What are the things in life that you're truly passionate about?
Submitted by Jess.
- Soul searching, if we have souls.
- Loving others.
- Finding myself so I can love myself and then love others better.
- Self-sacrifice.
- The dotted line between love and hatred.
- Books. I love books.
- Words, words, words.
- Connections and patterns.
- Fresh air.
- Clean rain.
How did you pick your Vox name? Does it mean something?
Submitted by LeendaDLL.
I feel like someone's asked this question on here. But my name comes from a poem I wrote over the summer about an interaction between a baby and a kitten, called "Collector's Items":
Lorraine was a girl who played with trifles,
Her eyes always caressed the simplest trinkets,
She fondled and fumbled with diary locks,
She knitted and purled with the blandest strings,
She always nibbled colored plastic over dribbled crystal,
She crossed prismatic sand with pricked diamonds, and
Lorraine loved all things glisteningly mundane.Her cat Sylvia preened her finest furs,
Lorraine cultivated her litter near the kitten’s pride,
Lorraine and Sylvia disagreed on collecting,
Sylvia adored diamonds and the finest yarns,
Lorraine preferred the most vibrant colors,
Lorraine coddled the most sensual textures, so
Lorraine and Sylvia always snipped at each other.One day, Sylvia spread nonsense about Lorraine –
In a fit of pique, Sylvia took Lorraine’s breath away,
She put it in her den and covered it with scents,
Sylvia circled the scene of the crime and mewed,
She pranced about the tiny girl with royal airs, and
She pawed the swaddled playground with nose in clouds.
Lorraine rested amongst her celestial trifles in peace.
I generally like cats more than baby people. But I adopted the screenname Sylvia's Revenge because what's wrong with a little decadence? What's wrong with preferring space? And why can't spaces be shared? Sylvia may have been too rash, but c'est la vie. My screenname reflects the protection of kitten individualism. :-p
Madonna of feline leukemia.
Our lady of unpaid anesthesiologist bills.
Virgin of earthquakes on the fortieth floor.
Our lady of diabetic blindness.
Madonna of drudgery.
Our lady of deadpan.
Our lady of drive-by shootings.
Madonna of laboratory animals.
Virgin of the safety deposit box.
Our lady of the sales pitch.
Heavy-lidded Madonna of thorazine.
Virgin of planetary tensions.
Personal virgin of stainless steel.
Madonna of the iron lung.
Madonna of the stock market.
Our lady of the statewide blackout.
Madonna of radiation sickness.
Madonna of carbon monoxide.
Our lady of genetic mutation.
Virgin of ether.
Madonna of nitroglycerin.
Virgin of medical ethics.
Our lady of instant cremation.
Our lady of concentration camps.
Madonna of poised aspirin.
Our lady of the sniper at the elementary school.
Virgin of the dwindling emergency rooms.
Madonna of the negative horizon.
Madonna of technology.
Madonna of the mass media.
Our lady's machine museum.
Virgin of the revelation of identity.
Madonna of the double-blind study.
Our lady of AZT.
Our lady of psychoanalysis.
Virgin of computer-engineered tax evasion.
Madonna of the synchronized sound track.
Madonna of autonomy.
Our lady of Dianetics.
Our lady of the stalled escalator.
Virgin of food irradiation.
Virgin of chemically induced birth defects.
Madonna of the wildcat strike.
Our lady of cigarette advertising.
Our lady of twilight sleep.
Madonna of suits "made by some poor slob in Hong Kong."
Virgin of the extra "Y" chromosome.
Madonna of fossil fuels.
Madonna of gridlock.
Virgin of the complete blood transfusion.
Virgin of sudden infant death syndrome.
Our lady of organ transplants.
Our lady of the power lunch.
Madonna of after-hours clubs.
Virgin of the oil glut.
Our lady of talk radio.
Madonna of the Gallup Poll.
Madonna of Muzak and call-waiting.
Our lady of sexual harassment.
Madonna of the glib interviewer.
Our lady of the temporal lobe.
Madonna of the caste system.
Our lady of unpaid sick leave.
