If I had a list of people that I only know online that I'd like to meet in real life...it would be pretty long. I can't lie. But I will say that roina_arwen is right at the top of my list.

What brought the two of us together? I can't remember. Maybe it was a friending frenzy, perhaps my "golden pins" bowling icon, maybe I met her like I met so many of my other friends (though popfiend.) But I don't know, and the truth is, it really doesn't matter.

Ro is a lot like me. I think when I look for friends, I try to find people that I have things in common with, like most of us do. I look for a kindred spirit. I look for someone who, if they lived here in town, I could see myself doing lunch with or spending an afternoon shopping or going to the movies with. Someone who would give me an honest opinion on how a pair of jeans made my butt look, but who would give me comfort and moral support if my heart was breaking.

In Ro, I've found that kind of person.

I can't lie, I was delighted when I got the message on Facebook a few months ago that she and Knight would be in Phoenix this spring and that she'd like to get together for lunch one day. How could I pass up on that opportunity? To meet someone I've had such respect for online in real life? I wouldn't pass up that chance.

Until then, I'll eagerly await the day when I get to see her face to face, to hear that voice (I imagine she's got an adorable Kentucky accent) and talk about bowling, cats, books and the desert in late spring.

With all the things I have to look forward to, if you really want my honest opinion - this is the one that I'm awaiting the most.

Maybe, if we're really lucky, there might be an opportunity to get some bowling in, too.

Well, a girl can wish, right?

I have a true confession.

Sometimes I stalk my niece on Facebook.

Actually, I guess that's not fair, because she's not really my niece anymore.

And she hasn't been since the day that I walked out in November of 2005. I haven't seen her since before that.

It's easier for me to remember the kid that she was ten years ago - blonde, blue-eyed, Miss Personality, full of piss & vinegar. When I finally worked up the courage to search for her on MySpace, I saw a teenage wild child with dyed hair who bragged about having sex and smoking pot, then got kicked out of school.

When I saw the pictures of her where she couldn't have been more than fourteen or fifteen with a Smirnoff Ice in one hand, flashing what looked like gang signs with the other, it bothered me. And I couldn't help but think to myself that even though it looks like she's out of control, she's got two great parents that will help keep her grounded. And she'll be okay.

A few months ago I saw her happily posing with her boyfriend, both arms proudly wrapped around her pregnant belly. And I won't lie, it threw me for a loop. I just thought of her as that little girl that I had met on a spring day in 1998, who I expected to be a quiet and reserved smaller version of her mother. And then when I saw her burst out of a bedroom door at the end of the hall and call me Aunt Corrie for the first time, I was a goner.

I expected to still see that little girl underneath all that dyed hair and makeup. I thought of the little girl in the pink knit pants who knelt in the front yard with me under a shrub, looking for worms. I thought about cuddling with her when she was sick with the chicken pox and I babysat her every day for a week when her mom and dad were at work and she couldn't go to school. I thought of the surprise in her voice when we watched that episode of "Full House" where Stephanie starts a band with Gia and Kimmy Gibbler and they play "The Sign" by Ace of Base and I sang along. "Aunt Corrie, you KNOW this song?!"

The span from 2002 to the fall of 2003 when I didn't see her at all, except for one day in the courthouse during the trial, was devastating. I missed her so much. I missed her smiles, I missed her hugs, I missed us being able to hang out in the basement of Tim & Mari's house watching cartoons or a movie. I missed the nights I would babysit her and Michelle, tucking her into bed, snug as a bug in a rug.

And now I see that little girl on Facebook, smiling the smile that I thought would never come back again. I see her looking happy for the first time since before everything happened and he destroyed a little girl's innocence. And I look at the picture of her, that sweet, brilliant smile that lit her up from the inside out back on her face, as she looks down adoringly at her newborn son.

If life is a highway, then we're just driving down it during our own thing. And even though we may hit some snags on the way to our destinations, we may suffer some hurt, heartbreak, pain and sadness, we'll still get there one way or another.

And we don't have to reinvent the wheel to make that happen, either.

