Being rich adds a couple years to your lifespan, according to the IRS. (Shock! Gasp! Who knew?!) On page four of the 81-page report on people who die wealthy enough to be eligible for the estate tax (i.e., those with estates > $1.5 million - and this is before the dollar tanked, as these numbers are from 2004), there is even a handy (if morbid) graph:



Wealthy men and women live about two years longer than men and women in the general population. Their deaths make up, according to the same report, about 1.8% of the total deaths annually - or about 42,000 people.

The fact that rich people live longer isn't terribly surprising - having money ensures that you can have your fundamental needs for healthcare, healthy food, exercise, rest, etc., met. But it is a pretty searing indictment of the idea that the US is a "classless" society. We're so classless that being in the wrong class actually kills you off sooner. And if you accept this logic, it's hard to believe that we also live in some sort of magical, post-racism society, since simply being Black cuts about six years off your life expectancy if you are male, and four if you are female.

These things can't be treated as completely distinct: the impact of class on life-expectancy contributes to the lowered lifespans for Black people, since they are routinely paid less and suffer the effect of environmental racism (if the city wants to build a new incinerator, for instance, they're not going to put it in the wealthy, politically-connected white neighborhood). Likewise, the impact of racism on life-expectancy contributes to the lowered lifespans for all non-estate-having Americans, since Black people face discrimination in areas fundamental to maintaining a healthy life, such as access to medical treatment. And that's not even considering the impact of the prison-industrial complex, both on mental and physical health and longevity.

Feminists call this "interlocking systems of oppression" or, alternately, "intersectionality."

Something else I found interesting about these data is that, despite constituting slightly less than half the population, male decedents owned almost 60% of the "total gross estate" value. Which looks great, at first - hey, women are 40% of rich people! - but on further examination, it's clear that there is an enormous gender disparity even among the ludicrously-rich contingent.

First, married men make up the largest fraction (62.8%) of all estate holders and have the largest average estate (single men, interestingly, have the smallest average estate. A good book on this phenomenon is Wifework - the basic idea is that married men do better than single men on many axes because married men have a live-in maid/secretary/sex-dispenser/babysitter to free up their time and manage their lives. Women, unsurprisingly, tend to do better single, which probably explains why between 2/3 and 3/4ths (requires University ID) of divorces are initiated by women).

98% of these men leave their estates to their spouses (women) upon their deaths at an average age of 77. These surviving spouses go on to live another 5 years, managing these estates before they kick off at 82. With these facts in mind, a clearer picture starts to emerge. According to the IRS report, the majority of the female estate-having decedents (61.2%)were widows.



Interesting how the numbers are basically flipped for women and men, eh?

Background information: I lived at my grandparents' house alone in Norcal Tourist Town last May for about ten days, making several trips from the house to Bay Area City and back while I waited for my new apartment to become available. I'm up here this weekend visiting my grandparents.

Conversation #1, with my uncle B, when I went to pick up the key to the house.

Uncle B: So do you know how to get there from here?
Me: Why yes. I even have the maps I used last year when I lived there.
Uncle B: Ok, you just turn left down xyz road and....


Conversation #2, with my grandfather:

Grandpa: So, do you know how to get to the house?
Me: Yep. I even have the maps I used last year when I lived there.
Grandpa: Ok, so you take highway abc, turn left on xyz road and...

I suppose it's my fault for having a tiny ladybrain that needs constant reinforcement, lest the learning escape.

I'll stop being a feminist when men stop thoughtlessly overruling me. Oy.

(Or: Why I Am Pro Choice and You Should Be Too!)

This originally started as a response to a comment left on my "Abortion Art" post, but I've decided to use it as a starting point to elucidate my views on the subject of women's fundamental humanity (since it's 4:22 AM and it's not like I have a paper due in 6 hours). It is my hope that with this post, I can explain why it is that I believe that supporting a woman's right to an abortion - or, more broadly, supporting a woman's right to decide what grows in and around her uterus, lives off her blood supply, profoundly changes her physically and mentally for ten months before literally ripping her a new one (few words scare me more than "episiotomy") - is the only morally defensible position to stake on this bizarrely contentious issue.

