I am currently going to get my undergrad degree in poetry, but it’s just the means to getting into a graduate program to get my Masters in Library Science, which means I’ll be a librarian. I’ve wanted to be one for a long time, since I love books and knowledge but I don’t think I could ever be a teacher since kids irritate me.
From November 2004 until September 2007, I worked in a library. At first I was just doing the circulation counter stuff, checking books in an out, shelving a bit, and helping out at the info desk, but I got a promotion to a cataloging position in 2006 that gave me access to all of the incoming books and I spent some of my time learning how to catalog, which was awesome. The problem is that to be a librarian, you need a Masters, which I find to be stupid since it’s not a job that requires cataloging anymore, depending on the job you want.
I’m not your typical ideal librarian style person. A while back I met someone online who I became friends with named Lily who is a librarian in New York. She has tattoos up and down her arms and is a bit too punk rock for your stereotypical librarian. But she works it, as does the woman in the following video: a fifty three year librarian who has taken up roller derby.
When I finally realized I wasn’t just a high strung person, that I had a serious anxiety problem, I was twenty two. I was having serious problems with chest pains, a racing pulse, and irregular heart beats. My doctor told me I had mitral valve prolapse, meaning the mitral valve in my heart was not opening and closing properly, and that I needed to stop drinking products with caffeine in them. She gave me a beta blocker and an anti anxiety medicine that she said I should take them until the stress died down in my life (my grandfather was dying, slowly, from lung cancer). After a few weeks of being on the anti anxiety medicine, I realized something. I wasn’t afraid to go out of the house anymore.
Sometimes it’s better and sometimes it’s worse. I stopped taking my prescriptions a few years ago and I’ve worked in therapy in the past on reducing my stress level, but it’s not all cognitive. Sometimes I know I am being weird or paranoid but I can’t control it. I guess it’s why it’s a disorder, durrrrr. But I am at another stage in my life where I’m paralyzed with fear when it comes to leaving the house. Part of it is money, to be honest with myself. I literally have none of that to the point where I’m strapped for cash to get to and from work. It’s why I don’t leave much anyway.
I need to get to a therapist or a doctor that will prescribe medicine for me, but I can’t afford it. I’m not sure where to go for free help, and even so, my anxiety makes it hard to leave the house to go to a new place. Today I decided I needed to do something about it so I started taking the leftover Lexapro that I still have. There’s enough there that it should start to make a dent and I can hope that I have my school money by the time that happens. Either way, I still need to go back to the doctor because my hands haven’t completely cleared up. They get almost normal and then a few blisters pop up the moment I stop using the hydrocortisone. I think it might be allergies also.
I made that post yesterday about all of the gun related comments I was getting with the question of why I was suddenly getting them in the back of my mind — I had the feeling they were related to someone I knew. Turns out my suspicion was right.
Two nights ago, I had this argument with an aquaintance who has been in a chat with me for the past year. In the past he’s shown himself to be racist, sexist, and classist. He’s a military man who is obsessed with guns and he has claimed some rediculous things based on studies that he’s read which turned out to be false. He’s also been known for saying there just shouldn’t be universal health care because the government already pays for his shit and it wouldn’t benefit him. So when he said that there were kids outside his house and that if they touched his property that he’d kill them, I wasn’t surprised. I have to admit I was particularly harsh on him, knowing full well that he’s just an ignorant bastard. I told him he’s pretty much a fucktard for valuing his property over human life. He also was the original person who told me I should get a gun because my place was robbed (we’ve already discussed why that doesn’t make sense).
Anyway, turns out he posted our conversation and my video on this website he’s involved with on a progun post. When I confronted him about it, he lied, left the chat, and then told that board that everyone in the chat was defending me because I’m a girl (he attempted to get the board to troll me with my skype…he gave them the wrong name). Funnily enough, no one else in the chat said anything. He then had the audacity to ask back in the chat.
When no one wanted to add him back, he tried to threaten me by posting my Whois info from my domain — I don’t have my real info on there for that specific reason. I’m not sure what he thought posting that would do, but there you go. It’s just the impotence of a man who has no way to attack. He can’t use his all important Uzi tha he keeps in the closet.
So I uploaded this video on youtube because someone broke into my house when Dan and I weren’t home and stole only my bike and (we found later) my video camera. At first, we thought it was only my bike that was stolen, which wasn’t a big deal, and I was trying to just let the person go about it — maybe they just needed it badly for some reason. But then I noticed my camera was stolen. The damn thing was four years old, so it’s worth almost nothing now, but it was my only portable video camera (the iSight built into my MacBook isn’t really feasible to use for making videos other than just talking into the camera). I was pretty irritated about it, so I made a video.
