feminist blogs

Earlier this evening, as we were driving home from a visit to my in-laws, I thought it would be funny if I posted this pathetic but true-to-life tip on Twitter:

Lifehack: Can’t afford repairs needed to pass inspection? Make sure you have washer fluid. Pass cop, wash windshield, sticker date obscured!

Within about ten minutes of sending that message, my cell phone rang. It was our houseguest, who had been borrowing our truck. He asked for my husband, so I handed the phone to him, then watched as Jeff’s facial expressions moved through various phases of alarm, and thought aw, fuck, what NOW?

Here’s what he was alarmed about:

Thus, my follow-up ‘tweets’ (1, 2) upon arriving home:

Fact: If you have 2 vehicles (one w/ valid inspection, one not), & you tweet about the one w/out the inspection? Guest will wreck other one.

ALSO, the vehicle that gets totaled (almost exactly as you were tweeting about the other one) will have just had $600 worth of repairs done.

At least the Henrico County cop at the scene did not find our friend (the houseguest who was borrowing it) at fault. (And, most importantly, he wasn’t hurt. Freaked out and terribly remorseful, but not hurt.) The insurance situation is still going to be a mess though.

Oh well, at least my husband’s unemployment checks finally started coming in.

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* UPDATE, TUESDAY JULY 22: And now the Jeep’s transmission has died. So other than my husband’s motorcycle (of which I am mortally terrified, and have never been on; nor have I been on any motorcycle in approximately a decade), we’re down to zero vehicles. No, I’m not kidding.

The quality of television programming available as workout accompaniment at our local gym ranges from trite and inane to offensive and enraging. (For which reason I have learned not to go at the 7 PM hour. I always get stuck at the Lou Dobbs treadmill.) Which is why I bring my iPod along and groove to Spoon or Pavement (shut up) or Otep or the podcast for This American Life or or, if I’m feeling particularly aggro, Lamb of God. But I am an attention deficit-disordered person, so even if I have awesome things to listen to, I will end up watching the TV too, or indeed all of the TVs, my eyes flitting between the screens (all the while guffawing at closed captioning borkings, because I’m nerdy like that).

So it was that today, at an earlier hour than that to which I am accustomed to working out, I was positioned between two monitors that had on some lameass shitsucking crossword puzzle-themed gameshow (really? a gameshow centering around crossword puzzles? Like gameshows aren’t already so inherently fucking¹ stupid²?), and The 700 Club.

I gleaned from this experience two pieces of knowledge:

1. I can never be a contestant on Merv Griffin’s Crosswords. That is because, if I were asked the question, “What does a lady who has been tied to railroad tracks need?” my answer, despite knowing the word had four letters and began with an h, would not be “hero.” Rather, it would be “Why, a knife! First, to cut the ropes. Second, to cut the motherfucker who’d tied her to the tracks.”
2. On the 700 Club, when Pat Robertson is supposedly praying? It does not appear to me that he is praying. Rather, it seems he is straining to have a bowel movement. And/or is passing a kidney stone.

You’re welcome.

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¹ Cross-word puzzle enthusiasts of the world, I do not mean to diss you. Being a word geek, I get the attraction even if it ain’t my thing - but to debase that concept with a game show? That, my dears, is the phenomenon for which I mean to express my contempt.

² I would have elaborated here about the piece of crap garbage-chewing-and-regurgitating stupidity that is Deal or No Deal, which invades my home life with embarrassing regularity and against my wishes, but then it would have turned into a spiraling tangent about my eternal loathing for certain of my husband’s television watching habits, not least of which is My Big Redneck Wedding, and then I’d be all off-topic and shit.

Oh wait.

Because I have about fifty other things going on, including a few stalled blog posts and an increasingly urgent need to pack for my trip to Greensboro tomorrow (my BFF is treating me to the Amtrak fare and a long weekend’s mutual writerly support, yay!), but I also feel like shaking up the uber-serious mood of this blog ever since that last piece posted, and finally, because I have been inspired by a dear friend’s adventures in (ahem!) ‘art’ criticism, I give you… this.

Please understand that I do not, in any way, endorse the practice of taxidermy. (FFS, I’m a vegetarian!) But I happened upon this… thing in a bookstore near VCU (which, in keeping with its catering to eccentricity, is open sometimes, closed at other times, with no predictable pattern to it), and I just didn’t quite know what to do with the surreal image. So of course I’m foisting it upon you.

…And, what was even more inscrutable? The other end (business end?) of said chipmunk¹:

(Note: If you couldn’t make that out, the lettering says, The rule of consciousness is near. Um, okay, WHAT?)

