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I saw a post recently on the Krofft Superstars, and while Sid and Marty wrought much nightmare material for the young ones back in the day, at least they gave me Electra Woman and Dyna Girl.

Those outfits! So fabulous.

Much more can be found at the unoffical EW and DG fan site.

Man. Via Boingboing, I see this letter a guy posted on Flickr that his grandma got from Disney. She applied to their animation school in 1938 but was rejected…because they didn’t hire women for creative work. Gotta save the good work for the menfolk, doncha know.

Enlarged and readable version here.

No wonder Snow White was such a simp.

Babycatcher33 is a midwife student and mom who had a beautiful baby girl named Abby last year. But Abby died of unforeseen natural causes, 2 days after her birth…she never cried or fed or got to be held very much by her mother before she went. Who was understandably devastated.

And then, Mom got pregnant again, unexpectedly, and the new baby was due only weeks after the anniversary of Abby’s death. Joy plus terror for nine long months. All of her readers were holding her breath that this baby would be ok.

And she is. Charlotte was born June 22nd to her ecstatic family and is doing just fine.

I love happy endings.

(INTERIOR DAY; BLAND GRAY OFFICE CUBICLE. EMJAYBEE’S DESK)

(PHONE RINGS: EMJAYBEE PICKS UP)

EMJAYBEE: Hello?

DORIS: Emjaybee? This is Doris. How are you today?

E (thinking: Who the hell is Doris?): Uh, fine, thank you. Can I help you?

D: Can you come to the boardroom for a moment?

E: Sure. Do I need to bring anything?

D: No, just yourself!

Rather than bore you with scripting the rest, I’ll just tell it straight; Wednesday, I was laid off. Me and the other manager who did the same job as I did, meaning the grunts are now manager-deprived and on their own. And extremely unhappy about it, they tell me.

It wasn’t a surprise, although I was thinking it would be July, not this week. I got a severance that wasn’t spectacular but was better than nothing, and at least got me health care for six more weeks. But the company is clearly circling the drain…I give them 4 more months, tops, maybe less, unless they find some really dumb rich investor to give them more money. Which is always a possibility. But ultimately, the product is crap and the management is a giant fustercluck. They’re doomed.

I’ve never been laid off before (which leaves only firing as a job-related experience I’ve yet to have…yay). It was rather surreal. I didn’t cry, or feel bad at all…once I knew what the money situation was, I was ready to go home and relax. For the first few days, I was actually kind of ecstatic. I haven’t had anything approaching a vacation in well over 3 years, so it felt like getting off for school for the summer. I mostly ate popsicles and watched soap operas and spend time at the pool. Everyone is very concerned about me, and of course, Matt is worried (OMIGOD WE HAVE NO MONEY WE’RE GONNA DIE) but I’m not feeling that way. Yet.

My job has really been a pain in the butt for a while, mostly because bad management meant I wasn’t actually able to do my job. It was an old story; autocratic CEO refuses to delegate or establish a hierarchy of decision making, and chaos results. I was a project manager, but neither I nor MY manager, nor HER manager were ever actually allowed to say “No” to anything that the CEO or one of his buddies wanted. Even if what they wanted was unworkable, shredded our carefully-figured and tight deadlines, and would cost both money and employee burnout on a massive scale.

I personally was very tired of being told about 3/4 of the way through a difficult and already-late project that some random person (it was never the same person twice) had pulled some cockamamie theory about how the project should look out of their ass and we had to redo it all practically overnight. And all our projects included teaching materials, vocabularies, video segments, interactive segments, Flash presentations, and about umpteen other components. So one significant change caused a ripple effect, something we tried in vain to explain to these idiots a hundred times. Not being Friends of the CEO, though, no one gave a damn what we thought. We were just the helper monkeys.

Pray for Mojo

After having this happen to me about 3 times, I learned my lesson and gave up. Initiative, expertise, and hard work would only get you more trouble, so it was actually most effective to procrastinate on every project as late as possible, since the parameters would keep changing until the very end. By the time I was laid off, about 3/4 of my time was spent diddling around on the Internet or doing minor copyediting work. In that sense, getting rid of me was a good move. No point in having cops around if they’re never allowed to hand out tickets.

