Maybe it's my punishment for being so angry all the time..

Sarah's apartment got broken into this weekend.

Fuuuuuuuuuck.


I know I shouldn't complain. I know it wasn't my house. I wasn't made to feel violated in the same way, her insurance company is covering it, and for these reasons I feel a combination of relief and guilt. But that computer was my house. It's been with my longer than any apartment, anything I have had and discarded over the last few years. My music, my pictures, my journals, my essays, all gone. All there for someone else to see, but never again for me. They took it to Best Buy to get everything they needed to make it their own. The guy at Geek Squad knew it was stolen, but couldn't do anything without losing his job. He contacted me later, found me on Myspace, after the man with my Mac was gone. He asked me for anonymity. Best Buy has too many privacy laws.

Kickin' it old school.

I'm sitting in the "Learning Resource Center" at KCC. In other words, a library with some computers in it. What was it called in high school? The media lab or technology center or something. I don't know why we can't just modify our definition of library a little. It is full of books.

I'm trying to study a bit for my upcoming test in World Lit. Reading over the Spark Notes for each of the ancient texts. Of course, I am slightly distracted by facebook chat. It really is the ultimate in time wasting. And what is going on around me, you may ask?

In our little triangle of computers, there are seven people. Me, a girl who is in my Comm 101 class who I can see is working on her speech for Thursday, and five idiots gathered around the third computer like it was a television in their parents' living room. Three dudes bros are doing very bad impressions of what I gather was last night's episode of Family Guy. The girls are giggling like these guys are the funniest, most clever people they have ever met. They show each other stupid videos on YouTube: headphones plugged in and turned up all the way so they can all hear. All of their phones go off constantly - not on vibrate but instead yelling out the latest rap single - and they sit around chatting over each other saying things like, "I got so hammered this weekend.. No, it's cool, I'm just in the library." The dudes wander off and one of the girls still sitting on the desk tell the other girl quite loudly how she had sex with one of them at his grandmother's house before going out and "getting shitty, hehehe." In the twenty or so triangles around us, the same scene plays out, over and over and over..

Really? REALLY? Have you no couth? No manners at all? I mean, I am not prude, and I'm not that asshole who gets angry if you come over and tell a friend hello, but this is just completely ridiculous. It's shit like this that makes me truly believe all the reports about our generation being the turd of civilized society. As I type this, three hours later, the phone of the girl in the same thing as me has gone off - and this isn't an exaggeration - at least thirty times. She is texting, but has on headphones on also, and doesn't hear it half the time. C'mon. Wouldn't vibrate benefit us both at this point? But instead, over and over, "(Bum bumbum) You came here by yoursellllllf TONIIIIIGHT..."

And that is why, for the thousandth time in my life, I am saying:
Fuck you, KCC.
Fuck all the girls with their Baby Phat coats and Pink! sweatpants, bunched up around their Ugg boots, carrying Lamb purses, talking on their phones like there is actually anyone in the world who would care if you choked.
Fuck the dude bros with their sideways hats and baby faces. Yes, I am five years older than you, and I don't give a fuck how cool you are.
Fuck all you fat assholes who walk around all lopsided because you can't easily reach your fatass arms around your fatass body to your rolly backpack, then take the elevator up one floor and look at me like you are going to eat me for my ability to take the stairs.
Fuck the lazy library staff who don't say anything when it's as loud in here as it is in the lounge.
Fuck all the couples, walking around entwined in each other and making out. It was gross in high school, and it's disgusting in college.
Fuck all the athletes, in your Bruin gear, going to college for free because you can play basketball at a CC level. Athletics/athletic scholarships at community colleges are the biggest waste of tax dollars and my tuition that it makes me shake with anger.
Fuck whoever decided a tiny iceberg salad should cost $4.50.
Fuck all the art students who walk around like this is the hub of modern creativity and they are the next Andy Warhol/Thomas Kinkade.
Fuck everyone who gets in a shouting match/physical fight IN COLLEGE! Grow the fuck up!!
Fuck every moron in all the Soci/Poli Sci classes I have ever taken, who say crime, poverty, illiteracy, etc, are personal problems that deserve no government aid.
But seriously, fuck rolly backpacks.

But here is something I have never been able to say before: Four more days here, and I am DONE! Good Riddance, Kellogg Community College. Congratulations on being the inner city high school of Michigan colleges.

Becoming a Nun

On cold days
it is easy to be reasonable,
to button the mouth against kisses,
dust the breasts
with talcum powder
& forget
the red pulp meat
of the heart.

On those days
it beats
like a digital clock--
not a beat at all
but a steady whirring
chilly as green neon,
luminous as numerals in the dark,
cool as electricity.

