Asshole +1

So, what else is new with me? Well, there's this:



What is that? That is an E92 BMW 335i. Actually that picture doesn't quite do the color justice:





Those are closer but you really need to see Montego Blue Metallic in person to really appreciate it. It's no Imola Fucking Red (unavailable on this car), but it's still pretty damn sharp.

Anyway got her last week. The lease was about up on my E46 330i, so I was left with the decision to either cut back on my spending and get something cheaper and more practical or I could continue to be spoiled and wasteful. Since I have problems (see previous post, or, shit, any previous posts), well, we already know what route I took.

I got the car pretty well equipped, and it has a manual transmission, of course, even if I am still a pretty shitty stick driver. I may not be cool, but I fucking could be if I could get my shit together!

I decided to go the coupe route since I'm not a huge fan of the E90 3 Series sedan's styling -- I mean it's nice but not great:



I don't care much for the "painted eyebrows" headlights and the fact that the tops of the twin-kidney grille are actually attached to the hood. Also I couldn't get too excited about that body style after coming off of an E46 ZHP, which is one of the best-looking cars ever. For reference, here's what I was driving:



Then there's the E90's rear view:



At one point ETP commented that with those tail lights the car looks like it's clenching its ass. He's absolutely right, and after he said that I was like, I can never get one of those.

Those things combined with the fact that the E92 coupe fixes all of the issues I have with the E90 sedan plus there being no insurance difference between the sedan and coupe made the choice easy on that front.

There are some things I do miss about my old car (I was actually very close to just buying out the lease on it). And I have a handful of small complaints about the new car. Like, for instance, there is STILL no simple "off" switch or button for the climate controls, just like with my E46. I have to press the fan speed button several times to get it to shut off. The fucking 5 series has an off button, but why can't they give us on on the 3er?

So yeah, pretty much any issues I have are minor and everything is overcome by that car's engine: a 3.0 liter, inline 6-cylinder twin turbo that puts out 300 hp and 300 lb-ft. of torque. That peak torque is available from 1,400 to 5,000 if you need it.

It's a bit of an adjustment. I'm going from 235 naturally aspirated horses to 300 turbocharged. At altitude that just magnifies the difference since a naturally aspirated engine will lose about 3% of its power per thousand feet in altitude (I'm around 5,000) and a turbo isn't going to lose as much. So that's pretty neat and I think turbocharging is my new best friend (sorry ETP).

As a result of all that the car is just stupid fast. I'm seriously trying hard not to flog her too much since you are supposed to break in a car gently (or at least according to the owner's manual and its break-in regimen; but I keep getting differing opinions on this). Like take for instance a moment I had on the highway last weekend. I was probably doing about 85 (75 zone, so 10 over like most everyone else) and there was a car on my ass. So I decided to punch it a bit and hop over a couple lanes to get the car off my ass. After not too long of a time I look down and the speedometer is reading 120. Fuck. I think I was on a slight downhill at that point but still hitting a buck twenty that easily is just ridiculous. It was at that point that I started to develop a healthy fear for what that car is capable of.

So anyway, yeah, that's my new toy. And hopefully my mom or anyone else I'm related to is reading this since they too have anxiety issues.

Sidepedaling

Okay, so watching boxing is boring, but that doesn't necessarily mean that boxing itself is boring. During the summer I was going out jogging to get exercise, but now that it's cold and icy out, I'm not fucking doing that anymore. Plus I hate jogging anyway.

Since I needed to find some other means of exercise, so I decided to give boxing a try and got myself an instructional DVD and one of these. I figure hey, why not try something that could be a good workout and potentially relieve stress at the same time? Something comes along that pisses me off so I just go and beat the shit out of the heavy bag for awhile. Sounds like a plan.

Actually lately I haven't been getting all pissed off to the point where I want to go beat the shit out of something. Okay, well, despite my temper and short fuse I really don't ever get that pissed anyway. Seriously.

Still though, I'm always high-strung and frequently stressed even when it's unwarranted sometimes, so what gives? Maybe it's the anti-anxiety meds I'm on to try and help combat my shyness. The medication I'm on is a benzodiazepine, and benzos are a CNS depressant. Apparently the way they combat anxiety is by putting me to sleep, and then I can't be anxious while I'm asleep. And then I'm also too tired to be stressed. Better living, or sleeping, through chemistry.

