All posts by Mush

About Mush

I want to be a veterinarian because I love children.

Dear today's Facebook meme, you're on my nerves.

Soapbox

In which I post about my life on Facebook, because the Internet is self-reflective like that.

I don’t know if it’s The CurseTM coming or I’ve just used up the day’s compassion for sloppy thinking, but when I logged into Facebook and saw the utterly meaningless meme traveling through it, I got a little worked up.

Many people are posting this as their status: “No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.”

So, being me, I posted this: “No one should die because they cannot afford health care (unless they spent all their money on stupid shit and actually deserve to die), and no one should go broke because they get sick (unless it’s their own fault because they ate at McDonald’s three times a day for 27 years).”

Heh. Pretty clever, huh?

Apparently not. My friend Jake asked, “So… You don’t think we need health care reform? How disappointing, Mush! Who are you?”

Well, when your friend asks you who you are, you gotta answer! And this is what I said:

“Of course I want health care reform. But it ain’t just gonna suddenly be free awesome health care for everybody, now is it? I know from reading my Vonnegut that people are NOT all equal, and pretending that we are is idiotic because it leads to handicapping and I will be damned before I’ll accept handicapping to make me as dumb as the chick I just got off the phone with!

“In some schools, they don’t let sports teams win because they don’t want the losers to feel bad. This is what happens when we try to homogenize and make everyone equal. We’re not equal. Some are much better at living, much better at liberty, and much better at pursuing happiness. Others are stupid, or lazy, or ignorant, or entitled, or just plain nasty.

“We are not all equal. We are entitled to equal opportunity under our country’s constitution, but we are not inherently equal in value or talent.

“Some people are deliberately more expensive, health care-wise, than others: smokers like myself, addicts, and the grossly obese, just to name a few. Do you want to pay for that?

“Right now we have a country full of obese, addicted, and old people. Do you want to pay for that? Do I? Hell, I’m poor enough I can’t pay for my own healthcare; how can I afford to pay for that family down the street, who, because of their choice to eat nothing but fast food, will all have diabetes and heart disease by the time they’re 35? Those conditions are both expensive to treat and avoidable.

“And although I respect the idea that everyone deserves to live, we don’t all deserve it equally. Pretending that every life is equally valuable is absurd: I myself don’t have as much value to my society as a gifted heart surgeon, but I do have more value than a 90-year-old with terminal cancer.

“So while I think that every effort should be made to save every life, I know that the world doesn’t work that way. If it did, we wouldn’t have the word ‘triage.’ In the UK, they say that deaths go up significantly during the last two months of the year because surgeons have quotas to fill and tend to quit doing operations after they’ve achieved them. People who need surgery in March are not inherently more valuable than people who need surgery in November, but they’re a lot less likely to die. Studies show that only one in five people who need surgery to reduce the risk of stroke actually get the surgery in time due to the way the healthcare system works there.

“Over here, if you’ve got the money, you get the surgery in time. So at least a portion of society gets adequate care… it just doesn’t happen to be the portion I’m in.

“There is in my estimation no way to make a perfectly fair system of health care in this world as it is, so today’s “post this as your status” Facebook meme is essentially empty. It doesn’t mean anything other than that we care in a half-assed way – only enough to repeat something toothless when it only takes us 5 seconds to do so.”

Let’s all remember that not too long ago I needed surgery myself, and I had no health insurance. Because of my extreme poverty the hospital gave me their services for free (somewhere around five grand worth) and it took me slightly over two years to pay off the surgeon, the lab, and the anesthesiologist. The only reason I’m not still paying it off is that my rent was only $50 a month during that period. That was LUCK, not worth. I didn’t “deserve” the excellent care just because I draw breath, and as a grown person I certainly hadn’t taken the responsible steps to grow an emergency nest egg or obtain health care insurance on my own. My results were, as I said, simply good luck.

So I’m not being a heartless bitch; I’m just saying, THINK ABOUT THIS, PEOPLE. Our system sucks, yes, but it may be that it sucks less than it could.

Thoughts?

Underdogs are good. Behemoths are bad.

Life

In which I realize something about my generation. We distrust success.

Dear Starbucks,

Back when you were the new guy, we were super into you. We drank your coffee by the gallon. We drove out of our way to stop at your new stores on our way to work.

Then time passed, and you became this giant behemoth with stores on every single goddamned corner in the nation, and we dropped you like you were hot.

You had gone and done the unacceptable: you’d made it. You’d quit being our little local NW business-that-could, and become everybody’s damned coffee shop. You slut!

