see, saw

Taking a page from Daniela's blog, I decided to post a couple of new places I've been to recently.

Stuff on my cat
Holla back Boston

I also just watched This Is What Democracy Looks Like. Well I watched part of it, most of it I think. I got frustrated by it and turned it off before it was over. It was very disappointing.

I've thought about it and I don't think my dislike of the movie reflects a rigid distaste for nontraditional documentary format. I suspect it might be influenced by my tendency to dislike nonlinearity in movies unless it is very very well done. And even when it is, I find it more welcome in something I am watching primarily for entertainment/artistic value than in something I'm watching primarily for information, perspective, cogency, and potency.

The movie included lengthy swaths of poor quality music (and other audio) and photoshoplike filtered collage/montages. These dominated the film to the point where it seemed they superceded any discernable nonfiltered or neon glow applied "what happened" content. At one point I said to A____ "This is what a music video looks like. Did fucking Bono produce this or something?" A___ replied "No, if he had the audio quality would be better..."

Content. I know, there is not a single defintion. If this had been billed as an art film, then it had plenty of content. Not necessarily plenty good, but plenty. However artsily done it was meant to be though, the main purpose was not (only) to present an art film. So what the purpose? I thought the idea was to present what happened at the 1999 WTO protests from the protestors' perspectives. This is not unlike what it says on the film's website

An Untold Story - Out of a sea of footage and multiple narratives, THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE weaves an elegant, powerful story that leaves the viewer feeling hope. "We set out to tell a story of empowerment and resistance," says Rowley (a co-director). "We've all heard again and again about random violence and broken windows, about protectionist trade unions and naive hippies. Even as activists, we turned Seattle into a story about repression and police violence. With 'Democracy' we wanted to tell a story of the power we have when we come together, a story of people standing up against the repressive machinery of the system and winning."

Ok, it's a story. They use the word "story" a lot so I guess I can't be blamed for expecting even a sense of narrative. But I think Mr. Rowley and I have different notions of what the word "story" means.

Yes, there is always a slant in any documentary. But when the majority of the content consists of images like red "paint" splashed, super-exposed, cliche images floating on a sea of cop vs. kid melee footage which has been grained and slowed to the point where it is physically nearly impossible to actually SEE what is going on even in the clip, you sort of start feeling like slant is all there is.

I'd cry if all (alternative) documentaries were as traditional, dry, and well, boringly done as Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, but Democracy strays so far to another extreme that any point or story which isn't completely lost in the mix becomes suspect due to the nature of the mix itself.

God damn, I guess I'm a square.

Blog for choice

I don't like the contraceptive options I have. Nope. I sure don't.

I don't like that most of the birth control available for women involves new and not improved ways to stun our ovaries into submission with fuck loads of hormone. If the drugs only zapped ovaries, it'd be one thing. But those drugs have necessarily non trivial effects on your body and can mess with your head, in a very real ischemic kind of way.

The Sponge was a reasonable alternative to the hormone hell of bcps. Back in the Sponge.1 years, it was just bcps as they hadn't yet gotten into hormone patches, injections, and implants (shudder). Sponge.1 was great for those of us lucky enough to not be allergic to it, but despite being IMMENSELY popular, Sponge.1 was yanked. Although after a nearly 11 year hiatus, I hear tell it's back now. The making of Sponge.2 is great news for women who spent the late 90s making difficult "spongeworthy" choices.

But where does that leave us? Essentially with the same sorts of choices for contraceptive that we had in 1992. That isn't really an improvement.

I don't like that other than condoms (which were invented when, like in the upper neolithic era, right?) there are no male-based contraceptives yet on the market. It's the twenty first century. Weren't we supposed to have super cool shit like "the male pill" by now?

While I'm on the subject of male versus female pills, I have to say that I really don't like that "woman problems" don't warrant the same kind of medical attention and research dollars that shit like male "erectile dysfunction" garners ("dysfunction" is not my prefered word here since the term implies it's somehow normal for an 80 year old man with PVOD to have an all night erection, which btw, it's not.) This is related to my dissatisfaction with contraceptive choice since both result from a simply shocking lack of consideration for women's health in mainstream medical and medication culture.

This brings me to a related issue, and one that bears on the topic of blogging for choice, which I will get to in a second. I am not happy that most of the big women's and reproductive rights groups I know of apparently give very little of a public shit about improving safety and variety in contraceptive choices and/or women's health care options. Efficacy of birth control, yes, that they care about. But when the news was breaking that the makers of birth control patches hid information that their product had a higher health risk than some of the commonly used pills, there was hardly a peep out of these groups. And that pissed me off oodles. It still pisses me off.

I guess you could say I am anti-limited choice and possibly I am anti-prochoice groups, but I am certainly not anti-choice. I'm pro-choices, lots of them and better ones than what we've got.

And so I am joining the "blog for choice" day on this year's anniversary of Roe V Wade, January 22.



Here's the info in case you're not in the mood to chase links*.

On January 22nd - the 34th anniversary of Roe v. Wade - we are asking pro-choice bloggers to join us in a day of activism for choice. Blog for Choice Day is a chance to raise the profile of reproductive rights issues in the blogosphere and the media, and to let everyone know that a woman's right to choose is nonnegotiable.

This year's topic is a simple one: tell us, and your readers, why you're pro-choice.



*I stole NARAL's button. They provided a jpg but it was linkless, and I have not devoted the time to learning html well enough to do it myself. I tried and failed several times here so I resorted to thievery but it's thievery for a good cause. The NARAL site offers a jpg to download (they called it a "blog button") which is swell but without a link it's just a picture, is it?

