postimg
Nov 2012 06

Mel Suicide in Undercover Konnenkova

  • INTO: I like to laugh and mess around a lot. I don’t take life too seriously. I’m a massive cat enthusiast.
  • MAKES ME HAPPY: Food, alcohol, friends (obviously), modeling, memes, sunshine, music, DJing, Hello Kitty, cats.
  • MAKES ME SAD: Ignorance, fake people, being cold, hangovers.
  • 5 THINGS I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT: My best friends, laptop, phone, and a splash of make-up.
  • I SPEND MOST OF MY FREE TIME: Being an absolute spazz with my friends!

Get to know Mel better over at SuicideGirls.com!


postimg
Nov 2012 06

by Julia C. Reinhart

While President Obama tried to improve the plight of the homeless, a President Romney wouldn’t even try. Without a major change in Congress, the fate of America’s homeless is unlikely to improve. States just don’t have money to deal with the problem.

With the US Presidential elections upon us, much is still talked about the economy, foreign policy, and ‚yes, whether Barack Obama is actually a naturally born citizen, and thus eligible to be president – never mind it’s the job he has held for the past four years. Conservative Republicans trip over themselves in making offensive statements about abortion and rape, scaring women voters with a sense of self-determination. Liberal pundits meanwhile try to outbid themselves in doomsday scenarios on how the world would end should Mitt Romney be elected. None of these realize that there is a group of Americans who will be losers, no matter who wins the race for the White House: Middle and lower class Americans, from a high school teacher all the way down to the homeless man on the street.

The big white elephant in the room that rarely gets discussed during American electoral politics is the systematic neglect of the country’s infrastructure, and the policy consequences that have sprung from that, especially in the area of affordable housing and combating homelessness. According to a white paper published by the Political Research Institute at Brown University, non-military infrastructure spending in the United States from school buildings to highways and affordable housing has declined from 3.8% to 1.8% of all government held assets between 1951 and 2011. Since then, the country has seen six Republican and six Democratic presidents, hence this is hardly a partisan issue. Core elements of the infrastructure, such as electricity grids and phone systems, have been economized, meaning that profitability aspects drive availability and maintenance rather than need.

In rural areas as well as in low income neighborhoods in large cities, electrical grids are regularly delivered via overhead lines, as there are fewer customers and those that buy the services can’t afford the added value services that drive corporate profits. Meanwhile in areas of high density and high income, electrical wires tend to run underground, protecting them from falling trees, swirling tornados, and heavy snowfalls brought on by America’s often harsh weather patterns. Power outages in New York City brought on by Hurricanes Irene and Sandy are an illustrative example: While Irene brought on heavy rains over the five boroughs of the world’s financial capital, Manhattan suffered some flooding but little lasting consequence once the storm passed. Long Island and low lying areas of Brooklyn and Queens however, which are more exposed to cross-winds from the sea, and also subjected to the storm surge brought on by the Hurricane suffered measurable structural damage, downed trees and power lines, and about 4 feet of flood waters covering the lowest parts of Long Island’s southern shore and Staten Island, bringing on substantial beach erosion, but no deaths.

If Irene was a dry run, it did not prepare New York City’s infrastructure for a storm the size and power of Hurricane Sandy. While government officials went through the same preparation proceedings that helped them safeguard the city’s 8.5 million population during Irene, little was done to improve or protect the power grid from flooding. For days, weather forecasters announced that the storm surge with Sandy could be significant, and sandbags were duly deployed around lower Manhattan – rows of them 1-2 feet high leaning against doors and entranceways of buildings. Yet the South Ferry subway tunnel remained open towards the sea, and many of the transformer stations run by Con Edison, the local utility company, that were underground did not receive sufficient flood proofing.

So, when the storm surge came, transformer stations blew out as electric equipment, under high voltage at the time, was introduced to salt water, an explosive and corrosive mixture that left half of Manhattan and significant parts of Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island in the dark. Subway tunnels flooded from above when the East and Hudson Rivers jumped their embankments and from below once water pushed into the South Ferry Tunnel and from there all the way up through the system. This time, the infrastructure shortages were hard to ignore, because they also significantly affected Manhattan. Weather damages in the outer boroughs, while having a significant impact on the local communities, go largely ignored in the public discourse of the city. Government officials, most of them Governor Andrew Cuomo are now loudly calling for infrastructure improvements in light of changing weather patterns.

