The Christmas Report from Down Under

From This is True:

DREAMING OF A LIQUID CHRISTMAS: A gang of men dressed up as Santa Claus went on a rampage in Auckland, New Zealand, police say. The 40-50 St. Nicks were celebrating "Santarchy" and roamed the streets, where they allegedly threw beer bottles at cars and people, vandalized Christmas trees, shoplifted from stores, and were generally naughty, not nice. Their point? Contrary to press reports it was not to protest the commercialization of Christmas, said Auckland's Santarchy organizer, Alex Dyer. "It's not against anyone," he insisted. "We're just dressing up as Santa and getting drunk. We just like booze." (New Zealand Herald, NZPA) ...It's nice to know their motives are pure.

Dirty Scrabble

My fav words from this weekend:

quiver
tiger
ride
potent
wad
vulva
tornato (later corrected to be tornado)
spelunking

Happy Fuckin' New Year, Old Dudes!

Many ancient Egyptians marked the first month of the New Year by singing, dancing and drinking red beer until they passed out, according to archaeologists who have unearthed new evidence of a ritual known as the Festival of Drunkenness.

More...

Home

Home at last. And by home I mean San Francisco. But I'm not about to spend all my time home updating just yet, so here's a little stocking stuffer to help you get through the drought. These cuties are loving their Christmas presents:

Snow

It's snowing here. I forgot how cold Missouri was in late December. I'm such a wuss now. Went out and bought hats, but have yet to find a nice pair of gloves. A peril of having long fingers.

Went to a bar last night called Missie B's with a drag show. Fun show, especially with all the WET PUSSIES I had. Rock on.

Sidekicks is a country-western gay bar that we'll venture to another time, but didn't have the pleasure of last night. Corey described the drag queens there as Shania, Reba, or Wynona, depending on weight. Can't wait for that one.

Off to curl up with my gay and watch a gay Christmas movie. Can't believe that's what I do when I leave San Francisco.

Enjoy your un-coldness, SFers.

While I'm Away

I thought I'd share some cuteness.

Kitty Salad


Guard Dog



Dog Food?


More to come :)

HOME

I'm going home for the holidays!

Mom, Corey, Gatsby, grits, chicken fried steak, lebkuchen, snow that I can leave behind, and my OWN car!

Rock on!

oh yeah...that means no blogs for a bit :)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PETE!

I'm posting the following links here rather than sending cards for two reasons:

A) Apparently all the good e-cards are now through a paid service. (When did the funny as hell free ones go away?)

and 2) I can never decide on just one. :)

Happy, birthday, baby! :) Enjoy!

Ducky duck

Bird Poop

Donner and Blitzen

Why I'm Proud of Wash U, Reason #4

Four days after I was born, U2 played their first ever show in St. Louis.
Where, you ask? Mississippi Nights?
Nope.
Blueberry Hill?
Nope.
Ready?

Graham Chapel, at Wash U! On the same stage where the Mosaic Whispers perform. The same stage where thousands of wustl alum have been married. The same stage where many a talented (and often not so talented) speaker has filled the heads of students and retired society attending Assembly lecture events.

And after the show they went to have a few pints of Guiness at, of course, Blue Hill.

If only I'd have been at Wash U back in those days. :)

My Sister is Cool

Because she sent me this quote:

Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, whiskey in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WOO HOO what a ride!"

Generosity

I gave a dollar to a homeless man because I wanted to pet his cat.

Grace No More

I resent Corey's latest post! :)

Just because we're still not sure of the sexual orientation of four or five (or more?) of my exes does NOT mean I'm attracted to gay men. :) Or does it? Shit!

I think the tomboy in me just needed a balancer for a while. Now I've found that fem side, thanks, and I don't need anymore help. Thank God Pete is hairy, at least as messy as me, so not into clothes, and into guy gadgets...no questions on his orientation. :) In fact, we may need the Fab Five to come help out on this one. I LOVE it!

I'm so thankful to have a boyfriend that (without a doubt) will never be into Corey!

Correction

Lord knows how I got this wrong, but apparently I've made a mistake on the date of my arrival into San Francisco. My loving ex-roommate informed me that I moved here on June 4th. I was sure he must be wrong (how could I forget such a momentous occasion?), but he's absolutely right. So my 6 month anniversary was December 4th. Can't believe I forgot that.

