what happened when we went camping:

What happened when we went camping: 

(Not all camping. Just this particular camping.) 

We forgot the dog. It's not our dog, but J. was supposed to dog sit for some neighbors and the days got mixed up. We were already out of network and 90 minutes out of town in crazy Friday afternoon traffic when he saw the text asking if they could drop the dog off Saturday morning. He sent a response on the wifi at the ranger station, but we didn’t know until later whether they would be able to find someone else.

We forgot the rain fly for the tent. The weekend before, a tree dripped sap on it camping out at B.’s parents’ house, so we left it out to clean it, and there it stayed, uncleaned, during a busy week and while we packed everything for this weekend. I thought of it soon after we left the ranger station, and J. and E. and I speculated on whether this would mean sleeping in the car or curled up on the floor of E. and B.’s tent. 

Fortunately, when we got to the camp site, we found that B. had packed a 9’x9’ tarp that E. picked up once on sale at rei, and when tied just so over the tent, it blocked all the rain and gave a beautiful view of the lake. It was more exposed to wind, but the wind didn’t get that bad in the trees. 

We forgot to fill the car up with gas. This we also remembered around the ranger station, having passed many, many gas stations between Gone West and the depths of the woods. We were headed two hours up into the mountains, with the nearest gas station 30 miles away on dirt roads. It was risky.

We planned to drive back out through State City so we could stop at the nearest gas station (adding an hour to the drive), but when we hit the intersection on the way home, the car said we had 70 miles of gas left, and the sign said we had 47 miles to the first town on the direct route back to Gone West, so we chanced it and headed straight toward home. B. and E. followed us in case we ran out of gas.

It turns out that when a Subaru says 70 miles of gas left after driving 30 miles of dirt road, it still has many miles of lovely paved road left in it, especially when that lovely paved road is mostly downhill. The gauge still said it had 70 miles to go after the 47 mile drive. 

And then, to top off the weekend, B. stepped in a hole that turned out to be a rusting culvert and it gouged a 2-3 inch long gash in his leg, about half an inch deep. I tried to wash it out, and someone who works as a medical assistant in an orthopedist's office (and, more importantly, is a mom of teenagers) came from a neighboring campsite came to look at it, and the consensus was that we needed a real doctor, not butterfly bandages and tap water. 

The nearest urgent care was 2.5 hours away in State City, and it was closed. The nearest emergency room was 2 hours away.

Math problem: if you leave your campsite at 6 pm to drive to an emergency room 2 hours away, and it takes 3.5 hours to be seen and cleaned and stitched at the emergency room and you still need to fill up on gas and snacks because no one has eaten dinner, and it takes 2 hours to drive back, what time will you get back to your campsite?

The answer is 2:12 am. 

Meanwhile, sitting in the waiting room in a little country hospital, we read about what happened in Charlottesville. 

There are actual Nazis marching unashamed in our streets, making KKK and Nazi salutes, and the president of this country can’t bring himself to denounce them. He says there are “two sides.”

Let’s be clear: what happened in Charlottesville is not the fault of people who oppose Nazis and the KKK. There are not two equally justified sides. There is one side that espouses hatred, and that is one side that opposes hatred based on race, gender, or religion. 

Pick your side.

right

I'm going on record here: I am horrified that this country elected Donald Trump. To me, racism and sexism and xenophobia are deal breakers. It's like saying, "My boyfriend is really great, except he hits me." Not hitting you is the bare minimum. Not being overtly racist and sexist and xenophobic is the bare minimum in a president. I am horrified that overt racism and sexism and xenophobia are not deal breakers for 47.5% of this country.

We are all racist and sexist and xenophobic to some degree. We were all raised in a society that told us that black people are a little scary and don't have good intentions, that told us that women are bitchy if they stand up for themselves, that told us that people from somewhere else have weird, unpleasant ways that would bother us if we had to experience them.

But we have to fight that. We have to fight it. If we don't fight it, we are part of the problem. When we vote for someone like Trump, we are saying, "Racism isn't important to me. I don't feel the effects of it in my life, and I don't care that other people do." 

