An Anti-Obama FYI

Just a little FYI for those of you who are anti-Obama, I wanted you to know who your peers are. http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/09/supremacist_group_blankets_rox.html ...And people wonder why I don't vote Republican... because these are some of the people who do! Granted, I hate hippies, and hippies generally vote Democrat, but at least hippies aren't in the intellectual neighborhood of lynch mobs.

The Football Proletariat Arises

After a couple of weeks of football have finally been digested, I feel a lot better about summer coming to an end. Besides the fact that Hurricane season is just as exciting as Football season, (and both are 100x more exciting than baseball season), both the college and Professional football seasons are shaping up to look pretty interesting. By interesting, I mean that no one knows what is going to happen, especially not the idiots on TV. It is an inverse correlation; the more sure someone is of their opinion about a sport on television, the more sure they are to be wrong about it. But we all know those guys are not paid to be right or wrong, they are paid to be loud and say things that make you mad. And that is what they are good at.

But honestly, no one knows what is going to happen in either league this year. In college football, the proletariat is definitely making a move to cut the heads off of the ruling class. Notre Dame was already taken to the Guillotine last year, and it looks like many more big names will follow this year; names like, oh, say, the entire Big East.

I mean, honestly, really, what the fuck? Really guys? West Virginia? Only three points against a multi-directional Carolina team? And Rutgers… don’t even get me started… But then , that is the main example of what I am talking about. Teams like East Carolina, Bowling Green, BYU, and Fresno state… FRESNO STATE! Have put major hurtings on BCS conference teams. I think this trend is going to continue throughout the year, even though the experts will tell you that "order will be restored" Well let me tell ya something, like the Joker said in The Dark Knight, things aren’t ever going back the way they were. Talented high school kids aren’t going to waste their time at BCS school riding the pine when they can start at Mid Major schools and have the chance to make a splash upsetting one of those venerable BCS schools. The tide has turned, and that dreaded "p"-word, parity, is sneaking it’s way into the College ranks.

In the NFL, after this opening weekend one thing is very clear; the National Football League is dedicated to making singers with funny accents as popular as it can. 2 out of 3 performers at the NFL’s Kickoff Concert on Thursday, September 4th were foreign born, and I do not think this was a coincidence. Keith Urban, a Grammy Award winning country singer, grew up in Australia, he performed a long set after singer Natasha Bedingfield, who grew up in London. I believe the NFL is trying to subconsciously force feed us international celebrities and making Buffalo play a game in Toronto to take away focus from certain domestic products that, quite frankly just stink (coughnfcwestcough). Yes, I believe the NFL is doing everything it can to draw attention away from it’s crappier teams with bright and shiny objects from other countries. God knows any sane human would rather see good old gorgeous blond Natasha than the God-awful Detroit Lions. You know your team sucks when even in a City in which the Mayor has resigned because he has been charged with a Felony, your pathetic squad is still the more depressing mess.

Anyway, Everyone in the NFC and AFC East won their games today, except for the Redskins and Dolphins, who played Division foes. If that means we are going to have an all East Super Bowl again, I’m all for it. Screw the rest of the country, what do they have to offer? I am all about East Coast Bias, and if Northeast teams dominate, than so be it. Of course, in keeping with the theme (there was a theme?) of this post, I guess I should mention some potential surprises in the NFL this year. OK, how about this… Howie Long and Terry Bradshaw won’t sound like complete idiots for one whole Sunday at some point this season. I mean, it has to happen at least once, right?

Confessions of a Crazy Ex Boyfriend 8/19

Confessions From One Ex to Another

This week I have something a little different for you. A few weeks ago I received an email from a guy who was going through a severe Crazy Ex Boyfriend phase, and he wanted my advice on how to extract himself from his situation. Here I will post his question (with the names changed to protect the unstable, of course) and what I wrote him in response. I would love for this to become a habit. If anyone knows any guys who need advice on troubling relationships, please point them in my direction. You know what they say, those who can't do, teach ;)

