My World of Warcraft toon of awesomeness, Aogail, is the 16th best geared Holy Paladin in her entire realm. (There are 308 of us Holy Paladins in the realm total.) Besides the commentary that this must unavoidably make on the status of me having a life, hello? it’s probably clear that I’ve put some work into this girl. She is now busily progressing through what is known as “end-game” content–the final boss challenges, and doing pretty well at it, too.
WoW Nerdage–Will Make Your Eyes Bleed Unless You Play Too
Thursday, May 21st, 2009The Light, It Burns
Thursday, May 21st, 2009
It was my intention to get caught up on current events this week, it really was. But I kept on finding myself sidetracked, drawn to articles that were weeks, months, even years old. I guess I am getting caught up, just not on current events.
A few of you may have gleaned by now that I tend to stay away from writing about gender and race issues. I thought this was because, to me, there were more important things to write about— American imperialism being top of the list. That is certainly very important, especially as the US under Obama shows no sign of parting ways with his predecessors on the mass murder of brown people front. But I am starting to see that my disregard for other more social issues is a direct result of my white male privilege. And cowardice. A blindness afforded to me because I don’t need to look. (And speaking as an experienced white guy, I know that I just lost the interest of about 90% of my white male readers by using the phrase “white male privilege”. Oh well.)
In terms of internal thought processes, it’s been a challenging week for me. I feel closed and shuttered, like a vampire living in a cave, preoccupied with shadows, comfortable, powerful, unfulfilled, and incapable of real empathy. That part isn’t actually new. What’s new is that I’m only just starting to understand that this may, in fact, be a problem. It would really be for the best if I could change this, even if only for the sake of my own personal wellbeing. But when I try to grapple the question of why I might feel this way, my thoughts recede from me, and I feel the strong urge to go play piano, or play a web game, or read just one more blog post, or masturbate. Or all four at the same time.
Apologies if this is getting too personal.
I don’t know how to talk about race. There’s no way I’d qualify to be Field Negro’s white friend– in all of my friendships with non-white people, if the subject at hand ever turns to race, I just sort of clam up. That way lies safety, you see. There’s no chance of exposing something about myself that might make me look bad, or, y’know, change me.
I certainly avoid talking about gender. The only time I’ve myself even brought up feminism before on this blog was a passive-aggressive screed in which I tried to tell feminists what they really should be thinking about. Strangely enough, that’s the only post I’ve ever written which received any kind of approving linkage from other bloggers. White male bloggers, I am nearly certain.
So, this is it. I’m coming out of the cave. Now we’ll see if I have the strength to actually open my eyes and see anything. To, you know, figure out if I can really approach other human beings with humility, respect and love, and not just the skilled appearance of humility, respect and love, which I’ve gotten all too good at. Who knows, maybe I can’t. The curse of privilege is that you never have to change. My existence may be just too comfortable. I do hope I can do one better than the vampire tourist of my little allegory, but really, only time will tell.
Totally Random Aside
Thursday, May 21st, 2009So back in the day, the (now-ex) spouse came home from work and said, “I have a question for you–don’t think about it! Just give me the first answer that pops into your head.”
“Okay,” I said, mildly interested–I think I was washing the dishes, and it’s usually pretty easy to get me to stop doing housework and pay attention to something else instead.
“Okay–” (drumroll!) “–which part of your body do you wash first in the shower?” He looked at me with bright, expectant eyes.
If Only They Were Perfect (Like Me)
Thursday, May 21st, 2009The Washingpost had a pretty good article up about some of the “invisible” costs of being poor (which apparently has now been moved behind a log-in wall: sorry people. Hat tip Feministe.) And of course, like all articles about poverty, I waited for someone to tell me that the poor were poor because they were too stupid, or lazy, or all they needed was some good ole fashion bootstrapping and then they wouldn’t be poor anymore. I was pretty sure they were going to misread something in the article, or act like they skimmed it.
Lo and behold, about 4 comments in, I got it (with the bonus of being the “I used to be poor, and I worked my way out of it” crap).
