Princess Loser

I Will Never Win This Game Without You

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 21:52:18 GMT

Losing someone you love is one of the hardest things a person can go through. It isn’t easy. It shouldn’t be easy. It isn’t fun. It’s not something that you jump for joy over, and there’s a reason for that. It is an end. And endings are scary. The uneasiness associated with death is logical, as are fears of the dark, deadly creatures, heights, and other things that make us feel so terrified.

But death isn’t the worst part. I think the grieving may be worse. It always has been. As a person who feels guilt over just about every unfortunate occurence, grief and the guilt associated with it have always been hardest for me. Well, that and the asthma attacks that I have from crying.

So, now I’m grieving. Grieving a loss that I expected, but didn’t. One I should have prepared for, but refused to. One I had convinced myself would never come.

Xander died. Actually, he was euthanized this afternoon. He wouldn’t have died today except that my dad and a vet decided that this was the best thing for him. I’m not mad at them. Like I said, I take on the guilt over everything. I’m mad at me.

On Saturday morning, he woke up and he was so lethargic. My perky little boy, who never acted his age or his species, was tired. And I was worried. I knew he wasn’t feeling well. He wouldn’t eat at first and he was so cold. So, I covered him up in a blanket, held him, and fed him some peanut butter. I figured that if PlumpyNut could save the lives of starving children that peanut butter could save my baby’s life. And it seemed like it worked for a while. He wouldn’t eat any of the dog food. He would drink any water, but he acted like he felt a little btter.

Before I fell asleep last night, I picked him up and curled warm, clean blankets around us and held him while we slept. When Gretchen woke us up at about 6:45 this morning, his back legs weren’t working. I thought they might just be “asleep” from being curled. They never started working, so my dad and I took him to the vet.

Because it was Easter, our family vet wasn’t open, so we had to go to the local emergency clinic. While we were there, I continued to hold him as much as I could. I only took a couple of breaks. I kept nuzzling him and telling him it would be okay. I thought it would be.

The vet tech gave me some hope by saying he had reflexes in his legs, but the veterinarian dashed those when he said they were just reflexes and that he was paralyzed. He started trying to explain it to me, which I guess he felt he needed to do. My dad asked what they could do. When they discussed how we didn’t have much money, the vet and my dad had a bit of a silent understanding that they were going to euthanize him. Somehow, I wouldn’t let myself understand that agreement, so when the secretary came in and had my dad sign a body disposal form, I pretty much started screaming. Xander go stressed out, and the secretary told me to calm down so that he wouldn’t be so stressed. I tried, but I felt like someone was ripping my heart from my body. It hurt so much. I just cradled him and cried as quietly as I could.

They offered me the chance to be with him when the drugs were administered. I couldn’t do that, and that made me feel worse. I couldn’t remember him in that kind of writhing state that euthanasia causes, but I felt so bad making him die alone. I still do. I keep seeing his eyes as the tech took him away. He didn’t seem to understand, and I feel like I just committed the worst sin a human being can ever commit. I let them kill my baby, and I don’t know how to get over that. I was supposed to love him and protect him, and I didn’t protect him. I couldn’t trade his life for mine, and I wanted to so badly. I wanted to save him so much.

I just can’t imagine my life without him. We’ve had him since 2001. He was here when I was going nuts and had no one outside of my family to talk to. He was here when I felt better physically, and he protected me when I felt worse. He was with my mom when she tried to kill herself, and he tried to keep the paramedics from hurting her that day. He’s the one who always would sit with me during the storms, no matter what. He always tried to perk me up, and he was the only one who really could sometimes. He made me smile more than anyone else, and now I’m crying so much. I’m crying and reacting the way that I did when Granddaddy died. I felt like I lost everything that day. And now I feel worse.

I just don’t know what to do.

I want him to come home. I want to hold him. I want to pet him. I want him to be here so much, and he’s not. And I just don’t know how I’m supposed to move past this. I’ve lost pets before, but this is so hard. It’s so painful, and I don’t know how to deal.

Mirrored from fuzzypinkslippers.com.

Idle Hands

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 18:42:05 GMT

I’m supposed to get my laptop fixed on Friday. For once in my life, I guess I’m going to have to treat Good Friday as if it actually is good. I hope that the technician is able to fix it, but I’m not going to assume that it will be that easy. Experience has taught me not to expect things to happen as quickly or easily as one would hope. That is especially true of repairs.

In the meantime, my dad is being nice about letting me have time on his computer. I guess he’s become accustomed to my laptop deciding to take a sabbatical. I guess that that makes sense.

My mom is being extremely difficult lately. I know that that has become the norm lately, but it seems like she is getting worse. And it seems like it is about the weirdest things.

When my dad and I came home from the emergency room on Wednesday, she decided that because I wasn’t admitted to the hospital, told what was wrong with my digestive system, and wasn’t dead that I was feeling well enough to be bossed around. She felt that it was appropriate to start having me get her things within five minutes of coming in. If she hadn’t just heard that I was anemic and that my blood pressure was low, then I could probably give her a break on that, but she’d heard both things and she just didn’t care. Actually, she seemed a bit pissed that I went to the hospital instead of her.

When my parents went to the grocery store last week, I had put chips and chocolate (in that order) on my list, which is normal. My dad understood that because the two things were on separate lines, I wanted chocolate and chips. My mother, on the other hand, decided that I wanted chocolate chips. When they got home and I asked why they had gotten 2 bags of chocolate chips, she told me that chocolate chips had been on my list. I knew that wasn’t possible. (I had written the list out twice because I felt the first time I was a bit too rude about what I didn’t want [i.e. food I can't eat] them to get for me.) My dad still had the list, so I got it from him and I showed it to my mom. I asked her where on the list had I asked for chocolate chips. She realized that she’d made a mistake. Of course, she had already taken the “fun” step of accusing me of trying to make her look bad. That wasn’t the case. She told me that I was lying and that I was definitely trying to make her look incompetent. She says that anytime anyone calls her on being wrong. She thinks that it is my mission in life (and my dad’s mission in life) to make her miserable and make her seem like she doesn’t have a clue about what is going on. I guess she thinks we enjoy giving her a hard time.

The next day, she asked if she was going to be getting my bank statements and bills and access to my accounts, so that she could get my finances “all straightened out”. She had decided that she was going to do this about a week before, after she’d told my dad that I had overdrawn my bank account again. (I hadn’t.) She’d come home from the grocery store that week to tell me that I was being irresponsible with the money in the account and that it was all due to being bipolar. She felt that, though she has a tendency to spend money as easy as (or easier than) me, she was the person who should be in charge of the accounts. At first, I had agreed, but that was only after she’d basically forced me to the brink of tears. By last Friday, though, I’d decided that I didn’t like that idea and I didn’t like how the “agreement” had been reached. When I told her, she said, “Your father told me that you would never let me do that.” I replied, “Well, I guess he knows me better than you do.” That pissed her off. She said, “I don’t know how.” I told her that dad and I had gotten a bit closer lately. She pointed out all the things that she had done for me in my life, and that my dad was always too busy for me. Basically, she was trying to use my insecurities with my dad against me. When she realized that that wasn’t going to work, she told me that she expected them to get the $200 per month that I owed them, even if I couldn’t pay any other bill or became overdrawn. And she seemed to think that I would definitely become overdrawn without her.

I realized about then that my mom has definitely been using me a lot more than I thought she did. I don’t know if she intentionally does it or if it’s just a “happy consequence” of the stuff I went through as a kid. I guess I’ve become so dependent on her for love and approval that I’ve given away my sense of personhood. The reason that I feel unappreciated and like a slave in my own house is probably that on some level, she doesn’t appreciate me and she does think of me more as a slave than as a daughter. And that’s depressing. I practically worshipped her for the majority of my life, and I feel like she never really valued me. Maybe I’ve let people step all over me my whole life because I just don’t feel like I deserve a real say in things.

Oh, I’m considering moving the posts from Hyperaware and Blah Blah Biddy Blah onto this domain. I’ve got a poll on the Facebook page for fuzzypinkslippers.com. If you could vote on it, I would appreciate it. I think it would be easier on and cheaper for me to combine them, but I want to know what other people think. Feel free to comment there or here about what you think about the possible combination.

Now, I’m about to talk about some stuff that might be gross for some folks, so don’t look if you’re squeamish.

I have yet to do the stool tests. I think that they wanted them done on Tuesday. Unfortunately, my gut doesn’t care about their schedule. If anything, it seems like it has taken on my personality of trying to give the doctors hell.

I’ve tried a few of the foods that easily upset my system, i.e. greasy food, sweet food, bread/crackers, cheese, Little Caesar’s pizza, drinks with sugar in them. So far, nothing has worked. And now, I’m getting worried about it. I haven’t gone this long without feeling the urge to go in over ten years. I know that constipation and just not going is normal for a lot of people, but it isn’t for me. Even when I’ve not had to go in the past, it was never something that was normal for me. I’ve always been more prone to diarrhea than constipation. And I know that my stomach is still having problems because it still hurts like hell. I just can’t do the stupid test. I don’t even think I could do the urine tests at this point, even though I have had at least 180 ounces of water. I hope its just nerves, but I’m beginning to feel like that might not be the case.

Anyway, until it happens, I guess I will just sit around trying all the other food that usually makes me sick. Meanwhile, I’ll be feeling all clammy, tired (more like extremely exhausted–yesterday I became exhausted just vocally calling Alice), and sore.

Mirrored from fuzzypinkslippers.com.

Let’s Make Some Lemonade, Yo!

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 20:34:13 GMT

I’m having to have my laptop repaired again. Guess what the repair is for? If you guessed motherboard, then you obviously know my laptop better than the guy at tech support. He told me that it had the motherboard replaced once and the only other repairs that were done were the palm rest and the LCD. Um, no. It has only been repaired onsite (meaning at my home or at Nana’s house) for those issues, but when it has gone to the depot, it has had all kinds of stuff replaced. Honestly, it’s got more new parts than all of the plastic surgery addicts of Beverly Hills combined. The constant repairing led to me submitting a question to WHNT about my state’s lemon law. I’m hoping it gets picked/answered. This is what I submitted:

I purchased a computer about 3 years ago from Dell and almost a year after I purchased it, it had a motherboard failure. Since then, there have been about 4 more motherboard failures plus many other repairs. The laptop is being repaired about every 3-4 months. It’s become really frustrating and I feel like my laptop is a lemon. Would it be covered under the lemon law? Or does that only apply to certain products? If it is covered, what would I need to do? I would really like to be able to get my geek on without contacting tech support so much.

So, maybe they’ll pick it. Keep your fingers crossed.

In other lemon-related news, I went to the doctor yesterday afternoon. Before I can get my GI referral, I have to jump through just a few more hoops. Namely, I have to have my Amylase, CMP (which was done at the ER), Lipase, and Lipid levels checked, as well as an abdominal ultrasound, 2 urine tests, and 4 (this is gross) stool tests. I have a feeling that insurance will kick the CMP when I go for it, because it was just checked less than a week ago. The other stuff, they will probably allow. The family doctor apologized to me yesterday when he was doing the exam. I made sure to yelp, scream, and holler when he would hit certain spots–something I have finally learned to do. I was surprised when he said he was sorry for hurting me. His attending came in and repeated the exam. She also was somewhat apologetic. (Maybe because I had been mentioning the pain and the issues somewhat persistently since I started to go to that clinic.)

