Have I mentioned lately that I hate the hospital?

I don’t hate them for letting me hemorrhage in their emergency room for over an hour , thereby forcing me to sign myself out and go to another hospital for help (I was having a horrible miscarriage a few days short of my second trimester). I don’t even hate them for sending me a bill.

But I DO hate them for siccing their lawyers on me and forcing me to delete the blog post in which I described that horrible two-hospital miscarriage. They’ve been harassing me, my employer, and my hosts with inaccurate, insipid crap. To wit:

Re: www.goblinbox.com/blog/archives/000446.html

Dear Ms. O’Connell,

Our office represents {name removed}, a hospital located in
Fairfield, Iowa. Enclosed with this letter is a copy of a blog published
by Michelle Morgan. Federal law as well as your Acceptable Use Policy
prohibits the publishing of defamatory information. The headline,
“{name removed} Tried to Kill Me” is clearly defamatory
within thte meaning of Iowa defamation law. Please advise within five
days of the receipt of this letter whether or not you will take action
to eliminate this posting which is clearly defamatory of {name removed}.

Sincerely,

Edwin N McIntosh
Dorsey & Whitney LLP

Uh huh. Rrrrright. OMG, where to even begin!

1. “a blog published by Michelle Morgan”
My name isn’t Michelle Morgan. Hasn’t been for years.

2. “The headline, ‘{name removed} Tried to Kill Me'”
The headline DID NOT read “{name removed} Tried to Kill Me”. I changed it weeks ago in an effort to comply with their bitch-ass requests.

3. “as well as your Acceptable Use Policy”
The host’s AUP does NOT prohibit the publishing of defamatory information. Go look it up.

4. “which is clearly defamatory of {name removed}.”
The post is NOT “clearly defamatory.” IT IS CLEARLY AN OPINION PIECE, you dolts! No one reading my blog would suspect that the hospital’s actual intent was to do murder, and I have every right to state my opinion, even ON THE INTERNET, about experiences with any businesses, yes, even hospitals. (Hello! Read the Constitution lately?)

I’m especially pissed off because I want that post in my archives even more than I want to post “negative” stuff about {name removed}. This blog is my diary, I’ve been writing in it for years, and I want it intact. That’s why I had my lawyer contact them to let them know I’d already {1} removed their name from the post, {2} had the cached version deleted from Google, {3} deleted Penny’s comments, and {4} put no-follow in the meta tags, all in an effort to comply with their desire to hide my totally constitutional opinion from search engines.

In effect, I bent way the hell over backwards for the incompetents who let me bleed for over an hour in their e-room to comply with their totally non-legal demand that my opinion be wiped off the ‘net because they simply did not LIKE it. Were they happy? NOOOO, they were too low tech to understand what I’d done for them, and the bossy little creeps had to have the post DELETED. And it’s not like I have the budget to launch a constitutional court case. Scylla and Charybdis.

This stupid letter caused Rackspace to give me (by way of Keef) 24 hours to comply before they’d turn off the server. Apparently any ol’ letter from any ol’ lawyer – legal or not – makes them ask, “How high?”

Nevertheless – the post is gone. And now there’s a big goddamned hole in my pregnancy archives and I’m PISSED. (Do you have any idea how many women hit all my old miscarriage posts in a week? Do you have any idea how comforting it is to read the blogs of women who have already been through whatever it is that you’re going through when you type “loss of pregnancy symptoms” into a search engine late at night?)

Before, I was just someone who had had a bad experience with them. NOW, I’M AN ENEMY. I will tell my friends bad things about them. Oh yes I will. I will say, “Don’t go there if you need medical help! Drive to the next county!”

—
This post is clearly NOT defamatory within the meaning of Iowa defamation law. This post is neither malicious nor damaging. It is factual and accurate and contains my opinions. If it comes up in search engines, that’s because THE SEARCH ENGINE WORKS.

{Shitty local hospital} finally figured out where goblinbox is hosted, and sent Rackspace a “remove the post or else” letter. Rackspace contacted my friend Keef, from whom I’m getting hosting, and said, “The post goes or we gotta turn the server off tomorrow.” (Yeah, right.)

So the post is gone. I deleted it.

I did this only because Keef’s got a bunch of other sites on the same server, and I just could not let his revenue go away in that manner. That would just be totally bitchy.

But let it be known that I. Am. Well. And. Truly. Pissed. The. Hell. Off. The post didn’t even have the {shitty local hospital}’s NAME in it any more, and it got absolutely NO TRAFFIC in the past two weeks. NONE. They’re pursuing this because they’re low-tech morons who’ve decided to harass me because I told a true story.

