Nope! No bunnies here!

http://fetlife.com/sit_on_santas_lap

I'm doing this to increase my chances of winning something. You know I rarely do this, and I won't do it again all year, but I'd really like a new whip.

Thx.

This is a really brilliant film - shows what you can do with editing to create an amazing feeling of violence and horror. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La6T8Bq6CsU&feature=player_embedded

My political views have changed so much in the last two year.

I wasn't vehemently anti-socialist, but I believed in the free market, the invisible hand, that with an economy of this scale, it will all shake out as it should. In many ways, in many sectors, this is still true: Breakfast Cereal is fairly priced through successful competition.

But in the largest parts of our free market, this has failed us. The power of the Individual to make his own world is a myth - we are truly connected in ways I didn't foresee when I supported de-regulation of capital markets. Of course, I was in my twenties, just starting to invest when much of the laws which set our disaster in motion were passed. But it made sense - these banks were run by smart guys, smarter than the failed insurance salesman representing them in congress.

Predatory Lending was just the Lion on the planes of Africa - there to pick off the sick, the weak, the stupid. It's part of the natural order, and frankly if there are fewer stupid gazelles, then there is more grass for smart gazelles to eat and prosper. So go ahead and sign up for every credit card invitation they send you. I'll wave to you when I drive past the bankruptcy court on my way to work. My wife has no credit cards, I have one from Target, only to bolster my credit rating for when I was ready to buy a house. And when people were signing up for Adjustable Rates, I chuckled and got a decent fixed rate. Smart Gazelle navigating around the Lions. I never saw a car as more than a necessary expense, and have always been modest with status symbols, instead putting extra funds into the 401(k), the investment account (buy-and-hold for me, good luck with your day-trading...).

I didn't believe that I would go down with all of them. I thought, I believed - like people believe in Jesus, I believed that doing smart conservative financial steps would protect me in the Ant and Grasshopper sense. The more I watch and read the autopsy of this disaster, the more stupid I feel. Frontline's "The Card Game" is a great example. All these people all around me, with revolving credit maxed out, 2nd mortgages, an entire society driving with the pedal to the floor until the system broke. Predatory lending put the balance of the entire country's fortunes into the hands of people stupid enough to believe a story too good to be true - and in my heart, I have always known that there are more stupid people than smart people.

I never made a mis-step in my financial life. My bad investments fall into two categories: A) I knew it was a long shot and I used gambling money (GM), or B) I based my decision on lies (Enron), but in all cases, it was discretionary dollars. Most of the money is in broad index funds. Conservative. I went down to the bottom, right along with every fool, every spender, every frivolous lout who mortgaged his home to buy an Escalade and paid electricity bills on credit cards with 31% interest.

The Free Market failed us all. Banking, lending, and securities trading needs to be watched closely, and consumer protections must be put into place as they are with food and vehicles. Most people are on board with this - a few holdouts, mostly the ones with the most to lose, who are also those responsible for the wreck we are in. Furthermore, our future growth will be slow compared to the short time I've been an adult and seen two major bubbles inflate and then explode taking me with it. They threaten to tighten credit, and there are few things we need more than tighter credit, though to hear the other side, you'd think restricting credit was killing us. We need to lose weight, but it's hard to cut out soda and fat kids whine when they can't have candy. I'm stating the obvious, but it's spilling over into other parts of my life.

Leaving many behind weakened us all. It's true for consumer credit, and it's true for healthcare. If you are smart, strong, capable, you must bear some burden of the weak and stupid. It sucks, and I wish it weren't true. I wish I could just be responsible for myself - as I always believed. I am healthy and I take care of myself, my wife is in good health (not this week, but in general, she is very strong and will live a long time). I believe my son will inherit a long lineage of sturdy constitution. We can take care of ourselves and only ourselves - but it is clear to me now that this is to our peril.

If we allow the weak to linger, we drag down our country. We literally lose our strength, and hand over control to those countries who recognize that there are limits to the free market, and that the care and protection of the populace is the responsibility of government - that we are and always will be our brother's keeper. Our lazy, stupid brother.

I can't crash again. I don't know how many people are waking up from this crazy dream - I know more are getting it than ever before, but with so much inflammatory rhetoric about healthcare, I have to wonder. Are we going to fix the financial system only to go back to the Every-Man-For-Himself world of Health Insurance - and just wait till that sinks our economy, yet again?

I hate being wrong. I hate that I was wrong for such a long time. I hate that I bought into an only slightly less ridiculous premise than the unlimited credit card ruse my stupid brother (metaphor, not the actual brother in prison, but this isn't far from) bought into. I'm just as dumb for believing a line that was too good to be true.

You are my brother, and we are in this together.

- T.

It was going to be a porn post with a lot of blowjobbery, but I got a couple of calls tonight that are preventing me from debauchery.

