rants Archives | Page 1 of 2

| 1 2 | next ten entries

Friday, May 16, 2008

It's a good thing I'm determined to like summer from now on.

Otherwise I might make a list of reasons to loathe this time of year. Like, say, this list. (I just can't stop myself.)

• Grasshoppers. Stupid nasty ugly chirpy GARDEN-HUNGRY grasshoppers. After all the precautions I have taken against deer and pocket gophers, if all the hard work I've put into that garden is laid waste by a Little-House-like plague of clicking insects I may have to go mad. (Although watching Scout chase them is amusing.)

• My car does not yet have functioning air conditioning, although T is working on that.

• Stickers. For a country girl, I am terribly wimpy about stickers in my socks. Always have been. I will never forget the humiliation I felt on the summertime hike I went on at the age of eleven or so, with my mom and my city-bred Bay Area cousin, when I was the one pitching a fit because my socks and shoelaces were a mass of stickers. And yet I just couldn't stop. Now I get to weed-eat them, which flings them all over my clothing at high speed, which I dislike intensely.

• The annual onslaught of the phrase "Dads and Grads" (it hurts me even to type it) has begun, and just like it has every year since I learned how to read, it makes my stomach heave a little bit every time I see it. I am not sure why.

• THIS.
  
  HELLO. It is not even Memorial Day yet. (Fortunately, it's supposed to be back in the 80's next week.)
  

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

is this the real life?

(bonus points if you're humming a Queen song now.)

Yesterday my husband emailed me this story (go ahead and at least skim it and come back or this will make no sense a-tall to you), and asked if I thought it was an accurate snapshot of the way women think. I told him, as I am telling you now, that I wouldn't know about the women-in-the-bar scene, or what it's really like "out there" for single women my age, because I and all my (staggering array of) women friends are married and have been that way for a while. This is what it's like in women's BOOKS, I'll say that.

What really made my stomach clench up was this bit in the men's equivalent article (linked at the bottom of the women's one):

Q: How far will you guys go that first time you’re together?

Joe: All the way.

Brendan: How far would I go, or how far would I go and have a relationship afterwards? Because if I get everything the first time we’re together, I probably won’t be calling her back.

Beecher: That’s horrible. But I will say that if she’s willing to hook up on the first date, it says something about her attitude.

Joe: For me, it wouldn’t matter. I’m not going to judge her based on whether she goes all the way, because, to tell the truth, I will if she will.

Beecher: It’s not a deal-breaker. If she makes me wait, so long as it’s not too long, that’s fine.

Q: How long is too long to wait to do the deed?
Beecher: Three dates.

Brendan: For someone I really liked, I’d wait months.

Joe: To tell you the truth, I haven’t had to wait any longer than three or four dates, so I don’t really know. But I’d have a very hard time waiting as long as Brendan.

These men are in their twenties. That means that, considering the way social mores trend downward, twenty years from now, when my daughter is in their age, it's going to be like that to the twentieth power, I would think. Or at least times twenty (observe my staggering mathematical acumen as I completely pull this theory out of the air). Or whatever. But it's going to be worse than this, I think we can all agree on that, yes? And those are going to be the men in the world who will be looking at my daughter as she walks down the street and goes about her business. Frankly it makes me want to pick out a few prospects who might be OK and then take out every other male who looks at her. Really, though, I'm going to try to save this article until she's old enough to discuss this topic, say eight or ten years, and point out to her that this is what average men of the world will think of her. They will think of her as someone who isn't worth waiting three dates to have sex with. Please God I hope there are some parents out there bringing up their sons to be different, and please God I hope that He will help us to bring up our children (both of them) to see the harm in this kind of lifestyle and avoid it like the plague.

