Dear Tom Cruise

Please stop starring in movies that I would really like to see. You are an astonishingly bad actor with the range and depth of a paper plate.

You ruined magnolia for me. Minority Report would have been much better had they cast just about anyone else in your roll. My son and I got stuck watching Mission Impossible 3 on a plane. We skipped the headphones and made up our own dialogue for the movie, which improved it greatly (don’t feel too bad- we did the same thing for Hutch). I actually sat through all of Vanilla Sky and Eyes Wide Shut. I should have watched the Spanish version, Abre los Ojos instead and Eyes Wide Shut was only interesting when Nicole was on the screen.

Now you have a movie with Robert Redford, who I love. I would love to see Lions for Lambs, but the thought of suffering through 2 hours of you makes me nauseous. I also think the movie you are currently working on, Valkyrie, looks very promising and is exactly the kind of movie I would like to see, except that you’re in it.

Please Mr. Cruise, for the sake of movie goers everywhere let someone else star in an interesting movie. I beg of you.

For now I take consolation in the fact that Javier Bardem is starring in a version of Love in the Time of Cholera. You should take acting lessons from Mr. Bardem, he knows his shit in several languages.

Sincerely,
RQ

Women- not stupid, really.

I am sooo tired of people (old white men) telling us that they are going to limit our rights because they know what’s good for us.

I am a mother. I became a mother at a very young age, just a week shy of my 20th birthday. I am now and always have been pro choice and when I found out I was pregnant with the Kid I had to decide if I was going to have him. I was rational about it. I knew that I was going to end up parenting alone. I knew all the drawbacks and I still decided to have him.

I was pregnant before that and I’ve been pregnant since then. I have the bizarre fortune of being extremely fertile and if 2 methods of birth control aren’t used at all times I will end up pregnant again. I should totally donate my eggs to science. But in the mean time- I have one child, but I’ve had more than one pregnancy. I was just as rational, if not more so, in deciding to end those pregnancies as I was in deciding to keep the Kid.

Contrary to popular opinion, I was not ever coerced into abortion. Actually, when I was pregnant with the Kid more than a few helpful “friends” tried to push me into having an abortion and when that didn’t work, into putting him up for adoption. Neither were a possibility at the time. I cannot explain it, but the Kid was the kid I was meant to be mom to. I didn’t feel the same way about the other pregnancies.

When I found out I was pregnant with the Kid, I was at a Planned Parenthood. For the same price as a test kit from the drugstore I got a full examination and a pregnancy test. The doctor asked if I knew what my options were and what I wanted to do. I said I was having a baby and I was happy about it. There was never any pressure to change my mind about it from anyone at the clinic.

When I had an abortion I actually went through more counseling than when I decided to have a baby. The clinic staff always made sure that having an abortion was exactly what I wanted. I was as adamant about not having a baby as I was about having the Kid. I am sure that if I wavered at all they would have given me space to figure out what I wanted before doing anything. Throughout the whole thing I was asked repeatedly, at each step, if this is what I wanted. I was given more chances to opt out of an abortion by abortion providers than I was ever given to opt out of pregnancy by obstetricians (number of times an OB asked me if I wanted to be pregnant- ZERO).

So when some non-doctor in a suit wants to ensure that women are getting abortions of their own free will, I know that he has no idea what he’s talking about. Abortion providers already go out of their way to make sure women are making their own choices, because that is what reproductive rights are about. It is not about racking up numbers and profits, it’s about ensuring that women become mothers when they want to and that they have options to not become mothers when they need them.

We are not stupid. We know exactly what we are getting ourselves into when it comes to pregnancy and abortion. We know, better than most men, exactly the kind of work that parenting requires and how much of a sacrifice that is. What I don’t understand is why you would ever want to make someone perform those sacrifices who doesn’t with her entire being want to. That is not healthy for the mom or the kid.

Happy Halloween!

Kiki of Kiki’s Delivery Service- My Favorite Witch Ever

To all my pagan friends out there (and stealing a line from Ms. Brendann) May all your trick or treating get you the big candy bars, none of that snack sized shit.

Fun with Belief-O-Matic (Is that anything like a Veg-O-Matic?)

It slices, it dices, it juliennes! and then it tells you what religion you are.

Basically you answer a little quiz & the little calculator adds up how closely your responses match up with their list of beliefs (kinda like a spiritual computer dating service… is this how e-harmony works?)

as they put it…. The top score on the list below represents the faith that Belief-O-Matic, in its less than infinite wisdom, thinks most closely matches your beliefs. However, even a score of 100% does not mean that your views are all shared by this faith, or vice versa

SO here’s my results… ok the 1st one was kind of a no-brainer, (although I’m somewhat disappointed to find I match any category 100% – the math must be off somewhere, it MUST be!!!) some suprises – my answers match neo-paganism, baha’i & 2 kinds of buddhism more closely than catholicism(grandma jo would be disappointed) the high match with LDS i have to attribute to spending a large chunk of my formative years in Arizona… i’ll probably edit this later after i read the descriptions….

1. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (100%)
2. Orthodox Quaker (83%)
3. Bahá’í Faith (82%)
4. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (82%)
5. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (79%)
6. Liberal Quakers (79%)
7. Jehovah’s Witness (73%)
8. Unitarian Universalism (69%)
9. Seventh Day Adventist (63%)
10. Neo-Pagan (53%)
11. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (53%)
12. Mahayana Buddhism (52%)
13. Theravada Buddhism (52%)
14. Reform Judaism (52%)
15. Eastern Orthodox (50%)
16. Roman Catholic (50%)
17. Jainism (48%)
18. New Age (48%)
19. Islam (45%)
20. Orthodox Judaism (45%)
21. Sikhism (45%)
22. Secular Humanism (38%)
23. Taoism (38%)
24. New Thought (34%)
25. Hinduism (34%)
26. Scientology (30%)
27. Nontheist (20%)