femminista: thoughts of a feminist rhetorician

On my flight to Albany a couple of weeks ago, I flew US Scareways and during myflight encountered the new advertising for the captive audience. As if it isn't bad enough that we are accosted with signs, billboards, posters, commericials, trailermercials (my name for advertisements mixed in with movie previews at the theater), and so on, they are now accosting us in places where we literally can't get away from the ads. The first step of this terrifying journey was certainly the advent of the toilet advertisement. You know the one's I'm talking about--the ads hung inside bathroom stalls, impossible to avoid and imminently readable (what else is there to do?). Now, once you're airborne, paying an airline to transport you from point A to point B, you are asked to further aid them in increasing their revenue.

When did Rolling Stone magazine turn into People for twenty-somethings? It's not that I remember it ever being a fabulous news source, but what I read today was just pathetic. My only solace is that I didn't actually pay for it; my subscription came free with my Salon.com membership. Oh, well maybe I can use them in Beloved's litter box.

Struggling towards what, you ask. I'm not sure how to answer that question. One- I am struggling towards speaking in a public forum about all of the amazing changes that have happened in my life. I want to share them because I believe that they might be of value to others. I fear sharing them because of those people who, for whatever reason, feel the need to devalue and disparage things spoken from the heart. Two- where do I draw the line between my public life and my private life? I'm not one for secrecy. As a friend of mine recently, and quite aptly, pointed out: I am a "full-disclosure kind of girl." It's true that I find great value in openness and that closing myself off is what I can only describe as unnatural for me. Moreover, closing myself off is painful to me, while opeing myself is beyond liberatory.

As I was watching this news report about the kids from New Jersey who videotaped a fight and then posted it to MySpace, a song begins to play over the sound of new report: "I walk the lonely road..." I don't own this song; it is not on my computer's hard drive; and there are no other windows open, so it can't be streaming from another site. I try to play the video again; no song. Who is this ghost and why is it haunting me? BTW, the choice of song was appropriate for the video of middle school kids fighting. Strange.

will it have been worth it to cook dinner on the web? An article on slashdot.org reviews one of the newer (and monumentally expensive) web-cookware gadgets: a refrigerator/stove which allows you to begin cooking dinner from a remote location using--yes, that's right--your web browser. So, I thought the whole web-browser coffee maker was a bit over the top, but this...well, I'm just saying : have none of these people seen "2001: A Space Odyssey"? I mean, c'mon, have we learned nothing from the world of science fiction? Granted, not too many people will be able to afford an oven that costs $8,699, but for those who can and do, I ask only one thing: don't call it Hal. --Just because I'm paran

I have spent a large portion of my life in doctor's offices and have always found the reading materials in the waiting rooms to be interesting and odd statements about the patients and practitioners. However, I believe that I may have found the loveliest example of bizarre reading material yet. Several weeks ago, while waiting to see my doctor at the Purdue University Student Health center, i happened upon a magazine that seemed oddly out of place in a university health center: the AARP magazine. Purdue is a university comprised mostly of "traditional" college students; that is, they are mostly eighteen to early twenties. I must wonder then, how the American Association of Retired Persons magazine fits into the reading material of this demographic. I am a firm believer in reading a broad range of periodicals, but how many eighteen to twenty-four year olds would be interested in reading a magazine targeted toward retirees.

"Hey little mama, whatchya smokin'?"

I'm sitting outside the local Borders in Indiana and a guy stopped to asked me this question. I pause, unsure about how to respond to being called "little mama." I'm always a little uncertain with these kind of comments. I mean nobody would say "hey little daddy (or papa)." Why is it kosher to call me "little mama"? Then again, I don't think he meant anything by it; it was matter of fact without the learing tone that agitates me. So, I just answer his question, explaining that the cigarettes contain cloves and his response makes me smile a bit: "So they taste spicy when you smoke 'em?" At that he goes inside and I'm left to write this random entry. I suppose his comment was better than the one I got outside of Starbucks: "Cigarettes are really, really bad for you." No kidding? Now there's an annoying comment for you.