It's a twofer!!

I'm a horrible award recipient, due to a combination of procrastination and short term memory loss (either due to all the pot-smoking in the 80's or the pregnancy-brain thing that never did fix itself after giving birth. There was another reason but I just forgot what it was 5 seconds after I thought of it. I wish I was kidding, but I'm not. Fucking irony). I'm also going to blame the Triad of Time-Sucks: Pinterest, fb and that fucking Candy Crush game that will NOT let me move up to the next level, despite finishing each of the first 35 levels because what the fresh hell is up with that bullshit???? UNLOCK THE NEXT FUCKING LEVEL, YOU CAVITY-RIDDEN ASSMONKEYS OR I WILL GET OUT MY IMAGINARY FLAMETHROWER AND MELT CANDYLAND INTO A STICKY PUDDLE....SCORCHED EARTH, MOTHERFUCKERS

 Ahem.

Anyhoo, back to these awards. I've been nominated for 4 Liebsters but I'm going to continue to put those off because I'm a lazy asshole and Liebsters are a honour, but labour intensive, especially when you save them up and have to answer 4 sets of questions, come up with 4 sets of questions and dress up 4 monkeys in tutus and teach them to perform Swan Lake (that last bit may or may not be required...I may not have read the rules clearly)

Today I'm going to accept 2 awards:

The first is from Marjorie at Don't Call Me Marge who I consider a member of my blogging tribe aka The Potty-Mouthed Pussy Posse, which I just made up right now and would totally make a badge for except for I don't know how to do that due to my technological ineptness. Also she had a brillo pad giveaway and I just saw I WON!!!! I seriously love her :)

To prove how devoted I am to this team, I promise that in the event of a zombie apocalype, I plan to amputate my leg and  arm and replace it with a cannon and chainsaw, respectively

What I love best about this award is there are no rules or questions or math questions you have to solve before you can claim your award...so I am honoured, grateful and a little relieved, especially about the lack of math.

The second award is from Starr at The Insomniac's Dream, who I also consider a Potty-Mouth Pussy Posse member and she is awesomesauce in human form. Unfortunately her blog will not let me leave comments anymore which is probably due to more technological retardation on my part because seriously, I still don't know even know where the mute button is on my phone, nor can I figure out how to add a fb/twitter/pinterest button to my blog because I can't understand the fucking tutorial

This award is super-cool, not only because it has the word "whore" in it (heehee) but look at those fucking boots!!!

 Rules:

1. Upon receiving this award, you will receive a prompt. You are to write about said prompt. (Whenever you feel like it)

2. Link back to who gave you this award and include the picture of the award in your post.

3. Pass it to just five bloggers. (You can tag back if you want to read what your presenter has to say about the topic you come up with.)

4. Come up with a prompt for the five bloggers you chose.

5. When you do finally get around to writing the prompt, let the blogger who presented you this award know. So they can read it.



So the prompt was Guilty Pleasures, and yes, I have several of those:

Reading: which I never ever technically feel guilty about except for a vague unease after I spend an entire Sunday reading and get nothing else accomplished. But I've learned to ignore the shit out of that feeling because fuck it...BOOKS!

The internet: I spend waaaay too much time online. I think it may be more of an obsession at this point than a guilty pleasure

Nyquil: I secretly get excited when I'm sick because I can dose myself up with this magical elixor. Fortunately I have enough self control to prevent myself from using Nyquil recreationally and turning into one of those people who visits 6 different drugstores so no one will question why someone needs 12 bottles of Nyquil at a time, but it really is the best part about being sick. Well that, and the stomach flu-induced weight loss, which also makes me excited once the vomiting and diarrhea ends.

Coming home from the salon on a slow day to have a nap in between clients: actually I don't feel guilty about this at all. So technically it's just a pleasure

So now I'm gonna pass on BOTH awards to the following 5 bloggers and your writing prompt is this:

If you were dictator of a small island nation whose only export to support the entire island was bananas, what kinds of cut-throat marketing and business practices would you use to insure that your island becomes a monopoly in the banana market?

