Oh, fuck:
Govs. Pawlenty And McDonnell Apply For Abstinence-Only Funding From Health Law They Opposed:
On Monday, both Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) said they would not be applying for funds from the Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP), which provides states with $55 million for comprehensive sex education programs. Instead, they applied for Title V funding, which has $50 million a year for states to implement abstinence-only education programs. The catch is that in order to get the federal dollars, states must provide a 75 percent match.
I hardly remember what sex education was like at my high school. However, there was a day care for all of the mothers who also happened to be sophomores, so my best guess is that it was a Hell-House-esque journey through photos of herpes sores and shades of avocado discharge.
Sadly, the curriculum even planned for the fact that in order to prove that sex always leads to infectious and in many cases incurable diseases, they’d have to show actual genitals. Their loophole depended upon showing outbreaks worse than the writing on Lopez Tonight, so that most of the sores actually eclipsed their penile residence in size. Or at least, what I think was a penis. So not only did I leave my nine weeks of, ‘This is what happens to you if you have sex, but don’t think that means we’re telling you that sex is real” with no mention of contraception, but I also began to question my own jittery grasp of how sex worked. Like, if this so-called ‘herpes’ was so bad, why did it look like a sea of pleasure nodes not unlike my own lousy uni-clitoral mud-flap? And why would I want to protect myself from it by promising Jesus that I would only take on multiple sexual partners after marriage?
It’s like taking a class on candy making that revolves solely around photos of cavities. And then telling everyone that if you make caramel, you will get burned. I mean, yeah, you probably will but that’s not the point. Because just like sex, candy is fucking awesome and if enjoyed responsibly, it can be more than an invitation to pass out in the bathroom of a 7-11.
But, really, $50 million is a great deal for a time machine. Just not one that is unable to actually go forward in time.
I went to Stanislaus National Forest to celebrate America’s independence and pizza and other things but mostly pizza. But before the pizza, I went hiking and probably caught the plague.
There’s an inherent danger when it comes to any outdoor activity. Things like sprained ankles, dehydration and sun burns. Those are just the things that can happen to you without even having to try. I’ve done plenty of stupid things intentionally – swam in nearly freezing water, approached an 1100lb bull elk, and one time, even mixed some Country Time into tepid water and drank it. But walking straight into an area infested with plague is so stupid it may as well be referred to as the rhythm method.
The sign circled in the photo is where I saw the, “You’re about to get plagued” warning. It basically tells you to stay away from small woodland animals and ticks, since they’re the major carriers. Armed with this gentle suggestion that, for most people with functioning risk assessment faculties would translate to “Don’t do it,” I sprayed myself down with 100% DEET, gagged because of the sudden gust of wind that directed the poisonous mist into my mouth, and went on my way.
After around the 11th time of thinking that the same patch of dirt on my ankle was a tick, I ditched Plague N’ Save in search of pizza. From there, the rest of the weekend was a blur until I woke up with a sore throat the morning after returning. In other words, I had swollen lymph nodes – one of the main symptoms. I rushed around my apartment looking for the thermometer, which is what I do in order to know whether I’m going to overreact by taking an ice bath or drinking eight cups of green tea. I couldn’t find it so instead, I wondered if the plague was the kind of thing where, assuming I didn’t die, I’d get to eat a lot of ice cream during recovery. Eventually, I did what any medically ignorant individual would do and resorted to Google.
Check out the guy whining about having the wrong tax code. Dude, I might have the plague. You just have a minor inconvenience. Predictably, my Google search didn’t yield much more than a barely literate Yahoo Answer and lots of links leading to information about the plague over 600 years ago. So not only was I kind of swollen and achy, but I was also grossly anachronistic.
But I’m fairly certain that I don’t have the plague. To be safe, however, I’m clearing my search history before I go to bed.
I bought a gallon of vodka a few days ago. It was $9.99 at Trader Joe’s – where they’ll sell you a rib-eye for the price of an onion. I mean, I’ll probably never drink a gallon of vodka in my lifetime, but the bargain was too hard to pass up. I’d buy a prostate exam for the right price. The best part? It comes in a plastic jug, which I figure should be the standard for any hard liquor. Glass rarely mixes with rowdynness anyway.
