Today's Alaska Pic

Today's a serious writing day, so unless the world explodes, I'll be leaving you with this:



And for the record, no: I didn't watch the debates. I already know who I have to vote for. And these guys are getting exhausting.

Lessons for Us, My Chiklits

And, as a perfect follow-up to that previous post, what happens when I try and subsist on 1500 calories a day and then walk into my 3rd MA class in a row, forgetting my 6pm protein bar at work --

I lumber through my class and nearly pass out.

Ten minutes from the end, I was ready to just fucking bow out my lame, shaky ass. Between boxing rounds, we were doing wall squats and plank positions, and I just blanked out into la-la land.

I've been trying to lean up my calorie count to speed up the condensing process, as I'll be traveling back to BG for the holidays, and we count coup based on weight in my family.

Oh well. I'll have to settle for the long, hard road.

Beer and pizza for everyone this weekend!

This Week's Eating Regimen

Because I'm an obsessed American woman who should be spending all of this mental energy working toward a Ph.D.... here I am cataloguing this week's meal plan.

6am: protein shake (half banana, four strawberries, half a cup of milk)

10:30am: string cheese
handful of mixed nuts

1pm: half cup mixed rice and veggies with pork
string cheese

3:30pm: protein bar
handful of mixed nuts

6pm: protein bar

8:30pm: 2 scrambled eggs with mixed veggies

I'm *so* eating bread products and drinking beer this weekend.

Four martial arts classes this week (about 50 min of hard exercise per day)
Five afternoons a week: half-hour walk at Forest Preserve at lunch
Five mornings a week of 20 min. stretching and 30lb free weight reps
About an hour a day of train-walking time, five days a week

I'm *so* NOT jogging this weekend.

This is getting ridiculous.

But I'm getting pretty buff.

Not thin. Buff.

And really, what more could a girl want?

Jib Jab Again

Jib Jab's got another parody up. Not as good as the first one, and I agree that it's moving toward the homophobic. One gay joke is funny - making the entire peice a gay joke is pushing it.

Take some lessons from South Park - discriminate against everyone equally: it's a lot funnier.

Debate Prep

Debate Prep: Shamlessly stolen from Jesus' General

-----------
DEBATE PREP

We have to be on our toes for tonight's debate. It's very probable that Our Furious Leader will go into a violent fit of rage, pull a piece from his waistband, and shoot Bob Schieffer. We can't prevent it from happening--killing is how Our Leader deals with frustration. We can, however, try to put a positive spin on it. I've created the following talking points to help you do just that...

*Sure, Our Leader killed a respected journalist on national TV, but Kerry forgot Poland. The liberal media is showing its bias by not reporting that too.

*Did you see that perfect military style shooting stance?

*Hey, didn't the terrorist threat level just go to red?

*Schieffer is a French name, isn't it?

*Our Leader isn't afraid to exercise his God-given Second Amendment rights on the campaign trail.

*Klinton did it with the pipe wrench in the billiard room.

*He's going to lower your taxes!

*OK, so Schieffer didn't actually have weapons of mass destruction program related activities stuffed in his sock. He was thinking about getting them.
------

The Labyrinth is Out

No, I haven't read it yet, but Catherynn M. Valente's The Labyrinth is out, and it looks hellacool. I get paid on Friday....

From Publishers Weekly
In Valente's surreal, image-driven first novel, centered on the Greek myth of the Minotaur, a female Theseus details the bizarre landscape of the Minotaur's maze and its unique flora and fauna. These include a wisdom-dispensing monkey guide, a mystery-solving "Meaningful Lobster" straight out of Lewis Carroll and numerous other creatures who evoke works of classic fantasy and mythology. The pursuing entities in the claustrophobic maze-world are not the bull-headed monsters of legend but doorways to other dimensions, which the characters spend much of their time avoiding. Most of the action is internal, as characters swap life stories, exchange experiences and try to solve their way out of puzzles philosophically. The author's poetic prose simmers with paraphrases from Blake, Milton, Shakespeare and other literary heavyweights, and this often gives her descriptions stimulating depth and richness. Sometimes, though, her sentences groan under the weight of images awkwardly layered and fused to express the unique chaos of this private universe. Readers who luxuriate in the telling of a tale and savor phrases where every word has significance will enjoy the challenge of this fantasy. Others may find its maze of language an impenetrable mystery.

