Throwing up w/Van Halen

My friends and I made a pact when we were about 23.  Life had become more like real life then a party at that point, and we were not to thrilled with the concept of growing up.  We made a pact that we would all get together at least once a year and go see a really good concert, or just one that reminded us of our youth.

Last year was a blast.  We went to see this traveling hair band show with people like Vince Neil and Poison.  It was crazy, we didn't really behave ourselves, and almost got thrown in jail.  This is a story for another time, though.

This year we chose Van Halen.  As our stretch limo arrived to pick the nine of us up, we were dismayed to find out limo's are now mostly "non-smoking".  Most everyone has quit smoking by now, but when we relive our youth, we really relive our youth.

To soothe our pain, we just drank as much as humanly possible during the 45 minute drive to the United Center.  Some of us *looks innocent* landed on their butts while trying to exit the limo.  We were way out of control.

So the highlight of the evening was when H. threw up in the garbage can during Mr. Van Halen's guitar solo.  She was embarrassed as you can imagine, but when we said "What would your 17 year old self do?" she replied, "Pass the bottle!"

Ahhh, it don't get no better then that...Especially when you are with a bunch of thirty-somethings.  I can just image what a TV show about us would look like...

A slave to my comments

Since I only have like 3 people who have commented on here, I guess I should answer a question on my comments page.  They wanted to know about my swan transformation.  Just so you know, you asked for it...

I was one of those adorable babies you see on the Sears Photo department posters.  In fact, I was on the poster at 3.  My parents had taken us to the local Sears for pictures, and they liked mine so much I ended up being the "poster child" if you will.  Things kind of went done hill from there.

They discovered that my Father had a rare disease that made him allergic to the earth.  Well, he wasn't exactly allergic to the earth, but fungus that resided there.  It attacked his eyes, causing him to lose part of his vision.  I, unfortunately, had inherited this disease.

It isn't a big deal.  They just recommend not spending huge amounts of time rolling in mud.  I was five when they found out, and it had already done damage to my right eye.  I had to wear these horribly out of porportioned glasses, because my left eye was still fine.

This made me a bit goofy looking, because of the distortion through the glasses.  My right eye looked waaaay smaller then my left eye.  Teasing didn't really happen, because of the playground incident mentioned earlier in the blog.  I was a bit of a bad ass, so to say, and the kids just didn't pick on me.  I knew though...

My lips were a bit to big for my face, and freckles appeared to cover my entire nose bridge area.  It wasn't something I lamented about, just something I accepted at an early age.  I wasn't what society deemed cute, beautiful, or even plain.  Looking back at pictures of myself I just look goofy.  Everyone says that because of the horrid clothes our parents put on us, but in my case it was true.

The onslought of puberty only compounded my problems in the looks department.  I never got that huge growth spurt most kids get, and around the time high school started I was becoming chubby on top of goofy looking.  Let me tell you, this is not a good combination.

I failed to realized that by the time my Senior year was over that the freckles were starting to fade, and that the contacts that replaced my glasses showed nothing but great big dark brown eyes to the world.  High School had been a blast, but just in the friend department.  I have always had tons of friends, and despite what all the teen movie cliches out there tell you, I was one of the most popular people in school.

Around the time I was 19 was when the perverbial shit hit the fan.  All of a sudden I had a huge growth spurt, going from 5'2 to 5'8.  I thinned out a bit.  A visit to the doctor also revealed I was thisclose to becoming a diabetic, so I lost any remaining extra weight.

Something miraculous happend.  I had boobs.  Like really big ones.  Long legs...No freckles...No glasses...  My features now fit my face.  In my minds eye I still was that little dorky kid, but others noticed my ugly duckling to swan change.

I haven't quite felt comfortable with my self since.  Maybe it's because I spent my whole life with the I don't give a shit what I look like attitude.  I wouldn't say I had low self asteem, that I was just a realist.  That was the way I was, and I dealt with it.

Going from goofy to Barbie is not easy, especially when you aren't equipped to handle it.  People are so different to you.  Women, men, sales people....Just everyone.  To quote Joe Walsh, "Everyone's so different, but I haven't changed."  Not on the inside, at least.