Jenn at Jeneral Insanity
Kelly at Dysfunctionally Functional
Lily at Incoherent Ramblings Of A Moose
Nagzilla at The Adventures of Nagzilla
Jenn at Something Clever 2.0

Also, I'm totally tagging back Marjorie and Starr...because I can :D

Mental deafness would be nice right about now

Let me preface by saying this: Carly Rae Jepson seems like a very sweet girl and I like that despite her fame, she has so far remained normal and not gone the trainwreck route, a la Amanda Bynes/Lindsey Lohan, nor  is she a serial dater who buys a house next door to her love interest after the second date, and breaks up before the ink is barely dry on the house title, then proceeds to release an album she might as well called "Men Are Dicks and Love Sucks Hairy Donkey Balls" (yes Taylor Swift, I'm talking about you. The breakup songs were amusing up until about 42 boyfriends ago. You may want to find a new kind of lyric fodder...I suggest you join a nunnery so you can avoid men for a while, or maybe the military where you could learn to channel your post-break-up fury by running over drug cartel kingpins with a tank)

Anyfuckingway, while I have nothing against Carly Ray, right now she is the bane of my fucking existance because her catchy tune has burrowed it's way deep into the center of my brain and will not fucking leave

My brain decided to play Call Me Maybe on an endless fucking loop with no off-switch last night. All. Fucking. Night. It was an ear worm of the most horrific kind and when I finally dozed off sometime around dawn, it started up again the minute I woke up. I'm feeling slightly insane today due to lack of sleep and think the lyrics should be changed to "Hey, I just met you/ you're tired and lazy/thanks to my ear worm/you're bat-shit crazy".

If you'll excuse me, I'm off to google DIY lobotomies before I lose what's left of my mind

This post contains taxidermied deer asses and giant testicles. Consider yourself warned

Since my week consisted of work and more work, with nothing earth-shattering to blog about ( although I'm still having a raging internal debate about the penis/middle-finger tree, which is a pretty good indicator of where my life sits on the excitement scale), I looked to one of my favourite sources of writing inspiration for blog fodder...Pinterest. Otherwise known as The Most Addictive Time-Suck In The Universe But Holy Shit I Cannot Stop Pinning all This Awesome Yet Fucked Up Shit.

I truly understand why sex shops need to post this sign because it takes every ounce of self control I have not to start dildo-sword fights with my fellow sex shop patrons any time I go there

This is a testicle mascot for a cancer support group in Brazil. I'm not really sure how effective a giant set of testicles that should invest in some manscaping ASAP will be in promoting cancer awareness, but it would be kind of awesome to parade your balls around town and not get arrested

I have no idea what this is supposed to be, but it's made out of taxidermied deer butts, which is fucking sick and fantastic at the same time

While I understand as a parent that we all think our kids are brilliant prodigies of some kind, deluding yourself into believing your baby is the Monet of shit-art puts you around Bat-Shit-Crazy:Level 127

Arts And Crafts For Serial Killers

I feel like I should end this post on a scientific note, because I am all about educational information. You're welcome.

Something wicked this way comes

This week's Theme Thursday topic is definitely an interesting yet complicated one:  Evil: Does it exist? What is it? How do you define it? Why does it happen? 

The word evil is defined in the dictionary as something that is morally bad, wrong or wicked. Pretty broad, and open to much interpretation, as far as definitions go, and I'm sure if you asked 100 different people to explain what evil personally means to them, you'd have 100 different answers.

Personally, I believe in evil because I believe in dualism. Where light exists, so must the dark. Where there is life, there is death...where there is harmony, there is chaos...ying and yang, etc, etc. I believe in universal balance and I could get easily get sidetracked and start blathering on about reciprocation in nature and opposites and a bunch of other shit that sounds so New-Agey that I have to check myself, lest you all start thinking I'm gonna suggest we all sit holding hands in a healing circle and discuss our charkra alignments, before we move on to protection spells and joyful chanting to charge the circle with positive energy (I mock, yet I've done all these things. And yes, the chanting made me feel stupid and I'm pretty sure mine was way less joyful than it was supposed to be, due to the voice in my head saying "Are you seriously chanting with a bunch of people who smell like BO and patchouli, and that smile way too much for no apparent reason?? They could be nice, zen-ed out, blissful people...or they could be the fucking Manson Family. Run for your life before they start playing a Beatles record backwards, you dumbass").

