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By Mina Xavier, October 1, 2009 1:48 pm

The following just took place via text, with one of my best friends in the city. It started with his complaint about his coworker’s… um, assets.

“Is it socially acceptable to tell a girl, flat-out, that I wish she would put her tits away? It’s horrendously distracting.”

I pondered this.

“Is she hanging off of a brass pole?”

[pause]

“No, what kind of jackass goes to a girly bar for lunch?”

“My ex. And his uber-cool-senate-coworker-types.”

[pause]

“I forgot about that. That’s pretty damn funny.”
[pause]
“I mean… it’s not funny. I’m sorry. “

“S’ok. It’s finally funny to me. He’s still stuck with the potato sack bar girl, who’s gained like 60# since I left him with her.”

“Dayum…”

“Are they at least appealing?”

“Which?”

“The offending mammaries. How are they?”

“They’re nice. Pale. With a tiny tattoo on the left one. She’s not wearing thick enough shirts for the decibel level of her nipples, though.”

“LMAO”

“She’s just so ridiculously titty. I’m sure that’s why she got hired. No one in the department likes her or her bullhorns.”

“What’s her job title? Is she clerical?”

“They hired her as eye candy. And to torture the uninterested, a la moi.”

“So, she’s the Token Titty Taunter?”

“OMFG. Marry me.”

“No.”

“Srsly? Why not?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”
[pause]
“I’m not opposed to legitimate heterosexuality, you know. You’re my favorite feral.”

“Just because.”

“????”

“I’m saving myself for Ann Coulter.”

“ROF I fuckin love you, bitch.”

“I’ll toast to that.”

“You’re writing my eulogy. That’s it. Done deal.”

“Oh good, I could use the exposure.”

“Lol. I’m off lunch, see you later, sweetie. <3″

“Tootlez.”

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By Mina Xavier, September 25, 2009 11:11 pm

From the ecclesiastical Latin dēsertum (originally “an abandoned place”), a participle of dēserere, “to abandon.”

Here’s the first question: How much life is required to satisfy the quota for “teeming”, and at which point do we examine a culture and pronounce it dead?

I’m running on caffeine fumes and sheer tenacity.  I broke my tension tonight by ignoring the GPS wench and taking I-95 and Rt 1 in alternating loops for a high speed therapy drive. My old steel beast of a Honda took me rolling like thunder between 70-90mph to clear my head.

I could hear the engine shift her gears, feel the low hum of the road surfaces changing between highways and off-ramps and Old Lincoln Highway on my blaze through the car dealership district and back onto 95. I always have a song or two stuck in my head anyway, so who needs a stereo?

I pulled into the gravel and decided that I still wasn’t thoroughly cleared out. So I took a walk. I’m pleased to rediscover this lately. For the last few months I’ve been walking more, mostly at night. It’s neat to hear the cars rushing past. If you stand still on a dry night with an adequate breeze, you can trick a tiny part of your brain into believing that the sound is that of nocturne tides touching the beach.

I watched people smoke weed on a stoop beside a Wawa. I watched a guy freak out at the credit card reader at the nearby gas station because he’d only just then realized that he’d pulled into a closed station and was going to have to find another. I listened to car stereos scream by. I smiled at the cop as he waited at the light. I suspect that not many people actually smile at cops.

An uncomfortable epiphany scrolled along the bottom of my mental screen like a sordid CNN marquee: Don’t drop anchor here.

I am aware that this feeling creeps up when I listen to too much Nick Cave and Utah Phillips. I am also aware of the first lesson of my faith: I am living as an absolved soul on a planet of the dead. This is, indeed, a fallen world. So much so that on some days it feels like a post-apocalyptic hellhole of very few reprieves and even fewer signs of life.

I signed up for this, so I’m in it. I could surrender my Will to chance and revel in the death rituals of millions of lost souls and burn with them, or I can push through and remain as I am, carving upward into the face of the mountain until I reach its peak. It is still up to me. I already know what I want; it’s simply a matter of disciplining myself in the discrepancies between the Temporary versus the Permanent.

