I Am the Slime.

Today I feel like bashing TV. I didn't wake up feeling this way, but listening to Frank Zappa has put a little bee in my bonnet, and that bee really hates cable.

But first . . . I love Frank Zappa. If I wasn't married and he wasn't dead, I'd totally go for Frank. Hands down, he is my favorite person to listen to at work. I find it very amusing that I type up stupid blurbs about educational products while Frank sings about how "po-jama people are boring me to pieces" and then goes on some super wigged-out guitar trip. Or, funnier, demands "give me your dirty love, like you might surrender to some dragon in your dreams . . . I don’t need your sweet devotion, I don’t want your cheap emotion, Just whip me up some dragon lotion, For your dirty love". I just love that.

I pretty much hate TV. Sure, there ARE some good shows out there, but if you think about it, you have to wade through so much shit just to get at a few tiny, tiny islands of fresh green grass. And, even on those islands, you still have to watch out for the increasingly large leavings of some damn dog. (Commercials, of course.) In other words, if I was never allowed to watch TV again for the rest of my life, I wouldn't be real upset.

While in Missouri, Kevin and I watched some cable television. We watched more in 4 days than we usually watch in months. Hey--it was REALLY hot outside! Most of the viewing time was spent surfing. I watched a few home decorating shows, but they are so fucking inane! I mean, I like seeing people's houses, but watching a bunch of talentless "personalities" ham it up for the oh-so-present camera for AN HOUR just to see, in the last 3 minutes, what they did with the place . . . it's unbearable.

It tickles me in that annoying tickly way when people say "but I love the History Channel and the Discovery Channel!" as if these channels were somehow above the fray. Please. How many WWII documentaries can you watch, and don't you get enough of them on PBS in between episodes of Antiques Roadshow and The One-Hit Baby Boomers on Their Way to Branson Spectacular? And the programmers at the Discovery Channel are nothing more than shark demonizers and ridiculous motorcycle modifiers. And is it so fucking hard to just set up a camera and leave it there? MUST every show employ incredibly annoying Blair Witchy camera shots, constant zooms, and other such tripe? I wasn't annoyed when I started writing this, but now I'm incensed.

Not really. But I have cemented my view that money spent on cable might as well be used to line diapers, and that I just can't stand to watch on any kind of a regular basis. I've also always been averse to unthinking habits, and TV is right up front here. There are waaaaay too many people who come home, sit in a room, and turn on the TV. It's just on! For no reason! Just on, on, on, all the friggin time.

Still, I'm not going to kill it. I'll catch an occasional Simpsons and a few football games (hopefully in the company of other people). It's not evil. But it is The Slime:

I am gross and perverted
I'm obsessed 'n deranged
I have existed for years
But very little has changed
I'm the tool of the Government
And industry too
For I am destined to rule
And regulate you

I may be vile and pernicious
But you can't look away
I make you think I'm delicious
With the stuff that I say
I'm the best you can get
Have you guessed me yet?
I'm the slime oozin' out
From your TV set

You will obey me while I lead you
And eat the garbage that I feed you
Until the day that we don't need you
Don't go for help . . . no one will heed you
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold

That's right, folks . . .
Don't touch that dial

Well, I am the slime from your video
Oozin' along on your livin' room floor
I am the slime from your video
Can't stop the slime, people, lookit me go
I am the slime from your video
Oozin' along on your livin' room floor
I am the slime from your video
Can't stop the slime, people, lookit me go

--Frank Zappa
(To get the full effect of these lyrics, it really should be listened to. I have the CD.)

Back at Work.

Ugh. I spent the first 30 minutes of my day laying in bed with a big frown on my face. It's so hard to go back to work after a vacation, however low-key.

And low-key it was, thank god. Kev, Stevie and I spent 4 days (and 2 travel days) in Missouri, basking in the roomy and cheap hotel room that is my parents-in-law's house. My mother-in-law bought ALL of Stevie's school supplies, which included an entire wardrobe of navy, khaki, red, and white dress pants and collared shirts and a pair of red Chuck Taylor high tops for "edge".

