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.

No Surprise, Bachmann Doesn't Consider Suicide Epidemic a "Federal Issue"

MoJo posted an article yesterday about Bachmann's reticence to discuss the youth suicide epidemic in her own district. In case you aren't aware, the suicides are almost all the result of anti-gay bullying in schools.

When asked about it she replied that it "isn't a federal issue."

Bachmann has a long history of civil rights abuses against the LGBT community--For instance, her husband's mental health clinic advocates the notion that you can "pray the gay away," and she actively worked to bar legislation that would prevent anti-gay bullying in schools. For whatever insane reason, she believes that homosexuality is wrong and unhealthy and won't lift a finger to protect citizens in her district who are gay from being harassed. Lately she's gone silent on the issue, possibly because it's becoming increasingly apparent to the GOP that anti-gay rhetoric is toxic to young voters, or maybe because her particular brand of anti-gay rhetoric is a hell of a lot worse than most of the other republican contenders for the presidency. To be sure, they pretty much all think gay marriage is wrong, but not all of them pretend that when a homosexual teen commits suicide they were brainwashed by the homosexual community to do so in order to advance the "homosexual agenda."

Given her stance on the rights of LGBT citizens, is it really that surprising that Bachmann doesn't consider this a federal issue? I think her reasons for overlooking the epidemic are two fold: First, she doesn't want to get into the problem her district is facing because it will almost certainly make her look bad. She might be completely insane (and stupid) but now that she's running for the republican presidential nomination, she must have advisers who wisely suggest that she stay away from her usual conspiracy laden tirades against the LGBT community. Second, Bachmann presents herself as a Tea Party member, and as such, she purports leaving things like anti-gay legislation up to the state. As far as she's concerned, the government shouldn't impose it's "morality"upon the states (though she clearly has no problem doing that when the federal government's morals align with her own). Instead each state should be allowed to decide for itself how it will treat its residents--Thus, because there are enough people in that district in Minnesota who think homosexuality is a punishable offense she feels justified in her continuation of treating it as such.

She might be a psycho-bitch, but she's playing this hand about as well as she can. She's managing to spin an incredibly draconian social arrangement into an issue of "liberty" such that disagreeing with her makes you an opponent of freedom.

Ah, American politics, is there anything you can't do?

Am I the only one...

Who's pissed about Wolf Blitzer's phrasing of the health insurance question?

The reaction for the audience when he asked "Should society let him die?" was worthy of the outrage that it received, but personally I'm really pissed off that that question was even put in front of Ron Paul, a staunch libertarian.

First of all, the entire rhetorical machine of the GOP and libertarians alike is that in a free market, everyone will be able to purchase goods and services that best suit their needs and income brackets. As such, the way that they understand the current health insurance set up is that if you're an American, you choose which health insurance provider to use and that's that. Anyone without health insurance simply chooses not to have it.

This, of course, is an absurd assertion. Health insurance is almost prohibitively expensive and providers are notorious for finding reasons not to insure potential consumers. They usually point to 20-somethings as the prime example of their "you choose not to have access to healthcare" argument, because chances are very few young adults have pre-existing conditions that would disqualify them. And yet, a lot of 20-somethings go without. Why?

Because health insurance is really fucking expensive and we can't afford it, rent, clothing and food all at the same time.

So when Wolf Blitzer described a healthy man who simply chose NOT to have health insurance, he might as well have handed Ron Paul a free pass on this issue. If he had chosen a hypothetical situation that was closer to reality like "Citizen A can't afford health insurance because she works part time and cannot find a full time job, though not for lack of trying. Citizen A gets hurt at work, which doesn't provide health insurance since she isn't a full time employee. If she doesn't receive treatment at the hospital, she'll become either very sick or she will die. What do you, as a policy maker, do about that?"

It isn't a choice for a lot of Americans not to have health care. Why would we consciously decide that we preferred to be barred access to medical treatment? And why doesn't anyone bother asking these assholes that question when they've got them in front of an audience?

"There are risks with freedom," says Ron Paul. What he should have said was "Giving giant corporations unlimited freedoms puts many of our citizens at grave risk." Hell of a lot closer to the truth.

No, You Aren't a Psychiatrist "bro."

I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. For whatever reason, I didn't take the diagnosis seriously at first. I resisted medication and treatment, but continued to see my psychologist because I knew that something wasn't right. Though she was the one who handed down the diagnosis that I didn't believe, I trusted her. I liked her. I had seen psychologists prior to her, but they had all been male and they made me uncomfortable, which makes sense given my history (well, that and the first psychologist I saw told me that I had nothing to worry about because I was "a gorgeous and intelligent young woman" which put me off trying to get help for another two years).

