Curled in a ball, internal and needy.
Awaiting the hand to guide me out,
Awakening to life from the gentle slap!
Breathing on my own.

My lips pursed, so needing succor
That sudden realization that I am not alone.
Cradled in the arms of one who cares
Whether my breath continues.

Today I gasp for that breath - that guide.
And yet none exists.

Am I an unlucky newborn?

Or must I continue to crawl on my own?


~Writer~

Fuck you and the boat that delivered you here. Fuck you and your inability to communicate, your propensity to ignore someone else's hard work and determination, and your womanizing. Fuck you for leaving me high and dry on a project that was YOUR idea, after doing NO work of your own, and for failing to follow through on what you promised to complete.

FUCK YOU! I will have no more interaction with someone who flirts with me one minute, ignores me the next, but never follows through on his promises.

I am an intelligent and (what must be annoying to you) attractive woman with self-respect. So much so that I am going to finish this project, take 100% of the credit, and never tell you. From my standpoint, my acquaintance with you is over. Good luck working on your other projects that will get you nowhere. I know that you needed what we were working on to maintain yourself, but you screwed up big time.

FUCK YOU, but you know what? I think you fucked yourself over already.

~Writer~

So generations later:

- There are more of us.
- We are less inhibited.
- Communication and information are filled with noise (aka the Internet).
- There are more means of expressing oneself (and perhaps one's vanity).
- We are a more punitive, litigious society.
- We live relatively more isolated lives without a sense of community.
- Marketing and politics are highly targeted to the "flattered self."
- We no longer try to emulate heroes, but prove how heroes emulate our own ideals.

We live in a chaotic, self-absorbed, and atomized society. Sure, that's how society has progressed, but the more permissive we become, the more we invite totalitarianism. What we've seen over the last several years (all the result of a chaotic act, btw) is only the beginning.

So why not a little discipline, in spite of generational progression? Why not strive for a bit of order in the chaos?

Anyone? ANYONE?

I'll take my responses off the air.

So my buddy got married a few years ago. We were happy for him. She seemed like a nice girl, and we accepted her into our coterie of friends. She was Mrs. X, after all, and although her religious beliefs didn't match ours, we invited her to dinners, parties at our house, and to many of our game nights.

You see, we called her Mrs. X while stabbing our tongues in our cheeks, thinking that she too saw the levity in our comments, until we realized how rarely she laughed. "I'm Mrs. X," she'd say, shaking our hands. "Or you can call me XW," which stood for our friend X's Wife. It wasn't a joke at all. In fact, Mrs. X was quite serious about referring to herself as Mrs. X. She refuses her first name, her submission pledge at the altar taken with pure determination.

We are an understanding lot. "That's her thing," we said to ourselves as we dissected it all. "It's how she chooses to live her life, as long as she and X are happy." And they seemed happy, with nearly every evening but Thursdays filled with church socials, meetings, pot luck dinners, and bible study. X's 30th birthday arrived earlier this year, and Mrs. X spared no detail in preparing an extraordinary, colorful pirate party for him, as they both are (oddly), self-avowed pirate fanatics. We all attended, their church friends surrounding us. We patiently prayed with them and ate merrily.

I'm not a stickler for stereotypes, but a wise person once mentioned in college that all stereotypes have a basis in reality. I never assumed my fundamentalist friends would yank out their NIV bibles and start preaching at parties and dinners, but I did wonder, especially about my friend X. A person who believes men should lead and his wife should submit can't carry that belief system outside of their house, I considered. It wasn't until a few choice game nights when I realized X overruled my thoughts and controlled the playing environment. His voice an octave below his natural tone, he would stiffen his neck and hold himself upright. A man! Or at least, a play at a man. A wannabe man from books and movies. But not X the Man. "Hor hor hor," he'd laugh at my other friend's jokes, his voice with a hint of Gregory Peck's Atticus Finch. Maybe X has always been a misogynist. Maybe. Or maybe he wishes for days long gone, when men were men, and women were Betty Crocker. The stories of books, magazines, and movies. But not of people. Of history. Oddly, they neither subscribe to cable nor have an antenna. These are messages received long ago.

Mrs. X is outspoken, if not uninhibited, and I saw this as an example of her retaining her beliefs while still living in the world. However, Mrs. X is a God Warrior, seeking out subtexts in any comment or bit of media. "Anything is now regarded as sexual harassment!" she said to me one evening when I happened upon the subject in light conversation. I didn't mention my own awful dealings with sexual harassment in my early twenties, a horrid experience that nearly cost me everything. I nodded, avoiding her glaring look and implied debate. There's little room for polite conversation when a snake sits before you, coiled and ready. "She did that because her baby was hungry!" she said one evening to another friend of ours who unfortunately complained about seeing a naked breast in public. I frowned as I watched yet another conversational topic cross itself off the list.