"Daddy, can you come play with me?"

She stands there in front of the TV, her blonde hair done up perfectly in two matching pigtails. Her jumper is red and white checkered, the turtleneck she is wearing underneath is red. The bobbles on her ponytail holders are both red, too.

"Not right now," he says. "Come back later and I'll...TOUCHDOWN!!"

Sadly she turns on her heels and walks away down the hall back to her bedroom. In her dollhouse, the baby is asleep in the cradle, and the mommy doll and the daddy doll are sitting on the couch together in front of a matchbox-sized TV.

She picks up the mommy doll. "You never talk to me any more!" she says in her most grown-up Mommy voice. "You're just too busy watching football and being at work."

In a gruff Daddy voice, the male doll responds. "Well, I have to be at work because I need to bring home lots of money to buy French fries and chicken nuggets. You can cook it for me and make us dinners because you are such a good cook."

The Mommy doll replies. "Sometimes I wish that you would be here more. Sometimes it is lonely at night when only Baby and I are here by ourselves. When you don't come home until late and then watch football on TV, it makes us both sad."

Daddy doll again. "I'm too busy to deal with this right now. Football is on! Come back later."

Impatiently, the little blonde girl wipes away a tear from her eye. She throws the daddy doll under the bed. "You're always too busy to play with me," she says in a barely audible voice.

He stands in the doorway of her pink and ivory bedroom, just looking at her. He's heard all the dialogue, he knows that she's spot on. And to him, that is truly the saddest part. His three year old daughter has captured all the nuances of the marriage in that five minute roleplay she just had with her dolls.

"Hey, princess," he says, clearing his throat. His voice is thick and heavy with tears. "Did you still want to play?"

"Of course, Daddy," she says, pulling a pink plastic chair over to her miniature table where the tea set is already put out. "Why don't you sit down and I will make you some banana bread and raspberry gingermuffin banana chocolate tea with whipped cream on top? It's my very best kind!"

He looks at her as she bustles around in her toy kitchen, pretending to fill the plastic teapot up with water and make him a special drink, he takes just a moment to realize that he'll never tell her that he's too busy again.

After all, she's won't be three forever.

She was a nurse at a sanitarium in the twenties when she met him. He was a patient, recouping from tuberculosis. They fell in love. She must have thought she'd never get married - she was in her late twenties, and all her siblings must have been married by then, raising their own families. And they got married, and they lived happily ever after.

I don't know why Aunt Rosie and Uncle Benny never had any kids of their own. Maybe it was her, maybe it was him. It doesn't matter. It very well just may have been that they loved each other so much that there was no room for a child in that equation.

We went to see my Aunt Rosie at her house on E. Diamond when I was in high school. She was well into her nineties but still as full of piss and vinegar as ever. It wasn't until she started talking about Uncle Benny that her eyes filled up with tears. "It's been ten years," she sobbed, "and I still miss him every day."

When she passed away at the age of one hundred, I cried, thinking of her joyful reunion with my Uncle Benny in the great beyond.

***

He was three years ahead of her in high school. "He seems so stuck up and full of himself," she would tell her friends. "I don't even like him."

Somewhere along the way, the young lady's distaste turned into love. They married October 7th, 1945. He worked the land as a farmer and instilled a good work ethic in their children. She is a hard working, dedicated wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, but before any of that, she was Mrs. Robert Simpson.

Grandma and Grandpa, as far as I know, never spent a night apart until he passed in January of 2002. A love like that only comes around once in a lifetime.

***

She was interested in his college roommate, Joe.

He was interested in the girl she went to Ratzkellers with, Kathy.

But things didn't work out that way.

He was getting over a broken heart. His high school girlfriend had broken his heart, flashed her engagement ring in his face and talked about how happy she was. His roommate, tired of the pity party, dragged him out of the apartment so they could go out and meet some girls.

And that's where Mike Schmidt and Joe Luchak met Colleen Simpson and Kathy Edwards.

He was a young cop a year older, she was going to graduate from nursing school soon. They both worked at Shriners at the same time - he was a janitor, she was a student nurse.

