1. I had an ex-boyfriend violently try to kill himself in front of me. It fucked me up and I dropped out of life for about four years. All my friends gave up on trying to get me out of my shell. As of right now, I have no physical friends aside from my family. I beat myself up about shutting everyone out so completely.

2. I also have an ex-boyfriend who is on death row and he's been there for 8 years. He killed some police officers and when they were fleeing, my friend Allen was gunned down.

3. I had a boyfriend who drowned in a lake. I don't like to call him an ex because we never broke up. He died. It's been almost ten years and I still go to his old LiveJournal and read all the entries and cry.

4. I had a terrifying experience in New Orleans when I was 16. It never showed itself to me, but made awful tapping noises all over my hotel room. Whenever I tried to wake up my parents, it would stop. I was so very very scared.. Even typing this now, I have to repress the urge to cry and turn on all my lights. I'm sweating. When I went to sleep that night, I curled against the headboard, with my back out towards the room. I woke up in the morning and took a hot shower and when I turned around, the hot water stung on my back. I looked at my back in the mirror and there were three long scratches spanning diagonally from the tops of my shoulders to my waist. Even though they had obviously bled and scabbed, there was no blood on my shirt or on the bra I had been wearing. That experience really fucked up my religious beliefs. I like to say that I'm a complete atheist, but whenever I say that, I think back to that night and I'm afraid of what an afterlife is and who or what exists in it.

5. I'm leaking breast milk all over my legs right now, but I'm ignoring the mess.

6. Mensa tried to recruit me as a little girl and it freaked me out. They sent so many letters and called to speak to me all the time. They tried to talk to me at school but I was convinced they were some kind of cult. Plus, they wanted me to spend my summer taking classes and doing homework. Crazy fuckers.

7. I had some rare kind of nerve cancer as a teenager and they cut the tumor from my chin when I was 16. The tumor and the consequent surgery left the lower part of my face numb and my lower lip a bit unresponsive. I drool on myself sometimes and when it's pointed out, I vehemently tell them I had cancer. It makes me laugh at how they scramble to apologize.

8. I used to be really into music and I've played with several bands, ranging from rock to jazz to blues to just jamming. I was really into it and I loved performing at dives and all the free beer. No one cards you when you're the band. But after my ex tried to kill himself, I fell out of that world, too. I regret that more than anything. I love music.. Now I just play for me and somehow it's not the same.

9. I play piano, clarinet, alto and soprano recorders[Hey, those are real instruments, too!], cello, violin, guitar, bass, any stringed instrument really, drum kit, hand drums, etc etc. I haven't really found an instrument I couldn't play. I like to sing a lot. My baby loves it when I sing. That pleases me greatly!! He's my number on fan.

10. I was expelled the last semester of my senior year from high school for doodling in my notebook a stick figure with a crude gun pointed at its head. It was accompanied by the sentence "I hate chemistry." The teacher walked by and saw it, seized it and dragged me to the principal. I was arrested for threatening students with a handgun. [My drawing wasn't specific, I mean, it could have been a sawed-off shotgun?? It was more of a sideways L..] I got 9 months of probation and had to get my diploma by correspondence. It was hilarious and fucked up all at the same time.

11. I had a neighbor freak out on cocaine and whatever else that guy was on. He came over and kept my roommates and I hostage and screamed at us about "sounding out" at night. He also put my roommate's Diamonda Galas CD on and played it full volume. That's what got the police there. Thank God for Diamonda's screeching voice or my other neighbor's wouldn't have called the cops. He also tried to strangle our cat. When the police finally busted down the back door, he was screaming about how he would kill us all. The cops took him to the ground and he told them he was the mayor and they would be fired. Heh.

12. I've been the victim of rape many times. I wonder sometimes if I have an aura that tells people it's ok to hurt me like that..

