“[A] one-term president with some balls who actually got stuff done would have been, in the long run of this country, much better. . . People are literally without any focus or leadership, just wandering out into the streets to yell right now because they are so pissed off. Imagine if they had a leader.”
— Matt Damon

Matt Damon, I love you. I really do. But we had an option for a president with, well for the sake of equality let’s call it spine or gumption or hutzpah or any name you can think of for gutsy fearlessness in the face of Republican fuckery. But you liberaldoodz couldn’t bring yourselves to vote for the bitch (in the best sense of the word) in the pantsuit.

Now would Hills have been much different? Well we’d have a better healthcare plan, us ladies wouldn’t need extra insurance in case of unwanted parasites, and that brief window when Dems had the Senate and the House would have be a magic hour of Bitches Getting Shit Done.

We’d still have multi-wars and drones and a good deal of corporate fuckery. But I’m realistic in who runs shit. The Obama fanboys are less so.

via Tennessee Guerrilla Women

Are y’all ready for some fucking Christmas cheer? Are your eggs nogged? Gifts wrapped? Do you need some inspiration because you have 9 dozen cookies to bake and wrap into adorable gift baskets in the next 32 hours and they have to look and taste fucking awesome because their for your boyfriend’s family who you haven’t met yet? And OMG you still have presents to wrap and laundry to do and packing and a real job and and and and and.

What you (I) need is some inspiration ( or a nice Valium Adderal cocktail) so here is some music to get through the holidays with.

My favorite all time Christmas song (it has nothing to do with my dysfunctional childhood at all. NOOOOOOOO. It has absolutely nothing to do with the screaming tantrums thrown by the only adult member of the family when holiday pressures inevitably got to be too much. NOOOOOOO. Stop head shrinking)is The Ramones- Merry Christmas (I don’t want to fight tonight with you)

It’s just not Christmas without the Waitresses

Or the Kinks

Or Erasure

Or XTC

I used to include the Pogues’ Fairytale of New York in this list. I mean common, Kristy MacColl sings on it. But there is a homophobic slur right in the middle of the song that jolts me every time I hear it. And if I won’t let people make excuses for the stupid racism in Breakfast at Tiffany’s then I really can’t let homophobia slide even if I love the dead singer of the song super hard. So no more.

Now the worst Christmas song ever, hands down, is Do They Know It’s Christmas. That colonial sack of bullshit- ugh. Boyfriend and I were in the grocery store last night and I pointed out that song was playing. His response was “Oh is that why I suddenly feel sad and angry all at once?” (That dear readers, is one of the reasons why I love him.) Anyways- enjoy this hilarious line by line take down of the song.

Your turn- hit me with your Christmas songs, best and worst.

Or where I remember that Seattle Weekly is truly a piece of shit.

Lemme just remind the douchecanoe author that part of the reason Washington is better than North Carolina is that the minimum wage law puts us closest to(but not nearly equal to)an actual living wage, even for restaurant servers. And with tips, serving actual becomes a living wage at 22 bucks an hour average (though there’s usually no benefits or paid sick days- another thing that restaurant owners were whinging about having to provide not so long ago). That minimum wage with mandatory cost of living increases means that more people in the state can afford to eat out. That means more money for restaurant owners and servers alike.

I’ve seen the 2 buck an hour plus tips servers in the south. I haven’t seen better service because the workers have less income guarantee. Actually I’ve seen worse. I’ve sent back a bad meal and complained to a manager exactly once in my 36 years. It was in a horrid chain restaurant whose name I won’t even mention in a state where servers get $2.13 an hour plus tips. In all my years in Seattle, I’ve had good and bad service. But I’ve never had consistently bad service.

Tips are not wages and should never be counted as them. A server should be able to budget based on their hourly wage and not on the kindness of strangers who may be pissy cause it took an extra 3 minutes to get a glass of water in the middle of a busy shift.

Like there’s any other version of me besides Bitchy Feminist Mom.

Fair warning- links to Jezebel.

Women, mothers in particular, but women generally, are the people expected to fill the hole when the state fails. And the state fails when it comes to educating children All.The.Fucking.Time.

So if you have a child, you’re all ready familiar with the barrage of (3rd shift?) work, called “volunteering”, that’s required (not so voluntary- is it). When kid was still in public elementary school it was the annual fundraising auction that raised enough money to keep class sizes small. Think about that. Parents, mostly mothers, performing enough unpaid work and donating enough hard earned dollars to do a thing that education experts have been saying since time began is necessary to properly educate children. There are also the “harass your friends, neighbors and coworker” campaigns of selling popcorn or cookies or candybars or wrapping paper. And then there’s the “make something for the bake sale, arts and crafts fair, auction” where it’s again women’s labor, time and cash required to fill a hole left by the state.

