Category Archives: Are you freaking kidding me?

Stress fracture whine

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It’s time for my stress fracture whine. This isn’t going to be pretty, so turn away if you’re squeamish around self-absorbed melodrama. If you find a petty lack of perspective nauseous*, then do not read any further.

[*that’s right. something that makes you feel like puking is nauseous. if you feel like puking you are nauseated. people who say or write that they’re nauseous are actually saying that they nauseate others. and that is funny to me.]

So here begins the whine. I’ve been on crutches and unable to carry Peanut for three months. And it’ll probably be another two months because I made the mistake, seemingly harmless, of sitting cross-legged on the floor to do a puzzle with my son. Without thinking I put the bad foot under my right leg while we were sitting, and the pain returned. The rest of the week has increased the pain and I now feel it all the time again.

That means at least six more weeks, if not more.

We’re a sling family–we cuddle and carry everywhere. We don’t own a stroller. He likes to be in our arms a lot. And we like that, too. I like to carry him, to cuddle him, and to tell him things on our walks, during our errands, and around the house. Because of my fracture I can’t carry my kid, and I’m sad. He’s sad. He doesn’t want to go for walks because he knows when he gets tired in the middle, I can’t help him. He doesn’t want to go to the playground because I can’t climb with him. Peanut is a timid guy in new places and around crowds, but he’s had to run through an airport pretty much by himself twice, and will again this month, because I can’t carry him. (He won’t use the mei tai. I could use crutches and the mei tai, but he refuses to try.)

I’m tired of crutches. I’m tired of being non-weight-bearing but extra-weight-bearing, if you know what I mean. I’m tired of the  inability to run, the inability to hold my kid while he brushes his teeth or carry him to his room after a bath, the need to hop on one foot with our lunch plates, the pain of accidentally putting my foot down while washing dishes. I’m tired of holdng hands while I crutch down the street, four fingers held tightly by a little boy who feels sad and alone that he’s so far from me.

I’m tired of stress fractures that won’t heal. I’m tired of expecting to be fully functioning because the reality of my human body is that I probably will be less and less wel functioning for the rest of my days. So I’m tired.

And whiny.

[And this section is for all the people who seem to Google “stress fractures that won’t heal”. Today, and for at least the next six weeks, they’re my peeps.

During our move from the icky part of the state to the better part of the state, I somehow cracked a bone in my foot. I have a history of stress fractures from running, and this time I was just barely increasing mileage and frequency from a paltry ten miles a week to about fifteen miles a week (always following the 10% rule because I’ve been here before and don’t like rehab or PT or water running or crutches). And I got the familiar sense of needing to crack my foot for three weeks straight. Sure enough, my old sports med guy said third or fourth metatarsal stress fracture. Bone scan points to fourth met. (First fracture was ischial tuberosity, second was femoral neck, third was femur on other side, fourth was calcaneal. Now I’m the proud owner of a cracked fourth met.)

So I got an air cast and crutches. Doc tells me I can walk in the air cast. I do. For 6 weeks. Fracture gets worse. So I go non-weight-bearing for 3 more weeks. The cast makes it worse (it’s too heavy, and makes me rest my foot often, which hurts it).  So I ditch the cast and go completely non-weight-bearing for 3 more weeks, and after two weeks of painfree hypercarefulness, the pain is back. Know why? I sat cross legged on the floor to do a puzzle with my son. Sitting on the floor with the bad foot tucked under me set me back another six weeks. After 12 weeks of care and 15 weeks from the first pain. Even with an ultrasound bone-stimulator contraption that cost us two weeks’ rent. (Insurance paid half. Gee, thanks. Otherwise it would have been a full month’s rent. When do Americans get to have health care instead of health insurance?) That means I’m at square one, and need at least six weeks, completely non-weightbearing to heal this thing. That’ll be at least 18 weeks. If all goes well.]