My psychologist was supportive of my decision not to immediately take up her diagnosis. Like I said, I trusted her. I told her everything, including my apprehension about the diagnosis and my subsequent negative reaction to medication. She didn't press me to change my mind. She didn't nag me. She didn't talk down to me. She listened quietly to all of my concerns and then gently began explaining what OCD really is and why she felt that I should try the medication (but also that it was ultimately my choice). Because of her approach and because she framed OCD in a way that made a hell of a lot more sense to me than the recurrent popular culture definition and portrayal of it, I went to see a psychiatrist she had referred me to. She made sure the psychiatrist was also female. I liked my psychiatrist. We saw each other four times before I finally agreed to start taking medication.

I think that these two women helped me enormously at a time when I really, desperately needed help. They were the kinds of doctors that perfectly fit my needs (and I think that they would still if I were still in the area). When I went back to school I started seeing another pyschologist who was similarly wonderful and really opened herself up for me in terms of support and the time she was willing to give me. I was sent to a psychiatrist who would continue to write my prescriptions for psych meds that, as it turns out, were as helpful as the time I spent with the psychologists themselves.The medication was enormously useful. It helped me. I felt better for the first time in years.

I was reluctant to take the medication at first because I had heard horror stories from so many other people that they knew someone who was prescribed psych meds who were seriously harmed by them. I had been told that psychologists and psychiatrists don't actually care about their patients, but instead prescribe them medications and toss around diagnoses on a whim. But none of that fit into the experience I had with my doctors and I gradually managed to shed this bias against psychiatry in general. Looking back on it, I feel like a complete idiot, but there are lot of people who still find it appropriate to keep on insisting that psychiatry is wrong.

The entire time I was going through treatment, I was semi-open with my diagnosis. I figured it was a big part of me, and that in a lot of ways the OCD informed parts of my personality. I told my closest friends and some of my family members when it became relevant. My new roommates knew. I was okay with it. A lot of them were really supportive.

But then I started paying closer attention to the things that outsiders were saying, and I became more and more confused about the public perception of both psychiatry and OCD.

I was an undergraduate at the time, and I was studying Philosophy and English Literature simultaneously. I concentrated in Medieval Literature as far as my lit. degree went and so I didn't run into anyone who bothered to make sweeping generalizations about the practice of psychology. But for whatever reason, it seemed to crop up with some frequency in Philosophy. I don't know if it's because sometimes people think that Philosophy=New Age and so they enroll in courses thinking they'll be treated to any and all of the alternative theories to EVERYTHING they've read so much about on the internet, but there seems to be at least one person in every course who has to bring up something about science and/or psychiatry that is patently false.

I think the most unsettling objections came during Senior Seminar in Philosophy, when two of my peers would insist both on our class's online forum as well as in person during class time that the health sciences are wrong. Period. One babbled on about how Native Americans didn't take depression seriously and that they were the better for it, while another claimed with tenacity that any and all of our discomforts are the direct result of not being in tune enough with nature. Given the fact that I actually have a mental disorder (AND my boyfriend is a type I diabetic, which is definitely not caused by a lack of touch with nature), I was really put off by these people and felt nothing but contempt for them. Ordinarily I would ignore them as they are obviously sadly misinformed. However, it occurs to me that they don't realize (and probably never even think) about the negative effect they might have on vulnerable people who are on the verge of seeking help.

Psychiatric disorders are things you are expected to be ashamed of. You aren't really allowed to talk about them earnestly, especially not with other people. You are, however, allowed to have an opinion about them, provided it's subversive.

I became more open about my OCD precisely because of these people and I met many more. They tried to engage me in finding "the root" of my problem, explaining that I would never be helped by my medication after a certain point. They'd claim that it stops working because the real cause of my disorder is not chemical or biological: It's the result of some traumatic event that I've blocked out of my mind, and had I tried hypnosis?

Look,"bro." You are not a fucking psychiatrist. I'm aware of the traumas I've suffered, and yes, I've talked about them in depth my psychologists. They do, in fact, think that my experiences in the past have something to do with my OCD. They also think I have PTSD. But to try to tell me that I'm not managing my mental illness the correct way because you happen to have a pseudo-political disagreement with it is insulting AND it's dangerous. You do not try to talk a patient out of treatment, particularly not when that treatment is effective and ESPECIALLY if you are not a doctor.

