this year exhausts me

 As I am sure it exhausts most of us. And I recognize that to be exhausted, rather than, oh, evicted, unemployed, evacuated, homeless, sick, or dead is a privilege. I am privileged. I acknowledge that. 

But fuckssake.

This week, the exhaustion has been more physically literal, because it's been stupidly, dangerously hot in my state (which is also on fire). I am not one of those folks who functions well in heat. I can handle it, insofar as I don't get immediate migraines or pass out or sweat excessively. I do get more anxious and more irritable. We are privileged to have A/C, which we try and limit our use of, because the power grid and rolling blackouts and all that. We can survive here on the coast without it (we did, in graduate student housing, which is literally across the street). We turned it on this week, set to 80, and it felt good. Cool.

Climate change, y'all. This isn't weather. The middle of the country blew away with the derecho. (My cousin lost her home.) People are dying of COVID all the fuck over, while other people whine about their masks and their rights and send kids back to school so that... yes, they can get sick and put hundreds into quarantine. The post office is being dismantled.  My state is burning up. People are losing everything. The sky is red. The air up north is black; here it's not so bad, most of the time. But I am aware, with every beautiful, lurid sunrise, that things are burning.

My fall class is about the zombie apocalypse, which seems more applicable this year than it has in a long time. I used to teach zombies because they were trendy. Now, though? It resonates. The end of the fucking world, indeed. We're remote, at least. This university has sense.

The DNC happened. I didn't watch. I mean, they could run a half-eaten sandwich and some moldy cottage cheese and I'd vote for them. I am fine with Biden. I am delighted with Harris (I wanted her for president, or as Warren's VP, so...). Now I fret about whether we will be allowed free elections (post office!) or if we do have them, and we win, someone won't vacate the office. Or, if we win, the people who really do want everything to burn take steps to make it happen. So yeah, I have some hope. But I'm not at all complacent. I think you can't be, if hope means anything. Hope is uncertain, by its nature.

I don't have more profundity than that. Tinycat is demanding her lunch, which she gets now in an effort to get her weight up (which is working, though I don't think we've cleared 7 lbs. Her highest ever was 8. I'd be happy with somewhere around 7.5). So I am going to feed a cat.

le petit chat noir

Fuck Racism

That is all.

No. Wait. It's not.

Zack de la Rocha grew up in this little city, going to a school a couple blocks away (which is now a boarded up refuge for wildlife). Having lived here now for, oh, more than a decade, I get the origin of the rage. I see the machine.

Rage Against the Machine - "Killing in the Name"

fantasy

I've been playing tabletop RPGs since I was 17, and except for a brief period when we were in different states, I've played with the Rat the whole time. She was my first GM, and we played AD&D 2nd ed, and my first character was a fighter. And although I have played mages and priests and rogues and multi-classed and scads of other games besides AD&D...the straight up fighter is still my favorite.

See, my fantasy-self isn't the mage, with crazy powers and All the Brains. Or the priest, for that matter. I am the  priest/mage/magic-user in real life. Those are my stats.

No, see, my fantasy is the tank. The physically powerful and capable and don't fuck with me character. Deals damage. Takes damage. Deals a little more. The monsters come at the tank first, but that's okay! Because the tank's gonna kick their butts.

It's totally a power fantasy, but it's the power fantasy of control. To be safe. To keep others safe.

Being a woman in gaming is a lot like a old-school dungeon crawl. You never know where the monsters are, but you know they're there and you're gonna see combat. It's just a matter of when. You even know who they are.

So this:  "Tabletop Gaming has a White Male Terrorism Problem" wasn't a surprise to me.

The Rat and I didn't do the gaming convention scene--in part because the one time we did go, to visit Nous and his then GF, we were Not Impressed with the crowd. (Nous  says he spent a lot of time at cons talking to "awkward" guys, trying to keep them away from the women at the gaming table.*) The other thing that prevented us from walking into that shitstorm was that we were, and are, wickedly introverted. The very idea of all those new people was exhausting and (for me) daunting as hell. Who the hell wants to play under those conditions? It's not fun! Let's go home and world-build.

