Category Archives: badness

badness, life

It’s past time we had a chat

Marriage equality is an inevitability, regardless of what’s happening in Russia right now (why are they hosting the Olympics again?).  But at least progress is happening in California.

Still, I’ve never had a logical, productive discussion about marriage equality with someone from the opposite camp, and feel as though my experience of this social phenomenon is diminished as a result.  Even if we disagree, I’d like to hear an intelligent dissenting opinion, if one exists.  So I went to the Protect Marriage website and submitted the following:

I have yet to have a productive discussion regarding marriage equality with someone who believes, as your group does, that marriage should be defined as between a man and a woman. Instead of having pointless Facebook discussions (that typically consist of someone quoting religious texts as a justification for secular law, or end with someone leaving the conversation in a huff) I figured the best thing to do would be to contact a group of people who have a clear idea of why they believe what they believe, and are capable of having a logical, productive discussion on the topic.

With that in mind, I’ve gone through the “Who We Are” page on your website, and am unclear on a few claims there.

Your website says that “children are most likely to thrive when raised by the father and mother who brought them into this world.”
-How did you come to this conclusion?
-Are adoptive parents (of any gender) therefore inferior?

Your organization claims to want “to protect and preserve traditional marriage…”
-How far back are you extending the word ‘traditional?’ 50 years? 100 years? 1,000 years?

Your website says that our government has “protected marriage to ensure that it exists to conceive and nurture healthy children that will sustain civilization,” and that “procreation is intrinsically connected to marriage.”
-Should the infertile (of any gender) receive the same government protections?
-Are relationships between couples who choose not to procreate inferior in any way?

When you say that children “sustain civilization,” I’m not sure I understand what you mean.
-Do you mean that they maintain the status quo, or that they maintain the same morals and laws that they inherited?

How will same-sex marriage “further [weaken] the societal norm that men should take responsibility for the children they beget”? How did you come to this conclusion?

How will same-sex marriage “corrode marital norms of permanence, monogamy, and fidelity”? How did you come to this conclusion?

Your website quotes Judge Stephen Johnson Field: “marriage is the foundation of family and society, without which there would be neither civilization nor progress.” This statement was made in 1888, eight years before he voted to uphold racial segregation.
-Do you contend that this man’s opinions on social norms (125 years later) are still relevant?
-Please define what you believe he meant by “progress.”

How does an opposite-sex couple’s ability to procreate make their marriage superior to one (made up of any gender combination) that cannot, especially if members of an opposite-sex couple choose not make use of their ability to procreate?

I look forward to hearing back from you.

I’ll post here if they respond.  I’m expecting total radio silence, but remain optimistic.

Meanwhile, here’s how I feel about people who think marriage equality will degrade the current (horrendous) rate of successful marriages between straight couples:

divorce, the silent killer of a full 50% of straight marriages

divorce, the silent killer of a full 50% of straight marriages

 

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badness, goodness, humor, life

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Flo

Going to an all-girls’ middle school and high school skews one’s perspective of the world, and in so doing, failed in small part to prepare me for the very different social dynamics of a not-all-female environment.  There were about 500 people in my high school, only 112 in my graduating class, and we all more or less knew each other.  I had become so accustomed to being around nothing but social, friendly females that I assumed I could do what I did in high school (be friendly) and get the same result (friendship).  Not so.  I walked into my first college class, sat next to a female student and immediately introduced myself and started up a friendly conversation.  She was shocked into near-silence, and I was shocked by her shock.  We created a shock-echo that sounds like nothing and vibrates at a frequency between awkward and stage-fright.

pretty accurate

pretty accurate

I encountered another social speed-bump when sharing a suite of four bedrooms with seven other women in my freshman dorm.  One of them called out to me with a question, and I came out of my room with tampon in hand, joined them in the living room and started chatting.  A few sets of eyes kept darting to my hand.  ‘What are they looking at?’ I thought.  Not one to allow the elephant in the room to go unmentioned, I ended a sentence with, “Dah-ling,” and pantomimed smoking my tampon like a 1950’s Hollywood starlet.  A couple eyebrows shot up.  ‘Why aren’t they laughing?’ I thought.  I had found a point of cultural disconnect that I never knew existed between white, female Americans of the same age on a topic we all shared.  Initiate shock-echo.

