tag team

back again.

it's like i just can't stay away!

children are not dogs, but we all need to pee

today i was walking the jack-pug, and we were told off by by a man outside an apartment building.

he began his tirade with a smile and a hello, which, in retrospect, makes me angry because i did not equate the smile with potential hostility. i get lots of friendly comments and hellos from people when i'm with the jack-pug. he's a quirky looking little guy. and he was sniffing around, as dogs tend to do.

"i saw you this morning," said the man. (switching gears, now that he's got me all unsuspecting.) "you were on the grass. it's private property. there's a sign."

there is a sign, yes, at the front of the building, behind a fence. i do not take the jack-pug behind the fence. indeed, i do not take the jack-pug onto people's gardens or flower patches. and should i even have to say it, i pick up his poo, neatly, in bags.

"we didn't even come this way this morning!" i said, stung by the surprise attack. (actually, we may have. ooops.)

the patch of grass in question lies parallel to the sidewalk. i have yet to see a dog pass by it without stopping to sniff. it runs along the sidewalk for about half a block, and it's about ten feet deep. on the other side? a fence. beyond which is the apartment building.

so here is my narcissistic, excuse-making rant. i have no excuse for it except that i am, all out of proportion, hurt by this. why the fuck, angry apartment dude, are you so pissed off, pun intended, about dog pee? digging, i can understand. leaving piles of crap, i can understand. but what the hell bothers you so much about my twenty-pound dog treading on your precious, mangy stretch of unkempt ground to lift his leg and deposit a quarter-teaspoon of pee? and if it bothers you so much, so very much, so much that you have to stand there and wait for a recognizable dog to come by just so you can harangue the owner, why don't you move the fence so your holy ground doesn't look like public property?

that's all.

and we were singin', bye bye little anakin guy!

last friday i had an unexpected evening on my own. the lovely boyfriend and i live in a small apartment and tend to do a lot of things together, because, i don't know, we like each other, or something? anyway, last friday he had a work event to attend. i, as the shameless mooch half of this relationship, had no work to go to and stayed at home.

the first thing i thought of when i realized i had an evening to myself was - what am i going to make for dinner? i'm not tremendously hungry, but i need sustenance, and for once, there's no one's taste to take into account but mine.

i made a caesar salad, a big one. i pulled out the flexetarian card and added some bacon. what a sensual pleasure is eating alone, with nothing to focus on but flavour and texture and the feel of food in my mouth. soft but delicately crisp romaine, salty, smoky bacon, assertively crunchy croutons, silky bright-tasting dressing with the edge of strong parmiggiano cheese. it was good.

of course, woman cannot live on salad alone. she needs the word of lucas. after a quick skim of our dvds i popped 'star wars' into the player. oh goodness, that movie. it's so earnest, with some terribly obvious acting, but the pace is engaging and the story is compelling and the sheer charisma of alec guiness and harrison ford (and the enthusiasm of those less talented) just carries you along to the inevitable conclusion. yes! fuck you, empire! take that!

the lb and i continued with moody 'empire strikes back' on saturday (do you know, i never really noticed how bloody nervewracking it was to experience the millenium falcon being pursued through the entire course of that movie? the whole thing is just one long endless pursuit!) and finished up with feel-good 'jedi' on sunday. (we had another caesar salad, but alas, an inferior one. i blame tasteless metro-brand romaine.) 'jedi' gets a lot of (deserved) crap for those silly ewoks, who are a big honkin' ass metaphor for colonized peoples if there ever was one, but dammit, they are cute. and yes, harrison ford is less than thrilled to be there at this point, but when he says, "hey, it's me!" with that shit-eating grin i couldn't care less about contract obligations. and up to this point, the intrusive stupid retroactive in-jokes that lucas put in can be forgotten. yes, there's the foolish interlude with a digital jabba in 'star wars' that slows down the pace and adds nothing, but okay, it makes a good bathroom break. the sarlac (sarlaac?) has a silly snapping clumsily added beak, but so what? luke did a freaking triple backflip and destroyed the barge! up to this point i can forget that the prequels ever existed, which is frankly how it should be.