While a good part of Manhattan’s intellectual elite, who live in areas like SoHo, Chelsea, and other Lower Manhattan neighborhoods, had to survive several days without power and water, leaving fresh food, drinking water and cell phone coverage in short supply, the worst impact of the storm disproportionally affected blue-collar and low income communities. Affordable housing in New York City is in short supply, and the housing projects and affordable single family homes that do exist are built on relatively cheap land, low lying areas and landfills that no high-level real estate developer would touch or use. Also, much of the lower priced single family homes were build before 1970, making for an aging housing stock build from cheap materials, which have a harder time resisting high winds and rising waters. Gas and waterlines tend to be old, cell phone coverage spotty even at the best of times, and power lines more often than not run tangled above ground. With the power out for as much as two weeks, and temperatures falling to the freezing mark, elderly residents of affordable housing units have already started to die from exposure. As the freeze and the power outage in the outer boroughs continues, many more may follow.

Many residents of public housing projects live on welfare and food stamps, a government allowance of $200 / month for a single person or $367 / month for a family of two. This amount often barely covers their basic needs for feeding their families, and leaves them ill-prepared to carry the extra burden of stocking up on food reserves when storms approach. The Rockaways, a particularly hard hit, and also very poor part of Queens located on a barrier island in the Long Island sound, saw survivors of Hurricane Sandy scrounge for food when emergency relief aid was slow to arrive. All the power lines to the island were cut, the bridge for cars was closed, and the subway tracks were flooded. Residents of the Rockaways were trapped on their island with little ability to go search or receive aid supplies, leaving them both cold and hungry for days before government relief services ramped up.

The lack of affordable housing combined with an outdated attitude towards the causes of homelessness is also one of the key drivers behind the city’s rising homeless population. In the early 1970s, as scores of veterans returned from Vietnam and struggled to re-integrate into society, many of the ideas shaping today’s governmental policy towards poverty and homelessness were formulated, operating on what then were perceived to be the key factors for homelessness: Drug or alcohol abuse, and mental illness. Unemployment, while existent, was less perceived to play a role. Fatima Shad‚ a Red Cross worker focusing on homeless outreach explains: “They thought, you choose to be homeless, and yes, they basically assume that it’s your fault that you’re homeless, you had to be a druggie, a drunk, crazy, or all three.”

The mentally ill have formed a large group among the homeless population, ever since the US government started to shutter mental health institutions in the 1950s, leaving many in need of serious long-term care without a support network that could keep them in a home. Many of the Vietnam veterans who wound up homeless did have mental and substance abuse issues, as did many other homeless who followed.

However, as Shad points out, the face of homelessness is changing dramatically: A long-standing trend of redevelopment and gentrification started in the 1960s, where entire poor neighborhoods are condemned and leveled to make room for real estate development projects that promise higher tax revenues to city and state governments. Due to a lack of funding for alternative low income housing and the recent flood of foreclosures brought about by the 2008 financial crisis, this gentrification process has given rise to a new form of homeless population: Those who simply can no longer afford to pay the rent or mortgage, because they’re either underpaid or underemployed. If you go into the housing courts, they’re packed, and everybody is two seconds away from an eviction: Shad explains: “It doesn’t stop. Monday morning through Friday night, case after case, people are begging marshals for mercy, and the court system, depending on the borough you’re in, might be a little more lenient, giving you another week or two before you’re being evicted. But once people go to shelters, if they don’t go to somebody’s sofa, they’re entering a very challenging world.”

It is also important to note that homeless statistics provided by the New York City government only count those actually housed in shelters. They don’t count people living on somebody’s couch, those living in subways, or those on the street who are not in a shelter environment. The official number of shelter beds in New York City is 46,000, which is the number of homeless Mayor Bloomberg keeps quoting. However, the number of people actually without a permanent home of their own is a high multiple of that. Most that do enter the shelter system are either part-time or fulltime workers, and get assigned to so-called “working shelters” where every resident is working.

Once homeless, keeping down a job becomes incredibly difficult. The New York City shelter system – still operating on the assessment that anyone homeless must have mental and substance or alcohol abuse issues – requires residents to attend a rigorous schedule of meetings and assessments in order to comply with requirements that allow them to stay. The appointments range from medical and psychological assessments, to workplace trainings. If a homeless person still has a full-time job, keeping these appointments is extremely difficult, as they’re usually set during business hours. This way a homeless person is trapped in a catch-22: On the one hand they have to go to work to earn a living that may be able to get them back on their feet and back to permanent housing, on the other hand, if they don’t keep the appointments requested by the shelter system, they get thrown back out into the streets. Once inside the shelter system many homeless do wind up losing their jobs, as employers tend to be unsympathetic with regards to the absences required by the shelter system. As Shad puts it, the homeless are being put on a hamster wheel with little chance of ever getting anywhere meaningful – and she thinks that is entirely by design.

