New Shoes

Shoe shopping is stereotypically associated with women- women supposedly love to buy shoes, own tons of shoes, can't get enough shoes. Well, here's my deal- shoe shopping is painful. Not physically painful (usually), but emotionally painful. This is due to the fact that I have an extraordinary foot problem.
My Left foot- long, narrow, perfect for heels- is a women's size 9 (US). My right foot is a size 5. While my left foot has long perfect toes, my right's are stunted little stubs. This is because I had Amniotic Band Syndrome in utero, which essentially cut off development for my right foot. My metatarsal 1, also called the Big Toe, was amputated completely, and I was born with only four tiny toes on that foot.
This means that, while others may enjoy buying shoes, I have loathed such an activity for most of my life. Because of the shape of my right foot, I flat-out cannot wear most kinds of sandals and heels. I have an orthotic insert for sneakers, boots, and lace-ups. This means that if the shoe's insert can't be removed to make room for my orthotic, I don't buy it. The orthotic doesn't bend, which means it can't be worn in any shoes with a heel that causes the sole to be curved. If I do want a pair of sandals (that don't have a T-strap, mind you, I can't wear those) or heels, I have to buy two pairs. More importantly, I have to find two pairs of the same shoe that are in size 9 (pretty easily found) and a size 5 (almost non-existent). I then have to shell out twice as much money as the normal purchaser would. Two-for-one deals are like goddamned Christmas to me.
Recently, I ventured into the world of online shoe shopping. At a lot of sites, you can get pretty good deals and you're more likely to find a 5. However, I can't hold them in my hands, judge whether or not they are going to work well with my poorly-designed foot. This also means returning said purchases is harder, which means the anticipation is worse. I ordered two pairs of a flat shoe recently, and they arrived today. I spent about a week being nervous about them- would they fit right, would they be the right sizes, et cetera. They arrived, fit perfectly, and made me wildly happy. Through the miracle of the internet, I am gradually coming to terms with my hatred of shoe shopping.
It's not as bad of a problem as, say, having no right foot at all, but it's something that affects my life every single day. Because of its shape, it gets weird muscle cramps. My knee has a lot of problems and because I'm missing some muscle attachment sites that are normally located on the structure of the big toe, my leg muscles are in a lot pain when I do certain activities. If regenerative medical technology gets good enough, I have every intention of having it replaced. It's not like having unruly hair or oily skin. It causes me problems that, because of the rarity of my condition, cannot be anticipated by doctors. It sucks. And up until now, shoe shopping has constantly served as a reminder of that.
So yeah, I got new shoes today. They fit well and I like them. And that's a pretty big accomplishment.

Christmas Decorations

It's that time of the year- THE HOLIDAYS™ are upon us. Store shelves laden with tinsel and snowmen figurines, strands of small lightbulbs stapled to porches and wrapped around fences, wreaths made of everything from actual fir tree limbs to pinecones to shining garland. And you want to know the biggest secret of all (read: not a secret at all)?
I love Christmas. 
Specifically, I love Christmas decorations. I love dragging the fake tree out of the closet (I am, in fact, allergic to real trees), I love taking an hour to put the lights on because they must be evenly spaced, I love carefully planning the placement of each and every ornament. I love candy canes of all flavors and I love getting out my light-up snowman to put in the window.
Someday, when I am not a poor college student, I will buy everything in the holiday isle at the store. I will have five trees and so many lights that my whole house glows. Every available surface will be wrapped in various colors of garland and I will make hundreds of paper snowflakes to hang from the ceiling. I will put real snowmen all over the front yard (or fake ones, if global warming continues to ruin Christmas). I will put up these decorations in early November and take them down around Valentine's Day (probably the worst of all holidays).
The real kicker about all of this is that I am not a Christian. I quit when I was ten, which means I have technically been a not-Christian longer than I was a Christian. I don't care about the Bible, I don't care about any of the mythology. It is my understanding that Jesus wasn't even born in the winter. I have no interest in any of that.
What I do love is the joy that a decorated tree gives me. I love the memories wrapped up in my family's collection of ornaments. I love our nativity scene, not because of the Jesus part, but because I colored on some of it with crayon when I was a kid. I love hearing stories about the holidays- like the one about my great-uncle drunkenly crashing into the tree while riding a pogo stick indoors.
I love the morning of, when my sister and I get up early and then wait as long as we can before charging into my parents' room to make them get out of bed. I love watching my family members react to their gifts- one year we got my dad a ghillie suit (Google it) and a pair of Wellington boots. He proceeded to run out into the driveway while wearing said items and bellowed. It was hilarious.
So that's why I love Christmas. It isn't about religion, for me, any more than Halloween is about religion. It's important to me because it both appeals to the obsessive side of me, and to the sentimental side of me. It's about making good food, putting up flawless decorations, and enjoying my loud and crazy family.
So yes, I put up Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving. In fact, I whistle Christmas carols while I decorate. I would not have it any other way.