When the nurse did my vitals, my blood pressure was doing its fun bottoming out thing. The top number was either 122 or 127 (one was for BP and one was for pulse), but the lower number was 53. It was kind of funny that it was so low because the nurse checking me in had just asked me if I was on blood pressure medicine about a second before the number popped up. I think that, because of my weight, she was expecting it to be super-high. She does not know how my body likes to operate. She and the doctors also didn’t seem to realize that the constant up and down, including laying back and raising back up was making me nearly pass out. I wanted to tell them, but when I would get so dizzy and light-headed, I couldn’t exactly think straight enough to get my point across.

When the nurse checked my weight, it almost looked like she was going to go with 298, but she decided to go up to the 300 range and settled on 312. The scale seemed like it “thought” I was closer to the 298, but she went with 312. Don’t know why. After she went with 312, she made sure to announce it vocally, which is something I hate. I understand if she thinks that I need to know the number, but believe it or not, I can read a scale well enough to tell what my weight is. I don’t like having the whole world hear it, though. Anyway, if it is at 298, then it has hit a new low. If it is at 312, it may be one of the lower numbers for their scales.

I had to describe what was wrong to her, and, wouldn’t you know, she tried to convince me that I could be pregnant. When I told her that it wasn’t possible, she gave me a look of disbelief. Yeah, I know, I’m going in complaining of nausea and pain, among other things, and I’m 28 and on Medicaid, but I’m not an effing stereotype. It is, as far as I know, impossible to get pregnant without having Miss Egg introduced to Mr. Sperm. I’m pretty sure that I would know if I had had sex with someone. I guess she thought I would be too ashamed to mention it, or something. God, I hope that if I had sex and got pregnant or thought I was pregnant that I wouldn’t be too ashamed to tell a nurse about it. I may be shy and hesitant about talking about certain things, but I hope that wouldn’t be one of them.

Mirrored from fuzzypinkslippers.com.

Dear Chrome

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 18:49:21 GMT

Oh, Chrome, I love thee, but you really need to get your shit together on some things.

One major thing that bothers me is that you don’t know how to spell certain words. It may seem like a small thing to have an issue with, and I guess that if you don’t use those words that it wouldn’t be a big deal. Of course, people with blogs, i.e. me, might actually need to use those words, so you need to learn them.

One of the words you don’t know is rheumatologist. Every single time I talk about mine, you throw up that ugly red squiggle. It’s quite annoying because I know that I’ve spelled the word correctly.

Another is gastroenterologist. Again, I know I’ve spelled it right, but the dreaded red squiggle comes up and has me doubting my ability to spell. I don’t like doubting that ability.

Now, while I don’t like the dude, I also find it unacceptable that the annoying ~~Prick~~ Rick Santorum’s last name always triggers a squiggle. I know that he’s a jerk and that he doesn’t deserve to be acknowledged, but he is (technically) an important figure in current events. It would make sense if his last name were added to your dictionary.

Of course, I know how to add the names to the dictionary, but I shouldn’t have to. These are words that could be used by just about anyone, except maybe Santorum, who makes it a point to tell us how much he hates science and men. These are words that some smartypants that works with the Chrome project should add to the dictionary.

P.S. – It’s quite odd that you can’t get real words like rheumatologist and gastroenterologist into your dictionary, but pseudo-word smartypants is there. Clearly, you have your priorities totally screwed up.

Mirrored from fuzzypinkslippers.com.

Oh, What Fun!

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 18:25:25 GMT

I finally got up the nerve to call my family doctor’s office for a referral to a new GI. I couldn’t get the referral or even a promise of a referral by just calling. I hadn’t seen the doctor there since September, though I did get blood drawn a few months ago for him or her, so they can’t just give out a referral. (I don’t even know the gender of my current family doctor.)

It’s a sound policy. I know it is important that they have up-to-date records on anyone they send to see another doctor, but it is also frustrating. I’ve been a GI patient since my early (maybe even pre-) teens. I have reflux. I have things that make reflux seem like a cake walk. It should be fairly simple to just get an appointment with a gastroenterologist.

But it isn’t.

Of course, I should have been able to see the doctor who sent me to have my gallbladder removed at 13. I should have been able to see him, but stupid insurance makes it impossible. Have I mentioned lately how much I detest the American health care system?

Honestly, though, I think I’m a little glad that I won’t be seeing him. I found his custody case versus his ex-wife online, because sometimes I randomly Google people that I’m about to see, and it was horrible. I know that divorce and custody cases bring out the absolute worst in humanity, but this made the usual “acrimonious case” look like a cupcake dipped in sprinkles, love, frosting, peace, syrup, teddy bears, puppies, and all the sweetness and goodness in the world. I mean, it was horrible! It made me kind of nervous, but I figured I could compartmentalize it the same way that I compartmentalize my therapist’s membership in the local roller derby team. Now I don’t have to try to do that, I guess.

So, now I haven an unexpected doctor’s appointment this week (actually, this afternoon) so that I can see a specialist. Fun, fun. Maybe I’ll at least get the results from that old blood work.

Mirrored from fuzzypinkslippers.com.

The Beating of Our Hearts Is the Only Sound

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 02:20:12 GMT

Right around Christmas, I made the decision to go to a privately-run (through Humana) version of Medicare. It’s basically Medicare that has been HMO’d. Some doctors don’t accept it. Some do. I never thought that making the decision to go with them would end up really impacting my care in a negative way. I just needed a way to see doctors without getting that judgmental, anti-Medicaid look that I would get so often. I also needed dental insurance, which the Humana offered. Well, today, I learned what my decision could have caused me.

Today was my appointment with my gastroenterologist. This is the doctor who I’ve seen since my gallbladder “died” when I was thirteen. He was the only one who believed me on that. I always knew that he had my back. I knew that he wouldn’t really let me down.

I was wrong.

He let me down. Actually, his billing people did. When I showed up for my long-needed appointment, I was told that they didn’t accept Humana and that I would have to leave. I’ve had doctors tell me that they didn’t take an insurance I had, usually with the Medicaid or when I was younger with PPO and HMO coverage, but I have never had one tell me that they didn’t take my insurance and that (because they didn’t take it) that I would have to leave.

I left, in tears. They had given me two phone numbers for doctors, but I know what the wait is for new patients to see specialists. And I felt hopeless and sick. I was in pain. I was nauseated. I felt weak, and I knew that, at the rate I was going, I might not make it to that appointment. And I told my dad that I would be better off going to the ER.

My dad took me to the ER. Even though I was going in the afternoon, when they weren’t super-busy, I knew it could be a long wait before I saw a doctor. Surprisingly, it didn’t take that long. It was about twenty minutes until the triage nurse saw me. When she got through doing her part, she rushed me back to a monitored bed. She was worried because when she had done my vitals, my pulse was at 146. I didn’t feel woozy or anything. I was too busy concentrating on the stomach pain and nausea and overall crappy feeling. My blood pressure was 146 over 86, which basically meant that I was in a good deal of pain. When I got back to the room, my pulse dropped the longer I stayed seated. When I was laying back, my pulse ranged from the 80′s to around 106. When I would sit up, it would go between 115 and 125. When I would stand, it would go up higher. The nurses in the ER didn’t really know what to do with me, so they had me wait until the doctor “examined” me. He ordered some blood work and a urine test. While I waited for the results, he had the nurse put in an IV fluid drip and administer some Morphine and anti-nausea medicine.

The nausea medicine helped long before the morphine did. Of course, what the morphine did was a little more sinister, in the long-run. At first, it felt pretty good, with the pain lessening and my brain feeling a little giddy. (I believe my exact words to my dad were, while giggling, “there are fireworks going off in my head.” That could have been dehyrdration, though, because I can seem extremely high or drunk when I’m just really dehydrated.) About a half an hour after the drugs were administered, I felt like someone was trying to cause my chest and upper abdomen to explode. I was having to actively remind myself to breathe. My blood pressure had gone from being in the 140/80 area to being 85/35. It was checked again, after more fluids had gotten into my system, and had gone to 91/58. The top number continued to increase to a relatively normal number. The bottom number never got over 60 again and had dropped back to about 36 right before I was officially sent home. (The top number was about 114 when I was discharged.)

The doctor said I was a little anemic. The nurse had said the same thing, but had asked if I had ever had to have blood for my anemia before, so I was a bit freaked out. (My anemia can get pretty severe, but I’ve never had a transfusion before.) He said I wasn’t really dehydrated, though the nurse said I was and his ordering of fluids kind of indicated that he thought I was, as well. The nurse had said that they had been discussing giving me another thing of fluids, but apparently he decided against that. She checked my pulse after the bad of fluids and it was now only maxing out in the 120′s. So, I think that the fluids helped that a little.

I’m supposed to take 2mg of Imodium for my ongoing abdominal issues. I’m also supposed to get an appointment with a local GI doctor–one who takes my insurance. I have a feeling that, in the mean time, I should start taking iron again. Or at least get some better quality multi-vitamins to counteract the anemia.

Mirrored from fuzzypinkslippers.com.

Not Glad You Came

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 13:07:28 GMT

About two and a half years ago, around the time of my mom’s first broken ankle, I had some wrist pain. The pain ended up being a type of tendinitis that was actually in my thumb. I had to wear a funky little splint that kept my thumb straight and immobilized. It got better pretty quickly after the splinting. I had almost forgotten about how bad it was until the other day.

I was moving my laptop and the “desk” (a piece of shelving) I use for it off of my lap to get my mom some water when it happened. I picked them up and felt that familiar tear-like sensation. The first few times that I had the sensation, it didn’t hurt. I remembered that the sensation would eventually become painful around the time that I was trying to check my thumb for other creaking and cracking noises. Unfortunately, checking for the noises only caused the pain to come on much more quickly. So, I’m going to have to remember how I did things sans thumb back in 2009. I’m also, probably, going to have to take a couple of tramadol to get through the pain, which will mark the first time that I’ve taken any since the neurologist suggested I go off of them.

I also need to find that stupid splint, so that I can help it heal a little better. Hopefully, I’ll be able to lull the tendinitis back to sleep without having to make an appointment with the orthopedist. Actually, to get to see the hand specialist from the TOC again, I’d probably have to make an appointment with the family doctor, get my hand/wrist scanned, have that doctor say that he/she didn’t know what was causing the swelling that was visible on the scan, get the referral to see the orthopedist, and wait the two or more weeks for an appointment spot to open up with that doctor. So, I really hope I can ease the pain on my own, because I don’t want to have to wait longer than necessary for it to get better.

Mirrored from fuzzypinkslippers.com.

Tummy Trouble

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:04:05 GMT

I know that I’ve mentioned my stomach/gastrointestinal issues on here. Even though they are a daily issue for me, I try not to discuss them here because, well, I feel grossed out discussing them. I kept trying to ignore them and not call the gastroenterologist. I didn’t want to deal with whatever was making me sick, and part of the reason is that I also feel disgusted by them when talking to doctors and nurses. It was easier to ignore the need for the doctor and continue being sick than it was for me to admit that I really needed to see someone.

I think the problem shifted from not a priority to a major priority when my mom, who doesn’t really notice what’s going on with me, pointed out that I had quit eating. I was eating some, but the amount had dwindled down to the point where my parents didn’t have to get me anything other than the junk food that was keeping my calorie intake high enough to function without having to down any real meals. And, though I had been telling people for months (and, for some, years) that I had cut out healthier food because that food made me hurt worse, I hadn’t realized just how sensitive my system was getting.