So, without further ado, the comment, and my responses:

//Abortions are a fact of life for some women,//

Our threatened access to reproductive healthcare is a fact of life for ALL women, not just the some women (that would be 1 woman out of every 3, by the way) who will have an unwanted uterine parasite removed at some point in their lives. And you don't know which third you are in, either. 18% of women terminating pregnancies identify as born-again or evangelical Christians. This number is almost certainly an underestimate, as there is the obvious disincentive to these women to identify as members of a religious group that has opposition to medical care for women as an inexplicably core value.

//and its not something to be celebrated. Abortions are a tragedy for all parties involved. Many women suffer deep emotional scars after having one.//

First, let me come out and say it unequivocally: abortion is a moral good; I celebrate when women have access to abortion.

Because in those times and places where women cannot access abortion, one thing always happens: women are maimed, women are imprisoned, women die. Sure, their suffering probably isn't enough to persuade you, but before you go writing off those life-disregarders as so much tinder for Hell's flames, keep in mind that most women who terminate (even in the US, where the figure is 60%) already have one (or more) kid(s). And we have a pretty high average age of first childbirth here in the US of A, what with our cheap contraception and our (however debased) sex ed.

Imagine how much truer that is in countries where "pro-life" policies prevail, and the typical age of first pregnancy is firmly in the teenage years. Or look at the issue of obstetric fistulae: the more patriarchal a culture gets, the more common it is to rape young girls in "marriages" to much older men and to force them to give birth when they are too young. We saw this in our country just a few weeks ago, with that child-rape FLDS cult in Texas.

But! you must be saying. Think of all the babies saved!

That's the interesting thing. In countries with the life-iest of pro-life policies, abortion rates are an entire order of magnitude higher than in countries where abortion is free and on-demand. See for yourself! The US, with our technically legal but much-reviled abortion services, has a rate that's right in the middle (22.9 per thousand women) of life-regarding countries like Chile, where it's always illegal (and where they average 50 abortions per 1000 women) and zygote-hating Babylons like the Netherlands (6.5 abortions per 1000)

So what can we infer from this?

Abortion laws are part and parcel to a larger legal and social system predicated on male sexual domination of women. Their primary function is to keep the bitches down; any zygotes saved are incidental to this goal. That's why so much of "pro-life" ideology boils down to some variation on "women are dumb and can't be trusted; they are a danger to themselves and others." They can be either madonnas - useful idiots who beat their breasts in anguish once they realize the horrors they have visited upon their helpless uterine detainees - or whores, life-disregarding harridans who don't treat The Word Father's Virility Made Flesh with the respect it deserves.

There's a reason why pro-lifers are first to want to throw a woman in jail for the high crime of having a stillbirth, but won't lift a finger to expand access to free prenatal care for pregnant women (and will in fact actively work against it, both for blastocysts and for children farther along on the life cycle: see the recent S-Chip debacle). It's why pro-lifers fall over themselves to lie to children about how condoms give you AIDS and how it's a woman's job to put the brakes on when faced with a quasi-sentient man-beast who only wants sex (the horror!) otherwise she's no better than a piece of chewed gum, but flip the fuck out when women do crazy things like get vaccinated for cancer (because OMG if they find out they can have sex without their cervices falling off, they'll be fornicating in the streets!).

It really isn't rocket-science: give women (and men) the tools, education, and access to medical treatment they need to be happy, healthy, egalitarian sexual beings, and they'll tend to use them, in part because outpatient surgeries, however safe, are painful and costly. And then everyone wins, except the patriarchal sperm-enthusiasts who want women to suffer and die needlessly!

Or, simply: where embryos are people, women aren't.