I always thought guys wanted to be my friend, and they practically had to hit me over the head before I realized they liked me.  Friends I had for years suddenly didn't want me around their boyfriends.  Women became catty, men became insincere about their intentions towards me.  The list goes on and on.  I had many problems during my early 20's, mostly because I felt like an alien had taken over my entire world...

At 33 years old I have grown acustom to my new body and the image it portrays.  There are times that I'll be in a meeting at work, trying to get through a presentation or something, and one of the bosses will say, "Hey, you know you could be a model if you wanted to."  This is my reality, and as the movie says, sometimes it bites.

Before my three readers comment about how I sound arrogant, I'm really not trying to come off that way.  I am still that realist little girl.  I don't put my stock in my looks, and could really care less about them still.  There are many times I wish the alien would give the goofy looking little girl her body back...

My love/hate relationship w/the Net

I first got online back in 1995 when the internet was still young...Most people didn't have it, and some didn't even know what it was...In it's infancy the net was a place for brainiacs...There were no easy ways to post pictures or make websites...Words were about the only way people had to distingish themselves...

I absolutely loved it...I had got on the interent to "chat" with my boyfriend at the time...Our phone numbers were a toll call, and he convinced me to get the internet so that we could save some money...

This chatting stuff was great...I didn't use it so much to chat with him, but with other people...This really helped me at a time in my life when I wasn't very comfortable with myself... I was still feeling quite uncomfortable in my metamorphis into the perverbial swan...
 
The internet broke the rules...No one knew what anyone looked like...It was all your personality and brains that mattered...I felt comfortable for the first time in 4 years...

There was the occasional person that had shelled out the big bucks for a scanner that had a picture...The pics were usually totally from a magazine or sumfin and everyone took it with a grain of salt...

I went to a local chat room provided by my internet provider...Most everyone in there lived in my area...It was so much fun...I never cared to meet any of the people in there...I just liked talking to them...Most of them didn't feel the same way...They started having chat parties and meeting...That's when things got really screwed up...

My boyfriend and I were on the rocks when this happened...He wanted to go to these things, and I didn't...Chat had changed, and not for the better...People were hooking up left and right, and most didn't seem as interested in talking about current affairs as much as who was having an affair with who...

Satan, as I like to call this infamous ex of mine, was starting to hear a lot of "your girlfriend must look like a real beast since she won't show her face at a chat party" type comments...This, of course, hurt his pride...In an effort to save face, the bastard got a picture of me put on disk at Walgreens and proceeded to email it to everyone...

It was no ordinary picture...No, it wasn't an X rated one thank God, but it was one where I had tried very hard to look good...It was taken outside of a local club, so everyone knew it was real...I had a dress on cut up to here and down to there...Think J Lo...lol...Anyway, it had been taken on his birthday, and I had made an extra effort to look good for him that night...Usually I hate pics of myself, but even I thought "Damn" when I saw that one...Blonde bombshell was written all over it...

That was the beginning of the end for both Satan and I, and myself and the Internet...People that I sparred with at great length in chat were suddenly very nice...Women I had become buddies with suddenly weren't so friendly...The superficial things in life had reared there ugly heads in my safe little internet world...

I did go to chat parties eventually...After I dumped Satan, a real life friend of mine begged me to go to one, and I did...I'm sure I did it partly for her, but I am more sure that I did it to spite him...

It was unbelievable...The amount of people that had outright lied about what they looked like...There were women that had described themselves as a Cindy Crawford type that looked like Kathy Bates...Even my friend had to change her nick name and be someone new for a couple of weeks before the party because her original name was "CJ" as in Baywatch Pamela Anderson CJ, and she did not look like that...She was to embarrassed to admit her lies, so she started being herself...How others could have walked in there after telling such tall tales about themselves is beyond me...

Don't get me wrong...I did end up making some very good friends from those chat parties...I am glad that I ended up attending them....The Internet lost it's appeal to me after that, or at least the chatting part...All the uglies of life had reared their heads, and chatting just wasn't for me...By that time people were making sites and uploading pictures, and chat rooms turned into meat markets and places to hook up...When the big chats started getting popular, like yahoo or aol, that was the total end...The Internet had turned into life, or something even worse...

