MeghanIsMe

This is important, and I hope you'll consider it.

This is about the dangers -- to you, and the people you try to help -- of communicating online about abortion in coded ways, like talking about "camping trips" and so on.
Please remember that the people enforcing laws against abortion are religious zealots in positions of power, and they're going to treat this like murder.

Let's say you have a friend in state Foo where abortion is illegal. You live in state Bar where it is legal. Your friend, who was in your state recently for a business trip or a vacation, has had a miscarriage. A year ago, you posted something about state Bar being a great place to come for "camping" *wink wink*.

State Foo is going to subpoena your friend's phone records, Facebook history, and so on. Maybe your friend called you or visited while they were in state Bar. They'll find your post about "camping" from a year ago. Now your post could be used as evidence that your friend didn't just miscarry. Also, congratulations: you are now accessory to a murder.

Maybe a year from now, you visit state Foo. Maybe on a vacation, maybe to see a friend, it doesn't matter. Police run your plate. Maybe because you got a parking ticket, maybe because you were in front of one in traffic and they felt like checking the out-of-stater. You have an outstanding warrant from your friend's "abortion". You are going to jail. You may or may not have had the slightest thing to do with any of this. It may not even have been an abortion. Just bad timing.

An alternative ending: a year after your friend's miscarriage, state Bar comes under new leadership. The new governor signs off on extradition for criminals of your class. State Foo has you extradited for trial. You're going to jail.

Please, think about this. I'm a little bit insulated from all of this right now since I'm living in Canada. If you're in the US, you are probably not.

Think about how you'd behave if you were helping someone commit a murder. *Do that*, because according to these zealots, that's what you're doing.

If you think these are valid concerns, *please* copy and share and attribute to anonymous.

United States senator from Texas John Cornyn wants segregated schools and the Jim Crow South to be legal again.

That's literally what he just said.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/texas-senator-john-cornyn-says-now-do-plessy-vs-fergusonbrown-vs-board-of-education/ar-AAYRRA0

Tell me it's not about fundamental bigotry and racism that overturning Roe v. Wade was just the start of.

I didn't dare to have hope for the Georgia runoffs over that past month. I have hope now.

It's about 9 AM here and I am awake early (for me) with a headache. At least the sun is mostly up.

The developing story about a whistle-blower complaint against Trump is curious, and I'll follow along with the news and see where it goes out of idle interest.

I suspect, though, that no matter what information comes out though, it won't matter much. To his supporters, it doesn't seem to matter a whit what horrible things Trump and people around him do. The fact that the US could potentially reelect someone like Trump is, purely in itself, enough to make me feel like the system we have has fundamentally failed. When so many people could want as purely vile and worthless a human being as Trump in office, it's hard to imagine it getting better in the near future. I just never thought, growing up, that this many people could think and behave in this way. I'm not sure I believe anymore that the moral arc of the USA bends, in the long term, toward justice. It makes me glad to be leaving the country.

In my head, the queen of England inviting Trump over for tea plays out like Aunts Abby and Martha inviting a lonely old gentleman into their parlor for a glass of elderberry wine. It would be doing him a service.

I was home from work Wednesday; I was too tired and too crazy to make it in. I couldn't help but stay up with the election returns on Tuesday. There was a point when 538's live forecast, before they switched to a less volatile model, was predicting better than even odds of Republicans taking the house and it made me feel physically ill. It was like reliving the increasing horror of the odds of a Clinton victory sliding ever downward on election night two years ago. I didn't get to sleep until after midnight and was dead on my feet at quarter to five when I usually start getting ready for the day.

Danae was home with me. At first, I thought I'd sleep in a bit and do some work. Instead, I spent the day on the couch with her until my therapy appointment, startled awake over and over from bad dreams.

In the end, the results are basically what I expected, and that's pretty good. I'm scared of Sessions leaving, and sad about Texas and Florida, but I don't even know what I'd do if the Democrats didn't have the lower chamber. There's a lot of balancing to do for the left, between aggressively fighting the right's agenda and avoiding some kind of public perception of spiteful obstructionism. (Why doesn't that seem to be a problem for the right?) I worry about whether things will get much better and that they'll end up staying the same or even getting worse. Continued one-party control of all of Congress, though, feels like a bullet-train to hell so at least that left the station without us.

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Between Rufus having another seizure last night and working at the dog shelter afterward until nine, I overslept enough this morning that I drove the car in. I'm disappointed; I would have loved to bike in the first snow of the year.

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I suspect have a different relationship to a lot of music than most people. Music is tied closely enough to social groups and culture that someone's tastes in it can serve as a shorthand for any number of characteristics. I, though, typically am exposed to music through buying a CD at a thrift store that I've heard of or that sounds interesting and seeing whether I like it in a vacuum, disconnected from the context that a typical listener might associate with it. I also typically listen to entire albums at once to start with, because I want to place the individual songs in the context of the the others.

I bought Lady Gaga's "The Fame" a few days ago and have listened to it. It's certainly tightly put together, technically. Paparazzi and Poker Face particularly are catchy and stick in my head. Paparazzi, of course, is a super-creepy song about a stalker, while Poker Face seems to be about intentionally withholding your thoughts and feelings from someone you're attracted to.

Oddly enough, it made me think a little about Meatloaf's "Bat Out of Hell." I already owned the LP, but I found it on CD a while back and had to buy it that way too to make listening in the car easier. I like most of that album because, even though it sets up clearly adversarial relationships with the women in the song, the coherent nature of the songs as a whole paints an interesting character portrait of the singer and I can kind of get inside his head a little bit. Like acting, I can live a little bit of another life for a bit and have experiences that aren't in my real life. I don't get that from "The Fame." It's either too far outside my own experience, or expresses actions and a mindset that I don't feel any desire to be inside of.

On a tangent, it occurred to me that, while most of "Bat Out of Hell" would be simply awful philosophy to base relationships on, "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" is actually an example of pretty good communication!

...And now I have Poker Face in my head. It's amazing how catchy pop music can be.

I did a twenty-five mile ride from Evanston down the channel trail, across Lawrence to the Lakefront Trail, then to Lincoln Park. And back. It was cold enough to put my vest and gloves on, but a really nice time other than that. My next goal is a fifty mile trip on the same route but ending at the South Shore Cultural Center.

But for now, my bike and I are ready for Naked Bike Ride tomorrow!

Speaking of my bike, the stickers I had printed look great. They didn't stick to the panniers very well, so I ended up putting them on plastic backing and then drilling holes to tie on to the outside of my panniers. I'm really happy with them!





The slogan is a reference to a sticker that Woody Guthrie, a musical voice against inequality, had on his guitar. This mural I photographed on the wall of the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, shows Woody with his guitar.