Earth You are 40% Extroverted and 51% Chaotic

Virtue - Earth people show propriety. They are conventional, proper and fitting. They follow what is socially acceptable in conduct, behavior and speech. They have excellent manners and are very polite. They are prudent and have a deep regard for conventional rules of behavior. Core - They are the storekeepers, barterers and traders. They are at their best when buying or selling material or tangible commodities. Most are very business oriented. Nature - They have a characteristic love for the material, tangible things. They derive pleasure from sensory stimulation such as taste, smell and feel. They surround themselves with tangible items such as fine furniture, art, jewelry and most have a nice home that is expertly decorated. They have good taste in clothing and most are connoisseurs of food and drink. Drives - Each of the five senses can produce an emotional response. Sight, sound, touch, smell and taste brings joy or depression. Vice - They are mildly revengeful. Their attitude is 'my time will come and they do hold a grudge. They will eventually get their revenge one way or another more often by hitting a person in his pocketbook. When angered, they are quick to express that anger verbally though most likely not physically unless as a last resort.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 5% on Extroverted You scored higher than 91% on Chaotic

Link: The Which Element Are You? Test written by daemongod81485 on OkCupid Free Online Dating

hmph. everyone thinks i hold grudges!

why is everyone not as excited about linguistics as i am? this is sooooo cool!


I'm Trying To Learn Arabic - Why's it taking so long? Robert Lane-Greene:

I do not recommend chewing gum in Arabic class, because a host of noises articulated in the back of the throat makes it likely that the gum will end up in your lungs. Arabic has one 'h' akin to ours, and another that has been described as the sound you would make trying to blow out a candle with air from your throat. That's not to be confused with another sound, the fricative kh familiar to German-speakers as the sound in 'Bach.' There's also 'ayn, a 'voiced pharyngeal fricative,' which is like the first sound in the hip-hop 'a'ight.' Unwritten in Roman-alphabet transliterations, it's actually a consonant that begins many common words and names, including 'Arab,' 'Iraq,' and 'Arafat.'

margaret cho kicks so much ass. i have never even seen one of her shows, or seen her live, or bought her books, but she totally gets so many things.

she gets being fat and working to not hate your body, for example.

Belly Dance

I knew that yoga would help, but any form of exercise for me was a slippery slope, a direct route back to the self loathing I had just extricated myself from. What to do?

margaret cho started bellydancing, and she's fabulous doing it. (if you go read her blog, there's a link to a picture of her dancing.)

i do warm water pool therapy once a week, and there are episodes of pilates/yoga on my tivo, waiting for me to get up the nerve to watch them. so here's to margaret, and we'll see if i'm as brave as she is.

(dear margaret: if you need crash space in st. paul minnesota, i have a spare bed. also two dogs, just so you know.)

me too. me, too.

slacktivist: Image is everything:

Here's what I believe:
I believe that torture itself is dishonorable. I believe that failing to condemn torture is dishonorable. I believe that condoning the practice of torture empowers our enemies and puts American lives at risk. And I believe that by embracing the immoral, counterproductive and utterly un-American practice of torture we make America more closely resemble the kinds of infamous and evil regimes we ought never to resemble in the slightest.
I believe that those who defend the practice of torture lessen America. I believe that the condemnation of those who condemn torture lessens America. I believe that Joseph Darby is a great American and that Jeremy Sivits is not.
But I can't believe that we've fallen so far that I actually have to say all these things. I can't believe that we have reached the point where statements like 'Torture is bad' and 'It is good to condemn torture' are seen as controversial.
A United States Senator spoke the truth. He condemned evil and called it un-American. And then he was forced to apologize.
Jesus God.

i am ashamed of senator durbin. speaking truth to power includes not backing down and offering apologies that are necessarily lies. the difference between america and the regimes he was comparing us to should not be that we only torture people when we think we have a really good reason. the difference should be that we do not torture people.


Fafblog! the The Torturers Accept Your Apology.:

Senator Durbin:

Last week, you had the nerve to compare torture conducted by America's brave men and women in uniform to torture conducted by Nazis, Soviets, and Khmer Rouge, and today you finally apologized. As well you should have: that comment was offensive. Deeply offensive. Many of the proud men and women at Guantanamo were deeply upset by it, shaking with anger, fear and doubt as they kicked naked men in the ribs and released the dogs. One soldier could hardly muster up the morale to brain a prisoner and stuff his semi-conscious head into a toilet bowl. But they found the strength and resolve to keep going, senator. Because they aren't torturing for Nazis or communists or some third world hellhole. Those boys are torturing for the stars and stripes, senator - and don't you forget it.

vito_excalibur: glass bull in a china shop:

The assumption that it is, that I must not be alone with a man, or men, unless I'm prepared to fuck them all, comes out of the attitude that men are slaves to the dick and cannot be held responsible for their actions: I must be responsible for stopping them. This takes rape out of the category of things like war: things caused by human agency, things that happen because at some point, someone had a choice of possible courses of action, and he made the decision to fuck someone - over. The 'men are just like that & nothing can be done to stop it & women must just be careful' reasoning says rape is more like a grizzly attack in Yellowstone. You can't educate the bears. They're going to do what they want to do. It's your responsibility to protect yourself.

listen up, you men out there reading this. i think better of you than that. i think that you are capable of controlling your urges. i think that you are better than animals.

if you disagree with me about yourself, please let me know so that i can adjust my behavior around you accordingly.

(go read vito's post, and vito links to to amanda who links to pseudo-adrienne, and they link all over.)

this is a weird advice column from salon; sometimes cary tennis is off on his own planet somewhere, but sometimes he just hits the mark. today, i think he was channelling anne lamott.