Pioneer Day Anniversary

Today is Pioneer Day, which marks that I have officially lived in Salt Lake City for two whole years. Two years ago today, my mom and I finished moving in all my stuff, had the cable and internet set up, and watched the (slightly racist) Pioneer Day parade.
It's been a strange trip, these last two years. My grandfather died, my mentor died, my lizard died. I swore at Mormons, I went to football games, I ate Jello. I watched cars slide down the street when it was covered in ice, and I watched a lightning-infused snowstorm. I enjoyed walking home from school on nice days, and I survived the trip home when the weather was bad.
I survived paying taxes, power outages, and the Salt Lake County DMV. I spent a lot of time in the university's anthropology department, too much time in the library, and not enough time in the gym. I made a lot of food, ate a lot of food, and managed to avoid setting my apartment on fire.
I'm not sure what I was expecting when I moved here. I picked Utah because I had friends here, and it was somewhere that wasn't where I was. I guess that's what made it a good thing- I didn't expect anything of this place. I'd been in Utah once, for the Salt Lake Olympics. I didn't know what it looked like, what living here was like. I had no set expectations.
Am I always happy here? No, of course not. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone who is always happy, regardless of where they are. But moving to Salt Lake has made me an adult, a real one, because I can cope when things are less-than-perfect. I can solve my problems for myself, and I feel like that is the biggest thing moving here has given me.
This isn't a long post, because it's easier to write witty one-liners that sum up my experiences than try to write a memoir. The summary of this, I guess, is that I've had a good two years in Salt Lake. And I have every intention of staying here.

If Preparedness is Next to Godliness, These People are Holy.

