NPR: Hair Samples Used to Trace Geographic Moment

Microsoft Slapped by EU With $1.35B Fine

Mexican Border Wall Will Not Be Built On The Land of the Wealthy and Well-Connected

Feminists are “Language Rapists”

Hollywood Casting Call for that “Inbred” Look

Dead Baby Found In Basket at Denver Hospital (Safe haven laws I’m sure have some interesting feminist implications, but I’m sleepy right now.)

Some kickass poetry to start your day (yes I’m biased, and no reason, just ’cause) and audio!

Obama: I am not a liberal

Scandal-ridden homophobic D.A. in ‘Lawrence v. Texas’ case resigns

Gay Man Beaten for Saying “Hello”

Immigrants Commit Far Less Crimes Than “Native” Citizens in California

National Eating Disorder Awareness Week

Just because I am trying to learn how to do this: 5 Ingredient Crockpot Recipes

Look out.

Look out the bedroom window to the street–if it faces the street–and see it stretching like two long arms reaching forever and ever (or maybe not so far) in either direction. Let your line of sight be directed down a meandering road that may, in this corporeal world, terminate to the North, but which, some of us know, really leads West, West, further and further back, winding down through Grand Junction or up through Yellowstone past the Rockies to that body of water, a landlocked sea, dead to everyone and everything but the putrid flies and bugs inhabiting it, and the seagulls glutting themselves upon its salty shores. Let it take you further, submerge you in the Platte and then sweep you away, down, down toward Mexico to escape an invented persecution with two wives and too many mouths to feed and to Guatemala with pretensions of
Spanish aristocracy.

This is where we come from. This is where we’ve been.

Look out.

Read the rest of this entry »

First, a little humor to start off your day - Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results of the 2008 Election Early (video)

Huckabee Supports Proposed CO “Egg As Person” Amendment

Chavez Government Fights English “Linguistic Imperialism”

Interesting Guardian Article on Wikileaks: Online Anonymous Whistleblowing

Proposed Florida Confederate Heritage License Plate

Screw the Voters, Let the Superdelegates Decide!

Pakistan Blocks Access to YouTube

Gay Iranian Refugee Risks Deportation From UK (Not sure what can be done about this one at this point?)

Terrorist Watch List Contains Almost 1 Million Names, Most of them Americans

Google Claims IP Addresses Are Not Personally Identifiable Information

Banks Unable to Foreclose On Homes Due to Lost Paperwork

Lawmaker Proposes Stripping USDA of Safety Oversight

Rape: Pretty Real When It’s Happening

Gang Rape Video Posted to YouTube Viewed 600 Times Before Being Removed

NPR: New York Philharmonic Plays In Pyonyang

So what I am going to do here is supply a list of assorted interesting links, in no particular order, on a daily or semi-daily basis without a lot of comment. They may have to do with pretty much anything. Because it’s easier than all the link-sending I do all over the place every day anyway.

Fragile Masculinity and Murder

A Few Other Responses to the Murder of Larry King

The Great Green Land Grab

Health Net ordered to pay $9 million after canceling cancer patient’s policy

ACLU Sues To Protect Marriages Threatened By Recent Court Decision

Conservative doctors to unmarried women: If you’re having sex, you *should* die of cervical cancer

Latest Anti-Pot Quack Science: ‘Marijuana Makes Your Teeth Fall Out’

The Growing Battle for the Right to Water

Gay man bequeaths $65 million to LGBT groups

Feminist Bloggers Unite! (Facebook)

The Science of Fairy Tales

A History of Evil (video)

Oh, and for those of you who are not up on the whole RSS thing, you can now receive a daily digest of new posts via email using the “e-mail subscription” link on the left.

It’s time for a renaissance. This part of me has gone neglected far too long, but I have reasons. I burned out, a meteoric rise and fall to earth, and I have taken my sweet time in trying to find my way back to some space of ambition and idealism once more. Depression is no simple thing. But I am in love and I have found other people in my life who could love me, too, and I have concrete goals and plans for the first time in four years, and though this is something I have thought, many times, that I should do, I am finally somewhere where, yes, I think that I really can do it again.

But it won’t be quite the same.

I have spent the past six months loving, growing, learning, talking, making connections. I have been creating, writing, painting, and concocting plans for my (our) future. I have engaged in everyday action and activism and have been planning to do so much more. I have not left the feminist blogosphere at all, spending lazy Saturday mornings naked in my lover’s bed perusing my RSS feeds while he dozes beside me, and so often the women I have connected with through blogging and those I do not know personally but follow religiously, inspire me to outrage and elation…and yet, I have felt too burdened by life and all its complications to write. This will change.

I am going to approach this differently, though, than I have before. I am a creative writer. I am a poet. I am an artist. But I am not and have never had pretensions of being a journalist. This is a problem in a political community where readers expect facts and figures and objective truth. I am not objective. I have never pretended to be. I have never been interested in sparking debate or even stimulating discussion. All I have wanted to do was to make people think about things differently. Not to talk or argue with me. To think about what I have said and agree or disagree. I am not interested in proving anyone wrong or being proven wrong, because I think there is room enough in this world for disagreement and that it is perfectly all right for people to have different perspectives from their respective vantage points.

