Wednesday, June 29, 2011

This is a very nice song



You should listen to it.

Monday, June 27, 2011

When I leave for the night I ain't coming back

The six-week bridge program I'm working as my second summer job started today. I'm teaching a workshop for a US history class, and to introduce the students to one of the central ideas of the course and the job of historians, the lecturer presented various portrayals of American women from the 1880s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and finally the present. I was pleased that the students were making interesting and even insightful observations, which means they're probably a) excited about the course and b) did not have their critical thinking stunted by the clusterfuck that is high school history.

But what was most interesting, I thought, were the observations they made about the contemporary portrayal. They made great comments about challenging patriarchal authority and pre-conceived social norms and gender roles of the "ideal woman", but also how this rebellion was still framed in comparison to men and was not considered socially acceptable behavior or even behavior to which they aspired.

The portrayal they were analyzing was* Ke$ha's video for "Tik Tok".

These next six weeks are going to be awesome.

*In case you hadn't figured it out from the title

Sunday, June 26, 2011

We're here, we're queer



Kristy and I went to San Francisco for the Pride Parade today. BART was absolutely packed; it was like the bus I used to take home in high school. By the time we got to Powell, Market was packed with people and we couldn't really see the parade, so we wandered towards Civic Center, looking at booths and costume-watching and passing by stages and eventually finding a nice area with good dance music and a nearby Mexican restaurant with really cheap beer. Even though I dropped my camera and now the screen isn't working, it was still amazingly fun. And really, is there more you need in this world besides queers, beer, and dancing?

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Are we going to have to save the school again?

I saw Harry and the Potters on Thursday night at the this tiny anarchistic library/commune/coffee shop here in Berkeley and it was such a great show, like no show I've ever been to! They could only set up one drum and a xylophone and only one of them was playing guitar so they were a bit limited in the songs they could play but the intimacy and interaction made it so much fun! Here is my really bad video of them singing "Save Ginny Weasley":





I also went to yesterday's show at the San Francisco Public Library. No photos or videos, because I forgot the battery in my camera, but it was also amazing, this time because they could actually run and jump around and had the full keyboard and drums. They have such a great rock star energy. They jump and thrash and jump off stage into the audience and interact with everyone in a way that is just unlike most concerts or even smaller gigs. Even though the music isn't really impressive, they make up for it in ~*magic*~

Friday, June 17, 2011

You can't always get what you want

So according to Dilbert author and bonafide asshole Scott Adams, men are a bunch of square pegs forced to hammer out a miserable and unhappy existence in a round hold society.* I was going to write a coherent rebuttal, but fuck that. Adams' piece of shit blog post makes absolutely no sense and barely follows its own line of argumentation, so why should I?

The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes.


According to Adams, the "natural instincts" of men are to shag anything that moves and tweet pictures of their junk. I personally think that's a bit insulting to men, as I know many guys who seem to be pretty happy with their lives without taking pictures of their penises and sending them to every woman they know. But maybe he's just referring to the idea of having an active sex drive in general. In which case, stop assuming that women don't have sex drives, you asshole. We do. Women also take pictures of their boobs and text them to people. Not that I'm saying that makes it a necessarily good decision, but it happens. Stop acting like men are the only people who want to have sex and that they're somehow oppressed because it's not socially acceptable to stick your dick in someone every time you get a boner.

All I’m saying is that society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness.

Oh yeah, not getting what you want instantly all the time = unhappiness. The reason you can't always get what you want is OH GOD WHY AM I EXPLAINING THIS GROW THE FUCK UP. Even Mick Jagger understands this. Jesus fucking Christ.

Consider Hugh Hefner. He had every benefit of being a single man, and yet he decided he needed to try marriage. Marriage didn’t work out, so he tried the single life again. That didn’t work out, so he planned to get married again, although reportedly the wedding just got called off. For Hef, being single didn’t work, and getting married didn’t work, at least not in the long run. Society didn’t offer him a round hole for his round peg. All it offered were unlimited square holes.

Wait, so if hiring a house full of women to be your harem (I'm not sure if that's actually how it works, but basically he is surrounded by beautiful women all day and I think he has the option to sleep with many of then? I don't know) doesn't count as fulfilling a man's natural instincts (as Scott Adams defines them), and neither does getting married and having one woman that you can constantly have sex with (not that this should be how marriage works, but I'm trying to understand Adams' logic here), then what the fuck? I don't see how this example makes any sort of sense according to the previous argument. What would another option be? If his argument is that society is constricting Hugh Hefner to choose between these two terribly oppressive** lifestyles, isn't his argument invalidated by the fact that Hefner's "single lifestyle" is outside the societal mainstream?

Maybe Adams doesn't get laid enough ever and therefore is completely miserable all the time, but I think it's acceptable to expect men (and women) to keep their sex drives under a certain amount of control, and also expect that mature adults can find happiness in things other than sex.

*Insert penis joke here
**Again, Adams' opinion, not mine

Sunday, June 12, 2011

We went to San Francisco yesterday






Bernadette had to do a photoshoot with her former boss. We had our own side photoshoot going. Also, there was a naked bike ride.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Top marks for not trying

Just got back from seeing the Arctic Monkeys in Hollywood. They were amazing! Alex Turner is so good at what he does! Ahhhhhhhh!