• 10:57 There's a lady in here that's been using the only working computer AND her laptop for the past hour without buying anything. How audacious! #

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• 14:36 What am I doing? I am about to take a nap, since it's Friday and I've averaged maybe 5 hours a night before my 4am days. #

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• 13:55 I don't seem to twitter much, though it's not for lack of something to say. I always forget I CAN Twitter... #

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• 10:00 I am a spiritual being on a human path. #

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Once again, it's probably too late to do much a of a thorough entry, but suffice it to say, I smell like coffee because I'm working at a coffee shop again. My feet are also itchy, just in case you were wondering.

On the way driving home tonight, with all the windows down, the smell of Earth, dirt, grass and night air was truly overwhelming. What a long-suffering winter this has been!!

I wanted to quickly let everyone know that my darling hubby has decided to join the land of LJ. He is ceaserswine and you should add him if you're so inclined!!

I'm off tomorrow so I PROMISE I will do a proper update then.

G'night friends and neighbors.

Hi there LJ land. I've been meaning to do a thorough update but have been busy, busy, busy!!! I promise I will get to that soon, because I have lots to share!

In the meantime, I need your help! My mother-in-law has been researching debt settlement companies in an effort to pay off her 60K of credit card debt. She is worried about finding a reputable company and has asked me to appeal to my blogging friends to see if anyone has any experience with a specific company or perhaps has some suggestions or recommendations. She's currently considering a company out of Texas called American Debt.

So, anyone heard of them? Any suggestions? Thanks in advance for your help!!!

Reposted from phred1973...

I'm not one for surveys, usually, but I've seen this one around, actually filled it out, and think it has some redeeming qualities. It would be SO AWESOME if you all are able to participate. I thought it was an especially good idea since I was away from LJ-land for some time and may not remember how we met.

1. Can you cook?
2. What was your dream growing up?
3. What talent do you wish you had?
4. Favorite place?
5. Favorite vegetable?
6. What was the last book you read?
7. What zodiac sign are you ?
8. Any Tattoos and/or Piercings?
9. Worst Habit?
10. Do we know each other outside of lj?
11. What is your favorite sport?
12. Negative or Optimistic attitude?
13. What would you do if you were stuck in an elevator with me?
14. Best thing to ever happen to you?
15. Tell me one weird fact about you:
16. Do you have any pets?
17. Do you know how to do the macarena?
18. What time is it where you are now?
19. Do you think clowns are cute or scary?
20. If you could change one thing about how you look, what would it be?
21. Would you be my crime partner or my conscience?
22. What color eyes do you have?
23. Ever been arrested?
24. Bottle or Draft?
25. If you won $10,000 dollars today, what would you do with it?
26. What kind of bubble gum do you prefer to chew?
27. What 's your favorite bar to hang at?
28. Do you believe in ghosts?
29. Favorite thing to do in your spare time?
30. Do you swear a lot?
31. Biggest pet peeve?
32. In one word, how would you describe yourself?
33. Will you repost this so I can fill it out and do the same for you?

I have my answers saved, so I will gladly respond to yours. Also, I am working on doing another update with my 365 pictures, though there will be a lot of them since I only posted the first five. Can you dig it?

Also, in other short news, I heard back from 2 of 3 professors I requested letters from and they both said they'd gladly do it. Haven't heard from the 3rd one...a woman...who I had for "Political Status of Women in the World". Not sure why she hasn't responded. She penned a fin aid appeal letter for me 2 years ago and we're facebook friends. Hmmm. In any event, I am now just waiting on MTSU to lift the hold on my account this coming Monday. Afterwards, directly, I can have my transcript sent to UPG and the community college I'm going to attend this summer. Cross your fingers for me.

And fill this thing out!!!

From incendiarypixie...

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones your favorites
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.


Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (X)
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (X)
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (X+)
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (X+)
The Bible (New Testament)
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (X)
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (X+)
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (X)
Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (X)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (*)
Complete Works of Shakespeare (X)
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (X)
The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (X)
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (*)
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (X)
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (X+)
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (X)
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (X+)
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (*)
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (X)
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (X)
Animal Farm - George Orwell (X+)
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (*)
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (*)
A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (X+)
Lord of the Flies - William Golding (X+)
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert (*)
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Set
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (X)
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (X++)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (X+)
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (X+)
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (X)
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (X+)
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (X)
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (*)
On The Road - Jack Kerouac (X++++)
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (*)
Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (*)
Moby Dick - Herman Melville (*) (Kyle's in the middle of this!)
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (X+)
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce (X)
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (X+)
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker (*)
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishigur
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web - EB White (X+)
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (X+)
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X+)
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare (X)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (X+++)
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (X...I only got halfway, but with this book, I'm giving myself an X for that)

My Tally: 37...not bad. I have a lot of complaints with this list though...I thought it was more of a "100 greatest of the 20th century" kind of list...Maybe I'll find one of those soon and do a similiar post :):)

How'd you do?

• 15:08 Holding down the front desk fort at Adams. Drinking some percolated coffee and starting Christopher Moore's new novel. #

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• 16:26 I love when my hair tickles the inside of my elbow as i'm simply moving around...or when i'm sitting and it brushes the tops of my thigh ... #

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Well, my post didn't even make it past the submission stage. I wasn't aware that the community had such strictly monitored posting access (unusual in a community simply about living poor). Here is the response I got from an unnamed moderator:

"Yes, you are new to the community. That is evident, because the mods have been working EXTREMELY hard with the members to work on this, and it has been working, judgmental posts like this will not help that."