The non/verbal shit, though.

The RPG club in college wouldn't even talk to us. I mean, we walked in to the first day meeting, the room of guys looked at us, the president wouldn't actually speak to us... it was amazing. Striking in its hostility. Like, put a sign on the door that says no gurlz and you'd have it.

There were two game stores in town. The one in the mall had a small RPG section and we went there most often for dice; the counter-help was blandly friendly. The guys lurking around the game section could be a little creeper-y. I learned not to make eye contact. Most of them wanted the Rat's attention (she was the more ideal physical type), but they'd make due with the short blonde sidekick. They'd get way too close and talk up in-game exploits like their characters were them. It was... awkward. And awful. I would have to physically leave to get the hell away from them.

The indie game store had a much bigger selection of books (and Magic cards), so we went there for those. Depending who was behind the counter... we could be ignored, or stink-eyed, or tolerated with barely-there courtesy. We didn't get as many no shit, there my 12th level necromancer half-elf was stories (I didn't); but the Rat got a lot more looks. I remember more than a couple oblique comments, too, about my unfuckability.**

Nothing to me. Certainly nothing to her. But we were meant to hear, and to understand where we fit. We certainly weren't gamers.

Which is not to say that it's all men who do this because duh. Lots of my gamer friends are, have been, men. White men, even. Not terrorists, but... well. Not exactly paladins, either.

So this: "For Good Men To See Nothing" didn't surprise me either. In fact, it rang even more true. Because I saw this a lot more. I saw my friends stfu rather than confront assholes, both in the game stores and not.

I once had a fight with an ex-boyfriend (and member of our gaming group) in which he tore apart the furniture while two other male friends (and members of our gaming group) sat in the back room, listening and doing nothing at all.

"We'd've come out if we heard anything, you know," one said later.

Any what? Screaming from me, instead of from him? Pain and fear instead of insensate rage? How exactly did they know the thumping was the chair's dismemberment and not me hitting the wall?  --I asked these questions.

"He wouldn't've hurt you," said the other, while not making eye contact. "He was upset."

This, this right here, is how men who don't act allow men who are trouble to get away with shit. This was all forgiven, by the way. When I expressed discomfort with being around this guy, well. You know. That was my problem. He apologized. He was sorry. I had to just, you know, let it go.

Right.***

So one official black belt and years of eclectic aikido and kendo and blade-training all around the edges ... I'd still run away from a physical fight if I could (because I'm not stupid) but I feel a little (little) safer in gaming environments where I'm getting the creeper-vibe.

Because I still do. Local-ish game store here, middle-aged dude wanted to talk to me, follow me around, gain my approval ("No shit, there my chaotic evil mage was, and..."). Other dude asked Nous how he could help him while pretending I wasn't actually the one picking through the bookshelf.  These were not teenagers. These were our contemporaries. And, as with most men, bigger than me. Heavier. Stronger. ****

So yeah, I still play tanks in D&D whatever-the-hell-edition we're on. Because, at least in my fantasy, I want to be the person in the room that no one will even think of fucking with.

The monsters are still out there.

---------
*He says awkward. I say poorly skilled predator.

**The Rat claims to remember none of this. She also can ignore people more completely than anyone I know, including my cats. I think it's her superpower.

***They weren't bad guys. But damn, did I learn a lesson.

****Thank all my various gods for online suppliers and the friendly comic book store across the street that has dice and understands why I need to try out every. Single. 20-sider to get the right one. 

Chaucer was so full of it

April is innocent. It's freakin' February.

Okay, Chaucer was all up about the weather, droughts of March, rains, blah blah. I would like to see that rain. El Nino in SoCal right now is a big no-show. I am not complaining (oh, yes I am) about nice weather. I am complaining about summer heat in February. I am not ready to yield up my long sleeves yet! No! It sucks to be a knitter in a place where you can wear a sweater, like, 2 days out of a year. I don't even wear socks most of the time. Fortunately Nous does, so he benefits. And Zero in Toronto gets sweaters.

