Dear honored sir (or lady)

In the last month or so, my email account has suddenly been flooded with spam. It's kind of funny to see what exactly is being targeted to me and speculate on where they got the notion that I'm interested in the things they're selling. To date, I apparently:

-shop extensively at Wal-Mart
-have won several lotteries in various African nations
-am the last hope of Nigerian royalty looking to safely transfer their ancestral treasure out of the country
-am single and solely interested in an interracial relationship, with either Asian men, black singles, black men, and black women; I am evidently feeling experimental these days.
-have already finished nursing school and am looking for jobs in Oklahoma
-might be stupid enough to click on a link sent to me by persons unknown to divulge my personal information in order to "FIND OUT NEWEST CREDIT SCORE!"

It's quite a combo platter, and if all of these pitches were applicable, I would actually make a very fascinating dinner party guest.

Adopting A Better Attitude

So, if you go to the blogs on my MySpace page, you'll see a few that mention that we can't have kids. We don't have a final, word-of-god statement on this yet, but as far as we know, right now that's the situation. For the most part, both Kevin and I are pretty okay with this, at least insofar as we're not upset that we can't have "our own" baby. Adoption is not a lesser choice for us, and we just want to be parents. There are definitely downfalls, like that it's a pain in the ass, and it's really expensive, and we wanted to have a baby by now and it will be several more years, but you know, we'll deal.

So I really haven't been one of those infertile women who hate all pregnant ladies. But...it's still kind of hard sometimes. I watched The Business of Being Born the other night, and, propaganda aside, it made me kind of sad that I won't have that birth experience. Another friend just told me she's pregnant, and I'm absolutely thrilled for her, she's a wonderful person and will be an amazing mom. But I can't say I didn't feel a little twinge of envy.

And I don't think that's such a bad thing. I know some people dealing with infertility who are so angry and bitter that they become the self-designated arbiters of who "deserves" a baby. Someone who's had a miscarriage deserves a baby more than someone who got pregnant easily with no problems. That kind of shit. Honestly, it's incredibly sad to see. Infertility sucks, and it isn't fair that some people get to be parents a lot easier than others. But if it takes someone until their twenties or thirties to see that life can be horribly unfair, I would be willing to bet all of my Tom Waits albums that they have an awful lot of other things to be thankful for. I'm sad that we won't have a kid for several more years. But not sad enough to lose sight of everything else. Not sad enough to forget that I have an incredible husband. Not sad enough that I can't be happy for my friends who are getting pregnant and having kids. Not sad enough that I believe that I deserve a baby more than anyone else who wants one.

Vewy Scawy

The other night, Kevin and I were sitting out on our balcony when we heard the sound of wind in the trees by the railroad tracks, about 500 yards from us. It came toward us like the demonic force in the woods in “Evil Dead”, getting louder and louder, until it was roaring, sounding like hail hitting the ground. Then it got silent, Kevin and I looked at each other, and next thing we knew, the tree in front of us was bent almost to the ground and we were getting blasted with an enormous gust of wind. There was no storm, no severe weather alert, although we were both half-expecting to see a funnel cloud off to the side. It was extremely disconcerting.

We probably won’t be spending much time out there after this coming weekend, not because of the Straight-Line Winds Of The Undead, but because of what our last few weeks in Madison will entail. Kevin switches his work schedule to the opposite end of the week and my job ends after this week and (surprise surprise) the temp agency is very un-encouraging about my prospects of short-term work for the next four weeks. This unfortunately means that my stellar husband will have to pick up extra shifts to cover the loss of my paycheck, which means that he’ll be at work or sleeping for most of July, which means I will be handling all things moving-related. Sucky all around, but it’s temporary and before we know it, we’ll be in our new house, running out to the sidewalk to catch a glimpse of Lake Superior any time we want. Good stuff.

Just sit there and look pretty

So I just read this piece in one of my favorite lefty news websites about “nerdy” women becoming sex symbols in these new, enlightened times. Fucking great, except, well, it isn’t.

While the author of this piece does a pretty good job of picking out the problems with this trend, she doesn’t mention that pop culture media seems to conflate “nerdy” with “smart/clever/witty”. They’re not the same thing. A nerd is, by definition, someone “who passionately pursues intellectual activities, esoteric knowledge, or other obscure interests that are age inappropriate rather than engaging in more social or popular activities” (thanks, wikipedia!). This means that someone like their prime example, Tina Fey, who is smart as hell AND hot, is not really a nerd. In fact, none of the women they mentioned can really be called a nerd. They’re incredibly awesome and their intellect is a boost to their hotness, which is a great thing. But calling them “nerds” kind of defeats the whole “yay, smart ladies” thing—why does a woman who knows her shit automatically become a nerd? Why can’t she just be smart?

