FDPL Weekly Feature

Today two people close to em are sharing a birthday. Well, let's not kid ourselves: they are also two of my three readers. So, this is a shout out to 66.6% of my readership: keep on truckin', and don't you ever stop. Peace out.

FDPL Weekly Feature

Mangoes

Here are ten reasons why you should eat mangoes:
1) They are soft fruit and super easy to digest.
2) They are full of sugar, which is good for you, damnit (yeah, pretty much everything you heard about sugar murdering your face is wrong. Except for diabetes, which is not cool)
3) They're tropical, and that's somehow more awesome than temperature fruit. Fuckin' apples. Think they're so cool.
4) Some mangoes are red and green, some (like in Zimbabwe) are purple and green.
5) They're sticky and juicy
6) Years and years of planned breeding has gone into them to make them not nearly as stringy as they used to be. Seriously, they used to have to be cut in a special way otherwise the fruit would get all mangled. But it's not like that now. Be a hero and appreciate it, damnit.
7) You can chew the residual flesh out of the peel and it tastes amazing.
8) Mango is a fun word to say. Imagine how fun it must be to eat?
9) They're not available that often, so eat them now!
10) They taste like sugarflower fairies having sex in your mouth!

FDPL Weekly Feature

For great Justice, please send me your original artworks! I'm running out of pictures here, and the FDPL needs all the help it can get! Without you, there is nothing but darkness and despair for all foxgirls worldwide!

My Second Cousin Once Removed

Well, first off her name is Epiphany. So, you should probably go and kill yourselves because nothing you do will ever compare to her name, let alone her accomplishments. I'm sorry, but we've all been made redundant. I know, it's hard.

Secondly, omigosh she is the cutest creature EVER. I've spent the morning with her walking on the mountain and doing handstands and everything and it has put me in the best mood. And somewhat broody, but I'll get past that soon... hopefully.

I hope to see her again soon.

God Emperor of Dune

I won. Barely, but I won.

I got all the way through that terribly thought-provoking book, all the way to the end, though admittedly the appendices defeated me.

But still.

I won! Except near the end I realised that all my preconceptions had been shattered by the beauty of the inverted ending. I felt that special feeling; being the only person in the world who interpreted a book correctly. I need to go and find all the other people like me and we can sit and be self-righteous together.

With a picnic basket, discussing World Systems Theory.

Yesssssss.

My Own Prejudice

I am going to tell you a sad story, about me.

A few days ago, on Saturday the 17th, I went to the first of a number of seminars designed to teach me how to become a cultural diversity facilitator. It was a long day and though I was prepared to deal with some ego issues and so forth, and have been extensively prepped on the subject matter from doing Anthropology, one incident sticks out on my memory.

(First, a little about the course. There were 18 facilitators-in-training, a few trainers, and the programme organiser. The group was politically-correctly homogenous, crossing the age, sex, colour, and class boundaries in a way so clearly aritificial it was almost nauseating.)

We had just finished defining prejudice (for the purpose of the course) and then had to introduce the person sitting next to us to the room. Everyone took their turn and di their thing, and it was interesting and enlightening. Then, one woman began introducing the woman next to her. They were both fairly young mothers, I'm guessing in their early thirties, and had obviously been talking about their children. So, this woman said that her partner's 'greatest achievement' was raising her 14-year-old son to be a good man (verbatim).

Here we come to the sad part. Upon hearing those words, I immediately thought: "Oh dear, I know what that means: she's raising him on a solid diet of feminist rhetoric. That poor guy is going to grow up to be omigosh Thomas WHAT THE HELL.You are the most terrible person."

Okay, well, that is rather sad. Unfortunately, it gets worse. Because throughout the entire course she... wow I really wish I wasn't saying this but she confirmed my every suspicion. I can't describe the scene except it was like watching someone about to stab themself in the face, and there's nothing you can do about it. And then I felt terrible for developing that judgement based on an earlier judgement and then I felt angry at the world for not jumping in and proving to me that I was wrong to make snap decisions. Remember, this was just after a section on why prejudice is bad. I was choking on the irony.

Now I understand I could simply have found 'objectionable' things in what she was saying to justify my earlier judgement and thus enable myself to feel self-righteous about the entire mess. And even using the word objectionable is a cause for sadness, because it speaks of my own intolerance towards certain movements, or at least ways of expressing certain ideologies. But the saddest part is, referring to my possible self-justification: I don't think that was the case.

I think I managed to walk away from a transformative session on the dangers of prejudice with reinforced set of prejudices. No wonder I was so bloody miserable on Saturday.