Buy Me Shit! (Not really).

Dear men,

You know that thing about how deep down, all women secretly want you to pay for everything? Like dinner and movies and little gifts? We don't. It's actually awkward as shit, particularly when you decline splitting a bill or allowing us to pay you back. That sends a message to us in no uncertain terms that you think you've got a tab running and you're free to call up that debt at any time.

Well, fuck that. You want to aggressively pay for stuff? Then don't whine when a woman leaves you or decides she doesn't want to have sex with you just because you were super nice and bought her shit. Pro-tip: Just don't do it at all.

And I swear to God if any of my male friends say something like "Well maybe you don't but most girls do" I will find you, and I will shove dollar bills down your throat until you are dead.

Are we clear? I don't want to have this conversation with you guys again.

Kay, Bye!

Quickly, on Manufacturing in America

Manufacturing jobs received a huge (at least rhetorical) boost after featuring prominently in President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address last week. He proposed offering substantial tax incentives to corporations who are willing to open factories in the United States and hire American workers. In addition to these incentives, he has urged state governments to provide additional funding to community colleges in order to train Americans to be able to do these jobs.

The problem with Obama’s proposal though, is that it is predicated upon only half of the complaints made by American manufacturers. Companies like Apple do business in places like China not just because they’re trying to avoid the cost of doing business in America or because of the ubiquity of cheaper engineers, but because the labor laws there are somewhat less rigid (which is saying something, given the decline of our own). At the Foxconn plant referred to above (and several others located in China), workers sleep in a dormitory and are subject to being woken up in the middle of the night with no explanation because Steve Jobs had a shit fit over the quality of theiPhone’s original screen and demanded an immediate overhaul of the entire assembly line production. In this case, workers at the Foxconn plant spent 12 hours on that shift, most likely after having returned to their dormitories only hours after coming off of a similarly long shift. 

Rather than being framed as a direct offense against basic human rights, the ability of Foxconn and of Apple to complete the overhaul within a matter of days is being hailed as the supreme example of a flexible high tech manufacturing plant. The conditions by which this flexibility is achieved is largely ignored, and the suicides which have occurred at Foxconn plants as a direct result of their labor practices have been trivialized.

The most Americans seem to understand of this ‘flexibility’ is the product that ends up in their hands. Were the entire plant powered by something OTHER than humans, perhaps this would be a marvel of modern manufacturing. But it is not, and it is wrong to consistently say that Foxconn and similar companies operating around the world have a leg up in manufacturing because of their flexibility. It is not flexibility—it is abuse. To achieve ‘flexibility’ on par with Foxconn plants, America would need to loosen its labor standards, though that certainly does not seem far off. With the consistent denigration of labor unions, it is becoming increasingly possible to circumvent basic labor standards, as was the case with Amazon. It is also worth noting that presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich thinks that American child labor laws are too strict and advocates sending children to work.

Hey, Foxconn employs children and they make the iPhone. If you want those jobs to come to America, you'd better start pulling out all the stops.

What we seem to want to do then, is to offer companies who abuse workers overseas large sums of money to come home and do it here. And how long will it take after we have lauded them as heroes for returning to America before we realize these giants of industry exist solely by trading in bodies? 

Companies like Apple have explicitly stated that they have no obligation toward America, that it’s the government’s job to take care of the country from which this computing giant originated. Meanwhile, Apple has done everything inits power to evade United States labor law and tax codes, all the while complaining loudly about social, legal, and political matters unrelated to itself. Can someone please tell me why we adore these people so much?

Wonder of Wonders

I've been off of my medication for about three months now. As a result, I'm expending more and more of my energy combating all of the things that come along with my OCD. This is making me both irritable and extremely paranoid, so today I decided I'd attempt something therapeutic: I spent the day baking.

Surprisingly, this is an extremely effective way of calming my very frayed nerves, since so much of my attention is diverted from what's happening in my shitty little internal universe and concentrated instead on the task at hand.