Which, to me, doesn’t make me a lick of sense, but maybe I’m just not enough of a ‘real artist’ to get it.

I suppose this would be called, by aficionados of the form, either ‘mixed media’ or ’sculpture.’ (And/or ‘animal cruelty,’ ‘crap,’ and ‘OMFG what drugs was this person on when they made this thing’ by others.)

Let’s say we agree to call this ’sculpture.’ (For the purposes of argument. C’mon, just play along.)

If, indeed, it is sculpture, how did it get there? Is this ’student work’? And if so, is it, by any bizarre chance, the work of a student in VCU’s Sculpture Department, ranked again by US News & World Report as the top program of its kind in the country?

(Clearly, stranger things have happened.)

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¹ Unless it’s actually a squirrel and I’ve got everything wrong. It’s not like I’m an expert in differentiating between varieties of taxidermied rodents, okay?

As some of you know, I recently deleted my entire blog. I had several reasons (of which this episode was less an immediate trigger than it was the icing on the hyper-rhetorical cake), but the bottom line was that my life had been overtaken by (overt) political blogging, such that most other subjects and activities had become subordinate.

There was also a growing disgust with the state of political discourse within the feminist blogosphere. Many of the feminist blogs to which I had once looked for nuanced explorations of crucial issues of politics and culture were now doing little besides spewing constant streams of grossly distorting invective against Barack Obama (or what they would oh-so-innocently refer to as “vetting the candidate”).

When I took a deeply felt, authentically diplomatic approach, my would-be sisters advocating for Hillary Clinton generally ignored me (with precious few exceptions - you know who you are). And when I took more of a fighting approach, I began to deplore the sound of my own voice.

Finally, I did a post specifically on the dangers of the Obama/Clinton divide among progressives (using a one-shot opportunity to guest blog at Huffington Post), and while responses were generally favorable (I was thanked, for instance, for “inserting a little sanity into the divisive discourse”), it was also clear that my words could not begin to counteract what was, after all, a tsunami-sized wave of grossly cynical, and sometimes openly hateful discourse.

So, does my about-face with regard to overt political blogging mean I no longer care - passionately - about these issues? Hardly. (Indeed, what woke me up in the middle of the night, provoking me to write this, was a dream containing the audaciously brassy and insistent chorus line from Skunk Anansie’s Yes It’s Fucking Political.) Well then, does it mean my support for Barack Obama’s candidacy is in any way lessened? Most certainly not.

But if months engaging in what had been a labor of love - writing about the issues in this election - have gotten me absolutely nowhere in terms of fostering open, substantive dialogue with progressives’ common interests in mind, why on earth would I continue with that labor now? (For while it is my candidate’s prerogative - and, indeed, mandate - to respond as needed¹ to constant attacks coming from the Clinton camp, I don’t see that my doing so adds to the current discourse.)

Today, as Pennsylvania voters go to the polls, I’m going to impose a total news blackout in this household (from TV to newspapers to blogs to Twitter) until I know most of the returns are in, and my kids are in bed. Because, in the event Clinton’s last-ditch effort to save her campaign, by deploying that most Rovian of all despicably Rovian tactics - using the image of Osama bin Laden in campaign ads, in an effort to scare voters (remember when Democrats were in universal opposition to this practice?) - is successful (where ’success’ would mean more than a marginal victory in this particular state, with significant net gain in pledged delegates), I am going to be incredibly angry. And I’d rather my kids didn’t see me like that.

Whatever the outcome, this time tomorrow, I’ll compose myself again, and deal with whatever comes next. If, somehow, Clinton becomes the Democratic party’s nominee, I will certainly vote for her, because McCain is by far the more dangerous candidate.

In the Huffington Post guest blog entry referenced above, I included in a footnote this somewhat out-of-place comment: Each post I write on the election, I die a little. Extricating myself from these debates, then - despite a constant stream of outrages to which I might otherwise have been compelled to react - has been in the interests of self-preservation, and I don’t regret it.

Going back to something I jokingly said on Twitter, awhile back:

Feminist blogosphere, I wish I knew how to quit you.

I’m happy to say that with this last post, I finally have.

Good luck, Pennsylvania. I hope you’ll vote your conscience.

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¹ As Obama said, in an interview to be aired in full on the Today Show later this morning:

This is an old trick, right? Somebody attacks you and attacks you and attacks you, and when you finally call them on it, suddenly you’re ‘engaging in the same tactics.’ We have been extraordinarily restrained during the course of this campaign and have generally responded only to attacks that have already been leveled at us by Senator Clinton.