>I received this email about an ago at work from our consultants to help them prepare for a retreat:

To help us, we would appreciate it if you would take time to answer as many of the questions below as possible. Please be candid, be you, and be prepared to have some of this information shared publicly at the retreat.

To proceed, simply hit “reply” to [consultant’s name] and then type in your responses to the following items and “send” your response back to me. Deadline: July 7th.

Wow, good thing we pay consultants gobs of money for their guidance. It’s not like I knew how to reply to emails in the 12 years since I began eagerly taking advantage of the internet as a communication tool. Really, who knew that getting a response back to the sender merely required hitting “reply” and “send.” Craziness!

Of course, the questions that they want me to answer bring up some issues as well. Choice selections include:

2. What is the most dangerous thing you’ve ever done?
5. What is a hidden talent you possess that most people don’t know about?
6. What’s one of the funniest things you’ve ever done?
9. What is a special interest/passion of yours that could be useful at [work]?
10. What’s your favorite thing to do on the weekend?
12. What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?
17. What skill do you have that never gets used at work?
19. Do you have any hobbies? What are they?
23. What special skill/interest/ability of yours contributed in a meaningful way to a project/program or new initiative during the past year?
24. Did you accomplish something in the past year that you never thought possible (i.e. acquired a new skill, created a new process or program, etc.)? What was it?

You can see from this why I am always of the verge of killing someone. I am extremely tempted to answer “suck dick” to each of these questions. They want to know the real me, right? Ha ha ha. Yes, it is a good thing I am moving into part-time employment.

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>Since eight years of “do-gooding” work have actively driven me to the point of such constant frustration that I actually asked my boss before I went to a meeting if there was money in the budget to bail me out of jail if I killed someone at it(answer: No), I have made the wise but still sort of sad decision to slowly step (Why is it that trying to help kids leads one to criminal insanity?)

I want to write more. Although practically no one reads CUSS (and a big hearty thanks to those of you “special people” who do – yesterday I had an all time high of 96 hits, and only about half were looking for porn! Wooo hooo!), it makes me happy to write on it. And I like writing for BlogHer. (I’m currently a contributing editor for Feminism & Gender. Hurray! List your awesome feminist blog on the blogroll, and I’ll write you up there.) Plus, I have been playing around with a book about unusual things to do and see in NYC that I really want to finish, even if it never gets published. And I have a screwed up memoir/essay book thing that I entered into the The Memoirists Collective contest (join the Collective and vote for me on July 12 and I will love you forever, not that I already don’t) and will polish up. Just because I am totally unqualified to pursue this path and also get lonely spending a lot of time alone does not mean I will not try. I’m going for my dreams and all that shit. Fuck yeah!

*Side note: This seemed to be a big catch phrase in the late ’80s. There were all these little goverment-issue programs that my school had that talked about how you should not fuck up and do drugs or get knocked up and shit. All these kids would talk about how their future was so bright, they had to wear shades. I swear that there was even an educational flick called My Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades that featured “cool” kids and all.

Plus the ’80s is the era of the Coreys, in which Corey Haim wore his sunglasses at night in the vampire movie Lost Boys that I have still never seen the beginning of, despite seeing about 100 times on cable. Anyway, Corey gets arrested for something and the police ask him what the fuck he is doing wearing sunglasses at night and he says something about being so cool he needs to wear them all the time. Maybe this was Corey Hart in License to Drive, a movie that I thought was gut-bustingly hilarious when I was 11. At any rate, Corey Hart re-recorded the song “Sunglasses at Night,” which was about wearing sunglasses at night.

Man, those were the days. And, insomnia sucks, but that is another story…

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>1. Even while standing still on the subway platform, I swear I can feel the thick, hot air clogging my pores.

2. The neighborhood sex shop (my new obsession) changes the mannequin in the window into a new sexy outfit every week or so. Such attention to detail, as if it were a boutique showing off the latest designer item, is very impressive, isn’t it?

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>Some time ago, Husband read an article about a man who suffered serious burns on his penis because he was using his laptop while on the toilet. It’s a long story why I started thinking about this, but it did suddenly occur to me that the man must have been looking at porn and jerking off while sitting on the porcelain throne. Otherwise, I cannot imagine how his penis got near the laptop. If he was just taking a shit and using his laptop like a normal person, I would think that his dick would be tucked away between his legs. This is mere speculation, though, since I do not have a dick and am thus not quite sure where it would go while one drops the kids off at the pool. Maybe the proper place for one’s penis while crapping is flopped on top of one’s legs, which would explain the proximity to the laptop and hence the burn. Any expert advice out there?

