8
July

The Last Liftoff

Today was the last STS Shuttle mission, which might seem like a big story where many people are.  Unless you’re from a “space” town, though, I bet my town can beat the massive amounts of coverage of the mission.  Huntsville, known by many as “Rocket City”, is one of the most important towns for the aerospace business.  All of my life, I have had to hear about the importance of NASA and going to space.  One of the schools that I went to was known as the Ridgecrest Rockets.  Another two were named for losses within the program, one being Challenger Middle and the other being Virgil I. Grissom High.  And the final university that I attended works very closely with NASA for its engineering program.  I have family members who work as engineers at companies that work with NASA.

That being said, I didn’t really care that today was the last mission.  Yes, it is a historical event.  Yes, it’s a sentimental event.  To me, a shuttle mission is a shuttle mission is a shuttle mission.  Generally, the missions are boring.  Generally, they are uneventful.  I don’t understand why people like watching the liftoff.  These are events that are only interesting when things go wrong, and then you really shouldn’t want to see what happens.  I’m not talking about the minor wrong things when no damage occurs.  I’m talking about watching the shuttle explode, like the Challenger did.  Watching something and knowing that that can happen is very odd to me.  Watching something and hoping that it stays boring seems so odd, but I would never want anyone to hope that some tragedy happen.

Unlike many people, including my family members, I’m not disappointed that the program is over.  We knew this day was coming for a long time.  I remember when I went to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, in town, I got a book that basically explained that as soon as the International Space Station was completed or nearing completion and that that date would be sometime in this decade.  I remember thinking then that it wasn’t that long until it would be over.  That was back around 1994 or 1995 or so.  The end of the program was not a new concept.  It was something that people knew was coming.

With that in mind, it seems odd that there was no viable plan for its replacement.  Some people may bring up the Constellation project, which was started by George W. Bush and ended by Barack Obama.  Now, the Constellation program might have seemed like an awesome idea to some.  It wasn’t.  I rode with some friends to Mississippi and heard them talking about how there were issues with the software.  Somehow no matter what they did, they encountered some kind of fatal error.  These were well-trained software engineers.  They were the geekiest geeks that you might meet in real life.  They were flummoxed.  There were also issues with the design and the expectations of what it should do.  Obama cancelled the program, after consulting with officials from the agency, because it was so over-budget and under-developed.  He has not caused any issue for the program that it did not already have.  Obama is encouraging engineers and scientists to come up with a better and more effective plan.  Doesn’t that seem to be a good idea?  And if folks are pissed that there will be no launches in the meantime, then I recommend that you blame past Presidents for adequately preparing for this time period.  Even if Constellation had not been cancelled, it would be years before it could launch, so the jobs that are in jeopardy down in Florida related to no planned launches would still be gone.

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5
July

If It Were You, Even If It Never Will Be Or Already Was

I have a tendency to have a differing opinion than people.  This is pretty much the norm for me.  Part of the time, I think it may have to do with an inner desire to not be like everyone else.  Other times, I think it is because I literally think differently than others.  My brain has a way of interpreting things that is probably different than others, whether it is from mental illness, from abuse and bullying, from the way I was raised, or from something differently.

When it comes to the criminal justice system, I tend to get asked about what I would do if it was a family member or friend of mine that got killed or had any sort of violence committed against them?  How would I feel?  Maybe I would say someone was guilty, regardless of evidence.  Maybe I would want someone to be executed, regardless of crime.  I get that some people see the world as being a place where if it happens to you, then you will want some sort of vengeance.  Maybe I would, but I don’t think so.

When I was 14, I had a friend who was almost killed by her oldest brother.  He also injured 2 of her 3 siblings and killed their mother and father.  He almost attacked another one of my friends that day.  I had been at the house the day before.  I had seen her mother.  I had heard her voice.  For me, that was very difficult to deal with.

When I was 15, a guy from my grade and his sister who was a year younger than me went missing.  I think that the father was either missing or his body was found in his home.  I do know that the kids were found a while later in the woods nearby.  They had been killed by their father.  Though these deaths were tragic, I never really felt sorry for either child.  I know that sounds awful, but they were always so mean and hateful, that empathy was something I couldn’t imagine having towards them.

