you can't make this stuff up.

standing in line at walgreen's, i notice the following three items lined up next to each other on a shelf at the front of the store:

1. small boxes of condoms

2. small bottles of lube

3. pregnancy tests

i wish i had my camera with me.

if the next harry potter is this disturbing, i'm going to need some kind of medication.

so on friday night BoyCat and i watched Crash, and last night we went out with friends to see Capote. a real feel-good, happy fun time movie weekend. i would highly recommend both movies, but not together in a 24 hour time span. you might be driven to drink copious amounts of vodka and ramble about the state of humanity.

and seriously, harry potter better be a game of candyland next weekend, or i might not know what to do with myself.

oh, i know, it's not that bad (harry potter, that is). i don't read the books, so i am not nearly as invested in these characters as you book-readers (you know who you are). that bodes well for me, as i should be able to watch the next harry potter movie with interest, but without the peculiar sensation that i kinda can't breath.

on the way out of the theater last night, our friend remarked how during a culminating scene (i won't say anything particular here, as the movie really was great and you should go), she felt like she needed to remind herself to breath. i think it's rare when a movie can actually achieve that emotional state in a viewer, but this one did. Capote felt longer than its alleged hour and forty minutes running time, but the pacing fit with the narrative, which was (fittingly) about a book that took over six years to write. while i didn't necessarily sympathize with anyone in the movie (except maybe Catherine Keener as Harper Lee, who was great and understated and crucial), but by the time the movie began to move towards a close, i was seriously invested. it wasn't until the credits started rolling that i realized my body had been in some state of tension or another for the last half hour or so.

so between last night and Crash, i am drained. they sucked me dry. my threshold for emotional involvement today will be the Bears game and the travel section of the Sunday Tribune.

oh, and an update: i'm going to win $310 million on tuesday night. the ticket last week didn't work out, but this time i've got the right one. so seriously, get back to me about the presents. if i don't hear from you, then you're getting a Jaguar, as they never go out of style.

friday cat blogging, sentinel edition.

friday's not quite over yet, i got this one in under the wire!



this is CatCat's watchdog (watchcat?) position. she monitors the courtyard for any deviant bird life and/or squirrel activity. she takes this job very seriously, so don't make fun of her or you'll hurt her feelings.

kind of like the claw game, but the prize is destruction.

so i was just walking down Broadway to pick up some dry cleaning, and a giant bulldozer crane was demolishing an empty bank building (the bank had formerly been connected to a Dominick's grocery store, which mysteriously caught on a fire about 6 months ago and was subsequently demolished. apparently they're just now getting around to taking out said bank).

i guess i've never actually seen anything in the process of being demolished. i mean, i've seen footage of wrecking balls and bulldozers and explosion demolitions. but i've never seen a building being torn down in person. apparently many other people out and about on Broadway were in the same position, as i'd say at least a dozen people had just stopped in their tracks to watch. granted, it was sort of tough to miss, what with the mind-blowing noise and giant machinery swinging around, but i've never seen that many people on a city block just stop and watch something happen.

while i didn't actually stop to watch (on the company dime here, people, what kind of slacker do you think i am??), i have to admit it was pretty arresting. this bulldozer crane was just pulling up its giant claw, slamming it down into the building, and tugging out heaps of concrete and steel like it was nothing. it was just creating wreckage, with no hesitation or second thought.

in a way, it was great. in another way, it was disturbing. terrible beauty, you know?

i would think more about it, but there are spreadsheets to generate. nonprofitland waits for no (wo)man, especially when they're wasting time pondering the metaphor of bulldozed buildings.

your disturbing news of the day.

hello, your favorite ray of sunshine here, providing you with yet another reason that the world is going to hell in a handbasket:

"Army secret surfaces: Deadly chemicals at sea"

i know what you're thinking: the army? doing something clandestine and harmful to society? never! but it's true. i would recommend that you read at least the first page of this thing - it's seriously shocking - but since i know many of you won't (you lazy bitches), here's the nut of it:

The Army now admits in reports never before released that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard gas agent into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels.

