Why People Like Me Will Have Trouble With the LSAT

Because people like me will have to answer questions like this (no, I'm not making this up, it's in my practice book):

Every adult male woolly monkey is larger than even the largest female woolly monkey. In colonies of woolly monkeys, any adult male will dominate any female.

If the statements above are true, which one of the following must on the basis of them be true of woolly monkeys?

A. Size is the primary determinant of relations of dominance among woolly monkeys.
B. Some large adolescent male woolly monkeys dominate some smaller females of the species.
C. If a male woolly monkey is larger than a female of the species, that male will dominate that female.
D. If a female woolly monkey dominates a male of the species, the dominated male monkey is not an adult.
E. An adult male woolly monkey can dominate a female of the spcies only if that female is also an adult.

You guys don't really think I could answer that question dispassionately, do you?

I'd be more likely to write in an answer, F:

F. If the female monkeys gang up on the male monkeys, they will kick the male monkey's asses, and teach them that female monkeys are vicious fucking fighters when provoked. All the monkeys will be happy and live in harmony after that, and when Big, Evil Male Monkeys try to dominate by sheer force of size, they will be brutally castrated and kicked out of the troop, where they will then be eaten by scavengers, making effective use of "natural" selection. It will be a great day for monkeys everywhere.

Think I could get into law school with that one?

No?

For the record, the answer is D. My initial knee-jerk answer was C, which shows just how many of my own cultural biases I'm carrying around.

Must... learn... to... be... logical....

Speaking of Listening to Yourself..

Nice piece.

As incredible as it sounds, nutrition is no longer the priority for the government's Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The new guidelines put the entire nation on a diet...

via bigfatblog

Food For Thought

I was doing my periodic overview of my eating habits tonight, because I came home and reached for a beer and realized why it is that I don't buy it that often: cause I'll drink it.

Ah, binge behavior.

I'd had alcohol on Saturday night (celebratory dinner), and a beer and a half on Tuesday, and decided last night to pass and opt for Diet Dr. Pepper, which I did again tonight.

Just gotta watch what you're doing. Beer is OK once or twice a week. Every night, it is not. I do find comfort foods/habits fascinating, though. How higher-stress means I've got a greater desire for food, and since I've resolved not to binge eat (and, honestly, I don't have any binge-worthy foods in the house. You can only eat so many eggs and radishes, which is why I have a refrigerator full of eggs and vegetables), how I try to transfer that feeling to something else. The idea is that I'll eventually be able to channel that energy into increasing the amount of exercise I do, but I'm not at that point yet.

Mainly, I'm at the point of, "Can't eat? Can't drink beer? Going to bed."

Instead, I'll catch up on some reading, and fume some more about idiots like Newt Gingrich.

Those Pesky, Pesky Women in the Ditches

Was channel flipping tonight while finishing up my omelette, and found VH1's "I love the 90s." They did a quick soundbite of these immortal words uttered by then Adjunct Professor Newt Gingrich, about why women should be excluded from combat:

"Females have biological problems staying in a ditch for 30 days, because they get infections."

I nearly choked on said dinner. Sound familiar?

I remembered this quote. At the time I would have been like 15, and I remember thinking something along the lines of, "Oh, of course. That makes sense."

No thought on my part whatsoever. No questioning. Just assumption. No, "Infections? Infections from what, exactly? The vagina periodically expells blood, but it's not an open wound."

And I didn't sit and wonder how, exactly, the female guerilla fighters (let alone refugees, nomads, and anybody who didn't have running water everywhere else, in every other time but the last hundred years and not even that, in many places now) in Africa, Palestine, and in the times stretching back behind me, had managed to survive living in ditches, blown out houses, on the back of carts, under freeway passes, and huddled in tents without dying of serious infections from their gaping wounds.

Here's the whole thing, which actually gets worse and worse as it goes on:

"If combat means living in a ditch, females have biological problems staying in a ditch for thirty days because they get infections and they don't have upper body strength. I mean, some do, but they're relatively rare. On the other hand, men are basically little piglets, you drop them in the ditch, they roll around in it, doesn't matter, you know. These things are very real. On the other hand, if combat means being on an Aegis-class cruiser managing the computer controls for twelve ships and their rockets, a female may be again dramatically better than a male who gets very, very frustrated sitting in a chair all the time because males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes."

-Adjunct Professor Newt Gingrich, "Renewing American Civilization" Reinhardt College, January 7, 1995

At some point, they're going to run out of arguments. Question this stuff. Don't let them preach from on high, cause if they can get away with it, they will.

Stomp. Shout. Scream. Yell. Be heard. This is fucking ridiculous. These are the people in the "power" positions who are telling us who we can be and what we can do.

And they're utterly fucking lunatic.

Oh, Shit! Don't Bring Up Roosevelt!

Gorgeous. Gorgeous.

Just fucking gorgeous.

Judy Bachrach is fuckin' awesome.

Thoughts on the Gay Rights Movement

Jason's got a good post up about the state of the gay rights movement in the US.

On the personal level, the case for treating gay people with decency has never been more robust. I would be willing to bet that more people are openly gay right now than at any other time in history [Brutal Women note: in this country, maybe. Not in Greece or Rome or some other places where sexuality was a little more fluid.. for men, anyway]. Acceptance of different sexual orientations has never been more widespread, and despite a recent backlash, the poll numbers still show an overwhelming trend in our direction.

It's well documented that when a straight person actually knows a gay person, the prejudices vanish on both sides. [Brutal Women note: because oddly, it's really difficult to hate a person when you realize... they're a real person. This is important] The water cooler chats, the backyard barbecues, even the family reunions very often go our way so long as we just show up and affirm who we are. Sure, there have been a few failures down here (my own family, for example), but on the whole we have had great success at the very lowest level of politics...

Strong at the highest and lowest levels, the gay rights movement is weak in the middle. The midsections of American politics--school boards, city councils, and state governments--are more solidly against us than any other sector in American public life.

OK, OK, I'll Say It:

"The great masses of the people ... will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one."
- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Chapter 10

When Jesus said, "Love Your Enemies," I think he probably meant, "Don't Kill Them."
-anon

"The truth of that matter is, if you listen carefully, Saddam would still be in power if he were the president of the United States, and the world would be a lot better off."
—George W. Bush, second presidential debate

It's like a bad science fiction novel. A really, really bad science fiction novel.

And Now It Is 3'o clock

No, I actually don't work much for a living, most days. Of course, when we do work, we work.

Just not today.

Hence my increasing restlessness.

This is Why You Don't Shut Up

Cause nobody's gonna know why it's inappropriate or understand how it effects you to hear this crap all the goddamn time until you get up off your ass in protest and scream at the top of your lungs .

You've got to speak the fuck up.

Bet I'll Be Thinking About This The Next Time Sifu Kat's Like, "OK, now it's a jump, squat, front kick, balance, squat!" And I Go: "Oh, Fuck"

From Pound (ignore the stereotyping a moment):

Maybe one night sometime in the future I will be in the parking lot of a Miami nightclub minding my own business, when a well-known rap artist and/or producer and/or promoter extraordinaire will step out of the building escorted by several bodyguards at the precise moment a late-model black Escalade with tinted windows careens past the entrance with a menacing shriek of tires skidding on asphalt, and shots will ring out, and the bodyguards will pop a few back, and then, just a second later, some instinct will compel me to put one leg out, extend the other leg back, and, keeping my feet carefully aligned at shoulder width, dip down and execute a perfect squat lunge just as a bullet zips overhead and misses me by a few inches.

Because there has to be a reason I did about a hundred and fifty of those fuckers today, right? Right?

You Know, I Have To Say It

Secretary of State.

Black woman. And yea, she's a ball-buster. She's smart. She's brutal. She'll kick your ass. First black woman to hold the post. Second woman.

In the history of the US.

I don't want to say "good for you" because she's done it with a foreign policy I don't agree with, and an attitude toward the rest of the world that sickens me, but shit, how many old white men have held the post with the same politics? And no, her parents didn't join the civil rights movement, and there's talk that she's seen as "disconnected" from the black community ("playing white"), but shit.

I gotta give credit where credit's due.

Next up: let's get people into this position who don't have to be bully assholes to get there.

Teenagers have Sex? No Way!

Actually, what I found interesting about this study is that they didn't break up the results based on the gender/sex of the teen. I'm not sure how to read that. More significantly, they didn't ask about "safe" sex - when teens choose to have sex, how much time do you spend thinking about contraception, what do you use, do you just shrug and go "Oh, nobody gets pregnant the first time!" or "of course he doesn't have herpes, he's a nice boy!" etc.

That would be far more interesting. "Teenagers have sex" (and don't tell their parents! Shocking!) is a pretty dull reason/conclusion for a study. I remember condoms being a big, big deal in college. You just didn't have unsafe sex. That's the way it was (same attitude in South Africa, for obvious reasons). In high school, being younger, less informed, I had friends who did some really dumb stuff really dumbly, but college was a different matter. I'd be more interested in how teens approach the potential consequences of sex - physically and emotionally.

"People have sex" is a given. What a waste of money.

For Your Workday Amusement

E-MAIL SHORTHAND THAT CIVIL WAR SOLDIERS WOULD LIKELY HAVE USED IN LETTERS HOME HAD THE TECHNOLOGY BEEN AVAILABLE TO THEM.


