I Love Nick (Happy Birthday to Me)

Hi there everyone in blogger land.
I am gearing up to celebrate my birthday tomorrow (the big 2-5) and nick was super awesome to begin the celebrations for me.
In honour of my birthday I have quit my job, so hopefully I will have more time to blog then.
So thanks everyone who remembered me and that I am still out there and if you will excuse me, I have to convince my kitten to stop eating my hair so I can go for my favourite Friday night activity, bellydancing.

Yes, I am alive.

K so sorry for being AWOL for a while but I have been extremely busy swamped in work just generally out having fun.

I would promise to try and be a better blogger but I feel my connection with the whole blog world sort of dying so why not just a little wrap up of recent events?

I attended the all night art festival here in Toronto called Nuit Blanche

I bought the wedding dress on weekend trip in Ottawa.

I graduated from my Masters with an "Award for Academic Excellence"

I wandered through the "word on the street festival" and got some free books!

I even got in a fight with a guy in a progressive bookstore.

Yea okay, the fight in the bookstore probably needs a little elaborating.

I was wandering through the bookstore in the "political thought" section that just so happened to be predominantly feminist. I was wearing a plain old t-shirt when this guy, who must have been there under duress, says to me "do you notice that the label says 'political thought' but it is all feminist", now this is not my store and I have never stepped foot in here, I don't even look like I work here but this man wants me defend the views of the store. I decide to leave it alone and ignore him when he grabs Maureen Dowd's 2005 publication off the shelves and decides to try again to engage me, apparently I resemble Maureen Dowd (I wish). He went to the obvious and said "I bet if a man had written it and it was called 'Are women necessary' it would be considered sexist". I decided not to ignore this one and just said "yea probably" and moved back towards TFG in hopes he would leave me alone if I was no longer near the feminist section.
Now the whole thing was friendly enough and he smiled asking if he was "getting a rise out of me" but at the end of the day there was this underlying idea that as a feminist I must be expected to defend the thoughts of all feminists. Are feminists still that marginalized that we only have handful of ideas we all believe in? Are we still considered man-haters?
Like any arena of political thought, it is open to scrutiny (and should be scrutinized just like anything else) but unlike a political party with one leader and one voice feminism and feminists do not a have a leader or a single unified platform, and if we did our leader would not be Maureen Dowd.
For that reason I don't think we should be open to the same scrutiny as someone with a bumper sticker supporting the democrats or the republicans. It just isn't that simple.
Feminism isn't a simple philosophy, it is a means of engaging with other philosophies and I hope the next well meaning guy that walks into a bookstore hoping to get a "rise" out of someone can recognize that.

Fuck You Vibrel

As some of you may know, I went through a two year period in my life where sex was impossible due to a sexual dysfunction. While I was able to get the help I needed and get everything back in working order, not all women are that lucky. For those women there is not much being done to help them and that is why I got excited when I saw a billboard for a product called "Vibrel". The ad shows a very large tube of lubricant with the FSAD (Female Sexual Arousal Disorder) next to a little blue pill that says "ED" above it. The words "now there is help for women, available at your pharmacy!" are plastered across the bottom.

Now what does this ad say to you? Does it indicate that medical research has been performed? That pharmaceutical companies are taking women's sexual health as seriously as they do men's?
Does the fact that you have to go to the pharmacy to buy it make you feel like it is a drug?
Unfortunately it is a load of bullshit. The product is available at a pharmacy but you don't have to go to the pharmacist to get it, and at $30 for 3ml the product isn't even approved by the FDA.
The vibrel website claims the "prescription version" is currently under review by the FDA, they are more then happy to sell it to you before approval.

So why does this whole thing piss me off? Because so much effort and money keeps being poured into developing pills like Viagra and Cialis so that men in the 80's can keep getting erections and yet there is no serious R&D trying to help women in their 20's who cannot physically maintain a normal sexual relationship due to serious medical problems.

The iPod Wedding

As the growing number of wedding related responsibilities start to pile up I am thinking of going for an "iPod wedding", which basically means I don't want to bother with a DJ.
So I have to ask, are there any songs you wonderful people in blogger land think are essential to a wedding? Any that you would rather die then have to dance to one more time?