it’s not about you

1. Since Jill’s comment, I have heard the phrase “sour grapes” not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES this week and I think there’s a conspiracy afoot (and Jill, we need to all hang out, at least once, before you pop).

2. My computer. OH MY GOD. The shift key has lost its mind. And is now removed from my keyboard. Using the other shift key is a total pain in the ass.

3. My power cord has decided it only wants to work in ONE position. What is WITH my laptop???

4. My son has learned the art of SCREAMING HIS BLOODY HEAD OFF. If this were a podcast, you would get an aural taste. COUNT YOURSELF AMONG THE BLESSED THAT IT’S NOT.

5. Two nights ago, we didn’t get any sleep due to above-mentioned number four, and his two teeth that popped through this week. I woke up after said sleep-deprived night and got head-butted right smack in the face. I think he broke my nose, but I’m not real sure. It hurts like hell. And so do my front four teeth (his front four have all come in in the past three weeks - baby Tylenol is his friend - so is the rum. And the whiskey). Not enough Advil for me in the world, my friends. My dentist is going to love this.

6. We’re moving. We found a flat (in our price range) in the Outer Richmond on 30th Ave. A half block from Golden Gate Park. Two bedrooms, one and a half bath, formal dining, living room with a working fireplace, kitchen with a gas stove, disposal and dishwasher, all hardwoods, and tile in the kitchen, parking garage, storage unit, W/D hookups, and a YARD. With real grass. And patio space. Did I mention it was a half-block from Golden Gate Park?? We move middle of July. i hear that hiring movers is worth every penny. I think we’re gonna go that route. Good Lord, I'’m tired of moving. This will be our seventh move in five years of marriage (July 6th - woot!!). And we have our own mailbox to boot.

7. We’ve been going to Mission Bay Community Church. And we’re going to join. And I’m going to be on the steering committee (I think). Good Lord, what have we done?? Does this mean we’re Presbyterian now?? Tracey and Lee Ann should be getting a good kick out of this.

8. MBCC is reading the Bible in 90 days. I’m so way behind. I’m somewhere in Exodus reading about a bunch of whiny Israelites, while everyone else in on their way to Judges or Ruth or something. And it’s good. It’s good practice/exercise/discipline.

9. Yeah, so that’s all I’ve got for now. I’m really busy. Hoping to post more often, sooner than later. I have lots of thoughts on lots of things. Really?, you say; you don’t say?, you say.

Ciao.

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.

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.

After talking and e-mailing back and forth with a few friends of mine who’ve been screwed by their respective “landlords,” I feel it is important to say:

I don’t care who you are renting from, or for how long: GET A LEASE.

Whether it’s from a company, an individual, short-term or long-term, from your family or friends (perhaps I should say especially if it’s from your family or friends), have SOMETHING in writing, signed by both parties, and preferably notarized, especially if it’s an agreement between individuals. This is to protect you, whether you are the one leasing out your space to others, or the one living or working in it.

For the worst-case, hope-it-never-happens, not-in-a-million-years-could-this-go-bad scenario. PLEASE.

Judah was playing by herself today and I heard her say, for one of her toys, “Oh my gosh!”

I snickered. Sometimes she says “Dangit!” I think it’s funny. Of all the words my kid COULD be saying, I’m thinking I’m pretty dang lucky, oh my gosh.

We went to Japantown on Saturday to (a) get some bento boxes and (2) because I’ve never been. Saturday was gorgeous and we had a good time. We even got some sushi to-go and we ate it next to the fountain at Peace Plaza. I’ve decided I’m not a fan of sushi. It makes me kind of sad that I don’t like sushi. I like saying it - sushi … sushi - it’s fun to say sushi.

On the way home from Japantown, we took the 22-Fillmore to 16th Street and Joshua walked home with the kids while I caught the 14-Mission. I was one of the first of many people to get on the bus and it was full - there were no seats left and a few people are already standing, but it wasn’t yet a sardine can. I weaved (wove?) my way through the front of the bus and found a pole to stand next to and turned around to face the middle of the bus with my back to the pole. On the side of the bus were forward-facing one-seaters, and I was standing in between two of these.

Apparently, I brushed the person sitting in the seat directly to the front of me, because she recoiled from me, turned around in her seat with this nasty look on her face and said “DO YOU MIND??” I turned to her and said, “Do I mind what?” And she glanced at my skirt and said, “Your …,” letting her voice trail off. At this point in our short conversation, I REALLY wanted to know what she was going to say next, so I said, “My what?” And she looked at my skirt again and said, “Your …derriere,” as if she had to FORCE the word out of her mouth. Now, “ass” I was expecting, or “butt” or maybe even “bum,” but “derriere?” Now that’s funny. I said to her, “Lady, it’s a crowded bus.” She got all huffy and offered me the seat, which I declined, and the she offered it to the girl standing next to me, who also declined, so she offered it to some other lady getting on the bus, who took it, not knowing (or caring) that my derriere was within a foot of her.

