* The fact that The American Prospect has a “Religious Right Watch.” Sarah Posner’s work has all the substance of a celebrity gossip blog. There is palpable disdain toward the groups religiosity — which is distinct from their political involvement. I don’t talk much about religion here, mainly because it is a private matter and it doesn’t come into play with most of the stuff I write about. But when I see the “latest update” I feel like a rat in a cage, looked down upon, my every movement tracked and reported as though it is of great importance to the outside world. But is it? I feel like the figures in question are monitored not for their danger to progressive policy, but for their religion, full stop. Isn’t it just so funny?

* The language that is used to Other the disabled. Sweet Machine highlights the work of Susan Sontag, examining how “grave, incurable illnesses (particularly cancer in the 20th century and TB in the 19th) get appropriated as metaphors for moral conditions, political events, and the like — and then the negative connotations associated with those metaphors are extended back onto the people who actually suffer from the disease.” Considering the recent discussion at Feministe about the use of words like “crazy,” “insane,” “psycho,” “demented” etc. I think this is an important point to make. For the vast majority of people in our society, the only model they have to reference when they come into contact with a pwd is the concept of that disability, or disability in general, that has been built up in their minds. And that’s where our “ironic”/”sarcastic”/”irreverent” use of these words comes into play — we associate “crazy” with, say, the religious right, which means that they are Irrational, and Silly, and Dangerous, all at once, and those associations are reflected back onto the people who actually live with the condition at hand. It is not a conscious process, but again, it happens, and the more we use these words as a shorthand for all these negative traits, the further we reinforce a structure that contributes to the oppression of the disabled every day. Maybe it doesn’t really feel offensive when someone uses the word “crazy” around me, but that doesn’t mean that these tropes aren’t being steadily fed even right this very moment. And it’s not limited to mental illness, as SM explains; it also applies to fat — and to “gay,” and “retard,” and “gyp,” etc…

* When issues that are deeply important to millions of people in this country are glossed over because they might also be expedient to someone else with an agenda. See my sputtering below about Jezebel, fibromyalgia, drug therapies and Big Pharma; see Mindy’s guest post at Hoyden About Town on advertising companies and women’s products; see TAP’s Dana Goldstein wax political about Obama’s campaign actually centering women’s rights as an issue that includes more than simply white middle class women’s access to safe abortions. Those are just the examples off the top of my (very cluttered) head. Sometimes, people’s actual lives don’t fit neatly into your ideological narrative. And if you really want to be a friend to those people, you’ll turn off the “irreverent” macro and listen to their actual concerns. (Can you tell I’m really pissed off about this stuff?)

* The fact that my emails to my husband at work keep getting bounced back to me, and I can’t shake this anxiety, the trembling and heart racing and shortness of breath that comes with certain triggers, one of which is confronting people who beat upon the “fibromyalgia is bullshit” (still the leading search term to this blog) drum in service to their own egos. Usually, rambling at him helps me settle down, but I can’t really fit the jumbled contents of my brain into a 160-character SMS.

* My continued unemployment, which is going to screw up our finances so hard. I am looking around but I worry about the insecurity, the fact that I didn’t have much choice in quitting because of my disability, and the fact that my prospects are severely limited because of same — which means I’m likelier-than-not to remain unemployed for the foreseeable future. It’s unsettling.

* Pantyhose.