The highlight was definitely our mid-week foray to our land which included outdoor pleasures on the deck of our cabin and a slow walk through our prairie grasses and oak trees. Afterwards we took a long drive through the countryside to the little town of Blackwater which was almost entirely deserted. In the last place I looked in the antique store there, I found three excellent towel hooks for our bathroom and negotiated a $12 price tag (a coup--the same hooks at Restoration Hardware or another such hack place would have set us back nearly $100, I'm sure). It was great to just hang out with Kevin for an afternoon, fully realizing why we are so damn happy together.

We slept, we ate, we fished and read. I finished a long-overdue quilt. Kevin loaded up a bunch of nice old boards that will soon become various tables for our living room. Stevie went swimming, fishing, biking, fish-feeding, sliding, and cicada-shell collecting. On the shell front, he collected about 45! He hung a bunch of them on a shirt and made hilarious "scared" faces for photos. We went to Matt and Deana's, played cards, and ate about 30 Freezee pops. I didn't even look at a computer sideways. It was great.

Peein' off the Front Porch and Howlin' at the Moon

The other night I finally watched a tape of the new Morgan Spurlock phenom, "30 days." Specifically, I watched the episode wherein the 2 city folk from Brooklyn go to live with a bunch of environmentalists at the Dancing Rabbit eco-community in Missouri.

It got me thinking. Specifically, it got me thinking about the time I lived in a little cabin in the woods of Meigs Co., Ohio while attending college. I'd like to start telling that story.

Here's the cabin:


Nice picture, huh? (Thanks again, Burb, for your computer acumen.) If I included a picture of the back, it would look much more shack-ish. Because it really was pretty much a shack in the middle of nowhere.

It was about 10 X 12, had no electricity or running water (unless we ran up the hill with the filled water bags from the pump, ha ha), and was heated by a wood stove. I did have a 1920s-era cookstove powered by propane. It was the kind where you turned on the gas, lit a match, and hoped for the best. Due to an earlier mishap involving my landlord's similarly primitive stove, an apple pie, a pilot light that wouldn't stay lit, and singed eyebrows, I checked for flames a lot.

I lived there for about 3 years while in college. The rent was reasonable: $25 a month ($40 when my boyfriend moved in early the next year). This is what I looked like towards the end of my stay:


See? Very happy! That's because I really loved living there.

The cabin was one of two dwellings on my landlord's 90 acres in rural Meigs County. All you dopeheads out there should know Meigs County, home of flavorful "Meigs County Gold" and many anti-drug taskforce helicopters. As the crow flies, I was but a few miles from the Ohio River, which was not easily but still reachable by nubby-tired bike. My landlord--who would've scored way-high on that "Are you a hippie" quiz--was a car mechanic in Athens. I won't tell you the name of his garage, but it had a lot to do with eastern philosophy, and plain befuddled other blue collar workers who weren't quite as familiar with The Way. He also spent a lot of time lamenting the fact that he worked all day in grease and oil to fix things that he had no respect or love for at all. Then he'd come home and do yoga in an attempt to work the auto toxins out of his system.

The other dwelling on the land was the landlord's hand-built 4-bedroom, one bathtub/shower home. When I moved to the land in the late summer of 1992, I lived in a room in that house. When my friend and former punk drummer turned bluegrass bassist, June Bug, vacated the cabin to live in a house with no windows or doors with his girlfriend who rolled her own cigarettes and smoked them while sitting in a near-impossible for adults crouched position, I moved into the cabin.

To reach the cabin, you had to park your car just off the road, cross a little (most of the time) creek on a rickety wooden bridge, cross another, mostly dry branch of said creek by stepping from rock to rock, and ascend a trail halfway up a big hill, with the land rising on the right and the creek down on your left. Total trip up was about 1/4 mile. There, on a rare flat piece of earth, sat my cabin. The flat side of the yard was populated with crabapple and redbud trees and had a rock ledge that overlooked the trail and creek. The up side of the yard had a small trail that continued straight up the hill to the tippy-top. Side story:

