Jessica and I went for a massage today. We went to a place she raves about, one both close and with a very personable, welcoming atmosphere. We signed up for a couples massage, where both of us were in the same room, and could talk during the massage, but only after I agreed not to hold her hand during the massages.

Now, I am admittedly not particularly shy about my body. I won't go flaunting it or wear particularly revealing clothes (or even a bikini these days!), but doctors appointments, laser hair treatments down there, gynecological appoints and the like faze me very little. "Here, this is what's wrong, what do you think," regardless of where "this" might be.

So, when the massage ended and the masseurs has left, I hopped up off the table to go put my clothes back on.

"How is it, woman," Jessica asked from her table as she watched me, "that you don't have a spec of cellulite on you?"

I turned to look at her, dumbfounded by her words. Every time I hop out of the shower and start drying off, I see my legs so much bigger than 10 years ago, and think, gah, I need to lose those 20 pounds I've gained in the last decade. I see the unbalanced curves of my waist, the increasing width of my hips, and the softness of my sides and think, do something now, before it's too late.

Yet, she sees none of this. She sees the sprinter's muscles in my legs that help me play ultimate. She sees the shoulders that through injury and healing have grown stronger. She sees the back that works its way through the various Velocity Sports workouts to become stronger, better balanced, more defined.

I laughed, and said it's there, the light's just flattering. "No," she insists, "I saw you there, and there isn't any."

We are our own worst critic. I'm the biggest dork when I'm out running, but I'm out running, aren't I? If I look like a dork, so what. Time to shut up the self-criticism. No one else is listening to it, why should I?

Jessica and I were talking tonight about various people in my life. I was telling her about friends who were pregnant, those who had a couple children, some with their first. I was telling her about my ultimate friends, my gardening friends, my (now-ex) co-workers, my possible new co-workers, and other people when our conversation drifted to one friend in particular.

We talked about him for a while, until she started asking questions about him that I couldn't answer. I mean, I thought I knew this guy pretty well, but what was his favorite color? Um... I can't say I recall Mark's or Doyle's or Mike's or Andy's or Roshan's or anyone's favorite color but Kris', mine and my little brother's (but his might have changed from the red it was growing up to green or blue or purple, for all I know).

If you're wondering, mine is yellow. Cornflower yellow to be more exact. Not that you can tell with my website.

The conversation led to more questions, though, and even fewer that I could answer. Jessica was surprised. Some of the questions seemed obvious to ask, about significant events that my knowing about wouldn't have seemed unreasonable. Wasn't I curious to know?

The stories had never been offered. I never asked.

Curiosity is an interesting urge, one that I've always had in spades. Not knowing something would drive me nuts, and to anger sometimes, when I was younger. Sure, academically, such a desire is a tremendous force. In the real world, however, needing to know that which, in reality, you don't REALLY need to know, leads to all sorts of heartache, both in the knowing and the not knowing.

The idea of not knowing, and being okay with not knowing, is a remarkably new phenomenom for me. I'm still curious about a lot, and sure, there are a lot of conversations I would love to overhear, decisions I would love to know the reasoning behind, and events of which I would love to be the fly on the wall.

However, knowing isn't always what it's cracked up to be. Sometimes the knowing causes pain in ways we could have never foreseen. And sometimes not knowing is a fine state to be in, because sometimes having the knowledge, knowing the trainwreck that's about to happen, and being unable to affect the outcome, can be an overwhelming burden.

If my friends want to share stories of their past with me, I'll certainly listen. Those are their stories to tell. If they're not ready to tell me, or are never ready to tell me, that's fine, too.

I guess I've finally learned not to be nosy.

If only I could learn tact. That would be nice.

Okay, so, note to self: "Girls in Tech" is not limited to girl programmers. There are lawyers and business women and PR women and contract specialists and caterers and designers and, well phooey, lots of other occupations.

And apparently, all of them are skinny and gorgeous. Holy crap, why is the first thing I notice about all of these women (other than the fact the ratio is 30 women to 3 men), is that they are all well-dressed, made up, thin and for the most part fabulously gorgeous?

Dammit, it's distracting.

My single male friends need to come with me to these events. The ratio of beatiful women to normal women is about 4 to 1 right now. Might be higher.

