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My Final Post

31 Dec

In 2013!  I got you there, didn’t I?  You thought this was my last post ever.  PSYCH!  Ha.  Okay.  Moving on.  Seeing as how this is the very last day in 2013, I thought maybe I would try to squeeze in one last blog post.  So, here it goes.

On my way to work yesterday, and having recently turned 30, I was thinking about all the things my also recently-turned-30 friends have been posting about being 30.  Like, how to know you’re 30.  Why your 30s are better than your 20s.  And things to stop saying in your 30s.  Sorry I didn’t link them all but after skimming through half a dozen such lists my eyes glazed over and I sort of just wanted to melt into a metallic puddle sort of like Alex Mack did on that show.  Come to think of it, I often fantasize about melting into a metallic puddle and sneaking out of, and into, places but that’s a story for another day.  So here are a few things. First of all, and maybe it’s because I wasn’t an avid social media user when I turned 20, I don’t ever remember there being lists about the things one should and should not do and say and think when maturing from teen to after teen.  Second of all, shut up.  I don’t know who made these people the authorities on the ways people should behave when they reach a certain age but I would like to see some credentials.  I would then like to take those supposed credentials, rip them up, throw them on the ground, and jump on them sort of like the bubble wrap my friend Carie and I discovered on a street corner a few years back.  There we were, two adults, one in her 30s, jumping up and down like lunatics on a giant sheet of bubble wrap, giggling and generally causing a scene.  We were, as some may say, acting “totes cray” and it was fantastic.  In fact, I wouldn’t mind jumping on a sheet of bubble wrap right about now.  Anyway, back to the list.  I agree with my friend Peter who, on a Facebook post mere hours after I was initially thinking about writing this post (get out of my HEAD, Peter!) said the following (much better than I ever could, mind you):

“There’s an article on Huffington Post about things you should not be saying once you’re over the age of 30. And I just thought, who is this punk to tell people what they should say and shouldn’t say? There are all these ways that people tell each other that they’re not good enough, that they’re unknowingly foolish and our minds get filled up with these corrections. Don’t write about this subject. This is how you ought to be. Don’t do this, don’t wear that hat, quit posting this, it’s too long, it’s too political…so for this New Year, my first resolution and wish for all of us is that we banish these little voices that seek to gain power or status over the “foolish masses” by shaming us for innocuous habits.”

Granted, there are things that people say that I don’t like.  It has nothing to do with age or anything, I just think these things are cliche, sound stupid, or make basically no sense.  But you know what?  I personally just don’t say them.* Anyway, I don’t know.  I am 30 and I sometimes say stupid things.  I also still have stuffed animals on my bed, do not own an iron, have no professional clothing, and sometimes I even eat junk food in the middle of the night (apparently all no-nos according to the internet).  I think I am still doing okay.  I also think that I shouldn’t just wake up one morning and be like “oh, I have turned this entirely arbitrary age and now I have to start behaving like An Adult.”  Whatever.  I like behaving like me.  So, I have compiled a list of things that people should stop doing altogether, no matter the age (this is in no particular order):

1. Stop making lists telling people what they should and should not do.

Oh, well, I guess according to my own list the list should just stop there.  That was a close one.  I just totally almost made a complete fool of myself.  But seriously.  I love The Internet just as much as the next person who enjoys cat videos, but I am oftentimes shocked by the things that go viral.  So that list, which obviously originated on Huffpost Women because shaming women is like a national pastime, must have been posted by like a dozen of my Facebook friends.  And I just kind of think that maybe there are other things that people should refrain from saying in casual conversation at all ages.  You know, things that hurt other people.  Things like saying something is “gay” or “retarded.”  Making jokes about rape.  Calling someone a whore or a fatass or a faggot.  Using racial epithets.  I don’t know, words like “adorbs” seem comparatively harmless.

So, anyway, that is all from me in 2013.  Thank you everyone for reading.  It was a banner year!  And I think next year will be even bannerier!  I’m looking forward to it.  Good things are coming down the pipeline for me.  And maybe for you.  Who knows.  In summation, this coming year I hope to write more, be nicer to people who are nice to me and meaner to people who aren’t, and check my email more often.  Try sending me an email sometime in mid-2014 and see what happens.  Hopefully something.

*Okay, fine, there was a recent time when I posted on a friend’s page my annoyance with the phrase “says nobody ever” but I didn’t write a post about it.  And I also don’t judge people for saying it.  I just think it is dumb, not funny and overused. But keep right on saying it if it strikes your fancy!

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Robo Callers can Robo Suck It

27 Dec

What follows is a rant.  For those of you that like my funny ones better and not my ranty ones (ahem Dad, I am talking to you) then maybe you should just stop reading.  Although there is a possibility that this post will contain at least a small percentage of humor, meaning that there is the admittedly outside possibility for this to be the funniest blog post I have ever written and you would have missed it because you are biased against my rants (because you have been hearing them for the past three decades in loud volume).  I’m just saying, choose wisely.

So listen.  I know that I have written about this definitely once but maybe even two times.  I believe it is important enough to warrant some repetition.  These goddamn spam callers are making me crazy!  Seriously.  I have been on the National Do Not Call Registry for so many years and yet I still receive these calls at least two times a week.  This is how it goes.  I get a call from a number I do not recognize.  I immediately get rage-filled.  Depending on my mood I either let the call go and research it on the internet to discover that it is some company trying to lower my interest rate or I answer the call and play the following game:  try to get the individual on the other end of the line to identify the name of their company before they hang up on me.  This game is really not that fun for the following two reasons:  (1) I always, I mean always, lose; and (2) the result is that I get even more rage-filled.  It’s as if I am a super hero and spam calls to my cell phone are my kryptonite.  I might be in complete control of my temper and my reaction to things and then my phone rings with some random 616 number and BAM any modicom of restraint I had flies right out the window.

