April was not the cruelest month, not at all.

Things that are dumb:
1. Reusing Cardboard Postal Boxes Illegal
2. Shell President: Produce More Gas in U.S. to Cut Oil Prices
3. Smith College Students Drown Out Anti-Gay Speaker

I feel compelled to comment only on the last item, which turns my stomach. The lecturer was accomplishing nothing but spewing hate speech, which is obviously despicable, but the day that our side starts suppressing dissident voices is the day I want out. I can even commiserate with the argument that Smith is one of few truly safe spaces for queer youth in this country -- I have been realizing recently how much I have internalized the instinct to censor myself for fear of harm or simple, debilitating disdain from people I respect. But holding rally that did not drive out the speaker could have created the same assurance of safety, of community, of support, without compromising the value of an open society. Let's do better.

Things that are at least kind of awesome:
1. Ecuador to Legislate Good Sex for Women as Inalienable Right
2. This lady's artwork
3. Combing the internet for old, forgotten livejournals of acquaintances. It's priceless, really.

My economic stimulus check should cover the damage I did to my car in a fender bender almost precisely. Too bad my darling Honda is Japanese made. Poor planning, U.S. government, that money is not staying here to stimulate the market even a little bit, but at least it is not going to China? Many factors in my life are conspiring to give me mono. I should just give in to the inevitability of the disease*, as it would give me a convenient excuse to drop a miserable class. So far I have been very good about abstaining from pleasant things like sharing ice cream cones and making out, but neither of those is a sustainable abstention.

I watched a video of a bear cub falling asleep today and got so sad and hopeful all at once, there was nowhere to go but to bed for a nap.


*It is a disease. Not an illness or a bug or whatever. That shit is a strain of herpes and it never leaves your body once it enters, like a bad memory of a stupid thing you once did, it just sits and incubates and flares up at inopportune moments to make you hate living in your own skin.

April was overall not that bad, despite that cryptic and horrible footnote. I only wish that my life was a little busier, and that my friends communicated better, but spring continues and I am open to life being good.

I am a grumpy, grumpy girl right now.

A PROBLEM WHICH NOBODY ELSE HAS:
On a scale of one to responsible, I'd say I score a "generally on top of my shit." Meaning if there is rain in the forecast, I almost certainly have an umbrella with me. My friends, however, get significantly higher marks in flakiness. Three times in the past two days it has rained, and I have found my walking companion to be without an umbrella. And I can't very well leave them to walk a few feet away, hovering just outside my circle of dryness. So when they ask to share I always say yes. But I am very short. So my companion always feels the need to hold the umbrella. Meaning at the end of the day, the umbrella gets held a solid foot above my head, in such a position as to keep me dry not even a little bit. And I arrive at my destination sopping wet, and my dry friend hands me back the drippy umbrella with a grin. Tall people, you do not know the hell you put us through.

Something in my room smells like cat pee. There is no way to figure out what; once one thing smells like cat pee, absolutely everything is vaguely infected. The only option is to wash everything I own. But I am feeling despondent and generally hopeless, and that is a very daunting process so for now I think I'll just go sleep on the couch or something. Fuckin'... fuck.

no, this campaign is not about gender, not even a little

So, check this shit out:
McCain Opposes Equal Pay for Women
McPain doesn't like the Senate legislation because he thinks it is designed to create all these new law suits to clog up the justice system. Let's follow this logic a moment. Statisticians are in agreement that women still earn circa 77¢ on the male dollar. McSame is not debating this. In fact, the implication is that SO MANY women perceive themselves as being paid unfairly that McNasty fears the courts will buckle under the weight of the caseload. Which obviously means the problem should not be dealt with.

This actually may be the most disjointed logic I've seen in a while. It concedes the problem of pay equity, and explicitly says it is not important enough to grace the dockets of judges who are also not busy hearing cases on domestic spying or denial of habeas corpus rights or whatever. Freedom and justice for... huh? Sorry, we got distracted by John Edwards chasing some ambulance, our country is just so full of frivolous law suits. Dear women, John McCain does not think your work is important enough to be paid for in a fair manner. Unless your work consists of cookin' and not aborting babies, in which case you should be paid the overgenerous privilege of being allowed to suck his cock (alongside the media -- wait your turn).


The text of the bill is also perfectly logical and reasonable, for the record. It's not like it opens up any huge loopholes. It just repeals the 180 day limit on claims, so that if your employer covers up their criminality effectively for a while you can still sue him/her/it. Statutes of limitations don't make a lot of sense to me in general, as I haven't heard a great argument for receiving a get out of jail free card for keeping quiet about your criminal activity for long enough. But in this case it seems pretty unreasonable to assume that employers will make their illegal pay practices obvious enough to be discovered within six months. Fuh fuh fuh, this country is going to the dogs. Well it's throwing its women to them, anyway.

I am not loving the new Weepies album. This worries me, but I'm also pretty sure I felt this way on the first few listens last time around, so maybe it will get better. It feels like they rushed the pace on every song just slightly, and the harmonies are getting repetitive and less charming. Also, I am a big old grump today, so whatever.

Springtime has been great but today I kept looking at people on the street to find their eyes small in their faces. It could be allergies. It could also be that spring does not magically solve every single problem as we had hoped. I bought a bunch of Brian Andreas books today in a bid to make something useful of this grouchiness, such as: melancholy. Melancholy is endlessly useful, and generally rather sweet. I've been thinking about the word "brooding," and how I can quietly reinstate it into the public vocabulary.* All of the good words for moping have been replaced by gruff, sticky words. It's high time to romanticize sadbess again if we are ever going to overcome Pfizer and their antidepressant culture. Or something. Maybe I just want to see Mary Louise Parker cast more often, and she pretty much only plays sad desperate women who turn their anguish into something active, and anxious, and brilliant.