This post is more public service announcement than anything else, for I am, above all, a philanthropist seeking to uplift the discourse. Some of what follows is generalizable to all human relationships, and, absent patriarchy, would not be gendered at all (although in all fairness, the situations described also wouldn't exist, because they are in fact a product of patriarchy and would not survive the revolution, but as I often do, I digress).

This post will serve as a handy field guide for the world's many manly morons: specifically, how to spot 'em and how to leave 'em.

For it is in the service of getting otherwise doe-eyed, brilliant young women to avoid the domestic drudgery and concomitant violence endemic to any attempts to carve out a life with these wretched beings that I have chosen to live my life. (And if you infer from the preceding sentence that I must then be a carpet-munching enthusiast, you will not enjoy this post!).

Red Flag #1: Inappropriate Declarations of Love
By inappropriate I, of course, mean any, but I refer here specifically to those assertions of erotic devotion that fall outside the already fucked up notions of propriety imposed by the culture. To pull an example from the aether, consider the situation of a hypothetical man named Dick. Now, Dick doesn't exist, but if he did, he'd be a 26 year old substance abuser with a dead-end job and an inability to grasp abstract concepts (and - when is this not the case? - no awareness of that fact) whose hobbies include attempting to forget the myriad ways he fails at life and trying to get previously referenced bright-eyed young women to fail at life as well. Misery loves company, as they say.
( Here it comes... )

What google returns for the search string, "Yale Moron." Such high standards, it's no wonder poor womb-ridden Aliza doesn't live up to them!

Alternate title (because what other cipher have I for my snark?): Yale Patriarchs Demand Uterine Affidavits; Quod Erat Demonstratum, Morons.

How perfectly absurd is this? Yale is using its position as artistic gatekeeper to demand that this woman disambiguate her fucking menstrual blood! Is there any other possible reaction that would more definitively prove the worth of her art than a bunch of dudes gathering to force her to repudiate her unauthorized use of Teh Sperm Magic?

Words fail me.

Pictured: Four Yale students gather to reassure me that I made the right choice by not applying to Yale.

Alternate Title: Yale Student Uses Privately-Owned Uterus for Her Own Reasons; Nation Flips Its Shit

So the story is that a Yale student, for her senior art project, claimed to self-inseminate, take herbal abortifacients, and collect the ensuing menstrual blood, once a month, for nine months.*

And people are completely losing their shit over it. Noted patriarchy-enthusiast and forced-pregnancy advocate John Behan said of the contumacious woman-creature,

"“We believe that Yale students, regardless of their views of abortion, will be deeply disturbed by this trivialization of the agony of women who face crisis pregnancies and endure miscarriages."

Note that it doesn't trivialize the famed agony of women with unwanted uterine growths to force them to give birth.

And bringing up the irrelevant end of the spectrum of reactions to this project, Yale freshman Elle Ramel bemoaned the hypothetical seventeen year olds who would defect to other Ivy Leagues: “What if you are a pre-frosh and this is your last impression before you decide what school to go to?”

Quelle horreur!

As a brief digression, I feel compelled to comment on the name of Behan's organization: Choose Life at Yale, or CLAY. This is presumably a throwback to Genesis, where Art to Grow On shows up at God's fourth grade classroom and gives him the chance to form the first human being (a dude, of course - women are the Divine Afterthought) out of that most organic class of molecules, the phyllosilicates.

So I thought I'd come on livejournal and give my $0.02 about whence the hoopla has come:

What makes her art powerful is that she’s forcing people to address the contradiction of, on the one hand, seeing menstrual blood (and women, by extension) as this dirty, gross, contaminating, quasi-sinful insult to human decency, and on the other hand, claiming to believe all the sentimental crap that posits that embryos are these sacrosanct snowflakes from conception onward, whose personhood is inarguable and whose beauty and symbolic value can be read as an extension of the presumptively extant father’s virility.

