Thursday, February 19, 2009

What the fuck is WRONG with people?

Because I assume that all eight of my sexy readers are personal friends (except those two guys who wound up here by keyword search after I blogged about 2girls1cup and the primary debates, and I'm guessing that was a one-hit thing), you've probably heard me utter this phrase once or twice before. But seriously. What the fuck IS wrong w/people?

Several years ago, I was in NYC on a date gone slightly awry with an old girlfriend-ish person from out west. We wound up at some crappy bar in the East Village where I, in an effort to build some sort of emotional blockade between me and her, struck up a quite chummy conversation with an ad executive.

Of course, he and I had ZERO in common, and I think ad guys are as gross as my date did, and I was particularly disturbed by the fact that one of the products he was shilling for was Bratz dolls.

Anyway, I was kind of drunk and getting a kick out of disregarding my date's desire to keep it intimate -- in my defense, she had done a lot of shit that, at least in my mind, totally warranted my behavior -- and got a little manic and cheerfully went OFF on this guy, kicking my new strappy platform-clad feet onto the stool between us and explaining how while it was wonderful for grown women to creatively engage with the outside world in part, by way of sexy clothing, war paint and accessories, that it was perverse to peddle a dumbed-down, sickly version of femme to small children, and that most disgusting about his work to me was how it evidenced the fact that our society not only peddles sex so cheaply, but that it's more about the money than the sex (let alone the respect for femme).

I went on to argue that whatever he was making on that campaign was worth less than my self-assuredness that, nearing the end of grad school, I would soon be getting paid, however pitifully, for doing good work in the world. That my gender and my sexuality were still mine, in spite of millions of images that twist it around and try to force-feed a beaten-up version of it back to me, and also worth more than this stupid ass system that would let a sexless white men like him to make millions off a cheap, phantomy, bland impression of femme identity. In short, that he was in the wrong business and would be better off making less money but doing good work and being kinky and smart.

My final piece of evidence against him was the fact that it was 2am on a weeknight at a bar in NYC and he was still wearing an unimpressive suit jacket. As I wrapped up my argument, I demanded that he pull his tie out from his jacket pocket and surrender it to me, which he did. I wore it as a belt for awhile and briefly entertained the idea of making that my schtick, letting gross rich guys buy me drinks and give me their ties while I told them how stupid they were, maybe making a book with the ties, but I never did.

Anyway. I'm not sure why this is the perfect example for how I'm feeling today, but I will say two more things, then send you off to think about me giving that adman whatfor:

1. It's not like me to engage with the opposition. I generally loathe to engage with anybody I suspect might hold radically different viewpoints from mine. But I know that I need to learn to, and I hope that more activists will, too, because it seems to help get things done. It's just as lame of me to assume that a person hasn't any humanity or lacks the ability to understand my point of view as it is for them to do the same to me, and it's even lamer of me to judge people who wear khaki. (I'm working on it -- I think it's PTSD from living in DC during the Bush Administration)

2. On the other hand, it's not lame of me to get pissed at shitfucks like that guy whose tie I stole, because their priorities are fucked, and they're fucking the rest of us. How does that guy sleep at night. How can our government pass a stimulus plan that lets these piece of shit bankers wipe their asses with our money and continue to ride the backs of the poor, meanwhile kicking them out of their fucking houses. How can a CEO knowingly distribute a food product contaminated with salmonella to millions of people and show his fucking face in court, let alone plead the 5th? How do people wear khakis???

I guess I just feel like I should be engaging more, with the opposition as well as people engaged in the same fight, but things (globally, politically) are so gross that I can't even see how. And I guess right now I'm just not feeling the wonder of my hotness (maybe I should take a shower :) or anything else. Surely, it'll pass, but in the meantime, send a girl some wonder, guys. Remind me how hot you are, what cool shit you're up to. Puh-lease, help me balance the wonder of the sexy and creative and SMART against the the greedy and boring.

Tell me something good. I would do the same for you.

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

She is risen!

Yoo hoo...is anybody out there?

Alright then. Turns out that when I'm not getting paid for it, I'm an incredibly inconsistent blogger. What the heck. I'm good at lots of other stuff.