These weapons of mass destruction virtually ring the country, concealed off the coasts of at least 11 states: six on the East Coast, including New Jersey and Maryland, two on the Gulf Coast, and in California, Hawaii and Alaska. Few, if any, state officials have been informed of their existence.

yes, you read that right.

i just recently finished reading bill bryson's awesome book, A Short History of Nearly Everything. the book gave me a sense of a lot of things, if not a full understanding of much (no matter how hard i try, the most basic explanations of space-time still elude my comprehension). one of the senses that i now have is how ridiculously slim the odds are that we are even here as a human race. sometimes you tend to think of evolution as a straight line, that there was some sort of inevitability of all of us ending up here, walking around, drinking our starbucks and listening to our iPods. but that certainly wasn't inevitable - in fact, the dumb luck involved in our existence and survival is staggering.

another thing i learned from the book was how humans, in our rise to ascendancy as the dominant species around here, have done amazing amounts of damage to the planet in a relatively short amount of time. i don't want to get all tree-hugger on you, because you know that's not my style (and it would get sap all over my nice new cowlneck sweater). BUT - not being a staunch environmentalist myself, i had no idea the wanton havoc we've been wreaking upon pretty much every inhabitable surface of the planet (and then some, apparently, judging by the article above). of course, it remains to be seen whether this complete disregard for ecological balance will result in us snuffing ourselves out, or whether we'll do it via nuclear war, or whether a big giant asteroid will slam into the pacific one day and take care of it. or something else. who knows? all i hope is that i'm not around to see it...and that is one thing, at least, on which the odds are good.

women and children. and board members.

first of all, go read this article: "Right to Wife: Why does Judge Alito treat women like girls?"

the first paragraph kicks in the door:

Judge Alito, it's a pleasure to have you before our committee this morning. You're obviously an accomplished jurist, and my colleagues on the other side of the aisle speak very highly of you. I really have only one question for you, and it's my hope that you'll be able to put my mind, and the public's mind, at ease about it. What I'd like to know is, why do you think it's constitutional to treat a pregnant woman like a child?

yes! thank you. moving on.

i am all kinds of george costanza's father this morning. "serenity now!!" is it working? not really. nonprofitland always gets itself in a tizzy for the holiday season, and 2005 is proving to be no exception. there are appeal letters to send, proposals to write, media inquiries to field (funny, the media only tends to remember that there are homeless people when christmas is less than 60 days away), reports to file, board members to placate, and so on. there is so much more that i could bitch about in terms of nonprofitland, but i realize i have not exactly taken pains to hide my identity on this blog, so it would probably be wise to refrain. i don't think you could find this blog by googling my first and last name, but i don't want to find out the hard way by having my boss do it.

oh-kay. on that note, back to the appeal letters.

annoying things abound.

so. i have a friend who very generously put a bunch of his mp3s on a CD for me. a number of good albums, some stuff i had wanted, etc. it arrived today in the mail, and i excitedly sat down to load some new songs onto my iPod. 45 minutes later, i have completely given up, as iTunes has frozen twice and and refused my every attempt to transfer anything from the CD to either iTunes or the iPod.

enraging.

and. and. today i am walking into the grocery store, and there is a woman in front of me that is wearing a brown leather jacket, brown tights (not like stockings, like dark chocolate brown tights), brown shoes and...a black skirt.

gah. ack. ohmygod.

this was an almost unbelievable instance of the black/brown faux pas. i mean, sometimes people just get sloppy, carry a black bag while wearing brown shoes (i am an offender here, since i only have one bag!), or throw on brown shoes with black windpants to run to the corner store. but this - this was obviously a premeditated outfit situation. this woman got out of bed and consciously decided to wear three brown items of clothing and one black one.

after about 10 seconds, i realized my mouth was literally hanging open. i had to reach up and close it with my hand.

is this week over yet???

your wednesday one-liner.

as always, courtesty of Overheard in New York:

Chick: I make it a point never to run to public transportation. It's a rule that I live by.

