After more than 5 years, no raises, no benefits and now no cheap employee bus pass, I am finally eligible to join the union for WA state employees.

Does this mean I get benefits or raises? Probably not. But it does mean that the next time the fuckers in payroll screw up my check, I’ve got a number to call.

W00T!

So out of boredom, anger, or for reasons not exactly known by me, I have been reading Washington state’s Child Support Enforcement reports and findings. Actually, I am thinking of making a push to require deadbeat parents to either pay up or attend mandatory Work First programs like we require parents on TANF to do. After I get some numbers figured out, I’ll need to see who would be the most friendly state rep to take the idea to.

In December a new report was published on state guidelines for setting support amounts. There was a bit of a debate (reading between the lines of the minority opinions published, it seems like the debate might have been a raucous) about what child to include when calculating family size. In they end they decided to count all the kids from both the non-custodial and custodial parents families, but:

A minority of the workgroup felt that later-born children should not be considered
in modifying support for the first family. Individuals supporting this position pointed out that the first family has an economic interest in the stability of the
support order and has no voice in the decision by the noncustodial parent to have
additional children in subsequent relationships. The custodial parent of a child
from a subsequent relationship enters into the relationship knowing of the
existence and financial obligations toward the child(ren) of the first relationship.

I find it funny (odd, not haha) that we have numerous ways of punishing poor custodial parents for having more children than they can afford, such as restrictions of TANF and Section 8 housing grants to the number of children in the family when the grant is first applied for, but we don’t have those kinds of measures in place for non-custodial parents who continue to have have children while not paying support on the older kids. Could it be that most poor custodial parents are women, and poor women have always been at the mercy of society when it comes to their reproductive choices, but non-custodial parents are usually men and we have an aversion to punishing men for “spreading their seed”?

Sanjay Gupta, fat-hater, misogynist, and private insurance cheerleader will not be surgeon general!

Hurray!

Now can we please please please get a single payer advocate? Pretty please with sugar on top, and a cherry?

Or can we lobby Obama to re-appoint the most kickass Surgeon General in the history of the country.

If you keep excommunicating everyone that disagrees with you, then all you’ll have left is a church membership made up entirely of pedophiles.

And that’s okay with me, cause then we’d all know to who to avoid.

But in the mean time, please tell me how Christ would think it’s okay to forgive the rapist but that the child he raped should suffer either excommunication or death because her 9 year old uterus is too small to carry one baby, let alone two?

And to all the folks about to be excommunicated for helping this poor kid out, I invite you to join my soon to be created “Church of the Real” where we believe lives of real living people are more important than the ideas of blowhard misogynists. There will be cookies instead of stale wafers, vodka tonics instead of church wine, and we don’t give up shit for lent but will still party at carnival.

First- thanks to everyone for their kind words yesterday. It helps.

But I am a wee bit of a fraud. I know that the Kid needs to know his dad on his own terms, but……

I had forgotten how angry I am at his father. And there are so many horrible things that I can’t tell the kid about that are dangerous, terrifying, unspeakable. Things I have never even told a therapist. Those dark little secrets that we push to the back of our mind and try to pretend never happened, try to talk ourselves out of admitting. And it’s all rushing back right now, boiling up so that it takes every ounce of energy to contain it. And I’m failing to contain it. Vicious little remarks about the Kid’s dad keep escaping my lips, and the Kid is avoiding the topic cause I’m pretty sure he can sense that his mom is about to blow. Just typing these two tiny paragraphs has taken forever. I have to pause and dig my nails into my palms to keep from sobbing or screaming at my desk.

So how do I let the Kid make his own choice when every fiber of my being is screaming “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO”? I don’t think the Asshat would hurt the Kid in the same ways he has hurt me. I think he would stick to simple neglect with the Kid, while I got the violence and the stalking and the stuff I can’t talk about. But how can he really know his father without knowing that? Ughhhhh. Most of me wants to grab the kid and take a whatever bus is at greyhound right now and leave, which is exactly what I did 12 years ago after being stalked by the asshat for almost a year.

Anyways, that’s the state of mind I’m in right now. And since i have always been proactive when it comes to this shit I have an appointment first thing Monday to find a therapist who specializes in domestic violence trauma.

Socialism is really happening because there has never been anything else but this form of wealth production. If it was not there, if all you could you see was markets and bankers, this was because its very fact was obscured by neoliberal nonsense. All one had to do was look at, say, cotton subsidies in the US to see that even under Bush, even during the economic boom of the mid 00s, socialism was alive and well.

The real question is do we want socialism for the rich or for everyone?

Me, I’m a hybrid kind of gal. I like shiny shoes and cheap computers. But I also like making sure everyone is fed, housed, educated and treated by doctors. I don’t think we should have to give up shiny shoes to get universal health care. If you listen to the rethuglikans and their tea party protests you would think that very shortly we will be living in Soviet style apartments and only have shoes for our left foot (has everyone heard the story about the Soviet shoe factory that couldn’t respond to market pressures because it was part of a communist economy or have I just had that story crammed down my throat by free market blowhards more often than most?).

