GeezerSue

But wait! There's more! So many end-of-the-world's, and--so far--not one of them available through Ticketron. http://www.religioustolerance.org/endwrl14.htm

My bad...all the Bush supporters look alike to me. Maybe it's the blinders... In that case...if you belong to Rapture Ready or any similar group or espouse those beliefs, yup, you're weird. YMMV Editing to add...here are a few of the INNUMERABLE End-of-Times/Doomsday/Rapture/Second Coming Scheduled Appearances. Do we need to buy tickets for ALL of them? http://www.geocities.com/alma-geddon/infinity1.html

Lying is a good idea if--and only if--you want to find yourself having a surgery that isn't right for you, not having the surgery "deliver" what you thought it would deliver, and if you don't mind dealing with severe depression, substitute addictions and/or thoughts of suicide. If one shrink give you an MMPI or similar multiple choice test and you "fail" the test, look for one who will interview you. If TWO or more shrinks--using different assessment tools--agree that you are not currently a good candidate for wls, you might want to find out why.

I thought you were staying away from this thread because of all the unreasonable people here...and then you post the above...fascinating.

I was just reading what another patient, age about 40, wrote pre-op about her wls goals. She said that she wanted to fall in love and get married. NOT that she wanted to be healthy, or to move better (her pre-op BMI was around 55), or to be able to fit in normal-sized places, or to NOT be pre-judged by strangers based on her obesity, or to be able to go shopping without becoming exhausted or needing a helper, or to NOT base her restaurant choices on which ones had armless chairs, or to be able to go out of town and know that if her luggage was lost she could buy clothes...etc. Nope, she had an adolescent, romantic vision of what wls would do for her. So, after this woman lost a considerable amount of weight and got down to a BMI of 27 or so...and she hadn't found Prince Charming...she picked up drinking as a substitute behavior...and regained to a BMI of 35...so far. I would HOPE that any mental health professional or bariatric surgeon would recognize that having the dream of falling in love and getting married at the top of her list was like a warning flag. This woman doesn't know who she is or what she wants, other than she just wants to be acceptable to a man. WLS does what it does. People who are counting on it to solve all of their problems should be educated on what they can reasonably expect the surgery to do and what needs another approach.

An EDUCATED psychologist will know what one of these MMPI's or MMPI-clones can diagnose and what it cannot diagnose. One thing they are NOT set up to deal with is reality. YOUR issues...and, as I recall, I was dealing with interstitial cystitis, a bladdr disease that makes you need to pee every 40 minutes or so, day and night, and other illnesses...OH WAIT! ONE OF MY FAVORITES!!! The test pretty much diagnosed COPD as panic attacks because I had "difficult breathing" and felt that "I might die." Imagine! Thinking you might die just because you can't breathe...how insane is THAT!!! While that CAN indicate panic attacks, but given that I had Chronic Obsructive Pulmonary Disease and I really did had trouble breathing...you'd think someone who had spent that much time in school COULD have added 2+2. Anyway...you need a shrink who will interview you personally, not one who relies on the easy-way-out tests. Good luck.

My husband has killer psoriasis. His NEW dematologist uses a three-fold approach. He usues a topical (Dovanex, I think) on a daily basis, then he goes to the tanning place three times a week (he started with just a couple of minutes and is up to about eight, I think), and he injects himself twice a week with a miracle drug called "Embrel." It is highly expensive...like $2500/month...but the insurance pays for it because he has psoriatric arthritis inside of all the places that he has psoriasis on the outside. It has made a HUGE difference in his life. I hope you can find something that works as well for you.

