{look upon my works, ye mighty}

Link: Delta Makes Woman With Muscular Dystrophy Crawl Off Plane

"On July 20th, Julianna's (delayed) Delta flight landed in Atlanta at 7:30pm, with a connecting flight scheduled for 8:05pm. Julianna, who has muscular dystrophy, missed the connecting flight because nobody came with a wheelchair until 8:05—the same time the connecting flight took off. To make matters worse, the plane crew told Julianna she might make the flight anyway if she stopped waiting for help and got off the plane right now, so she crawled down the stairs on her own. When the wheelchair came she was "wheeled into a back room and advised" that her plane had taken off. But that was just the first half of her ordeal, and the next eight hours only got worse."

Delta can't be allowed to just brush her off with a meal voucher that she wasn't even able to use.

If you have a Yahoo account, Buzz it up. If enough people Buzz it, it might make front page news and put more pressure on Delta to compensate her adequately and change their policies so nothing like that happens again. If you have a Digg account, Digg it. The more negative publicity, the better the chances of Delta being shamed into acting.

And finally, spare a couple of seconds to go complain directly to Delta here. I know it looks intimidating because they're asking for all that RL info, but all they really need is a name and an e-mail address, if you checked the asterisk'd fields. In the comment box, link to the news article in question so that they'll know what you're talking about, then tell them exactly what you think of their behavior.

If anyone's got any further ideas on how to make the story more visible, drop me a comment. A public apology is the least of what they owe her, but it's something that can be achieved through the pressure of public opinion if enough of us actually put our outrage to good use and do something about this.

I just accidentally checked my Bulk mail which I NEVER do and saw that all 7 messages there were lj comments!

If you guys have been replying to my comments/posts recently and not getting responses, now you know why. Link me to anything you desperately need an answer on! *going through her own posts for the last two months to check on them*

Apart from that, anyone got songs or stuff they associate with Reid or Garcia from Criminal Minds? I'm trying to make icons and keep getting stuck for lack of fandom-y knowledge and inability to dig up interesting stuff from wiki.

Also, I'm going to be writing a paper on self-harm for my Medical Ethics class. Might have questions up about it later for you guys but promise to lj-cut them if I do so as not to trigger anyone. I just thought you deserved a heads-up.

Link of the Day: The Bunnyocalpyse! Bunny Peeps die in a variety of disturbing ways. My personal favorite? The assassin.

LJ's got another announcement post over at lj_biz. As opposed to news, as usual.

Also, I know it's not important in the grand scheme of things, but has anyone been told yet why deleted usernames are bold instead of struck through? My curiosity, it's killing me!

Frankly, LJ already apologized and sounded sincere about it in May. Then this latest round of idiocy happened. I'm not too keen on sticking around for it to happen a third time.

If you've got a paid account, permanent account or used to have one of those, go here to answer a few questions about why and be counted amongst those people who are no longer to give LJ or 6A their cash to play with. I already filled it out -- if you aren't sure about your payment history, check it out here. Your info about when your journal was created and when the paid account expires is in your userinfo.

And finally, on a non-LJ but still Internet freedom issue, AT&T censors Pearl Jam's live Webcast concert so that the lines “George Bush, leave this world alone” and “George Bush find yourself another home” were muted out of the song.

Question: What happens when you take a sleeping pill but pull an all-nighter anyway trying to get a paper done, pass out at the keyboard and then wake up, realize that there is no way you can get the paper done, and collapse into bed?

Answer: You wake up feeling like hell, absolutely starving and you have a headache that feels like someone set off an atomic bomb in your head.

Ow fucking OW fucking OW.

On the fucking wow side, I got a letter from the IAEA saying that I have an internship there for the summer. Exact paragraph that you'll be interested in goes as follows:

I am pleased to inform you that you have been awarded an internship in the Nuclear Power Engineering Section, Division of Nuclear Power, Department of Nuclear Energy, from 1 June to 31 August 2007. Under the guidance of Mr. P. Wincze, Quality Assurance/Management Engineer, your work assignment will be to review documents being prepared for publication, editing and correcting the text when necessary and maintaining the following databases: (a) Document tracking system; (b) e-Glossary; and (c) a clickable map.

Of course, problems are that I don't want to spend my summer in Austria and that my college starts before my job ends, but hey, look, shiny internship that involves maintaining a document tracking system and THAT sounds scary. Everything else sounds doable.

....Annnd the Internet just went down all over campus. FUCKING PERFECT. Savior, I'll probably be on MSN again by the time you see this, but I'm sorry about disappearing like that.

( Fickle killing time by talking about random stuff while waiting for Net to return. )

I was going to make this an edit to my last post, but it stands on its own.

How to prevent rape.

