20 August 2006
♥ if i may. . .
Kudos to the lovely Ms. Potts for her fantabulous shindig. S'mores give me a reason to live!
8/20/2006
17 August 2006
♥ the girl who cried wolf
Civilization is booming. The global population has skyrocketed in the last decade, babies are being born every minute, and through it all, men still have the upper hand. Despite all this "progress," women still make only 76 cents for every dollar earned by males performing similar duties. Despite the notion that leaps and bounds are being made every day, women still have to fight to maintain control of their own personal medical decisions.
We can place the blame on Corporate America for paying men 24% more than it pays women. We can blame the neo-Cons for trying to outlaw birth control and make abortion illegal. But, as much as I hate to say it, there needs to be some self-examination here.
According to a 2005 study by Eugene Kanin, a sociology professor at Purdue University, 41% of reported cases of sexual assault over a nine-year period were proven to be false. That's almost half. "False rape allegations are not the consequence of a gender-linked aberration, as frequently claimed," Kanin writes, "but reflect impulsive and desperate efforts to cope with personal and social stress situations."
Several psychology professors conducted a study which tested whether people were more likely to believe allegations of molestation if the accused was male or female. Not surprisingly, the the behavioral science experts found that "the allegations involving male perpetrators were believed more than allegations involving females."
If Kanin and his colleagues are correct, there is a disturbing new trend among young women: the best way to get back at men is to accuse them of some type of sexual abuse.
The culture that's been created is conducive to this sociopathic behavior. The idea now is that girls are always believed and the accused are always investigated. Even when it turns out not to be true, which is apparently the case 41% of the time, the alleged pervert is ruined. It becomes a case of "he said, she said."
Who are these women? I want someone to sit them down and explain to them that what they're doing is bringing us down further than any Planned Parenthood picketer ever could.
For decades, sexually abused women had to keep quiet, because no one would believe them if they spoke up. Those days are over, because women fought too long and too hard for the right to tell someone when they had been abused, and a couple (41%, in fact) of sick individuals are not going to take that away.
But how can we solve this problem? Aside from simply not believing anyone who says they've been raped, that is. Is there really anything we can do about it?
It's not like we can just say, "Okay, girls, gig's up! No more false accusations!"
What we can do, though, is keep it up. We can keep the dream of those 1960s and 70s sexual revolutionaries alive by continuing to fight for our rights. We can march in the streets until we're earning the same money for the same work as men. We can defend Roe v. Wade and keep the neo-Cons from sticking their noses where they don't belong and turning back the clock on birth control.
The days of just popping out babies and making dinner in your mother's pearls have come to an end; we're capable of so much more than that. Women have orchestrated entire civilizations. Hell, we ran the country while men were overseas during World War II. Is there really any question as to whether we can get past this?
You're damn right, Rosie.
We can place the blame on Corporate America for paying men 24% more than it pays women. We can blame the neo-Cons for trying to outlaw birth control and make abortion illegal. But, as much as I hate to say it, there needs to be some self-examination here.
According to a 2005 study by Eugene Kanin, a sociology professor at Purdue University, 41% of reported cases of sexual assault over a nine-year period were proven to be false. That's almost half. "False rape allegations are not the consequence of a gender-linked aberration, as frequently claimed," Kanin writes, "but reflect impulsive and desperate efforts to cope with personal and social stress situations."
Several psychology professors conducted a study which tested whether people were more likely to believe allegations of molestation if the accused was male or female. Not surprisingly, the the behavioral science experts found that "the allegations involving male perpetrators were believed more than allegations involving females."
If Kanin and his colleagues are correct, there is a disturbing new trend among young women: the best way to get back at men is to accuse them of some type of sexual abuse.
The culture that's been created is conducive to this sociopathic behavior. The idea now is that girls are always believed and the accused are always investigated. Even when it turns out not to be true, which is apparently the case 41% of the time, the alleged pervert is ruined. It becomes a case of "he said, she said."
Who are these women? I want someone to sit them down and explain to them that what they're doing is bringing us down further than any Planned Parenthood picketer ever could.
