I never was a Korn fan. It wasn’t my kind of music. Recently, I came across 2 books by members of Korn.  Save Me From Myself by: guitarist Brian “Head” Welch and Fieldy’s Dreams by: bassist Fieldy.

The books  are both autobiographical.  Fieldy and Head had both toured as members of Korn for 10 years, so, many of the stories overlap.  The writing is simple, raw, and honest.  They were living the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle.  Addicted to booze and drugs, these are the stories of how they hit bottom and cleaned up.

First Head became a born again Christian and emailed his band mates to tell them that he was quitting Korn to play music for Jesus.  He experimented with speaking in tongues, read the Bible daily, attended church 3 nights a week, quit meth, which he had used heavily for years, quit drinking, and began parenting his daughter.  He booked a hotel room for three nights and privately detoxed off of meth in a fourth of the time that it normally takes to detox.  His battle with addiction led him to Jesus.

A few years after Head’s transformation, Fieldy’s father passed away and he started to re-evaluate his lifestyle of drinkin’, cheatin’, and just being a big meany to everyone.  He quit drinking and smoking pot and began to read the word of God.  He stopped cheating on his wife, quit cussing, and became more attentive to his family.  He did not feel that he needed to attend church in order to have a healthy spiritual life.  He began praying with his children, but was nondenominational.

It is not because both men found freedom from addiction through faith that I was touched by these books.  I was moved by the candid account of how each guy overcame addictive and destructive behavior.  Because I struggled with alcoholism, I find it empowering to read other people’s stories about how they found the confidence and heart to fight for their freedom.

If you noticed that I was quoting L7, you get a gold star for the day…

I am a freak magnet.  I have been chased around by freaks my entire life.  I’ve compiled this list of the most memorable creeps, weirdos, losers and freaks that have crossed my path.  Enjoy!

West Virginia circa 1998 I had a verbally and psychologically abusive boyfriend whom I loved intensely because well, I needed someone to love me back.  He was this goth-looking kid; I was a sweet, vegan, non-shaving, virginal, hippie-type.  He immediately got to work, attacking my insecurities and trying to turn me into his ex-girlfriend.  He would pick out clothes for me to wear.  If I was not wearing the outfit that he chose for me, he would pout and be pissed off for the rest of the night.

I will list his douche baggery-ness with bullets as it would take SEVERAL pages of small font to describe all of the reasons why this guy was a total freak.

• He convinced me to lose my virginity in a dirty hotel room that I paid for.  It was not a pleasant or memorable experience.  I had been pressured to the point where I just gave in.  The greatest part about this was that I was suckered into paying  for the hotel room, did the deed, then had to make it home by curfew.  Meanwhile, he and his friends got to party in the room, for free, for the rest of the night.
•  One time, we were visiting his sister out-of-state.  He had his mom drop us off at the mall.  There was this claw ring that he really wanted.  It was $100 and some dollars.  He called his mom and asked for MORE money to buy it.  She refused.  He spent the rest of the day, crying (and I mean literally crying) and saying that I didn’t know how much that ring meant to him.
• I had made an appointment to get a tattoo with my dad and I had really been looking forward to it.  My boyfriend wanted to come along.  My dad got his tattoo and the artist said he only had time for one more.  My boyfriend actually had the audacity to ask who was getting the tattoo, me or him.
• He talked me into moving out-of-state, then completely ignored me.  He would leave for work early in the morning and then go out drinking with friends and then come home and go to sleep.  I was not 21 at the time.  I was depressed and wished I was dead every single day that I lived with him–I lasted for 2 weeks before I moved out.
• He asked me to come over to his friend’s house and videotape his band practice.  I was thinking that it was really cool that he was in a band.  HA!  I got there and they were all lip-syncing to cd’s and pretending to play instruments.  I am not kidding.

Maryland circa 2003

I attended 2 parties hosted by an elderly man.  The party-goers were all in their late teens/early twenties.  This man had red lights in his living room, was constantly playing Slayer concerts on the TV and had a dungeon in his basement.  Fortunately, I never had the pleasure of seeing the dungeon.  The kids going to these parties weren’t the brightest crayons in the box either.  I heard that the old man was sleeping with some of them.  It was totally weird.

Texas circa 2004

I had just moved to a new city.  I was riding the Via bus to school, when I met a hippy-ish looking guy who was manhandling a guitar.  He didn’t have a case for it and had just purchased it.  I loved the excitement in his eyes, but there was DEFINITELY not a love interest there on either of our parts (to my knowledge anyway).  We exchanged phone numbers and parted ways.