So at work the other day I was talking to my one customer about my disdain for spam callers.  This came up because my dislike for spam callers is matched by my dislike for people who sell things on the television that are obviously pieces of crap but they market them towards people who are elderly, unwell, or stupid.  I think that is really mean-spirited.  So when my grandpa was all hopped-up on end-of-life pain medication he was watching TV and found this advertisement for newly minted nickels.  So my grandpa, bless his heart, spent something like $1000 on $500 worth of nickels because the commercial told him they would appreciate in value.  They were fucking nickels.  A nickel is worth five cents.  It does not matter how nice of a box you put them in or how shiny they are they are worth five cents from now until the end of time.  The only thing that changes about the value of a nickel is that it becomes less valuable because of inflation.  In his better days my grandpa knew that because he was good at things and also smart but when you’re sick and on medication and watching late-night television because you can’t sleep your judgement tends to go out the window.  And these people are there like little vultures, circling around just waiting to feast on you.  Seriously, fuck those people.  They make me so mad.

So anyway, I was talking to one of my customers about this and he said to me something that people say to me all the time because I have opinions and express them often and animatedly:

Why don’t you tell me how you really feel?

I hate that.  It’s like, I just told you.  That IS how I really feel and if you wouldn’t have made that “joke” I would have run out of steam and moved on to something else.  But now we both have to suffer because I am going to continue to get myself all worked up about spam calls and the value of nickels and you have to listen to it while you drink the vodka and orange juice I’m pretty sure you’re now regretting having ordered.

Anyway, in mid-rant this customer, who has obviously become accustomed to my antics or else is very skilled at blocking me out until there appears to be a break in the rant at which time he can sneak in a comment, said something about feeling badly for the people that work for the cold calling companies.  He pointed out what a terrible job it is and you know what?  He had a point.  In all the time I spent being mad at people who call me and tell me they can lower my interest rate it never occurred to me that I should be angry not at the person calling, but at the person who owns the company because, really, there aren’t that many jobs out there and maybe having a job, albeit an inherently dishonest one, is better than nothing?  I mean, who knows, maybe the grandpa of the woman who called me a few weeks ago also bought nickels at a wildly inflated price.  Or, maybe the woman was a robot.

And, actually, you should go read that article I just linked because it explains EXACTLY why these calls piss me off so much.  They piss me off because if you try to talk to a real person after dealing with a robot and ask them questions about the robot, themselves, or the company then they hang up on you.  It’s like, you called me so why are you being a dick?  No one will give you any actual information because the whole thing is a fucked-up scam.  And then when you finally do manage to get information* and then publish that information online, all of the phone numbers associated with the “company” go to busy signals when you call and the company’s website comes down off the internet.  The whole thing makes me see red.

In the next edition of things that make me crazy, I will write an open letter to both Chase Bank and Discover about the psychological damage their constant credit card come ons have caused me.  Stay turned.

*Apparently calling and telling them that you work for Time yields better results than telling them that you are the editor-in-chief and main (read: only) contributor at FranklyRebekah.com.

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No, I Do Not Want to Lower My Interest Rate

17 Sep

Okay, so, someone told me that I already posted about this topic.  There is a strong possibility that that is the case but I have a sort of bad memory and also I don’t feel like going back through all my posts to see whether or not there is any truth to this claim.  Also, I don’t really care because this is a topic I find so frustrating that I am perfectly happy to post about it more than once.  What could possibly be so important, so frustrating, as to necessitate possible repetition?  Why, the inefficacy of the National Do Not Call registry, or course!

So first of all, in doing some research to write this blog post, I encountered the following important message from the National Do Not Call Registry:

Scammers have been making phone calls claiming to represent the National Do Not Call Registry. The calls claim to provide an opportunity to sign up for the Registry. These calls are not coming from the Registry or the Federal Trade Commission, and you should not respond to these calls.

I have to say this does not instill me with a lot of confidence, not that I really had much before hence the need for this either first or second post on this topic.  But seriously.  Scammers have been pretending to be the National Do Not Call Registry?  What do these scammers say when they get you on the phone?  Do they ask you if you want to be included on the Registry and then when you answer in the affirmative they yell “psych!  You’ve been scammed, mother fucker!”  Do they some how manipulate the Registry so that you can never be added to it, no matter how many times you attempt to register either by phone or through the internet?  Do they then call you daily, rubbing in your face the fact that you fell for their cruel, cruel joke thereby aiding in the development of a very real and deep seeded fear of your cellular telephone? There are so many possibilities.

Anyway, I went onto the site once again to be certain that my phone number has indeed been registered because I get a lot of sales calls and it makes me mad.  It makes me mad not only because they are annoying, not only because I get excited when I get a phone call, only to have that excitement extinguished when I am faced with the pre-recorded voice on the other end of the line, but also because I think that the “companies” that make these calls are mean-spirited.  In my experience, most of the calls are attempts on behalf of the call-ee to get the caller to do something involving their credit.  If memory serves it has something to do with lowering interest rates.  I am actually not sure as to the nature of the call because I am always planning what I am going to say to the actual person on the other end of the line when I finally get the opportunity to speak with a representative.  I always opt to speak to someone.  I then attempt, always fruitlessly, to gather some information.  I have found that if you ask any of the following questions, or make any of the following statements, the person on the other end has been instructed to immediately hang up on you:  what is the name of your company; where is your company headquartered; this call might be recorded for quality insurance purposes; I am going to report you to the FTC.  The other day I was in a particularly saucy mood when I got one of my hated calls.  I, as always, chose to speak with a representative.  The lady I spoke to was, coincidentally, also feeling saucy.  Or maybe she is always saucy, I don’t really know.  Anyway, this happened:

Lady: Hello, would you like to try and lower your interest rate on your credit card?
Me: Which credit card are you referring to?
Lady: Do you want to lower your interest or no?
Me: Yes, but I doubt you can help me with that.  You need to stop calling me.
Lady: Need is a very strong word, ma’am.
Me: Yea? Well, so is ‘asshole,’ which is what you are because you called me during dinner.
Lady: Click.

