“Here the forsaken virgin rests from love.” –William Congreve*

Oh my God…just like me!

and

“Sex may have evolved as a defense against parasites.” -Richard Dawkins’ Twitter feed.

I could go so many places with that one. But I’ll restrain myself.

Next blog post: Serious and pertinent. Stay tuned!

*Congreve is the “hell hath no fury” etc. etc. guy. I like this quote lots better, but probably only because I’m taking it completely out of context.

Who is the first famous person you think of when I say…

• sexual harasser
• rapist
• domestic abuser
• spouse murderer
• child molester

Did a face or name pop into your mind for each of them? Okay, now you can read the rest.

How many of the people that you thought of were white?

I am genuinely curious about your answers. I am not blaming you if the answer was “not many” or even “none of them”. Then again, maybe your answers were people like Mark Foley and Jerry Lee Lewis– who knows.

I was inspired to ask this after reading this post by Julian Real, which was mainly a musing about Michael Jackson and John Lennon and their roles as fathers. But he touched on a really interesting point. One which, I’d wager, is not original to him, but which had never occurred to me due to my entitled vampire whiteboy state of mind:

But living in a white supremacist state, where African Americans–women and men–are frequently held out as “the poster people” for all that is wrong in the U.S., it is rather disgusting to me that in the dominant pop-cultural imagination when we think of a batterer we think of Mike Tyson and Ike Turner (depending on what generation we are), when we think of a rapist we may conjure Chris Brown or Miles Davis (again, depending on our age), when we think of spousal murder we think of O.J. Simpson, when we think of a sexual harasser we think of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and when we think of child molester we think of Michael Jackson. How convenient for all the white male perpetrators of those and many other atrocities that only Black faces come to white Amerikkka’s mind when various “crimes” are listed. To all the women harmed by famous or not famous men, by male musical artists or men who aren’t artistic in any way, my heart goes out to you. For the record, I believe that Anita Hill, Tina Turner, Robin Givens, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Rhianna were harmed by the men accused of harming them. In some cases the men have admitted it.

But, as one member of the racially oppressive class, the only batterer/murderers of women, sexual harassers of women, and child molesters of boys and girls I have ever known have been white heterosexual men. So I, for one, wish we’d find some white male figures to replace those listed above as “the” exemplars of said crimes.

Pretty thought provoking. How much did it bear out in practice? Did you guys all think of non-white men, in general?

Sunday June 28: 1 hour at gym
Wednesday July 1: 1 hour at gym
Friday July 3: 1 hour at gym

I’m thinking I should throw another day in there. Maybe Mondays too? And it’s all been cardio–if I had the determination, I’d keep those days cardio and throw in Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday weight training, but I think if I try that right now I’ll just scare myself right back onto my couch.

But all good things. Anyway, goodnight, Moon– I’ll miss you!

I went and checked my own passport. 3 stars. Woo hoo! Must be an enemy of the state. I did go to Pakistan once. Man that made it difficult to get in and out of the U.S. for a while. ALWAYS missed my connecting flights because Immigration wanted to quiz me. This annoyance finally stopped when I later updated my passport, thus removing the offending country stamp.

Does anyone else have 3 stars on their passport? Or know for a fact what the 3 stars mean? Google doesn’t seem to be cutting it for me on this issue.

“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.

I hadn’t actually ever thought about that before, so I pondered it, frowning–”Don’t think too hard about it!” but I ignored him–I gotta be accurate here, dammit–

“Left arm,” I said finally. “Yep. Unless I’m washing my hair too, in which case I wash the hair first, and THEN the left arm.”

He looked utterly crestfallen. “Really? Seriously?” he said.

“Um,” I said. “Yeah…is there some reason that’s a problem..?”

“Well, I was listening the radio driving into work and they had this guy on and he said that most people, in the shower, wash their left arm first and I thought that was total bullshit!” He was getting fired up again. “I mean, what’s so frickin’ special about your left arm?”

“Well,” I said reasonably, “your arm–your shoulder, where your arm starts–is right at the top of your body, and most people are right-handed so it’s going to be normal just to reach across yourself with your primary hand and start washing from the top down–”

“I don’t wash my LEFT ARM first!” he shouted. “That’s LAME!”

I couldn’t help it; I had to start laughing. “Well jeez, you don’t HAVE to! What do you wash first, your penis? ’cause it’s the most impor—” He nodded. I blinked at him. “I was joking–!”

He gave me a shamefaced smirk. “Well it IS the most important!” he said cheerily. “I even wash it TWICE–once at the beginning and then again at the end.”

…the things you find out about other people.

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.

(Download link)

Theme Du Jour by Quin Arbeitman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Today’s offering (they send out at least one e-mail every other day) unfortunately caught my eye:

Women’s Histroy in the Making!

(sigh) Yes, let us celebrate the last day of Women’s History month…by showing we care so much that we leave a huge, honkin’ typo in the subject header of the e-mail we are sending out to the majority of all the registered Democrats in the state of Maryland.

My feelings of gender specialness are now complete.