Related to nothing

Roommates who refuse to buy toilet paper yet leave passive aggressive notes around the house about EVERYTHING else deserve to be shot.

Buy some fucking toilet paper you cheap ass bastard. It's been 6 months already!

"they’re viewed as soft and less intelligent"

It's nearly Mother's Day, a holiday that I hate with the fiery fury of a blazing sun.

First- a rant about women who buy into the whole mommy fetish bullshit.

Our house is across the street from a very popular local park. On sunny days, there is no street parking. Lucky for us, we have a driveway that will fit 2 cars in tandem. It means there is a lot of parking hokey pokey when the roommate parked at the back needs to get out, but we deal and the street is left to the park goers.

Friday, Ruth had to go to work (and just to make this story a little more tragic- her job is scribing for disabled people on college math tests) and found that our driveway had been completely blocked in by a fucking Prius. (Now I'm as green as any poor person can be, which is greener than even your biggest eco-snob, but Seattle Prius drivers are a bunch of sanctimonious turds). She called to have the car towed and got to work late on the bus.

Several hours later (at least 3) and a pregnant blonde rings the doorbell.

Pregnant Blonde: Was there a problem with my Prius?

Me: Yeah. You blocked our driveway and my roommate was late to work.

PB: (giggling) Sorry, must be pregnant brain.

Me: I've got a 14 year old, I've been pregnant. It never made me thoughtless and stupid.

And then- just because I am a bitch but not really cruel I asked if she'd called someone for a ride and shut the door on her when she said yes.

I get bitchy with women mothers who buy into the mommy fetish bullshit. Women who act like the miracle of pregnancy (not really a miracle with current population levels) makes them special little snowflakes of purity and bliss and unaccountability to anything but their stomach. I want to punch in the face of women who act like the one true calling of everywoman is to be a SAHM. I get bitchy when people call me "Kid's Mom" or refuse to acknowledge my last name (different from the Kid's). I get bitchy with people who want to put me on a pedestal of martyrdom because at one point I chose to give birth. If I were a little less white looking or had a slightly more urban (or rural) speech patterns, those same people would be tisk tisking over my being a mother.

So for mother's day- skip the cards and the flowers and the brunch (though I'll take the mimosas, thankyouverymuch). Those crappy items don't make up for the real harm we do in treating mothers like precious little flowers one day of the year and unpaid idiot servants for the rest of it. Here's my wish list for a REAL Mother's day.

1. An end to the mommy wage gap.

2. Universal preschool and college

3. Paid parental leave and sickdays for everyone.

4. Child support enforcement that DOESN"T leave 70% of cases in arrears

5. Universal healthcare that includes birth control and abortion services

6. For mothers to succeed in their careers the same way fathers have been able to.

The title for this post came from this post about the women currently being looked at for the Supreme Court. All are childless and single. Some of my favorite heroines of history (Tina Modotti and Dororthy Parker and Jane Austen) couldn't or didn't have children. And that may be a huge reason why they were able to have careers when others didn't. Wouldn't it be nice if we had the same kind of options for parenting and working that men do? Wouldn't it be nice if we could do both and be properly compensated for it?

But first WE have to stop buying into our own bullshit. No using pregnancy as an excuse for stupidity. No accepting faux glorification instead of cold hard cash for staying home with the kids. We have been too good at making the best of a bad situation for way too long. Time to make the situation good for all mothers (and fathers too).

Please- go Galt already!

It's beginning to become the standard refrain of the haves when they are about to be "punished" for their misdeeds. If we take away corporate bonuses, then no one with the kind of talent that led to the financial collapse will want to work in banking and finance anymore. If we make the rich pay taxes, then they will leave for their own private islands.

Now Rethuglikan "thinkers" (I use that term very very generously) say that if we prosecute civil servants for their role in torture, then we will have no civil servants left.

Please, please take your torture ball and go home. Theses are not the best and brightest that we need, now or ever.

A dirty little secret from a feminist mommy

When I was pregnant with the Kid, I wanted a boy. Not because of family names or because boys are inherently better than girls. I was a bit terrified of what kind of mother I'd be to a girl. In my family, boys are so coddled and loved that we might as well be Chinese or Indian, and girls suffer. That's how it is. And at 19 years old, I didn't know if I had the skills to break that family tradition. I didn't want to do to my daughter what had been done to me, or to my mother and aunts. Having a boy meant that I could skip all the reprogramming my brain would need. A boy I could just love, a girl would require much more serious therapy.

