ilubmoney

A woman on OKCupid said that she bet that I was "fun in bed." And I had a weird dissonance upon reading that.

See, to me, "fun" is slip-n-slides, balloon-twisting performers at parties, playing Rock Band, telling stories. Whereas "sex" - although something I enjoy deeply (or at least as deeply as I am physiologically capable) - consists of hot kisses, fevered gasps, driving each other crazy until we rip off our clothes and have to have each other.

Needless to say, combining clowns and that sort of hotness causes me to pause.

That's not to say that I treat sex as though it's some sort of treasured classical painting - I have giggle breakdowns in bed just like everybody, and the crossover between my clown-fun and sex lies is connected by the luscious goodness of The Tickle Fight, that classic mechanism of getting some "innocent" body-touching that can lead to something a lot sexier. (I repeat: There has never been a thing as an innocent tickle fight between consenting adults in the history of mankind.) But to me, part of the fun of sex is that intensity of wanting, that need, and I have trouble parsing that fun in the way that I'd process Cinco de Mayo parties and squirt-gun fights.

Emotionally, I parse it differently as well, because while sex can be no-strings-attached whoopie, in my experience if you're not careful about setting boundaries, that intensity will often lead to one party or the other getting emotionally involved. You're swapping bodily fluids, there's a heightened sense of vulnerability - it can get messy if you don't watch out.

Which is not to say that anyone's wrong about how they feel. I suspect that for many, sex is the sort of walk in the park thing where there's no distinction between "I had a sundae for lunch and then a hot bi male for dinner!" But for me, there's a distinct and clear barrier between "fun" and "sex" - sex contains fun, but it's got something extra that brings it beyond that point for me. There's an intensity to sex, another layer that amplifies it so much that it nearly always catapults the act almost beyond something I take lightly - even my most casual hookups always had an aspect of, "Whoo, that was a unique experience that let me see a totally different side of that person," even if my partners didn't always feel that way in return.

What about you? Is sex fun? Casual? Whoopie? How do you parse it?

Yesterday, I read the opening chapter of Stephen King's "Under the Dome." Couldn't have been more than 800 words. And yet it had more characterization than any of my stories had put together.

I read it over and over again, just plain amazed by what was there: two characters, and not only did we get the feel and geography of the town they lived in, but we got their dreams, their social status, a good glimpse of their personality, their financial state, and how they interacted with each other. And it was all natural, told with ease, like a beautifully ticking watch where you don't quite realize how much work goes into keeping that ticking plot-hand moving forward until you shuck off that gold casing.

I think I've found my Holy Grail: that beginning section. There's so much in there, so neatly packed into such a small space (and, as you'd know if you read it, in such an easy to read way, that if I ever approach a third of that I'll feel like I've pretty much maxed out my ability.

I have no comment upon the rest of the novel; it's a silly idea stolen straight from the Simpsons, but then again Stephen King specializes in silly ideas made genuinely scary. This one might be a return to form, or might be a lousy crash. But that opener, should you look carefully, is a masterwork of characterization. I'm going to have to take it apart and see if I can find the central motor that drives it.

With another Thanksgiving Holiday come and gone, I'm sure most of us have plenty of food leftover, particularly turkey.

There is lots you can do with your turkey leftovers-Turkey Casseroles, Turkey chili, soup, pot pies-the list goes on and on.

Tag with "turkey."

Let's take a moment to give thanks for everything and everyone we love. Without them, what the hell is the fun in life, right?

That being said, now that everyone has gorged themselves silly on turkey, or duck if you like that sort of thing, and mashed potatoes or yams or both, lets feast ourselves a plenty with this veritable cornucopia of cake photos:


This cake was for a birthday and not as many might assume a wedding.






A giant black iPod I had to make for a 40th birthday party.


Classic interlocking circle design on the bottom tier, swirls on the second tier and rosettes on the top tier.


More interlocking circles and lots of fondant ribbons.