But weather is not the worse offense, O February. No. That, we reserve for the day job. February is Crazy Times in the quarter anyway. It is the month of All The Drafts of that second paper the necessity of which I acknowledge, while at the same time regretting its complexity.

This quarter, I got a plagiarist. I am not happy. They don't happen often, but when they do, they take a lot of time to handle--means getting my boss involved, gathering documentation, etc, taking time I would rather spend commenting on drafts (oh, be honest: writing non-work things). But really, it's the betrayal. Don't imagine I'm stupid, kid, or that I can't tell you didn't write something. But really don't imagine I won't notice if you stole work from my former students.  And then, for the love of all that is good, don't skip the fucking meeting with me because you're too scared to own what you did.

The worst part of this one: there might be complicity on the part of the plagiarized. Victims...or accomplices. We have no way to know. I can guess, and I can believe, but I can't know. I hate not knowing. I hate that I  now wonder if I must missed some degree of perfidy in those kids during endless conferences and talks about their work, or if their bleeding-on-the-paper honesty was just...bullshit. Bullshit that I believed.

I am angry. I don't like being angry. I don't like being the Green Knight's Axe. I don't like the waste of energy and time. I don't like being reminded that people are shitheads. I mean I know that, but I let myself believe it doesn't happen in my classroom, where we read freakin' Nicomachean Ethics in week one. Clearly the lessons don't stick. (But they do, for many. I see the lightbulbs go off.) There's an intimacy to teaching writing: they come in broken, convinced they can't do this, and you show them otherwise. You encourage and excoriate, you read confessions and heartbreaks and triumphs, you watch their eyes light up when they realize they care about what they're writing for the first time in their lives.

Right. Hold onto that feeling, not the betrayed-sick-I AM THE AXE feeling. Onwards to March.

bloodbath

The number of adjuncts with reduced appointments is brutal. The number who got no appointment is even worse. Nous scraped through. We're lucky. We're fully employed. Lots of our friends are at half their former pay, or three-quarters, or flat-out laid off. 

There are institutional....well, not reasons, but causes, for this. Reason would imply some merit to this decision, which will help various parties but ultimately hurt the undergraduates, who we are ostensibly there to teach. I think administration forgets that sometimes. A university is not a graduate student production facility. Today's TAs are tomorrow's (laid off) adjuncts.

The union is pissed off. We'll see what we can actually do. Nothing that will save the people cut this year, though. They're casualties of an administrative war on the adjuncts. 

bossy

Yoga-friend Anna and I  are bossy women. We've been called that all our lives. Her life is about 27 years longer than mine, so she's been annoyed by the practice much longer. Anyway, in light of Lean In and all the media yap about it, we ended up this week discussing how it is that a woman who asserts herself is called bossy and condemned for it, while a man who does the same is called, well, assertive, and everyone's just fine with that.

I think my first time being called bossy was by a teacher, when I was a little kid, maybe 6? for having an opinion and stating it. I was told to be more ladylike, to tone it down, to be quiet. Boys who behaved the exact same way were not called anything.

The lesson: Boys will be boys. Girls will be quiet.

That same school, a year later, punished me for protesting--loudly, and then physically--when a little boy my age would not leave me alone, to the point of poking and touching me, following me around, and generally being a creepy little stalker. He was a weird kid anyway. His attachment was unwelcome and unnerving. I was told--be nicer to him. He likes you.

The lesson: Boys have feelings. Girls have to accommodate them.

These lessons did not stick with me, in the sense that I never bought the basic unfairness of them. Oh, I learned to be quiet. Sometimes. I never did learn to back down. My own mother, generally much smarter than this, yelled at me in eighth grade because I decked a kid who slapped my butt. There were better ways to handle it, she said. I thought I'd used restraint, having just come through a mini-course (which 99% of the girls in my class attended) on self-defense, which involved knee-breaking and eye-gouging and which was taught by a big ex-Green Beret who collected many, many bruises in the course of the training. Butt-slapper only got thrown in a snow-drift. But I'd embarrassed my mother, behaving like that. (My father said, very quietly, that I'd done the right thing.)