Thanks, Corey.

Semi-Anniversary

As of yesterday, I've been a San Francisco resident for 6 months!

The Anti-Diet

I did the carb diet back in high school. I did the calorie watching in college. They worked, but they don't stick. If you're on a diet, it won't last forever. At some point you go off the diet.

The changes have to be a lifestyle. Yeah, sure, there are people who can eliminate things that make my knees go weak (chocolate chip cookies, anyone?) from their diets permanently, but I'm not one of those. No matter how healthy my lifestyle, I will always need chocolate, I will always drink some alcohol, and I'll always be a bread and pasta freak. So diets always ultimately fail.

A few days ago I had several discussions with various people about our bodies' ability to tell us what we need. For example, even my friend who is a vegetarian craves red meat sometimes. He knows that when he has one of those urges, he needs to either eat a bunch of spinach or take an iron pill. A lot of women feel a major need for red meat during menstruation. That's because we lose iron when we lose blood, and we need to replenish. Most people can tell when they've had too much starch and crave veggies or meat instead. This is the idea behind intuitive eating:

Professor loses weight with no-diet diet

By BROCK VERGAKIS
Associated Press Writer

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- When Steven Hawks is tempted by ice cream bars, M&Ms and toffee-covered almonds at the grocery store, he doesn't pass them by. He fills up his shopping cart.

It's the no-diet diet, an approach the Brigham Young University health science professor used to lose 50 pounds and to keep it off for more than five years.

Hawks calls his plan "intuitive eating" and thinks the rest of the country would be better off if people stopped counting calories, started paying attention to hunger pangs and ate whatever they wanted.

As part of intuitive eating, Hawks surrounds himself with unhealthy foods he especially craves. He says having an overabundance of what's taboo helps him lose his desire to gorge.

There is a catch to this no-diet diet, however: Intuitive eaters only eat when they're hungry and stop when they're full.

That means not eating a box of chocolates when you're feeling blue or digging into a big plate of nachos just because everyone else at the table is.

The trade-off is the opportunity to eat whatever your heart desires when you are actually hungry.

"One of the advantages of intuitive eating is you're always eating things that are most appealing to you, not out of emotional reasons, not because it's there and tastes good," he said. "Whenever you feel the physical urge to eat something, accept it and eat it. The cravings tend to subside. I don't have anywhere near the cravings I would as a 'restrained eater.'"

"You definitely lose weight on a diet, but resisting biological pressures is ultimately doomed," Hawks said.

...overweight at a new job at BYU, Hawks decided it was time for a lifestyle change.

He stopped feeling guilty about eating salt-and-vinegar potato chips. He also stopped eating when he wasn't hungry.

Slowly and steadily his weight began to drop. Exercise helped.

"I was pretty skeptical of the idea you could eat anything you wanted until you didn't feel like it. It struck me as odd," said Peck, who is an assistant professor at BYU.

But 11 months later, Peck sometimes eats mint chocolate chip ice cream for dinner, is 35 pounds lighter and a believer in intuitive eating.

"There are times when I overeat. I did at Thanksgiving," Peck said. "That's one thing about Steve's ideas, they're sort of forgiving. On other diets if you slip up, you feel you've blown it and it takes a couple weeks get back into it. ... This sort of has this built-in forgiveness factor."

"The one thing all diets have in common is that they restrict food," said Michael Goran, an obesity expert at the University of Southern California. "Ultimately, that's why they usually fail," he said.

"At some point you want what you can't have," Goran said. Still, he said intuitive eating makes sense as a concept "if you know what you're doing."

In a small study published in the American Journal of Health Education, Hawks and a team of researchers examined a group of BYU students and found those who were intuitive eaters typically weighed less and had a lower risk of cardiovascular disease than other students.

He said the study indicates intuitive eating is a viable approach to long-term weight management and he plans to do a larger study across different cultures. Ultimately, he'd like intuitive eating to catch on as a way for people to normalize their relationship with food and fight eating disorders.

"Most of what the government is telling us is, we need to count calories, restrict fat grams, etc. I feel like that's a harmful message," he said. "I think encouraging dietary restraint creates more problems. I hope intuitive eating will be adopted at a national level."

