surreality

Cat reality TV
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Ten cats in search of owners will spend the next 10 days in a New York store window, their every move caught on camera for a reality TV show on which they will compete for best sleeper and mouse-catcher.

Of course this scenario is very very far from "reality" for cats. Feline reality does not involve living in "a luxuriously outfitted cat-sized house that includes scaled-down sofas, beds, a fish tank (with fake fish), kitchen and a porch". I do think it's an interesting and creative way of promoting adoption of pets, and I guess that's why there are several shelters and organizations on board with it. Although it is rather commercial (Meow Mix is the major sponsor so it's Meow Mix stuff everywhere), who can resist a cat on a cat sized leopard print sofa? Not me.

One thing that I find amusing and a little annoying/disturbing is how few cats are visible on the "house" webcams. Occasionally a cat ventures on screen, and then a person, usually in a yellow shirt, comes in and poof, no more cat.
Come on! I want to see a cat on a cat sized sofa dammit!



Here's a guy who I keep seeing on the webcams. He's in and out a lot. Looking for cats I guess. He should ask the woman in the yellow shirt. She knows where they are.



See, she found one and she's about to pounce.

Oh hey, look! Finally, a cat on a cat sized couch. And not a yellow shirt in sight.
images are screen captures from http://www.meowmixhouse.com/webcamsite.html June 13, 2006

Tuesday

I don't normally go out of my way to eat donuts. I've got nothing against them. I think it might be that donuts are the kinds of things you eat one of and then wonder why the hell you ate it. Yeah, it tasted yummy, but not that yummy and now you have that strangely waxy donut residue in your mouth. And if you ate more than one, you might also have a stomach ache.

However, I do like chocolate coconut donuts. And I just happen to have one right now.

weather.com high 82 (last night it was 80)
weather.gov high 81 (last night, 83)
wunderground.com high 80 (last night, 82)

I'm going with 85.

Weather (or not)

Yes, the subject is a Little House on the Prairie reference. But that is beside the point. The point is has anyone else noticed that the weather forecasts seem to be more consistently inaccurate these days? There were always the days or weeks when the forecast and reality diverged. But over the last, oh I think about 2 years or so, that level of inaccuracy feels like it's becoming standard.

Take yesterday for example. Weather.com predicted a high of 68. It was at least 72.
This is not an insignificant difference for me. I know, it sounds nitpicky. And I also realize that non-recorded recollection and reflection do not make a sound basis for even the casual conclusion such as the one I seem to be making. Therefore I decided I'd start comparing forecast with outcome.

Last night, weather.com predicted a high of 72 for today.
Now weather.com says "High 78. A stray thunderstorm is possible late. A few showers in the evening"
Weather.gov says "High 76, slight chance of showers after 3 PM"
and wunderground.com says 75, partly cloudy, with about a 20% chance of precipitation.

We'll see where this goes. Personally, I'm going for a high of 81. My hip hurt like hell when I woke up.

Assumptions, part two

Quick quiz

Who in this picture:
has osteoarthritis?
has acquired immuno deficiency syndrome?
has an autoimmune disorder?

I have some health problems which may be part of just one big health problem. Seems I might be following in my grandmother's footsteps. She has mixed connective tissue disease. Me and my doctor mostly treat it as it goes because nothing much or significant is gained right now by my rushing towards having "Lupus" "Scleroderma" "Rheumatoid Arthritis" or any other big disease name on my medical chart. For starters, I don't have any life insurance yet and I sure would someday like to get some for less than a bizillion dollars.

Yep, I'm tired most of the time and exhausted some days. I finally started digesting my food again and hallelujah for that but every time I eat, I have to take a pill that keeps the food in my gut long enough for me to actually derive nutrtients from it. And I have arthritis.

This means my fingers, knees, ankles, and feet hurt like hell sometimes. My feet and hands swell up, usually at night or when bad weather is coming. When I wake up, I am ungodly stiff. It usually subsides within a few hours.

While getting routine exercise is good for me, straining my joints when they hurt is not good. It makes the swelling and the pain worse and can cause damage to the joint or leave me less than normally active for days. Thus, when my ankle or knee hurts, I've learned to limit even stuff like walking and climbing stairs so I won't end up with a prolonged period of less activity, productivity, or just plain old pain. Because I'm already behind at school and oh yeah, pain and fatigue suck bunches.

The drive to Providence from my apartment was not too long. It took about an hour and a half. But that was an hour and a half of not moving my legs around much which resulted in stiffness then pain (also there was bad weather moving in but I didn't know this at the time). This put me in a not great mood because part of my enthusiasm about going to Providence was the prospect of walking around a city, checking out the little neighborhoods and different areas, finding used record stores, stuff like that. All of this involves walking of course. I expected I'd be sore at the end of the trip (heheh, no from the walking, really) but I didn't expect to start off with a big fat OW! I was disappointed but tried not to let it get me down. I resigned myself to taking it easy, eating near the hotel, and not wasting my gait on unnecessary, taxing motion that night.

After checking in, A___ and I made our way to the crowd at the elevator. A___ and I were heading for room 213, just one floor up. Most members of the crowd were attending the conference. I could tell by the name tags and the unfashionably shabby professional clothing. Comments about the one elevator ("It's still on the seventh floor?!") and the other elevator ("It must be broken") were uttered by several of the conference attendees waiting in the hall. The one elevator eventually descended slowly from floor seven. When it opened, it was like a clown car. The first few to pop out were over-eager grad students. I could tell because they were wearing special tags that said "Student Council" on them. These people scurried by just ahead of a stream of monochrome pasty men with pants riding too high above the ankle (we call it "the engineer's cut") and shirts unbuttoned to show far too much sparse grey chest hair. Aging babyboomer academics out for a night on the town.

The other elevator remained on "L" with the doors shut the whole time.

Finally we saw the back of an empty elevator which seem much too small to have held all those people ("Hey how'd they all fit on there?"). Everyone piled in, with me and A____ hanging back since we would be among the first people to get off. The doors closed. Fingers pushed buttons. Someone asked"What floor?" I said "Two please," feeling a little self conscious.

I am somewhat aware of appearances. I was only carrying one bag. It was big and sort of heavy and hard to handle with the sore ankle, but it was just the one. Further, I'm only 34 and not an older looking 34. I've got both legs, both the same length. I'm slim and straight of posture with no crutches, braces, or casts. I look fit. I look healthy (and when I don't I think people just assume it's because I am a grad student). I felt a little self conscious because I realize that someone who doesn't look overtly disabled is subject to judgment when she acts disabled. Usually people have the decency to keep that sort of thing to themselves. Times when they don't keep that sort of thing to themselves tend to be when there is a scarce resource that must be shared (or defended, or won, depending on your way of thinking) and someone, in order to access that resource, is violating or is about to violate a relevant social norm - e.g. don't cut in line, wait your turn, special people get to go first etc. (where varying levels and types of "special" can be determined by either disability or privilege).

I did not think my apparently super healthy physique, the size of the crowd, or anything else about the circumstances constituted a situation where you'd expect someone to feel they had the right or duty to speak up. But someone did.

An older man said "Second floor? You could WALK up to the second floor!" He said it in that joking but not joking condescending guy tone. I know my response came out nearly immediately and articulately but I can't recall exactly what I said. I addressed the elevator at large and said somethig like: "I know I don't look like it but I have arthritis. And my leg really hurts right now. So no. I could NOT walk up, even to the second floor."

Then we were on the second floor and the doors opened. I was so mad I wanted to wait in the lobby and when he came back down, tail him to the bar, then tell the waitresses and bartender horrible things about him (he divorced his wife during her second round of chemo, left her for a 21 year old student nurse! Excuse me, I could be wrong but I swear I just saw that man put something into that woman's drink...no that man, the older one with the short pants and the unbuttoned sweat stained oxford).