REJECTION LETTERS FROM XAVIER'S SCHOOL OF EXCEPTIONAL YOUTH:

Dear Sarah "Fan Girl" Williams,

We regret to inform you that you have not been selected as a member of this year's class. Being able to recite, verbatim, the lines from every Orlando Bloom movie, while impressive, is not technically a superpower. Also, the fact that you are prohibited by law from coming within 10 miles of Orlando Bloom might limit our team's scope of service. Thank you for your interest in Xavier's School of Exceptional Youth.

Sincerely,
Professor X

"ROCKIN' IT, FRAT-PARTY STYLE!": A SHORT STORY GEARED TO COLLEGE STUDENTS, WRITTEN BY A 30-SOMETHING AUTHOR.

For those who think Tom Wolfe's latest is utterly pretentious.

Confessions of a New Coffee Drinker:

This stuff is great! I'm 26! I always ignored it, thinking, "Why start a bad habit?" This is a terrific habit! I get more done in an hour than I used to get done in a week. Coffee! I bought a coffeemaker. It makes the coffee for me in the morning! I open my eyes and it's there! I can see! The difference between tea and coffee is like a merry-go-round to a rocket ship! I like rocket ships! Coffee! I want to go on a real rocket ship. Where are they? Cape Canaveral? Let's go! Coffee helps my creativity. I can come up with something creative out of nowhere. "Larry laughs like a lavicious lunatic!" See!? That was instantaneous!

Maxim Does the Classics.

Boys Pissed Off With Plan B

Idiots. I love Amanda:

___________________________

Excerpt:

"As I figured, the ad for Plan B in Tuesday's Daily Texan would generate at least one outraged letter from a male conservo-virgin. He didn't go so far as accuse the Texan of trying to screw his chances at marriage, but he does come very, very close."

I expect to find advertisements in the paper; even more than usual considering the budget cuts. But the flyer found inside my Texan as I opened it flabbergasted me: a flyer that advertised not just a day-after pill, but a THREE day-after pill!

"Who knew that the sperm could slosh around in there for three days? You ruined this young man's masturbation fantasies for at least a week, oral contraceptive manufacturers."

That if, in the "heat of the moment," you forget to practice safe sex, it's OK because you have a "second chance?"

"His idea of what people do in bed is vastly different from mine. I can see it now--a nubile co-ed in the arms of a hunky frat boy on a Friday night.

"Oh honey, let's forget the condom tonight. On Monday, I can go just wait in line for 3 hours at Planned Parenthood to get a prescription for Plan B, drive over to Walgreen's and get it filled and then significantly reduce my chances of getting pregnant, even though I still may." Mmmm....sexy."
_________________________

To which I'll add: or, because I didn't know there was such a thing as Plan B and that it was actually available if I took an entire day off work to make the drive, wait in line, fulfill the perscription, I'll drive four hours and pay $300 for an abortion after pushing past hordes of conservatives screaming that I'm a dirty whore and throwing shit at me. Then I'll listen to people talk about "people like me" for the rest of my life, saying I must be a hollow, evil, person who wants to kill herself because I didn't fulfill my breeding duty.

Or maybe I won't risk the drive (I don't have a car or $300) and have the kid anyway, get on welfare to pay for my medical costs, try and marry the frat boy who I'm not really all that into anyway and who'd make my life and his unbearable (who'll laugh at me cause he has a football scholarship), and instead squeeze child support out of him for the rest of his life (law willing), and take up a job at the local burger joint.

Odds are (definately not always true, but I'm going to go there), I'll end up resenting my kid, resenting all frat boys, and kicking myself about how I've blown all of my potential on having a kid I could have waited to have ten years later instead.

There are women who succeed when they fall into this life-altering situation (yes, I know them), and who love their kids and can't imagine living without them. But for every one of those, there are three or four more who are just like a buddy of mine (who was always more brilliant than me) working at Walmart after having married a slack-ass of a kid who's unemployed. Women with this amazing potential, with these incredible dreams, who got caught in the "it's a life" trap, and forgot about their own lives.

I despise being told I have to sacrifice all that I am in order to flush my body of a handful of cells with the self-consciousness of a pancreas.

Bah

I'm moving to Switzerland.

Good night.

Movies

Beer. Thai food. Pirates of the Caribbean.

Yea, for those keeping track: I'm supposed to be in kickboxing class tonight.

Work is still playing downtime. My head hurts. Overwhelmed by Life, the Universe and Everything. Getting some great angsting done.

Gotta do that sometime.

Sleep well, wake up tomorrow, get back on track.

So it goes.

The Lovely Bones

Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones is a book my buddy Julian kept trying to get me to read. It's about a teenage girl - raped and then murdered - who narrates the book from a sort of "heaven" as she watches her family survive, live, love, in the wake of her death.

I put off reading this for as long as possible, because I was in South Africa, and with rape all over the news and being talked about all the time in your academic circles, the last thing you want to do is to spend your free time reading about it.

But it's a damn good book.

Sebold herself is a rape survivor, which makes it even tougher to read, but it's worth every damn ounce of your time.

And I am ecstatic to hear that Peter Jackson & co. have optioned rights for the movie version.

They'll do it justice.

Reader, I Bought Her

Assumption of privilege, much?

White man's burden.

Blow me, asshole.

This is What We Voted For

This.

An Iraqi girl screamed Tuesday after her parents were killed when American soldiers fired on their car when it failed to stop, despite warning shots, in Tal Afar, Iraq. The military is investigating the incident.

What kind of a fighter would I grow up to be, after that? Who would I fight?

I hate George Bush and his goddamn fucking wars. I hate these wars. They are fucking stupid. You're killing fucking real fucking people. This isn't a goddamn video game, you fucking rich, privileged piece of shit.

This is why people hate us. This is why they bomb our goddamn cities.

Cause of assholes like you.

via PZ

Boys & Books

Warning: Oddly, this is the first post I've written that I'm actually self-conscious about, and the first to come with apologies. What am I apologizing for?

Oh. Nevermind. Got it.

________________________________

What I love about having an amazing, brilliant, driven, ass-kicking bunch of friends is that I can go, “So… Law School, what do you think?”

…And Jenn the Ph.D. social psych student goes, “Yea, I have a study book for that. Let me have my friend send it over.”

…Alec the I-just-finished-a-1500-page-novel- and-now-I’m-going-to-grad-school goes, “Thought about doing that. Read Scott Turow’s One L. It’ll give you an idea of what the hell you’re getting into.”

…Ph.D. Bill (ever cynical), “I used to oversee those on test-taking days. Most of the people who take them are idiots. You’ll do fine.”

…And Ph.D. candidate-at-Oxford Julian, “As long as you’re not doing it to be a scum-sucking lawyer, but pursuing it for academic reasons, I think you’d be really good at it. Really.”

…And MA-Stanford-just-accepted-kick-ass-writing-job-at-Bioware (Yea. Neverwinter Nights. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. That gaming company) Patrick’s sister has taken the LSAT and he’s like, “Are you good at logic problems? No? Better work on that. “

I just love these people.

So I’m reading Turow’s One L. At this point, I’ve decided to take the LSATs in June as a definite. That’s all I actually have to decide for now. The rest can wait until after the results. From what I’ve heard, if I even want to get in anywhere OK, I need to score in the 90th percentile.

You can fail a fifth of the test and still get in the 90th percentile.

The plan is to spend Sunday mornings going over LSAT practice tests, and teaching myself logic problems; which, yes, I suck at.

Like this:

Buses 1, 2, and 3 make one trip each day, and they are the only ones that riders A, B, C, D, E, F, and G take to work.

Neither E nor G takes bus 1 on a day when B does.
G does not take bus 2 on a day when D does.
When A and F take the same bus, it is always bus 3.
C always takes bus 3.

Traveling together to work, B, C, and G could take which of the same buses on a given day?
(A) 1 only
(B) 2 only
(C) 3 only
(D) 2 and 3 only
(E) 1, 2, and 3

My buddies tell me the trick is scratch paper: make a diagram. Write it all out. I’ll be spending the next five months getting over my trepidation regarding questions like this one.

I tend to think I’m bad at testing, because what they’re testing is how you’ve been taught to think, and I need to teach myself to switch modes when I’m test taking, and - if I score well - when I’m in law school. Because I don’t want to become a scum-sucking lawyer.

This is a tool. I’m pursuing an education, another language, not making this my way of life. It’s a tool and a language created by old, white, rich men, and not knowing it or how it works when they’re using this tool to tell me and my friends what to do with our bodies, and how others use our bodies, pisses me off.

That’s the passion that’s driving me toward it.

I have no illusions: I know they’ll try and beat all the passion and fire out of me, and get me down to cold, logical fact, and I know I’ll have to portion out and box off the cold/rational side and box off the “me” side just to stay sane. But if I can get through this test, and the admissions process, and the first year of law school… then I’ll know another language, I’ll know that heavy-handed, coldly logical language that people use against me when I go off on my tirades, and I’ll be able to speak back to them in that language.

That’s the drive.

It’s funny, because thinking about testing got me to thinking about my lazy academic history.

I remember that it seemed to take me forever to learn how to read. I was incredibly impatient with it. I was always in the second-level reading group in the first grade, never the first, and it frustrated me. My mom says the reason I was so frustrated was because I was ready to learn how to read long before I was finally taught to.

My parents both worked, so our social time together was reserved for dinner and nightly movie watching, and though I have some fond memories of being read to, it didn’t happen often, due to the sheer logistics of getting everything else done to make the household run.