Long before I was born, my mom’s mom’s mom’s sister was killed by her ex-husband.  This death led to most of her kids going to one relative.  One of her older kids was not sent to that relative because they didn’t like her.  No one really thought they could handle her, except Mama and Papa, my great-grandparents.  They raised her, and though she wasn’t legally their child, I think of her as a great-aunt and Nana always calls her her sister.  But the grief over the murder of a relative that I have never known is something that has always been a part of my family’s interaction.  My mom tries to keep it light-hearted by telling me that my great-grandmother wanted to light the murderer’s grave on fire.  I know that the way that the members who were alive back when it happened, during my mother’s childhood, carry the angst with them.  In a family that never forgets and rarely forgives, this kind of thing can’t help but cloud your life.

In April 0f 2008, I had a friend that got killed in an accidental shooting.  He was headed home late at night and lived in an apartment complex.  The apartments all looked the same and he was apparently a little out of it.  He didn’t understand why his key wasn’t working on the front door, so he headed through the sliding glass door.  It was the wrong apartment, though.  The person who lived there shot him.  The shot was fatal.  He went from being a law student to being a statistic.  Many of my high school friends still have pictures of him as their profile picture on Facebook, even with it being something that happened over 3 years ago.

The next April, a guy who was in my stake’s YSA died in a horrible car accident. It was a supposedly a DUI. The car that hit his car was driven by an illegal immigrant.  The death of this guy that I knew and his girlfriend has been used by people who didn’t know them as a rallying cry to get rid of illegal immigrants.  It was even cited at one point by Mo Brooks, who was recently in the news for saying he’d do anything short of shooting immigrants to get rid of them, as a reason why we should get rid of immigrants.  He ended up being elected to Congress and part of his election was based on his rhetoric about this death.

Though I hadn’t been to the school in almost a year, I was technically still listed as a student when the UAH shooting by Amy Bishop took place in February of 2010.  I would have just had to reapplied (as a technicality) and signed up for classes to be considered a current student.  Even though I wasn’t going that semester, I had friends that were still students there.  I had friends who were in that general area earlier in the day on the day of the shooting.

Because of these deaths and others, I can fairly easily answer the questions of if I would feel differently if someone was killed in a certain way.  If I’m asked how I would feel about the death penalty if it were someone that I knew, then I can easily say how I would feel because I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing for a long time.  If I were asked how I would feel if someone I knew was harmed by an immigrant, I can say with a clear conscious how I would feel.  If I am told that people are never accidentally shot by someone in legal possession of a gun, I can tell them that that is bullshit.  If I’m asked about how I’d feel if someone I knew were harmed in a shooting at school or work, then I can think back to the fear and sadness of the shooting at UAH.

Between growing up in a liberal/politically-oriented family, losing these people, and studying social policy in and for school, I haven’t come to my opinions about things just by chance.  I’ve had to live some of it.  Other parts I’ve had to look up.  I can tell people that I never express an opinion that I haven’t tried to learn as much as I can about.  My parents always encouraged me to learn.  They always encouraged me to feel.  They also taught me that I had to think for myself.  I didn’t have to agree with anyone as long as I held an opinion that I understood completely.  I know that people think I am uninformed.  I know some think that I’m un-American or a bigot.  Hell, yesterday I got the following response to something I had said on immigration:

Mexico just DEPORTED over 2,000 ILLEGALS from their country, in the past month. Why is it, you do not want to give Americans the same Equal right? I will tell you why. You are an Anti-American bigot, wanting to deny the American people, the same EQUAL RIGHTS as the rest of the world. The right to a sovereign nation.

Just as I think of people who disagree with me as being unaware of all facts on issues, I get the same comments thrown at me by people with differing opinions.  And I have been called a bigot and a racist many times before, which is odd to me.  I’m not a racist.  If anything, I’m more on the egalitarian way of thinking.  (I’ve apparently been anti-bigotry/anti-racism and pro-equality since my mom and I passed a cross being burnt somewhere nearby when I was a toddler.  She said I asked what it was and she told me that it was some very bad people doing something very wrong.  Later in my childhood, when it happened and made the news, I found out what it meant.)  I know that it is easy to call someone a bigot or anti-whatever, though.  It’s easy to assume that no one knows what they’re talking about, and maybe I don’t know the same things that others know.  That doesn’t mean that my knowledge/experience is anything less important, though.