I am not generally a fuzzy brained idealist on the topic of human behavior. I believe that people act in their own self interest most of the time. I think that it is the government’s place to moderate the extremes of that. People should not be allowed to be too rich or too poor. A worker should expect that any job will pay for the basic necessities of life, but no job should give you enough wealth to topple an entire economy. Basically, I think the government is there to act as our better angel and force us to practice enlightened self-interest, or the idea that if we don’t take care of the bottom and control the top that our society will fail (For proof ask the Spartans, the Athenians, the Romans or any other “great society” that eventually failed when stratification became to much. Shit, ask the Mayans too.)

But what I really want to know is, now that Marx will be replacing Che Gueverra (murderous, sexist fuckwad) on the t-shirts of the all the young newbs of the progressive front, can some love for Antonio Gramsci be far behind?

Gramsci says “It would be a horribly ironic joke on my theory of cultural hegemony if my face was plastered on the mass marketed t-shirts of the youth”

So the Kid had his first meeting with his asshat of a father today since he was a year old. I set it up so that his school counselor would supervise the visit (when asshat and i split up, the judge ordered that asshat ONLY have supervised visits).

I need to bitch here cause I have to put on the nice face for the Kid.

Asshat hasn’t paid child support this month (or last month, or most of the last 13 years). He owes 40k in back child support. In the last 13 years I could have popped out more babies, but being a rational adult with one child already and not enough money, I didn’t. Asshat- not quite so rational. It turns out the kid has 3 siblings. Which would be fine, if asshat were supporting the Kid. But………..

It turns out he’s like some bad joke defendant on Judge Judy.

And to make it worse, just like I thought he would, Asshat comes bearing gifts for the Kid that do nothing towards feeding, housing or clothing him. But it makes asshat look good in front of the kid. I have to be the jerk mom who says “No you can’t have all your friends over for birthday dinner because we can’t afford a party” or “I know your shoes are falling to pieces, can you wear the ones that hurt your feet for a couple of weeks till I can fix it” of “Dude that box of rice crispies has to last an entire week. Stop eating them all”.

So I sent a nasty email to asshat. It was a spur of the moment, shitty thing to do. But fuck I am pissed. Here’s what it said with Kid’s name redacted.

Were you planning on paying child support anytime in the near future or should I tell Kid you can’t because your other kids are more important?

One target card does not feed or house him. But it does make you feel better. Not exactly the kind of dad Kid deserves.

I wish I could afford a bottle of vodka, cause today is totally a shot drinking day.

with Rahm Emanuel, what would you say?

Me? I’d say people first, bankers last. I’d say housing, education, health care. And I’d just keep repeating myself over and over until it stuck in his head like a Journey song.

I’m still wrestling with a bout of the doldrums. In the meantime enjoy these lovely literal versions of videos

First- a bit of RQ life history. I once won tickets to see TMBG in concert because I sang the original version of this song on the radio.

Is it wrong that I still totally love Tears for Fears?

I’m uninspired to post lately. I’d rather look at interior design blogs than read about politics or economics or sexism or whatever else is just going to make me frown.

In the mean time, I work. And work is as ever, good and bad. I have the problem student, who for god only knows what reason took the CAD class this quarter when he doesn’t seem to know the most basic things about computers (Q:Why is the image on my screen smaller than the image in real life? A: The same way things on your TV are smaller than they are in real life. Do you worry because they can fit whole shots of stadiums onto your TV that the stadium might be fake? Q:Why did the file that I saved on the guest login disappear? A: Because you’ve been told a thousand times that if you don’t login under your own name that anything you erase will be deleted. Q: What do you mean “login”? A: No, seriously? WTF? How are you sitting in front of that LOGON screen being such a douche? You’ve been logging in under guest just fine. Q: Why won’t this 3rd party website that is not in any way manner or shape connected to the school do what I want it to? A: Because the internet gods hate you.

I am frustrated with this student so badly that every time he walks in the lab I cringe. And then I just get angry. It’s become pavlovian.

But there is good. I’ve spent the last 4 or 5 days trying to drill holes in my bedroom walls at home to hang up closet rods so the the Kid can have my closet. The walls are lathe and plaster. And a pain in the ass. I nearly blew out a drill (after I borrowed it from work). So in my frustration I’ve been asking for help (Thanks Uncle Jim!) and I asked my boss who lives in the same neighborhood. Instead of telling me what he thought I should do, he packed up his tools, came over and in less than 20 minutes I had 12 feel of closet hung. He also took a look at the shelf I had bought to go over them (only 8 feet long- oops) and took some measurements. He’s making his students custom cut me proper shelves and is leaving them on my porch tonight. He said it’s no big deal, I’m school family. After literally spending hours trying to do this myself, I could almost cry for the kindness.

(BTW- even with an entire wall taken up with my clothes, my room is looking pretty fab. Now I just have to do the same for the Kid. Which will be rough since the closet is maybe 8′ by 8′ with severely slanting walls and a door that is no more than 4′ tall.)