Baffled

I'm baffled. I really am. As I've said before, I do understand that people think God has a negative opinion of homosexuality. I disagree, but I tend to disagree when someone tells me they know what God thinks about anything. Anyway, I'm assuming those are the people on the streetcorners as I drove home from work waving the "Yes on 8" signs. I'm assuming, and maybe I'm wrong, that California voters pushing for Prop 8 to pass really believe that there is something fundamentally so wrong with gay marriage that they need a constitutional amendment to make sure it doesn't happen.

But what baffles me is that in the middle of the yellow signs as I sat watching the group, there was one handmade signs that read: "We can disagree and still LOVE ONE ANOTHER. Yes on 8!"

I think it would be great if that were true. So, can someone explain how taking away a civil right from a group with whom you disagree is a loving act? That's a serious question.

I am so ready for this election to be over. I've found this election very anxiety-provoking and frightening. Really, people? This is the direction you think is right? This is the higher ground? This is what Jesus would want? I just hope that tomorrow we see goodness and civility win out.

War Wounds

A friend of mine came over for dinner yesterday, and was telling me about seeing a woman at the swimming pool with scars on her belly. My friend said, "I started thinking about women's war wounds. And the stories our bodies tell..." The phrase "war wounds" stuck with me. Usually war is about defending life and taking life, but for women in childbirth, I guess it can be about giving life, too. I remember reading a theory a long time ago that men go to war because they can't give birth. I don't know if that's true, but I have a 7-inch gash on my lower belly that's as real as any received in combat. Granted, I was numb when they cut me open, but it also came after a 5-day induction and a 30-hour labor. I've got breasts saggy from feeding my baby with my body. I've got stretch marks that would rival any schrapnel scar. War wounds received in combat get medals and are often displayed proudly as a badge of honor. But women just go about their day, and if anyone notices the scar, says, "Oh yeah, I had a C-section." They complain about their saggy boobs because they don't fit the image of the perky ingenue anymore. I don't think we usually think of a C-section scar as a badge of honor, let alone boobs that point down. Is there any other time that a person can go through an intense physical endurance test, get cut open (or perhaps tear), and then feed the new life with her exhausted body? Thinking of a woman's body as a wondrous, life-growing thing is not new, but somehow the phrase "war wounds" really put it into perspective for me. Yeah, I am proud of the scar. I felt like I went through combat to give birth. And I'm so glad the result was this beautiful boy, not a full military cemetery.

The Secret Danger Every Contact Lens Wearer Should Know About...

I was reading one of those family/women's mags (Family Circle, Women's Day, who can tell the difference?) and I swear, every other page was some dire threat. "Protect Yourself from Schemes and Scams," "Are Your Kids Safe at Camp? What You Don't Know Could Hurt Them," and "Hidden Summer Spoilers" (ex. Watch out for that wired glass in public buildings! If your hand goes through that, it's worse than going through plain glass! Why that's a "summer" spoiler and not a year-round threat, I don't know). That's actually my gripe with Motherhood magazine too, crunchy as it is. I can't read it without being reminded of Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. Which, if you haven't seen, you should. It's all about our culture of fear.

OK, so back to the title of this post. I just returned from the stupidest urgent care visit ever (and I've had some stupid ones). I was walking down the street, minding my own business, when my eye itches. I had contacts in, so I skillfully rubbed the inner corner of my eye ever-so-slightly. I know about not rubbing your eyes - I've had contacts, and severe allergies, for over 20 years. OK, so for some reason my contact decided to take a holiday underneath my eyelid. Just at this moment, neighbor came out and wanted to give us some branches off her pelargonium. G. was very neighborly and pretended he was interested in them, I was trying to keep A. from running down the street while propping my eye open. I couldn't get the contact back into place, so I growled at G that I had to go inside and find the damn thing, and I got to a mirror. No sign of it. I was wearing sunglasses, so if it fell out (and I have never, ever, had a contact "fall" out - I'm much more likely to have to peel the stupid thing off my eyeball)I would've felt it on my cheek. I mean, soft contacts don't just FALL out.

OK, so I didn't see it anywhere under my eyelids. Usually I can see the faint blue edge and can drag it down and then peel it off (apologies to those of you with eye phobias), but nothing. I went outside and had G. peer under my eyelid, and he couldn't see it either. It feelt like someone had dumped a box of sand in my eye, and despite lots of flushing, it was nowhere to be found. My eye was red and swollen by this point, and A. kept looking worriedly at me. I smiled and waved, hoping he'd think I was just winking at him. A really long wink.

