Thanks guys. I'm really nervous about what's going down this week, medically, and I wish my migraine doctor was more accessible. I was supposed to have an appointment with him tomorrow, which they wanted to move to today, but there's no way I could miss the 9AM meeting. So, no go. And no firm rescheduled.
I just..I don't know what's going to happen when I show up this weekend, and I'm scared. Because this has been a pretty crappy month.
The meeting has gone pretty well so far. It's the weekly "stand up and take credit for the system outages" meeting, and up until this week, that was never my job. But someone made a call somewhere to put me front and center for a couple applications I work on, from putting out the outage alerts, to shepherding the troubleshooting process (miraculously, I seemed to have worked out what was wrong with the intranet server, because I told the developer-with-no-more-ideas to google the answer, and that's when he discovered he couldn't google from that server, and voila! I'm so brilliant. Uh huh.) to explaining them to upper management.
I thought I could take the afternoon off, but I just got put on a meeting that no one can even give me context on, so I can't make an informed decision about crying myself back to sleep like I really want to.
I think the cracked.com author sounds pretty critical of the whole thing, and with the level of thought he put in to come to those conclusions as well as the blame he seems willing to shoulder I don't see where it's an endorsement. It seems like both an explanation and a criticism, just not a suggestion for how to fix things. Which, you know, I couldn't make either, so I'm not mad at him.
My primary criticism would be that it's totally heterosexist. Secondarily it does seem to blame everything on the sex drive of the (straight) man, whereas I just really hope not. Gross contributor perhaps, but please not everything. That makes me too sad.
I think he was more right than wrong. A war over oil is a war to get a resource, to make our country stronger, to make us richer, to make the oil men richer, to help the oil men be attractive to women. (It's not so much Protecting' Our Wimmins, as to Get Wimmins In Bed.) Even if the warmongers are only swaggering around each other, going "I'm a badass, I ordered Iraq to be bombed," it's to establish dominance over the other men.
I read an environmental essay/blog post that argued that in order to save Earth from global warming, we need to change things so that being rich and consuming a lot of resources is no longer considered attractive/desirable/etc, and that instead people should find people who work to improve society and the world attractive.
Yeah, I'm sure that'll be happening any day now. (Of course, it is true for some people, but I don't see how we can change the majority of people's opinion on the awesomeness of being rich and powerful.
My plan is to become rich and powerful and then work to improve society and the world. So far, it's not working out.
I hope the sanity fairy shows up at the ER meeting. She's overdue.
how we can change the majority of people's opinion on the awesomeness of being rich and powerful.
Since there's no inherent link between "rich and powerful" and wasteful or destructive, I don't see why one would need to change that opinion. Not that I think it's remotely possible, but it is probably more useful to address being wasteful or destructive no matter how rich or powerful you are. No reason you can't be rich, powerful, thoughtful, improving society, and sexy as all get out.
At least not if you are Newman or Redford
Zap2it tells me that the network up fronts are in May. This is something I consistently forget. However, haven't most series committed to a season finale by this point? Why am I convinced that SPN, for instance, traditionally knows, once it got off the bubble, what kind of season-ender they're filming? Have I gotten used to the luxury of early announcement? How can I forget this every single year about every show, and still consider myself obsessive?
Or maybe this is what old and obsessive feels like...
Anyway, first meeting over, millions of emails sent during, and now I'm going to collapse.
Fuck ita ! You need a pain specialist who has your back with the ER.
I hope your pain specialist can make the meeting and, whether or not he does, that the ER meeting ends up not screwing you over, ita.
I read that Cracked article and thought it started off well and then sort of went off the rails toward the end. I think that the author underestimated the wide variation of sexual drive in both sexes, as well as totally discounting non-heterosexuality completely. Did Alan Turing really break Nazi codes so he could get sexual access to women's bodies? Really? I don't think so. Frederick the Great might also have had something to say about how his need to get busy with the ladies drove his activities.
Fox News Doctor Dude: The Hunger Games Will Make Teen Girls Violent, Unfeminine
The Hunger Games … adds to the toxic psychological forces it identifies, rather than reducing them. …
It is an entertainment product of complete fiction and great potency, given its intense level of fantasy and violence. As such, it only conveys young people closer to “expressing” in a virtual format their powerful and primitive instincts (potentially kindling their desire to truly express such instincts) while conveying them further from their daily realities and a little further still from their real selves.
...
Other than entertaining millions and millions of teenagers and making millions and millions of dollars, the net result of The Hunger Games is likely to be:
1) Females will be further distanced from their traditional feminine characteristics that … suggested they were not being real “girls” if they were extremely physically violent.
2) Young teens and many pre-teens will be awakened to the fact that they are capable of extreme violence, given the right set of circumstances.
3) A few psychologically vulnerable teens—who would have come to no good anyhow—may be inspired to replicate the film’s violence.
(All quotes from the Fox Doctor dude.)
