If you’re curious as to why I, Scott Sevener of the Never Rise Before Noon Clan, is up at 6:32am on an early Tuesday morning, a good part of it is because in a little bit we’re going to be heading off to the doctor to find out the gender of our firstborn!
Ok, so it’s also technically because I got very little sleep the night before and pretty much crashed at 9:30pm last night, but regardless, that baby thing is still pretty exciting, amirite?!?! 😆
I’ve been kind of enjoying all of the recent posts on Facebook where people are tagging each other and random sharing things about themselves – it made me reminiscent of the earlier days of LiveJournal and whatnot when people would post more than just tiny snippets about their lives and actually wrote things instead.
Instead of just doing it on Facebook, though, I decided to revisit this old list that I made a year ago when I migrated my blog here and make a new one with even more wonderfully random things about myself!
Well, I don’t know if they’re wonderful … I guess that’s really for others to decide, but they’re definitely things and there’s definitely 101 of them – I counted and everything, so that’s about all I can do.
Maybe I’ll make this a sort of regular, annual-ish thing … I don’t know. We’ll see. 101 is still a lot – I need to go out and do some more things before I can write another one.
Anyways, enjoy!!! 😀
It was just brought to my attention that the Congresswoman Renee Ellmers who argues against boys having to help pay for maternity coverage is the same Congresswoman Renee Ellmers who a month and a half ago cited, “I need my paycheck!” when she was asked about giving up her own paycheck while 700,000 federal employees were on furlough due to the government shutdown.
So there’s that… 🙄
…and yet it kind of is…
Just follow me with this one for a minute, but first let’s watch this quick clip by North Carolina Congresswoman Renee Ellmers, who argues the same Republican talking point that has been going around a lot lately that basically supports my theory that “People who don’t understand how insurance pools work shouldn’t try to debate about them.”™
No, men do not have babies in the traditional sense, and yet it’s important to have maternity coverage in our insurance policies because other people do!
I don’t have cancer … at least as far as I know, knock on wood … but there are other people that do or that might get it in the future, so it’s important for our insurance policies to cover them.
A lot of Republicans seem to have this twisted theory drunk driving around their skulls right now that thinks that they shouldn’t have to pay for anything that doesn’t specifically affect them.
You know, just like how you don’t have to pay for national parks if you don’t visit them (oh wait, your taxes do) and you don’t have to pay for our military if you don’t believe in our latest global conflicts (well…) and you don’t have to pay for FEMA to help people out after disasters if you didn’t know somebody specifically whose house got leveled by the latest super storm (hmmm, you’re right).
Insurance does not work like your cable package where you can just say, “I’m not going to subscribe to HBO because full frontal nudity scares me!”
Instead, it works kind of like your cable package, where you can say, “I want Basic Service or Expanded Basic Service, but none of that smut on those premium channels unless you can find a way to only put them on after my wife goes to bed…”
When you sign up for Basic Cable, you’re subscribing to a group of channels like NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox, and that’s about it. Pop a few extra bucks and you can jump up to Expanded Basic, which adds things like the Discovery Channel or the Disney Channel or the Golf Channel. But you don’t get to say, “I think the Golf Channel is STUPID, but I want my MTV, so I’ll pay for one but not the other.” Cable packages don’t work that way because they need certain channels to help subsidize other channels to be able to offer a more thorough lineup, so they sell you a bundle that includes both the Golf Channel and MTV and you get ’em both whether you watch either of them or not.
Health insurance is no different. If they only billed you for precisely the things that you were likely to get, they’d never be able to stay in business because you can’t maintain an insurance pool if it’s always empty. The whole point of insurance is to have many people paying into a big pool so that it’s there when you need it, if you need it. Your best case scenario with insurance is to pay into it your entire life and never actually need it, but that doesn’t make it a waste of money all of those years if you never actually file a claim. That makes you fortunate because the guy next door might’ve gotten pneumonia and spent three weeks in the hospital that would’ve cost him tens of thousands of dollars had he not also been a member of the same insurance pool.
