Argh, I am started to get so fucking annoyed with my co-worker when she does that.  I can’t even sit down and she is already grumbling because the boss frustrates her too.   She started bitching me out about some letter that neither of us wrote last year and was basically implying that I wasn’t doing my job because I didn’t do it, even though we had both agreed last year not to write it because we questioned the ethicness of it.  Fuck.

I mean, I know she is frustrated, but I still believe that a lot of her stress and frustration is simply self imposed.  We both know and understand how the boss works.  I already explained to her that it is her choice on how much she is willing to sacrifice for this job.  I mean, I know it is her choice to always come in 30 minutes to an hour early and to stay until 6 or 7pm every night.  I just hate it when she takes that frustration out on me.

Gah, then she gets annoyed with me because I try to find out what exactly is going on with various documents and what is going on with the seasonal workers.  I mean, hello!  I deal with the public more than she does, wouldn’t it be a good idea for me to get the information so we can just deal with these people, give them the information so they don’t keep calling back to find out if we got that information for them yet?  Argh!

I can’t wait for this damn season to be over with, but I am just wondering if the boss is going to schedule some kind of meeting the day after it’s over like she did last year, so we don’t get the day off – like just about every other office in the building.

Well, on the plus side, we are all getting free massages at work tomorrow/today.  Yay!  That should be awesome.

So, to help me relax a bit – here’s a cute kitty from I can has cheezburger.

I am just so confused by the amount of women on this predominantly female board who think that it is okay for medical professionals to deny care to women simply based on their pro-life opinions. It’s really made me step back for a second to wonder what country I live in. The last time I checked this was the United States of America and NOT the United States of Fundamental Christianity. I thought this country was ruled by the U.S. Constitution and not a modern interpretation of the bible.

I made my opinion known when I asked if it would be okay for a physician not to treat someone of because they were of Japanese descent? Or would be okay for a pharmacist to deny, say, heart medication to someone who is African-American? I mean what is the difference? Discrimination is discrimination. By withholding medication or refusing to treat a patient based on that person’s gender is, to me, no different than denying services to someone based on their skin color.

Someone made the counter argument that there was a big difference between racism and trying to protect the unborn. Huh? What’s so different between racism and sexism? Does this mean that women should have no right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness because it might interfere with a possible pregnancy?

I just don’t get it. Since when did women give up their rights to be human beings just because they can conceive?

I believe every woman has the right to choose. Every woman has to right to contraception or abortion. I also believe that a woman has to right to refuse either course of action – if she so chooses. However, when a medical professional decides to refuse LEGAL services to someone based on their personal belief system, well, maybe that person needs a new profession. I mean, last time I checked abortion and contraception were both still legal in this country.

I just can’t get my head around it. I can’t understand how it would ever be okay to refuse to treat someone based on what their gender was. I mean, would we have this type of condonation if we were talking about doctors refusing to perform vasectomies on men because it would interfere with conception? I am sure there would be great cries of moral outrage over the government trying to control men’s bodies, but why is there none when this happens to women?

Of course, the first thing I did was to head on over to Snopes to check out the validity of this forwarded email.  The email was an urban legend and the photo included was a fake.  I was pretty sure that was the case, but I wanted that validity.  I then replied back to everyone who got it that it was a fake and gave the address for Snopes, so hopefully these people might realize that all of this crap that comes into their mailboxes isn’t real.

I don’t get these types of emails very often, but I always wonder about the people who come up with this stuff.  I mean what is the purpose of these types of inflammatory chain letters?  Is the purpose to incite fear in the people who get them – so that they are a bit more mistrusting of the world around them?  Or is it some kind of test to find out how easy it is to fool people?

I don’t know, but I just spent the last hour reading about all kinds of tales at snopes.com.  Whoops.

Here’s a link to the first chapter of his new book Where Have All The Leaders Gone?

From Chapter 1: Had Enough?

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

First, the FDA has approved the sale of silicone breast implants in the US again. Personally, I have weird feelings about implants. I think they are fine for women who need or want reconstructive surgery after a mastectomy or anything else that causes a woman to lose a breast or breasts. But, I really wish a lot of women didn’t think it was necessary to get implants for “cosmetic” purposes. I wish more women were happier with their bodies so they wouldn’t feel the need to get ginormous breasts in order to feel happy about themselves.

Maybe I am just saying that because I have larger than normal boobs. But I still don’t quite understand why guys like the big boobies. Is it because it goes back to some kind of code in their DNA that says bigger boobs means better breastfeeding? Or do some women feel that it is easier to be sexier when they have large breasts?

