A hot plate is no stove substitute.

Many months ago the boys in the house upstairs from Ruth's knocked out the gas line. So there is no heat and no stove (there is hot water though).

It's a fight between the boys and the owner over who is going to pay the 4000K to get it fixed, and Ruth is just kinda stuck until their game of utility chicken plays out.

In the mean time, it's cold and rainy and fall is here. And all I want is soup. Tortilla soup. And it has taken over an hour to get a pot of broth on a hot plate to boil.

Oh and BTW- the rethuglikans are doing the same thing to the banking industry that they did to civil liberties with the Patriot act. We are all scared and worried about being able to feed our families, so they are pushing through emergency measures that are supposed to make us feel better, but really just fuck us up the ass without lube.

Now you know.

A SATC Review

So I broke down and in my stomach flu agony watched the Sex and the City movie.

Spoilers below.

And it was one long ass commercial for over consumption.

And I still think Big is an ass.

What I formerly liked about SATC is that the happy endings the women got weren't the happy ending that they expected. Charlotte didn't stay with the princely doctor in tennis whites. Miranda had a baby, got married and moved to Brooklyn. And Samantha ended up in a monogamous relationship. But they were happy, even though it's not what they thought happiness would look like.

And then the movie went and undid all of that. I hated that at the end of the tv series, Carry went back to Big. He's a non-committal dick. He always has been where Carry is concerned. If Carry was your friend, you would be telling her to run, run away as fast as she can. You would know that people don't change and that she can't make Big into a decent guy through either patience or temper tantrums, even though she tries both.

And then the movie. Miranda gets punished for being Miranda (hard ass bitches who work to much have husbands that cheat- doncha know).

Charlotte gets rewarded for being a good girl.

Samantha gets bored. Duh. And fat (by movie standards) cause she is replacing sex with food.

And Carry gets left at the alter because Big craps out at the last minute. (Like no one could see that coming from a million miles away).

Ugh.

For a show that started with the premise that women are human beings with foibles and sexual agency all their own, I was let down by the movie. It's like one giant regressive bitch slap with a designer label.

Instead, if you want a pretty girly movie with both fashion and a feminist bent, watch the Devil wears Prada (the movie is way better than the book).

It just keeps pissing me off

So lots of proggy types are happy, excited even that Obama managed to come up with a grown up campaign ad.



Where he says a whole lot of nothing, in my opinion. No concrete plans to save homes and help actual people. But at least he sounds like he cares.

But then I went and read this and I am once again reminded how the Dems have backed the wrong fucking horse in this race.

Look- actual plans! Actual, concrete, non-platitude laden plans to fix our economic disaster.

* Create a new entity to buy up and quarantine toxic mortgage securities that are dragging down the markets which would allow the markets to stabilize. Last spring Senator Clinton was among the first to call for a new entity modeled after the successful Depression-era Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) or the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) created after the Savings and Loan crisis.

* Place a temporary moratorium on the most abusive stock transactions, many of which involve the “short-selling” of stocks. Yesterday, Senator Clinton wrote to the Securities and Exchange Commission urging such a moratorium, saying it would provide breathing room for the markets to recover, for investors to make accurate assessments of companies and for regulators to assess what trading practices should be permanently banned.

* Convene an emergency economic summit to show the American people their government is working together. Bringing together leaders in the administration and Congress with lenders, consumer advocates, non profits, financial institutions, and all stakeholders will allow a coordinated response to the crisis.

* Aggressively pursue and encourage mortgage modifications. Senator Clinton has introduced legislation to remove barriers to mortgage modification and to encourage lenders to voluntarily work with borrowers to keep them current on payments and in their homes.

* Restore competent federal oversight of the increasingly complicated financial markets. The rapid evolution of the securities and banking industry overwhelmed the current regulatory framework, resulting in a “shadow banking system” that operates outside of oversight and without accountability.

* Require transparency and accountability on executive pay. Senator Clinton has proposed the Corporate Executive Compensation Accountability and Transparency Act to impose new transparency rules on executive pay, end the accounting techniques that hide compensation, and provide shareholders a say in executive compensation packages.

* Ensure the accountability of financial institutions borrowing money from the Federal Reserve’s new lending facilities. Taxpayers deserve to know that the companies they are bailing out are on the road to recovery and aren’t throwing more good money after bad.

