Everything recent is indecent

So, I thought I'd start out this post with some recent photos, but they are all indecent.

I haven't been taking many pics around the house, but I do have a lot of pics from the beach...problem there is that Punky HATES wearing a swimsuit at the beach, and I've taken a very relaxed attitude about it. I'm so relaxed that I have about 125 of Punky nekkid on the beach.

I don't remember when beach time became nekkid time, but it did and it's a hard habit to break. DAVID AND I wear suits, but the little Heller isn't into it at all.

I guess when we get there, he's usually still in his PJs (I like to hit the beach around 9 am and stay until 11) and if we go in the water, I take off his clothes, and he fights me on the swim suit. It's not like anyone cares, he's a baby, but now that he's walking and making friends with strangers, I think that he needs to keep it in his pants.

He grew out of a bunch of his swimsuits this summer, and I was trying to make it all work with one suit and a pack of disposable swim diapers. The disposable swim diapers are EXPENSIVE, so we try to save those for the public pool, where they are required...and so I'm not just lazy, I'm cheap.

I just bought two more swimsuits, so hopefully we can get into the "Hellers wear clothes at the beach" habit without too much trouble and I will have some nice pictures for you soon.

The incumbent database must be a point layer

What? huh?

I know. My brain is scrambled eggs.

My husband bought this computer program for work, and he's asked me to learn it so that I can help him use it. It's loaded with severe nerd jargon and the manual is designed to make you want to spend the $1600 to have someone from the company come up and give a private "tutorial" (if we end up doing this, I will beat the teacher over the head with the manual...really)

David thinks I'm a computer genius, which is flattering, but completely untrue. Sure, I can host a blog, change the batteries in the remote and hook up a stereo, but this is so far beyond my paygrade.

I'm trying really, but needed a quick mental health break on my blog to let my little nogin cool down.

I have been on this program all morning, and I only have two hours of nanny time to finish my learning for the day, so the bloggin will be mighty quick.

Dylan is getting so cute, he flexes his little will all of the time ("no, no, no") and his new favorite thing is walking around the house with a wooden spoon.

It's getting seriously hot and humid around here and I'm having a hard time keeping up with the running schedule. You'll notice my Nike plus icon hardly ever runs anymore, but that's because you can't use the nikeplus software and listen to a podcast on your ipod at the same time, and sometimes I'd rather run to a podcast.

My favorite podcasts are as follows...

The Moth
NPR's Planet Money
BBC Friday Night Comedy
E Online's Answer B*tch
Walk in the Word
Grace to You (Charles Stanley)
Slate Political Gabfest (and culture, and DoubleX podcasts)
my church! Calvary Chapel Miami Beach (pastor Robert Fountain)
Lenord Lopate Show
Bob Edwards Show

oh, and last but never least, This American Life

there are about 10 others that I check in on, but I'm too lazy to mosey over to my computer to refresh my memory.

If you have an ipod (or just itunes on your computer) you can listen to podcasts by downloading them for FREE at itunes in the music store.

If you are a podcast listener and have a great recommendation for us, please leave a comment.

OK, back to making my brain hurt...

They Are Miami Social

Ack. What can I say? I know someone on this show.

First off, I love me some reality TV. I know it's not real, it's staged and exploited to show you the sexiest, craziest most outrageous snippets of each persons life under a magnifying glass.

I know that people act a little different when they're on camera, so what we're seeing is not reality, it's more like realty.

Miami social is fake times a million, because it's everything I hate about Miami, the dream of a party life.

The "party life" is so empty, so shallow, and the people in this show are pretending to love and enjoy this dream. Sure they'll show some drama, but the characters will all be looking fabulous and feeling the love in the end. We might even have a doctor Phil moment or two.

Life here is not really like that, I see women in their 30's who burned out on that lifestyle and are homeless and living in the streets of south beach, I see gorgeous models turning to bankruptcy because they gambled on the housing market here, I see teenagers in the mall wearing $700 prostitute shoes...but that empty dream of "life in Miami" is what sells the $4,000,000 houses that pay the fat commission checks which pay my bills.

Enjoy the show.

"Thriller" (original upload)

Do we mourn a child molester?

Michael Jackson, ugh, I can't even look at Facebook for another minute tonight (good thing, as I really need to prepare my Sunday school lesson) because everyone is all aflutter over Michael Jackson's death.

Other things happened today, too. My sister got another year older (Happy Birthday, Gooch!), Farrah Fawcet died (Rest in peace, Angel), and Governor Sanford sighed a huge breath of relief that the news cycle will have so much more to chew on for the next few weeks, and he could probably slink back down to Argentina, and CNN, NBC and even Telemundo wouldn't notice or care...

So, do you mourn a man who is the national punchline for child molester? Do you celebrate the music of a pop genius (with some mad props to the motown hitmakers and Quincy Jones) without commenting on the kind of man he was?

I think for most people my age, many of us parents who would not let their child within 500 yards of Michael Jackson, we are mourning something else.

