Love, Sweet Love

My Valentine's Day Tribute to Love:

First, some videos.

Jackie DeShannon "What the World Needs Now, Is Love, Sweet Love"

Tom T. Hall "I Love"

And the master of Love, Mr. Barry White "Can't Get Enough of Your Love"

And a random assortment of Valentine related images I found.

You know who you are.

If you need a pick-up line, try this one.

For anyone sad because you don't have a date.

True Love.

Happy Valentine's Day to ALL my Bitches out there! Love you, crazy people!!!!

The Great Car Run

Have you ever tried to push a 4,000-ish lb. Ford LTD up a hill? I have. I was probably fourteen at the time and weighed all of 90 lbs. soaking wet. But I had help. My even slightly smaller friend, *Marie, was with me at the time.

Mom was out of town and Dad was at work. Marie and I were at my parent's house, bored. There sat the LTD. It was a late 70's/early 80's model. My parent's had driven it in years past, but hadn't driven in at least a few years. It just sat there, parked, waiting for an adventure. So we decided to take her out for a test drive.

After some groaning, the engine finally roared to life. For those of you who remember, these cars were not the tiny, compact plastic cars we drive today. No, this was a tank with wheels. Anyway, off we go. We started by heading up the driveway and then down to my aunt and uncle's house down the road. So far, so good.

Headed back, we start making the climb up the long hill back toward my parent's house. Engine stalls. Car goes dead. I throw it in park, and try to turn the key a few more times. No luck. Well, okay, then. When the car dies, what do you do? You push it.

We devise a plan. Marie will stand at the driver's side door, with her hand on the wheel to steer it. I will get in the back and push. It made sense at the time. I had seen it done a couple of times. I get in ready to push position, with hands on the back bumper and legs braced. I yell to Marie, "put it in neutral". Um, Houston, we have a problem. I barely managed to clear being crushed to death by jumping into a nearby ditch as the behemoth started rolling backward rather impressively fast. Marie was only dragged down the hill for a short while, before giving up and letting go, also somehow managing not to be run over.

There she goes. Rolling in the wrong direction, back down the hill, ending up in a ditch at approximately a 70 degree angle. Thanks to a few friends, (and their Dads), we managed to get the car pulled out of the ditch, with the only real damage being that we ripped the front bumper halfway off in the process. One of the guys hammered the bumper back to it's original-looking shape. Car was parked in the exact place it had been. No one was ever the wiser.

Several months later, my uncle bought the car, for parts I assume. He shows up, they attach a chain or some device to the bumper to hoist it up to be hauled off. Imagine their surprise when the bumper immediately flies off the car.

"Jennifer, any idea why the bumper just fell off the car?"

"No, Mother, I have no clue." "Geez."

Time for a Cool Change

Whoever said people don't change, obviously didn't meet very many people. People change all the time. I think what they meant to say was that people don't change just because you want them to. That part seems to have been lost in translation. People change because they get older, wiser, and more experienced. People change because they see an attribute within themselves they are no longer satisfied with and decide to do something about it. People change because life deals them an unexpected hand that they must now face. Or they change because they have learned from past mistakes what works and what doesn't. But they do not, and will not change because they don't fit into some ideal image you yourself have created for them. And they never will. So stop expecting it.

A lot of relationships fail for this reason. Romantic, platonic, and familial relationships fail because of some unrealistic expectation of how we think someone should behave, and when they don't fit into the mold we have created for them, we feel let down.

Look, it's really this simple. You have two choices in any relationship. Either accept it for what it is, and that means accepting them exactly as they are at that time in their lives, or move on. If your boyfriend doesn't bring you flowers, and you want one that does, then find yourself the romantic type. There are plenty of flower-bearing men in this world. If your girlfriend doesn't enjoy World of Warcraft, and you can't live without a gaming partner, then find someone who shares your passion for video games. If you can no longer stand another minute listening to your bff's never ending drama, stop answering the phone. If you are unhappy with your relationship with someone, then get out of it. Otherwise, shut the hell up about it.

Miranda

I could never tell my story without including my friends. Names have been changed for all the typical reasons, innocence or guilt notwithstanding . This is *Miranda's story.

What you should know about Miranda: She has one of the best laughs I've ever heard on a human being, the contagious kind. And she literally gets a sparkle in her eyes when she's truly happy, an honest-to-God, twinkle. Her smile is her best feature. Her boobs are pretty awesome too, but I'm still going with the smile. I'm not a guy, so I can.

She is the Claree to my Ouiser. She is my, hopefully, one day, we will be those two old Southern women sitting on the front porch drinking sweet tea spiked with Jack Daniels, friend. She is also one of my best champions. She is my strength and courage, when I have none. When I doubt myself, she kicks my ass in gear. She probably knows as much, if not more, about my love life and relationships than the men who have actually been involved in them.

My best Miranda story? There's so many. Nothing, however, could top the epic and legendary story of her 29th birthday:


Two things you need to know before I proceed.


