When a solid handful of news stories can be gotten out of a speech before it's even made, there's something just wrong with our society.

Alito

He's been confirmed. That was way to fast for my liking. Of course, any time-frame for confirming him would be too fast for my liking, as I don't think he'll be a particularly good SC justice. In the interest of full disclosure, by 'good' in the previous sentence I mean 'agreeing with my personal idea of how things should work'. But since I'm always right, we're OK on that count.

Speaking of the future of womens' rights (which I was but in a rather non-linear manner), Indiana is at it again. This the state that in the past has tried to make abortion illegal unless the woman was in risk of serious permanant injury or death. They've tried to limit in vitro fertilization and other similar reproductive technologies to married couples only, which is not only mysogynistic but somewhat anti-gay-rights as well (link to .pdf). If a woman wants to get an abortion in Indiana, she must endure state-mandated lectures and literature on "alternatives" to abortion, and wait at least 18 hours before having the procedure done.

Now:

House Bill 1172 would require abortion providers to notify women, at least 18 hours before the procedure, that life begins at conception; the fetus may feel pain during an abortion; doctors may apply anesthetic to the fetus, which may or may not be paid for by insurance, if the woman is at least 20 weeks pregnant; and the woman is subject to physical risk during and after the abortion.

courtesy of IndyStar.

Aaargh.

And may I just say that there are no "alternatives" to abortion? If a woman is preganant, then there is nothing besides abortion that's going to change that for the ensuing nine months. It's an either/or situation: Get an abortion or give up your life for nine months (at least).

Status report

It's forty degrees and overcast today. My bedroom is something of a disaster zone - I got my four boxes of stuff that I shipped home (in addition to the two suitcases) and I'm in the middle of unpacking all that. Out side of my window, between the pale-gray of the neighbors roof and turquoise of my walls, a few barren tree limbs blow in the wind. They're not dead and I know that in a few months they'll be lush and green. For now, though, a few scraggly and shriveled seeds cling to the sekeletal branches.

I have no idea what the weather is like right now in Santa Fe - weather.com tells me it's 43, feels like it's 37, and cloudy. Weather reports are occasionally misleading at 7000 feet, though, and the weather in Santa Fe proper may be rather different from the weather up on the mountain at school.

I desperately miss my friends from school. At some point in the past year and a half the friends I had in high school were nearly all replaced by friends from college. With one exception, those high school friends I've held onto are away themselves now, at their respective schools. The effect, regardless of how much of it is in my mind, is that I feel isolated. It's vastly different from the "no one likes me and I'm a freak" feeling that plagued me in high school, but simply that circumstances have forced me away from the vast majority of my friends.

I feel unemployed. That's because I am.

I feel like I'm no longer a student, because I'm not. For the first time I can remember I'm not enrolled somewhere full-time, and I'm still trying to work out how I feel about that. Right now I don't think I like it, but that could be related to the unemployment as well. I'm unproductive.

Looking out the window and seeing mountains, as I could in Santa Fe, was unspeakably nice.

Blog for Choice

Today is the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, which in my opinion is one of the most important Supreme Court decisions of all time. I consider this opinion justified by the fact that even today, over three decades later, people still do their best to fight it.

Personally I don't understand the debate about it. I suppose that the main issue is that a woman's life will be drastically altered by pregnancy. There may be medical considerations for both the woman and the fetus. There may be financial issues (prenatal care is expensive, to say nothing of actually, y'know, raising a child). Or, it could be as simple as: Oops, I messed up, the condom slipped, and I really don't want a kid.

It's highly discouraging to me that, in a nation which prides itself as being a bastion of democracy, an oasis of freedom in a less-than-ideal world and a defender of liberty, a large and vocal part of the population would like to limit women's rights and force them to be incubators for unwanted lives.

Older and wiser now

The IRS - and federal government in general, I suppose - is rather fond of paperwork. Even the poor saps who are just applying for a temp data entry job get sucked into the Portal of Paper-Laden Doom.

A thought:

Is it ever acceptable to do something you consider morally wrong, if your only motive is that it will help enable you to fight that very wrong?

(travelling in the next few days, not bringing the computer, so nothing new until Wednesday night.)

Some rare praise

I went to get my passport renewed today, and I can honestly say that I do not have a single complaint. In fact (and brace yourself for this one), I'm actually rather impressed. This morning, I went to the state department website. It told me what I had to have (ID, old passport, money to pay for it, and the correct form). I filled out the form online and printed it out. Then I hopped in the car and cruised up to the mall, where there is a "country store", where they do various government-y things, such as vote registration, passports, and I'm certain any other number of convienant things. This is a wonderful idea, especially because it means that instead of driving into Camden or Philly, I had to drive two minutes up to the Cherry Hill Mall.

I didn't have to wait - literally, not for more than ten seconds - before someone asked if they could help me. They took my picture, filled out their part of the form, took my money (okay, minor complaint: a renewed passport is $97. That's insane.), and told me it would be about six weeks.

Total elapsed time in passport-getting? About twenty minutes. This is how things should work far more often.

Under a cloud...

It seems that the trite little saying about a silver lining may well be true. Leave school rather unexpectedly and somewhat on the wrong side of willingly, and you no longer have a reason to keep making excuses as to why you haven't travelled the way you want to.

Resolved:

I've decided to become a feminist. Not that I wasn't really before - I've never had any qualms about labelling myself as such, and I've certainly always embraced the ideals of the feminist movement. But I think I want to get serious about it now, get more into activism. Inspired mostly by finding this here blog.

In Retrospect

Think back to elementary school. Remember it? Lunchboxes, desks you put stuff in, those little coat closets, snack time?

Remember being told "just try your best"? It never seemed to matter on what. Not good at basketball in gym class? Just try your best, and that's good enough. Spelling quiz, long division? Try your best, and it'll be OK. Not playing well with others? Just try your best, and that's enough.

Maybe that was true in second grade, but they lied. They make you believe that trying your best is enough. That if you just work really hard, you'll manage to pull through.

The hard truth, I've begun to realize, is that your best sometimes just isn't good enough. It's not a happy truth, obviously. It's painful to sit back and look and see you have done your best, you've been trying, but it's just not enough. Sometimes, no matter how hard you worked, you're going to fail.

I could try my best to be a basketball star, and never land a single shot, because everyone would be a foot taller than I am. I could try desperately to make a hot guy be into me - or to make myself be into a hot guy - and it wouldn't happen, because some things you can't force. I could work endlessly at physics, but I'd probably never get a Ph.D in quantum physics beacuse my heart wouldn't be in it. Will doesn't make reality: we exist within the confines of reality. Certain limits are concrete and non-negotiable.

Maybe.

Or maybe, we just sometimes get confused. It's probably not true that you can do anything, but maybe you can do anything that you really want to do, deep down. Things you want to do for the sake of doing them, rather than to get to the result. Maybe you have to have a deeper will, something you can't exactly control. If you want it that badly, on that level where it's not even a conscious decision (and maybe you're not even sure what, exactly, you want), maybe you can do it. I don't know.