Being Amber Rhea

Of all the things I don’t understand…

…I really don’t understand this idiotic requirement to get a pregnancy test before buying the (really motherfucking expensive) morning-after pill.

Look. People. We have established that the morning-after pill DOES NOT CAUSE ABORTIONS! If you are already pregnant, it will HAVE NO EFFECT; just like how taking birth control pills while you’re pregnant also won’t cause your embryo – I mean, “whole, separate, unique human being” – to spontaneously shoot out of your uterus. So what is the point of forcing someone to take a pregnancy test before filling their prescription (assuming they can find a pharmacist to fill it, and can afford the hefty cost)? If you answered, “Shaming those whores into keeping their legs closed,” you win!

Now, if we haven’t sufficiently established that the morning-after pill doesn’t cause abortions (just ask Senator Eric Johnson), then maybe we shouldn’t go around passing laws and putting restrictions in place without knowing what the fuck we’re talking about. It’s beyond common sense; it’s the assumed default that this is the way we, as rational adult human beings, operate; and the idea that people with so much influence over the lives of others would even consider behaving any other way makes me want to stab myself in the face.

And I won’t even get started on the financial barrier to access for low-income women; I have to get back to work, and I could ramble about that for a long, long time. All I’ll say is, eighty-nine fucking dollars? Eighty-nine fucking dollars? As the Bitch said, “This country is so fucked sideways and upsidedown I could spit nails, one of granny’s favorite expressions.” (Negative idea spreader, over and out.)

Housekeeping

Thanks to Cari’s MySQL expertise, all my blog entries back to April 2002 now reside in this database. (You’ll see the greatly-expanded archive list if you check my Archives drop-down in the sidebar.) The solution turned out to be maddeningly simple:* maintain the dates of the entries, but just insert them all with new, auto_incremented IDs. Since I don’t do any sorting based on ID, it doesn’t matter that the oldest entries have 4-digit IDs while my post from this morning is in the 900s.

The only quirk is that there are a bunch of extraneous ‘n’s in my old entries. This most likely has to do with Cari removing control characters; but she said she could probably find a way to pull them out of the insert statements, which means all I’d have to do is delete the ones I imported and then re-import them (giving them even higher IDs, but see, it doesn’t matter!). She might even be able to get the comments to come over with the old entries. (But if not, I’m okay with that.)

Speaking of old blog entries, yesterday was Dooce’s 5-year anniversary. She opened comments for her anniversary post and already has over 1,000 comments. Duh, she kicks ass. Mmmmm, that humble pie I just ate sure tastes good!

* And when I say “maddeningly simple,” I mean conceptually. I had no idea how to actually make it work. My SQL knowledge is pretty limited, I freely admit it.

Public obedience as civil disobedience

What would happen if everyone actually drove at the speed limit on I-285? See for yourself.

Mass transit, anyone?

(Via Neon Poisoning.)

Your blog endorsement of the day

Nikki’s blog kicks ass. Her new post today especially kicks ass. I would like to reiterate part of it here, in all its ass-kicking glory.

Let me say that again, more obnoxiously, so that those freaks in the blogosphere who think that women get abortions because they are careless, wanton harlots who can’t keep their legs closed get it.

Women in this country have a disproportionately hard time getting health care and making a living wage, particularly low-income women and women of color.

Catch the fuck on, asshole. If you actually care about the “murder of millions of babies,” then sack up and do something about the problem, which is our miserable fucking government that can’t even figure out how to provide trains, much less get them to run on time.

I am really upset about the South Dakota ruling as well, but in an attempt to alleviate crushing depression about the direction in which this country is headed, I’ve decided to harbor some hope that such an extreme law will ultimately do more harm than good for the Religious Reich. Kind of like Fred Phelps with the whole “God hates fags” thing.

The closest I come to words of wisdom

In an email to a friend, I said:

It’s a scary thing, and a weird balance to try to strike, of being independent but also being able to give yourself emotionally to someone else. I don’t know how anyone ever gets that shit right. I know I sure haven’t figured it out.

Like the title says, this is the closest I come to providing actual words of wisdom. There it is.

Careers I never knew, part 1

At some point during my undergraduate career (I think it was during 2001), I decided I’d like to work part-time as a stripper. I was really excited about it for a few days, and in typical geek fashion dove into researching my soon-to-be new profession on the internet. But my dream died when I realized two things: 1) I can’t dance. Arguably, this contingency could be overcome, but there was also… 2) Strippers usually wear heels, and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve worn heels; it would be an accident waiting to happen. I would be a walking (and soon falling) liability for wherever I happened to work.

