bush vs. bush: the battle wages on...

my god lays in her
heaven weeping for those lost
in every god's name.


this is the body of an email i just received. now, i can remember reading a magazine article on this man many moons ago and thinking that he was a monster who i never wanted within one hundred miles of my reproductive system, and here's my feckless thug of a president prepared to hand over every womb in the nation, if not the globe, not that it surprises me in the least. greg tells me that appointments have already been made and Hager is not the current chairman, but he is on the committee. i still don't like it.



President Bush has announced his plan to select Dr.
W. David Hager to head up the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA)
Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. The committee has not met
for more than two years, during which time its charter lapsed. As a
result, the Bush Administration is tasked with filling all eleven
positions with new members. This position does not require Congressional
approval. The FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee
makes crucial decisions on matters relating to drugs used in the
practice of obstetrics, gynecology and related specialties,
including hormone therapy, contraception, treatment for infertility,
and medical alternatives to surgical procedures for sterilization
and pregnancy termination.

Dr. Hager is the author of "As Jesus Cared for Women:
Restoring Women Then and Now." The book blends biblical accounts of Christ
healing Women with case studies from Hager's practice. His views of
reproductive health care are far outside the mainstream for reproductive
technology. Dr. Hager is a practicing OB/GYN who describes himself as
"pro-life" and refuses to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried
women. In the book Dr.Hager wrote with his wife, entitled "Stress and
the Woman's Body," he suggests that women who suffer from premenstrual
syndrome should seek help from reading the bible and praying. As an editor
and contributing author of "The Reproduction Revolution: A Christian
Appraisal of Sexuality Reproductive Technologies and the Family,"
Dr. Hager appears to have endorsed the medically inaccurate assertion
that the common birth control pill is an abortifacient. We are concerned that Dr. Hager's strong religious
beliefs may color his assessment of technologies that are necessary to
protect women's lives and to preserve and promote women's health. Hager's
track record of using religious beliefs to guide his medical
decision-making makes him a dangerous and inappropriate candidate to serve as
chair of this committee. Critical drug public policy and research
must not be held hostage by antiabortion politics. Members of this
important panel should be appointed on the basis of science and medicine,
rather than politics and religion. American women deserve no less.




no woman deserves less. stand up, ladies, men who love their ladies, tell these people to keep their christ out of our coochies.


oh, and if you love me, i was accepted to my publishing internship today. if you don't, well, your negative vibes didn't keep me from being accepted to my publishing internship today.

this, um... this might not be very interesting.

i don't have much of
anything to say today.
like that'll stop me.


i do understand that arafat did some rather unpleasant things in his day. maybe i was sad about something else and projected it onto him. i could say he's a man who needs to be taken in his own context and that it's impossible for me to understand what growing up in that context can do to a person, but the evangelical american midwest is its own context, as well, and i don't understand it, but i'd never make excuses for it. let's say i made an emotionally informed judgment and leave it at that.

i've just watched "inside the actor's studio" with johnny depp and i'm thinking two things:

1. it should be "actors'," shouldn't it? perhaps it is and i don't remember. if it is, excellent. if it is not, someone should get on that this instant.

2. johnny depp is a truly lovely young man. i generally adhere to the advice given me as a young girl by Voice of the Beehive, which is that little girls shouldn't treat little boys they happen to meet like little gods, but i think that in his case that simply doesn't apply. i hope his wife makes ritualistic sacrifices in his honor at least twice a month.

and since we're nearly on the subject, you can buy the director's cut of ed wood's "necromania" from fleshbot. probably from amazon, too. i think you should, but we all know i'm a bit biased towards freakish filth.

