Fiscal Cliff, Indian Rape Victims, Saudi Clerics, and Mold

So here we are.  New Year's Eve eve.  The GOP house has refused to come to work until today.  Because I don't matter to them.

Really, that's what it is.  They don't give two squirts about me. 

My family stands to lose around six to seven hundred dollars a month if those idjits don't get their collective act together.  That is a devastating hit.  Like a "can't recover from that" hit.  But they're so busy politicking for their rich friends and their "corporation people" (because corporations are, after all, people, remember?) that they'll let me and mine sink rather than make those rich folks pay a bigger percentage than I do. 

Yes, that does make me hate them.  Being held hostage by bought politicians inspires that in me.

Found an amazing, astounding house in Alexandria.  If we were bought politicians or "corporation people," we could afford it without blinking.  But we're not, so it will never be anything more than a silly dream.  But it's lovely.  Here it is.   It would put hubby so close to work!  Hey, what's 3.8 million between friends, right?  Now all I need is a friend who feels the same way!

Terribly windy out, and very cold.  We're trying to save some money on the heat bill, but it's all I can do to resist cranking that furnace up.  I am ice cold, and that wind is working its way in through those windows and doors, doubled and insulated though they are.  It's just that strong a wind.

Woke up crying last night.  Can't remember the dream, though.  Had later dreams about swimming in this awful, dark pond with my ex-husband and a bunch of other Arabs.  The women had the most amazing bathing suits, but I was just in jeans and a t-shirt.  Hmm. 

Speaking of Arabs, did you hear the one about the Saudi clerics threatening to pray for awful illnesses and such if the government doesn't stop its attempt to allow women more rights?  Ew.  Just ew.  Talk about cheapening your faith and turning it into a bad joke.  I have no problem with Arabs (was married to an Arab for almost nine years), and I have no problem with Islam (or at least no more problem with it than with any other religion), but I have a problem with oppressive fanaticism regardless of the faith that spawns it. 

And speaking of oppressive fanaticism, how about those new Israeli housing settlements in Palestine?  Nice, huh?  No, no attempt to cause another blow up there, I'm sure.  They're the GOOD guys, remember?  Because, as we all know, the good guys take land, exile natives, and institute apartheid policies, and all the while they enjoy our support because--well, because they're the GOOD guys!  Duh!  Pretty sure the Bible telling us so helps with that. 

And last, but certainly not least, can India maybe, finally decide that women are worth lifting up, worth saving?  Because I gotta tell you, for a country that tries to forward itself as some sort of enlightened, technically advanced place, it sure does treat its women like dirt.  Think it might be that whole oppressive religion thing?  Maybe?  Just a little bit?  Hey, India?  Grow the heck up.

Wow.  That turned into a bit of a rant.  Wasn't intended.  I'm cold, and I want to go to Costco then go back to sleep. 

And here's some really crappy paneling with a story: 

Okay, first off, this is NOT how the room in question looks now.  But this is how it looked way back when.  See, my dad decided to create a bedroom for my sister down in our mostly unfinished basement.  Instead of painted walls, he found some truly awful paneling (which, I admit, I thought was purely beautiful when I was SEVEN) of the wallpaper veneer variety, and coupled it with the most atrocious, gawdawful bright red shag carpet.  Not just any shag carpet, this stuff came in 18 inch squares with adhesive backing.  Which he promptly stuck to the very nice clay tile floor already in place.  It was mind-numbingly awful.  Over the years, the basement flooded--not deep, devastating floods, but rather an inch here, two inches there.  Enough to really soak the stick-on shag and the wallpaper-over-pressboard paneling. Over the years, the stick-on-shag took on a horrendous smell, and the paneling began to disintegrate slowly from the bottom up.

Mold.

Yes, the fancy black stuff you hear about so much in the news.  Slowly eating its way through the paneling until the bottom six inches or so was just gone in some spots.  The carpet was so horrifying we tried to pull it up (38 years after it went in!), but years of damp and mold left it coming up in tiny, half-inch chunks with the adhesive doing what adhesive does--adhering.  Persistence only caused small shards of the original clay tile to come up, still stuck to the shag.  We wound up having to use a pavement scraper to take it all up, clay tile and all.  We wouldn't have bothered, but the MUSHROOMS growing up out of my Mom's basement floor in that room was just more than we could bear. 

