In the tank

     Well, I have nothing much to say about the VP debate that hasn't been said better by smart people all over the Interwebs. The dum-dums weren't listening last night, they were cooing; I have no use for them. Call me in the tank for Obama, if you must -- the genesis of that suddenly ubiquitous phrase is a mystery to me --  but at least I'm swimming with funny, bright people. 

     M offered to forward to me a Time snippet about why "women dislike Sarah" -- including fallacies such as "she's too pretty," "they're afraid she'll make them look bad," etc. Infuckingfuriating. I can't stand Sarah Palin for the same reason I turned against Susan Allen, long-suffering wife of Republican legislative delegate turned governor turned congressman turned senator turned "rising star" on the national stage who shot himself out of a canon and landed in Macacaland just a couple of years ago. Anyway, as a journalist twenty years ago, I covered his hijinx and caught on but quick that not only is he inauthentic in presenting himself as an "aw, shucks" tobacco-spitting, cowboy hat-wearing Southerner (???), but his wife is equally inauthentic in presenting herself as a button-nosed cutesy nitwit who defers to dumb men. (Not even smart men; dumb men.) It turns my stomach, the winking, the gee-whizzing, the flirting. It turns my stomach because, as a baby reporter with zero experience and blonde hair, I used those same tactics to try to get dumb men -- in my case, the peabrains in the police and sheriff's offices in Chattanooga, TN in 1984 -- to give me the information I needed to file stories. I wasn't asking for scoops; I just wanted the same access the boy reporters got. And every time I ran up against a brick wall, which was daily, sometimes hourly, I resorted to the only thing I knew how to do: I smiled, I flirted, I ingratiated myself. Sometimes it worked, mostly it didn't. I got pulled off "general assignment reporting" and promoted to anchoring (this was at a piss-poor CBS-affiliate TV station; I was 22; it did not escape my understanding that they'd have pulled a monkey off the street to anchor those newscasts, so low were the pay and the expectations). I hated myself for playing the game. I had slimed myself; had betrayed my gender and my mother's example and feminism and was caving to the most insidious kind of sexism. I may as well have slept with the fuckers in return for basic facts of a crime or court case. And now, I feel a twisting deep in my gut -- that old familiar, visceral stomach-turning -- every time I see The Two Faces of Sarah. Tough and confident? You betcha. Fine. Pandering and flirtatious? Wink! "Gee willikers, can ya help me out here? I just don't understand you big strong men from Warshin'ton, DeeCee!" Wink!

     Puke.

     An apt segue to what happened at the infusion center today, or didn't happen. No chemotherapy for me, so in the tank are my red blood cells and platelets. Fuck. First time I've ever been turned away. I have to have a blood transfusion. They scheduled it for Tuesday. I feel like poo.

     And I'm scared I'm not going to be able to tolerate Topo Gigio, and then what?

     Maybe I can summon that witch doctor dude from up there in Alaska to come pray over me.