The Blog I'm Not Writing

A Mind is a Terrible Thing To Waste

The dream I had Wednesday night was, perhaps, a plausible consequence of having teased my brain with two very different reading materials earlier in the evening.  The first was Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys, the memoir of Viv Albertine, former guitarist of the seminal punk band, The Slits. The second was a foo-foo foodie blurb about varying key ingredients for a difference in thickness of vinaigrettes.  Hours later, I dreamed I was a musician in a punk tribute band, who did mostly Ramones and Sex Pistols covers. I was the bassist, and took the stage name Cyd Viscous.

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Return of the CSA [1]

The produce is here! The produce is here! Yesterday was first weekly pickup of our CSA’s season, which, depending on weather and other farmy  [2] factors, runs ~ mid-to-late April through October.

I loooooooooooooooove going out to La Finquita del Bujo (“The little farm of the owl”), in the scenic Helvetia farmland just north of where I live.

I get a feeling of indescribable…tranquility comes closest, when I visit the farm, to load my basket with fresh/seasonal/local produce (I’ve missed having access to Chinese broccoli, which is rarely found in stores), count the farm goats’ kids and try to spot the swallow’s nests in the barn rafters.

Yummers – lots of green for dinner tonight.

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Enough with the waxing bucolic. This is my blog, after all. Must be time to complain about something.

Department of Hormonal Ranting

You may have stepped in this pile of festering oral turd spew run across the story in several news venues. It seems that Texas businesswoman Cheryl Rios, CEO of a Dallas PR firm – the aptly named Go Ape Marketing –  said that although she supports “equal rights,” a woman “shouldn’t be president” because of “different hormones” and “biblical sound reasoning.”

BBBRRRRRRRAAAAAAAA. I’m sorry, Tex-Ass CEO, but that buzzer means you’ve forfeited your chance to play in the Double Jeopardy round.

Women and men do *not* have different hormones – although the ones affecting this particular woman’s neuromodulators need some tweaking, as her asshat statements indicate. On the other hand, you have different fingers, in the case of most of the blather involving the word hormones, it is likely that she is simply ignorant, rather than willfully sexist.

Hormone, schmormone. Let’s all take The Hormone Pledge ®  and stop using the term as a catch-all, mysterious gender chemical label – because it isn’t. People who say “hormones” affect behavior are likely referring to (what they think are the) “sex” hormones, and totally forgetting the incredible assortment of the body’s most powerful behavior regulating hormones (e.g., leptin, one of the key regulators of appetite) – that, like the majority hormones, have nothing to do with gender.

A hormone is, in simple terms, a chemical messenger produced by human organs and tissues that is used for sending signals to other organs and tissues, to coordinate the body’s activities. The vast majority of hormones (and there almost one hundred) are involved in regulating digestion, metabolism, respiration, tissue function, sensory perception, sleep, stress, growth and development, ambulation….you know, * everything.* All hormones are found in both men and women, in amounts that vary only slightly between genders in the case of estrogens (mistakenly referred to as “female” hormones – men also have estrogen) and androgens (mistakenly called “male” hormones – females also have androgens).

Back to the story, hormonally balanced boys and girls.  As per the Huffington Post‘s account, Ms. Rios the Texas CEO (which in her case must stand for Christian Empty-headed Organism)  made a Facebook post in which she “…stressed that ‘there’s an old biblical sound reasoning why a woman shouldn’t be president.’ ” But, golly gee whizzing snakes in a garden, she didn’t cite any biblical verses to support her view.

As for her – or anyone – citing “biblical reasoning” to justify anything – by now y’all are aware on my opinions on that matter.  Ain’t enough hormones on the planet to explain that Go Ape Shit.

t

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Preview of Coming Attractions

Mark your calendars, local book lovers: A week from this Saturday, on April 25, the Beaverton City Library will hold a book fair featuring local (Washington & Multnomah county) authors.

The event, ingeniously titled Author! Author!, is free, open to the unwashed lit-loving public who, from 10a – 1p may browse and (hopefully) purchase selected titles of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children’s literature penned by local authors, as well as rub shoulders [3] with authors and fellow bookworms.

Yours truly will be there, with copies of The Mighty Quinn, and also my short fiction collection, This Here and Now . [4]  Do stop by, if you can, to say howdy, browse the titles, and maybe bring me some celery sticks.

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Department of Are We (Still) Having Fun Yet?

Recently there have been several articles, in the New York Times and other news outlets, about how flights to and from the Tel Aviv airport [5] have experienced delays and disruptions when ultra-Orthodox Jewish men refuse to be seated next to women.