Later we decided to hang out.  I thought he was a little weird, but he came over and we drank and played guitar together.  He invited some of his friends over to my house.  His friends were really cool…way cooler than him.  This lead me to the false belief that he was more normal than I had originally given him credit for.  I was dead wrong.

My bedroom window was right next to the slab of cement otherwise known as our back porch.  I often felt uncomfortable.  We weren’t living in the best neighborhood and I had nightmares that murderers would be lurking outside, ready to break through my window and pounce on me.

It was 5am in June of 2004 when I heard a tapping on the window.  I cautiously went to the screen door.  There stood this guy, bleeding profusely from his arm which was wrapped in a thick bath towel, soaked in blood.  There was blood on the porch.  A lot of blood.  Judging by the pool of blood on the concrete and the bloody knock prints, he had attempted to get my attention via the front door as well.

He concocted a story about how he was in a car accident and went to the emergency room only to be turned away.  He claimed to have walked from the ER all the way to my apartment.  Keep in mind that it would have taken a non-bleeding person a very long time to accomplish this feat.  If he had, indeed, walked all this way, I am sure that he would’ve passed out due to blood loss.  He asked for a ride to his parents’ house.   I was carless at the time and woke up my roommate who said that she would drive us.  We tried to convince him to let us take him to the hospital.  He blatantly refused to go to the hospital and being that we were friends, I respected his wishes and we took him to what he claimed was his parents’ apartment.  I was still relentless in trying to persuade him to go to the ER.  As my roommate and I were leaving, I felt very uncomfortable with this whole situation and I decided to try to talk him into going to the hospital one last time.  I found him lying outside, between apartments, on the concrete.  He proceeded to call me a “fucking bitch” and tell me to leave him along.  I went home and called 911 and told them where he was and that he needed an ambulance.

I tried calling his phone and leaving messages.  I never heard from him again and was living with the guilt that I could, in some fucked up way, be responsible for this man’s death.  I even tried to look him up in the San Antonio obituaries, but I did not know his last name or even his real first name.

Over a year later, my roommate and I were waiting in line at Henry Rollin’s spoken word and  there he was, the bleeding guy.  I did what any pissed off, guilt ridden, woman would do and loudly proclaimed how rude it was that “some people” would let certain other people believe that they are dead….etc.

Coincidentally, when we got inside the venue, he and his friends ended up having seats right behind us.  He had gotten up to go to the restroom and I confirmed his identity with the remaining member of his party.  When he got back, he and his 2 friends left.  The show hadn’t even started yet.

Texas circa 2004

I was in the middle of some very serious grieving as my mom had just passed away.  I went to a bar by myself and scribbled song lyrics into my journal…..long story short, someone put Roofies in my drink….I woke up on my living room floor with only the vaguest memory of a circle of hippies, a beautiful girl with dreads,  and a tearful conversation about my mom.

San Antonio, TX circa 2005

A college schoolmate approached me to compliment me on a feminist button that was on my back pack and asked me if I wanted to start a feminist club with her.  We attempted to start a non-hierarchical feminist group.  No one was doing anything because there was NO leadership.  I’m a very get-shit-done-er kind of person.  So, I tried to get shit done.  All of a sudden, I was a racist because I was pronouncing her name Marissa (as she had introduced herself to me) instead of “Ma-reesa” as the other Hispanic women in the group called her.  If you ask me, she’s the racist because she altered the pronunciation of her name for my white benefit.  I would have loved to pronounce her name correctly, had I been told what the correct pronunciation was.  The women in the group were NOT feminists.  They were afraid of their own feminism.  They didn’t want to do anything that would be construed as “man-hating” including a demonstration that I suggested about pay inequity.  They were a bunch of fucking idiots.

Before she turned from interesting, naive, indie girl into the misogynistic dragon lady from hell, we had taken a liking to one another.  We got together for drinks a few times.  She would say things like, “if I were interested in women, I would want to go out with you”…..and blah blah blah…  In case you are not familiar, this is something that bi-curious fuck wads say as a disclaimer to excuse the behavior they are about to display, because hey, they aren’t gay.  She went so far as to tell me that she wanted to date me and then ask if she could kiss me.  It was completely insane.  She started treating me like her girlfriend.  One day I made a comment to suggest that we were dating and she said she had no idea why I would think that.  CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS???!!!!!!!  I told her to “fuck off” and hung up the phone.

So then she had one of her friends send me a really mean email telling me that I was trying to  take over the feminist group and a whole bunch of nonsense….and that it was very unfeminist of me to tell one of my “sisters” to “fuck off”.  Then I told her the whole group could “fuck off”.  I didn’t hear of their feminist group ever again.  I’m assuming they didn’t do any type of activism at all.  I went to a smaller college and if any shit was stirred up, I would have heard about it….didn’t hear a peep.  It’s a shame that a feminist group was ashamed to be feminists and as a result did nothing.

