Logtar has a great post about wealth:

The word rich is so inaccurate at times. I have met people that have a lot of money in my short life, but in reality it does not mean as much as most people think. Much like race, there is a lot of preconceived notions about how people are in higher economic levels, but those notions are less accurate than even race stereotypes. My Great Grand Father was the owner of two hotels, several properties and was able to give each one of his kids a house when they got married. My Great uncles drank and partied two hotels down the drain and in the end were left with nothing. If you saw either one of them on the street you would have never even imagined that they came from such wealth, because in the end money did not do much for their lives.

Rich can mean a number of things. Most studies have demonstrated that wealth is in many ways a relative concept. We judge ourselves not by what we have, but by what we have in comparison to what our neighbors have and what our parents had. Though almost every realtor will tell you that it’s better to get the smallest house in the richest neighborhood that you can rather than the biggest house in the smallest, most evidence suggests the opposite. Living among rich people will make you see all the things that you don’t have. Living among poorer people will help you appreciate what you do have.

When I was in high school, I was from a “poor” family in a number of respects. First, though my father was pulling down substantial income, he was pulling down less than a lot of people that went to the high school. Further, we were in some ways poorer than families that made less money.

Being rich, to me, is not about what you make as much as what you spend. My family lived well below its means until recently when they finally discovered that they had quite a bit of money and not but a few decades left to spend it. Now, according to this theory, a $30,000 credit line makes one just as rich as $30,000 in the bank, provided that the latter lives within his means. In some ways that’s how I think. It’s definitely what I think when I harbor a distaste for what I consider “rich people.”

In a wealthy society, wealth is a zero-sum game once you get out of the lowest income bracket. Look around at the wealthiest among us and look at what they spend their money on. You don’t even need to go to the upper classes to see it. I’ve commented before that an economy in which people willingly pay $5 for a cup of coffee, $4 for a pack of cigarettes, and $20 for an SUV that will never drive on dirt is not an economy that is struggling in any meaningful sense. Except when compared to the wealthy, who often flaunt their wealth and then get defensive when it starts to make people angry.

How much money is spent by the middle class to get away from poor people? How much money is spent by the wealthy to differentiate themselves from the middle class? These are the things that, for whatever reason, really bother me. Mostly because, as a society, it seems to do so little good. Individual familes improve their prospects by moving to the tony suburbs and their flush school systems, but most of the improvement is comparative. Zero-sum. Nothing is really improved.

The same applies in a deeper sense in the world of fashion. Much of what we spend when we buy better clothes really does affect the quality of the clothing. Wrangler Jeans cost twice as much as Faded Glory, but they look good for three times as long. But once you go above Wrangler, you’re spending money just so that you’re not wearing Wranglers like everyone else. Nobody’s life is improved. Your prospects got better by making someone else’s worse (cause they’re stuck in Wranglers). People buy huge houses on huge lots with huge yards that they don’t their kids play in.

There’s a suburb of Santomas that is apparently banning basketball hoops that are visible from the street because the hoops betray property values. As do environmentally-friendly clotheslines. In some ways people aren’t buying their houses as much as they are merely renting against the property values thereof. Things that would actually improve our lives are passed over for the sake of maintaining the wealth that is supposed to improve our lives.

Wealth becomes its own happiness… at the expense of the real thing.

Becky has a couple of posts up about the feeling she gets when men oogle her. First:

On the friend flipside, even though it doesn’t bother me nearly as much, I would still honestly prefer to receive a compliment for my eyes, smile or wit. Perhaps these are my insecurities coming into play, but it’s almost as if they’re saying “while I like your breasts, the rest of you isn’t good enough” because these aren’t people that want to date me. The irony is that these are mostly just balls of fat, so it’s interesting that oftentimes men want large breasts with a tiny body (surgical help not included, of course).

It’s a long story worth sharing in its entirety at some point, but once upon a time I was involved with a girl named Brady that was physically stunning. She was everything I was attracted to at the time down to a T (though my tastes changed after… and maybe because… of her). Anyway, she would fly off the handle just about any time I complimented her appearence. I mean, she would just lose it. One day we finally got to talking about it, and she explained that she hated it because she put very little effort in to her appearance and she hated that the one thing that guys appreciated most about her was the one thing that she had absolutely nothing to do with.

