Have you ever

woken up after having a dream and just felt really really good and happy?

The actual content of the dream has not a lot to do with my mood, which is weird except that I often have dreams that don't match up with the physical world. I was once woken up by a boyfriend from a dead sleep where i was dreaming about Italian grocery workers organizing a union in the 1920's because the boyfriend thought I wanted to get frisky. I guess I was very wiggly in my sleep.

Anyways, the last thought I had right before waking up was "I want ice cream with all the stuff on it". I still want ice cream, but I feel all weird and happy and okay today. Go figure.

Moving on.

I jiggled some wires and got my compy to start up. It's working for now. I don't know how long it will last. But for right now I can type. Wheeeee.

I still don't have a summer job. I still don't know how I am going to pay rent next week or buy groceries tomorrow. But for today I am just going to bask in the unexplained happy feeling. It's all I got.

News you can't really use

My computer is dead. Dead dead dead. It's not a surprise really. It was old when I got it 5 years ago. It's been through 3 hard drives and 3 power supplies. It's been blue screening for a couple of weeks now. But this morning it finally gave up.

And since it's summer and there is no paycheck or temp work or money of any sort coming in until the end of October, there is no money to even try to fix it, let alone get a new one.

And Ruth and Bernard are leaving in just a few days. So while I can hijack one of their compys to check email for now, that won't be true for long.

So that's that.

OMG- this is sooooooooooooo cool!

Pee powered cars!


Seriously- piss like a racehorse is going to become piss in a racecar

RQ Cooks: Wild Rice Salad

Apparently this is the best thing I've ever made, judging by how fast it disappeared last night and how many people came back for seconds and thirds. It's a recipe I pulled out of my ass right before we went to the grocery store to shop for impromptu barb-b-que fixins.

I used a mix of wild and brown rice (cause wild rice is expensive). Just cook it like you normally would either on the stove top or in a rice cooker.

Then in a large bowl add

cherry or grape tomatoes, cut in half
an entire bunch of green onions, chopped (including the green parts)
a bunch of chopped flat leaf Italian parsley
a couple of large heads of garlic (I was lazy and didn't mince the garlic but just diced it)
juice from 3 or 4 large lemons
crumbled feta cheese

Normally I'd make the dressing from scratch, but I was all ready on my second Moscow Mule so I cheated and used some bottled Italian dressing (Newman's Own).

Add rice to the chopped veggies, drizzle with salad dressing and add salt and pepper to taste.

Nobody cares who you think is up to your standards of fuckability

One of the housemates has a relative visiting this weekend. The relative is more than a wee bit obnoxious. But he's family, so I'm polite mostly.

The Kid and I are having a Buffy-fest (I think it's a great show for teaching sex ed to kids, but that's a post for a whole other day)and the relative showed up in the middle season 5 last night. He sat down on the couch and proceeded to make comments on the hotness of every female actress on the show.

Me: Can we not do the commenting on the hotness of every actress please?

Relative: (in faux-frat boy sliminess) What? Is that NOT ALLOWED in this house?

Me: No. It's just tiresome and boring.

I had an ex boyfriend who used to do this. Watching a movie with him got to be such an exercise in frustration that I often dreamed of duct taping his mouth shut unless he was using his mouth for something interesting. When I complained about his running commentary, his response was "Don't be jealous baby, none of them are as hot as you".

That's not the point, and it's not jealousy or insecurities or anything actually having to do with me that is the problem. It's not my discomfort that needs to be fixed. It's their view that all women are to be judged first and foremost for their fuckablity and that their opinion on fuckability deserves respect. And when it comes to the relative, he thought his comments about hot lesbian love on Buffy should be shared in front of my kid, who I am watching Buffy with so that the Kid learns things like stalking is not the same as love (Spike) and making the perfect woman (Buffybot & April) is creepy and gross.

This isn't to say that finding people attractive is a bad thing. I would watch Clive Owen or Rachel Weisz or Kate Winslet sell tampons or laxatives. And there is a certain chef that Ruth and I both have a mini-crush on

but our opinions on what is attractive is just that. Our own. They still have the right to exist, to get work, to live their lives whether or not we find them attractive. But to the fuckability judges like the relative, people's (women specifically) first and most important job is to make themselves appropriately fuckable. It doesn't matter that in real life a chubby grad student with boy band hair and and way too much bad cologne wouldn't even get an autograph from Sarah Michelle Gellar. It's not his job to be fuckable. It's his job, his birthright even, to decide what is attractive because he is a white dude and his dick rules all.

