Blogging When The Baby Isn't Looking

New Year's Resolutions

2012-01-08T02:41:00.003-05:00

Fuck New Year's resolutions. Yeah, you heard me. Fuck 'em. Fuck judging myself and pointing out to myself all the things that are wrong with me that I really should fix this time for real this year or something. Fuck everything about it. This year I'm going to have fun. I could die, you know? I could get hit by a god damn bus and have spent the entire year worrying about my weight. Fuck that. January, I'm going to get my shit in order. I have a divorce and a move and stuff to worry about. Then, every month after that, I'm going to have a theme and a fun. I have had a little wine, but I've been thinking about this for a while. Just trust me on this one.

I haven't thought out the whole year yet but February is going to be GIRL MONTH. I am going to read books and articles only written by women and listen to music only written and performed (at least vocally) by women. I got the idea from CUNT (it is a feminist manifesto) and it sounds like a LOT of FUN!!!

After February, I don't know, but I think I might spend a month being a vegan just to try new things. Then on some other month, I might try spending every weekend outside. Maybe one month I'll learn an instrument, I don't know. I'm going to enjoy the fuck out of 2012.

Even if I gain weight.

Even if I accomplish nothing.

Even if, by the end of 2012 I have all the same regrets I had at the end of 2011. At least I won't have all the guilt.

Fuck New Year's resolutions. Who's with me?

Getting Divorced Sucks

2011-12-02T21:53:00.001-05:00

I have taken quite a long absence. Why? Short answer: I have a very demanding job. I get Sundays off and sometimes Saturdays but those are few and far between. I have to wake up to take the eldest to school every morning then come back home then get ready for work and work until 7:00. There just isn't time for anything. Oh well. I'm good at my job and it pays well on good weeks, so this is just my life now.

Even before I took a long absence, I'd moved away from personal posts. I just really don't like talking about what's going on now too much. It's complicated and many-layered and there are a lot of feelings that could get hurt with even the slightest peek at the details. In any case, I have a belly full of Chinese food and I wanted to get some things off my chest.

Getting divorced is not fun. Rock has been my best friend for the last 10 years and, while I'd like to stay best friends for the rest of our lives, I know it would be selfish and unrealistic of me to expect him to go along with it. I'm doing my best to earn it - I've not thrown around any insults, there have been no screaming fights, I have been very generous with custody/child support negotiating and have been careful not to get greedy while also not giving more of myself than I have to give. Though the split was a mutual decision, I was the one who sort of pushed it along, so I'm glad that I did that before we had a chance to hate and resent each other, or rather, before we had a chance to start fighting all the time. I know at this point I can expect him to resent me. Anything less would be ridiculous.

I've gotten a good look at Rock's character through all this, too. I thought after so many years of marriage, there probably wasn't a lot more to learn about him, but I suppose I never expected somebody to practice what they preach quite so well. He's been very loving and loyal as he always has been. He's been very kind to my girlfriend and has told the kids that they ought to be nice to her, too. He treats her with respect and has been very welcoming. I hope I can be as good a person about these things someday. It's not always hugs and handshakes, but about 95% of the time it is and that's pretty awesome.

Another thing I've learned since leaving the relationship is that the only thing that ever kept us going was our respect and loyalty for each other. We were and always will be very loyal and respectful toward one another and I absolutely love that and hope it will never go away. I'll never tell the world all his faults and I doubt he even has it in him to start telling the world about mine. I'll always treat him with respect. However, as partners, we never even came close to working. We had the same values but not the same needs. I wanted to go exciting places and do exciting things and I largely ended up spending all of my time alone. Friends and family can really only fill so much of that gap. He, too, had needs I couldn't really fulfill. We were both lonely. What can I say? We got married young and we grew apart. We never even saw it coming.

It's hard to leave somebody I love and like so much. It's even more difficult to explain to others, and it's still difficult to explain but...whatever, fuck it. Maybe I'm underestimating you all.

Yes, I'm gay. Rock was not surprised to learn that and nor was anyone else really except maybe me. "How could somebody get to their 20s and not know that?" You might be asking. Well...

I don't want to talk down to anyone, but for the sake of explaining it to as wide an audience as possible, I'll start with this: Attraction is a complicated and many-layered thing. There's romantic attraction and sexual attraction and some even say there's a third type but I haven't figured out how it's different from romantic so I'll just stick with two. My romantic inclinations know no gender. I was in love with Rock and with the guys I dated before him. I fell in love with women, too, but was much too cowardly to say anything about it. The men I fell for were available to me. The women weren't. So, I mostly dated men. "But Heather, doesn't that make you bisexual?" No. It makes me bi-romantic. That's the easiest way I can explain it. From about age 16 or 17 on, I identified as bisexual to close friends, but was mostly quiet about it. However, it recently became clear to me that I am by no means bisexual.

I am homosexual. When I look at men, I can see that they look kind, or thin, or fit, or varying degrees of awesome or not-awesome, but I don't desire sex with them. Cover your eyes, mom. That does NOT mean that I never ENJOYED sex with them. Sometimes, sex is about love and connection and bonding and making the person you love happy, not just about who makes my nipples hard. In that respect, I very much enjoyed it and even sometimes found myself wanting it. This is not the way I feel about sex with women. With women, I can enjoy sex just because it's SEX and sex is AWESOME and OMG BOOBS. *cough* Sorry.

You can open your eyes now, mom.

I hope it makes sense as to why it's confusing, and I'm not the only one, either. Apparently, while men tend to come out of the closet mostly in their teens and twenties, women come out pretty much evenly all throughout the decades of their lives. I don't know why this is, some think hormones, I think it's possible that women's sexual peak being later has a lot to do with it, but it's really all speculation.

So that's a big part of why Rock and I are breaking up, but it's not ALL of it. The kids are doing well with the adjustment and seem to understand what's going on. They were already used to their dad going away for several months a year anyway, and now it's just the same thing except he'll be living apart. Even the eldest, who fully understands, is happy.

Girlfriend moved in temporarily in late September when Rock went to Norway to do some work. Rock is coming back on the 20th. Girlfriend has been watching the kids while I go to work. She loves the housewife thing and is better at it than I ever was. She doesn't feel suffocated by it the way I did. She asked Rock if she could stay through the holidays and Rock said he'd love the opportunity to get to know her better. Again, he's pretty fucking awesome sometimes. So, it'll be all of us here for the holidays. Rock could have stayed in Norway to do work but wanted to come home cause this will be our last Christmas together as a family, as he puts it. I hope we'll always be family. We've decided officially to move apart when the school year is over, so long as we can figure immigration and stuff out.

It doesn't ALL suck. I'm happy to be living my life genuinely. I'm happy to be in a relationship where I can fulfill my significant other's needs. I'm happy to have somebody that wants to go exciting places and do exciting things with me. I'm happy that she likes Rock. I don't know what the future holds for us, but things are going well.

I guess that's everything. Thanks for reading.

Her Lipstick Is Not Your Permission

2011-08-07T02:36:00.004-04:00

I've been meaning for a long time to write a followup to my post about little girls being sexualized, I just didn't really know where to begin. Fortunately, the internet delivers.

Today's post comes courtesy of Dr. Keith Ablow, a Fox News doctor (seriously do they have their own medical school? It seems that way) and five star asshole of the pink-nailpolish-turns-boys-gay infamy who argues that the girl whose photograph I actually used for my last post has appeared in several other photographs in Vogue and it has turned men into pedophiles. Yes, this is his real argument.

Not only do I believe Vogue is stimulating pedophiles to act on their desires, but I believe Vogue and Abercrombie and Juicy are creating pedophiles by coaxing dark, illegal desires out of men who would never have otherwise consciously felt them, let alone acted upon them.

And we're back to this again. If you'll forgive my boasting for a moment, my last post on the subject actually ended up receiving quite a bit of attention and a number of comments and feedback. Of course I got a lot of nonsensical tripe from the opposition who either didn't read it or didn't get it, but I also got some interesting insight from concerned women, many of them mothers, who wished me to acknowledge that girls being posed in such ways are not only being exposed to a sort of attention from men that they're not yet mature enough to understand or comprehend, but also being primed for her lifetime role in the sex class and learning that being dressed up and displayed is normal and good behavior for women. I'll address both those concerns and Ablow.

So, how exactly, you may ask, does Vogue turn men into pedophiles? Here's Ablow's take on it:

She is wearing diamond earrings, lipstick, eye makeup and a red dress. In another, she looks about 20, with her mouth open and her finger gliding along her scarlet lips. The clear message is that it is A-OK to feel sexually stimulated by her (since that is the obvious intention of the photos), that little girls are inherently sexually desirable and that they desire men, in turn. Why else, the unconscious part of a man asks himself, would she dress that way?

Yes, that's right. She's wearing lipstick and heels. She's wearing things that adult women wear and adult women are sexy. What else are those poor, poor men supposed to do? Here's a thought: nothing. I've said it before and I'll say it again. There was never a man in history who dressed his son up like him and was accused of pimping him out. If this girl's mother dressed this way, she'd be considered classy, fashionable, and beautiful. So what's the difference? They're clothes, not sex, so why is it okay for an adult woman to wear these things in public, but not a child? Because clothes like this are considered to be no less than full consent to sexual advances. That's what the problem is. It's not the clothes, it's not that she looks good, it's not even that she looks sexy, it's that people consider skirts, lipstick, and earrings consent to sex. Oh, and when I say people, I mean men, because women never ever get dressed this way because they're ready to be fucked by all who please. If her mother wore those clothes and men catcalled, sexually harassed, or raped her, her defense and credibility would be significantly diminished. Her complaints would be largely ignored, her body's fate of being invaded considered as inevitable as a car with its doors unlocked in downtown Detroit.

I could simply tell Dr. Ablow and all the men he speaks of, from skeevy perverts jerking off at their desks to otherwise normal guys who are now ashamed of themselves that those clothes do not constitute permission. If they could internalize that - really internalize that - then perhaps the terror of the sexy child would be diminished. Yes, she looks good, yes, you may have some feelings about somebody you would rather you didn't have feelings for, but guess what? That barrier is still there. She is still a child and she is still absolutely not for you. She has put on adult clothing and that does not make her any more for you. Therefore, you are not actually faced with a larger dilemma than you were before. Nobody has told you it is okay. These are pigments and cloths, nothing more and nothing less. Would they believe me do you think? Or would they still perceive her as having asked for it?

Vogue is a magazine made for women who like fashion. These women likely spent their youths dressing up in their mothers' clothes and trying on their mothers' or maybe fathers' lipsticks and jewelry. For these women, looking at pictures of a pretty little girl dressed up in too-dark lipstick and too-big heels inspires feelings of nostalgia. It makes them want to buy those clothes. That is why those pictures are there. Not everything and certainly not everyone is put there for men.

Have her parents failed to shelter her from society's judgments of her? Judgments that she's too young to deal with? Yes! Is she being prepared for a life of having her appearance determined by men's dicks? Yes! Yes, absolutely she has. I never said these things weren't problems - I said that there were much, much bigger problems when we hysterically avoid these things. So, at the risk of being redundant: What's worse than failing to protect her from society's judgments? Worse even than priming her for a life as a member of the sex class? Teaching her that she absolutely must not dress up until she's old enough to consent to sex because every time she does, she's giving adult strangers permission to harass and invade her - that she's responsible for men's entitled attitudes toward her body - that things as innocuous as pigments and cloths can make her or her parents responsible for a crime as gruesome and horrid as pedophilia of all fucking things and that the men who invade her body can hardly help but feel that way. What's worse is setting herself up for a life of self-blame and triple-guessing absolutely everything she wears for fear that when she walks out that door she'll be mocked, judged, and exposed if she fails to cover enough skin and it was her responsibility to prevent that.

I refuse to accept that. I refuse to say that a little girl shouldn't be able to play dress-up because somebody might commit a crime. I refuse to say that a little girl's parents shouldn't set her up in a photoshoot meant to make her look like she just fell out of her mom's closet because some nice guy might be transformed into filth. Wear what you want, little girls. Fight the power.

Notecards

2011-08-02T23:44:00.003-04:00

I have a new job, as I've mentioned, and as a result, very little time to do much blogging, where time to do blogging is defined as excess time that must be filled or else I'll just.. stare at walls and drool. There's a shortage of that lately. However, there is no shortage of internet arguing time. There is always time to argue on the internet. So for you, my dear readers, here are a few of the things I've said in other internet places recently. They have been hand-selected to make me look smart.

On whether a slightly overweight woman can be considered "beautiful"

Why is beautiful so important that we must hysterically insist on our acceptance into its exclusive club? I've been denied membership my entire life and honestly I care very little. As far as I can tell, it carries very few benefits. Men will respond better? Don't care. People will want to stare at me? I'd rather they not. You'll forgive me if I don't buy into the line that because I'm a woman I should want to please the world aesthetically. While I can certainly appreciate a beautiful woman - my girlfriend included - it's an adjective we've been coerced into fighting for and I refuse to carry that yoke.

In response to somebody's insistence that homosexual men behave in an effeminate manner in order to further the gay agenda (I know, why bother responding?)

You and F_____ for that matter are assuming that everyone is like yourselves - that effeminate behavior is something affected to annoy you or to be different from you. I have too much experience to believe this is true and have known more than a dozen gay, effeminate men who were neither political nor socially exclusive. I've also known dozens of gay men who were extremely socially exclusive with voices and mannerisms indistinguishable from typical masculine men. There are demonstrable differences in brain chemistry and fetal development in homosexuals that affect feminine or masculine expression. To assume that their behavior is affected is to assume that masculine is the only way a man can possibly be wired unless he just wants to piss you off. It's quite narcissistic.

On why curing hunger isn't as easy as sending livestock to Africa:

On whether playgrounds being "too safe" is damaging for childhood developmentIt's all well and good to sit around and complain about how things are too safe for the kids these days and you used to fashion automatic weapons out of rocks and scabs in your backyard when you were a kid, but it's entirely another thing when you're actually the parent. If you are going to choose which playground to take your child to, and you've got a choice between the one with the giant spike that impaled 2 neighbor kids and landed their parents with a few grand in hospital bills or the safety approved one, you know which you're going to choose and the argument that your children's lack of anxiety about the playground will make them skittish later in life will not be worth acknowledging.

In response to somebody who was sick of student activism by people who could "afford to be ignorant"

Saying feminism is all about "choice" is a weak defensive tactic that people use to appropriate feminism to justify decidedly sexist behaviors and beliefs. Feminism is not about choice. Feminism is about making a society that treats women and men equally. Choices to be protected by a man or have cheeseburgers for lunch do not become feminist simply because they fall under the umbrella term "choice."

On why Susan G. Komen doesn't run a "save yourself from breast cancer by breastfeeding" campaign:

I really wish people would stop trying to include men as if this is an equal opportunity problem; you know it doesn't work that way. The attempts at parallels are laughable. If a boy wears underwear that looks like typical underwear men wear, he's not sexualized. If he wears an outfit a typical man might wear out clubbing, he's not sexualized. If he wears an outfit a typical man might wear on a date, to a party, in a fashion magazine, to go swimming, or to perform a concert, he's not sexualized.

Examining the reactions that people have to outfits on young girls that are considered "sexualized" is a fantastic way to see the hypocrisy of our culture when it comes to cultural attitudes toward what women wear. What we tell a grown woman looks "fashionable" or "professional" can be put on a girl and nobody sees a problem screaming that she's advertising sex and offering herself as bait to predators. At what age do these things cease to own her and become her property? What is the cut-off date exactly in your mind? At what point do these clothes cease to advertise sex and begin to tell the world that she's fashionable and mature? Why is it okay for boys to wear what their adult role models wear but when girls do it they're growing up too fast? If girls can't have the same freedoms to imitate adults that boys can, we're not helping them.

The solution isn't to police what girls wear, because the problem isn't what girls wear. If there is a problem it is that girls' and women's bodies are seen as public property and up for public review. The problem is that everything a girl or a woman wears marks her and puts her perceived chastity and sexual availability on a scale that everyone thinks they can point to and approve or disapprove of. The solution is that people need to give girls and women the same autonomy that boys and men already have.

Attention Insecure Women,

2011-07-13T23:33:00.003-04:00

I don't know if you noticed but all of your needs are invalid. Why? Because you're insecure, that's why.

Remember that time when I went out with all of my guy friends and said I'd be home around 10 then I got drunk and you started calling me incessantly around midnight while I was asleep on my friend's couch? We were totally justified in laughing at you. You probably thought I was cheating or something. A secure woman wouldn't waste my time with that. I'm an adult and I'll stay out as late as I please.

You should be home on time, though, because you're a small little vulnerable woman and somebody could take advantage of you or you could be in danger. Women need somebody to look after their safety.

Oh hey you know that time where you asked me how you looked in that dress and I wasn't paying attention and then you asked again and I said "I dunno, fine" and you threw a fit? Stop being so insecure, okay? You should know I think you're hot even though the girls in my porn magazines don't look anything like you and I'm always criticizing women on television who are old or overweight. I'm just a guy. I have to do this. You should be secure enough to take it.

I love you because you're not like those SHALLOW bitches who want big muscly no-necked men who are fucking stupid anyway. You always tell me my flab looks nice and laugh at my stupid jokes.

Don't even think about answering that phone while we're out on our date. Women are all chatty and ridiculous. Can't ever just put their damned phones away. I went to the fucking trouble to take you out and you have the gall to answer your phone cause your stupid bitch friend has yet another problem with her boyfriend? You disgust me.

And yes I will take this call from John. His girlfriend left him and men have to stick together. Bros before hos. Stop acting all insecure. You can't have all the attention all of the time, you know.

Sincerely,

Men

You All Wish I Was Your Mom

2011-06-09T21:05:00.002-04:00

Bug: OH MY GOD MOMMY I THINK I JUST SWALLOWED A BUG!!!

Me: Don't worry I've swallowed lots of bugs.

Bug: Lots?

Me: Yeah like hundreds.

Bug: Why?

Me: They're tasty. Don't worry, it can't hurt you.

Bug: Only frogs eat bugs.

Me: Well, do I look like a frog to you? RIBBIT

Bug: Why did you ribbit?

Me: I DONT KNOW?! I couldn't RIBBIT help it!! OH MY GOD WHAT IS RIBBIT HAPPENING?

Bug: Stop that.

Me: I can't!! RIBBIT!! AM I TURNING GREEN?! RIBBIT!! RIBBIT!!

Bug: Knock it off.

Me: RIBBIT!! *claps hands over mouth* RIBBIT! RIBBIT!!

Bug: Don't worry you're not turning into a frog. Only potions can do that.

Me: *eyes soda suspiciously*

Bug: *exasperated sigh, exits*

Fooled Again

2011-06-04T09:25:00.004-04:00

After I wrote about the gender-mysterious baby Storm, a bunch of people started linking to me. I love to comb through my analytics and find out what people are saying about me, so I visited every message board and blog that came up. I was surprised to find that, in the posts where people had linked to me, they were talking about Storm but they weren't referencing my post about Storm. They were referencing a much older post I wrote about parents who were obsessed with their children's gender presentations. I didn't understand why at first. I thought Storm's parents were a bit different. In fact their neighbors or friends seem to have stumbled over a family that normally kept to themselves, not one that was insisting on making a public issue out of it. Then today, I read this article, written by Storm's mother, Kathy Witterick, as a rebuttal to the media attention. Looks like they were one step ahead of me. Sigh. Here we go again.

Why do I keep falling for this? Why do I always get all starry-eyed when I think there's a parent or set of parents out there that truly desires to challenge gender binary indoctrination? Why do I ever think they're different?

In case you just met me, and you're procrastinating something at work, here's the history:

First, I fell for the parents who were supporting their boys who dress like girls.

Second, I realized this was more of a fun new thing parents were doing these days.

Third, I fell for Storm's parents.

So here we are. I won't go as far as to say that I have any animosity toward Storm's parents. I don't know them well enough for that. Let's just say I find myself a little disappointed to learn that Storm's parents' intentions here seem to be unoriginal at best and disingenuous at worst. Let's tackle this bit by bit. First, her insistence that she doesn't have the kids keep secrets:

Having spent many years facilitating on the topic of abuse and violence prevention, particularly as it pertains to children, I would never tell my children (or anyone) to keep a secret. Secrets are not safe and healthy. I, like many parents, have taught my children that some things are private matters, and when you want to share them, you need to do so honestly with sensitivity and consideration. If I had to convince my children not to share Storm’s sex (which I don’t because my children simply are not interested at this point) — I would teach them that someone else’s genitals and sense of how they relate to their gender is their private business, to be shared by them or in a context where safety, acceptance and sensitivity are paramount.

Okay so she hasn't told the kids not to say anything, she's just taught them that sharing information about somebody's genitals is a very serious thing to consider. Not knowing her personally, I can't judge for sure whether she just doesn't realize that these things aren't actually different or if she's fully aware and failing at spin. Teaching a child that sharing a person's sex is the same as discussing their genitals openly and should therefore be done as carefully and rarely is not much different than teaching them that they shouldn't go across the street because there are monsters. Apparently her ideals prevent her from building fences so she relies on falsehoods and fear to do the work for her. Now she gets to clap herself on the back for not being abusive. Good job, I guess.

She also gave us some further insight into her eldest son's gender identity and presentation, discussing how her eldest son's choices of footwear led her to do a great deal of research on gender identity (really? Come on.):

Jazz is five years old. Since he was a young baby, he’s enjoyed colour, texture and vibrancy. When he was 18 months, he loved to wear layers of wildly striped and mismatched clothing and when his grandparents took him to get his very first pair of shoes, he chose the ones with orange toes and pink flowers on the side... As Jazz grew, his love of bright colours (especially pink) and lots of fabric (especially dresses) continued, and he wanted to grow his hair... I re-read the research and approaches of Alfie Kohn, Barbara Coloroso and Adele Faber to find ways to support him... Jazz has a strong sense of being a boy

This really stood out to me quite a bit because it's an issue I covered before, the last time I had to admit that maybe these open-minded parents were a bit self-serving. Why would a person feel the need to go out and do a bunch of research on gender identities following their toddler's love of shoes? And, sorry to sound like a broken record, but I really doubt that a daughter who wanted to play with GI-Joes would have sent her nervously combing through library shelves. Her son picked out some dresses and she made her life about how different he was. Different, different, different. She must understand and support her different child. Everyone in the family must participate in his different-ness. While I hesitate to act like I know too much about a stranger, it strikes me as odd that somebody so interested in removing the gender binary didn't just default to accepting that colorful fashion was just an interest of his. It sounds more to me like his gender was on the very front of her mind all the time. Was it that difficult to accept?

Additionally, I'm not really sure how a five year old has a strong sense of being a boy. This may just be my cis privilege showing itself but I can't really see how a five year old has a solid concept of what it supposedly means to be any gender. This particular five year old, who has androgynous hormone levels and no secondary sexual characteristics (at least for now), who makes a point of crossdressing, is comfortable being gendered female, and therefore clearly does not feel the need to identify socially as a boy, is glued to his gender? Why? How do the parents know this?

Oh look her two year old also apparently strongly identifies as a boy:

Kio also strongly self identifies as a boy, and his choices around behaviours and image are different but have an equal amount of two-year-old integrity.

Okydoky.

I triple swear I've learned my lesson this time.

Oppressive Girl Toys: A Short Analysis of the Discourse

2011-05-30T00:49:00.005-04:00

I spend a lot of time talking about girls' toys. I've had quite a bit to say about the princesses as role models, toys that involve chores, and toys that seem to be preparing little girls for a life of childrearing and servitude. I'm far from the only one talking about these things. It's very 101. Today, I thought I'd address the nature of the rebuttals I get on the subject.

Most of the people who want to tell me that I'm wrong about these things being oppressive are moms. Actually, so far, all of them have been moms. Sometimes they want to tell me that they don't buy dolls/kitchens or they ask their relatives not to buy dolls/kitchens unless and until they ask for them, which they inevitably do. Most commonly, I hear that their boys play with them too. Therefore, it's okay! Whatever the rebuttal, they're all moms. I just thought my audience was 100% moms, but as the testosterone rich comments on my Kansas paternity bill post proved, that's far from the case. So why is it only moms who want to defend the Oppressive Girl Toys? I think the answer is twofold.

First, moms are the only ones who think I'm talking to them. Men haven't been taught that it is their responsibility to monitor every purchase in the household for total educational value, not to mention political correctness, environmentalism, and overall potential impact on psychological health. Men don't get together in groups on a regular basis and shake their fingers at each other in debates about their diapers' biodegradability. They don't label each other lazy or tell each other they're giving their kids diabetes when formula or McDonald's enters the house. They don't critique each other's children's car seats and rate each other by probability that their child will die in that thing. Of course I'm not just talking to moms (today I am but not usually) but I might as well be talking about tampons and diva cups for all the fathers think this applies to them. I don't care if the father of your children changes exactly 50% of the diapers and wakes up for exactly 50% of the night wakings and gets the children dressed exactly 50% of the time and does exactly 50% of the chores. The simple fact is that he has not internalized even 10% of the responsibility for the outcome of your childrearing venture. This is probably half because his childhood was not spent carrying baby dolls around and trying to one-up his friends on fake parenting and half because everybody in the free world claps a guy on the back just for knowing his children's birthdays. But I digress.