Looking back, it is perhaps the only thing the girl ever said that actually made logical sense. And that’s gotta be at least part of what is offputting about compliments about breasts. It also makes sense that Becky would prefer compliments about smile and wit, which are strengths that are cultivated. Even the eyes get a pass because they are often marked as the windows to the soul.

As far as I go, I have unusually dark blue eyes that various women have complimented in the past. It didn’t mean much to me when they did compliment them for the same reason that breast compliments meant little to the Brady because she didn’t really cultivate her appearance so much as simply inherited it. But I will always appreciate those that did compliment my eyes because it was one of the two physical strengths that I realized I had when it came to women (the other being my height, which is major points with tall ladies such as my wife). I made a point to look women in the eyes and I think that even if they didn’t care about my eyes’ color, it gave me an appearance of confidence.

There are other physical compliments that I guess could be considered valuable. For instance I have an expressive face, which would be on par with Becky’s smile as far as compliment acceptability rationale is concerned. Beyond that, there isn’t that much to compliment (note: I am just considering above the waste assessments here!), so I suppose that I take whatever I can get, but if it’s not something that I created or cultivated, my reaction will have more to do with who is complimenting rather than what the compliment is.

I try to steer clear of political issues on this site. I don’t consider this a political issue, so I would appreciate some restraint when it comes to approaching this from a “liberal” or “conservative” standpoint. It’s general thoughts on our country, race relations, and more generally the ability to change the way that things have been for generations.

Over the weekend leading up to July 4th, I took a brief trip back home to burn off some vacation time.

As odd as it sounds, one of the strangest things about my return from the south is black people. Deseret is not bereft of minorities generally or blacks in particular, but most minorities are either Hispanic or tribal and that is not as much the case down here.

Blacks are America’s most peculiar minority, which I guess makes sense because it is a legacy of the famous “peculiar institution” that brought them here. An overwhelming majority of blacks have been in the US for generations and those that are immigrants are vastly different from those that have been around. Unlike most immigrant groups in our history ranging from the Italians and Irish of yesteryear to the Mexicans and Asians of more recent, their upward mobility is, for a handful of reasons from all fronts, limited.

I liken it to two people that have known too much animosity for too long for things to ever truly be comfortable. There is a lot of talk from both outside and inside the black community that their current position is a result of their poor personal decisions and there is much truth to that. There is also a lot of talk from both inside and outside the black community about the persistent raw deal that they’ve gotten for at least 3/4 of their time here and it’s difficult to “start again” at a place that you’ve been.

I’ve read somewhere that one of the reasons that America is so optomistic is because it is young. Our history is bloody and brutish, but not on the broad scope of that of our more dour European contemporaries because we have not been around as long. Our concept of citizenship is not determined by bloodlines or geographic boundaries. Your citizenship is almost* the same whether you are born here or if you come somewhere else. As such, we have taken and assimilated different cultures better than most. Our immigrant pockets start disappearing after a couple of generations, while it looks like some of Europe’s may never do so.

Except, of course, the blacks and the tribes. Both are caught in a destructive cycle that people in all circles see but no one knows what can be done on a cultural level. I’m not sure there are any policy perscriptions that can do this for us. Nor am I sure that leaving it all up to individual choice — when social pressures so consistently run in the wrong direction — is a viable option, either.

Sometimes a relationship has worn on for so long that the more people try to “fix” it, the more tangled everything becomes. The welfare programs that were intended to help them all in the Great Society arguably did more harm than good. Whites telling blacks what the problems with black people are (their work ethic, their music, their language, etc) is also most unhelpful.

I have friendships that have turned like that, as well. We reached a point where no matter how much one of us tried to “repair” things, it only seemed to make things worse. Then, out of frustration, both stop trying. But when two people have to live together, it adds to stress rather than alleviates it.

I hope that America turns out better than those former friendships did.

(*- The exception being that immigrants cannot run for president. All the talk of flag-burning amendments aside, I figure this one is more likely than any other to become a Constitutional amendment.)

Ethan ponders the relationship of evil and ignorance:

I hope that Ethan will forgive me if I am misunderstanding what he means and am taking him out of context, but here are some of my thoughts:

I would say that most of us know someone that believes any time you disagree with him (or her, but it’s usually a him) it is because you don’t understand what he’s saying. Ignorance, sometimes, is an extention of that logic. If one is described as evil, then one doesn’t know what people described as non-evil know. This idea is dependent on a number of things, one of which is that there is an ideal state in which people are good if they are sufficiently loved for instance or, in this case, sufficiently knowledgeable.