In high school, I went through a rapid shift of hiding tampons when I went to the bathroom to tossing them into the air for fun while I waited outside for a stall to open up.  I give credit to the healthy self image the school managed to help instill in me as a female while still teaching Catholic values (quite a balancing act), and to my parents.  The first day of my first menstruation, my parents congratulated me.  My mom gave me a pad, then told my dad, who came rushing into my room and literally said, “Congratulations, sweetie!” before pulling me into a bear hug.  It was a healthy environment for a young woman, which did nothing to prepare me for the shame and secrecy I would be expected to keep surrounding my menstrual cycle in the future.

she's so stylish

she’s so stylish

I work in an office now, and I wonder where the line is for unprofessional behavior when I comes to dealing with natural bodily functions.  Is walking to the bathroom with a tampon in hand unprofessional?  My knee-jerk reflex says yes, but why?  Is it any less professional than carrying a box of tissues around if you’re sick?  Using a tampon is evidence of health and fertility, while being sick is proof of a weak immune system, and a threat to the health of everyone in a twenty-foot radius.  We should be more offended by the sickly than the fertile, given that menstruation isn’t a catching illness, and yet the male (and sometimes female) population occasionally reacts like I’m walking through the halls of my office holding a grenade instead of thanking me for doing what must be done to keep myself from bleeding all over everything for days at a time.  YOU’RE WELCOME, PEOPLE.

This needs to stop.  There’s no reason for me to feel ashamed of my ability to menstruate.  I’m capable of building an entire person.  That’s AMAZING.  I should get high-fives on my way to the bathroom, not shunned and encouraged to keep what is essentially a super-power in the down-low.  I’ve never understood the culture of shame that surrounds menstruation.  So I’m done hiding my tampons at work.  Anyone so horrified by the blatant display of my (and by extension, half of the human population’s) desire to keep blood stains out of the office chairs is welcome to explain themselves.  Starting now.

bring it

bring it

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badness

Daredevil needs some new moves

I’ve been reading comics since I was a kid, and there are loads of characters I’d like to get to know that I’ve never given enough time to: Green Lantern, Usagi Yojimbo, Deadpool, Cloak and Dagger, etc.  Daredevil was on that list until I bought Daredevil: Yellow a few years back.  I love Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, they’re a great team so I gave it a shot and was very pleased with what they produced.

But there was one thing that bothered me: Daredevil is drawn in the same weird mid-swing pose ten times.  TEN TIMES.  It’s not flattering.  It’s awkward and distracting.  Did they not do enough studies of the various poses a human body can make in mid-air?  So weird.

why... WHY

why… WHY

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badness, humor

Brain, or uncritical devotion to your religion: pick one.

This was my good deed for the day last week.  Some high-schooler on my feed (daughter of one of my parents’ work friends I think?) posted this, and I just had to respond (with humor, because anything else is met with defensive lashing-out).

Meahwhile, wtf, who writes this stuff?  Do people think these things just get pooped out of Jesus’ butt and get flushed straight into Facebook?

nonsense

also, god hates when you humblebrag all over twitter.

Objectively, this is an elegant equation: Religious + Facebook capable = particularly exploitable.  Therefore, religious chain letters that claim that all who read it “are being tested” is a perfect concoction for mindless reposting.  Those crazy enough to think that the creator of the universe is watching whether they’re gullible enough to repost anything that implies they might be punished if they don’t will repost.  Those who realize that the person who created said chain letter couldn’t possibly know whether it’s an officially god-sanctioned test (y’know, like Abraham almost killing his son) won’t.  If this had a Pepsi label in it, it would be a genius viral marketing tool.