& I think:
I can live without it all--
love with its blood pump,
sex with its messy hungers,
men with their peacock strutting,
their silly sexual baggage,
their wet tongues in my ear
& their words like little sugar suckers
with sour centers.

On such days
I am zipped in my body suit,
I am wearing seven league red suede boots,
I am marching over the cobblestones
as if they were the heads of men,

& I am happy
as a seven-year-old virgin
holding Daddy's hand.

Don't touch.
Don't try to tempt me with your ripe persimmons.
Don't threaten me with your volcano.
The sky is clearer when I'm not in heat,
& the poems
are colder.

--Erica Jong

of course.


Hmmmmmmm.... I have been listening to way to much Bright Eyes' Lifted

I don't believe in an interventionist God..

It's funny how little things can come along and keep you from having a major breakdown. School has been driving me nuts, relationships have me swimming, and finances have me drowning, but little things happen that keep me going. I don't believe in some kind of intervening force; too many bad things happen that people can't handle. Maybe it is just that we notice the little things more when we are under stress, and that is why they seem so extraordinary. Either way I know enough to be grateful for them.
A glass of wine with friends.
An unexpected kiss on the forehead, standing in my candlelit kitchen.
A really nice table that tells you how great you are doing.
This morning I was walking out of class, and this nursing student calls out my name (what is his?). I waited, curious, as he caught up to me. "Hey," he says as he approaches, "I just wanted to tell you that I've shown that list you gave out to like everyone I know."
I'm surprised. Last week when I gave a speech on organic foods and how they can reduce your carbon footprint, not only did I get a bad grade (too persuasive, not informative), but I had to practically force a handful of kids to take the half page handouts I had made on the cleanest and dirtiest non-organic foods (even my professor refused one). I went home with about thirty of them still in my backpack. "Wow, really?" I smile at him, "That's really awesome!"
"Yeah," he said, nodding, "Like you said, it's just really easy tool. I just wanted to tell you I've been using it, and it's really helpful. I've always wondered about that kind of stuff. It was one of the only speeches that was actually interesting."
I probably looked like a grinning moron staring back at him while he was talking. I shook my head to make myself speak. "You don't know how nice that is to hear," I say, "I really thought I was annoying people. Thanks."
He smiles back at me, like he understands what I am not saying, then touches my shoulder as he passes behind me and heads in the other direction. His touch feels slightly heavy and warm, tangible even after it is gone.
---


But I know, darling, that you do
But if I did I would kneel down and ask Him
Not to intervene when it came to you
Not to touch a hair on your head
To leave you as you are
And if He felt He had to direct you
Then direct you into my arms

Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms

When it rains, it snows.

Winter sets in and drowns me in it's darkness. I sleep in too late and then it gets dark before I have gotten started. When I get up early the crisp, bright cold is lonely and I desperately want something to warm me up. I'm constantly reaching out. Just put your arms around me and we'll watch the sun come up, looking distant and unimpressed. Then we'll sleep for days and days and days and it will be sunny the whole time.
I
I
I
I
Me
Me
Me.




(Everyone I know is getting all weird and I'm getting all weird.)

Show me all the rules, girl.

I just want to belong.

A Life of Dignity

In the late winter of early 2007, my family and I watched as my grandfather slowly succumbed to six years of terminal leukemia. Throughout his battle with cancer, he was strong, exercised, listened to the advice of his doctors, and assured his family he wasn’t scared, that everything was going to be fine. Over these same years, he became diabetic and lost most of his once thick hair, his energy, his appetite, was now under one hundred pounds, and by February, he had also lost his dignity. This man, who for seventy years took care of his family, built furniture, and owned a small business had become dependent on us for everything. His skin itched so badly from the medications that my grandmother had to trim his fingernails down to the skin to keep him from scratching. But the morphine and all the other drugs were not enough to keep the pain at bay. One day he asked my grandmother to take him to the hospital; he said that he was ready to die.

It’s not that easy, though. Here in America and in many other countries around the world, we have come to fear death so much that it has, along with suicide, become taboo. While it is important to do everything in our power to prevent suicides caused by mental illness, it is time to make a distinction between traditional suicide and a dignified death. When an animal is beyond treatment, when it is impossible for it to live without pain, it is euthanized, and we consider this humane. However, as my grandfather lay in a hospital bed for a week, semiconscious, having hallucinations and nightmares from all the painkillers, we watched. As he forever lost consciousness and slipped into a shallow sleep, his lips drawn back and noises of pain still escaping his mouth, we watched. All the planning, the Do Not Resuscitate order, the living will and power of attorney didn’t matter. It was illegal to assist in what was truly the inevitable, so we watched. My mother and her siblings publicly and privately begged the doctors, nurses, even their brother-in-law who is a surgeon, to do something. They all sadly shook their heads. He needed more morphine for the pain, but more would kill him, it was impossible.

