Coming Out Of Hiding (Though After This Post, I Might Need To Go Back)

I'm about to do something a trifle unusual: I'm going to start a discussion for which I do not have my traditional ABSOLUTE RIGHT ANSWER. Understandably, this bothers me. I trust in my nearly-unwavering rightness about most everything, and coming face to face with an issue that I don't have a blanket opinion for is frankly disorienting.

Obviously, I'm talking about guns because we're all talking about guns these days.

So, the first thing that probably needs to be said is how I too have been struck by the terribly awful no-good very-bad shooting in Aurora. That it has occupied my brain since I heard about it.

And the second thing that needs to be said is that I'm not sure it changes my opinions on anything.

My facebook friends have poured out their indignation at guns, the NRA, congresspeople who oppose gun control - all good, solid liberal positions.

And all completely beside the point in this instance.

Crazy people don't follow the laws of the land. That this nutball lunatic used guns bought legally to murder people does nothing to persuade me that he wouldn't have gone around collecting illegal guns should he have been thwarted in his attempts to buy legal ones. Why? Because he's a farking lunatic who wanted to kill people and if he wasn't hung up on the legality of that, he wasn't going to be hung up on the legality of weapons acquisition. Just Say No hasn't worked for addicts and I'm not sure that the gun control debate can be watered down in the same way: people who want to kill other people will find a way to get the guns to do so. Like how people seem to find all the cocaine they need. Gun control would not have prevented this act of a madman - it may have delayed it, but it would not have prevented it. Illegal guns are too easy to eventually get and, again, people who desperately want to kill other people find a way.

My personal feelings on guns are murky at best. I don't know what I think our position as a country, or even as a state, should be. I don't personally dislike guns. I'd like to feel comfortable using one and adding it to my list of life skills. I don't think people who like guns are any crazier person-to-person than people who like veganism (this is a lie, I would choose the gun nut over the vegan any day of the week). I don't think my lifetime will see scenarios where an armed insurrection against a corrupt government will be necessary.

But, then again, I'm not sure I'd be willing to bet my life on it...

I think that the yammering from pro-gun people and anti-gun people needs to simmer down long enough for them both to agree that neither is crazy about illegal guns. I think everyone can agree that it would be better for there to be fewer illegal guns. It's less politically charged of an issue and more suitable to legislation and enforcement that the current impasse about legal guns.

But whatever your feelings about guns, please do not be swayed by the media, your friends, facebook, the aliens that whisper to you at night: access to guns did not create the bloodshed in Colorado. A crazy person did. If anything, blaming the guns allows us to stop blaming him. And we should all be spending all of our time blaming the F out of him.

You'd Think Saying "I Told You So" Would Get Old

Dear American Women Moderates,
I don't know if you remember me, but I'm the one who said that your lukewarm opposition/nonplussment/indifference to a woman's right to choose would have repercussions. I tried really hard to convince you it wasn't about the scarlet-A abortion, but rather about you, as a human being, getting to decide your own medical destiny. You didn't quite see it that way. You only saw abortion which you though was icky. And that is totally your right. Lots of lefter-than-you women think it's icky. You're the Tipper Gores if you will, the "it should never ever happen, but if it does, we should acknowledge the tragedy and work to prevent it" people. And with such a contentious issue, many on the lefter-of-you were content to let you think it was icky while you didn't press to make it illegal. That way no one had to have an uncomfortable conversation.

But somewhere in the liberal elite bunker, someone who looks an awful lot like I do (this was a while ago, so fatter), was saying crazy paranoid doomsday stuff like: one of these days some idiot is going to try to limit access to contraception. "Don't be ridiculous!" You ALL said, "that would never happen. They're two entirely different things. No one could ever think that contraception should be up for debate!" Both you middle-of-the-road Tippers and you coastal hedonists.

I am so, so tired.

It was too difficult for all of you to separate your personal feelings and choices from what the letter and spirit of law should be. Because you, personally, wouldn't choose to have an abortion, you thought it was important to tell people that, to get that moral superiority bump. You didn't think it was hurting anyone because you still allowed that other women, the morally inferior ones, could choose to do it, but an upstanding citizen like you wouldn't. And you needed everyone to know that. Otherwise we could have mistaken you for one of those abortion-happy 10-stamps-and-the-eleventh-is-free people. I hope you feel really superior. I hope you are pleased that you took the high road and didn't stoop to saying something like, "medical decisions are private regardless of gender." You know, the way we do for Seventh Day Adventists. You didn't see it as a medical issue because you were so concerned about what people might think of you.

Welcome to the slippery slope. Now you have people in nearly normal states like Virginia proposing that before you get an abortion, you need an ultrasound. You know, the same way as when you go to the hospital to get a nail removed from your foot, you need a chest x-ray; the way you need a prostate exam before you can get a scrip for penicillin for your strep throat. And, I mean, only a crazy tin-foil hat person could have seen this coming. To say nothing of the resuscitation of a fifty-year old argument that The Pill is only utilized by women of loose morals (who, by the way, need fewer abortions).

So, I kind of want to know: how do you feel now? Are you able to continue feeling morally superior because your abject laziness has permitted this? Do you feel any sense of responsibility for prizing icky over equality? I kind of hope you don't.

I know, you weren't expecting that. But I am so beyond apoplectic about this that I've gone in the completely opposite direction. Ban everything! Allow any state that wants to turn a tax-paying, voting woman into a second class citizen because she has a uterus. Heck, propose that a woman can't even see a doctor without a male family member (father or husband) present. We women cannot possibly be expected to make those kinds of decisions on our own. We might choose incorrectly. Much like the mandatory ultrasound, having dad or devoted partner come to the doctor with me will make sure that someone understands what is about to happen to me, whether or not it's cancer treatment or drops for an eye infection. Those are heady issues that are way too difficult for me, with my uterus, to understand. It's the chief reason I'm so glad to have a husband.

I don't know how many years it will take before you revolt - I'm guessing somewhere around a Qadaffi-number of years, but perhaps you've had it too good until now and you need some serious oppression to make you rethink your priorities. You didn't realize that every time you personally denounced abortion that you were arming the enemies of all women with the weapon of: "polls have shown that most women disapprove of abortion, so no one cares if we outlaw it." And you laughed in the faces of the people who pointed that out.

I look forward to laughing at you.

Yours laughing maniacally from a pharmacy in Montreal,

Yelena

Watch This Space For A Massive Rationalization

I've sat on this a couple of days, desperately searching for the silver bullet of logic to make what I'm about to write not appear to be a complete reversal of previously published thoughts. I'm willing to believe a great many things about myself, but no matter how much sugar I sprinkle on this turd of a rationalization, it still tastes of, you know.

Someone who looks an awful lot like I do, and who has the password to this blogger account, wrote a scathing piece about why she could give a fig that poor, sad, Amy Winehouse made the leap into the inevitable, and how we should shut up about how it's a tragedy.

And then Whitney Houston goes and dies. And that writer feels, well, something. She casts around desperately for a reason that has more substance than sheer nostalgia and that can somehow justify her emotion at Houston's death when she nearly cheered at Winehouse's because, at least, we would get to stop hearing about the latter's antics.

Here's the pathetic result of that casting about:

Whitney Houston was truly singular. Much as it was cool to stop liking her after her airplay exceeded one's tolerance, I came back to Whitney in the 90s. Part nostalgia, part realization that, though Greatest Love of All is seriously sappy, no one else could have done it. One of the things that reality talent competitions have taught me (other than the fact that a lot more of you are getting pregnant in high school than I approve of, and more of you really need to consider college) is that there is an ocean of difference between talent and Talent. While discussing the X-Factor with my father this year, I noted that it was unfair to ask any of the participants to sing a song by Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey because, while they could likely get the notes out, their versions would only highlight how short they fall of the original. Whitney Houston's Talent was effortless and it's why I gave her first grudging respect and then true admiration once the 7th grade dance memories faded.

