Category Archives: Random Musings

Conversations With Mom

My brother and I were at Mom’s the other day and we were talking about the “Hunger Games” movie that is coming out soon and trying to decide if we were going to see it or not.  We were rehashing the first “Hunger Games” move and both thought that it was an ok movie with nothing except the occasional stunning visual to show for it.  We decided to see the second movie only if nothing else was showing at the time.

Mom cuts into the conversation at this point and states, “I just saw the ‘Hunger Games’ movie this past week and I didn’t like it at all.”, giving her universally known face of disappointment.  My brother and I were both surprised at this because it was far from a bad movie even if there was nothing outstanding about.  We begin to inquire as to what exactly she didn’t like about it when she realizes, “Oh, wait, I saw ‘The Crying Game’ this week, not ‘Hunger Games’.”

We all have a great laugh as I quip, “You can tell the difference because ‘Hunger Games’ has 100% fewer penises than ‘The Crying Game’ does.”

Most Fulfilling Job Ever

What is your ideal for the most fulfilling job you can think of?  I think partly just because you would consider something a job means there is something unfulfilling about it.  A completely fulfilling job would likely then be a beloved hobby that you happen to be lucky to get paid for.

Since we’re living in fantasyland anyway, I am going to go off the reservation a bit and just make up a job as my idea of the most fulfilling job.  My most fulfilling job would be taking DNA samples of white supremacists and letting them know how many black people they were related to.  It would be extra fulfilling if I could tell them they were related to Barack Obama.

Now I Want A Spongebob Squarepants Gravestone

I am in the minority that thinks Spongebob Squarepants is decidedly unfunny.  I am also in the minority that thinks burying bodies in a giant field filled with other bodies and markers identifying who the body was when it was alive is a decidedly silly idea.  Combine the two and it somehow seems to work.  It’s a shame that the cemetery changed their mind and decided to remove the gravestone.  It’s good to see that they seem to have acknowledged their mistake and are paying for replacements.

So let it be known that if I can get a Spongebob headstone, I give my full permission to bury my body underneath said headstone in a cemetery somewhere.  If not, I want my family to completely disavow any knowledge of me and let the State do whatever it wants with my remains (donated to science!).  They should then throw a giant party inviting all who know me.  There should be lots of food and even more drink.  New relations should be forged and old rivalries forgotten.  As many hookups as normally happen at weddings should also occur.  In short, it should be a grand celebration of life instead of a doleful mourning of death.

I Am A Bitch Ass

I have always strongly suspected such, but it was confirmed to me on the train ride in to work this morning.  I am a bitch ass.

I get on the train this morning and surprise of all surprises, there is a seat available right behind the conductor’s compartment.  None of the standing people seem eager to take it so I swoop in and sit down.  A connecting train comes in and a few more people get on including an older woman who is legally blind.  No one near the doors offers her their seat so I get up and walk over to her and offer her my seat and guide her over.  I am now standing up in that awkward part near the front of the train car where there is a lot of space but not much room to hang on.  There is still space in front of the two seats that face the middle of the car so I grab onto the pole and start reading my book.

Seated in the space right next to the pole is a lanky teenage looking kid with legs spilling out farther into the aisle than is necessary.  It’s not a big deal, though, he has room and I have room.  He leans over and mumbles something to me in a sleepy, half awake voice but I can’t understand what he’s saying.

“Sorry, what?”, I ask him.

“Could you move somewhere else?  There’s room in front of the door.”

I look to the door that people will be entering and leaving from and there is, indeed, some room.  But it’s the door that people use to get on and off, there’s supposed to be room.

He continues mumbling, “I don’t like people standing in front of me.”

I’m sure at this point I had some strange expression on my face; half bemusement, half incredulity.  I’m not sure if the guy is high as a kite or just tired and I don’t think it would be very productive to explain to him the finer points of train etiquette and my philosophy of proper standing arrangements given how full the train is currently and is expected to be.  So instead, I answer, “That’s tough.  Sorry.”, and continue to read my book.

The young man proceeds to mumble stuff under his breath with the only intelligible words being “bitch ass” making the woman sitting next to him more uncomfortable than he’s making me.  He also stretches out his legs making sure that they come in contact with mine.  Being a train riding veteran, bodily contact doesn’t bother me.  I just smile and continue to read, a “bitch ass” softly rising to my ears every once in a while.

