Turnabout's Fair Play

The Wheel of Time turns, and....

Ha. Sorry. Couldn't help it. You know, after decades and decades of listening to people harping on about women and their biological clocks and "all women want to get married as soon as possible" crap, it's sorta funny to see the tables turned:

"Dr. Harry Fisch, a urologist at Columbia University, asserts that men over 35 are twice as likely to be infertile as those under 25, and that a drop in testosterone after 30 can contribute to a psychological need to drop domestic anchor. And as the increase in fertility technologies and professional commitments for women pushes the average age of marriage back, some men are assuming a take-no-prisoners approach to shopping for a life mate.

For ages, men who have reached a certain age -- 35, perhaps, or 40 -- and found themselves single have freaked out. These days, their quests to settle down seem not to be the exception, but the rule."

::snicker:: You know, there's a social pressure aspect to it that comes into play for men about 30-35; the same pressure women often feel at 20-25 if they're not at least in a "serious relationship." I work with a couple of guys in that crucial "over thirty but not yet forty" range, and I can tell you that they're wife shopping with as much or more zeal than their late-twenties, early-thirties female counterparts.

35 is the magic number for the guys I work with. They're getting itchy. How much of that is nature, and how much is society saying, "Uh, dude, if you have kids now, they'll be 20 when you're 55. Better get going! Start up the interviews!" is anybody's guess.

But it's damn funny. Twenty years ago, nobody would have even mentioned guys who were eager to get married. We'd keep pretending that the only people interested were women.

Well, you know what? When women are able to financially support themselves, have kids with the help of friends or donors, and create their own lives independently, there's also not so much of a push for them to hook up with some random guy, either.

This is the scary female autonomy everybody's freaked out about.

Women who are free to live the lives they choose.

Scary.

Amanda, Echidne, Trish, all with some views.

Scientific American's April Fool's Joke

What scares me so much about living here in the US right now, and dealing with all of the pseudo-religious hysteria is that when somebody tries to make a joke, it takes me way too long to get it.

Here's the brillant editors of Scientific American, from the latest issue's editorial:

"For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by accusations that the magazine should be rennamed Unscientific America, or Scientific Unmamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But... you were right, and we were wrong.

In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies.. Where were the answering articles presnting the powerful case for scientific creationsism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon?... As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists... ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some stuff in the cells. That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in the details.

Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.

Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how sicence should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to building an anti-ICMB defense system that can't work as promised, that will waste tens of billions of taxpayer's dollars and imperil national security, you won't hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the administration's antipollution measures would actually increase the dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades, that's not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science either - so what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science. And it will start on April Fool's Day."

Cheeky scientists.

What I appreciate about this piece is that it reminds us of what the media was actually supposed to be for in the first place: to question all the bullshit coming out of the government's mouth, to dig past the sound bites that politicians give us and tell the entire story. I want the context. I want to understand how things work, and why we're at this point. I don't want my media parroting back at me press releases straight from the Pentagon.

The media's supposed to keep government honest. Now, increasingly, because of worries about ratings, about how to keep news "entertaining" we're getting media as entertainment and sound bites. I was listening to Fox news last night, and heard one of the "news" anchors refer to Terry Schiavo's husband as her "estranged husband," an interesting word choice considering the guy still hasn't divorced her after 15 years (I suppose the fact that he's in another relationship - after 15 years! - is enough to call him "estranged," cause he's not living the life of a monk), and seems really frickin' invested in this thing. There's a big family dynamic going on in that case that *nobody* is talking about, and I'd bet you a zillion dollars that he and the parents have a fascinating relationship in which they've never gotten along. Fox news also neatly edited out the fact that Shiavo's brain damaged was likely caused by bulima; watching them erase that and try to paint her life like a storybook instead of a real life was fascinating. We should be having some serious discussions about eating disorders and protecting men and women from getting brain damage and getting hospitalized in the first place. Prevention, people.

There was also very little in-depth analysis of what, exactly, it meant that the government was getting involved in what is, in fact, a private family affair. What does this mean for other Americans? What does it mean for Americans who want to be unplugged? Instead, Anderson Cooper ran a story about a woman who sort of came out of a coma she'd been in for 18 years and can now speak a few words - she doesn't ask questions, doesn't speak in full sentences, is still pretty totally paralyzed, and doesn't appear to have much in the way of true cognition, but she can say, "Hi Mom," and "Hi Dad," and so the argument was, I guess, that even if she'd wanted to die in such a state when she was cognizant enough to make such a decision, she shouldn't have been at any point during those 18 years because now her parents feel a lot better that she's around.

Um. How, exactly, would she have felt about that?

Guess it doesn't matter.

For the record, and I'll put it here: if I'm fucking brain dead, if my entire brain is full of spinal fluid and I'm reduced to an organic shell - fucking turn me off. I don't care if coming over to my hospital room and snapping your fingers in front of my face gives you a goodie-rush and makes you happy to have "me" around because I respond to external stimuli. If I'm a fruitloop, turn me off. If I'm in a coma, that's different, and give me and my brain some time to recover, but if my cranium is full of spinal fluid, shit, fuckers, let me fucking die with some fucking dignity. Don't drag me and my family business into the homes of 200 million Americans.

That said, the media's really starting to freak me out, and it's why I don't watch a lot of television. They just keep blaring these seemingly-random events around like they happened in a vaccuum, and there's no precedent. Nobody does their homework.

Journalists need to go back to school, and Americans need to work on regaining some interest in prolonging their attention spans. We wouldn't be so surprised when the shit went down, if we actually took the time to be informed, and to understand how everything's connected.

Bah, television.

What I'm Up To

Have finally started studying for the LSATs in earnest, meaning I've been equally appalled at how incredibly poor my diagnostic score was, and interested in figuring out how to figure it out. It's learning how to think another way, and it's challenging, in its way. This is what I've been doing at work instead of blogging, that and wishing I had an extra pair of contact lenses... can't get around to my eye appointment until this weekend, and my eyes are pissed at me.

I've got a lot of stuff to get together over the next 6 or 8 months, and it's just hitting me that I'm at the ass-end of March, moving full-on into Spring, and I don't know where I'll be headed next Spring (as I recall, my lease for 2006 will end May 30th). So I've got a lot of thinking to do, and a lot of planning. Have started looking at law schools in Chicago, expecially those that offer part-time night schedules that'll let me have an actual income while I'm going to school. Not sure if that's the best way to go: in a perfect world, the school would be free and the state would support me while I bettered myself. In return, I could be drafted as a state attorney for two years.

But, ah, what kind of a country would that be? Doctors and lawyers getting "free" education in return for a couple of years public service. Might lower health care costs...

Have also gotten stuck in a nervous-eating mode, as I'm stressed on a couple of other levels right now, the sort that just take time to hit a resolution on their own, at which point the stress will be either over or just beginning. Can't wait until that's done, cause I ate way too many bagels today. That's the problem with letting up my eating habits for the weekend - it tends to take me a lot longer to get back on track.

Sad, sad. Easing back into MA classes. Hoping to have a full work-out schedule again by next week.

Loooong Weekend

Enjoyed a very relaxing weekend, and am having trouble coming back to just about everything. Got some writing to work on...

Snow in December is Sexy

Snow in March is not.

Yellow came into the office at 10am yesterday and left at 3:30pm.

I have no guilt about my workday habits.

In other news, I'm subsisting mainly on weak echinacea tea and contemplating skipping out of work at noon today, because I'd rather be in bed.

It's been one of those... months.

Just a Note on Downtime

When I started blogging, I discovered a compulsive need to open the tattered edges of my emotional raincoat and expose the nasty parts beneath.

That's Ayelet Waldman at Salon, touching on the first of several reasons she stopped blogging.

I wanted to throw this up here real quick this week because it says so much about why I decided to take another breather and stay away from hacking through a bunch of emotional turmoil here moment-by-moment. Some of that has abated, which is why I wanted to post the link above. The other part is that she's very right about the other big problem with blogging: the blogging is fucking with my real writing. When your goal is to write books, and someday make a living doing it, well... this moment-by-moment knee-jerk gut-reaction real-time stuff is a very different type of writing from the mull-over-your-experiences-distill-reimagine-setup-imaginary-template-plot-out-cut-distill-squeeze type that I do in my book and story writing, and switching gears is a bitch.

And that's a problem. And I don't have a solution to it, except to close up shop a few weeks a month, or stem the tide of posts, limit myself to once a day.

I'm going to need to find a way to balance a lot of things in the coming weeks and months, and blogging's going to be one of them...

She-Blogger!

via Tild

Blog Down

Well, it's another crazy week. I've got lots of backlogged writing to do, and a whole house to clean, and etc. etc.

So I'll see you all on Monday. Have a great week!

Well, at Least They're Being Obvious About a Woman's Worth

Paying a woman to have a kid?

You know, considering that the cost of that kid over it's lifetime is way, way more than 10K, I think it's a pretty bum deal.

A Couple of Good Finds

Today was goodie-finding day. After becoming incredibly irate again at the "But if there are so many women bloggers, why doesn't anybody know about them" thing, I decide to... add more women bloggers to my own woman-blogger site.

Why the fuck not.

