Things I have accomplished this Thanksgiving break:

-I have had 4 new teeth installed

-I have watched 9 episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm

-I have not seen any of my siblings for more than five minutes at a time

-I have crashed my parents’ 27th anniversary weekend getaway and accompanied them to a Trailblazers game

- I have seen The Fantastic Mr. Fox twice (it’s great)

Things I have yet to do with my time off:

-apply for internships

-write any of the four essays due upon my return to Utah

-bathe

I’d have to say that I’m still comin outta this with the W.

How delighted was I to wake up and discover this in my inbox?  Because this is the first reader submission, I’ll let it slide, but for future reference these must be accompanied by a mortifying picture from your youth.  Other than that, there are no guidelines. You can literally write anything. Anonymous identities are not discouraged.  In case this isn’t clear, I am fishing for some really crazy stuff. Thank you for your compliance.

Send all submissions to: kaeleighkaeleigh@aol.com. 

First I would like to inform you that my gay roommate matthew likes to wake up every morning to a lovely mix of beyonce, pink, lady gaga, miley cyrus, kelly clarkson, etc. He also likes to play this exact same mix in evening before bed. I feel as though I am living in a horrible teen movie where the soundtrack of my life is being d.j.ed by power 99.1 and the theme is scorned women.

Second I have been having trouble sleeping and thus having to find ways to occupy my time and instead of being productive and studying I have started doing some old school creative writing. Seeing as how I no longer have 5,000 blogs and refuse to start one I would like to submit a piece for your consideration as a possible guest blog. I would like you to know that there is no pressure for you to accept my submission and if you do accept feel free to edit/change it as I have the writing and grammar skills of a 3 year old. At the very least I hope you will be entertained on a topic we have discussed before but has recently come back to my attention. I don’t have a title for it but here it is:

When one grows up in a relatively small town and attend public school there is a good chance that he or she may miss out on some key life lessons. Such as, when I moved to Seattle to begin college I discovered that I had absolutely no study skills. This I attribute to Mrs. Creed who held me back from going on to the more advanced math class in the 6th grade because of one B+. This set the precedent of me never having to study as a result of never really being challenged in school (especially in math class). Another discovery was that sex education failed me miserably. I’m sorry but a creepy middle-aged male “Health” teacher showing me a tampon and a video of a baby emerging from the womb does not give me everything I need to know about sex and my body. It also didn’t help that I grew up in a catholic family where my parents had only every dated each other and waited till marriage. Their idea of sex ed was popping in a semi-animated explanatory VHS for my 10 year old sister to watch and then having me (at the age of 7) tag along to kill two birds with one stone. The only further education my mother saw fit was to inform me of the most bizarre and least likely ways that a woman could get pregnant: “Katie, you need to know that if a man touches a pair of underwear that he has recently worn and then touches a pair of your underwear and then you put those underwear on, you could get pregnant….” In addition to that there was also the occasional need for her to update me on the latest sexual terminology while I was trapped in the car: “Honey, do you know what a ‘baller’ is?… It’s a man with—(making a cupping motion with her hand)—you know big….(cupping motion)…”

Needless to say, once I broke out of the bubble that is the Tri-Cities, and my family, I proceeded to educate myself where my Health classes had failed. Since then I’ve considered myself to be fairly informed about the human body and reproduction until TLC threw me curveball in the form of the show “I didn’t know I was pregnant.” It started out as a one hour special but recently it has turned into it’s own show because an obscene amount women are innocently going to the bathroom and finding babies in their toilets when they go to flush. WHAAAAAAAT?!?! Even though I first saw the show a few years ago, and stopped watching it because it is ridiculous, it was brought back to my attention when my grandma mentioned that someone she knew had a daughter that didn’t know she was pregnant and all the sudden popped out a kid. This got me doing some research on the show and how these women did not know they were pregnant. Then I started to get worried. I haven’t been having unprotected sex with every man that I meet but I do have a male roommate, and we do share a bathroom, and according to my mother toilet seats can get you pregnant if you aren’t careful. So lets say I am pregnant as a result of Immaculate Conception, the scary part is that I am a perfectly normal female that hasn’t experienced massive weight gain and has regular periods. Why is that scary? Apparently I could be having what I think are periods but are in fact a “pseudo period” where everything seems like its that time of the month but its not! Also a fetus can be really small and really sneaky and tuck itself away and not move so I can’t feel anything and it’s size isn’t causing me to gain a bunch of weight. The worst part is that home pregnancy tests can give false negatives so it doesn’t matter if I pee on a thousand sticks and they all say negative I could still be pregnant. How am I supposed to every know?!? In theory I could go to a doctor and find out for sure but I don’t have the insurance or the funds to do that so I guess I’ll just have to keep an eye out every time I go to the bathroom for the rest of my life. On the off chance that I do get knocked up without knowing I hope my fetus likes ungodly amounts of caffeine and cake.

For further information on this topic google “I didn’t know I was pregnant is that a baby in your pants?”

Katie Manolopoulos is a scholar and anti-whale activist living in Seattle.  Learn more about her here.