Second, I get the sense that there's a bit of defensiveness involved here, as in denial "I played with these things as a kid and I am not oppressed!" and anger "I am not oppressing my daughter! I can't screen fucking everything for good gender politics!" Well, you're right, you can't screen everything for good gender politics, nor should you. Constantly limiting your daughters' toy selection to politically uncontaminated playthings would take more time than you have, socially cripple your daughter, and probably piss her right off in the process. Like the stigma surrounding formula feeding, this sort of too-high expectation that women and society place on mothers leads to a lot of transparent excuses: the fiction ("I never buy gendered toys"), the fantasy ("my boys play with them equally!"), and the outright false ("these toys do not have a psychological impact on my children"). They're meaningless excuses and you shouldn't have to make them. You didn't start this and you won't be able to end it single-handedly. As a parent, it's your job to take care of the kids and raise them as well as you can, not to create a perfect soldier for the impending gender revolution. You haven't thwarted the feminist movement if your daughter has a Rose Petal Cottage. You don't have that power. In fact you could go to extremes and refuse to tell anyone your child's gender and you still won't gain the power to solve gender inequality. It's okay. Really.

So, moms, what should you do for your daughters? I don't know. Maybe there isn't a lot you can do. Work on liberating yourself instead. She might be the future but you are the present. You exist here and now. You're the one living with the results of your upbringing. You're the one who feels like the whole world is attacking you whenever something about children's toys or nutrition is discussed. You're the one who has to fight for your children's father to stop offering formula when you're crying because your baby wants to breastfeed every fifteen minutes. You're the one arguing with me on the internet cause I said girls play chores and referenced a toy you bought for your daughter while the father of your children is... well, I don't know what he's doing. Not arguing with me, anyway, unless I've recently mentioned paternity tests. We talk about these things because it's important to understand the roots of our problems, not because it's important for women to be perfect moms. That's not empowerment, it's another set of shackles. So: free yourself. You know whatever you have, your daughter will want more.

In Which Heather Spills Her Guts

2011-05-29T05:26:00.002-04:00

This is a difficult post for me to write so I hope you'll excuse me if I'm relatively inarticulate. Some people who are close to me won't be surprised and others will probably be quite pissed off. I don't really know how to say some of it but I've reached a point where keeping it quiet for the sake of appearances is no longer bearable.

A few months ago, Rock and I decided to split up. It would be difficult to explain this without drawing a lot of misunderstanding and anger. The simple answer is that I'm more compatible with women, but that's incomplete. Rock and I had something very real. I wasn't lying, I was in love. You don't stay with somebody you don't love for 9 years. We still love each other very much. We don't fight. We just don't work anymore. This was a painful and difficult decision to make and it was a long time coming.

We decided to free each other to date whomever but stay together until I could earn my own living. Rock understands that being a stay at home mom for almost 9 years can napalm a person's earning potential. When Brother got his dream job and moved out in January, I moved into Brother's old bedroom. We all still got along very well. Surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly, not very much changed at all. We simply continued a happy relationship based on mutual affection and respect that had become platonic a long time ago.

Unfortunately, only a few days after we came to this conclusion, Rock lost his job. This is the second time in a year this has happened. By the grace of our family and a few odd gigs here and there, we've barely sort of managed to keep our home and car. As it goes, things just keep piling up. The Orlando job market sucks eggs. I can't seem to get anyone to look at my resume. It's pretty ugly.

Rock and I have come to the conclusion that when there's a hole in the boat, two buckets are better than one. We're going to stick together as long as we need to until we're both financially solvent. It's best for us and best for the children. We're determined to work as a team. We will probably end up relocating to greener pastures. Right now, we're looking at Iowa. Nothing is certain about our futures. We're just doing everything we can.

I have a girlfriend now. She's awesome. She's very understanding and supportive of my current situation. Rock knows her and is cool with her. I'll have to come up with a blog nickname for her. And still, nobody fights. Okay my father in law saw us fight once when he was visiting recently so he'll know that's not 100% accurate but for the most part, nobody fights.

I know it might sound impossible, but apart from it all, life is ordinary. The kids are doing well. Bug is improving at school and Giggles is growing so fast I can hardly keep up. My mom wants me to walk a 5k with her sometime soon. I'm going to make a stupid America themed cake for Memorial Day because we like cake. Probably I'll take Bug swimming and boil some wieners. Father In Law taught me how. I'll resume looking for jobs when all the businesses reopen after the holiday weekend. I have a lot more feminist and parenting topics to cover. I spend too much time with my kindle. My living room is a mess. I'm still Heather.

On the Genderless Baby Of Whom I Am Now Jealous

2011-05-23T20:25:00.003-04:00

One of the recent popular articles traded over the feminist and parenting internet hubs (I love when the two coalesce) was about a child named Storm. You may have heard of this. Storm's parents won't tell anyone whether ze's a girl or a boy. As it goes, the family's eccentricity isn't an isolated event. Both of Storm's older brothers have been raised without gender expectations and appear to be genderqueer. One keeps a journal about how gender is silly and likes to wear pink. Both grow their hair long and both are read as female. The kids are all unschooled and pretty much determine their own days. The family is different enough to have garnered a lot of attention and so public opinion, as usual, abound and range from severe judgment (child abuse!) to people like me who wish they'd thought of it first.

And why didn't I think of it first? It was certainly on my mind. Bug, my firstborn, was notoriously uncooperative with ultrasound machines. Over the course of my pregnancy I had four ultrasounds: the 20 week standard, another at 30 weeks cause my fundus measured way out of the ballpark (everything was fine, he was stretching or something), another at 35 weeks when I imagined he'd stopped kicking and rushed to the hospital to make sure he was still alive (everything was fine), and another at 41 weeks when I was in labor. We didn't want a surprise;we wanted to know! I wanted to call my baby by a name and fantasize about his or her future! I asked at every ultrasound and then I asked them to check again but it was all in vain. His legs were shut like Fort Knox every damned time.

As a result, everything we bought for him before he was born was gender neutral. It was amazing how difficult this was. Rock (well usually Rock's mother or sister, but sometimes Rock) and I would comb through toy sections and clothes and blankets looking for yellow or beige or green outfits that didn't have dainty little flowers or gender-specific words on them. There were a lot of plain colored outfits that were dresses or would have frills. There wasn't much to see that wasn't made for girls, but what was there was very blue and had trucks all over it. If I had brought a girl outside in something like that, she'd have been misgendered. We ended up with something like three yellow outfits in newborn size but nothing for a baby older than that except maybe some white undershirts. Bug came out at 9 pounds 5 ounces so those fit for about a week. Even toys were difficult to find, though less so. The sorts of things you clip to babies' strollers so they have something to look at on walks tend to be highly gendered, as do stuffed animals and play blankets, but we managed to find enough in primary colors at least. His blankets were mostly white, which meant a lot of laundry. With my second born, Giggles (feel free to fawn over his picture above), I did hit the jackpot with some rare finds in sunshine and frog clothes for a little while although that window closed quickly as well. As anyone who's ever had difficulty seeing their baby's gender or kept it a surprise can probably testify, shopping becomes an insanely frustrating venture. Gift-giving well-wishers and relatives even expressed their frustration, one exasperated (but very loved) relative accused us of keeping it a secret on purpose!

Now imagine shopping for an adult whose gender you don't know. It's not nearly that difficult, is it? Say you know their age and general interests as you would with a baby (a few hours and drooling, respectively). They're thirty, majoring in English, and like the arts. How about tickets to the Shakespeare festival? Ta-da! Gender neutral and not even remotely confusing. (My birthday is September 2nd). This random, non-specific person (wink) has now been bombarded with gender expectations for a full three decades and yet it's perfectly easy to buy this person a t-shirt without knowing their gender, or walk into their living space without readily determining their gender. A baby may only be a few minutes old but once they're dressed, their gender is beamed into your face. Every last one of their toys, clothing items, blankets, and sometimes even dishes will broadcast their gender to you. Even the tender respite of primary colored infant squishy blocks quickly dissolves into royal blue aisles of space weapons and army tanks and dayglo pink and glitter filled aisles of plastic babies and dress up kits.

The vast majority of gender role indoctrination occurs in the first few years of life and then we hit puberty and are forced to spend the rest of our lives either trying to break out of these molds or chipping away at ourselves until we fit them. Yes, even naturally girly girls and naturally macho men regularly contend with the confines of their gender roles. Women commonly struggle with expectations related to their appearances, men with socially mandated stoicism. It has taken decades, but feminism has gained ground in the mainstream and it no longer seems out of place for women to work and watch football or for men to cook dinner and buy throw pillows. Gender lines have become more dotted than solid, at least for adults, while for children it doesn't seem to have changed at all. It's just as militarized as ever.

I tried to give Bug a gender neutral sort of upbringing, even if I was maybe too attached to society to go as far as Storm's family. I informed everyone that would buy clothes and toys for him that at the very least, such things should be absent sports references. I felt his interests shouldn't be foisted on him based on his genitalia and I was attempting to avoid the whole boys = football stars girls = princesses sort of dichotomy in his childhood, but exasperated gift-giving relatives and well-wishers did eventually beg me to give them hours of their lives back following long frustrating shopping trips looking for the one jumper that featured a puppy. I have to admit, I was a little bit done with it myself. Now that he's bigger, it's easier to find shirts with guitars and skulls on them (f-yeah) so at least there's that, but the damage is done. He often talks about wanting "cool" things and not "girly" things. My son gets a lot of gentle lectures but I can't erase everyone else.

So what will happen to Storm? Well, I don't know but I can speculate if anyone else can. I think that given the unschooling, we can probably forget all about worrying about school bullying. The parents already seem to be accustomed to protecting their older children from society's gender bullies. By the time Storm hits puberty, hir gender will be evident and the options will slowly fade from pink vs. blue to gender neutral options like basketball or robots and it will no longer matter so I think we can forget about that too. In the meantime, I think storm, like hir brothers, will probably present as female, whether ze is biologically female or not. The vast majority of messages about how to look good and have fun getting dressed up are about dresses and makeup and tiaras. Storm will probably want to look "pretty" because there just aren't any descriptive words for boys' looks that we don't reserve for their Sunday outfits. I think Storm's childhood interests, on the other hand, will probably tend toward the masculine whether ze is biologically male or not. Boys' toys are simply more active. They're more about building and creating and fighting and saving the world. Girls toys are passive and tend to be more about, well, looking pretty or placing plastic people into little beds. Storm won't have any reason to believe that ze looks stupid in princess dresses or should refrain from chasing hir brothers with a plastic sword. Ze won't have any reason to think ze will lose that battle or should wait at the highest point in the playground to be rescued by hir brothers. I was always April the reporter and perpetual damsel in distress when I'd play ninja turtles with my brothers and his friends. April didn't even get any weapons. April was boring. But April was the only girl in the show. Storm won't even know whether ze is "supposed" to be April or Donatello. Storm will jump in the fight or pretend to be a reporter based not on hir genitalia, but on hir interests. Storm is free.

What's Worse Than Seeing a Little Girl Dressed Like This?

2011-04-21T05:51:00.004-04:00

Telling her that she looks like a whore.

Teaching her that dressing that way is an invitation for grown men to invade her body.

Insisting that she would not wear these things if she had "self-esteem," that perpetually elusive quality which is supposed to elevate rare women above all other women, magically make them feel like they are hot in clothes that cover them neck to ankle, and finally make them worthy of respect.

Teaching her that there are moral and immoral ways to dress - that there is clothing her friends may be wearing that she cannot because it is sinful.

Devaluing her and her body because she wears this.

Imagining that you know something about her or her parents because she is wearing it.

Predicting future eating disorders, underachieving, unwanted pregnancies, and rapes based on her outfit.

Reducing whichever older person she is imitating by wearing these outfits (Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, whoever) to her sex appeal and then shaming her for it.

Giving her the impression that her body is not her own because she has a social responsibility to project an image of chastity and youth or else she is disgusting and offensive.

Teaching her that no matter how smart, fun, or interesting she is, the only thing anyone will care about is what she's wearing.

I'm in Chicago!!!!

2011-04-09T01:56:00.003-04:00

In the last year or so my life has sort of become... tumultuous. Because I'm currently obligated not to discuss most of what's been going on, I haven't talked about it. I don't want to talk around it either, but let's just say the stress got me to a point where I've had a lot of difficulty with basic life functions.

Everything will be okay. I have the most supportive family and friends in the whole world and I couldn't have been luckier in, if nothing else, love. Every kind of love. However, I found myself in dire need of something, anything, that might take some of the edge off. Fortunately, I expressed this desire before our financial problems cropped up, so I'm in Chicago! On January's money!

Brother is a WIZARD (complete with robe, hat) at finding good hotel deals and so he got me into a posh 4-star joint with doormen who hail cabs for you. It's very weird. I'm spending the days with someone very dear to me whom I previously only knew online. We've been to the art institute and the museum of science and industry and tomorrow it's buildings and who knows what else!

The art has been absolutely amazing. My legs are sore from all the walking. Everything's beautiful. I want to live here. Also you'd be surprised how hard it is to find the Willis Tower unless somebody tells you where to look. Biggest thing in the city. Who knew?

At nights, I'm alone in the hotel. I'm clearing my head and the physical stress symptoms I've been having have been clearing as well. Better than Xanax.

Don't Get Your Daughter This Breastfeeding Doll

2011-03-31T02:28:00.002-04:00

Another news outlet is manufacturing outrage again. Ho hum. This time it's ABC and it's over this "new" breastfeeding doll which I think is actually an old breastfeeding doll. I remember it being advertised a while ago. I don't know, maybe it's new to the United States. Anyway, ABC has this to say about it:

Critics say the doll is over-sexualizing young girls or forcing girls to grow up too quickly. The company and those in support of the doll say it's teaching young girls about a natural part of motherhood.

I agree with everyone. Breastfeeding is absolutely a natural part of motherhood. Also: this doll sexualizes young girls and makes them grow up too fast. Just not any more or less than any other doll does. You see, boys get a boyhood and girls get training for womanhood. Boys get helicopter toys and Star Wars Lego sets and skateboards and video games and trucks and girls might get that stuff but they'll definitely get dolls! Girls get miniature versions of household appliances and babies! Girls get to play chores. Woo. Fun. Hey I know when I need to blow off a little steam, I get out the vacuum cleaner or start washing dishes am I right? Holla! Who's with me? Girls?....... girls?

Seriously, though, tending babies and being happy housewives are adult stay-at-home mom roles for which things like dolls and Rose Petal Cottage don't-even-get-me-started crap are used as training. When we buy our girls cutesy little things like this and doll them up all the time for pictures and train them that their roles are to look pretty, make houses pretty, and bottle feed or nurse babies, then we're denying them a childhood. These things unduly romanticize domesticity and such things have been shown to contribute to unhealthy mindsets that cause young women to desire pregnancy and marriage before they're ready. We're training them to be members of a servant class and define themselves as complements to men.

That being said, I know everyone is going to jump all over the comments to tell me that their boys play with dolls too and this is teaching them what it will be like when their sibling comes along and girls are just trying to imitate their same-sex role models. It's true that pre-lingual small children can be taught to some extent what a baby is like with dolls before the birth of a sibling. In which case, I would say a breastfeeding doll is by far superior to a bottle-fed doll. Your child will learn how that all works and won't think you're weird because of it. The doll, if seen frequently out in public, will serve to help normalize breastfeeding. If your boys play with dolls too and you're truly doing an egalitarian sort of gender coercion free upbringing for your children, then cheers, man. Props to you. I don't believe you, but okay. And if your defense is that your daughters are just imitating their same-sex role models by tending house and caring for babies while your sons are imitating their same-sex role models by playing cowboys and indians and running around the house in capes saving the day and hahahahahahaha see what I did there? Their father doesn't do that.

So yes, dolls are causing girls to grow up too fast. This sort of indoctrination in our childhood is the stuff that leads to adulthoods full of angst where we sit around the house and sacrifice our lives to our significant others and children OR we go to work and feel guilty because we're not giving our lives to our children at home OR we go to work and don't have children and everyone thinks they can tell us that we're obviously behaving like children and we're missing out. Don't buy dolls. But if you must buy a doll, go ahead and get the breastfeeding doll. At least you'll be teaching your daughter something about infant nutrition.

I Don't Have Time For This...

2011-03-26T17:41:00.004-04:00

I have other things to do tonight besides go into depth over some idiot psychologists' pseudoscientific "experiment" in which they determined that breastfeeding women are perceived as less competent. I have had these plans for tonight for a long time now. So, I'll make this quick and if it's not clear enough just let me know I have to dig deeper and I will do that for you. Just not now because I can't find my black and white striped cardigan.

Basically, some psychologists played an answering machine message of some guy cancelling a dinner date with a woman.

"Some heard a neutral conclusion, while others heard a reference to breastfeeding ('I figured you would want to go home and breastfeed the baby'), motherhood ('I figured you would want to go home and give the baby a bath'), or sexuality ('I figured you would want to go home and change into your strapless bra')."

In any scientific experiment, you have to control for as many variables as you can possibly think of. Of course this is real life and not a perfectly controlled scientific universe but you can do your best. I didn't have to spend much time thinking about this article before I saw one big giant glaring variable they failed to control for:

Imagination!!!!

I suppose they thought they were real clever putting "breastfeed the baby" up next to "bathe the baby" so that they could see if it was about motherhood, but, um, no. When a person discusses "bathing a baby" they could be referring to a child up to 2 or 3 years old. You could have your career established and be coming home after work and bathing your baby in your free time. You guys could be enjoying each other's company and reading The Hungry Hungry Caterpillar or whatever it is you and your toddler get up to. This guy is cancelling his dinner date because he has a problem with kids or he's an ass. That's all you can infer from that.

When somebody cancels a dinner date saying "I figured you'd want to go home and breastfeed the baby" what do you think? Given that, in the United States, the vast majority of women cease their breastfeeding relationships before the baby reaches six months of age, and given that breastfed babies generally speaking need attention morning noon and night and given that this guy is rejecting her for a dinner date based on breastfeeding, what else do you think of? Perhaps that this woman is attempting to build up her dating repertoire while she has a baby under six months old at home? While she probably has absolutely no time for it? That she must be reminded that there's a child that probably needs feeding? Of course people are going to assume she's incompetent whether she deserves it or not. However, it probably has very little to do with the babe on her boob.

So I think if they really want to see whether people see breastfeeding women as incompetent, they need to use THEIR imaginations and come up with a much better way to do this. I have ideas. Maybe have a bunch of people get told they're doing job interviews and when the woman mentions she has kids, ask her what sort of formula she uses. If she says "oh I breastfed" or lists a formula brand, then measure their responses. Or anything else. Any number of things. But don't insult my intelligence.

And don't even get me started on "Oh I thought you wanted to change into your strapless bra." I have plans this month.

You Know What? I Don't Think I Like GOProud

2011-03-13T06:04:00.002-04:00

look at their fucking logo. There's one big guy in the middle and like on the left there's a dude couple and on the right there's a couple of lesbians with a dude chaperoning them or something. Like what are you there for? Making sure the chicks don't get too uppity? Fuck you dude icon. Oh also they're like a safe zone for internalized homophobia.

Yes I'm drunk.

Did You Flash Your Tits on Mardi Gras???

2011-03-08T22:08:00.004-05:00

Did you go out?

Did you let those ripe, succulent chest melons fly?

Did you release them from their oppressive holsters and let the air fondle them?
And how about the crowd? Did they like it?

Did you get a necklace?

Happy International Women's Day, Dear Intentional AND Accidental Moms!

2011-03-08T00:20:00.003-05:00

I hate pay walls. You know what I mean. You hear about a really great article and you get all excited and click the link thinking "oh yeah this is going to be way informative!" (if you get off on this stuff the way I do) and then you're there and there's a little summary and a "click here to purchase this article." Fuck those things. I came across one recently blocking me from what I'm sure is a great article except that I refuse to pay for it so I'll never know entitled Social Control of Mothers by Lisa Wade. The summary reads:

Drinking during pregnancy is not a good predictor of fetal alcohol disorders. Yet, public health campaigns urge women to stay alcohol-free before, during, and after pregnancy, and burden mothers with the responsibility of delivering a healthy child.

Looks great, right? And I agree with it. And I want to know more. And I hate putting my credit card information in websites.

So instead, I'm going to write my own significantly less educated, significantly less well-informed deconstruction of the way society controls mothers. I started taking some notes and I have some bad news for you moms out there: The world is not good to you (hah like you hadn't noticed). There's a lot to say. Like a lot. So we'll just call this the first in a series of I don't know how many and I'll be taking notes from your feedback along the way. Let's see how this grows.

Topic the first: Accidental versus Intentional mothers and parental classism.

Very few of us non-Duggars are pleased by a surprise pregnancy. Pregnancies in the best of circumstances are expensive, risky, and fraught with anxieties. In the worst of circumstances, any number of other terrible, terrible things could be at work. In the last few decades, as fertility becomes more controllable and alternatives to stay at home mothering become more attainable, society's scrutiny of parenting has become more intense. Freud began the investigation into just how much a parent, specifically a mother, has to do with her child's adulthood. His conclusion: mothers all suck and children are all screwed. Since then, it's gotten better and worse for all of us. While there's no doubt that educating mothers and potential mothers helps to steer them in the direction of better outcomes, there's a fine line between necessary information and unnecessary and hurtful judgment. One of the ways that is obvious is in the shaming of accidental parents.

Shaming pregnant women is nothing new. Time was, if you saw a woman who was obviously pregnant and she didn't have a wedding ring on, then she was obviously a slut who couldn't keep her legs closed until marriage. She was ruined. She would never recover from such a thing. God help her if her baby was mixed race. Before Roe v. Wade, her options were few and even now they're not great. However, with the introduction of widespread sociological and medical studies about pregnancy and childrearing, our ability to shame pregnant women has grown exponentially.

We know now that if a woman isn't expecting to get pregnant then she's more likely to be drinking or smoking or *gasp* doing drugs at the onset. We know that the less a woman wanted a kid, the less happy she is to see it. We know that younger mothers and unmarried mothers, more likely mothers by accident, are more financially unstable and that children from poorer homes are less likely to succeed. Some portions of society absolutely love to complain if a mother needs government assistance and if you've been paying attention this last week, you know that there are a lot of men who really, really hate to "pay" for babies. Even if you're in a stable happy relationship, having an unplanned pregnancy may mean that it came along at a time when your bills weren't paid off, when you weren't emotionally ready, or right at a time when your career was just taking off. You probably forgot your birth control (or your morning after pill) and therefore you're probably scatterbrained. You might even have diseases now. You're less ready and therefore as the perception goes, less fit. Suddenly, having an unplanned pregnancy doesn't only mean that you're a slut; it's tantamount to child abuse.

And there's another side to this: the people who plan children. The more planned, the better. Adoption is highly regulated now and that's a good thing, however it may also have warped our perception of adoptive home environments. We've been taught to believe that anyone who doesn't have children of their own and really really wants some is a sweet, loving couple in their thirties with a brand new SUV and a home in the suburbs. The longer they've been wanting kids, the better we assume they are. They picnic together and visit a house of worship weekly. One is a professor, the other a kindergarten teacher (gender that in your head, I won't do it for you). Holidays are bright and sparkling, full of presents and food and stress-free. The children are perpetually loved. The kids will never be yelled at or beaten or want for a high priced tutor and piano teacher. They're not normal families who want to expand, they're superhuman and they would love those kids way more than some idiot slut who forgot her pill, right?

On the one end of the spectrum, we have the absolute evil of all mothers, identifiable by youth, singlehood, and good old fashioned racism. We assume that none of these people would have planned a child and if they did, they shouldn't have. On the other end, we have have the saints, the ones who struggled for years: white upper middle class adoptive parents with special needs and probably multiracial children and/or disaster orphans. The more they need you and the crappier their birth parents were, the more altruistic the adoptive parents are! In the middle is everyone else. Toward the lower end we have unmarried women in their early twenties just starting professional careers but not quite making big bucks yet. On the upper end we have financially stable thirty-somethings who need fertility treatment. Even if you're at the top, your ranking can lower if you have too many children or not enough (increasing the likelihood that you had accidental kids or that you secretly don't like them).