i'm starving. i'm not kidding, people, we're talking ravenous. these past few days i can not get enough food in me. i had to get out of bed at 11:30 last night for a snack because i was too hungry to fall asleep, and it's not like i'd denied myself during the day. an hour ago i ate an entire pound of spinach, half a pound of tofu and a bell pepper, and right now i feel like it's been weeks since my last meal. i don't know what to do. is there something i can eat that will expand in my stomach? besides gorilla glue, i mean, because that stuff is sort of dangerous. flour? caulk? i'm so distraught by my unappeasable insides i'd maybe eat some sponge if i didn't know where all of my sponges had been.

so here's cirque du soleil. i know about cirque du soleil because when i was in high school my best friend was psychotically obsessed with the tour guitarist from nine inch nails. his name was robin finck, and at some point in the 1990s robin finck stopped touring with trent reznor and joined the cirque. my crazy beautiful friend momentarily considered dropping out of school and finding a job as a stagehand before discovering that mr. finck no longer wore dredlocks or a bondage collar while performing, at which time her interest began to wane. you know what they say about love which alters when it alteration finds. or some such guff. whatever, we were seventeen. i would have run away from home for twiggy ramirez if an opportunity had presented itself. i'd still beat someone up for one of his dresses. never mind that. i occasionally scan one of the perpetual offerings of cirque du soleil on bravo for a glimpse of robin, but i haven't found him yet. maybe she was wrong about it the whole time.

people make mistakes. it's all good.

sleep SO well, chickens. really, do. and don't catch my cold, it's a bitch.

stop killing things. stop it. stop.

does your soul feel your
body after it has been
sprung, like phantom limbs?





i'm quite saddened by arafat's death, and i'm not sure why; i wasn't a devoted follower by any stretch of the imagination. but there's no other way to describe it; i'm just plain sad. i never get over how strange it is, the way a person can feel so much affection for a stranger, the way that affection will crop up out of nothing in instants. or maybe that only happens to me. i don't mind if that's the case, i like that it happens. it's curious, that's all. it surprises me every time.

i think i'm frightened that some terrible people will take advantage of his absence to do some terrible things. the world can't afford that just now. more people who would rather not do any harm, that's what she needs.

speaking of not doing any harm, that's the motto of the mspca: to do no harm. some interesting facts about my hospital, which falls under the mspca umbrella:

1. they do not condone live-release mouse traps. when i had mice in my ward and asked maintenance what they could do for me, i was told that they only stock kill traps. something about not having time to check them all every day. so i went out and bought some live-release traps with my own money, but then i decided that the mice were kind of cute, and they weren't really hurting anything, so now those traps are in a cabinet.

2. there was an absolutely gorgeous stone building with a tower and a lovely yard out front until about a week ago, when they bombed the crap out of it to make room for an additional parking lot for all the clients we don't have. the theory is that they'll see all the construction we're doing and assume we have lots of money, which they'll think we're getting from lots of clients, which would then lead them to believe that we are the best hospital around. total through-the-looking-glass logic, if you ask me, but they didn't ask me, so there you are. anyhow, before they tore down the building they surrounded it with briefcase-sized boxes of rodenticide. apparently they can't run the risk of any of the mice that survive the blast making it into the building and costing them more money in traps.

3. a few months ago some people brought their kitten in because he'd been vomiting. it turned out he'd swallowed some string, and that string had led to an intestinal obstruction, so he needed surgery or he wasn't going to make it. i loved this kitten. i took his x-rays, i held him for his ultrasound, and then i let him sleep in my lap while i filed reports. while he was sleeping in my lap his doctor came along and told me that his owners couldn't afford the necessary surgery, so they were going to have to put him to sleep. i offered to adopt him, and then i offered to just pay for his surgery, or do whatever the hell had to be done so that he was not killed. the CHIEF OF STAFF told us that that wasn't an option, because the surgery would be half-price if i were the animal's owner. he said a lot of other rubbish, too, but that was the reason he kept coming back to. i'd pay half price, and if he let them do it for me he'd have to do it for everyone, and then no one would ever pay full price for a surgery again, and what kind of way to run a business was that? and so my kitten was sent off to the giant catnip pillow in the sky. that dude has since resigned, and he resigned because he was going to be fired for perforating a dog's stomach. let me tell you, folks, there was no containing my elation over that one (the dog is okay now). tightwad bastard. when the choice is between saving a life and not saving a life, shouldn't you save it every time you can? shouldn't that be the thing you became a doctor for?

