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November 30th, 2009
04:23 pm
I am having a very (non) serious conversation with my mother about whether or not (straight?) white men who criticized the Bush administration were targeted with threats of violence the way that many women and men of color who did were. I say no. That the death threats and the vitriol had a lot more to do about being uppity women and/or perpetual foreigners than simply lashing out at dissent.
This is regarding Heroes.
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November 23rd, 2009
10:24 pm - as it echoes down michigan avenue
For those of you who don't know, I'm officially moving to Ypsilanti on January 1st.
Of course, I'm sad and conflicted and hopeful about it. It feels like I'm starting fresh. I've been wanting to start fresh for a while, since my life fell apart a bunch of ways last winter.
Books and movies have always told me that moving to a quaint small town is the way to start over. My definition of "quaint small town" is broad enough to embrace Pontiac* so Ypsi is about as quaint as I could possibly handle.
Also, I get to live here:
I turned down the apartment in the tower on the grounds that it was absurd, and settled for a tiny apartment in the back with a patio and ivy and bedrooms in the basement.
Ya'll are invited to a New Years Day Brunch. Bring black eyed peas and any booze and we'll toast to starting a new life.
*Pontiac, a town named after a line of cars that doesn't exist anymore. My sister used to say that no one lives in Pontiac who isn't court-ordered to live in Pontiac. I find it charming.
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09:41 pm - Cool story bro
My brother's facebook today: "Nathan explained the difference between Earth One and Earth Two to Simone today. She accepted that there were two Flashes, and two Green Lanterns, etc. without difficulty. The only problem was that you can't read the entire Crisis on Multiple Earths at one sitting."
This is Simone.
This is a level of geekdom that I will never attain. Thank god.
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November 18th, 2009
01:23 pm
I am m so busy this week. So busy I can’t believe I’m taking time out of my work life to talk to you internet, but I love you so much. And there’s only so much data crunching one can do before one’s eyes begin to bleed.
Once upon a time, when I ran with a gang of ne’er-do-wells in the DC area who were always trying half-heartedly to overthrow the government by means of potato-based stews, I heard a story of one of the more senior ne’er-do-wells taunting a group of Georgetown students. According to his taunts, they had, “been caught smokin’ pot in [their] dorm rooms” and been sentenced to community service. For some unfathomable reason they were allowed to do community service with this ragtag band of unrepentant criminals. This was somehow supposed to prevent any future lawbreaking. I am confident that it did not.
Anyway, replace “smoking pot in your dorm room” with “knowingly manufacturing a dangerous and addictive substance then marketing that substance to children” and “rag tab band of unrepentant criminals” with “semi-rag-tag band of academics and you’ve got some idea of the cruel fate that America’s tobacco industry is enduring right now.
On a happier note, our Exec. Director is so nice I could cry. Not even taking into consideration his epic scheme to somehow legally embezzle money from (someone?) and get all our student loans paid off, he’s constantly forwarding policy paper to us peons in the back office, based on what he knows our interests to be. Amber gets public health policy stuff. I get stuff on residential treatment and substance abuse issues.
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November 16th, 2009
09:32 pm - let's talk about television.
What would Heroes actually do if it didn't throw in a little creepy incest into the mix every now and again? Oh, I know, it would suck and make no sense. So I welcome the return of the disturbing Jerry Springer nature of Heroes as a distraction from the lack of consistent character motivation and plots that make any goddamn sense at all.
"Oh hi Dad, I'm your teenage daughter come over to visit. No, I'm not wearing any pants. Oh wait, I guess these are technically pants. I borrowed them from a Hooters waitress. Can you throw my severed foot away for me?"
Then we cut to some brotherly groping in Peter Petrelli's unfurnished apartment. WHAT HAPPENED TO HIS FURNITURE? THIS IS REALLY STARTING TO BOTHER ME. I know he had furniture in the season; it was perfectly done up in Ikea-Nice-Guy. I know there was furniture in the second season when everyone thought he was dead and his brother was sobbing drunkenly into the sheets. But now that he lives there full time and works as an EMT he apparently has nothing but a card table and a collection of newspaper clippings.