Instead, I got out and went to my room and I was mad without a visible target. It's safer for everyone that way. I got to think about what made me mad, aside from my general and easily triggered rage about how women are members of an "open category" for pretty much any fuckwit to openly comment at, to, or on. That is not negligible. It definitely was part of what pissed me off. As I said, there was nothing that "wrong" with what I did - even if you assumed I was fully fit and able - which would constitute a violation serious enough to license overt public chastizement. Then there is the whole me not being ok with being 34 and limited like this. And then there's the fact that I expect people to be at least as civilized as I am...which admittedly sometimes is not a very high level by most norms. So I don't feel like I'm asking alot there.

How many times have you seen someone pull up to a handicapped spot, park, and then walk with no apparent problem into the grocery store? What goes through your mind? You know what used to go through mine? I used to think things like "What the fuck is that person doing parking in handicapped?" or "Handicapped my ass!" But I don't think I ever said anything. I can't say for sure though because it's been a while since I've been ignorant enough to make that particular set of assumptions.

The arthritis and various other shit my body's been through over the past few years have taught me to think differently about this issue. I suspect the same is true for anyone who has had experiences showing them bodies cannot always be relied upon to act the way they look like they can act. I suspect that the kind of people who know this are either socially precocious, are close to someone who is or has been sick, injured, or otherwise physically limited, or have experienced a physically limiting problem themselves. I'm not too mad at myself for being that obnoxious 28 year old woman who would shake her head and think disparaging things when she saw a young spry looking person step out of a car with handicapped tags because I was blissfully young and relatively healthy then. My friends were young and relatively healthy then. My parents were somewhat young and relatively healthy then. My friends' parents were....you get the point. My immediate sphere did not include much close and direct contact with people who were aging or ailing unless they were patients where I worked and hell, you make major exceptions for patients.

But this is why I was so very surprised not that the comment came but that it came from an older person who should have lived enough, seen enough, and felt enough directly and immediately, to know better.

Assumption, part one

I'm back from Providence. The conference was good, three students from my division presented posters there. A___ and I had a good time, even though it rained pretty much the whole week. He bought a "More cowbell" t-shirt and I bought this one.


On Thursday, several of the grads and I went out for dinner. It was me, my fella A___, and my labmates N____, Sharon, and M____. We had a some fun involving taking under the table pictures (I'll post them later), but there was one interaction that was troubling and which will have lasting repercussions. One grad student had made some assumptions about how far a joke can go and it ended with hurt feelings, anger, and distrust.

This was not the first big bad assumption of the week. The first one happened on my first day at the conference. In fact, it happened within the first 10 minutes of my first day there. My interaction also involved assumptions, a slightly different set of them and a slightly different response from the offended party (me), but it keeps kicking around in my head.

First I'm posting the grad student dinner Thursday night assumption and the grief it caused. I'm describing race and ethnicity related aspects because they become relevant.

My friend and schoolmate M____ is Asian. He's a great guy, witty, a little self conscious, and prone to self deprecating humor. My friend and schoolmate Sharon is also friends with M____. Sharon, an american of mixed but mostly white european descended background, is fun but sometimes insecure and plagued by esteem issues which she occasionally overcompensates for in social settings by hard ball joking with friends. For a while now, I've noticed Sharon and M____ (as well as Sharon and G___, another international student in our program) engaging in "off color" jokes. For example, Sharon had once been joking about how we should all draw self portraits for the student website. Hers should be colored red, she had said, since her skin tone is somewhat ruddy and she's prone to eczema. She then said "And G___ (indian student) should have like 8 arms and be blue!" at which G____ laughed lots. "And M___ should be yellow!" More laughing by Sharon, G____ and M____.

I was uncomfortable and had misgivings about laughing along with this kind of joke. But G____ and M____ were laughing and going along with this, saying "it's ok, it's funny!" so what do I do? Is it my place to turn what is apparently a funny ok interaction into something awkward and offensive by coming down on all of them for making ethnic/racists jokes about each other? Is it my place to play the parent and say "Sure, it's funny now but someday one of you is going to go too far or say it at the wrong time and then it'll make a big mess." Instead I said something non-commitally chastizing like "Wow you guys like pushing it..." the response to which was further reassurance that "It's ok. It's funny".

Ok. It's funny if you guys say it's funny. I guess.

Turns out it's not always funny.

Sharon has a habit of joking about M____'s driving. I've witnessed this before, and I've witnessed M____ joking along, seemingly merrily, saying that he's a scarey driver because he's Asian. I remember the first time I heard this I said "I can't believe you think your driving has to do with your being Asian." I know that on more than one occasion, M____ has told me the joking is ok because he is a bad driver. Now whether or not M___ is a bad driver is a bit beside the point, but let's go there for a minute. I've been in the car with him. Yes, there was one time when he didn't notice the "left lane ends" sign on the highway and had to merge in fast at the last minute. But other than that, he wasn't that bad. He was certainly not as bad as a mile a minute talker impulsive American woman named Rachel who always drove in the passing lane, continually drifting on and off the rumble strip because she was lighting her cigarette, talking animatedly to me, searching her Dave Matthews CD to find that part where he says something incredibly funny and witty that I just have to hear, having a side dialogue with herself about said CD, and checking her missed calls on her cell phone. Now that, my friends, is a BAD driver. M___ doesn't even come close to that shit.

For some reason though, Sharon thinks M___s driving is that bad. Sharon and G___ drove into Providence with M___ Thursday for Sharon's poster presentation. It was on the way to dinner that night that Sharon brought up M___ 's driving, saying "That is the LAST time you drive!" The usual hahahaha kind of M___'s a bad driver discussion ensued between her, G___ and M___ , then died off when we were seated at the restaurant. G____ brought it up again over appetizers and drinks by saying he was not sitting in the front seat on the way home and joking about how Sharon had lied about needing to study so she could sit in back. I added "So you guys call reverse shotgun?" And Sharon spent about a half hour going on about how bad M___ 's driving is. Jokes ranged from what kind of music M___ can and can't listen to while driving, whether dance music makes the driving better, to me telling them about how my brother blasted diva dance music all the way up to my sister's the other week and saying about half way up "Hey, let me know if the music is bothering you, ok?" and me saying "Oh thanks, that's sweet. It's ok right now though," and him replying "Good. I mean, I don't plan to turn it off. I just want to know when it is bothering you so I can fully enjoy it."

(which was funny...he and I do rip on one another and sometimes our feelings get hurt. But we have 33 years of shared history and we can be quite explicit about what is and what is not funny and I think this helps...more on that in another post)

During the M___ 's driving bashing joke fest at dinner Thursday, I recall Sharon saying several times "It's ok, he doesn't mind. He admits it!" And M___ adding, at least early on, comments like "Yes, she's right. I admit it. I'm a bad driver." In retrospect, I wonder what made Sharon feel she had to make this repeated disclaimer. I can't recall if I said much of anything, or if anything I did say sounded discouraging, or if this was just her responding to some semi-conscious understanding that she might be going a little too far even for M___.

At one point, M___ mentioned that his driving was good enough for them to give him a license. He said this still in the joking sort of discourse style. Sharon jumped on it. She said "Yeah I know. How did they ever give you a license? What did your boyfriend take the test for you?" I think M___ said something like "Um..that would be a little hard since he's not (Asian)," and Sharon said "Maybe he taped his eyes up so they'd be slanted..." then she dissolved into hoots of laughter.

I honestly don't remember where I went at this point. I know I heard her say the eye thing but I don't know what I said or did. For someone who can recall conversations in such detail, I find this is strange. I know I felt that familiar "this is too close to offensive for me" feeling but I have no recollection what my overt reaction was.