For decades, sexually abused women had to keep quiet, because no one would believe them if they spoke up. Those days are over, because women fought too long and too hard for the right to tell someone when they had been abused, and a couple (41%, in fact) of sick individuals are not going to take that away.
But how can we solve this problem? Aside from simply not believing anyone who says they've been raped, that is. Is there really anything we can do about it?
It's not like we can just say, "Okay, girls, gig's up! No more false accusations!"
What we can do, though, is keep it up. We can keep the dream of those 1960s and 70s sexual revolutionaries alive by continuing to fight for our rights. We can march in the streets until we're earning the same money for the same work as men. We can defend Roe v. Wade and keep the neo-Cons from sticking their noses where they don't belong and turning back the clock on birth control.
The days of just popping out babies and making dinner in your mother's pearls have come to an end; we're capable of so much more than that. Women have orchestrated entire civilizations. Hell, we ran the country while men were overseas during World War II. Is there really any question as to whether we can get past this?
You're damn right, Rosie.
8/17/2006
14 August 2006
♥ myspace-o-ranting
I know I don't have anything new to say about MySpace. Every blog and its mother has ranted about MySpace and how much it sucks. But I just can't help myself from commenting on this latest trend of general MySpace stupidity.
There's really no way to keep little twelve-year-olds from setting up profiles if their mommies don't watch them carefully enough. I guess the only ways to keep groady internet predators from getting a little too friendly with overeager teenie boppers are to
a) do a background check on everyone who tries to set up an account,
b) make parents monitor their children, or
c) make MySpace not free.
Since none of these things are going to happen, I guess someone (probably the all-powerful Tom, whose friends list is only so gigantic because it is mandatory for all 394,867,492,769,482,796,824,986 MySpace users to have Tom as a friend) was stricken with the grand idea of allowing users to set their profiles to "private."
This, in essence, is why I hate MySpace.
What a stupid, backwards idea.
Okay, let me lay it down for you: The goal of MySpace, according to its own tagline, is to "meet people from your area in the country and keep in touch." As such, I think it is safe to conclude that MySpace is intended as a social website. The word "social" is defined, according to my good friend Merriam-Webster, as "inclined to seek out or enjoy the company of others, sociable."
Doesn't that mean that keeping your profile secret (or, even more irritatingly, publishing a blog entry under an enticing heading like "You won't believe what he finally said to me the other night" and setting it so that only you can read it) is sort of... logically challenged?
Here, then, is a list of rules for MySpace users to improve MySpace and keep it from being the bane of my existence:
It's not something I'm proud of, but yes, in fact, I have. But I've been MySpace-free for over five months now, and I know that all I can do is warn those who don't care about how much MySpace sucks.
There's really no way to keep little twelve-year-olds from setting up profiles if their mommies don't watch them carefully enough. I guess the only ways to keep groady internet predators from getting a little too friendly with overeager teenie boppers are to
a) do a background check on everyone who tries to set up an account,
b) make parents monitor their children, or
c) make MySpace not free.
Since none of these things are going to happen, I guess someone (probably the all-powerful Tom, whose friends list is only so gigantic because it is mandatory for all 394,867,492,769,482,796,824,986 MySpace users to have Tom as a friend) was stricken with the grand idea of allowing users to set their profiles to "private."
This, in essence, is why I hate MySpace.
What a stupid, backwards idea.
Okay, let me lay it down for you: The goal of MySpace, according to its own tagline, is to "meet people from your area in the country and keep in touch." As such, I think it is safe to conclude that MySpace is intended as a social website. The word "social" is defined, according to my good friend Merriam-Webster, as "inclined to seek out or enjoy the company of others, sociable."
Doesn't that mean that keeping your profile secret (or, even more irritatingly, publishing a blog entry under an enticing heading like "You won't believe what he finally said to me the other night" and setting it so that only you can read it) is sort of... logically challenged?