I was cleaning up the blogroll (if I don't check a site regularly, I tend to cut it out, and this inspires me to go looking for new people). You must check out:

Sisters Talk: a fantastic blog by Genia Stevens.

Pseudo-Adrienne's Liberal-Feminist Bias: I'd known she was out there via comments on another's blog, but have just now (finally) got around to blogrolling her...

Cool Beans: Beans of Alas has her own shop, of course...

A Bird's Eye View

One Good Thing: Yea. I've really been needing to update my blogroll for awhile...

XX Blog: a group blog

Those Pesky Fat Women: Remember When the Curve of a Hip was Sexy and Not a Sign of Moral Disease?

What the hell is this?

Not only is it pure junk to keep using that stupid BMI formula to calculate a person's "healthy" weight (it doesn't take muscle mass into account, bone structure, body struction, etc., so Brad Pitt and George Clooney get classified as "obese" and if you're applying that shitty formula to this broad a template, what you're gonna get back as "results" is nothing but sheer junk), but why the fuck did they do this study only on women? Do men not get fat in a way that should be "worrying" since women are the ones we're all supposed to be looking at? Or do men just get a "get out of jail free" card? They don't spend enough on dieting products, I guess. Better work on changing that.

The leading causes of death in the world are still from infectious diseases and malnutrition: that means most people in this world are dying because they have shitty healthcare and poor nutrition. In fact, I'd bet that a lot of those "fat" people in developed countries who're below the poverty line are suffering from malnutrition, too: living on macoroni and McDonald's isn't exactly a great step in healthy living.

Shit, you fuckers: women are supposed to be carrying around an extra 35,000 calories for babies and nursing. That's what estrogen does. That's why I've got an increased appetite now that I'm back on female hormones. Did they take pregnant women out of this study? Nursing women? Women who were within two years of having a kid?

No, probably not.

Let's just continue telling people how fat and stupid they are, so they get so frustrated about it that they binge eat and stop exercising all together because it won't make them "thin enough."

Bah.

You can take your concentration-camp chic elsewhere.

Utopian Hell on Gender Equity

"My mother is 5′3″ and worked as a police officer for ten years. She passed the very same physical fitness tests that the men did, and with little complaint. Every day, for ten years she faced angry truck drivers that were three times her size, and gave them tickets. She did more physically demanding work than your average police officer, including lugging around portable truck weights that weighed a couple hundred pounds a piece. The requirements aren’t that hard to get by, and I haven’t heard anyone, since I was a teenager, discuss lowering them. That’s not what gender equity is about.

Gender equity is about other things. Gender equity is about the fact that my mother, while working in this capacity, was given second-hand men’s bullet proof vests that afforded no room for her breasts, and never fit right. Gender equity is about getting paid the same as the male who’s doing the same job as you. Gender equity is what feminism is about. It isn’t about who has more muscles, or whether or not muscles matter.

What you’re really saying is ‘Go ahead and discriminate against me and the rest of the women in the world based solely on what you think our bodies can and can not do.’"

Read the rest

Fuck-ups and Mental Blowouts `05

I honestly can’t convey just how great it is to be back in the Chicago office. It’s great to be back in Chicago in general. I missed Cyllia and the lead architect (let’s call him Mr. T.), and getting calls from Sarah, and waiting until 10am for Yellow to show up, getting back to creating materials for projects I actually understand and have a handle on… yea, it’s nice. It’s nice to be sitting at my own fucking desk with my music at hand and coffee in my own coffee mug.

It’s the little things.

Not that things are terribly easy right now… Life is incredibly busy, full, stressful, both physically and emotionally.

I didn’t realize just how ragged I was running until last night, when Jenn and I went out for our usual Sunday Borders & Starbucks run. I sat down at Borders and relaxed, found a beginning runner’s guidebook (shin splints. Ah. That’s what I’ve got after Friday’s run. Ah. Yes.), then moved to the back, picked up a book of Alaska photographs… and was confronted by a rather irritated-looking Jenn, who snapped at me for not being more visible, as she’d apparently been looking for me for some time.

We exited the building, Jenn still pissed off, and she bit off at me for my ability to blend into my surroundings and make if very difficult to be found, and why was she the one who always had to come looking for me? Why couldn’t I go looking for her? Borders, the grocery store, it was all the same! I’d lose myself forever, and she’d have to track me down! How could I be so annoying!

Yea.

Jenn and I are a little stressed right now. Can you tell?

I took a deep breath and halted our course at the corner of Broadway & Lawrence and felt myself doing the little mental checklist backpeddle: if I start screaming at her for being silly and being upset at a silly thing, and effectively blaming me because she’s unable to find me in a room full of people, what’s going to come out is us just screaming at each other for a silly reason because we’re both tired, hungry, and incredibly, incredibly stressed out. So, effectively, we’ll be having a snippy verbal fight at the corner of Broadway & Lawrence for no fucking good reason except that we’re really tired, and then we’ll be pissed at each other for the rest of the night, which will be fucking stupid, as we hardly see each other anymore anyway, and during the time we’re together, it would be nice if we weren’t pissed off at each other.

So I said, “OK, how can we fix this?”

And just her talking about how pissed off she was seemed to make her feel better. We discussed why she was pissed off, which I really tried to sympathize with, but which I couldn’t understand because I wasn’t in any sort of hurry while browsing the bookstore. I didn’t think our Borders run was on a time schedule. I was just there to relax and read books, and when I got bored, I’m sure I’d have gone to find her. But she’d gotten bored before I had.

I couldn’t think up any good solution for this, except that whenever we went out, we should have a time schedule and a meeting place. But that seemed really counterproductive to me, as I reserve weekends for relaxing time, and having a time schedule on everything seemed incredibly stressful.

“Let’s just go home and skip Starbucks,” I said, putting my arm around her. “I’ll order the Thai food and go and pick it up. I know you’re totally stressed out. We’re stressed. Let’s just go relax, OK?”

After talking, she seemed to feel better, and suggested we go to Starbucks anyway, and my whole body relaxed, and I was like, “Oh, thank God, calamity averted,” and my mind and body sort of crashed, so that by the time we sat down at Starbucks, I was on the downside that comes after an adrenaline rush. I felt drained and tired; totally emotionally tapped out. Backpeddling, trying to avert a snippy argument in Uptown with, basically, the only friend I have in Chicago, trying to keep this relationship together and stable when we only see each other once a week or so, had blasted out the last of my emotional resources.

It’s an accumulation of little things, and the last little thing broke me.

I’ve spent the last week living out of a hotel room and trying to negotiate a relationship with an actual guy that includes not only the friendly part (which is difficult enough), but the sex part (and everything that comes with it), and both of us bring our own emotional baggage into the mix, and that’s gotta be dealt with up front, and that’s what I’ve been dealing with all week, on top of the fucking hotel living, the mostly non-existent workouts, and the incredibly, incredibly, stressed out and fucked up work environment at our office out there. It’s a fuckfest.

But what really did it was the emotional stuff, because I’m so bloody fucking sick of emotion. Because I was pulling out of myself as much care and nurturing and understanding as I had left in order to not get into a pissing match on a Chicago street, and it blasted me out.

So we sat in Starbucks, and I started to bleed out this stream-of-consciousness thought on what I’d felt in the street, and how that fed back into everything else that’s gone on this week, and this year, just to sort of bleed it out so Jenn would know where I was at. What it comes down to is that I’ve got one friend in Chicago, and she’s tapped out: she’s got an SO, too, and her SO and her Ph.D. responsibilities take up a lot of emotional energy, which means she’s just as tapped out as I am… and honestly, I’ve reached the point where I realize I’m so broken down that I’m willing to ask for help – and the only person I’ve got around to ask for help is tapped out (Jenn insisted this wasn’t the case, that if I ever needed anything – but she’s tapped out. Trust me. She can’t take any of my bullshit onto her already full plate. It just ain’t gonna happen, unless she’s willing to have a mental blowout, too, and I’m not gonna incite that. There’s a point at which being a good friend means not asking things of your good friends, because they don’t know how to say “no” to people they care about any more than you do).

So I was forced to realize just how much trying to start up a relationship after six years of being on my own has taken out of me. It’s been about a month now, which is about the point you both realize the other isn’t a psycho, and you start trying to build stuff up and work things out, and there are a lot of ghosts and demons I’ve got tagging along behind me, stuff I didn’t even realize I had.

The problem with having been in a really unhealthy/abusive relationship and not having any real “relationship” since then is that you’ve got a really fucked up template about how things are supposed to go; and yea, I mean, sure, any time you’re with somebody new, you learn a new set of rules and preferences, but for me, there are weird ones like when I said something that really cut him (not realizing what I did), and he went a little quiet and stoic before responding, but during that long silence, that little light went off in my head, “I’m going to get hit. He’s going to start screaming at me. He’ll throw something at me. I need to practice some defense moves in case he freaks out on me.”

There was no violence or screaming, of course (I’d really like to think I’ve made a better, more adult choice this time around, and instead, we spent several hours talking this over), but the fact that I had that reaction when I realized I’d irritated/hurt the guy in bed with me was really telling about how fucked up my expectations are of what a relationship entails. Says a lot about why I’ve avoided them for so long.