The lesson: You can defend yourself against strangers, but if it's someone you know, you just take it.

That last lesson is a tougher one--not to learn, but not to learn. That's how acquaintance rapes happen. Acquaintance sexual assaults. Abuse. Creeper "friends" who get excused by your friends because "we know them."

Now how much worse is it with someone's family? A fine question. An academic question, until very recently. A dear friend of mine discovered a heretofore unknown older half-brother. Dear friend is an only, so this is a Big Deal. Dear friend is married to my best friend, The Rat, so this affects me because we spend major holidays with them, and New Brother is very likely to be there. They brought him down here a couple weeks ago to meet us.

I can't say I liked the man. He is frightfully insecure, and seems to be entirely artificial. He performs himself constantly. He wants to be liked. He is not above trying to steamroll you with you freakin' RAD he is (yes, he uses that word. FFS). How cool. How with it. Okay, okay. So he's a big golden retriever wrapped in manflesh. I like the attitude in a dog. Not so much in an adult. Less when the adult's been drinking. But whatever. I didn't hate him. I didn't have much opinion at all, except 'maybe when he's sober, and he's relaxed a little, he'll stop being a git.' Then we got to the parking lot and said our goodbyes.

Goodbyes involve hugging. From Dear Friend and The Rat, that's okay. I know them. They're family. New Brother is also clearly a touchy-feely guy. Ugh. Okay. Whatever. I've gotten used to hugs as the default greeting/goodbye from everyone, regardless of length or depth of acquaintance. I suck it up and hug him.

This is not a sweet little hug, this is a full body hug, the sort I would give The Rat, or Kman, or Nous. There's like 3 people in the world I would touch that way, ever. And he won't let go. And won't let go. And. Won't. Let. Go.

I was clearly Not Happy with this. I didn't kick or squirm, but I did my best to pull back, put a little distance between us. Nope. No hint taken. So after about 30 seconds, 25 too many, I tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Okay, that's enough," and extricated myself. That would've been sufficient to make me twitch, but then! Then he says something like: "I wondered how long that would take." And chuckled, like it was some big funny thing, that he'd gotten me to do something I found uncomfortable. Like he'd forced me out of my comfort zone, and that was cool. Like he was helping expand my horizons, dude, rad.

I am Cin's slow burning anger.

Okay, not so slow burning. I was pretty mad pretty quick. I told Dear Friend I wasn't happy. I told Best Friend. Nous already knew, of course. I resolved that, when next I met with New Brother, I would not allow the hello hug. Dear Friend and Best Friend agreed this was a good thing. "He needs to learn the rules of the tribe," said Dear Friend.

Ah yes. The tribe. That's the batch of us who hang together at T-day, Christmas, various other holidays and parties throughout the year. The ones who went to Dear Friend and The Rat's wedding. I've known these folks, friends acquired through The Rat, for about 8 years now. We've all got attitudes, quirks, issues, likes and dislikes. I wouldn't say we know each other super well, but we do know each other. We tease, and we tolerate, and we generally all get along--and when we don't, we squabble and then work it out, because we're in this for the long haul. You know. Tribe. Of which this guy is now a de facto member, by an accident of birth.

And so, at Dear Friend's birthday gathering this weekend, I pointedly did not let him hug me. "Nope," I said, when he leaned in. "You got your hug last time. You got like 6 months of hugs."

Now...how do you think he took that? Did he say, "gosh, did I bother you last time?" No. Did he laugh it off, and treat it as Cin's Hazing Me? No. He looked at me, at Dear Friend, at M. (who is Dear Friend's best friend, and one of my favorite people in the world, too), at Nous. Then M. cracked up and said, "OMG, I've missed you." Dear Friend laughed with her. The Rat only smiled.

New Brother was seriously offended. He sulked. He snapped at me whenever I spoke to him for the rest of the day. ("Where are you sitting?" "Aren't YOU up in everyone's business?") Maybe I was being bossy by asking. Hah. So I did what I usually do with people I don't like, and ignored him as much as possible. That was easy. M. and I just hung out most of the time, catching up.

