seems like whenever we are running late to get out the door, the Kid comes up w/ a decent question. i usually indulge her.
Kid: mommy, [so and so] told me she was born in the mouse year.
Me: that would be her chinese zodiac.
Kid: what’s chinese zodiac?
Me: let me show you.
here are our results:
Kid was born in the year of the horse:
i was born in the year of the monkey (but i already knew that):
and the Guy was born in the year of the [rat] mouse:
what is your chinese zodiac?
thanks, Red Queen, for tagging me…i don’t know anybody to tag, as i do not have the blog relationship w/ eight people…hrmmm i will work on that.
for now, if you open this, tag!
here’s the rules:
~we have to post these rules b/f giving you the facts
~players start w/ eight random facts/habits about themselves.
~people who are tagged write their own blog post about their eight things and include these rules.
~at the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged, and they should read your blog.
~8 is a magic number, not three.
as i said, i will tag more people, for now, david, audree, ann, shannon, kimmers, suzy, julie, and stacy, or all the people currently subscribed to my myspace blog.
~i like spicy food, but i don’t have the iron clad stomach to tolerate it. i like it hot enough to make me sweat, cry, and sniffle. i pretty much hate life for a few days afterward, but i think it’s worth it.
~i go through phases of vegetarianism. i can go months w/o eating any meat, but then will eat nothing but med. rare steak and hamburger for days. it’s given me a love of good tofu, but i still refuse to mix meat and tofu.
~i speak mandarin, but love me a great korean drama.
~i have a phobia of body hair, or something like that. i have trichotilimania, so to reduce the hair pulling, i shave almost everything from my pits to the five hairs on my big toe. i think it keeps me from pulling out my scalp hair. i also have been known to over pluck my eyebrows to damn near extinction, and pull my eyelashes.
~i love classic rock, among 30 other varieties of music, but i have seen yes, and kansas in concert together. i want to meet alice cooper and think aerosmith may be the greatest band ever.
~i firmly believe that some things just belong on the floor.
~i am a creative artsy crafty person. i sew, collage, scrapbook, cook, and blog. however, this stuff also clutters my house from one end to the other, w/ piles of projects in every stage of completion.
~i did it on the first date, and it is the best relationship i have ever been in.
three hits…
first,
new ad campaign for amnesty international, a picture truly is worth a thousand words…
second,
a story that gives me mixed feelings…
i think this ass hat should go to prison for a very long time. but i am not sure that murder should be the charge…
assault? yes. drugging a woman against her will? absolutely. forcing an abortion on a woman damn well w/in her rights to carry it to term? you betcha (tho, i know the anti-choice crazies are going to be all over this one…). let’
s not forget stalking, burglary, violation of a restraining order…
but murder?
i can’t seem to get myself to go along w/ it, even though this ass hat deserves to rot in a fucking cell for the rest of his miserable life. he should pay for the violence he committed against a woman, for the terror he has brought her, but i just can’
t bring myself to say he committed murder, no matter what the wisconsin law says.
and three,
a woman is murdered by her husband eight minutes after she attempts to get a gas station clerk to help her. she slipped him a note on her signed receipt. roy has a great post on this story about the morality of helping a stranger in this situation, and it is a great one.
someday i might have to post the story about how i had the shittiest neighbors ever in redford, mi, when my Kid’
s biological whatever and i had some incredible fights. why no one ever called the cops on us i will never know, especially since it was a family neighborhood, and it usually ended up w/ me outside the house half dressed crying for him to leave me alone…at midnight. or maybe i just did post it.
via bbc
i may add to this later…when i have had time to digest the atrocity here a little…where would the world be w/o kick ass women like this lawyer to stand up and fight for children sold as sex slaves for drugs? where would this girl be? how can a girl be gang raped, and then condemned to death for the crime committed against her?
why am i not cuddled up to hot asian guy asleep?
if you listen to bbc radio, which i am not saying i do, or that i actually sometimes like npr, leila’s whole story will be aired 29 NOV.
