Living by the Skin of my Teeth

I feel that over the years, I have lost my voice.

I always remember myself as being an outspoken youth. My Mother has recounted a variety of stories in which I’d embarrass her by saying exactly what was on her mind. In middle school, I was the only weird goth kid in our school from 4 different towns. By high school, I had discovered punk, and although rebelling through my appearance was something I grew out of pretty quickly, I had a very clear outlook and attitude. I was always fighting something, even when it wasn’t important.

My mental state has never been 100%. The signs of depression and anxiety were always there, but after some traumatic things happened in my early 20s, I fell slowly and thoroughly apart. Starting my Junior year of college, I barely left my room besides going to class and meals. I had some friends, but they had to make all the effort. I was diagnosed with major depression and social phobia. I had a pretty active online social life in my teens, wrote a LiveJournal before the advent of the “blog”,  but the social phobia eroded my ability to even socialize that way.

I don’t know how I even did it, but I graduated cum laude and found myself working a crappy customer service job for years. I isolated myself further, cutting off relationships with old friends because I felt that I had nothing to offer but despair.

Through a lot of hard work, I eventually got better. I was able to build and sustain friendships. I opened my eyes and fell in love with one of my oldest and best friends and moved out-of-state to live with him. It’s almost 2 years later, and I have a job in a different field that I feel good about.

But somehow I still feel stifled. I have wondered at times if the medication I’m on is to blame. Or maybe the weed I started to smoke around the same time. So many times I have tried to sit down and write and I felt like I had so much to say, and at the same time, nothing at all.

I wonder if I’m really better, or if I ever will be. Maybe it is the murkiness of remembering ones youth over a decade later, but I feel as if the bright, vibrant colors of my adolescence have faded, and that I may never experience life that way again. Maybe this is simply the reality of being an adult, and that it’s like this for everybody. In my heart, I do not believe this is true.

Social Media is Boring, Makes Us Boring, And I Hate It.

I was always one of the weird kids in school growing up. I never related much to my peers, and despite having some neighborhood friends who I would play with if they called me, I tended to stay home and be more reclusive than Morrissey.

I had a phase where I used to love the internet for social interaction, chiefly because it was more anonymous and I could sit around in AOL punk chat all day and troll. But as I got older, I started to feel more and more like the Underground Man, and I had less and less to say to other people.

Now in the age of social media, I feel almost completely turned off by the way people interact with each other, both on the internet and in real life. Interactions with people online are shallow, brief, and diluted with vapid self-centeredness. Interactions with people in real life are becoming increasingly boring, as people tend to be preoccupied with their cell phones, having conversations with other people who are not present or posting more mindless drivel in 140 characters or less.

I have a Facebook account again recently. I joined late, used it for a few months, and deleted it out of disgust. I rejoined only because I have realized that having any semblance of a social life or relationship with people besides my nuclear family and boyfriend is impossible, especially since I moved 3 hours away from where most of my friends are.

I frequently become annoyed whenever I look at it. Here are our lives, condensed into some self-taken snapshots, brief commentary, and carefully edited so that what is left is a portrayal of not who we truly are, but who we would like to be. I suppose a blog is not much better, in the sense that one can selectively edit it until it is no longer a true reflection of your ideas, just more watered down shit designed to be as inoffensive as possible.

As each generation is born and ages, human beings become increasingly dead inside, and our collective intelligence dwindles. Every time I see someone try to discuss anything at length and someone annoyingly responds with “TLDR“, I wish them serious bodily harm.

Instead of activities that enlighten us, we prefer being entertained with shiny objects, purple prose, and sharing the mundane details of our lives, if one can even call it living.

I feel like a mean old lady, and people tell me I should lighten up. I suppose I’d rather just be alone with my equally cynical boyfriend, away other people, enjoying rich and interesting conversations that I can’t share with others because they lack the attention span.