Seriously it was wearing me down so much that I finally had to cut back to just one dose a day in the evening. When I was taking one in the morning too I would be dragging ass all day at work, on several occasions nearly falling asleep while someone was talking to me. That's not good.

I almost didn't start taking them after reading about the potential side effects and withdrawal and shit. Yeah, I was too anxious to take my anti-anxiety meds. Hey, read some of that shit and tell me that you wouldn't have some anxiolytic anxiety. Finally, though, I thought to myself, hey, risk is part of the game if you wanna sit in that chair, so I finally got going with the meds.

Not sure if they're really doing anything after several weeks aside from making me feel like I'm drunk without any of the fun parts (in addition to making me sleepy they can also make me feel a bit lightheaded). Of course sitting at home alone most of the time hasn't exactly given me much of a chance to do serious field-testing. So far though if I'm around a big group I feel pretty much the same as always.

Okay, I guess maybe I do feel a bit more relaxed when I'm out and about though. And my moods are a bit more even than they were before. Of course when I say "before" I'm referring to when I was starting to take the medication, and I would have a lot of mood swings. Of course I could be that way before, so it's hard to say what the fuck is going on.

In the end though I don't have seriously high hopes for this latest experiment. Of course, I recognize that meds aren't going to actually solve my problems, I have to do that on my own. And maybe that's part of the problem. Well okay that's the whole problem. But what I was referring to is that maybe people who think that their prozac is going to fix their problems can actually bullshit themselves enough to where they get their shit together and get to work on doing something.

I've been on anti-depressant medications at two other points in my life and they didn't do shit. Then there was a short stint where I was seeing a therapist and he was always coming up with ways for me to combat my social anxiety and I would always shoot them down. It got so bad that he actually said he didn't know if there was any point in coming in for any more sessions. That's right; I am so stubborn and difficult that my brain is completely resilient to chemical changes and I had a therapist give up on me. So that's probably not good either.

Barack Obama: retard. I hope there's more to this or this comment was taken out of context because if not that's a pretty stupid thing for a supposedly smart man to say. I mean, seriously, how many toys out there come from China?

China, which makes about 80 percent of the world's toys...

Gee, that seems like quite a lot. Why not just say you wanna shut the whole industry down?

Man, every fucking candidate sucks balls. Well, most of them. I think I wanna get on board with Ron Paul. For some reason I had discounted him at one point but I think I need to re-evaluate that. Although running under the Republican flag the guy's really a libertarian and I'm down with that. If nothing else, if someone put a gun to my head and said "pick one" I think he'd be my choice. Not that that's a ringing endorsement or anything, but that's the shit landscape we've got here in this country.

And what is with the sudden surge of Mike Fuckabee? Just what this already ignorant country needs, a Baptist minister president.

Not Outstanding

So here's an instance of kids doing the stupid kind of shit that kids do where they should be going to jail. Along with the needless death of a little girl this raises several other issues and questions:

1. Bring on all the d-bags who like to rant and rave about videogames and violence. Video games don't make kids dumb and make them do stupid shit, those kids were stupid already.
2. The girl being charged in this case is cute and a couple years away from being legal and now may end up spending her more attractive years rotting behind bars.
3. If indeed that was the game they were playing, who the fuck plays Mortal Kombat anymore these days?

Addendum: Okay, so it looks like it may not have been the video game after all, that's just what they called their "wrestling" sessions. Not like that really matters; either way this is fucked up. But of course that really goes without saying.

If nothing else at least the choice was ballsier than "You"

Hey guys: shut the fuck up. Man Person of the Year isn't always complimentary. Hitler, Stalin (twice), and Bono have all won the award for fuck's sake. Not the best company to be in. Of course I wouldn't expect that you guys would notice this fact, because you were too busy with this shit:

"Clearly General Petraeus is the person, or one of a few people, who would certainly merit that designation," the former Massachusetts governor added.
...
“I noticed that Time Magazine made President Putin the Time Magazine ‘Man of the Year,’” McCain said, according to NBC. “I understand that probably, but my man of the year is one Gen. David Petraeus, our general who has brought success in Iraq.”

I realize that I get pissed a lot, usually for no good reason, but there are few things that make my blood boil quicker than pandering.