I mean I know that a lot of people in this country are very critical of a woman’s appearance. Heck, I am finally coming to the realization that part of my depression stems from my weight. I mean, I know that I don’t feel good about myself because I am not as thin as I used to be. I am realizing now that one reason why I don’t like to go out is because I am fat and it’s hard to find stylish clothes that fit and are not frumpy and would actually look good on me. Of course, it also never really helped that I grew up and live in Hawaii.
Well, I mean that is not the only reason why I want to lose weight. A lot of it just has to do with health and especially diabetes. Both my mom and my grandma have diabetes and I just know that unless I really get my weight under control, I will probably develop it too and I really don’t want that to happen.

In other breast news – a woman was kicked off of a Delta flight for breast feeding her baby.

Gillette said she was discreetly breast-feeding her 22-month-old daughter on Oct. 13 as their flight prepared to leave Burlington International Airport. She said she was seated by the window in the next-to-last row, her husband was seated between her and the aisle and no part of her breast was showing.

A flight attendant tried to hand her a blanket and told her to cover up, Gillette said. She declined, telling the flight attendant she had a legal right to breast-feed her baby.

Moments later, a Delta ticket agent approached and said the flight attendant had asked that the family be removed from the flight, Gillette said. She said she didn’t want to make a scene and complied.

Okay, so what is wrong with a woman breast feeding? That’s what they are there for!

Another thing that caught my eye was a letter from Planned Parenthood about some pharmacists refusing to fulfill prescriptions for birth control pills based on the pharmacist’s personal opinion on birth control. Basically, if a pharmacist finds birth control against their beliefs some states allow them to not fulfill a legal prescription because they don’t approve of it.
From the Planned Parenthood letter -

So far this session, lawmakers in 22 states have introduced 54 bills that would allow pharmacists to refuse to fill BC rx’s based on their personal moral or religious objections.

Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Dakota all have laws that specifically permit a pharmacist to deny certain rx’s, including oral contraceptives.

Most of the bills and laws allow a pharmacist to refuse to fill a BCP – despite the fact that 98% of US women who have had sex have used contraception.

What the hell? I will admit that I tried to find more information on this and wasn’t able to independently verify the states and the bills, but I just did a quick search, so no I didn’t try very hard to verify or refute the claims, but I don’t see why Planned Parenthood would just make up the states and the bills.

More information on the campaign can be found at this link.

I still am pretty shocked about this. I mean, what right does a pharmacist have to tell a woman how she should live her life. A pharmacist’s job is to fulfill prescriptions. I wonder if those same pharmacists would object to filling viagra prescriptions? Probably not since it’s a man’s right to fuck all he wants right? – but not a woman’s apparently.

You know what else is appalling? President Bush appointed Eric Keroack as the head of family planning in the Department of Health and Human Services. Who is Eric Keroack you say? Well, he’s an OB/GYN who heads A Woman’s Concern in Massachusetts. He is a man who believes that birth control is demeaning to women.  Excuse me?  Demeaning to women?  Give me a break.  Oh, let me just quote part of the article.

The Bush administration, to the consternation of its critics, has picked the medical director of an organization that opposes premarital sex, contraception and abortion to lead the office that oversees federally funded teen pregnancy, family planning and abstinence programs.

The appointment of Eric Keroack, a Marblehead, Massachusetts, obstetrician and gynecologist, to oversee the federal Office of Population Affairs and its $283 million annual budget has angered family-planning advocates.

Keroack currently is medical director of A Woman’s Concern, a Christian nonprofit. The Dorchester, Massachusetts-based organization runs six centers in the state that offer free pregnancy testing, ultrasounds and counseling.

It also works to “help women escape the temptation and violence of abortion,” according to its statement of faith. And it opposes contraception, saying its use increases out-of-wedlock pregnancy and abortion rates.

“A Woman’s Concern is persuaded that the crass commercialization and distribution of birth control is demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness,” its contraception policy reads in part.

Great.  The US has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the industrialized world.   Why? Because Americans are prudes and the government just wants to teach abstinence as the only means of birth control.  Give me a break.  Teens are teens, they are going to have sex.  Some people might say that the abstinence thing is working because teen pregnancy rates declined between 1990 and 2000.  Here’s another take on why that might be.

I just get so angry when I hear about these things.  It’s like those people who are opposed to abortion.  It’s like they think that women will stop having abortions if abortion was illegal.  Um, No.  Women had abortions before it was legal and guess what?  Many women died and many women were mutilated from these procedures.  Teaching people about birth control is not going to encourage them to have sex – but apparently that’s the opinion of the group that is led by Keroack.  What kind of backwards thinking is this?

This also gets me wondering.  What kind of country do these people want to live in?  Do they want to live in a world like in The Handmaid’s Tale?