There are times when I love how truly small the town is that I live in, and then there are times when it reminds me that I’m pretty much always only one connection away from every wacko I ever dated here and at any point they could pop back up out of nowhere and surprise me.

Case in point- yesterday I get an email from someone who just connected on another social networking site with a person I used to date. Apparently he ex used to be friends with this guy, and he somehow figured out we (she and I) work together (still not sure how) and told her to tell me hi.

So I get an email along the lines of “Jackass from 10 years ago” says to say hi to you! Huh, well, that’s interesting. Especially considering the history that “jackass from 10 years ago” and I have. I’m saving what I really call him for later in the story since I don’t want to give it all away and ruin the surprise. As SarahSpace said, this is a story I could eat out on for years, and I realized I’d probably never shared this particular gem with you fantastical readers and she enjoyed it so much that I figured what the hell lets have story time. We’ll call this my early Christmas present to you.

Lets get in our way back machine and head back to 1999. I am 21, almost 22, and all about short skirts going out every weekend night and shakin what my momma gave me. As I recall I was very good at the shakin part. I meet a guy in a bar- which really was the whole intent of the short skirts and 4 inch heels to begin with. He works at the bar (score! cheaper drinks!) and he’s pretty damn hot. That whole dark hair blue eyes thing that has always gotten me, and he had that goin on in spades- that and the whole cheaper drinks thing. He is nice to boot, so we exchange numbers and proceed to that whole casual dating thing.

Things seem to be going well, he’s smart, interested in the things I like, working his way thru school, has his own place. You know nothing that is screaming to my naive little mind RUN RUN LIKE HELL IT”S ABOUT TO GET WEIRD. Oh how weird it got. This one man is probably single handedly the weirdest of all the men I ever dated. Weirder than the foot fetish guy, weirder than the guy who only wanted to talk about the tv show wings, weirder even than the guy that always like to cook for me but always got so hot when he cooked that he sweated all into the food (though that one was more gross than weird). This one too had a slightly higher jackass quality than most- but really that part of the story pales in comparison to the other stuff.

So anyway, things are going great! We talk, we cuddle, we seem into each other, the bedroom life is going well. Then the relationship hops on the crazy train and away we go. It started simply enough, he had a secret, something that he didn’t share with everyone, something “people have a hard time understanding”. See now with my jaded 30 something year old eyes I know that those statements lead you to a point of a man admiting to one or more of the following 1) he used to be a woman, 2) he WANTS to be a woman, 3) he wants to see if you could let him wear your shoes/underware/makeup and dance around the house in them, 4) he was in jail for something, usually something really bad or 5) he’s about to ask you to do some kind of freaky ass shit in the bedroom. Normally with 5 is something like, threesomes but with another dude, open relationships, S&M, whatever. What I was not, and I mean TOTALLY not prepared for was the version of 5 that I got. He wanted me to dress him up like a baby and “mother” him.

Yeah you still with me? By dress him up like a baby- I mean full out, I mean the whole adult diapers, baby powder, give him a bottle, pacifier, sing to him like he’s my newborn son. Apparently that made him “hot” or some such. Needless to say, that wasn’t so much my cup of tea.

Well whatever is a girl to do with that one? How do you even begin to broach that subject with your friends? Yeah meet my new boyfriend, what you don’t know is right now he’s wearing a diaper so that you know he’s REAL good and in the mood when we get home.

At that point, you pretty much know the relationship is on the downward trend. But we’d already planned a little vacation together, driving to BFE north of here for a week to see his family, the sights all of that. I figured well may as well do that- I’d already taken the time off work so whatever. Long as the diapering wasn’t a thing it would be fine, he was still a nice guy, whatever (esentially all the things that 22 year olds say to themselves when their brains can’t comprehend wtf just happened). So off we go on our 8 hour drive to meet the family.

Our vacation is for 7 days- on day 5 he dumps me. In BFE. When we still have to drive 8 hours home TOGETHER. THEN he asks if I want to just finish the last two days of our vacation up like nothings wrong. Again, I politely declined. In fact I let him sleep for most of the 8 hours while I drove us home in the middle of the night. That was the last time I talked to him (shockingly I know). Now 10 years later he is sending me remote Hi’s. I don’t even know how he knew where I was. I didn’t work here then, and my last name is not the same but somehow he did. SarahSpace thinks perhaps he’s been digitally stalking me these last 10 years which I spose is possible but either way I think I’ll not be responding to his greeting. Or maybe I should and ask him if he’s still all into that crap. BTW- he’s been diaper guy in my head since then

I’ve been watching all this news coverage about the health care debate, much as many of you have. There are so very many things that bother me about the tone that this country is taking now. Half of me says please just stop covering the crazy out there, it makes us look like we’re all insane when all you see on the news is morons showing up to presidential events standing on church property with semi-automatic weapons. The other half says keep showing the crazy, it’s opening the eyes of all the independants, all the people on the fence. When your party is getting nothing but the crazy exposure of the extreme right holding up signs of our elected (honestly elected as opposed to fake Florida elected) President dressed like Hitler then suddenly you look like a pack of wackadoo’s and people run to the other side.

