Become a martyr for America, chiklits!
Paul Campos connects the dots. Cause none of these dumb media fuckers is willing to do it:
As I write these words, Terri Schiavo is being starved to death because she was once a chubby little girl.
Almost everyone has heard about how, 15 years ago, Schiavo's heart stopped for several minutes, causing massive brain damage that left her severely disabled.
What very few people are aware of, because it has gone largely unreported, is that Terri's heart stopped as a consequence of an eating disorder.
Terri was a chubby child, in a culture that tells children, and especially girls, that not being thin is both a disease and moral failing. And our children get the message: fully half of all 9- to 11-year-old girls either are or have been on a diet.
Terri was one of these children. She spent much of her childhood and adolescence dieting, in a desperate effort to deal with having the "wrong" kind of body. Like most dieters, her weight fluctuated a great deal, but she was unable to remain thin.
Eventually, according to evidence introduced at the trial following her collapse, she started forcing herself to vomit after meals. This, combined with a regimen of 15 glasses of iced tea per day, made her thin and "beautiful." (More than 200 articles have commented on Terri's beauty. Almost none of these mention her eating disorder).
On the night she collapsed, Terri had just eaten dinner. She went into the bathroom and forced herself to vomit. Apparently, the chemical imbalance brought on by her bulimia stopped her heart.
I find the irony of this situation deeply, deeply sickening.
I went out to lunch today, this being a Friday, and sat at a table across from two men and two women. They appeared to be work colleagues. The men were average-looking, 30ish, on the overweight side, looked like they could pass for, say, computer programmers, so I thought they were quite good-boy nice looking, but MTV would call them boring couch potatoes and Queer Eye would have a field day. They ate cups of soup and cheeseburgers and fries and talked in loud voices about work.
The women, at first glance, looked and acted much younger. Their hair was straightened, bleached. The one closest to me had that perfect bronze tan. They were both about a size four, though the tan one looked like she was aiming for a 2. They ordered salads, and spent their time waiting for those salads... talking about food.
The tan one salivated over the dessert menu, said something like, "I haven't had chocolate sauce in two years."
The other one, not so classically MTV-girlish, with more of a midwest softness to her face and complexion, said, "Don't you ever treat yourself?"
"No," Barbie said.
"Not even once?"
"No."
Barbie was little and very slender, wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt I wouldn't dare wear in public, and had just enough defined arm muscle to be considered hot.
And, the thing was, looking at Barbie, that's what I was thinking: she's the way I'm supposed to look, the way women are supposed to look. Thin, tan, straightened, dyed-blond hair, those pert features, the flawless-appearing complexion. It wasn't that she was beautiful: there was nothing behind her look to make her beautiful, no amazing wit or cute laugh or witty turn of phrase or particularly striking feature. The thing with encouraging all women to look like a certain "type" is that eventually they'll look that way, and it'll take so much time and energy to cultivate that "type" that they're not exactly going to have a lot of time for an internal spiritual journey that makes them really interesting people. Mostly, they're just going to talk a lot about diet and excercise and what they can't eat this week.
When the food came, Barbie scarfed down her salad like she was starving: and, likely, she was. Most women don't look like Barbie into their thirties without being very hungry as a result.
I had ordered a burger, no fries, coleslaw on the side, and an iced tea. I've learned to balance out my hunger: if I really want a burger, I'll eat a burger, I just won't have the crap I don't want, which is usually the fries, and that cuts the calorie count pretty neatly.
And eating that way will keep me at what I consider a reasonable size, in reasonable health, but I will never, ever, look like Barbie.
Ever.
Not even if I ate salmon ceasers and started getting that dull-eyed hungry look that supermodels carry around.
But oh, God, sitting there next to Barbie, I felt so guilty for eating my cheeseburger. What must everyone think of me, scarfing down my burger for lunch? Had I no shame? I could see everyone turning to look at me, thinking, "Look at that fat girl scarfing down that cheeseburger! Grotesque! Look at that fat woman, eating! A woman, eating, in a restaurant! How revolting! Has she no respect for herself?!"
I wanted to curl up and die.
And that's what a lot of women feel like: we'd rather die than be fat. We'd die to be thin for a decade, just give me a decade of hotness! Please! Please! I'll starve! I don't care!