But X and Mrs. X are my friends and, as Utopian as their beliefs may be, they do accept us for who we are. They play Dungeons and Dragons with us. They give gifts at our birthdays. They will likely join us when we go see the next Harry Potter movie. But here exists a fragile balance, between friendship and beliefs. Between judgment and life. I think the only way to deal with judgmentalism is not to judge back, and that has preserved something very precious: friendship.

~Writer~

Standing near the throne.
Pointed hats, many congrats
Causes me to moan.

Tonight I dream of knob-heads,
swaying to and fro.
A delicious treat, like waving wheat,
My lips pucker and blow.

Tonight I dream of mushrooms,
Sprouting from the ground.
Pull and tug, I cannot pluck
But never do I frown.

Tonight I dream of daisies,
And roses on the vine,
A flower blooms, my petals plume
Now you will become mine!




~Writer~

There will be no American flags.
There will be no decorations with patriotic verses.
There will be no cupcakes decorated with red-white-and-blue frosting...

There will be no sign of Independence Day, because America is missing...

Until enough of us are brave enough to take to the streets.
Until enough of us decide to cast aside our comfortable lives for uncomfortable change.
Until we finally discover that we do not require one drop of money to truly have power.

Until we finally decide what it means to be Americans again.


Have we, Americans of the Twenty-First Century, finally reached our moment?

((cue acoustical guitar))

Gather 'round, every man
Every man of every land.
Bring along nature's bounty
Bring it on - from every county!

The wind blows, but we don't care
Sitting bare on our derrières!
Brothers all, let's stand and sing
Our hands entwined but not coup-ling!

I look at you, you look at me
We're nature's brothers, can't you see?
You have a hood, and yours is free
And together now, we will sing:

No skin should stand between us!
No Bris Milah separates us!
We're brothers all, can't you see?
We're all one penis - you and me!

The fighting has brought ill-repute
To decisions made without dispute,
By boys and men, every day,
To keep the hood or let it free!

We handle every one the same,
We handle it - it's not a game!
We handle it, and handle it some more,
(I think I've lost track of the score...)

But we're together, our hands entwined,
It's time to let our hate unwind.
Your dick is capped, and his is bare
And together now, we will sing:

No skin should stand between us!
No Bris Milah separates us!
We're brothers all, can't you see?
We're all one penis - you and me!

Listen close, hear that sound?
It's the rush of something profound.
It's not a fart, but our resound.
Brothers, let's not goof around!

We came together for a cause.
What other reason would give us pause?
But our manly bits, proud and bare
Would there be a greater care?

So brothers all, look around!
We're together here, gender bound!
You are hooded, his is free,
And together now, we will sing:

No skin should stand between us!
No Bris Milah separates us!
We're brothers all, can't you see?
We're all one penis - you and me!

((music slows))

We're brothers all... can't you see?
We're all one penis...

JUST YOU AND ME!



~Writer~

Note the comment below on crookandliars.com
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/06/19/c... /

The FCC DOES NOT regulate CABLE NETWORKS. Cable networks enjoy full protection by the First Amendment. Any decision not to air a curse word is strictly based on rules created by the network itself.

Also note this stupidity from yesterday:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu...

If we don't know how they work, we won't know how to advocate them. Media literacy needs to be taught in our nation's schools.

I've been feeling dreadful for the last three or four weeks. Out of it. Very low self-esteem. But I'm starting to concentrate on the little joys in life. I remembered recently that over Christmas I began rewriting the prologue for a longer story that I have had in my mind for more than ten years. And that I liked what I wrote. And that I'd like to keep writing that. Remembering that one thing lit a beacon of hope - in my study, at least, where I spend most of my time.

So I'd like to share with you that moment - that epiphany of that one little joy. And to say to those of you, especially those I count among my closest friends, that if you can remember that one thing that gives you meaning, wrap a lasso around it and pull tightly. Never, never release it. It will lead you through the darkest days of your life.*

Much love,

Writer.








*And I pray that I will never forget this moment... for a while, at least.

If we don't understand our media, and we can't perceive bias from not, then there's no way we can advocate our media. A case in point:

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/06/19/s... /

When you pay your cable bill, your local cable company takes some of that money and pays "sub fees" which are a small amount the network charges the local cable provider to carry their network per subscriber. C-SPAN is a privately owned company that does not air advertising. It only charges local cable providers a tiny amount per subscriber (just to cover costs). Hence it is a NOT-FOR-PROFIT entity funded with ZERO taxpayer dollars.

