Biggest Forehead

I'm not completely sure why, but I laughed for the longest time when I saw this. It's hilarious in an unhilarious kind of way, which is my favorite.



On a different note, I'm reading a book called Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. It's about Mormons and Mormon Fundamentalists and the likes. It's pretty much the most fascinating book I've read in a long time. It's gotten to the point where I had a dream last night about incestuous polygamists. Yikes.

But anyway, I highly reccomend Under the Banner of Heaven. Good book. Read it.

Trends, trends, trends...

Somebody asked me recently why I think Livestrong bracelets are stupid. I'm about to tell you, so listen (read) carefully.

I love Lance Armstrong. I think he's awesome. I always TiVo specials about him, I watch the Tour de France and root for him, yadda yadda. Just like everybody else, I think it's amazing how he overcame cancer and came back to win seven consecutive Tours. A lot of people admire Lance, especially athletes. He's a cool guy.

So in case you live on Mars, Lance is the one who started the whole Livestrong craze. And I call it a craze because that's exactly what it is. Everybody wears the yellow bracelet, which isn't a bad thing in theory - the Livestrong bracelet stands for the fight against cancer, which is definitely a good cause. Proceeds from the bracelets (and other Livestrong products) go to cancer research, and you never know if you're gonna be the next person depending on the funding of said research.

A year or so ago, I started seeing some people wearing these yellow bracelets, which at first didn't really strike me as odd until I realized that everybody and their mother's dog was suddenly wearing one. Once I figured that out, it took me a couple of days to catch a glimpse of what was written/engraved on the bracelet. ...Livestrong? So I asked somebody who was wearing one. "What's Livestrong?" Their reply: "Uhh.. living... strongly...?" Oh, right, because that makes sense. Who doesn't want to live strongly? So why would you make a bracelet craze for something so utterly not unique? I asked several other people, and their responses were pretty much the same.

So I googled it. And it turns out that Livestrong wristbands represent unity in the battle against cancer and hope for all those who are living with cancer. Cool... if only the dude wearing the wristband knew that.

Different item, same principle: promise rings. It's a ring that girls (sometimes guys even) wear on their ring finger to symbolize that they're waiting until marriage to have sex. Mostly worn by Christians, but Christians aren't immune to the craze-following mindset.

Promise rings turned into a trend for a reason. They stood for something good, something pure, and people figured they could make some money off of a ring that says "True Love Waits" on it. It started as something that you wore because you believed strongly in what it represented, but then it became a trend and it lost something. Girls started wearing them because their friends were wearing them, and soon enough Christian girls were more or less expected to wear a promise ring.

I wear a ring on my left ring finger that says "Faith" on it; I can't even tell you how many times people have said, "Is that your promise ring?" No, it's my middle name. I don't wear a promise ring. "Why?" Because promise rings are next to meaningless now that everybody wears them. I don't even want to think about how many of my promise-ring-friends wound up not keeping that promise.

WWJD bracelets. Same principle as the promise ring, except that the WWJD craze from the late 90's has passed now. That's why I wear a WWJD bracelet, because it stands for something good and it has regained its dignity, per se, now that it's not a trend anymore. The only people who wear them nowadays are people who truly want to live their lives in a Godly way, as a living testament to Him.

My conclusion? People are like sheep. They follow each other, even if they have no idea what they're doing. They want to blend in, because they think they'll be accepted if they do. Maybe they will be, but I wouldn't count on it. Think for yourself, and if you wear a Livestrong bracelet, make sure you know what it means besides "Living.. uhh... strong."

Assisted Suicide

Here in good ole' North America, committing or attemting to commit suicide is no longer a criminal offense. However, helping a person commit suicide is a criminal act... unless you're a physician in Oregon. There's been a lot of debate recently about Physician Assisted Suicide, or Death with Dignity if that's what you want to call it. Of course, like most things, I have an opinion on the matter.

Let me start by saying that assisted suicide is a very slippery issue and both sides have some very valid points. We all know that I'm pro-life when it comes to unborn babies, mainly because abortion is murder. Ronald Reagan once said, "Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born." Of course the question is, once a person has been born, where should the next line be drawn with regards to their own personal will to live/die?

In case you wonder where I'm coming from, and why I have such strong opinions on issues such as these, here's a little background.

I'd say that I've seen my share of the world and real world issues in the short amount of time I've been on this earth. By the time I was 11 years old, I had lived in seven countries on four continents. I spoke two languages fluently, and I had lived through a civil war in Africa where my family lost everything and we had to be evacuated from our house in a tank in the middle of the night. Before we were evacuated, among other things, a hand grenade was thrown just outside my bedroom window – it was defective and didn't go off, otherwise I wouldn't be alive to tell you about it. Just hours after our evacuation, rebels jumped the walls of our compound with machetes, looking for the white people so they could cut off our heads, literally. I then continued to live in Africa (in yet another country) until I was 17.

All this to say, I'm not stupid. I didn't grow up in podunk Eugene, where all the liberals are obsessed with diversity yet, oddly enough, they live in a town mostly populated by middle class white people. I've seen more war, famine, disease, poverty, not to mention diversity, than they'll ever see in their lifetime. That is, all of them combined.

Now, back to the issue at hand...

