Monday, November 27, 2006

do the (best) right thing

So the ball is rolling. Finally. After a miserable few days worrying about this kitten, about what the right thing to do is, what the best thing to do is, I decided that to put it in the hands of the local animal control officer. I didn't get into the whole "rabid kitten" thing because I've seen the kitten around and if he were end stage rabies on Friday, he'd be as bad or worse today. He's not. He's not drooly and seems perky, friendly, and not psycho-rabid or stuporous rabid. Regardless, he needs veterinary attention. I just called the city's animal control number and left a message with the highlights of the situation. I don't feel like it's resolved, but I feel a little bit better for having done something to get things started.

The scenario I am hoping for is that animal control will compell her to either prove the kitten has been to the vet or they will take the kitten. If it's the latter, I think my sister may have just won herself a kitty. If it's the former, that works too for the immediate sense in that the kitten will get seen by a vet sooner than it apparently would if it were left entirely up to dumber and dumbest. In the longer term, having it on file that there was a complaint means if I find that cat out in wretched weather in the future, I make another call, and (I hope) at that point animal control will simply remove the cat. And either way, my sister may be getting a kitty.

I decided to do it this way because the girl and her man seem to be approaching this as some kind of battle of wills, mine versus theirs. It is not. There are laws about this sort of shit and I could have just turned her ass in without even a knock on her door. She doesn't realize it was a courtesy of me to even discuss this with her, let alone to offer to facilitate her getting the kitten the proper attention and care it needs. Putting it into the realm of animal control, I hope, will frame it in a different, less debatable context for her. She insists on being unreasonable, I insist that the kitten be cared for, but in the end I don't have the right or authority to compell her to take the kitten to the vet. Animal control does. Now I keep my (kitten scratched) fingers crossed and hope animal control calls back soon and does what seems to be the best right thing.

Sunday, November 26, 2006

damned if I do...

As the saying goes. It's very applicable today.

See, if I push the girl with the cat, it could make things worse. But not pushing the girl with the cat seems to have at least equally nasty possible outcomes, with a few added ones like me feeling personally responsible for failing to act should any of those potential bad outcomes come to be.

I could then resolve to push, but not so hard that I would cause her to fail to be moved. But then I have to wonder...how hard is too hard?

I also wonder what I am truly willing and able to do if I, pushing or not, find that she fails to act.

This is a wretched and frustrating mental process to be stuck in. It can go on and on, and will if I allow myself to dwell on it. I know there is NOTHING productive I can do tonight. Therefore I have been trying to put it out of my mind as best I can. Unfortunately, that is easier said than done.

Saturday, November 25, 2006

thankful

There's a lot to be thankful for this week. My cat even should be thankful. What he should be thankful for is to not have an owner who is as irresponsible and rotten as my neighbors. My neighbors have a kitten. He is very small and happens to be one of those cats who loves people. He just can't get enough of people. All he wants to do is sit in your house and enjoy company. He is in fact not very demanding, simply the presence of people seems to be all he desires. However, my neighbors have determined that cats can live outdoors, as is evidenced by the large number of apparent strays living outdoors around our apartments. Therefore, they reason, a 7 month old unneutered unvaccinated loving companion seeking cat who is neither feral nor totally a stray can live outdoors.

Why would you want to do this? Aside from just being a fucking moron, it seems there are some reasons for their choice to inflict outdoors only restrictions on this cat. The reasons are "my roommate is allergic" and "my boyfriend doesn't like cats". This was said by the very young woman who owns this cat. I think she does care for the cat. The problem is, she has two men telling her what to do. And the bigger problem is she believes them.

Rather than see her kitten end up a smear on our driveway the other night, my sister decided he should be moved indoors briefly while she moved her car (don't want to park in the wrong spot, we have assigned parking). So she brought him in briefly. This turned into him following a neighbor's visitor in the next day and getting stuck in our hall. Which then turned into him staying in the hall for most of the day, then working his way into my kitchen. My cat watched in horror from behind the french door to the rest of the house. "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?" he seemed to be slapping out with his swishing tail while all this kitten attention took place.