Don’t get me wrong, this is a step in the right direction. However, as the author points out, the “sex symbol” aspect comes with some very tired definitions of what sexiness requires. One example given of the New Sexy Nerd is Danica McKellar, mathematics genius and portrayer of Kevin Arnold’s object of affection, posing in a bikini for “Stuff” magazine. Millions of men in their late twenties and early thirties would agree, Winnie Cooper was sexy before she posed in a bikini, and a lot of them find the fact that she’s crazy-smart to be even better. Pin-ups are great and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with cheesecake, it just doesn’t need to be held up as evidence of hotness, like, “See, smart girls have nice tits too!”

So, basically it seems like it’s not that we’re recognizing the inherent sexiness in a smart, funny woman who can carry on a conversation, it’s that they’ve started wearing lipstick! So now they’re sexy! Isn’t that great?

Um, not really, no. I mean, I like makeup and everything, and I guess I’m all for anything that starts to shift the Sexy Ideal away from the Jessica Simpson/Tara Reid/Jessica Alba template, where it doesn’t really matter what, if anything, they have to say as long as they look good in a tube top. But you know, regardless of what she’s wearing, Tina Fey is sexy because of, not in spite of, her intelligence, and I think that’s what the media, in rushing to declare the newest definition of what makes a Hot Lady, seems to be missing.

The pre-crack Whitney was right, children ARE the future

I used to think that my outspokenly liberal nature was, while always a part of me, something that really took off in my late teens and early twenties. But the other day I remembered something from my childhood.

When I was 8, Ronald Reagan was in office, and I did not like him. Granted, when you're that age, if you have any thoughts on politics, they come from your parents. Still, I watched the news. I knew nuclear war was scary and bad. And even at that tender age, I could see that Reagan was kind of a joke, an affable old fart with a penchant for illegal weapons sales and rambling speeches about Evil Empires. Side note: who decided he was one of our greatest presidents? Cause I don't think the historical record bears that out.

Anyway, I started hearing about this "Star Wars" program, and at first I didn't understand why people were getting so upset about Star Wars. I liked it, especially Han Solo. When it was explained to me that, no, it was actually a nickname for a nuclear weapons program called SDI, or Strategic Defense Initiative, and it would make the Soviet Union angry and cost lots and lots of money, I thought that was a bad idea. Actually, as soon as I heard "nuclear weapon" I thought about how a nuclear war would destroy the world, which I had read somewhere ("somewhere" being closer to Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing than The Economist), and I worked myself up into quite a state of righteous indignation, if memory serves. I got so angry I decided i was going to write the president A LETTER.

So I sat at our dining room table and wrote something along the lines of "Please don't start a nuclear war with Star Wars. Nuclear weapons are bad and we should be friends with the Soviet Union." I think it was a little more fleshed out than that, but you get the drift. I also drew mushroom clouds with sienna crayons to illustrate my point to dramatic effect. My mom mailed it for me and I waited for my response. I was certain I would receive a tear-stained letter from Ronnie, telling me that I had made him see the error of his war-mongering ways, and he was convening a diplomatic envoy to Moscow; would I please serve as Junior Ambassador?

Weeks went by and I started to get a little annoyed that he hadn't responded yet; after all, how many articulate (and illustrated!) pleas for peace could the president be receiving from precocious children? I couldn't imagine very many children wrote to the president.

Finally, I came home from school to find an envelope from the White House waiting for me. I tore it open, read it eagerly, then cried "What the hell is this shit?" (That's not a verbatim quote. My truck driver vocabulary has been developed over many many years and was still in the incubation stage when I was 8). In response to my impassioned letter, I had received a picture of Ron and Nancy, a "Just Say No" sticker, and an incredibly lame brochure, printed on cardstock, about the Youth of America being The Future.

I was not pleased. I promptly threw it all in the trash and declared that I would wash my hands of this bozo president of ours. If he wasn't going to listen to an 8-year-old girl from Minnesota, who on earth could get through to him? My cynicism began to develop that day, and the following year in school, when we talked about satire and put together a silly little magazine, I drew a scathing cartoon that depicted Reagan freaking out about running out of jellybeans while weapons (including arrows, which I could never really explain, but they were easy to draw) flew past his head in the Oval Office. It was the sort of thing that almost certainly could have brought the government to its knees had it received distribution beyond the parents of the ten kids who worked on it. I'm a grudge-holder, what can I say?

After a 16-month flirtation with MySpace (I don't know why), I'm coming back to my abandoned blogger account. I promise never to leave again.

I need to stop reading the comments on CNN's "Political Ticker" section. The illiterate rants that make up the bulk of the comments paint a vivid mental image, and that image is "Red-Faced Idiot". In a recent post about Obama, one person actually said that Obama was a crazy liberal who wanted to destroy the economy in the name of the environment, specifically, to save polar bears, and don't you know that polar bears are dangerous and if you came face-to-face with a polar bear, it would kill you? You can't even have a reasonable discussion with someone who says something so insanely stupid. Just reading that made me a little dumber.

This is one of the downfalls of the Internet, that it gives an anonymous platform for those who have absolutely no qualms about letting the whole wide world know what moronic, racist, misogynistic, or all-around hateful assholish thoughts are rolling around in their big empty heads.