Now I am going to go curl back up in bed and moan for a bit because I have developed a very nasty stomach bug and I hurt on my insides.

How I know he's a teenager

Kid and I are having the gourmet version of beans and weenies for dinner (i/e New Orleans style black beans and rice with bratwurst cut up into it) when my rotten child decides to announce "Man, I don't want to smell my farts in the morning!"

Yes he is a teenager. This is proof.

Well this and the nasty B.O. that no deodorant can tackle.

How long till college? 5 more years? My sensitive nasal cavities cannot take this.

A post without center

I keep trying to write something, anything. Even a resume, since there is no way in hell that the kid and I will ever be able to get out of this mess on my measly part-time, no raise in 5 years salary at the community college.

But I am stuck.

I have all these ideas floating in my head that just won't solidify. Since I can't put them into a coherent stream, I'm gonna give you peeps the leftover bits and see what you can make of them.

1) I wonder how many houses could be saved if we took all the money that is bailing out AIG and Freddy and Fannie and just paid the mortgages off of people who are being foreclosed on. I'd rather see our tax dollars going to keep people in their homes than to bloated behemoths in business.

2) Are these bailouts some sort of Reaganomic style trickle down socialism? If socialism is good for the wealthy, why isn't it good for the rest of us? Aren't we just encouraging the upper class to be lazy slobs who would rather steal our hard earned tax dollars than do an honest days work?

3) If I do send out my resume, do I have to go back to the pink collar dead end crap that I did before I went to work for the college, or can I find a way to push myself into a more techy position. Shit, that's how I got so damn good at the pink collar crap. I fibbed about my knowledge and then learned on the job really fucking quick.

4) How fucked up is it that I- a political science major- am so fucking sick of the politics of both major parties right now I don;t even know if I can be assed to vote in November. I've eaten politics for breakfast everyday since childhood. And right now I think we;d have better luck if we randomly drew names out of a hat every six months to pick the president. And maybe the congress to.

This will pickle your victory right up

The Surrealism of Homelessness

It's the beginning of the school year and I have been filling out stacks and stacks of papers for the Kid.

Every single piece of paper wants an address from me.

I have no idea how to fill it out.


No. Fricken. Idea.

The Word-- How Dare You

If you have interest in being outraged, then you have a great ticket.  But if you want to question your leaders, how dare you!

A long rambly post in which I say a lot about nothing

In my first anthropology class, the professor gave us the radical opportunity to design our own course. We decided, individually, what we were going to write about, how many papers we were going to write and how long those papers were to be.

Half the class failed. With that kind of freedom they found themselves paralyzed and didn't turn in a single paper.

We have this fucked up idea that capitalism equals individualism. If that were true then all the students in that class would have been able to individually come up with an easy A. But the sole purpose of our American flavor of individuality is to make us thing we have all these choices, when all we really choose is what we buy. Does your brand of toilet paper make you an individual? Your brand of jeans?

And then there is the internet. The giant wash of ideas and information meant to make us smarter than any generation before us. And 99% of it is people screaming at other people over things that don't really matter. Even here, the most commented on posts are the one with the fewest ideas and the most bile.

What is wrong with us that we have no vision, no ideas? That's been my biggest problem with the hopium smokers. They want us to believe in hope and change without telling us how they are going to change things or in what direction hope lies.

What are we so afraid of? What keeps us silent when we should burst with ideas? If I asked for an opinion on whether or not Starbucks is the modern version of corporate evil, the comments would be flooded. But if I just leave it open and ask for your big ideas (or small ideas) to make things better then all I hear is the crickets chirp.

We've had the thoughts and sparks of brilliancy cut out of us as effectively as if it had been done with a scalpel. And that is sad. That makes me sad. We can't think beyond our purchases to create lives for ourselves with meaning.


So I started this post saying that I was writing about nothing. Nothing of importance. What you buy, what brand you choose, doesn't make up who you are. Even when it comes to elections, which are marketed to us no differently than Coke and Pepsi.

How do we break the spell of complacency that has settled over us like a smothering blanket? How do we make that class full of students choose for themselves how they are to be judged when we can't act for ourselves?