Daffodils Will Save Me

Whew, sorry, folks.  I had a little breakdown there.  The Professor called me, because when I start getting all “Green Eggs and Ham” in my righteous indignation, with the repetition, broken only by slight variations, of the things that anger me, she knows it’s a sign of impending trouble.  So, I was talking to her on the phone and trying to take pictures of the things blooming in my yard, and trying to get over to the neighbors’ for dinner.

They are Christian, but they prayed before dinner in such a charming way that I am kind of smitten.  They did a toast.  To God for family, friends, etc.  You have to know that seemed righteous to me.

Anyway, the daffodils the College Professor sent me continue to bloom.  I share them with you below only to point out that, not only are they cool because they’re blooming, but because they’re weird!  Some of them are regular, but look at these!

Also a couple of other things in my yard are in bloom and I am relying on you, internet, to tell me what they are.

Women of Tennessee, We are Screwed

Dear World,

I write to you out of such deep despair I don’t even know where to start.  I read Jeff Woods’s post an hour ago and I’m still so angry I’m shaking.

I’ll just quote:

Q: What else?

Fowler: There are other things we could do as well if this resolution passes that we probably could not do under Planned Parenthood v. Sundquist. For example, many states now are requiring doctors to inform women that they’ve performed an ultrasound and that they have the right to see that ultrasound. Many women think it’s just a blog [sic]of cells or tissues. But literally within eight days, I think you can notice the heartbeat on the sonogram and when they begin to understand the truth about what is inside their body, they recognize it as a human being and a child. That kind of law probably would not be constitutional under Planned Parenthood v. Sundquist.

Women of Tennessee, I don’t care where you stand on the abortion issue.  I just want you to read that and see it for what it is.  Fowler CANNOT EVEN BOTHER TO LEARN ABOUT WHAT GOES ON BETWEEN A WOMAN AND HER DOCTOR BUT HE THINKS HE SHOULD GET TO SET THE LAWS TO GOVERN IT.  Just let that evil sink in.  He cannot even bother to get his facts straight, he can’t be bothered to learn about what you might go through if you have an abortion, he can just make shit THAT IS PLAINLY NOT TRUE.  Just demonstrably false.  LIES, lies, lies.

He can just lie, plain and bald-faced and make shit up and not even be bothered to learn about what you might go through when you go to the gynecologist and he and his buddies are going to win.

He doesn’t even give enough of a shit about you to bother to learn what you go through and he’s going to get laws that affect you passed.  He can’t even be bothered to learn basic science, and he gets to govern your body.

Let’s start with the “requiring doctors to inform women that they’ve performed an ultrasound.”  Most women have abortions in the first trimester.  In order to perform the abortion, her doctor does an ultrasound, at the least, to determine the age of the fetus.  In the first trimester, the fetus is so tiny that it cannot be seen using an abdominal ultrasound.  As you know, the doctor will therefore almost always perform a vaginal ultrasound on you.  There is no way you won’t know that they’re performing the ultrasound.  But Fowler doesn’t know that.  He’s apparently gotten his information on how doctors work from television, so you’re going to be ruled by laws set by a guy who doesn’t know basic gynecological procedures.

He can’t bother to learn that there’s not a heartbeat until 21 days after conception.  So, he just makes up 8 days, because he’s too lazy to learn the truth and anyway, he’s too busy protecting us stupid, stupid cows from ourselves.

And that’s what burns me.  He thinks that, if we only had more knowledge–the very knowledge HE CAN’T BE BOTHERED TO EVEN FUCKING ACQUIRE–we wouldn’t have abortions.

But it’s beneath him to worry about the details or the truth of what he wants to force us to know.

And yet, he’s going to get his way.  He’s a lazy, condescending liar who can’t even be bothered to learn about the stuff he wants to force on women and he’s going to win.

God damn, that burns me.  It insults me so deeply that some man–who will never be faced with this decision and who can’t even bother to learn enough about it to get his facts straight–is going to make the laws we have to live by.  Damn it’s insulting to the core.

But then, let’s look at the second half of the problem.  There’s not a woman in this state who hasn’t been through one kind of gynecological problem or another, even if she’s never had nor would ever have an abortion,  who would hear what Fowler says and not say to herself–“But wouldn’t they have to do a vaginal ultrasound?  Um, of course they would.  And wouldn’t a doctor already tell her what she’s doing and why?  And wouldn’t a woman notice that?”

