This comes very close to describing how I often feel:

And it explains how I feel as a bi-female...I am feeling a little embattled as my well-meaning straight friends are kind of like, "it sucks...but less for you, because you can 'pass' and live in a Northern state." And it's like, yes, I can pass...but that's an ugly thing you're saying if you think about it in your pleas for compromise and slow movement.
-JennyO

Close, but not quite - because I have to admit to a lot of anger. Not just anger at straight, conservative america, that wants to make anyone or anything they can't understand just go away, but anger at gay america, that looks down their noses at me, because I can "pass". Because the person I happen to be in love with is a man, I don't count. I'm in a transitional phase. Or I'm just being trendy.

So, I'm disdained as a queer, or disdained as not being queer enough. This is the legacy of the gay rights movement - a land where I'm more comfortable coming out to anyone straight that I am outing myself to a gay man or woman.... because I won't be taken seriously.

Congratulations, folks.

I should be able to come up with something grand, angry, and/or witty. But all I can say.... is crap. Forget about the goddamed presidency - a majority of the american people believe that I and others like me are not deserving of the same basic rights they enjoy.

Fuck them all.

And yeah - I did vote. Not that NJ was much of a stretch

Dear customer -
We do not accept email attachments. Any email attachments. The fact that you already uploaded a file or two through our handy dandy upload center would bear out that you already understand this. So why are you attaching revised graphics to your damm email correspondence? This is not a pointless hoop we're making you jump though - this is a computer security policy enacted company wide that I do not have the authority or desire to fight. Why? Because email WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE A MEANS OF FILE TRANSFER. That's why we have FTP. That's why we've made such a nice web interface for our FTP server just for you.

GAH!

I don't care that the two minutes of thought required to fill out a web form is icky and a pain in the ass and just too damm inconvient for you to be arsed with. I don't care that you never glanced at the file requirements that we spent a LOT of time writing up. If you can't be arsed to work with us just a teensy bit, I can't be arsed to care when your order is late.

After scanning and importing all of the ireland pics, and getting three quarters of the way through prepping them, the bloody computer decides that it no longer wants to recognize the primary hard drive and won't boot.

Insert profanity here.

Insert worshipful praise for the guys at CompUSA here, as they got it back up and running in only a few hours, and it's now back home and happy.

The 1.5 gigs worth of pictures have been moved over to the secondary (and larger) HD, just in case. 'Cause I'm paranoid.

My department needs a FAQ for all the graphics questions the customers don't actually *ask*, but assume they should be helped with anyway. A FAQ for everyone who wouldn't read it, seeing as they don't read the painfully obvious file guidelines and upload instructions that we have up there already

It should be noted that this FAQ doesn't actually exist. We're not going to add yet another block of verbiage on the company site that the customers will invariably ignore. This is just me grouching off.

I uploaded a ZIP/SIT file. Why can't you use it?
Nice answer: The file within the archive still must be of a type that we accept. For example, a zipped Microsoft Word file will upload succussfully, but we will be unable to do anything with it upon arrival.

My answer: Sorry, you are not so special that the rules we have in place for everyone else will be waived just for you. As soon as I see the extension .doc or .rtf or .wpd or ANYTHING ELSE that resembles a word processing file, I toss the whole thing into the bit bucket. You can either email it to me as good old fashioned plain text, or print and fax it over. In spite of what the spiked kool aid is telling you, MS Word does not produce graphics files.

Can you take my logo from my website?
Nice answer: Web graphics are good for on screen display, and often print tolerably from home printers, but will not print acceptably from a professional press. Unless you also have a high resolution version of your logo/graphic on your website for download, you will need to upload a print quality graphic to us.

My answer: What am I - your trained monkey? I'm not hunting through your site hoping to find the correct unusable image. The web is not print, and print is not the web. Not that you'll have any idea what I'm talking about here. No - your cheap ass web graphic looks bad *now* and will only look worse if we sent it to press. That is, if it ever got on press, since I'm certain that the pressmen would look at it and fall down laughing.

I sent a TIF/EPS/etc... file - why you can't you use it?
Nice answer: Regardless of file type, the graphic still has to be of the correct resolution and quality. We cannot take low resolution images or poor quality scans "as is" although we may be able to clean them up to an acceptable standard for an additional charge.

My answer: You moron. Saving that logo from your website in a spiffy new format does not change the fact that is is still a web graphic. Please reboot your brain.

I'm using MS Publisher/Photo Impact/MS Word/PowerPoint/etc... Can you help me export the correct file?
Nice answer: We do not offer tech support for software. The only software that we can "walk you through" for basic problems are the following titles:
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Illustrator
WinZip
Stuffit

My answer: Do I *look* like tech support?