this NYT article alarmed me at first…at first i thought they were blaming medicare for the high cost of health care products…quoting that in pharmacies oxygen can be rented for “about $100 a month”, and my knee jerk reaction was “wtf mate? for the elderly on fixed incomes (real elderly, not ass hats who didn’t want to work anymore and now cry ‘fixed income’ b/c they live off of their husband’s fixed income from actually retiring) $100 a month is a ton of money (currently my grandparents budgeted bi-monthly grocery bill). luckily, contrary to popular belief, i am able to read…
in case anyone wants to know why we spend so much of our taxes for medicare, you may want to check out what happens when you let companies lobby to congress for control over prices. you may want to look into how they play on seniors’ fears that they will not be protected if the prices medicare pays these companies are reduced. i am sick and fucking tired of companies manipulating people, and congress to cause a problem that makes people look at medicare and yell “omgwtf!!!1! medicare is DRAINING our government…just draining it and we the poor tax payers are sucking up the cost!” well…look here, long and hard, and the fucking way things happen, how good congressmen and congresswomen get blindsided and bullied into making that happen. medicare is trying here people…and they are being cut off every step of the way.
for more on healthcare and how we are getting fucked over and not even noticing, see jay’s posts at feministe…they are amazing!
in case the SCHIP decision didn’t do enough to help women and children (/sarcasm) you can always count of dubyah to come riding in like a heroic cowboy to save the day (ok…now /sarcasm).
now, it has been five years since i have been on WIC. (actually i was declined in CA b/c i was far enough below the poverty level, but would have been if my husband had still been around to leech off of me…oish!) i am not overly aware of how well it is meeting the needs of women, infants and children today, but this sure as shit isn’t going to help things.
i am willing to bet the program is doing the best they can. five years ago, i worked w/ a guy who was raising his baby alone b/c the mother took off and never looked back (yes, it happens sadly) and was trying to get on WIC, but was declined numerous times b/c, they told him, it is called Women, Infants and Children. i wrote to my congressman again, and the WIC office itself tearing them a new one for such an outrage, and eventually he was approved (not b/c of me, but i am sure my rage helped). i like to think that things like that don’t happen anymore, that fathers who are actually in the same exact financial situation that some mothers find themselves don’t meet such silly restrictions. same standards for the same qualifications, no matter who it is. see? feminist issues help teh menz too! duh!
this isn’t exactly about violence against women, but i like that it is something positive.
while i always had mixed feelings about the girl scouts, never wanting to be one myself b/c i thought all they did was sell cookies and practice cooking and sewing, while the boy scouts got to go camping, my heart warmed a little when i read this.
“When you say you are a girl scout, they say, ‘Oh, my daughter is a girl scout, too,’ and then they don’t think of you as a person from another planet,” said Asma, a slight, serious girl with a bright smile. “They are more comfortable about sitting next to me on the train.”
while i think it’s sad the lengths some people feel they have to go to make other jerks feel better, i like that the girl scouts are giving these young girls some confidence.
“I don’t want them to see themselves as Muslim girls doing this ‘Look at us, we are trying to be American,’ ” she said. “No, no, no, they are American. It is not an issue of trying.”
bingo.
so, in a possibly feeble attempt to tie this into ending VAW, building confidence in young girls, especially young WOC living in a muslimphobic society, you encourage them to push for their potential. pushing for potential means they may try their damnedest to achieve more than being cardboard boxes, hopefully keeping them from situations where they might find themselves victims. not all victims of violence are minority women in poverty, but a damned large number of them are. and i would have to run stats, but i am willing to bet my pussy that there is a disproportionate number of muslim women who are victims of violence.
so i randomly babbled and submitted a piece on feminism from a single mother’s perspective, and it was picked up!
i am gonna be a published author!
and so is the fabulous Red Queen! (from whom i stole the affectionate term “Kid”)
she is on my blog roll…and has a truly awesome blog! check her out!
i almost forgot that the ever articulate cara has also been picked up! be sure to send her congrats too!
