Since i am limited to how many characters i can put in one post via my phone, you’ll all just have to deal with 2 posts.
Where did i leave off…
I don’t have to imagine too hard how relieved a non het person might be sitting in that office and hearing someone who is not them calling out a douchebag on their douchebaggery. I think if some random dude ever told a street harraser that it’s not my job to smile on command for them, or said ‘hey chill with the fucking not funny sexist posts on facebook’ or maybe even just ‘ugh not another crappy apatow flickwhere all the men are loveable assholes and all the women are shrews’ i’d bake him a fucking cake. Seriously. It’s never happened. Not once. Actually, that’s not true. Deeks done it once or twice. But never a random guy.
Be the random guy (or white person or hetero person,etc.) Show a little courage, suffer a little bit of anger, and be a real ally.

I read somewhere yesterday (and you’ll have to forgive the lack of sitage as i am back to only having internet on my phone) that political theory is all about left and right while political reality is all about top and bottom. It was prolly Echidne who said it. And then this morning the newsbunnies reported that congress refused to extend unemployment benefits of one million people who have been out of work for six months because it would either raise taxes or the deficit or both.
top and bottom indeed. As they’ve been saying at Corrente ‘let them eat catfood’.
(not unrelated, but despite trying to eat like a healthy person i have lost yet another 5 pounds. The cure for the obesity epidemic is apparently a good dose of Dickensian poverty. Woot fucking woot).

So Violet thinks us younger feminists are too elitist in who we allow to call themselves feminists. And Renee gets whinged at constantly for proudly proclaiming she’s not a feminist (for damn good reasons, I might add).

And the whole thing pisses me off.

See I haven’t been a feminist as long as Violet, since I wasn’t born until 1975. But I have been a feminist since I first noticed how different girls are treated from boys, so since my brother was born in 1977. I’ve never cringed from the label, not even as a teenager. But the truth of the matter is, feminism leaves a whole fuckload of us out in the cold. Not feminism the philosophy, but feminism in practice. Breaking a glass ceiling doesn’t mean a damn thing to a pink collar secretary trapped in a dead end career because the hours make daycare possible. Abortion access is great but for poor women and brown women we need to stop being treated like thieves and lepers because we had the audacity to breed. And w00t w00t, it’s way easier to get a divorce, but now we get custody of the kids and no real child support collection. Progress people, at least now we don’t have to be lawfully wedded to the deadbeats forever.

Perhaps us younger feminist are peeved about people like Sarah Palin calling themselves feminists because Oh shiny let’s go contort our principles even further to bring these ladies into the feminism fold while continuing to leave out those of us who’ve agreed with the philosophy all along.

But again, I don’t give a flying fuck what label you use. Do you believe in bodily autonomy (in all forms), social justice, economic justice and all those fundamental feminismy things. YAY! Call yourself Late to Dinner, we still agree on what’s important. If, however, you think that abortion is wrongity wrong or that Welfare should be abolished then you can call yourself Gloria Steinem Jr. and I’m still going to think you’re a giant tool(of the patriarchy).

It ain’t what you call yourself. It’s what you do that counts.*

*This exact same argument can be applied to progressives/fauxgressives, btw. You can’t be progressive while giving big corporations/banksters/insurance companies hand jobs for campaign dough.

(I actually adore Violet, but this whole “who is a feminist” shit has been going on way too long. Violet’s post just gave me a ranting off point.)

Look, I get the need to feel like you’re doing something, anything to help in the face of an overwhelming tragedy. That is good and fine and should be supported and encouraged.

But it should not be what we rely on to fix massive problems, especially those caused by humans to begin with. While it may make us feel individually better, it makes society as a whole weaker and less responsible.

We have a 10% (counted) unemployment rate. We have thousands of people on the gulf coast whose jobs in fishing and tourism are going to or already have disappeared. We can fix both those things, at least a little bit, but not by volunteering or donating money to cleaning up the gulf.

We have thousands or more unemployed construction workers. Pay their airfare. Pay for hazmat training. Pay for hotel rooms and meals at local restaurants while we pay them to clean up the gulf. And while we’re doing that we pay the unemployed admins to process the time cards and A/P and make the travel arrangements. And bill it all to BP. No need to find it in the budget. No need to wait for BP to do something. Train people to give Pelicans baths. Pay people to make protective gear and masks. Put them all on federal health insurance plans. Pay people who haven’t gotten oiled yet to boom the coastline from Panama City to Maine. And charge it to BP.

This is not a natural disaster. This could have been avoided. This is not a hurricane or an earthquake. It’s a toxic waste dump. There is a clear villain with deep pockets. Every donation you make, every hour you volunteer, is less responsibility that company has to take for creating this horrible mess.

If you still need to do something, then someone should establish a legal fund for all the victims of this disaster. Give your money to them, so they can hire just as many lawyers as BP.

Go read this right now

Huhmmmmmmm. That all sounds so familiar. Let’s see, same school district that we used to be in. Same neighborhood. Same AP program. Different schools. Oppression is a system, not the result of individual bias. (Unless of course it’s the same fucking teacher, in which case I will give the Mudede family every bit of my story to help them nail the district and the teacher.)

This was too awesome to simply throw into my shared items. Go read it, right now.

I am of the firm belief that you cannot have real democracy when you have any portion of the population that lives in fear. Fear of violence. Fear of hunger. Fear of imprisonment. You cannot be free and be fearful. They are incongruous. They are like toothpaste and orange juice.

It is possible to create a world where a person is worth more than what they can pay for. We have to start from the basic premise that food is a human right. Housing is a human right. Education and medical care are human rights. Without access to these things, no matter what our government or even our laws tells us, we are not free. We are not democratic when the scales of justice have the thumbs of the rich holding them down. And if nothing else, you all should see by how foggy brained I’ve been, how being hungry makes rational democratic choices impossible.

