Yeay my internet is working

Woah, so busy lately.Finally got the net hooked back up after my move. So I'll skip the boring details of my life. Lately I've been very interested in reading crack-pot stories about aliens! Probably because I've been watching too much x-files on dvd. Anyway I want to share with you my new favorite website...Signs of Witness It's an excellent laugh! The subtitle says "The interactive site that tracks putative signs of the supposed apocalypse and end of times for unbelievers, believers, and the unbelieved" unbelieved isn't even a word. its awesome.

I'm Back.

So it's been a while since I've made a post. Mostly I just decided to take a huge break from the internet and internet mingling and focus most of my time on work, a new relationship and getting my life back on par with happiness. But I'm back and I'm keeping up with the exciting world of internet articles. So you can expect some posts coming up.

But for now, chew on this :Yucky

ah music.

Hey all! sorry I haven't blogging my usual fem issues, but I'm going through a whole bunch of career changes. So in my spare time, I listen to music and I make music. So please check out my band Psychic Hotline at www.myspace.com/psychichotlineband

Also! god I can't stop listening to the old blood brothers records. People always get all superior with me and tell me that they were just a trendy band... but you know what fuck them!!! cause everythign before their last record and the break up was phenomenal. And you now what?!!!!!! I love loud fucking crazy music thats melodic and heavy at the same time. You know I really don't understand peoples deffinaition of HEAVY. It's like people can tell the defference between actualy heavy, and just loud. or stupid high end guitar tones and actual heavy. man, I'm gonna post soon on what Heavy music is. I'm sick of people making me listen to bands and saying "they're so heavy" when really the band is just saturated in effects. nothing heavy about them....

good bye corporate world... I didn't have the balls I guess.

sorry for the long absence. In the last few weeks I've been laid off and given into the forced holiday which coincided with the christmas holiday of family gatherings. (not my immediate family of course as they live in Nova Scotia) however, as part of my update I wish to proclaim my love for David Bowies album ""The Man Who sold the World" which has been my anthem since the group layoff at my previous place of employment two weeks ago. Why is it that companies see fit to lay people off two weeks before major holidays? As if the two weeks post are too much of a burden for them to bare. Well as we all know corporations don't have to have a conscience since they harbor multiple minds/egos.

As cynical as I am, I pretty much have accepted my fate, which I always do. Nothing can be done to change what has happened but at least I am no longer working for a company that exploits the fears of a tyrant government. I've always held a "what the fuck can I do" attitude when it comes to my career. I fell into this line of work (a defense company) and although I've taken much slack from the idealists of the world I've always maintained my innocents in the matter. At least I wasn't selling weapons. But sometimes I would wonder about the machine I employed by. The machine that builds "security" devices to protect civilians from the "ever present threat" of bombs. The fact of the matter is Ilive in canada. and although malls and other consumer monuments are threatened by them, those bombs never seem to materialize. So why was selling thousands of dollars in bomb disposal equipment to people who weren't in danger of exploding? And hey, at least I'm not longer in a work environment, where my male bosses think my most important job is to make sure their coffee doesn't have cream or sugar.

In the end why would I want to stay there? in a company ruled by the opposite sex purely because they are not female. It's a sad thing to see your male counterparts be promoted above you purely because of their genitalia. It's not as if I can say that I couldn't put in the hours becaues I have children, I can't even claim that. If I had gotten laid off for that reason, rest assured, I'd be more pissed off. But lets talk about the basic issue here, which is that ever position of power in a company of over 700 employees is held by a man. and don't mistake me, there are a hefty amount of positions of power. They just happen to be held by men.

The thing is I knew I couldn't get any further in that company than I already had. Who was gonna give me a leading sales position? Its funy when you look at the departments. All the heads were men, all the minion positions were held by women. Men that walked into the positions when experienced women could have been promoted into the positions. I see this all the time. Why promote someone when you can hire someone new to take the position..someone male. I'm bitter but not bitter enough to stop trying to be at the top of something. At least at the point where I don't have to bring coffee to my boss just because I'm female and he's male. and to object... well that will cost you your job. Maybe thats why I got laid off. Maybe I objected too much. Like when male managers from completely different departments came up to me , not knowing my position or even my name and asked me to do their photocopying for them as if I was a file clerk, as if I didn't have a title I'd worked for. Maybe thats why they chose to lay me off. Or maybe it was because I didn't laugh at their jokes when they said something offensive... when they made sexists comments about the waitresses at our luncheons. Maybe thats why. One can only speculate. In the end, one can only speculate. Then again, maybe the only reason I got laid off is because the company needed to downsize. I wonder how they make the call to axe people?

Feminism on punk ottawa.

Right Here.

The War of Heaven

You may as well call me an athiest. I don't claim to be part of any religion and I don't have any spiritual set of beliefs. Yet I have a confession to make, I absolutely love reading the War of Heaven. I love reading about the angels. See when I went to church as a child, we didn't get to hear about the angels. We mostly just heard about Jesus. Everynow and then one of the archangels (usually Michael) comes down to Earth to deliver a message but thats about it. See the selling point for me as a child would have been to learn about the angels. But we didnt get those stories. We got stories about how you shouldn't have sex before your married and do onto others.. the holy ghost.. blah blah, and jesus healed the leapers. I half wondered if they left out all the stuff about Heirarchy of Angels because they thought people wouldn't believe in it... cause um.. devine beings and all you know.. yet somehow it was easy to believe that Moses parted the red sea and that Jesus walked on water. So why didn't we get to learn about the angels?

