I have now decided that the expression, “Oh my God!” is absolutely not taking the Lord’s name in vain. No, it is definitely a prayer. 100% prayer – as in, Oh my God, help me, this child is driving me up the wall!

Happy Obama Day!!!

And, um, I don’t quite know how to say this, but – he is black, isn’t he? I hope my readers will take this in the spirit of peace and acceptance that it is meant… but I kind of forgot. I’m sure he didn’t forget, and I know black people in our country didn’t forget, but maybe my forgetting means something? That a white suburban twenty-something, just another girl of my generation, went and voted for the best man and skin color didn’t even cross her mind? I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. That’s also a symbol of progress, right? Edging toward the day when none of us will consider it a deciding factor anymore?

Michigan issues:

Medical marijuana wins (62%). I didn’t even know this wasn’t already legal. They interviewed this girl on the news who said making medical marijuana legal will just make it easier to get, and then everybody will be walking around stoned all the time. LOL! People amuse me sometimes. Because, you know, alcohol being legal and everybody just walks around drunk all the time… oh, how will we ever function???

Stem cell research wins (52%). I was a bit torn on this one, about the whole ethical, is it a baby, isn’t it a baby, debate. Finally leaning toward the side of no, it’s probably not a baby. I say probably, because none of us know for sure one way or the other. Hopefully this research will help cure people, and not be used to make bear-elephant-hybrids or whatever. That’s all I’m hoping for.

Good election people! Congrats to my friends and family in Ohio for voting blue!

NaNoWriMo Stats: end of day 4

6774 written (on track = 6668)

On track and then some. I had a productive day yesterday, but don’t have any idea what I’ll work on today. I guess I’ll just show up and see what spills out.

I am sick. I am a slobbering, worthless pile of snot! I always seem to catch something right now, at the butt-end of winter, just when I think I’m about to escape the cold/flu season free and clear. My sweet hubby cleaned the house for me last night and brought home orange juice and the fancy Puffs with lotion and Vicks. Even Dylan is being an angel for me.

I am excited about the primary elections going on today, and so jealous of all the attention my friends in Ohio are getting right now. Both of the candidates (Hillary especially) have been to Toledo several times in the past couple of weeks. None of the candidates have been coming to Michigan since we fucked up our primary. But how exciting it must be to be right there in the middle of everything as such an important time in this presidential race!

I hope everyone gets out to VOTE today! I can’t wait to see what happens tonight. We should pretty much know who our candidate is after these results.

This is “Dear Mr. President” by Pink. It’s been out for over a year now, but I’m only just finding it.

I just want to say AMEN TO THAT! AMEN!!! And kudos to her, for being ballsy in a time when people are afraid to say what they’re really thinking. This is what we are really thinking but might not have the guts to say for fear of being called un-American, unpatriotic, or a terrorist even!

This is what it means to embrace our first amendment – not just to bitch and moan, but to bring forward real honest problems with the hope and spirit to strive for something better. This is what it means to love our country. This is the passion that our country was born from. To not just roll over and take whatever crap they’re throwing at us this week. THIS is why America is beautiful!

This song gives me chills. 328 days, 2 hours, and 12 minutes until we can hope for something better.

I voted for the soon-to-be first female President of the United States!

And I’m taking my hubby to have his kidneys poked and prodded and stones knocked out. And we are both nervous about that.

And I hope that Dylan is a good boy while we’re waiting. He usually is while we’re out, if there are nice old ladies to flirt with.

And to my writers group, I am sorry, but I am obviously not a writer this week. Maybe next week. Hopefully next week.

That is all.

I think this must be my first political post this election campaign.

I like Hillary Clinton. I think she is strong and intelligent, while allowing herself to be both angry and vulnerable at appropriate times. She is, after all, a human being. And I think that had she been a man and gotten emotional (which happens all the time), nothing would have been made of it. No one would be questioning her strength or worrying that she might morph into a blubbering fool. I think that had she been a man and gotten frustrated and raised her voice (which also happens all the time) there would have been no talk of what hormones were coming into play.

Have we really not moved past this yet? I am very glad she won in New Hampshire, but I am furious that everything is coming down to did she win because she stayed when her husband cheated? did she win because she cried? did she win because the women voters identified with her and brought out the vote?

