My kid could kick your kid's ass! ... or could she?

Today was my thirty-seventh week checkup. In nasty, medically-official-sounding news, my cervix is 80% effaced. Good job, cervix. I'm glad we're on the same page.
     When the nurse practitioner went to measure Siren's heart rate, she got startled and developed a case of the hiccups, which pissed her off so hard that her heart rate shot up and she kicked the Doppler. Okay, there, Courtney Love--I guess hiccups can be pretty frustrating when you live in a warm little bubble and eat all your food through a tube attached to your belly.
     I told my mom about it and we got into a conversation about what happens when your kid is the kid that kicks other kid's asses--and how to teach your kid to kick other kid's asses if they try to kick yours. She never had to deal with this; I was a little bitch all through childhood and partially through adolescence.
     There were a number of factors: Madison doesn't really have the same Castle Doctrine culture of self-defense that, well, the rest of the world has--and I weighed no more than fifty pounds until puberty. Being one of those precocious high-IQ pieces of shit didn't help the situation, either. Basically, I was the skinny, dorky Asian kid who liked throw-up and virtual reality chat clients, until puberty finally hit and I could compensate for my utter lack of social skills with being extremely good-looking and excellent at sex my personality and varied interests.

I don't want Siren to grow up like that, though. Being beaten up with your own skateboard before having it stolen from you kind of sucks. I may have been gangly and into throw-up, but someone could've stepped in and taught me how to defend myself. My father was very physically protective of me, primarily because of my size, and my mother worked sixty-to-eighty hours a week for most of my childhood.
     In retrospect, I wish my mother would've been the one to step in. Apparently, being a hood rat skips a generation. (This bodes well for Siren!) During our conversation, we compared polar-opposite levels of confrontation; my mother, because she is way more sure of herself than I am and always has been, described only tenacity in her early years.

It totally is.

Siren, someday you'll find this blog, so here's something to take from it: don't be a little bitch like I was. Don't instigate violence, but don't let other kids beat you with your own skateboard before stealing it. Be like your Nana: defend yourself & your loved ones when you see that the time calls for it.

How to be an apartment homesteader... for poor people.

I don't write anymore. My hard drive--which contained years of bits & pieces of my writing, and portions of a chapbook--is dead, its files hopefully to be exhumed tomorrow.
     Oy. And I'm still fucking pregnant. Ce n'est pas juste.

One of the things I wanted to move from spiritually when I moved away physically from Madison was taking its idyllic city charm for granted, such that it obscures any sense of reality for those who don't live like how people live in Madison. Why don't people shop locally? Why don't people work for small businesses? Why don't people just grow their own food and live self-sustainably?     Well, because growing food is hard--especially when you try to do it on a large scale the year you accidentally get pregnant and a massive drought overwhelms the Midwest, oops--to juggle in between a full-time job and less resource-driven interests (like feeding poetry to your hard drive). And because small businesses, due to nepotism compensating for lack of resources, are less likely to hire strangers. And because Wal-Mart's right fucking there, and I just got off work.
     I don't advocate people make excuses for making lousy lifestyle decisions. No, "I'm too poor" is not a good excuse to eat fast food instead of cooking for yourself; go spend that $5 on ingredients you could use to make two meals. But, and this is so hard to realize in a city where dumpsters are treasure troves of bakery goods and last-gen electronics, saving the world is the last thing on your mind when you first get home from work.

I came across a post about apartment homesteading on Pinterest. To be honest, I haven't fully grasped the "urban homesteading" concept craze. It sounds like a lot of ways to make yourself feel better about living in a city while still living in a city. Living in the country is hard, but I've done it; if sustainable homesteading becomes the direction I want to head in with my family, I'll do it again.
     The point the post makes is that the country lifestyle I describe will, as population increases, become less sustainable than urban homesteading. That's an extremely valid point--as is the point that good home habits can be cultivated early on, even with limited space & resources. That said, reading further down the post at the suggested ideas, I get the impression the writer takes a blindly-privileged perspective on the matter.

