Unsubscribe me, Uncle Sam

They tell me to strip and put on a flimsy gown. They have me lie on my back on a slab with my head in a vice-like cradle. I am told I may not move a muscle. They stick me in a tube that blocks my vision, then assaults my ears with a series of unbelievably loud noises. Some are so loud the slab trembles.

As the seconds go by, the panic begins. My heart races; I can feel it pounding in my chest and my throat. I struggle to control my breathing. Bile rises in my throat and I fear I will vomit. Stars burst before my closed eyes. I fight fainting.

This goes on for twenty minutes. It is nearly unbearable and I almost squeeze the emergency alarm they gave me before the ordeal began.

To my insurance company, this was an MRI on my brain.¹ To my central nervous system, this was torture.

Coincidentally, a few days prior to this procedure, I heard a news article on NPR about the on-going debate in Washington (DC) about the use of torture by the military. To be precise, the newscaster said it is a discussion “about the use of torture, versus those interrogation methods that sometimes result in the death of the prisoner.”

Talk about nauseating spin. If the latter isn’t torture, what is it?

As I was lying in the MRI machine, hoping I wouldn’t throw up in my mouth, I remembered this broadcast. I thought to myself that anyone advocating the use of “enhanced” interrogation methods on prisoners should have said methods tested on themselves to help them decide whether or not they are torture.²

Well, I read today that journalist and Iraq war-supporter Christopher Hitchens literally took the plunge. He allowed himself to be “water-boarded,” the Bush Administration’s current interrogation method of choice at Guantanamo Bay. Unlike some of the Gitmo detainees, however, Hitchens lived to write about it.

His description of the experience sounds all to familiar to me, from the racing pulse to waves of nausea to near fainting. And guess what he concluded?

Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

So, enhanced interrogation supporters, let’s just stop the spinning, grow a pair, and call a spade a spade, shall we?

Righteous Ribs, in honor of our country’s birthday this year, I ask you to put your foot down and Unsubscribe.

Unsubscribe is a movement of people united against human rights abuses in the ‘war on terror’. The threat of terrorism is real, but trampling over human rights is not the answer. From Guantanamo Bay, rendition, torture and waterboarding – we unsubscribe.

Tell the government they cannot continue to torture people in your name.

“No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
—The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 5 (1948)

1. Alright, alright. I’m having problems with muscle fatigue, and my doctor wants to rule out a lesion-inspired multiple sclerosis since there is a history of it in my family. To quote Ahnold in Kindergarten Cop: It’s not a tumor. [↩]
2. Not likely to happen in Washington, given politicians’ history of hypocrisy, such as getting handy deferments for themselves and their children from wars they start. [↩]

What do Laura Ingalls Wilder, Bram Stoker, and Sigmund Freud all have in common?

At Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle, there’s a saucer on the counter by the register that holds “I Buy Banned Books” bracelets. Little ceramic squares with glazed photos of the jackets of several well-known banned books on them are strung together on heavy-duty elastic. They cost fifteen bucks.

I’ve been talking myself out of spending the money, but after seeing this list over at Fetch me my axe this morning, I’m gonna get me one.

And I’m going to try to read more of these damn books - I feel like an uncultured eejit.

Banned Book Project

Fellow bloggers, your mission, should you choose to accept it:

These are the 110 top banned books. Bold what you’ve read, italicize what you’ve read part of. Read more.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Little House on the Fucking Prairie? By Laura “Public Enemy #1″ Ingalls Wilder?

Technorati Tags: banned books, reading, freedom of speech

Bar Girls: An offer they can’t refuse

After 9/11, Kevin was deployed for a few months to Thailand.¹ He says one of the most disturbing things he saw there had nothing to do with the military operation.

It was the local watering hole and its female staff, young women known officially as “hostesses” and euphemistically as “bar girls.”

One look at Kevin’s uniform and these gals were on him like white on rice. When he demurred, they would always say, “Ah, you good man.” Which was immediately followed up with eyelash-batting and “I wish I had good man.”

