The question that will be on everyone’s mind in the next few days is: should abortion be legalized/banned? I’m sure everyone has an opinion and if you don’t have one formed, then now would be a good time to get one. I just want to attempt to help people see a little light into pro-choice that isn’t as awful as everyone believes.
1. Pro-choice is not anti-life.
Pro-choice really doesn’t have a hidden agenda on that name. It is about the right to choose what someone wants to do with their body. There might be pro-choice wisdom teeth people out there (like myself). That doesn’t sound like I want to destroy anything. It sounds like I want the information to decide and choose on my own with my own discretion on something that concerns my body. In this case, it means the knowledge that not everyone has to have wisdom teeth removed and doing it for the wrong reasons can be harmful to your mouth. That’s actually a pretty good parallel for what the argument is doing for women’s bodies.
2. Pro-life is (hopefully) not anti-choice.
If you’re all about the preservation of human life, then power to that. One would hope that your feelings shouldn’t be forced on others, though. That is correct. I said that you can have an opinion without forcing it on others. I understand that can be hard to accept. There are people out there who are pro-life and they think that a woman has the right to choose, but hope she would choose to save a life. I feel like pro-lifers get just as bad of a reputation as pro-choicers because they have trouble expressing themselves. Let me assure you that picketing is really not the way to go.
3. Protesting at clinics makes you look bad.
Seriously. This would be like me protesting braces outside of an orthodontist’s office. Saying no there is helping no one. Don’t run to Juno, either. That never happens. What does happen is harassment of employees and unnecessary rudeness toward other humans because of irresponsibility. I saw two older ladies outside of a clinic last week and my first thought was nothing like, “You go girls. Tell them to save those babies.” I was thinking, “There is no one in the office anyway, why are they bothering the people who need those jobs?” Make pamphlets and put them somewhere. Ask to counsel youths or women in need, but let me assure you that protesting in the lazy way out.
4. Supporting early life means supporting whole life.
Many pro-choice people point this out and it is ignored. If you support the fetus and force the mother to birth even when she physically can’t handle a child, you’re dooming the baby. Options include an overcrowded social service system or being raised by someone who already knew they couldn’t handle the child. Another logic hole: people who are pro-life and support the death penalty of criminals. You don’t get to turn that on and off. That really isn’t how principles work. People shouldn’t hit an age when the pro-life people should stop caring (2 seconds of life as it happens). Hold to something. I assure you, I firmly believe it when I say that everyone has the right to choose —even if some people are just not deserving of a choice. (Seriously, stop attaching metal to your teeth for aesthetic pleasure. 9/10 times the teeth are fine when you start.)
Why I’m writing this:
This has everything and nothing to do with that doctor who was trying to relive moments from American Horror Story by chopping up babies. Note that the news people are calling these instances abortions. The correct term is infanticide. That means murder. It is a small, but significant difference because of the way the story is being used. He was supposedly aborting babies that were already “alive” (born). Once something is born, it is pretty impossible to “abort” it in the sense that they mean it. He murdered them as infants: infanticide. That poor definition along with news coverage could be just the propaganda needed to destroy any hope for the pro-choice side because pro-life sees pro-choice as pro-death.
It is almost spring and, of course, the season of bad ideas. Please, do not make the same mistakes of those who came before you. It never fails to amaze me what people will put on facebook… So, here it goes.
5. Advertisements for pets that need homes. Skip the shelter crowd by just sharing the pictures of the saddest and cutest dogs/cats on your own timeline. Yes, because nothing makes your conservative friends who hate PETA happier than looking at sad animals —that’s what furries are for. We get enough of that on 4chan, so keep it off of facebook.
I always picture the beginning of “Lovefool” when I see things like this —but this one was thrown out for being too fluffy and adorable, we have to take him home.