After my mom pointed out my lack of eating, I tried to eat things. Anything I swallowed, whether it was water, soup, pasta, or anything that shouldn’t cause a person pain, was making me hurt so much that I wanted to curl up into a ball and cry for days on end. The nausea was getting worse, too. And I realized that I had been vomiting more often than usual. (Since having gastric bypass surgery, I’ve thrown up more times than I had prior to the surgery–even when I was just drinking water or eating something small.)

So, after a long, long, long time of stalling on calling the doctor, I finally made the call this morning. The first available with my doctor is the 28th of this month, not long of a wait for this office. The receptionist told me that if I needed to be seen any sooner that I should call them and they would get me into see someone at the clinic as soon as possible. I almost asked for the next available with any doctor, but I think I’d feel more comfortable being examined by a doctor who has known me since I was in middle school than one I have never met before–or one that I’ve met once or twice during an emergency appointment. But, if I start feeling any worse, I will call them to get worked in.

Hopefully, it won’t be long before I figure out what’s going on and get it fixed.

Mirrored from fuzzypinkslippers.com.

Any Idiot Can Face a Crisis — It’s Day to Day Living That Wears You Out

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 04:02:53 GMT

At the end of February, the house insurance expired. We haven’t been able to get any new insurance because of the roof damage that was sustained in the April 27th tornadoes; damage that, even with a check from our old insurance company, we can’t afford to have fixed. So, with severe weather season already here, I’m constantly worried about the possibility that some storm will damage the house and we’ll be left homeless. Of course, when it isn’t stormy, I’m worried about other things damaging up the house.

The roof and lack of insurance isn’t the only issue. About five years ago, our (at the time) eight-year old microwave decided to die. (It now functions as the “bread box” and sometimes the place where we put potato chips and candy.) The microwave we now use is one that is around the same age as me. It was in this house when I used to visit Mamama and Dadada in the eighties and very early nineties. It doesn’t really work that well; if you want to cook something that should take about 30 seconds, it will usually need at least 2 minutes.

The plumbing is a hot mess, as well. The toilets in both bathrooms are basically on life support. My father’s bathroom’s toilet just has problems getting enough water into the tank. The one in my bathroom (the bathroom I share with my mom) doesn’t pull any water into the tank and has trouble flushing, even when sufficient water is poured into the tank via a bucket that we keep under the shower in the bathroom to catch the constant drip. The sinks all drip constantly.

The central air conditioner hasn’t actually worked since the nineties. Luckily, the heating unit of it works still. But the air conditioner, something that is a necessity in this sub-tropical part of the world, doesn’t. I remember, as a kid, the repairman used to come out to fix it at least once every year. My parents gave up having it fixed after Dadada died in 1996. We started relying on window air-conditioners, which have also been a pain. (There’s the one in my bedroom that caused my wall and floor to get soaked, leading to a mildew and mold problem in there.)

We used to store food in this huge standing freezer in the laundry room. It died around April of last year, too. It was about as old as the house, around thirty-five, so I guess it was its time.

The wiring in the house is another fun little thing we deal with regularly. There are some lights that blow regularly, like the one in my bathroom. We try to use the energy saving bulbs now, which usually take more time to blow than the regular light bulbs we used to use. Of course, they still blow aftter a few months.

Let’s see, what else is wrong?

Oh, yes. The stove has had at least one eye on it that won’t work since the year that we got it. We’ve been using the oven part of that stove fairly regularly until this week, when it decided that it was not going to work properly anymore. Apparently, the thermostat on it has been fried, which led to me nearly burning down the house twice–Thursday and Friday nights. So, now we’re reliant on that old microwave, until it breaks.

It would be nice if all of this stuff could be fixed, but I don’t know how that would ever be done. It is even more of an impossibility when the lawn is taken into account. It is already just at the “legal limit” set by the city of Huntsville, so we’re going to have to find someone to mow it on the cheap.

Life is never easy, is it?

Mirrored from fuzzypinkslippers.com.

Why We Fight

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 23:32:55 GMT

At about seven this morning, my mom woke me up to fix her breakfast. As I was just about to fall asleep, she decided to toss a piece of her breakfast burrito to Xander, who was on my side of the room. The piece went past Gretchen and landed right in Xander’s mouth. Gretchen went into to full attack-mode. She clamped onto his ears & neck. He clamped onto her cheek. My dad had to get up to break up the fight because she just wouldn’t let go. He put Gretchen in her kennel while I cleaned Xander’s neck. When Gretchen got out, she had forgotten that she’d bitten Xander. Xander, however, was still extremely nervous around her.

I felt sorry for both of them.

It might seem strange to feel sorry for Gretchen for acting aggressively over food. It isn’t when you take into account her history.

All five of our dogs are rescues. They’ve all come to our house with some level of food aggression. Two, Molly and Gretchen, have come with more significant abuse and neglect issues. Molly’s abuse makes her aggressive towards anyone wearing scrubs, though it is mainly directed at veterinarians and not techs or support staff, so she is muzzled anytime that she is at the vet. She also is more food aggressive because she was practically starved to death when she came to our house. (She’d had puppies and the shelter she was at failed to feed her enough to make up for the nutrition lost by nursing and carrying them, so she almost died from that.) Gretchen’s food aggression and tendency to go after other dogs (not people) doesn’t come from being starved.

Gretchen was kicked in the face or stepped on or something like that when she was a little puppy. Her jaw was broken and she lost a tooth. She also suffered from some level of brain damage that causes her to attack the other “pack members”, chase her tail regularly, run in circles, do other obsessive-compulsive behaviors, and have other various issues. It also seems to keep her in a constant puppy-like state. Even though she’s almost 8 years old, she hasn’t really matured at all since we adopted her when she was around five months old. We’ve talked to the doctor about it, and there really isn’t much that can be done. We separate her when everyone is fed. We also try to keep her occupied when we think that something might trigger her to go nuts.

Aside from her aggression and OCD issues, she is a really, really sweet puppy. She’s very protective of everyone in the family, including the other dogs. She forgets that she attacks the other dogs and tries to check on them whenever she notices they’ve been attacked. She even licks their wounds.

So, that’s why I feel bad for her.

My parents have, in the past, talked about giving her away because of her attacking-tendency, but I think that we’ve all come to realize that that isn’t really a good solution for her and that the good with her always outweighs the bad. We just have to remember to be very, very careful when it comes to certain things that we do. She does the biting/attacking thing a lot less now than she used to, and I think that quite a bit of that is because we’ve learned to be more careful around her. I just wish I could find a way to help her get past this particular behavior.

Mirrored from fuzzypinkslippers.com.

The Big Day of Sucking

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 03:49:01 GMT

Tomorrow is the primary in the state of Alabama. I hate not voting in any election, even runoffs, but I really don’t see the point of voting tomorrow. I can choose between voting in the Republican primary or the Democratic one, since people in the state aren’t forced to vote for a party that they’ve allied themselves with.

I hate voting for Republicans, so voting in that primary does not really interest me. I don’t like any of the GOP Presidential candidates. I don’t like any of the GOP candidates for Congress. I don’t like any of the candidates for County Commission Chairperson.

I would love to vote in the Democratic primary tomorrow, but there is absolutely no point. I can choose between voting for Obama and voting uncommitted. (I’d choose Obama.) Then, with the delegate selection, I don’t really know who to pick. And it doesn’t really matter who gets selected because they’re all delegates for the same candidate. And with no other position to vote for in the primary, it seems like a waste of time to go to the precinct tomorrow.

So, tomorrow’s primary is just a big day of sucking in my opinion.

Mirrored from fuzzypinkslippers.com.

I’ve Got BOTOX In My Head & Neck and I Ain’t Afraid to Show It

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:57 GMT

Just 2 years ago, I had sinus surgery and a septoplasty done. I had fun telling people I had a nose job after that. Well, now I’ve had BOTOX injected (31 times) into my head, neck, and shoulders for my migraines. It wasn’t too painful, for the most part. There were some spots that hurt more than others. The neurologist also managed to find blood vessels in places that he hadn’t found them on other folks before. That didn’t really surprise me. My body’s always a little different.

Now, I’m a bit achy all over and feel sort of rundown, but I think that’s normal when you get this kind of shot. I’ve also coughed a little more, but that might just be because my mouth dried out during the wait to see the doctor. It’s probably all nerves.

I had another first this week.

I had group therapy (it’s a specialty group for depression and anxiety) on Tuesday for the first time since I got out of the “nuthouse” in 2001. I’ve been hesitant about it since then because of the bad experience I had at that hospital and my tendency to clam up around other people. But I went. I cried through the majority of the session, and I thought I was doing a good job hiding it until it began to shift into a major snot-crying session. I couldn’t stop it on my own, but someone started talking about their pets and how they help them get through the day and that made my icky, annoying tearfest go away. I was suddenly quite cheerful and I think I even laughed and smiled some. It was weird. If I had tried to think about my fur babies on my own, then I would be crying more. Somehow, when all of these different people started talking about their pets that they loved so much, it eased the anxiety and sadness that I was feeling. That was actually nice to feel.

I may start to enjoy group therapy, which is really shocking. The BOTOX will not become a love of mine, though.

Mirrored from fuzzypinkslippers.com.

Icons for 2012 - So Far

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 23:05:07 GMT

I haven't made a recent icon post thing over here in a while, so I thought now was as good of a time as any to do so. Each post has at least 90-100 icons in it, with some going as high as 151. The only one with fewer is the Gossip Girl/Leighton post with 44.

The Right-Wing Guide to Misogyny

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 21:46:43 GMT

Lately, there have been a lot of right-wing politicians attempting to take control over women’s reproductive health. Several states have introduced bills that would require women having abortions to have an ultrasound. One of the most egregious examples of this requirement is in my own state.

In the “Right to Know and See Act”, introduced as SB 12 by Clay Scofield, the state of Alabama “require a physician to perform an ultrasound, provide verbal explanation of the ultrasound, and display the images to the pregnant woman before performing an abortion.” It wouldn’t apply to abortions performed in the case of medical emergency, but would apply in all other cases. (Oddly, an ectopic pregnancy doesn’t seem to count as a medical emergency according to the law.) The bill would give the state the ability to impose criminal penalties and would give others civil remedies if there were violations.

The law defines women as being any female human being who gets pregnant, meaning that the state can enforce this law against children. It allows for the ultrasound to be obstetric (pelvic) or transvaginal (in the woman’s vagina). It requires that, while this is going on, the abortion provider give a verbal explanation of what is being depicted. It then requires that the images must be displayed so that a pregnant woman is able to view them, though she doesn’t have to look. The woman is also supposed to be told the size, what organs have developed, and if any external body parts are visible. All of these steps are even required for women suffering from ectopic pregnancies and from miscarriages.

A medical professional who violates the law can lead to a person being charged with a Class C felony. That’s right. If a doctor determines that he or she knows a bit more about medicine than Scofield and it leads to an abortion taking place without following all of his rules, that doctor might face no less than 2 years and no more than 20 and have to pay a $5000 fine. A woman who has an abortion without complying with the act can be sued by the father or the grandparents of the unborn child; the same is true for any medical professional who takes part in an abortion that hasn’t complied with the law.

State Senator Scofield believes that the woman can just choose a pelvic ultrasound if she doesn’t want a probe stuck in her vagina. Scofield, 31, is a farmer, not a doctor, so he doesn’t exactly have the expertise to know what goes on in these ultrasounds. He doesn’t know that transvaginal ultrasound would be required in earlier pregnancies and in pregnancies where the fetus is not easily visible. This means that if a woman (whether she is an adult or a minor) was raped, got pregnant and wanted an abortion early on, she would then have to have someone else violate her to go through this. (Rape doesn’t just include physical force. Coercion and manipulation counts as rape as well.) He doesn’t know that women who suffer from vaginismus, an involuntary muscle spasm that can be extremely painful and can be caused by a variety of things (including past rape and/or child sexual abuse), cannot undergo vaginal ultrasounds without going through what could easily be described as torturous pain.

