channonyarrow

I have comprehended a new thing.

I get really uncomfortable the very rare times that someone says, essentially, "Are you married?" as the follow up to finding out my name and clearly as the preface to asking me out. For a while, I figured that it was because my skeeve radar goes off - I am not the sort of person you just ask out, ask anyone who's seen me - and I distrust why you would ask and assume it has something to do with a lifelong desire to have someone you can debase and abuse and rah rah, my self-esteem is showing again.

But now I get it. (Yes, it bugs me for several hours when it happens, because I get annoyed that I evidently project "easily victimised" on all spectra.)

It bugs me because you don't even care to know me.

When the sum total of the information exchanged is "Hi, I'm so and so, I was watching you across the room," (or similar) and I say "Nice to meet you, I'm thus-and-such," DO NOT FOLLOW THIS UP BY SAYING "So, are you married?"

Hand to god, I will start responding to this with "No, and obviously we're totally compatible, because we are both carbon-based."

I like to laugh at the relationship surveys as much as anyone else, I really do. I like to mock Cosmo and the rest of them just like I like to mock cheerleaders, Oregon, and the colour mauve.

But dude, let me tell you: asking me if I'm married means that you don't even care. Srsly. If you really, truly, gave a shit (and didn't want someone you thought you could beat into catering to your filthy fetishes and living in your basement wrapped in only a burlap sack) you might want to try asking ... oh, maybe about ANYTHING I HAVE INDICATED I CARE ABOUT, given that I'm standing in the tech department and acting vaguely teacherly today. There are THINGS THAT COULD BE DISCUSSED HERE.

We could: find out that we're in a similar course for a similar reason! That we both really like X, Y, and Z! That we've both had Access/Visual Basic/Web Servers/Underwater Basket Weaving, and that we both found it fun/challenging/bloody impossible/ticklish! That we think the weather is being awfully crappy lately, but it looks like the sun is coming out! That I don't like X cuisine, but you know a fantastic X restaurant, meet you there at six? (Okay, whatever, I know that sounds like dialogue from a lame seventies movie.)

Apparently, Cosmo actually got it right: women like to be friends first.

In short, saying "Are you married?" when ALL YOU KNOW IS MY BLOODY NAME, is saying "I don't care about you as a person AT ALL," even if you don't think it is. You may think it's the most pragmatic statement ever, because it indicates that you'd like to ask me out, and it might even be that you choked in the clutch and said the wrong thing.

However: it reeks of desperation. If I were the sort to accept desperate offers, I would be living in Pakistan with some guy I met in a gay club in Valencia years ago. It's also REALLY FUCKING ANNOYING, because I am fundamentally tempted, every fucking time, to say "No, but I only got out of jail a week ago." Or "No, but only because I ate my husband." Or "No, but I'll marry you if you'll be my getaway driver - I think the cops are on their way." Or even "No, how big's your life insurance policy?"

At least ask me out, first! It's my job to say that my husband/wife/god/dog forbid it! That's how you get to know people!

I do not negotiate with terrorists, I do not pay with only pennies at the store, and I do not cater to desperation.

I also totally love the double shot of looking racist when I turn people down. "It's not your race I object to, it's the fact that you want it to rub the lotion on its skin that I object to."

I also have trouble believing that I'm discoursing on the art of getting a date. Let's take off the eau d'desperation and talk about other things! Like that you should not ask YOUR INSTRUCTOR (ie, me) whether I know X person at Hempfest. I hate to say it, because I LIKE hemp (hemp, not, not, not (infinitely fucking NOT) weed) as a concept. I think we should use more of it! I think it's awesome, ecologically friendly, and makes fucking durable paper. I also like hippies! I AM a hippie (in designer boots).

But, and I hate to say it because it turns me into my mother, I don't think "Ah, Hempfest - a joyous celebration of the miracle of hemp, which is totally ridiculously and arbitrarily mistreated by the government."