The farm girl soon took the born and bred city boy down to the farm to meet the parents.

He asked them for their blessing.

And they said yes.

They'll have been married for forty years on June 11th.

Some people call them Mr. and Mrs. Schmidt.

Some people call them Mike and Colleen.

But I'm one of the lucky few that gets to call them Mom & Dad.

***

They met on a street corner in St. Louis in the 1940's while waiting for a streetcar.

He asked her for a cigarette.

Later on, he almost went AWOL "chasing after your mother," as he told their kids.

They raised three kids on his Air Force salary.

She made all of their clothes, ironed jeans, and couldn't understand why Laugh-In was funny.

Even though the cigarette he asked her for caused her COPD and emphysema, I'm grateful for the fact they both smoked.

After all, a cigarette is what brought them together, after all.

Only in this situation can I say "God bless you, Philip Morris."

***

He was divorced and had a young son when he met her.

She must have seemed like a breath of fresh air - young, pretty, tomboyish, a daredevil, racing motorcycles and taking care of a cat named Pizzazz.

His mother tried to turn her away, saying that she didn't know what she was in for. "He has a son, you know," the older lady cautioned.

It didn't matter.

They met in May of 1974.

They married that July.

They raised two sons.

They buried one.

The other is now my husband.

I always tell him how thankful I am that his parents - and also mine - have such a healthy relationship.

It means we got to learn from the best.

***

We met on Livejournal on a hot August night when I couldn't sleep.

He was yelling at someone for being a closeminded, hypocritical fatphobe.

And I liked his goofy, gap-toothed icon. I thought he was cute, so I told him so.

The next night we were on the phone all night as we talked about everything and nothing.

When I was sick as a dog and he sang me Leon Russell over the phone to me, I knew I had found the man I would marry someday.

And I did, in Las Vegas, on August 23rd 2008.

Out of all the great love stories, ours is one of the best.

And that's because it's still just getting started.

What can I say?

I come from a long line of love.

Article from here.

I can think of worse people to have in office than Roseanne Barr.

Roseanne is throwing her name in the hat for the 2012 Green Party candidacy.

Before you start telling me what a horrible idea this is, let's look at this objectively, shall we?

We need someone who is on par with the normal, average American person.

Someone who gets us.

And let's face it, when Roseanne was on TV, it was the perfect sitcom at that point in time. We had a couple of average looking people - neither particularly attractive (although to be honest, I have always felt that John Goodman would be a great snuggle buddy) with three kids, a house they're struggling to pay the mortgage on. The Conners were struggling to get by like normal, regular, blue collar Americans.

So you're thinking that she's not qualified to run for office. I know you are. Let's look at this way, shall we?

Look at all the "qualified" people we've had in office over the past several years. There was George. W., whose brother basically won him the election by conveniently screwing up the votes in Florida, the state that he was the governor of at the time. He choked on a pretzel while reading a children's book to grade schoolers. And instead of going after Osama Bin Laden, who was behind the 9/11 attacks, what did Dubya choose to do? Go after Saddam Hussein, because Saddam threatened Papa Bush, and like all sons, Dubya just wanted his dad to be proud of him.

And then now we have Obama, who promised us change. And like sheep, we fell for it. At least Obama was able to get Osama. He hasn't been perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but like someone once told me during the fall of 2008 when the elections were getting heated - he's not going to be able to clean up an eight year long mess overnight, either.

And now we have this year's candidates. I don't think that a philandering Republican who preaches family values, yet leaves each sick wife to marry his mistress is the guy I want in charge of the country. Neither do I feel that Santorum, who has compared homosexuality to bestiality and who also has publicly spoken out against contraception and says that it's "not how things are supposed to be" is who I want in charge of America. And Romney, his wife Ann, and their five clean-cut sons and their perfect Mormon families are a little too robotic for me to comfortable with.