On top of this, there are some really batshit insane assumptions about OCD that I have been confronted with (in fact, some of them are the reasons why I didn't believe I had it to begin with). I've been told by lay people that there is no way I have OCD, because they watched Monk and I don't behave like he does. I have also been told that I'm lucky to have OCD because I have some sort of magic psychological drive to do the best I can in everything I do (like OCD is an amphetamine or something). Both of these assumptions are false. I've been told that if I went into computer programming, I'd do really well because they need obsessive people. I've been told that if I was really OCD, I would not have quit smoking cigarettes.

I don't intend to explain what my OCD is like, and it's worth noting that like Bipolar Disorder, people DO experience it differently. To provide a full and comprehensive explanation of it would take a lot longer than I care to right now. But, I accept the fact that I have OCD. I'm just completely bewildered by how many other people don't, both on the basis of what they think OCD is and on the basis of what they think psychiatry is. And I wonder, is this purely a cultural phenomenon? Is it unique to the United States? Why do we have such a terrible outlook on psychiatry and psychiatric disorders?

On the Political Appropriation of 9/11

With its tenth anniversary coming up, there's been a lot of discussion about 9/11, about what it meant for the security of America, what we lost, what we learned, and what it did as a whole to our collective idea of "America" as an entity. In the last ten years we've all watched as politicians used the events of this day ten years ago for their own ends. Notably, there has been a lot of insistence that the attacks on the Pentagon and the WTC were larger attacks on America (which is absolutely true), and that Americans as a whole were affected.

But how were they affected? Certainly we were all a lot more afraid of the world outside our borders, but the overarching message that was constructed immediately following the attacks, that America is some organic unity held fast by our bonds as citizens quickly eroded in the years that followed. We became afraid not only of the world outside our borders, but of the citizens we hitherto hadn't paid much attention to. Suddenly we employed terrible racial epithets toward ANYONE who appeared Middle Eastern on a mass scale and all but declared open season on unchecked hostility toward foreigners of Middle Eastern origin.We also agreed that extreme invasions of privacy were entirely warranted, thereby casting aspersions on the citizens who had previously been our closest and most trusted friends and family in the days following the attacks.

And yet at the same time, domestic terrorism perpetrated by white Americans like Timothy McVeigh became a distant memory as greater and greater numbers of citizens began to suspect that any and every Muslim was capable of orchestrating another catastrophe (ahem). This sort of footwork enabled us to keep on peddling the "All of America was affected by 9/11" rhetoric without seeming to actually deprive American citizens of any of their rights because we began profiling and vilifying specific ethnic and cultural groups. They became the enemy and Americans began to regard them as potential threats, only posing as American citizens.

Of course, this is an old, old process that has probably gone on as long as the idea of a unified, homogenous society has existed. But I find its application this time of year troubling, probably because of the fact that we did very little as a society to ensure that the people who were the most affected by the attacks on September 11 were well cared for mere days following the collapse of the towers in lower Manhattan. What's more, those family members of 9/11 victims who opposed the war on terror were openly mocked and insulted.

For workers who breathed in the contaminated air resulting from the collapse, it was a long uphill battle before they were finally granted the right to receive affordable health care to treat the illnesses they had incurred as a direct result of responding to the crises before, during and/or after the collapse of the buildings. What's more, the EPA was pressured to lie about the quality of the air in lower Manhattan, urging residents of NYC to return to work in the financial district on Sept. 17 in spite of the fact that the air was seriously contaminated with dioxins.

According to Mother Jones and ProPublica (linked directly above), there was a political push immediately following the attacks to get back to some semblance of normalcy as soon as possible. Since NYC became symbolic of the larger attack on America, then to them I suppose it followed that NYC's immediate and visible recovery was the most important image to broadcast to the rest of the world, thus proving our resolve as a people.

And so, they sacrificed the health and safety of countless more residents of a city that already bore the brunt of the attacks without their knowledge and certainly without their consent. Local health officials were cautious and did their best to protect their own, but the federal bodies on scene did little to help (IE letting clean up workers elect to don respirators that ought to have been mandatory for the sake of their health).

This flies in the face of the idea that we all came together, that upon reflecting on the events of 9/11 we can all recognize that we are united as citizens. It's just really fucking insulting that the federal government actively suppressed information that would have spared hundreds of city workers from illness because they responded to a crisis that directly affected them, their families, friends, their homes and their psyche's. Meanwhile, those same federal officials guilty of having done so steadfastly maintain that we stay the course, all the while bending 9/11 and the patriotism we happen to feel whenever we reach back and think about it into something that it simply was not and is not. The same is true of our current slew of politicians and pundits.

9/11 is highly politicized, and I know that that's to be expected. But because this is the tenth anniversary I want us to really think about what that politicization means. While you're doing that, here's some reading to help you out.

Ridiculous and Pointless!