 

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badness, humor, work

Just say no to drama, gurl

wait... we have a kid?

wait… we have a kid?

I work with parents at Office Job, and over the course of the past year they’ve really been misbehaving.  As a direct result, their PTA has been disbanded by order of the school, which will effectively eliminate all the problems and ensure that the parents who really want to focus their efforts on the school and their students will have every chance to do so without all the selfish politicking and unproductive complaints.

You’d think this would chill out Hollywood Coworker, who dealt with a big chunk of the drama.  You’d think she’d be happy and relaxed now that our office can focus our efforts on helping parents feel connected to the university and all the other work we have to do (because dealing with the PTA isn’t even 10% of what we do, much to the surprise of the majority of the PTA).  You’d think she’d be just fucking jazzed about this change, and excited about taking the reins of an organization that has gone badly off-track.

And yet.

She approaches my desk at least once a week since the disbanding and says something like, “I just have this really bad feeling that there is plotting going on behind the scenes, in the shadows, y’know?”  “I don’t think we’ve seen the last of the problem people.”  “I just know the drama isn’t over.”

And I just look at her like:

Wash knows what's up

Wash knows what’s up

Because come on.  Seriously?  At this point she’s stressing about imaginary problems.  How am I supposed to commiserate?  I’m feeling really positive and optimistic about this coming year, and she’s dragging all this fucking baggage around from last year like, “Oh no, what will we do with all this fucking baggage?”  How about letting it go instead of proudly displaying it like a white-collar battle scar under the guise of preparing for the next impending (read: non-existent) disaster?  Cus… that might work.  So… maybe do that.

I realize she wants to feel useful and important, and dealing with drama can be addictive for some people, but it’s not healthy, and more importantly, IT’S OVER.

save it for the drama llama, gurl

save it for the drama llama, gurl

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badness, work

Grow some ovaries, ladies

I’m in charge of social media in my office, and occasionally get tips from less technologically adept coworkers that I try to implement without letting my eye twitch too much.

For example, today, when I posted an article about how our university is attempting to make gay athletes feel more welcome, Hollywood Coworker told me to “tread very lightly when you post LGBT stuff” because the parents who visit our page are not all as “advanced” as we are on the topic.

my immediate non-verbal response

my immediate non-verbal response

I could tell she assumed this would turn into a disagreement (as her suggestions about what to do with social media often do), so I used my most soothing voice, and said something like, “Well, we can’t cater to every opinion, and even if we could, our job is to inform them about the university. This is happening right now. It’s a fact.”  Her hands came up in a ‘don’t get me started’ fashion, because we both strongly support the LGBT community, so she thought I was preaching to the choir. But I wasn’t, because the topic wasn’t about the LGBT community, it was about deciding whether or not we would do our jobs right, or be cowards.  She honestly believes that I should watch what I post about the LGBT community, especially anything demonstrating support of said community. Why? Because it might offend some parents. As if our job is to:
1) Cater to bigots
2) Lie by omission about university policies
3) Neglect to inform the other parents for fear of offending a few
4) Any of the a-fucking-bove.

This is an amazing university. I’m proud to have gone here, and delighted to be working here. So I’m left wondering: What does Hollywood Coworker think our social media is there for, if not to inform our constituency? If there’s a bombing on campus, we’d post about that too because our job is information distribution, not whatever-makes-you-comfortable distribution.  Remember that newspaper that published an article about the first gay marriage in a small community, and caught all kinds of grief for it?  The owner of that paper wrote a great reply to all the negative feedback: “The job of a community newspaper is not pretending something didn’t take place or ignoring it because it will upset people.”