4. Pictures of terrifying foods that people make. Seriously, I saw a nacho “creature” that may give others nightmares. One can only think, “were they high while they were cooking and uploading?” Seriously, never cook and upload. Don’t misunderstand. I love the Cheesecake Factory page and “I Love Chocolate Cake” (best page ever), but these are pages that actually associate with real cooks/bakers. Facebook is not the place to frighten others with your Spam projects. Some of us like to play Songpop before dinner and it gets really difficult with things like that.
What is this… I don’t even?
3. Tanning and just weird tan lines. Yes, the guy’s foot with the Croc tan spots is funny, but he deserved that and we all know it. Everyone else really has no need for putting things like that into the main vein of people’s photographic memories. It’s called a brain tattoo. While some people find skin cancer hilarious (Snook-Snook), the rest of us are looking at your bizarrely red-burnt skin thinking about how much aloe you had to rub on it to feel better. I imagine all of the Spring Break girls like this look like fried chicken a week later —while trying to figure out how much water to drink, so they don’t actually die from sun poisoning.
Totally deserved it.
2. Photos of your children. I’m going to add something to this. You put photos of your kids on facebook and tag this 10 year old —who also has a facebook. Stop it. This is not COD, 10 year olds aren’t welcome. Seriously, the minimum aged teens aren’t even really welcome. There is no good way to put photos of your kids on facebook —don’t tell me there is. How do kidnappers figure out which one is yours (facebook)? Even as adults, parents putting up kiddy pics is not good. Who is that helping? You have to scan them on and they just are not cute. The moral of this story is emailing and private albums because no one wants to see children doing wacky things —that’s why youtube exists.
He’s bound for great things.
1. Sonogram or 3D images of your unborn child. This is not technically a picture, but they certainly have that creepy poltergeist feel to them. No one wants to look 10,000 Leagues Under the Sea. They will see the baby when it gets out —as for the rest of this, there should be some mystery of birth. Nothing looks cute when covered in gooey placenta ick. That’s what you’re looking at in those pictures by the way. Some things certainly are private and that is one of them. I could go on about how weird it having this creepy black and white of your child on facebook that looks like the underwater pictures from a 1980s war movie or how freaky, freaky POLTERGESTY it is, but I’ll stop. Besides, they might reach out of the screen like that creepy American Horror Story baby.
Even the Rubber Man doesn’t want your child.
Why do maths seem so hard these days? She hasn’t changed. The “maths” that I’m talking about are the plural maths in the world. Plenty of people know what I’m talking about. I mean, sure it’s a “unified” field, but really there are tons of tentacles of this monster. I mean “monster” with love and affection. I happen to be one of the lucky ones; she has squeezed me with her warm tentacle with love. Other people are not so lucky, but is that their fault?
Is it how we are learning now? I may be a rare bird these days (for people my age) to have learned standard, harder methods. I came to math and wanted to learn more. I willingly took Calculus in high school even though I didn’t need it to graduate. Doing something you don’t have to because you care about it —that might be considered love. So, I’m a little hurt when other people don’t appreciate the complex beauty of math. She’s a beautiful creature that takes time too appreciate and understand.
Our lax approach to mathematics is frightening and growing. There is a growing movement to get rid of math, but it’s undercover. There are intelligent people who are pushing for this and it just crushes me. I had my first brush with this when one of my friend’s grandchildren was trying to do math homework and it didn’t make sense. Why? The homework said something about confusing rounding, which turned out to be another method of standard multiplication. It’s called “reform math” and it makes no sense.
Here is one example of the counter-revolution of the math growth:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyowJZxrtbg
It was terrible. Then, there are these other methods that take away the joy of learning. It is expressed by this somewhat disgruntled parent (who actually leaves off one prominent method shown by drawing lines):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr1qee-bTZI
There is no real way to connect this to a person… If you have to ask why math is useful, then you’re not doing it right. My math professor said that even he gets the ”Why is this useful?” and that has to be so hurtful to someone who likes it. I mean, if “99% of people don’t use it” in their daily lives, then they must not understand what’s going on. If you’re an athlete and you work out everyday, you probably do push-ups. How many athletes do push-ups mid-game? That’s (probably) none. That is what math is. Math is about reasoning and thinking through things. That’s what it is teaching you. It isn’t showing you how to use sine or cosine; it’s about critical thinking and reasoning. That applies to everyone. Thinking applies to every single person on the planet.
