Actually, my mood has taken a turn for the AWESOME because a Super Top Secret Creative Project that amberle404 and I have been working on for ages has finally come to fruition.

Introducing...

Bachelor Girl!

TA-DA!

I love LiveJournal (obviously - I've been here FIVE FREAKING YEARS, oh my GOD), but I wanted a space, my own little space, to start fresh and write my stuff and be a little bit more professional and (fingers crossed!) hopefully attract some more freelance work. The content will be pretty much the same as here on LiveJournal, just probably without so many lame-o memes when I have writer's block.

Bachelor Girl has truly been a labor of love for everyone involved. amberle404 designed it, her husband is hosting it, and avidchick created the Bachelor Girl caricature! Many others gave us shoulders to cry on and offered us wine when Google wouldn't play nice with us.

My LiveJournal will remain...pretty much forever. I want to be able to keep up with all of you and stay active in my various LJ communities. PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE come see me at Bachelor Girl, though, because I would be so lonely without all the funny and crazy comments you guys make here on Clothes_Slut. I don't know what I'd do without my Peanut Gallery!

I've got all kinds of exciting things planned for Bachelor Girl - In addition to chronicling my misadventures, I'm doing the $25-And-Less Gift Guide again this year, and closer to Christmas, there'll be a GIVEAWAY! And who doesn't like free stuff? I know I do.

So check the ol' Girl out and tell me what you think!

(Empty comment fields make me cry.)



Your thrilled
Kel

Actually, let's start by talking about someone very smart who probably shouldn't get her knickers in a twist over something moronic.

One of my favorite bloggers, Amalah, wrote a post today about Dennis Leary stating in his book, Why We Suck: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid, that there is no such thing as autism.

Amalah's son, Noah, has been diagnosed with Sensory Integration Dysfunction, a disorder that is, in some respects, similar to autism. So naturally, Amalah takes Leary's remarks about autism being a catchall diagnosis for bratty children of lazy parents very, very personally. However:

1. Soccer moms are not exactly Leary's intended audience in the first place. Most of the up-in-arms mothers who are raising a stink about Leary all over the internet ran out and bought the book just so they could read for themselves what he wrote. To which Leary responded, "KA-CHING!" Or they haven't read it for themselves at all, and they're just throwing a fit about something someone told them in the carpool line. Which is, after all, the American Way.

2. No one with any sense takes Dennis Leary, of all people, seriously. He's an actor and a comedian, for God's sake. The book (which I have, like a good American, not read) is probably entertaining, but when I want to read an author who will inform my views of the world, I do not choose Dennis-Effing-Leary. And I don't imagine anyone who's not a boy younger than 14 does either.

3. Like autism researchers around the world are really gonna throw up and their hands and exclaim, "Dennis Leary says autism is bullshit? Well, screw you guys, I'm goin' home!"

Personally, I believe that autism and Asperger syndrome are real, if overdiagnosed, disorders. While I think they are possibly caused by something environmental, I doubt they're caused by childhood vaccines, which, thanks to celebrity big-mouths like Jenny McCarthy, is the cause du jour.

You wanna get mad about something, Amalah? How about the fact that parents these days are refusing to vaccinate their children against deadly transmittable diseases because a nitwit famous for showing her hooters to the world via Playboy screams to anyone who will listen that those life-saving vaccines MIGHT cause a disorder that neurologists and other medical experts know very little about, including what its causes might be?

As for me, I'll get mad about THAT, thanks.

However, even though I think Dennis Leary hasn't much to offer the world in the way of wisdom, he does have a point about one thing:

Parents HAVE to take responsibility for their children.

I'm certainly not knocking all parents here; I know some truly stellar examples of parents. I won't name any names in the interest of privacy, but I have a friend whose son has ADD. Upon hearing that diagnosis, most modern parents would have driven straight to the pharmacy for their economy-sized bottle of Drug This Kid the Hell Out, PLEASE.

Not this lady.

She and her family tried (and I mean REALLY tried - not just, "oh, we did that for 15 minutes and it didn't work!") every behavior-modification technique known to MAN before they resorted to medication. Yes, the kid is on medication now, but medication combined with the afore-mentioned techniques. And the message they've sent their kid is an important one: Drugs are not the first solution, they're the LAST.

That's a good example. Now let me give you a bad one:

For the second time, I sat in Mass next to a little boy who has severe Tourette's syndrome. He doesn't have the vocal tics normally associated with Tourette's. He has the physical ones.

His mother always brings him to the noon Mass, the most crowded one, and sits in the center of a pew.

I spent Mass practically crawling into the lap of the old lady next to me, trying to keep from getting smacked in the face by this kid.

I am in no way unsympathetic to people with physical and mental handicaps. My aunt Carol, who lives with my parents, is mentally handicapped. But this kid...oh, this kid. I could have punched his mother in the face.

