I recently wrote a post over at my blog regarding the recent foiled alleged blow-up-some-planes plot, and about the US and UK’s response. Specifically, I’m among the school of thought that believes that imposing restrictions on average-joe-citizen doesn’t make things more difficult for would-be terrorists, but rather just makes things more difficult for average-joe-citizen.

Here’s an exerpt:

And I guess that’s the problem, really — laws and policies restricting freedoms don’t really stop terrorists who generally look for ways to get around those policies. Next year, people will be required to board planes naked and drugged, and terrorists will insert bombs into one orifice or another set to a timer… there’s not much you can do. It’s like gun control — taking away guns from law abiding citizens doesn’t do a thing to stop criminals. Tracking the purchase of Sudafed doesn’t stop the production of meth. These solutions simply don’t work, and yet it’s the only solutions governments use… and in the end, it’s average joe that suffers.

I’d like to fly without having to worry too much if somebody on the plane wants to kill everybody to make some statement about his or her beliefs. I think something should be done, but I’m at a loss for reasonable solutions to the problem.

The administration hasn’t done anything to make me feel safer. Any ideas?

I spent Friday night having a mini-party at the royal compound and drank more than is healthy. In my defense, I was drinking vodka tonics in an effort to ward off any chance of having malaria from my recent jungle adventures. So I spent Saturday laid out with what I thought was a massive hang-over. For future reference, rice is no fun coming back up.

But now it’s Monday and I am still feeling awful. I don’t think hang-overs come with a fever and fevers in the middle of summer really suck. I have bonded with my sofa, shut off my phone(s), and am holding onto my bottle of Advil for dear life.

Is it malaria:

With malaria, you develop a high fever, which comes and goes every other day or few days. How often a fever returns varies with each species of malaria. Many infections do not show this classic pattern of returning fevers at all.
In many people the infection will seem more like the flu with high fever and body aches. People also will complain of headache,
nausea, shaking chills (rigors), sweating, and weakness.
As the infection progresses, the fevers get less severe and you seem to recover. But the infection can hang on in many people for several years, particularly for those with a long history of exposure to malaria. These people can develop some immunity and may be infected for many years while only rarely having symptoms

Or is it just the run of the mill flu? Remember me when I am on my deathbed folks.

PS Jovial- I will totaly give you the OK to post. But I think you should have to do a funny monkey dance first. Dance monkey! Dance! Oh and I need your email addy to send an invite to post.

I keep meaning to write a long, ranty open letter to Israel about Lebanon, but I’m feeling a bit of nostalgia at the moment and I have someone on my mind and they won’t get off.

Maybe it’s the letdown from being on vacation and coming home to large range of crappy problems. See, I dealt with crappy problems everyday on vacation, things like “Oh my god it’s Friday night and we only have 50 pesos (5 bucks) till the bank opens on Monday” and “What do you mean you want 450 pesos for a room with no hot water or air conditioning” and the most frequent of our problems (because the naughty prof is a veggie) “Can we see a menu? Do you have anything without meat? No, without chicken or pork too- sin animales por favor? Are your beans made with oil or lard?” I never thought I would have to know the name for lard in Spanish- but if you’re wondering it’s manteca. Mantequilla (which is butter) is kinda like little lard.

But those are fun problems really. I like the feeling of throwing yourself to the wind in a place where your normal language skills and cultural knowledge have to be stretched and pushed to their absolute limits, like silly putty on newspaper. But being home means a list of time consuming, mundane problems that that just keep coming. No amount of creativity or brain power will solve them. I have to use the skill I suck most at- patience.

So in the midst of all this I distract myself with thoughts of someone I shouldn’t be thinking of. So to distract myself from my distraction- I am planning next year’s trip. Eastern Europe and all it’s glory of pickled veggies and potato dishes, vodka that is not the craptastic stoli (which made the kick in my nightly malaria tonics- the only thing that has kept my royal ass from winding up laid out like a tropical heroine in a trashy romance novel) and somewhere- a church made entirely of human bones. I’m so excited. I made the suggestion of visiting all the cities considered to be the new Prague, but that would take a year.