--1 train

and to this i have to say, right on. i sprinted half a block for the fucking B line too many times in Boston, with a work bag and a gym bag and a coffee mug and lord knows what else flailing around. it should never be that important to get somewhere, even to work. and if it is - well then, they should be paying you more, so you can afford to drive every day.

ugh. the B line.

in dreams begin responsibilities.

i am tired. wicked tired. so tired that i forgot to put a period on the end of my last post's subject line.

but before i go to bed at this ridiculously early hour, i wanted to mention dreams and the subconscious. these topics have come up, in some form or another, in a number of conversations that i've had this week. i've been talking with MomCat about the idea of a collective unconscious, and whether there might be anything to that. i've been talking with friends about the dreams they've recently had that have been affecting them in some way or another.

i'm certain that i'm not the first person to have the revelation that "wow, dreams are interesting." what i like about considering dreams, though, is that it's never stagnant - you always have some new dreams to think about, some you forget, some that other people tell you about that remind you of ones you once had, etc. there are always weird connections to make, connotations to consider. i make no claims about understanding the true nature of dreams (was freud right? jung? what about miss cleo?), and that makes it hard to make any claims about what a certain dream might mean. but damn if it isn't interesting to try to figure out, right?

for instance, i dream a fair amount about my grandparents' old house. we spent a fair amount of time there as kids, so it's a locale and a landscape with which i'm viscerally familiar. my grandparents both died about ten years ago, and i've only driven by the house a few times since them, but it keeps popping up in my dreams. recently i dreamt (dreamed? dreamt? who cares, see "wicked tired" notation above), all in the same dream, that there was a business meeting and a college party at the house, and then an inspection of the trees on the property, and then at the end of the dream i realized the house was ringed with a garden of rotting vegetables.

strange? yes. hard to deconstruct? perhaps not. but it's fascinating to me that this one location keeps factoring into my dreams, especially since i tend to dream in unspecific locales, bizarro dream spaces where places and people are constantly shifting. but these particular dreams are very rooted there.

anyway. maybe some more on this later. this stuff also got me thinking tonight about what the scariest dream that i ever had was. i think there's actually two - i'll tell you about them later, when i'm not so tired and rambling.

but first, tell me about your scariest dream....

pharmacy follow-up

if you're curious about which pharmacies to support and which ones to avoid in light of the birth control brouhaha, check out this handy scorecard. they've gotten policy clarifications straight from the horses' mouths, and these are the results.

for your reading pleasure.

click over and see The Chemist for a fun fisking of dennis prager’s most recent offering to the wingnut gods. he doesn’t tear up the whole article, but that’s understandable, as i’m not sure how one does finish reading a prager article and keep his or her lunch down at the same time.

now i know that prager could easily be elected mayor of loonytown, and his archive of journalistic work is not the best place to go for a sense of what the average american thinks and feels (yeah, yeah, there is no “average american,” i know that too). but i am a masochist, and apparently many of other liberal bloggers are as well, because we seek this shit out. it’s like if you knew that down the street there was a dog with two heads. you’d go check it out once, just to verify its existence, and you’d say “holy fuck that’s really a dog with two heads.” then you’d go home and forget about it…for a day or two. and from there on out, you’d find excuses to walk by the house where to dog with two heads was chained in the yard every so often, because you need to re-affirm its existence. you just can’t wrap your brain around the fact that it actually exists, so you need to keep checking and re-checking, OCD style.

there is really no other excuse for why i consistently click on links to outrageous articles at townhall.com and the like.

on a saner note, i’d also recommend rebecca traister’s new article, “Yes, Maureen Dowd is Necessary” at salon.com. i’ve been slightly uncomfortable with the gleeful pile-on of vitriol and holier-than-thou sarcasm that has been heaped upon Dowd (i refuse to call her MoDo, that’s just ridiculous) since the excerpt of her book came out last week. traister kinda puts her finger on why – whenever someone evokes such an instant and intense reaction by so many people, they’ve touched a nerve somehow. the more strident we are in our denouncements, the more it seems we might be protesting too much.

