The things that go through my head

This is a concept that makes no sense to most people in my experience. I am not really that great at explaining it and why it matters. When I ran into this explanation of it on this latest interesting blog I bumped into, I rejoiced. But I must temper my endorsement of this explanation of significant figures by saying that I really despise all reality television shows in general and The Biggest Loser in particular, even though I have never seen the show and I never, ever will.

The Biggest Loser appears to pit contestants against one another in some sort of judgmental fat-shaming boot camp. They have to report for humiliating weigh-ins and get kicked out if they fail to lose enough weight. A lot of the people on the show appear to have some psychological issues which led to their weight problems in the first place. It is hard for me to believe that people will learn long-term healthy eating and living habits as a result of this program.

It feels like stating the obvious to say it, but reality television is simply terrible, like staring at a train wreck. I just keep wondering, does anybody believe this is real? Or do they treat it like the WWF now known as the WWE. I have no idea what the acronyms stand for. All I know is that I used to watch the WWF when I was an impressionable youth, back when teevee had three channels and one was in French. You had to be pretty bored to watch French translations of English movies. So bored was I in small-town Saskatchewan that I watched lumpy, sweaty men with bad mullets and spandex tights pretend to beat each other up in the squared circle. I should have just read a book or something. If I was a teenager nowadays, I would be attached to my laptop. I’m not so sure that’s an improvement. But at least I knew it was fake. I remember having animated arguments with people over whether wrestling was real or not or some misguided adult would see me watching wrestling and explain to me that it wasn’t real. Some people think wrestling is real and some people think reality television is real. That is so sad!

You let him text you images while he is driving. I mean, really. What was I thinking?

As you can see, the weather was really terrible, wherever he was when he took those pictures.

I love books but I take terrible care of them.  My library fines are exhorbitant.  So I have taken a great liking to online book publishers that make classic texts available on the internet.  In this case, I just finished re-reading George Orwell’s classic dystopian book 1984. I can’t recall if I read this book while still a young high-schooler or as a single mom.  I can’t quite remember.  However, I really loved this book the first time I read it and I loved it even more on this lovely Easter long weekend.  When I read it the first time I remember being horrified by all the ways that the government can and does manipulate the media.  The use of torture, the constant surveillance of your thoughts and deeds by the Thoughtpolice, the use of Newspeak, the manipulation of language, all stuck out in my mind.  But you know what?  I completely missed Winston’s relationship with Julia.  How does that even happen?  Winston, the middle-aged chain-smoking alcoholic, is the main character.  His devoping relationship with Julia is a primary feature of the plot in this book and I forgot all about her!  I’m horrified.  Julia is the one that finally gets Winston to openly defy the State and Big Brother by sneaking off for sexy afternoon trysts in the Golden Meadow.  Her casual use of sex as a way to undermine the State was quite beautiful.  I even forgot about the puritanical Anti-Sex League.  How can one forget the Anti-Sex League, being reborn in modern times as the “Sarah Palin’s daughter does the shame-faced chastity pageant walk”?  The only thing Orwell missed out on were the D.A.R.E or Anti-Drug League.  That would have been sweet.  The only thing that terrifies people more than teenage sexuality is teenage drug use.  It’s a great way to stir up parental rage.

Oh and that was a spoiler.  There is an Anti-Sex League in the book.  However, those spoilers are just enough to pique your curiosity and no excuse not to read this classic.  It really is quite good in a “staring at a train wreck” sort of way.

I don’t post a lot of youtube videos because that is the laziest blogging that there is. Then again, I haven’t been the slightest bit interested in standing on my internet soap box lately at all. Real life is much more interesting than this lit-up screen. Even though Saskatoon is a really brown, drab and ugly place, I have been reveling in the warm weather and spending all my free time outside.  The streets and sidewalks are coated in a layer of thick, dried up mud that was left behind after all the snow melted.  There are enormous potholes everywhere.  There is a crater on just about every street in my neighborhood. There isn’t a stitch of greenery anywhere.  The grass is covered in old leaves, twigs, take-out food wrappers, broken toys, and plastic bags. I haven’t had a whole lot of free time either. Two kids, a full-time job, real-life activism, a horse, a house, piles of dirty laundry, unvacuumed floors, a yard that is beckoning to be raked and planted, and a trucker boyfriend that I miss. Jeez Louise! Nobody would have any business telling me to get a life. I get tired just reading that list.

