duermemucho's diary

duermemucho's Diaryland Diary

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fuck breast cancer awareness month

It's been Breast Cancer Awareness Month for, what, sixteen hours, and already I've been hit up twice to give money for research. Fuck this feelgood bullshit. Of all the ribbon-wearing people whose awareness will be increased this month, how many are going to make at least one of the lifestyle changes that are known to reduce breast cancer risk later in life? How many will give up smoking and start exercising and get more regular mammograms? About 0.001%, because it's so much easier to pin on a ribbon and throw a quarter into the can for research. Leave the hard work to the scientists, there's a pint of ice cream and three TiVo'ed episodes of "Deadwood" with my name on them. Even at my work, where you'd expect people would be a bit more enlightened, I found a pink flyer on the kitchen wall, saying "wear pink shirts and denim jeans on October 6th to promote breast cancer awareness!" This message was funded, I kid you not, by Lee Jeans. Looks like I'll be wearing my Dockers on Friday. Great photo op, that, just like the drones at the supermarket asking if I want to donate a dollar with my grocery purchase. Fuck off. If I were in charity, I would ask companies NOT to go begging for donations like that, since it just leads to donation burnout. I'm not going to donate a red cent to anyone if I'm being asked for it all day long, every day. And all this would not be so bad if they didn't toss around the word "cure" like a fucking beach ball. I despise the word "cure". How many diseases can you name that are curable? Diseases eradicated by vaccination don't count. It's such bullshit. People who cheer on the science sidelines for "cures" while doing jack shit to take responsibility for their own lives are not only ignorant hypocrites, they're enabling fundamentalists and new-age yahoos and others who would love to see science dismantled. Because the more we expect to have a "cure" someday, the more influence the anti-science wackjobs will have when they point at people like me and say "See? See? Decades of research and billions of dollars and there's still no cure! They [scientists] can't do anything for you that Jesus / Lazarus / a certified reiki practicioner can't!"

Fuck breast cancer awareness month.

********

I feel like a dick typing out that rant one day after having a conversation with Lark about small-minded people who expect everything they do and say to be taken seriously. We spent much of the weekend down in Portland "it's just like college, but a city!" Oregon, where from the front window of a Thai restaurant we watched as an elderly Asian woman pushed a stroller loaded with a potted plant and another (folded) stroller down the sidewalk. It looked out of place, and I mentioned that it might be performance art, and that's when we got into this conversation, concluding that performance art works best when it's used as an excuse to do something incredibly strange, rather than as a non-verbal statement that everyone must take seriously.

I've been all up and down the west coast, but I hadn't been to Portland since I was eight years old, when my family stopped there for a night on the way home from one of my dad's draining family reunions in Seattle. Lark and her ex, on the other hand, lived there for three years and had a child there, so she knows what's what and where to find it. That's a nice thing to have when you're visiting an unfamiliar city. It helped us find food on the drive to the concert that was my nominal reason for going there; even though it turned out that there was meat in my burrito, it was nice to be with someone who knew where you could find a drive-through Mexican restaurant where the burritos remind me of the little taco wagons you'd find outside the liquor store back in California.

Most of all, just like when I went to Cleveland week before last, it was nice to see trees again. Christ, I don't know if I can handle this dry climate shit for much longer. But it's threatening rain right now...so my fingers are crossed.

4:34 p.m. - 2006-10-01

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