I know that I put forth the idea that I am a big partier, and I’m always out having fun. That is a misconception. I am at the home of a dear friend, watching the Bears pretend to lose (a girl can dream), as my children and husband and friends play Yatzee in the other room. Yes, I’m drinking Grey Goose, yes we’re doing shots, and yes, we’ll either sleep here or take a cab home. But I’m not in the bathroom of a bar making out with a 22-year-old in between snorting lines of cocaine, so I’m totally ahead of the game.

I love New Year’s Eve. I always hated it when I was younger because I always got in trouble. Since I turned around 22, I stopped going out on NYE, and would sit in my apartment with a case of beer, my cats, and the television. Then I got married and had children, and I realized that it’s fun to sit around in my house with a bottle of Grey Goose, my dogs and my cat, and my children, and my husband, and some friends, and the television. It’s the New Year dawning, people. If I can end 2007 with the wonderful people I’m beginning it with, I’m a winner. That’s all I ask.

Time, and life, is weird. I’m not really sure what to make of it. Every year, seriously, has been better than the one before. So, by the time I’m dead, things should be rockin’.

I’ll be back.

Update, 10:20 p.m.–Okay, so the Packers beat the Bears on NYE. Whatever. Obviously, there was some convoluted and complicated reason for this that idiots don’t understand.

I will say, even as a hard-core Bears fan, that Brett Favre is (possibly was, notice how he “will talk in a few weeks”) an amazing player. A real football player, and I had a little talk with my son about playing the game with intelligence and heart, and I hope he doesn’t write me off as being drunk.

Back later.

Update: yeah. odkay. i broke off the front of Eric’s cabinet/drawer fajke frotnt thing. sorry. i’m making pigs in a blanket.

and we’re rocking out to AC/DC and I think I want to do apnother shot, (stop that, Grace, I’m trying to type)polp

of rumplem8i9nze

’1 \\

peppermint

blame the 11 year old tryiungt trying to mess with my typing. poooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

pooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooppppppppppp hahahahahahaha shes gone and I can mess up her stupid thingy. Hehehehohohohahaha I got to taste some peppermint aloholic thingy. I tasted WEIRD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I the eleven year old think I deserve a better name than the eleven year old but I better go before i die of messing this up

Her name is Grace.  She’s 11.  She’s way cool, man.yah mon

I like it.

I also like pizza, but I don’t care if I get it from Lou Malnati’s or Pizza Hut, or Due’s, or I stick some frozen crap in the oven.

It’s still a plank of dough with sauce and cheese on it.

It’s the sauce and cheese that matters.  Actually, it’s just the sauce.  Mozzarella is pretty much still mozzarella, when you’re talking pizza.  It’s the sauce that makes it.

And my CONTENT is the SAUCE.  Granted, I haven’t written any sauce worth reading in months, but whatever.  I don’t care about the cheese.  I care about the sauce.

The crust, however, is a different story.  And while you might argue that the template is the crust, holding it all together, I beg to differ.  Actually, I beg to be in the right frame of mind to think up some clever way to differ with you on that.  Suffice it to say (because I said so) that this crust is holding this cheese and sauce together just fine.

Did I just compare my writing to pizza sauce?  Should I just start posting photographs of naked breasts?

Could this happen to your child? Your brother?  Your friend?

Genarlow Wilson sits in prison despite being a good son, a good athlete and high school student with a 3.2 GPA. He never had any criminal trouble.  On the day he was to sit for the SAT, at seventeen years old, his life changed forever.  He was arrested.  In Douglas County he was accused of inappropriate sexual acts at a News Year’s Eve party.  A jury acquitted him of the allegation of Rape but convicted him of Aggravated Child Molestation for a voluntary act of oral sex with another teenager.  He was 17, and she was 15.

Along with the label “child molester” which will require him throughout his life to be on a sexual offender registry, Genarlow received a sentence of eleven years — a mandatory 10 years in prison and 1 year on probation.

