I am American. WE are American. That’s going to take some getting used to. . .suddenly not feeling disenfranchised from the previously brainwashed abyss of the States. In the words of a homeless black woman at work:

WE HAVE A PRESIDENT.

Yes, we do. Maybe now we will get to play catch-up with the rest of the developed world.

The necessity of regular, scheduled exercise, such as you might try to practice at The Gym, is the clearest evidence that the modern lifestyle is totally messed up and unsustainable. We live our lives in such a way that without concerted, health-oriented efforts, we would all become sick and die. Sure it takes several decades but still. The further removed our mode of “making a living” is from making what we need to live the more this is true. OK, I’m way over-simplifying here, which leads me to corporations, like most subjects do. It’s their fault.

Yes, all of it.

I had a fun little Islamic/Lesbian Feminist moment yesterday Downstairs.

I bend over a lot at work loading laundry, cleaning showers, and so on, and I noticed when I first started there that if there were people around, particularly behind me, I tended to squat down or work sideways, as if I was wearing a dress and afraid I might flash somebody. Now I just do my work and don’t worry about my ass sticking out at people all the time. We’re all women and nobody cares.

This intrigued me yesterday because there happened to be one of our males-who-identifies-as-a-woman and a couple of ladies-who-like-ladies present at the same time and my mode of going about my business remained just as functional and unladylike. This implied that my comfort wasn’t because we all had vaginas, and it wasn’t because there was a guarantee of absent sexual objectification, it was because we all had feminine identities. There’s something resembling visual assault when an unwelcomed dude does the leering, but when it’s a woman it merely is what it is instead of carrying all that weight of social power.

That last thought is what made me realize, “Holy shit, I’m experiencing the validity of Separatism!”

Both the Lesbian Feminism movement and Muslim culture preach the empowerment of private all-woman spaces. It’s a connection that amuses me and to a degree they’re right. Living every day in a man-dominated world can be downright exhausting, so a man-free zone provides a sanctuary where one can relax and just be. I see it work for the women all the time, and I am now seeing how it works for me, for after working a shift Upstairs I am often anxious and hyped up on adrenaline, whereas after working a shift Downstairs I feel content and focused.

It’s nice!

Thank you, my fellow Estadounidenses. “Excited” and “proud” are both a bit too strong to describe how I feel now, but I am at the very least not as disgusted as I was yesterday. Maybe if I sleep for more than four hours my sense of well-being will improve even still. IT CAN BE A FUN EXPERIMENT.

After all, science is the answer–just ask the ’50s.

I don’t find the concept of voting or my ability to vote exciting or comforting. Rather, voting only makes me angry.

I shouldn’t have to slosh through the rain to fill in a bubble that says we shouldn’t give huge pay outs TO property owners who want to break the law. I shouldn’t have to request that we NOT take away millions of dollars from education and give it to our wealthiest citizens. I don’t see why I have to OK every hmm and haw about paying for infrastructure repair, maintenance, and transportation expansion because it ISN’T FUCKING OPTIONAL. And lastly, how is allowing adult entertainers to make money a public issue? I DON’T CARE.

But I also don’t trust everyone else to not be retarded, so I vote anyways.

Funny but similarly cynical side note: the page with Ian’s name on it (and however many other voters whose last names come before Albert) was lost, so he had to fill out a provisional ballot. So ha ha! to Ian for being too much of a hippie for The Man to want him to vote.

I realize that is probably common knowledge, but I need frequent reminders. So, since I’m working the morning shift after a scant 3 hours of sleep and trying to keep myself encouraged, here are some various items of news that won’t crush your spirit:

Apparently there is now an inhalable form of insulin. Exubera, which is a fine powder that one huffs through a tube, was approved by the FDA this January and was welcomed onto the U.S. market this month. Interestingly, but not too surprisingly, it is Pfizer and Nektar Therapeutic’s love child.

