It takes a lot for me to call someone fat. I'm not the skinniest creature on the planet either, though have other things more worrisome than just lard. But it's yet one more nail in the coffin of my tolerance of other people breeding stupidly. If there's any action I can't stand it's someone who doesn't become pregnant for a reason. We have birth control after all. Some people just should not have children, no matter how much they want it, much in the same lines as some people shouldn't be trusted with high caliber military weaponry. Besides just their incompetence as parents, many people have bad genes, or at least from their observable characteristics, they don't exactly offer much for their kids. I'm one such person and it's one of the reasons I'm childfree, but other people seem to think it's their God given right to have all the kids they want. It just makes me so...
It's pretty obvious why I have such radical views, from my current environment at least. A close friend of mine is having a child with a man who is, to be kind, very retarded. He doesn't speak very much, and doesn't do much of anything except to occasionally thrust his hips in her general direction. He could be shy, but I don't think he acts any different when there isn't anyone else around but me and her maybe. I can't verify it, but I do worry desperately for that child she's gonna poop out of her body.
Another of my friends is morbidly obese. As I said it takes a lot for me to call someone fat, and she's packing it. I mean yikes, it even hangs over the edge of her pants. I'd estimate her weight somewhere along the lines of 300 pounds. So she's having a baby too, I found out today. You can hardly tell... but anyway, that just makes me all the more upset. She's clearly got genes that aren't so useful in our affluent society where food is plentiful, yet she's having a child. Why is she having a child? She didn't say. Just seems to think it's enough that she's having one, and it doesn't leave me worried about it.
Speaking of affluence, it might be the rich neighborhood this school's in (I commute) but I have about 3 friends who are confined to wheelchairs. Now before you go all Godwin on me, I think that people without the use of their limbs, eyes, or voice deserve the greatest respect if they can overcome their hardships and succeed in society. They made it all the way to college and that's great. Yet I have to wonder what the Hell their parents were thinking. I understand disability is hard to predict, and it's ridiculous to say we could take it back, but a lot of adults are having irresponsible sex, and spreading bad genes in our gene pool. Combine that with industrial pollution and war, and we've got a lot of invalids.
There are less people in wheelchairs in poor communities because people like that tend to die. You know you're in trouble when you're both homeless and stuck in a chair. In fact, in really awful communities like the catastrophe in Africa, the parents of people in wheelchairs tend to die. Ever notice a good third to a half of us have to wear spectacles to see clearly? Was that the case before we had eyeglasses to keep the visually impaired from stumbling into the wheat combine? How long have we been able to digest lactose, a sugar found only in the milk of bovine cows? We're changing our genetics--we're breeding ourselves as we make things easier to live, and frankly it upsets me. It upsets me because we're not controlling it, and polluting our own breeding pool with kindness.
I am all for advocating personal freedom, but having a child is not something that affects only you. Think of the child for instance. Many abortion haters say that inducing miscarriage is taking the child's life without its permission, and depriving it of life. Well I say that birthing a child is forcing a child to live without its permission, and life isn't all that great just to make things clear. Would you want to exist in this awful universe, given the choice? So a child's rights are being toyed with from the day of conception. Our bodies toy with us even, as they force us to breed in ways that provide short term gains in population, but long term debilitation and genetic disease.
What about the community? I know the corporations have taken away your community and replaced it with your daily commute and television, but remember that another mouth to feed is really freaking important. You should have children, when there's a place for those children. Nothing hurts more, there's no sadder way to die than to slowly starve to death because nobody has a need for you to be around. (A need = a paying job btw)
The worst thing is, the marginalization of individuals does not discriminate by ability so much! Every time I suffer because 99% of the people around me are unsupportive, with their own agendas, and their own values, and their own needs, that's one good reason not to have children. Or at least not to have more children. We can only divide our attention and resources so many ways, and there are 100 times at least too many people in the world. That means 1 person gets 1/100 of the attention they need, unless of course you have economic disparity between geographic regions. Then 1 person gets what they need, and 99 starve. Why do they not get what they need? Because they deserve to be so poor? Because they failed a test? No, just because they were born on land that's considered the wrong country, and they will probably be trapped, unable to self-actualize because our lifestyles are dependant on the fact that they can't escape, come to us and demand an equal share.