I am ashamed of us! I am ashamed that this brilliant woman wants to be our next president, is willing to tackle this MESS that will be left when the Bush administration leaves office, and we cannot even give her the respect she deserves as a human being! What a novel idea that she might have won because she was the best choice!

In other news, there is a lot of garbage going on in the state of Michigan right now that I do not fully understand. On Tuesday, I am going to vote for Ms. Clinton in my state’s primary election. However, she will be the only leading Democrat to appear on the ballot because the others have apparently thrown a hissy-fit (or someone threw a hissy-fit) and are boycotting our whole state. Just because we (=someone who is not me!) decided to have our primary a little early. We will be allowed to vote, but it will not count.

Like I said, I do not understand the inner-workings of all that’s going on, but this is how it appears to me. My vote will be ignored, because of some ridiculous grudge someone has on us, and that makes me mad. Is that even allowed to happen in America? Isn’t this against everything we stand for?

Of course, I welcome information, if any of you understand this better.

We watched Michael Moore’s Sicko last night and it really made me very sad. What broke my heart the most I think, besides that poor little baby girl who didn’t get to the right hospital in time, were all the happy couples going home with newborn babies. I realize that this must be very selfish of me. But all those free babies! How much did your baby cost you? Mine cost me about $2000. That’s an uncomplicated delivery, with a $300 epidural. This is with good insurance. Before insurance the costs were somewhere close to $20,000. My son is seventeen months old now and we’re still working down the balance, at $50 a month.

Did I mention that we have good insurance, that we are very lucky that my husband’s company pays for most of this good insurance, because a lot of Americans are going without entirely. We are not poor. Not poor at all. But we are certainly not rich enough to dish out $2000 in one fat chunk, on top of all the necessary new-baby supplies – crib, clothes, breast pump, bottles, diapers, and on and on and onÖ

In the 1990′s, my mother was one of those denied cancer patients, whose treatment the insurance companies deemed too experimental. They went ahead with it anyway, even though it didn’t work out. My father was left to pay, if I remember correctly, close to $50,000 out of his pocket. Or more precisely, out of his home equity. And she didn’t live. Can you imagine, losing the love of your life, and everything you worked a lifetime to build, in one single tragic moment?

I am resentful that one of the deciding factors to the question, Should we have another baby? is that we haven’t yet paid off the first one. I am resentful that my doctor has ordered me to get my first mammogram screening, because my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at 33, and the first thought on my mind is I wonder how much that is going to cost, and will they try to deny it because I am too young to possibly get cancer, and maybe I should wait until after Christmas.

This is all just so very wrong. And I don’t feel lucky to live in this great land of opportunity, where I have the right to the best health care in the world, if only I am willing to sell my piece of the American Dream for it.

Then after raging with passion last night and this morning, I calmed down and decided to read some reviews of the film, all of which were very good. And I read some opposition to the film, because it’s always a good idea to hear both sides of the argument, even if you don’t agree with it. And in my calm now, I understand that national health care systems probably have their problems too, but if it is working for the rest of the world, why not us? Don’t we deserve better than this?

Even if his documentaries are slightly skewed (and what documentary isn’t?), I admire Michael Moore for his courage to stand up for every one of us with smaller voices. I hope he continues to do so.

And I very much like some of the ideas Hillary Clinton has for reforming our health care system, and I can’t wait to vote for her next fall.

Global warming is real, it’s our fault, and we cannot stop it. This is not a complete shock to me. I already believed it was real. I worried. I saw An Inconvenient Truth and I worried some more. And I found myself apologizing to my son this morning that the world he grows up in will not be the same one I did.

On the news this morning, they spent about ten minutes talking about the global warming report out of Paris. Then on to Iraq. And of course, the Super Bowl is this weekend.

President Jacques Chirac of France says, “Faced with this emergency, now is not the time for half measures. It is the time for a revolution, in the true sense of the term… We are in truth on the historical doorstep of the irreversible.” Last night, to protest the severity of this issue, France put out the lights for five minutes on the Eiffel tower. Rome put out the lights for five minutes on the Colosseum. Where did we put out lights here in America? What does President Bush have to say about this?

What has President Bush ever had to say about any of this? Please share with me if you know, because all I can find are his speeches back from 2001 when he pulled us out of the Kyoto agreement. And a bit from 2004 during the presidential races, about how he said there wasn’t enough evidence.