I believe I'll try this out. I'll let you know how it works for me.

Surprises

So the surprise Friday night was an amazing dinner at Acme Chophouse and the adventure of Cirque de Soleil: Corteo.

Dinner was great, even though our waitress ruined the surprise by asking if we were going to Cirque right away. Cirque was even better. Truly enchanting. We sat in the 6th or 7th row. If you haven't gone to a Cirque de Soleil show I STRONGLY encourage you to go--even if it's just once. It was a combination of an opera, a ballet, an a gymnast exhibition. Absolutely beautiful.

Wonderful night. Wonderful boyfriend.

Life is good.

Personality Tests...

...Are usually fairly vague so as to be correct with just about anyone. This one is pretty damn detailed. And surprisingly accurate on most fronts.

Advanced Global Personality Test Results Extraversion |||||||||||||||||||| 90% Stability |||||||||||||| 56% Orderliness |||||||||| 40% Accommodation |||||||||||| 50% Interdependence |||||||||||| 43% Intellectual |||||||||||||||||| 76% Mystical |||||| 23% Artistic |||| 16% Religious |||||||||||||||||||| 90% Hedonism |||||||||||||| 56% Materialism |||||||||||| 50% Narcissism |||||||||||||||| 63% Adventurousness |||||||||||||||||| 76% Work ethic |||||||||||||| 56% Self absorbed |||||||||||||| 56% Conflict seeking |||||| 30% Need to dominate |||||||||||||| 56% Romantic |||||||||||||||| 63% Avoidant |||||| 30% Anti-authority |||||||||||| 50% Wealth |||||| 23% Dependency |||||||||||||||| 63% Change averse || 10% Cautiousness |||||||||||| 50% Individuality |||||||||||| 43% Sexuality |||||||||||||||| 63% Peter pan complex |||||| 30% Physical security |||||||||||||||||||| 90% Physical Fitness |||| 17% Histrionic |||||| 23% Paranoia |||||||||||| 43% Vanity |||||||||||||||| 63% Hypersensitivity |||||||||||||||||||| 83% Female cliche |||||||||||||||| 70%

Take Free Advanced Global Personality Test
personality tests by similarminds.com


Stability results were moderately high which suggests you are relaxed, calm, secure, and optimistic.

Orderliness results were moderately low which suggests you are, at times, overly flexible, improvised, and fun seeking at the expense of reliability, work ethic, and long term accomplishment.

Extraversion results were very high which suggests you are overly talkative, outgoing, sociable and interacting at the expense too often of developing your own individual interests and internally based identity.

trait snapshot:
messy, outgoing, open, self revealing, ambivalent about chaos, unpredictable, not good at saving money, social, likes large parties, likes to stand out, risk taker, quick to make friends, does not like to be alone, rash, fame seeking, sarcastic, craves attention, social chameleon, low self control, food lover, not rule conscious, weird, assertive, not a perfectionist, anti-authority, thrill seeker, vain, likes to fit in, reckless, emotionally sensitive, leisurely, trusting

A New Age

As if singing new agey stuff wasn't weird already, Enya has taken it to a new level. Randy Cunningham reports in This is True:

Irish singer Enya, who has sung in Gaelic and Latin, has rejected those languages for her newest album as not quite eclectic enough. Forget English; that's "a little bit obtrusive", she says. Thus, three tracks on her latest album are sung in Loxian. Not familiar with that tongue? That's because she made it up: it's "a futuristic language from a distant planet," she says. "It seems to choose elements at random," says Terry Dolan, a professor of English at University College Dublin.' The resulting "language" has "no form of grammar or word order," Dolan says, which provides "very limited comprehensibility." (London Times)

Because You Stink

The World Health Organization enacted a new policy to stop hiring smokers yesterday. The job application now includes a question about tobacco use, and if the applicant answers that they do in fact use tobacco, WHO will not hire them.
Major move.

Can you imagine in a few years that the kids won't be scared of pot showing up in their urine test, but nicotine?

Why I Like My Boyfriend reason #78

Tonight I'm meeting my amazing man to go out to...

well, I don't know what it is we're doing, actually. He's concocted some little surprise scheme and won't tell me a thing.

Boy am I intrigued :)

Perhaps this blog should be titled "how to keep Monika interested"