So, let's talk a little bit about everyone's favorite subject, Mormons. I do adore them most days, in the way I am entertained by the Smurfs- there is nothing remotely attractive about being a Smurf, but it's a lifestyle I don't understand and find fascinating. I also talk a lot of trash about Mormons, because they have quite a few rules that are just not for me (particularly the ones about swearing and drinking).
But occasionally, I do need to give them credit. Underneath all of the capped sleeves and boring suits, these are people who do seem to legitimately care about their community, and this is why Utah will be a great place to live when the zombie apocalypse finally hits. That, or it will be a theocratic hell. I'm guessing it's a combination of those two.
Like I was saying, they do things that impress me sometimes, and right now would be one of those times. See, I don't know if you pay much attention to what goes on in the Wild West, but it is dry. I mean, goddamned dry. Drier than Temple Square on a Sunday. There are currently wildfires everywhere in this state that grow by the thousands of acres. Not nearly as bad as Colorado, but if the whole hot, dry, windy thing continues, we're going to look remarkably like our neighboring state.
Right now, it is 100 degrees (Fahrenheit) with wind speeds at around 30 miles per hour. These are perfect conditions if you are a wildfire, and the worst conditions if you are a living being.
I am telling you all of this as a bit of a prologue to the main story. See, the closest fire to Salt Lake shot from being around 800 acres on Friday morning to 4,000 Friday night. This growth was so alarming that the police evacuated multiple neighborhoods in the towns of Eagle Mountain and Saratoga Springs (displacing about 9,000 people Friday night). What is incredible to me is that these people all took it in stride. The firefighters actually received so much food from volunteers that they started turning away donations. They had a shelter at one of the high schools up and running, plus multiple places that were housing animals free of charge. The families evacuated left their homes with almost no fuss, and they all had 72 hour kits ready for when they left (Google it if you've never heard the phrase "72 hour kit" before).
This is what impresses me about Mormon culture: they are prepared for anything. For all their high and mighty bullshit, they will drop everything and lend a hand when disaster strikes. I suppose a part of it is that they're waiting for the apocalypse. I mean, the "Latter Days" part of Latter-Day Saints is referring to waiting for the Savior (typed "savor" the first time, lololol) to return and go all Revelations on our asses, right? Part of their dogma is that they legitimately believe that's coming any day now, that we're at the end of days, and if we don't have our survival supplies ready at the door, Baby Jesus will cry. (Okay, made up the last bit).
Like those Daily Bread products (Again, Google is the friend of anyone unfamiliar with these strange Mormon ways). Daily Bread offers MREs that are supposed to be good for twenty-five years! Seriously! Can you imagine buying products that are going to sit in your basement for the next quarter-century, all so when the zombies show up you can still have your freeze-dried chicken fajitas? Well, the Mormons can imagine doing just such a thing, because Daily Bread ads are all over here.
This is how they live their lives- a low dose of paranoia every day. They have guns, they have indestructible food, they have survival kits ready to go in the hall closets, they have water purifiers in the trunks of their cars. On the one hand, I love it; on any given day, I would rather be fighting off the zombie hordes during an apocalypse than doing homework. On the other hand, though, it creeps me out a little. These are people who live in a constant state of low-grade fear.
Let's be honest here, though. When you live in a place like Utah, wildfires, avalanches, and earthquakes are all very real possibilities. We could potentially have the power go out for weeks because it is ten degrees outside and everything is frozen. It's kind of an extreme place. So if a fire breaks out tomorrow and swoops down through the Avenues towards my apartment, I'm glad that there are people around me waiting with water bottles and a sincere desire to help.

Why "Caucasian" is Discriminatory

This is a bit off-topic, but it's something that truly bugs me. Unfortunately, this is a concept so deeply embedded in our current culture that most do not consider these terms used to describe "race" beyond a superficial level.
First, I use quotations for the term "race" because I am a human biologist and, strictly speaking, there are no races in the human species. The biological term "race" denotes a subset of a particular species that is recognizable and distinct. Because no groups of humans meet these criteria, there are no races within Homo sapiens. Don't get me wrong, this is not an attempt at race denial or discrimination based on our cultural concepts of race. This is simply an attempt to clarify on a technical level, and as such, I'll be using "ethnicity" instead of "race," as ethnicity is a cultural construct used to divide populations. The continued use of the word "race" only serves as a continued white attempt to differentiate between white people and people of another demographic. Therefore, I reject the word and substitute my own.
Anyway, this centers on the term "Caucasian," which, ironically, Google insists I capitalize. If you are white, I'm sure you're familiar with the term. Even if you're not white, you still probably hear the term constantly. In American culture, we have historically struggled with finding terms to describe ethnicity in ways that are not offensive to the groups being described. I don't need to go into that history, you can look it up yourself if you truly care to do so.
Of all the terms now seen as offensive, though, "Caucasian" has survived. Such a strange term, isn't it? I mean, when we think of people with European heritage, we generally do not think of the Caucasus (or Caucas) Mountains, which form a geographical border between Europe and Asia (think Russia). Even those ethnicities like Italian or Spanish were not regarded as "white" until relatively recently. So why would we refer to those of Anglo-Saxon heritage as being from the Caucasus Mountains?
It's a fascinating story, and you can look it up for yourself if you want better detail, but the basic story is this: around the end of the eighteenth century, explorers uncovered human remains in the Caucasus Mountains. A skull found in these remains was regarded as being a "perfect" skull, a template, if you will, of what good, beautiful European people should look like. It was proposed that these remains represented the ancestors of all European people, simply because it was a subjectively-attractive skull. This is especially fascinating considering we hardly possess adequate technology for facial reproduction in this modern age. The fact that these remains were used as some kind of type example without any ability to know what the living human looked like stands as proof that this was about pure discrimination. The term "Caucasian," as it is used in terms of ethnicity in our culture, comes straight out of a desire to justify the division between Europe and the rest of the world.
So, while we have moved away from using terms used to describe various ethnicities that are seen as overtly discriminatory, we are still frequently using a term that originates in white history's continued attempt to prove there is a difference, and more importantly, there is a superior ethnicity. As a human biologist, I'm here to tell you that's a giant crock of shit. And that's a scientific term, you can quote me, if you like. My point here is that, while some apologists may prefer more specific terms like "Irish-American" or "English-American," the proper term for describing those of European heritage is either "European-American," or, for efficiency's sake, "white." It's not that hard, and if you're really that attached to such an outdated term as "Caucasian," you need to get a life.