Sometimes I am reading my Behavioural Ecology textbook and I feel as though it has turned into a Sci-Fi novel.  For instance, on pg.184 (don’t read if you think you might be squeamish about insect junk):

Males often compete in ways which are less conspicuous than fights, but are no less effective.  The invertebrates are a particularly rich seam of examples.  Females dragonflies, as with many other insects, mate with a number of males and store the sperm in a special sac (the spermatheca) in the body for use at a later date.  The males compete for fertilizations by trying to ensure that previous sperm is not used by the female.  The penis of a male Orthetrum cancellatum is equipped with a barbed whip at the end which is used to scrape out of the female any sperm left by previous males.  Crocethemis erythraea, another dragonfly, uses an inflatable penis with a horn-like appendage to pack the sperm of previous males into corners of the spermetheca. 

In some invertebrates the male cements the female after copulation to prevent other males from fertilizing her.  The males of Moniliformes dubius, a parasitic acanthocephalan worm in the intestine of rats, produces a chastity belt of this kind but in addition to sealing up the female after copulation, the male sometimes copulates with rival males and applies cement to their genitals, preventing them from being able to mate again.  No less remarkable are the habits of the hemipteran insect Xylocoris maculipennis.  A male Xylocoris may inject his sperm into a rival male.  The sperm then swim to the victim’s testes, where they will be passed on to the next female that the victim mates.

What?!?! Is someone messing with me? Man, that mother nature is one crazy hussy.

In other news, did anyone see the Lenoid meteor shower?  I desperately tried to stay awake, to no avail.  I’m not as young as I once was.

I have conveniently made a shopping list for everyone to purchase my christmas/hannukuh/birthday presents from.  Due to the struggling economy I have selected items below the $300 mark out of consideration for your budget constraints.  You’re welcome.

messenger bag:

Celestron Powerseeker, for looking into the sun:

‘nocs, for birdwatching and neighborwatching:

MET Jewelry (I don’t have a boyfriend and the immediate outlook is not promising, so someone has to pick up the slack in the jewelry department):

Moroccan tea set:

keyboard (full and weighted, more specifically):

Terrarium (didn’t know I needed this til jil told me):

Bike(found here):

There. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for.  I know you all won’t let me down.

In high school, I was briefly associated with an extracurricular club called S.H.O.U.T. – Students Helping Others to Understand Tobacco[1].  How I got involved with a topic I felt such indifference toward I do not recall.  Someone probably convinced me that it was great resume fodder.  Anyway.  S.H.O.U.T. would schedule stings during the school’s lunch hour where the students go around to local businesses and attempt to illegally buy cigarettes.  If anyone actually succeeds at doing so they are to inform the guilty business of the impending $300 fine.  What high-schooler would volunteer their spare time for such a completely lame undertaking? The future raging alcoholics of eastern Washington, that’s who. (I’m fairly certain in retrospect that ciggarettes were the least of most S.H.O.U.T. participant’s problems).  My first and only meeting attendance was a prep course for successfully suckering people into selling you ciggs.  The teacher who ran the club advised the girls to wear lipstick and pull their hair back for the big day in order to look older.  A list of cigarette brands was distributed and we were to all take turns doing a practice run-through of our script, which read “Hello, may I please have some insert cigarette brand?”  I am called upon and I say in my most casual voice, “Hello, may I please have some Kools?”  Everyone erupts into laughter and the teacher condescendingly says, “Kaeleigh, Kools are for black people.”  I never returned.  Thus ended my stint in anti-drug activism.

High School- a confusing time for everyone

It's so obvious now

I am amused by all of the people who are reacting to the new health care bill with, “that’s it, I’m moving” because, are you moving to Qatar?  Every place in the world where you would actually want to live has a health care system that you hate.

Read em and weep:

Key details of health overhaul bill

The House health care bill passed Saturday would do the following:

» Require most Americans to purchase health insurance or pay a fine.

»Expand health care coverage to 36 million more people over the next decade.

»Require employers with payrolls above $500,000 to provide insurance to their employees or pay a fine.

»Prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage because of pre-existing medical conditions.

»End premium disparities between men and women.

»Impose a 5.4 percent income tax surcharge on income above $500,000 annually for individuals and above $1 million annually for households.

»Establish a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers beginning in 2013.

»Cost $1.2 trillion over 10 years.

»Cut Medicare spending by more than $400 billion over 10 years.

The Associated Press

How did Utah vote? A trio of nos

 »R Utah’s House members voted against passage of the Affordable Health Care for America Act.

 Rob Bishop » R, ‘no’

Jim Matheson » D, ‘no’

Jason Chaffetz » R, ‘no’

No where does this provide that the upper-tax bracket pay for my abortions.  Democracy fails me again. I AINT PAYIN FOR THE LOW-INCOME LAZY JACKASSES OF THE WORLD TA GET DOCTORED, YOU KEEP THE HEALTH PLAN AND I’LL KEEP THE CHANGE, etc.  Wait, I qualify as low-income? Nevermind. Play on, Pelosi. On to senate! Long live public option. Conclusive fragment.