In recent years, the face of feminism has changed from what it really needed to be to serve its means. So, from here on out, let’s start from the ground up with new ideas and expectations —that we will actually carry out in actions.
I would like to say that my first brush with this idea was several years ago when I first uncovered the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment). This was not some man-hating bill; it was good for everyone because it meant “equality” in its simplest, purest form. It meant that women and men were equal, but not in those terms: everyone was equal regardless of what hindered thought in that direction. That is hard to swallow and some people were tense about it. Namely, this was fought by women. I won’t say it was fought by feminists because that isn’t what happened, but when everyone saw the “defenseless” woman fighting it, it was over. Only one book has dealt with something in this neighborhood: No Constitutional Right to be Ladies. Give that a read because it is certainly something a sixteen year old version of myself thought about.
Now, onto that, there still exist some people who feel entitled to some things. They feel that if we were totally and completely equal then the men would stop catering to them. That must be true. Who would want to be constantly catered to like that? I know some girls who just feel that it is a man’s obligation to open doors, attend to them, and treat every moment with them like they are talking to a princess. What kind of idea are those girls fostering in men about real women? I can assure you that no real woman with even an inkling of equality would stand for that blatant disrespect of men. I’m not entirely keen on men, but I am certainly not about objectifying anyone for the sake of “being a lady.” It’s wrong.
If you want to be a responsible woman, don’t be a Phyllis Schlafly. She should be shamed for her efforts to stop something good for everyone because of her own pride as a “lady.” There is no room for people like this any more. Here I stand, quite convicted for the future of feminism or as I should say “humanism.”
**And just so you know, I’m down with women in the military. Equally. I’m about women in the draft. I’m fair like that.
So, plenty of people have talked about the obesity epidemic. Today, I have postulated just why it is happening. Brace yourselves.
We are all gaining weight and getting larger per capita much faster. This is because we biologically need the body fat. Not right now, of course. We will need it. There is a new television series about people preparing for the apocalypse —it’s like those people, but more science-y. We are heading down a few different roads depending.
One is that we are prepping for the next ice age by building and storing fat now. Yes, our bodies are aware of our own impending doom (ice age or otherwise) and we are storing calories for this. It seems a little odd that everyone started rapidly gaining more weight in the last two generations, right? Well, on the upside, all of those skinny girls who made fun of normal-sized women will finally die from starvation. To that end, maybe we are only one step in this evolution into chubbiness that will keep us alive in the next stage of existence. Are we building fat for calories for later? Are we building fat to stay warm during the upcoming endless winter?
Well, that is one argument (endless ice age winter). What about the other popular suggested future: zombie apocalypse? Well, that could happen too. Are we building fat that will prevent the future zombies from eating our muscles (which are where they could really contaminate us)? If that is the case, then all of the twinkie eaters are safe —but Hostess is down. Can we all see this coming together? A major snack food company goes out of business (a producer of our chub) and liposuction is popular, too. There must be something special in the fat that we are unaware about that someone knows about it is trying to keep from us. Is it magical fat? What is it?
Impending doom aside, our other situation that is not related to the world really ending (but kind of is) is the Wall-E or The Matrix argument. Are we headed to a reliance on machines? We may be getting fat, so that the machines can take us over and use us. Humans are certainly weaker when they are fatter, right? It would be no trouble at all to scoot us around in chairs to our hearts content until we reach the point of all being cooked into little tubes forever. This could be the future ahead of us.
Does this remind anyone else of Dracula’s children from Van Helsing?