If I wasn’t so crazy about this guy, of course, I wouldn’t be doing this. It’s too much for me to do right now, and I wasn’t ready for it… but shit, let’s face it: it’s time for me to get over my bullshit. I can’t go on avoiding intimacy forever because I’m afraid that every guy around the corner is going to turn out to be just like my ex (charming and passive for a year and then screaming, demanding, controlling, blah blah, insert your domestic abuse cliché story here). I’ve reached the point in my life where I have enough confidence in myself to walk away if somebody ever tries to pull that bullshit again, and I’ve read enough stories just like my own to (I hope) recognize the danger signs and pull away before I get too entrenched, but of course, there aren’t any guarantees. People change. Shit could happen. I just need to know that I’m strong enough now to walk away from a relationship with somebody who seeks to take away my agency and confidence. It’s not my job to mother people, or fix people, and the last thing I need is a guy around who’s condescending and who holds me back from doing what I want in order to make himself feel better about his own choices.

It’s funny; I’ve read lots of stories about women who’ve been in abusive relationships, but I haven’t read many accounts of women trying to get back into relationships after having been through a shitty one where your template has become “relationship=me not being a real person/putting up with someone else’s draining bullshit/losing myself to someone else’s desires.”

For me, it’s not easy in the least. In fact, it’s one of the most emotionally draining things I’ve ever done, because every time I turn around, I’m finding something else that I’m weird about. I had a very, very, fucked-up relationship template.

And, of course, relationship issues are never one-sided, and we both bring stuff to the table, and negotiating all of that while trying to have a life… yea. It’s not easy. I didn’t think it was going to be. And it’s taking a lot out of me right now.

I don’t know yet if it’s going to be too much. I’m hoping that now that I’m back in Chicago, things will ease off. I’ve got my martial arts class tonight (FINALLY, after four or five weeks of NOTHING), jogging tomorrow, some cleaning to do. I’m back inside my life, and it’s a life I’ve built up that I really, really like.

Today was the first time I actually considered staying in Chicago after next year. I love this place, this life. I might not be able to afford to stay in the place I have now, but I could just get a studio or one-bedroom, or, if I can get a better-paying job, I might be able to figure something out. There are law schools in Chicago, if that pans out. If not, there’s plenty of writing to do here, and a community college down the street where I can pile on some extra classes to keep my atrophying brain in gear.

There’s a lot up in the air right now. I don’t know how it’s going to pan out. Usually, I take great comfort in not knowing what’s going to happen. It’s how I know I’m doing the right thing. But here, now, there are so many variables that they’re weighing deeply on me, and I need some time that I don’t have to really figure out what I want over the next couple of years. More and more, I want to throw off the law school idea and run away overseas for another stressful blowout year where I sleep on a mattress on the floor and work a crappy job or live as a poor student… When you realize that the next big birthday is 30, you tend to want to go out and live that crappy poor student life as much as possible with the last decade you’ve got to do it with any respectability.

I don’t know. I don’t know. I suppose that’s what it comes down to: there are a great deal of things I don’t know, and I’ve hit the tipping point where that’s actually starting to matter to me.

Quote of the Day

"Man [sic] cannot live on beer and the Polish smoked sausage in the fridge alone. Sometimes, he must send out for curry." - Empire of Dirt

"Stitching Time" By Stephanie Burgis

Check it out at Fortean Bureau:

"Imagine a farmhouse surrounded by snow. Not a thin layer of soft, flaky whiteness, the kind you might see in more civilized climates--this is Northern Michigan, where the snow falls and falls until it buries the roads, covers the windows, and mounts up before the door. The nearest neighbors are a mile away, impossibly far. Every morning, the men in this scattered community dig their way through to the barn where the livestock are sheltered from the cold. Every winter, some of the wives go mad.

There is a special asylum for these women, and in the spring you can watch the line of farm horses pulling them away in carts, plodding down the familiar road once the snow has finally melted. Women who were mail-order brides from the East Coast, seduced by the idea of family and land. Women who carried on correspondences with lonely Western farmers for years before they took the plunge. Dr. Horace Q. Grace will care for all of them, for a very moderate price. Some of them will return to their husbands, almost cured, by the fall. Others will be less lucky, and then their husbands will start all over again, biting on the tips of their pencils as they try to recollect spelling lessons from long ago. A lonely farmer hopes for a woman’s touch....

Thank God for the invention of cross-stitch. As the snow mounts up over the window, we count the months of snow: October, November, December, January, February, March, April, May.... Our husbands tunnel out to the barn, and our needles move, silver flashing through endless reams of fabric. Up and down, count over twice.... Samplers that will hang on our walls, covering the inches, more and more of them as the eight months pass. As the clock in the corner (brought from Boston at great expense) ticks away, ticking away the seconds of our lives. As the bright colors spread across the fabric, mimicking our wildness and our despair."

Read the rest

When the Lights Went Out In Parsippany

The power throughout most of Parsippany, NJ went out this morning around 6am, and by 10am, all of us in the office were figuring out ways to get the hell out of town for the weekend.

I hopped a train(s) into Brooklyn, and am currently spending my time hanging out at Brendan's until Saturday's touchdown back in Chicago...

Ah. To be home again. Jiggety-jig.

Looking forward to getting back into my old routine. Attempted a co-run with B, and found myself in staggeringly bad shape. I've seriously got to get my eating and exercise schedule back into shape.... very, very sad.

We're Watching You!

Right-wing Eye for the Left-leaning Guy.

I snickered.

via feministing

Homegrown Terrorism

I've been holding off talking about the killing of federal judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow's family in Chicago because, literally, it happened about 8 blocks from my house. A little fucking close to home.

I was coming home from O'Hare the night of the day the story broke, and found a host of television vans with their huge telescoping satellite dishes lining both sides of the road. It wasn't until the next day when I saw a couple of crosses up in the alley and a couple journalist newsvultures vying for space that I realized this was her house.

This one creeps me out, and it hit me deeply because of the sheer guerilla terrorism of the act. If you have some kind of problem with me, come and fuck with me. You don't go after the people in somebody's life who they care about. You just don't. Random violence is reprehensible in itself, but there's something deeply jarring, deeply offensive, about going after somebody's family. It's not cool. You just don't fuck with that shit.

It now appears that they've found the guy who did it; a pissed-off guy who's life sucked cause she dismissed his case. Instead of sucking it up and getting his shit together and finding another route, he went into a spiral of depression and despair and lashed out. He took somebody out, or had them taken out; or maybe he's just been framed, who knows?

For now, what I do know is that murdering somebody's family, trying to stir up fear in others, is homegrown terrorism. In fact, until 9/11 the biggest threats to our security - and, as a woman who makes use of reproductive health services, I'd say it's *still* my own personal biggest threat - are pissed off white guys with US citizenship who feel it's their God-given right to deal out death and judgement whenever they're pissed off.

You've got a social system that isn't set up to provide help to people, a bullshit masculinity culture that says violence (especially against uppity women) is - if not totally OK - usually justifiable, and a government that turns a blind eye to the fact that women live in fear of getting LEGAL health procedures in the US because of wacko guys who feel that God gave them a dick to point around like the finger of His will, to smite whom He pleases whenever He feels like it.

Wake up, dickwads.

You want to fight terrorism? You want to live in a country where nobody lives in fear?

Get the troops back from Iraq, work on your fucking social institutions, provide some goddamn assistance to people who's lives are falling apart and who feel they have no way out. Nurture a culture that *REALLY* preaches how valuable each actual LIFE is - you want to save life, protect quality of life, maybe you should start with actual children, go volunteer to teach actual people how to read, spend a couple days a month sorting files for Planned Parenthood. Become a counselor. Help people.

Violently lashing out cause you're pissed off violates the human rights of an actual person. People who've got families. Lives.

Real fucking people.

*That's* terrorism, and if we'd spend even a quarter of the money dealing with that bullshit as we are bombing foreign countries, we'd be living in a lot less fear of ourselves.

Cause make no mistake: the biggest threat to your security (especially if you're a woman) is other Americans. The ones who make the laws. Who fund the wackjobs. Who believe it's their God-given right to control you and your body and everything you give a shit about.

And they're a fuck of a lot closer than a couple of kids in Baghdad.

Ah, Women's Boxing Fuck-Ups

Why the fuck her trainer put her in a "pro" fight after less than two months of training... shit. This is why women's boxing gets a bad rap. There's nothing inherently wrong with ritualized violence (sports), so long as everybody knows what they're getting into and everybody plays by the ritual's rules.

When you don't, shit happens.

I couldn't imagine getting into a ring after less than two months of training. After six months, a year, sure. Less than two months? Who's running this bullshit gig?

But you know, if this was a man, this would be a different story. People'd be like, "What the fuck was he thinking? Gosh, that was stupid," in addition, of course, to saying, "Why the fuck didn't anybody stop this fight?" Somebody should have thrown in the towel. They didn't. And that's their fuckup, too.

Sports are brutal. That's what they are. They're physical tests of skill and endurance. Sending somebody in there who doesn't know what the fuck they're doing is like sending some 19-year-old kid who signed up straight out of high school, putting a gun in his hand, and telling him to run flat-footed into enemy fire.

After all, he signed up for it, right?

Sure he did. But just as much as it's his responsibility to take care of himself, it's a lot of other people's job to help him get to that point.

And a lot of people fucked up.