What I want in the stimulus package

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So Congress is debating, as are pundits, as are my friends and neighbors, about how best to rescue the economy. (The best option, a way-back machine that returns us to pre-Reagan and puts deregulation into context, has been shelved for some bogus lack-of-technology reason.)

Obama says spend money on the things we’re gonna need anyway—roads, wind farms, education—and in so doing, put people to work. Republicans say cut taxes (since that worked so well to this point…do they somehow think that tax cuts when the government is already bringing in, like, zero dollars, is going to help anyone but gazillionaires?)

You know what I say? I say spend the money, sure. Cut taxes on the lower class. And move the tax bracket *up* for anyone who works for a failing financial institution and got a bonus. If they took bailout money and got bonuses, make them pay 100% taxes. That’s right. If you get a bonus, you give back your entire salary including bonus. Because you know what? You’re lucky to still have a job, you economy-ruining f—ers. That Merrill Lynch yahoo who said he had to give bonuses to his best performers is a jackass. If you had any best performers my entire retirement would be worth what it was in May. And yet, he’s offering us the best way out of the crisis. Sure, pay extra to those who screwed up the economy, the international banking industry, and the world in general. Give them a bonus. Then we the taxpayers get to keep it all. Every bloody penny.

Ditto executive bonuses for anyone involved in mortgage-backed securities, subprime mortgages, or other banking shenanigans. They can all make the check out the the Internal Revenue Service so we can pay for those roads.

Bailout nonsense

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A Senator from Missouri wants to cap executive salaries for companies accepting federal bailout money. Ya think?!! It’s only now occurring to Congress that their blank check should have had some strings attached? Democrats tried for about twelve minutes last fall to get that as part of the no-strings-attached bailout. Remember when Paulson and Bernanke said that any limits to executive compensation would make it less likely for banks to participate in the mortgage bailout? Yeah. Did anybody else, at that time think, “Fine. Have it your way. Pay your CEO millions, and go bankrupt for all I care?”

I can’t believe the belated moral outrage. And I really can’t believe Guiliani telling the press that executives *need* big bonuses, because in his world, trickle down economics is more than just a disproven Reagan-era philosophy. Because CEOs who *only* get a few million base salary won’t eat out and New York will fall apart, Guiliani claims, but if they get their share of the $18 billion in bonuses paid in 2008, they will gladly hire underpaid workers to clean their houses, serve their food, and tutor their ignored kids. Folks, trickle down is a lie. Giving the exorbitantly rich *more* in the hopes they buy more crap and hire more workers just doesn’t work. Companies hire when people are buying their goods and services. Not when their CEOs are obscenely rich.

Of course we should cap salaries at any firm getting federal bailout money. Geezus, we should also roll back Bush’s gratuitous tax breaks for the wealthy because  people who make more should pay more.  Because it’s the right thing to do. Shut up with your “they need to eat out so people can work.” They need to invest in infrastructure, and they do that by paying their freaking taxes (which they don’t actually do since they have dozens of laws written so they can out of their taxes, while I pay mine.)

Take the bailout money back. Take it back. They used it poorly, they didn’t do what makes sense for the country. Take it back. Give them a timeout and move on to fixing science and education and roads, because that’s the shit that’s gonna produce jobs and a future economy.

I’d rather you bailout cops and teachers and people trying to get by than bailout corporations who made eggregious errors in basic business principles. Let ’em rot. But since you offered them money with no strings attached, you Congresspeople should have to pay those executive bonuses out of your own Congressional salaries. Talk about CEOS and CFOs working for a dollar this year…Congress should do that, too.

You know what, World?

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You really suck today, World. Sure, it’s a gorgeous 70plus degree day. Sure, there have been some very nice people in my way today. But overall, you are a rotten and no good inhabited planet today, World.

