By now, y’all have had to see his Purple Goodness’ performance at the Super Bowl (where Rex Grossman took a shit on the Bears’ whole season and fucked it up. Yeah, yeah, rain nothin’. He choked. Period). All I’m saying is, when the marching bands came out, I totally flipped my shit. He is the master, and we are all but peons in his raspberry universe.

Something’s happening over here at Chez Broad. I can’t tell you exactly what it is, because it’s not completely set in stone yet (plus I’m not sure how much I’m supposed to say publically, anyway, so I’m just not going to say anything concrete at all), but I need y’all to send good thoughts into the ether for me, because if it happens, it’s going to be HUUUUUGE. And it’s all because my pal Miguelino [aka NWI news stud Michael Puente] is a golden GOD who gets dinner on me, his choice, if it shakes out.

Stay tuned ...

Funny ending to the story about the hot guy with whom I was flirting Sunday afternoon during the Bears-Saints game.

It starts off Sunday evening: I’m filling Snidgey in on the deets when, for some reason appropos of nothing, I decided to see if he’s listed in the phone book. His name is kind of common, but sure enough, there was someone by that name in the phonebook in the town in which he lived. At first I thought Ok, what, if anything, should I do with this information? but blew it off until the next day, when I was telling one of my editors about it. We chuckled, and then I kinda forgot about it aGAIN until one of our writers called me up looking for a Colts fan. (I told said editor the group’s patriarch was the Colts fan, and this cat’s rounding them up to chat with them over the next few weeks.) I told him to find out if Hot Guy was single ... or, perhaps I could give him a call to find out patriarch’s digits, maybe ...!?? Hmmmmm ...

Fast forward to today. I was talking to Pops (and Peaps, who had the cutest case of the hiccups EVER), and I ran the whole story down to her. She was thrilled that I was taking initiative, etc., and it turns out that she KNOWS the family through her hub. Well, HOT PISS, I say! Ask Hub if he knows Hot Guy! This is awesome! So she texts him.

I was nattering on about something when, a few minutes later, I get:

Well, you’re not going to want to date (Hot Guy).

Because he’s (Hub’s friend’s brother’s) PARTNER.

Ok, so I keep meaning to post, but then I get sucked into the vortex that is my couch (oh, how I’m going to be sad when I give up that couch. I keep going back and forth over whether I should just have it cleaned and the middle cushion re-cushioned or if I should just scrap it altogether, but I digress) and then you know how it goes. And anyways, things have been rather quiet in these parts.

But how ‘bout them Bears, y’all? The Bears AND the Colts!?? Jesus, it’s going to be freakin’ bedlam in NWI for the next two weeks, though NWI roots more for the Bears by virtue of us being a technical suburb of Chicago. I’ll tell you what, though: If the paper asks me to cover the Super Bowl, I will do so gladly, because I? MET A HOT GUY TONIGHT! (does a little peepee dance of joy)

(ahem)

My gig today was hitting the local bars and watching people’s reaction to the game, and he was among a group I chose to interview. (And if you were to say that I chose to talk to them because of him, you ... probably wouldn’t be wrong.) The group was a blast, though at one point they wanted me to leave because the Saints made a few key plays, and it was thought that I might’ve been screwing up the juju. But the Bears came back, so it was fine. Anyway, if I do say so myself, there was a fair amount of touchy-feely going on, and it was not wrong, so ... Haven’t decided what my next move will be, but I think there might have to be one. 

I haven’t attempted to be all political and indignant in awhile, but a story that ran in the paper yesterday stuck as well as led me into several lengthy discussions that I’m still trying to process.

Our good buddy JB wrote a story (which y’all can peep in all its glory after the jump) about an illegal from Mexico who killed his back while working for this dude. Insurance covered his injury for about 2 months when it discovered that the SSN the cat provided was false and thus stopped paying. Well now, the cat is suing to get paid.

As a rule, I’m not anti-immigrant, and I cringe whenever I hear about these nutbags wanting to build walls along the border with gun turrets and all that crap. But I have to say, I got a little pissed off when I got to the part where the guy said:

I want to work, but I can’t. And now, they aren’t paying me.

Anybody as excited as I am that The Sopranos is coming to A&E!?? I’m, like, DYING, I can’t wait. Yes, it’s been out on DVD for five, six years now. Yes, it’s been on every version of HBO known to man. But I watch only three, four stations at the most, and my dial is always set to A&E. I’ll never have to think about changing the channel again!