I guess the groom is a golfer. The bride and groom cake toppers were custom made by (and dont quote me on this) the bride's mother. I think. It was awhile ago.


A Goliath of a cake.


This is a cake my best friend/co-worker made because I told her if she wanted it, she'd have to make it. I think she did a bang up job on it. It was for her mother's birthday.


I really love the copper colors against the white with the blue ribbon, even in a shadow, this cake pops. Plus, it has the bonus of having kind of a steampunk vibe to it. Only a little though.


Oh man, I remember delivering this one up near the wharf area in San Francisco. I had to go up these marble stairs, through a room, into the ballroom, all the way to the end and around the back to get to the table. It seemed like a lifetime carrying that thing. It weighed quite possibly a metric ton. But I have no scientific data to back that up with.


There was heavy wind this day, and as I left I had this fear in the back of my mind just lurking. It was the fear that those cakes werent going to make it. So I showed the guys there how to set up the cake (when I snapped this photo) and took it all apart so it wouldnt be a cakewreck.


I really like the simplicity of this cake. Plus it's really small and cute. The only bad thing is, it was on a 15' table and just looked way out of place. All the guest tables had their own 9" round of cake as centerpieces.

And that's that for this time. Until next time I wish you all good tidings and happy holidays. Please, if you care to share what you are up to and how you are doing, it would be much appreciated. I'll try and respond when I can to any questions of funny anecdotes but it's surprisingly busy this holiday season, which is good for us all.

~Kiyoshi

I am thankful for my family. Every day.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family.

Flipping through Lamebook, the catalogue of embarrassing Facebook debacles, I find myself envisioning an imaginary history in which Stupid Teenaged Ferrett had access to a larger audience via Facebook, instead of private notes and occasional bitter rants. And I shiver with terror.

I mean, crap, this blog's embarrassing and self-revelatory enough as it is these days. I was worse, once upon a time, and certainly more psychodramatic; I merely had no medium in which to spread my bozosity. I'm pretty sure every breakup would have been an anguished scream, followed by a crazy commentfest, followed by me working through my emotions in public.

I'm pretty sure Facebook would have destroyed me, back in the day. This may be one of the first times I'm grateful I'm old.

GUD: Greatest Uncommon Denominator (Issues #3 and #4)
What holds GUD together as a magazine? The space to hold a lot of different kinds of quality fiction. There's a lot of different styles in each issue, a veritable bouillabaisse of various stories - straight fantasy, cyberpunk, experimental poetry, even "straight" fiction with no fantastic elements whatsoever. In a gigantic magazine the size of a small book, you're sure to find something you like in here.

It's exactly what it says on the tin: a bunch of very good stories, loosely held together by the fact that they're, well, good.

That's not strictly true, though. Scratch the surface, and you'll see that GUD tends towards tales that delve into someone's character; in fact, if you're a writer looking to submit and characterization isn't your strong point, you might wanna pass 'em over. The best of GUD's stories are tales of sharply-drawn, real folks in strange situations - a Mayan astronaut about to be sacrificed, an insecure lover with his girlfriend falling for mysterious aliens, a mailman with a bloodied claw-hammer in the back of his truck looking for rebirth canals.

GUD's stories also tend towards the longer end - there's some well-done flash fiction in there (and poetry, to break things up), but most of the tales are long enough to lose yourself in for some time. GUD's stories want you to spend some time with the people inside them, walking along them and losing yourself in their skin.

When that works, which it usually does, it's a sensuous journey. On those rare occasions that GUD fails with a story, it's usually because the ending lacks punch - you've followed someone for five thousand words, only to find that really, it isn't much of an ending at all, turning what looked to be an actual story into little more than a rambling tone poem. (Or, as will happen, you just hated the lead character and didn't want to follow them anywhere.)

