Deviant Dispatches

Source I loved  Madison Mahdia Lynn's  suggestions, so I'm writing them out here. If you're feeling like a bit of flotsam in a sea of tears, give this a try for yourself - feel free to start from my list. Also, it's often the case that others can see you more clearly than you see yourself. Do you have insights for me? Let me know. STEP ZERO: Give yourself a moment to breathe. This was the first two weeks. Now I need to multitask. STEP ONE: Make a list of what you’re good at. Writing (incl. coming up with effective slogans and bringing humor) Knitting/crochet Empathy Patience Baking Listening Attention to detail Discount shopping Using the phone Passion for ALL THE THINGS STEP TWO: Make a list of your limitations. Public speaking (I can do it, and I might be good at it, but it's emotionally taxing) Inability to directly confront problems ... which is going to be fun for me Constraints due to having a toddler (time available, time of day issues) Li...

Source The World Turned Upside Down was written in protest of Parliament. Legend says that the song, referenced in the musical Hamilton, was played by the British Army upon their surrender to the United States. Listen to me and you shall hear of government gaslighting, opulence, fear: Since  Galileo in days of yore, you never heard the like before. The truth is despised, “alt facts” are devised, And science is kicked out of town. Yet let's be content, and the times lament, you see the world turned upside down. Astrophysicists did rejoice to see gravity waves; others sang with one voice That climate change is humanity’s thing, that now genes may receive editing. ( Let all honest folk take example and note That truth is not false, being bound.) Yet let's be content, and the times lament, you see the world turned upside down.   Our  Commander thinks himself a king, reddens to hear we’re organizing; Upon the border he’ll set a wall; Muslims already are part ...

Source The next four years will be hard for this country. Our rights will be hacked at with ice picks, machetes, toothpicks that introduce cracks in the foundation. It is Day 1 and the White House's climate change webpage has already disappeared , along with the LGBT , civil rights , and ACA pages. Trouble is not brewing; trouble is here. So what can we do about it? Groundwork has some great starting points on their site, and I listed a few details more below. Artist Haley Gilmore Educate yourself . What issues matter to you? Learn about them. What issues matter to others? Learn, and then fight for those too. " A healthy society is one in which those at the center scream in agony when those furthest away are cut." Make calls . Phone calls are the most effective method of contacting elected officials. Set an alarm on your phone to remind you to call on a regular basis. Keep your senators' contact info  bookmarked (or on speed dial) so you don...

Hey look! Another mish-mash of recent happenings. I'll be expanding upon a few of these later in the week. I made eggplant parmesan for the first time last night. It was much easier and more fun than I thought it would be (both good signs, as I haven't been very into cooking lately). It was a simple matter of baking the breaded eggplant and making some sauce. Spousal Unit and I found a three-tier cat tree near a dumpster. It had been rained on, but we let it dry in the sun and gave it a thorough cleaning. The cats seem to like it so far, though Oberon is still more of a ground-based kitty. Last week at work, someone used "thru." In a professional report. I headdesked so bad. Another item in my work week: someone emailed saying that if the government shuts down, she'll have to send her report on Monday instead of Tuesday. That should not be a serious sentence. I feel like "If the government shuts down" should be the start of a joke, not a qualifi...

The Freedom to Read They say not to feed the trolls, but I can't help it. I've been baited, so I'm turning it into a chance to bring visibility to a subject about which I'm passionate: book banning. September 22-28 is National Banned Books Week , and I was pleased to see that a site I frequent recognized it. This site usually has some civil, intelligent discussions, but there are always a few who have to bring it down, as on any site. This particular troll started out innocuously enough, wondering why they were called "banned" if you could still get them elsewhere. A simple misunderstanding of the word is where it all began. But after several people pointed out the error of the troll's ways, he/she began to talk about book banning as if it wasn't a big deal. In shop/library displays, perusers run across books that were drilled into them in tenth-grade English class, so what's "banned" about it? You can still get a book, even if t...