My fella A___ later recounted that he said something like "Wooah, that's pretty rough!" after the eye comment. I did notice that the dynamic shifted, and I noticed G___ barely said a word for the rest of dinner. I was pretty oblivious to M___ 's reaction, I have to say, and I feel bad about that. He told me later that he was really pissed off and considered getting up and walking away or saying something mean back to her. He also reminded me that at one point after Sharon had assured us (or herself) again that "It's ok he admits it" I had said "As long as M___ 's ok with it..." I am glad I at least said something like this. I feel like an idiot for not noticing that M___ was increasinly NOT ok with it though.

Not long after the unenthusiastic reception to this comment, Sharon piped down about M___'s driving. The next day, I got an e-mail from M___ . Among other things, here's what he said.

when (Sharon) was going on about how scary my driving was, etc. i am sure you noticed the change in my mood when something was said.
....
i thought about talking to her in person what she said was a bit out of line and was actually very derogatory in nature. but i didn't have a chance since G____ was with us in the car. i thought about emailing her but... she might just think "i am being too sensitive" and i am afraid that she might start making fun of me with that. "oh M____'s driving is scary, and on top of that, he was hurt when i said his driving sucks, such a lamo"
...
i do use the slanted eye stuff to describe myself... just like some black people use the N word among themselves or describe themselves.. but the difference is we own the words because they were given to us (not as a pleasant gift but nevertheless they were given to us).

I'm not sure if I can express how bad I felt that I didn't notice the change in M__'s mood. I was really horrified when I got his e-mail. Not that he was offended, I mean, this joking had always made me uncomfortable because I worried about if and when the line would be crossed. It doesn't surprise me that this happened. I felt bad because I had let myself believe that this kind of joking was ok even when part of me knew all along it wasn't. Yes, I didn't fully join in even the supposedly good natured race bashing, but I also didn't do what I think I knew all along was the right thing to do. Which is to completely refuse to participate in the conversation or to say to them, together or separately, "This joking is fucked up guys. Maybe M___ doesn't mind. MaybeG____ doesn't mind. But you know what? I do."

So I called M___ after getting his message and he came over my apartment. We smoked and talked at my kitchen table for a long time. We talked about Sharon, we talked about boundaries and how to express them. We talked about how just because something is ok sometimes that doesn't mean it has to be ok all the time. And mostly we talked about how if you trust someone enough to be friends with them, you need to trust them enough to establish and defend boundaries even if you worry about there being social risk involved. Yes, they might continue after you tell them how you feel, and yes that would suck. But if someone really is a friend, you should give them a chance to stop, and you owe it to yourself to stand up for yourself, even with an intimate. Beliefs about intentions always being good, about no hard feelings, about unconditional trust, etc. are tricky and can result in feelings of betrayal when they are not explicit, i.e., when they are assumptions.

I told M___ that I felt bad, especially since I am the one who says something usually, even when there is social risk. It's sort of my hallmark. The reasons are many. I'm just one of those people who refuses to keep her trap shut when there's shit like this going on around me because even by silence you can be part of it. I'm still upset at myself for not saying something, and M___ and I talked about that too. So I guess it wasn't just him who needed the counseling. It was a two way street. I shared some of my experiences with him, told him it is usually not easy for me to say something even though the frequency of my doing this might make it seem so. That I often feel my blood racing when I go to speak, that I worry that I will offend if it is a friend. But that it is important to me to be true to myself and that I've discovered friends feel worse if they find out after the fact that they inadvertently hurt or offended you. My experience has been it's best to say something directly and promptly, you can use humor if you want but you have to be willing to back it up with a firm statement to stop if the person continues.

So I guess I re-learned my lesson that if something rubs me the wrong way, I'm not going to be a part of it, even tacitly. I am not going to engage in perpetuating damaging assumptions. And I think M___ may be realizing that his habit of self deprecation might perhaps be a form of self abuse and might set his friends up for making some bad assumptions about what is hurtful and what is not.

Providence Here I Come!

Tomorrow I'm off to a conference in beautiful, urban downtown Providence Rhode Island!

Growing up and living just outside of Boston until I was 22, I never thought in a million years I would get excited about going to Rhode Island. Rhode Island and I have some issues. Well, I do at least.

Where to start? How about with those Crimson Travel commercials that used to be on the Boston area UHF stations when I was a kid? If you're from southern New England, you might know the ones I mean. If not, here's the reader's digest version. It was a family owned travel company. I assumed, given the numerous Rhode Island local commercials that surrounded the Crimson Travel ones, that the company was based in Warwick or some other god forsaken place (major exports include cranberries and ticks). I think Crimson Travel specialized in Disney trips. The whole family would appear in the commercials - complete with peevish looking bucktoothed children, all wearing Micky Mouse ears hats. My family never went to Disney. We were poor intellectuals. This is not a good combination, but it is how I was raised. I still have a visceral reaction to bucktoothed spoiled people in Mickey Mouse ears. In my immediate childhood context, it meant "I'm a nouveau riche fuckwit with the aesthetic sense of a twinkie wrapper."

As a child, I naturally assumed everyone from Rhode Island was like this.

As a slightly older person, I became aware that Rhode Islanders are wretched drivers. The recent and quite likely very flawed study has shown what I knew as soon as I was able to sit in the front seat during drives on Route 128 and watch the Ocean Staters hurl themselves down and across four lanes of Boston driver-filled highway like lemmings into a blender. We may be Massholes, but we at least know road from median strip.

And then there were the numerous ill fated trips to Newport, most or all of which never happened. The first one, I was grounded. Two boys asked me and my sister to go to Newport. Why? They spoke of it like it was some kind of paradise. But we were, or I was, grounded for the first and only time in my life (I was 17). Mom didn't like the boys. Or didn't like that I liked boys. Or that they liked me. Or something like that. My sister and I snuck out, there was a drive, there were boys, there was ice cream, but I don't know if we actually made it to Newport. There were two other times in later years that I almost went to Newport, but on both occasions I got quite sick and had to cancel at the very last minute, once on the road and another time when I got massive serious vertigo. No cliff walk for me!

And lastly, there is the fact that my ex bf's family vacations in Rhode Island. And they just suck outloud.

So a pending trip to Rhode Island doesn't seem like it should elicit this level of excitement. But I am in the middle of nowhere. Our college town consists of a couple of strip malls, four to be exact, and a big CVS. My semantics professor used to make jokes using various combinations of definite articles, superlatives, and varieties of local restaurants. In this context, "The best Chinese restaurant" is funny. Well, it's funny if you're a linguist. Ok, it's funny if you're a german semanticist.

Years of middle of nowhere CT has made even Rhode Island look like an oasis of civilization to me. Plus there's the hotel sex.

Twenty Questions

Tagged cjblue last night. Here are my answers to the 20 questions, plus one more - wtf is wrong with blogger today? Bad bad blogger! Is it just me?

1) Why am I doing this?
Because I can....
2) Do you remember playing 45s?
Yep.
3) What is the worst band you ever liked?
Duran Duran
4) Have you ever done the macarena?
No.
5) Are there books/magazines are currently in your bathroom? (if yes, what?)
an Italian/English dictionary, a book on the history of tarot, a book on herbology, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, an ephemeris, Bad Cat.
6) Have you ever done one of those embarrassing group dances at weddings?
Yes.
7) Coffee or tea?
Coffee
8) Whip or no whip?
No whip.
9) Did you ever have an imaginary friend and if so, what was it named?
No.
10) Do you know how to perform the Heimlich Maneuver?
Yes.
11) Do you still celebrate your birthday?
As often as possible.
12) Do you or have you ever cross dressed (women in overalls and men in kilts don’t count)?
Yes.
13) What is the worst food you ever ate?
Some kind of curried albino broccoli thing.
14) How old were you when you had your first real kiss?
Thirteen.
15) Have you had your 15 minutes of fame?
I’ve had about 9 seconds – I was the background footage on CNN once and someone related a conversation with me (anonymously) on NPR.
16) What is the longest you ever went without sleep for?
I think it was about 40 hours. It might have been longer, but I don't remember.
17) If your hair could be any color, what would it be?
Deep pink/purple.
18) What is your favorite ice cream flavor?
Fudge brownie thing.
19) Wax, bleach, pluck, or shave?
All of the above.
20) If you were a super hero, what would your power be?
Showing people how others see them.