Here, then, is a list of rules for MySpace users to improve MySpace and keep it from being the bane of my existence:
- It's really not that difficult to protect oneself from all the lonely old hairy fat men out there. If you add strangers at their request so that you can reach your eventual goal of having 850 friends or do stupid things like publish your phone number or address, you're too inept to use MySpace. Delete your profile immediately.
- The idea behind MySpace is, obviously, to make the internet even trashier than it was to begin with. It used to be only intelligent people with something worthwhile to say could have a website. MySpace makes it so that every retard with a keyboard, a dial-up modem, and several hours of free time each day can have his very own page. (I realize how ridiculous this sounds coming from me, whose pitiful collection of angst-ridden mutterings has no more of a place in the Web than your MySpace account. My point stands.) If you don't have anything to say except "I like soccer and biology and Dashboard Confessional and I finally found a nice boy to go out with," you are too boring to use MySpace. Delete your profile immediately.
- The point of commenting on someone else'e page is simply to make yourselves look more popular. I have a really hard time believing that it is anywhere near as efficient to comment back and forth purely for the purpose of communication on some important issue (i.e., where are we going tonight) than to just pick up the phone and call someone. And come on, MySpace and AIM go together like smoking and drinking; who does one without the other? No one who should be doing either, that's who. You're online anyway, they're right there, you just want to comment on their site so they'll comment on yours and you'll look like everyone wants to talk to you all the time. If you leave comments on people's profiles that say things like "OMFG didn't you have an awesome time on Friday night? I can't believe how wasted he got. *hehe*" you are too much of a spineless slave to the social ladder to use MySpace. Delete your profile immediately.
- What would a profile be without a monument to shallowness? Of course users want to publish their photos! Maybe it's one you took in your mirror, maybe you and your friends got all prettied up and took pictures of each other, or maybe you just want to show off your new haircut. In any case, fishing for compliments is totally annoying. If your photo captions say things like "gosh I'm ugly" or "I absolutely hate this new haircut" so that all your friends will comment and say, "what are you talking about, you're sooooooo pretty!!!!!!!" you are too insecure to use MySpace. Delete your profile immediately.
- MySpace is designed to keep viewers moving. Look at some photos, see if there's anything interesting in the blog, check out what kind of music they listen to and if they have a boyfriend, and move on. The Top 8, therefore, is the most important piece of any user's profile. How many Top 8s are you on? (If you're reading my blog, probably none. Again, my point remains.) It's how they found you. In fact, I would go so far as to assert that the Top 8 is a tool of intimidation. Of course you're going to comment on her new photos, of course you're going to give her a shoutout: you don't want to lose your place in her Top 8. The pitiful number seven isn't nearly as telling as the impressive just-after-the-boyfriend-and-best-friend number three! After all, what else says "we're like this" like being someone's third best friend with a MySpace profile? It screams popularity. If you lay awake at night wondering if Jill's less-than-enthusiastic greeting after Spanish today means it's time to retire her from your Top 8 ladder, you're too much of a bully to use MySpace. Delete your profile immediately.
It's not something I'm proud of, but yes, in fact, I have. But I've been MySpace-free for over five months now, and I know that all I can do is warn those who don't care about how much MySpace sucks.
8/14/2006
11 August 2006
♥ strollercise?
You know how sometimes people just do these little things that get you down? Like making up little hybrid words; that really makes me squirm. (Take "TomKat," "Bennifer," "Brangelina," or any similiar non-celebrity-couple-related term, for instance. I can deal with "Californication.")
I'll make this one quick, because I'm sure no one is really very interested in the concept of "strollercise." But it kind of struck me today when my friend Rachel mentioned it: these women leave their toddlers with a nanny and take their strollers (weighted, of course) to the park so that an instructor can boss them around and have them do different little excercises which, I'm sure, leave them in no better shape than they were the day they popped those babies out. Like, they really pay real money for this.
Are. You. Kidding.
I know.
Why don't you just push your real kid around the block in your stroller for free and also, you know, spend quality time with them? What a concept, right?
Who are these people who have so much time on their hands that they think of things like "strollercise?" What happened to those tired old "traditional" values, such as not spending money like it's water, or, more outrageously, spending time with your family?