and just so you all know, i plan on winning $225 million tonight in the illinois lottery. got the winning ticket right here. so, start deciding what kind of flamboyant and utterly superfluous gift you want from me once i’m filthy rich…

a drop in the bucket.

it might not be much, but it's a drop nonetheless. i'm sure you've heard this ridiculous noise about Target refusing to discipline its pharmacists who won't dispense Emergency Contraception because of "religious beliefs." well, fuck that Target. i am very sad that i won't be able to purchase your cheap and chic wares until you come to your senses, but sometimes these sacrifices must be made.

while you all might not be willing to take the drastic step of boycotting (or girlcotting, or personcotting, or what have you) the beloved low-price mecca that is Target, at the very least you can send them a nasty email. who doesn't like writing nasty emails, right? go to target.com, click on "contact us" at the bottom of the homepage, and then click on "target corporation information" to get to their comment form. you don't even need to give them anything other than an e-mail address.

so please, go forth and bitch Target out.

i don't even know what to title this.

did you know that ozzie guillen practices santeria?

holy shit.

chicago tribune sunday edition, you're rocking my world. it was way too early in the morning for the revelation that the manager of the (world champion) white sox periodically involves himself in animal sacrifice.

then again, it's the first world series victory for chicago in 88 years, so maybe he's onto something.

friday cat blogging, blurry hangover edition.

in my haste to drink vodka tonics and forget about the week, i forgot friday cat blogging! shameful. though i am not actually hungover, the picture is a little blurry, so i'll go with that theme. this is an old CatCat picture - taken a day or two after we got her, when she still slept under the table for protection.




newer CatCat pictures to come, eventually...at some point i'll try to catch her doing her spiderman act on the couch while chasing her tail. it's an elusive moment to document, but i will do my best.

appropriating blame.

what do we gain from our opinions? i mean, we all have opinions. but rarely do we think about them in terms of what they do for us. we tend to consider them as somewhat removed from our actual selves – something we have, not something we are. that makes sense in a way, as opinions often change, and we’d rather think of that as a remodel of something we possess, not a fundamental change of our person. if it were the latter, who could keep up, right? we have so many opinions, large and small, and they shift so often that we’d hardly know who we were on any given day.

but i also think it’s faulty to think of opinions as something we merely have, like a cat or a kumquat scented candle (yes, i actually have both those things. don’t ask why). because doesn’t the sum of all our opinions at any given moment largely dictate how we see ourselves? who we think we are, and who we would like to be? they’re very formative things, opinions. the big gun opinions especially – god, religion, politics, culture, etc – form our so-called “perspectives.” “your perspective on life,” you know, that sense of why you’re doing what you’re doing. and that’s no small thing.

i talk in these annoying generalities only because i’ve been thinking specifically lately about how my opinions serve me. i’ve been considering the issues of victim positionality in feminism (i just made that word “postionality” up right now – sounds good, don’t it? just grad school-y enough to make you wonder if you’re just not smart enough to know what it means, when in fact it’s just gibberish. ah, higher education). and in thinking about the way in which that subject position can serve someone, i got to thinking about how all of our opinions must serve us in some way or another, or i imagine we wouldn’t hold them.

for instance, in my case, i think on a certain level i resist people trashing the victim language of feminism because feeling like a victim of patriarchal structures gives me something concrete to blame*. the older i get, the greater the sense i have that something is tragically amiss – something is off. i feel wronged in a big, metaphysical sense, but i’m not sure why or by whom. i think i literalize in a thousand different ways, and one of them is to look at the insults and abuses that the patriarchal system has foist upon my gender and say, there, that’s it! i have been wronged! life is unfair!

so, on a certain level, naming and appropriating blame for misogyny gives me a sense of actualizing a broader sense of being wronged, even if the two aren’t the same thing. one is a smaller stand-in for the other, for the biggest insult of them all, the affront to which i can never sufficiently respond: i don’t know why i’m here, and no one can provide me with an adequate answer.

so, a moment of brutal honesty from me: on a certain level, being a feminist allows me to channel a bigger, unaddress-able anger into an arena in which i feel there can be right and wrong answers, and right and wrong actions. this gives me a feeling of control, however specious it may be, that i utterly lack in other ways.

it lets me feel like i’m winning the battle, even though i have no idea whether or not i’ll win the war.