So since you suck so much today, and you owe me some *major* kharma points for royally fucking with me when I really didn’t have it coming, please send some of your worst asspain to the following peeps:

Do me a favor and throw a pebble in the shoe of the a–holes who lied to us when they sold us the last house, the realtor who let them, and the realtor who didn’t catch the lie. Also, please, give a huge festering stye to the people ruining the planet, a labial sebacious cyst to chemical companies who get away with the slow murder of the human race because they have strong lobbyists, and a painful nasal laceration to the jerks abusing workers for a profit.

It’s the least you can do, you sucky, sucky world.

I *need* 5920 hours of sleep…that’s a medical fact (sort of)

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Most scientists agree you can’t make up for lost sleep. But at least one sleep center claims it takes two hours of sleep to replace one lost hour of sleep. (Bear with me. This isn’t the journal Nature. This is my pathetic little writing, ambivalence, parenting, anti-corporate blog and I feel like a little pseudo-science today. It’s not like the Internet isn’t full of made up crap already.)

So in the 27 months that Peanut woke frequently every night, I figure I got about 4200 hours of sleep. (Not counting that one, blissful night where he had a fever and slept for ten hours straight. Ah, bring on the 103 degrees.) Had I slept normally, I would have gotten at least 7100 hours of sleep. (At least is right. I used to need 9 hours a night, so that 7100 is probably 8000, but I digress from my highly technical calculations…) Plus the past five months, in which I have gotten 190 hours instead of the requisite 250. That leaves me with a deficit of at least 2960 hours. Using the Quanta Dynamics Sleep Research I found on a half-assed Google search, that means I need 5920 hours of sleep to catch up.

So to all the people asking when we’ll have another baby, the answer is, “As soon as someone arranges for me to sleep for 5920 hours straight.”

(Or, “when you have my conscience and maternal instincts removed so I could, hypothetically, let a child cry.” I don’t think that surgery is wise, as it goes against everything a feeling person knows, though just such a surgery was undoubtedly approved by the FDA under the previous administration. With postsurgical injections of materna-botox to insure your nurturing muscles are paralyzed so you can continue your life as though your children aren’t there.)

Spouse has a different idea of usefulness

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For our last move, I packed an entire 1500 sq. ft. house by myself. Over the course of seven months. And in the final stretch, Spouse came home and asked if he could help. Sure. There’s a cabinet full of ceramic mixing bowls and casserole dishes. Have at it.

Okay. He plops down on the floor with newspaper and a box. Crinkle, crinkle, crinkle…I go off to pack another bookcase full of texts I swear I’ll read again. I already got rid of hundreds of books I know I won’t read again. I’m in the living room and see Spouse walk past with a single AA battery.

Me: What are you looking for?

S: The box with the batteries.

Me: Above the washing machine. [interested that he’s recycling a battery when he was last wrapping bowls]

S: I’m going out to the garage for a few minutes.

Me: Are you done with the cabinet?

S: I need a break.

So I go in the kitchen and see he has wrapped two bowls. And, not to be judgmental or anything (yeah, right), but he did a crappy job. Two or three layers of newsprint between the bowls, nothing inside the bowls themselves.

When he comes back inside later, he goes straight to the kitchen. Crinkle, crinkle, crinkle…”This is bullshit.” He heads back to the garage for a while.

So now we’ve taken a few months to unpack. We’re quite slovenly, really, living amongst boxes for nigh on two months, and no end in sight.

I opened a box today, thinking that instead of working on my conference paper or my novel or any of the things that might return me to the realm of the living and thinking, maybe I should clean this joint up.

Inside the box were hand-selected, and carefully wrapped, items from my Goodwill pile. Spouse must have thought they might be useful and should be rescued. That night of “help” was a night of dumpster diving of the worst sort—stuff I already marked as headed to someone who really needs it had been retrieved by the one person who decidedly did not need it.

Do you think Goodwill will take one slightly used husband?

Hussein is not an epithet

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True story:

I had a student one semester, in his second year at the college. He was a great guy who worked hard in my class. He mentioned to me once that another professor had made fun of him for his name, asked him if anyone in his family was a terrorist, and told him that maybe he should change his name so he could get along better in the U.S. This student, the professor never bothered to find out, was third generation American. He was raised in the States, as were his parents.