There's really very little I can say about this one without making that little purple vein pop out of my forehead, so I'll wrap it up. I'm sure my readership of, like, three is sick of my angsty little "let's change the world!" rantings, but I just can't help turning this into a "look what the world is coming to" post.
This country is in debt out the wazoo. Seniors can't afford to retire, gas is above $3 a gallon, the government has landed us in an overseas occupation so sticky we can't seem to wiggle our way out. I'm thinking we need to simplify things a little bit.
Maybe we need to just, you know, exercise.
I'll make this one quick, because I'm sure no one is really very interested in the concept of "strollercise." But it kind of struck me today when my friend Rachel mentioned it: these women leave their toddlers with a nanny and take their strollers (weighted, of course) to the park so that an instructor can boss them around and have them do different little excercises which, I'm sure, leave them in no better shape than they were the day they popped those babies out. Like, they really pay real money for this.
Are. You. Kidding.
I know.
Why don't you just push your real kid around the block in your stroller for free and also, you know, spend quality time with them? What a concept, right?
Who are these people who have so much time on their hands that they think of things like "strollercise?" What happened to those tired old "traditional" values, such as not spending money like it's water, or, more outrageously, spending time with your family?
There's really very little I can say about this one without making that little purple vein pop out of my forehead, so I'll wrap it up. I'm sure my readership of, like, three is sick of my angsty little "let's change the world!" rantings, but I just can't help turning this into a "look what the world is coming to" post.
This country is in debt out the wazoo. Seniors can't afford to retire, gas is above $3 a gallon, the government has landed us in an overseas occupation so sticky we can't seem to wiggle our way out. I'm thinking we need to simplify things a little bit.
Maybe we need to just, you know, exercise.
8/11/2006
06 August 2006
♥ parenting, return, and foreign policies are all the same
Here is an incredibly nerdy story: From the time I was three, my mother would always say "personal responsibility" to me. I hated that. When I would whine or cry about something, she would just look at me and say, "What am I going to say, Emma?" and I would sigh and say, in my little toddler voice, "Personal responsibility." I learned that the kitty would bite me if I tried to hold him when he didn't want to be held, that I couldn't just help myself to things that were out of my reach, that if I wanted to know where certain toys were I would have to put them away when I was done playing with them.
The nerdy part is this: at sixteen years old, I am realizing that my mother was, and is, right. (May she not read this until I am much, much older, because I'm sure she would never let me live it down if she saw it now. Then again, I am posting it for the world to see. Personal responsibility.) As much as I hate it, there is a note on my kitchen table right now with my orthodontist's number and a note from my mother that reads: "Em: 2 words - personal responsibility." I'm not going to call, because I don't have braces and I'm so over the orthodontist, but the point remains the same: you have to live with the choices you make.
This little anecdote, as unamused as it may have left you, is the introduction to a musing on policy.
[Warning: it gets nerdier from here. I am going to talk about work.]
I hate to be so positive about my employer (it's not a very fight-the-man thing to do), but Petsmart is a pretty decent corporation. They don't sell cats or dogs. Each store has an adoption center where homeless pets from local shelters are rotated in and out (because more people visit Petsmart than do the shelters) because they believe that it is more important to find homes for animals that already exist than simply to make a profit by cranking out more puppies. They have 14-day guarantees on their fish - and they'll test your water for free if your fish die - because they believe in the products, live and otherwise, that they sell. In addition, we've got a pretty loose return policy: you can return anything, even live animals, at any time, with or without a receipt or tags, whether or not it's been used.
What people don't seem to understand is that it's not an upgrade program. I guess the return policy sets us up for it, but it's not like when you buy your eight-year-old a pair of skis and you pay the store for the privilege of exchanging for new sizes as your kid grows. People here buy their dog a collar, and ten months later, when we can't resell it because it's covered in your dog's hair and we don't even carry that brand anymore, they return it for a new one because it's gotten too old to use. I'm totally not even kidding.
