Fucking new blogger fucking sucks, btw.

Me: (struggling to open a prescription bottle) Why the fuckity fuck do they give people with muscle problems bottles that are impossible to open?
 Kid: Because it’s child-proofed, duh. And I can open that if you want.
Me: (glowering) You know the ability to open bottles goes away on your 18th birthday, right?
Kid: (does actual face-palm) FACE!!!! PALM!!!! If there was a wall it would be FACE WALL!!!!!
Me: Oh what can I do to make that happen? I wanna see it!!!

 And now I am sad because in less than a year I will no longer be able to use and abuse the Inappropriate Conversations With Children tittle.

 In not unrelated news, I am officially gimpy enough to qualify for the cheap bus pass. If I drove, this would be the equivalent of getting to park in the handicap spot. I don’t know how I feel about that. It’s weird. It makes it official and permanent in a way that just having a diagnosis did not. Now as to actually obtaining the bus pass, disabled people actually have to go into the Metro offices downtown to get it. That’s just a boatload of gatekeeping shittery right there. Luckily, my work is right around the corner, but it will mean having a very very long day of both work and line standing in the Metro office. If I lived or worked more than a single bus away, trying to get into the damn office might be hard enough to just say fuck it and pay for the full price fare. I keep having that problem with Kid actually. He doesn’t have his own bus pass, so he either borrows mine or we have to make sure we have the change/cash for him. Often we don’t have any cash because I don’t like paying cash machine fees and always forget to get cash back at the store. Kid and I have to go into a different Metro office to get him a youth fare card. He would get the cheaper fare if I did it, but because it is so full of hassle and I have been in mountains of pain since my old meds stopped working, I just pay adult price for him.

Gatekeeping! If you have the time, energy, and ability you can get the benefits. If you don’t, fuck you!

If you’ve got some bucks to share or a spare juicer contraption type thing, go throw it at the lovely Sasha.

This is what health insurance does to the people of this country. It puts the sick in desperate situations and stagnates the economy for everyone but the one percent.

It was lost before there was even a name for it. It was lost with the Hyde amendment, that meant poor women on Medicaid had to pay out of pocket for abortion services, unless you live on one of a handful of progressive states that use state money to pay for it.

It was lost with with the enactment of Welfare Reform, removing the guarantee of some small income to the poorest of women and children.

It was lost with weak child support enforcement and the refusal of Congress to allow federal collection of all child support through the IRS, instead leaving it to the patchwork of state agencies.

It was lost everytime another clinic in small town was shut down. It was lost when long waiting periods coupled with long drives meant that poor women with precarious employment had to choose between being fired or having a kid they weren’t able to care for.

It was lost when the Family Medical Leave Act made it so that small employers didn’t have to provide unpaid the same leave to care for a sick child or parent or to have a baby that large employers do.

It’s lost everytime feminism focuses on the glass ceiling with the rising tides lifts all boats theory while ignoring that women are more likely to live in poverty than men.

Feminism is a whole lot about what we do with our own wombs, but it’s also about making sure being female doesn’t come with a monetary penance. It’s about making sure that women don’t have to choose between feeding and housing their kids or keeping themselves and their children safe from violent partners.

Went to see the Hunger Games last night. It’s more than a week since it was released and we still had to deal with sold-out shows and long-ass lines. But it was good. It’s hard to translate a first-person narrative into a movie with no narration, so huge chunks of what Katniss is thinking and large swaths of backstory are missing. And those missing things are generally the details of the socio-economic-politcal issues. But the story is basic enough to still be very strong without it.

That’s not what this post is about. The author made choices throughout the book to give voice to the others of society. The poor. The not white. The people with disabilities. They are all represented. What I have found is that people’s reaction to what made it into the movie (poverty, race, gender) and what didn’t (disability, mental and physical) shows just where their privilege lies or doesn’t.

When you are other, when you are someone who rarely gets to see images of yourself reflected in media, you are attuned to look for examples and cling to them like a life raft. If you don’t have that particular flavor of oppression, and you aren’t making a conscious effort to overcome privileged thinking, then those details are skipped, ignored, tuned out in an effort to make the story conform to the narrative you have for yourself.

This explains all the screaming biggots on Twitter who suddenly didn’t have a tear to shed for Rue, a black girl. The movie glosses over the slavery reference regarding Distric 11 and completely eliminates the conversation about how much worse the (mostly Black) workers in 11 are treated for eating food they harvest, versus Katniss being allowed to sneak out of the fence and hunt for her family.