Careful what you wish for.
Yea. I've had nights like that.
I used to think it must be a pretty neat thing, to be thin and beautiful. And, in fact, it has its perks. You get better jobs, people treat you more respectfully, treat you like you're important.
But you know, if you're doing it the way most women are doing it, you're also going to be weaker, and stupider (try doing complex math equations while suffering from extreme hunger and fatigue caused by overexercise), and ultimately, you're risking your life for a pound of flesh, for a beauty ideal.
And today's a good day to decide if you're interested in martyring yourself for Christan America and the MTV beauty machine.
We've got a great example of the end result.
Friday, March 25, 2005
Martyr Yourself For Christian America!
The Strange Case...
The strange case of the homosexual necrophiliac duck...
Do you really need my commentary?
I learn something new every day.
What the Hell *is* This?
I suppose I would take stuff posted at Tangent more seriously if they actually proofread their work. As it is, I merely choke on my coffee, as good old Dave clambers up on his pulpit yet again. If you're going to post this blather from the most inane of the back-to-old-school-SF blatherers ("When men were men and women were green!), at least edit him into some semblance of coherence:
Politcal [sic] Correctness (and in the case of the instance written about in Silverberg's column, the fallout from Political Correctness, but that's another essay), has run amuck. Now, it seems, an active imagination and artistic freedom are under siege by those on the Left who have the power to punish us for what we think, and it ain't those mean old, uneducated, bible-thumping, red-state bubbas who are to blame. It is those on the Left, often-called the Elite Left—those who believe, in their heart-of-hearts, that they know what is best for us, that we are incapable of making our own decisions..
Much as he will berate short SF writers in this column about being unable to think for themselves, which is why he - an illustrious, well-read, uber-published writer - will tell SF short story writers what to think and what to write about:
ATTENTION SF SHORT STORY WRITERS!! YOU ARE BEING BRAINWASHED BY THE LIBERAL ELITE!!!
The best part about this bit is that it comes right after his introduction, in which the author insists that he's not "left" or "right" but shares a mixture of political views.. you know, like every other person in America. He then goes on to remind us that there is, however, a Liberal Elite working at Keeping Him Down.
I want a T-shirt:
I AM THE LIBERAL ELITE! I HAVE RUN AMOK!
All of which led me to wonder if SF is going soft these days.
The same way his erection's going, apparently, which is why he's so pissed off.
One doesn't often see hard-edged political stories in short SF anymore—at least not many of them in the past twenty, twenty-five years or so.
Umm... is he part of the same genreverse I am? Wasn't there just a big story that came out extrapolating what a neo-conservative America of the future would be like? I guess that one doesn't count... being about a conservative America and all.
We'll see the occasional story dealing with gender (a very tired theme these days, as more often than not a predictable Left/liberal agenda is espoused, but not really, dispassionately explored; the agenda is so predictable as to make for comfortable reading for those in the choir, but also terribly boring as SF—or as Judy Merril had it in the '50's—Speculative Fiction. Occasionally, we'll see something by way of satire (humorous, as in Esther Friesner's "Johnny Beansprout" from the July, 2004 F&SF; or darker, as in some of Terry Bisson's or James Morrow's short work), but they are too far and few between, when taken as a percentage of the tonnage of short sf/f foisted on readers today. Most of which deals with character interaction, or the feelings of characters, or how they feel about whatever milquetoast situation lazy authors choose to put them in (yet another essay).
SF is talking too much about women and their feelings. Men, as we all know, don't have feelings. So only women write about feelings. And only women are interested in gender roles. Men are just naturally manly - unless they're James Morrow, who's an amazing writer and so is allowed to admit that men might have feelings. Though that still makes Dave uncomfortable.
Everyone knows women aren't real people anyway. They should stop writing about themselves. And stop writing about men. And men need to stop writing about gender-conflicted men, too.
Men should only write about fishing.
In space.
I'm sorry, where is that happening? Must be in the work of all those pesky non-humor-writing Women Writers. Like, who, Leguin? Show me all the softy gender-speaking young women preaching touchy-feely writing as SF. Shit knows that if we're talking about gender - you know, conceptions of being, say, human (that's female and male, you fucktard) - that we must not be writing real SF anymore, huh?