I see this type of crap EVERYWHERE. Asshats!

Inevitable was the inane chatter about Paris Hilton's jail imbroglio, a blond ambition rudely stopped by California Superior Court Judge Michael Sauer's order for her to return to jail. We can't get enough Schadenfreude from Paris' demise, much like we couldn't get enough of Britney's meltdown earlier this year. We eat famous towheads for lunch, and one wealthy by birthright and sporting a vapid public image like Paris provided extra gravy that satiated us for a day, at least. Who needs to worry about one's own problems when we have Paris' anguish to feast off?

Why do we care about Paris? Closet intellects have wondered this ever since her first splash in the public eye, the wealthy hotel heiress whose dirty bedroom romp appeared on the internet "by accident." Paris is her own creation, but the same public that developed a love fascination with "Dynasty" and "Dallas" couldn't keep their eyes off this aristocratic celebrity. She's the unattainable "other side" of America that we don't see from our apartments and modest homes. Of beautiful clothes and lavish parties. Of an otherwise average looking girl who is beautiful because she can pay for it. We watched her like a train wreck in Prada, waiting (hoping, perhaps) that the shameless self-promoter would crash one day, licking our lips over the smoldering remains.

So when the ballyhoo spectacle that was Paris' jail sentence came to life, we immediately divided into three camps: those who feasted, those who clucked their tongues, and those who couldn't care less.

And for those who clucked their tongues, many of whom were the same closet intellects who asked why we cared about Paris in the first place, the prevailing question was, "Aren't there more important issues out there?" But the obvious answer - a resounding "YES!" - masks a greater lesson, that of holding attention-craving narcissists like Paris accountable for their actions, and that of our own hypocrisy in criticizing those who actually care about it all.

Allow me now to make a rather clumsy transition into another form of narcissism: the Bush Administration. The war. The lies. The pure contempt for our governing system and our intellect. George Bush is another product of wealth that achieved public power that has not yet been held accountable for his actions. He is Paris Hilton without the trial, the crying and the anguish. He's never been questioned, this male Marie Antoinette. And worst yet - he's supposed to be the president of our nation.

Let's fantasize a bit, shall we? A Texas criminal court judge hovers over a quivering 26 year-old George W. Bush. It's a warm summer day in 1972. George, Sr., and Barbara sit in the court room benches behind him, sniffling. He violated probation for yet another DWI (perhaps while he was AWOL in Alabama), and this time his father failed to pull the right strings for George. So now he must face the effect of his actions. The judge orders little George to jail.

"It's not fair!" he cries to Barbara as a bailiff escorts him from the court room. Pictures show a despondent George wailing in the back of a police car. George the Failure. George Who Never Could Best His Father. George the Jailbait.

Was this all Bush needed? A shock to the system? The knowledge that, yes indeed, he may one day have to answer to authority? To the law? And that the law applies to him, the Son of George? Maybe. Maybe the Paris Hilton light occupying the White House simply needed a kick in the pants. Perhaps he wouldn't have felt the need to run at all. But that's not germane to the "more important issues" facing us, right?

Once again the public enters the stage. Our own power, as voters and as consumers, makes or breaks celebrities and politicians alike. We post everyday (this writer, sadly included) about the need for Bush to pay for his criminal actions in Iraq but don't speak out where it matters - on the streets. We don't take control of our democracy and push for a change. We don't yell en masse. We don't picket. It's not a matter of money. Does one Paris Hilton truly outweigh the voices of a thousand screaming Americans?

And yet here we are, watching on a very small scale the very accountability that must happen on a large scale. Complain all you want about the attention we give to Paris Hilton. We should learn from it and move our attentions to Washington, DC, where sits a person well deserving of even greater punishment.

Are we truly biological? That is, should we consider ourselves mostly solid, impermeable masses comprised of tissue and organs? Perhaps we view ourselves too wholly, that instead we should view ourselves as tightly packed chemical compounds, prone to corruption by other chemical compounds with disagreeable compatibility with our own?

Consider my hands, for instance. As I type, I see ten fingers moving on impulse by the chemical triggers fired by my brain, delivered via nerve cells to my fingertips, a phenomenon governed by the physics of gravity and force as they press onto the keys. But my hands are not whole. Through a microscope they are merely the complicated chemicals that comprise skin, tissue, bones, muscles, and nerve endings. In fact, if I were to view my hands correctly, they would appear as stippled dots of individual chemicals fused together - a Monet portrait of the universe that is far more complicated than the whole images we accept as "biology."