A couple months later, I saw her in the hallway at school and realized that I hated her so much that the sight of her, literally, made me physically ill.  I got that vomit taste in my mouth.

Exhibit A:  Let’s get back to nature with this video of a praying mantis mating ritual, otherwise known as cannibalism.

Exhibit B:  Women live longer than men.

The reason for this post is that I randomly happened across the praying mantis video and just had to share it.

Interestingly enough, studies have shown that women are more prone to depression than men.  Because psychological well-being has such a prominent effect on physical health, I find this data rather surprising

Today is officially 9 months of not drinking. Wow. I never thought I was strong enough to do this, especially when smoking and drinking defined my lifestyle in so many ways. I feel pretty good, but I have another addiction: soda, particularly Diet Coke (sometimes with lime, sometimes plain). So today I will begin abstaining from soda.

I didn’t regularly drink soda until I quit drinking. Now I usually have 1 or 2 12oz. cans per day. Of course we all know that soda is bad for us, but I did some research to find out why.

1. An 8 year study at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, Texas showed that while soft drink consumption was definitively linked to obesity and weight gain, interestingly, obesity and risk of weight gain were drastically higher in those who consumed artificially sweetened diet sodas rather than regular soda. For each can of diet soda consumed per day a person risk of obesity rises 41%.

2. A can of regular has about 11 teaspoons of sugar making soda highly addictive. Gross!

3. Soda can rot your teeth.

4. It’s WAY unnatural! Look at the ingredients: carbonated water, caramel color, natural flavors, caffeine, phosphoric acid and high-fructose corn syrup. Carbonated water is plain water infused with carbon dioxide, which creates the bubbles. Caramel color is a natural additive that tints food products, providing the familiar color consumers expect to see. Natural flavors are often of the citrus variety and added for taste. All of these are simple, harmless ingredients. Next is caffeine, a diuretic and stimulant known to be addictive.

I slipped and smoked 3 cigarettes last night after 2 whole weeks of not smoking, but I am back on the wagon. I was very glad to awaken to my clothes and hair reeking of smoke and a tightening in my chest. It’s good to recognize how shitty smoking makes me feel.

So….no alcohol, no cigarettes, no soda…

Yesterday The photo above describes exactly how I feel as a smoker.  I, along with many other smokers, just want you to mind your own business.  We are well aware of what smoking does to our health and we are just too addicted to care.  Plus, shaming and nagging a smoker WILL make them want to smoke more.  Ask any smoker you know!

Yesterday was my first full day of not smoking.  It was also my deceased mother’s birthday, she would’ve been 47.  As you can imagine, this is not the greatest time to quit.  I almost bought a pack last night, but denied myself and I am very glad that I did.

So, let’s face it.  When you are young and beautiful, smoking looks cool.  It just does.  You are invincible and you don’t have to worry about smoking related illnesses for quite some time.  You don’t think about it.

I’m not sure who this is (above), but the cigarette and guitar are undeniably HOT.

Model (above) smoking cigar in her bra.  It looks pretty cool in the pic, but imagine how bad it would stink up a bedroom.  Stank-cig-smell equals NOT sexy.

James Dean

An old school Lucky Strike ad.  Makes smoking look really fun, right?

Now here’s a shocker.  It’s a kid, probably about 7 years old, smoking a cigarette.  Who took this pic?  Did some sick-fuck think that this was cute?! Notice the temporary tattoo on his arm.  I bet he really looks up to someone and is trying to emulate him/her.  Stick with the tats and drop the cigs kid!

Smoking Makes You Ugly:

BAD TEETH

Below are the teeth of an “occasional smoker” before having them chemically whitened.  Sadly, after 15 years of smoking, mine are very similar to her before picture. ;(

Thank goddess that my teeth do not look like the lady below!!!!!!  Gross!!!!

PREMATURE AGING

It’s no surprise that smoking makes you age faster.  Smoking causes wrinkles (think of those pucker lines on elderly smokers), makes skin leathery, causes “fur tongue” and may discolor skin.

Smoking Makes You Sick & Kills You:

MOUTH CANCER

LUNG CANCER

EMPHASEMA

Smoking is bad for babies, even unborn ones:

I found the following pics and decided to include them for the WTF factor:

Anti-smoking ad geared toward youth:

So this is not as shocking a post as originally intended, but my method is clear.  I’m on day 2 of not smoking and boy I would kill for a cigarette….but instead I am abstaining and trying to keep my mind off of the cravings. 

