RevSpork

Define "special"

This is a dating service?

Working eighty hours but paid for forty

It's always easy to change your life. Really. Changing jobs is a snap: you just need the summon the will to do the work required to stop working in one place and start working in another. However, even the most determined need breaks, some more than others. And I can't seem to catch one.

Sleep is the best break there is. Sleep, as we all know, is the best way to recharge your batteries. Even if you're a slow riser like me, eventually your brain wakes up and feels like it can take on what the universe will toss at you for the next 14-16 hours. My brain doesn't wake up, for the simple reason that it didn't relax in the first place.

I don't own one, but...owie

From cnn.com: Last month, in an American surgical first, doctors at the University of California, San Diego, removed the appendix of a 24-year-old patient through her vagina. Surgeons Santiago Horgan and Mark Talamini made a small incision in the wall of the patient's vagina, through which they passed surgical tools and a small camera to the appendix, removing the organ through the same incision.

Three thoughts:

1. Note to surgeon: don't sneeze.
2. I'm well aware how small cameras can get nowadays, but I can't help visually associating a "small camera" with a regular disposable one. Then I have to go lie down.
3. The organization these surgeons are members of? Natural Orifice Consortium for Assessment and Research, or NOSCAR. Where's the S, you say? I don't know. (Maybe they rented the leftover S from 1-800-MATTRES.) Looks like NOCAR to me, and I presumed that went without saying; I don't care which orifice they're digging through to pluck your appendix, there had better not be a freakin' car in the operating room.

For the entire article, click here. It sounds like an improvement over conventional surgery, but still...I think I need more time to not think about it.

It took him long enough

At the time, I was both horrified and fascinated: one night in the autumn of 2003, the Chicago Cubs pulled off the most beautiful work of performance art in sports history, falling apart with five outs left in the game to deny themselves a chance to win their first World Series in 95 years. And this living, breathing, ivy-lined canvas was triggered by a foul ball hit towards the stands.

Today, as the World Series drought for the Cubs reaches the century mark, after four and a half years of continued Chicago Cubs fans' frustration, former Cubs left fielder Moises Alou confesses: he probably would not have caught the foul ball that fan Steve Bartman batted out of his reach. Really? I suspected that all along, and it's about time he admitted it.

The dying alcoholic on the #22 bus

Two Sunday mornings ago, I stepped onto the #22 Clark bus. It was about 6:30, a hint of daylight in the sky. There he was, sitting where I've always seen him sit, one aisle back from the handicapped seats on the driver's side.

Drunks have ridden Chicago's mass transit system since the very beginning; I wouldn't be surprised if the very first rider was blasted. Drunks and the Chicago Transit Authority go together like rum and coke. But the gentleman I walked past for the third Sunday morning in five weeks was the saddest-looking drunk I've ever seen.

Self-preservation vs. self-absorption

Tori's mom got through the surgery fine. Although she's missing half a leg, it's a hell of a better choice than the alternative. We're all relieved about it, but we also know my mother-in-law has a long road ahead. She basically needs to re-learn to walk with an artificial limb for a month at a rehabilitation clinic, and then...who knows.

It's been frustrating for me, because I can only worry about so many people, and my worry for my wife and mother-in-law has completely eclipsed my own anxieties about my work hell and my depression. And before you call me self-centered, keep in mind that I do not consider my own problems more important than that of my mother-in-law; it's just a lot to absorb all at once.

Although I've not been exactly prolific in my quest, I have been looking for other work. However, there's just nothing out there. But depressed as I am about it, I do have a job...and two healthy legs. Do I have a right to bitch about my cruddy job when my mother-in-law just had a large chunk of her body removed? Do I want to immerse myself in a career change when my wife might need us to fly out to the coast on a week's notice?

At what point do I concentrate on helping myself so I'm in a better position to help others? Where is that elusive line between self-preservation and self-absorption? Am I making any freaking sense?

You don't impress me

Not that I'm a fan of Mass, or even consider myself a Roman Catholic anymore, but anti-war protests during Easter Mass strikes me as tacky, ineffective, and self-defeating. Who did these six people think they could have converted by ranting at worshipers and squirting themselves with fake blood during a religious observance of the resurrection of Christ? Did they really believe worshippers would talk to themselves about how right or wrong the war was after services instead of wondering out loud what a bunch of doofuses anti-war activists are? I support same-sex marriage, but I didn't masturbate to gay porn at Holy Name Cathedral during mass on Palm Sunday. (No pun intended, believe it or not.)

