The Old School Lunch

I forgot to blog about this earlier, but I just remembered it (again). For some reason, I remembered watching what’s that movie, Swiss Family Robinson or something when I was a kid. It’s an old, old movie and what I liked about it was the usual build stuff out of what you got to make a fort, make home and make a defense for intruders (the one about some rich family that crash lands on some remote island, I might be thinking of the wrong title). Anyways, I watched this when I was pretty young and even then, I remember knowing why at one point in the movie, the sailors, sea captains or whatever try and pass a young woman they had with them as man. If they realized that it was a woman, a young woman, they’d take her away and rape her. I don’t think I was old enough to know clearly about rape or that it was called rape but I do remember thinking that there would be trouble if they found out he was a she. It’s a pretty sad comment that I realized this at that young of an age and when I tried to think how I could’ve connected the dots (I don’t think they say “hey, cover up or they’ll see you’re a woman and rape you” nor do they just non-chalantly cover the woman up) I realized that watching all that tv and all those movies I did (my uncle let us rent whatever we wanted) I probably saw dozens of instances of violence/sexual assault against women and hundreds of the threat of sexual assault against women. Though there is a great deal of the former in media, the latter I think is what goes so freely without anyone wincing. It’s almost as if people say, “well yea, duh she’d get attacked or raped if she did [scenario].”

I didn’t think bathroom problems could get any worse than what happened a little while ago. Well, they did. After claiming to have fixed the problem, I stayed in the apartment after they had the inside of the bathroom completely cleaned and the carpet cleaned as well. OK. Then just earlier today right when I’m about to leave for Mother’s Day late lunch with the family (reservations were made) what happens? The toilet first starts to bubble then the water in the toilet disappears. OK, not a big deal, there’s no leak. Not yet. After I call maintenance, I notice that my bathtub is filling with some unusual water. Then, as luck would have it, both the bathtub and the toilet begin to fill up with water at great speed. What comes out into the bathtub? Toilet sewage and, after the maintenance guy took a look at it, “laundry water” as it had turned black and gray. Then the toilet starts to overflow and I don’t mean it leaked a little bit over the rim, I mean it was bubbling out as whoever was in the floor above took their showers, used the toilets, did the laundry. At this point, i’m frantically calling the leasing people and the maintenance guy but alas he’s stuck in traffic. He says he’s going to call Roto-Rooter again and they’re going to come out. As i’m about to lose it, I take a giant plastic bowl I have and start scooping the toilet water into the sink which is the only place that isn’t backing up. I do this a few dozen times but when I realize that the water on the ground is almost an inch deep, it’s no use. At that point, I wasn’t really freaking out because it was just so ridiculous and I knew at this point they would be forced to move me to a new room. I tell them that I want a completely new room in new area not on this floor but they say no can do. I then move into the adjacent room which to my surprise, is about the same size but lacks one closet that the original room had and also has about 40% of the kitchen storage space. There’s nowhere to put my plates, seriously. But this, i’ll deal with management tomorrow. So to try and bargain, they give me a free month’s rent which is nice but that doesn’t give me my 8 hours of my life back nor does it reverse time so I can make the mother’s day lunch. Nor does it give me back the hours I spent moving all my shit into the other room.

Shit.

And yes, another used condom did float up from the toilet. Except this time I didn’t think it was that bad because there was also bits of shit in there as well. At least they’re having safe sex.

My brother recommends legal action unless they give me exactly what I want. I don’t want to be difficult but I’m tired of looking at other people’s used condoms.

What irritates me the most about anyone who criticizes women’s fighting (whether that’s boxing of MMA) is the “I love women too much” line of thinking. They say that even though women can fight, we as men just don’t want to see our baby’s momma get mangled (or mangle someone else) in the ring. This sort of baloney chivalry is a complete bag of crap because if men really didn’t want to see women physically beaten to shit day in day out, they’d say something about the rates of men’s violence against women. They’d go all Michael Vick on athletes who beat their wives, not their dogs. They’d beat the shit out of men who rape women. They’d raise awareness to the rates of sexual assault in high school. But do they? If they are, I don’t hear about it.