All the same, I'm not throwing in the towel yet. For those of you who are interested, here's what we've been up to (to be followed, within a few months, by either another random bit of "what we've been doing" or maybe, just maybe, some snarky political commentary, or a viral video that hasn't yet been taken down):

Let me see. I took a long trip out west in September, which included a whirlwind work trip to San Francisco followed by nearly 3 weeks "back home" in Washington State. I can hardly remember that trip now, except that I ate a lot of good food, my new nose ring got infected as a result of a sunburn, which caused me to get an ugly sunhat and I was incredibly stressed out by the election (thank goodness that went the way it did, although I'd have to say that I'm as disappointed as anyone by Obama's cabinet picks and especially this Rick Warren shit). I was also torn up by the fact that one of my brothers (top secret: my favorite) spent all but the very last day of my visit there in an in-patient rehab facility in Mississippi. I picked him up at the airport the night before the night before I left, and he delivered me back to the airport about 36 hrs later. The good news is, he introduced me to my newest musical love, Tim Fite, (in Philly Feb 21 and DC the 28th -- come with us!) and he was still clean when I came home for the holidays.

I got back from Washington on a Wednesday late in September, which is noteworthy because Mr. Man and I moved into a new place THAT WEEKEND. Talk about a tough move. Although Mr. Man did his best to pack up before I got back, there was a mountain of shit to do, and the move put quite a strain on our already-pretty-strained relationship. Mr. Man had just started back at school, and I was swamped at work, so things were just...tough. I'll spare you the details, sexy readers, and flash forward a few months to the weekend before Thanksgiving, when we found two couches for $20 and $40 respectively, which we had delivered (AND the old couch removed from the front porch, where it'd sat since we discovered on moving day that it wouldn't fit through the front door) for a song at $40 plus a $20 tip.

We're now roughly 75% unpacked, which is pretty good, I'd say, considering the fact that we never even got most of our artwork onto the walls of our depressing old place. We've encouraged (read: forced) ourselves along the way by hosting a few small parties.

The best news about the new place:

1. It has a huge yard. I mean, huge. Plenty of room for lots of veggies, maybe even a few laying hens.

2. The landlady, a belly-dancer, is a saint so far. Our dryer (see #3) went shithouse on us the other night and she immediately started making plans to buy us a new one. Compared to the old landlord, we can hardly believe she's real.

3. It's got a washer and dryer. In the unfinished basement, which has plenty of room for our extra crap.

4. It's ridiculously cute. Ok. It's a little quirky, but mostly adorable.

5. It's in a great neighborhood, within walking distance of several of our friends, three amazing restaurants and a couple of decent bars.

Now for the bad news about the new place:

1. That huge yard is full of ticks. I just pulled one off the dog the other day, but when we moved in, I was pulling dozens off of her. Turns out that in spite of having a normally high tolerance for most things gross, I've got a weak spot for ticks.

2. Our bedroom and my office both have two of the most hideous paint jobs I've ever seen.

3. We've got mice. This is especially bad news for the devil cat, because we're rationing her meals until she kills them for us.

Three to five ain't bad, huh?

Aside from all that, we're relieved to have weathered what was a pretty tough year. And we're doing quite well romantically. Better than we've done for any stretch of time since we moved here. We've been fucking, not quite like bunnies, but almost like we did before we left NYC.

And I think we're each doing much better personally. Mr. Man is still on somewhat of an academic vacay, and although he's been stressing a little about work, he is lightyears more relaxed than he was before I went out to Washington for the holidays. As for me, I spent nearly a week off-line during that trip and have decided it suited me quite well and that 09 will be the year that I work less, garden more and do more for myself, like yoga and swimming and walking the dog and taking baths and fucking my boyfriend and making more friends in the Charm but also getting up to see my friends in NYC more, too.

There's so much else. Mr. Man went back on T, which we were nervous about but so far seems to be treating him just dandy, maybe even better than that. He's getting hairy, which I think is adorable, and other than that, actually seems more relaxed. The dog really does have arthritis, which is maybe better than having Lyme's disease, which was what I thought she had the first time it hit her hard enough to put her down (not "put her down"). $500 later, we've got it figured out and now she's on a regimen that is serving her well enough that she's playing some frisbee and doing lots of stalking of the cat. We haven't converted the car yet but in spite of a few minor fixes, she is a peach.

So. By and large, things are super good, which, I realize, probably places us in the top 1% luckiest folks on earth, considering the half million Americans who lost their jobs in November, the 1 billion who stand to go hungry worldwide in 09, and the poor Palestinians who are getting the shit bombed out of them as I type this. It might sound stupid, but I'm hellbent on channeling my energy into putting positive vibes (and positive work, a la peace march rather than anti-war demonstration, if you catch my drift) into the world, doing my best to roll my anger and stress off and do good instead of sitting around bitching.

