Posts (page 2)

i'm a huge advocate of pooping...no, not into another cup with a girl.*

it's summer season! which can mean all of many things: fresher food, fewer articles of clothing, and a generally more active and healthier lifestyle. as a veg, i'm someone who is very particular about her food, on a bipolar basis. i try to buy locally grown produce and usually spend most of my time in the peripheral aisles at the supermarket (Whole Foods) for, you know, real food. i'm surprised my old roommates didn't yell at me for taking up so much space in the fridge with fruits and vegetables. but i also eat junk when i'm stressed, bored, or with friends. c'est la vie.

for those of you who don't know what a colonic is, in a few words or less, it is a procedure where your colon is "cleansed" by shoving a tube up your ass and pressured water irrigates the crap out of your body. it's known to work wonders against the death knell that is bad health due to improper eating. it's also expensive and very bourgeois.

the saltwater flush is a more effective alternative. for a few days, you wake up and drink two quarts of water mixed with a total of two teaspoons of unrefined sea salt (very important, iodized salt is not as effective). needless to say, you'll be shitting your brains out. don't do this if you're in a hurry to go to work, give yourself a few hours.

i've done this once or twice in the fall when the readjustment into moving into a new apartment was uhm, changing things, digestively speaking. today, i remembered why i did it in the first place. when you eat food that is good or bad, your body has to properly eliminate the toxins cultivated through digestion or from those cheeseburgers you eat. if your body doesn't eliminate them by a scenario involving you and a toilet, it tries to eliminate them through your skin. in fact, not going regularly (being constipated) can lead to many problems, as it can produce toxins in your blood serum. headaches, rheumatism, arthritis, high blood pressure, cataracts, etc.

the night before, i drank a cup of senna tea, which is an herbal tea with laxative properties. then this morning, the "fun" happened. i felt (literally) drained after a while and went to take a nap, not sure if i should've done that. it is not pleasant and the very act of drinking it can choke you up. however, upon waking up, i felt completely better, not lethargic at all, the whites in my eyes are a littler brighter, my skin is going to be less stressed in a few days, and i feel less heavy, if you will. a bonus is that your body doesn't become dependent on salt, like it would on ex-lax. but you shouldn't do this on a regular basis, hence the i've-done-this-once-or-twice thing.

so here's my health tip for you. don't tell anyone i never gave you anything. note that for those who are prone to high blood pressure or can't take too much sodium, two teaspoons of sea salt is A LOT of sodium, and may not be the best thing for you. so take my advice and experience with a grain of salt (haha). doctors have contested this practice, but as someone who has family experience with some alternative views on health, this ayurvedic practice has been done for thousands of years. no pharmacological company is going to endorse this, colonics range at an average of $100 a session.

oh, and you're supposed to abstain from eating shit - as in bad food, not what most of this entry is about - while on the week of the flush, new gateway to eating healthier or whatever. which sucks, because i'm going out tonight with DM and tomorrow night with the girls and will have to control my alcohol intake. meh. but either way. just my two cents.

*for those of you who are grossed out by this topic, get a colonic.

With all the jeering, nasty factions, and millions being expended, sometimes I fear that this election is just a phony display of spatial images. Where's the horse-blood in a bucket? This is why the U.S. loses credibility. Sigh.

dad: there are some great oranges by bay parkway. do you want me to pick up some?
me: okay, pick me up a few, please?
me: wait, are they good oranges?
dad: haha. what?
me: well they can't be too big. or hard. and the skin can't be too thick. and you have to check the color.
dad: uh, if they look like oranges i'll bring back a few
 

I don't pray every night or morning, but I do make it a habit to floss my teeth (gums?). I am very grateful for the friends I have and my knack for the English language and pretentious punctuation. I am grateful that I can liken my mother to Wonder Woman - really, she helped me clean my room, the seven dimensions of which I wouldn't inflict on anyone - without sounding like a total kiss-ass. My denim genes (that's right) and my not-quite-but-almost-designer jeans, and my infallible ability to laugh at any given situation. But seriously, now. Remember that curve ball? The pendulum has been swinging lightly back and forth, well I need a huge swing in my favor. Kthxbai.

