66 - yahoooooooo!

there was a time a couple of years ago when a dear friend and i were bored on a saturday afternoon. this is when she introduced me to yahoo answers. basically, this is a place where anyone can log on and ask perfect strangers any question they desire. there are categories from health and travel to relationships and cars. some people actually log in and provide helpful answers...this is not what i choose to do. i prefer to read the questions, laugh out loud, and answer them silently in my head - usually with a big spoonful of tough love. today i decided to share some recently-posted questions, along with the answers i would post if i actually cared about these people enough to do so. i hadn't looked at this website in a long time, then my little fruititarian had me look at a question on yahoo answers last week, and all the memories came flooding back. thus, the idea for this post was born. obviously the family and relationship category is my very favorite, so that's where all these tidbits came from. oh, and i'm not changing spelling or grammar, because that's part of the fun.

question headline: I have to give away one of my dogs. Which dog should i give away?
body of question: I'm so sad right now. I am forced to give away one of my dog cuz our family cant take care of two anymore. One of the dog is 4 years old and my first dog!(it was so cute wen it was a puppy :(.. and the other dog is 3 years old and a son of the first dog i had. The first dog is a mom and the second one is a son. Which one should i give away? its so sad.... The mom, i cant give away since shes my frist dog and very fond of her. The son, i cant give away since it follows me everwhere and is afraid of ppl :( what should i do?
cal's answer: first of all, if your family couldn't take care of two dogs, why did they allow the original dog to procreate? that's what neutering is for. second of all, here's my advice. stand in your living room. put a large dog bone on the other side of the room. release both dogs into the room. the one that goes for the bone is the one you give away. the one that goes for you loves you more. if they both go for the bone, you're probably a bad dog-owner. give them both away.

question headline: Do u think my gf is going to break up with me?
body of question: My gf went to camp for 2 weeks and before our last words to each other were i love u. But her friend said for me to keep off her. Is my gf going to break up with me? She said we have a date when she gets back. My gf said that we are going to be together still next year. We are both 15 and 9 months. But also two days before she left for camp i was getting clingy like calling her 4 times a day. And i asked her if she is going to miss me and she said i don't know so i asked her again and she still said i don't know. Do u think she is going to break up with me?
cal's answer: well, i'm not sure, but i think you're asking if your girlfriend is going to break up with you. my general opinion is that if you have to ask this question, you probably already know the answer. yes, you were being too clingy, but then again, you're 15 (and 9 months!) so that's probably typical. chances are, she's gonna break up with you, and you'll find an equally clingy girl to call 4 times a day. oh, and even though she said you're still going to be together next year, i'm sorry to be the one to break this to you - girls lie too.

question headline: Did I make a mistake in this truth or dare game? girls only!
body of question: I played truth or dare friday and got a weird dare to fart on a guy's head...there were 3 hot guys and this one guy that was (not to be mean) sorta ugly...so i chose the ugly guy!! My friends say i should have picked the hot guy because the ugly guy has probably been farted on a million times...did i choose the wrong guy?
cal's answer: um, who are your friends and why do they insist on farting on people? what happened to the good old days of coed truth or dare where the dares were always to make out with someone? stop farting on people. that's gross.

question headline: I don't know whether to break up with my boyfriend or not!
body of question: I do not know whether to break-up with my boyfriend or not. We are both 14, and we have been going out now for 7 months. I logged into his myspace profile (just out of curiosity, since he had freely given me his password previously) and I noticed that he had a chat box still up from the day before - from a conversation with his best girl friend. They had both been making fun of me and he said things about me like that I'm not sexy, and that I piss him off, etc. I confronted him about it over MSN, but he denied it all. What should i do? I still really like him, but I don't want to be made fun of behind my back. I would really appreciate help from anyone, because I don't want to end the relationship, but at this point I don't see what else I can do? The problem is, I hate being single!
cal's answer: okay, although i am morally opposed to logging into a significant other's online profile/e-mail or reading their online chat conversations, you saw what you saw. how is it possible for him to deny it? he's talking shit about you with his best female friend, so break up with him. it's only 7 months of your life. get over it. and i'm still laughing at the fact that you "hate being single" at age 14. i could give you some good advice about self-confidence/loving yourself before you get into a relationship, but really i'm crying from laughter over here. someone help - i need a tissue.