Sunday, August 20, 2006

pardon me while I roll my eyes

It has always been a pet peeve of mine that high-school sports (well, all sports, honestly) are put on such a pedestal and seen as so utterly important. (This has nothing to do with the fact that I was a nerd who would not have been allowed to sit with the cheerleaders and jocks at lunch even if I'd wanted to. I swear.). But you know that jock worship is out of hand when kids who pull a prank that just about gets a couple of their classmates killed get their sentences suspended until the end of football season. Funny, I don't think the judge would have been so accommodating if the kids were just in drama. Or the band. Or, heck, academic competition. Nope, they're just really good at knocking down other people and getting the ball where they want it to go, so what does it matter if their thoughtlessness breaks a kid's neck and gives another person brain damage? The answer is clear: obviously it doesn't matter; those kids weren't on the football team.

Thursday, November 03, 2005

It's a really great day to be a homeschooler

"We agree, and hold that there is no fundamental right of parents to be the exclusive provider of information regarding sexual matters to their children, either independent of their right to direct the upbringing and education of their children or encompassed by it. We also hold that parents have no due process or privacy right to override the determinations of public schools as to the information to which their children will be exposed while enrolled as students."
--Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Nov. 3, 2005

Here's the Rachel's Paraphrased Edition(TM):

"Just because you're their parents doesn't mean you can make decisions about how you'll raise them. Sheesh, who did you think you were, the government?"

And the kicker is, for a ton of families there's no way around this. Of course, you can always pay for private school, or stay home and teach them yourselves, right? Oh, wait, you can't? Gee, that's tough.

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

The news, it makes me sad (and mad)

I am not a current events blogger, and words fail me when I try to even talk about the devastation in New Orleans and the vicinity. Not just for the people who've died or lost everything (although obviously that's the most important loss and I certainly don't want to downplay it), but for the city of New Orleans itself. For better or worse, that was a city with its own distinct personality, with centuries of history and antiques and architecture. How long will it take to rebuild? How much of it can never be replaced?

And if all that's not bad enough (it certainly is) now we have the sinful nature of man on full display down there. I guess it got far worse overnight, but yesterday I was reading an article about a man stealing jeans from a store, in full view of law enforcement personnel, and I was thinking -- have people no shame? I can just picture the guy a few years from now, wearing a pair of Levi's and complacently declaring that 'yep, these are my Hurricane Katrina jeans.' So, I guess the answer is no. Some people have no shame.

And also, while I'm complaining, gas is $3.33 for regular unleaded at the station down the hill from my house. Local gas station owners hold a special place of loathing in my heart, because they take the concept of price-gouging to new and amazing heights. It's summer? Cool, tourists expect to pay a lot for gas in remote areas, jack it up a dime. They have to carry that gas all the way up the hill to town, let's push it up another fifteen cents. Ooh! Oil-related disaster! Right on! Profit margin just went up. Seriously, I think it's about fifty cents a gallon higher than it is in the San Joaquin Valley. Not that I'll know, because I'll have to save up for three months before I can afford to drive down there.

Friday, April 01, 2005

I waited to type this until I was relatively certain I could do it without swearing.

Well, I can never again say that I have never received a traffic ticket.

Wow, it made me a lot angrier than I thought it might, to type that. Deep breathing, it's OK, life goes ON, Rachel, it's only a speeding ticket, it's only THE END OF A FOURTEEN-YEAR STREAK OF SMUG DMV BLAMELESSNESS, IT'S NO BIG DEAL, RIGHT??

Really. Um. Wow.

Anyway. I blame it on Verdi. I was listening to the "Anvil Chorus", and...

No, wait, it's all the cardiologist's fault! If I hadn't had to drive down there to return the stupid holter monitor...

Um. Can I blame this on my low iron? no?

Seriously, I decided as soon as I saw the red light in my mirror and looked down to see my speedometer sitting at 65 that I wouldn't make excuses, I would just be straightforward and honest, and be a good testimony, and all that.

That and I thought maybe it would confuse the patrolman so much that he'd forget to write my ticket. But it didn't work. At least I can do the traffic school online.

