Fourth Week Musings

Thanks to a borrowed heating pad and the fact that I tend to sleep with my right arm curling over my head anyhow, my elbow is fast on the way to allowing me to straighten it out without pain. For some reason, I keep thinking of pitcher Bob Gibson whenever I think of trying to straighten my arm out: one tale of his going to a tailor to have a suit altered comes to mind. When he was asked to straighten out his pitching arm to help the alterations, he was convinced that he had straightened it out. Seasons of stellar pitching hasn't gotten my elbow in this current situation, though, so I'll have to keep working on it.

Twitter has been a helluva online place despite my starting to get off the second floor a bit more than I have been. Disputes over the sexual abuse of boys and the sexual harassment of women will always get people talking, and the terrible news related to recent revelations over Jerry Sandusky's sexual misconduct while at Penn State (and the institution's attempts to keep it under wraps and in-house) as well as the women who are speaking up in seeming droves over presidential hopeful Herman Cain's sexually suggestive behavior have had virtual forums all abuzz for the past few days. The most memorable Twitter stream in probably all of the site's history then came courtesy of Queen of Spain, who posted a pointed question out of frustration and was so overwhelmed with followers' replies that her retweets of them had her in Twitter jail for a time (scroll down on both of those last two links to see them all). Answers ranged from simple "nos" to some descriptions of the offensive behavior complete with the further harassment victims found themselves subject to when they did report it. Just because we women are outside of the home in greater numbers doesn't mean we deserve this garbage from men in general. Putting us back in the home won't change things, either. Nor will dressing less provocatively, or speaking out less, or wearing more damned pink, or any of the other asinine ideas floated to women about how we can keep these guys off our backs. Simultaneously, though, women are expected to go through life being stoic about it all, which is still useful some of the time, but it all requires ordinary women to operate as superhumans. Perhaps it's been my physical state contributing to my current thoughts on this subject, but I have been thinking about this stuff a lot lately as I look at my mess of a house and simultaneously want to do something about it myself while wishing I could whip my husband and son into working on it. Women still have an uphill battle in life. Only thing different is the incline.

This past Monday counts as the third time in a few days my parents have been shaken by earthquakes in their current home in Oklahoma City. The second time it happened, it freaked my mother out quite a bit. Nowadays, though, I think she's graduated from being freaked out to simply being pissed off. Even her initial idea that her childhood home in east Tennessee might be free of the shakes has been abandoned. Just when Mom and Dad thought all they'd have to deal with out there were tornadoes...

Off to warm my arm. Hopefully, my physical therapy concerning it and my bum ankle will be beginning this week. 'Til then, I must limp off, though I was able to gingerly shuffle step in Das Boot yesterday to this:

 

Maybe I'll kick back with one of these concoctions while I take this album in. Who knows?

Update, 8:19 PM: Oh, and speaking of all the harassment talk, here's another way to look at the Penn State scandal: what if the victims were female? After you read, you might wanna do this. Dammit.