There have been a flurry of posts lately tackling the issue of social equality between men and women, i.e. the real glass ceiling is at home. I bookmarked the article that link goes to a few days ago, meaning to come back and patch together a coherent post about it, but of course, Bitch PhD beat me to it. And meanwhile I got all side tracked being horrified by this article in my Ms. - "A troubling Supreme Court decision weakens women's protection from abusers." Despite having a restraining order against her estranged husband, when Simon Gonzales drove off with their three daughters the Castle Rock, Colorado police department refused to grant Jessica Gonzales's pleas to go after him. Over eight hours later they discovered all three girls' dead in his trunk. When Ms. Gonzales sued the police department for refusing to enforce her restraining order, the U.S. Supreme Court declared, "We do not believe that ...Colorado law truly made enforcement of restraining orders mandatory." As if restraining orders for domestic violence weren't already enforced in a half-assed way, now the Supreme Court has essentially made them a worthless piece of paper.

My friends do amazing things. S-Lo won a small monetary amount for being an awesome art student (I'm sure it was somewhat more specific than that...) and used it do get to Spain to walk the pilgrims' path to Santiago de Compostela - all 900 kilometers. Check out her pictures here.

Germs 1 Public Health 0

So it turns out my cousin has whooping cough, which means I was exposed to pertussis over Thanksgiving. Which means two weeks of nausea-inducing antibiotics. Wa-hoo.

So a friend and I were having a version of the abortion debate when he said something along the lines of (I'm paraphrasing a bit here) - If I get a girl pregnant, and she wants an abortion and I don't, my responsibility/decision-making ability ends with my dick, but if she wants to keep the kid, my responsibility ends when my life does (i.e. child support, etc.). Now, to be frank, I would be a lot more sympathetic to this position if there were fewer dead-beat-dads lying around. But, in theory, I completely agree that this is unfair and gives guys the shaft. And since it sort of goes along with a father's rights conversation I had with Sid a while ago, I thought I'd throw it out there - So? How do we protect women from assholes while simultaneously creating rights and protections for nice guys? And thus, make a significant step toward real equality. (I'm punking out on making any solution suggestions myself; my brain is too full of causal inference and health disparities to tackle this one right now, so fire away peanut gallery!)

How come before I can get fingerprinted for CDC security clearance I have to sanitize my hands, but the dude who's all grabby with my fingers doesn't have to sanitize his? Ew.

Dude! I went to high school with this kid! And now he's guesting on Gilmore Girls and hosting on Google Current. The things you learn while procrastinating....

Blarg. So I have this friend. And she's in this relationship with this guy who has lied to her in the past and generally just not treated her right. And they've hashed things out and supposedly things are different now. And maybe I've just had too many friends in unhealthy relationships, but I just can't escape the feeling that she's different now than she was before this relationship. And now...well, now there's this situation that's resulting in her spending less time with our group of friends, and maybe I am just paranoid but it seems a lot to me like the sort of manipulative thing guys pull when they're trying to isolate their girlfriends. And she's got a good head on her shoulders, and she knows some of her friends are concerned...and I've spoken to other friends who've gotten out of bad relationships and they say to focus on "I" (I miss when we hang out, I wish we spent more time together, etc. etc.) and not so much on "him," which I've been doing...but I'm worried, you know?

Musings

Harry says that the worst kind of woman is one who thinks she's low maintainance but is, in fact, high maintainance. After sitting at the bar with Brad Friday night and listening to him talk about his girlfriend (who, freudian-ly enough, he says is a lot like me), I'm beginning to think perhaps the hardest type of girl to be with is the strong, independent, feminist type. You see, what happens with the strong, independent, feminist type is that, of course, we can't always, consistently, be that way, in every facet of our lives. So inevitably, there comes a situation in which we behave in a way that seems out of character, perhaps even 'stereotypically girlish.' Now, if we were stereotypical girls, this would be expected, but since we are not, it comes off as game playing. Which, in general, I would argue, it is not. We're simply...multi-faceted. And here's where we become difficult to be with - not only are you expected to see this coming, but also to miraculously know how to deal with it. Because more often than not, these moments when we are weak, insecure, fragile, and looking for you to make it better, are also moments that reflect our least favorite parts of our personalities. So these moments are, to say the least, tricky to navigate. And after listening to Brad's genuine surprise over various interactions with his girlfriend, interactions where her response seemed perfectly predictable to me, I am forced to admit that our type is perhaps the most challenging.
(aside - how weird is it that not only does my brother have a girlfriend, but he told my parents and I about her? It's like he's a pod person or something. It's nice. But weird.)

Tangentially, in another one of our conversations Carrie and I were revisiting what it is we want out of relationships - the seemingly simplistic request that people be nice to us. And, furthermore, that they allow us to be nice to them. Which all sounds very nice and easy to do. But there's a reason I phrased it that way - allow us to be nice to them. Our combined experiences would seem to indicate that this is not, in fact, at all easy to do. Mostly because what we mean is that people allow us to be nice to them without being weird about it. Which seems to stem from people misunderstanding what our niceness means. So here's a cheat sheet - it means we like you. It does not mean I Love You or I think you're my boyfriend or I expect some sort of commitment from you or any of a number of things that seem to freak people (mostly boys) out so much. Another problem that C and I seem to run into is this belief in a false dichotomy that a 'relationship' is either a one-night stand or a full-blown, meet-the-parents, start talking about forever Relationship. People - there is a middle ground. Chill out.

Then again, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that's just Carrie and I. Maybe we should get married and quit complaining about everyone else.

And lastly, just to re-cap, Thanksgiving with the family was nice. At times, surprisingly nice. On Sunday I went to church with Mom and Grandma, at the same church where Mom and Dad were married and Brad and I were both baptised. So that was neat. They had a pretty rocking Jesus Christ Superstar-esque chorus and during the homily the priest mentioned that reading the Bible should make us uncomfortable, should make us think, and should not provide us with easy answers. Pretty impressive, especially considering that this is Texas. Overall I ate way too much food, and Friday night I definitely drank way too much (as evidenced by my barely coherent drunk posting). It didn't seem like all that much, but by the end of the night I decided I was too full of beer and switched to gin and tonic. Never a good idea. Still, I probably could have gotten over that if I had managed more than an hour or two of sleep before heading to the airport. So for most of yesterday I had the worst hangover of my life, but pulled it together enough to enjoy pad thai courtesy of the Canadians and attend hockey with the Canadians and Andy and even indulge in a little hair of the dog during The Forgotten (not bad, but a little too happily ever after of an ending for my taste). Now it's back to reality. Hopefully tomorrow I can start to put a dent in all the research I was supposed to do last week...

Well kids...I think S-Lo said it best:

Gryphomia: oh my god
Gryphomia: did some one swim to the bottom of a very deep lake?
Gryphomia: and collect a very precious treasure?
Gryphomia: oh my god
Gryphomia: oh my god