Stimulating

I am making stimuli. Rather, I am making potential stimuli. The stimuli are not very stimulating.

The scribbled note says:
"I need 50 pairs of words - mono and disyllables. Within a pair one has a front vowel and one a back vowel. E.g.

beet -- boot
beetle -- bottle

The words need to refer to something picturable."

How's that for directions? My advisor is smart as a whip but she's never been what anyone would call a great communicator.

I have spent the last hour rotating the simple vowels of English through simple word frames like "p_p". Unfortunately, several excellently picturable monosyllabic words are naughty, like "cock". I can't use these since although we like to think that from a phonological perspective at least they are just words like any others, the truth of the matter is there are some words you just can't use in an experiment.

E.g., we had an experimenter who included the word "slut" in his stimuli. The grads who he piloted all commented on it. "Yeah, I got to 'slut' and I stuttered and fell apart." "Me too. I started laughing, you've gotta take that out." But the researcher refused on the grounds that that the word "slut" was ok to use since the dictionary defined it as an untidy woman. While that is certainly not very nice, it's not all that loaded a definition, right? We tried explaining to this researcher, who spoke english very well but as something like his 8th language, that "slut" (a) pretty much exclusively meant promiscuous to most people and (b) was a very strong word. He would not be swayed. He stood by the numerous dictionaries which list the promiscuous meaning second, evidence that this very negative meaning was the less salient one and not something to worry about. Further, he told us, "I need 'slut' to balance out 'slot'." I think I snotted on myself when he said that.

I'm going to just avoid those words.
Maybe I'll have better luck with the consonant clusters, you know, like "pr_k" and "cr_k".

more more more

...more moronicity from the headlines (excerpted from AP):
Authorities won't say how Devlin kept the boys confined in his home or what they believe to be his motive. Shawn seemed to have had every chance to escape during his captivity. He was left alone for hours to ride his bike, play video games and walk past missing-child posters showing his own age-progressed image.
This kinda makes me want to slap someone.

Rural juror

My brother has a new bit of comedy to revel in.



It's the second part that did him in. He called me Saturday and played it into my voicemail. More amusing than the clip itself was hearing it with the sound of my brother laughing uncontrollably in the background. I'm saving that message.

gavel fixation

Is it me or does it seems like there is a disproportionately large number of pictures of new US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi holding that damned gavel? Who's got the gavel fixation? Her or the press?

Correction

It was a mountain bike.

My god the man is lucky they didn't shoot him.
Have you ever noticed how after something like this there is always a handful of people who can be relied upon to say things like "I'm all for civil liberties but you don't just go charging around at a parade and expect the police won't see that as a threat...."

Interestingly, that response has been lacking here. I suppose that is because school is still on break. And, for better or worse, it will be old news by the time the campus paper cranks out their first edition of the semester.

The state I'm in

If you've read any other part of this blog, odds are you've stumbled across posts detailing or at least referencing my feelings about this state. If not, allow me to summarize - I am not a fan of connecticut. What's currently fueling my extreme dislike of the state of connecticut? This time, it's the use of law enforcement to pre-emptively silence speech of the sort most integral to even a shred of democracy.

Kenneth Krayeske, a freelance journalist, political activist, and law student, was arrested for being at the inaugural parade of our new (old) governor Jodi Rell. Ok, it was for more than being there. It was for being himself and being there. From the news reports it doesn't look like the cop(s) who arrested Krayeske knew he was a journalist. If they had, they might not have gotten all jazzed up when they saw him ride up on a bike, jump off, and approach the parade line with camera in hand as the governor passed. Although I realize as I typed this, Krayeske was riding a bike. That right there could count as probable cause.

But I digress. See, in connecticut it's not ok to exercise your first amendment rights. It's not just illegal to talk about things like poop and boobies on the radio. At least as offensive is visibly and effectively exercising first amendment rights. The existence of these rights is something that never fails to get patiots all swelled up and patriotic. But here in CT, there is a disconnect between pride in the existence of the right and pride in the practice of the right. According to news accounts, Krayese was targeted because of his "past actions" and statements. So Krayeske's being an outspoken critic of the Rell administration (among other things) made his appearance at the parade a questionable act. Thus, in connecticut, having visibly and effectively exercised first amendment rights results in forfeiting those rights.

But Connecticut is the constitution state! How could that happen here? Well, just because it's the constitution state doesn't mean it's the bill of rights state, does it? It turns out the constitution state has a recent history of high profile free speech fuckery. In October of 2001, demonstrators in Hartford were assaulted and arrested by police, held with ridiculously high bails, and charged with crimes such as inciting riot [1, 2].

The 2001 arrests were a frightening over reaction on the part of the police. At the time though it was easy to think it was part of a larger and temporary national trend towards over reaction. Tempers were running high and people were very freaked out in October of 2001. We were still dealing with the immediate wave of aftermath of the plane hijackings, the horror of realizing the full scale of what had happened. And on top of it, there was that whole fucked up anthrax in the mail thing going on, keeping many people on edge. But here we are, years later in a totally different situation. And still it is illegal to be a visibly dissenting member of the public, at least in Hartford, CT. Governmental reaction to September 11 can be seen as the grandfather of a bevy of (now) official restrictive policies and govenmental agencies. This trend is responsible for institutionalizing the kind of reasoning the police used in October 2001 and more recently to target and arrest Krayeske at the governor's parade.