Driving my little purple car throughout the city of Saskatoon is exactly like navigating an obstacle course. I live in fear of the tiny little tires falling into the bottom of one of those potholes of death, never to be seen again. In case you didn’t already know, I drive a puny little purple Geo Metro. It’s a beautiful, divine way of getting around. She is not a very thirsty little car, only drinking 1 gallon of gas for every 50 miles that she goes as opposed to my boyfriends’ far less efficient 1 gallon for every four point five miles. YIKES!  Buggy pwns Fat Freddie’s Kat.

I suppose it’s understandable when people, such as Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, look down their nose with disdain at all those potty-mouthed legalization advocates. I suppose it’s also understandable that she might, like me, be a bit uncomfortable with the antics of some legalization advocates. I have expressed misgivings about Marc Emery smoking up in front of police stations and showing off his gigantic bong in every photo opportunity that he gets. I sometimes wish that the face of the pro-legalization movement didn’t trigger all the prejudices of narrow-minded people. But you know what? At least they said and did something, unlike everybody else, who sat on their butts while the US incarceration rate sky-rocketed, while disproportionate numbers of poor and black people were targeted, while an incredibly useful plant was demonized and while no-knock raids of medical cannabis compassion clubs took place. If it wasn’t for those “stoners”, nobody would have done or said a thing.

Not only that, but the ridiculous prejudice against “stoners” by even so-called progressive liberal bloggers should give one pause. If they participate in the stigmatization of cannabis users themselves, are they really that progressive? Hmmm.

This train of thought is similar to the following:

“Poverty sucks but I sure can’t stand poor people. They smell so bad and never have any money and they are so uneducated. If only they would quit being poor and go away, things would be so much better!”

I say when you see a crowd of legalization advocates smoking up in public at a rally, you should understand why it’s a valuable action to take. If we decide to sit back and do nothing at all, nothing will ever change. People need to see that smoking pot is no big deal and nothing to freak out over. The more people see this relatively harmless action, the less likely they are to freak out about it.

If you do not use cannabis and never will, good for you. You should still care about this issue. Your tax dollars are being pissed away jailing producers sellers and consumers of a beneficial plant.

By the way, the Global Marijuana March is coming up. It will be a super swell time, full of people smoking up publicly and proudly.

Keep Big Brother off of my electronic media. Pirated software and copied movies and music is not a national security issue. I shake my fist at the over-bearing intrusive government.

The other day, when I was in the local gym exercising on the treadmill, I realized that I had forgotten my headphones and had nothing to listen to. I would be forced to work out with no distractions, except for my ADHD brain. I was forced to peruse the magazine rack for reading material. Unfortunately, it is a scientific fact that every single magazine at a local gym will turn out to be a complete tool of the patriarchy. I can recall in my younger days, enjoying some of the embarrassing sex stories in Cosmo magazine and I hoped that I would find something to entertain my me while sweating to the shmaltzy strains of Beyonce inviting men to mark their property properly by “putting a ring on it”. Unfortunately, I was too irritated by all the bullshit in this rag of a magazine. What self-respecting woman would buy or publish in such a waste of dead trees? Seriously, picking on Cosmo is like shooting fish in a barrel but I’m bored and I need post fodder so here goes nothing. I was reading the advice column and it was a desperately painful experience for a self-actualized woman like myself. Allow me to introduce “Tanya answers your Cosmo questions!”

“Dear Tanya:

I am in awe of your awesome greatness and the fact that you know absolutely everything. Give me advice about when to sleep with a guy that I am interested in. What if I sleep with him too soon? Will he lose interest in me? Should I keep my vagina under lock and key? Help!

Signed,

Frustrated Female”

“Dear Frustrated Female,

If this were Cosmo magazine, I would tell you that all men are dogs that only want one thing: to lure you into the sack and then judge you for it by refusing to return your calls, bragging to all his buds about what a great lay you are and dispersing those sexay photos you sent to him all over the internet and your facebook accounts. You won’t get a ring on it and you won’t get that monogamous, lifelong relationship that all the LAY-DEEZ want. Cosmo recommends waiting a month before having sex. He will thank you for it if you take all the responsiblity for when sex happens in the relationship, and being a woman, you probably only tolerate sex in order to snare a man and a ring for all time and eternity anyway.

It’s a good thing this isn’t Cosmo magazine! I say have sex whenever you feel like it and if the guy doesn’t want to return your calls, you are better off single than picking up the socks of a guy that treats you like crap. Men are generally not worth the trouble. Stay single, that way you won’t get stuck putting up with any crap. If you insist on pursuing a relationship with a man, don’t take any crap.

