Brazil is on to me:

hail satan! on my leg!

Heather pointed this out to me on Twitter, and it is glorious. The article goes on to say:

The evangelical cult “Paz do Senhor Amado” (“Peace Beloved of the Lord”) in the interior of Brazil forbids its followers to use any USB technology by contending that it uses a symbol that makes apology to the devil.

According to its founder, the “Apostle” Welder Saldanha says that this is just a symbol of Satan, is always present in all Christian homes.

“The symbol of that name (he even likes to pronounce) is a trident, which is used to torture souls go to hell. Use only a symbol of those shows that all users of this technology pífia are actually worshipers of Satan” – explains the” Apostle”.

Measures were taken so that all the USB connections of his followers were exchanged for common connections and even the Bluetooth (sic), which according to Saldanha Welder is permitted, for “Blue was the color of the eyes of our savior Jesus Christ”.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Jesus born in the Middle East, meaning he would resemble people in that area? I don’t think there are many blue-eyed people in Israel. Then again, these could just be the words of SATAN in my MOUTH. Take that, logic!

So, yes. I got the USB symbol tattoo’d on my leg not because I am a giant nerd, but because I am a giant Brazilian Satan worshipper.

Now you know!

It’s no secret that I have a lot of stuff. There’s no real way to categorize it; it’s just .. stuff. Piles upon piles of stuff. I try to keep it under control and I do a fairly good job of it, but every now and again I find myself envious of those with minimalistic living areas – like right now. I’m going through all my stuff and sorting it into four piles: garbage, donate, recycle, pawn off on friends. It’s very slow going, and it doesn’t help that the majority of my stuff is awesome. It’s almost impossible to part with books (although I’ve been very, very good about not acquiring any new ones); you’ll pry my various video game swag from my tiny dead hands, and I actively use the rest of it. What’s left to get rid of, other than the people who complain about the clutter? Maybe I’m looking at this all wrong – my stuff is FINE. The people who complain about my stuff? THEY’VE GOT TO GO!

I do need to clean out my cosmetics mountain, though. I donate all of my barely-used makeup and lotions to WISH once a year, and it’s about that time.

I’ve been trying to make my workspace a little less cluttered, too. I took down all my tiny little pictures and stickers, and classed things up a bit with some prints:

now it is classy!

The Autobot, Decepticon and Alice in Wonderland prints are by Dave Perillo; I love his stuff and bought them off his Etsy page. I’m going to get some mats for them this weekend, but wanted to put them up now because they’re awesome. The Hunter S. Thompson print (which is usually shortened to HST, making for some confusing conversations) is from LTD Tee; it came with the t-shirt I bought for Josh. I think this new wall says a lot about the things I am All About: Transformers, contempt for authority, and literary nonsense likely fueled by drugs. Oh, and video games. I love video games.

I just realized that I can’t wear my plaid Docs until my tattoo heals up. Damnit! Oh, these first world problems will be the mild irritant of me!

I don’t often feel like anything I ever do is wrong, but I’ve got some guilt going and I don’t care for it one bit.

Ed is in Alberta on business, and he left two days early to spend some time with his friends and family and/or away from me. From the brief conversation we had via MSN last night, I gather that he didn’t get to see as many friends as he’d have liked – they’re all busy having babies and shit. Most of me is reacting as expected (“ewwwwww, why”), but there’s a small part of me that won’t shut up that wonders if I did the right thing.

Not having babies is the right thing for me; there’s no question about that. However, every once in a while I wonder about Ed: is he truly on board with Team No Babies, or was he simply caught up in the ferocity of my convictions?

It seems as though everyone from Ed’s Alberta life is having kids – best friends, the cousins he grew up with, the people he hung out with daily. There are babies everywhere, except for in or around us. I’m ecstatic about that, but is he? Have I trapped him (for lack of a better word) in a life he doesn’t want? Am I denying him his right to procreate?

This thought kept me awake last night, because it’s a hell of a thought to have. I don’t tend to dwell on the consequences my decisions have wrought, but every once in a while – like now – I seethe with guilt because of my unwillingness to be a vessel of life. As far as *I’M* concerned, everything is super – I don’t want kids, and my mother doesn’t want grandkids (but even if she did, who cares) so that’s that. But .. Ed’s an only child too, meaning not only will HE not get the chance to raise children, I’ve denied his parents grandchildren. I feel .. mean.