And then I caught myself feeling bad... like, had I been embarrassing? Had I been...bossy? Had I behaved in a manner unbecoming because jeez, this is Dear Friend's New Brother, and that makes him someone I've got to accommodate, and hell with my feelings.

That of course was not the end of it. He lamented to The Rat, later, that he was just trying to be himself, he just wanted to be himself, and he felt like he'd spent the whole day being someone else. He also said he didn't want to come between her and her friends. (She laughed. I don't think he understood why.) But what he clearly did want is reassurance. He's done this before, with Dear Friend, when she disagreed with him--went around and tried to get another one of the tribe to agree with him. I thought that was shitty at the time, for Dear Friend's sake. I'm not a bit surprised he'd do that with me...I am a little surprised he'd try it with The Rat.

I feel a little bit like I'm back in elementary school, aggrieved because there's this boy being himself and I'm not allowed to defend myself or my space. No one has said that--quite the opposite--but that's how it feels. Like I'm wrong for refusing to smile and go along with it. That pisses me off, mostly at myself, for not having quite kicked the bullshit out of my system. Also at him,  for assuming that he should get to be him, but not understanding that I get to be me, and that might put a check on his privilege. Damn sure it's time he learned. But goddammit, do I have to be the one to teach him?

WoW. No. Not a Game.

I was initially reluctant to use the term War on Women. It sounded too much like a political catch-phrase, meant to drum up emotions and suppress logic. Also, it shorthands to WoW, which means something entirely different to me.

But then.

So by now you probably heard/read Rep. Todd Akin's comments about "legitimate rape." Now his fellow Republican conservative, Rep. Steve King (no relation to Stephen King, although the man speaks horror) claims that he's never heard of pregnancy resulting from incest or statutory rape, but he's willing to discuss it.

Funny. A bunch of OBGYNs did a study back in the 90s that showed "significant" numbers of women get pregnant from rape every year. Of course that looks suspiciously like science, so chances are Akin and King didn't bother to read--wait. Akin's on the House Science Committee. And last year he and King tried to define "forcible rape" for a bill. It's becoming clear that unless you fight like hell when someone rapes you, and come off bruised and bloody and maybe badly wounded, these assbags are not going to believe you were "legitimate." And maybe not even then, if you're one of that significant number who ends up pregnant, because your magic lady-bits didn't prevent the Hate Sperm from conception.

This isn't a war. It's a regression to the fucking Middle Ages.  

Maybe that makes it a little more World of Warcraft after all. Maybe those of us who didn't luck out on the lowest difficulty setting (thank you, John Scalzi) need to hurry up and level up. The Horde is on the way.

many littles make a much

My mother asked me today how my week had gone today. And I had to say, on the whole, it was pretty good. Began with a kickass teaching evaluation from one of my favorite professors. Ended with a kickass concert from my very favorite band. In between, there were some slingshot moments. So I said--well, little dramas. What do you mean? she asked. So I told her. And I'm telling you, too.

Thursday, delivery day for the farmer's co-op, I get a call. They delivered to the wrong address, they say. No box this week for us, sorry, account credited, delivery next week. This is annoying, but not the end of the world. I was a little sad to miss out on the butternut squash (listen. my ambitions are small), but hey. Then, Friday, I'm on the way home from meeting a friend and lo! in the middle of the sidewalk--the delivery box, sitting in front of the building to which it must've been delivered. I took it home. The lettuce did not survive its exposure, and a couple of the satsumas looked as if they had been stunt doubles for a hockey puck, but the rest of it was okay. I mean, cauliflower does not wilt, and radishes... radishes are strange red evil bundles of 'what the fuck do I do with this?', but they don't go bad overnight. And I got my butternut squash. Nyah.