Hi John,

My name is Steve, and I'm responding to the blog you wrote. I'm acting
like a crazy ex boyfriend. Before I met my last girlfriend, I was a pretty even tempered man. I was peaceful living on my own and working on fixing my inner soul. I was on my way of working towards the being in the film/TV industry. Then came her, her name was Louise. We met online and starting talking for a while, soon we became an item. We were in love. Even though she was always annoying, self centered, and narcissistic, I put up with it. Sometimes she day by day stressed me out, and got on my nerves about me focusing too much on myself working. She'd compare her ex's to me and then continued to mock me, insult me, verbally abuse my ego and made me feel insecure. It was an on going emotional roller coaster for the both of us. I bought her things, drove for hours just to be with her and she did nothing. I did everything for her, when she wanted to be spoiled I did it. When she wanted to be loved, I gave her attention but it wasn't enough. When she broke
up with me, I went into a rage. Time and time again another woman takes advantage of my good heart. I acted out in revenge. I became a person I didn't even recognize, I was frighting towards her and myself. I became one of those online psychos. It felt like two dueling personalities fighting me, one that is still the same noble and honest man I was then the other is a side of me I've never seen before, full of wrath, envy, aggression. I started acting out; recklessly drinking, sleeping with strippers, just this self destructive person. I could handle the separation but it was the feeling of being used, hurt, and taking for granted and thus treated like garbage after. I started drinking more and calling her until she threatened to call the police. I can't get her out of my mind, and I just want to move on. I want to get my mind right but this past mistake is killing that. I'm trying Christ and self help groups but it's still too difficult. What should I do to get this woman out of my head?

-Steve

P.S I'm sorry this is long but I'm trying to change my ways. For good.

And this was my response.

You have some things going in your favor, and you can build on those to break yourself out of the situation you are in. you have enough insight to see both your own patterns of behavior, and those of the types of women you get involved with. That is the first step towards breaaaaaaaaaaking the haaaaaaaaaaabit tonight (sorry, I almost sounded like a Linkin Park song there for a second). First thing that helps is to not lose your sense of humor. Or if you have lost it, send out a search party for it. Life is too serious already without you making it more so.

Basically, you have four emotions that are running rampant in your psyche like rabid dogs; in fact it may help you to think of them that way. Mad, rabid Dogs named Rage, Envy, Hurt, and Sorrow. It seems that what happens is you let yourself be hurt. And yes, this is sometimes a conscious decision. Sometimes our hearts get broken out of nowhere, but you saw the signs, and you knew that this women, and women in your past were doing things to hurt you, but you stayed anyway. You probably have some Romasochist in you (see my latest post if you haven't already), which isn't awful, but is something you need to be aware of. Either consciously or unconsciously you attract or chose women who take advantage of your good nature. There could be any number of reasons for this, and until you figure out why this pattern is going to continue. You have to figure out why you continuously subject yourself to such torture. Do you have a "Hero" complex, in which you seek out damaged women and have the need to save them? Do you have low self-esteem and think that you somehow deserve the abuse you get from these women, or that you cannot do any better? Do you feel that you cannot or will not find a decent woman to be with? These are all questions that will take some soul searching and a good friend, relative, or therapist. You are doing the right thing by seeking help, but you have to know what questions to ask to get the right answers.

Your immediate problem though, is you have these Rabid dogs chewing on your heart and mind and you don't know what to do about them. You feel Envious, and you are overtaken with Hurt and Sad, which leads to Rage. And when you feel that Rage you don't care who you express it on. There is one more Dog in this Pack, and it's the Alpha, the Leader, and its name is Love. You, like most Romasochists fall in Love incredibly easily and hard and let Love rule you. Unfortunately, Love brings the rest of its pack with it, and that is where the chaos begins. So I say to you, Master your Love, and you'll master the rest of the Pack. Don't let your Love lead you into a situation where you'll be taken advantage of, and you will not have to deal with the rest of the dogs that follow Love. Even though Love is the leader, Rage is the most dangerous because it can turn inwards, and that is when you become self destructive. And you can only destroy yourself for so long before there is nothing left to break. First things first; get away from the stressors, get away from what's feeding the Rage, lock up your Love until your ego can heal itself. Right now you can't trust yourself to be with a woman because you don't know what is leading you into these poisonous relationships. Until you do, stay out of them. Muzzle your Love, and the rest of the Pack will follow suit. You can't think straight while you are still fighting the war, so take yourself out of the situation; cut off all contact with all women who hurt you, or who you have hurt; you don't want to add Guilt to your pack of dogs. Guilt will only make you obsess about the women even more, and that obsession is where a lot of the restraining orders and police activity stems from. And that is something we would all like to avoid, right?