A Mixed Bag

Had a pretty good boxing class last night, and met Sifu Dino for the first time. He generally teaches on Tues. and Thurs. but he was out last week, so I didn't bump into him (last week was the first time I was doing classes in addition to my usual Mon/Weds). He seems cool, very loud and high energy, really likes what he does. He and Sifu Katalin played tag-team with the two classes going on simultaneously - Boxing and Krav Maga - which meant you got to work with both of them no matter what class you took, which was... different. Not so structured, but in a good way, cause it kept you on your toes.

In other news, I've been shrugging off the whole "Does Bush Wear a Wire?" internet debate because I thought it was a lot of smoke and mirror lefties snickering at each other. Then I caught this article on Salon.com, and I'm thinking I may be one of the clueless hookwinked. Bush apparently has a lot of problems with telepromters (he's dyslexic), and this sort of push-to-talk system would have been a great tool to use on the campaign trail. My thoughts are thus: if the pres. *does* wear a transciever so he can be in constant contact with the secret service, why didn't the White House just say so? If that's all it was, there wouldn't be anything to hide. Same as if it's some sort of weird bullet-proof vest of some kind. You'd owe up to it. Stop the controversy. Instead, they're flat out saying it's absolutely nothing, and we're all freak shows. The more you don't owe up to shit, the more conspiracy theories. Just tell is straight, folks. Oh. I forgot. That's not how you run a White House...

And, to keep you pissed off - voter fraud in Las Vegas. Of course. Aimed at Democrats. Of Course. Think you're registered? Think again! (you know, when I filled out my registration form, I wrote in "Independent." I thought that was really fucking conspiracy-theory cyncical, at the time). Did I need to mention that Nevada's a swing state?

And, to further baffle you with my mixed link bag o' goodness, I just had to include this.

For the record, no, I have no idea what the hell the brown teeth things are supposed to be: vagina dentate? (update: I have since been told that they are domokun)

via Pinko Feminist Hellcat

War Doesn't Work Without Women

My buddy Jenn forwarded me a reading list for Duke University's military history majors and minors. To be fair, this was a reading list compiled in 1995, and the note at the top says the instructor was compiling a 1999 list, but I can't find it, and h-net (a big history geeks list) is still toting this a great recommended reading list for military history (ie History of War and Warfare).

What bugs me about such a great, comprehensive list?

Oh. The "comprehensive" part.

There are 100 books on this list. Their topics cover a time period of about 5,000 years or so.

1) Not one book's major topic is the gendered nature of war/masculinity building/rite of passage of war (Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites, would be a great pick for this, though other do very well).

2) Not one book's major topic is women's roles in warfare (supporting/promotion of - there are about a bazillion of these books, particularly covering WWI and WWII). Think supporting roles aren't a viable part of "military history"? Bullshit. Every heard of "logistics"?

3) Not one book covers women's participation in violent combat as guerilla fighters, in, say, Vietnam, and my area of interest - Southern Africa (Cock, Jacklyn. Colonels and Cadres: War and Gender in South Africa. New York, Oxford University Press, 1991 - among many others. Unfortunately, my biblio isn't online). In fact, not much is said about the military history of Africa at all.

4) Unless initials are hiding gender, not one book of the 100 is written by a woman. I'd bet not one is written by anybody whose skin darkens much past tawny, either.

This shit really bugs me. Why does it really bug me? Because once I got into my women-and-war Master's thesis and subsequent book research for future projects and personal interest, I felt really ripped off. I honestly thought there weren't many women warriors at all, that women had always been kinda suckered into being couriers and damsels-in-distress. Seriously, I really thought this. Sure, you had all those Mythical women from Ancient Times, but what did we know about them, really?

