Author Archives: The Red Queen

What now?

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Micheal Lind has been running a series on Salon about how to fix the economy, and while I disagree with him on some things (complete elimination of corporate taxes, for example) I think there is a lot there to be impressed with. There’s also a lot of things that I’ve been saying since forever- so yay me.

Today he writes about an economic bill of rights based on FDR’s plan.

Check out the rest of the series. It’s pretty good. And I hope our new dear leader is listening, cause so far his plans don’t do anything that we really need.

A tisket, a tagging

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The lovely Susan from That’s Me On The Left has tagged me with the 6 things meme. I think I’ve done this before, but I’m sure there’s more than 6 things about me in the world.

1. I was a magazine cover girl at age 4. Just one small trade magazine, but there ya go. I was also in the newspapers a couple of times and on tv twice, once for cheerleading and once in high school being interviewed by the local news on HIV testing for high school seniors (I was all for it)

2. At the moment I have the world’s most gnarliest hangnail. And I’m a giant baby about it.

3. I gave my kid the name he has because every guy I ever met with his name was hot. Seriously. I was 19 though, so I should be given some leeway for picking that name for that reason.

4.I make up twisted lyrics to songs all the time. All. The. Time. Grandma got run over by a reindeer has been Bambi got run over by a John Deer for years.

5. Ruth likes watching cooking shows with me because of the faces I make when they cook something awful. Paula Dean, Sandra Lee and that doochebag with the scary bleach blonde hair are the main focus of my wrath. And I will totally scream at the tv if they start to burn their garlic! (PS- we also totally think Tyler Florence is gay gay gay. And closeted. But gay.)

6. The older I get, the more squeamish I get. I have to hide my eyes when anything gross happens on tv and the other day I had to leave the room when someone was describing their bloody mucus. I used to be much better about that kind of stuff, but now I get all nauseous and woozy.

So who to tag?

I tag you if you’re reading this since I think I’ve tagged everyone and then some all ready. Drop me a linky in comments.

Chicago Dyke at Corrente

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sums up exactly what I’m feeling. And it ain’t good.

Sacrifice? Be the change?

What more do I have to sacrifice? We have no money. Every month it’s another round of pay rent or eat (this month both lost to some extent). I have no health care, so I can’t give that up. I was kinda hoping that I might actually get healthcare from a Democratic government, but that got pushed aside for banking reforms.

I’ve sacrificed finishing my education. There’s no money for that. Next year I’m sacrificing my kid’s public education. There will be one less child sucking on the educational teat. A special needs kid at that. Is that enough sacrifice?

And I’ve been the change, since I was a tiny girl stomping her feet in patent leather shoes. The only thing left for me to change into is a Republican. And no body wants that. Or do they?

I want to see billionaires sacrifice their private jets to taxes so that schools can have smaller class sizes. I want to see Halliburton and KBR sacrifice the Iraq war cash they’ve disappeared like Pinochet’s prisoners to their rape victim employees. I want to see health insurance sacrificed to make room for healthcare.

I want to see Wall Street bankers be the change by giving their bonuses paid with TARP money back to the government. I wanna see the Big 3 car makers be the change by developing green cars and green jobs.

I am the change, I’ve been the change. I’ve given up 5 years making sure that students go into the world knowing how to use computers and get a job without a raise or benefits for myself. I don’t have anything left to give, except my voice. And I’ve been giving that away for free since I learned to talk.

What can make a political junkie say “meh”

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My email box is full of invites to inauguration get togethers, but not even the end of the Bush cleptocracy can get me excited about tomorrow.

I am having a really hard time with it actually. I can’t get past the fact that the dude giving the invocation hates me and people like me, and that our shiny new president thinks that’s reason enough to give him a national platform. Hell, I’m a slutty single mom whose had abortions (Nazi!) and called the police on my Kid’s dad instead of heading to church to get counseling. Not to mention that I’m pretty flexy on the Kinsey scale. Rick Warren would tie me down and perform an exorcism if he thought he could get away with it.

But it’s not just Obama’s choice of national preacher that has got me down. I keep looking at the stimulus package, desperately combing through the details to find some tiny thing that might make my life easier. Some kind of funding that will go to jobs that I can do. No luck. No national healthcare either. Food stamp amounts are supposed to go up, but since I’ve been waiting for over 3 weeks for the local welfare office just to schedule an appointment to see if I’m eligible for them, I don’t know that it’s going to do me much good.

There is one bright spot, Hillary. I am tickled that women in the rest of the world will finally have a tough American ally standing up for them. But it’s bittersweet when at home we won’t be getting the same advocacy from our president. We are just a footnote for him. A secondary thing that he thinks about only rarely. Secondary. Woman may make up 52% of the population, but we are just a note in the margins to Obama. Perhaps he feels that if he does things to help out our husbands then we will benefit by proxy. Unless you don’t have a husband, or don’t sleep with men.

There was a line in The West Wing once about how “You’re not just the president of the people who voted for you”. But what I’ve seen so far is that Obama is the president just to people who never vote for him. Godbags and Milton Friedman die hards.

But at least I’m used to having a president who couldn’t give a rats ass about people like me. I do have 8 years of experience with that. The only difference is that I never expected a right wing Republican president to speak for me, but I do kinda expect the Democrats to. I mean, that is the reason for their existence after all.