Day 2

1.  smelling and tasting more

2. lungs feel great!

3. salivating at the thought of a cigarette

Soooo….I managed to kick the drinking habit.  It’s been almost 9 months, but I can’t seem to lick the smoking habit.  I am not a pack-a-day smoker, nor I’m a social smoker.  I’m more of an impulsive smoker.  I just get the urge and I go with it.  I am currently salivating as I write this.  I am currently thinking about buying a pack on the way home from work.  I have quit smoking cold-turkey before, but it wasn’t totally quitting because I continued to smoke on the rare occasion. 

So, here’s my plan:  My next blog will totally gross you out.  I’m going to find the most disgusting smoking related pictures that I can and post them.  Pictures of emphysema patients, black lungs, stained fingers…you name it.  I intend to shock myself into not smoking.

I’m interested to hear your smoking histories and methods of quitting.  I have one friend that says he would get sunflower seeds with the shell and chew on them until the urge went away.  What do you do?  Stay tuned for the grossest blog of life…

I attended 2 campus’ of Penn State University from 2000-2003. I was a Women’s Studies major with a minor in Sociology. I then transferred to the University of Texas @ San Antonio where I was forced to switch my major and my minor because Women’s & Gender Studies (as their program was called) was not offered as a major.

I am currently reading a book called Professing Feminism:  Cautionary Tales From the Strange World of Women’s Studies, by: Daphne Patai & Noretta Koertge.  This book took me back to my college days, sitting uncomfortably in classrooms, fearful of speaking my mind.  AND here’s why:

I attended a branch campus of Penn State in Beaver County PA for 2 years.  I was the ONLY Women’s Studies major in the entire school.  There were NO Women’s Studies classes.  I took a ton of Sociology, Philosophy and Literature courses.  Most of my peers did not seem to think twice about my choice of major, but some professors in the school all but harassed me.  A professor of English, in a class called Intro to Composition, confronted me several times in front of the entire class saying that she didn’t know why anyone would major in Women’s Studies and blah blah blah.  It was completely unnerving!  So one day, I finally confronted her.  We ended the meeting in tears.  She had not known that she had been treating me so badly.

I then attended the main campus of Penn State (University Park) for 1 year.  This was a much different setting because there were hundreds of Women’s Studies majors and minors.  Now I was facing a different dilema, it became pretty clear in which classes I was permitted to speak and which classes I should just bite my tongue.  I was called a racist in a Race and Gender course by means of a “you people” comment directed towards me by and African American woman because I made an innocent comment regarding flesh-colored bandaids and white priviledge.  Later an African American man in the same class got up and violently shook his chair at me.  He apologized profusely after class, saying that he was trying to be an RA and he didn’t want this incident to hurt his chances.  The professor did nothing to de-escalate either incident.  I was completely apalled.  None of the other Caucasian students ever joined class discussion for fear of alienation or a blatant attack.  A few students approached me in private and confessed that they felt uncomfortable too.

Finally, I ended up at the University of Texas @ San Antonio where Women and Gender Studies was a relatively popular major.  I had a Chicana Literature class where Chicana women in the class spoke and everyone else did not.  I would leave the class sometimes in tears.  The readings really meant something to me and I was disheartened that I could not freely discuss how I was feeling simply based on my whiteness.

The “Women’s Studies Conflict” in Profession Feminism is the division or lack there of between feminist activism and academic study.  Should the 2 be combined?  Does drudged up and encouraged anger make Women’s Studies courses a hostile environment?

Here is my personal opinion:

For me Women’s Studies was feminist studies and I liked it that way.  I have never liked the division between feminists though.  By division, I mean that as feminists we are not unified because we have sectioned ourselves into many smaller slices.  We are separated by gender, race, socio economic status, sexual orientation, age…etc.  Then we are divided again into even smaller slices between feminists with opposing views such as porn is okay and anti-porn, pro-choice and pro-life, to name a few. 

I have studied feminist writings by white women, black women, Asian women, Native American women, Hispanic women, lesbians, heterosexuals…  I have known feminists that are men, women, transgendered, pro-choice, pro-life, gay, straight, bi-sexual, older, younger, professional, homemakers….and the list goes on.

Just because I am pro-choice and another feminist may be pro-life, that does not mean that can’t find a different issue that we can stand side by side, fighting.  We both believe in equality for women or we wouldn’t consider ourselves feminists.  I think there needs to be a mutual respect for our differences and a marrying of our commonalities in order for feminists to unit.