1. Miranda loves Jack Daniels. It is her drink of choice. And she is no lightweight, on the rocks with a lime, please.

2. A few months prior to this event I performed my version of the Tawny Kitaen stripper crawl at a girls' only night at a friend's house, much to the amusement of my girlfriends, and that crawl became, well, somewhat legendary in its own right. 

So let's begin.

We started the birthday night having dinner, and Miranda had a few JD drinks to celebrate. Now, in no way, am I blaming what happened later on the whiskey. But, I will say, where whiskey is concerned, it does make a pretty good scapegoat. After dinner, we decided to take the party to a nearby club, where they had a band playing and we could enjoy some dancing. Naturally, someone alerted the band it was Miranda's birthday. So they call Miranda to the center of the dance floor and she is instructed to sit in a bar chair while her friends "dance" for her.  A friend of ours pushes me out into the dance floor and says "Do your stripper crawl!". Now, under normal circumstances I would not be caught dead doing a stripper crawl, on a dance floor, in a club, in public. But, it was Miranda's birthday, several birthday shots had been consumed, and I was basically being double dog dared. So, off I crawled. And crawl I did, all the way to Miranda's chair where I stood up in front of her; we hug each other, laugh, I wish her a happy birthday, and, well, this is where things went downhill. What happened next is subject to debate and depends on who you ask. All that is certain, is the next thing I know, I am lying flat on my back on the dance floor and Miranda is face down on top of me. I get up, shrug it off, and go about finding my drink. Miranda heads to the ladies' room. She exits the bathroom, walking toward our table with her hand over her mouth, shaking her head. Naturally, we assumed she must have bitten her lip in the crash, but she refuses to show us the damage. We persist, out of genuine concern and morbid curiosity. Miranda slowly pulls her hand away and smiles. HOLYSHITBALLSBATMAN, Miranda's two front teeth have been knocked out!!! I mean, gone. For real. I can not in any effective way, explain to you the complex emotion of the complete shock and horror I felt while simultaneously laughing harder than I may ever have before or since. But let me try to explain, that on the one hand there are few times that I have ever felt worse for a friend of mine but at the same time I have rarely seen anything as hilarious as my best friend smiling at me with no front teeth - on her birthday! To make matters worse, it wasn't a clean break, so there were in fact, two tiny slivers on both the outside edges that gave the appearance of small vampire fangs. I tried hard to get a photograph, but she refused to smile for the camera. And right now, I bet you wish I had that photo to share. I know I certainly do.

Bless her heart, she was trying hard not to cry and all we could do was tell her how sorry we were while simultaneously wiping away our own tears of laughter. We bought her shots as condolences and sang a boisterous rendition of "All I Want For Christmas" all the way home that night. 

Thanks to the miracle of dental procedures, her teeth were soon thereafter restored, using whatever technology allows dentists to provide fake teeth, and none who ever see her would ever be the wiser. As I said before, her smile was and still is one of her best features. It is also the source of one of my very best memories of her, and certainly one of the funniest. If I live to be a hundred and am completely senile, I don't think I will forget that night or the image of my toothless friend. It, like so many other great stories is one of both tragedy and comedy. 

As Truvy Jones said, "Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion."

Stereotypes

A friend of mine sent me a text suggesting I blog about stereotypes, nothing specific, just stereotypes in general. That's a fairly broad topic, and one that could lend itself to more discussion than could really fit into a blog post. I'm willing to give it a shot though. I like a challenge.

First of all, let's be clear. Stereotypes are not just harmless jokes about Asians being good at math or white people can't dance. Stereotypes are dangerous. They breed fear and hatred. People have been killed over stereotyping. They lead us to make irrational assumptions on an entire group of people, be it racial, gender-biased, ethnic, or whatever the case may be. Even without being aware at times we are doing it.

How many times have you heard someone make a comment about welfare recipients being lazy or irresponsible? Is it true that some people receiving government assistance take advantage of the system? Yes. Is it true they all do? No. But that doesn't stop some people from making broad, sweeping generalizations based on an inaccurate stereotype. What may in fact (or not) be a representation of a very small minority, begins to become accepted as a universal truth. These unsupported biases are not only hurtful to the citizens who are being wrongfully categorized, but lend themselves to being accepted as the popular opinion. Popular opinion can have the power to sway policies and regulations enacted by elected officials in an effort to placate their constituency.

Not all Muslims are terrorists. Not all Christians are bible-thumping evangelicals. Not all Republicans hate gays. Not all Southerners are racist. Not all teenagers are self-absorbed brats.

You get the point.

So how do we overcome this? How do we gain understanding of that which we are unfamiliar? The old proverb about walking a mile in another man's shoes is appropriate here. At the heart of the matter is a lack of empathy for each other. And that lacking stems from inadequate knowledge. Our outlook and views on society have been formed over time by the experiences we've have had in our individual lives. Our prejudices, our threshold for what is or isn't acceptable, even our religious preferences and choice of companions have all been molded by our own singular life experience. We can't change that.