*'I will be sequestered at home this evening with my brood.' 'The old hen is brooding again.' It feels so good in your mouth. Brood.

William Butler Yeats was a fox. "Our souls are love, and a continual farewell." Sing it, sister.

It's that time of year again. You know, the time when the Lord Almighty freed my people from their bondage? And asked us to commemorate that by giving up everything tasty? I'm not biting that whole Passover lure this year, but shh, don't tell my mother. Or my angry old-testament God. I do, however, feel obligated to cook sans-leveaning for the THREE DIFFERENT DINNER PARTIES that I apparently am throwing this week. The springtime gaiety may be getting excessive, but whatever, there is always leftover soup and I'm into that.

I bought this cheese at Whole Foods that is studded with cranberries. It is surprisingly delicious. Food seems to be the only thing I want to talk about right now. Remember that debate last year about whether weed is kosher for Passover? I wish I could remember the final answer.* But the fact that I can't remember probably indicates which way I personally came down on that question.

There might be a girl? Yes, there definitely could be a girl. The world is small and funny. I had a dream about a pile of bacon while sleeping in her bed, do we think that means something? I hope not, bacon is repulsive.

If you have not heard of JayMay, you should look her up, her music is quite charming. That's all I've got, it has to end here before food works its way into this paragraph too.

* I'm pretty sure the answer they came up with was "who fucking cares, it's illegal, don't be an asshole and don't try to use Rabbis to enable."

Smart People: they are sad and desperate, says major hollywood production

Alright, blaaaaaaahg, the time has come to test the parameters of this relationship. I will try to respect your boundaries of restricted emotional vomitude, and in exchange, you should try and have an increased tolerance for half-baked political anger. Let's give it a whirl.

Recently I have taken up an aggressive Pedestrians' Rights campaign here in Evanston, IL. Mostly this consists of wearing bright colors and refusing to stop before crossing the street in places where I have the clear right of way, ie any intersection without a light. Occasionally I verbally assert my displeasure at the infringement of said rights in the clearest possible terms to drivers with open windows. There have been a couple of instances of hood-and-trunk banging on cars casually drifting through crosswalks, although sadly these are only possible when I have large male escorts because yeah rights are cool but so is not getting my shit jacked up. I am thinking about ways to take this to the next level. It is (wo)man against machine here, and if we refuse to stand up for what is ours we may as well just sell our babies to the robots already. Or something.

What brings you to the internet on a fine spring night such as this? you may be asking yourself. I suppose the answer is that I am still slightly tipsy from a single drink enjoyed hours and hours ago, and thus feeling a little loquacious. Did you see Smart People? I did.* You shouldn't. Why? I can detail the reasons if you really want.

Let's put aside for the time being that it was a shapeless script without a single likable character or memorable scrap of dialogue. Let's ignore the inflammatory pot-shots it took at feminists and gay men -- those jokes are so easy! Feminists are angry and gay men are pathetic homemakers groveling for your acceptance into polite society! Let's even look past the disgusting, lingering shots of Dennis Quaid's paunch as the director's only tool to visually convey how pitiful and sad the main character is, because we all know that fat people are required to be miserable because hello they are fat, and what a sad state that must be, although the lazy fucks probably deserve it for not taking control of their stupid fat lives.

My actual Big Issues with this movie were twain: the random pregnancy-as-fulfillment subplot, and the attempted portrayal of the characters as archetypal "smart people."
1) Correct me if I'm wrong, but there seem to be a lot of pregnant chick movies out recently. And again, correct me if I'm wrong, but abortion never really seems to be a serious option in any of them. Sure, Juno had a mildly funny scene about fingernails, but mostly abortion is just a bad option a minor character has to propose so that it can be shot down and the chick can make with the gestation. All women want babies, most want to be pregnant, and all end up finding some sort of character redemption and massive fulfillment of purpose on the other end of the delivery room. We get it. Movie making has actually regressed at least 30 years in the past 2. I am really, really over it.
2) If you are smart, you are most likely aloof. You certainly lack social skills, and are probably alone. Your interests are banal, and you assume that everyone around you is less than human. Oh, and you are UTTERLY MISERABLE. I know this cultural hatred of intelligence is not new, but it certainly is scary. Why the media and entertainment industry insist on spinning this myth of unlikeable, unpersonable smart people in opposition to the fun-loving, true of heart masses of midling intelligence is beyond me. This is probably not unrelated to our failing educational system and rapidly decreasing role in science and innovation on a global scale. When our culture denigrates the desire to learn, and insists that intelligence must come hand in hand with pretension, it's not surprising that so few of us make it through higher education and that 3/4 of the people around me are assholes. Just saying.

And, we're done. Thanks for listening, old web old pal.


*I will have it noted for the record that drinking jug wine with David and seeing Sarah Jessica Parker movies was not my original plan for the evening, but my hot date bagged on me,** and I do sort of like Ellen Page.
** Columbia College, it would seem that all of your students are sort of cute but extremely flakey. Based on the two I have met. This episode of Sweeping Generalizations brought to you by Carlo Rossi.

I need a test post. Yadda yadda, I can't sleep normally anymore, words are taking over unprecedented quarters of my brain, Sadie is in heat and reckoning with one's cat's sexuality is a strange experience indeed.

Yep. I am feeling feminist guilt about getting her tubes tied. Also about not fucking her with a q-tip, as the internet so fervently suggests.