For anyone who hasn’t heard, my apartment was broken into a couple of weeks ago and I thought that my bank account information was compromised. So I set up a new account. Obvious, right?

Well, I couldn’t actually close my account because apparently there were some transactions outstanding. So I left a little money in there and waited. I canceled all my bill pays and set them up on my new account. I waited some more. I checked my account and nothing was pending to post, so silly me, for some crazy reason I thought that, well, nothing was pending to post. How ridiculous. I was wrong though. Apparently a payment that I canceled and set on my other account miraculously appeared as a charge-and was pre-dated back to the beginning of the month! So, while this divine gift was being shafted upon me, I had spent the little money left in the compromised account that I wanted to close in the first place and surprise, surprise, got four overdrafts for amounts like seven to ten dollars at the high priced tune of thirty four dollars a pop. That’s a hundred and thirty two dollars in case you’re not in the mood for quick multiplication. And of course, when I called to straighten it all out, the charge was backdated so it most certainly couldn’t have been the widdle-biddy-baby bank’s fault. And so, “Sorry, lady”, “Sad to hear it, ma’am”, but “Them’s the breaks”.

I hate National City Bank.

I’m getting my money and getting out.

Get a Voki now!
(actual question posed in class)

What I hate about midterms! They really know how to da-a-a-a-ance!

Wait, I think I got distracted by an eighties tune there. It happens from time to time, or, really, more like constantly. Blame the Sound Disease I have. Anyway, as I was going to begin, and should probably be getting on to by now, is, What I hate about midterms is this One Eternal Question: Do we have to know . . . ?

I think probably that all my students would hate my guts if I were a professor. I mean, of course I would win their hearts with my loveable charm and personable layman’s explanations of deeply complex concepts. But when it came test time, their burgeoning devotion would boil within them, forming a thin but crisp layer of hatred. Sort of like an emotional creme brulee. And the reason for this culinary delight of abhorrance is simply this: If asked the One Eternal Question? I would always say, Yes.

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The atrium of my apartment building smells like bologna. Don’t ask me why. It’s one of those unanswerable questions, like why would a junior high school boy put deodorant on his face? Unfathomable. Nevertheless, smell of bologna it does, and that isn’t the worst problem.

The worst problem is something that I think I’ve mentioned before. Now, I’m no crazed hermit without furniture except for sixteen computers, wearing an aluminum foil hat so that aliens can’t read my mind or anything. I’m no enfeebled old woman with thirty seven cats to her name mewing around her efficiency apartment. I’m not even a begrudging middle aged redneck who won’t shut up about the Good Old Days, nevermind that he never saw them in the first place and that they weren’t really all that great besides. I mention this disclaimer because what I’m about to say next may make it seem that I am one of these types of people. So here’s the truth: I hate people hanging out outside my apartment.

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Instead of going for the expected, which I may do tomorrow or something when it’s UNexpected (hah-HA!), I thought I would address something that my sister and I were discussing Friday night at Panera before going to see Star Trek with some futuristic space nerds.

I’ve been trying like nobody’s business to find the link to the actual radio program she heard so that I can post it here and you can hear for yourselves, but apparently the idea of making your broadcasts available online for people who didn’t happen to catch it is unheard of on the internet today. Regardless. Apparently last week on WKRQ, there was a program on which a couple of staff at two local Cincinnati domestic violence shelters appeared. They discussed the problem of violence and of course offered themselves as avenues to escape an abusive relationship. But then they said something that I felt a little uncomfortable with. Namely, there is nothing that increases your risk of domestic violence besides gender.

Of course, there are many stastics that point to the fact that domestic violence is primarily directed against heterosexual women by predominantly heterosexual men, and in that regard, I agree that being female would make it more likely that you might experience violence at the hands of an intimate than if you were male. But the only thing?

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I’ve finally garnered enough support to have a first official re-founding meeting of Writers’ Grope in Real Life. Huzzah! Now I have only to write a dazzlingly spectacular literary dream of a story and I’m in the clear. Speaking of which, if anyone is interested in joining this ragtag band, what’re you doing next Monday at seven p.m.?

I should turn my TV off. I’m supposed to be writing.

But before I do, can I just say that I hate those Above The Influence commercials? They’re about as bad a those anti-smoking public dramas with wind up baby dolls and people trying to mail cigarettes. There’s so much information out there about why smoking whatever it is is a horrible plan with devastating consequences that if someone has already decided to do it, I don’t see how a commercial is going to make much difference. It isn’t as if someone shows up in an NA meeting and says, Yeah, I thought my life was great, but then I saw this PSA about a little boy wearing a million T-shirts and it made me ask myself, could THAT be ME?

Really? When you’re under the influence of drugs you act like a jerk? Didn’t your girlfriend just tell you that yesterday? Really? Blowing smoke in babies’ faces is bad for them? And you’re telling me that the tobacco industry KNEW this the whole time?! Wow. So did everyone.

I know I sound con- and pre-tentious. Maybe I’m just bitter these days. But these messages seem so obvious and therefore a waste of time. A way for people to feel like Something Is Being Done when really nothing is being done at all. I hate the model of, What should we do about this huge problem? We could either become responsible fellow people and talk with specific at risk individuals that we personally know and partner with them and assist them lovingly and thereby reach fewer people perhaps but deeply, or we could make a silly commercial and reach everyone without even scratching their surface. I think we have a winner!

Sigh.

I’m being complainxious. Sorry.

As some of you may or may not know, care, or agree, I have a porn obsession. No, no, not the kind that makes me salivate for the streaming video of, say, The Tipsy Sheep, XHamster, or The Wetplace (the names of which I got from a google of the word “porn”), but the kind that keeps me up all night devouring the research and reflections of people like Gail Dines,  Robert Jenson, and others with the same goal. It’s finally time to come clean and tell the truth: I can’t count how many times I’ve awakened well after noon because I was up all night getting my rocks off to anti-porn sites.

No, no. It’s true. It’s better that you know now.

And it’s why this article that I stumbled across was so disturbing to me. Disturbing in the way that it is pornography apologist while claiming to be scientific. Here are some  juicy excerpts.

Sex drives men from puberty through old age. It is their “raison d’etre”, their purpose in life; to reproduce. Everything else is, well, fluff. It diminishes with age but never disappears. Sex is a primitive – primordial – urge. (more…)

I woke up early this morning, shuffled to the kitchen, and let Emmy out. It had snowed a little overnight and the fluffy whiteness packed itself thickly into the crevaces of the soles of my houseshoes. I walked back to the parking lot to throw away a bag of trash and then swooped back  by Emmy cowering with cold on the front step to let both of us into my apartment. I sat on the couch and turned on BET. My mom used to watch Charles Stanley sunday mornings on this channel. Today David Jeremiah is on, talking about prophesy and why it’s as relevant as topical sermons on be ye kind or tithing or the length of the modern hemline. He raises a good point, which is that if Christians claim to believe in prophesy, specifically the Apocalypse, the Rapture, the Second Coming, it carries with it some serious indications about evangelism.

And now, on a more fallen and human note, I change channels to the Hour of Power and come upon the abject smarmy-ness known as Bill Dallas. Some mangled faced man in a long robe drones on and on about what a great man this is, this man who rose above, this man who’s been in prison and worked his way out, who’s poor little baby company failed. Bill Dallas the Resilient, the Penitant, the Saint. Slime in a suit, my mother would have said. Ugh. I feel like retching on his tailored suit and red patterned tie.

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