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Worked at my dad's school all afternoon on Tuesday for some competition for all the middle school gifted students in the district. I didn't actually get to see any of them compete, though, which was somewhat disappointing as it sounded like a pretty cool thing -- they wrote skits a while back, memorized them, etc, and when they got to the competition they were given a character, a prop, and a line that they had to work in somehow and they only had a few minutes to figure out how. I believe that may have only been one part of the competition, though, as there seemed to be a lot of different categories that didn't quite seem to fit with what he had told me they did when Dad was announcing the awards. That and his kids (or at least one group of them, I'm not sure how many there were or how it exactly worked) won, so I imagine they were pretty good at it. Problem was that it took a while -- he said we'd be home around 6, we didn't get back until 7:40 at the earliest. And I hadn't gotten much sleep Monday night and had been standing up making popcorn and running things around for hours Tuesday afternoon, so when I got home I decided to take a nap. Nothing strange there. Until I didn't wake up until 3:30am. Ouch. And then I looked at my watch, figured screw it, and went back to sleep. So I didn't have anything done for classes today. Not that I would have done anything anyway, but I had to take two Spanish quizzes over parts of the play I hadn't read (one because I was planning to read it Tuesday night and one because I thought we didn't have to have it read until Thursday but probably would have started Tuesday night anyway had I been awake).

So I missed NCIS and House and everything. Not fun there. I'll have to get those some time.

Tonight we went to our credit union's annual members' meeting thing. Twas at some banquet center thing and I expected thusly the food to be quite good, but it was merely passable. Not bad, but nothing to brag home about. Still. You walk in the door and they give you one of those plastickyacrylic drawstring tote bag things and a magnetic memo board, then they feed you, then they talk for a bit (but it wasn't that long, thankfully), then they introduce everybody, then they do a trivia contest and draw door prizes. We were in first on the trivia the entire time until the music category (which you'd think I'd be good at, but it was all really old popular stuff; they'd give you a line and you'd have to give the next one without even having been given the song or artist) where we ended up down by one and got beaten in the STL Landmarks category (because it was all downtown, where I never go. Seriously, it's sad. I've lived here all my life and I know Chicago better).

Funny thing was, I had been joking the entire time about how the door prizes should have been cash instead of stuff at the credit union meeting (it was totally random-- some wine basket, a garden hose, potpourri and dish, fancy lotion, a container with a bunch of snacks, etc.), and then the trivia prizes were cash. So I made $5 for getting second, which was especially nice considering I knew virtually none of the questions (usually I'm passable, but these were obviously geared for the older crowd; after me and some of the younger bank teller types that worked there, the next youngest was easily my mom, followed by my dad, and besides them I doubt there was anybody under 60) and was of little help at all. That and two muffin tins and a box of blueberry muffin mix from the door prize. So. Five bucks, a bag and memo board, and muffins; I'd say that was a good haul.

Talked to my old US history teacher today and asked him if he knew of any political cartoons that I could use for this dumb research paper I've got to do for history. Because he always had cartoons to illustrate stuff (because that was what was on all the tests and he wanted to prepare us. Which he did well. Looking back, he was probably my favorite teacher that year for sheer volume of stuff learned) and I was having trouble finding a good one. As my teacher of this year strongly suggested that we have one as part of our bazillion required sources. The whole assignment is crap. It wouldn't bother me so much if he didn't insist on calling it a Document Based Question, which implies an essay with 5-8 sources given to you which you use to support your given topic that you should be able to write in about 50 minutes (as it was on the US History test and will be on the History of the Americas test), and not a research paper with a given topic and 5-8 sources we've got to go find. When he calls it a DBQ it makes it sound like it's okay that he assigned this big, high point valued paper to be done in a week right before the huge finals start.

On that note. Looked at my calendar thing today and freaked out. Evidently my math tests are only in a week and a half and chemistry in two. Holyfuck. I had no idea. I've been trying to keep my head above (as these next two or three weeks are frakking hell every year in every class) in my non-hugeassfinals classes and not really reviewing at all for the ones with said finals. So I'm going to go die now.

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Oh, and just randomly, the patch of sunburn on my left forearm was really swollen all day yesterday and most of today. Like visibly so. It's gone down mostly by now, but not completely. It was quite odd. And fun to poke when I'd nothing better to do. And other randomness: I have a huge bruise on my right elbow. The top of my arm at my elbow, to be precise. It's been hurting since Friday like it was bruised, but only yesterday did the bruise pop up. And it already looked several days old, like it had been there since Friday and was wearing away. But I know it wasn't there before, because I spent a long time trying to figure out why my arm hurt so badly when there was no bruise there or anything. Weirdness, I say.

Still more tags on my Semagic tag list thing that I've never used. Odd. I know they're from one of my communities, I recognize them, but I've got no idea why they (and just a couple of them, not even the whole list) are in here.