Nuts & Bolts

So, Ikea's getting tapped for its sexist male-only assembly brochures. Living in a place where Jenn and I (yes, that's two women, no men) put together every stick of the copious Ikea furniture in the place, I find the idea of hiding the sexism in furniture manuals by pleading it's about "not offending" people (like Muslims, apparently) to be really stupid.

To be fair to Ikea, the manual I just had for the bed I put together showed a man and a woman assembling it; but yes, there's a default to "man" for the smaller pieces, and you'll never, ever, see two women putting a bed together, no matter how often this actually happens in real life.

And that, perhaps, is my biggest problem with sexism trying to co-opt the language of the "politically correct" for its own purposes: you're trying so hard (in their own words) to not offend somebody's belief that you stop telling the truth. You stop protraying the world as it really is. You start preaching abstinence-only education and filling up textbooks with lies that parade around as politically correct lingo when it fact, it has nothing to do with not offending Christians or Muslims or Athiests (nobody ever seems to care about offending athiests). It has to do with using "liberal, PC" language to reinforce stereotypes and tell lies.

There are a lot of women who spend time putting together Ikea furniture. The fact that Muslims (or whoever) don't believe women should doesn't mean that they don't. And deleting women from history, from life, makes your portrayal of life a lie, a disservice. You start trying to tell people how to live and what to do, so that each new generation of women has to start all over again from scratch, and thinks they're crazy because they're putting together their own furniture, aren't married at 25, and never have children. They think they're nuts until they get older, start digging up feminists texts, start running through blogs, and suddenly find this huge group of people just like them.

The problem, as I see it, is placing somebody else's belief before the way the world actually works; imposing somebody else's worldview on everyone else.

In the real world, both men and women put together furniture. Pretending they don't won't make it any different: it'll only make one subset of people feel better about their place in the world, while oppressing somebody else.

Unkempt Wenches of the Wilderness

From a speculative essay on the origin of human history, by our dear friend and philosophy canon member Immanuel Kant:

"In the course of time, however, the growing luxury of the town-dwellers, and in particular the seductive arts in which the women of the towns surpassed the unkempt wenches of the wilderness, must have been a powerful temptation to the herdsmen to enter into relations with them and to let themselves be drawn into the glittering misery of the towns."

I want a T-shirt.

Can it be any more obvious that men who write books with stuff like this in them aren't actually talking to real women at all?

Frickin' hilarious.

via kelby

Work Again, Work Again, Jiggedy-Jig

Another day, another dollar. Back in New Jersey. Last fucking week in NJ, dammit. Only mildly sleep deprived, because I was smart enough to take a Tylenol PM last night.

Stuck in the Tuesday conference calls of doom: eight to nine hours of `um. Yum. Here's a great idea for running your project - Fly people into New Jersey for conference calls that everyone else is calling into. What a grand idea. I suppose the fact that I'm here to make copies, too, justifies the $2200 in expenses I'm racking up. Ha.

Work out tonight, dinner, catch up on some story reviews. Maybe. Entertain a guest. The usual.

Can't wait for this week to end.

Thoughts on Polygamy/Polyamory

Jason's got some thoughts up on polyamory (I'm going to say polyamory as opposed to polygamy, because I feel that polyamory implies that everyone involved is marrying *each other* as opposed to polyandry or polygmany, in which it's more along the lines of one person of one sex marrying a bunch of people of the other sex, and if we're gunning for equality, you've gotta get all the polys into one word).

I went through a couple years of serious thought about my sexuality, and about the time I came up with the realization that yea, boringly, I was mostly straight, I also realized I was boringly hardwired for monogamy, no matter how alluring the idea of polyamory was (I have a lot of fun playing with polyamory in my fiction). So I've done the research, looked around at places like alt.polyamory and had discussions with a woman who had an open marriage, read about other people's open marriages, and am always fascinated with finding out how other people negotiate their sexual pairings.

As somebody who's liberal-minded, I realize that what works for *me* obviously *doesn't* work for everyone (which, I think, is the typical conservative mindset - "If *I'm* a man who thinks that kissing a man is gross, *all* men must feel that way!"), so I'm really interested in what'll happen if people do start pushing multiple marriages in this country again (the polys not being anything new under the sun). So far, I don't have too much of an opinion on the matter, though I tend to think consenting adults should be allowed to enter into whatever pairing they wish.

However, my mind immediately turns to Heinlein and his massive political/financial marriages in Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Friday, just to name two. What you can do with marriages like these is wed not for emotional/sexual feeling but for consolidation of money and power, so all the heavy hitters keep the goods within one family.

If you think there's a huge rich/poor divide now, think of the day when multiple billionaires consolidate their funds into one huge family-corporation.

Heinlein saw it.

Others Weigh in on PP

Amanda and Bitch Ph.D. and Media Girl, on PP as well.

Glad I decided to write about this one; sometimes going real personal can bring it home.

More on Being Beautiful... Only, Less

Well, Kirstie Alley's Fat Actress is gonna be out soon; not that I'm going to see it, cause I don't watch tv, but I've been interested in the tabloid interest in her and the show.. mainly because she's 5'8 and considered an obese balloon at her highest weight of.... drumroll.... 203 lbs.

Um.

203 lbs does not a freakshow make. If she was a guy who was 5'8, 203 no doubt people would be like, "Damn, that's a husky guy! He's kinda chubby!" They would not tell him to cover himself up and hide in his bedroom in shame.

Well, not quite yet anyway. Not in... some circles.

What gets me about Kirstie Alley's look is that she's not ugly. She's not unnattractive just the way she is. Like the women in Carnivale and Kate Winslet in Engima, a size 12 does not a sailboat make.. particularly when you see these women in real life and realize that the reason they look so huge on screen is because their co-stars are all 112 lbs.

I've been thinking a lot recently about my old pet interest: desire. What draws people together, why we obsess so much about our looks and how we look with the sorts of people we're attracted to.

I remember watching Carnivale and being a little weirded out that nearly half of the female main characters weighed more than 120 lbs. As I discussed before, it was a great choice for the show, and the time period, and the more I watched the show, the more I wondered why we don't have that sort of diversity on regular television and movies. Because you know what? Cynthia Ettinger is really beautiful, and has an amazingly powerful sexual prescence on screen... it just took me forever to realize it, because I'd gotten so fooled (me!) into reading "fat" (which, again, in Hollywood means anything above 120 lbs) as "no sex drive/no sex appeal." Seriously.

In fact, the only people allowed to be truly attractive appear to be the beautiful Hollywood types. Funny, how they're the only ones who're having sex, and yet... all these babies in the world. Imagine that!

It's funny, but until I read this article about the Camilla/Charles affair, it didn't really hit me that perhaps one of the reasons why nobody wants the grand wedding and the media isn't terribly interested is because they're not beautiful pepole. Diana was beautiful. Yes, she lived in her own private hell and dealt with bulima and probably had a lot of psychological freak-out image stuff, but she looked really pretty on screen, so during the wedding, when nobody wanted to look at Charles at all, they could just pan to princess-fairytale-pretty Diana.

Now, instead of a pretty farce, they've got a real love story about two not-perfect people who've been madly in love against all odds and despite all the media grotesquerie for thirty-five years... and people just laugh at them. It's like this incredibly fucking big joke that two not-perfect people could actually... love each other.

We'd rather have virginal Diana marrying her prince and pretend that somehow, by sheer virtue of her prettiness, it would make her attractive to Charles, and he to her. For some reason. Because, obviously, everyone should be immediately soul-struck by appropriately beautiful people - that is, people who look the way "beautiful" people are understood to look; thin, blond, women and tall, built men; and that's supposed to be all there is to it. Just look like a walking Abercrombie & Fitch ad, and you'll be the happiest, most loving couple(s) in the whole world.

Right?

Just buy enough plastic surgery, starve yourself, laugh a lot at some loser guy's jokes, and you'll be happy. Happy, happy. I mean, you're pretty, he's pretty. That's all there is to it, right?

Jenn mentioned an article she'd read about the rush of plastic surgeries that porn star women have been undergoing... oh, no, not just for the breasts and the tummy tucks - for the genitals. For the clit and the labia. To form a more "perfect" uniform version of female genitalia, so that they, too, all look the same.

Porn full of the same faces, the same pair of breasts, the same hips and thighs, the same clits and lips. Forming a more perfect female form. A uniform one.

Does that make us less scary? Easier to please? After all, if all women are the same, it certainly makes going to bed with them easier. And getting to know them easier. In fact, if all women were robots, life would be a lot easier for men, in general. At least for the straight ones.

Funny. Science fiction not so far off.

And watch out, boys: the consumer media culture's coming for you, too. And the day when you're expected to conform to body type ain't that far off. In some circles, it's already here.

Welcome.

The Annual Pilgrimage to Planned Parenthood

Because we don't talk about our uteruses enough.

I hadn't been in for my yearly exam in about three years, when I had to get a clean bill of health in order to get a student visa for South Africa, and it was About That Time again.

I chose to go to my old friend Planned Parenthood, as I had good memories of the one I went to back in high school. It was a small little office just off Main Street, and I was very comfortable there. It was like any other doctor's office, only full of women, women, everywhere, and frankly, when it comes to my reproductive health, I've always been a lot more comfortable with women administering to me, and I've never had a male gynocologist. Not by choice, mind you, it's just always sort of worked out that way, and to be honest, though being splayed open and prodded at for health reasons doesn't flip me out or anything, there's just an extra comfort level when the person doing the check-up's a woman.

