Marina Rose Martinez

ThereminJelly: @Marinaisgo A blog post arguing about why a complete homosexual re-branding of Batman would be a good thing.

Oh. My. God. Besides being my very own pre-teen wet dream come to life before my eyes?!

Not only have I pretty much always wanted to be Batman, I’ve pretty much always wanted to fuck Batman. And if I could have fucked Batman as Batman, my little heart would have exploded right out of my big gay, gray unitarded bat-chest.

I’m probably not the only person to admit that some of my first homoerotic fantasies starred Adam West and Burt Ward. I know there are a whole bunch of us out there, who sat on the living room floor, tensions mounting as the dynamic duo struggled-seemingly in vain-tied to a giant penny, or a giant gramophone, or a giant wrecking ball, only to break free at the last moment and somersault to safety. How many times can a man and another, younger man be tied to each other and also to a giant thing before dramatic tension turns to sexual tension, and the rush of freedom also brings the rush of love, of passion? For me, it was about three times.

But enough about why I like to be tied to giant things while wearing a tool belt.

A gay redesign of Batman is exactly what this country needs. DC threw us a homo-bone when they made Batwoman a dyke (like she wasn’t already, amirightoramiright?) but they were just trying to draw the gay rumors away from their moneymaker Bruce. Let’s be honest, every real batfan knows that their man Bruce Wayne is a fruit. An ass-kicking, super-smart, millionaire playboy nightmare fruit. And the sooner Batman comes clean, the sooner. all of my childhood dreams can come true.

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Mr_Bithead: @Marinaisgo I’ve been trying to switch careers to something I’m more passionate about.. Write about something you’ve always wanted to do but haven’t, and why (not).

There are so many things! This deserves a bulleted list.

• Move far away by myself (So far as as adult, I haven’t had the opportunity to move far away or be by myself, and my life here with Ben is so consistently awesome, why would I want to force that eventuality?)
• Successfully start and run my own business. (I actually have had a few little ventures of my own, and I guess they were successful in that they never cost me more than they made, but they were little more than lucrative hobbies. I’d like something more substantial.)
• Write a Book (I love to write, I’ve been told I’m good at it, but I don’t have enough drive or focus for a long-form project at this point. Plus, I’m afraid of the inevitable rejection, also the editing process.)

There’s other things, but those are the top 3 at the moment. The thing is, I’m very happy with my life right now. Even when I become frustrated with it, I know it’s not time to make any major changes. In my experience things change dramatically all by themselves, when it’s least expected. I always strive for my general goals of health, happiness and comfort, but other than that, life is exciting enough.

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Pengui: @Marinaisgo Is religion is a dangerous thing or do you think it serves a real purpose?

Both. I’d be hard pressed to think of a single person who doesn’t require some manifestation of the concept of infinity in order to keep themselves sane. Organized religion can be a backbone for people who need one. Just think of what Dr. King was able to accomplish with religion backing him up. I wouldn’t take that away from anyone. People don’t need religion to fuck with each other. If they didn’t have it, they’d just find something else.

2002

My mother and I are sitting in a diner with my grandma. Almost randomly she asks us what we’re doing on April 16th. We’re doing nothing. “Will one of you take me to the hospital? I have to have surgery.”

“Is this an outpatient thing?” Mom asks. No.

It’s a triple bypass that turns into a quadruple on the table and ultimately leads to a series of small strokes that leave her 25% blind and only functionally literate.

The entire family sleeps in the hospital for a week. It’s the first and only time I see my grandfather hold my grandmother’s hand. In fact, it’s the first and only time I see him touch her in any way. Because of the strokes, she has no memory of this uncharacteristic tenderness.

2006

I’m with my friends in San Diego, my mother and my grandmother are fighting. Both of them want me to take their side against the other.

My grandmother calls. I answer it reflexively. She’s telling me about their fight, arguing without subtlety on why she’s right and mom’s wrong. I’ve had a long weekend, I try and get her off the phone. Suddenly she blurts out “Gene raped your mother when she was 13.” All of the air goes out of my lungs. I instantly and totally believe her.

Gene, my grandfather by marriage is the worst human being I have ever known. If she knew Gene raped my mother, how did she know? If she knew Gene raped my mother, why did she stay married to him? If she knew Gene raped my mother, why didn’t she warn me at least? I can’t ask any of these questions. All of my friends went outside to smoke. There is one kid I don’t know sitting across from me. I’m giving him a ride back to LA. I hang up the phone and tell him that Gene raped my mom.