The walk cleared my head quite a bit, through the barren system of roads and grass that wasn’t dark just because of a lack of daylight. This place has long ago been abandoned by meaningful life and left for [the?] dead. I have noticed that Joel Rosenberg has found, in the Middle East, a hotbed of new life. A volcanic shit-storm of redemption, rebirth and reconnection to human community and the reversal of spiritual death.

For all of its glaring dangers and inhospitable conditions, it’s thriving. And we are not.

Which begs the next question: Do I stay, or do I go?

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By Mina Xavier, September 16, 2009 11:34 am

Click to enjoy the rest…

Continue reading 'Video Mixtape: Nick Cave'»

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By Mina Xavier, September 15, 2009 12:43 pm

With season 4 debuting on September 27, all eyes are on the internet for leaks and photos from the set of America’s favorite serial killer, Dexter Morgan.

I was going to host a Dexter party for the opening night, but decided against it. For one, this is a household that cherishes its serenity enough to refuse the pollution of a cable television signal. Secondly, I would provide the treats but would be loathe to experience the extensive carpet cleaning after the predictable experiment with blood spatter analysis using salsa. (My homemade vegan salsa.)

For those interested, the betting pool is over for the baby name, but the resulting comment stream was uproariously funny.

It can’t be that bad. Even gospel singer Charlotte Church named her son Dexter Lloyd back in January.

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By Mina Xavier, September 15, 2009 2:13 am

The most annoying thing that has ever befallen me whilst spooning in the cold fatty goodness of ice cream is the incongruity of textures. The ice cream melts faster and the frozen chocolate chips become a mouthful of cold bricks that stick to the teeth.

Andie, on the other hand, had a story to tell me today that just positively takes the cake. She was roughly one quarter of the way into a pint of rocky road when she noticed a funny tickle in her mouth. She gave it a tactile examination with her tongue and, producing no satisfactory hypothesis, she re-spooned it to give it a visual inspection.

Parts of a dead, frozen millipede lay in her gaze.

I’m not one to judge the exotic delicacies of others, but the sudden discovery of a cryo-insect embedded in one’s dessert is enough to send me screaming to the medicine cabinet for some Pepto.

She was an excellent sport about it, though.

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By Mina Xavier, August 29, 2009 10:51 pm

Depeche Mode – Wrong – from this year’s Sounds Of The Universe”

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By Mina Xavier, January 31, 2009 12:18 am

Many thanks to Britt for sending me this article! David Hochman has made an astute observation in his online article this week for Women’s Health Magazine: men and women are different. For the uninformed, this is a major news break! For the rest of us it is simply the obvious presented on an unpolished spoon.

What’s my gripe, you ask? I do not suggest that men are disqualified to report gender observations, but I would prefer that they not do so in such a careless manner.  Contrary to any good writer’s better judgement, Hochman uses his own wife as an example of negative interaction.

At breakfast the other day, I made the mistake of opening my laptop when my wife felt like talking. I was happily trolling YouTube, but Ruth wanted to dish about how her friend’s nanny is becoming a total hoochie mama. “You’re fun this morning,” Ruth sniffed when she realized I wasn’t listening.

To attempt a recovery from this faux pas, he then takes a shot at himself as an unworthy mate who is trapped in the caveman biology of his gender and therefore a helpless hack.

As a female human, Ruth has a meatier frontal cortex than this grunting, monosyllabic husband of hers. That part of the brain is associated with complex functions–like language and decision making. Ruth also packs more power in parts of her limbic cortex, which stokes her feelings and her need to “share.” Finally, because guys tend to process nonverbal expressions less efficiently than women do, I was too slow to read Ruth’s facial cues telling me, “Laptop down and listen up, buddy boy.”

