Not Quite Steinbeck

Keeping the 'X' in Xmas

2010-12-04T11:17:00.002-10:00

Every year, around...oh, I don't know....September, you start hearing ads for what the best new xmas gift will be, where the big sales will be, an endless barrage of holiday music and bells ringing everytime you try and walk into a store to buy some toothpaste or a frozen pizza...and honestly? I fricken love it.

I love decorating the tree and watching snow storms and drinking cocoa and eating popcorn from my stepgrandparents while we open gifts...the whole thing. Ok, well I am not too into the consumerism, but even I like to see a tree with a bunch of nicely wrapped boxes underneath.

But there is one thing I hate about about xmas, I hear it over and over and it annoys me more each time. I'm referring to the "keeping the christ in christmas" crowd. You know who I mean, those (uninformed) individuals who think that saying 'xmas' instead of 'christmas' is right up there with burning bibles or punching the pope.

People seem to get all upset that saying x-mas is somehow sacrilegious, that it is deleting Christ from the holiday. Actually though the root of the X in Xmas is a Greek letter meaning “chi” that looks like an X. X has been used as an abbreviation for Christ used by the Christians since about 100 ad. Christians during that time frequently referred to themselves as Xians or Xistians and referred to the “mass of Christ” (Christmas) as Xmas. It is not a recent thing, it is not a way for non-religious people to take the religion out of Christmas, it is an abbreviation that was started by the earliest Christians and was used by the church.

But if you really want to get worked up about how Christmas has lost its Christians roots look at St. Nicholas (The Saint that Santa Claus is based on). St. Nicholas was a man who anonymously donated his money to helping the poor. On that note, helping the poor was also a pretty big part of Christ’s message. Whether you call it Xmas or Christmas, I think everyone can admit that rampant consumerism has become one of the main focuses of the holiday season.

So maybe instead of worrying about what arbitrary abbreviations other people should or should not use, spend this holiday season worrying about homeless people, people losing their homes to foreclosure, the growing number of the unemployed in the US, people who have to risk their lives at war in order to afford college (I know that isn’t the only reason people join the military but it is one of them) people without health insurance, people who can’t afford enough food, or the millions of people in developing nations who are living in abject poverty because of how the US economy is run.

There is my rant.

Have a Safe and Happy (Christmas / Xmas / Hanukkah / Kwanzaa / December / Whatever)

p.s.
does this post seem a little familiar to any of you? It was originally on facebook and it was after writing this that I decided I wanted a blog.

Elections...

2010-11-03T18:04:00.000-10:00

So we had an election in the US yesterday. My state (Wisconsin) is now officially a red (republican) state and I am pretty....shocked? Disgusted? Angry? Yeah...all those things.

So when I was around eleven or twelve, my older cousin recommended the book 1984 by George Orwell to me. If you haven't read it, it is about a guy who is living in a dysutopian future where everything is controlled by a war hungry government.

When I read that book, I really got into it. After that I started looking for other books with the same plot-line which led me to Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and then Anthem by Ayn Rand...which led me to Ayn Rand in general which eventually made me pick up the communist manifesto. (I know Ayn Rand has become the figurehead of the teabaggers but she is a good writer, she made up some evil philosophies but she's still a good storyteller).

Anyway, sounds a little convoluted but that is, in a nutshell, how I got started thinking about societal inequality and what kind of governmental system I think is the most moral. In other words, that is basically how I became a socialist.

So back to my point...the election. I've been a socialist since around eighth grade, I am pretty aware of the fact that most people in the US equate socialism to devil worship. Joe McCarthy wasn't all that long ago and the red scare is something that people still remember so it never shocks me that there aren't socialist candidates on the ballots. I mean, sure I would love to see them there, but I know basically you have a choice between democrats and republicans. Sure you can vote for an independent (and I have) but when you do that you kind of know that your candidate isn't going to end up in office.

Now I have some friends who are socialists who don't vote at all out of principal. Their belief is that the lesser of two evils is still evil and that a democrat or a republican is just going to help the rich no matter what promises they make in their campaign. And they are usually right.

However, this my analogy for why I vote democrat. Ok, say you are starving to death and even though you are entitled to a full meal, even though you have worked very hard for it and totally deserve it, you are told that you can only have either a slice of bread or a few bread crumbs...what are you going to pick? The slice of bread right? Is it as good as the meal? Obviously no...but isn't it better than the bread crumbs?

My point is, I don't think that the democratic party will end up giving the American public what it deserves. Its just that I think the Republican party will give us even less. And it isn't just theory. I have a good friend whose family will now be without insurance because Scott Walker(R) was elected Governor instead of Tom Barrett (D). I mean, that’s a tangible thing. She will no longer have access to healthcare based on this election.

I know that my vote will never change the system. I don't really think that capitalism will bite the dust until more people wake up to the fact that the American dream isn't reality, but I still can't not vote. Not when things like my friends healthcare or my sister's disability funding or abortion rights hang in the balance.

So OK, now that I justified why I am arguing for democrats, let me get back (again) to the election. The only politician that I really every trusted, Russ Feingold (who isn't a socialist but is brilliant) has just been voted out of office. The REPUBLICANS won. They won the congress seat, they won the governorship and they won the senate race.

And the only thing I can think to say about it is WTF?! Seriously?? Good god, we chose the bread crumbs.

P.S.
My sister also had a baby last week, she is gorgeous and pretty much the most amazing baby ever so things aren't all bad.

I'm back...(maybe)

2010-10-24T21:44:00.001-10:00

So I have started but then stopped writing about a million blog posts in the last few weeks. Part of the reason I haven't written so long really is because my work schedule changed and its been hard for me to adjust to normal people time. Part of the reason is also because my computer was having problems, but to be honest a big part of the reason is because I got burnt out.

Not on writing, I pretty much love to write. What I got burnt out on was following politics. When I first started this blog, that wasn't going to be the central focus of what I wrote. I was just going to write about my everyday life and see what I came up with. However, it was not a huge surprise that what I came up with was politics.

Since I was a kid, economics and discrimination and woman's rights issues has always been something that fascinated me. Fascinated seems like a weird way to put it, but it seems so simple to me the way that poverty and racism and sexism are all inherent traits of capitalism and I have always been compelled (much to the annoyance of my friends and family I'm sure) to convince everyone around me why it all needs to change.

So when I started writing on here, it was really neat to find a way to connect with other people who felt the same way. I would write on here and get comments about people that thought about the same stuff I did. I would go on other blogs and learn about stuff I'd never be exposed to otherwise. Overall, it was cool.

So anyway, after writing for awhile I started to spend more and more time looking about stuff about these issues. I started watching mainstream media more trying to get a sense of why everyone else has such weird ideas about things (i.e. teabaggers). I started reading more essays by people that disagreed with what I thought. And the end result of all that was that I got so disgusted that I needed a little time away from right-wing equals family, freedom and hard work and left-wing equals fascism, baby murder and high taxes. Overall, I got cynical and burnt out.

It seems like instead of seeing the recent depression as a clear sign that the rich screw over the poor at every chance they get, the super scary teabaggers have convinced the working poor to become their foot soldiers.

They throw around words like family, “real” Americans and freedom and suddenly neoliberalism is this fancy new idea thought up around a roaring log fire by Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. They are literally proposing that the problems caused by neoliberalism and rampant, non-regulated capitalism can be solved by even less regulations, lower taxes and fewer social services. And of course by getting rid of undocumented workers...because obviously THEY are the reason that wall street fell apart.

Anyway, the conservative movements stance on the solution to this country's problems is basically like saying the way to put out a fire is by dousing it in gasoline. And people are buying it...hook, line and sinker. And the political ads for the midterm election? GA-ross. They're idiotic. No one says what their politics are, they just say that they
for: hardworking Americans, freedom, change and against; Washington, job loss and pork barrel spending.

here is an example of one:

Ron Johnson

What the eff does that even mean? I will tell you what it means, nothing. It is basically like me saying that you should vote for me, if you vote me into office I will be against toddler beating, stealing from old people and making McDonalds illegal and I will fight to make donuts free, a six day weekend and spending Christmas with your loved ones.

My point is, all that modern political ads say are that the candidates are against vaguely
bad things and for vaguely good things. They never get into what they would concretely change or what their own political history is. Its disgusting. And fyi, it isn't just the right that do this, all politicians are guilty of it.

Anyway, back to the point I was making, the fact that the conservative movement in the US is nutso isn't exactly breaking news but what does this have to do with this blog? Well, last weekend I was visiting my dad and I said to him that I was fed up with politics....And I got a very,very, very, VERY long lecture. Now to put this in perspective, my dad is not a lecturer. He is about the most laid back person you could find but a few hours after I made that comment, he knocked on the door and basically gave me an hour long speech about how doing nothing was about as useful as hopping on the teabagger train.

Now don't get me wrong, its not like I think that this little blog is going to swing an election (VOTE FOR RUSS FEINGOLD!) but my dad did have a point. Even if the only difference I can make is to educate myself, (and of course N. who is forced to listen to just about any interesting/aggravating thing that I learn) at least I'll be able to fight back if I am cornered by a rabid republican. Ugh, I guess we'll see. Anyway, hopefully my readers haven't completely given up on looking at my site.

Bookish, English Orphans.

2010-10-20T08:12:00.000-10:00

I'm rereading Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham. Such a good book, the beginning reminds me of Jane Eyre and Dickens (are all English children little orphaned waifs who usually live with wealthy and resentful relatives? Seriously, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, Vanity Fair, Oliver Twist, this book..even Harry Potter. Where the eff are all the English parents?). Anyway there is a quote in OHB that I absolutely love,

“Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of everyday a source of bitter disappointment.”...brilliant.

Is it weird that I tend to love books about impoverished children? I mean, not like I like to hear about people being poor but there are pretty much two genres I always like; kids in poverty (like Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Angela’s Ashes, Bastard out of Carolina etc) and dis-utopian stories (like 1984, Brave New World, Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451, Anthem etc). Ugh, I am making myself sound depressing.

N. (my roommate/soon-to-be-husband) is reading 1984 for the first time. He is usually a nonfiction sort of guy but has been raiding my bookshelf lately. I try not to talk about it to him because I really love that story and I am afraid I'll be talking about the plot and give away the ending, he seems to like it so far.

Speaking of Harry Potter (and I was a few paragraphs ago) I've read those books and the whole time I was reading them, I was like why does this story seem so familiar? Then, when my dad moved a few weeks ago and made me clean out my room, I found a box of YA books I hadn't seen in years. In it was a book called, Wizard's Hall by Jane Yolen.

Ok, so here is a story plot. An eleven year old boy goes off to wizarding school. He befriends a girl and boy who know more about the school than he does and they form a little trio. He doesn't do very well, but because of a legendary story about the boy, everyone expects him to be great. There is this wizard who used to be a student there but then grew up and now he hates the school and wants to ruin it. There are many times when the importance of saying the bad wizard's true name is discussed. Anyway, the bad wizard manages to sneak in to the school (did I mention that all over the school are pictures and paintings where the people walk around and talk to passersby and to each other?) and after he sneaks into the school he almost kills everyone until the little boy defeats him and saves the day. Yeah, the little boy in THIS story is named Henry and this book came out years before the Harry Potter series. Weird right?

Anyway, you are probably asking yourself, what was the point of this post? Well, sorry, it was mainly just rambling about English orphaned kids. I just got off a double shift and I am too tired to write anything more substantial...

Also, are you wondering why I haven't written is sooo long? Its because I now work days, usually over eight hour long shifts...hopefully I will get back into the swing of things now. Also, my computer has been working crappy lately but its fixed now....

work-work-work....

2010-08-25T12:44:00.002-10:00

Sorry for the lack of posting, in the last week I have literally worked 65 hours. Not cool, job, not cool. I am about to have a four day weekend starting tomorrow and I promise you all that after that I will be more consistent. (Hopefully).

Speaking of work, tonight is the very last time I will ever have to do a overnight shift. For the last year, I have worked from ten o'clock at night until six in the morning. There are some perks to it, like never having to wake up at the crack of dawn, being able to watch a few hours of TV every day (my work has cable, I don't.), and being able to work by myself. But for the most part it has sucked.

N. works during the day, so when I was on that schedule I would come home at six and he would be asleep. I would fall asleep and by the time I woke up, he'd already be at work already and I'd have to leave before he got home. So yeah, unless we had the day off or one of us got up way earlier than usual, it felt like we never say each other. We lived in the same house, but in different time zones.

So anyway, that will be pretty sweet to work during the day (although I am still not excited to wake up at disgusting five o'clock in the morning.)

WTF is Neoliberalism?

2010-08-19T03:42:00.001-10:00

Do you want to know why the Wall Street crashed? Because of neoliberalism. Do you want to know why there are so many illegal immigrants in the US? Because of neoliberalism. Do you want to know why you can’t find a job? Because of neoliberalism. I could go on, (and I will, this is one of my longer posts) but you get the picture.

Neoliberalism is the theory that an economy and state have the ability to function the most effectively when there are no market barriers in place. There are five main points in the theory of neoliberalism. The first is establishing a market that is completely free of regulation. The second is the eradication of public spending for social services. The third is the deregulation of any government intervention that imposes upon the gain of profit. The fourth is the privatization of all government run services. The fifth is eliminating the idea of the “public good”.

In the eighties, a new economic theory emerged called neoliberalism (sometimes called neoconservatism or reaganomics or teabagger craziness). Anyway, this new policy basically said lets make the only role that the government has on the economy is make sure that no one tries to regulate any kind of trade. Some examples of trade regulation are tariffs for imported goods, making it so companies can’t outsource, or having a country charge taxes to a corperation that wants to operate in their nation.

In neoliberal theory, the whole idea of government changes from an institution that makes laws and provides services to its country to one that is only in place to make sure that there aren’t any trade regulations. For example, if there were a country or group of people who were working against a neoliberal state’s free trade, the state would use violence or the threat of violence to force them to allow free trade.

There are definite problems when this idea is put into practice. For example, in a completely “free” society, a company would not have to follow labor standards or environmental standards. The theory is that if the workers were being treated badly, they would have the freedom to not work there. If the workers quit because they were being treated badly, the business would fail and the problem would be fixed. In that scenario, the “freedoms” of the company wouldn’t be infringed upon and the free market would continue to flourish unrestricted.

This theory, of course, does not work in practice. From a realistic point of view, one realizes that workers need payment, even if conditions are bad and that a high percentage of businesses will do anything to increase profits. Even though there is obvious proof that the end result of this practice is harmful, many classic neoliberals maintain that it is still better the state does not intervene. They believe that the “cure is worse than the disease.” (Check out David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism, “

The classical neoliberal theory, as discussed earlier, is that if people have complete and total freedom, then the market will become a self-regulating entity and everyone working within it will have an equal chance of social mobility. Like the example stated earlier about the ways neoliberals believe labor standards will regulate themselves, the idea of a free market ensuring equality fails just as miserably. The ideal economic climate that neoliberals envision is one wherein a person would have the freedom to use their monetary capital in a way that will afford him or her the best life possible. In practice however, neoliberalism only works to create an economy where the elite have the freedom to increase their capital to amounts previously unseen and the poor are forced to live at a lower and lower standard.