LOL like OMFG u guys Jamie Lynn Spears is preganant!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I absolutely abhor celebrity gossip but for about a million reasons I've gotta talk about this one. Seriously this is like the most fucking hilarious thing to happen in awhile. I mean, who would have thought that by year's end that Britney would be the kid in that family who isn't the biggest fuck-up?

Well OK maybe she still is. Tough call really. She's still a shitty mom and had to shave her head to beat drug tests and lost custody of her kids to fucking K-Dirt. All that on top of the fact that she had kids with that guy to begin with. That plus she's like soooo incredibly fat now that like no guy would bang her, except for pretty much any straight guy with a pulse. But at least she didn't get knocked up at 16! Or at least that's what she'll be telling herself.

If nothing else the heat is off of her for awhile until she screws up again and gets back into the spotlight.

Spears, who turned 16 on April 4 and says she is 12 weeks into her pregnancy, told the magazine she plans to raise her child in Louisiana, "so it can have a normal family life."

Best of luck with that one!

Then of course there's the "what about the children" angle (I got through two of those before I just couldn't take it anymore; if there are any gems in there please let me know via comments). This is funny to me because a bunch of candy-ass parents probably are freaking out about what to tell their kids. If I've learned one thing about parents it's that a lot of them really hate having to do the fucking job they signed up for.

So while this is freaking awesome for most of the rest of us, that kid who got her pregnant probably isn't finding it too funny. Not only is he gonna be a daddy before he can even legally buy the alcohol to drown those sorrows, but people are already talking statch charges for him. Hopefully it doesn't go beyond talk though.

I'm sure the kid's a real winner and all but I most kids don't deserve what Genarlow Wilson had to go through. Getting thrown in the slam for 10 and having to register as a sex offender for "aggravated child molestation" for getting blown by a girl two years younger than you when you're 17? Now granted they finally got the guy released but they certainly took their sweet time about it.

Now, this is the last country on earth I expect to get our sex laws right. And no, I'm not gonna make any kinda case for guys my age to be knocking up 16-year-olds, but calling someone a child molester when, at least from a legal standpoint, they're still a child is pretty fucking dumb. Just to throw more anecdotal evidence out there I seem to recall a case where an underage girl took nude photos of herself for her boyfriend and she got hit with child porn charges. That seems pretty reasonable.

Kids are gonna be kids and unfortunately are gonna do stupid shit. We'd rather they not, but in cases like these, they don't deserve jail and the sex offender tag for it.

Just to keep my street cred up here, what the hell happened to Jamie Lynn Spears anyway? I mean besides the pregnancy thing. Didn't she used to be cute? Maybe it's just all the makeup in that picture. If it is then that's just one more reason why I'm banning most, if not all, of that shit once I'm in charge.

I find myself in all sorts of odd places politically. In some ways I'm becoming more conservative. I'm down with moderate Republicans and even though I haven't pulled the trigger on it yet I'm still planning on becoming a gun owner. Fear not though, because in other ways I'm becoming more liberal. One such issue is the death penalty. I'm down with Jersey's decision to abolish the death penalty.

"Society must ask," he continued, "is it not morally superior to imprison 100 people for life than it is to execute all 100 when it's probable we execute an innocent?"

And that's pretty much the crux of it. As much as I am for killing assholes, the fact is that some innocent are going to slip through the cracks and that just completely goes against the ideals that we at least think this country was founded upon. As the saying goes (and as echoed by Corzine; hope he's wearing his fucking seat belt now), it's better to let a hundred guilty men go free than to wrongfully imprison one innocent. The notion of executing even one single innocent person is just completely wrong and I can't rationalize that one away in any sort of "justice" system. Plus at least imprisonment can be reversed.

The bill was introduced in November after a state commission concluded capital punishment was an ineffective deterrent to crime.

See I never really cared about it being a deterrent, and I also didn't need a study to tell me that the death penalty wasn't one. I was just all for getting rid of people we don't need, and of course, that Biblical need for revenge. Pretty much if it's that kind of shit coming from those corners of my mind it's probably bad.

I think of people like Jesse Timmendequas, and I'm like, yeah, just kill that guy. But as I've said before, being a child killer and/or child molester in prison has got to be way worse than death. No one wants to die, but not one wants to be that guy on the fucking prison totem pole, so life in prison is more satisfying of a punishment in the end for some of the more heinous crimes. But I guess in a way we're back to that whole revenge thing since I think that's a harsher punishment, aren't we? So is the death penalty good again? Shit.