PunkAssBlog.com

As those of you on this blog know, I decided to keep my last name upon marrying Hubby, and he choose to do the same. We are Ms. Antigone Myname and Mr. Hubby Hisname. Aside from the very minor problems we have been having with our respective families (what are you going to do about children? Who said we wanted any?), and a few of our friends (don’t you think that looks like you’re not very committed?), this hasn’t been that big of a deal. We got married, we didn’t fuse each other at the hip.

But lately, we’ve been running into an increasing number of problems, from government organizations. Now, since this is North Dakota, I don’t truly expect them to be on the cutting edge of social justice, but there bureaucratic hangups have started to be annoying.

First, Hubby moved in with me, so my name is the primary leaseholder, but he is on the lease. But, even though he’s on the lease, they still won’t tell him what our rent and utilities are a month. Yesterday, he went to the housing office to pay rent, and he had to guess how much money he needed to put in to cover expenses. It’s really ridiculous.

Last week, I got the title to my car in the mail, and it had the name as “Ms. Antigone Hisname and Mr. Hubby Hisname”. I called up the state DMV, and explained to the clerk that my name was Antigone MYNAME, not Hisname. She looked at the records she had, said “You’re right, you signed your name as Antigone Myname, we are sorry about the mistake. Please just send back the title to the same address, with a note explaining what’s wrong, and we’ll correct this name problem.” So, I sent the title back, and today I got it returned with my name fixed- and his name now “Hubby Myname”. So I called up the nice lady again, and we had the following exchange.

Me: I’m afraid we have a problem. I and my husband have a title to my car, and last week you had it Antigone Hisname and Hubby Hisname. I called up, saying that MY name was wrong, and this week you sent back a letter with Antigone Myname and Hubby Myname”.

Lady: What’s the problem?

Me: Now his name is wrong. His name is “Hubby Hisname”, not Myname.

Lady: I thought you said he was your husband; are you guys not married yet? If you’re not married, we’re going to have to send you a different form for joint title-holding.

Me: No, we’re married; we just both choose to keep our own names.

Lady: Why?

Me: Um, it was easier this way. Why, is this a problem?

Lady: (sounding a little embarrassed) No, I’m very sorry for the mistake. You guys BOTH signed your own names, it was just a mix-up. Please send the title back again, with a note saying that your names are different and we shall fix it. Sorry for the inconvenience.

In the grand scheme of things, these things are minor inconveniences- not worthy mentioning in the face of huge problems. But, they do add up. If my choice to keep my own last name upon that was truly what I said it was, a choice, there wouldn’t be these kinds of problems. I wouldn’t have to worry about carrying around my marriage certificate just because my name is different. If the choice to keep my name over changing it was a toss-up, there would be no problems in convincing people that I was really married. And if it was all about us having the same last name, it wouldn’t be just me, and not my husband, that has to deal with all of these problems.

“Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.” -Christopher Morley

(His previous weighing-in can be found here.)

Would people stop insinuating that I don’t care about women just because war is what I get the most worked up about right now? (I’m not just talking about on this blog. For some reason it seems to have become a common refrain lately.)

Being anti-war and being feminist are not mutually exclusive. After all, it’s impossible to support gender equality for women who you’re killing, or even for whom you’re just creating a constantly life-threatening environment. War zones, even once they’re ex-war zones, are where rights for women go to die.

(All pictures from here.)

Though I have argued that Obama appears to share McCain’s bloodthirsty imperialist core, it’s absolutely true that war is not the only issue that our choice of president could affect in meaningful ways. So, despite the fact that Obama has always been pretty lukewarm toward feminism, it’s also true that McCain has been downright hostile to it. Obama as president would surely be better for American women in general.

Women in Iraq, on the other hand — or in any other countries we’re raping to serve the business interests of the Great and Powerful Patriarchy — I’m pretty sure they won’t give a shit. Living in a war zone means the very fight for survival comes first. The things that feminists (quite rightly) fight for in America must seem like impossible dreams to Iraqi women who are forced to sell their bodies in order to keep their children from starving to death. Why is this our problem? Because we’re the ones who put them in this situation.