Now we avoid you because you’re no longer exclusive and hip and we go to local coffee shops instead. We talk shit about you whenever we see your green logo on a quaint downtown Main Street USA because your coffee ain’t like it used to be, back in the day when our love was new.

Well, being that all these truths are self-evident, I just wanted to let you know that I have a friend who recently started working for you and she’s changed my attitude. She overflows with enthusiasm when she talks about your corporate culture and your desire to give back with your ethical sourcing, environmental stewardship, and community involvement.

It occurs to me that you’re actually big enough to make a difference, if you really want to. The fact that you’ve over-saturated your market is our fault as much as yours: we threw money at you for twenty years. What were you supposed to do? Ignore it?

Keep up the good work. Be a good behemoth. I’m proud of you.

Warm regards,
Mush

I shopped at Walmarts because I was young and poor and they were cheap. Then they took over the world and now I loathe and hate Walmart. Same for Starbucks, Body Shop, and even Amazon.

Some of these businesses still get my money because they’re either really good at what they do or they’re the most convenient, but I no longer feel any kind of real emotional loyalty to them, like I did when they were little and new.

As soon as a business reaches a certain level of success, I quit trusting it.

Remember when Amazon deleted books off of people’s Kindles without warning, how outraged we were? Remember when they re-indexed their database and removed GBLT material from easy view, how offended we were? If a small company had made such a blunder, we would have accepted an apology with a grin. “Shit happens,” we’d have said, and kept supporting them. But when a big company does something like that we suddenly all put our conspiracy hats on.

Well, sometimes. Other times we just ignore it and keep shopping there. We know, for instance, that Walmart is a community-killer, but we keep shopping there because we’re brainwashed to think that it’s both cheaper and more convenient (which it isn’t if a store has been open for more than four years). We know, for instance, that Blockbuster censors the films they carry1, but we keep going there too.

We just don’t like it.

What size does a company have to be to earn our disdain? Why is huge success a target of such dislike? Where did I even get this attitude? If I inventory my opinons, I really do loathe big businesses, even if they’re big because I selected them and gave them money for years. Why do I like underdogs? Where did this attitude actually come from?

—
1 Googling this assertion these days comes up with a bunch of carefully-worded spin most likely seeded by Blockbuster itself saying that Blockbuster doesn’t censor films. Well of course they don’t literally censor films, they’re a rental place and not editors. But they do refuse to carry titles until the studios or distributors censor them to the organization’s Christian preferences (for this reason, I have never been a Blockbuster patron) and they got away with it because they were the largest rental channel in the nation for so long and had the clout to make such demands. Now they’re seedy little brick-and-mortars where they still exist at all, so I really don’t care if they demand censored films.

To Do List

Music

In which I’m planning my weekends.

I agreed to work 5 hours tomorrow from 8 to 1, so I’ll not be going out tonight. (Not that I would have been anyway; I just wanted to sound like I have choices!) I’m thinking of watching Mad Men (season 1, episode 7) and doing some knitting for a swap that I should have completed, like, a month ago.

There might also be some Mexican food, or pizza, or something decadent along those lines because I have basically been eating really, really well and want to splurge.

This weekend, I need to get my nails done and clean the bathroom and do laundry. Next weekend I’m busy: I’m playing the Fair on Friday night, have a hair appointment Saturday morning, and a winery gig Saturday afternoon.

The weekend after, there’s the Rally in the Valley (blues for bikers! w00t!) on Friday night, then my mom arrives (I haven’t seen her in, like, a couple of years) on Saturday afternoon, and right after I have a benefit gig in the Tri-Cities. Sunday I’ll probably be inundated with aunts, which will totally rock.

So THIS weekend? I’m gonna be mellow. And knit!

Guess Who's Going to Die Alone? Me!

Admissions, Love & Marriage, , ,

In which I’m not looking, oh HELL no I’m not, but if I were looking there’d be a pretty stringent list.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, here’s what my standard looks like these days (this applies only to mates, and not any other type of relationship):

