My big fat Brazilian resolution

I try every year to make meaningful New Year resolutions. Eat better. Exercise more. Be more pleasant. This year I decided to, in the soon-to-be-immortal words of Dr. Phil, get real. The truth is that none of those things matter that much. At least not if you possess a working... hmmm...which word to choose...there are so many...okay, I've decided. Snatch.

First a detour to explain the word choice. I think I gravitate to this particular word because of its versatility. It is, unlike most other terms for the female naughty bits, both a noun and a verb. We don't hear our children yell, "Mom! Sister beavered the remote right out of my hand!" or our friends say, "And that dang bear twatted our steaks right off the picnic table!" No, snatch has complexity and a variety of uses, just like its namesake.

Okay...back to the resolutions. I am sort of a pop culture fanatic. Especially when it comes to current fashion trends. Since I live in Colorado Springs, not known for its edgy style, I rely on the likes of Britney and Paris to inform me about bikini haute couture. Based on the limited exposure they kindly provided, I resolved that 2008 would be the year to go bare bare bare.

After several weeks of research, I took the necessary steps and attained quite a stellar result. But I discovered, with great dismay, that after a couple of days my prize-winning pet had developed what felt like a trucker's three-day stubble. Instead of languishing under my silky sheets as I'd been doing, I now lay awake at night anticipating with trepidation the moment my sweetheart, in a half-conscious state, reaches for me, startles awake and leaps from the bed in horror. Or worse, contentedly murmurs "Ohhhh, Uncle Eddddd."

My new resolutions for 2008 are to eat better, exercise more, and be more pleasant. But mostly I resolve to leave well enough alone.


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Wanderlust and Lipstick

Today I began to write for Wanderlust and Lipstick. It's a site geared toward solo female travelers, which I hope to be when I grow up. As long as Eric can come along.

My blog there is called Culture Chakra.

Check it out if you're so inclined!





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I had a blue Christmas without you

I felt more than a bit empty around Christmas this year. For the first time it seemed completely devoid of meaning. No one believes in God. No one believes in Santa. There's nothing particularly thrilling to give or get. There's just an obligation to pour money into the pockets of corporate pricks and fill our houses with crap none of us needs, or even really wants.

I remember Christmas as magical. But, as I reflect on my childhood, the magic of the holiday was closely tied to religious ritual. Coming into church on a Sunday soon after Thanksgiving, back when Christmas lights didn't begin showing up by Halloween and could still be cause for celebration, we'd find the Advent wreath suspended from the rafters. Oh, yes! Christmas is coming! The three purple candles, a pink one for the third Sunday of Advent, a white candle for Christmas Eve. Each candle with its own story and symbolic meaning.

The beautiful haunting Christmas carols. O Come O Come, Emmanuel was my favorite. It still gives me goosebumps. The nativity display. The Christmas story with its shepherds and wise men and camels and bright stars and inns and stables and mangers and gold, frankincense and myrrh. Oh my! I just loved it all.

My poor darling children have none of this, thanks to me. I, like many of my generation, have largely rejected organized religion. Unfortunately, I now understand hypocrisy and oppression and believe that the church is guilty of all the sins it forbids. But what do we do about our spiritual longings? How do we find meaning and impart that meaning to our children who are daily bombarded with despicable messages from our commercialized world? For meaning surely does exist.

I am at a loss when it comes to recreating Christmas magic without a little baby Jesus to help me. And I can't just pull him out of a box in the attic and blow the dust off of him so he can lay in his manger Christmas morning. My parents did this, and it was okay, because we knew all about him, every day of every year, so it didn't smack of phoniness like it does when I try to bring him into the Christmas mix.

I have no answers. My children sense my sadness around Christmas, and they know it has something to do with religion. But it doesn't really. It has to do with meaning, significance, all things lofty and sublime. It has to do with my remembered feelings of joy and sheer awe at the birth of the Savior. It's the Christmas spirit that, without a miracle, my children will never know.





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Getting high with Darwin and Keynes

The war on drugs. Oh yes, it's a nasty endless little war, one that's filling our prisons with small-time users/entrepreneurs and costing the taxpayers billions. It's a war that hasn't helped our poor addicted countrymen one iota, and it's a war for which win-happy Bush has not yet declared victory. But neither has he hung his head in defeat, which he certainly should.