I don't know why she couldn't keep it together. I don't know how anyone in her position wakes up one day and decides crack is a good idea. I do know that she didn't then go out and cut an album whose title track was "Crack Is Dope!" (Unlike our previous dead drug addict whose claim to fame was that she had a hit with a song about how the people who wanted her to stop doing drugs and get help were lames.) We had to watch Whitney Hosuton's Talent evaporate.

So news of her death did make me sad. She had a once in a generation voice and she totally effed it up. So I guess I was sad and angry. I don't want Houston to get lumped into the sad sack remembrances we reserve for the merely talented who bump themselves off due to drugs. I don't want retrospectives to put her photo after Winehouse's in the annals of people who recently died and also did music. I want her to remain in a class of her own (and I don't think it's unfair to say that Jennifer Hudson couldn't hold a candle to Houston - she can't, that's the point, no one can).

I'm not going to go so far as to say that Houston's death was a tragedy - I still like to reserve that for truly serious things - but it was a death worthy of reflection. We knew Houston before she knew drugs and we knew what she was capable of. That she gave it up along the way, yeah, that makes me sad, and I don't mind if that makes me a hypocrite.

Won't Someone Please Think of the Children

Oh, those words that get tossed about until they are rendered meaningless. The news had two non-default related things to talk about recently and, strangely, they both got the same word: tragedy. They got it right. Once.

If you are a Norwegian, you experienced a tragedy. In fact, you experienced a Tragedy. We're with you 100% as you try to come to terms with this.

If you are a highly publicized drug addict who is no longer alive, however, you are merely an inevitability.

Let's reserve tragedy for actual tragedies.

While perusing people's responses to said inevitability, something ungracious occurred to me: when a smoker dies of lung cancer, no one calls it a tragedy. That's because we all expect that smokers know they're going to die of lung cancer when they start smoking.

Pardon me, when they CHOOSE to start smoking.

Why, then, is one death brought about by a conscious choice less tragic than one, say, brought about by the CHOICE to do heroin?

If addiction is an illness, and I am not getting into that debate here, surely both the addiction to heroin and the addiction to cigarettes are both illnesses, right?

In only the most bizarre of instances is anyone forced to try a cigarette or try heroin the first time.

Yet the addict who overcomes an addiction to heroin is a hero and the addict who succumbs is tragic. Whereas the smoker who quits is an "it's about time," and he who dies "should have known better."

Where are the accolades for he who never tried heroin in the first place? Shouldn't there be some kind of prize for that?

Surely the collective fascination with drug addicts can't be attributed to their not knowing better. We can't possibly be saying that the smoker should have known better than to start smoking in the first place, but the tweaker couldn't help himself. After all, there was a day in both of those people's lives when they, for the first time, chose their poison.

And I'm not saying it isn't hard, once attached, to break up with one's addiction. But people do it. They're not heroes, they're making the right choice belatedly. And good for them!

Conversely, those who never make the right choice don't really get my sympathy, which I'm reserving for Norwegians.

Women's Issues

Despite my best attempts to appear disinterested and aloof, I would actually confirm that women's issues are important to me. After all, I am a woman, and a highly opinionated one at that. Since devoted partner has shown a waning interest in my post-Law and Order: SVU tirades, I thought I'd widen my audience to talk about this recent news tidbit that has my proverbial panties in a bunch.

Let us dispense with the obvious: rape is horrible; there is no excuse for rape; no one should be raped; people who rape other people belong in jail. Have I covered my bases? Good. Let's move on, shall we?

Once upon a time, New York City was considered a dangerous place. People disembarking from elsewhere were to be on their guards or suffer the violent consequences. As a result, many many people were wisely suspicious. Since the city became one of the safest big cities in the country, it seems to me people have become lax in the common sense department. This woman, who is a victim, showed remarkably poor judgment and I think there should be some significant acknowledgment of that.

Issue #1: The woman in question is 27. Not a 16 year old runaway, nor a wide-eyed recent high school grad coming to make her way in the big city. This person is a grownup (I would also take the other two examples to task for their decision making, but I think it's important to highlight that this person is a de facto and de jure adult). While searching for an apartment she discovered that a strange man she had never met wanted her to live for free in exchange for cooking and cleaning. Yes, I know New York is expensive, but did nothing about this "free lunch" strike her as OMGDANGERDANGERDANGER?

Issue #2: Let's pretend that this arrangement seemed normal to her. How about when he offered to buy her plane ticket? Had she never watched a Law and Order, or CSI, or any crime show ever on television? Does she not have the internet? Or cable? Or, I don't know, access to a newspaper? I know she's from Wisconsin, but people keep telling me that just because a person doesn't live in New York, that person isn't doomed to ignorance. Does she not have family or friends who said to her, "are you out of your ever-loving mind? You are so totally going to be raped and likely murdered by a psychopath!" Or how about, "this sounds really really suspicious. Give me all this man's information and make sure you call me as soon as you get there to let me know everything is ok, or I'm going to call the police because if I don't hear from you withing three hours of your plane landing, you are likely dead." (Come to think about it, why didn't this happen?)

Issue #3: He let her leave the house to go to work! Now, I know that if the woman had gotten this far she was probably so mortified by her own words-can't-describe stupidity that she might have been embarrassed, but I would wager a little embarrassment is preferable to returning home to your rapist and the handcuffs he hooks you to the radiator with.

Words like empowerment get tossed around to the extent they mean very little now, but the woman's issue that is most important to me is making women less f#$%@%@3ing dumb. There is no excuse for this having happened (which doesn't excuse the perpetrator). None whatsoever. This is a case of someone being so irretrievably stupid that she risked her life for no reason. And I don't know where this stupidity comes from, but this is not an isolated case. Whatever the disadvantages of being the second sex, there must be some way to make women smarter. At least smart enough to not get into these kinds of situations. Violence against women can't be solved merely by making women smarter, but it can make THIS PARTICULAR VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN go away. Everything she did was stupid. EVERYTHING. And it makes me very very very ALL-CAPS mad.

And what really gets me is that this kind of story detracts from women victims who couldn't have prevented their victimization. This is a great story: salacious, tv-worthy (for the record, at this point in time if you are a poor woman from a developing nation and you DON'T KNOW that if you accept free illegal passage to this country, you are coming to be a forced prostitute, you are stupid too). Victimized women whose stories are more heartbreaking and less glossy get forgotten.

I'm sorry Miss Wisconsin had such a horrifying experience moving to New York, but Miss Wisconsin did everything in her power to ensure the horrifying experience. She did nothing to prevent it and now she'll probably get a book deal. For being stupider than your average urban 6-year-old who knows not to accept candy from strangers.

The Crazy That Lies Beneath

I think one of the advantages of being ridiculously wealthy (conjecture, I assure you as I am not) is that you get to a point where you can lose your mind publicly and it doesn't matter. It's what devoted partner refers to as FU money. Tom Cruise went absolutely retarded on national TV and we've all sort of just let it go now. Richard Branson routinely does crazy shit like piloting a rowboat from London to New Zealand and we just sort of shrug it off. If you watched The Colbert Report this week, you may have noticed a little tidbit on Ted Turner. If you didn't, I'll wait while you watch it.