On July 1st, the new Romeo and Juliet law went into effect in Georgia for any other teen that engages in consensual sexual acts. That change in the law means that no teen prosecuted for consensual oral sex could receive more than a 12 months sentence or be required to register as a sex offender.

Had this law been in effect when Genarlow Wilson was arrested, or had been done after the Marcus Dixon case, Genarlow would not now be in jail.

Genarlow and his mother are overjoyed that no one else in Georgia will have to know their pain. In the meantime, however, the legal fight goes on for Genarlow Wilson.

Genarlow has been incarcerated since February 25, 2005.

This case is fucked up.  Go check out the official site. And there’s a Newsvine group dedicated to assembling information about it:  http://wilsonpetition.newsvine.com/.  You may have to join Newsvine to access it.  I don’t know if invites are still required.  If so, let me know, I’ll give you one.

The synopsis?  This kid was convicted based on faulty law, law which has since been changed.

December 18, 2006
The Georgia Supreme Court rejected Genarlow Wilson’s Motion to Reconsider

In the opinion Justice Hunstein wrote for the Supreme Court:  “….while I am very sympathetic to Wilson’s argument regarding the injustice of sentencing this promising young man with good grades and no criminal history to ten years in prison without parole and a lifetime registration as a sexual offender because he engaged in consensual oral sex with a 15 year old victim only two years his junior, this Court is bound by the Legislature’s determination that young persons in Wilson’s situation are not entitled to the misdemeanor treatment now accorded to identical behavior under OCGA 16-6-4”  Chief Justice Sears dissented from the opinion.

Totally absurd.  Take a moment and sign the petition.  Write up a little blog post about it.  You all know I REALLY hate child molesters.  This kid is not a child molester.

Any of my long-time readers will roll their eyes at this post, because they’ve read a version of it many times before.  I have a template-changing addiction.  I am fully able to admit that, and for a while, I thought it was a bad thing, because people won’t recognize my blog when they see it.  But that’s stupid.  Because they only see it if they’ve come here on purpose, and it says Viki Babbles at the top.  Plus, as I’ve said before, during those times when I am posting less frequently, the template changes serve to freshen things up a bit.  That is also stupid.  There’s no substitute for good content, I’m aware of that.  I just don’t care.

Recently, I became enamored of a blog called 101 Reasons to Stop Writing.   First off, it’s funny and witty and all that good stuff.  It’s also very well written.  And, at first, I thought silly things like “Fuck you, telling me I should stop writing, who the hell are you?”  And then, I read more of it, and I thought, “Yeah, all those people who suck should really stop writing, but not me, of course.”  And then, I read still more, and I thought, “Sometimes I do suck.  I should stop writing.”  And then, I berated some of my students for using the phrase “and then” more than once in a piece of writing, because it is just about the laziest and most unimaginative transition EVAH.  What I should stop doing is being lazy about writing; not just blog posts (although I highly doubt I’ll ever stop being lazy about writing them, because I kind of think there’s a beauty to the dashed-off babble, plus that’s the whole POINT to this blog anyway), but about my writing in general.  Because I am lazy about it.  Not as lazy as I could be, but lazier than I should be.

The point is, the internet is chock-full of crappy writing.  It’s everywhere.  It’s annoying.  My brain is too small to even comprehend the vastness of the crappiness of the internet.  I cannot comprehend unlimited, unending space.  Full of crap.  It gives me a headache.  And I don’t want to be a contributor to the crap.

That said, you are probably expecting to read some kind of promise, or maybe a New Year’s Resolution, or a commitment that I hereby swear to post something well-written, well-thought-out and wonderful every day of the next year.  That would be stupid.  How long have you been reading this blog anyway?  Five minutes?  You know me better than that.  I will, however, promise to think about it.

Oh, and, what do you think of the template?  I had one similar to it a long time ago, but this one is jazzed up a little.  I have a preference for clean, white space.  After all, it is the content that is important here, right?  And navigation should be easy as well, because I know how often people spend hours on my site, clicking around, reading the archives, etc.  It’s almost never, actually, but if someone were to want to do that, I would want it to be easy for them.

