my ex and i used to have discussions/arguments about having kids in which "they screw up the rest of your life!" would frequently come up.

"yes. yes!" is what i would always say.

dooce seems to be able to explain this better than i can.

dooce: Reformed

Sometimes Jon and I talk about what life was like before we had a baby, before the dog, before the ongoing chaos of those responsibilities. And I remember during those first months of Leta's life when I had a hard time going ten minutes without giving in to a nervous breakdown how I sometimes cursed the fact that we had gone and ruined our lives. Last night when confronted with that hollow silence, the silence of the way things used to be, all I could think was, "thank God we had a baby and ruined our lives."

over at One Good Thing, flea points out that her business, the honeysuckle shop is having a garage sale. this is because their website has been down for a while, and in addition, they just had to denickel one of their cats. (bobby bradycat came out of the experience fine, although now he is poorer by a nickel and also some testicles as long as they had him under.)

go read one good thing for the story, and then buy very very inexpensive sex toys at the honeysuckle shop.

jon carroll, talking about the bush administration.

sometimes jon carroll writes about his daughters or his cats; sometimes he writes about politics. he's brilliant at both.

JON CARROLL

He says he reads the front pages -- according to reliable reports, he does not actually read the front pages, but let's call it a metaphor -- and he knows what people are saying, and he's the decider: Rumsfeld stays.

Meanwhile, the administration has spent a week putting out the fire-Rumsfeld fires, almost as though it had nothing else to do. This administration used to understand how to control the news cycle, but it can't do that anymore. It has to play the chat show game. Last week, it sent representatives scurrying to dismiss reports that it planned to bomb Iran as 'wild speculation' -- not untrue, mind you, just not proved. This week it's devoting its resources to protecting Donald Rumsfeld.

This would all be gratifying in a 'see Spot run scared' sort of way, were it not for the reality on the ground, the deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, the obstructionism in the United Nations, the poisoned waters and the hungry children and the despairing immigrants, all put on hold by George 'The Decider' Bush.

the wall street journal, that bastion of unfettered socialism, recommends government funded single payer health care.

WSJ.com - The Doctor's Office By BENJAMIN BREWER, M.D.

Government-Funded Care
Is the Best Health Solution

Multiple Insurers, Multiple Plans
Create Expensive, Draining Hassle

[...]

With a single-payer system, there are concerns about waiting times for procedures and not getting access to the "best doctors." These are real issues, but not unsolvable ones. We have these disparities now. Fact is, they are mostly a matter of geography, insurance status and personal wealth.

(hi mom!)

A single-payer system would increase access to care for the uninsured and the underinsured, including the working poor. It would lower total health costs, in part by replacing 50 different state Medicaid programs and umpteen insurers with one system. This approach has the potential to improve quality and lower costs by improving care for chronic illnesses such as diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.

read the whole thing. it's really good, and covers most of the issues that i have either heard or or have thought of. and it's written by someone on the other side of this from me-- i'm a nearly impossible to insure person; he's a doctor fed up with the current system.

wow. good stuff here.

A Web Essay on the Male Gaze, Fashion Advertising, and the Pose

there's also a piece linked to there about semiotics, which for me was a good introduction to it. i already knew about the signifier/signified distinction, but metonymy continues to throw me.

amanda marcotte once again talks in a very sensible fashion.


And everyone else joins our other club, The Pissed Off Club at Pandagon

The sane response of people who are actually living in the world to infuriating things is to be infuriated. So being called angry can be taken as a huge compliment, since it means you are sane and you aren't a sociopath and you actually love life and hate that others are trying to fuck things up.

it's national poetry month. (and i didn't even know!)

endicott studio is celebrating with Endicott Studio Poetry Postcards. one a day for the entire month. today's is neil gaiman's _instructions_.

the current united states administration is seriously considering using nuclear bombs to attack iran.