I grew up in poverty and can relate to some of the issues in this article. Some I can not. An example:
Corner store:
Wheat bread: $ 3.79
Milk 4.99
Bologna 3.79
Butter 4.49
———-
Total: $17.06Safeway:
Wheat Bread $1.19
Milk 3.49
Butter 2.49
Bologna 2.50
——–
Total $9.67Difference: $7.39 for FOUR items. These four items each week is nearly $30 for a month. I would walk to the the store for that kind of money.
Lenwood Brooks says he paid $15 to cash a $300 check at a check-cashing shop because he lost his license.
I would have taken that $15 down to DMV and gotten a new license so that I could cash my checks at the bank for free.
Soda and prepared foods would never wind up in my food cart. Too expensive. Nor would I spend good money on caller ID even if it was to avoid bill collectors.
Harrison Blakeney uses the check-cashing store to pay his telephone bill. The store charges 10 percent to take Blakeney’s money and send the payment to the phone company. He pays this 10% because: “I don’t have time to mail it.”
WHAT?These are examples of people WASTING what little money they have.
Escaping poverty is difficult. It takes hard work and fierce determination. It takes sacrifice. But it can be done. The key is to look for solutions instead of excuses and to not become awash in apathy.
More musing on the whys and wherefores of p-o-r-n
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009So, I got some het dude input on my last post on porn, which I found somewhat useful and somewhat not–useful because one of the main foci of the last post was, why is this what your average het dude wants to see..? And not useful because apparently, these two het dudes are themselves not the dudes that want to see the commonest porn scenarios of woman = hurt/humiliated/bored.
Socrates Nosferatu
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
For You’re Consideration…
Monday, May 18th, 2009Hubby and I got an apartment this weekend. Hubby and I were both excited, as we’ve wanted to move out of North Dakota for awhile now, so we were of course acting a little high*, which seemed to confuse the nice real estate lady. Hubby makes a joke, like he normally does, and calls me a “liberal hippy”.
REL: Are you really a hippy? *looks a little taken a back*
Me: No, *chuckles*. I like to eat meat and wouldn’t consider myself “nature oriented” at all, except of course I like the fact that it exists somewhere out there. Hubby just likes to be silly.
REL: Oh good. I had to grow up during that time. You know who was the worst of it? The feminists. I mean, I like equal pay for equal work, but they completely ruined relationships for women. No one knows what to do with each other.
Hubby: snorts, and goes into the other room to go die of laughter
Me: *with the face I normally have for children telling me about Bible stories, so politely smiling but kind of blank.** You think so?
REL: Oh yes. My one friend, he told me about how some lady just started YELLING at him for no reason, and all he did was compliment her and open the door up for her. Men just don’t know what to do with women any more. But, I’m sure you kids*** aren’t like that.
Me: Yep, we open the doors for each other all the time.
Nice lady leaves; I start dying of laughter. It was like live-action trolling, I felt if we kept talking I’d get Anti-feminist Bingo.
*I’m sure someday we’ll grow out of it.
**Come to think of it, that’s the look I tend to give really annoying customers too.
***She also referred to as a “babies” a few times, “super smart” as others, and on the phone we are the “cute couple”. It was actually mildly irritating.
The good lord loves a concise defense brief
Monday, May 18th, 2009Does it make you feel better or worse (h/t Samhita’s tweet) that they may have really believed this shit?
Let’s Talk About Porn
Sunday, May 17th, 2009No doubt in a disjointed fashion–frankly, porn is not a big part of my life. If I look at porn four times in a month, that’s unusual. Now, that isn’t because I don’t like sex–I like sex, lots. Nor is that because I don’t have a high sex drive–I do have a high sex drive, one that has not infrequently exceeded that of my partners in the past few decades. Mostly, I don’t use much porn because it’s just more trouble than it’s worth as a sexual aid.
A Job is Not a Gift
Sunday, May 17th, 2009I am moving to a new city at the end of the month, seeing as I hate where I live and also because I’ve decided to flee the world of academia for a little while (possibly forever). Hubby and I already have a new apartment, which is nice and close to where he works. But, new city means I have to do the unthinkable; get a new job.
I always hate getting a new job; mostly because I have to beg to get a job that I know is going to make me miserable. It always seemed wrong to me; I have to do all the work of constructing an advertisement for myself so I can submit to giving up the bulk of my waking hours doing menial shit that I’m never going to see the point of. But, unless this lottery ticket pays of, and since I’m awful fond of being able to pay for the rent on this new place and eating (and paying off the jackals at student loans) I’m searching for someone who wants my skills.
