Made the seating arrangement, revised the seating arrangement, made the seating arrangement, revised the seating arrangement, made the seating arrangement, revised the seating arrangement, made the seating arrangement, revised the seating arrangement… I could go on forever.

Buuuuut I won’t. Instead:

Made the list WAAAAAAAAY back when, JUST found out that I somehow overlooked my 12 year-old cousin, Goomba. HOW!!!!???? And I overlooked TWO people from work who were among the first to respond “yes,” AND my Psychomom called to remind me that my aunt, uncle, and cousin from Arizona ARE still coming… to our knowledge. We haven’t heard from them since the WTC disaster.

And Skye got laid off.

Now, nobody panic. We’re FINE (twitch), juuuuuuuust fiiiiiiiiiiine (twitchtwitch).

Actually, I couldn’t be happier for him. You all know that his career here has been challenging and fulfilling in the last year or so (smell that? That’s sarcasm). I knew he wanted something else, that he’s too smart for the monkey work they’ve got him doing, and I know that he has just been sucking it up and staying miserable until after the wedding. The truth is, when you’re in a situation that’s crappy, you tend to FEEL crappy. And the crappier you feel, the lower you view yourself. However, if you let yourself stay like that too long, it becomes difficult to make the decision to leave. It’s like Briar Rabbit and the Tar baby; you get mired in the situation. Sometimes the Devil you know is preferable to the Devil you don’t know.

I remember several months ago a friend of ours lost their job. Skye said something to me that stuck in my head. He said, “I’m actually kind of jealous.”

So he got laid off. You can actually read that as the VP took him into the office and acknowledged that Skye is an intelligent, dedicated, hard-working guy, and WHY was he wasting his time here? The Big Cheese knew that Skye was miserable, AND he always knew that all of Skye’s time was spent on the IM or in a WWF site. VP didn’t even CARE! Skye’s work was always done right, on time, and well. He gave a crap less about what he did on the side. However, the project that Sky was doing was coming to an end, and this company has only three positions: Management, Sales, or Customer Service. To get to management you have to go through several months to several years of B-to-B sales, which he HATES. This answers the question of the sales position, too. And Customer service is a $7 an hour job. Not enough mental stimulation.

All in all, I am so happy for him. It may have taken the VP (basically a good guy) letting him go to do it, but here he is. We don’t have kids, we’re young, and this is the time to strike. Does it suck that this comes 30 DAYS before our wedding? Yes and no. VP has offered to pay him for the next four weeks anyway, sort of like a severance deal. We’ll be married soon, so he’ll be on my insurance, and VP has offered to GIVE us a computer. Nice.

Good and bad timing are illusions. There is no “bad” timing, there is only life. Life is gonna happen to us all, and whether it happens like a warm summer breeze, like a hang nail on my big toe in shoes a size too small, or like an acme anvil Wile E. Coyote-style, is TOTALLY up to us. Life gets to choose the event; we get to choose how we react. Sometimes we have the strength to shrug, nod, smile and deal with it. Other times we freak out and need help. It’s all good, as long as we remember that however we feel, WE are choosing to feel that way.

I feel that this is the best thing that’s happened to Skye in a long time. I’ll let him tell you what his master plan is. It’s his plan.

As I close for the week I just want to say this to all of the clotters: I would love to see each and every one of you at my wedding. Unfortunately, it is just not possible financially. We love you guys, we really do, and I wanted you all to know that.

O.k. Stick a fork in me, I’m done.

O.k., so I’m in the game. I wonder who keeps track of who’s in the lead. Ick.
Is it unfair advantage that I’ve been playing this game since the tender age of three? It was then that I discovered that some of the best equipment is right at your fingertips. Wink wink, nudge nudge. Since then, my financial situation and taste sophistication have led me to some… interesting gaming sessions.

Fields of Victory thus far:
My Car (while driving on I-95)
My Office (with the open window)
My Home (so many rooms, so little time…)
A Nightclub
The Library
My college English class (DURING class)

I learned a lot that day.

I want to thank everyone for your support in my time of bead. GET IT!?!?!? HA!! BEAD! Oh, I crack me up!

Whew. That almost hurt. Being funny, I mean. (Shut up, Ghost)

I saw the Presidential speech last night, and I have to say I was impressed in spite of myself. I really thought he hit the nail on the head. He’s got some brilliant speechwriters. And even if the words were written for him, the right feeling was behind all the right parts. That, at least, came across to me as though HE really got what he was saying. I haven’t always been so confident in him. No, really.

What stuck out for me most were the things he was not afraid to say. Things like alluding to the fact that there will be some aspects of this war that we will never hear about because they’re top-secret. That’s a ballsy thing to say to the public. It’s asking us to put a lot of faith in him. Risky.

I’m embarrassed to say that before last night I’d NEVER listened to a presidential speech… or ANY political speech for that matter. I probably wouldn’t have listened to last night’s either, had I not been so affected by the recent events in NYC. At least now I feel like something may get done about it.