On the way home, C appointed herself my official backseat driver. "I will keep an eye out for speed limit signs, Mommy, and I will read them to you if I see them, so you will know how fast to go. Because I am a very fast reader." And she did, too. "Mommy, it says 'SPEED LIMIT 45'. Are you going 45?"

Then a car VERY nearly ran over my daughter in the Vons parking lot. I was pushing the cart, and she was walking beside me, as we walked through the lot. The backup lights came on, on the car behind which we were walking, and before we could even trot out of the way, the car bolted backward. I pulled C out of the way just in time, and was still explaining why when the seriously seasoned citizen driving the car pulled backward far enough to finally see us (both wearing bright red sweaters). "I didn't hit her, did I?" Casual as anything. I clenched my teeth and replied, "Not QUITE."

I swear, all I want to do tonight, aside from maybe a nice relaxing sunset walk, is sit here and hork out on chocolate and do something totally boring, free, and harmless. Transcribing mind-numbing audio files about printer technology never sounded so good.

Monday, March 28, 2005

we've been on the slippery slope for years and just not known it.

I found this article linked from Molly's site. The whole article is difficult to wade through, for more reasons than one, but the basic gist of it is:

1) Passive euthanasia, practiced quietly at hospitals around the world,
is the practice of denying care to infants so that they die. Often
it's done to infants who have serious birth defects; denial of defect-related treatment (or sometimes any treatment at all) allows them to die. Generally it involves parental consent; however, in Europe especially, parental consent is becoming increasingly unnecessary. We personally had a daughter in 1997 who was born with a serious congenital heart defect; my husband I and were mystified and frustrated at the way her doctors continually disregarded our increasing concerns about her worsening condition, refused to move her corrective surgery date any nearer, and changed from one week to the next the standard for what was acceptable regarding her condition. (Week 4: Well, 02 saturations in the 80's are ok for her, but if she drops into the 70's, that's when we get concerned. Week 6: 70's won't hurt her; it's in the 60's that we get concerned. Week 8: An occasional dip into the 60's won't hurt her, but staying there for long periods, that's what we want to avoid. And so on.) At the time, we basically trusted their judgment and attributed their behavior to inattentiveness, failure to communicate with each other, or lack of emotional involvement in the case. Somewhere in the intervening years, in looking over her records and my updates about her case, I began to suspect that something like this might have been going on, but doubted it, because I simply didn't want to believe that doctors could do such a thing. Now, I wonder. Angrily. As I think I've mentioned here before, Natalie died at nine weeks of age, three weeks before the age at which she was supposed to have had her surgery.

2) Babies aren't really persons in the strict sense.

cf: "... it is difficult to determine specifically when in human ontogeny persons strictly emerge. Socializing infants into the role person draws the line conservatively. Humans do not become persons strictly until sometime after birth... . Unlike persons strictly, who are bearers of both rights and duties, persons in the social sense have rights but no duties. That is, they are not morally responsible agents, but are treated with respect (ie, rights are imputed to them) in order to establish a practice of considerable utility to moral agents: a society where kind treatment of the infirm and weak is an established practice... .The social sense of a person is a way of treating certain instances of human life in order to secure the life of persons strictly.

In other words, a person's not REALLY a person till s/he is "a morally responsible agent", and letting anyone else (especially a baby) be considered a person is basically just being nice.

This is an article in a respected medical journal. This is not some
scaremongering site. What is happening in our world??

Monday, March 21, 2005

Thinking about Terri Schiavo

There have been a lot of really good posts about Terri Schiavo in the past few days, and I don't have a lot to add to them, but I just went and watched some of the videos of Terri interacting with her family and her doctors, and I read this article written by one of the lawyers involved in the case (thanks Kristen for the link), and all I have to say is this.

If Terri Schiavo is in a "persistent vegetative state", then this:

is just a blob of tissue.