Wow, that whole paragraph just went completely sideways and turned into one long, run-on sentence, didn't it? It is obvious I'm neither Shakespeare, nor Plato but then again I don't really want to be either, because they probably died of the plague or some form of explosive diarrhea that today could be cured with antibotics and Pepto Bismol...hooray for modern medicine!

Fuck, I did it again.

Anyfuckingways, back on topic...I think all humans have the potential to be evil, just like I think all humans have potential to be innately good. Look at all the evil acts and behaviour in history and you can see that evil is definitely a human trait. While I think that some people commit evil acts because it's in their psychological makeup and their brain wiring is all fucked up (like how there have been studies on diagnosed criminal psychopaths that show their brain reacts differently than a normal person's brain to violent stimuli), I also believe that everyone has the potential to behave in an evil manner, but their own moral code is what keeps it in check. However, given enough negative stressors, whether it's a physical or emotional pressure of an extreme nature I think we're all capable of evil behaviour.

 Phillip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment is great example of how people can and will react under extreme conditions. The roles of the prison guards and the prisoners were chosen at random, yet by the time the experiment ended rather abruptly after 6 days, it was noted that at least a third of the participants in the role of prison guards were exhibiting genuine sadistic tendencies and most of the guards were upset when the experiment was terminated early. So were those participants closet-sadists to begin with, and they just happened to volunteer for this experiment, where they had no idea which role they'd be assigned to? Or did the experiment allow the evil part of those participants that may have lay dormant and undetected up until that point, to come to the surface when they had an opportunity to behave in a cruel manner with no repercussions? I believe the latter.

And what about the rest of us? I've seen a trailer for a movie who's premise is that for 24 hours of one day every year, people can do whatever they want, with no repercussions at all. They can rob, rape and kill...24 hours of absolute anarchy, where if someone has done you wrong, you have a free pass for revenge, anyway you see fit. I'm sure most people's first reaction when presented with that scenario would be "Holy shit, what a horrible fucking idea!". But ask yourself this, in brutal honesty...is there someone that has wronged you or someone you love, and if you had a chance to punish them in whatever way you deemed righteous, would you do it? Would that make you evil if you did? Because that's the problem with evil...we may have all thought about seeking some kind of revenge on someone who did us a horrible wrong, but is having to live with ourselves after crossing that line into evil is what prevents us from breaking our own moral code? Or are we maybe more afraid that if we did cross that line once, it would make it easier to cross again, until we moved the line to the point we could not recognize good from evil any longer?

I suppose my point is, when I think of evil, I don't think of some nasty dude who smells like sulphur and pokes people with a pitchfork. In my opinion, every human being has the capacity for evil, but our capacity for good plus our personal moral code keeps it in check

Douchebag trees and social rituals that require bending

I noticed this morning that one of the trees outside my apartment looks like it's giving me multiple middle fingers. I haven't decided if this is a personal insult or it's giving the neighbourhood the middle finger salute on my behalf, because it feels a sort of an asshole-ish kinship with me and this is our way of bonding. I prefer to believe the latter. However, on closer inspection it could be penises instead of middle fingers, in which case, I have a motherfucking porn tree and don't even tell me you're not jealous that nature decided to grace me with a tree full of dicks

Stupid technology. I tried to make this picture bigger but it keeps shrinking it back. Trust me, it looks like a middle finger/dick tree. Also, this tree is proof that Mother Nature is either a sarcastic bitch or a pervert. Or both.