This bothered me quite a bit, so I mentioned to Little Mole Boss that I had published this article, and she winced.  I asked why she had that reaction, and she said that some parents are prejudiced.  So I asked, “So should we not inform parents because some people might be offended?”
Little Mole Boss: “No, let’s just see what the reaction is.”
me: “Ok… I just want to make sure we’re not avoiding posting stuff because some people don’t like it.  We’re not posting opinions, these are facts.  Our page doesn’t have an LGBT agenda…”
“I know, of course of course…”
“So what’s our policy on this?”
“We don’t have one.”
“Ok.”
“I guess if it’s already up, it’s up.  Let’s just see what the reaction is.”
“Ok, sounds good.”

really? REALLY?

frustrated kitty is frustrated

So there’s some work to be done in the “do the right thing without being a big fucking baby about it” department.

So I’ll keep working on it.

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badness, school

Grad school, wut are u doin… grad school… STAHP

i made this

i made this

Another semester will begin in just over a week, and two thirds of the reading materials aren’t even available for the one class I’m taking.  Thus begins the nonsense that is the Master’s program in which I am currently enrolled.

Sometimes I wonder if they’ll ever get their shit together.  I had one professor this semester who was all over that shit.  So technologically capable, totally comfortable with the online setting and format.  She did hand-written edits to a paper I turned in on a tablet of some kind, and even sent me an audio file with vocal commentary on the areas that she liked.  AMAZEBALLS.  Why can’t they all be like that?  Alas, she is the first prof I’ve had through three semesters who has this level of comfort with the technology necessary to run an online class smoothly.

I also just found out that the person in charge of finding me a classroom that I can observe this semester has, in fact, not been in touch with the people he claimed to have been in touch with at the school where I need to complete my observations.  Le sigh.

So when school sucks, I remind myself that:
1) if it were easy it wouldn’t be worth while.
2) it’s leading me toward something I genuinely want to do.
3) fuck you, school, I will cut you in the parking lot if you keep fucking with me, Isweartogod.

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badness, life

I could not give less of a shit about the pope if I tried

haven't you been smokin' a lot of peyote?

haven’t you been smokin’ a lot of peyote?

Why do news outlets think the whole world needs to know every fucking detail of the pope “election” process?  Who gives a shit?  Catholics, that’s who.  This news should be (and probably is) posted (appropriately) all over websites dedicated to religious/Christian/Catholic news items, but it doesn’t belong on the front page of the LA Times, CNN, BBC, etc., day after day.  I realize there are a good number of Catholics in the world, but do we all need to be inundated with the minutiae of this one religion’s choice of leadership?  I think not.

I realize that whomever is elected will have some political influence, but I cannot be bothered to care because this man will still be a totally delusional whackjob.  He will spend his time in a position of influence telling millions of sheeple how guilty to feel for using condoms to not contract deadly diseases, and reinforce the idea that a sentient being with the power to create an entire universe gives a shit about your lost car keys.  There is no chart big enough to accurately display the level of ego necessary to believe that humans are not only worth listening to telepathically, but monitoring and judging, constantly, for thousands of years.  Even if I were capable of creating galaxies, I’m not sure I would have the stamina to listen to people ask me to  smite their enemies all fucking day, year after year.  The fact that humans assume to understand what a being of that magnitude might possibly be thinking is insane.  The fact that they think they’re capable of choosing one man (who magically becomes infallible the day he takes on a man-made title) to communicate with this imaginary friend, and is somehow better at said communication than anyone else is beyond absurd.

Anyway, here’s a pretty accurate depiction of my reaction to every recent news story about the recent potpourri (pope-ery, get it?):

poch

 

A friend just shared this one with me, too.

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badness, humor, work

Computers: THE SILENT KILLER, lol jk

fucking state of the art

fucking state of the art

I work in an office that is often technologically backwards.  I am surrounded by inept tree murderers who do not seem to fully grasp the function of a computer monitor as an endless and endlessly diverse piece of paper (at its most basic level).  I am chastised for suggesting that a digital file might be in some way superior to its physical counterpart, as if photocopying a hundred receipts in triplicate is somehow a superior record-keeping model to scanning and thereby immortalizing said receipts.  My suggestions to slowly but surely put us on track to being members of the present (not the future, which is where Little Mole Boss seems to think computers are from) are met with a “just get it done” attitude, as if involving technology will keep a job from getting done.