FUCK THAT.

You will notice, in the link above, that no one is chastising dads for bringing store bought cookies. On the few occasions I’ve seen dads show up to these things, they are heaped with fawning praise and batted eyelashes for doing the same, or less, than the women have by the same women who’ve done the fucking work.

FUCK THAT

Now for the historical. You know why the nuclear family became the ideal instead of inter-generational families or matriarchal families or any of the other thousand versions of families that exist. Nuclear families leave the ladies free to volunteer their unpaid labor when the men are around to get paid. Period. Unpaid labor is required for a functional capitalist society (cause let’s be honest- a good fucking giant portion of the labor that is paid isn’t necessary to society. Making copies and mastering spreadsheets doesn’t do a god damn thing for society. If it did, it would be paid at the same levels that daycare workers and CNAs make).

FUCK THAT

So when some deluded little shitface whines about mothers not making cookies from scratch to fill the state shaped hole left at her kid’s elementary school- IT’S THE FUCKING PATRIARCHY using that deluded little shit face like a puppet.

And fuck her for letting it. No- I don’t have to be nice about that. She gets all the little head pats she wants form the patriarchy all ready.

Just FYI- it ain’t no joke that unpaid internships are becoming a giant drain on society. Once the kyriarchy has mastered getting half the population to do for free the necessary jobs to maintain society, what’s to keep you white, middle class, middling boys from the same fate? Free labor is good for the bottom line, after all. This shit is all related and it all comes from the same rotting sewage dump of OPPRESSION! If any one of us and out labor is not considered worthwhile, then all of our labor can be considered worthwhile. No one is safe unless they have the money to buy their way out. If you’re reading this- you don’t have that kind of money and you never ever will.

So there’s this person, not a friend, kind of an acquaintance, that I have a vague icky feeling about. I can’t exactly say why, it’s just a vague icky feeling.

(Well maybe I could say.*)

Anyways, after 36 years on this planet, having read Gavin de Becker, and 10 years of therapy- I have learned to trust the nagging feeling. Even on little shit. And that’s no small feet. The therapy was partially to learn how to not be hyper aware of everybody and all their motives for every fucking thing, a problem not uncommon in children with abusive parents. But the problem with that is that you start believing in sinister motives for stupid shit, when really that person who is currently vexing you probably was just run of the mill thoughtless or forgetful or whatever. So yes, the therapy helped me to judge when someone is just being human, and when someone is a shithead you should avoid.

So this nagging feeling, it’s not Stranger Danger levels of nagging. It’s more “Oh this is a person I really don’t want to have to deal with often.”

Because of the therapy, I am very specific about why I do or do not like things. I can tell you why sweet pickles are the food of the devil. It’s not just that they taste bad (and they do- cloying gross sweet pickles) but that they fake you out. You’re thinking “Oh pickles! Yay!” and then instead of salty-sour awesome your get mouth full of gross. Sweet pickles lie.

It has made more than one person mad at me for being so specific in my dislikes, btw. Apparently people are shocked that opinionated me has such clearly defined opinions on every fucking thing. Wevs, people. Get over it.

So when I encounter something new that I don’t like, like a TV show or a book or a band or a person, I work really hard at figuring out the whys and hows of my dislike. Sometimes I can’t explain it right away, but eventually it crystallizes. This happens a lot when watching TV shows, I’ll have a vague sense of icky and then whammo! sexism or racism or some ism happens that makes it clear that I was feeling icky cause the people who made the show are assholes.

This is turning into a long, rambly post. Oops. But I haven’t posted in a while and I don’t have the time to do a “Fuck all y’all. I was right about Obama being a misogynist asshat- look at what he did with emergency contraception” post. (Oh look- there I just did it). Feel free to drop your thoughts about intuition and/or Obama’s fuckery into comments.

*And yes, now that I’ve taken 5 minutes to think about it- I know exactly why this person annoys me. It’s a certain kind of regressive femininity, which while I understand why it exists- I DO NOT LIKE. AT ALL.

Do you ever find yourself just straight fucking exasperated because you’ve schooled the same damn people on the same damn thing so many times that you just wish you could short-hand the whole thing to “fuck you, because I say so dammit”.

In an effort to decrease frustration and save time, here is a boilerplate “fuck you, because I say so” letter. This letter is particularly focused on the fauxgressive calls for oppressed people to join the non-oppressed to enact change, while refusing to acknowledge that the fauxgressive point of view may not be in the best interest of oppressed folks.