First, my mother went to Florence Arizona to visit my little brother, Young Dan, in the Big House. He's doing great. Sure, lonely and miserable and in fucking prison - but he's doing great. He's eating well, getting exercise, his skin is cleared up now that he's off meth, and he works off-campus doing welding for the school bus repair hangar nearby.

His work pays him a little, which he can spend at the prison shop, so he has a tiny tv to watch in his cel. He asked mom what "Twitter" was, since it's referred to often on tv, but no one explains. He keeps his head down, goes to church, attends AA meetings, and knows how to avoid trouble.

In prison, he knows how to avoid trouble. Put him on the street, and he's in bed with trouble in less than a day - but put him in a Maximum Security Prison, and the worthless fucker is doing fine; he's flourishing. I told him all the ways he could avoid this place he's in, and he went down the checklist to assure that he'd go - and now he's doing fine.

I gotta wonder.

...

So my old friend Shawna, the 'artist', calls me tonight. We went to a 'club' last Thursday to hear her do a music... thing. I don't know what it was. It was bad. Anywho - she calls me tonight, and we make some smalltalk about the night, and her kids, then she asks me if I remember Mason.

When we were little kids here in Houston, she and her sister, me, and Crystal were all pals. Crystal had a little brother named Mason, but we were 6 and 7 - he was 3, just a baby. I hardly remember him, other than who he was in relation to Crystal. 3 years is a big difference when it's half your life, but now it's insignificant. But he's younger than me. Was.

Mason died today, she tells me. I run through my memory, trying to remember mother informing me of some kind of slow illness, cancer, something. Some kind of accident? No. This 34 year old guy who was in great shape and doing fine, got a cold a few days ago, he thought. By that night, it was more like the flu. The next morning it was worse, so he went to the hospital. An hour later, he was in the Intensive Care Ward, and a day later he is dead. Bacterial infection.

Shawna is hazy on details, but it began with his getting a tooth capped, but something was under the cap, something that went into the roots, into his blood, and killed him. It killed him, while in the ICU of an excellent hospital in a city where you want to be if you are fucked up. We have the Texas Medical Center here, MD Anderson, a whole section of the city is the Medical District. They guy checks in a reasonable time frame, gets the best possible care, and he just dies while all the kings horses and all the kings men just watch.

This is my second Bolt Of Lightning kind of death - not dying in a war, or binge drinking while on prescription meds, or a car crash. A death, seemingly without cause. My first was Berty, who died on her kitchen floor from a brain aneurism while her husband went to the store for charcoal. That was nearly 15 years ago, and who knows if she could have been revived? Probably not, but there was no doctor or trauma team or crash cart right next to the bed. Mason had everything we've got, and he died from a germ in his tooth.

He wasn't my friend, but I've been here three months, and I haven't tried to see Crystal. Now I'm wondering if I should go to the memorial this Saturday.

...

I know - this is the kind of thing that starts to creep into the head of a first time parent with an infant son and no insurance; typical. No, it's not that I think I'm going to go like that - but neither did Berty, Frank, Jenny, Doug... I more reacting to the reminder that nature is unpredictable. We have tamed so much of it, that we can think it to be tame, but there are bullets hidden away still. A bacteria in his tooth - he didn't come back from the Amazon with this, he never left Texas.

What the fuck got into his tooth? What did he eat, or breathe? Was he swimming? Whatever it was, I can't avoid it. I'm just reminded that it's in Texas, like the killer bees and Al Quaeda. All I can do is live and try not to waste more of my time. I'd like to think if I die in an ICU, I will be thinking about sailing the ocean, of Borneo and Nepal, of driving across this country, of my marriage and my son.

And probably not: "Thank God I downloaded all that Porn!"

- T.

Things are starting to pick up. We have a new playmate who likes the camera. It's going to take a while to get the full story here, but I'll give you a teaser to motivate me to doing a real post about our new friend. The short version is that she's bright, interesting, horny as fuck 24/7, and I think she gets us - enough to have a good time.

( cut for small, succulent breasts )

This year I am doing holiday cards and I need to start collecting people's addresses. As I am no longer doing a paid subscription to LJ, I can't create a fancy schmancy poll. Thus, you can do the following:

1. Email it to me to academichussy at gmail.com
2. If we're Facebook friends, you can send me a message there.
3. If you're on Twitter, you can DM me (pnkrcklibrarian) your address.
4. You can do the trick of posting to LJ and immediately deleting the comment. Once posted, the comment is immediately sent to me but once you delete on LJ, it's removed from public view. Thus, I have a copy of it and it's not visibly to the public.
5. You can gTalk me at academichussy at gmail


Also, I moved in January '09 to Royal Oak, so if you have an address for me, it should be for a Royal Oak address. If not, let me know if you want to exchange cards and need my address.