Oh, Activism

I guess it's been a bit, since the whole Blogger format's got me feeling a little disoriented. That's okay, because there is licorice, Jones Soda, and I am listening to Green Day for the first time in five years (I admit I'd forgotten about them, but that's what iTunes is for, right?)
So it's 4/20, and feel free to laugh at the implied marijuana joke. Alright, that's enough, thank you. It also is the "Day of Action" for those silly enough to fall for the whole Kony 2012 thing. So let us talk about activism and marketing, two subjects that go skipping down the lane of consciousness hand-in-hand.
Kony 2012 is a movement, for those of you thus far unexposed, that places at the focus Joseph Kony, a dictator of times since passed that was notorious for coercing and threatening children into joining his militia in Uganda. Of course, he is now a mostly-powerless old man who has since fled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (a country so ironically named that it rivals The Peoples' Republic of China in ridiculousness) and has done little in the last ten years. Yes, to be fair, he is still a local threat and a war criminal. Given this, a campaign of the Kony 2012's magnitude is a tad overblown, would you not say?
Ah, but this is the magic that is marketing in activism. Throw it a little money, and you can turn everything from aging former terrorists to bugs in your berry frappe into a political movement. It is truly fascinating, how Adam Smith's invisible hand burrows into everything. You see, the base of the fervor behind this is a well-paid marketing strategy.
Invisible Children, the agency behind the Kony 2012 movement, has spent more money on their marketing strategy than they have on the actual cause- after reporting almost $14 million for 2011, they've spent about $3 million on programs in Africa and almost $4 million on film-making and presentations. (The USA Today article cites that they did not spend $6.5 million- http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-04-17/kony-2012-invisible-children/54362478/1) Obviously, you're going to do a fair job of creating enthusiasm with that kind of money, even when the issue is considered by many to be past its prime. I liken it a bit to protesting the atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party (who doesn't love a good bath party every now and then?) in 2012, even when Saddam's been dead for almost a decade.
Look, there's nothing wrong with getting teenagers involved in activism. I did a fair amount of activism work when I was in high school. I aspire to work for non-profits as a career (as you can see, my tuition money's been money well-spent). I love activism and I love seeing people get involved in something, but there are other causes out there that could really use this kind of publicity. I'm not trying to tell anyone what causes to support here, but I'm trying to tell people to pick and choose. I wish the people caught up in the Kony 2012 thing would spend some time and examine the issue. Examine the videos with a critical eye. Why, exactly, would any humanitarian activism request that you commit misdemeanors in order to promote the cause? Why would they demand that you use their "kits" in order to raise awareness? Why would they rely heavily on outdated information to create a relevant movement?
I've had to work pretty hard to understand the causes I get behind, and there have been plenty of causes I either abandon after further examination or pick up after further examination. If you have thoroughly examined the Kony 2012 movement, looked at how the agency spends money, read about the conflict in Central Africa, and you still support it, then I have no problem with you. However, if you are willing to base support for a campaign solely on a video on YouTube, I have nothing to say to you.

