::::bliss::::
As you all know, M and I got engaged last week. Yay.
That is all.
And, I got a big ring.
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As you all know, M and I got engaged last week. Yay.
That is all.
And, I got a big ring.
I probably (definitely) won't write until after the holidays, so Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all.
Some news:
I got a job. Not just a job, actually, a real job. Possibly a career. I got canned from this place, where they were going to put me in the research department and teach me the ropes and make me completely employable for the rest of my life. Well, they outsourced most of that position to India (hmph), and told me that I'd have work until the end of the year and that's pretty much it. Well, the Director of Research was impressed with the amount I learned in such a short time that he referred me to a friend of his that he outsources stuff to, and I interviewed with her yesterday. She offered me the job yesterday afternoon, and I'll be traveling to her offices (like 50 miles away) for two months or so, and then after I'm all trained, I get to work from home! Fuckin' A! I start January 3rd.
And in other news, I'm going to San Diego for Christmas dinner with my mom, stepfather, stepfathers ex-wife, brother, sister-in-law, other brother, niece and nephew, and family friend. No one said we weren't a fucked up family. The stepfather’s ex-wife (also known as brothers mother or woman who lived in house with us for over a decade for no other reason then to make my future therapists very, very wealthy) thing is a bit odd, but she's actually pretty cool. Too bad my dad isn't coming too to make it just a wee bit stranger. Throw in my other brother, his son and his "spirited" bride and we'd have a horrible, horrible sitcom waiting to happen. My family is fucked. Wait till you read the book. Whoa.
M rules. He's been so sad the past week because his mom went back into the hospital. Nothing too bad, just an infection, but it really weighs heavily on him. He loves so strongly and unconditionally, it's really amazing. She'll be home for Christmas we're told, which is really important to us. M and I will be exchanging gifts on Xmas Eve before having dinner with his fam, then in the morning we'll go over to his parents house to exchange gifts with them, then I get on a plane at 1pm and fly to CA, land at 1:30pm (love the time change!) just in time to diffuse any potentially harmful situations which may have arose in the previous 24 hours. Then I go home at 6am Monday morning, work 2 days, then take some time off before starting my new gig.
That's about it in my life, except I forgot to post my grade for last semester:
English/Critical Thinking: A
US History (Post-Civil War): B (only cause I got a 59 on my first test, which I neglected to study for)
Oh, and there is a vast right-wing conspiracy against my black dressy socks. Someone has gone and cut holes at each big toe, and then they've hidden them in various spots throughout my house. It's not Parker or M, so obviously someone has been breaking into my home, getting past my vicious pit-bull, my 6'5" 250 lb. boyfriend, and the pile of goddamned boxes said boyfriend has left in the goddamned dining room to destroy and then hide my dress socks. Find my sock-villian and you'll have your grassy-knoll shooter.
On that note, have a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. No Hanukkah wishes, cause that was like 2 weeks ago, so people: stop wishing me a Happy Hanukkah. It ended. And Christmas is way cooler, even if they did steal all the traditions from Pagans.
Do you know how many wars have been avoided because you signed an online petition?
Do you have any clue as to how many Afghan women are now free because you signed that Jay Leno petition?
Can you imagine how much money Bill Gates has given away because you forwarded that chain letter?
Could you believe it when you read Robin Williams' plan for national security? What a dick!
Isn't it amazing that Wal-Mart/Target/Microsoft/Starbucks is gonna donate $1 for every time you forward that photo of that abducted kid Savannah/Troy/Billy/Shayne?
Can you believe that Al Gore invented the internet?
Or that Tommy Hillfiger said he would rather he never got into fashion had he known "niggers would wear my stuff". And Lauren Hill said she'd rather see her children dead than have white people buy her music?
If you believe any of the above, you're what is now known in America as an "idiot". These are urban legends, passed from idiot to idiot via email. Every goddamn day my father emails me dozens of these. I tell him not to. He does it again.
I say to people who send me these stupid chain letters, or jokes, or warnings about how I'm gonna get raped if I go to Burger King between 6:15 and 6:19 on the 2nd Monday after a full moon, I say "Dude. I've had email since 1995. That's about 10 years. I rely on it more than my phone. More than the news, more than my TV. It is my lifeline to the outside world. There is a chance, a really, really big chance, that I've seen what it is you're sending me no less than 50 times. Stop it."
The worst thing is when it's being sent to like 60 people, someone inevitably adds me to their address book and therefore to the next idiotic fucking message list.
I find it hilarious that people sign these petitions like "Oh, I don't need to volunteer or give back to my community. I was number 11,284 on the online petition that I freely put my name and address on to which will likely get into the hands of a mass murderer/serial killer at some point. So, I'm all set thanks!"
I just can't figure out why smart people can't see that these things are hoaxes. I mean, don't bells go off? Why on earth would anyone give out money for no reason? Has this EVER happened to you? Ever? How can people think that Tommy Hillfiger or Lauren Hill would say something like this and it wouldn't get on the news? Only idiots with email happened to get that exclusive story?
Jesus fucking Christ.
