If you want to read along as I bitch about my family, my work (when I have any), or other issues that the entire fucking Internet doesn't really need to know about, add me as a friend. When it is mutual, you'll have access to the real drama.

If you are not a LiveJournal whore, then just set up a free account. The Russian media conglomerate that bought LiveJournal will require you to have ads on your page, but it's not like you aren't used to that bullshit from MySpace.

Then, once you have joined up, friend me. You don't even need to write up any blog entries.


Easy, breezy, beautiful.




-

For all of you whose love life is problematic; whether you are single (and wish you weren't), separating, divorcing, mourning, estranged, fighting, or otherwise beset with relationship drama; I wish you a swift and mild Valium Time Day today. Celebrate with the prescription sedative of your choice, and always follow your doctor's instructions.

Five milligrams is peach,
Ten milligrams is blue;
Valentine's is Valium Time,
So better give me two.



-

Before I bitch about my computer problems, let me firmly recommend that no one who reads this offer technical advice. Even if you just happen to have the magical solution to all my woes, I am still likely to regard your input with, at minimum, enraged contempt. I am about to explode at someone, so you best not give me an excuse. I especially don't want advice from anyone who has not dealt with this specific trojan, as it has uniquely insidious characteristics. Besides, it is unlikely that any advice you may cheerfully offer is advice I have not already seen somewhere in some forum out there on the internets. The "answers" for dealing with this trojan are legion, as are the ways the trojan is able to circumvent efforts at removal.

Mostly, though, I am just not in the mood to deal with the I Bet I Can Help Brigade.

But thanks for your kind thoughts.

The last few days I have been battling, to no significant avail, a trojan virus thing on this computer. It's the Vundo trojan, a.k.a. Virtumonde. It degrades system performance, hijacks browsers to ads for fake spyware removers, turns your desktop wallpaper into an ad as well, and corrupts the logon process, causing freezes almost every time one starts the computer (unless one starts in Safe Mode). Among other things. Some online sources issue vague but dire warnings about permanent system damage, so there's that, too.

The real skullfuckery of the trojan is this: the files it places throughout the drive are randomly named, therefore standard spyware searches can't keep up. It can, and does, prevent one from opening or using Task Manager, Registry Edit, the program Spybot - Search & Destroy, and even System Restore. It has more tricks up its metaphorical sleeve, and other victims report even more crafty trojan entrenchment tactics.

I'd hire a repair nerd to come over and battle it for me, but he'll probably want to be paid for it, and that's going to be a problem. My oral sex skills aren't mindblowing enough for that many hours of trojan eradication. And that's assuming that the repair nerd that comes over just happens to be gay and at least somewhat into 35-year-old overweight balding queens with small dicks. If my luck were that good, there wouldn't be this fucking virus on this computer in the first place.

It's like someone smuggled a chimpanzee with Ebola -- in the final hours of the incubation period, right before viral replication turns it into a fountain of liquified organs -- into a packed sports arena and chained, bolted, and welded the fucker directly into the stadium's structural girders, leaving dismemberment the only way to remove the ape. Which would of course involve spurting blood, which is the very strategy hemorrhagic fevers use to become epidemics.

So all that can be done is to seal the chimp in plastic, evacuate the stadium, and fill the chimp-bubble with bleach, which in this analogy means putting important files elsewhere and tossing the harddrive into the garbage. Probably doused with bleach.

All the sources I've found online are either outdated (this fucker's been around for 4 years in various forms) or issue incredibly dire warnings about how difficult it is to remove. I'm not a person who knows much about how computers really work, and I'm not comfortable editing the registry or disabling this or that to run this other. One site recommended performing no fewer than 4 separate scans by 4 different anti-malware programs, in a specific order, and I was just lost. The Windows OneLive or whateverthefuck it's called, well, each time I use it, it crashes my computer about halfway through.