Of course these perceptions, while sometimes realistic, mostly exist in fiction. Adoptive parents can be normal just like the rest of us. They can live in apartments, lose their jobs, drive used cars and scream at each other when the Thanksgiving turkey burns. If they're heterosexual and nobody has been permanently sterilized, they can get pregnant by accident later on, and wish they hadn't. They can even be worse. They can beat and neglect and sexually abuse their kids. Accidental welfare moms, too, can defy expectations. They can sit with their kids every night for hours reading and doing homework with them. They can feed their kids nothing but veggies and lean meats and they can go on to write a series of novels that makes them hundreds of millions of dollars. When we think about it, we know this, but for most people it's just easier to assume. Parents of perceived intentional children would have to go a long way to prove they weren't worthy of their children and parents of perceived accidental children exactly the opposite.

Where do these messages come from? Everywhere. Television, movies, parenting magazines, campaign ads, pro-life political messages, pro-choice political messages, everywhere. And the sentiment is clear: if you did not plan your baby, then you might as well have taken it from somebody more deserving.

So how do we know you stole your baby from somebody who would have done a much better job? Here's a checklist:

Were you between the ages of 25 (a couple years post-grad/had time to pay off student loans) and 35 (instance of downs increases) when they were born?
Are you in the middle income range?
Are your children well-behaved in restaurants?
Are you married?
Is the father certain of his paternity?
Are the kids geniuses? Alternatively: are they under the care of expensive tutors?
Are you modestly dressed?
Did you abstain from alcohol and candy bars while pregnant?
Do you have a fulfilling career?
Are your kids white?
Do you have more than one child and less than four?

If you answered yes to most of these questions, you probably deserve your kids. You've probably been really good with birth control and/or got an abortion in secret when you weren't. You'll get congratulations and support and everyone in your family and community will help you and be happy for you. If you answered no a lot, please deliver your children to the nearest adoption agency.

These perceptions, apart from being needlessly hurtful to women with sometimes uncontrollable uteruses, simply make no sense. You know those parents who tried for years to adopt children? What if they'd gotten pregnant by surprise a month before their wedding? Would they be any less worthy? What if Bristol Palin had been infertile and happened not to get pregnant until she'd been married a while? Would her teenage indiscretions matter as much? Almost anyone can have children. They're not a finite resource. Upper middle class homes, however, are. If we relegate the right to rejoice in children to them, what's left for the rest of us?

Dear Sweet Men Who are Shackled to Cheating Whores and Their Bastard Spawn

2011-03-01T20:05:00.005-05:00

I'm not a misandrist! How could you possibly think that of little old me? I certainly don't hate men. In fact, I've got one in the kitchen cooking dinner right now who is legally obligated to give me all of his money so I can sit around my house writing blog posts ever since I squeezed two little golden geese through my filthy snatch. Both are of the male variety. Hehe. They sort of look like my husband.

So I just want to clear up a few misconceptions from the comments here and in the reddit thread which linked here:

1. I never said that men ought not be able to get paternity tests. "Any time a man feels his paternity is in question, he can order a test."

2. I never said that men should be forced to raise children of questionable parentage. "I don't mean to say that men should be obligated to raise other men's children unknowingly."

Guess what? There's nothing my pretty little head can do to get in the way of that for you anyway. It's your legal right! So don't worry, you big sexy hunks. You're covered! In fact I want to help you. Now for those of you concerned about girlfriends and one night stands, it turns out it's already on the books in Kansas that if the father and mother are not married, a paternity test must prove that he is the father before he can be listed on the birth certificate. Therefore, I'm really only addressing the married men who, presumably, live with their duplicitous jail warden succubi.

You see, there are ways you, too can be sneaky. You can order these paternity tests at home. They're cheek swabs. Therefore, the next time that fire-breathing bitch wakes you up in the middle of the night and makes you change a diaper even though you obviously have to work in the morning to earn money for her to waste while she does nothing all day, you can swab your baby's cheek and be done with it! Ta-da! Results in the mail (use your office address!). The dual benefit of this tactic is that not only do you get to avoid those awkward conversations where you timidly try to ask your wife if maybe her tennis instructor has been hip-deep in her, but you get to know whether that screaming little poop-generator is your very own darling little snowflake or some other asshole's useless crotch-dropping.

Well what about the poor, cuckolded nice guys out there that loved and trusted these heinous bitches with all the blue-eyed adoration they could muster? I know you are having a hard time thinking of a single other way this problem could be solved without, rightfully of course, sitting all those cheating skanks under hot lights. I don't blame you. You've been working that big superior male brain really hard at your job all day. Well, don't worry! I've been on the couch watching Oprah and buying things for my boyfriends off Home Shopping Network with my husband's American Express, so I've got plenty of brain power to spare, inferior as it may be.

Assuming you can't work up the nerve to talk to her about it during or after the pregnancy or sneak around behind her back and do the test, then instead of having big daddy Kansas state do the dirty work for you at 3.3 million dollars a year, maybe man up and admit that you liked being there. You wanted that wife. You loved her even though there was a faint possibility that she slept around. You admired her devotion to you and you liked the way she rubbed your head when you were stressed out. You enjoyed the patter of those little feet around the house and the way they looked into your eyes the first time they called you "Daddy." When you built a model spacecraft with them or sat down at their little tea parties with their stuffed animals, you had a good time. When you went to barbecues and had beers with the other dads and bragged about your kid's spelling test, you enjoyed yourself. When you carried them, both of you crying, to the emergency room because they fell out of the tree after you told them for the thousandth time not to climb it, you felt like you might die. When they turned out to be okay, you felt like a superhero. So you are their dad. You are. Just as any adoptive father is his children's father and any adoptive mother is her children's mother. Your child never owed it to you to have a genetic code that proved your virility and his or her lack of said genes does not disprove it. And that means that the laws that sometimes obligate you to pay child support and entitle you to visitation were written for you, not at you. Those laws mean you can keep your kids.

Or if that's too much for you, maybe lobby to adjust family law so that non-paternity is grounds to deny child support in every case except adoption or some other kind of formal contract. Believe me, I understand that it's much easier to invade privacy and create a government record of everyone's parentage and so on. Also this way you can put all those bitches in the stocks. But you might want to consider for a moment that this wilting flower's hysterical feminist ideals might not only be more respectful to us, but to your privacy and rights as well.

Why the Kansas Paternity Test Bill Stings

2011-02-28T02:53:00.002-05:00

I haven't felt right about the Kansas paternity testing bill since I first read about it, but it's taken me some time to articulate exactly why this is. In case you haven't heard about it, this bill would mandate a paternity test for every newborn in the state. In this way, every man could be certain of his paternity before his name was written on a birth certificate. Legal action could be taken against parents who refused to comply. At first glance, it's tricky to argue against it. Certainly men have a right to know that a child is biologically theirs. Women who haven't cheated have nothing to worry about. Women who have cheated, become pregnant, and are lying to their significant others are certainly guilty of, at a minimum, a good degree of cruelty. For men who may find themselves in this position, saying "well you should just trust her" seems insufficient. Yet something about this bill rubbed me the wrong way from the very start. There just seemed to be something very sinister and unfair at the core of it.

I don't mean to say that men should be obligated to raise other men's children unknowingly. I doubt anyone would argue that in the case of a man who barely knows the woman who is bearing a child she claims is his, or a man who highly suspects his significant other of bearing somebody else's child, particularly in cases of child support conflicts, a paternity test should be off the table as an option. Fortunately, it isn't. Any time a man feels his paternity is in question, he can order a paternity test. In the afore-mentioned situations, lawyers typically advise men to get these tests and women are obligated to comply. This has already been taken care of. What this bill purports to do is save men from having to spend their lives and money supporting children who are not theirs. There are already things in place to help men avoid that. Therefore, what this bill actually does is help men who have a slight suspicion of their significant other's fidelity to avoid awkward conversations. It presupposes that the problem of female infidelity is so pervasive and so harmful that it is worthy of government intervention. Now men who are suspicious but too cowardly to ask can rest easy because their peace of mind has now been deemed important enough to be a government prerogative. Kansas will now police women's sex-lives, having created a legally endorsed method of checking her loyalty and tattling to her man.

Institutionalized protection of the "support" that men offer to the women and children in their lives fosters the incorrect and offensive cultural paranoia that women in all cases are using their childbearing abilities to hold men hostage and financially drain them. It diminishes the physical, financial and emotional sacrifices women make for their children to a sweet little confidence scheme. This attitude reduces society's expectations of men to nothing more than financial providers and canonizes those who fulfill it. It disacknowledges women's abilities to provide equally or even predominantly for their families.

State Rep Melody McCray-Miller (D-Wichita) claims not to know how much this will cost, so I did some math for her. Google tells me that you can get a super cheap paternity test with a cheek swab on your baby for $80 or less! Blood tests for official use usually cost more but let's assume the state can get a good discount. In 2008, which was a slow year for births in Kansas, 114 babies were born per day. Rep McCray-Miller insists this would not be added to the hospital bill, which means the government would pay for it which means even on the absolute cheapest year with the absolute cheapest paternity tests and assuming implementation costs nothing, Kansas will spend $3.3 million dollars per year on this. I suppose Kansas legislators can't think of a single other problem that could be solved with $3.3 million that is more important than a few men who might be unknowingly raising children that aren't theirs but I can. Oh, sure, I could go for the easy ones like clothing and feeding the poor or subsidizing health care for the uninsured or creating jobs, but I can see that Kansas is very interested in gender wars.

How about rape prevention screening? What they could do is they could have school counselors screen all teenage boys for their potential to rape women. Those who seem to have entitled fucking women-hating attitudes could be forced to undergo intensive deprogramming and in extreme cases, chemical castration. This would be more beneficial to society than the paternity screening bill as it would work to prevent actual crimes that harm people in more places than their wallets. Sure there will occasionally be false positives but paternity tests aren't 100% correct either, are they? Sure in theory they are, but with 114 being done per day, some samples are bound to get mislabeled or contaminated. Hey, calm down, men! If you're not a rapist, you have nothing to worry about!

What Do You Do When Your Boy Wants a Barbie? Get Famous!

2011-02-24T23:13:00.005-05:00

I don't often like to admit I made a mistake. The problem is, I have this compulsion where if I do make a mistake and then I learn about it later, I absolutely must make sure everyone knows that I have learned and I know the real right answer now. In this way, I always get to be right. It's irritating, I know. Thanks for putting up with me.

So, here's my mistake: I never should have written the post about my gender conforming kids in response to the posts about the gender nonconforming kids. When I read about the mom whose boy wore the Daphne costume and the other mom whose boy wore nail polish and Dr. Phil being an asshole, I felt compelled to weigh in. I thought it was probably kind of a different sort of thing for these parents to be talking about and I saw a weird thing or two in the blogs that I had to address. I found it awkward that they kept insisting that this phase was transient and didn't mean anything. I was a little taken a back by their avid interest in their sons' sexual orientations and their fixations on how all the other moms and kids were "dealing with it." What was with that? So I felt it couldn't hurt to offer my perspective on the matter. I wrote about how gender performance, while a good predictor of sexual orientation, isn't 100% reliable and I wrote about how it's silly to try to brush it off as no big deal. Frankly, it reeks of protesting too much. What I know now is that I had no idea of the scope and scale of this my-son-acts-girly blogging phenomenon and just how truly offensive it is. I'm embarrassed to have taken any part in it.

As it turns out, there are a lot of blogs like this. Like, a lot. That in itself isn't surprising. What did surprise me is just how much they all had in common. (I'm not going to include nerdyapplebottom with the son who dressed like Daphne here because her blog appears to have other content and is predominantly unrelated to her son's gender performance.) Here's a sampling:

Accepting Dad Son who acts feminine, now 12 but started blogging 5 years ago when he was 7. He is apparently a member of several support groups for parents of gender nonconforming children and has written a book about it.
Labels Are For Jars Son who acts feminine, current age not easy to find but on the about page, she says he's 5. Avid defender of gay rights.
Sarah Hoffman on parenting a boy who is different Son who acts feminine, is apparently older than 6 and has grown out of it.
BoyGir: A mother's journey Son who acts feminine, age 7. He has come out to his mother as gay and genderqueer because apparently he has a deep understanding of these concepts.
Raising My Rainbow Son who acts feminine, age 4. This blog is picked up by Queerty and she's done some interviews.

They write fake sounding stories about abnormally chatty moms with negative opinions "on the playground" and some give their sons eyerollingly ridiculous labels like "pink boys." These things are everywhere. I don't want to pull an "I could go on all day" but I really could. Just go on any of those blogs and start clicking on the links in their sidebars. You can see for yourself. They all have 2 things in common: they're all about boys who act feminine, and the boys are all prepubescent and in some cases barely emerging from toddlerhood. Nobody's concerned with girls who like boy things even though some of them could be gay, too (gasp) and anyone with a copy of What To Expect the Toddler Years ought to know better than to start a career writing about gender nonconformity in a child who is too young even to have any real solid idea of how to be gender conforming.

Girls aren't an issue because girls acting like boys are considered to be expanding their horizons and even promoting themselves. Femininity in women isn't assumed to be innate, but learned behavior (see: charm schools, every womens' magazine ever). Therefore, masculinity in women is not assumed to be innate but as contrived as femininity and possibly semi-rebellious behavior that will probably get her far in life if cripple her chances of getting a husband. Boys acting like girls, however, are immediately assumed to be acting on innate feminine impulses that are probably connected to them wanting to date other boys. Mens' genders are real, womens' genders are faked. This is a ridiculous double standard which I have neither the knowledge nor the time to explore at great length, but the application of this double standard by the parents onto these boys and the unfortunate readers of these blogs serves to demonstrate a very poor stereotype-based understanding of homosexuality. The color pink is not inherently feminine. Nor are dolls, kitchens, or even makeup. Nowhere along the evolutionary timeline did any of these things establish themselves in the female members of the human race. Society has coded them feminine for purposes of separating men and women and, let's be honest, enabling oppression and dominance. Just as your four year old boy has no idea that the garbage man is coded lower class (unless you've told him) and may sometimes enjoy pretending to be the garbage man, your four year old probably has very little idea that pink things are coded off-limits to him. Maybe one day he'll learn that and then he'll come to understand why his mother or father is spending so much time in PFLAG meetings. My son is going through a phase where he talks back. This may last well into his 30s. I'm not looking up law schools because this would be ridiculous for the same reason that writing these blogs is ridiculous. Similarly, as I've mentioned before, my sons are gender conforming but that doesn't mean I'm planning mother-daughter-in-law outings or saving my wedding dress in case one of their fiancées wants it. While there's nothing more wrong with assuming your child is gay than assuming your child is straight, the problem with this is that they're assuming anything at all. There's no need to assume anything about a child's sexual orientation and if anything there's a need not to obsess over it. Planning this far into a child's future simply does not make sense.

However, these parents insist they're not planning this far into their boys' futures. They insist and insist and insist on it. Oh, the insisting. They go on about how they know this is not a guarantee of a gay son. They have links all over the sidebar about GLBT causes and titles like "Raising My Rainbow" but don't you dare forget, they know that this probably doesn't necessarily mean they're gay except in BoyGir's case, where it necessarily definitely means he's gay and genderqueer. They insist they do not care about whether their sons are gay or transgender. There are really only two conclusions I can think to draw here. Either these parents are struggling with their homophobia and overcompensating for their negative feelings toward their own sons in the same way you might buy an extra special gift for the in-law you hate to prove you don't hate them, or they just really love the attention, Münchhausen's style.

Whatever the motivation, the result is a massive network of disingenuous parents who simultaneously flaunt and pretend they don't notice their sons' differences where they can all congratulate each other on being accepting of their gay sons, assure us it's not even an issue, and cross their fingers for book deals and spots on Good Morning America. They have turned their child's assumed sexual orientations into spectacles, sideshows from which they can collect attention for their trendiness and enlightenment in the face of overblown or imagined resistance.

Whatever are they to do if their sons grow out of it and/or they're straight and cisgendered? Certainly some of these kids will get past puberty and have to come out as straight to their parents. It will be hysterical and I wish I could be there but certainly it's no more harmful to have to come out straight than to come out gay, so that's not really a tragedy. If, however, the sons don't grow out of it and/or it was a predictor of some sort, and they hit age 15 and want to start dating boys or go on hormone replacement therapy and the questions get harder and have a lot less to do with princess costumes, then it will cease to be cute. I assume this is why there aren't a lot of these about kids over the age of 13. The public doesn't want to read books about that. Controversy is only fun in small, non-threatening, glittery doses. We don't want to get too real here, after all.

My Leg Forest Is Beautiful

2011-02-17T21:54:00.007-05:00

I stopped shaving my legs in September. At first, I was just annoyed with the repetitiveness of it. Shave legs. Wait three days, or three weeks, shave legs again. Keep shaving legs every week for entire post-pubescent life. Think of all the other things I already have to do to maintain myself: shower, eat, sleep. All nuisances. Who needs one more?

So I got lazy, and I stopped. I just didn't care for a while, and every time I would look at my legs I would think "oh well, nobody is going to see them" and put it off for a while longer. Then, if you'll recall, I came upon the idea of dyeing the hair blue. I discarded it, of course, once I realized that this might actually end up being hazardous to a very large area of my skin, but it made me change my tone a bit. I started looking at my legs and seeing not a roadblock to style, but a potential instrument of it. I decided that I was no longer refusing to shave out of laziness but with a purpose. There's no reason to hate this stuff or to apologize for it. What did it ever do? Why is it so offensive, anyway? Didn't you know it could be turned BLUE? I mean not mine but, well, you know. So I kept it. It grew longer than an inch. When I took off my pants and a breeze went by, I could FEEL it in my LEG HAIRS. It was amazing! I thought: this is why evolution kept this stuff, you know? I had a million little feelers on my legs, sensing all the disturbances in the force. It was awesome and it made me laugh. A lot.

It was about then that They came out of the woodwork. Oh, you know They. Everyone knows They. They are the acquaintances and friends and family members who have opinions about all the things you do. They are the source of the endless streams of microaggressions that keep you in your place. They curl their lips and raise eyebrows and say things like "well as long as you wear pants, it's okay" as though it weren't if I didn't and "how has that affected your sex life" as though it were any of their business and "you're acting like a turbo-lesbian" as though that were even an insult.

Recently, I happened to mention this to some of the women in my breastfeeding group and two other women friends outside of my breastfeeding group. I told them how They had reacted to my recent refusal to trim my leg lawn. The women, whom I adore, responded by telling me that they didn't shave their legs sometimes for weeks or months either and they didn't get any crap from They. They told me that they were simply lazy and wore pants during the winter anyway and that their husbands didn't seem to notice usually and in any case the next time a skirt occasion should arise, they'd shave. This made me think. Why have I been getting crap for this? Surely there have been other times in my life when I've gone months without shaving and didn't get what for. I can think of a few.

Then I realized: I had stopped apologizing for it. When I crossed my legs and my pants lifted and my long luxurious leg hairs showed, I didn't rush to cover it, pink in the cheeks, and make excuses for it. When people asked, I would smile wide and give them a line about oppressive patriarchal beauty standards and imposing expectations of perpetual prepubescence in women. Oh yeah I've got an arsenal of dialectic for this. I had the audacity to embrace my body's natural state and reject any and all messages that it was unacceptable without alteration. When They would say "but it's hygiene, you're not going to stop brushing your teeth or hair are you?" I would respond with "why isn't it bad hygiene when men don't shave their legs?" Imagine. Women's leg hair is the same as tooth plaque, oil, dirt, or dead flakes of skin. Men's leg hair is a-okay. I reject that. I refuse to think that something that's acceptable on a man's body is unacceptable on mine simply because I have a vagina. And They are uncomfortable.

The leg hair stays, and I am not done with They.

My Sons Are Gender Conformists

2011-02-05T19:07:00.005-05:00

And this doesn't mean they're straight. Or even cisgendered.

They like to play with toy cars and action figures but definitely not baking sets and dolls. They like things that are blue or green but definitely not pink. The eldest tries to sneak violent video games when I'm not looking. The youngest thinks everything from shoes to green beans can be guns if he points them at people and shouts 'PEW PEW PEW.' They were Batman and Darth Vader for Halloween. They shout and wrestle and pretend to be soldiers. They're as masculine as they come. They might be gay.

Mom bloggers everywhere lately want to talk about how their boys are gender nonconforming. One got national attention when her son dressed as Daphne for Halloween, another discussed her son's nail polish phase. Both claim their sons' dalliances into the world of transvestism are probably merely phases that don't mean anything at this age and even if it did, they're not going to freak out because they're totally okay with it if their sons are gay. My sons do not wear nail polish or dress like girls for Halloween. This, too, might be a phase and it, too, definitely doesn't mean anything at this age. If and when this masculine phase comes to an end and they decide to start wearing body glitter and cute skirts, I'm okay with that, too! And not just because it would probably be a phase, not just because it probably wouldn't mean anything, and definitely not because I think that would be super freakin' cool, but because even if it DID mean they were gay or transgender, those are not bad things to be.

For every boy out there who wore his mom's lipstick for a while then grew up and got a 3.5 GPA in business school, a hot wife, and 2.5 children, there's a boy who was naturally inclined to more gender conforming pursuits, like, say, football, and took to it like a fish to water. Those boys sometimes grow up pulling girls' pigtails and wrestling and crashing their bikes into trees. They never even so much as look at a pink toy or a Twilight novel. Then suddenly they hit puberty and one day they go to football practice and notice that the inconvenient boners they've been untucking their shirts to hide have had absolutely nothing to do with the cheerleaders. That could be my boys! Or not.

Should they turn out to be gay, my sons will receive the same wrap-it-the-eff-up sex talks as they would if they were straight. Should they turn out to be transgender, I'll pick up their estrogen and testosterone blockers from the drug store while I'm there to get their acne treatment. And what if they get bullied? Should that risk compel me, as Dr. Phil recommended to a mother whose son crossdresses and plays with girls toys, to encourage them gently toward more gender-conforming activities for their own good? Hell no. If my sons get teased, then it will be my problem and the school's problem and the bullies' problem and their parents' problem but it will not be my sons' problem to solve - at least not by changing his beautiful unique self to meet the standards of those who care about and respect him the least.

I will change the world before I will change my sons. I will go further than not to freak out about whatever phase they go through because-it-is-probably-just-a-phase. I will encourage any and all phase they go through (exceptions: drugs, alcohol, not doing their damned homework). Relegating my stores of encouragement only to socially acceptable interests stifles their individual self-expression, fosters self-loathing, and delays self-actualization. If I spoil my sons in any way, it will be in teaching them that they are not only encouraged but entitled to express themselves, however normal or abnormal that may be. Though "normal" seems to come naturally to my children, I don't automatically expect them to have it easier, though they probably will, and I don't necessarily expect that they've crossed some finish line and they're officially Joneses now. My children are their own works in progress as much as they are mine.

Oh, there was this one thing.

This picture could one day up on Born Gay, Born This Way OR I could end up showing it to his giggling cisgendered girlfriend while he looks on, whimpering. True story.

A Quick Note On Why I Vaccinate

2011-02-03T05:38:00.003-05:00

I get asked this question a lot and it came up in my breastfeeding group again today so I'm just going to take a minute and give you all the bullet points here.

My husband travels internationally. He goes to international airports and breathes international air in international planes and then brings home international germs.
Even if he didn't, for all I know, the baby reaching out of the cart at the grocery store and touching my kid has an uncle who has a coworker who has a girlfriend who does.
The studies linking vaccines to autism have been shown over and over to be fraudulent. I personally find the new hypothesis linking the autism spike primarily to a change in diagnostic criteria and secondarily to pitocin to make the most sense, but we'll see how it holds up to rigor.
I am a big fan of herd immunity. There are some people who really really can't get vaccines because they're allergic to all kinds of stuff or have had bad reactions or other conditions. These same people are often very limited in which medications they can take if and when they do get the diseases everyone else should have been vaccinated against.
I harbor no illusions of my ability to control the germs my children are exposed to. I touch produce and boxes and doors in public places. My children touch public playground equipment. I do not carry a bottle of hand sanitizer in my purse (it's ineffective against C. Diff anyway). I do not intend to stop touching things and people or to sanitize everything my children and I touch.
I favor the varicella vaccine over pox parties because while chickenpox is fairly harmless to children, it can cause pneumonia, osteomyelitis, shingles, sterilization, and death in adults. I wouldn't want to have to go around for two weeks not touching anything to make sure I didn't transmit chickenpox germs to some adult who has never had it and I wouldn't want to put anyone at risk either. Somebody in the group brought up personal responsibility. Given that chickenpox, like any other virus, has an incubation period during which no symptoms show but communicability is high, these things are impossible to control for.

I also sometimes get asked whether I believe in the delayed schedule. Yes, I do. I think that children do sometimes get unexplained reactions to vaccinations and that an older more developed immune system is better able to cope with this. The United States does tend to vaccinate babies earlier than other countries. This is because our maternity leave - usually 12 weeks - is anomalously short, not because the drug companies are out to get you. If you are sending your kid to daycare (full of kids with uncles who have coworkers with girlfriends - you get the idea) then it might be a good idea to skip the delayed schedule. Otherwise, I'm all for it.

