I see you there. Asking yourself, "Where can I go to hear more pearls of wisdom from Karla? Her blog, now that she's in the last miserable moments of pregnancy, is updated about as often as Common Wombat changes his dumpster-scavenged underwear. Isn't there someplace I can go on the web for more of Karla?"

You're in luck, my obviously bored, socially retarded friend. At the moment there is a place you can go to find a little more of me on the web. And no, it's not a pay site, like you're thinking--not this time. I quit doing those in the third grade, when I realized the real money is in black market babies.

No, I'm talking about this site, where, for reasons unknown to me, I was asked to do an interview. And there's some kind of voting going on there, although I have no idea why or what for. If you strain your eyes really hard, you can see a tiny little "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" symbol at the top of the post, where they mention the name of my site. I don't know what a hands-up means--if it means my lawyer has won me a stay of execution, if it means I'm STD-free, if it means I'm a "sure thing," etc. Likewise, I don't know what a hands-down means--if it means I've hit the wall, if it means I've turned state's evidence and am not to be trusted, if it means I have an unpleasant odor that can't be washed away with drugstore hygiene products, etc. So click or ignore the little mysterious hands, I don't care. I've never cared what you did or didn't do before, why should today be any different?

Now get off my blog and don't come back unless you have some advice for me regarding how to go into labor at will.

Labels: The internet--it's more than just pornography

Normally I'm incredibly picky about what I read. It has to have just the right kind of content and just the right writing style or I abandon it somewhere around the third paragraph. A lot of research goes into choosing a book to read--I spend time on Amazon.com using the "Look Inside" utility to read a few pages and see if it's to my liking, and I read the plot outline and few reader comments--then, if it sounds good to me, I go to half.com and order it. I try to keep about 5 such carefully chosen books on hand at all times so that I never have to settle for just any old crappy book when I'm desperate for something to read.

However, a long and unpleasant pregnancy can make you lower your standards for entertainment, and when I found myself with nothing to read during Month 7, I picked up The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I had heard good word-of-mouth about it, and a quick glance at the first paragraph didn't make me want to gouge my eyes out with a ten-penny nail, so I figured it was worth a shot.

If you suspect I'm about to launch into a scathing criticism of this book, I'm not, exactly. It's not a bad book--if you're an anal rape enthusiast. And hey, I'm as liberal-minded as the next guy, and so, sure, a modicum of anal rape can be quite lovely...but if you've ever heard of the concept of "too much of a good thing," you can see how it might apply to ass rape.

Let me recap this book for you, in case you:

a) don't have time to read it yourself, or

b) hear enough about ass rape in church and at the dinner table, and don't have room in your heart for any extra. In a nutshell, here's the book:

*Spoiler alert, genius.*
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Young male narrator lives in a supposedly perfectly lovely country that happens to be populated with a small faction of evil people. Young narrator has an pleasant childhood in which he spends his days at his rich father's estate, frolicking with his best (well, only) friend, the servant's son. Life is grand.

Suddenly, the small faction of evil people take over this supposedly perfectly lovely country, lightning-quick. Now, anal rape abounds, as well as copious random gunfire and bombing. This drastic change happens in a matter of about 14 seconds. The servant's son gets anally raped, and the young narrator shuns him, wanting no part of anyone who has become a boy toy for evil sodomites.

The crafty young narrator comes up with a scheme to get his father to banish the servant and his son, who wander off on their own to live in poverty amid the constant gunfire and bombing. One of the perpetrators of the servant boy's anal rape gets anally raped himself, then dies. Narrator and father flee the country and come to America in search of a quiet, rape-free life.

Narrator grows up with his be-hymen intact, and eventually returns to his country upon hearing that his childhood rape-victim friend and his wife have been killed by the evil people, leaving behind an orphaned son. Narrator searches the ruins of the now war-torn country for the boy, who, as it turns out, has been copiously anally raped for quite some time before the narrator manages to locate him in an impoverished hovel of an orphanage. In the process of recovering the boy, the narrator himself narrowly escapes being anally raped.

Narrator brings the boy home to raise, which you'd think would be the happy ending--yet the sad boy stops talking and never again speaks a word to anyone, so traumatized by the vicious rape and abuse he has suffered.

The end.

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There, I just saved you a few bucks; you're welcome.

After spending a few evenings reading this book, I was the one who felt raped. I want those hours back, and I also want back my faith in a world where civil unrest doesn't necessarily go hand-in-hand with vicious, forced sodomy.

Thank you, Khaled Hosseini, for bringing your strange, private obsession into my world. Now please put down that typewriter and get yourself a job as a prison guard.