His middle name happened to be Hussein. And until about the mid-nineties, he was pretty proud of it. Now he hid his name because of reactions like this other teacher’s. I told him, without a beat, that hundreds of thousands of people with his name throughout the world and throughout history had been fine, decent, honorable people. That one really famous a–hole and his family couldn’t erase all the other history of the name. That there are probably thousands of kind, loving, thoughtful people named McVay and Nichols and Bundy and Manson. That it’s not fair to judge people by their name any more than it’s okay to judge them by their skin or sexuality or political affiliation.

Then I told him to report the professor who acted so unprofessionally.

His look told me I had no idea what it was like to be judged by a racist, narrow minded society. Reporting it might not have hurt his opportunities at the college, but then again it might have. And it clearly had before.

End of true story. Beginning of rant:

Barack Hussein Obama is President of these United States. He’s not a terrorist, he’s not a fundamentalist, he is not a bad person. He’s fine and decent person who might just help us come together to make this country what we believe it can be. And he is not the only fine and decent person with this name. Those of you who say that we should focus on the name Hussein instead of on his actions, shame on you. You’re giving your own family a bad name.

A darned good trip home

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Our US Airways flight didn’t go anywhere near the Hudson, so A+ flight.

Our return flight attendants were about 3000 percent nicer than the outbound flights.

When *someone* forgot to leave us the car keys and *someone else* later left the car seat in the rental car and then thanked *their* lucky stars that the flight was late and *someone* noted to another passenger that a connection in Phoenix is always easy because it’s a relatively small airport and then, later, that same *someone* had exactly 19 minutes from wheelsdown to haul ass from the absolute farthest gate in one terminal to the absolute farthest gate in another terminal (on crutches and cheering on a three-year-old functioning on vapors a full three hours past bedtime and with no food in him to run at full tilt with his frog backpack [I know it’s heavy baby, and I know you don’t like running encumbered, but you’re doing a heckuva job!] and trying not to laugh at the hilarity of a three-year-old let loose in an aiport and told to run as fast as he can, wobbling a bit when the crutches hit the moving walkway and when the three-year-old stopped dead in front of her to ask if this was an escalator or something different, and just a little after she smacked the kiosk toadie upside the head with her crutch when he asked her, as she all but ran a three-legged race with the aforementioned toddler and packmule Spouse who carried everyone’s carry-on and personal item and carseat while running at helf-tilt, whether she could spare 30 seconds to hear about a special deal with MasterFuckingCard) made it with, no joke, two minutes to spare only to find that that *someone* had lost our boarding passes but that a certain airlines that can land on water or tamac can also replace a lost boarding pass with, like, no problemo, well then *all* those someones relaxed into their seats with a sigh and forgot even to bemoan the fact that you don’t even get pretzels anymore, let alone beverages on these flights home. Or that airport freaking restaurants close at freaking 9:00 pm when your flight is scheduled to land at 8:55pm and your three-year-old and your crutches conspire to keep you away from a different burrito—not the burrito they refused to serve you at 8:55am, noting that they didn’t serve bean and cheese burritos until after 9:00 am, and yes they’re sorry that your flight leaves at 9:06, but that they can’t make a burrito so early unless it’s a breakfast burrito, yes, ma’am, even if you’re willing to eat it cold andyes, ma’aam, even if you’re willing to order a breakfast burrito without the filling and substitute rice and beans, sorry ma’am; or the burrito that the wonderful airline who replaced your boarding passes refused to let your husband dash and purchase because even though their plane was late and even though they don’t have food on the plane and even though your three-year-old will probably lose it if he has to subsist on clementines and raw almond slices for *another* flight after being promised a burrito, they have a firm four minutes before takeoff door policy, and you’ll just have to eat at your destination. That’s three burritos denied, just this trip. If I weren’t still achy from the hilarity of  watching the three-year-old drop to his hands and knees in the airport, pretending to eat the floor, I might write a strongly worded letter.