I really thought it over after I received that and I started to think to myself that yes, maybe I was being judgmental in some fashion. But after even further reflection, I think this post was rejected because these asine moderator(s) decided to take it as a personal affront to their moderating skills or some such thing. I haven't responded to this moderator because A. I don't know who it is and B. I doubt they really give a fuck anyways but I have to say, I don't think her snarky reply is helping matters either. If I'm new, as she and I both point out, how would I know how hard the mods have been working? And it doesn't seem to be getting any better, for the comments I read were very recent and only over a 4 day time frame. I did not see any actions taken by anyone (not even other community members save one) to confront the nastiness on display.

So, what are your thoughts? Should I try to contact any of the mods further and better explain myself? Or should I just say FUCK IT and leave the community?

P.S. I love being on my period for 2 reasons.

1. Kyle can cum inside me as much as he likes (no health insurance=no doctor=no birth control)

2. I get to use that FUCKING AWESOME icon.

So, last week I joined this community poor_skills after seeing it mentioned in someone else's journal. It is essentially "tips & tricks on living poor" "the community devoted to people living without vast amounts of money". The very first rule of this community is "1. DO NOT make judgments on anyone in this community. This is a hate free zone and we value and respect people from all walks of life, so do not preach to the choir here, make assumptions of someone's character, belittle people in any way....etc." A good rule, right? One that the almost 10,000 people in this community don't seem to follow, though. I read the posts and comments for 20 minutes and found myself with a tummyache at how much judgment and vitriol was being tossed around. I finally brought myself to make a post about it this morning and am posting it here for future reference, as it is likely that it will not be approved by the moderators and/or deleted. Feel free to read and check out the community. I'm sure you will notice what I speak to.

Sincerely,

~Your friend Lindsay who has and always has been POOR AS FUCK.


"Hello all.

I am a new to member to this community...I came across it a few days ago in another friend's journal, as she was going through some food-stamp troubles and one of her friends referred her here. Having been poor pretty much since I left home at the age of 18, I thought this would be a great community to be a part of! With such a large membership, I looked forward to hearing others' stories on struggling & getting by and how they coped with their situations. I looked forward to great tips and helpful advice. I looked forward to a community, honestly, where people really and truly understood what it meant to be poor.

Unfortunately, that is not what I have found here at all. On Wednesday, within the first 20 minutes of reading posts in this community, I felt sick to my stomach at how much judgment was being thrown around here by members and towards other members. Additionally, I saw a lot of evidence through comments that perhaps some members here choose to live poor, in order that they might save up to pay off debt or buy a house. I don't object at all to living frugally but I think there is a big difference between someone who lives frugally and is able to save 1/3 of their paycheck every month and someone who lives frugally because they have no other option, as their paycheck is gone before it even enters their hands. I think there is a difference between idealistic people who can afford to avoid corporate hounds like WalMart and shop at Trader Joe's and those that only have $40 to buy themselves & their children food for a whole week. I wholeheartedly believe in supporting local businesses, encouraging entrepreneurial endeavors, avoiding the big corporate giants but most of the time, I find myself with only that $40 to spend and I have to make it go as far as possible.

I feel very disheartened at how people seem to treat each other here. I can think of two specific posts in which the original poster asked a reasonable question or explained a situation objectively looking for advice and was met with a lot of criticism, judgment, and self-aggrandizement. It seems people here think they know what's best for everyone's life and are less interested in offering a sympathetic ear to struggles they may know nothing at all about. I wanted to make this post a few days ago but haven't had the time. Today, I sign in and check things out one more time, hoping to see a change. Nope. None at all. The very first comment to the very first post I read was full of value judgments on the poster's life as opposed to helpful advice regarding the topic they posted on.

This may be deleted and I understand if it is. I understand if most of you could care less about what I'm saying. After all, I'm just one person and this is just one person's opinion. As a newcomer to this group, though, I feel I am possibly in a more objective position to take a good, hard look at the attitudes of some members here and I have to say I find them quite lacking. Perhaps it's just a difference in opinion, but I believe in being kind to everyone...especially those who are struggling every day just to get through the next. The less fortunate among us do not need flippant remarks from strangers...they need to be built up and supported.

It's called community. Maybe we should all try to act more like one."

• 15:11 You know what's fucking awesome? People who flash their lights at you to indicate unmarked speed traps ahead. What a public service! #
• 15:15 Holy shit! I think I just saw a drag queen in lil'ol downtown Latrobe. #

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• 13:39 Real Chance at Love, coffee, and my bearded boy. And SNOW! How can we forget that? Pork & kraut in the oven....This is my New Year's Day. #

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• 14:28 Pounding headache as a result of shelf reading with my head upside down. Yuck. Feeling yuck yuck yuck today. #

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• 12:34 I have discovered paradise and it is the Sunday India Garden buffet. Mango Lassi owns me! #

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• 12:45 There is NOTHING better than hot coffee on a snowy morning...Nothing. #
• 12:45 What's up with romance novels, huh? And why do all old ladies read them so obsessively? #
• 18:23 You know what I really appreciate? Christmas lights. It's like the only consistent cheerful thing humans do for each other. #

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• 11:10 You know what annoyingly gets stuck in my head all the time recently? That Verizon Beyonce jingle...."Let me let me Upgrade ya...upgrade ya" #

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• 19:35 Pyramid Apricot is twice as good when it's been sitting in the snow. #

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