So, to answer the questions I posed in paragraph one in a bit more detail… Because neoliberals took almost all of the regulations out of the banking industry, people on wall street were allowed to do whatever they wanted and what they wanted to do was to get a huge personal profit and they didn’t really care who’s pension they were ruining in the meantime.

Because neoliberals went into Latin American countries and ruined their economies by forcing deregulation of trade, now no one there is able to get a job. Basically US industries went in, took everything they could and left. Now the people there are forced between starving to death and seeing their children doomed to lead a life of poverty or illegally immigrating to the US were they can at least be able to send some money home. In short, the reason that the US has jobs for immigrants and their own countries don’t is because the US stole all their capital.

Because neoliberals forced free trade down everyone’s throats, companies are now allowed to go anywhere in the globe to look for the cheapest workers. Before neoliberalism, if say Nike wanted to make all their shoes in China, the labor would be a ton cheaper but Nike wouldn’t make such a huge profit because they would be forced to pay China taxes to operate there and they would be forced to pay tariffs (money to the government that could be reinvested in the United States) to import cheaply made goods. But since we decided to throw away any kind of trade regulation, companies can go make shoes in China and then sell them in the US for 500 times what it cost to produce. And since its so much cheaper to find labor overseas, American lost all its jobs.

So whenever you hear someone complaining about big government or trade regulation or the “socialist” agenda, just remember that the neoliberal agenda is what got the US to the state it is in today. I don’t know about you, but I am totally willing to try something different than this.

Sidenote, if you want to know more about neoliberalism, email me or leave a comment because I have a totally amazing list of articles and books about this topic!

Why We Probably Won't Be Friends.

2010-08-18T05:42:00.000-10:00

I just got switched to a day shift at my job and I don’t know if I am happy or not. Sure, I will be able to get more experience, improve my resume, get slightly more hours, not have to stay up all night, be able to spend a ton more time with my boyfriend, and be able to hang out with my friends more because I won’t have a completely opposite schedule than everyone else…but I won’t work alone anymore.

My mom tells a story sometimes about how when I was a kid, she used to have me make me go outside to play with the other kids because all I wanted to do was stay inside and read. I’m not saying I was some kind of intellectual, we’re talking Goosebumps and Babysitters club.

After she had forced me to go out and try to make friends, she would look out the window and see me reading a book I had smuggled out of the house. Kind of weird for a seven year old, huh? I also used to tell people I wanted to be a garbage man when I grew up. That has nothing to do with anything else on this post.

I tend to be pretty antisocial, sure I went through a period in middle school/early high school when I was all like “HANG OUT WITH ME! WE’LL DO ALL THE STUFF YOU LIKE AND I’LL ALWAYS AGREE WITH YOU WHILE WE WATCH TRL AND SING SPICE GIRL SONGS AND DO EACH OTHER’S HAIR AND WEAR MATCHING JNCO’S THAT HAVE DAISY PATCHES ON THEM! LETS BE BFFS!”

(I did have some cool friends in that mix, like D. and T…. now I am wishing that I had another friend whose name began with a D. so I could refer to them as DDT, maybe I will change Stacey’s name to D’Stacey?)

Anyway, by the time I hit college, I was pretty much done with pretending I fit in with people. The problem with that is I’m kind of a weirdo. I don’t mean like a unique, trend-setting, nonconformist hipster, I mean like I like to talk about sex and politics too much, I hate things like sports and parties, social chitchat makes me awkward and I’d still rather read than have actual conversations with people.

Now back to the shift change, I like my coworkers. They are all nice people. However, actually having to be around people all day invariably leads to social chitchat aka small talk. I’m fine at talking when it is to someone I am friends with but that is only because all my friends are super weirdoes (is that how you spell the plural version of weirdo? That is what Word corrected it to so I guess so) like me. But when it comes to people I don’t know very well, I literally don’t know how to do it. It usually goes something like this:

Casual Acquaintance: “My [name of spouse, kid, friend] and I went to [some place] and it was pretty [fun, dumb, weird etc].”

Me: “Oh. (Then I spend some time thinking of how I should respond because I have no idea why they are sharing this information with me, why they think I would be interested or what I am supposed to say in response) That sounds [fun, dumb, weird etc.]”.

Or

Casual Acquaintance: “I’m thinking about [going somewhere, doing something, seeing someone etc.] this weekend, you have anything big planned?

Me:(frantically try and think of something more normal/ less nerdy to say than writing blog posts about politics or playing dirty word scrabble with my boyfriend) Nope, nothing planned yet.”

Or my favorite,

Casual Acquaintance: “Did you see the [base, foot, basket] ball game yesterday?”

Me: “…No.”

Its like my inner me is Sarah Silverman plus Bill Maher, but my outer me is Micheal Cera minus the cool.

Uncle Jesus Sam Christ.

2010-08-16T00:42:00.002-10:00

When I was around eight, I slept over a friend's house and went to church for the first time. The night before I left , my dad put a pair of black pants in my bag , stressed that I brushed my hair before the service and didn't talk in the church. So yeah, that was my first exposure to religion: nice pants, tidy hair and no talking.

That plus a couple of other post sleepover masses were the extent of my religious experiences as a child. Oh there were a few other things, like being told by my elementary school friends that I would go to hell for saying god's-name-in-vain (I had to have them repeat that to me like five times because I was young enough that I didn't know what “in vain”meant and I think that they weren't too sure either because they pronounced the whole thing in one breath, clearly quoting someone else), spending Wednesday afternoons at school watching Bill Nye or relearning state capitals cause almost all the kids in my grade were in CCD and the time I called my dad at work terrified because there were a bunch of guys in suits knocking at the door one day when I was home sick (pretty sure those were Mormons). There was also the time my little sister came home crying that she was afraid that “the saints were going to get her”. Yeah, we were little heathens I guess.

It wasn't that my parents were against religion, we just never did it. Its weird because religion is one of the biggest cultural institution, I mean its kind of like growing up not knowing what it is like to go to school. Its this weird segment of culture that I had no idea about it. I did't have anything against it mind you, but I can't say that I really understand it either.

I try to keep an open mind about it. I really, really do. I hate to hear about someone that is discriminated against because they are a minority, or a woman or GLBT and I know that the same logic should be transposed onto religion...but it pretty hard for me to do.

It just seems like there are so many problems caused because of religion. Take the health care bill for example, all the liberal politicians are too scared to talk about birth control because they will have the anti-choice fanatics calling them baby killers ('cause like I said in a previous post, taking the pill is clearly identical in their minds to abortion). Another example is same-sex marriage, half the country is in an uproar because they are terrified that two gay people getting married is going to ruin families and ruin children brought up in those families. Another example is all the controversy over the mosque in New York. I mean, all those people want to do is build a place of worship. I'm not any more excited that a mosque is being built than I would be for a church or a synagogue but seriously, all this god stuff flying around is making people go insane.

And those are just the examples I think of when I am thinking about religion in regards to current events, that’s not even getting into the pervasive social problems like teaching kids that sex equals burning for eternity. Or this weird new way that the United States has somehow morphed Uncle Sam and Jesus Christ into some all powerful American deity (spoiler alert: Uncle Jesus Sam Christ is totes pro-war and republican).

I know it probably sounds like I hate everything about religion, but that isn't exactly true. I've read parts of the bible, there seems to be a lot of talk about peace and helping the poor and not being focused on amassing wealth (On a totally unrelated note, the Catholic church is the largest land owner in the world). Anyway, that nice stuff in the bible is great but for the US being a “Christian” nation, I can't really say I have seen those values coming into the common culture.

But maybe that is because I was raised so far outside the sphere of religion. What do you guys think? Is religion a good thing? Am I crazy for thinking it is more oppressive than helpful? Doesn't it seem to add to the repression of woman (i.e. Mormonism)? Isn't the show Lost eff-ing AMAZING? (OK, that isn't really about religion but thanks to netflix I am watching it for the first time and trust me, the question was rhetorical because I already know it is amazing.)

***side note: I don't meant to be offensive to any readers! I know for the most part religion is a very, very personal thing and I am not trying to say that what other people believe is wrong, unless, that is, you try and force it on to other people. Also, I know I kept using the generic term “religion” when the only religions I reference in my post are Christian but I grew up in a tinytinytiny town where the diversity of religions were Catholic and Presbyterian. The only reason I don't talk about my experiences with Judaism or Hinduism or Islamic faiths or any other ones is because I never really had any. ***

Broke Like Me.

2010-08-12T05:26:00.004-10:00

Before you read this, watch the clip below (fighting and chaos as crowd waits). Sorry for the grainy footage, but you have to watch this clip.

This is what America has become. I know it isn’t like this for everyone, but it is like this for hundreds of thousands of people. I joke around a lot on here, but when I see something like this, I can’t joke. It is too serious and too tragic.

Why aren’t we more enraged that our country has turned into a place where people are literally causing riots just to get on a waiting list to get affordable housing? Why is it that the only dialogue about public assistance you ever hear is that too many people are cheating the system or that anyone getting aid should just “go get a job”?

Anyone that thinks like that should be forced to live at minimum wage for one year. Just one. Then they can give an opinion on whether the working poor are abusing the system or not.

I’m sick of everyone in this country acting like capitalism was written somewhere in the constitution. It wasn’t. It isn’t. It would not be unpatriotic to get rid of free market capitalism, we wouldn’t be making the founding fathers roll over in their graves. And even if they did, they had slaves, murdered native americans and were ok with not recognizing women asfull citizens, so maybe we can quit worrying whether or not they approve of what we do.

This isn’t a well-written post, I’m annoyed. No, annoyed isn’t the right word. I’m pissed. People shouldn’t need help that badly.

Fighting & Chaos As Crowd Waits for Section 8 Housing Assistance!

2010-08-12T05:20:00.000-10:00

Gay People Ruined My Marriage and Hispanic Toddlers Stole My Job.

2010-08-05T19:48:00.001-10:00

First of all, yay for Prop 8 getting overturned in California! Hopefully it will go just as well in the appeals. I am so happy that that the ban on same-sex marriage got lifted in CA (for now anyway) but seriously, I had to avoid the news all day yesterday because I thought my head was going to explode from having to listen to conservatives talk about how gay marriage will ruin families and heterosexual marriages. Cause obviously you hear everyday about a husband and wife splitting up because they saw two gay guys kissing.

There was actually one woman against same-sex marriage who said that she got mad when people said she was prejudice for saying that same-sex couples couldn’t raise a child as well as a heterosexual couple.

Um, grab a dictionary you bigoted ass, prejudice means to prejudge and you are saying, without ever meeting them or knowing them, that a every single same-sex couple cannot raise a child properly because there isn’t at least one penis and one vagina in the equation. You can have whatever ignorant opinion you want, but at least learn what prejudice means.

Here’s the thing that stands out to me, the conservatives in this country never shut the eff up about how much they hate big government trying to tell them what to do in their lives. How we can’t let them regulate trade, we can’t let them regulate healthcare, we can’t let them regulate gun sales blah blah blah. But we can let them regulate marriage? How the eff does anyone else’s marriage effect you?

Speaking of nutcase republicans, have you people heard of Russell Pearce, he’s the senator from Arizona who spearheaded the law that makes it legally ok to be racist in Arizona. Anyway, he isn’t content with just racial profiling being ok, now he wants to make it so children of illegal immigrants aren’t citizens of the United States.

So ok, what he wants to do is rewrite the fourteenth amendment. The fourteenth amendment has five sections, and he wants to change the first one, which reads as follows,

14th Amendment, Sect. 1: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

His problem with it is the part that says that all people born in the US are US citizens. The reason that he is against this is because he thinks that children of illegal aliens shouldn’t be allowed to stay here. WTF Senator Pearce? I thought the big thing for you right-wingers was complaining about how all your constitutional rights were getting taken away?

I mean, wasn’t that your whole big thing against Obama was that he was going to take away your guns and violate the constitution? So yeah, lets make sure everything we do is constitutional and if there is a law we want to pass that isn’t constitutional well, then we’ll just have to rewrite that part of the constitution. Even if you are against illegal immigration, I am pretty sure that getting rid of progressive amendments to the constitution is a precedent we don’t want to set. I mean, as a woman, I kind of dig voting. Just saying.

So yeah, let’s sum up that logic. Big government is evil, unless of course you want to use it to oppress a bunch of people. Side note, teabaggers who are afraid of big brother and big government: PATRIOT ACT! A Republican enacted that little gem. Also, you can claim anything and everything violates the constitution if you have no other argument, but if you want to pass a law that CLEARLY violates it you should just change the constitution.

And isn’t it weird how all these things the right are so against have to do with minorities? What an odd coincidence.

Why the working class hates Obama

2010-08-02T09:01:00.001-10:00

I just did a guest post for The Socialist Way, read my post here http://thesocialistway.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-american-working-class-hates-obama.html

while you are at the site, make sure and check out some of their other great articles!

Girl (Purchasing) Power

2010-07-27T05:12:00.002-10:00

Hey, blog friends, I have a problem. I think that I am being a girl wrong. I know, I know, you’re all like, what? How can you be a girl "wrong"? It might seem impossible, but I have been watching a lot of TV lately and clearly I messed up somewhere.

Ok, so first of all, I cannot cook. I mean, sure, I can pour a mean bowl of cheerios, open a can of diet coke like no other and don’t even get me STARTED on my ordering takeout skills, but besides that I’m pretty much in the dark. I don’t really know what to do about it. Just kidding, I totally know what to do about it. I am going to buy a magic bullet, some Tupperware, some Teflon kitchenware, some Chicago Cutlery, an Electrolux stove and that new GPS looking gadget full of recipes. That should get me started at least. Because seriously, if I didn’t learn this stuff soon how will I get my boyfriend to love me?

So, I know what you guys are thinking, J., if you get all this cooking stuff your kitchen is going to be a gigantic mess! Well, trust me guys, er, I mean, girls, I was worried about the same thing but TV provided me with an answer – cleaning supplies. All I have to do is buy some Joy dish soap, a Swiffer mop, some Lysol spray, a Mister Clean Magic Eraser, some Easy Off oven spray, Some Electrosol dish washer soap, Some Arm and Hammer baking soda for the fridge, some Bounty paper towels, some Glad garbage bags, a ShamWow or two and a Shark steam mop and before I know it I will be dancing around wearing pearls and a dress in a kitchen that literally sparkles. And trust me, I need that stuff, cause right now there is a pile of dishes a foot high sitting in my sink from last week when I made my man a pot roast (just kidding...I didn’t really make a pot roast.)