Caveat 1: The patriarchy has no new tricks. All oppression serves to create haves and have-nots. At its core, oppression is about control of resources and power distribution. But not all oppressions manifest in the same manner. It’s a different world for a white woman than it is for a black man, for example.

Dear (insert faugressive group name here):

We (insert oppressed group name here) have recently received your request for our assistance in (insert pressing social action here). Thank you for (finally) acknowledging our existence. However, we have several long-standing complaints such as (insert example of oppressive act) that have yet to be addressed by you (insert privileged group name here). Until such time as you (insert privileged group name here) have addresses those issues, we cannot in good faith provide our time, energy, or labor to yet another social justice movement run by the people who benefit most from injustice.

It doesn’t take a doctorate in (insert type of degree that focuses on your type of oppression) to see that, to date, every single time you (insert privileged group type here) ask us (insert oppressed group type here) to follow your lead and (insert action here i/e vote, protest, etc)the way that you want us to, we get fucked over. Every single damn time. And that shit don’t fly no more. Sure, now that things are bad for you, you have noticed that things are bad for less privileged folks. But that’s just base opportunism, not empathy. You notice because you want our already oppressed bodies for your cause. You do not want to add your relatively unoppressed body to our cause. That is telling. It shows that you don’t give two shits about real change, you just give a shit about saving yourself.

And that’s fine. But we (insert oppressed group name here) cannot trust you, because a lifetime of privilge coupled with a very short peoriod

Newt Gingrich, professional shitface and the architect of the Rethuglikan Revolution of 1995, wants to bring back child labor because….

“Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits for working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday.”

I had my first job at 12, cleaning timeshares for a friend’s parents. It was part time, a few hours on the weekends, at minimum wage and under the table. It had to be. I don’t think I was legal to work.

My next job, at 13, was busing tables over Winter Break at Squaw Valley Ski Resort. I got to see what sexual harassment was at that job from the 20 something fucknugget kitchen manager who liked to tell me how sexxxay I was and how I “totally didn’t look 13”.

My next job was over Summer Vacation at 14, again cleaning timeshares, but now fulltime. I made 5 bucks an hour was fucking stoked at the end of the summer when I had enough money to buy all my own school clothes going into high school and could buy whatever frivolous 50 dollar pair of jean I wanted.

By 17, I had graduated to entry-level office work. It was nice not cleaning up other people’s food or used condoms.

Since I turned 18, I have never gone more than a few months without some kind of paid work, except when the kid was a newborn and we lived off student loans and Pell Grants for a brief period of time while I went to school. Even the last few years, I had the tiny monies I made writing this here blog when traditional work wasn’t available.

I had a mother who worked from the time I was tiny until her health prevented it when I was a teenager.

And Kid, well I don’t want the Kid to feel financially responsible for us, which is so easy to do when you’re a super fucking poor kid with a job (cough, cough). So I haven’t pushed him to get work. Now that we are semi-flush, he gets an allowance for doing the housework that I can’t do because I am at work all day. He did some of the same stuff without an allowance before, but I think it’s important he knows that housework is valuable. Though since we are, for now, semi-flush, if he wanted to seek outside employment I’d be okay with that.

So I don’t know who the fuck Gingrich is talking about when he says poor kids have no habits of working and nobody around them that works. I’m thinking that he must live on another planet, one with a social safety net. Cause that ain’t how the real world looks. And if I am not mistaken, (and I’m not) Gingrich was part of the whole Welfare reform bullshit. So even kids whose moms are on Welfare see their moms go off everyday to sit in a fucking government office and be lectured to by asswipes in exchange for cash and foodstamps that total less than half the poverty line.

But that’s just the fucking facts. Let’s look at what re-instituting child labor might mean for a country with an official unemployment rate of almost 10 percent (actual closer to 20). You would flood the market with even more people, willing to work for even lower wages. Those 18 to 30 year-olds with the highest rate of unemployment across the generations- fuck you. Businesses can now hire a 16 year old for lower wages and no benefits because that kid’s parents are still legally required to provide them.

Yeah, that will make things better.

And we won’t even talk about how much better our society will be when the illiteracy rate shoots back up because it’s now ok to hire 5 year-olds to pick crops. They don’t have to stoop so far to pick the tomatoes, you see they are short. And they aren’t so good at organizing unions. They don’t know who to tell when their boss is telling them their 13 year-old tits are hot.

But then, that whole “can’t complain, can’t sue, can’t organize” thing would be feature and not a bug to a douchenoodle like Gingrich.