h/t to my MOM! seriously. i gotta give my mom some space here…she is 50, and has gone back to school. she is going to be a surgical assistant, i believe. i try to tell her everyday how proud i am of her. we had a really rocky relationship growing up, but i find that the rory/lorelei bond might not happen in real life…i am digressing…but despite all the bad water that has passed under the bridge (and all the therapy i have been to in order to grow and become friends w/ my mother after years of turmoil) i gush w/ pride that while some people just throw in the towel and live off of their husbands and whine about fixed incomes, MY MOM GOES TO COLLEGE! i am so proud of you mom…and hope to be following in your footsteps soon…and i sure as hell never thought that i would say i actually wanted to do something like my mom…does that make me old???
she has also been asking me a lot about feminism lately, and is trying to write her first research paper in years about why feminism still matters. my MOM! who claims she is a republican (sorry mom, you just aren’t) wants to know as much as she can about things like the wage gap, and women’s health and other injustices that make feminism relevant today…i teared up a little emailing her some starting points…i may buy her jessica valenti’s book for winter holiday…geared younger i know…but it will probably answer some of her questions…and it was a quick read…my mom, afterall, when i was very young, gave me influences i (and possibly she) didn’t realize…one of my clearest memories of being a young girl living in jackson, michigan, was my mom yelling that she wished there was a huge puddle on the road where the “pro-life” *coughantichoicecough* protesters were toting their signs…a few weeks ago i called her and thanked her for that example…however twisted it may be…not very “freedom of speech” friendly of me…but it apparently made an impression on me…
back to me going to college…i am coming up on a change of life…no, not that change of life…but the end of one phase and the beginning of…well i really don’t fucking know…i have this GI bill to use…and i want to know what the fuck to do w/ it…i will have my AA in chinese soon…i have two more tests to take…but i am thinking of finishing what i started b/f getting knocked up by mr. i am allergic to condoms and would rather be a marine than a daddy…i was a history major w/ a geek on for all things russian…i wanted to go poly sci, but was afraid of econ…now i am wondering if my dread of econ may be holding me back from something i really love…no idea what i will do w/ it…but i am thinking of turning my 110 credits, plus AA in chinese into something along that road…switching from eastern europe to the far east and south asia in history…and biting the proverbial bullet and and facing econ head on in the hopes that i will find what i am looking for…but my GI bill has limits…and so i need to be sure this is what i really want to do…and figure out what the fuck i want to be when i grown up…cuz a SAHM navy veteran sure isn’t my life’s ambition…no matter how many nanny and au pair job offers i have received…and did i mention that i have never been good at decision making?
it is no secret that i am a convert…but i did just realize that i am still a registered republican…that’s right on my 18th birthday i marched my ass into the secretary of state’s office and registered to vote and became a registered republican…but we all grow up sometime, especially when life kicks us in the ass and we realize that we have secretly been harboring liberal ideals all along…and now those values are staring us in the face dressed as real life…and not the 1950’s tv show we thought life was when we were good little church girls green and naive…so now i have to figure out how to switch officially in time for a primary…which i need to apply for an absentee ballot…and it is all very confusing and i am not even sure if it is necessary. plus, i am not going to be ADM by the general election…so i need to look into voting here as well i suppose…ugh! growing up is tough!
finally…i finally got LEOPARD! zoltan brought it (along w/ that damned cold) from california last weekend. we bought the family pack (so i only had to pay half)…and w/ the household network we have, we have already had fun controlling e/o’s compys w/ the cool new “share screen” feature…i haven’t even had time to check out all of the cool new features…but i will! i heart my mac…i suppose i could also try working at the apple store so i could actually get paid for all this free advertising i give them…hrmmm…
so this blog is already longer than i had thought it would be, and more like “dear diary” than anything of substance for the five of you out there…*waves*. now i am off to swallow some melatonin in hopes of sleeping tonight…unless we have another thunder storm…ugh! i am babbling again!
malama pono!
nitey night!
Twitter / OuyangDan
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Ouyang Dan
The Guy
random babbling from readerland