I want to laugh at this writer's naive faith in marriage. If only those girls got married, and adhered to my personal mortality... he doesn't exactly tell us what would happen. Would these unfinished boys magically become good fathers or would they still hand their children back to their mothers with cuts on their heads? Would the mothers end up not working nights somehow if they were married?

And I'm not seeing how shame would help at all. Maybe it would make us feel good about ourselves; we're such big and wise adults that we made teenage girls feel bad about themselves. A great feat that only maybe a zit or some brat at their school could do. Yea, that'll show them for having the sex! Oh, you say that shame would keep them from getting pregnant? Shame's not birth control. In fact, it can impede it if you're so ashamed for having sex without marriage that you don't take proper precautions thinking "Oh, we won't go all the way. I'm a good girl." or "I'm a slut anyway for having sex the first time. It's not like I can say no when Sleazy McSleaze wants it again". Shame can cut our teenage girl away from good options from reaching out to trusted adults if say, her sleazy boyfriend is making her uncomfortable and poking holes in the condoms or even from getting a ride someplace where she can get the condoms and the birth control.

And marriage? It's not fricking fucking magic. If we all married the first person we boinked, I get the feeling that the children wouldn't see much benefit after the eventual divorce. Instead of wanking off to fantasies of shaming teenagers into virginity, maybe a little birth control, real sex ed and support for mothers would go a long way? Nah! Better make them write essays! That's real helpful,man.

I just get the feeling that it's not possible to have a company made completely of top performers. People's performance also shifts from day to day, week to week, year to year. We all say we want only the top people, but I wonder if it might be more effective to rely on a deep bench of people who are average instead of using up the 9s and 10s until they are 1s and 2s.

It also seems like a big waste of people to constantly fire everyone, make their lives hell....

I admit that I like memoirs of ordinary undistinguished lives. Reading them I feel part of a sisterhood of plain janes. Some have been addicts, and I sympathize with their horrors, some are ordinarily quirky people, and I laugh with their foibles. Yes, the latest "I had a life that was filled with interesting horrors/ amusing detours" book may not shake civilization to its core, but that's not what I read them for. OK, I admit it- to me, they are the written equivalent of television. I read, I'm briefly entertained and I move on.

Not every book has to be a deathless literary feat.

This article about being an escort is interesting. Whenever a woman is seen trying to achieve something, there always seems to be an added question- is she fuckable? It seems half the criticism of feminists is that we don't try hard enough to be fuckable, since you know, that's what we should worry about most.

People who say that if you have time to complain, you have time to change things are idiots. Why? It took me 20 seconds to type the first sentence of the post. Now, if I was to tackle a common problem- 'losing ten pounds' or 'being more organized', at least a week would be required. Losing ten pounds would require planning out exercise- "should I wake up at 5:30 to run three miles?", a meal plan (which includes figuring out what exactly is healthy), and then actually doing the cooking and running. This is hours of effort. And of course, this is not easy either- there will be times where I eat tons of delicious foods, and times in which I sleep in. So losing ten pounds may in fact take months, or even a year.

I get the feeling that people who say things like this just don't think about what they are saying, but they should. When people say things like that, they make light of change, which is brutally hard work.

A huge peeve I have is the idea that there's a minority of people who produce and the rest of us are useless parasites. Many people use social services yet produce a lot of things, such as they stock our groceries, cook and serve our food, and clean our buildings. They pay sales tax, gas tax, and tons of other taxes. Without the workers, without the people who do the making, the shipping, the paperwork, the folks on top wouldn't have any profits to gamble with.

I don't think marriage will fix an $8000 a year income. At best, you'll have two broke people who can't find gainful employment and their kids. I think that really, focusing on moral stuff like whether so and so believes in 'hard work' is pretty silly. They can work hard all they want, but if there's no jobs or they get sick doing all that labor(and not to mention: if they have no way to monitor their children, the kids may end up in trouble), they're in the same position as they were.

Education is probably a good idea, and we need to improve our educational system to work for the children's needs instead of 'reformer's' pocketbooks. Of course, that's no guaentee- black college grads have an unemployment rate double of white college grades.

