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July 9th, 2009
04:03 pm
Tart cherries may be a deeply unAmerican fruit. Were I Sarah Palin, I would devote my new free time to stamping out the pernicious communist influence of tart cherries, which are apparently scorned by RealAmericaAmericans.
Cherry preserves for everyone!
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July 8th, 2009
08:24 pm
More YMCA drama today. My morning swim was relatively uneventful except for being told that "adults only" doesn't actually mean only for adults.
But tonight while swimming with my mother we were kicked out of the pool so that the single member of the swim team could have 2 lanes to herself.
I dislike conflict so I went to chill in the parking lot while my mother, in true Madam Rose form, balled out the towel folders at the front desk.
She ended her lengthy diatribe with the classice Don-ism, "Apparently, you don't know who I am."
ETA: Madam Rose would like me to clarify that she did not, in fact, say, "Apprently you don't know who I am" to the towel folders but included in her summary of their conversation.
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July 7th, 2009
11:36 pm - sometimes those accusation of me projecting my issues onto internet drama are accurate
The thing about The Don Story is that is geniunely a good story and I follow the "less dead friends more recipes" rule of zine making that for every emotional confession one must include something objectively useful or entertaining.
The hard thing about The Don Story is that is makes my sister sound pathetic, which she wasn't. It makes her sound totally looney tunes, but I think that's an unavoiable fact. Her being crazy doesn't make the work she did any less valuable and the way she transformed herself any less real.
So heres the story:
Don was my sister's therapist, ol' one ear, a scar from the time he shot himself in the face in meth induced spiral of despair. He was the originator of the phrases, "This is not my first trip to the rodeo", "I'm not going to co-sign your nonsense" and "Who's putting your cats to bed tonight?" (directed at my sister because she was one of the few female clients without children).
He also was the inventor of "The Cha Cha Line", a practice that should be imposed on every punk house in America. If even a single dirty dish sat in the sink a Cha-Cha Line would be imposed. Each member of the house would line up in order and each one of them would wash every single dish in the house. It's probably terrible for the environment, and bad for the finish on the dishes but oh-so effective at stopping dish slackers.
Anyway, my sister had a long history of fucking her therapists but they didn't being to date until she was release. Which is, I guess, a little better, but I still hated him for it. He should know better. I hated him more when she would tell us that he wanted her to have a baby, for them to get married and live in a house that the church owned and she would get to stay home. Did he want to trap her? Was he afraid of her intelligence? Or was he just echoeing her fantasies of a perfect nuclear family where she wouldn't have to worry about her future?
Some of the things she'd tell us about him were....horrifying. On her birthday last year he contracted gonnerhea from a prostitute and confessed a serious sex addiction to her and to their pastor. She cried and cried and cried but decided to stick by him. She loved him. They were going to get married. She would text message me pictures of engagement rings. What a load of stupid! She wasn't even off paper yet and here she was shopping for diamond rings.
She said it was our judgemental attitude that kept her from inviting him to come over for dinner. She said we were sinners and he would be offended by our crudeness. Sometimes she just said he was shy or busy. We got used to it. Figuring as long as he invited us to the wedding it was all cool.
I can't really think back on that year of her life in a clear way. It's all fuzzy, like an after-effect of time travel. I don't know what was real and what never was.
I know they weren't going to get married. I know they never dated. I know he never so much as went out to lunch with her. I know her told her repeatedly and forcefully that they would not be having a relationship.
I know that the gonnnarhea incident and all those tears happened a few days after Shannon's wedding. My sister wore high heels she bought at Lover's Lane and an off-the-shoulder dress. Don brought a girlfriend. The scene she made in the parking lot was so awful that Shannon told her that she wasn't going to speak to her again until she apologized.
I don't know how much Shannon knows. I feel weird asking her.
At my sister's funeral, near the end, Don jumped up out of his seat and ran towards the podium. He began by saying, "Sometimes you feel the spirit and you just need to speak"....and Megan held her breath thinking this was some Perry Mason style reveal. But instead he just talked about Jesus and the nature of being born again and the transformation of even the worst sinners.
It was sweet. But it didn't answer anything.
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02:22 pm
This warms the cockles of my heart
I feel bad for the people who came to the rescue, though. I believe there is a great shaggy dog joke about that.
