Friday, December 31, 2010

Twelve

To end the year, I'm going to link to a completely subjective list of my top 12 posts of the year--one per month, with a little excerpt from each:

January Breakup Letter
Here's the truth, Nashville. You abandoned me long before I abandoned you. You jerked me around for years. For every Pat Green song you played three by Keith Urban. For every George Strait song you played five by Kenny Chesney. It hurt, Nashville. All I want from you, all I've ever wanted from you, is actual country music.
February Sometimes not giving unsolicited advice is HARD.
"Oh, and Esther, she was eleven days overdue."
"Your doctor let you do that?"
"What is this 'let' of which you speak?"

Sigh. Can we at least all agree that women should feel free to say to their obstetrician "What's the medical reasoning behind your desire to ______?"


March  Well, thanks for clearing that up for the rest of us.
Well. My first marriage didn't end well either.  Perhaps I am hopelessly naïve in thinking that it had nothing at all to do with gays getting married and everything to do with his inability to keep his dick in his pants.  Thanks for clearing that up, dude.  What's this imperial decadence stuff, though?  More Godiva chocolates?  I was given a Godiva chocolate once by a gay man, you know.  Because he was consoling me when I was crying over the end of my marriage.  I'm sure there was some hidden effort to convert me to the Gay Agenda, and I just didn't notice for the copious amounts of vodka I was consuming.
(Yeah, I bet y'all thought I was gonna go with this.  Or this.  But since I couldn't choose between the two, I went with a completely different one.)

April The Not-So-Subtle Racism of the Left
To deny the existence of "People of Color" at these Tea Parties, you have to, again, make several dangerous assumptions (all of them grounded in the "all black people think the same way" meme).  You must assume that black people don't care about having large chunks of their pay checks disappear to taxes, that there are no black small business owners who care about their future, that there are no black folks who have decent health insurance (that they don't want to see taxed with this new health care bill), that black folks who are in the bottom tax bracket are gonna be more than happy to see their taxes raised by a third with the death of the Ebil Bush Tax Cuts for the Rich (y'know, the ones that dropped that bracket from 15% to 10%), that black folks don't care about the strength of this nation's economy vis á vis the ballooning national debt, that black people are a-OK with being out of work right now, that black people don't care that their children are going to be saddled with huge debt and government oversight, that black people aren't politically active (just in case they do believe these things), that black people are all Democrats, etc etc.

May Screw you, Better Homes and Gardens
But nursing your kid at the table? Please.  Let me make something else very clear here: My tits are none of your fucking business, either. This is also not negotiable.  If you are paying such close attention to what's going on at my table that you even notice my baby eating--and frankly, this applies to noticing a baby taking a bottle, too--then the lapse in etiquette is YOURS, NOT MINE.
(Note: BH&G did issue an apology, but my objections to the general attitude haven't changed.)


June Someone at Etsy has been sniffing the craft glue.
Why yes, yes we are.  I count myself blessed to live in the city I live in, which has been influenced by many cultures.  Regular readers know this is a favorite subject of mine.  Mexicans, Germans, Americans, blacks, etc have all heavily influenced San Antonio.  But here's the thing.  We are not a city of several distinct, heterogeneous cultures, rubbing up against each other and never intersecting.  I can pretty much guarantee you that there are black people eating breakfast tacos at Bill Miller's before going to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day freedom march (which may well be the biggest, period, which is saying something with our whopping 7% black population).  My lily-white kids danced to conjunto music at Fiesta in Market Square, where corn dogs were sold alongside gorditas.  These cultures have blended together to produce something far stronger than had we spent the city's history clinging to the golden calf of diversity.
 July Sometimes there is no easy answer
Locking someone away in a mental institution sounds like a horrible thing.  Back when hospitalization was much more common and of longer duration, the back wards were filled with schizophrenia patients.  Today that sounds cruel, but in studying the condition in class, I have come to the opposite conclusion--many times, fast-tracking schizophrenia patients through treatment & then returning them to "normal life" is cruel.  Even in the best cases, schizophrenia is only a somewhat-treatable disease.  Even on antipsychotic medications, many of the problems of schizophrenia can persist--including very dangerous things like auditory hallucinations.  (IE, "I hear voices.")  At best, schizophrenia patients have a diminished ability to function in normal life.
August The first bit of strangeness for the school year.
I'm not certain whether to be glad that these things are being offered--I recall guidance counselors as being pretty much useless when I was in school--or sad that there are apparently a lot of parents out there who think the school should be in charge of helping their child develop social skills.
September So, where's the fear?
But it's not the safest neighborhood in the city. (I'm honestly not sure what is.) We can live here, though, and not be scared, because we own guns. We do not have to bend our lives around criminals.
October I am trying not to be insensitive.
 On this day I remember all the dead gay babies with breast cancer who were conquered by Christopher Columbus.
November A little revival...
The title of this post comes from Radney Foster's latest album, which I've mentioned on this blog before.  I'm not going to quote the title song, though, but one further into the album: Life is Hard, Love is Easy.
December Well, it's cheaper than an IUD
Seriously, why hasn't the pope spoken out against these yet?

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