I've often had cause to be embarrassed about my country. America, the home of trailer park chic. Where we revere the myth of the founding fathers and preach the idea of the self made man, while teaching in every schoolyard and every boardroom the power of mob rule. Where we are loud, ignorant, arrogant, prideful, and xenophobic.

But until Abu Ghraib, I was never ashamed to be an american.

I have no words, no bile strong enough to condemn the soldiers who committed these acts. I have no punishment fitting for the commanders who ordered it, or their commanders who turned a blind eye, or *their* commanders who squinted long and hard at the Geneva conventions and decided that there was plenty of wiggle room here, and even if there wasn't any room over there, well, it just meant that that part couldn't possibly apply to *us*, now could it? We're americans, we make the rules. Doesn't mean we have to follow them.

I have no fitting words for anyone who would try to justify these actions. You never want to believe that someone who looks and sounds just like you could do something like this. Like a small child, you refuse to look at it, wiping it out from your own personal reality. And when there are no places left to look that are not crammed full with the images of ugly truth, well then - someone must've made 'em do it! They *deserved* it, didn't they? 'Cause of those airplanes and those suicide bombers? 'cause they're out to get us, an' we gotta get them first!

It's ugly, isn't it? And now, it's never going to end. They did to us, we did to them, and now they have to go and do to us again. And again. And again.

The last comfort some had was in the idea that even though the country was going to hell in a hand basket, even though our government was clinically insane, we could look at the next person, even some stranger who just happened to be passing by; and know there was an even chance that they were, at heart, a decent person.

No one wants to believe in that ugliness, believing opens the door for the awful question "If that person, who looks and talks just like me, could be party to these awful things, what does that say about me? Do I have that same ugliness buried inside me?"

Yes. You do. You feed it with every denial, every protest, every attempt to turn the blame or hide behind rules of procedure.

I didn't think Evanescence could annoy me, but if I have to listen to "My Immortal" one more time on the radio, I'm gonna scream.

My disgust knows no bounds, but neither does my lack of surprise, nor my cynicism regarding the shrub's moral indignation. Because, of *course* our ill trained, damm near drafted, wanting to come home service people are just so perfect that they would never abuse, torture, or humiliate prisoners of war protected by the Geneva conventions. That only happens in other places, where the pure, upstanding american military hasn't come to save the day.

My ass.

• WBH Swim updates
• Plonked down approx. $1,600 for plane tickets to Ireland. (Finally taking the out of country trip. Wheee!)
• Kept all my day job clients (mostly) happy.
• Began re-designing the US Box envelopes. (I've already revamped their order forms and invoices)
• Visited the bookstore. (On orders from Bill. Apparently, I've begun stressing so much that I'm becoming hard to live with.)
• Called my Dad.
• Planned what I'll be taking on the plane trip.

What I need to do tonight:

• Finish coding the 1,000+ items for S4
• Finish redesign work for BubbleBliss (not yet live)
• Finish site updates for DragonFolk

No, I'm not going to finish all this tonight. Hence the stress.

What I need to do later this week

• Submit my passport paperwork
• Finish my taxes
• Figure out a way to stop stressing.

I was ahead of the curve this morning. I got to bed by 1:00 AM (Don't laugh - I could have kept going until 5:00 and still not have finished everything.) I was washed, alert, and ready go. I was even up for exchanging full sentences with Bill before I left. (I'm a not-a-morning-person of the grunting variety).

It was a bloody beautiful early spring morning. I was caffinated, wearing a top that was *not* a sweater, and ready to hit the day running. I didn't even have to go out early to warm up the car.

I get to the car, pop my key in the lock.... and come back with half a key.

Half. A. Key.

Y'know that sound Doc Brown made in Back to the Future when he saw the power cord was unplugged and hung up on a tree branch? Something sorta like that came out of my mouth. Then the hyperventilating started. I had visions of getting all the locks and the ignition replaced, at great cost. I had visions of trotting down to the used car lot, cashier's check in hand. I walked back into the apartment holding the two key bits.

Thank god for Bill. He calmed me down, called a locksmith, and cheered me up while he got ready for work. He left for work, I had a coffee and chilled out waiting for the locksmith.

The locksmith showed up, (in jig time) and worked sundry miracles on the key bits and locks, and now I have a brand new functional key, four spares, and everything is working *better* than it did before. And i'm out less than $100. Considering that he had to disassemble one of the doors and pull the lock to make a new key, I was expecting the bill to be higher.

So if you're in lower Bergen County and need a locksmith? Danny's Lock Service. That's the moral of the story. Oh, and always have a spare key.