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11:40 am
In terms of the zine project and lj, I am stuck on how to tell The Don Story (tm).
Especially now that I've been encouraging the internet to adopt one of Don's best catch phrases.
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July 6th, 2009
12:14 am
Inspired, of course, by internet drama. Also inspired, of course, by my brother's collection of worried monologues about his family (today's theme, if you are interested: was whether or not he should contest his grandfather's will)
anyway,
I hold no truck with the idea that "you can't control how you feel" or "I can be expected to turn my emotions on and off"
OH YES YOU CAN.
(Examples taken from life: If you are madly in love with your therapist you need to TURN THAT FEELING RIGHT OFF by processing the fuck out of it.
If you have fear for your daughters future based on classist and racist ideas, YOU NEED TO GET THE FUCK OVER THAT FEAR. RIGHT NOW.)
People who both can't control their feelings and believe they don't need to control their feelings scare the fuck out of me.
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July 4th, 2009
04:27 pm
I needled the ears of my brother and sister-in-law toinight. It's interesting (and a lot of pressure) to do acupuncture on someone who has never had it done before and is really unfamiliar with the concept.
I've been swimming a lot since I became unemployed. When I first started I would swim for 15 laps in 20 minutes. Now I swim 50 laps (way to go jeremy!) in an hour, 5- days a week. In an effort to swim faster than the gaggle of middle aged women in the lanes near me, I've also started working out with weights too. Now, my body shape is changing like it really hasn't since puberty, with my newly gigantic shoulders and upper arms making my clothing fit oddly.
I've become one of those imaginary fat people. You know, the ones who say, "I work out two hours a day, five days a week and I'm still fat" and all the fat-haters roll their eyes and insist that all fat people subsist on a diet of America's Next Top Model and potato chips*. And it's a stupid argument that doesn't matter because a strangers health is none of anybody's business and health should not be used as a yardstick of individual value and morality.
I'd hard to imagine what concept of health seperated from punitive morality would look like, much harder even than a concept of sexuality seperated from puritanism. I can barely fathom would it would be like to think of "healthy living" as something other than a stick to beat on the poor and fat and disabled and female.
But whatever it looks like, I think it's going to happen here and not the "slow food" and "natural living" meccas of the coasts. It's going to have to come from geniune radicals instead of hip bohemians.
It looks like non-invasive and non-stigmatizing mental health care for people in the military. It's what Patrick and Nora are doing here. It's making sure the most marginalized of women have access to same the birth experience that bobos desire. It what the people who eventually became NADA were trying to create when they were still just young revolutionaries. It's how Sandorkraut talks about nutrition and natural healing from the perspective of someone with a chronic illness. And yeah, it's Bill W. too, no matter what a bunch of fuck up anarchists/libertarians/punks say. (but that's a whole 'nother post)
And I think it might even be bigger than that. I mean, you'd have to talk about divisions between Southeast Michigan and the rest of the state, between the upper and lower penninsulas and who has access to "up north".
But mostly I think it would start with not imposing any of our own assumptions about what people Need To Do to Purify Their Bodies. We'd have to stop thinking that our fat bodies or our disabled bodies or our work-in-the-food-service-industry bodies or our eating-taco-bell bodies need to be scourged, need to be disciplined.
Which is what I love about NADA and Community Accupuncture and also why I think it's so important that Community Acupuncture practioners think of themselves as acpuncturists not as practitioners of allopathic medicine or TCM. Acupuncture is not a part of allopathic treatment or a subsector of TCM and insisting on a close relationship between the two gets in the way of the most important thing that acupuncture does: allow a person to realize in an amazing intuitive way their own capacity for healing. Now sure, later a person might decide to get tested for IBS or take some herbs to tonify their blood or whatnot (or, if you're my mom, realize that water aerobics helps your sore shoulder).
Is this something inherent to acupuncture? Can it be inherent to the way people eat and move? How do we change the dialogue around health?
*not that I don't adore both ANTM and potato chips
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July 2nd, 2009
08:39 pm
Sometimes the worst possible thing happens to you.
You wake up from the fog a few months later and you're not dead, it didn't kill you. You're actually okay, almost normal.
Then you realize you have become utterly fearless.
