This is significant because Provigil is approved by the FDA for treatment of SWSD, validating SWSD as a real, treatable, medical condition. What about, “Rave-Dancing Sleep Disorder,” which is the condition where you are too tired to dance to trance music until four in the morning? That condition doesn’t exist, of course.

This raises two questions: first, why is it that we need to medicalize something as simple as, “being tired because you work until five in the morning,” and second, why is it that we choose to medicalize THAT, but not other activities that also keep people up until early hours? Which adds more value to the world as a whole: working a factory job or dancing ecstatically at a rave?

I blame the Puritans.

And of course, more fundamentally, why is it that the state gets to decide which activities are worth taking medication to stay up for, instead of the individual?

So, apparently it’s okay for children to take amphetamines in order to help them get through their homework. What the hell? I mean, I’m not a doctor, so I’m not qualified to say whether it’s safe to give amphetamines to children, but given how SUPER SCARY BAD BAD BAD amphetamines are supposed to be, I’m surprised they’re okay for kids to take.

See? This is what propaganda says that amphetamines do to perfectly healthy adults! I can only imagine what little Kevin is going to look like in 2.5 years.

“Oh, but that’s meth, and Kevin is getting Vyvanse! Vyvanse is a prescription drug, not a dirty dirty street drug.” Riiiight. Would you rather I called it Desoxyn, which is what they call meth when a doctor prescribes it?

Look, bottom line is that I don’t care what people put into their bodies, and I do realize that not all amphetamines are the same, and that taking a drug under a doctor’s supervision is different from self-medicating. All that being said, the idea that we’re simultaneously putting out the message that meth is the worst thing since sliced anthrax, while prescription amphetamines are TOTALLY FINE TO GIVE TO CHILDREN seems kind of hypocritical. Especially given that meth used to be a prescription amphetamine (technically still is, but nobody really prescribes it anymore).

I’ve been thinking a lot about oppression and privilege lately. Fat-hate. Rape culture. Sexism. Racism. Able-ism. I don’t claim to be particularly well-versed in the topics, but I have started to notice a trend or two in the ways that people respond to an idea that challenges their position of privilege. One behavior that I’m noticing at this moment is what I’ll call selective outrage. Honestly, it’s a topic that I, myself, am only really starting to grasp, so I may have a hard time describing it, but I”ll give it a try. Selective outrage works something like this.

In 2007, A law was proposed in Australia which stated that intoxication does not imply sexual consent. Note: the law did not say that intoxicated people cannot give sexual consent, just that intoxication plus the lack of a “no” does not mean “yes.” Apparently, “She was drunk,” was being used successfully as a defense to rape charges, and this law was intended to change that. Put another way, the law requires drunk people to actually agree to fuck you. Seems pretty non-controversial, no?

Here are some of the comments made on a certain web forum regarding this law:

“So yeah, we had a few drinks, we went back to her place she threw me on the sofa, blew me for awhile and then rode we until she orgasmed and then the next day I get arrested for raping her”

This commenter appears to be concerned with the potential for misapplication of the justice system. He doesn’t want to see innocent people accused of a crime, and he is OUTRAGED.

When you drink and drive, it’s is YOUR responsibility in the fact that you should of known to say no to driving. Why is it then, that when women drink, our justice system thinks they are nothing but children, unable to control themselves at all, and thus exonerate them of ANY responsibility?

This commenter appears to be concerned with issues of personal responsibility. He also seems upset at a system that treats women like children, rather than autonomous adults. He is OUTRAGED!

Now, I can support the Sober Guy/Drunk Girl = Rape argument to some degree, but I have two issues with this. Foremost; Shouldn’t this girl be, in some respects, responsible for her own level of intoxication? Hate to tell you, but you don’t HAVE to get drunk, and then the consent issue stays clear. How can the guys be the only ones faulted when both parties are drunk?

Likewise, this commenter raises questions of personal responsibility and agency. OUTRAGED!

Do you want to deny a woman with a slumbersex fetish pleasure?

This commenter tackles the conjoined issues of sex-negativity and sexism, standing up for the right of people to consent to treatment of their bodies, even in non-mainstream ways. He is OUTRAGED!

Except it’s all bullshit, isn’t it? Because these people are probably not outraged about misapplication of justice, treating women like children, taking away people’s personal responsibility, or, more to the point, rape,  ANY OTHER TIME than when it might affect them. And that slumbersex person? The most eggregious example. Is that person actually kink-positive in real life, or is this just some semantic trick, used solely for the purpose of opposing the new law? Which, I will re-iterate, says simply that intoxicated people have to consent to sex just like everybody else.