but at the end of 'jedi'? LUCAS PUT HAYDEN CHRISTIANSEN IN THE LAST SCENE. yes, yes he did. with yoda and alec guiness and looking all saintly-like. seriously lucas? what did you have to go and screw up my movie for? i will not see your prequels! you can't make me!
on second thought, i bet it's hayden's fault my salad tasted gross. yeah.

in which i come crawling back

um, hi. i'm back, blog. i made a terrible mistake but i realized that i still love you. forgive me! i promise i'll make it up to you.

abort abort abort

as cheeky as that sounds, i think i want to be talking about abortion today.

nobody wants to like abortion. it's kind of a freaky thing, to end a pregnancy. no matter how you feel about the process, something dies that could have eventually drawn breath. and this is me talking, me who feels that you're not a person until you're born and breathing.

but at the same time, abortion is necessary. access to safe, hassle-free, medical abortions is the only way to knowingly address a huge societal imbalance, namely that we do not live in a sexually fair society. i don't care how much the anti-feminists want to rant and rave that we're overeacting and we have nothing to complain about and we're so aggressive and blah blah fishcakes. women don't get taken seriously as intellectual forces, women don't earn what men earn, women's contributions to society aren't given enough credit, and therefore women don't have the same social freedom that men do.

women and girls deserve a way to correct a situation that they don't want to be in. it doesn't matter if they enjoyed the sex or not, it doesn't matter if they were using birth control or not, * it doesn't matter if they were in a steady committed relationship or the school slut or divinely turkey-bastered with the holy sperm of the flying spaghetti monster. ending one's pregnancy is, for a lot of women, the solution that lets them keep their lives the way they were; in other words, it's what we consider the best possible outcome when we make a mistake or get into an accident. of any kind. thank goodness, no one got hurt, we learned something, let's put this behind us.

and this is why it worries me that abortion is undergoing a re-demonization in popular culture.

it is bad enough that you have your bible-thumpers and militant pro-lifers picketing clinics instead of handing out condoms or engaging in dialogue. but at least that's upfront, out there, understandable. when abortion becomes something that's not even an option in pop culture, it adds another taboo to what's already difficult enough to come to terms with getting. consider:

- miranda's decision in season five of "sex and the city" to go through with her pregnancy. (for all the show's a satire, it was really well done, though; they'd established miranda's mixed feelings about wanting to have a child early on)
- "saved," where a teenage christian goes through with her pregnancy in spite of the social ostracism that goes with it (again, kind of understandable. she's a christian!)
- "knocked up," where abortion isn't really an option, and
-"juno," ditto.

one of the fine ladies at BUST posted photos of lilly allen and jaime lynn spears on the magazine's blog, under the heading "i'm sorry, but haven't any of these people heard of abortions?" . not pc, for sure, maybe a bit insensitive? perhaps. but relevant? for heaven's sake, yes. if i were sixteen or twenty-one and just starting to get a career established and dating a) a nineteen year old who didn't want to be a dad or b) some guy fifteen years older than i - FOR THREE MONTHS, i'd damn well be thinking about it! and i should be, because for all that ideas of morality are relative and subjective, ideas about social realities aren't. being a single mother is hard. being a young mother is hard. being the child of a young, single mother is setting you up to be poor.

not hating on young parents, people. or single parents, or people who decide not to have abortions. i am hating on the idea that abortion can be dismissed out of hand as something that only the heartless can do.

abortion is an option. and it's a personal one that will affect each person differently. we have no right to dictate how someone should feel about it, if they should be crying tears of blood and lighting candles every year on the anniversary of their proceedure or whatnot. when we attach such angsty emotional baggage to it, someone who can walk away from an abortion, still functional and even relieved, becomes a frigid unnatural maneating bitch.

which is hurtful.

and unfair.

and funnily enough, directed towards women.

it took so long to get here, even here, even to this imperfect place. i don't want to go back.