1. You must not be a goddamned stoner.
2. You must not be an alcoholic.
3. You must not be currently or recently addicted to speed, pills, coke, heroin, or any other street, pharma, or pseudo-pharma drugs.
4. You must be a devotee, preferably of Amma’s.
5. You must not be a slob at home, at work, or in your car.
6. You must not watch more than five hours of television per week on average.
7. You must have a few hobbies or directions of study that interest you so deeply that you occasionally wander off and immerse yourself in them.
8. You must have a broad command of grammar and be able to spell.
9. It would really help if you were a ‘roo.
10. If you smoke cigarettes, it’s less than half a pack a day and you’re thinking about quitting.
11. Your glass is half-full.
12. You must respect the place you live in enough to clean and repair it as needed without being told by an outside source that it needs to be done.
13. You must not be co-dependent or passive-aggressive.
14. You must not be fundamentally angry.
15. You must know or be willing to learn enough about music and computers and my other interests to nod at the right places when I talk about them.
16. You must support yourself financially.
17. You must love to travel and be well-traveled.
18. You must be essentially good-natured.
19. You must not be obsessed with material possessions – actually, you shouldn’t be obsessed with anything.
20. You must be tolerant.
21. You must be contemplative by nature.
22. You must be reasonably healthy and take a certain amount of care of your person.
23. You must consider compassion to be one of your basic personality traits.
24. You must be vegetarian, or very close to it.
25. You must be very, very intelligent.
26. You must read. A lot.
27. You must never have been routinely cruel to persons or animals and you must not be so now.
28. It would really help if you’re not a morning person, but if you are be mellow about it.
29. You must not blame the shape or condition of your life on anyone but yourself.
30. You must be funny, and laugh a lot.

I’m made in such a way that I would genuinely rather be single than put up with things I’ve come to know that I hate: like stoners, for instance. Dear God, if I never find myself attracted to another goddamned pothead I’ll consider it a miracle. (Fat chance, though. Why are so many interesting men hell-bent on retarding themselves with endless bong hits? And DON’T let me hear again that “at least pot’s natural.” Whatever, you dumb stoner. Crude oil’s natural, too, but I don’t see you smoking that. And no, I don’t agree that everybody would be better off if they’d just get stoned, and how utterly unique of you to say so.)

And slobs: Christ! I cannot figure out what makes an adult person want to live like a pig! Pick it up, wash it, and put it away already. Messy rooms smell bad. Your mother doesn’t live here. Whoever let you think that masculinity was synonymous with slovenliness totally did you a disservice.

And unhealth: if there’s something wrong with your body, adjust your lifestyle. Continuing to party like it’s 1999 and eating crap food because you “don’t like vegetables” is suicide, so why not just save us all some time and fucking shoot yourself and quit with the trying to get laid already? What makes you think you have anything to offer if you can’t put your own house in order? And what sort of grown man is too much of a pussy to lay off the fast food? Hello! Are you twelve or what?

I particularly dislike listening to someone say mean shit about people because it’s exhausting to be around. We all have bad days, sure, and I’m all for a good venting session, but if you’re negative and mean all the time I just plain old don’t want to hear it. Your attitude is your problem, not mine.

I’m no longer interested in non-devotees, either, let alone atheists. Clearly I’m too intelligent to believe in the Sistine Chapel ceiling version of god so quit assuming that I do. My philosophy is fundamental to me and I really don’t want to have to hide it, nor do I want to explain it in endless detail. It’d be so much easier if it was understood implicitly.

As much as I wish I could let it go, bad spelling and grammar drive me batshit. I’ve always thought people who sucked at English would at least be good at math, but while probably sixty percent of my lovers couldn’t spell ‘thorough’ if they tried, I have yet to bed a mathematician. Go figure.

I don’t like TV. There are shows on TV that I enjoy, yes, but overall TV is crass and evil and fills your head with shit. It is a waste of time. While I’ve been known to veg in front of the glass teat myself, it’s a diversion for me and not a lifestyle. TV makes you complacent, stupid, and greedy, and while it does so it systematically makes you think you’re cleverer than you really are while simultaneously undermining your self-confidence. Fuck TV. People who watch too much TV are voluntarily crippling themselves.

I’ve tried to be tolerant of FODA, too, but I’m going to just come on out and admit for the first time anywhere that it grosses me out to taste meat in someone’s mouth or smell it in their sweat. It’s been so long since I’ve eaten meat myself that I can no longer perceive it as food: to me, it’s the dead body of a living creature that you just chewed up and swallowed because you’re, well, most likely thoughtless or greedy. Meat-eating is as disturbing to me as eating human flesh would be to you, actually. I just don’t say much about it because I know how statistically insignificant I am in this culture of rampant meat-eating.

Of course, I stink like cigarette smoke, so, yes, I’ll just shut the fuck up now, but the majority of my lovers have been smokers so the comparison isn’t equal.

Oh, and you should have already figured out that you need to have a job. If you’re still working on that one, fine, take your time, but I don’t wanna watch. I’m not a freeloader and no man has ever supported me; the reverse should be true for you. I’ll pay my way, you pay yours, okay?

And please, know what you need to be happy. Don’t expect me to know, because I’m not you. Have your own interests and pursuits and hobbies, and get your various needs met through them on your own. People without interests are both creepy and impossible to satisfy. And please note that buying things then abandoning them untouched in the shed does not qualify as a bona fide hobby.