Homeless shelters in New York City are private enterprises, which are reimbursed by the city for each bed and service they provide. For every mandatory meeting and assessment, the shelter receives a fee from the city in addition to the fees billed for the beds they provide. Furthermore, a homeless person that qualifies for food stamps gets their allowances confiscated by the shelter system, on the basis that they are being provided with three meals a day. A single person, who would normally receive $200 a month, is left with only $16.50 a month in food stamps for personal use. However, many in the shelter system are either on appointments or at work when the meals are served, so they miss out on them and are forced to find alternate sources for food.

If a homeless person works, the money that could be saved up for the security deposit on an apartment must so be used to buy food instead. Also, the meals that are served in the shelter system are highly dubious in nutritional value. No consideration is given to vegetarians, or those in need of a heart-healthy diets or ones for other specialist medical needs. Shad calls it “straight-up slop.”

One way to address the shortage of funds for food is to apply for public assistance, which results in more meetings and appointments for the shelter resident to attend, making it even more difficult for the person to keep down a fulltime job while conducting all the appointments and meetings imposed by the public assistance and housing authorities. In this day and age, and particularly in this economy it’s impossible for a person to do all these appointment and keep down a job. Shad elaborates, “More and more people come crying to me saying ‘I just lost my job.’ And when I ask why, they say, ‘I had to go to my public assistance meeting or I’d be kicked out of my shelter.’”

To make matters worse, Shad contends that shelter officials often schedule competing appointments with the public assistance authorities to compound the complications. Remember, they think it’s your fault you’re homeless, so you’re not supposed to succeed, because in their eyes you can’t.

Another side effect of a shelter resident applying for public assistance is that the shelter will receive a rent allowance in addition to the government subsidy these shelters receive for offering beds to homeless. Shad continues, “From there it just goes on and on, this is a money making enterprise. It’s human warehousing at its finest.”

The shelter system is incentivized to see its residents fail at re-integration. And how’s it even possible if there’s no affordable housing. Lack of investment in new stock has ensured that waiting lists for the homes that do exist are several years long. Voucher systems, which subsidized 70% of a person’s rent in the first year with an option of 50% subsidy in a second year, called Advantage systems, were introduced under President Clinton as a stop-gap measure to help reintegrate homeless shelter residents into the regular rental market. However, in the meantime, only very few new affordable housing units where built, and many landlords, especially in New York City, abused the system, by charging 30% above regular rates. With increasing budget pressures brought on by the 2008 financial crisis on federal, state, and city budgets, funding for these vouchers was finally cut completely in mid 2012. According to the Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress prepared by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 40% of homeless today are families, usually a single mother and children. Many of these families had Advantage housing vouchers that allowed them to transition out of a shelter into regular apartments. With the end of the Advantage voucher payments many of these families are now moving back into an already overcrowded shelter system.

Adding to the problem is the waves of veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, many of whom are suffering from PTSD. While President Obama has talked on occasion about addressing homelessness amongst veterans, recently saying at a campaign event that “nobody who serves, nobody who fights for this country should have to fight for a job or a roof over their heads when they come back home,” little has been done in terms of tangible policy achievements. While his 2009 stimulus package did include allocations for affordable housing, his primary focus in this area was on mortgage owners under threat of foreclosure to refinance. However, Obama’s Affordable Refinance Program wound up helping only a small number of the targeted recipients, leading the Republican controlled house to kill the foreclosure relief program in 2011, calling it a waste of money, since the program only helped about 750,000 distressed homeowners, instead of the targeted 7 million. According to a Congressional Panel that studied the program before it ended, a major reason for the program’s failure was that “loan servicers, who act as middlemen between the distressed homeowners and the investors who own the mortgage, often find it more profitable to foreclose than to modify.” In his 2012 State of the Union address, Obama announced revisions to the program aimed at simplifying the process, but the plan is still awaiting Congressional action.

In 2010, Obama announced a plan, called “Opening Doors” that would, as he claimed, end homelessness in American by 2020. Lauded by advocates of homelessness issues as a major breakthrough, the initiative ultimately went nowhere as Congress declined to provide the $1 billion in funding it required.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, meanwhile, when touring Louisiana in September for his campaign, told victims of Hurricane Isaac, who became homeless after the storm to “Go home and call 211” – the number that provides information about health and human service programs to Louisiana residents. According to his campaign website, Romney’s housing plan consists primarily of making the government sell the roughly 200,000 homes currently vacant due to foreclosure and an easing of bank regulations to “restore a functioning marketplace and restart lending to creditworthy borrowers.” This plan also calls for an end to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government agencies who underwrite most mortgages issued to middle and low-income homebuyers. Those already without a home are not mentioned in Romney’s policy papers at all.

