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“Everyone’s so politically correct these days.”

“Political correctness has gone too far.”

“Political correctness violates the First Amendment.”

Please stop saying statements like these and find a better way to articulate yourself because you sound really, really ignorant.

Politically correct is one of those terms that makes me cringe, not because of what it represents, but for how it’s been reclaimed by nasty people to mock those of us who request or demand a more mature and respectful general discourse. But, for better or worse, that’s the term that we seem to be stuck with, since “Not Acting Like a Racist/Prejudiced/Homophobic Jackass,” is wordy and not always appropriate for the evening news.

Let me tell you first what politically correct IS NOT. There is no politically correct legislation. The First Amendment of the Constitution states that THE GOVERNMENT may not dictate what you can and cannot say. It does NOT state that you can say whatever you want about/to whoever you want and that person just has to take it, even if you’re dragging the conversation down by being tactless and offensive. So while the government can’t tell you what to say or not to say, private citizens and companies (ie, your employers) can. You are, in fact, pretty fucking free in this country, no matter whatever dipshit on Fox News you get your information from tells you.

Politically correct is a general understanding that if you say something that the person that you are talking to or about finds demeaning and unnecessary, they can ask you to stop out of respect for them as a human being. And you, if you are not a self-centered a-hole, will at least adjust your language for the sake of the understanding that we are all equals and deserve to be treated with the bare minimum of respect.

What is usually pretty interesting about protests against politically correct language is that they often come from a member of a traditionally dominant group of society. Being told by someone who was traditionally beneath them that they do not permit them to speak to them that way makes them feel uneasy and not powerful. So, a straight person pouting over someone asking them not to use the word “gay” as a synonym for something stupid or negative, or an able-bodied person upset because they were asked not to use the word “retard,” or a white person coming to the stunning realization that making fun of “Asians” is not only assheadedly insensitive, particularly now, but myopically ignorant and tacky, or a man upset that he can’t get away with calling every woman a bitch and not get shit for it are the reactions of a privileged group threatened by those whose oppression they benefited from. It’s much easier to believe that one of those uppity “others” is trying to stifle your freedom of speech than it is to accept that your words do, in fact, damage our progress as a society. Words are never “just words.”

Of course, it happens often that we unintentionally offend people. Perhaps a joke fell horribly flat and you are in the awkward position of defending your choice of words. “You know that’s not what I meant,” is not the thing to say here. “I’m sorry that you found that offensive,” is also not the solution. And, seriously, “My best friend is ______ and he doesn’t care if I say ______,” doesn’t absolve you. The members of any group of people are not all the same. Simply say, “I’m sorry,” and try to absorb what you learned from the experience.

It’s not about censorship. It’s not about manners. It’s about treating each other the way we should be.

I’m trying to not think about earthquakes because they scare the shit out of me and aside from donating money for relief there’s not a whole hell of a lot anyone can do about stuff like that. Earth got a wedgie. Then everything went boom.

* * *

I’m ordering new checks and have the option of adding a pithy expression to them. I’m so tempted to add something ridiculous and untrue, like, “Horses are my life.”

After writing it out, it seemed so deranged and wonderful that I went ahead and ordered them as such. So now, at least in my checking existence, horses are my life.

* * *

I’m still jogging, as you can see from the widget over there on the left. I’m working on building up my speed because I have this somewhat arbitrary goal of being able to run 5K in 30 minutes. I decided to accomplish this by redoing the Couch to 5K program but using it to incrementally increase how fast I can go. It’s pretty cool, because I can remember getting on the treadmill around this time last year and barely being able to survive going 4.0 miles an hour for longer than a few seconds but eventually, after weeks and weeks, getting to 4.7 miles an hour and thinking, “Wow! I hope my face doesn’t peel off from going so fast!” Now, 4.0 mph is my warmup/cooldown walking speed and I’m pushing past 6.0 miles an hour.

One of the students where I work checks in on my progress occasionally. He did the Couch to 5K about two years ago and now regularly competes in triathlons and stuff. He’s obviously more hardcore about the whole thing, as I don’t think I’m really interested in working toward that big of a goal. He did encourage me to sign up for a 5K race, though. I told him that I had been hesitant to do so because I didn’t want to be embarrassed by how slow I am or how many walking breaks I might have to take, but quickly gobbled up my self-doubt with, “But, I KNOW that that doesn’t really matter. It’s far more badass to go out there and just do it than to stand on the sidelines and pout about how much better everyone else is.” He paused and said, “No, it matters.” To which I replied, “Oh…oh.”

A few days later he emailed me about the Race for the Cure, encouraging me again to go for it, adding, “There are lots of old people, so you know you won’t be the slowest person there.” Thanks, man! Now I’m thinking about making a point of running past old people at this breast cancer shindig and saying stuff like, “OOOOHHHH in your FACE, coffin-dodger! How does my ass look jogging further and further away from you? What was Prohibition like?” But I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if an 80-year-old elbowed me out of her way. We’ll see.