Women having abortions would also be subject to bullying. This would be more than what they go through from the assholes who stand outside womens’ clinics. This would be personalized bullying and extreme emotional abuse against a woman making a very difficult and personal decision. They would also be faced with extreme pressure by knowing that they can be sued.

One of the best explanations of how this law is so horrible comes from a pediatrician by the username of DrAbston on Left in Alabama:

From the woman’s perspective, she is being required to undergo a medically unnecessary procedure before having the right to consent to a fully legal medical treatment. I believe it meets the legal definition of rape. See this well-done discussion of how rape is defined in court. Rape is clearly understood in courts as not requiring physical force—coercion and manipulation alone is sufficient. An example is given, in date rape, of the assailant saying things like “if you really loved me, you’d have sex with me.” The woman is not considered to have given actual consent in that case. So a doctor saying to a patient “you have to let me stick this probe into your vagina before I can give you medical treatment” would certainly be coercion and would count as rape.

If the woman manages to talk a doctor into doing the abortion without the vaginal probe, she can later be sued by the impregnator or the grandparents. She won’t be imprisoned (that would be the doctor). As we know, sometimes the impregnator and father can be one and the same person. This means that a 12 year old girl (re-defined under this bill as a woman, even though every dictionary definition I can find says the word means “an adult female person”), raped incestuously by her father, could be sued by her rapist if she doesn’t agree to be raped a second time.

So women face financial repercussions over their decisions, and doctors face jail time, in a field where they already put their lives at risk every day. Women are subject to torture, rape, and emotional berating because some farmer from some rural part of the state doesn’t like abortions. Women get to be treated like incompetents because he doesn’t seem to know that they probably already understand a hell of a lot more about an abortion than he ever will.

And while Scofield is trying to pass this law, other politicians and pundits are behaving horribly over birth control pills. Birth control pills, seriously? Apparently, taking them makes you a whore, according to Rush Limbaugh. Forcing insurance companies to cover them is some horrible infringement of the religious beliefs of some people.

Calling women whores for taking a simple hormone pill every single day is not only hateful; it is a sign that people (specifically ones who agree with Limbaugh) are uninformed. I was on birth control pills off-and-on from the time I was 12 until I was about 24. I wasn’t taking them because I was some promiscuous person who just had to have sex on a constant basis for twelve years. I didn’t have sex the entire time I was on them. I was taking these pills because, like many other women in my family, I dealt with menometrorrhagia, a type of dysfunctional uterine bleeding where a person suffers from excessive and prolonged periods that occur irregularly and more frequently than the 28-day norm. It is a medical issue that caused me to have anemia several times, even on the pills. My parents paid out-of-pocket for those 12 years for these pills because insurance companies don’t cover what they deem to be “elective” medications. I was taking a pill to keep me from bleeding to death. How the hell was that elective? And my family’s medical need for hormonal contraception isn’t an uncommon one. According to a recent study, “more than one-point-five women in the United States take birth control pills for reasons other than preventing pregnancy. In fact, more than 726,000 women who take birth control pills have never had sex. Women with endometriosis take “the Pill”, as do women who have painful periods, irregular periods, migraines, PMS (it helps ease cramping), acne, and ones who want to lower their risk of certain cancers.

Even women who take birth control pills for sexual reasons aren’t prostitutes or sluts. They are making a responsible decision. It is horrifying to think that sexually active women are viewed as being sluts. Does Limbaugh call Gingrich a slut? No. There is still a double-standard in this society when it comes to sex. Men are allowed to have sex with as many women as they want. It is a sign of their virility and potence. It shows that they have power or that they’re a cool “player” or that they’ve met some other standard where they are given a significant amount of praise for their sexual exploits. Women, on the other hand, are to remain virgins until marriage, then they are to have sex with their husband whenever he wants and have children whenever the husband wants. Women are no more than a sex toy for men when it comes to people with these supposed values.

It’s also a religious double-standard. There are all of these Catholics evangelical, and even Mormon politicians (the Church has no policy condemning birth control pills) challenging the coverage of birth control. They call it an infringement of the First Amendment rights of Catholics and other faiths that are opposed to birth control pills. Jehovah’s Witnesses are taught that blood transfusions should be refused. They are taught that the refusal is a non-negotiable religious stand and that those who respect life as a gift from God do not try to sustain life by taking in blood, even in an emergency. Are there any big protests by the right-wing politicians over blood transfusions? Should blood transfusions not be covered on insurance because one group of Christians are opposed to it? How about vaccinations? Should people pay out-of-pocket for vaccinations because some people (from a variety of religious groups) believe that vaccines are immoral? (The Catholic church has raised concerns in the past over the rubella vaccine.) How about if a person needs to have an organ transplanted into their body so that they can live? Insurance covers that, but there are some Christians and members of other faiths who think that it is immoral to pull life support from a person suffering from brain death. How about we stop doing transplant surgery? No, that would be ridiculous, but that is the path that this whole religious-birth control pill debate takes us down. If we allow one religion or one set of moral “values” to control our public policy, then where do we stop?

We, as a society, have to stop the government from infringing on the rights of women to appease one religious/moral group. Treating people like they are some how less valuable because they have “girl parts” instead of “boy parts” is reprehensible. Women shouldn’t be political pawns. We’re sentient beings who deserve the right to make our own medical decisions, including on reproduction. This includes acknowledging that we have the right to make decisions that some people don’t agree with.

It is sad that in a country that continues to “fight for freedom” for other cultures denies and restricts freedom to half of its own population. Women are no less important than men. Women are no less competent. Women don’t deserve to be constantly reminded that they are undervalued/underappreciated and there is no respect from many male members of our society. No, we need to have a significant shift in our culture so that women are given true equality and respect.

Mirrored from Hyperaware.

You Lack Humanity. No, Seriously, You Do.

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 02:11:44 GMT

It all started so simply, as most drama does. My dad posted a video of an interview with Chris Matthews and Bill Maher. As usual, one of my dad’s friends, Norman, had to respond. Also, as usual, pretty soon Norman began to spout off some rather disturbing stuff. I knew what to expect, as Norman is one of those people who has, at times made comments about how the world was a better place before desegregation. *

I understand that, in his opinion, what he is saying isn’t that big of a deal. I’m not sure that he understands just how big of a deal his comments actually are.

Bill Maher and truth have no place in the same sentence. He is a part of a limo liberal Hollywood philosophy that bears no resemblence [sic] to the world where the rest of us buy gasoline ($3.66/gallon) and groceries (for what we buy up over 10% in the last year) and don’t have tax breaks for being bee farmers or investors in solar energy.

With his first comment, though, he seemed to be fairly rational, though the sardonic tone was very, very apparent. So, I responded with my own sardonic comment.

Norman, if you’re so upset that you don’t get a tax break for being a bee farmer, then I’m sure you could buy some bees. Or if you want the solar tax break, then put some panels on your own home. It isn’t like you can’t benefit from those same breaks, so don’t complain about them, k?

Bill Maher is no more out of touch with reality than anyone representing the GOP. Actually, given his stance on quite a few issues, I would say he’s a lot more in touch with what “real people” go through than you are.

And that was where the drama began.

I know that Bill Maher is an easy target for people on the right. After all, Bill Maher is very open with his liberal tendencies. That makes right-wing people uncomfortable. I understand this, and I’m used to seeing crap thrown at Maher for his politics. What is ridiculous about Norman’s anti-Maher stance is that he’s giving Maher a hard time for being out of touch with the real world’s economic situation. This coming from a man who is a semi-retired radiologist who spends his free time filling in for other doctors and travelling around the world (he openly touts that he’s been to all fifty states and 33 foreign countries); and, from what I’ve been told, has not really had that hard of a time paying his bills in a long time, if ever. But that doesn’t stop him from taking on the “overtaxed” and “overburdened” position that many libertarians seem to be fond of.

And that is where we begin, with my knowledge of where Norman is willing to take things, my personal tendency to respond with sarcasm, and the tendency of both of us to challenge people of differing political persuasions to a verbal duel on Facebook.

First response from him is that he doesn’t own any property. I guess given his travelling tendencies that that is a reasonable way to live. His response, though, that Alabama Power doesn’t buy back electricity from consumers who generate their own solar power is wrong. A simple and quick Google search by him (or anyone) would find that Alabama Power does buy back electricity. I know that that search took less than two minutes for me.

His second response was that Bill Maher is on his list to go to Guantanamo when “real Americans get the government back into control.” This is one of those statements where a person’s jaw drops to the floor, if they can tell what the implications of the statement are. He wants to imprison people who are on the opposite side of the political spectrum from him. That’s one of those comments that I just was not really expecting, even from him.

In that one sentence, Norman advocated for something supported by such “forward thinkers” as Fidel Castro, the Khmer Rouge, Benito Mussolini, and Adolf Hitler. And in that one sentence, he turned some simple Facebook drama into something more sinister.

I was hoping that he wasn’t being serious, but, from past encounters, I was pretty sure that he meant every word. That inspired me to point out how similar his idea was to something that would have been endorsed by Hitler or Mussolini. I thought that maybe if I pointed out that he was advocating something bad that he might back off. That was what I was hoping, at least.

Meanwhile, another “friend” of my father’s was going off on the potential donations to Obama’s campaign from foreigners, which would be illegal, and forgetting that the money that Obama receives might come from Americans who support his campaign. I guess that some folks don’t realize that there are actually Americans who plan on re-electing Obama this year.

As I waited for Norman to respond, I had to wonder how someone could become so intolerant of dissent. Yeah, I’ll argue with anyone, but the only people who I ever want thrown in jail are people who have actually committed a crime and did not do so under duress, as a result of mental or physical disabilities, or have any other legitimate reason for which they wouldn’t be responsible for their crime. To me, it is shocking that there are still people who would advocate something so horrible. Promoting dictatorship tactics seems like something that everyone in the world should have learned was a bad thing after the last 100 years.

Again, I waited for a response from Norman, knowing that he is not going to be one who just gives up a fight. And the response comes. Again, it is jaw-drop worthy.

Not real Americans Janet. I only keep two facebook friends as a barometer of the leeches who suck on disability and the truly insane who voted for this regime. We’ll reserve you a comfortable tropical suite with your fellow travelers. This is a matter of life and death for our country and I choose death for traitors and their followers.

This political discussion with Norman is making me more and more uncomfortable with every comment he makes. I want to believe that he is just some ignorant hick that doesn’t realize what he’s saying, but I know better. I know that he is a very informed person. I know that he is supposed to be incredibly intelligent, but by this point in the conversation, I feel like his intelligence is being overshadowed by some real darkness.

It surprises me that someone who is so judgmental could be a doctor. It seems like people who go into medicine should be compassionate, life-affirming people. Even though I’ve met my fair share of crackpot doctors, I don’t want to think that they’re the norm. I don’t want to believe that there are really people in that field who would advocate the death of people who they deem unfit for living in their society. That is a new level of creepy.

I think that at this point, even my father is about ready to fall out of his chair over Norman’s comments. My dad is used to Norman being on the furthest right end of the spectrum, but today’s comments are just a bit too surprising, even for him. Any respect that my father might have had for this man has obviously disappeared. Of course, I think that Facebook may have taught my dad that a lot of the people that he respected in his youth are clearly not worthy of that respect.

