Happy Birthday, Dad.

If it weren't for alcohol, my dad would be 62 today. Happy Birthday, dad.

I have this thought every year on your birthday. I hope you don't take it personally when the thought that immediately follows is, "Thank God for alcohol."

Idiocy.

The bundle of absolute retardation that serves as one of my neighbors has proven to me once more that my faith in the relative intelligence of mankind against the average rock is completely unfounded.

She has this terrible spotted dog, some kind of retriever or spaniel or retrieving spaniel of some kind. I'd be willing to bet you $5 or a mid-list glass of wine that her dog was procured in some kind of fit whereby cuteness was some kind of deciding factor. All dogs are cute, that's why we call them dogs and not cats. It is not a good reason to purchase an individual specimen. I am confident that she has no understanding that she has purchased for herself a dog that was probably bred for work, hunting or sporting of some kind, and that it is completely inappropriate for apartment living.

My conclusions are reasonable based on the fact that the animal is confined to her porch, dying of boredom, where it can look at about 25 other back porches and bark wildly whenever a molecule twitches in its visual domain. My guess would be that this beast of little brain is absolutely mad with pent up energy and work drive, and probably behaves just like a working dog in an apartment. Which is probably very undesirable to Little Bunny Foo Foo, his owner. Relegated to the porch, he barks. Persistently. Given the opportunity, he will run all over the apartment, barking from each window. He also likes to claw at the railing, dump his designer dog toys over the side, and bark some more.

Because I have apartment appropriate and fairly well trained dogs, at least mine don't bark back. My Italian Greyhound gives him a little what-for, but they both focus on ignoring him. To them, he's probably the dog equivalent of the kid on the playground with dirt on his face and urine down his front, begging everyone to play with him.

Let me be clear that I don't hate the dog. I have no criticism of an animal that wants to do what it was bred to do. It doesn't appeal to me as a dog because I feel that in modern times, people need to have modern dogs, not working or sporting or hunting dogs. This means that terriers, even silky little balls of grandma-nipping fuzz, are completely out. People who want a black lab completely puzzle me. Do people fail to understand that while trendy, a Labrador Retriever is not intended by any stretch of the imagination, to lay at your feet 24 hours a day? They chew on things and tear things up and are pent up in back yards and ignored because they want to do what they want to do, which is work. They want to run miles and miles every day, swim out to the middle of lakes, and pick up dead things, and swim back, and run to you, and drop the carcass at your feet, and then do it again. If you're going to get a fucking working dog, you'd better have some work for it. A Doberman is 1000 times more attractive, smarter, better with children, and just as available, and that particular dog IS designed to lay around 23.75 hours a day. Of course, I am also speaking about the same people who will buy an SUV that could house three migrant families so that they can play the, "I can take up 2 parking spaces" game while buying their single tall nonfat latte and 4 oz diet yogurt at a store three blocks from home.

Dogs are very intelligent beings. They are man's best friend because they are smart enough to train mankind to provide for all of their needs utilizing very little of their own effort. Their minds are not complete blanks. If they were, they wouldn't get into any trouble, or do anything at all. They are problem solvers and they do what is rewarding. It's obvious and simple. Solving problems and doing what is rewarding is a very common theme among all living things, plants included. How this can escape people's notice, I am not sure. I suppose that our society has created an entire populace of people who don't solve problems and fail to do things that are rewarding, rendering the rest of the planet and all intelligent life a completely confusing prospect.

That said, today Idiot Dog was barking his head off as usual. Little Bunny Foo Foo came out and yelled at him. To a dog, this sounds like barking. She's singing along. Woohoo! Then, when that failed, she let him out of his crate on the porch, (I'm guessing that he probably has a strong smell, being a working dog, which conflicts with her Victoria's Secret saturated environment), and started making kissing noises in his face, and then gave him some food.

So, the dog barks, and he is released, given attention, and fed. Wow, what a terribly, terribly "bad" dog. "Bad" maybe, but he's not stupid.