So don't tell me that people who voted for Trump aren't racist. Don't tell me that they aren't sexist. Don't tell me that they aren't xenophobic. They accept these things in other people. They don't speak up against them. They don't, above all, reject them in their leaders. 

I hope, I really do, that our institutions and law are strong enough to prevent Trump from becoming Hitler. I hope that social pressure is enough to keep Trump from becoming Hitler. But there is a very real chance that this is Germany in 1934, and we just elected Hitler. 

I grew up in the Midwest. I understand why people vote Republican. I will never understand why anyone voted for Trump, especially not anyone who claims to be a Christian.

Because I will tell you this: Jesus would have utterly rejected a man who stereotypes black people and calls them "the blacks" to other them. Jesus would have utterly rejected a man who treats women like objects and grabs them without their consent. Jesus would have utterly rejected a man who threatens to make Muslims carry ID cards (sound familiar? see Germany in the 1930s, Rwanda in the 1990s, just prior to the start of genocide in both countries). 

If you voted for Trump and are reading this saying, "But, the Supreme Court! He didn't mean those things!" let me tell you this: the man would say anything to get elected. He would tell you anything about the Supreme Court and Obamacare and immigration and how he's going to bring jobs back. But you have literally no idea what he will actually do. He changed his story every time he blinked. He denied statements that he made days earlier, that were on tape. He will do what is best for himself, not for you. He cares about no one but himself. 

And more: he pandered to the racism and sexism and xenophobia in some (hopefully small) segments of our country. He gambled on the fact that most people wouldn't stand up against that. And he won. Most people didn't stand up against that. They accepted it. If this is 1934 Germany, 47.5% of the country voted for Hitler. If this is 1964 Alabama, 47.5% of the country voted for the white supremacist governor. Trump lost the popular vote, but he won enough people in my home state and others like it that he won the electoral college. 

I don't know what my Oma would do if she were here, but I know this: she stood up against Hitler when the Netherlands was occupied by the Nazis. I can't imagine what she would have thought when her party elected a man who read Hitler's speeches for inspiration. She couldn't even stand the sound of German being spoken. I am so glad that she never knew that some of her children and grandchildren voted for a man who used Hitler's strategies to get elected, who talks about minorities  as if they are the source of white people's problems just like Hitler did, and who, I fear, may turn out to treat minorities the same way Hitler did. 

I worry now, speaking out about these things. I worry that I will have to stand in the gap and risk death to stand up to Trump. But I'm doing it, because it is the right thing to do, and because my Oma did no less. 

impossible

It turns out to be ridiculously, impossibly hard to buy a car. I know what car I want. I know how much I'm wiling to pay for it. And you know what I get, after extensive research, when I tell a car dealership that? 

Last night, one of them told me that I am wrong. 

Let that sink in for a moment: this guy claims to want my business. He tells me that he can get the car I want. He called me, so he apparently does want my business. And when I told him, based on my research, that one aspect of his pricing (a delivery charge) was more than I wanted to spend, he didn't say, "Let me see what I can do," he said, "No, you are wrong." 

Then he proceeded to mansplain to me 1. why buying a used car is a bad idea (he also sells used cars), 2. why Mazdas are just as good as Hondas and Toyotas (which is nonsense and unnecessary, since I told him I wanted to buy a Mazda for the manual transmission EVEN THOUGH they aren't as reliable as Hondas and Toyotas), 3. why he doesn't pressure people into anything because he wants people to send other people to buy from him (while continually telling me that I had no choice but to pay his delivery fee or end up with a lemon). 

I really don't understand how car dealerships do any business. So far, I have had the following experiences:

1. A car dealership that won't come down to reasonable prices. Should a used car really cost the same as a new one?
2. A car dealership that added all sorts of hidden costs and turned out not to have the title anyway. They also wanted me to sign a paper with my offer on it. I get the psychology that they think it makes me more committed, but it just made me irritated that they thought I was that easily manipulated.
3. A car dealership that claims to be able to get the car I want, but insists on telling me that I am wrong about everything. This bullying does not make for a happy customer. 
4. A car dealership that does not, despite confirming in writing, actually have the car I asked to see. They tried to sell me on some other cars until I flatly told them not to contact me again unless they had a manual transmission in stock. 