It actually wasn’t during dinner at all.  It was the middle of the afternoon.  But what does she know?  I might have to go to work at 4. I might have a very strange schedule.  I might eat dinner for breakfast and breakfast for dinner.  I might have just lost my temper and made a stupid word choice error, a word choice error which I then beat myself up about for the following three days (actually the case).  You see, I was fully expecting to sass, but what I was not expecting was to get sassed right back.  Because usually the response to my sass is a hangup, which I also find very rude. It’s like, you called me, not the other way around.  If I had called you and sassed you, then you therefore possess the right to hang up on me.  But since you called me, I think the only party in the interaction that should, by the laws of phone etiquette, be allowed to hang up on the other person should be the callee.  You see, I was going about my day, minding my own business, thinking about rainbows and unicorns when you interrupted my day with your bullshit, and not to mention illegal, sales call to my personal cellular telephone and then you had the nerve to hang up on me, leaving me feeling not only angry but also rejected?  That’s really fucked up.  Anyway, I just really think that hanging up on someone you called, and also sassing someone when you are imposing on her day, is simply beyond the pale.  I am getting all worked up again.  Fucking lady and her fucking bullshit imposter credit card company.

So here’s another thing.  Those sham companies make me really angry because they prey on stupid people and that is just not right.  Most people find these calls to be just annoying.  Some people like me find them to be absolutely infuriating but I’m an extremist.  But then there are some people who think these calls are being made by people who actually want to help them and they give the person on the other end of the line all the information to totally fuck them over.  I mean, there must be people that share their personal information or else these companies would not be able to pay their employees, and therefore they would cease to exist.  There are some people in the world who are stupid, and it isn’t their fault.  There are also some people in the world who are NOT stupid but who lack basic financial literacy because for some reason teaching people about money and saving and investing and budgeting is not something that is considered important in this country.  (Well, I think some could fairly make the argument based off recent strikes, budget cuts and policy changes that teaching anything at all period is not important in this country but that is a discussion for another day.)  I just think that most people work hard for what they have, be it a little or a lot, and it is really not right to go and call them and trick them into thinking you are trying to help them and then take advantage of their stupidity or financial ignorance or whatever and steal from them.  And then what do the owners, or employees, of these companies say when asked what they do?  What if they were on a first date and the person on the other side of the dinner table was all, “what do you do?”  Do they say “I own a company that blind calls people and hopes they’re stupid so I can relieve them of all their savings?”  I would hope that if I were on that date I would pick up my drink, throw it in the persons face, pick up his drink, throw that in his face also, and then storm out.  Or, better yet, I would smile, pretend like I thought that was cool and then, when he was in the bathroom, register his email address on like every pornography site ever.

As you can see I have given all of this quite a bit of thought.

Oh, but the point of all of this that I totally forgot to make is that I registered my phone number on the National Do Not Call Registry sometime in like 2010 or 2011 and I still receive all these phone calls!  What the hell am I even on the damn list for if I am going to get the calls anyway?  Or am I on the sham list and I just never realized it?  While writing my thesis I wasted more time than I care to admit researching different phone numbers that had scam called me and then reporting them to the National Do Not Call Registry.  It really just isn’t right.  The National Do Not Call Registry owes me a lot of time.

So, yea, National Do Not Call Registry, get your shit together.  Protect the stupid people.  Also the people who get extremely angry about receiving scam calls and then find it necessary to spend an hour writing about it on their blogs. I am sure I am not the only one.

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The Internet is SUCH a Crazy Place

28 Aug

So, a couple of things have happened since I last posted.  So, last week I wrote a post about the whole incident that happened in Ireland at an Eminem concert at Slane Castle.  I didn’t really expect too much of a response since a lot of people were writing about the same thing but I was wrong.  Somehow my blog got linked on a Flemish-language newspaper and my blog EXPLODED in Belgium.  (Keep in mind the word exploded is entirely relative.)  So I had my two best days ever in the history of my blog one right after the other.  I even got some hits off of Twitter which basically never happens for the following two reasons.  One, I am confused by Twitter as a general rule and two, I have like 51 followers.  I had 52 but then someone unfollowed me.  When you have basically no followers you notice the ebb and flow.   Then this sad thing happened.  I noticed that, after the HIT EXPLOSION my daily hits were slightly higher than normal and came from search terms instead of my blog followers clicking on their emails or my Facebook friends finding the link there.  I then noticed that I was getting all sorts of hits from people looking for the image of the girl giving head at the concert.  (If you don’t know what I am talking about, just read the aforementioned blog, it will fill you in.)  So, okay, I have a few things to say about this.

First of all, seriously people, I don’t understand what is so damn exciting about a photograph of a girl sucking a guy’s dick.  If you really want to see what sucking a dick looks like, go suck a dick.  Set up a camera on the other side of the room and have it take a photo of you in the middle.  Put a stupid lime green hat on the person on the receiving end of the oral gratification, have that person throw his hands up into the air and basically you have the photo.  Not that exciting, really.

Secondly, if you really insist on seeing the photo, which makes me think less of your value as a human being because neither the girl nor the guy featured in the photo gave their consent, why don’t you try searching Google images?  You know what Google images is?  A way to find images.  You know what a photograph is?  An image.

Thirdly, porn.  It exists and it is everywhere.  The beauty of porn is that if you are turned on by people that look as though they are not consenting of the photograph being taken or the film being filmed, you can find that only the people actually have consented.  Acting, you know?  So you get the best of both worlds.  You get to view people engaged in sexual acts that maybe look like they are not participating willingly or as though they don’t know they are being photographed/filmed, but you are not being a horrible creatch and reinforcing all the fucked up gender stereotypes that run so rampant throughout our culture.

Fourth, think about what your desire to look at this photograph means and start asking yourself tough questions.  Do you think she deserved all the negative attention she is getting?  Why?  Would you feel the same way if the roles were reversed, if it was a man pleasuring a woman?  Would she still be the slut?

Fifth, I hope you read my blog when you accidentally got there.  I hope you read it and starting thinking about your role in the world.  And I hope you know that I think you are a complete asshole.

So another thing that happened is that I received an email from my friend Debbie complete with a screen shot that demonstrated the fact that my blog has been banned by the company for which she works.  We think it is because I wrote a post about going to a male strip club and that, throughout that post, I used the word “penis,” both in the singular and the plural, very liberally.  On the one hand, I sort of feel as though you haven’t really made it until you’ve blown up via  Flemish newspaper and been banned in a couple of offices.  On the other hand, I use the word “vagina” ALL THE TIME.  The word vagina is even in the title of one of my categories.  And yet it wasn’t until I used the word penis that my blog got banned.  So, that’s fucked up.

