Line Up To Eat Me!

The TV keeps telling me that vipers and other incredibly poisonous snakes, alligators and crocodiles, predatory sharks that take over beaches where people swim, and lethal, invasive, and exponentially more populous, nearly-invisible jellyfish are all animals that are beautiful and need to be protected and not hunted and killed.

They’ve been on the planet, evolving, for millions and millions of years. Smooth-voiced narrators on the Discovery Channel and other channels say this like it gives the toxic bastards some sort of right to slither, swim, roll, and stomp all over the planet; MORE of a right than humans.

If they’ve been on the plane for millions and millions of years, I say, they’ve had a good run. It’s time to phase the fuckers out so they can’t bite us and sting us and rip us and eat us up any more.

I have a pretty smooth voice. Maybe I’ll make my OWN documentary, explaining the dynamic of hunter vs. hunted, and how when a species becomes the PREY, it’s okay to fight back and kill whatever is trying to EAT you.

Give me a fucking break. Sharks are awesome animals, but if one tries to bite me, you can bet your sweet ass I’m going to cut its fucking head off and mail it to fucking PETA.

Looking at Craigslist and the newspaper today, there were tons and tons of missing animal ads. It appears Seattle is next in line for a big, fat, natural disaster that just might knock us back into the stone age. And would that really be so bad? At least it would put a temporary halt to all the gentrification, and maybe lower the cost of living.

I will never understand why rents are so high in Seattle. It really isn’t a good place to live. There is water, and there hare mountains, but unless you work for Microsoft, or are married to someone who works for Microsoft, or started a coffee company a long time ago and now own an empire, you’re pretty much fucked.

It rains all the time, the state flower is Mildew, toxic mold is ignored and thus proliferates, and all the serial killers come from here and murder all of our hookers. Our freeways were built for the Boeing economy of the 1960s, and as far as volcanoes go, let’s just say if Mt. Rainier or Mt. Hood erupts, bye-bye Boeing. Or at least, bye-bye all the housing for people who can’t afford to live in Seattle proper and have to sit in hours of traffic every morning to get INTO Seattle proper (read: Renton and everything south of Renton).

Fault lines? We got ‘em. They aren’t even lines, really. A map of faults in the Puget Sound region looks like a detailed diagram of Buckwheat’s hair.

There are three major north-south freeways in the Seatlte area. One of them, 405, is on the other side of Lake Washington, so we’ll ignore it. If you are heading north-south on either side of downtown Seattle, you are either on I-5 or on 99, which is basically being held together by a combination of sheer willpower and state union-workers’ bubble gum. If there is a major earthquake (the “BIG ONE” we’ve all been trying not to think about since we learned about it), I-5 will most likely be buried under the Washington State Convention Center, which is actually built ON TOP of the fucking freeway. Whoever thought that up and got paid for it is certainly running a good racket.

99 will collapse and be swallowed by the Sound, as it is on a fault line, and the natural water line near downtown Seattle is somewhere near 3rd Avenue.

The sports stadiums we all voted against (we voted down the football stadium THREE TIMES) but the governor overrode us and made us pay for them anyway? They’re going underwater.

The tallest buildings in Seattle, one of which is where I used to work? They are built on top of “old Seattle,” which was never filled-in and stabilized. Rather, they put some posts up, added some concrete, and built on top of it. AFTER most of it had burned to the ground. So we’re talking charred remains.

Pioneer Square, Westlake Center, Pike Place Market…all of the landmarks Seattle people are proud of, and expect out-of-town people to know about, will be in the drink, on fire, or swallowed up by the Earth we Seattleites are so fond of saving through bumper-sticker and leaflet campaigns.

Maybe an earthquake will irreparably destroy the new light-rail tracks. The train that goes from the airport to nowhere near downtown Seattle. Useless piece of shit. IT’s another way the city is trying to rape us all in the ass for yet MORE of the money some of us would like to save to move the fuck away from this shithole. Once you pay for the trip on the train to the Sodo Station, you get to pay for a bus that will take you to the bottom of the hill, so you can hike up a 35 degree incline for 5 blocks in the rain to get to your office. PLEASE, Seattle, let me give you more money to fuck me over even more!!

Fuck Seattle, and fuck nature. If I could afford it, I’d move the fuck away. But Seattle makes that impossible, as all the money that comes in goes OUT toward rent, taxes (INSANE taxes that pay for things like stadiums and light rail projects that are completely impractical and unnecessary), bus fare, utilities (how can Seattle run out of water? Seems like every year, we have a “drought.” This is not possible. Fuck you, Seattle! I’ll keep saying it until you give me a reason to stop!), umbrellas, mildew remover, allergy medicine to keep from asphyxiating due to the mold.