See here's how it goes (excerpted from the Hartford Courant, January 9, 2007)

[State commissioner of public safety] Boyle said that when state police are providing security for any dignitary, its intelligence unit does research to identify "persons who through their prior actions or statements show an intention or propensity to disrupt that event."

"The officers are not told to arrest the person on site, nor to detain, question them or otherwise approach them," Boyle said. "That information is provided to officers working at the event so that they might simply give closer scrutiny to that person."

The whole story is pretty well covered here at this blog through the posts and links. The short version is that we can thank the convergence of the free speech hating policies of CT-local law enforcement with information provided by a relatively new governmental thing (let's refer to it as an "agency") called the Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security. DEMHS houses the Connecticut Intelligence Center. This agency has been referenced in several news stories on Krayeske's arrest. What is it? From the DEMHS website, the CTIC is a... multi-agency center...located at the FBI’s Connecticut office. The center includes Federal, State and Local law enforcement personnel working side by side to develop leads and solve cases. The center is connected to every local law enforcement agency by specially trained Intelligence Liaison Officers who report to Regional Intelligence officers to report to and work at the Connecticut Intelligence Center (CTIC). The CTIC produces weekly Intelligence bulletins which are distributed electronically to law enforcement and others...who work in the field and may come upon important information.

While emergency management services are certainly necessary, while it seems a reasonable goal to find ways to improve communication between federal and state agencies in order to expedite appropriate and useful responses to prevent (preventable) tragedies like the Hurricane response disasters, why put these jobs under "homeland security"? Even typing those words makes me want to cringe. For some reason, the phrase calls to mind notions of governments spying on their own citizens. News of the president's push for a monarchy and events like the arrest at Rell's parade solidify and validate that association.

So here's this creepy (as fuck) organization which exists with the blessings of our state legislature. It's run by what looks like at least one hack from the (former) super corrupt executive administration. Further, it sort of looks like The Department doesn't do such a stellar job at the whole protecting the citizens thing.

You have to wonder then what possible excuse we could have for entrusting oodles of money and power to an agency which has demonstrated a lack of ability to do exactly the one thing it was created to do, especially if it or its officers are implicated in this most recent application of what is apparently becoming a connecticut tradition of obstructing free speech.

The state legislators are in a tizz now, asking to see "the list", that is in reference to whatever information landed Krayeske on the radar of the free speech hungry cops in Hartford. There is talk among the state legislators of holding hearings. They know this is a king sized screw up and they want to get on the right side of it. But they're neglecting the fact that the assembly already had a chance to weigh in on this when the agency was first created. Today I read an article where a prominent state representative, a member of the party leadership in the house, said she hadn't heard of this agency (the CTIC). That's sort of odd considering she was on the legislature when the DEMHS was created through statute.

The state legislators should be held responsible for allowing such an agency to exist and for not mandating appropriate oversight of this agency (at least). That any member of party leadership could dare to claim ignorance of the existence of this agency speaks to that lack of oversight. Allowing the creation of such a thing without insisting on the proper safeguards against its use to curtail the rights and freedoms of the people it's meant to serve is the same as if the state legislators themselves acted to destroy civil liberties in the state. Yes, there should be hearings. But we should consider putting a few questions to the legislators too, starting with "Just what the fuck were you thinking anyhow?"


From the dissenting opinion in Abrams V the United States, US Supreme Court Justice Holmes (1919):
Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power, and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law, and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care wholeheartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system, I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.

cups of cake (I)

My brother's new year's resolution was to make cupcakes. He was down this past weekend, got himself to an NA meeting, and when he came back we frosted the chocolate cupcakes we had made earlier. All in all, a very good visit.

Still haven't done the carrot soup but I have the chicken stock done and I'm hoping to get cracking on it tomorrow. I'll post results and the recipe if it's decent.

awake

Today I woke up before sunrise.
Out of bed 20 minutes later.
I am so not a morning person.

side effect

Saw a different GI doctor today. The one I saw before christmas had gone on vacation over christmas. I'm sure it was a very much needed vacation, especially if all his patients dislike him as much as I do.

The new one was at least more likable. Also he doesn't look like a rat.

The new non-ratlike doctor recommended yoga, set up an endoscopy since the last time my stomach hurt like this I had some stomach polyps. God that sounds nasty, doesn't it?
He asked me "Did they find a lot of them?"
I said "The other guy didn't really say. I mean, who's gonna come in after the procedure and say 'hey I found a whole mess of polyps in there!' to a patient? He told me 'I found some polyps and removed them'."
This prompted him to confer with the chart. Apparently it was a whole mess of polyps.

He also gave me two scripts, one I will try because it's supposed to help me actually digest what I eat. The other I am a little apprehensive about because it is addictive.
"Isn't that addictive?" I asked when the doctor said the name of the drug.
"Hm? That? No, it's not addictive..." he said, sounding genuinely shocked.

But see, when this drug first came out I was engaged to Bob the ER doctor (then the ER resident) a.k.a. "Flounder". The drug was seriously pimped by the reps, I recall Flounder telling me at the time. It offered the pain control of opiates but it wasn't an opiate. Nor was it chemically similar to other (synthetic) opioids. Wonderful! So everyone promptly began prescribing it. Here you go. Here's some for you, and for you. I remember the sample boxes had a butterfly on them. I remember because Flounder, along with the other doctors at the drug rep lunch that week were given goodie bags of samples along with the usual drug schwag.

Then the bad news came. Turns out it was addictive. Oh yes indeed. No more samples of this drug, although the butterfly bedecked pens and note pads remained.