Though I do have some memory of my French grandmother reading to me, she’s always been really self-conscious of her accent (one of my biggest regrets is that my grandmother didn’t speak to us in French the entire time we were with her during the day – she was trying so hard to be a Good American, and was so intent on speaking English well that the only French I learned from her were the cuss words), so that didn’t happen often either.

Instead, I struggled over impossibly dense marks on the page in the first grade, fretting and fuming at my brain’s inability to make the groups of letters into sounds, and the sounds into words that made sense.

That was when Matt came into the picture. Matt was admitted at the beginning of the school year into kindergarten and then bumped up a grade a couple weeks later because he could already read.

When we had one of those “story-reading-times” in the first grade, it wasn’t the teacher reading to us – it was Matt, this little kindergarten kid who was reading us a fourth-grade level book.

Oh, you better bet I was drawn to him.

Matt and I became good friends in the 3rd grade, when we were both put into an “experimental” 2nd and 3rd grade “split” class. The idea was to put these really “smart” 2nd and 3rd graders into one class and have them work together to be better.

By then I was a 3rd grader, reading at a 7th or 8th grade level. The first thing my dad said when we went to the orientation about this “experimental” class was, “This sounds more like you’re putting really smart 2nd graders with 3rd graders who’ll teach them. How can they be at the same level? The 3rd graders will fall behind.”

The class only lasted that year, likely for above-mentioned parent complaints, which were reiterated by most of the other 3rd-graders parents.

But that’s when me and Matt got attached at the hip. I found the smartest person in the whole class and just sort of imprinted on him. He, and most of the other students in the class, were already taking “Gifted” classes, these “special” before-class classes that only brilliant kids who tested really well “got” to join. I was always very clear that these classes weren’t for me, likely because I felt that I’d had so much trouble learning to read (once I learned, there was no going back, but I can still feel the frustration about it, to this day).

After writing up yet another story about something-or-other in my spare time, for fun, and showing it to my teacher, my 3rd grade teacher recommended that I take the “Gifted” test.

I remember being flattered at the idea, but secretly not believing that I was that smart. After all, that would mean I was as smart as Matt, and that was, like, impossible.

So I went to this big middle-school cafeteria in the area with about a hundred or so other kids, and took the kid-version of these sorts of comprehension tests.

I remember that I had fun doing it, because it was sort of this, “I’m not as smart as those Gifted kids, who cares how I do? This is fun,” thing. I wasn’t really all that invested in it. As much as I wanted to be on par with Matt, there was this part of me that believed the dynamics of our friendship would suffer, as if me being as smart as him (or, fuck, smarter?), would mean he wouldn’t want to hang out with me anymore.

Funny, how early you pick up that idea.

When we got the test scores back, they looked really high to me. My parents went over them with my teacher. In the three areas, I scored 95th, 96th and 90th percentile (90th was in math).

My teacher, however, explained that, as the letter regretfully informed us, getting into “Gifted” classes meant you had to score in at least the 98th percentile in two categories and the 96th in the third.

I will never forget that piece of paper (though I’ve since thrown it away, thank god). I just sort of stared at it like, “Well, I’m a lot smarter than I thought I was, anyway. Just not brilliant.”

And there was some relief in that.

Back to hanging out with Matt.

We’d go into the library, and he’d just pull out books at random. I seriously think he’d read every book in the library.

“Have you read this? You should read this. Have you read this one? It’s about aliens on Mars. Have you read this? You have to read The Phantom Tollbooth. What about this one? Do you know the Redwall books?”

I couldn’t keep up with him. It was great.

As we got older, kids started making fun of me and Matt for hanging out together (“Are you guys going out? Why aren’t you going out?”) and he was a little, dorky guy, so the passive, effeminate "not a real boy" thing came up. By the fifth grade, he’d ditched me for playing kickball with the boys. I tried getting along with some female friends, but they turned their backs on me and made fun of me for reading too much… and then Aryan Adam started paying attention to me.

He was new my 4th grade year, and I was nuts about him the whole time. He actually noticed me in the 5th grade, when I was no longer hanging around with Matt. He liked reading my stories, he enjoyed my book recommendations, he was even willing to hang out with me and, like, talk to me. When I bumped into him years later, he described us as being “friends.” This was the guy who dated every girl in the fourth grade but me. The guy who announced he was “going out” with Angela the new girl.

“She just transferred here two weeks ago,” I said, “you don’t even know her!”

“Well, yea, that’s why I’m going to go out with her.”

So I spent a year being a beautiful boy’s intellectual whore.

There are worse sorts of whores to be, I suppose.

I switched schools between the fifth and sixth grade, and sixth grade was pretty much just the worst thing ever. Ever.

I started putting on puberty weight, discovered I needed glasses (too much reading), was advised that I had an overbite that needed to be corrected, and got hooked up with braces and headgear, and… entered a new school. The one I’d been to before was the one across the street from my grandmother’s house, slightly more diverse than the one in rural Battle Ground where I ended up once my parents deemed I was old enough to stay home on my own and look after my younger brother and sister.

All of the sudden, I was surrounded by Apostolic Lutherans (when the women who follow this religion turn 16, they get married and drop out of school because it’s God’s will that women bear as many children as possible – they have a big colony out in Battle Ground) and lots and lots of white trash boys who would later grow up to work pumping gas at the local Texaco.

Being smart was a liability.

I had a horrible misogynist of a teacher three years away from retirement who found the fact that all the boys in the class teased me to be really funny. I had chew and Tabasco sauce dumped in my hair, and had story notebooks and regular books stolen by these amazingly asshole boys who thought watching me run after them was really fucking funny, and the one time I stood up for myself and tripped a guy who was playing catch with one of my personal items (again, all of the male teachers ignored this “boys will be boys” behavior on the playground), I was summoned to the principal’s office and berated for my “lack of remorse” when confronted with the bruised knee of the asshole I tripped.

You better bet your ass I had a lack of fucking remorse.

I was disappointed there wasn’t any blood.

I launched into a really tearful, passionate, pissed-off response to the vice principle about the lack of supervision and discipline from asshole male teachers, to which she responded with an equal lack of remorse for my predicament. Over and over again, I was told that I shouldn’t have taken matters into my own hands. I should have told the teachers. But I did tell the teachers, I told them over and over and over -- but I was the smart fat girl that everybody made fun of, and those male teachers had made fun of girls just like me when they were in middle school. They could give a fuck.

I got detention.

The first time I’d ever been in trouble at school in my whole life. I was terrified to tell my parents. But I had underestimated my parents:

They were very proud of me.

So I had my year of hell, the year when you’ve got a teacher who treats you like a fat idiot and couldn’t give a shit about encouraging you to do anything.

And then I got into the 7th grade, and started to meet my people.

Like all turning points in my life, it started with a boy and a book…..

In this instance, it was Ryan the beautiful ADD boy who was always nursing some injury he’d gotten in his karate class. I got assigned a seat next to him and spent the entire class trying not to look at him, he was so damn pretty. When I broke out my copy of Mariel of Redwall, it was all over.

His eyes lit up. “You like Brian Jacques? He’s great! I met him once!”

After that, Ryan never shut up, and we traded Redwall books back and forth. He drew up the map for the first fantasy novel I wrote. Through him and a bit on my own, I found Renny the redheaded wanna-be theatre-diva, too smart and cynical for her own good; Heidi the math wiz who planned on being an architect; Jon the wanna-be comic book artist; Shannon the Smart Christian; Nicole the Smart Mormon who could verbally dominant anybody; and the Other Ryan, the one who mostly seemed to hang out with us because he was hot on Heidi.

And we had a gang.

I started to take refuge in not being smart. That is, not trying to excel in class. I picked up lessons from Heidi, who was very careful not to talk too much about the fact that she was acing all of her classes without really studying. Like me, she was too tall and carried around too much weight to be fashionable.

So I learned to be quieter, to not be so obvious that I’d rather spend my recess reading. And I avoided the threesome of “dorky” guys who headed up the chess team and went to this school’s version of Gifted classes. Best to just shut up. I wasn’t really brilliant anyway, I figured, just drawn to really brilliant people.

As for high school, I didn’t really go to high school, to be honest.

And yes, I’m happy about that.

The first year of high school I discovered the drama department, and boys. I also discovered that classes were boring, everybody was an idiot, and none of it really interested me. So sophomore year I got a magic, undated “Pass” from my theater teacher that I’d present to all of my teachers. It said, basically, “Kameron is needed in the theater this period.”

Easy, easy out. I don’t remember much of my sophomore year, at least as far as the actual classes are concerned. I spent the whole year at the theater, bullshitting, working on sets, practicing lines.

At the end of Freshman year, I was playing “The Chancellor” in an adaptation of a Twilight Zone episode, and condemning a librarian to death for crimes against the State. The guy they brought in to play the librarian, Psycho, was somebody I’d heard about around school. In fact, I heard his name so much I assumed he was one of the popular kids. He tried out for the play on a lark, and I later learned he stuck with it because he saw me auditioning for The Chancellor and was totally hot on me and wanted to act opposite me.

He was a year ahead of me, turned out to be captain of the chess team, on the debate team, and involved with pretty much every single academic-minded club in the school. He was always bragging about IQ tests, and how stupid jocks were.

He was also an absolutely atrocious actor, could never remember his lines, and caused me extreme irritation. I’d walk off the stage and not give him another thought. I was full of my own promise. People told me I oozed theater talent. I was much lauded as the next theater diva.