question headline: How do I get my sister to dress more like Carmen Electra or Paris Hilton?
body of question: I love her very much and I am a good brother. I want her to attract a lot of guys.
cal's answer: stop whoring out your sister. what's next? trying to get her to give $2 BJs on the side of the road? asking her to film a sex tape? if she's a nice person, she'll attract guys on her own. you sound like an incestuous creepy, creepy boy.

question headline: I really like to give this girl a romantic present to remember me by...which is better: running shoes or a watch?
body of question: (none)
cal's answer: if running shoes and watches are what you consider to be romantic presents, she's more than likely not interested anyway. save your money.

64 - poke this!

back in college, my lovely friend aj-dub once said something along the lines of, "does your school have facebook?" well, no, at that time, it did not...because facebook was something that only big college campuses had, and our little school with 3000 students was not on the list. the day we got facebook was one of the craziest days my e-mail inbox had ever seen. i was pounded with friend request after friend request and wall post after wall post. and this was obviously WAY before facebook opened itself to the public, after which things got even more ridiculous. now, i do love facebook, i promise. it has provided countless hours of entertainment for my friends and me over the years, and picture comments may be among my favorite things in the world.

however, you should all know by now that it takes a lot to make me mad...but i actually get annoyed fairly easily. thus...

want me to defriend you on facebook? do these things:

1. constantly update your facebook status with meaningless stuff. let me assure you that i do not care if you just watched the hills finale, the VMAs, or an ANTM marathon. nor do i care if you are SOOOOO mad that the united states soccer team/cleveland cavaliers/any other team just lost a game. get over it. you don't need to put that on facebook. now, if you are actually doing something fun or interesting, or if you can make your status amusing, please update away. but not every 2 minutes, because i will defriend you immediately.
2. take your profile picture in a mirror or with a webcam. you look creepy. who are you trying to impress with that picture? the 14 year olds you're hitting on in chatrooms? (do chatrooms even still exist? sidenote: anyone remember teenchat from back in the late 90s? good times, good times.) i am barely excusing people who take normal pictures of themselves by extending a camera in front of their faces, so prove that you have friends and have them take a picture of you. PLEASE.
3. download every possible application known to man. the worst day in the existence of facebook was when they started letting outside companies provide "applications" to users. if i go to your profile, i probably just want to read your info, check out your pictures, and probably leave you a cute/witty/thoughtful message on your wall. i really don't need to see that you petted your cyber-kitten, watered your cyber-plant, and took a test that says you are most like cinderella out of all the disney princesses. the only one i kind of like is the top friends application, but only if i'm on your top friends - otherwise, i don't like this one either. go out and buy a real kitten, a real plant, and meet a real prince if you want to be a princess so damn badly. also, meet me and add me to your top friends. i'm awesome - promise!
4. invite me to all kinds of stupid events. no, i don't want to go to bike night at quaker steak and lube. know your audience. also, if i haven't seen you in 4 years, i'm probably not going to come to your birthday party, a gig your band is playing, or a fundraiser your church is doing - just an fyi. and m-howie, if i've told you once, i've told you a hundred times (literally), no! i do not want to go watch you coach a soccer game for a group of random 10 year olds! one more invite, and consider yourself defriended.
5. poke me. i have had facebook for about 5 years now, and i still don't know what a poke means. if you want to say hi, then say hi. if you want to flirt, then flirt. if you poke me, i'm not quite sure what you want, and i'm not a fan of ambiguity in my life.
6. sync your facebook account with your twitter page. i am on facebook, not on twitter. if i wanted to visit your twitter page, i would. chances are, you're one of the people who constantly updates your status with dumb things i don't care about, so i don't want to read your twitter. enjoy facebook for what it is, and post a link to your twitter if you must...but please don't force me to read your twitter updates on my homepage. yes, i'm apathetic, but honestly i just don't care.