Now that I have this kitchen stuff figured out, I thought that I would be well on my way to being a real woman. Unfortunately with all that cooking, I started to eat the food (classic rookie mistake) and now I’m getting fat. And if TV taught me anything, it’s that nobody likes a fat girl. But, as usual, my friendly television set is just sitting there waiting with the answer – DIETS!

If you are just getting started on being a woman, you might think that exercise and healthy choices are the way to shed pounds, but you are wrong…and probably fat. One way you can do it is to order premade meals. These will usually be prepared by a skilled chef who somehow manages to turn chocolate cake and pizza into vegetables. You can also try workout tapes, these can be super helpful if instead of the television implying that you need to lose weight, you want to hear the TV bluntly tell you that you are too fat. But those ways are pretty hard, the best way to do it is to just buy pills. Whether you want to be strung out on speed or just use the old fashioned laxative approach, there will be plenty of options to choose from.

Just remember ladies, crash diets and pills are only the beginning, even after you lose some of the weight you will still want to invest in some tummy-tucking panties and a push-up bra to make sure you really look like a woman. And don’t think that you are going to stop with body morphing underwear, there are a lot of other products that you are going to need before you can leave the house without scarring the neighborhood children. Which brings us, of course, to make-up.

If you are single, and if you are reading this feminist blog, you are almost for sure single, cause if you had a man, you wouldn’t be a feminist and instead would be dancing around your newly cleaned kitchen with your Swiffer mop debating whether you wanted to fold laundry or start dinner. Anyway, if you are single, you will probably want to invest in some cover-up, zit cream, eyeliner, eye shadow, wrinkle remover, exfoliant, moisturizer, mascara, lip stick, lip gloss, blush, that weird little airbrush thing, some more zit cream, some teeth whitener, some skin bronzer and makeup remover. Lots and lots of make-up remover. A plus side to all these beauty products is that you can use them to cleverly hide your tampons in the bathroom. God, can you even imagine how embarrassing it would be to have your man (or really ANY man) know that you get your period? (Shudder!)

So that should at least get you started. There are lots of other things you are going to need (like Nair and scrapbooking machines and purses) but those are just icing on the cake, The stuff I already listed is what will help you get the most important product a woman will ever get – the diamond ring. Once you have that you will have graduated from Being a Girl 101 and be well on your way to becoming A Wife and Mother. See get out your credit cards ladies, and start shopping, er, I mean, start living!

Teabagger Logic

2010-07-24T05:59:00.003-10:00

Lefty Politics and Software Systems (I'm Clearly the Nerdiest in the Land)

2010-07-23T18:36:00.004-10:00

http://www.openoffice.org/

I am writing this on my newly downloaded open office writer program. If you guys don't know about this go to www.openoffice.org. Seriously, you can download this whole program, it is exactly like Microsoft office (complete with software that is nearly identical to Microsoft word, excel, power point, and a fairly powerful paint program). Wondering why I am talking about a random software download on my fairly political blog? Because this entire software program is completely free.

Lets start from the beginning. Have you ever heard of Linux? (Btw, don't freak out I am going to quit talking techie in just a minute and get back to my typical political bloggy brilliance.) Anyway when computers first started becoming a mass market kind of thing and not just something MIT dudes did in some lab basement, people started being like wow, we can be millionaires (see Bill Gates) and started copyrighting their software. As everyone knows Microsoft pretty much corned the market on operating systems (an operating system is what runs all the other programs on your computer).

So anyway, there were some programmers that thought operating systems and basic software stuff shouldn't be a profit kind of thing so they made Linux, an operating system that can be used instead of Microsoft...but for free. So Linux is an operating system but I didn't need that because I already have Microsoft OS on my computer but I didn't have Microsoft Office (or the couple hundred bucks to buy it). Anyway, that is where the Open Office came in.

At this website, you just click a button and download the system. It takes about fifteen minutes to get the whole thing. I've only had it for about an hour, but so far I can't tell much of a difference at all between this and the Microsoft system. (Except that when you save a document it is a .odt instead of .doc so I guess if you are a student and your teacher says you can only turn in .doc's then you may have a problem. I dunno, maybe they are convertible or something, I haven't had enough practice with it to be sure yet. )

From that, this whole movement started called the open source movement and the ideology behind is it to make software that is accessible to everyone, that can be shared by everyone and can be improved and worked on by everyone. It is an interesting thing.

So why am I babbling on about it in my blog? Because the company is paying me a TON of money to tell all my millions of readers. Just kidding. It is because I think this is a real cool example of a social need being met by people who aren't doing it to make bank. Because now I have a eff-ing awesome NON-CAPITALIST office package on my computer and it makes me pretty happy.

There are lots of people who aren't psyched about this whole thing...like Microsoft obviously. In this totally neoliberal system that we live in, the idea of people freely giving away their products seems crazy and companies who are NOT giving it away for free are getting kind of pissed. But then again, since it is free there isn't a whole lot people can do about it.

So yeah, enough tech stuff, but lets really look at this issue. Social need, social solution. Seems reasonable right? Now lets use this same framework for some other stuff that is created to serve a social need but that you can only get if you have enough money like medicine, or education or the internet. We live in a capitalist country obviously, and I'm sure 90% people are like me don't have the economic freedom to be like "eff getting paid, I am just going to donate my life to volunteer work" but still, stuff like this makes me hopeful.

Also, just so you guys know, It friday night and I am at home eating tofutti(delicious vegen "ice cream") and watching documentaries with my cat. And also am posting a blog about computer systems. I kind of feel like my life is a female version of P. Diddy's. (he's cool and hip, right? That reference makes sense, right?)

No Babies and Googling Myself.

2010-07-22T04:43:00.003-10:00

So at work today, another of my coworkers announced her pregnancy. There were a bunch of us sitting around and after the round of congratulations, they started talking about how, now that she is pregnant, everyone there is a mommy. Then they looked at me and were like, "oh yeah except for you. When are you going to get started on that?" Awkward.

Right now my sister is pregnant, one of my close friends is pregnant, most of my other friends have babies and every time I go on facebook, all I see are pictures of my friends’ babies or ultrasound pictures. And I am constantly being asked when I’m going to have one. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t in a rude way necessarily, except for maybe my grandma who asks me all the time if she is going to be a great-grandma before she dies. She asked N. this once, when him and I were going to have a baby…that happened the first time she met him, after we’d been dating for about a month. Thanks Grandma. That should hopefully subside a bit now that my little sister is going to have one.

Everyone else my age seems to be going through some huge maternal fixation. Most of the ones that don’t have babies want one really, really bad. They get all weepy when we walk past the baby outfit aisle and already have a list of names picked out for when the day comes. I’m not saying I don’t think about those things sometimes, but then I remember that I can barely remember to feed my cat and how usually don’t think to check how much gas I have in my car until that little low fuel light comes on. I’m not sure, cause I don’t have kids, but I am pretty sure that they don’t have a "Check Diaper" light.

Anyway, back to my original point, is it really so weird not to be reproducing at 24? It’s not like I don’t like little kids, I do. I love hanging out with my friend’s little boy and I cannot wait for my niece to be born. I just don’t want one of my own yet. There’s just so much I want to accomplish before I have a kid like graduate school and traveling and finally beating that xbox game I’ve been playing for the last few weeks…. you know, important things.

Side Note: You know that kid cartoon Veggie Tales, about the talking Jesus produce? I googled myself today (which sounds like something filthy but is really just narcissistic) and found out the "Not Quite Stienbeck" will pull up stuff about one of their movies. If anyone is curious if that is why I named my blog this, the answer is no. I named it this because I love John Stienbeck (and also because www.coolestpersonever.com was taken)

Fun with Math and Numbers (Military Edition)

2010-07-21T04:21:00.008-10:00

Here are some fun facts. ( fyi, I compiled this information off of government websites)

Currently, senators, congressmen and the president make (on average) $169,587 a year. Together, these 536 people will make $90,899,000 a year. That is not including their personal incomes from things like investments, this is just the salary that they earn from the US taxpayers.

On the other (much poorer) hand, over 40,656,000 Americans live in poverty. This 13.2 percent of the population lives on less than $10,000 a year. Did I mention that the president has a $19,000 a year "entertainment" fund that is separate from his salary? Or that all of his housing, travel and living expenses come out of a different account than his salary?

In 2010, the US government decided that about one out of every three dollars you pay in taxes will be spent on defense. This means that one dollar will go to the war and the other two will be used towards: education, social security, repaying the national debt, national parks, medicare, the national court and prison systems, housing and urban development, the postal service, TARP funds, disaster relief funds and every administrative position in the national government.

Just for kicks, lets look at what we could be doing if we weren't at war. We'll look at 2011 budget and we will just look at the federal income taxes that people in Wisconsin pay. If we weren't in the war, Wisconsin could use that money to get:
1,948,101 People Receiving Low-Income Healthcare or
1,433,296 Scholarships for University Students or
184,447 Police or Sheriff's Patrol Officers or
190,419 Elementary School Teachers or
9,319,786 Households with Renewable Wind Electricity or
3,494,920 Households with Renewable Solar Electricity

(all that renewable energy would kind of cut the foreign dependence on oil huh?)

If you are angry with this, but are worried that you should be supporting the troops, you should probably know that while the defense budget was increased this year, all of the increases went towards weapon development. All of the cuts, on the other hand, were in what was given to military personal and their families, included a 20.2% cut on military and family housing. Pretty patriotic, huh?

And if you are thinking to yourself, well we are an industrialized nation, money like this is to be expected, think again. If you look at defense spending on a global scale, the USA is responsible for 46.5 (!!!) per cent of the world total, distantly followed by the China (6.6% of world share), France (4.2%), UK (3.8%), and Russia (3.5%). And not that it could even be remotely related to thier low defense budgets or anything, but fyi, France and the UK have universal healthcare.

And the real cost isn’t obviously the money. The lowest estimate of the American soldiers that have died fighting these wars is over 5,000. That would be like if everyone in my hometown passed away…more than 5 times. The lowest estimate for the amount of Iraqi and Afghan civilians (regular people that had nothing whatsoever to do with the war) is well in the thousands. Remember that those are the LOWEST estimates., these are the US government estimates. There are some independent groups that say the civilian death total could easily be ten times that much.

Support the troops, bring them home.

***Websites I got information from***
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/
http://www.nationalpriorities.com/
http://aspe.hhs.gov/

Condoms that Attack Rapists

2010-07-20T04:26:00.004-10:00

I wanted to write about these things for a while and since one of my most recent posts was about contraceptives, I figured now would be a good time. Before I actually got around to writing it myself, I find out someone beat me too it. So yeah, just go check out this link to an awesome blog.
http://yourloudspeaker.blogspot.com/2010/06/real-vagina-monologues-vaginas-bite.html

An Incredibly Romantic Story (Where I am a Jerk)

2010-07-20T03:42:00.002-10:00

So the other day, N. and I were enjoying our first day off together in like 35 years (or two weeks, whatever). We were flipping through netflix and I said that since we were having A-Romantic-Day-Together, I was going to make him watch lovey-dovey movies all day. He laughed and said "Yeah right, you hate romance."

I pretended to be insulted until I remembered that it is true, in a way. I’m not a fan of traditional things like roses, Sleepless in Seattle type movies and novels of shirtless men clutching fainting, women wearing bodices. My idea of romance is more like using my scrabble tiles to spell out lewd innuendo while suggestively leering at him (‘cause I’m ladylike like that). So anyway, that reminded me of this story where N. was being super romantic and I was a jerk.

This story happened about two years ago on the night that we were taking down the Christmas tree in our, teeny tiny apartment in Superior. I’d come home from a day of spending Xmas gift cards at the mall and N. suggested that we take down the tree.

I, being lazy as usual, tried to convince him that we would do it another day. He persisted until finally I was like, fine whatever we’ll take the tree down (side note this happened at the very end of January so really it wasn’t like he was being a nutjob). So he put on some classical music, got out the boxes and got started. Being my usually ADD self, I was all over the place finding other stuff to do because I didn’t feel like wrapping up ornaments.

He kept asking me to at least come over and do a few. I would do a couple and then get distracted by the internet or my phone and then when they were just about done I decided that the least I could (literally it was the least possible I could do because he’d done the rest) was to pick up the tinsel off the carpet.

He asked me to stop what I was doing so that I could come take one of the ornaments off the tree. I was all crabby and said just put it in a box. He said he wasn’t sure if it went in my stuff or his. I told him to do whatever he wanted with it. He said, again, that I should just come do it. I said, again in a louder and more annoyed voice, just put it where ever, I am TRYING to pick up this tinsel. He asked me again so I got up, went to the tree to pull off the ornament and put it in the box and saw…

My engagement ring hanging from the tree…and promptly felt like an a*hole. He got down and one knee and did the whole lovely love thing. Luckily he is a wonderful BF (not a crabby a*hole like me) so he laughed about it. Ahh, love.

Anyway, that was a bit of a random story but I wanted to take a day off from politics. I watched a half-hour of fox news last night and it gave me some good ideas for stuff that I want to write about. Btw, there was a reason I was watching fox news specifically but I’ll explain that later when I write the post, I needed to explain that because I don’t even want internet strangers to think that I would watch that channel to get the actual news. However, it also annoyed me so much that if I try and think about it right now my head might explode, so instead you got a love story. Lucky you.

Health Care for Everyone (unless you have a uterus)

2010-07-19T02:17:00.004-10:00

So, apparently, birth control may just be the same as an abortion. At least, that is what the government is trying to say. I’m talking about the new health care reform bill. I know, I know. Everyone and their brother is screaming about how this new “socialist” (totally NOT socialist fyi) bill is going to turn America in to Soviet Russia overnight but I am not going to get into that (stupid) debate. The thing I am going to rant about is how it still totally sucks to be a girl in this country.

So if you are like me, you work a million hours a week in order to pay your rent so you may not have time to do research on legislation and mainstream media sucks when it comes to providing in-depth coverage, so I will break this down for you.

When the bill first came up, there was no language about reproductive health. Basically democrats were too scared to touch the subject because they were afraid that it would turn into an abortion debate. Which totally makes sense, because I know every time I go in for my yearly check my gynecologist is like “GET AN ABORTION!!!” and I’m like, “….but I’m not pregnant?” and she usually replies, “go get pregnant so you can come back and GET AN ABORTION!”. I should really find a doctor that yells less, but that’s beside the point.

Anyway, so last fall Senator Mikulski from Maryland put an amendment in that said the bill had to cover things like mammograms and other preventative screenings. But the bill still doesn’t say whether or not it will cover birth control and every time the issue comes up for debate the right wing nut jobs start screaming about baby murder. Seriously guys, birth control would prevent unplanned pregnancies which would prevent abortions. Where is the problem? I’m confused.