I hear a lot of moms tell me that they would never forgive themselves if they took their kid to get a vaccination and the next day, their baby just wasn't the same. Believe me, I understand. You don't want to think you caused something terrible to happen to your child. It's absolutely nerve-wracking to be in charge of this beautiful little person who means the world to you and know that you could do something to harm him or her. This sort of risk-aversion is completely understandable but I believe the cost-benefit ratio works in favor of vaccinating.

So, that's where I stand on it and if you're in my group or you're a mom I know from somewhere else and you still don't want to vaccinate? That's fine by me. I'm not in the business of judging moms. And, I'd love to hear your opinions too, so have at me.

Breastfeeding: A Feminist Perspective

2010-11-14T05:40:00.003-05:00

So, I hear there's a bit of a debate about whether breastfeeding is harmful or helpful to the feminist cause. I got this little gem in my inbox from my Friends of Midwives mailing list today and it brought to my attention a perspective on breastfeeding I hadn't quite considered before: breastfeeding as an instrument of oppression. How did I never think of this? What an idea. The article is a response to a decidedly breastfeeding unfriendly article in Atlantic Monthly written over a year ago by journalist Hanna Rosin, entitled "The Case Against Breastfeeding." The Miami Herald's Casey Woods makes the argument that breastfeeding isn't actually the oppressor but the oppressed.

Despite campaigning on ``family values,'' our lawmakers have time and again refused to mandate paid maternity leave, making this the only industrialized country without it. Most working women are obliged by financial necessity to be back on the job just weeks after their babies are born. The return to work is one of the most common reasons that mothers stop breast feeding

.
This is the line I usually follow. Readers who attend my weekly breastfeeding lectures (I sound so important when I phrase it this way) know that I draw from my experience living in Norway to answer questions of societal breastfeeding opposition. Living there, I learned that women were able to take ample time from their jobs with a completely manageable cut in pay (there were a couple of options about time off and pay cut) to stay home and take care of their children for the first critical months of their development - and by first critical months I don't mean the first month or two that we get here; I mean the first nine to twelve months. There, I met very breastfeeding-friendly medical professionals for the most part, a lot of women with successful breastfeeding relationships, and overall a society with a very healthy and encouraging attitude toward breastfeeding and motherhood. It was a new mother's utopia. So, when I look at the problems we confront as mothers in the United States, my default assumption is that things would be better if we had a setup more like Norway.

When I read the quotes from Rosin's article offered by Woods comparing breastfeeding to oppressive housekeeping requirements of old, my first inclination was to agree with Woods simply on the grounds that this comparison is totally absurd. Breastfeeding is just something we do because our bodies can do it and it's good for ourselves and our babies. Men don't do it because they lack the appropriate hormones to render their underdeveloped mammary glands functional. This isn't any more a sign of societal inequality than the fact that only women have periods and get pregnant. These are biological inequalities for which there is absolutely nobody with whom to file a complaint. However, I do just love to challenge my own assumptions. What if I have been wrong or maybe have had an incomplete picture of things? What if breastfeeding is, after all, another in the long line of things that are keeping us down? So, in the interest of intellectual curiosity and objectivity, I read Ms. Rosin's article.

Well, it's interesting. The woman did her research. Sort of. First, I'll tell you what I learned and breastfeeding moms whom I love: ohmygod please don't hate me for this. Hear me out. Remember all those studies we read in The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding and in about a million Dr. Sears articles and in about a million Parenting Magazine articles and so on and so forth about how breastfeeding makes your babies smarter and healthier and impervious to disease? Reports may have been exaggerated. Ohgod don't hate me please keep reading. Now, while I took most of what she said about specific studies pertaining to ear infections, leukemia, diabetes, and so on with a high degree of skepticism on account of her lack of citations, what she said about the studies as a whole was, unfortunately, true and made an awful lot of sense.

An ideal study would randomly divide a group of mothers, tell one half to breast-feed and the other not to, and then measure the outcomes. But researchers cannot ethically tell mothers what to feed their babies. Instead they have to settle for “observational” studies. These simply look for differences in two populations, one breast-fed and one not. The problem is, breast-fed infants are typically brought up in very different families from those raised on the bottle.

This is irrefutable. The studies they do on breastfed infants are not scientific and, if you know me, you know how offensive that is to me. When you do observational studies on something like successful breastfeeding, which is highly vulnerable to class, race, and educational disparities, you simply cannot trust the results. This doesn't mean that breastfeeding is not beneficial, but that we should probably throw out everything we thought we knew and start over.

However, there is good news: Rosin offers the results of one study, specifically about breastfeeding's influence on digestive health, that took this into account and solved it kind of creatively by simply offering extra support to a test group of women that was already breastfeeding and leaving the control, also already breastfeeding, alone. Basically, the findings were that breastfeeding reduced gastrointestinal problems by 40 percent. One down. I do not know whether anyone has adopted this method and done any further exploration of the benefits of breastfeeding or lack thereof, so I'll have to get back to you on that, but so far this is what I've got.

That was the end of her scientific argument that breastfeeding is nonessential. However, even if it turned out that formula feeding actually gave babies superpowers, that wouldn't really answer the question as to whether breastfeeding was oppressive to women. Rosin's argument on that one just gets ridiculous. I'd like to show you every single one of these idiot things in their entirety, but in the interest of brevity, I've (painfully) cut the quotes down and/or summarized them.

1. Breastfeeding ad campaigns with things like dandelions and scoops of ice cream with cherries on top as playful euphemisms for breasts are 'dripping with sexual innuendo.'

They're breasts. They're recalling images of breasts. One of the first things we have to do as breastfeeding mothers and activists is derail the assumption that our breasts are meant solely for the purposes of selling cars and titillating men. Breasts are for feeding babies. Those ads were talking about feeding babies. With breasts. There were no women in cold rooms (wink, nudge) wearing low-cut tight-fitting tops. There were scoops of ice cream. Nobody was aroused. That is not sexual innuendo.

2. Breastfeeding means a loss of 'modesty, independence, career, sanity'

Wow. Okay, first of all, fuck modesty. Nobody needs modesty. Modesty is an outdated concept tied to virgin worship and slut-shaming and the expectation of such is used as fuel for blaming rape victims and ohgod any number of other assaults to the feminist senses from male ownership of women's bodies to 'come on let's all wear burkas.' See also: breastfeeding at work is totally embarassing!

Your choices are (a) leave your story to go down to the dingy nurse’s office and relieve yourself; or (b) grow increasingly panicked and sweaty as your body continues on its merry, milk-factory way, even though the plant shouldn’t be operating today and the pump is about to explode. And then one day, the inevitable will happen. You will be talking to a male colleague and saying to yourself, “Don’t think of the baby. Please don’t think of the baby.” And then the pump will explode, and the stigmata will spread down your shirt as you rush into the ladies’ room.

Feminism 101. The problem here is not that her breasts leaked, which is not a shameful or amoral act, but the fact that she refers to it as stigmata and allows male coworkers to shame her. Rosin loses feminist points on that one. As for independence? Well, yeah, to an extent, breastfeeding can compromise your independence, but the difference in independence between a woman who breastfeeds and a woman who does not breastfeed but still takes care of her child is relatively minimal. If you have a baby, you don't have much. We're talking about a very minor difference here. Career? The baby did not take your career. If your career has been compromised it is because we live in a warped system that does not appreciate women or motherhood and does not allow adequate or paid maternity leave. End of story. Sanity? Show me a study where breastfeeding mothers are more likely to be Baker acted, and we'll talk. Otherwise, this is just insulting.

3. Breastfeeding mothers are 'miserable... stressed out... alienated by nursing'

Alienated? Really? But wait, Rosin! Didn't you JUST accuse the upper middle class moms in your group of responding to your threats to discontinue breastfeeding thusly:

The reaction was always the same: circles were redrawn such that I ended up in the class of mom who, in a pinch, might feed her baby mashed-up Chicken McNuggets.

It's okay. You forgot. It happens to the best of us.

4. Rah-rah Friedan!

In Betty Friedan’s day, feminists felt shackled to domesticity by the unreasonably high bar for housework, the endless dusting and shopping and pushing the Hoover around—a vacuum cleaner being the obligatory prop for the “happy housewife heroine,”... When I looked at the picture on the cover of Sears’s Breastfeeding Boo k—a lady lying down, gently smiling at her baby and still in her robe, although the sun is well up—the scales fell from my eyes: it was not the vacuum that was keeping me and my 21st-century sisters down, but another sucking sound.

That was cute. Nice try. I, too, have read Friedan. Allow me to share my favorite quote from the introduction by Anna Quindlen in my edition:

In hindsight, the shortcomings of the book become clear. Too much attention is paid to the role of institutions and publications in the reinforcement of female passivity, too little to the role of individual men who have enjoyed the services of a servant class and still resent its loss.

See what this means is that the vacuum cleaner, without which your carpet might be covered in grime and dust, and your baby, without whom you wouldn't need to be spending the money on formula, are not actually the instruments of oppression that we need to fight against. Actually it is men who intend to force you into the limited role of housekeeping and/or mothering and keep you out of a career. It really doesn't make any difference whether your baby and vacuum cleaner make the same noise. How silly. And cheers for them showing her in her robe when the sun is up, because that's exactly where a breastfeeding mother in a society with reasonable maternity leave would be. The problem is only that in the United States, that mother probably doesn't have a job to return to and whose fault is that? Not your kid's. Try again. It rhymes with Lorporate Cobbyists. Rosin might recognize these villains from this:

Even in the best of marriages, the domestic burden shifts, in incremental, mostly unacknowledged ways, onto the woman. Breast-feeding plays a central role in the shift. In my set, no husband tells his wife that it is her womanly duty to stay home and nurse the child. Instead, both parents together weigh the evidence and then make a rational, informed decision that she should do so.

Wait a minute! Why does she have to leave her career and stay home forever to nurse the child again? Oh... right.

5. Marriages suffer! Rosin asks, what about the woman whose 'marriage is under stress and breast-feeding is making things worse?'

So I'll just respond here the way I respond to my breastfeeding group. Why is the marriage suffering from breastfeeding? Because you can't go on dates? I went on dates from the second week of my second son's life. It's fairly easy to time about 2 hours of romantic date around nursing times. Of course this is temporary. By the time baby reaches about 6 months and can be supplemented with solids, it's easy enough to time a 5 hour date. By the time baby reaches a year, you can go out all day or night without any trouble at all. Because you can't have sex? Well, why the hell not? Put your baby wherever you would put a formula fed baby and have sex. Yeesh. Because the father wants to feel more involved? Offer him the responsibility of diaper changing and cuddlings and clothes changes and walks and baths. Ta-da. I once asked my dear husband if he ever felt jealous of me for being the only one who could breastfeed our sons. He responded with 'No. Do you feel jealous that I'm the one who's going to teach them to pee standing up?' Brownie points!

So, no, I do not feel that breastfeeding hurts feminism or oppresses women. I feel that needy husbands, predominantly male members of the ruling class of our American Corporatocracy, and women who insist upon judging other women are hurting feminism and oppressing women. Breastfeeding didn't kill your career, the lack of maternity leave killed your career. Breastfeeding didn't harm your marriage, the lack of patience and cooperation on your husband's part harmed your marriage. Breastfeeding never alienated anyone, cliquey attitudes alienated people (and will continue to do so, for every reason ever). Perspective, Rosin. Perspective.

你好启兰

2010-11-11T00:24:00.003-05:00

Have you heard of this ADORABLE little new show, Ni Hao Kai-Lan? It's like Dora the Explorer except Chinese and it's the bane of my existence. What happens is: little Kai-Lan goes around having magical adventures or something while I'm making dinner (getting into pointless arguments online), doing laundry (getting into even more pointless arguments online), or accomplishing various other feats of domestic achievement (*wink*). Then, later, when I turn off the TV like a good mom or something and actually attempt to interact with my children, my house turns into a pirated Jackie Chan movie without working subtitles.

Me: Hey sweetie! You want some juice?

Giggles: 玩球

Me: ... what, sweetie?

Giggles: 冰淇淋

Me: are you serious what the hell is this

Giggles: 比萨

Me: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD SPEAK ENGLISH

Giggles: 有趣的妈妈在大声呼喊

This show must be stopped.

In Which Heather Explains Her Latest Idiot Stunt

2010-11-08T21:41:00.004-05:00

In accordance with item number 7 of Trolga's unofficial dare, this is to notify the cherished loyal readers of this (woefully neglected) blog that Heather has dyed her hair blue for a Very Good Reason.

Prostate cancer kills. Did you know that in America in 2010, 217,730 new cases of prostate cancer will be diagnosed and 32,050 men will die of it (source: www.cancer.org)? Prostate cancer is a very serious disease. This is why, in honor of No Shave November, I've decided to show my support for all of the men out there whose lives are at the mercy of the ticking time bomb in their genitals by continuing not to shave my legs for the entire month! Don't ever say I didn't do anything for men.

Additionally, because I love men so much, I got the idea to dye the hair on my legs blue. After all, it's hardly a public show of support if everyone isn't looking, right? Right. However, before I could embark on such a task, I had to consult my Responsible Friend heretofore known as Trolga because she's German and because she straight up trolled me. Apparently, I interrupted her wine and Ayurvedic (what?) bath or something, and her reply was a little.. cranky:

My response? Oh, it is ON. Fuck yeah I'm doing this. Yes, I'm this gullible.

I went straight to the Sally's and bought two tubs of hair bleach and some blue dye, went home, and started to mix it up when the phone rang. It was my mom. 'Talk later, mom, I'm bleaching then dyeing the vast majority of the hair on my body at the moment.'

'Don't bleach your legs!' my mom pleaded 'it'll burn your damn skin off!'

'Can it do that?'

'Maybe. How's your health insurance?'

'...'

Damn.

So that was out the window. But did that have to mean I had to waste all the bleach? Hahahaha no. BLUE HAIR FUCK YEAH.

Before:

In process:

After one round of bleach:

After two rounds of bleach:

At this point, I sent a picture of my progress to Trolga and the conversation went something like this (disclaimer: this is not actually how the conversation went):

Trolga: LOOOOOOOOOOL LOL LOL IT'S ORANGE!!! LOL

Me: I'd noticed...

Trolga: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA YOU FAIL SO HARD AT ZIS. I SOUGHT YOU VERE GOING TO LOOK LIKE A SMURF BUT NOW I JUST SINK YOU'RE GOING TO LOOK LIKE ZE JOLLY GREEN GIANT HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Me: why would you laugh at me like this? I thought we were friends!

Trolga: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA JOLLY GREEN GIANT!!! LOOOOOL

Me: *sniff*

Pride wounded, hair fried and orange, I returned, somberly, to the task at hand. I'd been mixing and brushing and showering and mixing and probably toasting my lungs and singeing all the hair in my nose with the fumes for what seemed like forever at that point, but I am NOT A QUITTER and I was going to see this through to the end! For prostate cancer!

So you wanna know the best part about having blue hair??? All the crazy chartreuse stuff in the cutesy-hair-things section of the store suddenly WORKS. Yeah, baby!

No. No, sorry. I can't. Christ, I look like an anime character or something. Jeez. No. How embarassing.

The glasses stay.

And don't worry, men! I didn't forget you! I couldn't dye my leg hair blue but I painted my toenails because I love you SO MUCH. Prostate cancer.

Game, set, match, Trolga.

Why I Hate My Humanities Class: An Angry List

2010-10-05T11:42:00.003-04:00

1. It's just a history class except with less of a focus on politics and more of a focus on art or something.

2. It's not quite an art history class because I'm not learning anything substantial about the art.

3. The book just has samples of random famous quotes - the authors of which I'm meant to memorize - and random paintings/poems/operas that I'm meant to memorize without knowing anything about them other than that they were famous.

4. This feels like a class in name-dropping.

5. Is this a class in name-dropping?

6. Holy shit, I think it is. It is a class in name-dropping.

7. I AM PAYING THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS FOR A NAME DROPPING CLASS!

8. WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?

9. And it's REQUIRED of all motherfucking things! I couldn't even get out of this nonsense!

10. Screw this class.

Parenting Lesson

2010-09-08T14:35:00.002-04:00

Listen up! Everybody listen up!

I can't actually believe it but I've had to say this same damned thing THREE TIMES today. Obviously there's a problem here. Either the entire world has some problem with reading my mind (UNlikely) or YOU are not paying attention!

Now the first time I said this today it was in a nice calm, instructional, inspiring sort of way to my breastfeeding group this morning. The second time I said it, it was sort of an off-the-cuff remark, and the THIRD time I said it I had to YELL it because DAMMIT it needed to be HEARD. So this is the LAST time I'm going to say it today. Pay attention!

YOUR CHILDREN HAVE MINDS OF THEIR OWN!!!

Shocking! I know! "But Heather," you're thinking, "what are the implications of this?" Well, let me tell you. First there is the obvious one: when your child does something marvelous, it's probably not because you're the best parent in the whole wide world. You can ignore that one, though. You're tired and broke from buying him/her all kinds of crap and you stay up all night with the little sucker; you deserve a medal, so take what you can get. The second implication, however, I cannot stress enough. Are you listening?

WHEN YOUR CHILD DOES SOMETHING WRONG, IT'S PROBABLY NOT YOUR FAULT!!!

Sometimes, a world leader comes from the same family as a sociopath and more often than not it's not because one was adored and the other hated. Sometimes high school dropouts come from the same families as Harvard scholars. These things happen. Your children make their OWN choices. Sometimes you can school them as gently and encouragingly as possible and they still aren't academic types. Believe it or not, there are children whose schooling you can neglect entirely and they'll grow up to be voracious learners. Isn't there something your parents encouraged and it just never inspired an interest? Conversely, isn't there something they outright forbade and it still lights a fire in your heart? Isn't there something your parents taught you over and over and you still can't do right? Something they didn't even know and you mastered? Allow me to blow your mind: YOUR KIDS ARE THIS WAY TOO!

Amazing!

So stop blaming yourself if your child is throwing hissy fits over something stupid and you can't get him to knock it off no matter how loving or disciplinary you've been or how closely you've been following that book. Stop allowing yourself to be overcome with anxiety when your child is behind his class on something and his teacher is glaring at you like it's your fault. It's not. Probably. In fact, whenever your self esteem is low because of something your child is struggling with, well, his self esteem is probably even lower. Tell him he's great. Then let it go.

Oh and for that matter, stop getting on other moms' cases when their kids are acting like brats. They can't help it either. Probably.

Happy Birthday, Keanu Reeves!!!

2010-09-03T23:35:00.007-04:00

3rd September 2010 23:35

One glass of wine

When I was 12 years old I found out that Keanu Reeves had the same birthday as I do. I think he was a hunk back then. A quick IMDB search shows he had just done Bill & Ted and Dracula. LOL while I'm writing the rest of this I'm going to let my internal monologue talk with fangs hanging out. HAhahahaha. No wait. Ah ah ahhhh. Anyway nobody cared cause he's Keanu Reeves but then somebody got a picture of him eating a sandwich and looking all sad and posted it all over the internet and then some people saw some more stuff about how like... modest and philanthropic he is and now the whole world has a serious Keanu Reeves bromance thing going on cause he's so awesome so now I'm happy that I have his birthday. Also my son.

Yesterday was actually my birthday but I'm getting drunk today cause I spent all yesterday in class. I had a 1:45 break between classes and wanted to go to dinner with my friend because he is fun and was the only one geographically close enough to have dinner with and then not be late to my next class but he's totally being an asshole and not answering his phone. Calculating revenge.

3rd September 2010 23:57

1.5 glasses of wine, one brownie I really shouldn't have had

I was thinking cause I've got this like internet friend who does all these videos about atheism and some other stuff and I'm like his #1 fangirl that it would be super SUPER fun to do some internet videos about like feminism but I don't think anyone would watch because I'm not as pretty as he is. Stupid shallow-assed patriarchal fmgnnnfrfmgn...

4th September 2010 00:14

2 glasses of wine

I want a cigarette but I'm wearing a translucent white tank top and no bra and I don't want to wear a bra and there are like 2 cops who live in my apartment complex that could totally arrest me for indecent exposure. Wish I had one of those little vapor things.

4th September 2010 00:41

2 glasses of wine, some delicious green olives

I've been reading The Handmaid's Tale because I have to for lit class but if somebody had told me about this shit before I'd totally be reading it anyway. This is a GOOD BOOK. I'm only halfway through but I GET it. I was told it was a feminist novel and it kind of is. It's like this: women are in charge, but they hate each other, right? And they keep each other down. And that's sort of the way things are right now. Women hate each other. That's the problem. Whenever a guy acts all sexist and cites an example, a bunch of other women will be all like "well she's just a bitch!" when they really SHOULD be saying "False Attribution Error" which is a term I learned yesterday from a Harry Potter Fanfic written by a logician no kidding. I LOVE YOU, ALL WOMEN. By DEFAULT. Except Sarah Palin. Fuck you, Sarah Palin.

4th September 2010 01:35

Wine: I accddntally the whole bottle. OMG I want some tuna helper but I don't know if I should try to cook...

HOW aaaaaaaare you? I'm still reading my book and listening to some Massive Attack cause they have this song called Angel which is just a great soundtrack for suicide or something. I'm trying to talk myself out of eating more food but my judgment is impaired so I'm relying on my complete inability to get up and walk in a straight line to the kitchen and then cook something. Also I've been reading some funny webcomics and some blogs and stuff including this neato feminsm entry by Autostraddle about whether feminism and lesbianism should be tied together. I ahven't decded how I feel about this yet. Research required. I'm sorta passin out...

THINK UNSEXY THOUGHTS

2010-09-01T08:19:00.002-04:00

So, I've been trying to get some damned reading done. I've been over my syllabi for this semester and it looks like I'm going to have about 400-500 pages of required reading every week. I also have about 4 pages of writing assignments due every week. I know I signed up for this. It's a hazard of any English major and I was fully prepared to accept it, but this will be the first time I've been confronted with it. Every semester before this has consisted mainly of required courses like math and science where I just had to sort of stay awake for class and maybe take a concept down here or there. I have a natural facility for math and science; the effort is in staying awake all the way through class. I do very well for myself in English classes, too, but there are no shortcuts in those. It doesn't matter that I can write a beautiful paper if I don't write it.

So I've been trying to get some damned reading done. The kids interrupt me, of course, and the husband interrupts me, of course, and of course I procrastinate. The usual time vampires are in place. However, I noticed that I also spend an awful lot of time indulging the baser of my invasive mental distractions - like a lot of time. What the hell is wrong with me? I'm like a dude or something. I probably spend hours every day staring into space thinking about *ahem* things that get me absolutely nowhere. I have a limited amount of time on this planet! I have this really good, brilliant brain that could be put to such great use and it's spending most of its time on baser animal fantasies. WHAT IF IT ATROPHIES?! What if I live to be 100 having accomplished almost nothing and all that's left in there is PORN?!

So, I've been TRYING to get some GOD DAMNED READING done. I had an idea. What if I just push all the sexy thoughts out of my head until the end of the semester? What if I resolve to put 100% of my mind to work on productive or at least NEW thoughts and create new pathways in my mind? What kind of person will I be by Christmas? Will I be more productive? Will I have more opinions (haha watch out for this one) or maybe come upon some great revelation? Will I RULE THE WORLD?

The first few hours were the hardest. I was definitely not expecting them to be that difficult. Brother warned me, too. He said every time he attempts to disregard women, something gorgeous comes out of the woodwork and WANTS him. I said I felt pretty safe on account of I'm, like, married. I had my first day of my 20th century humanities class yesterday and I was pretty sure I'd be fine. NOPE. My God, it's like that class was hand-picked from the pages of SEX weekly. EVERYONE in there is a 10. What the HELL? I got through it but apparently when I'm making a solid effort not to leer at good looking people, I have a much harder time controlling my feminist rage. I blew up like 3 times. That will serve those fuckers right for saying women can't handle finances as well. Fuck those guys. I hope the teacher doesn't hate me too much yet.

I'll keep you guys updated on how this goes. 24 hours down... like 100 and something days to go.. fuck.

Until tomorrow. I need to get some damned. reading. done.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

2010-08-31T08:09:00.003-04:00

Well, I'm glad THIS shit is over.

Officially, I've been on break for three weeks. I go back to class today. Unofficially, I've been on break for months and months. I only took one class over the summer session and it just wasn't enough. I never had to study or stay up reading or working on anything unless I had a partner project and my partner fell asleep instead of getting online the night we were supposed to work on it. I won't name names.