Instead, I think "Ah. You're one of the dicksmacks who ruins every fucking music festival I ever go to, you stoner bastard. Let me take your totally private and personal drug and jack it up a totally private and personal region of your body; I still haven't forgiven you for the business about looking for the cops under the fucking bed."

Bonus points, of course, if you also tell me that you've designed LOTS of web pages already, and you TOTALLY know what you're doing, even though you:
a) cannot put your style code in the right place;
b) cannot use the right fucking code in the first place wtf (wtf because I had LITERALLY WRITTEN IT ON THE BOARD);
c) cannot figure out how to upload an image to your server;
d) do not listen when I explain the somewhat complicated process;
e) do not even realise that I explained the process;
f) clearly cannot hear me over the sound of your own awesome ... which is obviously why you're taking an evidently (supposedly) remedial course in web design and I am instructing it. Like, for money and shit.

I am just on a tear today.

Oh, and other!dude? If you come back to my lab again and sit there and play games, I will throw you out. I haven't forgotten that you're Broken USB Drive Guy, and I hate you.

Aside from all that, I failed to file my unemployment today because I was in so much pain I forgot, I have like WAAAAAAY too many fucking textbooks to read this weekend (I get to do remedial networking AND remedial Operating Systems because I don't have the slightest clue what a kernel is, or a web garden, but the one makes me hungry and the other makes me think of bees, because dude ... worker processes? Yes, I AM a Mac.) and I need a Sherpa for Fridays because hauling 2 computers, FIVE textbooks, a calendar, and my files/power cords/etc around really sucks.

Seriously. I picked my purse today because I could put two of my damn textbooks in it. This apparently triggered the textbook gnomes, and my bossish person gave me four fucking more.

To read over the weekend.

Last point: I hate pirates, I hate Simplicity, and I hate sleeves, and I want to finish the fucking coat so I can post the pictures of it, but I also want to NEVER finish the fucking coat, because the fucking coat is fucking evil. I may buy a camera, but I also may save that money and pour it directly down my throat, in the form of bottles of gin, because that would be less painful.

How are you?

I need to invent a way of drawing little pictures that can be attached to an email so that "visually-oriented" people can GET WHAT I AM SAYING TO THEM, without assuming - because they apparently understand NOTHING I have told them = that I am actually emailing them to say something like, instead of "I'm having trouble with step fourteen, but steps 1-13 went perfectly," "I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE FUCK I AM DOING AND MADE A MARTINI OF SLUGS INSTEAD OF MANAGING TO CHANGE THE ALTERNATOR."

DO NOT, in fact, start me at the invention of paper when I ask you whether you have a preferred format you want my homework header in. DO NOT assume that I have not worked out what "arms" are when discussing my stint as an international ping pong star.

Seriously, it MASSIVELY pisses me off when people only read the first sentence of an email and then take a great big guess to get the rest of it. I'll put up with it - rudely - from tech support once, but Jesus, really? This is how you function in the world, by patronising the hell out of people who know what they're doing and have asked you ONE specific question, which is not met by answering with an exegesis on the origin of string?

ALSO, it is FUCKING FREEZING. I may never get out of bed today, as long as I can solve the inevitable problem of my arms getting frostbite and dropping off.

No, I'm serious - IT IS THIRTY-NINE DEGREES OUT. WHY? I live in a temperate zone! This is not temperate! This is VILE.

I think the phrase BLOODY FURIOUS suits my mood, ACTUALLY.

See, when I CHOOSE a product BASED ON what it says on the box: "Each typeface was hand selected to inspire creativity and add life to any personal or business project," (emphasis mine) DO NOT FUCKING TELL ME, IN THE FUCKING README AFTER I INSTALL YOUR FUCKING PRODUCT, that "The fonts contained on this CD-ROM may be used for personal use only."

IN FACT, INCLUDE YOUR FUCKING DOCUMENTATION IN PRINT SO THAT I CAN SEE IT WHEN I OPEN THE FUCKING BOX, YOU COCKSMOKING DICKSMACKS.