The only thing more effective than baking is swimming, but not having access to a lap pool presently, it is unfortunately not an option. Hilariously, the things that I love and find enriching on an existential level are off limits at this point only because the mental fog I'm in makes it well nigh impossible to focus very long on anything.

So instead I made a couple of baguettes from scratch with my hands since I'm poor and I have no mixer or bread hook (or baking stone). Bread still came out pretty good though. Scorched the hell out of the parchment paper which is problematic since I need it to bake apple pie cookies in a couple of weeks here and it doesn't seem to be able to withstand temperatures higher than 450 degrees longer than twenty minutes.






Pretty standard recipe. This is just bread flour, yeast, and salt.















Warm water.

Mixed everything together with my hands and a rubber spatula.

 Makes your hands all old and stiff, as seen below.

Rolled it into a ball, rolled the ball in olive oil, let sit for an hour and a half.

 Pushed the dough in a rectangle, folded each side of the rectangle into the center, pinched the sides and ends closed. Placed it seam side down on the cutting board, waited 30 minutes.

Whipped up some spread for the bread from stuff in the fridge. Tomatoes, onion, garlic, oregano, chives, salt and pepper.

Accidentally left the bread in the oven a little too long, but it wasn't burned. It came out very crispy, which was pleasant.

 A nice bready texture! 

And it was good.

The "Entitled" Generation

A recent New York Magazine article epitomizes the seemingly doubled edged nature of analysis of Occupy Wall Street and the general status of recent college graduates. You could probably tell from the title "The Kids Are Actually Sort of Alright" how disappointing and noncommittal the article actually is. But even so, the article proves useful as it neatly encapsulates the general attitude toward "my generation" (I use that term very broadly) and our continuing bout of unemployment and underemployment.

Among the many disappointing and sometimes outrageous claims proffered by the author we find the mainstays of hackneyed and superficial social commentary: Kids these days suffer from entitlement because they were given trophies just for showing up, kids these days all think they're super stars and can do whatever they want, everyone thinks they'll be a millionaire, and so on. None of this is new and it is decidedly not unique to our culture or even our century. I think what makes the most recent variation on this theme (appearing implicitly in this article) particularly troubling is the fact that it emphasizes a somewhat older idea that there is in fact of group of people who deserve to go to college and there is another group of people who don't. Those who don't shouldn't be allowed to have an education and those who do not only should be, but should also be handsomely rewarded for it. The categories generally follow the rule that if you can afford to attend, then you are permitted to study whatever you want. You are in the class of Americans who deserve to go to college because you can pay out of pocket. The exception to the pay out of pocket rule are citizens who plan to attend for the sole purpose of securing a job, even if they hate the field they'll be required to study. From the article:

It’s not exactly a happy story, but it can be a hopeful one. And the early-onset pragmatism is trickling down. One of the youngest young people I spoke with was Kristine Nwosu. The child of Nigerian immigrants, she’s 19 years old and a sophomore at Temple University, putting her among the first members of our generation to enter college knowing full well the scary merry-go-round they’ll be climbing aboard when they’re done. […] Kristine used to want to cook for a living, too. But she’s leaning toward studying to be a pharmacist, a field for which hiring prospects remain bright. “I have a slight interest in it,” she says. That now feels like enough.

The reason that Kristine Nwosu doesn't deserve derision for knowingly entering college at a time when tuition is increasing and the job market is awful is because she's willing to give up her passion to do something she barely gives a shit about on the grounds that "hiring prospects are bright." For now, at least.

I don't bring this article up because it is the only one of its kind. In fact, it is quite the opposite. The responses to recent college graduates and current college students have been noncommittal at best and outright hostile at worst. While many people can agree that it's unfortunate for so many of us to be graduating at a time when the job market is so poor, there are just as many people who blame us for our situation. They believe we should not have attended college at all, as though we could have foreseen when we enrolled that the economy was going to collapse, or that even after it started to improve, job creation would remain stagnant. They think that even if we weren't able to see this coming, we should have at least put our education on hold and gotten a 'real job' in the meantime. We were never told how we could do that in a job market offering as few as one job for every six applicants. We were also saddled with unprecedented student debt coupled with soaring tuition prices that made dropping out of college seem both dangerous and crazy, since we had sunk so much money into our educations. And it could only get worse from there.

