Lyrics that Deserve to Be in Better Songs

1.  “Ain’t nobody’s hero but I want to be heard”–Puff Daddy, “All About the Benjamins”

2.  “I’ve got a Mustang.  It’ll do eighty.  You don’t have to be my baby.”–Martina McBride, “When God Fearing Women Get the Blues”

Others? 

Games Recommended by the Folks at Aunt B.’s

1.  “Tony Hawk’s Project 8”–As I have discerned from watching the Butcher, if you like cussing a lot and having to get up and pace around the room and throwing your new Nerf Playstation controller on the ground dramatically and if you also like to stay up until five in the morning, this is the game for you.

2.  “Tear Up Cardboard (or Paper, Whichever)”–The perennial favorite of the orange cat, this involves, simply enough, finding some cardboard or some paper on the floor (or pushing either item on the floor when no one is looking) and proceeding to tear it up.  If you can destroy it before getting tossed outside, you win.  If you lose the cardboard or the paper to one of the bald apes you live with, pee on the bathmat to get even.  You win again!

3.  “Lick All Your Butthair Off, Just Like You Do Every Winter”–The weather has been so mild that the tiny cat really got a late start this year on the Lick All Your Butthair Off Season, but she’s ready now, and making up for lost time.  I can’t figure out what about this game is so compelling, but she seems very proud of the results.  I think the rules are clear enough from the title of the game.

4.  “Stomp the Cat”–This is one of those games that seems like it’s going to go poorly for the stompee, but ends up with the stomper bleeding (just as a warning to those of you who might be foolish enough to want to play this game at home).  If I can’t dissuade you, what you do is wait for a cat to enter the room and then pounce very near it, pounding your front paws as close to the cat as you think you can come without getting yelled at by one of the bald apes who act as the referees in the game.  If you actually hit the cat, you win.  Unless the cat gets really pissed off and smacks you back right on the paw and leaves you bleeding, then you kind of lose, except that you can get a lot of sympathy from the referee who didn’t see what happened, which means cuddling on the couch, so, you win that way, too.

5.  “Lose the Money Your Parents Gave You For Christmas”–This game sucks so much, I’m not sure why anyone would want to play it, and yet, here I am in the midst of a rousing round of it.  It’s got to be here in the house some place and I suspect that it’s probably less than three feet away from me as I type, but I’ll be damned if I can find it.  And I need it for new bras!  How is the boob freckle supposed to maintain its mysterious sway over you all if I don’t have good bras to showcase it?

Pleasure and the enthusiastic yes

Aw, damn, now you guys have me all overthinking who I link to and why.  Does Amanda at Pandagon really need me to link to her? Does linking to her legitimize some notion of a hierarchy of feminist bloggers–some of whom set the conversation that the rest of us take up?  And should I just link to what I want or is it necessary for me to add forty-seven caveats and three big disclaimers just for the sake of clarity?

Ha, it tickles me that you have me mulling over questions like this.  But I think I’m just going to mull, since I’m in no mental state to really think it through or make any grand pronouncements (though, if I can get some real sleep tonight, maybe tomorrow…).

But I did want to point out that Amanda has an excellent post that gets at, from another direction, one of my favorite topics, which is the importance of pleasure as a feminist goal and touchstone as we set further goals.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we just cannot underestimate the importance of pleasure as a guiding force.

What do we want?  Justice, equality, freedom, all that stuff.

Why?

Because it feels good.

Why are we so loathe to say that?  Somehow it’s okay to have as your goal the alleviation of suffering.  But I don’t want to just alleviate suffering; I want to lessen or eliminate the causes of suffering.  I want to feel good.  I want you to feel good.

I don’t just want to alleviate suffering.  I want to replace suffering with pleasure.

In order to do that, I have to know, in my soul, that I am worthy of having pleasure and that I have a right to expect it.

Amanda rightly notes that a lot of us have not yet let go of that old paradigm which “was supposed to work roughly like this—women trade sex, housework, fidelity, and child-rearing to a husband-boss who pays her by taking care of her and being faithful.”

And because, in the back of our minds, we still see sex as an important tool of negotiation between two unequal parties, this notion that sex is pleasurable and for pleasure and that consent, therefore, ought not to be the absence of a sufficiently “no”-like no, but the presence of an enthusiastic yes, is pretty damn hard for people to wrap their heads around.

Amanda again:  “The notion that sexual relationships could be built on desire and enthusiasm from both parties instead of a series of trade-offs between someone with power and someone without is more radical than I realize a lot of the time.”

True enough.  But it’s an important point, which is why I bring it up here again.

The Red Beard

I have never had a nickname, well, except B., which isn’t so much a nickname as a nick-letter. But no one looks at me and calls me Bubba or Stumpy or Crackerjack or Pooky or Martin Amis or whatever. I guess I just look like I have an adequate number of names to call me.

The Butcher, on the other hand, is sometimes called Trab or Wemoholotrab* or the Butcher or the Baby.

And now? Now the Butcher has the most fabulous red sideburns. And he could, if he wanted, have a great big red beard. It’s pretty funny because his head hair is brown and yet, his facial hair is red, red, red. So, if he wanted, he could pick up one pirate name or another.

I see that Barbarossa means ‘red beard.’ The Butcher Barbarossa would be a great pirate name, too!

*Ha, it just occurred to me that that’s not right, but sounds cool.

Update on Thursday, December 28, 2006 at 08:40PM

Well, so much for this post.  The Butcher just came downstairs after shaving his red sideburns right off.

I should just take it as a sign that it’d be okay if I went to bed early.