I’m inclined to agree with the old saying that the Devil’s greatest trick was making people believe that he did not exist. I believe that evil is an entity unto itself. It is a state with a number of plausible motivations. Often, as you cite, it’s ignorance. Sometimes it’s fear. Sometimes it’s hurt (As Frankenstein’s monster said, “I am malicious because I am miserable”). Maybe there’s a better word for all this than “evil,” but I don’t think that ignorance is sufficiently encompassing.

Ignorance also implies, to a degree, that with knowledge comes righteousness. To a degree, right and wrong are not only what one knows, but how one internally organizes what one knows. Sometimes the organization paints a rather warped picture. Perhaps one can say that a warped picture is not a true one and is therefore ignorant. Be that as it may, there is no picture that is not seen through a lens of some sort, and some lenses are incompatible with virtue, harmony, and other things we would generally percieve as “good.” The issue, in my mind, is not what information is missing (ignorance), but how the existing information is organized (philosophy or ideology).

In short, if I can be short which I usually cannot, ignorance can be just as easily defined to support one’s prejudices as evil can be. Both exist (and I will absolutely concede that ignorance is much, much, much more prevalent than evil), but I don’t personally believe that one necessarily defines the other.

Several years ago I was dating a girl named Julie and was preparing to propose to her. Though we’d never openly discussed it, Julie had been periodically pointing out rings that she liked and didn’t like. As with other aesthetical things, we didn’t particularly share the same taste. It didn’t really matter, though, because the ring I was going to use was an old family ring on my mother’s side. There was also a wedding ring back there, too, though from a different source. Mom’s family, however, was generally of modest means. I did not suppose that the ring was anything by befittingly modest. I was fine with that, though it did not seem what Julie had in mind.

I found a way to indirectly ask her if she would have a problem with a more modest ring. I told her that I liked the idea of using family heirlooms. She was indifferent to the heirloom aspect of it all, but said that she would gladly accept any ring that I would have to offer whenever the timing might be right for such a thing. Then she asked “So just curious. How modest, exactly?”

The ring became a focal point of some of the doubts that were festering in the back of my mind. Not that I thought she would reject the ring. At that point she was hanging much more tightly around me than I was holding on to her. But though it’s one thing to lose a $2,000 investment if an engagement or marriage doesn’t work out. It’s another to lose a deep family heirloom. The former hurts financially. The latter spiritually. The fact that before I was even considering proposing I was already contemplating the effects of divorce was a lightning rod for my increasingly anxious mind. I was increasingly realizing that even as I was planning to spend the rest of my life with her, I wasn’t wanting to.

A couple weeks ago Clancy and I went out for a pizza and ended up at an art exhibit that was on the first floor of the second floor restaurant. The artist was absolutely amazing. His paintings centered on the western landscape. What initially was going to be a quick passthrough ended up with us looking at every framed painting as well as looking through the book. Naturally, we caught the attention of the guy manning the exhibit. He was gentle and charismatic with his sales technique. We told him rather honestly that we did love the paintings but that we were not at a time in our lives where would could afford such things.

As we left, we noted that he probably didn’t believe us. Salespeople notice things and Clancy’s engagement and wedding ring were undoubtedly among them. The wedding ring has over a dozen not-big-but-not-tiny diamonds on it. The engagement ring has three larger diamonds and a few specks of ones on either side. I don’t know how many there are total. It was not what I had in mind with Julie years before. It was, in fact, something I think she would have really approved of.

Being the wonderful woman that I married, Clancy cares less about the diamonds than about the family history. She, like myself, is less than impressed with some of the flashier rings in today’s style. Luckily the diamonds are set low and are therefore unobtrusive. But they sparkle and even low-key Clancy kind of gets a kick out of that.

I take Julie at her word that she would have graciously accepted any ring that I had to offer. Even so, it’s a bit funny that had I saw the ring I never would have asked the question which had the answer that put me ill-at-ease.

Whether you’re a fan of pop country or not (I’m generally not), I strongly suggest you check out a song called “Didn’t Have To Be” by Brad Paisley. An ode to his stepfather, it may be one of the most original and touching songs to have come out that year.

My friend Tony and his ex and future wife Lara are apparently going to buy a house. It was something they always talked about in their first marriage but things were always too turbulent. Now that they’re together again, I guess they believe new beginning warrant taking chances. They’re probably right.

