merchimerch

I'm inspired by the My Planned Parenthood Carnival that is going on at Shakesville (http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/), What Tami Said (http://http://www.whattamisaid.com/), and a bunch of other feminist blogs, and I'd like to tell my story as well.

Planned Parenthood is the organization that first introduced me to natural birth control. I would probably have been on hormonal birth control for much longer if it weren't for the wonderful doctors and employees at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Seattle in 2004.

I wonder what all of the anti-PP, anti-abortion, anti-birth control people would think of that.

That's the thing about Planned Parenthood: they educate women about their bodies and their reproductive choices, so that women can make the best decisions for themselves. They also provide really important services for a wide range of people, and I depended on them while in grad school, especially when my insurance lapsed over summers and other periods.

So here's my story of how Planned Parenthood helped me get off of hormonal birth control, a choice that I feel is much healthier for me:

I generally used my college clinic to get hormonal birth control, but it was getting more and more problematic as the different pills and rings that I used would first be on and then pushed off of the insurance plan. Different side effects were starting to show up from the different types of pills/rings, but I never thought to look for other options. My mother was on the pill when not having kids and my grandmother was one of the early adopters of the birth control pill. It was the way that all the women that I knew avoided pregnancy.

In 2004, I was set to head out for my dissertation research abroad, so I went to Planned Parenthood in Seattle to get some pill packs to tide me over until I could get some in the country that I was travelling to. My appointment happened to be scheduled for the day that there was a bombing in the city that I was due to live in for the next year. As a result, I was beyond panicked and edgy, but I went to my appointment all the same. Once at the appointment, one of the first things that they did was take my blood pressure and it was off the charts. I don't remember the numbers, but they were shockingly high.

I was only in Seattle for a summer language program, so the doctor had no medical history for me, and couldn't really take my word that my blood pressure is always 120/80 or below. She had the nurse wait a bit and take the BP later, but it was still high, and the doctor said that she couldn't prescribe hormonal birth control for someone with such high blood pressure readings.

I was incredibly disappointed and stressed when she told me that she couldn't prescribe me birth control pills or rings that day; I was due to run out just a few days later. What the doctor did instead was fit me for a diaphragm and talk to me about FAM, the fertility awareness method (she also gave me some free Plan B, in case I couldn't get it in my host country). The doctor gave me a handout and pointed me toward some websites, saying that she thought that I might be a good fit for FAM, since I was in a long-term committed relationship and wanted children eventually. I was resistant at first and disappointed that my long-standing, low-risk go-to birth control wasn't going to be readily available because of my blood pressure.

Despite my disappointment, I did read the literature on FAM, including Toni Weschler's _Taking Charge of Your Fertility_. The rigor appealed to me and I trusted the science around it. For someone who was used to taking pills every day, taking a temperature every morning didn't seem like a stretch. I later went to doctors and my blood pressure was diagnosed as normal, but I stayed on FAM. It has worked wonders, and I've never had an unwanted pregnancy as a result. The guidance that I received from Planned Parenthood helped me make informed choices about my fertility.

Here's the hub post of all the My Planned Parenthood stories from today: http://www.whattamisaid.com/2011/07/my-planned-parenthood-blog-carnival.html. They're really inspiring, and make a very clear argument why we need Planned Parenthood for so much more than legal and safe abortion.

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Until a few months ago it was the North African side of the Mediterranean. I hope that things settle down into prosperous democracies soon enough for that to be my get away fantasy of choice again.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html?src=me&ref=general

This is really awesome. It makes the decisions that need to be made about spending and taxes so much more tangible and conceivable to me.

Having played with it for a little while, I'm really convinced that spending cuts are so ineffectual at really addressing the budget problem, especially if military spending is untouchable. Every time I clicked on the spending cut links, it seemed like tiny slivers of the forecasted budget shortfall were repaired. Bringing taxes to Clinton era levels seems to be the way to fix the budget the quickest. I don't understand why people are so averse to this idea.

Also, since we're moving, we need to pare down our furniture.

We'd love to get rid of our love seat and 3 bookcases: 1 low dark stained real wood bookcase and 2 tall white target-type particle board ones.

Anybody want them? Just let me know and you can come and take them away.

Slate has an interesting article bemoaning the loss of the paper-book for e-book, since it makes people harder to judge by their bookshelves.

http://www.slate.com/id/2261955/

It makes an interesting point, but it forgets that we have found other ways to advertise our reading habits to potential friends and mates. Facebook has it's own "books" category in interests and there are all kinds of "Good Reads" type apps. Never mind the book section of OK Cupid and most online dating sites.

I TOTALLY found my Bosnian because of his taste in books, and I did so without the benefit of peering at his bookshelves or catching him reading in public.

Our first online conversation was me berating his choice of Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson as his favorite book. "Diamond Age, are you kidding? When you could have chosen the most exciting pizza delivery scene in literature or Cryptonomicon?" That was the gist of my first message to my beloved Bosnian at a time when I was looking for socializing but feeling too wounded from previous douchebags to hunt for romance. We chatted for a month about sci fi and European culture before I wanted to meet him in person. I don't think we'd have been able to manage 9 hours of chat in person without gaining access to each others' bookshelves via social media.

So, it's a neat article, but I don't think that we're losing what Mark Oppenheimer fears. Although our books may be hidden in our kindles as our album covers are now snuggled into our ipods, we still advertise our preferences.

This is an NYT article that really got to me. It's a major downer, but very well written and thought provoking. The article focuses on the author's father's decision to have a pacemaker, which caused an extension of the end of his life.

I'm posting it to make sure that folks have a chance to see it and also to remind myself about the whole living will issue (and also since it seems a little too long and heavy for a facebook post).

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20pacemaker-t.html

I found the body of superbowl commercials that dealt with a "reassertion" of manliness through consumer goods to be really tiring. I get tired of the stereotypes of women that go reinscribed over and over and over again, but maybe this emasculated stupid man (usually stupid oafish dad -- seriously, what does the media have against dads?) that then finds access to manliness through weak beer and big trucks really off mark.

Then again I'm a leftist Californian feminist academic -- not exactly the target market for those ads.

Still, this reaction vid made me laugh and was EXACTLY what I was thinking about when I saw the dodge ad on the superbowl: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou5Ens-qNRc

And yes I watched the Superbowl, in fact I made chili and guacamole and the Bosnian and I took it over to inflict some blatant Americanism on the Bosnian mommy. It was really good fun -- very relaxed and everyone got into the spirit. Apparently Bosnia's crest had fleur de lis on it, so she was very happy that the Saints won. The Bosnian and I were rooting for them as well after their coverage on the Rachel Maddow show the night before.

This made my morning and my kettle is just boiling :)

My favorite line: "When I say oo, you say long -- oo long oo long!"

My Bosnian and I got a great deal on a PC desktop in the after Thanksgiving sales. Unfortunately, we got what we paid for and our spanky new LCD monitor died this afternoon.

HP is shipping us a replacement, but it won't arrive until the 27th. Does anyone local have an old monitor lying around that we could borrow until the new one arrives?

I always appreciate writing that emphasizes that science, medicine, and facts are all culturally embedded (so it's not just art, music, language, and opinion). This does an interesting job of looking at madness and mental illness in other cultures and a little bit historically, and examines the phenomenon of exporting American concepts of mental illness and the accompanying pharmacological cures to other places with different understandings. My favorite quote is: "The problem is that our biomedical advances are hard to separate from our particular cultural beliefs."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html?pagewanted=1&em