I tried using a syndication reader years ago, but I found it too cumbersome to add sites and understand it. Well, it’s a new day, BABY! Google Reader seems perfect for idiots like me. You just have to be sure to keep all of the blogs you read associated with one gmail account, I guess (I have more than one email address).

So I started adding blogs and I am not nearly done. I’m hoping to be able to keep up with my blog reading a lot better.

Now that I see “the other side” of it, here are some things I wish:

1) I wish every blog had a feed link (RSS, Atom, whatever) that is easy to find (or just one ANYWHERE). I was surprised at how many blogs don’t have this. Luckily, with Google Reader, if the blog that is missing a feed link but is on a common free site like blogspot.com or wordpress.com, all you have to do is enter the user name (which is part of the URL) and it can find the feed location for you. However, being able to just click on a link or the feed icon would have saved me plenty of time.

2) I wish blogs would set their syndication feeds to display the entire post. If you have a Wordpress blog, here is how you do it: From your dashboard, go to Settings > Reading. In the “For each article in a feed, show…” select FULL TEXT. Now you may note that I changed my “show the most recent” to 15 for feeds, because some days I make more than one post and I don’t want anyone who checks their feeds only once every few weeks to miss anything. But I wonder if this is too many?

I don’t even PRETEND to know anything about feeds/syndication, any of that stuff. But I have Google Reader working for all but two of the blogs I’ve tried so far.’

I also shirked from feed readers for so long because I’m a layout whore and I love the graphics element of going to web pages individually. But that is time consuming, half the time a page loads and they haven’t made a new post, so the feed reader is more efficient.

Any thoughts?

The boss I had at my last job was an insanely handsome man. He was also kind, funny and smart. He had been in a wheelchair since he was about 22 years old. He and his friends in California had a habit of going to the roof of the friends’ 1-story house and jumping into the pool from the roof. This guy slipped and landed on the concrete.

You never saw a glimmer of self-pity in this guy, even though his condition led to bouts of serious complications without warning. He would say, “That accident saved my life. I was a wild kid, and I would probably be dead if the injury hadn’t slowed me down and forced me to re-examine my priorities.”

Now if a paraplegic seeing his injury as a gift from God doesn’t pull at your heartstrings, just wait for the rest of the story.

He later got married (his wife I only knew from pictures, she looks like a model). They decided to use in-vitro fertilization to have the child they desperately wanted. The son (a complete cutie) was born with cerebral palsy, and you guessed it… will require a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Now this to me seems beyond a cruel turn of events. But my boss would say it was a blessing. “What other parents could understand the needs and emotions of a child in a wheelchair but us? Besides, our house is already set up for it.”

What is the difference between someone like my boss, and someone else who decides to end it all or just gives up after a debilitating injury? Is my boss a better person? I suppose that would be the quick answer to jump to. I certainly thought he was an amazing person. And it’s hard to attach the label of “amazing” to someone going through a rough time and who doesn’t handle it as gracefully and as cheerfully.

Bottom line: Why do we feel badly for people with handicaps and serious illnesses? Why do the people themselves divide into two camps: one camp goes on, and another whithers and is never the same?

I suppose we could feel bad for so many reasons, most of which involves not wanting to see other humans in physical or emotional pain.

But I think the real reason we feel bad is the same reason why some people get so upset when a child dies and could barely blink when an adult dies. Because the results are the same (illness, injury, disability, child death): We feel so bad because we sense a permanent loss of POTENTIAL.

With my boss, he still had so much potential and he’s lived up to it. He became a family man, a career man, a good person. But the day his accident happened I think even he can’t deny, the door to a whole bunch of possibilities was slammed shut. As much as handicapped people can achieve, a guy in a wheelchair could never again dream of being a firefighter, for example.

My uncle has advanced COPD. His whole life he lived to travel, and even wrote a few travel books. But now his health has made it impossible (he should have stopped traveling 2 years ago, if we’d all be honest about the danger of it). He’s staying positive, despite my aunt’s sudden death in Egypt last April after being on a cruise. But despite everything he’s done in his life, I still feel sorry for him because he’s lost the POTENTIAL to be able to do what is most dear to his heart.

Maybe that’s why some people who suddenly find themselves going blind or deaf, or becoming a double amputee in a war, or becoming a paraplegic after a car accident… maybe the ones who can’t handle it well aren’t “weak” or have a “bad attitude”. Maybe they just no longer can see their potential. Family and friends would love for those people to “buck up” because it would make them (the family and friends) feel more comfortable. But when potential possibilities are perceived to be completely stripped from you, how can hope live on?