There are few misfires, though. The good news, however, is that GUD is of high quality - I anguished over choosing the "best" stories below, since almost all of them had something to recommend them - and is thick enough to be an exceptional value. For $3.50 a PDF, you get 211 pages - and the stories are wildly varying, from quick pulpy prose to lush, lingering visuals, so you're sure to find at least a few stories to fall in love with. And the art inside is also gorgeous. It's a downright pretty magazine, spiced up with professional artistry.

And hell, it's even cheaper: as a part of their Black Friday sale, you can pay whatever you like, making a normally unbeatable value of $3.50 an issue even more beatable.

That's a lot of reading, man, and a lot of value in a very pretty magazine. It's definitely worth checking out.

The stories that called to me in these issues are, in descending order of love:

Daya and Dharma, by shweta_narayan (Issue #4)
Daya is a handmaid in the palace of a selfish, beautiful princess - and a beautiful red bird from the court of the Rainbow Prince arrives to find a bride for his master. And what could have turned into a twee gratification story instead lands two steps beyond where you think it will to turn into something dark, beautiful, and majestic. The only problem I have with it is that this story started very slowly, but once it got rolling it was unstoppable.

Soon You Will Be Gone And Possibly Eaten, by Nick Antoeca (Issue #3)
He loves his girlfriend, Sabile, and yet he never really understands her. Even more so, when the aliens come to Earth and start abducting beautiful people. A tragic tale of love, loss, and the confused bereavement that comes when a lover betrays you for reasons you can't quite understand but can't quite condemn, either.

Night Bird Soaring, by T.L. Morganfield (Issue #3)
A Mayan man wants to be an astronaut, but that can never be: he was born as the Night Wind, a living God to be sacrificed at age 30. This is an excellent look at other cultures, one where Mayan culture was ascendant, and the only flaw is that the ending isn't particularly personal; it wraps things up, but doesn't necessarily connect. Still, the journey through this strangely mundane alien land is well worth it.

Think Fast, by Michael Greenhut (Issue #3)
"Pick an alternate timeline and you'll find my corpse." A man can send messages from his past self to his current self - a power granted so that he can help rescue his sister, who died. But the ending's a strange and surprising twist that makes sense, Memento-wise, becoming that rarity of things: a consistent, satisfying time-travel story.

The Great Big Nothing, by Frank Haberle (Issue #3)
A story with absolutely no speculative elements at all. Yet it made me tear up.

Forests of the Night, by Abigail Hilton (Issue #4)
A frail woman is dropped off by uncaring relatives at an old-age home. This story is short, almost flash, but that's good; it's a simple idea, and it doesn't overstay its welcome, finishing up exactly when it needs to.

A Man Of Kiri Maru, by Laura L. Sullivan (Issue #4)
Kiri Maru, a small island out in the Pacific Ocean, has a unique religion, if it can be called that: their God died by accident, and for a dumb reason, and isn't really worshipped. Into this culture steps a traditional scientist, hoping to study the culture and who instead falls in love. This is a wonderful example of a story that shouldn't work - the beginning has almost nothing to do with the ending, the tale wanders, and the ending is, to say the least, a little odd - and yet somehow, thanks to a wry writing style and engaging characters, this one pulls it off with style and grace and squids.

Chica, Let Me Tell You A Story, by Alex Dally McFarlane (Issue #3)
"I was a door, once." A magical portal tells her tale. The ending is a little flat, but overall this is strong for its concepts and intrigues.

Unfinished Stories, by J(ae) D. Brames (Issue #4)
A tale done with style and visceral pulp, this one's a simple tale built up with lot of punkish stylistic (and effective!) fillips. Follow Albert, the crazy mailman looking for a suitable body to scrape off the road so he can crack open the rebirth canal, and the narrator, who tags along for reasons that will be made devastatingly clear towards the end. And it has a damn near perfect final line.