Part of the problem is my inability to take people at face value. You can sit me down, look me in the eyes and say with every ounce of conviction you can muster “Kimli, I do not like mayonnaise”, and I will always wonder if, deep down, you don’t actually like mayonnaise but are saying you don’t just to spare my feelings. Ed has told me that he doesn’t want kids .. but is that true? Or is he just telling me what I want to hear? Do these visits home make him sad? Are his friends leading the lives he was meant to have; one that he’s being kept from because of me?

I am a selfish being, and I’m okay with that. If Ed came home tomorrow and said he wanted children, I would let him have them .. just not with me. I’d let him go; let him find someone to have children with. There are some things that are too important to simply “put up with” if there’s discourse in a relationship, and this is one of them. I’m not going to change my mind, but he’s allowed to change his – the price just happens to be me. It would suck great heaping gobs of suck, but part of being pro-choice is allowing people to CHOOSE what’s right for them – and if he CHOOSES to want children, I’m not going to stand in his way.

Yeah, this is a really crappy line of thought for a Monday morning: cutting your husband free if he decides he wants the one thing you won’t give him. I’d do it, though. I have a secret fear of being resented, and I’d rather let him go than think he’d be secretly hating me for the next 50 years.

Now I have a sad.

Update: I got the SD Card out. All I had to do was disconnect every cable from my Mac, unplug it, take it off my desk and shake it a little until enough of the card poked out for me to grab it with a Procter and Gamble cookie recipe from 1998 (don’t ask). I’ll let Renee post her pics on her own site, but here are mine:

bzzzzzzzzzzzz

i'm universal, baby

I am pretty sure I just leveled up as a nerd.

Better pics to come as it heals up and junk!

—

Renee and I got tattoos today (not the same tattoo; I already have a lesbian life partner in Ali). I would love to show you the pictures that we took while getting inked, but I can’t – I stuck the SD Card with the images into the DVD Drive of my iMac, and I can’t get the card out. My iMac ate it. It’s gone. I’ve tried scissors, a butter knife, a bamboo spoon and an actual CD, but nothing.

I would like to blame this on the fact that I am beyond exhausted – I couldn’t fall asleep last night no matter what I tried, and was still tossing and turning at 5am – but I’ve actually done it before. I’ve always been able to get the card out before it disappeared into the carnivorous depths of my computer, but this time my extraction methods are not up to the task.

Shit.

Pictures of tattoos coming, assuming I can get the card out without having to break out the chainsaw. All I have are the phone images taken during the tattooing. Can you guess what the tattoos are of?

renee getting inked

my turn

We went looking for trouble.

We found baby food instead.

I am not entirely sure if the day was a success or not.

Now that episodes of The Big Bang Theory are in syndication, I’ve been trying to get into it to see what all the fuss is about.

And .. I kind of hate the show.

My distaste makes no sense to me – it’s a show about nerds, doing nerdy things, starring nerds that I’ve had a crush on since Roseanne. The theme song is sung by nerds, and .. you know, nerds. Everywhere. And yet, I hate it all over the place.

I really wanted to like it, and I gave it a bunch of solid tries before I threw in the towel. It’s not that it’s not funny – we watched last night’s episode to see Wil Wheaton’s cameo, and I laughed out loud at Mayim Bialik‘s lines a few times – but the rest of the show leaves me seriously cold, and I’ve thought at length as to why.

It’s the laugh track.

The laugh track tries SO HARD to make sure you know that SOMETHING FUNNY IS BEING SAID AND NOW YOU SHOULD LAUGH that it seriously turns me off. I’m a nerd; I KNOW this stuff is funny. It’s right up my alley. The laugh track is so forced though that the entire thing feels like pandering; like the audience is being talked down to. It makes me really uncomfortable, and that’s why I don’t enjoy the show.

I know the core audience isn’t nerds – it’s people who like Two and a Half Men and stuck around to see what else is on – but that doesn’t mean the laugh track has to be so pointed and obvious. It takes the funny situation or exchange and turns it into slapstick for dumb people, and I can’t handle it. I don’t like being pandered to, and the show is nothing but.

It’s too bad – I could really get into it if not for that really loud, jarring noise every time someone opens their mouth.

NERDS! THEY’RE JUST LIKE YOU AND ME! HAHAH!