*mind you, i’m not going back on any of the other reasons i think the victim position could be valid – and i’m certainly not saying it’s invalid – just ruminating on some other implications.

vindication via the internet.

oh, how i laughed when i saw this headline on yahoo this morning:

Short Term Anger Can Be Beneficial

then i realized i had long term anger, so i'm screwed.

and then i also realized that i don't trust the "studies" that yahoo and it's ilk publicize farther than i could throw them, so it's a moot point anyway.

but still, i'm posting it for your viewing pleasure.

the things you notice.

so there's a guy who lives in my neighborhood. well, i assume he lives in my neighborhood, because i repeatedly see him walking past the gym when i'm there. he's a pretty average guy - probably early 30s, asian, shy of 6' with a pretty stocky build - just painting you a basic picture here. this guy would not be remarkable at all amidst the flotsam and jetsam of the city, except that he is always wearing a hawaiian shirt. and i mean always. i've probably seen the guy 35 or 40 times, and every time he is wearing a hawaiian shirt.

so tonight i spun circles on the elliptical machine and i wondered, what sort of pathology leads one to only wear hawaiian shirts? something more basic, like a black t-shirt or a white button-down, would be a bit more understandable. still strange, but not beyond the realm of normalcy. but hawaiian shirts? every day? in chicago??

i apologize for the over abundance of italics in this post, but i am truly at a loss here.

i wonder what his apartment looks like.

signs of life.

it's almost too much to hope for. Shakespeare's Sister has a picture from page A1 of the Washington Post today, and it is something else. the second coming of...democratic leadership?

i was beginning to think that term was an oxymoron.

check out the creative captions for the pic in Shakes Sis's comment thread too...

oh dear lord.

can i just note that, in my sick day stupor, i almost found myself watching Goldie and Kate: The True Hollywood Story.

now i likes myself some E! just as much as the next gal, but that is unconscionable.

blaming the victim.

i am home from work today. the combination of the four hour board meeting and a low-level sore throat i've had for the last week has rendered me useless to nonprofitland. so here, finally, is the overdue musing on feminism and victimhood promised last weekend. rudimentary and rambling, but here nonetheless.

why is it so bad to be a victim? feminists often complain about the “blaming the victim” phenomenon, which is an abhorrent practice (you’d think by now the phrase “she was asking for it” would have been thoroughly eradicated from our collective lexicon. you’d be wrong). but on the other hand, third wave feminism is very, very reluctant to take on the subject position of victim. hugo notes:

i don't know many authentic feminist scholars and instructors who are intent on convincing young women that they are being victimized by the big bad patriarchy.

he’s correct – feminist activism has consciously moved away from pointing out victimization to preaching empowerment. i think that this is, in many ways, an understandable development. on a practical level, there is less technical, legal discrimination and victimization of women (though we still weren’t able to pass the ERA, so this doesn’t exactly give me the warm fuzzies). on a theoretical level, i can see that it makes more sense to take the active position of empowering oneself than the passive position of being victimized by external forces. no one wants to feel powerless - it’s much more enjoyable to feel empowered.

but in all of this clamoring for empowerment, have we lost the ability to make people see why women deserve to be empowered in the first place? are we unable to convince people that the reason we need empowerment is that we still lack societal and cultural power? women are still victimized, all the time, all over the world. we are victims of sexual harassment. we are victims of rape. we are victims of pay inequity. we are victims of impossible beauty standards. we are victims of double standards. we are victims, every day.

why are we so ashamed to admit that? why are feminists less inclined to stand up and point out these injustices, the victimizations big and small, as they continue to happen? are we “blaming the victim” ourselves?

i’m trying to think about how narratives about women’s strength, courage, and conviction could possibly work together with the continuing, eye-opening disclosure of women’s victimization to further the cause of women’s equality. are these two phenomenons somehow mutually exclusive?

i don’t think they should be.