The DEA bigwigs ought to be lamenting the indisputable fact that its decades-long fight against drugs is not working. In fact, it's making things worse. After spending more than six billion dollars to cripple the Medellin and Cali cartels, the IBM and General Motors of the drug industry, cocaine production and trafficking in Colombia has actually increased. Hundreds of smaller and more efficient cartels have filled the void left by the blue chip cartels, kind of like the dot.com explosion, except the brilliant, creative, innovators happen to run drugs. And the DEA hasn't a clue who they are or how to stop them.

The war on drugs has penalized and incarcerated thousands of small-time drug dealers/users, the weak and dumb, the poor souls who would never be counted among the fittest in a Darwinian assessment. Years of artificial selection have given rise to the super drug-dealer, the one who, like the virulent bacteria that have arisen from overuse of antibiotics, is more efficient, more cunning, more innovative and much more difficult to eradicate. How can politicians hope to win a war with a strategy that ensures that only the most efficient and creative drug traffickers survive?

The relentless persecution of small-time drug dealers has decreased the supply of drugs on our streets. I suppose this can be seen as a good thing. However, the demand remains. Thus, according to accepted economic theory, interdiction has supported higher prices for the super dealers and provided incentive for more traffickers to enter the drug economy.

Alas, the war on drugs has been a complete waste of time and money. It's time for the DEA to huddle in the war room and come up with a new strategic plan. They should bring in some new generals, hopefully with public health backgrounds. They might even want to get off their moral steeds and decriminalize recreational drug use, thereby decreasing the demand for illegal drugs. They might decide to throw their allotted resources at dangerous criminals and our underlying social problems and let the small-time stoners be. That is if success is truly their goal.

After all, wouldn't it make sense to address the underlying demand for drugs? Shouldn't the DEA stop focusing on supply and address the unchanged demand for illicit drugs? Of course, this would mean funding public health initiatives and educational programs which are not nearly as fun as fighting a war against cagey dark-skinned enemies in exotic foreign locales. No, the men in suits aren't really interested in giving up their fat federal budgets in order to win the struggle against drug abuse. The war is too much fun.

So we will keep building expensive prisons and filling them disproportionately with people of color, too poor to make waves. We'll keep propping up the super-drug dealers we've created. We'll ask Congress for $1.4 billion to fight the drug-crazed Mexicans from Merida, the enemy du jour. And we'll rejoice that, as is true for all of our wars, there is no end in sight.

Benazir's murder, a matter of when

It's tragic that Benazir Bhutto was assassinated today. There is rampant speculation about who did it and why. But largely missing from the analyses I've read is the possibility that the nation of Pakistan, the Islamic nation of Pakistan, a nation that recently gave Osama bin Laden a 46% approval rating, simply didn't want a high-born, Western-educated, secularist woman in a position of power in their country. A woman who has twice been removed from office on corruption charges and whose father was branded an enemy of Islam and executed in 1979.

We can pretend that it's an oppressive regime we oppose and that the Pakistani people are longing for freedom and equality as we've defined it. In actuality, our quarrel is with the Pakistanis themselves, at least half of whom would institutionalize Islamic fundamentalism and call it freedom. Pakistanis who would love to be free of Western influence, be it cultural or political. Pakistanis who want to practice their religion and define their values without interference from outsiders.

The world does not want our electronics, nor our cars, nor much of anything we have to offer. Why do we insist that the world want our democracy? Clearly it doesn't.

The war on war

This is your president.


This is your president on drugs.

Any questions?


Brought to you by the Partnership for a War-free America



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Make orgasm, not wargasm

Orgasm and the sense of well-being it brings - how would the planet be if it felt that good? Couldn't that be one definition of Peace? Practice visualizing the planet experiencing the afterglow of a rousing orgasm and taking a break from the violence and despair that infects our daily existence.

What if this group effort was timed perfectly with the solstice and the funky energy surge it brings? Could that help move humankind off its sure path to self-destruction?

According to researchers at Princeton University working on the Global Consciousness Project, nearly ten years of data collected from random event generators indicate that "when millions of us share intentions and emotions the network shows correlations." Recent studies have shown that there is indeed power in prayer. It would make sense that there would be similar power that could be released through collective orgasm.

