Memo to the beasts

Eldest cat: Seeing the bottom of the bowl is not a giant tragedy. Also, stop hissing at everyone. It's getting embarrassing.

Middle cat: I understand that you are clawing my calf repeatedly because you want me to the throw the ball. But, as I have said repeatedly, I cannot THROW the ball unless I HAVE the ball. Fetch means you bring the ball back to me. It does not mean "bring the ball halfway back and then hassle me until I get up and go pick it up and throw it again." Whatever game THAT is, I'm not playing.

Youngest cat: I get that you need to be brushed ALL. THE. TIME. However, there are only 24 hours in the day and I do have other responsibilities. Don't worry, even with a mere 3.6 hours of brushing per day, your coat is lovely, sleek, and stripey.

Open Letter to Male Musicians:

We get it. You have a penis, and you would like to put it in someone. This is not brand new information, and you can stop writing songs about it.

Thanking you in advance,
Jezebella

Giftmas List

Dear Santa, enclosed please find my wish list for this year:

1. A day without rape.
2. A fifty-percent reduction in man-splaining (I'll take the rest next year, mmmkay?)
3. A better job
4. Free contraception for all, and abortions for anyone who wants one, on demand and without apology.

That should do it!
xo,
Jezebella

Dear Married Friends:

When you get married and stop calling your single friends, it's shitty. When you only invite other married people to dinner, to movies, to parties, it just sucks. What the fuck is wrong with you that you can no longer be friends with singletons? We're not contagious. We aren't a threat to your marriage. Go call one of your single friends today and invite her out to dinner, or to your holiday open house, or out for coffee. Or just, you know, fucking CALL her. Sheesh.

An Open Letter to Apartment Therapy Commenters:

You are a denizen of a website that regularly features $4000 coffee tables and $10,000 sofas. It fetishizes *original* Eames and Saarinen furniture and all things mid-century modern. The AT philosophy advocates saving up and investing in quality design for your home, your furnishings, and your decor, rather than buying whatever cheap crap from China fills up Walmart this week. And yet you accuse me of snobbery for advocating the purchase of art made by artists, and suggest that just anyone can make good "abstract art" with some paper and black ink. How does this compute? Abstract art, like good design, is a matter of connoisseurship. Anyone who reads AT often enough to comment regularly should be able to understand this. Why, I ask you, should someone who has carefully designed their entire living space give up on quality when it comes to the artwork on their walls? This is not snobbery any more than preferring an original Eames to a knockoff is snobbery.

Quality artwork at reasonable prices can be found at your local gallery, your local college art department, and online. "DIY"ing abstract art will result for 99% of DIYers in splashy shitty decorative crap that looks like something from a reality design show on HGTV, not something good enough to frame and hang in one's home.

Finally, if you can't tell the difference between Modernist abstraction and Asian calligraphy, you aren't looking very hard, and you have proven yourself a less-than-capable judge of artistic quality.

Hugs,
Jezebella, PhD

"what does a rapist look like?"

I wrote a post with that title over two years ago, and I still get a zillion hits coming from that search string. I find it depressing that so many people ask that question. Why? Because they don't look *any* way. They are all ages, weights, races, heights, incomes, eye colors, and manners of attire. Let me reframe it: if 1 in 6 women is raped or attempted-raped in her life, and most rapists assault an average of 10 women in his life, then 1 in 60 men that you know is a rapist.

One in sixty. Look at your facebook friends list, or around your workplace, your church, the bar you go to, and you'll probably see a rapist. He might not even *think* he's a rapist, because he thinks that pressuring a woman until she gives in, or raping a woman too intoxicated to give consent isn't "really" rape, but he is.

A rapist looks like your neighbors, your relatives, your acquaintances, your coworkers. I'm sorry to say it, but I speak as I find. You can't see them coming down the street. They don't wear crazy-rapist shirts or come with warning labels. I wish they did. I wish we could tattoo "rapist" across the goddamned forehead of every dickblister that rapes a woman, but unfortunately we cannot.

Do you want to know how to prevent rape? Get dudes to stop raping women. Here's a handy primer that all men should commit to memory:

I got yer rape prevention email forward here.

iiiiiii

I am tired of people who say "iPhone" instead of "phone". Do you REALLY need to let me know you have an iPhone? Can you not just say "phone" like the rest of us? I mean, it's not like I go, "Oh, hey, my Palm Treo 755p was ringing but it was in the bottom of my purse." "I got a new app for my Palm Treo 755p." It's just a fucking phone, yo. Cut it out. Seriously.

holidays

It just seems like the holidays engender an endless pile of to-do lists. Today: dishes, cat maintenance, pack, drive 130 miles, dinner with nuclear family and Republican cousins. Sigh.

bad habit

When I'm in nearby college town I still drive past his house sometimes, and when I do, I feel like a junkie visiting the corner where he used to score.

Report from Voodoo Fest

Ahem, the Voodoo Experience Music Festival.