So I made an appointment for an exam at one of the PP's closest to my place, and hopped on the train after work and went over. The building was easy to find, labeled prominently, very nice.

I opened up the main door and found myself in an odd little boxed room with a door in front of me and a door to my right that was, in fact, locked. I peered in through the small rectangular window and saw a set of stairs and some office plants.

Weird.

Then I saw the call box by the door.

Did I have to buzz in to Planned Parenthood?

Ah.

I picked up the phone by the door and hit the intercom button, told them I had a four o'clock appointment.

I was buzzed into the building, and proceeded upstairs...

Where I found a woman sitting in a booth behind bulletproof glass who asked for my ID and verified that I had an appointment.

She then buzzed me into the waiting area.

I felt like I was there to buy heroin, or maybe get a child prostitute for the night.

What the fuck?

Inside, I checked in up front and filled out all my paperwork (which, blissfully, didn't ask me when the last time I had sex was. I figured the gyno would ask anyway. I can never seem to get away from that question).

No, I haven't had any pregnancies, no STDs, no I don't have asthma, high blood pressure, oh, yes, my dad has high blood pressure, oh, yea, my dad's had a heart attack.... but me, I'm good. Check, check.

I turned everything over and sat around waiting to be buzzed into the actual medical office. Oh, yea, both the doors leading into the clinic were the gotta-buzz-you-in type, too. Three doors of buzzing-in before you can get to clinic personnel.

And I did a people watch, listened to all the women around me. There was one girl there with a guy who was most likely her boyfriend, a couple of women there with friends. A couple of friends were talking in low voices about abortion services, about women they know, about a boyfriend who was insisting a friend bear a pregnancy to term because, "He really wants to be a dad."

Sitting there, listening to these women, watching a room full of women waiting, another roomful behind glass sorting patient folders and scheduling appointments and handing over birth control pills, and having gone through the security checks in order to get in there, it really sort of hit me for the first time - not in an abstract way, because I've realized it in the abstract many times - but in a real, gut-kick visceral way, just how fucking terrified as all hell men are of women, of this power, of this choice. This is birth and death in this room, right here. This is where all the power is. And it scares the fuck out of people so much that they're willing to come in here and murder healthcare professionals and bomb us and our kids as we sit around waiting for a pap and some pills.

How fucked up is that? To live in a place where we live in fear of being killed for exercising power over our body's reproduction?

Sweet fuck.

I've got all the power in the world, and I've gotta go into a locked-down building so I can exercise control over that power; so I can make these choices.

What bugs me is that the fear and stigmatization of women's reproduction and control over it *is* so intrinsically tied to women's health that what's happening is that women's health, I feel, gets a similiar veil of fear and shame pulled over it. If you've gotta be buzzed into a building and feel like a criminal for going in, and if there's protestors outside screaming at you that you're a whore and threatening violence, you're less likely to go in at all - even if you're just getting a pap or an HIV test.

PP is more affordable than other places, it's more friendly, the staff is mostly volunteer and always very cool. Twenty-something student volunteers were running the ship behind the desk; those smart, savvy, cool women who believe in what they're doing.

Once I got buzzed in, I got another in a long line of great gynos; very friendly, professional, excited to talk about birth control options, relaxed and cool with the exam while using just the right amount of humor.

I checked out well, got a bunch of info on IUDs, which I'll be switching to in the next couple of months, because the failure rate's way, way lower than pills, and they last a hell of a lot longer - about 10 years. More expensive in the short term - about $450, but pills are $21 a month, so over 5 or 10 years, you're getting a pretty good deal.

I've always been in great health as far as the female parts go, so after much discussion with the gyno, it looks like that's what I'll end up doing.

I was buzzed back out into the waiting area, then buzzed back in through the check-out door where I picked up my pills and settled my bill.

All the power in the world.

It's a funny thing, reproductive power, and the fear of it. It finally really hit home for me, because here I am, in real life, trying to get out to these places, to get my shit taken care of; and you know, I'm lucky, cause it wasn't Abortion Day, and the protestors weren't out, and I didn't have to push through a crowd of hecklers.

Lucky.

Lucky.

How fucked up is it, that a woman's ability to choose whether or not to bear a life is so incredibly fucking scary that there's an entire formal and informal institution of fear and shame set up around her body to keep her from understanding it? How fucked up is it, that when I say that out loud, or here in a public forum, that people just dismiss it, pretend talking about women's uteruses is boring and unimportant and not worth thinking or talking about? How can they say that and then spend their time passing laws that directly affect me and my pesky uterus, and heckle me when I try and take control over my body's processes? How can they say that and then tell me that not only is my body not worth discussing (so long as I'm the one discussing it), but that having this body makes me bad at math, too emotional, weak and inferior and flippant and flighty?

Why talk about uteruses at all? It's so obvious that they're so bloody fucking unimportant.

Obviously.

I don't scare anyone at all.

Which is why rooms full of women and contraceptives are on a lot of people's hit lists.

What's Happening

Working on getting my shit together. Feeling incredibly slothful. I've pretty much reached the breaking point with the traveling stuff - I haven't done a bit of cardio work at all this week, and only a couple days of weights. It's tragic. And I can feel it.

The writing's gone by the wayside, and about all I've been able to manage the last couple of days is sleeping and take-out food. This is not, obviously, a sustainable existence. I mean, it's one of those "hey, I'm breathing," lives, but there's not a whole lot of fulfillment to it. I recognize that I'm atrophying.

Against all better logic, I've also started seeing somebody, after a long, long dry spell of pushing people away; but shit, hey, I'm gonna give it a shot. How I'm gonna work that and get my life back together after all this traveling, I don't know, but it's worth it for me.

This should be my last week traveling into New York - I told them I was done with it after this week. After this, I shouldn't have more than a few days a month in some strange place (knock on wood) so I can train any admins they bring on.

After this week, I'll be back in Chicago, back to going to my MA classes regularly, back to eating like a reasonable person, and back to blogging regularly.

That's the plan as of now. We'll see how it goes.

Addendum

Of course, all the strength in the world won't help you a wit if... you forget the Ikea box with the actual bed slats in it.

Yes, I have three academic degrees.

Fucking shit. Guess who's sleeping on the floor tonight?

Brilliant.

Thoughts on Strength

For all my talk about women's strength being so incredibly important for self-defence and self-confidence, I haven't talked much about the actual practicality of strength, and how great it is to be able to take care of yourself as far as everyday shit goes. Maybe this has something to do with self-confidence, too.

Jenn and I did our pilgramage to Ikea today, and managed to pack up the entirety of a queen-sized bed and another whole trunkload of shit. It took the two of us to move one of the more ungainly pieces of the bed puzzle, and as she picked up her end, I watched her biceps clench; ah, yes, the benefits of working out with free weights regularly. Does it look great? Sure. Yea. But more importantly, it means you're able to heft 50-100 lbs without too much trouble.

I came home and started the purging of the old bed, pulled out the 50 lb box of paper underneath it, deconstructed the old single bed and cleaned up. I'm starting to put together the new one, and I'm thinking, you know what? This being strong thing? This is really cool. It's cool that I can live in a house with another woman and we have absolutely no trouble keeping our shit together. I change all the light bulbs, cause I'm taller; I can heft the stuff that she has trouble with; she can grab the tail end of something to make it easier for us to move it around. We can make all the basic household stuff work. I can tie the trunk of the car closed when neccessary. I know about the wonders of WD-40 on everyday items. I know how to use tools.

We make our own money. We handle our own transportation. And we can heft around our own shit.

We were watching Vanity Fair last night, a good movie full of women freaking out about how they're going to marry, worrying about their reputations, freaking out about sex or lack thereof and not getting to hop about with whom they please. Watching other people throw them into poverty, watching them using their wits to get out of it.

And you know what, shit's not great right now, there's a lot of people who'd be happy if my place in this world was as constrained as theirs was, but for now, I'm enjoying this life; being me and free and strong and smart and capable. It's not often in history that women have been able to build lives for themselves without being *too* heavily stigmatized. And yea, I'm lucky; we live in a big city, so there's more freedom. I recognize the constraints.

But right here, right now, it's nice to be alive, and not too bad being female.

One of Life's Great Mysteries

How the hell Jenn and I fit a queen-sized bed into the back of her car.

Gotta love Ikea.

More later; women in sports, the annual pilgrimage to Planned Parenthood, & regular bitching.

Blog Down

Blog will be down for the rest of the week while I work through some stuff, do some housekeeping, get my shit together, etc.

I need a break from all things computer-related for awhile.

Women, Boxing

Women beating each other up. Blood and spit. Female aggression sold as objectification of women. In fact, women should just go back to being card girls only: holding up those "Round One" signs. At least then there's nobody freaking out about their place.

What do the women have to say about it?

Well, nobody's asking, of course.

This guy didn't seem particularly concerned with why women get interested in boxing, why women would want to know how to fight, or why they continue to fight in a sport that trys to sell many of them on looks before talent (Ah, a League of Their Own, anyone?).

