feminist blogs

I get on a plane for Orlando on Saturday.

It's currently 81 degrees in Florida.

Oh yes, I shall come back with a tan...

Cause they're actually making me work again.

And I was getting so used to getting paid for playing Rocket Mania all day, too...

Through trial and error, and a lot of low days, I learned that when I wake up in the morning, before I do my weights, I need to test my sugar and take 1 unit less of insulin that I'd usually take. So if I'm at, say, 109, I take 2 units instead of 3.

Weight lifting makes my sugar go up, so taking those units helps ease some of the sugar spike. This does mean, however, that an hour later, when I have breakfast, I have to take 1.5 units less of insulin than I would if I hadn't taken the insulin earlier.

Problem is, when I'm stressed and tired at 6:30 AM, I do stupid things. Like this morning, when I read "99" on the machine and dutifully dosed myself with 3 units instead of 1.5

Goddammit.

At least the low comes at a predictable time when this happens: when I'm on the stairway leading from the train up into the station at work. Not a *convienent* time, mind you, but a predictable one. And it meant I spent about a half hour being dopey and bitchy to Cyllia, the secretary, who was asking a bunch of questions about some projec thing we're doing right when I got in the door while I was still having a bitchy, irritable low.

I hate that being stupid and tired makes me easier to kill now, you know?

So, I went in for my annual yesterday - and it was abortion day! (ummm, not for me. But it's the one day a week they perform abortions at the one I go to)

But there were no protesters to harass. Alas.

Mostly I just wanted to go in so I could say, "See! I had diabetes! Why the hell didn't you notice that wild weight loss + non-stop monster yeast infections = diabetes, dammit!!!??"

Turns out that with the pap now, they automatically screen for HPV (they didn't do this before???) unless you opt out. Why the hell would I opt out? This is like not testing your blood sugar cause you Don't Want to Know.

She asked me how I liked the IUD - she doesn't see many women come in who have them, and was wondering why that was, and it's like, well, have you heard the stories about women in red states who try and get them? Their doctors harass them about being married and/or having children. Unless you're married and have a kid, they don't give them to you. And that's cause STDs + IUD = VERY BAD. And, as we all know, husbands never cheat on wives and wives never cheat on husbands. Never, EVER. And there's no such thing as Open Relationships.

The other reason is the small uterus reason: I haven't had a kid, and the damned thing is still a tight fit, and because of the diabetes, I heal slowly, so it looks like it's caused another minor infection; I'm now on a double dose of antibiotics, again (I did this last August, for the same reason). As a precaution, I was screened (for the THIRD time in a year) for chlamydia and gonorrhea (these are the ones that if you get when you have an IUD, you're in Trouble).

Oh boy, what fun!

Why is it more women don't have an IUD???

Seriously, though, I still love this stupid little thing, and I recommend it to women who've got major depression problems when they use the pill; you just need to practice safe sex (which we should all be doing anyway). And go in for your annual every year (which is why it's called an annual, people).

And, yea, there's that three months of blood and pain, but I have a feeling that if you're not dying from diabetes and/or you've had a kid, that blood-and-pain adjustment period is probably a hell of a lot easier.

OK, seriously, it was a lot of squats and lunges. But DAMN.

How to disarm a gunman.

We've practiced a few, far simpler moves in MA class. I like this technique oh-so-much-better.

Fantasy writers don't just make all this stuff up on their own. We have hundreds of thousands of years of mythmaking to draw from:

In the African-American hoodoo tradition, as well as in Sicilian folk-magic, menstrual blood served to a man in his coffee or tea is a sovereign recipe for capturing his sexual attention. No ritual, prayer, or invocation is necessary; you simply add some menstrual blood to the man's coffee or tea. The idea is to get your scent into the beloved's sphere of consciousness. This is nothing more or less than pheromone-magic, and as such it partakes of biology as much as it does of occultism. My Sicilian grandmother believed in its efficacy completely.

Operating on this sort of logic, ingesting coffee would make me want to make love to a coffee bean plant. Hmmm....

...there are probably a hundred (spells for) women who capture a man's semen to rule and control him or to keep him faithful. The most popular way to do this in hoodoo is by making a knot-spell on the man and keeping it tied up in a nation sack. For this purpose, the semen can be fresh or gathered from a discarded condom -- or even stored in the freezer until needed. Most of the rootworkers who have told me about how to capture semen have noted that it is important that the woman not have an orgasm when capturing semen, because then she might get "mixed up in the spell," and fall victim to her own conjurations. "Hold yourself aloof," was how one woman put it to me. "Don't let yourself get mixed into it when you collect his stuff."

Don't give in to the orgasm, ladies! You'll lose all your power!

Seriously, though, that's the first time I've ever read any sort of folksy advice to women about how having an orgasm would somehow deplete their power: you hear this a lot in relation to men and orgasm (Flaubert's moaning, "Well, I lost another book today")

However, for men worried about coming under the seductive wiles of women, some advice:

Because men are thought to be so susceptible to the magical deployment of women's menstrual blood, vaginal fluids, and urine, in some cultures they are taught to avoid eating anything served to them by an unmarried woman which might contain these bodily fluids. It is common for a man to refuse or only warily accept dark-coloured beverages like coffee or tea or foods with brown or red sauces such as barbeque, lasagna, or spaghetti from a woman.

Coffee: it always comes down to the coffee.

A substantial percentage of men who have homosexual sex still consider themselves "straight," a survey of New York City men suggests.... The findings are based on a 2003 health department survey that included 4,193 men age 18 and up. Respondents were asked about their sexual behavior and their sexual orientation. Almost 4 percent said they were homosexual, while 91 percent described themselves as "straight." The rest said they were bisexual, "unsure," or declined to answer.

But of men who considered themselves heterosexual, nearly 10 percent had had sex with a man, but no woman, in the past year, Pathela's team found. And of the 337 survey respondents who'd had sex with another man, almost 73 percent identified themselves as straight.

Cultural norms may have played a significant role in the discrepancy, according to the researchers. Foreign-born men, who make up a large proportion of New York City men, were more likely than their U.S.-born counterparts to call themselves heterosexual despite having sex with other men. Men raised in cultures less accepting of homosexuality may be "reluctant" to identify themselves as such, Pathela's team notes, or they may have a narrow definition of what constitutes homosexuality.

Labels are tricky, tricky things (don't I know it).

Pretty.

There's something far less appealing at the idea of lifting weights in the morning when you feel like you spent all night... lifting weights.

But I'm doing it. Cause, well...

Also, I just got another $256 hospital bill. Where are all these coming from? (OK, well, yes, *the hospital*)

I woke up at ten to five from a nightmare of blood, plane crashes, cannabalistic women, and this guy who gets his hands chopped off.

I really need to start writing lighter books.