So far the intinerary includes: Krakow, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, somewhere in Slovenia (naughty prof has a friend there) and maybe Dubrovnik, Croatia. And if we are going to be in Slovenia, then a quick trip to my favorite, non-touristy small Italian city is in order- Trieste- where coffee is brought into Europe and roasted and where James Joyce conceived Ulysses.

But thinking about Italy makes nostalgic thoughts worse- so maybe I will think of Fidel keeling over and travel restrictions finally being lifted. Cause if that happens- Eastern Europe will wait but Cuba is screaming my name. Until then- espero y sueno por Cuba libre (I wait and dream of free Cuba).

You and I may just be speaking to one another, but my response is a little too long for the comment box.

You may even know this one already. Network Commerce, DBA under many names such as Shopnow.com and other names was a total sham. The executive assistant was fucking the slimy boss and everyone knew it. The CEO was a middle-aged black man, but if you were a pretty white girl in your 20s, you could probably get a high-paying job. Of course, the company was buring through start-up cash and offering nothing.

I get hired as a customer service rep, dealing with telephone and email. After a time, the company chose a new credit-card processing company to handle transactions, mostly based on the payment the company actually paid, in cash, for Network Commerce to try the system. In the long run, the new comapny did a good job, but people where I worked with did not know how to set up the new software properly. The resullt was that small-business owners were getting charged twice or thrice for the auto-pay tied to their credit cards. People were getting charged again because the new system was validating their payment incorrectly though funds were sufficient. After a second or third charge, banks of these customers were accessing insufficient fund fees and the like, and other purchases on the cards failed because of the bogus charges from my company. It took about two weeks to figure out where the problem came from, but of course all arrows pointed back to us.

We, of course, received an avalanche of angry emails, more than our six-person team could answer. Every phone call, if they got through, was venomous vitirol. The executive decision after a time was to basically erase about two weeks of email. People were calling in asking whether we had received their emails and we could likely answer honestly, no.

Eventually, the program was figured out and solutions applied, but what an adventure!

Man, that was long… Did I tell about my stint for the Urkranian Daily Newspaper?

I really hate writing resumes. But after the millionth or so fuck up with the payroll office of my current job, I think it is time I move on to someplace where pay checks are issued on regularly scheduled dates. My check was supposed to be issued on the 31st- it is now over a week late.

So as I am typing up my resume I am pondering all the crap jobs I’ve had. There was the horrible pathology lab where we got billing statements in plastic biohazard bags because some hapless lab tech had spilled a vial of god-knows-what on it. There was the job I had for an international company that I really liked, except that one of the sales reps was married to the boss and had a tendency to have screaming tantrums for no fucking reason whatsoever. You couldn’t complain either- she actually said “You’ll do it because I’m sleeping with your boss” to me.

And then there was the temp job where I met Deek and the Hoopty of the week was started. We were cubicle hamsters and to alleviate the boredom I was fond of starting rubber band wars and throwing bottle tops at co-workers. Someday I will have to tell the story of the “Y’all don’t think I got a stack o’spreadsheets up under my desk” .

If any of you are still out there- hit me with your most craptastic job stories. Did you have to watch your boss change out of his gym clothes because he was to lazy to shut his office door (really happened) or listen to the same boss fuck his wife loudly on the stairs outside my office.

Hit me!

First- I climbed this all the way to the top

And this is what it looks like from the top.
And this is turtles having sex

And this is the ass of a spider monkey (sorry for the blurry- they are fast little buggers)

May I present for your viewing enjoyment- the pimpalicious, bling-bling, ghettofabulous short bus.

Now I must sing about it to the tune of “My Milkshake” by Kellis.

My hooptie brings all the boys to the yard.
Thats right, it’s better than yours.
That’s right, it’s better than yours
I could drive you, but I’d have to charge.

Yes, I intend this to be a controversial post, justifying my reason for waiting for RQ’s return.