BTW: You can get food stamps and work. It's just that your job doesn't pay any money.

NOW thinks up a clever way to deal with Hooters- if you're a family restaurant, you need to follow laws against sex discrimination, and if you're a titty bar with more clothes, you don't need kids there. Of course in the comments, there's a lot of complaining about how NOW women are BAD and JEALOUS because they aren't CONVENTIONALLY ATTRACTIVE. Personally, I think the best response to that is not to say BUT I'M A SUPER HOTTY! but to notice that it doesn't matter to the argument. It's a legal argument, not a beauty contest.

Also on feminist misquotes, Andrea Dworkin corrects the record in a 1995 interview.

This comment really captures something that has bothered me for a long time about 'time management' People always say "I just make time!" as if somehow all time is equal. As if a sleepy afternoon hour when you can barely string together two sentences is the same as a peak energy morning hour! I try to put the most energy using tasks at the best times, but on some days, I have no good hours of energy. I have a lot to spend my few hours of energy on, and when I am working, I tend to spend it on work rather than recreational writing.

Of course, the heart of this issue of who surmounts impossible odds to write and who doesn't, is that it doesn't really matter all that much. Sometimes people in fact are just talking. Everyone who says "Oh, I'd like to write a novel someday, when I have time" does not in fact need to be told about how if they just wrote a hundred words a day, they'd have a novel way before retirement or told about how they need to make time to write.

Maybe they just like to think of themselves as creative, a little more interesting than their lives have turned out to be. And that's OK.

We all have little fantasies of ourselves being the sort of person who likes doing things that we really don't like to do. We want to imagine ourselves as the sort of people who travel to exotic locations and have adventures or do volunteer work, but some part of us understands that bugs, heat and exhaustion do not figure into our fantasies.

And so it is with fantasies of being a writer. People don't imagine rereading their words over and over and over to edit it, or being up at 5 am writing that new chapter. And that's fine.

Advice for people who always complain that others don't heed their advice.

The thing is that the problem is not that people don't heed your advice. The problem is that you get twisted out of shape if people don't heed your advice. Advice is not a legally binding contract. If I tell someone not to buy brand name clothes, that they are all just made by the same sweatshops in China, and then they buy new name brand clothes, getting bent out of shape isn't going to help me at all. They probably heard my advice, and didn't think it worked for them. It's not a moral failing, they just like brand name clothing more than they like saving money.

And that's OK! This is not an epic battle for moral superiority! Giving advice is giving your opinion. Not everyone will agree with your opinion, and even if they do, everything is easier said than done.

This story creeps me out.

Now, I can't really excerpt it for you, but basically, a guy goes on a journey, tries to help some stranger who jumped off a bridge after this guy tied a rope around his waist, and then lets the stranger hurtle down into the water after some spiel about responsibility.

As a metaphor about not taking on too much, it doesn't work since the our audience is balancing our 'hero' losing momentum towards his goals and the horrible death of a stranger whose actions are irrational, but probably not death penalty worthy. Also, there's also the image of other people as mere baggage, mere obstacles on the way to your glorious goals. Just drop them off the bridge, and go on your merry way!

*shudder* I'm not saying drop all your goals and become codependent on a crack head. But balance is the key here. We're all interdependent on each other. We're both the man going towards his goal, and the man hanging off the bridge. Maybe we're the rope too. Seeing ourselves as all the characters gives us more compassion. Say, we're the man hanging off the bridge.

We see that our own actions have been foolish, irrational, or maybe we don't see. Anyway, we're hanging off the bridge, depending on someone else. We're scared. What if he leaves? What if we're all alone, speeding towards the water, the person we hoped that would save us, walking off smugly, after giving us a lesson in responsibility. Of course, we can't really learn this lesson, as our hearts stop when we hit the water.

Using math, people figure out that the rent is so high in many places that even with two minimum wage jobs, you're barely making it. It's so high that even if you wore sacks as pants, never watched cable on that cheap tv you got from extremely suspicious merchants, and only ate stone cut lentils, you'd be in the same position, but really miserable.

