do not vote on november 2, 2004!

Not Voting and Proud

I'm voting, but I wanted to post this just to be contrary.

ahnold

This evening I received a call from Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yep. I picked up the phone, and after a second his voice on the other side said, "hello, this is governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, urging you to vote no on proposition 72--" And I hung up after that, because it was freaky. I've received recorded calls before, but this was freakier than most.

indigo

Indigo will be released nationally on January 25, 2005!! Woohoo! I can't wait.

cruisin' the pacific

In case you were wondering where I disappeared off to last week, I went on a 7-day cruise with my mom, my grandma, and my mom's friends from choir. We sailed on a relatively new ship (inaugurated this past spring) with Princess Cruises, and mostly I enjoyed eating and veging out with a book (I gained an extra 5 pounds to show for it). We stopped at three ports in Mexico: Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, and Cabo San Lucas. To be honest, these places are tourist traps for the most part. The shopping is kind of crap, unless you wanted to buy jewelry, so I didn't get much in the way of souvenirs. Cabo San Lucas had pretty good water activities, and we went snorkeling there. Four of the seven days were spent on the ship itself, and I did a lot of reading (finished three books), a lot of eating, watched 4 movies (The Terminal, Stepford Wives, Something's Gotta Give, and Spiderman 2 -- only Spiderman 2 was really any good) and various shows. The food was really good, and that's good and bad at the same time. I knew I had to exercise self-control in that regard, but it's hard when you get to order four or five courses every night and everything on the menu looks good. I really appreciate being hungry these days.

celebrating men, satisfying women

So I went to a workshop last weekend called Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women. When my aunt first told me about it, I was pretty skeptical as to what it could teach me. Until I went to the preview seminar and was completely blown away, that is. It was a series of workshops put on by a company called PAX (which stands for Peace, Adoration, and X-tasy), which was started by a woman named Alison Armstrong, who started studying men by observing and listening to them.

Having taken the first in a series of four workshops, my opinion of their work is basically that the information they give you, when practiced, can lead to relationships (with all men) and marriages most women only dream of having. If I said to you, for $1200 (for all four workshops in the series) you can have a marriage that thrives for as long as you both live, peace with unmanageable sons, or partnership instead of competition with co-workers, would you even hesitate paying that? I believe in their work that much. Actually, I don't have to believe it. I see it in the way the workshop leaders treat people and in the stories they tell about their own husbands and others'.

It's really sad how much men-bashing women do in our culture. So much so that they expect the worst when they hear that we women are talking about them. When I was telling some guys at Primerica about this, one guy joked about how they're teaching women to take over the world (I talked about empowering men so that we empower ourselves)and another said, "oh, is it like that Mars vs. Venus thing?". When I was telling a female co-worker at my other job about the workshop, a guy overheard me and said, "men are all jerks, is that it?" I just think it's really sad. Poor guys.

ten reasons to fire george w. bush...

...and nine reasons why Kerry won't be much better.

http://www.reason.com/links/links071304.shtml

I came across this article in this month's Reason Magazine, although this online version has hyperlinks the print version doesn't (obviously). Sometimes I get annoyed with over-hyperlinking because you get distracted with other articles and lose track of what you're reading about in the first place. But they are informative in any case.

I laughed at the description of Kerry as a "sanctimonious statist blowhard."

I've turned into a real swing voter in recent times. Just yesterday I was reading an article in BusinessWeek about Bush's "Ownership Society", which, while not perfect, almost makes me want to vote for him. Almost. And then I read Reason and I learned deeply what it's like to have to choose the lesser of two evils.

quote of the week

To sail is necessary, to live is not.

Gnaeus Pompeius

I have this quote in the signature of my Gmail account. I don't really remember where I got it from, but it really describes how I (and some people I know) feel about sailing. There's just something about it that makes you feel free and fully alive. It is also very meditative, as I realized after going to the CWG retreat, because in my experience when you sail you have to be fully in the present. You are always aware of the wind, the water, adjusting the sails, navigating, etc., and there is no room to be over-thinking about the "stuff" you carry with you in life. Sailing is wonderful. Just wish I had more time to be taking classes.

soulebrate greeting cards

A friend I met at the retreat last weekend me this woman named Tara-Janelle Walsch, who creates these beautiful and meaningful greeting cards at www.soulebrate.com. The messages on them are ones that are deeply touching and you don't see them everyday. She also happens to be a daughter of Neale Donald Walsch, although she doesn't publicize that fact.

i would just like to say...

I love not having to do homework anymore!!!

Love it.

angels & demons

I recently finished reading Angels & Demons by Dan Brown, which is the prequel to The Da Vinci Code. It was a very good suspense thriller, and I think the plot was more interesting and varied than that of Da Vinci Code. It also deals with a mysterious real-life legend type thing, which in this book involves the Illuminati. Like Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons revealed interesting tidbits about significant artwork that were related to the Illuminati, but I didn't find these tidbits nearly as fascinating as the ones relating to Mary Magdalene. It was a great book nonetheless.