This is the low level of narrative continuity that Heroes has sunk to: Characters randomly lose all their furniture and nobody bothers question it.
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November 15th, 2009
10:10 am - Your Vagina is Haunted
I finally took that oddly difficult emotional step of throwing away one of the last remnants of my sister's presence in our house: Her three boxes of Summer's Eve douche.
It was a particular kind of magical thinking that held us back, I realize. The belief that if she rose from the dead tomorrow she would be infuriated at us denying her the ability to scent and sanitize her vagina.
The "Tropical Breeze" flavored douches are also the very last tropical fruit scented item in the house. We threw out 10 Paradise Breeze renuzits from her apartment after she died. The mango tango body wash went next. The tropical Axe body spay after it.
I want to chalk it up to her emotional stunted, or some special borderline characteristic, but I think it may have just been a very personal eccentricity. She loved artificial pineapple flavor. She loved it so much that it wasn't enough to fill her house with the nauseous smell, or to constantly suck on jolly ranchers. She wasn't satisfied unless her lady bits also smelled like they were stuffed with starbursts. Thank god she died before creating some sort of fruit punch enema.
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November 11th, 2009
10:53 am
We try to be helpful, but when someone from Detroit Public Schools calls and is having trouble with our software or website the problem is always on their end. The root of the problem is that, due to budget cuts, DPS has replaced their IT department with a herd of llamas. If you complain about inappropriate blocking software, they spit on you. Your only hope is to bring a taste armful of sumac leaves and hope you can distrac them long enough to unplug something vital.
We don't have good enough health benefits to be dodging llamas.
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November 10th, 2009
03:47 pm
The story of the world’s smallest woman, who is about to give birth to her third child has been awfully rage inducing today because I only heard about in the context of people letting their fucked up inner-eugenicists out. Yes, a smiling woman with a happy family is obviously suffering a horrible fate that it would be cruel to subject a child to, yes indeed. Fuckers.
Anyway, moving on. I am fascinated by how this ought to totally bust Kate Gosslin’s bubble. I’ve defended Kate Gosslin’s newsworthiness as a person before by point out that she grew 6 human children inside her body and kept them there for 36 weeks. Could you do that? I couldn’t. It’s almost unheard for higher order multiples to gestate for that long and I think it’s a pretty amazing physical accomplishment, like the woman that swam in Antarctica or someone who can lift a lot of fucking weight.
But in terms of percentage of body size, Stacey Herald kick’s Kate Gosslin’s Christian, cuckholded ass.
Lately, I’ve been, in general, really into the idea of thinking of physical achievements in terms of being relative to body size. It’s because I’m slightly obsessed with being able to do a pull-up and stumptuous.com said once that the heaviest woman they’ve ever seen do a pull-up weighed 100 lbs less than I do know. It’s a little depressing to think about, so I’ve decided to think of it in a more positive way. So I’ve decided that once I can do a pull-up I will be able to brag that, in terms of weight lifted, what I did was the equivalent of a skinny woman with her twin sister tied around her legs doing the same thing.
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November 9th, 2009
07:15 pm - An informal housing poll
I am cofuzzled by my pending move to Ypsilanti because I have been so long so spoiled by cheap Detroit real estate and cannot handle the stress of wanting to live in a town that is merely "cheap" as a opposed to "a town where property and old cars are so cheap that people push trucks out of 4th story windows for shits n' giggles.
Potential new apartment has all sorts of fancy doohickies like ceramic tile and granite countertops and a washer-dryer but will cost 33% of my monthly take-home pay.
So here is my informal internet poll:
What do you feel is an appropriate percentage of your income to pay towards rent? Optional: what percentage of your income to you now pay towards rent?
How much higher of a percentage would you hypothetical be willing to pay to reduce your commute to 50 feet instead of xxx miles?