One way or the other, I've been completely understimulated for months and it has not been good for me. Somehow I got it into my mind that I needed to figure myself out. I don't really want to go into details and trust me, you don't want to know anyway, but there was some clutter in my mind I felt I needed to sort through.

The unexamined life is not worth living; however, I became a slave to it. I woke up in the mornings and fed my kids and got them dressed and paid the bills and all of that nonsense, but the entire time I was just thinking of me and my problems. I guess at first it seemed necessary but there is a point where it crosses the line into vanity and then there's another point where it becomes petty, self-indulgent, and redundant. There I am.

Time to examine other things! I am but an insignificant, temporary installment in a wider, greater universe filled with things much more interesting than the gray matter between my ears. I've walked every hall in my brain's museum and it has grown boring and requires new material. Hooray for the four classes I have to take! Perhaps I'll be so busy with art history (yay!) and literature (double yay!) and mopping the floor with my creative writing class (INFINITE YAY) that I won't even have time for brooding.

I'm taking a sabbatical from myself. So long, ME, see you at Christmas!

If You're Reading This, I'm Not Talking About You

2010-08-22T21:11:00.004-04:00

I only really get hits from my facebook link and I don't have any facebook friends that annoy me with this child-free nonsense, so it's not YOU I mean, even if you're child-free.

I just had to rant. Now you know what you're in for.

First of all, I just want to say that I have absolutely no problem with it if you don't want to have children. If you want to go the rest of your life taking vacations and staying up all night on Friday and sleeping all the way through Saturday, then good. If you come home after work and don't want to do anything more complicated than microwaving your Lean Cuisine and operating your remote; fantastic! In fact, I wish I'd spent more time doing that before I had my first son. It was fun. Ahhh, those were the days. Having said that, however, there's nothing more annoying to me than listening to child-free types congratulate themselves and each other on the distinctive accomplishment of Not Getting (Anyone) Pregnant.

I hear an awful lot about why this is such a wonderful choice. The world is overpopulated. Children are annoying and expensive. Children bother them in restaurants and on airplanes. Parents don't have time for anyone or anything but their children. Parents are annoying because they talk about their children. Even cockroaches can have babies. Whatever. The more extreme stuff I hear is about how parents are just awful, awful people who screw everyone and everything up by thinking their kids are great or not letting them play in traffic. Parents are either overmanaging or undermanaging their kids these days. They either need to be spending five hours every day reading Tolstoy with them or need to be letting them play barefoot in the mud for hours until they come back in dirty and bleeding or both. People who are proud of not having kids have all sorts of opinions about how children should be raised. It sounds VERY mommy-issue.

Well, guess what, child-free champions who are not reading this blog: NOT having children? even more of a non-accomplishment than having them. Congrats on taking your birth control pill every day or wearing a condom every time you have sex. Good job. I won't sit here and tout the wonders of being a parent because I know it annoys you, but I actually don't hate being a parent as much as you would. We disagree. I know; impossible, right? Surely the world revolves around you. Just please return the favor and shut the fuck up about the wonders of having pets instead. I don't sit around and bitch about how expensive kennel costs are and how annoying it is when people walk by the door in the middle of the night and make the dogs bark. I don't ask you when you're going to have kids or why you don't want to have a little genetic half-duplicate of yourself. I don't tell you that you're training your dogs wrong and that you're the scourge of the earth. I don't tell you that dogs and cats are overproducing and that puppy's mother should have been spayed. That would be rude. Learn some fucking manners.

Thoughts On Plastic Surgery

2010-08-10T05:39:00.006-04:00

It's like 5:30 in the morning so I'm not sure how much coherence I'm currently capable of, but I'll do my best.

Lately, I've been doing a lot of thinking about feminist issues. Actually, I shouldn't say "lately" because it's nothing new, really. I'm sure "misogyny" was one of my first words after "mama" and "Looney Tunes." Lately, however, I've been doing some extra thinking. Perhaps this has something to do with the chauvinist-packed sociology class I just took (it's okay, they had a really good sense of humor about it when I called them out) or maybe it has something to do with my brain fidgeting and squirreling around inside my skull, all understimulated and unhappy about the three weeks I have to kill before classes start again. Whatever the cause, I got to thinking about plastic surgery.

As I mentioned before, I've been a feminist my entire life and I, too, went through a phase where I absolutely hated the whole beauty industry and reserved some particularly strong loathing for cosmetic surgery. Ask anyone who knew me as a teenager and while I went through some phases of wearing cute skirts and so on, my preferred attire usually included t-shirts that were several sizes too large and jeans which were also too large and way past their expiration dates. My oft unshaven knees were almost always visible through large holes that came into being either in the wash or following minor skateboarding/rollerblading accidents. I wore hand-me-down sample sizes of makeup only when my mother made me and my hair was usually just brushed in the morning but sometimes in a ponytail to keep it out of my face (and no, I did NOT care about "bumps"). It was usually dyed orange or purple. I wasn't entirely exempt from spurts of vanity. This taste in "fashion" if it can even really be called that endured up until last year or so when I decided to buy a bunch of black clothes, dye my hair black, and try to revive goth or something. Between you and me, I don't really know what I'm doing. Black is slimming, though, and this is working for me.

I want to make one thing very clear: I have never had trouble getting dates. In the last 13 years I have been without a boyfriend for maybe a cumulative total of six months. The men did not care. Granted, most of that time they were teenage boys, and yes I do have some rockin' tits, but believe me: they still don't care. They kind of act like they care when they're looking at pictures of anonymous women and slapping each other on the back. I've personally seen them do it as I sometimes blend in with groups of guys and make them forget I have a vagina. An avid interest in science-y stuff and a hobby or two like skateboarding and action films will do that on occasion. However, both genders really are guilty of objectifying the opposite sex. I had a really good laugh when I saw New Moon and the girls all went into screaming, weeping fits when Taylor Lautner took his shirt off. Poor boy. Don't even get me started on male leads in romantic movies all having to be independently wealthy. Men as well as women usually only do this when the sex object in question is somebody they don't really know. Every woman out there has flaws her boyfriend or crush object doesn't notice or care about and vice versa. The guy that still cares about a woman's cellulite after the first date is not likely to get a second date. But I'm getting off track.

We were talking about plastic surgery, right? Okay, so I got to thinking about where it all comes from. The popular line is that it's womens' magazines and the fashion industry which is of course dominated by women and gay men but still misogynistic because it focuses on creating sex appeal for men. Well, that's wrong. Some lovely ladies at Jezebel said it better than I can but the gyst is that models appeal more to women than they do to men. Well, either that or straight men all started liking flat-chested androgynous women with scary makeup, and a quick flip through any copy of Maxim or Playboy will tell you that's not the case. No, the vast majority of people reading the magazines with the unrealistically skinny, over-botoxed, coked-up little darlings in couture are women. Men are not masturbating to Vogue. Usually.

In the 28 years I've spent being downright offensive to fashion sensibilities, I catch the most slack from women. I think most women can say the same. Men don't usually care if you wear Uggs or spats or whatever as their eyes usually don't get that far south. Women do. Men don't care if your clothing is label or knock-off as long as they get to take it off and they don't care if you have perfect Cs or low-hanging Bs or pendulous Es if you'll let them touch. That's not to say they don't have preferences; of course they do! But the dating pool is massive. If one guy doesn't like your Bs, screw him. You didn't like his potbelly anyway. You may have been willing to forgive it because his American Express has a ridiculously high limit, which is hot, but let's get real: that man had little to do with your self image and you really don't have to go far to find somebody who would walk over broken glass to touch your funbags.

I don't hate the women who don't like the stuff I wear, they're just doing what they do. Women in general care how stuff looks. We care how our houses look and we decorate them. We care how our kids look and we dress them nice. There are definite exceptions, myself included, but women as a gender have declared ourselves the keepers of aesthetics. Maybe there's nothing wrong with that. Maybe it's just getting a lot of slack because it's a feminine thing. A lot of stuff does. Male-dominated professions are more respected and better paid than female-dominated professions. A female doctor is breaking through gender roles and climbing to the top. A male nurse is... why? He could do so much better, right? Masculine hobbies and pastimes are taken more seriously than feminine hobbies and pastimes. A woman who builds model trains must be some kind of genius; a man who cross-stitches is liable to encounter some serious homophobic bullshit.

Of course, it's probably not in our chromosomes to be keepers of aesthetics. We're socialized this way. We grow up wanting to be around other women and collect female role models so we do what they're doing. This is a natural consequence of being a gregarious species. However, it's only fair to ask why we think it's a bad thing at all. Imagine for a minute that the ONLY answer to that is that beauty is feminine. Absorb that. It's wrong to care about beauty because caring about beauty is feminine. Now reject it. Care about beauty if you want. Reclaim the right to be as concerned as you damned well please about your lipstick and the cut of your skirt. These concerns are NOT inferior to traditionally masculine pursuits. You caring about having a slim waist is NOT less valid than a man wanting to be ripped. You watching Project Runway is NOT sillier than him watching football. Go beyond that and reject the ridiculous notion that you've elevated yourself if you can name all the quarterbacks in the NFL or beat your husband at poker or whoop some guy's ass in WOW. Masculine pursuits were never superior. Don't let them have that.

So, plastic surgery. I'm getting there. I'm going to disregard the porn industry for a minute and I won't even talk about the film industry. Cosmetic surgeons would all go broke if Angelina Jolie and Jenna Jameson were the only people who ever got operations and clinics everywhere are booming, so let's talk about the little people who keep the industry alive. Well, here's something interesting I found! Married women are getting procedures done more than unmarried women. It's not single women out to catch a man that are getting the most procedures. It's married women. It's also usually upper class white women in the demographic with a relatively low divorce rate and in any case really nice alimony when it does happen. I think it would be tough to make the argument that they're doing it to attract men or keep their husbands from straying, especially since the divorce and adultery rates haven't exactly decreased with the significant increase in plastic surgeries, but it gets a pretty bad rap anyway.

I think part of the reason it catches so much heat is that it exists to make women look better and we assume that means they're doing it for men. Also it hurts. Oh. My. God. Women are hurting themselves for men! Misogyny!

Well, we already dealt with the aesthetics argument; let's go to the next thing. Are YOU afraid of the pain of plastic surgery? Cause I'm not. I want breast reduction someday cause I'd like to be able to wear a blouse thankyouverymuch and about the furthest concern from my mind is the pain. I wear heels when I go out on girls' nights and men are NOT allowed and getting laid is not going to happen. Heels hurt - especially because I'm usually squeezing my size 11.5 skis into some size 10s, but I'm doing it because I want to look fierce. I won't look fierce, but I want to 'cause it's awesome. My feet are going to hurt like hell at the end of the night and am I afraid of that? No. I know women that get laser stuff done on their skin and collagen injections and botox and I know women who've had breast augmentation and the general consensus is "yeah it hurt but so what? I look great."

Aren't there also other things that are extra painful that women do that have nothing to do with our looks? Natural birth comes to mind, as does gymnastics, probably the most high injury sport out there. Good God, have you ever looked at a ballerina's feet? Ow. As leader of my breastfeeding group, I've met more than one woman who rejected pain killers after a cesarean section because they might interfere with breastfeeding. That sure wasn't for any man's sake but I'm fucking impressed.

Maybe we're not victimizing our poor wittle selves for men. Maybe women just aren't afraid of pain. Maybe we're totally happy to do something we think is awesome and then get right up and walk it the fuck off. Take that you pussy ass men.

Silent Films

2010-07-25T18:24:00.005-04:00

It's a good thing I have Brother because without him, I'd be boring all on my own. We like to watch documentaries and silent films and independent films and educational type stuff. Are you snoring yet?

Lately, we've been working through D.W. Griffiths and I say "working through" where you might expect "enjoying" or even just "watching" because it really is work. Sitting through three hours of jittery black-and-white film with only the occasional card to tell you what the hell is going on isn't exactly recreational, but we have to do it. Why? Because somebody told us the first film, The Birth of a Nation, is basically the source of racism in America and then we read somewhere that the second film, Intolerance, bombed completely and the guy who played Jesus got taken off the credits for screwing a 14 year old. It's like mandatory now.

I'm happy to do it, actually. I've learned a lot of interesting stuff and I wanted to share.

1. The Birth of a Nation is not racist, it's misanthropic. I don't know, maybe I'm subconsciously a racist and entirely unaware of it and that's why I think that, but there were loads of examples of white people being ridiculous and maybe even more examples of black people being just as noble as could be. That's not to say that the movie hasn't been used for racist purposes and I'll get to that next, but I could not. stop. laughing. when a black man proposed to a white woman and she got so upset that she jumped off a cliff. Wow. Good going, dumbass. Other examples include: a couple of white kids cowering under a sheet because they see some happy playful black kids running around, two black house servants being the only ones to mourn the death of the white dumbass who killed her damned self, and those same two black servants being the only ones to rescue an old white guy who got caught with his son's KKK sheets.

2. The Birth of a Nation made damned fools out of the KKK and they don't even know it. I won't bore you with links but a little googling will show that the original KKK burned Scottish crosses which are shaped like Xs (like the ones you see on the Confederate flag). This was meant to reinforce the idea that they were ghosts of Confederate soldiers. Apparently this was a special effects disaster when they tried to make The Birth of a Nation because when you have people riding around on horses with mini burning Scottish crosses, they're liable to burn their hands clean off, so they used a Christian cross. When the KKK chopped the movie to pieces and used it as a recruiting tool, the new KKK started burning Christian crosses which has been confusing the rest of us for ages. Hahahahahaha. Hah. Idiots.

3. There are BOOBS in these movies. Real, honest to God BOOBS. They were made in 1915 and 1916 and there are nipples everywhere. As it turns out, before the red scare, Americans weren't so bent on being modest Christians but the Bolsjevik Revolution put a stop to that. Apparently, to prove we weren't communists, we had to get all religious-like and cover womens' naughty bits.

4. So far I've found one legitimate example of sexism but otherwise, D.W. Griffiths just. hates. everybody. It's pretty fantastic, actually. See Also: my favorite satirist Jonathan Swift.

So if you're boring like me and Brother, please go watch this stuff. The copyrights are loooong expired and you can download them everywhere without feeling guilty. We'll talk.

School Assignment

2010-07-13T12:07:00.002-04:00

I know it's just a school assignment and nobody, like, cares, but I just had so much fun writing it that I wanted to share. It's an article analysis. Here's the original. It's worth reading because it's just inherently ridiculous and therefore humorous. This is not my final draft of the analysis, so the writing isn't perfect and if you're wondering why I keep using buzzwords like "troubling conditions" and "claims making" and stuff, it's because it's a sociology course and we're required. Enjoy.

Analysis of “’Twilight Effect:’ Are Teens Biting One Another Because of On-Screen Vampires?”

This is an article which seeks to explain troubling conditions in high schools and otherwise among teens. The authors make the claim that the popularity of Twilight has inspired teenagers to harm each other and spread disease by mimicking the romanticized biting activities they see in the movies and read about. There is a short interview with a teen who claims to be participating in this behavior and various expert opinions.

Neglecting the fact that there is absolutely no instance of romantic biting present anywhere in any of the Twilight novels or films, the authors chose to open the headline with it. With over sixty million copies sold to a primarily teenaged demographic, it is unlikely there are many American households that do contain teenagers and do not contain Twilight novels. Furthermore, millions of parents are currently chauffeuring their teenagers to see the newest movie: Eclipse. The headline was meant to catch the attention and anxiety of a massive audience.

The grounds begin with cultural understandings and implications. It goes without saying that some teenagers do engage in risky behavior. They have adult-sized bodies and sometimes cars and responsibilities but only a naïve understanding of how such things ought to be cared for. Anxiety is a natural part of being a parent. The authors were depending on the power of this anxiety and escalated their claim to a terrifying level by asserting that the biting, which is just everywhere if 16 year old Michael Kaplor can be trusted as an expert, could have potentially fatal consequences. Kaplor has heard rumors that there are some teenagers who bite each other hard enough to draw blood and of course when there is blood, there are deadly diseases such as syphilis, hepatitis, and everyone’s favorite bogeyman, AIDS. Twilight is giving American teenagers AIDS.

Finally, the authors emphasize the vast extent of the problem, explaining that there are biting groups and videos just everywhere on Facebook and YouTube, the most popular modern hangouts for teenagers who live in homes or attend schools with computers. The seemingly innocent abstinence glorifying novels that parents once allowed and even encouraged their teenagers to read are the source of an impending widespread AIDS epidemic as they awaken dangerous lust and passion in unrealistically impressionable teenagers with no common sense or self-control.

The article is a thinly veiled attempt to catch some of the excess money bursting through the seams of the Twilight bank bag. By presenting plausible sounding rumors and exaggerated risks touted by attention-seeking experts, this article appealed directly to anxious, suspicious, and possibly Twilight-loathing parents to increase the sales of the newspaper. Reality is distorted to create the illusion of troubling conditions.

Let's Make a New Formula, Shall We?

2010-07-07T06:48:00.004-04:00

Don't get me wrong, newly pregnant mamas; I love you and I'm really really happy for you. I am! I've done the pregnancy thing and I know what it's like to get that plus or second line or "Pregnant" on your pregnancy test. You're euphoric. Your head is spinning and your blood doesn't seem to be in any of the right places and when it all overwhelms you and makes you nauseous you're even excited about being nauseous because you read that one article that time on that one website that said nausea means you're less likely to miscarry. I get it.

So you get on Facebook or Twitter or, if you're a luddite, you wait until you actually assemble your mom club in person (you weirdo) to make your announcement. Okay, that's where you start to bore me. It's not your fault, really. I mean, pregnancy announcements have been done, am I right? There are over four million babies born every year in the United States alone. That's a lot of competition. You can hardly be expected to go up against that many women in originality and coy hint-dropping. It's too much! So you all do basically the same thing with only marginal variation. It's like a mad libs!

"Hey everyone! My husband/boyfriend/fiance/lesbian partner armed with a turkey baster and I are proud/shocked/tickled pink! (blue?) to announce that we're expecting/baking/(insert some other gestation-related analogy here) a new little (insert your last name or some combination of last names) on (due date)!! Swim!/Grow! little nugget/bean/sprout/treasure/(insert some other metaphor for a fetus here). We can't wait to meet you!"

I did it too! I know I did. I bored MYSELF to sleep. Oh and you may delete one statement for each subsequent pregnancy. By the fifth baby, it may be reduced to "Pregnant" by the twelfth a simple "yeah" will do it.

So then your friends (often including me) will start to bore me. Choose one: "Congrats!" "OH MY GOD I'm SO JEALOUS!" "I can't wait to meet my little niece/grandson/godchild/playmate for MY little blessing!" or the standard message board "Happy and Healthy 9 months!" which frankly is just a little bit passive aggressive. Come on. My email inbox will be full of your friends' responses to delete because I usually want to know when people reply to my comments so I have it set up that way but I can't just not comment on your thing cause then I'm a bitch and also I really really do care about you and I really really do want you to feel cared for. So I delete the hundred canned responses and just wait for the bombardment to end. Somebody will ask you if you have names picked out. You'll reply that it's a SECRET. Somebody will ask if you want to know the sex. You'll reply that you and your significant other will know but to everyone else it will be a SECRET. All the girls will go nuts.

Why do we do this? Can't we switch it up a little? I mean just a little? Can't we have a little fun with it? I promise I'll still believe you totally love being a mom and love your baby and are absolutely over the moon about this if you announce it in this fashion:

"HOLY CRAP YOU GUYS MY PERIOD IS THREE MONTHS LATE. OHGOD I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHICH OF THE ORLANDO MAGIC IS THE FATHER!"

Or maybe...

"My husband is pissed and wants to file a class action lawsuit against Durex. I feel bad for them but I can't tell him I poked holes in the condom. I HAD to get pregnant! He was going to leave me! What do I do?"

And then maybe further along in the pregnancy when you're posting ultrasound pictures and using photoshop to blur out the genitals to keep it a mystery, maybe go a little further with it, huh? Add an extra limb or two! Maybe like a four-chambered stomach. Tell us you're naming it Voltron because it's dual-gendered and "Emily" just didn't fit anymore. Photoshop the birth pictures to look like that scene in Species 2 where the baby just bursts out of that sorostitute's stomach. That was bad-ass. Who WOULDN'T want that birth story? "30 seconds of labor, people." You'll be a legend.

You have your assignment. I'll be watching Facebook. Until then, I have about 50 canned responses in my email inbox to delete.

Snippets

2010-04-29T23:07:00.002-04:00

A day of conversations with my brother... Sigh...

Me: So, Brass Balls and I each got two As and one B- on the papers so the quiz average had to be the tie-breaker and I got a 96 and he got a 97, the bastard.

Brother: What does it matter? Even if he got a zero, you'd still have an A

Me: It matters! And we'll never know who got the better grade on the final, so...

Brother: OH YES YOU DO! Yes you do! You can check your grade and then if you both got A's then you know you're BOTH IDIOTS

Me: ooh, good price *grab 4-pack of tuna off grocery store shelf*

Brother: CAT food? You are aware we don't have a CAT, right?

Me: ...

Me: I'm not watching that video it's nine minutes long and I don't want to watch it.

Brother: It's FUNNY. Sit down.

Me: This is dumb

*Video plays, stupid jokes ensue. A zombie barfs everywhere*

Brother: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Me: This is dumb

Brother: but it's TRYING to be dumb

*some guys pick up a phone and do the wazzzzzzzzuuuuuuuuuuuup joke*

Brother: BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Me: I can't believe there are eight more minutes of this.

Brother: WAIT IT GETS FUNNY! It's not supposed to be high brow, Heather.

Me: This isn't even low brow, I don't know what the fuck this... what is that guy doing?

*A guy hits a witch (?) with a door and eats a snow cone*

Brother: HAHAHAHAHAHA *collapses into a puddle of tears*

Me: So my lit teacher got us PIZZA for the final isn't she nice?

Brother: She did?

Me: Yup. She even got a veggie one cause Brass Balls and I requested it.

Brother: My lit teacher didn't get us anything, he just said "After this final, I'm going to go home and drink." Then he fell asleep at his desk.

Me: Say something funny, I only have 4 quotes for my blog. Five will make it more complete.

Brother: Something funny

Me: Try harder

Brother: ...

Me: Hey, you know what? I was thinking of replacing that TI-89 Titanium with one of those TI-83s that you call a Soviet adding machine. My teacher said they're more user friendly.

Brother: ...

Me: Lame.

Which Hipster to Abide?

2010-04-27T12:54:00.003-04:00

I recently learned that I'm a stereotype. I'm okay with that. No, really. I spent years wondering which stereotype I might fit into. Geek? Maybe, I guess, but I never really got into gaming or anime and so even though I always got along with geeks, I've never really had enough in common with them. Overachiever? Hah. Hahahaha. Ha, no. Emo? Eh, not quite. While I do occasionally enjoy a night of self-loathing and wallowing in my own misery, I can never really get the hang of angst. Too joyful. Jock? Please. If my seasonal allergies and fear of sweating didn't take care of that possibility, my complete lack of coordination did. I was the kid in P.E. who threw the ball at the pitcher's head then got sent to far-right field to take a nap until the end of class when I had to go straight to the nurse to do something about my swollen, snot-encrusted pollen victim face.

So, until recently I just accepted that I was probably a geek. After all, I spend an inordinate amount of time online and read a lot. Geeks do that, right? Sort of. I mean they usually prefer programming manuals to Salman Rushdie but it's the same concept. I get all the jokes on XKCD. I think that sort of qualifies me.

Anyway so recently I was online and I was reading a lot of insults directed at "hipsters." Apparently, "hipsters" like things that are retro and obscure. They watch indie flicks and smoke cigarettes that don't have additives and shop at farmers' markets and eat organic food. They avoid associating themselves with anything mainstream because they imagine they're way too cool for that and they like to think they know something about art and music but are really just talking out of their asses. It hit me like a truck. "THAT'S ME!!" I said. I mean I don't know what the hell I'm talking about sometimes but I sure enjoy sounding like I do! You won't catch ME reading anything on the bestseller list, that's for damned sure, and I only enjoy Twilight ironically. See? I'm a hipster. Wow. Who knew?

Those with whom I've shared this epiphany like to argue with me about it. I think it's the geek in me that chooses friends that like to argue with me, but I digress. Apparently, a true hipster would never admit to being a hipster so I fail on that qualifier. I'm also told that actually being well-read debunks the "talking out of my ass" thing, at least when it comes to literature, but to be fair, when it comes to art and music, well, I'm still talking out of my ass. I've also been told I'm not "trying hard enough" to be a hipster. Hmm. Possibly. However, I've recently noticed how much of my inner monologue is insufferably hipster-ish, which brings me to today's dilemma.