Then Saturday, morning of the Much Anticipated Concert, Nous and a plate had a parting of ways. The plate hurled itself at the floor and burst. You know how sometimes plates just bounce? And sometimes they split and fall into neat broken halves? And how sometimes they combust on impact, throwing shards like a ceramic frag grenade? Yeah. Fortunately, none of the cats were in the kitchen at the time. Fortunately, none of the cat dishes were struck by the plate-bomb.  I, however, was not so fortunate. Of course I was barefoot. I caught a big piece of something sharp on the joint of my big toe, where it connects to the foot. At first, I thought it might've broken something. It was that kind of pain. And as I was hopping around, mindful of the rest of the shrapnel, securing a broom for Nous, the fairly deep cut made by the impact decided to bleed. Wet clean-up, aisle one! Two bandaids later, the bleeding had stopped. Managed to get the damn thing into a boot (concert. Not missing it. Fuck that.) and off we went. But it hurt the whole night, and really hurt whenever there was any pressure on it. But today, the swelling's down, the bruise has revealed itself as localized (kinda like a goose-egg. About that size, too), the cut is scabbed, and walking is okay. So there. Bullet (and urgent care) dodged.

And then today, which is technically a brand new week, we had The Incident In The Parking Lot.

We're walking to Trader Joe's for the weekly grocery run and we spot this asshole in a hot-rodded Camero. He guns past a car on a two-lane residential street. Asshole, we think. Then we watch him blast into the TJ's parking lot and do the same thing on one of the access streets. Clearly a man with a deathwish. Unfortunately, the dead party would be whoever he hit. That parking lot is full of elderly folks from the housing complex across the street, and moms with kids, and just people. It's also super narrow and stupid-twisty. Anyway. As we're making our way across it, who should come blasting up our aisle? Yes. Camaro-dick. He whipped into an open space maybe 5 feet in front of us, cutting us off very nicely. He showed no indication of having noticed two people crossing the aisle. Okay. We angled away from him, as if he were a rabid rhino on meth withdrawal.

At that point, he decided he'd fucked up his entry-angle and slammed his car into reverse to try, try again.

He missed me by 4 inches. I kid you not.

You know how some people get fight or flight? I'm pretty much always fight. I yelled at him, which penetrated the super loud music coming out of the open windows. Then I came around the driver's side.

"Goddamned motherfucking asshole watch where you're going what the fuck you almost hit me!"

Got my first look at the guy. Uncharitably, it kinda looked like this car might be his prosthetic masculinity. And his eyes got egg-sized when he grokked that I was yelling at him and coming at him and holy shit. 

Then Nous came around behind me--long hair, black leather jacket, beard, looking every inch the old-school black metalhead, yelling his own stream of invective. I believe it was "learn to fucking drive, you asshole."

Guy held up a peace sign, two fingers, looking scared. Right, guy. Peace. What the fuck ever. But by now, the brain reasserts itself: You are yelling profanity in a public place. It does not matter how scared and angry you are. Stop it.

So we walked away. As we're going toward the Trader Joe's (and the adrenaline slammed home into shakes and chest pain), the car next up the aisle rolled down its passenger window. Great.  I'm about to get chewed out for public profanity by some mom with kids. But the woman stuck her head out and said, "Good for you! Yes! You tell him!" and I realized that's the car Asshole burned past on the residential street.

I expected my mother to scold me for the whole public profanity thing. Instead, she laughed out loud. "You said that to him?"

"I did."

My father, when told the story, sighed and chuckled. I could imagine him shaking his head. "You know, your mother yelled quite a stream of swear words in German at a guy in Germany who ran into me. She really chewed him out. Made him apologize. Really embarrassed him."

Like mother, like daughter.

-----
I miss the Livejournal 'what's playing' feature. So, what's playing: Kidneythieves, "Taxicab Messiah."

i am having trouble

...with this whole Penn State thing. I cannot wrap my head around how shit like this goes on and no one does anything. How the victims are named One and Two because no one knows who they are, but they have been seen by witnesses being abused and no one bothered to ask their goddamned names because no one bothered to intervene. I don't get how you see something like that happening and you just, oh, walk away. I'm kinda with Jon Stewart, on that one. Call Cops! Stop Rape! Or Stop Rape! Call Cops! Really. One of those things. Walk away? Not so much. Let's leave aside the dude who saw it--the big one, the former quarterback, that dude. So he can't bring himself to say anything, okay (but not really). So he calls daddy (daddy? daddy?) and waits a full fucking day to tell his superior, who reports to his, and by the end of it, raping a child in the lockerroom becomes questionable sexual behavior becomes horseplay that made a grad student uncomfortable. I can feel blood vessels popping in my brain even typing that.