While I know it is a horrible thing to question one's doctors, I did look it up when I got home. Turns out it happens to bind to certain opioid receptors. I also found this article which I excerpted below.

A 74 year old man with lung cancer was referred to the palliative care team for symptom control. He had pain in the left side of his chest and was advised to take tramadol hydrochloride 50 mg four times daily at home. Soon after starting the tramadol, he began to experience auditory hallucinations. These were particularly vivid and took the form of “two voices singing, accompanied by an accordion and a banjo, singing songs, songs by Josef Locke—old songs.” They were distressing, making him feel as though he was going mad.

No offense to Josef Locke (whoever he is) but I'm quite sure I would also feel distressed by having vivid hallucinations of any duet accompanied by a banjo and accordion ensemble. Who wouldn't?

The addictive issue is more relevant if you take it long term. These days most doctors are more concerned with treating (or masking) symptoms rather than using them to diagnose whatever is causing them. I'm not a fan of adding a "take it for, well, um, let's see here... for ever. And see me when you need more" drug to my daily routine. I've already got a couple of those, but at least those are relatively benign and are meant to control the underlying problem rather than just make the symptoms tolerable.

I think I'll skip this drug. I'd like to say I'll skip it in favor of a diagnosis but that's probably not an option. So I'll skip it and hope the other one works, or at least works enough.

another new year

Last year my resolution was to learn three new recipes.
Here are some of the recipes I'm counting towards that total.
One - sesame noodles (with a peanut noodle variant)*
Two - sweet and sour sauteed carrots and red peppers
Three - Greek chicken
Four - Broccoli and cheddar risotto
Five - New version of chicken parmesan

*This one was from 2005 I think but I am counting it anyhow since I kept working on it into 2006.

It's past the end of the year, but I am going grocery shopping today and I'm planning to pick up stuff to try carrot ginger soup. I've been losing weight again and I need to find some nutritious food that might be easier on my stomach than tomato or other spicey/acidic creations. I'm very excited about trying the soup since I had some in Ann Arbor when I last visited and it was quite good.

This may have been the first time I can happily report I have kept my resolution. Most years I resolve to undertake some big life and perspective changing attitude or growth. I remember resolving to learn to rely on other people better. I got sick of having my resolutions turn into trials. Although I do realize that the resolution itself wasn't causal (more likely it went in the other direction), I got sick of the sense of uncomfortable ironic self fulfilling prophecy that such resolutions raised. So I resolved to make only silly resolutions.

This year, I resolve to post fliers with something like what Rob Brezsny would call "sacred advertisements". Back in 1999 a friend and I conspired to commit similar acts. We researched quotes on women, academia, and women in academia. We collected them, printed them up on colorful paper, then snipped each out so we had a handful of individual brightly colored quotes. Over the next few months, we occasionally taped a set of them around our building on campus.

This year's resolution is to commit similar acts but involves expanding the repertoire a bit.

tagged

I got tagged by Daniela at Lingo Franko.
So here we go....

4 jobs I have had
1. florist
2. unit clerk (medical)
3. ESL instructor
4. salesgirl

4 Movies I could watch over and over
1. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
2. Nearly any Coen brothers movie but especially The Big Lebowski
3. Airplane
4. Mystery Men

4 places I have lived apart from where I live now
1. Quincy, MA
2. Waltham, MA
3. Ann Arbor, MI
4. Various towns in CT

4 tv shows that I love (which are on DVD/itunes because I don't have cable)
1. The Office
2. Scrubs
3. My Name is Earl
4. 30 Rock (not LOVE but the buying all the hotdogs was just too great)


4 places I have been on hols
1. Peaks Island, Maine
2. Leenalau, Michigan (stayed at a nice B&B, went to the dunes park which was GORGEOUS, saw the biggest snake I've ever seen right smack in the middle of a trail)
3. San Francisco
4. Vancouver

4 websites I visit daily
1. Google
2. The Boston Globe
3. Weather Underground
4. Pandora

4 favourite foods
1. Minestrone
2. Lasagna
3. Greek chicken (mint, oregano, peppers, red onion, feta cheese, and grapes – yum!)
4. Chips – nearly any kind

4 places i would rather be at right now
[I noticed that there aren’t as many places as there are states (of being), so below are places or ways i'd rather be right now]
1.In the house I rented in Ann Arbor the last year I lived out there, but with a slight change of cast. Cat and dog are still there but no ex. I miss that place. With the exception of my ex husband’s presence, it felt right to me.
2. Heading up to Boston to meet my little brother for dinner as I had tentatively planned yesterday morning. I made those plans before I spent the day with pain and nausea (they make rotten guests btw – came about a week before thanksgiving and they won’t leave). I am currently waiting to see how food treats me today but I suspect that I will not be making my trip as planned.
3. Brave again.
4. In possession of the kind of trust which has more than one (somewhat superficial) apparent level.

4 people I am tagging
Vengicar
Winterwheat
Gypsy
and of course cjblue

Looking for a contraceptive that's convenient — and tasty?

That's how the news story on chewable birth control pills began.

I can't help thinking WHY? What, other than having a new pill, is the fucking advantage of chewable minty freshness? The write up is all about making it easier to take the pill (correctly). The drug’s site references this. "Research has shown that compliance still impacts oral contraceptive failure rates, and anything we can do to make it easier for our patients to maintain a daily regimen is a notable advancement," said Laurent Delli-Bovi, MD, Medical Director, Women's Health Services at Chestnut Hill Family Planning Facility in Boston, Massachusetts.

