How about a photo essay? If you’re not following me on Twitter (see the little bar to the right), you’re missing out on most of my inane goings-on, as well as the occasional interesting photo. Let me clip the rest off here, so you don’t have to see any pictures if you don’t want to. Reminder, some are NSFW.

Follow me, below the goddamned fold.

Most recently, I have been breaking my ass while rollerskating at 4am on asphalt.

That’s me, keeping it classy. This one, from the night of the wipe-out, is less well-lit but cuter-ish.

The pride and penalties for being a derby girl.

Okay, well, I haven’t actually been doing derby recently. Since my last post, I got into a bit of a downward spiral of bad behavior, only to bring myself out of it, only to go back down. It’s been a helluva six months guys, on the whole.

Let me summarize, with photos. In reverse chronological order, I have been:

Fired from this place:

(Okay, not that particular one, but still.)

Did a bit of modeling for Dr. Sketchy’s:

Spent some time suffering from mild depression and anxiety, hanging around my house watching this House:

And was my best friend’s maid of honor, with this kick-ass hairdo:

And those were pretty much the highlights of June (the first 3), May, April, and March, in that order.

I did other things, sure, but those are the most interesting pictures I put on Twitter.

I didn’t get the funding I needed to go to grad school just yet, so I’m deferring entry another year– I did get accepted into Durham and Bristol, however. So, yays?

Other trifles: I developed and (mostly) overcame a drinking problem, I got my hopes up and down a few times in regards to the unfairer sex, I went to a shrink and got on meds briefly (until they got me fired, really), I filed for unemployment, and I ultimately decided to move down to New Orleans in September.

So, enough boring personal shit, how about that Celebrity Death Bingo?!

Celebrity Death Bingo!

That’s my selection, at least. If you’d like me to send you the Word Document so you can create your own card, just drop me a comment with your e-mail address. If you’d like to tell me I’m going to hell, don’t bother, I’m already aware. If you have any editing suggestions, just let me know!

I’ll get around to making another post eventually.

Those are the 200 most popular words (excluding common English terms) in my Honours in Religion Thesis, “The Garden of Eden in Early Jewish and Christian Exegesis”.

On Any Night
I listened to you all night
when we met
telling stories under
cheap paper party lanterns
and drinking red wine

when you spoke you looked
into my eyes too long so
I bent my head back
to the underbelly of the leaves
smiling so you’d know

that my heart was racing
when you kissed the corner
of my lips and touched my neck
I looked at you and moved
away towards the house

filled another red plastic cup and
took it into the bathroom
with a word to the hostess
not to worry, I sat down
on the tub and thought

my mind rushed forward, easy
I could see us together
for a time and you know
it would be so good
I tipped the wine into the sink

because it takes some time
some practice but
I’ve learned that running
means never having to say
I love you

So I’m taking a brief break from here until I can get back to the basics of this blog– cooking, roller derby, and sex. Or something like those.

Of course, I’ll need to clean my kitchen for the first, and, well, get laid for the last. But I’ll post soon on derby, since that’s the only one of the three that I’m doing these days. See you soon.

Actually, I guess there is one story I’d like to relate, that’s been pestering me for a while now.

I have a new job since last I posted– one of the reasons I’ve been remiss. It’s a proper nine-to-five, so I don’t have every other week to just fuck around on the internet.

I make no secret of the fact that I work for an abortion provider– I am proud of all the work I do, which includes basic medical services as well as abortion services. I help treat women from all economic backgrounds, races, ages, even genders. That’s right, we had a man come in a few days ago for his annual Pap smear. But that’s not my story.

A few nights ago, I was at derby practice. One of the girls was recently hired as a Pilates instructor, and invited us all to her first few classes, which were being offered free. I told her I couldn’t make it on Thursday, as I leave work late that day. Mind you, it is no secret where I work. She said that there was also a 1pm class on Saturday I could attend.

“Oh, I can’t make it, I have abortions all morning.”

I said this casually, not going for the twisted-humor laugh I occasionally pull out. And immediately some of the girls started looking at each other, and one of the leaders said, “Yeah, you could have just said you have to work. You didn’t have to put it like that, it makes me uncomfortable.”

