feminist blogs

Quoth the bot that came up with this NC-17 determination:

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

• sex (14x)
• dead (7x)
• hell (6x)
• queer (5x)
• shit (3x)
• kill (1x)

Apparently they’re only looking at the front page; lard knows there are quite a few more naughty words here than that.

___

Anyway folks, some actual substantive blogging is in the works… just not ready to post yet. Until then, I give you dumb quizzes and shit. (That word again!)

At this moment I have numerous posts percolating on proverbial backburners, so until they’re good and ready, I give you the following cuteness.

Lynyrd & Mariarosa.

Quoth my thirteen-year-old:

If I ever get married - and if I marry a man - he’s going to have to understand that I will will always be completely crazy about A Series of Unfortunate Events [the book series].

Well, she may or may not remain as exuberantly enthusiastic as she is now for that particular book series, but I love that without thinking about it, she does not see heterosexual marriage as an inevitable norm; nor is this, for her, whatsoever in contradiction with the fact that she is as typically “boy-crazy” as plenty of other girls her age. Currently, objects of her young fannish affection include the dashing Corbin Bleu (she literally screams whenever his countenance appears on the television screen) and Liam Aiken, not least of all because he stars as Klaus in the movie based upon the above-referenced book series.  Further, at her own profile at fanfiction.net,* she includes this line: Marriage is a human right, not a heterosexual privilege. Add this to your profile if you agree.

She really is an extraordinary kid.

*For her privacy, I won’t link directly to her profile or to any of the stories she writes, but suffice it to say I was a proud and amazed mama when I learned she was posting her stories at that site, and that she has her own little following!

Valley:

I found out from an old friend that someone with whom we went to high school, Jeremiah Johnson, died in February in an apparent snorkeling accident. Jeremiah was a good kid, and I knew him better than I knew most of my classmates at Kapa’a High, in part because he lived in the same tiny north shore town as me (Hanalei, not Kapa’a as the Honolulu Star-Bulletin incorrectly reported), and in part because he was simply approachable, authentically kind. Those are rare traits in teenage boys (as I knew at the time, and thus had a quiet little crush on him, though nothing ever came of that), so it doesn’t at all surprise me that he went on to become a fine man, a school teacher who was on a field trip with his students when the accident occurred. I’m still pretty shaken up about this, and I’ll have a lot more to write about it later, though probably not for this blog.  His family has my sincerest condolences. This is an unimaginable loss for them, and to many others as well.

An applicable wisdom-pearl swiped from, of all places, a bulletin board at Shoney’s last night: To the world, you may be just one person, but to one person, you may be the world. I know for a fact that Jeremiah would have been ‘the world’ and more to many.

Peak: 

I had a writing breakthrough, which there’s no need to get into now except to say, with gratitude, that it happened. (Partly in response to sorting through my myriad reactions to the above sad news, so, thank you, dear Jeremiah.)  As I explained to a friend this morning:

There is a direction I’m headed with in all this, but you know what happens when I stop to explain that direction? Right, I don’t actually get around to proceeding in said direction.

Valley: 

There was a misunderstanding yesterday between various family members involving my youngest girl Annalisa’s breakfast. (That in itself wouldn’t be relevant, but for its consequences.)  The misunderstanding: I’d thought Jeff was getting Annalisa’s breakfast for her, he did but then asked Mariarosa to grab it out of the microwave for him, she either didn’t hear him ask that or pretended not to, but in any case left it in the microwave and then dashed off to catch her bus, meanwhile Annalisa was playing in the kitchen when I thought she was eating, following which I sent her to brush her teeth, then found the breakfast in the microwave, then had to have her eat it and brush her teeth all over again, making us about ten minutes late getting her to school. 

Anyway, it was a good thing, because at some point in the morning, a dog got hit by a car in front of our home. In the chaos of our morning, none of us heard it happen. Then we all left the house, Jeff in one vehicle, Annalisa and me in the other. Jeff saw the V-DOT worker with a dump truck scraping animal remains off the pavement, then looked up in time to see what had already been placed in the truck: very clearly what had once been a Rottweiler, with a chain still attached to its neck. Evidently, he or she had been chained up long enough to get pretty pissed off about it and broke loose, only to get slaughtered on our street by what Jeff assumed to have been several different cars, based on the pavement markings and the condition of the corpse.  (And here I will pause to post a link to the Richmond SPCA’s article about how you can support anti-chaining efforts locally. Please read it, and pass the news and ideas on.)

Somehow I managed to not see any of this, even though I was in the vehicle right behind Jeff. I just navigated around the dump truck and focused on getting Annalisa to school as quickly as possible. Then he called me on my cell, to make sure Annalisa hadn’t seen it, and I had to ask, did she see what? Ugh, heartbreak.

