Oh damn!

Just had to share:

So, I am a member of this website called Shelfari where you can post the books you've read or want to read and share them with other people, get reccommendations, etc. One part of the site is to read and write reviews of the books on your "shelf" and I got an email with the tag line "see what other people are saying about the books on your shelf!" and just in passing I saw that a person had written this yesterday about "To Kill a Mockingbird":

quoth says
Agree with almost every word of most of your post, indrani. Except this part: "Gives you a picture of the real America (I have never been there)". The book depicts a very prejudiced period of America. Very true and realistic given the time period and setting. Thank God, however, most areas of our country has "grown up" since then. We've got much more growing to do , of course. But it is a "period piece", keep in mind. :)

Is this person for real? Yes, thank God we are out of the prejudiced period of America! I would have hated to live at a time when people were discriminated against based on race, class, gender, ability, or any of those things. We are so lucky! And what's with the fuckin smiley face? As in, here's my last condescending sentence where I talk down to you like a child and spray bullshit about grown-up america that is so distant from the terrible (almost unimaginable, since they happened so long ago) things depicted in "To Kill a Mockingbird," and I'm going to tack a smiley face on the end of it just to really bring home the greasy idiocy of my opinions.

Hell no!

-Etheline

the shit-head, my lab partner, and other white men

Marching behind this big huge globe today with thousands of other people was definitely the highlight of my day. Obviously any crowd that big is full of energy, but it was the speeches beforehand that really struck me. The best was the archibishop from Seattle, here's his quote from the Seattle PI:

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"Seattle Catholic Archbishop Alex Brunett, addressing demonstrators before the march at Judkins Park, said his church "respects the law" but "cannot ignore the human needs of immigrant workers and their families when the law fails to protect their basic human rights.""

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He also talked about how every person is welcome at any Catholic institution and that no one needs documents in a Catholic school, hospital, or any other Catholic social service. What. A. Badass.

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Being Catholic, you don't get tons of opportunities to be freakin' proud and happy about stuff like this. I won't go on about this topic just incase Olives doesn't want me to de-secularize the nature of our blog.

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Of course, whenever you hit the high of thousands of people claiming their freedom and humanity there has to be the obligatory ignorant shit-head who brings you back down a little. I had to leave the march early with a few friends and we walked back through the traffic-jammed streets. One of my friends still held her Mexican flag up proudly. We were still super pumped, talking about the awesomeness of the march when aforementioned shit-head leans out of his car window and actually yells "Go back to where you came from!" (that statement is, like, really out of fashion now isn't it? someone should tell him about all the new, more fashionable racist one-liners)

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Now, being me, I couldn't keep myself from giving him the finger and telling him that he needed to take his ass back wherever the hell he came from because my ancestors are fucking from here. Last time I checked the only legal documents his ancestors came with were a bunch of guns and poisonous diseases. Anyway, I wasn't really too mad about it all seeing as thousands of people were triumphantly taking the streets and keeping his ignorant self stuck in the biggest traffic jam of his life. Because, if it had been a contest, we won.

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In other news, my lab partner definitely thinks I'm whacked. Just because I seem to always misunderstand how every single measuring instrument works and because I thought it was super mind-blowing and awesome that my astronomy professor has looked back to almost the beginning of time. (It is awesome by the way, because the way light years work means that whenever you look at things in space, because of the time it takes light to travel that far you are seeing them as they were in the past which means the oldest things we can see are just not that long after the big bang. Tell me how that isn't something you would get excited about?). Anyway, he secretly loves being my lab partner.

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Seeing as I added "and other white men" to the title I guess I should include some:

Here's a shout out to you Vanilla Ice, Chevy Chase, guy who I don't know who always says hi to me, Elvis, Stephen Hawking, Dad, and Tony Blair.

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Ok, shit, I really need to study.

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-Etheline