The Pogues: alternately sublime and sad. Shane MacGowan is going to be dead soon. He is a terrible alcoholic, a bloated, pale, shambling, mess. The rest of the band is tight, fierce, and brilliant. Shane stumbles on stage every third song or so and slurs his way through a tune. He's got a handler who walks him on stage, gives him a lit cigarette and the microphone, and makes sure he doesn't fall down. Awful. Honestly, they're better without him. Obviously they put up with him because the drunk yobs in the audience are all about how hilarious the drunk is, but the yobs are young enough to have never seen a man drink himself to death. Overall, they were brilliant, and I love the band, but the other singer is, frankly, better. Also, he was in a temper, and it put a sharp edge on their performance that I kind of enjoyed. Also, they had a hot accordion player in velvet pants. I mean, smokin' hot bald guy with an accordion. Whoda thunk?

Squirrel Nut Zippers: Listened from outside the tent while chatting with a friend I hadn't seen in way too long. They sounded excellent, but I can't say I paid a ton of attention.

Flaming Lips: Holy frijoles, what a freakin' spectacle! Psychedelic from the get-go, lights, screens, people dancing in furry animal costumes, confetti, Wayne Coyne in an inflatable ball, smoke machines, bullhorns, yes, and yes, and yes. I could've taken hours more of it. They played Yoshimi, and Do You Realize, and the Yeah Yeah Yeah song, and some new stuff, and they were terrific.

Meat Puppets: ROCK! SHOW! They played in the Bingo tent, so it felt like a rock show in a club. They were amazing. They were loud. Curt Yearwood is one of the best guitarists I have ever heard. Sometimes I forget how much brilliant noise a three-piece band can make. They fucking rocked it. SO good. It helped that the douchebags were all at the Lenny Kravitz stage. Not that Lenny's so bad, but you know, his audience? Not so much. It was intimate, and punk rock, and just so fucking good.

I caught a few minutes of Widespread Panic because they were on the opposite stage while the Flaming Lips were setting up, and man o man are they some boring stinky hippies. Jeebus. So boring. Allow me to share with you my Widespread Panic story. About, oh, a decade ago, the Squidophile and his friend K wanted to go to Jazz Fest and see Widespread. I tagged along, thinking, well, I'm just going for the food, really. Widespread had TWO lots at Jazz Fest, which is really unusual, and totally undeserved if you ask me. So we're watching Widespread and I'm eating this great veggie pita from the African food stand, and when my food is gone I am booooooooooored. I mean, yawn, right? So I ask K and the Squidophile: is this more interesting if you're high? And they're like, well, let's find out! So they spark it up (I do not indulge. Jez no like the weed). I wait ten or fifteen minutes and say, so? Is it better if you're high? And they're all, "No, we're just too stoned to want to get up and go away." Aha! I see it now: the entire appeal of Widespread Panic is that their audience is too high to leave.

thanks be to modern pharmacology

Turns out lortabs really DO kill toothache pain. Good news indeed.

I want a cape.

It's the 21st century, right? So where are my silver jumpsuit and my awesome boots and my cape? Why are we not wearing capes for every occasion, whether casual or formal? I'm ready. Science fiction, have you lied to me??

moment of clarity

So I've been trying to sort out what the fuck it is with Ann Coulter: why do the right-wingers love her so much? I mean, sure, she's a racist, homophobic, right-wing hate-monger, and they like THAT, obviously. But, she is also tall, leggy, blonde, miniskirted tanned, thin, polished, painted, buffed, and waxed. Normally this sexbot look adds up, for dudes, to someone they want to just shut up and look good. But they seem to like it when she says stuff. A lot. But then Mearl, a commenter over at IBTP said, “There is almost no way to be Dude-Approved hawt and be taken seriously." And she is absolutely right.

I had a light-bulb moment. I haven’t been able to parse it before, but I think I’ve got it now: they really *don’t* take her seriously. She is popular to the right-wing dudes the way a monkey singing opera might be popular: it’s not what she’s saying, but the fact that she is *saying it at all*. It’s like, “Look! Barbie TALKS!!” They surely, to a man, don’t think she actually writes her own books or thinks her own thoughts.

I feel so much better now.

Things I learned while painting my bathroom

1. Lock the cats out.

2. Do yourself a favor and invest in the Benjamin Moore Aura low VOC (non-stinky) paint. I had to start with a coat of Kilz primer, which was brutally stinky, and then a coat of Aura, and it was like painting with heavy cream. Lovely. If you can't afford it right now, wait until you can. Worth every penny, especially when you consider it's truly one-coat coverage.

3. If I paint without a bandanna on my head, I get paint in my hair. If I wear a bandanna, I don't get any paint on my head at all.

4. Twelve years ago, I vowed never to paint behind a toilet again. Lesson learned? Never say never. I still hate painting behind the toilet.

5. Don't fool yourself: there is no painting just the walls of any room. As soon as you paint the walls, the paint on the woodwork looks dingy and shitty.