* * *

And in stark contrast to all of that health and exercise talk…

Since it’s the first Friday of Lent and we’re celebrating my mother-in-law’s birthday today, we’re going over to her house for fish sandwiches. I am far too excited about this. And I agreed to make her a birthday cake. So, knowing that she really likes Oreos, I made her a Chocolate Oreo Cake, the recipe for which I found at Sing for Your Supper.

The hardest part was actually cutting Oreos in half. They’re such brittle cookies. Even still, I didn’t finish up with this until nearly 1 a.m. because I had a horrific stomachache that kept me confined to the couch for a few hours.

This morning, I was putting my oatmeal on the stove and the baby was supposed to be getting his shoes and jacket on. When I came out of the kitchen, he was reading a book. “BLAFGGHHHAHAH!” I shouted. We made it to the bus stop just as the bus was pulling up to the light. The bus driver actually said to me, “You know, you almost missed the bus,” to which I replied, “Hehehe,” which is what I say when someone has just said something so thoroughly annoying and obnoxious and unnecessary and I need to prevent myself from saying, “ALMOST DOESN’T COUNT AND ALSO I ALMOST HATE YOU EVERY OTHER MORNING WHEN I STAND HERE FOR 15 MINUTES WAITING BECAUSE I GET HERE AT THE PRESCRIBED TIME.” I don’t like to provoke the people commandeering large vehicles containing my child. I’m overprotective.

Anyway, this past weekend, I consumed like a good American.

Movies:

The Duchess

Yawn. Very pretty-looking period drama about the Duchess of Devonshire, but I get so bored with heavy-handed, “You’ve come a long way, baby,” pearl-clutchers in which women are overtly oppressed in such a way that we’re supposed to go, “My, it’s so good that sexism is all gone now.”

The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia

I can’t remember why, but in one of my short story classes in college we watched The Dancing Outlaw, about the wild mountain dancer Jesco White. He was a character and not always likable but entertaining enough. It never occurred to me what kind of cloth he was cut from. But someone went back to Boone County, WV and made a documentary about his family, including matriarchs Bertie Mae and Mamie, Kirk, and of course Sue Bob, aka The Pretty One.

I admire their loyalty to each other and their determination to live exactly the way they want to. But it was undeniably fucked up to watch Kirk snort crushed up pills in her hospital room while her newborn daughter slept nearby and to know that even if they do get sober, the only real option they have is to break their backs working for a coal company and still be more or less broke. Blargh.

ANYWAY

The Glories of Big Box Commerce:

We went to Teh Wal-Mart to procure groceries. Most of the time this is a purely robotic venture. We march up and down the aisles, grabbing stuff on our list and try to make it out of there expeditiously so that we can get on with our lives. But sometimes if you really look at the stuff that’s available to purchase, it all seems kind of surreal.

Chocolate-covered Froot Loops. You can tell from the startled expressions on the faces of the banana, orange, and cherries that this was an unexpected development. I’m not really opposed to chocolate-covered anything and really if you’re eating Froot Loops, why the hell not dip them in chocolate at that point?

It’s never encouraging when your food barfs before you even eat it. “Ugh, I’m nauseating.”

This is very clever product placement. Next to the condoms, you have both the Gatorade Prime, for the pre-game, and the Gatorade Recover. It’s got electrolytes.

Doo-do-doo, I’m strolling through the hair care aisle. The last thing I’ll run into is pla–

I had heard of placenta treatments for hair, I just never imagined seeing them in Wal-Mart.

Charlie Sheen and Ronald Reagan. A double dose of “I just can’t bring myself to give a shit,” and “Thanks for the legacy, a-hole.”

This is me, pretty much all the time now:

I feel like all I do is work and then come home and fall asleep on the couch. In between all of that, I mentally toil with some stuff, but nothing that I feel comfortable sharing here. Maybe I could do like the blog equivalent of Mad Libs?

“Kelly [adverb] [verb]ed some [adjective] [noun] with [person in the room]. It was a [adjective] [noun] and it made her [verb].”

I can tell you that I got my hairs cut the other day.

My desire to keep the salon blowout has prevented me from washing my hair, so picture me today with a stringier, somewhat Kelly-Cutroneish version of the cut above.