How is it that every other business at least attempts to offer what people want at a price people will pay except this one? 

If I were a man, I would have my car by now. 

Ebola fury

I slept for 9.5 hours last night, and I momentarily feel human again (momentarily because on Monday I am going to jump right back into the second half of a two week long Major Work Event and then I will be exhausted again).

I am so busy with this Major Work Event that I can't even stop for more than a second to lose my shit about the fact that so many people are dying in Liberia and rather than give one single fuck (swearing absolutely necessary here), the entire United States is up in arms that one single hospital in Dallas didn't take enough precautions with one single Ebola patient. 

How the hospital was allowing staff to treat an Ebola patient without coverings for their shoes is a legitimate question - had no one even googled Ebola? I am not a health professional, and I know better.

But I know! (Here comes massive sarcasm:) Let's freak out and waste our time blaming the Obama administration and try to get them to close our borders to people coming from that part of the world (really? really? when most of the people arriving in the US from West Africa are US CITIZENS, how are you going to enforce that one?), when what we should be doing is STOPPING PEOPLE FROM DYING IN WEST AFRICA, starting with basic things like oral rehydration salts and gloves and clean water and doctors.

Sometimes it truly drives me to fury how lives in Africa don't seem to matter.

Let me put it this way: if your child got sick, and you took care of her for days while she vomited and had diarrhea because there was no hospital to take her to, and then she died in your arms, would you be sad?

Why do we think of it any differently when the child dying is in Africa? Do we somehow think that the mother who just watched her child die in Liberia cares less than we would?

Yeah, let's think about that for a while, while we ignore the thousands of real people who are dying in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. 

There is this: Where's the Empathy for Ebola's African Victims?

"hell," apparently

I was randomly clicking around on the internet the other day when I came across this photo essay in Foreign Policy. The link that I clicked was something about the Failed States Index, which is the sort of thing that interests me. But lo! I had stumbled upon the perfect example of how the U.S. media turns the Rest of the World into Bad and Scary.

Let's start at the beginning, shall we? The title of this photo essay is Postcards from Hell. Postcards from Hell. You're kidding me, right? This cannot be real. Who let this article go to press with such a pejorative title? I can tell already, from the title, that the person who wrote this 1. doesn't travel much, and 2. buys into every stereotype of the Rest of the World.

At this point, I've mentally mostly discarded any words that are going to appear in the essay, because they are clearly going to be ridiculous, but I did read the first caption, below a picture of smoke in, probably, Sudan. Smoke! Where there is smoke there is fire! Fire means death and destruction, right?


Or, you know, that people need to cook food. There are both children and adults in that photo, and they all seem to be going calmly about their lives. They don't look particularly pained or upset. If that is hell, it doesn't look so bad. Am I to assume that every time someone lights a fire, they are in hell? Because we build a fire every time we go camping, and it's pretty great.

Here's my favorite line in the entire thing, right underneath that photo: "...as the photos here demonstrate, sometimes the best test is the simplest one: You'll only know a failed state when you see it." My mouth gaped open in astonishment. Apparently you can tell, from one single photo, selected by a person whose biases are pretty glaringly obvious, that a country is hell. An entire country. (I am so irritated that I am overusing italics.)

I looked through about half of the essay, just for the pictures. Let's see a few examples of what "hell" looks like, according to Foreign Policy:

1. Somalia:

Apparently, hell looks like a beach, and a boat with a big motor. OOOh, you mean you are worried about the guns? If you haven't noticed, those men are not pointing those guns at anyone or shooting anything. Presumably, in hell, they would be. Hell depiction? No.

2. Chad:

Apparently now hell is... getting old? That seems mean. This woman actually might be laughing, if you look closely, and the people behind her don't seem at all upset. So maybe hell is sitting on the ground? Getting old and sitting on the ground? Doesn't seem so bad to me. Hell depiction? No.

8. Central African Republic:

This one wins for sheer stereotypicality. The CAF has had a civil war and some rebels from Uganda have hidden there. But no, the photo is of FIRE. A fire, I might add, that was set intentionally to get rid of snakes and scorpions. It has nothing to do with the war. But it looks like hell, right? So let's use it! Even though it's a perfectly legitimate use of fire. Hell depiction? No.