Madonna of infinte echolalia.
Say:
your race, your sex, your color. Say:
The world is round and the arctic cold.
Say: I shall kiss the rondure of your soul's
living marl. Say: he is beautiful,
serenly beautiful, yet, only ephemerally so.
Say: Her Majesty combs her long black hair for hours.
Say: O rainbows, in his eyes, rainbows.
Say: O frills and fronds, I know you
Mr. Snail Consciousness,
O foot plodding the underside of leaves.
Say: I am nothing without you, nothing,
Ms. Lookeast, Ms. Lookeast,
without you, I am utterly empty.
Say: the small throat of sorrow.
Say: China and France, China and France.
Say: Beauty and loss, the dross of centuries.
Say: Nothing in their feudal antechamber
shall relinquish us of our beauty-
Say: Mimosa - this is not a marriage song (epithalamion).
Say: when I was a young girl in Hong Kong
a prince came on a horse, I believe it was a piebald.
O dead prince dead dead prince who paid for my ardor.
Say: O foot O ague O warbling oratorio...
Say: Darling, use "love" only as a transitive verb
for the first forty years of your life.
Say: I have felt this before, it's soft, human.
Say: my love is a fragile concertina.
Say: you always love them in the beginning,
then, you take them to slaughter.
O her coarse whispers O her soft bangs.
By their withers, they are emblazoned dopplegangers.
Say: beauty and terror, beauty and terror.
Say: the house is filled with perfume,
dancing sonatinas and pungent flowers.
Say: houses filled with combs combs combs
and the mistress' wan ankles.
Say: embrace the An Lu Shan ascendancy
and the fantastical diaspora of tears.
Say: down blue margins
my inky love runs. Tearfully,
tearfully, the pearl concubine runs.
There is a tear in his left eye - sadness or debris?
Say: reverence to her, reverence to her.
Say: I am a very small boy, a very small boy,
I am a teeny weeny little boy
who yearns to be punished.
Say, I can't live without you
Head Mistress, Head Mistress,
I am a little lamb, a consenting lamb,
I am a sheep without his fold.
Say: God does not exist and hell is other people -
and Mabel, can't we get out of this hotel?
Say: Gregor Samsa - someone in Tuscaloosa
thinks you're magnifico, she will kiss
your battered cheek, embrace your broken skull.
Is the apple half eaten or half whole?
Suddenly, he moves within me, how do I know
that he is not death, in death there is
certain // caesura.
Say: there is poetry in his body, poetry
in his body, yes, say:
this dead love, this dead love,
this dead, dead love, this lovely death,
this white percale, white of hell, of heavenly shale.
Centerfolia...say: kiss her sweet lips.
Say: what rhymes with "flower":
"bower," "shower," "power"?
I am that yellow girl, that famished yellow girl
from the first world.
Say: I don't give a shit about nothing
'xcept my cat, your cock and poetry.
Say: a refuge between sleeping and dying.
Say: to Maui to Maui to Maui
creeps in his pretty pompadour.
Day to day, her milk of human kindness
ran dry; I shall die of jejune jejune la lune la lune.
Say: a beleaguered soldier, a fine arse had he.
Say: I have seen the small men of my generation
rabid, discrete, hysterical, lilliput, naked.
Say: Friday is okay; we'll have fish.
Say: Friday is not okay; he shall die
of the measles near the bay.
Say: Friday, just another savage
day until Saturday, the true Sabbath, when they shall
finally stay. Say:
Sojourner
Truth.
Say: I am dismayed by your cloying promiscuousness
and fawning attitude.
Say: amaduofu, amaduofu.
Say: he put cumin and tarragon in his stew.
Say: he's the last wave of French Algerian Jews.
He's a cousin of Helene Cixous, twice removed.
Say: he recites the lost autobiography of Camus.
Say: I am a professor from the University of Stupidity,
I cashed my welfare check and felt good.
I saw your mama crossing the bridge of magpies
up on the faded hillock with the Lame Ox -
Your father was conspicuously absent.
Admit that you loved your mother,
that you killed your father to marry your mother.
Suddenly, my terrible childhood made sense.