Ruth’s frontal cortex has nothing to do with her embittered response to his internet musings, nor does David’s gender handicap him to the point that he is incapable of simply pardoning his distraction and rejoining the table for a recap of what he missed. The episode itself illustrates something that both David and his editors seem to have missed: women assume that they are being ignored, get angry about it, and immediately punish the other side of the breakfast table for a lack of psychic talent. Men are less fixated on chatter and therefore forget its importance as a form of maintenance between mates.

By extension, we could be on the verge of solving such imponderables as why men leave the toilet seat up and women dig Josh Groban.

One study quoted in this article was that of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. MRI scans were used to discern the differences between how the sexes cope with stress. Feelings of anxiety trigger a “tend and befriend” response in the female limbic system. We negotiate, bargain, argue and even manipulate to resolve danger. In male test subjects, however, the prefrontal cortex flared dramatically in the classic “fight or flight” response. Men, reportedly, are more likely to react to threatening situations with defensive violence to protect themselves and their kin.

To take these differences and pit them against one another in a mutually uncomfortable confrontation is essentially what we saw acted out in the anecdote at the start of his article. But to observe that men and women are wired differently is like pointing out that dogs bark. Gender analysis like Hochman’s, based on legitimate research but drawing some rather simplistic conclusions about some very complicated issues, is part of the reason why we still have the Mars/Venus theory keeping us gridlocked in a DNA blame game. We are still ducking the responsibility to compromise in relating to the mysterious other sex.

Another equally valid point to be considered (one completely avoided by Hochman) with regards to this topic is the documented neurological differences between heterosexual and homosexual males and females. A clear example of responsible reporting on the subject came last year in an issue of Time Magazine, in which science correspondent Alice Park explored the question: are the brains of heterosexuals different from those of homosexual men and women?

“The big question has always been, if the brains of gay men are different, or feminized, as earlier research suggests,” says Dr. Eric Vilain, professor of human genetics at University of California Los Angeles, “then is it just limited to sexual preference or are there other regions that are gender atypical in gay males?”

The evidence surveyed in the studies was irrefutable. Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden provided valuable data in the study of human sexuality, even if it was narrowed to a study of the physical properties of the brain as an organ.

In heterosexual women, the two halves of the brain are more or less the same size. In heterosexual men, the right hemisphere is slightly larger. Scans of the brains of gay men in the study, however, showed that their hemispheres were relatively symmetrical, like those of straight women, while the brains of homosexual women were asymmetrical like those of straight men. The number of nerves connecting the two sides of the brains of gay men were also more like the number in heterosexual women than in straight men.

Additionally, I might have suggested that Hochman examine a separate factor altogether: social programming. In ignoring the nature-versus-nurture argument we miss the benefit of this dichotomy for its compelling challenge. We are neither permitted to write ourselves off for our biological makeup nor are we permitted to be careless in our assessments of social influence. The article only barely touches on this concept.

In historical and even modern societies, women are limited to a primarily verbal and social existence while men are limited to a mostly athletic and vocational existence, each defining themselves through their achievements and status therein. Occasionally these diverse tracks intersect rudely and result in a microcosm of culture shock — like any marital dispute — which will either break a relationship or strengthen it.

Less sophisticated minds might use it to make demeaning observations about their partners as fodder for writing internet articles that make them feel smart. For Ruth’s sake I hope that her husband’s preparation for this piece gave him insights into how he can bridge these gaps… and that she never reads it.

Throwing Josh Groban under the bus is not likely to bode well for future breakfast conversation.

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By Mina Xavier, January 26, 2009 3:28 pm

This number has called me several times over the last few days. Because I am a nosy little rube, I called them back just to see who this was. A woman with a heavy eastern accent named “Abigail” (yeah right) identified herself as a representative for University Opportunity Services. When I grilled her for how they got my cell number, she finally slipped and uttered the phrase “career site”.

I hit the roof. I had joined a few job search sites months ago for the sake of upgrading my then-impossible position.
One of them, Job.com, has a section where users are asked if they plan to increase their level of education.
They are VERY manipulative with this. The options read as though you are either interested in a degree “someday” or you are a deadbeat who doesn’t care about your future.