6. Lesson confirmed: the previous homeowners, aka Mr. and Mrs. Half-assed, did everything half-assedly. EVERYTHING. The wallboard is not tightly fitted, there's a gap around the window frame where he measured wrong and just left it, and the whole reason for this painting project is the half-assed wallpaper started falling off recently. Like, I brushed against it and a whole sheet came loose.

Stupidest thing ever

Y'all, there's a lot of stupid shit on the internet. Sport corsets. Fetish shoes. BDSM fans. But I swear, this shit is the stupidest ever: makeup. for your boobs. The "My Beautiful Breasts Kit" includes seven shades of powdery stuff, "primer", "setting spray", two brushes, and, get this: semi-permanent "bust stain". So you can have makeup on your boobs even when you're sweaty. For fuck's sake. I'm sure someone rad-femmier than me could produce a highly nuanced review of this fucking ridiculous product, but I am clearly reduced to swearing and sputtering.



How might a cranky old ranty-pants run across something so pink, so artificial, so patriarchally endorsed, so stupid? Well you might ask. I found a review of said product on a website called "Vital Juice", which purports to be a website about health and wellness. What the fuckity fuck does boob make-up have to do with health and wellness, I ask you?

Dumbfuckistan..only with beaches!

I have a job interview in Florida next week. Yeah, it's still Dumbfuckistan, but, dude! BEACHES!

Pop Culture Guilty Pleasure

People, do not count me as a member of the Yay! Musicals! Club. I am missing the musical gene. I think they are silly and stupid and boring and highly synthetic and on the whole I loathe "musical theater" music. There are two exceptions: I thoroughly enjoyed Rent and Spring Awakening, but both have music written by people who came out of pop/rock and not out of Musical Theatah. Furthermore, I cannot carry a tune in a bucket nor do I know my f-string from my minor chord. Jezebella? She plays *the stereo*.

Never mind all that. My new favorite show is Glee. I luff it. It is campy, stylized, extremely silly, sweet, and I can't get enough. Jane Lynch as sociopathic cheer coach? Check. Socially "flawed" but musically talented student cast? Check. VICTOR GARBER AS TEACHER'S BOWTIED DAD??!! CHECK and CHECK.

You know what won me over? The full-on perky show-choir treatment, with costumes and choreography, of Amy Winehouse's "Rehab". I mean, only an evil genius could come up with that.

Area Cats Stage Protest

The Bathroom - Area cats Pippin, 2, and Nigel, 1, staged a loud and vigorous protest outside of the bathtub late Tuesday night. No translator was available to determine the exact nature of the feline community's objection to the human habit of soaking in soapy water. The protest broke up shortly after bathtime, so the cats could return to their rigorous napping schedules.

Worst Week Ever

Reasons, in no particular order:

My shoulder still hurts and I still can't reach around my to my back and hook/unhook my good bras. Wearing old, stretched out, grey bras that I *can* hook in the front and twist around to the back is depressing.

My uterus is trying to kill me. Any woman in or past their 40s knows what I mean. Younger women, I will spare you the painful news of what you have to look forward to. Dudes, you just don't wanna know.

I can't afford my student loan payments and had to get a forbearance, which only adds to my interest piling up and is not a real solution.

My cat Bennet, who's been ill all summer, reached the end of the road: that place where I had to take him to the vet and have the kind doctor end his suffering. It was just awful.

Oh! Also!

I forgot to mention my progress in my Year of No Gueros. Having inhaled all of the Sookie Stackhouse novels, I moved on to Kate Atkinson's intelligent thriller/mysteries. I've read Case Histories and One Good Turn, but the library doesn't have the next one, nor does Bookmooch.com. I found her male protagonist remarkably non-douchey for an ex-cop. Her book of short fiction, Not the End of the World was both comical and apocalyptic, if you can imagine it. There's a subtext of parental worry throughout all of her work, particularly fathers worrying about their daughters. Interesting. Also, she's making me want to revisit Edinburgh. I was only there for a few days and mostly we drank a lot, except for a trip to the National Gallery which is one of my more favorite museums. Anyhow, Edinburgh: I think I need to go back.

Also, Tayari Jones' Leaving Atlanta was short but deep and dark and she is one of those writers who remembers how children think and feel. Remarkable. I've got her next book in the mail to me directly.

I'm in the middle of Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup and I'm not so much in love with it. It's kind of slow, and, oh, I don't know, the complications of race in South Africa, why must they always be seen through the lens of an interracial romance? I find this trope tiresome. Her male protagonist, Abdu, is more interesting than her female protagonist, who's trying so hard to shed her privilege but so far, she just can't do it. She lands in his desert home, after he is deported, and asks where the bathroom is, she'd like a hot bath. In the desert. Sigh. Anyway, it's Nadine Gordimer and she's a Big Deal and so I will certainly finish this book, but I think I'm going genre next: Octavia Butler is up next on the reading list.