I mean, come on, it’s a freaking BUS. If you want personal space, hire a taxi. This ain’t the Ritz-Carlton, people. So this woman, ended up standing RIGHT next to me on the bus, because by this point, the bus was really packed. As the 14 wove (weaved?) its way down Mission, everyone was getting jostled and people were bumping into each other - that’s just the nature of the beast. So by that point, my derriere was REALLY touching her. I think she made it two stops before she took her muttering self to a point further back on the bus. I think she thought I was bumping into her ON PURPOSE. I really do. I wasn’t. I mean, if I was, I would have grabbed her ass or something.

So today, we all got on the 49-Mission/Van Ness to go to the dentist. Our bus driver today was the shit - he was the compliance KING. There are a few rules for MUNI that practically everyone disregards - fold up your stroller (I ALWAYS do, now), board at the front, no food or drinks, pay the fare, let people off before you get on. This guy was making sure everyone got on at the front. If anyone boarded at one of the back doors, he wouldn’t go anywhere til they got off - and he MEANT it. One guy got on at a back door and the driver wouldn’t move. The guy got off and boarded at the front.

One other guy got on at the back and the driver made him board at the front. When he boarded at the front, he tried to get on with a cup of orange liquid (HE said it was juice - I’m sure some of it was) and the driver told him he couldn’t bring it on board. He made drunk dude get rid of the cup. So drunk dude did, and then he tried to get on without paying the fare or showing a transfer. The driver kept telling drunk dude to show a transfer or pay and drunk dude just kept walking to the back. The driver kept telling him to come back up and we all sat at the stop until drunk dude came back up front. I mean, our driver meant Biz-Ness. Drunk dude didn’t have a transfer, a pass, or the fare, so the driver told him to get off the bus. This whole process actually took three to four minutes. That may not seem like long, but we’re at a BUS STOP.

Stops usually take fifteen to twenty seconds - all you gotta do is get people on the bus. Drunk dude kept arguing with the driver and people starting yelling, “Man, get off the the bus!” Drunk dude kept trying to convince the driver it wasn’t really a big deal to let him on (I can’t tell you how many times he used the very-stoned phrase, “come on, man…”), but he FINALLY got off. So did a lot of other people who left to catch other buses and were tired of waiting for drunk dude to get off. Every stop the driver would use the intercom to say “Do not board at the back door, board at the front!” and at one point, an older lady was trying to get off at the front and people almost started shoving past her to get on, and the driver made them all step back. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried getting off at a back door, with Killian, the stroller and Judah and people are SHOVING past me, practically knocking Judah over to get on the bus. It really pisses me off.

I told Joshua it’s nice to finally see a driver making people follow the rules. I mean they’re not THAT hard. But he wasn’t a stickler either. I got on just after 8 a.m. and my transfer is STILL good, and it’s dinnertime (they’re supposed to be 90-minute transfers) - I guess I was rewarded for good behavior. A lot of people were complaining that his enforcement held us up, but really. If people would just do what they’re supposed to, it wouldn’t be a problem in the first place. We were slightly late to our appointment, but at least my sense of justice was satisfied (oh, and Jill, when I told Dr. Katz I was from Texas, he told me I didn’t have an accent). I think I’m going to have to add a MUNI category for all the things that happen on our bus travels. Sound good?

So tomorrow is Ash Wednesday and we’re having a morning service at our house. Unfortunately, the palm branches that Julie sent from LGBC didn’t make it in time (dang President’s Day holding up the mail!), so I’m going to have to substitute something. Perhaps artist’s charcoal? I think I’m going to add the prayer from Brent’s blog post from today as a benediction, along with how Mark recently signed off on an e-mail (which I’m SO stealing) which is this:

“Peace in Christ if nowhere else.”

And on that note, it’s time to go fix dinner.

Suburban parents dote on and hover over their children, micromanaging their appointments and shielding them in helmets, kneepads and thick layers of S.U.V. steel. But they allow the culture of boy-toy sexuality to bore unchecked into their little ones’ ears and eyeballs, displacing their nimble and growing brains and impoverishing the sense of wider possibilities in life.

There is no reason adulthood should be a low plateau we all clamber onto around age 10. And it’s a cramped vision of girlhood that enshrines sexual allure as the best or only form of power and esteem. It’s as if there were now Three Ages of Woman: first Mary-Kate, then Britney, then Courtney. Boys don’t seem to have such constricted horizons. They wouldn’t stand for it — much less waggle their butts and roll around for applause on the floor of a school auditorium.

via “Middle School Girls Gone Wild,” an editorial observer column from the New York Times.