The website he showed me that had pictures of the house also had pictures of his family at the Colossal Kingdom amusement park. I had never met the kids before and never seen him with them. It was extremely odd to see my friend, younger than I, as being the Dad. He’s one of only two of my friends to have kids so far. His are the only ones out of diapers. But there was no mistaking it in the pictures.

They were an odd combination. Tony was 19 and barely a year out of high school. Lara was a nearly thirty year old divorced mother of three living in a welfare complex. I never learned much about the father(s) of Lara’s children, but I gathered that (t)he(y) was/were never a significant part of the kids’ lives. At 19, Tony was a father with two sons and a daughter not five years younger than he. It was difficult to wrap my hands around then and it’s still difficult now.

There was no mistaking it in the Colossal Kingdom pictures. Biological or not, he was Dad. From what I understand, Lara was pretty directionless when they met. She was on welfare with little likelihood of getting off any time soon. She was overwhelmed by her children — particularly their problematic daughter. He stepped into a tempest and managed to keep it all together for a couple years. Unfortunately, it was the conflict about their oldest that drove the wedge that cracked their marriage wide open. Having gotten this family all at once, I think that made it all the more harder to let go of when that time would come.

My coworker Simon is also a step-dad in all but marriage-license. He was relating to me the other day how disturbed he was about the family finances. Family. Finances. Like Tony, Simon also stepped into a relationship and immediately became a father. In some ways I think he has had a more difficult task than Tony did. Paige was apparently pretty clueless on how to take care of her kids and it was Simon, who’d been a dad for all of a couple months, who actually came up with a disciplining regimen. Prior to that, Paige was rewarding whichever son it was that hadn’t done something wrong. The oldest son would talk back, the youngest son would get ice cream. This lead to endless tattling and even more acrimony than is usual between brothers.

Things were apparently so bad that Paige told me a while back that she was considering giving the oldest one up to the state. A couple years later and they’re now stable, relatively speaking.

As I contemplate whether or not to embark on fatherhood and consider all of the challenges therein, I can’t help but admire those around me that not only stepped right into fatherhood, but into unstable situations and made the most of it.

Several years ago I was at a party where I met two young ladies. They had apparently graduated high school, moved out to Hollywood to become actresses and instead came back mothers. I was mildly interested in one of them for a little while. At some point, however, it donned on me as she was talking about her kid, I realized how much the kid was at best an ornament and at worst a chore. And I saw how she insisted on not letting the kid hinder her ability to enjoy her youth. It wasn’t what she said as much as how she said it… as though the ability to go out with friends and get drunk were a civil right and the baby was a little John Ashcroft trying to trample on it.

It was a bizarre realization that left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. I lost interest almost immediately thereafter. As envious as I may be of Tony’s role as Dad to two strappin’ young boys and as admiring as I am of Simon’s work with Paige’s kids, I determined then that wasn’t a role that I really wanted to be in. Had I fallen in love with a woman with a woman that had kids my views might be different. But the thought of parenthood is scary enough. The thought of step-parenthood or unplanned parenthood is even worse.

So hat’s off to all those that became the parents they didn’t have to — or didn’t want to — be.

One of the more depressing things about living and working where I do is that it seems to be a concentrated set of examples for a phenomenon that I noticed back in Corona: A good number of young men and women in their twenties are being tragically under-utilized. Over half our department is overqualified for the position that we now hold — a couple absurdly so. College degrees and years of experience are being dedicated to jobs that could be handled by inexperienced high school grads with decent grades.

This isn’t a complaint so much as an observation.

It seems odd to make this observation at a time when our school system keeps seeming to get worse and worse and we seem to have fallen behind past generations. I don’t pretend to understand it myself, really. But it seems that out here in particular, a better education system (and a family structure more conducive to a good education, I’d wager) only serves to push down the wages of the educated.

There is a rather high concentration of phone centers in the area. Long-distance companies, satellite television, ISPs, and during the last election political polls are being done in this area. Why? Because they can find more educated people willing to work for a lot less money than they have to pay less educated people in the city. There is a surplus of well-spoken, personable individuals. And where there’s a surplus in supply there is no premium placed on it.

I find myself wondering what we can do to better utilize this talent, where it exists.

But what many of us seem to have in education, we lack in attitude. Some within the department feel this job is below them and function accordingly. I think a number of my peers (the ones that went to college) expected to land straight into the middle class. I think that the expectation is higher and so the disappointment is greater and so the performance is lesser. Curiously, there doesn’t seem to be the ambition of starting your own company as there might be. Curiouser still is that those out here that do want to start up their own business seem the least mentally equipped to do so.