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November 7th, 2009
04:34 pm
Oh lord. I'm reading "Brightsided" and I don't know if it's my mood or the cycle of the season but it is making me so angry! I'm angry on Barbara Ehrenreich's behalf, I'm considering calling up my aunt and yelling at her about a fight we had 8 months ago. I want to track down acquaintances and scream at them over things they said over a year ago. I want to track down old internet fights where I backed down to avoid being labeled bitchy or edgy and type "cry all you want, you're still an idiot!". I want to send hatemail to those people with the braintumor kid. I want to search out my classmate from last month who told me to "work the steps" and spit on her. I'm just bubbling over with rage.
Oh B.E! I love you! Marry me! Let us embrace each other and realize we are the only sane people in America!
It's one of those things y'know? When someone validates your secret feeling and you realize you both have been weighed down and silenced by some ridiculous taboo.
That's the thing that brings up all this old anger in me but also the thing I find most fascinating: There is a twee and idiotic cultural frame around death in America. Anyone who embraces this frame is supported and anyone who rejects it is shunned. It's come up several times in my life that I've expressed my feelings and, in a context where everyone's feelings are supposed to be supported, been told that my feelings are wrong, that my experience shouldn't be shared. (srsly. strap-on.org of all entitities tried to float the "some experiences don't matter" card on me 3 years ago. yes. I am still made about it.) I don't think this frame really serves very many people's needs, and does more for consumer/media-centric society than for those who are dealing with death or serious illness. Nonetheless, it's defended with such a fierceness.
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November 5th, 2009
10:49 pm
1. Mitch Albom. Oh, he won't be there, gentle reader, but just as his terrible presence oozes through this piece of writing he will ooze out of the mouths the well-meaning people around you who probably weren't English majors and are looking for something comforting to say. They will quote Tuesdays with Maurie and I lose the ability be a good sport and start snarling about scabs and elia kazan. People will think this is funny. I do.
2. Rose Kennedy and Her Daughters of Spite. These people, mothers mostly are my favorite. I trade a thousand of them and their shrill judgement opinions for one weep "she lit up a room time". I shall strive from this day forward to attend the funerals of all troubled daughters in order to catch a Rose Kennedy in action.
For those of you who don't have a great collection of Kennedy Trivia, Rose's daughter (and JFK's sister) Kathleen Kennedy married the Marquess of Harrington, a non Catholic!. When Kathleen and the Marquess died in plane crash a few months later Rose took to the pulpit to explain that that is the fate that awaits girls who don't listen their mothers. My great-aunt Patsy did a fabulous Rose Kennedy impression when her daughter Tracey died of complications from bulimia. It was, as the story goes, a 30 minute lecture directed at Tracey, sitting there in her coffin about the motherly advice she ignored.
But like I said, these people are my favorites. They annoy me the least. Judgmental bitches they may be but that the decency the honesty to remain same judgement bitches they were the day before their daughters died.
It's the truest kind of love to remember someone as they were. And in this, the Rose Kennedy bitches maybe the only grieving people on this who ca be said to have ever loved their children at all.
3. The wearers of tacky jewelry. Let's talk about my father's Joey-Bag-Donuts outfit that caused such distress last winter at this time, to the point where it was called "triggering". He walked around the house in the mornings wear nothing but a robe and a gigantic crucifix necklace with green plastic gemstones from Claire's accessories. It was my tacky necklace and I was just annoyed to still be mistaken for my sister. But it increasinly enraged my mother. He dug into her car to find the necklace, which she had borrowed from me a fews before and not return and assumed it was a piece of meaningful jewelry that look ungodly tacky. That's bad enough. But to make such a gesture, tacky and in our face was a way a reminding us of something we were trying to hard to forgive him for: He never bother to know anything about her. He couldn't tell you a thing about the adult she had become. He didn't even know or remember how she had come to be a bright up and comer in his own little cult. She might as have been a stranger to him.
And, damn, did we need to forgive him for this because she was hard to love and secretive and he was just doing what his people do....but that stupid cross made it a lot more difficult.