I’ll be back, maybe this evening, with a review of a FANTASTIC book I got for Christmas.  I spent much of Christmas Eve reading passages of it aloud and laughing hysterically while my in-laws laughed at me for finding it so amusing.

Merry Christmas, my friends.

I am always awed by the generosity of the people I love. This year, I got a lot of wonderful things. And, among them, was a CD by a man named M. Ward, of whom I have never heard, and who I now love. I wish I could figure out how to post the video that comes on the CD of this song, but the best I can do right now is toss you a live version from YouTube. Enjoy. And I hope the holidays brought to you what they brought me, which is a sense of being thought of, a sense of being considered thoughtfully. I love Christmas.

Chinese Translation

I screwed something up by messing with shit in my sidebar, and I don’t know how to fix it, nor do I feel like trying right now.  So, deal with this for now.

Oh, and Merry Christmas!

I’ve been baking cookies for HOURS.  And I’m not done yet.  My back hurts from standing for so long.  The only thing that is making it okay is the bottle of wine I’ve been plowing through.  I will, however, fully regret this bottle of wine in the morning, when I’m standing in front of 13 eighth graders, trying to run them through a writing workshop.  I’m bringing them some of the cookies, however, and I’m hoping that bribery will work.  “If you’re a good bunch of boys and girls, I’ll give you cookies!”  I kinda doubt it, though.  They’d rather torture me, I’m fairly certain.

I haven’t posted in a long time.  My classes are over for the semester, but I still have a little work left over, and blah blah, long list of excuses you’ve heard a bunch of times before.  I’m busy.  If you’re so desperate to read what I’ve written, take a little trip through the archives.  Read something from way back when, when I used to be entertaining.

Go Bears!  Please.  I made what seemed, at the time, to be a very wise bet, but I should have known better.  What’s up with this Tank Johnson fool?  Idiot.  Gangster thug.   If the Bears don’t drag their asses to the Super Bowl, I’m going to be very angry, and I’m going to blame Tank Johnson, just because I can, and I’m going to find him and bitch-slap him.  It’s not like anything will happen to me.  I mean, his bodyguard is dead, for God’s sake.

Oh, that was cold.  Sorry.

Soon, I will be done Christmas shopping.  Or Christmas will arrive and some people won’t get presents and then it’ll be over and too late for presents, and I’ll be off the hook.  And then, I will post more.  The kids will be home for their holiday break.  I won’t have anything to do aside from work on my thesis, so posting to my blog will be an excellent way for me to procrastinate doing that.

Anyway, Happy Holidays, everyone.  Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Kicky Kwanza, auf wiedersehen, Good Night. Adieu, adieu, to you and you and you.

Where’s my wine?

That’s right. No snow day for the kids. But it was a snow day for me! By 7 a.m., I was perusing the various emergency closing websites and listening to WGN, to no avail. My kids had school. Heh. I mean, of course, for their sakes, I did kinda wish that school had been canceled, if only so I could say, “PANCAKES FOR EVERYBODY!!!!” and dig out the chocolate chips from their hiding place and make a grand batch of chocolate chip pancakes and some sausage (they won’t know it’s veggie sausage if I hide the box, I was thinking), and then dig out the snow pants and gloves and shit and go outside to start a fort. Because today’s snow? Was PERFECT PACKING SNOW. And if you are still young enough, either in years or in heart, to remember standing in your front yard in your snow pants and coat and boots, legs spread apart as you lean forward to gather a couple of handfuls of snow together to gauge the packi-ness, and discover that that snow had just the perfect blend of moisture and ice to mold together in a way that makes for perfect snow-fort molding (and perfect really-hard snowballs for that crabby brat down the street’s back, sending her whining and crying into her house), well, then, god bless your pretty little heart. Because before my husband left for work, he blew the snow off the walks, came in to grab the lunch I had lovingly (;)) made for him, and a mug of coffee, and said, “That is some heavy snow.” And I thought, Wouldn’t it be great if school gets canceled and the kids and I can pull on our cold-weather gear after a breakfast of chocolate chip pancakes and (veggie) sausage and go outside and build an awesome snow fort? Then I thought, I’ll dig out the food coloring and a couple of spray bottles, and we’ll spray the fort some fun colors, and it’ll be awesome, and we’ll be all hot on the inside, and our fingers and toes will be frozen, but we won’t care because we’ll be having a freakin’ blast playing out in the snow together, and at some point, I’ll stop and wipe frozen sweat from my brow and lift my face to the sky and open my mouth and catch a million snowflakes on my tongue, and my kids will follow suit and then we’ll look at each other and laugh in that wonderful brand of glee that is only available to children and their parents when their parents stop worrying about bullshit long enough to go outside and build a fucking fort.