People should be the right person with the right lifestyle for the dog, or get a stuffed animal instead. I am Absolutely Correct.

Annoying

I can't decide which is more annoying:

People who are really really fat and don't do anything about it, or people who are only like, 5 or 10 pounds overweight but obsess about it all the time. Like me.

People who cuss all the time, or people who never ever cuss and say things like "fudge" and "sugar" instead of "fuck" and "shit", but who also, once in a great while, throw out a REAL "fuck" and it actually makes me step back a bit in surprise.

What is also annoying is that Dr. A and Mr. P have started blogs now, both naming me as someone who got them into doing it, seemingly against their will. Which is not true. I wanted to be the One With The Blog. But now they have blogs too. Dr. A is even doing that annoying, "Did you read my blog?" thing that I used to do when I first started a blog. What's more annoying, that he does it, or that I realize how annoying it was when I did it?

Keep your hands off my heritage, part 1.

So, I'm half Korean and half Norwegian. And by "Norwegian" I do not mean white. Fairly white, but not 100% white. Norwegian in the sense that my Korean mother made codfish and lefse every Christmas dinner, after we had avvel skeevers for Christmas breakfast. I am half Korean in the sense that my mother came from Korea as an adult, about 30 years ago. What I do not mean is that I cling to some vague ideas about my ethnicity in order to feel all connected to my roots and show my "diversity" and all that shit. Fuck that. I am the purest bred half and half you can get.

I am uniquely qualified to be absolutely correct in making some comments about ethnicity.

First of all, I am sick of white people and their obsession with diversity/culture/heritage/ethnicity.

White people are white, Black people are black, Asian people are Asian, and then there are some people who kind of fall in between the traditional red and yellow, black and white categories. What this means is that if you are white, and you are living in the United States, no one cares that you are 1/512th Shawnee Indian. You are not a "mutt" with French, German, and Italian, and some Greek on your father's side. You are white. News flash, everyone in the US, with the exception of actual American Indians, came to this country within the last 200 years.

The new Absolutely Correct rule is that if more than 50% of your family's life happened in the United States before 1900 and/or involves Europe, you are white, just white. Stop trying to be all ethnic. It is not remotely interesting and it pisses real ethnic people off.

Furthermore, stop honoring diversity. It's annoying. I hate going into Safeway (or wherever) and seeing these "We honor diversity" posters with a Black guy, Asian girl, and Hispanic guy on them, with about 100 white workers milling around. It's bullshit and it's vaguely insulting.

People are not diverse because the color of their skin is different and they eat spicy food. Furthermore, white people cannot make themselves more diverse by eating spicy food and getting kanji tattoos. Fucking gapers. Don't even get me started on anime.

I'm also fucking sick of people telling me how they shape their lives based on some vague attachment to their imagined cultural history. "Oh, the real FRENCH pronunciation of my last name is Bouquet, but it got changed when they came over." No, your family name is Bucket, and it's been that way for a hundred years. Stop trying to be so special. "Oh, I really love bratwurst, it's my German heritage." No it's not, it's sausage.

I'm half Korean and I don't drive a Hyundai. I drive a Volkswagen. A nice Nazi car from Germany, assembled in Mexico. My first name and last name are bland and boring and I have no compulsion to change them or explain them. I don't need to cling to something just because it vaguely corresponds to my "roots" and neither should you.

Just be white. Get your identity from your actual personality, if you have one. If you don't, try to make one up, preferably without looking to a pop star for inspiration. All this standing around trying to be something you're not makes you into that kid who hung around outside the group of cool people in highschool, basking in reflected glory.

Things people say that piss me off.

irregardless.

This should be self-explanatory. The definition of this "word" is regardless. So, why add "ir-" to the front, other than to sound stupid? The irony is that the same people who will go to all this additional trouble to add useless letters to a word cannot be bothered to type "yo" in front of "u." For the people in my life who use this word, I treasure your friendship. Oh wait, no I don't. And I'm absolutely correct.