dear online advertising teams,

      If you decide to advertise online, good for you! but please bear in mind a few things. for starters if your ad begins with audio or video without my clicking directly on it, not only will i silence it before i know what it is, but i will assume if i were to click on it that some kind of terrifying virus will be overtaking my computer and personal information and my accounts will be drained without my knowledge... most folks i know feel the same way, even if they don't share in my virus paranoia they still find it annoying and will not click on your ad. a gif is one thing, a video is another. (also a note to the pages who allow this sort of ad on your site: i immediately navigate away when these things show up and do not return.) 

       If your ad shows up before i can view my video on youtube or on some site that allows me to watch full episodes of my favorite shows for free, thats cool, i turn off the volume but it doesn't bug me. If however your ad continues to interrupt my video at the places where a commercial break would have happened had i watched on tv, be smart, don't show me the same damn thing three times in the course of one viewing. some people remember my posts on the ads for doritos and wheat thins, neither would have brought on such distain from me had they not played three or four times over. i never buy wheat thins anymore. i like wheat thins. the advertising has actually gotten under my skin and rubbed me so raw that i cannot bear to buy them anymore.

 I am not angry, but i just think you should fire whomever it is that came up with these tactics. you should hire someone outside of advertising, not to come up with ideas, but to simply say 'no' to ideas. NO. That is annoying, don't do it. I could be your girl for this. i have ideas, but thats not what you pay me for, just let me say 'No. That is a bad idea and here is why...' 

I have the time if you have the cash. I can say 'No' to anything from ad placement to style to content. I am ready to say 'No.' 

You know where to find me if you would like me to save your company.

                                                                                                          yours,

                                                                                                                Amanda McCall

my apartment

My apartment looks as if a crazy hobo lives here. A crazy hobo with good taste in antiques and an apartment...

That said, i have been making an effort to clean my act up, and with my act, my apartment. Nothing motivates me to clean like buying new things to put up or with which to clean it. So i got myself a new vacuum. My old vac was more of a 'make-the-house-smell-funny-scare-the-cats-machine' so it seemed like this might be the time for an upgrade to something that might actually contribute to the cleanliness of my floors. i decided to get one with a clear canister where i might see the evidence of the filth I'm removing and boy oh boy did i make the right call on that.
I have since spent my time ignoring my dishes and pushing my clutter into a pile just to enjoy the shocking satisfaction of how much dirt i can collect from so little a space. In truth i should be ashamed of myself for letting it get to the point where a fist sized collection of pet hair, my hair, dust, and general debris can be pulled up from such a small patch of carpet, but I'm not. I find myself oddly proud...

that is...

until i was invited into my neighbors apartment. i share a wall with the woman in c-1, and when tonight she invited me in for a beer and apologised for the mess, i realized that for two days of diligent work on my place, i would still never EVER feel i could invite her into my place without what would probably amount to a week of work on this and even then i would still be apologising for the mess...

being an adult is hard...

maybe i wont do it after all..

please jesus, i take back what i said in 5th grade, i dont want my period anymore... but id like to keep the breasts...

I was born in august of 1986. my parents, Pat, and Nancy, were all set to name me Stella, until, soon before my birth, my Aunt Glo called up my mother and asked "How's Amanda doing?" I have always suspected that had my mother named me Stella my personality would have developed differently, I imagine i would be vastly more aggressive (if you can imagine that) and perhaps a better singer... don't ask me why, its just the feeling i get.. As it was my parents called me Amanda, which, as it happened, was the third most popular name in the United States that year, thus making me one of four 'Amanda's in my elementary school classes. The Amanda's and I spent each year from grade 2 til grade 5 together.

Children of this age group rarely base their friendships on much beyond who lives near them or who has blond hair or who likes Michael Jackson. as for us, I and the other Amanda's based our friendship on our shared name.

One day in the 5th grade the adults decided it was time for a school administered version of "the talk" and the boys were taken to one room and the girls another, and we were all shown films and shown diagrams that warned us that soon our bodies would be changing and our hormones would kick in and ruin everything that was once simple. i can't say what the boys were told, but based on some of the clueless comments and confused sexual metaphors i heard in later years i cant imagine it was very much beyond instruction to wear deodorant. It is clear even now that even that little bit did not stick for far too many of them...

For the girls, we were given deodorant, and ... *maxi pads* ... we were told that soon we would get our periods and that around the same time we would gain weight on our hips and most importantly we would be getting *breasts* . We couldn't wait for those breasts! The giddy joy of the possibilities of womanhood was almost too much to bear...
That day at recess the Amanda's and I all met under the tree at the edge of the playground to discuss what we had been told. To my delight we were all on the same page and it wasn't long before we agreed we should hold hands and pray to Jesus to give us our periods so we could have our breasts. We believed of course, that the period was the key to the breasts...

years later, i can report, that we all got our periods, but I am the only one who got breasts, and I am the only one who has lost Jesus. who needs him now that i have my fantastic breasts? although i could really do without this stupid period....