jamie-lynn spears

i was commenting on my friend amber's blog, because she posted about jamie-lynn spears announcing her pregnancy at 16 in ok magazine today, and because of course i love britney spears and follow her religiously, i had enough to say that i realized i was way exceeding the blog comment etiquette.

so below is my original comment, plus my additional commentary below that.

ok, i never comment on complicated issues, i but i have been especially following the saga of britney over the years, and there are definitely a few things that are bothering me about this. and it isn't the teen pregnancy thing i don't think. my parents were really young when i was born, and i also enjoyed having younger parents and i appreciate that my grandparents were in their early 40's when i was born, and that because of that they and i are very close. that said, 1) about ten years ago, britney and her mom were all over the press on the sex before marriage is wrong issue. remember? britney and justin never did it, because they were church-going folk? that has certainly helped britney a lot. and the abstinence only kids are the ones who are likely to make mistakes, not use birth control, and regret things. 2) the ok article says a lot about lynne spears' adorable grandchildren and jamie-lynn's adorable nephews and doesn't mention that they don't really see them because britney has been ruled by the state of california unfit to spend anytime with her own child without a court appointed parenting supervisor. 3) in all this talk about unplanned pregnancy, no one has mentioned that there are way, way worse consequences to unprotected sex than pregnancy. and as a former louisiana safe sex worker, really, it's the kids who don't use birth control because they figure babies are cute anyway are kids who get sick. and this last point is what is really bothering me. because 16 year olds should use condoms because they don't want to end up hiv positive. ok, end of rant, thanks for listening.

the ok article was creepy. both jamie-lynn and lynne answered "we just need to focus on the baby right now" to every single question. britney was never mentioned except to say how cute her babies are, except of course she has no idea how to parent them. and let's not mention the father very much, because he's clearly going to bale at some point.

jamie-lynn said something about needing to find work she could do to stay home with the baby, except of course the one million dollar deal with ok magazine for the story plus the exclusive rights to photos of the newborn would really be enough for most single moms with one infant to live off of for a while. and i don't even care that she sold the story, because, yeah, way to be an kick-ass single teen mom and make yourself a million dollars. whatever if she's exploiting the baby. i wouldn't care myself if i'd been in a goossip magazine as a baby. but don't pretend that's not what your doing.

and still the thing that bothers me the most is the lack of connection of stds to unprotected sex in any of this. because really, pregnancy is an ok outcome, because that won't kill you. i spent a depressingly long time doing hiv/aids statistics for the state of louisiana public health department, and it makes me mad that jamie-lynn won't say, "even though i got pregnant by accident, i am happy that i'm going to keep my baby and i think everything will be fine, but unprotected sex is still not cool, because everything would not be fine if i had ended up hiv positive and not pregnant, or worse, both hiv positive and pregnant. and at the health department in louisiana i used to deal with the case files all the time of teenagers much younger than 16 who were both hiv positive and pregnant and that is why i now work for whole foods in customer service and make much less money, because i couldn't fucking take it anymore.

and on a lighter note, how could they have named that girl jamie-lynn (dad=jamie, mom=lynne), come on, please be more southern white trash.

i wish both britney and jamie-lynn could just get it together and collect their children and go live in an awesome punk rock lesbian feminist mothers' collective. that would be wonderful.

how come?

...there isn't a project runway/top chef style reality show for fine artists? there's really something to be said for having the opportunity to work with/be judged by one's peers. or maybe thinking this is just a sign that i should go back to school and get the mfa finally. or maybe i'm just bored artistically and should meet some cool artists. or maybe i already know them, and should just not be so shy that i cannot talk to them. or maybe i should just try to heal my left hand real fast and learn to sew on ali's old machine, and make the quilt i've been planning for about five years with all the beautiful lily pulitzer things i have that don't fit. or learn to hook rugs or something.

i really do think a reality challenge show for fine artists would be good though. how come the chefs and the fashion people get to have all the fun?

top chef!

