Fox News = Chicken Little (and Other Complaints)

At my job, there are seven flat screen tvs within my range of watching. Seven. There are more, I just can’t see them without turning around.
Seven televisions that play three different stations: CNN, MNBC, and Fox.
For eight hours I watch the news. Sometimes during this eight hour period, I read the news too. Sometimes before work, around 6:30am I watch a few minutes of the local news while I shovel down a bowl of cereal and a glass of orange juice. Sometimes after work I am inadvertingly exposed to even more news by my fat
her blasting fox news from the time he gets home around 6pm and whenever Bill O’Reily is over.

Because of this, I am so well caught up on the news that I often correct it. “Why are they showing this? This is week old news.” - “Actually, three other sources said it was 4, not 6 people…” Etc. You got my point. I watch a lot of news over the summer.

As a result, I have come to several conclusions about the news, the media industry, and American culture.

First: The Worst Thing that has ever happened to the news industry are 24/hr news channels. Really, there is only about forty minutes to an hour of news every day, fluxuating throughout the day. So what most news channels start to do is make news up to fill the other 23 hours in the day. Oh, I’m not saying that they lie. I’m saying that there is no other news to report so you have some reporter on a boat in the Mississipi talking about an overpopulation of native-to-China fish. This story is not news. No one [on a national level anyway], frankly, cares about an overpopulation of fish. Not only is it not news worthy, but they somehow manage to incorperate it into the day’s footage no less than ten times.

Second: Instead of showing stories about fish (or, todays story is about Redneck Fairs and doing things like arm pit competitions) over and over again, maybe they could incorperate some international news. The only time any international news comes up is if any of the following happens: 1.) it can be spun to be related to The War on Terror 2.) at least one American is involved or might be directly effected. 3.) it is about someone famous who happens to not have succumed to the pressure to live in Hollywood.
How about the flooding that is going on in Asia right now? How about the more than 40 in Vietnam and the more than 360 people in South Asia who have died because of it? That story got maybe two minutes four days ago. Yet for the past three days all they’ve talked about is the mine collapse. Where six Americans may or may not be alive but regardless, we’re going to hear every little detail about it for the next week that it takes them to dig.
Who cares about those in Asia, anyway. We’ve been trying to kill them through war and neglect for half a century. Nature’s doing it for us? All the better.

Third: Fox News is much more guilty of this than the other two stations (I know, you’re shocked). They have their “Around the World in 80 Seconds” - which only really happens in the evening - and then that’s it. They’re done. They’re back to war and terror and stupid things like armpit farting. They play the same stories over and over again, have the worst graphics, and have god awful captions that occasionally attempt to be punny. They are also the most dramatic. The difference between CNN and Fox News when it comes to caption and reporting is that CNN will say something like “Oh, X, Y, and Z happened! Isn’t that awful? Here’s some more information.” and Fox News is like “Shark Attack! Can you be attacked by a shark too?! The sky is falling! It’s the fault of Islam extremists! Look! A car chase in California! This retired cop from West Virginia will now talk about car chases. Do you have any video footage of the sky falling? Email us! We Spin, You Decide If You’re Really That Gulliable!”
The thing is, I see the same stories told multiple times a day by different stations. Politics aside, Fox News is still the worst at delivering unbiased, unspun, straightforward news. Not that the other stations are much better, but Fox News doesn’t even try. It just tells you that it is unbiased - that they report, you decide. But do so many people really not even question it? “Oh, they say they’re unbiased, so everything that comes from this source must be true!” And I think that’s what bothers me the most about Fox News and to a lesser extent, the other news stations. I wouldn’t mind the American-biased news, the repetition of the same stories over and over again, or even the bias in general… if it wasn’t for the fact that their very motto seems to go against that.

If Chicken Little came to you and said that THE SKY IS FALLING THE SKY IS FALLING, would you question her sources? Her intent? Her background? What kind of information is being left out or construed?

Then why don’t more people question their news sources?

Magic Wand

The first thing I ever bought as soon as I turned 18 was not a pack of ciggarettes but rather, a vibrator (from toysinbabeland.com).