Probably the most unusual comment from Norman was the one where he said that my father and I (and one other person) think that he is mainstream or even liberal. Honestly, it seems like either those people must be humoring him or are completely oblivious of his real opinions on issues. I wish I could tell these people that his advocating of legalizing marijuana does not make him a liberal. Hell, he could be pro-choice and anti-death penalty, and his Facebook comments would still paint him as a racist and a fascist.

I almost wanted to slap him when he suggested that at the “trials” he wants for liberals that he would somehow have some kind of say over what happened. It was in that moment that I realized that he seemed to be even more of a narcissist than I had ever imagined. I don’t know how he came to view himself as being so untouchable, so worthy of adoration, etc. Maybe people gave him so much attention in his youth for his brains that it fried any part of his mind that could comprehend how to be compassionate or humane toward another person. I wish there was some way to go back and change him into a person who might be capable of being more than a self-serving ass.

Mark decides to jump back in at this point, and starts whining over how I’ve called Norman a racist and a fascist. I don’t throw these terms around lightly, so I have a very good reason for using those terms to describe Norman. I tell him this and, shortly after that, Norman manages to throw another zinger my way. That the people he hangs out with are doctors and that the “most rabid racists” are Nigerians. He also manages to throw in an insinuation about how he thinks that my father and I are lazy. (He makes this comment quite a lot, so it isn’t me jumping to some conclusion.) I know that I haven’t met a lot of Nigerians, but I do know one and I know that she is one of the most amazingly kind, tolerant, and loving people that I have ever met. If Nigerians have such horrible feelings towards the “lazy” and those who make excuses, then I have to wonder why my friend would go into Social Work, which unlike medicine, is not a field where people can easily make money off their degree. Of course, it didn’t surprise me that the one race that he could come up with as being super-racist was one of color.

The conversation with Norman made me feel like someone who was interviewing someone who was an active participant in some kind of atrocity. It wasn’t really enlightening, but it did teach me one thing: even people who are supposed to be smart can advocate for some really dumb things.

* – Two of the comments referenced in that paragraph can be found here and here.

Mirrored from Hyperaware.

The Orphaned Voice

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 19:20:56 GMT

As a child, I had two sets of parents–the biological ones who provided me with food, shelter, and care and the musical ones who taught me the joy of music and dance. As of February 11, the biological parents are the only parents I have left. And though they are the only ones that I have ever personally known, I still feel a great loss after the deaths of my musical parents.

Whitney Houston was my musical mother and Michael Jackson was my musical father. As a child, the only two people who influenced me more than my parents, grandparents, aunts, and other relatives were Michael and Whitney. I don’t remember a moment in my life where I wasn’t a fan of the two of them. Though some might not realize it, there are probably few people born in the eighties that weren’t, in some way, influenced by the music of these two icons.

I would watch videos (back when VHS was in its heyday) of Whitney and Michael over and over; the obsession led to the tapes becoming completely worn out. I would also listen to audio tapes and vinyl records in the same obsessive nature. The Whitney album, containing “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”, can no longer be played because I’d listened to it so much that it became damaged. I could recite the lyrics of the majority of their songs (that had been released at that time) and the dialogue from Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker before I started to elementary school. As I got older, I no longer watched or listened to the music with the same obsessive fury. I would still get their albums. I would watch their movies, though I still haven’t watched all of Waiting to Exhale. I still adored these two people, even when the rest of the world turned their backs on them.

I wanted to be them, as a small child, even though there was no physical way for me to become the embodiment of either Michael or Whitney. They were more than just role models to me. They were, essentially, non-custodial parents. And when they died, I felt like I had lost an actual family member. I went through the same shock, denial, anger, etc. routine that I had gone through with the deaths of my three deceased grandparents. It took days for it to feel real and, even now, it still sometimes feels like some kind of cruel dream.

And I have wondered, since the death of Whitney, if or how I should address her death. I didn’t want it to seem like I was pretending to adore her, which is something many fans have been accused of since her death. I wanted whatever I said to be how I actually felt, so I waited and waited and waited. And what I’ve said still doesn’t seem like enough.

Mirrored from fuzzypinkslippers.com.

One Person’s Pain Is Another Person’s Misery

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:40:01 GMT

The Glee episode last night featured a comment by one of the main characters that suicide is selfish. It isn’t an uncommon utterance. In fact, if you do a simple search on Google with the words suicide and selfish, it returns 10.5 million results. So, clearly, this is something that many people either believe or think is absolutely ridiculous.

Different people handle the topic in different ways. One comment that I found contained the following statement: “I think it’s not only selfish but it’s the last punishing blow to the living. It’s the easy way out of dealing with the turbulence that is life! We are left with so many unanswered questions.” Apparently, this person doesn’t want someone to commit suicide because it is just too cruel to the living. I guess that it is simple to put your own feelings ahead of those of someone who is so depressed that they see no other way to deal with their pain than to end their own life. I mean, that’s a very typical thing, to put your needs before those of someone else. What’s weird is that that attitude is not considered to be selfish, even though the “survivor” is not thinking about what the suicide victim has been going through, what pain might be causing them such agony, and just how desperate or lonely the person might be feeling. To me, it seems selfish to say, “You’re punishing me by killing yourself.”

A religious website had the following: “When one has no hope does not know God or have faith, suicide becomes one of the greatest acts of selfishness.” I don’t get it. Does that mean that if a person who commits suicide is an atheist that they are being selfish, but if they are a Christian or practitioner of another religion that they are now less selfish? How does their spirituality or lack-thereof determine if the act is selfish or not? If God exists, do people really think that one of God’s posse is keeping up with which suicides occur among those who are church-going and which are among those who lack faith? It seems like God would have bigger fish to fry. (And, no, that wasn’t some lame Lent-oriented pun.) God shouldn’t want anyone to suffer needlessly and, despite what some religious organizations seem to think, I don’t see a loving God as being one intent punishing people for being sick.

A user from the Experience Project’s website stated, “I don’t think its selfish to be angry with a person who chooses a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” That disregards a whole segment of society. While some who are suicidal are only temporarily depressed, there are so many who have a mental health issue that might be considered terminal because it will be with the person for the remainder of their life. For example, if a schizophrenic ends their life, then they are using a permanent solution to resolve a permanent problem. The statement also disregards the intensity of the pain that the person, regardless of the nature of their problem, is going through.

And, as always, children seem to have the best understanding of the world we live in and the problems we deal with. As a first grader, this person had lost her father to suicide and heard people at his funeral asking how her father could hurt her family in such a way. Even at that young of an age, she realized, “he didn’t do this to us. Instinctively, I knew.” So how is it that kids can understand that suicide is not an act of aggression against friends and family? How do the rest of us not understand that?

Suicide is not some simple choice people make because they are lazy or they don’t care about others. Suicide is the choice of someone who feels that their life has lost that little spark that made it worth living. Suicidal ideation is a horrible thing to go through. To feel suicidal is to feel like your very core is being sucked out of your body by a high-power vacuum and no matter what you do, you can’t hold onto it and you know that you can’t save yourself. It’s almost like being in the ocean with no life preserver, no lifeguard in sight, and no ability to swim. It drains you of your hope. It drains you of any joy you could have in your life. It makes you feel like your family, your friends, etc. don’t care or shouldn’t care or that they would be better off without you. And to write it off as the act of someone who doesn’t think about what others will go through is to thoroughly misunderstand the act itself.

Mirrored from Hyperaware.

How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 06:55:05 GMT

Today is my 28th birthday. I’ve received a few sweet birthday wishes from some of my friends. I’ve also received a card and a check (for $20) from my grandmother. I have a feeling that that will be it for the birthday celebration. I’m very sure that my maternal aunt will not be sending any cards. I think that she is still of the opinion that if I died, the world would be better off. My paternal aunt might say happy birthday if she gets on Facebook sometime today. My mom will probably forget that it is my birthday, and will thus expect me to run around doing things for her. I don’t think my dad has even noticed that it is no longer the 16th, so he may not realize that it is my birthday. (Oh, there he just noticed.)

So, my plans for the day are:

Once my dad goes to bed, I shall watch the episodes of Vampire Diaries, Gossip Girl, and Grey’s Anatomy that I’ve had to DVR this week.
If I still have energy after that, I’m going to finally watch Breaking Dawn Pt. 1. (I still haven’t seen it.)

That’s all. No other plans. No other plans to make plans.

I told my parents a few hours ago that I was not going to do anything on my birthday, meaning I’m not cooking or doing stuff for them. I doubt that they will remember that.

I may see if I can go get Will (maternal aunt’s grandson) a birthday card so that I can celebrate his birthday, which is the 18th. I have a feeling that a card from me would be unwanted by his parents and grandparents. I don’t really care whether or not they want me to send him a card, though. I have no problem with him. He has no problem with me. It would be nice to celebrate his birthday.

Mirrored from fuzzypinkslippers.com.

Not Now, I Have A Headache

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:30:03 GMT

I had my appointment on Tuesday with the BOTOX doctor. (He’s just another neurologist in the practice with my neurologist, but he’s younger and has apparently been schooled in the use of toxins for neurological issues.) It was interesting. Actually, it pretty much sucked. I have a hard time with appointments for just about any kind of problem. I end up making light of problems, even if they’re nearly crippling me. This time was no different.

He asked me how many days I have headaches. I told him 20. He asked how many were severe. I told him 15. The truth is that I have headaches more often than that and that they are severe more of the time. I didn’t tell him this because my mind was doing this kind of warning thing, where I thought that if I told him the truth that he would think that I was just a drug addict.

Well, apparently, my answers were so off that he was “worried” that I might be having rebound headaches. He was still planning on submitting the paperwork to my insurance to get the BOTOX injection approved. He wants me to go off the Tramadol to prove that I’m not suffering from medication-overuse headaches. Since I’m not using the Tramadol as often as I do the Zanaflex and the Flexeril, and because I still have some Tramadol from October, I really don’t think that is the issue.

I was a bit annoyed by the speculation that I might be overusing pain medicine. I get why he thought that. I mean, I was making weird jokes, which I blame partly on my tendency to make light of my health issues and partly on my having taken 2 Flexeril earlier in the day. I also told him that I was having pain in my neck, was on Effexor for depression, and had trouble sleeping. Of course, I’ve been on the Effexor for over 10 years, and I have had a lot of trouble sleeping throughout my life. I also told him that before my current medicines I’d had problems with Migranal and Imitrex. He didn’t know that I had problems with Migranal because I have bad reactions with caffeine. He also didn’t know that the Imitrex bad reaction happened the very first time that I took it, and it wasn’t a rebound headache. It was more like serotonin syndrome. Anyway, for those things, I’m not that annoyed by him.

I am, however, annoyed that this man couldn’t be arsed to look at the damn file or any of the tests and notes done by my neurologist. I’m pretty damn sure that if you have a chart in front of you that has recent MRI and EEG results, as well as God knows what other tests my neuro has done over the past several years, that you look at that chart. Otherwise, why have a chart?

Anyway, to prove that I’m not overusing my pain medicine, I am going to be switching from it to Elavil. That makes me a bit uncomfortable since I’m also on Effexor, which he hinted that he wanted to take me off of. (If he tries, I may have to resort to some violence.) He also suggested that I get my eyes checked, because he thinks I have a lazy eye or something. He checked my eyes, doing the movement test first (and stalling forever at the upward part at the end) and following with an external examination of my eye test, which he ended up triggering a massive migraine. (The left eye didn’t take long, but he seemed to be obsessing over something about my right eye. He ended up getting extremely close to me, with his hand on my face, and it seemed like he was looking at the right eye for about five or six minutes. My photosensitive eyes didn’t like this, thus the migraine.) I was not happy to leave an appointment about headaches with a worse headache than I’d come in with.

