The things that go through my head

It seems to me that we spend altogether too much of our time glorifying bullies. We just love nothing better than to glorify some knob who gets his kicks making others look and feel bad about themselves. Take that Chef Ramsay short haircut guy on that horrible Hell’s Kitchen show. He yells at people, throws things and is a classic abuser. I wish I knew why so many people are entertained by that. I can’t watch this show for more than fifteen minutes without cringing in disgust. Terrible terrible stuff.

Yet I am endlessly entertained by Dr. House, while recognizing that he is a mean jerk that constantly manipulates people. The worst part of that for me is that some people think he is sexy. Puke. See what I mean? You can’t throw a shoe at a former US president (or dream about it) without hitting a bully. They are absolutely everywhere.

Do you want to know what scares me the most about all this bully glorification? What if I turn into one of them. What if I start screaming at and abusing people when I don’t get my way? Say my kid doesn’t wash the dishes properly and heaven forbid left one of the cups or plates with a thin film of soapy grease on it. What if I freak out and start screaming like some idiot while tossing plates around the room? The idea of me doing that is absolutely frightening. I rather like living a life free of abuse. It may be hard work being normal but it is totally worth it.

What can we do to live bully-free lives? Toss all media into the fire? Electro-shock therapy? Drugs? I just want people to be nice to each other for a change. This rambling post brought to you courtesy of insomnia.

WHAT THE HELL????

I had no idea that all you had to do to get the Nobel Peace Prize is be slightly less evil than George Bush. Talk about having low standards.

Shame on you Nobel Prize committee! Now Obama can just rest on his laurels and be even more useless. BAH!!!

Did he end any wars? Oh hell now, they are still going full tilt. When I expressed my irritation at work I got the whole, “the Nobel Peace prize is intended to encourage somebody at a critical time” nonsense. What bollocks!

Also, shame on you Obama apologists, for continuing to drink the koolaid, despite the fact that this is turning out to be Bush’s third term.

Oh and Happy Thanksgiving!

Sorry that I haven’t updated the blog. I do know that there are a few people out there that care enough to check out this blog, despite its’ shoddy content and bad grammar, thanks to my email. I appreciate the fact that anybody cares enough about my opinions to miss my updates.

That being said, yes I am alive. I have just been busy and suffering a case of the end-of-the-year blues. This is a hard time to be an educator in the public school system and the proud parent of two children attending the public school system. I am overwhelmed by grade eight farewells, graduations, year-end parties, a birthday party, a beautiful horse to visit and ride and planning for a vacation. I also have a garage to clean so I can start my new career as a heavy-duty semi mechanic. Or maybe I can start by learning how to change the oil in my crummy little Geo Metro.

Now that I am bloviating into this post window (wordpress thinks bloviate is not a word) I have to admit that I miss this blog and I am thinking of all kinds of things to blog about. I want to build a doghouse this summer. My inept fumbling with power tools should be good post fodder. I wanted to blog about all that fuss about Safe Grad (much ado about nothing) but I got busy and tired. I am thinking of writing a novel, but I will probably end up chasing squirrels or frolicking around southern Saskatchewan.

But you will have to wait until summer when I finally get some time. Can you believe that I started this post yesterday but then I had Mom stuff to do which prevented me from publishing it? Unbelievable. This parenting stuff sure isn’t for wimps.

As seen on a local fence, as I went to drop my oldest child off at her friends’ house. I have to say I agree with this sentiment. And pretty soon we will be getting nookyular power. That is just bad news, as Saskboy can tell you.

PS: I had to post this with Internet Explorer because Firefox is still not working.

Every time I try to upload a picture onto my blog, the browser crashes. I have the firefox browser and this is a really recent problem.

As you can understand, my inability to post pictures on my blog is painful. I have pics to share and I can’t do it right now. I have to rely on facebook to get my fill of spamming the internets. It’s not fair!

I’m off to read some support forums until my eyes bleed. I need to know if anybody else is having this same issue.

This story really set off my old creep detector. Remember Mary Kay Letourneau, the teacher that was arrested and jailed for her relationship with her underage student? She and her husband hosted a “Hot for Teacher” Night. If you want to spew chunks on your keyboard, go ahead and check out the promotional poster. On the off chance that you don’t want to see the poster, allow me to describe it. It’s a picture of a scantily clad young woman wearing school-girl fantasy gear. Puke. This event creeps me out on so many levels I don’t even know where to begin. Glorifying child rape? Celebrating the abuse of your authority over young people? It’s a really creepy toss up.

I may have to post pictures of kittens after writing about this disturbing story, in order to cleanse my blog of evil spirits. YECH!

With all the bad things going on in the world, one needs to see some good news in order to keep sane. It would be great if we could come up with reliable green sources of energy that will help ween the population off of its’ addiction to oil. Wouldn’t it be excellent to have a whole bunch of kites in the sky used to power all of our homes and vehicles?

Earlier this week Tammy Roberts, the woman who became famous for shaming women for having the audacity to breastfeed their children in a public venue, posted a picture essay displaying all the needles in local Saskatoon parks. There is no question in my mind that this is a public safety issue, as children becoming infected by diseases from used needles is undoubtedly a danger everybody wants to avoid. However, the conclusions drawn by the poo-flingers in the comment section denigrating “junkies” demanded a blog post from yours truly.

Many commenters are demanding that the health region stop handing out clean needles and feel that this would solve the drug problem. This is an absurd notion. Even if it put an end to needles in the parks, it would do nothing to help people that are suffering from addictions issues. But let’s be realistic here. None of these people screaming for the health region to quit handing out needles cares even the slightest bit about the people that are addicted to drugs. They don’t care at all, they just want the problem to disappear. They don’t mind reading an article in the newspaper about the escalating STI and AIDS rates because it doesn’t touch their lives at all. But the minute that they see evidence in their community of needles, concrete evidence that society has a huge drug problem, they get angry. They prefer the drug problems out of sight and out of mind.

What I would like to see are some real concrete practical solutions to these issues. How about a discussion of the root causes of drug addiction? How about a discussion about poverty in our inner city? It’s an indisputable fact that poverty is the root cause of a lot of issues facing people in the inner city.

I would also like to point out that Tammy Roberts could have done an excellent photo essay on broken beer bottles in the parks. While these aren’t a vector for disease in the same way that broken needles are, they are dangerous to small children. When my kids were little I can’t count the number of times I walked around and picked up all the broken beer bottles to prevent the children from cutting themselves on them. So where is the moral panic about beer drinkers? This panic about condoms is even more pathetic. They are gross, just like the take-out food wrappers and old plastic bags I clean out of my yard every year after the snow melts, but they aren’t dangerous. Why the moral panic? Let me tell you. People see real evidence that people have sex and do drugs and they get all worked up. It’s much ado about nothing. Just an excuse to marginalize people that lead different lives than they do.

Thanks to Saskboy for bringing this to my attention.

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!

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!