Insurance is a tool to help mitigate risk and manage the financial burden of healthcare across a group of people. It’s not a savings account where you put money in and then get to take out that same amount again later, and it’s simply not sustainable if you micromanage it down to the level where each person only pays exactly what they’re affected by and not a penny more. That’s not how insurance works.
So, no – boys can’t have babies. I think we’re pretty good to close the book on that one at this point, but that doesn’t mean that boys shouldn’t help to pay for maternity coverage because last time I checked, boys are still kind of instrumental to the process, so it’s not like we’re just in the clear based strictly on a “No vagina, no problem!” policy. When you pool your resources, sometimes you have to pay for things that you don’t need or maybe you don’t even want … but it’s sure a hell of a lot better than fending yourself and rolling the dice on whether you can handle ginormous medical bills yourself in the chance that you actually require some type of medical care yourself in your lifetime.
Just ask the hundreds of thousands of people who will file for bankruptcy due to unpaid medical bills this year alone – the every man for himself policy hasn’t exactly been working out too well for them. That’s why we’re trying to make things better.
This is a short one, but it’s just too weird and random not to write down…
So my wife and I were wandering around some random store in the mall, talking about what we were going to do for childcare for our baby. In one store we actually ran across the neighbor kid hanging out with a bunch of his friends. Apparently he had watched our house or cleaned or something for us a couple of times, so we started talking about whether he could be a makeshift babysitter as needed, and after some deliberation I decided to go ask him about it.
Also, completely irrelevant to the story, but the kid looked shockingly like Justin Bieber. 😕
I walked up and started chatting with him, and I guess my segue into the babysitting conversation was to ask how he’d liked working for us in the past. But instead of the cordial, “It’s great, Mr. Sevener!” that I was expecting, instead young Jason Bieber went off on this tirade about how we were living in excess and how he thought it was ridiculous how we spent our money, like we were flaunting it in front of people or something.
In hindsight, I’m honestly not sure what “job” he had actually been doing for us, but needless to say by the time he was done with his little rant, I had fired him.
From there I went looking for my wife, who with a friend had disappeared out of the store that we had been in. I started wandering the mall looking for her, but was quickly distracted by a fudge store that sold fudge and nothing else! I guess it was kind of a gourmet fudge store, as they had long shelves of boxed fudges of all sorts of flavors. Well, as you might expect, I soon started looking for a pumpkin fudge, and I did find one, but the price on the box was $90 for a not large box of fudge!!!
I grabbed the box and called over to the shopkeeper to ask about whether it was right, but when she took the box from my hand, she noticed that it was kind of light, and after further examination, the bottom of the box had actually been slit open and it was empty.
I was pissed because it was the only box that they had had, despite it being a $90 box of fudge … maybe that was the excess that Jason Bieber was bitching about! The lady then explained that it had actually been an ongoing problem of their fudge getting stolen and it was really hurting their business because, well, when you charge $90 for a single box of fudge, every box hurts.
Then I woke up. I never did get to try any fudge, and apparently now I need a new babysitter.
![MV5BMTAyNzQyNTcwNjVeQTJeQWpwZ15BbWU3MDAwOTQ4Nzk@._V1_SY317_CR0,0,214,317_[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/MV5BMTAyNzQyNTcwNjVeQTJeQWpwZ15BbWU3MDAwOTQ4Nzk@._V1_SY317_CR00214317_1.jpg)
I think I would’ve enjoyed this movie a lot more if they had just been honest and marketed this movie as kind of a comedy.
As it is, I wasn’t super thrilled about it after watching Olympus Has Fallen earlier this year, thinking that they were pretty similar and all. As it turned out, Olympus definitely had the better initial siege of the two, although most of that movie was lost on me by also having the worst leaders of the free world in the world!!!
Seriously, if you have access to the launch codes, I don’t care if they’re threatening to filet your grandmother on the table in front of you – YOU. DON’T. GIVE. THEM. THE. CODES.