Ok. Yes. Crazy. On the face of it. And yet so intensely brilliant. When you or I suggest that we buy the right to have babies from the poor, we sound insane, deeply unpleasant, and others ignore us. When Ted Turner says it, it sounds MASSIVELY CRAZY, and yet, this guy is a highly successful businessman, so you sort of assume he's thought about it. Which, in turn, leads you to think about it. Or about things like it.

As I am of the belief that we are merely a hop, skip, and jump from dystopia, I gave this more than casual thought, and discovered that, in theory, I wasn't completely opposed to the idea. And yet, much like the privatization of social security, it's just not practical right now.

Let me explain: let's say we allow all people to manage their own retirements. What percentage of those people, freed from the burden of forced savings, do you imagine will not save at all and end up at 70 without any money? 5%? 10%? I'll bet it would be higher. And then what? We're not really prepared to let people starve to death on the side of the road, so then the government would step in to take care of the people who need it; this, in turn, would cost money angering the very people who want to privatize social security. Similarly, the free marketers might see sense in the selling of reproductive rights. After all, if it's a saleable commodity, have at it. Oooooh, except, I'm not sure how they would feel about either a) government sterilization or b) arresting illegally pregnant women and terminating their pregnancies. We just don't do that sort of thing.

But I can definitely see a future where this sort of thing isn't frowned upon, and while I might not like to live there, it sounds like a fascinating place to visit. And I'll bet I run into Ted Turner there because this is a crazy man who is definitely going to be cryogenically frozen until they find a cure for being old. Maybe we'll grab drinks.

It Gets Better

These days I spend a lot of time in front of the computer crying. If you know me, you know it sometimes doesn't take much: the At&T and Folger's commercials are perennial crying favorites. I like to think emotional freedom is a trait I picked up at home: my dad's a good crier. We're all good criers. Some would say it's an ethnic thing, some would say it's political, I don't know what to think. I just know that it's always been ok to cry and that empathy was never greeted as weakness.

Well, for several years now, the internet has been trying to compete with TV for my tears and I blame Dan Savage. A couple of years ago it was this which just reduced me to a blithering mess. Upon rewatching, nothing has changed.

Now, more recently, it's this, the It Gets Better Project developed by Savage after a spate of suicides by gay or perceived gay teens. In an effort to give these kids some kind of support, gay adults, and quite a handful of straight ones too, have been making videos trying to explain that as crappy as adolescence is, especially if you feel on the outside of your society, it gets better as you get older and get to make your own decisions about where you live, whom your peers are, and how you want to live your life. To say this stuff is heartbreaking is a massive understatement.

However isolated I have ever felt (and I'll lump you readers in here with me - we're all super lucky), it doesn't even register on the same scale. While my immediate reaction involves fantasies of firearms leveled against those who disagree with me AND SIMULTANEOUSLY act against children whom they perceive as threats, my second reaction is just a sea of helplessness: all I feel that I have to give is money, and while I know the money is useful (donate here), I wish I could DO something. But all I have is compassion. I have nothing meaningful on which to draw and my rage isn't something I think would be therapeutic to share with people in real pain.

I try to understand how some people can be so utterly invested in the thoughts, actions, and lives of others; how they can think it matters so much that they would actively interfere in a stranger's life - I still don't get it. I mean, I've heard the explanations, but it has never rung true for me and so I don't even know how (other than with cleansing fire) to combat it.

So I'd like to thank the people who are making videos, who are sharing their lives with kids who think they have no life left to live. While I know emotion is preventing me from being as cogent as I'd like, I'm going to try and take a quiet moment to believe that not only will it get better for individuals, but for all of us; that we'll reach a time when this sort of abject hate is the exception and not the rule.

Monday Nopropos

As we prepare for our slightly spontaneous must-use-vacation-days-before-September-1 vacation to the Great Smoky Mountains, I wanted to dispense with several items.

1. I'm not feeling a lot of love and support vis a vis this trip. To a person, everyone I have told about it, including my beloved sibling, has looked at me incredulously. "What are you going to do?" "Are you, um, outdoorsy?" "Why are you going there?" When I respond with the hiking/rafting/boating/riding we hope to accomplish, the stares become even more incredulous. Listen, I know that I take pride in my Gucci hiking slingbacks and in things like hot water and television, but I would like to remind ye of little faith and great mirth that devoted partner and I, despite our girth, are some pretty outdoorsy types. Offending one and all, devoted partner has been known to call me Action Jew (apologies to Eddie Izzard from whom we shamelessly stole), or if we are being athletic in France, Juif d'Action. In fact, if we can jump on a horse, get in a kayak, or get to the top of something really high, chances are we will. Now it's true, we will not be camping, and that was my decision, but it was prompted way more by the inconvenience of hauling camping crap on a plane than it was any abhorrence of outdoor sleeping. To say nothing of the fact that we have abandoned the sloth of the shore for the wet, oxygen toxicity of beneath the waves. In the future, perhaps a smidgen more benefit of the doubt would not be unwarranted.

2. While I still believe the best future for the MTA lies in Mayor Bloomberg buying it outright and running it like a business instead of a slush fund, I would like to commend the current thieves and criminals for installing, in some stations, the board that updates passengers on when the next train will arrive. Yes, other cities have had these for ages, but I say better late than never.

3. Devoted partner is a far better interweb miner than I, coming up with tons of funnies which he shares with me. I now share some with you and also a serious one courtesy of Antonio:
* Not about OJ Simpson, surprisingly
* Not statistically sound, but tee-hee
* Roger Ebert and I are mind-melding

Happy Monday!

Fundamentalism

Last night, devoted partner and I read the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Yeah we knew what it said, just not the specific words it used to say it. After all, American history class is, sadly, eons ago, and I am an American, I get to take this stuff for granted.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Read it again to let it sink in.

This is truly the greatest gift we have given to civilization.

I might go so far as to say this is the greatest gift anyone has ever given to civilization, and you know how much I love the ancients, Rome and Greece.

So we've found something I'm a fundamentalist about. These words. All of them. Interpreted as broadly as possible. Forever.

People who attempt to abridge these words, narrowly interpret them, claim the authors of this document didn't really mean what they wrote? Those people are my enemies. And frankly, they are yours as well.

Messrs. Stewart and Colbert have done a much better job than I could hope to these past few weeks detailing exactly how preposterous my enemies are, but it doesn't blunt them.

We all poked fun at former president Bush the 2nd with his admittedly laughable you're either with us or with the terrorists because that's a binary equation that is logically unsound. But this one isn't: you either believe in every word of our first amendment or you believe in none of them. It's like being a little bit pregnant, it is simply impossible. Change, abridge, hem-and-haw, ignore, pass over, denigrate, disregard just one part of that comprehensive sentence and you negate the whole. The same sentence that allows you to loudly disagree with something someone else is loudly saying allows that person to say it in the first place. Opinions and feelings don't enter into it.

We, all of us, have these rights - even Scientologists and vegetarians - and if you're not willing to uphold these rights for everyone, to my mind, you're not really an American.

We as a country have made our fair share of mistakes, lo these 250ish years, but this one we got 100% absolutely right. Anyone who doubts that has completely missed the point. And while I will uphold his right to doubt, it's a pretty heavy irony; an irony that eludes so many (I have the right to say that this person doesn't have the right to say...wtf?!?).

Defending these words is the most important duty an American has and many Americans have died doing so. The trickle-down effects of its dilution are honestly too awful to imagine which is why I'll be sharpening my pitchfork for when the angry hordes collide.

I hope you'll be there too.

Speechless...Well, Not Really

I like to think of myself as having a thick skin. Yes, there's a lot of really really bad stuff out there in the world, but I find little of it truly surprises me. And when it comes down to it, if I'm not surprised, I can't really be all that up in arms. After all, my Hobbesian view of the world anticipates truly bad stuff and considers it normal. But once in a while, something gets through and after reading the incriminating piece, I stand up from the computer and actually pace, feeling tears of rage well up in my eyes and the tiny particles of idealism I have left rupture.