And finally, today I received a comment on my blog that said the following thing:

“Read on twitter you do a bit of bartending, would you be interested in us customizing your own bottle openers? We have a free promotion going on right now, send an email!”

My very own FranklyRebekah bottle openers.  I never thought I would live to see the day.

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A Different Beefcake Ruined my Workout

29 Jul

Maybe you all remember back in October when I wrote about how a trainer at my gym ruined my workout.  No?  Well, you can read it here.  To recap, I was in a place I hate being (the gym) doing something I hate doing (lifting weights) and I was forced to talk to someone I had no interest in talking to.  There was no escape and I was pretty sure I would see him around every time I convinced myself to go to the gym so being overtly dismissive was out of the question.  I do not like having unnecessary bad blood if I can avoid it.  Anyway, I pretty much pretend like I don’t recognize him whenever I see him which is, obviously, the mature way to handle the situation.  I just carry along with my day, doing squats the way I am supposed to do squats and ignoring his looks as he does like 50 kabillion pull-ups because he is so strong.  I’m just glad he doesn’t talk to me anymore.  Or, well, I was glad he didn’t talk to me anymore before a new trainer decided to give me advice.  Now I would take the old beefcake over the new one any day.

So there I was, post-run, doing some ab things on one of those big balls.  He was in the midst of training this other woman when he caught a glimpse of me doing my workout and said under his breath, in a voice that was way too excited for the circumstance,

“Ooh! Tucked ab rolls!”

Unfortunately I didn’t have my music, making it harder for me to pretend like I hadn’t heard him. Whatever, I pretended anyway.  Then he leaned over and said

“Miss? If you want I can show you a variation to do on those that will really engage a whole other part of your core.”

I hope those words are never said to me again.  Anyway, against my better judgement I agreed to hear him out.  So he showed me something that I guess was maybe a little bit better and I thought the whole thing was over and I would just go along with my life, avoiding his glance when I walked through the gym.  Pretty much I like to think when I am at the gym I am invisible. But no, of course he wasn’t done.  He then wanted to watch me do the weird, new, obviously very exciting tucked ab rolls.  Then he said that, if I wanted, he would do some sort of movement and flexibility test which comes with my membership.  It felt like a strange thing to turn down so I acquiesced. I mean, how do you turn down free!  He asked for my number or email, I opted for the latter.  Last Thursday afternoon, at 12 o’clock, was my 45 minute appointment.  It was the most uncomfortable 45 minutes of my life.

After running through a few normal questions, he told me he wanted me to do this stepping exercise to try and figure out my vo2 max.  While gathering all the necessary equipment, he told me that he had scored an audition (a role? a place?) on this show Fit or Flop which, he informed me, is a show to try and find the next Jillian Michaels.  Personally, I don’t know why anyone would want to be the next Jillian Michaels because, as far as I can tell, she is a bitch who yells all the time.  But whatever, to each his/her own.  In informing me of this opportunity which I cared oh-so-much about, he told me about another trainer with the same gym company who is on the current season of Fit or Flop and had created a workout class called “coregasm” which was designed, surprise surprise, for women because women have orgasms while doing core exercises.  I thought of informing him that if this were the case then basically all women everywhere would have really awesome abs but thought better of it and instead told him that I was sick of this obsession with sexualizing everything.  I figured this would be a clear sign that I am was not interested in discussing sex or sex-related topics with him.  Apparently not clear enough.

No more than 5 minutes later he was on about this woman he works with at another location who makes and markets all these cute workout tops with fun sayings on them.  Every Friday the trainers at this other gym wear her t-shirts to try and drum up some interest.  I thought that was nice.  He then informed me that he got the shirt that said “fitgasm” on it. Of course. He promptly launched into a whole story about how one of the members at the gym told him about his own fitgasm and said that he thinks women have them more than men and that if he were a woman he would work out all the time.  Seriously, dude.  Let’s go through this again:  if women had an orgasm every time they worked out two things would happen.  One, the gym would be more crowded with women and two, the gym would be louder.  We’re not stupid.  We know a good thing when we experience it.  But again I didn’t say any of these things.  Instead, I looked at him blankly and said “yea, people say really inappropriate things all the time” hoping that he would read that comment as “you say really inappropriate things all the time.”  Obviously he didn’t.

Fast forward 4 awkward comments later to when we were wrapping up the longest 45 minutes of my life.  He started explaining to me why he had asked me lots of questions at the beginning of the session including “what do you do to unwind.”  He then said to me, “you know how you said you like to hang out with friends?  Well, this other client I have told me she likes to” –he looked around the gym suspiciously and lowered his voice to a whisper — “have sex.”  Dude!  I said the only thing I could think of to say which was “um…I’m sure her partner is very happy about that?”  He nodded his head enthusiastically.  Ew.

So that was pretty awesome.  And by pretty awesome I mean incredibly awkward.  I have been left over the last few days wondering if this is his chosen behavior all the time or if there is something about me that screams “yes, please talk to me about sex and sex-related things at every possible opportunity.”  If that is the case then I need to change that thing because trainer, I do not want to talk to you about sex ever at all.  And now, after this incredibly weird experience, I am left with two responsibilities.  One, I have to hope that you don’t realize that the link at the bottom of my email is to this blog because it would be uncomfortable if you read it and two, I have to avoid you every time I go to the gym from now until eternity.

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Why Do People Cut Their Nails in Public?

28 Jun

So today I was reminded of one of my biggest pet peeves:  people cutting their nails in public places, most notably on the subway.  This afternoon I dragged my exhausted self into the city for an appointment with an extra large, extra caffeinated iced coffee in hand, while reading an article on Alzheimer’s research (for those of you wondering, any sort of progress towards a cure seems sort of hopeless at the moment).  I was really excited that the R train came right away and that, even though the N had passed on the express track while I was two stops away from Atlantic Avenue, when I arrived I found it waiting there with open doors, inviting me to enter. I hustled across the platform next to an equally excited woman who was eating pork rinds.  I settled into my seat, drinking my coffee, reading my magazine, generally feeling happy about my insane train luck and then I heard it.  Click, click, click.  I have this like, really keen sense of hearing when it comes to people clipping their nails.  I started looking around the car to find the culprit and there he was, a young man, probably in his 20s.  He was sitting next to his girlfriend, hunched over, shedding his nails all over the train floor.  Yuck.