The reason people are pissed about this, then, is because of the cognitive dissonance inherent in facing the fact that no, there’s no magic line between miscarriage, abortion, and menstruation - that it’s all fundamentally the same uterus expelling the same damn tissue, sperm magic notwithstanding. I would argue that this is the primary reason, and that it beats out, however slightly, the competing anger about a woman (1)attempting to impregnate herself (and thereby co-opting that sacred male prerogative) and then (2) attempting to abort (further emasculating the male prerogative) while (3) thinking she had the right to go and talk about it. And trailing all those reasons is the concomitant squickiness at seeing what could very well be The Curse on public display.

This dynamic shows up other parts of, to use Twisty’s terminology, the megatheocorporatocracy. Think of the archetypal fundie squawking about depictions of sexuality that do not conform to the man and woman in obvious heteronormative marriage "ideal." It’s not that there’s something obviously different about unmarried or even (gasp) queer boinking that makes it intolerable. Indeed, the undeniable similarity between the actual acts of a married heterocouple’s sexing, and any other kind of sexing under the sun, has forced patriarchy enthusiasts such as our dear John Behan to invent the whole goddamn sex-gender system itself in order to carve out these bullshit value-laden distinctions where previously there were none. Give these asswipes a few millennia, and - oh wait, they’ve already done that for we members of the temporarily functional uterati!

The fact that anyone cares at all whether she did what she said she did makes this art (or rather, makes this a patriarchy, to which she is responding with art). In a sane world, no one would give a rat’s ass about what’s going on in anyone else’s reproductive tract, and she would have had to do something else for her senior project.


*I should say, for the benefit of those among you that may not be familiar with women's bodies, that it's impossible to actually do this and know you are doing this. She's "self-aborting" before she could possibly know she is pregnant. So she may be miscarrying. She may be making embryos that don't implant (most, by the way, don't, regardless of artistic intent). She may actually be inducing some sort of early miscarriage. She may just be having her damn period. Or any combination thereof! But the mere suggestion that a woman could opt for a period instead of a pregnancy like she was a human being with rights makes people lose their freaking minds.

thiz piktur DID NOT MAKE. (bu resimi YAPMADIM).

So in Turkish, you can make these two kinds of adjectives using different suffixes: -lI and -sIz, with the I changing according to vowel harmony

For instance, if you want to say "cloudy," you take the word for cloud, "bulut," and add "-lu" to form "bulutlu." To say not-cloudy, you add "-suz," to form "bulutsuz."

To say snowy, you take the word for snow, "kar," and add "-lı" to form "karlı." To say the equivalent of snow-less, you add "sız" to form "karsız." Etc.

So, what's the problem? Türkçeyi seviyorum ama...

The word for house in Turkish is "ev." My house - evim. Your house - evin. At his house - evinde. And so on.

Now, what happens when you apply the two adjectival suffixes?

First, the positive "-lI." Adding this to "ev" does not produce a word that means "housey," but rather "evli," which means "Married."

Eep! Well, that's not too terrible. I mean, we refer to married women who don't draw a paycheck as "housewives" and "homemakers."

But what about "-sIz"?

Well, turns out that does mean what it's constituent morphemes would suggest. "Evsiz" does, in fact, mean "homeless."

Which means, then, that in Turkey, at least when this part of the language was being developed, the opposite of marriage is homelessness. Which is true of any culture that does not protect women's access to independent, fair incomes. It wasn't that long ago in this country that women couldn't even get credit in their own name if they were married.

Still, though, this is the language where the verb for "to become angry" is literally, "to girl." Turkish verbs are formed with a verbal stem followed by mek or mak (according to vowel harmony), much like English verbs have a word-stem preceded by the word "to," e.g., to run, or to swim. So, the word "kız," by itself, means girl or daughter. The word "kızmak," however, means, "to become angry." There's also an alternate use of the word to mean "to become sexually willing." Really subtle, eh?



Feel free to check my work.

I found this website via Pharyngula, and oh man, is it hilarious. I definitely recommend checking out the actual pictures of their home school "science" fair, but this note is about their suggested topics.

First, they open with a bible quote: The fear of God is the beginning of knowledge. Proverbs 1:7. Because what better basis for knowledge is there than fear?