okay, this just got me all worked up. if i could access facebook at work, i would totally go through and defriend a bunch of people right now! and yes, i can sneak onto facebook via my blackberry, but for some reason, my blackberry is encouraging me to be nice and doesn't give me the "remove friend" option. gosh.

a quick hint regarding tomorrow's entry: yahoo! (inspired by my little fruititarian)

55 - but geeks are cool, right?

warning: this blog post is evidence that i may be a giant geek. i mean, just in case you weren't already convinced by my self-proclaimed boring sense of style and the fact that i may be the most easily amused person in the world. oh, right, and the fact that i almost said out loud to the couple perusing skymall (see my previous entry) that, "omg, skymall is TOTALLY going to make an appearance in my blog next week!" in my opinion, nothing is geekier than talking about your random-ass blog (which a total of 6 people read) to strangers. however, i will digress just so i can get to the point of this post. oh, one sidenote - if anyone knows how to fix it when the spacing on a post gets messed up when you publish it, please let me know. this is annoying me to pieces.

i began my lifelong obsession with books early on. my parents used to read to me every night, and (because they are oh so clever!) they started to skip pages to make the stories go faster so they could put me to sleep sooner. i promise, i'm pretty sure they loved me. anyway, at age 3, i was laying there and indignantly pointed out to my mom that she had skipped a whole page in the book. thinking i had just memorized the pictures, my mom asked how i knew, at which point i proceeded to flip back and read the page to her. then she thought maybe i had just memorized the whole book (a wonder in and of itself), so she grabbed another classic (probably a golden book) and asked me to read a random page from that book. i happily complied, and thus, my status as a child prodigy was cemented forever. i mean, i was reading chapter books (babysitter's club, yesss!) in kindergarten...evidently, that's not normal? whatever.

as i got older, i made my city's award-winning library my second home, especially because they had reading contests in the summer. you filled out a little slip of paper when you had read five books, your mom signed it, and then you got to enter a drawing for a prize that would be handed out at an end-of-summer party. luckily, you didn't have to be present to win, because although i loved to read, i was also kind of a slacker when it came to going to library events. um, hang out with other nerdy book-loving children or play at the pool with my friends until dark? tough choice. right. the point is, i won prizes every single year of my adolescence (from kindergarten until 8th grade, because summer reading contests are sooo not cool enough for high schoolers). from pizza parties to free roller skating coupons to gift certificates for shops in town - i was a summer reading contest baller. when the librarian called the day after the end-of-summer party, i'd be all, "yeah yeah, what did i win this year?" wait, who am i kidding? i love winning things, so it was probably more, "OMG! I WON?! EEEEEEK!"

so yes, i loved the library with all of my heart...but i also began a little love affair with bookstores on the side. my grandparents used to give me money for every A i received on a report card, and duh, i was smart, right? this was an easy way to earn some serious dinero, and as soon as i had that cash in my hand, i would ride my bike down the little alley that virtually connected my street with a little bookstore called b. dalton. all the women who worked there not only knew me by name, but they also met basically all of the members of my family along the way. i could hang out at b. dalton for hours, browsing through the latest young adult fiction (i adored sweet valley high and the 90210 series and anything by christopher pike) and teen magazines.

to this day, there is something i find completely cathartic about heading to a huge bookstore (i.e. the barnes and noble at easton) when i have money to burn and absolutely nothing to do on a weekend afternoon. i love walking through the aisles and aisles of books, checking out the new release and summer reading tables, and i especially love walking out the door with 3-5 brand new books to read. (i told you at the beginning, i realize i am such a geek for this.) i will seriously look at titles in every genre from travel to history to humor to self-help to biographies to sports...but of course, my favorite books are still plain old fiction.

