it’s not about you

I read a Washington Post article this morning that got me thinking. Here’s a quote:

A 2006 University of Maryland study on chat rooms found that female participants received 25 times as many sexually explicit and malicious messages as males.

And another:

Joan Walsh, editor in chief of the online magazine Salon, said that since the letters section of her site was automated a year and a half ago, “it’s been hard to ignore that the criticisms of women writers are much more brutal and vicious than those about men.”

What concerns me most is whether or not police departments will take these types of threats seriously or whether they will brush them off as trivial. I’m not here to present a case for the validity of the Internet as a form of real community and communication. If you’re a skeptic, nothing I say will convince you anyway. I know my husband makes a living - a very GOOD living, as a matter of fact - by helping create content for this virtual world. That makes it real enough. He jokes that he makes a living by creating things that don’t tangibly exist.

A death threat, a threat to strangle, kill, rape and molest on the Internet is just as real as a threat in the physical world and should be taken as such. It is sad and a shame that due to the anonymity of the online forum that people can get away with thinking it is okay to make such threats, or pass them off as jokes, that women’s voices are being silenced. That they are being introverted because that are so afraid of what someone might do to them, or say they will do to them, if they continue to speak their mind. And that is NOT okay.

Generally, men don’t face this problem. If a man speaks his mind, it’s accepted as a part of life. But when a woman speaks her mind, nay, dares to speak her mind, she is labeled - “outspoken,” “opinionated,” “masculine,” “bossy,” “bitch” - and must deal with consequences, threats, and punishments, simply for being who she is. I’m sick of it. I’m tired of it. I want to see change taking place.

As women, we can speak up against this, and I think we should. At the same time, I don’t fault the women who have retreated and pulled away - no one else can make a decision for another about how much risk they are willing to accept. I’m proud and privileged to be in global community with both men and women who value women’s voices and interactions and stand in solidarity to help all of our voices to be heard.

Joshua and the kids and I went to look at a two-bedroom apartment yesterday. As we were finishing up our tour, I went downstairs to talk to the leasing agent. She was finishing up a conversation with another prospective tenant, so I stood there and waited for them to finish. He asked her on his way out the door and down the steps if she was also the one showing the place on Capp Street. She didn’t know which property he was talking about.

As he was walking down the steps, I moved closer to ask her a few questions and jokingly called out after the man, “Which place on Capp?”

The leasing agent turned to me and firmly said, “Oh, you don’t want to live on Capp Street - that’s not a good area.”

I looked at her for half of a second while I debated in my head what to say next.

“Actually, we live on Capp Street.”

You could see her visibly try to recover.

“Oh, so that’s why you’re moving.”

“No, we’re moving because we have a family of four in a one-bedroom apartment and we need more space. I love where we live.”

She then started talking about how she had heard it wasn’t a good area and so on and so forth and I re-emphasized how I liked where we live, that it WAS a good section and in no uncertain terms put to rest her her misperceptions.

Don’t talk bad about my ‘hood, yo.

Oh, and we won’t be renting that apartment after all.

Regarding the Imus “scandal.”

First of all, let’s just get this out of the way: The idea that anyone in the media world gives a shit about the dignity of women, black or white, is a ridiculous joke. America’s TV networks have spent the last forty years falling over each other trying to find better and more efficient ways to sell tits to the 18-to-35 demographic. They make hour-long prime-time reality dramas these days about shopping-obsessed sluts hitting each other with pocketbooks, for Christ’s sake. Paris Hilton — dumb, rich — gets her own prime-time show. MTV, the teenie mags, the pop music industry, they’re basically all an endless parade of skinny, half-naked brainless women selling makeup and jeans to neurotic, self-hating, weight-obsessed little girls.