on the top chef holiday special tonight (which i've been way too excited to watch all week) they were shopping at whole foods! goddamn for like ten minutes the whole thing was like a whole foods ad...'well i was excited by their great produce' and 'when i got to wf and saw the meat and seafood selection i got really excited about this challenge' etc. on one hand this sort of product placement is obviously very wrong...on the other hand, i really really really love top chef, so i still squealed that they were shopping at the store i work for.

i knew from worjkthat wf was the official food sponsor now for top chef but i hadn't seen it on tv yet. i can't wait for season 4 when wf is on every episode!!!

sorry. i know this post is lame. i think it's just comforting for me after my last angry post.

mindless visually stimulating pretty food tv = the anecdote for bitchy myspace emails that hurt ones feelings.

misunderstood collage girl

someone i know recently got rather mad at me for saying that i liked their myspace icon photo...i guess their choice of photo was meant to convey something important about stuff that was going on in their life which apparently i suck for not noticing...

i don't know, a lot of the art i like is a mixture of dark feelings and lighthearted representation. i know it wasn't necessarily a happy image, and i don't know exactly what i liked about it, but it kept catching my eye. i do tend to use the word 'pretty' for any image that makes me look twice and maybe that confuses people who simplistically think i mean pretty in the most basic sense. i don't know. i didn't really mean that i like it as a myspace icon, just that everytime i happened to see it that picture caught my eye. it's sort of my full time job to identify images that make me look twice...i was trying to pay that person a compliment by acknowledging that they had picked out an image that made me want to look.

all i do all day right now is sort through piles of images and save the ones i like. i am training my eye. i didn't realize that someone would think i was happy that they were sad. i also really did think that myspace in general had to be some mixture of silly and serious. i would never assume that my friends should throughly understand my mental state from anything they read on myspace. communication is tough in the best of circumstances. you've got to at least try harder then your internet profile.

i went off on a long ranty email in response and that's where a lot of this post comes from, but i made me really angry, i think especially because i've hanging out on the couch tonight watching top chef reruns on bravo and collaging from magazines in my sketchbook, so i was definitely in a mind set of finding visual inspiration wherever i find it. when i'm just free collaging, i tear out anything that catches my eye, and don't stop to think about why. i work fast, and i let the meaning come together later. once i've glued everything back together, it all means something that i couldn't have planned in advance.

so i'm sorry if i said an image that someone intended to be negative was pretty. i guess i was just born to find beauty in ugliness.

anyway, bitches always want to be hatin'...whatever.

knitting metaphors

last night i remember dreaming that someone was talking to me and using knitting metaphors...i can't remember exactly what the point was, but it was something like, this thing in life is like just knitting, while this part is like both knitting and purling. this was so vivid when i woke up that first i thought it was something i had read or seen on tv before bed, but that doesn't really make any sense, but the metaphor doesn't really make sense. in my dream it did though.

trying not to hurt myself anymore is...

...frustrating, because i am trying so hard to make the most that i can out of all this free time, and i feel like theoretically i should be able to make my work one-handedly and i can but not much, only for really limited amounts at a time, and damn it, the thing is that it's super hard for me to get to the place where stuff works right for me, and so all night i built up to it, and hey, it's midnight and i have no work or plans tomorrow and my boyfriend is out of town and we already said goodnight on the phone and i'm in my room and the music is right and my room is right and and all my materials are right and i've had the right amount of time playing in my sketchbook and i've reached that very elusive place where i can see the connections between images so effortlessly and it is so hard to get here and every time i look around the room there is something on the floor that should be glued to something else and i shouldn't do anything that involves moment right now at all. because i really can't do anything without somewhat employing the good fingers of my left hand, at least to hold things in place, and i sensed on the last thing i did that i was really pushing. and i had some really bad pain trying to get the lid off a gluestick. and for i while i really thought that i popped the tendon again and fucked everything again, i think it's ok but i'm still a little scared because that would be so stupid. anyway i feel all energetic and creative and wide awake except my arm is in a lot of pain and i can feel every inch of the tendon burning and i know it needs to rest. and all this would be fine if i could easily tomorrow just get in a good place to work again but i know i can't always and honestly i haven't felt this much like working in months. mostly i've been looking for any excuse to not work and this certainly is one. although typing this is making me realize that i did use to at least feel like a serious writer and i could do that without hurting myself i think, also i realize that this is such sloppy writing and i use 'super' and 'really' and 'sort of' every two seconds. i should probably not actually post this, as it makes little sense, but what the hell, this is sort of a journal entry anyway, and it's hard for me to write with a pen right now so i might as well record things here.