The Dancing Aliens, by Mithran Somasundrum (Issue #4)
The aliens didn't jet down from a great spaceship in the sky; no, they turned up in public squares everywhere, dancing in strange and hypnotic patterns, starving to death because they didn't know how to busk. And the narrator, one of the first to discover the truth about things, witnesses the reason why they dance. The ending's a little anticlimactic, given the awesome buildup, but it's still reasonably creepy and believable.

The Dragon's Thorn, Sword of Kings (And Fred), by Idan Cohen (Issue #3)
A very funny flash fiction story about a great magic sword that winds up in the hands of, well, Fred. I've seen a lot of stories like this. Most of them don't work. This does.

On The Monthly Magazine Review:
Every month (hopefully, on the first, though not this time), I'll review a pro to semi-pro 'zine. There are a lot of potential definitions of "a semi-pro zine," ranging from circulations of over a thousand to income levels for the publisher - but for purposes of this, I'll say that a) you have to pay at least a cent a word, on average, and b) not be a Twitter-zine. I'm not opposed to bold experiments like Tweet the Meat, but paying five cents a word for a 140-character story really isn't going to support any starving artists.

I'm also not going to review just a single issue. No, I want to read multiple issues, to get (and give) a greater sense of what hits this particular 'zine's kinks. Is it deep mystery? Beautiful prose? Pulpy action? Reworked myths? You can't tell by a single issue, man, you gotta see a few.

My goal as a writer is to both educate myself in the market (so I know what markets like what), to help give some attention to markets that are always hungry for new readers, and to read some damned fine stories. If you have a semi-pro zine you'd like to nominate for review, speak up.

http://www.thedoghousediaries.com/?p=1101

It took me years to develop these habits and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let some book take them away from me!

http://everyoneneedstherapy.blogspot.com/2009/11/different-thanksgiving-story.html

Lodz ghetto, circa 1939.

Hard to believe that anyone would be sitting around on Thanksgiving reading blogs, but here I am, writing one, so there are probably a few of you reading. Mostly recipes.

Last Saturday I was a little down. And sometimes, when things are going wrong for me, when life feels more than out of control, I like to read about the Holocaust.

Crazy coping strategy, I know, but it works every time. There are many collections of stories about the Holocaust, and I happened to have had one on hand, a survival story. Here's a mini-review, not on the level of one you might find at Jew Wishes, but it is what it is.

Sisters of the Storm, (from the Holocaust Diaries series), by Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz is the story of two young teens trapped in Lodz, Poland, a ghetto established by the Gestapo in 1939, a home to approximately 200,000 Jews, surrounded by barbed wire. According to DeathCamps.org

". . . inhabitants vegetated in wretched wooden houses comprising 31,271 apartments. Sanitary conditions were disastrous. Apart from the lack of food, only 725 apartments had running water. There was no sewerage, no coal or wood for heating the rooms, no warm clothes and shoes. As a consequence, 21% of the ghetto population died in various epidemics, of starvation or were frozen to death."

No turkey, baby.

Those who survived only survived to be deported to concentration camps, Auschwitz in particular, and the gas chambers. An estimated 6 million Jews were murdered in this war, another 6 million non-Jews fell to the Nazis, as well.

Here are a few hungry people on the way to Auschwitz in a rare photograph ostensibly to die.

Anna witnessed the torture and murder of family and friends, including her mother and brother. She survived the ghetto to be shipped like cattle, in a cattle car, hundreds to a car, little air to breathe, no room to move, certainly no bathroom facilities. From the crowding of Lodz to Auschwitz. You must know what happened there. I can't go into it now. It's a holiday.

It's hard to read these things, stories of survivors, but hard not to. On page 90 the author describes how her 22 year-old brother, before his death from tuberculosis, married knowing that the Germans intended to eradicate the Jews. Anna's brother contracted tuberculosis on the job, an occupational hazard, carrying human waste. He married with the intent to have a child, to stick it to the Nazis, to say, "You can't stop us. We shall survive, we will continue."