I'm not Cherokee, but my Mexican half is, of course, "native American." On that side we have an ancestor from a relatively obscure California Tribe, but it was one of the only tribes that had a treaty with the US that was ratified by Congress. My grandfather started the paperwork to have us enrolled in the rolls of "The Bureau of Indian Affairs," back around 1950. He had fdecided to forgo an earlier opportunity--around 1930--because he was afraid that "Indian blood" would be used to limit his rights. The enrollment closed right around 1970. We each got a check. I voted for them to give San Diego back, but I was in the minority. The check wasn't much...barely four figures. But I guess it's the thought that counts. I'm not Indian enough to be into "the open spaces," except to drive by or look at photos and "ohh and ahhh" appropriately. Somehow, the "room service gene" sneaked in.

Wheetisn, We are nowhere near as orgainzed as you are, but our automatic deposits go into one account, then we write a check from that account to the account from which we do our online banking. I don't know if it really makes a difference...but I feel like it provides an extra layer of something between incoming money and outgoing money.

Okay...so I'm not a Suze Orman fan...but I bought her product and--while getting everything IN the box was a pain--I'm glad it's done. http://tinyurl.com/wjtqq It's also availabe at www.qvc.com Item # F8500 It not only has a place to store everything (except those old HUGE living trust documents that look like big city phone books), it has a list of everything that needs to be in there. My very organized sister saw mine, got jealous and got one, too. Six years ago, my husband had a heart attack. Once the dust settled, I had to go home and find things. Whichever of us has the next emergency, the other needs only to grab the blue box. "It," or a copy of "it"--whatever that turns out to be...medical insurance, disability info, wills, retirement stuff, powers of attorney, social security stuff, credit card info, FICO scores, vehicle registrations, auto insurance, homeowners' stuff and more--is in there. It also has a CD which pumps out boilerplate wills and medical power of attorney documents. We kittysat our daughter's cat and wouldn't give the cat back until she sat down and completed her will, POA and durable POA for medical care. (She IMPLIED kidnapping, but we ignored her.)

Since she's not coming back to this thread, she won't be able to follow this link and see that the US, for the first time since 1933, has maintained a "negative savings rate" (that is, people spend more than they make and there IS nothing to save) of 0.7%. I wonder why, if the economy is doing so well, people aren't putting money in the bank...and what they'll do if their "savings" that they think they have in their property or investments takes a dump. http://money.cnn.com/2006/12/21/news/economy/savings_rate/?postversion=2006122114

And it isn't just the New Testament that has ties to ancient stories. We have a massive deluge in the Epic of Gilgamesh, too, dating back to probably 3000 BC or so. (The apologists claim that ANY flood story would contain similar elements, and claim that the Gilgamesh story is silly and the Genesis story "makes sense.") (To them.)

We say roast beef when we're talking about the finished product. As in, "I think I'll order the roast beef." Same with "roast pork." As in, "I'd like the roast pork with dressing." But when you go to the store, you buy a roast, or a beef roast or a pork roast. I dont htink we ever mean chicken when we say "roast," but it could be in other parts of the country.

Sunta and Pam...you ladies sure do your homework. I really--I mean REALLY--do not enjoy mythology but I admire those who manage to wade through it. Pam, throughout history, man has "created" magical, mystical, powerful beings to help make the world easier to understand and to provide protection from things not understood. That all of these stories share those features makes them (from my perspective) have far more in common than they have separating them.

Trying to force right-handedness on kids was practiced in public schools, too. As far as I know, it went out of favor mid-century...maybe a little earlier. But it wasn't limited to Catholic schools.

When I was 17, I TOLD my mom that I was like a spring and she was like a big thumb compressing that spring and holding it down and that on my 18th birthday...she would lose any right to make any decisions about my life and that she OUGHT TO let me grow up slowly instead of waiting until she had no power. She didn't believe me. My birthday is on the 13th of the month. On the first, a friend and I rented an apartment. The weekend before my birthday, I moved all my stuff out of the house. On the 12th, I left for work in the morning (I had graduated from high school very young and had a full time job and actually made more money than she did) and told her I wouldn't be home that night. She told me that legal curfew was at 10:00 p.m. I told her that at midnight, I was beyond the age of curfew, which mean all I had to do was hide for two hours. I did; I went home to my apartment a little past midnight and--I'm now sorry to say--she cried herself to sleep for many weeks. Kids do what they need to do to be able to grow up and be themselves...it's merely a matter of time.