Anyway, I don’t know if this post makes any sense at all.  And now I’m annoyed ’cause I read about the David Duke potential campaign for President in 2012, which I think is one of the worst pieces of news I’ve heard in a while.

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9
December

Start a Revolution

Today, I have to go see my gynecological for the follow-up of the D&C/hysteroscopy. I will also get to go over whether or not I want to continue having periods, aka do I want (at the age of 26) to have a hysterectomy? The gynecologist kind of suggested to my parents that I really needed to think about that, and I have been trying my hardest not to. I don’t want to have it at the same age as my great-grandmother. I don’t really want to even have it as early as my mom (age 41), but I would rather that than earlier.

So, I’ve seen that there are demonstrations in Britain over tuition fees. (I know that there are ties into the health/education system that some are demonstrating about.) I read that the maximum would be £9,000, or about $14,000. Now, if I were to go back to UAH at full-time status, the tuition cost for me (as a resident) would be about $4,000 per semester or around $8,000 per year. Instead of being in the 3 year system that would accrue £27,000, or around $42.5k, a new student here would face 4 to 5 years which would be up to around $40,000. Of course, if someone from out-of-state tried to go to UAH, they would face $10,000 per semester or $20,000 a year, and almost $100,000 in tuition over their undergraduate program. The UAH costs are prior to the addition of fees/expenses that are subject to change without the student knowing. At Alabama A&M, a resident would pay $6,140-$7,040 per semester if they were staying in a dorm or $3,509 if they were staying outside of one. A non-resident (out-of-state) could anticipate paying up to $10,000 per semester to study.

I just find it weird to think that people are that upset about their fees when they’re actually quite similar to what people here pay for a public higher education. I understand that fees are higher than what you’re used to, but just think, there are kids over here who have very little and they still have to pay these rates, though some of our schools are definitely not anywhere near as high quality as the ones in the British system.

Now, as for some of the proposed cuts that folks might be facing, that I can understand. Maybe it has to do with a difference in the places we’re from?

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5
August

The Good, The Bad, and The Ridiculously Stupid

So, yay about the Prop 8 ruling. I have to say that first. I guess that would be the good news. Oh, and when I was watching Rick Sanchez on 8/4, he said that Amy Bishop taught at the University of Alabama. I sent in a message that she worked at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, not the University of Alabama (which is Tuscaloosa). A few seconds later (during the commercial break), I saw that my Twitter had updated. I looked and there was this:

@JanersM u are right! and i was recently there. i’ll tell my writing staff u got them

I have to admit that that was kind of cool. I’ve gotten responses on twitter from other famous folks before, but this was cool since I got it during the commercial break of that show. Okay, so it caused my geeky-ness to get a bit squeal-y.

The bad news is only semi-bad. I have an appointment for the neurosurgeon now, which is not that bad of a thing. The bad part is that I don’t know what the films results were. The other bad part is that I have to go get the films, which I hate having to do. I always forget to do it.

The ridiculously stupid thing has to do with my comment on MSNBC’s Facebook thing about buying credits for games at brick and mortar stores. I said:

No. I find it ridiculous to spend money for virtual goodies on games anyway, but buying credits at a store is just ridiculous.

I didn’t mean to use the word ridiculous twice. :/ I think I was kind of distracted. Anyway, it got like 5 likes within a couple of minutes. I don’t know if the likes were for me thinking that the practice of buying game credits for Facebook games is stupid, or if it’s for the dumb way that I portrayed my opinion. Maybe I’m just too critical of myself. But hey, that goes to show that I’m not just snide about other people making grammatical errors. If I notice my own stupid mistakes, then I can get pissy at myself.

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1
July

A Million Theories

I had my rheumatologist appointment about 12 hours ago. The doctor didn’t know what would cause the toe swelling/redness/itching. He added some extra meds for pain relief, and I guess I can officially acknowledge that I’m on something for pain. Of course, my pain management meds aren’t the kind that get you all dopey and stuff. I guess that’s good, since those are the ones that make me hyperactive.

I had gained 9 pounds since he last saw me. He didn’t fuss. He doesn’t usually fuss. He seems to get that I don’t want to be overweight. I wish other doctors were so understanding.