In the mean time, this being high school, and theater, there were runarounds with boys. I got the expected offer from the resident male theater slut, whose “mission” it was to sleep with all of the incoming female freshman who were still virgins (seriously). Then there was EK, who I was pretty certain was actually gay, but who cornered me backstage one day to profess his undying interest and attraction to me, and though he was physically my type, he had absolutely no drive or passion for anything at all, and I found the idea of going out with him really boring.

Psycho, however, was slowly making inroads, offering to drive me home, asking if we could practice lines together, bragging about all of his accomplishments, enlightening me about the nature of the universe and the complexities of this, that, and the other thing. He had also just been adamantly rejected by a dishwater blond with the IQ of a sponge.

He would later marry a redhead with the IQ of a sponge. They are well-suited. Funny, it was just the sort of person he was looking for.

Anyhow, seeing how much time I was spending with Psycho, a good friend of mine, Jem, hauled me out behind the theater, burst into tears, and declared his undying love.

How, exactly, does one deal with this?

I actually admire him for doing it, now, ten years later, because it was a really brave thing. He was terrified that if he told me, we wouldn’t be friends anymore, but he was so crazy about me, he went for it. Well. We stayed friends. Unfortunately, he didn’t give me up, and several years ago he gave me a really, really sweet speech about how you’re supposed to marry your best friend, and I was his best friend, and blah blah. Sweet. But, again: he had no drive, no passion. Hanging out with him just didn’t fire me up to be better, to live. So we’re still friends. He has since married a woman who is a much better fit, and they’re doing very well.

Psycho, however, being a psycho, had lots to say about passion, and living, and Great Things and Great Deeds. Problem was (and because I was very, very young, I didn’t know any better) that I didn’t know how to differentiate the talkers from the doers. I was always very clear as to what I wanted in a partner, and I learned later that he’d clued into that from the start, and created a whole other person to woo me (yes, he admitted this). This is the guy who brought me to his house and opened up the book of Greek art and said, “Real women look like this. This is what you look like.”

Warning! Warning!

Unfortunately, by the time I realized how fucked up he was, I was too physically and emotionally invested.

By the time I realized that he had a deep and abiding hatred for the women in his family (his mother, his grandmother. Which explained why he needed to pretend I was a goddess and not a real woman, as he hated real women. Biggest lesson learned from this relationship: never, ever get involved with a guy who hates his mother), I didn’t have the strength to fix things.

I should have known better.

Anyhow, by the end of sophomore year, I had taken and passed a college-entrance test to the local community college, which would offer me both high school and college credit. So I ditched high school my junior year and spent it at the community college taking classes with one of the best bunch of history teachers I’ve ever met. They were amazing.

By January of my senior year, I had enough credits to graduate, and moved up to Bellingham with Pyscho. I applied to get into Western Washington University, and went to speak with a councilor there who told me, frankly, that no, I couldn’t get in because I was missing a math class. I’d taken the SATs without studying, without much thought of any kind, and randomly answered pretty much all of the math questions. I ended up with an 1130, which wasn’t great (to be honest, I was just amazed that I “passed”), but was enough to get into a local school, so I didn’t bother retaking it. I felt it was the right sort of score for me: intelligent, but not brilliant.

So I ended up at the local community college in Bellingham for a semester. Due to Life Bullshit, poverty, and stuff already discussed here, I returned back to Battle Ground, alone, after about 6 months, and then spent the next year recuperating, finishing up my Associate’s Degree at the community college, and applying to colleges in Alaska.

Alaska.

2.5 GPA to get in.

Ha. Ha.

No, I didn’t stress about college. I wasn’t there for the fancy degree. I wasn’t brilliant, after all.

And two days into the semester at U of Alaska in Fairbanks, a cutie down the hall walks into my room, looks at the books on my shelf and goes, “Dude, you read Robert Jordan?”

We were connected at the hip for a year. He was the anti-smart guy. He was a slow but eager reader (dyslexic); a motorcycle riding, beer drinking, marijuana smoking (biggest bone of contention between us), big-hearted guy who lusted after me knowing full well I wasn’t the marrying kind, and we had too little in common to base anything long-term on. Still, we had our brief affair, decided to be friends, and then spent hours on the indoor climbing wall at the rec. center. He taught me how to hotwire a car, taught me companionable silence, and taught me never to get involved with a guy who has a girlfriend, cause when she moves up to Alaska and finds out (a year later), that you had a brief affair with him, she’ll threaten to kill you, and you’ll never see any of them ever again.

Good life lesson.

Most of my other obsessions that first year in Alaska revolved around that circle, revolved around me pretending not to be smart, dressing down, drinking a lot of beer. Being too smart scared those Alaska boys, so I shut up a lot, and enjoyed hoping on motorcycles, and considered getting a leather jacket, and learned how to roll cigarettes. Working on a fishing boat sounded really fun.

All of this wackiness culminated just before the girlfriend’s death-threat, when I was drunkenly pawing after one of the boys’ circle, and he said, “You realize how much better you are than us, right? You’re so much better than us.”

And, as much affection as I have and had for them, and as much as I learned (I also spent a good deal of time with the girlfriend learning how to shoot a rifle – yea, she’s a better shot than me), I had to admit that it was true. They were my detour. They were my vacation. I could foolishly adore all of them, because I saw no long-term future with any of them. It was a moment.

I adore them still, for that moment.

Alaska grades were a 3.7 or 3.8 (there wasn’t much else to do in Alaska but schoolwork and beer drinking, punctuated by the occasional road trip and bike ride out to the pond). I didn’t graduate with any honors because my community college average was something like a 3.4 or a 3.2, and when they averaged grades from all the schools together, I came out with a 3.4999.

I really didn’t care. I was just amazed to graduate.

Then I went to Clarion.

I’d been rejected by this writer’s workshop when I was 18, and had no real hope that I’d get in this time, but I had a writing instructor in Alaska who encouraged me to apply, so I figured, what the hell, why not.

I was initially put on the “waiting list” for Clarion West… Which I thought was appropriate.

Smart, sure. Just not brilliant.

It fit my idea of myself.

Luckily, somebody else accepted to West decided to go to Clarion East, so I got into West.

Me. My writing. My brain. Whoever the hell I was, I got in there.

And then I met these fucking amazing people.

Everybody had some kind of graduate degree. Some guy had an MA from Stanford. Another just finished a BA at Yale. Everybody was in Ph.D. programs. One of them was a fucking doctor. We immediately began giving out book recommendations and talking about the authors who were going to be instructing us.

I felt like the biggest, stupidest rural hick ever to wander into Seattle.

I was standing in this room with these absolutely fucking amazing people, wearing my baggy cargo pants and dressing in layers like some kind of skater, telling people I was, uh, going to the University of Alaska. Uh. Yea. 2.5 GPA to get in. Ha. No. Didn’t apply anywhere else. Didn’t want to go anywhere else. When they all started comparing SAT scores in the 1430-1500 range, I quietly slunk out of the room.

But when they started talking, I could talk back. I could have intelligent discussions with them. Yea, I was out of practice cause I didn’t hang out with people like them, but you can’t change who you are. It doesn’t go away.

And when we started producing written work, I was keeping pace with them. This was the shit I knew. Writers? Yea. I do that. I know this. They had all of these amazing credentials, and I could keep up with them on the writing part. Sure, each of us was better at something than the others, and worse than some others, but we were well matched.

Julian (now at Oxford), in response to one of my week two stories, said “You just keep raising the bar, don’t you?”

I had never been in a room full of people who liked that I was smart. Who were secure enough in themselves and their own abilities not to care. I had never been in a room of people who were just as dorky as I was, but not in an in-your-face-captain-of-the-chess-club way. They were smart in a bookish way, in thoughts about stories, about people, about the way things worked. They were good at questions. At introspection. They were passionately engaged in an effort to know themselves, and, by extension, figure out everybody else around them.

Without any bullshit, I can tell you that was the biggest turning point for me. It was me, in week two, realizing I could hold my own with this incredible group of people. Amazing, amazing people. I’d spent my life learning that being smart got you tobacco spit in your hair and got boys to hate and menace you. I didn’t realize there were groups of smart people who’d actually accept me.

So when my grandfather suggested I go to grad school (and said he’d pay for it – I paid for undergrad with student loans) – I wrote to my Clarion buddies in New Zealand and South Africa and asked for advice (if I was going to continue with school, I’d do it overseas: a school’s location has always been more important to me than the school. There’s more to learn outside a classroom than in it). I wrote up a BA dissertation on student violence in South Africa, and decided that’d be where I’d go.

The best part about lobbing out that idea to this incredible group of people is that they didn’t laugh at me. They didn’t say, “You’re smart, but not brilliant. You can’t do that.”

They took it as a matter of course.

When I finally turned in my MA dissertation in South Africa, all I wanted to do was pass. I thought I was the worst student in the entire department. My buddy Julian, the department star, the Clarion buddy who would drag me into his room full of books in Durban and say, “Have you read this? Read this? You really must read this one. What do you think of this one?” read the diss. before I turned it in and said, “You do realize this is quite good, don’t you?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t.”

When the MA came back, it came back with a “First.” Everything above a 75% is a First Class mark. Granted, I got the lower end of that: the 75%. But sweet god, the dissertation got a fucking First! (I would later discover that because I’d done a half coursework/half dissertation MA, the grades for my coursework and diss. were averaged in order to get my overall MA grade – which was only a 72%. Still. A First on my diss.!).