I spent today cleaning my kitchen from top to bottom, or essentially top to bottom since I didn’t touch the top of the fridge or the insides of the oven or microwave (wasn’t quite THAT ambitious). Not only did I clean it, but for the first time in many, many months a while, I cooked, as in REAL food, not frozen pizza as I’m wont to do. I didn’t even BUY frozen pizza, as I also rediscovered that grocery shopping ain’t cheap. But it was either that and have some food for the next two weeks that I’m going to be piss poor or risk overdrawing my account and put myself into a huge hole that my next check won’t be able to cover.

(Which reminds me: Several people have been giving me grief asking me if I’ve finally given up the dream of living as a near-starving writer because they haven’t seen my byline in awhile. The answer is no, I’m still an intrepid reporter; it’s just that everything I work on shuts down in December, and then it takes a couple weeks for everything to ramp back up. It would be cool if the people that were asking were doing so because they miss my writing, but alas, the concern is more that I’m going to be hitting them up for rent. Such is the life of an intrepid reporter.)

Anyway, I about bowled Kaffy over when I told her all I’d done today; the best part was when she said that if I’d actually cooked real food, that had to have meant that I had to have gone to the grocery store for more than Pepsi and cat necessities.

Guess you had to be there.

Going along with the whole cleaning bit (though on a much lesser scale), over the past few days I’ve taken a cue from Ms. Pants and gone through some of my old entries about certain things in an attempt to purge them from my world, start 2007 anew, yadayadayada—not the entries themselves, but the impetus behind them. What I can say about the exercise is that while I still feel strongly, seeing what I said and what I felt at the time feels really foreign to me, like it doesn’t even compute. And ... that probably didn’t explain anything at all, but I’m all right with that. I’m in a comfortable, reasonable place right now, without much regret about anything that happened last year. Of course, I’m not saying, “I’m never ever going to let someone treat me like that again ever in a million years ever!”, because there’s nothing I distrust more than the absolute. I’m just saying that looking back at it fascinates me in way I’ve never been, kind of like looking at an experiment that’s gone horribly wrong.

On that note, I totally want this, and I’ve got a birthay coming up. Just saying.

A lovely ending to a great holiday—spent it lit up on la champagne with Kaffy in an undisclosed location of which we would have to kill you if we told you, and then I covered what just might be my New Year’s resolution next year: The Polar Bear Swim. For the uneducated, it’s a bunch of idiots who’ve donned bathing suits and taken a dip in Lake Michigan each New Year’s for the past 9 years. Now, I’ll admit that the first thing out of my gob upon seeing the masses run toward the angry waves was, “Not now, not EVER,” but then I went to the afterparty. The whole thing is a family tradition that got started when one of the elders had a heart attack, and he wanted a way for the family to get together and create the craziest memories they possibly could. What a blast these people are! They celebrate FESTIVUS, fer chrissakes! And there was going to be a zip-line with some of the guys holding a mattress so you wouldn’t get creamed by the tree at the end! And one year, they even made a 100-pound meatloaf! Seriously, how could this not be a freakin’ scream!?? The caveat, however, is that I’ll have had to have shed enough weight that I won’t be horrified to put on a swimsuit.

This year’s resolution, on the other hand, is that I resolve to continue working on rebuilding my spine (metaphorically, natch, though after ending up on the floor Sunday night (don’t ask), I really could use a massage). Oh, and being less tactful.

I know y’all saw the whole “suspended account” business, but that’s what happens when your evil overlordsout-of-state accounting department sends your paycheck late, and it doesn’t clear until the day after you were told it was going to clear. Add ot the fact that December is always a lean month, anyway, and you’ve once again got a broke broad.

The holidays however, have been completely lovely. Got some cool things by way of the man in red, including a brand new one of these bitches from my small brother; spent a good portion of the night/morning before Christmas Eve getting it all set up and cleaning out my contacts database. It’s amazing the obsolete shit you find in there after five years of not really paying attention. Anyway, my sister got me some cool stuff, too, including dish towels and new placemats (yeah, domestic stuff that I asked for. And!??) The only thing I have left to get is a new winter jacket from Mother, but finding one that fits over my giant ass and that I actually like has been a real drag.

Of course, the holidays would be nothing without family drama, and there was a goodly sum of it this year. None of it, remarkably, has anything to do with me. I KNOW, get out, right!?? That’s, like, a total first in a long time, but yeah, everything was very peaceful and happy. There was some missing of people I shouldn’t be missing, too, of course, but nothing that made me a soggy mess. All in all, a wonderful week.