I invite you to join me in a Global Orgasm for Peace. Hopefully worldwide orgiastic energy combined with a mindful intention for peace (no dreaming of scantily-clad nymphets or bruiser beefcake---peace, not piece, should be the focus) could reduce global levels of violence, hatred and fear. We, for a brief spell, could join in a vast post-orgasm group spoon and change the course of human history.

Saturday, December 22 at 06:08 GMT is the appointed time for the Global OooooAaahhhOh. That's FRIDAY the 21st at 11:08 p.m. for those of us in Colorado. Women, you may want to practice a little beforehand to get the timing down. Men, I'm sure you've got a handle on it already. And remember, the intention is peace. Think peace. Wish for peace. Come for peace.

Blog advertising

Recently I put an AdSense widget on my blog so that I could possibly hook into an audience of readers. Don't get me wrong. I love the dear-diary-for-my-eyes-only nature of this blog. I can write anything I want to without fear of offending anyone, which is nice.

I've had plenty of fun looking at the ads that appear after I make a new post. After posting The Tao of Marie, ads promoting cutting-edge nutrition appeared. I'm guessing that the word tryptophan put me into the "appeals to health nuts" category.

I noticed another change after posting I'll keep my Old Life, thanks, which was a scathing indictment of the rigid evangelical Christianity that would lead a young man to embark on a murderous spree. Suddenly I had ads promoting GodTube and beautiful young Christian singles networks.

Next I posted She's a real doll. Sure enough. Ads for mail order brides and sex toys appeared. After pulling the blog for some re-vamping, I am back to the Christian ads.

Gentle readers (hi mom! hi Sue! hi Martina!), if you see strange words that don't seem to fit in future posts, know that it's just me amusing myself at AdSense' expense.

varicose veins

She's a real doll

Over the weekend I saw Lars and the Real Girl, a strange but funny movie about a mentally-ill introvert who, much to his concerned family's delight, finds a "girlfriend" on the internet . The girlfriend, Bianca, it turns out, is actually a Real Doll, a life-sized anatomically correct silicone woman, created by Abyss Creations in California and sold for upwards of $10,000. The entire community sweetly honors the "relationship" while Lars works through deep psychological issues resulting from his mother's death at his birth.

The brilliance of the movie is that it causes us to gain an uneasy acceptance of something that would otherwise seem perverse and completely laughable. Yet Lars is not, by any stretch, a normal guy, so our acceptance is tenuous. What type of real man is satisfied substituting a silicone representation of a woman for an actual relationship? Abyss Creations has sold thousands of Real Dolls and has an order backlog even as we speak. So who is purchasing these things? Maybe the same man who leaves his wife sleeping upstairs while spending hours looking at internet pornography? The guy who can't handle the complexities of a real relationship with a flesh and blood female?

At the core, Real Dolls and pornography appeal to the same man. Both give the illusion of love--a travesty of love--created for poorly mothered or often-rejected men. For once these men have control over the omnipotent feminine. The unattainable girl. The instrument of rejection. That intense and infantile vulnerability to the female is turned on its head. The female is now submissive, expendable, interchangeable. Performing for you! Wanting only you! Loving only you!

Ryan Gosling, Lars from the movie, is quite charitable in his assessment of the men who own Real Dolls. "There's a whole culture of guys out there who have these dolls, and they have very intimate relationships with them. Part of it is sexual, but a lot of it is emotional. One guy goes hang gliding, and he takes his doll to watch, so that he has someone to support him in the things that he likes to do. Some guys cook with them and have dinners; they're part of the fabric of their life. So, all of this is possible. … I think it's a romantic idea, that love's not a transaction. It's something you have to give, and you give it freely to whoever and whatever you want."

Okay, I can't disagree. It's plenty romantic. Objectification of women is the epitome of romance. In fact, it's the definition of romance...an artistic work that deals with sexual love, especially in an idealized form...an idealized form like a silicone doll or a stylized airbrushed photograph.

Oh hell, now they want a picture of him

The family of Matthew Murray released this picture, taken in 1998, today.

It's about time really. Am I the only one who found it odd that after five days there was only one crappy photo of him circulating? And now the only picture the family can find is nearly ten years old?

Such a well-loved son.