I've been trying to figure out why this 'culture of poverty' stuff bothers me. Some have written beautifully on environmental factors, and some have spoken on the effects of growing up poor.

I guess one thing that bothers me is that it's not just the language of Rohan and the language of Mordor, and those who can speak both are able to move fluidly- it's the idea that the language of Rohan is somehow the language everyone should speak, forever more, and that the language of Mordor has no grace or poetry to it. I don't agree with that- the ways people live are always both beautiful and terrible, because humans are like that. By focusing on what we think is 'terrible', even if we ourselves are doing the same 'terrible' things, we miss the whole rest of people's lives.


I was reading slackitivst and people were talking about the parable of the prodigal son. And I think some of the people talking about the culture of poverty are like the older brother. Instead of rejoicing that the poor can at least have something in their bellies, even if we don't like what they eat, or can enjoy some of the good of society, even if we think that their choices are wrongity wrong wrong, we sit in resentment. If only we could change their dysfunctional culture! If only they'd see the light! But..even if we think they should live like this or that, maybe we can let go of the feeling that because someone is poor, we should be able to control their lives.

Because, at base, this is what our whole culture of poverty ideology is about. It's not about discussing people's experiences equally- it's about saying that if only poor folks had made the same choices as us, or choices we think everyone should make, they wouldn't be poor. That's why I don't like it. The idea that people who are richer are somehow better than the poor. That there's one right path to get through life, and if you deviate, you're wrong, even if you're adjusting to the circumstances of your life.

And I don't want to have that power. I don't want to be in people's bedrooms, questioning if they are having sex the 'right' way, with the 'right' person. I don't want to be at people's doctor's appointments, trying to make them not have children they want. I don't want to be in people's mailboxes, and bank accounts, trying to make them spend their money the right way.

To say that I know how you should live your life...that's arrogant. I know I'm arrogant, but to give yourself that much power, you're giving yourself an equal amount of responsibility. The world is not under our control. To say that you know the right way for millions of people! Feel the hubris of that!

To say you know when they should have kids, what they should eat, what they should spend their money on, what they should value... It makes me dizzy to think of it. Maybe we should try to be more humble. Instead of approaching people with "You should...", maybe we should try to listen to others sometimes.

White feminists realize that just because there's TEH SEX in porn doesn't mean that any and all standards for say...*safety* and *not getting a horribly fatal disease* are suspended. We can discuss how we can have some standards, but let's not pretend that porn stars aren't workers...

I'm thinking about the rat fable David Sedaris read on This American Life. BTW: Some time ago, I heard Sedaris read at the Canon Center, and he said that he had a lot of them and didn't know what to do with them. Now he does. Anyway, he's amazing, squee,etc. But yes, I really dislike people that Sedaris is satirizing with the rat character. On an irrational level, it feels like bad luck. I'm a grumpy guts, and I'm way less sick than many beautiful people who love life and help others. Thinking that they must have secretly done something wrong seems overly distrusting, especially if they are out saving the lives of babies instead of playing Civilization 5 for a zillion hours, and less logical than simply thinking that say...one can't help that they have breast cancer or lupus, etc.

The American belief that the individual has almost mystical powers bothers me on a deep level, that sadly for this blog, I can't quite articulate. All success is on an individual's shoulders, but also all failures, and that's too heavy for one person to bear.

What does his mom's marital status or lack thereof have to do with his success as an entrepreneur? Is this 1954? Let's get off of the whole UNWED MOTHER kick for good.

Now, I'm not a positive person. I don't tell others to smile or that their problems are unimportant because of the starving kids in Africa. But I think that some paths to problem solving are dead ends of despair. And one of those dead ends is thinking that getting people to make decisions you approve of is the path to societal change. It can be fun in small doses- I like getting riled up and complaining as much as anyone. However, if all we got is telling our cousin Mookie, random acquaintances in the grocery store, and strangers on the internet to close their legs, to not choose to parent when they want to parent, to stop drinking all that soda, well, we're doomed to failure.