It’s good to be home.

Groundhog month

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Since the doctor saw a shadow on my X-ray, I’m due for another six weeks of crutches.

I should be walking normally by June, they chuckled. (Actually, they were really nice and sympathetic, but I’ll go mad if I can’t make someone the villain in this story.)

This is unacceptable. I have a three-year-old hellion who never stops moving, a sick cat, a paper due, four thousand library books due on campus and no way to park within a mile of the drop slot, a novel that’s so close to being done that I can taste it, a potential move, two trips involving air travel, a filthy house, an unbearable urge to go running, and an overdeveloped case of liberal guilt pulling me to volunteer seven days a week to deal with this month.

Can’t you freaking take these feet off and give me stronger models?

And while you’re at it, fit my kid for new hands. He’s been asking and I figure it’ll be like an early birthday present.

Melissa and Doug alternative

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So I just blogged last week (okay, it felt like last week, but it could’ve been three months ago—my life is a black hole and days get lost, sucked into the vortex of trying my best and driving myself insane in the process) about my disappointing discovery that the dressable, mix and match outfit dolls from Melissa and Doug are horrifyingly, nineteen-thirties-ingly, cringe-inducingly gender stereotyped, with one career boy doll and three pink, frilly, princess-y dolls. (I’ll repeat here that I love the boy doll, and I’m only very, very upset with the toymaker about the difference between boy doll and girl dolls.)

Well, I found the antidote. (note: I found this on my own, in a locally owned and operated toy store. I don’t get stuff free, I don’t advertise on my blog. I vent. If you don’t believe me, try to find another product endorsement in these posts. There aren’t any that I remember. Second note: my memory sucks, so don’t hold me to the sales-pitch-free site promise I just made, ‘cuz I can’t be held responsible for what I blog at midnight. Third note: of course I can. I just don’t remember all of it. In an “I don’t remember what your fourteenth word was, honey” kind of way, not an “I don’t remember that we had sex, but I believe you if you say we did” kind of way.)

Schylling makes a wooden boy bear and girl bear set, where you mix and match their expressions, clothes, and shoes. And they’re as close as I’ve found to gender non-assumptive. Yes, the girl has some pink outfits (including a ballet getup) and the boy doesn’t. But there are several almost-gender-neutral outfits for both, and, surprisingly, the expressions are almost exactly matched. (Boy has a crying face, so does girl; girl has same number of smiling faces as boy; neither has angry face. The only difference is that the girl has a sleeping face to a befuddled face for the boy. I’m willing to let that go. Even Spouse was shocked. He expected only crying and smiling from girl bear, and only angry and sleeping from boy bear. But whether that’s more a statement on our marriage or on his feminism, I don’t know.) The girl has a pair of overalls, the boy does, too. Yes, hers have a couple of sunflower buttons and his have plain buttons. But it’s about three hundreds years more advanced than M&D’s nonsense.

I plan to buy both and mix all the clothes into the boy doll’s box. If I had a girl, I’d buy both, surreptitiously toss the frilly outfit, and mix all the other outfits into the girl doll’s box.

Ernest Moody and Emma Moody. Relatively inexpensive. Sold separately. Smaller and more portable than the Melissa and Doug discrimination-fest. Tell your local toystore to carry them (and why!)

If you know of something even more equal, let me know. But for now, I’m pretty happy to find an alternative to Melissa and Doug’s discouraging message that boys can be anything they want and girls can be pretty.

CNN thinks it’s groovy to leave a job for another job, but not to parent.

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So this article beatifies those who leave a lucrative career to follow their gut. The people profiled left jobs with great benefits for…other jobs.

