xeginy

My name is Marilyn, I'm 25, and I'm about halfway through finishing my bachelor's degree. I live in the Pacific Northwest, in the US, and I want to go to nursing school and join the Peace Corps, not necessarily in that order.

Posts Written by Marilyn

By xeginy • 13 years ago

Money Can’t Buy Happiness

Cross-posted at Blueberry Shake.

What is class? According to Wikipedia, the different levels of class in the US are upper, upper middle, upper lower, working and lower. But as I am sure many people know, class has a lot more to do than with how much money you make. Your age, ability, how you look and where you live are important factors in deciding your social class.

Financially, I’m pretty sure I’m part of the lower class. (My tiny paychecks have dreams of growing up and becoming grown-up paychecks!) And the poor are divided into two parts – good poor and bad poor. Good Poor are poor people who don’t like being poor, and make attempts to climb up the social ladder. They make a lot of effort to dress nice and make their homes nice. They are also usually properly grateful to charitable organizations, and have an almost reverent attitude toward wealthy people. Good Poor do not like taking “handouts.” Good Poor attempt to enhance their image by cute little sayings, like my favorite one – “Money can’t buy happiness.” I think that’s official Good Poor speak. Because money not only buys happiness, it buys time, health and entertainment. Money can be the tipping point between life and death. Money can buy children. Money can keep your marriage stable, or prevent a parent-child relationship from breaking. Money can buy heat and air conditioning. Money buys transportation ...

By xeginy • 13 years ago

“Sure Doctor, You Can Have My Uterus”

Cross-posted at Blueberry Shake

So I’m still reading Seizing Our Bodies: The Politics of Women’s Health, which I first blogged about here. The book is an anthology of essays written about women’s health issues, published in 1977. The latest essay is “The Epidemic in Unnecessary Hysterectomy,” written by Deborah Larned. This essay was originally published in the New Times Magazine in 1974 under the title, “The Greening of the Womb.”

Let’s start out with a definition of “hysterectomy.” According to the Mayo Clinic’s website, a hysterectomy “is a surgical procedure that removes your uterus through an incision in your lower abdomen.” The page also explains how hysterectomies can be performed “through an incision in the vagina (vaginal ...

Cross-posted at Blueberry Shake

So I’m still reading Seizing Our Bodies: The Politics of Women’s Health, which I first blogged about here. The book is an anthology of essays written about women’s health issues, ...

By xeginy • 13 years ago

“A Taste of Power” – My first book review

Crossposted at Blueberry Shake.

I just finished a fantastic book, and I want to tell you all about it. The book is called A Taste of Power: a Black Woman’s Story by Elaine Brown. I picked it up in a used bookstore for about six bucks, but it seems to be pretty widely available. Paperback version over at Amazon is $12, and at Powell’s the same version is $10.50. It chronicles Brown’s childhood and eventual chairmanship of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California in 1974 – 1977.

I’ll admit I went into this having no prior knowledge of the Black Panther Party whatsoever. But through Brown’s autobiography I have learned of Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver,

Crossposted at Blueberry Shake.

I just finished a fantastic book, and I want to tell you all about it. The book is called A Taste of Power: a Black Woman’s Story by Elaine Brown. I picked it ...

By xeginy • 13 years ago

“The Theft of Childbirth”

I just read a beautiful essay the other day – Adrienne Rich’s The Theft of Childbirth. It was published in 1975, so kinda dated, I know, but after doing a bit of research, though some of her statistics are dated, it’s a little horrifying how little has changed when it comes to obstetrics.

The first piece of information I want to tackle is this: “Of sixteen developed countries, in 1971 and 1972, the United States had the highest infant mortality rate” (159). [Page numbers refer to the anthology I read her essay in, Seizing Our Bodies.] As of 2006, CNN.com reported that the United States has the second-highest infant mortality rate of developed countries, tied ...

I just read a beautiful essay the other day – Adrienne Rich’s The Theft of Childbirth. It was published in 1975, so kinda dated, I know, but after doing a bit of research, though ...

By xeginy • 13 years ago

Does Pro-Choice = Pro-Abortion – or – My Crisis of Faith

Aristotle, Socrates and Plato were all great men. Seriously, they were. They were all really smart and they had a lot of good ideas. (I think I heard somewhere that Socrates was Aristotle’s imaginary friend, but I’m not sure, and I don’t care enough to find out.) They were also the Fathers of Western Philosophy. And, for some deeply philosophical reason, I’m sure, they decided to create requirements for being a person. Apparently, having a person as a parent wasn’t enough. (Cause, you know, some lady could give birth to a turtle!) No, the requirements were thus:

1. A human must be able to reason and be self-controlling.

Okay, not a lot of requirements, but look at where this logic led them:

2. ...

By xeginy • 13 years ago

Hate is Never Noble

I don’t see my dad very often. When I do, it either goes pretty okay or horribly bad. The latter was what I experienced last Friday night.
My dad is pretty conservative, I’ve known this for awhile. He listens to conservative talk radio and watches exclusively Fox News. As long as we don’t talk politics, the conversations usually don’t go sour.
Our most recent conversation lasted roughly four hours, and I learned a lot of things about my dad: he believes that the outrage over the priests molesting children is simply an attack on the Catholic Church. He believes that the majority (if not all) of gay men are or will be child molesters; he was not ...

I don’t see my dad very often. When I do, it either goes pretty okay or horribly bad. The latter was what I experienced last Friday night.
My dad is pretty conservative, I’ve known ...

By xeginy • 13 years ago

The Glory of Motherhood and Shame

Being a mother is hard. I do not know this from first-hand experience, but a close-personal-friend is a mother, and this post will be primarily about her. Let’s pretend her name is something generic like Jane, okay?
Jane has a ten-month old son. She lives with the father of said son, they both raise their son, and he – we’ll call him John – works a full-time job and financially supports both baby and Jane, who is unable to work. (To clarify, Jane tried to work, but both Jane and John found the cost of daycare too prohibitive to make Jane’s paycheck financially worth it.)
Before Jane had her son, she had an exciting life. She had exciting jobs, that ...

By xeginy • 13 years ago

Feminism vs Abortion

So I found this article at the Washington Post. Colleen Campbell is arguing the existence and validation of pro-life – or anti-abortion – feminists. The organization she cites is Feminists for Life , who believe “women deserve better choices” and that “no woman should be forced to choose between sacrificing her education and career plans and sacrificing her child.”

I feel so torn on this. For about a minute and half. And then I remember what would happen if I got pregnant. I would get an abortion. Just as fast as my little feet could carry me to a Planned Parenthood. But not because I don’t want a child to get in the way of my career plans ...