Personally, when it comes time for me to choose who I want to vote for in the fall of 2012, my vote will be going towards the person who I think would be the best person for the job. I'm likely to vote for someone who understands what the middle-class is struggling with, who understands how hard we're fighting to get by day after day, and someone who will fight for us as the middle class, because she came from the middle class herself.

"I will barnstorm American living rooms," she said in a candidate questionnaire submitted to the Green Party. "Mainstream media will be unable to ignore me, but more importantly they will be unable to overlook the needs of average Americans in the run-up to the 2012 election."

If the Green Party picks Roseanne for their candidate, then it's quite simple.

My choice has already been made.

The package showed up on the front porch at about three in the afternoon. He had expecting it, so when he heard the thump on the front door from the UPS man, he roused himself off the couch, turned off the ball game, pulled a slightly dirty t-shirt on - he didn't want the neighbors to catch a glimpse of his hairy beer belly when he opened the door - and brought the package into the house.

Inside was what he had been waiting for.

It was the woman who would become his wife.

Every part of her had a story to go along with it, noticed Joe as he took the bits out of the box. He looked at the arm with the scar on it, then glanced at the manual. "That scar is from when she was sixteen and the most popular girl at school pretended to trip into the cafeteria, and then spilled her milk all over her in front of everyone. When she went home she ran a steak knife across her arm to hurt as much on the inside as she did on the outside."

And the feet, complete with red painted toenails.

"These are feet that have scampered barefoot around the backyard as a child, paddled furiously in the lake in the summertime, been massaged after a long hard day at work."

Then there were her hands. Lovely hands with long, beautiful fingernails painted the same red as the toenails. "This is the hand that she held the pen in as she wrote in her journal in high school about how lonely she felt at sixteen," he reads.

And "this is the hand that softly petted the fur of her pet cat, Tallulah, as the cat got euthanized after suffering from cancer."

The teeth. "An orthodontist worked on these teeth for several years to finally get her to close her mouth around a spoon. Those teeth used to be too big for her mouth. After she stopped wearing her retainer at sixteen, they started to drift but she still has a beautiful smile. Treat her nicely and you should see it often."

He assembled her from head to toe. Arms, feet, legs, eyes, ears, nose. He even put in the two perfect, high cheekbones that made her smile so contagious and perfect.

Now there was only one thing left for him to put in.

"This is her heart," read the instruction guide. "Please do not break it or damage it in any way. If you do, please do whatever you have within your control not to cause any irreprable damage to it. She is fragile and she can be broken, just like everyone else. Handle with care. Surprise her with Starbucks green teas on a Saturday afternoon or flowers, just because you feel like it. Go out for French toast on Sunday mornings. Splash through puddles together. Kiss on the escalator at the mall. Don't get too mad if she accidentally backs the car into yours, compliment her cooking even if she burns your dinner. Give her free reign to sing along with the radio on long car trips. Don't berate her and make her feel stupid. Laugh together. Tell her you love her often and make sure you mean it."

"You will have her for the rest of your life as long as you follow the directions and do not harm her in any way, shape or form. Misuse will void the warranty and you will be alone for the rest of your life."

With one long, slow look at her, he takes a deep breath and realizes that there's no way at all that he would ever think of making that same mistake again.

( LJ Idol poll hiding behind the cut. Clicky! )



Also, my friends m_malcontent, mac_arthur_park and shadowwolf13 are also in my tribe, so please read them and shoot them a vote too.

Muchas gracias!

And if nothing else? Do it for the puppy!


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THE PERSON I ADMIRE THE MOST

I am doing my report on my grandma because she is awesome. And I know that since I have to back that up, so I will tell you why.

My grandma has a lot of interesting stories about things that happened to her a long time ago.

My favorite is one that she swears is true, but I'm almost sure that she made it up.

She and my grandpa got married on a sunny day in the spring almost forty years ago. I have seen her wedding pictures and she really did look beautiful. Grandpa looked kind of geeky though, he was wearing big thick glasses and kind of looked like a dork. Grandma says that the right word to use to describe him back then was "square".

She says that they were on their way to their honeymoon on a dark and stormy night and their car broke down, and they had to walk to this old creepy house. And she said there were all these crazy people that were living in this house.