Now we're being told that if we had just worked 40-70 hours a week while attending school we wouldn't have accrued so much debt. But we know that this isn't true, because of the unemployment rate among college age students and the practical impossibility of attending school full time while working full time. I know there are people with the 53% who claim to work upwards of 50 or 60 hours a week while attending school full time, but I'm sorry, I think you're exaggerating. That's a hard pill to swallow when recent reports indicate that most students who attempt to work full time either stop attending school or drop down to part time and wind up amassing even more student debt because it takes them much longer to reach graduation.

Ironic, yes? Those students who have taken the advice of a society that tells them they can do everything if they work hard enough have gotten an even worse deal than those of us who chose to work part time while going to school full time. And yet the lie continues.

Reporting on the effects of for-profit colleges has been dismal, and I think few people realize just what the hell is going on with our education system. We want to strip k-12 public school teachers of most of their rights and benefits, thereby making the practice of teaching in this area that much more unattractive to people who are already struggling to make ends meet, and sort of assume that by the time these kids get to college everything will have worked itself out. A new trend is emerging across the country of hiring part time professors at universities to avoid paying out benefits or awarding tenure. Meanwhile, the quality of education declines rapidly at these institutions because our professors have to take on more teaching jobs to make ends meet. They don't have time to devote to their students. They don't have time to devote to their lessons or their classes. They have time to go from one job to the next and the next until they are dead and someone comes to take their place.

Well, maybe we shouldn't attend college. Maybe we should walk out of our classrooms right now and stop attending:

• because everyone is being lied to, not just students and their parents, but citizens who think this shit doesn't affect them (just like they probably thought not having a mortgage during the mortgage crisis wouldn't affect them).
• because the quality of education has declined and continues to decline preciptiously across the country, while the cost of attendance has skyrocketed. 
• because for profit colleges use predatory tactics to intentionally enroll students they have no faith in. 
• because having a BA at this moment in American history is almost worthless. Companies save money if they don't have to acknowledge you as possessing any type of skill. It's easier to hire you as a part time employee to deny you benefits, but keep you scheduled for one or two hours fewer than a full time employee. It's easier to disregard your degree with a wave of the hand and a brisk "Not in this economy."
• because the government ensured that we could never be released from our student loan debt at a time when that debt is at an all time high.
• because our country is refusing to examine any of the causes of our situation, and chooses instead to let us dangle, to let us remain unemployed or underemployed, to allow us to go on with no health insurance, to keep telling us that we live in a meritocracy and if we had just been better people we would've been fine.
• because those of you who plan to be climate or environmental scientists, engineers, activists etc, will be at the mercy of endless politicking by people who balk at your education and accuse you of deception, fraud, theft, intellectual dishonesty, and a host of other things (and that's if they aren't outright ignoring you or intentionally revising your work to reflect their own beliefs).

I realize that I haven't cited any sources in this post, but I've been busy lately with work and interviews, so bring up all questions and point out any dubious claims in the comment section please. I'll post sources as questions come in.

Interdependence.

We seem to have a huge problem in this country with the fact of interdependence. We dislike it so much, we feel compelled to take on herculean responsibilities because we have been trained to believe that no one successful ever got where they are with the help of others.

This is false, of course. Generally speaking you don't work 3 jobs, attend school full time, suffer from chronic illnesses, and take care of your two paralyzed parents all on your own and ever work your way out of poverty. In fact, statistically speaking, if you have even one full time job while you're in college, you will probably not finish. From the Daily Kos:

When students who have borrowed to finance their education face an average of $24,000 in debt after graduation and public college tuitions are skyrocketing, the problem of graduation rates requires us to think bigger. Yes, if students took less time to graduate, they would accumulate less debt. But they would take less time to graduate if they did not have to work so many hours; tinkering with scheduling is not going to suddenly make people able to afford high tuition, especially when people in their 20s face 14.1 percent unemployment and increasingly cannot afford to live outside their parents' homes.