While President Obama tried, but failed, to improve the plight of the homeless, a President Romney wouldn’t even attempt to alleviate their plight. Without a major change of heart in Congress, the fate of America’s poor and homeless is unlikely to improve, no matter who wins the election today.

Related Posts
Blood And Thunder: New York After Hurricane Sandy
Occupy Wall Street Crowdsources Sandy Relief

postimg
Nov 2012 06

by Blogbot

Every week we ask the ladies and gentlemen of the web to show us their finest ink in celebration of #TattooTuesday.

Our favorite submission from Twitter wins a free 3 month membership to SuicideGirls.com.

This week’s #TattooTuesday winner is @matty_beats with his Hipster Grim Reaper calf piece.

Enter this week’s competition by replying to this tweet with a pic of your fav tattoo and the #tattootuesday hashtag.

Good luck!

A few things to remember:

  • You have to be 18 to qualify.
  • The tattoo has to be yours…that means permanently etched on your body.
  • On Twitter we search for your entries by looking up the hashtag #TattooTuesday, so make sure you include it in your tweet!

Check out the Tattoo Tuesday winners of weeks past!

postimg
Nov 2012 06

by ChrisSick

“The ugly fallout from the American Dream has been coming down on us at a pretty consistent rate since Sitting Bull’s time — and the only real difference now, with Election Day ’72 only a few weeks away, is that we seem to be on the verge of ratifying the fallout and forgetting the Dream itself.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

By the time you read this, if I’ve done my job correctly — and there is little guarantee of that — the polls will already be opening on the East Coast. This endless election is almost over. I’ve only been writing about it, with varying degrees of regularity, since the end of August and I’m exhausted. I have new pity for the professionals who have been writing about this horror show we call an election since May of last year, when the evolutionary throwbacks who made up the Republican Primary contenders first stood tall on a stage in South Carolina, looking more like a well-dressed police line-up than candidates for leadership of this struggling superpower.

To attempt to summarize the strange odyssey of the last four years in under 2,000 words would be an impossible task, and more befitting some grizzled pro journalist ready to sellout from grind of print and into the bright lights of book-length reporting and television appearances than this humble column. That said, looking back I can think of at least three points worth making before we’ve collectively settled (in every sense of the word) who should be the next President:

Point 1: We had it right before we had it wrong, but mostly we are Wrong

In my first Tactical Animal column I wrote:

“Overall, it looked like the President would eek out a largely meaningless win without an electoral mandate and go on to see his second term as stymied by Republican opposition in Congress as the later half of his first has been.”

The conventional wisdom — ahead of the selection of Paul Ryan as Republican Veep — was that the election was going to come down to a narrow win for Obama that would leave him with a weaker electoral mandate and a less cooperative Congress than he began his first term with nearly four years ago. The conventional wisdom in the last days before the election is exactly the same.

The last two to three months since Romney secured the nomination and the race began in earnest have featured myriad ups and downs for both candidates. By the end of September Romney had racked up an impressive series of gaffes, a meandering and largely uninspiring convention, three or four campaign reboots, and a leaked video about how he loves America despite hating nearly half of all Americans. The conventional wisdom then was best surmised by a headline I, and others, ran with declaring that Mitt Romney would never be President.

Then, of course, came the first debate, in which an energetic and forceful Romney hammered a sleepytime-tea Obama. There was much liberal gnashing of teeth and movement of prediction markets. The media narrative of a shambling and useless Romney campaign that had no hope in hell of mounting a serious electoral challenge was discarded in favor of asking if Obama was even trying to win this election.

Just typing that is reminding me of the whiplash feeling I had closely watching the events unfold. But, a month after the Obama crater, we’re back to Intrade predicting a 65% chance for him to win, and Nate Silver going even better predicting an 85% chance for an Obama victory. We’re literally right back where we started, with Obama looking to win by less than two points, but for sure looking to win.

All of the gnashing of teeth, wringing of hands, and general calamitous reactions to every little news story, gaffe, comment, interview, debate, commercial, or event is, really, meaningless. Six months ago it looked like the President was going to beat Mitt Romney by a small margin and that Democrats would narrowly hold the Senate, while Republicans continued to hold the House. Today it looks exactly the same.