It explains why women and girls, who never bought into the Twilight love triangle dynamic (seriously, the Twilight trailer before the movie got major laughs. I may have said something like “Wrong audience” loudly to the screen) are so into this series. The love triangle isn’t something Katniss wants. It’s something forced on her. She’s a survivor. She doesn’t have time or energy to think about romance. And that’s obvious from the book, though without her narration it’s less obvious in the movie. It’s Maslov’s pyramid. You can’t think mushy thoughts when your belly is empty.

What was left out was the disability narrative. Haymich is a man who drinks to drown out the pain of having survived the games and then watched the Capitol kill off his family whenever he even thought of stepping out of line. If you were to put it in current lingo- he very likely suffers from PTSD. Peeta loses his leg. It’s not a terrible cut that magically heals. It’s removed. Cut off. He literally comes out of the games having paid with a limb. Neither of these things are in the movie. Haymich cleans up his act quickly when the kids need a real mentor. Peeta gets what amounts to a deep scratch.

But unless you live with a disability, it would be easy to write off these missing plot points as superfluous, or just to hard to fit into a movie that is already very long.

And while the movie does show the poverty of the districts versus the capitol, it missed the story about the class division and colorism within district 12. Peeta, Prim and Katniss’ mom are all blue-eyed, blonde-haired, delicate flowers of the merchant class. Katniss, Gale, Haymich and Katniss’ dad are the black-haired, olive-skinned members of the mining class.

Now I am interested to see if they include bisexuality and coerced sex in the next movie (spoilers!!!!!!) or if that is another thing that just doesn’t make it because of time constraints or a desire for a family friendly rating. I wonder how many people even picked up on that in the book.

Racist shitfaces hacked (possibly, racists lie) Trayvon Martin’s Facebook email and “OMG!!!!! He’s got pictures of himself holding wads of cash! He must be a drug dealer!!!!!”

You know what’s super fucking funny, I mean nearly made me pee funny? My current Facebook pic is literally me wearing a hoodie holding fat wads of cash, grinning like the Cheshire cat. It’s been my profile pic for ages. I must be a drug dealer. When will the Feds by knocking down my door?

That picture, btw, was taken at a friend’s birthday dinner after we all kicked in dough to pay the check and cover the birthday girl’s portion (Hey Ms. J!!!!)

I think Trayvon was just your average kid, posting funny pictures (hell, as seen above even us boring middle aged moms post funny pictures to Facebook- that’s why it exists). But even if Trayvon was some kinda marijuana dealing teen entrepreneur, George Zimmerman could not have known that. All he could know was that a Black kid was walking around his neighborhood and Zimmerman didn’t like that.

It’s so stupid I don’t even know which of the shitty Rethuglican’s said that.

It’s also timely since I got the preliminary statement from the hospital about the cost of my IUD insertion.

Hold your breath kids, it’s about to real.

$1950, plus the $30 copay, plus an additional $30 in prescriptions.

Now this is before my insurance pays its chunk, so I will probably end up paying $650. And this was attempt #4, so there are copays and etc from previous attempts.

All this for 5 to 7 years of birth control and (legs crossed for luck!) period control. I can’t do the math to figure out what that breaks down to per year, but we’ll go with $100. Which is not bad. But it’s super fucking pricey up front, that’s for damn sure.

Could Google have delivered an IUD straight to my lady bits? Cause if it could, I would have skipped the jaws of life cervix clamp those 4 fucking times I had to deal with it (That last time was, in all fairness, a breeze thanks to super fucking awesome specialist IUD placing doc. Who listened when I said “Freaked out” and used all the lidocaine in the world before doing anything. Plus mega dose of valium.I love you Doctor P. even when the Valium has worn off. I love you!!!!)

This is rambley. What I mean is if reliable birth control were as easy and cheap to come by as searching Google is, we wouldn’t be having this stupid fucking debate all over the country about women’s right to health care. There would never have been a “Show your boss your whore pills” bill in AZ. The Catholic shitheads Bishops would have to complain to Google instead of Congress because they can’t get their own damn parishioners to follow their own damn rules.