BTW, I'm in a pissy mood, if you can't tell. I was laid off today, the day they were supposed to make my employment permanent. Merry motherfucking Christmas. No rent, no car payment, no insurance, no gifts. Surely no Christmas bonus. Hi-dee-ho!
My latest thing....
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The Image of Women in the Mainstream Media
by Layla McCabe
Selling products through the use of the female form is nothing new in American culture. Curves, breasts and thighs have been selling everything from cars to beer to guns and ammo for years. But what is the feminine image portrayed in the media doing to women throughout the country? How has it affected teenagers, and what is now known as the “tweens”, those between the ages of 8 and 12?
The Beauty Culture
Robin Gerber, noted author, historian, professor and women’s rights advocate said in a 2001 USA Today article, "We don’t need Afghan-style burqas to disappear as women. We disappear in reverse—by revamping and revealing our bodies to meet externally imposed visions of female beauty" (Gerber, USA Today).
In the 1990’s, America became obsessed with the “Supermodel”. Women like Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and Elle MacPherson (all of whom, along with Cameron Diaz and Julia Roberts, meet the Body Mass Index criteria for anorexia (Rader)) became household names, celebrities merely because they were thin and beautiful. A study done in the mid-1990’s showed that fashion models were, on average, 98% thinner than American women as a whole (Smolak, 1996). By the late 1990’s, MTV and their ilk were seeing a boom in the pre-packaged pop star, with a ready-made image to be easily bought at your local shopping mall. The one catch: you needed to have the body to fit into the clothes.
An article by Kimberly Phillips of the media watchdog group FAIR pointed out that magazines aimed at young girls, such as Seventeen, warps and distorts even the simplest things in a young girls life. “By assuming that skincare is the first thing on their minds, magazines like Seventeen are telling young women that their minds are unimportant. By teaching young women that the most important things in a woman's life should be her looks and her relationships to men, they only serve to reinforce the drop in self-esteem reported in Gilligan's study.” (Phillips, 1993) Phillips is referring to a 1988 study by Harvard Professor Carol Gilligan on the psychological development of teenaged girls. Only 29% of those involved in Gilligan's study said they were “happy” with who they were, as opposed to 60% of nine-year-old girls who were asked the same question.
Dying to be Thin
Glamour Magazine, who says it promotes “Fashion, Beauty, Romance & Health”, surveyed its readers asking what parts of their bodies they were ashamed of. 61% of respondents said they were ashamed of their hips, 64% were ashamed of their stomachs and 72% were ashamed of their thighs.
Rader Programs, specialists in the treatment of eating disorders, say that “79% of teenage girls who vomit and 73% of teenage girls who use diet pills are frequent readers of women’s health and fitness magazines. This is in contrast to less than 43% of teenage girls who do not participate in these purging methods.”(Rader, 2004)
While the entertainment industry is likely the most influential force in a young girls world, athletics would be a close runner up. U.S. Olympic gymnast hopeful Christy Henrich was told by a U.S. Judge at a meet in Budapest that she was too fat, and would need to lose weight if she wanted to compete in the 1988 Olympics. At one point in her battle with anorexia and bulimia, she plummeted to a shocking 47 lbs. By age 22, Henrich was overcome by organ failure and died as a result of complications due to eating disorders.
Rader estimates that as many as 62% of females who participate in “appearance sports”, such as gymnastics, ballet or figure skating, have active eating disorders, and the numbers are almost as staggering for sports like running and cycling.
The Tween Generation
Marketers have several different advertising variations. Toy manufacturers, for example, have historically marketed toys to children from birth until about 14 years old. They have recently dropped that age to 10 years old, realizing that kids have stopped being “kids” earlier than they did even ten years ago (“Media Awareness”, 2004). After school, most kids aged 10 and older watch MTV, rather than cartoons, as they would have before the days of cable-in-every-home. Calvin Klein and Abercrombie & Fitch are prime examples of “after school hours” advertisers aimed at capturing the youth generation – selling sexuality and unreal body image along with fashion.
Big Business in Beauty
In 1979, Dr. Jean Kilbourne, an educator known for her work on alcohol and tobacco advertising related to women and body image, produced a film titled “Killing Us Softly”, and followed up with two more volumes, “Still Killing Us Softly” (1987) and “Killing Us Softly III” (2000). When her first film was released, advertising budgets topped out at a $20 billion business while her last release twenty-one years later, budgets hit a staggering $180 billion.
Television in the recent past has unrelentingly clamped on to “reality television”. “Extreme Makeover”, a top-rated show on ABC takes a person who is seen by most as physically repulsive, many with little more than acne, a bump in their nose or dental issues, and surgically turns them into a “beauty”. With billions of dollars in revenue generated by this type of programming, advertisers are becoming even wiser to the fact that 78% of seventeen-year-old girls are unhappy with their body (Brumberg, 1997). Plastic surgeons from Miami to Seattle are seeing a boom in patients coming to them with “extreme” requests: breast augmentation, liposuction, nose jobs, brow lifts, eye surgery, chin augmentation, teeth whitening and straightening, lip enhancement with collagen injections, tummy tucks, upper and lower eye lifts, porcelain veneers, and neck lifts.
