Ugh, I’m so frustrated with my skin problems right now that I could just scream! I’ve been following a pretty good skincare regimen for the past few months that included taking DIM for acne, using toner on a daily basis, exfoliating weekly, and using benzoyl peroxide cream on existing pimples. That system worked well for a while, and my face was actually clear for about a month or so.

But now I can see a whole new crop of clogged pores, blackheads, and pimples coming up all over my face! It just makes me sick and depressed to think about it. I mean, seriously… I’m 34 years old. When will my skin problems end?

I’ve tried all of the most popular acne treatments out there. Some work great for a while, but then my face goes back to the way it was. I can’t stand it!!

My husband can be such a child sometimes! I wasn’t feeling very well today, so I asked him to go grocery shopping for me. I made out a very detailed list and organized it according to how the store is laid out. For example, I put all the stuff that can be found in Aisle 1 right at the top of the list so he wouldn’t have to go searching all over the place for whatever I needed.

Anyway, I also had tampons on the list because, well, I need them!! But Jerry managed to “forget” about them, meaning I had to make a special trip back to the store just for that one item. It’s funny how he was able to locate every other thing on the grocery list except the feminine care products. I know he was just too embarrassed to buy them, but come on! It’s not as though I asked him to go purchase bridal lingerie or anything like that… they’re just tampons!

How ridiculous.

I don’t know about you, but I can barely handle reading or watching the news anymore. Most of the stories are so negative that I end up being pretty depressed after taking in current events. From mortgage lenders writing off unpaid loans as bad debt to schoolchildren plotting to harm their teacher, negative campaigning, and endless coverage of train-wreck celebrities like Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse, there are hardly any “feel good” stories out there anymore. It’s enough to make me want to avoid news programs and publications altogether!

Man, I absolutely cannot stand it when rich people bitch and moan about money. We get endless examples of this nearly every single day, which pretty much makes me sick.

For instance, just yesterday, I read an article about the Paul McCartney-Heather Mills divorce settlement. Mills was awarded $48.6 million by the judge in the case, which, as the article points out, comes to more than $34,000 for each day she was married to the former Beatle.

Of course this was not enough for Mills, who reportedly threw a tantrum in court, doused McCartney’s attorney with water, and bitched about not getting the $250 million she felt she deserved.

To top it all off, Mills had the nerve to complain about the $70,000 of child support that McCartney must pay each year. To quote, she said, “She’s [the daughter] obviously meant to travel B class while her father travels A class”

Oh, give me a break already!! Greedy money-grubbers like this bug me to no end. Does she realize how she sounds to people who are trying to raise children in the real world?? If I had $70,000 per year to raise my child, I would be eternally grateful, yet Mills acts like she’s going to be forced to ask for charity.

She can go to hell, as far as I’m concerned.

I absolutely cannot stand it when people flavor their blog entries or message board posts with interjections and phrases from other languages — when 99.99999% of their writing is in English, their native language.

What is the point of this? Is it to show off? Is it to make people scratch their head in wonderment and say, “What the hell?”

Whatever the reason, it’s totally annoying.

I studied Latin and Greek throughout high school and college, and I know Japanese as well. Nevertheless, you won’t catch me throwing out a stray word or phrase from any of those languages without context.

Cepe indicum. Get a clue.

In the past couple of months, I’ve noticed an alarming increase in the number of intrusive ads on major websites such as Yahoo.com and ESPN.com. Both have always been full of advertisements, of course, and I certainly understand the need for these ads in order to help keep the content free. But in the past, the ads have been standard, static, clickable links that the user could choose to read or ignore.

Now, both sites have extremely annoying ads that the user is forced to engage with in one way or another. On ESPN, they’ve got ads that float out and obscure the article text, forcing you to close them before you can continue reading. On Yahoo, they’ve got video ads that play automatically once an article is loaded. There’s no way to stop the ad, but at least there’s no sound unless you click on the speaker icon. Still, it’s so distracting to me to have the video playing when I’m trying to read that I have to scroll away or wait until the damn thing is done.

