So yet another book about overly privileged, horse faced, white people living in houses big enough to contain a small village, spending enough money in a month to settle the national debt of the average third world country is hitting the stands?  Where do I line up to buy it?

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My voice in the many….I was 6 months pregnant, 10 days married and working less than 5 miles from the Pentagon on that day.  We had just put the last wedding guest on a plane out of Dulles the day before.  My coworker wandered up to my reception desk and told me a plane had hit the WTC.  We both figured it was a small aircraft such as the one that had hit some months before.  It wasn’t.  We listened in horror as another plane hit the other tower.  We felt the earth shake as a plane plowed into the Pentagon.  We searched for our husbands via land lines since cell reception was spotty at best.  We waited for news.

I finally found my husband two hours later.  I had logged into the online game where we met and was being fed information by friends of mine in Toronto.  Scott logged in and I lost it.  The wedding had been stressful and being pregnant on top of that had caused me to wonder if I had made a huge error getting married.  It was at that moment that I knew I had made the right choice.  Knowing that he was safe after all the mayhem settled me.

We watched the footage that evening until neither one of us could stand to see it again.  We went out into a Northern Virginia that, for that evening, was quiet.  No traffic, no noise…you could hear the birds.  There were no planes in the sky.  The world stood still.

Um…this is 2009.  Communism ceased to be a threat about 20 years ago when the Berlin Wall fell.

9/11 was caused by henchmen of Osama Ben Laden, not a specific country.  Afghanistan might have been necessary but Iraq was a put-up job.  We never had any business going into the Middle East and we should beat a hasty retreat out of there.

Before you get all tense, my dad was career military.  I grew up military.  My BIL is military.  I heard once that when you put women in combat, war becomes an ugly thing.  I was nine years old at the time and I remember thinking that killing people was ugly regardless of them being boys or girls.

Go Bill!  I missed you.  Job WELL done!

I think they should have invited Carol and Sydney McCain, John’s first wife and first daughter.  THAT would be an entertaining discussion I might actually pay bucks to see.

Other than that, Slinky is right, snore-fest.

Hair issues go hand in hand with body image issues.  No matter what you have, you want something else.  If my ass was small, I’d want it bigger.  If my hair was curly, I’d want it straight.  The way to win this game is just be content in what you have.

It has, however, taken me 40-odd years, therapy and SSRIs to get to that contented spot.  Just sayin’…..

My my my…those is possibly the most arrogant statements I’ve read on WoW.

Do you presume to know the mind of God?  Oh, wait, don’t tell me…it says it in the bible!  ‘Course it also says we shouldn’t eat shrimp but hey, we can cherry pick, right?

God makes mistakes and I am sure he/she/they/it has giggled about those mistakes.  God also gave us brains and the capacity to use them although this ability is sadly lacking in much of the world’s population.

I think a better way would be to ask if the B/C ticket is the last of the ‘old farty white guy politics’ variety.  I don’t think Bill played that game and that’s what set him up so badly with the repub congress.

 I am for the best person regardless of sex, age, creed, color, sexual preference or ability to tie a cherry stem into a knot using just your tongue.  We may well have another all white guy ticket but I must say I was quite happy with the ‘08 election outcome.

Heidi, I’ve thought that for years.  Good to know somebody else is on the same page.  It always sounded like an extortion plot to me.  I don’t think Michael had a sexual bone in his body, poor guy.  Was he inappropriate?  Oh, yeah but I don’t think he ever put a hand on a child in a sexual manner.

I think Michael might have pulled the plug on himself.  He had not toured in 12 years.  He was 50 years old.  He couldn’t move like he once did.  I think in his mind he was going to be a huge disappointment to his fans.  Instead of being comfortable in himself and giving his fans an evening with him regardless of the age induced limitations, he chose to step out and leave them with the Peter Pan version from their past.

All in all, poor guy.

My then 3 year old son found my husband dead on the floor of the bedroom.  "Daddy still sleeping," he told me.  I knew something was very very wrong.  I will never get the last picture of my husband out of my mind.  Every time I think it is gone, it suddenly appears again.  The level to which it shakes me has diminished over time but it still burrows to the core of my being.  I shake for a moment then soldier on.  After all, I have a son to raise and a life to live.

We have never pulled away from discussing death in my house.  I am very up front with my now 8 year old son.  Avoidance of the subject won’t work.  How can we avoid an inevitability?  Everybody dies.  My friends have been dropping dead since the mid-80s.  I have many friends in the gay community and AIDS has been a fact in my life since 1985.  I grieve but I soldier on.  We have villified death.  We act as though, if not spoken of, death will just go away.  It doesn’t.  Nobody gets out of life alive.

My husband and I had discussed at length what we wanted for our funeral.  I have no idea why we did so.  We were young, just married with an adorable kid but still we spoke of what we wanted for our death.  The morning I had to meet with the funeral home, I knew exactly what my husband had wanted:  cremation, no casket and no embalming.

I spoke at his funeral.  I got comments of ‘how brave you were’ and ‘I could never have done that’ but it needed to be said that my husband would have been flabbergasted at the turn out for his funeral.  It was standing room only for a very gentle giant who didn’t think he could get 20 people at his funeral, much less the 500+ that showed up.  It is odd to me that this memory of that time is what brings me to tears.  The sea of people, all wearing black, looking at me while I spoke of how impressed he would have been at the turn out.

I have lost friends since becoming a widow.  I was amazed at how uncomfortable people became when I tried to talk about my husband.  I was also amazed at the depth of compassion shown to me by complete strangers and acquaintances when I needed to talk about him.  There were those who became embarrassed when I spoke about him as I smile.  There were those who simply told me to go ahead as I sobbed over finding a button of his in a deep fold of my purse and remembered the day it popped off his shirt.  It is amazing the things that will blindside you.

I have a wonderful son.  He looks exactly like his father.  I have a huge Greek in-law family who keeps me hopping.  We are still very close.  I have managed to acclimate to them and am far better for it.  I’m Southern by birth but the level of ‘family’ I saw with my Greek in-laws makes me grin and shake my head. 

I put one foot in front of the other and continue going forward because doing anything else wouldn’t please him at all.  He told me all the time that if anything ever happened to him, he wanted me to get remarried.  Nobody could ever replace him.  My husband was one in a million. 

Awww…poor little ego ran up against somebody better than him.  What kind of misogynist thinks it is okay to be bettered by one sex in competition but a greater defeat if given by the opposite sex?  Puhleeese!  Grow a pair and be gracious in defeat.  That’s what being a good sport is all about.

I am the mechanical/handy one in my family.  My wonderful husband found a pink tool belt for me for mother’s day one year.  (I LOVED it!)  He fixes the computers, I do the handy work around the house.  He brags that ‘his wife can fix anything!’.  It makes me proud.

CP could quite easily have answered the question with "My personal feelings towards this issue aren’t important" or something to that effect.  No, her choice was to voice what she knew would be an unpopular (in Mr. Hilton’s opinion).  She also had to know the pageant world is lousy with gay men.  In my book, what she did is called biting the hand that feeds you.

 As to the attention whores that are Jon & Kate Gosslin…well, isn’t the premiere of the next season coming up?  Wow!  What timing!  The cover of all the gossip rags and every online ‘zin are buzzing about these two.

In the end, I just feel sorry for the eight kids.  All of them are going to turn out as whinny as Maddie.