The idea that NBC — the company that proudly produced 241 episodes of Baywatch, a show whose two main characters for nearly a decade were Pamela Anderson’s tits — was “offended” by the use of the word “ho” is beyond preposterous. Until this incident, I would have wagered very good money that “ho” would be in the title of at least one NBC-produced reality pilot within the next ten years. You can’t see that? Trivia-battling sluts in Ho-llywod Squares? An irony-for-irony’s-sake callgirl-improvement show called Pimp My Ho? Would you bet real money that the Paris-and-Nicole vehicle The Simple Life wasn’t originally called Whore Acres at some stage of the pre-production process? I sure as hell wouldn’t. Programming decisions of the The Bachelor ilk aren’t spontaneous mid-show farts by an aging drug-battered brain like the Imus deal — they’re wide-awake decisions, forged in the crucible of number-crunching corporate reflection, to use reactionary images of cheap brainless skanks to sell Fritos and pickup trucks.

via a very brave article in Rolling Stone.

Kryptonite found in Siberia.

NICE.

Many had advised me that three was much worse than two and I didn’t believe them, and so I think I should warn those of you who haven’t yet been through three that three is so much more horrible than two that you might want to start drinking heavily right about now.

via dooce.

I’m getting a little tired of hearing people nowadays talk about the “Emergent church,” when what they really mean is the “emerging church.” There’s a big huge difference, and the nuance seems lost on the masses.

Emergent is a BRAND, people, not a descriptive. Get it right. It’s like in Texas, where we call all sodas, “Coke.” As in:

“You thirsty?”

“Yeah.”

“You want a Coke?”

“Sure.”

What kind of Coke do you want?”

“A Dr. Pepper.”

Or it’s like squares and rectangles: all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. All Emergent churches are emerging, but not all emerging churches are Emergent. The capitalization should be the first clue.

Emergent is an organization (or a movement, or a conversation, or whatever), and while many emerging churches and people involved or identifying with the emerging church would find affinity with this organization, many would not and many would have no clue what it even is.

This must be fixed. It’s annoying the crap out of me.

Equal sues Splenda. Splenda says “nanny, nanny, boo, boo” in a sing-song voice, while sticking its thumbs in its ears and waggling its fingers at Equal. Equal sticks out its tongue and then says, “I know you are, but what am I? Jinx! No backs for all infinity!”

McNeil says that the process it uses to manufacture Splenda starts with sugar, pure and simple. To make sucralose, McNeil adds three chlorine atoms that are naturally found in foods like salt and lettuce to a molecule of sucrose. The sucrose disappears in the manufacturing process, but the result — sucralose — is 600 times as sweet as ordinary table sugar. Splenda then mixes two bulking agents, dextrose and maltodextrin, into the sucralose.

The chemistry is complex, and it may be baffling for a jury to hear about a process that starts out involving sugar but ends up lacking it.

Despite its use of sugar as the starting point for making sucralose, nowhere do the words “sugar” or “sucrose” appear on Splenda’s ingredient list. That is because under Food and Drug Administration regulations, it cannot list a substance that has vaporized during the manufacturing process.

Maybe if they go to court, the judge and jury will rule they both have to cease and desist creating either product. They’re both creepy. That and the fact that the sugar business is lucrative to the tune of $10 billion a year - well, it all just scares me.

When you’re willing to catch their vomit with your hand.

Killian is victim number three in the stomach virus/foodpoisoning fest that has taken over our family, oh, since the plane took off from Dallas Monday night.

I threw up in the airplane galley, in each of the rear bathrooms, in my seat, on the jetway walk and in the terminal, in the baggage claim bathroom (twice), at 25th and Folsom, the second I got the apartment door open, and multiple times until about two or three in the morning. By then, my kidneys ached and my head was pounding and I was in such a state of delirium, I really can’t remember how many times it was. But it was several at home. I couldn’t even keep water down - within 10 minutes or so of trying, it came right back up.

I woke up yesterday morning, no longer nauseous, but feeling like I’d been hit by a truck, when Joshua came in to tell me he had been back and forth to the bathroom multiple times with the same problem, other end, since about six in the morning. I remained weak and exhausted while he got to enjoy his sickness (I win for most vomits). Eight o’clock never looked so good - we ALL went to bed then, and got about 11 hours of sleep.

I’m feeling much better today, thought still tired and still with a sensitive stomach, Joshua’s still pretty iffy, and Killian has now had two bad diapers and vomited once. But I caught it. In my hand. Judah seems to feel fine, but who knows what tomorrow will bring. I have a feeling it’s going to be a long night with my little guy.

Looks like Lower Greenville is a VERY giving community.