All about you

This is from Texas Gal. The way it works is for you, dear reader, to answer these questions in the comments section. Then post them on your blog, and so on.

1. Name:
2. Date of birth:
3. Where you live:
4. What makes you happy:
5. Currently listening/the last thing you listened to:
6. Do you read my blog?:
7. If yes, what makes it especially good or bad?:
8. An interesting fact about you:
9. Are you in love/do you have a crush at the moment?:
10. Favourite place to spend time:
11. Favourite lyric:
12. The best time of the year:

RECOMMEND
1. A film:
2. A book:
3. A band, a song, or album:

PLUS
1. One thing you like about me:
2. Two things you like about yourself:
3. Look at my friends-list and tell what you like about one of our mutual friends:
4. Put this in your journal/blogger so that I can tell you what I like about you.

Better free your mind instead

In another "Look a pterodactyl" move, president Bush used his weekly radio address for some quality gay bashing.

"Ages of experience have taught us that the commitment of a husband and a wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society," Bush said in his Saturday radio address. "Marriage cannot be cut off from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening this good influence on society."

Actually, ages of experience have taught us that straight marriages and breeding result in divorce and abandonment of partners and children. Straight marriages frequently involve physical and emotional abuse perpetrated by the spouses on each other and on the children. This abuse takes the form of sexual assault and enslavement, severe physical trauma, neglect, starvation, torture, and sometimes even death.

How's that for using convention and fallacy to make nifty generalizations?

So Bush supports amending the US Constitution to make discrimination legal. If we were going to get all excited about an amendment, here's one that's been kicking around for over 80 years which seems like a much more noble and civilized modification of the Constitution.
That's right. It's the Equal Rights Amendment.

Here's the text of the highly controversial ERA:
from equalrightsamendment.org
Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

More about the ERA:
from equalrightsamendment.org
...By June 30, 1982, the ERA had been ratified by 35 states, leaving it three states short of the 38 required for ratification. It has been reintroduced into every Congress since that time.

Who hasn't ratified it? Big surprise, states which are part of what I refer to as "the cracker barrel" (for several (1, 2) reasons).

Map 1 - States which haven't ratified the ERA:


I thought this was an interesting comparison. Map 2 is of free states vs. slave states.


Map 3 would be the states which would support an amendment to the US Constitution banning gay marriage. Presumably, that could be derived by looking at which states ban gay marriage right now. But state level bans and rights are not at all easy to track because this issue is in a high level of flux in the states right now. A run down in 2004 reported that 39 states had some sort of prohibition of gay marriage, a spread that is all over the damned place. It seems allowing everyone the opportunity to fuck up and get married is a really scarey concept for a whole lot of people. Some of these state level bans have been challenged, some states not in that original 39 are dealing with court challenges and proposed legislation prohibiting or allowing gay marriage. In keeping with the Map 1 and Map 2 set, of the 11 states which passed constitutional amendments banning gay marriage in 2004, many came out of the cracker barrel. A couple that didn't had far narrower margins in the votes. But this is pretty discouraging nonetheless.

The "Eeek Gays!" strategy worked so well in the 2004 presidential election that Bush, as GOP cheerleader, is using it again to play to "his people" - the crackers - in the lead up to the congressional elections. I really hope sanity and reason can prevail in the upcoming legislative elections, but considering the quite mild ERA couldn't get 38 states in 80 years, I feel a little uneasy believing the average US citizen will be immune to this current policy of pandering to prejudice.

Sharing

You know, the pope has really inspired me. A while back, he encouraged us to love our neighbors. And I did. Repeatedly. I am a catholic after all. I was born one, I went to Sacred Heart for a whole year. I played one of the three wise men in the christmas pageant even. Like all people raised in a culture of strict and dogmatic religion, I do sometimes worry about heaven, hell, the nature of the soul, and salvation. However, I just can't reconcille most of the teachings of the church (any church) with the morals and principles I have come to understand and accept through my own deeply personal experience.

But here is something I can definitely get behind. Thank you Pope!
Most recently, Il Papa has decreed:
"Who has known something true, beautiful and good in life should run to share it around everywhere, in family and in work, in all the places of one's existence."

And so I'd like to share with everyone that I had really awesome sex the other night. It was beautiful, true, good, and loud.
Amen!

Max update

The Big Orange is doing better. His bloodwork was good and he's on prednisone again, which I think is helping. He's got new food (newer than the new a few weeks ago) which seems to be working well. It's kitty wheaties apparently, or at least kitty fiber food. Now, does anyone in the US remember the Wheaties cereal jingle? It goes something like:

"Before a day of (clause ending with a word which rhymes with wheaties),
I get the eaties for my Wheaties"

I started singing it about Max ("....I get the eaties for Kitty Wheaties") but got stuck. I asked my fella A___ for help with what a cat might do that rhymes with "Wheaties" (and "eaties"). A____ looked at me like I was maybe a little bit crazy. This is nothing new, I'm used to it when I get singy. I only recently started singing in front of him. I habitually sing and make puns in front of people I am quite close to if they're around a lot. I blame my sister. I used to sing to entertain her. She encouraged it (you hear that Miss A___?). Please note that I can barely carry a tune. This is singing for humor's sake alone, not for any art. I wonder though, maybe I should have done this more often and eariler on in past relationships. It might have helped screen out a few people before the shit all hit the fan. I digress. Back to kitty Wheaties.

I explained about the jingle, the breakfast cereal, fiber, etc. I don't think he doubted me but since he's soooooo much younger than me, he doesn't remember the Wheaties song.

A quick google search only resulted in a few hits, but this one truly comforted me. It seems the Wheaties jingle occasionally occurs to people as a sort of fragmented hallucinatory experience. Good lord I'm happy I'm not the only one whose head this song pops into and who tries to explain it to people around her who have no idea what she is talking about.

Now I have to think of what Max might do that rhymes with Wheaties because the song is in my head and I think it won't go away until it has reached some resolution. He's an indoor only cat, so "catching tweeties" doesn't work. Suggestions are welcome.

Max sunning himself at my old apartment. In my current apartment, the bed is right next to an east facing window, so he gets nice morning sunlight.

Ow

I've had migraines since I was 22. I remember the day I had the first one, which was an aura with no pain. I was at work and suddenly had no peripheral vision, kind of like someone letterboxed my screen. There were perks to working in a hospital, although having your boss (whom you loathe) take your blood pressure is not one of them.

I didn't get a migraine with aura and pain until years after that. That one included Mr. Scotoma and when he had made his way entirely around the left field of vision in my left eye, BANG, the pain started.

Since then, I've had plenty of time and experiences to figure out what my typical migraine is like and what tends to trigger a migraine for me. I've had some where a day or more before I know I'm in that mode. Usually, it's just a 20 minute session with the scotoma thing, maybe a little pre-nausea, light and sound sensitivity, and then a headache that makes me want to burrow my head into a wall.

My triggers are pretty straight forward. A sure fire migraine mix is when it's unseasonably warm out (like this weekend), I haven't had enough sleep (like this weekend), and I am menstrual (like this weekend). I do try to avoid that combo, but sometimes you just can't. And then you just have to roll with it. Ginger and rosemary tea help. But once one has a hold of me, there isn't much I can do but curl up somewhere dark and quiet, preferably with a wet washcloth and some lavendar until I fall asleep. So what happened this week?

