Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Bang, meet your replacement, Whimper

I've come to the conclusion that there are some key ingredients that that the average every-single-day blogger has that I do not. I've done some research (read: "didn't have anything to do today at work") and I need to acquire one or more of the following:

- A baby, either in or out of utero
- The belief that everyone on the internet is interested in the progress I am making on my novel
- The time and ability to distill the random items I find on the internet into a cohesive, entertaining whole.
- An unnervingly intense passion for a book or television show and a passionate devotion to the fan-media generated thereby.
- A complicated and rapidly dissolving relationship and absolutely no respect for the privacy of my partner in said relationship
- A paycheck.

Since none of these items seems to immediate forthcoming, I'm reassessing the idea of posting every day, which I obviously have failed at doing. There is a lot to be said for only speaking when you have something to say.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

On Spider-Man and the future of American Democracy

This really seems like the worst presidential election ever. The endless empty posturing. The completely inane if not actually obviously biased news coverage. The fact that the United States of America is teetering on the jagged edge of what feels like complete and total collapse and responsible, voting citizens still care about the cost of a haircut. I can't tell if I've just gotten older and more cynical, or if the entire country has taken crazy pills and is just spiraling directly down the craphole to oblivion.

With those concepts in mind, I made a list of the candidates and compared them to popular comic book characters. Harmless parody, you say? No. From now on I am going to attempt to hypnotize myself into believing that this list is trenchant political commentary and this race is really between Thor and Captain Marvel and therefore isn't really goddamn happening.

Let's start with Hillary "Her vagina makes her weak, unless it's got teeth, in which case I'm terrified that it will bite off America's penis" Clinton. Of course she's Wonder Woman. They're both women, right? They're totally like sisters! Let's talk at length about their emotions and their periods and their hair and totally ignore the fact that one's a divinely powered lesbian warrior and one's as smart as all goddamn hell and has live, breathed, and fucked politics for the last thirty years of her life. Quick, someone write an opinion piece in Time about their panties.


Like Spider-Man, Barack Obama is beloved by many. He's a smart, talented, caring guy with everybody's best interest at heart, whether it's pulling the troops out of Iraq or hitting Doctor Octopus in the head with mailbox. Also like Spider-Man, Obama really isn't all that impressive. Sure, he moves us, but he's only served one Senate term and he can't even fly. When the shit really hits the fan in the Marvel universe, you want one of the cosmically-powered heavy hitters standing between you and total, mind-blowing peril, not some kid from Queens (or a junior senator).





I'm sure that Rudy Giuliani did many incredibly worthwhile things during his tenure as mayor of New York, things that completely offset the fact that he paid for his girlfriend's apartment with city funds, crippled the emergency response network, and fired the best chief of police that New York ever had because he was getting too much attention. I also understand that the Kingpin gave generously to many charities, and never actually killed Daredevil. Anyway, they're both from New York and they both suck.



Do you see that lightening? Do you see it? You better take a good long look at it, because come January 2009 Mike Huckabee is going to use it to smite the living crap out of all our unrighteous asses and then lead the worthy on the goddamn jihad. I don't have a problem with being Christian. I also don't have a problem with Odin. What I do have a problem with is the power of the gods being used to influence public policy, be it the decision to ban abortion or the decision to hammer the living bagoogoo out of Doctor Doom. Separation of church and state, people.




Man, Jessica Jones was an awesome character in a great book that not enough people read. Man, Dennis Kucinich is an awesome senator with a great message that not enough people care about. The similarities pretty much end there, as she's an sexy, ass-kicking drunk and he's a weeny-tiny post-hippie peacenik, but the whole flawed situation really speaks to the need to think outside the box, whether comic book or ballot, because one day all the alternatives are going to vanish completely because of lack of attention and we're going to be left all alone with the fucker who's coming up next.



