Yesterday, once more

7 10 2008

Lucretia, as usual, is forcing me to sharpen my thoughts in response to her own perspicacious observations.

So: the varieties of tolerance. I’ve been focussing on political tolerance, tolerance among citizens, and tolerance among strangers. The first might be a kind of structural or constitutional tolerance; the second, for those who move within a particular political or constitutional tolerance; and the third, for those about whom one knows little, and for which no relationship of even the minimal constitutional type is necessarily defined.

I haven’t said much about this third type, mainly because I’ve been preoccupied with the political and there’s nothing particularly political about this. Still a brief: A certain defensive wariness may be apt when among this last group, insofar as the encounters may happen ‘outside of the law’ (e.g., a deserted street or minimally populated area, with no obvious authority present), as it were. That these encounters may be ‘lawless’, however, doesn’t mean they have to be violent or aggressive or even threatening: One may wish only to move through or around strangers, and however much the strangers may eye one another, each nonetheless decides to leave the other alone. (This might be considered a literal ‘toleration of existence’, and a necessary precondition for politics.)

Perhaps somewhere in there should be tolerance of acquaintances (feel free to offer a better term): These are the people we work with or see regularly or engage in genial conversation, even if we wouldn’t invite them into our home and they wouldn’t invite us into their home. We might like one another ‘well enough’ or find each other ‘interesting’ or ‘worth talking to’, but wouldn’t, really, call a friend. Someone you know, kinda, and are satisfied with that.

Anyway, what poked at me from Lucretia’s comment was about the personal side of toleration. I noted that I wouldn’t be friends with someone who merely tolerated me, but Lucretia adds some shading to this statement:

As for wanting more than tolerance from my friends – maybe. I’m finding as I get older that I am more tolerant than I thought I could be. I can be friends with someone even if there are one or two things about them I really don’t like or even actively disapprove of, because they have other qualities that shine brighter, and because everyone has faults and blind spots, including me. But I agree, that if a person only tolerates something that I feel is the very core of my being, it’s going to be much harder to feel close to that person, and trust them.

I was getting at more the ‘very core of my being’ aspect, as opposed to the ‘I’ll put up with’ or ‘I’ll overlook this’ aspect of tolerance. My sense of not wanting to be friends with someone who merely tolerated me arises both out of a desire for dignity and from not wanting to feed my occasionally raging neuroses. Why hang out with someone who doesn’t think you’re, basically, okay to hang out with? Why do that to yourself?

But Lucretia’s right: Ain’t none of us perfect, so even dear friends are going to irritate us (and vice versa). What then to do? Nothin’. Let it pass. Be glad for the friendship, be glad the other person is as flawed as you, be glad you don’t have to be perfect to have a friend or be a friend.

When I was younger I used to say ‘I don’t judge.’ Hah! I judged all the time, but since I didn’t want to be judgmental, I wasn’t honest about it. As a result, I was never able to reflect on those judgments; they were unconsidered. Now I know I judge all the time, but I also let a hell of a lot more judgments go. So X is always late and Y never calls, but I know that, and I still want to be around them. So I set aside time for X and I’m the one who calls Y. At some point, I decided not to moralize these behaviors. Yeah, it’d be nice if X were prompt and Y could pick up the phone, but so what: the people matter more than the irks. (And I’m glad that goes both ways.)

Yeah, sometimes the irks overwhelm the people, and it becomes difficult to remain friends. And sometimes things just change so radically you have to reconsider everything. (I’m thinking of my friendship with someone who moved her Christian faith from the periphery to the center of her life. Another post, perhaps.) But at that point I think the issue is less a matter of tolerance and more a matter of compatibility.

Huh. Perhaps the distinction should be between tolerance of persons (which is not somethings friends do to one another) and tolerance of acts (which friends, citizens, and strangers may allow).

Does this help, or am I just fucking it all up again?


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Sandra at the beach

5 10 2008

There were some interesting comments about ‘tolerance’ in the Fray at XX Factor (Slate.com), in response to posts by Abby Collard (Oct 3) and EJ Graff (Oct 4). Neither Collard nor Graff thought tolerance was sufficient; Collard wrote that

Tolerance is widely accepted as an admirable virtue, but it still feels cheap to me. Essentially what Palin is saying is that she puts up with homosexual couples. There’s no approval there, no acceptance, just respectful disregard. The difference between “tolerance” and “acceptance” is like the difference between looking the other way and actively supporting something. Her tolerant speech doesn’t mean she supports, or even approves of, homosexuality. It means she just doesn’t act out against it.