They prey on your insecurity about what employers will think of you, and then bombard you with advertisement screens for colleges.
Whether or not the job you were being teased with in the first place actually exists is impossible to know, since no one ever contacts you regarding your application or your resume. Users give their cell and home numbers so that prospective employers can contact them.  These calls are the final result.  They sell your information to these telemarketers.

THIS IS SLEAZY, AND I DO NOT LIKE IT.
I have had the same bombardment from Jobseeker, CareerBuilder, Monster, and so on down the line.
DO NOT use these sites to find a job. The number of complaints received by the FTC and the BBB are astounding.

INSTEAD: Go to a reputable classifieds site for YOUR region that is affilated with a real newspaper (like phillyburbs. com) and start looking there.

These telemarketers are under investigation by the FTC and you can help by posting your experiences and complaints to www. callercomplaints. com.

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By Mina Xavier, January 23, 2009 7:42 pm

I don’t generally play the fan girl and I don’t ever advocate the adoration of any person in this way, but I did find some fascinating statements in these letters. I didn’t vote for him. But I am interested in watching him to see what occurs within his administration.

In their latest issue (hitting newsstands January 27), Ms. Magazine has collected a stunning array of letters and remarks from feminist icons and activists across the country, written directly to President Barack Obama.

Some of the more memorable among them:

SOW EDUCATION, REAP REWARDS.
To solve the most challenging problems facing our world, President Obama should actively promote global gender equality. For every additional year of education a woman receives beyond the fourth grade, her average family size drops by 20 percent, her children’s mortality rates drop by 10 percent and her risk of HIV/AIDS infection drops by over 50 percent.
—KAVITA RAMDAS, PRESIDENT AND CEO, GLOBAL FUND FOR WOMEN

ENSURE WOMEN CAN EARN.
The road to social parity for women of all cultures, including Afghanistan, is the same: universal education for girls, access to health care and family planning for women, and, above all, the means to earn money. Earnings give a woman a voice in the family, the society and her own destiny. Nothing else will elevate a woman as quickly in any culture, including our own.
—MAVIS LENO, CHAIR, FEMINIST MAJORITY FOUNDATION’S CAMPAIGN TO HELP AFGHAN WOMEN AND GIRLS

ROOT OUT MILITARY RAPE.
As commander in chief, President Obama can direct the military never to tolerate or hide the sexual persecution of its women again, and to lift the ban against women in combat, which denies them the respect they have earned. Today, even as women soldiers are fighting and dying in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, their treatment by their comrades is a national scandal. They are sent into combat without official recognition, one-third are sexually assaulted and almost all are harassed. Here is Obama’s chance to take on military misogyny at its roots.
—HELEN BENEDICT, AUTHOR OF THE FORTHCOMING THE LONELY SOLDIER: THE PRIVATE WAR OF WOMEN SERVING IN IRAQ (BEACON PRESS, APRIL)

DEAR PRESIDENT OBAMA:
I have received so many breathless letters myself and now it’s role reversal time. You have reawakened a disillusioned and passive electorate and begun healing racial wounds that have crippled us for centuries. I believe, like you do, that America today is not as intolerant and bitterly divided as we are encouraged to be by the mainstream media and the military industrial complex that dictates its messaging. It is my sincere hope that our national discourse will rise to your example and employ more humility and maturity in the political arena. I look forward to working with you. ¡Viva democracia!
—ANI DIFRANCO, SINGER-SONGWRITER

BROADEN HEALTH CARE.
Create health care systems that are culturally competent, linguistically accessible and geographically centered in underserved communities. It is imperative for our nation’s leaders to make the health of women of color a priority.
—ELEANOR HINTON HOYTT, PRESIDENT AND CEO, BLACK WOMEN’S HEALTH IMPERATIVE