In other girlhood news, check out this article: What’s Wrong With Cinderella?, also via the New York Times. It’s a much longer read, but as a mother of a Cinderella girl, who refers to herself as the princess and me the queen (not to hard to argue with that!), I found it very interesting. Also as someone who is concerned with the limitations and expectations that will be placed on my daughter (as well as my son, of course) simply because of her gender, I found it very interesting. I found it very, very interesting, because I have a daughter, who as I have written before, “lives for sparkly.”

That’s fine and good, just so long as sparkly isn’t all that there is to live for.

Now this sounds like a great idea.

The Compact originated in December 2005 at a San Francisco dinner party, where guests decided to take recycling one step further and go for a year without new purchases. Consumerism, they said, is destroying the world and most of us already own far more than we need.

The exceptions are food, medicine and underwear.

I wonder if it’s feasible. And I wonder if diapers count as underwear.

via Burnside Writer’s Collective.

Let’s be honest with ourselves. We all get angry. Anger is a natural part of our daily lives. For most people, anger may be felt once or twice a day. For those more serious about their religion, it may be felt a greater number of times. Like 4,000. One of the ways we express our angry feelings is with words. Bad words.

I get so offended when people swear in front of me. It hurts my ears, and it makes me feel bad for them. The Bible tells us to feel bad for people who aren’t Christians.

However, being a Christian myself, I refuse to swear. That is heathen talk. Profanity. The word profane means “of the common people.” Do you really want to be associated with common folk? Of course not. No good Christian in his right mind would. I mean as Christians we are supposed to be elevated above the common folk. That is also why I am a Republican, amen.

But I had a problem. How was I to express all this anger? I couldn’t say those bad words, so I had to figure out something else.

I thought about using euphemisms, like calling the toll booth operator a female dog, or the guy at Burger King a fatherless child, or an anus, or a bowel movement-head. But that would simply reduce my intended word-blitz from volatile verbiage to little more than an aborted word-eunuch.

Then it hit me: letters. Yes! Instead of actually saying the profane words that dribble so abundantly over the drunken, slutty, cold sore-encrusted lips of the un-churched, I could simply designate a letter to represent each hateful member of Satan’s lexicon.

Click the link the read the whole article. I laughed so hard, I almost snotted. This is the kind of stuff I wish I was writing.

Wow. There are just so many things wrong with this, I don’t know where to start.

How about with the fact that over half of them are in the exact same pose? Check. If they’re gonna shoot a calendar, at least vary it up. They couldn’t come up with 12 different poses?

Say what you will, but the men and boys fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are NOT fighting for our freedom. Our freedom was already fought for, back in what was called “The Revolutionary War.” They’re fighting, being wounded by the thousands, and dying, along with tens of thousands of innocent civilians, for someone’s ego, bully status, and God-complex. You can couch it in freedom terms all you want and sell your freedom fries and try to boycott luxury products that most Americans can’t even afford anyway and get everyone all amped up and patriotic, rah, rah, rah, but it reeks of trying to sell mayo for the same price in a smaller jar - something just doesn’t feel right about it.

I’m sorry, having Saddam Hussein out of power is the lesser of two evils? Really? I honestly don’t know which is worse. What’s the saying, “two wrongs don’t make a right?” Anyway, I digress. That’s a different blog post.

Now I think what the non-profit is for is great, aiding the wounded and their families, and the families of people killed in combat. That’s a noble goal. It’s just too bad that we wouldn’t need so much aid if this war had never been pre-emptively started in the first place.

It’s also too bad that the calendar itself that is raising money for support for wounded and killed troops isn’t bringing much awareness to those troops in the first place. Something tells me none of the wounded are going to make it into a beefcake calendar. Cause, you know, nobody wants to see that hanging on their wall, now do they? It might just cause them to be uncomfortable. And we can’t have that. We can’t have the reality.

No to mention the exploitation of the human body (and the military, good Lord). Just cause it’s men and not women doesn’t make it right. Yes, they can wear short shorts and they can rappel and they can tow inflatable rafts by hand and hold their big guns and pump iron and hold up their cammo tents and wear fatigues and face paint and puff up their shoulders and suck in their tummies with the best of them, but that doesn’t make them men. Or soldiers.

It makes them models.

I think I just threw up a little.

On Why I Blog: Let’s just get it all out in the open, shall we?

There’s an unspoken understanding about people’s blogs that around here lately has either been ignored or that people just weren’t or aren’t aware of. And that is that you show the appropriate respect for the blog owner and the type of blog she has. Certain blogs are meant to incite a lot of controversy and can then be treated as such. There are religious blogs where you can weigh in your theological thoughts; there are political blogs where you are encouraged to participate and fight with each other and continue to root yourself even deeper into your political affiliation; there are news blogs and gossip blogs and sports blog and weather blogs, and well, you get the idea.