Now I was not overly happy to have this kitten in here. I really wasn't. Cute aside, I already caught something from a cat with even less contact but in a similar situation. Years ago, I had just moved into my (then) new apartment with Tom. One of my neighbors, Terry, had many children and pets and just kept getting more. She was wretched. She treated her children and her pets horribly. I never knew which I was going to find standing outside my kitchen window, crying in my garden. Seriously, it was either Tima or one of the never ending supplies of kittens Terry's cats seemed to produce. When I moved in, I witnessed Tima, her sister, and a couple of other stray kids dunking one of Terry's cats in the kiddie pool. Poor Shadow. That cat put up with a lot. I stopped the kids and then sat with them towelling Shadow off. It turns out Shadow had ticks and I got one. Then I got Lyme disease and I've not been well since.

So while I adore cats, I am reluctant to get too cosy with outdoors ones, even if they are cute skinny kittens who are left outside on a cold soaking rainfilled day. I did feel that it was ok to have him in the hall though. This turned into my patting him, feeding him, and playing with him because I am a softy and he was so cute and sweet. He gave me a small scratch, I can't remember if it was when we were playing with him or when I was trying to see if I could get him to go back out (this was early on when I was still hoping my neighbors were home and hadn't gone to check out his outdoor "bed" the girl had set up for him at her boyfriend's direction).

As it became clear they were not coming home that night, we decided to set the kitten up in the hall with a bed, food, and a litter box. It was better than the outdoor box the neighbor had set up for him and there was food.

Today I went over to talk to her about the kitten. I was hoping to either convince her to bring him in a little more or to let someone adopt him. She wasn't having any of it. In the meantime, I noticed kitten had started drooling. I had thought he felt warm, possibly feverish. No, I'm seroius. One of my other neighbors even commented on it (kitten had made his way into her house too earlier in the day). So by the time the girl and her man came over to collect the kitten from my hallway, the kitten had full on drool and was indeed rather warm.

Fuck. "Um...did you ever get his shots?" I asked twisting my feet into a knot which is what I do when I am nervous or holding in a violent impulse. "No...we didn't have time. And I was waiting to get a job to take him to the vet," she said to the floor and not to me. Her boyfriend had researched outdoor accommodations for cats, he told me this. But in this internet frenzy of research to justify neglecting the cat, they hadn't bothered to look into the low cost spay/neuter/vaccination programs in the area. Which are ample.

That there's the final straw. Not only do I now have to know this MORON, this supreme idiot, this selfish rotten child of a woman who lets men trample not just on her but on the things she loves without regard for the fact that some of those things are living feeling creatures (yeah mommie issues), this door mat is letting her kitten stay outside and doesn't want him in because she's afraid he'll get "spoiled" and want to be indoors all the time - not only do I have to know she is over there abusively neglecting her cat, but now I have to wonder do I have fucking rabies.

Mother fuckity fuckola. There's precious little I can do at the moment. I don't want to call animal control and have the kitten killed and tested. He wasn't acting odd, just drooling and feverish. I'm really hoping it's that he's losing his kitten teeth. His breath was foul and I guess they can get fevers when they are losing their teeth. I'm still calling my doctor on Monday but I'm also going to be a royal pain in this girl's ass until she takes the kitten to the vet. She said she'd try to take him tomorrow (I guess the drooling alarmed even her although I give it 1/2 hour after she and the man left before he was able to talk her out of it). She's going to wish she never learned the word "CAT" if she doesn't get him to a vet ASAP. No, not threats of retribution. Just me, at her door, several times a day every day until she at least gets the kitten checked out. You might be thinking "wow she's a total hypochondriac". I might too if I hadn't caught Lyme in such a similar way just a few years back. Since I did though, I prefer to think of it as anxiety that has a basis in a seriously shitty experience. If I have some proof kitten saw the vet and the vet said it's all good, that'll be enough for me. Until then, I'll be a little bit twitchy (although hopefully not in the literal sense).

My cat should be thankful I kept him the hell out of the kitchen, away from the kitten, and that I washed my hands every time I patted it and changed my clothes at least every other time. He should also be thankful I'm not a total idiot like this chick. And I am thankful that although I have done some supremely, spectacularly stupid shit for the men in my life from time to time, I don't think I've ever sunk that low.