these are just random highlights. for those not in the know, mspca stands for the massachusetts society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. soak it up for a second. maybe you can see why i'm starting to explore other options. hypocrisy sucks. bureaucracy sucks. the o.c. sucks, even though they did feature sufjan stevens in this evening's episode.

it's o.k. to be sad.

i am a marketing genius.

i was told the fur
trim was fake, but in the rain
it smells like wet dog.




brilliant idea of the day:

spongebob squarepants tampons. they're super-absorbent.

i think there's an enormous subset of cynical weirdos like me that is utterly underrepresented by the advertising world. we buy stuff too, you know. if you want us to buy more of your stuff, try making stuff that we want. like spongepons, the ultimate vaginal contribution.

from the broken heart of a future canadian

what the hell happened?
the sadness, the terrible
sadness . . . i feel sick.




it took me this long because i couldn't bear to talk about it before.

all of his other horrific policies aside, do republicans not have wives, mothers, sisters, aunts, nieces, girlfriends or any other female acquaintances? because here's my understanding of the bush approach to the worth of women:

if a girl, say, maybe, a thirteen-year-old girl, were raped at gunpoint by someone, a stranger, maybe a relative, and became pregnant as a result, well, she'd just have to suck it up and deal with it. if there were potentially fatal complications to that girl's pregnancy, she'd have to make the best of that, too, because god wouldn't have let her get pregnant if he didn't want her to have the baby.

this is a man who would look me in the eye and tell me that, in such circumstances, my life has no real value. he had no problem executing people left and right as governor of texas, who knows how many soldiers and civilians have died as a result of this utterly fraudulent war, but mention a fetus and suddenly every life is sacred? every life except the mother's, every life except that of the uncle or neighbor who was just blown to bits on the other side of the planet for no justifiable cause.

he will potentially have the chance to appoint three (THREE!) supreme court judges who will look at the world in exactly the same way.

fuck off, you hypocritical, egomaniacal, greedy, smug, monstrous, moronic douchebag. i don't understand how any of this could have happened, but i know that i wouldn't elect you to clean my toilet.

i suppose it doesn't have to be canada. anyone living anywhere where a majority of people know better, if you have a couch i might be able to sleep on for the next four or five years, i'd be infinitely in your debt. i'm no trouble. quiet as a mouse, i swear.

oh, earth, i am so, so sorry. i did what i could. but if you want to give up on us now, i understand.







postscript, four hours later:

i just saw a woman say the words "vaginal contribution" with a serious, if not intense, expression on her face on some crime drama that toadie watches because one of the men in the cast has woman's butt syndrome (this means he has a basically manly build except for his curvy, girly hips. she is both helplessly drawn to and utterly repelled by this phenomenon. she has the same response to hasidic jews and scabies. this is irrelevant.) the context was, "we tested the beer bottles in the van for the suspect's saliva and one of them possessed a vaginal contribution." this is my new favorite phrase. i plan to use it whenever possible. i suggest you do the same. it momentarily lifted my spirits, if nothing else. go ahead, try it. the next time a telemarketer calls to demand that you buy more crap, tell him, "i'm sorry, i really can't afford that right now, but i'd be happy to make a vaginal contribution." if you work in the service industry, place a vaginal contribution container next to the tips jar on your counter. it could become the new slang for feminist efforts. the sky's the limit, really.

come on. we have to laugh about something.




post-postscript, 10:06 p.m., 11/13/04:

if you look up the phrase "vaginal contribution" on google.com, the only matches are transcripts of bad crime dramas.