general discontent

I have not taken the time to blog in a very long time. My "animo" has been very low during this time and my tendency is to burrow and want everyone to leave me the hell alone when I feel this way.

After a lovely, lovely vacation abroad I sadly got walloped with real life in the form of summer school and very discouraging news about my proposed dissertation topic. I sulked for a long, long time over the criticisms I received about my topic and it was really not until yesterday evening that I did any work in earnest. I did make a list of reasons to stay in grad school vs. reasons to quit grad school the other day and have looked at it several times since its creation.

My poor sweet Skippy tore his ACL at the Bark Park on Friday chasing squirrels. He's having surgery on Monday and has to stay at the animal hospital for 3 days. I am already missing him. Ray thinks there is some significance in the fact that Skippy and the quarterback of the Patriots sustained the same injury. Who even knew football had started for another season? Plus we KNOW Skippy we do not actually personally know that man so focus, Ray, focus on the real issue here--our sweet dog is on addictive pain medication and is going to cost us a small fortune.

I'm also unsettled by the political situation in this country and the fact that I am surrounded by people altogether not like me. I read in the October issue of Glamour (do NOT even start, I know) a quote from Sen. John McCain that demonstrates what I mean. When asked about federally funded birth control programs he responded, "I would do everything I can to encourage abstinence among young women, and that we not have unwanted pregnancies." As a feminist there are so man places to begin my critique of this comment....how about with an obvious one, these young women do not impregnate themselves. I also just LOVE that somehow women and their bodies are once again the source of the "problem" at hand, unwanted pregnancies. Perhaps young boys might also benefit from such abstinence programs. Let's go back just one step, abstinence, abstinence, gosh WTF John McCain, are you really that old and out of touch! Those programs are sure working well when the teen pregnancy rate increased last year for the first time since the 1980s in the wake of increasingly more states adopting "conservative" sex education programs that only teach about and advocate for abstinence.

Before I go shower and head off to what else, my feminist theory class, I would like to just mention that Sarah Palin does NOT meet any criteria for a feminist that I have ever know (having a vagina is not required nor does it make a feminist by the way). Maybe I should be happy that at least the word feminist is spoken in the media these days, but I am not since the definition of the term and the varied aims of feminists all over the world are being distorted. I prefer to call her the anti-feminist. I guess she's the equivalent of the fat orange stripped cat to Skippy Lynch-my nemesis.