Andrew Roffe, 31, a writer based in Los Angeles, said he and a friend wound up debating the ethics of the situation after Mr. Roffe described his experience on a flight….. When passengers started to board, an ultra-Orthodox man stood in the aisle, refusing to move and delaying the departure for 15 to 20 minutes until another passenger volunteered to switch seats.
“My buddy who is Orthodox was saying this is a traditional thing — he doesn’t want to be tempted when his wife wasn’t there. And I said, ‘Are you kidding?’ This was just some woman flying to work or home and minding her own business.”
(When a Plane Seat Next to a Woman Is Against Orthodox Faith, NY Times, 4-9-15)

In many of these incidences, airlines and/or passengers have tried to accommodate the Orthodox ortho-assholes’ men’s demands, a fact that is almost as infuriating to me as the idiocy of the demands themselves. Such “tolerance” is in fact abetting ignorance, discrimination and bigotry – don’t do it, folks. Would you accommodate a demand from a member of Christian Identity, or one of the other religious groups that believe in the separation of “the races,” if he refused to be seated next to an African or Latino or Asian man?

A flight from New York to Tel Aviv was delayed by half an hour last week after a group of male ultra-Orthodox Jewish passengers refused to sit next to women, the third such incident in recent months….The cabin crew tried to find seats for the men, but were met with refusal by other passengers, some of whom who took a dim view of the reasoning behind the request.
(“Groups of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men keep delaying flights by refusing to sit next to women,” The Independent, 4-16-15 my emphases)

A dim view, ahem.  Once again, I ponder the dimmest of views that the backward thinking which produces the shrouding of women, both literally and metaphorically begets. Religions and cultures which preach restrictions for women, and for men’s contact with women, almost always cloak (yuk yuk) or justify such restrictions about women as being a protection for women; specifically, to preserve women’s modesty and/or privacy, to prevent them from being considered sex objects, to shield them from the less than gracious gaze of the menfolk, yada yada yucka.

Aside from the fact that religions which forbid or severely restrict intra-gender contact outside of marriage [6] are JUST PLAIN MYSOGYNIST and severely fucked up, the restrictions (for both men and women) end up doing the opposite of what the proponents of them say they do. Restrictions and proscriptions for women deeply and relentlessly sexualize women.

Limiting women’s physical presence in/access to public society and limiting inter-gender contact combined with shrouding the female form – these practices practically scream to men, LOOK, IT’S A WOMAN !!  Males raised in societies where they have little or no contact with unrelated females learn a warped, circular, paradoxical social dynamic – ’tis a  Catch-22 situation that reinforces the dangerous nonsense they are taught. They don’t get to know girls and women as people, but as The Other. This mysterious, dangerous, Other’s mere presence will tempt them to stray from whatever path they’ve been taught they must follow…and yet, they must desire this Other, as per Allah’s/Yahweh’s plan for family and procreation. Since the men in such societies don’t get to know women as friends, mere acquaintances or co-workers, women are either relatives or potential mates – potential seductresses! – who therefore must be cloistered and….round and round and round again.

Although there is nothing arguably or intrinsically private or provocative about a human being’s elbow, human nature being what it is, if you are indoctrinated with the idea that catching even a glimpse of a woman’s uncovered  ____ (hair, feet, elbows, nostrils) is provocative, then it will become that forbidden fruit.  I saw her suggestively wrinkled arm joint and  felt a pang of lust – it must be true — praise Yahweh/Allah/Fox News and get that hussy away from me! [7]

I keep thinking about the Orthodox man on the airplane, who said he didn’t want to be “tempted” by sitting next to a woman. [8] Poor schmuck. The average American man boarding a crowded plane is not thinking about avoiding temptation when he is seated next to the average American woman. Yo, Ortho dude, here is what normal, rational people think about on airplanes: they wonder how long/late the flight will be and what will happen to their luggage, and will their rental car reservations be messed up like the last time they flew to Cleveland. They are hoping the human beings seated on either side of them are not Amway distributors looking for new recruits or the type of people who chow down three garlic sauerkraut chili dogs from the airport’s Baby Got Brat kiosk before boarding a six-hour nonstop flight.

 

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May all of your fellow travelers in life be healthfully-hormoned, and superstition- and sauerkraut–free, and may the hijinks ensue.

 

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

 

 

[1] You knew that was Community Supported Agriculture and not Confederate States of America, didn’t you?

[2] Sorry to get all agricultural-technical on you, and in only the second paragraph.

[3] And elbows or other non-sexual body parts, which still may be threatening to Ultra-Orthodox Jews (story to follow).

[4] Which is out of print – RIP, Scrivenery Press – and may only be obtained from the author herself, ahem.

[5] And, more and more, other destinations, as the high-birthrate Orthodox population increases, and encounters the rational – i.e. non-Orthodox – world.

[6] e.g. most strains of Islam, Hasidic and other varieties of Ultra-Orthodox Judaism.

[7] Although I’m singling out conservative Jews and Muslims here, I hold the same contempt for conservative Christians’ Purity Movement and similar organizations, which over-emphasize and warp human sexuality via their obsessive teachings on “sexual purity” (shudder).

[8] Time to tempt SCM with another footnote to nowhere. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!