Mon Dieu!

It's early on a Friday evening, but I'm fading fast. I have to rise and shine early tomorrow for our end-of-season kickball tournament and I have a feeling I'll be zonked out on the couch shortly. But as you all know, it's NaBloPoMo and I've got to come up with a blog. And when nothing springs immediately to mind, I turn to that bottomless well of inspiration: the humiliations of my youth... Oh, goody!!

Picture it, Sicily 1937... No wait, that's not right.

Picture it, the first day of seventh grade, 1981... We all trotted into French class for the first time and claimed a desk. We had more students than desks and by the time the teacher got there, a good many kids were lined up along the walls of the classroom. My friend Heather and I were sitting in the front row (my sitting in the front row should immediately indicate how sparse seats were. Chuckleheads like myself always head for the back of the room!) Miss Moro arrived and realized we didn't have enough desks. She appealed to the boys in the class to offer their seats to the girls who were without. "Would all the gentlemen please stand up and let the ladies sit down?"

Of course, the guys thought this was stupid, but a couple begrudgingly stood. There still weren't enough seats and some girls remained standing. "Would all the gentlemen please stand up and let the ladies sit down?" A few more guys got up and that was it; there were no more boys seated.

"Would ALL the GENTLEMEN PLEASE stand up and let the LADIES sit down??" came the voice from the front of the room. I'm thinking, "What the hell is wrong with this woman, all the guys are standing..."

I'm looking around the room trying to find the wayward boy and then I hear right in front of me, "WOULD ALL THE GENTLEMEN PLEASE STAND UP AND LET THE LADIES SIT DOWN??" Just as I began to realize, with all due measure of appropriate horror, that she was speaking directly to ME, my friend Heather leaned over and said quietly, "Miss Moro, she's a GIRL."




{Insert lifetime scarring here}






I blushed, Miss Moro got all flustered, and Heather managed to stifle what must have been a GIGANTIC laugh out of pure empathy and compassion on her part. I don't really remember much after that. I believe I got home that night and demanded to get my ears pierced. Not wanting to leave anything to chance, I got my ears pierced a total of 3 times within the next month or so. Of course, it didn't help. When the yearbook came out that year, I discovered I had been listed as my cousin. My MALE cousin, Patrick. In the wrong class. Above the picture of the boy I had a crush on.

Really, does it get much worse than this???

I believe I cried for 4 days straight. And I can only imagine how thrilled my cousin was as well.

But I have to say, I made a damn cute boy!


And now, your Daily Moment of Schmidt:

Flashback, Oct. 25th: "These people are going to try and shred her after the campaign to divert blame from themselves"

A "McCain aide," who we can now reasonably conclude is the fired Randy Scheunemann, predicted precisely this.

He names names. Schmidt and Wallace.

Are they behind this? I don't know. But he predicted they'd do this. And now it's been done:

"Even as John McCain and Sarah Palin scramble to close the gap in the final days of the 2008 election, stirrings of a Palin insurgency are complicating the campaign's already-tense internal dynamics.
Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline.

"She's lost confidence in most of the people on the plane," said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to "go rogue" in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.

"I think she'd like to go more rogue," he said.

The emergence of a Palin faction comes as Republicans gird for a battle over the future of their party: Some see her as a charismatic, hawkish conservative leader with the potential, still unrealized, to cross over to attract moderate voters. Anger among Republicans who see Palin as a star and as a potential future leader has boiled over because, they say, they see other senior McCain aides preparing to blame her in the event he is defeated.

"These people are going to try and shred her after the campaign to divert blame from themselves," a McCain insider said, referring to McCain's chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, and to Nicolle Wallace, a former Bush aide who has taken a lead role in Palin's campaign. Palin's partisans blame Wallace, in particular, for Palin's avoiding of the media for days and then giving a high-stakes interview to CBS News' Katie Couric, the sometimes painful content of which the campaign allowed to be parceled out over a week.

"A number of Gov. Palin's staff have not had her best interests at heart, and they have not had the campaign's best interests at heart," the McCain insider fumed, noting that Wallace left an executive job at CBS to join the campaign." ~Ace of Spades HQ.


Me again. Gosh, are they implying that Steve Schmidt is not an honorable person? No, that can't be...

Hi Mrs. Schmidt!

(She'll probably be happy to know I'm running out of DMOS. He's just not in the news much these days. But I'm sure he's going to write a book out of all of this, right after he weasels himself out of turning McCain into a dishonorable curmudgeon and inflicting Wasilla Barbie on the lower 48. So hopefully he won't be gone for too long.)