Coelestinus

Alright, and now I’m done with little road trips and have settled in at my parents house…

…but only for 2-3 weeks, because the other day I was offered a job! It’s at a state park doing interpretation, which I love. And I’ll get to care for a bunch of various animals too. 

It’s slowly dawning on me that it’s actually 7.5 hours from here and therefore everything about my life will be changing. I mean, whether I’m here at my parents’ house or at a place where I got the job, I’d be rebuilding my social circle from scratch (thank you for that, ex-boyfriend). I guess I’m just glad I didn’t start trying to build a social life here, only to move out in a few weeks. 

What will I do there? I’m already on meetup.com. I checked for American Humanist groups - there’s one nearby, though their website isn’t functioning, and the next closest one is an hour and a half away. I wonder who my coworkers will be. The particular town I’ll be living in is fairly small, still looking into what else is around it. 

Lots to do in the next few weeks, I guess. I need to make a visit to the seashore and see everyone and everything before I leave (I’ve been told there’s some wonderful foliage-viewing out there), but the rest of it will be spent getting ready to move. 

/deepbreath

(ha, that comment just gave me a wicked Warcraft nostalgia moment. I miss my guild from vanilla).

So I spent the past…how long has it been since I was on here?…not sleeping, drinking, and making a few sort-of mistakes. 

Now that my seasonal job is done, I’m back at my parents’ house for an unknown amount of time. I miss my friends. And it’s weird to be back here…our dog was put down in May, and I haven’t been here at the house since then. 

I keep looking around to make sure I’m not stepping on her, or dropping food and waiting for her to come get it… 

:/

What am I supposed to do with myself now? Look for a job, try to get some sort of social structure going on. At least I’ll be saving a ton of money by not having to pay rent or buy food.

I’ve so fallen out of gaming, it’s…well, it’s weird, that I was such a hardcore gamer and now I’m just…not. The limited internet access is a big reason at the moment. Doing my master’s was another reason, prior to now. And I kind of got to the point where I cannot stand the gaming community anymore.

But single player games, I’d be all about that if I had my consoles and my desktop. I have a second playthrough of Dragon Age 2 (first playthrough is always how I would act in the situations, second is “be a total douchebag”) to finish, then maybe I’ll pick up Catherine. Though my single male friend has been bugging me for MONTHS to play the Mass Effect games…

With Persona 4, Atlus addressed some issues of sexuality and gender. I’m curious to see what they did with Catherine.

Three job applications out today.

/highfive.

Not enough time to do more than skim tumblr.

Oh well. Real life calls.

fuckyeahgenderstudies:

Smoking is more likely to give women heart disease than men, a study has found.

Toxic chemicals in tobacco smoke may have a more potent effect on women due to biological differences, scientists believe.

US researchers analysed pooled data on around 4 million individuals from 86 studies. After adjusting for other risk factors, they found the increased risk of heart disease linked to smoking was 25% higher for women.

The longer a woman smoked, the greater her heart disease risk was compared with that of a man who had smoked for the same length of time. A woman’s extra risk increased by 2% for every additional year she had been smoking.
(Heart Disease Risk Greater for Women Smokers— Guardian) 

With new evidence today in the Lancet that smoking-heart disease risk is 25% higher for women, it seems as good a time as any to offer a refresher on how gender plays into heart health.

It’s really fucking despicable that the most advice women as a group receive about their hearts is pretty much to make sure they don’t get broken.

Because—listen (read) closely here—women are dying because this information is not getting out:

Patriarchal medicine kills women.

Sounds like an overreaction, right? Well, it fucking isn’t.
Medicine as a whole is overwhelming focussed on men’s health (funding, publicity, research). This fact has particularly egregious implication when it comes to women’s hearts.
Myocardial Infarction (heart attack) and heart disease kill more American women than men every single year and pose more of a threat to American women than the combined threat of every form of cancer. Unfortunately, many women (and doctors) do not know that the symptoms of a woman having a heart attack can be significantly different from those of a man, and that the commonly publicised “warning signs” and “symptoms” of heart attack are actually not that common.

Like chest pain. 
Yeah, chest pain! You read that right.

 Almost everybody believes that chest pain is the primary and most telling symptom of a heart attack. Not so, not in women. Only about 30% of women will experience chest pain/discomfort prior to a heart attack and 43% won’t experience any chest pain DURING one. At all.
So why do doctors still consider chest pain the most important marker of MI around? Why do so many doctors not even know that men’s and women’s symptoms differ? If neither the public nor those employed to take care of the public know, it’s no fucking wonder so many women are dying.