Before I get a little more into this, let me just say that if my boyfriend were to start cutting his nails in public I would break up with him then and there.  That, to me, is a sign of a complete inability to discern that which is disgusting from that which is not disgusting and I do not want to date someone who thinks that doing something disgusting in public is normal.  To me, nails should only be cut when you are alone, in the bathroom, with your hand or foot dangling over the garbage can to try and catch as many errant nails as possible.  It is then important to sweep.  There is nothing worse than walking around the house, feeling a prick on the bottom of your foot and then discovering that someone elses nail is stuck into your skin.  A guy I used to date used to cut his nails on the coffee table while he watched TV, collect them into a neat pile and then deposit them into the ashtray.  I had to leave the room.

Anyway, sometimes I think that people who cut their nails in public literally follow me around.  I encounter one such person in the subway at least once a month.  When I was on my way to New Orleans in late February, the woman in front of me on the plane was cutting her nails.  One time I saw a cab driver cutting his toe nails (thankfully I was not in the cab at the time).  I have seen them on the bus, on the train platform, I have seen nail clippers dangling from key chains.  These people are everywhere.  They are everywhere and they are always cutting their nails.  Do their nails grow faster than other people’s?  Are there just thousands of people who find cutting their nails in public appropriate?  What is the thought process behind this?  Do these people simply not notice that their nails are long when they are in the privacy of their own homes?  Are their lives that busy that they have no choice but to cut in public?  And why in the world do they have nail clippers with them on the go anyway?  Of all the things I might think to throw in my bag, nail clippers are nowhere on the list.  And then you have to wonder, do public nail clippers do other yucky things in public as well? Do they floss out in the open?  Do they pick gunk out of their belly buttons while sitting at a red light? Do they pop zits at the dinner table?  These are all things that I wonder whenever I encounter a nail clipper out in the wild.  These are all the questions I silently asked myself as I suffered through the click, click, click of a public nail clipping event just this afternoon.

Seriously, one of these days when I am on the train and this happens, I am going to politely approach the offending individual and ask him or her why.  Either that or I am going to siddle up next to the person, snatch the clippers out of his or hand, and throw them violently across the train, taking care to not hit anyone in the head with them because that would hurt.  I will let you know how this goes.

As a final point, I would like to quote from my friend Mandy’s response to my Facebook posting about this very incident:

“The cutting of one’s nails in a public place should be condemned openly and publicly. It is revolting and I don’t understand why people don’t know this.”

Mandy, I could not agree more.

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We’re All on About Paula Deen, But What About the Blackhawks?

25 Jun

This whole thing with Paula Deen is a total mess.  Previously, the most outwardly offensive thing about Deen was her overuse of butter and heavy cream.  In fact, one of my favorite games to play back in the day was “predict when Paula Deen is going to add more butter/heavy cream.”  Turns out no matter when you said “butter!” or “heavy cream!” you were right more often than not.  It got old fast but it sure was funny the first few times.  So anyway, Deen has been all over the news and rightfully so.  However, there are many people who have rushed to her defense.  One of those people was a commenter on the New York Times website by the name of Sandy who said,

“I am Paula’s age and live in the South. Whom among us hasn’t laughed at a joke or said something about another race and yet not been racist. (Um, Sandy, you are obviously racist.) I for one believe Paula is like me. We grew up in the 1960’s and definitely know about civil rights and honor them. To fire her for some off hand remarks is a knee jerk reaction by the Food Network who has made a lot of money off of her show. She was sued for the money and now dropped by the Food Network for fear it’s watchers would revolt against her and the Network. Shame on you!”

This attitude was repeated by Deen herself as well as her sons, Jamie and Bobby, who both spoke to Chris Cuomo of CNN in defense of their mother.  I would love to pull the whole interview apart, but I fear I could not do even close to the job done by Alyssa Rosenburg of Think Progress so I encourage you to read her piece entitled “What Paula Deen and her Sons Tell us About the Four Ways Racists Defend Themselves.”  It’s super well written and gets at some of the things a lot of us have been trying to articulate over the past few days but have struggled with.  Anyway, all of this is actually not the point of this blog post because, honestly, I have not been reading up on this Deen-bacle enough to really be able to express my feelings about it in a way that I could get behind.  Perhaps that will come sometime in the future.  The point of this blog, instead, is to point out something that has sort of been boggling my mind over the past few days which is the fact that while we are all talking about Paula Deen, and while people are criticizing her and defending her with equal fervor, we watched with fascination and excitement an incredible Stanley Cup final.  One of the two teams in the final wears a jersey featuring the face of a Native American (worn, may I point out, by a team made up overwhelming of white men). Why aren’t we outraged about this?

As pointed out in an article in The Native Press from 2003, there have been lawsuits brought against many professional sports teams, most notably the Washington Redskins, for their use of racist and derogatory names and imagery.  The term “redskins,” according to Suzan Shown Harjo, president of the non-profit Morning Star Institute and an advocate for American Indian rights, “is the most derogatory term for Native Peoples in the English language.”  And yet in 2013, the Washington Redskins still retain their name.  And then of course there is the Atlanta Braves and their infamous tomahawk chop, which is shared b the Florida State Seminoles, a team that also features offensive imagery on its jerseys.  As pointed out in a recent article on Policymic.com by Sarah Dropek, the Blackhawks were criticized most recently in 2010 for the “the racist nature of the name, emblem, and mascot of the team.”  To the people who claim that “political correctness” has no place in hockey, Dropek declares that

“the problem with decrying political correctness as a reason to throwout a legitimate discussion of racism is that it claims the racism is frivolous, that it is not worth upsetting the fandom or the team dynamic. The suggestion that the racism is not worth arguing against is a claim that it has no real negative impact in our world, that it is not worth bothering about in light of other issues.”