I felt a little nervous when I applied to my undergraduate (for a brief moment) because I was not sure I would get in and nothing sucks more than a rejection letter. I actually got acceptance letters from every school I applied to, so I got to go about choosing carefully which I liked the best. It was a nice sort of ease into college life that most people don’t get. Graduate school will not be so easy. Actually, I am counting on it to be especially difficult. I can feel the tension building up inside my stomach and I haven’t even applied to them yet. I’m applying next year like so many other people.
Unlike them, however, I have one tiny piece of science comfort up my sleeve that they lack. When I get my response —the rejection or acceptance —I will be fully prepared for each. You see, when you get the letter and you haven’t opened it, you are holding Schrodinger’s cat in your hand. You are both accepted and rejected simultaneously. Maybe there are two universes: one in which you are accepted and move on; and the other is the one where you aren’t and have to figure out what to do with your life. In any case, you have both present before you before you open the envelope carefully to see your results. Until you know for certain, there is an equal amount of hope for either of these two options.
There is a little thing called the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle that can be kind of complicated, but not always. It’s one of my divine pleasures to find some way to connect weird physics or math to life in a grander way. I wrote a paper that connected Euclid to apologetics/anti-theists (that’s right I used a slash there). That sounds weird, but it seems to work if you really think about it. Anyway, today I thought about my friends’ and my own futures respectively. Then, I thought about college and how we never really know where we are in life (except that we do).
NO! Not that Heisenberg!
Most of us are aware that we are in college and some of us know that we are going to a graduate school (more college). In any case, we know where our literal position is, but not where we are in life. We know where we want to go (most of us), but we have no idea where we are right now. Sounds familiar? That is an intangible version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. We know our position or we know where we are going but never both at the same time. It’s funny how math can describe some of the weirdest things.
So, the next time one of my friends has an existential crisis about her life, she can take comfort in Heisenberg. She knows what she is doing right now even if she has no idea where she is going after that. Will I get into grad school? Will I get into med school? Maybe you will never find out, but you do know that you know at least one of those things at any given time (probably only one). I find that physics can be the most comforting thing when you’re lost in the dark —lasers aside.
Like the Avenue Q song, I have to wonder what a B.A. in English will get me. I know that I am not just another lost English major taking the easy way out, but sometimes it just feels like I’m lumped in with the lost souls. If this is unknown to you, the English major is like the river of lost souls who flood into Tarturus like the Hercules movie —and equally in despair. However bad things get (and they have just been awful lately), I have to remember that I am not one of them. I’m not purposely. My goal is well defined: I want to be a librarian, an academic librarian. That is something that I know, but I am in a field full of people who just aren’t sure about their lives. It wears one down from time to time and I need the pick me up.
My main issue that leads to the “lost soul syndrome” comes from soemthing one of my professor’s said to me. He told me that library science was not me living up to my full potential. That is by far a compliment on my intelligence, but a little bit of an insult to my decision making. I suppose I could see where he was coming from with that, though. How would the world feel if Carl Sagan just decided that cosmology was cool and all, but he really liked painting more? The landscape of academia would be drastically different. I’m not arrogant enough to relate myself to him, but it is a fine example of what my professors must be imagining.
From my viewpoint, I see things in a rather Harold and Kumar fashion in the sense that “Just because you’re hung like a moose doesn’t mean you gotta do porn!” Perfect example: Asia Carrera decided porn was the way to go and she was in MENSA. Not that my decision is that extreme, but it isn’t a crazy idea to do something that makes me happy even if I’m not changing the world in the ways I would like to.
As a side not, one day I will probably publish something in my fields of study and when I do I will even be able to catalogue it myself.
This is about looks and trends —like the olden days. So, there has in recent years been a growing trend to slim eyebrows down to nothing. This is much like the bikini trend that keeps insisting that less is more and that is wrong. So, what’s wrong with strong eyebrows that are well-shaped?
