WARNING (to my few readers): This entry talks a little bit about female genital mutilation. If you do not like the topic or prefer more g-rated topics I would skip reading this.


I should be doing something productive, such as working on some sort of homework that I have. However, my motivation seems to have gone away and so I am going to attempt to update this wonderful thing.

Lately I've had nothing really strike me as worthy of note. I have many of the same old tired ideas come back to me, but as they are my own recycled thoughts from a previous time they are not worthy of being posted. Other thoughts I've had seem cliche to me, which leads to the same conclusion of being unworthy of note.

I'm taking this as a sign of my life being stagnant right now, where things are just the same as they were and I apparently can't see in a different light enough to even take a new spin on an old idea. Perhaps I am reading too much into a simple writer's block. I would question whether it can be called writer's block when considering the verbal diarrhea I put here because writer's block is usually associated with good or at least prolific writers, but I'm digressing from the original complaint.

Perhaps the block with break when my routine is broken next week by a completely new experience. We shall see.

In the meantime, here's the new thought that seems like an over-asked and probably cliche question. Are vaginal plastic surgeries female genital mutilation?

I question this because anyone who would look at the procedure alone would say that it is. It's chopping up women's genitals or altering them in some way. The last article I read about this just defined female genital mutilation as altering or cutting the female genitalia. I wonder if there needs to be a new definition for this. Would it be mutilation if the procedure causes the woman permanent harm or pain? Would it mutilation be if someone chooses it for the woman rather than the woman herself choosing the alteration? Perhaps, it's considered mutilation the woman does the behavior out of her own accord but it is due to the beliefs passed to her by the society. If the last definition is mutilation, then so is the plastic surgery performed on women's genitalia. However, no woman walks into a plastic surgeon's office and asks to have her genitals mutilated, cut, chopped or altered; they ask for reconstruction, revitalization or whatever euphemistic terms someone might use to sell surgery.

Trying to distinguish between plastic surgery and mutilation will continue to leave me puzzled at the ideological level. I think of the women's liberation movement and am further puzzled. Part of the movement was to allow women more opportunities and choices that may otherwise not have been allowed, such as vaginal plastic surgeries. On the other hand, feminists still often speak out against the unrealistic images of the female body propagated by the media because of the possible negative consequences on real women. This latter part is more applicable to waistlines rather than genitalia, but with pornography being more accessible and abundant than ever in our digital age I have to wonder if the parallel is being drawn. Is it possible that with more women watching pornography that they acquire an ingrained idea of what their genitalia should look like? Could this idea cause women to have plastic surgery on their visible sex organs?

Is it more feminist to say that vaginal plastic surgeries are simply women taking control of their own reproductive health and sexual satisfaction, which is a choice that early feminists fought for? Or is it more feminist to say that it is society's warped perception of the female body by the media that is causing women to alter their bodies in new ways? There is the third alternative that is a more extreme version of the latter view, that it is simply genital mutilation caused by societal beliefs. Would that more extreme view be more feminist than the other two points?

Is there anyone who knows more about feminism and female genital mutilation willing to give me an answer? Where is the line drawn between surgery and mutilation?

My main mode of transport to school happens to be walking and sometimes I will take the bus to save time since I am able to do so for free. Now my commute is a little on the long side and I tend to either space out entirely to music, learn things or make observations. Today was a day of observation.

As today was a very warm day everyone was outside enjoying the lovely weather. Upper-Midwesterners tend to treasure any sort of warmth we get that isn't 95 degrees or above and rush to do outdoor activities when it's sunny. I noticed the usual people on mopeds without helmets and ipods in their ears. This baffles me in itself because they may not hear another car around them and wind up with some sort of brain injury because they were not wearing a helmet.

However strange this sight may be, a slightly more commonplace sight stole my attention. I noticed two females rollerblading in very short shorts and sports bras, nothing more. I wondered to myself, why on earth would these women do this? Rollerblading is an activity where you move at relatively fast rates of speed with little control, why would you lack protective gear? You may run like that, but you have very good control over your feet when running. Then it hit me, they were likely trying to attract a potential partner because if this weren't the goal they would have thought to try to not look as attractive and put on protective gear.

Firstly, this saddens me that people would sacrafice their own safety like that to attract a partner, perhaps just for a one night stand. Why would these women not wear helmets? One could severely injure one's brain attempting this, which leads to very serious consequences (intellectual disabilities, motor issues and so forth). However, I couldn't help but think why on earth, even if these women were out to attract others, would they not take care of their prized mate-attracting possession: their breasts? You may be willing to risk breaking a knee or an arm, but getting road rash on your breasts? Perhaps it is because I am female, but I would not risk getting road rash on my breasts.