i'll admit it: usually i can't get enough of chick-lit. all books by jane green (jemima j, the beach house, mr. maybe for example) or jen lancaster (bitter is the new black and pretty in plaid are my favorites) go perfectly with a C&V and a swimming pool...or a cup of hot chocolate on a snowy afternoon. basically, they're my any-season indulgences. and don't even get me started on janet evanovich, who writes the stephanie plum series, because that crazy comedy/mystery shit keeps me laughing and guessing through every page. honestly, when a new stephanie plum book comes out, i can't even wait for it to be released in paperback - i need it immediately.

however, every now and then i will occasionally read something deeper and more meaningful. and although my life is pretty awesome usually, i am sometimes interested in self-help books, too. now, i'm not talking about books like he's just not that into you, which my parents gave me in my christmas stocking in 2003 because they hated my then-boyfriend. (ironically, it turns out they were right as he cheated on me/i left him soon after). although that particular novel was fun and kind of interesting to read, those kind of "self-help" books typically don't do a lot for me. but i love reading books that make me think about my faith differently, or open me up to new ideas about the future/my career/relationships that i would never have invented on my own. i think learning as much as you can about the world also helps you learn about yourself. does that also make me a nerd? probably, but i can deal with it.

recently, a certain book kept being brought to my attention by different people. i saw quotes from it on facebook, i had friends pull it out of their purses when they were digging for something else, and i believe hf even wrote a recent blog post about it herself. finally i was walking around the teeny-tiny fort myers airport last wednesday, wasting 3 hours of my life before my flight wandering in and out of all the little shops. now, in an airport that small, every single shop has the exact same 50 books and 20 magazines. you can only look at them so many times. but in each shop, this book that i'd been hearing so much about lately was prominently displayed.

the book is eat pray love by elizabeth gilbert. the first time i picked it up and read the back, it sounded kind of interesting, but also like it might be a little over my head. i mean, she used the word "transcendence" on the back cover. i have many thoughts, but i would categorize very few of them as transcendent in nature - and by "very few" i might mean zero transcendent thoughts. i put the book down and kept wandering...but i kid you not, this book jumped out at me in every single shop in the airport. i picked it up a second time (at a different shop) and read a couple of pages. i do this before i buy any book - just to see if i like the author's style. some people read the last page; i read the first page to see if it's a book i can even get into and i flip to the middle and read a random page to see if i am still interested. eat pray love pretty much passed that test, but i wasn't sure if i was in a mood to read about someone else's enlightening experience. i even texted my work friend, the frutitatian, to ask her if it was worth buying. needless to say, the third time i saw it, i bought it - if for no other reason than so it would stop annoying me by its presence.

i started reading it in a hammock at my parents' house late yesterday afternoon, and i seriously cannot put it down. i read more before bed, and i went to a park around the corner from work and read more during lunch today. there are so many things in that book that i can relate to, and instead of explaining them all to you, i'm just going to say this: read it for yourself. seriously, i'm recommending it to everyone. and if you hate it, i'm sorry. there's always jane green, janet evanovich, or (if you're a male reader, even though i don't think i have any of those) jeff and michael shaara. anyway, this has been possibly my most rambly post ever, but here's an excerpt to convince you to go read this book:

"Virginia Woolf wrote, 'Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword.' On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where 'all is correct.' But on the other side of that sword, if you're crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, 'all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course.' Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a far more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will also be more perilous.

"...The Bhagavad Gita - that ancient Indian Yogic text - says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection. So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly."