Thought that this was too good not to share. This is our family dog. This is how he sleeps. The picture alone is amusing but the response from my mother's friend was much better.

Florida to poor residents: Fuck you.

You'd think that during a recession as long and as serious as this that Americans would be more compassionate toward their poor. Well, you'd be wrong.

Florida governor Rick Scott signed a measure into law requiring all citizens applying for TANF benefits to submit to a drug screening. He reasons that taxpayers shouldn't subsidize illegal drug use. Awesome. Too bad they're not doing that here any more than they would be doing it elsewhere.

I pay taxes to maintain roads. Drug users use roads. Ergo, rather than toll bridges, we ought to have drug test bridges--that way, I don't accidentally subsidize drug use by allowing drug traffickers or drug users to use these roads for their nefarious purposes.

This is a discriminatory practice. Never mind the fact that America's poor are already submitted to humiliating violations of privacy by the state simply for being poor. Now we think they're using state benefits to buy drugs or to support their habit?

Really? So do you think that poor people use drugs often and middle and upper class people don't? Or do you think that members of the middle and upper classes do, but they're above the law and therefore we shouldn't ask them any questions?

There are so many crazy narratives about what poor people do with their benefits, and it's all basically bullshit. When people of privilege aren't complaining that poor people are ruining America by means of entitlement programs, they're trying to convince us that they're using their funds to get drunk and/or high, and by doing so supporting crime and violence in certain sections of THEIR cities or THEIR communities. This legislation is nothing more than an extension of that logic, and it makes me fucking sick.

Okay, look.

It seems like I have far less to talk about on this blog than I thought I did.

I suppose the truth is that I'm goaded into disagreement and don't wind up doing so on my own. The process isn't entirely organic. Whatever, fine. What the fuck ever.

Michele Bachmann and Why I Might have to Repeat Myself Every Four Years

Michele Bachmann, at a PR event in Iowa today, announced that she plans to run for the Republican presidential nomination. Stressing the importance of family, she smiled her Cheshire grin and assured citizens in Iowa that they would ultimately decide the Republican ballot, and that she was their perfect candidate.

The election of 2008 gave us our first serious female contender for the role of president of the U.S. I was a proud supporter of Hillary Clinton and disappointed when she was out of the running. I was not, however, proud of Sarah Palin's spot on McCain's ticket, wondering why so many bewildered men were insisting that I ought to support Palin because I supported Hillary. This apparently happened nationwide, with many female Clinton supporters being confronted by the insane notion that just because we are women and we support women, we would automatically support Sarah Palin because she has a vagina too.

And so all across America, women found themselves explaining why we supported Clinton, why we don't support Palin and why we shouldn't have to support Palin simply because of her gender. We lectured those foolish enough to assume that we could be tricked into voting for a candidate who was ideologically opposed to the candidate we originally supported on the basis of her genitalia.

The McCain/Palin presidential bid was unsuccessful, thankfully, but fast forward 4 years and you've got Michele Bachmann--of neo-conservative mind and a member of the essentially libertarian Tea Party.

The strangest thing happens when women oppose a female politician: We get shamed, or accused of not truly understanding the magnitude of a woman, any woman at all, doing a "man's" job.

This, among other reasons, is why I feel like I have to repeat myself this year, and perhaps every election year for a very long time. The former position is absurd and easy to combat, but the latter, while equally absurd, dons a certain guise that is not as easy for many Americans to understand. Bachmann, Palin and most of their supporters have gotten very good at this tactic. In so doing, sexism is spun into a rhetorical point by a class of people who use their heteronormativity as a badge of courage. And it's a real fucking shame.

In the 2004 campaign, Palin's entrance sort of forced Fox news pundits to admit that sexism does in fact exist but it was, of course, mere opportunism. The revelation came only after other people publicly complained about Palin's candidacy and after they had endlessly criticized Hillary Clinton and anyone who ever said she was facing sexism in her own campaign for the presidency (not to mention the fact that conservatives do not exactly have the best track record from a feminist perspective).

So they used the fact of sexism to suggest that anyone who seriously doubted Palin's capability as the leader of the U.S. was primarily motivated by chauvinism. Meanwhile, Palin did everything that she could to appeal to men (and white, Christian men, at that): Emphasis on her role as a mother, her lust for money, Christian zeal, big toothy grin, and a profound love of guns and hunting. She even used rhetoric generally reserved for war when speaking about opposing political candidates in the United States. She didn't support pretty much any women's issues, as she is anti-abortion and did nothing about the women in her own state who had to pay for their own rape kits post examination.

