An airline just for pets. And there’s a wait list already.
Clearly we really are suffering through a terrible economic downtown. The worst one since Old Yeller came out.
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Andrea updates: I should use this opportunity to sell t-shirts.
First comes love, then comes marriage, and then comes an array of strange divorce-related options including but not limited to living in the same house with your ex, your (former) husband and father of your children cooking with a microwave and sleeping on an air mattress in the basement.
Nothing to see here, move on. Except when it comes to potential new suitors:
Both have resumed dating and have even given each other advice on how to get back into the singles world. Ms. Brewster took the photograph of her husband that he put on match.com, the online dating Web site. On some Saturday nights, she says, they hire a baby sitter so they can both go out, and they share their plans so they won’t run into each other. Their living situation has scared away some potential suitors. “It freaks a lot of them out,” says Ms. Brewster. “I tell them upfront: Here’s my situation. Eventually I will move on, but I’m not going to do something to mess myself up financially.”
Um, ya. So your ex-wife and kids just live right upstairs? No, no, that’s great. So pleased you were able to work that out. Oh, she cooks for you from time to time too? And I could potentially have the honour of joining into this happy, modern fray?
What’s to be scared of there?
Last night I watched the Sex and the City movie with friends. I believe the whole movie, the central theme, can be summed up in this one line of dialogue:
I still love you, but I love me more.
I love you, but I love me more. Seriously? Does anyone else ever wonder why our divorce rate isn’t higher?
At first I saw this headline (“Why do pro-life activists oppose sex education?”) and thought–here we go: Another tirade on how pro-lifers are repressed and want to repress others.
But here the author actually spoke to Jill Stanek in attempting to answer this question. (BTW, I didn’t realize pro-lifers oppose sex education. But that’s a different post.) He doesn’t agree, but he reports. Groundbreaking.
After a discussion of sex, sin and how to decrease the number of abortions, the author asks pro-lifers this:
Question for my pro-life readers. Let’s posit that that more sex education leads to more premarital sex. Let’s assume for the moment that it also led to fewer unintended pregnancies and abortions. Would you accept more premarital sex if it meant fewer abortions?
That’s one heck of a mammoth and unsubstantiated “if”–but I’ll make the leap and say this. Yes, I would accept more premarital sex if it meant fewer abortions. There is a connection between sex and pregnancy, and if you are aware of this and willing to take on the responsibilities that come with sex, then be my guest. (Er, not literal.) If this sex-pregnancy link were firmly established in our culture it would inevitably lead to a whole lot less premarital sex anyway.
Very tangentially–I am reminded of Meatloaf. Yes, Meatloaf. When I spent summers up north Paradise by the Dashboard Light was played weekly at The Friday Night Dance. Funny song. Girl makes boy promise he will love her forever, even make her his wife (“wife”–what’s that?) before they “go all the way tonight (tonight)”. In the end he swears on his mother’s grave he’ll love her to “the end of time.” (And then starts “praying for the end of time so he can end his time with her,” but I digress.)
So I’ll end this post with another thought experiment–would we have as much casual sex if girls made guys promise they would marry them and love them til the end of time (“I’ll never break my promise or forget my vow” sings the boy in the song…) beforehand?
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0ns8t9iQck]
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Brigitte adds: Strikes me as a big IF as well, but OK, let’s play along. This particular anti-abortion activist wants fewer abortions, and that’s pretty much it. I believe too much uncommitted sex is bad for young women, but otherwise I don’t really have a reason to meddle with what consenting adults do. If we could demonstrate that more premarital sex leads to fewer abortions, I’d be in favour of it. Mind you, if we could demonstrate that less sex leads to fewer abortions, I’d be in favour of that, too.
Pay my loans. Pay my mortgage. Pay my rent. And promise you’ll care for the kids I don’t yet have. Even though I was able to afford a university degree, and I live in Vancouver, I still believe my life is harder than those living in Africa.
Quite a letter in the Citizen today.
I personally would also demand that the government provide free, grandé, extra-hot, non-fat lattés for those mornings when it feels hard to get up.
Wowee.
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Tanya adds: The letter writer claims, “[I] would love the opportunity to have babies…”
Nah…you wouldn’t. If you think paying off your student loans is a drag, try paying $40 a week for diapers. You know, those women in poor countries don’t use disposables so they just don’t have that same burden. (Man alive! This lady’s something special.)
A high school student writes about her family, in particular, her mom. The whole thing is worth reading. This is the kicker:
It is not Mother’s day. It is not my mom’s birthday, or the anniversary of some important date. Nothing… except a song on a radio, which reminded me what a beautiful woman my mother is, and how lucky I am to have her in my life.
I like this sort of every day hero story.
Better their party than my tax dollars? (with the options ranging from “bad” to “increasingly horrible”.)
Read all about an abortion fundraising party, here.
(h/t The Corner)
With a bit of luck no one will ever need to have sex again.
I’m a cerebral sort of gal, who, in the past has felt I should subjugate feelings to reason. Which, sometimes, I should. A good time to exercise this might have been before eating a second bowl of frozen yoghurt last night.
Anyhoo, here we have a study showing that those who follow their gut reactions make more ethical decisions. I don’t know how science comes to these things, but I see this as a vindication for conscience. I.e. we all have one, so use it.
Although it’s widely believed that ethics engage reason, free from passion, a forthcoming study in the journal Administrative Science Quarterly finds gut instincts are more principled than logical thinking.
Back to my deep philosophizing though. We have feelings, logic and the gut/conscience competing for our attention. So on the matter of the frozen yoghurt, for example, my feelings told me to eat more. Logic would say a second bowl of frozen yoghurt for a girl who doesn’t tolerate milk well is a bad idea (and it is). But my conscience aka my gut, did not speak. So there are clearly some issues that fall outside of the moral domain.
This pertains to the whole ProWomanProLife thing because I think most women have a conscience on abortion, but they subjugate that to all those other reasons, very logical ones, on why abortion is suitable in their particular situation. I believe they pay for this in the long term, when the conscience they subjugated comes back to haunt them.
I believe we would increase our personal freedom, freedom that is not defined by government or people or any tangible source, if we followed our gut more often. We would then live in the freedom of knowing we had done the right thing. This is an idea that is hard to get at when we talk about abortion–the provision of which is generally viewed in mainstream culture as offering more freedom, not curtailing it. I, of course, have to be difficult and view things in precisely the opposite way, struggling to find a way to describe what it is I believe. And then eating too much frozen yoghurt when I am disappointed that I can’t do so adequately.
Rebecca had this idea that perhaps we could pick a topic, and the ProWomanProLife team would weigh in on that topic.
We decided for the first round to go with something completely uncontroversial: The Birth Control Pill. Not birth control in general, but The Pill.
So here you have our uncensored, unfettered views on the Pill, in alphabetical order. There were no consultations prior to filing with me.
Enjoy.