Funny… until you realize that most of these girls were sold into their jobs by their own families, and that their nasty, brutish and short lives will most likely end with AIDs.

Human trafficking is very lucrative and thus epidemic in poor countries; Thailand is only one among many.

Most (70%) of the 600,000 to 820,000 people trafficked across international borders are women and children. Though they can be forced into everything from organ donation to religious cult membership, most are forced into prostitution. ²

And since most of the trafficking is done by organized crime, if the merchandise complains, they just make her an offer she can’t refuse.

But don’t go thinking this horror is all happening “over there.” An estimated 14,000 people are trafficked into the United States and 600-800 into Canada every year.³

I can’t believe that almost 150 years after Lincoln freed the slaves, people right here in my country are purchasing other human beings.

So every year, I donate to the Amnesty International campaign to end human trafficking, and today, I’m proud to join other bloggers as we Unite for Human Rights.

All of the non-governmental organizations below work to end the suffering. Act Uppity and donate. It may not seem like much, but I promise you — every little bit helps.

After all, if we don’t speak for the voiceless, who will?

• The American Anti-Slavery Group
• Resist Exploitation, Embrace Dignity
• Transitions Cambodia
• Ansar Burney Trust
• Anti-Slavery International
• Project to End Human Trafficking
• Free the Slaves
• The International Justice Mission
• HumanTrafficking.org
• Shared Hope International
• Not For Sale
• Stop the Traffik
• Love 146
• The Redlight Children Campaign
• The Red Light Movement
• The Salvation Army - Human Trafficking
• Project Rescue

Technorati Tags: human trafficking, Bloggers Unite for Human Rights

1. For those who don’t know, Kevin is an Air Force reservist. And yes, he does make me call him “Major.” [↩]
2. Source: Wikipedia. Because of the nature of trafficking, exact statistics are difficult to get. [↩]
3. Source: Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery - Canada [↩]

Because thirty-six years ago, “choice” was just another word for nothing left to lose.

I couldn’t find the place at first. I drove around and around, checked my directions a dozen times, but it wasn’t there.

At the spot where the clinic was supposed to be was a building that looked exactly like the 1970s-era apartments I lived in when I was a kid - the kind of building that looks like a motel, with stairways on the outside leading to each floor.

Not knowing what else to do, I parked and walked over to the building. The doors all had numbers on them, but no signs. Windows were closed.

I checked the suite number I had been given, then followed the doors until I found the one marked 213. It was tucked far back from the street. I tried the door handle. Locked.

I must have the wrong directions, I thought. I was just about to leave when I saw a sign in the lower corner of the window, so small you’d miss it if you weren’t looking for it: Women’s Health Clinic.

I pushed the door buzzer and a woman’s voice answered, “Yes?”

“I’m here for an eleven o’clock appointment,” I said, and gave her my name.

The door knob clicked and I pushed it open. The waiting room was tiny, empty, and eerily silent. No patients wandered in and out. No sounds of sick kids crying in exam rooms or medical personnel talking in the halls. Not even any musak playing.

The rather grim-looking woman behind the reception desk looked up as I entered. She handed me paperwork to fill out and return. Soon a nurse called my name and we went through a door into the bowels of the clinic.

In another tiny white room with two chairs and a rack of literature, the nurse and I discussed the purpose of my visit. She asked me a few questions, but it was clear early on that I was well-informed and had made up my mind, and she didn’t try to dissuade me. She actually seemed a little relieved and I could tell she was skipping entire sections of a well-rehearsed speech.

Finally she explained the procedure to me briefly, then told me the doctor would see me now.

We went to a tiny exam room, where she handed me a paper gown and left. As I undressed, I looked around. The room seemed over-stuffed with furniture and equipment, but that was probably because it was so small. There was nothing unusual about the room’s contents, I thought, until I noticed the contraption in the corner.

