My latest hair donation. Someone needs it more than I do. And 2013 feels like a fresh start year. Click picture to learn how you can donate your hair.

And of course, I’m not alone in my sense of freedom upon a bicycle.  The bicycle is often held up as a key component of the changing culture in the 1890s.  Women took to bicycles as they were experiencing greater access to public life, and riding changed fashions of the days, as women began to dress to accomodate riding.   They were also affordable for many people, and “in 1897 alone, more than two million bicycles were sold in the United States , about one for every 30 inhabitants.”  I agree, that “cycling is inherently feminist.”  I’m proud to be a part of this tradition, just as I am proud when vote or support women owned business.

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.” ~ Susan B. Anthony, 1896

Suffragettes On Bicycles

Cycling has also been shown to be a great vehicle for improving physical and mental health.  (Pardon the pun)    I have always felt that cycling has been great for my personal health and wellbeing, even though at times it can be a harrowing experience.    It’s exhilarating, it’s fresh air, and it’s movement.  All good things for body and soul.

My bicycle has become very important to me.  It does feel like an extension of myself.

So, I was absolutely heartbroken when I found that my bike had been stolen on Monday night.     This is all that’s left of her.  I’m crushed.

So much so, that I went out and got myself a brand new bike right away.  I don’t want to live a bicycle-less life ever again.

I think she’s so beautiful.

However, I did dress up for work yesterday, and my costume of Zombie Lenore & The Raven tied for third place (with Robert Smith from The Cure) in the office popularity costume contest.

First place was awarded to a co-worker whose costume consisted of a Disney princess gown and wig, pillow for a baby bump, a baby doll, a cigarette dangling from his lips, and a half full bottle of Jack Daniels.   He (a middle class, straight, white, cisgenerder man, for what it’s worth)  called it “Snow White Trashed.”

Holy misogynistic, classist trope, Wonder Woman!

Now, you may think that by taking offense to this costume, I am over-reacting, but I don’t think so.   It perpetuates a stereotype of working class women that is repulsive.  It holds it up, and it points a finger at it, and it laughs at it.  (Not with it.  At it.)    That stereotype is that the working class woman is too stupid and too lazy to better her situation, and it’s bullshit.  And if you’re me, that caricature is ever more offensive, because at a point in time, that was what my probable future looked like.  I was a working class girl, from a working class family.  My grandparents were migrant farm workers.  My parents were enlisted in the Navy.   We didn’t have much.  I grew up in an working class neighborhood, and I was educated in California’s desperately underfunded public schools.   There was a time when my parents thought I couldn’t make it out of high school without getting “knocked up.”   They had no idea how we would pay for me to go to college, if I could get accepted, other than enlisting like they had, and getting a G.I. bill.  I grew up afraid of my future.  Fear was my motivation.

My story is not the Horatio Alger myth.  This is not about my boot straps.  When I think about the working class women who haven’t managed to achieve the “American Dream”, I know that it’s not because they are lazy or stupid.  For some of us, it worked out.  For most of us, it did not.  I graduated high school near the top of my class and horribly ignorant.    I can say that when you’re ignorant, you do not know that you’re ignorant until someone or something slaps you in the face with it.  For me, that happened in my first year at a university that I somehow managed to get accepted into.  It was only then that I learned the damage that my public school education had done, that I didn’t know anything about learning, and that I had been the victim of a system that rewarded me for doing the bare minimum, and passed me into the world without any knowledge of how to succeed.   I got mostly A’s in high school simply because I was there.  The overworked, underpaid teachers who don’t have the time, the resources, or the energy at the end of the day are not to blame.  The young people in the schools are not to blame.  The system is not set up to help anyone succeed, the teachers or the young people, especially not the young women.   It is an institution that is broken, and the ill prepared students it churns out have little with which to build a future any different from their parents, nor the skills with which to fix institutions.