Everything between reaching that conclusions six months ago and that conclusion today was almost entirely in service of attracting viewers, clicks, and readers to SELL YOU SHIT. It was all just politics-as-entertainment, and taking part in it has lead me to conclude that I’d be much happier (and most likely more useful) writing about real, actual policy than about the tactics used to get you to buy into a political brand. I have no idea how full time political writers do this without massive amounts of heroin, but the truth is most likely they just have no souls.

Point 2: Whomever wins, cheated

Several times over the last week, I’ve been asked if the President is going to win reelection, mostly by close friends and passing acquaintances, in slightly panicked tones. Mostly my response has been, “How the hell would I know? What do I look like, Nate Silver?” Then I recall that I write this column and am generally acknowledged as Knowing Things about politics, so I gently but firmly reassure them that yes, the President is going to be reelected, and they can stop worrying or start, depending on the political affiliation.

Typically, I’m never asked how I know. Because people, frankly, aren’t much interested in minutia. They want to be comforted, generally, and they want to be Right. Luckily, there’s an entire industry that exists just to do that! It’s called Right Wing Media. So when you wonder how I know, with a large degree of certitude, that the President is going to get reelected, I can helpfully point you to a Fox News story already claiming that massive election fraud is underway.

Although the story in question is related to electronic voting machines in Ohio, the implication is clear. If Obama wins this election, it will be due to a subversion of democracy, not an exercise of it by a populace that largely disagrees with the Right and doesn’t find Mitt Romney to be an appealing candidate. It can’t be that the electorate simply prefers Obama to Romney, at best it implies that Obama somehow duped the country with his big smile, and at worst it means Chicago-style election theft.

To me, and I’m sure many of my readers, these accusations sound utterly ridiculous. But to someone who’s convinced that Nate Silver is trying to game the election for Democrats, that a Romney landslide is coming, and that Democrats only win elections through fraud. And following those links as opposed to taking my word for it might be instructive if you’re wondering how people come to believe all of that:

“I, personally, absolutely believe [that the ‘Romney will win!’ theme] is a de-legitimizing strategy…One can expect legal challenges if the vote is close. I think this push to portray Obama as having zero chance is laying the groundwork. At minimum it works to keep constituents of Republicans in Congress from tolerating any compromises in the event of an Obama re-election because they will have a reinforced sense of being robbed (which they have had about Mr. Kenya his whole presidency)….”
—Reader email quoted by James Fallows, The Atlantic, 11/3/2012

The important takeaway here is that any and all attempts to “de-legitimize” the President are not new, and a smaller margin of victory on the sixth will only give them greater life. In 2008 Obama won by a margin of 7.2% of votes cast and 192 votes in the Electoral College. That didn’t stop the Right’s press and candidates from spending the last four years treating Obama as an illegitimate President. There’s many reasons for such a strategy, but if nothing else, it was vindicated when several Editorial Boards endorsed Mitt Romney because of the idea that Democrats in Congress would be more likely to work with a Romney administration than Republicans have with Obama.

But there is a cost to this. The strategy of stymieing the President for political gain may very nearly have worked this election cycle, and certainly was useful to the 2010 midterm-Tea-Party-takeover. But convincing somewhere between a third and half of the country that the President is illegitimate, and that their political opponents are immoral little fucksaws who care more about accumulating power than serving the citizenry is dangerous for reasons I shouldn’t really have to elucidate.

The Left, of course, worked most of the year to create their own counter-narrative about voter suppression through Voter ID laws. But, speaking of things that should be clear without further commentary, legitimate concerns about voter suppression amplified as an electoral tactic to motivate the base are a far cry from convincing the segment of the populace most fanatical about owning guns that their voting rights are being taken from them by electoral fraud on a massive scale. Which isn’t to say that the Left won’t play the same game as the Right if — somehow, despite all odds — Romney wins the Presidency. It’s just to say that some concerns originate from a more “reality-based” community than others.

Either way, when the voting ends, we can easily find ourselves in a situation where the campaign will not:

“So no matter who wins, the endless partisan arguments are going to continue. And hell, the campaign might continue for a while, too: There is also a chance that the winner of the popular vote loses the Electoral College this year, again, and if Obama ends up the Electoral College winner I bet Romney and the GOP don’t concede quite as politely as the Democrats did in 2000. If Romney wins the Electoral College but loses the popular vote, he will be our next president. In the unlikely event of an Electoral College tie, Romney will again probably be our next president. But we might get to keep Biden.”
—Alex Pareene, Salon, 10/23/2012

Final point: Democracy is beautiful

“Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
—Winston Churchill, between his eighth and ninth “lunch brandy”

All of the above points aside, forgetting all of the partisan bickering, and media narrative, and politics-as-bloodsport bullshit that I’ve spent the last two months writing about, if you’re reading this on the morning of November 6th and watching the news to see how this all shakes out, you’re watching a tremendous and beautiful moment in the history of human affairs.