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June 29th, 2009
01:43 pm
A Monday housewife present for ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) armchairshrink
thanks so much for encouraging me to join poly communties
Oh god in heaven. Some of my students are now 18 and 19 years old, freshmen and sophomores in college. The idea that someone my age would hit on them or sleep with them makes me throw up in my mouth a little. The idea that someone almost ten years older than me would have "preference" for them makes me want to buy a shotgun.
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June 28th, 2009
07:05 pm
Anyone want to talk about Female Chauvenist Pigs?
I so desperately wanted to like this book. Each chapter would beging with some really groundbreaking and insightful take on pop culture and feminism....and then Ariel Levy would pause her writing and go do some whippits and every sentence after that was just a collection of nonsense.
Maybe she should have put down the airplane glue and read "transgender issues for dummies" or something.
I hate when I want things to be smart and they end up being stupid.
See also: the book, "Fatal Misconceptions"
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June 27th, 2009
10:25 pm
mylittleredbike brings words of wisdom in response to internet goat wank
"omg! goats are not pets! goats are delicious snacks, and creators of delicious snacks"
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June 25th, 2009
12:04 am
meme going around, of which I still a little unclear on, or more like that I am making more complicated.
chesirebitten gave me 5 words she wanted me to write about.
Yell: WORDS! at me and I will pass on the favor.
additional note: I recently consumed an ambien this may lead to some disintigration in my language skills
anyway:
Children: I don't have one. I don't really want to have any. I enjoy the princess Simone but our interactions are sort of "Oh small child, do you appreciate my self-deprecating humor? No. you just want titty? I'll call your mom"
I never planned on having a child. I felt pressure about it from people.
I asked my mom about it every few weeks. Do you want me to have a baby so you can have a grandchild that is biologically yours? You tells me that's a stupid reason to have a baby.
I had vague dream plans of fostering lost girls in a glorious multigenerational group run entirely by womem who have been effected by sexual violence, drug addiction and the sex industry. Were we all get smarter and less crazy and I get to blow out my crazy on a 14 year old street prostitute and she gets blow out her crazy me and we get to project the fuck ont either and sometimes some of us have to go into a mechanical trap of our own making and we could die but if *live* it helps us remember how to cherish life.
There will also be accupuncture.
Factory I wrote a mediocre poem about this one time. Frida Kahlo hated the factories, hated the weather, hated the aching, triumphant beauty of the Rouge Plant. Maybe she was a painting prophecy. May she could see were all so doomed.
My aunt Pam remembers giving baskets of food to be taken up long lines of pulleys to give to her father during the Flint sit-down strikes.
Nobody wants to the guy who makes things anymore.
Radical I wonder if "radical" is code word for people that fight all the time because we can't ever trust each other because finally in an act of great liberation we revealed all the untrustworthy things we are doing to each other right now and some of use weeping while we do it. It hurts more. It makes me lonely more to loose all those shallow bonds of trust and all those naive beliefs I really truly have her back and the really honest will always have mine. but this is the way it's got to go. Speramus Meliora, Resurget Cineribus
Family I don't know what my relationship is with my father. I dont' know what I want it to be. It's hard to tell the funny stories of our Eloise childhood around him because he wasn't there and he is embarressed not to have been there and so he says nothing, even though it's our A material. Those 3 weeks we lived in the Penthouse of the Park Lane Hotel in London, eating scrabbled eggs, baked potatoes and milk shakes from room service, going to the Tower of London Every day and collecting tacky souvieners of the crown jewels which fit poorly on our barbie's heads. Gina screaming "but I am an annoying American in the basement at Herods. Petting the wallabees at the London zoo. Wandering alone, just the three of us in a brand new country. It was fantastic. The best time of my childhood. My mom was crippled with loneliness.
My dad was in Russia for almost all of it.
Real Real bodies are imperfect. Real strawberries are imperfect. Real cherries are tarte and have seeds.
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June 23rd, 2009
06:40 pm - Horrible bordertown political conflict has degenerated into prank war
...in the most aweseom way possible
Text: Detroit Bridge Company: State Dumped Dirt on Ramp
The ongoing dispute between the state and the owner of the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit escalated today with the bridge company’s president accusing the state of dumping huge piles of dirt on a ramp that could be used for truck traffic once I-75 reopens.