According to Apple, however, SINCE THE BOX SAYS "personal or business project", and, also according to Apple, sometimes the readme is not all-inclusive (I don't even KNOW) it's fine to use them for commercial use. ASSUMING anyone comes looking for me, I WILL TELL THEM that their FUCKING PACKAGING says "business project" and that APPLE SAYS the readmes may be wrong. (I don't even know.)

FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU.

I'm not buying from this company again: your product needs to be AS ADVERTISED, and the advertisement was: BUSINESS USE OKAY.

This is reason ONE of about TWENTY that I intend to BITE THE WORLD TODAY. FUCK THE WORLD, I'M GOING TO WIN.

I feel compelled to make this post a good 'un because I have new people on my flist who have evidently friended me because apiphile says I'm even angrier than she is. Also, I haven't said much about politics in a LONG while (here's how long: my real political posts are on my website, which I haven't updated in donkeys. Also, they're all bitching about GW.). So politics + anger should make for some fun times.

I am blatantly cribbing some of this from a conversation I had with graeae over the weekend, but since I have the memory span of a goldfish, it's possible that I will forget things. But some of the ideas come from that convo.

I was reading spam today, as one does, when one is unemployed and single and the apartment is already mostly clean and one's issues with contacting people are making getting a new job a bitch. I've had a few emails from some group called MomsRising.org; imagine my confusion when I realised that this was, actually, a forward from my semi-pro email account. Evidently, despite not being a mother, and not giving one tiny shit that 1.2 million children have now lost their health care, I signed up for this at some point. I guess.

The premise of the email is one I've seen several times, and this is where I start to lose my shit. Tell Congress to move quickly to make this promise a reality on Day One of the Obama Presidency by a quick and fully-funded reauthorization of SCHIP.

I've seen this elsewhere on the internet. Right now, Obama is supposed to save children, Gaza, and *insert your pet cause here* by, at the latest, Day 100 of his presidency. I have actually seen someone call Obama's presidency "failed" because he's not doing whatever the fuck they wanted him to do - I don't think that was in the context of Gaza, but it might have been. Or it might have been because, yanno, he wants Reverend Wright to do his thing at the Inauguration.

This is insane.

1) Obama is the President-elect. Not the president. As such, he cannot do these things prior to taking office. Even though, as Barney Frank said recently, saying that we have only one president at a time is overstating the case on how many presidents we have right now, he cannot do anything other than what a senator may do right now.

2) There are other problems in line before yours. The economy leaps to mind. The environment needs to get started on - I say this, by the way, from Seattle, where we are completely cut off from the rest of the United States: due to heavy snowfall and avalanche danger, both US 2 and I-90 across the mountains are closed, and I-5 has at least three feet of water over the roadway south of Chehalis; it's expected to hit ten feet, even with pumping and a manmade levee breach, before it crests. Getting some of the more pernicious acts of our previous "president" out of the way leaps to mind, as well - as graeae pointed out, Bush has made it, currently, so that the documents relevant to his presidency remain secret, not only in his lifetime but may be held as secret by his heirs. Emperor Bush indeed.

3) Just because, as good liberals, we've endured eight years of the worst presidency America has had, with empire-building, a failed war, massive executive power increase and the sort of vice-presidential powers that not even Henry Kissinger dreamed of, that does not mean that it's now OUR turn and we get to fucking have ponies on the day that Obama takes office. For Chrissake, let the man figure out how to turn the phones on.

Now. Just to clarify one point: I take Gaza very seriously. I am pro-Palestine, all the way, and I can fucking back that opinion up; I did my Master's on the subject. I take health care (for ALL people) very fucking seriously indeed; as the child of a nurse, it would be hard not to. As someone who's lived for an extended period in England, it would be impossible not to. As someone who stands for everything that Reverend Wright opposes, I don't like his selection, but I'm not gonna kill anyone over it. So now you know my biases.