It Makes Me So Mad.

This contraception debate really, truly makes me want to cry.
Normally, I can brush this shit off at some point. But the things being said are so personally offensive that I can hardly even talk about it without screaming. I just don't even know what to say about it all anymore. I mean, it is horrifying and severely disappointing to find out that the people elected to represent the citizens of America do not even think I am a person who is capable of human functions, such as thought. It is so mentally destructive to hear these fucks claim that employers shouldn't have to pay for my healthcare if they don't think I deserve it. That is not how this works. People who have guaranteed health insurance and access to healthcare (representatives) should not be able to pass laws that say others are not deserving of healthcare simply because they are women. It is clear to me now that these are people who not only do not care about me, but actually want to do me harm. These are people who think I do not deserve to be treated like a human being. These are people (mostly men, unfortunately) who are so determined to reinforce the barriers separating people like me from gaining power that they will actually jeopardize my health.
It disgusts me. It makes my skin crawl. It fills me with so much rage that I want to take a sledgehammer and start breaking things.
This last week, in the ongoing war over my uterus, I've been called a sex-addicted slut simply for being on birth control. (Thanks Rush.) I wish I could simply believe that people who say things like this are ignorant, that they don't understand the myriad of reasons a woman might take hormonal birth control. But I cannot believe that. People in these positions of power have, undoubtedly, had this pointed out to them. The truth is that they don't care. They don't care that hormonal birth control is used to treat severe menstrual symptoms, or ovarian cysts, or hormonal imbalances. That does not matter to people like Rush Limbaugh, because people like him do not care about women. They don't care that without legalized abortion, women die. They don't care that doctors cannot treat a woman who is bleeding to death, because it would abort the fetus. None of this matters to them, because people like this see women as expendable less-than-human beings.
There is no way to clue in people like this. They are so far beyond help that there are not words in the English language that will change their minds. Women, in their minds, will never be capable of being as smart, or as talented, or as strong, as they are. They do not view people like me as equals, or even as rivals- they view us as no better than children. They see us as ignorant lesser beings who should not be given any kind of power.
This is not a characteristic of all men, and it infuriates me when people imply that this is somehow a trait that all men share. It is not. For one, there are (inexplicably) women who argue that we are not as capable as men. More importantly, there are men in this world who are just as infuriated as I am. I've been fortunate to have so many male peers who see me as an equal. It is reassuring to know that there are men out there who believe I should have every right to do whatever I want with my body.
Because the truth is that it is none of anyone's business, what I am doing with my uterus, or my breasts, or my earlobes. It should not matter whether I take birth control because I like sex or because I have a hormonal imbalance. It is between me and my health care provider, and no one else. I don't ask to know why anyone else takes a prescription drug, and I don't know why my prescription should be anyone else's business. The reason that I deserve to have my prescription paid for by my health insurance is because that is what health insurance is for. It is there to assist us with medical costs. It helps pay for insulin, and painkillers, and power scooters, so why should my medical needs be excluded? It would be one thing to argue we should do away with health insurance, and that is a different discussion for a different time. However, it is basic discrimination to argue that only my medical needs should not be covered, simply because some people personally do not like it. I personally do not like people who get free power scooters, and yet I see no "conscience" argument against providing for them. This is not about your conscience. Your conscience has no fucking business in my medical decisions. If you want to pretend the space beneath my underwear is nondescript and looks like a Barbie-crotch, fine. I don't care. But wanting me to pretend that about myself? No. Fuck no. I'm not interested in this religious guilt-tripping, because I have nothing to feel guilty for. I have not violated any of my own ideals. So why exactly should I be penalized according to beliefs I do not believe in?