From the low point that was Sunday breakfast, J took me to a starving artist sale and to Gabriel Brother's to look at clothes.
After looking at the wonderfully bad art I dashed off to the restroom. While in the stall I spotted a piece of scrap paper lying on the toilet tissue holder. Curious, I opened the paper to this...
“Chef – piece of Bone in pork loin – woman bit down on & was very displeased Said pork “loin” is suppose to be boneless – Dirty Silver”.
Hmm... I don't have any theories. I just thought the note was fascinating. Maybe I'll send it to Found Magazine. (Confession: I once left a love letter in a very public place. I came back later in the day and discovered it was gone. I've been checking out Found's website ever since on the off chance it gets submitted).
My other comfort this week (aside from the peace offering of irises, roses and carnations from J) was the arrival of the huge order I placed from Amazon. The only book that did not come in was Joseph Moncure's The Wild Party, illustrated by Art Spiegelman. I wanted a hardcover copy, which I had to order through Powell's Books.
And the dental hygienist who cleaned my teeth on Monday said I had “very expressive eyebrows”.
In Other (Horrifying) News
Three pregnant teenagers assaulted their caretaker with a frying pan and escaped from the New Hope Maternity home in American Fork, Utah earlier today.
A maternity home. In 2007.
I skimmed some of the headlines for the 27 articles listed in Google News. The majority of the articles used the phrase “whacked” to describe the assault, which I found to be an unfortunate choice of words, as it made me laugh over a tragic situation.
What kind of parent, in 2007, feels like they need to isolate their daughter by sending her to a maternity home? What kind of pro-life bullshit is that? To proclaim that all life is sacred, then slut-shame your daughter by hiding her away?
I've never heard of a maternity home. But, it is Utah we're talking about here. Utah is so backwards that people in the South make fun it. ;-)
ReplyDeleteHaving been raised in the former and visited the latter (where one brother attended U. of Utah), I can say that people in the South who would be predisposed to make fun of the Beehive State would be too ignorant of it to start with even to realize that it's ripe for relative scorn.
ReplyDelete"Horrifying"? Hoist port eyebrow: The kinds of maternity homes I'm more familiar with are the ones where the teenage girl lives while carrying the baby to term with the understanding that she's giving the baby up for adoption at birth -- not necessarily a "slut-shame" sitch involving "pro-life bullshit," more like "an alternative to 36-year-old moms suddenly becoming de facto parents to two successive generations of children."
Not trying to pick fights, but I'll politely suggest that giving up a newborn child for which one recognizes one is not psychologically, emotionally or financially ready to parent can be a courageous alternative to being a teenage mom or obtaining an abortion. I don't argue whether abortion should also be an available option for unwed teenage girls, but it's nice if there's some supportive provision to allow them to carry a healthy fetus voluntarilyto term.
True, it used to be commonplace that parents would consign their pregnant daughters to these sorts of places, taking them to the train station in the dead of night, quite against those daughters' wishes and to their detriment, but I can't say from what news reports I've read that this is that kind of place.
In the sorts of contemporary maternity homes I read about, you wouldn't expect see the residents assaulting caretakers and "escaping" -- maybe some rulebreaking about smoking and curfew. These kids are described as "struggling" and being kept away from problems involving friends and drugs, so who knows?
"The girls used the victim's credit card to buy a tank of gas immediately after Tuesday's attack, but there was no evidence of it being used elsewhere, police Sgt. Shauna Greening said.
“I don't know what their finances are,” she said.
"The teens, two 15-year-olds and a 16-year-old from Illinois, California and Texas, struck Jana Moody with a frying pan, then bound her and another pregnant girl and dashed away in the woman's van, Greening said. Moody was not seriously injured."
Leaving in abeyance any pro-choice arguments -- my own son, adopted at birth, is the product of a young couple's poor contraceptive choices, so I find my own heart and head are tugged in quite different directions -- it sounds like there's some question as to whether these were girls who got railroaded by vindictive 'rents.