This trend totally sucks….!!

I participate on several blogging-related message forums. Last week, I read about a jaw-dropping situation that I’m still having a hard time understanding. It seems that a blogger named Angie suddenly had her blogs suspended by the person who had been providing free hosting services. Angie discovered this after returning home from her grandmother’s funeral, no less, and since it means a loss of income already earned as well as potential income, you can probably imagine how devastated Angie is.

What could Angie have done to incur the wrath of her hosting provider (who, by the way, is just another individual blogger like you or me)? Did she post p*rn*gr*phic (sorry, don’t want the wrong people landing here via search) images, talk about drug use, or start an illegal gambling operation? No, of course not.

All Angie did was mention how she might give her daughter some children’s Benadryl during the long car ride in order to calm her down and ward off motion sickness. This came on the recommendation of her pediatrician, no less.

But the host decided that this was such an egregious offense that Angie’s blogging account had to be suspended. This is costing Angie, a single mom doing all she can to raise her daughter right, hundreds of dollars.

I simply can’t believe that one blogger would purposely mess with the livelihood of another like this, for something as stupid as children’s Benadryl. One of my best friends since junior high is now a GI specialist at the Mayo Clinic and he has recommended the VERY SAME THING for my son when we go on plane trips. As long as you pay attention to the dosage amounts, children’s Benadryl is not harmful at all.

My god, was this an overreaction or what?

So anyway, Angie has learned a tough lesson here. She promptly signed up for paid hosting and can now be found at One Clear Dot and Girly Things. Please visit her sites, link to her, giver her some encouragement, etc. This never should have happened.

As for the person who did this to Angie: Shame on you.

I don’t know if this particular pet peeve is a widespread phenomenon or if it only afflicts a bunch of my friends and acquaintances, but I just have to post it anyway. I cannot stand it when a married couple shares a single email address! What is up with that?? Let me explain.

I was at lunch with a group of girlfriends earlier today, and there were three women there that I hadn’t seen in a while. When it came time to exchange email addresses, every single one of them handed me a slip of paper that said, janeandjohn@hotmail.com, tonyandtina@gmail.com, or thejohnsons@yahoo.com (I hope those aren’t real addresses… sorry, LOL!).

Why do they do that? It makes them look clingy at best, and untrusting at worst. Is it so hard to create email accounts that you can’t be bothered to make separate ones? I don’t want to send emails to friends thinking that their husbands could be reading what I’m saying. Sheesh!

So am I alone in this or do your friends do this too? If you’re one of the people who have a “couple’s address,” why do you do it? I’d really like to know!! Maybe there’s a practical purpose that I’m missing here….

I absolutely hate it when people refer to McDonald’s (the fast food chain) as “MacDonald’s,” as in, “I went to MacDonald’s for lunch today.” It’s not M-a-c-Donald’s, it’s just M-c-Donald’s!!! How can you screw up a name you see in print, on TV, or in person at least 10 times per day? And no, these aren’t merely typos because the people in question use the same (mis)spelling over and over again.

Yes, I know this is a trivial annoyance and pales in comparison to the “real problems” plaguing the world today, but it still bugs me to no end.

Am I alone here?

About a week ago, a friend of mine asked me to fill out an online survey for her. She’s participating in some affiliate program where she can get a free iPod or whatever if she gets x number of people to sign up under her. I didn’t have to use a credit card or anything, so I figured I’d go ahead and help her out.

The survey itself was pretty quick and painless. I think it took me five minutes to complete the thing — no biggie. At the very end, there were about two full pages of “special offers” where I had to click Yes or No radio buttons to indicate whether I wanted to get more information about college degrees, loans, coupons, and things like that. I clicked No for every single one of them.

Well, I’m not sure why I even bothered, because those damn companies have been spamming me like crazy anyway. Thank god I used a throwaway email address to register for that stupid survey, otherwise I’d be drowning in these crappy offers. I checked that email account yesterday on a whim and saw 187 spam messages from all those places I said I didn’t want any info from.