I could go on, but I will illustrate with just one more, my personal favorite, for many reasons -

33. Liberia:

So, we have a market street, with things for sale. We have healthy kids wearing nice clothes, with their hair braided and one of them even carrying a school bag.* This is supposed to be... hell?

No. I refuse to accept it.

Other pictures show: A man pushing a bicycle of bananas to market! Kids drinking from a water pump! A man with blood on his clothes! (That looks, frankly, like he works as a butcher, not like he is hurt.) A kid next to an abandoned mud house! The sign for a national park! Women lined up to vote! So scary.

I have been sarcastic throughout this entire post, but I am actually pretty disturbed, because this article told me that I was supposed to see hell in these pictures, and all I saw was people going about their lives. Is it far too cynical to say that I worry that the only thing that makes them "hell" in the minds of the people who chose them is the fact that, well, the people in so many of them are black?

...

* I should say, regarding this picture of Liberia, which I love, that it was taken by Glenna Gordan, who keeps this blog: Scarlett Lion, which I also love. Her pictures are beautiful and real, and nothing I am saying should be taken as a reflection on her work. I am only annoyed that FP chose to use her lovely photo as a depiction of hell.

Photo credits:
First photo - Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Somalia - Mohamed Dahir/AFP/Getty Images
Chad - Olivier Laban-Mattei/AFP/Getty Images
CAF - Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Liberia - Glenna Gordan/AFP/Getty Images

swearwords!

When I was little, in Liberia, ships dumped oil off the coast, or spilled it. There was usually a line of black gunk at the high tide line, and every time we went to the beach, we played in the waves and dug in the sand, and then we sat in the car with our feet sticking out so our parents could wash our tarry feet with kerosene.

I've been thinking of that as I see pictures of the Gulf Coast. Looking at pictures of the gooey brown water and the suffocating animals makes me feel sick to my stomach.

Then it makes me furious.

[Warning: swearing upcoming. I am too mad to do otherwise.]

Have you seen the charts of BP's violations of safety violations? If not, you can see them here: Center for Public Integrity. We should all be raging. We should be up in arms. This oil spill is going to affect the oceans of the entire world. How can it just go on and on?

I cannot believe that BP is doing everything they can to fix it. I just can't. Because they are doing nothing. If you ask me, it is time for the US government to step in and fix that shit. Someone knows how to fix it. Someone can get it done. Take the well away from that irresponsible company and fix it.

BP? Clearly isn't going to bother.

F&#$ers.

anger

I read an article in the New York Times yesterday - this article, in fact - that made me gnash my teeth and want to move back to Africa. I mean, okay, yes, the last time I lived in Central Africa, c. 2005, people were dying of AIDS. I know this. But somehow I had the (apparently delusional) hope that things were getting better. I thought anti-retrovirals were, I don't know, reducing transmission rates? It was depressing to hear in the accompanying video that for every 1000 people who start anti-retrovirals, 2500 people are newly infected. That's... not good.

I made five lunches this morning, five little containers of beans and rice and cheese. I had made too much rice, and I stared at the extra rice morosely. What bothers me the most about the AIDS crisis in Central and Southern Africa, sometimes, is not that it is happening, but that we can ignore it. What bothers me is that I can waste rice here in my happy little North American life while people I met in Rwanda in 2004 could not take anti-retrovirals because they couldn't afford the food they needed to take with the pills. I find it less depressing, actually, to live in a place where people are dying of AIDS than to live here, where AIDS is invisible, and to know that I can live my merry life without ever thinking of the people living and dying across the world.

I remember, when I first moved to Rwanda, being surprised at the casual way that my educated friends and colleagues, both African and Western, spoke of being tested for HIV. "Every year," they said, even the married monogamous ones. They know too well what AIDS looks liked. They have seen friends and coworkers and neighbors die of it. Contrast: a few weeks ago, I was talking with a couple of friends about the transmission of HIV. One friend said that despite her party days in college, she has never been tested for HIV. It doesn't feel like it applies to her. Another, an over-educated lawyer like me, said that he understood that HIV could only be transmitted through blood.