This, I think, is exactly the point. And Dopek does not stop there.  She then says,

“The objectification, commodification, and logo-ization of a group of people (a very real, live, and living people) is cause enough for change. The continuation of racist stereotypes of Native Americans based on these logos is reason enough for change. The majority of sports team logos and names center around animals, much like the Boston Bruins (bears). When you slap a stereotypical image of a Native American on a jersey you are equating them to these nameless, carbon-copy animals that populate other team’s locker rooms. They are no longer a people with agency, history, and future like anyone else, they are a thing to be harnessed however the individual in charge decides. “

For those who then point out that teams such as the Blackhawks compensate tribes for the use of their images as a way to let themselves off the hook for blatantly racist and dehumanizing actions, I say you are missing the point.  No amount of money can undo the damage of commodifying an entire group of people.  If there was a professional, or collegiate, sports team called “The Kikes” that pictured a shifty-looking guy with a big nose on the jerseys I think we would have a lot to say about that.  So why is it that in a country willing and able to have a conversation about Paula Deen’s blatant racism, we are so incapable of being critical of the even more obvious racism presently featured in the sports world?  Are Native Americans so invisible to us that we don’t even notice anymore? Or are we just so attached to these names and chants that we simply can’t bear to change them.

 

 

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Jezebel: Stick with Women, Stay Away from GMOs

5 Jun

I’m sorry.  This is really long.

Okay, so, there was a time when in the mornings, after checking the headlines on the New York Times, I would head over to Jezebel and see what was happening in the world of women, as represented by feminists (some of them not so much) on Gawker’s payroll.  It was a pretty good way to keep up on all the happenings surrounding that Susan G. Komen debacle, gave me a link to an amazing speech by Sandra Fluke, and strengthened my extreme dislike for Donald Trump (I previously hadn’t thought that particular strain of dislike could be strengthened but there you have it).  In the last few months, however, I have found myself, for reasons I could not quite pinpoint, abandoning my daily visits to Jezebel.  Maybe it was because of those damn “thighlights” that I found both hypocritical and gender-normative, maybe it was the Jezebel staff-writer who had a few drinks at my bar and was a total asshole, or maybe it was the fact that the site was straying from it’s gender-focus and moving more in the body-snarking, celebrity-obsessing, semi-women related fluff direction.  Whatever the reason I didn’t have a particular aversion to Jezebel, more a feeling that we had just grown apart.  Until, that is, I read an article titled “Everyone Just Shut Up About GMOs.”

I don’t know if all you readers actually know me but here’s a little background.  I stopped eating meat when I was 11-years old because the texture grossed me out (still does!).  As I grew older I started having moral objections to the way we in the United States raise and slaughter our animals for consumption.  I don’t like the way we grow feed, the damage that concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) do to our environment, the lack of oversight of CAFOs and slaughterhouses at the state and federal level, the power the meat lobby has in Washington, the immunity that packaging plants seem to have to any regulation whatsoever, etc.  I could go on for days, literally.  This is not to say that you should stop eating meat or that I think any less of you if you do.  Educate yourself, if you want to (I know some good places to start), or don’t.  Your choice.  My interest in food and agriculture just sort of spread out from there and, during my junior year in college, I became incredibly interested in genetically modified organisms.  Over the last ten years or so, I have done quite a bit of reading on this topic so to come across an article on a relatively high-traffic site that was as poorly researched as this one was really infuriating.  I am actually sort of convinced that the author was being paid.  Let’s just look at some of Meagan Hatcher-Mays more…um…simple-minded points.

1. “A lot of people are wary of GMOs because of long-term public safety and health concerns. These fears are misplaced—not only are genetically modified foods regulated by the same rules as ‘regular’ food, but there is also a broad consensus in the scientific community that genetically modified food is safe to eat”

If GMOs are regulated by the same rules as regular food, we are fucked seeing as how regular food is hardly regulated.  Or, more specifically, that regular food is regulated in such a way that protects industry over consumers.  Ever heard of “veggie libel laws?”  Or the story of Stephanie Smith, a children’s dance instructor, who ate an ecoli-tainted burger in 2007 that rendered her paralyzed, with cognitive problems and with severe kidney damage?  Her case was settled in 2010 largely because she was profiled by the New York Times in 2009, lending her experience the added boost of national interest.  Also, there is no scientific consensus that genetically modified food is safe. Short-term studies seem to reveal it is fine, but GMOs have not been on the market long enough for anyone to decisively say they do not cause long-term harm.

2. “Monsanto… has genetically modified its seeds to make crops resistant to pests, herbicides, and disease. But the crops’ ability to repel these dangers reduces the need for pesticide use, which is actually good for the environment.”

Actually, no!  The result of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds have resulted in the creation of super weeds, against which Monsanto’s seeds are not resistant.  This is because of evolution!  As it turns out, weeds and insects also want to survive and will evolve over time to be able to tolerate the use of Roundup.  The result is that farmers all over the United States are forced to use greater amounts of more hazardous pesticides in order to deal with this new generation of pests.  This was discovered by Charles Benbrook, who is a research professor at the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources at Washington State University.  He found that herbicide use has increased by 527 million pounds from 1996 to 2011, and although insecticide use had initially decreased by 123 million pounds,  it is now on the rise.

3. “GMOs can provide much-needed vitamin supplements for populations that are deficient. Two ounces of golden rice can provide almost 60% of the recommended daily intake of vitamin A.”

Here, Hatcher-Mays completely disregarded the scandal revolving around the tests of “golden rice.”  This rice was tested on children in China without the proper research approvals and without informing the parents of the children that the rice was genetically modified.  As someone who enjoys occasional forays into academia, this fact is incredibly problematic and also reinforces the feeling that many consumers have that they are not being provided proper information regarding their food by the agricultural industry.  Hatcher-Mays insistence that people against GMOs are therefore against poor people shows her inability to do even the smallest amount of research into the topic: I found a wealth of information in a 5 second Google search. Treating the poor as guinea pigs is not exactly a good thing.

Also, “golden rice” is not as new as Monsanto and other GMO supporters might have you believe.  I learned about it when I was in India in 2004 and Marion Nestle, a professor of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU published a letter to the editor about it in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association in 2001. In her article she does not completely dismiss the usefulness of biotechnology in reducing diseases caused by vitamin deficiency, but she does state that simply adding vitamin-B to rice neglects to address the other biological (necessary enzymes and dietary fat) and political forces that are needed to truly deal with this deficiency.

