Wednesday, February 21, 2007

On Stupidity

Bowing to pressure from rightwing nutjob parents’ groups and doctors’ groups who apparently are concerned primarily with physicians’ bottom lines, Merck has chosen to stop lobbying to make Gardasil, it’s HPV vaccine, part of the mandatory battery of vaccines administered to school age girls.

This makes me want scream and hit people with my shoe. More than usual, even.

This should be part of the mandatory vaccination panel for every young woman. This vaccine was found 100% effective in preventing two strains of HPV that cause 70% of cervical cancers. ARE WE LISTENING PEOPLE? It’s a shot that can prevent cancer.

Ponder that for a second. Take your time. I’ll wait.

Now why would anyone oppose a shot that fucking prevents cancer? Well, if you’re a rightwing nutjob, it’s because the HPV is considered a sexually transmitted infection and giving girls a shot to prevent it might encourage promiscuity. So, if you have sex before marriage, you deserve to have cancer. Riiight. Okay. I gotcha. What if you wait until marriage, but your partner did not, and he gives you HPV? Do you still deserve it? What if you marry a widower, or remarry one? What if, oh I don’t know, your uber-godly husband cheats on you? Do you deserve cervical cancer because your spouse can’t keep it in his pants? What if you’re a rape victim? Deserve cancer then?

Whatever, I don’t care what the answer is. I look at it like this. Parents can make whatever plans and have whatever hopes they want for their kids, but those kids are ultimately individuals who are going to grow up and to make their own choices. Some will undoubtedly follow their parents’ wishes and wait until they marry, others will go to college and discover beer bongs and casual sex. Further, we compel parents to do things to protect their children—like car seats—so why not this?

The other argument comes from the good folks in the medical profession. It goes like this: many insurance companies are under-reimbursing for the vaccine, and we don’t know who is going to pay for poor girls to get the vaccine, so we shouldn’t require the vaccine.

Okay. So, poor girls deserve cancer? GREAT. Doctors deserve to make more money on the vaccine? Even better.

You know what, requiring that all girls get the vaccine would, if my understanding of basic economics is sound, drive down the per unit cost to produce each vaccine dose. This would, if a modicum of public pressure were duly applied, likely cause the good people at Merck to pillage a little less with the sale price.

The most asinine argument, by far, is the fact that cervical cancer only kills 3700 women per year in the U.S., thanks to PAP smears and available treatment. So? Who cares if fewer than 10,000 women develop cervical cancer each year? How many woman are diagnosed with pre-cancerous abnormal cells and have to go through painful, expensive, uncomfortable treatments? That have the further added bonus of, at times, increasing the difficulty of being able to carry a baby to term. This is the argument? THIS?

ASSHOLES.

You know, if HPV caused prostate cancer, they’d put Gardasil in the water like fluoride.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Extreme Elimination Challenge: Literary Edition

The question on the table:

Do I still have my copy of T.S. Elliot’s The Waste Land?

Let me get on the record as saying that I have, sort of, read The Waste Land. More accurately, I have run my eyes over all the words in the poem. I read it in college, towards the end of a semester. I will admit, freely, that I did not give it the attention that any piece of serious literature—especially poetry—deserves.

That said, I hated The Waste Land. I hated it with a hate that was sure and true. Not only did I hate it, I felt insulted by it. By the time I was finished with it, I had decided that Elliot was, in fact, having us on. My working theory on The Waste Land is that Elliot was a dick with an inflated sense of self who was gleaning a sick form of entertainment from watching the dopes that were stupid enough to slog through his epic struggle to ascribe to it a meaning that it did not have.

BUT

When I finished reading it, exhausted, unbathed, and seriously annoyed, I promised myself that I would read it again within 10 years. “Why,” you ask? Because I might be wrong. Because even though they might not be smarter, there are people out there who are better-educated and harder-working than I who value and appreciate it. Because Elliot also wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” which is a genius little snapshot of the great tragedy of a small man and his small concerns. Because before I call one of the most important pieces of 20th century literature a horrific insult to letters and human intellect, I think I need to give it a second chance, if not to like it, then at least to appreciate it.

I used to hate tomatoes, after all, and now I view a salad of ripe summer tomatoes and balsamic vinegar and a lovely soft cheese as evidence that there might somewhere be a benevolent god. It’s important to revisit things periodically to see if they are as you left them. (Of course, if the little fucker is as awful as I remember it, then at least I can say I gave it a proper chance and thus that I really mean it when I call it the sticky leavings of a terrible literary masturbation.)