Detroit International Bridge Co. President Dan Stamper held a news conference this morning to show mounds of dirt he said the Michigan Department of Transportation trucked onto a newly paved lane along I-75 to the bridge plaza area earlier this month.
Stamper accused the state of retaliating against the bridge company because of the ongoing battle over the bridge company’s wish to build a second bridge next to the southwest Detroit crossing. State and federal officials in the United States and Canada favor a publicly owned bridge a mile downriver from the Ambassador.
Stamper called on officials including Gov. Jennifer Granholm to intervene to resolve the matter.
“There is no explanation for dumping dirt on new pavement,” Stamper said.
MDOT’s metro Detroit region engineer, Tony Kratofil, said the bridge company, privately owned by Manuel (Matty) Moroun, has made changes to the design of the bridge plaza that could threaten as much as $145 million of the $170 million in federal funding for the ongoing upgrade of I-75, I-96 and freeway approaches to the bridge.
“They can’t make unilateral changes,” Kratofil said.
Kratofil said MDOT is storing the dirt there to “protect the public’s property rights” because the newly paved lane should not be used until the bridge company corrects the changes it made to plans for the bridge plaza so they conform to designs approved by the U.S. government
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June 22nd, 2009
11:38 pm
Part of me wants to show my mother this...just to get her on a roll saying offensive things. My mother's intolerence for grieving miscarriagers is bordering on infamous. Thank god she doesn't have a livejournal.
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04:49 pm
My mother and I were simultaneously discussing this article and the ins and outs of how to cook the steak I bought. Neither of us have ever cooked steak before or know much about steak.
Peggy: OMG - where do these people come frm?
me: they are obviously the best couple but that dumb teenage slut won't get it
Peggy: seriously girl, GIVE ME YOUR BABY
it is not easy to find steak cooking recipes and people seemed to be conflicted about the george foreman grill
me: i know. plus i have discovered that "a petite steak" is also called a "butler steak"
Peggy: never heard of it
you know, you could ask your Dad
me: well, it's like a steak...but evidently cheaper so you can feed it to your butler
Peggy: oh - so it isn't made from your butler - or your butt
me: or you could give it to the teenage girl whose baby you want and hope it will impress her
Peggy: true
but, really, you make so much money, that should be enough
me: except that this girl has poor decisions making skills and so will be impressed by tangibles like steak
Peggy: plus, I will put extra forks on the table to confuse her and make her feel poor and stupid
me: and once she's dazzled by the aray of utentsils, I will take advantage of the situation to make her sign over that fetus to me
Peggy: but I will pay her, of course, in cigarettes and used designer clothing.
she will be so grateful.
or, she'd better be
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June 20th, 2009
09:49 pm
So, we drive by the statue of Hazen "Potatoes" Pingree yesterday and see this poster stuck to the base of it. I says to Stacey, I says, "Are you and your husband responsible for this?"
She denied it.
Somewhere in the city is someone else who is pining for the long ago days when Hazen Potatoes Pingree, urban agriculture pioneer, crusader against corruption and enemy of corporate greed was still mayor of Detroit.
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June 16th, 2009
11:15 pm
I mentioned this article in a facebook comment so I thought I should link to it here. Also because Nora is smart and awesome and, like so many awesome people, is passionate about the midwest. Also Also because I was thinking about it in the context of some NPR discussions about making healthcare more affordable.
What if Everyone was an acupuncturists?
"Instead of failing to become the basis for yet another upper middle
class profession...acupuncture could succeed wildly as a humble,
ubiquitous, miraculous modality that nobody owns and everybody uses." -
Lisa Rohleder, Acupuncture is Like Noodles
. . .
I just spent two days at the NADA Conference in Ann Arbor (following five days of Acu-Detox Specialist training in Detroit), and I was planning on writing a nice little linear report about my experience. Maybe I still will; maybe I’ll post it on the Forum somewhere. But everything I heard there – reports from hospitals in Europe; about community-centered projects in the Philipines, VietNam and Cambodia; about refugees in Uganda giving 18,000 treatments in 6 months; Lisa Rohleder’s presentation on class; Michael Smith’s comments about what and who acupuncture is FOR; and just hanging out with folks aged 17 to 71, most learning to do acupuncture for the very first time, taught by the wonderful Lincoln Recovery staff – all that makes me want to ask everybody to consider this RIGHT NOW:
What if we just trained EVERYBODY? What if everyone who was interested learned to do at least *some* acupuncture?