Then I started reading all these books. I started reading about all these women who not only defended hearth and home during those times when men went out to kill each other and other women, but women who crossdressed and joined up - or didn't hide their sex at all, but were so damn good nobody cared what sex they were. I read about women passing out white feathers to men who didn't enlist in WWI - shaming men into heading off to war. Women who did all the laundry, cooked all the meals, cleaned the guns, brought ammo to the front, nursed the wounded, and yes, even picked up guns and fought for their damn lives, because that's what people do when they're at war. WAR DOES NOT WORK WITHOUT WOMEN. Women must support the war and soldiers. They have to maintain homes. They have to take up arms. They have to burn fields and farms when the enemy gets in. If women don't support war, wars don't happen. They can physically pick up a gun or not, and sure, war will march on, but UNLESS WOMEN ARE SUPPORTING WAR, IT CAN'T HAPPEN.

In our country, WOMEN HAVE TO VOTE for war. We make up 51% of the population. Yea, yea, patriarchal society and all that. Maybe if we weren't so concerned with how skinny we could be today, we'd be more interested in politics. Wouldn't that be amazing?

Hence, the popularity of Lysistrata. Still. Thousands of years later. It's a comedy, sure - but I think it's using the sex so it doesn't have to say just *how* important women's continued involvment in and support of war keeps the machine running. Women in some societies have kicked men out of the house for not fighting, for being cowards. Women have killed and butchered bodies. Women have always fought, and have always supported men fighting. They had to. Because if they hadn't, there wouldn't be wars. They would have stopped. 49% of the population CANNOT continue to fight without the support of the other 51%. That's just simple numbers.

Is war primarily a male sport? You betcha. That's why there's so many books on it. Yet here we've got a list of 100 books about men carving people up, and not one of them explores *why*. Why primarily men? And if it's so inherently male, why do women fight? Why can they be just as brutal - or more so? Because women are people too? And why are some men so terribly bad at fighting? Why is there an entire coercive system in place socializing men to fight? Not one book addresses that. The list makes assumptions. The list is "specialized" enough to add a book about the history of the US Marines, but one book about female guerilla fighters is just too much. Apparently.

I feel ripped off. And I have a feeling a lot of other women who start in on all this "alternate" or "specialized" reading about what the hell the other half of the world does during a war (when they're not getting raped and killed - our assumed default role) are gonna be pretty pissed off, too.

This One's A Winner

I admit it - this one's from a wacky little nut (anti-semitic, too?), but it deeply amuses me. Can't you just see it?

We're not at war! We're supporting Israel's fight against terrorism!

I kept wondering how on earth we were going to figure out how to go to war with Iran. I mean, hell, throw in another shitty desert country. This is a fun little test-run scenerio, don't you think?

Why are we going to war with the Middle East? Cause Bush slept through four years of college and doesn't know who finally got their asses handed back to them in the Crusades.

Another Great Electoral Map

Here's another great electoral map, this one is running data based on the day's current polls. It's cool.

Kerry was at 280 to 254 yesterday, down today 260 to 274.

Fun to watch.

More On How Geeks Get Through It

Had an exhausting class last night - Mondays are always a bitch, because I'm coming back to it after a break.

We were doing the classic Monday cardio and technique class, three minutes of jump roping, then three minutes of bag work, one two, one two, then some pushups, back to ropes and bags, then pushups again, then, dear lord, we're jump roping again, and then - 100 punches, GO!

Toward the end, I was keeping myself afloat by imagining that each time I jumped over the rope, I was jumping over a sword. I pictured one of the heroines from the first book I tried to sell a couple years ago - a sandfighter named Nalah - hopping over her teacher's sword in the desert, again and again and again as her mentor taught her to jump over low sword swipes. I tried closing my eyes while jump roping, but that was a no-go. It fucked with my balance, and I almost keeled over.

Sword swipe. Jump. Jump. Again. Jump. Jump. Keep going. Jump. Jump. She'll take your legs off. Jump.