I don’t care if you’re competitive and aggressive, just don’t take it to the point that you really believe that compassion is for weaklings. That’s just stupid. Compassion is fundamental – I am That, Thou art That, and all of This is That – so man up and volunteer already…

Uh, yeah. I could go on for hours, but I’ll just quit now. Don’t I just sound like a card-carrying bitch? I really do, don’t I.

The good news is that I’m quite prepared to die single, because the bad news is that I obviously will.

Oh, well. Someone has to be the childless old maid in the family, I guess.

What I did.

Blurbs, , ,

In which there are two lists. And pictures. And a lot of colons. I love using colons.

These are the things I DID NOT do over the weekend:

Get laid, get wasted, have an epiphany, knit, buy a bike, eat Mexican food, do yoga.

These are the things I DID do over the weekend:

Friday, I went to a thing out near the airport, and heard some music:

Music

Saturday, I made this purple wrap:

The Wrap 2

It was based on a thing I saw on Etsy, and I made it without a pattern ’cause I’m clever like that. It took a looooong time because I would pin it together, put it on, look at it, take it off, cut it, pin it together, put it back on, and look at it over and over.

I made and ate this delicious Indian food:

Sambar

Sambar, for the record? Is freakin’ nommability squared.

Sunday: I napped, watched three episodes of Mad Men on DVD, and packed a bento. (Seriously. That’s all I did in a whole entire day. You may confer upon me now the Laziest Girl Evar! award, because I totally done did earned it!)

Pray the Devil Back to Hell

PSA, , ,

In which I’m bugging people I don’t even know.

I want to see this film. A lot.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell

Unfortunately, you gotta be an organization to get a copy – DVDs for individuals aren’t for sale yet.

So I bugged Sheila over at the paper, and she gave me the names of some unsuspecting progressive people in the community, and I found their email addresses on the ‘net and fired off a missive asking them to host a screening.

So we’ll see.

What I Did With The Bicycle Money

Wishlists, , ,

In which I shop online… for clothing. Oops. But it’s not like I don’t need clothes.

Etsy is crack. Do you know this? OMG a zillion things I could totally wear right now!

It turns out that since the mall in this town is half torn down, I doubt Macy’s is going to carry anything I want, and clothes-shopping at Walmart is foul and depressing, I’ve been buying many of my clothes online since I moved here.

Behold my local mall:

Blue Mountain Mall

Last week I somehow got distracted from bike shopping and ordered a fleece wrap and some bloomers to wear under skirts. Fall’s coming, you know, and a fleece wrap is totally gonna save my life. Yesterday I ordered a dress (because I live in the tube dresses I already have) and a long-sleeved cardigan/layering thing. And today? Today I ordered pants and a groovy top.

I already have a little remorse about the bloomers, because they’re not made out of knit fabric (and y’all know about my all-knit-all-the-time clothing obsession, right?) but I’ll probably end up wearing the hell out of them. At the very least, they’ll make lovely custom pyjama bottoms.

These items are a wee bit spendy, yes. But a few unique, hand-made pieces in one’s wardrobe go a looooong way (I wear the holy living hell out of the Etsy items I already have) and now I can buy staples like t-shirts and undies at Walmart and not feel like a fucking dork.

But! Since this is all Etsy stuff and therefore handmade I’ll have to wait awhile before I actually receive any of these goodies! Aaaiieee! (*taps toe*)

I’ll get a bike next month. Swear.

Working Musican

Music, ,

In which you hear all about the fascinating stuff we rockstars do on Wednesday evenings.

Yesterday was that dreaded day, the one where I had to actually follow through on my promise to go to band practice and learn some songs.

I hate band practice. I always have. Practicing is boring because it doesn’t involve an audience, and really, half the reason I’m a rockstar at all is because I like being the center of attention. And when you’re the chick with the big voice on stage, you’re the most important chick in the WHOLE ROOM. But at practice? You’re just sitting in someone’s basement wearing saggy underwear because you couldn’t be arsed to do your own damned laundry last weekend.

Anyway. “Band practice” failed to mean the whole band and consisted of me, a guitar player, and the drummer hanging out in the guitar player’s mother’s basement. She hasn’t been down there in years and he apparently wishes he lived in a shanty town, because the whole space is a freakin’ mess and there is trash down there from 1986. But it has air conditioning, and since it was 104 degrees or something yesterday, that A/C was really a more salient point than the garbage from 1986.