Also, never, ever feel guilty for having sex or wanting to have sex, as long as all parties involved gave their full and enthusiastic consent. That is the biggest waste of time that MANkind ever came up with. Of course, men never feel guilty about having sex, because they are brainwashed from the cradle to the grave into thinking that they don’t have to take responsibility for anything. This is why men feel they are entitled to opinions about abortion or the right to call women who enjoy sex sluts and other judgmental names. It isn’t completely their fault that they are brainwashed, as they do grow up in a patriarchy with about 32548265 privileges that they don’t acknowledge or appreciate or realize that exist because nobody ever bothered to point it out to them. You would never expect a male child to encounter feminism in school or in the media or anywhere else, after all. Feminism only affects women and is therefore unimportant.”

“Dear Tanya,

My one dream and wish in life is to be as great as you are. Since this is a goal far beyond the reach of a mere mortal such as myself, I will settle for your awesome advice.

I am planning a wedding and…..”

“Dear Wedding Planner,

I could not finish the letter wedding planner. Sorry. Every time a woman gets married, God kills a kitten. No wait, how does that go again? Every time a kitten masturbates God kills a Domo-kun? Did I have a point? Oh yeah! I am about to make the most important point ever.

Never, ever get married. Don’t have a wedding. It’s the biggest tool of the patriarchy that there is. The nuclear family, consisting of a married couple, is the basic unit of patriarchy. I know some well-meaning feminists and others (fools, the lot of them) feel that marriage can be reformed. This is impossible. It needs to be abandoned. It doesn’t matter whether we allow gays to be tools of the patriarchy too. Nobody should ever let the government or any other institution or organization dictate your family and your sex life. It’s the biggest mistake you will ever make.

This is how families should be joined together. A couple likes each other and feel they like each other enough to share the same living space. So they get together and they decide who does what and where everyone is going to sleep and who is going to pay the bills and who is going to look after any children. The couple stays together as long as they want. If they feel at some point that their differences are irreconcilable, they split up. I really loved the system some First Nations’ groups used before the White Man came along and ruined everything with their stupid rituals and patriarchy. There was a simple ceremony to celebrate the joining together of a couple. But if they wanted to break up, the man would simply move his stuff to another teepee. No muss, no fuss, no divorce court, no visitation, no fretting over the status of the Baby Daddy. Life was so much simpler before we came up with marriage to police womens’ sexual habits.”

Holy Cow Patties am I on a cynical roll these days!

Sarah Haskins’ link, since the embed function refuses to work on this blog.

Commercials are the reason that I don’t watch television. Except for Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel. They rule so much. You can always count on Animal Planet to deliver some extremely awesome octopus videos. Octopuses are such an excellent species. They never warmonger or lock up other members of their species for smoking the wrong plants. I suppose it is rather difficult to smoke anything underwater though.

We’re number 1! We’re number 1!

Everything sucks. Everybody is fiddling while the planet burns. Obama just gave the lying thieving bastard banks that ruined the economy another bailout. People are brainwashed tools that refuse to think for themselves. They probably went to school and failed to learn how. Medical and recreational cannabis users are treated like garbage for merely failing to conform to mainstream societies’ reefer madness propaganda. Feminism is a class in university instead of a way of life. As soon as anybody gets a little bit of power, they find a way to abuse it. We are absolutely inundated with advertising of over-priced worthless garbage that we don’t need. Here I am, thinking that the problem is the advertising for products, when the real problem is the big lie that advertising sells: that happiness can be bought and paid for. The things that really matter are the things that we take for granted. Your health, your family, sunshine, a good home, clean air, peace and quiet. Rich people are some of the most evil, power-hungry, corrupt assholes that you will ever meet. Just go to Wall Street and take a look around. Education, as a public institution, like all public institutions, is beyond reform. First they brainwash the indoctrinators and turn them into excellent tools of the patriarchy and then they brainwash the next generation.

Do I sound cynical? Hell yeah. I have just had enough of all the bullshit and I feel like I can’t take it anymore.

Do I swear too much? Well, if the world teetering on the edge of ecological and economical collapse, all the wars, violent corrupt political regimes, as well as the endless persecution of minorities, lifestyles, drug habits, sexualities, politically incorrect plants, women, animals, kids and everybody else are not enough of an excuse to put FUCK on my blog, than I don’t know what is.