Listen, maybe golden rice will be helpful in the future.  More tests need to be carried out to that effect and probably the scientists should inform their subjects of their role in the study and also the contents of the food they are eating.  Also, internet writers in the United States should shut up about their desire to feed “poor, nonwhite, non-American, non-British human beings” if they haven’t done even a modicum of research into the surrounding debate.  Repeating mistakes made at Tuskegee is probably not the best approach.  Also, to trick ourselves into thinking that big-Ag is doing anything positive without thinking primarily about PR campaigns and its own ever-deepening pocket is simply naive.  These companies are far-more concerned with making money than with solving world hunger.  The state of agriculture in the United States is horrific and to think that big-Ag has any intentions other than expanding into growing markets is ridiculous.  Whether or not GMOs are dangerous to human health when consumed has still not been proven, but the fact that they are incredibly dangerous to the environment at large (water usage, increased herbicide and pesticide use, monocropping, etc) has been proven time and again.  So, probably people shouldn’t be self-righteously telling those who know more than them to shut up about GMOs.

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Today in Ridiculous: New Bill to End Flight Delays!

26 Apr

Hear ye! Hear ye! Read all about it!  Today, the day before the Senate leaves town for a week, they did the unthinkable: they passed a bill.  Unanimously.  What did they pass, you might ask?  Well, I’ll tell you.  As the title of this blog suggests, they passed a new bill to end flight delays.  Oh, thank god.  Seriously, you guys, that is like the most pressing issue I could possibly imagine.  On time flights for all!

Okay so listen.  There was this one time when I was going to visit my extra-super-awesome friend Meredith in Portland, Oregon in like, I don’t know, 2008?  So long ago.  I had been working at a restaurant in the West Village where my schedule was as follows: Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights 6pm-2am or later if needed, Sunday, Monday nights 4pm-12am, or later if needed, and Tuesday lunch, 10:30am to 4pm.  At the same time I was training for a marathon and had speed workouts on Wednesday nights and long training runs on Saturday mornings.  Needless to say I had very little “me” time.  I was very excited for my 4-day Portland adventure, which I had scheduled months in advance.  The day of the trip I traveled, by subway, to JFK to catch my nonstop flight to Portland.  Upon arrival, I was informed that my flight had been cancelled due to “lack of crew.”  Um, what? Instead, they flew me to Washington, DC to catch a connecting flight to Portland.  Fine.  When I arrived in DC they told me there was no flight to Portland, so I would have to spend the night in DC, fly to Chicago the next day and then on to Portland from there.  I would arrived at 4pm on Saturday, about 32 hours after I walked out the front door of my apartment building in Brooklyn.  Not going to work.  I asked the lady if I could just fly back to New York and change my trip.  No, because, somehow, flying to DC because the company had fucked up and then, as a result, flying back to New York would have used up the tickets I bought plus my free ticket and so I would have basically just flown to and from DC just for fun.*  Finally, after much attitude on the part of me, she got me on a flight to San Francisco for that night. I would then spend the night in San Fran at the airline’s expense, and then fly on to Portland the next morning. I would arrive there at 10am.  Twenty-six hours after leaving my house.  I took it, but not after I gave the lady a piece of my mind which resulted in me getting escorted out of the line by security.  It was not my finest moment.

Anyway, that whole experience sucked.  (The trip to Portland was, as expected, so great! I want to go back!  Meredith, when can I come back?!) Anyway, so I get it, flight delays are awful.  But seriously?  THIS is the thing we are so excited about?  That the Senate managed to pass a bill to “ease impacts of cuts on air traffic?”  Okay, so let me just give you a couple of really fun little quotes from this article I read in, where else, The New York Times.**

Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said “I am so happy that we were able to work together across the aisle in a bipartisan way to solve this problem.  It’s nice to know when we work together we can really solve problems.”

I just have to say that I am pretty sure that I learned the lesson of working together in like, kindergarten, but some people just take a little longer.  Also, I would just like to say that cuts to air traffic control that results in flight delays certainly results in inconveniences but I would hardly call this a problem.  Problems, to me, are cuts to education, to social security, to infrastructure development and maintenance.  You know, stuff like that.  But what do I know.

And Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, had these words: “At some point, we have to admit the best thing is to find another $2 trillion in debt reduction by looking at revenue, closing some loopholes and bringing down the debt with some spending cuts, but not ones like this.”

Oh, no, not cuts like that!  Never cuts like that!  I mean, cuts to air traffic control is totally insane and I can’t believe we ever in a million years thought about doing it, let alone actually did it.  I know!  Let’s take money from other parts of the transportation budget and just, you know, move it to air traffic.  Like, let’s not invest in high speed rail.  That was a dumb idea, anyway.***

Then there’s this. Republicans are accusing the Obama administration of “mismanagement of the cuts, at best and intentional infliction of pain at worst” (emphasis mine).  And then also, this: “Republicans — and some Democrats — have been pushing for much of the month for a rescue of the air traffic control system, charging that President Obama was intentionally extracting maximum pain on the traveling public to illustrate the costs of the cuts, called sequestration.”

I know that last paragraph is redundant but I feel like if The Times can have both those sentences in one article, so can I.  Anyway, here’s the thing.  Maybe the Senate wants to prove to the American public that, after the debacle involving the failure of the background check bill which 90% of the population supported yet still couldn’t get through the Senate because Senators are “doing what their constituents want” (!!!!!) that it can actually accomplish something.  Well done, Senate, you get a gold star.  But give me a break.  I mean, sure, when I fly I want on-time departure and on-time arrival.  I think we all do.  But let’s not act as though we are solving some huge, life-shaking issue.  Let’s not be so sensationalist that we start talking about how Obama is intentionally fucking with your life, travelers, to show you that spending cuts suck. What this is to me is the whining of a bunch of people in the leisure class who are pissed that their lives are inconvenienced by something that they themselves pushed for.  They wanted spending cuts, they just didn’t want it to impact them.  So why don’t we go ahead and solve this problem and let all our spending cuts occur on the backs of the poor.  So carry on, travel class!  We’ll get this economy back on track but don’t worry, you won’t feel a thing.