It wasn’t just the public schools, though.  My parents didn’t know what I wasn’t being taught.  My father was never good at school, and would tell you that he did just enough to keep his grades high enough to play football and baseball.   With a batting average above 400 in his senior year of high school, he thought he his future laid in professional baseball.  When he was not picked up by the Giants, he enlisted in the Navy.  My mother tried college, but after a year of struggling with it, she enlisted, too.  My siblings had children early, and some of them dropped out.  I was the only one who went straight to college from high school.  My family was not the kind of family that knew what successful education looked like.   All they knew was hard work.    They taught me hard work, but they didn’t know how to teach me to have more for myself than what they had, raising a family on too little, and working too hard.   When you don’t know what you don’t know, all your left with is what you do  know.   All you know to teach your kids is what you know.  They did the best they knew how to do, and I don’t fault them for it.

So, maybe you think I’m over-reacting.  Maybe you think I’m too sensitive, or too easily offended.  I think that you just don’t understand what it is to fear that trope, to fight against it, and to try to live it down.   I don’t have the luxury of laughing it off or not being sensitive to it.  I know Snow White Trashed all too well.   I might have been her, and if I had, so fucking what.  Being poor doesn’t make someone bad, stupid, pathetic, or lazy.  I was as lucky as I was smart and determined.  I did not get pregnant.  I graduated from college.  I got a nice cushy internet job.  The stars aligned.

There but by the grace of god go I.  

Just sayin’.

And so, I present, the test!  I will not date you if:

1. You are so drunk while you are hitting on me that you don’t notice that you’re dribbling or drooling beer down your chin and onto your chest.
2. You do not have some sort of occupation (doesn’t necessarily have to be a 9-5 type job or even a job – you could be a student, for example).
3. Your pick up line is “I have a really good job”.
4. You live with your parents.
5. You introduce me to a group of your friends as ‘my girlfriend’, but later claim to have nothing but platonic feelings for me.
6. You ignore me.
7. You don’t listen to me.
8. You have a hobby that you insist that I adopt as a condition of our dating.
9. Your favorite band is Limp Bizkit, Korn, Hoobastank, Creed, Coldplay, or Linkin Park.
10. You work in law enforcement.
11. You try to sleep with my friends behind my back.
12. You’re mean to my cat.
13. You’re married.
14. You already have a girlfriend.
15. You already have a boyfriend.
16. You are in the middle of a divorce.
17. You get arrested on our first date.
18. You have no idea who Lloyd Dobbler is.
19. You think making fun of me is a form of flirting.
20. You are constantly giving me mixed signals.
21. You haven’t read at least two books in the last six months.
22. You have an issue of Maxim in your bathroom.
23. You voted for George W. Bush.
24. You try to get me to make-out with a girl so you can watch.
25. You ask me if I have a Brazilian.
26. You have a child out in the world that you’re not helping to raise.
27. You don’t want to wear a condom.
28. You come on to me so hard that I feel a little frightened.
29. You knowingly try to hit on me the same week that I got dumped by some other dude.
30. You don’t want to see my favorite movie at least once, even though you think it will probably be totally lame.
31. You don’t like “kids’ movies”.
32. You say my friend is ‘weird’.
33. You say my friend is ‘gross’.
34. You ask for a foot massage on our second date.
35. You hate or fear children.
36. You say something to me that is so absurd and ridiculous that I feel obligated to start a tumblr based on it.
37. You refuse to meet me halfway.
38. You act like you might be into men, but refuse to admit it.
39. You scare me.
40. You scare my friends.
41. You want to put me up on a pedestal or treat me as a trophy.
42. You are not supportive of my goals.
43. You insist that I get into a serious, monogamous relationship with you immediately after I meet you without giving me a chance to get to know you first.
44. You so much as mention that you might want me to change a single molecule of my body in any way.
45. You try to move in with me without being asked.
46. You use my toothbrush.
47. You leave the bathroom door open while you’re using it.
48. You over share about how you’re carrying baggage from your ex from ten years ago the first time we have a conversation.
49. You give unsolicited advice and then get angry when I tell you that I have the situation under control and don’t need your advice.
50. You offer me your phone number, and then get upset with me for calling you.
51. You say “you’re not how I expected you to be from reading your blog”….. Seriously, get the fuck out!

