We went to the doctor the other day to get her official 2-yr-old check up.  She is wee. Her height is 50%, but her weight is only 10-25%. The doctor says Spock is healthy and strong, she is just small boned and skinny. She feels so delicate when you pick her up. Then again, Stitch was the same way, and now she is a sturdy little girl who is in the 70% of height/weight. Thus, there is hope Spock will grow to have a bit more meat on her tiny bones. After all, she has recently discovered pizza.

For her birthday I’ve dressed her in a cranberry red turtleneck and a pink dress that has cranberry colored decorations on the yoke. The red is the perfect color for her.

Her hair still only goes to her shoulders, because it is so curly, but when I pour water over it in the bath it will go halfway down her little back. It is still the color of milk chocolate, and lays in big, thick locks that sort of go boing-boing against her neck when she walks. Her eyes have a little less of the sherry-look than when she was one; they are more of a golden brown now.

She walks with a springing motion, as though she is bouncing in a gravitational pull that is just slightly less than the one other people are walking in.

She clasps her hands behind her back and sways from side to side when she is thinking or watching one of her educational shows, like Blue’s Clues. Remember how Mr. Spock stands when he’s arguing with Kirk and McCoy on the original Star Trek? Yep, that is just how she stands.

He favorite game to play is “hai-yah!” She watched some Muppet Show with her sisters, and when Miss Piggy said “Hai-yah!” and smacked her opponent into orbit, Spock would giggle until she couldn’t move. She calls the Muppet Show “Frog & Pig hai-yah” now. She will climb in your lap, reach her arm as far as she can behind her, and bring it in a karate-chop down on your head or shoulder, but gently. However, she expects you to cry out and thrash around like she just decked you with a brick. This makes her damn near feeble with mirth.

She currently loves to wear her boots, because boots making nice stomping sounds and look important. She even sings a song about boots that she learned from Jack’s Big Music Show. Ever seen a tiny little girl clomping around singing about boots? It’s cute, y’all. 

When she “gives you a kiss” she still grabs your hair and head-butts you, soccer hooligan style. If your not careful her kisses can make your eyes water from the pain or split your lip. We don’t care. We let her kiss us anyway.

We love her so very much.

Happy birthday, dearest Spock.

Moreover, companies that invented shenanigans like Hollywood Accountin, or the gross stupidity of ignoring factors like the economy and their own mendacity as explanations for why their bottom line is now “only” over $8 billion now, cannot be trusted to ‘safeguard’ our information streams.

Remember in the 1980’s how movie studios tried to get the government to ban the VCR? No? Well, most people don’t remember it because movie studios lost. And did movie studios go under because of the VCR? No. They adapted.

Technology has changed, Entertainment Industry. Instead of trying to control freedom of information and innovation, why don’t you try to maximize your profits by adapting to the new reality of life?

Anyway, the Elders of the Internet found out about SOPA and told the rest of us. Then a great many people who use the interwebs and don’t want to put up with censorship threw a fit and fell in it. What effect did this have on the clueless politicians who were letting Entertainment lobbyists tell them what to think and how to vote? Well, it scared the shit out of them, of course. Look how many left the dark side and openly joined the anti-censorship crusade:

Neat, huh? The will of the people actually had an effect on the officials elected to represent them! (For a change!)

The more information that gets disseminated, the more people that can fight for or against something. It makes for a better, smarter democracy. That’s why the internet needs to stay unfettered by special interests or any other species of controlling asshats.

However, we have not won. SOPA is only ‘on hold’. The Entertainment Industry and the politicians it has bought are hoping to sneak this goat blowing censorship back in when public outrage has died down. So we need, in the words of Mad-eye Moody, to have “constant vigilance!” if we are going to keep our freedoms.

So pay attention. Turns out there will be a quiz.

But here is the thing: human sexuality is not so black and white.

Kinsey pointed out that people “do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories… The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects”. In order to understand that continuum, he divvied up people on a scale of 0-6:

0 = Exclusively heterosexual

1 = Predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual

2 = Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual

3 = Equally heterosexual and homosexual

4 = Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual

5 = Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual

6 = Exclusively homosexual

I know I have mentioned before that homophobic men are more likely to get a boner while watching gay porn than men who aren’t bigoted gay-bashers. Also, our closest biological relative, the bonobos, are try-sexual (they will try anything and everybody, which makes most of them bisexual. The odds are good that humans are also much more fluid than they anti-gay culture allows. Certainly there was a lot more homosexual action in ancient cultures, including that of Ancient Egypt, and it has been a part of just about every culture world wide. Perhaps what the far-right really fears is that the “homosexual Other” is the bisexual Us”, and there is an uncomfortable level of conflation between the two “opposites”.

