In this case, knowledge isn’t power:  it just leads to paranoia.

The first cancer I ever remember hearing about, though, was my Grandpa Bill’s; he died before I was born, of liver cancer, and I always knew that because at the time, he was the only one of my grandparents who wasn’t there.  It wasn’t until I was older and could experience panic about things like CANCER! that my mother gave a more complete version of the ol’ family medical history:  liver cancer was not something that I had to worry about, she told me, because Grandpa Bill developed it due to complications stemming from Hepatitis B.  And Hepatitis B was something that (thankfully) she had not inherited and that could be prevented through things like blood screening and condoms.

And vaccines.  She didn’t mention that last option, because the Hepatitis B vaccine was not around when Grandpa contracted the disease, which was probably sometime during the 1940s (he had his appendix out during WWII, and then there was that whole tattoo issue…).  It was not even around when my mother and her siblings were children.  In fact, it wasn’t around when I was born.  This isn’t exactly surprising, considering the fact that Hepatitis B itself was not discovered until a full two decades after my grandfather most likely contracted it.  For the first twenty years of his life with Hepatitis B, no one knew that the disease even existed.  What was in his blood was a danger to himself and others, and he didn’t know and had no way of knowing.  No one did.

How fucking scary is that?

So fucking scary that when I was in the eighth grade and my school district finally offered Hep B vaccinations (the vaccine was first developed in the 198os, but wasn’t part of the standard protocol when I was a small child), my parents never even hesitated.  There was no wringing of hands and wondering if being inoculated against a disease that can be sexually transmitted would encourage me to give my Most Precious Flower of Virginity away before marriage.  There was no wondering if I, a demonstrably healthy child, could possibly develop all sorts of health risks because of a vaccine (this was before the autism scare, but vaccines have been vilified for as long as they’ve been around).  I was signed up, no questions asked, no resistance given, no time to even be scared of the needle.   Because what happened to my grandpa was not, at the time, preventable, but thanks to advances in medical science, it never needed to happen to me.

And that  is what ultimately annoys me about the anti-vaccination movement.  I mean, yes, it squicks me that they have NO IDEA that they’re making the same arguments that were made back when doctors still thought that every disease a woman suffered from could be traced back to a wandering uterus, but seriously.  What they don’t seem to understand, and have never understood, is that inoculations and vaccines developed from a hard truth:  without them, people die.  Without them, there are holes in families that can never be repaired.  Without them, there is a suffering that we–the people who live in the healthier world that vaccines created–cannot even imagine.

I am not trying to belittle people’s pain:  the latest anti-vaccination crusade has centered on autism, and I understand that people need something to blame for a condition that they can’t comprehend or control.  But the fact of the matter is, vaccines are just a convenient scapegoat and always have been.  As long as they’ve been around, people have been scared shitless of them.  The excuses have changed, the ailments that they’re accused of causing may differ, but one thing remains them same:  in every era in which vaccination or inoculation was possible, someone–sometimes many dozens of someones–has come up with a spittle-flecked diatribe against them.

But here’s another thing that doesn’t change:  if the Hepatitis B vaccine had been around in the 1940s, my youngest aunt would not have lost her father while she was still a teenager.  My mother and her other siblings would not have had to go through the pain of losing a parent before they turned 30.  Me, FANG!, and all the cousins who are our age or younger would have memories of the person we now only know through photographs.  The hole that is in our family because of this disease would not be there.  The suffering that this disease has caused my grandparents and their children would not have happened.

Instead of thinking of all the things that could go wrong if your perfectly healthy child gets a vaccine (he could get autism!  Freed from the fear of cervical cancer, she could become a complete slut!), concentrate on all the things that won’t happen if your child gets a vaccine.  He won’t die of a disease that more properly belongs in a Victorian novel.  You won’t have to hold her hand after she has to have part of her cervix removed before her twentieth birthday.  As someone with an anxiety disorder, I understand irrational fear–boy howdy, YOU BET I DO–but as someone who cares about my family and the community I live in,  I don’t understand letting that irrational fear lead you to make choices that could harm your children and the people around them.  I’m as cynical as the next person about the motives of drug companies, but having read the history and seen the impact of disease on my own family, I’m not cynical about the usefulness of vaccines.  They save lives.  So let’s quit acting like Enlightenment-era peasants about them.

Whatever, you know you love it.

But seriously, y’all, I hate it.  When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a housewife just like mom because she was as a god unto me, but now that I actually am one by default?  OH.  MY.  LORD.  I am apparently missing that gene that my mother has, the one that causes her to want to do things like bake bread, fold laundry, weave baskets (I AM NOT EVEN KIDDING, ALL MY EASTER BASKETS WERE HOMEMADE), and generally tell Martha Stewart to SUCK IT.  I mean, I’m not impervious to the charms of homemaking:  occasionally I feel the urge to decorate, I have trimmed my share of Christmas trees, and my oven has been used to make more than frozen pizza.  But on a day-to-day basis?  I get out of bed, realize that I have to make it, just like I always have to make it, and kind of wish there was a gun in the house so I could SHOOT MYSELF IN THE FACE WITH IT.