What I want is to let my writing and my art speak for itself. I am not interested in defending myself from personal attacks, in that they do not largely bother me enough for me to feel they are worth addressing. I am not interested so much in defending my ideas, not because I want to ignore criticism but because they are my ideas, not my identity, and they are fluid and often shift. I want to impact the shared discourse. I want to demolish frameworks and alter the world as we see it, but not to propose solutions because I don’t pretend to know better than anyone else what is best for anyone but myself.

I do not and have never worked in things which can be qualified, quantified, proven. Not everything has to be concrete. Not everything has to be objectively true. (And objectivity is an illusion, anyway.) I am an artist and I experiment in thought. The mind is my canvas. Ideas are my medium. But I am not a scientist, a sociologist, and economist, a journalist. I might be called a philosopher, if an examination of my own internal mechanisms can be termed “philosophy”. Because that is all that this blog is or ever has been.

I have been lost and disoriented, trying to make this personal exploration into something more. I have tried to be too many things for too many people. It is not that I dislike writing critical, persuasive essays. It is not that I do not want to engage with others. It is not that I do not want to have a space to post interesting articles. But it can’t be just that. That can’t be all. That can’t be what is at the heart of all this. I had abandoned this project in favor of more creative pursuits. This project must be and will be more creatively-driven from now on in order for me to maintain interest in its growth and evolution.

That does not mean I will post fiction. But what I write will be art. It will be true, it will be flawed, it will be subjective, it will be beautiful and sometimes terrifying, it will be nonfiction and autobiographical, and it will be poetry.

I don’t know if there is a place in the political blogosphere for these ambitions. I don’t know if there is a niche that I can fill. Obviously, I had found one before. But I am going to try, and I hope that you are all willing to join me in this experiment, to hold on tight and see where my musings take us… I have things in store I hope you will enjoy. Some things will be the same. But the focus will be radically different.

This is Definition version 2.0. Enjoy the ride.

There is an amazing post up on the Feminist LJ Community detailing the poster’s childhood experiences growing up fat:

I was often physically assaulted for being a fat kid.

Boys would attack me on the playground, the bus, the classroom when the teacher had her back turned. They’d punch me as hard as they could in the middle of my back and then run away, laughing. I’d go home after school, my arms and legs covered in bruises from where the boys beat me. I’d get yanked around on the school bus by my hair. I would get told that I was fat, ugly and should just die.

I remember one beating, a particularly brutal one. A kid named Kevin told a boy named Scotty that I had written on the back of a bus seat Kelly + Scotty. He was so embarrassed a fat, ugly, “fucked up nasty piece of shit like me” did that, he attacked me in the school lobby and beat me for several minutes until a teacher was able to pry him off me. He screamed, he cursed, he told me how ugly I was, fat, disgusting, and in the principals office, he told me, “Why don’t you just die?”

Go read the whole thing.

Hey, everybody. Thought it couldn’t hurt to post about the little project the guy and I are working on here! Sorry to my friends who will be seeing this pop up everywhere.

Electronic Quiver: Winter Issue
Call for Submissions

Electronic Quiver, the quarterly print publication from Razee Ink, is looking for submissions for its winter issue on the theme “Choke: The Effects of PTSD”. We are accepting submissions of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art on the theme of PTSD, the anti-war movement, and general radical/left-wing politics and activism. A diversity of viewpoints and perspectives is welcome and encouraged; we are interested in seeing work by queer, feminist, PoC, and other minority voices.

Payment is in copies, as we are a small, membership-funded organization.

Deadline: November 9, 2007

Please email submissions to the editor, D. J. Razee, razee@razee.com . Be sure to specify that you are sending a submission for EQ in the subject line.

Happy Columbus Day.

The guy and I almost went to protest the parade on Saturday, but, well, the timing of the protest was unfortunately early in the morning, especially for those of us who would have to commute down to Denver.

So I am spending a lot of time/energy on the business I am starting, Scribe Help and, unfortunately for this blog, trying to focus my blogging energies on that site’s blog.

In addition to, you know, spending as much time with the guy I love as is feasible. And trying to squeeze some quality fiction writing time in there somewhere. And doing a bunch of volunteer work with Druidawn. And being addicted to Facebook.

And getting sick a lot, which has been no fun.

Maybe. But the idea of not posting anything else ever is way too painful, even if I never actually get around to it.

I really want to write up some stuff on BDSM in feminism from a submissive angle…I think this is important because there isn’t really enough information out there from the point of view of feminist submissives. By which I mean there’s practically none and what there is isn’t really easy to find.

But I’m trying to start a business and negotiating the beginnings of a relationship. I met an awesome hardcore feminist guy a couple weeks ago with the dominant kind of personality I need in a partner. I know, it’s amazing. I was beginning to think such a person didn’t exist, since most guys with an “alpha male” personality tend to be total misogynistic assholes, or at the least they think my feminist thing is really weird. The other feminist guys I’ve met are very nice and so staunchly egalitarian on principle they would freak out at how I like to be subservient and do whatever my partner tells me to, and if they are kinky they’re not dominant and there’s no chemistry. I also think he’s totally sexy, especially his brain. Some people like dirty talk, I like literature and pinko liberal commie politics, uh, talk. It helps that he’s got a sexy voice. Whew, is it hot in here? Sorry for the tangent.

So, anyway, totally haven’t got the time. I’ll try to get around to it, eventually. No promises. Hell, I could write a whole rambling post just about how frustrating it is looking for a partner who understands how to treat you with respect, as an equal, and has an basic grasp of feminist theory, while still wanting to tie you up and spank you. Maybe I will.

Watch the feed.