Tags: bitch

moar funny pictures

Holy shit! Bitch magazine cannot go under!

Bitch magazine is basically the go-to offline source for feminist critique of breaking pop culture. They are a non-profit magazine, and have more content than ads (if you've ever read a commercial magazine - and come on, who hasn't - you know that this is quite a feat).

However, they are not able to sustain this kind of quality without financial support from readers and others who value a feminist voice in popular print media.

They need to raise $40k by mid-October. You can support bitch by becoming a subscriber or just plain donating.

So give up coffee for a month (or brew your own!), bike to work instead of driving or taking the train, sell some of those books that you'll probably never read again, hock that hideous chair your roommate/spouse/partner/boyfriend/younger-morefoolish-you got on craigslist, and give the money you saved to Bitch. Do what you need to do, people!

Tags: bitch

Went to the Alley yesterday with armchairshrink, gwenzilla, and c. I started out singing "What Do You Get When You Fall In Love", thinking it would be the slow, depressing version that I'm used to. Instead it was an offputtingly up-tempo rendition that totally threw me for a loop. Apparently I had to be rescued by the crowd singing over me.

Then I sang Summertime, which I knew well, but I think by then the crowd's faith in me was gone, and they started singing along (loudly!) with me right from the beginning. Which made me indignant. But of course, you can't just stop singing a song halfway because other people are drowning you out.

The crowd included like 10 people from the Oakland Gay Men's Chorus.

Tags: bitch, singing

Fini.

I am all but done. I finished early, but they wouldn't let me take my laptop until everyone else was done. I have to go back in like 5 minutes.

Who knew the bar examiners would be such sticklers for rules?

EDIT:
Laptop collected. Exams uploaded. Next phase of life officially on hold.

Tags: bitch, law school

David Rakoff's Don't Get Too Comfortable: Sexless and caustic faggot that liberal women and some straight guys love to love/pity. I didn't learn a lot, but I got through the book quickly. Also there were plenty of funny parts. And Rakoff's self-deprecation seems genuine, which is not the case with Burroughs.

Augusten Burroughs' Dry: Confessional, shallow, passive-aggressive self-congratulatory pedantry with a thin aspic of self-awareness and ironic detachment. Whatever you coat it in, it's still overdone tripe. But readable. Burroughs is the non-fiction Robert Rodi.

Next gay autobiographers to tackle: Dan Savage and David Sedaris.

Tags: bitch, books, queer

Y'all know how I love me an ordered list.

Marty Lederman tells us, from 1 to 10, what the AG scandal is all about. It's a Just So story for our time.

Tags: bitch, politics

I had an unexpectedly good time at a dinner full of attorneys, and an unexpectedly bad time at a party that didn't have any attorneys present. So I guess attorneys aren't all bad, and non-attorneys aren't all great.

Or maybe I'm starting to only really be able to get along with law students and attorneys. Mere mortals are no longer able to interact with me on any kind of pleasant level.

Or perhaps it's because I wore a suit to the attorney dinner and a skirt to the party, and people treat you different.

Tags: bitch, homophobia, law, law school, misogyny

I recently complained to a friend of mine that somebody we knew got on my nerves because all the stories he told portrayed him in a flattering light.

"Nobody wants to hear about how great your life is all the time, and about what a swell guy you are," I growled.

Over the next few days, I realized that all around me, people were telling stories putting themselves in a positive light. Self-deprecation seems to be a dying art.

In California, especially, the success-story dominates the conversation-scape. Even stories that start out being about mistakes and failures end in some kind of "lesson learned," so that in the end the speaker has "grown" from the experience. This "redemption story" is really a sub-genre of the success story. Perhaps it satisfies the same drive that makes people get "born again." Newsflash - it is not self-deprecatory to tell a story where you fuck up and then improve yourself.

When people tell me stories where they come off looking vulnerable, foolish, mean, petty, terribly unlucky, and so on, I feel honored. It's the human equivalent of rolling over and exposing your tender underbelly. Pain, humiliation, insecurity, heartbreak, these are the things that bring us together. It's a cruel world, and I want to hear about it.

Tags: bitch, musing