So, why now? Well, we’re right around the halfway point of the 10 year deadline, so it seems a reasonably good time. Right now, I have very little going on in the way of intellectual challenges, so I have the brain space and abundant time to devote to my little adventure. Plus, I don’t know, the universe has gone to considerable effort of late to make me re-examine things that I thought I understood. I figure, in for the penny, in for the pound.

I’ll keep you posted.

On Approaching Spring and Surviving Winter

Winter is losing its grip on St. Louis’s throat. Yesterday when I walked outside in the morning it was practically balmy—at least 40 degrees. I almost wept with gratitude. Then I promptly slipped on a patch of ice and gave myself a minor injury, proving that clumsy knows no season.

Spring, of course, is not here yet. But it’s coming. It’s hard to explain the feeling, the promise of it in the world. Usually, spring makes its promise during the January thaw. This year, however, the January thaw was apparently pre-empted by more harsh and wintry ass-kicking. Now, even though I know that winter isn’t over, I am equally confident that spring is coming.

It’s something about the quality of the mud, and the way the dogs act, and something about the birds. That, coupled obviously with the warming temperatures and lengthening days, is doing something to renew my will to live.

Hopefully it will also do something to kill the chocolate tapeworm I must be harboring. I’ve been craving chocolate in what I’m sure is my body’s way of releasing needed endorphins into my cold-addled brain. Fine, as long as my butt stays roughly the same size.

Monday, February 19, 2007

On Monologues and New Year's Non-Resolutions

I came, I saw, and I . . . moaned. A lot and loudly.

This weekend was The Vagina Monologues. It was a great experience, if not entirely what I expected. In future, I hope to get some direction from any directors with whom I work. “Thanks,” while appreciated, is not exactly useful in developing a character.

Still, though, a good time. I stood in front of a roomful of about 100 people and moaned—loudly and repetitively. A year ago I wouldn’t have thought I could do such a thing.

I find that I’m in an interesting place right now. I turned 30 in October, a milestone that I greeted with much the same enthusiasm as my annual gynecological exam. Like my trip to the stirrups, I figured it as a necessary evil that would pass more painlessly if I mostly ignored it and tried to relax. While my actual birthday was about that good (attention boyfriends of the world: do not stand up your girlfriends on their 30th birthdays—no excuse is sufficient or will staunch the inevitable flow of tears), my 30th year has, thus far, been rather enlightening.

My friends who are a couple of years older than I told me that being 30 was a self-changing thing. That I would feel more secure in myself, more certain, and less-inclined to the struggles and self-doubt that characterizes people’s 20s.

I don’t know if it’s the passage of the mile marker that is 30, or if it’s the fact that the latter part of my 20s were filled with sundry disasters that, at the end of last year, culminated in a sort of interpersonal Armageddon—wherein the worst thing I could imagine happening to me (that did not involve death or physical harm to self or close friends/family) actually happened. Once “the worst” has happened, it becomes increasingly difficult to give any more than a fleeting fuck about “the rest.”

I said before on this blog that I don’t much go in for New Year’s Resolutions. I still don’t. I have, however, embraced a couple of mottos:

1. What are you trying to prove?

Whenever I look at taking on a new task/chore/job/challenge/whatever—I ask myself what it is I’m trying to prove, and to whom I am trying to prove it. If I realize I’m trying to prove something not in question (“I’m smart”) to a random “them” about which I really don’t give a damn, then I opt out. If I’m trying to prove something that I care about to myself, then into the breach.

2. If I don’t owe you money; I don’t owe you anything.

Civility, decency, respect—sure. Otherwise, unless your name is Chase Manhattan and you are holding my freakin’ mortgage, then I don’t owe you a damn thing. There are some exceptions made for very dear friends who have a right to expect some things from me, and who pay me back in kind, but in general I’ve spent far too much time worrying a great deal about what others want or need, or think they want or need. Fuck’em and feed’em fish heads.

3. What could happen?

Thank you, Julie Powell of the Julie/Julia project, for this one. Want to try out for a play . . . what could happen? Want to take time off school/quit school entirely? Refer to Motto #1 to and quit already . . . what could happen? Stand in front of a roomful of people and pant . . . what could happen? Yes, this does lead to things like my recent Peanut Butter Dessert Disaster—but it also leads to fun things like first kisses with new people.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Cold day thinking

Not much going on here, winter continues sap my energy and ruin my fragile peace.

