Life Needs a Few Detours and U-Turns

For a few days I couldn’t bring myself to blog and risk bumping the Net Neutrality topic down the list. Then I remembered that I could refer to it and direct my 2.5 readers down the page. Duh. So, 2.5 readers, please scroll down to read about how to Save the Internet.

That said, let the blogging begin!

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It occurred to me the other day for the bagillionth time that I have allowed myself to become stuck in a rut. Parts of the rut I wouldn’t change for the world. My honey and my dogs and cats are at the top of that list. Some parts of the rut are maybe not so hot. Like the part where I think about how thin I was before I moved to frigid one minute, broiling and humid the next New England (land of Weather Vomit), yet somehow never make the trip to the store to buy the expensive special clothes you need to excercise in rain, sleet, snow or sun here.

Or the part where I feel like I can’t have One. More. Conversation. About. The. Damn. Red Sox. without puking. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I love baseball and I enjoy watching the Red Sox, I just think that there is a limit to how many times you can travel a verbal rut and say some of the many Sox-platitudes like “Well it is still early” or “But their stats are up for the year, they’ll come around” during a game where your team ends up losing 15 – 3. I’m just saying.

It isn’t all about baseball though. Honey has also taken up Golf. Notice the capital G? Yep, he is that kind of golfer. *sigh* I hate golf. I moved from my native South Carolina, and while I do occasionally miss the people or the music or the proximity to good cajun/creole food (and to Calabash) I so do not miss the endless, endless golf. South Carolina is so all about golf they try to hook ‘em young, like cigarettes, and keep ‘em hooked til they die. Why is honey’s new golf addiction sad? At first, it wasn’t. In the beginning, I told honey how I felt about golf and that it would make me happy if we could compromise – I didn’t want golf to become a) a money argument or b) an obstruction to family time or c) something that made me all naggy (shudder). Last year, all went well on that front. This year, not so much. So the golf thing is becoming part of the rut I travel.

I could go on waxing poetic about state of this rut I ride, dribbling examples all over the page, but that really isn’t the point of this post. The truth is that while I was pondering this rut I travel, I also started pondering how I’ve grown attached to it. The good parts shine. The bad parts fester like a tumor under the skin. In spite of that dichotomy I hug my rut like a pet, close to my chest and protective. This road I travel has become crumbly in places, and even knowing I can stop the ride and fix the problem hasn’t motivated me to let go of my well worn path.

The reality is that my life is in my hands. Changing is difficult, but not impossible. Impossibility is just one of the many excuses I use to keep trodding along at the same snail’s pace. I will have to learn to keep the things I do not want to change, like my honey and my dogs and cats, and change the things that aren’t good for me. Time to make my life take a new direction. The list of rut-inducing behavior is long, so tackling things one at a time might take forever (or fohevah, as they say here). I guess I’ll just tackle all of it, then, not being known for my patience. I sense more blogs on my progress in the future (hey, anything for new material, right?).

Rut Life Changes

Save The Internet As We Know It

For several weeks I have been vaguely aware of mutterings on and off line about Network Neutrality, and the way the big phone companies are lobbying Congress as hard as they can to have the Internet no longer be a level playing field. Well, with all the other poor decisions coming out of Capital Hill this year, this got slightly lost in the shuffle for me. It was brought back onto my radar screen with jarring force this morning when I discovered that while I was busy looking elsewhere at Congress and the President’s other craptacular moves, this issue has made it into committee. I know! I didn’t think it would get that far either! Silly me.

Network Neutrality has been called the First Amendment of the Internet. Wikipedia defines it as follows:

Network neutrality is a principle of network design. It asserts that, in order to promote innovation, network service providers such as telephone and cable internet companies should not be permitted to dictate how those networks are used (i.e., not permitted to ban certain types of programs, to ban certain types of devices connecting to the network, or to favor carriage of traffic to certain web sites over others).

Save The Internet adds this to the standard definition of Network Neutrality:

Net Neutrality allows everyone to compete on a level playing field and is the reason that the Internet is a force for economic innovation, civic participation and free speech. If the public doesn’t speak up now, Congress will cave to a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign by telephone and cable companies that want to decide what you do, where you go, and what you watch online.