EXTRA CREDIT:  You could get an immediate pass if one of my close girl friends gives you the thumbs up.    Let’s face it, their bullshit-detecters are much better than mine.

Reblogged from Whirligig-a-Gogo:

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Oh, that's all of us? I guess we should all stand up then!

Following up on what I wrote the other day, I decided to make my own Perfect Woman image for people to share around town. Actually, I made a few; options are good!

Read more… 243 more words

“Because, OMG, skinny bitches are gross!  Who would want to fuck that?  Amirite?”

People’s bodies come in all shapes and sizes.   You don’t have to be attracted to them all, but you sure as shit don’t need to do line-ups of one type against another and then post (or repost) some body policing shame-a-thon up on a social network in order to get high fives and ‘likes’.

And if you thought this was somehow empowering, think again.   Our body shape and size is largely determined by genetics, so how is this compare and contrast line-up supposed to make anyone feel better, when all it’s really doing is saying, “If you look more like the women on the top, well then it sucks to be you, because you’re scary!”  And the overwhelming majority of us look nothing like either of those two sets of women. “Real women have curves.” No, actually, not all women do, and it doesn’t make them any less fucking real if they don’t.

Also, and why isn’t this the most obvious fucking thing ever, but all the photos featured in the bottom row are obviously from fashion shoots, while the ones on the top are candid shots of celebrities who happened to be at the beach?   No one looks in real life like they do at a photo shoot!  Even before Photoshop, they would still pose them, and stitch them into swimsuits that would be most flattering, do tall their hair and makeup, so comparing a model shot of Elizabeth Taylor to a shot of Keira Knightly just hanging out at the beach is fucking ridiculous.

If you want to encourage acceptance of women’s bodies, you should find an image that is a positive portrayal of multiple shapes, colors, sizes, without imposing a hierarchy.   Something like, I dunno, This…

Source: naturalmodelsla Borrowed from - http://healthyisclassy.tumblr.com/ Click to visit!

Also, Keira Knightly’s abs are fucking ridiculously jacked.  Holy six pack!  God damn, girl, you buff!

Just sayin’.

So, I’m not regularly dating.  I am, however, irregularly dating.

I mean, I still have a profile up on a dating site, but since it’s not really breaking my heart to be single, I’m not fully invested in the whole process, am sort of half  doing it to be doing something, and it’s not going so well.  More than anything there have just been a lot of awkward exchanges, and some red flags a’waving.   But I digress . . .

I’ve met a couple of people here and there that I’ve been hanging out with.   It’s all very much just about as serious as Sponge Bob, at this point.   Yep, “still” (grr) single.  Still crazy.

So, last night I was hanging out with a guy friend, and the topic of threesomes came up.  I said that I wasn’t interested in having a threesome with a guy and another girl.  This lead him to say that he didn’t think that he and I could ever be compatible, because I’m too closed minded, since I wouldn’t consider a threesome.   I’m not closed minded.  I’m straight.

(It should be noted that I had not been considering having sex with him, so this is kind of a moot point.)

It reminded me of an exchange I had with another fella some time back.  I was trying to encourage him to stop with the endless flirting, and, you know, actually take me Out, instead of just talking about it.   Well, he had suddenly changed his tune, and let me know that now he had decided to only take out “ladies who like other ladies.”

What exactly am I supposed to do with this?   I guess whatever floats your boat, but what about actually floats my boat?  I also just don’t understand why this would be such a shock to anyone.   I mean, why would anyone assume that I would be into women when I’m so obviously into men, and haven’t shown any signs of being into women.   I guess it’s wrong to assume anything about anyone’s preference, but it’s equally wrong to assume that I can just turn gay all of a sudden.

