Sorry for my absence, I've been successfully attempting to keep myself busy. I've been working, I finally got myself back to the gym after gaining somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 pounds (which I am not happy about, though I suspect that I gained the weight because I wasn't happy and therefore eating for comfort) and fixing up my apartment. Things are almost completely in place. Last night, I went to Home Depot and bought wire molding and covered over all those unsightly wires that were running all the way around the apartment. Can I tell you how proud of myself I am? Unfortunately, my thumbs are raw from the experience, so giving people the thumbs-up and the OK-sign is a little painful. One of the things I've been thinking about recently is the madness with this whole indecency on the radio thing. Quite frankly, Janet's breast touched off a whole firestorm of controversy that the religious right is using to bring moral goodness to our country. Do I agree with President Moron and his cronies forcing morality on us? Absolutely not. Do I agree that the airwaves should be cleaned up a bit... well, see, there's the grey area. While I personally didn't like what was being aired, I knew that obviously there was a demand for lowest-common-denominator humor. I could change the station if I wanted. But there's a difference between free speech and the right to be balls-to-the-wall raunchy. And the other thing to consider is that radio is free and open to anyone to receive -- it's not like cable where you can regulate the stations by doing the parental lockout on channels you don't want your kid to hear. And quite frankly, if the FCC wants to take aim at something, maybe they should also take a look at song lyrics and call out the record labels. How many songs these days are about sex? On Friday morning, a couple of guys in Atlanta decided they wanted to push the envelope on this whole "zero tolerance" policy their company had on indecency by recording a porn star "doing her thing" and then playing it back on the air backwards. Unfortunately, it backfired on them when someone left a microphone on during the commercial break while they were recording it, and it went out over the air underneath the commercials. I heard it -- damn, was it graphic. That's just dumb though -- trying to push the boundaries in a cute way by saying "look, we're not being indecent, it's backwards!" In other news, I've been surprised at how often I've been looking at people's eyes to judge them recently. It's been said that "eyes are the windows to the soul," and I'm really starting to firmly believe that you can tell how intelligent and how emotionally stable and kind someone is by looking in their eyes. There's just some kind of warmth you can see in a kind person's eyes, an inquisitiveness in a smart person's eyes, a certain kind of "intelligence has permanently checked out" look in the eyes of someone who's not quite there. Call me judgmental, but it's a thought...