Fuck you, Seattle. You, the city, may be first in line to eat me. You’ve certainly earned it. Asshole idiot hippies. You are idiots. Every last one of you. Even me. Because I live here.

We all deserve whatever the planet can dish out. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that the Food Network exists. There’s nothing worse to me than seeing food of any kind on tv. Or in movies. All I can think when people on film are eating food is, “My God, that food must be completely turned to dust by now, and how moldy it must have been no less than a couple of days after filming.” There’s not a lot grosser than that.

But there is one thing: people who chew with their mouth opens, and people who make loud smacking noises when they eat. It’s just bad manners to make a big show out of eating. I’m not saying to eat like an anal-retentive jerk, all prim and proper. I’m must saying have some fucking consideration for people who have to watch and hear you eat. Here’s a hint: NOBODY wants to see and/or hear you eating. Any more than they want to see you pooping or barfing. It’s just something you should keep to yourself.

Then the Food Network comes along, and brings cooking and eating into popular culture. Every time I see a show on someone cooking, and then some people eating them, I wonder why they don’t go the extra step and film the digestion, and ultimately the excretion of their creation. Why not sift through the crap left behind by the diners we just watched cook and eat, and figure out what nutrients are absorbed and actually used by the body, and what nutrients are there just for “show,” or for “taste.”

Sure, if you want to enjoy yourself cooking, that’s fine. If you want to enjoy eating, more power to you. But it is absolutely SICK to consider the act of watching people cook and eat something you can’t touch or smell yourself entertainment. It’s like pornography, but there’s more poop involved, unless you’re into THAT kind of porn.

So, to me, the Food Network is absolutely horrid. What’s worse than the Food Network?

I’ll tell you what’s worse. The fact that a perfectly good cable network, the Travel Channel, has hopped on the bandwagon, but instead of just traveling around the world and showing us what people eat, they have hired this fat, bald, midwestern jerkoff who chews with his mouth open to not just taste various foods from around the world, but to offer his opinion on them.

I don’t even know where to begin with this one. Let’s start with cultural relativism, and how it is absolutely trampled by this show. Cultural relativism, as any person who has taken anthropology EVER , can tell you, is trying to understand a culture on its own terms so that it becomes meaningful and relevant.

What cultural relativism is NOT is trying to compare value systems and make judgments. If you want to understand a culture on its own terms, there is no better way to get off on the wrong foot than to jump head-first into a culture, armed with your cultural biases and values and opinions.

Example: A fat, bald asshole from Minnesota heads to darkest Africa (already, we’re making judgments), where he’s presented with a basket of some sort of dried worm, covered in spices. Because he is a fat, bald asshole from Minnesota, he makes a snarky comment about how disgusting the worms look, but he’ll be brave, and for the sake of his viewers, take a bite. Very delicately, he nibbles a piece of the worm, makes a face, and then, as if he’s in the final round of a brat-eating contest, tosses the rest of the worm in his mouth, chews it, his face as brave and proud as if he had just ended terrorism. He rubs his fat fucking tummy, and moves on.

His producers then throw together (if it’s a show short on actual footage of said fat fuck chewing things with his mouth open and making snarky comments about the food eaten by people in other parts of the world than the midwest of the USA), a 30 second montage discussing how in this part of Africa, desert has taken over. There are few plants left, and the only source of protein left is the Nasty Worm, which is harvested once a year by the entire village, then dried and salted, and used as the staple of the Nasty Worm Tribe’s diet.

How did that make anything meaningful and reldvant to anyone? It didn’t. And of course, that is not the purpose of the Fat American Fuck Show on the Travel Channel. The purpose of the Fat American Fuck Show on the Travel Channel is to capture the fleeting attention of the average fat American fuck at home on his leather sofa, watching HD programming on his giant plasma tv, and therefore garner ratings which will attract advertisers to pay exorbitant prices to put their “caveman” ads on the Travel Channel.

It’s sick, sick, SICK, and nobody, including me, will do anything to stop it. I will, however, complain about it. I’m glad this blog has no readers, it’s liberating. I can say whatever I want, and ain’t nothing anyone can do about it. Kind of like how if the Travel Channel, which does a great job of making the world seem a little smaller to people who can’t pay their rent, support their children, pay their bills, but gladly pay satellite tv companies to bring them HD programming onto their giant plasma tvs.

Great job, Travel Channel! U-S-A! U-S-A!

