If so, head to the Jo-Ann Fabrics and Crafts store in Apple Valley, MN.
750words.com: The #madwriting
Time to rumble with some #madwriting! It’s been a long time since I’ve done this and since I still haven’t done my 750words.com writing for the day, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do it. Time to see what I can pull off…
First off, I’d like to say that I have kind of a vindictive streak, at least when it comes to people who deserve it. I’ll try and keep this as general as possible on the off chance that some of the involved parties read this and realize that I’m making fun of them. Basically, it’s an organization with a board made up of a bunch of people. What’s relevant about that is because someone is writing a newsletter for said organization and she wants a certain amount of money. They can’t afford to pay her that much and upon hearing that news, one of the board members sent out a fairly extensive e-mail about how there’s a bunch of money in some other funds, they paid her predecessor that amount, blah blah blah. There’s just one big problem:
He’s her husband.
Upon joining the board, he signed a conflict of interest form and his wife getting money is definitely a conflict of interest. I wanted to help write a simple e-mail about the situation, which really would have been one sentence: “We appreciate your concern, but we cannot accept any input from you in this matter due to your conflict of interest.”
The official e-mail that went out to the board included a lot of additional information and wasn’t nearly as direct and blunt, but it still pointed out the fact that due to said conflict, that board member should exempt himself from the vote. Every time I read that message, I start giggling and thinking about how pissed off he’s going to be when he opens that e-mail and reads it. “You’re not allowed to vote, so you might as well stop bitching now.” I know it doesn’t say that, but that’s what floats through my head, which is why I keep giggling about it. Does that make me a bad person? Eh, even if it does, I’m willing to accept the consequences. He wasn’t nice and started throwing some dirt, he got some dirt thrown back at him and it’s possible that I’m taking too much joy in the situation, but I can live with that.
But since I’m on a madwriting streak here and still have plenty of time to write, there’s something I want to touch on about a comment made on here earlier. Someone was really upset at The Onion because of an article it wrote on Patriot Day, focusing on how young people might be in the army, fighting for… well, they don’t know why. The World Trade Center went down 11 years ago, so 18-year-olds in the army would have been really, really young when it happened and probably wouldn’t appreciate the significance of the event. That struck a chord with me.
It also struck a chord with someone else, but not a good one. Why? Because her mother died in one of those towers. She lost someone very close to her and it seemed like The Onion was tormenting that loss, making fun of it and it cut deep. I don’t blame her in the least for being upset.
Before I continue, I want to emphasize that specifically: if you’ve lost anyone in a tragic accident, you have the right to be mad. Really mad. Whether it was the World Trade Center or shooting up the movie theater while The Dark Knight Rises was playing or losing a family member because someone was driving home drunk… it doesn’t matter what the circumstances are. You can attribute the blame to someone—someone could have acted differently and your loved one would still be alive. That “someone” did something really bad and you have the right to be mad. I’ll never question that.
What I don’t… well, I don’t want to say I question it, but I wonder if we should feel obligated to have the same emotional connection to such tragic events. I didn’t lose a loved one in any accidents or incidents or what have you. A close friend of mine lost her brother in Afghanistan, so the war means something very important to her. The blog commenter lost her mother to the World Trade Center disaster, so she’s got a major emotional investment in its occurrence. Me? Not so much. I felt horrible when it happened, but as time has passed, I’ve become somewhat distant in comparison.
In a way, I compare it to Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, except Kevin Bacon is Death. Kind of a twisted metaphor, but bear with me. If a loved one dies for whatever reason, it hits you hard. One degree. If a friend’s loved one dies, you feel the loss through that friend. Two degrees. You empathize with your friend, but that loved one… there’s simply not the same connection. No one should expect you to want to care as much about the dead person as you do for your friend.