The sneaky thing about selective outrage is that the points raised are, on the face, valid. At least they would be if they occurred in a vacuum. But they don’t. They occur in a context in which, for example, WOMEN ARE ACTUALLY BEING RAPED and the people who raped them are not being convicted at stunningly high numbers. The commenters often have absolutely nothing to say about that. Being outspokenly angry about rape is reserved for Feminists Who Are Probably Also Lesbians. Oh, if you asked them, they’d probably say, “Rape is bad, yo,” but the only time they can be bothered to actually type a comment on the Internet is when a law might be passed to actually DO SOMETHING about the raping, and when they do, it’s to poke holes and point out potential problems with the law.

This is the essence of selective outrage. If the only time you express your outrage is to oppose ideas that seek to change conditions, then you support the conditions, no matter what you might intend. And in this case, that means you support the status quo as it pertains to rape, which is a little shocking given the state of rape in America today. If you are anti-rape, I don’t insist that you actually speak out about it. Hey, there are a lot of issues in the world for people to care about, and rape may just not make your list. That’s actually fine with me. But at the very least, maintain your position of silence on the issue when those who care enough to speak up do so.

If I were asked why McDonald’s food tastes so good, I’d say a meticulously-perfected balance of fat, salt, and sugar. Little did I know that the actual answer is far more obvious.

We make it the way you would.

Well, that’s good. I suppose. Although, arguably, the whole reason I’m going out to eat is because you’ll make it better than I would. Or, perhaps you’ll make it worse, but the convenience of having someone else do it will offset that. But okay, bold idea: make it the way I would. I like it.

With 100% beef.

Ok, now here I was surprised, because it hadn’t occurred to me that anything except beef really could go into a hamburger. I mean, I’ve heard about the trace amounts of rat droppings and cockroach parts, but that hardly counts. No McDonalds’ bag has ever said, “Hamburger: Now With Roach Carcass.” Then Issa told me that McDonalds’ hamburger patties actually didn’t used to be 100% beef. They had soy, or something, in them.

So, shocker. The big marketing push for how awesome McDonalds’ burgers are is that they… drum roll… are made from cow. Can you hear the dripping sarcasm? I mean, isn’t that the least we can expect? This is kind of like a dry-cleaner saying, “I did not put any new stains on your clothes. AREN’T I AWESOME!”

Especially since pink slime (ammonia-treated slaughter-house-floor-scrapings) counts as 100% beef. And pink slime is in McDonalds’ hamburgers! Yeah. I have to tell you, every time I make a hamburger, I scrape up some fatty bits from my slaughter house, grind them up, treat them with ammonia, and mix them in with the chuck. Way to “make it the way I would,” McDonalds.

This is the first two truck-loads of firewood that I brought home. The stuff sitting on the ground, not the stacked stuff. Well, it ain’t firewood in the picture, but it is by now.

Notice the difference in the height of the right-hand stack? That’s what used to be that wood. I estimate it’s about a rick, which is about $65 in the bank by my math, or about $50 if you take into account that I picked it up vs. having it delivered. I focus on the money, because it’s obvious, but there’s no price I would put on the idea that I’m providing for myself a fundamental and life-sustaining need (heat, during the winter).

Splitting wood is fun, which is an odd thing to say given how much work it is. My hands and arms have been very tired from swinging the maul, and my back and legs are tired from moving the big hunks of stump after I cut them off the log with the chainsaw. Still, hitting a solid chunk of wood with a12-lb piece of metal and having the wood split into two pieces and go flying has a certain visceral pleasure. KA-POW! It’s kind of like working a heavy punching bag, but with a fire at the end.

The neighbor has offered to let me borrow his gas-powered splitter, but I’m not interested. I have enough things in my life that a gasoline engine turns into nothing harder than a button push. I’m happy to have something so valuable come out of nothing more than a stick, a piece of heavy metal, and my body. That’s not to say that I’m not also happy to have a riding mower for the field, or a gas tiller (that thing was a damn life-saver; I can’t imagine doing all that work by hand), just that here’s one thing I can do by hand, and I like doing it, and there’s no need to turn it over to Almighty Petroleum just because I can.

Currently, we have at least 3 cords stored up, but some of that is going to be burned on what’s left of this winter. I estimate we may need about 5 cords to get through a year, so I’ve got a lot more work to do before I’m “done.” The truth is that I may never be “done,” because it’d be fantastic to have at least two years’ worth saved up. One year is the absolute minimum for seasoning hard-wood, but two years is usually better.

And, even if I had two years saved up, seeing good wood rotting on the ground just looks like a waste to me now. But of course, that’s not true either. Bugs live in the wood and eat it. The wood itself rots and turns into soil. I suppose if I gathered up enough firewood, eventually the soil in the woods would be less fertile, but I doubt that little-ol’-me is making that much of a difference. If everyone in Knox county heated their homes with wood, then we might have to worry about how many trees were getting cut, but as-is, I can pretty much heat my entire house for a year on what other people would just leave lying on the ground. It’s nice to be in a situation where I can be reasonably confident that my ecological impact is low. Hopefully I can increase the number of those as this homesteading adventure, also know as My Life, continues.