There is no mention of the hundreds of thousands of women leaving really good jobs to make a difference in their children’s lives. Those, for instance, who leave simulating and lucrative careers in advertising to be more useful to society as the parent of a decent human being. Or the child-free idealists who leave corporate america to teach or be a voice for the voiceless.

Apparently, leaving because your gut tells you to raise your own kid or save the world doesn’t count as news. Way to show your priorities, Turner Corporate.

F—ing Sony copy protection

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So sony wants so desperately for me not to copy their DVDs (as if…I can barely get them into the drive slot in my computer and I barely have time to watch them let alone copy them) that they’ve made newer discs unplayable in my computer.

Somene who knows more than I do, and who has a better system (like a television and a DVD player made by…you guessed it…sony) explains their dick move here. And here.

I was all happy that I got my draft novel to KDT and Netflix delivered Stranger than Fiction the same day. So Spouse and I got Peanut to bed and loaded then crashed then loaded then crashed then loaded then crashed the f—ing copy protected DVD.

But for people who know better, this was news in 2007. It’s 2009 and Netflix is still sending me this. Today.

With whom shall I be more angry? (hint: the answer is not me, for having a seven year old computer and DVD player therein.)

Now I have to go back to my tape flags, damnit!

Okay, that’s it.

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Attention ants: Stop it. I know it’s warm in here, I know it’s dry in here. I don’t want you in here. Stop it before I run out of Biokleen spray, because its replacement is decidedly less pleasant for all of us.

Attention interest rates: Stop it. Fucking settle around the low 5s and stop. For fuck’s sake. We’re trying to fix an economy here, and you’re not helping. Greedy fucking bank jerks who stole our 401ks. Stop, stop, stop. Just lend everyone nice some money and quit trying to turn 2005 profits. Stop it stop it stop it.

Attention toddler: Keep up what you’re doing, boy. We’re having a great month. You’re doing very well. Nice effort on the friendliness, the compromising, and the listening. You’re a fine and decent human. Keep up the good work.

Attention early morning freight trains: Stop it. You don’t need the horn. Nobody on the planet could miss the blinking lights and dinging bells and dropped crossing arm. Stop honking your horn at 4am already.

Attention everyone on the planet: Step off! Just get out of my way for a few days. I have a novel to send to KGT, about which I’m terrified, even though she’s the sweetest and most gentle creative soul I’ve met, including MPG, who is the sweetest and most gentle creative soul anyone has ever met. While dealing with that fear (and unfinished novel that has two days to be finished), I also have to stop interest rates, decide whether to buy a house, decide how to finish this conference paper, decide whether to think about another kid, decide whether I can pull off above the knee striped socks with a skirt and an aircast. It’s an artificial-crisis-filled stressful month, and I’d like to ask that you all stay home, stop calling, and take a step away from the car keys. Just have some eggnog, chill, and resume your duties after the new year. (NDM, you may resume whenever, since the whole international date line gives you an extra day, anyway, and you wouldn’t get in my way, anyway, since you’re busy not drowning on the other side of the world, fighting to keep the world a better place than the rabid monkey blogs ever could without you.)

Attention babysitters: please select the best amongst yourselves and call me. I have no idea how to find one of you, but I need to see Spouse once before Peanut turns three. It would make three dates in three years, and I’m begging you…please call your own references, because I don’t have time. That’s why I haven’t found you yet. I haven’t looked. It’s a daunting task, one that should be important enough to stop parenting for the three months or so I assume it takes to find a good sitter, but that would sort of make the whole thing a bigger deal than I’m willing for it to be, seeing as I just want one stinking date with my husband in 2009. At least, I mean, but still. Ah, fuck it. I’ll just have Netflix send something not subtitled, and we’ll have our stinking Hot Tamales and popcorn on the cat-litter dusted couch. Sigh.