This still baffles me, along with many other things in life.

I've begun to wonder about something lately. It was brought on by a discussion about "race." Really, it was a discussion about ethnicity, but I say race for simplicity's sake because racism is a word, ethnicism is not.

Does white privilege make it alright to treat white people differently in a detrimental manner?

Is it ok to deny the qualified white person a job and give it to the less qualified minority applicant because you assume that with the privilege they have that they can get another job more easily? Is it ok to call them a cracker or a honkey because they will have it easier in life overall and can handle a little bit of insulting?

I can completely see the whole idea of making white people walk in a minority's shoes for a few miles. I also have a problem with it because it is fighting fire with fire. If we are attempting to eradicate treating people poorly because of the color of their skin are we really doing that? Is there another way?

Honestly this is a whole big long issue to tackle and I don't see another way, which makes me sad.

I should be tackling the mountain of homework that I've been picking away at so slowly that it may never go away, but this hasn't been updated lately  so.....

In my ever-present paranoia that I'm not normal I am beginning to think that some evolutionary time clock that should be ticking is not. I watch how the other women my age look at babies. They coo and proclaim "Oh how cute" then proceed to speak in motherese or simply pretend that their brains fell out of their heads. This reaction does not come naturally to me. Frankly, when I see babies they don't look quite human yet. They're weird little chubby things that eat, poop and cry.

That being said, I have come into a problem lately. Now, I realize this is going to sound cliche, but I wouldn't attest to it's veracity if it didn't happen.

The problem: People who feel the need to randomly show me pictures of their infants.
Usually I can suppress my initial reaction of "oh that's a nice alien-like creature you have there" and go along with the "how cute" reaction. However, I have a feeling that I must radiate some sort of energy that makes people show me the strangest pictures they could think of. For example, imagine an infant with its eyes crossed, tongue sticking out and a giant cowlick.  This child looks to me as if it has not been cared for or that it's being tortured. I wonder if the only acceptable response is "oh how cute!!!" to these pictures. Is it such that the biological instinct to take care of one's children so strong that one finds them beautiful in the worst of photos? I wouldn't even necessarily believe that the child to be an ugly baby, but for the photos I've been shown many of them must be.

How do you deal with the terrible pictures? Ugly babies?

I feel that I've neglected this thing, but oh well so is life and school. Anyway here's a little anecdote.

This isn't something that comes up much and when it does it's only with people I'm close to for obvious reasons, but I get great joy from deleting "friends" from facebook. Now I don't do this willy-nilly, I have standards. Generally, if I did something for a short amount of time with you and I haven't seen or heard from you in a long while (many months or a year) I delete you. For example, I've played in many quartets, usually I'm only with the same group for three months when I do play in quartets and never see those musicians outside of rehearsal. Many a violinist from long ago have been deleted, though they are associated with the violin, perhaps it was meant to be that way. Another reason to delete, people who were in one class with me once and we're to that point where we pretend not to know one another. If we pretend not to know one another in person, why are we friends on facebook? I've had it where I passed by a friend on facebook who had made contact with me a few times, I waved and said hi. There was no response, I may as well have been invisible. He was later deleted.

Anyway, usually there is no problem with this. Generally I do not see the people I delete, which is part of the reason why they were deleted. However, this came to bite me in the butt yesterday. I ran to a rather tall building to turn in a take home final (my last literary analysis, hooray!) after depositing a rather large amount of oddly written literary analysis, more commonly known as bull-shit, in Spanish on a high floor I meandered to the elevator. Inside it was a person who I was in a class with once. I remember his full name because he went by his first name in English and his middle name in Swahili (sisemi kiswahili, ninasema kingereza na kihispania kidogo-that's all I can remember...). Anyway, I didn't want to say anything because I wasn't sure if he remembered me. In addition, it's hard to keep a conversation with someone you hardly know. This turned into one of those times where you have two people who pretend not to know one another. It's one of those times when you know both people are debating whether it would be super weird to say anything. Then the elevator opened and no one was there, even mentioning that it was weird that no one was there was, in fact, odd to the extent of not making eye contact in conversation.  Later I got off the elevator and walked away quickly.

It wasn't until after the fact that I realized that it could be my facebook deleting that might have made it more odd.

So the big questions:
Do you delete people from facebook? If so, for what reasons?
Are you offended by people deleting you as friends on their facebook?