green

...but you will have to tie him (or his ears) down during outdoor ceremonies on windy days. This might happen a lot in Chicago, the windy city, eh.

All the better to hear the needs and the concerns of the voters with! :scared:

My brother is a skinny Democrat who lives in Virginia. Does that count? :scared: I am going to have to find out who he is voting for....

I like open-minded, curious people and I like people who find me funny. This indicates that they obviously have a sense of humour, and I figure that a sense of humour is a very important thing to have if you want to get through life relatively unharmed.

My on-line needs are information, entertainment, and the opportunity to discuss/debate various issues. This is why I enjoy R&R and the Lounge so much. I do get a sense of emotional fulfillment whenever I am able to help someone else out. I tend to discuss my own problems with my psychologist; that is what I pay her the big bucks for. :scared:

Yah, I am crazy about handbags, too. They must be leather, and these days they must be big, big enough to carry a couple of sets of eyeglasses, a book, three wallets (!), a bottle of wine, some cheese, a camera, and I won't buy anything made in China. Although I have a couple of black ones and a brown suede one I do have a weakness for ones which come in interesting and unusual colours and shapes. I have a fabulous burnt orange one and another which is yellow and my summer bag is aqua. I wear mostly only black, white and grey; colourful bags look great against these non-colours.

Oprah is gonna have to work harder! :heh: Barack is young, fresh, intelligent, and he is definitely the cutest of the candidates.

Ooops! My blonde, eh! Not only am I blonde but I am also Canadian.... :bounce: This does cause me problems from time to time. :phanvan

Bwahaha, notes Green bitterly. Yep, you are likely right.

It is a private poll. Nobody knows who voted for whom unless you choose to post your choice.

This horrible tragedy happened pretty close to where I live and thus it has been getting a lot of coverage in the local media. You might be interested to hear that the head of the Canadian Muslim Congress spoke out on television about the hijab, explaining that there is no mention of this sort of garment in the Qu'ran; he explained that these garments - hijab, niqab, abaya, etc - have purely cultural roots which have become mistaken over time for religious imperatives. As for the girl herself, she had left home recently and was staying with friends. She returned, moved out again, and was going home merely in order to pick up some more of her clothes when she was killed. The photos of her show that she was a really cute girl with dimples. The brother may yet also be charged with murder pending the results of further investigation. I don't think that it is fair to blame this murder entirely on Islam. There are also cultural factors to take into account. The family comes from a region where honour killings do take place. Think, too, that not all families are the same. Some are less healthy than others, and certainly living in a new and very different country will definitely place additional stress on the family, particularly on the males who may well be left feeling powerless and thus emasculated in front of their own families. The word is that this family is very religious, very traditional, and so when you factor in the defiant female, his daughter, you can begin to understand, I think, the sad underpinnings of this dreadful tragedy. Still, Islam does seem to play a role but whether this is cultural, I don't know. However, there does seem to be a sharp inequality between men and women in this religion plus a sanctioning of domestic violence, a combo that you don't find in the earlier two Judaic religions, Judiaism itself and Christianity. I recently read an article about Muslim daughters of Turkish families who live in Germany who have fled their families and their cities in order to avoid arranged marriages. These women claim that if a male member of their families should ever find them they will kill them in order to regain the family honour. Long post, eh, but these are my thoughts on the matter for what they are worth.

Yup, and oh the tragedy! *sob*

Good point, kagoscuba. All of us who are either recovering from or trying to kick our dependencies on our destructive pleasures, whatever these may be - alcohol, tobacco, drugs, food, gambling, shopping, computer fun, etc - are cut some slack whenever we backslide for it is generally recognised that the human relationship to pleasure is a complicated thing and that it is not easy for us to get ourselves unstuck. Birth control, even for those of us who are diligent, does not always work. I myself can attest to this. And as for this biz that those chicks who don't want babies can simply keep their legs shut, well, life ain't so easy as that. If you accept that humans share much with other animals you will acknowledge that sex is one of those very basic drives, clocking in behind only food and shelter. Women engage in sex for all kinds of reasons, one of which has to do with our reproductive, a species friendly act, hardwiring. Another reason why women engage in sex is that it makes them feel good on both an emotional and a physical level. The act of sex does release some pretty nice brain chemicals which produce good feelings in a grrl. Good feelings in much the same way that stuffing your face with carbs and sugars, doing a drug fest, smoking a cigarette, drinking too much, gambling, going on a shop-fest will also make an addict feel good. Women also engage in sex for more complicated, more human reasons than merely wanting the short term bio-chemical high. Women often feel themselves unlovely, unloveable, and unloved. They may engage in sexual exploration while attempting to sort out their own issues. This is why I don't feel that anyone should attempt to place this horribly complicated human issue into any splendidly tidy box. Let us admit that men and women will f*ck. Let us also admit that some of these women but none of these men will be left holding the bag even though both parties may well have been afflicted by the same and equal desire.... There are some of us women who feel that this inequity is not right. And then let us imagine, if you want to argue that the foetus is human from the get-go, that we are in a forest and that there is an argument between the survival of the old growth oaks and that of the acorns and the tiny sapplings. Well, you know that most of that new growth is not going to survive, is it? This is how I feel when I contrast the needs of the individual who is already alive and fully cognisant against something which is in effect an acorn. This is an issue of rights and I believe that the rights of the fully sentient and currently suffering creature trump those of the acorn. Of course, in an ideal world there are no birth control screw-ups and all women who are trapped in unwanted pregnancies are both capable and willing to commit 9 months of their time, physical, and financial resources in order to bring these to term and will happily and easily pass on their infants to anxious couples who have none of their own. This would be cool but real life is much messier and more painful than this.