My mother's best friend Lynn, she who has given up all holidays and stopped speaking to her living son, is also a tacky jewelry wearer: she wear a giant D with a vial of her sons ashes. Like my father, she had a rocky relationship with her son. He was troubled. She was troubled. So she's created this mystique of the dead perfect son. Which leads me to:
4. The parents of children who "Lit Up a Room". Never light up a room. It is a path to certain death. You should probably start turning off light as you enter rooms. The parents of children who were always sweet, the loving, beautiful daughters and the sons who always said, "I love you Mom" a just sort of sad and pathetic in their lying lying lying ways. I can just roll my eyes at their bullshit. But I inadvertently offend them because I have the gall to say that my sister was a junkie who died of an overdose.
It's murder, really, what they are doing. I don't know their kids so it doesn't effect me to watch their parents murder them over and over again. But I worry about my dad, I know the southern in him makes it tempting and I know he doesn't like to tell the funny stories of how insufferable Gina could be. I worry because this is murder and I will not be kind to him and forgive him while he sits there murdering my sister and turning her into some angel who lit up a room.
5. The parents who want to erase it all. The parents who have never let Paul Farrell speak at their child's funeral. My sister's was the first time he had over presided over the funeral of one of his church members ever. When people die in his church on of two things happen: the body is abandoned in the morgue and buried by the state or the parents of the dead person take them away and don't tell the church where it is. For the parents who have been so beaten down by this disease that they can't even come love their children even death, I have such compassion. It's the ones that take them away that enrage me; the ones that yell at the kids who leave NA literature on the graves, the ones who put "natural cases" in the obits, the ones that are still so shamed by their child's disease, even in death.
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01:15 pm
The internet is hilariously divided into two camps over a heartwarming story about a terminally ill 6 year old who left adorable notes for her parents to find after she died. Of course, they have published them into a book and of course, post balloon boy, there’s a score of people calling hoax on the whole thing.
Which is leading scores of other people to make accusations of heartlessness because grieving parents wouldn’t lie!. I died, internet, seriously, I died. Man, nobody lies like grieving parents. Sit in on any grief support group and you will be just devastated by all the dead Einstein-Mother Teresa hybrids the world has been deprived of and you will weep with the perfect parents who hugged their brilliant, kind hearted children every day as they lit up rooms all over the place. Not to mention the suicides who are reinterpreted as anneuryms, the wholesale banning of NA literature from the tombs of kids who died of drug overdose a head injury while recusing kittens from trees.
I keep meaning to write The 5 Terrible People You Will Meet in Grief Support Groups
I also keep meaning to lol at my mother’s best friend Lynn who, 5 years after her son’s death has decided that, in addition to no longer celebrating Christmas, Thanksgiving or 4th of July she has also decided to stop celebrating birthdays….anyone’s birthday.
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November 3rd, 2009
09:28 pm
Because I'm a glutton for stupidity I put ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) cf_hardcore on my friends list.
Which led me to this nonsense
Which led me to imagine that we actually lived in a child-centered world I would no longer have to sit in trainings or on conference calls with professional educators who identify as "behaviorists" and insist that because the children they work with are poor/black/"learning disabled"/in the juvenile justice system/in Detroit/the children of teen parents/in a school with low test scores they aren't capable benefiting from a humane, experiential learning approach.
And I'd probably get a raise.
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November 2nd, 2009
07:45 pm
I'm so conflicted about my life plans right now. Since I've decided to start liking my job it's seeming less and less reasonable to flit off to Minnesota for grad school. But I don't like my job enough to get over the sting of abandonment from my last job and I realize I need a master's degree if I'm going to advance in either this field or any other field. So now I'm looking at Marygrove. Fuck knows.
Also, I feel like I need to make some housing decisions because, as adorable as my parents are, living with them is going to get old eventually.
So, live in Detroit? Live in Ypsi? Live where?
Live in this apartment? Fuck knows.
On the topic of indecisiveness: the long, long, long, long lag time for everyone between applying for a job and getting hired is a running joke in the office. This, combine with coworker saying that from my first interview (IN APRIL!) she knew they needed to hire me, made me feel better.
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October 31st, 2009
08:39 pm
Maggie's come a long way from last Halloween when she hid upstairs and trembled all night. Now she growls at the frightening ghouls that come from out of the terrifying dark night...until they get close enough for her to realize they are children and then she commences with vigorous tail wagging.