Then there are personal blogs, where people like you and me write about ourselves and what we think about stuff. This blog happens to be one of those - it is my PERSONAL BLOG. This is meant to be a safe space for me to brag on my kids and my husband, to post photos, to link to articles about issues I care about, and to talk about what’s going on in my life and what I’m thinking about, well, anything and everything. I don’t always have everything figured out. I don’t always have a perfect opinion on the topic at hand. But that’s the point, really. It’s where I unload my brain, where I try to sort things out, where I dump my frustrations, where I archive my life and my process. You don’t have to like what I’m thinking or what I’m saying. You don’t have to agree with me. If you dislike that, then go start i hate kristen rudd dot com. I don’t care. I won’t read you, but go ahead. If what I say on here bothers you that much, then just don’t come back. I won’t miss you.

The way I see this is that by you coming here, it’s like you coming into my home. We have pretty much an open-door policy at our home. You are welcome to come in, visit, stay for dinner, we might even take you in for a while, and talk about pretty much anything. We (gasp) even have people over who have wildly different thoughts on everything from us. And we love that. We love that. I believe in free speech. I believe in community. I don’t believe in only letting voices be heard that I agree with (otherwise Hollywood would NEVER stand a chance on my comments boards!). I want to foster those values in my life, and my blog is an extension of my life.

Having said that, if I were to invite you into my home, and your only response was to abuse me and my family, verbally, physically or otherwise, you would be asked to leave. Immediately, and possibly with force. Speech and community are only valuable as long as they are mutually respected by all the parties involved. Otherwise they cease to be beneficial things.

I say all this because lately, something has been happening on my comment boards that has caused me quite a bit of upset and distress, and has been the equivalent of someone walking through the door to my home and hitting me across the face. What’s happened on my comment boards has stripped my blog of being that safe place for me and it’s left me not wanting to post anything because I don’t want to deal with, and don’t have the emotional energy to deal with, the resulting comments. I am self-censoring, something I never wanted to do on here. And I haven’t really been sure of what to do about it.

I’m really sad to say that instead of this coming from anonymous strangers trolling my blog, it is coming from members of my own family. When the comments turned downright mean and rude, I decided to moderate them and keep them from appearing on the blog, because really, is that necessary?

Then I just kept getting more and more comments from members of my family, some of which were extremely hurtful (and on posts that are one to two months old), and some of which I actually would allow through. When the comments turned mean, at first it confused me, then hurt me, then frustrated me, then angered me, then downright pissed me off. This caused me a dilemma. Up until this point, I have never moderated non-spam comments.

We (by this I mean Joshua and I) have never had a comment policy other than to keep spam off our sites. When I moderated those initial comments recently, I thought perhaps I would never have to do it again. Since I’ve continued to receive what I consider valid comments from the same people, I was faced with the decision whether to allow some of their comments through - essentially only letting through what I deemed was appropriate. After all, no one but me and the commenter would know about the moderated ones anyway.

That was part of the problem. I already did know. Whether the comment appeared on the site or not, it had already been made and it had already had its effect. So I’ve decided to let all comments through. It’s either that, or I close down the comments boards entirely, which I don’t want to do. Like I said, I value and believe in free speech and community.

So here’s a comment policy I’ve come up with:

Say whatever you want. Go ahead. It will be published on my blog for all the world to see. The only way your comment will be kept from appearing is if it is spam, if you do not provide a valid e-mail address and respond to a request for identification, or if you promote any illegal activity that could get me in trouble. Please be advised that anything you say in the comments boards may be loved, adored, put up with, responded to, completely ignored, ridiculed, spat upon, made fun of, or be turned into fodder for (a) blog posts and (b) t-shirts, by either myself or the other commenters.

That said, I have a few requests of your comments of things I would appreciate:

If you wouldn’t say it to someone’s face, don’t say it on the comments board. The virtual barrier of this forum allows for some people to say things to others they would never say in real life. That sucks.

Please consider the impact your comment will have. Do you REALLY want to hit that button? Once you do, it’s going on here and will be part of your permanent electronic internet record.

Also, if I feel that if certain commenters get out of hand and continue to disrespect the boards, the blog, or me, I will privately ask them to no longer comment and would appreciate their respect of that request, as I would do if someone continued to show disrespect for the integrity of my home and family. If your problem with me is so great, then let’s be mature about it and deal with it privately. I would much prefer you send me an e-mail than use my blog to publicly shed your grievances with me.

As for my family, I felt this needed to be addressed here. I have never used my blog in any way to publicly display any grievances or issues I have with family members or about family dynamics. I’m honestly shocked, appalled, and deeply hurt that you feel it is appropriate to do so. I will continue to respect my family members in this way, and if you cannot do the same, please consider the impact on our relationship that will have, because I can tell you, it is having great impact on me.

Having said all of that, please keep commenting on my site. I enjoy it. Usually.