Having to sit through fuckability commentary is both boring and gross and not dissimiliar to having to listen to someone desrcibe jacking off to their favortite porn. Seriously, no one cares what makes your dick hard. You dudes may want to think about that next time you feel like commenting on some one's tits. It puts images in my head of you, alone, with a box of tissue and a jar of lube. And that is not a good thing.

Bible reading 101

Dear Gov. Sanford:

You know that commandment about not taking the Lord's name in vain? I am assuming you know it. Hell I know it and I'm not a Christian. But I think you maybe might be misinterpreting it. You see, I don't think that god really cares about whether you use his name as a curse word, I think (if he/she exists at all) that the point is not to go around claiming that it's god's will for you to do something you want to do, like start a war or stay in a political office.

I think if I was god, I'd be peeved at your comparing your choice between staying with your devoted wife or running away with your soul mate as a Kind David type situation. David was acting as a judicious arbiter, you were acting like a selfish asshat, bound to cause pain to both women and your children because you couldn't keep it in your pants. David didn't cause the situation where 2 women needed his decision, you did.

Perhaps you might wanna re-read that part of the bible. You might also want to read what Jesus taught about fidelity. Now mind you, I'm a godless agnostic who thinks monogamy isn't for everyone, but I also don't endanger the welfare of an entire state or enforce rules I can't or won't follow onto others.

I'm just saying........

When does life begin is a specious argument

or an argument full of truthiness, to steal from Colbert.

But it's a pretty frame that forced pregnancy blowhards have been using for eons to justify controlling women's bodies. On the surface it SOUNDS good, like they are caring and really all about life and shit. But all you need is a teaspoon sized shovel to dig out their real aim- to punish the dirty whores for having sex by giving them mountains of unwanted bayyyyyyyyyyyyyyybieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees.

If they are all about preserving life, are they also anti-death penalty? (Sometimes, but not often)

Are they pacifists? Would they refuse to support any war? Or just the wars they don't like?

If they are all about preserving life, what about the life of the woman?

And if you bring up the "people are not life support machines" argument, they tell you that women choose to become life support machines when they have sex. But if that's true, what about fathers? Should both parents be legally required to donate blood or organs or tissues to their offspring? Should fathers who don't pay child support be charged with child abuse (thats 70% of all non-custodial parents, btw). Should men who smoke pot before sex be held liable if their sperm creates a disabled child? What if the man is old and his child ends up with schizophrenia? He knew he was an old dude when he was getting laid and that the chances of producing a mentally ill child were increased.

This is where the forced-birthers fall apart. Men aren't responsible for the gestation of children, ergo they cannot be used as life support machines. Anything they do with children is a CHOICE, even choosing not to pay child support won't hurt them much in the long run.

The thing is, if they really did want more babies to be born there are a gazillion programs that help do that. Universal healthcare and daycare are a start. Paid parental leave, flexible work schedules, better overall collection of child support or even the socialist idea proposed by Richard Nixon of mandatory minimum incomes so that financial devastation is no longer a side effect of an unplanned pregnancy would help. Eliminating the mommy tax (the giant wage gap between moms and EVERYBODY ELSE that works) would make it better too.

But those aren't programs that punish women for having sex (and generally they require some relinquishment of $ from dudes in the form of lower wages, higher taxes or child support payments). And these are people who see babies as punishment, god's great big scarlet letter for being a dirty whore. And without that, how would good men ever know which women to marry and which women to run off to Argentina with? And if a woman doesn't feel bad about having the dirty sex, then how will she ever lower herself enough to continue having the dirty sex with forced-birthers? (I actually knew a 48 year old grandmother who felt so bad about having premarital sex that she married the 20 year younger copy shop dude she was dating rather than continue to enjoy herself. Guess how long that marriage lasted?)

All this is a long way of saying that the pro life part of the forced birthers party line is one giant crock of shit. The question of when life starts may be fun to debate in a purely philosophical exercise, but it has nothing to do with the actual problem of women who are pregnant and don't want to be. The real debate is who controls your body? You, your nearest patriarchal overseer, the assholes in navy blue suits who vote for our laws? If you believe that you are the only person capable of making decisions about your own body, then you believe that everyone is capable of making decisions about their own body. If you believe that there is ever a time when someone else gets to make decisions about a body not their own (which is slavery), then you better be prepared to line up for mandatory blood donations. If you're okay with a little bit of slavery, it's best not to assume that you're going to be the slave owner.