So I’m white, that doesn’t mean that I haven’t known poverty, struggle, discrimination, hatred and bigotry.  I can find a piece of myself in writings by women of all walks of life.  It’s a little something called empathy.  When you look at me, all you can see is my whiteness, but do not think that I could not possibly identify with someone of a different race or sexual orientation.  We have all struggled.  I do not wear my struggles like a badge.  You just see a blond, heterosexual, young woman when you look at me, but what you get is a bisexual feminist, who grew up so impoverished that her family didn’t have running water or electricity until she was in second grade.  What you get is a girl that had her life threatened every day of middle school for being a “dyke” even though she wasn’t out to anyone.  I could go on and on….  My point is, we are different yes, but the point of Women’s Studies to learn about women of all types.  Allow me to understand you.  Let me tell you what a particular passage means to me.

Share your opinions with me in comment form.  I always welcome any new ideas and discussions.

I should go back to school and become a professor of Women and Gender Studies…

I could most certainly write 100,000 words about my experiences with alcohol, but I’ll save the pity party.  This blog is about my experience without alcohol.

I used to be the biggest drunk, a scary drunk, a drunk that blacks out and has amnesia.  After putting myself (and others) in many dangerous situations and nearly ruining my relationship, I finally quit drinking.  I had tried to quit a few times before that, but after a month of non-drinking, I would think that it was cool, I could handle it.  Five months ago, I quit-quit.

Here is my dilemma, it is really hard to meet people that have also given up the poison.  People that have never drank in their lives don’t count.  I need some good former lushes to hang with.  I am fine being around alcohol, but because I’m no longer looking down the barrel of a loaded bottle of Jack, I am unsatisfied in social situations that exist for the shear purpose of getting totally wasted.  I want late night diners, poetry readings, art, conversations, music.  I want to find others that are at this same point in life when the layers of hidden person can finally be exposed.  Am I asking too much?

AA is a crock of shit.  I am not powerless over alcohol.  I do not need to give my powerlessness up to a “higher power.”  I am in control of my own actions.  Yes, it is hard to do, but you can overcome addiction.  Could I pick up a beer and go back to being a lush?  Yes, of course.  I am predisposed to alcoholism.  That doesn’t make me powerless.  I’ve got alcoholics on both sides of my family.  I’ve experienced it first hand.  The cycle stops here…with me.

I attending one AA meeting.  I didn’t like the bullshit God stuff, but I did like that everyone was so open and accepting.  They gave me books with all the meetings they thought I would like.  They gave me their numbers and said if had the urge to drink, I could call them and talk about it.

I went to one Smart Recovery meeting.  It’s the same premise as AA, in the get clean sense, but without the God stuff.  The differences are that there are many types of addicts at these meetings (coke heads, pill heads, alcoholics…etc.) and people aren’t so inviting.

So how the fuck am I ever going to make non-drinking friends?

I created a meet-up for this reason.

http://www.meetup.com/The-Allston-Alcohol-Free-Meetup-Group/

1.  Finish compiling my poetry book and find a publisher.  This has been a dream of mine for many years and I’d like to finally put it into motion.

2.  Pick up my guitar again.  Since my mom’s death, 4 and 1/2 years ago, I have not been musically inclined.  Guitar was something that I was very passionate about, but my mom taught me how to play so it was bittersweet to retire my guitar.  I think that she would want me to play again.

3.  Continue to be alcohol free.  I quit drinking nearly 4 months ago.  I’m thinking clearly and good things have been happening as a result of my sobriety. 

4.  Become more dedicated to roller derby.  I’m just now caught up enough on bills that I can start moving derby up the ladder of my priorities.  I’m very thankful to be part of such an amazing sport.

5.  Volunteer more.

With everything coming together at the end of 2008, I’m very optimistic about the new year.  So tell me, what are your new year’s resolutions?

I recently discovered a television show called “30 Days”.  It is a reality show in which people, with strong opinions on a particular issue, spend 30 days with a host family that opposes their view.

Some of the topics:

A conservative, Christian, who believes that homosexuality is a sin, goes to live with a gay man in San Francisco to learn about gay culture.

A mother is concerned that her 19 year old daughter is drinking too much so she intends to teach her a lesson by going on a 30 day drinking binge.

A Christian from WV, who associates all Muslims with terrorism, is sent to live with an American-Muslim family to learn about the religion and culture.

A woman who opposes gay adoption is sent to live with a family consisting of 2 dads and 4 sons for 30 days.

I highly recommend this show.  Most individuals are descriminating against a particular group of people because they have never been exposed to that culture.  It’s very interesting to see how this experience changes their view points.

You can watch “30 Days” for free at http://www.hulu.com.  Just click on “TV Shows” and then type “30 Days” into the search box.

http://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/originals/30days/