I believe it was my junior year that Lisbon High School became graced with it's very first little person. Lance wasn't a technical midget, rather, he had a unique developmental problem with affected only the size of his legs, leaving him with the approximate proportions of a thin chimpanzee. Back then, he compensated for his diminuitive statute with an oversized, boisterous personality, and the ability to use his own arms as a jump rope. Nowadays, he compensates with a myspace profile chalk full of pictures of him from the waist up, my favorite being this one.

I've been cruising myspace a lot lately for additional people to add to my friend's list, for the sake of nostalgia, comradery, and publicity: I've taked to announcing my new blog posts on the bulletin board to drive people here, where they can experience, first-hand, the steaming pile of prose that is my self-interest. This is especially satisfying when the reader is one of the many I went to high school with but whom did not know me particularly well, seeing me only as the intellectual misfit who was constantly scribbling her thoughts into a notebook or blogging them on the library computers.

See how far I've, uh, come? *Ahem*

Sometimes I start writing a post without any intention of it being ironic, then, as it comes out, I become more and more aware of the subtle mockery I'm unconsciously making of myself. It seems that, here, there is a delicious parallel: In high school, I had Lance-legs in the areas of fashion sense, social skills and, let's face it, personal hygiene. I faced this with either defiant, counter-culture avoidance of the people I wasn't like and the skills I didn't have, or with a humorous, defensive turn of phrase, like "Hey, look at that short kid who can jump rope with his own arms!" Now, Lance's profile highlights his upper body and mine has only pictures of Pretty-From-A-Certain-Angle Girl.

And yet, I lead them here. Here, where I bare my soul, my flaws, my insecurities. Sure, I dress them up in their Sunday best, but still, this is a fairground of failings. It seems that I endeavor to face my deepest fear: That those who love me would not if they knew who I really was. Put it out there, unpretentious, and send the people there, to read about all the miserable things I say, think, and do. She's a snob, a pervert, and a hypocrite. She's a currently unemployed waste of human life, someone who clings to her own pathetic blog for validation.

But if she can make you laugh by the end of the post, well then, maybe that's something.


Fierygwenivere: I'm now finding the profiles of all the Popular guys who were too list that they went to LHS, so I have to search for their names individually. Justin Costello, Jeremy Steenson, etc. If they don't accept my friend requests, it's gonna be like my sixth grade birthday party all over again.
FieryGwenivere: I'm thinking of creating a second myspace profile that I will use for adding as many people as humanly possible, just so I can announce my updates on it and up my traffic.
Snappyguy: just tell everyone you're on a webcam like so many other girls seem to
FieryGwenivere: that's not the way to get thoughtful, literary traffic
FieryGwenivere: and you don't get a whole lot a guys who are like "A cam girl? Alright! Oh, it's a blog...even better! Now I can get to know her for the person she really is."



In other news, an new show will be airing on British television called "Masturbation for Girls", featuring "an 'orgasm coach' who teaches three ladies all her tricks, which they will demonstrate, live, to camera." The source of this information it this article by Carol Sarler, in which she argues that position that this is a disgrace to woman, a pitiful attempt to masquerade porn as education, and cheap television. She makes some decent points decently well and, unlike other online journalist I've read lately, can use a semi-colon. Do I agree with her? I don't know. Lately, my level of conservativeness is flippant at best, and reality TV has always been a bit of hot button for me. So, whether or not this is pornography or "cheap" isn't really something I see fit to argue from either side; however, there are some points she didn't make which beg to be argued, and I did so in the form of a comment to her article that the editors decided not to publish. So, I'll make them here.

First of all, porn or not porn, her viewpoint on this show seems to suggest that female sexuality, in whatever form it takes, is something to be ashamed of, and that's a stigma that has done quite enough damage to the world at large already. Secondly, with the world as it is today, more women than ever are reporting suffering from Female Sexual Dysfunction, as well as being pre-orgasmic. Whatever the marketing strategies behind it, here is a show that endeavors to teach women how to have an orgasm, a show that prioritizes a woman's pleasure. Carol Sarler argues that this show could not possibly be "mark of women's progress and of liberation". But the fact is that this day in age, there are still thousands of women utterly dissatisfied in their sex lives, and who have resigned themselves to being merely an aid to the pleasures of men. This is one of the arenas that, despite progress, true liberation has not fully occured. Science says, doubtlessly, that having an orgasm is an essential function of life, alleviating physical and emotional tension and instilling a level of confidence sorely needed in today's women. Advancing the progress of pre-orgasmic women, therefore, isn't "science, education or art"; it's a fucking cause.


Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a date with my brand-new, 60-dollar vibrator. Gonna go have a little women's movement of my own.

On with it.



Technorati Tags: compensation little person personal evolution myspace insecurities masturbation england reality TV vibrator women's movement hitachi magic wand

First and foremost, Happy Birthday, Emily!

Please feel free to leave a comment below for the birthday girl, if I you (or I) can figure out how to work it. (Click Here!)

On a vaguely related matter, if you're ordering flowers from a online site, a site that's entire purpose is to deliver flowers, shouldn't the delivery fee be included in the price? There's no way to pick up these flowers, the whole point of the place is just to deliver them...I think that's rather slippery, FTD. Slippery indeed. Now, I want it made clear to the birthday girl that this is not even the slightest concern, and if she spends even a moment thinking about it, I will send her flowers every day for a month as punishment. But the principal of the thing seems a bit wrong.

Rosie O'Donnell has apparently gone and offended fundamentalist Christians on her new gig on The View, and people are acting like everything Rosie O'Donnell is, and, in fact, everything most people are, didn't offend fundamentalist Christians from day one. Her exact words: “Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have separation of church and state.”

You don't have to know me very well to know that I agree. This is obvious enough that I, in fact, would not be blogging about this at all had I not read this commentary on the whole thing. In it, pundit wanna-be Robert Paul Reyes writes a short and simplistic agreement to her words, blatantly disregarding, on multiple occasions, the functionality of a semi-colon and ending the article with "You go Rosie! You go girl!"

This begs the question-- why the hell is this guy getting paid to write grammar-killing blurbs about celebrities and politics while I write this drivel for less than 25 visitors a day? The feeling that I need to be doing more with my writing has begun to build up, once again. Let's see how far it gets me this time.

I mean, I know I'll never be on Robert Paul Keyes' level. I let that possiblity slide on by when I passed 11th grade English. Jackass.

On with it.



Technorati Tags: Rosie O'Donnell The View Robert Paul Reyes semi-colon fundamentalist radical christianity grammar

The good thing about getting your circadian rhythym put into a blender is that being awake at crazy times exposes you to things you might never get a chance to experience during your normal routine: In this case, I've just watched an AMC show called "Movies that Shook the World" doing an episode on The China Syndrome. For those of you who have never heard about this movie, it was a 1979 thriller written by a controversial documentary film maker about a nuclear power plant experiencing a meltdown, as well as a conspiracy to cover the warning signs. The interesting thing about it: it was released twelve days before the incident at Three Mile Island. Many speculate, and rightly so, I believe, that the eerie parallels between the movie's message and release date and the accident had such an influence on the public's opinions of nuclear energy that it was single-handedly responsible for shutting down the growth of the nuclear power industry in America.

The question AMC posed: Was this a good thing or a bad thing?

Many would argue that nuclear energy may have been the closest thing to safe, clean, efficient energy we ever could have come, and that the movie irresponsibly drove people to have a disproportionate reaction the later occuring incident, which, while frightening, did relatively little damage. AMC, however, wrapped up the show in a different way, not surprisingly supporting the movie for it's role in preventing a major catastrophe: an expert at the end of the show came on to comment about how susceptible we would be to terrorism attacks on the hundreds of nuclear reactors that would have been built had it not been for the movie. This commentator left everyone feeling all warm and gooey about the wonderful job Hollywood did in preventing large-scale vulnerability in a post 9-11 America, twenty years in advance.

I may not have learned much in college, but the Critical Thinker that got the highest score in Mr. Thatcher's class couldn't help but pose the question no one was acknowledging: Had things gone as planned back in the seventies, would we still be today dependent enough on foreign oil that terrorism, specifically, the kind we fear today, would be that kind of concern? Would 9-11 have happened?



Well, don't ask me. I don't fucking know. I just thought it was an argument someone should have been making. Also, every now and then I like to remind you all that I don't just obsess about my own life all the time. Sometimes, I take a few minutes to think globally.


*Phew.* Glad that's over.

On with it.



Technorati Tags: the china syndrome nuclear power three mile island 9/11/2001 terrorism what if...

What they mean when they tell you you're too smart for your own good.