Dear Everyone In TV, Movies, Modeling, Magazines, and Video Games:

If your character is not actually about to shoot something, for fuck’s sake, please do not pose them with their finger on the trigger. This is a heinous safety violation. Many of us who know about guns are TOTALLY UNABLE to enjoy your art or be influenced by your advertising because we are so damn distracted by the catastrophe that is about to happen.

Seriously. Spend a few minutes on a public firing range at 1:00 on a Saturday afternoon, when everybody and their cousin has come out to shoot for the first time ever, and after Little Billy accidentally points a (supposedly unloaded, but who can say for sure) gun at you two or three times, you too will hard-wire your brain to notice when people’s fingers are or are not on the trigger. You may also, as I did, resolve not to go to the range on Saturdays. When a person’s finger is on the trigger, and they are not firing at a safe target, all I can think of is getting their finger off the trigger, or leaving the area before they accidentally shoot me. This is probably not what you media people are intending.

You are also perpetuating bad habits. Why do you think Little Billy puts his finger on the trigger the second he picks up the gun? Because that’s what people on TV do. Har-de-har. It’s all funny until somebody gets shot in the foot.

Here is how you hold a gun, right up until the moment when the sights are on target and you are about to fire:

Where’s that finger? You got it.

I’d like to take a minute here and express my frustration with non-specific units of measurement. See, a cord of wood is exactly 128 cubic feet of wood. You can give it to me in a 4×4x8 stack, or a 4×2x16 stack, or whatever combination you please, but a cord is a cord. But people never seem to sell wood by the cord. Instead, they sell by the “rick,” at least that’s what they call it here in Tennessee.

A rick is a 4×8 stack. Notice any missing dimensions? That’s right. A rick is 4 by 8 by whatever length the wood is cut to. So a person who cuts the wood to 18″ is giving you a heck of a lot more wood than someone who cuts to more like 14″. And you never know until they deliver the wood, which makes it damn near impossible to comparison shop, which is, in my opinion, why people like to sell by the rick.

I guess in the long run, it probably works out, because most people cut to about the same length, but the engineer in me just hates the lack of precision.

Anyway, the bed of the truck is about 45 cubic feet. A cord of wood is exactly 128 cubic feet, and a rick usually works out to about 1/3 of a cord, or about 42 cubic feet. So the bed of the truck is, conveniently, almost exactly one rick. Ain’t that handy.

I found a place near my house where some trees had been felled for a construction project. They were cut into 2′-4′ long pieces, and laying on the ground. Some of them had already been run through the chipper, so I felt pretty confident nobody would mind me taking them. Issa and I finished filling up the bed of the truck, and she said, “Do you think we’re over the truck’s weight rating?” Well, I hadn’t much thought of it until that very moment.

It turns out, we have a truck stop near our house, so for about $10, we could have figured out exactly what we weighed. Keep this tip in mind if you own a truck and/or a trailer, because you can overload those things really easy and not know it. You don’t have to be a semi to go through the scales. But since I didn’t think of that, we just drove home real slow and tossed the wood off on the ground.

But we’re not the first to have this kind of question, and I found this nifty little booklet that contains a table of nominal weights for a cord of various types of wood. The heaviest type of wood is oak, at up to 5500 lbs per cord of green wood. Which means that if we were to pack our truck bed full of oak, it would weigh about 1900 lbs. I think our truck’s payload capacity is about 1700 lbs, so I guess we might have been over-weight, but not by much.

I feel like I have a lot to say about the issue, but I am going to try to keep this post down to just one main point: the “Bunsen burner” theory of metabolism. The theory goes something like this: the body burns fuel, like a Bunsen burner. If calories in is less than calories expended through metabolism and exercise, you will lose weight. Therefore, you are fat because you eat too much.

Fat-haters use this idea to put fat people’s weight into their control, which then justifies the fat-hate, since apparently what we learned from Teh Gays is that it’s okay to be hateful to people if the thing you’re being hateful over is a choice, but not if it’s innate.

I confess to having used this argument in discussions about weight. It made terribly good sense at the time. It’s basic thermodynamics, right? If you have a fuel source with so many calories of energy, and you burn off that many calories, plus some more, the extra calories have to come from somewhere. The thermodynamics are sound, but the Bunsen burner theory of metabolism is total bullshit. The human body is not a black-box in a lab.