This one is unusual. The pre-migraine symptoms were days long. When it peaked on Tuesday, it was chock full o'weird. At one point when I was lying down Tuesday, I started saying the alphabet in my head. It's hard to explain why...if I'm in a lot of pain, I tend to do things like count, say the alphabet, conjugate verbs in Latin, and other repetitive mumbly type stuff. I just do. It's like a mantra or something. Anyhow, I got to "P" and could not get what came next. To say I didn't remember is an understatement. I just couldn't GET it.

There were a couple of other things that made this one quite different, not the least of which is that I still feel like I am in that nasty post migraine state. And so I win a trip to the neurologist next week, who will probably do little more than tell me I had a brain all along.

Now if only I can manage to get some courage and figure out how these ruby slippers work, I'll be all set.

What the hell is a migraine anyhow? You may as well ask the Ouija board, because like many other things that tend to affect women more than men, it seems migraines are a big medical mystery. If men got them and if they were correlated with erectile dysfunction, we'd have migraines all figured out, I'm sure.
For now, here's a collection of possible causes for this incredibly mysterious yet rather comon disorder:
"The mechanisms of migraine remain not completely understood."

"For many years, scientists believed that migraines were linked to the dilation and constriction of blood vessels in the head. Investigators now believe that migraine is caused by inherited abnormalities in genes that control the activities of certain cell populations in the brain."

"Migraine headaches seem to be caused in part by changes in the level of a body chemical called serotonin...When serotonin levels are high, blood vessels constrict (shrink). When serotonin levels fall, the blood vessels dilate (swell). This swelling can cause pain or other problems."

"Although much about headaches still isn't understood, some researchers think migraines may be caused by functional changes in the trigeminal nerve system..."

Personally, I think it's transmissions from aliens. I knew I shouldn't have let them put that probe in there.

Me and my migraine

Hey, guess what? I just found out this sort of pre-migraine symptom (aura) has a specific name. It's called a "scintillating scotoma".

Audio blog, family portrait, and interpersonal whatnot

Blogger offers the option to post audio, but why do you have to call in the audio from a phone? I've got sound files I'd post but fuck the phone shit. Is this some kind of piracy thing? Sheeesh.

Ok to answer the comments questions:

1) The unfortunate family portrait incident
My father's side of the family is Irish and Italian but predominantly Italian in culture. Although there are six siblings (my dad plus 5) only two of them had kids, my dad and his brother Louie. Louie's kids are all girls, and my dad had two daughters and a boy. This meant that for most of my childhood, my sister and I were referred to as "the girls" at extended family gatherings, while our brother was lauded and hailed, given attention, money, and presents for simply existing. This continued through highschool (which my sister dropped out of) and college (which I dropped out of). By 1998, I got married, graduated, bought a house, and started a PhD program. Around the same time period, my brother came out, dropped out of law school, and acquired HIV. In 2000, my family had an extended family gathering. All six of the siblings were there, plus some cousins and second cousins and shit I hardly even knew existed. My dad, my sister, my husband, and I all attended. My brother did not. At this event, my aunt Claire (the oldest of the six) had hired a photographer who would take a big picture of all of us at exactly 6:00. She spent the whole day running around saying things like "the whole family is here!" and "Everyone is here! Oh it's so nice!" She and the rest of the relatives also spent the whole day sucking up to my doctor husband and asking me about grad school and my new house. NO ONE EVEN MENTIONED MY BROTHER. No one.

Picture time came and I had had a few. "Everyone" was arranged in the family room of Louie's house for the big portrait shot. I think if my aunt hadn't squealed yet again about "the whole family" I might have behaved myself. I might have been able to control that evil impulse. But she did it. "It'll be so nice to have a picture of the WHOLE family!" she said. And I, posed at my doctor husband's side with my hands folded femininely on his right shoulder, adjusted my fingers just so....
snap, click, snap, click, snap.

The pictures were taken. My sister came up to me after and said "Oh my god, you didn't! I can't believe you flipped off the camera!" I responded "yeah but only to one shot". Turns out that one shot was the one where everyone's eyes were open. The only one where everyone's eyes were open. And I RUINED THE ENTIRE FAMILY PORTRAIT OF THE WHOLE (except for our unmentionable relative Tony) FAMILY!!!!!

2) Interpersonal coordination
People imitate one another. We stand in the same postures as others around us, we gesture in the same way, if we are asked to stand in a lab and swing pendulums we swing in time to one another (even if we aren't asked to), and we pick up and reproduce even very small details of one another's speech. We do this to different degrees, mediated perhaps by social factors and personality, but it seems even when there is no apparent social gain we do it, and even when there is a social gain and we are imitating a lot, we often are completely unconscious of doing it (personally I love watching my faculty imitate one another's postures and hand positions during talks). Conscious or not, instances or this are called "interpersonal coordination", "entrainment", "convergence", "mimesis", and "imitation". There are slightly different shades of meaning to each term, but they can be grouped together as describing the same class of phenomenon of Monkey see (or hear), Monkey do.

One of the research projects I work on is using this tendency to imitate in speech as a way to investigate the nature of speech perception and the properties of the speech percept (or mental representation of speech/spoken words and sounds). The idea is, very generally, if you imitate a property, you must have perceived that property. The big deal is that most of the classic, traditional research on speech says that we perceive speech in terms of acoustic properties and that we strip away certain speaker specific elements of speech. By this account, when someone says "cat" or even a nonsense syllable like "ka" we are able to understand it because we can match it up with some abstract acoustic representation in our heads. The nature of the something in our heads is what is up for debate in my field, and while traditional accounts differ, they all tend to agree that the something in your head is 100% acoustic and abstract. You have some kind of acoustic template in there that "sounds like" "cat" or "ka" and when you hear "cat" or "ka" you know you heard it because it matched the acoustic properties of that entry (or of those sounds, i.e. "k" plus "a") in your mind.

This something in your head has to be abstract because we all say "cat" differently. In fact, each time you or I or anyone says "cat" we say it differently, at least from a purely acoustic point of view. But you can understand me saying "cat" if I say it with a cold, a sore throat, if I whisper it, if I have a mouthful of muffin (it's a little harder then but if it's not too much muffin you can understand me). So how the hell do you understand it if you have to match all those possible acoustic manifestations of "cat" with this one uber mental acoustic form of CAT in your head?

The theory I work in says that you perceive "cat" not in acoustic properties but in terms of the gestures the speaker made with his or her mouth, tongue, lips, glottis, etc. These properties vary but not as much as the acoustic ones do. This idea is also not new. Theories of recovering the event that made the signal, or inference, abound in the history of psychology and studies of mind. What is new and different is the idea that we perceive the event directly, and not through inference. We "hear" the acoustic consequence of gestures and we perceive in terms of the gesture that made that event. We do not extrapolate, we do not infer, we do not learn an association, we do not need to strip away the speaker specific acoustic properties. That last bit is important because while we might be said to imitate the "abstract" properties (in that we all learn the language we are raised in), we also imitate the not abstract properties (accent, style, voice quality, etc). We can account for that if we describe speech perception in terms of perception of the gestures because the process of "stripping away" so the acoustic input will match with the stored mental abstract acoustic form is not required.

Some people say this is silly, or that it's like magic. You hear sounds, not tongues, says one researcher.

The cool thing about the imitation stuff is that there are some neurological findings of structures and processes which could underly exactly this kind of silly magical perception. There has been a big fuss about what are called mirror neurons, which show activation when we watch another human engage in an action. This area shows activation when we see someone talking which would make sense because we are seeing a human perform an action. But it also shows activation when we listen to speech, which is interesting since it seems to support the idea that you perceive actions (speech gestures) in motor terms.