And the pity for Joe Paterno... I don't get it. I don't want to get it. This man covered up child rape. He knew shit was happening and he did. Nothing. He has regrets? I bet he does. What about the kids? You think they might have some? Those folks who defend Paterno, who "support him"...the ones for whom football is more important than stopping pedophilia... words fail. Truly.  I just want to know who they are, in case I ever have the chance to boycott a business, or refuse employment, or have a clear line of sight and some extra spit.

what's wrong with this picture?

Good lord, daydrinking. I should totally know better than to drink a "high alcohol" beer on a Luna bar at 2PM, but WTF EVER. There was pumpkin porter! and good company! and I have to spend tomorrow with student thesis statements!

So yeah. Daydrinking. Anyway.

You know that XKCD comic? The one that says there's people doing stupid things on the internet? And the little stick man gets all pissed off and can't let it go?

Yeah. Well. This isn't a stupid thing, what's got me all ticked--but it's a symptomatic thing. In short: this picture.

It makes me angry.

And more than it, the response to it makes me angry. I got into it, briefly, on Facebook, and I walked away before it got personal and angrier. And because Facebook isn't the place for argument, and because it wasn't my Facebook, and because the impetus behind the posting was, for the poster, rather personal. So okay. I get that. Fine. I was bulimic in high school. I get not finding validation in the media for my body type (which is, for the record, mesomorphic. I am muscular. Not gaunt. Not curvy). But I had, and have, friends on both sides of the fat/skinny divide, so siding with one and slamming the other was and is not an option.

Anyway. This is my space, and I'm still pissed off about this picture and its message and the women who are passing it around and liking it and who should all fucking know better. 

So tell me.

Why is the curvy woman more attractive than the skinny one? Seriously. Why? Because more women have hips? More women are curvy? More women have big breasts? Is this an argument by majority? More of us can attain the hips and butt and tits, so the other one is clearly the problem?

I don't get it. They're both women. We can't tell from the image if the thinner woman works out, is anorexic, is naturally gaunt, or what. We can only lay our value judgments on her, and then back up and pretend we're being feminist while doing so. If the thin one works out to be thin, she's Bad because she's conforming to society's expectations! She is? How do we know this? Maybe she likes to work out. Maybe she's naturally skinny. Maybe she catches shit from people all the time for having a small chest and bony hips. Maybe she tries like hell to gain weight and can't.  Maybe she really does work out 10 hours a day and eat three leaves of lettuce a day and drink only water and take speed to keep skinny because Hollywood tells her to so she can have her image posted on the internet  for people to make fun of and judge to get validation from strangers?
 
It doesn't matter. She has a body and she's living in it. Curvy women, fat women, skinny women, athletic women, transwomen--all have bodies. And we're all living in them. And we really, really don't need to be judged and policed by our own because... because... what? Society is currently favoring the thin over the fat? It's all bullshit, people. Shaming the skinny chick to validate the curvy one is no different than fat-shaming. And don't even bring up 'health' to me, okay? Health isn't measured by skinny or fat. You can't fucking tell from looking. Citing health as a reason for personal preference is concern trolling at best.

What the image, and the comments about it, come down to are personal aesthetics and an adolescent need to justify one's self by denigrating someone else. Seriously. We need to be the fuck over that shit by now.

In order to stick up for the curvy chick, we have to slam the skinny one. We have to decide that one of them is ugly, and one of them is not. That tells me we're still talking about attractiveness as some objective value, without discussing who decides what's attractive. In this case--you know what? It's the same fucking society. The one that deemed Marilyn beautiful is the same one that's decided the skinny woman is beautiful. It's called... wait for it... PATRIARCHY. It's MEN deciding which of our bodies is acceptable, and whose is not, and assigning us value based on that. So you know what? When we think we're being all rebelllious and valuing the curvy woman over the thin one, we're still playing their game. We're still buying into their power structure.

