confronting the hard parts.

I like what I do. It's a privilege to tell the stories of others. I've enjoyed meeting the people I study. I love going to conferences, I love going to class, I love the feeling the feeling of opening up a box and not knowing what I'm going to find. The challenges of interpreting the past engage me deeply. I have made a lot of sacrifices because being a historian is so satisfying and rewarding that I want to do it for my whole life, and I want desperately to learn how to do it well.

I love to study New Right conservatives. I admire their passion and temerity. Their rhetoric and writing captivates me. Making sense of a time in which my parents came of age and the moment I was born into has great appeal for me. I have come along way since I started studying these people, and I really, genuinely appreciate what they have to say and how they challenge my worldview.

I say all this because today I had to confront the aspect of my topic I hate the most. It's impossible to write about the New Right without talking about abortion.  For many social conservatives, it's the reason they mobilized, the one thing in the world that they would give anything to change.

I hate reading about it. I hate talking about it. I would do anything to avoid it all together.

The descriptions in pro-life literature, while well-intentioned, are often grizzly and grotesque. They depict excessive and unusual procedures, and overemphasize poorly handled situations.  I concede that it is purposeful and deliberate language. But I think that by and large pro-life accounts are as decadent as the behaviors they are intended to critique.

It has little to do with the fact that I'm pro-choice. I believe that women should have  access to safe medical procedures should they elect to do so. I stand with Linda Gordon in acknowledging that women have made this choice throughout history regardless of its legality, and with Barack Obama who feels that unwanted pregnancies should be prevented through affordable birth control and comprehensive sex education. Like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I believe that it is not a question of either / or. But my politics seldom enter the picture. I am guided by professional ethics and exercise a level of restraint that others have called judicious and even admirable. What I write is not about me. I am not trying to change anybody's mind, nor am I open to my mind being changed.

I just don't like reading about blood and tissue. Needles, suction, disposal, no thank you. I think it's a terrible way to spend the day. It makes me miserable. I don't find it enjoyable to try to understand what's going on in the text; I find it so abhorrent that I struggle to get motivated when I have to address the issue. It's impossible to focus on, requiring breaks, endless coffee, snacks, checking of blogs, email, twitter, and anything that might offer relief from the task.  If someone called and said, "Hey, would you like to come clean my toilet?" I would probably opt for that.  My work ends with descent into exhaustion and then unsatisfying naps. I wind up feeling drained and find it near impossible to shake off the dirty feeling I get from reading this rubbish. To use a turn of phrase from my Mormon days, it offends my spirit.

I love what I do. I love what I study. I wouldn't change my path even if I could. 

But what do we do with the parts of our jobs- our vocations- that we hate? 

if only i could ride the bike i just bought.

The D3 arrived this morning. It's an pretty overcast day here, and I woke up feeling not so well, so getting the bike was pretty exciting. It was easy to get up the stairs which is about all it takes to make me happy. Or so you would think.



Getting it together was, for the most part, a breeze. I really liked all these clever little hinges. It really does just snap together.

So this it where I started to have problems. As you can see, there's no seat. Currently, as it stands, if I try to put the seat post in, the seat is taller than the handle bars. As I have a 28" inseam, that would work, oh, I don't know, basically never.

The problem is that there is this white piece of pipe stuck up the stem (?- my bike vocab is limited here). There's no mention of this piece anywhere on the instructions or in any picture. My first call to Performance's product support, the guy says, "Yah, that's just a piece of packing material. Pull it out." And I was like, well, funny you would say that because I already tried that, but what the heck. I'll try again. So I hang up, and I try pulling really, really hard, and it won't budge. So I call Performance's product support again, and I'm like, no really, that piece of pipe won't come out.


And so this guy, he's a little more committed to being helpful and suggests maybe needle nose pliers, which would work if I had pliers that had an eighteen inch nose on them. And ultimately he says, well, you should take it to a shop. Which pisses me off to no end, because for this bike, they don't give you the option of shipping it to the shop to begin with, which I would do because I'm not a mechanically oriented person. So now I have no option really, lacking the necessary brute strength to get the pipe out (really, I think most people would- it's going nowhere), but to try and figure out how to get it to a shop. As SEPTA has a no bikes policy (including folding) and I lack bungee cords to strap this shit on the back of the ODT, I feel pretty hosed right now. Going to give the local Performance shop a call to see if they can make this right.

what's wrong with america when getting stapled in the back doesn't earn you best actor.

Let's have a talk about how I haven't even seen "Milk" and I didn't even watch "The Oscars" but I am all kinds of pissed that "The Wrestler" got completely snubbed.

I would like to see Sean Penn do that.

milking mormon masculinity for all its worth.

I saw this on facebook today. Maybe it's because my blood pressure is a little high right now because people are DUMB but I saw it and was just like, "great, as if they need to be even bigger douchebags when they get home."


It's like you think you've gotten over things and then you realize that you haven't. I mean really, I have gotten over things... but REALLY? Yesterday my friend was just talking about how weddings are such big business in Utah, and this was like icing on the cake-- exploiting things that should be valuable and emotional and special for business! ARGH! I am going to go live in a cabin in the woods ALONE. Good thing nobody clicks on facebook ads anyways.

p.s. isn't screen grab useful?

i can't tell if this shows that i really care about what i do or whether it justs boasts about my ability to make a great sandwich.

