The twiginess of sex and drugs.

It's an election year, so of course, there are lots of presidential hopeful twiginess, but that doesn't keep other political personalities from showing off their twigi. And people around them are getting twigi, too.

On the local front here in South Carolina, former state treasurer Thomas Ravenel lost his job because of a drug addiction. Ravenel admits to smoking marijuana at 15, snorting cocaine at 18, and using LSD, ecstasy, and other drugs thoughout high school and college. His drug of choice was cocaine using at least 2 grams of coke every couple of weeks. Now, drugs are twigi because our society doesn't seem to take the problem seriously. I mean, take popular media...movies, for instance. How many movies get made based simply on drug use? How many use drug use as a source of comedy? How many of these are rated PG-13? Like Perfect Score? Well, Perfect Score does have the pothead character turn his life around, but then will teen viewers remember the end where he straightens up his life, or the beginning where he is prominently used as comedy relief? But movies like How High, the Scary Movie series, and most teen comedies these days display marijuana use as "just a little fun". It's an escape that has more carcinogens than cigarettes and can be spiked with worse narcotics.

But what really set my twigi-meter off was the newspaper article about Ravenel's conviction. What I found...offputting...is that the article starts off proclaiming how Ravenel used drugs to varying degrees since he was 15 and was still able to earn millions of dollars and get elected to public office. Again, and maybe it's just that as a teacher at an alternative middle school servicing expelled students, I find it bothersome that my students can now use Ravenel as a reason that they don't have to worry about their marijuana use because he was using cocaine and was still successful. I think the tone of the article could have been better set to show how bad his behavior was. I also think his sentence should be worse, because I know my students. "Wha'? 10 months in jail? That ain't nothin'! $250,000? Shoot, he's a millionaire. He prob'ly carries dat in his pocket!"

Then there's Eliot Spitzer. We know all about him and prostitute "Kristen". "Kristen" is really Ashley Alexandra Dupre, who apparently is unhappy with media putting her in the spotlight. Sorry, honey. You can't expect to do something like get paid to have sex with the Governor of New York and not assume that if it's discovered what he's doing, your face won't also be plastered all over the place. Her lawyer is talking about copyright law with pictures being used with news articles. So, would she be complaining if she was getting a percent from the periodicals? There's a complaint about accessing pictures from her MySpace page? MySpace? She says on her MySpace page, "I Keep Seeing Myself on TV. This is Very Strange." "Strange" doesn't sound like she's that offended or distraught over the attention. I'll de-twigi Miss Dupre if she does not accept any of the many offers we all know she's getting to talk about herself, to show herself, etcetera. She's supposedly a musician and if she gets an album offer while this mess is still "newsworthy" and takes it, she stays twigi. If she poses nude in Hustler for the $1 million Flynt is offering, she stays twigi. You can't complain about the attention and cash in on it. But if she takes no money, no offers, and stops selling her body to high profile clients, then she will have convinced me that she doesn't want the attention and she just didn't think things through when Governor Bad Apple called her up. Hell, she needs to learn to get a real job. If there's not a whole lot of growth from this, then she is twigi.

Well, that's all for now. Avoid the twigi, cause the twigi won't avoid you.