The way to not be a Crazy ex-bf is to first, not be crazy. And the thing that makes most of us crazy is some kind of intense chemical reaction with the former object of our love. Cut that off, and the reactions die down, and sanity returns. Sometimes, you can never re-establish that contact. I have an ex that no matter how long it has been, when I see her I feel the insanity start to creep back into my brain. You have to consciously master your emotions, and save them for someone who is worthy of the Noble and Honest Man you can be. Those are the Dogs you want leading your Pack of Emotions. The second way to not be crazy is to not date Crazy… like attracts like, and Crazy girls will draw it out of you like putting a magnet on an Etch-a-Sketch pad. So if you want to move on you have to cut off the negative stressors from the past, even if they weren't all negative. Your personal growth is going to have to come at the cost of leaving some people in your past and locking them up there. You have your Hollywood Dreams; you still have YOUR LIFE TO LIVE. Write, go to writing groups, do things that will help you be the person you want to be, the person you know you can be. Do that and forget the women who want to tear you down and use you. When you heal yourself, you'll be able to see with clear eyes, and you'll be able to easily steer clear of the girls who are traps for your inner soul. You have pro-social factors in your life, support groups, God… go to them, leave the insanity behind, and you'll be on your way to being an ex-ex-crazy bf.

So yeah, I like this, it feels right for me. There's an obvious reason for that, but whatever. You have my contact information, and you can always leave comments, And as you can see, I am very enthusiastic about helping people with problems, so don't be scared, get things off your chest. As men we are so often made to feel like we should keep things in. That's why we occasionally go on shooting rampages. I'd much rather you email me instead.

Confessions of a Crazy Ex Boyfriend 8/13

Present Tense(ion)

For those of us who may or may not be affiliated with the “Crazy Ex-Boyfriend” demographic, one of the trials faced by such men is leaving the past behind. That is, in fact, what exacerbates the Crazy. The brain has a way of taking all of the good memories of the past relationship, making them seem even better than they were, and then mixing them in randomly with the comparatively miserable realities of the man’s present situation. The person almost always idealizes the past, remembering things to be better than they were, and forgetting the parts that were not so rosy. In some occasions, the past was actually rosy, and nothing was wrong; sometimes the man was the one who did all of the very bad things, and the woman was in fact pretty damn decent the whole time.

Obsession is the motor of any crazy ex, and the gas for that motor is living in the past. We all have moments in our life that we wish would never end. For some of us that wish is so strong that our minds actually make it a reality. Those moments literally do not ever end. The problem is, those moments are not always mutually valued. I remember specifically for me, there are some instances where I was with a certain person that meant more to me than they did to her, and that is what makes it hard to let those memories go. At some point there comes a reckoning, a moment when the man and women realize that they both have placed a significantly different amount of importance on a certain event or time in their shared experience. If it is the man who has exalted a time in the past, then he is not going to just let that go of that zeitgeist for anything or anybody. He becomes obsessed with making that moment in time be forever, whether the woman even believes that the “golden age” he is referring to ever existed at all or not. It is usually at this point that the man crosses the line into Crazy Ex territory, doing all he can to recreate something that has long since past, or never existed. Then come the restraining orders.

I personally believe that some of us, if our ego strength is not, well, strong enough, simply become only the sum of our shared experiences. What I mean by that is our Ego strength is similar to the main tent pole for our personalities. Our experiences are like the people who fill the arena underneath the tent. If that tent pole, our basic personality that should be stable over time, isn’t strong enough, and those people are really rowdy and drunk, eventually those experiences will break the pole and collapse the tent. Our personality then becomes entirely dependent only on our experiences. Since experiences, and our perceptions of experience, are rapidly changing and subjective, so too does the personality of that particular person become rapidly changing and prejudiced. Eventually the person who becomes the Crazy Ex, their subjective experience of the past becomes their objective reality. The person with low ego strength has based their entire personality and reality on positive shared experiences from the past that may have never existed. They CAN’T let the past go, because then there is nothing else left to hold up their tent, their psyche. Without their past, without the relationship they had, the Crazy Ex feels a complete loss of self. If there is no “them” there is no “him”. And the fact that the person’s ex is now denying that golden age and the concurrent present reality leads to confusion, frustration, obsession, and eventually, anger.