I still love the net...I use it to get information, and I make good extra spending money doing websites...I just don't love it for the same reasons anymore...I used to love it because you could be seen as who you really were, instead of outside appearances...In reality, many people were not acting how they really were, but who they wanted to be...I don't know which was a bigger disappointment...

A nice, relaxing night...

This was my first Saturday off in about 6 months.  I spent it with my bestest friend in the whole world and her very patient husband.  He deals with our uncanny ability to know what each other is thinking, our fits of giggles, and general immature nature that appears when we are together.
 
I met R when I was in kindergarten.  The class bully had her trapped on the merry-go-round, spinning her sadistically while she cried her eyes out and begged him to stop.  She was one of those kids that didn't adapt well to being away from her Mom, and some people in this world can just smell that kind of fear from a mile away, even in kindergarten.
 
Everyone kind of stood around and watched.  This kid looked like he had been in kindergarten for a couple of years.  Around and around she went with just sudden sightings of tear streaked cheeks being visible.  I ran over to him and told him to stop. 
 
Miraculously her did stop, but it was just to teach me a lesson.  He pushed me to the ground and began laughing the most sinister, ugly laugh I have ever heard, even to this day.  What bully boy didn't count on was that while I was small, I had a brother that was 4 years older then me and a sister that was 8 years older.  No super-sized kindergartener was going to scare me.
 
We proceeded to get into a school yard brawl.  I was taking quite a beating, but I wouldn't back down.  The "recess teacher" came over and broke it up, and our parents were called.  My Mother was mortified, and my Father just sat their silently listening to what happened.
 
As I walked the walk of the soon to be annahilated to the car, my Mother lectured about how violence is never the answer, blah blah blah.  I was the one with tear-streaked cheeks at this point, and my Dad picked me up.  He said, "So you did that because the little girl was crying."  I shook my head.  He gave me a great big hug and whispered, "That's my little girl."
 
As we were getting into the car, the bully and his Dad were walking up to their car.  My Father walked over to their car, and started talking to the boy's Dad.  He shook his hand and climbed in our car.
 
R and I have been the best of friends ever since.  The bully never picked on either one of us again, and I became quite the playground legend.  A couple of years ago R, her hubby, and I went and visited my parents in the south.  We were laughing about our first meeting.
 
I had never thought of it in the past, but at that moment I remembered my Father walking over to the bully's Dad.  He looked nervously at my Mom and said, "I told him that if his kid ever touched you again, I would be at his house that night, and he would get his ass beat three times worse then whatever you had got."
 
My Dad is 6'5.  Enough said.
 
I guess I am my Dad's little girl....

No more ranting?

In the last couple of weeks I started reading Rance's blog.  A friend of mine sent me the link and said I'd be interested.  As mentioned in my last post, I'm addicted to Project Greenlight TV shows, and basically anything that has to do with movies.  I'm a movie junkie, sometimes taking in 3 or 4 movies a day.  I'm also a closet screenwriter, and who knows?  One day I might actually sell one.
 
The lure of this blog at first was the fact that it was supposedly some celebrity dishing dirt under a secret identity.  Once I started reading it, I realized this dude can write his ass off.  I thoroughly enjoyed reading his posts, and his last post states he wants to leave the world of blogging behind.
 
This is a great disappointment to many of his fans, but I can see where he is coming from.  As mentioned earlier in my blog, I have several abandoned, lonely blogs out there on the Information Super Highway.  I left them for various reasons, but a one of the big reasons was usually someone I knew in real life stumbled upon them and realized it was me.
 
I can imagine the pressure on this poor guy.  With me it was a cause for embarrassement once, and the other time it had to do with dealing with an angry co-worker who didn't exactly appreciate what I had to say.  I am just an "ordinary" person, so I can just imagine what would happen to this guys career if people found out who he really was.
 