Since America invaded Iraq, an estimated 1.2 million Iraqis have been killed as a direct result. Surely everyone realizes that this means we’ve killed over half a million women in the bargain? I know it’s hard, but please take a moment and try to imagine what it would be like if some new threat (misogynistic terrorists, militant MRAs, whatever) had arrived on the scene five years ago and begun violently killing over half a million American women, with more killing still to come. Or if that seems like I’m rigging the argument too much, just make it over a million people of both sexes. Or, to make it even more analogous to Iraq, we can just say 3% of our population (9 million people, give or take).

Any which way you cut it, there would be absolutely no other topics of discussion in America. It would be priority number one to deal with. There would be no compromises that allowed the killing to continue at a slower place, no half-solutions which involved convincing the killers to target Canadians instead of Americans or somesuch.

But it’s hard for Americans to imagine that this is really happening to people just as human and important to themselves as we are to ourselves. Our compliant propagandistic press doesn’t show us life on the ground in Iraq. True critics of this war– those who say it’s wrong on every level, not just the way it’s been “poorly managed”– are marginalized and derided in our national discourse.

Let’s face it, the reality of war is just not pleasant to think about. Let’s watch HBO instead.

After having spent my adult life variously not being a mom, being a married mom, being a single mom, being a mom who stayed at home and being a mom who worked outside the home, I have come to the conclusion that if you are a fertile woman of childbearing years, no matter what you’re doing in terms of marriage and motherhood and career, you’re wrong. To wit:

1. You’re married, you get pregnant, choose to give birth, and decide to stay at home with the baby.

Lazy! Self-indulgent! and just GIVING away all the advances women have made in terms of career equality! Get a job!

2. You’re married, you get pregnant, choose to give birth, and decide to work outside the home without the baby.

Selfish! It isn’t all about YOU and YOUR fulfillment anymore, you have a child to think of now! you just don’t want to have to live within your means! You need to raise your OWN child!

3. You’re married, you get pregnant and choose to have an abortion.

Murderer! If you didn’t want to have kids you should have gotten your tubes tied! If you have a husband and a home, there is no excuse for not stepping up to the plate and carrying that life you created to term!

4. You’re married and you choose not to get pregnant.

Immature! Self-centered! Look at Europe–do you want to see our culture crash too? It isn’t all about you, you have a duty to society! It’s time to GROW UP and take on your responsibilities!

5. You’re not married, you get pregnant, choose to give birth, and decide to stay at home with the baby.

Leech! It isn’t society’s responsibility to care for your child conceived due to your irresponsible behavior! Get out there and get a job!

6. You’re not married, you get pregnant, choose to give birth, and decide to work outside the home without the baby.

Slut! Our culture is collapsing because of the explosion of all you single mothers! Why didn’t you give that baby to a real family that could raise it properly instead of shoving it off onto strangers!

7. You’re not married, you get pregnant and choose to have an abortion.

Slut! And now you think it’s okay to take another human life so you can just erase your careless, selfish behavior! You spread your legs, now you need to step up the the plate and take your medicine like an adult!

8. You’re not married and you choose not to get pregnant.

What’s wrong with you? Are you that ugly and unpleasant that no man wants to commit to you, or are you just a selfish whore?

Continue reading ‘“Men” and “mankind” apparently not being defined to include “ambulatory wombs.”’

We’ve started a little conversation in the back room that I figured I’d take back to the main table.

Where we left things: I asserted that McCain and Obama are both warmongers, it’s just that McCain is honest about it.

QUIN: [Obama] can say he doesn’t want South Korea-style military bases, [that he’s for] autonomous Iraqi govt, all the rest, but it’s all empty rhetoric unless his actual plan calls for pulling all US presence out of Iraq. Currently, it’s nothing even resembling that.

THENE: No, but it’s markedly different from the McCain approach. You’re the first person I’ve ever seen even make the argument that there’s no difference between the two in that regard - even if we can’t know what either would really do until one of them takes office.

