aroraborealis

It will come as no surprise to exactly no one who knows me that I don't want to have kids. I've fantasized for years about permanent sterilization, but, of course, I know how much our desires and inclinations can change over time, so I always had age 40 in mind as the point at which I would pursue a permanent solution to the problem of my potential fertility. Since moving into a household with kids, I've been even more sure that that's not a path I want to pursue in life. (I love living with other people's kids. Almost as much as I love not having any of my own.) (Okay, not even close to how much I love not having my own.)

So, even though I'm about 18 months from my 40th birthday, I feel ready to make a longer term decision. So! I met with an OB/gyn this morning to talk about my options. I went in with Essure as my likely preferred option. It's a minimally invasive procedure with good outcomes. The other permanent option is tubal ligation, which is a real surgery.

While I was talking to the doctor, she suggested I consider the Mirena IUD, primarily because the low dose of hormones could alleviate some of my endometriosis symptoms, and most women on the Mirena don't have periods, which is obviously appealing. But it's also appealing to know that pregnancy is totally off the table. So, I'm thinking about it.

I'm interested to hear thoughts and helpful questions, if you have any, but it will make me angry to hear anything along the lines of "But what if you change your mind?" or "Don't you want to keep your options open?", so please skip those!

Meh:

The situation in Ferguson looked up briefly last Thursday, when the Missouri Highway Patrol took over with a very community policing tone, and there was a sense of optimism as a result of that. This didn't last long, as Friday night, the local police promised not to use tear gas, then denied using tear gas, and then admitted that, oh, oops, yeah, so, that was tear gas. And it's been downhill since then, with a curfew on Saturday and Sunday nights, deliberate obfuscation of information, threatening to shoot media personnel, and corralling media in a corner where they can't record what's actually happening. This police force is out of control, and no one with power over them seems interested in interrogating that.

Imagine living with these people as your law enforcement every day. :( :( :(

If you're mainly getting your news from mainstream sources, know that a lot of them are heavily filtered. Livestreams and twitter are available for independent on-the-ground information. Again, I suggest @AntonioFrench as a great resource. Please share others in comments.

A few links:

Amnesty International is sending in a team.
Here is a resource for resisting the militarization of local police.
Here is some info on the details of the legal process here.

More opportunities to donate to folks in Ferguson:

You can donate money that goes to food and water for protesters to sadditycooks@gmail.com -- she'll post the receipts and purchases on her twitter stream at @bellebutters . I gather some of these donations may go to other aid as well.

You can donate to the local food pantry by sending money here: St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church; 33 N Clay Ave Ferguson, MO 63135

This is an updated link to donate to the bail and legal defense fund for protesters.

Please share any additional resources in comments; I'll keep sharing as well.

Do you have a favorite article about enthusiastic consent? I'm especially interested in one that's good, clear, and relatively concise and easy to read.

(I quite like this one -- http://www.doctornerdlove.com/2013/03/enthusiastic-consent/ -- but it's a tad lengthy for my purposes.)

CNN recently aired some coverage of the verdicts against the Steubenville rapists that was all, "boo hoo, these poor boys' lives are ruined." I won't link to the video, but here's a link to The Raw Story's critique of it. The critique is right on, and I am utterly amazed and disgusted at the CNN coverage. I largely avoid mainstream media, because, well, it's bad, but in this case, I might even write a letter, because this is an impressive level of badness.

BUT. There's a thing about the CNN fuckup that has made me happy, and that's this: I have heard outrage about it from a huge swath of my social media channels, not just from the people who I know identify as feminists or progressives, and not just from women or people who already are steeped in thinking and talking critically about rape culture.

I know I live in the bubble, and I know there's a long way to go before the full cultural and awareness change around this stuff is more common than its lack, but I have felt importantly allied in my community's response to this.

I'm also really glad that there seems to be more mainstream discussion of rape culture as a result of this incident and the subsequent trial. Even Forbes is talking about it.

Here's a good list of things to do to end rape culture from The Nation. Here's Tony Porter's outstanding TED talk on the fragility of masculinity and the importance of raising sensitive, vulnerable, emotional boys.

Comment submitted on Home Depot's website today:

I am writing about an experience I had at your Everett, MA location in November, 2012.

