This made me laugh for a very long time...

Lately I have just been getting the BEST e-mail forwards of my life. This one takes the cake. The pictures are hilariously disturbing in their own right but it's truly the captions next to them that made me laugh until I had tears in my eyes.

Enjoy!

Born Free

Last night I came home to find Chewy inside the trap I set for him. It was a mouse-friendly plastic tube trap and I had lured him into it with some peanut butter and a wheat thin. Apparently, the aromas were too overwhelming for little Chewy to resist. After much screaming on my part (I know he is a cute harmless little mouse but I was deathly afraid and still can't figure out why) I took Chewy outside at 11:00 at night, walked him to the nearby high school and promptly set him free on the lawn. People keep telling me he will find his way back even though I did my best to spin him around a couple times to make him dizzy and disoriented, like a container of coke during a game of Spin the Bottle.

I shall miss little Chewy. He really was an adorable little guy--brown with white fur on the bottom and big awkward ears. HOWEVER--I enjoy living alone and I do enjoy my English muffins, preferably without anybody gnawing through the plastic. Farewell my dear Chewy! I hope the adolescents of Williamsville High treat you well, in the rare case you end up in the girls' locker room or the school cafeteria. Peace.

If you give a mouse a cabinet...

Great Things That Happened Yesterday:

1. NPR was doing a piece about how important literature is to help children and adolescents cope with certain issues. They recommended lots of books and explained the different themes including the Ramona series. As if that wasn't exciting enough, the commentator mentioned The Hundred Dresses, a book I used to read when I was little. I still remember exactly where it was in my sister's closet on the book shelf. I haven't thought of this little book in years and when I heard the synopsis and how it relates to adolescents...well. I'll admit. I got a bit nostalgic.

Worthy of note, they mentioned The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Steve Chbosky, which is one of my FAVORITE novels of all time.

2. I went to the costume shop to try on my costumes for STEEL PIER. Precious' dress is adorable but it was loose on the top because I do not have an ample chest to fill it out. As Sara was pinning the places where it needed to be taken in, I wondered aloud if I could have boobs sewn into it. Cindy pointed to a drawer and lo and behold--it was an entire drawer of FAKE BOOBS!!! When I put them in the dress, they made it look ten times better and so I asked if perhaps Precious could have some help in the chest department and they said YES! SO WAHOO!!!! The costume is brilliant. That is all.

Great Things That Happened Today:

1. Erica and I decided to dress like FLASHDANCE for rehearsal tonight, just to spice up the old fashion routine. Erica and I both came with amazing off the shoulder sweatshirts--she bedazzled a headband completely 1984 style. I tucked my black dance pants into pink scrunchie socks and completed the ensemble with a side ponytail. Very chic. Elliot joined us with the scrunchie socks which were further complimented by his jazz shoes and headband. Holy. HOWEVER: the award for best-dressed goes to the amazing Jason Bravo who wore MC Hammer pants and a bright neon YANKEES shirt. Ah. Neon. A thing of the past?

Not-So-Great Things That Happened Today:

1. I have a new roommate. I did not advertise to anyone that I needed one. In fact, there is little room in this one-bedroom apartment for a chum. However, this person is small enough to fit. I have dubbed him Chewy. Chewy is a mouse who enjoys gnawing at my bread cabinet until there are piles of wood shavings that fall out when I open the door. I was forced to throw away 1/2 a loaf of bread so there will be no peanut butter and jelly tomorrow for lunch. Chewy also does not clean up after himself and therefore, his little Chewy poo is all over my cabinets.

And so I must close with a message to Chewy:

Where are you Chewy? Why must you hide from me? Are you curled up in one of my warm cozy walls waiting for me to sleep so you can eat the English muffins without asking permission? Now now Chewy, be a manly mouse. Show yourself. And before you are evicted permanently, I must beseech you to HELP ME WITH YOUR SHARE OF THE RENT. It is officially past due. Thanks. ~Management.

Peace.

"And history seems to agree that I would fight you for me...that us would fight them for we. Is that how it always will be?"

I find that when I try to have something inspiring and/or important to say, I fail. I do not articulate well and therefore consider myself to have extreme trouble when it comes to vocalizing the many scattered thoughts in my brain. I have decided to post quotes from other sources that directly relate to how I feel at this point in time. And yes, for dramatic effect, I wore black on Wednesday.

"17 Reasons Not To Slit Your Wrists" Michael Moore comes through for all of us and reminds us about the good. I was surprised to read his thoughts and was truly grateful for his positive outlook and his humorous list on how we can end the bitterness surrounding this election.

For those not willing to click the link, here are three of my favorites from his list.

"3. The only age group in which the majority voted for Kerry was young adults (Kerry: 54%, Bush: 44%), proving once again that your parents are always wrong and you should never listen to them. "

"14. Bush is now a lame duck president. He will have no greater moment than the one he's having this week. It's all downhill for him from here on out -- and, more significantly, he's just not going to want to do all the hard work that will be expected of him. It'll be like everyone's last month in 12th grade -- you've already made it, so it's party time! Perhaps he'll treat the next four years like a permanent Friday, spending even more time at the ranch or in Kennebunkport. And why shouldn't he? He's already proved his point, avenged his father and kicked our ass. "

And of course,

"17. Finally and most importantly, over 55 million Americans voted for the candidate dubbed "The #1 Liberal in the Senate." That's more than the total number of voters who voted for either Reagan, Bush I, Clinton or Gore. Again, more people voted for Kerry than Reagan. If the media are looking for a trend it should be this -- that so many Americans were, for the first time since Kennedy, willing to vote for an out-and-out liberal. The country has always been filled with evangelicals -- that is not news. What IS news is that so many people have shifted toward a Massachusetts liberal. In fact, that's BIG news. Which means, don't expect the mainstream media, the ones who brought you the Iraq War, to ever report the real truth about November 2, 2004. In fact, it's better that they don't. We'll need the element of surprise in 2008. "


And lastly, courtesy of Brendan Bittner, from www.evanmatthewcobb.com, a sentiment which was so profound that all I could do was sit down and cry.

"I'm trying to sort all of it out, but there are really only two showings in particular that I'm interested in:


Manhattan K 82%, B 17%
Washington D.C. K 90%, B 9%

Funny. The two places that terrorists actually attacked went to Kerry overwhelmingly. I don't count Somerset Co. in PA because the plane could have crashed anywhere. In all this I see an enormous discrepancy between those in America who experienced terror first hand, and those who experienced it by television; between those who have felt terror, and those who jealously yearn for its sublime touch; between those for whom the need to combat terror is the source of meaning and the antidote to other disempowerments, and those for whom it is not the targets of violence that makes violence bad, but the act of violence itself."

Peace.