I’m collecting here the best explainer posts, widgets, and videos on the health care legislation that just passed. Immediately after the bill made it through, I started getting questions from friends who are politically aware enough to know it was happening, but not nearly as hooked-in as I am–and I couldn’t even tell them what was in the bill. So, here’s my attempt to help with that problem. Above is a video from GRITtv (yes, my place of employment) with Maggie Mahar of HealthBeatBlog.org and Jacob Hacker, the inventor of the public option (that we didn’t get) explaining what’s in the bill and when it takes place.
The Washington Post made this really great interactive gadget that should tell you how the bill will affect you.
The New York Times also has a gadget, though not quite as cool to my mind as the WaPo’s, it is simpler.
The Kaiser Family Foundation has a handy subsidy calculator as well, just in case the last two widgets didn’t tell you enough about your personal finances.
From CNN, a rundown on when different provisions kick in.
Nick Baumann at Mother Jones with a plain-English rundown of what happens this year.
MoveOn.org has Ten Things Every American Should Know, though frankly it’s more like Ten Talking Points. Still, stats worth looking at.
CBS has a nice summary of the bill in bullet points.
**Not really an explainer of personal effects, but this David Leonhardt piece from the New York Times is a must-read for the general direction of the bill–and why Republicans and tea partiers are so angry about it.
This is just a start; I plan to keep collecting. Please leave your suggestions in comments, and feel free to steal this! Almost all of these suggestions came to me via Twitter, thanks to everyone who sent ‘em.
I wrote something for Global Comment today—should be up tomorrow—about the decade, the politics of it all, and how it was the decade that Americans woke up and got involved again.
Maybe that’s me projecting, though, because the arc of the last ten years for me more than anything else is the formation of my social conscience.
I don’t have any deep thoughts about that at the moment, though—I wore myself out on that.
Instead, 2009. It was a shit year for a lot of people I know, and a shit year sort of collectively, but for me it was an absolutely amazing year. I finished my master’s, saw Obama inaugurated, got my dream internship, moved to New York, met and worked with and befriended people whose work had helped shape me into the writer I am, found out who would have my back and who would go out on a limb for me, and got a job in my chosen career field that I absolutely love, working for a woman who is a constant inspiration. I got stories published in magazines I’ve been reading for years.
Not many people had this kind of a 2009, and it almost makes me sad to see it go because I fear that 2010 won’t be as good.
What didn’t I do in 2009? Pretty much have any sort of a love life. I went on a couple of dates that didn’t result in anything—nice guys that I just didn’t click with. I’m trying to remember if I even kissed anyone in 2009 and I don’t think so (that drunken moment does not count even if part of me did not want to stop it…long story that I’m not telling on the Internet, sorry). I had a series of crushes on absolutely wonderful men, some of whose friendship now I would never trade for a fleeting hookup. But as far as I know I won’t be kissing anyone at midnight, and that’s pretty much OK with me.
New Year’s resolutions? I don’t know if I have any. Maybe to take better care of my body—I eat too much crap and don’t exercise enough. I keep resolving to go dancing more, as it is good for body and soul (and is in fact magic), so maybe I’ll keep that one in 2010.
Tonight? I’m putting on a hot pink dress and I’ve painted my nails with purple glitter and I’m going out to the Lower East Side with some (new) friends. There will be booze. Hopefully champagne, because (hello blog title) it is like liquid happiness and also what is New Year’s Eve without bubbly?
Looking forward: I will keep writing, and keep fighting, and learn new things and meet more new people and love the ones I know better. I WILL kiss someone, and I hope as Mr. Gaiman wished for all of us, that it is someone who thinks I’m wonderful. I will work hard but I will play hard too.
I don’t know if those count as resolutions, or declarations.
2009 might have been good for me, but the past ten years were sort of shit. So let’s have a better decade, everyone.
A friend said on Twitter: 2010: Love, music, wine, and revolution. I think that’s a good plan.