First of all, I don't even have a porch. Even if I did, I live in a part of the country where food-growing & clothes-drying aren't feasible outside choices nearly half the year. (As do millions in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, D.C....)
     The proposed urban homesteading lifestyle coupled with the inevitable urban responsibility of a forty-hour-a-week job means constantly working--and, forty hours out of the week, working for others. One of the most disgusting aspects of our culture is that it equates service & servitude with personal resources, depleting people of the motivation necessary to actually provide themselves with personal resources (such as home-harvested herbs). The irony of this is that the less motivated people are to take care of themselves, the more they rely on the service of others, who then become similarly sucked dry.
     Like I said, I don't want to make excuses for not doing. I'm just having a hard time putting together the words "urban" & "homesteading" in the same sentence, much less the same phrase. The city as an institution, fueled by its illusion that the institutions you work for will take care of you if & when the time comes--hey FMLA, nice shot--seems a perfect contradiction to the concept of homesteading.

Poor advertising.

I just got an ad on Facebook asking, "Got stretchmarks?" To which I replied, "Lulz, no." Truthfully!

I feel kind of like a piece of shit; my pregnancy has been sinfully easy. Sometimes I fear Siren must be at risk for birth defects, just because being pregnant with her is so abnormally normal. Yeah, my back hurts--especially where my spine starts headed eastbound from scoliosis--and I'm always way hungrier than I have room in there for, and Siren's options for in-the-womb playtime seem to involve either my cervix or my ribcage, but I feel like those discomforts are par for the course. I did sign myself up to sublet my uterus to a first-time roommate. (She probably leaves all the lights on in there before I get home. She definitely eats all the food.)
     The traditionally-associated discomforts of pregnancy, though--the stretchmarks, the unshakable extra pounds, the swelling feet & ankles--have all escaped me. My mother was the same way: she remained relatively small throughout her pregnancy, and (like myself) had no need to buy bigger clothes. We do come from an island nation where nearly one-hundred million tiny Asian people share land.

That said, there are a few things I wish Facebook had bothered to waste their poor advertising on--many of them things no one tells you before you decide to keep your kid. Among them...

1. "Hey, is your snatch really itchy for no reason?"
2. "Actually, come to think of it, is the rest of you really itchy, too?"
3. "Are you hairy as fuck? Like, moreso than usual?"
4. "Do drunk dudes try to hit on you by asking if they can touch your belly?"
5. "Were you on birth control when you got pregnant, and want to choose a form of birth control for after you give birth, in a pathetic attempt to prevent this from happening to you in another year-and-a-half?"

I really gotta get rollin' on number five. I thought it was just poverty, poor family planning, and religious fundamentalism that dictate why Filipinos automatically associate sexual activity with pregnancy. Boy howdy, was I wrong as shit...

Pizza Punks pt. II

After Sam & I got in the Camaro--much shittier than the one Papa John sold to open up his first store--to head to my doctor's appointment, I brought up with him the boycott. He still works for Papa John's, managing a franchise store owned by a third-party corporation. A really, really reasonable point he brought up: boycotting his store is not going to have any effect whatsoever on whether or not he or his employees have health insurance.
     I giggled, "Yeah, I bet some Madison kids are going to stop eating their food thinking they're doing something, but it's just going to end up hurting local employees."

Sure enough...

The ensuing thread was so ludicrous that it involved my gay friend being called a bigot for calling the original poster gay. A fine example of Madison's PC social justice culture infecting the minds of reasonable thinkers, preventing them from looking at social situations from a more individualized perspective, and jumping them to conclusions.

Papa John's, in three states now, has paid a portion of my rent for the last two years. However, Papa John himself only paid my rent in one of those states: Kentucky, when Sam & I worked for corporate-owned stores. If everyone in our neighborhood who usually eats Papa John's decided to boycott the product, here's who would be affected, in order of severity:

1. Sam & I, and his employees, would start losing money. Manager hours would be cut as the store failed to sustain its present business hours, drivers would begin losing tips, and we'd continue to not health insurance because the corporation that actually owns the franchise store only offers it to general managers and up.
2. The third-party corporation that owns the franchise store would take a hit, certainly--but it owns so many other stores, many of which are located in way more profitable locations, that it wouldn't have as successful an impact.
3. Papa John's Pizza, the corporation, is barely impacted. It would take shutting down several hundred stores before Papa John himself cares. This is because he has already made money off of the store's initial opening, and continues to make money off of the store by having it buy his product.