Say: beauty and truth, beauty and truth,
all ye need to know on earth all ye need to know.
Say: I was boogying down, boogying down
Victoria Peak Way and a slip-of-a-boy climbed off his ox;
he importuned me for a kiss, a tiny one
on his cankered lip.
Say: O celebrator O celebrant
of a blessed life, say:
false fleeting hopes
Say: despair, despair, despair.
Say: Chinawoman, I am a contradicition in terms:
I embody frugality and ecstasy.
Friday Wong died on a Tuesday,
O how he loved his lambs.
He was lost in their sheepfold.
Say: another mai tai before your death.
Another measure another murmur before your last breath.
Another boyfried, Italianesque.
Say: Save. Exit.
Say: I am the sentence which shall at last elude her.
Oh, the hell of heaven's girth, a low mound from here...
Say:
Oh, a mother's vision of the emerald hills draws down her brows.
Say: A brush of jade, a jasper plow furrow.
Say: ####00000xxxxx!!!!
Contemplate thangs cerebral spiritual open stuff reality
by definition lack any spatial extension
we occupy no space and are not measurable
we do not move undulate are not in perpetual motion
where for example is thinking in the head? in my vulva?
whereas in my female lack of penis? Physical
thangs spatial extensions mathematically measurable
preternaturally possible lack bestial vegetable consciousness
lack happiness lackluster lack chutzpah lack love
Say: A scentless camellia bush bloodied the afternoon.
Fuck this line, can you really believe this?
When did I become the master of suburban bliss?
With whose tongue were we born?
The language of the masters is the language of the aggressors.
We've studied their cadence carefully -
enrolled in a class to improve our accent.
Meanwhile, they hover over, waiting for us to stumble...
to drop an article, mispronounce an R.
Say: softly, softly, the silent gunboats glide.
O onerous sibilants, O onomatopoetic glibness.
Say:
How could we write poetry in a time like this?
A discipline that makes much ado about so little?
Willfully laconic, deceptively disguised as a love poem.
Say:
Your engorging dict-
atorial flesh
grazed mine.
Would you have loved me more if I were black?
Would I have loved you more if you were white?
And you, relentless Sinophile,
holding my long hair, my frayed dreams.
My turn to objectify you.
I, the lunatic, the lover, the poet,
the face of an orphan static with flies,
the scourge of the old world,
which reminds us - it ain't all randy dandy
in the new kingdom.
Say rebuke descry
Hills and canyons, robbed by sun, leave us nothing.
What's your sign? What do you think of astrology and horoscopes?
I'm a Scorpio. We rock. Astrology and horoscopes illustrate this fact. That's all I need to know.
I am also a Wood Ox. Oxes also rock boxes. And the earth is our box. I GOT DEEP RIGHT THERE. ;-)
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
It has to be living, to learn the speech of a place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage
And, like an insatiable actor, slowing and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightness, wholly
Containing the mind, below which is cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.
I hate being a woman. Serenity now!
I've written a few politically-oriented blogs in my blogspot account, and I scored a C on my Criminal Law midterm (yessss). I have a legal memorandum due Monday that I don't want to start. I've reached that plateau in the school year where I just don't give a--
I turn 21 on November 6th. I'm going to a casino midnight of that day, and then I'll celebrate with alcohol some later time. I'm not planning to get trashed because I don't want to go that far, honestly. Not while I'm staying home. Is it sad that I don't want to have sex because it freaks me out and ugly people do it? If porn needs to be banned for any reason, it should relate tangentially to its newfound equal opportunity. Everyone with a wee-wee or a hoohah (or both) should not be in front of the camera. Seriously. *shudder*
And maybe I'm being immature but...*convulsion* I am not joining the ranks of people who do that. The fluids and the noises...! How do people...I mean...I can hardly masturbate without laughing at myself. I feel great and then I feel so dumb. Even when I fool around with my boyfriend (no offense, boyfriend), I'm into it in that moment, but afterwards I just...wonder what the hell I did, why I did it, and why I have to do it.