God I hate humans, and I hate being one. If there is a God, I certainly hope we were not made in his image. There has to be something out there better than us. There just has to be. Because we suck pretty fucking bad. It makes more sense to just go with the idea that we are muck monsters. With many fundamentalists, you can see the distinct family resemblance.

My crappy little Mac decided to eat itself for a while today, crashing my Apple Mail, etc. I was about to throw the thing out the window, but I just couldn’t. Everything was moving at a snail’s pace, and even the massive amounts of pain and sinus medication I’m on right now didn’t quell the frustration.

For some reason, Apple Mail won’t import its own crappy file extensioned files. If you use Tiger, you know about the “.emlx” extension and its complete lack of compatibility with any program, including itself.

So if you find yourself in a situation in which your files appear in your Finder, but not in your actual mail program, you have a pretty nasty situation on your hands. Here’s what to do:

1. Create a new folder on your desktop and call it “EMLX files”.
2. Drag all of your .emlx files into that folder.
3. Create another folder on your desktop and call it “CONVERTED files.”
4. Download this fantastic application: www.cosmicsoft.net/emlxconvert.html
5. Open the program.
6. Open your “EMLX files” folder, and drag all the .emlx files into the converter program’s window.
7. Click “save mbox.” When it asks you where to save the converted files, point it to your brand new “CONVERTED files” folder.
8. DONATE TO THE CREATOR OF THE CONVERTER by clicking on the button. Seriously, it’s the handiest little app and it’s saving your ass, right? So show the love. Give what you can, he’s not asking for anything at all (and no, I am not the creator, nor do I know him at all, I just think it’s polite to share what you can when someone does you a favor).
9. Open your mail program.
10. Click on “File,” then “Import Mailboxes.”
11. It will ask you what kind of mailbox, just click “other.”
12. Navigate to your “CONVERTED files” folder, which now has an “mbox” extension.
13. Let Mail do the rest. It will create a folder for it and everything, and your messages will appear.

Should Mail continue to crash on you every other second, don’t come crying to me. I’m still about to throw this shitbox out the window. Mail STILL crashes constantly on me and I’ve been working on it all day.

Anyone want to buy a Mac?

Imagine for a moment that the human race accepted everything we knew of medicine 70 years after Galen lived as gospel truth, and never developed medicine as a science, because surely, in 70 years, we knew all we ever needed to know. We wouldn’t even have gotten to the glorious “leeches” phase! And where would we be had the barbers of olde hadn’t cured our demonic possessions or imbalanced humors or excesses of bile with a good bloodletting?

In 2009, it will have been (nice English, LUTEM) 70 years since the death of Sigmund Freud, who formed the basis of psychiatry by gathering data on the shit-eating, mother-fucking tendencies of residents of insane asylums, and then telling the world that every personality is formed around our defecation schedules, and our sexual feelings about our parents.

Because, if it’s true for that guy who draws on the walls with poop and decorates the floor by pissing rune-shapes into caked-up vomit, it’s true for the most repressed Elizabethan school-marm, or the baseball player who has his world records revoked because all his bat-swinging was based on roid rage, or your average Joe or Jane, living his or her life shaded by the Elm Streets of suburban anonymity!

That’s right. Next year, we set sail on another 70-year journey during which we just might find out if a cigar can ever be JUST a cigar. Here’s hopin’!

What I’m trying to say is, it is entirely too common, and is entirely too disturbing that people, especially in Anglicized countries like England (ha!) and the US and Canada, are all too willing to accept the word of psychologists and psychiatrists as gospel truth. Yes, there are myriad differences between psychologists and psychiatrists. For the sake of this blog-posting, though, they will be ignored, as they are irrelevant. They both claim to be experts in their field, and what I’m trying to say is, there is no such thing as an expert on the human mind. There are people who have studied the human mind longer than other people have, but that is a far cry from “expertise,” or even “a tip of the iceberg.” To mix yet another metaphor, the science of psychiatry has yet to merely scratch the surface of the subject.

Anyone can conduct a study and publish it. Polish the frame and hang it high, boys! It’s as simple as this: if you don’t understand the beast you are studying, you are not an expert, and whatever you have to say about the subject is entirely irrelevant.

Example:
I could travel to Egypt and give a rectal examination to a camel. I could write my findings in beautiful penmanship. I could maybe even make some graphs and diagrams and label them. I could submit my findings to the leading journal on Dromedary Proctology, and they might very well publish. I could crown myself the Queen of Camel Constipation Relief and maybe get Bono to play an awareness-raising concert under the gaze off the Great Sphynx. I could put my face and name all over television advertising for laxatives, citing my recent studies.