And this one almost didn't reach me, a fact that my conspiratorial side is going to repress because it's not germane to the story, though I find it interesting that this didn't warrant a passing mention in the paper of record.

Read this. (Think the folks at the Guardian are a bunch of dirty pinkos? Fine, read this.)

No. Really. Read this. READ IT!

Seriously.

Then come back.

...

...

...

Now for the only important part of this case. The only part it seems both parties agree on: there was sex and it wasn't forced.

She says it. He says it. There was consensual sex.

After the fact, when she discovered he wasn't what she thought he was, it somehow morphed into non-consensual sex. The kind that sends people to actual prison where they can experience the gamut of non-consensual sex.

Now, before you reverse the ethnic makeups of this story and decide whether or not you think this argument would hold water then, please try, as I am DESPERATELY TRYING TO DO, to think about examples where race or ethnicity have nothing to do with it and ponder the validity of the following claims. It was rape because afterward I learned he was:

short

an a$$hole

a scientologist

a vegetarian

a meat-eater

a wwf fan

a bmw owner

a republican

a communist

in love with someone else

homeless

missing a toe

missing a kidney

not a member of mensa

not a graduate of an ivy

not a doctor

an undertaker

a gas station attendant

your best friend's ex-boyfriend from high school

Yeah. I'm done. This list could literally go on forever.

And before we get all high and mighty that this kind of nonsense would never happen here in our land of the free, let's make sure we truly believe it (he didn't tell me he was muslim/an illegal immmigrant/in favor of Obama's socialist policies). Cause I can't say with any assurance that I couldn't see some judge, somewhere in our great country pronouncing the same verdict which, while striking a vomit-inducing blow against equal rights SIMULTANEOUSLY weakens the definition of rape and, when the blowback comes, will negatively affect the actual victims of rape.

Rape is serious. And perilously open to interpretation. After all, if you punch someone in the face and later on that person discovers something about you he doesn't like or realizes he had one too many drinks, the punch doesn't suddenly become attempted murder. And as pissed off as I am at this woman and this judge, I am equally pissed off at women's groups who, in order to preserve the rights of actual rape victims, blindly side with any woman who changes her mind after sex and chooses to call what happened rape. Bad decisions are not actionable offenses. And, for all parties concerned, consensual sex after a 10-minute discussion in a convenience store is a bad decision. Women who don't own up to their own bad decisions shouldn't complain when they're not treated equally in other environments; after all, they just said they couldn't be held responsible for their decisions - they made themselves unequal.

Frankly, I don't even know what to do with this information. Yes, there's a lot of horror out there, but I expect most of it. In war, there will be war crimes. It doesn't make them any prettier, but it doesn't shock me to learn of them. This: a woman accusing a man (and a judge convicting him) of rape because she later discovered she wasn't keen on his ethnicity? Never saw it coming. Cannot even conceive of it. Which is my fault and naivete. But, jeez, what do I do now that I have this information? It turns out I bitch and moan and conceivably make myself ineligible for any job in the future that would find my opinions on this matter questionable.

I can only hope that when the dust clears, Saber Kushour has the mother of all civil cases against, well, anyone involved in his prosecution. After all, that's the American way!

Fundraising Opportunities

Back in the day, when I lived on 110th street, CNN was a part of my daily diet. I woke up, turned it on, went to the computer, and spent 20 or so minutes availing myself of information. Sure, Paula Zahn annoyed me, and the other guy, Blinky (I don't remember his name, I only remember that he has a serious blinking frequency problem) was distracting to watch, but I felt that it was the 1010WINS of national and international news: 20 minutes and you were pretty good to go for the day.

Then September 11th happened and, like others, I spent a lot of time watching television. But after two or three months, I became pissed off, "Man in Nebraska tells local radio station he is positive terrorists will next attack his corn field. We have him live in the studio to discuss his national security concerns." So then I stopped watching CNN. Apparently just in time. As the cable news wars heated up, the news became unrecognizable and the news I was interested in was replaced, a lot of the time, with missing white girls and tornadoes. I went back to reading my news.

But every now and again I'll tune in just for a quick refresher. And I'm so glad this morning was one of those days.

You see, fellow Nutmeggers, our esteemed Senator Lieberman has given me the greatest gift of all. He has said something so utterly preposterous as to make your donations flood my nascent campaign office. Our senator, the guy we keep electing despite compelling reasons not to, has suggested that citizens of this country, if arrested on suspicion of being involved with terrorists while abroad, should be stripped of his citizenship so that he would not be able to avail himself of our legal system and could, instead, be sent to military court. (And I'll link to the FoxNews story so that I can't be accused of unfairness and imbalance.)

Let's try that again:

Joe Lieberman has penned a bill that would allow the State Department to strip a U.S. citizen of his citizenship if it deems him affiliated with a terrorist organization (for the sole purpose of trying him without, for example, due process).

Lieberman claims that this is no different from stripping citizens of their citizenship if they serve in a foreign army (and I've never quite understood how the kids who go play soldier in Israel for a year get around this). But, as with many things, nuance is important. If you join, say, the Botswanan Army, there's probably a piece of paper that you signed somewhere pertinent to that assignation. If, on the other hand, you end up (stupidly, and possibly with criminal intentions, though I like courts and such to make those determinations) hanging out with some guys at a mosque in Pakistan, we don't really know what your intent is. Yes, the war of the future is not going to be between uniformed soldiers of sovereign nations, but might this not be getting a little out of hand.

I will freely admit that I'm one of those "100 guilty men go free so 1 innocent man isn't falsely imprisoned" kind of people, but let me be more bloodless for a second (and check out my logic, voters): if allegiance to a foreign terrorist organization (TO) is tantamount to participation in a foreign military (FM), don't we then need to extend Geneva Convention (GC) rights and responsibilities to our dealings with foreign terrorist organizations? If TO = FM and FM = GC then TO = GC. Idiots.

But we don't want to be bound by the Geneva Convention when dealing with terrorists - they aren't members of, say, a foreign army, whom we must treat humanely, they're, well, terrorists. And if you join up with them you will be stripped of your citizenship the same way people who join foreign armies are.

It is obvious that, contrary to perception, we are willing to sacrifice quite a bit of essential liberty for temporary safety, I just think the esteemed senator may have drunk an especially heady brew of Kool-Aid on this one. And that it's probably time for retirement. And that you'd be way better off with me as your senator. (Full disclosure: I am pro-Mexican and anti-"wo Sie Ihre Papiere sind.")

I know that terrorism is scary.

But Joe Lieberman is scarier.

Real Women

Recently there's been some brouhaha because ABC and FOX passed on a Lane Bryant lingerie commercial. Whether or not the whole thing was a publicity stunt or FOX and ABC hate fat chicks interests me less than the reactions it has produced, both on the anarchic internet and in my mother. To paraphrase pretty much everyone, "ABC and FOX would rather show stick figures with bolt on plastic boingboings than real women."

Far from cringing, this kind of sentiment causes my blood to boil.

What in the bleepity bleep bleep bleep is a "real woman?" Want to know why Hilary Clinton isn't president (aside from some personality flaws)? Because women like to take the piss out of other women. Hate your thighs? Console yourself by saying that real women have jiggly thighs. Ok, I'm all for lying to yourself in the interests of self-preservation, but what, oh, what, does that make women with non-jiggly thighs? Fake women? What is she's slim, has fake boobs, but also jiggly thighs? Is she half-real? Half-fake?