However, school was not canceled.

So, because I am a wonderful and dedicated parent, I made them go to school. I shouldn’t have. I should have said, You know what? Fuck it. Fuck school. It’s friday. Let’s make some pancakes and hot chocolate and go outside and have some fucking fun. Goddamnit.

But I didn’t, and I’ve regretted it all day. Really. After they left, I putzed around. I did some laundry. I cleaned the bathrooms. But every few minutes, I gazed outside at that perfect packing snow and I thought, Damn, I wish I had someone to play with.

Two days ago, it was 65 degrees. I thought, what if winter never comes? You’d think I’d just moved here, rather than living in this great state of Chicago for the last 37 years. And yes, I meant STATE.

The thing is, we love this shit, we Chicagoans. We love the first crappy forecast of the year, so we can stand around and debate whether or not the forecaster knows what the hell he’s talking about. We can say things like “It’s a slow news day. We’ll get flurries at best.” The fact is, we WANT the snow. We want a rehash of the blizzard of ’78. We want to be completely immobilized by snow. We wish that snowblowers and even, for god’s sake, SHOVELS, had never been invented. Snow plows? What are they? We want 28 inches of snow to fall within a 20 hour period, and we want to have a story to tell about it taking 8 hours for us to make it home from the city. And when we finally made it home, someone special to us had made our home cozy, and handed us a drink, and we planned, with our children, to make an incredible fort the next day. However, because snowblowers are so readily available and relatively inexpensive, and because local governments pay guys ridiculous amounts of money to keep the streets clear, we no longer have any excuses to make it to work/school/whatever. And that’s really annoying. We want it to be so bad that the school buses don’t bother showing up. We want it to be so bad, we have to stay home and play like kids.

I remember a snow day when I was a kid, I think it was during that crazy ’78 blizzard. My dad was out of town on a business trip, and in the years since, I’ve heard him tell a story of driving on a highway on his way through Indiana to Ohio, and getting off the road to get gas or coffee or whatever, and the snow blowing so thick and white, he got back on going the wrong way and drove for hours and ended up in Iowa. Or something like that. I remember literally shoveling a tunnel to the mailbox. I was ten-ish. It seemed like a tunnel. And there’s pictures of my brother and I hidden behind some bushes at the back of the house, and a HUGE drift had formed, and we used the air conditioner thing as a stove, and made meatloaves and bread out of snow, and held this all-day-long weird fantasy game of that being our snow-house. We made plates out of snow. We made everything we needed out of snow, and we played all damned day long, and when we came in, surely there was hot chocolate and cookies.

Is this post long enough? It’s snowy out. My kids are still young and beautiful and naive enough, and Chicago-bred enough, to think that when it snows, it’s Christmas.

So, happy season everybody. Whether or not you get snow where you are, take a minute to stand outside and look up at the sky and just be damned glad it’s still there. And if you do get snow? Toss on your snow pants and go outside and open your damned mouth and refuse to worry that the snowflakes might be slightly radioactive or poisonous. Build a fort. Throw snowballs at random cars and that cute girl down the street. It’s WINTER!!!!