That sounds pretty neat, doesn’t it? There are a LOT of problems with that scenario, not the least of which is I don’t know the first thing about camels, other than the basics, and that their toes are not good fashion role models. I make myself look like an expert, and since I have had my hands up the asses of so many camels, people are willing to believe me.

People who practice and believe in things like psychoanalysis and talk therapy are experts on the human brain as much as I am an expert on the asses of camels. I can look at the ass of a camel from all different angles and think about camel’s asses from all different perspectives. Hell, I can even reach in and pull out a big fat turd every once in a while. But that doesn’t necessarily help the camel.

Any assertions made by psychologists or psychiatrists or even unlicensed “counselors” are just as ludicrous. They can listen to you talk, inform you about tough love, send you to AA meetings, try to get you to think in a goal-oriented manner. Sure, those things might be beneficial, but you can get that same advice from talk radio hosts. They will charge you up one end and out the other, and maybe eve pull up a real turd from your past every once in a while, but talking about it doesn’t necessarily help the camel, if you catch my drift.

I’m sick and tired of mental health workers thinking they are experts, and that everything they say is fact. If that were true, wouldn’t the world be a nice place to live? There would be no blindness, no scizophrenia, no Alzheimer’s, no neurological decay, no strokes, no neuro-vascular disorders of any kind. There would be no learning disabilities, no cerebro-spinal degradation, no multiple sclerosis, no cerebral palsy…hell, no palsy of ANY kind!

But no. We just don’t know enough about the human mind yet. The science is only in its infancy, and nobody has any right to make claims of having even SOME of the answers. Because nobody does. There has been some progress, but not nearly enough to get excited about.

Some doctors still prescribe electro-shock therapy. And some patients still GET electro-shock therapy.

When it comes to psychology and psychiatry, we are not even into the stone age. We’re more at the “water good, fire bad” stage. I’m pretty sure we don’t know that meat is better for us when it’s cooked.

The quacks in the mental health profession haven’t affected me personally, but I could cite several cases (anecdotal evidence, which is why I don’t present it here-I understand that anecdotal evidence is not a logical or effective way to make an argument) in which trust in them has been fatal. And if I, being only one person in a small corner of the world, know that many people who have died as a direct result of advice from these “experts,” there have to be some numbers out there to support this argument. I just haven’t found them yet.

Here are some numbers about suicide (the 11th leading cause of death in the USA, and THE MOST preventable cause of death anywhere):
According to the Centers for Disease Control, as recently as 2005, there were 32,000 deaths by suicide in the US. To break it down, that’s a person deciding to fucking DIE rather than live another day on this planet every 16 minutes. That’s less than the length of the average sitcom, minus commercials. So just about the time Homer realizes MAYBE he was wrong, your sister could have strung herself up in her garage for her 9 year-old daughter to discover when she gets back from trick-or-treating.

The military is doing a stellar job taking care of their own. In 2007, suicides among veterans increased by 20%. In one year, that’s 2,200 people, or two suburban Seattle high schools FULL of young men and women who couldn’t make it another day.

Why aren’t there standardized treatments in place for suicides? It isn’t because the government or the medical community have decided suicides shouldn’t have the right to live. It’s because each and every case is different, and as of yet, there are no means in place to evaluate each and every situation.

As of yet.

Because while mental health workers and social workers don’t have the tools to deal with this situation. Why not? It’s simple. There is just so little known about the human mind, nobody has a clue what those tools would be.

EDIT
***Although this article uses very little usable statistics, it’s on the right track, and backs up what I’m saying about talk therapy. I didn’t know it existed, but I found it on a blog I read regularly. How very fortuitous!
When talk therapy hurts.
***