What we can change is how we react to the world around us. Once we accept that our perceptions are biased, and make no mistake, they absolutely are, then we can then step away from ourselves and try to look at things more objectively.

If we never leave the confines of our own back yard, it's easy to fall into the mindset that it's the best yard; that other yards are somehow inferior. If we only surround ourselves with like-minded people, we deny ourselves the opportunity of being exposed to a new way of thinking. We become closed-down, narrow-minded, so filled with absolute certainty in our own beliefs, we begin to accept them as fact rather than mere opinion.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't have convictions. But we should arrive at them after careful deliberation, considering all sides, with thorough knowledge of why we believe what we do.

By gaining perspective into the lives of others, we gain understanding. Our perspectives shift, views are challenged and we become more accepting of what is foreign to us, thus diminishing our need for useless stereotypes.


Author's Note - My advice, if I have any worth offering:
Be diverse in your choice of acquaintances. Travel as often as possible, as far as your resources will let you go. Keep your mind open to new ideas. Be kind to one another.

Experience the world through someone else's eyes. You never know what you might see.

Damn Yankees

The South has a reputation for being slow-moving, sometimes slow-thinking but seemingly friendlier than our Northern counterparts. And we like to paint a picture of Northerners as being fast-talking and abrasive. Well, a friend of mine and I developed a hypothesis about this recently.

Standing outside in beyond ridiculous cold weather, which for me, anything below 60 degrees is insanity, but nonetheless, here we were in the cold of winter and we shared a thought. It's not that Northerners are rude. They're just cold. Of course Southerners are more congenial. We have time to be. If you catch us outside a Wal-Mart we will stand in the parking lot and inquire about your family, your new job and tell you all about our recent vacation to the Smoky Mountains. But trust me, when it's below freezing outside with arctic wind chills, who in their right mind wants to hang around outside and chit chat? They're in a hurry simply because they want to go home and thaw out in front of a heater. Who can blame them? And if they seem a bit grouchy, well, how would like to have to shovel snow out of your driveway every time you wanted to leave the house? Or spend twenty minutes scraping ice off your windshield three or four months of the year? Or better yet, know that if you don't bundle up like the little brother from "A Christmas Story" you could lose body parts to frostbite just by walking to the mailbox? I'd be pretty pissy about life too. Further proof that I need not live any farther North than the Mason-Dixon line.

So, next time you spot a Northerner in your neck of the woods, invite 'em over to sit a spell on the porch and enjoy the warm sunshine and a glass of sweet tea. The poor souls just don't get to do that often where they come from.

Bless their hearts.

PS - You know the difference between a Yankee and a Damn Yankee? A Damn Yankee never leaves.
Just kidding - you know I love y'all.

Selfies

For lack of anything better to write about, tonight's topic: The Selfie. Which, to my understanding now has an entry in the dictionary. Yay. Way to go mankind. We have now made narcissism a national past time. Don't get me wrong, I am sure I have had my share of shameless selfies, but I feel I can honestly say they are at least somewhat few and far between, at least compared to the realm of relentless look-at-me pics that flood the internet. Until tonight that is!!!!! That's right. This blog is my humble dedication to that great ego-boost, self-important, cry for attention, The Selfie. 

Here goes:

First up, The Duck Face:

Nothing says I'm sexy and I know it like puckering up to a handheld computer device. Alone. Because you have nothing better to make out with than your iPhone. 

The Bathroom Selfie:

On the upside, I got to take care of some important paperwork while taking a picture of myself. That's a  win for multi-tasking. 

The Mundane-Same-Shit-I-Do-Everyday Selfie:

Here is a photo of me holding a Sharpie marker. Why? Well, as we all know, Sharpie's are awesome and I thought I would share some of that awesomeness with the world. What? You're doing homework?!?! For the love of all that is good and holy PLEASE share that with everyone you know. Because, no, none of us have EVER participated in anything as exciting writing a paper for English Comp 101. Or have jobs with desks. Or drive cars. Or eat apples. 

And my personal favorite - The Cleavage Shot Selfie

This is a classic, almost always followed by some heading like "Loving Life and All Smiles" knowing full well it isn't your smile you are attracting attention to, but yet, will still pretend to get offended when some guy makes a comment about your décolletage. I actually applaud the men who make inappropriate comments. Good for you, I say. Call a spade, a spade. And if I don't get at least a few lewd comments on my barely-there cleavage, I'm going to be terribly offended. 

(yes, there was a wardrobe change - can't get a good cleavage shot in a sweatshirt for heaven's sake)

So here's to you Selfie. You self-absorbed son-of-a-bitch. You bring the world closer, one Instagram pic at a time. As you can see, I was totally excited to write this blog. Like, Totes MaGoats!!!