It’s true, we can’t know. But, when was the last time a politician on the national level turned out to be MORE liberal once s/he attained office than what they promised in their campaign?

I’m not actually arguing that there’s no differences between McCain’s and Obama’s plans for Iraq. The biggest thing that sets them apart is that McCain is a fairly transparent opponent, whereas Obama and the other savage mules are more like jiujitsu masters. McCain just goes for the direct attack and says “We’ll stay in Iraq, you’re just smelly hippies”. But Obama deftly steps to one side, saying “I’m on your side, don’t worry, I’m change you can believe in” and then just stays in anyway. Continue reading ‘Master of Jiu Jitsu’

Stories like this have cropped up with more and more regularity in the past several years:

Questions Surround Kids’ Sexual Harassment Charges

Between 70 to 100 of the state’s youngest school children are suspended each year for sexually harassing their classmates, state education records from 2003 to 2006 show.

The disciplinary tactics are prompting concerns from parents, educators and academics about the appropriateness of charging young children with sexual harassment.

“They cannot understand what it means. They’re too young. They’re just babies,” said Linda Burke, whose grandson attends the Downey Elementary School in Brockton.

Oh, my. Really?

None of the stories are ever really supportive of the girls. At best, they’re like the one I linked to above, or this one. At worst, they’re so skewed that if it wasn’t such a sad state of affairs, it’d be funny–

…here’s another example of how our schools have become hostile environments for our boys…

Were they much friendlier in the days of yore for our boys..?

Let’s jump into the Wayback Machine and find out–

Continue reading ‘And every time I read one, I remember.’

This weekend, I watched the movie “Dark Knight” twice (once on opening night, and once when my Hubby came back down from the sky) and the movie “Camp” off of Netflix*. Now, the two movies really don’t have much to do with each other: one is a dark, modern-day morality play with lots of explosions, and the other is a lighthearted drameidy about outcasts at a drama camp. But, both have something in common in regards to what is “true”.

In “Camp”, there is a down-on-his-luck director, who berates the campers for failing to be “normal”. He felt they needed “a hard dose of reality, and (he) gave it to them with both barrels”. He was upset that they were happy, being the weird little people they were together, and felt they should know the world was a cruel, wicked place that was going to chew them up and spit them out.

SPOILERS for Dark Knight after the fold. Continue reading ‘“A Hard Dose of Reality”’

We have a contender.

Meet Dmitri. He’s a pick-up artist, which in itself gives him about 50 million douchebag points. He met a woman named Olga, who talked to him for a few minutes, gave him her card, and said, “Call me.”

So he did. She wasn’t home, and he left the second-douchiest phone message in history. Olga seems to be a sensible woman who, in realizing her mistake, did the sensible thing and just didn’t call him back. So a few days later, he fired back with the douchiest phone message in history.

Have a listen. He’s from Toronto, and the comments from the good folks at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore in that article are just wonderful.

Hat tip: Rantipole6

So like I said in my last post, I’m moving. This will be the first time I’ve lived by myself, which of course has advantages and disadvantages. Ability to walk around topless whenever I want? Maru! Splitting the cable bill? Batsu! This biggest disadvantage will be the crippling loneliness. Sure, I spend all night reading or attached to the computer anyway, but the option to go down and pester a roommate was always there, and now they are a 15 or 50 minute drive away, respectively. This means I will probably have to venture out in search of local companionship, and will probably be hitting more bars. No bill splitting + more leaving the house to socialize = must budget better.

The biggest place I can rein it in is the grocery store, and that means finding the time to clip coupons. But there are other obvious places: our family plan cell phone bill was $100/month, which meant I was paying $33/month for the 100 minutes of phone conversations and a dozen text messages I actually used. We have over 3,000 unused rollover minutes. Screw that noise - I suspect a prepaid plan will slash my yearly phone bill from almost $400 to just over $100.

Cleaning supplies were another place. I have an insane collection of cleaning chemicals. I’m always on the lookout for that one product that will actually make my life easier. And just before I left for Europe, I found it: vinegar. Cleans fucking everything. So the only remaining chemicals I want are toilet bowl cleaner (love those curvy necks, love them love them love them) and a super-strong calcium and lime remover, plus window cleaner because it’s still cheap and easier than diluting your own ammonia, which is what my mom does.