No luck, so I called the advice nurse. She suggested I open my eye under water by filling a bowl with water and dunking my head in it. Well, I did call for advice. I tried it, and you know what? It's really hard to just open up one eye under water. It's also impossible to do this and not get soaking wet. But no little contact floated up. So she said I had to go to urgent care and get a doctor to take it out. The first appt. was in 2 hours. Sheesh.

So we packed up A., I apologized for making my men go to the hospital with me for such a stupid reason, I paid my $25 co-pay and we waited. And, as you might imagine, waited. And waited some more. The NBA game was on, so that was OK. A. loved the elevators, so he was OK too. G. was worried that he'd have to go in with me and watch them pop my eyeball out. I told him he didn't have to go in with me. Then I started worrying that they were going to have to pop my eyeball out.

I got a doctor who was 22 if he was a day, and a klutz on top of it. He couldn't get the stool for me to sit on right, and he made it way too high. It was one of those round swivel stools in the exam rooms, and I had to sit on it on one side of the eye-examining-machine. Well, it's really hard to sit on one of those when it's too high and your feet don't touch the ground. In fact, I may go so far as to say it's impossible to even get on the damn thing. You can imagine how it rolls away from you on the slick floor as you try to jump on. He said, "Be careful, I've lost a few people that way." He also admitted he wassn't very good at flipping over eyelids, but he gamely tried it in every position imaginable. Arms through eye-exam-machine, arms around e-e-m, swiveled to the side, laying back, standing up. I started wondering if he was one of those people with an eye phobia, and if his skin was crawling at the thought of pulling on my eyelid and that's why he couldn't do it.

Anyway, he couldn't see it either, but unlike me, he thought that meant it wasn't in there. No, no, no - I just went through all this hooha - you are getting out a pair of tiny tweezers and you are pulling something out of my eye, damnit!

He called over Chipper Physician's Assistant and asked her if she sees anything. She's much better at flipping over eyelids. Way too good at it, in fact. It hurt. And she kept telling me "Look down down down down down to the left to the left to the left waaaaay down, waaay to the left, c'mon you're doing great, down down down down" like she's the "yeller" on Survivor and I'm the blindfolded teammate trying to get a puzzle piece into the right square. I yelled, "That's as far down as my eye goes!" and the doctor started to laugh. She replied, "I know - you're doing terrific!" Hey, I guess I can look down with the best of them. Then she wanted to flip over another corner of my eyelid and have me look to the right to the right to the right to the right, I know, you're doing a great job! to the right to the right etc. You know what I think? I think they whispered in the hall and he told her, "The chick in the eye room doesn't believe me that there's no contact lens in there, so go in there and torture her so she knows we really are looking." That's what I think.

So it turns out that I do have a scratch on my cornea, which was dispatched with a bottle of antibiotic eye drops. I'm just realizing now that he never told me how often to use them. He pulled them out of a drawer somewhere, so there's no prescription, which is a good thing, because if I had to shell out $10 more dollars for the contact lens that wasn't there, I'd be unhappy. G. was very nice about it all - "Well, it's good we had that checked." I probably should've told him they popped out my eyeball and looked behind it. At least my hand didn't go through wired glass. Which makes me wonder, if your hand goes through plain glass, do you think, hey, at least it isn't wired? No, I don't think so. I think you say, Damn, I'm bleeding anyway, wire or no wire.

(Sorry for all the cursing, kids, but it's been one of those days).

Lunasea's Getting Political

No, not on my blog (much, anyway), in real life. I'm joining Mainstreet Moms Oppose Bush and I'm adopting a swing state - I'm going to send an unregistered mom a personal letter and the "10 reasons Bush policies are bad for children." I am very bad on the telephone and don't want to call people, but stickers on envelopes and little kid fonts? That I can do. I think I'm going to do Washington - that's where my Republican BIL lives. The same one who donated to the Bush campaign in my name to get me back for drawing devil horns on his autographed photo of George and Laura. I also did "Stupid" and "I'm With Stupid" T-shirts. He didn't have any sisters so I'm trying to make him feel more a part of the family, you know.

More....

OK - I found the sites I was looking for. In Psych 101, you've gotta learn about social psychology and the particular kind of weirdness that goes on in group situations. One infamous experiment separated a group of students into guards and prisoners, stuck them in a makeshift jail and then observed what happened. It was supposed to go on for 2 weeks, and they pulled the plug after 6 days because it got so dangerous. On the links page is a collection of parallels between this study and the abuse in the Iraqi prisons.