Oh well.

Blast from the past, and the present

30 years later, why does it all sound so familiar? Did you catch that next-to-last paragraph? If it weren’t for the date on the bottom of the pamphlet, I could swear it was written yesterday.

Also interesting is SB’s observation, earlier today, that the South Dakota abortion bill hasn’t received much mainstream media attention. I guess I took for granted that it was part of the news at large, since I read a lot of “lefty” and feminist blogs, and SB forwarded me an article about it from CNN or somesuch. Silly me, allowing myself to remain cloaked in an insular [dream]world of actual fair-and-balanced media coverage. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… liberal media, my left tit.

And as for South Dakota, all I have to say is, just when I thought nowhere could be scarier than South Carolina, the other “South” state ups the ante by forcing rape victims to bear their attackers’ children. How you like them apples, S.C.?

(Pamphlet via Bitch Lab)

Open letter provokes close-minded responses

From definition, a new addition to my so-called blogroll, comes this most excellent open letter to all the liberal straight men. Predictably, the mouth-breathers who like to troll feminist blogs by day and tearfully jerk off to them by night have provided exactly the sort of knee-jerk reactions that were the point of the letter in the first place. I fear we are in an infinite loop.

But really, what did she expect? I, or any other female feminist blogger, could write something like that; and no matter what, it would be tantamount to setting ‘em up and letting the trolls knock ‘em down. Introspection is a tall order for most people.

An excerpt:

First of all, it doesn’t all revolve around you. If I am discussing sexism or the unique difficulties women face, I can understand and appreciate the frustrations that men also grapple with in our society. Really, the problem isn’t so much men and women as the fact that all powerful institutions want to make everyone feel worthless, so that we will do whatever they tell us to. But, for now, I am talking about women and women’s unique position in the world, and it is not about the big picture. It is about us. About me. Your tangents derail the conversation and shift the focus so that the issues I want to raise are ignored.

What can I say, other than I’ve been there countless times? I am so over hearing somebody whine, “Men face discrimination, too!” in a discussion about the discrimination women deal with on a daily basis (which I have firsthand experience with, seeing as how I’m a woman and all). And my God, if I could count the number of times men have tried to “talk over me” in discussions ranging from the important to the mundane, why, I could quit my job right now, ’cause I’d be a rich little lady!

Now, if you have the urge to post a comment about, “Not all men are like that…” or “But men do face discrimination,” well, hold your Enter key finger just a minute there, cowboy. Take a deep breath and a step back, and try some of that introspection I mentioned… it’ll do a body good. And remember:

If you are one of the handful of men I have met who actually treat women like people, though, this disclaimer won’t mean anything to you. If you aren’t guilty of the offenses I’ve outlined, you aren’t defensive about it.

h/t eponymous

One big happy database

I’m in a bit of a geek quandary. I want to take all the entries from my old blog (which is really this same blog, just a different database – semantics, I know) and move them to this database, so all the entries from April 2002 until now will be together as one big happy family.

Seems easy enough, right? Do a mysqldump of the old database, and then mysqlimport into the current database. Well, the problem is, the entries have unique IDs which function as the primary key in the database, and are set to auto_increment (if you don’t know what any of this means, you probably should’ve stopped reading after the first sentence). So as you can imagine, a lot of the entries in the old database and this one have the same ID.

I’ve imagined and tested several possible solutions, none of which have worked. (Including, but not limited to, changing the type of the ID column from int to varchar and appending a character onto each of the IDs of the old entries – but then, oops, how do I handle inserts? Et cetera ad nauseum.) It would be nice to merge the two databases into a new one, starting all the numbering over from 1. Yes, this would mean some of my internal links would be fux0red, but I’m prepared to deal with that.

I should also mention that thus far, mysqlimport hasn’t worked for me, and neither has the “import data from file” feature in phpMyAdmin. Boo.

So, if any of you fellow geeks have viable ideas, let me know. Or, maybe I’m just SOL, and that’s what I get for rolling my own blogging system.

Blah, day two

I’m home from work again today and not feeling very energetic, so don’t expect much in the way of blogging. There is, however, a good post over at figleaf’s blog about the tired old “wife-as-cow” metaphor, which I wrote about back in November.