While snooping around about insulin, I also found this article about an AIDS drug that Pfizer is going to release by the end of the year, which is both exciting and disappointing. I’m glad the big guns are behind an effective and less destructive AIDS treatment so that it will be well funded, promoted, and received, but I foresee major issues with making it available to those who need it most like our dying friend Africa. 

The countdown for when a immunosupressantless life will be a possibility for transplant recipients is well under way, and although this isn’t new news to me, I like to occassionally hunt around for articles about it so I can get all excited and teary-eyed. I mean, wow! Let’s get on that train.

A popular stance among conservatives is that social services should be funded by charities so that people can choose what services they want to support. They’d like to slash taxes and reduce if not eradicate government spending on like, disability checks. If we were to adopt their desired optional approach to “philanthropy” I think it would only be fair if things like, say, the Star Wars project were also funded out of the goodness of concerned citizen’s hearts. While I agree that some military is a necessary part of any country, I certainly don’t want to pay out the hundreds of millions that we do, a stance that I feel mirrors the conservative idea that some social services are worth funding but not the ones that are, you know, “hand-outs” (like paying for children to learn how to read and see a doctor—stuff like that). I feel the exact same way, except about all the budget areas that they like to give monetary priority. So OK, let’s do this! I can see the telethon fundraisers and radio donation drives now, and let’s not forget everybody’s favorite: charity calls!

Oh wait, there’s this one kind of major problem I just thought of. People are incredibly greedy and short-sighted. Ooooooooh, right. That’s why we have taxes in the first place!

So here’s a better, or at least more intriguing, idea. I wonder what would happen if everyone, when they filled out their W2s, also selected what percentages of the money taken out of their paychecks would go to each department. Each person could control exactly what they were supporting. Obviously some departments (the important but boring and not-in-the-media Department of Housing and Urban Development, Corps of Engineers, National Science Foundation, etc.) would be ignored not because people don’t want to fund them but because most people probably don’t know what they do and they’d rather designate their money towards things they understand. So I suggest a Department of Balance that would take a set percentage not decided upon by individual taxpayers but by an election that would distribute their funds into the departments that needed more than was selected. To be ultra fair, you could choose a sub-department of the DoB that you’d like to have distribute your DoB taxes so you can choose the emphasis of your own spending.

Options could be Maintenance (including the departments of Agriculture, Energy, Education, Justice, the Interior, Transportation, etc., departments that keep our people fed and mostly literate, our streets not crumbling, and so on), Progression (Aeronautics and Space, Science, Small Business, Environment, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Education, departments that progress our technology, culture, minds, health) and Protection (Defense, Homeland Security, Commerce, Veterans Affairs, Environment, Social Security, Education, Health and Human Services, departments that protect us from becoming a third world country).

is today. Stores are having sales, banks and post offices are closed, the newspaper’s filled with uncontroversial human-interest stories, and all are decorated with the flag’s colors and tacky stars. I don’t understand why Memorial Day is seemingly practiced as a day of patriotism. What do barbeques have to do with remembering our dead soldiers? I’m not against celebrating, but it should be via the appreciation of life and our relative good fortune, not of the military and cheap crap. Memorial Day is to remind us how awful war is, which considering we’re in the midst of one, is a pretty fucking important remembrance.

there was a massive march downtown last night basically protesting the widespread hatred against non-legal U.S. citizens with sun-tanned appearances. Since I was working in the vicinity I got to witness the prolonged traffic jam and correlated grumpiness of everyone affected by it and a part of me thought, “gosh, if I wasn’t at work I’d love to be out there with them!” because it was heartening to see such a large turn-out of people who aren’t crazy or apathetic. But then I realized that a bigger part of me thought the whole effort was just funny and sad. Of course people shouldn’t be felons just because they happened to be born outside our borders and of course everyone ought to be given equal chances and blah blah blah. But the idea that all those people actually think the white guys in D.C. care AT ALL what anybody thinks or feels, well, that makes me want to cry.