It looked like an alien, with a dull green reservoir and a long tube snaking out the side, and I admit I did not relish the thought of playing Ripley.

The doctor entered a few minutes later. He was short and stocky, with dark hair and mustache. He spoke very little to me and made no eye contact. His movements were brisk and he performed his exam at lightening speed (compared to others I’ve had, anyway). He confirmed the diagnosis, turned on his heel and left.

I got dressed and after a few minutes, the nurse came for me and we went back to the reception desk so I could make my next appointment. I told Grim Lady I wanted to have the medical procedure.

“You are just in time,” she said. “One more day and you’d have to have the surgical.”

I nodded, remembering the alien.

She clicked her pen and scribbled on her calendar. “August ninth.”

I smiled at the irony. My birthday.

Grim Lady gathered up some paperwork and handed it to me. I took it and turned to leave.

“Wait, one more thing,” she said, handing me a bulky manila envelope. I looked at her quizzically, but she dropped her gaze and busied herself with her work.

As soon as the door shut behind me, I opened the envelope. Inside was a VHS tape labeled “From Conception To Birth, A Fetus’s Journey.”

On the way to my car, I dropped the tape into a street corner trash can.

—

Two days later, on my birthday, I came back to the clinic and got a shot in my hip. I returned a week after that for the final step: two tablets placed as close to my cervix as the doctor could get them.

As I sat up on the exam table, the doctor took me by the shoulders and for the first time, he looked into my eyes. I saw compassion in his.

“OK?” he said.

I smiled and nodded. He let go of me and walked out.

—

Not so long ago, the health care clinic I went to and the procedure I paid for were illegal. In a town like Salt Lake City, with its uber-conservative origins, they are still at risk of annihilation in some way or another.

A sobering thought for me, a thirty-something Seattlite who took for granted her shiny liberal bubble until she left it.

What would it be like to be an unhappily pregnant kid living in a community so filled with misogyny that its “women’s” clinics must be hidden to keep from being bombed?

What would it be like to go to work each day knowing that you could be shot at with jihad-like zeal by people who pledge to love thy neighbor?

What would it be like to be a doctor whose patients often have such guilt and fear that you must distance yourself from them, allowing only a brief moment at the end to show you care?

Today I’m Blogging For Choice in the fervent hope that these questions will someday soon be made unthinkable, just as 35 years ago, “Pregnancy or jail and possibly death?” was for me.

Never forget how precarious Roe v. Wade really is. Use your vote to make sure a woman’s right to sovereignty over her own body remains the law.

Technorati Tags: abortion rights, Blog For Choice

The Loafer’s Way, Part 1

I went window shopping at the pet store the other day to see all the cute kittens and puppies that I, Bubble Girl, can’t have. It’s been pretty warm here, and Kitty is sensibly drowsing in her food bowl.

I’m reading the perfect book for summer: How To Be Idle: The Loafer’s Manifesto, by Tom Hodgkinson. If you are a workaholic, this book will show you the error of your ways, how working your fingers to the bone really does just get most of us boney fingers. If you are a would-be idler with one foot in the office and one in the hammock - c’est moi - this book is all you need to convince you to take the plunge.

Why exactly do we work so hard for so very, very little? Because we think we want stuff, need stuff, care about stuff. It’s true that certain stuff, such as food and a roof over one’s head, are important, and thus jobs have their place. But how much consumption do we do that is ultimately pointless?

How much crap do we buy because we think it will bring us happiness - “This is the lipstick that will change your life!” as a friend of mine jokingly said to me once - only to find we’re simply that much more in debt, waiting for the next new crap?

Constant consumption seems to me to be an attempt to fill from without the creative void within. With no time or support for nurturing our own creativity, we consume someone else’s. Chuck the plastic wrapper into the landfill and move on to the next thing. Work, consume, die.