So I’m increasingly fascinated by the politics of food. I grow massively annoyed by the marketing of “green” as an upscale lifestyle choice–I’m out of work right now aside from whatever freelancing I can cobble together, and I cannot afford to buy my groceries at the local organic food co-op, which sells the same things as Whole Foods but is even more expensive (though at least it’s not a rotten corporation). I buy cheap food at the cheap bodegas and might have to make a trip to the grocery superstore a few blocks over, and cheap food mostly translates to cereal, rice, pasta, and frozen vegetables so I don’t die of scurvy.
I do spend a few extra bucks on fresh apples and other fruit, at the local farmer’s market if I can manage it.
Then the other problem: I don’t cook. I am almost 30 and I doubt that at this point I’m going to turn around and decide I love cooking, and though Michael Pollan’s right about a lot, he’s not going to be able to talk me into liking cooking the same way that hundreds of earnest people have not been able to talk me into liking the Beatles.
Much the same as the Beatles, I understand that cooking is important. I just don’t enjoy doing it. Moreover, at this point I feel GUILTY for walking away from the computer to spend half an hour or more in the kitchen when I have work to do, and when I’ve reached my quota for the day, I don’t feel like doing any more work.
And there are many people out there who have less money, less education, and less free time than I do.
So, where’s MY cookbook? I don’t need 30-minute meals, I need 5-minute meals. Organic farmer’s markets aren’t going to solve my food dilemmas as long as the food at the crappy corporate grocery is cheaper.
I’m interested in urban gardening and real food co-ops and ways that people can provide real food activism that isn’t preachy and condescending. I’m interested in ways we can make our food better for us, better for the environment, and available to all. Eating healthy shouldn’t be a privilege, and climate change will never be addressed if only the top 5% of the country can afford to “live green.”
I’m betting Erik has some thoughts on this, since the intersection of his academic work–labor issues and environmental issues–is really what I’m talking about. But I want to hear from everyone. Unless you’re going to tell me to learn to cook (or just listen to the Beatles one more time, man…)
In keeping with the literary theme of my last post, I’m stealing this meme from Natalia because I love her. And because I love you, and we have good discussions about books on this here blog. So!
Instructions: Don’t take too long to think about it. List 15 books you’ve read that will always stick with you — the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Copy the instructions into your own note, and be sure to tag the person who tagged you. (In the interest of staying true to the exercise, I listed the books first and then went back and wrote descriptions)
1. Les Miserables. This book more than any other has been a huge part of me. I was a kid when my parents went to see the musical and brought home the soundtrack, and I became obsessed. My grandmother, the one who always wanted me to put down the books that I read obsessively at meals and in bed, bet me that I couldn’t read the book. I was 9. She brought me a huge hardcover unabridged copy–I’m not quite sure where that copy is now–and I read it in 3 days, at meals, in bed, in every spare second. Of course at age 9, 90% of it went over my head, but I go back to it over and over. I tattooed a quote from it on my back. I find something new and beautiful every time I read it. One day I’ll learn French and read it in French. I swear.
2. Ulysses. I guess I already blogged about it once, so I don’t know if I have to say much more than it pushed the boundaries of what fiction and language could do in my mind. That said, I too have not read Finnegans Wake.
3. The Thief’s Journal I came to Jean Genet because of a silly goth magazine’s photo spread with quotes from Funeral Rites. Funeral Rites is a seriously fucked-up book, and an amazingly beautiful one, but The Thief’s Journal has stuck with me longer. Genet makes the hideous and abject beautiful, and makes the beautiful abject. More people probably know his plays, but I love his fiction. Another reason I need to learn French.
4. The Savage Detectives. I read this last summer after hearing an NPR segment on Roberto Bolano. I came away from the book staggered, like I hadn’t been by an author in years. His fierce devotion to his artistic and political ideals reminded me that art is as revolutionary as politics, and writing fiction is a worthwhile occupation.
5. Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail. Hunter S. Thompson is like Jesus, in that the man is pretty awesome, but I can’t stand most of his followers. No, seriously, I hate people who start immediately talking about the drug references in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, because they miss out on the real reason Thompson was so fucking great: the man could WRITE, and he could see through hypocrisy no matter how out of his mind he was on whatever substances he could smoke, drink, or snort. The best political journalist America’s ever seen?
6. Lolita. Is also a cliche, but I don’t care. No one should’ve ever tried to make a movie out of it: Lolita is the consummate novel, from a man who spent plenty of time messing around with the idea of a novel, stretching it to its limits and beyond (Pale Fire). The story in Lolita can’t be told properly in any other medium but the written word.
7. The Sound of Waves. I also came to Mishima from that same silly goth magazine–so my goth years were good for something. The first book of his I read was Forbidden Colors, probably his best book, but the one that hits me like a ton of bricks is this one, a deceptively simple first-love story.
8. Written on the Body. Jeannette Winterson is a whole lot of awesome as far as I’m concerned, but Written on the Body is a standout for many reasons, chief among them that it’s a love story in which you never know the gender of the main character. You know that the lover is a woman, but the “I” who speaks is so perfectly concealed that it becomes a game within the book, trying to find a clue. And yet it doesn’t compromise the story a bit.
9. Namedropper. Emma Forrest’s first novel, written when she was maybe 19; I read it when I was in college and it was the first time that I really saw myself in a character. Normally, I read books to get out of my own life, but this one was so much like me.
10. The Sound and the Fury. So Faulkner might be another cliche. So what? I still love him, and always will. I love the way this whole book revolves around Caddy and yet she is only a ghost; that everyone thinks they know her and yet it’s so immediately clear that no one does.
11. Shanghai Baby. Wei Hui’s first novel, I think, I bought because it was “banned in China.” It’s not very shocking at all, but it was the first book that I read where I thought, “I could do this.”
12. Jazz. I did not properly appreciate Toni Morrison in school, despite going through several of her books, a few of them repeatedly. It wasn’t until I took an audiobook of Jazz from my local (tiny) library for a road trip that I realized why people love her. What most of my favorite books have in common is a love for and experiment with language, and this one is no exception. It reads like music.
13. Blonde. Joyce Carol Oates does Marilyn Monroe, and I melt and want to cry just thinking about how heartwrenching this book is. Another one that someone unfortunately tried to adapt to the screen, and another one that should only be read.
14. The Sandman. Because I am me, I have comics on this list. I only have comics that were written by one person for their span, and the Sandman counts. I cannot make a list of books I love without including Neil Gaiman, and I cannot be honest and say that I like any of his prose novels more than Sandman. The Sandman comics are about stories and storytelling, about the nature of fiction and characters and myths and of course dreams, and they will change your life.
15. Local. Another comic, and my favorite since Sandman, I think. It’s a collection of short stories about one girl, and when put together (in a gorgeous hardcover that I still don’t have) it’s a story of a life told in the moments that define it. It is also the perfect comic for people who don’t read comics. Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly are wonderful.
(OK, it took me a lot more than 15 minutes to write blurbs about all of these, but I did come up with the list in less than 15. Your turn, now…)
In the midst of lots of other important news, why am I taking time out to celebrate James Joyce?
Well, aside from the fact that I just like to point out that I’m a member of the august group of people who’ve not only read Ulysses, but read it more than once and ENJOYED IT. Loved it, really. I love Joyce’s willingness to play with language, to toy with its history and its future and the way it can be changed and manipulated and made to say several things at once.
There’s a dissertation in me somewhere on Joyce and Yeats and the feminization of the Irish people by their colonizers and how it impacted their writing, referencing all sorts of theorists on colonialism and feminist theorists who talked about writing. Maybe if I don’t get a job I’ll go get an MA and then a PhD in literature just to be a nerd.
