Anytime a man tells you to shut up, speak louder.
From the drafts pile, relevant since the dawn of time. Every young woman should be taught this first above all other socialization.
some things are universal
Drafted when I lived in Singapore, so sometime in 2009/10.
Children act like children, though the children in Singapore are generally better-behaved than children elsewhere (and Asian babies are so cute!).
Saw an ad for a local children’s daycare. All these cute little Singaporean kids and the one token white girl.
Gyms still pressure-sell and everyone gets suckered in, then regrets it—as evidenced by some discussion forums I’ve looked at.
Cabbies add unexplained charges to the meter, pretend to not understand you or just act lost.
Women, no matter naturally tiny they are, still want to lose weight. As evidenced by all the weight-loss products and advertisements here. Or maybe all this stuff really works and that’s why they’re all so skinny. Or maybe not.
Women with straight hair want curls, women with curly hair wish for straight. Take this one to the bank.
Asians flock to stores to buy branded goods, the more expensive the better. Westerners flock to markets looking for knock-offs, haggling for the best bargain.
Nobody likes illegal immigrants working in their country. And yes, the browner-skinned people are always the “immigrants.”
Technology is imperfect around the world.
Hotel maids move my stuff around too much for my liking no matter where I am.
Regardless of where I am in the world, when I travel alone, I invariably end up in the next room to a fighting couple. She always starts crying. Then he either leaves or starts hitting her. Eventually, it stops. In case you’re thinking this leads to hot make up sex, it doesn’t. Sex never follows these hotel-room abuses. Fortunately. I’m not sure I’d want to hear the sex that follows abuse.
non-universal opinions
I’m still not used to the metric system. It’s utterly meaningless. What is 100g of something? An ounce? A pint? A teaspoon? It’s just a number divisible by 10. Okay, so I’m very Imperial. I’ve been told Australia successfully switched to metric in recent history and I don’t believe anyone died. I still like Imperial. It means something. It was created to measure real-life scenarios. It’s not sterile.
The only metric measurement I know is the weight of my checked bag. I can guess it to within a kilo, though I still can’t guess its weight in pounds. My goal was 10-12kg, but it regularly clocked in at 12-15kg. No getting around it no matter how I tried to skim the weight down. Even now in the US, I’ll check my bag’s weight and ask them to change the scale to kilos for me. But I can’t weigh anything else in kilos, if it’s not my bag, then I have no idea how much it is in kilos (and really, not a very clear idea in pounds either).
I still love US greenbacks. They feel like money. They smell like money. They sound like money. I think we have the sexiest currency in the world, but maybe it’s just what I’m used to.
Australia and Singapore and other countries have plastic money. It’s slick but not papery. No smell. Singapore’s currency is graduated by size, each denomination is radically different in color, it has a clear plastic window on the bills (which is cool) and a Braille system so the blind can easily handle it. It’s as progressive as currency can get. But it’s not sexy.
dec 17 — accessing justice
Today is the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. I feel it hardly needs introduction anymore, thanks to social media and a lot of sex workers starting to have an interest in activism, or at least interest on social media.
This year the December 17 memorial site has short bios for some of the victims. It’s about time. Credit to whomever implemented the idea. Humanizing and properly memorializing the victims is so very important.
Accessing justice is very difficult for sex workers living and working under US laws.
Violence against sex workers is legally-sanctioned here in the US. Unless you get really lucky and find someone who is willing to help you and has the power to do so (and that someone likely won’t come from a sex work org), you’re going to end up dead. I’m not trying to derail this day to make it about Jill and I because we’re alive and I can’t complain about that. But it was perfectly clear to us through the last six months that the system was willing to let us be killed rather than take minimal measures to protect us. It wasn’t just that we were fighting an enemy entrenched with the legal system (Pig), a large part of it was that we were women, and sex workers.
How much harder is it for women who know they’re in danger but don’t have any help at all? The news is filled with women killed by former partners or men they’ve rejected but never had a relationship with. Some of those women have been sex workers. Legal protections rarely extend to sex workers. Their surviving loved ones have almost no hope of justice. Someone tell me I’m wrong and that most of the men who killed sex workers in the US this year were apprehended. I’d be thrilled to know that and make a correction.