Like most women's sports, women's boxing isn't taken seriously, women aren't encouraged to do it - much less get good at it - and they're sold as being freaks or sexual objects before athletes. Anna Kournikova, anyone?

Somebody's still making women tennis players wear ridiculous little skirts, and it has nothing to do with their ability to play the game... and women boxers aren't being encouraged to train or taken on by the best of trainers because it's seen as a sport even more ghettoized than its male counterpart.

Does that mean women shouldn't be "allowed" to particpate in boxing? I mean, if it's so scary to see women in sports, out goes the WNBA, women's soccer, and tennis - short skirts or not.

Cause women being strong is scary.

Of course, his argument here isn't with women's sport: he feels women are being cheated into thinking that they can "compete like the boys" when in fact, the sport is incredibly ghettoized for women. What interests me is that he doesn't seem to grasp just why so many women keep coming back to it. I don't know that it has as much to do with the Rocky movies as he might think.

The problem with women's boxing isn't that women are doing it - it's that women's sports aren't taken seriously, and this one's no exception. The fact that there's often more blood involves doesn't matter a wit.

Brutal women, indeed.

What the fuck was he expecting? Skinny blonds in tutus?

via Jeff

Zombie in a Winter Storm

The only problem with trying to sneak in extra time with Brendan while in NJ/NY is that I spend the rest of the next day utterly sleep-deprived.

Not that is wasn't worth it, mind you. I'm just not exactly functioning on a high level today.

Must go drink more coffee...

Much-Anticipated E-mail

Note from my NY/NJ "boss" to the project team:

"Office hours are at your discretion."

Basically, try and be here before 9am, and stick around until at least 4 or so, OK?

Oh, finally.

Snowing here, too.

Legos Do Escher

Neat.

via Alas

Trolling Through Blogs for Useless Trivia

It's Sunday. Looking for useless trivia that doesn't piss me off. Not finding much.

I think I'm going to go out and buy books today.

Decompression

This weekend has been reserved for much-needed decompression time. The problem with go-go-go nonstop is that I need down time in order to properly evaluate everything that's going on: to look at what's going on, re-evaluate what I want, and figure my shit out.

One of Jenn's buddies from California is over for the night, and I opened up the door to find a tall, blue-eyed guy in a suit staring back at me, and felt a startled jolt at the idea that ah, yes, this was the guy I'd been hearing about for the last five years, standing at my doorway... and I looked at him, and he looked at me, and sweet fuck, he's pretty. And damn, yes, he's currently single.

We all went out for dinner, and the plan after that was to go to the Hancock Tower for drinks and then go out to the Second City comedy club and have a night of it... but after dinner, when we came back to the place so Jenn could switch coats, I realized I really didn't want to go out on the town. I just wanted to be home. I leave for New Jersey again on Monday. All I want is this time, here, in my own bed, sleeping and mulling over everything that's going on. I haven't had enough downtime.

So I bowed out of the rest, and here I am, preparing for bed, trying to work some stuff out, wondering about life, about what I want, about how everything can fit together, wondering about... just, everything, and how it can all go spectacularly wrong and change you forever, for better or worse.

I wonder, sometimes, if relationships are just sort of like the rest of the things in my life... something I'm so afraid of, but need to come to grips with in order to live fully.

I've been told that vertigo is not, in fact, the fear of falling - it's your mind fighting your body's desire to fall. We have a tendancy to desire those jumps, those freefalls into space, and what we fight, the battle we wage, is desire against logic.

For some bridges, the big kind, the ones you jump off in order to die, these are good battles to fight: having some wit keeps you breathing. But for those more modest bridges, the ones, say 55 ft. tall with a freefall into water, well, those are more realistic bridges; the ones our mind might fear, but the sort of jump that will make us different, better, for having jumped it.

That's what I'm decompressing.

Good, Old Fashioned Romance

Everybody needs a little lovin'...



via Greg.

Ah, Chicago

Oh, I'm home....

Thai food, beer, soaking in the tub, decadent reading of multiple books...

Oh, yes. This is the good life.

You're In Trouble

Mosh just took me aside with the immortal words, "You're in trouble," and put me in a closed-door meeting with him.

Thoughts running through my head:

1) Somebody's been checking my internet time. I'm screwed.

2) Somebody found my blog

3) Somebody found out that I'm staying at the Grand Hyatt week after next

4) Hopefully, I'll be fired.

In fact, Mosh was totally being a smartass, and he'd brought me in to discuss my $1000 yearly bonus that just got deposited into my account. 40% is stock, 60% is cash, but all of the taxes come out of the cash, so I've only got an extra $221 in my account.

Not exactly a high-roller.

I was thanked for doing what I do (what do I do, exactly?) and thanked for my willingnes to travel, and told what an asset I was and blah blah and hope you'll be here many years to come and blah.

I swear, people can totally sense when you're completely fed up with your job and ready to jump ship.

The Pope

Gosh, sure is lucky he had the choice to have an elective surgery, huh? Sure is great that the Catholic church thinks going to the hospital for an elective surgery is OK, if it can potentially improve and lengthen your quality of life.

How thoughtful of them, to let him choose how he'd like to be cared for. I mean, could you imagine having the procedure in place that could potentially allow him to lead a better life, but him being unable to make that choice because his religion said that only God could play God and that humans had no right to interfere with the body's "natural" processes? Like, say, birth and death?

He sure is lucky to be a white man with choices. White men sure are lucky that way.

So Incredibly Illegal

This is just sooo incredibly illegal that I didn't even think it was worthy of bringing up: it's just so illegal. You just can't do it.

But that was when I lived in another country.

Why aren't they demanding the sexual health and histories of the men whose sperm instigated these pregnancies? Aren't promiscuous men equally suspect of being "sexual perverts" because they fucked around?

Oh, wait, I forgot: women are the sexual gatekeepers. Guys get a Get Out of Jail Free card.

This is fucking grotesque. It's a mockery of women, of the supposed "equality" of women, and it's a fucking smack in the face for every fucking woman who's fought to keep her body off the state chattle market.

Bull fucking shit. Bullshit. This isn't treating women like human beings. Watch yourself being put back into line, chiklits, one Kansas attorney general at a time.

I want a record of his sexual history, seeing as everybody's sexual history is now of the utmost importance to the State.

Fuck you, asshole.

Random Links

Alaskans make me proud... Check out the latest shuttle commander... Here's what happens when your parents get pissed off with what you write...

D.H. Lawrence gets taken to the mat:

It is hard to take Lawrence's preachings about 'phallic tenderness' seriously, other than as a reflection of the deep-rooted fears evoked by the first phase of the sexual and economic emancipation of women. He is the ultimate spokesman for a particular type of male personality, so defended against a devouring mother that he is crippled by fear of commitment.

And, Look! The Gays Are Taking Over the Phillipines, too! In the army, no less! All this gayness! All this marriage! Too much love and happiness and this world might just EXPLODE!

And, for your workday amusement... Practical Applications of the Philosopher's Stone. For Drunks.

All via Jenn. Cause lord knows I haven't had the time to find all of these myself...

Hotels Suck

I don't know that I can do this "living out of hotels" thing much longer; this is probably the loneliest state of existence, ever. Being nomadic is fun and great, and I've done that - but when I've done that and lived out of a backpack and enjoyed it, I enjoyed it because I didn't really have a home or a life at the time. I was really just doing the nomad thing. Now I've got an actual home and an actual life, and this is a killer.

This is seriously wacky. How do people do this? I mean, I know all of the guys have been married and divorced at least once (including Yellow, who's only 34); I guess you do this shit and have to give up everything else. And you know what? It's not a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

Damn. I've got a lot of work to do this weekend to get the hell out of this job and figure out my shit.

Deja Vu

New Jersey. All next week. AGAIN. Weekend home.

NY city the next week, Mar 6-10th.

I knew things were bad when I arrived at the Hilton in Denver and thought, "Oh, I'm home."

This can't go on much longer.

She Won! She Won!

Amanda won the Koufax for Best New Blog!

Yay!

Thanks for voting!

Tipping Point

Well, had my expected little freakout at the Denver airport today. Made a beeline for Taco Bell, though I wasn't hungry, and ran into an obsessive desire to then eat a chocolate croissant and ice cream. About the time I got the ice cream, I was sick, and threw most of it away, but it was good little mini-binge the likes of which I haven't run into in a long time.

I've been reasonably good the last couple weeks; not eating great, but definately not binging. My workouts are sporadic, but they're getting done, and now.. and now...

I'm incredibly stressed out, I have too much going on, and I'm really fucking exhausted. I have no idea how the hell or if the hell I'm supposed to be doing whatever the hell I do at work, and I'm flying to New York again tomorrow morning, and all I want to do is be home and write books.

The reason I don't like the idea (for myself) of using drugs like, say, appetite suppressants or anti-depressants is that I think that when my body freaks out like this, it's trying to tell me something, and that something is usually, "You're unhappy. You're doing too much. You're losing sight of what you want. Slow down. Back off. Rethink."

A bunch of stuff has been going on all at once, and I haven't had the downtime to mull it all over and figure out what to do with it. I have such a huge, long list of shit (need to study for the LSATs, make my June test date appointment, gotta gotta gotta drop those two sizes [meaning continuing to eat right and exercising way more than all this traveling allows] if for no other reason than that there are far better clothes available in a 12 and I need to clean up my look, need to ask for a raise and/or dump this shit job [they'll squeeze until you say STOP], need to finish my fucking latest novel, need to get three more short stories in the mail [which will require, you know, *finishing* them first,] and etc. and more bullshit, and other bullshit and more...).