I am not thankful that I now need to call my doctor on Monday and tell her I got scratched by a drooling febrile unvaccinated kitten in a state where rabies is like the fucking catch of the day. More joys of living in the middle of buttfuck nowhere rural New England. In case you can't tell, thankful or not, I am in a bit of a rotten mood about this. Mostly, I think, because I am in shock that someone as just, well, ungodly irrationally stupid as her continues to exist. We can only hope her stupidity facilitates her rapidly removing herself from the gene pool before she spawns. I plead guilty to some dumbass thinking for letting myself get cozy with the kitten, but for fuck's sake, it was a cold wet skinny little kitten howling to come inside from the rain. At least my stupidity had some heart in it.

Monday, November 20, 2006

global o!

This is so my speed. Not my style - the acoustic guitar serenade when you get to the site is a bit er, not me. And the stuff about male sexual displays being aggression and war is a weak tie in at best. BUT....as a concept I think it's fucking great. That time of year needs some good positive energy and I'm all for being a part of that.

Pass it on!

The more info part (from globalorgasm.org)
This is the First Annual Solstice Synchronized Global Orgasm for Peace, leading up to the December Solstice of 2012, when the Mayan Calendar ends with a new beginning.

The intent is that the participants concentrate any thoughts during and after orgasm on peace. The combination of high- energy orgasmic energy combined with mindful intention may have a much greater effect than previous mass meditations and prayers.

The goal is to add so much concentrated and high-energy positive input into the energy field of the Earth that it will reduce the current dangerous levels of aggression and violence throughout the world.

Global Orgasm is an experiment open to everyone in the world.

WHO? All Men and Women, you and everyone you know.

WHERE? Everywhere in the world, but especially in countries with weapons of mass destruction.

WHEN?
Winter Solstice Day - Friday, December 22nd,
at the time of your choosing, in the place of your choosing and with as much privacy as you choose.

WHY? To effect positive change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible surge of human energy a Synchronized Global Orgasm. There are two more US fleets heading for the Persian Gulf with anti-submarine equipment that can only be for use against Iran, so the time to change Earth’s energy is NOW!

"corporate-style management"

Selections from the AP story below. Check out the last line.

Pay packages rise for college presidents
WASHINGTON - More college presidents are earning annual compensation of $500,000 or more, fueled in part by stiff competition by schools for the best candidates, according to a study.


Some 112 of the 853 public and private university presidents surveyed said they had pay and benefits packages of more than half a million dollars, according to an annual report being published Monday in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The jump was more prominent among public university presidents, rising from 23 last year to 42. The median pay package for those leaders is now $374,846, about 4 percent higher than last year's median of $360,000.
....
The survey attributed the pay increases to increased competition for top candidates, who are seeking more money amid growing job duties and a move toward more "corporate-style" management at universities.

Shameless? Yep. And rather irksome. Especially when you consider the rate of increase in college tuition at four year schools. What a racket! There are hiring freezes and early retirement offers as part of the corporate style management. The trend is to replace the lost teaching staff with contingent labor, people who are just as qualified as their 20 year senior peers were when they first came on the market. But these folks are coming onto the market in the new era of "corporate style management" of universities. This leaves them with prospects of temp jobs with no or few benefits and lower pay scales than those offered for the few tenure track faculty positions.

The next time you're wondering why you or your kid is taking 6 years (without time off for bad behavior) to finish what used to be a 4 year degree due to lack of availability of class space or a total absence of decent academic advising, consider how much these jackasses at the top are making. Kinda pisses you off, huh? Does it piss you off enough to write to your state legislators and tell them this is a disgusting use of your money? It does me, although I doubt it would help in my state. The appropriations committee chair is in my university's pocket.

Friday, November 17, 2006

T.G.I...fuck

On the cusp of a migraine, this morning I woke up to the sounds of my musically inclined neighbor. She plays the harp and her name is something that sounds like a name you know but is not. She was not playing the harp. From her apartment was some kind of wind instrument. I like strings of pretty much any variety. I fucking hate wind instruments. Some more so than others, but pretty much the entire set is bothersome to me.

And what was being played on this wind instrument?

It was christmas music.

Continuing to sleep was out of the question, but a little dead kennedys on the ipod at least took the edge off being awake. This is not how I wanted to wake up. I had already realized 10 minutes before that (a) we had no coffee left (b) I couldn't go get any because my car was in the shop and A____'s is a stick and (c) Neither one of us had any cash left on us so even if I did wake A_____ and ask him to go get coffee, the mission had just become more complicated than the drive through down the street.