Something is seriously wrong. This is someone with decades of education who does not know that HIV can be transmitted through bodily fluids other than blood (s3m3n? v@g1nal fluid? bre@st mi1k? hello? how did you think transmission was happening? it's not some stereotypical primitive blood-sharing tradition we are talking about). If my over-educated friends here don't even know how HIV is transmitted, what then do we expect in Bwindi, Uganda, where hardly anyone makes it to secondary school?

It costs $11,000 for life-long anti-retrovirals for one person in Uganda. Apparently, a life is not worth that much to us. The war on HIV/AIDS? It was the one war I thought we could win. I guess we don't care enough. It's not happening to US, right?

Eff.

politicking

I really ought to post something about, I don't know, politics, so I can feel like I am contributing something to society. Mostly, however, my views about politics continue to consist primarily of scouting for photos of the First Family and then sighing in delight that Barack Obama is my President. I am not weeping every time I see him, anymore, but I'm still overwhelmed that he was elected in my lifetime. Today A. and I said his name a few times on the phone, just to hear it, just because it's so exciting that our President's name is Barack Obama.

I have some opinions about the Sotomayor nomination, too, namely: h3ll yes, a wise Latina will make better decisions as a Supreme Court justice than an old white guy will. Aside from the fact that the more diversity of perspective we have on the Court, the better, a Latina has had experiences that a white man will never have in this country. Namely, having been a part of the non-ruling group. You can be the smartest fracking white man in the country, but you will never have been a part of any group but the ruling one. You can be the most compassionate white man in the country, but you will never have anything more than empathy for people who experience daily discrimination. Empathy and experience are not the same thing. A panel made up of only white men are just not going to get it, much of the time.

See also: more qualified than basically anyone on the Court right now.

And anyone who thinks affirmative action got her into Princeton and Yale, has clearly not:

1. Been to Princeton lately (it's a haven of white people and unbelieveably expensive).
2. Gone to law school (it's a haven of white people and unbelieveably expensive, sometimes to the point that I thought they were deliberately making it close to impossible to attend if you were not wealthy), or
3. Thought about this issue at all (if affirmative action is driving the education system in this country, why are most institutions of higher education so overwhelmingly white? Why are there so few black/Hispanic/Native American lawyers/doctors/scientists? I'll give you a hint: it's not because black/Hispanic/Native American students aren't smart. Trust me, I went to law school with some incredibly smart people of color, most of whom worked much, much harder than I did to get there. If you are worrying about who is taking spots, worry about the slacker not-so-smart legacy white kid who went to expensive schools and could spend his summers "volunteering" so his application would look good, so he could go to a good law school, so he could make a lot of money doing nonsensical corporate work, so he too could send his kids to expensive schools. Because trust me, I know him, too. And he's probably headed for the Supreme Court.).

(The swearing in this post: 100% deliberate. For effect. Thank you.)

vaccine rant

I think I have previously mentioned my philosophy on vaccinations, which is: get them. Get every one you are offered.

I know, I know. Reactions, over-loaded immune systems, possible (unproven) autism link, etc. Have you ever seen a man drag himself across the street on his hands, which have flipflops on them, because he was paralyzed by polio? Have you ever seen the mass graves after an entire town has been decimated by cholera? Get the vaccines.

I know, I know. HPV and Hepatitis B are transmitted sexually, so if you are just good, you can avoid them. Me: RAGE, FURY, CANNOT SPEAK STRAIGHT. It's not about being good or bad, people, it's about the most effective way of staying healthy. GET THE #$%@ VACCINES. No one can predict everything that will ever happen to them. No one.

