The Fallout

Monday's music of the moment: The Fallout

The newest addition to my iPod would have to be a few of this bands songs, particularly from their second album, Dismantlement.

It's pretty straight forward punk; maybe a mix between a slower, less revved up Good Clean Fun and some sloppy Green Day chords, but their lyrics are smart and it's pretty entertaining to listen to. My favorite songs are probably 'Riot Boys' and 'Bread and Freedom'. You can hear some of their stuff here, if you want a bigger listen than what iTunes lets you hear before you buy.

This is me pimping capitalism again (sort of)

Hopefully there are enough procrastinators around that this post is still somewhat relevant.

As many of the folks I know are likely to buy some sort of holiday card set anyways, I don't feel like directing people to essentially buy from a "better" place is totally out of line. I usually just make my own holiday themed cards around this time of year, but realized quickly my list was going to be too long for that sort of endeavor - so I found a compromise. I give money anyways to a few different environmental organizations, Peaceful Prairie (http://www.peacefulprairie.org/), ect; so I thought I would try to multi-task a bit better.

One of the websites I was at was featuring holiday-ish cards you could buy, with 10% of the profits going directly to charity. Well, honestly those cards were poor, and costly (10 for $15!!!) and I thought for that price it should be a bit more then 10, as I continued to think about it. But a quick goodsearch (www.goodsearch.com for those folks who haven't switched over yet!! It's exactly like searching yahoo! ) latter I had stumbled on http://www.cardsthatgive.org/charities.html which I really ended up liking. They organize everything by category, and have a quick key that shows you how much of the proceeds go directly to charity. I ended up with two different designs from http://www.healthebay.org/ ; and 50 cards for $30, a much better ratio!

^My favorite of the ones I got. Who can resist dolphins? Plus I can sneak in with winter greetings my favorite Finding Nemo quote, "fish are friends- not food". Too bad they didn't have any shark ones. Now I just have to remember to mail them out.

So for anyone who hasn't invested yet in holiday cards, try this out; or just save it for next year.

My etsy shop

With it being summer, and LSat's being over I found some spare time and so I started selling some jewelry I made. We'll see how that goes for a bit!

http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5601067

Celebrities are an odd set of people

So in case somehow in your vegan bubble it escaped your attention (though doubtful)-- Oprah is totally going vegan.

For a month.

Lots of vegans couldn't be happier at this turn of events; but I'm, of course, extremely dissatisfied and practically offended. It would be one thing if there was just the statement that she was going vegan. Fine. That's great. The more the merrier, one down, only billions more people to go.

But for one, there is a deadline, and a pathetically short one at that. If some dude came up to me and said, you know- I'm going to reject sexism for a whole month!, I wouldn't exactly be doing cartwheels. And correspondingly I'm not now. I guess compassion is only good less then ten percent of the year? SO odd.

She isn't doing it to be compassionate anyways, though. It's this "cleansing" thing from a book Kathy Freston wrote that is so hippish, it has me shuddering. Admittedly, I've only seen the offhand soundbite on Ellen or Oprah that other folks have tagged for me, but that has been enough.

Freston was on Ellen explaining the whole book (in ten minutes or less) and she was perfectly complacent with a situation where a person would just pick one day of the week to go meatless ("Meatless Mondays" was her suggestion). I get people sometimes need a starting point, but that is ridiculous. Maybe Mondays will be my meatless day, Tuesdays will totally be all about rejecting racism, Wednesdays will be my super feminist day... you obviously get the picture. It's insane, and other being deserve more then that.

To top it all off, Oprah is making this big production of all that she's giving up, and a lot of the things have nothing to do about veganism. Caffeine, sugar (alright, some types), glutton--nothing to do with veganism. So understandably, it is just confusing the issue even more. My mom called me up, in fact, to tell me I've been doing it wrong all along-Oprah isn't drinking coffee because it's not vegan--and if I've been "cheating" all these years anyways, why won't I enjoy a little ice cream with her? This is me, banging my head against the wall.

