Author: Jess

i saw sin city last night with caitlin in lawrence. it was really good and i liked the editing a lot. i just wish movies would stop sexualizing violence against women. AUGH! i crashed in lawrence as well and we watched monsters, inc before bed. lol. I’d forgotten how cute that movie was.

steve took me on a date yesterday.. we hadn’t been on a date since my birthday and i’ve gotten really spoiled with the idea of dating since i started dating him so we decided to go on one last night because neither of us had to work… we went to lawrence and saw Born in Brothels which is a documentary about children who grow up in the redlight district of Calcutta. I enjoyed it. Although, as steve said, it wasn’t really a date movie. steve also said it was kinda boring. and I’ll agree with that. except that what she does is more or less what i want to do with my life so i was pretty excited about it during the movie.

after the movie, we went to pochi so i could get full on gado gado and thai tea before heading to ryan’s for the party that he was so relunctantly having. weirdly enough, we ran into riley there. which i guess isn’t that weird because he lives a few blocks away but given that i was planning on stopping by seaman that day to see some of my high school teachers.. i found it kind of odd that i ended up seeing him like 30 miles away by chance. heh. the dinner was great and i guess i’ve numbed a little to spicy food because i didn’t even freak out about it at all. the first two times i had gado gado i had to stop eating it because the peanut sauce was more than i could handle and this time i just stopped eating because i got full with a little bit left to go.. not because it was too spicy. this is good news because i’m kinda in love with spicy food and would eat it all the time if i could. and now my tongue allows it. although today i made ramen from the asian market and i still needed a whole glass of milk to keep the spices under control. ugh.

after dinner, i got really nice and sloshy on bitch beers yesterday but it mostly just made me incredibly annoying. there’s no other way to put it. i had 3 cranberry hard lemonades, 2 of which were finished in the same half hour and the other one in the next half hour so i thought i was doing okay cos i was just laying around but the second i stood up i was hammered. and acting really stupid but i couldn’t really do anything about it. so i just tried (unsuccessfully mostly) to play the quiet game.

i woke up to two text messages today because i slept with my phone on silent:
Steve, 1:43 am, “I just wanted to say that i love you and you’re beutiful and you mean the world to me.”
Madeline, 2:38 am, “Hes not really my type but i hope you two are forever i hate to say it but youre perfect together so fuck you.”
The second is a catty sending of an intentionally misquoted lyric from “our song” but i still can’t help but to agree.

steve bought bitch and animal’s cd “eternally hard” for me today and i’m extremely excited about it because it’s a really exciting cd. and there’s no better song to blare at the phelps picketters than “best cock on the block.” it was pretty awesome.

madeline im-ed me yesterday to say that she hated me. i’m not lying. the text of the im was “i hate you.” so i was like what the fuck!? who does that and just leaves… and waited for her to come back so that i could inquire as to why these feelings of hate. i asked “what was that about earlier?” and she just said “oh that, i don’t know. i’m sorry.” what the hell. it’s such a confusing situation between her and i anymore. obviously (and at her admittance) she wants me to hate her. unfortunately for her and maybe me sometimes, i really don’t because the love i have for her just isn’t going to go away.. but that doesnt’ mean i’m not incredibly frustrated. the last time she decided to quit speaking to me was march 15. after that date we did not speak until march 31 which was my birthday. she called in the afternoon and i was confused because we weren’t supposed to be talking and she said something about me having a nice birthday and her thinking it was good she wasnt in my life. then she texts me at like 10 and says “i hope yr having a happy birthday i’m sure its better cos i’m not there” AUGH!. so i’m drunk and call her to clear up the issue. at the part where i say “bye.. i’ll talk to you later..” she just says “yah i don’t know about that” so i’m just like “you can’t do that.” and then she proceeds to do it anyway and i just get really pissed off because its not like im the one to ever decide that we should start or stop talking again. i get no say in the matter. so i call her the next day to sorta apologize. then she calls me like a week later because she finds some new mean things to say to me. and then this last week she does it again. on saturday. she emails me to say we shouldn’t talk. which doesn’t make sense because she’s not supposed to be speaking to me. by her decision. and i don’t get the whole ordeal or what i’m supposed to do to fix the problem. or whatever our situation is. i thought we reached a decent resolution on saturday which was that we shouldn’t talk and then on monday she starts talking to me again to say that she hates me. thanks.

the real problem here isn’t necessarily what she’s doing to me because i think i just expect it anymore. she’s nothing like the girl that i fell in love with and she’s doing it on purpose so that i hate her and i’m just not going to hate her. because it doesn’t make sense to and hate isn’t in my nature. the real problem is that its affecting my relationship with steve.. on saturday he was upset because i mentioned her and at first it was like him just being upset that i mentioned her and then he admitted that he doesn’t really understand why i talk to her at all… so we ended up talking for like an hour in the third-floor lobby because of it. and that got settled.