13. When my baby cried for almost 7 hours straight, I honestly contemplated smothering him. I feel evil because of that.

14. I had a college reading level by fourth grade and teachers would get upset that I wanted to read during recess. I read the same books as my mother and father and of course, some had "questionable" content. Whenever they confiscated one of my books, my dad would get royally pissed and scream at them over the phone. I still love to read. I read compulsively. I read all the labels of everything I buy just because. When I take a shit, if there's nothing to read, I read the back of the shampoo or whatever is close by. To my utter shame, I have read harlequin romance novels. I'll read anything within arms reach, even if it's utter shite. I really love a good book, though. Don't get me wrong!

15. I won a national short story contest for children when I was 12. The story was about a demon who disemboweled hapless victims during one cold winter night. I only really remember one part where the entrails steamed in the snow. What the fuck was wrong with those judges??

16. I talk way, way too much.

17. I have CPS involved in my life because I tested positive in my urine for marijuana when I went to the hospital to deliver my son. I hadn't smoked pot in almost six months. The CPS people call me a liar, but I'm not fucking lying. I read that pot can sometimes be detected up to 90 days after, but it had been twice that. Now I have to go to counseling twice a week for 6 months and they randomly drop by and drug test. They assess my whole house each time and write it up when I don't do the goddamn dishes. I hate CPS. Where were they when I was being abused as a child? Why didn't they care about rape and physical abuse? They ignored me when I begged for help..

18. I'm often way too candid.

19. I hold a grudge like a mother fucker. I try very very hard not to hate certain people. But I often fail.

20. I really love VideoSift. I used to be really into IRC. I have a long history of communicating and making friends over the internet. But the Sift is my favorite. I stopped for a long time and it was really hard not to come here and browse. I would find myself absent-mindedly typing the url. Oi.

21. I'm really into Facebook. It's the only way I talk to my estranged family and friends.

22. I love music, if you can't tell by the stuff I sift. Any and all types of music, except for bad music. Har har. Farhad's queue is one of my favorite places to peruse.

23. When I bare my soul to people, it never ever turns out right.

24. I tend to over-punctuate!!@!!!@1!!11!1!@!111one

25. I love to smile and be cheerful. I find humor in even the most dire of tragedies and I often get flack from that. People don't understand it, I guess.

"Sammy Sosa fails a drug test in 2003. People in Chicago are afraid of that. We'll tell everybody. Sosa juicin'."

I don't know the details of that story, but you need to go back 6 years to make a point of something that you claim you do all the time? You just can't argue with facts.

>> ^Sagemind:
The reality is, anyone who can't get a job, because they do drugs, shouldn't get paid because they can't get a job! Period!


How can you tell if the drug use is the cause of their inability to get a job?

If we're going to add a drug test to Welfare then can we add an IQ test to voting?

you cant deny food to children because the mother smokes a joint once in a while. thats the whole point. the psycho republican knows this will never pass as law,hes just pandering to his other psychos and fox news viewers. he get s credit from his supporters just for proposing it.
p.s. i work as a firemen and we have random drug testing. our local union supports it as long as the person who fails is first offered treatment.

All good points guys. I guess my point is I don't like to see people getting a "free ride" on my dime AND still be able to get high and neglect their kids. They need to make it so welfare isn't so attractive of an option for folks who don't want to work and would rather milk the system. I don't mind people on welfare. Hell I've had to use it myself. However, I used it to feed myself, not support my drug habit. And believe me, I knew a lot of people who did use it to support their habits and NOT their kids.

Oh, and for the record, my current employer does not require drug tests, YAY!

I do love the guys argument that you only have to take a piss test if you are applying for a job which can endanger your life. Completely false. I have had to take a piss test for a computer support job more than once. Which is utter bullshit.

>> ^Sagemind:
I don't know what the answer is here...


You're assuming a lot there.

"Anyone who can't get a job, because they do drugs"

Is not the same as

"Someone who can't get a job, because of drug testing"

Duckman33: You don't have to 'pee in a cup' to get a job. Your employer made you do that in order to get a job with them, it's not required by law. Sadly more and more employers require drug testing because of liability issues.