While I may feel cantankerously skeptical about the worth of a chewable pill, I do know that medication compliance is certainly nothing to be sneered at. For example, a staggering majority of people being treated for Hepatitis C will not complete the entire course of treatment because the side effects are just so horrible. Less treatment means lower chances of clearing and kicking the virus. Similarly, if you miss just a few birth control pills (bcps) in a month, you lose a significant amount of efficacy. Less effective means more chance of preggers. It also means a change in the risk/benefit ratio and when a medication's risks are just barely outweighed by the medication's benefits, it doesn't take much to tip the scales so the drug is too risky to take. Hormonal contraception has plenty of hefty inherent risks to weigh against. In the category of inherent risk, I’m including only the ones that exist even when we don't consider factors like interactions with other medications. Some of just the short term inherent risks of bcps are weight gain, mood changes, loss of libido, and death. (For the full list look under the heading "side effects and possible adverse events" or somesuch, printed in the tiniest font imaginable on the insert which has been folded into an impossibly small but quite dense packet, glued shut, and jammed in with your pills.)

It seems women who choose to use bcps perceive the apparent risks to be outweighed by the apparent benefits, where the big benefit presumably is the increased freedom from and control over one's reproductive cycle and where death should be considered the most obvious and serious immeidate inherent risk. I think, though, that such a comparison of medical risks and benefits is not as integral to the decision of what contraceptive to use as it should be. If it were, the favored option would be condoms. Condoms are not just the best bet in terms of lower inherent risks. They won't give you a stroke or make you fat, and they will keep you not preggers if you use them right. Pills? They'll keep you not preggers if you use them right. Also, condoms have the added attraction of being good for you by limiting exposure to several nasty diseases like HPV, HCV, HIV, plus all the good old fashioned ones. Obviously, if the decision were only or even primarily in terms of health benefits and risks, condoms win. But they don't. Why not? Compliance.

Because condoms are not user friendly and they are not user sexy. A condom is a latex wrapper which requires a certain degree of practice if not skill and a kind of shamelessness which in some contexts can be seen as unappealingly wanton. Using condoms might raise unspoken questions about how much roll is left at the bottom, an issue which for some people could affect The Mood. Condoms can necessitate a higher level of lighting, especially for folks who haven't had tons of experience putting them on. All of these spell out a kind of encounter that is highly incompatible with what seems to be typical, vanilla, het US sexuality.

That pills come in at all should suggest that the issue of compliance isn't just about risk/benefit, side effects, or efficacy. It's not about health related issues. It's about userfriendliness and also usersexiness. We live in a culture where long standing norms mandate that feminine (sexual) availability and desirability to a man universally trump the woman’s health and wellbeing. So in terms of the user friend/sexy aspects of compliance, birth control pills, although they can kill a woman in a couple of ways (or leave her forever dribbling into a drool cup) are a far better contraceptive. I find this revolting. However, it's a choice people are allowed to make, not just the eventual choice of specific contraception, but the decision of how to assess the available options.

In light of this, I can see that it makes sense to improve bcps as a form of hormonal contraception. I can even see that there is some benefit of focusing on increasing compliance in terms of making them more user friendly/sexy since this seems to be an aspect which carries a lot of weight in people's decisions about what to use and how to use it. And still, I can't quite see how making chewable mint flavored pills will make them better in ANY way. Of course being chewable or mint flavored makes them no more effective or less dangerous. Would chewable pills increase patient compliance in terms of user friendliness or user sexiness and thereby at least give more women the full 99% efficacy to weigh against the full set of health hazards associated with pill use? Not really.

According to the story, the new chewable mint flavored bcps will address the pressing needs of
A) Women who "don't like swallowing pills"
B) Women who "want to take their birth control with them"
C) Women who "sometimes forget to take their pills"
There is so much wrong here.

Let's start with B. So the chewable pills are easier to take with you? They are no easier to take with you than the nonchewable counterpart pills. Loestrin(fe), the old school nonchewable counterpart of the new pills, comes in a pack that is credit card sized. According to the AP story, the new improved chewable pills come in a credit-card sized dispenser kept inside a velvet pouch. The velvet pouch cannot possibly make that big a difference. If the dispenser is too much, you can pop one or two pills out and stash them all sorts of places (e.g., the bitty front pocket on jeans, in a compact). But you can do this regardless of whether the pill is chewable or not. In fact, the nonchewable might have the advantage here since who wants to chew up some pocket lint with their bcp? Before I got all the way through the article, I remember thinking “it might be nice for when you don’t have access to water or liquid and you need to take your pill within the next two hours or something to avoid feeling ill when you wake up” (that was always an issue for me when I took them…the timing was critical or I’d wake up hurling). Then I got to this part: Women must drink 8 ounces of water with the tablet. The chewables are as fucking portable or not portable as the nonchewable counterparts are. Both still require access to water to take. No advantage here.

And then there's C. This was just insultingly illogical. How the fuck would making the pill chewable make it easier to remember? No advantage here.

That leaves A. It’s for women who don’t like swallowing pills. This at least logical, but it's pretty damned weak. I've had to take some antibiotics which I thought perhaps I should use a fork and knife on, and generally I'm not someone who's got swallowing issues (hey don't go reading into that). But I hadn’t realized that this is, was, or could be a significant issue in compliance with this particular type of pill. Have you ever seen how small the nonchewable bcps are?