I feel like a 12-year-old, so I'll stop here with the sex reflection. But I do want to reproduce my most recent class experience.
Shifting Objectifications Solve Nothing -or- How to Oppress a [White] Woman
While the title of this post does connect indirectly to the discussion over at nubian's blog, it also relates to an experience I had in my Contracts class today.
Two key points:
- Objectification isn't cool, regardless of who uses it.
- Objectification isn't cool, regardless of whom is objectified.
Point 1 is exemplified in that comment thread about Jessica Valenti's new book, Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters. (The comment thread on Feministing's pretty interesting as well.) Using another form of objectifying women to promote something good is still objectifying and commodifying women's bodies. You're using the body part of a woman to market your product. Period. It doesn't matter if you're marketing jewelry, alcohol, guns, feminism, world peace, or Jesus. If you use the body part of a person or the image of a person to sell or to market something, you're using that person as a means to accomplish your own ends. As Kant would say, "That's pretty fucked up." Doesn't matter how much you have in common with the person, either. So, how do you singlehandedly oppress a woman and make her cry? You explain to her that using the tools of the patriarchy to dismantle the patriarchy make you no better than the patriarchy. In other words: you wrong and you ain't special. Besides, shouldn't we question why subversion is powerful and what exactly makes it powerful? What powers are we using, people? And if they're identical to the powers used against us, do our intentions/motivations really matter in the end?
Point 2 happened today in Contracts class. I swear, when our professor gets laid, his personality improves. Today he exchanged cake for giving correct answers in class. (Okay, his new weirdness could link to drugs, but HE HAD CAKE!) Today's class introduced the subject of damages for breaching a contract. We went over the fundamentals of two ways to compensate damages for breach: expectancy and reliance. My notes describe the difference thusly:
Our first case illustrating the weight of these two theories for calculating damages dealt with plastic surgery. (I believe the name of the case is Sullivan v. O'Connor.) The judges deliberating on Sullivan's appeal toed the line between reliance and expectancy calculations. Our main take-away point for the day emphasized that expectancy calculations would result in higher costs than reliance calculations. However, our teacher chose a very...interesting way to illustrate this example.Reliance damages measure the difference between post-K (where you are now) and pre-K (where you were before) situations. Expectancy damages weigh the difference between expected results (where you would have been had no breach occurred) and actual results (where you are presently).
First, he proclaimed that he wanted to avoid anything that would anger feminists. Since Sullivan involves a "professional entertainer" suing for a botched nose job, our professor switched the facts. He transformed the plaintiff into a male seeking ab construction surgery. Then he "regrettably" drew a scale on the board from 1-10, corresponding of course with any infamous beauty/sexiness ranking scale.
Mr. Sullivan's abs before surgery rated as a 5. However, his "5" abs weren't raking in the sexist chauvinist female pig ladies (and I'm quoting), so he decided to go under the knife to obtain Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise abdominals (ranked 11 on his scale o' sex). After surgery, poor Mr. Sullivan's abs failed the cut and have sank to a rating of 1. Ouch.
So on this scale, he illustrated the difference between expectancy and reliance. Using the expectancy scale, Mr. Sullivan would collect a hefty penny because the difference between an 11 rating and a 1 rating is a whole fucking lot. To illustrate the reliance rating, our professor then waded deeper into the pool of stupid: he equated Mr. Sullivan's ability to woo women with their level of intoxication at the first meeting. Yes, he went there. He argued that before the operation, Mr. Sullivan only needed three beers to distort the woman's judgment enough in his favor. However, after the botch job, Sullivan will require many more beers for women to ignore his newly created potbelly, so to speak. So his reliance calculations would determine the difference between his post-op situation (1 rating) and his pre-op situation (5 rating).
So after a day of cake sharing, objectification of males, objectification/denigration of females, and a strange streak of quality teaching, our professor calls it a day. We all pack to leave, and my friends realize that my [white] female friend is fuming at this lesson, to the point that she is physically trembling with anger, and she leaves the room immediately after the conclusion of class. I was pissed off as well, but after the last time I became angry about something that affected me deeply, I now try my hardest to focus on the lesson and to let the stupid fade to the background. (This is the same friend that I referenced as an anti-racist sympathizer in my post.)