So I’ve been on the interwebs looking at being thrifty. I found this recipe for homemade laundry detergent, and have looked at covering my windows with 3M window films. Would wrapping my water heater in insulation actually help? How long would it take a toaster oven to pay for itself?

How do you punkasses save money?

Hi all!

I’ve been back from Europe for about a week now, and posting is still light. I got back at 9PM on a Sunday and had a 9AM Monday meeting, four projects to get caught up on, two younger students to keep occupied, and I have to move apartments. My brain is fried.

I highly recommend traveling in Europe for anyone who has the opportunity. The only downside is that when you come home, you can’t talk about all of your wonderful experiences without making people scoff at your supposed bragging, or making them burn with jealousy. Or both. Which means you’re just bursting with fun and funny stories that you can’t tell too many of without people accusing you of pretentious twatdom. It’s a gift and a curse. I’m just saying, if you like coffee, get yourself to western Europe right now. They are not fucking around.

For now, I am focused on getting some projects started at school, one of which is funded by a major company and so of course they’re a little more in love with hard deadlines than our usual funding sources. This has led to an interesting dilemma for me: my helpful coworkers are constantly dropping in to give helpful advice and suggestions to my enthusiastic undergraduate, and while he’s excellent at setting up the equipment and doing experiments, he’s having a hard time keeping his eye on the prize. It’s all so important, how can he possibly not enact every suggestion? So now I need to tell these guys that while I generally appreciate their help, they need to back the fuck off the kid so he can get something done in time for the next meeting. That part is easy. It’s doing it without starting some kind of passive-aggressive scientists feud that’s going to be tricky.

At home, I’m sorting through five years worth of roommate possession creep, dividing up plates and towels like we’re in some kind of divorce. I’ve been living with these guys for five years, and this is the first time I’ll be moving to a place by myself. Somebody hold me. Or at least tell me how to get that musty smell out of my towels, the one caused by years of ex-fiance’s pile-the-wet-towels-until-all-towels-in-the-house-are-dirty method of laundry management. OK, I admit, some things I won’t miss. He’s already gleeful about never having to look at the breadmaker again, and about not having to share bathroom counter space with me.

I promise to form an opinion on something one of these days. Maybe after I’ve moved.

I’m ba-aaack!

(It’s possible nobody noticed I was gone…but in case anybody DID–)

In the past year or so I have gone on many, many, many business trips. Oh, to think that there was a time when I thought that business travel was probably Glamorous and Exciting and You Get To See Lots of Cool Places on the Company Dime!!

Well, it ain’t, it ain’t and you don’t.

There are two kinds of business travel. There’s the kind where you are going to a conference or a seminar or a training course as a recipient of knowledge only, which is actually a blast. This is because all that is required of you is to show up someplace for roughly the normal equivalent of a typical work day, absorb whatever you are there to absorb during that time frame, then party like a beast into the wee hours. I had a trip like that to Montreal early last year. I actually didn’t anticipate it being as fun as it was–I knew I’d have plenty of time to explore the city ’cause it was a four-day seminar from 8 am to 4 pm each day, but I was the only person not just from my job site, but from my entire company attending, and a quick check of the folks I know from surrounding companies didn’t reveal anybody else from them that I might know enough to pal around with either. However, by the end of the first day I had fallen in with a group of folks in my general age range from various other companies and, heh. Montreal is a fun city…the first night we went out, we were out til 11 pm and I was kinda tired the next day and so was everyone else and we swore we wouldn’t do THAT again…so of course the next night we stayed out til 1 am and we REALLY swore, ya know, tomorrow night is the last night before the final day of the seminar so we will be good TOMORROW night..!