There are better, more effective ways to protest the war than to ruin people's Easter, and there are far worthier targets than a corrupt machine politician and a nondescript Catholic official. Yeah, yeah, Cardinal George and Dickhead Daley chatted with the president recently. Whoopie. I'm sure Hillary Clinton has had a chat or two with the Prez too, but it doesn't mean she suddenly became a babbling pro-war political chickenshit; no, it took far more than gabbing with Bush to turn her to the Dark Side.

Sorry, kids, but you didn't convince me of anything, other than the sorry fact that today's antiwar activists have run out of good ideas and reduced themselves to desperate pleas for attention.

No, I'm not turning into a conservative. Now get off my lawn.

Not one of her better birthdays

Saturday was Tori's birthday but, given how our week transpired, we didn't do anything other than eat birthday cake we bought at Dominicks the day before while waiting for the phone to ring. Everything else - trip to the Shedd, dinner at Gibson's - was cancelled. Hopefully we'll do something in a few weeks. In the meantime, read her blog and wish her both a happy birthday and good luck and happy thoughts for her mom.

More burnin' Qs for 2008

Man, this year bites so far. Let's inject a little happy into it:

1. After sex, most couples cuddle or fall asleep. What's the silliest activity you've done after nookie?

2. As you walk into your dining room, you somehow cross a hole in the time-space continuum. It is now 1958, and you're a dog named Scruffs. Your only way back home is to pee on someone from 1958 you really hate. Who do you pee on?

3. You're going to add the 1st season of "Love Boat" to your Netflix queue, aren't you? Don't deny it.

4. What would have to happen in 2008 for you to emigrate from the USA?

5. You've just joined a roller derby team. What name do you give yourself?

6. "Iron Man" is soon to be in theaters. What comic book character should never, ever be on the big screen?

7. A movie about you has debuted on the Lifetime Movie Network. Who plays you?

How's your sex education program?

I'm not sure what to make of this, but only because I don't know how sex education in cities like, say, Chicago is taught. I'm guessing it's taught, like most of Chicago's public school education, not too well.

But think about that: one in every four teenage girls, including every other African-American teenage girl in the United States, has an STD. In your typical group of black girls on the CTA car, chatting and hollering and laughing, odds are that half of them have a sexually-transmitted disease. And the most common STD amongst teenage girls? HPV, that lovely little virus that causes genital warts and is considered the source of nearly all cases of cervical cancer. And condom use, although effective in reducing incidents of HPV transmission, does not eliminate it by a long shot, because the virus can be spread through the skin around the genitalia.

In a country where teenage girls are exposed to weird anti-sex perversions like virginity pledges and purity balls, how in the hell are they supposed to develop healthy attitudes about sex? And girls are the ones who need to develop these attitudes, because boys are complete morons when it comes to sex. We can't help it.

Ok, I'm kidding. A little. But what the hell is right about abstinance-based sex education? We know it doesn't work, but those supporters of it don't even seem to care it doesn't work. It's the only moral program, they believe, and if something is not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.

So a quarter of our teenage girls have STDs. A small portion of these girls will be at risk for cervical cancer later on. Sex education, no matter what the approach, would have not and will not prevent this. What will put a serious dent in teenage STDs is the HPV vaccine. But this, too, is controversial because it's considered pro-sex. Abstinence, these purity ballers proclaim, is a far better "vaccine." Well, no. A wedding ring is one of the worst forms of STD protection in the country, and if you think your convenant with God will somehow halt HPV in its tracks, you're a deluded lunatic. Unless you ban all non-virgins from marrying (and I'm sure there are quite a few loonies who think that's a great idea), using abstinence as an STD preventative is a fool's dream.

So while boys and girls give each other crotch rot (and how many teenage boys have STDs, huh?), we're stuck with sex education programs designed to fail our kids, a vaccine not available to nearly enough girls, and the most sexually neurotic nation on earth. Boy, I feel aroused just thinking about it.