Ms. Eilenberg-Eibeshitzs writes (italics in parentheses are mine) :

My father came home one day with a very pale face. I tried to talk to him, but it took him a long time before he was able to speak to me. It seemed that he had seen Brocha (Anna's new sister-in-law)walking in the street, and she was obviously pregnant. I understood why my father was so firghtened; pregnant women were a favorite target for the Nazis. I offered up a silent tefillah (meaning prayer) that everything would be all right.

I grew more and more worried as the days passed by. . .I gradually came to understand that Brocha had been taken for deportation. (The Nazis killed mother and child as a matter of course. Babies filled in the gaps in mass burials before the Nazis came up with the Final Solution.)

Generally you hear a woman is pregnant and the response is joyous, gleeful. Happy.

Sisters of the Storm becomes more and more violent, more and more impossible to read, gut-wrenching. You wonder, you really do, when you read about such torturous conditions, starving people sleeping, if you can call it sleep, on dirty floors, punished with dirty (yellow) water for days at a time. Their simple crime? Genetics, race. You wonder how anyone can survive such conditions, always at the other end of the boot, slapped, beaten, waking to new corpses in the barracks. Grieving, fearful.

Do you become immune? I don't think so. Do you become skeptical? Suspicious of others? Jaded. Certainly. But many survivors kept their religion, stayed observant even within the camps, to the degree it was possible. Their faith somehow kept them going.

Survivor stories are told less often these days. The survivors of World War II are in their 70's, 80's and 90's. They are leaving us. We go to museums to hear them speak to us from videos, through headsets, or we read books to remember them. My cousin works for the Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, travels all over the world to tell the story of the Holocaust, tells people that history can and will repeat itself. He recently spoke in Mumbai, a city on the watch for terrorism, bombs. It is the most heavily populated city in the world, the trains are mobbed at all hours of the day. We must not forget. Everyone is vulnerable to hatred.

Everyone takes something different from survivor stories. For me it's how amazingly little we need to survive (when it comes to food) and how precious survival, life, really is.

Lo aleinu, we say in Hebrew. Such things should not happen to us. We mean, really, that these things should not happen, and we're thankful, that we're not suffering, not like they did in the camps. We feel better somehow, telling ourselves, whispering some kind of talisman, a quick nod of thanksgiving. No one, none of us, should ever have to be hungry like that, should ever have to suffer like that. No one should. Lo aleinu. The downside of life can get pretty down.

My favorite journalist, Peggy Noonan, writes for the Wall Street Journal, and last Saturday she wrote a piece about being thankful. We're Still Here After a Rough Year--We're serving up a new gratitude this Thanksgiving. I liked it very much and am copying it below because we are thankful this week, as Americans. Last year was a difficult year. Our country, once a super power, is less super, we all agree. We don't trust, we are afraid of the future. But it's better now, today, than it was a year ago. We survived, she's suggesting.

And all I can think is,

Survival is surely relative.

Happy Thanksgiving.

therapydoc

*For those of you new here, shul is Yiddish for synagogue. I wrote this last Saturday night.

Here's Ms. Noonan's piece.

Last Thanksgiving, it looked as if a hard year was coming, and it was and it did. The holiday was shadowed by a sense of economic foreboding—Wall Street failing, companies falling and layoffs coming. It isn't over—no one thinks it's over. But the mood of this Thanksgiving looks to be different.

An unofficial poll of a dozen friends yields two themes: "We're still here," and, "I am so grateful." Almost all experienced business reverses, some of which were deep, and some had personal misfortunes of one kind or another: "I am thankful that my mother's death was fast and that she did not have to suffer," wrote a beloved friend. But something tells me that a number of Thanksgiving dinners will be marked this year by a new or refreshed sense of gratitude: We're still here. I am so grateful.