I love "fat insults"...from a guy with whatever that is on his head. [ame=http://youtube.com/watch?v=xGZaCnfNgLE]YouTube - DONALD TRUMP VS. ROSIE[/ame]

sherrijo, We all have different ideas of what is "good" and what is "not so good" and all that. I don't know what your basis for comparison is...but, have you ever been to a site like www.epodunk.com ? You visit and enter the name of your town and see how it "measures up." When I put my town in--because there is a very high income area and a very low income area...it kind of lands on the national average on incomes. I noticed that Paducah's average income is below that average. I like that almost 40% of the population in my town over the age of 25 has a 4-year college degree. I can compare crime rates where I live with the rest of the country. I am REALLY not suggesting that there is anything wrong with Paducah...my husband comes from upriver and I know the area and it's lovely...and our daughter was born across the state, but also in KY. I AM suggesting that from YOUR viewpoint things may appear better (or worse?) than they really are. Maybe you have neighbors across town who aren't doing so well. Maybe more people could be in college...maybe more people than you think are not earning as much as it might appear that they are. And, when the rest of the folks in town aren't doing as well as they might, we all aren't doing as well as we might. Again, I'm not bashing your part of the world. I don't know what the stats were ten years ago. Maybe things are the same; maybe they are now phenominally better; maybe the data on epodunk is old. BTW, I get what you're saying about gas prices in Europe. We lived there thirty years ago and I swear we paid more for gas then than most of the US does now. But is DOES make me wonder how that can be that Europeans pay so much more than we do and still make ends meet. Is our desire to get that cheap gas costing us American lives in the Middle East? I think it is and would rather pay double for gas and have those kids back. Maybe others think we somehow deserve cheaper gas and that the deaths in Iraq had nothing to do with oil. We are like blind men describing the elephant from what we can feel in front of us...we all look at the same data and see totally different things. Very likely, none of us is 100% right.

I may be the last person on the planet to have heard this...and I DID let it play for 20 minutes before I had to go to the gym. But you can get the drift right away and and become VERY frustrated in five minutes: http://kornkob.consumerist.com/consumer/clips/verizon-doesnt-know-difference-between-dollars-and-cents-220362.php

I'm not the spokesperson for Italian-Americans here, but I didn't have to profess to believe in any creed or course of behavior to be an Italian-American. I just AM. I think the point was that people who profess to be following a loving and merciful God can exemplify the opposite of love and mercy while expounding on the glory of iiving a life influenced by the loving and merciful God. And I got tuned in to religious differences early on because our parents were told by our church to limit our interactions to playing only with other Catholic children AND my entire "Blue Bird Group" was told to go to confession because we had sinned by attending a Christmas Service--with other Blue Bird Groups--at a local Methodist Church. Yup...I must have been seven or eight at the time. BIG sinner.

Eloquent. Thank you.

You might want to try it yet again...never give up and all. It was not my intention to imply that because Christians are outnumbered by non-Christians, they cannot be correct. That would be an odd position--certainly not one I'd take--coming from an atheist.

Let's give credit where credit is due, gadgetlady. I am the one who said that there are more non-Christians...YOU are the one who said "therefore the Christians can't be right." Paranoid a little?

Hell in a handbasket is a FUTURE threat? mysherrijo...how is this president protecting you now? What is he doing for your life, your career, your children, your security, your retirement? I ask because he's not doing squat on my behalf...and I wonder what his supporters--the few who are left--think it is that he's doing well.

Well, I paid around ten grand for my band, plus the other adjustment expenses. My insurance paid to take it out because it was messing up my esophagus. I didn't want the RnY, but insurance paid for the DS. Answer? I wouldn't want either one. Now that I have a year of the DS under my belt, I'm very satisfied.