The very next stop, one of the sitters gets up and leaves the train.  The woman that is standing in my favorite standing spot tells me that I can have the seat so I sit down.  The young man immediately sprawls his legs into the aisle in front of him making it impossible for anyone to use that space to stand. He looks my way every once in a while with a “bitch ass” on his tongue before pulling his cap over his eyes in an attempt to sleep.

As I exit the train at my stop, I pass the young man and he makes it a point to stare directly at me as I leave the train.  “Bitch ass” greets me as the train doors open.  I meet his eyes and give him my best grimace smile as I walk out the door.

The Porno I Would Make

One of the major train lines into the city was shut down this morning due to a suspicious package being found at one of the stops.  This, of course, got me to thinking about pornography.

If I were to make a porno, it would be called “Suspicious Packages”.  In it, a crack unit of the police force, all female of course, would be called in to investigate suspicious packages throughout the city.  The packages in question would be men just laying around in bus terminals, train stations, and airports.  The women would have to poke and prod them to try to figure out what makes them tick (Which we all know is an impossible task, am I right ladies?).  They would then have to work on “disarming” the men all while engaging in conversations about various feminist issues.  There would also be a guy that the women can’t figure out how to disarm and they would have to call in a specialist which would end up being a gay guy.  Because my pornos would be equal opportunity pornos.  There would be jokes about controlled explosions and premature ejaculation and such as well.  One of the guys would “explode” leading to the hospitalization of some of the ladies and they would have to go to the hospital to be nursed back to health.  Oh, and there just HAS to be a scene with a bomb disposal robot.

A sex-positive, female-positive, funny porno.  This really needs to be made.  Time to start writing a script!

The Meaning Of Life

I can think of no greater instruction on how to live your life that what Tim Minchin mentions here:

I have been an admirer for a long time, but this definitely puts him in the category of people I want to have in my neighborhood.  I imagine him in some sort of M.C. Echeresque house for some reason.

DAWWWWWWWWWW!

I used to have a Siberian husky.  This reminds me of him playing in the snow.  Also, what a beautiful yard for a husky.  I wonder how they managed to keep it devoid of holes.

[youtube http://youtu.be/7xEX-48RHCY]

Tennis Anyone?

I started playing tennis again recently.  I didn’t really start playing tennis until around 10 years ago when I lived in the burbs.  Then I moved into the city and took lessons for a while, but the classes I knew about were pretty easy and I didn’t have anyone near my level to play so I stopped going.  Then a friend mentioned that she was taking lessons and I was all like “I should do that too!”  So I did.

We joined a level three class which went only for a month and the first two classes were embarrassing at how much I had forgotten, but I quickly got back into the groove after that and settled in nicely.  But then, due to the weird vagaries of the park district, there was a month off before the next class started and the next class was two months long.  Despite the fact that I signed up only a day after registration started, the level three class was full so I figured I would just try the level four class.

The level four class is kicking my ass.  Two weeks in and I’ve gotten a blister on my thumb in different places both weeks.  I cannot remember the last time I’ve had a blister on my hand and now I have one two weeks in a row.  Revenge of the programmers hands, I guess.  This is mostly because I am easily the weakest of the players in the class.  My only saving grace is that I have really good reflexes and anticipation.  The class itself is very good for me because I am actually being challenged.  It’s not just an hour lesson, it’s an hour workout.  By the time I’ve stopped playing because I tore open my blister, I am gasping for breath.

The level three class that I would have joined runs at the same time as ours and I look over there every once in a while and it really is amazing at how much of a difference there is between the two levels.  There are a few level three people that are about my skill level, but most are much worse.  It’s like level three is filled with people who want to waste an hour playing tennis and level four is filled with people that want to play tennis.

All that to say, if you know me and you’re decent at tennis, we should play sometime.