Well, yeah. And maybe that’s all that can be expected from someone who thinks there’s something wrong with homosexuality. A number of Fraysters echoed Collard & Graff’s unhappiness with the tolerance, but Wren W noted that, given all of our differences, tolerance may be the best we can get. Although I disagree with a number of the opinions Wren expresses in her (his?) comment, I think she’s right that those who despair of tolerance do so because they seek something more: approval and acceptance (which is what Collard wrote, above).

So. Those of us who are pro-queer or are queer want those who are not to accept and approve of LGBT folk. This is not unreasonable. But it may be unreasonable to expect those opposed to accept and approve. Yes, we should act to expand acceptance, but that we have to act ought to signal that not everyone does approve of homo-, bi-, and transsexuality. Hell, until very recently it was quite acceptable to denounce gays and lesbians as contemptible perverts. What does Sarah Palin really believe, in her hockey-lovin’ heart? I don’t care—but I sure as hell do care about her behavior, that she not ‘act out against’ gays and lesbians. I prefer politicians who are pro-gay rights, but I’ll take a ‘tolerant’ politician over a hateful one any day.

Now, this is all complicated somewhat by the fact that Palin is an elected official, and a candidate for even higher office. She is in a position of ‘power over’, so a discussion of what she as a politician tolerates is a different matter than what a fellow citizen, who is my equal, tolerates. Still, there are two similarities:

One, I have low expectations of accord amongst a mixed crowd. I see us as working our way ‘up’ to tolerance, rather than falling ‘down’ to it. In other words, I begin from a position of conflict rather than comity.

Two, while I may accept that tolerance is the most I can expect from strangers, I wouldn’t be friends with someone who merely tolerated me. That is, in moving through the world, it is enough for others to tolerate me, to not act against me, but with friends, more is expected.

That, after all, is why they’re friends: Because I can expect more.

Yes, there’s more to be said. But this was worth a quick hit.


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I want your sex

4 10 2008

I found (via Feministing) this mutual interview between Gloria Steinem and Suheir Hammad, and homed in on this comment by Hammad:

. . . [I]n the nineties you had the sense that you could sleep with anyone you wanted, and we thought we knew enough about safe sex. And there wasn’t any reference to the emotional reality of sharing yourself with people you didn’t trust. Some of my friends are able to make the distinction between love and sex.

I used to say, semi-seriously, that a woman should sleep with someone earlier rather than later, to find out if he (or she) were worth the emotional investment. So when I read this I thought, Yeah, I remember thinking that.

Now, I was never much of a slut. (Was that because I practiced self-control—or because I lacked opportunities?) Regardless, I was impatient with the notion that sex had to mean anything other than pleasure. Sure it could be about getting closer to your partner, deepening intimacy, blah blah, but hey, couldn’t it also just be about a fun toss?

I really wanted to believe that. I liked the idea that sex was simply another form of bodily pleasure, akin to the pleasures of a good run or workout or dancing or any other physically happy endeavor. There was no reason to make it more than it is.

Except I never believed myself. Sex was—is—different. Why? Why the hell is sex different? Is it about the vulnerability, that one is, literally, naked before another person?* Why is physical nakedness more meaningful than emotional nakedness?

(*Nothing against threesomes or more. I’m just trying to capture something about the act the way most of us do it most of the time.)

Ah. Maybe it’s not. Maybe that’s where I got tripped up: I wanted it to be different from emotional vulnerability (with which I have my difficulties), so tried to strip (sorry!) sex down to its bare (okay, that one I did on purpose) essentials.

No more snarkiness. What I mean is, I wanted to be able to have sex without having to worry about any emotional entanglements. I didn’t want it to mean anything, wasn’t sure I wanted the other person to mean anything to me, wasn’t sure I wanted to mean anything to the other person.

Still, this hardly explains why sex matters, or even, really, that it matters. Maybe it really is about the emotional component, and the difficulty of separating the emotional from the sexual. In other words, I was right, in a way, before: sex is just sex, and the issue is with its shotgun rider, emotion.

Hmpf. This post is all over the place. If anyone is reading this, can you PLEASE chime it to say if sex matters or not, and why?


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My dog has. . .

29 09 2008

Fleas!