According to Save The Internet there are already 135 bloggers blogging this issue, and growing (make mine number 136). The combination of people who have come together to rally against this move against free enterprise and free speech by the telecommunications industry overlords is astounding. What other issue could bring together this list of names (and these are simply a random selection of a few of the charter members of the Save The Internet Coalition – there are hundreds more people not listed here who support the cause regardless of differing ideologies):

Professor Timothy Wu — Columbia
Gun Owners of America
Craig Newmark — Craigslist.com Founder
MoveOn.org Civic Action
Consumers Union
American Library Association
Common Cause
National Association of State PIRGs (U.S. PIRG)
Flint River Hospital
Afro-Netizen
Loyola University Chicago, Department of Communications
Quicksilver Communications

Alex Curtis of Public Knowledge made a short video that gives a clear idea of the ways losing Network Neutrality could affect you. If the embedded player below won’t work for you, you can view the video here, at YouTube.

Save The Internet is not the only web site speaking out against this potential removal of freedoms. FreePress is also sponsoring the Net Freedom Now! movement. Public Knowledge has published a downloadable PDF of the Committee Print of the proposed bill (scroll to the bottom of their page to see it). The Center for Digital Democracy is running their own Digital Destiny Campaign. There are many more organizations and web sites running parallel campaigns against this poisonous legislation. You can visit either Save The Internet or Free Press for a comprehensive list of people, web sites, businesses and organizations that are on the side of Net Neutrality.

Most importantly, send your letter or email to your state’s representative today! The vote on this could be as early as April 26th, 2006! Many of the aforementioned sites have internet forms to fill out and email to your representatives, and also phone numbers for you to call.

Now that we have had the educational portion of this post, you may be wondering how this would affect me, and why I am so up in arms over it on a personal as well as political level. That is simple. I am a freelance writer and editor. I live in a very small town, close to not very much. The nearest serious research facility (library, college, or major city with access to research facilities in abundance) is over an hour away. I find my clients on the internet, I find my ideas on what corporations may want me to write about on the internet, I conduct my interviews on the internet, I use the internet for my phone and fax service to save money, I submit my work on the internet and most importantly, I do 99% of my research online. If unbiased research is removed from the internet, or access to a variety of clients and not just “big businesses” who can afford to pay the toll that would come with the loss of Network Neutrality, then I will be unable to continue my career. Without moving to a large city where I have access in person to the resources I have now at my fingertips, I would be sunk. So yes, this bill would affect me personally.

Call! Email! Write! Forward the links to your friends, coworkers and family! Stop the loss of Network Neutrality!

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Tangential issue: web site labeling

Network Neutrality

A Politically Correct Society is Not a Good Thing

This line of thought started with a radio program I was listening to the other day. Female DJ # 1 mentioned she had gotten a wolf whistle, and being in her mid-30s it had been a while, and that it made her feel good that someone appreciated her looks. Female DJ # 2 became Highly Agitated at this, accusing her of not supporting feminism, causing backwards motion in The Movement, and giving women a Bad Name, among other things. Male DJ appreciated that there was a woman who could still understand that a simple whistle from across a street wasn’t threatening, but an off-hand compliment. So many phone calls started pouring in, and such a bicker-fest ensued between the two female DJs, that their entire remaining two hours passed in what seemed a nano-second.

The seeds of pondering political correctness had now been planted. Follow the line of thought to this week, when several offhand comments on a forum board that I enjoy visitng caused much more anger and indignation in some forum participants than the comments should rightly have engendered. All of the comments/threads in the forum were posted as humorous. The indignant and/or extremely pissed responders didn’t find the threads funny. Well, ok, that’s fair enough, but why escalate it? Why can’t people just not find something funny, instead of not finding it funny then picking at it like a scab trying to get people, in general, to Stop Offending Them?

I’ve noticed since the ever-expanding Politically Correct Movement began, things have changed. Work is less fun – you can’t tell risque jokes, or flirt with a co-worker (though most flirting is never intended to Go Anywhere), or even compliment a co-worker on anything physcial anymore for fear of being slapped with a sexual harassment charge (and usually NOT by the receiving party, who found it refreshing, but by the super-feminist or uptight male boss or Human Resources person). I understand that the original intent of sexual harassment regulations were to eliminate abuses of power and positon and create a level playing field for everyone. I simply refuse to accept that these regulations and changes for the better were ever intended to morph into a humorless, lackluster work environment.