Oh! And Pink is standing up for puppies!! Finally, folks are standing up for beings that have no one advocating for them.

Don't even turn the television on anymore

Objectified flesh covered in dead tortured flesh. Sure sounds sexy to me. Designer Tuleh, who was on America's Next Top Model made sure to mention it was, as he looked at the womyn clothed and surrounded by flesh.

Insert the obvious Carol Adams critique here. Particularly for me, as I looked at the images and heard the (shockingly) sexist and speciest commentary, was the part at the end of The Sexual Politics of Meat where she iterates,

"For women in the patriarchal culture...we have been swallowed and we are the swallowers. We are the consumers and the consumed."

Wrapping yourself in consumable to most flesh certainly drives this point home, literally saying consume me as you would meat.

I keep getting these mailings from Nigel Barker for the last three weeks or so (okay, so really probably the HSUS or some other messed up organization [why am I still on their mailing list?] that pretends to be "for the animals" sometimes--but my e-mail sender totally says it's from Nigel, so...) and I know that these e-mails contain pictures of super cute seals, so of course I looked at them. And they are, SO cute. Like a cold puppy. And I decided to move Nigel up a few points on my cool list because he has this letter that clearly states,

"Like you, I care about animals and I don’t ever want to see them suffer...Each year, hundreds of thousands of defenseless baby seals are brutally clubbed and shot to death for their fur—most of which is exported to Europe.I still remember the first time I saw the shocking images: conscious seal pups impaled on metal hooks and dragged across the ice, wounded seals left to suffer…some baby seals even skinned alive. I vowed then to do everything I could to stop this cruelty."

Replace the seal with another being and fur with flesh and the same thing is happening, only by the billions. So, how is this different again? Shouldn't you be vowing to stop the cruelty to these beings used in this shoot? I don't know how some people's heads don't explode with the disconnect they try to make their minds mold to.

So, I'm obviously not going to show some pictures of flesh on flesh, but I will show a seal pup:

and while you're at it, take a look at this cute cow because s/he is totally worthy of your compassion as well.

Issues with addressing groups

(This is the post in which I will pretend I haven't neglected my blog). I think it comes off a little they said, then I said, in parts; but bear with me-I'm trying to get on the blogging track:

So, a few instances have popped up recently that has made me think a bit. A fairly new co-worker asked me the other day if I was from "the South". Being confused at the seemingly random question, after answering in the negative I asked her why. Oh. Because I used the word ''y'all" when addressing my table, which was apparently weird if I didn't hail from there. After saying very vaguely that it is my favorite gender neutral address, I was told that they were all ''ladies" and I totally should have totally addressed them as that.

I don't know them, or their gender; so I would never address them in a way that took for granted that. The topic, much to my dismay, gets continued fairly often. Cries of, "you did it again!", and little remarks of how I'm a "crazy vegan (though I struggle to find the relevance of this particular quip-maybe just to further emphasize how crazy I really am?) feminist" gets repeated now, and I just seriously never envisioned this thing as labeling me as such. Is addressing a group with gender neutral language that extreme? Really? How depressing. I think my next dilemma quite possibly enters that category, but even so; I think it's something to at least spend a bit of time thinking about.

I finished a short presentation with a classmate and afterwards the professor exclaimed, "thanks girls, and now I believe you two gentlemen are next?". Okay. Even assuming that the classmate I worked with identified as female, and following presenters identified male--there is no positive or helpful interpretation of that remark. It wasn't "ladies" and "gentlemen" which could have been at equal levels I suppose; it was girls. And a lot of times I think of myself as a kid, sure, (certainly at school sometimes) but this seemed deliberately dismissive; especially when put so closely with identifying two males as the latter.

What really irks me even more, as I've been trying to pin down as I've been thinking about it, is that it all seems unnecessary to me. How is it relevant what gender the presenters were (especially in a situation where all of us are getting a grade)? Is it really important to classify my customers as male or female and address them as such? No.