Worklife

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

Batfuck

Just. Batfuck.

Make up your goddamn mind already.

Ninjas

I am easily amused.

via john rickards, my Secret Boyfriend

Best. Advice. Ever.

Unfortunately, I didn't write it:

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

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

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

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

Read it all.

The 10,000 Hit Mark

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

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

Beat of the War Drum

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

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

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

Check it out.

Via Bitch Ph.D.

Everything's Better With Women

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

No?

Better as spouses and cheerleaders?

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

Ratings burn. Raise the bar, would you?

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

Like a rat and random electric shocks.

What's On My Mind

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

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

Night Thoughts, Sunday

Sunday is prep day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seriously.

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

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

It's gorgeous. It's fucking beautiful.

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

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

It's a wacky life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds fun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's really no need to stress about babies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

prisoner6655321:

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

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

Lisacurl:

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

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

In short, prisoner6655321, kiss my feminist ass."

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

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

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

via Ginmar

Women & Sport

Much thanks to Davina for sending me this link -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very cool.

Shaolin Soccer

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

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

Downer

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whooosh of relief --

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some days are better than others.

Life is Hard.

After all, it eventually kills you.

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

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

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

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

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

Weird.

Don't Say Writing Has No Meaning

From Moorish Girl:

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

Men of Science

Just got my latest copy of Scientific American.

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

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

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

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

More Weighing In on Dowd

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

That one's going on my quote list.

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

Sweet Home

Stumble home, unpack, pile up laundry, try and find a fourth frickin' quarter... turn the house upside down to try and find a damn quarter, nothing, fuck it, these kicking pants are clean enough, leave `um to air out.

Pack wraps, belt, shirt, towel, (boxing class tomorrow) ignore two coffee cups in the sink (at least somebody in this house is getting laid), grind coffee, stumble toward bed, find that my roommate left me a fucking birthday present, goddamn it. I hate this. I'm so bad at getting people stuff.

Find she's left me a dragonfly pin, oh! Excellent (long story)! Open other pacakge to find --

Holy fucking christ.

Golden States, by Michael Cunningham. His first novel. I have literally read and re-read The Hours over a dozen times. I bring it on trips with me, as comfort reading. I read it before bed on bad days. It's the book of the hours, of life, and I'm crazy about his other stuff too, but you can't get Golden States because apparently he absolutely hates it, refuses to have it reprinted, and doesn't even list it on his list of "books by the author" page.

Fuck, where did she get this?

"It'll Cost You More Money."

The age-old battle between the people on the ground and the people heading it all up from on-high:

When corp. comes in next and tells us how incredibly complicated we need to make things, we've collectively agreed to use this knee-in-the-gut retort:

"It'll cost you more money."

Gets `um every time.... Makes our jobs easier. Gets work done.

The end.