Jesus Christ, my cats had fleas! Fleas! AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!

Yes, I lost my mind the moment I examined Fat Cat and found a little nasty scuttling into her fur.

Fleas!

How did they (yep, Skinny Cat, too) get fleas! They’ve NEVER had fleas, or worms, or any of the assortment of nasties which afflict housepets. And they’re indoor cats! INDOOR!. . . .

Except, hm, I have been letting them outside. Skinny Cat would squeeze between the security bars of the window leading into the backyard, to chew on the weeds and sit in the sun, and I’d let both of them hang out with me out front as I cooled down from a run, or read on the stoop. And there are plenty of cats and dogs and outdoor critters in the neighborhood, so, you know, I shouldn’t have been so shocked.

But I was. Shocked and, frankly, disgusted. Really. I’ve already mentioned my genocidal tendencies when it comes to (indoor) bugs, but to see them strolling their way through Fat Cat’s fur set off a primal loathing steeped so thickly in moral panic that I had to remind myself (not terribly successfully) that this was hardly an earth-shaking event.

Still. I found the little bastards at night—long after everything was closed—which meant I could do, basically, nothing.

Except get on the computer and find out what the hell to do. So I searched on ‘cats fleas’, and found this site and this one (it’s not letting me link here; see below: http://www.sniksnak.com/cathealth/flea-control.html) and a bunch of others, and learned more than I cared to about the biology of fleas, and what needs to be done to get rid of them. So I clicked through on one of the sites to National Pet Pharmacy and ordered a six-month supply of Advantage (one each for Skinny and Fat Cat), and sat back, completely freaked out. (This place didn’t help: ‘Under optimal conditions, the flea can complete its entire life cycle in just fourteen days. Just think of the tens of thousands of the little rascals that could result when conditions are optimal!’ Thanks a fucking lot!)

I did not sleep well that night.

The next day I zipped over to MegaPetStore and bought a flea comb and a spray, which I figured I would use until the kitty drugs arrived. Now, a number of the sites had mentioned that IGRs, or insect growth regulators, are key to stopping a parasite attack, especially since a number of the topical monthly treatments (such as Advantage) kill only adult fleas; IGRs kill off the eggs and pupae. So I thought, hey, any products should list IGRs. Only they don’t. They do list active ingredients, but I neglected to read carefully the info on what was what, and, more importantly, what to avoid. I looked at the various products, then grabbed one which included methoprene and tetrachlorvinphos. Okey-doke, I thought.

Wrong thought. When I got home I fired up the computer and checked out what, exactly, these two ‘active ingredients’ are. Methoprene: an IGR. Excellent! Tetrachlorvinphos. . . uh oh. An organophosphate (OP), tetrachlorvinphos is, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Executive Summary on Poisons on Pets, one of seven of a poisonous group of OP insecticides that were, as of the NRDC’s report, still on the market. (Another site, from Sept 08, noted that most of the other OPs had been phased out, but tetra. was still on the market.) Poison. Dammit.

I considered using the spray, anyway, but snapped out of it: the point is to help my cats, not hurt them. And while it’s not like I expected flea-icides to be candy, I did recognize that there were different levels of risk. Some sites were fairly laid back regarding fleas—heeeyyy, bathe your pet, vacuum, shake some powder on ’em, and all’s good—but, as is obvious, ‘laid-back’ and ‘fleas’ really don’t go together for me. And I have to admit that I was so caught up in my own disgust—Ewwww! what if they get on ME? Ewwwww!—that it took a while to get my focus back on the cats. Fleas don’t really like humans, and they do like cats: they were the ones suffering.

So I left the poison capped, got some soapy water, and pulled the comb through their hair, plunging it into the water to drown the nasty bastards. (And drowning does work, unlike, say, trying to crush them. I did manage to kill one with a tweezers, but, man, even after being squeezed tight, I swore I saw it move. And trying to get them beneath something to crush is a trial, too: those little nasties really can jump!) Fat Cat suffered through this, and kept giving me looks like Why do you hate me? I only saw one adult flea on Skinny Cat (tho’ she did have the tell-tale ‘flea-dirt’, i.e., dried blood), but she protested mightily against the comb and inspections. Bad sleep, night two.