Ever have a cut on the tip of your tongue, get no sleep for 48 hours, get no housework done because of pain, fall asleep for 2 hours, dream in detail that you have already done said housework, wake up, spend most of your time trying to appease a very noisy cat who has recently relocated his favorite piece of plastic and demands that you toss it for him for hours on end, stay awake to watch a specific tv program, but that program sucks, try to rip some more damaged old cds onto your computer, still not find one of the two tracks you’d been looking for, your eyes heavy like slabs of cement, but so heavy that when you close them it actually hurts your head really badly, your fever rages so you’re off and on too hot or in a cold sweat with frozen toes, your cat jumps up on your bed with a turd stuck in his tail floofs, barfs on two separate little rugs, then insists on wrapping himself around your arm and sleeping with his head in your hand and if you move, he yells until you put your arm back, wakes you up if you roll over or move your arm in any way, you run out of popsicles you’ve been using to ice your bloody stump of a tongue, it’s your best friend’s birthday and her mother is insane and really pissed at her and making her cry all day and you just want to smack her the fuck up but she’s in Hawaii for the winter, nobody answers your one-sentence e-mails asking simple questions, you find a big stack of even MORE scratched up CDs to fix, you can’t contemplate the amount of housework necessary to make the place even remotely habitable, you can’t get “Pannis Angelicus” out of your head, you realize that you’re becoming more and more of a waste of breath with every passing inhale/exhale because you’re 32 but can’t take care of yourself and you are just so sick of dealing with a body that feels like it’s being stabbed over and over and over again all day and all night, and pain medication doesn’t do anything more than take the edge off and make you goofy and semi-retarded?

Why, in sci-fi movies and tv shows set in space, do they always show space battles as if they were set on a 2-dimensional plane? The only one that’s gotten it even close to representing the 4 dimensions is the new Battlestar Galactica. And they only use the full 3d axis occasionally. I guess to make it simple. More tv writers should be forced to read Orson Scott Card.

And now there’s nothing but the rain.

So. Grab your gun and bring in the cat.

It has to be a long, tedious process, standing in line just to eat me. So let me fill you in on the recent reasons for delay.

Yesterday I was in a lot of pain, out of pain pills, and then at my best friend’s first birthday party since she was 16 and her mother invited HER friends over for dinner. It was obviously important to be there and be supportive. Plus, it’s not every day this foxy femme fatale gets out of the house. We had dinner with just a few people at our favorite Greek restaurant in town and my best friend’s two very young sons. When asked if he’d like to lick the candle that came in the birthday baclava, her oldest boy misunderstood and gave it a thorough tongueing a-la cow with a salt lick. Hilarity.

Last night I couldn’t sleep because of the pain and lack of pain killers. I had pretty much pushed the limits of how many aspirin/ibuprofen tabs one can take and still survive in one day to make it to dinner, so night time wasn’t all that great. Did a little reading, did a little soaking in the tub to lower a pesky fever that finally broke sometime around 7 this morning.

Today I managed to buck up enough to get to the pharmacy, fill my prescription, and buy some auto wax.

I can’t really explain the compulsion I had to buy auto wax. Sure, it was a great price. But as my car has been in the garage, and seen extremely little use in the past year and a half thanks to the fact that it feels like I’m being stretched on a rack when depressing the clutch, it’s really not in need of any special cleaning or care. My shopping list for the drug store was short:

drugs
bandaids
sinus tabs
cough medicine

It was entirely surprising to me that I came home with a bottle of car wax. I brought everything upstairs, put away the drugs, took a couple of pain pills, and stowed bandaids strategically around the house, closest to the areas I tend to fall over/bump things/have little accidents with scissors or knives. I hopped into bed, hoping for the pain killers to kick in.

Then, it hit me. It was time to simonize a bunch of old scratched CDs. Over the past few months, I’ve been in the process of finding the perfect, cheapest method to repair the poor things that used to take so much abuse in the back seat of my car. I’ve tried boiling them, scrubbing them with abrasive soap (from the inner ring to the outer ring), then rubbing them with vaseline to fill in the crevices. I’ve had minor luck with some of those methods.

You may wonder why not just either 1) replace the CDs 2) buy one of those little machines that buffs them for you or 3) go to the library or video store and ask to use their CD/DVD repair machines. Well, you’re not the only one, Smarty Pants. I offer no excuse than…well, fuck it, I have no excuse, and I have no reason. This is just the way I do things.

As I type this, there are about 50 CDs on a towel on my bedroom floor, completely covered with simonizing wax, hopefully drying quickly and not very toxically. Soon, I will be scrubbing them. I hope the CDs will play at least once so I can load their contents onto my computer.

The sad things about all this is that there are only two tracks I care about recovering. One is a mix I mastered on an old computer of Leonard Cohen reading the lyrics to the song “A Thousand Kisses Deep” with an on-stage improvisation of him on the guitar. The other is a dance mix someone made of Tori Amos’ “Leather.” It’s a mix I have not been able to find since.

Neither of them is fantastic, and I’m pretty sure I won’t listen to them more than once, ever, but at least it keeps me off the streets, and at least, for the relatively short time it will take me to recover these two tracks, I don’t feel like I’d rather be dead than alive.

Let’s hear it for the subconscious mind’s desire to survive! Hooray!

