I'm official!

Yay! I got my diploma from ASU in the mail today!

Dan Loses Virginity

I got a blowjob in the back seat of my new car last night. Hot, right!?

Dating and other disasters

So - My dating story ran today and I got one phone call so far asking me on a date and three emails asking me on a date.
No word from Tyler.
Or the bad influence.

Here's the story if you wanna read it and mock me later. ;)

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/arizonaliving/articles/0213dating0213.html

I hate the new couples tagline

In the spirit of Valentine's Day, I responded to an email Tyler - the eHarmony guy- sent me.
This is on behlf o everyone who was ever dumped for what seemed like bogus reasons.
Enjoy.


Hey Tyler -
I've been trying to think of a response to your email.
But all I really keep thinking is, "I wanted to date you."
Please read all the following not in a pushy, whiny way, but in a more frank, easy way:
I have no idea how I want to respond to your talk of friendship. I mean I have friends. You have friends. And I'm friends with several men I've dated... So awkwardness isn't an issue. But, for the first time in almost two years, I started dating someone I liked, that I was looking forward to liking more, who (pretty much) inexplicably dropped me. And the reasons you gave didn't really sound like reasons guys break up with perfectly cute, upwardly mobile girls who teach spin class and have college degrees.
I thought, and still think, you're handsome, charismatic, intelligent and wildly amusing. And, then there's the chemistry.
So I can only fearfully guess at what grave personal deficiency I must have demonstrated to make a man who's dating a woman who thinks that highly of him, drop her.
So, respond when you feel like it. I look forward to it. But I don't do fairgrounds, no matter who's selling what.
The bewildered bombshell,
Megan

How About A Campaign For Real Honesty?

If you were skeptical about Dove's Super Bowl ad pretending that it cared about creating a world in which women don't hate themselves, you're not alone. Here's ad critic Seth Stevenson, writing in Slate:

I hate this new ad more than I can express. First of all, Dove cheated: How am I supposed to make fun of cute little girls who think they're fat? I can't win here. Second, this is the most cynical ad campaign of the last several years. Women, do not be duped! Dove is not selflessly interested in your (or your daughters') well-being. It is a multinational beauty-products company, which hopes to sell expensive cellulite cream to these same little girls just a few years down the road. And using Dove products is not some sort of righteous political statement. Buying retail goods—from a division of Unilever—is not in fact the pathway to gender equity.

You can view the ad, along with all the other Super Bowl ads, here.

More on Brokeback

After months of discussion, I know that some of us are starting to experience Brokeback Mountain fatigue. But this week I read the best essay on the movie that I've seen so far, and I wanted to share. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn reminds us that the film isn't the "universal story" that the straight press is so desperate to believe it is. The entire thing is worth reading, but here's the key passage:

"One reason [Ennis] can't bring himself to envision such a life with his lover is a grisly childhood memory, presented in flashback, of being taken at the age of eight by his father to see the body of a gay rancher who'd been tortured and beaten to death—a scene that prefigures the scene of Jack's death. This explicit reference to childhood trauma suggests another, quite powerful, reason why Brokeback must be seen as a specifically gay tragedy. In another review that decried the use of the term 'gay cowboy movie' ('a cruel simplification'), the Chicago Sun-Times's critic, Roger Ebert, wrote with ostensible compassion about the dilemma of Jack and Ennis, declaring that 'their tragedy is universal. It could be about two women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic groups—any "forbidden" love.' This is well-meaning but seriously misguided. The tragedy of heterosexual lovers from different religious or ethnic groups is, essentially, a social tragedy; as we watch it unfold, we are meant to be outraged by the irrationality of social strictures that prevent the two from loving each other, strictures that the lovers themselves may legitimately rail against and despise.

But those lovers, however star-crossed, never despise themselves. As Brokeback makes so eloquently clear, the tragedy of gay lovers like Ennis and Jack is only secondarily a social tragedy. Their tragedy, which starts well before the lovers ever meet, is primarily a psychological tragedy, a tragedy of psyches scarred from the very first stirrings of an erotic desire which the world around them—beginning in earliest childhood, in the bosom of their families, as Ennis's grim flashback is meant to remind us—represents as unhealthy, hateful, and deadly. Romeo and Juliet (and we) may hate the outside world, the Capulets and Montagues, may hate Verona; but because they learn to hate homosexuality so early on, young people with homosexual impulses more often than not grow up hating themselves: they believe that there's something wrong with themselves long before they can understand that there's something wrong with society. This is the truth that Heath Ledger, who plays Ennis, clearly understands—'Fear was instilled in him at an early age, and so the way he loved disgusted him,' the actor has said—and that is so brilliantly conveyed by his deservedly acclaimed performance. On screen, Ennis's self-repression and self-loathing are given startling physical form: the awkward, almost hobbled quality of his gait, the constricted gestures, the way in which he barely opens his mouth when he talks all speak eloquently of a man who is tormented simply by being in his own body—by being himself.

It goes on.

Porn

And by popular demand...the Jessica Simpson pose.

My new car!

Isn't he pretty!? His name is Dan. I'm embracing the inner yuppy!