I have, however, been keeping myself busy around these here internets. I wrote on MoxieBird this week about Arianna Huffington, the iPad 2, legislative fetuses, $14,000 prom dresses, and gender roles in toy commercials. On MamaPop, I wrote about the aforementioned Kelly Cutrone, Kate Middleton, Oprah, and, of course, Big Love (or, as I tend to call it nowadays, “God damn fucking Big Love,” because I write out the events of each week’s episodes and sprain my eyes from rolling them so hard. Who knew a show about polygamists would turn out to be absurd? Oh, wait…). Also also wik, I’m writing on the new iteration of Sweetney. I wrote last week about what my “Mommy Card” might look like, and this week I wrote about how bitchin’ roller skating is.

I’m hoping that Daylight Savings ending next weekend will help. Winter seems to kick my ass harder and harder each year. SIGH.

The baby, not surprisingly, is shaping up to be quite the smart ass. When he was leaving for school the other day, he said good-bye to the husband, who told him (as he does every day) to do well in school. The baby replied, “Thanks for the words of wisdom, Daddy.” I’m so screwed.

A lot of what gets me down is my inability to control things, to not be able to grasp them and fix them the way that I know that I can. This seemed to go into overdrive after I had the baby. I felt so responsible for everything that could go wrong because I’d spent the 15 or so months that I was pregnant thinking about all of the ways that my decision to have the baby could screw up the lives of everyone involved.

I remember rocking him to sleep one night when he was pretty little and telling him how I was going to make everything just right. Me and daddy would finish school, we’d get good jobs, we’d get our own house, maybe a dog, and we would never have to worry about money the way we did then. I would lead by example. Somehow I would make this world deserving of him.

Of course, my promises to him were and are much more than just those material symbols. I will always look out for him. I will never take my role in his existence lightly. He makes my heart swell with pride and crumble with humility, so awe-inspiring it is to me that I was able to just bring him into being. But when you’re broke you start to feel broken and find yourself looking for pieces to pick up.

For awhile I was making all of those things come true. We finished school, I bought the house, we got a cat (decided a dog wasn’t right for us). But the money was always an obstacle instead of a means to an end. I became increasingly furious with the external forces at work. Politicians who cannot grasp the vast ripples that their piddly words and their tiny yeas and nays cause. Crooked business leaders who only accept one outcome. Small people with small minds who cause big problems. But most of them have held their babies in their arms. How could they want less for my baby?

I have to start letting go. I don’t know what’s wrong with them. I can’t make perfection happen the way that I think it should. In wisdom that I thought I already had, I realize that’s it not one big peak that can be achieved, not a state that stretches on indefinitely. It’s in my creaky stairs that I stumble down in the morning, the crook of the husband’s arm that has lulled me to sleep for thousands of nights, the perfect oval of my son’s head that greets me when I go to wake him up for school.

It’s when I let myself go and thrust myself toward nothingness.

(Snagged this from the VIA Facebook page. Full credit to the photographer Lindsay Danger.)

That’s me, eyes closed, hair flying across my face, sweating like someone who caught the Holy Spirit. In this moment I am perfect. In this moment I am nothing. My knees bend and my lungs contract and my hands are empty. This is where perfection happens.

Two things worth noting about this video: 1) I’m wearing a shirt that says, “There is no R in Warsh,” warsh being how many people in this region pronounce wash and 2) I did my best to just say the words as naturally as I could. I’ve noticed lately that I do have a bit of a Pittsburgh accent for certain words and that I kind of talk out of the side of my mouth. What’s that about?

Anyway, this has been all over the interwebs by now but I saw it most recently here. The full list, if you’d like to play along, is:

Aunt, Route, Wash, Oil, Theater, Iron, Salmon, Caramel, Fire, Water, Sure, Data, Ruin, Crayon, Toilet, New Orleans, Pecan, Both, Again, Probably, Spitting image, Alabama, Lawyer, Coupon, Mayonnaise, Syrup, Pajamas, Caught

Added on: Pillow, Toothpick, Milk, Eggs

Questions:

What is it called when you throw toilet paper on a house?
What is the bug that when you touch it, it curls into a ball?
What is the bubbly carbonated drink called? Edit I can’t believe I skipped over this one. The word for that type of drink is pop!
What do you call gym shoes?
What do you say to address a group of people?
What do you call the kind of spider that has an oval-shaped body and extremely long legs?
What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the supermarket?
What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining?
What is the thing you change the TV channel with?

I had a not-so-great evening last night. I was in a really bad mood after work and started babbling to the husband about the various Dark Things that I was thinking.

“I feel like I managed to screw up my life without actually doing anything wrong or bad.”

I used to feel this way all the time but I’ve been trying to just push it back and away because it doesn’t help anything. I think it bubbled up because I haven’t been running in about three weeks (no real good excuse…got sick and work’s been CRAZY). But after ranting for awhile I settled down. We headed to our neighborhood and visited with the husband’s grandmother, home tonight after a very rough two weeks in the hospital. Perspective: gulped down like the big ol’ pill that it is.