But if Annalisa hadn’t been running 10 minutes late for school, the truck wouldn’t have been there in the street - only the dead dog would have been, and for all I know, in my rush I might have hit the poor thing, too. And if Jeff hadn’t told me, my next step after dropping off Annalisa would have been to take Lynyrd for a walk right past that spot. As some of you know, when Lynyrd was first rescued by our friends Karrie and Mark, he was found on the side of the road guarding the corpse of what appeared to be his traveling buddy: another dog. So even if, after walking by the scene, I had been oblivious, Lynyrd, I am quite sure, would not have been. With his hound dog’s nose and life experience, it’s a damn sure thing he knows what death smells like.

Peak:

So instead of walking him near our home, I took him to Barker Field, the dog park here in Richmond I had stumbled upon only yesterday. And not only did he have an awesome doggy time, but he actually met a few doggies who looked like him. Their humans told me the breed was American Foxhound, and that they can be any combination of tan, black, and white in color. A subsequent internet search turned up lots of American Foxhound images that look an awful lot like Lynyrd, though most of them have black markings along with the tan and white. So our apparent ‘mutt’ may actually be a specific breed, this or some related variety of hound. Though I wouldn’t care if he was from Jupiter, I love him so.

Here he is, apparently obtaining important information from one of his fellow hound pals.  (Alas, I couldn’t get any pictures of them together where one wasn’t sniffing the other one’s butt or doing something equally unphotogenic, so this pic will have to do.)

One more peak:

At the library yesterday when my cell phone rang, in order to avoid disturbing other patrons, I left the table where I’d been sitting with my 12-year-old, alternately typing from a handwritten version of a story I’m working on, and quizzing her for her Civics test. Husband and I then chatted, me using hushed tones, from the hallway. Then I looked up, and noticed that Mariarosa had turned my laptop’s screen toward her and was optometrically devouring it when I busted her and, ’library quiet rules’ be damned, loudly scolded her from across the pretty large room. (This is not the first time she’s been busted on similar charges.)  Upon my return to the desk and my devilishly grinning child, I informed her that she is simply not allowed to read anything of mine until and unless it is published, and even then I’d rather she didn’t. To which she protested loudly. Then I offered this further clarification: by ‘published’ I do not mean ‘blogged,’ and I explained how I can, in the future, IP-address-ban her impudent ass if I so chose. To which she protested even more loudly. Then I looked over to where the librarian was, expecting the Stink Eye, and found to my surprise that she looked like she was suppressing a guffaw. Here’s to my daughter’s and my disturbing the peace.

—

And so, three cheers for life going on. Jeremiah taught biology, the life science of all life sciences. I’m pretty sure he’d understand.

And now, I have a happy doggie to walk.

Today is picture day, so last night we took our seven-year-old Annalisa to Great Clips to address the problem of her wild wild hair. The girl has a sensitive scalp, so mornings have been a living hell in terms of getting through the knots it manages (through every kind of rowdy kid activity) to get into every day. We’ve used every kind of conditioner and detangler* to little effect, leaving me with two unsavory options for each morning: 1) Incite child to screech at the top of her lungs through the seemingly responsible activity of brushing her hair, or 2) at least partially abdicate the ‘grooming’ portion of our parental responsibilities - meaning: make it look at least a bit neater, but don’t dare go in for the tangles in the undergrowth, as it were.

So it was no wonder to me that she wanted to get her hair cut much shorter. So she went from hair that was a bit longer than this:

To a much shorter ‘do, like this:

We checked in with her throughout the haircut to make sure she was comfortable with it being that short, and she was as cool as a cucumber. The woman doing the haircut seemed astonished that we would allow her to make this ‘big decision’ for herself; I replied with an anecdote about how, in the third grade or so, my stepmother’s first major parental act in my life was to force me to get a Dorothy Hamill haircut (when my hair was quite long then, and had hardly ever been cut before). I had been pretty upset about that, so who was I, now, to compel my child to keep her hair long if she wanted it short?

And we laughed and we chatted, and through it all there was Annalisa giggling, boasting of how awesome she’s going to look for today’s portraits, etc. And then she issues the night’s great verbal humdinger:

Mom! Maybe I’ll turn into a boy!

To which I say, while struggling desperately to avoid erupting into laughter, something to the effect of that would be interesting, dear and we leave it at that.

*Re: detangler: According to both of my kids, this is pronounced de-TANG-u-lar. As the word hamburger is to Hamburglar, I suppose.

Revealing more freakishly personal shit in comments at others’ blogs than I am (initially) inclined to here.

This time, it’s at Hillbilly, Please, in a comment to a post about the seemingly innocuous topic of “choking hazards.” Good Lord, I even started it with that self-mockingly tedious “once upon a time” bit:

Once upon a time my ex and I (who was not, duh, my ex at the time) were looking for a place to rent along with my very young daughter, and we interviewed a prospective roommate who said we could have two rooms in the house she was already renting, and it would be no problem whatsoever that we’d need to childproof the downstairs. So we moved in. Suddenly the woman developed complete amnesia about the childproofing thing, and found it necessary to tell us how much money she had spent on one corner that had a Mapplethorpe print and an expensive glass vase, that it was all part of the “effect” and was thereby non-negotiable. So we spent a lot of time chasing my poor kid throughout four months of what ought to have been her carefree toddler-hood, trying to keep her from inflicting major property damage. This was depressing, as was the fact that our roommate was a classist, racist bitch.