One fine day I loaded an old hiking backpack with creek rocks to make a big fire pit on that same tippy-top. I know--creek rocks and firepits aren't natural allies, but we never did have an explosion. I figured that each load weighed at least 80 pounds and the trip up the backside of this hill was at least 1/2 mile, often very steep. I did this for hours. Near round dinnertime, I shucked the pack and my boots at the top and ran top speed all the way down the hill, trying to "let go" and let my body steer itself. By the time I got down the hill (Yee-haw! Japhie Ryder got nothin' on me!), around the pond, past the outhouse and down to the main house (my landlord's), I was positively buzzing on endorphins and exhaustion and hunger and didn't even notice that I had cut the bottom of my foot open until someone pointed out the pool of blood. I sat down to a dinner of homemade cornmeal tortillas (HOT!), beans, rice, spicy mustard greens, assorted other garden veggies, a big jug of cheap South American wine, and friends. Life has rarely--rarely--been better.

Back to the cabin. The whole semi-clearing where the cabin was located was surrounded by a mostly hardwood forest. The 90 acres was similarly surrounded by state forest. We (my landlord and I) were the only people who lived on our "road," which more closely resembled someone's crappy driveway. We were two miles away from the nearest paved road, and about 45 minutes from Athens. Not having a car of my own, at first I got into town with my landlord, who was always driving some cheap peace of shit that someone gave him and he got running. If our schedules conflicted, I stayed overnight on a filthy couch in his auto shop, with appropriately awful amenities. Luckily for me, I had a student card and could gain access to a proper shower at the school's then-crappy work-out facility. Still, the water was hotter than the creek at the cabin, where I bathed with the fishes (and biodegradable soap) when there was enough water and it was a bearable temperature. Ah, nature.

That first late summer and fall was idyllic. I had just started school, which I really enjoyed, and I loved, loved, loved my new digs. One of the first things I did was nail up an owl "shrinky dink" that I had taken from the last city house that I'll ever live in. Soon after, I was sitting on the cabin's little porch with my back resting on the wall that was the owl's new home, and, in the blue light of late evening, I saw a shadow move past me and heard a barely audible "whoosh". I turned my head in time to see a real owl land in the shadows of a pine tree, and soon after I was privileged to hear it's strange song, located in the strange, magical, owl-song-place somewhere between devil-dog barking and gentle, mournful hoos.

I had so many moments like that. I have promised myself to keep writing about them, as those memories are starting to move me to actions too long suppressed.

Three more updates

1. Kevin killed a bunch of chickens while I was in America Lite. Unfortunately, he managed to make chicken shit out of the chickens, as opposed to chicken salad or roast chicken or a variety of other chicken dishes, because it's hard to butcher chickens after only reading about it in a 1970s-era library book. It was quite a disappointment for all involved.

2. I just went to the women's restroom and, on one of the bottles of shared toiletries, Dream Angels Heavenly, the product is described as "a weightless cloud of moisture". Now THAT'S a marketing blurb worthy of praise. It could be very useful in the textbook field.

3. I'm just over 21 weeks along in this pregnancy. The second trimester has been a breeze--very little weight gain, no food aversions, no need for long naps (though I still take them). Still, nothing is perfect. To my dismay, my "groinal area" is readying for a birth that is still months away. Everything is starting to shift and pull, from mid-belly on down. Sometimes when I sneeze, or move suddenly, or do something else seemingly inconsequential, I'll feel a sharp pull in a very isolated area, like someone has pinched just part of an ab. That's not so bad. What I'm finding a bit tougher to deal with is the constant feeling of slight pain in my pubic bone. Any gal who's ever slipped off the pedals of a bike and rammed into the bike frame knows that, 5 minutes later, you still feel it, and it makes you walk a little funny. That's what it feels like. Motherhood is so hot.

Creating a New Post

Hi everybody! Just a bit of an update:

1. Kev and I decided to not adopt Anthony. Most, if not all, of you know this, and I'll leave it at what was said in the mass email. Since his departure to, hopefully, better and permanent digs, things around our house have been much calmer. Back to normal.

2. The Job has been pretty stressful lately. I haven't been on vacation in over a year (save for a few days at Christmas, which is anything but relaxing) and I'm feeling it. The workload has been non-stop. Not that I mind work--what I mind is not knowing what I'm doing, yet doing so much of it.