If you really think about this, be careful, because you could end up doing serious self-reflection and reorganization of priorities, a subversive act which, the Idle author argues, is precisely why the “hard work” ethic was created by the ruling classes in the first place. Convince the rabble that they are morally obligated to work their asses off, and they’ll never have the time or energy to figure out you are full of shit.

Technorati Tags: idleness, The Idler, work, kittens

Smile

I spent many of my formative years in small towns, being raised by small-town women who’d led small-town lives. It was then I learned the small-town custom of smiling at pretty much everyone.

In a small town, you smile at people because you know them, and if you don’t know them, they must be guests in town which makes you their host, so smiling is your job. And people usually smile back, even if the weather sucks or they’re late for work or they’re just travelers stopping over in your podunk small town.

Now I live in a big city and few people smile back. In fact, you are much more likely to be viewed with suspicion than goodwill. I don’t know you - why are you smiling? What are you selling? What do you want? Only the nuts or the needy smile at strangers.

But old habits die hard and even though I know I run the risk of having security called on me, I still tend to smile at people. And once in a blue moon, I smile and they smile back and for a brief shining moment, we see a glint of recognition in each other’s eyes. We share a secret, we belong to the same tribe. Greetings, fellow smiler. Keep calm and carry on.

The other day I was exiting a Starbucks, my usual soy latte in hand, when my glance fell on a baby stroller on the sidewalk. In it was slumped a tow-headed kid, sitting perfectly still, staring off into space. He looked almost too old for a stroller, and certainly too young for the lifelessness in his eyes.

Standing nearby was a man I assumed to be the boy’s father. He was young, skinny and unkempt, with a two-day blond stubble on his chin and a faint, scraggly mustache. He looked at me, looking at the boy.

I smiled.

“Hey lady,” he muttered, rolling the stroller toward me now. “Do you have any money..somethingsomething…get something to eat?” His voice was so low I could barely understand him.

I spoke reflexively: “I’m sorry.” I smiled again, dropped my eyes, and began walking.

He followed.

“I’m just trying to….” he continued muttering. The stroller wheels squeaked as they rolled over the pavement behind me.

I walked faster.

His voice grew hard. “Oh well. I guess I’ll just go steal something then.” The squeaking faded slowly away.

I thought of all my unreturned smiles.

Later I tried to assure myself that the man and the boy with the haunted eyes had somewhere to go. There are many shelters in my area, and there’s the YMCA. I imagined them there, where smiles come with a meal and a bed, and everyone is part of the same tribe.

Technorati Tags: homelessness

Racist Fucktards Is Us

OK, you’re probably really tired of pictures of plants by now, so I promise this is the last one for a while (barring the irresistable, like a 400-pound tomato in the garden or something). This is a hens-n-chicks I’ve had for a few years, and it keeps growing tentacles and stuff. I’m waiting for it to leap onto my face and deposit eggs in my mouth.

You may also wonder what’s with the disappearance of all the Deep Thoughts on my blog lately. Well, I’ll tell ya. I’ve been taking a break from the insanity for the past couple of weeks. Usually when shit gets me down, I just reach into my trusty Fucket Bucket, grab a piece of candy, and keep on blogging. But the other day I ran across something that made me crawl head-first into the Bucket and not want to come out.

Around about the last week of May, the writers of the blog Pandagon informed me that there are still some racist fucktards in the good Old South. I know, I know - like, duh. But it’s always hard to face racist fucktards, and even more so when some of them are children. You may have already heard about this, but in case you haven’t and don’t have the stomach to read the (excellent) blog post itself, here’s the gist:

Some black students in a high school in Jena, Louisiana decided to partake of the shade of a tree that grows in a part of the schoolyard traditionally claimed by the white students. The next day, a noose or three were hanging from said tree. The white kids who hung them were suspended for three days for “playing a prank.” Then some of the white kids got into fist-fights with some of the black kids. Within hours of one such fight, three black kids were arrested and charged with attempted second-degree murder. If convicted by their all-white jury, they face probable life imprisonment.

