Makishef

Oh geez, I didn't realize how long it had been since my last post. Hi! I'm here! I've been commenting and such, but infrequently, and I definitely haven't been posting. So to catch up, here are ten things I've done since my last post:

1. Started a new job, which basically involves doing all sorts of things I'm good at for less money than I want, but what is not too shabby for this area and economy.

2. Moved into the house (finally).

3. Got a visit from the_assilon.

4. Had too many margaritas and sang "Under Pressure" with the_assilon for karaoke. What's more embarrassing, I sang Freddie Mercury's part. Yes, with the "mmm bum bah day" and the ridiculous high notes and everything. This was over a week ago and I still get embarrassed thinking about it.

5. Cried over this Fandom Secret. I realize I probably should not have admitted this.

6. Ranted several times about Obama and Fox News and ladybusiness IRL to anyone with ears. I'm pretending this is out of character.

7. Lasted an entire week without internet.

8. Quit smoking. Again.

9. Played laser tag with a bunch of small children.

10. Hosted a book club meeting.



So what have the rest of you been up to? :)

I am sick and drowning in my own snot, and my personal life has been turned on its head, and basically I just want to bury myself in comforting fanfic and forget the rest of the world exists right now. Only I can't not talk about this Roman Polanski bullshit.

( Cut for length, ranting and serious trigger potential. )

Do you ever hear a song a million times, then one day it dawns on you that this is personal? Maybe you grew into it, or maybe it never really clicked for you, but for whatever reason, this song you've been hearing your whole life hits home in a way it never had before.

( Today, this is the song. )

I have to be awake in less than six hours. I am the kind of sleepy person who needs at least eight hours and a cup of coffee to function. But alas, right now? This is me:



Commenters at BoingBoing are being WRONG ON THE INTERNET about Caster Semenya, and I cannot pull myself away. Agh!

Here is a contender for quote of the day, thanks to Shakesville:

"I'll be danged if I am going to give up my Social Security because of socialism."

I live in the South. I figure most of you had gathered this by now, but just in case, I'm throwing that out there. It's important.

There are a lot of stereotypes about us out there, that we're ignorant, that we're backwards, that we're racists, sexists, homophobes, Bible-thumpers. Unfortunately, a lot of these stereotypes persist because the people living here continue to back them up. It's a sort of pride people take in being perceived as the country's losers: we're told we're backwards racists, so we start using the N-word even louder.

It doesn't mean backwards bigots don't exist elsewhere; they certainly do, in large quantities, and some of them are sneakily disguised as open-minded progressive types. But I will definitely grant that around here, it's overt. It isn't something sneaky; it's something people honestly believe is normal, something they can get away with.

Sometimes I am thankful, in a way, for the overt bigotry; it's helpful in discerning who you actually care to be around. I don't have to parse someone's words, because it's already there. The panicky front page headline stating that our city was now 50% African-American and growing is what led me to finally cancel my subscription to the local paper. Gay panic, use of the n-word, it's all around me, right out there where anyone can see, and as painful and infuriating as it is, at least it's obvious.

Mostly, though, I feel like I'm going to be angry every time I step out of the house. Most recently, we moved out of our apartment, to the great sadness of our former neighbors. Now they're already complaining about the woman who moved into our old apartment. Apparently she is a bitch because she asked them not to play Rock Band loud enough to shake her floor at ass o'clock in the morning. I won't write out the other word she is, by grace of her being born the "wrong" color.

This matters only because our former neighbors also received a formal note on their door from the apartment complex's owners, stating that they had received complaints of hate speech and that further violations would result in immediate eviction. According to the story they told V, they had at some point been out in the breezeway using the n-word. Next thing they knew, they had this note on their door, and ain't that fucked up? They're Americans, they have freedom of speech, you know.

V shrugged and told them to maybe rethink using the word at all, but particularly in a place where people who might be directly affected by the word could hear and be offended. He did, however, come home and say he wasn't sure how he felt that the apartments could threaten eviction over that kind of speech. I initially told him that hate speech of any kind could be considered threatening, which means it's affecting another person's right to be and feel safe in their own home.

Then I looked it up. As I understand it, that's sort of how it works, but I couldn't really find anything in regards to the apartment complex's duties or rights as a corporation. I did, however, discover that a company who receives complaints that one of its employees is using hate speech as a form of harassment can be prosecuted for tolerating it if they do not take action against that employee. It makes sense, then, that an apartment complex could consider hate speech to be harassment of another tenant. So not only are they doing what I (and likely they) believe to be ethically correct, they're also covering their own asses as a business.

So you can't legally be punished for "thought crime," which was where V's concern was coming from, but the company responsible for you can surely be held accountable.

All this mostly interested me because I like knowing that occasionally, the things I believe to be good and morally correct do indeed have a law to back them. But I also find it interesting because I am a huge proponent of the idea that words are intensely powerful. On the radical end, I genuinely believe that when you use a certain rhetoric, you are aligning yourself with every other person using that rhetoric, including the extremists, and you have to be willing to accept the labels and consequences that go with that.

In this case, the use of the n-word draws a line in the sand. My former neighbors are the ones who drew it, not their new neighbor, and they drew it so that they are on one side and she's on the other. They drew it so they could say she is Other, less than. And the other people standing on their side, staring her down? Those are the political dorks photoshopping watermelons in front of the White House, they're the white cops who shoot a man for the heinous crime of being the wrong color at the wrong place and time, they're the Southern politicians intent on keeping POCs "in their place", they're the KKK and neo-Nazi organizations.

