I think I just threw up in my mouth a little

So I am taking macroeconomics for the THIRD time this quarter. No I have never failed this class. The only class I ever failed was typing/intro to computers a million years ago and now I type about 60 wpm and tutor people in ... Intro to computers. Maybe I should fail a language course so that 10 years from now I can be an interperter.

I am taking macroeconomics (again) because I keep having to drop the damn course because the ONLY professor who teaches it is such a misogynistic asswipe that I feel like I've run the gauntlet at Tailhook every time I leave his class.

Let's see, in the first 15 minutes of class today we heard a joke about a dumb blonde who couldn't do math and that women are secretly making more money than men. (Who knew? That whole 75 cents on the dollar things is a big freakin lie)

Seriously.

I know that part of my education means learning to sit through and get through classes with jerks. I'm usually pretty damn good about finding subtle ways of of changing right wing proffs opinions through my writing (Hello Dr. L! Thanks for using my papers to lecture from and for the kick ass recommendations you write). But this guy- he is not someone whose opinion can be influenced by a mere student, let alone a student with a set of ovaries (ovaries of steel mind you, but ovaries none the less).

So, what's a girl to do when I have to get through this class (required for my major) but I feel like I need a shower and a machine gun every time I leave it?

Next time

someone accuses me of being an irrational woman- I am so pulling out these quiz results.

What kind of extremist are you? Your Result: Rational Person You consider these questions obvious straw men, designed to distract people from a meaningful investigation of facts and a serious discussion of relevant political issues. How boring.
Left-Wing Extremist
Moderate Extremist
Right-Wing Extremist
What kind of extremist are you? See All Our Quizzes

(I couldn't help but choose the rocket launcher answer even if the rational part of my brain was screaming NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!)

So I go away for a summer and....

The housing bubble bursts.

Totally predictable- the puppet heads on TV don't blame reckless lending practices or the lovely shell game of packaging mortgages so they look lower risk than they actually are, they blame poor people.

Poor people who want to own their own home. Poor people who are doing what they have been told to do all their lives. Work hard, save money, invest in a house because it's the safest, most useful place you can put your money. People who are following the American Dream line that has been force fed to us all. But it's those damn poor people who can't qualify for traditional mortgages that are responsible for the current mess.

Fuck that. If Alan Fucking-I love Ayn Rand- Magic Fixer of the Economy- Greenspan could not predict this bubble bursting- then neither could all those people who don't have fancy degrees in economics or haven't spent their entire careers analyzing how money works.

Though I will say this- all those talking puppet heads on TV may finally make it really clear to the rest of us that the American Dream of the white picket fence was never intended for everybody but it was intended to make us work our asses off and not blame the power elite when all that work doesn't pay off.

Than again, maybe we'll be too busy watching the latest edition of Dancing with the Stars to care.

Meh.

I'm going to Paris for my birthday!

So my birthday isn't for another 6 months, but I love planning a trip almost as much as I love taking one. SO I have 6 months of happy, joyful planning ahead of me! Yippee!

I have been to France before, but not Paris. (I know - how does one go to France and skip Paris? I went to the French Riviera- that's how).

I plan on parking my ass in the Louvre for a few days with a sketchbook unless the Louvre is cool and let's you take no-flash photos. Anyone know their photo policy? Any other must-see museums? (I know there are many- I'm looking for recommendations).

I am also wondering which neighborhood is best to stay in. I like being able to walk everywhere. In Rome I stayed in the Piazza Repubblica which ended up being easy walking distance to everything but the Vatican. I'd love to find a spot like that in Paris.

Suggestions, fun travel stories, etc. are always welcome.

3 hot girls walk into a bar.....

The Red Queen sandwiched between her friends Amanda Panda and Ms. J. For the record, nearly every picture of Ms. J and me has her making smoochy lips at me.

I've been musing over the nature of compliments versus harassment lately. The two lovely ladies with me in the photo above have given me some insight based on incidents that have happened over the course of several drunken pub crawls in Belltown. We came to the conclusion last night (after drinking many red stripes and coming up with the new name of a coffee drink shot full of vanilla stoli and goldschlager- the stolengolencofffee!) that it is a matter of payment.

Lemme splain. A few weeks ago we were at the same bar when we were followed, harassed and pestered by this one guy. He took turns "complimenting" each of us, trying to see which one of us had self esteem so low that we would trade a few comments about our looks with the removal of our panties. Some of his words were just obvious BS about how important he was. You know, typical drunken cock swagger and a bunch of big fat lies about where he was from - South Africa, Jamaica, Ethiopia, he was a US Marine in Iraq, he was from New York. Blah blah blah.

Now let me get to the line that cemented the difference for me between a real compliment and creepiness- "You're beautiful". (Pauses for many moments to figure out how to write the next bit without sounding like a super conceited piece of shit.........)

I get told this alot. I am not, by any means, conventionally attractive. I am a big, curvy girl. I look nothing like what beautiful is "supposed" to look like. Yet, on a fairly regular basis random strangers will tell me I am beautiful. Sometimes it is a genuine compliment and I take it as such with a thank you, but the guy at the bar was not doing that.

What the guy at the bar was doing was almost the reverse version of a neg- pick a girl whom you assume does not get a lot of compliments and try to buy her favor. I've been trying to figure out specifically for weeks what the difference is between a creep and not-a-creep and how it is that we know the difference without being able to explain it beyond "he was creepy". I think it lies in whether the compliment is genuinely given or whether it is given with the expectation of payment.