The next morning I checked my e-mail and noted that the pharmacy had sent out the drugs, and they were due to arrive at Job3 that day. Yay! Too bad I was working at Job1 rather than Job3 that day, and wasn’t at all sure I’d be able to get into Job3’s building after hours. Thankfully, S. was willing to look out for the package for me (thanks S! Lifesaver!), and I managed to dash over during my lunch hour.

Also, I returned to MegaPetStore with a list of good and bad chemicals in hand. I can’t find the exact links, but I do still have my handwritten notes on okay & bad chems (if I find the links, I’ll post them later) [here’s one site that lists them, tho’ I can’t remember if this is the one I used; link or scroll down to ‘toxicities’]:

BAD

carbaryl, chlorpyritos, diazinon, dichloros, dioxathion, lindane, malathion, naled, phenothrin, phosmet, propoxor, pyrethrin, ronnel, tetrachlorvinphos (n.b.: Some of the spelling may be a letter off. My handwriting is, um, bad.)

OKAY

methoprene, lufenuron, fipronil, pyriproxfen, d-limonene (natural), imidacloprid

Methoprene and pyriproxfen are both IGRs, which can be used in conjunction with imidacloprid (the active ingredient in Advantage & Advocate; I don’t know if it’s okay with fipronil (used in Frontline).

Given the age of my cats, Advantage seemed the best choice (some of the treatments aren’t so great for kittens, ill, or geriatric cats); however, since the imidacloprid would kill only the adult fleas, I combined it with Zodiac Spot On (which only active ingredient is methoprene 3.6%). I squeezed the Zodiac and then the Advantage on to the back of Fat and Skinny Cats’ necks, then got to work spraying down every damned porous surface with Zodiac Carpet & Upholstery spray (active ingredients: methoprene .09% & permethrin* 0.5%, i.e., an egg-and-pupae killer combined with an adult killer). Then I grabbed everything that could be laundered and hauled it to the laundromat, where I washed everything in HOT water, and dried it all to hell.

(*Permethrin is apparently used safely in high concentrations (45-60%) in some dog treatments, but at such levels are deadly for cats.  Concentrations of less than 1% .1% are apparently okay for use on cats, [update: the link is broken, so I’m going by what Jeff wrote] but I didn’t use the spray on the cats: I used it on furniture, pillows, and drapes, and, as per instructions on the can, kept my cats off of everything until the spray dried.)

The cats were a bit punky that night and the next day, but are fine today, two days after treatment. I’ll keep up with the combo-treatment for the next few months, as well as the spraying, but this is more precautionary than anything: Careful and frequent fur inspections have yielded no fleas, and the cats aren’t scratching. Success—thus far.

We are all sleeping better.

One more thing. I was flipped out about this, and when I used the phrase ‘moral panic’, above, I wasn’t kidding. Yeah, it sounds over the top, but so was my reaction. This infestation seemed shameful, something that shouldn’t have happened, something I should have known better than to have allowed. What kind of unclean person lets fleas into her home?

I couldn’t talk about it with my friends, referring only to a ‘situation’ with my cats, and mentioning ‘medicine’ to treat an unspecified ‘issue’. I was grossed out; wouldn’t my friends be similarly appalled?

Nevermind that fleas are common as hell, that I’ve known other pet owners discuss their various cats’ and dogs’ parasites (fleas, ticks, worms), and thought, Yeah, that happens; hell, I’ve even removed ticks from others and myself. And people get worms, scabies, and other parasites, and it’s a health, not a moral, issue. So when I said my cats were sick, I wasn’t lying.

But I wasn’t telling the truth, either, because I was using ‘sick’ as a euphemism for ‘infested’. ‘Sick’ is worthy of sympathy and attention; ‘infested’ is bad, disgusting, to be hidden and eradicated. Had the cats been afflicted with an internal parasite, I probably would have responded as if to a health issue. But fleas! Nope. My bug-a-phobia, combined with my mini-moral panic, led me to keep my mouth shut—at least until I could state the problem had been dealt with. (See! Clean! Nothing to worry about!)

Sigh. I don’t like the reaction, but there it is. At least I wasn’t so frenzied that I couldn’t remember that it was the cats who were really the issue. They are apparently flea-free, and seem to have weathered the first month of their treatments.

And we’re all feeling better about that.