I bought a silicone dual vibrator. It was a trusty device which was followed by the Nubby G, which I could never get to work as a g-spot vibrator but it had a nice strong vibration so it worked well for other things. Various other sex toys later, those two remained the staple of my little collection.
The problem being that vibrators get old. Even if the thought of an old vibrator doesn’t gross you out, they start to loose their vibration and just chew through batteries (they are literally the only things I bought batteries for).
In looking around for a new vibrator, I spent several weeks debating which would work best for me.
The Hitachi Magic Wand is a throw back from the 1970s that has survived for a reason. Its box has a bunch of early 1980s images of people using it to massage backs and arms and legs but everyone knows what they really use it for.
Described as “the Cadillac” of vibrators, its almost as big as one.
Well, actually its as big as my forearm, with the actual vibration part (clit-only) being about half the size of my fist.
It’s also electric which means no more batteries, you’re set as long as there is a plug in nearby.

And it is quite possibly almost too powerful. I can see why so many women swear by this. Personally, its a nice switch in gears but cuts out too much of that fun build up. Zero to orgasm in three minutes (or less) flat.

If that sounds appealing and you aren’t too worried about noise, by all means… go for it.

Choosing Celibacy?

I deliberately took a year of celibacy - starting late August 2006. I had many reasons to do this, one of them being that between January 2004 and August 2006 I had dated 8 people, including two women that were a year long and eleven months, respectively. That’s a lot of people and drama in two years and eight months.

In this year, my life hasn’t been completely free of drama, or even sex in the strictest sense of the word, but it has been pretty tame compared to previous years. Granted, I spent eight months of the twelve NOT at the drama cesspool (I say that fondly) that is my women’s college as I went abroad for a good chunk of that. I’m sure that helped a lot.

While it hasn’t been completely drama free (I’m starting to think that that is not possible, that life = drama), I feel like this decision was very good for me. I have spent a lot of time thinking about myself and how I relate to people both in relationships and out of relationships. I spent a lot of time thinking about what went wrong in those relationships, and time thinking about how I can improve my own communication and relationship skills.
I have grown and changed a lot in the past three years. All of these relationships have changed me in some way, all of these women and more have had an effect on my life in one way or another. This past Year of No Sexual Relationships was spent examining and managing these changes and the effect that it has had on my life and my outlook.

Some results of this year?

I have learned that I can grow and change as a person on my own, without this change being attached or directly influenced by other people. I have thought about who and what it is that I want in a relationship. I have learned that my genitals and impulses do not, in fact, rule my life.
And I started dating boys. Or rather, to give a nod to the gender spectrum, I started dating “people” rather than “women and the occasional gender queer/FTM.”
This last development creates a whole new slew of problems that would ideally need time to think about, time I will not get this year. When you’ve been identifying, living, and out as a lesbian since you were fourteen - seven years ago - what do you do when you start dating men? How do you explain to your mother if and when birth control (of any form) shows up on the family insurance statement? And that whole worrying about pregnancy thing, that’s just weird. Having to figure out what kind of birth control is going to work out best for me, having to worry about not just 2-4 STIs that are commonly transmitted between women but all of them? Straight women do this? Just to have sex? Christ. What a stresser.

But, my mother. Seriously. It has taken me seven years to get her used to the fact that I like women, I date women, and that she will end up with a daughter-in-law. Now, even if I explain that that is still a very real possibility [probability], her hopes will be pinned on me ending up with the nice upstanding [male] citizen, having a beautiful extended family wedding, buy an SUV, a nice house in the suburbs, a dog, and 2.2 little brats she might call grandchildren.
I haven’t really figured out what to do with her yet.

Why is sexuality so complicated? I’m starting to think that it wouldn’t be at all if society stopped auto-boxing people into heteronormative heterosexual relationships. Then all of this civil rights/gay marriage talk would be a non issue and people would go about their lives without having to worry about telling their parents anything about their sex life until they’re in a committed relationship.

I suppose if life was easy, it would be stagnant and boring and wouldn’t produce nearly as many great leaders or democracies.
Or, for that matter, sitcoms and reality television.

The Office Job

One of my summer jobs for the past few years has been to work for one of the more hated branches of the government. Kind of goes against all of my liberal feminist ideas but a job that pays is a job that pays, I’m a college student, I can’t afford to have ideals.

I work in an office full of really nice people who all do just about the same damned thing every day.

If this job has taught me anything it has taught me that sitting in an office for the next forty years is not how I want to spend it. They don’t give me enough to do, first of all. Which you wouldn’t think would be a problem but I am one of those folks with an attention span of 0 which means if I am not doing a bazillion things at once I am not paying attention. As far as I can tell by the prevalence of people getting paid much more than I do just standing around and chatting on a regular basis¹, that would not improve by taking a government job post graduation.