I really love getting into the stories from not only the bible, but the Quran, and judaism. The stories are really similar with specific diferences. Everytime I read about Lucifers fall from heaven I keep half feeling sorry for Lucifer. I mean he's sapose to be the embodiment of evil and all that but the few reasons for his rebellion against God aren't actually all that unreasonable. It also couldn't have been that unpopular of an idea since 1 third of the choir of angels saw his way of things.

Anyway, taken like a story and not you know..reality, it's a terribly interesting subject.

The sexist pencil sharpener and a bad comparison

Yesterday Jessica Valenti blogged about the sexist pencil sharpener you see above. As a regular reader, I know that Jessica often posts pics of sexist sinks, urnals and other objects that are designed to look like dismembered female bodies.. it's creepy and sexist and downright grose. She wants to address the issue.. fine right?
Well apparently some people get a bit thrown off by this and decide to try and compare apples and oranges. Here's an article I found today and sent to Feministing just in case they hadn't caught wind of it. It's good for a laugh. I don't get how peoples minds work.. totaly lack of logic. (I won't touch on the pencil pic since Jessica already covered it and it's pretty plain to see why)So lets read the article :

Feminist blogger Jessica Valenti, author of Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters, is angry over the pencil sharpener pictured above. On Feministing.com she writes:

"What better way to start the week than a stark reminder of how the world sees women? (It seems the perfect woman is almost always dismembered and frequently being penetrated.) Just f***king kill me now."

I don't blame Jessica for being unhappy over the pencil sharpener, but I wonder if she would be as offended by the knife block pictured. The knife block seems far more offensive than the pencil sharpener:

1) The knife block depicts extreme and painful violence.

2) The pencil sharpener depicts a conventional, common sex act which women enjoy.

I'm not saying Jessica would reject any complaints about the knife block--perhaps she would agree with men's activists that it's offensive. But it seems that Jessica and many other feminists tend to see popular culture as "offensive to women" when, in reality, popular culture is far more anti-male than anti-female. This is particularly true when depicting violence--a dozen men can die in a movie or cop show and scarcely anyone blinks, but when a woman dies, it's a big deal. To pick one example, see my blog post Pirates of the Caribbean & Male Disposability.

First off, jesus, can we stop with the "I'm more persecuted/descriminated against than you"?? I don't see why the author thought it neccessary to even compare the pencil sharpener with the knife holder! We're talking about two very different patterns of thought behind two different sexist objects. You can't really compare them except to say that they are two sexist objects. It's silly. It's so childish to go, "well the one with the knife through it is way more sexist!!" What exactly is he trying to say, that because the knife holder exists that we shouldn't be upset by the pencil sharpener?! It's very valid to be upset by both of these tools but comparing them just to try and rationalize that men are more persececuted than women is fucking dumb and irrational.

secondly, um.. okay there is a difference between people dying in a movie and people dying in real life!! How do you go from relating sexist knife holders and pencil sharpeners, to how many more of one sex dies in movies than the other!?Here's a thought- Maybe more men die in the movies because there are generally more movies directed by men, roles written for men, and actors who happen to be men? Ever think of that? Then if you wanna talk about stereotypical gender roles in movies, well thats the issue isn't it! Thats worth talking about- and men don't have it so hot, but then neither do women. Your standard, cop shoot out movie (which Mr. Up Above is talking about) is going to be chalk full of male actors in manly hero/villan type roles. He's gonna shoot people, people will shoot at him, lots of extras will get in the way and die, usually the hero's best friend dies or gets horribly injured. The average female character in one of those movies will serve as one of two things, either she's the sexy villan or love interest, who sleeps with the hero. The villian female doops the cop and audience into believing that she's "one of the good guys". The love interest female only enter scenes to have sex with the leading male role, make dinner or become a victim. THERE YA GO! So if you got a problem with men dying in movies, why not complain to the MEN who actually create those movies!? Since ya know, the larger percentage of one sex running hollywood happen to be male.

Also, if you read the comments posted under the article you get a big insight on what Men's Rights Advocates are actually worried about - women being independent and having babies without getting married! OOO all chaos would insue!! Read this:

You see the sexual notion that women hold: men like sex, and wish women liked it. This is learned behavior. We teach this to our children, boys and girls alike. It makes men believe we need women more than we really do. Women believe it too. It is patently untrue. It can be un-learned.

But it is a very useful social convention. Were men to realize how little we really need women, society would unravel. Men have not yet even gained the ability to conveniently and easily control our fertility, and women are already bemoaning the lack of good marryable men. Middle aged middle class single women are, as Glenn pointed out elsewhere, choosing to have children without benefit of marriage. There are, I believe, two reasons for this. One is the marriage strike; the other is much much more troubling to me.

"Liberated" women seem unwilling, or unable, to endure the compromise necessary to actually marry and live with a man. They will say they have been in relationships that they hoped would lead to marriage and children, but "none of the relationships worked." What these women really mean is they were unwilling to accept someone else at face value, as another imperfect human, and actually compromise some of their deeply-held beliefs in the name of making a marriage work, and for the good of children. Women have been told they can have it all, and that is what they believe. Choosing to become a mother without a father is the ultimate act of self-indulgence. The lack of marryable men is partly due to a genuine shortage; the rest is merely a reflection of women's uncompromising attitudes.

Olivia, maybe you will be able to find someone you can manipulate long term with that thing you were born with. And then again, maybe not.

I read this stuff all the time. Self-ish woman, and the poor neglected men being tossed aside because women are too self-centered to get married...god, it makes me wanna vomit. Mens Rights Groups are less about fighting for men's rights and more about taking away the freedom of women to choose their own path in life. It's painfully clear... makes me really sick actually. takes a certain kind of insecure person to wanna control someone... let alone an entire sex.