Tonight may be the last night I spend with my car. Tomorrow might be the last morning I drive it.
You’d think that, after this month, I’d be glad to be done with it.
And… and I am.
But I also feel a little sad.
Okay, well, here’s hoping the next car is better.
I admit, I often don’t understand what gets conservatives all up in arms. Today, for instance, they’re riding Kleinheider’s butt because he called our troops “pawns” and also said that they have honorable professions.
Somehow, to the conservatives, “pawns” is such a grave insult that it outweighs the compliments he paid our armed forces and Terry Frankis falling all over herself to distance herself from Kleinheider’s comments (Why? I have no idea. Maybe the Army has nothing better to do than to sit around and retaliate against bloggers for imagined slights. If so, let me be the first to say how terrible it would be if four hot half-naked soldiers came over and gave me massages and cleaned my house in order to teach me to have more respect for our soldiers. [Ooo, there’s the slight! It’s Soldiers now.]).
Anyway, Frank says:
There is no greater love nor charity than for one man to lay down his life for another. I hope that if the time ever arises, I may do so for my family or my fellow man. I believe such risk, such sacrifice is truly loving your neighbor as yourself. [emphasis mine]
I would just point out that now is the time. Our Army needs dedicated soldiers who believe in the cause they’re fighting for and they’ll take anyone up to forty years old.
I have it on good authority from Stacey Campfield, the Right’s favorite blogging legislator, that Terry Frank is, at most, thirty-six. So, if she really believes in the cause our soldiers are fighting for, believes that what they’re doing is for a greater purpose and makes good sense, the Army needs her and would be willing to take her.
She’s anxious to have the opportunity to serve and the Army’s anxious to have her.
I anxiously await her enlistment.
Good fun.
(Not to let Kleinheider off the hook. Once again he’s whining that us “First-World-ers” are not doing enough to have more white babies. And yet, how many white babies has Kleinheider squirted into the wombs of women? Can we ever put a moratorium on encouraging others to do dangerous things we ourselves can’t bother to get around to?)
I can remember when I first heard “Down to the River to Pray.” I’d just gotten that year’s Oxford American music issue and I was driving home from work, back when we lived way far south, and it came on–I think it was the last song on the CD–and I had to pull the car over and wait for the song to finish, because I just wasn’t sure I could drive safely and listen to it at the same time.
There’s not much to say about this song that hasn’t been said before, how Krauss comes in alone and then how the choir comes in behind her and it seems to get fuller and richer until the song ends.
The song, in retrospect, is very, very similar to Nina Simone’s “Take Me to the Water,” another hymn about baptism. Simone’s starts with the piano, then she comes in with “Take me to the water” and is immediately backed by a smaller gospel sounding back-up group. Both are concerned with “who shall wear the robe and crown?”. (“None but the righteous shall be saved,” Simone tells us.)
Both are asking folks to join them. Krauss goes through a litany of family members she’d like to come with her. Simone is asking for someone to take her.
It’s just curious to me that they’re so similar. And I think it provides an interesting contrast to listen to them back to back like that. Krauss sounds like she’s getting a large crowd together, following her down to the river. Simone sounds like she’s begging someone to help her get there. Krauss seems hopeful, but with Simone, she sounds suspiciously like she might be singing the blues.
In general, I don’t have a problem with porn. Porn stars, to me, seem like the equivalent of gymnasts. Yes, they’re women. Yes, I have those basic body parts, but if you think I’m going to be able to bend and stretch and balance mine like that, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, on you.
Do some folks get weird expectations about what are common and generally acceptable sexual practices and body types from porn?
I suppose they do.
And do I think that porn reinforces the notion that women are available for men’s pleasure whenever the men should need it? Yes, I do.
I guess I kind of see pornography as saying explicitly what so much of society says implicitly.
So, I’ve never viewed pornography and felt pressured to look like a porn star any more than I look at a gymnast and feel pressured to look like a gymnast. Maybe that’s because I think it takes a lot of care and training I’d rather not do to be able to have your body consistently perform that way. Maybe it’s because there’s just no way anyone would look at me and expect my body to miraculously transform into a porn star body upon the removal of my clothes.
In other words, I’ve just never viewed porn and felt bad about myself as a woman (even though I’ve seen some stuff that made me feel pretty damn bad about men). I especially have never looked at those cooters and thought, even for a second, that that’s what my cooter should look like.
So, I’m a little weirded out by a link I found in this thread over at Pandagon. I will just say up front that the link I am about to give you is for serious not for safe for work unless you happen to work at a gynecologist. But, since I want you all to get an idea of what I’m talking about, when you click over there, you will see many vaginal openings that have been “fixed” from something like this–0–to something like this–I.
Okay, here’s the link.
Y’all, there’s not a cooter on this page that looks like mine. Not in the before pictures, certainly not in the after pictures. But those before pictures!
Seriously, those to me look like porn cooters already all shaved and… okay, I’m just going to say it… small. Where are their labia majora?
Fuck me, maybe we need to just have naked normal cooter day because I look at those cooters and see nothing that resembles mine.
My cooter, for those of you who’ve not seen it, is covered first by my labia majora. If I’m not aroused, everything stays pretty much tucked up in behind them. If I am aroused, they kind of open up and pull back and everything that’s normally kind of tucked away is covered in at least a thin layer of slick secretions.
My clitoris is tucked away under its hood and between my clitoris and my vaginal opening is some really slick and soft tissue that is normally kind of covered by my labia minora
I had thought that that’s how cooters, in general, worked.
But then I look at these cooters, cooters that are so “abnormal” that they’re being hacked away at by folks who’ve sworn to first do no harm, and I’ve got to tell you, it’s make me feel a little weird about my cooter.
Do I have an abnormally large cooter? Are folks getting lost up there and are just too polite to tell me? Am I one cold snap away from someone wearing my cooter as a hat, using my labia majora for ear flaps?
You know what I mean? If these are the cooters that need surgery, where does that leave mine?
I don’t know. I’m going to assume that, since I’ve never had anyone down there scream and run away in horror that everything’s okay. Shoot, a gynecologist would say something if you had a cooter so large that folks could use it as housing, right?
I mean, my cooter feels good to me. Isn’t that the point? If they work and they feel good, why are we hacking on them?
And those afters. The afters break my heart. They seem so tame and safe, like little coin slots, not decadent pleasure-filled gateways to the mysteries of the universe.
Something about them looks like an apology–“I’m sorry for being a woman; let me tuck as much of that gross girly stuff away as I can.”
So, yeah, I’m momentarily weirded out, but I think I’d rather have an untamed unapologetic weird cooter than a perfectly fine cooter I felt so bad about that I paid someone thousands of dollars to hack away at it.
Tiny Cat Pants 