Did I mention that Viagra is covered. Soak that in for a minute. Women can’t get birth control, even though there are situations where it prescribed regardless of sexual activity like when someone has polycystic ovarian syndrome, a condition that can be helped by birth control but men can get Viagra. I’m sure ED sucks, but seriously have you ever heard a doctor yelling, “This man will die if he doesn’t get a boner STAT!”? I didn’t think so.

Side note:

I’ve spent the weekend trying to understand more about how to do a blog. Its confusing as f. I been looking through different directories, trying to upload url links and trying to figure out what a rss feed. All this other techie stuff which hasn’t been boding well with my extremely non-technical brain. But I think I have it a little more figured out.

So yeah, in case you are wondering what the whole directory thing is, it is where you can get your site listed. I am posting info about not quite Steinbeck so more people can read my genius and start worshipping my internet wisdom.

By the way, when I first got my blog, I installed that little map over there (on your right à) so I could see how many millions of people visited my blog everyday and where they are from. There are at least two pretty consistent visitors everyday, me and then some mystery reader from (judging from that tiny map) somewhere south of here…approximately Kansas? Who are you mystery reader, why do you love me so much? Just kidding, obviously you love me cause I am a visionary but seriously, you have me curious.

So yeah, basically what I am trying to say is that I need and love attention, so everyone reading this, you should totally become a follower or, if you totally hate me and wish that I would stop poisoning the internet, at least leave a comment saying so. Like I said, I love attention.

Double Side Note:

I spent the last five minutes trying to figure out why a random period kept showing up in the middle of that paragraph. I kept trying to delete it and nothing happened. It was some dust on the screen. I’m basically a genius.

Walter's Thumb

2010-07-17T13:41:00.005-10:00

This is a super long post because it is actually a short story. A few posts ago (Cartoons and Anarchy) I talked about the first short story I had written. A friend of mine suggested posting it and, since this is after all a blog starring yours truly, I thought it would be kind of fun to post the first fiction I ever wrote.

It’s not a great story, not even really a good one, the dialogue is pretty wooden, its lacking description and there are some MAJOR plot holes but I wrote it ten years ago when I was like fourteen. I fought the urge to freshen it up and fix spelling and/or grammatical errors so it would be in its original form. You can definitely tell that I had been reading George Orwell and Aldous Huxley at the time I wrote this but its kind of a fun story to picture a shy, polite preteen girl (aka me) reading in front of a high school class. So yeah, here it is. Enjoy.

Walter’s Thumb

"It’s prison, man. Did you think it was going to be easy?" Vick Shrofeild, Walter’s cellmate, sat on his damp, military-grade cot and stared across the tent at Walter. "It might not seem like we are well guarded and you are new so you might think you can get away but trust me, you are going to fighting this war for the rest of your life. I mean think about it, they put a tracking chip in your thumb. Inside of your body. You could be a million miles away from any of the guards and all they would have to do to find you is boot up their compu-trackers"

Walter Peasly stretched his arm in front of him and examined the round, red scar at the base of his left thumb. "Not me. I may have committed a crime and that court may have decided that I am going to die in this war to make up for it, but that isn’t what I decided. If I die trying to escape, I will be just as dead as I would be if I died out there in the slaughter house they expect us to charge into everyday."

Vick stood up to leave but stopped to look back at Walter before he exited the tent. "Look man, do what you want, but don’t involve me. The less I know the safer I’ll be. You seem like a nice guy, but I am not going to get tortured to protect your secrets."

Once he was alone, Walter lay back on his cot and stared at the olive green canvas of the ceiling. He was 26. He was only 26 and he already had a life sentence hanging over his head. Two years ago, when he was still free, when he still had some sort of hope of making something of himself, he’d decided to risk all that to try and make some money in the black market.

He’d been successful at first, started out small with black market food exchanges and clothing distribution but then he’d gotten greedy and started trading in government grade stolen vehicles. While the cops had been willing to overlook someone skimming some profit on food rations, they had not been so forgiving when they caught him selling stolen military trucks to the private armies that had begun operating out of the Rockies. After he got caught, he’d been given a court date. He waited in a military prison for a few months while they sorted out his sentence and then taken to a hospital to have his tracking chip implanted. After that he was dropped off at the Great Lakes border, destined to fight in the war that the United American Federation had been waging against the Northern Resistance for the past forty-odd years.

But Walter had decided tracking chip of not, if he was going to die, he was going to die on his own terms. He stood up and walked to the door of the tent. Most of the men had gone to cafeteria to have dinner and the sleeping area sat empty in the darkening night. Walter stepped back into the tent and closed the flap all the while trying to prepare himself for what he was about to do.
With the tent flap closed, Walter knelt next to his cot and reached behind his extra uniforms to pull out the bottle of cheap alcohol he had stolen from the guard’s tent earlier that day. He pulled the greasy cork out of the top and, though he didn’t really like alcohol, especially the cheap stuff that the government issued, gulped down a third of the bottle in order to numb himself for what he was about to do.

Walter closed his eyes and sat perfectly still, gathering his thoughts and his courage. He then broke the bottle on the cement floor, pressed his hand flat on the pavement and used the broken shard of glass to cut his thumb off just below the line of the round, red scare.

"G-g-god." Walter bit back a scream as an angry, red bolt of pain sliced up his arm. "Oh god. Oh god." The room swam in front of him and he knew that he would have to act fast in order not to faint. He grabbed his first aid kit and used a cauterizing tool to stop the flow of blood. He grabbed the cut off thumb with his good hand and shoved it under his pillow so if anyone did a compu-track check it would register that he was in bed.

Walter tried to make his mind focus on escaping rather than letting it sink into the dark tunnel of pain that was tugging at the edge of his thoughts. He clumsily grabbed the bag he had packed the night before, pushed through the flap of the tent and raced into the dark forest that stood at the edge of base camp.

He ran for hours, taking breaks only to chew up tablets of pain reliever and take swallows of the lukewarm water in his canteen. The sharp pain had subsided a bit, but had been replaced with a dull, throbbing ache that threatened to knock him out if he concentrated too much on it. Finally, just as the cool blue light of morning began to creep around the edges of the horizon, he came to a clearing in the forest where an old, abandoned cabin stood.

There was no door, most of the windows had been broken out and he could tell from the smell of the place that more than one animal had sheltered in the cabin’s crumbling walls, but it would have to do. Walter knew that this quadrant of the border was mostly empty but he didn’t want to risk running in the daylight.

It wasn’t until he made himself as comfortable as possible on the wooden floor that he realized what he had done. He had run away from the United American Federation. He had cut off his own thumb. He was free. It was with that thought that Walter curled into a ball on the cold cabin floor and sank into the deepest, most needed sleep of his life.

Hours later, long after the January sun had risen to the center of sky, Walter awoke to a sharp kick in the base of his spine. Half asleep, unsure of what was happening or where he was, Walter attempted to push himself to his feet before screaming out in agony as he accidentally put his weight on his throbbing wound. He rolled over, clutching his hand and looked up to the circle of military guards that surrounded him.

The guard closest to him, the one that had kicked him, bent down to yell into Walter’s face. "Think you’re smart? Think you’re the first soldier that thought they’d slip out without getting caught? God kid, you aren’t even the first one to cut off your thumb!" The circle of guards erupted in laughter as Walter cowered at their feet.

"You think that you are smarted that the UAF? You think you, a disgusting criminal, could manage to outsmart the entire United American Federation? Ha." Walter tried to make the ball he was curled into smaller. "You know, cutting off your thumb seems like a pretty logical idea. You get rid of the tracker, you steal away into the night and between the chaos of the war and the craziness of the overcrowded camp, no one notices you got away, huh? But here is the fun news; that scar? That little marker that you thought was so clear? That’s just a decoy. We put that on there because if we let the soldiers know where the device was, they could easily get rid of it."

Between the pain and his fear, Walter was fighting to remain conscious. What was this guy talking about? A decoy? His vision started to go black but the guard grabbed him by the hair and pulled him up so they were face to face.

"Here’s the thing, Walt." The guard yelled, with a sick smile on his face, "You just ran through the woods for nothing. You didn’t get away, you aren’t free." The guard grabbed Walter's right thumb and lifted it up into the air. "The tracking device is right here, you idiot, you cut off the wrong thumb!"
.......................................................................................................

So there you go. Brilliant, right? Rereading this, the whole "put a fake scar on to trick the prisoners" seems like a pretty elaborate ploy that doesn't actually seem to serve any function. And I love the compu-tracker, which if it had been written later than 2000 probably would have been called a GPS. Not to mention the fact that he had a cauterizing "tool" (?) in his first aid kit or that there is no way you could CUT OFF YOUR THUMB and then jog, all night, in January (in the Great Lakes Border BTW) without dying but, like I said, I was fourteen. An awkward, gossipy giggling cheerleader mind you.

On a side note, since I was fourteen, I am pretty surprised that the main character in my story was drinking alcohol and my teacher didn't care. But that's how I roll, I write about drinking and thumb amputations and oppressive governments and I don't let anybody stand in my way. I'm pretty hardcore.

Some Lists

2010-07-16T04:57:00.001-10:00

Five Very Ordinary Things that I Hate to Do
1. Having to return library books
2. Going to the dentist
3. Watching any kind of sport
4. Waking up early
5. Going to a bar

(Eddie Izzard sums it up well I think)

Five Very Cool Places I got to Visit
1. A Buddhist monastery in China
2. Monet's Garden in France (The water lillies Japanese Bridge painting? there.)
3. Albuquerque, New Mexico at three in the morning
4.The Washington Memorial in the middle of a HUGE antiwar rally
5.The Shore of Lake Superior in the middle of the night in January

Five Things that Always Make Me Laugh
1.Talking to T.
2.Talking to J.M.
3.Aqua Teen Hunger Force
4.Talking about our college days with A.
5.Conservative politics

Five Things I am Very Excited About
1.My Niece!
2.N.'s graduation
3.Enrolling in Graduate School
4.Going a vacation with N. (soon I hope!)
5.Moving somewhere new (nothing wrong with here, I just like to move to new places)

Five Things that Annoy Me
1.The sound of Styrofoam
2.People that cry about abused animals but complain about people who need welfare (I cry about the animal commercials too though)
3.Prejudice
4.Being almost albino and having to wear sunscreen almost year round.
5.The fallacious notion that verbosity connotates intellect, and the multitudes who imbue all conversations with a string of multisyllabic phrases in order to appear erudite. In other (simpler) words, people who think that using big words means you are a smart person.

If you are more concerned with the length of the word you are using than you are with the meaning, you will be hard to understand, your writing will suck and people will think that you are pretentious dick.

Five is my fav. number and I just made five lists of five, so that's all for today

Belated Fourth of July Post.

2010-07-14T04:11:00.000-10:00

So long time no post. I was out of town for a week helping my dad move and then came back and had to do lots of extra training at work plus some double shifts so its been a bit too long since I’ve written.

Happy belated Fourth of July though. In terms of the greatness of our country, I heard a story today about how a bunch of New Yorkers are protesting building a mosque near (as in a few blocks away from) ground zero because it would be a “shrine to terrorism”. I wonder if they think of churches as a “shrine” to the crusades, the inquisition, the holocaust or child molesters. I am not saying that I think Christians are all those things, but the corollary could very easily be drawn. I also heard a story on NPR about how the teabaggers are saying that the NAACP is…wait for it…racist. So yeah, YAY AMERICA!

But I do hope that anyone serving overseas is safe and gets to come home very, very soon. I also hope that people who are just trying to live their lives in countries like Afghanistan or Iraq are safe. There are a few people that I personally know that are in the military and I really do worry about their safety when they are over there. Because I know them, it is easier for me to be worried about them as individuals. Other than that, I can’t really say that I feel MORE concern for American citizens in war zones than I do for other people that happened to get caught living in a war zone. To me, both cases are situations where people I have never met are in danger and, because they are human beings, I genuinely hope the violence ends and ends soon. But, unlike most people in this country, I do not think of the Americans first and the people in the other countries as a belated afterthought.

I think that I feel that way because I have never really understood patriotism. Obviously I understand the concept but I have never felt that emotion. To me, national borders just seem like what they are, imaginary lines drawn on a map. I mean I get it, there is usually uniting cultures languages etc. that create a sense of community between people in any particular country. However, I have a ton more in common culturally with people from Thunder Bay, Ontario (which is about four hours away from where I went to college) than I do with someone who lives in Hawaii. Or Los Angles or New York City for that matter. The point I am trying to get at is that I think, overall, patriotism seems just a little, well, nonsensical to me.

But we as Americans do have a lot to be proud about. For example, the KFC double down sandwich, the twilight series, scientology not to mention the fact that we have been able to develop a prescription medication to cure…wait for it again…thin eyelashes. But seriously, I have been to a developing country and I am not going to lie, I am glad that I was lucky enough to be born in a country where the living conditions are really high.

But the thing is, and this is the thing I think most “I LOVE THE USA” people should remember, we didn’t do anything to be born here. It’s a crapshoot, basically, and no one who was born a US citizen worked harder or is better than anyone who was born Canadian or Mexican or Swedish or Nigerian so quit acting all high and mighty because of a totally random event that happened to make you a US citizen. And, since I know a lot of patriotism and Fourth of July festivities are aimed at supporting the troops, lets really show our support by ending the war and bringing them home safely.

Plus, the fireworks scared the crap out of my cat and he showed his dissatisfaction with the holiday by yowling and racing around the apartment like a nutcase for hours every time he heard a bottle rocket go off.

Press One for Racist.

2010-07-01T16:09:00.000-10:00

For anyone that complains about having to press one for English: If you are too lazy to PRESS A BUTTON do you really think you are in a position to call other people lazy for not learning a new language?

Yeah, that was my facebook status today because I saw that a few of my facebook friends had joined a group about not wanting to press one for English cause “this is America”. Really? Really? If I saw that some people joined a group that said that they were pissed about having to speak English and not some Native American language, I wouldn’t be so annoyed because those WERE the languages that were spoken here originally before a bunch of immigrants came over and changed everything. They would at least have a valid point that they were the ones that were here first. But do you want to know why I said “some Native American language” and not a specific example? Because I don’t know any, I don’t even know the names of them, because Europeans came to America and wiped out as much of their culture as possible.

But that, apparently, was OK. It was OK when Europeans came to a country with more resources and killed the people and stole their land, but three hundred years later it’s a travesty if Latin Americans want to work here. I mean, really, until there are huge groups of Mexicans coming here and handing out smallpox infected blankets and forcing European Americans live on reservations, shut your fucking mouths you racist, ignorant pricks.