Wasn't it enough that you were a billionaire industrialist, Iron Man? Did you really have to build yourself an invulnerable suit and go out and fight crime? Couldn't you just have used your vast fortune to effect social change and nip those super-criminals in their childhood buds? And now you're the head of S.H.I.E.L.D, too. Wasn't the massive fortune enough for you? Do you really, absolutely have to a phenomenal level of power as well? Power you don't really deserve?
And, in addition to his staggering similarities to Tony "Kind of a Douche, Really" Stark, Mitt Romney hates gay people and presided over the Big Dig.


There's nothing wrong with Captain Marvel. He's got all kinds of nifty powers, a long, impressive resume of winning bouts with nasty bad guys, an outfit with a lightning bolt on it, even, but for some reason he's just not bringing the people in the door. John Edwards has had a distinguished Senate career, he's a Southern Democrat, and he's got a lovely wife and some hot daughters. Still, somehow, he can't get them in the door. Which is too bad, really, because I'd much rather have a magical flying uber-man between me and the space monsters than that punk kid from the Daily Bugle.


Who the hell is Ron Paul? What does he believe in? Is he really a fascist? Does he actually have a plan for abolishing income tax? Where did his vast fortune come from, and how come I've never heard of him? Why is he the king of the internet? Am I really seeing my hands melt, or could that be from his awesome powers of illusion? Is that a fishbowl, or the physical manifestation of his unbreakable Libertarian philosophy? Why is it so easy to compare a presidential candidate with a genuine shot at winning to a B-list Spider-Man villain? There are no answers. There is only Ronsterio.


In conclusion, I'm moving to Canada and I'm taking the X-Men with me. Good night.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Thirty Five

I work for Planned Parenthood. I work to raise money to fund reproductive health services and education for the counties we serve, and to fund the advocacy that protects our right to provide those services. One of the services we provide is first term abortion, a medical procedure that terminates a pregnancy in its first three months. My work is incredibly important to me, but most of the the time I try not to talk about it too much. Now is not going to be one of those times.
Today is the 35th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court case that protects a woman's right to choose. Its author, Justice Harry Blackman, wrote the decision six months after helping his twenty year-old daughter find an illegal abortion.
This case is at the center of all the work I do, and it's weak. It's easy to knock holes in Roe, and it's easy to put limitations on it. The only thing that keeps it standing is the grassroots movement that I am proud to belong to, and the power that individual men and women can exert when they raise their voices in support of what they believe in. In the end, that's probably all that can keep anything standing.
Roe vs. Wade is about life and death. Both its supporters and its detractors can agree on that. They say we're ending innocent lives. They say we're killing babies. We say something different. We say that Roe saves lives.
Banning abortions won't stop women from having them. It will stop poor women, young women, minority women, rural women, and abused women from having them safely. They will go back to back alleys and coat hangers, while women with resources will find private doctors or fly to other countries in secret. We know this is what will happen, because it happened before. Ten thousand women died from botched abortions the year before Roe passed, and thousands more were scarred, mutilated, or left sterile. Without the protection of this case, women would die in the thousands again.
So many people believe what we do is wrong, that our doctors are murderers, that we're liars and child-haters, that we protect rapists and pedophiles, that we brainwash women who would otherwise be good and loving mothers. Strangers scream at me on the street when I walk into my office and harass our patients with bloody portraits of crying infants. I don't blame them. If I believed, truly believed, that there was a building in my neighborhood where they killed infants and lied to their mothers, I would be out of the street screaming with them.
I don't believe that. I do not believe that a ball of cells smaller than a quarter is a viable human life. I've seen literally hundreds of women walk through our doors, and they don't believe it either. The mothers and fathers who are our doctors and nurses don't believe it. But none of that belief means anything. All that matters is the law that says that it is your right as a human being and as a patient to decide the outcome of your pregnancy with your doctor. As long as that stays on the books, they can scream and wave their signs and call us killers from dawn til dusk, and they can't stop us. It's the law, and its on our side.
I don't want anyone to have to have an abortion. They're very painful and deeply upsetting and they force you to make a choice that you wish to hell you'd never even had to consider. I want every child in this world to be conceived and born with love into a world where they are cherished and wanted. I want women to understand their bodies and know the right time to become sexually active, and choose when the right time is to become mothers. I want us to be an educated, caring society that puts its children first.
We're not living in the world I want. We live in a country where we tell students nothing about their bodies or their sexuality, where women and men have no access to contraception, where there is incest and rape and plain goddamn bad luck and bad planning. We live in a country where we need Roe vs. Wade. I wish we didn't, but until we don't, I'm going to do everything I can to keep it standing. Here's to another 35 years, Roe. I hope to God that we don't need them.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