Little Mole Boss has been asking me to make changes to a PowerPoint presentation recently, and with every iteration finds something new to change.  Today I completed what might be the last changes to this file, and was promptly asked to print it out so Little Mole Boss could “check [it] one more time.”  My knee-jerk response was to ask if her monitor was broken, but this would have been met with some variation of same response I get from other coworkers:

1) “I just like having the paper in front of me.”  Translation:  I don’t have a good reason, only a personal preference I developed in a time when we didn’t have computers.

2) “I’m used to having a paper copy.”  Translation: I’ve used the same method to deal with this issue for decades, and am unwilling/too lazy to form new, more efficient habits that utilize the current technological leaps that the vast majority of modern offices embraced years ago.

3) “It’s a generational thing, you wouldn’t understand.”  Translation: My life experience forms a vast ocean of mysterious superiority that covers all topics (including those about which you have superior knowledge), and would be disrespectful for you to question, youngling.

"back in my day, all we needed was a pen, paper, envelope, stamp, long walk to the post office, and a week-long wait to communicate with people. none of this "texting" whatsit."

“back in my day, all we needed was a pen, paper, envelope, stamp, long walk to the post office, and a week-long wait to communicate with people. none of this “texting” whatsit.”

Needless to say, the above answers are complete horseshit, but that doesn’t stop my coworkers from clinging to them.  So imagine my frustration when, just the other day, I had the following conversation with a coworker (let’s call her Hollywood Coworker, since she’s so impressed by celebrities and movies and TV and all the vapid nonsense that comes tumbling out of her flatscreen) who asked me to print out a few copies of a PowerPoint presentation to be passed out at a meeting between just two people.

Me: The fact is, we should never be printing out PowerPoint files when we can just email them to each other and look at them on a screen.
Hollywood Coworker: [shakes head] Well, when I was doing presentations to clients, they liked to have a copy in front of them.
But we’re not selling anything, right? If this is just for a one-on-one meeting with a coworker we could just show it on a laptop screen. Or, if they have to have a hard copy of the info, don’t use PowerPoint at all. Just put the info into a Word doc and print that so we’re not wasting paper.
Look, I’m just saying this from my experience, but back in the day, when you presented a PowerPoint, everyone needed a handout.
But this won’t be a large meeting. If it’s just information exchange, there’s no need to do a PPt at all. That’s where we could just put the info into a Word doc to keep it compact and simple, and just go through it together. If we’re not presenting anything, why use PPt? If all we need to do is print out information, PPt is not the system we should be using.
[rolls eyes] It’s interesting to hear your perspective.
[sighs] Here’s the main issue: When technology stops making things easier, we should stop using that technology. PPt is making this harder, not easier, so we should stop using it, and use something else.

The conversation ended without us coming to a consensus, though I did not print out the PowerPoint presentation then or since.  This is a point of contention between Hollywood Coworker and me that arises occasionally and that I find myself dreading.  We would get along a lot more smoothly if we could just find some middle ground on this issue, but our pattern is: she digs her heels in while I try to drag her forward.  It’s a dance we will do until she has killed every tree on the North American continent, or I stop working at Office Job.  Whichever comes first.

So now I go to work and feel like I’m trapped in a time warp.  I’ve started to do what I do with all things that make me crazy: I’ve made this into a game.  I pretend that I’ve traveled into the past where no one knows what a computer is, and I get to explain what this amazing new technology is capable of and watch all the primitive natives freak out and get mad at me for showing them something new and amazing (read: scary).

hey look it's my car on the freeway as I travel back in time to Office Job

hey look it’s my car on the freeway as I travel back in time to Office Job

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