2009

I’m at work, my grandmother calls. She’s not a frequent caller, but it’s not unusual for her to call and ask that we spend some time together, or mention a news story she saw.

She says that she should probably tell me that Gene is dead. He had a series of strokes, lapsed into a coma and died that morning at his nursing home. “Do we have to do anything?” I ask. No, he already made arrangements with the Neptune society. They pick up the body, cremate it and dump it into the Pacific. Her tone is bored. She seems astonished I even care to ask.

When we put him into the nursing home, it was almost a family reunion. My uncle came back from Wisconsin, my mother and I were not fighting. Ben and I went out to dinner with them, everybody laughed and talked and smiled. The passive-aggressive side-sniping and bitter backhanded compliments were at an all time low.

When he died, nothing happened. I got a sad and awkward call from my estranged mother, I observed the fact that I had no real emotion either way, I cried a little, but I’m still not sure why.

The man’s entire life was cruelty and neglect. He leaves no children of his own, no footprint on this world and no mourners whatsoever. Aside from the lasting mental health issues of my mother, my uncle and myself there is nothing to show he existed at all, and I think that’s very fitting.

I have invented the one thing we all needed but did not have:

THE VAGINA EMOTICON!

(i)

Alternate spelling: ((i)) for when your vagina is fat or your text is narrow.

I asked twitter for inspiration, and it came.

charliewarhol: @Marinaisgo the truth about feminazis


Feminazis are people that claim to be feminists, but are actually short-sighted, mean-spirited dicks. A feminazi is just an ass hole, and ass holes are everywhere. This can be terrible, because the truth is that nowhere is safe from them, not even a so-called ’safe space,’ like the one that many feminists try to create and uphold. But it can also be a good thing because ass holes like the feminazis don’t care who they hate. The truth about a feminazi is that she is an insecure person who needs to impose irrational rules on other people in order to protect herself and her ego. The people she directs her hate at have nothing to do with her or her beliefs or her morals, only her insecurity and her ego. A feminazi is only here ruining feminism because of sheer coincidence. If she’d had a different experience, she’d be somewhere else, imposing another kind of fundamentalism on those poor people. Every group has an asshole that tries to impose judgment on others for not adhering to a set of rules that she has made up and tries to enforce, no matter how much this hurts the group or the individuals in it.


The other truth about feminazis is that we all most likely support one, or have supported one at one time or another. Maybe not in feminism, but in our own communities and lives. People like to blame the asshole for making everything suck, but who keeps them around? Who keeps feeding them when they need that attention (negative or positive)? And more importantly, the feminazi is only pushing the rules that we ourselves make. Feminists create a hostile environment for men. That’s the truth. We discerning feminists just don’t say it out loud like those assholes do. Feminists create ’safe spaces’ that are women only spaces, and the rest of us support them by not challenging that. Feminists make domestic violence, rape and sexual abuse a women-only issue and the rest of us support that by towing the line when it comes down to it. Feminists give lip service to the sexes begin equal, but instead we have started a competition against men.


The result of thousands of years of inequality in most parts of the globe is that today it’s easier to work towards inequality in our favor than equity in everyone’s favor. There will always be inequality in the world, but the concept of treating another person equitably is very new, and we’re still working out the kinks. Just when we think that we’ve got this feminism thing down, it turns out that middle class white women are running the show and making it difficult for women of color and working class women. Then it’s the queer women who get the short end of the stick, then the transwomen and transmen. And in every single faction, women of color, working class women, queers and transpeople there is a new brand of asshole trying to dictate who can do or say what, when, where and why, and if we’re not the asshole, than we’re their support.


This is a lot of the reason that I’ve shied away from activism over the last several years. Instead, I support where I feel I can–mostly with donations or phone banking–and stay away the rest of the time. In my daily life I try to be respectful and kind, and not impose my rules on other people. There are a lot of responses to other-ness that are ingrained in us by society, so it can be difficult to always be equitable and fair in all my actions, but I suppose that the best one can do is to try.

I put the call out on twitter for a blog subject and this is what I got:


cherryfizzy: @Marinaisgo about why your pants are awesome?


