I first heard about the whole sordid mess from Ann  last week.  But when I took her advice and went here to see if I was a victim, I didn’t turn up.  I figured since I used the aggregate search and none of my key words–fuctard, Diva Girl, and Zen Baby, in case you were wondering– popped up, I wasn’t affected. 

I figured I just wasn’t plaigerism-worthy (sniff).  I figured wrong. 

Mary P’s another victim.  Like me, she didn’t turn up in the more sophisticated aggregate search.  But the dead simple strategy of simply searching the blog listings for hers turned her right up.  So I checked again. 

And the bastards got me.  Twice. 

Now, I’m pretty much a luddite with a keyboard and DSL, so I’m not even going to attempt to delve into the whole “how to protect your blog” thing.  Ann and Mary P both have excellent links about that.  What I am going to do is sic a major corporation on their plaigerizing asses.

See, Ms Sisyphus is a labour of love.  (Yes, I snark because I love.)  But Solo Mom?  That’s a job.  A job I like, but a job nonetheless.  NBC pays me for those posts (and how cool is that?  My paycheques?  Have NBC stamped on them.).  And according to my contract, NBC owns that content.  Somehow, I don’t think they’re going to be to jazzed about the shiticales stealing their ad revenue.  You think I write nasty letters to the Fuctard?  Man, I cannot wait to see what iVillage sends to these bastards.

Our local school board just gave themselves a raise.  A 300% raise.

Nope, that’s not a typo.  300%.  They just voted to raise their own salaries 300%.

This is the same school board who sent its EAs out on strike last year over 30 minutes of supervision time.  This is the same school board that is currently in negotiations with its custodians.  This is the same school board that will soon be starting negotiations with its teachers.  This is pissing me off.

They can’t afford to pay EAs for all the time they work, but they can afford a 300% raise for themselves.  Somehow, when contract talks come up, the Board is always strapped for cash–implying that it’s employees should be grateful for the 2 or 3 % wage increase it manages to scrape out of the budget.  And yet, it manages to find enough to give the trustees a 300% increase. 

Politicians, even low level municipal politicans, should not be allowed to set their own salaries. It’s a recipe for abuse.  I get that it’s human nature–nobody is going to say “please, pay me as little as humanly possible.”  But it’s an all too familiar pattern, this offering of a pittance to the people who actually do the work, while rewarding themselves handsomely for the relatively few hours a year they spend doing god knows what at interminable meetings and on junkets.

Oh, and did I mention they did this with only a month to go before the municipal election?  Now that’s arrogance. 

Why didn’t anybody tell me about this?

I hate October.  Loathe it.  With every fibre of my being. 

It’s not exactly a 31 day, calendar event, but every year since I can remember, this time of the year rolls around and suddenly my skin is too tight, the world is grey, and my temper, which is of the tightly-reined redheaded variety, is suddenly unleashed.

Back when we used to see each other more than a couple of times a month, October was always the month that Not My Boyfriend and I would have an epic blowout fight–The kind that results in not speaking to each other until Christmas.  Given the things I’ve forgiven Not My Boyfriend for over the years, none of which have happened in October, that’s saying something about October.  Now, he just avoids me until this blows over; it’s safer for everyone this way.

This October is going better than most.  I actually started it with an unaccustomed feeling of lightness.  A sense of optimism and possibility that I’m not used to associating with this time of the year. 

That lasted until Thanksgiving, when I awoke with an intense feeling of dread and an intense desire to just crawl under the covers and stay there.  Clearly impossible, given the 17 immediate family members congregated at my parents’ house who were expecting us, but also clearly the more attractive option. 

It wasn’t a bad Thanksgiving.  I didn’t feel the need to take my children and leave before the turkey.  And I’m pretty sure I managed not to say anything that will come back to bite me on the ass.  Didn’t even write about it, so no one can complain there.  Unless they complain about the fact that I didn’t write about it, which is entirely possible.  But, all in all, it was probably the best Thanksgiving I’ve had in years.  But I still really, really hate the enforced gratitude and appreciation that is “Thanksgiving.”

It’s been downhill from there.  As you can see, I’m just a ray of sunshine.  The worst part is, knowing that this was coming, I’ve been trying so hard not to fall into the trap again.  But here I am, feeling like the world is completely blah and wishing I could just crawl into a cave and not have to interact with anyone for the forseeable future. 

Instead, I’m treating all of you (snort.  All.  Like so many of you are still reading!) to the joy that is me in October. 

I’ll try to do better.  Or at least make the ranting funny.  

Stories like these ones are why I don’t watch the news or read the papers.  I don’t want to live in a world like this, and I certainly don’t want my daughters to know that they live in a world like this.  I won’t be taking the advice of any of the talking heads currently guiding shocked parents through the process of how to explain Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Quebec to their children.  I won’t be taking it because Diva Girl has no idea those events occurred, and I intend to keep it that way.