That’s right, I could have just said I had to work– but that’s not what came to mind. The simple fact is that I am busy well into the early afternoon every Saturday with abortions. That is not a dirty word. That is a basic outpatient procedure which is, in all honesty, safer than carrying a pregnancy to full term. And in a group of liberated, empowered women, I thought I’d be safe saying that. The woman who voiced her objection is even a lesbian– maybe she’s uncomfortable because she doesn’t think she’ll ever have to worry about it.

But the fact is, according to the Guttmacher Institute’s research at least 50% of American women (even lesbians!) “will experience an unintended pregnancy by age 45, and, at current rates, about one-third will have had an abortion.”

That’s right. Every third woman you see on the street, statistically, has had or will have an abortion. And the only thing that makes it a shame is your perception of it.

Women who have abortions do so for a number of reasons, and if any one of them is valid, they all are. I counsel women every day from every walk of life who need our services aborting a pregnancy that they cannot envision keeping. And they are clearly not alone in numbers.

But they are alone because of the stigma of abortion.

I know, definitely, that at least one woman on my team has had an abortion– a close friend of the “uncomfortable” woman. She knows it too. And statistics say that even if she doesn’t feel concerned (though we do have lesbians come in for abortions, either through rape, one-time “mistakes”, or even wanted pregnancies that they find they cannot complete), one of the women sitting on either side of her has or will use abortion services.

And I couldn’t help but look around the group of women and wonder which among them sat there in silence while the others spoke about their “discomfort” with my simply mentioning my work. Just imagine being them, in this group of strong women where we’re encouraged to be ourselves and be tough and most of all to be connected with one another.

How isolating must that feel?

That’s why I got into this job. Because I do not want women to feel alone, no matter their backgrounds, no matter their reasons. Finding out you’re pregnant changes your life, and everyone deserves support, no matter what choice you make.

On that note, I’ll make sure to post something fun and funny about sex later.  Or maybe grad school. Good to see you again.

Well, the point is, missionaries wake me up– and I know for a fact that there is a better way to be woken up with missionary.

Today, however, was the first time members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints knocked on my door.

I should warn you, I do not always look my charming Dickensian self, as seen on my pal and neighbor the Homosecular Gaytheist’s blog. For example, sometimes when I wake up after six hours of sleep following a twelve-hour shift, my hair does this number:

Now, roundabouts 5.30– a full half-hour before my alarm was set to go off– I hear a firm, strong hand entirely dismissing the fact that I have a doorbell and instead rapping sharply on my door. I startle awake, and first check the back door, suspecting that the HG wants to chat. No dice. So it’s downstairs in my PJs (let me tell you, there were lucky I was wearing PJs and not my fluffy yellow short-skirted robe. Although next time…) and to the peephole, where I find it difficult to believe my sleep-bleared eyes.

Mormons.

Jesus FUCKING Latter-day Christ it’s Mormons, and bless they’re hearts they’re even tolerably attractive– and for a girl in this state of hormonal turpitude, well. Plus, I’ve got a thing for the religiously inclined and… right. Easily distracted.
So I’m desperately trying to paste my bangs down over my forehead and look tolerably presentable and, as it turns out, much more pissed off than I anticipated.

“Hi, we’re from the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints.”

“Yes, and I was opposed to Proposition 8, so you’re out of luck.”

“I’m sorry?” This was said with one of those dumb-sheep looks.

“California’s Prop 8 banning gay marriage, that the Mormon Church worked so hard to pass?”

“Well, we’re sent out for two years with no real contact with what’s going on in the world…”

“Then I’ll tell you what’s going on. The Mormon Church encouraged its followers to donate $20 million to the cause of banning gay marriage in California, which I happen to support. So if you weren’t aware of that, you are now.”

They didn’t say anything, but looked a little confused (are they trained to do that when faced with opposition?). So taking some pity on them, because god knows they only have one another on those long, cold nights trudging around unfamiliar territory… those long nights with only each other to reach out to and understand them… holding one another as they weep silent tears, fingers clutching frantically at their pearly-white buttons…

Well, anyway, I realized tonight might be a long night for them, since their Church doesn’t love them enough to let their love be made public, so I said as gently as possible,

“Look, best of luck, but you’re going to have a tough time. There are a lot of people that support gay marriage.” I left off the part about not liking Mormons outright, since they probably were already aware. “And don’t go knocking on the door around back, fair warning. Now, I’m going back to bed.”