People rarely change their behavior because someone says so. For example, I hear all about how fast food is horrible. There are websites and national campaigns against eating factory farmed meat products. But I still eat it. Why? Several factors- it's quick and I can go to a fast food place without being late for work tasks, it's avaliable, it tastes better than food I make myself, occasionally others buy it for me, it's familiar and comforting.

If you want me to stop eating McDonalds, a lecture won't work. You're going to have to identify my reasons. You can't do this by arm chair psychoanalysis. If you want to change the behavior of one person, you'll have to actually try to talk to them on their level. Figure out what drives their behavior and what help they want, instead of what you think they need. Then instead of focusing on their behavior- focus on your own. How can you promote the opening of restaurants with quick, healthy, and inexpensive food? It may take work- the good part of the finger wagging is that you don't have to do anything. All you have to do is complain, and complaining is fun.

But it's passive. You're waiting for others to come around and see your obvious rightness. You feel productive, but you're standing still. In terms of social change, you might as well have been writing Gakuen Alice fanfic. In which they are all furries.

Postbougie helps me learn that just because we're both black that doesn't give me the right to start complaining that some other lady's sex life isn't the same as mine. Trying to force all black women into this one model isn't working! Marriage is consistently held up as an ideal, but women who don't fit into the ideal don't go "AHAHAHA! I'M GOING TO HAVE A BABY OUT OF WEDLOCK* TO BRING DOWN THE BLACK COMMUNITY!!!" It's not like that, and no amount of finger wagging is going change the reasons people do things that we don't like. I can say "You gotta LUUUURVE everyone you have sex with" and folks will still have casual sex, because sex is fun. I can say "You need to do a credit check, background check, and check his 401k contributions before he can even see your ankle" and folks would pretend to do a 401k check, much like religious folks pretend they never have sex outside of marriage, and then go with what actually fits their lives instead of my ideals. Yea, I said it, people will go with what fits what is actually going on in their lives rather than the ideals of people on the internet that live in totally different states!


*That sounds so judgey and old fashioned, btw?

More about how No Wedding No Womb is a horrible fucking idea.*


*Not so much about weddings- there's nothing wrong with a good marriage,but the idea that if everyone conformed to this marriage ideal, everything would be dory hunky.

Apparently scolding black women to get married hasn't been working, so we need a different approach. It's not two parent, white wedding or total chaos as our choices. There's a rainbow of opportunities out there.

The black snob discusses parenthood and I have an opinion. My first opinion is that not every child can be so easily dissuaded from sneaking out at night as the black snob. Some children are easier to parent than others, so a child who is easy to parent can be guided easily with a parent with just basic parenting skills. It's like getting a baby to sleep through the night. Some will sleep through the night no matter what a parent does almost[They won't sleep through the night if they have a rap concert every night at 3 am, but other than that, they'll sleep through anything] and some will have parents up every night, contemplating leaving their child at the fire house. People who have the easy babies can think they are better parents than those with more difficult babies, but that may not in fact be the case.

Of course, many others may have issues with the narrative about the goals and dreams of teen moms- I get the vibe that some think that if teen girls had higher self esteem or more goals or something they wouldn't get pregnant, and while it's important for girls to have goals and dreams, a broken condom doesn't go "Well, she wanted to be an ob gyn,so I'll magically fix myself!",and contrary to stereotype, 'good girls' who have goals and study hard still have sexual relationships- some with well meaning boyfriends and some with 'men' who ought to be ashamed of themselves, and some will, even if they have access to birth control,will get pregnant, and some of them either won't have access to or do not desire to have an abortion or go through the trauma of adoption.

I also have to note that the nuclear family model is not the only model- a cousin, a brother, an aunt,a friend, a teacher, a church member- all of them can raise a child. I have to admit that sometimes I think we act like women have a crystal ball and can see the future of a relationship,so we blame women for not knowing that a relationship would go south- it's not just casual encounters that lead to single parenthood, but committed cohabitation or even marriage.

Children aren't a problem to be solved, but a solution to be envisioned.