I felt it the other night, unexpectedly, in a way that reminded me of the anxieties of last year. I had been away from the city. I was in a cab going down Fifth Avenue. I hadn't been there in months. I looked up and suddenly saw, looming in the darkness to my right, the white-gray marble and huge windows of the Bergdorf Goodman building—tall, stately, mansard-roofed. Its windows were covered, but some lights were on, and there seemed to be people inside. They were preparing its Christmas windows. Something about the sight of it caught me—proud Bergdorf's, anchor of midtown commerce. It looked exactly as it looked 10 years ago, 20, only better. Because it's there. New York has been so damaged by the crash, and last year at this time small shops, the ones with the smallest margin for error, were closing. And now I see more that are opening, and Bergdorf's is preparing its Christmas windows. The sight of it came like an affirmation. We're still here. I am so grateful.

What are you most thankful for in 2009? I asked an old friend, a brilliant lawyer who lives in a New York suburb. "I saw my 6-year-old son run a mile, and catch a bunch of fish," he immediately replied. He saw his wife, a journalist, "dodge the firings" in her office. He still has a job, too. All of this sounds so common, so modest, and yet, he knows, it is everything. A child caught a fish, he ran, his father saw it. "Broadly," he added, "I am grateful to America for its freedom, for its yeastiness and, at times, its noise. Dee Snider belting out 'I Wanna Rock' is so America."

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My friend Robert wrote, "I am thankful that I lived to see a person of color sworn into the office of President." He takes heart that America has set a new face toward the world. "I am thankful and proud when I am in London and people ask me about my president and show great interest in him." And, "I am thankful that my friends survived the global financial disaster. I am thankful America survived it."

A real estate lawyer in Washington emailed, "Whether you agree with the policy decisions made by the new administration or not, let's be thankful that our economy did not fall apart since last Thanksgiving."

A Washington journalist: "I am thankful that this is still a normal country, with predictable common-sense reactions to excesses. The American people served as a counterweight to the excesses of the Bush years, and are now serving as a counterweight to the excesses of the Obama years."

A friend who emigrated from Nicaragua 21 years ago and lives now in New York knew right away what she was thankful for: her still-new country. "I'm mainly grateful that I could raise my son in freedom. I could vote for the first time in my life. I could express my opinions without being shot on the spot, jailed, or exiled like my grandfather. I could sleep through the night without fearing for my life. I could work and buy food without rationing."

My friend Stephanie is grateful that she got health insurance despite a pre-existing condition. Another friend, an academic, was grateful to have been raised in America that taught well the rules of survival—perseverance, discipline.

Jim, who owns a small business, told me that as 2009 began, with all its troubles, "the number of frowns" he saw on the street "was overwhelming." He decided to take action. "I now make a conscious effort to smile at people in the street, in a bus, while waiting in line. It's such a simple form of connection, and it only takes one smile returned to make a difference in my day, and I hope the same is true for the other person smiling back." He hopes to start "a smiling epidemic" in Chicago.

My friend Vin said, when I asked him what he was most grateful for in 2009, "I remember reading that survival rates for breast cancer have been improving. I remember thinking: Thank God."

I am grateful for a great deal, especially: I'm here. I'm drinking coffee as I write, and the sun is so bright, I had to close the blinds to keep the glare from the computer. When I open the blinds, I will see the world: people, kids, traffic, dogs. Too many friends have left during the past few years, and it reminds us of what death is always trying to remind us: It's good to be alive.
More Peggy Noonan

Read Peggy Noonan's previous columns

click here to order her new book, Patriotic Grace

And after that, after gratitude for friends and family, and for those who protect us, after that something small. I love TV, and the other day it occurred to me again that we are in the middle of a second golden age of television. I feel gratitude to the largely unheralded network executives and producers who gave it to us. The first golden age can be summed up with one name: "Playhouse 90." It was the 1950s and '60s, when TV was busy being born. The second can be summed up with the words "The Sopranos," "Mad Men," "The Wire," "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "ER," "24," "The West Wing," "Law and Order," "30 Rock." These are classics. Some nonstars at a network made them possible. Good for them.