So, how do we untangle this Gordian Knot? The same way Alex did, we cut it. Cut yourself off from the past. One important step towards not being a crazy ex is to not think of yourself as an ex anymore, but to think of yourself as a person, whole and complete. And do not think of the woman you were with as your ex, but as a person you had some pleasurable memories with, but who, ultimately you could not be with in the long run. Do not let your emotions chain you to your past; don’t demonize the person who you were with, nor should you idealize her. She is a human being of flesh and blood, prone to mistakes and successes just like all of us. This is going to take some soul searching, and, most importantly, an accurate recollection of past events. The past is never how we remember it; if you don’t believe me, look up some studies about the reliability of eyewitness accounts. Our brains always twist the truth to make it a little more or less palatable to us. The point is that you cannot change the past, and like Michael McDonald says, things will never be the same again. That’s not to say your life cannot be better or worse, it just won’t ever be the same. Once you accept that, it helps towards letting go of the past. It hurts to let go of good memories, but you do not have to obliterate them; just put them where they belong, and stop trying to make them the present again. Disengage them from your waking present life and look towards the future. Concentrate on making more good memories in the future. Occupy your tent with hopeful, sober experiences, and that tent pole should get stronger and more stable, so the winds of change don’t blow it down again.

Romasochism

There are still romantics in the world; I should know I'm one of them. Romantics are a dying breed though. We are killed every day by assassination squads of cynicism, betrayal, denial and frustration. But some of us, the ones who hold onto hope against hope, still manage to carry the torch of the romantic. Some of us take it too far though; some of us are diehard romantics. Some of us are such diehard romantics that nothing can kill our spirits; nothing can make us drop our banner, even when we really should. I call those people Romasochists, because we hold onto our romantic notions unto the point of emotional pain. And yes, I have been among their number on occasion. And many of you have as well.

Romasochists first and foremost always believe in the Happy ending. They have usually watched too many movies on Turner Classic Movies for their own good. They believe everything that Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan have ever taught them. They know every line from almost every Jon Cusack movie you can name. Jon Hughes movies ushered them through many a hard time. As an aside, I personally believe that every single person who does outpatient mental health today in some part owes their livelihood to romantic comedies from the 80’s and 90’s. Those movies have given so many boys and girls such unrealistic expectations about the way relationships should be, and caused so much neurosis because of it, that I think we all would be a little poorer without those thrice-damned movies. I mean, come on, Pretty Woman? Really? This is what we, as impressionable human beings, are accepting into our romantic fantasies?

The inevitable outcome of believing too much in these fantasies is heartbreak. Repeated, inevitable heartbreak. Some people become bitter from this heartbreak and vow never to love again, to become crazy cat-ladies, or move out into the woods and live alone in a one room shack. But the ones who repeatedly go back for more are the Romasochists. This isn’t good for the psyche, like repeatedly smashing your forehead against jagged rocks isn’t good for your IQ. So, you are probably asking, how does one avoid, or in some cases stop, being a romasochist? Well, since romasochists are by definition passionate people, they tend to only engage in extremes. If they get hurt badly enough, they usually engage the other extreme and either become emotionless robots, or swear off love entirely. Neither of these approaches works, because eventually the rubber band snaps back, and we end not where we started, but someplace worse. The romasochist always falls in love again, only the next time the set point for love is a little lower because deep down we want it even more. We maybe successful in fending off most romantic stimuli, but eventually one will get through those white blood cells we developed to kill off any love bugs that come our way. The next time the Romasochist falls in love after a bad experience is likely to be far worse than the previous time, ostensibly because the stimuli will have to be far stronger to get through the thick scab of bitterness that the last disappointment left.

And so it goes. Love, Hurt, Reject, Repeat. Until we put the breaks on the entire process. The problem with this series of events is its rapidity. All of this happens so quickly that its progress generates a large amount of emotional friction, and we all know friction ultimately leads to fire. Problem is that fire doesn’t always end up in passion; it most times ends up in the person with the vulnerable heart just getting burned. So there are two ways to deal with this process, slow it down and reduce the friction. We can slow it down by doing just that; control the rate at which we fall for people. Put on the breaks. It may seem like an impossibility, but love at first sight, as I’ve covered in previous posts, is a myth, and you can take more than a few minutes to decide if you are meant for someone or not. That alone may help you avoid 50% of situations that would eventually end in heartache. The next thing is to lubricate the relationship so as to avoid friction. By this I mean when you enter into the preliminaries of meeting someone, don’t gush, don’t tell them everything about yourself, see if you are compatible, and even if things are going great, make sure that they go great at a slow pace. That way you cut down on friction and sparks. Do not invest more of yourself than the other person is. That is a sure way to get your heart broken.