I hate them now. Before, I was fairly indifferent. Now I officially hate them, and I will tell every single person I ever meet never to go there for care. Ever.

Today I was surfing knitting blogs, and ended up at menknit.net, which is – obviously – a site for men who knit.

Men have been knitting forever; in fact, they most probably invented it. Yet it’s been considered ‘women’s work’ probably since the Victorian times [that’s my guess], so men who knit don’t have much community. I mean, even my knitting site is called Iowa Chicks Knitting because I thought the name sounded cool and honestly it simply did not occur to me that men in Iowa would want to join. (Can you say, HOW SEXIST IS THAT?!) (“How sexist is that!”) (Thank you.) In my own defense, all the men I know enjoy internal combustion engines, guns, and pork products. They just don’t knit, although a couple of them say they know how to.

Anyway, menknit.net has a list of links to their members’ blogs, and I surfed a few (while troubleshooting a Sonicwall VPN setup over the phone here at work) mainly to look at their WIPs and FOs. In the process I came across this post, by a gay guy wondering about the fag/lesbian double standard.

And it reminded me that I’ve been meaning to vent about this topic for months! So, here it is: my Why You’re A Dork To Expect Me To Eat Pussy When You’re Not Willing To Suck Dick Yourself rant. (Sorry for the language, but y’all know how it is around here.)

This is the double standard I’m bitching about: straight guys think two women together is the hottest thing ever, and they all admit to having fantasies about a two-girl-one-guy threesome. ALL OF THEM. And many of them will shamelessly ask their woman if she’ll consider taking another woman to bed with them! This has happened to me more than once.

That this occurs does not upset me in the least. But that they – the men asking – think of this as being totally normal and natural while having the nerve to be “disgusted” by the idea of taking another MAN to bed just PISSES ME OFF.

When propositioned in this way I tend to say something utterly unromantic along the lines of, “I have a vagina of my own, and I know how they are. They’re terrifying. You wouldn’t catch me putting my fingers anywhere near one I didn’t own myself, let alone my face. Wouldn’t it be so much sexier if we just hooked up with another guy instead?”

And the reaction is always the same kneejerk double standard: “No way! That’s GROSS!” Most men will tell you that two women together is ‘natural,’ and say in the next breath that two men together is somehow not natural? Puh-leeze! None of it is ‘natural’, gentlemen! The human body is built for two, NOT THREE!

Now pay attention here. The ancient Greeks – remember them? – were all about man love. (Okay, not really all about it. But romantic love, including sex, between men was popular and considered acceptable, normal, and natural. Even beautiful. The West’s whole concept of male beauty comes straight from those boy-humping Greeks… the ones who also gave us GOVERNMENT and the philosophy that molded at a shockingly fundamental way the WAY WE ALL THINK.)

Two-thousand six-hundred years later, everyone thinks girl-on-girl is ‘natural,’ and that it doesn’t even make the females in question ‘gay’ because it’s so very ‘natural’… but guy-on-guy is done only by people who are, well, “gay”. (You know, the ones who are born that way. The “real” fags. Or dudes in jail. But not NORMAL guys.)

WT flying F!?!? Guys, I know the idea of four boobs in one bed is distracting, but you’re just not THINKING RATIONALLY here!

It’s my opinion that any human being is capable of having homosexual sex, but that the majority are simply unlikely ever to pursue it because it doesn’t interest them. And I simply LOATHE the misguided idea that all women secretly want to get down with another woman because it’s YOUR MALE FANTASY and that that makes it somehow more ‘natural’ for two straight women to be together than two straight men!

I’ll tell you right now that the idea of a threesome consisting of two women and a man sounds hideous to me. I imagine that most men couldn’t realistically keep up with two women in the first place, and also that such a scene would by its very nature have to be more about porno-style performing than making love. Which interests me not in the least, since I’ve been out of my twenties now for six years.

However, the idea’s opposite – two dudes and a woman… well! Let’s just say I’d at least be willing to discuss it. {nudge, nudge, wink, wink!} Providing he was totally fucking hot, of course, in a masculinely vulnerable sort of way.

{rofl!}

My conclusion is that threesomes are essentially intellectual excercises anyway, since the human body is clearly hardwired for twosomes. And in that context there is simply NO COMBINATION that is more ‘natural’ than any other: girl-girl-boy, GBB, GGG, BBB… it’s ALL artificial in terms of biology. What’s considered hot right now – chicks together – is simply a social convention, and the truth is that the opposite was hot in Socrates’ time.

Here’s to waitin’ for that pendulum to swing back!