While I think that a 1, 2, or even 3 is probably likely to stay “straight” in a culture that punishes homosexual activity, I think that it is harder for a 4, damn hard for a 5, and almost impossible for a 6 to stay in the closet. and I don’t know whether life events or biology or both makes your number, but I do know that my 1 (I can tell if a woman is “hot” so can I really be a 0?) means that I have only desired to have sex with men. I also know that it is NO effort for me to not bang other women, and that all my crushes and my one true love have all had wieners. So is not being a lesbian some sort of moral “victory” for me? I think not. I also don’t get tattoo because I don’t want one. That doesn’t make me holier than people with ink. 

Also, what about emotion? I have never fallen in love with  a woman, but if I loved a woman the way I love Sweet Babou I don’t know how I could “not” want to be with her physically as well. I want to be with Sweet Babou the way I want oxygen. Should I demand gays just ‘hold their breath’ for eternity because the inhalation of their form of oxygen is worse than mine?

Nixon defended her position by saying, “I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not … I also feel like people think I was walking around in a cloud and didn’t realize I was gay, which I find really offensive. I find it offensive to me, but I also find it offensive to all the men I’ve been out with.”

While some people are so straight or so gay that they never fall in love with, or lust after, the same or the opposite gender, that does not mean all humans were born on one end of the spectrum or the other. To reconfigure Cynthia Nixon as “ always gay” means she didn’t “really” love the father of her two children or that their relationship lacked full commitment. And that is bullshit.  No one gets to decide that but Nixon herself.

I think for a lot of people being gay isn’t a choice. Most gays I know personally have known they were queer since they were young. But at least a few feel like they had an option, and they followed their heart. They are people who are in the 2-4 range but are now “gay” because the person they loved was the same gender. I also have at least one friend who was bi, but fell in love with a guy and lived happily ever after. Does that make her “straight” now? What about people like Meredith Baxter Birney, who didn’t ‘become’ a lesbian until she was in her 50’s? Whose to say that wasn’t a hormonal shift? Why couldn’t she have ‘been straight’ for all the years before? When they were forcibly separated, two ‘gay’ penguins found girl mates … but does that make their loving each other and building a nest together for years less “gay”? Would they have stayed ‘gay’ if not forced apart?

Isn’t our assessment of categories more about social function than human reality? What about categories of race or ethnicity? Is a multiracial child who could pass for white NOT allowed to consider themselves a person of color? (It would be hard to work that in reverse, since structural racism would never let a darker child forget they were NOT white “enough”.) Ben Jealous has a white dad and is fair skinned, does that make his tenure as president of the NAACP suspect?

Isn’t what really matters is that everyone be treated as equal citizens, not whether they were ‘born’ to be discriminated against or not?

So, don’t be a homophobe. Or racist. Or sexist. Or bigot of any kind.  Bigots are asshats.

And nobody really likes asshats.

Some of it from Asperger’s. When I get frustrated or have to deal with  inexplicable (to me) behavior by others I get angry. It’s the smaller version of the autistic meltdown.

The other part of it is training. I grew up in a house where Mom, once I was pre-teen and older, tried to control me through passive-aggressive digs, just like she had learned at her own mother’s knee. Let’s just say I “resisted” this. I learned to make sure that anyone who wanted to hurt me figured out fast that any sneak attack would be met with a counter-attack that made an atomic bomb look tame.  A lot of time Mom (most of my fights were with her, of course) would then sulk to try to make me “sorry” I was “mean” to her by resisting her back-stabbing or put-downs.

Now that I am older and have read a LOT of psychology stuff, I know that Mom’ behaviors are a result of her abusive childhood. She has incredibly low self esteem. She copes with this by being defensive and paranoid. Her knee-jerk reaction to almost anything is 1) is this about me? 2) of course it is about me! 3) It’s about pointing out I am bad! 4) this makes me angry! 5) I must deflect this by pointing out I am right and the other person is wrong, no matter what the situation is! 6) If they say I am wrong they are only doing it to be mean to me. 5) I must be right all the time about everything or else I am scum. 6) I must defend myself by stealth attack! 7) why is everyone so mean to me?

So, most of the time when she metaphorically stabbed me, she did so because she was convinced something, anything, even the fact I didn’t like buttermilk, was a criticism and attack on her. Now, I try to cut her some slack when she does weird shit and not take it personally. However, when my patience is worn thin or I am already hurting her jabs still cause I big-ass blow back.

