Like April 1st all over again.

Eating pretzels in the library during my carefree undergrad days.

I got a rejection letter today.

I wasn't turned down for my dream job after a month of rigorous background checks and nerve-wracking interviews or anything like that. That kind of rejection letter is the terror of the mature job seeker, a class which I have yet to join (although I'm starting to suspect that with my new qualifications, I would have an easier time finding full-time employment than the part-time summer work I'm looking for now -- damn you, high schoolers). It wasn't even technically a letter, more like an email notification that I should log into an online account to check the message in my one-way inbox, but it was definitely a rejection. University of X does not, in fact, want me in their graduate program, and they made no attempts to soften the blow:

"We are unable to consider you for a place on this programme as the information you provided in support of your application did not meet the standard we require."

I'm biased, but that sounds like kind of a bitchy way to put it, no?

It's not the first time I've had higher education turn me away. I'm not yet at a point in my life where I feel secure enough in myself to advertise just how many colleges turned me down as an aspiring seventeen-year-old with a decent GPA but killer standardized test scores (the telltale indicator of lazy smart kids across the nation), but suffice it to say that my heart knew a lot of brokenness the spring of 2009 that had very little to do with teenage boys.

A little over four years later, I have a bachelor's degree with honors from a well-ranked institution, I've worked six different jobs (four of them simultaneously at one point), I've flown across the ocean and back a few times, I've conversed in French with actual French people, I'm ranked in the top 1% of Scramble with Friends players globally, I make people laugh sometimes, and now I'm applying to graduate school with enthusiastic references from two professors I respect and admire. If that all sounds like I'm being a bit defensive in order to remind myself that I'm not generally a failure in life, it's because I am. Practice does not make rejection perfect.

Proof of my mild distinction.

The good news is that I have two other universities willing to take me on for a Master's in Modern Literature, and I'm holding out hope for another six. Unless dire circumstances strike in the next two months or so, I'll be a graduate student somewhere in England this coming fall -- or a postgrad, as they call it -- and I'll be so over University of X. For now, their rejection is a fresh bruise, but I've always thought bruises were kind of pretty, all colorful and mottled, and so full of character. I'll move on, and I'll almost -- but never completely -- forget about it. I'll go somewhere else, and they'll be sorry it's not there.

Also I unfollowed them on Twitter. Take that, jerks.

Standing with Wendy.

I planned to go to bed early tonight, but I made the mistake of tuning in to the online live stream of the Texas Senate's special session. State Senator Wendy Davis (D-TX, Fort Worth) was filibustering Senate Bill 5, a piece of anti-abortion legislation that would inevitably be passed by the Republican majority if put to a vote. SB 5 proposes to prohibit late-stage abortions under criminal penalties and effectively reduce the number of health clinics performing abortions in Texas from 42 to just 5 by imposing new requirements forcing clinics to undergo certification as "ambulatory surgical centers" and mandating that clinic doctors have admitting privileges at local hospitals -- conditions that, in their absence, have never before interfered with clinics' ability to perform safe, necessary medical procedures. In order to avoid giving Republicans the chance to pass the bill, Senator Davis announced her intention to filibuster, i.e. to remain on the floor discussing the bill for the 13 hours remaining until midnight, when the special session would be required to close without having had the chance to vote. Because the Texas Senate only convenes once every two years, with the exception of governor-mandated special sessions like this one, the legislation would have been tabled until 2015.

AP/Eric Gay

I'd been watching parts of Senator Davis's remarkable performance on and off throughout the day, as she read to a predominantly-male Senate a series of testimonies by Texas women who'd had firsthand experience needing abortion services. Not being allowed to sit, lean, eat, drink, use the bathroom, or otherwise move from an upright standing position during the filibuster, Senator Davis wore comfortable neon-pink running shoes for her very lengthy speaking engagement. She was holding up well, until the third time a Senator called for a Point of Order due to to Senator Davis allegedly breaking the filibuster rules. The first time was for introducing a topic that was not "germane," which is to say relevant, to the discussion of the abortion bill; the second was because she received physical assistance from another senator handing her a back brace midway through her lengthy standing session; the third and final interruption was again a claim that discussing Texas's newly passed ultrasound law was somehow off-topic when discussing abortion. I didn't witness the first two objections, but the third is definitively nonsense: by no stretch of the imagination are ultrasounds -- which Texas now requires for all women undergoing abortions -- NOT related to the bill at hand.