Throughout most of the history of mankind, people had no choice but to allow disease to take its course. You got cancer, you died of it. End of story, no pun intended. You probably didn't even know you had cancer, you just knew that you were dying. However, modern medicine has come a long way in the last few decades. Not only can we diagnose sicknesses and diseases, we can also cure some of them. Cancer patients can go through chemotherapy and have a chance of overcoming the disease. However, some treatments only delay the inevitable, like with AIDS.

Some people, however, don't want to go through chemotherapy or whatever treatment options they have. Others have such slim chances of survival that treatment is a mere shot in the dark. Still others don't even have any viable treatment options. In the more severe cases, I can understand the lack of eagerness to undergo invasive surgeries or agonizing treatments such as chemo. Not to mention the financial burden of prolonged and potentially ineffective treatment.

To these people, I say, God bless you and your decision. Every person has the right to refuse treatment, just like every person has the right to sign a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate). However, when you decide to cut short the natural course of life, that's where I draw the line. You can refuse to let your doctor treat you but you can't ask your doctor to please kill you. Not in my book.

My general conclusion is this. I've seen firsthand people dying on the streets in third world countries. Never once did I think to myself, "Why am I carrying around a Bible, or anything else for that matter, when I could be toting a breifcase full of lethal injections?"

Eugene Drivers Suck

We all know that Eugene drivers are pretty much the worst drivers in the entire world.

They drive the exact speed limit, if not below – they're the people we vehemently call Speedlimiters. They take turns at about two miles per hour, while I'm sitting behind them being forced to shift into first gear so I can make it up a hill that I usually take in thrid gear. They drive their LAVs (Lesbian Assault Vehicles / Subaru Outbacks) like they're the coolest thing ever, with their outdated Kerry-Edwards bumper stickers that do nothing but scream "DEFEATED!!"

There's one Eugene-driver thing that ticks me off more than all of the others combined. Eugene drivers absolutely refuse to pull into the intersection when yielding to oncoming traffic in a left-turn lane. They don't understand that the intersection is there for a reason: for the first dude to pull out so the dude behind him can get his nose into the intersection, allowing at least two cars to get through while the light is green/yellow.

Allow me to illustrate.

There's this one intersection at Hilyard & 24th that can be especially annoying because there's a lot of traffic and it's hard to turn left in general. The kicker? On that corner is one of Eugene's most popular all-natural food stores. As a result, half the people using that particular left turn lane are burnt out hippies who lost at least half of their brain to weed and LSD in the 60's and 70's. They're not the brightest people in the world.

So yesterday, I was driving home from school and I pulled into the left turn lane just as the light was turning red, joyously thinking to myeslf, "Yesssss, there's only one car in front of me!" In time, the light turned green and, of course, the girl in front of me didn't pull out into the intersection. I was a little perturbed but hey, this is Eugene. So I sat patiently with my left foot slightly releasing the clutch so I could be fully prepared when the turning moment came. ...It didn't come. The light turned red and Airhead in front of me was still sitting there safely behind the crosswalk line as if we hadn't just sat through an entire light cycle.

We waited a few minutes, until our turn came around again. The car in front of me started inching forward and I thought to myself, "Woah, she's pulling out!!" But no. It was only a couple of inches. You can imagine what happened next, after she didn't pull out into the intersecton: the light turned red. Again. And again. By the fourth time, I was getting really pissed off and, trust me, she knew it. Mind you, this entire time there are cars piling up behind us so when the light turned green again, I started making huge motions for her to "PULL OUT" and guess what? She did. And guess what else? FOUR cars got through on that light after she finally moved her butt out into the intersection.

Needless to say, I didn't want to stare at her bumper for a second longer so I sped up and passed her. As I was passing her, I looked over at her with my best death glare only to find her boppin' along behind her steering wheel, probably thinking to herself, "Welp, that was fun!"

My general conclusion for the day: People are stupid. A person may (or may not) be smart but when you put 'em all together, people are just stupid. And Eugene drivers are the stupidest of them all.

The Story of My [Former] Mouse Friends

The other day, my mom found two dead mice and one live mouse in a vase under the sink at my parents' house (incedentally my house too right now). She alerted my dad, who took the vase out from under the sink only to find that the live mouse was actually eating his dead mouse companions. They had starved to death, and he was eating them as a last resort to survival.

My dad's first inclination was to let the live mouse out into the forest in our "backyard" – I mean, heck, the poor lil guy had already been through enough, right? No. My mom insisted that my dad fill the vase with water and drown the live mouse. So he did. And the lil rascal swam around and around in the vase of death, until there was no more swimming left in him. He let go of the little sliver of life he had clung to, even while he was forced to eat his lil mouse friends.

That's my story for the day. I threw a fit when I found out about it. But my mom insisted that a watery death is not a bad way to die, that the mouse was busy thinking about swimming and had no time to think about dying. Oh yeah... if he wasn't thinking about dying then why did he resort to eating his lil buddies? And why did he swim until he could no more? And not to mention, my mom is freaked out of a watery death. The very idea terrifies her.

So I said to my mom, "If a watery death is a better way to die, then why does the exterminator use poison to kill mice and other critters?" Her response: "Because the exterminator is a busy man, and he doesn't have time to fill up a bunch of little containers with water."