My eyebrows are not pencil thin because my eyes are huge and that would just look weird. I’ve never seen someone who had eyebrows that were just ridiculous for their face —as long as there are two who cares? Why should you wax them to perfect shapes that are just little lines in the face. An eyebrow should never be two centimeters in width because that is weird, cat-like (not in the good way). It’s even acceptable to have them removed (lasers, razors, wax) totally and tattoo them onto your face. Wow… There is no way that is as attractive as someone confidently wearing their eyebrows as they are and in a lovely thick-ish manner.
I mean, look at Audrey Hepburn. She had nice, normal eyebrows. No one wants to be the Faye Dunaway. There are far stranger things than eyebrows that match your face. I know that being in an all-female bubble makes some girls relax about how they look, but why shouldn’t it always be like that? Why can’t we just make sure we have two eyebrows? Something unappealing about heaving nothing there to shape the eyes properly (any queen can tell you that).
Be yourself. Keep your eyebrows luscious.
So, there is this most excellent book called Flatland, which everyone needs to read. It’s by Edwin Abbott Abbott and I’m sure I’ve gushed on it before because it is one of my favorites —like History of Pi by Petr Beckmann it’s a classic piece of math literature. In any case, there is a part of Flatland in which the main triangle quite astutely describes society at all levels from differences to perfections through shapes. The way women are seen as very dangerous and irrational is nice too. Anyway, this book is all about inter-dimensional travel and such. A shape from the third dimension comes to the fourth dimension and has these amazing powers on the third dimension, but it really quite ordinary in his own dimension. What he wants to spread to the second dimension may even be considered a gospel of sorts unto the shapes of the second dimension.
It is by this possibility that I want to discuss the creation of myths in our dimension, which we’ll call the third dimension. So, we exist on the third dimension and anything form the fourth dimension would appear godly or magical to us. The extension of that thought is that there is a fourth dimension in which other worldly being live: aliens, gods, heroes, etc. All of these are possible through the extension that they live in a fourth dimension and each are unique, but similar because they are different beings of the same plane. So, instead of the growing theory that these legends were spread from group to group as part of a necessity fro a mythology; I’m tossing into the ring the possibility that these being really existed in their own “world.”
Like with the Norse mythology, they name the different places and the beings that exist there have seemingly “super powers” or abilities that humans could never achieve. This is similar to the “magic” of the disappearing third dimension interloper in Flatland. These different places on a separate plane, which appear to connect through portals or holes of inter-dimensional travel. I’ll leave it open as to what sort of hole: worm, black, white, Donnie Darko. That is not my area of expertise and it could be something totally different like the spike from Cool World.
On that same train, some might draw from this the Olympian connections and the myths built around them. Following the logic that The Iliad was real, one can continue on the path that all of these myths may have happened in our other dimension. I’m not even saying it was just the fourth, but that is all it would take to appear magical to us in the third dimension. So, each character is a separate entity in this dimensions and each may have actually meddled in the lives of mere humans. Maybe, the extra-dimensionalness of these “gods” made them so magnificent that man could literally not behold them. This logic is even carried on in contemporary culture. Just as the first dimension could not understand the second dimension’s character or fathom his existence, so too can man not completely understand the dimension of its gods.
Even in current mythology or religions, this same logic can be applied. The god of the Old Testament can be seen as some being from a higher dimension that the other “pagan” gods because he can work such wonders over their heads that even to them he is godly. By this logic, we’ll say YHWH is from the fifth or sixth dimension. So, then, when we discuss things like Enoch, what may have happened is that he was brought to the higher dimension just like the character from Flatland. From before, with man’s inability to behold Olympians, it would follow that he would not be able to behold YHWH either. As Kevin Smith so eloquently showed in Dogma, the voice was enough to literally blow a man’s mind.
So, maybe they all exist or have existed at one time. That would certainly account for some inaccuracies with legends and contradictions in religious texts.