This is where personal responsibility comes in. Sure, if it's defective after two weeks, fine, return it for one that keeps tags on your dog. But otherwise, you bought your dog that collar, you took the tags off, you used it. It is yours. It is not the company's responsibility to cut its loss and write the collar off, because it is not defective. It is used.
This mindset, in essence, is the same one we're seeing from the Bush administration. The government sent money to what they knew were fundamentalist groups in the eighties, ignored intelligence that there were going to be some sort of terrorist activities in fall 2001, then pleaded clueless when three thousand people were killed on September 11. They break the rules of the Geneva Convention by harboring prisoners without trials at Gitmo, then claim to be shocked and bomb the living hell out of innocent villages in Afghanistan when an American has been kidnapped in response. They send troops to the Middle East and start an Iraqi civil war, then cry for peace in the Middle East. (Somehow, though, they still manage to "justify" their refusal to call for an Israeli-Hezbollah ceasefire. Go figure.) They want democracy in the countries they invade, then try to oust [democratically elected] leaders when they are not pro-America.
You'll get no argument from me that war and death are not the answers. I strongly believe that terrorist and fundamentalist groups are in the wrong, but I also believe that the United States government needs to start following some of its own advice. It needs to stop acting like a fundamentalist group and listen to its people when they march in the streets and demand that no troops are sent overseas.
It all comes down to the same thing my mother told me when I was three: personal responsibility. The definition of insanity, according to Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We need to stop making the same choices over and over again and find something that really does work. We need to take responsibility for our actions and how they got us into the situations we're in now, whether it's Iraq, Petsmart, or your three-year-old.
The nerdy part is this: at sixteen years old, I am realizing that my mother was, and is, right. (May she not read this until I am much, much older, because I'm sure she would never let me live it down if she saw it now. Then again, I am posting it for the world to see. Personal responsibility.) As much as I hate it, there is a note on my kitchen table right now with my orthodontist's number and a note from my mother that reads: "Em: 2 words - personal responsibility." I'm not going to call, because I don't have braces and I'm so over the orthodontist, but the point remains the same: you have to live with the choices you make.
This little anecdote, as unamused as it may have left you, is the introduction to a musing on policy.
[Warning: it gets nerdier from here. I am going to talk about work.]
I hate to be so positive about my employer (it's not a very fight-the-man thing to do), but Petsmart is a pretty decent corporation. They don't sell cats or dogs. Each store has an adoption center where homeless pets from local shelters are rotated in and out (because more people visit Petsmart than do the shelters) because they believe that it is more important to find homes for animals that already exist than simply to make a profit by cranking out more puppies. They have 14-day guarantees on their fish - and they'll test your water for free if your fish die - because they believe in the products, live and otherwise, that they sell. In addition, we've got a pretty loose return policy: you can return anything, even live animals, at any time, with or without a receipt or tags, whether or not it's been used.
What people don't seem to understand is that it's not an upgrade program. I guess the return policy sets us up for it, but it's not like when you buy your eight-year-old a pair of skis and you pay the store for the privilege of exchanging for new sizes as your kid grows. People here buy their dog a collar, and ten months later, when we can't resell it because it's covered in your dog's hair and we don't even carry that brand anymore, they return it for a new one because it's gotten too old to use. I'm totally not even kidding.
This is where personal responsibility comes in. Sure, if it's defective after two weeks, fine, return it for one that keeps tags on your dog. But otherwise, you bought your dog that collar, you took the tags off, you used it. It is yours. It is not the company's responsibility to cut its loss and write the collar off, because it is not defective. It is used.
This mindset, in essence, is the same one we're seeing from the Bush administration. The government sent money to what they knew were fundamentalist groups in the eighties, ignored intelligence that there were going to be some sort of terrorist activities in fall 2001, then pleaded clueless when three thousand people were killed on September 11. They break the rules of the Geneva Convention by harboring prisoners without trials at Gitmo, then claim to be shocked and bomb the living hell out of innocent villages in Afghanistan when an American has been kidnapped in response. They send troops to the Middle East and start an Iraqi civil war, then cry for peace in the Middle East. (Somehow, though, they still manage to "justify" their refusal to call for an Israeli-Hezbollah ceasefire. Go figure.) They want democracy in the countries they invade, then try to oust [democratically elected] leaders when they are not pro-America.