The above is a response to the Time is the Enemy of College Completion report, a 246 page compendium of the problems plaguing the American college student today. Turns out, a lot of students are going to school part time because they have to work full time. Even with their full time jobs though, it's not enough to prevent them from racking up $20K+ in debt by the time they graduate, if they ever do.

I'm tickled by the 53% "movement," for its assumptions, its prevarications and its motivations. I am disappointed and saddened though, that there appear to be so many American citizens who believe that working without rest round the clock will have a pay off substantial enough to lift them out of debt and assure that they live comfortably for the remainder of their lives. Again, the chances of this happening are slight, especially now, given the flood of job applicants who have a Bachelor's and a job market that offers 1 job for every 4 people.

Nevertheless, the undeterred "53%" wear their fatigue as a badge of honor, claiming that no one owes them anything, all the while paying into a system with their blood, sweat, and tears with dismal returns. Why is it that in America, only the privileged deserve to live comfortably? Why are we so reluctant to grant everyone a living wage, access to affordable health care, a decent job, a good night's rest and food on the table?

Reading the 53% tumblr account is tragic. Most of the people telling their stories live or have lived in horrible circumstances and they believe, truly, that it is their own fault. What's more, they think the fault of unemployment rests with the individual, and claim that people are choosing to be unemployed. The Bureau of Labor Statistics begs to differ: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t11.htm. People aren't out of work because they chose to be. They're out of work because they're being laid off and there are few (if any) places to go. Some of them are starting all over again after having long careers and finding that the field that once held gainful employment for them suddenly doesn't, and they can't find anything else to do until they complete job training. (There are, of course other reasons, but as you can see from the statistics, people who left their employment constitute a very small percentage of total unemployment, while people who were laid off and people who are trying to reenter the workforce make up the majority.)

There are also older generations of college graduates participating in the 53% who argue that those of us who are unfortunate enough to have gone to school and graduated within the last five or six years are to blame for our student loan debt. They don't acknowledge the fact that with budget reductions, schools are less likely to award students with merit scholarships (I should know—I had 3.88 GPA the entire time I was in school and wasn't awarded a scholarship until my junior year. It was $1000 for the academic year, and after a round of budget cuts, it was reduced to $640 per year. At the same time, the cost of attendance rose to $18,000). They also don't acknowledge the soaring price of college as for-profits enter the market and use predatory tactics to increase admission, thus increasing the number of students with debt. Additionally, graduates of for-profit schools have far higher debt than students who graduate from non-profits, and they are also the most likely to default.

You have students who pay $40,000 for an education that gets them a $20,000 a year job if they're lucky. More than likely they won't be able to find full time employment, but will be underemployed for months at a time. In all likelihood, they will default on their student loans. Meanwhile, no loan servicing agencies are making Income Based Repayment options easily accessible to recent graduates whose grace period on their loans is almost up. Most schools aren't telling their students about this option either.

Given all of this, you'll have to forgive me if I don't want to blame young adults who hold bachelor's degrees responsible for their financial situation. They were led to believe that having an education was a step in the right direction, that they'd make more money and live comfortably. They were lied to. It certainly doesn't help that we have the 53% continuing to lie to them and to prospective students about the way that student loans work, or what the job market is actually like. Because there isn't a job out there for everyone, like they'd have you believe.

Suggesting that individuals are solely responsible for everything that happens to them, good or bad, is naïve at best and destructive at worst. Independence is a myth—No one independently earns all of the good things that happen to them, and no one independently gets all of the bad things that happen to them either. Interdependence is a fact of life, but we choose to ignore it. If we were to acknowledge it, I doubt we'd be able to continue living the way that we do in this country, with the situation as it stands. How could we countenance paying nurses so dismally and asking them to do so much for the sake of society while people like Ken Lay get paid a princely sum? How can we let the laborers who work in excess of 12 hours a day, five to seven days a week next to nothing when they produce, clean, process and/or package our food? How can we cut their pay and benefits and then get angry with them for demanding them back? If you think we don't depend on these people, please—go to Paulville, TX. Become a subsistence farmer. Then imagine that you aren't farming for you and your family anymore, but for millions of Americans and tell me that you deserve to be spit on when you ask for affordable health care.