The other one, Stanley Milgram's 1963 study, was made into a grainy, disturbing B/W film that we all watched. People were told to shock someone in another room, and turn up the voltage on command. These people heard the (phony) screams coming from the other room, but turned the voltage up anyway because they were told to. I imagine each of us in that lecture hall, myself included, told ourselves that we wouldn't have participated. Keep in mind, these people weren't army officers, sworn to obey. These were people who had been told they could leave the study at any time, and they STILL did it.

Keep in mind, I'm not condoning this behavior AT ALL. It disgusts me. But my point is that those perpetrating the abuse are not doing this in a vacuum. There's a culture in the prisons that supports this behavior and dehumanizes the prisoners. We've got a lot of information about tendencies towards sadism in prisons (not to mention war), and we're supposed to be one of the most advanced nations in the world - let's use that information to prevent this from happening ever again. I think there are a whole lot more people responsible for this than those two taking and posing in the pictures.

Hit Me Baby One More Time...

My counter's at 999....I know I don't get as many hits as some people (hello, DQ and Martini), but hey, roll me over, will ya?

So am I the only person not shocked by the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in the military prisons? While of course the abuse and torture of POWs is horrible, it's not exactly surprising. We've been trained as a country to see the Iraqi face (particularly the male face) as the face of 911, the "Axis of Evil," the face of everything un-American. They hate us, they want us to die, they think nothing of killing innocents in their jihad. I would imagine that if you're working in a military prison, it's even worse. Those people are sub-human - why else would we have them locked up like this? To do that work, to bomb and shoot and send missles, you've got to classify the enemy as categorically evil. Nothing else - just evil. Certainly not human and deserving of human rights. Not to mention the fact that you might think they have special information that would prevent another 911, if you could just get it out of them. It's very important in prisons to establish who as the power and who doesn't (the prisoners). So no, I'm not surprised. Saddened, but not surprised.

War Is Hell

Try as I might, I haven't been able to find the people who are offended by the sight of the caskets draped in American flags as they travel home. It seems to me that the only one who has a problem with this is George Bush.

This is purely conjecture, but I think I'd want those photos on the news, in the papers, and all over if my loved one were killed. Those caskets are the reality of too many Americans. I'd point to those photos and say, "THIS was my war." I think what's disrespectful is to greet the arrival of troops home safe and sound and ignore that some of them are missing.

Where Is My Gay Apocalypse? / Over 3,500 gay marriages and, what, no hellfire? I was promised hellfire. And riots. What gives? Drama Queen forwards this missive (which I should have found, given that I do live 20 miles from the City of the Damned). I'm also still waiting for the institution of heterosexual marriage to collapse. I expect my female friends to start asking me to marry them any day now. Or, maybe G will take a few more wives. Hey, am I even still married? As far as I can tell none of my straight friends have cancelled their summer weddings yet, meaning I still have to buy a present. Sigh. Maybe, just maybe, letting people in love marry won't ruin society.

Went to John Kerry's rally at the Teamsters last week. We were very very lucky - it was a huge crowd in line and a campaign worker came by and pulled all the families with babies and let us in! I'd say about an eighth of the whole crowd got in. The rest were outside fogging up the windows as they tried to see him. WTG, Aidan! I knew we had him for a reason. The bummer, though, was that my digital camera was still fried and I didn't get any photos - we were about 20 people away from him. All I could think about was what a great scrapbook page it would have made for A's 2nd year.

Swim lessons went better this morning. A. complained a little at first, but I found a dolphin that squirts water and that was hecka fun. He had a death grip on me the entire time, although the water barely comes up to his belly if he stands up. Curiously, he enjoys the big pool much better than the little pool. I guess he knows I won't let go of him in the big pool. He actually kicked a little, and got all googly-eyed at our teenage instructor when she complemented him on his form.

My subconscious mind is driven by:


Okay. I'll buy that. I also have a 131 IQ, which seems to have gone down. When I was tested in high school, I distinctly remember testing at 145. Doesn't surprise me. The whole Ph.D. thing made me way stupider.

Test Yourself Here.

Reality Show Update:

The Apprentice: FINALLY!! Geez, Donald, took you long enough. Nothing against Omarosa - in a particular type of setting, she'd do fine. She's smart, but she's not very good with people.