So stick around. There may be some very shiny, very damaged CDs in your future too. IF you’re as lucky and hopped up on opioids as I am. Psych.

Let me be clear here. In no way is this notice direced at homosexuals, or transgender males or females. I’m talking about “drag queens,” you know the ones I’m talking about. The men who put on a bunch of sequins and clown makeup, complete with giant high heels and lipstick outside the lines of their lips, who prance around on a stage, usually lipsyncing. The men who do this and refer to themselves as “divas.” The men who are actually trying to convince themselves that doing these things is “lady-like.” I’m also talking in very general terms. I know there are exceptions to the rule. There are people in drag out there who perform, and it’s their personal statement about overcoming often overwhelming obstacles to survive, let alone maintain a sense of humor.

The drag queens I am talking about are the ones who deeply, completely abhor everything about women, and prove it by dressing up as caricature of “glamour” and “feminity.”

Well they can all suck my ass.

Is that what drag queens think actual women are like? What a fucking insult. Who the fuck do they think they are?

Go act like a tyrannical cunt of your OWN gender, douchebag. Don’t bring me into it, and don’t bring every woman who has ever lived into your petty fucking hard-times reactionary brand of asshole-ism. And don’t you fucking DARE call it entertainment. It’s akin to getting dressed up in black-face and doing “Mammy” jokes. One could argue that it’s worse. America has abolished slavery, but Americans are still permitted to be openly hateful toward members of their own species. Being sexist is actually considered FUNNY. Really. You can pay to go see a drag show. Is drag-based misogyny legal because being a drag queen is mostly a hobby confined to homosexuals? Of course not. The government is openly against homosexuality. That means we have to face the question: is it legal because it’s okay to marginalize and generalize and completely demoralize women? Apparently, it is (see: Family Guy, Beavis and Butthead, The Simpsons, every fashion magazine that exists, et al.).

Yes, dressing up like a gittery, viperous psycho and calling yourself a “lady” is THAT offensive. It’s as bad as the “N-word.” But nobody else wants to say anything lest they be duped a “gay-basher.” Nothing could be farther from the truth. I have nothing against anyone for what he or she does with his or her genitals, or whatever gender anyone feels they are. I feel deeply for people who were born in the wrong body, and I think that corrective surgery and hormone therapy for those people is necessary and wonderful. But if you think you’re doing anyone any good when all you’re going to do is dress up like a clown and lipsync, then go give blowjobs in the bathroom, don’t you DARE call yourself a woman. That is not what women do. It is not how women act. Maybe it’s how your mom acts, but that is not my problem, and I am not your mother.

Neither is anyone else on the planet, so stop acting like we are the reason you grew up to be a miserable fuck. You need to stop hating all women because your mommy jerked you off and you never got over it. Nobody cares about what happened to turn you into a hateful beast. Nobody. And no amount of back-alley ass-rapes is going to make you any happier, or make anyone glad that you’re on the planet. If you want to be a woman, do some research before you go running for the sequins and yelling, “FAAABULOUS” every time you see something shiny.

There’s nothing funny about your ignorant, obnoxious, hateful send-ups of women. Unless, somewhere in your act, you perform an actual gender reassignment surgery on yourself, and make it so you menstruate. Go through just ONE painful period, and tell me how funny it is to be a woman. Try to button your pants when you’re retaining water. Afterwards, you can call me “honey” and give me unsolicited fashion advice, then glare at me when I tell you, “Thanks, but I’m perfectly happy how I am.”

You get up on that stage and personify hate. You make me wish I was dead, even more than I usually do. You haven’t earned the right. Go wave your hideous, manly Lee press-on nailed talon in somebody else’s face. If you thought of women as human at all, you’d take the time to understand that even being in the audience of such a show is to feel completely persecuted and hated for something we had no say in.

Sound familiar? Not being able to control what gender one is born is universal, and none of us have the right to mock someone for being born one way or another.

Let it sink in that a straight woman just said that. It goes both way, shit-bag. Got it?

You are not a woman, and when you do your little act, your are hurting women everywhere, sending civil rights (yes, you are discriminating) back to the iron age. You aren’t dressing up and acting like an actual WOMAN. You are dressing up and acting like an ASSHOLE. Not all women are the bitchy, shrill psychopathic whores, or innocent little school girls you seem to think we are. Most of us in no way deserve the kind of spiteful treatment you give us on stage. Any woman in the audience can tell you how it feels to be the target of such complete and total active hatred that you are sending her way.