But first, she says this scary tall guy opened the door and he scared both her and my grandpa, but they came in anyway because they just needed to call AAA or something like that.

So they were trying to eat dinner when some guy rides in on his motorcycle and starts singing some song about a hot patootie and rock and roll, and then Grandma says that he died and one of the maids got really upset because she was his girlfriend and they wanted to get married. I think it must have been really romantic, but she actually says that it was more creepy and weird than anything else.

And here's the other thing. The main guy that owns the house is apparently a cross dresser and he's a mad scientist from (word unacceptable for a seventh grade class project - Mrs. Whitney) Transylvania. And Grandma said that he made this perfect specimen and he was all blonde and German looking.

And there was all kinds of stuff going on (Grsndma won't really tell me a lot of specifics, she just says "shenanigans", but she says when I get older maybe she'll tell me more) and THAT'S when it starts to get really weird. Because then a SPACESHIP shows up and takes the crazy mad scientist guy, the creepy butler, and the rest of them to outer space.

I think that Grandma is a little crazy, and I'm pretty sure that none of this ever really happened, but it's a good story anyway.

She did tell me once that she told the story to some guy that writes plays and that he turned it into a play and then later into a movie, but I have my doubts about THAT!!!

The end.

by Emily Majors

Dear Sir and/or Madam,

I just have a few things that I would like to set straight for you.

First of all, I am not down the street from you.

I am not a recording.

I am not in India. Or Manila. Or Guatemala.

Don't ask me who won the World Series to confirm my US citizenship. It wasn't the Rockies, so I don't care.

Also, surprisingly enough, I have not had twelve cups of coffee to sound this chipper. Believe it or not, most days I don't even have any. This upbeat tone comes from a combined five years in customer service, and the ingrained knowledge that if I say what I want to say to you, I'll get fired.

But let's progress, shall we?

I cannot look your account up by a model number. Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds? Do you have any idea of how many other people probably have that exact same appliance? Do you know how much time it would take me to do that?

I am not trying to rip you off by offering you an agreement. I don't necessarily understand why you feel that way, but when you're calling me with a nine year old, three hundred and sixty-four day old refrigerator with a failing compressor, the plan is only good for an appliance up to ten years old, I'm actually trying to do you a favor, not rip you off. But that's fine, you just continue to call me a con artist and hang up on me.

When I'm not finding your account under the phone number that you have given me, then PLEASE don't repeat it four different times in a nasty, snotty voice after I've already repeated it back to you the first three times. It's not there.

Your zip code and your area code are two different things.

Saying "I don't call myself" when I ask for an alternate phone number is not clever. Seriously, just stop.

Also, please don't imply that just because I work in a call center, I don't work as hard for my money as you do. Believe me, this job is no walk in the park. What do you do? Work on an assembly line? Drive school bus? Change old people's diapers? Let's trade places, and then you can tell me what a cushy job I have.

When I ask if there's anything else I can help you with, replying with "Your phone number" or "the winning Powerball numbers" or "a million bucks" makes me want to strangle you with my headset cord. Not funny the first time, not funny the twelve millionth time.

The technicians do not carry around brand new appliances in their vans. They are not appliance fairies. With all the parts they're already carting around in there, there's no room for a brand-new refrigerator. It's not going to fit inside a Big Blue Van, anyway.

Also, when you tell me that "I don't have any time to deal with this crap", generally that means that you're going to spend five extra minutes TELLING me that you don't have time to deal with it. Do you realize that if you weren't carping about your problems, we could have had this done already?

Also, I'm not a mind reader. When you say "it's the same thing that it was before", I don't know what that "same thing" actually is unless you tell me.

Do you have any idea how many other people work here? Unless you mention "that English guy, Michael" or "you know, that fellow that sounds like the Geico gecko?" or "Tom with the Boston accent", then I honestly don't know who you're talking about.

The things that I'm telling you *may* not seem right or correct, but trust me, this is how it works.

Thank you,
your friendly Tucson, AZ technical specialist