I've had a handful of times in which Windows Defender and Spybot both declare my computer clean while the Vundo pop-up crap is all over the place. How can I trust them again?

This computer is essentially inoperable unless I am in Safe Mode (which I showed my mother how to do as well). I've been moving crap to external hard drives (thank god I have those) and just listening to my molars crumble as the tension gives me jaw cramps and bends my spine into gothic-novel-supporting-character shapes.

Trust me when I say I am ill-tempered, weary, dismayed, furious, and exasperated.

I am against torture and the death penalty, but if the creator(s) of the Vundo trojan are ever discovered, I might reconsider. Hell, I might show up with butt plugs slathered in Liquid Plumr drain opener.

Tabasco eyedrops might be fun, too.






-

Sunrise does not herald the start of a new day.

Depending on your time zone, by the time the sun rises, 25% of the day is already over.

The first spring blooms do not indicate the start of a new year.

For those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere in areas that have seasons, each year begins in the depths of winter, less than two weeks after winter solstice. The Jewish year starts in the fall, and the East Asian lunar year starts in mid-to-late winter.

-

Now, I'm not one for finding spiritual meanings in things, but I do think it is an apt analogy to make. Beginnings don't always feel like beginnings; we don't always get that Fresh New Feeling or immediate indicators that Everything Is Different Now.

Our years always start in the bleakest part of winter, and our days always start in the darkest moments of the night. The first day of January is usually much like the last day of December. And 12:01 a.m. is just as deep and dark as 11:59 p.m. was.

-

I was fired twice in November 1999. I was visibly jittery, and calling in sick frequently. Sometimes, I didn't even feel like going to the trouble of being sociable, so I just threw on some clothes, drove out to the bar, bought my cocaine, and went home to enjoy it. I went through at least $300 the week after Christmas, and I was angry with myself for not saving the money a little longer. My plan, you see, was to fatally overdose some time before my birthday in January. I figured going out high was probably more enjoyable than any other method.

My life was very dark and very bleak.

My family staged what they considered an intervention on New Year's Day. Within a week, I had a bed at Griffin Memorial Hospital, the main state-funded psychiatric hospital in central Oklahoma. A smart and insightful intern made sure to keep me there the rest of the month. The first week or so, I spent as much time as possible just lying in bed in the most extreme depression I'd ever felt (which is saying a lot). My brain was starved for dopamine, and the rebound depression was vicious. But even if my brain chemistry had been balanced, my life was a gaping hole of awful.

The treatment plan was to send me to the state rehab center on the hospital campus. I interviewed with them the day after my birthday, which would be 19 January. She wouldn't admit me because I was too emotionally unstable (which was an understatement, I promise). I never went to rehab.

-

My life breaks in two pretty cleanly at 1 January 2000. It was clearly the beginning of a completely new chapter, if not book, and my life in the nine years since then bears very little resemblance to my life back in the 20th century.

But nothing felt new -- trust me. My life was in a freefall into an abyss in December 1999, and January 2000 was just as dark and bleak. Different circumstances, but just as dark and bleak.

-

That's the analogy. Beginnings aren't always fresh and new. The new day starts in the darkest hours, and the new year in the bleakest winter.





-

As mentioned in my FaceThePastBook and MySpace statuses, I have officially moved 'LASIK Surgery' up in my Cavalcade of Bad Choices; it is now ahead of 'Not Going to Grad School' and just after 'Working for My Dad.'

I'm currently painting Wall Filler (as opposed to 'Art') for my immediate family as CrassMess presents. As you can imagine, haloes, ghosting, and haze have been making the process just a little more difficult. Everything will now be less detailed and more broad-n-brushstrokey.




-

My mother had our cat Andrew euthanized this morning, because she had the nerve to do it today and did not want to wait until it would be more difficult. A couple of months ago, our vet had said his further deterioration from a liver/kidney thing was inevitable, and we have been letting him live for as long as he has seemed comfortable.

