I'm Not Legal

Dear Arizona Idiots:

This is how your rhetoric makes real people feel. If you think "illegal" is an acceptable way to define another human being, you are responsible for this.

Sincerely,

Personal Failure

p.s.: Racist idiots aren't worth killing yourself over. You belong right where you are, please don't jump off the bridge.

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Cry Poe! and Loose the Skeptics of . . . Um . . .

So, anyway, I wish what I am about to present to you is the work of a Poe. Unfortunately, the woman who wrote this is utterly sincere, and that makes me sad.

Stay at Home Daughter Graduation

If you are unfamiliar with the SAHD movement, quite simply, it is a fundy movement to make sure that their daughters never, ever see, much less take advantage of, the opportunities the evil feminists have given them. The girls are homeschooled, heavily sheltered in every way, and then, when they reach legal adulthood, they remain at home, heavily sheltered in every way. They never get a job or go to college or date. They never watch an unapproved TV show, see an unapproved movie or talk to anyone outside their restricted little world. They never hear another opinion besides their parents' and the pastor's, and then they are married to someone they barely know and inflict this upon the next generation of girls.

At the time of my high school graduation in 2006, one of the first reasons I chose not to pursue college was that my interests had always been in real estate and I did not need a degree since I had already completed real estate school and received the credentials I needed to work as a real estate broker.

Ultimately though, the primary reason was that my greatest desire was to be a wife committed to furthering my husband's vision and a mother devoted to raising and teaching my children. It was obvious that the best training for this lifelong occupation could be obtained among my family in my own home and not among my peers in an institution. Although I did not consciously choose to avoid college specifically for this reason, it seems it could have been a great diversion if I had invested four years primarily in the pursuit of academics and autonomy.

Of course she has no vision of her own to further, and knowledge and independence would simply get in the way of slavish devotion to a man she's never met. Notice that she doesn't state she wanted to further one specific man's vision, just any man's vision. That's sad. It means that to her, any man's goals are more important than her own. Every man in the world is more qualified to tell her what to do with her life than she is.

She lists the many advantages of staying home, which mostly include cooking, cleaning and caring for her younger siblings, and then we get this bit of heartbreaking honesty:

Furthermore, the independent spirit that would have likely grown in me had I been living hours away from my family has been kept in check since I have lived under my father's authority. I trust that this will make the transfer of authority from my father to my husband an easier task than if I had been accustomed to exclusively running my own life.

Well, yes, having once been free, it would hard to be a slave again. I agree. That an argument for freedom, however, not against it.

Unfortunate Circumstances

[trigger warning: jail, drug abuse]

I am sad today. I tried to help a friend and it didn't work out and in the process I learned something about what the war on drugs has become: a way of ensuring that very nice people who have made a mistake that hurt only themselves will never move past that mistake.

There is an expression in Christiandom I am still very fond of: There but for the grace of god go I, meaning of course, that only luck prevents you and I from experiencing terrible misfortune. That bum down the street begging for change? The only difference between you and him is misfortune.

My friend is a recovering drug addict. Like so many, he tried drugs and found they were wonderful for a momentary relief from his troubles. So he took more drugs and wound up with more troubles, necessitating more drugs, and ended up in jail. The very best place in the world to get drugs is jail, so that didn't help anything. Eventually, he fathered a child, which motivated him to quit using and now he's stuck in purgatory.

What do I mean by that? My friend is trying to pick up the pieces of his life, get a decent job, get his own place, eventually go to school, but everybody does background checks for even the most menial of jobs these days. And nobody cares whether or not the person's record reflects a true unfitness for the job at hand*, they just see arrests and jail time and no job for you.

So why even try to clean up your life? Why bother? You've been convicted, you have a record, and now you're never getting a decent job with a living wage. You'll scrounge your whole life, living in one friend's basement, sleeping on another's couch, with never even a shot at getting ahead. You were a danger to yourself, not anyone else, but you'll be treated as if you carry a lit stick of dynamite in your back pocket at all times. "Go to rehab! Get clean! You can do it!" we all shout, while hiding behind our backs the dismal life we've condemned them to.

We all make mistakes. We all do things we are ashamed of. Some of us get to say we're sorry and move on. Some of get to pay and pay and pay forever.




*I suppose that you could argue that drug use 5 years in the past makes one unfit for cleaning toilets, but I'm not sure how.

Another Day in Paradise

My xbox broke. I turned it on and got the dreaded "red ring of death".

This is my fourth xbox since the original I bought when it launched. The only good thing I can say about this is Microsoft does replace them, every one, free of charge. I don't even pay shipping to send the broken one back.

However, 3 weeks without an xbox does not a happy PF make.