While I know there are some people who have problems swallowing pills, I have a hard time believing that this is a major reason why women might not take their bcps correctly. The drug company may as well have just changed the color. So clearly this innovation is just a ploy, and given how seriously shitty for you bcps are, it's a disgusting ploy. It's also a stupid ploy. If compliance in contraception use comes down to how user friendly/sexy it is, then they're gonna need something other than chewable minty freshness. If the drug companies can't get their heads around making safer hormonal contraception, maybe they should at least rethink the whole makes you fat, angry, and unarousable part.

big ol' sentences

I realize that my last two posts were chock full of them. Needlessly big old sentences happen but they are never a good thing. That's what I get for writing it sporadically over several days, over christmas-time. "It" being singular reference for them because they started out as one post. I split it into two when it became completely unruly. Well it's out there and I'm reluctant to edit such lengthy posts. Thus they will remain, more or less, as they are - plural overstated rambles.

I'm going to try for shorter sentences here. Or at least for parsable sentences here.

Christmas is over. I got some mixed emotions. A sample pack as a matter of fact. The picked through left overs look a little sad sitting there on the coffee table. They don't come wrapped individually in little crinkly brown paper cups. These come loose, knocked around in a beautiful box tied with a silver trimmed blue bow. Unfortunately, some of them seemed to have already gone stale before I opened it. A couple left a nasty aftertaste I can't seem to get rid of no matter how many tums, proton pump inhibitors, or anticholinergics I've tried to wash it away with. Also, it appeared that one or two of them had been smooshed by a finger, curious to see which had the much coveted sweet soft centers. Little did they know this was the nut packed holiday sampler.

On the pro side, I found a website where you can make an elf. A____ and I (and my sister) made one of my division head. This may have been the highlight of my christmas weekend. Currently, I am making myself a holiday sweater. Also this week I discovered "The Office" (US). I'm renting the british version on netflix.

Then comes next week and a return to work.

pique part 2

I noticed some years back that when you are open about stuff, there are a very large number of folks who take this to mean they have license to throw all sensitivity to the wind in their response. I don’t mean that their response is equally open, if by open we include sincere as a necessary trait. The response is simply insensitive. This isn’t always so bad from anonymous strangers, but it sort of sucks when a friend or someone you respect has that sort of reaction to getting a glimpse at your unclothed inner self. The suckiest part is that often this behavior feels like it was invited if not deserved as a result of having been open in the first place.

Having had a couple of occasions to think about this kind of situation as it arose between me and others here and there, I've come to the following conclusion. Thinking being open means you're asking for inconsiderate, remote, socially conditioned responses which place a premium on upholding the disclosure ban (to the detriment of supporting a friend, lover, or even just a fellow human being struggling with some totally normal but perhaps distastefully negative aspects of the human condition) is like thinking when a guest is invited over, they are welcome to shit on the host's coffee table if they don’t like the dip, find the curtains tacky, or are allergic to the host’s cat.

Being open is inviting someone into your space. It’s like letting someone into your home. Of course anyone would agree an invitation to come in doesn't even indirectly imply that the guest could or should do something like that once they are in, not if the invite is into someone’s house. (Ok, fine, a guest could logically and feasibly do that I suppose, but you know what I mean.) Why does letting someone in on a less physical level mean a lower standard applies?

The most rotten part is that this gets internalized, even if you disagree with it. So when someone gives you the "too much information" response (in any of it's forms) to what is sincere and possibly quite necessary self expression, you feel bad. You are the one who has violated the social norm and you now can add guilt for that on top of whatever was going on that lead you to "there" or to express "too much information" in the first place.

I wanted to say for my friend and for whoever else has had a run in with the disclosure police that the desire to be open, to express oneself and even to do this in a forum as public as a blog is not deviant. Sure, at times it might be narcissistic. It might be self absorbed and silly. It might come across as boring or whiney. But those feelings are part of the human experience folks. Self absorbed silly shit come with being a person. Keeping your silly self absorbed shit just to yourself is no guarantee that you're going to move past that, if indeed that is your goal. Plus, who said that all literate introspection on one's personal life and personal response to a larger life is shit? Try reading some Yeats. Talk about mixing your political, personal, and even spiritual, and all out there in the open for EVERYONE TO READ!!!! My god, it's like a fucking blog.

Admittedly not everyone's writing resembles the skill or artistry level of a poet. But keep in mind the focus of the criticism lodged against people who give us "too much information" is not "you don't write in rhyming meter". It's "your personal stuff is up where everyone can read it...ewww!" as if no one ever put their personal, trivial, possibly not terribly stylish shit out there, ever. So untrue. This is nothing new. A quick history lesson should make it clear that this impulse to reveal and disclose even the less exciting and/or less pleasant details of a minor and otherwise unimportant life is about as normal as you get.

Before we had words, we some neolithic guy smearing antelopes across a cave wall in ochre and ash mixed with spit and god only knows what else. I wonder if anyone at the time was thinking "Oh-my-god. Thog so needs to get over himself"

A more direct lineage from ancient to modern expression of the mundane can be seen in graffiti. Graffiti by it's definition is not art. Mutating words into tags is not art. Lines about whether boys or girls give better head written in a ring that spirals out from around the toilet paper holder like some kind of sharpie galaxy of profanity is not poetry. Interactive stories, debates, prayers, curses, vows are not literature if they appear on a wall and not in a peer reviewed journal or magazine. But god damn people just feel compelled to put it out there on the fucking wall don’t they?