And it's a lot. I'm going to try and see if I can get away with only spending half of next week in NY, or a day in NY or whatever, as I've got a computer training class in downtown NY for Mar 7-9, and shit, I need some time at home. I need a life. This is getting fucking ridiculous.

And I know it. My body knows it. It's getting really pissed off at me.

Denver's Continuing Fuckups: And Why It Matters to You

From the state that brought you Littleton and the fucked-up still-unsolved Jonbenet Ramsey case comes the latest fuck-up by the Denver police. Not only was their latest serial rapist just out of prison... for being a serial rapist, but he confessed his post-prison crimes to the police and was released from their custody due to red tape issues. He then went out and assaulted more women and young boys.

As if that wasn't enough, some dipshit sent out all of the personal information about the two women he most recently assaulted - including their names - to a bunch of accountants "by accident." In fact, they didn't even know it had gotten out until the local news station brought to their attention the fact that they now had the names and details of the assault victims (this was just on the local 4 news, I can't find an internet article yet).

Go Denver police!

And guess what I was doing this morning? Why, I was walking to work from my hotel... my, my, it occured to me halfway over there, "I wonder if they've caught that rapist yet?"

Ah, yes. This is why police fuck-ups matter, because when you've got a predator on the streets who primarily attacks women and girls and young boys, you've got over half the population of a city looking over their shoulders. I sometimes wonder if people fuck this shit up on purpose, just to keep everybody afraid. Fuckers.

And to top off my day, which began by me looking at the news of the missing pregnant woman and her son and thinking, "Duh. The boyfriend did it," I returned home to find that yes, indeed, the boyfriend did it. And you know what, it actually got to me. It made me teary-eyed, that it was so bloody fucking obvious, that the person who fucking kills you is somebody who was supposed to give a shit about you.

Because a real man slaughters his girlfriend and her kid. That's pretty fucking manly, isn't it?

Please take your self-defense classes, my chiklits. Until guys get their shit together, about all you've got to rely on is yourself.

I'm just... disappointed.

What I Learned Today

1) Basics of Adobe Photoshop. Best. Program. Ever.

2) Improving my knowledge of Access. We're trying to implement a company-wide database system that we can apply to all of our markets. It's gonna be a tough sell to the Boys, and me and the amazing woman who put it together had a pow-wow to try and get me familiar with it so I can take it back to NY.

3) Got familiar with the electronic filing said amazing woman had set up so I can replicate it in New York.

I've got some good stuff I wanted to bitch about tonight. Will get there eventually. Leaving early today because of general exhaustion. Out to lunch. More later.

Shit I Never Thought I'd Be Doing

I've been in three different time zones in the last two days. It's now 10pm Denver time, 11pm Chicago time, midnight in New York, and I just got back from the gym where I put in my jogging time. I ate at the airport because I knew that the only place near the hotel was a sit-down, and by the time I finished there, it'd be midnight, and I'd have lost my workout time.

This was hard. It was a bitch just to psych myself up to get down there, but if I want to get in three days this week, I had to go down tonight. My motivation was simple: I repeated over and over to myself, "You'll feel better afterwards. You'll feel a lot better. You're feeling twitchy and anxious because you're traveling so much and living out of hotels and so much is on your mind, and if you exercise, you're going to feel about 80 times better. It's meditation time."

That was the only way I could get down there. Even then, I committed to a time limit instead of a miles limit because I feared I'd peter out. So it was a couple minutes walking at the beginning, a couple for cool-down at the end, and twenty minutes of jogging in the middle. I tried to stumble off toward the free weights after this, but I already did my weights this morning, and I was exhausted.

I'm committed to taking care of myself. I'm committed to being this person. The great thing about having been the absolute worst person you can be is that you always have a place you never want to go back to, and you can look at yourself now, and look at yourself then, and look forward and go, "Yea, it's possible. I can be that fucking cool."

It's possible. It's just really fucking difficult.

Stumbled back upstairs, setting my alarm for a day in Denver.

EDIT: Took out some work stuff that - it occurs to me in the light of day - might get me into trouble if it makes it back to a client.

I need to be making more money.

I'm exhausted. I was IMing my buddy Julian this morning, and peppering everything with a bunch of stupid spelling errors. I'm just wacky. I miss my MA classes so damn much. I want to go to class on Saturday, but I think I'll be risking my sanity. I'm going to need to sleep.

By Saturday, I'll have lost track of what timezone I'm in.

Keep `em Stupid

Ah, yes: America's children shouldn't be educated, they should be entertained.

"I'd rather them not do it at all," he added. "You've got a show watched by millions of children. Do children need to have gay marriage thrust in their faces as an issue? Why can't we just entertain them?"

It reminds me about the parent complaints when a high school teacher had his students engage in a debate about the validity of the war in Iraq. I think one of the parents said, basically, "These are high school students. They shouldn't be engaged in debates about these kinds of issues. They're in school to learn things, not argue. That's what college is for."

Cause high school kids are just naturally DUMB. Like women. And people from foreign countries.

For fuck's sake.

Random Links

I'm getting on a plane to Denver later today, but I've got a couple hours of office time...

So, just a couple of things. For those who haven't seen "Sideways," do. It's a great movie. I tend to bitch about movies that give me two random people who are supposed to be falling in love but don't show me what the hell it is they find attractive or interesting about each other. This one does it right. I was a believer. It's a great "people" movie about what it is that draws friends and lovers together over the long haul. Very well done.

In other news, the fucktards are back. I think they only write up this "women just don't blog" crap because it pisses women off, and gets a lot of comments going as women bitch at dumbasses who argue that women are biologically inclined to argue less. Excuse me a moment while I snicker uncontrollably. It's the same old bullshit. I think it has something to do with the incredibly short attention spans of modern media-saturated adults. Nobody stops to think about anything any more. They just vomit something up, say, "Of course," and move on to the next guy who's murdered his pregnant wife; while forgetting that yes, in fact, the leading cause of death among pregnant women is being killed by their significant other. Every time it happens people keep thinking it's some kind of fluke. Shit, doesn't anybody read anything anymore?

Amanda's got a great post up about teen girl hysteria and boy-bands/boy celebrities, and argues that a lot of this hysteria has to do with the repression of female sexuality. I have to agree with her on that point. It also puts me in mind of that scene in The Handmaid's Tale, when the incredibly repressed women are allowed to tear up an accused "rapist" a couple times a year as a way to vent their incredibly anger at the system. There's also a phenomenon among Zulu women called umhayizo a "bewitchment" exclusive among Zulu girls and young women in which they break into hysterical crying, attack anyone who approaches, and have an irresistable desire to run after and be with the man they're pining over.

There's something to be said for the repression of desire.

And, of course, there's the other point Amanda makes: that the desire for these men is articulated about being "Mrs. Somebody," and reinforcing the get-married culture. However, I think that the reason women give for wanting to be "Mrs. Somebody" may have to do with the fact that it's just not considered proper for women to have conversations about casual sex and desire. Whereas men are encouraged to talk about their attraction to women in casual terms, women get a "gotta marry him," script, even if that may not exactly be what they're looking for. There's more pressure to talk about attraction in terms of long-term viability and not "Really, it's mostly about the sex. I really, really want to drag that guy home."

Marriage - and the way a lot of women and men talk about it - has also always struck me as feeling very much like possession: wanting and desiring an object and finding a way to bind it to you in an effort to pretend that perhaps things won't change, that perhaps you can relax and be comfortable and not worry quite so much that your partner will be banging the hot thing next door. It's a false security, of course, especially now... but it's interesting to listen to people talk about it.

I'm off to lunch...

Fucktards

They wouldn't give me a late checkout time, so I had to rebook my flight, which, honestly, is a way better state of affairs. I really just want to be home for awhile. Do some laundry. I might even be able to get out and go jogging while the laundry's running.

I'm a bit exhausted. Looks like they want me in Denver for a few days next week, then more time in NY... I'm looking to book a hotel closer to downtown. These transit costs are fucking killing me. I could have bought a punching bag with this goddamn money. Spent Sat. night watching HBO boxing with Brendan, which was cool. I haven't watched professional fights since I started taking boxing classes, and let me tell you, it's waaay cooler when you have an appreciation for just how fucking difficult it is for them to do what they do...

Outta here in an hour.

It's Official

I'm in love with that guy at the front desk. We keep beaming at each other. Granted, he's paid to beam, but hot damn. I keep trying to think up ways to take him home with me...

Anyhow, as regulars have likely noticed, blogging has stalled out. We're packed into meeting blocks all week. It's an all-or-nothing business. Just don't expect miracles.

I've gotta get some food and get to the gym... Corp travel is tough. I can see how easy it is to default to bad habits. If I can travel and still get in at least three good gym days a week and continue to watch my food intake (one of the problems with being on somebody else's food schedule is that they've got you eating when they want to eat, not necc. when you're hungry). It's just going to take a lot of work.

Just like anything else.

