So RQ walks into the the doctor's office

to be told that I have freakishly low vitamin d levels and am aneimic.
Grrrrrrrrrrrr. But, these two deficiencies may explain at least part
of why I'm all hurty and tired all the time. So yay! but damn, i've
been half joking for the last year about the weird ridges in my nails
being malnutrition. turns out it wasn't actually a joke. but now i can
eat all the steak and broccoli want. And veal, yummy iron filled
babies.

--
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

Hey Melissa McKewan

stereotyping and entire group of people with less priveldge than you,
a middle class, well educated person, as too stupid to know what's
good for them is.....dumdumdum OPPRESSION.
If I, as a poor white woman were to say that middle class blacks
aren't oppressed becuase, hello they're middle class, i would deserve
a fat clue stick to the head for missing the obvious. if you, as a
middle class white woman, say that poor whites aren't oppressed
because hello, they're white, then you might want to examine the
privilege that blinds you to poverty. allies don't treat you as too
dumb to know what's good for you. (the post i am refering to is
today's worst thing you'll read at Shakesville, but since i'm a poor
white i can't afford internet access to include the link).

--
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

awesome and weird food bank gets

when i had regular internet access i used to post pictures of weird
foods from the food bank, like the giant can of labeless 'PORK WITH
JUICES'. i don't even know what that is. but recent food bank stuff is
way better. i get cast off veggies from whole paycheck. but this week
i got my favorite food in the whole world, a food that has been nearly
impossible to get in the US for the last 20 years or so. a food that i
have only eaten in the last 20 years when i was in Paris. and after
reading a piece today about how animal rights groups are looking to
adopt the woman hating practices of the forced birther orgs, i am
proud to announce that right now i have a fridge full of freakin VEAL.
Breaded veal was one of the first things i learned to cook (with
canned green beans and boxed angel hair pasta). my cooking skills are
a bit more advanced now, and i can't wait to show my true feminist
cred by eating delicious BABIES! Apologies to the many veggies who
don't condone misogyny as a publicity stunt.

--
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

literary pet peeve

This will probably get me in trouble with other readers of high brow
fiction, but i hate, and i mean hate when authors include other
people's peotry in their stories. i'm not a huge fan of poetry to
begin with. so much of it is crappy, mushy romantic schlock. i'm down
with the angry, political, cynical stuff though. but when it's
included in my fiction i get growly. if i wanted to read poetry i
would buy the books (lord knows poets need the money) but i'm reading
fiction! i want an interesting narrative uninterrupted by the author's
wish to show off how pretentious their own reading habits are.

--
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

the truth of it is

the elites don't need us, the american people. their markets for
buying and selling are the BRIC countries and their markets for labor
are anywhere that human rights, labor rights and the environment don't
matter. so why would they put a dollar into housing, feeding,
educating, medicating, employing or infrastructuring a citizenry who
has nothing to hold over their heads. want better food, suck it cuase
giant agribussiness isn't going to change when they know you'll die
without them. want your kids to have better schools, why would the
elites educate kids when all their workers are overseas and their kids
go to private schools. every single dollar they pay AND we pay in
taxes is a dollar they think should be in their pockets. not ours, and
certainly not in bulk buying projects like updating power grids or
medicare for all. we have to stop imagining that we can ever appeal to
their sense of community, they have none. it is time to cut them out
of the country running process.

--
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

banana cake recipes

Once upon a time i had the most amazing banana cake recipe. it was
hand written on fancy journal paper in curly letters by a long lost
friend. it made this delicious sticky sweet cake with a velvety crump
and no need for frosting. it was lost in the maelstrom of the last 3
years, along with everything else we own except for a couple of
suitcases of clothes and our recently aquired laptops.
the food bank we frequent seems to be overrun with bananas lately. and
last week i made a banana cake from an online recipe. it sucked, hard.
well, it was totally edible but it was not the life changing event of
the old banana cake. I got another bunch of food bank bananas today,
on the verge of black banana cake/bread goodness, and i need another
recipe. so dear internet friends, send me your best banana recipe and
help me restart my recipe collection.

--
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

Obamacare means never having to say 'you're insured'

there's apiece in the nytimes about PEnnsylvania dumping 41000ish
people from their insurance program for poor adults as of yesterday
even though over half a million people are still on the waiting list
for the plan.. in my own state, our supposedly democratic governor
(the one whose balancing the budget by slashing child support
enforcement and cutting allready measly tanf grants) dumped 17500
people from Basic Health. when asked if HHS could speed up the
insurance exchanges to cover the people who are now uncovered,
KAthleen Sebelius basically said 'Suck it poor,sick people. you gotta
wait till 2014! with any luck you'll all be dead in the saltmines by
then' she then rubbed her hands together and growled 'excellent' to
herself like a real life Monty Burns. What you should take away from
this is that fewer poor people can go to the doctor today than before
our 'historic' give away to the insurance industry, i mean heath care
reform.

