she's a little lost girl in her own little world i'd like to help her i'd like to try

So I don't know if I've mentioned it here but some of you who know me in person might know that Crazy Lady (aka my mother) has multiple sclerosis. She was diagnosed with it about ten years ago, after being terrified she had it for twenty years. She'd been showing symptoms since she was a teenager, actually. But she wasn't actually diagnosed until her symptoms got worse and worse and her health degenerated really, really quickly within a six month period of time. And unfortunately, MS is a disease where one only degenerates. Once my mother loses even a little bit more of her muscular control in her legs, she never gets it back. Once she loses a little bit of her eyesight, it's gone for good.

So my cousin Melissa and her family and I are walking in Walk MS in Maine on April 12th. It's a personal walk for us, since it affects our family. But if anyone wanted to sponsor us, even for a dollar, here's our team page. (Yes, we're Team Awesome!)

ETA: Anonymous, thanks for trying anyway! I don't know why they would have rejected your card!?!? Give me a way to contact you if you want to try again, otherwise, we appreciate the effort!

somewhere in my wicked, miserable past there must have been a moment of truth

Memes and the like. I'm rarely tagged and stuff, but I have been of late. So first, I must thank the wonderful JohnK who gave me the You Make My Day award. Because, you know, really? Because of gov docs? I mean, that makes MY day.

Second, that bitch Amber is making me do the seven weird things about me thingy, and no, I haven't actually been tagged for it before, so you're now forced to sit through it. And I'm not sure what exactly I'm going to say here.

1. While I'm a movie buff and tend to watch anything, I would rather watch movies with happy endings, even if they're really bad and cheesy. I can watch these kinds of movies over and over again, even the same exact movie, even multiple times in one day. I can spend an entire weekend watching a single movie from start to finish, nonstop, from Friday night until Monday morning, over and over and over again, and never get bored. I did this a month ago with a new Masterpiece Theater version of Jane Eyre I have on DVD.

2. On average, I read about one book a day. The books vary, but in general the rules follow as with movies. If the book is part of a series, I absolutely positively must read them in order, even if it means waiting two months to get the first book of the series on back order. About halfway through the first chapter of every book, I read the last half of the last chapter. Of every book I read, even mysteries. I don't know why, but I do. It doesn't spoil anything for me. Usually the mysteries aren't revealed that late in the book, so I don't find out anything about the plot, only whether there's a happy ending. If there isn't a happy or satisfying ending, I put the book down and won't finish it.

3. It doesn't matter whether I see a movie of a book adaptation prior to my reading the book - it doesn't spoil things for me. I can separate books from movies. However, I get really annoyed if a well-loved book is made into a movie and then the movie is really, terribly bad AND has strayed incredibly far from the book (e.g., "Ella Enchanted" - I don't recall the book having a scene where Ella sings Queen's "Somebody to Love"). I would prefer in those cases that the movie had been given a different title, rather than be connected with the book in any way, so that there's hope that a true(r) adaptation of the book could be made in the future.

4. I have no clue how much yarn I have. I have forgotten more yarn that I own than I remember. I have an odd obsession with sock yarn, which I then am reluctant to knit up, for fear that it will no longer exist - this has happened to me too often in the past. To avoid this lately, I've knit more socks with non-sock yarn than with sock yarn.

5. I've had a zillion odd jobs in the past, because I have a lot of different interests. I once partially supported myself through singing and musical theater, and would and could have done it as a career if I really felt like I needed to sing and/or act and/or dance to the exclusion of everything else, but since I had so many other interests, I was able to let go of the poor starving artist life.

6. If I had learned what an engineer was before I graduated from college, I would have been one. I was meant to be a mechanical engineer. I came from a humanities background, where math and science wasn't emphasized (although every member of my family has always been naturally incredibly good at math and science, everyone has gone into a career in the humanities). Had a single member of my family been in math or science, I would have seen a different career path, but I never knew what engineering was, nor had I had anyone encouraging me toward that area until after college, when it was deemed "too late" for me.

7. I detest political labels, because they either don't accurately wholly describe a political belief or they box one into a belief without looking at individual issues. But I was once a fairly active Maoist Socialist, and I carried The Little Red Book around with me. I now consider myself to be a Liberal Republican. My political beliefs have not changed at all, not even one tiny iota, from my Maoist period to my Liberal Republican period (about a twenty year stretch of time). I believe both labels were and are completely accurate in describing my political beliefs.

i don't ask for much these days and i don't bitch and whine if i don't get my way (2.0)

On August 9, 2006, I used the above lyrics as my post title (minus the 2.0), and I've gotten more emails, random comments on random posts, etc., asking me what the name of that song is. I got two today alone, from "Anonymous," asking me for the name...

Uh, Anonymous? If I don't know who you are, I can't respond, can I?

Mind you, I don't mind responding to anyone. But this was maybe the fifteenth question on this particular song lyric, most of which were anonymous, and I don't even know if it's the same person asking over and over again, or multiple people who really like the song and have been dying to know who sings it, or what.

But here's a clue, to anybody who ever wants to know what song a lyric comes from. Despite my posting the lyrics out of my head, they're usually correct (hopefully). So. Today's lesson is on searching for information. This is free of charge, and mind you, I had to get a master's in library science for this. (Seriously, we had one entire class on Online Searching. Although it was a bit more complicated than this, but it was also back in The Days of Yore, Before Google - although we did have Yahoo! and Lycos.)

Type the lyrics in question in your favorite search engine. We'll try, for example, Google. I hear the kids these days use the Google quite a bit.

So, first I highlight the words in question with my trusty cursor, copy them, and go to Google and paste them in the little white window in the middle.Now, when I press the little button labelled "Google Search," I get a results page that looks something like this:While I realize (and am a little weirded out) that my blog is the second result, and someone else's blog quoting the same lyrics is close to the top, by just reading the results page, without clicking any of the links, I can infer that these are the lyrics to a song called "The Seed (2.0)" by The Roots.

If I choose one of those lyrics pages, I can confirm that the lyrics in question do, indeed, belong to that song. I can also see that the song appears on the "Chasing Liberty" soundtrack (which, if I recall correctly, is a movie starring Mandy Moore as the president's daughter - Mark Harmon plays the president - who runs away from her Secret Service detail in Europe to go galavanting about with some hot guy. And now that I think of it, the reason she ran away at first was to go see The Roots concert in France or something. It all comes together.) (Perhaps I've said too much, since I think I just admitted to having once seen that movie.).So, there you have it, kids. An introduction to how to find information on the intertubes using The Google. Mind you, once again, I don't mind answering questions. It's in my nature. But it's also pretty darned easy to find that information yourselves sometimes. Especially when I can't respond to you because you've left me no contact information.

In summation: The song is "The Seed (2.0)" by The Roots, on their album "Phrenology," and also, apparently, on the "Chasing Liberty" soundtrack. It is available on iTunes and the video is on YouTube.

I'll leave it to you to look that up.