The thing that really gets me is that 95% of my friends live in RURAL Wisconsin. I would honestly like to know how many illegal (or even legal) immigrants you see on a daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly basis. I’m guessing the number is about none.

The number one reasons I have heard that people are against immigrants are “because they take our jobs”. Its pretty convenient that certain Caucasian people I know blame ethnic minorities on skyrocketing unemployment rates; but when those same people talk about African Americans or Hispanics or Native Americans who are unemployed, the reason they give for that is laziness.

See, from my point of view, the problem is not people “stealing” jobs, it is that there aren’t any jobs here anymore. Like I’ve said in other posts, all the jobs have gone to other countries where the labor standards are lower and cost of production is astronomically cheaper. Most people act like the cause of this problem are unions or illegal immigrants…not trying to be rude, but if you believe that, YOU are the reason the system is able to exist.

I mean, think about it. Let’s say there is a guy, we’ll call him Bob. Now Bob owns a company where he needs five people to work for him. In the beginning, Bob hires five white guys. The white guys realize that Bob pays them such low wages that they can’t afford to live and he makes them work in an unsafe work environment so they form a union saying that Bob needs to make them work only eight hours a day, for a living wage and that they can’t work if the conditions are unsafe.

So, Bob says eff that, I will fire the two guys that organized this and hire other people. I will hire two white women cause they will work for less money anyway cause it is harder for them to get a job because of sexism. So the two guys get fired, the workers (now two girls and three guys) go back to work without the job conditions getting any better. And if anyone complains, Bob can just say, hey its not my fault, I am a business owner, I have to increase my profits and women work for less, blame them. Which increases sexism because people have been led to believe that unless women are held back, men will not have as good of chance of becoming successful.

This goes on for awhile until the workers decide again that the system sucks, so they go on strike again. Bob, remembering how good his plan worked before, fires the girl and guy in charge and hires some African American men who will work for less because it is harder for them to get good jobs because of racism and the people go back to work in the shitty work environments. And if anyone complains, Bob can just say, hey its not my fault, I am a business owner and African Americans work for less, blame them. Which increases racism because people have been led to believe that unless other ethnic groups are held back, then they will not have as good of chance of becoming successful.

THIS goes on for awhile until the workers decide again that the system sucks, so they go on strike again. Bob, remembering how good his plan worked before, fires the two in charge and hires some Hispanic woman who will work for less because it is harder for them to get good jobs because of racism AND sexism, the people go back to work in the shitty work environments. And if anyone complains, Bob can just say, hey its not my fault, I am a business owner and Hispanic woman work for less, blame them. Which increases sexism AND racism because people have been led to believe that unless women and ethnic minorities are held back, then they will not have as good of chance of becoming successful.

And during the whole process, the person to blame wasn't the women or the minorities it was Bob, the rich guy who was unwilling to cut into his profits to make sure that his workers could work in a safe environment and support their families. But since racism and sexism are pretty common words and boss-ism or rich person discrimination aren't common ideas, I think it is pretty clear who takes the blame for old Bob's greed.

This scenario could go on and on and on. And it does, everyday. Now though it has gotten even worse because it is on a global scale (hey its not my fault, I am a business owner and Cambodians and the Chinese work for less, blame them.)

The super rich use racism, sexism, homophobia and intolerance of all kinds to make sure that working people are divided into super small, competitive groups so that the working class will never realize that 95% of the people are just barely making it while the rest live in decadent luxury. If that 95% percent would just realize how the system of capitalism works, they would be able to quit working for the rich guys all together and start working for themselves in a socialist democracy where sexism and racism would not be perpetuated in order to divide the working class.

I know every pick-up truck driving, flag-waving, freedom-loving patriot in this country is terrified of socialism, but wake the eff up. Wouldn’t you like to live in a country where you could go to college, get health care and be able to support your family without the fear of losing your home or your job? Wouldn’t you like to live in a country where you were able to have the same opportunities as other people, whether they were born in rich families or not?

And, for the record, if you are so against socialism, you had better watch out because the red terror has already invaded your life. Right now there are (GASP) many socialized institutions in this country…like public schools, post offices and fire departments. And we all know how often the mailman tries to take away our freedom, so I guess your fears are pretty well founded.

So back to my original point, if you are going to complain about having to hear Spanish, I will make sure to write my advice to you in English: Shut the eff up, learn how economics work and why the people are immigrating here to begin with. It isn't because they want to steal your jobs, it is because the US has fucked up the economies in almost every Latin economy. It isn't because they were sitting in nice houses in Mexico and had good jobs and they decided to risk their lives to illegal immigrant here so that they could steal your job and force your kids to speak Spanish. It is because they are trying to survive. They are trying to make sure that their kids don't starve to death and maybe so that their children can have a better life than they do.

You know it's weird, its almost like Latin Americans are trying to do exactly what United States citizens are trying to do, almost like it is a basic human desire to have food, shelter and the opportunity to support your family. But that must not be it, it must be because they hate you...and the English language...and freedom...and probably NFL and strip malls too. So if we can't win the battle to save this idea of white American that everyone seems to love so much, let's at least make sure that Spanish speaking people can't have someone tell them over the phone how much they owe on their cell phone bill in a language they can understand...that will definitely fix the unemployment rate and the economy.

Breaking News: Multibillion Dollar a Year Oil Company Doesn’t Really Care About the Environment or People!

2010-06-30T03:43:00.000-10:00

I am shocked at what I hear about BP on the news. Don’t get me wrong, I am not shocked to hear that they knew the oil spill was much, much larger than they first said. I am not shocked to hear that they could be using four times as many boats to help the cleanup effort but aren’t because it is too expensive. I am not shocked to learn that they were knowingly operating under unsafe conditions or that they are trying to cheat the people that they hurt out of compensation. What I am shocked about is that everyone else seems to find this surprising.

I am guessing that there isn’t a single person in the United States that doesn’t know about the effects of the oil spill. If you turn on CNN, MSNBC, or even (gag) Fox "news", the coverage is basically streaming footage of the oil soaked pelicans, the pools of dirty ocean water, tar balls and interviews with fishermen and women who no longer have a source of income. It is all very poignant and disturbing and I am glad that they are showing it but I still think that there is a very large part of the story that they are leaving out.

There is an old expression about journalism that says, "if it bleeds, it reads". In other words, heartstring tugging footage or violent scary stories generate more interest that a report that focuses on things like statistics and in-depth analysis of an issue. Media today is centered a lot more on revenue than it ever was before so I get why it’s happening. However, people should know that things like the oil spill (and Haiti and Katrina and the Tsunami and many others for that matter) all have a common thread, they are caused by neoliberalism and greed. In other words, our profit driven system of social and economic policy (i.e. capitalism!) is to blame.

In the eighties, the whole idea of neoliberalism and free market economics began to emerge. This meant that governments (and the US was definitely in the forefront of this) began to take a hands-off stance on big business. The free market policy has a good sounding name, especially in the US where we love the word freedom almost as much as we love McDonalds and SUVs, but what it basically means that trade and commerce are free of government regulation. This means that companies like BP can run a company that endangers its workers and the environment without being shut down.

I suppose there are some of you (out of the millions and millions of people that read my blog everyday) that are saying "Wait a minute, what do you mean they are allowed to run them that way? Didn’t you see on CNN where it said that BP violated like 800 safety codes? If they violated them, obviously there are regulations in place. And haven’t you heard that the government is going to make them pay for they did? Obviously they aren’t just being allowed to walk away from this mess that they made."

You’d be right in a sense, but think about it for a minute. They did violate safety codes, it is documented that they were told this…but the operation was still running. That’s the thing, there aren’t nearly enough regulations in place and the ones that exist aren’t enforced that much. In other words, they get a slap on the wrist if they violate the regulations and there are a bunch of other ways that they should be regulated but they aren't.

Last year BP was fined $87 million dollar for having "willing" errors in safety violations. $87 million sounds like A LOT of money but last year alone BP had a profit margin of 14 BILLION dollars. Billion! So $87 million is only 0.6% of their profits!So, for knowingly operating in hazardous, life-threatening conditions, for every hundred dollars that BP made, they had to pay sixty cents

Paying a little fine must have seemed like a pretty inexpensive fix compared to what it would have cost to fix the safety problems. I mean, there was also the lives that were lost when the rig exploded, the livelihoods that were lost by ruining the economy of the gulf, not to mention the poisoning of an enormous ecosystem but those loses don’t come out of the BP pocketbook so those don’t really count right?

One way that it is justified is that it creates jobs, even though the system also advocates cutting any and every job possible if it means that the profit rate could be increased even more. Another reason people say it’s good is because it fosters business growth, which I guess means that we should let big businesses operate dangerously without punishing them so that they can get even bigger and have even more money to pay fines instead of fixing problems.

Either way, for every person in America and around the world that isn't a multimillionaire we are letting ourselves get screwed by rich people so that they can make more money. Right now, The wealth of the top one percent of US households exceeds the combined household wealth of the bottom 95 percent. That means that if 95% of the people in the United States put all of our money together, it would still be less than the richest one percent! And not by a little, the top one percent have more than fifty percent of the wealth in this country. They are the ones that are making the money out of ruining the environment. They are the ones that willing put workers' health and homes in danger in order to add to their billion dollar a year profit margins. And we let them, cause someone who was really eff-ing smart put the word "free" in front of trade and convinced the American public that it was our patriotic duty to support this insanity.

And as for BP and the government making sure that the lives of the people in the gulf are restored to what they were before the oil spill? Well I’ll believe that might have even a tiny possibility of happening as soon as the victims from hurricane Katrina aren’t still living next to ruined houses in the "temporary" FEMA trailers that they were given five years ago.

Some Torture then The Bookstore

2010-06-28T05:31:00.000-10:00

Ugh, had a dentist appointment this morning. I was going to write a longer post about being home for the weekend and all the stuff that was happening but it will have to wait until my face isn’t throbbing. I hate the dentist, hate it more than anything in the world. Its not even the pain that I hate so much as the needles they use to numb your mouth…basically makes me want to pass out.

Correction, it usually makes me want to pass out, today it actually DID make me pass out. I got super dizzy and then kind of woke up when the dentist was like "she’s looking awfully pale, (which must have meant I was REALLY pale, cause I am basically albino to begin with) are you ok?" I answered "eemmm uhhuth ermmmm" because my tongue was numb and his hand was in my mouth, but what I meant was yes, I am fine please continue to shove long, scary needles into my gums.

As soon as that was over, N. took me to the bookstore. I love the bookstore even more than I hate the dentist. When I was a kid, I remember being bribed into getting cavities filled or getting a shot by the promise that we could stop at a bookstore on the way home. Usually this resulted in me following my mom around the store with an armload of books and a lopsided, half-numb mouth trying to convince her that I needed a new Goosebumps book, a new Sweet Valley book AND a new Babysitters Club.

Luckily N., who normally tries to politely remind me about electricity bills and the rent when he sees that I have collected a pile of books and am still looking, is pretty charitable when it comes to post-torture bookstore visits. So even though I am dead broke after paying for the dentist, he bought me three new books. Ah, love.

I watched that show "To Catch a Predator" for the first time today. Kind of sets a weird precedent for what the media can be involved with in terms of law enforcement but I can’t really work up any anger towards the makers of the show because I have no sympathy for the yucks that they are busting. I was actually glad that those people were shown for what they are on national television. If I had it my way, I think the punishment actually might be a little worse, maybe some scarlet letter justice. They could have "disgusting pervert" tatooed on thier forehead or something.

Still a weird concept for a show, it is a little too disturbing for my tastes. I mean the content is obviously disturbing, but I also felt like a big weird-o for watching it. Have you ever read Fahrenheit 451? (If you haven't, why not? You should go do it as soon as you done reading this, its amazing) There is a scene in the book where the hound is chasing Guy Montage, the fireman, and it is broadcast on everyone’s tv walls. When I was watching that show, I kind of felt like that and also like I was being entertained by a show centered child molestation. Creepy either way.

But enough ruminating about the perversion of the media, I am going to put on my pajamas, crawl into bed and enjoy one of my new books until the pain pill the dentist gave me knocks me out.

Emo T-Rex....(mostly rambling about high school)

2010-06-23T23:12:00.000-10:00

About to go home in the morning, or rather, to my parents house. I haven’t lived in that town for six years but I still think of it as home, which is weird because from the age of like, ten the only thing I looked forward to was turning 18 and moving far, far away. That is exactly what I did and I would never move back but I am getting to like visiting it.

It wasn’t because of my parents that I disliked it. I mean, of course I went through the usual teenage phase of being totally and utterly mortified but every single thing that they did but for I actually have a better relationship with my parents than almost anyone else I know.

Back to my original point, it surprises me that I have gotten to the point in my life where visiting my hometown is actually exciting. I remember when I was in high school I’d throw tantrums, not just whining, not just complaining, but full out bawling, screaming teenage tantrums BEGGING my parents to send me to move or send me to a boarding school or let me live with a relative in a different town. To let me do anything that would make it so I didn’t have to go back to that school.

I can’t exactly remember what about it was so horrible. It wasn’t like I was teased or bullied, in fact even though I was never popular, I had a few very close friends, liked most of the people and there were only one or two people that I actively disliked. Just never really fit in. I somehow managed to get a reputation for being wild, which was weird because while I smoked cigarettes, besides the normal experimenting a few times, I didn’t really drink or do drugs. Nevertheless, there were a lot of people in school that thought I was a pretty big party animal.

My closest friend through school, we’ll call her T, who did even less "bad" things than me was also considered fairly wild. Which is pretty funny, because there were many, many times when we would get invited to a party or asked to go do something but instead would go to my dad’s house (now this is where you can tell I am insanely wild) and would spend the night…reading library books. Seriously, we’d get home from school, put on comfy pajama clothes, and talk and read in the living room until we felt like sleeping. If we got bored with that, she would play the Sims on my dad’s computer while I played the piano or watched TV. There were times when we would be at a party and pretend that we were going to another party and just go back to one of our houses, to read. I was like the opposite of every other teenager in the world, instead of lying to my parents saying I was going to sleep over at a friend’s so I could really go to a party, I lied to my friends so I could get out of the party so I could sleep over at T.’s to read books. FYI, I still talk to her about every other day and when we get together now, as adults, we usually do the exact same thing.

I think part of the reason people thought that I was sort of a bad apple was because I missed a lot of school. I am sure most people thought that I was skipping with my friends (which is something I did exactly three times in my life and got caught and in a ton of trouble every time). I did miss a lot of school, but it was usually because I was sick or hadn’t slept the night before. I have fibromyalgia but didn’t get diagnosed until I was 19, so it wasn’t until then that I realized my chronic mystery illnesses and insomnia (AKA going two or three days in a row without sleeping) had a medical reason. I used to get in trouble with teachers a lot for it too, especially one teacher who acted like me not being there held everyone else in the class back too. Though to be fair to her, the only thing I know how to say in French, which was the class she taught and I took it from 7th grade to junior year, is "I speak English", "I cannot speak French", and some random numbers, nouns and swear words.