File This Under Sucks To Be You

(via)

Imagine you are a medical photographer at the University of Birmingham Medical School.  You go about your business day after day documenting patients and their medical conditions and head back to your darkroom to develop your prints.  It’s 1978, you’re young, all is right in the world.  Suddenly, you fall ill and develop a rash on your body.  No big deal, you think, everybody falls ill occasionally.  Only you get worse and are admitted to the hospital.  There, the doctors tell you, “You know that, perhaps, greatest achievement of the 20th century where we totally kicked smallpox’s ass and now it doesn’t exist anymore?  Yeah, well, it turns out it still does.  In you.  Surprise!”  Poor Janet Parker.

On September 11th, 1978, Janet Parker became the very last person on Earth to die of smallpox.  She didn’t work with it, but the hospital did and her darkroom just happened to be just above the laboratory where they were working with it.  It turns out that their containment procedures at the school were a little lax.  A few others close to Janet also contracted smallpox from her, but none of them died.  The sad part is that, thirteen years earlier, this exact same thing happened to another medical photographer that worked in the same darkroom!  That also resulted in a tiny outbreak, but no one died.

Oddly enough, the one thing that struck me the most about this is the name Janet Parker.  This was a woman!  There was a female medical photographer in 1978.  That has to be a bit of a rarity for back then, I would think.  Or maybe they were kind of the same thing as nurses back then.

Gendered Pronouns: Great Evil Or Greatest Evil?

I have long despised gendered languages.  Partly because it makes them more difficult to learn, having to memorize both a word and the gender that goes along with that word.  Mostly, though, because it’s always struck me as fairly sexist.

The language we speak has been shown to change the way we think about things.  There have been studies of gendered languages which show that if a noun is feminine in one language and masculine in another, it actually changes the words individuals use to describe the noun.  As a made up example so you understand what I’m talking about , take the word “chair”.  If “chair” is a masculine noun in a language, people were more likely to use more masculine descriptions like “sturdy” or “solid”.  If “chair” is a feminine noun in a language, people were more likely to use more feminine descriptions like “elegant” or “dainty”.

Because of the lack of gendered nouns, I have always thought of English as superior to other languages.  English is illogical, self-contradicting, and phonetically unpronounceable, but at least it doesn’t have gendered nouns!  It does have gendered pronouns, though.  They’re really just as bad.  Maybe worse, even.  At least gendered nouns aren’t talking about an individual. Gendered pronouns change the way we think about an individual and reveal our own prejudices.

Think about this sentence: She jogs in the park every morning.  The word “she” in that sentence offers zero pertinent information into the forming of the sentence.  What it does is form a picture in your mind of a female jogging.  Chances are, if you’re a cis male, that female is also shapely and well endowed and bounces in all the right places.  It’s certainly a pleasant image to have, but it is also likely nothing close to reality.  The sentence itself has altered our reality.

It’s a fairly benign example.  Try this experiment, though.  Take a sheet of paper and a pen and write down the first things you think of when you read this sentence:  She was raped.  Get it all down before you go any further.  What did you write?  If you’re like me, it would be a laundry list of victim blaming nonsense interspersed with some sympathetic words.  I am one of the least likely to victim blame, but our culture is so infused with victim blaming that they’re the first words that come to mind.  Now try the same thing with this sentence:  He was raped.  For me, it was much more difficult to come up with things to write.  Did you have the same experience?  Maybe you wrote something about prison or dropping a bar of soap?  Why does the altering of a pronoun so greatly change our view of an unforgivable act?

I wonder how completely neutering our language would alter the way we think about things.  I’ve spent some time trying to come up with genderless pronouns for the English language but everything just sounds weird.  Making up words is harder than it sounds.  ‘It’, as a pronoun, already has connotations of non-humanness that would make it impossible to use as a replacement.  I’m somewhat partial to using the Italian word ‘lei’ because I’ve always been fascinated by it being both the word for ‘she’ and the formal word for ‘you’ and I like the way it sounds.  I also like the word ‘ser’ which is ‘to be’ in Spanish because it sounds English-y and already has a etymology of being built into it.  What words would you be in favor of?

It would be a fascinating experiment to take public domain works and replace all the gendered pronouns and nouns with genderless equivalents and see how it changes our thinking of the stories.  Imagine a love story where you’re never quite know who is the male and who is the female character.  Imagine a poem where you’re not sure if it was written for a male or a female.  I think we would find that our gender prejudices are much deeper than we suppose them to be.