42 - jukebox!

on very rare occasions, i find myself upset, angry, or in a bad mood. ask my friends, this really doesn't happen too terribly often. today happens to be one of those days, so rather than continue to dwell on the little crappy things that have happened in the past 24 hours, i'm starting a new segment on my blog to cheer me up. and no, i refuse to say this will happen every week, because let's face it - i'm a very temperamental blogger. sometimes i want to write all the time, and sometimes i won't write anything for months. therefore, i don't want to make you any promises i can't keep. i'm sorry, these daily updates may not last forever. don't blame yourselves. it's not you, it's me.

new segment - jukebox!

i have a very eclectic taste in music, so i've decided to occasionally share the music from one of my favorite artists/bands with my vast readership (of three people - welcome to my little fruititarian, i see you over there reading my blog during work!). enjoy.

today's featured band: aerosmith!

now, i get made fun of sometimes for the randomness in my musical preferences, but no one in my life has ever teased me about my sincere adoration for aerosmith. i don't find steven tyler attractive, but you've got to love a 125 year old man who dresses like this and has scarves hanging from his microphone:

also, their music is basically genius, as evidenced by this collection of my favorite aerosmith songs:

"angel", circa 1987's permanent vacation album

reason: back when i was about 16, some dude told me this song reminded him of me. i had never heard it, so i had a friend download it from napster and burn it to a CD for me (ah, musical piracy - RIP). i was kind of freaked out by the guy after listening to the song, but i realized it's not the song's fault that the guy is creepy. it's still my second favorite song of all time (bonus points to the reader who knows the song that beats this on my list!)

you're the reason i live, you're the reason i die

you're the reason i give when i break down and cry

you're the one reason why

baby, baby, ba-a-a-by

you're my angel, come and save me tonight

you're my a-a-angel, come and make it all right

"fly away", circa 2001's just push play album

reason: i debate leaving my little suburb all the time. like, on a daily basis. this song is always the one i listen to when i'm in one of my "get me out of here" moods, and it makes me so happy. i recommend it for singing-along-in-the-car-with-the-windows-down (SAITCWTWD, if you will) purposes. it's also the only song from that album that was worth mentioning.

gotta find a way, yeah, i can't wait another day
ain't nothin' gonna change if we stay 'round here
gotta do what it takes, 'cause it's all in our hands
we all make mistakes, but it's never too late to start again
take another breath and say another prayer
and fly away from here, anywhere, yeah, i don't care
we just fly away from here
my hopes and dreams are out there somewhere

"walk this way", circa 1975's toys in the attic album

reason: not only does it remind me of greek week lip-sync 2006 (i still maintain we were robbed - i mean, we opened with a rockin' dance to this song and ended with an even better dance to AC/DC's back in black and didn't even PLACE. are you kidding me, otterbein?!), but it is easily one of the most mainstreamed songs about being a girl who is a giant hobag. plus, i'm almost convinced you can't find a better music video than when run-dmc covered this song and steven tyler came bursting through a wall.

see-saw swingin' with the boys in the school
and your feet flyin' up in the air
singin, "hey diddle diddle" with your kitty in the middle
and you swing like you just don't care
so i took a big chance at the high school dance
with a missy who was ready to play
wasn't me she was foolin' 'cause she knew what she was doin'
when she told me how to walk this way

"what it takes", circa 1989's pump album

reason: okay, i'll admit it. i'm totally a sucker for power ballads/break-up songs, and this is one of the greatest of all-time, in my (totally un-biased) opinion. the lyrics are heartfelt and also heartbreaking and so relatable. ugh, who hasn't felt like this?!

tell me that you're happy that you're on your own (yeah yeah yeah yeaaah)
tell me that it's better when you're all alone
tell me that your body doesn't miss my touch
tell me that my lovin' didn't mean that much
tell me you ain't dyin' when you're cryin' for me
tell me what it takes to let you go (oooh)
tell me how the pain's supposed to go
tell me how it is that you can sleep in the night

without thinkin' you lost everything that was good in your life to the toss of the dice

tell me what it takes to let you go

oh aerosmith, i love you more than puppies and rainbows and glitter combined. (truthfully, i prefer kittens and sunshine and shimmery lip gloss - but you get the point.)