* in my opinion, not using birth control when you don't want to get pregnant = stupid. HOWEVER. does that make it right or fair or smart to say, "stupid little girl, you got pregnant. now you can't have an abortion because you don't want to be stupid AND EVIL, do you?" AND with the megastupid idea of teaching abstinence-only sex education in schools, we're raising a whole generation of deliberately-kept stupids, as opposed to the i-know-better-but-i'm-lazy kind of stupid. and anyway, the contraception thing could fuel a whole other rant, believe me.

wherefore and why

i'm beginning to ponder why people blog. why they do it, why i do it, why i read them. why i've connected - sortof - with a cupcake obsessesed housewife in north carolina and a group of fat feminists in chicago, and why i come back to my blog time and time again, even if i have a readership of one.

i enjoy kate harding's "shapely prose" a lot. more than that, i learn. every day day i learn as she vocalizing something that's fierce and funny and thoughtful and MAKES ME THINK about fat. thinking, not worrying! i don't think i'm "too fat" - i'm just "fat," in the same way that i have brown hair and glasses and am tall. i don't feel guilty anymore. i've changed my goal from "lose x number of pounds" to "run twenty minutes on the treadmill." and that is due, let me give credit where it belongs, to a blog written by three women that i know as kate harding, fillyjonk, and sweet machine. it's kind of ridiculous, because i always think of the first as "kateharding," all one word. if i met her on the street, i couldn't just call her "kate!" i know about her private life, her boyfriend, her opinions and her history (my goodness gracious, what on EARTH must be like to be the SKINNIEST person in your family?) and i've lurked, i suppose, in the comments pages, and seen the close relationships she has with a lot of her readers. but i'm not one of them - at least not yet, nor am i sure i want to be known for posterity as some snazzy disembodied username like "origamiduck," or something.

i know why i read her blog. i read it because it educates me, it's amusing, and intelligent, and thoughtful, and says things that many people don't dare to say because being fat is associated with shame and hate. it's easy to rag on fat people because we're all so damn afraid of being one of those fat people that everybody rags on - a CIRCULAR ARGUMENT if there ever was one (and NOT a tautology, thank you very much, stupid australian english teachers). but why on earth does kateharding WRITE it?

because she's a writer, and writers write! because she's writing about principles that are difficult to maintain in one's own life, even if you KNOW they're true. you hate yourself for eating 'too much' sometimes, even if you're hungry, even if your boyfriend eats less (or in my case, weighs less. not much less, but still less. hey, man has no boobs!) and this is why i blog too, i think. i write to remind myself of who i am and what i'm thinking, even if it's dorky. i write because i love words and i could use the practice.

and i write because i like it.

it's in the sun above, it's in the one you love, you'll never know the reason why.

braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains . . .

i am a late person. i try to be on time, really i do - i know how disrespectful it is to be constantly late, and how inconvenient, and blah blah blah, but i am BAD WITH MORNINGS and WORSE WITH DEADLINES. today, i was late for work; but for once it was not my fault.

as i walked into the subway station today, i heard a train pull away. no worries - i picked up a metro, went downstairs, and prepared to wait. a train pulled in, packed to the rafters. i didn't try to board. it left and another train came, more full than the last one. i stayed on the platform. another train came and went. and another. and they were all dangerously overloaded.

obviously something was up. every entryway was jammed with people and you couldn't see through to the other platform through the windows. the platform began to fill up with people who were, like me, waiting to catch a subway. a few held back, but some exceptionally foolish citizens attempted to rush the doors. some wiggled through, thanks more to the kindness of strangers than to their own pigheadedness.

then a train went out of service and there was pandemonium! disgruntled passengers everywhere on platform, protesting loudly! i'm not going to say that i wasn't pissed off - because that would be a lie - but quite frankly, there was no one to complain to and nothing to be done by complaining. the subway system was fubar, and none of us were going to get to work on time.

now here's where the story gets creepy. trains kept crawling in, going at the snail's pace that means there's trouble somewhere on the line. people were jammed in every possible space. the glass was fogged and hands were pressed against windows. and yet, every time the train would creak to a stop to let people disembark, the sea of humanity around me would heave and shuffle and gravitate to the doors. it was like a horror movie. people had been zapped of common sense and were launching themseves slowly but inexorably inside the subway cars. like zombies, they lurched and mumbled, intent on their dopey purpose . . . to get in and suck on brains, i guess.

i went home after an hour. i passed a paramedic vehicle on my way out. i hope they do brain transfers.