Flutey christmas music was like salt for my wound.

And I am noticing this is starting to look unpleasantly like a pattern. Oh say it isn't so....

Last Friday, it was the carbon monoxide detector. While I am glad it works and got me out of bed, several things surprised me about it. One was how easily I could have stayed in bed.
The other is how hard it is to do what you know is right (e.g. call 911, pack up your cat, sit on the porch with laptop and kitty and no coffee) when there is no immediate sensable evidence that you should.

See, it turns out there was a good reason for the CO detector to be going off last week, and that would be the presence of CO. It seems the unseasonably warm weather shut off our oil burner, which, when it restarts, causes a build up of gas. At least this is how the landlord explained it a day later when he called back - that it happened once before when the weather was warm (hey don't bother telling anyone, I mean it's just the carbon monoxide alarm and all). Landlord fixed it later last Friday by coming over and opening the windows to air out the basement.

Good. Meanwhile, I guess most of the night at least, it was wafting up....up into the spaces around the furnace, spaces like my apartment and the hallway where the CO detector was.

I'm not saying I narrowly escaped death. I don't think there was that much gas. I think though that I might have escaped a rotten sick head feeling for the rest of the day. And I think I had my ability to actually respond to an alarm tested. I discovered that when there is JUST an alarm going off, when it doesn't say what it is (see this isn't the old school bat cave, not EVERYTHING has a label on it), when you have people standing around saying "oh my I wonder what that is?", when one of those people is a man who talks like he's taking charge and going to deduce what is causing this based on whatever, his fucking Y chromosome and male pattern baldness (not loving guys this week), it's really HARD to go into your apartment, pack up your kitty, and call 911. Maybe it's years of conditioning based on meaningless latenight false fire alarms in my dorm as a younger woman, but I discovered there was almost a physical force to overcome to take the alarm seriously.

So that's my Friday so far, this one and the one before. This one has resolved...the dead kennedys/pixies shuffle seems to have done the trick.

I really gotta get me an mp3 player of some sort if I'm going to get through the holidays (wait, I mean the birth of jesus christ. Related - do you think these (self) righteous media sluts will start a campaign to boycott people who don't say "god bless you" when someone sneezes?).

Monday, November 13, 2006

how to

Oh jeez. I'm stuck in my lecture writing. The problem is how do I explain this to my students? Is it better to oversimplify it, to confuse them with a detailed description which would necessarily include a lengthy history of the very larger context issue, or do I just skip it and say something like "and there's another theory which assumes you don't infer reality?" I'm too tired to sort this out tonight.

Sunday, November 12, 2006

Cost

"I think your mother and I have more than paid for what we did when you kids were younger"

That is the latest from my dad, said to little brother T on the heels of T's latest meth mess. Of course, the latest meth mess was very near to the previous meth mess. I sometimes feel like I should be counting in between to know when the storm will be above me.

During the meth messes, there's a sliver of semi-lucid but totally dysphoric thinking before a descent into full psychosis. That sliver tends to involve excruciatingly critical thought where T focuses on whatever he's done which he thinks might have made his life right now wrong or bad enough that it is so impossible for him to live without meth. He doesn't put it like that but this seems to be what is going on. This time, his demon driven inner critic picked living with parents as "what needs to change".

My sister and I couldn't agree more that living with them is horrible. But this is not because of the unseemliness of a 34 year old living with mom (and dad). I think some slack could be cut for someone who turned HIV positive when he was only 24 and supposed to be starting out feeling fearless over confidence in his own ability. I'd argue that this kind of arrogance is common in 24 year olds and is necessary to get us through the transition from adolescence to adulthood. To be given what at the time was a certain death sentence, and one with still quite large stigma in the larger social context, has got to take some of the wind out of that sail.