This fanatic need to diminish other women who, let's face it, look better than we do because THEIR JOB IS TO LOOK BETTER THAN WE DO, is ugly, childish, and just plain wrong. One of my least favorite things to hear from people, whom I know are saying it to be nice is, "oh, I'm so glad you have curves like a real woman." Ok, in fairness, I'm glad I have curves too. I wish they were less filled with butter, but I like that in the figure lottery, I got the basic shape I got. But I like it because I like it, not because it may make me better or worse of realer or faker than someone else. My mother, a diametric opposite of me in the figure department, is no less or more beautiful because of this. My mother is beautiful because she has spent a lifetime embracing what she looks like and I am an aspiring beauty because she taught me this lesson. Which may have been difficult considering she had to send me first bra shopping with my aunt because she herself didn't own one. But to say my mother isn't a real woman because she has been slim her whole life is offensive. Oh, but maybe because a) my mom is old and b) she doesn't have fake boobs, she might get grandfathered in to the real woman category. But if my mother had gotten a breast enhancement, I don't know if that should have catapulted her from the stratus of the real. (And by the way, my mother was solidly on the side of the ABC should show real women crowd...)

And when your jeans are too tight, when your bust isn't full enough to flatter you in that awesome dress, when your legs are too stumpy for that short skirt, or your arms to flabby for that tank top, do you really, honestly, care how flippin' real you are? At that moment wouldn't you, somewhere, kill a man to look like Cindy Crawford or Angelina Jolie, or Taylor Swift, even if only for the evening? When I hear someone talk about real women, what I hear is deep, ugly insecurity. Because I am not perfect, I must be something else that purportedly perfect women are not. And that something is "real." Now I can feel better about myself because while she's perfect, she's inauthentic.

If we, as women, spent, oh one-tenth the time improving both ourselves and our lots in life as we do disparaging other women whom we envy, whose successes we don't understand and can't seem to emulate, I think the life of a woman would look radically different. And I say this as someone who has written about watching the Oscars and wondering why all these young famous people have crows' feet. Now I'll try to walk it back so that I appear ever so slightly less hypocritical, but the urge is in us all. Just, please, stop it short of trying to compliment me (or any other non-perfect woman) by dissing another woman. I'd like to get to a point where that sort of behavior is beneath us. All of us real women.

Being Entitled

Yeah, this one crops up a lot, most likely because I catch myself feeling entitled to things, hating myself for these thoughts, and taking it out on people who are less self-aware in their entitlement. Yesterday, this manifested itself in my doing something I NEVER do: commenting in a very public forum on an article. I know myself. I know that I have the potential to be exactly the kind of nutzoid who becomes obsessed with being an internet know-it-all and trolls sites on whose subject matter I can claim vague expertise and becoming a general menace. I know this about myself and I steer clear.

But this article got to me. I know it's so incredibly insignificant. Perhaps it only pissed me off because The Boy works in the industry and would promptly fire anyone who acted this way, or perhaps it's that now, seeing exactly what exemplary service is and how relatively painless it is to achieve, anything short really really bugs me.

I guess, as a very very very brief resident of a kitchen, and in an apprenticeship role, I don't quite understand the griping of servers. Who make at least double what the people who actually made the food make. And who are the first to sue when a restaurant tries to tip out the back of the house. Yes, in the end, the restaurants are to blame (if we're handing out blame) because everyone should make a livable wage.

But this is besides the point. What really irks me is that entitlement seems built into our culture in a way that seems greater than at other times (I'm not going to say than at any other time, but I think it inside - take that, Cicero). On the news this morning I was treated to a crazyperson soundbite from the NJTransit hearings, some woman bawling that she did not agree with the fare hike. Wow, what a shocker! Just like you didn't agree with the increased price of gas, the increased price of milk or orange juice or tomatoes, the increased price of a movie ticket. We get it. Left to their own devices, people would rather not spend money. But, much like my extreme peevitude at Cablevision and the fairness of ABC raising its prices, I don't quite understand what is achieved by bitching about the rising cost of life.

There is an undercurrent of, "I'm entitled to only pay a buck for the subway in perpetuity." Now I don't like when they raise the subway fare, but I know what my choices are: pay or walk. Now I know I am a have, and the people complaining are have-nots (albeit, frequently have-nots with iPods; cost of iPod: $250; cost of fare increase $.25; if not iPod, then 1000 subway trips, also known as about 2 years of commuting). But if fifty cents a day, or frankly a dollar or two dollars, is going to so severely affect your ability to feed, house, and clothe yourself, doesn't it stand to reason that something much much worse is happening, and that perhaps you should direct your energies towards something more important than transit fare hikes? If you can't live on your wage, you should be working tirelessly to raise it. Whether that means lobbying for a minimum wage hike - which we desperately need - or coming up with some other idea (tax rebate for commuter costs, for example), I think that it's futile to think that prices will remain stagnant.

I listen to people I know, some of whom I agree with, and others of whom I don't, debate current public policy without addressing the core cultural obstacle to change: us. The ideal of the American Dream, however 50s and pollyanna-ish, has become something that gets handed to us, not something we have to do anything to achieve. And if that makes me sound more conservative than you're used to, it isn't, really. The minimum wage worker who busts his ass and still can't get ahead? I want to help him. Help him so that his kids might not need to work a minimum wage job. But the person who doesn't take the minimum wage job because it's not enough money for all that work. He can go pluck himself.

Whether or not I support public health care (which I think I do, just not this iteration), I HATED the rhetoric that health care was a right, an entitlement. It just isn't. Elevating something to the level of inalienable is a dangerous thing to do and it breeds complacency. It would be nice if everyone had decent health coverage, but it isn't a right. It isn't something that simply by being born one is entitled to. Something can be important, be the right call, be necessary, without having to be a gimme putt. I would say a better argument is that, having worked hard to make the nation great, we have EARNED a public health care system that can take care of all our citizens - that's how I would have spun it (let's, for the moment, leave aside the particulars as they are fodder for endless argument and think, instead, of the IDEA of public health care, not this particular implementation).

And, while I'm completely all over the place with this, it's what was the final nail in the coffin of my American Idol addiction. Choosing, and it's still a choice, to be a single mother at 18 does not, in any way, shape, or form, mean you deserve to be on television and get a record contract. You made a shitty choice. You deserve to live with the consequences, and no one owes you anything simply because the shitty choice you made is hard.

But I'm happy your kid will get to go see a doctor from time to time.

Dude WTF?

US jet lands when religious item mistaken as bomb

You can read it, you can not read it, I'll summarize: plane lands because someone thinks jew using tefillin (the shit they affix to their heads and wrap up their arms - kind of looks like S&M, but the rest of the outfit rarely matches) is terrorist with bomb.

Issue #1: Really, no one on the plane knew what it was? It was a US Air flight out of LaGuardia, surely one of the passengers had been to hebrew school. New York does have a lot of tribal members.

Issue #2: The first step in assessing a threat is to land the plane? Leaving aside for a moment the fact that were it a bomb it could just as easily explode on the ground, and let us turn to some of the steps a potentially rational person might take prior to making an emergency landing. Like using your talkie-hole to ask the person in question what he is doing? Because

Issue #3: Terrorists are generally the furtive types. Dudes who wrap leather up and down their arms and chant in hebrew are certainly not furtive. They're out there praying in a non-hidey kind of way. People about to ignite secreted munitions generally like to do so in an unassuming way so that no one knows about the about to be blown up plane until it's too late to do anything..