It’s not Jeff Woods’s fault that he’s not a woman.  And it’s not his fault that he didn’t know, so it didn’t sound funny to him.  But he’s who Fowler’s sitting down with to spew this bullshit.  And he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know to be able to press Fowler about it.

And what do you do in the face of that?

A Few Things that Freak Me Out

1.  I have a chin hair.  I’m not embarrassed to admit it.  I just check my chin and when I feel it, I grab the tweezers, get in front of a mirror, look for a dark spot, and yank it out.  But today, when I went to pluck it, I couldn’t see it.  I managed to grab a hold of it anyway, and get it out.  And I looked at it there on my finger and, America!, do you know why I couldn’t see it?!??!

Because it was gray!

Holy shit!  My one chin hair is gray!

I’m not even thirty-five yet.  Just tell me now, when do the gray pubes come?  And how do you not just go out back and dig a shallow grave to lie in every night after that?

I always used to make fun of my parents when they’d get together with their friends and give each other a litany of all the stuff that’s going wrong with them, but now that I’m older, I see it’s because you still feel like everything should work the way it has and your body has other ideas and it’s just hard to fucking reconcile.

On the other hand, apparently nobody but me even has pubic hair anymore, so maybe no one knows when it goes gray and, when mine does, I’ll be able to join a circus sideshow and make my fortune showing people the twin marvels of pubic hair and gray hair among them.

So, there’s an upside to the whole thing.

2.  So, we spent a bunch of money and time as a city to come up with a plan for what to do with the river front and we’d settled on something everyone seemed happy with (including a forest, which tickles me so much because it seems to have just a little touch of whimsy to it in a way that appeals to me) and the Mayor is being a giant douchebag.

3.  I can’t even talk to you about this post because it freaks me out so much.  It’s this part that does it–“What happened to the mice in the other trials?”  Exercise away.  Eat as well as you can.  Lose weight if you can.  Hell, keep it off if you can.  But once you start talking about taking a pill that makes you shit yourself, or hacking off parts of your insides, or drilling into your brain, I just feel like we’ve crossed a line from body modification because it pleases you to body modification as a way of publicly acting out how much you hate yourself.  It is the difference between piercing your ears and cutting your arms.

4.  Ha, so I wrote to the Feds about e. tennesseensis and they forwarded my email on to someone at the state, who says, basically, that the state would rather gardeners didn’t plant Tennessee coneflowers.  I asked and they said–“Preferably not.  If too many people start doing this in their gardens there is actually the potential for pollinators to carry pollen from gardens to wild populations, and vice versa, at higher than normal rates.  This can lead to genetic homogeneity of all the populations and potentially weaken the chance that the species can survive long-term in a changing environment.”

And it just went downhill from there.  I personally find myself charming in print, but when I asked about planting them along the road to keep the state from widening it–and even said I was joking–I was sternly warned against such a thing.

Pftt.  Anyway, yes, e. tennesseensis will cross-breed with other coneflowers if you have them in your garden.

So… I’m still going to Fairview to buy e. tennesseensis to put in my yard.  I’m still also going to plant other coneflowers.  Does this make me a bad person?  I don’t think so.  First of all, I live way on the other end of the county from where the wild populations are, so it’s not like my population is going to have any effect on those.  And second, fine, so I’ll have coneflowers in my yard that started out being all different types of echinacea but after a few generations became e. purpurea “whites creek” and then I’ll sell them and become rich.

After all, by that point, I’ll be traveling the country with the circus sideshow, so I’ll have plenty of chances to sell folks on the beauty and uniqueness of my coneflowers.

Ooo. I Forgot to Tell You About Our Neighbor

We have a bat!  Who is hopefully not living at the top of the chimney, but maybe in a nearby tree.

Ha, I’m sorry.  Eventually the novelty of having a house will wear off, but bear with me.

I tried to make the Butcher look at the daffodils but he refuses.  He says he’s only interested in looking at sunflowers and until we have some of those planted, he’s not looking down.  And then he started talking smack about Warren Harding!

And that just cracks me up.  Who talks smack about Warren Harding just all randomly?  I think those Diet Mountain Dew commercials with the rasslin’ Lincoln have got the Butcher feeling a little Presidential Smackdown in general.

Speaking of neighbors, tonight we’re going over to have dinner with our neighbor to the south, who got broken into.  I’m a little nervous because the Butcher made friends with them ages ago and I have been behaving like my usual weirdo unfriendly self, so I have only talked to them a little in passing about their break-in, their dogs, and whether they have water pressure.  The Butcher has already debated human cloning with them.

I am sometimes a little jealous of the Butcher’s grace and comfort in any situation.