The response has been mostly positive, but I’m suddenly getting all of these comments saying things like, “You should have had a gun,” and “if you had a gun you could have intimidated them away from stealing your shitty bike”.
I’m not a big fan of guns anyway, but I can’t see how a gun would protect me from having my bike stolen while I’m not home. I’m just gonna go back to feeling lucky the idiot didn’t steal my PS3.
When I left for St. Louis this week, I decided I didn’t want to have to carry my camera with me. My only alternative, since I don’t have a point and shoot, was to use my iPhone’s camera.
I decided I liked some of these to start uploading them and making a set on flickr. The set will probably end up containing all the images I take with the camera from now on, and I’ll probably upload some more older ones when I get the chance. The phone camera seems to work pretty well in bright light and focuses pretty sharply, especially for a cell phone camera. It’s obvious though that there’s a lot of grain in any type of darkness, which I expected.
The first picture I showed was in much lower light than this one. Colors look nice and bright. For a phone camera, it’s pretty stunning.
It seems that events like that that are segregated for men and women are done so because women cannot compete on the same level as men physically. While I agree this is usually true, there are plenty of women who can. I’m not advocating changing events or trying to prove that women and men are physically equal because we’re not (and btw, in my view as a feminist, when I express that women and men are equal, I mean rights-wise because we sure as fuck aren’t emotionally, mentally, or physically) and I am completely accepting that breaking genders up into groups is akin to breaking up wrestlers into weight classes. But the problem is that gender is not binary. I know, I know, old news, right? But where do we draw the line? Let’s say that Semenya has the body of a woman but for some reason has an XY chromosome. She is born as a woman, identifies as a woman, and is a woman. I feel like, and this is speaking from my opinion, not hers obviously, that trying to prove she is not a “real” woman is taking away from her identity.
As we know now more than ever, the way your external genitalia expresses itself is not always what is going on internally, genetically, or mentally. I also feel like it’s always women who come under this pressure, not men. Feminine men are not usually put under suspicion of possibly having too much estrogen.
Forgive any ignorance in this blog entry. Just trying to express myself in some way about how much it irritates me but I know I still don’t know enough to give an educated opinion.
As you all may have inferred by this point, I am a huge time travel nut. I also love Futurama. Over a year ago, I bought the first three seasons of the show because they were on sale for $20 a piece, which is really cheap for a season of a tv show. I’ve watched them four or five times by now, but I never bought the fourth season.
I’m currently in St. Louis at my friend Erin’s house and I noticed she had season four, so we watched it. I had seen a few episodes, but not all of them, and I enjoyed the ones I hadn’t seen. The show is much better than any other cartoon, for me, because of the element of science in it. (Also the fact that they’ve dipped into time travel a few times doesn’t hurt.) When we finished it, I still wanted to watch more, and I saw she had two of the movies they made recently (Bender’s Big Score and The Beast with a Billion Backs) so I gave them a watch.
Both of the movies were a good length and multiple plot threads that kept my attention. You definitely need to watch them in order. The first one was all about time travel. Bender recites some binary code that’s written in a tattoo on Fry’s ass and it causes a portal to open up that he walks through to steal things for these creepy nude aliens. Not much is explained technically, but the Globetrotters show up again to help like in the time skipping episode. There are very few paradoxes contained within the movie (some can be explained by Bender’s inability to consolidate his trips, but the one that causes the final moments of the film is impossible) but a lot of things that happen in normal episodes of the show become paradoxical.
The Beast with a Billion Backs starts off right at the end of the first movie. Fry starts dating a girl who he is very into and ends up asking to move in with her. When he goes to move in, he finds out she has four other boyfriends who live with her. He’s first uncomfortable with it, but grows to the idea until he realizes she’s still looking for more men. Here I’ll omit some of the plot that would ruin the first movie, but Fry ends up falling in love with a space alien who then says he’s in love with the whole universe. It’s kind of a mockery of polyamory and monogamy so I really enjoyed it. At the end, Bender says something like that real love is jealous, which made me laugh. I haven’t much talked about polyamory and how it relates to me on this blog, but it people are interested I could give it a go.
Anyway, two great movies that made me really think that the writers of Futurama were writing specifically for me. I suggest the show and the movies (though there are two I still haven’t seen) for anyone who likes scientific themes and coherent cartoons for adults.
As a poet, I feel like any photography I do will always be a reflection of the words I use. When I think, I think in words, not images, unlike visual artists. This site houses a minimalist dream log, my poetry including poems from You May Waltz To Your Doom In Sanguine Stained Shoes, my photography, and a blog with Let's Play related entries.