I'm doing speech research (no neuroimaging...the closest I got to the MRI was as a subject). I was looking for all this background research on imitation in speech as a way to preface our study on imitation in speech. Problem is, we fucked up the imitation study we did so I can't approach it the way we had planned. My advisor hates when I say this, but it's true. We fucked it up, so there isn't much to say in terms of what we perceive in speech or about what the cognitively relevant properties of the speech percept are. But there is something to say about imitation of actions in general, specifically, there is something to say about when and to what degree we imitate if we must extrapolate the action/gesture from the (acoustic) signal vs. when and to what degree we imitate if we perceive gestures directly. So I turned to the non-speech imitation papers and I found some really great stuff. And I am happy. I only hope my advisor is happy enough that she doesn't kill me for going over yet another deadline.

Today was a good day!

Today was much better than Monday. First off, I got my period. Ok, I know, usually not something to cheer about but it's good for me because that means the first day will not be Saturday, when my brother and I are driving up to my sister's place to get ready for her graduation on Sunday. And it will not be Sunday, when I'm cooking food for The Aunties (insert suspenseful music there). Yes, it sucked to do my laundry with cramps today, but there is the considerable bright side of not needing to have them bad while dealing with holiday traffic and/or relatives I haven't seen since the unfortunate family portrait incident back in 2000.

Second, I found a set of papers on interpersonal coordination that will help me write something other than "All work and no play makes PFG want to throw knives" in the perpetual paper.

And lastly, and best, there was the good news that Enron bandits Lay and Skilling were not let off the hook. They are Guilty!
Let's count 'em up.
(from the Boston Globe)
Lay was convicted on all six counts of conspiracy, securities and wire fraud against him in the corporate trial and all four in the personal banking trial.
Former Chief Executive Skilling was convicted on 19 of the 28 counts in the corporate trial, including one count of insider trading...

Charity

I saw this in the news about a university I went to for three years before deciding I could grow up more cheaply outside of college:

PROVIDENCE, R.I.
A legal battle continues over the naming rights and funding for the Center on Hunger and Poverty at Brandeis University.
Rhode Island philanthropist Alan Shawn Feinstein filed a lawsuit in 2003 in the U.S. District Court alleging the center's director, J. Larry Brown, breached a contract by denying him the right to put his name on the center....

Feinstein told The Providence Journal it was important to have his name on the facility because anonymous donations encourage no one to follow suit.

"If you make a donation and a name is not connected with it, people are not going to be moved to give a donation, but if it's someone they know and like who gave money, then they may be moved to give money, too," Feinstein said. "So modesty does not always work well when it comes to charity."

Personally, I couldn't disagree more. Here are two instances of anonymous charity which are not even remotely dulled by the fact that they are anonymous.
- Last year's donation of $100 million to Yale's Music School. According to ABC News, this donation will make advanced music education (at Yale) free beginning in 06-07.

- "The Kalamazoo Promise". This is a program which will provide four year tuition scholarships to students from the Kalamazoo public school system who will attend any public university or college in Michigan. According to the Kalamazoo entry at Wikipedia, the program is sponsored by private donations from several anonymous individuals.

Mr. Feinstien knocked "modesty" in defending his lawsuit against the people he once thought worthy of his money. To me, that modesty is a very large part of what made the Yale and Kalamazoo donations so fucking amazing.

Then again, I don't have a zillion dollars. I don't know what it's like to have friends who have a zillion and one dollars and who, because they made more named charitable donations than I did this month, get to dock most of their yatchs in the best places at the marina and jeer at me over the buffet at the country club. That could be really difficult to deal with.

what happened?

Monday was not so great. It was beautiful out. But it was not good. I woke up with my stomach fucked up, didn't want to eat. I don't think the cookie and coffee breakfast helped, but no appetite made the idea of taking the time to prepare real food seem like too much. The cookies were in fact an attempt to be somewhat responsible and eat something. And the coffee is just plain necessary under all but the direst of circumstances. Despite hurrying (and probably partly because of it) I got to campus late and had to stand up my friend for lunch (sorry!) .

Then it was on to my meeting with my advisor, who was all kinds of cranky. She had just come from the faculty meeting. They have only one meeting a year at the end of the year. They didn't meet to talk about prospective students, not all of them anyhow. They didn't meet before or after the strange job talk we had this spring (strange because we are not having an official job search). They didn't meet to talk about the new "milestones" the new division head is imposing on the new set of students, they didn't meet to talk about whether or not the rest of us should be grandfathered in under the policies we started with.

But they met to evaluate the grad students. This is the meeting where all the faculty, no matter how little contact they have with the grad students, decide if we are doing well or not. The first time they had ever done this was last year. That meeting resulted in some genuinely peculiar "informal" evaluation letters being sent to most of the grad students right before my division head left town for a few weeks. I say most of because my division head's wife, who just defended her dissertation this past January, didn't get a letter last year. Yes, my division head's wife is (was) a student in my PhD program.

Anyhow, back to the letters and what they said. In my lab mate Sharon's letter last year, she was evaluated not only on her academic progress, but also on her social skills. No one else was. While Sharon has some quirks, we all do and (further) Sharon's are hardly glaring. They look downright mild when you put them in the proper context, in comparison with some personalities in my division.

My letter last year said that I was making "satisfactory progress and that (I) should expect to write and defend both the proposal and dissertation within the year." I laughed when I read this. Then I asked my advisor if this was a reasonable expectation. She said no.

Although I am told the letters are "informal" it still sucks to know you are going to be evaluated by people who couldn't manage their way out of a paper bag with a map, a flashlight, both hands, and a sherpa. I've been worrying for weeks that the letter I'll receive from my division head will send me either into a towering rage or a deep depression. My money's on the former. I headed into my meeting with my advisor knowing she'd been at this meeting for hours and wondering if she had advocated or not. Turns out not since she came into the lab later and told my other lab mate that the division head wanted him to re-schedule his qualifying exam for next month instead of December. Why did the division head want this? Let's take the Cosmo quiz*:
(a) it is more convenient for him
(b) it fits his plan of promoting our program as a 5 year phd
(c) he's a sadist
(d) it's all part of an evil conspiracy to make people more miserable and the world more rotten

During my short discussion with my advisor, she told me she might be leaving our university.

WHAT???!!!!

I'm not sure of the exact story, her options, or the odds that she will be leaving. She explained it but at that point she was addressing both me and our lab manager (the former grad student, my division head's wife, whom I also dislike and who also is in the same paper bag as her husband). My division head's wife/lab manager processes information a little differently than I do (euphemism) and we were asking conflicting questions in rapid succession. The result? I know very little other than that this is all up in the air and I should try very very hard to be completely done with my dissertation a year from this Fall. I told my advisor this would be no problem since if I am not officially done by a year from this Fall, I will self destruct. "No seriously, I'll blow up," I added when she and the lab manager chuckled as if I were making one of those silly self deprecating hyperboles female grad students are prone to making when dealing with discussion of academic deadlines and milestones which they have every intention of wanting to reach if for no reason other than to show what a good little pony they are. My advisor is a nice person, but I believe a high functioning autistic. She often has no idea how to deal with me even when I'm not being sincerely sarcastic, so my "outburst" only confused her.

This all left me feeling like I got smacked in the head with something large, heavy, and wet. Her leaving could make things hard for me, but I am quite serious when I say that I will be done in a year whether I am done with the PhD or not. I can't stay here doing what I do much longer. I strongly dislike connecticut and many other things about where I am. I'm not even sure I want a career in academia, which puts the whole PhD with oodles of publications goal into the category of having more cons than pros. My advisor's leaving will probably destroy whatever is worthwhile about the division though, and that sucks. It's been going downhill since my lab manager's husband became division head about two years ago. He's a trolly bastard who mistakes displays of contrarianism for intellect. Oh wait, I think I have a picture of him that I drew. Yep, here it is.