Beyond a respiratory infection that meant he was sneezin'-n-wheezin' (I referred to him as "Mrs. Jefferson" because he was Wheezy), he was not acting any differently this week than he had in the last five or six years. He stopped grooming about 8 years ago (giving him a distinctive greasy appearance), and has acted like a cranky old man since before then. With small children, however, he was always astonishingly patient, or at least passive, letting my nieces pet him even when they were toddlers and couldn't distinguish between "gentle petting" and "open-handed whacking".

When they come to visit, my nieces are usually most interested in seeing him, as opposed to me, and occasionally even their own grandmother.

One unusual characteristic: unless he desperately, shamelessly wanted something, he made no sound when he meowed. If he was in fact fraught with food-inspired shameless desperation, his meows became small "ack" noises.

When he was asleep, however, he often made sounds that could easily be mistaken for the sound of an adult woman mumbling in some other part of the house. It never stopped being eerie.

He was killing mice and running up and down the stairs in the final month of his life, and was certainly persistent in his efforts to score any available chicken breasts with garlic seasoning (my mother figured he deserved to be spoiled in his final weeks), so it's not like he was an invalid cat at the end. Here is a photo with Juana Tortilla that clearly shows some garlicky chicken meat used as a portrait-sitting bribe:



About two years ago, I was home by myself and therefore in charge of pet maintenance. I fed him some dry food which he apparently found lacking. I poured a bit of some sort of bottled sesame garlic Asianesque sauce, and he effin' loved it. Two days later, I let him inside through our front door. He followed me all the way into the kitchen and then dropped a dead mouse at my feet as a clear token of his appreciation. Of course, another time not long ago, I had grown weary of his pushy invasion of my personal space and picked him up and tossed him (with the gentleness that a genuine cat person uses when tossing a cat, of course) outside, which pissed him off. I knew he was pissed off because the next day I found cat barf an inch away from my closed bedroom door.

Clearly, he liked to keep the moral ledgers balanced.

Born in November of 1990, he is preceded in death by his brother Anthony, who went missing in the mid-1990s and is believed to have been killed by one of the hawks, coyotes, or bobcats that prowled the semi-wooded grassy acreage we lived on at the time. He is also preceded in death by his adoptive siblings: a succession of three shelties Shelby, Cody, and Puck; and by one cat, Fudge, as well as at least a dozen other dogs and cats in our family that died before he was born. He is survived by one cat, MuShu, and Puck's sister, Button.

Anyone know what 18 is in cat years, besides really fucking old? Especially for a cat who was "adopted" from a cardboard box saying "Free Kittens" outside a Wal-Mart.



Savory carbohydrates, especially tortilla chips and french fries, were also not safe if left unguarded in his presence, as evidenced in the above candid shot.






-

I have been painting a lot these last few days, and let me just say that I so very much regret ever deciding to get LASIK (and the subsequent 4 surgeries to try to correct the problems from the first one).

I can for the most part deal with ghosting, haze, haloes, starbursts, and occasional double vision in one eye as a part of my everyday life. But after a few hours of painting, I just want to scream.

Just sayin'.






-

Neither Andrew Rice nor Jim Roth, both shown in my previous post, were elected.

Oklahoma is, to my neverending joy, the reddest Red State in the United States. John McCain won a higher percentage of Oklahoma votes than he did in any other state, including last cycle's reddest state, Utah. Oklahoma went for McCain 66%. (Wyoming was 65%, Utah was 63%, Idaho was 62%.)

Oklahoma is the only state in which Obama did not win any county at all. In every other state, he won at least one county.

The name "Oklahoma" comes from the Choctaw "okla humma", meaning "red people", since the Oklahoma Territory was where the US shoved most of its Native Americans toward the end of the 1800s. We are still red people, but in a different way, I suppose.

-

I did enjoy Obama's win, though the celebratory mood was undercut by California's gay-marriage-ban-vote. It's not as gut-wrenching when states like Oklahoma or Georgia ban gay marriage, but when California legalized it, then took it away -- that's just vicious.