Right now I am feeling very envious of you. Winter hit Toronto, Canada early this year and the days have been cold and grey and snowy. Apparently this is thanks to la Nina, el Nino's ugly sister. Last year I was able to wear a fall jacket right up to mid-January. That was weird but nice. :bounce: It is the lack of sunlight combined with the cold that really gets a grrl. Thanks for the Florida love. I sure do wish I was in Florida. :phanvan My parents used to spend their winters down there and we would visit them. My father was one of those old man drivers from hell!

So far I am the only one who voted for Obama in your poll and I am a foreigner so my vote doesn't count of course. It is more like a Christmas gift list kinda thing.

I don't believe in signs per se but I do believe that when you have a problem or become curious about a certain area of interest you will inevitably become much more alert to picking up on information which is pertinent to this, information which you likely would have ignored before.

When you are my age and have lost a lot of weight, which I did, people don't think that you are anorexic, they think that you have been ill!

Guilt is what my parents gave me for Christmas and at many other times of the year. :phanvan

It is a little bit of both good and bad: it is kind of real cosy, and wearing sweaters and sheepskins sure is fun, but at the same time it is easy to get cabin fever, not to mention that relentless drive for a carb freak-out because it is cold and you don't see the sun much. And now that I lost all that weight I am really suffering from the cold! Oh, ugh! I used to like winter much more than I do now. The clothes are really great. And crawling into a winter bed with a duvet and flannel (my husband made me buy them!) sheets is truly cosy. And the fireplace thing is wonderful.... But the days are short, grey, and cold. Brrrr.

Yah, like the sage, my post is Ghandhi.

I find Sweethot's comments to be very judgemental. What about the married woman who does not wish to have children? It seems to me that you are slotting all women into a very narrow paradigm. You are assuming that all women will want to be and should be married and you are assuming that all women, once married, will want/should/must have children. Where does this place heterosexual women who know that they do not wish to be mothers? I mention these individuals because these are the women who will be careful about their birth control issues. They are focussed on staying child-free and they are likely to be well-educated about these reproductive issues as a result. Nevertheless, birth control measures can flop and it is awful difficult for a chick to get herself spayed before she has had a kid or two. In France it was actually strictly against the law, and I knew a woman while I was living there who loved children but who ended up having two abortions for strictly medical reasons: you see, carrying a pregnancy to term would have killed her. She was, by the way, a teacher and a happily married woman. Her husband was a psychologist. I mention these details in order that you understand that abortion is not just a form of lazy birth control that is practised by a clutch of lower class, ignorant and lazy trouts. I also mention this because I find the argument in favour of abortion, the one which is often trotted out by my fellow pro-choicers, the one about victims of incest and rape, to be specious. Yep, it is true that those poor individuals should have the option of refusing to continue their pregnancies but these poster children are in the minority. Most people who want abortions have engaged in an act of sex which went sour on them and they oh so desperately do not want to be trapped by this. A woman who is caught in this situation is much like a wolf who is caught in a trap; she will do the equivalent of gnawing her leg off in order to escape. This level of desperation is something which you who are pro-life do not, perhaps, understand. These are women who will risk death if abortion is recriminalized. I know what I am talking about because I am one of those women. And, yah, I do find Sweethot's suggestion to be both offensive and impractical. What she is suggesting is that no women, apart from those who are married and who desire children, have a right to a sex life. Well, sh!t, it is either the convent, the dildo, or the burqa for the rest of us, is it not, Sweethot? The glaring inequality is men - remember them? - the humans who can't get pregnant, and who do have the freedom to enjoy their sexuality.

I note a considerable lack of these blessings in certain parts of the world, most notably sub-Saharan Africa; this area is arguably the most dysfunctional, the most impoverished, the most violent, and thus the saddest place that we will find on our earth. And yet, even if God were to favour His Christians, understand that many of these peoples are devout Christians. No, I am inclined to believe that these so-called blessings are merely the luck of the draw. Folks who are born in the affluent, industrialised countries of the West are very, very lucky. Folks who are born without intellectual or physical handicaps and who are physically attractive are very lucky. Folks who are born into affluent and loving homes are really very lucky. None of us had any control over these circumstances and yet they will control, to a large extent, whether we will experience those blessings or not. Let me explain: we did not win or merit the blessing of intelligence, looks, health, the "easiest" skin colour (if you are a whitey), access to an education, an American (or Canadian or Common Market) passport anymore than the child soldiers in Sierra Leone or Liberia, the folks who were slaughtered in the Rwanda mess, the intellectually or physically handicapped or their parents deserved their luck. In truth I find the argument that belief will manifest itself by God showering the believer with a bunch of good stuff/blessings to be both illogical and kinda alienating. One would hope that a benign superior creature, should one exist, would be both detached and kindly. And even-handed. Perhaps what you see as blessings is your ability to both notice and take joy in all the fine things which this world, which life itself does offer us. There is nothing wrong and everything right with that.

I always find it amusing - in a deeply repulsive way - when the one guy who manages to crawl away intact from a major disaster announces to the media with tears in his eyes and with a choked up voice that God was looking out for him! Of course my mind inevitably drifts to those other poor saps, the ones who didn't make it out alive, and their bereaved families.... So where was God for them, eh? A tragedy is a tragedy and sometimes some people are lucky and sometimes they are not. Statements like the above example always make this cat want to cough up a furball.

These people find your fabulous weight loss confusing and are afraid that you have lost it because of anorexia is my hunch. Tell them not to worry, that's the best you can do with such people; they will worry, however, whatever you say. It is in their nature.

Manatee is right. When they are talking about themselves and their own concerns they are not seeing you at all. Haven't you ever heard rich people complain about their money problems in front of friends who are simply middle class? People do tend to be self-absorbed but there usually is no malice involved.