It’s a huge double standard.  These same guys, they would never dream of having a threesome with me and another guy.   It would never even occur to them, and there’s not a lot of precedent for it in media, either.  While there are so many examples in pop culture of the portrayal that women’s sexuality is fluid, men’s is in most cases portrayed to be rigid.   For women, there are a gajillion porns, Girls Gone Wild, Katy Perry’s I Kissed a Girl, etc, where at any moment a woman who identifies as being straight could become attracted to other women.  Because it’s not enough that we face pressure to be beautiful, youthful, smart, and malleable in a hundred other ways, now we have to be bisexual, too.   Or at least be willing to have sex with someone we’re not the least bit attracted to in order to be attractive to the ones we are.

Pardon my French, but FUCK THAT SEXIST SHIT!

Message to the dudes of the world . . . .I can’t help it if I’m hetero.   Oh darn!  I actually am attracted to humans that have body shapes and appearances similar to yours.   What a bloody tragedy.   And this idea that I should have sex with someone I didn’t want just to prove something to you or that it means that I am closed, narrow, or small minded is fucking insulting.

I’m straight.  Get used to it.

Just sayin’.

And a side note to any bisexual women and/or women who do want to have threesomes with another woman, go get your get, and I just want to be clear that I got no problem with you.  In other words, I ain’t mad atcha.

The last couple of years, I’ve put myself to the task of some really hard work.  I really haven’t felt like I had a lot that I wanted to say publicly.   Also, there was a somewhat threatening comment that someone tried to leave which didn’t make it out of my moderation queue.   Those two things really made me take a step back, and think about what the heck it is I’m doing with this space.  For the most part, this has always been just where I come to spout off about random shit that’s on my mind, be it dating, friends, travel, or baseball.   I tried to be funny, and it felt good to watch the daily page views go up, and to feel like I was writing something that resonated with other folks out there.   I look at it as a good way to work out things that I might want to write more about in the future, or to vent things in a way that makes me laugh at them, because I’m really big on not taking myself too seriously.  But do I really need to be putting myself out there in the world wide web like this?  Am I really just a self-centered wanker?  The answers are yes and yes.

Look, I’ve gotten plenty of ‘hatemail’ and ‘trollers’ on this blog before, but this was different.  This was a person who wanted me to know that they knew who I really was (no pseudonym) and where I could be found.  It was shocking, a little bit.  And I’ve been working on other projects, so it was really easy to just fall back into those other things, and let Just Sayin’ idle.

No resolutions, no promises, I’m just sayin’ that 2012 is the year I get over it.   Let that person be mad.  Let that person hate.  Let that person come find me.   This is pretty much what restraining orders were made for, so I would love it if ne would show nir face.   I doubt ne will, as obviously this person’s whole threat is based on the premise of making sure I know that ne knows who I am, while not letting me know who ne is.

Anyway, so I’m back, and I’m more badass then ever.   And yes, I am single.  Roar, or something.

I’ve got a lot of exciting things planned for this year, which I am going to share with all you strangers out there and the general population, including my ex’s wife and my mother.  (Hi!  I see you there.)

In no particular order, here is a list of things I plan to blog about in 2012:

• My actual New Year’s Resolution, which is not to blog more
• Boot camp fitness classes (also not a resolution)
• Bicycling
• Planned travel to Costa Rica and hopefully back to Kauai again
• Elections!  (oh fun, more arguing)
• Dating!  (oh fun, more arguing)
• Feminism! (oh fun, more arguing)
• San Francisco Giants back in the playoffs!  (Hello, Mr. Posey.  We’ve missed you.)
• Music – shows and albums, oh boy
• Oakland!
• And possibly some pictures of my cat being cute.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy while I do my best to hold up my end of the bargain.

And if you have something nasty to say, well, you go right ahead sparky, but if you make it personal, I’m going to ignore the shit out of it from here on out.

Just sayin’!