Filed by Bil at 12:30 am under General
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I know that money cannot buy happiness, but I’ll tell you this – I just spent twenty dollars and I am pretty darn happy for it.

On what did I spend this fortune, you ask?

A new cell phone. The cheapest phone in the store. Tough beans for the salesman who works on commission, sweet peaches for the consumer (me) who needs a phone on a budget.

I wasn’t desperate for a new phone. My old phone was still in working condition. But – to put it in perspective – the battery was held on with Scotch tape.
(Keep reading…)

Filed by Chelsea at 11:21 pm under Catholicism, Religion, Social Issues
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Tonight is the night of Easter Vigil.
The Holiest Night of the Year.
While Christmas may get the most attention and inspire warm fuzzies and gift-giving frenzies all over the world, even in people who have no idea what’s actually being commemorated, Easter is actually the biggest deal in the religious world. Everybody has a birthday. Not everybody rises from the dead.

I’ve just been to a three-hour Easter Vigil mass and I feel great!
I feel enlivened.
I feel I have a clean heart.
(Keep reading…)

Filed by Trevor at 5:05 am under Love
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Ten years ago today was the my first encounter — the first of several subsequent encounters — with suicide. In fact, by this time he was already dead, long since scooped up from the drainage canal behind his house where he’d taken his life with his father’s automatic. But I didn’t know it yet. That phone call would come later on the next day, a Friday, after I had driven my battered car fresh from an uninsured accident six days prior up to my best friend’s house to get the weekend started right.

Once a year I call his parents. It’s also the only way I can remember my sister’s birthday. He would be 23 today.
(Keep reading…)

Filed by Bil at 12:24 pm under Politics, Racism, The Media
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, more politics crap. I know.

Listen up, though, young folks. This particular speech by presidential candidate Barack Obama may very well go down as one the great speeches in our nation’s history. Or it might be forgotten by next week, you never really know. But if you’ve got forty minutes to spare, check this video out. Even if you’re not an Obama fan, it might be good to be able to talk knowingly about this speech some day.

Filed by Bil at 5:27 pm under GOP, Politics, Pop Culture
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As you may or may not have heard five billion times by now, New York Democratic Governor Eliot Spitzer is in some hot water because he hired a pricey hooker after a career of prosecuting powerful men who hire pricey hookers. We have all seen this before, and if there’s one thing that we as a nation should be able to agree upon by now (but for some reason aren’t), it’s that political party really has nothing to do with the fact that some politicians are just plain old douche bags.

Okay, sure, perhaps Eliot Spitzer should resign, perhaps not. Honestly, as a resident of a state that is NOT New York, I don’t think I could make a valid argument either way. I don’t know what their funny laws are. Is prostitution illegal up there? Isn’t it illegal in every state but Nevada?

NY Repbulican threaten to impeach Spitzer

Let’s just slow down a little bit though. Who said anything about impeach?
(Keep reading…)

Filed by Chelsea at 9:48 am under General, Politics, Racism, Social Issues
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Tim Wise, anti-racism activist and author of one of my favorite and oft-recommended books, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son , has written some essays recently on Obama voters and the myth of reverse racism. I’m keeping up with them because he is my MySpace friend (the only person listed as both a friend and a person I’d like to meet), proving that MySpace CAN be used for good as well as evil.

I won’t quote his most recent article extensively here, because I want you to read it. But here’s a little taste:

In other words, if voting for a white person because of their race is racism, then so too must be voting for a black person because of theirs. So see, those black Obama boosters are every bit as racist as we are, maybe more so, because they’re breaking his way by about eighty-five percent, while whites are splitting between Obama and Clinton by about fifty-fifty. So if anything, the e-mailer said, it was blacks who were more racist and whites whose voting behavior portended open-mindedness.

Such an argument–which is really the political equivalent of “Why can’t we have white history month, I mean, we have black history month?”–suggests how far we have to go in this nation simply to have a productive dialogue about race, let alone to really conquer racism.

Check out the full article here: http://www.lipmagazine.org/~timwise/Obama2.html and give yourself a pat on the back for keeping up with political critique. Even if you (I) do it on MySpace.

Filed by Bil at 8:32 pm under General, Love
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It’s true. Devon is my personal dresser. She doesn’t actually put my clothes on me, but she tells me what to wear. Not because I pay her, and not because she wants me to be happy. For the most part there are two motivating factors for making me wear the clothes that I wear: 1) she does not want to be embarrassed by me; and 2) she derives pleasure from watching me embarrass myself.
(Keep reading…)

Filed by Bil at 10:00 pm under Love
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It’s been too long since I ventured back onto the web in all my text and glory, and I’d say it’s time I got back to it.

The main reason I’ve been so absent is not a lack of personal time, no, but more a notable lack of a person. A good friend of mine passed away quite unexpectedly a few weeks ago, and I’ve been reserving my “next post since then” for her. But it’s hard. You can really only do it once, they say, and I wanted to get it right. I don’t want to make light of it, but I also don’t want to weigh everyone down with sap and pretense.

Because the fact of the matter, as I have come to realize, is that writing a post about someone who’s passed away for the sake of that person is bullshit. It’s never for their sake, it’s always for the writer’s sake; for one thing, the person who has passed away – well – has passed away. For another, it’s therapeutic or soothing to the writer to express feelings; and honestly, when I go to someone else’s blog, I don’t really care how they were feeling when they posted a paragraph.
(Keep reading…)