Democracy is messy, ugly, and, at times, brutal. Our American version of it has many failings, from lacking a viable alternative to the two-party duopoly, to being vulnerable to fraud and abuse of the system, to the simple fact that we treat it not as a serious exercise in self-determination, but largely as a sporting match. But all those failings aside, in the long view, it’s a pretty incredible thing that every few years the citizenry of this country comes together to decide who their leader should be.

I wish I had more time and space here to address some of the imperfections we have and ways to improve it. Perhaps they’ll be more columns in the future, and those issues can and will be addressed. But the most important thing to remember today is that voting is a right and privilege, and people did and continue to die for those same rights of self-determination. It is a glorious thing to be allowed to step into a voting both and will my opinions into political action that determines the course of my country.

I hope you exercise that right today, regardless of whom you’re voting for. Personally, I plan to vote early, and spend the rest of the day watching the news and laying down as much action as I can before all the betting windows close.

God bless America.

Related Posts
Tactical Animal: The Beginning Of The End
Tactical Animal: Obama vs Romney 0.4 – Round II
Tactical Animal: An Autopsy And A Stratagem
Tactical Animal: Democrats, You Can Dry Your Cryin’ Eyes Now
Tactical Animal: Round One
Tactical Animal: Let The Presidential Debates Begin
Tactical Animal: On Politicking Cont…
Tactical Animal: On Politicking
Tactical Animal: Regarding The Pain Of Being Right…Or More Reasons Mitt Romney Will Never Be Your President
Tactical Animal: Have You Got Yourself The Belly For It?
Tactical Animal: Sorry Folks, Election’s Over, Donkey Out Front Shoulda Told Ya
Tactical Animal: Politics In The Post-Truth Era
Tactical Animal: Now We’ve Got Ourselves A Race

postimg
Nov 2012 05

by SG’s Team Agony feat. Lexie

Let us answer life’s questions – because great advice is even better when it comes from SuicideGirls.


[Lexie in Speres]

Q: I can’t seem to make the leap from friend-zone to boyfriend-zone. Everyone I ask advise from says “just be yourself.” I be myself and it hasn’t gotten me anywhere. Is it that girls just don’t want me?

A: Oh, boy. The dreaded friend-zone! First off, sure being yourself can work, but only to a certain degree. It can be a terribly slippery slope to make that climb from just friends to something more. Get the wrong footing off the bat and you’re a goner for sure.

You have to remember one important fact, not everyone is going to be in to you the way you are into them. Some people you’re just destined to be friends with. If I could give you a few pointers on trying to stay out of that zone, they’d be this.

Don’t be too nice/accommodating/helpful. If there’s one thing that screams friendship to me it’s having someone all too eager to lend a hand. This applies mainly at the start of building something, once you’ve moved into almost boyfriend-zone, crank up the helpful/sweet notch. Just make sure it’s not too soon or she’ll rely on you for little things and see you as that guy friend that’s so helpful. Be a little aloof/hard to reach. The more you step back the more she’ll want you.

Treat her well but know when not to push it. Take her out to a nice dinner, movie, concert, but afterwards send her on her way. Even though you want to take her to your place and bend her over that futon, don’t push it. Remember the whole hard to reach aspect? Play it up.

Don’t be whiney or complain. Nothing says unattractive like a whiney person. Especially if you throw in desperate and needy, you’ll automatically get thrown into the no boyfriend-zone.

Have something in common with her – I know this seems like a given, but I think it’s really overlooked. I get it, you want that hot bartender at your local bar, but if you just want to talk about Skyrim and the new Batman movie when clearly her eyes are glazing over, it might not work. When someone talks to me about things I have no real interest in, I tend to get instantly turned off.

Hopefully some of these pointers will get you in the right direction. Be yourself, and apply these and it might get you somewhere.