Yes, I'm sick of those e-mails that tell me to carry umbrellas, watch what I wear, don't let myself be caught alone in a room with a guy - I'm sick of being told I should never let my guard down. I'm sick of being told that when rape happens, it's just a girl exaggerating or trying to cause trouble. I'm sick of having rape trivialized, to the point that the next person who tells me it's just a bit of unwanted sex is going to have to deal with me verbally laying into them until my fingers are too tired to type/my mouth is too dry to speak. What I'd like to do is gut them, to castrate them, then tell them over their screams that it's only a little wound, not to make such a fuss. Pain is in the mind of the perceiver.

If nothing else, that's what Take Back the Night rallies tell people - it's okay to grieve. It's okay to be hurt. There are going to be days when you can't drag yourself out of bed, periods of time when everything hurts. Smells can trigger flashbacks, sounds too. It's okay. It's normal. It's not what you want, it stops you from acting the way you feel you should, but it's what happens anyway. I'm not fostering a culture of self-pity here, but nor do I think that denying your own pain is productive. To slice away the part of you that was wounded in an attempt to be wholly clean and incomplete - no. Because then you lose, not just to someone else, but you lose part of yourself, and it's not a game because it's your soul and your mind and your heart, and if you let someone damage you to the extent that you have no choice but to cripple yourself just so that you can survive, then they're hurting you twice over, once for the inital incident and once for the self-sundering. And they'll never stop hurting you, because you'll always remember.

And I know I said 'when you let' right after protesting the use of the phrase 'she was raped', but the thing is, getting raped is not the victim's choice. How a person deals with that is their choice. Sleeping around, swearing off sex, hiding away, hating yourself- they're all different ways of reacting, some more destructive than others, some less. The latest rally had about 50 girls all jammed into a small room, and I know that wasn't everyone. I know there were people too scared to come to a private, Safe Space meeting. A full third of all females have to deal with sexual assault at some point in their lives; it's jumped up from one quarter. How long before it hits 50%, and then 100% so that it turns into a standard experience for women, as normal as having blatantly sexual propositions tossed your way by complete strangers when you're just walking down a street and trying to get home?

Go ahead. Say that I'm borrowing trouble. Say that feminism isn't needed any longer, that we're practically equal anyway and that rape isn't really all that much of a problem. Please do. I'd love an excuse to hit someone with my copy of I Never Called It Rape. Because it's getting worse. Not better. Worse. With all our supposed moves forwards, the fact still remains that the incidence of rape has gone up, not down.

And home's not safe either. A quarter of all families will have a child molested by a family member at some point; one million American women endure domestic violence each year. (And those statistics are on the conservative side). Not to mention that again, most rapes are committed by people that the victim knows - and yes, marital rape does count and it is possible to be raped by a boyfriend/crush/ex. Still counts.

If you say no, if you don't want it, it's rape.

That simple.

It doesn't matter who you've slept with before, it doesn't matter what you were doing when you said stop. It doesn't matter what you were wearing, what you drank, or how badly s/he wants you. If you don't want it, then it's your body and ultimately, your choice. When someone rapes you, they take that choice away from you. They don't make up your mind for you; a person's default is not 'yes'. They simply remove your chance to say 'no' by refusing to acknowledge it.

What it all comes down, basically, is that real men accept the responsibility to not harm another person, and it needs to stop going unpunished. I'm not an idealist, no matter how you stretch the word. I'm well aware of the fact that most victims aren't believed, and that even when it does go to court, it's hard to win a case, standing in front of a jury that'll judge you on how you act, dress and speak, operating from the assumption that you must have done something to provoke an attack.

I know that police prefer the victim to be battered black and blue, half-dead from physical violence, rather than deal with the tricky grey areas of physical intimidation and how if a girl knows her attacker is stronger than her, and that fighting back will just result in her getting raped and beat up both, she's more likely to give in without fighting. In my school, when we had a quick seminar about self-defense, we were told to fight as much as we could but not if we thought it would endanger our lives or if we couldn't win. One of the girls summed it up as "lie back and try to not think about it"; the girl I liked best fiercely said she'd carry a knife on her and "kill the fucker". In retrospect, those lessons were only for girls. None for guys.

If I'd been the girl then that I am now, I might have questioned that, asked why we get trained to defend ourselves but why they don't get told to not make it necessary for us to know such things. Back then, though, rape was barely even a blip on my register. It was only as we grew up that my friends started to coming to me, telling me that a friend of their father's raped them, that their boyfriend raped them, that it wasn't true they'd had sex [name deleted] because he'd forced her and she couldn't say otherwise because nobody would believe her...

Rape is underreported.

Rape is a weapon.

Rape ruins lives.

And 'no' means 'no'. Always. Always.