Attention world governments: please, please hear me now. I’ve figured out the secret to world peace. It came to me in the car (you know, that thing that very few people in the world have, and I’m way too spoiled to even have that, considering what most of the people in the world go through daily). The world would stop its fighting if every man woman and child had working indoor plumbing. Clean water, yes. That’s just necessary, though millions don’t have it. But beyond that, a flush toilet in some sort of structure where you can go all by yourself and close your eyes and have one minute of peace and quiet. And I’m going to go out on a limb here, and GUARANTEE world peace if somehow Bill and Melinda can get everyone a heated toilet seat. I know. We need to fix malaria and AIDS and birth traumas and birth defects and maternal health and cancer and everything else that afflicts the world populations. But once we’re all healthy, we might still be angry. Not with a heated toilet seat. There would be no wars if everyone had a heated toilet seat (which, if you were paying attention above, requires clean water and indoor plumbing, and about three thousand steps of poverty and disease eradication before the heated seats, but still).

Just consider it. Because once I go against my personal beliefs and kill all the ants in the house and strangle bank interest rate people and put a huge boulder on the railroad tracks and kiss my toddler and get a sitter and finish my novel and cure all those diseases, I would really like, for once in the winter, to not freeze my ass just trying to keep the house cleaner than our cat is willing to. And I can’t enjoy a heated toilet seat unless the rest of the world is also fed and healthy and happy and not abused and not endangered and also evacuating on a lovely, clean, heated toilet seat.

So there.

I’m really peeved at Melissa and Doug

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I usually like the toy makers over at Melissa and Doug. They’re all wooden and edutainment-y, and I like that.

But today I’m heart-poundingly, strongly-worded-letter-y pissed.

Grandma brought Peanut a cool magnetic dress-up Joey doll. Peanut loves the doll. I love the doll. So I figured I’d get him the female version, too.

Uh-oh. Not just gender-assigned, not just gender-stereotyped, but gender-disgusting.

The Joey doll gets to be a firefighter, police officer, knight, superhero, construction worker, and a pirate. Stereotyped, sure, but not totally offensive, provided there is a female doll with the same choices, too.

Well, the Maggie doll lets you choose between “cute” outfit and “attractive” outfit. Period. Revolutionary choice of skirts or pants. No career garb. No uniforms. Nothing she could wear to a world where they value her for her mind. But she sure is purdy.

The Nina doll is all different ballerina costumes. The Princess doll is too disgusting to discuss here. Use your imagination. Now add more ruffles and glitter.

I’m genuinely pissed. My son happened to catch a glimpse of baseball on tv a few months ago, and asked where the ladies were. I told him I wasn’t sure, but we’d turn the channel until we saw some. So we watched billiards for a while. Then poker. ‘Cuz in those worlds, women and men seem a little more equal.

Are you freaking kidding me with dolls like this? Why can’t the Joey doll come in a female version? There are firefighter and police officer and construction worker women. Why not add a garbage truck driver and an executive, because women do that, too. Sure she can be a princess. Can’t each set have real career choices, including princess? (Oh, what? Like pirate is a viable career choice outside Somalia? And knight is a monster.com pull-down option? Each set could have some realistic and some unrealistic jobs. I want a set with a professor, a lawyer, a doctor, and a comedia delle arte harlequino. I guess we’ll have to learn to carve our own.)

I’m going to go write to Melissa and Doug. If you care what your daughters and sons know about life, I urge you to do the same. Tell me when you find a girl doll who dresses up as something other than a princess or a beauty object. ‘Cuz I’ll buy her doll. And more for gifts. I mean, hell, even Barbie got a job every once in a token while.

Melissa and Doug, shame on you. This is not 1909. The only choices are not mom or princess; policeman or fireman. I’m not teaching my son that, because it’s not reality. And I’m not teaching girls that, because it’s not reality. There was a motherf–king woman running for President this year, y’all, and all we get is princess and dresses? F— you. I’m buying Plan Toys this year.

Btw, where is the black Joey doll? And the Latino/a and the Asian? I know that shouldn’t be a “by the way” question, but I’m too pissed to rank my equality priorities right now. I want it all.