It goes beyond handicaps and serious illness. What about the person who becomes addicted to drugs and cannot see any possibility of ever getting off the drugs? What about the person who has lived their lives without love, and suddenly realize the possibility of love may never exist for them? What about the person living in poverty who has no education, no job skills, and no possibility of ever improving their situation?

People who become sad about their circumstances may not just be “negative nellies” who need to just cheer up. People who commit suicide may not be the selfish people that many would like to dismiss them as. Maybe these people just get lost in a fog, and lose sight of any hint of potential being available to them in the future. They can’t see any possibility of anything better, whether their vision is accurate or not. It’s still what they can and cannot see - it’s still their vision and we shouldn’t judge it.

Living a life without being able to see any potential for things ever changing for the better must be a very lonely, weary road.

Over at Ungrateful Little Bastard, there were some amazing postings going on. I know I have at least a few readers who are interested in the point of view of people affected by adotpion. For you, this blog is not to be missed.

This post particularly spoke to me, and there are interesting discussions in the comments.

My favorite quote from the post:

When you are unwanted by the first, and last resort of the second, the world itself is a spiritual wasteland.

If I had (or ever do) decide(d) to have kids, my first choice would be adoption, and I know full well I am the definite minority. I’m in a place most people aren’t - having known no genetic relatives, biology isn’t that important. Also maybe because I think so poorly of myself (fat, ugly, prone to depression), I’m not particularly interested in replicating myself. But most people in the world truly desire to have their own genetic offspring, and adoption is often the “last resort” for them. That baby that everyone pretends is so WANTED is really the consolation prize, and probably a constant reminder to the parents of their reproductive failure.

The unavoidable “last resort” reality is just one layer in the complicated, no-story-is-exactly-like-the-other minefield of emotion related to adoption.

The comments are interesting - although civil, it’s clear that the blog author is being judged on her feelings. I don’t know why people don’t get it - that every adoptee has a right to his/her feelings without being judged, because every experience is so different.

When I wrote my adoption entries, my blog was linked to by at least two adoption websites pointing me out as a horrible evil person because I called my birthmother my “biological mother”. Apparently, they feel they have a right to dictate exactly how I refer to my biological mother (and since titles often indicate emotions, they are basically telling me how to feel). They said I should be calling her my mother. Well, little do they know that in real life I do. I also call my adoptive mother “my mother”. But to be clear to the reader of my blog I made a decision to refer to both women by the descriptive titles as “biological” and “adoptive”. Because I am certainly not going to use names, and referring to them both as my mother is confusing to the reader and really, is a lie. My birth mother is not my mother the way my adoptive mother is. But all that aside, how DARE ANYONE tell me what I should call my relatives! That is for ME and ME ONLY to decide, thank you very much. It makes me wish someone would go up to them and tell them they’re horrible people and setting adoption back 50 years because they called their grandfather “grandpa” instead of “paw paw” or something stupid like that.

Using my personal story to further their own political agendas - what scumbags.

You can see a slight, almost hidden undercurrent of that in the comments of the post I quoted above. People quick to jump in and try to nudge the author to feel a different way, because the bottom line is the author’s feelings made some of them uncomfortable. It’s their agenda (which they may not even be aware of) that led some of the commenters to judge or “nudge”. Ignoring the author’s right to feel the way she feels about her own situation.

People are interesting, I’ll tell you that.

Yeah, the way I feel about people like this is how I feel about spiders. I like to live my life pretending such evil creatures don’t exist. And on the highly unpleasant occasions I am forced to see one, I get the heebie-jibblies so bad I feel nauseated at the ugliness of it, and just pray it will scurry away quickly to whatever hole it came out of.

Some highlights:

1. Hey! Drilling for oil anywhere the oil companies want to drill is totally worth raping the environment because it’s guaranteed to lower gas prices because there’s NO WAY that oil companies would just keep the profits and have record-high earnings, is there? (Cyrus has an excellent entry about why anyone without brain damage can see right away this plan will not work.)
2. According to the sign on the roof nestled amidst plastic flowers, God blessed America because George Washington was a tobacco farmer. Guess 250 years ago, instead of getting a Marlboro-emblazoned Members Only jacket for doing your part to support the tobacco industry, you used to get God’s blessings and a brand new country! (Why not smoke 250 years ago? They didn’t have science to tell you it was bad for you, most of society died before getting out of their 40s so even if they knew about long-term health effects who cares, and when your nearest neighbor is miles down the road, your smoking didn’t bother anyone!)
3. What is about six inches below the “Speaking truth in love” assertion? Why the message that we should boycott the Humane Society of the United States! Oh, and apparently her dogs agree, and her dogs vote! (I’d bet my pension this woman keeps her dogs outside tied to a tree 24/7 and considers herself an “animal lover”.)