(Some) sites cited (I’ll try to get all the sites on the chemicals, and to make sure the links work, tomorrow):

About.com, ‘Don’t Flee the Flea’, Franny Syufy, http://cats.about.com/cs/parasiticdisease/a/fleas.htm (also some click-throughs on links at her site)

Cat Fanciers’ Association, Cats and Flea Control Products, http://www.cfa.org/articles/flea-products.html

Feline Advisory Bureau (FABCats), Tackling fleas on cats, http://www.fabcats.org/owners/fleas/info.html

Pawprints and Purrs, Inc, Flea Control, http://www.sniksnak.com/cathealth/flea-control.html

The Pet Center, Fleas on Dogs and Cats, http://www.thepetcenter.com/gen/fleB.html

Plenty Magazine, http://www.plentymag.com/ask/2008/09/flea_control_for_pets.php


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Bitter pill

22 09 2008

Ahhh, Sunday. My one day off. I used to dislike Sundays—the day before Monday—but now that it is the only I can spend the day in glorious indolence, I rather like it.

I do tend to hate the lead-up to a dreaded phenomenon almost as much as the phenomenon itself—sometimes more so. So, while agreeing with the Boomtown Rats’s general sentiments on Monday, I have held Monday against Sunday. Similarly, dreading hot weather, I hold summer against spring.

A neighbor to this sensibility is the desire to get the worst or unavoidable parts of an activity out of the way, first. Thus, when painting, I do the trim work first, then just let it roll over the walls. When moving, I grab all of the stuff out of the closets and cupboards, first, so that I’m not surprised by extra work at the back end. Hell, even as a high schooler and undergrad, I overloaded my early years so as to ensure flexibility later. (It was worth it: on alternating Fridays in high school I had more study halls than classes.)

Unfortunately, this determination only goes so far. In fact, if I don’t do dreaded tasks early, I may not do them at all, or only do them embarassingly or inconveniently late. I can drag my ass on the most mundane of to-dos: changing addresses, making doctors’ appointments, calling in a refill, renewing my driver’s license (really gotta get on that), sending letters to literary agents (really really gotta get on that). Done early: no big deal. Done late: HUUUUGE deal.

This is not mere procrastination (as with, say, the sixty papers sitting on top of my filing cabinet), but a kind of sulky refusal to deal with my life. ‘I don wanna’. Please. I’m too damned many years old to be acting like this. If I can manage to deal with ordinary procrastination (that is, of the sort which involves my wage-work) and get stuff done, why can’t I puncture the inflated meaning attached to the ordinary tasks of life? Because that is the problem: By my inaction, I turn these prosaic matters into something operatic.

God. I remember when my neuroses would poke me into getting shit done. Even they’ve given up.


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Similar promises

19 09 2008

Okay, here’s a link to the Judith Thomson piece I mentioned earlier: http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.htm

I haven’t re-read the piece, but there it is. You could probably find it in other formats—the piece was originally published in 1971—simply by searching ‘Judith Jarvis Thomson’ or ‘A Defense of Abortion’. Anyway. Have at it.

The computer is now 4 days old, and I’m mostly happy with it. I did have to ditch my old WordPerfect software: too old. So I’ve downloaded a 30-day trial version of WPX4 (just released!) while waiting for the software to arrive.

I do feel like a bit of a hypocrite. I regularly opine that ‘brand loyalty is for suckers’, but here I am chasing after this software (and, for that matter, after a particular pair of Doc Martens, which I CANNOT find in my size) when Microsoft Word is snugly installed in my operating system. Why bother?

Well, I guess I’ll have to nuance my way past my snark. See, I really do think brand loyalty makes no sense: corporations don’t care about you, they care about money. If they can make money by creating things you want, fine. If they can make more money creating other things, that’s what they’ll do. This isn’t personal, ; this is capitalism. So the appropriate response to the self-interested behavior of corporations is one’s own self-interest: I will buy your product if it suits me, or another corporation’s product if it suits me better.

Thus, I ended up with my third Dell not because I’m wild about ‘Dell, The Brand!’, but because after a months-long search of reading reviews, checking out different computers’ websites, trekking to stores to test keyboards, and much to-ing and fro-ing about my finances and do-I-REALLY-need-this, I decided Dell suited me best. That had nothing to do with loyalty, and everything to do with my wants.

But WordPerfect, hmmm, I do have a soft spot for it. I started with it in grad school, when the computers in the pol sci computer lab still had the blue screens with the off-white text. I pirated a copy from that lab, then later bought my own upgrade. I like how it works, and what I can do with it. C. pointed out that a couple of the features I mentioned I like I could also get with Word, but it always seemed like more of a hassle.