No matter how conscientious you are about your relationships however, some are still bound to fail, and that is the real test; when you do everything “right” and still end up with a broken heart. That is when you rely on your friends to pick you up, dust you off, and get you back to your feet. Romance should not be a painful experience; if it is something is wrong, and chances are that something is not you. So do not take too much blame when things go wrong, and do not give too much either. Reduce the stress and strain of going between the extremes of love and hate by trying to maintain and learn from experience until the right one comes along. Try and accept what happened and make sure it does not happen again. Your Brain is your most important organ, but your Heart is your most important Muscle, so stop leaving it open to so much abuse. Be more careful and don’t play so fast and lose with your emotions Romasochists. At the end of the day, no one cares more about you than you do.

Special Crazy BF/GF Section
Unless you’re one of those like, crazy stalkers, then ignore all of this and when someone says no to you, just except it and move on. It probably is your fault. If there is a restraining order taken out against you, take a hint. If the person you love moves and doesn’t tell you, take a hint. If they call the police on you, take a hint. If you find that you have to threaten to kill you/him/her/all-of-the-above to get their attention, then give up and move on. In fact, never mind that, maybe you should try being single for a while… like 20-30 years.

How to Save Your Life

Nobody ever really tells us this one. There is no pamphlet for it and no instruction manual. Some of us spend our whole lives trying to save other people, some of us see it as our calling, some of us make it our profession; our religion. And we become good at it, more or less, to the detriment of our own welfare. We learn how to save the lives of others, but every time we do we lose a little bit of ourselves in the process. Every time we acquiesce to the needs of another do we somehow lose a bit of ourselves, or do we gain something back from the act of giving?

Some people do, and some people don’t. But at some point, most people reach a point in their life where they look at their energy meter and see that it is on “E”, and that does not stand for “enough”. Sometimes you are just done; you have had enough, you are through, ready to throw in the towel. There are times when you feel like life has won, and you just want to give up. You fall to your knees and look up at the night sky, wondering why this is, this life, this everything so goddamned hard? All you want is peace, quiet, all you want is to pick the road less traveled, the silent path… But you cannot really, you have to keep on living… or do you?

At times like this, some of us, our thoughts turn to darker places. When we are sick of playing The Game of Life, there really is only one winning move, and that is not to play. Our consciousness begins to dwell on suicide, and some part of your brain, the part responsible for self-preservation, searches desperately for a lifeline, some single thread of light to shine through the opaque depression that covers you and everything you think and do. Because really, none of us wants to die; it is a conclusion we come to like question on a multiple choice test where we just want to pick “none of the above”. It’s like a wrong turn that leads to a dead end. Suicide is a 6-sided Rubix cube that has 8 colors. This is where our pedagogues and politicians have failed us; they have taught us everything; how to save and conserve every life but our own. What do you do when the person threatening your very existence is yourself? How do you do it, how do you save your own life?

First of all, you cannot save anyone else before you save yourself, and the first step is to never, ever give up on yourself. You may give up on everything else in your life, but never, ever give up on yourself. You may lose faith in every institution, every politician, every religion, everyone around you, but you cannot go on if you lose faith in yourself. You can’t ever escape yourself, so never let yourself down. No matter how much you drink, or how many drugs you do, you’ll still be there in the morning, unless you do so much that you find the cure for Living. But we are trying to avoid that, remember? So I say again, never give up on yourself. Some of you may not understand what I mean by this. Well, there is something of worth in all of us, something worth keeping alive, one little spark of light worth keeping alive. Most people have more than one spark, we have great big blazing fires of potential that are gradually buried beneath an inveterate deluge of shit over the course of months or years. Even the most stalwart of personalities can only take such a life for so long. Even if you are mostly useless, there has got to be something good about you. Maybe you’re dumb as a brick and have the personality of one, but you are good looking. Or you are devastatingly intelligent but also devastatingly hideous. That’s something. Find whatever that is about yourself and hang onto it, and make that spark grow, because I guarantee you somewhere, someone in the world needs that talent. Someone needs you and that ability you have. You just cannot give up on yourself before you find that spark and make it grow. And when you appreciate yourself, and your spark, others will see it to, and they will appreciate what you are and what you have become because you have recognized your own sense of self worth.