*I was young and stupid back then and didn’t know the full potential of letter writing.  If this happened today, I would write the shit out of some letters (and, obviously, post them here).

**I know it might not seem like it but I do, in fact, read things other than The Times.  I read The New Yorker.  Also, books.  Also, all of the comments written on that grumpy cat internet meme.  I want that cat.

***I don’t know that this is where the money is actually coming from but I am feeling especially snarky this morning so, whatever.

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I Think the NRA is Missing Something with this “National Model School Shield Program” Thing

2 Apr

On December 14, 2012 I walked into the laundry mat near my house and was faced with the same gruesome news report that people all over the country, the world even, were greeted with: the deaths of 20 first graders and 6 educators at the hands of a 20-year-old man suffering from a mental disorder who then, as is the norm it seems, killed himself.  And all this after he had put a bullet in his mother’s head. It was horrific.  It was one of those days that really just makes you wonder what is wrong people that they are capable of such atrocities.  It makes you question the idea of ever having children if having them means they will to enter a world in which this sort of event happens.  It was heartbreaking and nauseating and continues to be so today, 3 1/2 months after the event itself.  It also spurred those words that I have begun to hate so much for their lack of meaning:  never again.  It’s almost like that’s the thing politicians have to say to make the public believe they are actually going to aggressively go after an issue, and the comment they can reflect back on when they try to convince themselves and the country that their completely impotent, sorry excuses for policies that in reality do absolutely nothing were worth the months of useless, partisan conversation we had to endure.  And so here we are again.

I honestly am at a loss today.  I have reflected back on Newtown and the idea that maybe we need to consider the state of our mental health infrastructure and the way in which we have been raising our boys here.  And then I talked a little bit about gun control legislation here.  And so now today I am going to do what I should have done months ago when Wayne LaPierre made a statement regarding Newtown following a week of complete and total silence from the NRA. (Silence which, by the way, he claimed was out of respect for the victims and their families but really, I would venture to make a guess, has more to do with benefiting the NRA than anything else.) For those of you who aren’t masochistic and didn’t listen to the entire press conference the day it was given, and for those of you who can’t, or won’t read the complete transcript I linked above, I will give you a series of small quotes from which you can glean the basic gist:

“How do we protect our children right now, starting today, in a way that we know works?… We care about our money, so we protect our banks with armed guards. American airports, office buildings, power plants, courthouses — even sports stadiums — are all protected by armed security…The only way to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved and invested in a plan of absolute protection. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun…. With all the foreign aid, with all the money in the federal budget, we can’t afford to put a police officer in every school?… I call on Congress today to act immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school — and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place when our children return to school in January.”

Okay.  So, we all laughed and we all thought he was crazy, but in the back of our minds we were thinking, well, I was thinking anyway, what if this idea gets some traction?  What if people actually think this is reasonable?  And, surprise!  Today the New York Times published an article entitled “Under Heavy Security, N.R.A Details School Guards Plan.”  This plan is a 225-page document full of proposals to improve school security, including the suggestion by LaPierre —  who, by the way, was not present at the press conference — to have security stationed at schools.  At this conference, for “safety,” was a bomb-sniffing yellow lab and a dozen officers in both plain clothes and uniform, one of which admonished photographers to “remain stationary” until the press conference was over.  (Sounds to me like a little paranoia if I’m being completely honest.)  Is this what they want for our schools? Is this what they want for our students?  For our children?  I think that even in the effort to theoretically make our children more safe, the presence of all of this fire power and all of this assumption of danger makes for a slightly scarier, more sinister learning environment.

But let’s just say that we say, yes!  Let’s put guns in the schools!  But then we would have to ask the smart Mr. LaPierre where all that money would come from.  It’s true, the US does spend a considerable amount of money, about $50 billion annually, on foreign aid.  And guess what countries receive the lion’s share of aid.  Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Mexico and Columbia.  Thinking about what we have put those countries through in the last decade or so with our preemptive actions and our wars on drugs, we owe them a few billion easy.  And all the money in the federal budget? I’m pretty sure we’re actually in a situation where we have to decrease our budget by something like $1.6 trillion.  In order to do that do you know what’s getting cut?  Are we significantly going to cut our defense budget?  Are we going to raise taxes considerably on the richest Americans?  Are we going to deal with the expensive and unfair add-ons to so many bills that make their ways through congress?  I’d venture a guess and say no.  What we are going to do is cut down on social spending.  We’re going to pull money out of welfare, infrastructure, Medicare and Medicaid, the US Postal Service and, you guessed it, education.  So then what are we supposed to do?  Not buy new books, cut teacher’s salaries, get rid of free busing?  Or are we going to put it on the school district itself to decide whether and how to employ these security guards at schools?  And if we do that, what happens is that the wealthiest neighborhoods that, normally, don’t experience violence on a regular basis are going to have security guards and schools in neighborhoods in places like Chicago’s south side,* districts that lose students to shootings every single year, will likely go without.  So if we do go ahead and support this plan, which I personally think is an insultingly obvious play by the NRA to increase its own power and revenue, what we will end up with is a ridiculously classist and racist band-aid response to an issue that really should have spurred an assault weapons ban, a limit on magazine size, a discussion about mental health in this country, an understanding of how our gendered approach to, well, everything is incredibly damaging to both men and women and how our capitalist system has resulted in an incredibly individualistic culture that just exacerbates all the problems I just listed.

Or we can just take the easy way out and do absolutely nothing of any significance, like usual.  Never again my ass.

*Probably some schools in this neighborhood actually do have security given the recent history of gun violence in the area but a very brief search on the topic yielded no definitive information.  The point is that if the onus of responsibility for providing armed security lies on the schools, then many schools with less available funds will opt not to provide it.  For those that do, it necessarily means that the money has to come from somewhere else.  Schools in inner city areas, ie schools in areas with lower property values and therefore lower taxes, tend to have lots more students and much less funding than public schools like the one I went to in New Jersey, and so if they do opt for security the money that they do allocate for that purpose has a bigger impact because there was no extra money to begin with.  So access to money for, well, teaching significantly decreases.

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