Wow, zuisa, I can't imagine taking a 42-day cruise!

Some people are the wires, some people are the electricity. I'm a wire that throws out an occasional spark.

Ooh, I like that, and would like to think of myself that way. I just became facebook friends with someone I know from work, so the next day she said, "I didn't know you went to [grad school]! You must be really smart." I was like, eh. "...and a feminist." Well, yes, I am. Not that it has anything to do with [grad school]. But I guess that's a fair assumption. Anyway, it was kind of funny.

WRT to sexism, Dawkins did also say this

"A more subtle reason for preaching to the choir is raising consciousness. When the feminists raised our consciousness about sexist pronouns, they would have been preaching to the choir where the more substantive issues of the rights of women and the evils of discrimination against them were concerned. But that decent, liberal choir still needed its consciousness raising with respect to everyday language. However right-on we may have been on the political issues of rights and discrimination, we nevertheless still unconsciously bought into linguistic conventions that made half the human race feel excluded."

To me, the notion that women have all the power in sexual relationships is a pernicious myth with little basis in reality.

We're that gatekeepers, dontcha know. We decide whether or not men will be allowed to fuck us.

I have been told that more times than I care to remember. (Not by Tim. He tends to view sexual relations as something both people engage in, not something the man does to the woman because she "lets him" do it. That's kind of nifty.)

It did occur at that meeting earlier this year. I'm not sure if there is YouTube evidence of it, though.

I'm writing an essay about this, and cognitive dissonance for the new book, so i feel raw-nervish.

It's uncomfortable when I'm called out on something racist or sexist. I think I've been called out here a few times, and my reaction is the same: defensiveness, justification, embarrassment, shame.

I'm trying to strangle the first two. Or at least shorten the time from them to shame.

Scott Adams sockpuppeted on MeFi? Wow, that's really dumb.

It's going to be a long tornado season. (We just graduated from tornado watch to tornado warning.)

Dude.

I totally just knocked a grand of my taxes. WTF! I was at the last step, comparing this year's numbers to last year's, and I decided I really needed to investigate the mysterious "other adjustments" number that was so much higher last year. So I upgraded to TurboTax's Home & Business, figuring I was already so much in the hole an extra fifty bucks wouldn't hurt.

And whaddya know, I had my health insurance premiums in the normal spot instead of in the self-employed spot, and bang, a grand less.

Oh shit, could I have deducted health insurance premiums? Meh, it wouldn't have helped that much, I don't think.

I'm watching Modern Family and laughing about how my cousin was saying it is her family. It's funny because of how true it must be about so many families.

Well, there's two bits. You can put your health insurance premiums in the normal health expenses category. That's what I did initially. But that amount has to be pretty high for it to count at all. So in my case, that was just zeroed out.

The second bit is if you're self-employed, in which case there's an entirely different place where you put your health insurance premiums, which can be deducted 100%. That was (obviously now) what I did last year, and what I have done now. But it wasn't immediately obvious, because it was lumped in an "other adjustments" category, so I could see that it was different, but I couldn't see why.

That's fantastic, Liese!