In short, with about two hours remaining on the clock for Senator Davis's filibuster, the remaining time was filled with an almost comically confused back-and-forth between senators about parliamentary procedure, like first-graders arguing over whose turn it is to play with the toy truck, or a particularly inept rendition of Who's On First. The Democratic minority senators backed her up, with Senators Leticia Van de Putte and Kirk Watson in particular providing robust appeals of the appeals to the filibuster (it got complicated). Senator Van de Putte, having been overlooked in earlier parliamentary proceedings, triggered the night's final push with only ten minutes left to midnight when she directly addressed the President of the Senate to ask, "At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over her male colleagues?” The thousands of citizens watching and listening from the balcony erupted, and the cheering drowned out any attempts at legislation until midnight had safely passed.

The sinister twist to the story is what happened next: the Senators huddled -- literally huddled, in a small mob of suits and thinning hair -- and took a vote anyway, two minutes past their deadline. They claim to have passed SB 5 with a vote of 17-12 in favor, but the midnight deadline is non-negotiable, and that verdict is therefore illegal. No one is sure what happens now, but the thousands of protestors remain in and around the Texas Senate building awaiting confirmation either way. Department of Public Safety officers are handcuffing and forcibly removing them one by one, but the pro-choice supporters are stubborn, and they're there in droves.

I live-tweeted the situation, naturally. If anyone's interested, I'm trying out Storify for the first time to compile my take on the events as they happened:



[Update] Fast-forward to now. It's 3:30 a.m., and by the time anyone reads this, the cat will be out of the bag: SB 5 IS DEAD. Thank you, Wendy Davis; thank you, Leticia Van de Putte; thank you, Kirk Watson; thank you, Democratic senators whose names I didn't catch, women and men both. Thank you to all the avid Twitter users who kept the rest of the country informed while every single major news network slept. Huge shoutout to The Texas Tribune, whose live stream and live blog proved that local news isn't dead, and that we need it more than ever.

Nick Swartsell, via Texas Observer

I've never had an abortion, and I don't have any immediate plans to need one -- but then again, no one ever does. I'm also not a Texan, and definitely never intend to become one. Nevertheless, this was a personal victory for me, as it was for every single person in the country who may one day have to resort to this kind of reproductive care, and I'm glad I stayed awake to see it happen.

How (not) to make jokes about women.

This picture of me will be relevant later. I look okay, though, right?

[Note: this is not new, but it’s new to me, so I’m writing about it as if it were new to everyone.]

A little over a year ago, 4Chan, the sort of Reddit Lite image-sharing forum site where teenage boys go to feel something – anything – birthed a “hilarious” meme called “2/10: Would Not Bang.” It’s a spinoff of the 2010 “Butthurt Dweller” meme, which in itself subscribes to that brand of humor that strives for irony but trips over its own offensiveness: the acne-ridden, glasses-wearing, greasy-ponytail-sporting face of the meme makes judgmental comments about other people, even though he’s not such a hot item himself.

The joke is in the irony, of course, because what right does some video-game-playing nerd who lives with his parents have to comment on anyone else? Just as much of a right as anyone else, arguably, but there’s potential for a genuine laugh in the contrast between “Complains about being bullied in school / Calls everyone a faggot online” or “Complains that girls only like attractive guys / Likes girls because they are hot.” That’s incisive, and it’s based in truth – there really are people like that, and I tend to be okay with making fun of people who make fun of other people. (Note that I don’t apply this eye-for-an-eye philosophy in other areas of my life.)

“Butthurt Dweller” isn’t a name I totally love, though, because in simple terms: butthurt → reference to anal sex + male character → insinuations of homosexuality + intention to be humorous → gay people are funny because ew = homophobia. So BD, as we’ll call him, is often paired up with captions specifically leveling ridiculous criticisms of women, like “Girl I stalk is holding hands with some guy / WHORE.” That’s hilarious, because it’s a clearly unfair accusation borne out of the character’s bitterness rather than reality. However, there’s a difference between jokes that establish BD as a jerk then play off that, and jokes that assume BD’s worth is tied up in his attractiveness. He looks like this:

…and that joke only works because the viewer agrees that this is a wildly unattractive guy who would never have a shot with any woman, period. That’s pretty shallow.