I would have nothing against email marketing if the companies respected customers’ wishes about receiving info. But the way they operate… no wonder all of these “industries” have such a bad name.

Edit: Screenshot added from today, with 85 more spam messages already. Click thumbnail to enlarge.

I’ve been testing AdSense out for the last month and a half to see if it’s worth keeping the ad blocks up on my site. Because of this, I log into my AdSense account everyday to review the site’s performance, check how many clicks I got, etc.

Today when I logged in, I saw that I had a CTR of 75% on the day, but that my earnings hadn’t increased at all. I don’t know what’s going on here because I’m not at all familiar with how AdSense works, but at first glance it seems to me that someone’s messing with my account by coming to my site and repeatedly clicking on links.

I don’t know who would do this or why, but it would suck if I got banned from the program for something I have zero control over. Who knows, maybe I made an enemy somewhere out there in cyberspace….

I did a post a couple days ago about Michael Vick and his alleged involvement in dogfighting, and now I’m getting lots of hits from the search engines for terms like “dog fighting equipment” and whatnot.

Once again, I have to say that it makes me sick knowing that this sort of thing is going on. What kind of person puts a domesticated animal — a pet — through something as brutal and deadly as dogfighting? I guess it’s no surprise that this sort of thing is usually connected to street gangs and other scumbag types.

In Illinois, the penalty for attending a dog fight is up to one year in jail, and repeat offenders can get anywhere from 1-3 years. I hope they start locking more of these idiots up.

I often check the Writing Gigs section of Craigslist, and approximately twice a year (in December and May — the traditional end of school semesters) the boards get deluged with requests to write research papers for high school and college students. They usually all say the same thing: “I’m sooo busy and I have five other research papers to write, plus I have to study for finals. Oh, and I can only pay you $10.” Totally ridiculous all the way around.

I hope no one responds to these ads and helps these losers write their research papers. This is blatant CHEATING and the idiots deserve to fail or even get expelled.

Actually, I’ve always wanted to try two things. First, I want to agree to write a research paper for someone and then hold out until the very last day and say I couldn’t do it after all. Then hopefully the schmuck wouldn’t have time to solicit anyone else and would be stuck up the proverbial creek. Second, I want to find out the person’s name and where they go to school, then I’d call the prof or an administrator and report the student for cheating.

I mean, how hard is it to sit down and write these research papers anyway? High school and college teachers don’t expect much out of their students these days and would probably just be grateful to see correct grammar and non-plagiarized work. It wouldn’t even matter if your research paper truly sucked — you’d probably still pass just for turning something in.

Anyway, I hope none of you freelancers out there are helping these kids cheat their way through school by writing research papers for them!!

So I finally heard back from Rivals.com about my disputed charges. I posted about a week ago that they automatically renewed my membership and charged $99.95 to my credit card without notifying me of anything.

I just found out that the billing department denied my request for a refund. Yeah, big fuckin’ surprise there. Bastards. I will NEVER do business with them again, and I will tell everyone I know about how bad they suck. And yeah, I guess I’ll post this on my blogs too.

Now I have to go through my cc company to get a refund. Let’s see if they’re any better.

As my son approaches school age, it’s time for us to make a decision about where we’re going to live more or less permanently. I have serious reservations about both the Japanese school system and the American school system, so this isn’t something that I’m taking lightly.

Anyway, I just read an article this morning that serves as a strike, if you will, against Japanese schools. The new PM, Shinzo Abe, wants to increase classroom hours by 10 percent because he thinks the students aren’t studying enough or whatever. I’ve had A LOT of contact with Japanese high school students and I can’t believe how much time they have to spend on homework and club commitments every single day. It’s hard for me to imagine that anyone could think these kids need to do more than they’re already doing.

Instead of simply worrying about the amount of time students spend in class, why doesn’t Abe focus on what’s being done with that time. Because that whole rote learning thing? It’s absolutely true. Can that really be called an education?