In other news, I was texting with Rigger (aka my boyfriend, and I was too lazy to come up with a really good nickname for him, so his job description will have to do...he's currently building an oil refinery up north and rigging is what he does. Not clear on what exactly that is, but it involves massive tanks, pipes and scaffolding that he can plummet off of if he's not careful. Also, a big crane almost fell over a couple weeks ago which would have killed several people, after which he informed me this job is 100 times more dangerous than his old job, which thrills him a bit because he's an adrenaline junkie and makes me want to look up "crushing injuries" on Web MD, but I won't because WebMD is already  a major contributor to my Paranoia: Medical Department.) and I asked him if he had a chance to try out the golf simulator at camp yet (since these camps are generally in the middle of nowhere, the company Rigger works for provides shit like an winter outdoor skating rink, 2 gyms, a game room, private theater and a bunch of other cool stuff for these guys to do in their downtime, to ensure they don't get cabin fever and start running around with an
axe, chopping people's heads off. Or something like that)

So far it's been a no-go with the golf simulator partly because there's a big list to get on it, but mostly because there's a bit of a bowing non-compliance war going on. You see, the company he works for is Korean...I'll refer to them as Company X. Company X works for Company Y (also Korean) and Company Y owns the golf simulator. Apparently the younger Company Y  Korean employees are not bowing to the older Company X Korean employees, which is a big-time cultural offense.I asked Rigger if he bows at work and if he he gets a hall-pass if he does it wrong because he's not Korean. He told me Canadians aren't expected to bow, but he bows because it's respectful. But there's different types of bowing, depending on who you're bowing to and now I'm wondering if the Korean language lessons he's taking at camp include bowing lessons and maybe they should, because he wants to move up in the company, so he should probably become an expert on bowing since maybe it's kind of like French shrugging, which indicates a hundred different things depending on shoulder stance, lip-pursing and how high you can raise your eyebrows.

Conclusion: Bowing is fucking complicated. And my boyfriend cannot golf because some asshole won't bow correctly.

Got my zen back. Apparently it was in Tofino all this time.

I am way behind on the ABC's of Swearing Challenge ( shit, damn, fuck, douchenozzle) and I am totally out of the blog loop but I have a really good excuse. I was on a mini vacation, reconciling with an old flame and I'm happy to say the whole thing went awesome. He's made some huge, positive lifestyle changes and I'm ridiculously proud how far he's come. The only thing that sucks is that he works up north building an oil refinery and the shifts are looooong...long as in he had his 5 days out and now he won't be back out again until sometime in July. However, he's one of those insane people that thrives on busting his ass in a dangerous job in the middle of nowhere, living in camp keeps him out of trouble and, as much as I care for him, having some distance is not a bad thing for us at this point. Plus, we text back and forth throughout the day so we probably spend more time talking then if he was here.

Anyfuckingways, we spent our mini-holiday in Tofino, which is my favourite place in the world. It rained most of the time, but the suite we stayed in more than made up for the weather. It was pretty luxurious, with a fireplace, a king sized bed that was so comfy you didn't want to get up in the morning, heated floors,  a private hot tub on the deck and Chesterman Beach was just steps away.

Part of the view just off the deck, which I would never ever get tired of admiring

At sunset on Monday night, which was one of the very few times the sun came out. They don't call it The Wet Coast for nothing

We surfed (first time for me, and oh, did I suck at it and got totally beat up by the ocean. Plus I discovered it is not possible to look remotely good or breathe well in a wet suit, but the water is so fucking cold, it's a necessary evil. BUT, it was fun as hell and I can't wait to go again), we golfed (rained out on the 7th hole, which was not entirely bad because I was playing like a blind amputee), we ate (found the best fish tacos in the universe!), we shopped (Best find: this t-shirt for me...

Could I have found a more appropriate shirt for the ABC's of Swearing Challenge? Motherfucking doubtful.

...and this paper made of actual horseshit for Spielberg)

Why yes, I find poop humour just as amusing at 42 as I did when I was 8

Of course I smelled it to see if it really was odorless. Also, buying this made me feel like one of those Rainbow Warrior environmentalist people because recycling poop is hardcore

...and we walked the beach, wandered around town, had lots of naps and spent lots of time relaxing. It was fanfuckingtastic and I cannot wait to go back (which we plan on doing in July).