The “2/10: Wouldn’t Bang” meme arose from this shared agreement between meme-maker and audience that BD doesn’t get girls, so it’s super ironic of him to be so critical of women when, again, he looks like this:

So 4Chan users ran with the joke, creating “2/10: Would Not Bang” as a sort of competition to see who could come up with the most ridiculously unfounded criticisms of beautiful women, starting with comments Photoshopped over an image of actress/model/WWE fighter/George Clooney’s girlfriend Stacy Keibler in her underwear: her eyebrow arch is too extreme, her bra and panties don’t match, her bracelet isn’t authentic quartz, the curtains are wrinkled, 2/10: WOULD NOT BANG. This, I submit to the jury, is good comedy. What isn’t so funny are the memes that came after it:

Did you catch that? “Fat ass pinky” is funny; “rope should be around neck” is horrifying. Implying that a woman should commit suicide is never funny, and even less so here because it’s so out of the blue: why, exactly, should that rope be around her neck? Because she’s, ha ha, not pretty enough? That’s sick, and whoever “would not bang” this woman is definitely not someone I would bang, or let my friends bang.

An image of Angelina Jolie, voted Most Beautiful Woman in the World (probably by a bunch of heterosexual men) like, a million times, is great fodder for this meme:

“Ears too high for head,” “nose bridge too straight edged,” and “hideous mole” (pointing to maybe a two-pixel blemish) are all outlandish comments to make about Angelina Jolie. This meme succeeds, but it’s one of the few that does so without taking a sharp turn away from humor into perpetuating legitimately offensive comments about these women’s appearances:

The first example is straight-up rude. “Forehead cut off” is worth a laugh because duh, how irrelevant to someone’s appearance, but “big ears,” “big man shoulders,” and “boobs too small” are likely contenders for things that girl has actually thought about herself, looking in the mirror on a particularly rough day. Irony succeeds when it presents a view that contrasts sharply with someone’s expectations, like if a picture of Dolly Parton were captioned “boobs too small, would not bang,” but this fails to do that.

The second example, which not only repeats the not-so-funny “Jew nose” joke while introducing the term “gypsy,” which is a racial slur, also completely misses the point. The girl’s cleavage really isn’t presented from the best angle there, so calling it “Grand Canyon cleavage” is just doubling down on an actual, if infinitesimally minimal, flaw in her picture. “Roger Rabbit teeth” doesn’t make sense: her teeth aren’t big enough to merit derogatory comments, but they’re not so small to make that criticism truly outlandish, either. “Rings from extensive goggle usage”…well, that’s just not funny, try again.

According to an article by Slacktory, a self-identifying “comedic blog about the pop culture of the internet,” Would Not Bang is the funniest thing going (or at least it was in 2012; again, sorry for my much-belated outrage). According to me, a self-identifying woman with 21+ years’ worth of experience as a punch line for jokes about making sandwiches and being a bad driver, it’s more inadvertently misogynistic garbage masquerading as satire that buries any actual comedic value under a dump truck’s worth of humor that laughs at women, not with them. Sure, there are a few examples of men being subjected to the Would Not Bang treatment, but the Slacktory gallery at least didn't bother to include any. At any rate, this is just one example of the myriad ways our society normalizes putting women on display like museum exhibits; while it might be flattering to treat someone like art, it also makes them an object, potentially one that can be bought and sold. People aren’t paintings, and they’re worth more than face value.

Some of the meme creators used pictures of celebrities; others used pictures that, worryingly, look to be pulled off a Facebook page, not necessarily with the subject’s consent. I can’t do anything about that, but what I can do is present my version of the 2/10: Would Not Bang meme with myself as both joke-maker and joke-taker, using a picture that I thought I looked at least good enough in to send to my boyfriend (although the kissyface IS a joke). Female-authored comedy right here, everyone:

Hideous.

I got in the kitchen and made me a sandwich.

Giant mutant strawberries are coming for us all.