Palin embodied everything that a male candidate might represent, but with the fact that she was a women thrown in to try to garner support from those of us who tend not to vote Republican. It didn't work, but it did seem to open a veritable Pandora's box of gender politics manipulation that is ceaselessly called upon now and has been every since.

Which brings us right back to Michele Bachmann. As with Palin, Bachmann is not at all progressive in terms of women's rights or basically any gender related political issue (she's anti-abortion and anti gay marriage to boot, among many other things). What's more, like Palin she appeals to the same demographic of people: White, Christian conservative males. What makes Bachmann a more serious opponent than Palin is that these white Christian conservatives feel like they've been kicked around and oppressed very seriously for the duration of Barack Obama's presidency. They are not overwhelmingly difficult to convince or to scare into supporting Bachmann, precisely because she is so very good at delivering the kind of rhetoric that these people are looking for.

She consistently cites examples of the diminishing place of Christians in America, complaining that they're losing ground to humanitarian secularism or--perhaps more jarring to her converts--Shariah Law. Her views on immigration are draconian, but this sort of shit really appeals to a certain demographic in America, especially now. She participates in the Tea Party movement, which is sort of terrifying in and of itself.

I'm not sure if she's aware that she occupies a seat of privilege or if she honestly believes that she and all conservative Christians across the nation are downtrodden, but she is certainly proving that she has a knack for stirring up insanity and managing to get people to swallow it wholesale. But just like Palin, Michele Bachmann uses her white, heterosexual Christian privilege as a symbol and a rallying cry for any and all white, heterosexual Christians who feel like they've lost something important since Bush left office. And I will bet you anything that just like Palin, she will use her gender as a method to combat any arguments that she represents a group of Americans who are already privileged and seek only to enhance that privilege as much as possible. She demands homogenization, and she'll pretend that being female somehow nullifies that fact.

Beautiful Dahlia

Dahlia,

I love you so much, I hope to make it possible for you to learn from Arendt, rather than Palin.

Even if that means I have to painstakingly review Arendt when you're old enough for philosophy to come strolling your way.

Love,
"Nitole"

Why Don't You Dance?

In general I don't discuss movies, as I find that I am particularly bad at film analysis. However, the upcoming film Everything Must Go, which is based off of the Raymond Carver short story "Why Don't You Dance" has me pretty curious. Given the fact that I loved What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, I'm a little skeptical that a film adaptation will do the story justice.

According to the synopsis, the protagonist is a relapsed alcoholic who has lost his job and ruined his marriage as a result of his failure at sobriety. So, he moves everything inside of the house onto the lawn in hopes of selling all of it to obtain money to purchase more alcohol.

What is so jarring about this version of Carver's short is its emphasis on alcoholism being the primary culprit for all of the protagonist's woes. Carver left that detail out of the original story, and it's worth noting that alcohol appears in almost every story in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, but it doesn't figure so prominently as it does in Everything Must Go. To situate the film around alcoholism might be a more "modern" (21st Century, perhaps) reading of the story, but I'm disinclined to go that far. Truthfully, I'm worried that the man who wrote the screenplay isn't being that true to the original short, or he's glossing it poorly. It also completely excludes the most important part of the short, which is that fantastic moment when the young woman dances with the man who is selling all of his stuff. The dance is bizarrely intimate and moving, and it imbues the entire story with a romantic hue absent from the relationship between the young couple (and, for that matter, the majority of the couples throughout the entire collection of stories). What cinches the power of this story is the girl's retelling of her experience with the man selling off all of his possessions on his lawn. She treats it with humor shot through with insanity as she shows her friends the things she bought that day. She doesn't mention that they danced. In the memory she passes onto her friends, he was some crazy man. A meaningless encounter that resulted in the acquisition of a mattress and a record player.

The trailer suggests that the protagonist can be saved, which in turn implies that he wants to be saved, and or that he needs to be saved. What is it about a person who is selling their possessions off that suggests they have lost touch with reality? As I mentioned before, it's likely this is going to be turn back into an issue with alcohol.

Then again, I don't know. I do plan on seeing this movie, but I'm afraid of being outraged at the film adaptation of one of my favorite Carver stories. Maybe I should shut the hell up about it until I see it.

Also! I have no problem with the casting: A cursory perusal of internet posts about this movie reveal that many people are skeptical of Ferrell's ability to pull this roll of. He did alright in Stranger than Fiction so I don't doubt he'll adequately (perhaps even fantastically) portray this character. I think it will be another radical departure from what we know Ferrell for, and I'm interested to see which of his fans appreciate this work as opposed to his others. At any rate, not really worried about that. I'm willing to bet that even if this movie is as multivalenced as I sincerely hope that it is, Ferrell will still do a good job.

Restart

May as well restart with something I love.