The Office is stagnant. It takes years for things to change, something that is more obvious to me as I only return over the summer. The people are the same. They dress the same. They eat the same lunches. They drink the same Starbucks drinks. They are in the same office cliques.

I crave change. Real pressure, real use of hard earned leadership skills. Is The Office going to give that to me?

In our service oriented post industrial society that is the United States, what the hell else is there to do but work in an office? I could create a company that becomes a maze of dozens or thousands of people working for me. That would be fun. But still in an office. I could be a professor, but then I’d still have to deal with the cattiness and competition that is the academic world. And there would still be an office environment. I could go to law school, but that would still probably involve working in an office.

Almost any road I peek down inevitably involves plugging away in an office somewhere for an undetermined amount of time.

Part of me is bitter about that. I am going to graduate with a private liberal arts education (and $30,000 +/- in debt) that has taught me that I Can Do Anything. Only, I know that in the real world it doesn’t really work that way and that so many of the things I have learned won’t necessarily apply.

I have learned that change can happen if I am motivated and organized enough for it to do so, I have learned to analyze and research and to form at least somewhat coherent arguments. Upon graduation I have international experience, a first hand look at the effect of globalization, and three years of a leadership training program under my belt in addition to my B.A. I have learned many things in my three years at school, and I am sure I will learn many more before I graduate. But what is the point really? Why did I make myself a well rounded person with a very expensive piece of paper if I could have done what most office jobs do with a year of on the job training? Where do I go now, with my fancy degree?

This is a problem of the middle class American college student and I know that. Poor me, my options might be limited to sitting on my ass all day and poking around on the internet in order to pay for my comfy lifestyle. I could be working for minimum wage in a factory putting one cog into another cog and grateful for the job because it pays for my food. I could be a mother in Cambodia with three children, trying to make a living washing clothes for Western tourists who spend more in a week than I make in an entire year - and I am still better off than my rural counterpart.

I am so privelaged with the life I got at random that I don’t know what to do with it and I am so afraid that it will go to waste in the short time I have.

¹ A generalization, of course. There are a lot of hard working people too, I’ve met them and they’re really kind of crazy about their job and don’t have a life outside of it. Kudos to them, I guess.

Public Blog Take III

So I thought I’d give this public blog a try again. I had several somewhat popular blogs during the course of my high school life.¹ It got weird because I’d randomly meet people who were like - “Yea! I know you! You’re [name] on [site]! I love your writing!”
Eventually, when I was looking at colleges as a senior in high school I would meet college students that recognized me from my blog. This was a problem.
Why is this a problem? You get 800 women together at one university and tell me they don’t gossip. Things like facebook and public websites are just asking for drama, which is a problem when you’re a first year and your life is going to implode anyway, you don’t need anymore help.

Who am I now? I’m a senior college student at a women’s liberal arts college. I am working on my senior thesis for my B.A. in History. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do with that later when I figure it out myself.
I live a typical college life of study, women, booze, the three jobs and the side gig. I deal with sexuality and gender issues, men, women, sex, as well as the Over Arching problem of What The Hell Am I Going to Do With My Life? I grew up in New England but I presently consider the DC Metro area my home and I plan on returning to the DC Area post-graduation in order to be properly gouged by the cost of living here ($1000+ for a studio apartment? Go ahead, call it Efficiency if you want to make it sound better, but you’re not fooling anyone! A box is a box is a box!).

So here we go. My Public Blog Take III. This design is temporary, eventually I will finagle my own because I have something you might call web skillz. However, until then this will do fine. Even if this design is called ChaoticSoul, a name that reminds me of all the gothic-emo poets at my school. Most of whom are good enough not to write poetry involving the word “soul” of any sort, but there are a few first years who haven’t quite kicked their gothic-emo-angst. I can relate to them in that I, too, once wrote awful gothic angsty teenage poetry, but at least I never thought I was good enough to make a career out of it (I chose History instead, which is only slightly better than Creative Writing in the scheme of degrees that will involve living in a box post graduation. Hey, we could be Women’s Studies majors²).

Why should you care about what I say?
You shouldn’t. But perhaps you are as bored, confused, and frustrated with your life as I am. We can bond over that.

¹Popular in that high school way that is simultaneously both popular and completely irrelevant.
² Tongue-in-cheek for those easily offended - that is my minor.