I'm reading this really stupid fantasy book. Jump. Jump. And there's this male hero who supposedly keeps himself in really good shape so he can act as a sexy consort in this sendentary royal court. Jump. Jump. But there's never any scenes with him, like, exercising. Jump. Jump. Or sweating outside of bed. Jump. Jump.

Why don't we see the hard fucking work? Outside of bed?

Jump. Jump.

Fiction writers are lazy. You teach people that being wicked tough is either really easy or some kind of sexy birthright.

Fuckers.

Jump. Jump. Oop. Bag work time.

ONE HUNDRED PUNCHES. GO!

Fuck.

Stolen Words

I stumbled on this over at Hugo's place. It's by Sharon Olds, and after reading this, I'll be picking up some of her stuff.

Just beautiful.

Sex Without Love

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

Interactive Election Map

Run your own Test Election.

This Electoral College crap has got to go.

Via jed

Fuck You All - I'm Eating a Bagel

Is it really neccessary to bring *more* food into a workplace where we all sit on our asses all day and read blogs and check our email incessently?

Oh, fuck it. I've got kickboxing four days this week. I'm eating another bagel.

Bastards.

Ah, Young Love

Amanda's picking apart our trusty MSN advice columns again. This time, MSN is trying to aid those poor, poor middle-aged men seeking 18-year-old sweethearts.

Poor, poor boys.

---

William, 45, has always dated younger women. It was only recently, however, that he detected a pattern in those relationships. “I end up raising them — helping them solve their problems, grow up and expand their horizons,” he says.

Indeed, it is a lot of work helping your love select what college she wants to go to, especially if that means she might be moving away.

On the most obvious level, there’s that fun, young energy they have. There’s naiveté, which can be attractive when compared with the cynicism of some older women.

Remember how your ex-wife used to correct you when you made mistakes? "Oh no, honey, that's not Cary Grant, that's William Holden." Cynical bitch. When you're dating Bambi, you can tell her the moon is made of green cheese and she'll believe you. Not only is that ego-boosting, but it's entertaining.

All of these things, though mutually beneficial for a while, eventually wear thin for most women.

“If the relationship is… based on the man being a sort of father or mentor figure, problems can – and likely will – arise once [the younger woman] really begins to grow and come into her own,” Masini notes. “Even for couples where there is little-to-no age discrepancy, people often grow in different directions, leading to the dissolution of the relationship.”

That and your young love starts whining that boys her age don't need Viagra and don't want to be called "Daddy" in bed.

----

I'm totally going out and picking up an 18-year-old hottie.... The sex would be fantastic. Problem is... what, exactly, do you *talk* about? Hell, I won't date 33-year-old men who have nothing to say. Where's the *real* erotic tension?

What's the Ray Bradbury quote - "All the women in my life have been librarians, English teachers or booksellers. If they couldn't point the way to Usher and Ox, it was a no go. I have always longed for education, and pillow talk's the best."

I want to see an MSN advice column on how men should look for intelligence in their long-term partners. Funny. You probably *will* see an advice column like that - only it'll be pointed toward a female audience, and tell those fickle women not to be so picky.

Get me a boy and book.

On Polyamous Matriarchies and Selling Books

My buddy Jenn and I went to brunch over at Mary Anne's yesterday and ate good food and talked shop. I also had the opportunity to meet Jennifer Stevenson, who wrote the recently released trash sex magic. We talked about selling novels - it apparently took Jennifer about twenty years to sell hers - and I found myself terribly uncomfortable talking about my finished book. I tend to shrug it off when people ask and say, "Oh, it's just classic epic fantasy."

But that's not going to sell a book.

Jennifer was talking about finding a "high concept idea" spin for your book. She launched into hers - trash sex magic was about a promiscuous woman, a hussie, who lives in a trailer park and falls in love with a tree... Only - she says it way better than that, and when she's done with her spiel, your eyes light up and you think, "Hot damn, I have to *read* that!"

She told me not to feel too bad: it only took her twenty years to condense the concept down into something that made dollar signs flash in the eyes of editors and agents. We trotted out ideas from my book: priests who practice biological warfare, shadow knights who ride dogs into battle, the kitchen-girl-who-would-be-queen in a polyamous matriarchy.