Evolutionists ask this question:
How can I prove that evolution is true (and God does not exist).

Evolutionists have evolved beyond the need for question marks.

I believe true science is a way to learn more about God and ourselves. It is a living class room in which God is the Instructor and we the students.

And like the Creationists, God's making it up as he goes along, and his students are too afraid to object.

Now, let's move on to the actual suggestions!

2. How many shades of skin color are there? Use a paint scanner to test 100 people.

18. Is intelligence influenced by physical attributes. i.e. are blondes "dumb" or does skin color influence intelligence?

Obviously these are important questions for science, dating back to at least the Gilded Age.

5. What can we learn from the Amish blood disease and sixth finger? Compare this to the half Jewish Samaritans.

?!?!?

8. How much voltage or current can a human take before he is killed? Could do experiments on a plant.

Homeschools are far too holy to be burdened with CPHS guidelines, but I'm pretty sure this wasn't the question the Milgram Experiment was trying to answer.

14. Can salt water and fresh water fish live in the same water or not?

This is just mean. Won't someone think of k-k-k-Ken's p-p-p-pets?

15. How long can flies survive freezing in a frig?

This option is for married 12th graders only.

20. Why do we have allergies?

Because you frig yourself at night.

22. Could a person function without thumbs? or What would it be like to not have thumbs?

WWJDWT?

46. Where are teeth stored?

In your FACE!

50. Why is blood blue in our veins but turns red when we are cut? If we are cut in a vacuum would the blood stay blue?

If you're floating around naked in a vacuum and someone's cutting you, you have bigger problems than what color your blood is.

53. Were all the animals friendly to man before the Flood? Idea: raise several baby animals like snake and mouse together to see if they remain friends as they are older.

Yea, let me know how that works out.

62. Why do plants give us oxygen?

Not how. Why. It's an existential question.

65. What affects skin color? Is one color better than another? What was God's purpose in this?

See, after the flood, Noah got shitfaced, and his son Ham uncovered his nakedness (all the kids were doing it - at least, all the kids that didn't drown). Noah got really pissed, and cursed him with perpetual slavery for him and his descendants. And that's where black people came from according to 19th century Christians. (Genesis 9)

66. What color is our brain?

Creationists are gonna have a tough time getting this data.

70. How do mice react after 24 hours of confinement? What about other animals?

What about your little brother?

72. What is God made of?

You got me.

80. Why did God make pests like bugs and mosquitoes?

As a wedding gift to Pandora.

83. Why do people believe in Evolution?
84. What events caused them to become evolutionists?

Maybe it was that time a creationist tried to see what color their brain was or how much electricity they could survive.

90. Why do we experience a feeling of fear? What makes this in our body?

Knowledge.

97. Why did God make birds to fly?

To retroactively give Cheney an alibi.

99. Does a mare in foal become more ornery than one not?

Hahahahahah

110. Why does lead melt at a low temperature?

Should children really be doing science experiments with molten lead?

At the end of last winter break, I drove back up, stopping at a gas station along the way that had a bunch of inspirational children's toys.



I almost bought this one, because I'd love to be able to create my own idea. I'd say I've had that idea for years, but paradoxes confuse me.



Adding garnish to a three year old is illegal in most states.



As is calling 3 year olds for a good time.



Yes, that's toluene in that children's toy.



The sister toy to the less popular Malignant Girl. This distinction was explored on an episode of House MD.



Last and most certainly least, Farm Equipment action figures. Downer cows sold separately.

So I saw this amazing deal at CVS over winter break. Luckily I was able to restrain myself.

O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

I have what is charitably described as a tenuous grasp on reality. My dreams bleed into my waking hours. My waking hours bleed into my dreams. Whether I am happy or sad or neutral or stressed or comfortable, I have to accept the possibility that I may wake up and find that my circumstances have changed, so often has it happened that my tears pull me out of a nightmare or my smiles drag me down into one. I am also a lucid dreamer and so am in the habit of regularly performing reality tests if I suspect I am in a dream. Berkeley's large population of bizarrely-dressed people often make these tests difficult.