I think this experience is what has given me such an aversion to bad paneling.  I don't hate ALL paneling.  Heck, I love a good example of Judge's paneling or other wainscoting.   But the cheap, comes in sheets, pre-fab, and especially wallpaper-veneered varieties?  I can smell the mold and see the ugly--they're indelibly stamped in my poor head. 

Not our mold, just a representative of the species.

REM ain't got NUTHIN' on the Mayans!

So, it's almost the end of the world, huh?  Being the skeptic I am, I can't actually remember what date that's supposed to be because--well, because it's bull, and I don't tend to put a lot of effort into committing bull to memory.  But December, right?  Maybe the 21st, right around the solstice?  Or maybe some other date?  The 12th?  Hell, I don't remember.

What I do remember?  Is being in high school when one of these dippy "end o' the world" things hit.  Pat Robertson blathering about having a heart-to-heart with his deity, who let him know about a war in the Middle East that would begin by the close of 1982, eventually leading to world-wide economic collapse and political upheaval giving rise to "God's Kingdom."  When his dippy prediction failed to materialize, he changed it to 2007.  Again, no joy.  That people still send that charlatan money astounds me. 

Anyway, so there it was, the end of 1982.  New Years Eve.  Last day for the Amazing Mr. Robertson to be right.  Being teenagers, we were thrilling to the idea of an apocalypse.  You know, the same way kids bungee jump and drag race--it's exciting to be scared.  Bio-chemically rewarding.  One of my closest friends (at the time--that ship sank a long, long time ago) and I decided to smoke weed (NOT advocating such things--twas a long time ago and smart wasn't my thing back then) and stay up all night playing five card draw--what better way to go out than playing cards and laughing entirely too much?  Playing poker with Lou (so nicknamed because of a Lynyrd Skynyrd song) was always an adventure in rule bending, misdirection, and plain ol' cheating.  You could always tell a game with Lou--half the danged deck was "wild."  One-eyed Jacks, suicide Kings, twos, nines--she'd call as many "wilds" as she could, and when she still didn't have anything in her hand, she'd pretend she'd also called tens, or fours, or Queens.  Even with her creative methods, I won.  Twelve straight hours of poker, and I won.  The prize?

Her firstborn child. 

No worries, we knew we were kidding.  Or at least I knew we were kidding.  Lou?  Might just have tried to collect if she saw some money in it.

The practical upshot of this trip down memory lane?  GROW UP!  If the world "ends" any time soon, it'll be because of food shortages, overpopulation, and temperature increases, not some God whispering in some con artist's ear.  Heck, even at 17 years old, I knew this sort of thing was a sham--why else play poker for a prize not yet born? 

If you really believe that the world is coming to an end next month, please, I beg you--max your credit cards with cash advances and send the money to ME.  Hey, it doesn't matter, right?  We'll all be dead next month anyway, so why not?  If you believe there's a giant, invisible, rogue planet catapulting our way, just take out a second mortgage, send that my way, too!  And won't you have the last laugh when you're right and I have no use for all that cash?

Yeah.

If you laughed at the Hale-Bopp crowd in 1997, if you pointed and giggled at the Richard Noone doomsday prediction of 2000, if the 2008 debacle of God's Church/Ronald Weinland didn't sway you, then what on earth is wrong with you now?  Some ancient civilization that believed in killing animals and letting blood to appease ghosts in the sky doesn't make a calendar that's FOREVER, and you think that means we're all going to die?  These people used to sacrifice humans when the crops went south, and you want to lend this much weight to a calendar they made?  You think a 1,300-year-old fear of some invisible planet is enough to base a life-plan on?  Why stop there?  Why not embrace all the dippy crap humans believed centuries ago?  You know, like ill humors, comets and eclipses being signs of some deity's displeasure, women's bodies determining the sex of offspring, moles and physical ailments being indicative of witchcraft, little baby girls being born sinful, and holes being drilled into folks' heads to release evil spirits.

Seriously, why not?

Well, because that would be stupid.

Right?

So relax.  The world's not going anywhere next month, we're all going to be paying off those Christmas bills, and that "Fiscal Cliff" is still going to be looming around the corner.  And if that doesn't warm your heart and make you glow with optimism, I don't know what will.

Some Mayan-ish thing I discovered on the craziest anti-Jew/Lizard People/Chemtrail/conspiracy website I've ever seen.