I get furious when people say that they aren't going to vaccinate their kids, or get vaccines to travel. I am all about alternative medicine (love my doctor, love, for suggesting that I get acupuncture for the tension headaches I get at work), and I hate taking unnecessary medication, but unless you or your child are medically fragile or immuno-compromised, get the vaccines. In fact, that's the entire point. If the healthy people don't get the vaccines, the diseases will be running around able to infect people who can't get them because of their health or immune system problems. You owe it to the rest of us to get the vaccines. Putting a little bit of a disease into your body so it can learn to fight off the real thing when it comes is an entirely different thing than over-medicating. Bodies were made to fight off diseases. Healthy bodies are bored with the lack of things to fight off in our too-clean culture.*

I was inspired to write about this by something I happened to read in which someone objected to giving their pre-teen daughter the Gardasil vaccine because it would encourage her to have sex. Are you kidding me? Seriously? Are you mad? You would rather have your child potentially die of cervical cancer than get a vaccine? Do you think that's going to be what determines whether she has sex or not? Is she going to be thinking about that while kissing some boy someday and trying to decide what should happen next? If the risks of pregnancy and HIV and gonorrhea and herpes and chlamydia plus all the guilt that this type of parent is sure to have put on their child are not enough to keep her from having sex, I seriously doubt that the risk of HPV is going to do it.** Plus, did you know that they have found HPV under the fingernails of pre-teen boys who have never been sexually active? That you don't actually have to have intercourse to get it? That stuff is going AROUND.

People. Get a grip. Get the vaccine. Get every vaccine they offer you.

* I also think a little salmonella is good for you, as long as you are in general good health. Go right on eating the peanut butter and spinach.
**I was seriously tempted to say, right there, "What if she doesn't have sex before she gets married but she marries a guy who did, and who gives her HPV?" and also, "What if she is raped?" but I didn't, because it infuriates me that we still, in 2009, have a double standard for men and women. It infuriates me that they don't even give this vaccine to boys. It infuriates me that in order to come up with reasons why people should give their daughters a vaccine that will help keep them healthy, I have to even consider resorting to a story line that allows them to think of their daughter as "pure" until some man takes ownership of her.

PS. I should also add that when the Gardasil vaccine came out, I was just about to turn 27 (they give the vaccine to women up to age 26) and I lept at the opportunity to get vaccinated. I paid $360 out of pocket while broke in law school to get that vaccine, because I had to get it then or never. I figured it was an investment in a healthy future. You know why? Because life defies predictions. And because I get every vaccine I possibly can.

broken

There is an article in Time magazine called "Why Your Bank is Broke." I started to read it and then I got bored and stopped, because it's about things like finance and accounting and there is nothing more boring than that, although I do have the window open still and I intend to go back and read it and edify myself. But the fact is that I don't even need to read it, because I know why my bank is broke.

Illustrative story:

I called Citibank this week (I am not even bothering to disguise their name. Citibank: please google yourself and find this, and know that I hate you. Hate, hate, hate. HATE.) Anyway, I called Citibank this week to try to organize my student loans, which I have been trying to do for literally three months and things never all come together at the same time long enough to settle my accounts, and I explained to them what I needed in order to be able to make my payments. (This is a long story; it has to do with documentation that my law school needs and paperwork that Citibank needs to fill out, and timing, and blah blah blah.)

The woman to whom I spoke at Citibank Student Loans said, and I quote, "We don't care if you repay your loans. If you don't pay them, we'll get the money from the insurance company."

Double-you. Tee. Eff.

Here I am, trying to repay my student loans, as one ought to do with money that one has borrowed, and Citibank DOES NOT CARE if I pay them back, because they have insurance, probably paid for with taxpayer dollars. In fact, it is probably easier for them to get the money from the insurance than from me. After all, it will take years to get it from me in my little dribbling payments every month. All that bureaucracy. Better to just get it back in one swoop from the insurance company.

Meanwhile, Citigroup wanted to buy a $50 million corporate jet, until Wonderful-President-Obama laid down the law.

This, my friends, is why banks are broke: they have stopped acting as sustainable businesses. They are not just lending out money that they know cannot be repaid, they are lending out money that they don't WANT to be repaid.

What they want, of course, is bailouts. So they can pay their bonuses. And not bother with all those pesky BUSINESS DETAILS.

Word. The free market has failed. Greed has won. NOW can we finally regulate this nonsense?

(I mean regulate in a useful manner, obviously. I know that there are already regulations, but they don't seem to working so well, do they? Well? Do they?)