He acts like he looks. Poorly drawn and constipated.

From a purely selfish perspective though, with the prospect of my advisor stepping out of the picture, the division is only going to get worse, which will only make finishing with degree and a continuing desire to look for an academic job more difficult. Smack.

I worked on my paper, listened to some music, tried to just work and get it out of my head. It doesn't change what I need to do now, I reasoned. A few hours later, I took a break. I checked my e-mail to see if I had gotten the troll's "love letter". I figured I may as well just get it all over with. Nope, no letter. But there was an e-mail in the "Unboyfriend" folder.
Let's see what Tom had to say.
Subject: Questions about cats
Hi (PFG), someone is giving away kitties and I was thinking about one. It is 12 weeks old but has not had shots. What are some of the "rules" of thumb about getting kitties-thanks-t

Smack.

This has placed me into a nasty dilemma. Do I respond or not? And if so, what do I say? A little back story. This is Tom's second e-mail in less than a week. The first one came soon after the whole bringing his new girlfriend to the dissertation defense party thing. That e-mail was about electronic voice phenomena of all things. In it, he asked me to write back and tell him what I heard in the attached wave he found on a website about EVP and what I thought of the acoustic qualities and such.

Initially, I contemplated writing back and saying "I think I hear a voice saying 'Tom, what would your flat assed humorless girlfriend think if she knew you were writing to me?'". For a couple of hours, I was very tempted to reply with a re-synthesized wave that included a distorted voice saying "Booooooo! Tom's new girlfriend has an ass like an oversized ibook - Boooooo!" I chose not to respond instead. This is my preferred option when I am considering doing something I know I will probably regret for one reason or another. Hey, being over 30 does have its perks. I've learned I do not always need to make understanding the reason for reservations a requirement of heeding them.

I want to treat this second e-mail the way I treated the EVP e-mail, no response, but I'm finding that difficult. I believe, in retrospect, that part of why I was able to squelch the "ass like an ibook" and similar impulses was that I knew they were childish and came from a desire to be hurtful, neither of which are behaviors I want to give free rein to. In this situation though, it's a much more noble desire, and one that is at least as deeply ingrained as the "fuck you" impulse is. I keep thinking this is a kitty who might end up neglected and unsocialized, one of those adorable cats brought into a shelter because the owner just can't be saddled with the huge responsibility of taking care of anyone or anything other than themselves.

Yes. I know, really I do. It's obvious that this is tripping off some of my unresolved anger at the way Tom acted in the relationship, you know, the whole reason I had to shoot it like it was a dying animal, blah blah blah. Which is why the e-mail is still sitting unanswered in my "unboyfriend" folder.

I give up. I'm going to bed. Time to reboot and hope tomorrow turns out better.


* = while the ultimate effect is (d), the reasons are (a) and (b). Like most evil shitwads on this world, my division head is motivated to act rotten by a combo of an unacknowledged selfish streak and an implicit belief that no one else is as real or human as he is. Someone like this in power can do a lot of harm. Also someone like this should stick with neutral tones in the brown/salmon range for lipsticks, rouges, and polish. Crimson and other "cool" tones do not work well with the shitwad in power pesonality type.

A supermarket (and mall) in Connecticut

Yesterday - I woke up late, I got out late, but god damn it I got my errands done, I cleaned my apartment, and then I read for fun for the first time in a long while. I already regret not working more on my manuscript this weekend (this paper is NOT going to be ready to submit by the end of next week) but, well, mental health is my priority always. What good is having my advisor not pissed off at me, having my degree, a career, if I am insane? And yes, all that DOES depend on this paper, not because of any inherent properties of the paper, my degree, or of their relations to one another, but because my advisor has stipulated it be so. If I ever do finish this paper, I am considering printing a copy of it, sauteeing it, and eating it. I think I must in order to regain what I have spent in writing it. Maybe I can just eat the abstract.

But this isn't about my perpetual paper. It's about the mall and the unforeseen perils of the supermarket.

About half way through browsing in the bookstore yesterday afternoon, I became aware that I had to piss. This is a problem because the bookstore is in a nasty little mall populated largely by criminally bored kids who are too young to drive far far away from here. As you can imagine, the bathrooms at the mall are just foul.

That mall could be better if whoever runs it could make up their mind about who they're pitching to. For example, although the mall is populated by the very young, the very old, and the very poor, yesterday the mall was hosting an "antique sale". The very young, very old, and very poor don't buy overpriced 4th hand junk, which is a better characterization of most of the goods peddled as antiques here, where every other town claims to be the antique capital of the region, state, country, or world. The mall has driven out stores like J. Silver (properly pronounced "Jay Silva") which sold cheap hip apparel to make way for more Fashion Bug and Dress Barn type shops, where the bored sales people stand and watch the bored non-shopping kids pass by the entrance. How many times can you refold the floral print turtleneck jerseys and straighten the rounder packed with 20% off tapered leg stretch corduroy before you lose your mind?

When did the little crappy mall bookstore turn into a Borders? And when did books get so expensive? This morning, I spilled a (large) cup of water off my night stand. It is the cat's blue plastic cup that has to be kept exactly where it is and constantly full. My very first act of the moring was to accidentally hit it with one of my long flailing arms, dumping water everywhere, soaking the exact area of the carpet where two nights before I had spilled an ashtray (I vacuumed but it's the principle of the thing), and dousing the book I spent too long worrying about buying while I had to pee and still had grocery shopping to do.

I had spent so long worrying and reconsidering the cost of my eventual purchase that by the time I made my way to the mall exit, slinking past the bank of antique dealers slumped in their cane seated chairs, I decided I had no choice now but to go to the other grocery store. The other grocery store is the Big Y supermarket. Big Y has a much nicer bathroom than the one in the mall or the ones at the other area supermarkets. Big Y is also much closer to the mall. I was hesitant to go there even with these really good reasons compelling me to. You see, I don't shop at Big Y anymore because it's too far from my apartment now that I've moved two towns east. Further, the new grocery store, Stop and Shop, is union. The workers seem happier there than at Big Y. The floral department is less cramped and staffed most of the time.

This is complete bullshit.

These are undeniably nice things and good reasons to prefer Stop and Shop over Big Y, but when I think about it more than superficially, I have to admit none of these is the reason I completely stopped shopping at Big Y. No, the reason I find reasons to feel less silly about avoiding Big Y is the memories. When I was with Tom, in the 4 years we lived together, I shopped at Big Y. Or more accurately, we shopped at Big Y.

As soon as I walked in yesterday, I felt suffocated by sorrow. The worst passed quickly, but left me staggering by the muffin cart. I chose my muffins, folded the top of the bag down, and told myself to pull it together. I was surprisingly good from produce to soda, but by the time I reached the coffee corner, another wave hit me. Shake it off. Sometimes you get through things by will. Walk push walk push where are papertowels? Fuck the papertowels, keep going. Walk push walk push where is (don't cry) half and half? Where is milk? 2%? Walk push walk push....

I waited for ever in line. I flipped through the last 6 years of my life. It has as much drama, torrid love, and bad choices as any tabloid in the racks. I started feeling sad again so I went back further. Back to when I was still excited about grad school. Back to Michigan. Back to Boston...oh wait, too far back! Has my life changed much since then? Have I just found less dangerous diversions?

When the cashier finally cleared enough of the large order in front of mine, I began piling my things on the belt. As I put my dairy up, the boy behind me said "Mountain dairy, they make good stuff!" I didn't look at him completely when I began to say "yeah I guess they don't use hormones and shit...". He laughed and said "I know, I work there. We have very healthy cows." I turned to see this extremely wholesome looking young dairy boy smiling at me and I immediately blushed. In retrospect, I think part of this is that I just sometimes blush when I talk to strangers. The other part is that I had been lecturing him about something he was apparently an expert in. And the last part is that my trip through the supermarket had been so emotionally draining I am sure it showed on my face. "Oh. Um..." I said and went back to piling up my food on the belt, happy I hadn't bought tampons or preparation H or something, suddenly embarassed by my purchase of the mega-pack of double roll toilet paper. Yes, I'm an emotional wreck and I have intestinal problems, Nice to meet you wholesome young Dairy Boy.