Since I am never quite sure of myself, or perhaps because I am growing tired of the semi-randomness to which I had long attributed my life's arc, and indeed my very existence, I end up drawing conclusions about everything as though I were interpreting a dream. Although at this point, the dream metaphor breaks down, because dreams are functionally as unplanned and organic as our embodied lives, authored only in part by our subconscious just as our realities are only partially to the credit of our conscious minds. So it is more like I am interpreting my life as I would interpret a work of fiction, as though every parameter is planned out prior to my experiencing it, as though everything has some meaning behind it.

The fact that I have long considered myself an atheist in the strongest possible sense of that term does not prevent me from contrasting someone else's sterile, empty, peaceful existence from my chaotic, genitive, cluttered home, and asking whether these two ways of living reflect two different ways of organizing the mind. Is an empty wall a reflection of an empty soul? Will my clutter follow the same path as my favored originary myth of the cosmic soup and produce after eons something meaningful and beautiful? Or are those walls the carefully ordered superstructures that make life and all its beauty and pain possible, the foil to my cold and lonely space, empty yet always pushing everything away and apart?

Or am I just too damn lazy to clean?

Despite my propensity to see symbols everywhere, to see stories and parallelisms and larger points that no one is there to make, I feel the novel metaphor is also inadequate, and so I must return to the dream. The novel is too controlled, too planned, too directed and chosen and inevitable. At least in a dream, there is hope. But I do not know if it is my dream or someone else's, and my greatest fear is that I am the antagonist in someone else's nightmare. I miss the people I meet in dreams who stop to help or to explain just what is going on. I wonder how they know, but that doesn't keep me from feeling grateful. And if life is like a dream at all, it's a dream that is terribly confusing, fraught with illusory danger and above all, vivid and blinding in its pain.

As Sartre said, "One always dies too soon - or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are - your life and nothing else."

*Poem from here

So there's this word in Turkish: Berbat.

It means 'awful.'

I'm a fan of mnemonic devices, so when I see this word, I try to imagine an animal that would be a cross between a bear and a bat. And when I imagine this animal, I can't help but think, "Damn. That would be awful."

Turns out, I was right. I put 'bear bat' into google's image search, and got this:


Bearbat is definitely awful. For crime!

I'm doing research right now for a term paper for one of my classes. My intended topic addresses, among other things, that god-awful movie (from a feminist, anti-racist, disability-rights, queer rights, historical and cinematic - does EVERY SINGLE SCENE need to use that ugly gold filter? - and I could go on -perspective) 300 and how it manifests many of the findings made by those researching Terror Management theory.

This post is not about that.

Instead I wanted to share with you a quote I came across in one of the articles I am reading, called Fleeing the Body: A Terror Management Perspective on the Problem of Human Corporeality (which I definitely encourage everyone to read - there's a lot of good stuff in there). The broader argument I plan to make is that misogyny is nascent in male and female fears about the fact that we have these icky, gooey, physical bodies that are eventually going to die and decay whether we like it or not. Basically, the idea is that we fear death, and to get over that fear, we invent culture. Culture gives us meaning, and if we have higher meaning, then maybe we're not just pointless mortal meatsacks.

To get around the ever-present reminder of our pointless-meatsackery - our bodies - culture makes our bodies into symbols - man, woman, soldier, mother, worker, black, white, Korean, Southern, country-music-star, hipster, emo etc. etc. And damnit if we don't bend over backwards trying to live up to those symbols, through clothes, through make-up, through hairstyles, through speech patterns, even through painful beauty rituals and surgical solutions.

Although most of the research on the objectification of the body has focused on the negative consequences of cultural standards of beauty for women, our analysis suggests that objectification of the body also serves a
useful function: It transforms the creaturely body into a symbolic object ofbeauty and value. We certainly agree that the consequences of having a body that serves as a symbol in one's culture can be devastating (and we discuss these consequences later). However, one payof f for these negative consequences is a temporary escape from deeply rooted existential anxiety.