I’m beginning to think that my life is one long Women’s Studies joke:  first I was a secretary, and now I’m a fucking housewife.  Ha, ha, universe.  Very funny.  What’s next–will George make a millions and then “upgrade” to a trophy wife, leaving me destitute with three children to support?

UGH!

Him:  So technically we’re on the West Coast now.  What do you think about it?

Me: I’m not sure.  I’ve got a distinctly East Coast mindset.  Everything here is a little…alien.

Him: What do you mean?

Me: Well, give me a minute–holy fucking shit, I think that’s a goddamn wild pig heading for the Payless!

Him:  Hmmm.  So it is.  Well, I guess that answers my question.

Finis

But if you’ll look behind the cut (something you should only do if no bosses or children are present), you’ll see that it’s really, really, REALLY not.

Cass, if the Comstock laws were still in effect, I would have been arrested for obscenity.

…AWESOME!

Oliver is…not adjusting so well to being dragged cross-country.  He’s actually attacked me–twice–and bitten George.  True, he was “provoked” in both cases (we grabbed him by his scruff to prevent him from eating his sister, and he took exception to that), but still.  It’s very unlike him.

And what’s even MORE unlike him is the fact that when he isn’t trying to injure me, he’s trying to fashion an umbilical cord between us.  Check it.  I look out my door, and guess who just happens to be waiting there?

I look up from reading my book, and guess who’s fucking staring at me?

Okay, and this part was super-creepy, because I was sitting in my little chair in the living room, watching Kdrama with my headphones on, and when I closed my laptop lid to put it away for the night, GUESS WHO WAS SITTING OPPOSITE ME?

And yes, he was staring at me.  AGAIN.  And it just got better.  Later, I had to dishes while standing on top of this:

And considering the fact that I’m only 5′4″, I nearly overbalanced!

Oliver, I love you, too.  But seriously.  A little more independence, please?  Okay?  Okay!

Word of advice?  Never be polite.  You’ll end up seeing Paris Hilton in your nightmares.

Anyway, the plot, such as it is, is that in the near future, people will start experiencing random organ failures.  Mira Sorvino’s dad comes to the rescue, however, by creating a company called GeneCo to provide spare organs.  But!  He is a total asshole (and the father of Paris Hilton’s character, so that kind of goes without saying), so he strong-arms the government into passing a law that allows him to send someone to repossess organs that their owners have defaulted on.  By cutting them out of their still-breathing bodies!

Needless to say, this led to some seriously gnarly violence.  Really, truly unnecessary violence.  Hold on, I need to go cry for a moment.

Ahem.  THROUGH MY TEARS OF HORROR AND PAIN, I noticed three things:  1.) Instead of providing backstory by like, HAVING FLASHBACKS, the filmmakers do it through comic strip sequences and…it totally destroys any momentum the film might have had or any sympathy the viewer might have felt for the characters.  Not a conceit that worked, although since it allowed everyone (including Paris) to act as little as possible, I can kind of see why they tried it; 2.)  If Shiyiya hadn’t informed me of the plot beforehand, I wouldn’t have been able to make heads or tails of it on my own, because this movie is such a patched-together mess with frequent irrelevant song breaks that it takes YEARS OF STUDY to grasp its most basic premises; and 3.)  Even though his character is totally unnecessary and, in fact, completely gunks up the plot (the sequences he’s involved in only serve to make the movie that much more disjointed), the Grave Robber is ridiculously hot.  I was like, “If they’d just gotten rid of him, this would have made MUCH MORE sense and been much more compelling!  But wait, he’s hot and involved in the best songs in this entire thing.  Shit.”

In conclusion, it was weirdly awesome and yet totally terrible.  Excuse me, I need to go hide underneath my covers now.

So those  of you who grew up on Laura Ingalls Wilder  may or may not remember the totally awesome book The Long Winter, in which Laura and her family nearly freeze and starve to death because winter comes EARLY and HARD to South Dakota.

There’s obviously a sex joke in there, but I’m not going to make it.  Because I do hold some things sacred, and the Little House books are one of them.

Anyway, that winter totally sucked and Laura’s family had to grind wheat in a coffee grinder and twist hay into sticks to keep warm and fed, but as Laskin demonstrates, that was not EVEN the worst winter the 1800s had to offer the American Midwest.  Oh, no.  Several years later, during an unusually balmy day in early January, hundreds of people died because a giant effing blizzard blew up with no warning and caught them outside.  They called it the School Children’s Blizzard because so may of the victims were little kids who were trying to get home from school.

Yes.  Reading about this was every bit as depressing as you might imagine.  I still did it, though, because Laskin manages to make it compelling and has the sense to include enough “Miraculous survival!” stories to keep the reader from dying of despair.  But in conclusion?  Never, EVER try to settle the prairie.  It’s not worth it.

Recommended for:  history junkies, disaster buffs.