As of last year, the rate of breast augmentation has increased 657% from 1992, and the “buttock lift” has gone up 526%. The “upper arm lift” has increased 1332% (American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 2003).
Where do we go from here?
There is nothing wrong with beauty, or the desire to seem attractive to others. However, the mainstream media and entertainment industry has turned their perception of perfection into a dangerous and losing game for millions of women and girls.
In this country, it has been made abundantly clear that we are to provide an abstinence-only environment for our youngsters. Why then, do we allow our children to be a part of the systematic dismantling of their self-esteem and intelligence, the number one combatant of teen pregnancy and drug use? It’s time to give our children back their childhood, and start becoming role models ourselves. If all they are seeing is adults with poor self-image, then that is all they’ll have to look forward to.
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Works Cited
·“Why turn a brilliant lawyer into Barbie with Brains”, USA Today, February 11, 2002.
·Smolak, L. (1996). National Eating Disorders Association/Next Door Neighbors puppet guidebook
·http://www.media-awareness.ca/ (12/02/04)
·http://www.raderprograms.com/media.htm (12/02/04)
·The Media Awareness Network, Marketing and Consumerism - Special Issues for Tweens and Teens (12/02/04) (www.media-awareness.ca/english/ parents/marketing/issues_teens_marketing.cfm)
·Brumberg, J. J. (1997). The Body project: An intimate history of American girls. NY: Random House
·The American Society of Plastic Surgeons 2003 Report on Cosmetic Surgery Trends. (http://www.plasticsurgery.org/public_education/2003statistics.cfm) (12/02/04)
·Phillips, Kimberly (1993) http://www.fair.org/extra/best-of-extra/seventeen.html
Here's a really interesting - if not scary - article from Medical News Today...
Abstinence only sex education courses lie to youngsters with scary ‘facts'
03 Dec 2004
Some federally funded abstinence sex education courses tell youngsters that 50% of all American teenage gay men are HIV positive, touching someone's genitals can make you pregnant and abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, says the Washington Post. This is according to a congressional staff analysis.
The study was ordered by Henry Waxman, Californian Congressman. It studied 13 abstinence sex education courses - all of them federally funded. Millions of children throughout the USA have been on these courses (aged 9-18). The Bush administration is injecting $170 million into these courses during 2005.
According to the Washington Post, 11 of the studies contained information that was completely untrue and made subjective conclusions from these false statements.
The courses stated that ‘condoms fail in 31% of cases of heterosexual sex'. Some of the courses went on to say that a fetus is a thinking person when it is just 43 days old. Many of the courses claimed that you can catch HIV from a person's tears.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Waxman said he is not against the idea of abstinence courses, but he is against using lies.
In an email received from Medical News Today, a health expert wrote ‘Are we going back to the days when priests told young boys not to masturbate because you could go blind? Is this the kind of sex education we want for our kids?”
I got a MOTHERFUCKING A on my research paper on mandatory sentencing! Yay! Thanks to my editor/SIL S for helping me smooth it out!
I took my 3rd history test in under a 1/2 hour yesterday, and I either did really well or really badly. If it's the latter, I'm fucked.
I gained back 3 of the 9 lbs. I lost over Thanksgiving. I couldn't help it! It was so delicious! Come on: Sweet Potato Crunch? Mashed Potatoes with Sour Cream From Heaven? Deep Fried Turkey? How can you not? Man, I wish Thanksgiving was tomorrow again.
I'm coming home for a few days next week! Man, I can't wait to see the ocean. *sigh*
M's mom felt like crap yesterday, which really sucks. You know, when someone is about to go through chemo, you brace yourself for the absolute worst. Then, when they're like "I feel great!", you're all happy and relieved, so when they have a bad day, you get really upset. M was so sad for his mom yesterday, and he's like 1,000 miles away so I can't give him a big hug and pet his baldhead. I really hate to see that family upset about anything.
Parker is fucking cute.
If you haven't gotten the new Green Day (American Idiot), please go buy it today. It's so frigging good. I mean, yes, it's reminiscent of The Who's Tommy but it's got a little Lou Reed, a little Beatles, even a little (god forbid) Meatloaf. Don't download it. Buy it. You have to listen to the songs in order (it's a "punk opera"). Fantastic.
I feel sort of bad about how I treated the Avril Lavigne kid in my class yesterday. He said, while we were talking about sexual harassment, "Why do girls always make you pay on dates?" I just want to punch him. I turned around in front of everyone and said "Have you ever even been on a date?" Ugh. Everyone laughed, which made me feel worse, but that's not how I meant it at all. I meant it as a "What year are you living in?" sort of way. So, I spent the remaining 20 minutes of class apologizing and giving him dating advice. Hopefully he's sterile.
I really hate those ribbon magnets on peoples cars. "Support Our Troops" or "Pray for our Troops"! How about "No". Don't tell me what to do, especially when your stupid magnet is on your ten-ton SUV that is sucking the oil from the delicate veins of this planet already. How about "Support alternate sources of fuel so we don't rely so much on the middle east for oil which causes our troops to go to war in the first place, Brainiac". That would be a big motherfucking ribbon.