The pressure to turn our bodies into symbols inarguably falls disproportionately on women. The authors of this article theorize that this is because women's bodies are associated both with Mother, god-like figure that she once was to us as very young children, and with corporeality via menstruation, lactation, and childbirth, and so men, since they have more social power than women, can enforce their dislike of the idea that they're so sexually - and sex is about as corporeal and physical and animalistic as you can get - attracted to women (forgive the heternormativity), requiring that women spend a lot of money and put a lot of time and effort into being physical representations of these cultural symbols. Additionally sex has to be about True Wuv - or not about an actual woman at all:

Although romantic love is probably the most common way ofelevating animal sexuality to a uniquely human plane, it is certainly not the only way to do so.[...]In addition, contrary to popular opinion, most variations in sexuality are in the direction of being less animalistic and more symbolic than so-called normal sexual behavior. For example, sadomasochism is usually not wild and uncontrolled but rather highly ritualized, making use of scripts and props, much like the theater, thereby turning sex into an art form. Similarly, most fetishes consist of sexual arousal associated with an object that is closely associated with the body, but not the body itself, such as a shoe, leather, or silk panties. When a fetishist fixates on the body itself, a particular part of the body is objectified. By fixating on an inanimate object, or objectifying and idealizing specific body parts, the fetishist escapes the threat associated with a mortal, animal body.

This association between women's bodies and death is so strong that simply being reminded of a woman's corporeality is enough to elicit feelings of disgust and revulsion among research subjects.

In this study, a female confederate "accidentally" dropped either a tampon or hairclip out of her purse. Participants (irrespective of sex) not only evaluated her as less competent when she dropped a tampon than when she dropped a hairclip but also liked her less and physically distanced themselves by sitting farther away from her. Furthermore, subsequent to the manipulation, participants were asked to evaluate women in general using the objectification
measure developed by Noll and Fredrickson (1998) in which respondents are asked to rank in order of importance appearance- versus competence-related attributes of women's bodies. The findings revealed that, again regardless of participants' sex, being reminded of women's creatureliness led to greater value being placed on women's physical appearance.

Is it any wonder so much sexualized violence is directed our way?

So this morning a piece of frozen fish attacked my foot, resulting in a four hour visit to the local ER. Thankfully nothing was broken but I don't know why God is taking my limbs one by one. In what I can only assume was a giant cosmic joke, I was given crutches, which are unbelievably bad for my arms but which save me the indignity of looking like I'm playing an invisible, unending game of hopscotch. It wasn't fun in first grade and it isn't fun now, damnit! (I was secretly hoping for a cane, because at least then I could make House references to my heart's content).Also the fact that over the last few days there has been this bizarre swarm of Drosophila makes me think that God has me confused with the bastard lovechild of Moses and Job.

Potato and I had an ongoing debate about what I should do with my foot should they have to amputate. My thoughts were that I should preserve it in a jar and keep it on my desk, so that it would be available (and slime-eriffic) should I need to bludgeon someone with it. Potato argued with a passion I frankly found disturbing that I should desiccate it, which in his defense would have the added benefit of turning it into a magical-monkey-paw-type object that could grant the owner five wishes.

So all of this means that I'm at home typing on livejournal instead of running around like a wild child of the corn in the world's biggest corn maize (haha get it? because every corn maze proprietor on the interweb does!) tonight. Which mean everyone else gets to put up with my facebook graffiti. Yes, even you. Enjoy.

A lot of you know I've been in physical therapy most of this semester for nerve pain in my hands and shoulders. So using leftover halloween makeup, I marked all the places where I have shooting pains in my left forearm and hand and took a picture with my crappy cell phone camera. The right hand is worse. Red is worse than black. Sometimes this makes it difficult or impossible to do things like:
drive
type
pick up heavy objects (like backpacks)
toss small objects
Open jars

Etc. etc.

Please people, take care of your wrists!

Oh yea. I had fun.