Well, there’s evidence now, and where is he? What does he have to say? When he makes a nationally televised speech every time there is a new development in Iraq, or when he needs support for this war, why can’t he go on TV now and tell us what he’s going to do about this climate crisis. It is a crisis now, officially. There is evidence. The whole world sees how serious this is. The world is changing, and we can’t stop it, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I want to know what our plans are.

I’m not trying to turn this into a George Bush rant, I just want him to care. I want the people I live with in this country to care. And I’m not denying that Iraq is a terrible mess and important to deal with as well. But damn, if we don’t pay attention, we wont have a planet to fight on.

I asked, a couple weeks ago, in this post, why even have a landline telephone? When you have a cell phone anyway that is every bit as useful.

I still have my landline telephone, and will probably keep it. I’ve been using a Virgin Mobile phone for the past two or three years, so I assumed (and why shouldn’t I?) that if I upgraded from pay-as-you-go to an actual cell phone company and plan, that the service would be every bit as good, if not better. Boy, was I wrong!

We chose Sprint. I had Sprint back in Toledo about four years ago, before their merger with Nextel. The merger obviously did terrible things to the company because I used to love Sprint. It was the main reason we decided to go with them again.

Maybe this is true of all cell phone companies, though I never had a problem on my little Virgin phone, but coverage is so spotty. Downtown Royal Oak, I get five bars. Outside Jim’s office I get five bars. I guess it just happens to be that there are Sprint towers in those places, because our house is in a dead spot. I have one bar most of the time, which isn’t enough power to make a clear call, and it drops to no bars very often, every ten minutes or so, and the call drops instantly. I tried to have a half-hour conversation with my dad and lost the call three times.

That’s just problem number one.

Their customer service reps don’t speak English well, which means that very likely, they don’t work from here in the US. I have no respect for American companies that ship American jobs overseas just to make an extra buck. People will tell you that it’s good for our economy. How is that exactly? All I know is that the unemployment rate here in Michigan is six or so percent right now. That’s a good two percent above the national average. And with everybody losing auto industry jobs, I’m sure a lot of people would be more than happy to have a call center job.

But besides the fact that I can’t respect them as a company, I only know that their call centers are overseas because we’ve had to call them to fix the mistakes they made setting up our plan three times already. We signed up for an international calling package for which we would be charged $4.00 a month. When Jim went to call his family in England, we discovered that not only did it not work, but we aren’t even eligible to apply for the plan until we’ve been Sprint customers for 90 days. Oh, but they sure did sign us up for it, and the $4.00 charge was right there on our bill for the first and second months. Even though we’re not even eligible to use it.

They credited our account, of course, but I’m sure they were hoping we wouldn’t notice.

I have nothing good to say about this experience so far. Well, I guess my husband’s camera phone is pretty handy, but that really has nothing to do with Sprint, does it? Maybe it’s a local thing. I don’t know how Sprint service is anywhere else, but I’ll say this. If you’re looking for a new cell phone, and you live in Michigan, run screaming bloody murder away from Sprint.

I hear Cingular is nice around here. But of course, I hear that after we’ve signed a two-year contract with Sprint.

I ran across this blog via pesky’apostrophe this morning. This woman, Molly, is very brave to post the detailed instructions to a DIY D&C abortion for the women of South Dakota who are no longer able to get a safe and legal abortion in their own state.

I think the point of this post goes beyond just making sure women have information on how to have the procedure properly performed. I mean, if you actually read the post, the way in which it is written is absolutely TERRIFYING! Molly does not take the subject lightly, and nowhere does she imply that it will be easy or that the results will absolutely be safe. The point, I believe, above all else is that we, women of the 21st century, in this great country we live in, are sometimes no better off than we were 100 years ago.

It is naive to think that this kind of thing wont happen. If a woman wants an abortion, she will get one. Whether it be ethical or not. If she can’t drive to another state and have one legally and safely, she will use a coat hanger, drink chemicals, use tweezers or whatever else she’s heard works. Or she can be informed and have someone do the procedure to her with these instructions and maybe she wont die from it.

I pray that the women of South Dakota will find alternatives. Another state if they’re able to drive there, or a doctor who would be willing to break the law for their safety.

I don’t know what to think about all of this. I don’t believe abortion is right ethically, but I also don’t believe women should be forced to put their lives at risk to get one. Because they will – we have to realize that.