Was it something I said?

You guys know I love you. You know how much I appreciate it when you read and share my stuff, follow my links, enter my stupid contests, and leave your stupid comments in my stupid comment box. And I hope you know that I try, I really try hard, to provide content that will titillate your senses and set your brain pans vibrating.

So is it too much to expect my own hate site? Matt Walsh has one. Mark Shea gets a support group for people he’s banned on Facebook and a petition for his removal. Even that nutty lady from Florida who knows how to get around IP blockers has a hate site. The nutty lady from Florida! And yet here I am, tapping away, and I can’t even remember the last time someone complained to my editor.

Oh, except for last week, but that was just one guy, and all he did was write two stinking emails titled “your wrong.”  This is penny ante stuff.  Folks, I can’t do this on my own. As much as I loathe everything about my personality, my character, my history, my likely future, my grooming habits, my political views, real and implied, and my stupid stupid face, I simply cannot supply my own anti Simcha Fisher website. My plate is too full. I know you guys are generous. Look into your heart, can you not? And if you find some hatred there, even just the smallest, lukewarm hatred . . . won’t you give?

PIC angry heart

32 authors and one banana

. . . read excerpts from Jen Fulwiler’s new book. I fought through my horrible Skype connection and provided a few seconds (no, I am not the banana one):

You have to watch this, if only to see Dwija mostly unruffled by a wandering lion. And of course Bonnie just had to let it go.  I’m delighted to be in such august company, delighted to see that Hallie Lord’s husband Dan is secure enough in his masculinity to wear what is surely a vest conceived in Hell. Never mind a hate site, I have a new goal: I want to someday write something that will cause Patrick Madrid to rear back in his seat and feign disgust. Jen has arrived!

 

I’ll be on the Fargo Diocese’s “Real Presence” show live at 10 Eastern today

You can catch the live stream here on their website. Hope you can join me!

Why don’t you like my shoes?

Okay, this is stupid, but so many people (3) had nice things to say about the shoes that just barely appeared in my Why I Don’t Do WIWS post that I thought it would be fun to rerun this post from 2010, in which I debut my extremely cute white shoes, which I  bought on clearance at Target, and which I just wore this morning for this morning’s well dog excursion to the poop part of the yard. 

******

I am not great with clothes shopping.  As I have mentioned before, shopping bundles together being fat and being old and being cheap into a tense, ugly ball of being miserable, effectively blotting out the pleasure of getting new stuff.

You’d think shoe shopping would be different–easier, simpler, less emotionally fraught.   You don’t even have to look in the mirror.  But somehow, I make it difficult.  I don’t know how it is, but all the shoes I come home with are just so dang stupid.

The one exception is what I was wearing today, when I took three kids for their well-child check ups.  I then drove three kids right back home again when seemingly-well child #3 threw up on previously-well children numbers 1 and 2 in the doctor’s parking lot.  Then I went to the supermarket to pick up something nice and bland for supper.  So here’s those shoes:

Moderately cute, aren’t they?  They’re fairly comfortable, they go click-click-click, which makes me feel brisk and capable, and they were only $3 at Target.  Believe it or not, these are my dressiest dress shoes, as well as my go-to footwear when dragging nauseated children around town.

Next, I present the shoes I actually squealed about (in my head) when I found that they were my size. They cost ten whole dollars.  For someone who generally shops at stores called things like “Ye Kingdom of Consign-a-lot,” these were a downright frivolous purchase.

Especially when I got home and remembered that I recently made another frivolous purchase:  a bright green purse.  To go with my bright red shoes.  Fa la la la la!

Next:  my comfortable, expensive sandals which do a good shoe’s job of making me forget that I’m wearing them:  my trusty old non-deluxe Tevas.

Or Teva, because I can only find one.

These next ones are the shoes I wore on my recent one-day hiking spree, because I couldn’t find my other Teva:

Can’t you see how malevolent they are?  I don’t know how they got into my house, but when I put them on, it looks like someone was angry at my feet.  “Take that!   Grrrrrrr, here’s some webbing with big, ugly stictching, and arrrrrr, here’s some rigid hunks of rubber.  I’ll teach you to have ten little toes and flexible skin!”  Worst blisters ever.  Seriously, they even made my eight-year-old son avert his eyes, and he really, really likes gross stuff.

Here is another shoe of mine.  I think you can see why it’s single:

I bet her partner never even took the time to see if she has a great personality.  Poor dear.  Now she’ll have to go join the shoe convent on the porch, where spinsters spend their lives praying for the soles of others.

And finally:

I guess these are shoes?  I don’t know.  Where did they come from, and how did they get so dirty?

My husband thinks I should also talk about my boots.  He doesn’t mean the black Gloria Vanderbilt shoe-boots I bought with a gift certificate 12 years ago. They look something like this:

except they have crescent-shaped toenail holes in the tops, because I can never find socks, and they are shaped less like footware and more like a pair of venerable potholders.  I like them because they are black.  Also, there are two of them, which matches my feet.