He looked over my request for student loan discharge, and he said that he’ll fill it out, but first I have to have some kind of physical exertion test. (He wants to be able to tell them exactly what I can and can’t do, and not lie about it.) He also advised me to take a copy to the psychiatrist to get them to fill it out, since he said that that should help my case. The only problem with that is that I’m about to start to a new psychiatrist, and typically when I see a doctor for the first few times, they don’t believe that there is anything wrong with me. I don’t really get that. I guess they have this belief that if you have certain symptomatology then you present in a standard way. Typically, therapists are the first ones to understand that I’m not a standard case kind of girl. Maybe since the new pdoc is one I’ve seen before, who (on her first visit with me) wanted to have me locked up, she’ll actually believe that I’m a loon or something.

There was a report on the news last night, which I found a bit annoying. The investigative reporter keeps bringing up safety issues that she says exist at UAH, which don’t really seem that different from anything I’ve encountered in various educational settings in my life. This time she brought up the bitchy philosophy teacher. Apparently, there was a student who (a week after the shooting) said something about maybe he’d get respect if he brought a pistol to class. She gave all these details about the student, because some was public record (and other stuff had been leaked to her), but she didn’t disclose the professor. She did say that the professor was a female philosophy teacher. Even if I hadn’t (briefly) been in that program, I could have easily found out who the teacher was. That department is relatively small. Of the 8 or 9 professors that might teach in a given semester in the department, only 4 are regulars, and only 1 from the entire group is female. That would be the professor that led to me dropping Modern Philosophy. She called my papers bizarre. She’s also the professor who kicks students out of class for disagreeing with her, and all that fun stuff. Basically, if you write down what she says word for word and don’t question anything, you can pass. Since I’m of the opinion that part of learning (especially in something like Philosophy) requires insight and thought, I knew quickly that we weren’t destined to be super-buds. With her classes being required for the major, I determined that that wasn’t the major. Admittedly, I didn’t vocalize any intent to harm her, but I can’t say that I didn’t idly think about it. Mainly I just wanted to slap her or something like that. I have a feeling that most people who have a tendency to disagree with this particular professor have the same experience. Back to the whole issue, I emailed her and told her that this wasn’t the first time that that professor had had issues with students in her class, and I felt that it was a bit lopsided to present her as a victim. We’ve emailed back and forth a couple of times, and now she wants me to tell her more. It kind of makes me uncomfortable. I know I brought the whole thing up with her, and if I felt that her intentions were more than just getting some kind of journalistic gold star, I might feel more free to discuss it. Besides, what if what I said had some kind of negative impact on someone else’s life? I would actually feel guilty. My conscience can be abnormally restrictive sometimes.

Oh, I still have no clue when I’ll see Eclipse, so I’m basically trying to avoid all social networking until then. I know that this will post on a few places, but I thought I’d explain why I was kind of in absentia. I know that I’ve read the books, but I still have this fear of being spoiled or hearing something that might effect how I feel about the movie. Since it happens to be the one based on my favorite book in the series, then I kind of have this fear of being semi-spoiled.

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1
March

Exaggeration is to paint a snake and add legs

Those people aren’t your friends. Just let it go. They don’t respond because they don’t care, simple as that. People do things they want to do and make excuses for things they don’t want to do. Move on and if you can, put yourself out there to make new friends. Stop whining around being upset that people you’d like to be your friends don’t actually give a shit about you. You complain about them all the time, it’s like you’re misunderstanding what’s even going on there.

That was the question that was left in my tumblr questions message box today. It was anonymous, of course. Things like that usually are, right?

So, it made me wonder, how often do I whine about them? I looked up on fps the number of times I’ve tagged an entry with friends or family, and the most recent (other than the one a few hours ago) was the one 8 days ago. It mentioned that my friends had wished me a happy birthday. The ranting I did in that post was about a first cousin of mine. I guess if he doesn’t give a shit about me, I should find another cousin.

Prior to that, it was January…and again, it wasn’t a rant. I know I have whined and ranted about them in the past, and it is usually the same thing, but all the time? Hardly.