Yeah, it’s an habitual preference (which, admittedly, may have a not-minor role in loyalty) as opposed to obvious WP superiority, but it’s not only that. I wrote my dissertation and two novels using WP, and NOT ONCE did it crash or lose my work. NEVER. And I was paranoid about losing work: chapters of my dissertation are scattered repeatedly across numerous floppy disks, and I bought an external hard drive years ago as a sop to my fear. But my trusty word processor hung on to my every word, and never booted me out of my thoughts with a pop-up stating ‘WP has encountered a difficulty and must close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.’

Unlike, say, Word. And WP never froze, unlike, say, Word.

So, based on track record, I’m a-goin’ with WP. And if it becomes as unreliable as its ubiquitous counterpart, I’ll look for another word processor.

Is that a kind of loyalty, or just extreme customer diligence? Pfft, maybe a bit of both. Maybe I am a sucker.


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All blue

16 09 2008

Picked up the new computer today. After dicking around with Dell and DHL, I just went to the depot and picked up the damned thing myself.

So pretty. So blue. So so so much faster. I can actually watch YouTube clips now!

Now if I can just figure out how to activate the Filemaker and WordPerfect programs I copied from my external hard drive. I have the disks (christ, I THINK they’re cds and not old floppies), but I added various macroses (sp?) and am too lazy to repeat them.

Hm. I’ll figure this out. Hell, I managed to copy all my bookmarks from the first-best browser on the old machine (right before I uninstalled it) to the external hard drive and then to the Sleek Newcomer.

Then again, this sucker has Vista, so who knows what’ll happen.

Still. So pretty. So blue.


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Coda to: This woman’s work

15 09 2008

I noted in the previous post my, mm, strong opinions on the legality of abortion. But I didn’t say anything about the morality of abortion.

Is abortion moral? Yeah, I think it is. But I also have a lot more sympathy for the position that it is not moral than I do for the position that it shouldn’t be legal.

I think it’s moral because of the status of the woman. When unexpectedly pregnant, a woman has to decide whether to end or to continue the pregnancy (and if she continues with it, to keep the baby or give her up for adoption). It is a real dilemma, one which requires some hard thinking about her own life, her relationship to the man involved, her relationships to other people in her life, and her understanding of the fetus. Is it a baby? A person? Or just a conceptus, a potential person, but not one yet? It requires moral work to make one’s way through these questions, and to consider how to act amidst uncertainty.

Yeah, I know, there are girls and women who act unthinkingly in terminating their pregnancies, but arguably just as many act unthinkingly in continuing them. That some women (and the people around them) don’t do the moral work doesn’t mean it’s not there to be done.

But what of the fetus? Absent a miscarriage or abortion, it will someday push itself out of the woman to enter the world as a baby. Even in its embryonic stage it is arguably human—if only human tissue rather than human being. What about its. . . rights isn’t the right word. . . what about its status? What of the possibility that it is already a human being?

Judith Thompson had one reply to this question, in her famous example of the violinist whose life would end were he not attached to another person. (It’s been a long time since I read the piece—sorry I can’t remember the particulars. And I’ll see if I can find a link to the piece online.) She concluded that even if the violinist would die if you detached him from you, you still had the right to do so.

It’s an interesting piece, but I don’t know that it gets at all the complexities of abortion. Hm. What I mean is, I don’t think that all those who talk about a ‘right to life’ are really into rights talk. I think it’s about something deeper, or at least other, than rights. I think, for many, it is about a protectiveness toward the fetus/baby, and about a belief that one ought to sacrifice oneself on behalf of another vulnerable being.

These are not unworthy sentiments (and I’ll skip for the moment any legislative ramifications—we’re talking about morality, not politics—as well as those worms who are afraid of and want to control or punish women’s sexuality), and ought not be dismissed without deeper consideration.

Abortion is a moral issue. Those of us who believe such a choice ought to be left to the woman need to do a better job of articulating that morality.


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This woman’s work

15 09 2008

A 23-year-old woman has been blogging about her decision to get an abortion at myabortion.tumblr.com. Her site, titled ‘What to Expect When You’re Aborting’, includes a line near the top that says ‘I’m 23. I’m knocked up. And I don’t want to keep it. You can fuck yourself, Judd Apatow.’