If you want to see what it’s like to be a woman, do it realistically. Otherwise, you’re just another stone on the path to back-alley abortions and no votes for women. Women STILL don’t get paid as much as men in the same jobs. We’re not out of the woods as far as equal rights go, and you are doing your part in making sure that equality never happens.

Try having just ONE painful period, and then maybe you will have earned the right to make a joke about “being on the rag.” Or feeling disgust when someone mentions the word “tampon.”

Attending a drag show as a straight woman is similar to being the only Asian person at a White Supremacist rally.

So shut up. You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.

You miserable, ignorant, misogynist fuck.

When I was a kid (post banana-seat bike, pre-10-speed bike), we had a pretty good sized earthquake. I was standing in the family room, my mother was sitting on a sofa just under a window and beside a bookcase with a 40-gallon fish tank on top. She had a plate of rice on her lap, and she was holding a fork.

It all happened in a matter of seconds, but like most major events, time appeared to slow down substantially. First, the ground moved in a gentle side-to-side motion. The fish tank water was sloshing a little. I didn’t know what was going on. Next, it felt like a series of waves rolling through the family room. A clock fell off the wall. It felt like an amusement park ride.

“Cool!” I yelled. And it was. It was like getting a ride for free, and I have always been a big fan of roller coasters, speedboats, and other devices that shake up your insides. And this one didn’t even require tickets!

Then I saw my mother’s face.

She was green. Her hand, wrapped around her fork, was clenched tighter than I thought anything could clench. She leaned forward, away from the big window, pushed me away from the glass sliding door, looked up at me, straight in the eye, burped slightly as if she was stifling a wave of nausea, and said, “No. NOT cool.”

She dropped her fork and set down her plate, and got to the serious business of getting us away from all the windows and other hazards, like hanging cupboards in the kitchen, and any walls covered with large framed art.

I had never be fore, and have not seen since, the level of absolute fear I saw on her face. Pure and vulnerable, absolutely terrified, she could barely move.

In order to understand how bizarre it was to see her so scared, you have to know the basics about her. My mother was born in the lower 48, and raised in Alaska. When she was in high school, she started hanging out at the municipal airport in Anchorage. She had her pilot’s license by the time she was I think 16. She was one of only two female pilots rated for twin-engine planes in all of Alaska in the 1960s.

She was a bush pilot in possibly the most hazardous terrain and atmospheric conditions in the world, and she had more fun doing it than she’s ever had doing anything else. Whereas a lot of young people who grow up in relatively rustic areas turn to drink and partying, my mother took her friends on puddle-jumping jaunts all over her home state on the weekends.

The day after her 20th birthday, March 27th, 1964, her brother was driving her home along a strip of road just beside the municipal airport where she spent so much of her time. The car started lurching, and they both thought the car had a flat tire.

Then, the road started opening and closing like cracks in dry cookie dough. Everything was moving, and the city of Anchorage was quite literally destroyed. Flattened to the ground in just minutes. Since that earthquake, my grandmother has never and will never take a room higher than the 3rd floor.

My mother, who was a nursing student at the time, volunteered to fly supplies and assist with any medical needs to Inuit villages and other towns with no other access to help.

She never talked about it much. I managed to get her to talk about it once, and luckily I had a voice recorder. She said that she had never seen anything as destructive and horrible until lower Manhattan just after 9/11. Flying aid after the earthquake was how she met my father. People really do form fast bonds in the face of extreme trauma.

When I stood in that family room and saw my mother’s face and heard those three words, “No. NOT cool,” I got it for the first time. I understood the concept that it was absolutely important to stop and think before saying anything.

That was the first time I completely grasped the concept of perspective. It wasn’t an epiphany, it was the understanding that in order to fully appreciate the people around me, I need to try to see events through their eyes. I need to look at someone’s face before opening my big, fat mouth.

Not many people think that way, I have found. It’s more important to most people to make sure everyone around them knows THEIR perspective, so they talk and talk and talk about themselves until their faces turn blue. But to them, they’re doing you a favor. They’re doing the work FOR you.

Instead of trusting you to make an effort to read them, they’re telling you exactly how they feel. And what do you do? In all likelihood, you return the favor and tell them all about you, before you even stop for a second to digest what they’ve told you about themselves.

When I’m having a conversation with someone, I prefer to listen, wait a beat to think a little bit, and then proceed. A lot of people can’t deal with even the briefest of pauses, and a lot of people tell me that I’m “quiet,” and things like, “You don’t say much, but it’s clear you have a lot going on upstairs.”