That was a long rambling tangent, but back to the high school thing, it wasn’t just that I didn’t feel like I fit in at the school, I felt like I was a big weird-o compared to almost everyone else in town. I didn’t care about the football team, school spirit and gym class was the bane of my existence. I didn’t like to go four wheeling, snowmobile, ice fish, fish, hunt, shine for deer, play sports, drink alcohol, go to parties or go to school dances (never went to a prom, homecoming, or anything like that in my life, and even though multiple people told me I’d regret not going I never have).

So yeah, like a billion other people I didn’t really like my hometown or high school, but I am getting to the point where I can at least appreciate my hometown and get excited when I go and visit my family and the friends I have that still live there. But I’d NEVER move back, I need to live in an area that has a bookstore, mall, museums, and restaurants in easy access. From my dad’s house it is almost an hour long drive to even get to a Wal-Mart, so if you need anything you have to try and make it into town before like, 4 o’clock to see if it might be at the Piggly Wiggly otherwise you are out of luck. Speaking of being way out in the middle of nowhere, don’t expect another blog post for a few days. My dad’s house has no cell phone reception or Internet connection (‘cause apparently the house is located in 1992).

Side note, I am watching a documentary on birds (because I am really cool like that). Did you know that ostriches eat rocks with their food to grind up their food for them? Did you ever hear of a terror bird? It’s like a Baby t-rex and an emo combined. Also, I would really like a pet owl. They look neat. Ha, I just noticed that I wrote emo instead of emu but I am going to leave it because the visual that I get when I think about an emo t-rex is pretty amazing. Just picture them running around, wrist bands on their teeny, little arms and dyed purple, floppy hair over their big heads. On that note, good night.

The Crabby Feminist.

2010-06-23T02:18:00.000-10:00

So got to work today and wore my engagement ring. I usually don’t have it on when I am there because I have to wear plastic gloves a lot and I’m always worried the ring will rip the gloves. Anyway, for the first time my coworker saw that I was engaged and asked when we are getting married. I told her not until N. is done with school next year at the earliest and then she asked what my name would be when we got married.

When N. and I do get married, he is taking my last name instead of me taking his. When I told her this (and after having it happen so many times I don’t know why I am still surprised) she looked at me like I was nuts and was like "why?" Ugh! What the hell do you mean, why? Because. Because we want to do it that way. That is the only reason, there’s no back story, there isn’t any big reason we just decided that when we get married he’d become Mr. J instead of me becoming Mrs. N. Why the hell SHOULDN’T we do it that way? Granted, to be fair, there have been a lot of people that were like, oh that’s cool and stuff like that but even that reaction makes it seem like it is something really out of the ordinary, which I don’t think that it is.

N. was actually the one that first suggested that he take my name after we had a discussion about how my mom kept her maiden name when she got married, and how my step-mom kept her last name when she married my dad. N. asked what I wanted to do and I said I’d never thought about that much but that I didn’t want to do the hyphenated keep both names things. After that he was like well I’ll just change my name then. So that’s what we are doing, you would think though, by people’s reactions, that it was the craziest, most unheard of thing to ever happen. I mean, come on, its 2010 guys. There was even one person who said that N. "wasn’t a real man" if he took my name. WTF?

So anyway, that happened right before she left and then I spent the night stewing about the situation. I also saw a bunch of commercials that annoyed me by being super sexist, though I am sure I was a little more sensitive to it than usual because of the whole name discussion. One was for this sheer cover makeup. It was a lady talking to an audience, and it was like this.

Lady: "Ladies, what is the most important day in a woman’s life?"
Audience enthusiastically answers: "YOUR WEDDING!".
Lady: "And what will you being worrying about most on that day?"
Audience: "HOW WE LOOK!"
Lady "Exactly! And with new sheer cover you can make sure that you blah, blah, blah."
Barf.

Seriously? I mean, are you eff-ing kidding me? I love N. more than anything else in the world but I don’t eff-ing tell me that the most important day in a woman’s (and apparently this applies to ALL women) life is her wedding. I am not saying that it isn’t an important day, but I am pretty sure that when I am celebrating finding the love of my life with my family and friends my inner monologue won’t be "Good God, do my pores look too big? Can they see that zit on my chin?"

Add to that, a bunch more commercials about makeup work out plans, diets, diet pills, and tummy slimming underwear and I finally just turned off the TV and read.

I am glad that I was born in this time period instead of earlier, but man, there is still a lot of sexism out there. For example, when I posted on facebook that I was about to graduate from college one or two people were like, "yay, congrats." When I posted that I got engaged, it was like a flood of congratulations. I mean, I am glad that my friends were happy for me, I'm not trying to sound ungrateful, but based on how much attention one got versus the other it was pretty clear what was more exciting. That kind of bugged me, but don’t think I am saying that I like my college degree better than N. Obviously I am head over heels in love with him and my degree and me are barely even speaking at this point because it hasn’t done sh*t for me in terms of finding a job. My point just is that based on people’s reactions, it was clearly a bigger achievement for me to get a husband than it was for me to get a degree.

But I am probably overreacting, you know how women can get so emotional over things….

Here are some random ramblings

2010-06-22T04:53:00.000-10:00

1. I’ve become addicted to surfing through blogspot and reading strangers’ blogs. Most of them I just skip over (especially the ones about people’s babies, their businesses or art ones) but there are a few I have found myself reading like they are a novel. I’ve decided that there are a lot of single women who blog about dating and it is all very Bridget Jones-ish. Interesting though. It makes me super glad that I have a guy who is funny, affectionate, a genius and very respectful…also glad I found a guy that is not chauvinistic and doesn’t expect me to do the household chores just because I am the person in the relationship who wears a bra.

2. I graduated from college a year ago (crazy!) and I have been feeling very nostalgic for my friends from school and the town of Superior in general. Scratch that, I have been feeling nostalgic for Lake Superior and Duluth, the only way that I could feel nostalgic for the actual town of Superior is if I loved bars and boarded up businesses…which I don’t. But I do miss the group of girls I used to live with in the dorms, even though I have lost touch with some of them…on the other hand there are still a few that I talk every few days. I also REALLY miss being politically active (I haven’t been able to find anything political to do around here except for a few postings about democrat functions and I’d rather do nothing at all then hang out with people who didn’t get it) and the people I used to hang out with in that whole period in my life. It makes me bummed out that during the last few years of school, I lost touch with a lot of those people and now I have to resort to lengthy rambling blog posts (like the one about Afghanistan and the other one about trying to find a job) just to get all my annoyances at the way the world works out of my system. And of course I miss N.’s family (he is originally from Superior so when we lived there we had a whole extended family thing in the area).

3. I think I should go on that show intervention for my extreme Diet Coke addiction. I just read the list of ingredients and the only ones I recognize on there are carbonated water and caffeine. I feel that it is not an especially healthy drink. I don’t eat or drink dairy products because I am freaked out about what is in them but I guzzle down about five of these cans of tooth decaying chemicals every day. But I know myself, I still probably won’t stop.

4. I am going to find out in about a week if I am going to have a niece or a nephew! I am so excited, I am not ready to have kids for a few years but now I will have a little person to buy adorable outfits for and read all my favorite kid’s books to. This kid is going to be the first grandkid on our side and on his or her dad’s side, so everyone is pretty excited.

5. Two more days and I get to go home to my parents’ houses. My dad is moving and he called to ask if N. would come down and help him move furniture. I think that my dad is pretty psyched that he now has other guys in the family and I am hoping that while they are moving the piano and large appliances I will get to hang out with my sisters. Fun fun.

Well, that’s enough random thoughts for now, its time for me to go to bed…

My ad for the Personals section: CEF seeking ARC for FTE.

2010-06-21T04:21:00.000-10:00

You know how when you are little you daydream that as soon as you are ready, you are going to find “the one”? You hear about it in books and movies and from your friends, and it seems like it happens so easy for other people. They decide what they are looking for and then go out and find it. I have been searching for over a year now, trying to be outgoing, trying to let it “just happen on its own”, hell I’ve even tried looking on those internet sites that try and help you find a match. All this work and all I have found are dead ends but I am done searching the old fashioned way, I’ve decided that I am just going to take out an ad in the personals section. Its going to read: CEF seeking ARC for FTE. (College educated Female seeking A Real Career for Full Time Employment).

Yeah, har har har, I was talking about finding a job, not true love. (Side note, cause I know he reads this, I have found true love). But back to the whole job thing, I busted my ass through college to get my degree…OK “busted my ass” should probably read “attended most of my classes on at least a weekly basis” but I did graduate with honors with a Bachelors degree in Sociology with a minor in English and do you know what kind of stellar job I have found? One that pays exactly one dollar over minimum wage, has no benefits and where I only get 32 hours a week.

Don’t get me wrong, in some ways I love my job. I work at a residential facility for physically and cognitively disabled adults and I love the time I get to spend interacting with the people that live at the house. Unfortunately, I work from ten o’clock at night until six in the morning, so the time I spend with them is exactly none at all because they are asleep. So yeah, basically I paid thousands of dollars to get a degree to get a job where I do house work and occasionally bring a glass of water to someone who wakes up thirsty.

I look online every single day trying to find a job that is either more interesting, pays better, or has better hours. I wouldn’t need a position that meets all three of those conditions, just one of those things would make me happy. (And notice I didn’t even mention benefits in that list, that’s not even something that seems remotely possibly to me) But every time I look for jobs, and like I said its every eff-ing day, it’s the same thing. The jobs are either limited term employment, part time, or minimum wage.

My favorite thing is when I see a job that looks like exactly what I want to do, which incidentally is working with disenfranchised populations, I am not looking to be CEO of Fortune 500 company here. But anyway, my favorite thing is when I see a listing that sounds perfect so I click on it, see that I am perfectly qualified, the pay is good, and…that the position offers like six hours a week. And here’s the eff-ing kicker, usually these postings say that they are looking to hire, like, 10 people. Seriously? Instead of paying one or two people a LIVING wage and benefits you are going to hire ten people to work like six hours a week?

But that’s the system that we live in and that every flag waving American swears that they will die to defend. OK, I know that seems like a pretty big jump in thought but let me explain myself. So in the United States, there was a very long battle to get labor rights, things like a minimum wage, benefits for full time employees, safety standards etc. So companies in the US had to hire its workers and make sure that they could at least survive.

Seems simple and logical, but this system cost big companies a lot of money so somewhere along the line someone figured out that hey, if it costs too much money to hire workers here, why not hire workers in developing countries? Why pay $7.50 an hour when you can pay 13 cents a day? (FYI that isn’t an exaggeration, a worker in countries like Thailand and Cambodia really get paid those kind of wages).

So all the jobs got sent to other countries. Here is why this system will ultimately ruin itself. Say you own a shoe factory and your shoes cost $50 a pair. You make them in the United States and after you pay wages, make sure safety and environmental standards are met, and provide benefits for your workers you end up with a $10 profit on each pair of shoes. But, since you are paying your workers and since car companies, toy factories, clothing makers and other companies are also paying people in the United States money to make things, people here have the $50 to spend on a pair of shoes.

But ten bucks isn’t a big enough profit for you, so you decide that you are going to make your shoes in China, where it only costs five bucks to make the same exact shoe, and then sell it in America and get a $45 profit. Brilliant. You just more than quadrupled your profit margin! However, every other manufacturing company sees the idea and sends all their jobs overseas so they can quadruple their profits too. Sounds great right?

Wrong. Once all the jobs go to other countries, all those people that used to work in manufacturing will be unemployed so they won’t have $50 to buy your shoes…or the cars, or the toys, or the clothes or anything else because you took away all their jobs. So what you have done is eliminate a GIGANTIC portion of your consumer base…but hey, not all Americans work in manufacturing right? There are lots of other people who work in medical fields or administration or retail…they are all still getting wages so they’ll be able to buy your crap, right?

Wrong again. Since so many jobs went overseas, and so many people became unemployed, the job market is FLOODED with people willing to do whatever they can to get a little bit of money. So now, companies that can’t outsource can offer ten people jobs where they will only work a few hours a week. This way the company gets out of having to pay for benefits or retirement funds or anything like that. Companies also don’t have to try and lure employees in by offering high wages, they can do the bare minimum and still have people lined up outside fighting for a paycheck. So basically, this system takes 95% of the population and makes them too poor to have any purchasing power and soon there won’t be anyone left to buy that hypothetical pair of shoes we discussed earlier. By allowing companies to take all the jobs out of our country, we completely and totally ruined the United States economy.

So, yeah, the next time that you start to blame the economic state that our country is in on ridiculous fucking reasons like too much social welfare, immigrant populations, unions, or the insane fantasy that the government is being taken over by socialists, remember that the reasons no one has a job is because companies like Nike, The Gap, Dell Computers, and about a trillion other ones sent most of the jobs overseas and left millions of people to fight over the ones that are left.

And now that there are hundreds of people competing for each job, do you think that the companies are going to increase or decrease the wages, working conditions, and hours that they offer the workers? If you are unsure about what the answer to that is open your nearest “help wanted” section of the newspaper.

Since this blog is already WAY too long, I’m not going to describe what this system has done to economies in developing countries (spoiler alert: they’re fucked too) but I am going to leave you with this one thought. If you were a huge corporation, would you want desperate workers willing to do whatever you told them or would you want workers who knew that if you provided a shitty job they could reasonably expect to find a better one somewhere else? Remember that the next time you vote Republican or Democrat or any other candidate that is sponsored by a big business or the next time you want to run your mouth off about how the government should not be able to tell companies what to do.

But now that we have looked at the big picture and I have written this eloquent and intellectual post, is anyone out there interested in hiring me? Please? Pretty please? Pretty, pretty please??

The Nerdiest Crime in Recorded History: books I’ve read so many times the covers are falling off.

2010-06-19T03:08:00.000-10:00

Yeah, since this is my blog and I doubt many people are ever going to actually read it anyway, I figured I would do a super long post about my five favorite books. If you aren't a huge fan of reading, but are just DYING to know what else I think about, skip head to the other posts because thats basically all that this one is about. I love to read and have no idea what people do with their time if they never read. I don’t mean that in a "oh wow, look at me, I’m a literary genius" kind of way, I just mean I seriously can’t picture how you would pass the time if you never picked up a book. If you like to read here are some suggestions and if you don’t, well, you’re weird.

5. We the Living by Ayn Rand.

OK, lefty friends don’t freak out. I KNOW Ayn Rand is Spongebob Psychopants and that all the crazies in this country have picked her as their leader, but hear me out on this one. This was her first book, she said it is the closest to an autobiography that she would ever come. The plot line is kind of like a Soviet Union Gone with the Wind (minus the slavery and racism…and the hoop skirts). Oddly enough, the hero in this book is a man named Andre and he is the most devout socialist featured in any of Rand’s fiction, and he holds onto his ideals until the end.