Now what? I don’t know. Look for work. Get my hair cut. Do some unpacking. Call the landlord about the mouse/mice that have been leaving presents in my bathroom and kitchen. Watch Nathan practice his chicken-wing flapping dance that he picked up somewhere. Hope for better things.

I don’t seek out political discussions here in America’s Heartland, not because I don’t enjoy them, in principle, but because there’s a lot of God Gets Mad When You Question Things sentiment, which means “discussion” doesn’t really exist.

No matter where we start, even if we agree on things like “Iraq is a mess” or “It’s too hard for most people to make a living wage,” for the other person it usually comes back to this formula:

1. America is a Godly nation–therefore,
2. Questioning America is questioning God–therefore
3. There’s nothing we can do, and it’s wrong to show disrespect to the leaders of our Godly nation, so long as they talk about being Godly a whole whole lot.

The strangest thing about all of these ideas is that they are not so much from the Bible as from some strange mix of selected Bible verses and weird John Bircher theories that seem to be pouring from America’s pulpits more and more lately.

Not only is it nonsensical and scary, it’s not even Biblical. What it is is the strangely addictive desire so many people have to let other people walk all over them, instead of having to stand up for themselves. It’s so much easier, after all, to live in a dream world where your country is great and perfect and your leaders wiser and more deserving of power than you’ll ever be, and if all doesn’t go well, you can just shrug and say “God’s will.”

But whatever you think of God, it seems…odd…that He or She would tell us to accept leaders who lie, steal, hurt the poor, torture the imprisoned, spread war, and cause suffering to the sick. I mean, if you think the words of Jesus about casting anyone out of heaven who did those things have any weight.

The only way you can claim to hold on to Jesus and still support this administration are by:

1. Forgetting what the Bible actually said and letting other people twist it to say what you want to hear.
2. Living in denial about the truth of what Bush and co. are up to.
3. Somehow believing that Jesus cared more for submitting to authority than caring for the poor, sick and imprisoned. Despite the fact that he was constantly on the outs with Jewish leaders and was crucified for being a political renegade. If Jesus had done what so many of his followers do, he would have kissed up to the Pharisees and Romans and defended their actions, no matter how bad. He certainly wouldn’t have stopped them from stoning a woman or pointed out their hypocrisy in parables.

So what gives, Jesus people? Do you worship some twisted, corrupted, brutal version of America that lusts for power and doesn’t care about the suffering that lust brings about? Or do you worship the guy on the cross at the front of your churches? You know…the one who was always droning on and on about poor people, helping others, being humble?

Much more exciting, I suppose, to slobber over other people’s sex lives and blame the poor for their own suffering (especially if they’re brown and speak something besides English). I mean, that Jesus guy…he was always making us feel bad, talking about all that helping he wanted us to do. Whereas Pastor Jim Bob McHellfire is much more fun, shouting about sex and movies and Raptures and uppity women and brown people, all of whom we can look down on, because they’re going to Hell and we’re not. Nanny nanny boo boo.

Ok, that’s harsh. But not really far off the mark. Feeling superior to other people is addictive. I know, because I used to do it, used to revel in knowing I was one of the Chosen and I knew the secret, and hey, ain’t I wonderful.

It might be good if some Christians asked themselves, what if all this hysteria about gay people and brown people is just a dodge, just a way to work us up into a frenzy so that we don’t do anything useful with our beliefs? I mean, if you believe in the Devil…that’s a pretty good bait and switch. When you’re signing petitions that stop gay people from marrying and pretending you’ve done something important, you’re not feeding anybody, clothing anybody, or comforting anybody. You don’t have the time or the energy. Your dollars go to Jim Bob’s “ministry” to pay for his flights to Washington to eat lunch with the President to remind him to keep hating gay people.

Meanwhile, behind your beautiful church building, a man digs in the garbage for food, talking to the voices in his head that he can’t afford the medicine to cure.

Meanwhile, across town a single mom tries to tell herself it’s ok to leave her 9 year old and 3 year old home alone while she works, because she can’t afford daycare and she doesn’t want to end up on the street.