I drank the Obama Kool-Aid, and I drank it early and often. I was never a supporter of Clinton; while I would not have cried tears of blood at voting for her, I felt - and still feel - that Obama is a uniter, and Clinton is a policy wonk. We don't need a policy wonk right now. We need someone who can pull the two sides of this country back together and make ALL of us realise that whatever else we are, we are all Americans, and that we don't have to annex part of the county to get along. I also think that Obama is a very, very smart man who likes more than a little bit of Machiavelli in his politics; Clinton is a deal-maker who'll bargain to get what she wants, but Obama will convince you, and will make the gestures needed to get his point across: he is the president for ALL of America, not just the evangelicals (as Bush was not) or for the tree-huggers, or for the minorities, or for whatever sub-group you'd like to ascribe to him.

And now I'm watching his approval rating - 75% - with a lot of trepidation. Not because I think that Obama will do something wrong with that, but because he could. That's higher than Bush came into office with; that's higher than Bush had at any point in his presidency other than during 9/11, when he polled 90% (and let's be honest: he didn't look presidential then; it could have been Bozo the Clown in office and he would've scored that high.). He tapped 75% again with the declaration of the war, and it's been downhill ever since for ol' Bush.

Source.

Obama could use that approval rating to do anything. Anything at all. Keep the changes in executive power over the last presidency? You can have them! Refuse to reverse some of the policy decisions made by the Bush administration, such as family planning overseas? Go for it!* Want to nuke Pakistan? Knock yourself out!

I believe - because of the Kool-Aid - that Obama will do the right things with that rating, things that I approve of and can get behind. I also think that this addresses why he selected Wright for the Inauguration - if he'd not reached out to the conservatives who believe that his election mean that they're gonna get witch-hunted for not being pagan queers, he'd get nowhere. Whether liberals like it or not, there are fundamentalist conservatives in this country. And they're not going away.

But do you really think that Obama can fix everything on the first day? He's just gonna sign a bunch of legislation and that's it, we can all have a beer for the next four years? No. We did not get into these problems overnight. We're not getting out of them overnight, either. And the economy is the 800lb gorilla.

This is why all these calls for Obama to fix this on the first day/first 100 days drive me bananas. They don't recognise a basic fact. The man may be able to walk on water, without even having Air Jesus shoes, but he can't do everything. And - quite frankly - he would be fucking insane to try. Not merely because it can't be done but because he needs to do two things first: fix the economy, and unite the country.

There is no possibility that we could have a president left-wing enough for me. I am so far left I verge on communism, frankly. Perhaps that gives me some of the necessary distance here, but this pet cause business drives me nuts because it doesn't recognise reality. You are not the most special snowflake in the room. And expecting Obama to fix, in the first three months of his administration, all the things that Bush fucked up is unrealistic.

Anyway, if you didn't like it, why did you let Bush get away with it?

This is from the Declaration of Independence. Read it very fucking closely.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

The consent of the governed. It is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government.

This means that we have the right to overthrow the government if we don't like it. If it fails to provide for our unalienable rights - and certainly, I would argue that the Constitution and Bill of Rights, both of which have been thoroughly skullfucked in the last few years, posit an entire constellation of unalienable rights - then we have the right, even the obligation, to overthrow the government and try something new.

The 33% approval rating that Bush polled in May of 2006 would argue that two thirds of the American people agree that Bush was a shitty president.

Why was there no revolution?

Why did no one choose to take power back, take it away from the hands of the madmen we've allowed to run the country (into the ground) for the last four years?

I didn't, I know that. No one else did, either, though. No one figured out that we had the power, and we had the right and organised around that. Instead, we sent petitions and marched in demonstrations and protested quietly and bore witness - in a media state that did its damnedest to hide the numbers of those protesting, marching, angry. Hell, that tried to hide that such things - such dissent - was occurring.

There is a reason that we have the right to bear arms, by the way. I would argue that Bush, Cheney, et al are not necessary to the security of the state. They seem to be doing too good a job, even now, fucking us all over.