So The Flame is on his way back to The Great White North, Spielberg comes home tomorrow after school (yay,because I missed him!) and I get back into work mode tomorrow.

What's new with you guys?

Ask and ye shall receive

Yesterday I left a comment on a blog post about swearing and in my comment I stated I find religious rhetoric offensive. The blog author asked me to explain why people are offended by religious content and instead of clogging up his comment section with a long and wordy comment, I thought I'd write a post instead.

Let me be clear: I have absolutely nothing against faith, spirituality or personal belief systems. What pisses me off is religious dogma, hypocrisy and the self-righteous, closed-minded attitude that seems to go hand in hand with organized religion. Have your faith in whatever gives you strength and peace...but the minute you start preaching at me and trying to jam your own morals and belief down my throat? Hell, yes, I find that offensive.

Dogma is defined as an official system of tenets and principles concerning faith, morals, behaviour, etc. This doctrine is proclaimed to be unquestionably true...and the unquestionable truth is the part I have an issue with. Faith is defined as belief in something that is not based on proof, which is fine for the individual who has faith, be it faith in God, Allah, The Flying Spaghetti Monster or the deity of your choice. The thing is, not everyone believes in the same thing...and there is absolutely no proof or empirical evidence that any one belief system is right. The only way to find out if your unquestionable truth is actual fact is when you die...and since there is thus far no scientific method of communicated with the dead, the question of God and the afterlife will remain a mystery. So yes, I find it offensive when someone suggests to me I repent, ask forgiveness from a deity that is based on myth, not fact, and if I don't I'm going to end up in some horrible place that no one can prove exists, while the self-proclaimed righteous go on to flit amongst the clouds and play harps all day. Again, believe what you want...but until you can prove that your belief system is based on fact, you have no right to foist your morals on anyone else.

Let's discuss religious hypocrisy. I'm not even going to get into all the heinously fucked-up things that have happened throughout history in the name of religion, because they are legion and we'd be here for the next 10 years slogging through them. But the thing I find most hypocritical about religion is how things like the bible get all twisted around and cherry-picked to suit a particular argument. I'm sorry, but NO ONE in this day and age takes the bible absolutely literally. If they did, then you'd be walking around asking random people if they were adulterers and hucking rocks at them if they answered in the affirmative. Quote all the bible verses you want, but just remember your own glass house is going to get shattered, because if we were to take the bible literally then every single person on the planet is guilty of something, including the most pious of people. Hypocrisy of any kind is offensive. But hypocrisy that hides behind a book and twists words for the sole purpose of pointing fingers and acting as judge, jury and executioner, while sweeping it's own shitty behaviour under the religious rug? Is the worst kind of hypocrisy there is.

I love this, I really do. Judge and condemn by using scripture as your weapon and then have a most un-Christian-like comeback when your bible-quoting gets thrown in your face

This leads me to the self-righteous/close-mindedness part of the story. Having faith is one thing. Declarations like "God kills fags" isn't about being faithful to anything. It's hatred in the name of religious dogma that has been so twisted that it cannot even be recognized as anything remotely biblical. The Westboro Baptist Church may be an extreme example, but it's an interesting one. These asshole picket funerals and claim that soldiers killed in Afghanistan died because God is punishing America for what they claim is the abomination of homosexuality. The part I find morbidly fascinating is these people have convinced themselves they are doing God's work and will be rewarded for it in heaven. So the question is this: if they believe the bullshit they spew is all said and done in the name of God, how is that different than sitting in judgement of how anyone else lives? Sure, it's way more extreme and disgusting, but it all boils down to that pesky unquestioning truth thing. Therefore, if you're a Christian and you find the WBC and their dogma repellant, do you not think that maybe someone else might find your own dogma repellant as well? If you're convinced that the WBC is wrong, how can you be so convinced that your own personal beliefs are right for anyone else but you? That's a hugely egotistical assumption to make...and closing yourself off to any other possibilities except for the one's that are your personal unquestionable truth is your choice. But it's not mine. And I find it offensive that anyone else would want to chose my own unquestionable truth for me.

Ok, religious rant over...back to our regularly scheduled shenanigans