On Accomplishment, Bleach, and Nude Self-Portraits

I am a domestic powerhouse. I am a household goddess. South Asian families should put statues of me over the stove, such are the scope and majesty of my house-cleaning, errand-running, laundry-doing, grocery-shopping skills. I will put it to you thusly: In the past 24 hours, I have ironed ten shirts, washed, dried, and folded three loads of laundry, grocery shopped with both thrift and verve at two entirely separate stores, got the oil changed in my car, got the rust stains out of my favorite skirt, planned meals for the week, and bought a copy of Jaws. Ha.

I was going to follow this up a sort of guilty rumination on my basically acquisitive nature (IKEA calls me Customer Zero) and how I feel that I should be devoting my time to hipper and more meaningful pursuits than buying sesame oil and bleaching shirts, like creating a one-woman show (not bloody likely) or taking ironic nude photos of myself by the dishwasher (almost unbelievably not bloody likely), but then, in the course of this incredibly long sentence, I decided that the sense of pride I get from efficiently, creatively, and attractively accomplishing the tasks that keep Mark and I functioning as responsible Western-world adults isn't anything that I needed to beat myself up about. Pillars of the avant-garde like throw pillows and clean pants too.

Next entry: Comic books and movies that aren't about abortion.

Friday, January 11, 2008

Correspondence

Dear New Year's Resolution,

Shut up, I can still make 365 posts. I'm just going to double up on some days. It's going to be awesome.

Guiltily,
Emily

Dear gigantic fucking bastard who broke into our apartment and stole all of Mark's stuff while we were goddamn in Hawaii, you fucking massive yeti bastard,

It was so considerate of you to keep your gloves and not get your dirty fingerprints all over the apartment. Likewise, it was enormously thoughtful of you to leave your gigantic footprint on our couch so we would have something to remember you by. I hope you enjoy the XBOX 360 and the games; we had had it for about three months, and you must have assumed we were getting bored with it. Mark is touched that you took the time to rummage through all of his possessions; he's been collecting those video games since he was about twenty, and I know he wanted them to have a good home. Of course, without the fifty or so games you took the PlayStation 2 was useless, so it was really very considerate for you to take it with you and save us the trouble of finding a place for it in the closet, which, by the way, looks so much better now that you've taken everything out of it and stacked it on the floor. The one downside is that your new laptop needs to go to the shop for repairs, but I'm sure the trip there will pass really quickly while you're listening to your new iPod with your new headphones, playing your lovingly maintained new GameBoy Advance. Mark will be happy to recommed some songs for you, if you're a little lost. Oh, and what really touched me? The way that, after you rummaged through my nightstand, you carefully placed my vibrator on the bed, just to prove that you'd touched it. If you happen to stop by again, be sure and take that with you. I'm done with it. Good luck at the pawn shops, and I hope that you can score yourself some really nice crack, you know, the good stuff, the kind your Mom used to cook down.

Hoping you get raped in prison,

Emily

Dear Island of Maui,

Wow, that sure was fun. You'll have to tell me where you got your breathtaking tropical beauty, because I'd love to pick some up for the apartment. We have a little extra room now, and I think a black sand beace would look great in the office. iI loved what you did with the verdant, mist-shrouded mountains, and the miles and miles of perfect beaches and sparkling oceans were a really inspired touch. Initially I wasn't quite sure about all those twisty mountain roads you sent me down, and those one lane hairpin turns definitely gave me pause, but really, the heart-stoppingly lovely views and the awesome volcanic crater more than made up for it. (Mark especially enjoyed the parts where it looked we were going to plummet to our deaths. Kudos!) Tell the whales that how happy we were that they decided to swing by; all that leaping has really paid off, their flukes look great. (Oh, and just a quick aside to that fish I met snorkelling: Call me. We can make it work.)