🙄 🙄 🙄
…anyways…
My biggest hang up going into this movie is that simply put, I couldn’t picture Jamie Foxx as the President. In fact, I still can’t picture Jamie Foxx as the President of the United States … but what I can picture him as is Jokey President of the United States! It didn’t start until about 1/3 into the movie, about when he made the executive decision to slip on his Presidential Air Jordans – that’s when I knew that this was in fact a very different movie than I had anticipated.
Unfortunately, I had a really hard time slipping out of action and into comedy at that point, so I couldn’t stand to give it much more than eye-rolls from there on, but if I’d just known going in that it was actually really a comedy???
I think if I had sat down to watch this movie thinking, “Ok, this is going to be ridiculous…” then it might’ve been ok. But otherwise it’s hard to watch these two barreling around the White House lawn like the Dukes of Hazzard, the military all watching from the sidelines even though they’ve got a tank, and then elsewhere James Woods is feeling a little anxiety over his whole takeover plot and honestly think, “Yes – sitting down to watch this instead of several reruns of The Simpsons was a good idea.”
Ultimately I give it 2 and a half thumbs sideways, mostly because of Maggie Gyllenhaal. She had some pretty terrible lines, too, but she gets a pass – namely because she’s Maggie Gyllenhaal.
On second thought, why didn’t they make her the President?!?!?! Would’ve been just as believable, if not more, than Jamie Foxx! 😮
A lot more fun to watch with a rocket launcher, too…
This video has been going around a lot recently, and for good reason – there are a lot of really great thoughts in it. I love the story about the pancakes, but the part that really hit home with me was when she talks about the dangers of ranking my hard against your hard…
Sara and I have had a really hard time getting pregnant. I’ve promised myself that once we’ve had the baby and all of it’s behind us, I’m going to write about it in more detail, but for the time being, I’ll just say that it’s taken us years to get where we are today and tens of thousands of dollars to get here, and for now we’ll leave it at that.
It’s been really hard, but quite frankly, a lot of the time what made it even worse was not having the social support that we didn’t know we didn’t have until we were already up to our necks in it.
Comparisons were levied at us from every direction. We had friends try to minimize what we were going through by telling us their own pregnancy horror stories. We had family tell us that it wasn’t fair for us to distance ourselves from gatherings because other people had it hard, too. We also had friends and family who held back the good tidings in their own lives because they felt bad about the things that we were going through.
It was after one of these randomly terrible exchanges that I started analyzing what was going on around us and it really made me start to wonder, “Why does your hard have to be worse than my hard? Or better, for that matter? Why can’t we just sit here and sympathize with each other over the phone and recognize that we’re both going through some really hard times, and support each other instead of one person having to win over the other???”
Because believe you me, I certainly didn’t feel like I had won that conversation. Knowing that I’ve got it harder than somebody else doesn’t help me to get through that situation any better than knowing that it could be worse. If something is hard for me, then it’s hard … it doesn’t make it any lighter because I could have cancer or my loved one could’ve been killed in a plane crash instead of simply having to endure this less hard problem of not being able to make a baby.
Everything is hard, and most everyone goes through hard patches in their lives, but that sentiment should never be used as an argument to “Suck it up!” because “Everybody’s got problems…”
Everybody’s got problems because life is hard, and we should strive to help each other through those hard times by being there, and being supportive, and listening, and not judging, and not comparing someone else’s struggles to our own as a means to justify how much sympathy they deserve. We could all stand to be a little more neighborly and easy-going on one another instead of always being so quick to throw our own challenges into the mix when the other person is just trying to unload.
What would’ve helped in any of those situations is if someone would’ve spoke up and said, “Hey, it sounds like what you’re going through is really hard. Do you want to talk about it?” Or, “Let’s go get a cup of coffee and try to get your mind off of that stuff for a while.” Or even just, “I can’t imagine what you’re going through, but I’m here for you. Full stop.”
It’s actually pretty simple because my problems may not be about you, but you’re welcome to try and help be part of the solution … as long as you can remember that they’re about me and not about you.
And that’s actually pretty hard, too, but it’s something that we all have to work through together. 😉
Just one other quick post with some random photos that I wanted to share – after the movie, we slipped over to the Magic Kingdom to walk around for a bit and I was a little surprised to see the majority of the Christmas decorations already up!