He flailed uncontrollably throughout the entire Mass. As is common with Tourette's, the more he tried to sit still, the worse he got. When it came time to kneel, he hit his chin on the back of the pew in front of him because he had a tic wherein his knees came out from under him and he flung his arms behind him.

He was utterly humiliated. He kept looking at me apologetically with tears in his eyes. I gave him a smile and then glared daggers over his head at his seemingly-oblivious mother.

I don't know how much anyone here knows about Catholicism, but our obligation to attend Mass on Sundays is an extremely serious one. So I don't blame her one bit for bringing him to church. I would do the same thing in her position, EXCEPT
--I would seat the child on the end of the pew, nearest the aisle. That way, he couldn't hit anyone but me, OR
--I would bring him to an earlier or later (less-crowded) Mass so that we would have more room in the pew around us, OR
--I would sit with him in the Cry Room. (The sound-proofed room where parents with babies sit. NO, it's not a place for us to work out our Catholic guilt.)

But not this lady. No, sir. She doesn't care that those around her can't pay attention to anything the priest is saying, that someone might be injured OR that her child is mortified. Just as long as she can sleep late on Sunday and make a spectacle of the both of them.

I told this story to a friend of mine who is a mother of a small child. She didn't actually say that I am a heartless monster and that she hopes God curses me with 20 developmentally-disabled children (and she absolutely is the sort of person who would view a child who is anything less than "perfect" as a curse), but that was the gist of her response. She actually used the word "un-Christian," and she is very lucky indeed that the words "narcissistic bitch" weren't bandied about as well.

(It's OK; her kid is a B-R-A-T brat from hell. The apple doesn't fall far and all that.)

So what do you guys think? Have you had an experience like this? Is the mother in the wrong, or am I just cruel?

And is Dennis Leary a 21st century prophet and I'm just missing the boat?



Your thankfully-uninjured
Kel

Mouse introduced me to Thai food. Ever since, I've been hooked. I love rice noodles, coconut, citrus, lemongrass, peppers and peanuts, so I suppose my affection for Thai cuisine was inevitable. When I first moved to Shreveport, it didn't have a SINGLE Thai restaurant, and I mourned this travesty at great length.

Sunday, Jennifer, Swell Nathan and I made our way to the Thai temple in the late morning. Basically, the deal is this: Each family who worships at the temple prepares food to sell on certain Sundays each month. They set up at long tables in a pavillion, and people from the community come and buy the food, then they eat at the many picnic tables by the water. The families then donate all the money they make from the sale of the food to the temple. Jennifer and Swell Nathan found out about it through Creative Loafing, and they've gone frequently ever since.

Many of the temple members don't speak fantastic English (though many probably speak English better than I do), but everyone communicates pretty well nevertheless. All anyone really needs to know is "This," "How much?" and "Thank you." I surveyed the landscape, then swooped in for the kill.

Cute side story: One Sunday, Jennifer went into the pavillion and indicated to one of the ladies that she wanted to try some sort of orange-colored dish, probably a mango salad. Jennifer pointed to the dish and said, "This, please."

"Nooo..." came the answer from a little old Thai lady.
Jennifer was understandably confused. She indicated the dish again. "This?"
"Nooo..."
Jennifer held up some cash. "I have money, I can pay! I'd really like this, please."
"Nooo..."
To this day, Jennifer doesn't know what the deal was. Maybe the lady figured it was something Jennifer wouldn't like.

I'm gonna be real honest with y'all right now. I don't really know what I ate. All I know is it was fanTASTic.

Jennifer and Swell Nathan found a table for us right near the water (as in, if I had walked three steps from our table, I would have found myself IN the water), and we dug in.

After we finished eating, we decided to have a look inside the temple. I didn't take any pictures inside, of course, since that's you know, just rude, but I think from the outside pictures you can tell that it was one of the most magnificently beautiful things I have ever seen.

(When we walked - barefoot - into the temple and kneeled, I gasped, it was so gorgeous. Swell Nathan just looked over at me and smiled.)

As delicious as the food was, as breathtaking as the temple was, as good as the company was, the most important part of the day was a grand cultural lesson that I learned because of the experience:

Church ladies are church ladies no matter where they're from, what language they speak or who they worship.

Seriously. Except for the notable lack of Sicillian food, it was more or less exactly like the St. Joseph altar at my church.

I couldn't understand their language, but boy howdy, I know me some church ladies, and they were gossiping and fussing at each other and their kids and grandkids just exactly like the church ladies at St. Joseph. I was expecting, at any moment, someone to grab me by the arm and demand to know why I'm not married yet.

Some things naturally transcend nationality and religion, I suppose.