Graffiti, while it may be debatable in polite circles as a form of art, is without any doubt the best kind of snapshot of the individual embedded in his or her social contexts. It is therefore valuable if you are interested in what I guess I’m stuck calling “the human condition”. The sentiment hasn’t changed for a while now either. Consider the following from "The Walls of Pompeii"*
Marcus loves Spendusa.
Serena hates Isidore.
Thyas, don't love Fortunatus.
Sarra, you're not acting very nicely, leaving me all alone.
Restitutus has deceived many girls many times.
I have screwed many girls here.
When I came here, I screwed. Then I returned home.
Let him who loves, prosper. Let him who loves not, perish. And let him who forbids others to love, perish twice over.
Let him who chastises lovers try to fetter the winds and block the endless flow of water from a spring.
Lovers, like bees, lead a honey-sweet life.
I am amazed, o wall, that you have not collapsed and fallen, since you must bear the tedious stupidities of so many scrawlers.
Shelton, J. As the Romans Did: A Sourcebook in Roman Social History Oxford 1988.

And here’s an adaptation of a sentiment that has also been around for a while.
Don't like the tedious stupidities? Don't read the wall.
Don't like the drama? Stay off the blog.

You can give someone shit for "going there" or for having disclosed "too much information". But recognize that your response and your need to vocalize it can be seen as being every bit as tedious and irksome as what you’re responding to, and 100% as personal.

Just for shits and giggles, here's the rest of Margaret Cho's "don't go there" bit (from Revolution)

I'm considered a highly inappropriate person. And it makes me a problem dinner guest because at some point during the evening the person seated next to me says, "Okay, uh huh okay, too much information. Yeah, don't go there." I live there. I bought a house there. I will take you there. Because to live as a minority in this country feels like dying of a thousand paper cuts and I ain't going out like that, so I always have to tell the story.

Like I was driving in my car and I saw this woman in front of me and she had a bumper sticker that said, "This car was built with tools, not chopsticks," and it was in this super chinky font that was really like "hi yah!" like that kind of feng shui hong kong fooey font that's really like "aaaieeeaaaiieeaiaai." You know, that kind of font? And I exploded with anger, like I just turned into the Asian Incredible Hulk. I got gigantic and yellow like, "boom boom boom Aaaagh!" And I rolled up next to her and I had nothing prepared. So I just started to scream like, "Aaaagh Aaaaagh Aaaaagh!" I just kept doing it and I kept doing it and I forced her to make a left turn against the red light.

And I felt really good about myself, because I don't want to be the better person. I don't want to rise above it. I don't want to turn the other cheek. I will show you what cheek I'm gonna turn, okay?

pique part 1

I understand there is a long standing or at least far reaching social custom of self righteously expressing discomfort at disclosure of things less than sunshiney happy great. Oh no, I don’t mean to say that disclosing this sort of thing can be uncomfortable. That much should go without saying. I’m talking about people’s reactions to someone else’s disclosure. There are some folks out there who are so disturbed by disclosure that they will react strongly to someone else's, and even when it occurs in a place where it could have been quite easily ignored. Like in the impersonally distant space afforded by things bloggy. Still, some people are so bothered that they will promote themselves from simple disclosure patrolman to disclosure detective - not just issuing tickets for blatant instances of someone saying too much, being too graphic, too detailed, or getting too personal but going that extra little bit out of their way to apprehend the effusive bastard who has the nerve or lacks the restraint to properly bury his too not happy thoughts and feelings in public.

Think I'm over-reaching? Maybe a wee bit but consider the common type. The particularly flamboyant version of a disclosure cop. The person who, while making the stereotyped head and hand gesture combo, laughs maybe a bit nervously and sneers "OhMyGod....too much information!" and "don't go there!" at you and then goes back to reading his/her celebrity gossip-rag website.

From this hypothetical composite but immediately recognizable example of the familiar social phenomenon of disclosure policing, we can deduce that “going there” is very much socially proscribed. The problem is most of the interesting people live THERE (to paraphrase Ms. Cho). In fact, one of my friends has indeed bought a house THERE. Or rather he inherited the house, but there he is, right firmly THERE in "there-ville". Then what to do about the people who are THERE. The zero disclosure policy translates into all sorts of unpleasant mandates. Keep your head down, avert your eyes, work really hard to not be THERE, and for the love of god if you must suffer at least have the decency to do it in silence and self inflicted isolation. Commit yourself to the Sissyphean task of changing yourself when most of what needs changing is society. And do this so others won't be made uncomfortable by shamelessly displayed evidence of your discontent, deviancy, or disquietude.

Or you could "dare disturb the universe". You could say something now and then. You could share your feelings and thoughts about life, your slice of it and how the bigger view looks from THERE and deal with the disruption this causes. I’m not sure if that’s what Eliot meant when he wrote those lines. I read them that way for me. As if having a sincere and honest reaction, word, or conversation, would be so out there that everything would fall apart.

I go there. I live there. And you know what? It turns out my shit is so relatively tiny that the universe CAN handle it. How about that? My friend had been providing “too much information” but now thanks to some custodian of decency out to protect the universe from being shaken to its core by semi-disgruntled musings of a new parent and recently dissertated (heheh) academic, my friend’s blog has swung in the opposite direction. Now posts from the last 6+ months have come down off his blog. This sucks. I don’t like knowing someone got silenced. Also some of the posts were quite funny, despite hints at bleakness here and there. Some of them were informative in terms of elucidating the shit that is an academic job search. But they were too negative for someone or for some set of ones.

Fuck.

Done!

Yippie! Grades are in. Papers will soon be shuffled. And I will pray no one comes calling at my office door at the start of next semester with a complaint about not getting the A they are sure they deserved. It's possible. There are a couple of people I think might have a hard time coming to grips with a C despite having consistently done a semester worth of C work or with the full letter grade or more reduction as a result of having bombed the hell out of the end of the semester.