In order for a boycott to actually have a dramatic enough effect on the corporation itself, thousands of workers--let me take a moment to italicize the word workers--and their families would have to deal with the backlash.

So, before you feel real good about yourself for ordering Chinese tonight instead of tipping a Papa John's driver, just remember that John Schnatter is still going to be in his nice-ass Z28.

Equating ObamaCare with socialism is like equating your degree in film theory with an education.

I've been sitting here waiting for the Sexy Blob That Drives Me Places to get up and take me to my doctor's appointment. Armed with a spare hard drive--my main one, which contains all of my poetry & photography, decided to gasp its final beeps of death last night--and nothing better to do, I came across this article. It absolutely boggles the mind, the fact that people actually equate a mandatory buy-in with socialism. Canadians must look at us as though through a funhouse mirror that makes you look like you have fewer teeth and a lower IQ.

Here's the thing: I don't think social healthcare, in this era of our nation's history, would be a good idea. Once our country stabilizes to a point where...

1. we're not spending more on defense than entire nations combined. (No, we don't have "more to worry about" than those entire nations; bitch, our soil has seen blood only once in war, and it was the war we had with ourselves.)
2. my generation, the generation perpetually told to "study something if you're interested in it," without any care in the world of whether or not it'll yield a job, finally yields jobs.
3. an unemployed person receiving cash assistance doesn't have an easier, less-costly time seeing a doctor than a low-income employee.

... then I might think it'd be about the time for all of us to start receiving healthcare. The point is, we live in a culture that thrives on laziness, shallow self-centeredness, and the "all for one" idea that merely by existing is a person entitled to a high quality of life.

     Louisville, Kentucky is like the epicenter for that train of thought. It is where that train of thought stops for maintenance. Louisville is where Yum! Corporations--the people who brought you Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and the corporate movement for food stamps to work at fast-food restaurants--and Papa John's Pizza are based out of. Louisville is where poor, shitty people are encouraged to remain poor & shitty, so that the shareholders selling them lousy goods can continue selling them those lousy goods. Louisville is where "socialism" takes its most evil form: corporate socialism.

Here's a copy & paste of the comment I left in the article about Papa John and his fight "against" "socialism." This issue seems to be bringing out the stupid in a lot of people--anyone who equates ObamaCare with socialism--but, moreover, really reflects upon Louisville's overall lousy culture, and why I'm so happy to not be raising my baby there.

I used to work for a corporate-owned store in Louisville. Most franchises are owned by private companies and do not offer health insurance; however, the corporate stores in Louisville are run by the Papa John's corporation itself, and -do- offer coverage. I use the term "coverage" to loosely describe a series of packages you can purchase that squeeze far more money out of a minimum-wage income than it's worth. Yes, it was my choice to not pay for health insurance, but I was choosing between losing a fourth of my $600-a-month income or being saddled with debt in the event of an emergency.
I only got health insurance (state-issued Medicare) for the first time since leaving home after I got pregnant. The letter I received basically stated that, since I was employed (then by PJ's), I shouldn't need to rely on the state for health insurance; however, that I was eligible for coverage through my pregnancy. If I had been unemployed (read: already receiving cash assistance), I would've qualified for full Medicare benefits, even after my pregnancy.

Have any of you guys been to Louisville? Place sucks, man. The neighborhood I worked at, in particular, was this teeming cesspool of broken homes & cultures: every month on the first of the month, when people got their cash assistance checks in--hey, did you know that one in five Kentuckians is on cash assistance?--we would have four hundred orders, many of which made by people who believed we were the stupidest people on the face of the Earth for working for wage instead of applying for assistance. These were the people in Louisville who had healthcare; I, the employee serving their food, paid for with taxpayer money, was not one of them.