Gina Carano crushes the nail on the head when she (to paraphrase) says that men can’t have fighting as a gender. If fighting is to be seen as a vocation, a lifestyle, how do you designate that solely to men? Men have been trying to “own” and place their completely bogus stamp on every vocation that is of any worth to people. Men don’t want to be seen as cooks, as women are seen, but they’ll be seen as high paying chefs to the stars. Men don’t want to be seen as teachers, like the elementary school teachers stereotyped as babysitters but they’ll take the high paying, illustrious professor jobs. Men don’t want to be seen as nurses, only doctors, men don’t want to be seen as maids, only janitors, the list goes on and on. The point is this is both a cultural gender stereotype thing and also a money thing. There’s big, growing and young money in MMA and when men say they don’t want women involved (like men’s golf tours, where the biggest paychecks are) it’s another way to disenfranchise women and put them at an economic disadvantage.

If you start to hear men complain and attack women’s fighting, what you’re really hearing is men fearing that they won’t be the high draw with the biggest purse.

I have almost my entire music collection on my iPod and when at the gym, unless I make a playlist I put the thing on shuffle. Sometimes instead of skipping to tracks I want to listen to, I just listen to whatever comes on.

One song was Jermaine Dupri’s “Coming Home With Me” which I remember being huge when I was in high school. I’ve listened to this song hundreds of times but some of the lyrics only struck me at that moment.

The general plotline of the song (rap songs have plotlines?) is that JD, being the popular dude that he is, is at a club and he meets a woman there. They return to his place and he proceeds to tell her a few things first before they have sex, which he admittedly videotapes. Then, because he’s JD, he says right when he’s done he’s going back to the club to get another woman in the sack. Another rapper has some lines but it’s just stupid shit (not that JD’s isn’t) so I won’t go into it.

Now first let’s look at the chorus:

Now if I buy you a drink and you drink it up
Then, uh, you goin’ home with me (and all my niggas say)
And if you talkin’ at a party and we talk too much
Then, uh, we goin’ home with me
Now if you came with a friend that don’t wanna do my man
Then you need to give her your keys
Tell her to call you tomorrow or give you a beep
Cause tonight, you going home with me, ya heard?

There are several offensive things about this. Of course there’s the whole idea that if he’s going to lay down some dollars for a drink, that woman better lay down with him. And then there’s this whole thing of “we’re hitting it off and let’s get down to business. But wait, you can’t do shit unless your friend nails my pal over here and if she doesn’t, tell her to hit the bricks.” Now I can say this is pretty common in a lot of rap songs. Jadakiss talks about it in “Ride or Die Bitch” (which was another popular song in high-school) but there he talks about how a woman is so great because she “don’t have no problem hittin’ us all.”

But anyways, back to JD.

Now, is it because my name’s Jermaine? no
It’s all about how I kick my game, you know?
I just flow with it, spend a little dough with it
Entertain, before you know, I’m in your brain doing my thang
Tellin’ you how good you smell
Send you up for a drop top cruise through the A-T-L
Now when they tipsy, it’s risky, you don’t know what you facin’
Fuck around and end up like Anthony Mason
So I let’em know a few things before we leave
Like, “it’s true, I tapes damn near everything”
So don’t even think about lyin’, baby
Or try baby, to set me up for rape cause it’s all on tape
Where you said put the cake
How you fed me the grapes
What I did with the ice that made you shake, shake
Now when the night’s over and the girl is gone
I’m back up in the club singin’ the same damn song

My bolds there. Of course what he’s saying here is, “listen, now that i’ve got you all drunk, we’re going to have sex and i’m going to videotape it too because you women lie when you’re drunk and have sex. You cry rape because i’m famous and you think you can scam me.” So yes, seriously, this is actually spoken in a song.