Respectfully submitted,
Kendra

P.S. A more sturdy alcohol-tolerance would be splendid, but I won't push it.

 me:  ha we're going to the hood

 DM:  lol yeah

 me:  okay that sounds good

and grab an appetizer at tgif

i haven't been to sheepshead since high school

with you i think as well

 Sent at 4:21 PM on Friday

 DM:  ok

sounds good

so if we get there earler we'll just buy tickets and grab a bite

 me:  yay

is sheepshead still ghetto or did the capitalists get to it

ha! i should paste that onto my blog. and i will.

 DM:  i went there like 3 weeks ago

they made renovations

 me:  meh figures

 DM:  hmm if we attend 5:45, we can catch another flick?

lol

 me:  whatever you want

hahaha

 DM:  if we can i wanna do that acutally

we're being charged 12 for something right?

 me:  we have to keep it like that if we're going to do it in sheepshead

yesterday:

me: mom, i want to invest in stocks
mom: do you even have money?
me: yes! i was thinking about a few hundred in shares
mom: ha! don't bother. that's like investing fart.

sometimes i wonder if people fully recover after loss. when a relationship doesn't pan out, you're told that it happens to everyone, you'll get over it. tapping into the oft-referenced kubler-ross' 5 stages of grief and what-have-you. but i wonder how true that is. i wonder how these aphorisms are actually necessary sugar-coated pills we take, not to get better, but to get over it. because after getting hurt the first few times, it's not about losing him, losing a friend, losing a lover or whatever. it's about losing the belief we'd - hopefully - held from conception up until the truth pierced that bubble we'd actually been living in. it's about losing that optimistic naivete that we'll never claim ownership of again. because we're hardened to it, no matter how stoic or in control we thought we were, it doesn't hit us until we accept two things: that we'd never understood ourselves as well as we'd originally had and that we'll never hold those false albeit sugar-coated-double-binded plexi-glass beliefs again.

this was a direct quote from one of my many past privated blog entries. and it's not necessarily about boys. augusten burroughs perfectly captured this sentiment earlier this week at the reading, when he said that you never recover. you're comprised of holes of variable sizes. some are larger and deeper than others, but after time, you hopefully adapt to them and move on.

but what if you're conditioned to a point where your exterior is so hardened that nothing phases you, surprises - hurts - you? sure, this year has been full of ups and downs. many people walk in and out of your life. we taste each other's laughters and miss each other's presences. sometimes it's mutual, others it's unrequited. games that are both good and bad. but the difference is this. i stopped putting my heart on the bargaining table a long time ago. not sure if that's a good or a bad thing.

i crawled into bed at midnight after i'd caught a bug - probably something i ate. my feet and fingertips were frigidly cold and i was writhing in dulled pain. pangs of nausea and persistent faintness as i tried to warm myself under the covers. then i shook myself awake. my room is at the front of our house which faces the street light - pale and orange overcast. unnatural light peeking through the venetian blinds flooding into my room. i gathered whatever strength i had and reached over with one hand to close the curtains.

but i couldn't fall asleep. do you know what date it is today? about a year ago - almost to the date - my grandmother had her fifth stroke, which then precipitated months' worth of hospital visits and rehabilitation. i haven't visited her once since i've been home - a week, it seems - and she lives about eighteen steps upstairs. i didn't think about her when i studied for my finals, when i was sitting in a sea of red during commencement, when i was idly flipping through the pages of a new book.

augusten burroughs has this uncanny ability to tap into certain sensory faculties that allows him to vividly remember moments in the past. some think this is a hoax, but i believed him when i watched him defend himself at Bryant Park yesterday (two days ago.) i can remember the smell of the stroke unit. lying at the foot of her large hospital bed listening to John Mayer on my ipod because i was going through some personal turmoil of my own. practicing french to myself through my ipod three winters ago while she visited the acupuncturist after her third or fourth stroke. how hard her grip never ceased to be, reminding me of years ago when she was yelling and subsequently crying to a four year old me while washing my feet. crying because she confessed to me that she was going to die and she'd be placed into the dirt.

a year of silence. last year, when all of her daughters and my sister and i were gathered around her bed before surgery, she grabbed each of our hands and strategically placed them together, so that we were all holding eachothers' hands. i'd leave the hospital with a  momentary pain that my parents and aunts couldn't fathom, tears suppressed on the R train. though by now, if she'd ever have the chance to speak, it'd be that she wished she were dead already.

do you believe everything happens for a reason? or, rather, that some thoughts are conjured up that are not exclusively of your own volition, but something - someone - else's? i'm probably rambling at this point, but i'm due for some catharsis.

my hands are quickly losing warmth again because they aren't submerged into a sea of blankets. i have no idea what she is thinking of; dreaming of. but i woke up and closed the curtains. 