Issue #4: Beards. I don't personally have one, but I know people who do. I'm pretty sure most, if not all, of them are not terrorists. Beard ≠ Terrorist. (See also Muslim ≠ Terrorist; Brown Person ≠ Terrorist; Chick in Head Scarf ≠ Terrorist; Sikh ≠ Terrorist; Person Wearing "Tom Jones in Beirut" T-Shirt ≠ Terrorist.) Also

Issue #5: Praying people. I don't personally pray, but I know people who do. Praying people are not always terrorists. Even if they have beards while praying.

Issue #6: Do you ever sort of wonder if people WANT to be the victims of terrorism? Even aborted terrorism? When I see someone doing something out of the ordinary, my first though isn't, "gee, that person must be a terrorist," yet that seems to be precisely what a lot of other people tend to think. I don't buy into the whole "if x then the terrorists win" crap, mostly because in the end we're all losers, but I'm just not all that frightened and, in this way, I can lead a life free from paralyzing fear. I know that's not the universal scenario.

People are scared. Some for good reason, most for not good reasons, but something happened here (albeit 8 years ago) that hadn't happened before and it scared people. Perpetually. Now all of our frames of reference take it into consideration; all of our actions are supposed to acknowledge or mind it; and our collective psyche is weighed down by its import (again, leaving aside that in the annals of tragedy, it ranks rather low - it just seems to rank high because it happened to America the Impervious). None of which is to say that terrorism doesn't suck and likewise the people who are terrorists. But I can't quite grok the rush to be victimized. Victims seem somehow sadder than non-victims and I don't personally like being sad. But as stories like this one crop up more frequently, I can't help but think that people are rushing to find instances of terrorism because it legitimizes their fear. It makes them less afraid of being afraid because now they have reasons to be afraid. "Of course it's ok to be frightened, look how many people are out to get me. I'm not paranoid, I'm a realist." And I get that too even as it saddens me.

As jaded and unpleasant as I may come across, I actually believe that most people are more or less just like me; they just want to live more or less happy, unmolested lives. And that's true whether or not they believe in evolution, or Vishnu, or thetans. So when I see people who are different from me, my first assumption is not that they're out to get me - and this is in no way designed to be raw self-aggrandizement, I just am sort of wired this way - even if they're really really different from me. I'd like to hope that others give me the same benefit of the doubt.

Wednesday Nopropos (Political)

Perhaps it's that I went to bed at 9:15 last night, but I'm a little scattered today.

While watching Monday night's Daily Show wherein Jon Stewart lambastes the democrats for, well, being totally ineffectual, I confess I gave a bit more serious thought to challenging Joe Lieberman for his senate seat. Yes, let's all overlook the obvious for a second (I have barely managed to hold any job for more than a year, and not one of them has even been tangentially related to representing a state's concerns in congress to start), and talk about putting together my exploratory committee. I think one of the main problems with politics is the idea that our elected officials spend most of their time trying to remain our elected officials. A senate term is six years and my guess is, short of doing something actually illegal, they can't throw you out. I could campaign on giving free cookies to every Connecticut resident and then get into office and propose a bill banning cookies, and there's nothing anyone could do. I think the reason we don't see people taking chances or, frankly, calling out their colleagues for being spineless wimps who are afraid to take a hard position, is that they are all worried about getting reelected.

I wouldn't be like that.

Six years would far outstrip the time I spent at any other job and I am willing to be that I'd be bored by the end of it (or burnt out), so six years would be enough time for me to be a senator. This would give me the freedom to talk out of turn a little - like a Ron Paul with way better legs. I'd consider running as an independent so I could take both sides to task without worrying that Chuck Schumer wouldn't sit with me at lunch. Now, I realize that any rational person reading this (especially any rational person who may or may not have ever seen me act in a way that is not strictly "within the law") is worrying if I'm off my meds. After all, senatorial campaigns (hell the campaign for alderman) are incredibly expensive and I'm still paying off student loans. But isn't there still the useful fiction that in America one can lead a grassroots movement? I could be that grassroots movement! So, what I'm saying is, start seriously considering donating to my campaign.

One thing that might ruin my credibility with the left is a little disturbing tidbit passed to me by darling Antonio. He sent me a link to a brief segment on the O'Reilly Factor wherein (did I just use 'wherein' twice in one posting? It is a useful word when you think about it) it could be noted that Bill and I are in a kind of creepy agreement vis a vis Haiti. Now Antonio, who is hoping beyond hope that my senatorial campaign is more about shooting wolves from helicopters and less about, say, helping people, thought this would be an excellent springboard to convince me that Bill O'Reilly and I are more aligned ideologically than is actually true. One of the things I can't stand about modern politics, modern news, modern punditry, is the idea that all blanks think blank. Contrary by nature, this is grossly offensive to me. While chuckle-inducing in the short-term, I'm not super surprised that there is an issue, nay probably issues, where Bill O'Reilly and I can find common ground (I mean I would be willing to bet that both Sarah Palin and I think that intentionally poisoning retarded people is wrong - see we agree).

However, in the same clip, O'Reilly goes on to say something to the effect of, "see here's where the liberals blah blah blah." Wait a tic. I'm nominally liberal and we were right there together, Bill, why do you want to then make the discussion about how liberals as an undifferentiated group do/say/think/are anything? I know it makes for good television, I just wish our politics weren't so constantly televised that it became good politics as well.

So, creative types out there, start trying our slogans (it has been pointed out to me that, "Hey, I couldn't possible suck more than Joe" is not all that catchy). Together we can a) gainfully employ me for six years and b) change the face of American politics.

Cause Celebre

When cherry-picking culture and tradition as I do, one has the opportunity to craft a personal code that embraces only those things one deems important and worthy of dissemination. From all the years of indoctrination, the one principle of jewish tradition that resonated most strongly with me was the jewish attitude towards charity. I can think of a number of reasons for this, but the easiest one to point to is that I have been the frequent recipient of a very jewish form of charity throughout my life.

Charity is a very important part of traditional jewish life, some would argue it is the most important part, and not just any charity. A list making people (read the bible, it is full of lists) the jews of olden times made a list of ways to be charitable from least to greatest, and I am recounting them here:

1. Giving begrudgingly
   
2. Giving less that you should, but giving it cheerfully.
   
3. Giving after being asked
   
4. Giving before being asked
   
5. Giving when you do not know the recipient's identity, but the recipient knows your identity
   
6. Giving when you know the recipient's identity, but the recipient doesn't know your identity
   
7. Giving when neither party knows the other's identity
   
8. Enabling the recipient to become self-reliant

I like this list.

A lot.

And I'll explain why it is of particular significance to me. I was a scholarship student for all thirteen years of my Dalton education. I got a lot of scholarship. There would have been no other way for me to attend what is, I believe, the most expensive private school in Manhattan. I don't know whose donations put me through school, though I suspect that, through their giving, most of my friends' parents paid for my education. How nice it was, though, to be able to be a kid in a good school and not always know that it was by the grace of specific people. What a wonderful thing to not have that feeling of being beholden. I might add that this experience engendered two things: the first is that I give what I can whenever I can back to the school so that someone else can benefit and that both my brother and I have a lottery-winning pact that involves an immediate endowment of a scholarship fund.

Now what is not on this list, but is of importance to me, is giving without making a big fat deal out of it. Whether or not the recipient knows, if you are a person who gives and then broadcasts your giving in a self-aggrandizing manner (as opposed to broadcasting for the purposes of encouraging others to give as well), I find your giving to be somewhat tainted. As if you gave not because the giving itself was sustaining, but to be acknowledged for what a generous and selfless person you are. Yes, you gave, but I would call that giving grudgingly - as if the giving was a byproduct of your ego.

