Oh, so the worst thing you will read all day.

Posted today on Shakesville was this, which is a link to an article about a "controversial" new book that postulates that feminism has ruined male-female relations and that women need to stop "acting like men" at home and give up on this whole "equal" thing because "men don't fall in love with equals."

If you've got enough sanity points, it's worth reading the article, if only because I cannot make this shit up, y'all.

Feminism does in fact tell women that we do not have to act demure, "sexually available", "complimentary", etc. and so on. 

But feminism does not tell us that we MUST not act that way.  The beauty of feminism is that we have the ability to be individual people, and decide what femininity means to us on our own terms - so far as any of us can have our own terms, growing up and living in the miasma of patriarchy.

Likewise, feminism does not proscribe narrow roles for men and say all men like THIS and think THIS and do THIS and are capable of THIS.  Which is what the authors are saying.  And yet, feminists are man-haters?

Additionally, you know, I am all for clear communication in relationships.  Part of that is because I try to do it myself and I really like the results, part of it is because I think communicating respectfully with people is just part of being a decent person and I have this thing about not being an asshole.  And it chaps my ass that these authors can advocate a healthy relationship skill like communication in the same mothafuckin BREATH as they advocate that women should tone their personalities and accomplishments down so they don't hurt the menz' precious fee-fees.

And while we're at it, could this book get any more hetero-normative?  The entire QUILTBAG community, where are they in all this?  Oh right, patriarchy tells us that only straight relationships matter.  And only those where the woman is properly "sexually available" and "complimentary" (no, the misspelling is not mine).

Oh also, what about relationships that aren't dyads?  Wait wait wait, those don't exist either; sorry my silly ladybrane forgot.

This is the same old WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ LADIES YOU BETTER STAY DEMURE ON THE GROUND WITH THAT BOOT ON YOUR NECK OR ELSE bullshit.  And it is absolutely galling that they mixed in a little bit of actual relationship advice to, what, make it more palatable?  Make it more mainstream?  I don't even know.

Is it possible someone will read this and chime to the "communication" part and it'll change their lives for the better?  Sure.  But why should they have to swallow all of that other shit to get there?

And here you thought you were predictable!

For a long time I would have said that when I'm mightily stressed, I'm completely uninterested in sex.  This week - well, this past month, really - seems determined to prove me wrong.

I work full-time, as does Jay.  I'm not in the field I'd prefer to be, but I do something I'm damned good at, and I like my boss, so that helps.  Work's been... busy.  Really busy.  I don't have enough hours in the day, etc. and so on, blah blah blah.  Added on top of the busy bullshit, this has been the week of my name getting associated with shit that is so not even close to my demesne.  I have job duties.  I'm pretty clear about them with people.  And no less than four times in the past three days has my name been listed as the responsible one for things that I don't even have the slightest clue about.

That is intensely frustrating for me.  If I might indulge in a bit of bragging, I know a fuckton of things.  I am a wealth of knowledge, which is actually part of my job description.  But I don't lie about what I don't know - I'll be very blunt and upfront when it comes to telling people I don't have a fucking clue.  And I'll also be blunt and upfront when it comes to telling people that it's not my job, and they need to speak to the person who does own it.

So when others fuck up and put me on the hook for things I shouldn't be, I am irritated.  I am even more irritated when it results in hundreds of emails and phone calls to me (oh, if only I were kidding).  Let's talk about the fact that answering my phone is pretty much my least favorite part of my job, hmmmm?  (And how my voicemail is now changed, and I don't have to answer it this week, with my boss' permission.)

So a lot of things have been conspiring to make me stressed.  And I, oh, I am all about the sex.

Jay and I have had sex every night for the past week, and almost every night for the past month.  Joseph is all up in my business again (shocking, I know) and that is totes okay with me.  Hal's been on his game as well, and let's talk about the lovely comments we've made to each other.  The imagination?  In overdrive.  And the dreams I've had!  Good lord!

And yet I am so stressed that rather than join Jay at an activity tonight that we both enjoy and I adore, I opted to stay home.

What.

To be sure, I am not complaining.  I am slightly confused, but I am not complaining (okay, maybe I'm complaining about not being able to go two nights without dreaming of Hal in an inappropriate way, but other than that...).  Perhaps my self has decided that since sex is a highly effective stress-reliever, it does not behoove us to not indulge?  Who knows.  But good lord!

If this is what getting older entails, I am NOT INTERESTED.

While digging around in old computer backups tonight looking for some music that somehow fell OUT of my iTunes library, I came to the realization that I have turned down a shocking, shocking number of opportunities of the sexual nature in my life.

At this point in my life, I have to admit, my first reaction is whyyyyyyy.

Like, there were three guys in 2003 - THREE - while I was NOT with Jay, who were all about it.  Why on earth did I not do anything about that?  Seriously?  What the hell was I thinking?