This all started when Sweet Babou forgot to put the baby’s antibiotic back in the refrigerator last night. So this morning I had to call the pharmacist and confirm the antibiotic would have to be replaced. Then I had to call the doctor’s office and have them send in the prescription again. Not only is her morning dose late as a result, but now I have to drag Spock back out (it’s cold and I already had to take her with me to take the girls to school)  to go get the new medicine, which should be ready in about 1/2 an hour. And insurance will NOT pay for the new bottle, so it’s going to be $50.00. Sweet Babou said he was sorry for all this, but he sounded more put out by the fact I was torqued than contrite.  This made me angry, considering I would be the one paying the consequences for his actions.

My temper is worse when I feel like the person I am angry with is ‘sulking’ about being in trouble more than they are really sorry they did something asinine that caused me hardship or emotional pain. It’s my legacy from my relationship with my Mom.

Since I didn’t want to scream at Sweet Babou (he said he was sorry; I try not to be an evil bitch), I called my friend Kitty to grouse about it. She said all the right things. “I hate when people do that!” “Doesn’t it make you mad!?!” Basically, she let me vent knowing that 1) sometimes you have to vent and 2) Sweet Babou is a wonderful husband but that doesn’t mean I never want to stab him (lightly, in the thigh with a small knife).

Then I made the mistake of calling my Mom. I made the mistake of saying, “I know it’s his ADD that makes him do this, but it still feels like he just doesn’t care.” Since Mom has ADD, she had been attacked! This lead to her interrupting me to tell me about her bad memory and how it is not her fault, then accusations of me having anger issues ( I do, what has that got to do with his leaving the antibiotic out?), and then when I called her on her behavior she started passive-aggressive mewing that she should never give her opinion because I always get mad at her (*sniff*).

I took deep breaths. I told I loved her but I really needed to get off the phone. So we hung up before it escalated like it would have when I was in my 20’s.

But in an odd way it was very helpful. I am no longer mad at Sweet Babou, even though I still have to go get the meds. Nope. Now I want to throttle my mother.

I think I’m calling this a lose-lose.

Sorry I have not been able to blog recently. There is both good news and bad news about that.

First, the good news. Another academic article written by my mild mannered alter-ego, AKA under my real name, has been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal and thus needed final edits. You could hand over The Gettysburg Address and academic editors would want you to “tweak” it a bit, BTW. Not that my writing didn’t need tweaking. I’m just making a comment on the tweak-happy state of editing in general.

The bad news for why I have not been blogging is that the wee and precious Spock is sick. When she is sick she 1) wants to be held and 2) wants to breastfeed and 3) both of those things NOW dammit, or she will cut a bitch.

So it started with a cold on Thursday, which ran a fever which made her feel like crap, which devolved into a nasty cough that made my skin fall off in sympathy pains by Saturday, which went downhill into pink-tinged eyes on Sunday.  Basically she has been a miserably unhappy mucus-erupting limpet for four days. Even mommy kisses, daddy cuddles, anti-histamines, and acetaminophen had limited effect on her woe.

Today I took her to the doctor and found out that Spock had turned a normal cold into an upper respiratory infection with the tendency for pneumonia and a double ear infection and the beginning of pink eye.

ACK!

Needless to say much antibiotic is happening up in here. Happily, after just one dose, she has suddenly felt well enough to sit by herself and watch Go, Diego, Go reruns, thus giving me a chance to jet over here to the computer for a quick bit of blogging.

With any luck, I can go back to ranting about shit tomorrow.

Not that it wasn’t rip-roaring at just the rumor of her medical condition. Huffington Post is one of the many news outlets gloating about reporting on the speculation that Paula Deen has Type II diabetes. It was, like nearly all the “reporting” on this topic, a monument to concern trolling. They said (I added the boldface, to point out the egregious fat –hate/shaming), “Paula Deen, the large-living queen of heavy cooking, is about to come clean with what some say has long been her dirtiest secret … There’s no doubt that fans would be upset to learn that Deen had been keeping such a major disease, and a major consequence of heavy eating, from their knowledge. It would certainly cast an alarming pall over the reckless abandon with which she endorses delicacies like turducken”.

Then there was the article on the otherwise feminist blog, Jezebel. They mange to tsk Deen for getting diabetes too, and seem to revel in pointing out how it is all her fault. (Again, boldface is mine) “Diabetes is a serious disease — the American Diabetes Association notes that diabetes causes more deaths a year than breast cancer and AIDS combined. Genetic factors contribute to the disease, but “lifestyle factors” — diet and excess body fat — are also part of the cause.” They point out that Deen is known for the heinous “love of butter” among other culinary sins.