We thought about how we’re going to do Use Me Up to make it our own. We discovered that I can’t do Some Kind Of Wonderful in the key it was originally recorded in. We seriously discussed doing a Jackson 5 cover. We did a verse or two of a couple of the songs we did last year but have pretty much forgotten how to get through. Then we sang silly, unrelated crap for awhile, including Brick House and some freakin’ REO Speedwagon tune.

The whole process took an hour and a half and we didn’t learn any new songs at all. And we’re doing it again next Wednesday since it was so helpful.

Maybe next week I’ll actually show up prepared, like, with some lists and some lyrics or something. After all, the whole point of the practice was to learn new songs for me to sing, sheesh.

Weekend, lovely weekend!

Music

In which I had an awesome weekend, even though I never did get around to being a consumer.

I was gonna buy a bicycle this weekend, but I didn’t. By the time I got moving on Saturday, any good bikes over at my co-worker’s street-long yard sale would have been gone so I didn’t even bother to swing by. I didn’t go to Walmart or the local bike store, either.

But I did take a killer nap each day!

Here’s the band from Saturday night’s gig. No pics of me because by the time someone we knew got there to run the camera, it was too dark.

Oh, yeah: I know this site was down all weekend and I’m sorry about that. It’s been decided that the current host either won’t or can’t solve the problem, so a move is imminent. Good thing I LOVE MIGRATIONS LIKE LIFE ITSELF.

Last night I went and saw District 9 with my brother. I dug it. Excellent aliens! (Annoying hand-held camera work, though. It’s the Blair Witch of sci-fi.) It’s worth seeing, but sit in the very back of the theatre to avoid too much motion sickness.

The wobbling jowls of irony.

Blurbs, , ,

In which I write a timecapsule missive to my younger self.

Hey, dingbat, remember when you were twenty-something and you saw that disgusting old man in his driveway caring lovingly for his hot little convertable, and you wondered how he could possibly be unaware of how painfully stupid he looked?

Remember how you assumed he had to be aware since he was at least twice your own age, and you decided – because you were still young enough to believe that an adult was a cleverer, more mature creature than you – that he was probably polishing his convertible with more irony than your young little head could possibly perceive?

Remember walking by, not looking at him, not looking at his car, and hoping that he wasn’t stealing inappropriately lusty glances at your hot little bod (because that would just be pathetic and gross) and thinking, That HAS to be irony, a fat old man in a sports car, because there’s just nothing at all attractive about an expensive little fuel-injected COCK EXTENSION in tandem with those jowls and that beer belly! Jesus! Ick!

~+~+~
I walked by that guy again today, eighteen years later.

He had his little red convertible in his driveway with the top down. He was hand-polishing it. It was a cute car, too expensive for a younger man to afford. I sincerely doubted that it was comfortable for him to drive, since the cabin was so small and the bucket seats so narrow. He’d probably lusted after it in the back of his mind for twenty-five years, and had just recently found himself in a position to afford it.

That “old man” is no longer so old to me. He’s essentially my contemporary. I mean, he’s still old and he’s still fat, don’t get me wrong, but not as much as he used to be. In fact, I probably would have been flattered if he’d eyed me, but he didn’t – he only had eyes for his car.

I know now that he never meant for his skin to sag, his waist to disappear, or his belly to stick out. Those things just happened while he was doing what he was supposed to do. For all we know he may have been toned and fine and healthy once, back when his self-image was originally formed. The way he looks now is not necessarily the result of unchecked gluttony after all.

He does what you do, you judgmental little twenty-something. He sleeps, eats, works, and plays. It’s just that he’s been doing it now for fifty years, and this is what he looks like.

He has the little hot rod because he’s been a good dad and and good husband and he’s always wanted it and it’s his turn to have something frivolous. He doesn’t enjoy his toy with irony; he enjoys it with the same innocence and entitlement that you enjoy glitter lip gloss. It makes him happy, and he’s proud of it because it is an expression of who he feels he is. He knows what he looks like, yes, but he also knows that inside he feels just like he did in college.The only difference is that now he can remember more days, and he doesn’t have as much stamina as he once did.

He still expects himself to look, feel, and move like he did when he was twenty-something, but he doesn’t and he knows that he doesn’t. He bought the car for himself, not because he thinks he’s going to win your twenty-something adoration with it. Of course he’d most likely bed you if you asked him to, but he doesn’t think the car will make you want him and that’s not why he bought it.

In fact, the car doesn’t have anything to do with you at all, or women in general. It’s just a cool toy he’s always wanted, and you’re really a nasty little bitch for thinking you’re all that or that you have any idea what the phrase “mid-life crisis” means or feels like.

Continue reading The wobbling jowls of irony. →