Maybe that’s selfish of me.  Maybe I’m avoiding a moral responsibility here.  Maybe it’s unfair of me to shield my daughter from this world of hers. Maybe I should be preparing her for this world we apparently live in–a world where women and girls are  lined up and shot, execution style, in front of their classroom blackboards.

But how do I explain to her that there are men in this world who hate her simply because of what she is:  a bright, beautiful, bubbly little girl who will grow up to be a breathtaking, brilliant, vibrant woman.  How do I explain to her that while it’s true that all people are equally valuable in this world, there are men who will resent her for her value (and the value of every other woman) and who will use any means necessary to take it away from her and every other woman in the world?

We’re up in arms over female circumcision practices in Africa.  Afgan women sporting burquas cause a political outcry.  The idea of “throwaway daughters” in asian countries leaves us incensed.  And yet, we’ve somehow accepted that we live in a world where this happens.

We live in a culture of violence.  First person shooter games.  Casually violent song lyrics. A government bent on war at any cost.  An entertainment industry that glorifies murder and mayhem.  

We have a news media that has taken the axiom “if it bleeds, it leads” to a whole new level of lurid.   The coverage of these tragedies becomes so all encompassing that it loses all meaning.  We become numb to the images and the horrific becomes the mundane. 

School shootings, once a terrifying aberration, have become almost commonplace.  It’s only a matter of time until “columbine” joins “going postal“  in our vernacular.

Dateline becomes “All Predators, All the Time” and what was once a shocking expose on internet predators becomes a weekly exercise in the ridiculously pathetic. 

School shootings, accidental shootings, snipers, all routine occurances on the evening news.  And every attempt to stem this tide of violence by curbing access to the guns that allow it to be perpetrated with such distanced ease are met with the rallying cry, “guns don’t kill people.  People kill people.”  As if that makes it ok.  As if that makes it better.

More so even than gun violence, the thing that terrifies me about these instances is the focus on female victims. Maybe this lack of randomness in the choice of victims shouldn’t make these crimes all the more chilling, but but as a woman, and the mother of daughters, it does. Somehow, it’s easier to accept that some madman simply opened fire than that he methodically and deliberately chose out his victims, separating the boys who would live from the girls who had to die.  And I wonder, what does that do to those young male survivors?  What message is imprinted on their young pysches? 

The rage at women, the power structure that fosters that hatred, the society that allows it to fester, I think these are the issues we need to be looking at.  We need to take our heads out the sand and really look at the gender politics of our society. 

It’s all well and good to be raising strong, confident, independent women, but are we doing so at the expense of our men?  How do we balance the needs of both sexes?  How do we create a world where my daughters’ sense of their worth and confidence in their choices does not leave someone else’s son feeling disenfranchised?   The “hapless hubby” jokes and the “dumb blonde” jokes. The absence of positive, nurturing male role models in our popular culture today. The lingering image of the shrill, manhating feminist. All of these things contribute to the seething societal stew that allows this type of aggression to breed and grow and eventually to explode.

Today I no longer feel confident that my daughters will have the place in this world that they deserve. I don’t feel confident that anyone’s daughters will. But I still have a fierce belief that they do deserve that place.  Every person does, regardless of gender.  But until we figure out how to support one without failing the other, we are continuing to create the type of society in which exacting wholesale vengance on young women, while still unthinkable, is, sadly, not undoable.

You may remember Amy.  She (and her stooges, but we’ll just simplify things and refer to their collective consciousness as “Amy”) was the impetus for the move to this shiny new place. 

I moved here to get away from her threats to expose Ms Sisyphus to my real life, and then decided “screw it” and put up the url on the original blog.  Sort of defeated the purpose for the move, but it’s so pretty here and blogger is, well, blogger, so it all worked out in the end. 

Anyway, I realized during the Long Silence that my final stumbling block to posting was that I was sort of subconsciously waiting for the shit to die down before resuming the merry chroniclings of my failings as a mother and drubbings of the Fuctard. I guess I figured given enough time and space, Amy would get bored, move on, whatever.

Thordora let me know that apparently that’s just not going to happen.  So again, screw it.  If a bunch of washed up cheerleaders cannot outgrow junior high and need to pin all their vitriol and self loathing on me to make them feel better about themselves, well, have at it ladies.  

No need to stalk me across message boards and comments on other blogs any longer.    Here I am .  Enjoy.

(oh, two pieces of blog housekeeping: 

Comments:  I’m having some trouble publishing them at the moment.  I’ll figure it out there.  And I’m no different than any other blogger–I loves me the comments.  So please, keep them coming, even if you don’t see them posted.  I promise I’ll figure it out.

The Fuctard Follies:  I’m thinking about making these private, password required posts.  I really don’t want to do that.  I’m not wild about the idea of creating a tiered system of readers.  But, on the other hand, I’m not wild about Amy sending the Fuctard along to read everything written about him.  And if it comes down to it, my family’s safety wins.  However, if they do go private, I will absolutely give the password out to commenters I know who want it.)

There’s actual content coming, I promise.

And Eden, I’m sure I can work up a rant just for you.