Lexie

***

Got Problems? Let SuicideGirls’ team of Agony Aunts provide solutions. Email questions to: gotproblems@suicidegirls.com

postimg
Nov 2012 05

Lyxzen Suicide in This Is It

  • INTO: Perry’s boobs, asking questions, fruit, good company, walking anywhere and everywhere, cat snugs, the public library, taking photos at inappropriate times.
  • NOT INTO: Dishonesty, apathy, ignorance.
  • MAKES ME HAPPY: Serotonin, dopamine, ampersands, a fully-stocked kitchen, and sunshine.
  • MAKES ME SAD: Feeling lost.
  • 5 THINGS I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT: Lip balm, my pillow, peppermint tea, fruit, and words.
  • VICES: Miami.
  • I SPEND MOST OF MY FREE TIME: In a frantic state of confusion.

Get to know Lyxzen better over at SuicideGirls.com!


postimg
Nov 2012 04

by Laurie Penny a.k.a. @PennyRed


[Image of Staten Island Relief Workers by Jenna Pope a.k.a. @BatmanWI]

In the forty-eight hours since I landed in the United States, flying into storm-torn Brooklyn just days after a bunch of cars floated down Wall Street, nobody has mentioned the election to me once. You know, the presidential election, the one that’s happening in – what is it, three days? Right now, New Yorkers have more important things on their minds.

Access to food, fuel and electricity, for a start. People who do have these things are opening up their homes to friends and strangers who don’t. Across the city, volunteers are packing cars and heading to the disaster zones of Red Hook and the Rockaway, as well as to Staten Island, the borough worst hit when Hurricane Sandy battered through to flatten homes and devastate lives.

Like I said, nobody’s talking about the election. The island I always privately think of as Starship Manhattan spent days cut off from the rest of New York state, all of the lights out for days under 34th street, basements choked with brackish water, old people stranded in their homes. There’s an actual crisis taking place: houses have been destroyed, lives lost. The eighteen-month media circus that passes for representative politics in this country seems worlds away from the women in Staten Island weeping in front of the remains of their family homes on the nightly news.

With it being practically impossible for anyone without a car and a full tank of fuel to cross the city, I’ve just come back from volunteering down the street at the Williamsburg Church emergency blood drive. Right now New York is in a blood crisis. When the hospitals were evacuated during the storm, there was no time to collect the blood left in storage banks when the power went out, and by the time they got everyone to safety, that blood had rotted. Now they need new blood desperately.

When me and my friend Veronica Varlow went down to the Church to open our veins for the cause, I was told that my tangy British blood was not acceptable because I might be riddled with mad cow disease (this from people who haven’t even read my Twitter feed). They did, however, need volunteers to help shepherd those donors who were waiting patiently in line for up to three hours to hand over pints of superior all-American hemoglobin. So, I pinned on a badge and spent a few hours buzzing around filling out forms for people, cleaning tables and chairs, handing out snacks and tea and generally making myself useful. Even doing something so small to help the people helping to rebuild the city felt powerful.

Blood: when disasters happen, I’m always struck by the readiness with which people queue up to restock the banks of blood, platelets, and plasma. In the days after September 11, 2001, the donation centers had to start turning people away, and indeed, here at the Williamsburg Church we’re doing the same thing; with the donation line already thirty people deep, we’re running around with sign-up sheets where eager donors can leave their name and number in case we need more blood tomorrow.

There’s something so tender about that impulse. Sure, it says, we could raise money or go and help pump water out of basements in the Lower East Side, but wouldn’t it be simpler just to give you this part of my own body that was pumping in my heart five minutes ago? I’m pretty sure that if the New York blood centre were to put the call out tomorrow asking people to donate a pound of flesh cut from the chest closest to the heart because someone stranded on Staten Island needs it, there’d be plenty of volunteers, and not all of them would be kinky Shakespeare fetishists.

When there’s a crisis on, people want to help. Running around with the snack basket I was reminded of the floods of volunteers who gave their time, money and expertise to the Occupy camps last year. Practical anarchism. Everyone so keen to do whatever they could to help. Not just the kids from all over the country who kicked in their lives to sleep in the cold and be arrested multiple times in the name of a better future, but the shop owners who shipped out their spare produce. The trained nurses who turned up to administer basic medical care to those who had none. The parents who donated freshly-baked pies and soups to the kitchens. The librarians and academics who created an enormous library that, almost a year ago, I watched the NYPD rip apart and hurl into dumpster trucks, just because it was messing up their nice clean corporate dead-zone.

It’s no accident that the original Occupy Wall Street organizers were among the first to set up and co-ordinate volunteering efforts across New York. The group, which has drifted in recent months, immediately set about organizing teams and transportation to the worst-hit areas. The Zuccotti Park protest camp which was evicted last November and the enormous post-Sandy volunteer effort going on this week are different expressions of the same thing: overwhelming human response to crisis.