RQ Cooks: Traditional(ish) Hungarian Goulash

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It’s freezing. We’re broke. It turns out the Kid is allergic to wheat (do you know how many cheap foods contain wheat? Or how difficult it is when you rely on free school meals that are made of wheat covered wheat with a side of fricken wheat?)

So what’s a person to cook? I found a giant lump of top round roast for a mere $5.50 at the store. A couple of onions and some other stuff later and you got goulash.

Contrary to popular belief, goulash is not whatever you scrape out of the bottom of your fridge, cover in tomato sauce and sour cream and call a meal. Mine is traditional(ish) because i throw some Worcestershire sauce in (all beef tastes better with Worcestershire sauce- it’s the fish sauce of Europeans)and I cook it in a crock pot (thanks Tobes!) instead of a dutch oven.

You need:

A good sized roast. (2 pounds or more) I usually don’t care so much what the cut is as long as it’s reasonably priced and has some good fat on it.

A can of tomato paste

a quarter cup of paprika (ish)

3 sliced onions

Worcestershire sauce

beef or veggie stock*****

3 or 4 heads of chopped garlic

salt and pepper

Throw sliced onions into bottom of crock pot. Place roast on top of onions. In a bowl mix tomato paste, paprika, garlic, Worcestershire sauce (I put in a lot, probably a quarter cup or more) and enough stock to make it easy to stir but not liquidy. Also generous sprinkles of salt and pepper. Mix thoroughly and pour over the roast.

******Edited after making this like a thousand times. Skip the the stock. All you need is a tablespoon or so of water. The roast will release so much liquid that every drop of extra liquid you put in just makes for runny sauce. Really. I know it looks like a pile of dry stuff with red paste on top at first. That is OK. It won’t when it’s done.

Set crock pot to low, cover and leave for about 8 hours.

Some people use stew meat or cut the meat up before cooking. I prefer to cook it whole and then I know it’s done when it starts to fall apart with a fork.

I serve it over garlic and dill mashed potatoes and skip the sour cream on top (cause it’s in the potatoes). You can also serve it over noodles and rice, but I really like the potatoes.

For the record

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I am allergic to lavender. It gives me migraines and makes me want to vomit. You were the one that liked it, not me. They way that long red nails creep you out is what the smell of lavender does to me, only with vomit. (For the readers- I may be the first person in history to have become nauseous in sight of the legendary lavender fields of Provence. Thank god that french pharmacists understand the word “migraine”)

The books- one I already own and the other is written by a hack. But Ruth said she’d see if she could sell them since what we really need is grocery money.

We are fiercely agnostic. And I mean fierce. Every time you send the Kid some ridiculous religious piece of jewelry I get the desire to burn down St. James. But then we just make fun of how hideously ugly the religious tokens you send are and the problems with crazy religious freaks and their belief in the magic sky fairy who try to push their beliefs onto rational people.

And the idea you have of who the Kid is and what he likes is off. Stop trying to push your fantasy onto him. He’s his own person, more so because I don’t let people like you push him into being what you need him to be. That’s why you don’t get to come withing a thousand yards of him. You’re a fucking grown up, leave the Kid alone.

Presents, when obviously chosen because you 1) don’t know shit about us and 2) think you know shit because you’ve been creepily stalking my blog are creepy! Way to make someone feel uncomfortable about having to accept a gift they don’t want and don’t like. And did I mention creepy.

And creepy. Has anyone ever told you that you have serious boundary issues? Cause you do. Stop trying to cross mine. You do not get to be part of our lives. Not now, not ever. We’ve made peace with that. You need to make peace with that too. Hold a mock funeral for us if you like and if it will make you feel some closure. You have one child now, I suggest you focus on him.

PS- the spoon rest, in all it’s hideous tackiness, was crushed “accidentally” several times by a hammer on the back deck last night. So was the cd. It’s tragic really.

(for the regular readers, this post goes out to someone else, obvs.)

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“The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.”
Willem de Kooning

That is the signature on my email and it’s true. Poverty is giant time suck. It’s a waste of time and resources and even money that could be better spent finding a better paying job or going to school or helping your kids with their homework. But instead, those of us who live in poverty spend most of our days just trying to get the basics covered; food, rent, utilities, medical treatment. And in my state, getting all those things covered (or at least alleviated a tiny bit)is about to get harder for poor women.

In order to balance the budget, Governor Gregoire is cutting the funding that pays for nurses in Welfare offices. The nurses provide annual exams, prenatal care, birth control and most importantly- pregnancy testing. Washington is one of the few states in the country that pays for abortions for women on Medicaid, and the income levels to qualify for Medicaid are higher if you’re pregnant. But you can’t qualify unless you have proof that you are pregnant from a medical provider. If you are poor and without health insurance, you can either go to Planned Parenthood, spend 10 dollars (after the $20 you’ve already spent getting a drugstore test), pee in a cup and get certification that you are in fact knocked up. Then you have to go to the Welfare office and apply. It’s expensive for someone making less than $800 a month.

Or you can go the Welfare office when the nurse is in, pee in that cup for free and save yourself $10 plus bus fare for several trips.