Out of all her writing, this book has the fewest references to her nutjob politics, at the time of the writing she wasn’t such an extreme fanatic of capitalism. Unlike The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, the characters in this book are very relatable and human. It reads more like a memoir than propaganda (which is basically what I consider her other works).

Overall as a writer, I have to give her credit for being able to present her theories/philosophies in a clear manner but this book is a real story, whereas her other novels are very two dimensional backdrops that she projects her nuttiness onto. But back to my original point, We the Living, is a really good book, lots of really vivid details and I would recommend it to everyone.

4. Any short story by Steven King, in particular, The Moving Finger.

Kind of a big jump from Rand to King, but to anyone that thinks King is just a paperback, bestseller lowest common denominator kind of author you are wrong. Personally, I think that King uses dialogue and voice better than any other writer I’ve ever read does. I don’t just mean his use of dialect (i.e. all the old men from Maine in his books that say a-yuh all the time) but the way that he is able to give each character, even in some of his huge novels like The Stand or The Dome, unique personalities and characteristics.

The Moving Finger is a story about a guy who hears a tapping noise in his bathroom. When he goes to investigate, he sees a finger poking out of his sink drain and it is moving around. He thinks he is going crazy and every time he tries to show someone the finger, it disappears but when he is alone the finger just keeps getting longer and longer with more and more knuckles. The end of this story is pretty gristly but you’ll have to read it yourself to find out what it is.

Doesn’t exactly sound like the best plot ever, but the way he wrote this story made this weird little idea of a finger poking up out of the sink drain scare the hell out of me. I’m twenty-four years old and I am not going to lie, sometimes when I take a bath or do the dishes I still push the bubbles out of the way so I can see the drain…you know, just in case. My point is, anyone that can make a grown adult afraid of a finger coming out of a drain is probably a pretty damn good writer.

3. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

This story is one of the saddest and most beautiful stories that I have ever read. The story is about an immigrant family that moves to Chicago in the meatpacking district in the early 1900s. They really trust the system and think that if they work hard they will get the "American Dream". I guess when it came out Sinclair was hoping to show the American public how flawed the capitalist system was by showing how this industrious, immigrant family came to the US and got screwed over no matter how hard they tried to make it. The reaction he got though was that everyone learned how disgusting the meatpacking industry was and there were a lot of reforms made in order to make the food that was coming out of Chicago more safe for consumption. The meat stuff is pretty gross, but so is the meat industry today. What I loved about the book was the story of the family and this is one of the first books I ever read that made me really realize that I was a socialist.

2. East of Eden by John Steinbeck

For anyone that thinks they know this story based on the James Dean movie, the plot is so much bigger in the book. The first time I read this book I literally finished it and started it over immediately because it was that good. It is the story of two families and goes through multiple generations for both of them. There is such a intricate plot that there is no way that I could attempt to explain it in a blog post that is already getting to be too long. The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, like The Jungle, was another of the first books I read that made me start to really care about politics, but East of Eden is his best book if you are looking at it in terms of how enjoyable it is to read. It has a lot of biblical allegories in it, particularly Cain and Abel. If you haven’t read it and you like to read at all, you should definitely go read it.

So, my very favorite book ever is…

1.A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Francie Nolan, the main character, is a little girl that is born in Brooklyn around the turn of the century. The book details her life from her birth until she is about to go off to college. This book is the best example of American realism I’ve ever read. Smith doesn’t have any unexpected plot twists and the characters in the novel all lead regular lives and have regular jobs. It is just the story of a girl who is born poor, has a difficult but sometimes happy childhood, and then grows up. But it’s a beautiful story.

There is one part in the book where Francie and her brother Neely are talking about how Neely got drunk for the first time. I can’t remember the exact wording but Francie asks how he felt and he says something like it made me dizzy and like the world was spinning around me. Francie replies that if that is what drunk feels like, she got drunk once when she saw a tulip for the first time in a park down the street from her apartment. I mean, she says that the flower was so beautiful it made her feel drunk. Yeah, so that’s why this book is my all time favorite, that scene alone is probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read in my life.

I’m actually on my second copy of this book because the first one had been read so many times that the whole middle section would fall out every time you picked it. Side note, anyone who went to my high school after 2001 (the year I was in 9th grade) may not have gotten the opportunity to read this book. I liked it so much I literally stole it from the school library. Only time I have ever stolen anything in my life. I think that might be the nerdiest crime in all of recorded history.

Dear Sir or Madame, I would be pretty eff-ing stoked to attend your fine institute of learning.

2010-06-18T15:52:00.000-10:00

So I think I have finally found the program that I want to go into. It’s a Mental Health counseling masters program at UW Stout and I am pretty eff-ing stoked about it. (That’s what I am going to put on the application too, "Dear Sir or Madame, I would be pretty eff-ing stoked to attend your fine institute of learning…")

The program lasts for two years and afterwards I would be licensed to be a therapist in Wisconsin…which would be pretty sweet. The program also doesn’t require a GRE, which is a pretty big bonus for me because my math skills are fairly nonexistent. Which isn’t fair because all of my family is like insanely brilliant about math. You know the whole Irish American family stereotype about people getting drunk and then fighting? That’s how thanksgivings are at my grandma except the drunken argument will be about something like how the imaginary number E factors into an equation. (Not joking about this, it happened. There was actual yelling and swearing) So yeah, my grandfather was an engineer for NASA, a literal rocket scientist and my grandmother was a professor at Milwaukee School of Engineering but I still get confused about fractions. Not cool, DNA, not cool at all.

Anyway, point being, I am glad that my admittance will be based off my GPA and work/volunteer experience and not anything to do with a math test. Plus I have been looking at all the UW schools for a program for counseling that is practice based and not research based (UW Madison is primarily research based) and this is the only one that I found.

This is a rare, totally serious thought from me, but I really am excited I found this program because I have wanted to work in this field for a long time. My older sister suffers from a mental illness and I have spent my whole life seeing her and other people with similar illnesses shoved through a system that doesn’t have a whole lot of empathy for them.

I know that there are some people out there that honestly care and advocate for disability rights, but I feel like mental illness somehow is treated differently than other disabilities. Maybe its because it isn’t one that you can see right away, like when someone is in a wheelchair, or maybe it is because society has everyone convinced that anyone that suffers from a mental illness could snap at any moment and go on a murder rampage. And news flash to people (like some people I am friends with hint hint) "bipolar" is not a personality trait, when you use that word to describe someone that you think has a bad temper or is annoying or THE DAMN WEATHER, you sound like a eff-ing prick. Its a disease, one that puts people into the hospital and that the people who have it cannot control.... ugh, the whole thing just disgusts me.

Its like, if someone had cancer or a broken leg, you wouldn’t be weird about it or embarrassed or whatever but whenever I mention to someone that my sister has bipolar disorder they change the subject real quick like I’ve made them awkward by bringing it up. So I figure the best thing I can do is go to school, learn more about and work within the system to help people. Not that I am like some holy martyr or anything like that, but it would be nice to be able to make a difference in someone’s life. And lets face it, NASA and Milwaukee School of Engineering aren't exactly knocking down the door asking me to come work for them so I better find some kind of career. N. still has a year left of school though so it wouldn’t be until fall of 2011, so I still have some time to figure everything out.

It would mean that we would have to move again though. I just counted the number of times I have moved in my life and the answer is 24. I am only 24 years old (to be fair my parents got divorced when I was a kid but lived in the same town so I’m counting every time either of them moved). But seriously, that is a lot of times to move. But one more won’t hurt me, plus who else can say that they have lived in that many houses?

Last Day Off...

2010-06-17T03:54:00.000-10:00

About to go to bed after the last night off I will have for the next eight days. It was a pretty good night even though N. was at work until 1am. I don't wake up until around 8 o'clock (I work nights fyi and I stay on that schedule even on my days off) so I didn't do too much before he got home.

When he got here, we had dinner and then watched the blue planet documentaries (which I loved) while we played scrabble...yeah, we are pretty wild like that. But really those are our fav. things to do. After he went to bed, I played around on the Internet, talked to one of my closest friends from college (who luckily is just as big of an insomniac as me which is nice because all my other friends don't like to chat on the phone at 3am).

Then I painted, nothing too impressive but still a nice way to spend my last night of freedom before more than a week of work....

Cartoons and Anarchy

2010-06-16T02:07:00.000-10:00

Maybe its because I have been writing this blog or maybe its because I am in my mid-twenties and am going through a quarter life crisis, but either way I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what kind of person I am. When you watch TV or read books, it seems like everyone fits into one easy category; the cheerleader, the emo, the jock, the Goth, the party animal etc. I know that fictional characters are represented this way in order make them easier to fit into a plot line but lately I’ve been wondering just what cliché stereotype other people think that I’d fit into.

The thing that really got me thinking about this just now is Netflix. So N. and I got Netflix a few months ago. After you have it awhile, it starts to suggest genres of movies you might like. Netflix suggested two genres to me based on what I usually watch: Dark Fight-the-system documentaries and Classic Children’s Animation. So basically an automated computer system tracked my interests and decided that I want to start a revolution…or watch some cartoons. Pretty accurate but just a little bit odd.

I kind of feel like weird juxtapositions of character traits have been a consistent theme in my life. The first time I thought this about myself was when I was a freshman in high school and took a creative writing class. To give you a little bit of background, in ninth grade I was your typical 14 year old girl, kind of shy, super giggly when I got around my friends, I was a cheerleader and got pretty good grades…a pretty normal kid. Our first assignment was to write a short story on whatever subject we wanted but it had to be fictional.

Everyone came to class and we had to read our stories out loud. Most of the girls wrote about love, or at least the fourteen-year old girl idea of love. The guys tended to write about hunting or sports. There were quite a few kids that wrote about a teenager fighting with his or her parents and some people wrote about a fight among a group of friends. By the time everyone else had read theirs and it was my turn, I started to feel pretty nervous.

Here is a basic run-down of my plot line. It was set in the future and it was about a guy that had committed a crime so he was living in a forced labor camp. He wanted to run away from the camp but the government (which was a huge, evil entity of course) had implanted a tracking device in all the prisoners’ thumbs so that they couldn’t get away. My story was about how the guy drinks a bottle of stolen vodka, breaks the bottle and uses the broken glass to cut off his thumb. He then runs through the woods, with a trail of blood behind him, until he finds an abandoned cabin. He sleeps there until he is woken up by one of the guard of the forced labor camp kicking him in the back telling him he cut off the wrong thumb. So, yeah, basically the shy, sometimes giggly cheerleader, stood up and announced to the whole class that she was a gigantic weird-o that made up stories about people cutting off their appendages. Needless to say I got a lot of weird looks.

I continued this trend through most of high school. I placed second in the science fair but then got called to the guidance counselor because the chemistry teacher thought that I had a drinking problem. I’d get praise from my English teacher for taking night classes at the local college for fun, but then sell black market book reports I’d written to most of the kids that were taking her class (FYI pretty profitable business, I made like $200 one semester).

In college, it was the same kind of thing. From one point of view, I was a shy, polite girl who worked at the campus bookstore, tutored English for the university, edited the college newspaper and volunteered on the weekends at a homeless shelter. From another point of view, I was the sarcastic girl, who spent a lot of her time drinking, taped huge pro-choice stickers everywhere on her uber catholic, republican roommate’s side of the room, organized a middle of the night road trip to Canada during finals week out of boredom and who could frequently be seen chain-smoking outside the dorm building in the middle of the night. Mixed in with all this was the fact that I was president of the Socialist club on campus for a few years, went to anti-war protests and was in a feminist group called the Militant Madonnas. Also, I loved to shop.

So yeah, back to my original point, I am not sure what kind of person I am. Probably just a pretty normal one, because in all actuality I don’t think that anyone really fits into one of those ready-made categories. But it is still interesting to think about sometime. But I think I’ve spent enough time trying to figure it out for now and will probably go watch some TV, maybe I’ll finish that documentary I was watching about health care reform in the United States…or watch another episode of Rocko’s Modern Life. Either or.

You're going to take this "freedom", whether you want it or not!

2010-06-15T04:49:00.000-10:00

I knew it wouldn’t take me very long to end up writing a post about political issues. First off, I am a socialist. Yep, teabaggers, you were totally right. There are socialists in the United States that want to get rid of the old system…and put one in place that makes sense.

Every morning at work between 5am and 6am I tend to watch CNN. This isn’t because I think they have great, unbiased coverage of issues. It is because the house I work at only has basic cable and my choices are basically infomercials, cartoons for toddlers or the news. So I watch CNN (unless the cartoons are something good, like reruns of the rugrats, but I digress). So I watch CNN and usually end up getting more and more annoyed at their idiotic statements while I sit muttering to myself about how stupid the media has become.

Take today for example. The biggest story they were covering was the lithium deposits that have been found in Afghanistan. It is estimated that these deposits of lithium (which is the mineral that is used to make stuff like computer chips) could be worth trillions of dollars.

The fact that CNN was reporting this wasn’t that big of a deal to me. I am always glad when the news mentions something more important than things like Lindsey Lohan’s alcohol anklet. The thing that made me start swearing at the television was how everyone involved, the anchors, reporters, interviewees weren’t even trying to hide the fact that the US was probably going to be able to get a pretty big piece of this pie. In fact, they acted like the US was entitled to it.

The way they framed the argument was like this. Afghanistan needs to exploit these resources. **Exploit is the term they used, that isn’t me shoving my opinion in** Afghanistan doesn’t have the infrastructure to get to these deposits. The US will need to do it for them. (You know, “to save them from themselves” which is a role that US has gotten pretty damn good at playing, or at least a role that the US has gotten most people to believe that they are playing).

So by these statements, I am pretty sure it means that Afghanistan will be forced to open up its borders to foreign companies (my guess is US run corperations) who will know exactly how to best exploit these resources…and how to fully exploit the people with the rightful claims to them, the Afghani people. Companies from the United States will be able to go in, set up shop, dig up what’s worth money without any concern for environmental risks (it isn’t their country after all), take it out of the country with no tariffs or taxes paid back to the Afghani government and sell it to the working classes of industrialized countries while pocketing the ungodly amount of profits they are able to make through ventures like this. So that old refrain, the rich get richer while the poor get poorer, rings true once again.

That’s how these things generally work. Either through war or economic strangulation, industrialist countries go into third world countries and take over. They steal the natural resources and export them. They have no regards to risks to the environment and since they are operating in developing countries, they usually don’t have to meet any environmental standards. They ruin the labor markets in the countries (and in the US because they take all the jobs overseas which ruins any progress that American’s have made in the labor rights movement). Basically they try to pretend that the idiotic, neoliberal bullshit that has ruined our own economy, economies in most South American countries as well as most of Southeastern Asia will somehow magically work to spread “democracy” in these newest neocolonial conquests.