Over the past four years of splitting my life between Morristown and Meadville, I've found that one thing remains constant when I come home: there's never any food in the house. There will always be leftovers more than a week old, a giant tub of baking powder that expired in 2010, a plastic lemon half-filled with juice that grows ever more acidic and not in a good way, and whole milk when I've grown used to skim and 2%, but there has never been anything I'd be excited to eat. I've been home for a month now, and yesterday was the first time I had a chance to go grocery shopping with my mom (read: without using my own money; starving grad student habits start now)...and I did with a vengeance. (Or a hunger. Damn, missed that pun.) It took two stores and four hours, but the kitchen is stocked and my stomach doesn't have any reason to complain for a few weeks.

With the proper ingredients in the house, the obvious first step is to bake. I woke up this morning and made buttermilk biscuits for my best friend, who's off to start her new life in the South and will probably have more and better biscuits in Kentucky. I ate the ugly biscuit, made up of all the fragments of dough left from cutting the prettier biscuits, as soon as it came out of the oven; the rest are sealed up in foil for future reasons that I will elaborate upon shortly.

I got more ambitious for late lunch/early dinner (had a verrry long nap this afternoon, so) and made a sandwich that came to me in a vision yesterday afternoon: prosciutto, mozzarella, and baby spinach with cracked black pepper, toasted and pressed in a buttered skillet. The abundance of food blogs I read have always helpfully suggested that a home cook with a panini craving but no sandwich press to call her own can concoct a sort-of substitution with a foil-covered brick, a clothing iron, or a particularly heavy saucepan, so being without brick and skeptical of ironing my sandwich, I tried the third method today. It looked like this:

THREE saucepans.

Not quite food blog worthy. Check out the sandwich, though!

Yeah, I eat in front of my laptop, whatever I'm a millenial.

Then I had an ice cream sandwich and cut up some strawberries, tossed them in white sugar, and put them in the fridge so that I can take them out tomorrow when they're all syrupy and make strawberry shortcake with the leftover biscuits and vanilla ice cream and maybe some melted chocolate over top and I just really love food, you know?

Blerg.

Lately I've been getting occasional bursts of energy and inspiration and motivation for self-improvement, which would be well and good if they didn't always occur in the middle of the night. I tried to go to sleep early(ish, at about half past midnight), but woke up around 4:00 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep. Instead, I read up on the Supreme Court decision giving law enforcement officials the go-ahead to take a cheek swab of any arrestee's DNA without obtaining a specific warrant in advance, the nouveau riche class in mainland China, and a Philadelphia experimental theatre company's race-swapped adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Philadelphia. I scrolled through Tumblr for a while and reblogged some crossover fanart of John Watson à la BBC Sherlock in his soldier days with a pet Growlithe because that's the kind of thing that appeals to me these days. Then I tried in vain to find an original source for said fanart, and lamented that we live in a world where people don't think to credit artists before appropriating their work for Tumblr-fame.

Then I got sad about how much I think about Tumblr in general.

I've been trying to brush up on my French again. If I'm completely honest, a lot of that effort is driven by guilt at including "French: intermediate reading, writing, and translation proficiency; conversational speaking proficiency" on my graduate school résumé, which is...a stretch. I once vaguely considered how much I would enjoy working as a literary translator, and I still anticipate that I'll need to manage quite an advanced level of reading proficiency to take advantage of academic resources in French someday, so it's a career-driven goal in that way. I also have lofty ambitions of reading at least sections of Proust in the original French at some point in my life -- who doesn't? (People with better things to do/care about.) Part of it, too, is the stubborn refusal to let what was technically a very significant chunk of my education (six years through middle/high school, an AP class, a 300-level college course, travel in Paris and Belgium) go to waste. Duolingo has been enormously helpful in helping remind me of the basics, and I've been pleasantly surprised to realize how much I already/still understand of the more subtle nuances that don't come across so well in online software. It's also incredibly satisfying to learn new vocabulary, which is one of the most instantly gratifying intellectual experiences out there. It's hard not to brag, actually: I didn't know this word in French yesterday, and I do today, which makes me one word smarter now than I was then, you guys! Be thankful I don't tweet about it every time.

I'm also blogging again, I guess. I'm an unemployed English major; it's basically a right of passage.

Me and John Watson: SO ALIKE .