There was another guy in 2005.  Didn't do a blessed thing.


There's been a few more this year (okay so odd-numbered years tend to be good, okay).  There were all the guys in college who I didn't realize until well AFTER college that they were hitting on me.


Christ I feel fucking stupid.


To be a bit more fair to myself, I do know a bit of what I was thinking.  High school having done a number on me but good, the idea that anyone found me attractive was not a feeling I trusted.  I never quite believed that anyone genuinely found me likeable and attractive in a sexual sense.  I always figured they had some ulterior motive that generally involved my public humiliation.


Then there was the fact that I was brought up to believe that you shouldn't have sex before marriage, and once you're married, you stay married.  I still believe in the second, although the first I've done a lot of work to unlearn.  However, again in 2003, while I'd gotten around it to the point where having sex with Jay was okay, it wasn't completely okay, and the idea of having sex with more than one person in my lifetime was ZOMG WTF scary.


Still, the older french thinks the younger french was a bit of a frikken dipshit.  Just... CHRIST WHAT WAS WRONG WITH YOU AUGH GOD.

Seriously, what the hell.

Why is it that some times, Jay pinching and twisting my nipples makes me scream in pain, and some times (like last night) it is the HOTTEST MOST WONDERFUL THING EVER.

Motherfuckshitting christ WHY is there a fucking SKUNK outside my WINDOW

What the hell?

That's funny - I don't remember locking this blog down...

Fuck wireless, and fuck you too.

For Christmas, Jay bought me a wireless router and a matching wireless card for my laptop. I'm sure there are people out there that are thinking "he gave her what", but I assure you, this was an entirely appropriate and appreciated gift. We're both dorks, after all, and it saved me from having to buy it.

Now, he gave it to me right before I was leaving for my parents' house, so I wasn't going to set it up. He was not allowed to set it up for me either - last time he set up some computer-type thing for me when I hadn't wanted it set up, it resulted in the thing being broken shortly thereafter. So he's not allowed to set things up for me anymore.

I finally set the damn thing up the other day. Now, I have to mention here, I've been working in IT off and on for almost a decade.

Holy crap, almost a decade. I need a minute here.



So it's not like I don't know anything about networking or computers or crap, right? The router comes with an "Easy set-up cd!" that I use because I'm lazy. Being that I'm not an idiot, I choose to have a secured wireless network and set up a key for it and everything.

I then tell Rabbit, my roommate, to try connecting to it, since she's got a Powerbook with internal wireless. She can't - oh, because the key that I assigned to the network? Not actually what was put into the router settings by the set-up cd. In fact, none of the security settings I specified were actually applied. Awesome. Fucking shitheel. No wonder everyone else in the neighborhood has an unsecured network.

So I change that, and she's connected. Awesome, I have wireless router. Time to put in my wireless card and get that set up.

The wireless card also has a set-up cd, which I promptly use. I go through set-up, restart, and referee the fight between Windows and the card's software as to who will be in charge. I declare the card software the winner, and it opens up.

And promptly hangs my computer.

I'm sorry, but you really have to try to make that happen. But fine, I'll do a damn hard reset, and you'd better work next time.

It does it again.

I tell it to fuck off and use Windows, except that Windows can't actually find the network that it should damn well be able to find seeing as how the AP is sitting less than ten feet away.

Fine. Fuck you both.

I got back to the proprietary software and wrangle with it for nearly an hour in an attempt to actually get it to save the settings I want and then connect. Finally, finally, it works. I am connected in a wireless fashion, I no longer have cat5 snaking across my bedroom floor, life is pretty good.

Now, I'm also on a green kick, seeing as how it being sixty in January really isn't good for my health in a lot of ways. So, my computer currently goes on standby after twenty minutes of idleness, and hibernates when I shut the lid. In both cases, once I wake it up, it should go back to where it was.

For a while, this was happening. Then, then, we have yesterday. I wake the thing up, and the wireless card won't connect. It saved the settings, the router was up and working, my roommate was having no trouble, but my wireless card would not connect, no matter what I did.

Once it was finally set up, it was definitely under the category of "I push the button and it works". Since it was not cooperating, I pulled the fucking piece of shit card out, threw it onto my couch... somewhere... and proceeded to plug in my damn cat5 again.

This is why we cannot have nice things people, because the nice things are non-functioning pieces of shit.

Jay is all sad that I am not using the wireless card. I told him to go fuck himself. I'm a bit hormonal, so I'm extra angry. As far as I'm concerned, everyone and everything can go fuck themselves/itself. If you want me to use the gift, give me something that actually fucking works.

Give me fucking steam, already

Now, I like to consider myself an intelligent person, but there are certain things I don't like (like fire), and certain things that are categorized under "I push the button and it works". My heat is under the latter, and the boiler that powers it is under the former.

