A friend admitted she’s not speaking to her mother anymore. Her mother has abused her from the time she was a little girl, and now that my friend is grown, that woman is trying to abuse her grandchild as well. My friend tried to reason with her mother, but it came to nothing, so she’s going “no contact,” at lest for a little while. She’s doing it to protect herself so that she can heal, and to prevent abuse of... Read more
Saint Cyril: What can we do for fun? Saint Methodius: I know! Let’s invent a language with all the pronunciation eccentricities of English. And then some. One of those languages where you pronounce every syllable yet still get it completely wrong. Saint Cyril: Okay, but it has to have all the grammatical horrors of an inflected language as well. Saint Methodius: Both in one language? Dude, that’s cold. I like it. Saint Cyril: Can we give it its own... Read more
It turns out that my grandpa was not a farmer. I thought he was, when I was a very little girl. His house was a big brick farmhouse on a triple lot, the biggest plot of land I had ever seen. And on that triple lot was a picture-perfect garden. There were fruit trees on his lot, and a grape alley, a patch for strawberry bushes near the house and a huge patch for vegetables on the far side of... Read more
I didn’t expect to enjoy The Handmaid’s Tale. I don’t really enjoy post-apocalyptic fiction. Not even the best post-apocalyptic dystopia stories appeal to me. I read Brave New World in one sitting and it moved me deeply, but I didn’t enjoy it; it gave me the creeps. Not the good cathartic creeps I get from a supernatural piece of horror like The Exorcist or The Shining, but the nightmare-inducing creeps I got when I watched Fail Safe. Further, all the trailers... Read more
In the first grade I had a spectacularly useless health book entitled “Health: Focus On You.” I don’t think there was a single page in that book which was informative on any topic. First graders already know that grown-ups want them to eat five servings of produce rather than snack food, and sneeze into kleenex rather than their fingers, and stay away from those mysterious bogies known as “drugs.” At the end of each chapter was a review section,... Read more
Yesterday, I talked a little about the struggle with poverty, and how complicated and frightening it can be. Within five minutes of doing so, I got a comment on the Facebook page, explaining that I should buy dollar store shampoo instead of Ivory soap, buy in bulk “instead of in packages” and “yes foraging but learning to do it right.” Apparently, I had struggled because I didn’t know how to be poor in the “right” way. I tried to be... Read more
I just read an excellent article in The Establishment, an essay by someone who grew up in poverty about what they call “poverty appropriation:” fashionable people doing gussied-up versions of the things poor people do to survive, for fun. The author criticizes bars with a “redneck” theme, where you pay to can drink cheap cocktails out of a paper bag in a real re-purposed trailer; also dumpster diving as a hobby, and eating glamorized versions of cheap food in fancy restaurants. There is also... Read more
I don’t often read the president’s twitter feed. If I want to read other people’s stream of consciousness, I’ll read Proust, and frankly I usually don’t usually want to read other people’s stream of consciousness in the first place. I can barely manage my own. Still, I tend to see tweets by the president circulating around, another one just as soon as I’ve stopped wondering about the last. The latest tweet I’ve noticed from our president was made at one-thirty this... Read more
I am tired of single issue pro-lifers hijacking the words of Pope John Paul. Let’s call the following the ‘maximum determination’ fallacy. It goes like this. You complain about the hyper focus on abortion to the exclusion of other issues and the pro-lifer responds with something like this: ‘Saint John Paul II is the one who said that nothing else matters if abortion is not fought with “maximum determination”.’ Not exactly. Here’s the quote: “The inviolability of the person which... Read more
If you’re anything like me, you’re noticing a lot of comments these days explaining how taking away insurance coverage or drastically increasing premiums will not really leave women desperate and turning to abortion more frequently. They say that “they can choose not to kill their babies,” which is true enough, but their ideas about how they can keep from doing that are terrifying. There are some people who think it’s a compassionate and medically safe option for women to have no... Read more
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