I got a letter from Dear Local Hospital’s lawyers. It said I had five days to remove the blog (yes, the ENTIRE BLOG) or they’d pursue… something. I wrote a letter back, but then decided to have Wally vett it before I actually did anything. I drove over and dropped it off with his secretary – my beloved MIL – just now.

*sigh*

This whole thing’s absurd. I had a miscarriage, and they’re sending me hate mail. I just hope they’re tech savvy enough to UNDERSTAND what I’ve already done to keep the post from being read by anyone but the rare person who decides to dig through my site manually.

You had your lawyers send a letter to LISCO Internet telling them that my blog post is in violation of LISCO’s appropriate use policy and Iowa defamantion law both, and you gave them five days to have the offending post removed.

However:

1. This web site is not hosted at LISCO. You (or your lawyers) would know this if you’d actually read through the whois results. Contacting LISCO directly has done your cause no good. It has only succeeded in causing most of Admin to read my blog (so now they all know waaaay more about When Miscarriages Go Wrong than they ever wanted to) and if you persist it may end up costing them money – like if they have to have their own counsel look into any of this. They’re my employer, incidentally, and if you make them spend money on this when they’re utterly uninvolved I will feel really bad.

2. I removed your name from the ‘offending post’ LAST FRIDAY. Apparently you didn’t even bother to check to post for compliance before emailing LISCO, who is not the site’s host.

3. I have added a meta tag to the post in question so that the next time it’s crawled by search engine spiders, it will drop off their search results. YOU WOULD KNOW THIS ALREADY if you’d checked the post or contacted me directly.

4. You’re a big dork, Local Hospital. Not only is your care substandard, but apparently you’re a bully, too.

This crap makes me crazy:

Movie studios want the US Supreme Court to rule that the developers of the Grokster and Morpheus P2P software should be held responsible for the illegal trading of copyrighted software using their technologies.

I realize that when you (believe that you have or will) lose money due to new technologies, you get pissed off. But holding the developers responsible is fucking nuts. Let’s step back, folks: could, say, RCA have sued reel-to-reel manufacturers in the 60’s when people started recording songs off the radio for the first time?

Ahem.

Judges expressed concern that making P2P software illegal could have a major detrimental effect on future software innovation and asked where the entertainment industry would stop in its pursuit of file sharers. Would they consider suing Apple because iPod users may be carrying around illegally acquired music, they asked.

Bless those clever judges. Those movie industry lawyers are grasping at straws.
——–

Work’s been slow, so I’ve spent a fair bit of time over the past two days surfing blogs. There seem to be two kinds. The first kind is mostly links. Links to funny stuff, weird stuff, time-wasting stuff, political stuff, or links to more links to stuff. The other kind seems to be deeply personal and somewhat put-offish: long, drawn-out posts about being fat or depressed or discovering you’re fucked up because your dad was an asshole.

I have no idea where goblinbox falls. I guess I’ve got a fair showing of both kinds of posts.

I’m not terribly political – thank the gods – so most political blogs bore me. Politics, to me, are just glorified playground games, being played with bigger toys. One memory that was painful for years: I was in third grade. I ran with a group of three girls. One of them – I don’t remember why – decided she no longer liked me, and convinced the other two not to play with me any more. The recess bell rang, and I was detained by a teacher I think. When free I ran late from the building all the way out to the back soccer field… and one of the girls told me that they were no longer my friends. And she told me, cruelly, to go away. So I did. I walked back to the toys near the building and put myself on a swing for the rest of recess, and I was shattered. Heartbroken. I no longer had any friends.

This is how little girls are. They’re mean little politicians. Fortunately, all they have to play with is other little kids, and their scheming is harmless in the sense that all they can damage are feelings. Grown men, on the other hand, play real games with real money and real weapons and real lives – but the motivations are the same. So, I don’t particularly care for politics. All I see are conflicting ‘belief’ systems, posturing, ego, hatred, ego, and petty decisions based on not much more than “we don’t like you any more, so you can’t play soccer with us at recess.”

While I realize these people can and will make decisions that affect my life, I find myself thinking that the less attention I pay the less real the game is. But I read a blog entry today by a soldier who answered the question, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen?” His answer was this: he was on a reaction team in Cuba. Orders were not to let any refugees through. A group of refugees approached, having safely navigated a minefield to get that far. The soldiers, following orders, turned them back. The refugees didn’t follow their own safe path back through the minefield: they deliberately stepped away from their own footsteps in the sand, and blew themselves up rather than go back into Cuba.