Probably the worst thing about job searching is the advice that I should take the first job someone is willing to give me. I am sick to death of people saying a company “gives” you a job. I am also sick to death of pundits saying that tax cuts means that more “investors” will “give” people a job. I’m also sick to death of companies seeming to think that employing people is a barrier to their wealth and growth, and talking about it as if employing people was some sort of altruistic action.
It isn’t. This goes double for the government. When they’re debating this “stimulus” package, they need to know that this is them investing in the health and growth of our own country.
Employees are where owners get their money. I realize that this sounds counter-intuitive to some, and completely “duh” to others. But without employees, businesses don’t DO anything, don’t produce anything, and surely don’t make money.
Take, for instance, the airline industry. Airline travel has decreased 7 percent, or so it is projected. Now, a bunch of different airlines have laid of employees, and shut down whole wings of airports. What is the result of this? Well, first and foremost, it means that their quarterly stock price goes up 2 percent*. In the mean time, it means a few different things. First and foremost, getting a plane down, unloaded, and off-again (called “turn arounds”) are much, much longer. This means that customers have a greater level of irritation with the flight (because no one likes waiting in a plane). But, I suppose, more importantly for the businesses, this means that they are losing money by the boatloads. Take 350 lbs of jet fuel/ hr, per side for an engine at idle on a CRJ-200, one of the most common commuter jets. Axillary power unit unit, extra 150 lbs fuel/ hour. Then there is battery power, or an external power source.
To sum; you have four different places you can get power for a plane; the engines, the APU, a battery, or the external power source. If you have people on the plane, you want some source of power, (you need lights on). Ideally, if you’re on the ground, you want to be connected to an external power source as opposed to burning fuel of any kind. But, in order to get connected to the external power source, you need a ground crew to maneuver you into position, and to hook you up. If you have very few ground crew people, each plane’s going to be going off the APU or an engine longer. A rampie costs $12/hr (if they have some seniority time; I believe they have been advertising a starting wage of $9/hr). Jet fuel costs 4 dollars a MINUTE (240 dollars per hour- this is a Hubby and Captain calculation, and they should know). A time savings of 3 minutes pays for the rampie’s wage for that whole hour. This is just one example in one industry of how less people means less money.
Additionally, having less employees also means that traveling is going to be more uncomfortable, with longer lay-over times (because of fewer flights) and more crowded planes. In the long term, this is going to mean that less and less people will be inclined to fly commercially if they have other options (like businesses deciding it’s in their best interest to get private jets) and other people foregoing the vacations entirely. So, to me, it looks as if they’re trying to fix a cut by cutting off their whole leg. If you cut off your employees, you’re cutting off the people who make your whole company run.
That’s why I say we should change the entire look of jobs; these aren’t gifts, and you shouldn’t be grateful for your company for hiring you. If I’m grateful to a company, it’s what they gave to me that they didn’t need to (additional training above the job I was hired for, flex-time, and actual interest in my well-being, bennies that weren’t there in lieu of a pay-check raise), not the stuff I contracted to do for them.
*Can anybody explain to me where these prices come from? Seriously, I’m nearly convinced that these numbers are voodoo and magic but I never went beyond microeconomics in class, and people frequently say the same things about other “soft” sciences, which I know isn’t true because I learned about them.
Hello, again
Friday, May 15th, 2009Insomnia blogging. The sleeplessness is my own fault, can’t seem to get myself on a steady sleep schedule.
It’s been a month since I moved from Tokyo to Fukuoka, Japan. My big honking project that I’ve spent the last six months of my life on is over. I wrote about 750 pages of curriculum for the school I work for. That’s nearly a Michener novel. It’s good to be finished!