I don’t really get this once since I tend to avoid pants like the plague. I have a very high waste, and I carry my fat in the front, so wearing constricting fabric all up around my fat stomach has never appealed to me. Not to mention the fact that pants bother my vagina. Also, my lack of ass and hips in relation to my stomach make me look ridiculous every time I wear them.


When I was in highschool and college I wore pants constantly, but they were always far too big for me and I would sag them down around my hips. At the time I was either thin enough or retarded enough to think this was a good look, but once I started trying to be taken seriously as a professional, educated woman, I knew that pants had to go.


Every so often, on a weekend or on an extremely casual day at work, I’ll dig out my old cargo shorts, and try to relive the glory days, but I know it’s over between pants and me. My gross old Cartman gut hangs over my awesome cargo shorts, and no matter how many or various different shirts I wear on top of that, there’s no way I could lie to myself and say that it looks okay. So i put a damn skirt on and I go about my day.


I have to admit that I miss pants terribly at times. I don’t like the vulnerability of skirts, but they’re infinitely more comfortable than pants, so I stick with skirts and dresses most of the time. Although I do have a secret wish that my weight loss will continue at least until I can wear pants again and not look like a fool and feel like a sausage.

I’ve been a fan of the various multimedia ventures of Keith McNally for awhile now. His taste and ear for popular music is only less enviable than his encyclopedic knowledge of it. If you go over to keithcourage.com, you’ll see and hear some good fun stuff, ranging from shitty comics to well composed and edited videos.

So when McNalley announced his latest venture, “XO, an Internet Show by Keith McNally in the Style of This American Life,” I was interested to hear what he had to offer. I was a fan of “This American Life” for years, and I remember wishing there was something else like it in the world. But that was before I started to get more and more annoyed with the continued fake-ness of celestial radio, the perfect cuts and the slightly pompous, over-important sound that most radio has, including “This American Life.”

By the time “XO” came on the scene, I had been bored with “This American Life” for awhile. I was over their traditional 3 act composition, I was over their smart indie music, I was over their articulate, sensitive and quirky staffers, I was even over the well produced and eerily ironic TV show.

But “XO” has ignited my love for things ‘in the style of This American Life,’ despite my dispassionate objection to the actual show for so long now. So far, 7 episodes in, McNally delivers everything I liked about “This American Life,” and everything I like about podacsting in general, while leaving a lot of the apathetic, over-edited bullshit I left radio for in the first place.

Since music for me can sometimes make or break a show, let me say up front that the music selection is the kind of considerately chosen, perfectly variegated pastiche of sound and meaning that I’ve come to expect from McNally’s work thus far. But unlike his earlier show “I Have a Ham Radio,” where the music was clearly the main event “XO, an Internet Show by Keith McNally in the Style of This American Life,” places the emphasis on the story, using the music as a compliment to the narrative.

The meat of the show is the real life audio, mostly recorded by Keith in different everyday situations. The magic of McNally is that he has the genius or the arrogance that it takes not only to put the mirror of unfiltered observation against his own life, but that he has the testicular fortitude to reproduce it for all of us, and leave the dirt in, with full knowledge of his actions. There’s a part in one of the shows where Keith contemplates editing out some earlier section where he felt he was being petty, and unreasonable. But in the final edit, the petty audio remains, and so does this on air rumination on the future editing process.

So many things in life advertise themselves as genuine, and yet they rarely are. XO makes no such claim, in fact, with a subtitle like ‘in the Style of This American Life,’ a potential listener almost expects an imitation, absolving the subject from any obligation to reality. But what I love about XO is that it is so honest, and so brazen, without sacrificing quality. This is not to say that there isn’t windy audio, or fuzzy audio. The show is recorded during the course of a man’s actual day-to-day living. What I mean by quality is simply that: the impeccable transitions between music and talking, the fact that the music so often matches the tempo, the tone of the language as if they were made for each other.

If you like “This American Life,” you might like “XO.” That would depend largely on what it is about the show you like, and what you’re looking for when you’re looking for a show. In “XO 006 Alcohol Rant,” Keith says “I’d rather continue to alienate the people who aren’t on my wave-length in order to feed the people that are.” I think that’s as good a philosophy as any. I look forward to more of this fledgling show, and I recommend anyone who likes to be early to the pop-culture party to watch Keith McNally and his future endeavors. I think there’s a lot more people out there who are on that wave-length than he might yet know.

