Jane Smith’s Translation Dictionary of Everyday Lies, Insults, Manipulations, and Clueless Comments
NOW AVAILABLE and FREE TO SITE VISITORS (just send a request, specifying your preference of epub or pdf)

Jane Smith is a character In my novel A Philosopher, a Psychologist, and an Extraterrestrial Walk into a Chocolate Bar (blurb below). And she started this dictionary. I’ve continued it. And everyone else is supposed to finish it. Well, add to it. (It’s unlikely it’ll ever be finished.) Send additions – new definitions to the entries already listed and/or completely new entries – for future editions to me at . (Additionally, you can add your entries to the tumblr page I set up, hoping it would become viral like “Everyday Sexism” and “Why I’m a Feminist” and #MeToo. Sadly, it did not.)

Jane also started a list titled “And here’s something else that would never happen to a man …” – which I include at the end of the dictionary (it’s also in Sexist Shit that Pisses Me Off, 2e). I created a tumblr page for this as well, similarly hoping it would become viral, but, similarly, it did not. Pity. (But it’s not too late! Add your additions to the page and send them to me for future editions of the Dictionary.)

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A Philosopher, a Psychologist, and an Extraterrestrial Walk into a Chocolate Bar: When a self-appointed independent activist and her office-temp-with-a-doctorate buddy embark on a quest for a chocolate bar (a bar that serves not alcohol, but chocolate – in all its deliciously decadent forms), they pick up a hitchhiking extraterrestrial who’s stopped on Earth to ask for directions. Trying to explain Earl (Earth), confronting sexism (rather like bashing your head against a jellyfish), and committing assorted outrageous acts and everyday rebellions, they help “X” find the information she needs to get back home – and go with her – to become chocolate bartenders. A (way) off-the-beaten-path first contact story.

from her speech at the 2019 UN climate action summit in New York (just reading this now) (yeah, I know …)

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing.  We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth – how dare you!”

 

(complete transcript here)

 

 

It’s hard to get upset about 5 million people dying per year from COVID when more than twice that, 13 million, die each year die from air and water pollution.

And over 120 million have died of global warming as of 2000 according to WHO. (Can’t find stats for since then.)

Not seeing daily coverage of either of those facts. Nor a bunch of emergency restrictions on what can be put into the air and water …

So I went to get my COVID booster vaccine the other day, and I asked one of the attendants whether she knew the science, any statistical data, regarding my likelihood of experiencing side-effects (I’d had a rough go of it after the second dose and wondered whether I’d be in for the same with the third), and she simply replied “Oh, everyone’s different.”

Well, that certainly absolves one of the need, the responsibility, to actually learn anything about human biology, human chemistry, and psychology. We’re all unique little snowflakes, so you can’t really know anything about anyone … Hell, maybe you can’t really know anything about anything.

And then, one of the people who’d just received the vaccine said, helpfully, that he didn’t feel any side-effects.

Well, then. I guess I won’t either. Case closed. Seriously? I know, he was just trying to reassure me. But I was clearly asking for information. Apparently reassurance trumps actual knowledge. I’m reminded of the movie Don’t Look Up.

I wanted the facts. I asked for the facts. Not for what you believe or hope or want to be the case. Can no one handle the truth these days?

Also while reading James Morrow’s The Wine of Violence… ” … a world finally wanted his ideas.” (p119) That stopped me.  Because even academia, not just the world at large, had never wanted my ideas.  Simply because they come from a female-embodied person. Maybe that’s why ‘love’ is so much more important to women than to men.  And so too marriage and kids.  It’s the only way they get wanted. (I bet when you read the title of this post, you were thinking about being wanted emotionally, sexually … see?)

So I clicked on one of the embedded videos on a Facebook page supporting the truckers’ protest, and this young guy rambled on and on about how he fought in Afghanistan for our freedom …  Um, don’t think so.

I was free before you went to Afghanistan.  I had freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of/from religion …   I have the freedom to vote, to get an education, to get a driver’s licence, to open a bank account,  to get a job, to own property,  to get an abortion …  And most of those freedoms were fought for, and won, by second-wave feminists.  Not you.

I don’t know why you went to Afghanistan to kill a bunch of people, but it wasn’t for me.

Freedom’s just another word for ‘I can do whatever I want.’

Mature people realize that freedoms should be limited.  (Because otherwise assault would always be okay.)

Now.  Let’s talk about reasonable and unreasonable limitations.

Check it out here.

(#2 is inspired by incels and #3, #4, #6, #8, and #17 are inspired by transgenders, for those who remain oblivious of what’s going on in those fringe-to-mainstream movements; the rest are and have been forever the case…)