As for Fukuoka, I like it for many reasons. Probably most important is that it’s not Tokyo. There’s lots of ways I love Tokyo, but it’s good to have a breather. Obviously, there are quite a few fewer people here. I can step on a train without imitating a tinned sardine, and I can ride a bicycle without taking my life in my hands. The people are super friendly here, too. I already have about four local food establishments vying to be my “local” since they’re all staffed by such friendly folk who seem to genuinely enjoy talking to me, even with my limited Japanese. And my living situation rocks. My place is big. I have my own garden and a real piano. At my job, my new position is rewarding and not too terribly time-consuming. In short, life, for me, is good. I’m one of the lucky ones, and I certainly appreciate my good fortune.
On Monday night I finally got internet again. A month ago, I was really jonesing for my series of tubes. My circumstances, between my new job and all the busywork attendant with a big move, made any meaningful connectivity more difficult than it was worth. Then, suddenly, about a week into my cold turkey, it ceased to matter. Life presented itself with other things to fill that void, and nothing felt lost. I was a bit surprised by this development. Part of me was even a bit disappointed when I got hooked up again. (The other part of me, of course, was really grateful to be able to get caught up on “Lost”.) But if technology were to suddenly fail us on a wide scale and all computers and televisions were to stop working, have no fear, we’ll be fine. Thus speaketh me, anyway.
True story: Lisa K, you got me in trouble! While I was living blog-free, there was a brief bit of excitement at my company due to a manager who didn’t like me trying to get me in trouble for this here little blog. Probably foolishly, I include the address to this blog in my e-mail sigs, and as per normal I left my sig on an e-mail which another boss happened to forward to a bunch of teachers. The next day, I get this phone call: “So, Quin, I was just looking at this website– this ‘Punk’ ‘Assblog’…” –(yes, he actually went out of his way to pronounce it as though he’d never heard the work “punkass” before)– “…and well… what’s this about anal sex?” He claimed that one of the teachers was terribly offended by it and had contacted him over it, an assertion I find highly suspect. So terribly offended by an article which hadn’t even been on the main page for, like, three weeks. I later heard that he tried to raise a big fuss at head office over it, and everybody there was just like “whatever”. Eventually the manager above him just called me and asked that I not include the blog address in my sig anymore. No sweat!
Strangely enough, aforementioned prudish manager resigned from the company two weeks later. Or perhaps I should add scare quotes and say “resigned”. (And to think I made that voodoo doll of him as a lark– who knew those things actually worked!)
Despite that piece of fun fun fun, I still haven’t quite gotten caught up to speed on what’s going on in the real world, or even just this blog. I see that our little dysfunctional Punkass family has increased by one. A belated welcome, Jad! Looks like your presence has been stirring the pot a little. Hope that’s a good thing.
Right. I’m going to go try to get to sleep again in a minute. First, though, to celebrate my glorious reappearance here, which will surely change all of your lives forever, I’d like to share another song. When I originally created it (for an electronic music class I once took) it was on a crystal clear impeccably mixed DAT tape, but alas the only version that has survived through the years is from a 2nd generation audio tape copy. Also, it’s saddled with the generic title “Theme Du Jour”. Still, it’s one of those ones that gives me a warm glow to hear every now and then. Hope you like it, too.
Theme Du Jour by Quin Arbeitman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Sex 2.0! Part Four: You Can Run But You Can’t Hide, Feminists!
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009(Parts One, Two and Three are linked.)
See, this is one of the biggest reasons I don’t listen to Ann Coulter.
(wtf? How did Ann Coulter get involved in this? you might ask. Well–)
Ann has made a career out of, among other things, trashing feminism. The last time I paid any attention to much of anything she had to say was one of the first times I ever paid any attention to her at all–basically I got to the point where she was saying that women needed to get out of public discourse, particularly political public discourse, because they weren’t suited to it and had been screwing everything up in it for decades. Once I heard her say that, I translated it to mean that there was no point in listening to her discourse publicly anymore, particularly politically–I mean, she’s a woman herself. And I never argue with other people who tell me not to listen to themselves, eh?
Generally I am underwhelmed by women who globally trash feminism. Not that being a self-identified feminist has a hell of a lot of meaning these days–given that Sarah Palin, Maureen Dowd, Catherine MacKinnon and Wendy McElroy all insist that they are feminists, I’m not sure exactly what assumptions about them we’re supposed to be making based on that. So, when women state that they have a problem with specific so-called feminists or specific schools of self-identified feminist thought, THAT I have no problem empathizing with. However–
Recently