ulitave

I went looking today for a free massage. Austin is great that way - we have several massage programs. By law, the students aren't allowed to take money until they've competed their programs. (Even when they're done, they have to take reduced rates for 60 massage hours, something like that.) Massage students always need people to practice on. With some effort, you can find a free or cheap massage.

I found some community college students advertising low-cost massages - good. I also saw an ad from a lesbian couple, advertising for a sperm donor. This had come up in red_tayna's meme recently. Would I do it? Only in very special circumstances, for a dear friend or family-of-choice member. Would I want to be involved with the child? Of course I would. That doesn't mean I'd have to be a parent, but I couldn't just vanish.

This ad didn't meet my criteria - I don;t know them, they don't know me. They were looking for a white or hispanic donor, which is not me. Setting that particular issue aside for a moment, they also wanted the donor to have no involvement afterwards. I'm not entirely sure why they wanted to go to the internet for this, but if people made sense I wouldn't write.

The posted responses were almost uniformly hostile. How could they just "make a baby" like that, kids are not pets, all sorts of bullshit. I was just in a mood today, so I posted a short response, something eloquent and beautiful, the kind of writing that I hope illuminates and elevates:

"If you don't like the idea of donating sperm to that couple, keep your dick in your pants and shut the fuck up."

Surprisingly, I got a hostile response. Never saw that coming.

"Screw you!!!"

I've been talking lately about the dangerous effects of too much testosterone. It's bad shit, there ought to be a law. I'm not joking, no one ever gets that monkey off our backs. misia has spoken long and well about men adjusting themselves in public. This guy is a habitual public adjuster, I can tell just by the number of exclamation points. He e-mailed my anonymized e-mail address from his work address. I tracked him down with the help of Uncle Google in less than two minutes.

All I have to say is guys, if you're going to send nasty mail out from your work computer and leave easy-to-follow tracks all over the internet, don't be a fucking private eye with an office on Spicewood Springs Road. Kinda embarrassing.

Earlier today, I gave my two cents on a post by garrity - how to describe the situation when women are deemed inferior, held to lower standards, and then judged less culpable for their crimes because of this supposed inferiority. I called it Ethical Dimorphism - a code or set of codes evolving into a symbiotic relationship with biology over time, most likely several centuries.

The CDC and several health organizations have colluded with Bush & Co. to give us a whopping example today - for today on, without any kind of public debate whatsoever, almost every woman and girl I know is considered an incubator. The official term is "pre-pregnant." Not "pre-college", or "pre-career", but "pre-pregnant".

Elementary school teachers keep pads in their desks now, because menstruation starts around age 8-9 these days. Parents aren't prepared. No one's quite sure why it's happening so early, but the idea that 11yo's pals in third fucking grade are now "pre-pregnant" is sickening.

So what to do? Letters, phone calls, petitions...nah. Well sure, if you think that will help. Bush & Co. only listen to a tiny minority, and we're not it.

I caught the end of a commentary by Andy Rooney a few weeks ago. I usually turn his crazy ass off, but he actually made sense for once. he was blathering about how odd it was that the U.S. had never elected a female executive, as most other Western and non-Western countries have at some point. He pooh-poohed the traditional feminist arguments (this is when I reached for the remote) and then came up with some interesting points:

- women outnumber men in the United States
- more women are registered to vote than men in the United States
- more women than men actually vote in the United States

He concluded that if women want to elect someone different, women should get together and elect someone else. That's a very simplistic idea - put phoenixcoerin the same room with Ann Coulter and we'd be collecting poor Ann's remains with a mop and bucket.

I hear over and over that "an America that cannot secure her borders will not long survive as a country" or words to that effect. I wonder which America we live in. America has re-tribalized, splintered. Different people have different standards of law, morality, even different economies. The borders to watch were never the Rio Grande or the 49th Parrallel, they were the pharmacy tenure committees, school board meetings, church doors, and the gated communities. We never secured them, never integrated them into the fabric of our America. They co-evolved with a separate moral code.

I don't have a plan here, I'm just rambling. I have to go home now and see if 11yo's Little Mermaid chewable vitamins have folic acid.