More examples, cause I like them. Women can give these kinds of compliments all the time to each other. Last night I told the girl sitting at the table next to us that she had the most beautiful curly hair. Ms. J oohed and awwed over another woman's fabulous boots. I did not expect anything from the girl with the gorgeous hair, I just wanted to tell her I thought it was awesome. Ms. J did want to check out the woman's boots, but only if the other woman wanted to show them off. There was no expectation that since Ms. J had given her a compliment the woman then had to hand over her leg so that Ms. J could get what she wanted. Ms. J did ask if she could touch them (they were this very tactile looking patchwork that could have been leather or fabric) and the woman let her. Had the woman said no, Ms. J would not have felt like she had paid out a compliment for no gain.

One more example. In a cab on the way to work the other day I struck up a lovely conversation with the driver. I live in a neighborhood with a large number of Ethiopian immigrants (yay- this means I also have many yummy Ethiopian restaurants within walking distance) and a lot of the cab drivers are Ethiopian. The driver and I were talking about kids and marriage. He's 40ish, married late in life according to his culture, and has 2 kids. He was shocked that I was only 32 and had a 12 year old and wasn't married (more shocked by my age than by the not married part I think). Then he broke out with the "You are a beautiful girl" but not as a cheesy come on. Actually he was very explicit that he was not trying to pick me up. He was merely trying to explain that if I was as beautiful at 20 as I am now that some of the Kid's dad's idiocy might be explained by raging hormones (there's only a slightly different argument to be made that a beautiful girl is the reason a boy acts like an ass- but that's for another time). Anyways, his compliment was nice and part of the conversation without being a payment for some future favor.

So there it is. 2 guys. Nearly identical words. Neither of them do I have any romantic interest in. It really comes down to the basic feminist idea of ownership of ones own body. The creep assumed that he could buy control over my body by paying me compliments on my looks. The cab driver just gave me a compliment. The creep assumes that women's control over their own bodies is something that can be sold away (and if it can be sold it can also be stolen). I know none of this is really groundbreaking news, but it does help to clarify why behavior that seems exactly the same has radically different results in the way we feel about it.

I'll give you trite!

Several years ago I was looking at a Rothko painting with my then boyfriend. I like Rothko. He's not my favorite color field artist (that would be Morris Louis) but seeing the evolution of his paintings in order and you see his life in the most basic, wordless sense. See, he committed suicide and you can see the darkness and heaviness evolve from the bright lightness in his later works.

So then boyfriend looks at the piece and says "I hate modern art- it's so obvious these guys were just doing it for the money!" My fabulous retort was "You're a fucking graphic artist for christ's sake- all you do is make art for money!"

Then there was another not-quite boyfriend who was trying to get me to listen to yet another insufferable angsty white boy band. Don't get me wrong, there are lots of angsty white boy bands in my repertoire and I don't rock the indy-pop queen title for no reason, but this band was a hair's breadth away from being Creed. I wasn't into being all worshipful of the tormented band, so I was told my music (at the time I was heavy into the reemergence of disco punk like Franz Ferdinand and Gang of Four) was "trite". Uhm Hello! They may be tongue in cheek, up beat and danceable but that's just to make the subversive bits go down easier.

"Trite" is a fabulous way of minimizing the importance of art that bugs you, and though the references I made above were to things made by men, trite is usually used for art made by women. Sonia Delunay and her textile designs were "trite". Judy Chicago and her dinner plates were "trite". I am sure someone probably even thought that Frida Kahlo's iconic paintings were "trite" little pieces next to her husband's much larger and simpler political murals.*

So then I saw this piece on Pandagon- A woman artist, Amber Hawk Swanson, buys herself a real doll modeled after herself and experiments with the idea of what it's like to own in every possible way a submissive female. I think the idea is brilliant, the photos I've seen are disturbing and awesome and I hope that someday I can see the results in person.

But of course, someone has to get all "I'm the bigger critic than you" and call it "predictable and trite". But predictable and trite wouldn't garner the kinds of serious and interesting questions that this piece has raised- would it? I mean trite is usually something that lacks "the freshness that evokes attention or interest" (thank you Merriam Webster- though I prefer the OED, your online dictionary is free). I would think that if this piece were really "trite" then there wouldn't be all this questioning about what it means to appear to be subjugating your own image or if the brainless, opinionless, impossible to achieve in real life body of a real doll is what men really want. The questions, the thousands of questions that this piece of art evokes should be enough to prove that this is by no means a "trite" piece but a thought-provoking thing of interest.

Things made by women are not automatically "trite". But they get called that in order to minimize their importance and to silence their creators. Trite things are obvious- hummels are trite, Cathy cartoons are trite, most Hallmark cards are trite. Every fat guy, hot wife sitcom is trite (and those I'm sure were produced by guys). Most romantic comedies, every Adam Sandler movie except Punch Drunk Love, Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kincaid paintings, and every single commercial ever made for a household cleaning product are both trite and predictable. A woman showing images of herself in dominant, sexual positions over a doll of herself is not trite. It's disturbing, and that is why it is successful as a piece of art. It conveys what the artist wanted it to convey.

*I also once a had potential suitor, a fabulously wealthy art collector, call my own work "primitive" as if it were a good thing. I use a lot of the line styles that made men like Matisse and Leger and Klee famous, though I doubt any collector worth their salt would call works by those with penises "primative" unless they also happened to be brown. Which this guy did- he was comparing my work to some of the paintings he had picked up cheap on his last art buying trip to Cuba.

Fursday Funny-Ness

Ok, so i'm apparently the last person on the internets to hear about lolcats.

Well, they're still funny.

Here's another site


Of course, I had to make some of my own! Courtesy of the Wonder family's waay tooo many cats, which make me lol on a daily basis