I am writing a paper, because I am Ms. NoFun Maggoo.
I hate writing papers during the week though, and the level of spite I feel towards my fellow students is really propelling this paper along. Topic: "The Crisis of Cultural Competency in Substance Abuse Counselors with regard to GLBT Youth". Subtitle: "why none of you homophobic fuckers should ever have jobs".
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October 29th, 2009
03:36 pm
After some though I came to the conclusion that in the majority of cases I am against Harm Reduction as a philosophy/idealogy and I think Harm Reduction as a philosophy/idealogy represents values that are wrong. (although I wouldn't have worded it that way)
After coming to that conclusion I decided to research a possible internship placement. I chose them because a)they are near my work and b)they have BUNNIES*. I discovered they have a clearly articulated position paper on why they are opposed to Harm Reduction, although they engage in some activities that fall under the harm reduction label and they respect and value the ways that the harm reduction philosophy has created positive change, because they believe that many aspects of Harm Reduction as a philosophy have values that are wrong.
and I swooned a little. Also: BUNNIES!
*yes, actual flopsy eared bunnies, and piglets and goats and probably alpacas
ETA: AND THIS:
"Addicted survivors of domestic violence should never be referred to or treated as “codependent.” There are at least two potential problems with this approach that include:
Treating the survivor as “codependent” could arguably be considered “blaming the victim.”
Counseling the survivor to emotionally detach from abuser could put the survivor in danger. Behaviors that counselors might consider codependent may serve as self-preservation for the survivor. Stopping “enabling” behaviors may result in an increase in violence"
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October 24th, 2009
09:35 pm - Writer's Block: Take the pain away
Dude, I can't believe you didn't stay alive to watch Season 3 of The Tudors.
(Also, fuck you, writer's block for your pathetically half-ass attempts to trigger me. Do your worst, I have the emotional sensitivity of a rattlesnake.)
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08:10 pm
A total of 8 hours in to a 12 hour, 2 day class that contained about 20-30 minutes of actual content, I, legitimately, seriously, totally in context said the following, "Amy Winehouse's Dad has a very legitimate point when he said...."
The self-satisfied feeling I got from that utterance kept me from killing my classmates.
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October 23rd, 2009
09:48 am
I'm bitching to my mother about the Maryland Curriculum Standards and how they switch, in the middle of the report, from 3rd person to 2nd person. Who the fuck does that? It's bad enough to use 2nd person in the middle of a serious policy reprot. But to switch in the middle? UGH!
Anway, my mother says the following:
Peggy: don't you love the opportunity to use your education to be self-righteous?
me: these are education policy people!
They set the curriculum standards!
Peggy: you go girl! tell it!
I'm pretty sure she's making fun of me. But I stand firm on this one.
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October 22nd, 2009
06:40 pm
It's been 48 hours since there has been either a dog or a baby in our office. This is a new record and makes me sad. Not only does the regular appearance of small,cute,drooling mammals make a welcome distraction from boring ol' work but it reminds me that my new bosses might actually be nice people who care about their employees.
Anyway, my scheme of trying to convice A. that "Bring your Newfie to Work Day" is a Michigan tradition has failed, and my subtle hints about bringing Bea Arthur the boxer back to the office are apparently too subtle. I was even looking for an excuse to make K.come to the office for a meeting so I could coo at her baby. Making the mother of an infant drag her ass into the office just because I want to pet something is evil as fuck, y/y? I don't have the seniority to get K. to do any damn thing anyway.
It's actually kind of awkward being around K. and her baby because he is so amazingly homely. I know, I know there are no ugly babies. I also know that one simply does not say anything to the parents of an ugly baby about the baby's ugliness so I struggle to not bust out with "who looks just like Nosferatu? Whosie Whosie?". I think he knows thats what I want to say because he's always giving me these more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger looks of disapproval.
God, I love a truly ugly baby. They are so much better than cute babies. Cute is the default for babies, but truly, honest-to-god homely is like gold.
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