Through Hell and High Water, do not give up on yourself; bang your head against the wall, punch it till your knuckles bleed, but don’t you dare give up. That is how you stay alive. Some people say the only way they know they are alive is through pain, so they cut themselves; that isn’t pain. Pain is going through a whole MA program only to discover that you cannot get you license in counseling because of the wording of your Masters Degree. That’s more pain than any Emo cutter will ever know.

Real pain is loving someone knowing full well that they won’t love you back, but honestly and truly in your heart wanting what is best for them. That is pain. I don’t make it sound appetizing, this living thing, do I? Most of the time it is not. There is one reason, one thing that makes living worth it; perseverance. Proving people wrong, beating the odds and coming out on top anyway. Like Kanye said, “giving up is way harder than trying”. Become stronger from every defeat. Double your resolve every time someone tells you no. Do it again and again, harder, faster, better, stronger, until you can’t tell what’s your blood and what’s your sweat anymore. That’s the only way to get ahead in life, risking it to get what you want.

Life can be cruel, life can revel in the abject destruction of everything you have, and laugh at you while you try to pick up the pieces. Life can take your mother from you suddenly at the age of 23 with no warning whatsoever, and leave you with no reason to go on with your meager reality. But what can you do? Give up on the people who are counting on you? It may be easy to, they don’t know what pain you are going through, but can you give up on yourself? Can you give up on all of the promises and dreams you have had since you were a child? Don’t you think you owe it to yourself to make the best of your life, no matter how hard life fights you along the way? Fight back. You may not win the first time, or the 5^th time, or the 60^th time, but never let life beat you. If you take that approach, no man or woman will ever be able to sway you either. If you are constantly at war with the fates for your destiny, what does it matter what some guy or girl says about you? You do your best and leave the rest up to fate to decide.

Finally, not everyone in the world will be against you. Sometimes, you will be lucky enough to find an ally, a friend who believes in you despite the fact that you don’t. Hold onto these people as if your life depends on it, because it does. If you want to survive the low points in life, you have to have good friends. They cannot save you though; just like you cannot save them. But they can be the tools you need to help you save yourself, and that’s good enough. If you have yourself, and you really care enough about yourself, what you went through to get where you are now, and what your family did to put you where you are, you have part of what you need to save a life. If you have friends to look after you and pick you up and dust you off when you get knocked down, then you are damned near invincible. But the most important part is the belief that no matter how many times your face hits the floor, you can get to your feet and keep swinging. Life isn’t like boxing, it isn’t about how many times the wind gets knocked out

5 AM

It's really the Nothing Hour. No one is awake who wants to be awake. Nothing good happens at 5 AM. No happy surprises happen at 5 AM. 5 AM is the point in insomnia where you are ready to strike yourself with a mallet in order to be unconscious. 5 am is the last bit of sleep before most people have to get up. No one is on Facebook, no one is on Myspace, no one is on LJ. It's so bad that even teenagers have torn themselves from the internet and head off to bed. Everyone but me. I'm here. I'm here, awake, taking care of emergencies, because like I said, no one who is awake now is particularly doing well. Not just me, there are maybe, I'd guess 10% of the population getting the world ready for the rest of you, taking care of things no one else in their right mind would do. 5 AM is when I update Exit Eleven the most. 5 am is when i usually send out my emails, so my sleep deprived brain is usually saying things that shouldn't really be said, but I am too tired to know better. No one likes 5 am, even those who like the sunrise, because the sun usually doesn’t officially come up till around 6. Trust me, I know. In fact, I'll go check right now, hold on...

Actually, it's a cloudy morning, so it looks like there will be no sunrise for anyone. It's actually... 6:12 am now, but I conceived of writing this at 5 am. The mind works slower at this time of day, if you can call it that. It truly is an ungodly hour 5 am, I don't know why they call midnight the witching hour. If I was going to do any evil, guess when I would do it. Who is ready to deal with anything at 5 AM? I guess there are good things that can happen at 5 am but one would have to work really, really hard at it. And I can't think of anything right now... why? Because its 6:15 AM, who can think at such an hour?