If you knew me at all, you’d know that I’m anything but quiet, and that I’m really not that bright (Hell, you can tell that by just reading this blog, or even by the fact that I have a blog at all!). I’d just rather simplify things. Instead of explaining everything, I will give the simplest answer I can, and try to actively listen to what people are saying, and think about why they are saying it.

Clearly, this doesn’t apply to every conversation I have. Often, for the sake of efficiency, things have to be said quickly. That’s fine. I’m talking more about conversations with people I care about. I try to appreciate the people I call friends. That’s all.

I sometimes feel bad when I think that there are people out there who have never actually had anyone genuinely try to understand where they’re coming from.

But hey, it took a fucking earthquake to make me figure it out. Actually, it took two.

When I heard that Oprah was working to educate poor African children by setting up state of the art schools, complete with technology, staff, and uniforms, my immediate reaction was, “Good for Oprah! Way to help the less fortunate.” That reaction quickly morphed into the question Oprah apparently did not consider: Why? How is that going to help poor African villagers? What does a millet farmer do with his daughter’s new spreadsheet skills?

Frankly, the entire idea is a cruel tease. Wave the United States flag in the faces of the world’s poor, hug a few kids, and you’re loved. But think about the consequences. Here in the Land of Plenty, we’re fond of our slogans. We’re so fond of them, in fact, that we usually end up in the rut of believing they are true. One slogan in particular comes to mind: KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.

Sure, here in the states, people with more education are likely to get better-paying, less labor-intensive jobs than those with little education. By “education,” of course, I’m talking about what we refer to as the basics: reading, writing, and math. In our country, those skills are absolutely necessary to make a living, keep your home, and live a healthy life, full of food, friends, family, and fun. However, in 3rd world countries, knowing how to read, write a letter to the government, or balance a checkbook isn’t going to harvest the millet, stop the spread of disease and famine, put a halt to the genital mutilation of girls, or keep your animals alive and fed so you can eat.

Here’s a metaphor. You go to the hospital to visit your friend’s 13 year-old son, who has had both his legs amputated. You work with his doctors to install a flat-screen television and kick-ass sound system in his hospital room. The catch is, the only thing he is allowed to watch is a video entitled, “See what you could do if you had your legs? Wouldn’t it be great if you had legs?” The content of the video is comprised of a series of in-depth lessons of how to do the sweetest tricks on a skateboard, how to stand up on a surf board and ride through the green room, which is when you’re riding in the tube of a monster wave. Other lessons include upbeat lessons on how to perform magic tricks using only your toes.

You can teach these kids the basic skills, and show them what life could be like if only they hadn’t had the misfortune of being born into an extremely poor area of the world. You hand them the keys to succeeding in a Western economy. But if you don’t give them a way to use this knowledge, you’re just sort of jerking off.

Some might respond and say, “But what if they just changed the way their village works? Let’s open a 7-11 and a McDonald’s and see if we can’t give these people jobs.

Really? Is that why Oprah opened schools for poor African children? So they’d be able to work a cash machine? Wouldn’t it be better to set up villages with viable irrigation, healthy livestock, nutrient-rich soil to grow food to feed themselves and their animals? Doesn’t that sound like something the extremely poor could really enjoy and appreciate?

Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he will eat forever.
Give a town a school with computers, they learn how to live. SOMEWHERE ELSE!!! Teach a town to farm and support itself, and they will eat forever.

It just makes more sense to re-think our “generocity” than to completely colonize people who have lived with famine, disease, political persecution, prejudice, genocide, and all sorts of good stuff.

It is arrogant, ignorant, and entirely inappropriate to head into a place you can’t begin to understand, impose your values, and call yourself charitable. True charity isn’t done out of a person’s need to feel better about themselves by doing something they think is a really, really nice gesture.

True charity is seeing a genuine need and fulfilling it.

If you see a need, want to help, for crying out loud, ask the person or people if they want the kind of help you want to give. Think it through to the next step. Ask yourself, “If I do this thing for these people, how will their lives improve? Will they, in fact, improve, or am I imposing my social mores and institutions on people who live in a way I don’t understand?”

Again, ignorance expressed as so-called “generocity,” is still ignorance. And in this case, it is also cruel, racist (I’m not talking about skin color. I’m talking about society and nationality and geopolitical and religious differences).

It may take a village to raise a child, but it only takes a couple of goats to feed an entire village and everyone in it for weeks at a time.

If I was a student at one of those schools, as soon as I learned to write, I’d send a letter to Oprah and say, “Take your iMacs, send goats and goat food. I’d like to eat some time this month!”