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>Many moons ago, I wrote about the time a Playboy photographer took my picture. (Quick recap: The NARAL Teen Advisory Group, of which yours truly was a very proud member, got together to make a calendar to raise money for NARAL’s policy initiatives concerning teen girls. The nice lady who ran the group, cleverly also named Suzanne, had a boyfriend who was a photographer for Playboy. He came and took our mug shots for the calendar.) On that post, I included a censored picture of myself holding a fistful o’ condoms while smiling innocently and wearing my hair cute pigtails. I am going to undo a wrong.

I have revealed (chortle, chortle) myself anyway on this site recently, so I an uncensoring that picture from the calendar. Cute, no?Now that I am looking at it again, I do find my appearance to be a bit on the busty side. Leave it to the ol’ Playboy photographer to find a way to make an innocent youth look semi-smarmy. On the other hand, it would have looked way worse had the picture been taken a few years later. I accidentally shrunk the dress in the dryer (it was dry clean only), and man did I bust out of it after that. It would fit nicely now, though. Oh well.

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>Operation Rescue (now known as Operation Save America) is laying siege to the only sole abortion clinic in the entire state of Mississippi in July.* If their digusting name change is not enough to make bile rise in the back of your throat, I spent a few minutes perusing their website and found out that they are calling this “the Gentle Revolution.” I checked the dictionary, and not one of their hateful, forceful actions ever matched the definition of “gentle.”

Also, I know this is not funny, but a June 22 post says, “It appears that the denizens from hell are quite concerned about Christians coming out of the closet as far as the abortion issue is concerned.” Nothing makes me more delighted than being referred to as a “denizen from hell” by religious bigots intent on forcing me to convert to their religion. The rest of the information on the Operation Save America website is terrifying. One of the pictures on the site shows a girl holding a sign calling RU-486 “Hitler in a Pill.” As the anonymous June 22 writer said,

No Exception
No Compromise
No Apology

You cannot reason with psychopaths like that. I can point out that if they are so upset about killing people, they should be agitating their friend King George to save people in Darfur, they’d just stare at me like I was bringing a message directly from Satan. Nope, they have no interest in saving actual independent, breathing, thinking, feeling lives, especially ones in Africa. (I guess their new name makes a lot more sense than I originally thought.)Remember, a big tactic of the Catholic church and other fundamentalist religious institutions in the not so distant past was to torture and kill people to save their souls, so this is nothing new to them. No means are too low for them to “help” people who don’t want it.

Which of you other “denizens from hell” can I sign up with me to lay siege to the HQ of Operation Save America or to any church that sends people to badger and harrass people? How would they like it when they are prevented from exercising their right to go to work or to get their religious brainwashing? I suspect they would not like it at all. (People never like it when their own tactics are used against them, and then bitch and whine and act like victims.) We can call the action “Operation Save America from Operation Save America.”

*FYI – Frontline has an amazing program on this clinic, which aired last November, but can be seen on the web here.)
**Updated on June 29: Steve (see comments) pointed out that Mississippi, where Jackson and the siege are located, is in fact, MS. MI is Michigan. Man, I used to know that kind of shit. Old age, my friends, hits hard.

If you want to do something to really save America, the National Organization for Woman (NOW) is collecting funds specifically to protect women who have no choice but to enter the clinic that week under the hostile and violent conditions imposed by mentally ill people who think they are taking on the work of Jesus. Donate here.

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>Recently one of my friends investigated the Today Sponge as a birth control option. She had been persuaded by two women she trusted, Elaine on Seinfeld and her former boss, that the sponge was the most rockin’ awesome birth control out there. She purchased it, read the directions, and put it in. That is when she discovered that her sources had no idea what they were talking about.

“I’m totally comfortable inserting things in my body, but I felt like I was stuffing a balloon inside me,” she confessed. “Although to be fair, a balloon is not wet and heavy. You have to get the sponge wet and sudsy before you put it in…”

I love my friends. What would I do without them? I’d never learn any of this important stuff. You are the best.

