Don't leave a voicemail, seriously.

What's not awesome is there being an actual show I WANT to go to but can't. Not on. Two times in one week. What are the odds? Very low because I hate everything.

True story: the other night we went out and we'd been out, oh, a WHILE and Jenn looks at me and says "is your shirt on backwards?" and I look down go "oh, yeah, it is!" IT GETS BETTER. This is like my favorite shirt, right? And I wear it a lot (you can safely assume it's striped) and sometimes I forget to take the pins off my clothes when I wash them. I had a CBC Radio pin still attached to the proper front side of my shirt. Which was on my back. Typical day in other words.

Because Jenn hates me, she sent me this.

As if that work of genius (the person who made that is on my fl, represent! I know you are), she followed it up with this: everyone should record the television and put it on youtube. I love Pete's glee at being a jackhole. Who hasn't broken up with someone by saying they're gay?

After seventy two more hours of television viewing, I will write more vampires. I am being hilariously stalked for it (that works, btw).

*cruises over to mcrstoryfinders*

What, pray tell, is The Immortality Project? (I'm really excited to find this out because I have a feeling it will provide me with hours of fucking off potential.)

I want to say the story is called I Never Told You What I Do For A Living and it was about Frank and Gerard heading out somewhere to meet up with a couple graphic designers to go over album art. Frank fell for one of the designers and it turned out that Frank and Gerard had this whole murder scheme going for quite some time and they had planned to kill her and Frank didn't want to because he had feelings for her.

Excuse me, what? Sekkrit murdur plot timez? It sounds like they're in the band. So this is NOT AU? The real Frank and Gerard seem like the kinds of dudes who would randomly MURDER someone? And Frank only doesn't want to do it because he falls in love with the potential victim? Where is Jamia, already dead because of another murder plot? Or is it AU in that there's no Jamia but there are zany murder hijinx? I feel this story has to be zany (even though I suspect it's not).


Frank and Gerard are sitting around the tour bus one day and Gerard looks up from drawing a severed arm creeping across the page. He flips his bangs out of his face.

"Dude, you know what would be cool?" Gerard says in an excited tone.

"If people would stop flagging my Xtube vids as underage? I don't want to have to give the site my ID. For obvious reasons," Frank replies. He's sitting behind his laptop and Gerard's really glad it's angled away from him.

"No. You're fucking disgusting." Frank just giggles. "Don't sit there and giggle at my repulsion over your porn habit."

"Duuuuuuuuuuude! You're a fucking freakazoid."

"It's demeaning to women. Haven't you seen all those fucking college girls throwing their clothes off and blowing anyone who'll tape it? What if it was Jamia?" Gerard knows that's a low blow.

Frank just laughs again. Gerard walked into that one.

"Fucking shit. I don't want to know, ok? Listen, I've got a great idea."

"Shoot."

Gerard puts his sketchpad down. "We should totally fucking off someone."

"I vote for that dude who line jumped me at Starbucks." Frank scratches the side of his face and flips off the air.

"I'm serious," Gerard leans towards him and snaps Frank's laptop closed.

"What?" Frank looks stunned.

"Yeah, motherfucker. Murder!"



Did it go like that? I used to try to get people to defriend me in new and interesting ways. Uncuttagged fic? Will that work?

Some days I think to myself “go, be opinionated, give those wrong-thinking heathens what-for!” and I look around and Julia's already said anything I have to say. This is mostly because she THINKS before the speaks, unlike other people I am intimately familiar with (the internet makes you an asshole, I swear to you).

But then other days she goads me. We sort of have a symbiotic relationship of inflaming each other's hatreds and bitchy sides. Good times. We have two main conversational topics: food and racism. What's not to love? I only mention this because she's having a bad week and she likes it when I talk about her. She's not online to save me from myself right now...

I think this year's ibarw is particularly poignant considering the zeitgeist of the US is all about “are we really going go there?” with Barak Obama. Last night we were watching Chuck Schumer on The Daily Show and I came over all Jewish on poor, poor Jenn.

Me: Dude, how fucking awesome is this shit?
Jenn: Hm?
Me: We're watching one of the most influential political programs in the world hosted by a Jew and the guest is the Senior Senator from New York—who is also Jewish! Don't you see how fucking amazing this is?
Jenn: I think you're about to lay it on me.
Me: Indeed, my friend the Texan, I am!