But it turns out my husband meant something he laughingly referred to as my “work boots.”  I don’t know what’s so damn funny about that.  I can’t take a picture of them, because I put them in a bag marked “Salv Army,” and I have to leave them in the back of the car for a few years before I can take them out and wear them again.

But you know what?  I have a problem here.  I bought a pair of shoes.  They are SO CUTE.  They are the cutiest, wootiest shoes you ever saw.  I wear them a lot, and they fit, they’re in season . . . I don’t know.  For some reason, I guess I halfway expect people to burst into applause whenever I walk up in them.  I mean, they have silver wingtip-style toe caps!  But, at the same time, they’re heelless for that carefree spring in your step in the happy, happy springtime!  But they have a nice big elastic band so they don’t fall off!  They are the perfect shoe.  Actually, they slide around a bit, but that is totally my fault, not the shoes’ fault.  My fault.

Just look at these shoes!

 

No?

Aw hell,  you wouldn’t understand.

At the Register: Something Other than God: Jennifer Fulwiler’s New Memoir

. . . is great! Of course it is. But it’s even better than I expected.

Don’t you love the cover? It’s finally ready for just plain buying, rather than pre-ordering. And check out Jennifer’s site for the launch party including a HUGE contest with LOTS of excellent prizes. Dammit, it’s no fair that someone who write so well should also be such an excellent promoter! Well, I hear she has big feet, so there’s some comfort.

Have I told you lately that I know how to talk?

It’s true! I have the speaker’s page to prove it.  I’d love to come speak at your event, big or small. Contact me at simchafisher[at]gmail[dot]com, and let’s chat!

Why I don’t do “What I Wore Sunday”

So we get to the First Communion preparation workshop, which is *sigh* somewhat earlier than I’m used to getting up on Sundays. But I did all the things, I went on my treadmill, I took a shower, I even put mascara on. The kid is wearing underwear under her dress and shoes that match (each other, I mean. Not the underwear). We are a little groggy, but definitely pulling this off.

We settle into our seats and wait patiently for our felt and our glue and our wheat templates. While I’m thinking wistfully about the second cup of coffee I never had, I notice there’s something wrong with my shirt cuff. One sleeve is much higher than the other, and I can’t figure out why. I try to fix it, and discover that I have put  my hand not through the end of the sleeve, but through a hole in the elbow.

I surreptitiously try to scoot my hand up out of the hole and where it belongs, and it makes a loud r-r-r-r-r-r-rip! Which probably nobody else noticed, but still I can’t help feeling like I’m wearing a huge sign that says “DURRRR, HOW DO I SHIRT?”

So I decide to fold it over and hope no one notices. At which point I realize that the buttonhole part is rapidly separating itself from the rest of the shirt.

Apparently I’m a hobo. And there is a dead dog on my kitchen floor, which is clean.  This is what it looks like when it’s clean.  As far as this morning goes, I only hope that the other parents had an edifying day as they beheld the generosity of the Church, who offers her sacraments to all peoples, be they black, or be they white, or be they whatever. And that includes people who do not know how to shirt.

At the Register: Doctrine doesn’t change over the phone

Ring-ring.
Hello?
Hi, it’s the Pope, and guess what? It’s OPPOSITE DAY!
From Conversations that didn’t, won’t, and wouldn’t happen, vol. 836

Yes, we still need feminism.

I used to wonder why any 21st-century woman would call herself a feminist.

Feminism has become something utterly toxic. Maybe the word once stood for something useful and good, but feminism today means abortion on demand and without apology; now it means contempt for virginity, contempt for children, contempt for motherhood. Why would any right-thinking woman even want to use that name, when it puts you in such dreadful company?

And anyway, why do we even need feminism anymore?  Aren’t we done?  There once was a real need for the movement. Long ago, women truly had to fight for basic freedoms. But now we can vote, now we can own property, now we have as much as a men do in the way our lives go. We can go to school where we want, work where we want, wear what we want, travel where we want — and if we want to stay home and raise babies, assisted by female doctors and respected by our enlightened husbands, then feminism has won that right for us, too. It’s a golden post-feminist age, if we play our cards right.

In the past, when someone questioned the need for feminism, I would think of my mother, my grandmothers, my great-grandmothers, the way they lived and how they struggled.  My mother tells me of how she was suffering through a difficult labor. The male doctor, irritated, responded by strapping her down and injecting her, without her consent, with a drug that left her pain intact, but made her unable to cry out. “She feels better now,” she heard the doctor say, and she couldn’t argue with him, because she couldn’t form words.

So that’s why we needed feminism. Because unless someone told them otherwise, there would always be men who treated women like vessels, like nuisances, like inferiors, like property — and women, because they are the vessels of life, needed to fight back against this treatment. They needed to demand justice.

But no more, right?  The women’s movement was necessary, but it’s done its work.  Thank you for your efforts, suffragettes. And now we can rest, because we are all set.