My sister and I don't like the living with mom and dad thing because mom and dad are abusive fucked up people and like many abusive parents, they continue inappropriate, hurtful behavior even with their grown children. Although the hitting stopped as soon as we were old enough to potentially hit back (with my dad, with my mom it's a different story), they have no regard for boundaries and continue a pattern of emotionally abusive behavior. One example of their continuing and intolerable behavior is the chronic attempts to exonerate themselves for what they did when we were kids. This is a large part of why my sister and I won't have dealings with them. It is dangerous to our health. Personally I feel it risks my freedom as well since my interactions with them in my late twenties often ended with nearly violent fights. I decided it was better for me to stay away from them after hearing my father snarling at my 30 year old sister and then kicking the dogs. I was angered to a frighteningly severe point and it was all I could do not come after him with whatever was around. My mother was intentionally antagonistic, setting up times for us to have mother daughter moments together then sabotaging them, then using the failed "moment" to have a tantrum where she would say things like "you're dead to me!"

My sister made the same kind of decision a short time after I did. My brother noticed my parents' continuing horrible behavior, how it stifled our adult identities in very damaging ways. He talked about it, had nightmares about it, and then lost himself in meth and k.

My mother's a pro at the exoneration game. She can work in a plea for extenuating circumstances or co-victim status masterfully as if she were expressing guilt or remorse for her failings as a parent, prompting you to say things like "it's ok" when you know it's really not. My father is either less skilled at or less comfortable with the subtle approach. He chooses a more direct tactic, like the example at the start of this post. This is odd because he was the more physically abusive one. You'd think it would be harder for him to reconcile a desire to believe he did nothing wrong with years of memories of assaulting his own children. However, it seems he has convinced himself that we owe him some sort of absolution.

Even if he had spent the last 15 years being the best dad ever, what he wants is not an option. It is just not possible in this case. The guilt he feels he has paid off was not placed on him by a court. His (and my mother's) "guilt" is a natural guilt. It is a simple and direct consequence of repeatedly harming children who were in their care and who therefore had no hope of avoiding them, no other recourse, no one else to tell them they did not suck or did not deserve to be ground down emotionally and physically. The guilt they have is a consequence of destroying lives they charged themselves to foster. And because the guilt here is not an artifact of a legal system, it is not debatable. It is consequence. Hurt someone over and over and you are guilty of hurting someone over and over. They might move past it, replace it with something good later, but the history is still there. Hurt someone over and over as they are becoming a person and you will have written the act and your part in it into their existence completely and inextricably.

If we keep up with the analogy, it is fair to say my father admits some guilt but believes he has paid his debt and is arguing that he has served his time in guilt prison. See, he thinks the sentence and the guilt are separate things. He's wrong. The guilt is the sentence. There's not a debt, there's a mark, an unhealing wound that each of his children can at best bandage and treat gently. For my father, the sentence is what he created - hate, distrust, anxiety, pain, damaged people who will measure their success not in terms of living a good rewarding life but in terms of not harming others as they were harmed and not letting fear of being harmed again limit and color every aspect of their existence.

My point is that no matter what my parents may have convinced themselves of, there's no getting off the hook on this one. There's only pretense and denial, and that seems to be exactly what my father is pleading right now. Because my sister and I won't speak to our parents, and because our brother lives with them, my father is making his case to my brother. You'd think if he were convinced that such a wrong thing to do were somehow a legitimate and plausible option, he'd have tried to make the plea to me. I'm the one he didn't hit much. I'm the one who inherited his temper. I'm the one who is most like him. I'm also the one who most recently and directly called him on his shit, reminding him that if you intimidate and push people they just might push back, and that bullies who live in old man bodies shouldn't antagonize the very people they damaged. Could be this is why dad's not asking me, that and convenience. My brother is conveniently located, right there in the same house. So dad is pimping his "debt paid" shit to my brother.

Even if my brother were inclined to accept my father's logic, my brother cannot choose to ignore the damage done by what we were raised in. As with all of us, it is part of him. He can choose to find ways to channel it, to address and express it in safe areas and with safe people. He can try to find the social equivalent of a bomb squad to help him defuse the explosive devices his trauma will occasionally build in his soul. He can choose to subject it to attempts at emotional alchemy. He can do any number of things, but he cannot refuse that it is there, which is essentially what my father is asking. To attempt to do that risks my brother's soundness of mind, and that is already something in short supply these days.

Which brings me to the next point. Whether my father consciously intends it or not, this strategy of his can only serve to further the abuse. It is abusive to try to coerce my brother into declaring my father's time served. There is no way my brother can do that without assuming some of the guilt himself.