A few of my friends (of course) did not understand what the big deal was. I mean, he did it with guys! Come on! He left women alone! What's the problem?! Specifically, what is HER problem?! I explained as plaintively and as calmly as I could that it does not matter who is the target of objectification -- objectification is wrong. It is also condescending to think that feminists speak out against patriarchy because they want to establish an equally wrong matriarchy in its stead. Of course, they all just scoffed and rolled their eyes at the whole situation. We Kwazy Lib'wals Wif Owr Kwazy Ideaz.
I referred to this instance in my title as oppression of white women because I found it strange that I did not have as visceral of a response as my friend did. If it were a racist matter, I would have been upset. If it were a racist and sexual matter, I would've cut somebody. But just sexist? Especially a sexist stereotype that's lumped more heavily on the heads of young white women and glosses over other women? Not so much. I wondered why that was.
I think I became jaded after a Philosophical Issues in Feminism undergraduate course where perspectives of women of color emerged nowhere in the curriculum or the discussion unless one of the five women of color made a tangential comment about it. The end-of-term discussion really fucking pissed me off after hearing all these white women around me talk about how ending sexist treatment "trumps" ending racist treatment. Good thing a section of me is saved; I guess the rest of me can go to shit in other ways.
I raised my hand and made the point that eliminating sexism will not be successful until we eliminate racism, homophobia, ablism, transphobia -- we have to tackle all the oppression-laced -isms and cooperate. My white female classmates then informed me that I would unfortunately have to wait until their problems were solved. One of them explicitly turned to me and said, "Yeah, but that stuff can come after we're done with sexism, you know?" As a way to placate me. I don't know how I resisted punching her in the face, especially since I was running on a half-hour's worth of rest for the second day in a row. I remember how livid I was, and I wrote very sloppily on the course evaluation that more course readings written by women of color need incorporation into the course.
So
I guess as long as people felt comfortable spitting on different
aspects of my identity, I tried to write off my disconnect as an
ability to develop affinities and responses to individual violations of
them as I please. Today, however, I realized that insulting one part
insults the whole being. I can't accept that or tolerate it. The
difficulty starts here.
What's the most memorable building you've lived in?
Submitted by Shelly.
A homeless shelter. There was a cool playground outside of it, but we only stayed for one night. Two days. It was the second time I've ever slept in a bunk bed. To be as poor as I was/am, I was snotty and I thought it looked disgusting. The food was...not yummy. I didn't eat it all, and I kinda wished people would clean the food off the floor. I remember there being a small devotional room or prayer room. I thought that was the prettiest part of the shelter. It wasn't very big, and for some reason it didn't feel crowded to me.
Maybe this question answers the most memorable place I've stayed in rather than the most memorable building I've lived in.
The answer to that would be my aunt's house, hands down. She bought it one or two years after I was born, and I practically grew up there as much as any place my mother and I lived on our own. I still love that house. My aunt loved decorating and redecorating, and her house looks exquisitely coordinated, expensively outfitted, and ridiculously comfortable. The upstairs has always been hot, and the basement has always been storage/living space. If they took out all the stored items down there, they could open up a little flat with a shared kitchen space. I don't see that happening any time soon. My grandmother has the greenest thumb ever ever. ^_^
Also, I hate dial-up and breakdowns. I'm trudging through law school, and I'm learning to avoid awkwardness in social environments. Sometimes I just can't help it.
I am being a very bad girl because I shouldn't be typing this while in Criminal Law class. I have a free night tonight because my mother and grandmother will not be in town when I get home. So I'm going out to dinner with friends, and after that I'm going home. Screw happy hours.
I'm only going to dinner because I like food.
Also, spite, anger, and frustration that words cannot express besides the succinct declaration that I am a boob.
And a failure.
To live as a proper lover of knowledge, I have to want to KNOW something, and I can't even get THAT right. I feel so worthless, and while staring at the wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall, I still haven't discovered the chink that will get me beyond the barrier of the wall.