I subscribe to NPR updates (point, hipster) and I've recently noticed that their book lists include an awful lot of Isabel Allende. NPR has a serious boner for Isabel Allende. What do I do? The NPR-loving hipster in me says "now you must read Isabel Allende!" but the never-do-anything-mainstream hipster in me says "now that NPR has mentioned it, all the hipsters will be reading it and you have to be the most different hipster." Then there's this other hipster that says "all the hipsters are going to try to be the most different and refuse to read Allende now, so you can read it and enjoy it ironically and then you're still different." The logic is hard to follow. Perhaps I should take the advice of one of my online geek friends:

"I recommend you beat up both hipsters. It won't solve your problem, but it'll make you feel better for giving it to those annoying hipsters for trying to tell you what to think."

Words to the wise. This might hurt.

There's Awesome and Then There's... Ugh... Arizona

2010-04-24T00:51:00.002-04:00

Okay so first I'm in a good mood because all my final projects are done. My finals won't be done until Thursday evening, but my final projects are done and those are the real pains in my ass. My lit paper nearly killed me. I stayed up all night agonizing over the damned thing and cursing myself for not producing something up to my own standards. Finally, at about 10 in the morning (there were a lot of child-related interruptions) I finished it and drove down to school to visit my professor during office hours. I had hoped beyond hope that she would give me a thing or two that I could fix so I could somehow, some way get an A on the paper and therefore in the class. I knew I'd only have a couple of sleep-deprived hours to pull it together, but I hoped I could manage it somehow.

Well! She gave me an A. Right there in her office! She said "you're done" and wrote an A in her grade book. Wow. Win for Heather! So, instead of spending the rest of the day grinding my teeth into powder, I was able to hang out with Brass Balls before math class. Math class was awful because he made us all sit in the library until our names were called, in alphabetical order, so we could discuss our grades. I knew I had an A. I wasn't even worried, but I had to wait and because my last name starts with S and about 75% of the class is a Rodriguez, I was waiting for a full hour and a half. Lame. Still in a good mood, though. After all, I had wine and a trashy summer break vampire novel to read at home.

So I was in a good mood this morning after all of that and then I read the news in Arizona. Now I don't like to get political on this blog but I cannot abide what Arizona is doing. In case you are unaware, they just passed a law there stating that everyone should have to prove their immigration status on demand. In other words, you have to carry your papers around with you in case a cop suspects you might not be here legally.

I'm not a fan of illegal immigration exactly, but I don't entirely hate it either. Illegal immigrants pay more into the government than they get out of it. Because they are unable to apply for things like medicaid or welfare or even mortgages for that matter, they rarely collect much from the government but because their employers pay taxes and because they buy goods and services and pay sales tax, they pay into the system. Sometimes they commit other crimes but then so do Americans, and most of them are just here to work. So, while they are breaking the law and in some ways, illegal immigration can contribute to human trafficking and other icky things, I can't bring myself to hate illegal immigration unilaterally. I just don't see it as that black and white. They're breaking a law. So what? If you're a man having anal sex with another man in Florida, then you're also breaking a law. Does that make it wrong? Absolutely fucking not.

Now if an illegal immigrant is walking down the street drunk and brandishing a weapon, he will go to jail. On booking, they will likely realize he is an illegal immigrant unless somebody particularly special is in charge that day, and he will be deported. The end. Once somebody commits a crime, their status is revealed and deportation happens. Cops can ALREADY check your status once you've committed a crime or hell even on just a traffic stop. What this law says is that they can check your status if you're sitting around in a restaurant enjoying your lunch - just to make sure you're here legally. They can check you at the bus stop if they want.

The Arizona legislative asshats in charge swear they will try to keep the cops from racial profiling, but how realistic is that? They can already demand identification from somebody committing a crime so really they're addressing people who haven't committed crimes. Imagine you're a cop and you're looking for illegal immigrants. How many white people are you going to check, really? Well, I suppose you could check a few here and there just to show you're not racial profiling but it would just waste everyone's time wouldn't it? It will be just like the "random" checks at the airport on anyone brown or spray-tanned.

Does that mean I think we should let illegal immigration slide? Well, not necessarily. I'm not for amnesty, but I think Maddox had a good solution. Just force their employers to pay them all what they'd pay an American. No more mistreatment AND no more incentive to hire them. Done and done. In fact, just read his page instead of all this junk.

At the End of This Post, There is a Poem About Menarche

2010-04-16T19:53:00.006-04:00

So I have this new friend that I met in my lit class, we'll call him Brass Balls. Anyway, he's tons of fun, a true smart-ass, and he's read Twilight and hates it so we have a lot to talk about. This past Sunday, Brass Balls and I went to a movie at a local film festival and while we were waiting outside for forty-five friggin' minutes (they started the movie late) we got to talking. At our school, there's a "Coffee House" event every year where people who want to share poetry, short stories, or songs they've written come to perform them. Brass Balls is in theater and voice classes and so I told him that if he's really interested in that sort of thing, he can't pass up opportunities like this. The only problem was that it's not so much of a performing event as it is a share-the-stuff-you've-written-yourself event so you can't just show up and read anything, it has to be original and he couldn't think of anything to write or anything he'd written that he'd like to perform. So, I offered to write him something.

"Sure!" he said. "As long as it's funny." Well, outside of this blog, the stuff I write tends to get a bit gross and/or controversial, so I had to see what he would be willing to do and the best way I could think of to do this was to suggest something I knew he would absolutely refuse to do. So, I asked "would you be willing to get up there and read a poem from the first person point of view about your first period?" I don't know what I was expecting exactly, but certainly not the enthusiastic "YES!" I received.

So then I was obligated to write a poem about a girl's first period. I had like three days and no inspiration as I harbor no strong feelings one way or the other about my own menarche. I was twelve. I was at home. Mom supplied me with the necessities. Um, the end. There was nothing particularly embarrassing or enlightening about it; I didn't follow up the experience with any particular epiphany or introspection. I got to writing; I threw away three separate attempts, each worse than the last. I was ready to pull my hair out.

Finally, I just said "fuck it" and wrote the most vulgar account of a first period I could think of. Lucky for me, apparently that's the state of mind that taps into my creativity. I toned it down a bit in the edit, but a good portion of the shock value remained. I fully expected Brass Balls to read it and waffle. Nope.

Last night was game time. I was nervously glued to my chair, lightheaded, heart pounding, hands shaking, but Brass Balls just marched right up there with a smile on his face. He read my name to the crowd and asked me to stand up "because you won't want to in a minute." So I did, for a split second, and then slunk back into hiding.

Oh, I wish I'd taken video. I soooo wish. Not taking video is going to go down in the greatest regrets of my life. I couldn't possibly do him justice with mere words. Brass Balls got up there and sold this poem. Ice to Eskimos. First prize: Cadillac. He read it with feeling. He changed his tone for the dialogue. He nailed the cadence. It was beautiful. He made this poem beautiful:

One morning in gym class, the thirteenth of June,
Womanhood came riding down her chosen moon
Proclaimed her arrival, her screech split my ears
Taking form in the cackling derision of peers

For nothing can be such a faux pas in sports
As springing a crimson red leak in ones shorts
My face caught on fire I thought I would die
But the last thing I'd let them see me do was cry

Coach called class to order she said “be mature,
This will happen to all of you some day for sure”
As their own faces processed this warning of doom
She led me to change in the quiet locker room

“I hate them” I said “and I’ll never come back”
A smile crossed her face she said “cut them some slack”
“Bad enough” she sighed “that we take it from men”
And I noticed the tan line on her finger then

She left me alone in quiet my thoughts stirred
Until I came up with something absurd
I made myself fresh and gathered my clothes
High up in the air, I fastened my nose

I marched back to the court, abandoned my fears
Stood defiant against their merciless leers
“Solidarity will be your lesson today”
They snorted and waited to hear what I’d say

“TAKE THAT!” I screamed, and fling’d the soiled pile
The gym floor now speckled with my new womb’s bile
They screamed first in horror and then with delight
June thirteenth, mark it down, first ever blood fight

What can I say? Respect.

I'm Blocked

2010-04-14T22:09:00.002-04:00

I've been just awful with this blog this year. I know it. The few sweet, loyal readers out there who used to comprise my daily audience are now shooting angry looks my way, arms crossed, toes impatiently hammering the floor. And really, if I'm going to be honest with myself, neglecting my regular obligation to write something outside of school purposes has affected my ability to write well for school purposes. The last paper I turned in to my literature professor received a charity B and we'll just leave it at that. The details are humiliating.

So I've battled my procrastination instincts to the couch and now I'm sitting here, resisting the urge to read Perez Hilton and wondering what the heck to tell you guys. As I told my most impatient (and therefore favorite) reader, I don't really have much to talk about lately. I've been taking four classes this semester so where my brain used to happily ponder the events of the day and developments of my children, it's now running an infinite loop around science, math, and the ever-important accomplishments of dead white guys. Some of it is interesting, some of it is controversial, and I think that stifling the controversial has blocked me from posting here too often. I have readers from both edges of the political spectrum and all over the middle. I have grandparents and students, optimists and misanthropists, so I usually keep my topics out of the realm of anything that can really be debated. "Just write something controversial anyway!" said my favorite reader. Oh, fine.

Well, let's see. What sorts of conversations have I had today? Well, Brother and I had an argument at Denny's. Husband asked if he could give Giggles some soda and I said no because caffeine will screw up his sleeping and impair his calcium absorption. To be fair, I cannot recollect where I read this and I don't recall checking the source for legitimacy or peer review but it had the ring of truth. After all, caffeine is a stimulant, right? And loads of otherwise benign things impair the absorption of nutrients. Calcium impairs iron absorption. Loads of things.

Unfortunately for me, my brother possesses the same genetic tendency toward contrariness that I do. It's right there on the double helix, between the gene that makes our eyes dark and the one that makes us slobs. "Do you have any idea how they do those studies?" he demanded. I rolled my eyes. "What they do is they inject a gallon of soda directly into a rat's brain and then they flick it and record the observation that the rat is no longer capable of absorbing calcium."

"You're exaggerating." I said.

"No, they sit there in their labs and they go 'I can't fit any more Diet Coke into this rat's brain! Let's see if it can absorb calcium now.'" He poked at an imaginary rat. "'Come on! Eat the cheese! Well, that settles it. Caffeine is bad for calcium absorption. That's enough to release it to Fox News.' Then Fox News says soda is killing children and two glasses of wine at dinner is either great or bad for your health, whichever is the opposite of what we said last week."

"Haha! I'm going to give him soda." My husband said, finally joining in.

"No, you're not! He's exaggerating and we're not giving our kids caffeine until I've checked it." He's probably right.

"But he waaaants it." Giggles reached and fussed for Husband's soda. "Look how cute!"

"They don't inject soda into rat brains! He might be right, they might have OD'd the rats on Diet Coke but this all just came straight out of his imagination. Nobody flicked a dead rat and concluded it could no longer absorb calcium. This is imaginary and hyperbolic and unresearched." They pouted. It was over.

"So," Brother started up again. "Let's talk about how many billions of dollars Exxon pays in taxes to other countries besides our own!"

I can't imagine what it must be like to be my kids and have to listen to this stuff at dinner.

And it turns out caffeine doesn't significantly impair calcium absorption after all. But they still can't have soda. Good parenting is about setting arbitrary limits.

More soon, my beloved readers.

I'm A Poet

2010-03-11T00:37:00.003-05:00

Well, since I haven't been updating much lately, you don't know this but my lit teacher has been making me write poetry...

*SNORE*

I hate writing poetry. I know that sounds stupid coming from a writer but I really, really hate it. It all just seems very masturbatory to me. "OOOhh look at what I can do with words! I can express emotions! I'm in love/heartbroken/grieving and somehow it's like a wilting flower/waves crashing on the beach/a crying dove!" There's a stretch. So anyway, because I was feeling angry and bitter I wrote stuff about botox and pills for class.

But I was in a good mood tonight at the wine bar with my friend so when I found their magnetic poetry board with wine-themed magnets, I had a little fun with it. It's not perfect, I know, but YOU should know that the words "me" and "eat" were conspicuously absent. Not my fault!

Spring BREAAAAAAAAAAAAAAK!!!!

2010-03-09T08:18:00.002-05:00

Sunday afternoon, I finished the last of my midterms and was FREE! Sweet freedom! So I have like two papers due the week after next but I'm so not even thinking about those until Friday. It felt so good to be able to do my own work instead of schoolwork that I stayed up all night Sunday working on my OWN writing and didn't stop for a break until about noon Monday when I started having crazy thoughts. Luckily, Brother was around so I bribed him with pork chop sandwiches to make sure the kids didn't accidentally hang themselves on a telephone cord or something so I could get some rest for a bit.

Well, now I'm RESTED and the crazy thoughts are mostly stifled and it's back to writing! Also: I have The Road on my kindle now so I'm going to read that and if I get around to it, Brothers Karamazov. Meeting a friend Wednesday night and then? I don't know! Maybe I'll take the kids to the beach. Man alive, spring break is awesome!

FML

2010-02-15T08:24:00.003-05:00

So I'm awake a lot earlier than I really had to be this morning. Apparently, it's President's Day, which means No School but nobody told my Alarm Clock. I, of course, stayed up way too late last night watching Memento with Brother because everyone swore it was a super badass flick and I'm about a decade late getting around to seeing it, so Alarm Clock's initial nagging went completely unnoticed and my arm, acting entirely on its own, probably hit the snooze button about 4 times or so before I jumped out of bed in a panic about an hour after it first went off (that's 40 minutes after when I actually intend to wake up after 2 snooze button hits, 30 minutes after I can wake up late but still make it on time, 20 minutes after still-less-than-five-minutes-late, 15 minutes after embarassing note to Bug's teacher late, and about 10 minutes before fuck-it-let's-go-to-Denny's late). Anyway there was a lot of yelling and throwing of clothes before I checked Bug's planner. SSOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO tired.

On a more positive note, I had more accomplished before 8:30 this morning than I needed to have all day! It's a breeze from here on out. I may even be feeling generous enough to make pancakes.

I wish I had more to report as I have been terrible about updating lately, but I've just been doing a lot of homework, mostly. I did, however, get out on Saturday night. I took myself to P.F. Chang's and made a lot of eye contact with much younger very handsome waiter who was obviously trying to get a good tip (it worked) then went to midnight showing of Black Dynamite, which was ohmygod hilarious. Aside from that, I've just been working on my reading and otherwise being a super awesome straight-A student.

Oh, and I got an A on the sarcastic Sir Gawain paper you see below. I'll just take a little bow right here. Yes, just a modest little one...

Heather Is Not Writing! (Yes Heather Is)

2010-02-04T21:56:00.003-05:00

Assignments only lately, unfortunately. I can share one with you, though! We were asked to write a paragraph about lines 713 to 734 or something in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. My classmates thought it was worth reading.

Sir Gawain is entirely too manly for words. Even the most skillful poet is transmogrified into a stammering fool in the face of his masculine overachievement. Sir Gawain is a veritable testosterone geyser. No fire-drooling reptilian monstrosity even comes close to besting him. With God on his side and prayer in his heart, there is no match for Sir Gawain’s unyielding bravado in all of Beelzebub’s vicious unholy creatures. He fears not the cold for the fire in his chest will keep the bitter winter at bay. Also his armor. He walks off the pain, shaking the nagging chill from his elephant hide and marches forward, stone-faced and gallant. A beast like Sir Gawain would not allow his life to be taken from him before completing his quest.

I Am A Transvestite

2010-01-27T01:42:00.002-05:00

Scene: My living room, last night, watching RAGE on Netflix. Jude Law as "Minx" wears a blonde wig, a lot of makeup, and many strings of pearls. He has temporarily dropped his feminine voice to speak plainly with the off-camera character "Michelangelo."

Bug: That's a girl? Mommy, that's a girl?

Me: That's a man playing a man who lives as a woman.

Bug: It's a man? Why he dress like a girl?

Me: Some men don't feel comfortable as men and prefer to dress and live as women and vice versa.

Bug: Not me. When I grow up and I'm a man I'm going to dress like a man.

Me: That's okay, too.

Bug: I'm going to be like you. You dress like a boy.

Me: ...

Bug: You dress like a boy and I'm going to dress like a boy.

Me: I wear pants and shirts most of the time but that doesn't mean I'm dressing like a man. Sometimes I wear dresses, too.

Bug: Sometimes you dress like a woman but most of the time you dress like a man.

Me: Okay.

Bug: And you talk like a man!

Me: BEDTIME!

Quick Love Note To Government & Environmental Science Professors

2010-01-11T18:22:00.002-05:00

Omigod I love these classes. After tripping and tumbling through the labyrinthine cyber obstacle course that was my speech class last semester, I was actually doubting my ability to succeed in online classes. Skipping out on online courses altogether would present a SERIOUS challenge to me as I have limited babysitting availability and can only do so many classes in person, so I had been gritting my teeth and bracing myself for the stings from a swarm of Bs this semester with my environmental science and government courses.

I first logged onto them today. I expected something similar to the speech class last semester: about twenty links to click, incoherent instructions, and dozens of boring videos to watch and facebookish quizzes to take, only to find out after completing them that only a handful were actually necessary. Instead, I found clear, concise instructions and refreshingly efficient syllabuses. Today's assignments? Read the books and answer some questions. Now this I can do. Here's looking forward to a stellar report card.

I Love This Kindle

2010-01-07T06:12:00.002-05:00

Seriously, I wish I could read everything on this kindle. Grocery list, taco kit nutritional information, nylon/poly blend blouse washing instructions, everything. You know why it's so great? I can be reading something as lame as Twilight or pretentious as The New Yorker and YOU DON'T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE! I can read Thomas Hardy without imagining everyone around me is thinking "what? Didn't she read that in high school?" I can read any old thing I want without broadcasting some statement to the world about my intelligence or education level.

Well, Mom says it broadcasts something anyway. "Woo, look at me. I bought a Kindle!" She's right of course, but I bought a Blackberry too, and a ludicrously over-equipped family van so I'm used to the sorts of labels that come with that. "There goes that woman that apparently has enough money to spend on a Blackberry and Kindle but still won't buy a shirt that doesn't come ten dollars for a pack of three at Wal-Mart" etc. At least I've got Angry Sam to have this in common with. I'll take my appearance seriously when I become famous.

In the meantime, I'm reading The Lovely Bones because a friend of mine is sort of making me. I wanted to read The Bell Jar next because I can do this now without imagining everyone is thinking "oh look another emo lesbian, how original" but apparently it is not available on Kindle so I have to think of something else. I love this thing sooooooooooo much.

COUNTDOWN!!

2010-01-01T03:02:00.002-05:00

Yeah, I'm wasted. So, January 1 2008 I was pregnant and January 1 2009 I was nursing a little baby but this year I'm neither so I'm completely snockered. Normally I do a poorly photoshopped countdown with pictures I found on the internet but this year I thought I'd just draw 'em for ya. I'm a shitty artist.

First, though, I just want to say that 2009 has been a great year. I'm a little disappointed with my weight change this year. I gained some. Only 10 pounds... well, ONLY, I dunno. Ten isn't good. Anyway, I'm not happy with the weight gain but I'm going to forgive myself on account of how much of my mental and physical energy was necessarily spent on my littlest one. These things happen. Other than that, however, this has been a really good year. I started going back to school and I am really enjoying it. I've read a lot and written a lot and grown a lot as a writer and a student. I am well on my way to meeting some life goals I made a long time ago and put on hold for the sake of marriage and motherhood. I don't regret anything, I'm just on my way to having it all. Is it possible? I dunno, but hell why not? So without further ado, here are my New Year's Resolutions! Hooray!

Heather's Chat, 4:30 a.m.

2009-12-30T04:32:00.003-05:00

In case you were wondering what you're missing whenever you go to sleep (names changed for privacy)

What's happening on IRC:

Guy: so then #channel. I have a challenge for you. I was given £20 ($30) in book tokens. What do I buy?

Me: wtf is a book token

Guy: it's like a voucher

Guy: for buying books

Me: ok

Guy: except at any books store that accepts them. Borders, Browns, Blackwells, Waterstones, WHSmiths books, etc.

Me: don't spend money on anything you can get here: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Guy: I do not yet know if they can be used online.

OtherGuy: Guy: Practical LSD Manufacture

OtherGuy: its the seminal classic

Guy: OtherGuy: lol :-D

Guy: I *like* my front door being intact.

Me: well if you want to redo your bathroom

Guy: if I was gonna do that, I'd have to have it delivered to an aboned house in bransholme, and paid in some un-trackable manner...

Me: you could get something on meth manufacture

Guy: I don't want drugs :-p

OtherGuy: learn to make mdma

Guy: no, just no :-p

OtherGuy: grow doobs

OtherGuy: that's the ticket

Me: grow boobs

* YetAnotherGuy wakes up

OtherGuy: now ur talking

Guy: oh dear god.

Guy: Ok, so let's summarize. I have $30 to buy books with, and you want me to *grow boobs* ??

Me: ok grow tomatoes then what do I know

Me: you could make spaghetti sauce

* Guy sighs

What's happening on Facebook:

Girl: Hi!

Me: OMG sleep woman

Girl: i'm working

Girl: til 73090

Me: okay that is not even a time

Humbug

2009-12-23T10:50:00.003-05:00

Meh, Christmas. My student world and mommy world are coming together like milk and orange juice. My last final - math - was on Saturday. Sunday, I owed a girl from my breastfeeding group a night out so we went to a bar and drank like freshmen. Monday, not hungover by some biological miracle, I made up for lost time with Rock and squeezed a date into the evening. Saw Avatar again and again, it rocked my eyeballs. Yesterday I slept in and napped with Giggles and then finally got some Christmas shopping done. Today I cancelled breastfeeding group and totally intend to get something Christmas-y done, I guess.

I remember my first Christmas as a wife. We'd only been married a few months and we had spent like every last dime on the wedding so we didn't have much. I was just getting the hang of Norwegian Christmas traditions and battling morning sickness. It was all very exciting and romantic. The next Christmas, we had Bug. Five months old and still screaming for my boobs every hour and a half, Christmas shopping was near impossible and a total drag but it was our first Christmas as a family. I was a mommy! We put together a little tree and took a zillion pictures. In the years to follow, Thanksgiving and Christmas were my big days. As a career housewife and stay-at-home mom, those are the events. I got to show everyone my happy healthy family and have a bunch of people over and Rock would be home and I could make him help with the kids while I baked or decorated or something and for once, even if only for a little while, everyone would appreciate my cooking and tidying and sundry domestic servitude.

This year, I didn't even have time for that until Sunday. Christmas just snuck up on me. I was sitting there doing my homework and then BOO! Bug was nagging me about stockings and my facebook home page exploded with chatter about shopping. Ugh. Over one hill and up another. I just don't have time for it this year. I want to! I think! More than that, I wish I had a wife. Somebody else put this shit together for once. Somebody else bake with the kids and clean up the mess and wrap the damned presents and argue with the pickiest damned tongues in the world to figure out what everyone will eat for dinner. Isn't it enough that I juggled Giggles and Bug and got my homework done? Can't this be my break?

I'd Like To Thank TI-89 and Wolfram Alpha

2009-12-14T03:30:00.002-05:00

Without the two of you, I wouldn't be sitting here at 3:30 in the morning with finished homework. I'd be sitting here at 3:30 in the morning with a pile of tear-soaked math notes and a bottle of gin.

If only Wolfram Alpha could make a speech-writing engine. Sigh. Expect next update at 3:30 tomorrow morning from behind the tear-soaked speech notes. Gin won't help.

This Post Is Revalent To My Bloggy Absence

2009-12-10T12:45:00.004-05:00

In exactly one week I will be done with my speech class. Unfortunately, until then I'm stuck watching Professor Fuckwit's how to videos and navigating the endless labyrinth that is her class website (geocities isn't dead after all). At least I can now say that I've found all the little hiding places and lately, all of the assignments have been getting done. By my calculations, I should be getting an A, but we all know how much I can rely on that. Begrudgingly, I must admit there are a few things I actually have learned from the class, but it's all mixed in there among a sea of broken links and videos in which she declares THREE times that we must make sure the information we use in our speech is "revalent." No joke.

In exactly one and a half weeks, I will be done with my math class. Today I will be working on the project that is due Saturday - a paper and powerpoint presentation showcasing a mathematician and his or her achievements for every letter of the alphabet. I don't know. Whatever. Easy A.

Once that's all over with, I get two weeks off to eat cookies and open presents and get fat with my family before I'm a full-time student again for the first time since 2001. I've got a couple more annoying classes to get out of the way - natural science, government, and another math, but I also get to finally start my lit classes! Woohoo!

So that's what I've been up to, in case you were wondering. I've found that Panera is just about the only place I can ever get any work done, so I've been leaving the little ones with Rock and Brother for an hour or two here and there so I can sit around and listen to Christmas carols and drink shitty coffee and do my homework. It's better than Starbucks because Starbucks is always crowded and much better than the bookstore because we all know I'd never accomplish anything there. At Panera my only options are: 1) do homework 2) eat overpriced food. So if you see me, say "hi!"