Survivor: Hate to be a cynic, but at first I really thought Sue was thinking, "Hey, no one here's gonna let me win a million dollars; but I can use this as a ticket to some food and a hot shower, and get paid to boot!" After watching her on CBS whatever-that-show-is with Harry Smith, I decided differently. However, I suspect she has some abuse in her past to be so brutalized by Dickie's dick. More Lex this week - yee haw!

Eden: Yawn. A reality show with no end and no one understands what the game is? This is just a reworked Paradise Hotel. Boring young beautiful people, lots to drink, and a green apple. Yippee.

Food update: I'm at my heaviest weight ever (besides the last trimester, and even then I'm a bit too close to that weight for comfort). I think I have to go low carb. I hate to give up my corn flakes and toast, but something's gotta change. My belly is hanging so low it's hard to shave before swim classes. That's just not right. And besides, if we're gonna go for Lil Uechedo #2 this year, I'd like to start off not looking pregnant already.

We have entered the terrible twos at 18 months. I've heard that's normal. Aidan has learned the magical word "no." Not just "no," but "nnnooooooooo!" with a whine that suggests I've just told him his father and I are leaving him forever. He also says "yeah!" with such enthusiasm that you'd think we've just told him it's ice cream for dinner from here on out.

What I'm thinking about tonight: What exact threat to marriage and family exists if we allow gay couples to marry? Are the conservatives afraid that straights will suddenly *stop* getting married? And why does the government get to decide that, anyway? If it's a religious issue, then deal with it in church. On Larry King tonight some blonde legislature kept asking Gavin Newsom "What about polygamy? Where does it end?" I suppose we could come back with, "And what about legislating our bookshelves? Are you going to insist we all own and read the King James Version? Where does it end?" Grrrr.

And what's the exact problem with Janet Jackson showing her boob? Why is that soooo much more offensive than the violence of men tackling each other for fun? (FTR, I do like football). I wish people would be as offended by all the commercials targeting our children and all the violence on prime time. I'd much rather Aidan see a boob than see all the gunfighting. Heck, he sees mine all the time (my boob, not my gunfighting). Also, it was pretty obvious to anyone who saw it any of the 10,000 times they showed it that she was surprised afterward and tried to cover up. I believe that that lace thing was supposed to stay on.

:::Off the soapbox::::

Aidan had his first big owie this week. Took a tumble and knocked into the sharp corner of a chair leg. It looked much worse than it does now, honestly. It took 2 hours to see a doctor, and by that time I felt pretty foolish, but I'd already paid my $25 for him to say, "Yep, he's fine." I missed my mom's group dinner, so I sent G out for a bottle of red wine, which I desperately needed by that point.

Bonus:

Reality Show Update:
American Idol tonight! Hope it's better than last week. Update: Yeah - better. Trying to get the rugrat down so I missed the first two. Jon Peter fascinates me, although I don't think he's great. I'd like to see him advance just because he's interesting to watch, sort of like Clay was in the early auditions. Go LaToya - way to represent Oaktown! She was good, but I didn't think she was the best they'd ever seen, so I was a bit surprised by the judges reactions.


Littlest Groom: Good for him for picking the little woman, but really, it was kind of obvious who he had more in common with.


My BFOF: AWESOME finale. I was ready to go live with that family by the end of it (minus Randi). I loved the way the mom just got up and calmly walked out. She didn't even yell at Steve, she just said, "That's fine, Steve, you can tell them." Now there's a mom who doesn't need to yell - but when she's pissed, you know it. I also loved the way the family made the producers beg them to come back. Way to rise above it! Too bad about that money-grubbing middle child, though.

Survivor: Best season ever, though I'm sad to see Rob C go. I think he'd have been at his best after a merge and he never got a chance to do some good scheming. I've heard rumors about who's in the finale and I will be a bit disappointed if it's true. We'll see. Still love "Pretty Boy" Ethan. Also like Lex. Would probably marry Lex if he were single and if I hadn't already gotten my first choice of husband (added that in for G). He guests as a DJ at a local radio station when he's not surviving on a desert island, and he's pretty funny. Beginning to think Rupert might have some delusional system going. Digging down into the sand? Even I know that's a bad idea. Jerri's much more tolerable this time. Jenna's not. Richard's great - loved that he bit the shark back. Oh yeah, and that Tylenol "Push through the Pain" award - great idea. Gotta give it to Goat Farmer Tom this time. Ouch.