We'll see how it goes when my/our luck takes a turn for the worse, which it inevitably will, because, as my daddy says, "the good old days for one guy are the shit days for somebody else." For now, though, I'm rolling with it.

PS. We're crazy enough to be heading down to the Inauguration, which, according to my handy Hightower countdown clock, is in less than two weeks! If you're that crazy too, give a girl a call and let's hook up.

Friday, October 24, 2008

"Crumping you can believe in"


http://view.break.com/592648 - Watch more free videos

Is it just me, or is this kind of the funniest shit ever.

Monday, August 25, 2008

mermaids and drunken bigots and yes! a new car!

Jeez. Where to start. A friend of mine is starting a new blog and got me all inspired to write, even though I've got a million things to do before I head out to the west coast -- for almost a month -- on Thursday. Thanks, K. I'll be linking to her when she gets it up (no pressure :)

What I guess I'll do is treat you to a stream of consciousness about some of what I've been up to since I blogged last (which was quites some time ago. Summer is a cruel mistress). Maybe I'll throw in some photos. Maybe I'll have to stop in the middle. Hopefully I'll get to the wonderful, gruesome details of Mr. Man's (and my, though mine was much less dramatic) piercings, performed with expertise and love and humor by our friend Aimee, the Bearded Lady of PeeTown.

Let's see. Yes, we walked in the Mermaid Parade, as a marine-life shotgun wedding: Mr. Man the pregnant seahorse and I his mermaid bride. You can find photos on his Facebook, if you're a Facebook kind of person. Or you can ask nicely and I'll send you one. We couldn't have asked for a nicer day -- ok it was a little hot, but not humid. There were a lot of drunk people, and many of them were temporarily mesmorized by my large titties, even though I was wearing a full-coverage bra. A few of them lost their manners. They weren't all straight bio-men. I guess some people are just a little less mature than others.

The next day, we went down to Delaware for some much-needed r & r. Unfortunately I was due back in New York a few days later, and I was super down, so it wasn't as good as it could have been, especially when we nearly got in a bar brawl at the Frogg Pond, the supposed unofficial lesbian bar of Rehoboth, where a very intoxicated (and I suspect, coked up) homosexual white man harassed us beyond anything I've ever experienced (it started with him wanting to hang out with us and us wanting to be left alone and quickly went downhill, ending w/him walking around the bar screaming and that it "smelled like tilapia" in there, and then our friend threw some water in his face and then the shit kind of hit the fan). The main points are these:
  • As a queer woman, I'll never go back to the Frogg Pond and would never encourage anybody to go there.
  • The bartenders did not have our backs, even when we were being harassed in a very visible, very audible, very offensive way that also infringed on the other customers.
  • The cops in Rehoboth (at least the ones who wound up questioning us) don't have a fucking clue about queer issues. When we told them about some of the weird shit he was saying to us even before things escalated ("I rape your sunglasses." ???) just to point out how fucked up he was and why we wouldn't want him hanging out, the cop said "Well, that's interesting because he just told us out there that he's a homosexual." Yeah, because rape is a sexual act, and not a violent one. Yeah, because gay men never harass dykes or trannies.
Anyway. Camp Henlopen is nice, although it's right next to some kind of pharmaceutical compound. The company was good (with the exception of one Mouthy Femme who is not much fun to hang out with when she's feelin' down -- sorry about that, guys.)

Our trip to Peetown was better, though not without its bumps. I don't think I want to recount our piercings in the same post as the yucky Rehoboth thing, but hopefully the inspiration (or a forward-thinking impulse to clear my camera out before my trip, so I don't get stuck standing in front of something I really want a picture of, deleting them as fast as I can) will get me back here before Thursday.

In other news, we really did finally get a car, and she is a beaut. I think we've named her Gretyl. She's a 1975 mercedes benz 240d. The former owner said he was running her, unconverted, on about 1/3 recycled veggie oil, and we will likely do the same, but I want to get all my facts straight before we go for it, and we'll get her converted before winter, so that hopefully we can run on straight veggie oil with no worries. Our friend N, who took us to Rehoboth and the Mermaid Parade and Peetown and about 100 other places before we finally got a car, now says she wants to help us bondo the rust so that we can paint her up nice. What an angel.

So things are going good.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

McCain called his wife a cunt



Don't believe me?

