Now that life may possibly be returning to normal-ish (damn could that
sentence have any more qualifiers) I should have the time and energy
to join in the happy protests like the peeps who took over the capitol
in Olympia. During the Bush years I attended protests in a fetching
black cowboy hat with a sign that read ‘stop mad cowboy disease’. I
think my next sign is going to read ‘Brother can you spare some
change?’ Both as an homage to the famous line from the Great
Depression and as a kick in the teeth to his audacious changeyness.
But I’m open to others. So darling peeps- what would your protest sign
say?

So YAY! We got the apartment!!!! Yay! One mountain os stomach churning
stress down. 5 million more to go. But YAY!

to be approved/ not approved for the apartment. The stress is really
doing a number on me. I’m getting little panic attacks everytime the
phone rings and my stomach is an acid churning sea.. I may hear for
sure tomorrow. A yes would be awesome, but then there’s a whole new
level of stress with the old utility bills and no furniture or
bedding.( though that makes the physical act of moving easier, my
hurty body is not looking forward to sitting and sleeping on the floor
for an extended period) A no starts the whole process over. I keep
fighting a desire to hide behind the sofa and sob. So that’s where I
am right now. Freaked out and stressed to the max.

Tonight, to make up for having been out of town on my birthday, my
friend Amanda took me to a gorgeous dinner (rabbit caccitore with
riccotta gnocchi) and then to the symphony. Amanda is blind and
travels everywhere with Winnie, the bestest, most awesomest dog ever.
In movies, Amanda usually has someone quietly narrate the whole thing
to her, but for concerts she just needed me to quietly point out
things she would find interesting, like that the amazing guest
violinist was wearing flip flops and toe rings under her long formal
dress, or that almost every single male bass player was mr. clean
style bald (there were 6 of them, it was unusual) I only whispered a
handful of things to Amanda. No more the 4 sentences in the course of
2 hours. We were in accesible seating with the dog. You all know
what’s coming, right? Of course the douchebag in front of us, who
nearly stepped on the dog, shushed me. The dog, who again is the best
ever, then proceeded to fart at the douchenoodle, more than once. Good
dog.

The Democratic Party sent out a wee survey to the faithful today- Tell
us what you think was the email title, I believe. So I told them what
I think of the tacky little men in their tacky blue suits who spend
their days selling out the bottom 80% to the kleptocrats. If you’re
still on the party’s mailing list, I suggest you do the same. It’s a
great exercise in venting, if nothing else.

Andrew McCarthy has a decent piece up at Echidne about Obama’s lack of
a moral core. He writes that he can’t imagine that if Obama was faced
with the choice of demanding the troops be intergrated, he can’t see
Obama making it, putting Obama to the right of Eisenhower. But then he
makes the same lesser of 2 evils mistake and says he will probably
vote for Obama in 2012 anyways. That is why we have evil and
compassionate-substitute (like splenda) evil. This coountry is locked
into the mindset that there are only 2 views on politics, 2 views on
economics when there would be riots in the streets if we only had 2
types of breakfast cereal to choose from. But we won’t have better
choices if we don’t make better choices. Yes, you’ll have to give up
the thrill of the horse race because by choosing a better, non-legacy
party candidate there will be no nail-biting waiting to see if your
candidate won, at least not at first. But when parties are only a few
percentage points from each other, those better votes matter.

Here in good old Washington state. Seiu organized a protest in Olympia
against the seriously draconian budget cuts made by Democrat Gov.
Gregoire. If I had a car, or even a couple of bus tickets, I’d be
there too. But it ain’t just repubifucker politicians getting the
protest treatment anymore, and that is a damn fine thing.

Since Republifuckers are so damned determined to lie about what Planned Parenthood does, and since so many of us have used their services, I think we should tell our stories. So here’s one (of many) that I have. When I was a wee unmarried lass of 19 I confirmed that I was pregnant for 10 bucks at PP. But I didn’t just pee in a cup. They did a full exam and and then gently asked me if I knew what my options were. I knew from the second I thought I might be up the stick that I was keeping the kid. When I told the doc, she didn’t lecture me about my age or state of non-marriage (as other doctors and nurses would later). She gave me information on how to apply for medicaid, including the actual forms, so I could get prenatal care straight away and she gave me a paper prooving a positive pregnancy test result to include with the forms. At the bottom she scrawled ‘Elizabeth has decided to parent’. And that is the moment where I realized the enormity of the CHOICE I made to parent the Kid. I decided to parent.

It’s that painful, nauseous, feverish, messiest craptastic time of the
month. My fucking periods, aka the communist invasion, are a large
part of te reason I have to take double doses of iron everyday. My doc
thinks that, if all looks normal on a yet to be scheduled internal
ultrasound (can they turn down the lights and add some buzzing action
to those things?) then mirena might be a good idea. And since the
republifuckers are hell bent on killing women’s reproductive rights,
birth control that lasts me 5 years sounds like a damn fine
investment. It’s either that or a hysterectomy, which I’m not mentally
ready for yet. So peeps, anyone else with a little mirena experience?
Good bad or ugly? I just don’t think I can take losing another week
per month to the red army for much longer, (yes, a solid week, plus a
week of painful crampy pms before hand and metzelspritz when I
ovulate. So I really only get one non-ovary affected week per month).

I’ve noticed the term ‘gatekeeper’ pop up in a couple of places
recently and damn if that doesn’t just curl my toes in joy. I think
the world would be a much happier place if we learned to snarl
‘Gatekeeper’ with disdain in our hearts whenever someone acts
gatekeepery. The first thing to understand about gatekeeping is that
they (we) are the underpaid security gaurds to the powerful, and the
way you recognize a security guard is by the uniform.. There’s a
reason any kind of anti-oppression activist has a well-practiced eye
roll for the 10,000th time they’ve heard the same tired-ass arguement
for why oprressing person X is okay because blah blah. Uniformity,
lack of critical thought, are the main tools of the power structure.
If you have ever found yourself using the sentence structure if/then
relating to an oppressed group, then you are a gatekeeper. If girls
don’t want to be raped then they shouldn’t wear short skirts. If black
kids spent more time reading books then they would go to college. Etc.