You'll get no argument from me that war and death are not the answers. I strongly believe that terrorist and fundamentalist groups are in the wrong, but I also believe that the United States government needs to start following some of its own advice. It needs to stop acting like a fundamentalist group and listen to its people when they march in the streets and demand that no troops are sent overseas.
It all comes down to the same thing my mother told me when I was three: personal responsibility. The definition of insanity, according to Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We need to stop making the same choices over and over again and find something that really does work. We need to take responsibility for our actions and how they got us into the situations we're in now, whether it's Iraq, Petsmart, or your three-year-old.
8/06/2006
05 August 2006
♥ bumper stickers, revisited
Somewhere, in a little cabin in the mountains, a short little bald man with cokebottle glasses and a goatee sits at his desk every night thinking of bumper stickers just to infuriate me. Sometimes they just say things like "Bush/Cheney '04." When he's feeling creative, he does things like put the little restroom people together - one male and one female, of course - and indicates that this is what marriage should be. Sometimes, when he's really on a roll, he works a little harder and comes up with the exceptionally clever "If God didn't want us to eat animals, then why are they made out of meat?"
I try to ignore his work. When I see a bumper sticker that seems to merit honking and / or obscene gestures, I take a deep breath and remind myself that, although anyone with a Bush/Cheney sticker on their car is obviously opposed to it, everyone has a right to free speech.
But tonight I saw one that I simply couldn't stand. (So much so, in fact, that I came home, peeled off my little Petsmart uniform, and immediately started blogging. Because obviously that's going to make a difference.)
It said:
I try to ignore his work. When I see a bumper sticker that seems to merit honking and / or obscene gestures, I take a deep breath and remind myself that, although anyone with a Bush/Cheney sticker on their car is obviously opposed to it, everyone has a right to free speech.
But tonight I saw one that I simply couldn't stand. (So much so, in fact, that I came home, peeled off my little Petsmart uniform, and immediately started blogging. Because obviously that's going to make a difference.)
It said:
If you don't stand behind our troops,
feel free to stand in front of them.
feel free to stand in front of them.
Where do I even begin? I think some bullets are appropriate here.
- No one is "against" the troops. Except, perhaps, our thief-in-cheif, who continually puts them in harm's way. Our government has repeatedly failed to provide our soldiers with armor that will actually protect them, and (more to the point), why have they been sent overseas, particularly to Iraq, in the first place? Perhaps it's because Bush was becoming bored with our seach for the ever-elusive Osama. His name certainly isn't popping up all over like it used to, but we're onto bigger and better criminals now. Maybe it's because we had to save the world from all those scary WMD. Funny, though, they never did materialize, did they? That's because they never really were the reason for an invasion. Daddy's little war criminal wasn't having much luck drilling in the pristine wilderness of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, so he thought he'd a take a swipe at the next most likely candidate, the Middle East. This brings me to my next point.
<>No blood for oil. Junior's in it for the oil. With gas at three dollars a gallon and people starting to catch on that oil companies are turning in some of the biggest profits in world history, he needs to find a new source for this non-renewable resource. (Note: fossil fuels are not actually non-renewable, they just take millions of years to create. Then again, they way things are headed, no one will be around to use such energy by the time it regenerates, because the polar ice caps will have melted and anyone who survived the Apocalypse will have to wear SPF 24087624968734987 to avoid getting fried, as the ozone will have been depleted.) The point of this point is this: the offending car was a HUMMER. I'm not even kidding you. I think the situation speaks for itself. How incredibly ironic, right?<>
And, finally...
- Who are these people?! Of all the problems I have with this administration, the one that really gets me is this new trend they've created, where anyone who disagrees with a decision or believes in civil liberties is labeled as "unpatriotic." I'm tired of being "unpatriotic" because I don't want my phone calls tapped or my bank accounts watched or my Googlings kept track of.
8/05/2006