Take it a step further to three degrees: a friend of a friend of a friend dies. Do you know that friend? At all? Sure, there’s a general sense of loss, but if you’re not grieving, should you be considered a bad person for that? It seems like the natural way of things: the closer you are to something, the more it affects you. The further away you are, the less it does. Hell, if you’re grieving for everyone who’s within three degrees, you’re non-functional. Too much emotional trauma. Maybe it’s a way for your brain to cope: you can only handle so much suffering at once before you go into a state of proverbial emotional overload.
And aside from the “six degrees” I mentioned, there tends to be a level of proximity as well: the closer something occurs to you, the more significance it has. If a car crash happens near your house and some people die as a result, it doesn’t matter whether you knew them or not. It was in your backyard—it happened right there. If you’d been two blocks away from your house, you might have seen it. That’s a scary thought, seeing someone die in a fiery car crash. I’m glad I haven’t seen one.
But they happen all the time. I haven’t seen one, I haven’t had one happen anywhere near me, I don’t know anyone who’s been in a fiery car crash, so that idea doesn’t bother me very much. I don’t stay awake at night feeling traumatized about the fact that fiery car crashes happen all the time. If I did, again, emotional overload.
New Yorkers had the buildings fall down in their neighborhood—they had a reason to care. But what if a building collapsed halfway across the world? Did they have the same emotional investment when the tsunami hit Japan, powerful enough to destroy nuclear power plants? Who knows how many lives were lost? Not us. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was all over the news and people were immensely concerned about what was happening and what we were doing to fix it. The tsunami? AIDS? World hunger? How often do you hear about that on the 6:00 news versus a fiery car crash that happened in your neighborhood?
So I can’t relate with someone who lost a family member when the World Trade Center collapsed—I feel bad for the person, but I wouldn’t be so demeaning as to assume that I feel the same kind of pain. At least for me, it comes down to those six degrees: how deeply something affects me emotionally depends in large part on my own connection to it. What is my relationship to a person, how close did it occur… what kind of effect did it have on me personally? That sounds kinda shallow when I put it that way… I blame Kevin Bacon.
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Patriot Day is just another day
I don’t want to call it a crisis of faith, but I’m having an internal struggle today and I blame The Onion. It’s not because they wrote a news story that some people thought was true, driving them into a ridiculous frenzy that makes me want to cry. No, in this case, it reflects a viewpoint that a lot of people reading this blog entry might not appreciate. The article is called “18-Year-Old Fighting In Afghanistan Has 9/11 Explained To Him By Older Soldier.”
Today is the 11th anniversary of the collapse of the Twin Towers. I remember standing in front of a TV and watched an airplane collide with the second tower in a giant ball of fire, then the first tower started to collapse as I rushed out of the room to go to class. I’ve written about it on here before. How I let a few tears trickle down my cheeks to mourn the victims’ loss, both those in the buildings and their loved ones. How I felt that Americans should consider today our day instead of a day that terrorists took from us.
Today is the 11th anniversary of the collapse of the Twin Towers. We’ve invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and God knows how many other regions in the Middle East since then. And if anyone wants to try to convince me that we went in specifically to “liberate” those people, save your breath—if not for the terrorist attacks here in the U.S., the number of American troops whose feet touched those sands would be microscopic in comparison. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate the sacrifices they’ve made, but I refuse to accept bullshit reasoning for our being there.
Today is the 11th anniversary of the collapse of the Twin Towers. We have troops stationed overseas who were in 1st grade when it happened. Do they fully grasp the significance of today’s date? Can they?
- Veterans Day is November 11th: in 1918, the Allied forces signed a cease-fire treaty with Germany to end World War I.
- Pearl Harbor Day is December 7th: in 1941, Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor. Four days later, we declared war on Germany and became firmly entrenched in World War II.
- Patriot Day is September 11th: in 2001, terrorists hijacked four passenger airplanes in flight and used them to destroy the Twin Towers and thousands of lives.
In an age where social media enables people to express their views throughout the Internet whether you want them to or not, 9/11 leads to an enormous number of Twitter posts and a multitude of status messages, flags and “Never Forget” pictures on Facebook. Veterans Day and Pearl Harbor Day? Almost nothing.