(Hold on, you knew I’d say something actually relevant to your post, right? Really, I’m almost there!)

Part of what we had to try to keep from young Mariarosa’s mouth and airways included this woman’s various knickknacks on (what else?) very low-lying shelves. She’d bragged to us, in particular, about a Native American arrowhead which she’d gotten from some expensive hiking trip or another. My first thought at the time was, so you, a white woman, found it necessary to remove this artifact from the land. Grrrreat. (Which is not to say that I would always and invariably have a problem with someone owning such items, but because of the numerous other ways in which this particular woman was such a classist and racist bitch, the ‘arrowhead’ bit was quite the icing on the unsavory cake.)

Soon enough, we had to move out of there. And the woman’s beloved arrowhead came up missing. I could only think of two things:

1. Geez, I hope my kid didn’t swallow it, and
2. I wonder if she threw it in the trash? [’Throwing stuff in the trash’] had been a favorite activity of hers at one point. Yes, we were quite poor and had limited entertainment options.

In the end, nothing came out my daughter’s end… so no damage was done there. I’ve often wondered what became of the arrowhead, though. Was it in a landfill, to turn up later in some mysterious situation? Had angry gods come to swipe it in the night? (Of course I liked this second option best.)

This long-assed comment is my lame effort at catching up, and returning the gift of your most welcome goodwill. May no toddlers be caused to choke on your awesome collection of cute little things. May you not be caused to part with said little things as a result. And I know (duh!) you’d never act like that mean nasty woman with whom we were forced to ride out the extremely cold Minnesota winter of 1995.

History, it seems, still gives me plenty to choke on. What was it Robert Frost said, Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat? The material of my life - including its specific poetries - is forever having me by the throat.

Since I’m overly consumed with non-Internet life at this moment, I am dropping by in an effort to render the illusion that, having labored for a great deal of time to fix various template issues, I still have some energy leftover to actually blog.

Therefore, this post shall conclude with a (mostly) gratuitous photo of my kids meeting Chris Rock (and his kid), last year in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Rock was in town for the April 30, 2006 Rally to Save Darfur. I was in town (with family in tow) for the beginning of a week long workshop, Protecting Victims of Child Prostitution, hosted by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

(Pause inserted here so that any of y’all with actual money can go visit either or both of the above sites and consider making a donation. See, this isn’t completely gratuitous post.)

So while I was holed up in Alexandria with an interesting mix of FBI agents, prosecutors, child advocates, and Law and Order: SVU detective types (plus one incredibly obnoxious vice cop, whose bullshit I was happy to call out in front of God and everybody - but that’s another story), my husband and kids were gallivanting about the Capitol, going to this museum and that one, eventually running into Mr. Rock and his family at one of the various Smithsonians.

Jeff reports that at first he didn’t recognize the star, since his hair had more gray than he could recall from recent film appearances. My husband, being a gregarious fellow, finally approached the artist and struck up a conversation, in a non-threatening manner (in other words, did not scream oh my God! It’s Chris Rock!, which likely would have irritated the star and his bodyguards, of which there were several).

Mr. Rock was quite courteous, and said “sure” when Jeff asked if our girls could have their picture taken with him, so that’s what happened.

is it wrong to make your daughter have an abortion

The answer is yes.

Until you’ve lip-synched to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody along with your 12-year old daughter at the amazing music studio exhibit at the Virginia Science Museum. (Alas, no photographic evidence of this event was captured; you’ll just have to picture us with  headphones on, rocking out. For pretend microphones, I used my cell phone and she used her hairbrush.)

Here, however, is said kid playing the piano with her feet:

Also, it was pretty fun to capture this image of Björk licking my husband’s ever-balding head. (Staged with the intention of disturbing our friend Royce who suffers from a perpetual crush on Björk, though I suspect this image may be disturbing to lots of folks.)

In all, a good but tiring weekend filled with friends and children and gratitude and exhaustion.

And here I thought there could be nothing more alarming than finding out my mother was reading this blog…

Someone within my girls’ school district (can’t tell which school) arrived at this blog today after specifically Googling my name, and accessed three pages. Then the presumably same individual (from the same IP address) came back later in the afternoon and accessed forty more pages.

Not sure which is more alarming: whether it was a kid (perhaps my own…) or a teacher or what. Though if it’s my eldest child’s creative writing teacher, I might not have to completely freak, since I happen to know she’s a David Sedaris fan like me, in which case she might not deem me an unfit mother based on the sheer number of scandalous and strange topics I have addressed on this blog. (Or, for that matter, on the number of dead links and pages with bad formatting from old blogging systems. To my thinking, that’s actually the more embarrassing aspect of all this… dead links! Missing image files! Augh!)

P.S. If the individual responsible for the Googling and the 43 page views cares to alleviate my anxieties by identifying himself or herself, this can be done in comments or privately via email at the contact page. I won’t even blog about it later, promise