So the hoisting of nooses is a prank that gets three days, and the fist fight is attempted murder that gets life. Right.

The tendency when reading about atrocity is to shake one’s head and mutter, “How horrible. Those damn racist southern fucktards.” It’s a way of distancing, an attempt at self-protection which is ultimately quite delusional. As Lydia Bean, founding member of Friends of Justice, put it so well on their blog:

Many bloggers across the nation are clicking their tongues about Jena as a vestige of the old Jim Crow, and despairing that progressive politics could ever flourish there, in that muggy, exotic, backward place we call “The South”. What progressives don’t realize is that the South is Us. Repeat after me, progressives: The South is Us.

[There’s] nothing exotic about Jena, Louisiana, except that the white kids got away with hanging three nooses in the public school. The sad truth is that young black men are routinely demonized by police and prosecutors all over America. Our nation has set up a direct pipeline from high school to prison for young poor black men, so that we have more black men in prison than in college. And for the most part, nobody cares unless someone does something exotic like hang up a noose. Without the nooses, nobody would have cared if these young men had been prosecuted on bad evidence on a petty charge, and thrown away for life like so many of their generation.

Ouch.

The silver lining in all of this, I guess, is that due to the awesome power of this newfangled Information Highway the internet, this incident is getting a lot of really bad press which is reaching a lot of people, and maybe in the long run, it will help things get a little better.

Maybe the fact that this kind of slavery-era shit - black kids facing life sentences for fist-fighting with white kids - will make us realize that it’s our children that pay the price of adults’ hatred, and as their protectors we are obligated to climb out of our Fucket Buckets, step up to the plate and enact federal hate-crime legislation.

That’s what I’m gonna do. I’m all out of brandy truffles anyway.

Technorati Tags: Jena Louisiana, hate crimes, racism

The attempt and not the deed confounds us.

It seems lately I’m either having anxiety dreams (How did I manage to make it all the way to work without noticing I’m naked?) or surreal ones (Why are the ancient witchcraft spells written in spiral notebooks and kept in a Trapper Keeper?).

Last night’s dream, unfortunately, was one of the former. In it, I missed the Race for the Cure. But allow me to back up a bit.

Since I signed up early online, the Komen Foundation sent me my t-shirt and race bib in the mail which I received this weekend. The different race and walk groups have different colored bibs (paper numbers you pin to your shirt): blue for the women’s-only runners, green for the co-ed runners; and white for the walkers. Though I signed up for the co-ed run, the Foundation sent me a white bib.

Perhaps the volunteer processing the registrations remembered me shuffling across last year’s finish line. “Poor dear,” she said, reading my registration. “She’s all confused. I’m sure she meant the Walk.”

Yes, yes, I know. But human insecurity is not subject to pesky logic.

Anyway, if you’re sent the wrong bib, the only way to exchange it for the correct one is at a specific table of volunteers on race day. A wee bit of a challenge, given that there are approximately 8 million participants milling around pre-race, and almost as many tables.

So last night I dreamed that I got to the race and was unable to find the swap table. By the time I gave up and went to join the runners, the race had already begun - too late!

Oh the shame of it! What will I tell all those wonderful friends and family who donated money to Run Uppity Run? That it was actually Lie Uppity Lie?

Out, damned spot!

And speaking of family and friends, mine continue to amaze me. My donation tally has surpassed my expecations!

Love and gratitude to the latest donors:

• Lachlan
• J$ and Justin
• The Medical Ninja

Never fear, I won’t let you down. I’ll do the 5K whether I have to run, walk or crawl. Or lie. After all, these days you can Sleep in for the Cure®. Maybe that was what my dream was trying to tell me?

Technorati Tags: Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, dreams

“The trouble with jogging is that the ice falls out of your glass.” — Martin Mull

It’s that time again, folks: May.

And that means the annual Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure is just six sweat-filled weeks away.