This little moralizing is a result of something that bothered me (I willingly admit it bothered me more than was strictly necessary) in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti. There were two kinds of reactions to this tragedy (more on this later): the first was the "please donate to Haiti relief;" the second was "oh my god I am so sad about Haiti I have been upset all day my thoughts and prayers are with all Haitians we are all one planet today."

There is not a single Haitian currently buried under rubble who gives a shit about how YOU feel! This is not about YOU. Using a disaster to broadcast what an empathetic do-gooder you are is disingenuity at its worst. Shutup and pay the nice people at the Red Cross if you feel so strongly about it.

Now for the controversial part. WHY do you feel so strongly about it? An earthquake killing people in Haiti is the most normal way people have been killed in Haiti in ages. Haiti is a cesspool and has been for your entire life. Where was your sadness on Monday? Haiti is easily the worst country in our hemisphere - disaster relief isn't going to help that. Which is not to say we shouldn't contribute to disaster relief. But the outpouring of, frankly, crocodile tears over a natural disaster in a place that is a manmade disaster is unbecoming. Again, I am making a distinction between caring about the plight of the Haitians by making a donation and seeming to care about the Haitians while making it more about how much you care about Haitians.

The world can be a deeply shitty place most everywhere. The difference is that when an earthquake hits Northridge, California or Kobe, Japan, since neither of those places is a hellhole on earth, once the rubble is cleared, and the mourning finished, life in those places isn't unbearable. In two weeks or two months, once the aid agencies have left and the streets are free of rubble and body parts, Haiti will still rank among the places human beings would least like to be. I wish that we, collectively, could spend more time in between natural disasters donating our time, our money, and our well-wishing to making places like Haiti, like Sri Lanka (remember all the people who died there in a natural disaster? when was the last time you even thought about Sri Lanka?), livable. So that a natural disaster would be a temporary sadness in an otherwise decent place. We're not ever going to stop earthquakes or hurricanes or volcanoes; reacting to their impact and leading the victims to believe we give a shit on a grand scale when we only care for the duration of the news cycle, is, at best, unbecoming.

It's ok to be overwhelmed by the seemingly unsolvable problems of our age. I wish I felt there was a little more honesty in our reactions to these crises. It's ok to say, "jesus christ, I know I should do more all the time, but it's really hard. In the meantime, let's all pitch in and send a couple of bucks to the red cross. It must especially suck in Haiti right now." It's also ok to donate without fanfare, when you can, what you can, even when it's not a reaction to an immediate problem. Like I've tried to make clear, it's not like Haiti's problems are going away.

I Am So Pleased To Have Become Apolitical

These days, I get my news from Jon Stewart. I'm not going to be proud or ashamed of this, it's just the way it is. My general stress level is down, I think (I used to also get my news from Bill Maher, but we decided against premium cable in the new house because there was still never anything on). Oh, from time to time, I'll lazily scan the New York Times, but I feel like if anything truly important happens, someone will be sure to tell me. Crap, that's a lie. I listen to 1010WINS in the car but that is only because metro fm radio stations are such crap. If it's really important, I feel like 1010WINS might mention it.

I bring this up because, after his traditional holiday hiatus, Jon is back, filling me in on the things I've missed. The Daily Show pokes a lot of fun at Fox News and I generally laugh along, but it's the laugh of the uninitiated. Because, I've never watched Fox News. Never. To be fair, I've also never watched MSNBC. When I really need a fix, my channel has always been CNN, and one of the reasons I no longer watch television news is that CNN has turned into such utter crap, I no longer have the time to sit through the 55 minutes per hour of lame prattle in order to discover the 5 minutes of news. I guess if it was really important to me I'd watch BBC International news, oh, but wait, the Cablevision Suck Monolith does not think I deserve BBC channels.

I digress.

Sort of.

So, here's the thing. Do the commentators on Fox News actually behave the way they do in the Daily Show clips all the time? Does Glenn Beck make it a habit to fake choke up and cry on air when he laments the end of days we are living through? Really? That's almost commendable. Grown men crying is certainly entertainment. But, do the viewers who agree with him (for the moment let me not judge them) think he's real crying, or do they understand it is fake crying and are ok with that because it's fake crying to prove a point? Cause his acting acumen might be sub-Peter North (shout out to my college roommates - you know what you did).

I do have concerns, though, about my newspeople making a habit of ostentatiously emoting, though. Will this bleed into news I might watch? I can't really get behind Tom Brokaw or Brian Williams or, even Wolf Blitzer breaking down in the middle of a newscast. Now, if I understand correctly, Glenn Beck's show is not a newscast, more of a (hell, I don't even know how to categorize it - frankly all the cable "news" shows are confounding. What are they?) newsy program, so perhaps he can get away with things that anchormen could not, but then I guess I would ask for the cable news networks to hire, well, actors. My feelings on having actors be president (not with any decision-making power, mind you, just the speaking figure-heads for the shadow government; cause actors can read off scripts well, project their voices, seem interested and engaged) are well known, but perhaps we need them to deliver our news, commentary, and newsertainment as well because at least their feigned righteous indignation would seem real.

Big Effin Deal!

So as the moments dwindle down to the new year, I am a little overwhelmed by the sentiments I'm reading pretty much everywhere about the horrible year 2009 was and how we're well shut of it - good riddance 2009.

Might I be so bold to tell everyone to get over himself?

This is one of those things that might drive me a little crazy. Yes. 2009 hit some low points. We're poorer for one. But the (I guess entirely predictable) overdoing of the import of the horrors of 2009 make me, a cynic if ever there was one, want to reach into the annals and pull out some good things that happened in 2009. Mostly to shut all the crybabies up.

But before I do that, I'd like to explain myself. One of my main complaints with the society I currently live in is that we are self-involved to the point of comedy - except we don't know it. Gas prices go up 25c and the news badgers local pumpers to bitch and moan about the extra 3 bucks they'll spend each time they fill up; an unmarked van is abandoned in Times Square causing police activity, and 1010 WINS finds some brainless midwestern tourist to complain about how it ruined the trip for her kids. This is to say nothing of the Mexicans who take your jobs, the socialists who turn your kids commie, the gays who engayenate your kids and, so I don't seem overly partisan, the ban-all-gun nuts, PETA-freaks, and sugared soda crazies. Isn't anyone at all not miserable about everything?

Life sucks. I paraphrase Hobbes, of course, but who told you (collective) that life owed you dick? Yeah, sometimes the economy tanks and your 401k gets eviscerated. Sometimes a giant frickin wave obliterates your town. Sometimes you must choose to fill your car with gas as opposed to buying your latte at Starbucks. War means people die; pluralism means you don't get your way all the time; and frequently you have to pay for things you don't necessarily think are important. Welcome to the real world - you've been living here all along, just with your ears plugged, your eyes closed, and pablum oozing from the sides of your lips.

But you know the nice thing? Even a brief glimpse at the recorded history of the world will tell you that ups and downs are NORMAL. Yeah, you lost half of your savings, but it will come back, and then it will grow larger. Currently religious freaks of every type are intervening where I, personally, would rather they didn't, but that too will pass. Currently Mad Men is on hiatus, but I'm pretty sure there will be another season, so I'm not going to maul a local news reporter to get on camera saying the producers of Mad Men should think of my needs and wants and broadcast new episodes every week of the year.

I'm tired of being surrounded by entitled complainers (and I count myself among them from time to time). I'm tired of being labeled a loony liberal by certain friends and occasionally devoted partner, and a slowly turning republican by my loony liberal parents - frankly I think both sides are worthless POS (this just in: I am seriously considering running against Joe Lieberman for CT senator - my slogan: I couldn't possibly do a worse job than Joe) and are more interested in entertaining me, Jerry Springer style, than doing anything remotely substantive. But the reason they suck so hard is that we want them to. Substantive discourse is way beyond our soon to be outsourced brains, so we'd prefer to watch politics the way we watch television: numbly.

