I try to share myself openly with everyone, balancing the fine line of over-disclosure and often times falling mercilessly on the wrong side of the fence. Fortunately I have grown in many ways the past few years here and met so many people that I couldn't begin to name them all. So I wont even try.

Levanna and I are real close, that girl always has an inspirational quip to remind me why I started writing in the first place. She does supremely awesome things like sending me the in-flight magazine from her trips around the globe and home made cookies that have roughly the same addictive properties as crack. Finding an email in my inbox from her is like sitting down with a fresh cup of coffee and the paper while the kids play quietly in their rooms. It heals me.She knows me because I share with her, the little frustrations in life that I must keep secret elsewhere.She knows me, and from what I can tell, she still likes me. She is fantastic and as gorgeous inside as she is on the outside. Which is to say, drop dead. Thank you for your friendship.

Some of my *other* favorites:

Joel When xanga pushes people away, Joel is the reason they always come back. The backbone of this community, the beating heart of the BFN and my friend.
ShamelesslyRed One who will slap you in the face with her honesty and leave you whimpering for more. My dear, your bravery is a startling testament to those around you and you are far more talented than people give you credit for.
BigShow You know I love you, even if you are part of the problem.
Matt My favorite ginger and a pretty great talent who will stand up for what he thinks is right.
Batman It isnt just my affinity for the best superhero (for his lack of supertalents) it is also the very real feeling that this guy loves this community.
Riis The resident hottie, always posting the love up to everyone else.
Gari What can I say about you? You and your wifey are both so great, always around to give me the internet equivalent of a high five. Thank you for that.


and


BabushkaD Someone I dont know very well but I am excited to learn more about. Thanks for the shout out on the radio!








   

I just answered this Featured Question; you can answer it too!

The year I became aware that there was more of a world outside of my small religious community was 1994, at the tender yet stubborn age of 12. I spent a summer wearing flip flops and bobbing my head to grunge metal riffs about teen angst. Kurt Cobain was the first musician to reach his fingers through the tiny speakers in my headphones and turn my veins to ice and my heart to a steaming glop of unhinged emotion. I felt alive and free, inside my own little headphone world. Five children and two angry adults could never create the music I found within the solitude of my room, nirvana cds strewn on the floor, posters of Hendrix and Marley, peeling at the edges.

Early that year, Kurt Cobain put a gun to his head and took his own life, a very stomach churning death for a 12 year old girl to swallow. I heard the news along side my best of friends. Nicole, the girl I always looked up to and idolized, crumbled into a heap as the news was delivered over the small stereo we huddled in front of. She sobbed, and without notice locked herself in the bathroom and carved the word KURT into her arm with the business end of a lady bic. Ten years later, I caught a glimpse of this scar during a brief encounter with her in the grocery store of my home town. Her hair was longer, she was still far more beautiful than I could stomach, and I envied her passion as she spoke quietly about her life.

I was crushed too, when I heard the news of my beloved blonde haired, gorgeous eyed, crooning Kurt. I cried deep sobs into my pillow and questioned my most concrete beliefs on the afterlife. I mourned the loss of a man whom I had never met. But I had not mourned quite so much as she had, not quite as hard nor quite as permanently tragic.

Today, as we are all taking a moment to watch the drama that unfolds at the staple center, to bid goodbye to the King of Pop, Michael Jackson I remember the last time I mourned someone I had not known. I spent a little bit of time in a chat room where hate-filled comments attacked the notion that paying respects to the man was in some way, consequential to life as we know it. Yes, I admit that when I heard the news about Michael Jackson and I sat back watching the coverage in shock, I cried. I sobbed my little eyes out for the man who wrote the soundtrack to my life. I am sad, though thrilled I can share the music with my children and enjoy it myself, but this blog isnt really about me. It is about mourning, how it is the right of every person to go about it in their own way.

To those of you who are crying that people are making too big of a deal of too small of a man, I beg you to step aside. Many people are devestated, many people are angry, and many people are happy about these events. Your passions are your passions, and mine are mine. Perhaps I want to take a moment out of my day to mourne the loss of something that brought me joy. Perhaps you want to get to and from work without having to hear about him on every single station. Please don't tell me how to mourne, and I wont tell you how to channel surf.

Last time I wrote about it, It was in refusal to watch the movie. Maybe that was naive, or rude of me in respect to the "artists" involved. Ive had hate reigned down on me from such twilight enthusiasts that I nearly shut down access to my site from the xanga network. You people are really passionate about this drivel.

This time, I am writing about Twilight because in a fit of extreme boredom and in light of having to watch shitty B movie after shitty B movie, I watched Twilight. I did it in the privacy of my own home, while my family was out of the house. I did not make a single person watch this tripe with me, instead of subjected myself to 2 hours 1 minute and 50 seconds of the worst splenda-sweetened vomit I have ever seen.

Now, lets indulge.

Twilight follows on the heels of other super scary movies in which the idealic teenage outcast with the snarky attitude we all wish we had at the tender age of SumpTeen falls in "love" with a boy from the wrong side of the tracks. Family and friends disparage the union and blah blah blah.... drama ensues. Let me start by saying I had hope. I HOPED that this movie had some merit to it, that it would make me feel those tickly sensations in my netherregions that great movies can inspire. I had hope that my heart would leap at the site of Edward Cullen and I would be swooned into the romatic world of vampire stories.

I was not thrilled, nor excited in any way.

For those of you who dont know, here it is in a nutshell.

Boy meets girl, girl and boy spend more time together, fall in love. Boy shows true side, He is a shiney diamond vampire who glows in the sun. Girl is unafraid. Boy teaches girl crap girl doesnt need to know. Boy takes girl to play Vampire baseball, (no, really!) girl gets into trouble with rival vampire clan who cant help but want to eat her, the rest of the movie is a rough and tumble charade of typical blogger-style rhetoric where feelings aren't real and everyone is a cry baby trying to outwit/outrun each other.  Girl gets hurt, nearly bites it. True love conquers all, even itself, and girl and vampire boy make it to prom in time.

NO KIDDING.

The story was crap, the film was crap. The acting, mediocre at best, given the terrible writing quality. Do I think I could do better? Absolutely, give me twenty minutes and a roll of toilet paper and I could come up with a thicker story line. I promise not to equate my love of a relative stranger to a heroin addiction, and I promise not to bastardize the very nature of a centuries long belief in something as simple as vampires.

Not only did this movie suck, but if you liked it, You suck. This kind of "story-telling" is what lines the pockets of the media mogules and shows the rest of us that you can capitalize on the weak minded, easily thrilled, and brain dead entertainment junkies of the world. For all the people that write long winded blogs about how much this movies means to you, I seriously question the level of your IQ. The hoopla around this movie was enough to keep me from watching it, until last night. I knew that something that "agreed" with so many people, must be terrible, considering people. But clearly, I had no idea how utterly vapid the movie could be. Seriously, Where has true filmaking gone?



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