then steve and i had a disagreement about joe for a while on monday or something which i think got cleared up. i don’t know. i wasn’t as upset about the joe thing because i think it was more or less valid. joe and/or i have a tendency to flirt with each other especially in the company of others. mostly because we don’t mean it and partially because we’re both basically sluts and don’t notice that we’re doing it because its in our personality to be that way to other people. also we’re really close friends and i think we confide in each other a lot so it seems like we have a lot of inside jokes. and we probably do.. but we try to let people in on them as much as possible. i don’t know. but i’m pretty sure he and i can fix the problem without any trouble. because its mostly us just being unconcious assholes.

so this all culminates today when i have built up in my mind that steve and i don’t communicate very well. which is false. cos we communicate about each other wonderfully… its just that lately we dont’ ahve the same deep conversations that we used to. and maybe this is because we agree on a lot and don’t have to say much. or something. but i decide that its an issue and then i pretty much make it an issue. but then we talk about it and i end up upset about madeline because i suppose that was the real reason why i don’t want to be close to anyone because obviously love can mean this utter chaos she and i have developed. oi. that conversation went well and i’m convinced that everything is going well between steve and i now. and hopefully there wont be any problems.

it’ll have been 5 months on the 24th. like whoa.

I volunteered to work at the Sexual Assault awareness table sponsored by Project Unity (which pretty much means my women’s studies class) every monday for the next three weeks and my first day was today. I didn’t really get that concerned about it because I’ve worked tables before, but then I realized the nature of the questions that this table could raise. I think the only other tables I’ve sat at were for pretty nondescript things. Like PISSED trying to register voters. Not even a big deal, you know? Who’s going to get really angry about voter registration. Anyway though…

Laura and I walk to the Union together and she sets down the box of materials we have and I volunteer to carry the table over. I get this idea in my head that I can carry the table with the chair on top of it. Of course, the extra weight causes the table to be really off-balanced so I stop to adjust things and get it moved. This man asks me if I need help carrying the table/chair combo and I tell him that I think I’ve got it but thank him. Meanwhile, I’ve pretty much no idea why I’m being obstinate and not accepting help from anyone. I consider whether or not I need the help and decide that I can probably lift it for the next 20 feet and then I do. So I thank the man. Then, he picks up my Sexaual Assault awareness ribbon and hands it to me. I say thank you again.

I sit at the table and help set it up with Laura and while I look over the material it occurs to me that the questions will probably be harder than just “who do i show my id to?” like with voter reg, et cetera. I ask Laura, “How is this table usually received?” and she said most people look at it really positively. they may tell you that they support the YWCA or what you’re doing and some of them may say that they’ve been sexually assaulted or have more difficult questions but the literature should be able to answer that. so I’m like awesome.. this won’t be a big deal. I’ve helped people with much harder questions than these before.

This is where it gets interesting: the man who offered to help me carry the table wanders over to it when we get it all set up and says that he doesn’t know how he can help the YWCA but that he really supports what we’re doing. We said thank you and I think both of us mostly assumed that would be the end of the conversation. But then, he goes on to say that he was in prison for eight and a half years after being convicted of child molestation. He explained that he had been in the Persian Gulf War and when he got back from the war he was injured and on a lot of medication, plus, he felt pretty much like a stranger in his own house so he started drinking as well. As one can imagine, these drugs do not work very well together, and his head didn’t work right anymore. So one night he was baby-sitting the next door neighbor and molested her. He didn’t go into a lot of details there.. but he did say how remorseful he was. He went to prison for it with the maximum sentence of 10 years with a 20% good behavior possibility. Now he’s serving 49 months of probation and he’ll be on Kasper (Kansas’ list in compliance with Megan’s law) until September 2013.

It seemed to me that his remorse for what he had done was pretty immediate. He said that he had been a victim of sexual abuse when he was a child and had never done anything to report it or seek counselling for himself. When the trial came, he plead guilty for his offenses against the girl and the state, even though the girl’s story had kept changing. She was pretty young obviously and she couldn’t keep the details of the story straight, but he confessed to the crime and because of that was able to plea bargain to 56 months. Then, the DA said that he was dangerous because he’d been counter-terror in the war and got him the maximum sentence. I didn’t really get the impression that he was upset about that at all though…

In prison, the first task of the sexual offenders therapy group was to write an autobiography. This forced him to relive the experiences of his personal abuse. Then the therapist asked him to put himself in the shoes of his victim and he realized the horror that he had caused this girl. He also realized that most of the other perpetrators were victims of abuse (about 4 out of 5 in his estimation) and that the majority of them were not willing to take any responsibility for the crime that they had committed. He said that most of them felt like the woman had deserved it. He commented on how most of these men had no women willing to come visit them. Instead, only sometimes the men in their family and their daughters would come to visit them. Because of this they all loved their daughters a lot and he said “But the way I see it, you know, the girl they did that too was someone’s daughter too…”

We spent some of the conversation talking about the attitudes in prison and society about the act and how violent prison mentality is. The major subject of our conversation was the laws that currently exist. He said that he doesn’t believe victims of rape should have to testify against the perpetrator to get a guilty verdict because of how traumatizing the rape is. Also, he said, strategically the defense attorney will make the victim relive all of the details that they initially gave in court and that when this happens the perpetrator is able to revictimize the victim because they have to go through all of the trauma of the rape again. He talked about how he got physically sick last week when he was watching CNN and there was a story about a man who had been accused of molesting two young girls but the defense attorney was really good and made it look like the kids were lying because their mom told them to and got the guy acquitted. Within 6 months of the original accusation, he was linked (by DNA) to a kidnapping, rape and murder of a 5-year-old girl. He talked about how we need harsher laws or to fix these flaws in the system so that this doesn’t happen.