I think I'm job searching the next time I get back to Chicago. I'm secretly hoping that in their meeting tomorrow, they decide they don't need me to fly into Greensboro, N. Carolina, and I can go home to Chicago for a week or so. I'm also trying to lock down the March 6-9th date for my return to New York - I'd prefer to do the map training they have me slated for in Manhatten as opposed to Minneapolis. Right now they're going back-and-forth with it. We'll see.

Damn, I'm tired. Sorry, I have nothing pissed off or witty to say. This is how pissed off people become conservatives: you make them work crap hours at crap jobs so they don't have *time* to think about what a raw deal the world's giving them.

We could use more pissed off people.

Out & About

Bleary-eyed and functioning on about five hours of sleep, which isn't too bad.

Had dinner in Brooklyn last night with Brendan, which I was nervous as all hell about for a number of reasons. He's the first person who's "known" me through the blog first, and met up with me offline.

In fact, this turned out to be way easier than I gave it credit for, pretty much from the moment I saw him. It was a little bit like hanging out with a smarter version of my buddy Eli (no offence in that dept. Lysha darling), which meant I was pretty comfortable after about five minutes, and felt like I'd known him a long time by the end of the night. Yay. Very cool guy. What was it I was saying about guys from NJ/NY?

I must meet more of ya'll offline. I have amazing readers ;)

More good fun this weekend, and reading recommendations.

I'm now going to go find some coffee...

I Went To Work Today And All I Got Was This Stupid T-Shirt

Insane. Insane. I don't know how anything manages to fly around here. Miracles. All of it.

I'm out of here in 45 minutes, fucktards.

This is Just So Incredibly Stupid

Sucks. Sucks. Sucks.

I'll elaborate later. Just frickin' sucks. This is just incredibly stupid. I should be sleeping NOW. I will sleep. Turn off brain. No more thinking. I promise.

Fuck.

Some days, I amuse myself with my utter inability to get my shit together.

Some day, I will be a supah ninjah.

Until then, it's just me, with a brain that won't shut off. Looooong night. The pay off is that there will be some neat bows to tie off afterward, a weekend of siteseeing, and then, real life. I could use some of that.

Well, Shit. If Nothing Else, It's Gonna Be Damn Interesting.

Or, not.

You never know.

I'm going to bed. It's a Tylenol PM night.

On Being White Trash

I've talked before about being the oldest child of a couple of burger flippers, but I haven't really talked about what it was like, socially, to be the daughter of fast-food employees; however much I enjoyed my time in the restaurants, the kids at school, the people we knew socially, didn't really see it as a terribly enjoyable experience. Fast food was something you got away from, fast.

Fast food was white trash.

I can remember a time for about two years when I'd go so far as to say my parents were "poor," though we'd likely be "lower middle-class" by anybody else's standards, cause we always had enough to eat. For about two years, my parents were paying their bills with credit cards (now that they own their own business, they're doing this again - another one of my eternal battles is figuring out how to figure out money). My sister and I were subsisting primarily on scrambled eggs and macaroni and cheese. I suspect that my aversion for scrambled eggs has something to do with being presented with yet another dinner of scrambled eggs when I was five or six.

Things got better, but when we played show and tell at school, I didn't particular want to bring in my parents. When I was younger, I resented the fact that all of the other kids seemed to have mothers who baked cookies and didn't come home smelling like grease every night. When I'd go over to other kids' houses, their mom cleaned the toilets - in my house, I learned how to clean toilets when I was four.

My mom was always really adament that her kids become self-sufficient. We chose our own clothes every morning (which lasted until the day my sister dressed herself for kindergarten and forgot to wear underwear. My grandmother was horrified, and from then on, she would set out clothes for us every morning and re-dress us when my parents dropped us off at her place). We learned how to cook a remarkable amount of macoroni and cheese and grilled cheese sandwiches (I have an especial fondness for all sorts of cheese, to this day). Every Saturday or so, we cleaned the house, working with our mom from a big to-do list. Whenever we'd go out to restaurants, even if it was just the local diner, my mom would give us a rundown on basic restaurant politeness, napkin over lap, "excuse me," "thank you," and which fork to use (when we were at places with two forks).

"Someday," she'd say, "you're going to go out to a nice place, and you don't want to look foolish." What that meant, really, was "You don't want to look like white trash."

In fact, I've always sort of viewed my family as about one step to the left of white trash. The kids I hung out with either lived in a trailer packed with ten kids or lived in a crapped-out moldy place down the corner, or the dilapedated barn down the street (somebody did finally gut that fucking pigsty and redo it from the inside out).

When my dad worked some weekends for a stump grinding company, my sister refused, refused to have him pick her up from school in "the stump grinding truck" because it was so incredibly white-trash looking a vehicle.

The one time my dad did this, she burst into tears. "What's everyone going to think of me!" she cried. "It's bad enough that when everyone asks, I have to tell them you work at a burger joint!"

The one thing I never, never, learned how to do was dress like anything other than white trash. That's something I've been spending the entirety of my 20s working on. I just don't understand clothes. I don't know how to buy them. It doesn't help that fashion's not made for women who look like me. Throw in the fact that I have no idea what looks decent on me, and it means hours and hours and hours of crappy shopping time and a lot of stuff that makes it home and then gets thrown out when I realize it's way crappier in real life than it was in the store and "Sweet fuck, what was I thinking?"

The last time I went shopping, I went to Nordstrom in downtown Chicago, and I stood in the middle of the shoe store, holding two shoe styles I wanted to try on, feeling incredibly out of place among the Beautiful People who all hustled about looking busy like they belonged there, and nobody was coming up to help me, and I thought, "They can see it, can't they? They can totally see that I'm really white trash. That's why nobody's helping me, that's why --"

"Can I help you, ma'am?"

Er. Yea.

It's funny, though, how the white trash thing still stirs me sometimes. It's one of the reasons I find it so funny to be in these meetings, to put on a suit jacket. There's just this incredible feeling that I don't fit here. I keep waiting for the moment when some hotel clerk yells, "Aha! White trash! I knew it!" and kicks me out of the hotel.

I'm waiting for the corporate dinner where there's a fork I don't know how to use (though to be honest, many of these guys wouldn't know how to use it either). I worry that I'm being too nice to the waitstaff, do they think I'm being condescending?

It's funny, what follows you.

Once I got older, I realized that in fact, my mother had done me an incredible favor by being a working mom, by teaching me early that I needed to figure out how to do shit for myself. I have a friend back home who got married and realized that, in fact, toilets do not clean themselves. Her mother had done all of her laundry, cleaned the house, made her bed, for her entire life. She had no idea how to do any of it on her own, and no set routine. I have another friend who moved out and managed to burn a can of instant soup: she'd never cooked anything before. And there were others, mainly women, but lots of guys I know, who don't understand how to work for a living. Who don't know how to do an interview. Who don't know how to write up a resume. I'd been working informally for the burger joints for years, and done so many crap jobs since I was 16 that I don't even find interviews scary anymore. I clean my house every Saturday (yea, the toilet too). I can cook - sure, mostly only what can be cooked in a wok, but I can cook. I learned how to be self-sufficient really quickly. Nobody did it for me. When I moved in with a guy who *wasn't* self-sufficient, problems quickly ensued, cause I ended up playing mom. Let me tell you: I'm never doing anybody else's fucking laundry ever again.

But for the most part, I got a great gift, being the sort of white trash who had two parents who worked their asses off. They knew about work ethic. They knew that even if you fucked up everything else, if you got up and went to work everyday, you'd keep scrambled eggs in the fridge and kool-aid on the table, and some days, that's enough.

Ohh... I Found the Nice, Cozy Robes

Ohhh, I found the complimentary fuzzy robes in the closet, and the umbrella, and the ironing board, and... and the actual room rate here (they're billing a "government rate" of $111.00 on my corp. card). The actual room rate?

$350 a night

::snicker:: ::snicker:::

I feel like I'm getting away with something EVIL.

This One's for Brendan

Cause Jenn's already read it.

"ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"

Oh, The Insanity

Wow. This is an insane business.

Blame it all on Blaine. I'm here through Sunday night, and now it looks like they'll be shipping me off to North Carolina Monday morning. Then back to NY for map training Feb 28-Mar 3rd (downtown, this time, if I have anything to say about it). And they're floating the word "Dallas" around a lot more lately.

My brain is pretty fried, as we've been talking about microwave engineering all day, and I'm not an engineer. I don't think I actually believed them when they said this was really what they were going to make my job into: flying into a bunch of cities and setting up project support and document controls for all of our wireless projects.

I'm ordering some traveling weights. I'm heading to dinner now, then to the gym.... I'm starting to understand why all of these guys are packing around an extra 80lbs. We do nothing but work really late hours and live out of hotels and eat crap food.

I might have something more interesting to say later, after food and workout endorphins have kicked in. Right now, I'm out of it. Need to make travel arrangements for downtown tomorrow, too. We've got jam-packed meetings, and I've already pronounced rather loudly that I'm out of there by 5pm, cause I've got a dinner meeting downtown.

I'm definately not doing this for more than a year. In fact, the next time I get some breathing space, I'm calling my recruiter. Seriously. I'm not getting paid enough. I do, in fact, have an actual life *outside* of work, which requires me to *spend time doing it.*

Damn, I'm hungry. Gotta run.