Lurker's Corner

( Pic back here )

Okay, some of the borders are more like the nail, but the middle finger turned out well. Also, it appears I've reached an age (or weight) where I need to practice less wrinkled (or more slimming) hand poses. :P As part of the Baby Boom, which may grow older but will never grow up, I PROTEST.

I blew 20 French nail tip guide stickers on that manicure -- one for the top and one for the bottom of each nail. Colors are the diet Coke silver from the Coca Cola collection and Thank Glogg It's Friday from the Nordic Collection, both OPI.

Warning: the link I am about to post will likely trigger the hell out of anyone who has ever been screwed over by a man.

Emotional violence and social power

I'd link to the tumblr entry where I came by that link, but do not know how. copperbadge put it up on his tumblr feed in response to a response to a post of his discussing China Mieville, who is mentioned by initials in Bidisha's blog post. Copperbadge's post is called Owning an error, for anyone who knows how to work tumblr better than I.

Anyway -- my point. My reaction to that linked blog entry up there was varied, but boiled down to "little girl," (for the author is somewhat younger than I) "if no one did business with men who've screwed over women, no business would get done. Get over yourself."

How jaded does one have to be for that to be the initial reaction, followed more than 12 hours later by "also, this makes it sound like no man ever had his life destroyed by a woman. We do our share of damage." In the context, by the way, of being kind of proud of getting some of our own back.

I partly feel like a bad feminist and partly feel like a very old lady to be thinking of a 35 yo as a little girl.

I am wearing SOCKS with SANDALS.

Or, Luann Makes Me Feel About 200 Years Old:

The world is totally conspiring to remind me that I Am OLD.

"IF YOU WERE RAISED ON HEE HAW, HAD A CRUSH ON ANY OF THE DUKES, ONLY WATCHED CARTOONS ON SATURDAY MORNING, PLAYED IN THE DIRT, GOT YOUR BUTT WHIPPED WITH A BELT OR HAD TO PICK YOUR OWN SWITCH, HAD A ROTARY PHONE, HAD 3 TV CHANNELS, SCHOOL STARTED WITH THE "PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE", HAD A BEDTIME, RODE IN BACK OF PICKUP TRUCKS, RECORDED THE TOP 40 FROM RADIO ON CASSETTE TAPES, PLAYED IN THE CREEK, RODE YOUR BIKE ALL DAY WITHOUT A HELMET, & YOU STILL TURNED OUT OK.... RE-POST THIS & REMEMBER THE GOOD TIMES....."

So how old am I?

I can remember when...

...whole families shared one phone number and every phone in the house rang at once when you dialed it.

...ZIP codes were optional.

...Seven digit dialing for local numbers was not.

...postage stamps jumped to fifteen cents per.

...people used postage stamps.

...TV meant ABC, CBS, NBC & PBS.

...the tagline at the top of TV programs said "in color where available" only on primetime shows

...cable was a message sent overseas.

...eighty cents for a gallon of gas was price gouging

..."Is the Pope Italian?" always got a yes

...black was beautiful, and "person of color" would have gotten you a beat down from the thought police for being so similar to "colored person."

...wearing blue jeans to school was the most outrageous fashion statement a girl could make, surpassing even the mini-skirt, which was at least a girl item.

I was earning a paycheck and living on my own when:

...Compuserv charged for internet access by the minute.

...AOL was a good idea

...cellular airtime cost thirty-five cents per minute, unless you wanted to pay $99.95 a month for (better be sitting down for this) the 300 minute package or $199.99 per month for the unlimited package and carriers billed by the whole minute, always rounding up, of course.

...but that was Okay, because you were lucky to get 30 minutes of talk time out of an eight hour charge.

...twenty megabytes was more hard drive acreage than a woman could dream of filling in a lifetime.

...there were still two Germanies.

...the USSR was really, seriously scaring people.

...nobody thought consumers would ever buy things they hadn't seen, touched and tried on (or out, as the case may be.)

...kids went trick or treating without adult supervision or X-rays of the goods when they got home.

How old are you?

www.gocomics.com reruns several classic strips like Peanuts, Cathy, Boondocks and Bloom County. The one above took me back in ways I didn't expect. As a Cold War Era International Relations major at UC Davis, an unbelievable portion of my graduating 3.0 GPA depended on being able to write thousands of words worthy of essay that boiled down to "USA good, USSR bad." I had exactly one professor in 4 years + two summer school sessions who alluded to a post-Cold War era, and lost the crowd to hilarity in the middle of a sentence that began with "the world will no longer be bi-polar," and ended with "multi-polar," because Huntington hadn't written Clash of Civilizations yet. How they would have howled if the prof had even speculated that religion would form the basis of most conflict, foreign and domestic.

I wish more Cold War Era IR majors had gone into tech support rather than the State Department. We might have a better chance at the mental flexibility today's political environment requires.