3. I just found out a few days ago that student loans don't work like mortgages. If you take 30 years to pay off a mortgage, you move from paying almost all interest, to half and half, until finally you're just left with the remaining principal. Unless you pay off your mortgage in huge chunks at first or pay significantly more per month to be applied toward the principal, by the time you get 20 or so years into it you might as well cool your jets and make the monthly payments for the duration because the interest is already paid.

Stupidly, I thought this was how student loans worked, too. I've been paying on my $22,000 for NINE YEARS. The bill now says "Principal balance = $19,000 (and change)" "Interest balance = $25.00". So I'm thinking I've hit the midway point, right? (Even though, with each new payment, the bill says pretty much the same thing.) I've been paying mostly interest for the last 9 years and have only paid about $3,000 in principal, but now the tide is turning and that sticky principal balance is going to start moving! So, in making my future economic plans, I figure I might as well cool my jets and keep paying $150.00 month for years and years until it (the principal) is paid off. After all, paying it off early is not going to save me any money now, right?

Oh, so wrong. Interest continues to accrue on a daily basis, and the interest has just gone from 4% to SIX PERCENT! Overnight! So I HAVE been paying almost all interest for the past near-decade AND I'm nowhere near being finished. In fact, if I were to pay it off in 10 years, it would cost me $471 a month! That's a mere $56,520. And that's AFTER I've already paid roughly $20,000--$17,000 of which went to interest--for a grand total of nearly 4 times what my education actually cost. So, basically, if you're poor and try to better yourself and society through higher education, OR if your dad decides to put your little brother through school and not you, OR if your dad also forgot that HIS parents paid for his schooling, you're fucked. Of course, I could just lay down the $19,000 and have it paid off, meaning that the price of a college education was just double what it was for luckier youngsters . . . . But, really, who has the time to write that check?

4. On the way into work yesterday, I thought I'd be slick and avoid a bunch of orange barrels by taking the "back" way. I got stopped by a flagger at a one-lane road for nearly 10 minutes. While sitting there, in Park, I watched as the Dodge Behemoth Truck/Small Penis Enlarger behind me crept up, ever so slowly up, and then bumped into me! After Stevie and I felt the little jolt, I opened the door to survey the damage, if any. The truck driver--a young man--didn't even get out until I was almost back in my car. He said "I didn't think it did anything" ("it"--not him. Lord knows he wouldn't want to take responsibility.) after surveying my bumper from his 3-story high cab. I said "It looks all right", and then he got back in his truck without saying anything more, not even "Sorry about that! I was yakking on my cell phone about a matter of national importance and forgot that I was in a 4 ton vehicle on a public road with other life forms." See why I live in the country? People are such assholes sometimes.

5. I adore my husband and look forward to seeing him and talking to him every day. And of course I love, love, love my adorable little child, too. In the end, I have little to bitch about. *

* Still, I reserve the right. Something might come up!

Sliding Down the Pole of Empowerment

Burb included this link in a comment on my last post:
http://dancingbrave.typepad.com/db/2005/08/my_birthday_pre.html

It's about a 28-year old who decided to take strip aerobics classes (complete with a pole) as a "gift to herself" for her upcoming 29th birthday. She figures that, since she will soon be a prime number, she "might as well know how to wriggle, remove my shirt correctly, and give a lap dance."

Indeed. Is there any higher measure of a person's self esteem? Now, I'm sure she was being a bit facetious, and she admits in her post's title that it's just as much a present for her male partner, but she came across to one man as somewhat empowered, and that is the fuel for this post.

Burb's inclusion of this link is right-on: There are links between strip classes and the Dove ads. In a nutshell, they both involve women who have a naive, but all-too-present these days, idea of empowerment. Sure, it's an opinion. It's also my blog. ; D

First, let me clarify something. I have no problem with sex--any kind of sex--between consenting adults--as long as all parties feel good about it. Gay? Totally fine. Even hot. Anal sex? Why the hell not! Sex before marriage? Awesome! Hot tubs, whips, leather, butt plugs, swings, blow jobs, toe-sucking, VHS, purple dildoes, two guys and a gal, three gals and a guy, front, back, sideways, upside down, outside, at the OSU library . . . I don't care. In fact, I may have a thing or two to share.