Kris likes to arrive at airports early. In contrast to this desire to arrive early to the airport so that he can go through customs, er, security stress free knowing he has lots of time to make it through and saunter to the gate, he likes to be the last one on the plane. He wants to board the plane, find his seat, sit, and pass out. Why he can't do this when people are still boarding, I don't know.

As a result of the former Kris quirk, I've started arriving at airports earlier and earlier. I don't particularly mind, as I can write or read when I'm sitting at the airport, it's just a strange way to travel: less stressed. I'm used to being late and being stressed.

So, today when I was trying to figure out what time to leave the house to arrive at the Girls In Tech (a Drupal site!) Negotiations Workshop on time, I budgeted a certain amount of time to grab food, drive to the train station, buy a ticket, make the train, train to the City, walk to the location and sign in on time. Unfortunately, I budgeted TOO much time, made an earlier train, walked faster than I expected to walk, and arrived before the volunteers at the front desk arrived. No one to sign me in.

Adriana Gascoigne, one of the lead organizers, was kind enough to point me the way, and off I went.

I'm here, by myself, wondering, crap, is way early better than slightly late?

So, I went to take a match-yourself-to-a-candidate poll site, choosing 2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz as the one to run through. Kris had commented this morning that McCain was the bottom for him, which was funny, as he had registered Republican in the 2004 election in order to vote for McCain - his quixotic attempt to boost the demented village idiot from office. I was excited McCain was leading the Republican candidates after yesterday's primaries: we might actually have two candidates worth voting for if Obama wins the Democratic nomination.

Yeah, so the poll. I took the poll, annoyed at the question on health care, as none of the options were what I wanted. The question and options were:

15. What should be done about health care?
a. We need a national health insurance system that makes sure everyone is covered.
b. Keep the current system, but cut regulation and give health insurers more control.
c. No significant changes are needed at this time.

My answer would have been: scrap the entire system, and remove the gouging insurance company middle men. Doctor's offices charge $200 a visit because they know the insurance company is going to pay out only $60 of it, and the patient will pay $20. If the insurance company didn't discount so much, the doctor wouldn't inflate the prices, and those without insurance wouldn't be gouged with the $200 bill.

Something like that happened to me when I went in for a doctor-ordered MRI back in the mid-nineties. I received the bill for $2500. The office had taken my insurance information, but never bothered to submit the claim. Instead, they billed me, added late fees and threatened to send the bill to a collections agency. When the insurance company finally paid the bill, it was discounted to around $500. Gee, $2500 from the patient, or $500 from the insurance company. No wonder they went after me.

The problem with a National Insurance program is that someone has to pay the costs. 98% of the time, it'll be the healthy people paying for the unhealthy people (yes, a made up number, but you knew that, right?). I'm not sure people realize that tax revenues don't just appear out of thin air, they are paid by individual people (yeah, yeah, you really think corporations pay that much? Maybe that's where future revenues should come from - have to think about that one). So, when someone decides to spend 200 billion dollars to take down one man who shot at his daddy, that money has come from the pockets of the people around me. When Hillary proposes some everyone's covered insurance plan, that's my tax payment that's paying for that smoker's lung cancer.

And that last statement shows a horrible bias of mine against people who require preventative medical intervention.

I can't say it's particularly merciful. Another topic I should think about before just spouting drivel. The drivel I would spout would be something like most obese and overweight health problems can be prevented by exercise and life-style changes. Many of them are choices. Yes, it's incredible hard to exercise every day if you don't have motivation (like a sport you love), or a friend to go with you. Not exercising is a choice, though, and the consequences are a result of that choice. Same with smoking. Same with (currently illegal) drugs. Ultimately, though I don't like to admit it, the same with depression, which often has a physical cause that needs to be addressed (though, sometimes it's just life).

Yes, there are illnesses, diseases and health issues that aren't consequences: some cancers, juvenile diabetes, Down's syndrome, other genetic anomalies (hell, migraines with aura caused by weather changes - try to blame that one on me!), . These are the ones that should be subsidized by insurance.

Yeah, don't even get me started on the question about the death penalty.

At the end of the quiz, when I received my results, my thought was, huh? Who the hell is Chris Dodd?

Yay Wikipedia!

Chris Dodd and his political positions (we'll forgive him for his gun stance, and applaud everything else).

I'm still voting for Obama.