Meanwhile, a former street vendor who was turned in to US forces by a bounty hunter sits in Guantanamo Bay and wonders if he’ll ever see his family again, or even get the chance to defend his innocence against those who call him a terrorist.

Meanwhile, the world goes on suffering, and the churches go on not caring at all.

I haven’t yet seen The Vagina Monologues, but I want to. Even more so after seeing this talk by author Eve Ensler.

Ensler and her supporters have used the popularity of the Monologues as a way to fight violence against women. But what I was moved by in this piece is how much it fit with something I have been thinking about lately, about why I want to be a midwife/birth activist.

Ensler describes women and men who have suffered violence, but who have, after grieving, determined to keep that violence from happening to others. Now, I only had a bad birthing experience, and a c/section I didn’t want, and I can’t really compare that to a woman beaten by her husband, or being genitally mutilated, or living under the Taliban (to use some of Ensler’s examples).

But. What happened to me was violence, even if it was done with good intentions, or at least those who did it told themselves that. I don’t believe there were good intentions; I believe there is indifference, sexism, greed, and justification at work in the minds of those who push the c/section rate ever higher in this country. I think those forces had much more to do with what I went through than any real concern for me or for Nathan. And I suffered, if not as much as many women, enough to know that I was hurt, and I grieved, and I had been wronged, and that it should not have happened the way it did.

And that it shouldn’t keep happening, that there was no reason for it to be happening other than those forces–greed, sexism, indifference–that were the worst possible reasons for it to be happening. And I wanted to fight back.

I thought, quite hard, about becoming a lawyer specializing in birth rights and reproductive rights, but I quickly realized that wasn’t my path, wasn’t the skills I had. I had thought about being a midwife before, but felt unworthy and intimidated of the idea. But once I realized the immense need for good midwives to fight for good births, I still felt unworthy, but needed all the same.

It will be humbling to go after this goal; I’m not all that certain of myself. There is a lot to learn, there is a lot at stake in each birth, and I will face bigger challenges than I ever could in my current series of dayjobs. I think about copping out on it now and then, but the pull always comes back. I love birth, I love the power and beauty of it, I love that it is something utterly unique to women. I am angry that sexism in medicine means we still know so little about it, that birth is still considered about as significant as buying a new car in a woman’s life. I am angry that so little respect is given to it, that it only gets seen in our culture in jokes about screaming women and panicked dads and sitcom cliffhangers. I am angry that doctors are painted as the heroes in birth while the woman whose body has done all the work of building and sustaining and birthing the baby is relegated to a supporting character. I am angry that almost no OBs have ever or will ever see a simple, unmedicated, non-crisis birth, that they are not forced to spend some of their time with midwives, sitting calmly and waiting while a woman labors, at the ready but not interfering till she’s needed. That all they see is a vagina in crisis and a baby in danger, that women are nearly erased except as a set of bleeps on a monitor or as an obstacle to the birth itself that has to be patronized and worked around.

I was hurt, and I grieved, and I’m angry, and I want to do something useful and real with my life. There are 8 million good causes to throw myself into, but this one seems to have picked me.

This artist has been around a while, engaged in various forms of artistic activism around birth/parenting and women’s bodies. I really enjoy her cartoon strip blogging as the personification of Hathor, the ancient Egyptian Cow Goddess associated with birth and the milky way.

She talks about a lot of issues, including natural birth, but breastfeeding is a big one for her. And while reading through her archives, it was funny to me how strange and wonderful it would be for women to be able to breastfeed without having to worry about what men (or anyone, but usually men) think. I mean, ok, some men are going to find Maggie Gyllenhall doing this:

arousing. And that will be taken as reason Not to Do It.

But you know…there are idiots with fetishes everywhere. If you tried to police yourself to avoid all of them, you’d never leave the house. If some git thinks feeding a baby the way it was meant to be fed is some kind of come-on, clearly they have mental and maturity issues. They are the ones with problems. I think women who breastfeed should do so wherever they need to, whenever, for however long they think is right. And people who can’t deal should look away, or just grow up already.