RAGE (Swear Words Ahoy)

2009-12-06T23:44:00.005-05:00

It's a six-point why Heather needs to get the fuck out of this apartment complex countdown!

6. Our bathroom looks like the before picture on an Oxyclean commercial - AFTER it's been cleaned! Don't even ask me what it looks like before. It's going to be sentient any day now.

5. We pay more than almost every other apartment complex in the area charges and we don't get valet trash. In case you don't live in Florida and don't know what that is, I'll try to explain very quickly. In normal environments with normal weather and normal amounts of wildlife, there are generally a few dumpsters here and there throughout apartment complexes where you can bring your trash. It's only a hundred or so yards to the dumpster so whatever you're carrying, you'll make it. Here, there are raccoons and 230,305,118 species of insect lurking around which could get pretty out of control with normal dumpsters so there's only ONE dumpster which is enclosed and doubles as a trash compactor and is usually quite a walk, so most apartment complexes have trash cans disguised as welcoming benches for you and they send somebody around daily to pick it up. We don't have this, so there's a lot of hauling heavy leaking bags all the way to the other side of the complex.

4. There's a jackass Muscovy duck living here that chases and threatens me, Brother, Rock, and all our neighbors every time anyone has the audacity to try to check the mail.

3. Everything keeps breaking. Recently we had to go five days without the use of a fridge. I almost died a painful fast-food related death. It's amazing how many instant things require refrigerated ingredients. But, that I could have forgiven. The A/C constantly breaking is another story entirely. This is Florida. It's fucking HOT.

2. Whenever something breaks, they send their Denier In Chief right on over to chew me out about how it works just fine. Once he actually looked me in my shiny sweat-drenched face and told me the a/c was working perfectly and the big old "87" reading on the thermostat was an estimate. I ask him to close the door behind him because we have a crawling baby and he tells me that's my problem and I should look after him. I ask him to close the door quietly because the baby is taking a nap and he slams it even harder. I hate this fucker and he's ALWAYS HERE putting newly chewed wads of Doublemint gum on my fucking electrical components and telling me it was my fault for setting the thermostat so low (73).

1. I'm a patient woman. I've been living in apartment complexes my whole life. I know they're usually working with unreasonably low budgets set by some jerk living a million miles away that never answers his phone. I know that faraway jerk cares more about the resell value of the property than the residents and the local managers are usually pretty good people with their hands unfortunately tied and for all I know, Denier In Chief is the jerk's son in law or mom's best friend's recovering alcoholic nephew. Who knows. But what happened tonight threw me over. When I was pregnant with Giggles, I used to go to the apartment complex's gym to use the treadmill and get my workout in an air conditioned room almost daily. When he was born, I realized I couldn't bring Giggles with me because there was nowhere to put him so I paid for a membership at a very expensive gym with a daycare which was very worth it for a while until I was recently forced to cancel it in order to pay for school. I tried outdoor exercise but I'm allergic to all of Florida. So, I'm back to the complex gym. The first thing I noticed was that in the year or so since the last time I went there, the television has been removed from the gym and all the buttons have been plucked off of the treadmill. The treadmill's default speed is .5 mph and there is now no way to increase it. So that's out! But OKAY. Still patient! I had my iPod so I spent 45 minutes on the recumbent bike. I'm so pious. Then I left.

I didn't get any further than the pool's fence. Apparently, the apartment managers felt it was necessary to change the locks on the pool, which formerly opened to the same key I used to get into the gym, but did not feel it was necessary to notify the residents or give them new keys. The gate had been slightly open when I went in and I'm So Stupid closed it behind me. I was trapped for THIRTY FUCKING MINUTES. I used to jump pool fences all the time when I was like 16 but it turns out that's not so easy anymore after your body has been mined by two baby humans and you pay your own medical bills. I would almost get one leg over and then look at the ground six feet below and feel the fence wobbling under my unsteady out of shape forearms and see nothing but price tags and smiling x-ray technicians. I tried getting a chair over to the other side to step on but it was too low and anyway wasn't certain to hold my weight. I tried opening the window in the workout room and removing the screen but I couldn't do it without breaking something. I didn't want to explain myself to the cops.

Finally, a very kind neighbor came out to have a cigarette and I sent him to go get Rock who then explained to his fellow video game fiends that he had to go rescue his wife who was "apparently trapped somewhere." All I needed was a pair of shoulders to steady me that weren't attached to somebody who would sue if I threw out his back. Rock provided that. He got me over to the other side and into some shallow shrubbery which we then ran out of as quickly as possible once we realized there could be SNAKES and I'm free. Try to stop laughing.

And I'm going to fucking kill somebody at the apartment office tomorrow.

Or Else

2009-12-03T01:26:00.006-05:00

Sir Norman Rockwell, lord of all the holidays hath insisted most insistently that Heather rise forth from her lazy wide flesh caboose and adorn her hovel with ornaments most ornamental and more importantly: merry.

Young ones, by law of course, must put forth an endearing ruckus whilst dressed to their necks and ankles in warm holiday-themed flannels, climbing and crawling through cozy clutter - implicitly fresh unfolded laundry, jingly playthings, and scattered shiny baubles. The household paternal figure is exempt from any labor and may rest his presumably aching back against overstuffed cushions and finger his way through the sports pages.

No, no. What's this? Why, Heather, whatever do you mean the area meant for the Christmas tree is inhabited by a disorganized cluster of books, yarn, and neglected mail? What have you been doing with your time? What's that? Stop giggling at Perez Hilton's blog and get to work! No. I DO NOT CARE WHAT TIGER WOODS DID TODAY!

That's better.

Ahem. Moving the mess to the other side of your living room does not count as cleaning it BUT we'll get to that later. Dress the children appropriately. They should be involved! Oh it will be so delightfully delightful. Their innocent soft pitter patters around the house just warm my WHAT THE HELL IS THE BABY EATING?! STOP HIM! But how did he get the battery out of there? Okay. It's okay. No harm, no foul! Back to the matter at hand.

Okay, well rather than listen to you blah blah blah on about saving forests and whatever other ridiculousness, I'll just accept that you've chosen some plastic nonsense instead of an actual tree. I don't understand what you have against the sweet scents of sap and pine but... stop rolling your eyes at me. Very well. Get the "tree" out of the closet. Good heavens. That closet isn't safe at all. Heather, putting messes in the closet does not count as cleaning up. Don't roll your eyes at me, young lady. Where are you going? Yes, okay, I suppose baking the Christmas cookies is part of the routine today but we should save that until we're done with the tree. Are you listening to me at all?

Fine, you bake. Your husband can navigate the closet. Where is he, anyway? What's Command and Conquer: Generals? So he's just in the other room, then? I'll just get him! Why are you laughing?

Dear God what is wrong with him? Stop laughing! You'd think I'd asked him for his right- what are those? Dearest, cookies are made from flour and butter and sugar, they do not come in pre-packaged cylinders with tree patterns and I am starting to get the feeling that you are not taking this seriously OH NO THE BABY IS TRYING TO JUMP OUT OF HIS HIGH CHAIR!! Why are the children whining for attention instead of playing Cowboys and Indians as the Good Lord intend - Cowboys and Native Americans then. Fine. Stop glaring at me.

What's that smell? Have you burnt the cookies? Only you could manage to ruin pre-made cookies. Well, good job, Heather. An evening gone and what do you have to show for it? Burnt cookies, tree still in the closet, and messes relocated. You know what? I - OH CRAP THE BABY IS TRYING TO OPEN THE OVEN DOOR! It's HOT, DAMMIT!

Forget you!

Happy Birthday, Angry Sam!

2009-11-30T02:41:00.002-05:00

She's out of town right now but I know she'll get all mad at Crapstick and check her computer at some point, so get over there and embarass the hell out of her!

Now she's as many years as I am for another 9ish months and I can stop hearing about how I'm old. Isn't that great?

Oh, and tatt skin is less angry today and I look like I've been typed on! Yay! I love it. Boo for Bug going back to school in the morning, but what are you gonna do? 3 more weeks until he gets two weeks off. I love when he has time off. We all get to hang out and nobody has to harass anyone to get ready at 7 a.m. and then deal with rush hour traffic to get him to school and ugh homework and whatever else. Just 3 weeks...

My Tatt!

2009-11-28T21:22:00.002-05:00

I got my tatt today! Rock was sick but he agreed to take the kids anyway since they were being so sweet and easy and everything. Such a nice husband. I shall have to make this up to him. Anyway, I NEEDED a day out and I've been planning today for months.

So, my tattoo. I think I've mentioned here and there what it means and what it's about but just in case anyone is still wondering, this post will clear the air completely. I'll tell you absolutely everything about it.

It says "Aut Viam Inveniam Aut Faciam" which is Latin for "I'll either find a way or I'll make one" and yes every word is capitalized which is probably incorrect but I think it looks best that way so I sacrificed a little form for aesthetic purposes. I spent weeks looking at it both ways and I just like it best this way.

It didn't hurt so very much. Actually, I prefer getting tattooed for an hour and a half to getting my eyebrows threaded for ten minutes but that's probably a personal thing. The guy who did it was a total professional. Very clean, very good. He warned me that the location (the underside of my upper arm) was generally sensitive and hurt like a bitch but it wasn't actually too bad. The m in Inveniam stung the most but I hardly felt the I at all.

The origin of the phrase goes back to the Punic general Hannibal who supposedly uttered it after he was told he could not cross the alps by elephant and before he went ahead and did it, which apparently is kind of a big deal in terms of ancient warfare. Of course, there's no way to know if he actually said it and of course he would have said it in Punic if he had, but that's not the point.

So, I've been wanting a tatt since I was 17 years old and I realized after Giggles was born that I still wanted one and all this time I'd been afraid to get one because of the commitment. I figured that 10 years is a long enough time to wonder about whether or not I'm ready to commit to something so I started thinking about exactly what I wanted and where. I've been thinking about it since Giggles was born and waiting until Giggles was no longer nursing. I've had this one in mind for quite a while now.

It's on my right arm because I write with my right hand. It's in Times New Roman because it's my favorite font. It is my life's ambition to write a novel that will be published and over and over again I've tried to convince myself that such a thing isn't a practical goal and my time is better spent elsewhere and every time I think those thoughts, it breaks my heart. So, no more of that. I'm going to publish a novel. Hell, I'm going to publish many novels. I'll either find a way or I'll make one.

I WIN

2009-11-26T02:55:00.005-05:00

Did you ever doubt me?

Professor Fuckwit* tried the old "this is available for you to keep track yourself" line and then when I pointed out to her that not only is 300 (the number she said was possible) a fiction fantasy number from the land of make believe, but so was 75 (the number she said I had), she was forced to admit that my grade was just fine.

Okay so I knew the first day of class that she was functionally retarded and I believe I mentioned this here as well, but her grading always seemed fair so I wasn't all that worried until now. Yes, she's fixed it but what else will need to be fixed before the end of the semester? I have a beautiful GPA, people. She's got class. She's clean and well-groomed and makes a good impression. I can't have Professor Fuckwit coming around dressing her in a spray tan and a skanky sequined C, okay? That's not okay. I'm not okay with that.

Anyway so I'm up really stupid late at night and soaked to the skin in pinot noir (French for "fuckup juice") but the cranberry sauce is ready for tomorrow and so are the deviled eggs per Rock's request. It's shaping up to be a good Thanksgiving people.

Oh and today we taught Bug about the origins of Thanksgiving.

Bug: What's Thanksgiving?

Rock: That's when the white people came over from England and beheaded all the existing residents of what we now refer to as the United States.

Me: We give thanks to them because otherwise we'd all be speaking Brown right now.

Rock: Indeed.

Don't worry, I don't think Bug was paying any attention at all.

*Name given does not reflect actual name, only reality.

I AM NOT OKAY

2009-11-25T02:09:00.003-05:00

I was okay! I was great! Rock came home from Norway this evening and he was in a fantastic mood. He got to fly first class this time, which always means he comes home happier. We had a quick dinner together at Chipotle before heading home and he thought my new black hair and sparkly ruby slipper platform heels looked fantastic. Super good.

So then we got home and Bug gave him a bunch of hugs and Giggles acted coy but then did a few of his little baby tricks and showed off then let Rock hold him. Sent the kids to bed. Sent Rock to bed *cough*. Went out to the living room to check my speech class.

There was a new email from Professor I'm-a-fucking-thirteen-year-old-in-a-sixty-year-old-woman's-body.

"Heather,

It has come my attention [sic] you have logged onto the course on November 20th but have missed most of the assignments! You have only 75 points out of 300 for the semester and it is not possible for you to pass the class missed assignments [sic]. Just hope all is well.

-Professor Fuckwit*"

*Name changed for confidentiality!

So I immediately went into the grading sheet which is laid out in a weird sort of non-intuitive way to check my grade. The first thing I saw was 84 points on my last assignment, so there's 9 points more than she said I had already. I think my total was somewhere in the 250ish range although I can't be sure because again the grading sheet doesn't make a lot of sense. I've turned in all of the assignments. Yes, I checked if there was anyone else in the class named Heather. There isn't. I also don't see any possibility of anything ever adding up to 300. I also see a full list of the assignments I turned in that were graded and there aren't ANY MISSING.

I am freaking. Out. This is not okay. I've been stressing for the last two hours about this now.

So, I'm doing the assignments that are due tomorrow just in case I wake up in the morning to an email that says "Heather - Whoops! My bad LOL." Otherwise, I'm ready to FIGHT. I will not let this moron fuck up my GPA. Brother says threaten with going to the dean. I think this is a good idea.

Sobering Up

2009-11-20T23:31:00.002-05:00

So, New Moon... New Moon.

No, Robert Pattinson did not bring his A game but whatever. At least the writers grew a sense of humor this time so there were more jokes and less angst and Kristen Stewart appears to have taken an acting class or two so I didn't have to watch her attempt to ingest her own lip over and over and over again. Not sure what I would have thought of the movie if I was sober but the three glasses of wine did their job to magically transform it into a comedy. I went with my mom who kept jabbing me in the arm every time I laughed, which was often.

Adding to the fun was a theater full of 15 year old girls and some of their boyfriends so every time Robert Pattinson came on screen there was a mixture of falsetto fangirl screaming and vocal fry catcalls "EW!! HE SUCKS!!" etc.

Also: at the beginning of the movie, Mom sent me to go get her some Junior Mints. As I stumbled drunkenly out of my aisle, cash in hand, I spotted a mousy young girl on the edge of the row wearing rainbow colored VANS. I told her they were awesome. Cause they were. She smiled and said "thanks" and looked all shy and then she must have caught my eye and smiled like 5 more times throughout the night before the house lights went off and then after they went on again and everyone was streaming out. I think I made her day. Mom thinks she's a lesbian. I think Mom's gaydar may be picking up false positives left and right. Discuss.

Dude

2009-11-20T17:30:00.004-05:00

I'm going to see New Moon tonight. I might have to get a little toasted to get through the plot. Robert Pattinson better have brought his A game, that's all I have to say.

Here's what Ebert had to say. Sounds suspiciously similar to how I felt about the book.

Downhill, Fast

2009-11-17T00:54:00.003-05:00

How did I get so bad at this? Like six days since I last updated.

Oh, I know. I've got all these kids. I mean when I count them up there are only two but it seems like at least thirty. And I've got all these classes. Again, I count them up and there are only two, but it seems like... well, one, but with thirty kids who has time for even one class?

Rock comes home next Tuesday and my plans for the following Saturday are MANY. New tatt, margaritas, possible shoe-shopping with mom, and maybe see New Moon if I can get Brother to go with me. If I don't have anyone to rip it apart with, then I might just vomit. I hate the story, I hate the acting, I hate the directing. The cinematography and the music are all right I guess but the real bacteria in the milk is the glorification of basest adolescent behavior and don't even get me started on Bella's ersatz father, Edward the angst machine. "Well, why are you going to see it if it will make you vomit, Heather?"

Don't judge me.

Next semester, I'm taking 4 classes and then I'll be done with re-taking credits I should already effing have but didn't transfer and then one more semester I think of some nonsense and I should be in upper division courses. Can I get a woo-woo?

Eraserhead

2009-11-10T06:51:00.002-05:00

I'm going to spoil Eraserhead for you because it's better this way. Do not watch this movie.

This is the first piece of cinematic "art" I can truthfully say that I do not begin to comprehend at all. I don't get the symbolism. I don't get the message. So, I'm going to summarize and spoil here in hopes that I have a reader who can piece it all together and enlighten me. You do not need to watch it yourself. You've been warned. It cannot be unseen.

The movie begins with a whole lot of noise. I mean a lot of noise. You could mute your TV and turn on your dishwasher and press your head up against it instead. At least your dishes will get clean.

Finally, we see Henry Spencer, a guy with weird hair get in an elevator and go to his apartment. Some kind of whore across the hall tells him that Mary called and invited him to dinner with her and her parents. Henry is bemused. We see his apartment. It has a rickety old bed, a table, and a hair collection I think on the dresser. Oh and a houseplant which is a pile of dirt with a stick in it. No pot. More noise.

Henry goes to Mary's house for dinner. Henry is annoyed that Mary hasn't called or come around in a while. Mary kind of hems and haws and decides to ignore that then invites him in for dinner. There is a fleeting glimmer of hope here that there might be a plot or character development of some sort but that is out the door once Mary and her mother interrupt the already uncomfortable conversation with weird seizure (?) fits that everyone seems not to notice. Dad comes out. Dinner is served! Henry is asked to carve the teensy itty bitty chicken but just as he's about to stick a fork in it, it starts gushing blood all over the place and he decides not to stab it after all. Everyone else looks at him like "what's the problem?" The mother then has a seizure for some reason and screams and goes into the kitchen. The father says "oh don't mind her." Oh and there are weird fucked up puppies of some sort making noise the whole time.

The mother corners Henry in the hallway later and insists on knowing whether he and her daughter had sex. He refuses to answer. Mother starts making out with him. Mary walks in and gets upset with her mom. Mom says that Mary has had a premature baby during their time apart and now they must get married. Mary says "they're not even sure it IS a baby!" but they agree to get married.

There's noise. Now Mary is in the weird apartment with the hair collection and pile of dirt with stick. There is a weird half-puppy half-baby sort of thing with its body all bandaged up and its head on a pillow on the kitchen table. Mary is trying to spoonfeed it oatmeal and it keeps spitting the oatmeal back up. Henry comes home and looks at his hair collection for a while. The baby cries a bunch. Nobody picks it up.

There's noise. The couple is trying to sleep and the baby keeps crying. Mary finally loses it and leaves and says she's going to stay with her parents. HERE IS WHERE THINGS GET WEIRD. Henry takes baby's temperature and it's normal. Henry says "huh." Baby instantly explodes into some kind of deathpox. Henry puts a ghetto-rigged humidifier near the baby and sits with him. Baby foams at the mouth and continues to ooze and seize and otherwise be fucking gross.

Henry starts hallucinating or something? I don't know. Suddenly he's in bed with the whore from across the hall and the bed is a hot tub. Mary comes home and snores and steals blankets, so Henry tries to wake her up and finds out that she has been crapping severely deformed screeching fetuses all over the bed in her sleep. Henry tosses them against the wall one by one. They scream as they splat. Nobody cleans it up. The baby seems to be recovering. Henry dreams (?) he's on a stage with a dancing, singing chick who is pretty except for some weird crusty jowl growth things that make her look like a puffer fish and those weird fetus things are falling on the stage all around her. Then some guy comes in and lops Henry's head off and uses the brain to make pencil erasers. Hooray an explanation for the title! Henry goes back home and the whore is sleeping with some other guy who is bald and laughs at Henry for some reason. The baby's head grows in place of Henry's old head. Henry wakes up and everything seems normal again so he goes into the kitchen with a pair of scissors and cuts the baby in half like the chicken he refused to carve in the beginning and it bursts open and spews oatmeal everywhere after dying a horrible blood-coughing death. More noise.

In case you thought I was bluffing:

The end! And Heather never ever ever sleeps again. Ever.

What in the holy fuck did I watch, people? Help me out here.

Do The Homework

2009-11-03T05:48:00.005-05:00

Simple. No problem. Do the homework. Do the homework. Stop playing Bejeweled and do the homework. Can't possibly do the homework before breakfast, though. And I should make coffee. Can't think on an empty stomach. I should cook eggs. Nice and full of protein. Can't possibly cook breakfast without cleaning the stove, though. Oh the trash can is full. Can't possibly clean the stove without taking out the trash.

Okay. Trash taken out, stove cleaned, eggs cooked. Do the homework. Oh wait. Can't have breakfast without a fruit or vegetable; I must think of my health. Also, it will be good for my brain and then I will do a better job on my homework. Must eat grapefruit. Rats. Out of grapefruits. Store? Nah, I have grapes. I'll save some time and eat grapes. Can't eat grapes without washing them, though. Oh jeez the fridge could use some cleaning out.

Okay fridge cleaned, grapes washed and eaten. I should make coffee. Hrm, the sink is kind of full. Should probably do the dishes. No! Do the homework. Dishes can wait. LAUNDRY CAN'T THOUGH. Ohmygod how did I forget laundry? Bug has no clothes to wear to school. Is there time? Phew, there's time. Okay. Collect laundry, start the washer. Laundry collected, wash started. Oy. We're out of detergent. I should put that on the grocery list. Oh and nail clippers. Rock took the nail clippers to Norway and our nails are all growing out of control cause I keep forgetting to buy nail clippers but now I'll write it down. Hmm, and milk, bread as usual, and something for dinner. Spaghetti's easy but we already had that this week. I really don't feel like cooking chicken but it should be something nutritious that the kids like, so maybe I'll cook chicken. I should make coffee. We're a little low on coffee. More coffee, that goes on the list.

How did I get so off track? Do the homework. Oh coffee first. Don't forget coffee! Okay, coffee made. Do homework. Okay at computer now, going to start the homework. I could check Perez Hilton though. It'll be good to reboot my brain, like cleansing my palate with sorbet or something. Just takes a few seconds. Maybe there's a new picture of Robert Pattinson up. Hmmm... Rihanna, yurgh the Kardashians, Jon and Kate double yurgh... no Robert Pattinson. Eff. Do the homework...

I'll just write a blog post real quick then I'll do the homework...

Just Crack My Head Open

2009-11-02T04:55:00.002-05:00

Let the gray gooey pain spill out. I'll mop it up later, I promise, if the bits that control walking and other motor control don't escape their throbbing prison.

Brother's birthday was the 20th and since Grouchy Grandma was here during that time, we waited until she left before Brother got his birthday present, which I'd been planning for the last 4 months. Brother likes to play poker, so I said I'd take him to the casino in Tampa and we'd play for a while!

HAHA a "while." Brother is generally pretty good at poker but I sucked out loud and the other guys at our table were total assholes so we lost everything, and quick. So in an effort to make up for lost fun, we played nickel slots for a while and I may have had a glass or three of the casino's generous helpings of wine. (Brother quote "They're not going to be stingy with the alcohol here, Heather; it's a casino. They want you good and loaded.") Smoking was allowed on the gambling floor so I spent a few hours in a wine-saturated haze, pushing the "lose" button on a slot machine over and over to the cacophony of a thousand unsimultaneous BING-BING-BINGs and inhaling human exhaust. Naturally, it was going to take a two-day migraine to show me that even at my tender age of 28, I'm not as young as I used to be.

So anyone who is reading and has ever had a child, ever, knows that the kids were at their absolute neediest during this time. Of course it wasn't their fault that Saturday night was Halloween or that it was 90 mother-effing degrees outside at the park where we walked in a SLOOOOOOOOOOW and very crowded line around the lake to beg the irritated bottom-rung employees of local businesses to fill our sacks with year-old candy.

The Tylenol, it does nothing.

Maybe migraines are contagious and pass from mother to baby and that's why Giggles was bashing his head against every object in the house yesterday. Maybe the confusion is contagious and that's why Bug had to ask me the same questions over and over and over and OVER AND OVER AGAIN! "When's lunch?" "Twelve." "When's lunch?" "Twelve." "When's lunch?" "TWELVE STOP ASKING!" "Don't yell at me, I'm going to be sad." "I told you a hundred- where's your brother?" *THUNK* *blood-curdling scream*

I'm up early today to do some homework. So far, I've gotten two loads of laundry done and a really great breakfast sandwich made but no homework. The good news is I can feel the headache sort of making its way out through a cramp in my neck, so maybe it's over. I wish moms could take sick days.

Feast Your Eyes!

2009-10-28T00:17:00.005-04:00

Hooray! The one night of the year that mothers of boys have more fun dressing up their kids than mothers of girls. Have fun with your fairy princesses and strawberries and grapes and whatnot, moms of girls! I'm going trick or treating with Cobra and THE BAT. As for me, I'll be wearing the world's most economic costume. I'm a genius. I got face glitter. Get it? GET IT? I'll be a Twilight vampire in the sun. Four dollars. Genius.