And don’t think that this is some conspiracy cooked up in my crazy, socialist head. If you want to know more about this system read David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism or Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. There are a lot of other great books on the same topic but those are the best that I have found.

I am a pacifist. I hate war and I especially hate war that is profit driven and no matter how I try and look at the current “conflicts” that the US is involved in all I see is bloodshed for profit. The fact that its been determined that Afghanistan is pretty much literally sitting on a gold mine convinces me that the chances of the US getting out of their country are pretty much zilch.

What sucks even more is that United States citizens are pretty ok with this. I considered CNN to be pretty moderate and they aren’t doing anything to question why it is ok for the United States to just lay claim to resources that another country has. I am guessing that the average person thinks it is pretty much OK too, if they bother to think about it at all.

I mean, throw away the preconceived (and wrong) notion that every middle eastern and/or Muslim person hates freedom, American pie, Jesus and country music, how do you think people in the United States would feel if some other country, like England, was in our country and demanded that we had share our resources and money with them? Oh wait, that happened. American’s didn’t like it. So we had the revolutionary war, demanded our freedom from foreign rule, invented Independence Day and all.

But I’m sure that’s completely different. In the revolutionary war, we were fighting to GET our freedom. Now we are just SPREADING that “freedom” overseas…with bombs.

My Cat vs. Other People’s Babies. Plus, Socially Inappropriate Coworker Rant.

2010-06-14T01:36:00.001-10:00

There seems to be about three main types of blogs on blogspot.
A.) Artists/small business owners
B.) Moms updating the universe on their babies
C.) Spanish. (I know that isn’t a topic but there are a lot written in Spanish, which is cool, but I can’t speak it so, even though some look pretty interesting, I don’t get much out of them)

I don’t really fit into any of those categories. But the mom and baby ones kind of annoy me. Just a little. I think it is because all my friends are having kids right now. Every time I am on the phone with one of them it is a constant refrain of "oh my god, he’s so cute he just walked/talked/laughed/rolled over etc. You need to come see him he is so cute and so big. Yes you are! Yes you are!"(<-- All this convo is done in a baby voice and clearly more directed at kid than me.) I get that they are excited, but I really have nothing to add to the conversation since I have no kids so I just feel like I keep repeating myself "awe, wow that’s amazing…"

I think I am just going to start talking about my cat, subtly work it in there like it ranks on the same level as their baby, "Awe your kid just said Mama for the first time! How cute! That reminds me of my cat, he was so cute the other day he threw up…right on my socks! Yes you did! All over my clean socks, you need to come see him he is getting so big, yes you are! Yes you are! "

Side note,

Just got home from work. Very quiet night as usual. My job gets me down sometimes but then I remember that I am able to assist disabled individuals which is super rewarding…and then watch Chelsea Lately when they are asleep, which also very rewarding but in a different way. I love my job but I am so glad I work alone. I can barely even handle the slightest interaction I have with my coworkers during the shift change.

Take today for example. I get into work and my coworker starts telling me how her toilet at home is broken from her boyfriend doing something gross. She explained it in detail though. Then she told that if she had to use the bathroom that she had to do it before she left work, you know, because her toilet is broken. Otherwise she would have to drive to the gas station in the middle of the night and needed to…well you get the idea.I was so eff-ing stoked she let me in on all that info.

Since it’s socially unacceptably to cover my ears yelling "I can’t hear you LALALA" and also pretty unacceptable to punch someone in the head until they promise never to mention their digestion problems to you again, I just politely nodded and then quickly made up an excuse to leave the room. I don’t get it though. Never, Under any circumstances, ever do I want to know about what someone else does in the bathroom. Much less stories about what their significant other does. Or anyone else they know. Ever. Not to mention the fact that she talk (this is all the time, not just when she is telling me gross stuff) about a billion decibels louder than anyone in the world needs to speak.

Ugh, frustration. I am clearly NOT a people person.

Oh My God.

2010-06-13T03:05:00.000-10:00

So yesterday I watched the documentary, Jesus Camp, for the first time. And probably the last time too, very informational but those evangelicals are pretty eff-ing scary…or at least the ones in that movie were, I don’t want to make a blanket statement about a whole religion on here but really, that film freaked me out. There was a whole scene in it where little children were crying and praying in tongues because of the sins that they had committed.

I guess all that kind of stuff seems so weird to me because I was not raised going to church. One time when my sister was in kindergarten, she came home crying because someone at school had told her about saints and that she was bad for not going to church. She was terrified that she had done something wrong and “the saints were going to get her”. When I first went to college, my assigned roommate was a Catholic who spent the semester trying to convert me and telling me over and over I was going to hell. When I told my family about her at during my Thanksgiving break, you would have thought that I told them the school was making me live with a crack addicted prostitute. Don’t get me wrong, my parents were pretty strict about teaching us to respect other peoples difference (religion, ethnicity etc) but nobody likes a fanatic.

Historically, both sides of my family are Catholic. I say “historically” because neither of my parents were raised in particularly religious environments either. In fact, it was my Grandma who was the most freaked out about the fact that I was living with a Catholic. I held off telling her that the girl was a Republican too, I think that fact may have convinced her to pull me out of college all together.

This post isn’t all that coherent, I feel like I am rambling a bit, but the point I am trying to get it is that while I considered myself a very open minded person, I feel like I have some major prejudice against religion. There are just so many things I don’t understand about it. For example, it seems like really religious people are anti-abortion but also pro-war. I don’t get how they can be so against aborting a few-week-old fetus but perfectly OK with sending off men and women to die. Or OK with the fact that the soldiers are killing other people, including civilians, some of which are children. Not to mention the fact that I think they are dying in a war that has nothing to do with preserving freedom and everything to do with making money but that is a post for another time.

I also think that the repression of women is something that is pretty deeply rooted in religion. I mean, maybe I am biased, but it is pretty rare that I hear about a group of atheist talking about how America is laying ruins because family values (which I read as men in charge, women having babies and everyone being straight) have gone down the tubes. And not to mention the whole abortion thing.

I did attend a Unitarian Universalist church for a while with my fiancee. They really focus on exploring the positive aspects of different religions but (and this was focused on a lot more in the church that I went to) they are really dedicated to doing charitable works like helping the homeless, GLBT rights, the green movement etc. I liked that. It was pretty much like lets help as many people as we can and also we can get together, as a community, and try and find the good behind the whole human experience thing.

We quit going to that church but only because we moved when he transferred to a university four hours away from town we were living in. It was cool while we went, but I don’t feel like I have a void in my life that needs to be filled with religion. My basic theory is that you shouldn’t do actions because of the reward or punishment you will get. In other words, you should be a good person because you should be a good person, not because if you do it you’ll get to go to heaven and if you don’t you’ll go to hell. So I try to be a good person, do as much volunteer work as possible, and try not to figure out what is going on with the guy (or girl, or entity, or entities, or lack thereof) in the sky. I figure people aren’t ever going to be able to really know that until we die anyway.

Plus, I have a pretty firm belief of what I think is right and wrong, and I could never try and pretend that I think someone else’s ideas about good or evil or more correct than mine. I could never go somewhere where they try and tell me that between people of the same sex is a sin or that I’m going to hell for living with N. before we are married.

But what do I know? I’ve written four posts on here and one advocates sex whenever you want and another one talks about how I think religion is creepy, so basically if I am mistaken about this whole “religion is wrong” thing I’m in for an eternity of pain...literally. So I wouldn't take my advice on it, figure it out for yourself. Just don't make your kids feel so guilty for their "sins" that they start to sob and pray in tongues. That's just creepy and wrong, no matter what religion you are.

All My Single Ladies.

2010-06-10T22:51:00.000-10:00

This next post goes out to all the single ladies. (I like to start out my posts as though I was dj-ing at a dance club). I met my husband-to-be about three years ago. Before him, I had dated a different guy for about a year so in all honesty I’ve been involved in long term relationships for the bulk of my adult life a.k.a. the four and half years since I’ve been a teenager. So while it might seem like I am not in the position to give advice to other girls on the “Right Way” to find a guy, I have listened to about a billion stories about assorted assholes, disaster dates and ruined relationships from my single friends.

The thing that seems to mess everyone up the most is, of course, sex. Should you do it? How long should you wait? Will he respect you less if you put out or will he leave you in the dust if you keep it PG? If he doesn’t want to make a commitment, will taking your clothes off make him realize that he wants to buy you a diamond ring, a house and start shopping for a crib and matching changing table?

The thing is, from the time that we are kids, girls are taught that a guy will respect us more if we wait to have sex. That it is ok for him to try and grope you while making lewd innuendo but a good girl coyly bats her eyes and says that she doesn’t want to rush things, that she wants it to be special.

News Flash: Most sex isn’t special. Fun? Yes. Exciting? Hopefully. Sentimental? Rarely. Usually its just a hormone driven adventure that leaves both people sweaty, exhausted, feeling a little awkward and hoping that they didn’t say anything weird in the middle of it.

The thing that makes me the maddest about the whole issue of sex and dating is that most women really do try and figure out those questions I listed above. Especially about how long they should wait and whether or not doing it too soon will ruin things. Maybe I’m an enlightened feminist or maybe I am just kind of slutty, but I honestly never once thought about whether waiting or rushing into would be better to start a relationship.

Don’t get me wrong. If you are dating some guy who wants to have a pants-off party fifteen minutes after you met him and you aren’t into it, definitely don’t. A woman should never, under any circumstances, have sex unless its what she wants to do. And especially don’t have sex with someone that wants a one-night stand when you are already picking out the wedding invitations you are hoping to use with him. There are so many women out there that think that if they put out they will eventually get love in return.

Second News Flash: guys will either like you or they won’t. Sometimes he won’t like you, but he will still want to have sex with you. If the guy is sending you signals that he doesn’t want to know anything about you except what you look like topless, don’t try and trick him. It won’t work, he’ll end up getting what he wanted (sex) and you’ll end up with hurt feelings and being no closer to your goal of being in a relationship with him. If you are ok with it just being sex, go for it, but if your master plan is use nudity to prove you’re worth dating, keep your clothes on and go find someone who is as interested in you, as you are in him.

The thing is, if you want to have sex and he wants to have sex, you should. If afterwards he decides that you jumped into the sack a little too eagerly, than he is the kind of chauvinistic prick that probably wouldn’t make you very happy anyway. Don’t ever let a guy make you feel bad cause you like sex. In fact, don’t ever let anyone make you feel bad cause you like sex. It isn’t just the male population who thinks that good girls wait, I’m sure I am not alone when I say that I have heard more girls call each other sluts than guys call a girl a slut.

If you are honest about what you want from the other person, things will go a lot more smoothly. Girls are conditioned to think that they are supposed to want to wait AND conditioned to think that they are supposed to make the boy they like happy. Since those two things make it really hard to figure out how the hell you are supposed to act (and also disregards the fact that you might just want to bone (<-look at me being all ladylike!) throw out both the rules and start from scratch. Do what makes you happy and try as hard as possible to avoid hurting anyone else in the process.

If you want to wait until marriage, wait until you find that guy who wants the same thing. If you want to get to know each other by testing out his bedroom skills, wear cute underwear on your first date, make sure you have a condom in your purse and have a good time. Two consenting adults should be able to do what they want. If he judges you harshly for doing the exact same thing that he just did than, like I said earlier, he’s chauvinistic and not worth your time.

Either way unless you are doing what you honestly want to do, there is no way for the guy to know what you really want. So go forth, be slutty or be prudish, just be honest. It really is the only way that you will ever meet the guy of your dreams and be able to have the kind of sex that really is sentimental. But, and this is me being honest, afterwards it will still probably make you feel sweaty, exhausted, and hoping that you didn’t say anything weird in the middle of it.

...working on my novel...

2010-06-10T22:09:00.000-10:00

When I was nine years old, I read Harriet the Spy. So for anyone that hasn’t read that book, it’s about a little girl that spies on people and records her observations in a notebook. Anyway after that I decide that I’d found my calling. I was going to be a writer.

Sound’s simple enough, right? Sit down everyday, think of a few plot lines or interesting people, link them together and BOOM the next bestseller ready to printed off and sent to Barnes and Nobel’s around the world. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

The first great story idea I thought of sort of a fairy tale. It would be about a little girl who is unhappy at home and then magically finds her way into a different land. Once she is there, she finds out that there is an evil ruler who only she can defeat. After a journey through this magical land, which incidentally is filled with magical creatures, the little girl defeats the evil ruler and makes her way home. Well, it sounded good and I was pretty excited when I was making notes about it in my diary…until I realized that I had just rewritten the plot line of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, A Wrinkle in Time, The Phantom Tollbooth and about fifty other kids novels.

So, over the past few years, I’ve repeated this process quite a few times. My disutopian story set in a future that had gone horribly wrong? 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451. My historical fiction idea about a little girl going west with her family? Little House on the Prairie and about a hundred other kids books about the Oregon Trail. My idea about writing a book about a secret school where kids learn how to be witches and wizards…well, you get the idea.

At that point I realized that the only way I was going to think of something really original was if I wrote about something I knew a lot about, something that I had actually lived through. I don’t mean like a literal memoir, but I would probably be able to add more unique details to a book about a kid growing up in a trailer court in the nineties than I would about some little girl crossing the prairie in a covered wagon with her parents. I can either write about my experiences or rewrite one of the million books I’ve read in the course of my lifetime.

So with this blog, I am hoping to just write a little everyday and see what comes to the surface. If that doesn’t happen, at least it will give me something to do. Since I graduated college last year, I’ve been going crazy trying to think of things to do when I am not at work other than watching TV or housework. (Just kidding, I don’t really try and get out of watching TV).

j.

2010-06-09T15:08:00.000-10:00

Like every other semi-nerdy, bookwormish, twenty-something female in the twenty-first century I decided that the world was probably suffering something fierce by not being made aware of the inner workings of my mind. Easy remedy? A blog. So here we go.

So why is reading this worth your time and who am I? As far as being worth your time, it might not be. This is the first post. There are probably lots of other more productive things you could be doing. Like paying your phone bill or finally getting started on the three or four loads of laundry that are pilled up in your bedroom. But still, if you have somehow stumbled upon this page its probably because you are trolling around the Internet in the middle of the night so this is as good of past time as any other I suppose.

Now as to who I am, well, that is a question I can answer with a little more authority. I am a girl, twenty-four years old, and I live in rural Wisconsin. I live in a little apartment in a little town with my fiancée. Not too terribly exciting. I am a redhead. I am lactose intolerant. . I love to read. I am a feminist and a socialist. I hate pork and the smell of flowers. There. That is enough for now.