. . .
Okay, let me back up for a minute. So much of what the acupuncture establishment worries about is creating - or preserving - a market for acupuncture. In the guise of protecting the public, it strives to legally protect our turf from MDs, nurses, chiropractors, and ADS folks. It clings to the tiny pie of current demand for acupuncture, and clings to fantasies of increasing the size of the pie by increasing insurance reimbursement, and by trying to increase our cache with a few more credits (and a few more thousands in student loan debt) and a fancy title.
Consider this alternative. Last week I saw several adolescents - young people who had never had acupuncture before - become competent beginning acupuncturists in three days. Was I threatened? No; I was deeply moved, and incredibly jazzed. I woke up thinking: what if every high school sophomore learned the NADA protocol in their health class? What if they had a teen stress clinic, where they took shifts needling their peers – maybe even their teachers, the janitors, the lunchroom staff, their kid siblings, their parents – whoever wanted to come? What if some of them wanted to go on to work in healthcare, including acupuncture; wouldn’t they be the kind of people you would want to hire in your clinics? Detroit teens’ high school graduation rate is currently around 25%. Yeah, you read that right. Wouldn’t ANYTHING that helped keep *them* from giving up be worth whatever pie *we* had to give up?
But here’s the thing: would we really end up with less pie? Sure, some of these NADA-trained youth would go on to become acupuncturists (i.e. “competition”), and would probably be unstoppably awesome - just the kind of folks we'd want to hire in CA clinics, or to start clinics in neighboring areas. Many would want to do other things; getting acupuncture at school might help give them the clarity to figure those things out (a recurring theme in the various reports from the NADA conference was that acupuncture seemed to give people hope, and to enable them to think more clearly and make their own plans for the future). In addition, not only would most of them be healthier, more confident and less-stressed young adults (which would obviously be a major benefit to society as a whole), they would know for the rest of their lives that acupuncture is something they can use to help them maintain their health and sanity. Doesn’t that sound like a way to bake a bigger pie? Sure, sometimes they would treat themselves and their families at home, with ear needles or seeds, just as everyone should be able to cook themselves and their families a decent, healthy meal. But people who know how to cook still go out to eat. And the folks that have decided that they love to cook and feed people will be there, providing nourishment and communion in exchange for a modest amount of money.
. . .
This wouldn't have to stop at high schools, of course; this thought is just one of many jostling around my brain right now, and just somewhere to start. One thing I believe is that we can't protect acupuncture (much less our livelihoods) by hoarding it. As one of the addiction counselors in a wonderful documentary shown at the conference said, “you can’t save your ass and your face at the same time.” Please, let’s stop trying to save (or gain) professional face, and modestly and bravely and steadfastly join the work of trying to save humankind's collective ass.
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09:10 pm
Oh oh! look at me getting all annoyed at someone's internet opinions
One of my more random and nonsensical pet peeves is people who have carry on with very particular Things They Will Not Do over the age of, say, 12. Obviously the poster does not have tactile avoidance issues because they say that they don't mind being touched for sex, for hugs, for hand shakes. But they have decided that omg! it is such a violation of personal space for their mother, whose home they live in, to touch them on the shoulder.
Variations on a theme: people who are attached to their long hair, or their wacky hair color or their hair in any way. Once you are an adult you are too old to let your fucking hair become this huge marker of identity. Sub-Variation: being obsessed with a particular subcultural style of dress. Thirty is too old to be punk, way, way too old to be punk. You are not Abby Shuto and corporate America is not trying to steal your soul by forbidding your Gothic Lolita look.
Watching a lot of America's Next Top Model, as I have done ever since being unemployed, has really allowed me to revel in this particular pet peeve because every episode of every season much feature some variation on it. Also, GOD DAMN do I love America's Next Top Model
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June 15th, 2009
02:38 pm
sometimes you find a macro that really sums up your life. this is mine
see more Lolcats and funny pictures
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June 11th, 2009
11:59 pm - do bill collectors have plants on lj?
because poor skills is full of "helpful advice" for dealing with creditors like "keep in communication", "pay off the whole balance and any fees", "the people at the collection agency can be your buddy" and "pay a small amount for years and years".
what the fuck?
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