--------

Thursday, March 17, 2005

the textbook definition of "uncomfortable"

Today I had to go to what my dad has always euphemistically called "the ladydoctor" (all one word like that). I had to have a sonogram. I want to note here and now that this is far less fun when you're not pregnant. Especially it is less fun when you sit there (with the required full bladder, of course) for TWO HOURS in the dressing room with the little gown on, reading Les Misérables (thank you, Mr. Hugo, for that scintillating history lesson about Louis-Philippe, can we get on with Jean Valjean now), wondering if they've forgotten about you. And it is even less fun when the technician comes in to call out the third or fourth person who has arrived after you and then been seen, and tells you that by the way, the reason you're waiting is that you arrived half an hour late and they have to wait till they can "squeeze you in." Especially when you arrived on time -- early even -- and the front-desk people had your appointment time correct in their book but the technician lady didn't.

And yet I didn't kill anybody. Not even one person. I didn't even swear, not even in my head. Aren't you proud?

(Just don't ask if I, uh, cried. Because of the frustration. When I was alone.)

Then after I finally finished that unpleasant business, I went shopping. Alone. I went to Subway alone and then sat on the grass at the park alone and ate my sandwich alone while reading alone and I went to Costco and Save Mart and Smart and Final alone. It was like a vacation and a prison sentence at the same time. Like being Martha Stewart maybe, only I bet Martha Stewart never had the fun of figuring out the best way to spend exactly $55 at Costco.

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

as normal as I ever am

So I'm doing a lot better than I was on Monday. Basically, except for a lingering tendency to get all choked up over songs that would ordinarily have no effect on me (I can see "With or Without You" -- but "Fields of Gold"?!), I am normal and fine. Well, as normal and fine as I ever am.

What I am as well, however, is again extremely pissed off at T's boss. So much that it's not satisfying to look at other job listings, like I usually do to let off steam when T's job satisfaction levels hit a low point thanks to that loser, because I would want to actually send in his resumé, which would possibly involve being willing to move out of California, which is one of those things that's great in theory but scary as hell when you actually look at it, up close, personal, and seriously. Not because I wouldn't be unbelievably glad to get out of the politics and price-craziness of the left coast, but because:

• I love everything physical about California. I need relative proximity to mountains and ocean simultaneously. And frankly that's kind of hard to come by in places that aren't expensive and therefore populated by a lot of, well, people whose voting decisions make me want to scream out loud.


• Also, my parents, T's parents, my brother and SIL and nephews, T's friends (my local "friends", except for the aforementioned SIL and parents, could pretty much take me or leave me; we're not all that close) -- all are here within half an hour's drive. And that's a lot to throw away -- especially since my dad's health is poor, and that makes it even more important to us to be near him. It would seem scungy (funny, I have never tried to spell that particular junior-high word before) to move out of state just for our own selfish reasons and leave all that behind.

All this to say, this is why I'm not having a usajobs.gov/realtor.com spree right now. As much as I would probably enjoy it.

---

Darnit, T keeps altering my Yahoo Launch settings so that they play No Doubt ALL THE TIME*. They are definitely a two-or-three-star group for me, not a four-star one. GET YOUR OWN LAUNCH. Now I'm going to have "Underneath it All" in my head for DAYS. I do not appreciate this.

*He is also prone to giving anything by Pink Floyd a "Never Play Again" rating. Stinker.

---

I was carrying C to bed a few minutes ago (she is ill with a nasty sinusy thing so we are home from Bible study), because she had fallen asleep in her chair, and we had the following conversation:

She [mumbling, eyes still closed]: "Mommy, where are you taking me?"
I: "To bed, dearest."
She: "But I'm not tired."
I: "No, you're just asleep."
She: "I'm not asleep. I'm just resting."

She was fully unconscious again three (3) seconds after I put her down in her bed.

---

edited to add:

HE GAVE SHANIA TWAIN FOUR STARS. I cannot believe he would do that to me. What's next, Faith "you pretend you listen to me because you like my music but that's not really your reason, now is it, big guy" Hill?? gag.

rants Archives | Page 1 of 2

| 1 2 | next ten entries