Also, he said that he hates that drug abuse can be used to get off of the crime. We protect victims who pursue people under the influence of alcohol that alters their opinion.. but if both people are under the influence of drugs, it’s often really difficult to prosecute the perpetrator because they can just say that he or she wasn’t in their normal state of mind. This man would like to see this change.

Another change he wants to see happen is to see the past left out of the DA’s accusations. He gave the example that I could have sex with 1000 men but if the 1001st man did it against my will he should be sent to jail as if I were a virgin. Also, he thinks that from the theological standpoint, rape shouldn’t be considered a loss of virginity and the women who are victims of it should be allowed to wear white at their wedding. I didn’t realize that was still part of the church dogma. I think he also said that he doesn’t think th epast of the perpetrator should play into the sentencing process or the conviction process. Even though he was raped as a child, he never should’ve done this to the little girl and feels horrible about the trauma that he caused her.

I think the most shocking part of his testimony, to me, was that he acknowledged that rape does come out of sexual desire. The other rapists he knew in the prison system all admitted to wanting their victims. He says that part of it is about taking power but a huge part of rape is sexual for the perpetrator which I don’t know that I’d ever thought about it. I guess it makes sense but I hadn’t really heard much evidence on either side to suggest this to be the case. I’m pretty sure that the women’s studies book’s perspective is that rape is a reaction to the power structure of the patriarchy and mostly based on power with little or no sexual roots.

There were other really interesting parts of the conversation that I had with him but I think the most important thing is that it was a really really intense conversation that managed to completely alter or at least shake the foundations of some of my beliefs about people in general. His opinion and situation was so unique to most people that I was really interested in it. It was kind of comforting that he seemed so remorseful and I said that I respect that he’s now trying to take action against sexual offenders by working in advocacy and lobbying. At the same time though, I think about how digusting rape is and there were times in the conversation where I was so disgusted or angry that it made it difficult to cope with what was going on… I feel almost like I’m betraying the people I know who have been traumatized in that way.. but at the same time, he was a victim of sexual abuse as well, and I really feel like not acknowledging that there is this horrible cycle of sexual assualt that permeates so many levels of society and so many different races and classes does an injustice and makes the issue completley defeatist. He and I both agreed that the problem has to stop with the individual or it will continue throughout society. In a broad way, he personally gives a sense of hope that there is a chance for recovery. However, the picture he gives of the criminal justice system is terrible and mostly against the picture that I had. He talks about how Cops is the favorite show of the inmates and they cheer when the perp gets away, women get beaten, etc. He said that the hate in their eyes and the things that they find funny shows him that a lot of them, even the non-rapists, have the potential to rape because of the culture they’re subversed in in prison.

Wow. I’ll probably think about this some more and blog more later. It’s hard to say.

i made dinner for my family plus steve today. i cooked that spinach and ricotta stuffed shells but i changed the recipe on the sauce from the last time cos i didn’t like how it turned out. i also made the asparagus with hollandaise and it was probably the best job a microwave has ever done cooking hollandaise. hooray! then i made riccotta cakes for desert which are these riccotta based honey and vanilla flavored cheese-cake type things that are really fucking rad covered in berry sauce (mmm) with berries on top of it. it was probably the best tasting thing i have ever had in my entire life. i’m not even kidding.

i’ve been really fucked up and sad lately and i’m not sure why. i think its the culmination of a lot of things. this weekend i was sad because i felt like all of my friends were going to be stoners and that’s just not something i enjoy so i got really weird about it. but then it turned out alright. because things were that way until like monday and since then they’ve been pretty normal. besides. pot would probably be just like playing hacky. except i’m probably not as dumb about marijuana as i am about hacky. because i dont’hate it. but i would inevitably do it for a little while and then start to forget and/or lose everything in my life and i wouldn’t want to do it anymore and they still would and it would just suck. so this is what i worried about on sunday. then on monday everyone was hanging out at the park when i was in forensics and i called steve who told me to meet them there and by the time i was a few blocks away they decided to leave and i got harassed into driving everyone back to campus. well one person. but you know. gas is pretty expensive these days. grr. so then i was extremely irrationally upset and couldn’t undo it. so i basically just sat in my car and talked to steve about how i was really angry but knew that i had basically no reason to be as such. OI. why i do this to myself…

today i was more upset about normal jess things. “the world sucks and everything is so defeatist and i don’t know why i try…” this is mostly because i was sitting at the same table as jeremiah and he always makes me feel suicidal if not homicidal. i just don’t understand how these people exist most of the time. and i don’t know. i’m too compassionate. and i care too much about the things that i care about. aaaaugh. then i went to chem and we talked about how to build nuclear weapons and i felt a lot better. don’t ask me why.