I think next time I'm going to have them put just ID numbers on the essays because I kept worrying that my impressions of them so far might influence my assessment of their end of the semester writing. I'm pretty consistent and reliable in things I measure, but years as a researcher make me nervous about non-blind ratings. I take some reassurance that in the end, the final grades are nicely skewed towards the high side (25% in the A range) and have a distribution that goes all the way down to an F or two.

Waiting

The semester is wrapping up and I am having a hard time feeling the relief I thought would be here like a nice reward for keeping it together and getting shit done all semester.

I keep anticipating it, any day now....but so far it's not coming. I wonder if that's because Christmas is looming just around the corner. Or maybe the problem is the sense of waiting for something is not an anticipation of relief but something else entirely. There are hints that is the case. When I stop and sit quietly, I can almost feel something looming. Like a movement in the corner of the eye. It's not anything as dramatic as a sense of dread but it does involve a murky sense of something not very pleasant.

Then maybe I need to take some stock of what's up in my life to figure out what's motivating this. There's the chronic christmas-phobia, never to be discounted. On top of this (and possibly partly because?), my health's been not so great the last few weeks. Oh then there are the guys who've been working on the oil burner/boiler in the basement all week, with no heat in the meantime. It could be worse, the weather could be seasonably cold. If our oil burner had to totally meltdown, I guess this was the week for it. On the con side, these guys have been in my basement directly below my apartment for most of the week starting at about 8 AM each day, which has seriously impacted my sleep time. I am NOT an early riser, mostly because I am not an early bedtimer. Last night was the first night all week I even thought I was going to get to bed before 3:00 and as it turned out that was more wishful thinking. The guys working in the basement thing started as a result of my calling my landlord and to bitch him out/convince him to actually DO something about the burner that keeps setting off the alarms (something other than disconnect the alarms). That wasn't an easy conversation and it sure wasn't fun. I can go toe to toe with people like my landlord, but I am always drained afterwards.

And now I have a pile of exams to grade (essays all) in addition to a student who had an end of the semester crisis which has left me wondering if I am turning into the kind of bitch who has the "hey I dealt with it so you should just suck it up and do it too" attitude I hate when I see in other people. I don't think so, I mean I don't think that is the true nature of my reactions to this situation, but thinking about her, the mess she's in, the mess she's made of what was supposed to be a nice less-stress end of the semester, and my reaction to all of it is occupying a great deal of my time. It's not really avoidable as a line of thought either since I still have some administrative crap to deal with as a result of her crisis (missed the inclass test and the essay portions of the final exam), and come Sunday I must assign her a grade whether I've heard from her, the dean's office, or whoever. Witnessing and experiencing this is kicking up nasty thoughts of how people in my program like my faculty and peers view me and my seemingly constant stream of illness.

Which then brings me back to my health, which sort of sucks. As an adolescent and younger adult when I would feel these waves of excitement and anticipation for no specific reason. They were not common but very nice when they occured. Those moments always felt like they held promise and hope, not for anything in particular but just for the potential of many things, futures that were not only immediate and long term, but also of various kinds. I LIKED that feeling. What I've realized recently is that they have mutated. It wasn't sudden. It began after living a few years of my body making a habit of betraying me a bit. Now I think I'm kind of stuck with them. They come on as vague unease at best and something approaching full on anxiety/panic at worst. To have those reassuring, happy moments of awareness of simple potential not only gone but replaced with a fear of insurmountable limits fucking blows.

So what am I waiting for? For the relief or for the fear?

It's beginning to look a lot like...

April.

It's 53 degrees out (that's Fahrenheit, not the temperature units everyone else in the world uses). Tomorrow's high is predicted to be 55.

I'd say any fool could see this is officially screwy weather. I can and I am not that knowledgable about the environment or climate. I'd say I know about as much fact as the average person on this issue. And yet to me, what I am witnessing is unnerving and disturbing. The solid month of rain which is swamping Spring and Fall. The violent thunderstorms in the winter, complete with tornado warnings (this is NEW ENGLAND Toto, not Kansas).

I have a deep sense of "this ain't fucking right" that I can't get away from. The smell of thawed earth in December, the sight of buds and blooms on trees in November provoke vague thoughts of melting ice caps and warming oceans, lost habitats and starving animals. Here and there memories of Katrina and the December 26 2004 asian tsunami emerge, calling to mind notions of weather gone very very bad.

Yesterday it was quite warm. Less than today but still not even a little December-y. I was in an outdoorsy store (I followed A___ in) and heard this one presumably outdoorsy kid who worked there saying to another young employee "I just LOVE this weather! I love love love it!" He was sort of dancing and jumping about when he said it. I wanted to throw him a hackysack. Actually I wanted to shove one down his moron throat. How the fuck can you "LOVE LOVE LOVE" this weather? It is FUCKED UP. I can see something like "golly it sure is nice not to have to worry about an ice storm but this is creepy". Or the kind of rejoicing relief a January thaw can bring after weeks of cold. But that ain't this. No. He love love loves that it hasn't even really become winter yet, that the weather is so fucked up our seasons are shifting and mutating, and it's happening often and persistently enough that it's becoming hard for even a skeptic to dismiss as a fluke. So why does this kid love love love that we've fucked up our climate? Because he was up at (insert name of impressive hiking trail in northern/central new england...probably something in New Hampshire) this weekend and it was AwwwwweSome!

Although this kid was anywhere from 5 to 15 years younger than me, it's that sort of attitude that I think of when I think "babyboomer".