Little Birdie

I love MySpace. It’s completely addictive. You can get lost in MySpace. You can get found. People that you haven’t seen for years and years that you barely ever knew are now your “friends”. You can be friends with Mary J. Blige. Where else can you be friends with Mary J?!?

I use MySpace mostly to reflect my latest mood. If you check out my current layout, it’s rather dark. My last layout was bright and in-your-face. I love how there’s ALREADY a layout somewhere on the wide web that expresses exactly the way I feel. Someone even made an icon collage that is the essence of my interests and feelings. How did they know?!?

I’ll tell you how. People are predictable. I mean, people generally fit into 1 of 9 different personalities. NINE. There are more than 6 billion people in the world, and they can be grouped one of nine ways. Of course complexity exists within a personality type: each has 3 subcategories, and some people exhibit strong characteristics of 2 personalities. Like, I am a 4 (emo), but I have a 5-wing, meaning I am also highly analytical. So I can analyze my mood swings almost as quickly as they happen. It’s very entertaining.

…And, after an hour of fruitlessly trying to end my blog with a witty vid from YouTube, and failing miserably, I bid you all good night.

I watched the Truman Show again last night. There are a thousand things to blog about this movie, but I’ll focus on the least-mentioned: product placement. “Everything on the show is for sale. The actor’s wardrobe, food products, to the very homes they live in.” (Christof) “And of course all of it is available in the Truman catalogue.” (interviewer)

Look around your desk right now, or wherever you do your blog reading. What’s there? I have:

• a Wendy’s Biggie cup with Minute Maid Lite Lemonade in it
• a Scotch brand tape dispenser
• a Kleenex brand tissue box
• Simply Basic (Wal-Mart) brand scented lotion
• Tatung brand monitor (what the crap is Tatung?)
• Intrex brand computer (don’t ask)
• Dell brand speakers
• a Boston brand stapler (because someone stole my red Swingline)
• a Sharpie
• a Glad brand container with Food Lion-bought white grapes in it (along with the grape bag that warns us away from suffocating our children and little penguins with it).

Those are just the items that are labeled in such a way that I can see the brand from where I’m sitting.

Brands really win when they become colloquialisms. You don’t research something; you google it. I almost said I had a Kleenex brand box of kleenex and a Glad brand tupperware container. And Sharpie…everyone knows that Sharpie is the thing that if your kid gets a hold of it, your walls are screwed. And everything else that gets in its path.

There’s no doubt about it: we are all brainwashed. We believe what the television tells us about how great something is, and we fail to research it. I might as well have said I endorse child slavery, solid waste pollution, terrorism, air pollution, deforestation, global warming (ack! global warming! we’re all gonna diiiiieeeee!!!!), inflation, embezzling, oil spills, species extinction, animal torture, and every other inconceivable evil on the planet.

The moral of this blog is, vote with your dollar. Buy local. Do your homework. Some products really are better than others. Figure out what’s important to you and stick to it. We can’t fix everything, and if we boycotted something every time the parent corporation screwed up, we’d all starve, freeze, AND suffocate to death. But we can have a voice. We can influence corporate America.

Put your money where your heart is.

You Are 75% Burned Out

You are very burned out.You need a huge break from your responsibilities, starting as soon as possible. And you need this time to reevaluate what you really want out of your life. Because you’re working hard and going no where… and that would burn anyone out!

Are You Burned Out?

I have come to learn that love (that is, infatuation or lust) and stress are physiological twins. Let’s examine some of the similarities:

• Racing heart
• Loss of appetite
• Giddy fatigue
• Distracted thoughts/inability to focus on a single task
• Emotions run high
• Insecurities emerge in force
• If you don’t end up in bed you REALLY WANT TO.

I qualify the term “love” here because I have learned, after more than 6 years of marriage and 29 years of other close relationships, that real love is entirely different from that kind of sweaty-palmed feeling you get when you see Johnny Depp dressed up like Captain Jack Sparrow. Or the initial stages of dating, when all you do is lie for 3-6 months so your prospective life mate won’t see who you really are and run screaming.

Love is hard. Love is dying to yourself. Love is submitting to each other. Love is not a doormat, but neither is it domineering. Love is the most wonderful and most painful thing we do. Read I Corinthians. It sums it up nicely.

“So tweh-zha your wuv….”

“Skip to the end!”

“Have you tha wing?”

Free ice cream for anyone who can name that movie

Heavy heart…Heavy thoughts…Heavy eyes.
My soul is sad…My body aches…My spirit cries.

Grief floods me. Laziness pervades me. Pride imbues me.
Life, come rescue me. Hope, breathe into me. Truth, come infuse me.