Let me put all this health care debate into real person perspective for you. For those of you that are regular readers, or up to date readers you know about my cancer scare. You all know my mother had breast cancer at the young age of 40. My Doctor, and all other doctors recommend that i have regular mammograms starting at age 30. I am now 31. I went through the scare, the sleepless nights, the unexpected medical expenses of just the copays and prescriptions and the quite real fear that I was going to end up being sick, not cold sick, Cancer sick.

I have insurance, our insurance isn’t great, but it’s not horrible. Thankfully I have a company that takes a lot of the expense of coverage for me. Thankfully for my coverage for my husband and myself I don’t go broke every paycheck trying to just keep us insured. However, even my insurance, my fairly good insurance largely failed me. Two months after my cancer scare I got a bill from the medical imaging facility that had provided my biopsy and mammogram and ultrasound. Apparently my insurance decided to cover a portion but not all of my bill for services. I owe them an additional $200+. Granted for my husband and I this is not a HUGE amount of money, it’s painful but it won’t force us to skip bills. For others, that single bill means they no longer have money to pay rent, buy food, buy gas to get to and from the job that will pay for what the insurance will not.

After getting and opening the bill, hubby of mine looked at me and said you know, if you’d really been sick one or both of us would have probably had to file bankruptcy. The sad part is, he’s completely right. We were one positive test result away from not only dealing with months of chemo or surgery and recovery or radiation, based on what my insurance DID cover vs what it did not we would have been drowning by this point in medical bills.

So please, pretty please do not tell me that we do not as a country need some type of healthcare reform. Please do not tell me that it is OK for an insurance company to suddenly decide that someone who is sick, and has been sick for years is no longer “insurable” forcing them to go to an insurance plan where they still pay hundreds of dollars of month that in the end saves them some money but not what it should. Personally, having a parent who has reached the “uninsurable” level and seeing what they go through with what they pay just to get SOME level of coverage I think the insurance companies already have their own Death Panels, composed of people just looking out for the bottom line, just trying to get that profit.

I can only assume that the people out there protesting, holding the signs, making a scene have either never been sick, or had a scare, or seen a friend or relative go bankrupt or go without care simply because they cannot afford to get the care they need. They’ve never gotten a bill, a letter from an insurance company saying that test to see if you had cancer? Yeah you didn’t really NEED that so we’re not paying it, even though you give us thousands of dollars a year. Either that or they’re all on the insurance company payrolls. I hope my country wakes up soon, gets past whatever this bullshit is that is holding us back and making us all look insane. Perhaps we need to have a sane people rally, where we can all show up and just stand there quietly saying thank you that someone finally is intent on making a change.

I was poking around amazon today hunting for a new good yoga DVD (BTW if anyone has suggestions please let me know). That’s when I wandered across this little gem:

Umm…. Lets break this down shall we?

Naked Men = Good

Hot Men = Good

Yoga = Good

Hot Yoga = Yeah that’s good too

Hot Men doing hot yoga= I’m all on board for that

Naked men, doing hot yoga, that’s where something in my head just snaps a little. It’s one of those moments where the individual components all are fantastic on their own or in smaller combinations. It reminds me of the friends episode where Rachel is making the thanksgiving dessert, and the pages of her magazine get together and before you know it she’s made a concotion of Ladyfingers, Strawberries, Whipped Cream and Beef Browned with peas and onions. All by themselves all excellent, the first three ingredients excellent, the last three also excellent. Together, one hot mess.

Yoga is a calming thing, it’s a centering things, it’s all about strenghthening and elongating and releasing stress. It is also a thing which can contain poses that while fine, hell even lovely with your pants on just get a little weird when they’re off- and that applies to the ladies and the mens. I for one am just not sure I could watch, much less follow a naked hot man getting his downward facing dog on. I’m not sure if it would be more laughter or sheer horror and shock that would get me, but one of them sure as hell would.