Unfortunately, I come from the Ironic Generation, where irony reigns over all things, including self-interest. It seems that a lot of the smarter people just double-back on themselves, aware that the path to success is littered with failures and appreciating (and exagerrating) the odds and repercussions of failure. Though I can’t speak for others in this area, I was coming up through grade school when Ronald Reagan was president and a number of my teachers had a rather dour view of the man and presented Reagan’s America as one where you can’t succeed because the game was irreversably rigged in favor of the big corporations that fund the Big Gipper.

Maybe my experience was unique. Whatever the case, the cynicism and apathy isn’t particularly helpful. I find it particularly sad when I’m one of the more ambitious people of my generation.

Kate the Peon takes a point-by-point on Maureen Dowd’s essay on modern relationships. So, too, will I.

I. Dating
Relationships are unfortunately a negotiation. Don’t show your hand too early and all that. With guys this is more about expressing emotions, with women it’s more physical. A guy who says “I love you” in earnest has lost a lot of leverage if he’s not satisfied with the sexual progress of the relationship. A girl who sleeps with a guy that has not had to demonstrate emotion or attachment is less likely to be able to get him to do so at a later date.

II. Money
I can’t really think of a point where this has ever been a problem in my relationships or even the relationships of my friends. I’ve never minded paying, never minded being paid for. Same goes with most guys I know. Not sure how much this is really an issue.

III. Power
This one works both ways. Are men intimidated by women with more power? Some, surely. But a lot of women are uninterested in men of a lower station and that skews the statistics. Part one is that men are willing (or desiring) to marry their secretaries in larger numbers. Part two is that women are unwilling (or desiring) to marry theirs in larger numbers. Unless one believes that it’s a bad idea to marry out of class, I’m not sure that either is right or wrong. So says the codemonkey that married the doctor.

IV. Sex
On the whole, I’d probably rather be a guy than a girl in the dating and sex world. Even if you’re expected to do most of the initiating and face rejection at every turn, at least there’s something you can do about it. A lot of being a woman is waiting for some guy to do something, cause if you do something it might be looked upon unfavorably. That’s one double-standard that most assuredly exists and, in my opinion (though others disagree) quite favors men.

First, it pertains to daily life in a way that everyone can relate to. Kate the Peon tends to bear all in her posts, which is one of the things I really like about her. Today she posted on an encounter over last weekend where she shared a bed with an acquaintance.

In a former life I’d been in situations of that sort. On one hand it gets my heart thumping a bit just reading it, and on the other hand it makes me quite glad that I don’t have to worry about such things anymore. I wasn’t built for the single life. Even when I was single. If I hadn’t had a girlfreind throughout most of my college tenure, I probably would have exploded.

My nigh-extant coworker Marc was telling me the other day about this woman that he was interested in. This was significant because Marc rarely talked about such things. It turns out that it’s not a privacy issue so much as it is an issue of a lackluster romantic life. It’s odd because Marc is extremely charismatic and attractive enough for the movies. Turns out that he’s just really picky and a girl of interest only pops up into his life every year or two, but rarely more frequently than that.

Anyway, so he was talking about this love interest that he dated a while back. She emailed him out of the blue and they started talking again. His interest was piquing, but she unbeknownst to him she was about to get married. Somewhat uneducated in the ways of women, he was educated by a couple of his chatty peers. They said that it’s not uncommon for someone to dip their toe in the water before making a big commitment. He was actually somewhat delighted to be considered “Plan-B.”

Ahh well, in another year or two someone else will come around for him.

I’ve never had a high tolerance for ambiguity. Both Kate’s and Marc’s story exemplifies everything that I hated about being single. There was a lot of excitement, but the “excitement” came from the ambiguity that I hated. That moment when you don’t know if she likes you as much as you like her (or him, obviously). Exciting, I guess, but terrifying. Ideally I like there to be meaning in the world, and most of my downtime between stable relationships was spent on meaningless things.

It’s interesting how I get further and further away from being involved in that lifestyle even second-hand. If I look at my five closest male peers from my high school and college years, three are married, one cohabitating, and one dead. My three most serious exes are a bit of a different story, but you have to keep in mind that they had to be screwed up enough in the head to date me to begin with.