So two of my friends are having babies now, and I'm too terrified of their harsh reaction to even mention that I wish they wouldn't. It's kind of late for me to wish, I understand, but it just makes me wish that there were a way to... well, to reverse entropy. Turn back the clock, heh. I always come back to my doomed quest, but not having children is something we can do regardless of the tyranny of inevitability we live in. We have birth control! It's one of the few things we do have a choice over!
Update: Aargh! Now someone's cheezing me out on a message board, because they're getting all high and mighty about how they had to starve and work for a living so you all should too, and they mentioned that, homeless, they became pregnant. Do the words bad idea come to mind? And here's the clincher: the State paid for her medical care because she was pregnant! So that's right there a State based policy rewarding people for birthing children into poverty. Am I paranoid? But am I wrong?? Why couldn't that State based program include spaying the strays it picked up? Sheeesh! Oh and because she cares so much for her child we should be humble and agree that we all deserve to suffer like her. I'm ranting here because I want to respond to her civilly on the message board without all these stupid exaggerations I keep using to express my frustration at the plot of the wealthy to keep the working class poor by tricking them into having too many children.
As for tests, my math test went better than I expected. Considering I only had about half the homework done since she decided to DOUBLE the workload in this last part of the class. It was hard enough before her incompetence threatened to show up on the radar they call college curriculum, she has to cover her tracks so who cares if we get stuck with a half embedded shrapnel of knowledge in our brains, as long as she gets all that homework assigned! Both she and my computer science teacher are total bastards for this and this alone: they're giving a test this week, yes both of them, and then the week after next is Finals. A midterm two weeks before the final, how screwed up is that?
I don't like people who ask me "Did you study for the test?" It glorifies last minute cram type thinking, because why would anybody study for a test? Isn't the purpose of studying to learn? People should study every chance they get, within reasonable work limits, and when people think I'm a big genius head for not "having" to study, it's just that I do it all the time, so when the test comes I can't increase it! It's like... it's so antethetical to change pace like that, I just don't do that sort of stuff. Never have. Let me tell you though it really gets on bosses nerves when they can't manipulate you into working harder when the deadline looms.
Oh by the way, my computer crashed big time last weekend. I happen to be insane, so one day it just seemed like the greatest idea to resize my partitions to make space for a special partition to contain certain files that turn over rapidly, as a way of streamlining disk access. I did make a backup of (most) of my configuration, but when I tried the resize operation, it totally corrupted my reiserfs partitions. Tip: never use parted to resize reiser3 partititons. Tip: never resize partitions with file systems on them. So I spent last weekend not studying for the math test, and frantically trying to get my poor computer up and running again.
In a last minute flash of sanity, I didn't mess with the really important partitions, such as the one I have oh, say, /home on. As well as some other partitions with ...nice data on them. I opted not to go with Gentoo this time, as their package manager is implemented in python (yuck!) and uses a database scheme that grinds to a halt over time, requiring many diverse operations to vainly attempt to keep it operational. Instead I'm back to Debian. That's right, not Ubuntu, Debian. I went with Debian Unstable this time though, because last time I tried to be patient and stay on Stable, I couldn't resist trying to get some of those delicious Testing packages, and also those home grown X11 packages for my video driver... long story short: completely screwed up apt. Ended up with a circular dependancy, and various holes where packages should be. I'll try not to repeat that with this Debian, and will hope and notpray that the rat bastards working on xfce4 will get off their arses and stop injecting packages that depend on unreleased versions, instead of telling users who ask for help, "lol that's what you get for using unstable."
No, I wasn't the one asking for help. I got it working in spite of them, via installing xfce4, then when that failed utterly, installing its dependancies and pretending everything was okay. But comments like that are so useless, along the lines of "You have to make some sacrifices," and "Welcome to the Business World." We're all on the same planet. If someone asks for help installing xfce4, tell them how to get the new releases, or else how they can fix your mistake in depending on those releases before they actually exist. Or don't say anything at all as 99.9% of the world's population seems to do.
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