I leave it to others to dilate on why TV now is so good and movies so bad, since both come from the same town, Hollywood, in the same era. But there is a side benefit to televisions's excellence, and that is the number of people who follow a show so closely, and love it so much, that after it's aired they come together on long threads on Web sites and talk about what happened and what it means. People use their imaginations and unfocused creativity to add new layers of meaning and interpretation. "You know that was a reference to 'Chinatown.'" "Did anyone notice what it meant when Peggy told Mr. Sterling 'no' when he asked for the coffee? A whole revolution captured in one word!"

Those threads are golden. We rightly discuss the fact that media now is fractured, niched and broken up, that we no longer watch the same shows or have the same conversation. But what's happening now on the Internet after a good show is a conversation, a new one, and it's sprung up from the technology that helped do in the old one. How ironic and predictable, and another cause, however small, for gratitude.

The Unwritten Rules of Generational Poverty.

While you could argue some of the specifics in the article, I think there's a greater truth here in that a significant amount of poverty is cultural. I'm lucky enough to come from a "rich" family, but my rich family is largely rich because of investing decisions thanks to lessons taught to them by their parents - and in turn, my family passes down those lessons on how to use money wisely. My Grampa nagged me into getting an IRA account, my parents yelled at me to get my 401k maxed out at work, my stepfather sat down with me and discussed how to lay out a portfolio. And even now, I'm using my Mom's trick of "If you get a raise and your expenses haven't risen, keep living on what you had and put all the extra money into savings/investments." (That took like fifteen years to get to, but I remembered it.)

I'm reasonably sloppy by their standards, but even when I was making $18,000 a year I still tried to put money away and invest whatever meager windfalls I got. And it's helped.

Whereas I've seen people who come from poor families, and they do have a different mindset - some of which overlaps with what's described in the article. It's often a "Well, stuff's gonna happen, whatcha gonna do?" It's a mindset which leaves them much more vulnerable to bumps in the road, and we all have bumps.

This isn't saying that poor people deserve their poverty, of course, and that rich people are all smart. Rich covers a lot of stupid financial sins, like spackle, and the smartest person can get jostled out of their best savings plan when they're living close to the edge. But I think a lot of people are poorer than they could be, thanks to them lacking a cultural education in how to plan for the future.

I wish there was a way to have the quiet lessons I've been taught spread a little further out, is all. And on Thanksgiving, I'm grateful to come from a background where that stuff was just a subtle, continual lesson.

I don't like turkey. There. I admitted it. I do, however, like cranberry sauce, which only seems to be socially acceptable on turkey, so I'll eat the damned turkey.

I also like turkey pastrami, which I'm convinced isn't really made of turkey because it's so flavorful and delicious.

Maybe it's space turkey.

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Send some lovin' thanks to your friends with our holiday vgifts!

Photos of the week

We're so delighted with the immense talent of our growing, global lj_photophile community that we've decided to introduce a poll. Each week, we'll choose a half-dozen photos (based on user comments and staff feedback) and ask you to select a photo of the week. The winning photo will be announced in the next newsletter. If possible, please limit photo size to 350x350 to ensure that images display properly on friends pages. We want to thank you again (and again!) for sharing your passion.

Check out this week's photo poll and more fantastic user content after the jump!

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Curtains

Thanks for joining us. To our American friends, have a fantastic Thanksgiving. To all of our international neighbors, we'll eat a little extra for you!

Earlier today, I made this Twitter post:

Straight men who dislike cunnilingus and fluoridation conspiracy theorists: two groups I'm surprised to find still exist.

And then, an hour later, I made this post:

I'd be more excited about Google Wave if I saw people expressing interest AFTER they got their invite.

Ever since then, I've been giggling all morning, because people are responding to me about how good Google Wave is, or how they're bored with it already, or how it's just too fiddly to use properly - and every time, I think they're talking about cunnilingus instead.

I am such a child.