Yeah, we stayed out til 3 am. Oh well…

However, this kind of trip comprises the definite minority of my business trips. Mostly, I am there to work, and when that is the case, the days are usually at least twelve hours long and even after they are over, you have so much follow-up-and-preparatory work still to do that you have to go straight to your hotel room and spend another three hours on the faithful laptop. So in spite of the fact that I subsequently traveled to Chicago, Indianapolis (okay, we can probably skip over Indianapolis as a potential fun spot anyway–sorry to anyone who lives there, please don’t take offense!), New York, Helsinki, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Quebec City and Philadelphia, I did not really have too much in the way of F-U-N. Read, practically NONE, bleh! My company got its money’s worth outta me, let’s put it that way.

(Now, I do have another seminar later this year in Puerto Rico–finally, I’m travelling in the right direction as we head into wintertime instead of as close as possible to the freaking Arctic Circle like usual!! I am a presenter, not just an attendee–the organization sponsoring the seminar invited me and are going to pay for all my travel and other expenses based on a process I’m publishing in a peer-reviewed journal with my company that I developed to–er, do something. Sigh. Stupid confidentiality agreements…oh well, if you don’t work in biotech a description would probably range for you from boring to incomprehensible anyway. But the seminar is Wednesday and Thursday, deliberately designed they told me so that attendees could stay over the weekend…bliss! I am allowing myself to hope.)

This week’s business trip was of the usual variety, however. Flew out to LA Wednesday, trapped on the job site during all beautiful beach hours, just flew back in last night on the redeye and was a total effed-up mess this morning. Which really sucks because I took vacation today and Monday so I could go to the beach here and nope, I did not make it out the door this morning. Oh well, at least I didn’t have to drive from the airport straight into work either, and didn’t have to take a vacation day–travelled from midnight to 9:30 am this morning, which my boss is willing to concede counts as a full work day. So there. A small consolation, but it is my own. And our travel agency got confused and put me in an “Economy Plus” seat right behind the First Class section on the return flight instead of the usual crap seat in the dead back of the plane so EVEN THOUGH our plane had unspecified electrical problems that kept us at the departure gate for an hour and a half after we were supposed to take off, it coulda been way worse.

Anyway, in my bountiful spare time on this plane and many others, I have been compiling a running list of thoughts, advice and complaints that I feel like sharing. Also, it’s a painless way to solicit advice from any other frequent fliers out there that might wanna share some happy tips on making business travel life more like people THINK it is rather than the way it ACTUALLY usually turns out–hook me up!

Long Plane Flights:

1. They suck.

2. Don’t wear socks; your ankles swell up like balloons sitting in a fixed position at high altitude for hours.

3. Do business class or even the new “economy plus” if you possibly can, unless you enjoy seeing how long you can sit with your knees jammed into your chin. Do not ever fly JetBlue. I am five feet eight inches tall and one hundred thirty-five pounds, which makes me a very average size for an American person, and I was physically unable to sit facing forward in their standard seat because my knees would not fit behind the seat in front of me and the seatbelt prongs dug into both sides of my butt.

4. When making transoceanic flights, do not leave the business class TV screen tuned to the picture of the plane going over the ocean. It may seem cool at first, but after you discover that intervals of three hours at a time don’t appear to change the plane’s position over the endless blank blue appreciably you start to lose it a little.

5. Make a big hairy deal to yourself out of trips to the bathroom with the toiletries kit they give you.

6. Accept in advance that there will be a screamy poopy nauseated baby within fifteen feet of you on any flight you are on that lasts more than three hours, especially any flight you plan on sleeping during.

7. There is no law that says you have to talk to large stinky older men sitting next to you, even if they keep trying.

8. Pay absolutely no attention to anything the pilot says, especially about “turbulence” or “mechanical problems.” Seriously, what can you do about it?

9. Accept that if you try to alleviate the paralyzing boredom of the flight by eating everything they offer you in business class, you will gain at least five pounds by the time you return home and you will suffer indigestion on the plane and also, it won’t taste very good.

10. Whatever you do, do not miss your scheduled flight, as any replacement flight will be twice as long, require at least twice as many plane transfers and will have layovers of either less than one hour (especially for international flights) or more than four hours (especially for domestic flights).

11. Believe that customs and baggage officials couldn’t care less about the quality of your life personally.