Mirrored from fuzzypinkslippers.com.

Obscenity and You: An American Guide to Censorship

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:59:37 GMT

How many people were actually offended by M.I.A. during last night’s halftime show? My guess is not many. For the most part, I bet people didn’t even notice. I know that I didn’t notice. Hell, I was online the whole time and I don’t remember seeing anyone even mention it.

Somehow, though, someone did. And apparently, it was the wrong someone because now the Parents Television Council, an organization which thinks it knows how to parent best and has such stellar parents on its advisory board as Billy Ray Cyrus, is involved, and they’re making it a big deal; a bigger deal than it should be. They complain about this event and talk about how this has harmed their children, but did it really? Did the kids ask what the gesture or the word was? Did they actually have to take time out of their Sunday evenings to actually parent their own kids? I have a feeling that the kids didn’t notice it, and that, if they did, they probably didn’t care. By making this incident into such a scandalous affair and making it seem so taboo for someone to violate a social more, they are more likely to see this kind of behavior and language within their own families.

Obscenity laws run rampant in American culture, allowing groups like the PTC to attempt to govern what ends up on our television sets. In a society that promotes the idea of free thought and free speech, we have trouble accepting that some people might not conform to Puritanical ideals. We spend time on newscasts devoted to faux stories like the Super Bowl halftime show and we don’t pay attention to the real stories from the night, like Pete Hoekstra’s political ad that actually was offensive.

The PTC is demanding more than an apology from NBC and the NFL, in their words for having “a lineup full of performers who have based their careers on shock, profanity and titillation.”

How many performers don’t do something shocking in their careers? I remember people freaking out when the Madonna/Britney and Madonna/Christina kisses happened on the MTV Video Music Awards. Oh, or how about when the guy from Rage Against the Machine climbed up on the scaffolding on the VMA stage and made his political protest? Or what about Miley Cyrus’ doing the pole dance at the Teen Choice Awards or, more recently, making photos at her boyfriend’s birthday party licking his phallic-shaped cake? That might actually be considered shocking, profane, and titillating by a majority of people.

But, as a nation and as a culture, how define what is shocking, profane, or titillating? What is completely unacceptable to one person could be acceptable to another. To me, flipping off the camera is not a big deal. And a singer mouthing a expletive? Again, not a big deal, especially since being caught spouting off various expletives is not all that unheard of during a sports game. (I grew up trying to figure out all the words that Greg Maddox used to say during Atlanta Braves games.)

We’ve got kids being beaten or molested in their homes, kids hearing epithets used on various groups and being raised to hate, kids being neglected, underage kids going on social media outlets and being exposed to things that they aren’t old enough to be exposed to, and kids watching violent programming. So why is it that this one incident is being lambasted? Why is it such a big deal that this happened?

As I mentioned earlier, part of the problem is that we allow the PTC too much of an influence over how we are governed. Part of that influence is exerted through the FCC, whose power over obscenities and profanity is currently before the Supreme Court. You may remember the FCC for their lovely part in the 2004 circus that was the Super Bowl halftime show with the wardrobe malfunction. You may also remember the PTC from that, as well.

The actual power lies within the Supreme Court, if they choose to step in, which has established a three-part “test” for determining what is obscene:

An average person, applying contemporary community standards, must find that the material, as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
The material must depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specially defined by applicable law; and
The material, taken as a whole, must lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

Now, I don’t know that this incident would qualify as obscene under the second and third parts, since it was not actually depicting or describing (despite the implication of the gesture and the meaning of the alleged expletive, since both are forms of showing contempt) sexual conduct and since it has caused a bit of a political and artistic debate in the country. I’m not even certain that the FCC could fine over it being an indecent act since it doesn’t describe or depict a sexual act. And I’m absolutely certain that it doesn’t meet the profanity rule, since you have to actually hear the word in order to break that rule. Of course, the same could be said about the Janet Jackson incident, but that didn’t stop the FCC from going after her for showing her nipple. So, I would definitely not be surprised if they go after M.I.A., NBC, and the NFL. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if they go after Madonna for wearing a skirt while doing a cartwheel next, or if they went after M&M’s for the “Sexy and I Know It” commercial or the GoDaddy body paint commercial.

Why don’t we actually focus on legitimate issues, instead of pretending like this halftime show crap is significant? Are we too afraid of dealing with the real problems of the world that we have to focus on something as dumb as this?

Mirrored from Hyperaware.

Can’t and Won’t Are Different Things

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:58:22 GMT

I’m going to start this by saying that I love my mother and father dearly because I may say some things that indicate otherwise.

I’m ~~tired~~ sleep deprived. I don’t get to sleep well very often. I’m always doing something for someone, whether it is waking up every two hours to get my mom food and water or waking up every morning to wake my dad up (even though he has an alarm clock) or waking up to cook dinner for them. I’ve become a mother to my parents, and that might be okay, except I don’t want to be their mother and I don’t feel like I can keep doing these things for them. I can’t quit, though, because it isn’t a job. And I try not to complain because I know that they both don’t feel well and I know that my dad does some things around the house that I can’t do.

Still, I want to quit. I want to run away and hide somewhere where they can’t find me. I want to leave and never come back. And I know that that is selfish, but I just cannot deal with this any longer. I feel like shit and I need to sleep, but I can’t because someone always needs me. So, the more sleep I miss, the grumpier that I get and the worse I feel. I try to point this out, and it is remembered for all of two seconds before I get my marching orders again.

My mother fell last weekend and cracked her ribs. She wouldn’t go to the doctor for the first few days after the fall, but just kept whimpering like a hurt animal. She said she couldn’t go to the doctor because my dad wouldn’t take her. She hadn’t told my dad she needed to go, and he can’t exactly force her to go. (He knew she needed to, but I don’t think he wanted to try to convince her.) So, I told him that she needed to go, and I told her that I told him that she needed to go. She went to the ER last week and found out that her ribs were cracked. The doctor at the ER couldn’t give her any extra pain medicine (because she’s on one with an opiate antagonist in it), so he gave her Flexeril.

My mom doesn’t do so well on Flexeril. Every time she takes one, she ends up sleeping through days and wondering around in a stupor. She gets whiny and she gets more clumsy. And this leads to her falling more often and to her making claims that we either don’t love her or don’t take care of her or don’t pay attention to her.

Case in point, she fell last night. She had already fallen about 12 hours earlier and managed, with some help, to get up on her own. (Keep in mind, when she broke the ribs last week, she got herself off the floor with absolutely no help.) Last night, though, she wasted her energy holding on to a door frame during the fall, so she was too tired to try to get up when she finally completed the fall. We had to call the ambulance. Even though she was fine, other than that she was in a drugged out state and a little sore, she decided she had to go to the emergency room. There was nothing wrong, but she needed to have tests run to prove that to her.

When my father and I were going to call the ambulance, she first accused us of not taking care of her and not loving her. This was after I’d managed to hear her call (over Mims’ “Like This”), run to her, then run to my dad’s room and gotten him up, and we’d both spent about 30-45 minutes trying to help her get up. My dad had tried to basically pick her up, even though she weighs about 100 pounds or so more than him. I’d moved pieces of furniture toward her that I thought would help her get up easier. My father was out of breath and worn out. I was about to pass out or vomit or both. But because we headed toward the phone to call someone else to help her, which she had asked us to do a minute earlier, she determined that we didn’t care enough for her.

When the paramedics got here, she enjoyed slinging some barbs at our expense. My dad drove to the hospital at 3:30 or so in the morning, even though he has trouble seeing at night, so that he would be with her at the ER. (I stayed here, as I usually do.) When she got home, she had my dad fix her 2 breakfast burritos. A couple of hours later, she woke me up with an order for a bagel and cream cheese. And at about 1 pm, she asked me to fix her 2 small frozen chicken biscuits, her 32 oz. cup of water, and hot chocolate. That wouldn’t be such a big deal if we had a decent microwave, but since the biscuits took about 5-6 minutes to cook, as did the hot chocolate, and I didn’t feel like I could waste the energy sitting down and standing up, I ended up standing up during the 12 minutes it took to do this. A while after she had eaten that and had gotten up for a minute, I ended up having to move her back onto her couch. And she was still in the “my family is awful to me” mood, which made it that much harder. (Somehow, the moodier she is, the less cooperative she is.) She even said it a few times, which I wanted to scream at her over.

I get that she is in pain, but she is stuck in this bubble. She thinks that no one takes care of her, which is ridiculous. We do everything that she asks for and she still gets pissed off at us. And she’s doing more of her “I’m worse than you are” comparisons again. She’d stopped for a few days, but she’s back at it. If I tell her that I’m going to faint, I don’t exactly want her to try to one-up my statement. I want her to say that I should go sit down or take a break or something that I would think a mother would suggest to their daughter when their daughter said something like that. And, this may sound petty, she always seems to fall more (and have to go to the ER) when I have an appointment with a doctor or someone that I need to see. She may not plan it, but it almost always happens that way.

So I’m frustrated. And I’m sitting here with a splitting headache, and I know that I can’t take anything for it because my mom might need me and my dad is getting in his much-needed rest. So I’m going to try to avoid talking to anyone on the internet until I get a little bit of sleep because, until then, I am going to be bitchy.

Mirrored from fuzzypinkslippers.com.

Why I Wouldn’t Vote For: Newt Gingrich

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:57:12 GMT

Oh, Newt, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways. I could say it is because you are a big schmuck and just leave it at that. That would be true, but it wouldn’t be worthy of a blog entry. I could also say that I have disliked you for so long (since I was around 10 years old) that it is just impossible to start liking you, but that wouldn’t be completely true. People could change, but I don’t know that you are capable of any kind of meaningful chance. Honestly, when I look at you, I think of a a conservative Dennis the Menace or, possibly, a robot; and I just don’t like robots. But these are not the reasons that I will not vote for you. No, the reasons are numerous and varied, and might contribute to some people think that this whole post is just too long to read.

Though I don’t want to judge the private lives of others, Newt Gingrich is one that begs to be judged. I don’t particularly like the idea of divorces, and that is probably one of the only things that people might think me as conservative on. (Actually, my issue with divorces is when people don’t take their marriages seriously, so it isn’t really a conservative thing as much as a frustration at folks thing, but I digress.) First, he marries and (eventually) divorces one of his former high school teachers, which I could almost forgive him for, as those types of relationships are often (on some level) a form of authoratative abuse–especially when they start (like his did) by secretive dating. Now, I might have let it slide because of the circumstances related to the start of the marriage, but because he chose to leave his wife while she was being treated for cancer makes this personal decision of his a very disgusting decision. It is even more disgusting, if the allegations by Jackie Battley are to be believed, that he wanted to discuss the terms of her divorce while she was recovering from having surgery (her third related to uterine cancer) to remove a (benign) uterine tumor. Even more disgusting was that he refused to pay alimony and child-support while marrying Marianne Ginther, whom he’d been having an affair with. I have a hard time forgiving any person who cheats on their sick spouse. Adultery is bad enough, but to do it when a spouse is sick is just, in my mind, unforgivable.

