Conservatives Beware

Sarah Palin admits to crossing Canadian border for health care

That was basically the best thing I heard all day. Thanks to the array of liberal blogs that I read daily, I am a very happy camper today.

I keep getting in fights (over facebook, no less) with one of my cousins. He is ten or so years older than I am, he dropped out of college and joined the Navy for seven years when he was my current age. He couldn't hack it at college, and he knew he couldn't hack it as a pilot like his father was in the Air Force and he didn't want to go to the front lines with the Army or the Marines, so he joined the Navy. Now, don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with that. The bottom line is, he didn't join the Navy because he is patriotic or felt a sense of duty to his country. He joined up because he didn't want to get shot at, to learn new skills or have to really do anything. He joined the Navy and worked in the boiler rooms as someone who keeps the ship running because he just could not hack it in the real world, either finishing college or getting a job.

He dropped out of college because they asked him to leave because he is/was an alcoholic and never went to class or did his work.

And he's a conservative bigot who thinks that, because he is a white heterosexual male (with a wife and three little boys, who will all be brainwashed by their good for nothing father) he is entitled to put others down and his opinion is always right.

We fight about everything, because he is "extremely right" and I am "extremely left." He thinks socialism is the worst idea he's (n)ever heard, and I think, after extensive reading and studying the matter, that socialism is one of the best economic systems imaginable.

He doesn't want to do his research, he doesn't want to hear what the other side has to say. All he wants is to spout off his opinions and for everyone to hear him and tell him how right he is.

Well I'm simply not going to do that. I'm not going to go belly up to him because he is a white heterosexual American male with too much free time and not enough common sense. And that pisses him off to no end.

If, at the end of the day, I can sufficiently piss off a conservative, I have done my job, and it will have been a good day.

The only word of advice I have for conservatives: do your research. If you're going to say this that and the other thing about socialism, make sure you've actually read the Communist Manifesto. If you say that socialism and communism are the same thing, you sound like a dumbass so go back to middle school. I read the Communist Manifesto for the first time in the 7th grade. Now, I know that many conservatives didn't make it that far in their education, since they were too busy worshipping idols and preparing for the rapture, but there is no excuse for talking about things that you haven't researched.

If you come to me spouting off your ideas and telling me that I'm wrong (unless, of course, I am wrong. There is nothing wrong with being wrong, there is something wrong with being wrong AND STILL trying to impress yours wrongness on others), I will ram you into the ground with knowledge and vitriol so hard that you'll have to go crying back to your mommy.

Nothing would satisfy me more than to know that I've made my 30 year old cousin go crying to my aunt because I schooled him over facebook.

Flagpoles Are Serious Business

I can't recall if I've blogged about the infamous flagpole incident, so I'm gonna do that right about now.

We've all seen A Christmas Story when the whimpy little boy gets dared to stick his tongue to a flagpole and the fire department has to come and Ralphie feels terrible about it for all of two minutes. For whatever reason, a lot of people still don't believe that sticking one's tongue to a very cold flagpole will result in one's tongue becoming frozen to said flagpole.

Alas, if only I were not such a skeptic and a researcher by nature, I might have been spared the agony and the shame of being that girl. You know, that girl, the one that no one wants to be.

So it was a dark and VERY cold January evening in Connecticut and we were driving around, looking for trouble. This all took place last year over winter break.

All of a sudden I got it in my head that it would be a fabulous idea to put the old flagpole myth to the test. Brilliant.

So we drove to our old elementary school, hopped out of our cars, and prepared ourselves for laughs. Not believing that it would work, I stuck my tongue to the icy flagpole with no fear. When I tried to pull away, I felt the tug of the icy metal at my tongue and my lower lip which had also become frozen to the pole. Tears began to stream down my face and I begged my friends to do something. They ran for water, which would do nothing in the below freezing temperatures. We were not close enough to run home for help, and I was in too much panic to be left alone. Finally, I braced myself, put all my muscle against the pole and ripped my tongue off the flagpole. My friends looked away with terror and I wrapped my arms around my head in excruciating pain and walked blindly back to my car.

I rested my head on my car as my heart started to calm down and stop racing wildly and my vision began to go back to normal. I didn't care about anything in the world except that my tongue was no longer an extension of the flagpole (I'm a psychology major, not a chemistry major, I had no idea that when you stick your tongue to a frozen flagpole that there is a chemical reaction). My best friend Kate came up to me and asked me if I was alright. I looked over at her and opened my mouth to speak, but when I did that no words came, only blood splattered out of my mouth. I spat into the snow and tried not to look because I can't handle the sight of blood at all. I decided we needed to get out of there, and we needed to figure out how to take care of it without involving my mother. We drove home in silence. I was driving, with the window rolled all the way down and my head sticking as far out of the window as possible so that the blood dripping from my mouth wouldn't get on my car or my clothes.

So we got back to my house and we rushed past my mother and into the basement. I think Kate went and got hot water or something while I sat and tried to keep talking to my friends. I kept saying things like "It'll be fine I think" "It's totally fine" but eventually I couldn't speak anymore because my tongue had swollen to at least 2 times its normal size. I couldn't even breathe out of my mouth.

I told my sister, who told me I was stupid, who then told my mother that I was stupid (I had told her by then, and begun rinsing my mouth with salt water), but my mother in her infinite kindness does not believe I am stupid, just that I am strange and too curious for my own good.

I couldn't eat solid food or speak (and be understood) for two weeks. I still have two scars on my tongue, and I have no feeling on the tip of my tongue, and that will likely be the way it will be for the rest of my life (since it has been almost exactly a year now since that fateful evening).

So the moral of the story is: Tongues really can get stuck fast to flagpoles, and it sucks, so don't do it!

P.S. Molly I hope you think this is accurate. I'm glad you and Natasha and Kate were there, even if none of you tried to stop me :-P