Some employers can and do employ people without drug testing them, and drug testing welfare recipients just encourages more and more pre-emptive encroachment on personal privacy in the public and private sector, just as you are using the encroachment of the private sector to justify drug testing welfare recipients ("if I have to pee in a cup to get a job, then they should have to pee in a cup to get my hard earned money for free. It's only fair."), the same can be used as an excuse for more private companies to drug test workers, then more public services, until we end up in some reductio ad absurdum scenerio where anyone can be randomly drug tested at any time.

So that is absolutely no reason to require welfare recipients to undergo a drug test.

Let's drug test Wall Street, all of them, randomly.

See how they like it.

We have drug testing on the roads in Victoria, Australia. I believe they can test for marijuana with a saliva sample. This has only recently been introduced and has been under a little criticism (mostly from the media), but this is to be expected given it is still in its infancy.

I'm not sure how accurate it is, although I would guess the harder thing is to differentiate between a joint smoked an hour ago and a joint smoked the previous day, because marijuana remains in the blood for so long compared to alcohol.

As omnistegan says, the police can still operate the old fashioned way if necessary.

^SDGundamX
I'm pretty certain most people would say that paying 100x the price for the drug is worth preventing the taking of a human life.

What gives you the right to make that choice for me? If I have cancer, and I have one year to live, who are you to tell me what products are safe for me to use? What if I don't have health insurance and I can't afford a drug which costs $100,000, but I can afford the drug that costs $1000 even if the side-effects aren't well known. Are you saying I should just die?

If 50,000 people die from heart disease and a drug is invented which cures heart disease, you just killed 325,000 people waiting for it to get FDA approved (50,000 x 6.5 years). You are looking at the situation from only one perspective, and you haven't looked at the FDAs track record. If you count the number of lives saved and the number of lives that could have been saved--the FDA has an awful lot of blood on its hands.

And by the way, do you know what the failure rate in drug testing is?

You act as if companies make profit when their drug kills people and their name is all over the news. They don't. No company wants to be headline news for killing thousands of people, which is why they would purchase private testing. Would you buy drugs from a bum on the street, even if they were FDA approved? No. So why would you buy new, unproven drugs from a company with no safety record? You wouldn't unless you had no other choice--and a bad option is better than no option.

In addition, when companies release products they usually do it slowly, and in small numbers. So if problems do arise, they can recall them and few if anyone is injured. However, when a company receives the FDA seal of approval the product goes into immediate widespread production. This has happened many times. One case is the government mandated that all pajamas be made flameproof, so companies used the cheapest chemical available (FDA approved) in a rush to comply with the law. Years later they found out all the kids who wore those pajamas got cancer. If the market had been allowed to operate, they would have introduced "brand new flame-proof pajamas" and the market would have adopted them slowly and the number of kids would not nearly have been as high. Eventually, the flame-proof version would become widespread because what parent wants their kid to catch fire? The difference is that the product would have been proven safe in the market years before tons of consumers adopted it.

It's fine if you really believe the FDA is the way to go, but you aren't being fair to yourself or the issue if you don't take an honest look at both sides of the story.

If you go the route of the FDA, you are putting your life in the hands of a dozen bureaucrats.

If you go the route of the market, you are putting your life in the hands of the sum knowledge of hundreds of millions of mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters, each looking out for their personal wellbeing and the wellbeing of their families and friends, who personally use the products and judge them as harmful or beneficial.

To illustrate this concept--when you buy a product, say from amazon. Do you base your decision more off what the single reviewer wrote, or what the hundreds of buyers wrote?

>> ^imstellar28:
Prior to FDA regulation, the average time to market of a drug was 18 months and the average cost was $500,000. 10 years later, the average time to market was 8 years and the average cost was $8,000,000. If you would like to see what your life would be like without the FDA, take the cost of your last prescription drug and divide it by 100. Your $30 a month birth control would be $0.30. Your $50 antibiotics would be $0.50. Your grandmothers $1000 heart medicine would be $10.
Yes, the FDA has prevented some dangerous drugs to market, but how many life-saving drugs could have been made available to dying patients if they were released 6.5 year sooner? How many tens of thousands of lives were lost waiting for drugs to be approved? You don't hear about their class action lawsuits because they are all ghosts.