Some evangelical leader speculated that gay marriage has overtaken abortion as Conservative Christianity's most important political issue. Now, since foes of abortion consider it homicide, that puts same-gender marriage at the extreme end of an already extreme spectrum. Murdering fetuses is more tolerable than letting two guys fuck and file a joint tax return?



I am glad to see that California's young voters, straight and gay and otherwise, began spontaneously marching, and that the energy is picking up worldwide steam. I think the LGBT rights movement may have had a defining moment last week, comparable to Stonewall or to the AIDS crisis in the mid- to late-1980s. Queers -- and notably, their allies and supporters -- reached another point where they collectively said, "We are done with this bullshit and we are not having it anymore!"




--

During a presidential election, voting for the Democrat candidate is little more than a symbolic gesture for an Oklahoman. We aren't as red of a state as Utah, but polls have shown McCain leading Obama in my state by at least 15 points since Obama won the nomination over Hillary.

But my other votes are likely to count more, even though incumbent (and relentlessly Bible-quoting prick) Republican Jim Inhofe is very likely to beat Democrat challenger (and apparently decent person) Andrew Rice. Two interesting facts about Mr. Rice: His wife's name is Apple. Apple Rice. Also, his brother worked on the 104th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center, and died on 11 September 2001.

Plus, he's awfully effin' cute.



 

He's 35. Looks like a college freshman, doesn't he?

Also, it's nice to be able to vote for Jim Roth for Oklahoma Corporation Commission. He was appointed June 2007 to the office to fill a vacant seat (it's a three-person committee) and is running to keep his office. He is the first openly gay person to hold a statewide office in Oklahoma. The pathologically conservative Daily Oklahoman newspaper even endorsed him, based on the ethics, business sense, and innovation he has already shown.



Not as cute as Rice, but definitely worth voting for.

While my vote for Obama may turn out to be less useful than putting an Obama '08 sticker on my car, it still feels nice to get to vote for him at all. Plus, the voting venue for my local precinct is Saint Monica's Catholic Church, which is just north of our neighborhood. Every time I drag my pro-choice atheist gay liberal ass there to vote, I still get a tiny buzz off of the rebellion of it.

I make sure to give a mental shout-out to the Jesus-on-the-cross wall hanging as I feed my ballot into the machine.





-

Okay, boys.

Halloween is tomorrow, and for several of you, this will be the one time each year that you dress up in drag.

One of the most important aspects of any drag presentation, in my view, is the name. A great drag name can make a career, while a bad drag name can condemn a girl to a lifetime of shame, or at least several years of pitying glances. Not every little gay boy was born to wise and prescient parents who chose to put "RuPaul" on his birth certificate.

Personally, I prefer pun-based names, because those are the most fun. They can, however, be limiting, so some pun-ny drag queens opt to have more than one name, depending on the theme of the venue and of the outfit. For a Halloween-only display, they are ideal. For Halloween 1997, I wore a big kimono with all the geisha accoutrements. My name was Seksi Sosumi.

Now, if you decide to name yourself "Anita ______ (Mann, Cocktail, Xanax, etc.)", you aren't even really trying. And most of the "Miss _______" names have already been taken.


Miss Understood, from her Screaming Queens website

Over the years, I have come up with several dozen completely amazing drag names for a vast, undisclosed, perpetually-procrastinated project. I'm not sharing them with you bitches, of course, but I would like to help you little draglets with some inspiration. And so, here is a list of some of my favorite drag names that someone else invented.

Some are actual drag queens, some are fictional characters, some are international superstars, some are one-liners from stand up comic routines, and several have been plucked from far corners of the pop culture landscape. Not all are puns -- one or two are just fierce in and of themselves.

I may have spelt some names differently than the original versions.

