Or it’s not just a criminal act to be poor, it’s now a criminal act to feed the poor in Orlando (fucking) Florida.

Can’t sleep here. Don’t eat there. Don’t give food away. Don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t. Why it almost seems like governments are trying to starve a certain segment of the population to death.

Or maybe they’re worried that us poor folks are like bears. If you give us a taste of human food, we’ll never learn to pull ourselves up by our furry bootstraps and work a minimum wage job.

Or maybe, if we’re really lucky, after getting probation (probably for committing some form of criminal existing while poor crime) we can get jobs as migrant farm laborers!

Fuckers.

I’ve been meaning to write a post about all the colonialism movies I’ve seen and how they SUCK but Sociological Images has a video up that pretty much covers it

I think the line “OK boss” is the key.

That said, I recently watched Even the Rain which was refreshing mostly in it’s attempts to show what a load of bullshit the Great White savior idea is. The story is about a film crew deciding to shoot a movie about Christopher Columbus in Cochabamba, Boliva (and yes, they make fun of themselves for shooting Incans who speak quechua as Tainos) because the labor is cheap there. They meet Daniel, a fiery local organizer who causes some trouble at the open casting for extras, and decide to cast him as Hatuey, a Taino rebel. What they don’t realize is that Daniel is a local organizer against water privatization and that battle is about to get fierce.

Over and over, the film shows how that white film crew, while making a movie about the evils of colonialism and the birth of the slave trade, ignores what is going on around them. When they can no longer ignore it (Daniel gets arrested for protesting) they buy their way out of trouble but sell Daniel out in the process.

Unfortunately at the end, there is a little bit of white savior-ing, but for the most part it a nice change of pace from standard “I will show you poor oppressed brown folk the way!”

Lenin to women: cease your infernal girlish prattle.

The following gem was mined from my choice of in-flight entertainment, “Socialism: A Very Short Introduction” by Michael Newman. It concerns an exchange between V.I. Lenin and Clara Zetkin, who was in charge of the Communist International Women’s Secretariat.

[S]oon after the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin admonished [Zetkin] for encouraging women members of the Communist Party to discuss sexual matters, rather than the fact that the ‘first state of proletarian dictatorship is battling with the counter-revolutionaries of the whole world.’ He thus told her, ‘I could not believe my ears’ when informed that ‘at the evenings arranged for reading and discussion with working women, sex and marriage problems came first.’

No matter what the movement, guess who gets to take a number and stand in the back of the line? You got it. If you ask yourself, “What have my male comrades ever done for us?” and keep coming up with the answer “Diddly fucking squat,” you win a coupon for your own liberation redeemable after the apocalypse.

To a man, they never get it; the vanishingly few who do (Arthur Silber comes to mind) have experienced marginalization, often in several dimensions, *and* have generalized from that, rather than playing Oppressions Can Be Ranked and Mine Comes First. The rest will bully, badger, nag, and blame you, but never treat your political aspirations as anything more than a girlish fit of pique.

Well, not really. But….

I am super femme in presentation. I’ve got long, flowy, shiny hair. I have very traditional (though slightly exoticised due to black hair, dark eyes and pale olive skin)feminine features. I like skirts. I wear pink and or red nearly every day. I paint my nails. And the shit that I am really fucking bananas good at, cooking, decorating a house, putting together an outfit (when I have the clothes), and raising the Kid are all super traditional girly pursuits.

I also cuss like a trucker, have been in a couple of actual fights and am way more likely to jump in the middle of a brouhaha, physical or otherwise, than most of the dudes I know. I don’t dream of a princess wedding (Elope! Elope! Is what I say whenever a friend tells me they are getting married) and I’ve been the wanton hussy and never the “but will you respect me in the morning” type for as long as I’ve been into boys. All those traits usually scream MASCULINE! And perhaps if I didn’t already present as the feminine (almost) ideal, I wouldn’t be allowed to get away with that shit.

All this is just a blathering way of saying femininity- not evil. Also not just for girls. Masculinity- also not just for boys. Be who you are, and throw a mean left hook if you have to.

I finally got around to making a pretty resume and shockingly, I have interviews (no really). And I am realizing that I own no appropriate interview clothes (live out of 2 small suitcases for 2 years and just see how long holding onto the formal business attire lasts? I own fewer pairs of shoes than most dudely types and a single coat).

I have a phone interview today. And an in person interview tomorrow (which is business casual, I can pull that off) and another Thursday (full business attire, it’s for a hedge fund. I know, I know. But poverty sucks, people, and this job pays really well). It’s also the end of the month, rent to pay, so there isn’t any extra cash to run to to the thrift store or discount clothing places and pick up a basic anything. There isn’t even enough in the bank for me to pull out 10 bucks and do laundry.

Throw money in the pot and maybe in the very near future I may be self-sufficient. OMG I can’t even remember what that was like.

And if you don’t have the cash to be spending, send me some good luck instead. I need all the help I can get.