I'm pretty certain most people would say that paying 100x the price for the drug is worth preventing the taking of a human life. If I (or my grandmother) has to pay $990 to relatively ensure that someone else--or even my grandmother herself--doesn't drop dead from taking the drug, we can both live with that cost. By the way, most of my grandmother's drugs are covered by Medicaid/Medicare which also ensures that she never pays that $990 but a minor co-payment instead.

You'd have to be pretty inhuman to bitch about how expensive drugs are and how much better off we'd be if we'd just led people die from the experimental drugs and figure out which ones are safe that way.

As far as drugs that are slow to get to market go, if you really want to try experimental drugs that badly you can go sign up for the clinical trials. But a lot of people wouldn't take the risk even if given the chance to participate. The number of willing risk-takers is probably much lower than "tens of thousands." Except for people with the most dire terminal illnesses, waiting a few years to make sure the drug is safe isn't going to hurt anybody.

And by the way, do you know what the failure rate in drug testing is? According to an article I read about a Japanese company developing new drugs here in the U.S., a new drug has maybe a 1 in 10,000 chance to make it to human trials and a close to 1 in 1,000,000 chance of getting through the human trials without unacceptable side effects being discovered (or the trials showing the drug doesn't actually work as advertised). I'd much rather have the FDA keeping those 999,999 potential dangerous/useless drugs off the market than having to have me or my doctor pick through all those choices whenever I get sick.

^I'm not talking about writing a ticket for it though, I'm talking about using it as probable cause to give a coordination test. If he/she fails the coordination test, they get a ticket for reckless driving--NOT a DUI/DWI. Its a really big difference. You still haven't explained my example of the guy with a 20 year old resistance.

Then they can go into court with the results of the coordination test, BAC test, and the reckless charge and if the Judge wants give him the maximum because of his BAC--fine by me. You can even increase the penalties for reckless to make it match that for a DUI, but pretending someone is reckless only because of their BAC is absolutely unconstitutional. Just because driving with a BAC > 0.08% is dangerous for some people, doesn't mean its dangerous for all people.

Likewise, if someone is pulled over for reckless driving--the fact that they are driving erratically is enough probable cause to administer a BAC/drug test. That information can be used to prosecute him de facto as if it was a DUI (if the punishment for reckless driving is the same as those for a DUI)--just let the Judge decide.

Its really not that different than your position--in both cases the penalties could be the same. We both want to reduce accidents, I am just tweaking it a little so it is constitutional.

A few years ago I saw a fascinating documentary about the actual origin of the olympics as we know it (not the original re-makes featured in the movie Chariots of Fire). Basically, it was the Nazis that brought the olympics back from obscurity and into a giant marketting campaign for their own superiority at the 1936 Berlin olympics. It was the Nazis that added all the ceremony and even the olympic symbol if I remember correctly.

Of course, their plan to use it as a showcase of the superiority of the master race kind of backfired when Jesse Owens (an african american) trounced them winning four gold medals... (edit: whoops, I checked wikipedia and while it is true that Jesse Owens "owned" at the olympics that year, the Germans did in fact get the most gold medals overall... sorry, guess they were the master race )

Going back to China... really, in this day and age, I find it kind of disengenous. I know that the Olympics are supposed to be about bringing the world together, but it seems more like that we all just get together and "look the other way" in regards to the major problems. It is highly corporate, political, and ultimately doesn't seem to address anything important. Some people get together and play some games. Meanwhile all the millions (if not billions) of dollars that are poured into this event don't quite serve to make anyone's life that much better.

The fact that we have to drug test everyone is yet another sign of the fake-happy-face nature of the event.

yeah, can you tell I'm not a sports fan in general

>> ^schmawy:
That sucks, Rougy. Did it turn out as badly as I fear it did?