DSK: Top 6 Reasons Why I Believe He’s Totally a Rapist

Every time I read an article about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, I feel overwhelmed with disgust. Not only for the accused rapist, but also his legal team, and those people who defend him.

This is not to say that he doesn’t deserve his day in court; I have to believe that even the worst human deserves a trial, as selectively denying this right for even the lowest scumbag could turn into selectively denying rights for any one of  us.

However, I am convinced that DSK is absolutely, positively, totally a rapist, and here’s why:

1. He claims he can have “any woman he wants”.

No man, no matter how rich and powerful, can have any woman he wants. News flash! In the past 150 or so years, society has slowly, shockingly, recognized that women are actually capable of making independent choices. This includes choosing, or denying, a sexual partner.  It is also accepted in contemporary Western society that a woman’s panties are not automatically drenched when a man makes a sexual advance, even if (and not especially because) he is wealthy.

The claim that a man can have any woman he wants is a textbook example of a rape mindset. Such a statement demonstrates that he not only feels entitled to sexual contact with any woman of his choice, but also implies that he thinks his target should feel lucky that he has condescended to let her touch his priceless, Twilight fucking sparkling upper-crust penis.

2. He does not deny having sexual contact with the maid, but claims it was consensual, and alleges she was a prostitute.

Those pesky hotel maids, always coming into my room and trying to engage me in sexual activity. He claims that she walked in when he was nude, and began to perform fellatio on him. That happens all the time! If she willingly chose to have sexual contact with him, there is no reason she would then flee the room, as security tapes confirm she did. She would well, you know, just leave the regular way.

For a fraction of a second, we could give DSK the benefit of the doubt, assuming that he had called for and been expecting a prostitute, and only mistakenly took the housekeeper for a sex worker. At the kind of high-end hotels he stays in, especially if you are staying in a luxury suite in said high-end hotels, the concierge will get you anything you want, legal or not. So there he is, waiting for a hooker, and the maid knocks several times, announcing housekeeping, before entering. Why automatically assume the first woman who enters is your whore, run over, and stick your cock in her mouth? Because he is a wealthy, entitled prick, who likely doesn’t even look service people in the face. Kind of like Lucille Bluth on Arrested Development. It doesn’t make any sense.

3.  He fled the hotel.

He fled the fucking scene! And he was in such a hurry, he forgot his phone. We are to believe that an innocent man was just chilling out naked in his room, and the maid decided to come in and blow him. And then instead of maybe taking a shower or watching TV, making some business calls, he decides to get the fuck out of there as quickly as possible. Not suspicious whatsoever.

4. He accuses her of running a negative media campaign against him, to smear his name and extort money from him.

Last I checked, accusing a person of committing a crime against you is not slander, especially if you report them to police and choose to pursue charges against them. The fact that he is wealthy and famous has nothing to do with this. Not to mention the astounding absurdity of accusing arguably one of the least powerful members of society, a poor, black, female immigrant.

It also reeks of irony, since DSK is the one with the power, connections, and money necessary to influence the media into printing falsehoods. Such as the numerous articles published accusing his victim of being a prostitute, having connections to drug dealers, lying on immigration documents, etc. The fact that he and his lawyers even have access to her immigration documents at all is telling.

There is also the issue of the phone call the housekeeper made to someone she knew in jail, where she allegedly said that he was a rich man and she knew what to do. How the fuck did he and his lawyers have access to this shit?

Incidentally, an article came out yesterday that debunked the phone call, and noted that while she did state he was rich and she “knew what to do”, statements made separately from each other and wildly out of context. In actuality, she mostly described how the rich man tried to rape her, describing what he did to her, and the “I know what to do” was in reference to going to the fucking police.

5. He was the chief of the IMF.

He was in charge of an organization that I like to think of as a serial rapist of poor nations. Most people do not truly understand what the IMF does, and if you accept their explanation of what they do, you may even be fooled into thinking that they are doing a good thing by providing economic aid to impoverished nations.