The White Papers has glanced at the role of beauty in today’s society, but never discussed it in depth. Beauty has played a role throughout history and continues to dominate our public life. I don’t have any specific numbers, but I am certain that the cosmetic industry makes billions in profits. Fashion drives much of the marketplace all over the planet, from stores to magazines to an entire industry of models, hairstylists, hairdressers and the like. Like it or not, the desire to be beautiful is a stalwart of our economy.

Here is where the controversy comes in. Though men certainly do their share (more on that later), women for the most part consume the products offered. Women support a system where similar clothes (or ones that use even less material) costs more than what men pay. As uncomfortable as high heels may be, very few men wear them. And yes, men still generate toward and give favor to women they deem more attractive. Yes, some women try to make themselves less noticeable for their looks, but their efforts will hardly prevent some women from using their looks or men rewarding them for looking like they desire them too. Women now outperform scholastically, and one may surmise, in the workplace where the demographics are even (though the money is still not there).

This is where it gets a little dodgy. Though women can hardly be considered fuly responsible for their consumption, most cosmetics are made from some pretty nasty chemicals. No American companies make bras anymore, an extension of this fact suggests that the conditions under which they are made are less than desirable (and likely exploit women more than men). High heels, as sexy as they may be, displace the hips and alter ankle structure.

So what is the answer to beauty? Do men, who encourage women to look the way they do (some go further by purchasing breast implants) play an equal role in encouraging the beauty and fashion industry. If high heels are so bad (a common complaint), why do women still wear them? It really sucks that an attractive female (and sometimes males) get hired for positions solely for their looks. Yet, in many ways women still use their “power” to get what they want. Also how do we feel that stripping and prostitution, vocations based mostly on appearance, are the only ones where women make more than men? (Thanx, RQ for that fact).

Obviously, women are not solely responsible for the role beauty plays in our society, but they do possess, and inscreasngly so, the power of the pockebook to foster change. But will they use it? How should women see their beauty in light of the fact that they can compete equally with men? And no, I haven’t even mentioned the unrealistic standard to which women are asked to adhere (that’s up to you).

And yes, I am equally shallow as most men. A beautiful woman, even one way out my league will make me melt. A hottie will make me turn my head on the street. I still look at pictures, music videos and the like that feature unrealistically beautiful women; I am not immune. Nor do I have many answers, but I am sure all of you have a lot to say about this, whether you actually leave a comment or not!

Isreal is bombing the fuck out of Lebannon, Castro is on his death bed and Mel Gibson is proved to be an anti- semetic asswipe.

Yet none of these things are even slightly surprising.

Instead I will give you the Top Ten Funny Things That I Know About Mexico

1. In Merida- you can totaly outrun the police in a slow speed chase if you want to avoid the “gringo tax”.
2. Agua Caliente (or hot water) advertised by hotels is usually a myth.
3. Bisteak (steak) is not always beef. But I learned that one eating kangaroo in Italy. I think I ate horse tacos in Escarcega.
4. Howler monkeys should be called growler monkeys- they sound like wild boars about to attack.
5. Manzana Lift (apple flavored soda) is the best thing ever. I am starting a campaign to get it sold here.
6. “Ecological Preserve” and “Pristine Jungle” are code words for mosquito farm and malaria breeding grounds.
7. When towns have big signs up warning you about dengue fever and cholera- you should sleep somewhere else.
8. Looking a little like a local (dark hair and very tanned) made a Mexican guy in Villahermosa “Whatever” me when he found out I was not Mexican. (What the fuck- no one whatever’s me- ever)
9. Bugs the size of dessert plates can totally crack a pair of sunglasses when they dive bomb you.
10. Being a slightly drunk gringa will always get you filmed for the giant monitors at baseball games.

I have many stories (and pictures of turtles gone wild) to share with you later, including a fictional tale of revolutionary Zapatista love staring my new imaginary boyfriend, Subcommandante Marcos, as told through post cards.

Buenos Dias!