The New Yorker: Fact: THE IRAN PLANS, by Seymour Hersh

The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap,” the former senior intelligence official said. “ ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan.”

i knew this was going on, and what i didn't know, i suspected. but it still makes me want to throw up.

although i am pleased to note that i agree with at least one european diplomat:

One reason for pursuing diplomacy was, he said, Iran’s essential pragmatism. “The regime acts in its best interests,” he said. Iran’s leaders “take a hard-line approach on the nuclear issue and they want to call the American bluff,” believing that “the tougher they are the more likely the West will fold.” But, he said, “From what we’ve seen with Iran, they will appear superconfident until the moment they back off.”

The diplomat went on, “You never reward bad behavior, and this is not the time to offer concessions. We need to find ways to impose sufficient costs to bring the regime to its senses. It’s going to be a close call, but I think if there is unity in opposition and the price imposed”—in sanctions—“is sufficient, they may back down. It’s too early to give up on the U.N. route.” He added, “If the diplomatic process doesn’t work, there is no military ‘solution.’ There may be a military option, but the impact could be catastrophic.”

i love twisty. in a don't always agree with her but daaaaamn, but she's sharp sort of way. also? best blog title ever.

I Blame The Patriarchy

An example of the sort of thing an actively blaming spinster aunt must address: this morning I got an email from a woman who says her 17-year-old daughter has been reading I Blame The Patriarchy. The daughter is apparently troubled by my post on altar girls in India, wants to know whether nuns are being raped, and if so, why there isn’t “big outrage” over it.

The answer to these questions—that of course nuns are being raped, since they’re women, and that there isn’t big outrage over it because it is not the policy of any patriarchal society to exhibit big outrage over rape in general—leads to many unpleasant streams of consciousness originating within the Twisty obstreperal lobe. First I speculate whether the 17-year-old daughter is specifically worried about nuns—as opposed to, say, prostitutes, or housewives—because the cloistered bride of Christ occupies a place in the popular imagination somewhere next to baby bunnies, whereas hookers and housewives are fallen and uninteresting, respectively, making their rapes seem deserved or de rigueur, also respectively. Then I am moved to jokingly remark to myself that Bill Napoli would relish making an exception for a raped nun, as long as she was sufficiently mutilated in the process, and not too old, and that no priest would go to jail for it. Then I admonish self for being a sick fuck and why can’t I get this Napoli jagoff out of my mind. Then the notion that nun-rape is more popularly abhorrent than the rape of any other sort of woman morphs into a contemplation of the total weirdness of the practice of getting unmarriageable or politically inconvenient women out of the way by locking them up in convents and assigning them Godliness as a profession. This, in turn, makes me think about the Catholic church, and the untold ways in which it has totally fucked up the world, and therefrom, I begin to writhe in trepidation over the astonishing extent to which people have normalized—if you’ll forgive me using that geekism—oppression.

oh, this is a great idea.

Pledge a Protester PPMNS

(that's planned parenthood, minnesota, north dakota, south dakota.)

Like every day of the year, anti-choice protesters are outside Planned Parenthood clinics. But on April 14, Good Friday, as many as a thousand anti-choice protesters descend on the Planned Parenthood St. Paul Clinic for a day-long “vigil.”
This year, things will be different. This year, the anti-choice protesters will help raise money for Planned Parenthood.

i'm pledging a quarter each. what are you going to do?

new orleans is not okay, says poppy z. brite. if you're not familiar with the name, she is a horror writer who lives in nola.

docbrite: Not OK:

Occasionally I'm asked by friends Not From Here, 'New Orleans is better now, right? You had Mardi Gras!' or 'Are you doing OK?' or some variation. Sometimes, particularly if they're contemplating a visit, I even try to reassure them: it's very possible to have a good, safe time here; the French Quarter is fine; lots of restaurants and bars are open. In truth, though, New Orleans and most of its inhabitants are very much Not OK. I present to you a baker's dozen facts about life in the city seven months after the storm. Some are large, some small. I think many of them will surprise you.

no streetlights, no stoplights, no garbage, no clean water in some of the parts of the city that people are living in, and many others.

i don't even have words for how badly we as a country have failed new orleans, or how badly we continue to fail them.