I would just like to use this post to publicly thank the turkey-cranberry sandwich in front of me for preventing me from spontaneous combustion. You see, I turned down an invitation to a kegger in Logan (Logan? Really? Not even gas under two bucks a gallon can make driving that far seem like a good idea when I am this busy. It just occured to me that not even free beer could get me to drive that far this weekend. Who am I becoming?!) to spend the evening "getting ahead" on a paper not due FOR ANOTHER MONTH (Where is Melanie?! What have you done with her?! This is turning into Invasion of the Body Snatchers, clearly).

I say this because I think that such effort-- such devotion to my craft-- should certainly be rewarded by the magic of the text-- the six books I need to read are, after all, in my field! This should be an unending pleasure cruise of an evening! And then I opened up The Longest and Newest Book on My List that I Shall Not Name and my evening started to feel like that Office episode where they go on the cruise, only not even funny or entertaining. I have not been so enraged and annoyed by a book after reading only the introduction EVER. I already hate this book more than any book I've ever read, and I mean come on, I finished... no, nothing even compares. My sensibilities have been so assaulted. I feel so wounded, injured, insulted, and aghast that somebody entered my subject area, injected this nasty, biased, bourgeois consensus liberal intellectual elitism into it and then, THEN, called it OBJECTIVITY! The children of post-modernism weep at the very existence of such a book.

So I just wanted to thank artisan bread, mayonnaise, red leaf lettuce, salt and pepper, rosemary infused roasted turkey breast, homemade whole cranberry sauce and whipped cream cheese for settling down the bustling atoms that make up my body. I very nearly exploded.

the tragic state of health care in america, or, why i hate being a grown up sometimes.

Watch out-- this post will be filled with profanity. -M

Today I received a bill for 335.40 from University Health Care. For August 23rd of last year. When I still had decent benefits through Uncle Callison (my student insurance now is sketchy enough to make me a diligent partaker of my multivitamin and hope my appendix never bursts). Surprised, both at how quickly seven months can pass, and in extreme wonderment at how, after seven months, I was being fucking billed, I called their billing office, because um hello, this I cannot afford. I already spent that money on plane tickets for wedding fun and family reunionizing!

I don't have good experience with billing-- something similar to this happened in November over treatment I'd received in May and June and finally it was determined that it was nothing more than an unfightable case of my insurance just being assholes who don't want to fucking pay to have me tested because fuck, they might actually fucking have to pay to treat me. So I was defensive when I made my call today.

This defensiveness quickly melted into hysteria (blasted "hysterical woman" stereotype! I hate being that woman!) as I was told that my former asshole insurer had denied the claim not once, but four times, and finally UHC just gave up and sent me a bill. I told poor billing guy, over and over and over, but I was covered through the end of that month. I mean, fuck, what if my appendix had burst? What if the bill was for 8,000 dollars? Clearly I was being screwed. Finally the guy conceded that my former insurer had said that they didn't recognize my ID information and that I would have to call my former insurer. I would have to do the work because people specializing in medical billing can't fucking handle it. This is our health care system-- oh just charge the patient, they can assume the costs, we don't care how we get our money as long as we get it. That fucking attitude is destroying our country. When patient care-- the whole fucking purpose of going to the doctor-- is not the priority, our country is headed down the shithole fast.

Enraged, I hung up and tore into the black hole pit of hell that constitutes my filling system. Finally-- FINALLY-- I found the letter from my former insurer stating I was indeed covered and called their asses. You know what they told me? Oh, it's because they were filing with former insurance Utah, not Washington. It means they had your prefix wrong. Three little letters on my insurance card that the billing people didn't catch. Of course our system didn't recognize you. Our records don't even show they tried making a claim, the nice girl said.

So I called UHC and the guy had his tail between his legs as I told him how his fucking system that he should understand works, and hopefully I won't get billed for it.

But here's what makes me mad. If you don't know what questions to ask-- if all you did was go to the doctor and that's all you really understand about the situation-- then the system makes you pay. The healthcare system in this country privileges not only the people who can pay for it, but also the people who know how to negotiate it, the people who can articulate their needs or concerns or problems to ensure they don't get fucked over. Honestly, this is the kind of shit that gives me heartburn, I'm choking down berry-flavored Tums like skittles right now because it gives me reflux that everything-- fucking everything in this fucking country-- seems to come back to some kind of privilege. Whether I got the job with insurance because I'm white or because I was a woman or whether that guy didn't take me seriously because I'm a woman or because my class has put me in a position to get higher education so I can have the linguistic skills to deal with the bureaucracy-- it's all dependent on some kind of privilege. And that makes me so angry because it seems to me that healthcare shouldn't be privileged. In a country with as much abundance, with such an exceptionally high standard of living, it seems to me that access to healthcare should be a right extended to all Americans. And that my friends, is why I will support a Democrat in November, because this shit can't be tolerated any longer.

*end rant*