When Julian’s diss. came back, I learned… he’d gotten a 75% too.

Par for the course.

3 points behind my brilliant boy buddy.

Perfect.

However, though I ended up with a decent mark, the experience on the way to getting that mark pretty much clobbered me. I had a violent aversion to one of the Old White Male professors who pissed me off (hence the reason my coursework marks weren’t as high), I was in a very, very foreign country (South Africa is not England) with a tropical climate (I’d just come from Alaska), I was truly living by myself for the first time (in a cockroach-invested flat whose owners were corrupt and didn’t pay their water bill on several occasions and whose tenets were often involved in domestic violence disputes in which the police were called), and I was poor as all hell and lived mainly on Indian pastries, peri-peri and rice, and bacon and egg sandwiches. As said, dealing with all of this stress meant serious binge eating sessions the likes of which I have not seen since, vast consumption of alcohol (this was partly social. South Africans are big drinkers), and an affection for those Peter Styvesant 30-packs of cigarettes.

And now I’ve stumbled into Chicago, fell here with just the same “hell, why not” attitude with which I’ve decided to take the LSATs. Chicago felt right, though it made no logical sense, no logical sense in the same way that none of my decisions ever make logical sense. And I’ve got Jenn here, another one of the amazing-wonderful Clarionites, and there’s this job that went from “temp” to “fly around the country working on these million-dollar projects” and work colleagues telling me that I channel god when I put in minimum effort and spend most of my day blogging.

And I suspect I have a shitload of uptapped potential that I’m not doing a damn thing with.

And the question is: what am I going to do about it?

Go back to the Alaska boys? Kick off to Canada? Or go to law school? And I’ve been sitting around waiting for some new kick in the gut, some push for the next thing, and just like everything else, I found it. The intensity of feeling, the Big Location Switch. For Chicago, it appears, there was a Girl and Books… (“Have you read this? I can’t live without books! I love them! They are my friends!”). For the next one, I have no doubt they’ll be another bunch of brilliant people and their books, a bit like a guidepost: ah, yes, you, this is where you’re headed, let’s go together. It’s an incredibly bizarre life that makes no sense….

And yet, when you pack your whole life together, it shows you where you’re going.

Mine is about being better.

And surrounding myself with people on the same road.

You've just got to find your people.

Break

I'll be taking a few days off from blogging, as I've got some personal stuff to work out.

I'll be by every once in a while in case the comments go out of wack, but for all intents and purposes, things should be mostly quiet on the new-posts front, unless we go to war with Iran, Roe v. Wade is overturned, or someone in my immediate circle dies.

At which point, I'll be blasting again in a public forum. For now, I'm going to go bitch to my private peeps forum about Life Issues.

See you all in a couple days.

Whu-pah

Ha. I was hoping this one would get a reaction from him...

Check out Brendan's take on being the son of a feminist. I keep wishing this guy lived in Chicago. We'd go watch fights at the Aragon and argue gender politics over Thai food, and he'd have a blast with Jenn's circle of psychology students...

Oh well. That's what blogging's for: finding your people, however scattered they may be.

Enjoy.

You Know It's Been A Shitty Workday That You're Glad to Have Over When...

...you glance over at the Everclear CD next to your computer and think, "Hey, I'd like to listen to that. But aren't I listening to it right now? What disk is in the machine?"

Well, no, Kameron, you wouldn't be listening to it right now because you're staring at it sitting on your desk.

My brain has died. I'm heading out to kickboxing.

Just Give Out the Goddamn Pill

Seriously gotta get this shit together. It's the fucking 21st century.

Fierce arguments have gone on inside and outside the Food and Drug Administration, which may decide as soon as this week whether drug stores can sell the emergency contraception known as Plan B without a prescription to women age 16 and older.

The cons?

Easy access to this kind of birth control might "encourage women to have sex."

Oh, wouldn't that be terrible.

Last May, the FDA rejected nonprescription sales of emergency contraception, against the overwhelming recommendation of the agency's own scientific advisers.

Your body is a battleground...

Randomosity - I Love People

Random rant from prettygirl

Clear. Blue. Not So Easy. Day!

Pregnant? Fuck!

You're gonna have to get outta town. If your Dad finds out, he'll have it taken away from you because he thinks you're dangerous. And if your ex-boyfriend finds out, he'll try to get custody. And with your record, he'd stand a hell of a good shot (You threw your mom down some steps).

When you get across the state lines, open a bar. Name the bar and the baby the same name. Gluggs. The bar will become your favorite place in the world.

Your dad, your ex-boyfriend, and the law are gonna come after you to get their hands on the kid. When they all die, it will be thanks to your son. He'll have killed them to save your life. That night, he'll burn down the bar and take off.

Though you won't have the bar anymore, you won't be sad. Because you'll know that somewhere in this country Gluggs lives on in the shape of your beautiful boy. All you ever wanted was a bar that would outlive you.

Happy Clear. Blue. Not So Easy. Day!

Frickin hilarious.

So Much Entertainment, So Much Time

I am so amused.

And, there's more.

In Which the Protagonist's Head Explodes From Boredom

Someday, I will have a real job. In the mean time, some breathing space:



"Aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn't know that so it goes on flying anyway."
- Mary Kay Ash

"Life is hard. After all, it kills you."
- Katharine Hepburn

"Let us not confuse stability with stagnation."
- Mary Jean LeTendre

"The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more."
- Colleen McCullough

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
- Anais Nin

But Boys Raised By Feminists Won't Get Laid. And Other Really Funny Bullshit

Actually, raising up boys to believe that women are people too is pretty fucking cool:

In the past several years we’ve seen a glut of magazine articles, talk shows and books like The War on Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Boys and The Decline of Males demonizing a simple term: feminism. How silly. Feminists are people who believe women deserve the same opportunities and compensation as men...

I believe feminists by their very nature imparted questioning minds to their sons, encouraging them to question stereotypes including those existing within our school system: jocks, nerds, freaks and snobs. They learned from us that name-calling is a critical part of alienation. We taught them to appreciate differences, not disdain them, to neither be nor seek victims.

We taught them to be discerning, to carefully evaluate influences, ranging from peer pressure to media input.

For feminists active in the business and political community, sons learned to interact with a myriad of individuals, from the powerful to the disenfranchised. They carried those experiences with them, and, I believe, profited as adults. I also think we imparted a sense of purpose in our sons, the knowledge that every life is part of something bigger and does make a difference.

Children of feminists know that every stand they take may not be popular. They may be subjected to ridicule or contempt as a result of their beliefs. But through the examples of their mothers, they know a worthy stand is worth the price.

Via Trish

Why Is It My White, Upper-Middle-Class Ass Doesn't Support This Administration, Again?

I got my quarterly or whatever stock statement yesterday. I put 3% of every paycheck into a diversified stock account, which includes stock in my own company. And my eyes boggled at the dollar amount.

In the last year, stock in my company has nearly doubled.

We're doing Iraq contracts, afterall.

I find it deeply ironic that somebody like me, the white, educated, working-for-the-man type who's financially benefiting from the presidency of George W. Bush is actually more anti-Bush, pro-taxes, actually-some-socialism-is-neat than the Midwesterner whose factory job has been outsourced to India who won't have any retirement (stock or otherwise) or social security benefits in old age and whose daughter's children he'll have to support because his vote for Bush was a vote against Roe vs. Wade.

Fucking hilarious.

Feminism? It's Hardly Begun

Interview with Gloria Steinem in The Guardian.

"What is frustrating," Steinem says now, "is being told that no matter how hard I've worked, it counts less than my appearance. Although if you're not considered conventionally attractive, that also becomes an issue: you know, you're a feminist because you couldn't get a man." Still, there is a part of her that doesn't like getting older. "You become less visible. You become a category rather than an individual - an Older Woman."

Thanks to my buddy Julian for the link.

You Know, I Think I Could Do This

And this was the moment when I realized it, musing through the LSAT center, law school websites, looking at requirements, cut-off dates:

The LSAT test day is over four hours long. Keep your pencil moving to help yourself stay focused. If there is anything the LSAT measures, it is raw determination and endurance.

And I thought... You know, I could do this. Hell, I mean, what else am I doing? I mean, besides the boxing, the work travel, the book writing... er, I mean, really, what else am I doing?

Spend 6 months studying for the LSATs? Take it once in June and again in October, if I totally crap it. It's not like it'll be the end of the world if I suck. Then I'll at least know, and I can do something else. Falling flat on my face doesn't bother me.

Took the morning to come up with a list of law schools in the northeast and a couple in Seattle. And the whole world just narrowed, and everything just lined up and came into focus.

This is why I took two years off from school. To find that moment.

I mean, I don't expect to get into Columbia or anything, but why the fuck not apply to 12 or 15 schools: if they all tell me to go to hell, so what? I have a bunch of other shit I've been wanting to do. No sweat off my back (prepare for: "and they all told me to go to hell - anybody want to go to Peru?" - I'm a realist).

I can rock out the personal essay and why I want to do it, the "South Africa" thing always peaks people's interest, and being another 40K in debt doesn't bother me. It's just money. You can't take it with you.