Brief Update

I've been moving slowly of late due to my increasingly feverish efforts to secure a job and help shoulder the cost of necessities that my poor boyfriend has been having to deal with here on his own. As a result, I'm only pecking at the keys when I'm about to rip my hair out in frustration over being both broke and unable to find a job, no matter who shitty. Since I don't have time to say very much I'm going to pass along some links from bloggers and websites that say a lot and say it all very well. Here's a short roundup of stuff I've been reading:

---> Child poverty, appallingly high among people of color and Latinos.
---> Homelessness in current recession hardly over.
---> European Banks in trouble.
---> Basically why you should give a shit about redistricting.
---> SEC Conflict of Interest in Madoff Case.
---> Wall Street Managing to Gain Victories Against Reform.
---> A Page of Useful Numbers Pertaining to the Recession.
---> Homophobes being Homophobes in NYS
---> Sexist Assholes being Sexist Assholes in America.
---> America Pretending to be Post-Racial.
---> This. I don't know why.

Teen Suicides, Part II

The death of Jamey Rodemeyer surprised me when I read about it, probably because he lives not far from where I grew up. And yet it is because I grew up in that area that I should not have been surprised at all.

I organized the Day of Silence for my high school when I was junior. In the days leading up to it, I had asked faculty members I was close to if they'd be willing to put up posters, wear buttons and otherwise help out as Allies. Most of them agreed but one of them stopped and talked to me at length about how the homosexual lifestyle was unhealthy and he couldn't in good conscience help the cause or show support in anyway. Not wanting to push my luck and risk pissing off a member of the faculty, I let it go. I also didn't bother asking those members of the faculty who I knew to be staunch conservatives out of fear that they would have a similar reaction, or that they would, as a group, do something to stop the DofS.

In spite of this, there was a lot more support and participation among my peers than I had ever anticipated. Surprisingly a lot of them were eager to be allies, even if that meant they just wore the badge and lent support to people who chose not to speak that day. It was pretty inspiring, even if I did get called a "dyke" once or twice. In fact, it was so inspiring that, even though I was pissed off that someone had said that to me, my next immediate thought was that he was the minority in that school and he wouldn't dare announce it in forum (yes, my high school had a forum. It was twice a week after first period).

As it turns out, I was pretty wrong. Apparently after I left a friend of a friend took over organizing the DofS for the school. Other students then took the silence of participants as an opportunity to rail against them, tell them they were going to hell for being homosexuals, and otherwise treat them like shit. I'm not sure if they were trying to force them to speak or if they just did it on that day specifically because they didn't want to deal with retaliation.

I think people assume that because New York tends to vote democrat that we don't have to worry about bullying the likes of which compelled Jamey Rodemeyer to take his own life, but there is no place in America that is immune to it. People are especially quick to pretend it isn't happening in the northeast, because we don't exactly fit the bill for "gay-bashers" but they're there, and they weren't transplanted from other parts of the country. They were born and raised in the area. I think it's likely that the reason they still exist at all is because no one bothers taking a hard look at what they're saying or what they're doing. Now is a good time to start paying attention, because it's becoming more and more apparent that these are not pockets or communities of people who don't affect the larger group. This is a widely spread mind-set that crops up all across America, and we need to deal with it head on.

It's painfully important that we talk to students about this. I've heard claims made by politicians (Bachmann, no surprise) that bullying is part of growing up and to legislate in any way against it is ludicrous. This is clearly beyond bullying--this is threatening, this is extraordinarily painful, this is forcing kids who may already have a support network to kill themselves in spite of it.

And anyone who can look at the suicide of any child and scoff is not fit to be a leader. So lets stop sending the wrong message to our nation's vulnerable youth by electing them to office.