Most people who use Twitter and Facebook weren’t alive when those first two events occurred, so maybe that’s why they don’t fully appreciate them: “Never Forget” doesn’t apply when you never learned in the first place. That’s why I wonder how long it’ll be before September 11th becomes “just another day when the flag is lowered to half-mast.”
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As more parents skip shots for kids, other children put at risk
When I opened The Pioneer Press this morning, this was the article at the top of the front page (with the title above) and I did a little happy dance inside. Lemme explain why.
Basically, it drives me nuts when people make ridiculous, non-scientific claims and present them as objective truth: a woman’s body is capable of preventing pregnancy if she’s been raped (Rep. Todd Akin); Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for America’s abortion policy (Pat Robertson); and there’s a link between vaccines and autism (Jenny McCarthy, among others), something that’s never been proven. Never ever ever.
From the article: “Public health officials strongly maintain that there is no proof vaccinations cause autism. Last year, a prominent medical journal found a British researcher whose work gave rise to the childhood-vaccines-cause-autism movement in 1998 faked his data. Before that, other researchers checked out Andrew Wakefield’s hypothesis and none found a link between vaccines and autism.”
And to all the bull-headed parents who feel justified in ignoring the fact that there’s no data to support their beliefs about the dangers of vaccination, I have some good news: you’re putting everyone else’s kids in danger, too.
There’s something called “herd immunity”, which is pretty well explained by this website. As long as most kids get their shots, the rest should be fairly safe. As an increasing number of parents decide not to vaccinate their kids, my doctor has to start warning her patients about things like a local outbreak of whooping cough.
There is no connection between vaccines and autism. NONE. Scientific studies have demonstrated this fact time and time again. Consequently, if I have to accept medical advice from either my doctor or a Hollywood celebrity, I’d like to say this: Jenny McCarthy, shut the fuck up.
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“Hey, they should be able to get us back, right?”
NASA has confirmed today that Neil Armstrong has passed away, marking the end of his decades-long struggle to prove that he has indeed been alive since his first trip into space on the Titan II on March 16, 1966.
Numerous people at in the space program have claimed that they participated in the cover-up. Buzz Aldrin went so far as to say that whenever engineers contacted them in space, “I would mimic Neil’s voice as well as I could to tell everyone we were fine.”
Armstrong had always pointed to the fact that he had successfully passed every physical a doctor had administered year after year, but finally decided it was time to pass on.
Because Armstrong has chosen not to arbitrate against the determination that he has finally died, NASA is stripping him of all his famous accomplishments, including his presence on Apollo 11 and his world-famous quote upon touching the surface of the moon: “That’s one small step for man, one giant step for mankind.”
The official first words spoken on the moon will now be Aldrin’s asking, “Hey, they should be able to get us back, right?”
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Call me the Glass House weatherman!
Because I predicted a large chance of Andrea-win at the beginning of this final episode, but in the end, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Hell, as one of the final three, she ended up with the fewest votes, whereas Kevin emerged victorious! Cha-ching!
My mother’s theory for how he pulled out the win? He’s an attractive dude, so he had a majority of the female vote. (She also suggested that females are more likely to watch reality TV than males, but I imagine “Kevin’s a dude” was the more important factor.)
So Kevin took home the grand prize of $250,000; Stephanie came in second with her bribe money of $37,600; Mike gave himself a couple thousand during one of the challenges (he lost the challenge because of it)… Not everyone went home broke, but compared to $250K, a lot of the contestants don’t have much to brag about, especially considering how ABC presented them on TV.
The show is over, so I’m at peace now. Congratulations to Kevin, even though he’s not Steph. Congratulations to everyone else who didn’t get prize money, but still got a lot of national television exposure, even though some of them are jerks. And most importantly, congratulations to all the viewers and voters who survived this train wreck. The Glass House wouldn’t have been the same without you.