Fuck it. I've been chewing on it too long. I took a year and a half off to figure out what I wanted. It finally clicked. I can quit at any point in the process, and it gives me something to work toward. My brain is dying. I've been going crazy being out of school for so long. I need a challenge. This feels right. If I bomb the LSATs, at least I'll have given myself the challenge of studying for the LSATs.

It occurs to me that last night I had a conversation with Jenn that went something like this:

Me: "You know, I've been running really fast for the last seven years. I want some down time. I need to take some time to appreciate what I've got."

Jenn: "That makes sense. That sounds like a really good idea."

Me: "You realize that that's just my stance on it now, for this moment?"

Jenn: "Yea. We're the sorts of people who pile a lot on our plates."

That attitude lasted exactly one night.

I'm fucking hilarious.

Women, Like Black People, Are Just "Naturally" Stupid

Obviously.

Do you even want my commentary?

Repeat After Me:

My attraction to Yellow is based purely on looks and familiarity. Yes, motorcycle riding would be fun. Yes, he is a nice person. He is funny. He can be dorky. But he's not a real dork. He's the sort of guy who would take me out, but hide me from his friends, cause I'm not the sort of woman he "should" be dating (read, thin blond stewardess. Yes, he once regaled our group with news of a date with a blond stewardess who "wouldn't stop talking").

No, I am not batshit-fucking-insane about him. I do not angst over him. He doesn't read books. He is convienent to sigh over for about four days a month (what would we do the rest of the time?). So, what's the point? I'm fucking busy, not tossing and turning about him - I know exactly what the sighing's actually about: he's the only single guy of about my age and close enough to my type who I actually interact with on a semi-regular basis. He merely looks very pretty today, walking through the office.

I appreciate that.

Ah, hormones. Just that: hormones. Funny, how I still have that little social twinge: no, no, I can't just be sexually attracted to somebody, I have to pretend I'm romantically crazy about him.

Actually, no. I can appreciate that I'm not nuts about him. He's just damn pretty.

Social pressures on repressing female desire? If-I'm-hot-on-him-I-have-to-figure-out-how-to-marry-him? When that's absolutely not what I want at all?

Funny.

Worklife

"I fight for what I believe in. I am a mercenary, and I believe in money."

Batfuck

Just. Batfuck.

Make up your goddamn mind already.

Ninjas

I am easily amused.

via john rickards, my Secret Boyfriend

Best. Advice. Ever.

Unfortunately, I didn't write it:

"Listen up, you grain-fed honky dickweeds - not just you, WW, but every fucking honky out there needs to hear this. We're not alive for very long. Have you noticed this, dickcheeses? We do not have all the fucking time in the world to draw up cost-benefit analyses on potential long-term pairings. If you're not swept the fuck away by your lady, move the fuck on. If you're not gritting your teeth and biting the palm of your hand like goddamn Squiggy every time she walks by, get over it. If you're not having the best sex of your life - and this is when you do that, dummies, in your mid-fucking-thirties, this is your big fucking shot at great sex, or at least this is where it starts - if you're not blown away, freaking out, breaking out, thrilled, shivery, talking a lot, sending stupid fucking emails to each other, rolling around, sighing, bragging, buying dumb little gifts - then how do you think you'll feel in a few years when you're fucking old and creaky and you have three little doo-doo factories in residence? You fucking dumbass honky-ass losers.

This is how you find the man/woman of your dreams, stupids: You refuse to waste time on the man/woman of your loneliness-fueled spreadsheets. And if you can't get worked up over anyone... well, Jesus, what is wrong with you? Can you get worked up over anything at all? Here in LA, lots of people wax romantic about movies, but when it comes to their real lives, they're fucking numb and alienated and don't see the raw thrill, the breathtaking drama of every little minute. Blahblahblah boringcakes, motherfuckers! The girl who made you your coffee this morning has beautiful green eyes, and she paints weird portraits of her customers and keeps chocolate and rope stashed in her nightstand and she reads books about gardening and she knows what she wants. You could spend the next two months in bed, honkwinders, getting tied up and eating chocolate and watching old movies in the middle of the night. You could be swooning and sighing and feeling like the world is opening up like a flower. So why are you watching "Survivor" with that guy who bores the shit out of you, and pisses you off, and doesn't give a flying fuck about how you feel, ever, and mostly just wants you to get to the point and stop crying? Why are you heating up canned soup and wondering about the long-term viability of negotiating a reasonably satisfying coexistence with someone 3,000 miles away?

You stupid bitches. You're wasting your fucking time. Whenever someone really digs you, you go numb. Whenever you really like someone, you decide to just ignore the fact that they don't like you nearly as much. Or maybe you married someone, and now you give that person your worst possible self day after day, and then wonder why they look so crumpled and lame to you now. Go ahead, put it off, get back to work. Love is only the greatest fucking thing in the entire universe, but hey, you've got a presentation to finish, and besides, you can't really change anything, and only flakes and dreamers care about this shit.

Life is short, dippies. Today is the day to make your move. Buy some flowers, and a lottery ticket, and start to believe in the possibility that your life could be big and bright and pretty. As Frances McDormand says in "Almost Famous," "Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid." Magic, honkies! Believe in magic for once in your narrow little lives. Give up on the mundane for a minute, and open up your hearts, and listen to all the dead people in your office and on the street outside, screaming the same thing: "Live, motherfuckers! Stop planning and fucking LIVE."

Read it all.

The 10,000 Hit Mark

Have passed the 10,000 hit mark. No, not a *day* but since September, when I started using sitemeter.

Thanks, all. Good to have all you obsessive clickers around...

Beat of the War Drum

Listening to too much from Emotive, particularly: Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums. It appeals to my dark, cynical, pissed-off side.

Rumsfeld added that America was committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no second-guessing.

“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”

Check it out.

Via Bitch Ph.D.

Everything's Better With Women

Well, you could try improving ratings by getting 52% of the population up off the bench.

No?

Better as spouses and cheerleaders?

Well then, crash & burn, baby. Unless you're going to market these couples as real people (and from what I've seen, they aren't. From what I've seen of the couples [they aren't selling this as a boxing reality tv show, but a "character" show "about" the boxers and their families], they're pretty gender-conformist), what you've got is a niche sport that you're only showing as being performed by less than half the population.

Ratings burn. Raise the bar, would you?

All that said, I intend to watch the first show. After all, I e-mailed Jenn from Denver and made her tape the latest installment of the puke-fest that is Battlestar Galactica on that King of All Misogynist Channels, Sci-fi. It's like an abusive relationship: you like the idea of what you could possibly experience, you're deeply invested, and you keep hoping it'll get better.

Like a rat and random electric shocks.

What's On My Mind

Woke up from a dream about going to New York with my sister, losing her and her son at a theater party held by an old high school friend of mine I once had a crush on, got lost on the train (numbers? colors? Does anyone remember what stop we got off at, shit, how does this system work? What street is this?), my dad flew in to check on us (insisting it was on his way to some pizza convention), which made me really angry, cause I'd already lost my sister and her kid (failing at my older-sibling duty), my plane ticket reservations were messed up, I had to call into work to say I was "accidently" in New York for a day, having screwed up my reservations somehow, I couldn't stay longer because my sister was going to room with some random guy she met at the party instead of splitting costs with me, my bank account was almost nil, I had just enough to change my ticket reservations, it was raining, and I was hovering near the phone, fuming from debating with the ticket people, and engaging in a furious internal debate about whether or not I was going to call Brendan and beg a beer during my last 12 hours in the city.

If that doesn't perfectly encapsulate all of my neuroses, I don't know what does.

Night Thoughts, Sunday

Sunday is prep day.

Collect the week's story rejections and send out new stuff, water the plants, get the groceries, cook up the week's chicken and broccoli lunches, clean the bathroom, pack for Monday's MA class, read the Tribune, hit Borders and coffee with Jenn, recover from a hangover if neccessary, roll over the week's goals, go jogging or put in my government-recommended 20 minutes on the elliptical machine, chat with my brother, bid Jenn off to her SO's, catch up on e-mail, grind coffee, slump off to bed, exhausted...

And then you roll it all over, and you've got your week again - and you bust through it on the way to wherever it is you're going, recoup on Sunday, and do it all over again.

I've got a novel that needs to be finished this year, another one that needs to do the "straight to publishers" gamble. I need to contact my recruiter sometime this summer and start looking for other jobs. I need to get to Glasgow in August. In autumn, I'm signing up for that French class, come hell or high water. By year's end I need to have done some serious thought as to what I'm doing after Chicago - Jenn will finish her Ph.D. next summer, and we'll likely be parting ways as she heads out to teach and I figure out what the next crazy leap is going to be. As much as I like Chicago and as cozy as I am, I won't stay here.

I'm incredibly lucky to have so many roads open to me, and I know it. Yea, there's stress in choosing what you want: go for a Ph.D., law school, give it up and go make a living on a fishing boat in Alaska? Work at a bookstore in Canada? Transfer to the company office in London? Backpack around New Zealand doing odd jobs and running from student loan debt?

For the last seven years, choice has never frightened me: what's concerned me is how I'm going to fit everything I want to do into one far-too-short lifetime. And, more recently - how am I going to fit all this in while allowing myself to enjoy it? When you spend seven years running, seven years piling it all on, trying to live up to your potential, trying to be somebody you want to be, you get to the end of that and you have to take a deep breath and go: yea. I did it. I'm doing it. It's OK.

Because at some point, you're going to get breathless, the scenery blurs, and though you'll still hit the water, you'll miss the view during the long drop, and anybody who's gone bridge-jumping into dark water knows that the "oh fuck" moment's the best part.