And there's the answer. Obama can't fix everything in the first day or first hundred days, or even first term, because none of us said, in any effective way, that enough was enough. None of us demanded loudly enough that our government be accountable to us again. None of us exercised our rights - so the mess got worse.

The mess, in fact, became almost im-fucking-possible to see through.

And now, armed only with the joy of some portion of the country at the fact that we have gone against type and elected a smart, competent man as president, Obama is supposed to fix this? Right now?

Are people actually out of their minds?

Evidently so.

Do not come to me with a demand for what Obama "should" do on the first day in office. Do not outline for me a plan of what you think Obama should do in his first hundred days. Do not tell me that everything will be better now.

Let's borrow a business maxim. You can do it fast, cheap, or well, and you have to pick two out of three. My corollary is that generally, fast and cheap go together. Well is the redheaded step child in this.

I'd rather he did it well. I'd rather that he, and his team, and Congress, thought about things before rushing right into the briar patch. I'd rather that you and I and everyone have to deal with the consequences of our own fucking inaction for a while longer.

Because maybe that will remind us next time: we are not obligated to sit still for a president like Bush.


* I have to note here, I don't necessarily think Bush did a bad thing with that, frankly. I am pro-choice - but I also live in a society where the value of a fetus is not, generally speaking, determined by whether or not it's male or female. In countries where that is the context, the statement of "Pro-choice means no choice" is accurate. Otherwise, female babies are aborted in vastly disproportionate numbers. Just something to think about, there.

We have a new hire in my department. I need to work on:

- not calling the new guy "Fresh Meat".
- not inviting him to the Holiday Party (yeah, I don't even know) to get him drunk and ask him pointed questions about commas and whether he's a total dick.
- not making any more jokes about goldfish and cells.
- not continuing to quote Munch's comment to Bayliss about how Bayliss isn't even on Munch's radar yet and won't be for several years.
- not figuring out how to booby-trap his cube. (Side note: we have no incandescent lightbulbs here.)
- not accepting bets on how fast I can make him cry.
- not being biased just because I haven't met him yet and everyone else has.
- not talking someone else into running a book on how quickly we can drive him out.
- not saving submissions to give him with an earnest look and ask for a second pass because they're "the next big thing" when I know they suck in the hopes that he'll quit in fear.
- not continuing to assume that he has no sense of humour (but it'll make him quit faster).
- not planning to invite everyone out for drinks the next week just to drink him under the table.
- not spreading rumours about our shared alma mater.

All of this by the end of January, when he actually starts. Damn. I can haz dominance issues!

October may well be Breast Cancer Awareness Month. We may well all have the opportunity to buy pink mixers, pink sewing machines, pink vacuums, pink rotary cutters, pink pinking shears, what-the-fuck-ever (and by the way, where the fuck are the pink hammers, pink solder guns, and pink floorjacks? Are they blue for prostate cancer?) and thereby demonstrate that we have some sort of social consciousness and absolutely no decorating scheme unless we'd LIKE to look like we live in a wedding cake, but I have my own sort of Awareness Month in mind here.

I am declaring October Breast Awareness Month, and I will kill anyone who uses the term "boob", particularly in a pseudo-inspirational "Breast Cancer Awareness Picture", featuring a little Hummel girl, or maybe it's Holly Hobby after a bad day with the Pepto-Bismol, and the slogan "Tickle me pink and find a cure before I grow boobs."

I just. What? What the fucking fuck is up with that? What? I don't even, look, my brain's in an aphasic spasm here. What? What?

Seriously. What?

NO. That is so very, very, very wrong! That is up there with all the other cutesy things we do to avoid calling things by their proper names (and okay, I am not a fan of some words either, but STILL FOR GOD'S SAKE, THIS IS COMPLETELY WRONG.) and somehow - somehow - it sort of, you know, defeats the purpose of calling it "Breast Cancer Awareness Month", if we're going to cute it up and paint it in pink and slap "boobs" on it! It's exactly the same as that theatre in Florida that censored the sign for "The Vagina Monologues" because some woman didn't want to tell her daughter what a vagina was! It is NOT empowering, it is NOT inspirational (not that I think ANY of the marketing around Breast Cancer Awareness Month is, but that's another post entirely) and it is NOTHING other than offensive and insulting, and it reduces us all to the level of third graders, giggling about boobs and peepees and whether our older siblings "do it".