Check it out yourself here and here.

Now, swallow hard (because I know you just threw up in your mouth a little) and gulp back your contempt for the big baby reporters in Arizona who witnessed the exchange and never reported on it--in fact, just ignore your contempt for the mainstream media entirely--long enough to forward those links to anybody you know who might be fool enough to vote Republican (you know you have an uncle or something) or anybody you know who might know somebody like that.

Ask them if they really want this dude's finger on the button. I mean, feminist politics aside, if he's hot-headed and foolish (and out of touch--trollop???) enough to say some shit like that in front of a couple of reporters, do we want him meeting with foreign leaders?

Try not to demonize the c-word; it's all in the context.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

WWJWD?



Maybe I'll just make this a monthly blog. :)

So last weekend Mr. Man and I went to Honfest with a couple of friends. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Honfest is a marketing scheme for Cafe Hon a celebration of Baltimore's "hons," those bygone, beehived queens of kitsch who peer through cat-eye glasses and say stuff like "how you doin' hon?" Actually, everybody in Baltimore says that.

Anyway, in spite of the wicked heat, Honfest was a-buzz with hons and non-hons alike, enjoying crab cakes, pit beef, smoothies and beer, and treating themselves to summer dresses, t-shirts and kitschy souvenirs. For those who were inspired but lacked the know-how to rat up their own hair, there was an on-site, open-air salon serving up beehives on the fly.

One Bawlmer resident was quite noticeably absent. Mr. John Waters, arguably Charm City's most famous living resident (Mama Cass was also from here, Cal Ripken probably still enjoys greater fame in most circles) thinks Honfest is bullshit. Waters thinks the festival is a place for middle-class suburbanites to come and make fun of this working-class stereotype.

You know, the stereotype he's been exploiting for years.

The stereotype that he sold to New Line Cinemas so that they could dress John Travolta up like a fat drag queen, because I guess there aren't enough fat drag queens out there that they could find one to play Mama Turnblatt--oh wait, maybe Mama Turnblatt could have just been played by a fat woman--there are lots of those, too, but I guess that wouldn't have insinuated that fat women are as attractive as drag queens, an insinuation that is totally fucked up and offensive to fat women, trans women, and the people who care about them.

It kind of reminds me of how Perez Hilton likes to lambast Sherri Shephard or whatever her name is and people like her who air their uneducated opinions on trans issues, even though he himself makes fun of trannies incessantly (at least he did when I quit reading him). I'm not saying that all white gay men are hypocrites--they're not--but these are two relatively high-profile cases of the big fat (or creepy skinny) pot calling the kettle black.

Whatever, bitches.

Monday, May 26, 2008

"An awesome group of people"

So there I was today, laying down on the couch for a late afternoon "nap" (actually I was sleeping off the early afternoon beers--Mr. Man has been away the last few days, and I've found myself treating my menstrual cramps with daytime drinking, which is a pretty fun way to treat them, as it were) when I thought I heard something. Not a drunken neighbor screaming--too early for that. Not a police helicopter flying overhead--too quiet. In fact, the sound was a faint swishing sort of rumble, an otherworldly "am really I hearing something or am I drifting off" sort of sound.

Upon my waking, I sat up and opened my laptop to the Times and behold, my question answered: twas the sound of tens of thousands of dead soldiers rolling over in their graves.

That a person so clearly out of touch with not only his fellow person, but also with reality could be not only making this speech but running this fucking show, still boggles my fucking mind. Worse than that, though, it chills my heart, too, to recognize just how corrupt a system we've built, that could find a person so ineffective, mediocre, and asinine allowed to speak to any group of people, let alone represent a country.

I guess we should just consider ourselves lucky (knock on wood--238 more days to go!) that he hasn't managed to kill us all yet.

Anyhoo. Enough with this bit half-drunk, sleepy, depressing blather (a couple of friends came over after my nap, and I had another couple of beers this evening--good thing Mr. Man gets back tomorrow). Next time I blog (could be awhile--I'll be out of town on work for a few days this week), I promise it will be about something more interesting--possibly, my new Diva cup and the use of menstrual blood as fertilizer.

NYC lambs, I'll be up on Wednesday night so give a girl a call if you are free. Alternatively (I've got movie plans Wed eve, but all are welcome, and was thinking drinks and dinner after in Manhattan, but realize that it's short notice and all so) I'll be coming back through town on Saturday afternoon.