And I went inside, and they left, and really it was a much more pleasant exchange than I’d anticipated. Like I said, I’m a sucker for the religious types, even the cult-y religious– that’s where the sociology minor comes in, after all.

So if you see two lonely Mormons trudging down the road tonight, have some courtesy. Have some sympathy, and some taste– the Mormon church sends these poor stragglers out alone into the wilderness, and they’re expected to face down all the rest of the world while they’re left without a clue as to what’s going on.

Besides, they’re not evil, just misguided. It’s their megalomaniacal church you have to look out for.

I tried it last year, but it was my senior year of college and I had a lot going on. Even my framework novella of short stories couldn’t withstand the pressure– though I do intend to finish it some day.

This year, thankfully, I am doing nothing with my life. (Ha, never thought I’d say that.) But I do acknowledge my inability to keep a coherent storyline going, so instead I am re-christening the project “Laurie’s NaNoWriMo Short Story Challenge”.

Along with a few friends, I am text messaging and e-mailing a daily prompt, with a goal of writing 1,600 word (or more) short stories each day. They will not necessarily be good, or polished. But they will be written.

I think I’m going to update this blog with each day’s prompt, and encourage anyone out there to take the challenge as well! Or if one particular prompt strikes your fancy, go ahead and write. And if you’d like additional incentive, or input, e-mail it to yeswecanwrite (at) gmail (dot) com. I’m not going to read anything unless you specifically ask, but I will keep track of the word counts. My story today had 1821 words.

Day One: In 1600 words or more, tell me a love story about a river.

Check out below the fold for the full rules of engagement, as laid out in my introductory e-mail to friends.

I need people to write with, and for. And I know each of
you needs to write more, as well. So we’re going to play a little game
during November, to coincide with National Novel Writing Month. Feel
free to sign up on their page (nanowrimo.org) to show off your word
count. But we’re doing things a bit differently. I’ve laid out the
rules below:

1. The goal is to meet the NaNoWriMo standard of 50,000 words during
the month of November. But since none of us have the patience or time
to work on an actual novel, I’m insisting on a 1,600 word story
(minimum) each day. If you only write the minimum, you’ll have a few
hundred words left to go by the end of the month. Try to average
1,667. Feel free to write more than one story, of varying lengths.

2. The point is not to have polished, wonderful works. The point is to
write. Get those words out, pad your sentences if you need to, do not
use contractions if that helps. Just get the words on the screen.

3.I’m going to text message a daily prompt at 8am. You don’t have to
use it, but it’s there to help. Turn it any way you want to. Write
more than one story from it. Delete it out of hand. Just write.

4. E-mail your story to yeswecanwrite (at) gmail (dot) com by midnight each
night. We all have busy schedules, so don’t make excuses. One story
each day, on your own topic or the prompt. No one is going to be
reading them, I’m just going to collect them each day, make sure
you’ve sent them, and have written the correct number of words. I WILL
NOT READ THEM, THEY DO NOT HAVE TO BE POLISHED, OR EVEN ANY GOOD.

5. Do not fall behind on the word count. Feel free to get ahead, and
then take a break, or write a shorter story, or whatever, but at the
end of each day you should have [1600 x (the day of the month)] words
written. Preferably you’ll be keeping a bit ahead of that, since the
goal is 50,000 by the end of the month.

We all need to challenge ourselves, and actually start writing some of
those stories floating around. So DO IT.

All of the cords, pins, and medals are in fact mine. I’m even missing a couple of pins.

Two choice excerpts from the night:

Man: Congratulations!

Me: Thanks! I’m a Victim of the Ailing Job Market!

Man: [blank, then horrified stare]

Woman: I like your costume!

Me: Thanks! It cost $40,000!

I don’t think it would be as funny if it weren’t true. My other idea was to show up in my leather fringed vest over my workshirt, a headband and a pair of aviators. I would be a baby boomer that used to have principles but is now a corporate shill. This too is funny, because it’s pretty much true (aside from the generation).

Now, when it came to actually making the soup, I fudged a bit on some of the originalx8 amounts– I used less water and brie, for example, because the first seemed to be enough, and the latter was too damned expensive.