Thanks for a great time,
Emily

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

On Ambition, Reader Response, and the Flawed Western Calendar

My beloved readers have already pointed out some flaws in my ambitious blogging plan. One, from my cherished boyfriend, is that this is a leap year and there will be 366 days of Emily, not 365. The other, from a foreign correspondent, is that while keeping a blog is all well and good, the minutae of my existence as a non-profit employee/resident of upstate New York might not be the stuff of which great and epic tales are spun. My initial response was going to be, hey, fuck you, which is my initial response to most things, but then I actually took stock of my day so far.
Here's what I've done:

Woke up late.
Lost keys.
Went to work.
Did boring non-profit stuff.
Thought about lunch.

Clearly, I am not a unique and beautiful snowflake. While there are the occasional moments of wild excitement (I throw small change at Mark's head, something breaks at work, there's a lot of snow), if I had to look back at 2008 and realize my most thrilling moment was when, say, I paid off my credit card bill, I'd probably shoot myself My foreign correspondent suggested that a more interesting blog would the adventures of Remy LeBouef, Rock Detective, as he solves the great mysteries of Rock, which is completely true, it would be way more interesting. It would also require an enormous amount of creative effort on my part, moreover a lot of discliplined creative effort, which I've failed notably at in the past, and so I've decided to take him at his word and do it. In addition to this one. I've always been interested in the idea of keeping a diary as a completely different person, and I think that I'm going to start one, in which Remy will be making cameo appearances.

But Emily, you say, aren't there people who do things like that online already, except they're pretending to be Eowyn of Rohan's twin sister or Han Solo's clone or something? Aren't they sort of terrifying and lame and don't you make fun of them at any available opportunity? Are you also going to start dressing up as anime characters on the weekend? And what makes you think you're going to be able to sustain an interesting narrative over the course of an entire leap year and still keep up with this original, boring blog? And can I read it?

And the answers are, yes, of course they are and of course I do, fuck you, I have no idea at all, and no, not until I've done a couple and it doesn't suck, or at lease, sucks interestingly. I'm not getting any younger, and if I don't start pushing myself as a writer now I'll wake up one morning a deeply depressed forty-something with five 10 year-old unfinished plays.

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

On Resolutions and the Nightmare of History

Blogging with Emily: A History

2001: Motivated almost exclusively by peer pressure and the desire to impress Brian Hitselberger (?!?) Emily starts her first blog over at Diaryland. There are a few a shining moments of pith and wit, but she unfortunately abandons it to focus her energies more completely on smoking pot in cars and freaking out about her studies, thereby depriving herself of what could have been a highly lucrative career as an internet superstar.

2003-4: In a fit of emo passion, Emily starts another blog over at Livejournal. She manages to update it regularly for approximately one month, but then chooses to devote herself instead to ill-advised romantic relationships, which she tragically does not write about.

2005: After moving back home to Rhode Island, Emily decides to launch herself back into creative writing by starting yet another blog at Livejournal. She manages to post one sentence, once, and spends the rest of the year gaining weight and temping.

2008: Emily shakes off the blogging failures of her past and starts afresh, this time at Blogspot.

And this time, there's a goal. My New Year's resolution is 365 posts in 365 days. This time I think it will actually work, based on the following reasons:

1.) I have a job which requires me to sit in front of a computer for eight hours a days, 5 days a week, and an extraordinary capacity for procrastination.

2.) I have honed my ability to make myself feel guilty to a razor-like edge - see: going to the gym.

3.) I'm linking this to Facebook, so maybe someone will actually read my brilliant and sparkling posts, and maybe the fear of public shame will keep me from making an ass out of myself. (Not that this has ever worked before.)

4.) I'm...more mature and self-discliplined???