Technically, there are three kinds of euthanasia: passive, non-active, and active. Passive euthanasia involves withholding treatment or medication for treatment, and is for the most part widely accepted for terminally ill patients. Non-active euthanasia is the withdrawal of life support, and while at times controversial, is somewhat easily attained, especially if the person in question has a living will. Most recently non-active euthanasia made headlines when a 13-year-old British girl living with a heart condition brought about from drug complications from leukemia, won the right to refuse an extremely dangerous heart transplant, and live out the remainder of her life at home. Doctors involved in the case say they support her decision, and that she understands the risks involved. Active euthanasia, however, is the lethal use of controlled substances or forces to kill a patient, and is highly controversial and most often illegal.

In 1994, the state of Oregon became the first state to allow its citizens to choose the right to die. The Oregon Death with Dignity act made it legal for doctors to prescribe a lethal dose of drugs to a patient, if it was determined by two doctors to be within six months of dying from a terminal illness. In 1997, the Oregon Legislative Assembly tried to have the law repealed, but was defeated by a 20-point margin. Then in 2005 members of the Bush Administration took aim at the law, in Gonzales v. Oregon. The Supreme Court Ruled in favor of Oregon, citing, among other things that the U.S. Attorney General did not have the right to overrule state laws on legal controlled substances. As of 2007, only 341 patients in Oregon has chose to end their lives using this new measure, and an overwhelming majority were suffering from end stage cancers. In a recent study, it was determined that the people choosing this option were not at a heightened risk due to being elderly, uninsured, of low education, a minority, suffering from psychiatric illnesses, or even physically disabled or chronically ill, when compared to the overall population. In just this past general election on November 4, 2008, Washington passed Initiative 1000, becoming the second state allowing patients to end their lives using medication.

Some of the main arguments against a patient’s right to die include that it violates doctors’ Hippocratic oath, that it devalues human life, and that it may give doctors, families, and insurance companies too much power, or that they may give up prematurely on a patient. What needs to change is the way in which we interpret the Hippocratic oath of “first do no harm,” and what value a human life has that has been so far degraded. Death must be seen as a part of life, not as a final stage in a disease. When death is more valued than life by a patient, we have crossed the threshold in the very definition of what it means to help or harm someone. The checks and balances in laws like in Oregon and Washington, as well as the independent studies showing no problems with exploitation should be enough to make these laws nationally acceptable. As for others who may argue that it is religiously, morally, or ethically wrong, that is their choice, just as it is their choice to follow a religion, or hold a belief: it is what makes this country so great. But we aren’t talking about what is natural anymore. These patients would not be alive now if it wasn’t for advances in medicine, and unfortunately many will reach a point where modern medicine can do nothing more for them. Unexpected recoveries – or “miracles” – can happen, but they weren’t coming for my grandfather, and they aren’t coming for almost anyone with a terminal, end stage disease. If we are willing to accept the miracles of modern medicine, and everything it can help us with, we must also accept there are things with which it cannot help. Death is the end of life, but still a part of it. Let us accept that death with dignity is just as important as a life lived with dignity, in fact, they are one in the same.



http://www.oregon.gov/DHS/ph/pas/docs/History.pdf
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-623.ZS.html
http://www.balancedpolitics.org/assisted_suicide.htm
http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=Washington_Death_with_Dignity_Initiative_(2008)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7721231.stm

My favorite part.

You know that part where you are afraid to even touch someone because the electricity between might burn your fingertips? When you have to kiss someone or puke on his shoes because you are so nervous? Oh yeah, that's the Good Shit. How do we ever cross those lines, from not touching to touching? It's the same feeling as when you are about to jump off a high dive, give a long speech. Only way better. I tend to make the first move not because I am gutsy, but because if I don't do something I feel like a mean bout of Tourette's Syndrome might set in suddenly. Kiss me, fucker!

Now, I'm not saying anything, I'm just saying it's fun. My realist/pessimist side is strong, so please spare any warnings and just know I have already taken care of all the doubting.

It's really too bad all this oxytocin and adrenalin can't last forever. Of course, scientist say that prolonged exposure (ie. feeling this way all the time) would cause the body to shut down or have a stroke, but that is a risk I would be willing to take. In checking my spelling just now, I learned that oxytocin is Greek for "quick birth." I like that.



"I do want to get married. It just sounds great. You get to go grocery shopping together, rent videos, and the kissing and the hugging and the kissing and the hugging under the cozy covers! Mmmm! But sometimes, I worry that I don't want to get married as much as I want to get dipped in a vat of warm, rising bread dough. Yeah, that might feel pretty good, too." - Maria Bamford