Maybe it's seeing your little cousin in a pair of red pants with zippers all over them, maybe it's the memory of a brutal michigan winter braved wearing only one glove, maybe it's countless nights in my room, with my record player and my Thriller album, reading the words to the songs on the record sleeve, singing "why, why, tell them that it's human nature..." over and over again (cause they do me that way) not really understanding it, but loving it just the same.

Maybe it's a long drive from Savannah to Jacksonville on a hot summer night sitting with Josh in the way back of my Dad's station wagon making faces at the driver behind us on our way to catch the Jackson's Victory Tour. Maybe it's the memory of being too young to understand why girls were actually crying over a concert, but thrilled out of my mind to be there.

Maybe it's spending every morning at the bus stop arguing with Julie Fair over why it would be better to marry Michael Jackson than Paul McCartney ("the girl is mine", who would you pick?), or my first slumber party, which was a "Making of Thriller" video viewing party...and after we watched Michael go through applying that makeup, wearing that mask, teaching the dancers how to act all scary, we'd watch the thriller video and dance along, like real live zombies.

Maybe it's dancing around the living room with my little sister to "the way you make me feel" and have my brother come into the room grabbing his privates screaming "ho" on cue nearly every time that video came on...

Maybe it's the memory of a trip to epcot center, watching Caption Eo in 3D, all of our little pre-teen hands reaching out to touch what really felt like was "right in front of my face!". Or the memory of "being very quiet" while my Mom let us suit up in leg warmers and work out with her to Jane Fonda's workout record which featured "can you feel it" by the jackson five...or dancing around the living room with Mom to "don't stop till you get enough"

So, no, I'm not mourning the loss of a child molester. I'm taking a trip down memory lane and feeling a little older now that a big contributor to my life's sound track is now dead.

John and Kate divided by fame

I think that we're all a little John and Kated out, so let's move on to the trannies living in Iran.

Last night, I was in bed flipping through the channels and I landed on "Be like Others" a documentary about transexuals in Iran.

A "friend" called at the end of it, and I was still reeling with all of these observations, thoughts, questions and he wanted no part about hearing about Iranian transexuals.

"First, you lost me with Iran, I mean, I JUST DON'T CARE about Iran. They're crazy and we're better off to leave them alone" and then he let me know how he felt about transexuals...

"I'm ok with the G's, I respect the hell out of the L's, and I give five stars all around to the B's, I mean, I like the B's so much that if they did a show about the B's in Iran, I could be persuaded to watch it, but the T's? Ugh, no thanks"

So, I had to process it all on my own, and here I am thinking about it "outloud" on my blog for you, dear readers.

Homosexuality is totally illegal in Iran, you could get stoned for it, and I don't mean they hand you a joint or slip you a wacky brownie for it, they throw stones at you, and you can die. The homosexual guys in this documentary can't get jobs, get sexually harassed all day long, get in trouble with the police for walking down the street with a little too much of a swish..they don't even have to be caught in the act, they can get arrested for acting queer.

You can imagine that it's pretty awful to be gay in Iran, and most of the homosexual men in small villages work really hard to stop being gay.

Some guys struggle and struggle but just can't stop "being gay" and they have another option. In Iran, it's perfectly legal to change your sex, so they can become women, and then they are no longer a problem to Islamic society.

At first, I got caught up in the young men's optimism for becoming girls, they'd become a girl, marry a boy, and live out a nice middle class existence in Iran. The movie features this "Queen Bee" transexual who makes a living helping these guys through the transition. (S)He's very conservatively dressed, helps the guys learn how to dress, introduces them to the big doctor in Tehran who does these operations and serves as an example to these young men what they could become with a few hormone pills and surgery.

The Queen Bee doesn't like homosexuals and does not make friends with them. She makes it very clear to the film makers that she is a woman who used to be trapped in a man's body, and (s)he does a good job of convincing other men the same thing is happening to them. She encourages them to dress conservatively and sells them the dream of being pursued and chased by a suitor.

After a while, I started to get the feeling that the Queen Bee is caught up in a government sanctioned transexual surgery industry that feeds on young men who feel they have no other options, and at that point, I started to weep for these guys.

When asked if they would have the surgery if homosexuality was legal, they all said, "no", so these guys aren't really transexuals, they're homosexuals being butchered in Iran.

We watched two men go through this surgery. One man has some support from his family, and goes home to live with his mother and sister. The post-op girl's boyfriend (who is actually kind of hot, while she still looks way tranny) says he's way too young to consider marriage, and the family is stuck in limbo waiting to see what will happen to the tranny daughter.

The second man did not have support from his family, and ended up staying in the city with a couple of other post-op friends. They work as temporary wives, which is legalized prostitution.

I recalled how I felt when I first started learning about gay people, transexuals and life outside of parents raising children in the suburbs. I know that at one point I thought, "why can't those boys just become girls? it would be so easy..." so it was very fascinating to see my adolescent reasoning played out in real life.

I would love to talk about the movie if you've seen it.

Old baby footage

This is old video I found today cleaning up my hard drive. He makes a peace sign....cute.