RE-ROUTE U.S. MONEY.
It’ll be a long hard slog for our new president to correct all the ways American policies deepen the marginalization and poverty of women in developing countries. From the boatloads of cash we send to patriarchal, undemocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia to the trade policies that allow U.S. corporations to exploit the labor of some of the most impoverished women in the world—it’ll take more than the brush of a presidential pen. In the meantime, can we at least not spread sexist dogma with our aid dollars? Billions in U.S. funding for HIV/AIDS prevention require recipients to preach abstinence and condemn prostitution. It doesn’t work, it’s dangerous and it should end, straight away.
—SONIA SHAH, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST; AUTHOR OF THE BODY HUNTERS: TESTING NEW DRUGS ON THE WORLD’S POOREST PATIENTS AND CRUDE: THE STORY OF OIL

REMEMBER THE THREE R’S.
Feminists understand that equality for women and girls will be sustained when government makes progressive education a national agenda. As we study and learn together we create community. Making literacy and democratic education available to everyone is the necessary foundation for responsible citizenship. Without education, diverse populations cannot communicate across boundaries.
—BELL HOOKS, AUTHOR AND DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR IN RESIDENCE, BEREA COLLEGE

DON’T FORGET THE POOR.
The most urgent problem facing women and girls here and around the globe is poverty and its dire consequences: poor health, dying young, illiteracy, violence, HIV/AIDS, unwanted pregnancies, dependency, bleak futures. Women continue to be unsafe in their homes, their workplaces, refugee camps and in war-torn spots around the world. Their families, not just middle-class families, need the president’s ear.
—BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL, FOUNDING DIRECTOR, WOMEN’S RESEARCH & RESOURCE CENTER, SPELMAN COLLEGE

ELEVATE WOMEN SCIENTISTS.
President Obama can encourage young women to enter careers in science and technology by appointing distinguished women to influential positions in such federal agencies as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Young women need to believe that they have a place in science, and success breeds success.
—SHIRLEY M. TILGHMAN, PRESIDENT, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

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By Mina Xavier, January 9, 2009 11:01 pm

I have been a fan of Dead Can Dance for quite some time, but only within the past few years have I been able to truly share their work with others through the creativity of fans on Youtube.

“Bird” – from A Passage in Time

Continue reading 'A Beautiful Noise'»

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By Mina Xavier, January 7, 2009 2:36 am

I got stuck watching Rock Of Love at a friend’s house the other night.

I had a difficult time keeping my food down.

First of all, I don’t care who the hell you think you are: you’re just a man and not a job interview.

Secondly, if you are willing to throw yourself into a cattle shoot of plastic mammaries and chemical tans just to audition to be some re-worked rock star’s trophy girlfriend, then you have just signed up for whatever mental abuse and strategic humiliation you get.

The distended skin of their chests barely kept itself from tearing under the strain of the unnatural orbs shoved underneath to the degree of looking grotesque. I actually thought that some of these girls were female impersonators. The high point was when a six foot tall Brazilian supermodel, disgusted with one of the show’s dozen blondes for dumping beer on her, started a hilarious catfight wherein she clocked her, smacked chips onto her face, and choked her. Immediately the other 23 girls were surrounding the melee in a flurry of legs, shouting, whining and beer. Primo entertainment.

The rejects from Rock Of Love get their own ridiculous reality circus, Charm School,  with Sharon Osborne. She forces them through a very bizarre sort of rehab good for its own laughs via high drama screaming matches over shampoo, stealing jewelry and spitting on one other. Scene of the century: uber-bimbo from hell Megan snerks a jab at Sharon about her family, resulting in instant retaliation. Before this Paris-wannabe knew it she was covered in Sharon’s drink and having her spray-tanned ass hauled off the set and onto the sidewalk … in a bikini.

I could get fanatical with the feminism whip but it’s pretty much pointless at this juncture. I used to be ferociously protective of other females. Now I just sit back and let kharma do its cleanup work. I don’t think I could stomach a guy who found that bullshit even remotely amusing or attractive.