"Go with the polyamous matriarchy," Mary Anne said.

Always get straight to the sex... it sells more books. When Mary Anne introduced Jennifer and said, "Oh, she wrote this book," and handed me trash sex magic, well, I'd already heard of the book - it's tough to forget a title like that, and it's always cool to meet an author whose work I know.

I've had a tough time trying to condense my book into soundbites that make for good cocktail party conversation. I'd finally figured out how to do that with my thesis project in South Africa because I was asked so many times. Now I've got to work on 1) my 1-line spiel 2) my 60-second Editor's Dollar Signs spiel 3) my 5-minute, chatting with other writers about my book spiel.

I hate talking about myself (though I could *write* about myself all day...). I've been taught that talking about your accomplishments is akin to bragging. Bragging is rude. You should always listen twice as much as you speak. But I was being asked about my book three or four times over the course of the brunch, and every time, my chest seized up and the mortal fear came over me and I wanted to say, "It's nothing, no, really, just an epic fantasy. You know, classic epic fantasy stuff. With polyamous matriarchies. And weird social structures. Oh, and giant dogs. And end-of-the-world, purging-magic-users stuff. You know. Kitchen girl who would be queen. It's classic fantasy, only there are women in it. And everybody gets laid."

So I went home after the brunch and thought about High Concept Ideas while I cleaned the bathroom floor. George R.R. Martin could say he was writing an epic fantasy loosely based on the War of the Roses. I'm writing an epic fantasy where priests practice biological warfare, shadowy knights ride dogs into battle, and a kitchen girl struggles to become queen of a polyamous matriarchy at the brink of destruction as magic-users are purged from the continent. Oh, and there's some sex scenes. And some men kept in harems. And lots of fights scenes. Did I mention the sex?

It's a starting point.

Yada, Yada

Here's the final word on nutrition and health. It's a relief to know the truth after all those conflicting medical studies:

1. The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the Americans, British or Canadians.

2. The Mexicans eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the Americans, British or Canadians.

3. The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the Americans, British or Canadians.

4. The Italians drink large amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the Americans, British or Canadians.

5. The Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than the Americans, British or Canadians.

6. Ukrainians drink a lot of vodka, eat a lot of pirogues, cabbage rolls and suffer fewer heart attacks than the Americans, British or Canadians.

CONCLUSION: Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is apparently what kills you

Via metaquotes

If the Presidential Debates were Moderated by Science Fiction Fans...

Matt Cheney's got a great post up - What if the Presidential debates were run by SF fans? They might go something like this:

MODERATOR: Welcome to the first World Science Fiction Presidential Debate, sponsored by Tor Books and Baen Books. Let's start right off. What do you think about the threat of clones and/or cyborgs replacing middle-class workers? Mr. President?

BUSH: I'm against it. In my administration, no cloning will go for money. I was talking with Tommy Franks just the other day about cloning. The President has to be strong on cloning. You have to make decisions. My opponent has been in the Senate since the end of eternity, and he has never once made any. Decisions. And that's bad. The American people expect cloning to be against God's will. It's like abortion with stem cells, which I supported very much, it's important, it's the beginning of the start of something, but there's morality. The President has to be moral.

MODERATOR: Senator Kerry, a rebuttal?

KERRY: I'm glad you asked that question. Considering that cloning is, at the moment, a theoretical venture, we must be certain that what I voted for is what was enacted, which, if you consider what this administration has accomplished, is very little. It's a complicated issue. The President has shown no leadership on this subject, and it's a subject we can't approach with folded hands. My plan will accomodate clones and non-clones, it will allow cyborg technology to be explicated by the best minds in the universe, and it will cut the deficit in half.

MODERATOR: How do you feel about genre-bending movements such as The New Weird and Interstitial Arts? Are they a threat to the purity of science fiction and fantasy? Senator Kerry?