I know I mused about people from online blocking me on Twitter, but it wasn’t a whining thing, and it didn’t involve the friends I was talking about the other day. Just people that I’ve talked to from a particular site, and thought that I hadn’t pissed off. I wasn’t whining about that situation, though. I was saying how it was odd that people who I thought I hadn’t annoyed had me blocked, but Scott Baio had unblocked me on Twitter, even though I’d openly disagreed with him and he’d blocked me for it. And generally speaking, I don’t really follow people on Twitter from my real life. I have a few real world friends that I follow on there Jordan (@yorudan), from YSA, Chris (@chrisdepew), from high school, and Amberley (@AmboG), who was in my Honors class last year at UAH. Some of my real life friends (including the ones I ranted about) have twitter accounts, but given my tendency to go into liberal tirades and my past history of ranting about church policies on twitter, then I don’t follow them. If I were to find out that some of them were following me, I would probably block them…not because of shame or anger, but because I don’t want to have a big public squabble with them on Twitter.

Of course, my feeling is that if you feel that I’m THAT annoying, don’t follow me. If I bug you so much that you feel compelled to anonymously tell me how annoying I am, then don’t follow me. If you’re following people that bug you all the time, then it sounds like maybe you’re the one with issues and you need to put yourself out there and find some friends. There is a reason that you can unfollow people OR not follow them to begin with, and that is called “personal preference”. If Joe Blow bothers you, don’t follow him. If Suzie Sweetheart bothers you, don’t follow him.

I do not take kindly to people telling me how to use my blog. I understand that my fps blog feeds OTHER sites, but it says on everything that posts from fuzzypinkslippers that it comes from the site. If you look at the tags on Tumblr or at the mirrored from on LJ, then you see that it says it comes from my domain and my server. Since it comes from said places, and since I pay for said services, then hearing from people, who were so proud of themselves that they left anonymous comments, that I should shut up.

So, there is a “policy” change now with the tumblr questions that you want to ask me. They will no longer be anonymous. If you want to talk shit to me, then say it with your name attached. The people who I might annoy most in the world with my rantings about real world issues would. I know that Kate, Leslie, Jonna, Jenn, Gill, and Damita would definitely say, “Janet, shut up already!” Most people that I talk to regularly will tell me when I’m being whiny, stupid, etc. Hell, I know of people who don’t like me who would tell me that I’m being whiny or stupid.

Also, I want to know who would ask me things like if I was going to go into assisted living when my parents die or if I could physically care for myself, especially given that I have made it perfectly clear that in my house, I am the one who usually cares for the other members of the house. (If you think that a disabled person is unable to do anything for yourself, then you don’t understand how things work. Disability means that I can’t hold down a full-time or a part-time job. It doesn’t mean that I am unable to cook for myself or take a shower or change clothes or anything like that.)

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15
February

Evil Little White Girl!

I am a closet racist. Yes, that’s right, you heard me. I am a closet racist. I hate closets that aren’t right color.

I have been accused of racism several times in the past few days over the Amy Bishop thing, and my responses to zennie from SFGate. Apparently, when I pointed out that UAH was not anti-intellectual, that was racist. When I stated that the allegations surrounding Amy Bishop’s criminal past and criminal present did not add up to her being a racist, that was racist. (A person who is accused of shooting 6 people at work [2 blacks, 2 whites, 1 Hispanic, 1 Indian], her own brother [white], and possibly trying to bomb another professor [white], but ends up targetting more whites than any other race tends to lead me to believe that if she is racist, then she hates white folks more than anyone else.)

Why am I racist? I was ranting about what zennie was saying before I realized his skin color is darker than mine, which since I’m a redhead, means he could be white, too. He could probably be albino and I would have lighter skin.

If I’m racist, how did I spend the majority of the first 8 years of my life in a ghetto filled with people of various races, religions, and creeds? How could I put up with that? How did my first real best friend at my next school end up being black? Why would I sit with the black girls at lunch in high school? And why did I enjoy all of that, and miss each part of that life when it was over?

If I’m racist, how did I last 3 years at A&M? How did I get the label as the “clear black” girl? I mean, I had friends who said that they hated all white people, and when I’d look pitiful, they would tell me that I’m NOT white and that I was actually just clear black. This was a statement that was reiterated by other professors.

I’m the girl who has never said the N word. I am a girl who hates people being picked on. I am a girl who was invited to be on the Wall of Tolerance by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which I kind of think was a way to get some money for the Teach Tolerance program. (All they had to do was tell me they were raising money for the program and I’d send it.)

I guess that makes me racist. Wow. I wish everyone were as much of an intolerant bigot as me.

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