• At an early age, before they had us approrpriately divided into classes based on your developmental stages and intelligence, and even after that, I found myself constantly able to do the work assigned to me in school without having to wait and listen to the instructions. Back then, this afforded me the head start to get it done and earn the status of being the best, the fastest, the smartest. In the long run, however, it just fucked me out of the important lesson you're suppose to learn at that stage of life: how to listen.
• Having identified me as gifted slightly later, they began taking me out of my regular classes during unimportant times, like penmanship practice, for advanced placement classes in Problem solving and creative writing. This afforded me the advantage of being able to write the best reports, stories and essays in class, but, to this day, nobody can read them until they're typed.
• And that brings us to: respect. While other kids were learning the importance of respecting their elders for their superior knowledge, intelligence, and common sense. It was much earlier than most that I began to realize that the many of the adults around me weren't smarter than I was, and this lead me into a very early, very prolonged "question authority" phase. This triggered the cockiness that caused me to doubt the reasoning behind every moral, standard, and institution I encountered, blazing my own trails in many ways that ultimately failed, for lack of the time-tested common sense that I was too good for. When I didn't want to do something a certain way, I could easily dream up an argument to justify the behavior I wanted and totally convince myself, and many others, of it's validity. Don't feel like going to school for another four years? Well, college is just part of a grossly overrated system that shuffles people blindly into a place they may or may not belong, costing them, in the long run, lots of time and money that often would be better spent developing their individual skills in a different environment. Don't want to do homework tonight? People put too much emphasis on academics, anyway; the pressure on students today is overwhelming to the point of suffocation, and nobody gives credit to teenagers whose achievements are more personal, like being an excellent friend, or just being kind.

Then I went and got married. I couldn't be bothered to listen to my mother when she plead with me to be nicer to his family, or to be yoked into a subservient wife role when she suggested that I spend some real time learning to cook the things he liked. When people would criticize me for the obvious hypocrisy I practiced in spending enormous amounts of time with ex-boyfriends but being controlling in his social life to the extreme, I said merely "I need what I need, he needs what he needs. It's not hypocrisy to need something of your partner that they don't nessecarily need back. It's simply being realistic."

I was drawn to Zack for a myriad of reasons, but one cannot deny the cold practicality behind some of them: Here was a boy with few opinions, whereas I could not shut up, in all my intellectual superiority, about the righteousness of what I believed. Here was a boy who was willing to follow where I wanted to go, whereas I was a girl determined to blaze her own trail. Here was a boy who, initially, thought so little of himself that he felt there was nothing of him worth holding onto; I, a girl who was unwilling to sacrifice.

It's taken this long, but now the unspoken tension has grown in intensity to the point that it's presence becomes, often, undeniable: he resents the respect I have neglected to give him, and I am dumbfounded and defensive at the all-too sudden build up of changing standards.

The vaginismus and related problems have, undoubtedly, provided us with more than our fair share of problems, but, as we scramble to fix those with little time left on a ticking clock that reminds us constantly of a deadline of frustration we have previously been willing to to acknowledge, it's impossible not to notice the unrelated problems that have taken their toll. Don't get me wrong-- I believe that the vaginismus has, at the very least, excelled the growth of every problem that we have. A man, many argue, needs respect in a relationship as fundamentally as a woman needs love-- perhaps not the most politically correct of ideas, but I believe there is a degree of truth to it. I also believe that sex can supply a man with a feeling of confidence that he can't nessecarily get anywhere else; a feeling, perish the thought, of providing for his wife in a way that demands her (oh, god, the feminist in me is shuddering here) respect and gratitute. (Jesus Christ. It's so awful to write.) I, of course, also must point out that this trade of pleasure for respect is a two-way street, and one a woman can more easily profit from, even. But perhaps one that a man needs more.

Still, here is a problem that we have that's not directly related to vaginismus; one that would have manifested itself eventually. I have failed to respect him adequately in the past, and, over the years, part of him has become very angry. He has become a man who is ready to demand what he needs and deserves. As for my part, I have lost sight of the girl who was selfishly stubborn, and lost sight of the relationship I was drawn to, in part, because of convenience. I find myself, scared as a girl, but no less a woman in love with a man, and realizing that she has little time to figure out precisely how to give him what he now needs and has always deserved.

Where are my grade school teachers, now?


On with it.

Technorati Tags: intelligence development personal evolution gifted and talented respect question authority cockiness hypocrisy vaginismus sex men and women