Soup:

16 tbsp (8 oz) olive oil

4 sweet potatoes, diced

green trimmings from 1 leek, cut into small pieces

400ml white wine (Roughly half a bottle– a bit more)

64 oz hot water

24 oz brie (three cheap 8 oz wheels, Kroger brand)

Bread:

3 or 4 ciabatta buns, cut into 1.5-2″ squares

olive oil (splash some in according to taste)

3 tbsp butter (or more, to taste)

3 small cloves of garlic, finely chopped

Heat the oil in a large pot, and add the sweet potatoes. Cook until soft and mushy. Stir in the wine, water, and leek. Keep at a low boil until tender.

Use the in-between times to cut the rind off of your brie, and cut it into chunks. Stir it into the soup until melted. Continually stir at this point to make sure the cheese fully blends. It will start smelling AMAZING.

But first you must prepare the bread. Heat oil, butter and garlic in a separate small skillet. Dip both sides of bread pieces, and then grill or bake them for three to four minutes (we used a George Foreman Grill), until just crisp on the outside, but still chewy.

After the bread’s ready, start ladling the soup and dive in!

My primary recommendation for the future would be to use less olive oil in the soup. I typed the recipe as we used it, but I think 6 oz of oil would be sufficient. Otherwise, when ladling the soup you may want to use a 1:3 ratio of ladle to slotted spoon– that way you get the nummy juiciness, more tasty potato-and-leek, and less flavour-inhibiting oil. Alternately, use the bread to sop up the extra oil, and save it for last.

Enjoy!

One of Ali’s major criticisms of contemporary Islam is its inability to adapt to the modern world, which is a necessary and painful transition. “The West would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred towards women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life.”

I absolutely agree with her on this point- any way of life that mandates inequality based on any criteria, let alone biological sex, should not be supported by any government. This is why it is occasionally necessary to legislate equality, something you’d think would be common sense to all people.*

Hirsi Ali praises this transition, citing the centuries of Enlightenment Christianity has face as a kind of skipping-stone that Islam can use. “Muslims don’t have to take six hundred years to go through a reformation in the way they think about equality and human rights.”

Yet again, this is something I can agree with. My problem arises from the what-comes-next arena. What Islam is facing, and needs, is a reformation that allows them to update their religion, as Christianity has done, and in order to do this, it will need to look to the spirit of the text, and not the hard copy. Just as Christianity has been able to rebuild itself as a peaceful religion (in a number of ways, at least), Islam needs to be allowed to be re-interpreted. Unfortunately, even Hirsi Ali denies modern scholars the ability to do this.

“Wishful thinking about the peaceful tolerance of Islam cannot interpret away this reality: hands are still cut off, women still stoned and enslaved, just as the Prophet Muhammad decided years ago.”

“When people say that the values of Islam are compassion, tolerance, and freedom, I look at reality, at real cultures and governments, and I see that it simply isn’t so.”

Hirsi Ali was involved in some of the worst that modern Islam has to offer. We cannot deny that atrocities such as those she encountered and lived through still occur. What needs to happen is a realignment of values under the flag of Islam, such as her father wanted to believe. It will require that people stop looking at the Qur’an as uninterpretable, yes. But even Hirsi Ali will need to allow it to be interpretable: you cannot say “Learn to take this metaphorically!” and then shout down the people who are seeking to do just that, with examples from those who are not as progressive.

Yes, Hirsi Ali is an atheist, and that is her right. But just as atheists clamour for freedom from religion, we must also remember to allow the religious among us their freedom to religion. Some people will want to maintain their religious faith, even when tempering it with reason. Hirsi Ali gives lip-service to the idea of updating Islam, but then has a sad disregard for those who are attempting to do just that. Reformers in Islam deserve support, the same as those Christian philosophers who struggled for centuries to allow reason and faith to coexist–which they can.

If we want Islam to skip the centuries of transition that Christianity required, we should support those who are striving for a moderate, modern Islam, instead of disregarding based on the actions of the literalists.

I’ll have to revisit this later to streamline it, I believe, but I’m afraid Two Smokin’ Hot Freethinkers are expecting me next door.

*The next Two Smokin’ Hot Freethinkers podcast will feature more opinions on legislation and the church-state division, once we re-record it.