Chatting with Jenn over coffee today about books, life, job. She asked me if I had a copy of Herland, I said I had no idea, I might have given it away during one of my book purges. I had to ditch a lot of books in my move from South Africa to Chicago because I didn't have the money to ship them, and I had to ditch pretty much every book I owned back in Bellingham when I was 18, cause I needed the money. I sold the books when I pawned the VCR and the TV so I could pay my electric bill.

Seriously.

And I let myself have one of my moments tonight, thinking about my suit jacket, and Denver, and New York, and story sales, and book manuscripts, and I thought - yea. I did it it. Look at that. Look how far I've come from batshit nowhere, from the white trash path, from being able to look out over my whole life and know exactly where it would go, exactly who I would be.

Now I look out and there's this vast landscape, this incredible open sea of possibility.

It's gorgeous. It's fucking beautiful.

And then the moment's done, and you gotta get back up again, find another road, another bridge, another way through, on the way to where you're going.

Cause on the road to where you're going, toilets need to be cleaned, stuff needs to be packed, beds made and stories written and read, and that doesn't happen if you spend too long loitering at the crossroads.

It's a wacky life.

Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit: Here's What You're Missing, Dumbass - Historical Context and Social Pressure

Man, I keep trying to ignore these dumbfucks, but then the other feminist bloggers jump on board, and I have to bitch.

Here's the panic - I would say "latest panic" but they've been preaching "smart, successful women won't get married and have kids, and they'll regret it and spend their nights sobbing into their empty nest and eating bonbons, so you should get barefoot and pregnant straight out of highschool to a Big, Successful Guy who can tell you who you should be, since you won't have enough time on your own to figure out who you are and want you want," for thirty years:

Over the past 30 years, the fraction of women over 40 who have no children has nearly doubled, to about a fifth. According to the Gallup Organization, 70 percent of these women regret that they have no kids.

Uh, hold on there, buddy. First of all, we don't have a population crises in this country. Fewer kids from well-to-do whites (or well-to-do Romans, yea, I've read this argument before) is the real issue. Let's not pretend otherwise. He's really talking about well-educated white women. The Roman state used the same sorts of arguments to try and get upper-class women to have more children.

But these women were smart, knew what contraception was, and knew that pregnancy killed 1 in 4 of them. So they kept their kid-cap to two. The Roman state started offering tax breaks to men who convinced their wives to have more children, and husbands were told to keep an eye on her use of contraception. Keep out the people providing knowledge, get rid of the ingredients for pessiaries, and above all, keep marrying women when they're very, very young so they have as little knowledge as possible coming into a relationship.

Sounds fun.

Yet more women in the US today have children than did a hundred years ago - they just have fewer of them. How can this be?

Well, it's social math: having sex before marriage, being an "unwed" mother, was the Absolute Worst Thing that could happen to a woman. It was far more discouraged a hundred years ago than now. Do I need to say this? Some women were still able to get away with this - and of course most marriages were "the baby's due in 6 months" sorts of marriages. However, it was expected that a certain percentage of women would be "old maids" without spouse or children, due to an imbalance of men and women (a hell of a lot of men died in those world wars, the civil war, etc. There have been long periods of lots-of-women-who-don't-have-kids). Keeping that pool of childless women out there was a good way to cut down fertility rates, too. Nice way to curb female agency and sexuality, as well.

Women today, however, have more options. You can choose (oh, thank all your feminist orgs for that) when to have children and how many you want. You don't have to be married. Hell, you don't even need a steady male partner, just a sperm bank. This is a great thing. This is not Evil. This does not lead to Sobbing Over Bonbons, though a lot of guys sure seem to wish it would.

But there is also one big problem that stretches across these possibilities: Women now have more choices over what kind of lives they want to lead, but they do not have more choices over how they want to sequence their lives.

WTF? This guy seems to think that a woman has to stay home with her kids for the first ten years of the kids' lives, so she's only got a couple of ten-year windows: either she's gotta be married and punching out babies by 25 or 35. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

I'm not sure what planet he lives on. He's really obsessed with this idea of a woman's "most fertile years." Like if these women don't have kids, the world will implode and we'll all die (read Joanna Russ's We Who Are About To).

I've never been especially concerned about my fertility or having children or getting married. I'm one of those, "If I meet a cool partner who's in it for the long haul and have a kid sometime, that'd be cool. If not, even better: more retirement money for me."

The women in my family are incredibly fertile, just the sorts this columnist would love. We're the wagon train women who signed up to marry some random guy so we could go populate the west and dig out a sod hut and drive cattle. My maternal grandmother recently told me about her mother's mother, who was purported to have been married five times - once to an Indian - and spent most of her evenings in the local pub playing the piano and singing baudy songs. Rumor has it both my grandmothers did the "hell, we're practically engaged, let's get it on - hey, oops" thing and were nice and rosy for their weddings, and it wasn't thirty days after going off the Pill that my mom was pregnant with me. My brother was the famous "oops" baby - my mom was trying to wean herself off Pill hormones, and my brother was conceived despite the use of spermicide and a diaphragm (needless to say, I don't use either of these forms of birth control. Learn from the women in your family. This is important). And then there's my sister and my "oops" nephew, of course.

All we have to do is roll out of bed, and hey, hot damn, look at that.

There's really no need to stress about babies.

I don't know about everybody else's parents, but mine have always worked. They were lucky in that they had a great babysitter in my French grandmother, who took care of me, my brother and sister, and my cousin during work hours for the first twelve years of my life. Either my mom or my dad picked us up after work, we always ate dinner at home, watched a lot of movies, and having a two-income household gave us the opportunity to go on some great roadtrips.

Once I was twelve, I stayed home with my younger brother and sister and looked after them, and my mom finished up her MBA. Our job was housecleaning, which took some of the load off my mom (my dad just isn't big on the housework, it's true - their deal was that when my mom made more money than my dad, he'd take over cleaning the house. This has happened only once, because for 20 years my parents worked for a company that consistently paid my father $100 more a paycheck than they paid my mother, even though they had the same job. Why did they do this? Because, apparently, their boss thought that paying them equally would somehow disrupt my parents' marriage. So he got paid more and promoted first, all the way up the line: he'd become a manager, then her, then he was an area manager, then her, then he was VP Operations, then she got VP Human Resources. Yea. Fucked up. My mom still remembers the days when they'd pay the male burger flippers more than than female ones because "men are the breadwinners. They have to support a family on their salary. Women are just earning money on the side." :;snort:: My mom said that when she was 16, this made a lot of sense, until she actually stopped and thought about it. "Hey, but, wait a minute, we're doing the same work! And I'm doing it better than him!").

This guy's seriously suffering from a lack of imagination about the way the world can work. He's got a very small box.

So there are women now who, like my sister, can have kids and not be married or attached to anybody in particular and can live on their own with limited social stigma (depending on the circles). Mainly, they can do this because it's not only so incredibly common, but incredibly visible: you're allowed to talk about being a woman who has a kid and not a husband. Yea, you still get flack for it, but it's a serious option, as is buddying up with another woman, picking a friend or going to a clinic, and having and raising a kid together.

Options aren't bad things, and I don't believe that women who are over 40 and haven't had kids are really all that broken up about it: anybody who really, really wants kids is going to have them at the right time in their lives. You find a way to do it. What you're hearing from the Famous Over 40 women is them interrogating their lives based on studies like this, on panic-hysteria about how you're more likely to get killed by a terrorist than get married after 40 (total bunkum. Completely disproved. Read Backlash), and how you should be feeling guilty for not having kids, and you must be some kind of selfish bitch to have this free life, and don't you feel Hollow and Empty? Ask people this enough times, and they're going to start thinking they're weird for saying they're not.

They'll start questioning themselves, and feel bad or not-normal for their perfectly valid life choices.

I'm a woman. That doesn't mean it's my biological duty to have children. It doesn't mean that that's my ultimate purpose. Not everybody's here to have kids. That's a good thing.

Having and raising children is too fucking difficult a thing to do because you felt pressured into it, because you felt you had some sort of biological duty that you thought you were weird not to feel.

And I resent these studies that don't take the issue of women's social pressures to have children into account. The day we're given positive images of childless, single, Over 40 women who have lots of great friends, a great job, and perhaps the occasional lover in Paris or Milan, is the day when we might be able to ask women for real how they feel about being Over 40 and free of children.

He Was Asking For It, Your Honor. I Was Ovulating, and He Wasn't Wearing a Shirt. Biological Imperatives, and All That

I'm sorry, what was that? You mean if I find a guy sexy I can't beat him up, molest him, and go home? Dude, he was totally asking for it! He was wandering around after dark, looking drunk, and wearing a damn fine pair of ass-hugging jeans! I couldn't control myself!

I'm sorry, you said, I have to be able to control myself because I'm a woman? I can't just bash somebody around and take them home? WTF?

I wasn't going to link to this discussion about the well-trod "she was asking for it" argument about rape, because it's the same old story [oh, come on, you guys, most rape and abuse is actually from somebody you know, it's not about sex, it's about power, blah blah, I should have a standard post for this] until I read this bit, which I had to share:

prisoner6655321:

"Actually, I'm sorry to say that it's very likely that you DID hurt some people. Some guys no doubt looked at you and lusted after you. That brought them down a sinful path. What if some 21 year old guy looked at you lustfully? Encouraging a 21 year old guy to lust after a 13 year old is bad for the 21 year old guy.