Ida Slapter
Anna Rexia
Skye Scraper
Jillian Dollars
Sue Veneers
Sharon Needles
Eva Destruction
Claire Voyant
Shanista Quitt
Robin Cradles
Colleen Allcarrs
Noxzeema Jackson
Jenny Taylia  (or perhaps Jenni Taye-Leah)
Frida Lay
Ginger Vightess
Carlotta Tendant
Amber Alert
Winnie Baygoe
Dixie Lawngate
Patty O'Chaire
Helena Handbasket
Rachel Tensions
Felony Williams
Farrah Moans
Gertrude Garnet (pronounced gar-nay)
Charity Case
Venus de Mylar
The Chixie Dicks
Misstress Formika
Shanda Leer
Lois Carmen Denominator
Sheila Noya
Elvis Herselvis (he is actually a drag king)

I'd also like to give a special shout-out to Minnesota's own Ginger Snapp! (Who, I believe, is the daughter of O. Snapp and Shegonna Snapp.)

So, go forth and be fierce! And don't try to wear any shoes you haven't practiced walking in for at least two consecutive hours!





Okay, fine, I'll tell you some of my names I'm not going to use.

Elle Evader
Coco Chris-Peace
Constance Supervision
Portia Control
Candice B. Hapnen
Anna Steesia
Diana Van Overdose



-

I also did not get the job. I got a nice letter saying I was one of the top candidates, so there's that, I suppose.

At the family get-together after the funeral, there were huge ice chests full of Stella Artois and Dos Equis. Molto internazionale, no?




-

The stock exchange in Reyjavik is closed. The krona is no longer being traded in currency markets. The "financial system has completely collapsed."

What kind of war-torn-Third-World-drought-stricken fuckery is this?*

Even if Iceland was in many ways the author of its own bankruptcy, through its "decade-long, debt-fueled binge", this global mess just gets more and more fucked up.

Iceland, in Financial Collapse, Is Likely to Need I.M.F. Help - New York Times

 

*Also under the category of "war-torn-Third-World-drought-stricken fuckery", this past week, Atlanta and several other cities around the American Southeast (including Chattanooga and Charlotte, N.C.) was out of gasoline. Literally -- gas stations throughout the area were dry, and people were driving on fumes.

I know. I haven't kept anyone up on anything. At least everyone can rest assured that everyone in my life is being neglected equally. For now, just a bullet list of shit that's been going on.

• I got $3000 from my dad's company last month. So I got brakes and alignment for my car, paid off my state taxes from 1997 and 1998, and filled my gas tank for the first time in years.
• I had lunch with my dad and his wife. More on that later, maybe.
• I had a phone interview and was asked to submit a portfolio for a graphic design position at the corporate office of a national convenience-store chain. I am terrified of not getting the job. I am terrified of getting the job.
• My sister may be turning into a Republican, if her Facebook page is any indication.
• I got eyedrops from my eye surgeon that improve my vision my shrinking my pupils to a millimeter in diameter. They also make everything dark, like I'm wearing sunglasses indoors. Oh, and the accompanying headaches blow, too.
• Every silver lining encircles a cloud.

Okay. That's what's what.





-

There have been significant, blogworthy events in my life recently, but typing all that shit out is way too tedious. Instead, I'll whine about the disappointment that stems from my new fave pastime - making Lolcats.

I am starting to question the screening and selection process at I Can Has Cheezburger? and its sister sites, such as Pundit Kitchen.

I've submitted around 40 Lol-pictures, some of which I think are pretty fucking hysterical. 6 of my submissions have been favorited by 15 users, and yet not one has made it onto the main site.

I mean, some of these are funny, right?





I thought so.

(grumbles)

( More lolpolitics and lolcats... )
You can see all my submissions, even those that kind of suck, at my profile page on I Can Has Cheezburger? 'Cause it's not like they're gonna graduate to the main page.


-

This woman has rendered me so very fatigued.



Can we be done with her already?