Oh fucking hell no.

Maybe I should have titled this “feminism, you’re doing it wrong.”

Here’s the thing, feminism isn’t about women competing with men. It really isn’t. it is about women being respected as full and complete human beings in their own right. In relationships, that should mean partnership, teamwork, having each others’ backs. Not competing with each other.

What I get from the little essay is that this wildly insecure woman didn’t get the life she wanted and blames it all on feminism. Shit, I didn’t get the life I wanted either honey.

(yes yes yes, Jack White is still a jerk. But I like this song. I like most of his songs. Fucker)

When your mouthpiece can’t come up with ANYTHING your administration is doing/or going to do to stop the War on Women, your contempt becomes painfully, blatantly obvious. And it has been, to me at least, since the fucking primaries.

Obama, you may have had “99 problems but a bitch ain’t one” in 2008. That’s not true anymore.

I stopped taking Vitamin D a little less than 2 weeks ago. My doctor wanted to take some blood levels to see if I still need to take it or if I can be done.

For the last week I’ve been hunched over like an 90 year old. Everything hurts from my neck to my toes. I even got an hour and a half long massage (gently) and that helped for a few hours. But the next day I was right back to cramping and aching.

I’ve got a bottle of over the counter Vitamin D. My prescription was for 50,000 IUs 3 times a week. The over the counter stuff is just 5,000. I took 2. I should take 4. We’ll see how I do.

I can’t decide if I should be super happy that (maybe) all that is wrong with me is malnutrition (technically malabsorpbtion, I think) and anemia. I know that sounds weird.

So I have these cousins on my dad’s side of the family that I have never met (or met when I was so young I don’t remember- that’s the joy of deadbeat parenting) that have become Facebook “friends” by virtue of sharing some DNA with me. No biggie.

Then there is this guy who I had a brief (couple of) flings with a few years ago. We are not Facebook friends. He keeps popping up in my “people you may know” thing because he is friends with one of the above mentioned cousins.

And that is probably the only time in the last 5 years that someone I know has actually met a member of my family.

Fucking Facebook, blurring all my steadfast social boundaries. Grrrrrrr.

Jezebel oh fucking Jezebel. When all I want is to get some trashy gossip with a funfeminist spin, you go and pull some stupid ass shit. There is a reason that I have to put warning labels up every time I link to you.

Tracy Egan Morrisey, writing at the above mentioned Jezebel is SHOCKED OMG GRAB THE SMELLING SALTS that someone might not believe in adoption.

I don’t. Well, I believe that adoption happens. It’s not the same as not believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. And I am pro-to my bones and the depth of my (crooked) uterus- choice. But I think that adoption is the last possible option that should be considered. I think that it is the worst kind of betrayal, to know that the person(s) that were supposed love you most in the world, don’t want you at all (while I was not adopted, I can tell y’all about what an awful feeling that is for a kid. Lived it.) But I am a pragmatist, and I understand that there needs to be a way for children with no parents (or with awful parents) to have a loving family. So I am not all “burn down social services and protest adoption organizations” about it.

That there are people, like me, who don’t think adoption is the universal good it’s made out to be should not come as a great big fucking surprise. There are people who don’t think abortion is all the great either and would never choose it for themselves, yet still think abortion should be accessible and legal for those who would choose it. There are also lots of interracial adoptees who aren’t so keen on the whole adoption thing either.

Now as for what Tracy is describing regarding the show 16 and Pregnant, that’s probably closer to reproductive coercion. From the description, the teenage father seems to be a complete and utter asshat who has no interest in raising his own kid but “doesn’t believe in adoption”. So his teenage girlfriend sits at home, struggling to raise a baby with the help of her mom, while he cheats and is verbally abusive.

(And for the record, 35% of teenage pregnancies end in abortion. Yet almost all the teens on 16 and Pregnant choose to either parent or give their babies up for adoption. There was one special about abortion that MTV did regarding this show. It’s this kind of skewing that makes it easier for forced pregnancy blowhards to get laws passed.)

And as much as I love this here blog, it does keep me from looking for less fulfilling but more regularly paid work. So posting and responding may be a bit thinner than normal. There’s only so many years a girl can go without dental work and buying new undies and I’ve reached that limit (I probably reached that limit 2 years ago, but I’m a trooper).

I’m not going away, though. I just thought you all should know. And if any of you all have resume skills, I think I need them. I mean, I’ve been the person reading other people’s resumes for years and have helped people get jobs that way, but I am just at kind of a mental block when it comes to my own. Argh. I hate this part.

Also, if you want to do guest posting NOW IS THE TIME! Get something off your chest! Bitch here!

I’ve been calling myself and agnostic for years, which gave me a little pass on having to scrub my language clean of all the tiny religious references we make every single day. Think of the ubiquitous OMG! Or “Jesus Christ” said in response to something awful. Or the more happily uttered (moaned, occasionally screamed) “oh god!” pre and mid orgasm. And then there’s all the co-opted non-Christian (or non-monotheist) “Kharma’s a bitch” or talk about luck, or my general go to- “the universe has a sick sense of humor”. (No, it really fucking does. After years of owning queen size beds so that overnight guests wouldn’t be uncomfortable, I decided I only needed a full size bed in the new apartment because 1) My room is fucking tiny. 8′ by 11′ and the 11′ wall has the heater on it so it’s more like 9′. 2) I pretty much decided that I was just going to go back to my slutty ways and having a full size bed makes it easier to kick people out of it at 4am. Then whamo, the second person I go on a date with after coming out of hermitage turns out to be the kind of awesome person that I want to sleep over all the time.)

But the truth is, I’m an atheist. Bad things happen to people sometimes because they are just in the wrong place, and sometimes they happen because the human created systems we live under are rigged to fuck you up if you don’t belong to the elite. Things don’t happen for a (impossible to divine) reason. There is no divine plan, just us humans trying to find meaning in a world that can be hard sometimes.

But I still have all these leftover bits of language. What the fuck do I do with that? How do you explain the currently unexplainable without the use of religious phrasing? How do you retrain your brain to stop going for the immediate “OMG” and what do you use in it’s place? OMFSM (Oh my flying spaghetti monster) is cute but cumbersome and sometimes I don’t want to be cute. OMFSM does not work when a friend is telling you that their much loved dog has incurable cancer or that their birth control failed.

So my fellow atheists, what do we do with the leftovers (hangovers) of religious speech. Continuing to use them feels more than a bit like a sell-out to me. Every time the word “god” comes out of my mouth I feel dirty. But it’s a habit and I don’t know what to break it with.

Seriously, how rad are these guys? I once played a video of theirs on here that made crusty old Deek tear up.

I’ve had this discussion, more than once, with “progressive” types who are all “Oh I like all music but rap and country” which usually means they’ve got some unchecked class and race privilege they need to deal with, but also shows that (with some exceptions) the only time someone who is either non-white or non-middling middle class can get played on the radio is if they are following the dominant kyriarchial paradigm. Rap that is violent and misogynist, country that is ignorant (and violent and misogynist) is what gets mass promotion because it doesn’t challenge the status quo. (See my recent post about Odd Future, for example)

This does challenge that shit. He’s not rapping about bitches and hoes. He’s not talking about how tough he is or how violent he can be. He’s just telling us about life when you’re poor and non-white and riding the bus with a whole fuck ton of politics thrown in. (And it’s a wee bit dated, it ain’t 6 quarters anymore. It’s 10)

FTR, the 48 is my old bus route. Goes from way down in the brown Columbia City, past the U District to lily white Greenlake. I lived in the brown half of the route.