Similarly, I don't have a problem with women who want to strip for their partners, give them lap dances, whatever. If it sparks up your sex life and doesn't feel demeaning to you, go for it. Similarly, if putting your body on display for a world filled with people who tend to look at women as meat and judge them accordingly makes you feel "real", fine.

Just don't confuse what's personally liberating for YOU as somehow liberating for women as a group. Especially when your ideas of "liberation" and "empowerment" are fed to you by corporations and FHM readers, and feed into their motives, which are money and an unhealthy need to dominate women, respectively.

"Lulu, what do you have against strippers!?" I know from previous rants about this topic that some of you may be asking that question. The answer is nothing. I have nothing against strippers. But I have a whole lot against stripping, at least for money.

As it is currently portrayed in strip classes, by actresses on The View and similar idiotic shows plugging their latest role as a stripper, and by the sheer amount of stripping seen in movies and TV shows, stripping is becoming normal--even fun! Disturbingly, though, it's also becoming a parallel of female empowerment as it gets mixed up in the debate involving women using their sexuality as a source of power in the boardroom as well. Remember all the bru-ha-ha about The Apprentice? I don't know, ladeez. I don't think it's gonna work. When Queer Nation took over the word "queer", the word lost a lot of its power when used by homophobes against gays and lesbians. When women use push-up bras to get a raise, or go through the motions of a lap dance on daytime television to show how empowered they are, all it shows is that we are going backward, ever backward. While a pair of firm titties will sucker some guys out of their paycheck, or even their job, for the most part the very same men that the world would be better off without are the ones getting off on all of these empowered chicks.

Isn't the point of female empowerment to move beyond the sole reliance on fleeting and all-too-subjective sexuality as a path to power? Haven't we learned the pitfalls of that stupid program already?

I can say with some authority that the actual world of stripping isn't liberating, or empowering, or even fun. It's not an exhilarating and titillating exercise in exhibitionism and sexual play. On the contrary, it's quite depressing and overwhelmingly all-business. On an SNL episode several years ago, Tina Fey "reported" on Hugh Hefner's 7 or so big boobed, overblown blonde "girlfriends". She made a snarky, hilarious, and dreadfully true remark along the lines of how 'they weren't doing it (exploiting Hef and being exploited) because they want to become famous . . . they do it because they were molested by a family friend." Let me just sum it up by saying that I've never known a completely well-adjusted stripper. And the strippers that I have met, witnessed, and read about don't have a real high opinion of men. Guys, here's a tip: When a stripper sidles up to your newcomer self and pretends to like you, they really don't. They want to soak you for as much money as possible (even the nice ones have to, on orders from management), and they think you're an absolute jackass to pay big money to see what they see in the shower every day.

Stripping is a hard, economics-based (NOT "fantasy-based") reality for a lot of women, many if not most of whom were sexually abused in some way, and they become sometimes shockingly hard people if they're at it for too long. Does anyone really think that strippers, prostitutes, and porn stars feel good about what they're doing, do it because they just love human sexual contact, and come away from the experience with the desire to pass this torch of female empowerment to their daughters? The difference between "play" stripping and actual sex work is as broad as the difference between playing the "ripped bodice" victim during a sexcapade with a trusted "pirate" partner and actually being raped.

So it disturbs me to see women naively (again, my opinion) think of strip classes as a chance for good girls to be bad WHILE thinking that this act somehow empowers women. Sex work and it's darkest relative, sexual slavery, are not a source of power for women. If we really want to empower women, we'll work to make sure that women and girls won't turn to sex work out of a warped sense of self worth brought on and exacerbated by sexual exploitation and abuse, and that they have the economic options needed to avoid it.

Fat Girls and Underwear--Has the World Gone Crazy?