Well, think again. I’m 39 years old, and feeling it. I read the blogs and comments of younger women, and I know that they’re living in a different world. Now, when I wonder if there is still a need for feminism, I look to the future of women, not the past.

When I was in college, there were a few cads and perverts on campus. But there was no such thing as nonstop porn — violent porn, available for free, 24 hours a day, on tiny devices that could be carried in your pocket.  There was no such thing as generation of men who thought of themselves as decent guys, and who expected their girlfriends to act out that porn which is normal normal normal.  There was no such things as websites dedicated to teaching guys how to drug their dates into submission, or how to trick their reluctant girlfriends into getting an abortion. There was no such thing as mainstream retailers like Target ads featuring a girl whose entire vulva was Photoshopped away, to make her trendy thigh gap gappier. There was no such thing as feminist who vehemently defended sex-selective abortion. No such thing as women live-blogging their abortions, gleefully posting pictures of their bloody baby’s remains and calling it liberation. No such thing as women selling eggs to get through college — selling their bodies to make it through college. No such thing, at least, as these things happening and progressive people calling it . . . empowering.

This is why we need feminism. Because someone needs to fight back, to tell these people, men and women: STOP. This is not what women are for. This is now how it’s supposed to go. This is not how life gets carried on. This is no life, for women or for men.

And if you think these outrages only exist in the godless secular world, you are sheltered indeed. Men and women in some Catholic circles believe that marital rape is impossible, because the marriage debt means that women never have the right to say “no.” They believe that if men use porn, it’s the woman’s fault for not being compliant or submissive enough. I know a woman whose priest told her that it’s a mortal sin to refuse her husband sex even one time, for any reason.  I know women who’ve gotten an annulment after enduring years of rape and physical and emotional abuse, and the congregation shuns . . . the woman. And her children. Because marriage is sacred.

This is why we need feminism — yes, still. This is why we need it more than we needed it twenty years ago.  Yes, the movement went astray. Yes, some evil people call themselves feminists, and do dreadful things in the name of feminism. So what?  People do dreadful things in the name of democracy, and people do dreadful things in the name of beauty. People do dreadful things in the name of Christ our savior. That doesn’t mean we abandon the name. That means we rescue it, we rectify the misuse.

When I call myself a feminist, I don’t mean that I break out in a cold sweat when McDonald’s asks me if I want a boy toy or a girl toy in my kid’s happy meal. Some people use “feminism” to mean “being upset all the time” or “getting revenge on men” or “stamping out everything that makes women seem feminine.”  So what? I don’t use it that way. Neither did John Paul II.

Yes, we still need feminism. A lot has changed in the world, but there is much more that never will change. Women will always need men in a particular way — just as men will always need women in a particular way. Barbara Valencia said it well in a recent Facebook conversation:

Left to their own devices, human beings will always drift back into oppressing and abusing one another. The strong will dominate the weak, the weak will in turn manipulate the strong. It’s like a bad wheel on a stroller that will always send the thing veering off the sidewalk into traffic if an extra counter force is not applied in the opposite direction. Christianity is supposed to be that counter force, so is feminism. Indeed, the reason why JPII’s theology is so compelling is because it uses feminist ideas and “completes” them.

It’s not about men or women being more important than the other; it’s about learning how to work in harmony. Ever hear a choir practice? Constant tuning, constant correction.

Maybe sometime in the future, we will be able to retire the word “feminism.” Maybe there will no longer be any need to struggle against injustices that men (and women!) perpetrate against the feminine. But that time is not now. That time is not coming soon. We need feminism. Yes, still.

Passover/Easter/Daughters/Stoopid Gies

Happy Easter Tuesday! I’m apologizing in advance for this post being more-than-usually disjointed. I spent all yesterday cleaning my sons’ unspeakably foul room, and I woke up to discover that my spine had fused into a white hot solid. So I’m just tapping stuff out and whimpering for jelly beans. Here we go:

If John Singer Sargent came to our house, instead of this

PIC John Singer Sargent four sisters

he’d get this

Pretty sure old J.S.S. would be up for it, too. Yes, we did take a more traditional Easter portrait of all nine kids. This is the best one:

She actually loved Passover, loved Easter Mass, loved making eggs, loved eating candy, but no no no, she did not want to have her picture taken.
We are on vacation this week, my husband has my car because his is in the shop, my back went out and I can barely move but HE IS RISEN, the sun is shining, and I can hobble over to the coffee machine. We’re still basking in the glow and leftover chopped liver of Passover

(yeah, I bask in chopped liver. It’s full of iron, great for skin, hair and nails). Here are a couple of shots of my parents:

The power went out and we had to roast the leg of lamb on the grill over wood gathered from the side of the road. And now my kids are keeping busy by inventing a new universe of superheros

including Fledgling, who mercilessly fires poisoned Peeps at stoopid gies. Well, the stoopid gie had it coming!