While selecting shelving material and having it cut to my desired lengths, the staff member helping us (Mike) offered to make us a good deal on it. Thinking he meant there was a coupon or sale available, I inquired further, and he said he could sell each length to us for $3 (rather than $11), but it would have to be cash. Once it was clear this would be an under the table sort of "deal", I declined, but I was troubled to be invited by an employee to pay him to, as far as I could tell, steal from the store.

Later, I was in the screw aisle looking for drywall screws, and I was approached by a male staff member who offered to help me find what I was looking for. He did so, but in the course of helping me, he stood closer and closer to me, until he actually brushed my ass with his hand "accidentally".

Both of these experiences were very off-putting to me. I recently returned to the store for the first time since that visit, and I encountered Mike again, and I found myself wanting to leave the store immediately, which I did, without making the purchases I had intended to make.

I had intended to simply blow off the earlier experiences until I found that it was making me less inclined to return in the future. Because of that, I thought you should know that your employees could use additional training on appropriate behavior with customers.

Thanks for your time,
aroraborealis

Rule 1: Know your audience.

Failure 1, exhibit a (marketing email): "If you’ve been handed the dreaded task of planning the next company outing or holiday party, we’ve got you covered."

Dude, I, and presumably most of the other people on your list are event planners. The notion that we dread what we do? Incorrect.

You know that bully landlord who doesn't know and/or respect tenants' rights, and tries to run roughshod over their tenants? I hate that shit.

Unfortunately, a good friend of mine is dealing with this right now, and she could really use some help, in particular regarding communicating with the landlords to protect her rights in the last couple of months of her tenancy.

She already knows about the Massachusetts Tenant Handbook, but she's looking for other resources, especially who can provide protective language to include in a letter or other communications.

Are you or do you know someone who could take a few minutes to give her some pointers re: legal language and protection, or possibly even write a letter on her behalf with legal letterhead to make them back off a bit? This is in Somerville, MA. If so, please get in touch with me and I'll connect everyone.

So, firing someone is hard!

I have this feeling that I'm forgetting something important, but I can't for the life of me think of what it is.

It is driving me CRAZY.

Some of you may already be familiar with hydraulic fracturing, known as "fracking", which is a way to extract resources like oil, gas or water, from deep below the surface of the earth. By boring deep into the ground and pumping fluid into the hole, miners increase the rate of fracturing in the material below, creating larger fissures through which the material can flow into a well for collection.

Unsurprisingly, given how fracturing works, and the way everything's all connected in those cracks and fissures under the earth, there's a lot of mixing that results in this; chemicals that are used in fracking pretty often wind up in groundwater supplies. And, of course, these chemicals are often harmful to human health and life.

Fracking is actively in use in 37 states in the US.

The recent documentary movie Gasland focuses on this issue, and has created quite a fuss in the oil and gas industry. I'm not going to link to the petroleum-industry-sponsored "debunking gasland" document, but I will link to a pdf debunking "debunking gasland", which quotes from the industry document and rebuts its points.

I haven't watched Gasland, yet, and I honestly don't know if I'll be able to -- this kind of thing is so infuriating to me, and I feel there's so little I can do to change it. I don't want to become a living-off-the-land survivalist; I want to keep living a life that looks a lot like the one I currently have, and that requires using energy and other resources that we have to get somewhere, so I'm part of the problem.

But I get really stuck in thinking about the people who make the decisions to drill hundreds of wells that have the potential -- indeed the likelihood, statistically speaking -- of poisoning hundreds or thousands of people, and I wonder how they could choose money over those people? Or how can they choose money over the future productivity of huge swaths of land in the United States? What good does that money do if people can't survive there?

I was talking about this with a new acquaintance this weekend, and expressing my confusion about how the math works here, when he pointed out, quite rationally, that it's a very smart decision for those people, because they're not worrying about all the people in the world. They're worrying about themselves and making sure that they have enough money and resources to always be able to buy as much water as they need, even if there's only one good well in the entire country. It's an approach so singlemindedly selfish, so anti-humanist that I literally cannot hold it in my head long enough to follow it from start to finish. But I can't imagine anything but that mindset that would allow some people to make the decisions they do. It seems like not all people are people in that framework, and the future isn't for everyone.

It's really upsetting, start to finish.