Major heart attack symptoms in women preceding the attack in order of reported frequency include:

• Unusual fatigue — 70%
• Sleep disturbance — 48%
• Shortness of breath — 42%
• Indigestion — 39%
• Anxiety — 35%

Major acute symptoms during a heart attack in women in order of reported frequency include:

• Shortness of breath — 58%
• Weakness — 55%
• Unusual fatigue — 43%
• Cold sweat — 39%
• Dizziness — 39%

Add to this the fact that heart device studies ignore women.

So—What the fuck?

Why are women being ignored? Why are researchers, physicians and governments ignoring these genuinely grave differences between cardiac function/dysfunction in men and women? 

Can someone please tell me, because i don’t fucking get it.

ignatius-m:

coelestinus:

I was leaving the library today and hopped in the car just in time to hear an ad for an all-male Shakespeare performance at Plymouth Plantation.

All-male performances were, of course, how things were done back in the day. So while today an all-male performance of something that actually does have female characters might give us pause, if the Plantation is aiming for a historical reenactment, they’re doing it right, and are perfectly entitled to do so.

And if the World Trade Center memorial is aiming to have important pieces of history in its museum, they should be allowed to do so - even if its the religious history. Yes, the cross doesn’t mean anything; yes, so, so much suffering occurred that day that no supernatural power stepped in to prevent; yes, the cross has been blessed and prayed around; yes, if the cross is in the museum then people will likely pray there; yes, the religious people are being ridiculous in placing so much value on some chunk of steel.

But we can’t write religion out of history, any more than we can write sexism out of history.

(oh, and this shit? This shit needs to stop. And don’t you dare tell me “I’m a real Christian, those people aren’t real Christians - let me introduce you to No True Scotsman)

Leaving the “cross” out of the WTC memorial isn’t removing an important piece of history. It’s refusing to allow a federal function to be co-opted by Christians trying to impose their views on others and intimidate other faith groups (or lack-of-faith groups) out of the public light.

We’re in agreement on the rest.

The organizers say that the cross would be in the museum, not the memorial: 

The culminating chapter of the historical exhibition will take visitors from the immediate aftermath of 9/11 to the present moment, exploring the character and challenges of the post-9/11 world. From presentations on collective grief, global responses, and the search for the missing in the immediate days and weeks after the attacks, the exhibition will explore the prodigious efforts of recovery and rebuilding at the three attack sites, describing innumerable acts of compassion, volunteerism and public service. A concluding presentation presents the ongoing questions arising out of 9/11, and the evolving nature of how we understand its significance and place in history

Via here, also here has a long discussion of figuring out where the cross would be.

If it’s in the museum, presented in a historical context of “here’s something that people took comfort in, in the context of other sources of comfort”…then I think this falls into the category of “choose your battles - and here’s one that will make you look terrible”. There are other religious symbols being presented (as well as non-religious artifacts), but I don’t know how one would be expected to find a symbol that represents non-theists and people who don’t identify with traditional religion, who are a diverse group lacking a central symbol (Silverman’s idea of an atom was just…ridiculous). 

 Of course, even in a secular context, I’m certain Christians will pray in front of the cross, and…well, honestly, that isn’t something that we can do anything about (besides, of course, not having the cross present at all). But I can imagine that people pray in other museums - the Holocaust Museum in particular comes to mind. People are going to do things like that. And yes, they’re being silly. But…I’ve trying to think of a sentence to follow this “but”, and all I can come up with is: as long as they’re not making a disturbance…oh well? 

ETA: I thought to add something else later, but the library had closed for the night so I was unable to. American Atheists themselves stated on their Facebook page:

James is certainly entitled to his opinion, but like many he has one fact wrong. The memorial and museum are separate entities. The memorial is a separate place surrounded by the museum. The cross is going in the memorial and is the only religious symbol in the memorial.

If it were part of a display in the museum…

I don’t have the link to this comment (it’s included in the discussion here), so I’m making the assumption that the “…” at the end is not saying “there’s more here that James cut out”, but that that’s how AA actually finished the comment. Edited again: I found AA’s comment, and this is the full text of it. So AA themselves appear to make a distinction between “cross in the museum” and “cross in the memorial” - which is an extremely important distinction. No, the cross should not be in the memorial - and according to the organizers of the memorial and museum, it won’t be. 

shortformblog:

Warren Jeffs convicted of child sex abuse: Sentencing came down today on Warren Jeffs, the 55-year-old leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (or FLDS). The FLDS is a group separate from mainstream Mormonism, which operated a ranch in West Texas in which authorities reportedly found “women dressed in frontier-style dresses and hairdos” as well as “underage girls who were clearly pregnant.” Jeffs himself had two underage brides, which led to the child sex abuse charges. He railed in court against what he called religious persecution in this matter, but that argument left the jury cold — they took just a half-hour to sentence Jeffs to life in prison. source

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