ARGH!

Cancer, any cancer, is a serious fucking problem, people. It's SRS BZNS, and you know I'm serious when I lolcat. I, like everyone else on the planet, has lost friends and loved ones and has watched and helped where able as friends have struggled with it, to cancer, and I am NOT AMUSED. I am every bit as insulted as I am every time someone I know says something about boobs or tits to avoid using The Dreaded Word Breast. Are breasts REALLY that scary? If they are, someone needs to alert Homeland Security to the fact that fully half the population of the US (actually, slightly more) has either GOT a pair of them already or has the potential to have them, and we need to do something about that right. the. fuck. now.

We'll start by raising the terror alert level to pink.

If we can't call something by the right name, how can we assume that we're going to be able to find solutions to the problems? That's not a concept only relevant to breast cancer, either - that's relevant to everything we face as a problem - let's rename it so it's not scary.

Wrong.

Names have power, and calling something by the right name is a strong step in the right direction, because then we can quit giggling behind our hands and actually work on the problems rather than being amused-like-five-year-olds over fart jokes. Refusing to name something gives it power, not us, and I am not at all into that. Not if it's something we intend to have serious discourse about.

But, of course, we don't. Cancer beats us. Cancer is not something we can treat effectively, cancer is not something we can prevent effectively, it confuses us and it probably should, given that viruses have been around a lot longer than our monkey asses. (For reference, I'm using the last school of thought I heard, about ten years ago, that there might be a viral component to cancer - no idea if this has been proved or disproved, and I am in full bate anyway, so I fail to care.) And if we can't win, why would we talk about it?

This is why we talk about Iran instead of Iraq, Iraq instead of Nola, and EVERYTHING instead of climate change. So, perhaps, refusing to continue to call a part of everyone's body a boob, we could call breasts by their right name?

It might mean something if we did.

Oh good, they're doing it again. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/20/AR2006072001904.html?nav=rss_print/asection

For anyone who doesn't know, in the Nakhba, which I believe is the Israeli war of independence, the Israelis used rather interesting terrorist tactics to frighten a population that already believed itself unable to resist and in need of the promised relief by the rest of the Arab countries (help that never materialised). One was to have sound trucks drive around Arab neighbourhoods and cities, broadcasting - to a backdrop of the sounds of bombs exploding and fire bells clanging and generally alarming sounds - in Arabic that the people should flee now, the Israelis were coming, they had the nuclear bomb, they were going to use it, everyone should flee and trust in Allah to save them.

Of course, this is not something that people generally like to be reminded of, but then they also don't like to be reminded that in the Six Days War the Israelis bombed a US military ship in the eastern Med (that was flying the largest flag the captain could find; as I recall, it was a twenty foot flag, though that might be wrong) because they didn't want the US, which had made it clear they would not intervene, to listen to their radio transmissions.

And let's not forget that the largest supplier of arms to the Middle East, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of America's Twin Pillars arrangement with Iran, is Israel. Many of those arms are, interestingly enough, American ones that are not, in theory, supposed to leave the country they were "sold" to without express permission by the US. But of course, we ramped up the Cold War with the Soviets on artificial grounds, so it's reasonable to assume that the Israelis could learn from that tactic.

And then there's the final point that Hamas and Hezbollah, whatever their initial funding (in the case of Hezbollah, it was Iran) have been funded by Israel as a counter to the PLO, which was non-sectarian, because (since the Israelis haven't learned how to have a state that doesn't rely on great internal disagreement about religion) the idea of throwing a fundamentalist-Islamic group or two into the mix to counter the PLO just made sense. And, in fact, it worked. Really well.

As innocents are finding out now.