So what say you - do you believe we are biological creatures, or are we manifestations of chemistry governed by physics?

I am posting this directly to my journal. I don't know if this will post anywhere else, but I assure you I don't wish it to. (Who knows - maybe I'll once more instill the belief in others that I'm a pretentious woman writing from her ivory tower? ) But quite frankly, I don't care what others think of what I write or what I believe. I wanted this entry to be read by only a few, and only those who would care enough (I believe that number lies somewhere between 0 and 0.00) to actually open up my journal and read it. I typically keep an offline journal in a Word document on my laptop. But these are thoughts that I would prefer to share with a few... perhaps like a flashlight in the dark, not wishing to shine too much light on herself, but enough glow to illuminate only what's important to me.

This all started when I was thirteen in 1988, as I watched Congress debate cable rebroadcasting consent rules debated on the House floor on C-SPAN. I became enamored with the study of broadcasting, specifically television, at an early age but that grew to become a lifelong love, from college to the broadcast industry, to afterward as a writer, to here as I write in this journal. I earned a BS in Radio-TV-Film and an MA in Media Studies. I hope to earn admission to a PhD program in the next year. I am a complete geek about communication issues, to my detriment as a young woman who tore through television ratings right out of college, pointing out every interesting factoid I could find, while my coworkers rolled their eyes.

My thesis is that Americans, being so richly immersed in rapid communication, are media illiterate. We read media, we listen to media, we watch media, we write media, but we do not understand much of it. In fact, I would gather that many do not even know that the word "media" is a plural noun - an obscure but very important fact that my professors pounded into our minds from the moment I stepped into a media studies class. It seems like such a picky grammatical point, but I believe that the daily comments I read online beginning with "The media is..." reveals the collectivist grouplogic that limits our ability to truly assess and change our media. And, in turn, this impacts how we affect our version of democracy.

The media are a group of disparate mediums that we use to transmit communication from a sender to a receiver. If we decide to think of the media as a collective - like a beehive - we immediately limit their incredible complexity as an institution. We simplify them, and therefore, simplify our view of them. If we can break ourselves of this false logic, and begin to assess each medium as its own entity, then we can free ourselves of the limited and fallacious notion that somehow they work collectively. They simply don't. Especially in this age of digitization, where media are as diverse as the 300 million of us in this nation, the mere idea that the many workers (especially journalists) somehow can coordinate their messages on a daily basis is unfathomable.

Instead - and I strongly emphasize - focus on the receivers who make choices about which messages they wish to receive. What are their tastes and preferences before making their media choices? What are their political standings? What are their philosophical assumptions before turning on their television or entering a web site? The receivers are the media consumers and the(little d) democrats. And the media, being run by capital, listen to what the majority of us wish to focus on at the moment. They may not always comport with your philosophical beliefs at the moment, but to diverge from the majority of tastes would mean economic death for many media institutions. We are our media, and it is a very honest reflect of America's moments - even if those are very bad moments.

But to dissect this just a bit farther, consider that many Americans advocating the media do not always understand what aspects of media the government can actually affect. One of my deepest belly laughs came after reading a comment by a poster who wrote that he was angry at Bill Clinton because he "signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that increased media ownership caps, giving us Fox News." Setting aside the mere complexity of the Telecom Act (it is the reason why I can type this to all of you cheaply, and why some of us now watch high-definition television, by the way) the fact that the content of cable television networks such as The Fox News Channel are not regulated by the FCC was missing. And that is a very important point, especially to the many of us who don't agree with Fox's version of "journalism." Deregulation of broadcast ownership impacts only broadcast television networks and stations. If tomorrow a group of us were to protest the Fox News Channel, on the other hand, the calls shouldn't be for "fairness," the calls should be to their many advertisers to boycott that waste of cable space. Fox News operates in the world of cable television, where the only regulation is consumer choices. And those choices change as the political climate changes. Is it not a surprise to you that Fox News' ratings have dropped as Bush's popularity has decreased? Don't believe me? Look it up!

I suppose this is the time that I should propose a call to action. That I should suggest a solution to combat what I see as a rampant problem. I don't have a solution, really. I say this because if I've learned anything over the last few years in online forums, it's that the quickest way to rankle a liberal is to suggest that they may not be enlightened somehow. To suggest that they drop their Chomsky and Bagdikian (I'll save my utter hatred for Chomsky for another day) and learn a bit about more about how the media operate before they advocate change. But let me leave you, you 0 to 0.00 of you reading this now, these thoughts: In school you learned how to interpret literature. You tore apart the meaning of Yeats or Steinbeck. You discovered how poems are constructed, how Swift deftly used prose to satirize the British monarchy. But we did not learn to break apart media images and sounds to find their meaning. Perhaps its time we started teaching that skill in school, as well.