(if you want to go read the full article, you'll have to watch an ad. suck it up!)


this particular column is responding to a woman who is very carefully planning her life around her future children, and how angry she is with people who had unplanned pregnancies or are lousy parents or who hate having kids. but the advice is applicable in other places as well.


Salon.com Life | Help! I'm insanely jealous and full of contempt:

You can let go of this by loving the world and everyone in it. That's the only way I can put it. We could chip away at your attitude. We could agree that you're no better than the people you are mentally criticizing. But that wouldn't fill your lungs with fresh air. I prefer to sing: Love the assholes you hate. Love the cocksuckers you judge. Love the idiots. Love your dismally incompetent sister. Love the numbskulls too lazy to roll on a condom. Love the zeroes who shouldn't be parents. Love Vice President Dick Cheney (love your enemies out of sheer perversity). Love all the babies in vitro and otherwise, love all the sperm donors jerking off in sterile rooms, love all the unwed parents in their blithe unconcern, love the children blooming on the roadside like wildflowers, love the one-eyed mistakes, the legless mistakes and the heartless mistakes because they too are perfect, it's only our vision that is flawed, love the woman in line before you at the grocery store with the unruly children and the woman behind you with no children and the atheist at the checkout counter and the Greek Orthodox bookkeeper in the manager's box and every other ethnic and religious designation too numerous to mention, love them all, love every category that serves to divide, love the atom and the chromosome of indivisible creation, love the falsehood for its beauty and the truth for its fragility, love all social classes and economic classes and love all the prisoners in all the prisons and all the soldiers in the sand and all the babies emerging into the cruel light of day every day and every night and love your own hatred and your own bile and your own contempt.

so, if you see me walking around kicking things muttering "love the cocksuckers", now you'll know why.

i'm wearing my righteous babe/ani difranco t-shirt today, so i thought i'd post a poem by her. (right now i have "we could touch, touch our girl cheeks..." running through my head, but that one is so much better sung, whereas this one is a poem all the time.)

the slant, by ani difranco.:

the slant
a building settling around me
my figure female framed crookedly
in the threshold
of the room
door scraping floorboards
with every opening
carving a rough history
of bedroom scenes
the plot hard to follow
the text obscured
in the folds of sheets
slowly gathering the stains
of seasons spent lying there
red and brown
like leaves fallen
the colors of an eternal cycle
fading with the
wash cycle
and the rinse cycle
again an unfamiliar smell
like my name misspelled
or misspoken
a cycle broken
the sound of them strong
stalking talking about their prey
like the way hammer meets nail
pounding, they say
pounding out the rhythms of attraction
like a woman was a drum like a body was a weapon
like there was something more they wanted
than the journey
like it was owed to them
steel toed they walk
and i'm wondering why this fear of men
maybe it's because i'm hungry
and like a baby i'm dependent on them
to feed me
i am a work in progress
dressed in the fabric of a world unfolding
offering me intricate patterns of questions
rhythms that never come clean
and strengths that you still haven't seen

flea is baffled by people who don't read. so am i.

One Good Thing

If you don't read, how do you think? Through tv? Through gossip? If you don't read, how can I possibly relate to you? If you don't have a library, no matter how small, or a book splayed face down on your coffee table, how will I be able to see your brain?

depending on where you work, one good thing may or may not be work safe. personally, i just scroll down a little so that my boss can't see what's on sale this week at the honeysuckleshop, her business. (this week, it's the rabbit pearl!)

okay, finally found where i put the pridepin jpg, and i put it back. no more broken picture. that only took me what, six months?

here is my blinding revelation about how i wish other people would interact with me.

i don't want to be fixed. i want to be listened to.

does anyone reading this know a travel agent who will book hotels in russia and deal with getting visa support?

the people we are trying to deal with are driving me crazy.

i have totally lost my ability to read cyrillic. this is aggravating. especially since this lj post has pictures of very cool things in it, and i can't quite figure out where in moscow it is, or even if it's in moscow for sure. darn it.

okay, i should probably have gone to bed before i hit that personals ad site. but i don't think i sounded too stupid in the response that i recorded, and who knows, she could think that dorky giggling is enormously attractive. it could happen!

at wiscon on sunday there was a fancy dress party. it was a little crowded, so i didn't actually make it in there for long, but i did dress up. here is a picture of my sunday night outfit.

(that is *not* a hickey, people. that is a surgery scar with a lipstick kiss from a friend on top of it. silly portland people and their rumors. their sadly sadly untrue rumors. [sigh])

so. tired.


zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

were it not for the explanation at the end, i bet this post would get the most comments ever.

i am in front of the computer, hot, wet, and naked.

i'm also deeply cranky, because i can't manage to get my airconditioner in the window upstairs, so i will be sleeping in the hot hot upstairs and getting more and more sweaty, and more and more cranky.

but i got the a/c unit all the way upstairs by myself, and i disassembled the windows to the point where i think i may break them if i go further without knowing what i'm doing by myself, and i decided to stop by myself, and y'know, it's pretty good anyhow.

it'd be better if i were colder, though.

Non-dieters more successful at boosting health than dieters, study finds:

Behavior change and self-acceptance trump dieting hands-down when it comes to achieving long-term health improvements in obese women, according to a two-year study by nutrition researchers at the University of California, Davis.

The findings suggest that significant improvements in overall health can be made, regardless of weight loss, when women learn to recognize and follow internal hunger cues and begin feeling better about their size and shape. Results of the study will appear in the June issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

the google ads on that page are just sad, though.