So saying 2009 sucked hard, even if it didn't suck that hard for you, is jumping on a bandwagon that I'd just as soon see pushed off a cliff. People got married in 2009. They had babies. Some bought their first homes. Some realized that getting fired or laid off was the best thing that ever happened to them because if forced them to take stock of their lives and choose things more meaningful to them. Some people me the loves of their lives, others escaped bad relationships. Some people saw Paris for the first time; the Great Wall; the Pyramids. Some people read and wrote good books, started new companies, sold their first paintings. I would be willing to bet that here, in America, there isn't a single person who can't find something good that happened in 2009. So stop bellyaching already! Every year isn't going to be a non-stop date with Brad Pitt eating chocolate cake in a jacuzzi full of money.

I always hope the year to come will be better than the year that was simply because it's nice to look forward to things, and I certainly hope that 2010 will be better than 2009. But not because I'm owed it.

I wish everyone a good 2010, but I implore you, in these last moments of 2009, think of something good that happened in 2009. To do otherwise is beneath you.

Lest We Forget About the Important Things

I was all set to huff and puff about something insanely important to life as we know it: traffic lights and their utility to modern society, when I realized that this blog is not painting a picture of me as an even remotely well-adjusted person who takes time to ruminate on the world around her. Instead she plots elaborate fantasies about destroying utterly those who speak on cellphones in her general vicinity. Surely the 5.8 million dollars spent on my education yielded something beyond the capacity to snipe at commuters and whine about the cost of exotic produce.

So I'd like to step back and examine a serious issue facing us this week so that perhaps my small contribution can help us all to understand things better. I speak, of course, about the Tiger Woods saga.

I know. You're at sixes and sevens about the whole thing. Me too. I just can't stop thinking about it or wanting to hear/read/watch things about it. The very idea of a multimillionaire professional athlete, his former nanny Swedish bikini model wife, and the tragic dissolution of their union shakes the very foundations of my worldview. How could these two kids have gotten it so wrong?

Professional athletes from Kobe Bryant to Mohammed Ali have demonstrated that, simply because a man is paid extremely well and universally worshiped for his physical prowess and strength, he need not be a serial philanderer who believes himself to be above the moral constructs of our society. Sure, women from around the world may vie for a chance to orally commingle with them, but these men are grounded enough to realize they are not gods for whom consequences are a moot point. I cannot think of a single professional athlete who has been callous enough to put his "hockey stick" in non-matrimonial "goal areas" - it simply doesn't happen. Maybe that's how the game is played if you are a stockbroker, or a patent lawyer, or a podiatrist, but that's just not how our athlete heroes roll.

Similarly, if you are, say, a stunningly beautiful but mentally light woman whose career experience involves caring for rich people's children, teaching rich people and/or their children a sport or hobby, planning parties for rich people and/or their children, or generally being in the rich people service industries, it is only right that the pot of gold at the end of your rainbow is a long and emotionally, not to mention economically, fulfilling permanent legal relationship with one of the members of the class you so humbly serve. Once love hits, the idea that you and the "richie" are on such grotesquely uneven footing as to make the very notion of a partnership seem absurd, becomes, again, an idea that might apply to secondary school teachers, nurses, or peace corps volunteers, but not to women for whom higher education is a hindrance not a help.

Adultery happens to other people. A subordinate woman's good looks will always dissuade her egomaniac husband from getting free nookie from other women. After all, what man would want unlimited free sex from only passably attractive women when he could have perhaps occasional sex maybe sometimes after a suitably large gift had been exchanged with a totally gorgeous woman? See? It just doesn't make sense.

So, I'm frankly flummoxed. It's probably why I can't get enough coverage of this worldshaking event. I know you feel the same way. And the reason I know this is that, apparently, this is such a major event that no other news has taken place since it began. It's like other news knew how important this was and is waiting until the dust settles before making itself known.

As for the figures at the center of this continuously unfolding tragedy, I hope you two know that you've let us all down. This isn't the way things work, and all you two need to do is look to others in your situation to realize how far off the mark you truly are. I only hope the hundreds of millions of dollars in play can be used to wipe up your children's tears - that is if you can find them among your other tokens of good fortune.

Property Values

I'm a city girl and the product of renters, so the idea of property values has always been a little strange to me. Fortunately, devoted partner is a suburban boy and the product of owners, so he helps me with the finer points. Yet, I still find some peculiarities. Home ownership is expensive. Should I buy a house and decide that I would like to paint my asset Mary Kay Cosmetics pink, I will be highly aggrieved should a neighbor take me to court to stop me. Devoted partner thinks the sentiment is sweet, but points out I will probably lose in court.

So, what I'm about to say might come as a surprise.

Yesterday I saw an article in the paper that a former classmate pointed out. For reasons I hope will become clear, I'm not going to link to it. It was not in the paper of record, but it was in a paper with a large readership, so my hopes that it went unnoticed are few. The article was about a parent suing her insurance company for not covering medicine for her son. Before you get all out of joint, health care argument people, this isn't THAT conversation. The medicine in question was for, what I think all rationale people can agree, cosmetic purposes. It served no purpose beyond the superficial.

Fine, you say, blah blah blah, viagra, boob jobs, restless leg syndrome. I hear you. I wouldn't have cared either except that the article described the child not merely by his condition, but by his affiliations. Specifically, he is a current student at my alma mater. To which I am fiercely loyal. The article painted an unflattering picture, to my eyes, not only of the mother who is pursuing a frivolous lawsuit for a ridiculous "condition" afflicting her son, but succeeded in categorizing this family as typical of families who enroll children at my alma mater.

This may well be the case.

I know that every generation is expected to belittle those that follow it and I'm cognizant of that as I write this, but I also know, as in know beyond a shadow of a doubt, that when I attended the school, people weren't like this.

I'm not saying we didn't have people who had unnecessary medical procedures, lived decadent lives, or behaved in ways that invited scorn. I'm saying it wasn't publicized. No parent in her right mind would have consented to a tabloid interview like this one.

It. Just. Wasn't. Done.

You can call it hypocrisy that I find it ok to give girls nose jobs for their bat mitzvahs as long as no one talks about it, but I'm comfortable with that level of hypocrisy.

This mother lowered my property values.

Let me explain. I still hold out hope that should I have a child, that child will attend my school. But if this is what that hypothetical child's classmates will be like, the experience has been devalued. By permitting her family to be featured in an unflattering article, this mother has lowered the prestige of the school. While the school has always enjoyed a reputation as being elite, this article casts doubt on what we mean by elite. This woman and her brood are, by their complicity in this article, officially non-elite. If it is assumed that ALL the families at the school are like this one, the school goes from being one that can be held up as an example to one that can be held up as an object of derision (see any school involved in the NY Prep show).

If the school is considered risible, the value of matriculating there is lessened (and let's be fair, the cost to attend is in no way insignificant); if the value is lessened it can be assumed, over time, that the school will not be able to attract the same caliber of teacher - after all the top teachers want to teach at top schools, not those featured on the pages of tabloids or on Bravo. More than anything, I was embarrassed that this woman, in what I assume was a bid to get publicity for her ridiculous lawsuit, made her kid, herself, and her lifestyle look ridiculous. Not because I give a shit about her, but because in making her lifestyle look ridiculous, it made mine look ridiculous too.

The hyperbole of which is that now I live next to the idiot who painted her house pepto bismal pink.