The coolest thing of all, though: You know the 8-rugrat family I wrote about? People listened, and they literally went from less-than-nothing to overabundance like whoa. A church put them in a fully furnished house rent-free for a year, and the kids got a whole bunch of toys and clothing. And Ogger and his nefew are planning to get their vehicle up and running as early as this weekend. Good stuff, something I’ll always be kinda proud of.

Piet the staffer did a great job on the folo—it’s after the jump:

and I totally want one:




Yes, everyone’s posting it, but with good reason.

If I may direct y’all over to my myspace profile (link’s over on the right), this is what happens when I’m let loose in Photoshop. Now, only a few of you will get why it’s so damn funny, but for those of you not in on the joke, here’s the image I started with: Lookit

Personally, I think it speaks for itself.

Have I bitched yet about my new neighbors? They took over my landlords’ old crib, and so far, they’ve been quiet. But they have a big honkin’ van and an SUV, however, and they think they’re allowed to park both behemoths out front, thereby taking up precious cul-de-sac space. I’m sorry, but there’s no reason that both those tanks need to be out front when the neighbor downstairs and I have only one vehicle apiece. “But we use both of them!” they said to the landlords when she and I complained. No, screw you. Seniority rules, and she and I have been here for eight years. Jerks.

So, the other day I was working on stories for the paper’s annual Empty Stocking Needy people fund, and it happened that one of the families I interviewed was a single mom with eight kids who’re homeless and have to be out of the shelter they’re currently staying in by Monday, while the mom (who’s 34, btw; oldest kid is 14) is in her third year of nursing school and is trying to study for finals next week. Oh, and the water pump on her van is shot, so she and the brood have been having to walk everywhere in the butt-ass cold. Ok, so I write the story, and for as many people who called in wanting to help out, there was at least one ready to literally jump my shit for daring to publicize a welfare mother who doesn’t understand the concept of birth control?

Of course there was.

Had my one editor allowed this woman to contact me—after some of my past skirmishes with sources, they don’t allow that to happen anymore—I would’ve liked to have told her about the stuff that I DIDN’T put in the story, like how she tells her oldest daughters every day that she doesn’t want them to be like her and how humiliating it is to have to defend the fact that she has so many children at all. Yeah, she knew about birth control. Yeah, one of the baby daddies kind of helps sort of, but you try getting child support from someone who doesn’t want to pay (though I’m surprised by the latest round of stats on this very subject). Yeah, she gets TANF—a whopping $373 a month because you get cut off after the fifth kid, at least in Indiana. Yeah, she’s been trying to get a job. But her oldest kid is 14. Would YOU leave seven kids between the ages of 12 and 2 with a 14 year-old? Yeah, she has friends and relatives who help out from time to time, but who wants to take on eight more mouths on a regular basis?

Here you go, fundie conservative nutjobs who believe no sperm should go to waste. Figure this one out.

Mostly, though, I’d have told the woman that no one was telling her to help them out if she was so morally outraged by their situation and oh, go suck a dick while she was at it.

I’ve implored several of my pals to see what they have in the way of stuff for the family, and this weekend when I go Christmas shopping with the sibs, we’re hitting the resale shops. If any of y’all would like to chip in a li’l something to the effort, Paypal button’s on the right.

I can’t remember where I saw it, but ever hear the phrase, “Useless as a bag full of d!cks”!?? I would say d!cks in a pot are just as useless. Tasty, but useless just the same. Observe:

but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t even mildly amusing to be eating a bowl of penis pasta with red sauce. (And kinda disconcerting, too, but hey! would you rather me eat it with alfredo? Or pesto?)

Or I need a good screwing, because between almost blowing off an assignment that didn’t end up being mine after all, hearing Mother complain that I was late picking her up because she’d been stuck in the house for more than 24 hours (it’s my responsibility to keep her entertained, you see) and getting the suspicion that my NYE plans are shot to hell, I’m in a fairly rotten mood these last couple days. I mean, like chewing metal nails rotten. Not even Tara’s Spawn Shower could wipe away the ick entirely, and it was pretty damn cute. (I told y’all Tara’s knocked up, right? Due in March. And Pop DID evenutally burst: A baby girl, 15 days late (yes, you may collectively groan). For our purposes, we shall call her Squeelie, and she’s perfect in every way. She farts flowers even, forealz.) Being broke until Friday doesn’t exactly help, either, and my gas door was frozen shut, so hope it warms up tomorrow or I don’t have to go anywhere for work, because I have no gas.

Also been dreaming about Dad a lot in the last few days, and it’s revolved around money. Wonder what the underlying issue is and why he’s coming to visit.