But even if I never get the degree, I’ll keep writing about that last chapter in Ulysses for a long time, because among many, many other things it’s a lush celebration of female desire.
why cant you kiss a man without going and marrying him first you sometimes love to wildly when you feel that way so nice all over you you cant help yourself I wish some man or other would take me sometime when hes there and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you
Molly Bloom is just a figure in the background for most of the novel, but here we dive straight into her mind and her thoughts, of course, are of sex. The building, heightening repetition of the word “Yes” is dirtier, hotter than any of the more lurid descriptions in the chapter, and I wonder if those who would have banned Ulysses were more put off by Joyce’s pleasure in prurient description or in the triumphant declaration of Molly Bloom at the end?
I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
And so today, June 16, is the day that Leopold Bloom took his famous walk around Dublin, and book nerds the world over celebrate. I certainly don’t have a Bloomsday party to go to, but I’m blogging it, in the midst of revolt in Iran and war supplementals here, because books have power. If they didn’t, no one would try to ban them.
I submit that not only is Dirty Dancing a classic, but that it is in fact a feminist movie. The entire relationship between Baby and Johnny is about HER desires, what she wants and when. She has the power to break his heart. Her sexuality is not punished in the film (though admittedly Penny and her sister do suffer for their desires). But Baby knows what she wants, and she goes and gets it, class differences be damned. Plus, she’s studying economics of underdeveloped countries, and wants to join the Peace Corps–in the 60s. I love it. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”
*Do you really think love is something we’re trained to expect? How would we know what it was, and be so sure about it, if it were simply a learned behavior?
*Women get accused all the time of being the ones who want romance, but the most swooningly romantic, ridiculous songs I can think of were all written by men. (I say this as I listen to Morrissey crooning “To die by your side would be a heavenly way to die.”)
*Is there such a thing as a feminist heterosexual love story? As in, a film/book/TV show where the sole purpose is for the heroine to get together with the hero that won’t elicit criticism for sending the wrong message?
*How old were you when you first fell in love? I was 18. And if you’re like me, that’s the one you’ll never quite forget.
*Tell me a movie that encapsulates the way you see love. Mine is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
It was New Year’s Eve when I first kissed the boy I was supposed to marry.
This will be my second New Year’s without him.
We didn’t make it to two years–we celebrated two New Year’s together, and now I have two alone. Last year I spent the evening with friends who knew and loved both of us, and it was wrong and yet right that I was with them.
This year I may well spend it completely alone. Me and a bottle of pink champagne, a bubble bath and more bad TV.
2008 was good to me. Very good, despite economic turmoil and occasional drama and one painful, wrenching moment (Kacie, I miss you).
I made a lot of new friends this year. I learned a lot, both in school and out. Most importantly, I feel as though I’m just inches away from the life I want, and I’m not giving up now.
I kissed some great boys this year, too. (Yeah, that’s right.) And nothing really fell apart afterward. That’s always a bonus. So I don’t really mind not having a New Year’s kiss.
Of course, 2008 will always be the year we elected Obama. I hope he will live up to at least some of our hopes, and be worthy of our work, our sweat, our support.
I read some great books and comics, saw some great movies, heard some great music. I’ll have more to say on that later, of course. I got tattooed, got paid decently for my writing for the first time, worked hard and played hard. I remembered how much fun it is to dance.
And though there were many people who were part of the year, who helped make it great, in the end I have myself to thank for it. I learned to trust myself again, and to trust myself more than I ever did. I questioned that trust over and over again, but I say goodbye to 2008 with it strong.
Maybe I should be more afraid of 2009 than I am. We live in scary times, after all. But right now, I’m looking forward to it.
Yeah, I’m nominally Jewish, but Christmas is the one day a year my family shuts the damn business down and hangs out around the house eating breakfast at noon, drinking wine at 3:00, watching a big Hollywood movie, and then eating a huge dinner.
My co-blogger at Alterdestiny, Erik, pointed out that among many famous folks, Shane McGowan was born on December 25. That’s certainly another reason to drink today, so here you go: my favorite Christmas song.