Since this is such a HOT political topic ("hot" as in ssssssssss) I thought I'd chip in as to why I'm so surprised that this is the standard "progressive" position on public breastfeeding.

I always thought of breastfeeding as a branch of the anti-abortion movement. The opinion that says that a woman must strip herself of her physical independence, of her ability to make choices, and do what God has deemed to her to do - produce and mother children. She is not to decide when to conceive, is not to decide whether to keep the baby, and should consider staying at home to care for the child if possible. Because, according to anti-abortionists, that's the woman's role. A woman's body is a vessel of life - one not to be tampered - and should also provide nourishment for the baby through breastfeeding.

A simple google search for "breastfeeding Christianity" produces results like this:
http://www.birthandbreastfeeding.com/mamma...

Or this:
http://geocities.com/Heartland/8148/ezzo.h...

So I've been taken aback by many of the thoughts here regarding breastfeeding. Putting aside the ordering of mothers from public places (which is itself a civil rights issue), the rather vociferous nature ("breastfeeding is best for the baby...") implying, essentially, that you're less of a mother if you don't (isn't there something fundy about that idea?) seems to follow more the fundamentalist ideology than the progressive philosophy. I had to go back and recall mothers in my own world to figure out if they breast fed. Now, admittedly, my mother is psycho and not a good source for this ( )so I asked my husband, who told me that his mother did not breastfeed him because he didn't take to her nipple. (And I heard this happens a lot.) From what I can see, my husband and his two younger siblings are healthy, his mom is in her mid-60's and is healthy (no breast cancer). He didn't develop trust issues because he wasn't breast fed. Everything seems copasetic in this particular non-breastfeeding system.

So, when I have a baby I'll probably breastfeed immediately after birth, but likely put my breast milk in a bottle so that I can have my independence while the baby receives his or her nourishment. I don't feel like wearing special garments out in public. I want to do it my way, and I resent breastfeeding through peer pressure. Given the amount of H.A.T.E. I have read upthread (which has been deleted, THANK GOODNESS), I'm sure someone will find a way to badmouth me. If that's the case, and I can't have my choice because I'm not doing "what's right for the baby" then who really is the progressive here?

Toodles,

Writer.

We fight one another for resources. We torment those who appear different or weaker. We believe we're in the heat of battle in all things; not just for religious doctrine, but also for mates, for material goods, and for status. We never see beyond the boundaries of our own existence.

Can we ever transcend these basic human conditions? Will we ever discover a greater, holistic way of viewing the world that casts aside selfishness for the greater good?

I do not know. Who knows for sure? But if we ever get there, and when our species becomes extinct, we will die in peace.

In July, I found myself stranded in the Las Vegas airport. I was en route from Boston to Denver, with a layover in Chicago. Weather in Chicago cancelled many connecting flights, so they rerouted us on a hellish 5-hour flight through major turbulence to Las Vegas.

It was 11pm PST. I had been travelling (or waiting in line) for 18 hours straight. Yet another line waited for us at the ticket counter to schedule a flight back to Denver. I stood behind one hundred others, all waiting because we missed our connecting flights due to weather delays. Ahead, I saw a man standing before the ticket counter, and in a style so quintessentially American, he flailed his arms, demanding kingdom and treasure from America West Airlines. HE was going to get the compensation HE was due, never mind the 100 others behind him who had endured the same inconvenience as he had. He was the alpha and the omega of that terminal.

A book I read last year, "Mediated" by Thomas de Zengotita, said it best: "It's all about ME." Our entire economic and political systems are wrapped around pleasing the self. Yet the theory of the Enlightenment, that we are rational creatures, was wrong. We are anything BUT rational, and it shows by how decrepit both American capitalism and American democracy are after almost 230 years. If you want to blame someone or something for the state of this nation, you need only to look in the mirror.

We are a society that has lost the ability to choose our battles. Everything is of utmost importance now, because deep in our consciouses, it's all about ME. The man I watched at the Las Vegas airport never once took the time to put his experience into perspective, to understand that the airlines cancelled our flights because they worried for our safety, including his. Perhaps the man missed an important meeting. Perhaps he had an important engagement to attend. Perhaps he was worn out after a long day of waiting and travel. Yet, so did many of us standing in line. That's what happens in life, and we must learn to view that life outside of ourselves.

In short, we must learn to get over ourselves in all things before we can begin to live together peacefully. But will that ever be possible?