KERRY: I believe that we can have a large movement all together, and that the tent we live in -- or, rather, everyone here but the President and I and, I'm sorry to say, you Mr. Moderator [chuckles] -- that tent -- it's large and can contain multitudes. What's new and weird is the President's approach in Iraq. If we had made alliances, we would have an interstitial approach to foreign policy, but at the moment, the failed policies of this administration have given us a maze of death which our troops are dying inside.

MODERATOR: Mr. Bush?

KERRY: What's new and weird is my opponent's love for Saddam Hussein. Look, I don't know half of what he's talking about, I don't understand any of the words he's using, but I know I'm right. And that's not weird, and it's not new.

Continued here

What's Goin' On

Bear with me, as I am resurfacing from the land of the dead...

Only to read via mousewords about a woman's "romantic" memoir about her discovery of self through sodomy: "You open your ass and you open your mind and you open your heart."

WTF?

Oh. She's from New York. I mean, what kind of person gets these sorts of questions about their book "Can you talk a bit about the connections you make in the book between being anally penetrated and finding God?"

I think that pretty much says all you need to know.

Apparently, she's really sure that her book will anger feminists - this is something that really gets her riled up. But you know, I don't think feminism is the issue, here, when she "keeps the condoms-and-K-Y detritus of their [she and her anal lover's] unions and a baggy-full of his pubic hair in a little memory box", probably on her dresser. This has less to do with feminism and more to do with being a wacky, malnurished nut-job. Are all ballerinas this neurotic? She needs to go out to eat more, and find some other hobbies. Sex is great. Fetishes are fun, and no doubt there are some men out there who keep used condoms from their male lovers in little boxes under their beds... or not. You need to get out once in a while, woman. Damn.

Speaking of sex, over at Utopian Hell and Hugo's place, there's some debate going on about how the sexuality of youth is being contained in the bodies of young women - that is, when we talk about curtailing "hook-ups" and other sorts of casual sex behavior, what everybody's argument turns back to is how to convince young girls to be ashamed about having sex whenever they want to - even if it's safe sex.

The assumption being, I suppose, that men have this really amazingly uncontrollable sexuality: whatever. It's interesting, however, that both Hugo and Astarte bring church lingo into the debate, and how the diffusion of church doctrine in our society has targeted young women. Nobody ever asks if a guy regrets having sex "too early" or "with the wrong partner." What really got me about this discussion was what Amanda pointed out: women are encouraged to have deeper feelings for those partners they have sex with, because if they don't have deeper feelings, they're "sluts." I know that's something I've always struggled with: Am I in a deeply loving, committed, monogamous relationship with this person? If the answer was no, I'd feel terribly guilty for getting involved at all, even if I, the Evil Woman, was just interested in something purely temporary.

I've often wondered how much of the cliche of "women always want to get emotionally involved and men don't" thing has to do with putting pressure on men to treat sex casually, and pressure on women to treat sex like one's only item of self-worth. Sure, having sex with someone you feel affection toward is what it's all about - but why does it have to be monogamous and looking-toward-the-longterm before women get to have "guilt free" sex?

Glad there are people moving past that.

Snapshots From My Domestic Life

Me: Hey, Jenn, I just finished the copy of Zelazny's Guns of Avalon that you loaned me.

My buddy Jenn: Great! How did you like it?

Me: It was cool. Zelazny does in 200 pages what all these other writers do in a ten book series. Though, if we put Martin into that category... I'd taken a Martin doorstopper any day. They're just... different modes of writing. I read Martin to get that really complex character stuff, really big, complex politics. Zelazny'll take you there and back again in 200 pages. Cool in itself, but you're going through all these neat, crazy worlds, you know, like the furry people?

Jenn: Oh, I wouldn't know. I haven't read the Amber books.

Me: ::looking at pile of 6 Amber books sitting on my bedside::: But... you have *all* of the Amber books. You've had them for... years and years and years.

Jenn: Yea. I know. I never got around to reading them.

Me: Like the 800 other books in this house that you haven't read?

Jenn: Yea.

Me: You're nuts.

I then go and start reading the next in the line of eight books I'm currently reading all at the same time.

We have a great house.