She notes in her first posting, from August 20,

I’m trying to get some advice and info that isn’t off a bulletin board style fact sheet. When I google “abortion blog” —because we all know blogs are a great repository for facts and rationality— i get these terrifying pro-life, abortion regret websites. One is called ” silent rain”. UGHHHHH.

WHERE IS THE JUNO OF THE ABORTION WORLD?!?

Precious, silver-tongued, knocked up 16 year olds where are you??

I found this site through either Broadsheet or Feministing, and have been reading it for the past few weeks or so. Like the commentators and the blogger herself has noted, it seems really odd that there isn’t more out there in the cyberworld about the experience.

What do I think about the blog? First, the requisite disclaimer: I am totally-utterly-completely-militantly pro-choice. I don’t like parental notification laws, I don’t like waiting periods, I don’t like legislatively-mandated ‘informational lectures’ (that’s you, South Dakota)—I don’t like any more legislative or regulatory conditions attached to abortion than would be attached to any other medical procedure. This is nobody else’s damned business, legally speaking.

And I really do believe all that. I’ve been pro-choice for as long as I’ve been menstruating, have argued on behalf of a woman’s right since I was a teenaged feminist, and have heard the stories of more than one friend who’s undergone the procedure.

I, however, have never had an abortion, never been pregnant. And while I think that I probably would have terminated the pregnancy had I ever gotten knocked up, I don’t know, for sure. I think it’s one thing to have an opinion about an issue, and quite another to have lived through it.

So I’m surprised by my ambivalence toward this blog. I truly don’t know what it’s like to be 23 and unhappily pregnant, and am glad that she’s willing to talk about the issue. (How many women have had abortions? How many talk about their abortions? Not nearly as many as have had them.) But, I don’t know, the tone seems off. Glib. Narcissistic?

AAARRRGH! What the hell’s up with that reaction? She’s 23! Her body is being taken over by an unwanted intruder and she wants it out! But the process of evacuating her uterus is not an easy one. She considered taking RU-486 before deciding on a surgical abortion, but even though this is a generally safe procedure, it’s still surgery. It’s still a big deal.

So maybe this is less about glibness than bravado. When you’re in the middle of the rapids, you just try to paddle yourself out of them; you don’t have time to wonder about the beauty of the canyon or profundity of a waterway which has been carving its way through the earth for millenia. Nope, you’re just trying not to drown.

And I’m on the bank. Who am I to critique her on her technique or disapprove of her brand of kayak? If I don’t like what I’m seeing/reading, I can leave. This is what she’s going through, and how she’s going through it. It’s not about some PR campaign about the Perfect Candidate for the Perfect Abortion Experience. Because what woman could live up to that?

And why should we have to? We shouldn’t have to be perfect (or, shudder, the Perfect Victim) to ‘deserve’ to make decisions about our bodies. It ought to be enough that we live these bodies.


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OK Computer

11 09 2008

Or not.

I was going to go with a couple of Poi Dog Pondering references (Tall & Building) for this post, but then—surprise!—the browser went poof. So Radiohead again.

I can go for about ten minutes before second-best browser (first-best browser was uninstalled, due to memory issues) ducks out back for a pack of cigarettes and never returns. Sometimes it says something like Hey, the application aljfd has failed before it waves itself away; other times it slinks silently into the night.

Oh yeah, this computer knows it’s about to be sent across the cyber sea (in its handsome computer briefcase!), unlikely ever to be recalled to duty, and is sabotaging itself with every bit of its being.

I respect that. Obnoxious, but I’m all in favor of the die-on-your-feet than live-on-your-knees ethos.

Still, no mercy. As soon as the new is in, old is out.

As for Tall/Building(s), I was walking with my friends and coworkers (Job3) around the Wall Street area, and mentioned that even though I knew New Yorkers (and I am one, now) were supposed to look down or straight ahead, I loved to look up.

How could I not, especially in the financial district, with all these magnificent old buildings erected by long-dead capitalist rotters? Fuck that, L. said. I look up all the time. Me too, said S. S. grew up on Long Island, and L.? I dunno, he could be a native New Yorker. Anyway, they didn’t care about the tourist-New Yorker distinction. And we all agreed that while we may not have liked what happened (or still happens) in these buildings, we’re glad that this area hasn’t been Times Squared.

So why not look up? There’s so much to see!

(And no, no lessons please. This is only meant literally.)


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