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Welcome to the world, Solomon -- Amanda & Eli's (big) boy

20 Questions Needed!

OK - help! - If you're a person who wouldn't mind becoming a famous writer before you're dead, give me one question you have about getting from here to there (there being famous, not dead). Big issue or small. I'm pretty sure you can post anonymously here, so please don't be shy.



(brainstorm answers provided; longer answers pending consultation with actual famous writers . . .)

Bringing Home 2nd Place at the Tigard Invitational Championship . . .

Oregon Woman Convicted of Acting Insufficiently Traumatized

Posted by Ampersand | December 4th, 2005

An Oregon woman who says she was gang-raped by three men, has been convicted of filing false rape charges, because she failed to act "traumatized" enough. From the Oregonian:

After a day-and-a-half trial, Municipal Judge Peter A. Ackerman on Friday convicted the woman of filing a false police report, a class-C misdemeanor. Ackerman explained his decision, saying there were many inconsistencies in the stories of the four, but that he found the young men to be more credible. He also said he relied on the testimony of a Beaverton police detective and the woman's friends who said she did not act traumatized in the days following the incident.
That's appalling.

The Judge seems to believe that there is a typical way in which all rape victims act, and that if a woman fails to act that way, she must be lying. But that's nonsense. There is no "rape victim script" that every rape victim follows. Essentially, this woman has been convicted of a crime for failing match the judge's stereotype of what "legitimate" female victims act like.

Judge Ackerman has sent a message to rape victims in Oregon: If the judge doesn't think you're weepy enough, emotive enough, hysterical enough, whatever enough, then he might just convict you of a crime. There's every reason to think an asinine ruling like this will deter rape victims from reporting rape to the police.

Well, my goodness

My computer just ate my entire inbox for lunch, 2000 unanswered emails and all. When I woke up this morning and said, "Dear God, please help me with all the stuff I have to deal with," this isn't quite what I had in mind. But it certainly clears the calendar. Yikes.

Baltimore, Virginia

I dreamed I got sentenced to four years in a state penitentiary in Baltimore, which was in Virginia. The reason for my incarceration was unclear, but it had something to do with a fortune cookie theft for which Bette Davis was actually to blame. I wondered why I'd been sent all the way to Virginia, which contained Baltimore, and I decided that the cookie factory must have been there. First thing first and I got in trouble for bringing a dildo to the women's prison. Sigh. But it was a minimum security place, so minimum that I got day passes to hang out in Baltimore quite often. I saw my friend China on the Avenue, and it so happened that she'd just been released from the very same prison. She lent me her prison waitress uniform so I could get a job inside. This was excellent, as I'd been worrying about how I was going to pay for Maia's college if I was, in fact, in prison. The dildo incident didn't bode well for good-behavior early-release. But then I discovered that my new waitressing job was only going to earn me prison wages -- a dollar an hour. A dollar an hour doesn't add up very fast even if you don't have to pay rent. Maia came to visit me and asked the warden if I would now be considered a Virginia resident, thus entitling her to in-state tuition at Virginia schools. The warden thought yes. After Maia left and my day passes ran out, I sat in my cell, bored out of my mind. I thought, But this was my dream--to have cloistered alone-time away from all the responsibilities and daily tasks of the outside world. Why am I not writing my book? I have all the time in the world. But I wrote no book. I thought about fortune cookies a lot, and Bette Davis, and where I was going to get the money to pay for Maia's college, and how it was starting to get cold in Baltimore, Virginia.