May 13, 2008

Clinton Campaign Brought Sexism Out of Hiding

By Marie Cocco

WASHINGTON -- As the Democratic nomination contest slouches toward a close, it's time to take stock of what I will not miss.

I will not miss seeing advertisements for T-shirts that bear the slogan "Bros before Hos." The shirts depict Barack Obama (the Bro) and Hillary Clinton (the Ho) and they are widely sold on the Internet.

I will not miss walking past airport concessions selling the Hillary Nutcracker, a device in which a pantsuit-clad Clinton doll opens her legs to reveal stainless steel thighs that, well, bust nuts. I won't miss television and newspaper stories that make light of the novelty item.

I won't miss episodes like the one in which the liberal radio personality Randi Rhodes called Clinton a "big f---in' whore" and said the same about former vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro. Rhodes was appearing at an event sponsored by a San Francisco radio station, before an audience of appreciative Obama supporters -- one of whom had promoted the evening on the presumptive Democratic nominee's official campaign Web site.

I won't miss Citizens United Not Timid (no acronym, please), an anti-Clinton group founded by Republican guru Roger Stone.

Political discourse will at last be free of jokes like this one, told last week by magician Penn Jillette on MSNBC: "Obama did great in February, and that's because that was Black History Month. And now Hillary's doing much better 'cause it's White B---- Month, right?" Co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski rebuked Jillette.

I won't miss political commentators (including National Public Radio political editor Ken Rudin and Andrew Sullivan, the columnist and blogger) who compare Clinton to the Glenn Close character in the movie "Fatal Attraction." In the iconic 1987 film, Close played an independent New York woman who has an affair with a married man played by Michael Douglas. When the liaison ends, the jilted woman becomes a deranged, knife-wielding stalker who terrorizes the man's blissful suburban family. Message: Psychopathic home-wrecker, be gone.

The airwaves will at last be free of comments that liken Clinton to a "she-devil" (Chris Matthews on MSNBC, who helpfully supplied an on-screen mockup of Clinton sprouting horns). Or those who offer that she's "looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court" (Mike Barnicle, also on MSNBC).

But perhaps it is not wives who are so very problematic. Maybe it's mothers. Because, after all, Clinton is more like "a scolding mother, talking down to a child" (Jack Cafferty on CNN).

When all other images fail, there is one other I will not miss. That is, the down-to-the-basics, simplest one: "White women are a problem, that's -- you know, we all live with that" (William Kristol of Fox News).

I won't miss reading another treatise by a man or woman, of the left or right, who says that sexism has had not even a teeny-weeny bit of influence on the course of the Democratic campaign. To hint that sexism might possibly have had a minimal role is to play that risible "gender card."

Most of all, I will not miss the silence.

I will not miss the deafening, depressing silence of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean or other leading Democrats, who to my knowledge (with the exception of Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland) haven't uttered a word of public outrage at the unrelenting, sex-based hate that has been hurled at a former first lady and two-term senator from New York. Among those holding their tongues are hundreds of Democrats for whom Clinton has campaigned and raised millions of dollars. Don Imus endured more public ire from the political class when he insulted the Rutgers University women's basketball team.

Would the silence prevail if Obama's likeness were put on a tap-dancing doll that was sold at airports? Would the media figures who dole out precious face time to these politicians be such pals if they'd compared Obama with a character in a blaxploitation film? And how would crude references to Obama's sex organs play?

There are many reasons why Clinton is losing the nomination contest, some having to do with her strategic mistakes, others with the groundswell for "change." But for all Clinton's political blemishes, the darker stain that has been exposed is the hatred of women that is accepted as a part of our culture.

mariecocco@washpost.com

Copyright 2008, Washington Post Writers Group

Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/05/clinton_campaign_brought_sexis.html at May 14, 2008 - 07:05:18 AM PDT