I'm just glad no one bugged me about why I haven't yet birthed a litter of Catholic (or Buddhist) babies.

And now, the part everyone's waiting (or wading) for: PIKTURZ!

Tampa! Part Two

Your table mannered
Kel

I have this Thing.

(I have a lot of Things, actually, but here's a new one!)

Before I go out, like, you know, for an evening out, I have to straighten up my apartment. Because people might come home with me, and I don't want them to see my shamefully messy abode.

Not like COME HOME WITH ME come home with me, but, you know, just come over after a night on the town. Like when you're sitting at a restaurant and everyone's like, "Let's go finish this bottle of wine somewhere else!" I'm always petrified that my place will be nominated, people will come over and the illusion I try to create every day that I am this perfect, perfectly beautiful, perfectly organized creature will come crashing down around my ears because people will see my dirty potty or my overflowing garbage can.

Obviously, this blog greatly helps to maintain that illusion.

I think this particular Thing is leftover from Kel: The Post-College Years, when I was one of the very few who had a) had an apartment and b) had an apartment that did not house myself and five roommates. People dropped by all the time and stayed for hours, so I was always very careful to pick up after myself.

These days? Not so much.

So Saturday night, I headed out to my friend Karla's daughter's 13th birthday party. I didn't pick up before I left because, I mean, 13-year-olds don't go back to anyone's house after a party to drink too much wine and talk shit. Or at least they shouldn't.

I won't give too many details, but A.'s party wasn't going so well for her. She had a pretty good time, all things considered, but let's just say there was a fair amount of intermittent crying.

During the final crying jag, I got a flash of inspiration.

After quickly talking things over with Karla, I invited A. back to my place to spend the night, watch scary movies and gorge ourselves on cookies and popcorn. Sunday, I promised, we would go to the mall or anyplace else she cared to go.

Well, it worked a treat, and A. quickly packed her stuff for Slumber Party 2008.

(There will apparently also be Slumber Party 2009, as A.'s little sister S. promised not to get jealous that A. was allowed to spend the night with Miss Kelly, etc., as long as she could spend the night with Miss Kelly by herself on her birthday. What can I say? I'm popular.)

We got back to my place, and the cat boxes. Were NOT. Clean. Whatsoever. The whole joint smelled like poop, and I had to scoop the boxes with A. watching. Fortunately, she didn't seem to mind a bit, but this is what I get for not cleaning up before I go out. Lesson learned.

I have to say, though, as good as an evening with Miss Kelly's undivided attention was for A., it was every bit as good for me.

See, the thing is, unlike yours truly at 13, A. is definitely part of the In Crowd. She and her little girlfriends rule the 7th grade, whereas I, in sharp contrast, had to go to the middle school Valentine's dance with the son of my father's optometrist because no one else was going to ask me.

A. doesn't think there's anything pathetic or weird or countercultural about the fact that I'm single and have no children. As a matter of fact, she thinks it's freakin' awesome. I got to see my world through her eyes, and it was a little like having the ghosts of the popular girls from my junior-high days tell me that I did well, that I turned out OK. In A.'s view, I have unimaginable freedom - I can eat whatever I want! I can go any place I want to! I can sleep late, and no one's going to come in my room in the morning, jump on my head and demand that I play with them!

(Yet. I will have a boyfriend again someday, you know.)

She loved my pink appliances, my "HUGE!" closet, my pets and my car. I must have heard "Miss Kelly, your house is so clean" about 150 times.

"Well, lovebird, I don't have any little girls to mess it up!"

Sunday, I took A. to the Clinique counter at the mall for her first "real" makeover. The Clinique lady assumed I was A.'s mother and kept saying things to me like, "Well, Mom, you can help her practice with eyeliner at home." A. and I were greatly amused by this and didn't correct her.

As we walked away from the counter, I said to A., "Aw, lovebird, she thinks I'm your mommy!"

"I know!" A. said, laughing. "You're too young to be a mom!"

God bless your anachronistic little heart, A.

(Please note: I am barely a year younger than the child's mother. Perhaps she meant "too immature" rather than "too young.")

It was a perfect girls' weekend in every way. We talked about boys and college and cars and apartments and high school and makeup, and I hope I had a small part in ensuring that A. had a 13th birthday that she'll remember for a long, long time.

My favorite part, though, was this:

After Mass, we went to Sonic to grab some lunch. We ate in the car, of course, with the windows rolled down so we could enjoy the gorgeous weather (I *heart* Louisiana in October). As A. munched her popcorn chicken, she went quiet for a few moments.

"MISS KELLY!" she said suddenly.

"What is it, lovebird?"

"I just remembered something!"

"What?"

"When I'm 20, you'll only be 38. We'll be practically the same age!" she said.

Damn right, lovebird. DAMN RIGHT.



Your loved
Miss Kelly