I've always been a feminist, from the time I was a little girl. It was always glaringly obvious to me how unfair it was that I was the one who got blamed for a messy house or who had to put their needs aside in favor of my brother. My mom showed up to every one of my brother's baseball games (which he hated playing) but never went to single one of my volleyball or softball games, never came to watch me cheer a football or basketball game, and only showed up to state cheering competition when I begged. By the time I was the Kid's age, my mom was doing everything she could to push me out of the house including moving into homes where everyone had a bedroom but me(and my anger at the whole situation made me happy to leave). Girls in my family are supposed to work their asses off, all the time. Boys get pats on the head just for trying.

It wasn't until I cut off contact with my mother that I started examining the minutia of feminism, the things beyond access to work and reproductive rights. By that time, the Kid was 8. If he had been a girl, that poor child would have had 8 years of a life with a horrible parent. I've made some mistakes with the kid, but overall I've been a good mom to him. If he had been a girl, I don't know that would have been true until a few years ago.

Please understand, this isn't because girls are more difficult children. They aren't. I cringe whenever someone says things like " be thankful he's a teenage boy and not a girl, then you'd be in real trouble". The only thing that makes girl babies harder to raise is that society hates them so fiercely, and that parents are part of society. If the kid was a girl, right now I would be dealing with creepy middle aged men (and teenage ones too) who think growing boobs means a girl is asking to be sexually harassed. I would be walking a fine line between trying to keep her safe from rape without making her feel that not being raped is her responsibility. I would be trying to teach her that she is beautiful but that is not all she is when every message she gets from the world says that she must fix her physical flaws or no one will love her. The Kid is chubby, but if he was a chubby girl (highly likely given our genes) I'd be struggling with keeping him healthy and keeping him from an eating disorder (or an exercise disorder with a mild case of orthorexia- which is what I had). The biggest struggle I have with a chubby boy is finding pants that fit, and now that he wears grown up clothes it's much easier.

Everytime I make the kid do the dishes is an act of feminist rebellion. The rule of the house is either you do the cooking or you do the clean up. But if he was a girl, I would just be reinforcing the idea that the house is the responsibility of the woman. My brother, at 32 years old, hasn't washed a dish in forever. And I know cause he used to pay me to wash his dishes and do his laundry and clean his bathroom. The Kid knows how to scrub a toilet and used to help me with paid cleaning gigs.

Until a few years ago, I wouldn't have even recognized most of these things as issues. I might have blindly gone into things in the exact same way my mother did. And at 19, I knew that there were all these tiny issues that needed to be dealt with, but I didn't know what they were. So when the ultra-sound revealed that he was a boy, I felt relieved. This I could do. I could be a good mom to him.

Now 15 years later, I could be a good mom to a girl. Now there wouldn't be an 8 year lag between me figuring my shit out and becoming a better parent. Now, most of the baggage from my horrid childhood wouldn't be passed on to a girl child.

So when I read this, I took a deep breath and made a wish for this woman's daughter.

RQ cooks- half assed Spanish rice

It's the half of the month where dinner becomes "interesting" because we are scraping the bottom of the fridge and the wallet. Last weekend the awesome produce stand down the street had roma tomatoes on sale for 39 cents a pound, so I made a bucket of pico de gallo and we had tacos (2x) and tortilla soup (half assed again cause we had no actual meat to put in it) and casadillas with cheese and avocados.

Last night I was soooo tired of anything Mexican flavored that I bought a cheap pack of pork ribs and we had that and half assed rice pilaf for dinner with a pile of lettuce for something green. Anyways, this recipe comes from the leftover rice (basically white rice made with chicken stock instead of water).

In a large skillet, heat up some oil. Add in finely diced onions and cook till a little blackened. Add half a diced bell pepper and then the leftover chicken rice. Add some minced garlic and turn heat to medium.

Now spices. Generously add some chili powder, paprika, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes. Add a wee bit of cumin if you like (cumin goes a long way). At this point the rice is probably getting a bit crispy. You need to add some liquid.

You can use chicken stock or water, but my creative ass drained the liquid out of the remaining pico and poured that in. Once it was almost all dried out I added the remains of the pico (at this point about half a cup) and cooked till the liquid was gone.

Now I am typing and happily stuffing my gullet with yummy goodness. And pico de gallo week is officially over. Maybe next week will be 18 ways to eat pesto or potatoes.