Gypsy Poetry

Since everyone else has weighed in with their two cents, I might as well have a go, too.

This pre-pregnant stuff is creepy and presumptive. Now, it’s good advice to take care of yourself, whether you plan to have kids or not. I don’t like the assumption that every woman of childbearing age is just panting to get pregnant, though. They say that women should stick to what’s basically a pre-natal regiment throughout their childbearing years because half of all pregnancies are unplanned. Yep, many pregnancies are accidents, but you know what might help reduce the number of those? Easy access to cheap birth control and safe-sex education. Teach women to take care of themselves not only by taking vitamins, but by knowing how to better prevent pregnancies.

And this article makes some good points about how religious conservatism’s influence on the government is affecting women’s health care. For example: In fact, Glamour, has found that on issues ranging from STDs to birth control, some radical conservative activists have used fudged and sometimes flatly false data to persuade the government to promote their agenda of abstinence until marriage. The fallout: Young women now read false data on government websites, learn bogus information in federally funded sex-education programs and struggle to get safe, legal contraceptives—all of which, critics argue, may put them at greater risk for unplanned pregnancies and STDs. That chaps my lily-white arse. I’m all for everyone practicing their own morals. That’s fine and peachy-keen by me, but when you start shoving your morals down my throat in the guise of caring about my reproductive health? That’s bullshit.
And now, in non-political-ranty news, I’ve been reading. The hurricane book was awesome (Hurricane Watch : Forecasting the Deadliest Storms on Earth, in case you want to be an awesome nerd like me), even though I’ve read it probably six times. It follows the history of hurrican forecasting from when the first Europeans got smashed in the time of Columbus up to the late 1990s. It’s a very comfortable read, even for someone with next to no knowledge of meteorology, and that’s a great accomplishment for a science nonfiction book. Most of them try to appeal to the average Jane, but miss the mark. This one is actually quite pleasant to read. After I finished that, I read about half of East, West by Salman Rushdie. Actually, I got to the West section and got bored, hehe. “The Prophet’s Hair” is a beautifully written short story, and it showcases Rushdie’s incredible way with words. One of my favorite lines is this:

At dawn the next morning a flower-vendor was rowing his boat through water to which the cold of the night had given the cloudy consistency of wild honey when he saw the prone form of young Atta, who was just beginning to stir and moan, and on whose now deathly pale skin the sheen of wealth cound still be made out dimly beneath an actual layer of frost. (p.36)

And then, as the fickle reader I am, I got bored with the serious literature and decided to read some smut. I had picked up Emma Holly’s Strange Attractions at Half Price Books the other day, so I dove into it. Whew. There’s nothing like smut sometimes. This one is more erotica than romance, though I get the feeling all of that romantic lovey-dovey crap is going to show up sooner or later. I’m more impressed by the fact that Holly is writing both straight and gay erotica in this book. Way to push my buttons, Ms. Holly. The main female character is borderline annoying, just because she’s so damned spunky. I can only take so much spunk, no pun intended. The male characters are rather fascinating, though, and it’s fun to read an attempt to bring together the mysterious world of quantum physics with the magic of Really Hot Sex. No, I’m not joking. One of the guys is a big-time physicist, and he’s doing some kind of experiments studying sexual desire. No, I have no idea how that relates to quantum physics. But hey. It’s smut. Smut makes me happy.