You guys, I'm not a "socialist." I'm a firm believer in the idea that hard work, diligence, and modest values--read: the difference between a practical two-year trade degree and a sophisticated four-year liberal arts degree--should be rewarded. If you believe Papa John would look like a "socialist" for paying the extra to ensure his employees have healthcare, then you're highly mistaken. His current system--profiting off of cash assistance, trying to keep his wage costs as low as possible-- is socialism; it's corporate socialism. What we presently have is socialism, and the amount of work you put in is directly proportional to the benefits you -won't- receive. If you think John Schnatter paying an extra fifteen cents per pie would brand him a "socialist," then I implore you head to Louisville and see where good ol' fashioned "capitalism" has gotten them.

Read more: ObamaCare controversy: National Papa John's Appreciation Day | Washington Times Communities
Follow us: @wtcommunities on Twitter

Crack baby.

Also, I just cracked my back--whereupon, Siren totally jumped after being pretty calm for a little while. Damn, are my bones really that loud in there? If I were her I'd want to post up and find somewhere a little less snuggish. (I would also want that if I were me.)

Flashback.

The definition of "triggers" in psychology originated as stimuli which provoked flashbacks in post-traumatic stress patients. Moving further & further down intellectual hierarchies, until finally making its way to Tumblr, the "trigger" is now a term you (as a victim) can blanket over whatever makes you uncomfortable. It's been a hot-button issue for those of us with no lives outside of the Internet, ever since Susannah Breslin concluded that trigger warnings just don't work, because the warning in & of itself is a trigger.
     But when I found out what a "trigger warning" was, I was already familiar with the concept, albeit not by name; I went to a high school that had a written policy about trigger warnings. We called it "third-party harassment."

Flashback. TW: weed. And trigger warnings. But mostly weed.

It's 2008--November of 2008, and I'm a sixteen-year-old high school senior attending alternative school in Madison, Wisconsin.
     One of Madison's fun facts is that the Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival takes place there every November, and every November at least half of the Shabazz High student body smokes weed on State Street that day with full legal protection from police.

To sidetrack, and drudge up some vaguely-relevant high school drama, there had been a dispute around that time between two students. It boiled down, basically, to our school's "third-party harassment" policy; wherein, if a student was made uncomfortable overhearing a conversation, and the people in the conversation didn't stop, they would be suspended.
     At the time, I was going through some "trigger warning"-type issues myself; however, it made more sense to me to just remove myself from things that made me uncomfortable, rather than draw attention to myself by being uncomfortable. That, and I thought (and still do) that a "third-party harassment" policy was the worst thing to enforce in an institution where students just years away from being legal adults (if they weren't already).

To baby-blanket teenagers in a world where you can just tell someone to stop indirectly making you uncomfortable? To say that you have a greater right to tell others that they don't have the right to do something that indirectly makes you uncomfortable? What the fuck kind of life skills is that?
     So, after Harvest Fest, most of Shabazz came back to school that Monday still-stoned and draped in 420-friendly body decorum. My poetry teacher took a moment to explain that, even though most of us were either active participants or supportive of Harvest Fest, some of us weren't--and that the pot leaf pins & patches could be taken as quite offensive, especially to anyone seeking treatment for drug & alcohol abuse. "It might not be that big of a deal to you," she said, "but I have a friend who struggled for a long time with a marijuana addiction."

I blinked twice. That's a bummer. Then I raised my hand.
     "Since we're bringing it up, I'd like everyone to know I have a non-specified eating disorder, and it's really offensive to me when people talk about food."
     The whole class turned to glare at me.
     "So, can we just, like, not talk about food anymore?"
     My ex-boyfriend, one of the few other Shabazzoids who wasn't a de facto bleeding heart, burst out laughing.
     Flashback: we had class that day and no one ever said anything to me about "third-party harassment" ever again.

This thing.

I was trying to think of something really awe-inspiring & heartfelt to bring life to this new blog, but I'm just going to plagiarize from a pattern I found on Ravelry:

k2tog to join in round

NO. FUCKING. WAY. You can do that?!

This is like when you're six and you realize your dysfunctional, divorced parents live in different houses... so you can ask both of them for the same thing if one of them says no.