I happen to like flavored vodka because many of them tend to me more Skittle than they are alcohol. And if you really want to twist my arm, when I say “flavored vodka” I actually mean, “wine coolers.” The differences are negligible as far as I’m concerned since they both end with me talking about how I always confuse The Mighty Ducks with Darkwing Duck but what if they are secretly the same thing?
So while I’m far from being a mixologist, I do know how to put things in other things. And with that, I’ve essentially shared my recipe for Bubblegum Vodka. I used 16 pieces of Dubble Bubble for about 1.5 cups of vodka and shook it around every couple hours. With every shake I thought to myself, “This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done. Even worse than that time you Naired your eyebrows.” For the full 24 hours that I let it steep, I felt like an idiot. A cheap idiot. But after tasting the final product I was like, holy shit this actually works. Oh, and there are even leftover bubblegum soaked vodka bombs. They act in kind of the same way as olives in a gin martini but, you know, edible.
My finished product ended up being a disappointing pale pink. To get closer to Barbie’s convertible I added some red decorating sugar, which also made it a bit more like Fun Dip. Just how I like it.
Now I just need to figure out what to do with the rest of this vodka. Using it to make homemade NyQuil seems too obvious.
After three weeks on the road and seeing Wal-Marts scarier than Christian Slater’s hairline (and if you think your Wal-Mart is scary, then either you live in Salt Lake City, where it has its own parking garage, or you’re completely full of shit), I have finally made it to Oregon.
Unfortunately, one of my first impressions of Oregon was a small town by the name of Hines, where I stopped off at a supermarket to buy a party tray of boneless honey barbecue chicken wings because, unless I wanted to chow down on bumper stickers reading “Real Men Love Jesus”, there was nothing else. It was at this moment that I overheard someone say, “I hope he falls off the face of the earth and we never have to hear about him again.” Hoping they were talking about Ryan Seacrest, my ears perked up, only to discover that this Joe Dirt knock-off and his girlfriend and/or mom were referring to a tabloid featuring Barack Obama.
Now, as far as my opinion of Barack Obama is concerned, I’m somewhere in between the rabid commemorative plate crowd and those who come up with new ways to talk about Michelle Obama’s ass, so I didn’t feel the need to really say anything. For this, I was rewarded because after that, the conversation transitioned into a heated debate on whether or not they would have enough money for cigarettes and a movie, which was weird since they were buying 22 fruit pies. If you make more than $30,000 a year and are therefore unfamiliar with the fruit pie, it’s a processed dessert (or in this case, every meal ever) consisting of a glazed pocket of crust filled with your choice of an ambiguous gravy-like substance that is passed off as cherry, lemon, or apple. It’s more like the concept of pie, which is why in most cases, it only costs .75.
So there I am, not really able to be too judgmental because I’m standing around with 7 pounds of chicken in my arms, wondering why I left everything behind for this. I mean, I knew that Oregon had more to offer than a couple with matching Army t-shirts and crew cut hair styles, but in that moment, all I wanted to do was go back to Florida so I could at least bask in a lower socio-economic culture that I was used to. Then, as I was driving away, imagining these two going home and eating their fruit pies while watching “Reba” in what I hoped was a child-free home, I saw this billboard:
It says, “One style doesn’t fit all. Especially when it comes to birth control. Free or low-cost birth control, that fits your life, your body and your budget.” I didn’t know what to make of it at first, and while searching for a picture of an aborted fetus holding up a “fornicator” sign, I finally realized that this was actually promoting safe sex practices instead of pandering to the lowest depths of teenage vernacular in order to transform pregnant fifteen-year-olds into married pregnant fiften-year-olds.
So, overall, Oregon is pretty cool–and I don’t even have to pump my own gas.
No SILS this week because I have been pissing out of my asshole for eighteen hours but assuming that you’re through vomiting because of what I just said, come back for the details.