--
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

echo sucks

echo, my little commenting platform, sucks. it lets me reply to
comments via email on my phone, but it doesnt let me free comments
stuck in the mod que unless i'm at an actual compy. it also
occasionally likes to send approved commenters of long standing into
the mod que. sorry. i'm trying to drag my sorry ass to internetlandia
more regularly, but....
(in other words, if you're stuck in moderation pergatory and havent
been banned- you know who you are you stalking fuck nugget of
relentless abuse- then i'll get to appoving you eventually. i promise.

--
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

straight from the kid's mouth

Kid and I have this running convo where i call him a dork, geek,
monkey child, or some other good natured teasing thing and he responds
with some version of 'well i got it from you so you are the real dork,
geek, queen of all monkeydom'. I usually respond with 'oh no dude, all
the dna you got from me is the cool dna, the other 50 percent is pure
howler monkey'. The other day i tried to prove this by pointing out
the things that are different about us. 'you are way sweeter than i am
kiddo' to which the kid replied ' that doesn't prove anything. you
might be as sweet as me if you'd had a different life. that's nurture,
not nature'. this folks, is what i get for teaching the kid biological
anthropology for science last year, and for having the sweetest old
world monkey* boy on the planet.
*true fact, we have old world monkey noses because our nostrils are
paralell to the ground. new world monkeys have forward facing
nostrills. And then there's lemurs. i don't know where their nostrills
point, but they are cute

--
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

Finally- The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest

Damn i love these movies. Yes, sacriledge, I saw the movies and I
haven't read the books yet. Wevs.
But here's one tiny way you know you're watching feminist kickassery:
Lisbeth's lawyer is obviously pregnant and has 2 young kids at home.
She helps Lisbeth avoid an assasination attempt, she gets her
briefcase snatched on her way to work, she comes home after her kids
have had dinner and she has a glass of wine IN PUBLIC and no one ever
says 'you must be careful you're pregnant/ a mom. Also (SPOILER
ALERT!!!!!!)after recieving death threats and bricks through her
window, editor Annika isn't treated to a fucking 'greater good' speech
from Mikke, or even any excuses from him for putting all their lives
in danger. She calls him selfish.
As for Lisbeth, there is no one else on the planet who could take a
bullet to the brain and end up with an even cooler punk rock hair cut
after brain surgery. There is a moment when she smiles, the first of
only 2 in the whole film, that makes me want to give her a fist bump.

--
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

At what point

did it become right and proper that a Democratic president sits on his hands during the biggest labor dispute in a generation?

Now I am sure we all know the ridiculous justifications the faugressives and neolibs will be spouting. The same people who would puff out their cheeks if GW was doing absolutely nothing about Wisconsin are the ones who will be saying "he has to think of re-election, budget costs, blah blah blah blah blah". But the truth of the matter is that you cannot be a Democrat and be cool with this kind of union busting. 

Cannot.Be.A.Democrat.

But for the frothing-mouthed hordes of the cheetoh eating creative class, there is nothing Obama can do to prove that he is not the Great Audacious Hope of the Left. Even as our country sinks deeper and deeper in poverty and despair. Even as states balance budgets on the backs of poor women, children, the unemployed, people with disabilities, and the last few groups of organized labor in this country, Obama will stick to a bipartisan plan for dividing the spoils between the super rich and extremely rich. 

I was a member of the AFSCME

the union of  state and county and city employees that Scott Walker is trying to bust.

For 6 years I worked as a "part-time hourly" (in quotes because that designation is important, it's what local schools use to keep high skill employees from benefits and union memebership. It's the Walmart class of  government employees) computer lab administrator for a local community college.. I loved that job. I loved the students, the instructors. I loved that my job didn't feel like some soul-sucking exercise in corporate suckitude. I loved it enough that I took a $5 an hour paycut to go from doing what I do in  the private sector to teaching what I do in the public sector. I was not eligible for any benefits, not health care or pension. I wan't eligible for unemployment insurance because of my classification. If I worked over 18 hours a week I was subject to immediate termination. I went through a year where the school administration flately refused to follow federal guidelines for when paychecks are to be issued, and because I was one of the not-so-rare little snowflakes who didn't have union representation, the state labor board couldn't do anything about it unless I hired a private attorney.

The last year I worked there, I finally qualified for memebership in AFSCME. It didn't get me heathcare or a pension. But it did get me my paychecks in a timely fashion. Once I had union membership I didn't have a single late or missing check. I was informed in advance when paycheck dates would be weird because of scheduling. My few dollars a paycheck in union membership worked better than a year of legal threats at ensuring my basic employee rights were upheld.

And that is what they are trying to kill. Public workers don't make a ton of money, tjhey make less than they would in the private sphere. But we do it because we love the work and the stability. For a lot of us, that is worth the loss in compensation.
But without unions to keep us from the most avarice of  politicians, we suffer, and so do the students and citizens who we work for every single day.