It makes me want to go buy something to support the economy of Texarkana, Arkansas.

Backstory: A girl named Olga was out with her friends in the Marina district of San Francisco (known for being a popular hang out for douches), and she talked to this guy named Dmitri for all of two minutes. Then she gave him her card and said “give me a call.” These are the messages he left. Listen to the whole thing, because it just keeps getting better and better.

What a nightmare!!!!! He has no clue that the obnoxiousness of his first message is what guaranteed she wouldn’t call him back.

Found via List of the Day

UPDATE! The plot thickens on who this jerk really is. Dimitri is really an ex-doctor named James Sears who lost his medical license after being CONVICTED of sexually assaulting patients, he’s had plenty of press about this incident. He’s threatening to sue, saying the messages were taken from his private voicemails (guess he doesn’t understand calling someone else entails leaving a message on THEIR voicemail, not his).

Here is his disgusting website: dimitrithelover * dot * ca (I refuse to link to it)

Read about his psycho past.

Despite his senior citi-bun-ship, he remains hip and cool to the latest trends. In fact, he’s a huge fan of the Dramatic Prairie Dog video that has swept the nation.

Bun-G is convinced that if he could just master the look, he’d be the next hot thing on the internet. Let’s check in on his rehearsals, shall we?

Who he is trying to emulate: Dramatic Prairie Dog (aka Dramatic Chipmunk or Dramatic Gopher, even though it’s painfully clear he’s probably an overweight prairie dog.)

Let’s see Bun-G’s try:

Well, you look good. But you don’t have that shocked look about you. Try again.

That’s not “shocked”! That’s the typical “Paris Hilton trying to get the paparazzi to get a shot that doesn’t show her droopy eye” pose. Try again.

The face has what it takes, but there’s a little too much paw-flailing about. What else you got?

Dude, maybe you should try imitating the cat playing the piano instead.

]]> http://bunnytude.com/wordpress/2008/07/01/dramatic-bunny/feed/ http://bunnytude.com/wordpress/2008/06/30/mooses-clandestine-campaign/ http://bunnytude.com/wordpress/2008/06/30/mooses-clandestine-campaign/#comments Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:51:28 +0000 DrunkBunny http://bunnytude.com/wordpress/?p=313 (Click image for big)

So I was getting TONS of hits to my website starting this morning. I didn’t get it - what is so interesting? Then some blog surfing alerted me to the truth:

MOOSE HAS BEEN LAUNCHING A CAMPAIGN FOR PRESIDENCY - behind my back!

Seems he has a lot of friends from his six years on the Intraweb™.

His grass roots campaign for presidency has even elicited mainstream medica coverage - SEE THE CHANNEL 3 VIDEO HERE!

Cody Bear now has a new rescued puppy friend - a Border Collie named Pickles. He arrived last Friday. Cody Bear’s personal assistant “Goodbear” is posting plenty of pictures, so stop by the main page for the most recent Pickles pics.

Two other favorite dogs of mine, Lauren’s Sammy and Jasmine (who I like to call Bunny Butt), are expecting a new rescue dog addition to their clan too. Avery is due to arrive July 12. Like Goodbear, Lauren is way into photography and I can’t wait to see the new pics of Avery the beagle mix!

Wednesday night there was some thunder and lightning (of course it didn’t rain, as my yellow front yard can attest to). For some reason, Moose became very upset by this.

I was lying on the couch watching the best TV reality show ever (So You Think You Can Dance), and I barely noticed the occasional thunder and lightning.

Moose started panting like I’ve never seen him pant before. It was like he had just run a marathon. And his tongue was sticking out - something that never happens in the house because he’s not running around.

He kept leaning on me and trying to shove his head into my arm. So I pet him and didn’t notice. Next thing I know, he had jumped on the couch and jumped ON ME, and was trying to get so close it was like he was climbing through me. I think he was trying to hide his massive head by tucking it in the crook of my neck. He didn’t bark or whimper, but his eyes were a bit bugged out.

I couldn’t get him to settle down, and I certainly didn’t want a 180 pound dog laying on me. So finally I gave him two tablets of Benadryl. I don’t know if it worked or not because I had taken some too so I fell asleep soon after.

It is just weird to me that a dog suddenly develops a fear of thunder at the age of six.