on an unrelated note, i hate when i say 'it is hard for me to...' because it sounds pathetic, and i keep doing it anyway. note to self: really must stop complaining asap. blah blah blah,

anyway that was my rant. 'night, y'all. i'm gonna go lie on my bed and rest my hand on a pillow like good girl.

at least while i'm going that i can enjoy my pretty pretty glittery snowflake christmas ornaments i giot at the hospice shop today and somehow manage to hang in my window (one of the reasons my hand is so tired).

p.s. sorry the title of this post is so dramatic, i didn't mean it that way, just that my hand is very delicate and most normal things are now dangerous. hey, 'most normal things are now dangerous' would have been a much better title, wouldn't it?

chicken and diamonds

so you know, i've got a ton of free time right now, and it's winter and freezing and lame outside, so i've been watching way more tv than usual. also i spent years having no tv at all and now i have on demand plus tivo, so occasionally tv just seems really surreal anyway.

but last night i was watching a very long mini series on the sci-fi channel, and it was astonishing how many commercials were either for kfc or kay jewelers. i felt like there were these images of a woman biting into a piece of fried chicken or a woman who looked like the same person crying over a diamond necklace. i know television commercials are evil, but the art part of my brain sort of loved it. what a wonderful juxtaposition, the generic blonde all american woman, in ecstasy over chicken and diamonds.

although things like that are the reason i make collages in the first place.

but i was terrified that by the end of the night all i would want in the world would be a chicken leg and a gigantic ring shaped like a heart. which sort of happened, but it wore off.

on a related note, i watch football games with greg sometimes, and it's creepy how many diamond commercials there are during football games. i swear, i know this is only my first serious boyfriend, but i am confident that men are not actually so stupid that they cannot buy christmas gifts unless they see commercials for them during football and those gifts do not actually have to be hideous diamond jewelry that looks like it came from kmart. i mean, maybe i am mistaken, but greg appears to be a rational human being who knows me as a person and can pick out a gift or two.

and that is my media commentary for today. thank you very much.

I wonder why...

...there has been a slice of pizza lying on the kitchen counter all day.

i also wonder why i like to eat jalapeno slices out of the jar as a snack so much.

and i wonder how wacky i'll get by the end of this week. i'm kind of strange anyway, and with not working and not being able to drive combined with greg being out of town and wintery weather keeping me in the house, who knows what sort of bizarre habits i'll develop. as if sitting on the floor of my room listening to britney spears and tearing things out of food magazines and gluing them onto cheap calender pages wasn't odd enough.

ah, these mysteries of modern life.

lovely

walking in the falling snow with rin and sarah this afternoon and drinking whiskey and eating gingerbread muffins in the park. and having the sun break through right at the end. lovely friends and lovely winter.

mail

i've just spent the morning writing letters the old fashioned way, because what the heck else do i have to do, on a snowy monday morning still being an invalid and with greg having left for vancouver at 5am, and i was really appreciating the tactile sensation of putting paper into envelopes and addressing them, and of walking the envelopes out to the mailbox in the snow.

there was a nice rhythm to writing the letter, packing it up to go, and them putting on my big sweater and sheepskin boots to walk out into the snowy drive to the mailbox, then back up to my desk to write some more.

i was writing letters on my collection of postcards, so the letter continued on from one picture to the next and something about the combination of words and pictures really pleased me. i love postcards, especially the tackiest possible touristy ones. there's something so wonderful about their enthusiasm. greg just bought me some chicago cards at the airport and i am excited because i have never been there.

it's such a quiet day, sitting at my desk watching it snow and writing things down, occasionally checking in with greg stranded in the airport in chicago, not even listening to music, just hearing the sounds of the house.