We women (and people with unterii) have gone through no understandable amount of pain and sacrifice and hardship to both not be pregnant and to be pregnant. It’s work. It’s spendy. It’s painful. And for fucking once it would be nice if the be-penised half of the population stood up in a full-throated scream and supported us, instead of (best case scenario) using our lady-bits as a political trump card (cough*Obama*cough) or worst as a torture device (cough*every-last-rethuglican-cough).

But fuck it. I’m good till I am 44. I can outlast almost 2 whole new presidential terms. You all can keep playing stupid asshole games, but my uterus ain’t your football no more.

by informing me via twitter that Jarvis Cocker would be in NYC- the fucking week after I will be there.

I sobbed on my keyboard for a minute.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially with the murder of Trayvon Martin. Everybody wants justice for his stupid, shitty death and for his grieving family.

But justice is the thing you go after only after someone has caused harm. Never before.

I’d rather have fucking safety, equality, and a society that functions for everyone than after-the-fact justice. I think Trayvon’s parents would rather have him alive and happy and unknown than some martyr for Kids and People of Color who are killed by racists.

Justice doesn’t actually fix what it broken. It just gives some measure of relief for the ones left behind.

Which leads me to the phrase Social Justice. You know, I don’t give a flying fuck if people who are shitty acknowledge racism or sexism or classism or ableism or homophobia or transphobia, etc etc. I don’t care what they think or feel. I don’t give a flying fuck if they never change their minds about what horrid things they believe. I care that their horrid thoughts and beliefs are allowed to form actions that do others immense harm.

Maybe that’s where the failure of social justice is (not complete, little baby steps happen and then bigger steps happen. But so mind numbingly slow that the costs are monumental in terms of lives and burnout). Maybe we have to say fuck the changing of hearts and minds and just start isolating abusive shitheads from the populations they would hurt. Racist cops could no longer be cops. Misogynist politicians could no longer be politicians. Anti-choice doctors could no longer be OBGYNs. And shitty-ass murdering douchenuggets would not get access to a gun.

I don’t know. Maybe this shit doesn’t translate into the bigger picture. I know that the Trayvon stuff is making my heart break and my stomach turn. I know I am lucky that I will never have to get the kind of phone call Trayvon’s mom must have gotten. Kid’s white like paper. He could be wearing a hoody and firebombing doctor’s offices and he wouldn’t raise much of an eyebrow.

Years old and years blogging, respectively. This here is my birthday blogiversary day.

This year is the first time since I started blogging that I didn’t have to curse Georgie W. for starting the Iraq war on my birthday. Instead I get to worry along with all of you that Obama is rattling the sabers for MOAR WAR: Iran Edition. I read rumor a few weeks ago, and granted it was a rumor, that Israel had already knocked out most of Iran’s nuclear possibilities. But Israel’s not talking cause they want MOAR WAR sponsored by the US and Iran’s not talking because they like to swing their dicks and never admit weakness.

Sometimes at ye old blog I feel like I’ve said the same thing a thousand times over and that nothing ever changes. Except that’s not true. When I started this blog I still believed the Democratic party was worth voting for, as they were the only ones to treat us be-uterused as sentient human beings and would never be the party of the have mores and warmongering. I don’t believe any of that anymore. Haven’t since 2008. Us ladies, despite making up 60% or democratic voters, only matter to the party as political footballs. Suddenly we’re only autonomous human beings in an election year.

Fuck that. I am a full-fledged human being every single damn day of every single damn year.

I also started out writing this blog while I still had the tiniest thread of faith in a possible higher power. I don’t have that anymore. You would think a loss of faith like that would be a blow to ones optimism. On the contrary, since I gave up trying to figure out how some higher power could possibly be okay with shit heap that this world is, I have more hope. Lives are hard because of some secret master plan. Inequality isn’t a test from a higher being. The world sucks the people we let rule us are assholes. That’s it. I am much more hopeful knowing that it’s possible to change a super fucked up system created by humans that I was thinking that I was some stupid pawn in a celestial chess game.

I know I haven’t been the most faithful of blogmistresses. I think I wrote more on my crappy cell phone without internet access or a home than I do having moved up to the top of the bottom 20 percent. It’s a time thing. Full time work is full time. They ain’t fucking kidding about that. Thankfully, the Kid is learning to cook and is (mostly without nagging, sort of) responsible for the housecleaning. (I’ll be damned if any boy of mine grows up not knowing how to make dinner or clean a toilet. NOPE!)

Thanks for sticking with me all these years. You peeps are the awesome sauce on my sundae.