Of course, his morally-deficient personal decisions don’t stop with his dumping of a wife with cancer for a younger, prettier version that he’d already proposed to during his first marriage. No, Newt was so into family values that he chose to browbeat Bill Clinton for his cheating ways, even though he had cheated on his first wife and was cheating (again) with who would become his next wife. And when he left Marianne for Callista Bisek Gingrich, it was a surprise to Marianne. Not only did he file for divorce from Marianne, he asked the Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta for an annulment based on the fact that Marianne was previously married. He not only chose to divorce her, but to say that their marriage never existed. That alone would be proof of his lack of a conscience, but he left her eight months after she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. As is true with many chronic illnesses, the symptoms of and problems related to Multiple Sclerosis get worse with stress. It is important for people who have Multiple Sclerosis (or cancer) to stay as relaxed as possible to keep their diseases from worsening. It shouldn’t have surprised Marianne that Newt would do this to her, since it was virtually the same thing that he had done with Jackie. It also shouldn’t surprise her that he has never expressed regrets or apologized to her for the choice to leave her or cheat on her, since it looks like Mr. Gingrich has no moral compass.

So, why do these immoral decisions impact why I wouldn’t vote for Gingrich? Well, it’s a couple of things. In general, people who divorce their chronically ill spouse end up not only dissolving a marriage, but stripping a person of income, health insurance, and a good enough support system. Usually, the divorces come about because of the stress of caring for a disabled spouse or stress over the family’s finances. As the former probably isn’t true since, at least in Marianne’s case, the chronic illness was a relatively new diagnosis and the latter is likely not the case for Newt Gingrich because of his financial status, then it makes it seem like he doesn’t want to take care of someone in need. That is not a personality trait that should be admired or coddled in a politician. It is bad enough when politicians lose their moral compass because they are bought and paid for by corporations, but when they have no moral compass to begin with, it makes me wonder what kind of decisions they might make when given a great deal of power and authority. Another reason that I would not vote for him based on this issue alone is that if he abandons someone when things are stressful, then will he be able to handle one of the most stressful jobs in the world? What will he do when he has to make a decision and someone’s life is on the line? Will he be able to make it or will he just go find something easier to do?

Now, I shall devote my anti-Gingrich opinion to the typical issues that impact many voters on their way to the polls.

First of all, Newt Gingrich is, against federal funding “abortion providers” which is a fun and inflammatory way of saying that he doesn’t like Planned Parenthood. Despite the fact that he knows that it is already illegal for organizations like Planned Parenthood to use federal money for abortions, he still managed to bring it up as one of his campaign promises. He claims that more people in the country are pro-life than pro-choice, though, in 2003, 66% of Americans believe that first trimester abortions should be legal, with 25% of people polled supported legality into the second trimester and 10% into the third. Each of these numbers was up slightly from a 2000 poll and about the same as the numbers from 1996. A 2007 CBS polls also found that 30% of people said it should be permitted in cases like rape, incest, or to save a woman’s life, 16% said it should be permitted, but subjected to greater restrictions, 12% only want it permitted to save a woman’s life, and 31% said it should be permitted in all cases. In that poll, only 5% wanted an outright ban. This means that, regardless of how they self-identify, the majority of Americans are actually pro-choice on some level.

Newt Gingrich is a hypocrite. This is one thing that I’m pretty sure most people could agree on, if they looked at the facts. He has repeatedly gone after Mitt Romney for making money off of the Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae housing bubble, despite working in a “strategic” influential position as a lobbyist for the housing market giants. If he was allowed to make money off of people going into debt, because of the “free enterprise” that he so lovingly promotes, then why not allow someone else to do the same without painting them in a bad light? And it isn’t just the economy that he is a hypocrite on. Gingrich has spoken in favor of cracking down on deadbeat dads, which is almost funny since he chose not to pay child support for his own children. How dare he take the moral high ground on that issue?

Gingrich doesn’t understand the economy and the problems related to it. He blames all of the issues related to the recession on Ben Bernanke, despite the fact that the majority of the problems that actually caused the recession were started during Alan Greenspan’s term. Bernanke became the Chairman of the Fed almost 2 years before the economy officially went into a recession, while most of the actions started in the 90′s and early in the first decade of the 21st century. In fact, he, during his term in Congress and as Speaker of the House, helped pass some of the laws that led to the recession. If anyone should have their feet held to the fire over this recession, it should be people like Newt Gingrich.

Newt Gingirch seems to be a conspiracy theorist. At the very least, he partakes in the conservative tradition of paranoia. He promotes loyalty tests for all Americans working in government positions because, as he puts it, “we now know there really were communist spies.” He doesn’t specify which government positions or how he would be able to tell who was lying and who wasn’t. He thinks that continuing the PATRIOT Act is a good idea because he says that we will all “be in danger for the rest of our lives” from terrorism. While it is true that we could be the victims of terrorism, it could also be true that we are all potential victims of crime, car accidents or accidents in other forms of transportation, health problems, etc. I mean, a lot of people have the possibility of having aneurysm somewhere in their body, which would increase the risk of dying unexpectedly, but that doesn’t mean that the possibility of dying by aneurysm should cause us all to have panic attacks and force everyone to be checked for them, including people who aren’t even necessarily at risk for them. The support of the PATRIOT Act is a support of severe and, many times, unwarranted anxiety and panic in all Americans. By making people fear some sort of imminent death, Gingrich promotes the allowing the government to use our fears and irrational thoughts against us. That is an action that could have severe repercussions for our basic rights and freedoms.

Newt Gingrich loves bringing up that he helped author the Defense of Marriage Act, a law enacted in 1996 that defines marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman. If it fails, he wants a constitutional amendment to ban it. I could point out how hypocritical it is to have a noted philanderer promoting a law that defines marriage. I could also point out how cruel it is that Gingrich has a half-sister, Candace Gingrich-Jones, who is personally impacted by his ignorance. Gingrich-Jones came out as a lesbian years ago, even appearing on Friends for the marriage of Carol and Susan, and has been challenging his political views openly since then. (Gingrich-Jones did say that privately her brother is cordial to her wife and bought the couple a shower gift and a wedding gift, which makes her question whether he is really anti-gay.) But I think it is more important to say that promoting the Defense of Marriage Act, Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, or any law denying civil rights to any group of people is not the kind of behavior that I would want in a leader of this country. It is even more disheartening that Gingrich chose to help finance the ousting three Iowa Supreme Court justices who approved same sex marriage in the state. I find it disturbing that he chose to call those who supported the ACLU’s lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America a group of “counter-culture warriors”, as it is a way to stir a greater hatred against the LGBT community and those who support the civil rights of all persons. It is also disturbing that Newt Gingrich refuses to accept that America is socially behind (including in same-sex marriage) so many other “developed nations” which impacts how the rest of the world sees us. He may think that it doesn’t matter, but even he should know that a lack of foreign support makes it harder for this country to be taken seriously when we comment on the actions of dictatorships and regimes that deny civil rights to their people and it also hurts when, in times of military conflict, we need the help of our allies. Regardless of what he wants to think, we are not on this planet alone, which means that we need a better ethical standard in this country.

Newt Gingrich promotes the more of his illogical ideology when it comes to drugs. He claims that legalization of Marijuana would tear the country apart. He claims that this would result in more people on welfare, more people being dependent, more people with bad health care outcomes, fewer people being able to work/pay attention on the job, and more people advocating cocaine and heroin becoming legalized. Maybe it isn’t his fault that he sees things this way, since this what many Americans are taught as children. The fact is that marijuana was more openly used in America up until the early to mid part of the twentieth century and its illegal status is the result of a series of actions by Andrew Mellon, William Randolph Hearst, and the Du Pont family. Hearst felt that the use of hemp as a substitute for paper pulp was a threat to his timber holdings, while DuPont, which was heavily invested in by Mellon, was promoting nylon as a replacement for hemp. The financial impact of marijuana was impacting their bank balances so they worked to make it illegal. The result is people like Gingrich continuing to promote an anti-marijuana stance, despite the fact that it could actually help the economy (since it is the #4 value crop in the country and is #1 or #2 in several states), does help some people with chronic illness to deal with various symptoms related to their disease, has never proven to be a gateway drug, and its being illegal has a negative impact on the crime rate of the country. (Many people are imprisoned on charges related to marijuana, thus contributing to prison over-crowding. The illegality also contributes to money going to various criminal enterprises, which increases the rate of other crimes.) It should also be noted that, though it is illogical to say that a legalization of marijuana would lead to a legalization of cocaine or heroin, the legalization (at least in certain cases) of those drugs might actually be a good thing, since both have been known to treat certain medical and psychiatric problems. (Also it is hypocritical for him to be anti-drug since he also admitted to smoking marijuana during his youth.)

His suggestion of increasing penalties on drug users is also a form of cruel and unusual punishment. In this country and in the world, we have a tendency to want to punish people using illegal drugs, while we do not understand that punishment is the wrong course of action for drug addicts. Drug addiction is both a psychological and physiological condition. It is something that we should try to treat, not punish. Throwing an addict in jail does not help the addict to deal with his or her addiction. Instead, it punishes him or her for his or her problem and, in some cases, introduces them to the world of drug smuggling within prisons. If we dealt with drug addiction in a more progressive way, then we might actually have fewer addicts.

Newt Gingrich’s promoting of ending the student loan program and only having a work-study model might sound good to some folks, but it is not flexible enough to deal with the lives of many college students. Gingrich thinks that students go to school longer if they are on loans, and take fewer hours per semester on average, which he says has led to the tuitions going up. He does not take into account that many students who are on loans are actually very well aware of what their education costs, but are, for one reason or another, unable to afford college any other way. Some people may not be able to do work-study because they already have a job or because they have a child at home or because they are ill and unable to work. Some may be unable to do a work-study program if they are in a program that requires them to complete an internship. For example, to get a Bachelor of Social Work degree, you have to complete a 40 hour internship. While some universaries will allow a work-study student to count some of those hours toward their BSW, it is generally on a case-by-case basis.

Gingrich also continues to promote ignorance when it comes to social welfare programs. He has made various statements that make programs like food stamps sound like they are being used primarily by blacks and other minorities (whites are actually the majority) or folks on Medicaid are actively abusing emergency rooms. (At least in Alabama, if you are on Medicaid alone, you must be going in for an emergency or something that cannot wait until a doctor can see you, or you are responsible for the full-cost of the visit.) His comments also make poor people sound like they are some how intellectually deficient in statements like, “to the shock of academics, poor people were aware of money and strived to get that bonus by not abusing emergency rooms”, which almost makes people using social welfare programs like Medicaid sound like either academics or Americans in general expect these people to have some severe cognitive issues. He does not understand that people within the system can be just as intelligent as those outside of the system. He even suggests that people who are unemployed need to do some kind of training, which seems to point to his idea that they are not educated. Given the number of jobs related just to the financial sector that were lost over the past few years, I have a hard time accepting that people who lost their jobs are somehow untrained or uneducated. The idea that people aren’t working because there is something wrong with them is a type of victim blaming that is just completely unacceptable. He also does not understand that the majority of abuses that the right claims as being rampant are the result of restrictive social programs. (For decades, the restrictive welfare programs would help single mothers, but not families. This led to families making the decision that in order to feed and shelter their children, they would split so that they could have help with income or food or housing. Thus the tradition of belittling “welfare moms” began.) There is no such thing as “free welfare” as he calls it. Gingrich willfully plays up the idea that welfare programs are something that people can have throughout their entire life, despite the fact that he was instrumental in working on the bill that started TANF, which is a temporary program that promotes work and only gives benefits for five years over a person’s lifetime. Oddly, the requirements that TANF set for people and the time limits actually led to employment rates of 20% less than those who left voluntarily. About two-thirds of people worked at some point after they left welfare, but many are still impoverished either by not having a job or by being concentrated in low-wage jobs. Having fewer people on the books for assistance hasn’t helped lower the poverty rate, since the number of leavers considered impoverished is between 48% and 74%. It has actually the share of the population considered to be working poor go up within the country. Newt can pretend that because people are working that this is somehow acceptable, but it is never acceptable for children and families to be in poverty.