This is the world that politics made.
——–

If you read dooce.com, you probably read the Times article about ‘mommy blogs’ (the phenom of meticulously documenting the perils of parenthood on the Internet) in which she was interviewed.

There are thousands upon thousands of blogs on the web, and I can tell you that most of them (including this one) aren’t worth reading. But in spite of the fact that it’s considered cosmopolitan to believe that everyone (but you and the ten people you dig best) is an idiot, the fact is that I have found a lot of amusement, reassurance, enjoyment, and yea, even solace in many of the blog entries I’ve googled over the past few years.

If you’re going through something, you can damn well bet there’s someone else out there who has got it worse. Depression? Anxiety? Broken heart? Morbidly obese? Pissed off at your husband? Someone out there is battling your demon along with you, and every once in awhile they’re a lot funnier at it than you are.

But the Times article made mommy blogging sound so… petty. So horridly egocentric. So awful. While there was a nod toward the idea that parenting is not one moment of pure joy strung on a string after another, the underlying mood of the article was that mommy blogging is nothing but a symptom of vanity, self-centeredness, and exhibitionism.

The Times article was so negatively blase about human expression that it made me feel… sour. About blogging.

I’ve been doing this for several years, myself. Since before I even knew people were developing software for it. Since I did it in HTML every day. I started at liscoplus.com/mush (defunct) and eventually bought goblinbox.com, and I’m now on my fifth server. I blog because I like to, because people read it, and because I can. (And also to use the web skills I’d taught myself, to make the whole effort of doing that worth the time it took.) I blog because I, like every other human being in the world, want to be heard. I want a chance to say what I have to say. I want to express myself in a medium that doesn’t require me to respond to input as I go.

I want a fucking hobby.

I like that my mother-in-law lurks on my site, and vicariously keeps an eye on her son and his wife. I like having friends drop goblinboxisms into their conversations at bowling alleys and restaurants. I like seeing where my traffic comes from every morning.

Most of the time, my life isn’t blog-worthy. It isn’t interesting, it isn’t intense, and it’s not even particularly amusing to anyone who isn’t me or a member of my clique. But sometimes, the shit does hit the fan, and I do have something worthy of expression. I’m not a professional writer, but I do know that when I get comments from people saying my post has made them cry, I know my expression of the human condition wasn’t fluff.

Most of life is fluff, if you’re lucky, oh New York Times writer. Most of life is nothing but tedious, no-one-cares-but-me details. Maybe putting that stuff on the web is tacky, but if ya don’t like it, don’t read it. And better yet, don’t write condescending articles about it.

I take the point that those heavily-blogged-about kids are gonna grow up, google themselves, and promply puke their guts out. But hell – wouldn’t you rather raise children in a society so rich that you can afford a computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, electricity, DSL, and enough leisure time to sit down and keep a running journal, and run the risk of (*gasp!*) freakin’ your kid out when s/he reads about the first time they pooped on grandpa’s lap… versus living in a world where “being freaked out” by something you read on the Internet is a LUXURY?!

Fuck it. If I didn’t keep my journal on a web server, I probably wouldn’t keep one at all. I think I’m over my reaction to the insipid nature of blogging even when your life isn’t ‘interesting enough’.

…stuck up Times writer, anyway…

Morning people are the dominant bio-type, and they set the attitudinal tone of the entire culture. They’ve decided that morning is the best time of the day, and that people who are not naturally bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at the very ass crack of dawn are in some way lazy and unfocussed.

Well, screw that.

Morning is not the best time of day. It’s a fine time of day of course, but it isn’t inherently better than any other time. Getting up early does not mean you’re more productive or a better member of society. Being on time during the pre-noon hours doesn’t mean you care more or that you’re a better person.

As a night person, I’ve been chronically late to morning events my entire life. I’ve been told my tardiness proves my lack of commitment or concern about jobs, classes, and friends. It’s been condescendingly explained to me that if I just “made an effort” to go to bed on time I’d be on the “right” schedule and would find myself reaping the benefits of a morning person lifestyle.

Bah fucking humbug.
Continue reading Morning people are not better than night people, damn it →

It’s five thirty and it’s pitch black outside.

Fuck this. I loathe and despise DST. I always have. I always will. It’s the stupidest fucking thing in the world.

FARMERS DRIVE TRACTORS WITH HEADLIGHTS ON THEM!!! AND THEY TEND TO DO IT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GODDAMNED NIGHT!! THERE’S NO REASON TO FUCK UP MY BIORHYTHMS FOR PEOPLE WHO NO LONGER NEED AN EARLIER GODDAMNED MORNING! FOR CHRISSAKE, PEOPLE!!! STOP THE MADNESS!!!