Otherwise, I'm attempting to cheer up because even though the little ones have been absolute angels today, I'm in a rotten mood due to erm... *cough* the date on the calendar. Let's just leave it at that. I feel like kicking things. So I'm going to ease the rage out of me over a bottle of pinot noir while I boil some eggs to make deviled egg eyeballs for tomorrow's breastfeeding group potluck. I don't know how this is going to turn out. We'll see.

To be fair to myself, though, my rage isn't ENTIRELY unreasonable. I spent the better part of yesterday fighting with my new online speech course. See, it's an online course so clear and concise directions are an absolute must unless I want to spend the rest of my life clicking and emailing, which I don't. It's not clear and concise, though. Did you guess that already? There were 16 pages of directions, mostly links to quizzes all over the damned internet with instructions to "copy and paste" results (into what?) and here's a direct quote "print this out because you'll need to upload it later." If that weren't confusing enough, there's a thing or two just thrown in at random that makes no sense like "when it asks for my email address, enter this (email address here)" and then it never asks for it BUT something 14 pages back asked for it. Did that mean I was supposed to enter it then? WHO KNOWS! Only teacher, that's who! Of COURSE the class page plays music and has animation. And you thought Geoshitties was dead.

Also, I spent $6 on IFC on demand to see John Krasinski's directorial debut Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. Oh. My. God. I like John Krasinski, I do... or at least I did. I might hate him now. I can't believe I sat through the whole thing. I've never seen a bigger pile of string of consciousness bullshit. OH and if I thought the Swedish flick Menn Som Hater Kvinnor (the movie made from the book called The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in English) had enough rape in it to avoid comparison with anyone else ever, well I was wrong. Rape, rape, rapity rape. Here a rape, there a rape, everywhere a rape rape. Here's the whole movie: WARNING: SPOILERIFIC

A guy who is not even Hollywood hideous but at least arguably not Robert Pattinson sits in a gray concrete block room that looks like a prison cell in front of an ugly old table with a jug of water on it being interviewed by the world's least approachable so-called researcher of the effects of feminism on man and shares an uncomfortable story about how sex is uncomfortable for him.

World's least approachable so-called researcher henceforth Ice Queen is at a party scowling into space. We are supposed to sympathize with her, I think.

Another non-hot, non-ugly guy recounts a long boring uncomfortable sex story in the prison cell. Where did Ice Queen get this prison cell? I mean she had to go way the fuck out of her way to find a room like this for conducting interviews.

Ice Queen is scowling at another party but briefly takes a break and chisels the hate out of her face to smile at John Krasinski who gives her the world's most toolish grin and air-clinks his wine glass in reply.

Another monologue. These are getting repetitive and obnoxious. The general theme is that somebody gets USED or hates a woman for being polite to him after he does something really obnoxious in bed.

Ice Queen goes to gatherings with toolish friends, drinks wine and scowls. Various vague comments are made about Ice Queen having a hard time after being dumped by John Krasinski and getting a new shirt from Urban Outfitters, also a haircut that makes her look even more unapproachable.

Some guy talks about getting gangraped.

More monologues.

More of the guy talking about getting gangraped to Ice Queen who could. not. care. less. I mean what does this guy know about misery and pain? At least John Krasinski didn't dump HIM.

MORE MONOLOGUES

John Krasinski comes around and explains that he cheated on Ice Queen and left her after all because the new girl that he originally hated for being nice to him when he was nice to her (seriously EVERY guy in the film says this at some point) recounted a story of being RAPED and in this story, the girl shows her rapist love and now he loves her.

Ice Queen is icy.

The End.

Oh my fucking God six dollars I spent on that.

____________________________________

edited to add:

Just in case there's anyone out there now thinking "Well she just didn't get it." I did. The men were hideous on the inside. That was a stretch. Ice Queen was icy because she built up barriers to protect herself against hideous men and Oh. My. God. the only woman who could break down barriers on the man she once loved only did so by not having any barriers herself. The gangraped dude was her mirror and the pillar of wisdom, saying "I went through worse but I did not put up walls. It did not kill me so it made me stronger" and she resists him because she is not ready. Yes, it's very profound and deep.

It's also about 50 wordy, uncomfortable, painfully unrealistic, repetitive monologues and a universally unlikable cast of characters and WHO DESIGNED THESE SETS?!?! That is all.

House Machines: Activate!

2009-10-21T02:21:00.004-04:00

I have been SO GOOD tonight! I set aside this block of time to watch the meteor shower and did not anticipate the one hundred billion kinks in my plan. Lousy clouds. Just look at them. Sitting up there watching the meteor shower like that tall dude in the movie theater that sits right in front of you. Except this time he's wearing a hat - no, a sombrero. And the theater manager is on his lunch break.

Anyway, so during the time that I was waiting for 1 a.m. (prime meteor shower viewing) I wrote 1,500 words! And then once I finished licking my wounds over the stupid clouds, I did the dishes and folded a bunch of laundry that's been collecting wrinkles in my clean basket and - get this - I washed The Big Blanket at the Bottom of the Laundry Pile. Yes, I wrote pile and not hamper. It's not a mistake. My laundry pile is a separate entity from the laundry hamper(s) and the laundry mound(s) thank you very much. Don't judge me. Anyway, there were all sorts of treasures under The Big Blanket! Coins! Baby toys! A pretty old shirt I almost forgot I had! Ta-da! And now there's a path 22 inches deep into my laundry nook if you just shove aside laundry hamper #2.

Also: the kids were little ANGELS at Brother's birthday dinner tonight! So proud.

Like Eighty Thousand Calories

2009-10-20T16:46:00.002-04:00

Today, I'm just going to give you all a smattering of little updates. I have nothing big to write about but I feel like updating, so here you go.

Tonight I'm going to Brother's birthday dinner. Yeah, I'd LOVE to be going to the Friends of Midwives meeting but they scheduled it way out of town and it's supposed to go until 8:30 so I weighed my children's loss of sleep against family obligations and Brother's birthday dinner won out. Of course he wants to eat somewhere they've never even heard of a salad. How many minutes do I have to go on my stepper to work off 2 pounds of fried noodles? Oh well, it will be yummy.

Yesterday, Brother took the kids for 2 hours. I got myself a new Writer's Digest and a burrito from Chipotle. Good times! I'm still working on my writing and everything but I'm not setting any writing goals or dates or deadlines at all until I'm finished with college. I promised myself when I started classes again that writing as a career would wait until I had a degree in my hand. Any time I set word count goals or anything I either lose sleep or lose control of the house. The kids are just too young and Rock is just too far away for it. But I haven't given up!

I am running on adrenaline and coffee right now because Brother and I stayed up until 3:30 a.m. watching all 37 episodes of Death Note which is officially the first anime I've ever liked, ever. I mean if there were somebody in there I thought I could get away with dressing up as, I would be at the next megacon trying out my Japanese. "MOSHI MOSHI! HAI! ARIGATO!" I'm in love with it. But no, I still won't be convinced to try out anything involving super martial arts powers or robots, especially if the main characters occasionally level up somehow. F that.

Also: it turns out I wasn't the only one who screwed up on Friday! Bug's school planner had a note in there that said "ORANGE COUNTY TEACHER WORK DAY NO SCHOOL!" so I read the part that said "TEACHER WORK DAY NO SCHOOL" and apparently decided that was all I needed to know. You guessed it! I don't live in Orange county. Anyway, I wrote a very apologetic self-deprecating note to the teacher about how stupid I felt with a post script "I hope I wasn't the only one." Her reply? "Nope. There were 2 of you." Somehow this makes me feel better. Bug and I had a nice day at home anyway.

Family Fun!

2009-10-19T13:48:00.003-04:00

Grouchy Grandma (her self-appointed nickname) is in town from Hawaii! So we've been hanging out with her. So far, there's been wine and tacos and X-Men and Zombieland! Zombieland was actually quite good. I think it was just about the most feel-good family zombie movie I've ever seen.

So other than that, there really hasn't been much going on. Tomorrow is a Friends of Midwives meeting AND Brother's birthday. Mom is going to take Brother out to dinner and I'd like to go to that but it's the first Friends of Midwives meeting at the coffee house, but it's Brother's birthday, but I've already got his present planned out for him (trip to Tampa to play poker!), but it's Brother's birthday dinner, but... I dunno. I give up.

Not Quite Enough...

2009-10-12T21:52:00.004-04:00

Finished off my bottle of wine tonight. Well! I'm not breastfeeding anymore. Thought maybe I could get a little tipsy but not quite. Lame. Oh, well. Listening to this lovely song.

Had a nice talk with Husband on the phone last night. He thinks he might actually make it home for Thanksgiving this year! I'm excited. I told him the tradition divides the responsibilities thusly:

WOMEN: cook and get drunk BEFORE dinner

MEN: watch TV and kids, get drunk AFTER dinner

KIDS: be little hellions and give dad a hard time

Ta-da! I defy anyone to disagree. The last few years we've had Denny's for Thanksgiving so I'm really stoked to do a real one this year WOO!

I've been writing a lot lately (in case anyone was wondering) and thinking about how lovely it is that I'm done having children. I'm not at the point where I'd throw myself of a roof if I got pregnant again but I'm thrilled to look forward to the day where I can own breakable things and get manicures while they're at school. Giggles is getting easier and Bug has been easy for a couple of years now. Ahhh. Won't it be nice.

&%!?#@

2009-10-11T04:29:00.003-04:00

Stupid, stupid math tests. I got ONE question wrong. ONE. It was a TRICK. Dammit! Dammit, dammit dammit!

I know, I know. I got an A and I should just shut the eff up because who's crazy enough to make a big deal out of something so stupid? As my CIS professor once said to me "A is the highest grade I can give you, Heather. There is no super-A. You have an A. Jeez." But I just want one class in my life besides that stupid human behavior joke of a class I took senior year of high school to be a flawless 100%. Waste of energy? Yes. Still, though.

Otherwise, nothing much going on BUT Mom returned a costume she bought so that she could get a different one from somewhere else that she liked better (in pursuit of perfect Halloween costume, another complete waste of energy in case you were wondering where I got it from) and they wouldn't just give her the damned money back so I get $50 in store credit to buy the kids' costumes this year! Hooray! I love free stuff.

More Helium, Please!

2009-10-08T01:38:00.003-04:00

Today's breastfeeding group meeting went wonderfully. Last week's did too, for that matter... and the week before, and the week before. I got myself all worked up about it on Tuesday, though, utterly convinced that this or that would go wrong or result in an argument or drama or a division among the members. Yet somehow, magically, it doesn't!

Wednesdays are extremely exhausting for me. The two hours I spend at the group are mostly spent talking about parenting and breastfeeding issues, but the whole time I'm also watching Giggles to make sure he's not killing other children, being killed by other children, getting into something that could kill him, getting into something that could maim him, or pushing buttons on the DVD player. Always with the buttons! At the same time, I'm expending all my efforts on being as diplomatic about everything as possible since SO much of parenting is opinion and SO many tend to have such strong opinions, myself included, and to boot I'm talking at the top of my voice so everyone can hear me over the babies and listening in on various conversations around the room for women who are experiencing problems but too shy to address the group or women who might be starting arguments with others (which hasn't happened yet).

Just how much of this effort is actually necessary for keeping the group as wonderful as it is, I may never know, but today there were some more new members and at the end of it, a few more people telling me they thought the group was fantastic and they were happy to be members of it and, as a friend of mine pointed out to me the other day, people tend to come back! So good for my ego. Why did I ever let it stress me out? It's doing wonders for my inferiority complex. So, I'm pretty high on that accomplishment today and on the fact that Giggles fell asleep at 7:15 while playing with a toy car and the fact that Bug got an extra note from the teacher for doing wonderfully today. I could float over buildings!

My Failure To Communicate

2009-10-06T19:49:00.005-04:00

It's very hard for me to communicate what's going on with Rock and his job and our future prospects and why I'm so frustrated right now. I think the way it comes off is that I'm frustrated disproportionately to our situation since, to my readers, it hasn't changed much. To us, however, things have taken a complete 180. I always wanted this blog to be a place where I could share a lot of things about my life and myself but the more readers I have, the more conscious I have to be about who it all gets back to and the potential consequences of my words. I've been bitten in the ass more than once. So, before I post all kinds of nice pictures and tell you about my weekend, I'm going to end this long one-sided conversation we've been having about Norway and Rock being gone and all that nonsense by asking very kindly for my readers to just take my word for it on the following:

1. Things are different this trip. It's got nothing to do with the kids or my marriage or even me, but things are very, very different and as much as I want to, I really can't say anything about it.

2. No, you don't understand. I'm sorry, but you don't. Single moms generally have ex-husbands they can send their kids to visit and/or jobs that they can go to during the day where they talk to other adults and get lunch breaks. I don't (usually) have money problems and never have child support haggles. I do have a supportive husband. Unless you had a husband that was gone half the year out to sea or something, I don't understand the half of what you went through and you don't understand what I am going through. But I do appreciate your sympathy and thank you for it. Just please please don't compare. It makes us both feel like crap.

3. Everything will be okay one way or the other and Rock and I really believe at this point that somehow it will work out without us moving anywhere (although we'd like to relocate to Washington someday).

4. I usually write on this blog and write emails and just write in general when I have an emotional pebble in my shoe, if you get my drift. Most of the day I'm talking to the kids and playing on the floor with them and listening to my music or reading and having a pretty good time. I'm a happy person in general.

Okay so that's it. Now for my weekend and some pictures.

I spent Friday and half of Saturday at Baby! International Film Festival. It's a traveling film festival featuring many films about childbirth and breastfeeding and so on. Right up my birth junkie alley. Of course I had to represent my breastfeeding group and on Saturday there was the Worldwide Breastfeeding Challenge, in which groups of women all over the world got together and latched their babies on at the same time in an attempt to break the world record. No word yet on whether we did. Giggles did not cooperate. Oh, well. It was fun either way. I saw a lot of women I know but haven't seen in a while and I had a really good time. It's pretty rare that I get locked in a building with a bunch of like-minded women. Good times.

I'm going to list here what all the pics are instead of writing something in between each one because I've recently switched from Firefox to Chrome to fix a few issues I was having and it fixed them but it makes editing in Blogger a bit trickier.

Pic 1: My awesome shirt and a necklace that means "birth" supposedly that I bought from the ICAN booth.

Pic 2: Me and a woman who calls herself an elder and attends births and sings a welcoming song to all the newborn babies. I thought she was awesome.

Pic 3: Me and my midwife

Pic 4: Me, the kids, and Jennie Joseph, the local midwife who hosted the event. She's amazing.

Pic 5: Me and the 5 members of my breastfeeding group that represented us at the world breastfeeding challenge! I'm bursting with pride.

Plans, Plans, Plans...

2009-10-01T20:50:00.004-04:00

I'm off to bed in two minutes so I can be up at about 4 in the morning and make it to all of my comittments tomorrow, but I decided to make a few notes here before attempting sleep.

So Rock agrees that being apart 6 months a year sucks and that he doesn't function quite as well after a while without me, either. We'd fix it right now but of course my bachelor degree is a priority. I need to finish that degree. It would open a million doors and make every choice a million times easier. But after that, we're going to be wherever in the world it is that we can be together ALL YEAR. Even if that's Zimbabwe. We're not going to sacrifice family togetherness beyond that. We've been doing this for three years now and unfortunately may have to continue for three years more but once that degree is in my hand, we're done. And if we find a way to get me that degree and be done before then, we're done at that moment. Zimbabwe, here we come.

It's not good for my mental health to take care of my kids on my own for six months a year. I hesitate to say it's not good for my marriage because I don't think it's necessarily been bad for our relationship. Our marriage, if you'll forgive the sappy Bronte quote, resembles the eternal rocks beneath. It's permanent. I hope I don't jinx myself saying this, but I can't name a single thing in the last five or so years that has even threatened to threaten it. Certainly not this. But it's not good for US. We like being together. We're happier people when we're together. I'm a better mother when we're together - less stressed, happier, more organized. We're miserable apart. The kids get more clingy when he's not here, too, so I know it affects all of us. I can be chipper about it and say that it's not TOO bad since I've got my brother here to help and it hasn't caused any real fights or resentment between me and Rock and it's true, it could be worse, but I've come to realize that this hardship is not necessary, either. I'm more grown up now and I have the tools to thrive wherever I may be.

But don't get all excited. We're not going anywhere for a while. I just needed to make that plan. I needed a concrete end to this toxic routine. Just imagining this going on indefinitely had me distraught. I feel like I'm in control of it now. This is a comfort to me, even if the relief is anything but immediate, and I'm fairly sure it's a comfort to Rock, too. He's not an overly expressive sort of guy, but I'm fairly sure I detected the subtlest undertones of hope and relief.

On another note, I had a talk with my breastfeeding group about how I was just venting on this blog and even though I said I felt like I'd be a hypocrite showing up there while not currently nursing, I was just having a bad day and I didn't mean anything by it and I let them know that it was a support group and not an exclusive club so nobody would be checking them at the door (in case they were worried that a nursing interruption excluded them). I think they all liked that. And they were very supportive of my issues, of course. I've heard from two people now that the problem is probably that Giggles just wants to be more like his older brother and his older brother doesn't nurse. Probably right. In the last two days, I've been able to get the morning feeding back, and for now, I'll take it. He doesn't seem to be getting much, just a bit of comfort sucking, but it's our bonding time so it's nice to have it back.

Well, that's it for now. Off to get six winks and then go run myself ragged all day tomorrow.

Exhausted.

2009-09-29T17:23:00.003-04:00

What am I doing here? What am I doing in Florida? I don't need to be in the states twelve months a year as much as I need to be With My Husband twelve months a year. Giggles has been attempting to destroy my laptop all day, screaming all day for this and that, and not taking his naps the way he usually does. Okay. Normal baby stuff. But then on top of it, he's self-weaning a lot earlier than I thought he would. I have gone through suggestions from friends, kellymom, my giant breastfeeding lexicon, everything, and as far as I can tell, I've done everything right! No bottles, no excessive pacifier use, no letting him walk around with a sippy cup, no 'don't offer, don't refuse' TONS of offering! I know there is probably more I can try at this point but with Giggles screaming "NO!" every time I take my boob out of my shirt, pushing it away, and crawling in the opposite direction, I just feel too worn out to fight him much anymore. This has been a long time coming. It's not an instant strike sort of thing, he's been removing 1 feeding every 10 days for the last 3 months or so. I made it a year. I'm just done. And now I feel like I'm going to go to my breastfeeding group tomorrow and stand in front of them a hypocrite. I'm worried I will feel like I don't fit in. I know they'll be supportive but I will likely beat myself up in my head. I'm worried that I'll be bombarded with suggestions I don't have the energy to try. I need my husband. I need my partner. I know my brother is here and he helps but I need the man who can take one or two of the night wakings (we're having a lot of those lately with Giggles growing teeth and yes, he refuses my boob when he's half-unconscious, too) I need the man who can give them their baths. Talking to my brother when the kids go to sleep is not a substitute for talking to my husband. If a friend or sibling could really do all the work of a spouse, why would so many people go through all the work of marriage? And what's going to happen when my brother finds himself a spouse?

I know, I know. Moving to Norway would cause more problems than it would solve at this point. I need to finish school. That's at the top of my priorities right now. It would affect Rock's green card status. We'd be stuck there for a LONG LONG time. But I just hate this. I'm done. I'm going to finish my degree because dammit, it's WAY overdue, and when I'm done with it, if it looks like Rock is still going to have to spend 6 months a year in Norway for a long time, then we're going there. We need to be together as a family. What is this all for? What's the greater purpose to living in the states?

The longer I spend here the more I realize that the problems I was facing in Norway were not a result of living in Norway but the result of very suddenly having a husband and children to be responsible for. Life is always easy when you have only yourself to think of. I don't know why I built it all up in my head that my locale made all the difference. I guess it's human to hang on to hope. Being here didn't solve much. I'm glad I came back because at least it answered the question "Would things be better in the states?" Answer: like everything, it solved some problems and caused others. Being there wouldn't solve everything either, I know, but it would solve the problem of being a single mom half the year and that's my main problem at the moment. I'm tired of it. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.

Walked!

2009-09-27T23:36:00.010-04:00

The walk was everything and nothing like I expected it to be. Everything because it was wonderful to see so many cancer survivors, bereaved families, and enthusiastic supporters there and nothing because I expected fewer screaming religious zealots and something like zero storm troopers.

I raised $136 which isn't much but I was only fundraising for three days. Next year, I'll start much further in advance. Special thanks to everyone who donated moneys! I won't list names on my blog but they know who they are and they know I love them. My face looks puffy in all of the pictures and I don't know why because I haven't gained any weight and it's bothering me but I'm going to get over it so that I can show you what I was up to last night.

Here's me in my t-shirt that I got for raising over $100

Here's Giggles looking OMG adorable

It was a fairly nice day on Lake Eola but it was a bit warm.

Here's my balloon, gold because I was walking in Minstemann's memory.

Bug's teacher was there! A man from her church died recently of leukemia or lymphoma I can't remember so they had a big group which had apparently raised quite a bit of money. Again with the puffy face. Just don't look at me.

Here's Queen Amidala or Padme or whatever and Pre-Darth Anakin for some reason.

And some storm troopers. These guys were everywhere. I have no good explanation. They had a table, but the only things on it were some Star Wars figurines. Star Wars fans love blood cancer, I guess.

Some dogs in dresses

Here we are at the start of the walk.

These girls were members of a church whose group decided their job was to be cheerleaders and high-five everyone and call them HEROES!!!

Oh, crazy asshole religious zealot shouting to everyone on the walk (which included cancer patients, survivors, and bereaved) that they needed to repent or they would die... why can't you be more like ^^^ THEIR church? (There were THREE of these assholes)

My new leukemia hope bracelet that I bought from the family of these two little leukemia survivors who have now raised brazillions for the cause. I love it. And that about sums it up. I SLEPT after this. More on what I'll be doing in the future tomorrow. Now: wine and movie. WOO!

Light The Night

2009-09-24T01:59:00.003-04:00

I'm walking on September 26th in Orlando - ducking out of math class early and everything to get there on time. Finding a cure for Leukemia and Lymphoma is something I care deeply about. Leukemia killed my nephew and about 3,500 American children this year alone - twice as many adults.

Please consider donating. This time, the money goes toward life-saving research, patient consultations with experts, information sharing, and support groups. Click here for my fundraising page.

Cabin Fevers (whiiiiiiiiiiiiine)

2009-09-23T19:14:00.003-04:00

Spent the day doing nothing much. I had a girl replace me in my breastfeeding group today so that I could stay home. I've got a killer headache and the kids are getting restless and running around the house being destructive.

I'm wondering if I would feel less like crap if I hadn't done EVERYTHING yesterday. My particularly stupid moment was when I got on my stair machine. ("OOh I know, I should exercise! My calves are feeling a little fat.") After 10 minutes, I felt like I was going to die. ("OH GOD THIS WAS A TERRIBLE IDEA!! WHY DID I DO THIS?!") Not smart.

Giggles has been screaming his head off all day long and Bug has completely lost his patience with sitting around the house. It seems like forever to bedtime. Do I really still have to cook dinner? Ugh.

Inhuman

2009-09-23T02:49:00.004-04:00

I am the FLU WARRIOR!

Okay it's not that bad, really, but I am pretty sure it's the flu. I have every symptom of it, it's just sort of... not too bad. It's mild. It's a mini-flu. It may be a strain I've had before or been vaccinated against before, or a very close cousin. Bug had a fever for two solid days, though, and Giggles I'm sure is coming down with it based on the blood curdling screams and fitful night (that's how it started for Bug, except whining instead of screaming).

Whenever Rock's paycheck comes in, it's a mad dash to catch up on all the bills and errands that have been waiting so impatiently for it. Today was no exception. I drove all over central Florida getting my stuff done. Bug got to stay home with his uncle and lay around the couch and play video games, but Giggles and I were not so lucky. Giggles was unhappy in the back seat and when we stopped to share a sandwich and iced tea, he spilled everything all over his front and had to stay like that through one last errand and then all the way home. Some things had to be rescheduled. He was not happy. I was not happy.

In any case, a whole LOT got done and thank goodness for that because none of it could wait, really. I'm magic. It seems to have caught up with me now, though, and I feel like hell. Dishes washed, kid tornado messes picked up, bills paid, phone calls made, errands run, replacement for me in my breastfeeding group tomorrow FOUND, I should have been in bed over an hour ago but NO! Whoops! I forgot that Giggles was all out of clean diapers so those are in the wash now and I have to wait until the hot cycle is done before I can throw them in the dryer and get myself some little slices of death.