In the grand scheme of things, my frosty detour (not to be confused with a Frosty detour, which is delicious) was not such a big deal. I did not realize that most of downtown would be closed off for ceremonies so early, forcing Lola and I to go the long way around to get to the office. If this is the biggest hurdle I face today – and even if it’s not, really – I will be grateful for the sacrifices made by my countrymen that allowed me to whine about they trivial things that they literally died for.

It’s very cold in the office today – I forgot they turn off the heat when no one is around. I may have to abuse the hot chocolate machine to warm myself up – it’s either that, or put on gloves.

The more I play with the Phoster app, the more I like it. I have it on my iPad, and I use it to do things like this:

look at them all

Nothing deep or meaningful; just a whole lot of cherries. This makes me laugh, a lot. I am nothing if not simple.

Tell me that the tiny white flaky things wafting down from the sky on my freezing cold ride home were, in actuality, one or more of the following:

• Volcanic ash from an eruption I somehow missed while forearm deep in CRM
• God’s dandruff
• The aftermath of a catastrophic Office Depot explosion in which no people were hurt but thousands of innocent loose-leaf pages perished in the resulting inferno (then kicked up by a sudden windstorm and spread throughout the night sky)
• Cigarette ash from the butts of every person in every car in front of me (which actually happened yesterday; I was never so happy to have your disgusting, repulsive ash in my face)
• This guy, sloppily doing blow:

.. tell me ANYTHING. Just .. not that. Please, not that.

I think I may have just ridden my last pantless* ride of the year.

(*while I technically rode pantless due to the dress I wore today, I am far more protected than if I were wearing actual pants thanks to knee-high boots with thick soles and the sexy shin guard/knee pad combo I wear over them)

Tomorrow will be my very first Remembrance Day with someone to remember. Other than going out and getting myself a raging case of Super Gonorrhea, I don’t quite know what else I can do – I think about the grandfather I never knew on a regular basis, and I respect his sacrifice (and appreciate the fact that he helped make my dad before the war and before dallying with the most diseased French prostitutes 1916 had ever seen so I could be here 94 years later to poke fun at him). I have to work tomorrow so I can’t go to any ceremonies .. but I don’t know that I would go even if I could. I’m not a ceremony person – I pay my respects in my own way, and it generally doesn’t involve Amazing Grace played on bagpipes.

Did You Know: I memorized “In Flanders Fields” in grade 8 for fun (I was a weird kid), and I still remember it to this day. I recite it when I can’t fall asleep – and if it doesn’t work, I move on to Shakespeare. If THAT doesn’t work .. well, there’s masturbation involved. Warm milk is for pussies.

In honour of my grandfather’s Super Gonorrhea, I give you some wartime STD Awareness Posters. I’m thinking he could have really used these in France, but Wangzillas aren’t known for our common sense – also, these are from WWII. Perhaps VD wasn’t as big an issue in WWI, or something.

it's a (booby) trap!

coming MY way?

those are terrible, terrible odds but it still doesn't explain the severity of my grandfather's super mega godzilla gonorrhea

I begged. I pleaded. I opened my soul and asked for help: I beseeched Twitter to tell me, order me, FORBID me from buying these Doc Marten boots.

Don’t get me wrong – the floodgates of support did open .. the other way. Countless people (okay, 5) threw their hands up in encouragement for me to BUY the boots, not to stay away from them. I *KNOW* they’re totally me – that’s why I wanted them so badly in the first place. For the sake of my credit card, I needed help resisting the impossible lure of plaid, 20-hole awesome – but instead, you turned your coats on me and cheered me right into the devil’s hot sticky embrace.

THIS IS YOUR FAULT, INTERNET!

they're fucking awesome, damnit

I ordered them on Friday after you all stabbed me in the back, and they showed up today. I’m both impressed and cursing your names aloud.  Tonight I take them home and treat them with toxic chemicals, then tomorrow we take over the world.

It’s been Crazy Delivery Day here at work – two and a half things arrived for me. My iDevice cases shipped separately and I only got the first one today but it’s really awesome: check my app blog for pics and a review. The case, boots and various girl sauces from Sephora mean I have a busy night ahead of me, no thanks to you crummy people on the internet.

(you know I’m kidding; I <3 even if you drive me to terrible, awesome things. I guess it’s just payback for all the times people have thrown things at me for being an enabler – shopping with me will break your wallet. s’not MY fault I find great things for other people.)

Boots!