The Race for the Cure is really awesome - where else can a bunch of kindred spirits gather in service of boobs? Thousands of psyched-up women + race-day adrenaline = five kilometers of yakitty-yak-yak.

And if you’re a guy, you get to wear pink and still be macho. Need I say more?

Yeah, this 5K doesn’t resemble a race so much as a big, co-ed coffee klatch. All kindsa folks show up, from high school boys who don’t break a sweat to groups of grandmas who walk the whole way hand in hand. And lots and lots of Average Jo’s like me who race for the cure for Desk Job Ass.

Oh, there are still your race addicts who run the 3.2 miles in 10 minutes as a warm up for their afternoon triathalon. Like the two brawny Amazon women who cut in front of Kevin in the t-shirt line last year (he would have called them on it but they scared him).

The last person to walk across the finish line last year was a survivor fresh from chemo. She had tears in her eyes - tears of joy that she was there at all.

I’m running this year in hopes of raising $200, and Dog knows I ain’t too proud to beg…

Visit my race page and let me give you a run for your money!

I’ll be blogging my training, too, so ya’ll come back now, ya hear?

Technorati Tags: Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, breast cancer, running, fitness

Virtual Violence: Shining light on the dark side of the internet

Several weeks ago, I wrote a post about how nothing says success in the blogosphere like hate mail, and thanks to all my nicey-poo-poo readers, my blog has a way to go.

Little did I know that just a short time later, the subject of my joke would be a serious news story, with a twist: hate specifically targeted at women bloggers, a la sexual harassment, stalking, and death threats.

Well, I take it back. Take Back The Blog, that is.

This post is a contribution to the TBTB blogswarm, a day in which bloggers everywhere speak out against the escalating online violence against women.

As Jessica Valenti of Feministing.com wrote,

While no one could deny that men experience abuse online, the sheer vitriol directed at women has become impossible to ignore. Extreme instances of stalking, death threats and hate speech are now prevalent, as well as all the everyday harassment that women have traditionally faced in the outside world… It’s all very far from the utopian ideals that greeted the dawn of the web - the idea of it as a new, egalitarian public space, where men and women from all races, and of all sexualities, could mix without prejudice.

I’m not sure who actually held those utopian ideals — at the dawn of the web, I was still fast asleep. But it seems obvious to me that anywhere human beings mix, there will be prejudice in all its ugly varieties. Where ever we go, there we are.

It’s sadly ironic that the web is, in fact, particularly attractive to a certain breed of fucked-up people. One can air their bloodiest fantasies and join gangs of other like-minded sadists in total anonymity. It’s a cowardly predator’s wet dream.

If I sound less than shocked about online assault, it’s because it happens to me every day. My job requires me to be the bearer of bad news, and certain percentage of the recipients are insane. For me, being called a “jiz-mopping cunt” or what-have-you is all in a day’s work. Unlike the aforementioned bloggers, however, it is I who has the safety and peace of mind of anonymity here. The psychos I hear from are spewing their hate at a faceless corporation; I know them, but they don’t know me.

Significantly, even though the psychos have no idea who is reading their email, their rage is almost always expressed in a highly sexualized, misogynist manner. I could be a 55-year-old man for all they know, but their email will inevitably be some version of “fuck you bitch I hope you are gang raped and your children die of aids and your cunt is cut off.”

The bloggers are being assaulted with the same savagery, only their genders and contact information happen to be common knowledge.

Thus we wake from our dream of Utopia to acknowledge that misogyny is alive and well on Earth, and the internet is far from being immune. But I’m not worried. We’ve come a long way, baby, and it’s unlikely that women will retreat now just because the old foe has a new battle ground.

Shutting up is not our default anymore. As we have for several waves now, women will continue to act uppity and call bullshit, and feminist men will join them. Like racism and homophobia, virtual assault will lose its acceptance in our society and with it, its impunity.

It will probably never disappear entirely, but the more we speak out against violence against women in cyberspace, the smaller and weaker its twisted orbit will be.

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