When Julie and I were dating back in college, it was something of a novelty that I was in a serious relationship. None of the above were in a serious relationship nor had even had a serious one. It was in many ways decidedly inc0nvenient. Partially because she didn’t get along with any of them, but also because I was out of that entire race. I was, it seemed, fixed for life. I couldn’t go skirt-chasing and if I was flirting it wasn’t cool but rather a controversy.

The tide on that turned within a year of Julie and I parting ways. Suddenly I was making friends with people decidedly older and more settled down than myself. They were in relationships and instead of having an inconvenient appendage, I was a third or fifth wheel. Intermittently there was Evangeline, but the more presence she had in her life the more lonely I felt. It’s odd and hard to describe. Even in a relationship, I was unhappy. It didn’t count.

Then, in the same year that I met Clancy, three of the five friends met their either wives or practically-wives. Unbeknownst to us, we were all working on a pretty similar timeline. We were all ready to leave that phase of our life behind. The ambiguity, anyway.

There have been times when my relationship, engagement, and marriage to Clancy have been less than ideal. There have even been times when I wasn’t sure if we were going to make it and I’ve had to look very seriously at the prospect of being single again. When I had similar thoughts with Julie years ago, part of me really lamented the fact that I wouldn’t be able to see what else is out there. Then I found out.

A wise man once said that nothing is ever so consistently overestimated as the opportunity cost of being married.

7 Answers to 7 Questions

7 things I plan to do before I die:

• Have at least one moment in time where I am not afraid to go to the dentist, optometrist, or doctor because I don’t want to hear that I have cavities, an outdated prescription, or an ulcer.
• Make a movie or short film.
• Learn the basics of auto maintenance.
• Have a computer with internet access or at least a television in a house bathroom.
• Read the Bible from front to end and at least one other religious text (Talmud, Koran, Book of Mormon, etc.) from cover to cover.
• Get a dog or preferably two.
• Learn another language.

7 things I can do:

• Sing all 50 states in alphabetical order. The real states, that is. I can’t do that with the Trumanverse states. Yet.
• Touch my nose and walk in a straight line no matter how plastered I am.
• Make unbelievably good egg-based breakfasts and chili-based dips.
• Make myself sound more educated and intelligent than I am by using unnecessarily long and obscure words without making myself sound like the intellectually insecure pompous prick sort of person that uses long and obscure words to sound more intelligent and educated than they are.
• Find something to appreciate about any moderately coherent artistic work.
• Block out the whole world in pursuit of a singular task for hours on-end some times and yet be completely unable focus most of the rest of the time.
• See and understand both sides of an issue, even when I feel strongly one way or the other.

7 things I cannot do:

• Carry a tune.
• Keep a straight face when I witness or think something hilarious. I’m told that my face lights up when I think of something funny.
• Keep my mouth shut whenever most appropriate to.
• Be comfortable in a room full of strangers.
• Keep track of time mentally.
• Dance.
• Let go.

7 things that [used to] attract me to another person [before I got married and lost all notice in women other than my lovely and talented wife whom I love more than all others]:

• Intelligence.
• Marches to the beat of a different drummer. I don’t get along well with normal people.
• Competence. I am really attracted to people that are really, really good at something. This applies to friends, but moreso to significant others.
• Patience. I couldn’t survive a relationship with someone that didn’t have patience.
• Sociability. Someone needs to help me get out.
• Mental instability. Hey, it doesn’t say that I have to like the fact I was attracted to a particular sort.
• Red or black hair. Everybody’s gotta be frivolous sometimes, no?

how’s that for a disclaimer?

• Very good
• Very true
• Very good and very true
• The words of wise man
• The very good and very true disclaimer of a wise man
• A good way to get out of trouble.
• The very good and very true disclaimer of a wise man that are effective at getting someone out of trouble.

7 celebrity crushes:

• Lisa Loeb
• Nabiki Tendo
• Nicole Kidman
• Molly Shannon
• Claire Danes
• Penelope Ann Miller
• Sela Ward

7 Things I say the most:

• “I didn’t do it.”
• “Sorry, I can’t smell it.” Having a poor sense of smell is not the curse one might think it to be.
• “Oh, sorry, I was just talking to myself.”
• “Outstanding!”
• “Well, it’s complicated…”
• “Ready to get up and face the day?!?!” This one is not-so-popular with Clancy.
• “Uhm.”

7 bloggers I am tagging:

• Hey, I already answered 7. This is 8. Sorry, no dice… 🙂