Going out is certainly more risky. I know I always thought a bar was an absolutely appropriate place to smoke, drink, tell jokes (from cheesy to risque to downright nasty), flirt, dance and let yourself get a little mental release from your everyday cares. Now if you cuss, tell a dirty joke, or Heaven forbid, SMOKE, in any easily offended person’s general direction you will receive anything from a dirty look, to insults, to an outright argument and in some places can get escorted out of the bar. For a joke. For a cigarettte. For a compliment given a stranger. For a dance.

Political Correctness is a disease that has invaded every facet of our society. Did you know that the incidents of kindergarteners being suspended from school is on the rise? That’s right, kindergarteners. Do you know what they are being suspended for? Unacceptable touching and sexual harassment. FIVE YEAR OLDS. Sexual harassment. Apparantly you can no longer hug people to show affection at age five, as many five year olds are wont to do. Heaven forbid you play “kiss-tag” now (remember that silly game?). By all means, please teach our children that loving gestures and hugging someone hello or goodbye is sexual harrassment. Thank you, PC Army.

Are you a smoker? I am. Walked down the street in the open air smoking lately? Isn’t it nice when someone will go out of their way to cross the street TO you, just to “fake cough” at you, or tell you you’re ruining the air they were breathing 400 yards away? Yep. I thought so. Or when people go in to a bar and grille that has a completely separate smoking area, completely apart from the non smoking area and on its own ventillation system, and then choose to sit in smoking, just to complain about the smoking? That’s one of my personal favorites.

The basic point of my mini-rant is simple. When did I become forced to be the keeper of your self esteem and moral code? Why does society have to tiptoe around each other? Common sense says that if a place offends you, don’t go there; if a joke offends you, don’t listen; if a TV show offends you, get up off your fat, Dorito encrusted ass and change the channel. Don’t make other people bear your mental and emotional burden. It detracts from the original point of the movement toward basic Politcal Correctness, which was to solve racial and sexual issues in the workplace. For example, the more people complain about a dumb joke that “offended’ them, the less I will listen when the same wolf-cryer complains about their boss making sex a condition of employment – I’ll figure they are blowing another joke out of proportion, because that is what they always do. See how being a member of the PC Army may come back to haunt you?

Don’t be the one who cried wolf. Be responsible for your own self esteem and moral code. Learn to laugh, to live and let live, to acknowledge that life can be funny.

Politically Correct

Update on Political Blog Issue Re: “Texas Arresting Drunks in Bars”

Those of you who read my political blog the other day may be interested to know that the issue of the TABC sending in undercover agents to arrest people drinking in bars, even if the bars are located in a hotel, under the pretense of “preventing drunk driving” has been shelved. Temporarily, of course.

At http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyid=2006-04-14T170827Z_01_N13257090_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-BARS.xml

A controversial Texas program to send undercover agents into bars to arrest drunks has been halted after a firestorm of protest from the public.

The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission has “temporarily suspended” what it called “Operation Last Call” even though it still believes it was worthwhile, commission spokeswoman Carolyn Beck said on Thursday.

Mainly I’m just encourgaed that enough people got up out of their fog of apathy to let their opinions be known and effect a change, however small.

Politics

Let The Sunshine In

Finally, after the months of wind, ice, snow, cold and gloom, comes Spring. There are many things about New England that don’t make me smile. One of the things that does make me smile every time is that first day back in the yard, hands covered in dirt, cleaning a spot for the garden, planting Spring bulbs and raking out flower beds to prepare for the growing season.

New England Winter

These Boots Were Made for Walkin’

We asked ourselves tonight what has become of us, the nomadic duo, becoming enmeshed in one spot for so long. We, the gypsy lovers, in love with each other, in love with motion. Craving the new – new friends, new places, new travels. We sated ourselves every two years. One day five years past we gave in to an urge to move closer to one of our homes, and became ensnared by family – blood family and the false family the snow bound granite worn populace tries to create. The snow mafia surrounding and refusing to let you leave for fear of being labeled disloyal, deserter. The fishmongers listing your soul as their catch, garbled by alcohol and gull shit. So we talked, and discoverd we both felt lost without motion. It is a step. Hopefully a step back into our path of joy, discovery and living life to its fullest.

Moving