One night I dreamt of a masked man pursuing me down a dark and deserted street. I ran too fast to slow down, even when I saw a warning sign that said the street was about to end. And then the street dropped off like a cliff.

I fell screaming the name of Jesus, and my body righted itself. I landed on my feet. The dream was warning me about something, but I didn’t recognize anything awry in my life, so I put it out of my mind.

A few months later I landed an Internet job opportunity that appeared legitimate. Raising funds for life support systems in third world countries was the goal of the organization, and the headhunter was looking for facilitators to handle financial transactions between his organization and potential sponsors. We corresponded for a few months, and finally he emailed me to inform me a sponsor would be sending a check. He instructed me to cash the check at a certain bank, take out my fee for handling the transaction and send the rest on to him.

A check came in the mail in my name. I took it, unsigned, to a cash store instead of the bank they suggested after my daughter told me the cash store has an authenticity machine for checks. I waited a long time and began to feel that something wasn’t right. The next thing I know I saw a policeman come into the store and approach me. He asked me several questions about the check and my job position. He told me the check number had already been used and that the check was a fraud. I was arrested for uttering a forged document and spent an uncomfortable night in jail.

While I lay on the cold bench that night in jail, the Lord reminded me about the dream that I had months before. I was in the middle of the dream and trouble came to me, but I did not heed the warning signs and fell off the cliff. I had failed the test!

I was found not guilty, an incident that should never have happened. If the dream had come back to me when I received the check, I would have recognized it as a trap and torn the check up. Now I look at every sign when it comes to making decisions. I have learned not to overlook the small details as well as the big ones. Even if signs or dreams do not make sense to me, or I tell myself, "It was just a dream," they are God’s message to me that I am heading for trouble and had better heed the warning signs sent to guide me.

Catharine Joy Parks

Would you take a moment to sign a petition to save Internet radio and save my sanity in the process?

As you may or may not know, there is no jazz station where I live in Rhode Island. There is a jazz station in Worcester, Mass., to which I "listen live" online when I am trying to write, need to relax, reading, what have you. It keeps me calm, which means I’m a nicer person, I’m more polite to strangers, willing to break for animals, and my positive jazz vibes make the world a better place.

But…politicians have decided to cash in on Internet radio. They want to double the rates these stations pay and make it retroactive, costing almost 200 million dollars. This does not just affect my local jazz station, this affects every station, including any you might stream at work or home while trying to retain your own sanity. But with a 200-million-dollar bill, these stations cannot continue broadcasting, and we don’t get to listen to our music online. I don’t get to listen to jazz. Which means I don’t write, or relax, or break for animals!

So save the music and the sanity. Sign the petition, and get a nice banner for your site.

Jennifer Leblanc

Let me begin by saying, I cannot stress enough the importance of a liberal arts education. I would like to thank my professors for teaching me the importance of two crucial things: reading comprehension and backing up your statement, however small, with evidence from a legitimate source. With these elements, you will succeed in digesting the information that surrounds us 24/7, making an informed opinion, and, if you should be so lucky after college as to land a job blogging for free, being armed with cold, hard facts instead of spouting off whatever you please.

Now that I’ve expressed my gratitude, I will show you how to use these two elements. First, reading comprehension. Arguably the most important thing to learn to do after reading and arithmetic. Without this, you cannot understand anything from recipe instructions to boiling down political spin or grasping foreign policy. It’s a lovely skill — the anti-feminists simply must try it! I’m assuming they have not; otherwise, they would not have connected a pitiful rant from a man who cannot get laid to their opinion that feminism and equality have wronged women, and more importantly, men. 

Amanda at Pandagon wrote a great post about this, which is how I came upon all of this. The pitiful man, voodoojock, just seems to have had bad luck with "ladies" who, by his account, seem like selfish snobs, airheads, and drama queens. They also seem like women who just plain weren’t interested in him. "How dare they?" he asked. It must be the fault of feminism. He never mentions the F-word and cannot connect the lack of chemistry or romantic success to any particular woman’s political or social beliefs. Yet his piece has been hijacked by an anti-feminist blogger named KellyMac and labeled, "Ladies, Wonder Why You Can’t Get Men to ‘Talk To You?’" She read this and somehow came to the conclusion that there’s something wrong with women. Specifically, women who believe in, or have been brainwashed by, feminism and equality.

But KellyMac using this piece as an argument against feminism makes as much sense as using a birthday cake recipe to show that the war in Iraq has been a mistake. You don’t need a liberal arts education (or even a middle-school education) to see that one man not getting any in a bar does not equal feminism harming anyone.

Just as the fight to ban birth control and abortion is less about the health of women or children than about giving the government and the church control over the sex lives of others, anti-feminism is not about how or if either gender has been harmed by an ideology. When a person (or gender, in this case) cannot face his or her weaknesses or faults, he or she turns the blame on someone else. If a man goes home alone, it must be the woman’s fault. So, please, Ms. KellyMac — please tell me one more thing that females have done wrong in life (i.e., not wanting brief or long-term contact with voodoojock), therefore making the world a worse place for men to live. It’s been a whole day since I’ve read a finger-wagging article addressed to my gender. 

If only it stopped there.

Further down the webpage, you’ll find a post entitled, "Twenty One Indicators of Systemic Discrimination Against Men." (Wait, wait — let me get into self-flogging position.) There are too many sins to list. Besides the outlandishness of each item, I have a major bone to pick with the list creator. After some, and only some, of the items, the name of a source is listed. However, there is no link to any source. Writing "Forbes Magazine" or "Dept. of Health and Human Services" at the end does not satisfy me. For one thing, I don’t have time to go through the Forbes archive to find the single article from which you’ve extracted this information. Either the anti-feminist blogger doesn’t have time either, has chosen to be lazy, or is lying about the source. Second, while still assuming the fact came from Forbes, if a link can be provided, I would like to read it for myself. Oh darn — more reading comprehension for me. Good thing I reaped the rewards of feminism to be the first woman in my family to get a college education and can wade through big words in intimidating publications to see exactly how, and in which context, the information as used.

If I were the weaker sex I’d be tired by now, but I’m just getting started!

Next up — "Dept. of Health and Human Services?" Which state? Federal? What year?

The item about the war casualties of men vs. women is in reference to the Vietnam War, before women were allowed to fight alongside the men as they do in Iraq. If there were fewer women in that particular, or any, war zone, then there were fewer female casualties of that war. Maybe my third crucial element should be logic.

But all of this questioning is moot anyway, as I took the liberty of Googling one of the "sources" and I did find a connection to Forbes. Except, this was not used in a Forbes article or by a Forbes reporter or even approved by Forbes magazine. It was posted by a nobody on a Forbes message board in response to the absurd opinion piece, "Don’t Marry Career Women." The feminist (or just sane) reader who posted a message after this list went through it item by item, with links to legitimate sources, including the Department of Justice.

Eventually I found the origin of this list: the Christian Party and Fathers’ Manifesto. They do include links in their list — links to another page on their website. And on each page that you’re taken to, there is another link that takes you to another page on their website. For instance, one item reads, "…zero percent of American 12th grade girls were able to correctly answer basic math and physics questions…" Zero percent? As in, none? I clicked on four links, only to be led to four pages of their site repeating this fallacy. One can only assume that the Christian Party itself made this up. (If you’re going to fabricate a statistic, at least make it believable.)

So, boys and girls, today’s lesson has been: do not B.S. a feminist armed with an education.

Jennifer Leblanc