It's as if much of today's short sf has become metrosexualized, a term I'll co-opt from one coined to label the metro-sexual male.
At this point, I go into cardiac arrest and must stop reading this column. Who's in charge of Tangent?
Oh, this one's good, too:
Sometimes I have this unnerving and spine-chilling thought that too much short SF today is naught but metrosexualized SF.
Truly, spine-chilling. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.
There's a dearth of imagination on any real, cutting-edge level today.
I don't think Dave reads books.
No, really, I don't. I don't think he's ever gotten past a couple of shelves at the local Borders.
Do I even need to mention that he uses "he" as the default pronoun throughout? I wonder what women readers think? Is he speaking for *all* male readers when he asks if they're scratching their male heads trying to figure out what to think about a story? I certainly get the feeling that he's only actually talking to male writers. And funny women, of course, who write funny stories about gender. That's pretty cutting edge, right?
Ballard had it 99% right. Switch his "ultra-conservative" government for "ultra-liberal" and we pretty much are living what many on the Left are preaching today. Individual rights trump everything, all the time, regardless of the effect on society as a whole. And how timely is the line about the mentally ill being left to their own devices, in light of the Terry Schiavvo case in the news. Ballard puts Nostradamus to shame.
Wow. Did you know you were living in a country run by an "ultra-liberal" government? Fooled me!
What a mess!
Indeed.
The overall point of bringing up Silverberg's column, Ballard's forgotten story, and my own comments, is perhaps to strike a spark in today's short sf/f writers. Not just in a political sense of awareness, and what isn't being written about very much anymore, but more importantly not to forget the story. If you're not writing about much of anything, it doesn't matter how well "nothing" is written.
Though, in the case of this column, being well-written might have helped.
What a fucktard.
Deadwood
As there's no real actual good shows on "real" television - and I hate commercials, the messiness of taping stuff, and etc - and since I do so adore HBO's Carnivale, I went ahead and rented the first couple of episodes of HBO's Deadwood.
Watched the first episode last night, and thus far, I'm not terribly impressed.
We're in South Dakota in 1876 with a cast of characters trying to make their fortune in the mining "town" of Deadwood, where there's no law but who's a better draw. There's lots of literal backstabbing, lots of liquor, lots of whoring, as yet very little of the actual prospecting, but lots of dirty people trying to make a living, which I always appreciate in a show.
As yet, nobody's too classically pretty, and they're mostly dirty and occasionally threadbare, which is cool. Episode one also wins for the most times I've heard the word "cocksucker" used in an hour - I think, 26 times. I don't know how historically accurate the frequency of that particular word use is, but hey, I'll go with that one. These are gritty Western boys, they better be talking pretty dirty.
This being a Western set in a mining town, I was also cool with the fact that there wouldn't be many female characters, and those there would be wives or whores, and maybe you'd have the occasional really kick-ass prospector woman who walked into camp with 120lbs on her back and a couple Indian scalps.
That's pretty much what they did: they've got an actress named Robin Weigert playing Calamity Jane, who's our butch heroine... well, er, that is, she's played by a fresh-faced slip of a thing who'll clean up really well when they decide to fem her out and do the "look, she's really pretty!" thing instead of a character actress who has got a little spit and wisdom in her face and some bulk in her body, but she's got a good swagger and her blustering almost convinced me that some of the guys might respect her... that is, when she's not making eyes at Wild Bill Hickok or getting passed off some kid that the guys rescued... (Why the hell would you pass the kid off to Calamity Jane? Cause she's a woman? Looked like they were doing just fine carrying the kid on their own, and town wasn't very far off, but this possee of guys rescued this kid, ran into Jane, and then had her *carry the kid the rest of the way into town with them.* Weird. I think it was one of those instances where the writers reverted to stereotype. Who's to say that Jane had any more idea what to do with a kid than the guys did? )
And so, yea, there's The Gem tavern where more of the liquor and prostitutes are (in that order), and we've got an immediate subplot going on with a gun-toting woman named Tricksy who has a habit of killing her clients. Sounds promising, interesting power dynamics; might go somewhere, might just go cliche (as the episode ended, she was apparently reconciling with her master, but we'll see).