Then they try to cover their asses from accusations of fat-hate by saying: “No one deserves to have a disease. That’s not the point here. But Paula Deen is someone who’s orchestrated the announcement of her illness in tandem with a drug company, someone who’s launching a website dedicated, ostensibly, to helping people be healthier. In a way, she’s branding and marketing her diabetes. In doing so, her failure to talk about her own diet — and the unhealthy recipes she’s peddled for years — is downright irresponsible. (All of the artery-clogging foods in the image at top, by the way, are from her kitchen, and she’s not going to address what we can see with our own two eyes? Bullshit.)”

What have clogged arteries got to do with diabetes, which is all about blood sugar, again? Oh right. Not a damn thing. But lets make sure we subtly reinforce the fact that fat people who eat “too much” MUST be eating unhealthy food and MUST be in poor health and MUST have clogged arteries from their diet and no other reason!

So far articles have managed not to outright say, “the fat bitch got type II diabetes because she stuffs goopy cheesy shit into her pie hole all day, and now she is going to die because she has a big fat ass” – but just barley.

Just how is this different from the far-right hate machine saying gay people deserved to get AIDS because they had gay sex, which infuriated liberals when it was being spouted back in the 80’s and 90’s? But now “liberal” sites like Huff-Po and Jezzie are letting fly on Deen because everyone KNOWS fat people are only fat because they are gross eating machines and everybody KNOWS fat makes you die.

Fat people. Everyone feel free to hate on them, okay?

Let’s look at some facts. Medically proven FACTS about type II diabetes. First, skinny people get type II diabetes all the damn time, but no one wants to talk about it. Furthermore, while many people with type II diabetes are overweight, MOST overweight people will NOT get diabetes. In fact, people may be getting fat BECAUSE they developed type II diabetes, not vice versa.  Additionally, genetics are a big factor in type II diabetes. Some ethnicities, such as Hispanic/Latino Americans, African-Americans, Native Americans, Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Alaska natives all have higher risks of type II diabetes.  Are they all just pigs, then? Being poor also doubles or triples your risk of type II diabetes, even when ALL other factors, like weight and stuff, are taken into account. Only poor people are fat, then? Hell, type II diabetes has sprung up in tandem with GMO foods, foods that poor people are more likely to eat because organic foods are so expensive, but no one has really done the research showing whether there is a connection or not.

But lets keep on keeping on blaming fat people for their diabetes, okay? Because it just doesn’t make sense to let information and facts get in the way of a hateful prejudice, apparently.

All the asshats out there crowing over Paula Deen’s diagnosis can suck my big, fat metaphorical cock.

The PLU codes are the “price look up” numbers on produce stickers that let the cashiers know how much to charge you, BTW.

So, if a bunch of grapes are “conventionally grown”, that is “have been hosed down with enough pesticide to make springs silent for the next thousand years”, then they have a 4 digit PLU … let’s say 5555 for example. If a bunch of grapes are organic, they will have a 5 digit PLU that starts with a 9 … which would be 95555 in our fictitious establishment. If the PLU on the grapes is 5 digits starts with an 8 – such as 85555 – then those bad boys might have fish DNA in them for all you know.

I’ve made up a mnemonic to help me remember when I’m actually in the store. (I’m old. I need mnemonics to function. Stop judging me.) To wit, it is “4 is poor, 8 we hate, and 9 is fine”. (I am a SAHP, not a poet laureate. Stop judging me.)

Anyway, avoid the crappy food as much as you are able within constrains of economics and location. It may turn out the miRNAs don’t matter a hill of beans and Frankenfoods are safe as safe can be, but until we get some proof up in here let us err on the side of caution.

Not that it matters in my house, because my children refuse to eat for days at a time, reducing me to stalking them and trying to shove some pre-chewed carrot in their mouth.

(Stop judging me.)

BTW – “natural” means diddly-squat. It is a marketing tool. Because people assume natural + higher price = less chemical/GMO laden, so they pay more for the same pesticide covered garbage sold in Wal-mart, or stuff that has all the nutritional  goodness that pop-tarts have to offer.

Why is the proliferation of Monsanto-created GMOs bad? While there are some studies that make GMOs look bad, it is the absence of studies showing they are definitely, incontrovertibly benign that worry me. Big GMO factories insist we don’t need no stinkin’ tests. Monsanto argues  “that human toxicology tests are unwarranted is based on the doctrine of “substantial equivalence.” According to substantial equivalence, comparisons between GM and non-GM crops need only investigate the end products of DNA expression. New DNA is not considered a threat in any other way.” However, this might be knee-deep bullshit, especially in the light of new research into miRNAs. Recently some researchers in China have found miRNAs from rice in the tissues and blood of animals that ate the rice.