So what is it that dad thinks he and my mother paid for?
Let's make a list.
For inviting my mother's adopted father who was an unconvicted, untreated pedophile to live with us when we were 3, 4, and 5.
For using my mother's father as a babysitter, thus giving him access to us and putting us into a position where we were expected to recognize him as an authority.
For failing to respond appropriately when my sister informed them (hey big surprise) that he was sexually abusing her.
My father: For letting my mother "handle it"
My mother: For "handling it" by alerting her father to the accusation, the result of which was that her father stopped trying for my sister and redoubled his efforts with me and my brother.
My father: For beating the shit out of my brother and sister over and over and over and over and over......
For making me a witness to it.
For abusing my brother and sister in violent but not battery ways, like locking my brother in a small laundry hamper in the basement, then leaving him down there in the dark for what seemed like hours.
For force feeding my sister a piece of cheese that she tried to feed the dog. The dog licked it a few times, decided she didn't want it, then walked away and left it on the floor. My father grabbed it, grabbed my sister with his fist balled up in her hair, pulled her head back and literally stuffed it down her throat. She gagged and cried and choked on it. How many years of guilt do you serve for that? How fucking many?
For behaving in every interaction with us as if we were the most loathsome and criminally reprehensible of beings because we did things like NOT PICK UP ALL OUR TOYS or DIDN'T IMMEDIATELY STOP LAUGHING AT SOMETHING or WATCHED A TV SHOW THAT STUPID PEOPLE LIKE or WANTED TO DRINK TANG AND EAT WONDER BREAD or ACTED "CUTE" or any number of things kids just do.
For more often than not storming into a room and when he wasn't hurting people breaking stuff like the tv (kicked, thrown out window) and the phone (ripped out of the wall).
For calling my sister stupid, retarded, moron, ditzy, empty headed, a space cadet, dipshit, maggot, little bitch, ungrateful little shit, selfish pieceof shit....
For mocking my brother when he cried after being beaten.
For becoming enraged at hearing any of us cry when he scared us.
My mother: For letting it happen even though she knew (and I knew she knew because I wrote her notes telling her).
For letting it happen.
For letting it happen.
For letting it happen.
For facilitating it.
For being drunk and inappropriate (she once open mouth kissed my brother then laughed about it, made jokes about masturbation a lot).
For leaving.
For systematically invalidating my anger at my parents' horrible behavior.
For confiding in my sister with her personal marital problems with my dad, thus robbing my sister of a genuine mother figure.
For acting as if our love was never good enough.
For flipping out and beating the shit out of at least my sister and me in public places.
For writing stories where characters which strongly resemble her own children fantasize about having sex with their parents...and asking us to read them.
For getting drunk at parties and sobbing to strangers that she shouldn't have ever had children because we were so horrible.
For gettting drunk at home and sobbing to her mother that she shouldn't have ever had children because we were so horrible.
For violating each and every boundary we so desperately needed in that house.
For threatening us with foster homes when DSS came in (finally) to investigate the claims about her father's sexual abuse of us.
For lying at family therapy.
For attacking me, occasionally physically and always with unwarranted spite, repeatedly the summer before I started college and was out of the house more than I was in (but never in any trouble).
For her tantrums at christmas, birthdays, and many other holidays which usually involved booze and were often in public.

I know there's more but these are the ones that occur off the top of my head. If I were to count each and every instance of only the most horrible and concrete of this list, their guilt is worth at least three lifetimes of regret, one for each of their children. Neither of them has the right to ask for absolution from any of us for their acts or for the outcome of their acts. To speak of having "paid for" any of this is absurd, and I'm pissed off enough that I'm thinking of finding a public and punitive way of telling them so. If only I had free time and some money...I'd sue their asses. Not because I'm a fan of litigious solutions but since my father has chosen to wrap his inappropriate desire in that framework, it strikes me as just to consider a very public accounting of the crime and the cost.

Addendum: I just found this. So it seems my parents are in fact still open for a lawsuit, at least civil if not also criminal. I just might look into this, seriously. I don't have a lot of free time and I have even less money, but maybe the inquiry will make me feel better.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

fuck santorum!