Once again, an image off of ffffound.com with additional banter by yours truly.

I asked for blog ideas on twitter today, and this was one of the responses I got.

Moopigpoo:@Marinaisgo Any news on the utility mishap? I may have missed it, but I’m curious and nosy and redundant and bored.


Here’s the deal. When we moved here, our electric bill was a lot higher than it had been in Anaheim. But we had a private electric company in Hawthorne, whereas before we had been on the Anaheim public utilities, and I’d heard nasty things from my friends about our new electric company, so I kind of just assumed that it was the cost of living in LA where everything is better than Anaheim, even the electricity.

I supposed I should tell you that our apartment used to be a 5 bedroom, 2 bath unit, and before we moved in, it was split up into our 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom unit and two smaller 1 bedroom units. So in June, when our neighbor moved in and our electricity usage spiked by 50%, I became suspicious. I had the electric company check the meter, they said it was right. I asked about whether or not they could tell if I was paying for my neighbors electricity. The lady at the electric company told me to turn the breakers off in my house and if the electricity went off in other apartments, I was paying for their shit. I did, it did.

So, we learned that I was indeed paying for someone else’s electricity. In fact, In addition to my apartment, I’ve been paying the electric bill for 2 and 1/2 other apartments. And as a cherry on that Sundae, my playing with the breakers in our apartment broke our fridge and I came home to everything melted and spoiled on the same day I realized that I was 5 days to payday with $10 in my account. I had about $35 in my savings, so I took $15 of that and thanks to pasta, and my habit of buying my lunches all on Monday, we lived through the week just fine. (If you’re wondering why I didn’t just buy food with my credit card: I don’t have one.)

So, I think that I have my apartment complex over a barrel. I’m clearly paying for the electricity of my neighbors, and our awesome and nice maintenance guy told me that the complex used to pay the electric bill for my unit for this very reason. I understand that the complex came into new ownership a little while before we moved in, so maybe they didn’t know about that. If I was trying to dump that dump, I would keep something like that to myself. Especially in this economy.

Anyway, our fridge got replaced with a working one. We may or may not get our old fridge back, which we actually own, unlike this new fridge. On Friday, I was asked to email my electric bill to the property manager, who is stationed in an office in Irvine, about an hour to hour and a half drive away from us. I did this, and emailed her again today to see how she was coming on a solution to the electricity problem. I know that in California, the rights lie heavily on the side of the tenant… if said tenant can afford the legal fees to ensure those rights.

I’ve already stated that we live in kind of a dump. We’re not “sue now, ask questions later” kind of people. We can’t afford to be. So for the time being, I’m being really nice to everybody. I did call the electric company again, and this time I got a much smarter lady on the phone who told me that they could perform something called a ‘load check’ on my electricity in order to find out exactly who is using my electricity.

There are a lot of things that could happen from here. I hope that it’s resolved and that our complex pays for my electric bill, and hopefully that they reimburse me at least partially for what I’ve spent on other people’s electricity so far. They could try to evict me, or try to play dirty. They could just lead me on, making me pay continually for my neighbors electricity, bills I can’t afford, until I’m forced to break lease or miss rent.

Thanks to the dispute with the electric company, I’ve only had to pay one $180 bill so far, the other one is on hold until September, at which point there will not only be August’s $180 bill but also September’s. This morning I saw someone moving into one of the other apartments I pay the electric bill for, so by September it’ll be even higher than that.

Despite the rather slow movement in this issue, I think that we’re coming to a resolution. If nothing else, the electric company coming out will give me some evidence on my side that I do really pay for those other apartments. And maybe if they come out and find that I’m paying for other apartments, there will be some course of action that the company itself will take with my complex.

My hope is that this will be over in a few days, but I’m prepared for it not to be. So far, I’ve stayed really calm through the whole thing, I haven’t gotten mad or mouthy, just insistent and consistent with my questions and my requests.

I found this image on ffffound.com



So I thought I’d answer it.

 

It’s not much, but I like it.

Ben and I joined a gym around the end of May, and except for one week that I was sick, we’ve gone every Monday, Wednesday and Friday since then and I’ve started to notice the different categories of gym people.

I have made an MS Paint about it, although it seems that I forgot to mention the crazy muscle dudes which our gym seems to have a lot of. Maybe I’ll break them into subcategories and make another paint just for them.


Click on the image to see a larger version.