sundries

Classmates threaten to beat Richmond gang-rape survivor since it will be her fault if her attackers go to jail.

U. of Sydney students set up pro-rape Facebook page.

(this and previous link via gwyd)

Gay couple banned from Wal-Mart for life for _not_ shoplifting, trying to care for their special needs kids, and being unwilling to go into some sort of security area with employees who they say were behaving in a threatening manner.

Fandom strife I'm glad to have mostly missed: the ongoing stuff with the ST:U creators; so much stuff that seems to happen around the Supernatural fandom; and something I still can't even make sense of related to Girl Number 9 -- the blessings of being days behind on episodes there.

The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War -- all of that was the end of my childhood. I had just started my senior year of high school and had not gotten to study abroad in Germany as I had wanted (my mother loved German and Austrian art, but I was not to go to such places, was one explanation; cost was another, less likely one; the general lack of autonomy I had a kid was probably high on the list too).

I remember how much I wished I was brave and had the nerve to just steal my parents' credit cards and run away from home and fly to Berlin. I remember how much I wished my parents were brave and would abruptly decide to take me there to see history happen. The entire 20th-century it sometimes seems, happened in Berlin.

We watched it on TV at dinner-time instead. And it felt oddly personal to me, but whether it was because of the Jewish daughter of scientists pen-pal I had in the USSR who never wrote back or because I had listened to the begging, desperate sound of David Bowie singing Heroes for possibly every single moment of adolescent anguish I could summon up (an emotional act, oddly, not dissimilar form my obsession with The Pogues -- I could have been someone / well so could anyone / you took my dreams from me when I first found you) I don't know.

I remember those were the beginning of the years where my parents hated me: for having a boyfriend, for leaving home, for fucking up the way college kids do. A little over a year later I was home from a university not prestigious enough to brag to their friends about and my mother was explaining to me that bisexual people were sluts and my father was accusing me of being a heroin addict because I slept for 27 hours after I'd been awake for over 72 to finish a school project.

Other things happened too, they threw a friend of mine out who came so as not to be alone on Thanksgiving because they thought he was gay. Later, they did the same with a boyfriend of mine (with whom I was not allowed to be in any room with, even with the door open, without my parents' presence) whom they decided must be gay because he was too thin, and that wasn't what they wanted for me. I wonder how often girls are raised to have no desires but those gifted to them by others; I wonder how often it works.

After all that, I tried never to go home again -- I took summer classes or stayed with friends as much as I could.

When the coup in Russia happened in August 1991, though, I was back in my parents' house and my father got up at 4am to yell at me for being so irresponsible as to still be up watching TV.

"There's a coup in Russia," I said. "They don't know who has the nuclear codes."

My father got up to watch TV with me then, and woke my mother in case we were all about to die, but he has still never apologized to me for anything in my entire life.

My parents don't hate me any more, perhaps because the world is less full of the things that scare them; I grew up, and they couldn't stop it -- stuff like that.

But when the Berlin Wall fell, when the world I grew up with fell apart, I had really wanted it to save me too.

you guyz!

http://community.livejournal.com/fandomsecrets/380682.html?thread=209341962#t209341962

(thanks newsbean for the tip).

Muahahahaha.

sundries never sleep

ladysisyphus is reading evangelical Protestant sex manuals so you don't have to. Is this where fandom got its obsession with the simultaneous orgasm? That's what I want to know. (I jest people, I jest!)

One of the neighborhood garden cats died; it was hit by a car. We are all sad.

Hip-hop about Alexander Hamilton in the voice of Aaron Burr. Um, it's actually more awesome than bizarre, which is saying something, because it's pretty bizarre. Found through kalichan who grew up with the guy (the dude performing, not Alexander Hamilton or Aaron Burr, because that would be weird).

Patty has alerted me to Sarkozy Facebook shenanigans.

She also sent me a link to the New York Times explaning current unemployment rates. If people need an illustration to understand the idea of 1 in 10, our problems are more epic than I can possibly imagine. After that, the charts actually attempt to tell us something we don't know.

We're talking about Falco on Twitter.

Tomorrow the utter clusterfuck of New York State politics meets the ongoing horror of the struggle for equal marriage rights. Ugh.

Also, gay couple kicked out of cab.