Sing-alongs have been happening at the Wisconsin capitol building since Governor Walker's disbanding of unions in 2011. For more than 700 consecutive weekdays, their purpose has been to gather in the rotunda, sing peaceful songs of protest, and gather strength from each other. Walker apparently felt threatened by this and all of the demonstrations in the capitol, as he outlawed gatherings of 20 or more that did not have a permit--then replaced Madison's police chief, who wasn't enforcing the law, with his personal bodyguard. This week, arrests have begun. This excellent article talks about the author's 80- and 85-year-old parents, who were arrested at the sing-along, where 22 people were in attendance. The next day, instead of the numbers decreasing, they went up - 29 citations were issued, and ( as WPR put it ) the remaining protesters sang louder. I understand the point of needing a permit for a public gathering. But the capitol has always been a place for ...

Remember that letter I wrote to Governor Walker ? Well, I actually sent it to him, and I received a reply, too. It was something along the lines of, "Thanks for taking an interest in government. You should keep doing that, even though I really don't care what you think and am never, ever, ever going to actually read what you send me. After all, I'm just here to turn Wisconsin into the northernmost Southern state." That might be an exaggeration. But it was definitely a form letter that is sent out to anyone and everyone who sends him letters. I realize he can't reply personally to everyone, but he could at least have that form letter tailored to certain issues. Yesterday, I got a letter from Senator Jon Erpenbach . Sure, this may also have been a form letter, but it was a form letter tailored to the issue of mandated ultrasounds and the bitch slap Planned Parenthood received. I haven't followed senators or representatives that closely in the past ...

This has been one hell of a week, and it's only Thursday. On Sunday night, I got very little sleep. Monday morning, I learned that come September, I will be forced to work five extra hours a week for no extra pay, right after we had this extravagant remodeling done, when we were told there would be no pay cuts. (I hate being salaried, I hate sliminess, and I hate, hate, hate technical truths.) Monday afternoon, I either caught a cold or had a sudden onset of allergies that is still around now. Tuesday was fairly mediocre, but on Wednesday, a coworker backed into my car and left a "dent" the size of both of my hands, spread out. He's covering everything, but this is already an obnoxious headache - plus the car is still new to us, since we've only had it for one year. All of these things could be worse, of course. There are no layoffs happening, I don't have a flesh-eating virus, and my car wasn't hit hard enough to fall over the embankment and roll in...

*Warning: Triggers and politics ahead.* Dear Governor Walker, I was very disappointed to hear about the new legislation requiring women seeking abortions to 1) get an ultrasound first and 2) be forced to look at the ultrasound images. I understand that, from your perspective, this is being done to provide women with "more information" on which to base their life-altering decisions. I'd like to tell you why I think that is, to put it lightly, a misguided perception. Imagine being a pro-life woman who desperately wants a child, who has to have an abortion for medical reasons - if she doesn't, she, the child, or both of them will die. Being forced to look at that ultrasound would be a torturous reminder of what you can't have. Without that torture, would her decision be uninformed? Perhaps you are a woman who never would have considered abortion before being raped. A month or two have passed, and you are still traumatized by the event, having frequent night...

This picture is completely unrelated to the post. I just wanted to share it. Sometime in high school, while I was evaluating myself, I realized I didn't have much in the way of favorites. I decided I had to change that. It wasn't that I didn't have passion and goals; it was that when asked, "What's your favorite meal? What's your favorite hangout place? What's your favorite season? What's your favorite book?" I didn't have an answer. I knew what I liked, but all of my likes blended together. No one seemed to stick out as an obvious choice above the others. That seemed like it was wrong to me, so I pondered many different aspects of my life, hoping to reach a point at which I could say with confidence, "Spinach wrap-up lasagna. The coffee shop downtown. Autumn." I learned many things about myself and found many answers. Of course, in some areas, I still couldn't identify any one favorite thing. I still can't tell y...

In Washington, D.C., everyone's concerned with the fiscal cliff right now. Come midnight on January 1, congress will either put unsatisfactory measures (according to everyone, I'm sure) into place, or the entire country will jump off the cliff like short-sighted, drunken lemmings. I'm not terribly worried about what will happen; everyone puts things like this off until the last possible minute, and then there's a cave-in by one or both parties. Even if that doesn't happen this time around, I still have a (personally) more pressing worry on my mind: that the fiscal issues we're facing will make lawmakers lose track of goals related to the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings in Connecticut. Here's what most concerns me. This is already a politicized issue. It was politicized within days of the shooting. Fine; such is life in this, our U.S. democracy. There appear to be two sides: people are either for stricter gun control, or they are for better, more acc...