And my former neighbors can argue all they want that they have their First Amendment rights, that they didn't mean it that way, that it was a joke, that it wasn't directed at her, but in the end, they still drew that line in the sand. So yeah. I'd consider that a threat to my sense of safety, too.

I am sort of ashamed to admit this, but I am really, genuinely too confused about the healthcare debate to have an opinion. Everywhere I've been, there are opinions out the wazoo but very little in the way of unbiased information. Does anyone know where I can get a cheat sheet?

Because right now all I can be sure of is that no, Sarah Palin, Obama does not intend to euthanize my grandmother.

V and I are now proud homeowners!

I am so excited! We signed all the paperwork yesterday and have keys now, so we've been giving tours to friends and family. We have about a month to do all the major work and move, so I may still not be around much. There is so much to love about our silly little house; it's kind of ugly and the design is goofy in some of the rooms, but it is still wonderful and lovable. I'm especially excited to have a project. I mean, yay, A HOUSE! I feel like a real adult now.

I'm considering posting before-and-after or work-in-progress pictures as we fix up the house, but I might just be spamming my flist. Hmm.

I OWN A HOUSE!

I've tried to stay out of the triggers/warnings debate, aside from a few comments to people actually on my flist, but it is still bothering me. The emotional arguments have been made on both sides by people much more eloquent than I, but there is one aspect that I wanted to touch on that I haven't seen mentioned much.

As someone privileged enough not to have triggers, I can't talk about what it's like to be triggered. I can try my damnedest to empathize and avoid intentionally hurting someone, but I can't say how it feels. What I can do is talk about what it's like as part of an audience of fan works: you know, consumer and supplier relationship.

Most days, I prefer things that will make me laugh. I've got enough stress and enough to make me sweat in my daily life, so I am probably looking for some schmoopy rom-com style fic with the meet-cute (or the known-each-other-forever-but-now-I-realize-I-love-you), the quirky sidekicks and goofy hijinks, the clever dialogue and predictable but totally sweet ending. So if I go into a fic assuming it's a comedy and on chapter three a non-con scene comes out of nowhere, I'm going to hit my back button, and the author is going to get absolutely zero feedback. If it happens more than once, I'm probably not going to read anything by that author any more. And I'll probably tell my friends about the experience. So the author has lost not only one reader of all hir fic, but possibly several readers.

Along the same vein, some days I am in the mood for, say, evil, Antichrist!Sam and his conquest over Dean, which necessarily frequently includes dub-con and non-con. Personally, my tastes don't include straightforward non-con, but dub-con? Hell yes. That means that I'm specifically seeking out those warnings as an advertisement to come read someone's fic.

Again, as someone privileged enough not to have triggers, it is for me much the same as listing squicks and kinks. It lets the reader know what they're getting into, much like movie ratings -- and not just the R, PG-13, etc., but the little part on the preview that says "contains adult language, brief nudity, sexual violence." If a story doesn't have warnings or a squick/kink list, particularly if it has an R or NC-17 rating and is by an author I don't know, I'm probably not going to read it. Period.

Sure, survivors of trauma could make the same decision, but that means that the author is not only losing out on readers who don't want to read dub/non-con, but also losing out on the readers who do, and for what? Supposed artistic integrity, I guess, in which they still run the risk of harming another person. Triggering is not hurting someone's feelings or offending hir; it's causing hir serious emotional trauma.

It just seems to me that even without all the emotional reasons to put up warnings, even if they're behind a cut tag, it's still pretty reasonable to use them in order to continue sharing with the most fans who have similar interests to your own. It's such a minor inconvenience to have to type out warnings for common triggers, especially when compared to the emotional harm done to another person. Combine that with the fact that, for many of us, those warnings are actually enticements, why wouldn't you?

I'm trying very hard to distract myself from the news of Dr. Tiller's death (and the subsequent conservative media spew of irresponsible "information"), so let's try a meme I stole from paintingroses:

Step 1: Put your music player on shuffle.
Step 2: Post the first line from the first 20 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing.
Step 3: Strike through the songs when someone guesses both artist and track correctly.
Step 4: For those who are guessing -- looking the lyrics up on a search engine is CHEATING

1. Why did you steal the matches from the one room motel?
2. Allie woke up 8 AM, graduation day.
3. He goes 40 on the freeway, he plans his day 'round eBay.
4. Tell me, do you think it'd be alright if I could just crash here tonight?
5. I dragged this lake looking for corpses.
6. When I'm walking I strut my stuff, and I'm so strung out.
7. When I first held you, I was cold.
8. Here we stand, worlds apart, hearts broken in two, two, two.
9. Oh, no, here it is again. I need to know when I will fall into decay.
10. Johnny, Angry Johnny, this is Jezebel in Hell.
11. Dig if you will the picture of you and I engaged in a kiss.
12. I saw her, yeah, I saw her with her black tongue tied round the roses.
13. I've dealt with my ghosts and I've faced all my demons, finally content with a past I regret.
14. I don't want you, but I hate to lose you.
15. Cold late night so long ago, when I was not so strong, you know.
16. Lately I've been living in my head. The rest of me is dead, I'm dying for truth.
17. Your daddy works in porno now that Mommy's not around.
18. My friends they wash the windows, and they shine in the sun.
19. Childhood living is easy to do. The things you wanted, I bought them for you.
20. Another head hangs lowly, child is slowly taken.