Breasts belong to women; if men like them, fine, but it’s not women’s job to tiptoe around the problems guys may have seeing a boob feeding a baby now and then. It’s mens’ job, to keep it to themselves, not to harass her, and stop feeling some sense of entitlement, some right to tell women what they can do or not do with their breasts.

We’re moved, and we still like our neighborhood. My drive to work is much better. If Matt takes me, we can take the HOV lane, and man, if that doesn’t make you feel like royalty, zipping ahead of the poor single-passenger schlubs.

The house is HUGE (to us), and on the surface, cute, in a hey-look-it’s-an-old-house kinda way. But like all old houses, it has Old House Problems.

We were clued in to some of them when the next door neighbor, Mrs. Needle^, asked if we’d bought the house from “Tim.” Tim, I think, must have been the owner, who did some…hasty…repairs^^ before selling the place to our landlords. Or he died and SOMEone did the repairs. I don’t think there’s been any other renters.

Before he kicked it/retired to the home, however, Tim must have been working on “renovations” for a while. The bathroom has a nice vanity and new cabinets, but no plugs. Anywhere. Speaking of plugs, some of them in the house have two prongs…but some have three. There seems to be no particular reason either way…sometimes they vary in the same room.

We have a garage with an automatic opener, but Tim did not give the remote to the leasing company. Nor did Tim install a wall button to open the door. So the only way to get into the garage was to unhook the automatic door opener and open the door manually.

Tim also neglected to put lights (other than the one in the garage door opener) in the garage, so we have to use a flashlight to go in there. And there are some BIG roaches, so I don’t do that too often. That’s where our washer/dryer hookups are…I’m not looking forward to installing those.

The yard is overgrown and the shade in the back means there’s not a lot of grass. No problem…except what there IS on one side is a LOT of poison ivy. Oh yay! Thankfully we saw it before any of us touched it, but now it’s a showdown to see if the landlords will come and kill it for us. So our visions of Nathan running around the yard will need some work. Also, it hasn’t stopped raining since we moved in, so what there also are are mosquitos..lots of them. And they love Nathan. So we’ve invested in organic baby bug repellent and some disks that promise to kill larvae if you throw them in standing water.

Tim did leave us a set of highball glasses in the kitchen cabinets. Thanks. But also a greasy fish-smelly broiler in the oven. Ew.

We’re making a little progress. We got most of the dirt off the floors and got some cheap IKEA rugs to make things homier. The rain is finally letting up. Nathan’s grandparents bought him a sandbox, which we’ve installed well away from the poison ivy. We painted the walls and killed most of the cigarette smell (Tim was a chain-smoker…or his friends were). Our cat is coming home in 2 weeks. And Nathan has made the (cleaned) laundry hamper in the hallway his hideout, which is pretty cute. Clean wood floors do feel nice and cool on your bare feet, no denying it.

I’m mostly conflicted about the backyard. Once we do get rid of the ivy, what do we do next? I’ve never done much maintenence, but I would like to make it nice for Nathan. There’s old leaves on one side, and inexplicably, landscaping wood chips in the side yard, but no path to get through them. There’s two old laundry line poles, which I can put hanging plants on, but what do I do about the mildewy crumbling slab that used to be the back porch? And what about the even-worse crumbling concrete sidewalk up front; should I keep stumbling over it (the landlord has told us he won’t fix it) or just spend my cash to decrease the hassle? It’s a rental house; I hate to sink a lot of money into it. But we’re not ready to buy, and we may be here for a couple of years. It’s hard to live in a swamp just on principle.

Rent in haste, repent in yardwork, I guess. Still, we mostly got a decent deal, and some of the repair/yard work I can look on as practice. The house itself, if it got a real renovation, would be a very nice, cozy little place. For us, it’s a step up, and that’s good enough for the next year or so.

^Mrs. Needle, the wife of Mr. Needle, who is not really called that, but who looks EXACTLY like Mr. Noodle from the Elmo videos, only with a meth addiction. The Needleses have already told us they’re moving to a trailer in Shreveport next month. Okey dokey by me.

^^Which included painting the tub. With house paint. Which did not cover the mildew, but does flake off in the shower. Hey thanks, Tim!