No, the testing went all right, but I let them know how mad I was. I couldn't believe I was being drug-tested for doing a good job.

I consider it corporate molestation.

Here's some questions for both Dem frontrunners, via columnist Lawrence Elder. Why does the mainstream media focus on this fluff while issues with real impact go unaddressed?

Don't Obama supporters also deserve straight answers?

As of March 2008, kids applying for a job at Burger King have been given tougher interview questions (+ a drug test) than Clintobama.


1. Sen. Clinton, you oppose the Bush tax cuts because they unfairly benefit the rich. Since the top 1 percent of taxpayers -- those making more than $364,000 annually -- pay 39 percent of all federal income taxes, don't all across-the-board tax cuts, by definition, "unfairly" benefit the rich?

2. Sen. Obama, you also oppose Bush tax cuts, and claim that they take money away from the Treasury. But President Kennedy signed across-the-board tax cuts in the 1960s and said, "It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low -- and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now." Was he wrong?

3. Sen. Clinton, you criticize President Bush for inheriting a surplus and turning it into a deficit. The National Taxpayers Union added up your campaign promises, and they came to an increase of over $218 billion per year. What would this do to the deficit?

4. Sen. Obama, if elected, you promised to raise minimum wage every single year. But isn't it true that most economists -- 90 percent, according to one survey -- believe that raising minimum wages increases unemployment and decreases job opportunities for the most unskilled workers? What makes you right, and the majority of economists wrong?

5. Sen. Clinton, you want universal health care coverage for all Americans -- every man, woman and child. When, as First Lady, you tried to do this, 560 economists wrote President Clinton, and said, "Price controls produce shortages, black markets and reduced quality." One economist who helped gather the signatures explained, "Price controls don't control the true costs of goods. People pay in other ways." Are those 560 economists wrong?

6. Sen. Obama, you once said you understand why senators voted for the Iraq war, admitted that you were "not privy to Senate intelligence reports," that it "was a tough question and a tough call" for the senators, and that you "didn't know" how you would have voted had you been in the Senate. And over a year after the war began, you said, "There's not much of a difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage." How, then, can you say that you consistently opposed the war from the start?

7. Sen. Clinton, you want to begin withdrawing the troops within the first 60 days of your administration, with all the troops out within a year. Former Secretary of State Jim Baker of the Baker-Hamilton report said that such a precipitous withdrawal in Iraq would create a staging ground for al-Qaida, increase the influence of Iran over Iraq, and result in "the biggest civil war you've ever seen." What would you like to say to Secretary Baker?

8. Sen. Obama, the church you attend, according to its Web site, pursues an Afrocentric agenda. Your church rejects, as part of their "Black Value System," "middleclassness" as "classic methodology" of white "captors" to "control subjugated" black "captives." Your pastor, Jeremiah Wright, recently called the Nation of Islam's Minister Louis Farrakhan -- a man many consider anti-Semitic -- a person of "integrity and honesty." What would happen to a Republican candidate who attended a Caucasian-centric church, and who praised David Duke as a man of "integrity and honesty"?

9. Sen. Clinton, you recently criticized NAFTA, the free trade agreement signed into law by President Clinton. The conservative Heritage Foundation says that NAFTA-like free trade benefits the economies of the United States, Canada and Mexico, resulting in increased trade, higher U.S. exports and improved living standards for American workers. Explain how President Clinton and the Heritage Foundation got it wrong then, but that you are right now.

10. Sen. Obama, this question is about global warming, something about which you urge extreme action to fight. You criticize President Bush for going to war in Iraq, even though all 16 intelligence agencies felt with "high confidence" that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of WMDs. Critics of Bush say he "cherry-picked" the intelligence. Hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists consider concerns about global warming overblown. Isn't there far more dissent among credible scientists about global warning than there was among American intelligence analysts about Iraq? If so, as to the studies on global warming, why can't you be accused of cherry-picking?