Pain

As I move into ping.FM and Twitter to microblog the quotidian, I am find it is increasingly harder for me to use blogging as a personal space. I am gradually leaving blogging to the realm of "big think" publishing that takes longer to write and produce and certainly longer to read and react to.

Yet today I am making an exception because there's another reason for my not writing as much as I would like to. That reason is pain.

I have been consumed by the pain that ails me and my body at any given time of the day for the last year and a half. And yes, I speak of my body as a separate entity because as someone who is her 40s, I am suffering from the realities of this twilight age where the youthfulness of my body doesn't mesh with the decomposing realities of a body that by evolutionary standards should have been turned to dust if not 5 years ago, then right about now.

Pain is nothing new in my blogging life. Actually, as I created this blog to break free from the shackles of a writing block that I had dragged into motherhood from my years as a PhD candidate, I found that the only thing I could rant about was pain. Here's an example from 2003 :

Sometimes, as my dad always says, "you don't know whether to shit or go blind." (It's an English idiom.)

When I see what the members of the Right have done to the language in an effort to try to change reality, I know exactly what my father is talking about.

This week, in one of those grandstanding fuckwadded-up pieces of bullshit that they specialize in, right-wing Republicans will introduce House Resolution 6099, The Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act. Because, according to the bill's sponsor, fetuses of 20-weeks gestation are capable of feeling pain. The answer? Is not to assume that it's a medical fact and require doctors to administer pain to these fetuses. No. The bill requires that doctors INFORM women about to undergo post-20 week abortions that their fetuses will feel pain.
See? That's the "awareness" part.
It's all part of the wicked baby-killer thou art woman bullshit.
According to Yahoo news,

The bill, by Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., defines a 20-week-old fetus as a "pain-capable unborn child" — a highly controversial threshold among scientists. It also directs the Health and Human Service Department to develop a brochure stating "that there is substantial evidence that the process of being killed in an abortion will cause the unborn child pain."

Las night, from AP :

Any hopes of commercial reward were quickly overwhelmed by near universal revulsion to last week's announcement — from those who knew Goldman and Brown, from booksellers and advertisers, even from Fox News Channel personality Bill O'Reilly.

A dozen Fox network affiliates had already said they would not air the two-part sweeps month special, and numerous stores had either declined to sell the book or had promised to donate any profits to charity.

"I really don't think there would have been very many advertisers who would have been willing to participate in this show," said Brad Adgate of the ad buying firm Horizon Media.

With little advertising, Fox would miss the chance to profit from the show. If there were no advertisers, the show wouldn't even be rated by Nielsen Media Research — so the number of people watching would have done nothing to help Fox's season average, he said.

The cancellation was a stunning setback for ReganBooks — an imprint of HarperCollins — and Judith Regan, who had labeled the book and interview Simpson's "confession." She insisted that she had done it not for money, but as a victim of domestic violence anxious to face down a man she believed got away, literally, with murder.