As the Bush administration seems to be building a case for attacking Iran, and as the Congress chases its tail by criticizing President Retread while apparently doing nothing to curtail his wild and wacky abuses of power, I have declared a partial news moratorium. It’s not that the news isn’t important; it’s just that it is so relentlessly bad that I find myself unequal to coping with it in my current winter-weakened condition.

One exception to the aforementioned news break is my seeming inability to avert my eyes from the ongoing car wreck that is the St. Louis City Schools. District parents are all in an uproar because the state is considering revoking accreditation and taking over control of the district. Now, I don’t blame these parents for being pissed. I do, however, find myself wondering if they’re pissed off about the right things.

After all, the St. Louis Public Schools have been failing to adequately educate City students for years. Economic mismanagement is rampant; schools are rife with lousy teachers; and the school board has degenerated into a backyard spitting contest. Why shouldn’t the state take over? I mean, I really don’t think they could possibly do a worse job. St. Louis City parents can howl all they want about local control, but they can’t break the intractable morons running the teachers’ union. They can’t force the fucktards on the School Board to hire and retain a superintendent who is worth a tinker’s damn. I usually try not to say this, as it seems like tempting fate, but I don’t see how things can get any worse.

Thursday, February 8, 2007

Nutty Blind Squirrels

There is not much going on here in the Lou. A whole lot of teeth gritting and waiting for Spring. The cold makes me feel like my brain is wrapped in cotton; it’s all I can do to formulate a coherent thought.

I comfort myself with knowledge that most people don’t even try to form coherent thoughts. So, whatever. I’m still ahead of the curve.

I’ve been kicking around various things to write about. Various rants about love and desire in the face of the approaching High Holy Day of Hallmark Mush, but whatever. I don’t feel like going there right now and besides, romance will still be stupid and glorious later in the month or year or whenever I’ve had a decent night’s sleep.

Plus, I should be trying to learn lines. I will be appearing in The Vagina Monologues on February 17, nine days from today. I’ve got nine days to figure out two characters that have nothing to do with me at all. One is a lesbian dominatrix. The other? A woman in a workshop who worries she’ll never find her clitoris. As someone who found and befriended mine at about 19 and has been taking it out drinking and buying it nice dinners on its birthday ever since, I’m having a hard time relating.

It’s so cool. I don’t remember the last time I did something that was hard, but didn’t suck really bad. To borrow (steal) from Mandy . . . Bring it.

Let’s see, what else is going on?

In an unanticipated turn of eventsPresident Retread actually has a good idea. Actually, he is espousing the good idea of others, but I’ll take it. He has proposed strengthening the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) Standards. An environmentally thoughtful policy that, at the same time, allows market forces to pay a part. Sweet god, Retread and I found something on which we actually agree. Never thought it would be happen, but mea culpa. As much as I usually hate to be wrong, I’ll embrace it this time.

Of course, I still don’t trust him. I still think that he might actually be a moron who watches television in a hotdog suit, or possibly just truly and sickeningly evil, but hey. . . even a blind squirrel gets a nut once in awhile.

Speaking of nuts, Anna Nicole Smith's death just got splattered all over the news. I find myself with this real sense of pity. I'm broke, and in debt, and freezing, and more than a little wacky, but at least I have some idea who I am. She always just seemed so sad to me. I mean, she was undoubtedly not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I don't believe for a second she started out as dumb as she acted (although later she might have killed off enough gray matter that she became that dumb).

No, instead she was just some blond girl who learned too-well the lesson that women are rewarded for playing stupid and being pretty. Apparently, she lacked whatever steel-rod spine is necessary to resist the garbage, instead embracing wholeheartedly the idea that "dumb blond" was an admirable career path.

Thursday, February 1, 2007

V-Day Audition

So yesterday was all about boobs, or boob-like objects. Today? Vaginas. I guess I could write about spleens or appendices or something, but what fun would that be?

I’m off tonight to audition for a V-Day charity performance of The Vagina Monologues. The work’s author, Eve Ensler (who I totally wouldn’t mind being when I grow up), allows it to be performed on or around Valentine’s Day to raise money for domestic violence causes.

I have always loved The Vagina Monologues, for a lot of reasons. First of all, it’s largely brilliant, touching and witty and sharp and sad and provocative in the way more things should be and most things aren’t. Also, it uses with great frequency and relish a word that makes many people squirm who desperately NEED to squirm. The Conservative Republican with the stupid haircut who dresses like he doesn’t own a mirror and sits three cubicles away from me? Vagina! Vagina! Vagina!

It would give him hives.

Plus, one of my goals for the year was to try to get out and act more. Just auditioning for this small thing feels like a step in the right direction; like I’m accomplishing something. Go me.