New Thing #50: A new attitude--and it's off the hook, yo. This shit's gonna make me a more well rounded individual or I ain't your babydaddy.

Sorry, but I don't know why I decided to be all gangsta and shit with the title of this post. I don't even know what the title of this post means.

Anyway.

New Thing #50:

I've decided to read fewer entertainment/gossip websites, like Defamer, and to read legit news sites more frequently, like CNN.com, so that I can be a more well-rounded individual.

(Okay, actually I'm not reading any fewer gossip sites, but I am trying to read more legit news sites. It's all about balance, people.)

So that's what I've been doing. I've been gettin' my news groove on. And I wanted to share a few stories with you from the last week or so that I've found particularly interesting:

(in no particular order)

1. This man gets my vote for "Worst Father of the Year."

2. Have you heard of DonorSiblingRegistry.com? It's a networking website for mothers who have conceived via sperm donation, and through this website (which I like to think of as MyDonor or Spermster) , they're meeting up with other mothers who've conceived using the same donor's sperm. I honestly don't know what to make of this. Part of me thinks it's pretty rockstar, but it freaks me out too. If you potentially had a dozen (or more) half-siblings spread across the country, would you try to reach out to them or would you let well enough alone?

3. Hey, if I ever heard an example of dramatic irony, this would be it. (Okay, this is so weird, but as soon as I finished typing that sentence, "Ironic" by Alanis Morisette began playing on my Ipod.) (True story.) (If Alanis ever redoes this song and decides to up the ironic quotient, as she's been advised to do by millions before me, I would suggest she use this news story as an example in her song instead of the thing about only having spoons when you really need a knife.)

4. I may have mercury poisoning (and that's just speculation on my part, of course), but at least I'm not the victim of "backward evolution." However, when I was, like, fourteen, after I saw the movie My Left Foot, I decided that it would be really cool to be able to use my feet like they were hands and I spent a summer trying to teach myself how to be a really good artist using my feet. The problem was, I wasn't even a very good artist with my hands, so there was little hope for my feet. I did, however, get really good at opening doors with my feet and I've trained most of my little toes to move back and forth on their very own (without their brothers and sisters moving with them), which is actually a pretty difficult thing to do. (Go ahead! Try it! Just try moving your middle toe without moving the other ones! Try it now.) (Okay, did you try it? See. I told you it's difficult.)

5. I don't sleep nearly enough. I mean, my average is probably seven hours a night. Some nights I get eight and some nights it's more like six. Apparently, we're supposed to get eight hours a night, and those of us who don't get eight hours a night might be killing ourselves via lack of sleep. Okay, that's probably over-doing it a little bit, and the fact that we all need to get more sleep is hardly newsworthy, but this article gave me another reason to be paranoid about my health.

6. I haven't even talked about Iraq or anything, like, truly newsworthy, but I'm tired of this new attitude. I'm just going to go ahead and say it: I'm a shallow person.

7. This isn't news. I'm just sad that Joe Chandler hasn't posted a comment in my blog in, like, months, and I needed to express my sadness somewhere and I figured that this was as good a place as any. Joe used to post comments on my blog all the time. I don't know what happened to him. Where did you go, Joe?