This could be triggering for people with eating disorders.

5 years ago I gave up dieting forever. I went through yet another round of exercise bulimia and was walking about 8 miles a day in addition to pilates and a couple of different aerobic dance things every day. I was in constant pain from leg cramps. When I wasn’t walking, I was thinking about walking.I was obsessed. I was a bit manic, though with a normal diet and daily activities I am never manic. I was eating very little. I was sleeping very little. I plateaued out after losing 30 pounds and then gained back 50 when I resumed eating about 2000 calories a day. I slowly realized how stupid the whole pursuit of perfection was.

In the last 2 months, I’ve lost 30 pounds. Not on purpose. It’s poverty, and like billions of mothers around the world, when money got tight (okay, nearly non-existent. We are living on the generosity of family and blog friends and they have all been mucho kind) I skipped meals. At first i went from 2 meals a day to one, then somedays instead of a meal it was a snack. Some crackers. A bowl of salad. Then somedays it was nothing but ice tea and the sugar to sweeten it. I didn’t want to lose weight. I just wanted to be less of a burden. I wanted to make sure there was food for everyone else.

But a funny thing happens when you starve yourself, and I am getting a very strange view of the whole dieting industrial complex from this side of it. First, not having enough calories fucks up your brain. I know that seems really, like DUH! But I was cranky about things that never make me cranky. I snapped at people. I started holding weird little grudges over imperceptible slights. The rational part of my brain was screaming “stop it!” But I didn’t have the mental resources to calm the fuck down. I hid in my room a lot instead. It was better than unleashing the bitter bitch on people who have been nothing but kind to me and the kid.

I also (some of you might have noticed)lost the ability to coherently string words together. I can’t go back and read most of what I wrote recently.

But wait folks, that’s not all.

It’s amazing how fast disordered thinking can sink back in when you aren’t feeding yourself. I don’t want to be thinner, or any of the euphemisms we use to convince ourselves it’s not starvation but a lifestyle change. I’d feel super sanctimonious when I could go more than a day without eating, like I was pure and virtuous and good. My flatter, empty stomach was awesome. My pokier hip bones were rad. Sure I was weak and couldn’t think straight and nauseous most of the time, but look how far I was willing to go!!!!!

Anyways, I’ve had 2 days of eating now. My brain seems to be working a bit better. I’m way less bitchy. I might be capable of writing a sentence or two. There is a little (large) voice in my head that is chastising me for being such a greedy eating pig. But I’ll shut her up eventually. She’s full of shit anyways.

If you’re a facebook friend, you know the tragic tale of sick baby kitty all ready. If you’re not….

Baby kitty, also known as Burleigh (after my grandma), Bee, Burls and numerous other nicknames, started having seizures yesterday. Burleigh was brought into the house by my uncle right around my birthday, and as soon as I saw her fluffy little self, I was silly for her. We called the vet, who suggested trying caro syrup (in case it was low blood sugar). That didn’t work. We tried giving her a bath, in case it was some toxin making her sick. That didn’t work. Auntie spent all night with her and we took her to the vet this morning. She’s got a neurological problem, possibly kitty leukimia or lesions on one side of her brain. All we can do is drug her full of phenobarbitol and steriods and hope for the best.

While we were waiting in the vet’s office we were chatting with a lovely lady about her newborn daughter and kids in general. Out of fricken nowhere this douchebag chimes in with “That’s nothing, my son tried to make out with my girlfriend, and he’s only 8”.

If that wasn’t weird enough, he goes on this homophobic rant about how glad he was that his child tried to mack on his girl because it means that his “only son ain’t gay,he’s gonna carry on the family name”. As happens when confronted with bigots, I got mad and my hands started to shake. Not helpful when trying to keep a wee baby kitty with seizures calm. Douchebag keeps going on and on about how having a gay son would be the worst thing in the world. Wonder, bless her, pipes up with “I think there are worse things in the world than having a gay kid, like having something actually bad happen”. Then douchebag goes on about his gay ex wife. Still trying to control my anger and calm a sick kitty, I said (as snakily as possible) “I can’t imagine what might have turned her gay””. The conversation just got worse from there, including Douchebag overestimating the weight of his pitbull and Wonder wondering if that’s the only thing he overestimates.

I don’t care what Doouchebag thinks, though I feel more than a bit sorry for his kid. I don’t want to be slapped in the face with his hatred and ignorance. I don’t wan’t anyone to be slapped in the face with hate and ignorance. But I really don’t want to have to get my fist shaking, kyriarchy smashing rage up when I am worried that my tiny ball of fluffy love is at death’s door.

(Baby kitty, after a marathon, drug induced 6 hour nap, seems to be doing a little better. She peed!!!!! And then ran off to play with her brothers. She’s still wobbly legged and can’t jump up on stuff too well. But maybe she’ll be okay).

Let’s see…

Israel is trying to start a war with Turkey and peacenik hippies and the US is blocking an independent investigation through its vote on the UN Security Council.

The top kill failed. The junk shot failed. There will be no more efforts to stem the gush of oil until the relief wells are drilled 2 or 3 months from now in the Gulf. But that oil spill is dwarfed by the one in Nigeria, apparently, where oil companies have been participating in state sponsored murder for at least a decade.

Economies in Europe like Iceland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, are lining up to drop like flies (if they haven’t already gotten to the austerity measures normally reserved by the IMF for browner skinned countries, then they will shortly).

Economics here ain’t much better.

And how many states are thinking of passing “Papers, please” laws similar to Ari-fucking-zona’s?

But what the news bunnies are covering today is Al and Tipper’s break up and “Is Obama aging faster than previous presidents?”. And no, this wasn’t fauxnews.

There is only one appropriate response