All this, in a what was then a popular club song. This is, I believe, some of what people are talking about when they say “rape culture.” Agents of rape culture, songs like this, on varying levels tell folks that women lie about being raped, that women who say they’ve been raped are just after money and are drunk idiots who don’t remember the night before.

I don’t think this hurt JD’s image very much as he’s still making music. But then again, you can video tape yourself having sex with an underage girl (and then claim it was your lookalike brother) and still sell albums so I guess it’s not much of a comment.

The next song up was Kanye West’s “Stronger.” Now I love a lot of his music. I think his production did to music what Timbaland did with Aaliyah (and what he’s doing now with JT) but Mr. West also does some very dumb shit as who else would rhyme “Klondike” with “blonde dyke”?

i don’t know if you got a man or not,
if you made plans or not
god put me in the plans or not
i’m trippin’ this drink got me sayin’ a lot
but i know that god put you in front of me
so how the hell could you front on me
there’s a thousand you’s there’s only one of me
i’m trippin’ i’m caught up in the moment right?
this is louis vuitton dime night
so we gon’ do everything that kan like
heard they’d do anything for a klondike
well i’d do anything for a blonde-dike
and she’ll do anything for the limelight
and we’ll do anything when the time’s right
ugh, baby you’re makin’ it (harder, better, faster, stronger)

So the same old rap shit about how he’s such a stud and yada yada but then he manages to get in there that since he’s famous and this woman/women will do anything to get a piece of that spotlight, they’re going to have sex.

Oh wait, wait, that’s not even to mention how he thinks God himself is (at least in this story) drawing the cards so he meets this particular woman. And when he says “so how the hell can you front on me?” he’s really saying, “It was God’s plan for me to meet you so you better put out.”

Sometimes I wish he’d just zip it and not say anything like some of the other producers. Or, at the very least, just say what everyone else says and keep it to how much of a prize catch you are and how you really want this one (sometimes multiple) woman like Pharrell.

It’s almost 5 in the goddamn morning and guess what’ i’m doing? I’m blogging about how my apartment’s resident tech is snaking the pipes of the toilet. Why? Because a few days ago my toilet started leaking from the base. They checked it out, said they couldn’t find any problems. Happened again and this time they ripped out the entire toilet and then when I left for my Sunday errands, I came back to find that the toilet is still ripped out with an exposed pipe. I go to sleep when I start to hear water bubbling. That’s right, every time someone on my floor flushed their toilet those magical contents would come shooting out of my toilet’s main line. And what do I find besides water and dirt? Cigarette butts and condoms. Used condoms along with a magnum brand wrapper. Motherfucker.

So then I frantically start vacuuming the water that’s coming out with the wet vac that the guy left here and when it stops I try calling maintenance. Well the number they gave me was wrong. I then try calling the main office and they have the right number for the guy. I call, but I don’t know how to leave the message. I later learn that it’s a paging system and I have to send my number. In the frenzy, I call a 24 hour plumbing service and after talking to the slowest customer service agent, they say they’ll call me back if they can get someone. After I figure out that I have to page the maintenance people, the dude calls back and says he just left all the shit there because when he came back, he knocked twice (at 9pm on a Saturday night) and assumed I was sleeping and he didn’t want to wake me up. He says he’s coming down so I cancel the emergency plumbing folks. He come by 30 minutes later, apologizes and he proceeds to snake the pipes.

I used to work in a hygiene center for homeless folks and I have never been this grossed out. Or angry.

Fuck.

The snaking of the pipes is loud and I don’t know what the fuck he’s doing but it’s taking a while. The wet vac is extremely loud so I wonder what the neighbors must be thinking. I wish someone (or the neighbor that used the condoms) could come by so I can tell them that my toilet is overflowing. And then so I can ask them why the fuck they flush condoms (and the wrapper) down the toilet. Who the fuck does that?

Shit.