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So this is in response to something xx_housecat_xx posted in her journal asking about people's views/responses/emotions regarding abortion. And my response became long and such, so I figured I'd just throw it over here. As I went way off topic of her initial query. And ended up staying up way later than I planned so that I could finish typing it.

It gets kind of personal, though, so if you're not comfortable with that for some reason. . . .


Good topic. I've actually thought about this a lot, about how people say that you can't ever actually know what you'll do until you're actually in that situation and I think that I can still say that I know that I would never do it.
(Whoa, long sentence.)
(Edit: rather long response in total. What can I say, good topic.)

I know a lot of my anti-abortion stance comes from the fact that that was how I was raised; Catholic and more or less conservative. And though I'm essentially neither at this point, the pro-life thing is one of the few viewpoints I've retained. And I've realized that one of the main reasons for my keeping it is because my mum tried to have kids for so long and couldn't. I'm the first of 3 kids out of 6 pregnancies that actually took, not even counting the undoubtedly countless that never did or miscarried before she knew. And I've never been able to comprehend why someone would throw away something that some women try so hard for and can't get. But I know that's really hard for a lot of people to understand, the desperation and sorrow and such that comes with not being able to have kids. It's almost irrational, honestly, the amount of pressure that women have to propagate successfully, but it is the biological purpose of life, so it makes sense that there's this huge drive for it.

Regarding the whole "you can't understand until you're in that situation", I think it works both ways. You can't really understand the entire debate until you've had to try to keep your kid siblings in the front room while listening to you mom sobbing in her bedroom after just having been told that the baby she's carried for 5 months and will carry for 4 more (after having two later-term--one late first, one early second trimester--miscarriages and thinking she was out of the woods) has no chance of surviving. (That's still one of the most harrowing memories of my entire life.)

Plus there's the whole I see it as murder thing. Because, um, that's a person. In there. Not random growth. Having babies, the fact that we can do it, the fact that an entire sentient being can come from the union of two zygotes is what I've seen for a long time as the greatest miracle of the universe. I mean, if you think about it, it's pretty wicked beautiful of a phenomenon. Sentience as a whole is pretty wicked cool if you think about how many species are not sentient and how we managed to get the luck of the draw (or survival of the fittest, I suppose) and come out on top. And that somebody would willfully destroy that before it even had a chance and furthermore that it would actually be legal sort of baffles my mind.

And I understand the wanting an abortion for rape/incest/whatever, but if you report it, they automatically give you a triple dose of birth control that induces menses within 48 hours, thus preventing pregnancy, thus not actually needing to terminate a child (though I know that some people would consider the birth control thing abortion in itself, but I give a bit more leeway than that). Barring that, say she didn't want to report it at first and by the time she finds out it's too late for the birth control thing, I'm semi-okay with early abortions in that case.

But here's the kicker. Banning abortion = pretty much impossible. You ban it completely, you're a heartless bastard who cares nothing for the emotional welfare of abused and raped women. You ban it except for in cases of rape or incest, all of a sudden you've got every woman who wants an abortion claiming rape. Pretty soon, nobody's going to investigate rape seriously at all because it will have become synonymous with simply wanting an abortion and rapists will walk the streets free.

So it doesn't really work. My opinion is that the best bet is to provide birth control and better education. None of this abstinence education shit, real sex education so you actually know what's going on when the time comes. That's what's going to lower the abortion rate faster than anything. Let's put some money into better, cheaper, and more insurance coverage for birth control instead of male impotence drugs.

But yeah. I think the one thing that cemented my knowing that I'd never ever be able to get an abortion was something my mom told me about after having and losing her 6th kid, Riley. We had known that he was terminal since her 4th or 5th month, and sometime in there she and my dad had seriously talked about aborting him. Because all the doctors had told us that there was no chance, he probably wouldn't even make it to term, it would probably be cheaper, etc. And my dad had sort of been for it because basically it was fucking up my mom (totally understandably, you know) and by extension our whole family. But mum said no. A, they weren't clear/right about what was wrong with him and she knew they were wrong about what they had initially said at that point because of things they had said earlier, etc., and if they were by chance wrong and only found out after they had killed him that he wouldn't have died in the first place, she wouldn't be able to live with herself. And this had already happened to us before, more or less, as my parents were given some list of things that were possibly wrong with my brother Tyler way back 7 years earlier, all or most of which were terminal, and he came out okay. (Well, you know. Little brother kind of okay.) Those, of course, were never given as certainties like Riley's was, but she didn't want to take any chances. But the way she phrased it still nearly makes me cry every time I think about it:

"I had to live with carrying him for 9 months. I would have had to live with the possibility that I was wrong for a lot longer."

So yeah. That's essentially why I'm against it. To put it in a nutshell.

Wow, now I'm all somber and teary-like. Nice job, Cathryn. *pokes*