This past Monday, season five of Weeds premiered on Showtime and reminded me of one of my biggest girl crushes – Mary-Louise Parker – who plays the sassy, snappy California soccer mom turned rebellious drug-dealer on the television mega-hit. Beautiful, talented and unafraid to show off her stuff (Parker posed nude in advertisements for the third season in 2007 and appeared naked in a bathtub in the season 4 finale… not bad for 46 years old!), Mary-Louise has come a long way from her hometown of Fort Jackson, South Carolina.

In addition to earning acclaim as Nancy Botwin, Weeds’s pot-pushing, Mexican-border-hopping protagonist, Parker has demonstrated that she is well suited for the stage. In 2001, she won a Tony award for her Broadway performance in Proof (which was then turned into a movie and snatched up by Gwyneth Paltrow), and she received both a Golden Globe and an Emmy for her work in the HBO miniseries Angels in America. MLP added to her Emmy tally, and added a Screen Actors Guild Award to her resume, for her guest performances on seasons three through seven of the political drama, The West Wing.

In 1996, Parker met and began dating heartthrob actor Billy Crudup, who ended the relationship while Parker was seven months pregnant with their son in 2004. He started dating Clare Danes immediately after the breakup, although he maintains that his decision to dump Parker on her pregnant booty had nothing to do with the beautiful blonde actress. Tom Brady, anyone? Since then, Parker has dated Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz, actor-director Timothy Hutton, and Weeds co-star Jeffrey Dean Morgan, to whom she was engaged for a few months in 2008.

Mary-Louise Parker will continue to give hope to horny little potheads (and, um, normal 21-year-olds like myself) through 2010, as Weeds is confirmed to run through then. Perhaps she’ll help lead the efforts to legalize the happy green plant in the US?

“I’m really in favor of legalizing marijuana,” she said after accepting her Golden Globe in 2006. “I don’t think it’s that controversial.”

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Man, the Internet is just full of scary sh*t today

Recently USA Today ran an article questioning Juno’s portrayal of teen pregnancy. It seems that some people worry the movie glorified the whole thing.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think they missed the point of Juno. One of the quotes in the article suggests that teens won’t see that Juno faced any consequences, because the baby was “handed off.” Juno ended up with her boyfriend and was able, presumably, to go on with life as usual.

Sorry, but I think that’s BS. First of all — and I don’t know how many times we have to stress this before the right-wingers get it — pregnancy is NOT about punishment. Yes, the movie ended happily, but it wasn’t because Juno didn’t face any consequences. It was because she made a big, and really tough, decision. I don’t think that even a self-involved teen is going to miss that.

Furthermore, let’s not forget the outcome of that decision: By giving her baby up for adoption, Juno made another woman’s dreams come true. Honestly, you’d think the conservatives would be happy about a movie that promotes adoption as an alternative to abortion!

Okay, so Juno doesn’t portray teen pregnancy as one of Dante’s nine circles of hell. So what? To be perfectly honest, I think it portrays it realistically. Choosing between abortion, adoption, and keeping the child is a difficult decision, no matter how self-involved the teen is. And contrary to what many adults would apparently like teens to believe, getting pregnant does not mean the end of the world. Girls survive teen pregnancy every day — maybe a little worse for wear (like Juno), but they get through it.

I know what Juno opponents are afraid of. They think that if they praise Juno’s decision-making abilities after she becomes pregnant, then teens will interpret that to mean that getting pregnant is okay. Personally, I think Juno’s struggles speak for themselves — the viewer knows that even if everything turns out all right, it was a difficult road that got her to that point.

And you know what would go great with this newfound individuality? A pet. Right?

Something fluffy and cuddly that will always be there when you get home and love you unconditionally, something to keep you company on those long nights when no one calls and all you’ve got is the Food Network to keep you from plummeting into a chasm of mind-numbing boredom.

Something small, cute, simple.

Not to sound like your mom, but it ain’t as simple as you think.

I learned a very expensive lesson this week; having a pet isn’t easy. Especially when they get sick.

For some reason, a week ago, my cat started throwing up all over the place. It was gross, and scary, and after a day or so of cleaning up cat puke, my roommate and I decided to take her to the emergency room.

Something was wrong with her, the doctors agreed, but what that thing exactly was no one could figure out. Four days and $1000 later, they released her, saying she probably just ate something bad.

After staring at the bill and mentally erasing that cute skirt I was planning to buy and preparing myself to ingest peanut butter sandwiches for weeks, I limped home, cringing as the doctor called after me. “If she doesn’t eat in two days, you’re going to have to bring her here and we’re going to have to do surgery!”

When we adopted our cat, we didn’t waste one minute thinking about how expensive it would be if she got sick. We didn’t think about the annual shots and check-ups that cost anywhere between $60-$100. We didn’t think about vacations and where she’d go during them. And we certainly didn’t count on the fact that she’d get into everything…routinely eating objects that were plastic, rubber, and disgusting.

Neither my roommate or I regret adopting our Kitta, but had I thought about all this stuff beforehand, and done the calculations, I’m not sure if we would have jumped into it so quickly. We love her, we’re glad she’s here, but we’re also hundreds of dollars poorer.

If you’ve got the money, the space, and the time to devote to an animal, then by all means, adopt away. But just remember, these living creatures don’t come for free…and if they eat your hair elastic, it’s gonna cost a lot of green stuff to get it out.