We trudged to our house, hungry, and I became pretty angry with the baby for not completing his homework at his after school program. If he waits until we get home, he’s always too tired and what should be 20 minutes of work turns into 3 hours. While he looked for excuses to dawdle around his math problems, I picked up a piece of homework that he had finished: a worksheet asking him to study some greeting cards and deduce what the greetings inside might be.

I started laughing and couldn’t stop. I could barely breathe. Tears rolled down my face. I shared the greeting cards with the husband and he cracked up, too.

We seem to be raising some kind of accidental greeting card genius. If I were someecards, I would be very scared right now.

It starts off innocently enough with, “Hope you get well,” but then we move into the cool, detached world of new baby joy with, “Your baby is looking well.”

There’s another basic greeting of, “Congratulations on getting married,” but then there are those other two.

Every time I look at this, I lose it. If I don’t get this card for my birthday this year, I’m going to be pissed.

The baby was surprised that we found them funny, but was pleased to have made us laugh. Of course, after that happy moment, he continued to stall on his homework, which pissed everyone off. Whatever. Cool bike.

I posted to MamaPop last week about a UK show called Big Fat Gypsy Weddings (or My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding according to some sites) and wailed about how it wasn’t available to watch in the US. I forgot, of course, that this is the internet and anything can be had if you know the right people. I won’t reveal my sources, but a few discs with some episodes arrived in my mailbox last week and I spent Saturday afternoon devouring them.

It’s pretty wild. The gypsies and travelers regard themselves as very strict and traditional. Gender roles are severely defined and haven’t changed much in the face of several waves of feminism and a sexual revolution. Girls marry young and move immediately into their roles as homemakers. They do this in their mid-to-late teens, which is around the time that many girls begin exploring their sexuality. So they’re able to say with some degree of authority that there is no pre-marital sex.

Because of the young marital age, gypsies and travelers seem to be far more tolerant about outward displays of sexuality extremely early in life. I watched, slack-jawed, as a group of 8-year-old girls celebrated their cousin’s First Holy Communion by grinding in high heels and tiny skirts and tops. Their parents and grandparents sat and watched and beamed with joy, the same expressions that they might have if they were watching the kids play Duck, Duck, Goose. They’re not concerned about the early sexualization of the girls because a) they’re only a few years out from being married anyway and b) they’re merely imitating the behavior of presumably chaste adolescents. The boys display a sense of territoriality by participating in “grabbing,” a courtship ritual that sounds a lot like accepted assault to me.

I wish the show would explore these gender roles and sexuality conventions more thoroughly, but they spend a lot of time on the bridal attire, if for no other reason than how absurd it is. I’m really curious about the general attire of the young people, which is, again, sexually provocative but to the ends of securing a husband, and other outfits that almost look like stereotypical/racially offensive gypsy costumes that you might see around Halloween in the US.

Anyway, all that pondering aside, I suddenly found myself feeling a bit of a pang during the Communion scenes. It occurred to me that the baby is around the age, perhaps even a bit older, that he would be making his First Communion if we were raising him Catholic. I remember being extremely excited about mine and in the context of this show I began to wonder how much of that was because of the dress and the veil that I got to wear. We looked like mini-brides and were giddy about that. But the important thing about my Communion outfit was that it was my mom’s. I was the latest in a long of people who had made the same sacrament. It was presumed that I would continue the tradition…until I knew that I wouldn’t.

Parenting and life are so scary sometimes, that maybe traditions, even those surrounded by yucky things like inequity, are comforting because they give us some road map that was laid down by people who lived and took care of their families with what seems to be a degree of certainty. Of course, the old ways were once new and there’s nothing stopping us from forging new traditions that are more appropriate for how we feel about and experience life. But I can’t help but look at even the most ridiculous, competitive dress for a young gypsy girl and think there’s something at least a little nice about it, the sheer celebration of survival of it.

Husband: “Smell my pants.”

* * *

Husband: “Smell the cat’s butt.”

* * *

Husband: “Why are you drinking whiskey?”

Me: “I’m not drinking whiskey.”

Husband: “Oh. Then what are you drinking?”

Me: “Cognac.”

Husband: “Why are you drinking Cognac?”

Me: “…”

Husband: “…?”

Me: “Because we’re out of whiskey.”

Today was a long day and I say that after yesterday, which I dubbed “Tullamore Dewsday” because of how long it was.

Earlier tonight, I plopped down on the floor in the hallway while waiting for the baby to be done brushing his teeth. I was short on patience and told him that I just needed the day to be over. After he finished in the bathroom, I heard him rummaging around in his toys. He emerged a minute later with a Hot Wheels car and some kind of stick. He then proceeded to give me a massage by running the car up and down my back and tapping me with the stick. It didn’t make much sense but it made me feel a little bit better.