Seth Stevenson in Slate writes about Dove's new ad campaign. (See http://www.slate.com/id/2123659/). This PC campaign for whatever beauty product features shockingly fat, yet real! women, ranging in size from the merely zaftig size 4 to the morbidly obese size . . . 12. In their underwear! In un-retouched photos! Revofuckinlutionary.

This sort of ad bothers me, and Seth merely scratches the surface as to why. First of all, it's because Dove really is seen as revolutionary for featuring non-models with "real" bodies in their ads for products that non-models with "real" bodies buy. Wow. Women write to all kinds of beauty magazines clamoring for these types of images, and women are writing to Dove to express their post-feminist pleasure, and, yet, they continue to buy fashion magazines packed with "unreal" women that make "real" women feel bad about themselves.

Secondly, it's the term "real women." Models, no matter how chiseled, are real women with real women's bodies. They are not manufactured by the Japanese or anyone! They were born to actual, living women and enjoy all of the voluntary and involuntary privileges that come with a functioning brain. The fact that they are famous, lauded and paid outrageous sums of money for putting up with the dehydrating effects of air travel and having to endure goosebumps on cold beaches in their bikinis is a product of the fashion economy--an economy almost solely supported by women who insist on blowing their 80 cents for every dollar a man makes on $5 Cosmopolitans and $45 bras. If you don't want to see 18-year olds with no body fat and gravity-defying breasts posing in $3,000 frocks, don't buy the magazines, and don't buy the frock. My analysis of what would happen in the marketplace is thus: Mean model go bye-bye!

Along that note, it irks me when women express hatred for other women based on how they look. It's bullshit, and we need to stop doing that. If we base all or most of our self-esteem on our relative attractiveness to a tiny subset (yet still real) of possible female shapes, we've lost our collective minds. Is this really all we've got going? My notion of the perfect weight and size is based 90% on myself--MY perfect weight, MY version of good health--and 10% on what various health professionals say is healthy. (OK, maybe 2% is based on clothes-buying ease.) Getting to this mental state was ridiculously tough, by the way, and chewed up a lot of gray matter that would have been better used to learn French or distribute the world's resources more equitably. I am 5'8" tall. At my thinnest and healthiest (in college and immediately thereafter), I weighed 135 pounds, wore a size 10, and could run 5 miles over hilly terrain fairly easily and hike all damn day. Note that this healthy and attractive size would have made me one of the heftier models in Dove's campaign. By comparison, Cindy Crawford is 5'10" (six inches taller than the average American gal) and, at the height of her modeling career, a size 6, maybe 120-125 pounds. She, too, would be eligible for Dove's "revolutionary" campaign.

Which leads me into the third beef (ha!) I have with Dove's campaign: they cut women off after they reach a size 12. This effectively eliminates the modeling chances of the average American woman, who is a size 14. She and the rest of her pod, or roughly half the American female population, are much too fat for Dove--an example of unreal women on the other side of the scale. And, of course, they start the "real woman" campaign at size 4. FOUR?! This is 5 sizes below the average, and a mere 1 or 2 sizes larger than everyone's favorite fatass, Sarah Jessica Parker. She is a well-reported size 0, which is the starting point for women's clothes.

The dimpled bottom line is thus: Dove is not a beautiful bird, but a parasite. They are still feeding off of women's insecurities, but have found a not-so-sly-really way of feeding off of the insecurities of a different market of women--the "you go girl!", faux but-I'm-not-a-feminist, enlightened and empowered yet still reading the same old soul-crushing, money-sucking fashion magazine crowd--and getting them to shell out the ducets for their hideously overpriced ass-firming cream. At the same time, they've managed to make women who were at least used to feeling like shit in the presence of actual models feel even worse for not even making the cut of Dove's (huge corporation) version of the Real Woman. When you let someone else, and especially a huckster trying to sell you something, set the standard of what you should be, and get away with the radical, insulting, and misogynistic judgement of whether or not you are a "real woman", do you deserve to be miserable and miss out on great parties because your thighs are too big?

Women are more than their looks. (Apparently, this isn't obvious enough.) Imagine what would happen if women, in their collective, unified glory, told the fashion and beauty industry to fuck off. Let the revolution begin.