  Source Source   I was going for nonpartisan images in this post, but this is a good one... Source All of this is by way of saying: VOTE. Find your polling place , stand in line for however long it takes, register if you need to  (no photo ID required), and let your voice be heard. I'll be watching election coverage tonight with bated breath, hoping they don't screw up the absentee ballots like they do every year.

Now that the Wisconsin recall election is over, I'd like to shed light on something many of us may not have considered in all this: money. You may say money has been a huge  part of this election. Walker raised over $30 million in his recall campaign, trying to buy a win. Everyone's been talking about it. But I'm not talking about it in that way. Consider the following: $30 million could... Send 30,000 ShelterBoxes to families in need of disaster relief. Each box contains a tent, water purification and storage, a toolkit, and many more items that are essential when a home has been demolished. Give 60,000 cows to families in need of milk, via Heifer International . One heifer provides four gallons of milk per day, enough for a whole family and then some - not to mention a yearly calf, too. Assuming a minimum of four people per family, that many cows could provide for 240,000 people - more than the entire population of Madison, Wisconsin . 20 years of main...

Wisconsin, today is the day. If you signed the recall petition, that's not enough. If you support the governor with a sign in your lawn (not my cup of tea, but some do), that's not enough. The only way you can speak loudly enough is by voting. Go vote today. The months of strife, arguing, split families, and bumper stickers come down to whether or not you vote today. If any of this election talk affected you in any way - if you have any kind of opinion about Wisconsin's future - it is worthless unless you vote. Let's look at some numbers. Voter turnout for the 2008 presidential election - an election that was as much about race as politics itself - was about 58 percent. By comparison, France's recent presidential election earlier this year sported a voter turnout of 80 percent . Eighty.  Can you imagine living in a place where so many people are willing to act  to change their country - where so many use  their democratic rights? Get out there and vote toda...

Yes, musicians deserve to be paid for their work, especially in a world where so few actually buy CDs anymore. But that doesn't mean YouTube deserves to be shut down. That doesn't mean random comics deserve to be blocked. Essentially, SOPA and PIPA are about censorship, and under those bills with their incredibly lax wording, you could come to Deviant Dispatches one day and discover it's shut down. Don't know what I'm talking about? Read a good explanation here, via CNN Money (whose parent company supports the bills, but it's a fairly unbiased article). XKCD has some excellent links you can follow. Time has a list of different ways you can shout from the rooftops that you don't approve. As long as I'm on a political note: big shout out to my fellow recall peeps! We are 1 million strong , and one step closer to the 21st century again - though we'll never get a chance at that high-speed rail again, will we, Governor ?

Everywhere I look online, I'm seeing the word "occupy" appear. At first, it was just "Occupy Wall Street." We Are the 99 Percent's website features posts from people who are in the enormous bottom segment of income in the United States: people who aren't making enough to live on and are involuntarily in hopeless situations. And with almost every post came that phrase. I had no clue what it meant. That was two days ago. Yesterday, I saw it again, in links on Facebook. Occupy Wall Street is a social/political movement (somewhat connected to the group Adbusters ) that some are comparing to the recent Middle Eastern revolts. The purpose is more or less to stand up, as the lower-class majority, and stand against a country run by the top one percent of money holders. According to the website , they have "an interest in returning the US back into the hands of it's individual citizens." (Guys, I love the idea, but you need a copy editor. I volunte...

Some heavy issues have been running through my mind lately - including the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. I'm thrilled with the repeal of DADT (which, when I see it abbreviated like that, reminds me of a certain very harmful chemical that was also banned for the good of the world). I think it's about time the military has the same equality as all other American jobs are supposed to have. (I say "supposed to" because I'm sure plenty of people at equal-opportunity jobs have been fired for their sexual orientation.) I'm really glad to see recognition that DADT did no good and is, in fact, harmful. You're clearly not required to be straight to be a military presence , so why should we discriminate? No good reason other than homophobia. Which is why the repeal of DADT makes me a little bit nervous. This is an incredible breakthrough for gay rights in the U.S., but my concerns are in the retaliation we might see. The fact remains that many people stil...