There's also a promising wife to a rich-boy wanna-be prospector guy who's getting himself swindled by all of the locals: right now, she's mostly living on sleep and laudenum, but I can already see how they could play it so her strutting dandy gets axed, and she has to step up and become her own sort of prospector: fragile flower turns to tough heroine in the face of adversity.
Hey, it could happen.
So, there's hope, but I'm not in love with the series, thus far. I'll watch another episode tonight, and see what I think.
Women, Writing.
Oh, here we go again. It's like the "Where are all the women bloggers?" debate... It. Just. Won't. Go. Away.
There is no such thing as Women's Writing. Just as there is no such thing as Left-Handed Writing, Red-Headed Writing, European Writing, Northern Hemisphere Writing, or Writing from the Planet Earth. All of these categories are so large as to be meaningless. Sadly, Women's Writing is the only one of the above repeatedly used as a stick to beat women who write. Either Women's Writing is fluffy and inconsequential, full of romps and buttocks - or Women's Writing is coarse and aggressive and the kind of muck you'd expect from an off-duty stripper in a strop - or Women's Writing is obsessed with plumbing and bleeding and bonding to whale music. Effectively, Women's Writing is whatever has most annoyed any given journalist, commentator, academic, or author in the past few books by women they've read. Sweeping generalisations must be made, insults must be slung, personal abuse is welcome and two or three days of columns and op-eds can be sustained with the merry to-and-fro.
There a couple of problems with all this bullshit "women aren't edgy writers" bullshit.
First: men, for some reason, just get to be men, but women, as individuals, are always a stand-in for Every Woman. So if you get 800 subs from men and 100 from women, and those women's stories are:
40 about women fleeing bad marriages/having midlife crises and bicycling around the world
20 about women and their families/finding marriages/having children/relationships with other people
20 about women overcoming vast personal hardship (including family trouble)
10 about women who take heroin or become prostitutes, and how neat or tragic that is
10 are about women who kick everybody's ass and rage against society like superheroes
Mostly, you'll hear people bitch: "Look at how domestic those women are! Always talking about all those domestic issues like marriage and family!"
But of those 800 subs from the guys:
300 are about men going through midlife crises and bicycling around the world (and/or dumping their wife/job/car and getting an upgrade)
200 are about men and their comraderie in war or with gangs or on sports teams (you know: "real, meaty fiction" like Hemingway would write. Stuff women aren't supposed to be writing about anyway, and if they write about it, there's something definately suspect about them and not worth listening to.
150 are about men who take drugs and how neat or tragic that is
150 are about men overcoming personal hardship (including family trouble)
Only, those final hundred are, of course, "better" than women's literary attempts at talking about personal hardship and life struggle because they're about men overcoming personal hardship, and how hard that is, and there's no pregnancy involved, unless he gets a minor character pregnant and ditches her.
And these stories, because they're written by men, aren't called "domestic" --
They're called "examinations of the human condition."
Men being stand-ins for All of Humanity.
Whereas a woman, of course, is speaking for ALL WOMEN EVERYWHERE ON EARTH SINCE TIME BEGAN!!
But not, of course, for humanity. Women aren't real people. A woman doesn't know how to tell a story about the human condition, even if her main character(s) are men.
How ridiculous would it be, for me to group every male writer into a box and say, "These male writers? It's all about boys with penis envy trading in their wives for cars! How safe! How dull! How domestic! Where are all the edgy male writers? Where are the men writers who really take risks!"
Bah.
Maybe it means I'm trying to find a "real" reason that I just don't like the book - but am too lazy to find it, so I blame it on the author's gender. Maybe it means I need to be a better reader.
"Women's Writing"... bah.
Charlotte Bronte, Sex Kitten
Read the rest at the Guardian:
Let me introduce you to the real Charlotte Brontë. She was not a wallflower in mourning. She always wanted to be famous; she pined to be "forever known". Aged 20, she wrote boldly to the Poet Laureate Robert Southey, asking for his opinion of her talents. He replied: "You evidently possess and in no inconsiderable degree what Wordsworth calls 'the faculty of verse'." Then he chides her: "There is a danger of which I would ... warn you. The daydreams in which you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind. Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life and it ought not to be." Charlotte ignored Southey but Gaskell couldn't believe it. She concluded the correspondence "made her put aside, for a time, all idea of literary enterprise".