While I appreciate the fact that rice enhanced to make a complete protein could really help people, I would really like a little more information on safety before I unknowing consume vegetables spliced with scorpion-toxin DNA. It’s nice that the venom keeps insects from eating veggies humans cultivate, but what EXACTLY is that shit doing to my gut flora? And don’t hand me any more “substantial equivalence” malarkey, sunshine. I want some fokking PROOF that it won’t hurt me or my kids.

There is enough proof that it MIGHT harm us that, coupled with the glaring lack of evidence to the contrary, the EU (and now individual European countries) banned GMOs, but in the US corporate profit is WAY more important than citizens, so Monsanto and its ilk can sell it’s gunk willy-nilly here in the states.

And now the large corporate allies of smaller organic farmers have promised to suck Monsanto’s dick stop fighting GMOs provided they get paid. Thanks guys. I feel so much better about the high price of Organic Valley butter now.

Excuse me while I have some amaretto (were the almonds that made it GMOs? I have no way of knowing.) in my non-rBGH milk.

Mitt Romney is taking hits from his “friends” in areas that his enemies have traditionally been too mealy-mouthed, spineless, and/or complicit to address. Typically the GOP has dominated political discourse and the media narrative because they make a cohesive effort to stick to the ‘gospel’ talking points and not slag each other. Also, if one of their members was under attack, they usually rushed to defend him, not to ignore his plight or join in the kill — unlike Democrats. Also, the GOP usually tries to simply one-up each other in who can be the most puritanical, homophobic, asshat and attack on a personal basis only.

But this time the GOP has run aground on it’s own hate. Gingrich and Perry aren’t taking the George W. Bush route of saying their opponent has a fictitious black love child and is also gay. Nope. The dumb bastards are going after Romney for things that are the sacred cows of the right wing: money grubbing and misogyny. Worse, they are telling the truth. The King of Bain ad is a pretty accurate summation of what those kind of companies do to middle-class America while sucking huge profits up for the top 1%. There are those on the right who are rushing for damage control by insisting that Bain did the noble work wherein it took companies, “reorganized them and then sold them for profit”.  Since everyone in America knows downsizing and preordination mean lost middle-class jobs, either through speed-up or outsourcing, this doesn’t help Romney that much. 

And that numbnuts Perry is being a smart mouth to the “Kingmakers” in his party, which is as stupid as I have always thought he was.

Basically, if Romney gets the GOP nomination then his fellows have done a shitload of Barak Obama’s reelection campaigning for him, and the Dems don’t even have to put up with the accusation of “going negative” or running a “smear campaign”.  Even if Gingrich snags the nomination from Romney, he is very unlikely to win the Presidency because he has no credit with the fiscally conservative or evangelical GOP base. They all know he is a lying, whoring, me-first kind of scummy, cheating, goat blowing, turn-coat. Perry is not going to elected because there is a level of moron even the GOP won’t go for. Jesus loves you Perry, but the voters know you couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if there were instructions on the heel.

How I wish Molly Ivins was alive to see this.

I see.

I was just chatting today with my daughter Lilo’s former preschool teacher, Miss Sharon. Her 10 year old son recently survived brain and spine cancer. He hit his million dollar spending cap on, roughly, day three of his treatment. But thanks to Obamacare her insurance had to keep insuring him. They had to keep paying for the treatments that have wrestled his cancer into remission. Now, thanks to Obamacare, when he is an adult companies cannot deny him insurance based on the fact he had caner as a child. If Obamacare was a person Miss Sharon would give it deep French kisses and a handjob.

I don’t think “fascism” means what Rick Santorum thinks it means. Here’s a handy definition for him to work with:

Now, who has shown a lust for money and power so great that he has sent his principles to the doghouse exists as a walking testament of hypocrisy? Who has made his hatred of gays and how he want’s to “eradicate” Islam the platform of his campaign? Who has made denigrating remarks about Black people, then tried to cover it by asserting he actually said “blah” people? Who plays fast and loose with the truth? I’ll give you a hint. His last name is synonymous with a frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that can be a byproduct of anal sex. Another hint: I recently wrote a whole post about the festering pustule at Workhorse Politics.

I think anyone capable of complex equations of 2+2=4 or can understand ALL citizens of the USA should have equal rights under the law can see who is really dabbling fascism. In fact, they can see whose political party has been showing the most fascist tendencies.

Hint: It’s Rick Santorum and the far-right cabal of the GOP.