What I had to say was very long winded (in real life, don't get trapped with me when you hear me utter a few keywords: Patrick Stump, String Theory, comic books, or Israel). Some of my opinions are as follows--

I think in the post-WWII landscape in the big Western democracies things changed for Jewish people so swiftly and so overwhelmingly that as a group we/they are still confused about our place in the world. We remember thousands' of years worth of oppression, murder, rape, annihilation, and fear. The fear was constant. The fear's still there. This is true to lesser and lesser degrees as time goes on. But we (here addressing my peoples) have all heard the older people who are in full belief that the police will one day show up at the door and cart everyone off again.

The whole “assimilation” debate has a lot of currency again because of the very fact that most Jews don't feel all that different from anyone else in so far as we move freely, work freely, and play freely in the Western democracies. Kids see no issue w/ marrying out. NO ISSUE. And, frankly, in a family like mine everyone gets sucked into the family traditions whether they want to or not because it's just so pervasive and consuming. I think where we trip up often is that within our own community we still feel part of something other, so we think other people think in a similar way. From what I can see, that's much less so than some of my fellow Jews think (here I am laughing because I'm an atheist, so my claims are to a culture more than a religion, this always feels awkward to me). I also have a sort of semi-outsider status because of my background (I'm Southern, not Ashkenazi, and don't “look” Jewish so people almost universally go “WHAT!?” when I say I am. I did, however, live in NYC and attended a synagogue there outside of my own community for the experience--it felt awesome to be part of the mainstream of Jewish society for a while).

Where I'm going with this is that I often get really (this word has meaning, it's not for flavoring) bent out of shape when I see Jews roll up in racism debates and start out saying “...as a Jew...” Sometimes I just roll my eyes and walk on by. Sometimes I get, um, comment happy?

I think it's extremely offensive for people to think they have access to a special status in race debates just because they're some sort of minority. Yes, Jews are a religious minority who have a long history of being abused, denigrated, maligned, and murdered. However, personally, I've never been walking down the street and had someone clutch their purse more tightly to themselves, been spied on in a department store by security as a shoplifting threat, had someone cross the street to avoid me, or been detained by the police for existing while black. I have had people touch my hair, though.

There are tons of ways people are devalued as human beings. Sometimes we're well-meaning and want to air a concept of empathy rather than sympathy with someone voicing a personal anecdote of a racist encounter. I have many many times been told “but you don't LOOK Jewish” as a compliment, so I get the general “oy, really, bitch?” experience of something who has been told something like “oh, but you speak so well.” But the experiences are vastly different. For one, because I've never personally been systematically discriminated against by my entire society (and here I will say that even in the experience of my living relatives this was not the case, but I am talking about ME not Jews over the whole of history), I have no hesitation to say “what the fuck? Get off my lawn, waspy mofo!” I've never been scared of physical violence, being arrested, or just simply dismissed because of what I look like (aside from being a tiny person in a world where people think that's SO CUTE—but, come on, hardly the same thing). There are places in the world where Jews still experience this sort of culture-wide oppression—this is not the case where the vast majority of the people I interact with online live.

You: But WHAT ARE YOU SAYING?

I'm saying that there are different sorts of minorities. I think the Canadians handle this very well. They call PoC Visible Minorities. This can get touch and go because hijab-wearing Muslims are usually classed in there, but that's a hair-splitting kind of issue because often Muslims are brown or ecru or whatever you want to call dark skinned white people.

I'm saying that it can be offensive to slide a conversation about racism into a conversation about discrimination based on other markers.

I'm saying it's valuable to accept the world for how complex it really is and admit that even if I might have X divination from mainstream, white, middle American, Christian culture, that doesn't mean I have any access whatsoever to knowing what it would be to be terrified of the police, constantly under threat of violence or mockery, or have to watch people I otherwise thought of as allies and friends show their deep-seated internalized racism over the current election and feel it personally. I can recognize racism, but I have no idea what it feels like. Discrimination, sure. But mostly of the variety of “oh, do you get Christmas presents?” than “Jews over there!”

I can certainly know what it's like to turn on The Daily Show and want to cry over HOW FAR we've come in such a short amount of time. It'll be amazing when visible minorities can have that same feeling of “hot damn, check this shit out!”

We all want to have our moments of “good god, can you believe this shit?” as members of a culture that has been the victim of wave after wave of hatred and systematic attempts at destruction (and can I just take a moment to say GO US for being like the equivalent of the tribe of cock roaches—oh dear, I can see the flames...maybe I should delete that...oh fuck it!). We all have valuable things to say about that. We all have personal experiences with that history that are deep and important to who we are as human beings. That being said, I think that in a place where PoC are trying to talk about their daily struggles just to get by and be accepted as HUMAN and VALUABLE our stories don't belong right now because we've got it pretty good, all things considered.

Once there was a time when we belonged in those conversations—isn't it the most amazing thing in history that we no longer do?