The Lord of light is breaking me down,
humbling me before His crown.

My life is hinged on His grace.
I long for the day I see His face.

This sinful life I will leave behind
My carnal nature…flatlined.

There once was a 2X belly
That shook like a bowl full of jelly
But now there’s less there
And I’m walking on air
As I snack on fat-free turkey from the deli.

I am an intermittent insomniac. Here it is, 12:30 in the morning, and I’m not sleeping. Five dollars says it’ll be 3 a.m. before I get to sleep. It’s happened often enough so that I can pinpoint the various causes:

1. I am repressing anxiety about something that I don’t feel like analyzing and resolving
2. I have had caffeine after lunch time.
3. God is calling me to intercede for something or someone
4. I literally think I’m missing out on something and I don’t want to fall asleep because I’ll miss it for sure

Tonight, I am putting my money on numbers 1 and 2. I drank a 32 oz full-flave Coke because man, I wanted one so bad and it was 95 degrees out and what goes down more smoothly than a Coke? Problem was, it was 9:00. PM. Alas. I was working my tail off and I needed refreshment. Thank you Marty, you are my hero for bringing me that Coke. I don’t even regret it.

Also, I am stressed about various things; work, my relationship with God, etc. All things under my control, yet I am so unwilling to work on them. So, I stay up and watch loser tv instead.

Number four doesn’t happen much anymore, but sometimes I feel like if I close my eyes, I will miss something important. Like, something big is going on and I will miss it. I think it’s just a manifestation of a deeper fear, that I am somehow missing out on life. Maye it’s a four thing, I don’t know.

As for #3, I used to mind God waking me up in the middle of the night to pray, or keeping me up, but now I don’t mind so much. I can tell when it’s Him and I’m honored he would wake me. Of course, my humanity often rears its ugly head and I complain, but I’ve seen prayer work in too many circumstances to ignore its importance. It’s such a mystery to me how God can be sovereign and still hear and answer our prayers. I guess I won’t understand it until I get to heaven. And no, it’s not a cop out because I still search the scriptures for more understanding on the topic and wrestle with it all the time. Just because we don’t understand something doesn’t give us an excuse to quit searching. It should actually encourage us. However, I like how Ben once put it, and I paraphrase, that God requires us to fill the gap between human understanding and supernatural answers with faith. Until we get the answer, we must walk by faith.

Well, happy sleeping everyone. I might end up losing that $5 after all

The almighty Viking converted my site to Wordpress. Thanks li’l bro

Wordpress is the awesomest.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye. –Miss Piggy.

This quote was on my Quote of the Day and I think its hilarious. “If you don’t think I’m pretty I’ll punch you in the face!” Classic feminism, don’t you think?

Feminism has been heavy on my mind lately. I hate it, and I hate what it has done to women. Empowering? I think not. We are now afraid to be beautiful but at the same time long for everyone to notice our beauty. We flaunt our bodies, and in the same breath we criticize or even sue anyone who dares to comment, whether it’s a stare or a cat call, or someone with the wisdom to tell people to cover up. “I can wear next to nothing if I want and don’t you dare say anything about it, you fascist pig!”

I’m all for equal rights, equal pay for equal work, and our right as humans to be respected by our fellow men (and women). And to be fair, these attitudes of women, and toward women, have been around since Eve ate the apple. And I can’t blame feminism for everything. I also can’t entirely blame the fashion industry, television ads, or the weight loss industry. But they sure don’t help matters.

Can you believe weight loss is an INDUSTRY?!? It even has a NAICS code.

And for the record, I am a card-carrying member of the weight loss industry. $40 a month will guarantee you a thin and healthy body. [disclaimer: $40 a month will not actually guarantee you a thin and healthy body.] Lose weight now, ask me how! But the sad reality is, I need to lose weight and I can’t do it on my own, and this is America, where anyone can make money off of anything.

Anyway. I’ll be posting more on this topic but I just had to get this rant out of the way. Thanks for shopping at littlebirdieopinions.com.

You know how sometimes you try to use sarcasm to be funny and it comes out all wrong?

I do that a lot, and it especially doesn’t translate well on the web. I feel my last post had a little too much sarcasm in there and it muddied up the parts where I was trying to be sincere.

I really did have a great vacation. I really do, believe it or not, love going to the mountains when it rains. It wouldn’t be the mountains otherwise. And losing my keys wasn’t that bad.

I wouldn’t normally post a follow-up like this but sometimes my sarcastic nature gets on even my own nerves. Anybody else ever get on their own nerves?!? Is it hard to get off? What happens if you get all twisted up and stuck?

These are the things you can ponder on your cell phone when you don’t have to worry about how many minutes you’re using.