And here I’m not allowed to put anything up until after Thanksgiving … from what I could tell, they pretty much had everything save for the Christmas trees themselves in place. The garlands down Main Street were all lit, which I can never seem to get a decent picture of, the castle lights were lit and a part of the nighttime shows … another sight that apparently my iPhone camera didn’t feel like capturing, but one thing that it was willing to entertain was a few photos inside the Christmas shop in Liberty Square, which had some cute merchandise and I don’t simply say that because some of it was baby related and, well, you know!
The last few are ones that I kind of enjoyed from the window displays outside of The Emporium, where they now have the highlights from A Christmas Carol. Do you have any idea how much that last scene used to scare the crap out of me as a kid?! 😕
![MV5BMTQyNzAwOTUxOF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTE0OTc5OQ@@._V1_SY317_CR4,0,214,317_[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/MV5BMTQyNzAwOTUxOF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTE0OTc5OQ@@._V1_SY317_CR40214317_1.jpg)
*** SPOILERS, BLAH BLAH BLAH… ***
So we went and saw this over at our favorite movie theater yesterday for Sara’s birthday. I think at this point Thor is my least favorite among The Avengers, or at least among The Avengers that actually counted enough to get their own movies! 😛
Just for the record, Captain America and Iron Man are seriously duking it out for #1 with me … which I know is surprising because Iron Man was awesome when the first one came out, but I guess the second and (especially) third ones kind of dwindled for me, whereas I can go back and watch Captain America any day of the week and love it. The exchanges early on with Stanley Tucci are nothing short of incredible, and I don’t know – maybe I like his innocence? His sense of honor? Whatever it is, it makes me really curious to see how Winter Soldier is going to fare next spring…
Which is kind of a coincidence because at the beginning of this movie, we got treated to a nice, little five minute vignette from that very movie! It kind of confused me at first because I had no idea why Cap would be in Thor 2, but needless to say, it was awesome to see him kick ass in the little ambush scene before the real movie started.
But as for Thor 2…
It was ok. That’s about it for me. It was a fine enough action movie, despite a few loose ends, like why the Rainbow Bridge looks as good as new when it was such a pivotal climax in the first one when Thor destroyed it, or why Natalie Portman is even in these movies because she feels so out of place to me. I honestly didn’t really like her in the first one, either, and always found myself rooting for Sif (Jaimie Alexander) to just club Portman upside the head and woo Thor herself … but that never happened! 😛
Granted, it was kind of nice to see Loki on the side of good, even if only for like seven and a half minutes or whatever!
But otherwise it didn’t exactly wow me like most of the other Marvel movies in this series have … I wouldn’t necessarily say that I was as disappointed as I was when I left Iron Man 3, but I just wasn’t blown away. At least the first Thor had some awesome scenes when we got to see his powers for the first time, and when he finally gets the hammer back and kicks the guardian’s ass, that was pretty sweet, but by now we’ve already seen that twice in Thor 1 and The Avengers, so it’s time to bring something new to the table and The Dark World … wasn’t it for me.
So studies have shown that quitting smoking is … a good thing!
![a-timeline-what-happens-when-a-smoker-quits_52720a006ec94[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/a-timeline-what-happens-when-a-smoker-quits_52720a006ec941-575x632.png)
(via Daily Infographic)
I used to smoke for a period of about 6 months in high school because I thought it was cool and I would get bored when I drove truck runs on Friday night. I barely even smoked enough for any real smoker to consider it smoking … it took me weeks to go through an entire pack of cigarettes and I was always very paranoid about getting caught. Eventually I quit because I started getting into diving and I realized that my lungs were actually pretty important to the process.
Good to see that some 15 years later, my risk should be pretty much non-existent at this point!
Related:
(I wanted to link to a YouTube video of those old anti-smoking videos … remember “Smoking Stinks – YUCK!!!” and then the person would stick out their tongue and it would be covered in cigarette butts??? Well, I couldn’t find one, surprisingly, but you probably get the idea nonetheless…)