The first flaw in the theory is that the human body uses calories for a lot more than just maintaining weight. For example, if you restrict calories, many people’s cognitive function will suffer or energy levels decrease before they reach a point where they begin to lose weight. You can’t pick and choose. You can’t say to your body, “Dear body, please take those calories from my fat and not from my brain-function.” Imagine that, on a given day, my base metabolic rate is determined to be 2200 calories, and from that point on, I begin to consume only 2000 calories, a 200-calorie deficit. Who’s to say that I won’t be 200 calories stupider, slower, grumpier, and weaker without losing any weight?

This brings up a fundamental flaw in the very idea of the base metabolic rate, which is the basis of the Bunsen burner theory. The BMR is defined as the amount of calories you need to eat to maintain your weight, therefore if you eat less than your BMR, you must lose weight. Can you see the circularity in this definition? If you’re eating your estimated BMR and not losing weight, the doctors and scientists will say, “Your BMR must be lower than predicted.” Then they’ll restrict your calorie intake until you start to lose weight and say THAT’s your BMR.

So, calories in minus my BMR equals weight gained or lost, right? But BMR is defined as, “the amount of calories below which I will lose weight.”  So, let’s just substitute the variable in that formula, as they used to say in algebra. Calories in minus whatever number it takes to make me lose weight = lost weight. Uhhh… yes, I suppose that’s true. It’s also a tautology, and so not very interesting from a practical perspective.

Somehow, “Calories In < Calories Expended = Weight Loss,” sounds very reasonable, but it sounds pretty stupid when you translate that to, “In order to lose weight, restrict your calories until you begin to lose weight.” Thanks. Next you’ll tell me, “In order to be able to live in a vacuum, hold your breath until you no longer need to breathe.”

In closing, to the person with whom I argued in favor of the Bunsen burner theory: I was wrong. You were right. I was stupid and bigoted. I’m sorry.

On a side-note, the next time you hear somebody debating whether people are “born gay” or “choose gay-ness,” please for the love of whatever you find holy, remind them that it doesn’t matter, because who you love and fuck is nobody’s business but your own, regardless of why you’re choosing to love and fuck them. The whole “innate vs. choice” debate presumes that the only reason we shouldn’t punish a person for gay-ness is because the person had it imposed upon them, like some sort of birth defect. This is equally true for fat people.

Somewhere along the line, noticing things to get angry about became a sort of hobby. Don’t let the ranting fool you: I’m really very happy most of the time. I can’t explain why anger at the injustice in the world and a near-total loss of hope for humanity’s overall redemption coincided with happiness for me (Stockholm syndrome, maybe?) but it did. Being angry seems to work for me, and I’ve found more and more things to be angry about.

I started out being mad about religious inequality. I used to call myself Pagan, and was able to get up a good head of steam about the ways in which my religion was not afforded equal treatment by the majority. I eventually came to call myself an Atheist, which is an even more fruitful ground for righteous indignation. After religion, I added relationship issues. I’m polyamorous, and there are all sorts of ways that society punishes me for my non-conformist relationship structure. From there, it was a short hop to gender, sexual identity, and race. The newest “isms” of which I’ve become aware related to people with disabilities and fat people. It turns out that we have enough discrimination and self-hate to go around to just about anybody, even groups that I wouldn’t have immediately identified as discriminated against.

As each of these groups came onto my radar, it was pretty easy to integrate them into my existing framework of non-discrimination, because the principles at work seemed to be the same. The reasons why I would discriminate against people are the same, regardless of which particular factor I’m basing the discrimination on. The ideological framework that leads me to try not to discriminate is also the same. I’m often surprised when I hear, for example, feminists, spewing hate-speach about, for example, trans-gender people, or gays, or what-have-you. It seems so obvious to me that the feminist argument is fundamentally the same as the argument for acceptance of other minority classes. Issa tells me that line of thinking is relatively new, and falls under third-wave feminism.

Each time I have become aware of a way in which I am unconsciously bigoted against a certain type of people, it has made it easier to accept the next time it happens. The more I do it, the more I am able to see people as, simply, people, and the more I feel able to relate to them, instead of whatever condition I am imagining obscures them.

It’s pretty rudimentary. 3/4″ PVC and some fittings. Didn’t even really glue it, as friction seems to be doing the job okay so far. Since I took this picture, I even hung some aluminum foil curtains from the lights to reflect more light on the plants and less into the room.

This little plant right here is going to grow up to be broccoli some day.

As a side note, the grow lights make wonderful photography lights too, as long as the camera and lights are both about 6″ or less from the subject.

These here are the onions and leeks.

I actually started the first batch on the 12th, and most of them didn’t germinate. I may have planted them too deep in the soil, or maybe the seeds are just no good, because they are left-over from last year. I put in a 2nd batch of seeds, and if those don’t start, I may chuck the whole batch and open the new batch I ordered this year.

I have also started some lettuce and carrots.