Promoting tort reform is another anti-freedom issue that Gingrich seems to enjoy having as part of his campaign. Torts allow Americans to have some way to right a wrong within the civil justice system. It is a right guaranteed by the Constitution. Tort reform has not stopped “frivolous” lawsuits. It has, however, allowed corporations and bad doctors and other professionals to hold onto their money, even if there is proof that they have harmed a person in some way.

He has severe misogynistic tendencies, which is not only evident in his treatment of former spouses, but is also evident in a claim he made in 1995 about women and combat to make a point. Gingrich made a comment to a college class that women are not suitable for combat because after 30 days in the ditch they are susceptible to infections, while men were born to hunt giraffes. While he was trying to say that women have skills that make them better suited for non-combat positions, he used a grotesque way of saying that and he promoted an idea that women are somehow built to fight. That is rather odd to me, because as many girls and women will probably tell you, you do not want to pick a fight with those of us without a Y chromosome because there are many women who will willingly kick someone’s ass. Underestimating the fighting ability of women is one way that Newt Gingrich exhibits that he doesn’t understand women. His misogyny was also exhibited by his statement that high school girls should be rewarded if they graduate as virgins. I’m not exactly sure if he’s planning on doing a virginity test, like the ones done in countries accused of or known for human rights violations, or if he is planning just taking the word of the girls.

I have expressed on this blog and off that I feel that Gingrich is a racist. Gingrich wants to replace bilingual education in this country with immersion in English so that people speek a common language and prosper, instead of staying in the ghetto. Whether referring to Hispanics or Asians or any other group, what he said was, at best, disrespectful and comes across as being very hateful. (Interestingly, there are many countries that provide multilanguage educations that have better economies and better education systems than the predominantly one language system that we have in America.) Another racist and/or classist tendency of his was saying saying that kids should work poor-time in school as janitors. This is not only a disrespectul position with regards to race and class, it is also against the law, cruel and dangerous (given the chemicals used by and activities done [like electrical repairs] that “janitors” do in schools) to make children do janitorial work, and advocates firing a group of working class people who probably need jobs just like other adults in this country. So, in that regard, he is not only racist and classist, but a complete and utter fool. Another racist idea of his is that Palestinians are an “invented people” and that somehow he is the only person telling the “truth” on this. It isn’t true. It may have been under the control of different groups over the years, but that doesn’t mean that they are an invented people any more than calling Estonians, who were controlled by various countries for hundreds of years, an invented people. The fact is that people lived there before Israel was established, both in Biblical times and in the last century. What they were called officially didn’t change the fact that they were Palestinian. Pretending like they didn’t exist will help spur more anti-American sentiment in the region, which will result in a greater risk of injury or death for Americans and American allies abroad.

Gingrich is one of many Republicans who has said that the Environmental Protection Agency is a radical, over-reaching agency that should be putting the economy over the environment. He fails to acknowledge that the quality of actual protection of the environment by the EPA has been reduced regularly and dramatically since his hero Reagan was in office; by not acknowledging this, he also fails to acknowledge that the economy and corporations have regularly benefited from the decrease in environmental protections. If we continue to put the economy over the environment, we will only see more of an increase in rates of asthma and other chronic diseases. (Asthma alone has increased by 4.3 million people in the United States in the past 11 years.)

And of course, there is Gingrich’s plan to have an American colony on the moon in eight years. Now, NASA is a wonderful agency. But getting to the Moon within 8 years is out of the question. It was a lot more feasible in 2005, but with just 8 years, it is financially impossible. And trying to get it past a Congress that has repeatedly decreased funding for the space agency is politically impossible. Then, of course, there is the science of building it for the moon and getting it to the moon. Newt proposes smaller rockets that already exist, but that would be more difficult and time-consuming, which would end up costing even more. Of course it seems like Newt Gingrich is either promoting this idea either to pander to Floridians or to promote his belief that China is out to enslave and/or kill all Americans. Either way, he is promoting this idea for the wrong reason.

So these are just some of the many reasons why I would not vote for Newt Gingrich.

Mirrored from Hyperaware.

Writer's Block: Backwards Day

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:12:47 GMT

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.yadot resworb a eb ot skcuS .tpmorp siht setah emorhC kniht I - WTB

American Exceptionalism Scares Me

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:00:14 GMT

The other day I saw something that said that Callista Gingrich, the third wife of Newt Gingrich, promotes the idea of American Exceptionalism. Honestly, the idea of promoting a particular nation or ethnicity over another is a bit scary to me. It becomes especially disconcerting when the person promoting it has bleached blonde hair, sparkly blue eyes, and dresses like she’s stepping out of a mid-twentieth century movie or sitcom where the womenfolk just weren’t quite as well informed as their husbands. Maybe that’s because I’ve watched too many documentaries on other countries and their beliefs about how they were more special than other people. Maybe it’s because there were countries during the early and mid-twentieth centuries that promoted the idea that not only were they more special, more deserving, and more super-cool, and when people didn’t agree with them, those extra-special and cool folks decided to force people into agreeing that they were awesome by threatening them with war, loss of life, loss of property, etc.

I tried to give Callista’s special video on America being the home of the coolest kids around, but halfway through the short (two-and-a-half minute) video, I was already feeling nauseated by the the rhetoric. Somehow, we are super special because God gave us special rights because we’re from a special nation. (She doesn’t understand that the very line she quotes doesn’t mention anything about the rights only being given to Americans and no one else. In fact, it says everyone is equal.) And while she’s giving the shout-out out to God for being the bestest sugar daddy in the history of the universe for giving us our coolness factor, this video, like so many propaganda films of the last century, displays various military images. Maybe it’s to inspire patriotism, but that was the excuse those other governments had almost a hundred years ago, too.

She may have innocent reasons for promoting American Exceptionalism, as may many others who have promoted it through the years. Still, I would hope that people would be more wary of the ideas of one country or one group of people within a country being more important than another. The ideas of empires, nationalism, and exceptionalism all rely on people placing more value on the lives of one group than another. That may seem like a basic tenet of being a good citizen, but it is also a basic tenet of ideologies that shaped Nazi Germany, a fascist Italy, and the far-right regimes that rules the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.

When we start pretending that we are better than or more important than anyone else, we begin going down a dangerous path. If we hope to be a nation that promotes liberty and freedom, then we can’t accept the idea that we are, in any way, more deserving of freedom, respect, and liberty than any other group. When we start promoting the idea that we are better than anyone else, we forget that one very basic idea that existed at the very start of this nation: equality.

Mirrored from Hyperaware.

Dear Birthers

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:28:24 GMT

Perhaps you do not understand the Constitution or perhaps you just don’t care. Personally, I think you are racist and/or ignorant. No matter what the reason is for your insistence that Obama is not a US Citizen, you need to shut up and get informed. There is no good excuse for your stupidity at this point, so I’m gonna try to help you get over that stupidity.

First of all, Obama was born in the state of Hawaii in the year 1961. There were witnesses, since he was born in a hospital. There was a birth certificate, since he was born in a state that has a certificate of live birth (aka a legal birth certification). There was also a birth announcement. Now, I know that on the last thing you birthers think that his grandparents from Kansas were trying to make him look like he was born here because they were conspiring to make him President almost fifty years later. Conspiracy theories are for people who wear tinfoil hats. They aren’t for high-functioning people like many of your purport yourselves to be.

Secondly, if Obama wasn’t born in the state of Hawaii, he would still be (cue drum roll and ominous music) an American citizen. Why? Well, since you admit (via your conspiracy theory) that his mother was a US citizen, he would be an American by birth. His mother came from the Midwest long after it had been entered into the Union. She, as an American citizen, carried him in her womb and gave birth to him, giving him (as a birthright) American citizenship. It made him a natural-born citizen. So, the very same thing that makes many of you citizens made him one, too.

Now, why do I think that you birthers are racist? It is very simple. In the 2008 elections, there were two viable candidates: Barack Obama and John McCain. Barack Obama was born in Hawaii to an American mother, making him an American citizen born on American soil, which meets even the narrowest of definitions of citizenship. John McCain was born in Panama to American parents. Yes, he was born at a Naval Air Station, which means he was technically born on American soil, but he wasn’t born in the fifty states, which is what many of you claim is necessary. So, if this weren’t a racism-related issue, then you would have been equally appalled with the idea that McCain could have been President since he was, according to the birther logic, from Panama.

What some of you may not realize is that McCain’s citizenship actually had to be verified prior to the 2008 election because some members of both parties weren’t sure if his election would be constitutional. Because Obama’s birth was well documented as being in Hawaii and to an American mother, his was not tested by both parties in Congress. Instead, his went before courts back then to prove he was a real American. His citizenship was verified again several times, even before Donald Trump decided to go after Obama.

Now, there is a precedent of the clause not being followed to the strictest of standards for some, while being interpreted too strictly for people from unpopular backgrounds in the past:

Chester Arthur was rumored to be born in Canada. Despite the rumors, he was able to convince enough officials that he was American by birth.
Barry Goldwater, a candidate in 1964, was born in the Arizona Territory before it officially became one of the fifty states. The 50 states thing is a common issue for some birther-types.
Mitt Romney’s father George was born in Mexico to American parents. George was still able to be called an American citizen because his parents retained their citizenship. This allowed him to run for president.
Lowell Weicker was born in Paris to American parents and was allowed to run because he was considered to be an American by birth.
Christopher Schürmann was born in New York to German parents and tried to run for President in 1896. Despite being born in the country, his campaign was forced to disband because some Attorneys General felt uncomfortable about his parents being naturalized citizens. (Germans were discriminated against at that time, like many other minority ethnic groups.)

Basically, the country has had a history of allowing people who look a certain way or have acceptable names to get away with not being born in the right place or to the right kind of parents to run, while scrutinizing others. Since the scrutiny is only being focused, in great amounts, towards minorities, it makes birthers seem racist.

And the recent court order for Obama to appear before a Georgia judge to prove his citizenship is further proof that some of you are clearly taking this racist witchhunt way too far. What is surprising is that many of you are reportedly well-educated, with some of you even being doctors or lawyers, but you are unable to grasp the simple concept that yes, black folks born in this country can become President. Maybe it isn’t your fault. Maybe you were dropped on your heads or subjected to the racist tirades of a relative. Whatever the reason, you need to get over it. Obama has proven in court that he is an American, yet you won’t give it up. You’re basically repeatedly filing truly frivolous lawsuits, which is either because you are too brainwashed by some Klan-like group or you are just too damn immature to admit that you are wrong and that filing these lawsuits is a waste of time and does the country no good. So, I shall give you some free advice: get over it.

P.S. – Please tell some of your friends who keep calling Obama a “Muslim” that he isn’t one. (I heard a comment yesterday on the news from someone who claimed Obama was Muslim.) Also, tell them that being a Muslim is not an insult. I know some people think Muslims are terrorists, and yeah, there are some terrorists who claim to be Muslim, but they are in the minority. (There are terrorists from ALL religious backgrounds.) So, let’s stop with the ignorance and stick to facts.

Mirrored from Hyperaware.