So many people are beggin him to stay, and I just don't get it.  Man, when something is over, it's over.  Move on.  If they guy doesn't want to do it anymore, let him go.  I actually feel bad for this person when I read these comments about him being selfish and the like.  The only people being selfish are the ones trying to guilt him into staying when he really doesn't want to stay.
 
Maybe I'm just weird, but I always take change in stride.  In fact, I love change.  Maybe I just haven't been reading the blog long enough to be emotionally invested.
 

and the marriage posts continue....

My friend K is not married either, thank God.   I just got the news that she is breaking up with her significant other, and it has made everyone close to her breathe a sign of relief.
 
It's one of those sticky situations where you just really can't stand the guy, but you know saying something will make things just suck between your friend and you until they come crying about how the person broke their heart.
 
This guy was a real piece of work.  She met him from the Internet (Egads!) and just fell for him immediately.  As the former owner of a once very popular chat room, (until I pulled the plug because I was sick of the BS) I don't trust the whole Internet hook up option.  I have, simply put, seen way to much shit.
 
He told her he wanted kids and a family and all that good stuff.  K was born to be a Mom.  That is her main goal in life, but finding a Daddy has always been an issue with her.  She doesn't exactly make the best choices, and there is nothing that reeks desperation like an early 30's woman who wants children in the worst way.
 
This guy had how he wanted kids soooo bad in his little Yahoo! Personal ad.  I guess he just told her that  he really didn't want children, so she dumped his ass.
 
I'm beginning to think I am rubbing off on K. 
 
More good news on the home front:  I have a whole weekend off this weekend!!!  I haven't had a whole weekend off since Christmas.  To double my pleasure Amazon delivered Project Greenlight 2 on my doorstep this morning.
 
I am so hooked on that show.  If they don't make a 4 I'll cry.
 
 
 
 
 

Why I'm not married...

So I went out with this guy last night, and he asked the question that will kill anyone's chances of ever touching me in this lifetime.

Why hasn't some guy snatched you up already? God I hate that question. He followed it with a good statement, about how it was just unbelievable to him that no one would have scooped me up by now because I was so wonderful.

I looked at him and said, "Stick around and you'll find out," while making a wide-eyed psycho face. For a second there he thought I was serious, much to my amusement. Pretty much from that second on it was another free meal from some clueless man. Did it ever occur to him that I didn't want to be "snatched" or "scooped?"

In unrelated news I was driving listening to this hilarious CD my best friend's hubby made for me with all the stupid hair band songs of the eighties. As I sat at the stop light singing "Once bitten twice shy" at the top of my lungs, I looked over and saw this gorgeous hunk of a man in a convertible. He looked as though he was about to put his top up out of fear for his life.

Maybe it is related. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I'm not married....

Yet another reason why I want to start my own company....

This 8 inch rat jumped out of the desk next to mine today. After I got down from my chair I called maintanence to tell them what happened. Their answer? "You'll have that." You'll have that my ass!

Look, I have really overcome a lot of things to work in a manufacturing type environment. From gross men without teeth thinking for some odd reason I'd be interested in them to getting the most distgusting form of dirt know to man on me, I've managed to fit in pretty well for a girly-girl. I draw the line at rats. Yes, I see them all the time out there, but never in my office.

Bad day just doesn't seem to cover it.....

What the hell do I look like?

Body image...What we think of ourselves...What we see...
I have a real messed up body image, and didn't realize it until last night...

Two of the monsters, my niece and youngest nephew, have been @ my house since school has been out...That's kind of how it goes during the summer...They don't go home too much...

I had started to get out some of my summer clothes yesterday morning...you know, the ones I haven't worn in 4 years or so...I found them...The little cutoff shorts I loved so much...They were a size 8 slim fit levi's but were baggy on me...I used to wear them down on my hips and they were soooooo comfy...

So I get home and my niece has on my cutoff shorts...and they like fit her...they are not loose on her...They weren't cutting off her circulation or anything, but they weren't baggy like they were on me...and I had a revelation...I have no idea what I look like at any given time...

I was skinny...sheesh...who knew??? I can still get those suckers on, but they make breathing rather difficult.

This is really shocking to me...I just am amazed...I have no idea what I look like...