Oh, and I really don't want to get into an argument about what is harmful or not harmful. I just want to let you know that some people feel that scantily clad women make their lives more difficult. The younger the scantily clad woman is, the worse (more illegal) the temptation could be."

Lisacurl:

"So, to review, ladies... once we hit puberty, and probably before then, we are responsible for the thoughts that men have when they look at us. It's our responsiblity to dress appropriately so that men are not troubled with lustful thoughts.

Now why does that sound familiar? Oh yeah, because it is what is generally taught in psycho misogynistic religious cults!

In short, prisoner6655321, kiss my feminist ass."

You know, I'm very good at dealing with my lustful thoughts. If said lustful thoughts get too intense, I can always get off the train, or stop looking. Thinking a guy is hot doesn't entitle me to force him to come home with me (yea, I know, rape isn't about "hotness" - but let's pretend, OK? Makes the psychos feel better).

If there were fewer scantily-clad men in the world, it would be a sad, sad, place. But I understand the dangers: women just can't control themselves. They're ravenous hormonal beasts. So if we need to put men in burkas in order to protect them from their own inherent hotness, well, you gotta do what you gotta do.

I'm sorry, who wants to live in that world?

via Ginmar

Women & Sport

Much thanks to Davina for sending me this link -

The Observer's got a piece about encouragining girls in school to enjoy PE and physical sport, as:

Health experts are now warning that the trend [girls shunning sport] has profound health implications for women in later life because people who do not get into the habit of being physically active as teenagers usually take little or no exercise as adults, and run a much higher risk of obesity, heart disease, infertility and joint pains.

I touched on some of this in my old sport post over at Alas. If men and women aren't encouraged to be physically active in equal numbers [in everyday life, in sport, in PE, etc], if women feel socially awkward participating, then you can't make accurate comparisons or assumptions about the differences in male and female strength - you've never got an equal playing field.

They found that 30 per cent of the girls surveyed did not like their PE kit, and 40 per cent were self-conscious about their bodies. One in five said they only took part in PE because they had to, 15 per cent did not enjoy it and 3 per cent rarely took part. One in five believed that being good at sport was not important for girls and that it was not 'cool' to display sporting prowess.

Worryingly, the researchers found that 30 per cent of girls did not think they would be physically active once they left school. They also discovered that girls become progressively more negative towards sport after the onset of puberty.

Completely unsurprising. Ah, puberty, that magic age when women suddenly, desperately realize they have to fit their minds and bodies into weird social boxes. No pretending anymore.

The great thing about this article is that they did a study, reacted to their findings, and got results:

However, the academics also found that girls' participation has risen steadily at schools which have made PE more female-friendly. Girls-only sports lessons, the introduction of aerobics, pilates and dance classes, and changing gym kit rules so girls can wear less revealing clothing such as tracksuit bottoms and hooded tops have boosted involvement...

Since the school introduced the changes in 2001, the number of girls aged 11-14 doing extra-curricular sport has risen from 35 per cent to 75 per cent, the number of female sports teams it puts out has increased from four to 25, and the proportion of girls pleading sickness or injury to avoid PE has fallen.

Very cool.

Shaolin Soccer

After 4 martinis and a black russian, Shaolin Soccer isn't a bad movie.

Saved! however, is fuckin' awesome. Get a copy. Share it with friends. I am moving drunkenly to bed.

Downer

Man, downer day. I was also kicking myself during pilates about my weight again, because we've got 2 walls of mirrors, and I'm exhausted, and have spent most of the week living out of a hotel.

So fucking frustrated, why's it take me a year to drop two sizes? Why do I have to wait another goddamn year to drop the last 2? Am I just some kind of lazy fuck? Why don't I just cut calories again? Why's it 10 degrees outside, I should go jogging... why can't I get this right? Why is this taking so long? I look awful...

I'm so used to the binge and purge cycle that I honestly don't know how to deal with just this: approaching eating and exercise not as a binge or purge time but an actual altering of my whole life, so I *don't* have to binge or purge again. No more binge sessions. No more crash diets. Just being better. And being that. Long term. No more bullshit. I'm tired. I'm too old to do this, and if I don't get a handle on it now, I never will.

And it's fucking hard to do when you *feel* like you're doing everything right, but society's benchmark to who you are, what you're worth, is how much fat you're carrying around on your body.

Jenn and I are about to head out for a birthday dinner, and I just put on my favorite brown jacket, the one with the third button that's too tight a fit to close down there around my hips -

- and I just closed it tonight without a hitch. No fabric stretching. Easy close.

Whooosh of relief --

Because the easy fit reminded me that I was right about my "set" weight point. I'm heading back there.

The women in my family have big hips, so when we're in good shape, our set point is about a 10/12. If I was smaller than that, I'd either be a serious athelete or dying of cancer. This means I've actually spent most of my life at a 14/16, which is perfectly reasonable for me and my frame. I'm currently a 16, same size I'm at in the profile picture (you'll note I included the full scectrum of life photos on my photopage).

This is not an unreasonable thing. It is, in fact, quite comfortable. It's just... it's just... I think I was just scared. I was scared that I'd treated myself so horribly that I couldn't get back into good shape, back into a 12 where I'm big enough to be intiminidating and fit enough to carry out the threat.

In the back of my head, forever, I think, is going to be this fear of backsliding. This fear of just giving it all up and reverting back to who I was once-upon-a-time ago, and though that's a good driving force to get me off my ass, there's a deep, gnawing fear that that awful person is who I really am, is my default. Do I see an increase in weight as being tied to being a weaker person? Well, yes, actually, I do, because the history of my (however short) life has seen the two biggest weight spikes at the two most turbulent, stressful times of my life. So I'm going to associate weight spikes and huffing and puffing up stairs with being a bad person.

I just don't want to be weak again. Physically, emotionally. It's like that deep fear just sits on your shoulder, leering. It's the same fear that sends me into mild panic attacks at the thought of forcing myself to go on dates (man, I've been on a dating kick, lately - it's midmonth, I'm ovulating. I'll be better next week):

You try and do that, and you'll be that weak person again. You know how you get. You'll fail. You'll backslide. That's just what you do. This is your life. This is how it has to work. Just like this. Add anything else to it, and the delicate balance you've got is going to alter, and it'll all come crashing down.

Is there ever a cure for this sort of thinking? I don't know. You just live it.

Some days are better than others.

Life is Hard.

After all, it eventually kills you.

Feeling a little off today. Went to my pilates class, but skipped boxing because Sifu Dino showed up, snarked off something that really irked me, and then hung around while the boxers were warming up.

And I just wasn't in the mood for him.

I have this bizarre reaction to Sifu Dino. I have no idea what's up with it. It's not an attraction thing - he doesn't do anything at all for me - but it's definately a physical reaction that sets me on edge. I hasten to add that this is a purely personal thing: he's a good guy, and lots of people - men and women - love working with him.

It's like every time I see him, I want to fight him. This is the stupidest thing ever, of course, cause the guy could rip both my arms off if I looked at him funny, and cripple me for blinking weird. And here my body goes, switching into combat mode when I see him.

I remember when I first started working for Blaine, and whenever he came up next to me, I expected him to hit me. Blaine's a big guy, about 6ft tall (I'm 5'9, but in heels, I can easily look him in the eye), and outweighs me by something like 50 or 60lbs. But he's also a big puppy dog, a sweet guy, who I actually haven't even ever heard raise his voice. I wasn't hit a lot as a kid, and though my ex threatened violence, and I got the same sort of hunched defensive reaction when Blaine would lean over me as I did when my ex screamed at me, my ex wasn't exactly an intimidating person - same height as me, and I outweighed him - so I'm not sure where this aversion for big, physically powerful men comes from (and, in fact, Sifu Dino's only like 5'10, but the way he holds himself, the way he's built, his attitude, is one that exudes some sort of danger trigger for me - not an attraction one).

Weird.

Don't Say Writing Has No Meaning

From Moorish Girl:

And I'll always be jealous of how he [my father] once spent an airplane ride shooting the shit with Salman Rushdie (during his fatwa years). When he got off, a police squad was waiting to escort Rushdie off the plane. My baba came home that night and told me, "Randood, don't believe when the donkeys say writing has no meaning. A row of police men in riot gear...for a writer! No meaning, my ass."

Men of Science

Just got my latest copy of Scientific American.

Why is it that whenever they do a story on "early man" the covershot is always, always, always a man holding a spear?

Because showing a woman's breasts on the cover (however artistically rendered) is scary? Or just because the idea of a female form standing in for "all humankind" is really scary?

I would love to see a woman with a spear representing "all of mankind."

It would be no more or less totally representative than this stupid "artistic" rendering.

More Weighing In on Dowd

Oh, good. Feministing takes on Dowd. My favorite paraphrase from this one has to be "Feminism isn't a fucking dating service."

That one's going on my quote list.

Amanda's got some good reactions as well, and links to others, who aren't so good. She points out that we're still seeing articles and "studies" with a focus on male desire, on "what men what." We've gotta find other ways of talking about this (in fact, the guy she links to, and the guy he links to, both Assume this Truth: there's no talk of equals, but What I Want, What Makes Me Look Good. I don't see any talk of partnerships or mutual affection in their rants, just assumptions that they should be patted on the head for dating women who have subscriptions to The Economist).