When you actually look at what the IMF does, however, it is apparent that all of their “aid” comes with a tangled web of strings attached, and that the “aid” offered is little more than modern-day colonization dressed up to look nice. They privatize national industries, and export the profits to wealthy international corporations.  They break indigenous labor movements. The “aid” comes with interest so high that it virtually guarantees that the loans can never be repaid. I could continue, but my complaints on the organization are so numerous that it actually warrants its own post.

To be in charge of such a corrupt, amoral organization that purports to do good when, in actuality, knowingly causes harm, only further illustrates his moral character, or lack thereof.

6. He keeps trying to get the charges dismissed.

Could it be because he knows that, given the physical evidence of his semen on her uniform, the actual phone call she made in context, and the fact that although her story changed, the key points have been consistent? If he were truly innocent, he would have the full confidence of facing her in court, especially with the high-powered legal team a man like him can afford.

I get that the housekeeper has made some mistakes, including lying on her immigration papers. How many desperate people lie on immigration papers (not that it makes it right exactly, but it is what it is)? However, that does not mean that she was not raped. I find her story much more plausible than his, and she did the right things in calling the police, getting herself checked out for evidence, etc.

I will be furious if the case is dismissed, because the victim of this heinous crime deserves her day in court. If he is convicted, this case will give hope to so many victims of rape who may not come forward because they fear exactly the same media criticism and character assassination that she has experienced. If a man like him can be convicted of rape, then it could  pave the way for more victims of less famous men to demand justice.

And so it begins….

I’m a 28 year old woman living with my boyfriend in Southcoast, Massachusetts.

I created this because I could not sleep due to financial concerns, a problem I know many people must have in these times. I was wondering what, exactly, constitutes wage slavery in modern America.

A quick google search provided a wealth of information (pun unintended) on what the government and policy institutes define as the working poor.  According to workingpoorfamilies.org, a family of four needed an annual income of $22,017 to stay out of poverty. That’s right. Four people living on $22k are not considered to be poor.

In Massachusetts, experts at liveworkthrive.org claim that in order to be economically independent, a household of two adults requires an annual combined income of $35,689, each adult requiring an hourly wage of only $8.45 per hour.

I find this data laughable. We are living in a country where the cost of everything keeps rising, and wages, adjusted for inflation, have not risen in over 30 years for most people, aside from the already wealthy. The statistics fail me at the moment, but I have heard several times recently on NPR and through other sources that that upwards of 30% of all new income generated in the past 30 years has gone to the top 1% of earners, and the bulk of that to the top 0.01%.

My boyfriend and I are both low level managers working in the social services, and we make more than what think tanks and officials claim is necessary for economic independence. We live a very bare-bones lifestyle, and can not afford many things that others seem to. Our biggest luxury is having air conditioning. We routinely have to decide which bills we won’t pay, and we are lucky if we can afford to eat meat for dinner once a week.

I do not mean to lament on my situation too much, as I realize that there are many who have it worse than we do. We both have some college education (I have a BA, while the boyfriend has completed some college). We are both white and do not have to face the same employment and economic discrimination that non-whites face; just today, the AP has published several articles reporting that the disparity between whites and non-whites is the largest it has been since the civil rights movement. The realization that we have some privilege is not something that we ignore.

Yet we can not be content, when despite our privilege and hard work, we have virtually nothing to show for it. And it is apparent that we will likely never be able to afford to own a home, as our parents were able to.

Something has got to change in America. The existence of a middle class in 2011 is fiction. Instead, the parasitic rich continue to prosper at the expense of the rest of us. We have over 6 million unemployed in this country, and large corporations continue to export our jobs and demand more productivity of our of the existing work force, rather than creating new positions. Profit margins and productivity skyrocket to never before seen levels, and the faceless masses continue to want.

So what do we do? Do we continue to take it, or do we learn how to fight back?