And what was up with Mrs. Bemis? Was she eerily calm, or what? Ladies and/or gentleman who are in a loving relationship, I’d like to ask you if you feel that you’d be able to talk about the horrific death of your significant lover, their heroic de
eds aside, ONE WEEK after said demise. Hmmm. Methinks yon Bemis may already have found a new lover in a bottle of Zoloft, no? I would.

So, yesterday I went to Macy’s Bridal with my two sisters to pick up their bride’s maids dresses. Both of them are Maid of Honor, because I could never pick one over the other, so I had the task of making it obvious that they were BOTH… the maid of honor.

SO.

I picked a dress that comes with six different tops, and six different skirts all in the same fabric and color, allowing all seven girls to pick whichever they were comfortable in. I did this mainly because I’m not really a girl, and I hate picking things like this, so I ASS-U-ME-D this would make life easier.

No.

See, the SISTER’S tops were supposed to have what they call “caviar beading” on the front. I’m sure neither of them really wanted fish eggs on their garments, but from the picture it looked really sparkly, and sparkly things mesmerize me, so they will suffer and like it. I rule. PLUS, it would set them apart from everyone else, yet keep them looking like each other. Perfect.

Yeah, there were no beads. Did anyone else see this coming? Yeah, see, what had happened was, the purple fabric? Yeah, that doesn’t come with beads. I’m sorry, what? No beads? Really…. Hmmm…. And you were going to tell me WHEN!??

I left the salon to call my mom so that I could freak out in private, and as the phone was dialing I happened to glance out the window. About 50 yards outside the window was a flag poll with a flag at half-mast.

Yeah. They’re just beads.

I’m having a lot of trouble getting past all that’s happened here. Skye wants to just “move on” with life, and he’s doing a really good job of it. I just don’t think I’m doing as well. I feel like I‘m in mourning, but I don’t even know any of the missing or dead. So I feel guilty for my mourning, as though I don’t have the right. Oddly, I feel very alone about it. It seems that everyone I know, everyone I work with, had just gone about their daily lives unaffected. I’ll say this, it takes a LOT of the wind out of my wedding planning enjoyment. Talk about GUILT? I feel bad about planning my wedding. There’s an apathy behind the planning process now that makes me sad… and then I feel guilty about being sad about being apathetic.
Ow.
I’ve read that Goats cartoon that is linked to Skye, and really started to like it. The cartoonist has a panel of posts of his own, sort of like his own blog. I found this link on one of them. With all the talk of retaliation, this guy is the first one I agree with. Bombing would be a stupid and brutish way of dealing with things, akin to burning down a house to rid it of ants. Anyway, read on:
By Tamim Ansary Sept. 14, 2001 | I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on San Francisco's KGO Talk Radio, conceded today that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."
And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived in the United States for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.
But the Taliban and bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats' nest of international thugs holed up in their country.
Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan -- a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and healthcare? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans; they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban -- by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time.
So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that, folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.
And guess what: That's bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the West. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose; that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong -- in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean -- but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours.
Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

Yesterday morning I got up, got dressed, and left my apartment to go to work.

I did not lean down and kiss my sleeping husband good-bye. Today marks 3 years of bliss for us.

My heart breaks for the thousands who did the same, and will never be able to make up for it.

O.k., I got my first official “You Are Now Old” notice. It came complete with instructions on kvetching etiquette, how to properly piss and moan about aches and pains, and more modern ways of telling people how much more disrespectful these kids are today.

It was an invitation to my High School reunion.

Gahh.

Oh, make no mistake, I’m going. Hell yes, I wanna pay $90 a pop to see people I didn’t really like when it was FREE. And do you know WHY??? Because I can still fit into my High School Prom Dress!! HA! In your faces!! In fact, if I thought it was even remotely socially or tastefully acceptable to wear electric blue lamé EVER, I’d wear that self same prom dress right to the reunion.

How can TEN years have gotten away from me so easily??? It’s very strange. I remember being eighteen (Purple RAIN, puuurple Ra-hain) and looking ahead to the reunion. It just seemed so impossibly far away. When I look BACK, however… whoo! Time just Flew! It was, like, two days ago when I graduated High School. I mean, wow. Or Ow. Whatever.

Sigh.

Well, at least I know that it’s still, like, EONS away until my 20 year reunion.

At one point this weekend, I found myself being berated by an eight-year-old about the fact that I would be working on Labor Day. Not half an hour later this same eight-year-old told me that he wanted to be the first person to have a HUMAN HEAD mounted on his wall. He was planning on knocking out the teeth, cutting out the eyes, and removing the tongue. When asked whose head it would be he replied:

“A cop.”

Ah, youth.

Sigh. I’m actually TIRED of running the streets, warning people out of the water. NOBODY LISTENED TO ME!! If you had all just listened to me, NONE of this would ever have happened!!! Oh, Woody. WHY didn’t you go straight to the police??? Sigh. Here: http://wire.ap.org/?SLUG=SHARK%2dATTACK

I will repeat this one more time. The sharks are coming. The Sharks are coming. Everybody run for your lives. (NOTE the distinct LACK of the word SWIM). And just because I love you all (and the news of these attacks freaks me out beyond all repair) here: http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/Sharks/ISAF/ISAF.htm