Shit. We don't need the patriarchy. We do it to ourselves.

and the death count rises

So the terrorist in Norway was a home-grown, right-wing, conservative Christian fundamentalist. He's blown up buildings and killed close to 100 people, many of them teenagers and affiliated with the liberal party in Norway. A political act of terrorism, in one of the most peaceful, open societies in Europe, one of our NATO allies. The attacks are symptomatic of a rise in extreme right-wing crap in Europe, and that should worry us. It should worry us even more that we have our own right-wing conservative fascist element. Our Christian white-boy terrorists generally confine themselves to bombing women's clinics and murdering doctors, but they have occasionally gone after buildings full of government workers and their children. When they do, we execute them and dismiss them as extremists. Norway won't kill their terrorist, having evolved beyond government-sanctioned vengeance killing capital punishment at the turn of the last century. But they might have a backlash against the kind of xenophobic thinking that produced him.

In an ideal world, or even a self-aware one, the rest of us might be looking at Norway and grieving with them, and thinking that we should be that much more vigilant against the kind of thinking that produces home-grown terrorism and right-wing extremism. 

Instead, most of my fucking f-list in varying social media is on about Amy Winehouse.

today, i am disappointed in the world

I hit a point, sometimes, where I just can't muster the energy to be angry about the things that deserve that anger. Or when too many angry-making things pile up until I'm buried in them. I am not sure which point I am at, at present. Maybe both. But I am freakin' tired, people.

I am tired of so-called Christians practicing none of the compassion I see in their Jesus. He hung out with the dregs of society. He did not avoid said dregs and condemn them and treat them like shit. He did not spend his days posting (ha. Jesus on Facebook. There's a thought) about how awful those other people are, and being smug; nor did he spend all his time trumpeting his own righteousness. He said--love people. Be humble. All that really hard stuff. I don't see a lot of love. I think if these people had been Jesus, they've been all Yo! Magdelene! Get OFF MY FEET! Nasty ho. Stop that. Then come talk to me.

I see my best friend hurting because her brother won't come to her wedding or bring his family because he doesn't want to "give his kids the wrong idea"--said idea being, apparently, that two women might love each other that way. No, it's better to give those kids the idea that Jesus might hate two people for loving each other. Great plan.

So that makes me tired. And it makes me angry. But mostly tired, because I cannot do anything about it. Or them. Or the attitudes they carry, that have not changed in the 20 years that I've known them.

And I swear to all my ancestors that I am tired, tired, TIRED of the manufactured drama around Certain HBO Series(tm). Is it rape? Is it not? Come the fuck on, people. It's fantasy, it's fiction, and it's supposed to be upsetting. More upsetting: rape happens now, today, all around us, to people we know, and you're all worked up about a fucking TV show. Worry about real women who are asked what they were wearing, or were they drunk, or were they married, or did they really fight back, or the thousand other shitty things we say, as a culture, to rape victims to turn them into partially responsible agents in their own violation.

Also sick of people muttering about how the source material isn't critical enough of the violence against women. It's the middle ages. It's violence against everyone. It's worse to be a woman, sure, and worse still to be a poor woman.  But if you think GRRM isn't critical of that, well shit. I don't know what you're reading. I say this as Not A Fangirl, but someone who found the books uncomfortable and not entirely satisfying. But again, I think--if you don't like the books, don't read them! And if violence against women upsets you, DO SOMETHING. Or write something that better portrays what you want to see in the genre. Or write letters to publishers so they buy things that you want to read, and put them on the shelves, instead of discounting large swaths of the reading public and imagining we prefer romance novels or paranormal romances or sexy vampires or whatever.


But sexism, homophobia, religiously excused assholery--that shit's really for real, and happening to really-real people.  And we can't be bothered to care about that, no, let's throw a shitstorm instead about a cable series.

Tired. So. Damn. Tired.