Crisis is what people in the United States have been living with for at least four years. Active emergency, turning people out of their homes and into the cold, destroying lives. It’s not crass to compare a climate disaster to a juddering crisis of capitalism, because the two are connected, not least because those most responsible are also those most likely to be snugly tucked away in gated compounds shrugging their shoulders when the storm hits. Like the crash, Hurricane Sandy hit the poorest hardest, smashing through Staten Island and Rockaway while the lights stayed on on the Upper East Side.

Nobody expected it to be quite this bad. Last year’s Hurricane Irene was bearable for most. But what I’m seeing here, at least in Brooklyn where I’ve been stuck for two days, is a city coming out of a six-month paralysis: finally, there’s a concrete task that people can put their hands to.

Sarah Jaffe’s brilliant piece at Jacobin draws attention to Rebecca Solnit’s work on the communities that arise in disaster zones:

“There’s a particular opportunity for mutual aid in the void in the aftermath of disaster, particularly in a neoliberal state whose safety net has been shredded, where the state simply isn’t there and people step up to take care of each other (not “themselves” as our libertarian friends would have it, and not the rich handing out charity as Mitt Romney wants you to believe, but communities in solidarity). The idea of mutual aid was at the foundation of Occupy as much as the much-debated horizontalism and the opposition to the banks.”

Volunteerism, of course, can be regressive as well as radical. I am reminded of those “broom armies” in London in the middle of the August riots last year; the sea of white, middle-class faces holding up brooms they’d brought to unfamiliar areas of the city, the sweet intention to mop up after a disaster tempered by the idea that the kids from deprived areas who came out to fight the police could just be swept away like so much filth. Like any desperate human impulse, volunteerism can easily be co-opted, twisted into something violent, calcifying.

Greece, where I spent part of my summer documenting the human effects of economic collapse, isn’t the only developed country where people have been living in crisis for so long they are starting to numb down and accept it. As Imara Jones pointed out in The Guardian today, 50 million Americans, the same number as those in the states hardest-hit by Hurricane Sandy, are living in acute poverty, and nobody in the presidential race has deigned to talk to or about them, despite the fact that they also have votes.

How do we respond to crisis when crisis has become status quo? That’s the question facing the entire developed world this year, and neither of the men jostling to lead the nominally free world appear to have any sort of answer. The Occupy Sandy operation is not an answer either, not even the shadow-play of an answer, but it is deeply radical and compassionate. That means someone’s probably going to try to shut it down reasonably soon, especially if it continues to provide food and assistance to the needy after the floodwaters have receded. A community response to immediate external crisis can be spun as good PR for an administration, but a community response to structural, internal crisis is just embarrassing. In every case though, the most dangerous thing you can do in any crisis – the absolute worst thing you can possibly do – is sit at home and accept it.

Back to blood. Funny thing about blood: until the 1970s, America used to buy it. Blood donation, as the United States quickly discovered, is not something you want to inject with a market incentive when you have to juggle things like infection risks and supply shortages. All that changed when Richard Titmus’ book The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy was published in 1971, explaining why the values of public service beat the private market every time when it comes to social care. The private market in American blood was regulated until it became something like the British voluntary model – people coming in to open their veins for a biscuit and a cup of coffee, just because somebody else needs their blood more than they do. Quite a lot of my job at Billyburg church today was handing out packets of Oreos to younguns waiting in line to do just that – I still have no damn idea who donated those biscuits – and telling the people massing at the door that no, we have all the blood we need for today, thank you, come back tomorrow.

“There is in the free gift of blood to unnamed strangers no contract of custom, no legal bond, no functional determinism, no situations of discriminatory power, domination, constraint or compulsion, no sense of shame or guilt,” wrote Titmus. “In not asking for or expecting any payment of money, these donors signified their belief in the willingness of other men to act altruistically in the future.” There is still enough blood beating in the cynical hearts of New Yorkers to pound out an immediate, compassionate response to crisis. Today that gives me hope.

***

Occupy Sandy Relief information here can be found at interoccupy.net/occupysandy/ – a website put together by the good folks at OWS, which contains all you need to know about what you can do to help. Click here for the NYC Blood Drive list of donation centers and opening times.

Laurie Penny is a journalist, feminist, and political activist from London. She is a regular writer for the New Statesman and the Guardian, and has also contributed to the Independent, Red Pepper, and the Evening Standard. She is the author of Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (2011) and Discordia (2012). She has presented Channel 4’s Dispatches and been on the panel of the BBC’s Any Questions. Her blog, “Penny Red“, was shortlisted for the Orwell prize in 2010.