beeelargh.

Thoughts in my head lately. If you are bored, please pick one and answer with your view -

What is it that makes each person who they are? What makes them like and prefer things over others? How does one qualify the difference?

How alike are we to people from the 1300's and the 1400's? Is there anything to be considered in this quality of life vs. there's? Which is better?

Where does personal responsiblity begin? At what point must one take over there own choices and healing and at what point can they essentially be termed a "victim"?

Who defines perfection? How can someone be a perfectionist if perfectionism is so hard to define?

Cross-posted to damnportlanders  as I am curious.

current state: curious

so there's a car alarm going off behind my apartment and it's driving me insane (along with everyone else in my building i'm sure) it's been going off ever since i got home (45 minutes ago) and who knows how long before that. i tried calling my building manager cause there's something in our lease about car alarms that last longer than a few minutes, but couldn't get ahold of her. any suggestions on what to do short of blowing my brains out going insane?

Oh, sweet silence, I've missed you so.

neverfuckingmind. the awesome police man came and turned the alarm off, but hey! guess what! it's back on! so, uhh...anyone got some big rocks and some spray paint i can borrow?

current state: annoyed
current tunes: erase errata in attemps to drown out the effing alarm

Last Friday I taught a creative writing class at a local high school. I gave them a fairly extensive vocab test of eighty words and had them match the word to its definition. It was a class of 12th graders, so I wasn’t surprised that most of them did well on the test.

What did surprise me was the lack of reaction by the female students to one of the definitions. The word was: bevy. The definition was: A group of girls or young women; a flock of birds.

I said, “A group of girls or young women. This test must have come out of a hundred-year-old text book.”

No reaction from anyone.

I said, “A group of young girls or women?”

Still no reaction.

Finally, after waiting a beat for some kind of outraged reaction from the girls in the class and getting none, I said, “A bevy is a flock of birds, period.”

I thought back to my undergrad days at WSU and imagined the storm of protest such a definition would have evoked from the women in class and wondered why none of the girls in this high school class found anything demeaning or offensive in being compared to twitting, fragile, flighty creatures such as birds.

Has the conservative Christian tide in this country brain-washed young women into thinking there is nothing demeaning about being compared to animals? Did the feminist movement reached its zenith with Generation X and is now in a death spiral? Will this generation of females aspire to be the new June Cleavers and Donna Reeds?

This is all very troubling and demoralizing to an old child of the sixties like myself.

current state: disappointed