Of all the election results news, I think this one warms my heart the most:
In Pennsylvania, Democrat Bob Casey, son of a popular former governor, soundly defeated incumbent Sen. Rick Santorum, a conservative and third-ranking member of the Senate GOP leadership.
To hell with a victory toast. I think all of us, gay, straight, and in between should have a victory fuck in honor of his defeat. And just for fun, try something different. I think Rick would have wanted that much at least.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

voting is hot

It's backwards. The turn out I mean. More people go out and vote in an election where their vote is dilluted and filtered through an intermediary body, the electoral college, than go out and vote in elections where they directly elect someone. What the hell is wrong with people? I blame the media in part, but really they are just whores packaging and reselling us what we want to hear and see. At least most of the time.

So what's wrong with people that they can't see the so called "off year" elections as the big deal they really are? My guess is it's just not as sexy as voting for president. Oooh, president, you know? One way to address low turn out for elections then would be more hype of a sexy sort. I advocate t-shirts and pins that say "Kiss me, I voted!" Yeah, it's dumb but think about how cool it would be if as many people voted and got into voting as are into say St. Patrick's day. And along those lines, there should be festivities around voting and political participation. Voting eve and day bar nights, including politically themed trivia games. Costumes might be fun, dress up as your favorite (or least favorite) politician, statesman, or political concept (liberty, justice, bureaucracy).

Here's one for you. There's all sorts of bitching and moaning about the lack of participation in the under 25 set. Ok, so you'd think folks would do something to address that, right? All of these proposals would help. Less commercial and frivolous would be if universities took an active role in promoting political participation. My own university, for example, has NOTHING up on the website about voting, voter registration, where students can vote, etc. Any visits by politicians to our campus are announced through chalk on the sidewalks, not through university wide email or posting on any of the various university sites. This sends a message that the university administration just doesn't care about engaging students in active citizenship. And why should they? If the students started noticing state level political processes, they might start lobbying their state legislators about issues which the university would rather they not care about, e.g. rising tuition costs, too high student to faculty ratios, and corroding or unsafe student facilities.

I'm about to go vote in my new town. Registering was one of the first things I did after moving in. I can't imagine doing things any other way. When more young people feel this way, then maybe we'll see some interesting changes in our government. Until then, I'm thinking of starting a club at my university for the sole purpose of making and distributing "Voting is hot" t-shirts. Because it is.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

lost and found

"did you ever find my digital camera?" my ex asked me numerous times after our breakup. To which I invariably responded "NO".

Sometimes I responded testily. Sometimes I was even very nasty about it. I was annoyed that he persisted in thinking I knew where his camera was. I had been very good about not trashing his shit, about not hanging onto trophies or whathaveyou. As much as it sucked, I made the effort to maturely and discretely return all of his crap as I found it. Maturely and discretely mean I grouped stuff together and left it for him in the department, rather than using each new find as an excuse to call him with harassing requests to come over to pick them up, or with screeching psycho threats to set fire to it all on his family's lawn.

Admittedly, a few things remain in a box in the trunk of my car, mostly stuff he gave to me or pictures of him and/or his family that I have no need for. I hadn't seen his camera during the miserable months long process of finding his shit mixed in with mine. Moreover, I was quite sure there was no reason it would have ever been at the apartment I moved to after we split up in June of 05. The breakup had been coming all spring of 05, at least that long. As I recalled, we hadn't exactly been filling up the hard drives with snapshots of this happy time, (although it turns out there were a few, some of which at this point count as nearly amusingly horrid).

Further, he was barely around once we moved apart in June of 05 - him to rush off months in advance to move closer to his 30 miles from campus crappy nontenure track one year lecturer appointment at a satellite campus while he finished his dissertation and me to move into the shitty but what counted for affordable near campus little rat trap apartment while I tried to get this last chapter of grad school underway.

So why the fuck would his camera be at my place? And more to the point, why the fuck should I know where he dropped all the things that were important to him in his rush to get his dissertation hand stamp which he believed would give him unfettered access to fully competent adulthood-world?