I'll be sending cards out the week before the 25th so there is no rush. ;)

Originally published at lib schooled.. You can comment here or there.

Virginia Woolf once proselytized that a woman needs a place of her own, “a room of one’s own” in which they could think, create and have their own space without outside interferences. The slim book by the same name sits on my To Be Read pile, with the hopes that one day I will have the space of my own (and to finish the damned book!).

I think about having my own space a lot these days, not necessarily my own apartment, but a place where I can go shut off the world, lounge on a chaise reading or writing and basically just having time for me. How Justin and I have existed nearly half-a-year in a 600 sq ft apartment where everything we do is broadcasted to the other is still kind of a minor miracle. How Justin survives with his “desk” actually being the dining room table, no room for his things except for one large closet and a corner by his “desk,” again, a minor miracle. Granted when he moved in, he came with just a carload of things, mainly a box of books, clothes and some personal effects — but everything else in the apartment is me.

Read the rest of this entry »

My son is jacking the AA golf cart.

It's snowing in Houston, Texas. I'm pretty sure that is a qualifying event.



Good luck!

( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )

You know how sometimes people on your friends list post about stuff going on in their life, and all of a sudden you think "Wait a minute? Since when were they working THERE? Since when were they dating HIM/HER? Since when???" And then you wonder how you could have missed all that seemingly pretty standard information, but somehow you feel too ashamed to ask for clarification because it seems like info you should already know? It happens to all of us sometimes.

Please copy the topics below, erase my answers and put yours in their place, and then post it in your journal! Please elaborate on the questions that would benefit from elaboration. One-Word-Answers seldom help anyone out.



1. First Name: T. I have a name that could only come from dirty hippies. I am not the only person in America with this name, but there are probably less than 5 of us. It's just too googlable to print.

2. Age: 37, with 38 coming this month

3. Location: Houston Texas, after spending 5 years in Phoenix and before that: Philippines, Chicago area, LA, San Diego, and various points Southwest.

4. Occupation: I am a useless, unemployed house-husband.

5. Partner: The Extraordinary Lisa. We're still newlyweds with less than 2 years under our belts, and I'm crazy about her.

6. Kids: We have one together, only 17 months old. She has a boy and a girl (7 and almost-10) with their dad in Phoenix, and we miss them very much.

7. Siblings: Complex. I have only half and step siblings, but if they are all you have, they are full siblings to me. I am the oldest of 6 counting all combinations of parentage: Jason, married professional in Phoenix with a son just a little older than my boy; Maya, single professor in upstate New York; Ethan (twin), world traveller and skilled bartender in Austin but soon to be permanently in Thailand; Daniel (twin), serving hard time at the state pen in Florence AZ for being a druggie scumbag; Sara, married but soon to be probably divorced, mother of 4, a burden on everyone she knows. Some are mother's kids, some are father's - all are mine.

8. Pets: None right now, unless you count Lisa's baby brother living with us. he's kindofa pet.

9. List the 3-5 biggest things going on in your life:

a) Short-selling our former house and trying not to get too hard a screwing in this process, but we keep the Bankrupcty on the table in case someone wants blood for the $80,000 loss this short sale is incorporating.

b) Gearing up for yet another low-budget holidays, and the road trip back to Phoenix. Can't wait to see everyone, but I'm tired of the tight budget holidays, year after year. I'd like to simply be generous, but our extended families push the present count into the 20's. There are a lot of kids around now - I'm having trouble keeping track of them all.

c) Setting up my life so I can go back to school in September. I'm finally going to law school, like everyone told me to do back in '95.

d) Losing 20 pounds by spring. Seriously, this is just getting stupid.

e) Part-time / temp work. A little extra $ will go a long way here.

10. Parents: Father is happily married in Phoenix to wife #4, trapped in his house by the collapsed market, working a job he likes after more than a year unemployed. He spends too much time taking care of Sara's kids. Mother is in Austin, still working as a nurse, married to husband #3. My son is her first grandchild, and while she loves it, she is also confused/conflicted about it. I am still in contact with mother's ex, the father of her three children, and my father's ex is still in the lives of her kids, so she's kinda in my life, too. This means I have 6 parental figures floating around, and one set of surviving step-grandparents.

11. Some of your closest friends are: all in Phoenix, but I am discovering I have good friends and resources here in Houston - and I need to cultivate them.

Why did I not know about the power of the Three Wolf Moon shirt?

Seriously, you fuckers. I lost my job, I lost my home, I had to relocate my family - and this could have all been prevented with a lousy $9.95!

...

For reals, did you know about this? The shirt has over 1500 customer reviews. Read them. Watch the film. Unless you all had this laugh months ago, and it's like I just discovered Dilbert.

- T.