My expectation, then, of the fucking heat, is that when I push the little switch on the thermostat to "heat", and program the temperatures on the thermostat to "not freezing", the heat will automagically kick in and make my house comfortable.

In large part, this is exactly how it works. My house is very comfortable. Except for my bedroom, which is fucking arctic.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people that likes their house to be eighty in the winter and still wears a sweater and wool socks. 70 is the highest my thermostat is ever set, and that's in the am so that we have extra hot water. That's really all I ask.

I investigated, because leaving my door open all the time to benefit from the heat in the rest of the house is clearly not an option. I put my hand on my radiator, and was thankful that it wasn't quite cold enough that my hand would stick. I put my hand on the other radiators, and quickly jerked it back because they were very hot. Not cute.

I go online and start trying to educate myself about steam heat and radiators (since that's apparently what I have, who knew) and am confronted with a miserable morass of obscure terms and incomprehensible troubleshooting instructions. I can't very well do anything if I don't even know what you're referring to, now can I. There was much waving of hands and whining and frustration and girliness.

The one thing - the one thing - I manage to figure out is that my radiator needs to be tilted towards the pipe going into the floor, so that water can run down it. Okay, that I can handle. I dig around and come up with a piece of cardboard, which I fold in half and attempt to place under the far end of the radiator. Mind you, I wasn't even aware of the fact that the radiators were not actually secured to the floor. (I told this to Jay. His response? "Well where the fuck are they going? Nowhere, that's where.")

I manage to heft up the end of the much-heavier-than-it-looks radiator and shove the cardboard under, all by my lonesome, and I realize that the cardboard will compress and thus be useless. I find a useless trade magazine and shove it under there too.

I am soon rewarded with mild warmness in perhaps 10% of the radiator. This is better than before, so I am gratified. The rest of the radiators in the house were cool, so I wasn't expecting lots of heat at that time. I slept with my door half open, to again benefit from the heat in the rest of the house and also freak my shit out, and went to work today.

I came home to discover the house toasty-warm, and my room, not so much. Once again, I had a cold radiator and no one else did. God fucking dammit. Okay. The knob is open, the system is on, I almost burned my thigh in the bathroom again (the radiator is RIGHT. NEXT. to the toilet. Seriously). What the hell else could it be?

Okay, maybe it's the air vent. I don't feel comfortable with actually taking it off, so instead I get the brilliant idea that maybe it's clogged and I can poke around with a pin! So I do. Thankfully, steam did not come rushing out at my hand.

However, the radiator heated up. Hooray! I enjoyed warmth and closed the door to my room.

And then froze my ass off, because for some reason, my room is determined to be cold.

I fucking give up. I pushed the button. Where is my heat.

Seriously

I have a hickey on my nipple.

I have a hickey on my damn nipple.

What the fuck.

Yes, he is for real.

He ate my damn cool whip.

I bought some cool whip on sale about a week ago, to go with the strawberries and dessert shells that I got on sale. It's summer, that means strawberry shortcake, bitches. I made some for me and Jay last weekend, and it was good. I used no more than half of the cool whip, even factoring in the two doses of strawberry-and-cake-and-sugar goodness I made for myself last week.

Tonight, I ventured into the fridge to kill the last dessert shell, as well as make a dent in the new pound of strawberries I bought yesterday. I grab the cool whip container, and it is suspiciously light.

I open it up: suspicions confirmed.

"ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!" I am relatively sure that this was heard up to ten miles away.

There are a measly two tablespoons of cool whip left.

He ate my damn cool whip.

He being Chris, the roommate that I hate, who maybe I should tell isn't living here next year.

The cool whip joins a long list of my food that has been violated by Chris, including an entire box of Nilla Wafers, a sleeve of Chips Ahoy!, and an entire bag of tortilla chips.

I have since taken to storing food in my room, whenever possible. This is bad, because it encourages me to eat in my room, which was a habit I'd gotten out of after college, and one that I am not pleased to have picked up again. However, it does prevent food stealing pretty effectively. I am not so rich that I don't care when someone pilfers my shit.

I wrote a note on the whiteboard in the kitchen. Pretty simple. "What happened to my damn cool whip."

I heard him moving about shortly after I wrote it, and stayed in my room, because I was not in the mood for a direct confrontation (I need to get over that).

He wrote a reply.

"I'm so sorry. I didn't think you would be so angry."

I left that up there for Rabbit to see tomorrow when she gets home from vacation, and responded.

"Yeah, except it's not the first time that food of mine has just disappeared. If you want some, please ASK. Don't just take - it's wicked rude and inconsiderate."

You would think this would be standard roommate etiquette - if you didn't pay for it, and you don't have permission, you shouldn't be eating it. Obviously I was wrong.