After a brief and awkward conversation with Dairy Boy and the bagger about what to do if you drop your cell phone in a toilet (bagger suggested a hair dryer while I advocated the waterless soap option), I pushed my cart to the door. Leaving hurt almost as much as going in. Outside was a beautiful sunny evening, and I realized I still had to pee.

Me versus a bag of chips

Hey, fun. This poster is part of the American Cancer Society's Eat Right campaign. If you go here, you can make a customized poster for yourself (I chose my comic book porn name/alter-ego, Muffin Force, as drawn by my sister) versus whatever diet/nutritional challenger you choose. For example, mine is bag o'chips. Some advice to avoid frustration - don't use the back button on your browser while creating your poster or your work will be flushed. Also, when you finish your poster, select the print option, then "print to file" and save it as a jpeg. I didn't the first time and because the link generated when I chose the e-mail option didn't work, the poster was flushed (again).

The poster game is a gimmick intended to get you into the contentful part of the site (the "interactive tools" part). Unfortunately, the eat right campaign is partly funded by Weight Watchers - although they are not the worst of the diet peddlers out there. As a point of comparison, Jenny Craig is horrible (I feel their ads irresponsibly prey on and promote unhealthy body image ideals as well as anti-female sentiment in general).

Back to the American Cancer Society.
The "tools" are a little hokey, full of flash movies that are clearly intended for people who, well, people who aren't really like me apparently. This is probably a sign the tools will have the intended broad appeal in the larger target audience though - people like my ex mother in law and my friend Tory from Michigan.

The messages seem quite reasonable and hokey or not, I'm glad the ACS put this together. The overall point is to eat healthy, not simply to lose weight by any means possible ("Weight Watchers asks Have you tried crack?"). On the healthy eating pages, while there is a constant subtext and assumption that people accessing this information are overweight, it is not something they hit you over the head with like some sites I've seen do.

The simple fact is you can be over or underweight and still be malnourished to the point where you are doing serious damage to your health short or long term. Contrary to the commercial ideals we receive, skinny doesn't always equal healthy. Unfortunately, our bodies will work on total shit for fuel (e.g. a diet consisting primarily of items from the hostess, frito-lay, and sarah-lee food groups) allowing you to starve your body of needed nutrients while filling your belly (and perhaps your arteries with fat....MMMmmmmm). Human bodies are really very good at going on as if the shit we are consuming is what we need. But eventually, if you keep running on crap, you're gonna pay for it.

So me and Bag O'Chips are gonna go a few rounds. Since today is a grocery store day for me, I think I'll pick up some nuts and popcorn (the kind w/o the goop). Bag O'Chips, you're going DOWN!!!!

I h8 weddings

Wedding season is here and I still have not gotten my shit together to try to sell my old wedding dress. I considered e-bay but it scares me. I keep saying I'm going to have a good old fashioned tag sale (that's what the yokels in CT call what the rest of the world who share this concept call garage or yard sales).

As I get older I dislike weddings more and more. I am a big fan of celebrating things. Life sucks enough, it makes you stop and deal with the bad. The good should be celebrated, always. But traditional weddings are just out of control. They often are bad inherently and only get worse when you add in things like pre-existing family tensions, a miserable economy, and an apparent belief that worth is measured in extrinsic symbolic values (like money spent) rather than real ones (like love, happiness, romance, good sex).

I've been to some weddings that were nice, where it didn't seem like the cost and stress of doing this event hurt the couple and their families more than it helped. But even those involved so much stress for the couple and their families/friends. Anything approaching a traditional wedding in the US is exceptionally expensive. Having been to a pretty good number at the ripe old age of 34, I gotta say, with a few rare exceptions, it just doesn't seem worth the cost and hype.

I just typed "weddings" into google and this is the featured hit - Weddings at the Balsams (grand resort hotel)

At The BALSAMS Grand Resort Hotel the destination wedding you've always dreamed of (I didn't dream of my wedding which might explain why I was such a bad, bad bride) becomes the wedding you'll always remember (Oh I remember mine, but does memorable necessarily imply dreamy? I don't think so. I will always remember that my mother bought "favors" which were little stuffed chicks (it was easter weekend) that emitted loud electronic PEEPING sounds when you squeezed them. She handed them out during the toasts).

Planning for the big event is easy with our all-inclusive packages, experienced wedding planning staff and convenient layout of indoor and outdoor settings. Keeping your guests entertained is even easier with our array of on-site resort activities. You can rest assure (I can "rest assure"? That you people will take care of every last bloody detail, but you can't proof read your damned website. Now that's just sad) your wedding day pictures will turn out gorgeous thanks to the breathtaking backdrop of sweeping mountains, sparkling lake and lush woods. For the proverbial icing on the cake, (eeek, they've rolled out the puns) our renowned culinary staff will ensure that each and every guest leaves satisfied (the staff are extremely well hung). Contact us today and let us begin planning an event you'll never forget.

Why is "you'll never forget" the catch phrase for wedding shit? Does anyone really believe you will forget your wedding day? If you stay married, even if you stop really celebrating anniversaries (at least the little ones), you still will find yourself turning to your spouse and saying "My god, do you remember at our wedding when my mother took of her shoes to dance and her extra long toenails had torn through her nylons and were hanging out like tallons?" If you get divorced, like me, you will find yourself saying to your sister or brother "Do you remember at my wedding when mom took off her shoes..."

I think it might be more accurate to say "A wedding you'll want to remember". But embedded in this is an denigration of the fine and expensive institution of weddings, which would be a no-no. It makes sense that when you are selling something that is so likely to be ultimately regretable as an expensive wedding package, you are also selling the concept of great big fluffy expensive weddings in general. I'd guess if I were selling shit like this, I wouldn't want to say anything that might make the happy couple think once let alone twice about whether this is really going to be worth all the expense.

If you think I'm overstating how hard on the couple the traditional US weddings can be, just look at this quote from one of the testimonials on the site:
"The setting of The BALSAMS, in the White Mountains overlooking a lake, is very calming."
She did not write "romantic", "charming", or "fairytale princess perfect". No. She wrote "Calming".
This rather strongly suggests she needed sedation.

Here's my best advice if you're thinking of getting hitched and you want to celebrate it. Elope. I don't recommend getting married at the town hall, it isn't romantic. Run off and get married someplace you can afford to go that is pretty and nourishes your spirit. When you come back, have a big party at the local Elks hall or something, backyard BBQ, big ass mo-fo family and friends pic nic in a park. It'll be more affordable, you won't freak out from the stress, your family and friends get to celebrate your union, and you get presents (which do serve a useful purpose that shouldn't be reserved only for newly weds, but that's another rant for another day).

Hey, here's a great idea to help defray the cost for those romantic fools who simply must have the fairytale princess perfect wedding. See if you can get a drug company to sponsor part or all of the wedding. A small and tasteful graphic or logo advertising the newest in anti-anxiety/anti-depression medications can appear on the programs, napkins, napkin holders, and whatever other junk the couple has emblazoned with their names and cartoon doves or bells. In compensation for this, the drug company can pay for something like dinner, a couple of hours of the open bar, a block of hotel rooms for the wedding party, or music and photography.

This favor is a pack of tissues. Because people cry at weddings.
Here's something to cry about.
The average cost of a US wedding could sponsor a central Asian village's water supply
and just about cover tuition for one year at Harvard.