"It's probably in some family member's car" I had snapped at him the last time he asked. In July, we had that last big fight. You know the one, the one you've had over and over but this time you see just how far apart you are and you are so TIRED of trying to fix it that you are crying just from sheer exhaustion. We decided to give it "a break", at least while he worked on his latest draft of his dissertation. During that time, he took off for the beach with his family. Had he come back, finished up, and had anything remotely eloquent to say to me on his return, things might have gone differently. He didn't. He did happen to mention he had gone to Boston to visit the art museum with "a friend" (whom he later exchanged promise rings with - that's right, during our "break" for him to work on his dissertation he was instead taking trips with his family and hanging out with "ass like an ibook" friend).

That pretty much cemented the breakup.

So here we are, well over a year later, and what has turned up in my most recent move? That's right. It's his camera. I found it the last day of my move.

The battery was dead but it turns out my lovely new laptop has a reader for the memory card. Presto, there they were. Some quite nice pictures I had taken with his camera during the Spring of 2005, before the move, before the breakup.

I took off all the pictures I wanted and left him with the pretty nature pictures he can tell his family he took (he'd done this in the past) and pictures of himself, since that will be important to him, to ibook ass lady, and to his family. I also left on this one of me since I do of course plan to return the camera.

Friday, November 03, 2006

In the air

There was something in the air today. Preseasonal promos on the radio. The house near the mall flashing out a cheerfully bright message - that in just 52 days, the christmas consumerism marathon will culminate in one week of too much family, too much booze, and slipper socks. Ah christmas. It's not a day. It's a fucking ideology.

It wasn't upon me yet. I was aware of the christmas items encroaching on the halloween aisle around October 26, however it seems I had been even more self absorbed than usual with my midsemester move. I think this inward attention had saved me from noticing these christmasy things on too acute a level. That or my mother and brother tag team calling me throughout my move to give me updates on my brother's most recent, disasterous meth-moment. It ended with the hospital, I was told by phone as I was cleaning the toilet at my new place.

On my way home tonight, I stopped for movies and food. The guy at the counter in the video store mentioned that he was on CNN today. "Really?" I said, genuinely pleased to be interacting with people again but torn about displaying too much interest which might encourage a full conversation. Mostly I was worried about the mood of the growing line of people behind me. Friday at 5 PM in the video store involves a lot of people who are no doubt hoping to get this done fast before getting home. The impatience was palpable but since this is CT, the people behind me merely shifted around, stepped up a little closer to me, and pressed their already overly thin lips together more tightly when the kid added "it was a crowd shot but I was totally on CNN for like 5 seconds!" Someone behind me snapped at her children "Asia! You get over here now. Where's your brother?"

After escaping with only a few more huffs and exasperated puffs from the uptight citizens of NE CT, I went to the supermarket next door.

About 10 paces into the supermarket it hit me. The stench of christmas. It took a few unfortunate passed through that area for me to realize where it was coming from - a big bin of bags of scented pine cones. The "scent" was like cinnamon but cinnamon on steroids and wearing an entire bottle of some horrid 1970s cologne (like "big game rhino").

I'm not antiperfume or scent. But I am one of those people who is rather sensitive to smell though. Chemically stinking shit like the reek emanating from a vat of big game cinnamon scented pine cones puts me into some kind of overdrive nauseated brain scramble.

I worked my way through the supermarket taking too long on account of being brain scrambled, forgetting most of what I came for and abandoning several items in order to avoid having to cut back past the cones once I had identified them as the source of the holly jolly stink.

The nearly inescabable smell assault made me realize something though. I'm totally fucked this christmas. See, several months ago, I started having sort of intrusive music issues. This has not ever been the case with me. I'm not one of those people who go around humming things, who gets song after song stuck in her head. Or at least I didn't used to be. Sure, the occasional "ear worm" would make it's way in now and then. But not ever to this constant level. The nice thing has been that I found I can usually "reprogram" it when I want to by thinking of another song. But that assumes I am not being subjected to nonstop external stimuli of the musical variety. This year, with the constant stream of christmas music just around the corner, I fear my mental ipod will be permanently stuck on a wretched yuletide shuffle, prompted by too frequent sensory collisions with bells and chimes, blaring horns and hurried strings, and other seasonal musical slop.


Bing-bong bing-bong!
Hurry up and start buying some SHIT for christmas!
It's just around the corner...

...through there, down the hall, and around the next corner.
The lightswitch is on your right.