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>Theo put on a costume to celebrate because today is my big B’s birthday. (Big B is Steph; little B is me. We started calling each other B because it took too much effort to continue referring to each other as “beeeyotch,” which we started calling each other when plain old “bitch” got too boring.) Big B is 31 today. Good Christ, that is old. I can’t believe I have such a hag as one of my best friends. Oh well. Shit happens. I can’t wait to give B her special birthday stamps that Husband and I snapped up for her in the British Virgin Islands. I also snagged a special book for her at a street fair. Buzz buzz!

June 27 update: I forgot to mention the most important part: one of the special things about Steph’s b-day is the escalating card competition between my mom and Steph over who can send a grosser or more offensive card. One point to my mom for sending Steph a brithday card with a picture of a urinating cat with his leg stuck in the air that says something about losing flexibility as one ages. Steph loved it, of course. Way to raise the bar, Mom!

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>My new online pal (although that sounds creepy, it is not meant to be) Sister Wolf has an excellent theory on the shaved snatch issue. She takes it one step further and integrates the social pressure on women to shave their pits (something I only comply with if I am wearing sleeveless shirts to work). I cannot say it any better than she already did, so I will just quote her.

Men love our bodies, but they must first overcome their fear and loathing of our V area, which in the adult woman is covered with hair. Eeow, get rid of that hair, it’s too scary! If we wax it off for you, though, it will look like a child’s V area, which is harmless. Not only that, a waxed V area is naked in a sad, vulnerable kind of way, like a sheared lamb. If you disagree with this last point, on aesthetic grounds, okay (you pederast!) but before I would wax my precious V, I would have to say: “First wax your balls, pal and then we’ll talk about it.” Finally, there is female armpit hair, the scariest sight you can impose upon any man in the Western hemisphere. If you’re a woman with unshaven armpits, you are a woman with THREE PUSSIES, and few men are up to that challenge. My husband however is one of them, I am happy to report. But the average man will react like a vampire faced with the sign of a cross.

I just love the bons mots Sister Wolf threw out there. The triangle of hair spots image I have in my head is just priceless. Maybe it is like the Bermuda triangle, where people have ventured and disappeared among the islands of pleasure in the Caribbean Sea. (Speaking of triangles, Husband has a triangle theory regarding relationships, which I shall share this week.)

I also appreciate the Sister’s ball waxing bargain, although as both Impossible Jane and The Explorer (who sent me a slate.com or salon.com article eons ago about “smoothies,” ie – hetero men with no body hair) point out, men are falling prey to the hairless sickness. It used to be safe to offer to wax the poon if your guy would wax his scrotum, but these days you never know if they will take you up on it. I don’t want to be forced to live up to my end of the deal.

Male or female, just leave all the hair in place or pubic lice will become homeless. I don’t think I could handle an epidemic of homeless crabs at this point in my life.

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>I read a hilarious list on Red Stapler of 10 things that piss Suebob off. Not to ruin it (you must read it yourself, it is great), but #10 is people who wear designer clothes and think they are god’s gift to earth as a result. (I’m paraphrasing here.)

Anyway, Suebob’s list brought on a flashback to my days of youth and stupidity. (As opposed to now, my days of hagdoom and stupidity.) Back when I was in 6th grade, my family could not afford designer anything, but I lived in a very affluent area where anyone who did not wear designer stuff stuck out like the Jewish white trash I was (and still am). This was awful to a girl going through puberty who wanted to be accepted and liked (as opposed to now, when I am not going through puberty, but still seek approval and affection from others, albeit in strange ways), and I hoped and hoped that one day Guess? jeans would be on sale or marked down enough that I could have a pair.

One day, during a back-to-school clothes shopping trip to Whiz Kids in Highland Park, I found the mythical Guess? jeans for $27. I begged my mom to stretch a bit so I could have a pair, and she agreed. Every time I wore the damn things, I made sure my pocket with the symbol was showing. Then one day I had an argument with a classmate and she rudely asked why I thought I was so great (which, as a side note, was totally not true – I had terrible self-esteem), and before I could stop myself, I said, “Because I wear Guess jeans.” Immediately, I was mortified to have said such a thing. Years later, I found out the brothers behind Guess? were horrible sexist pigs when I read Backlash, the book that made me the raging feminist I am today, and to this day, they are second most expensive pair of jeans I ever owned. (The most expensive pair being Levi’s 518 Super Low Rise jeans that I bought for $29, but truly they are an amazing fit.)

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