Charlotte continued in her position as a schoolteacher, which she had already held for a year. But she hated her profession and heartily despised the aggravating brats she was forced to teach. As the children at Roe Head School did their lessons, she wrote in her journal: "I had been toiling for nearly an hour. I sat sinking from irritation and weariness into a kind of lethargy. The thought came over me: am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy and the hyperbolic and most asinine stupidity of these fat headed oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity? Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair prisoned within these four bare walls, while the glorious summer suns are burning in heaven and the year is revolving in its richest glow and declaring at the close of every summer day the time I am losing will never come again? Just then a dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited." Note to Mrs Gaskell: Charlotte didn't want to kiss those children; she wanted to vomit on them.
Charlotte did not only feel passionate hatred for small children; she felt passionate love for men. Unlike the female eunuch created by Gaskell, she was obsessed with her sensuality. She wrote to a friend: "If you knew my thoughts; the dreams that absorb me; and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up ... you would pity and I daresay despise me." The thwarted lust of a parson's daughter? Gaskell dismisses it as "traces of despondency". In Brussels, studying to become a governess at Heger's school, the virgin became ever more lustful. She wrote obsessive letters to him, begging for his attention. "I would write a book and dedicate it to my literature master - to the only master I have ever had - to you Monsieur." Later she writes: "Day or night I find neither rest nor peace. If I sleep I have tortured dreams in which I see you always severe, always gloomy and annoyed with me. I do not seek to justify myself, I submit to every kind of reproach - all that I know - is that I cannot - that I will not resign myself to losing the friendship of my master completely - I would rather undergo the greatest physical sufferings. If my master withdraws his friendship entirely from me I will be completely without hope ... I cling on to preserving that little interest - I cling on to it as I cling on to life."
Thursday, March 24, 2005
Snapshots From My Worklife
Me and Cyllia just spent eight hours formatting files that are now useless because corp. takes two days to give me permissions for the electronic folder I was supposed to already have access to but apparently don't for some strange, cryptic, technical reason, and all of these files are due by COB tomorrow.
These new "permissions" guidelines were part of the firm-wide security upgrade that was supposed to make our business more streamlined and secure.
Excuse me while I snicker, and my company pays out a total of 16 hours of masturbatory time.
Ah, corporate America.
I need a new job.
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Battlestar Galactica and Its Troublesome Human Women, Redux
Ide Cyan sent me an interesting note about recent events on Battlestar Galactica, which, unfortunatley, I haven't been able to keep up on, as Jenn's the one who tapes things and we've both been out of town a lot (I plan to catch up when it's out on DVD).
Ide noted that the two main female characters in the series who are actually women (as opposed to robots) are both currently suffering from debilitating illness or injury. Adama, the President, has been dying of cancer since episode one, and now, hot fighter-pilot extraordinaire Starbuck has a knee injury that apparently has taken her out of fighting commission.
What the hell is up with these SF shows and their fear of women who actually kick ass? Andromeda wasn't bad: it had a woman captain, though she ultimately got booted to second by the new captain, who's a guy, and... well, I have some other problems with her now too: as the series has progressed she's gotten increasingly thinner and less butch. Firefly probably wins as far as diverse portrayals of women as actual strong, smart, people, but Firefly was cancelled.
What's so scary about putting a woman on screen who's not a stereotype? Who can take care of herself? Who's actually saving her husband and not necc. being saved by him (As Zoe saves Wash in Firefly)? Relationships between and among people are complicated, complicated things, and we don't all revert to gender stereotype. Think outside the box, people.
I think what continues to irritate me about BG is that they toted the gender-swapping of some of the main characters as being a huge deal, like giving 1/4 of your screen time to female characters was a big deal (well, 1/4 time of women characters not engaged in sex, 1/3 of the time if you include the sex). Yea. Real revolutionary.
What gives?
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.
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
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.
Monday, March 21, 2005
Loooong Weekend
Enjoyed a very relaxing weekend, and am having trouble coming back to just about everything. Got some writing to work on...
Thursday, March 17, 2005
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.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
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...