I keep running into people who believe these things are fundamental truths that are really just stereotyped bullshit. It’s a common enough occurrence that there should be a site for this shit like TV Tropes.

And I feel more than a little stupid having to write this post. It pains me. It annoys me. It makes me want to smash, feminist-hulk style.

1. Women are humans. Suprise, so are men. Treat accordingly. You do not need a guidebook, instruction manual or self-help advice column to understand a member of the opposite gender. Or to understand a person with a different sexuality than yours. Or a different race, creed, color, ability etc. etc. All you need is to shut up, open your ears and listen. And then believe them when they tell you who they are. That’s it. Simple.

2. Not all women like to shop or buy pink things, but some women do. Not all gay men are into interior design, but some het men are. I like beer, the Boyfriend does not. Explain that, crappy beer advertisements. People, shockingly, have individual tastes and preferences and interests. Sometimes these things line up with behavior classified as stereotypes, sometimes they do not.

3. There is no behavior, not even giving birth or having periods (thanks to modern medicine and a slightly more accepting understanding of the gender non-binary)that is exclusive to one gender. Not a single one. Men are usually taller than women, except when they’re not. Woman usually have larger breasts than men, except when they don’t. There are men who just want to cuddle and never have sex and women who could have sex 3 times a day and still not be satisfied. (Actually, I know of more cases where the lady half of a het couple has the bigger libido than the dude half, than I do of the reverse).

4. “Ladies just want to rant about their problems while men want to problem-solve” bull-fucking-shit. I am a problem-solver by nature. I have to be, being a single mom of tiny means, but I am also pretty damn good at it. IRS has a lean on your house, gimme your paperwork and we will solve that problem. Creditors being douchenoodles, here’s some things you can do to get them off your back. Lemme figure out what your insurance papers actually say about what’s covered. Etc. etc. etc. I am also a good listener, or at least I hope that’s why I have friends who still talk to me when they need to be heard. Judging by that oft repeated trope about ladies ranting and men fixing, I am half dude at least.

5. “Ladies want to get married and have babies, men just want free access to sex.” Does not compute. Again, I’ve known way more men that wanted the ring and the ceremony than women. And more men that wanted the wailing infants than women.

What you should be getting from all this is that anytime someone trots out some variation of “men are blech, women are blah” you’re talking to an asshat at worst, a clueless dingleberry at best. It is up to you whether you want to disabuse them of their terrible ideas or simply call them names and make fun of them. I know it gets old and tired, always having to educate people. And for the love of Pete I know how frustrating it is when the person sporting the asshat is someone you actually like and know to be smart enough to pick up on this shit without a 101 course. I advise copious amounts of Vitamin V(odka) for such situations.

So ends this rant. No, I do not need you to problem-solve that shit for me.

I’m in a music searching mood, what with the cheese wars (seriously, is there NOTHING to make the boy’s ears bleed?)

So have some Stevie Wonder, who is not cheesy. (And hey boyfriend, it’s got horns)

And the best baseline in music history, plus it’s a song for skeptics.

That’s a quote from Arundhati Roy that up at The Crow’s Eye, go read the whole thing.

I once saw this brilliant, wrinkled old man give a lecture. He had escaped from some horrible regime, I can’t remember if it was communist or facist. He was a pacifist, but when asked about it his response was amazing. “I would never chastise a person for acting in self-defense against an oppressive state. People have the right to decide for themselves how to respond to violence”. I wish I could remember his name.

I’m not a pacifist, but I do waver, back and forth, on non-violence and it’s effectiveness. And honestly, on violence and it’s effectiveness. There is no question, violence works. If it didn’t we wouldn’t be bombing Libya. But violence is like chemotherapy, pumping toxins into society to kill the tumorous elites. What’s left afterwards isn’t always a healthy body.

And people keep offering me these false constructs, “Isn’t A preferable to B?” and getting peeved when I refuse to let that kind of framing be the basis for an argument. No, neither is preferable. Think bigger, think better, demand more! So maybe I need to think bigger, think better, demand more of myself when wavering on the violent/non-violent ideas. Never let it be said that I don’t look inwards first, since the only thing we really can change is ourselves.

I was going to write a post about colonialism movies, having just watched an awesome one (Even the Rain, in Spanish on Netflix) but it’s been a long week (of obvious light posting). I’m using today as a “Girl Friday” which, when I used to work 4 days a week, meant spending the day painting my nails and lounging in a tub of sudsy water before going out and partying like a rockstar. In the case of this weekend, that means swimming tonight, Gay Pride tomorrow day and a friend’s birthday party tomorrow night. Rockstar!

And since I was reminded of their awesomeness this morning in the ongoing musical cheese wars being waged by the Boyfriend, here’s some Crowded House.

I have watched way too many white man comes to the “new” world movies, from Aguirre:The Wrath of God by Herzog to Roland Joffe’s The Mission