I’m not down on sex work orgs — they do vital outreach and education in the US. The one thing they really have no ability to offer is legal protection or access justice. Legal referrals are difficult to get because there are very few people in the system who are okay with helping sex workers. Very few. (The one sex work org referral I got ended up being a vice officer who was skeptical that Pig had broken any laws — yeah, that’s a big help.) It’s far easier to find a doctor willing to treat sex workers because we’re seen as disease vectors who need monitoring. Far harder for someone in the legal system to see us as anything but ready-made criminals.
US sex work orgs are severely hampered by the laws, obviously, which makes their ability to offer protection or justice slim. Changing the laws is the answer. Always. That hasn’t changed and will never change.
The best protection any victim, or potential victim, could have is to be viewed as a citizen of equal worth to anyone else. That their life is worth defending, their death worth preventing. Not regulating them to criminal, non-human status is a huge start in getting to that place.
Jill had the idea of a lawsuit brought by victims’ families holding the people who make these laws responsible. It’s a unique idea, and worth exploring. (You can hear Jill and I discuss this, and a few other topics, on a brief radio show.)
In the same vein, the Vancouver police department issued a video statement of how sex workers are to be treated. Basically, like humans and citizens with rights. Revolutionary.
pig in the poke
Massive update…Pig’s been arrested!! You can catch Jill and me gloating on our XXBN show. If you don’t have time to listen, here’s the recap.
Pig has been sending goons to harass friends for our location, up until last week. On Sunday, Jill got the news that Pig had been arrested Thursday 2/26 on felony charges. It seems the Jordan family was able to get an arrest warrant against him on the misappropriation of the funds they gave him to disburse to their children’s trust. By “misappropriation” I mean that Pig simply used the money as his own. No doubt he spent some of those funds last spring to have Jill beaten and to pass his threatening and disjointed messages to me. Whatever he did with the funds, it seems the Jordan family has proof the funds are gone.
I’m hoping that Pig finally loses his law license. One would think; but then again, he seems to have the State Bar well in his rapidly-diminishing pocket. He paid his $250,000 bail and was re-arrested on the same day: 3/2, which is just hilarious to me. If you’d like to sympathize with Pig, his Harris County inmate number is SPN02781148. Here is a PDF summary of his arrest and bond.
Pig had a really bad week last week. His divorce was finalized just a couple days before his arrest. I don’t know the details but I hope she got a lot. She did get a permanent restraining order against him. Based on the questions “reporter” Craig Malisow was asking about Jill, it seems that Pig hired someone to beat his ex-wife (and Malisow idiotically thought Jill did it because Pig said so). Sounds like Pig’s tactic for every woman who doesn’t do what he says. Now perhaps people will believe that he did what we claim he did?
Sunday evening Jill and I went out for a celebratory glass of champagne. (I had two glasses, Jill only had one because of the threat of an alcohol-induced stroke — one of Pig’s many gifts to us.) We watched the sun go down over the clear ocean on a breezy cliff overlooking the surf washing over the rocks and beach below. Pig was spending the exact same moment in a smelly concrete box, probably rooming with someone named Bubba Lee.
We have waited over 2.5yrs and gone through hell for this moment. It was very, very good. The memory is one I will savor for the rest of my life. Jill said she is glad that she has lived long enough to see it happen.
This isn’t the endgame but it is certainly the start of the burning of his little kingdom. We like to think we helped it along. 🙂
coda
In my excitement, a few things I forgot to add.
The Jordan family apparently is concerned about violence from Pig. In one of the documents we found, there was a notation about this very issue. The family may have been granted a restraining order. Would have to look that up again. If anyone cares to look, just do a Criminal Search at the Harris County Court Clerk’s website.
I tried to get a copy of his mugshot but because I’m not a member of the media, I could not. If you are a member of the media and would like to get it, please contact me. The process is simple and done via email.
All this really gives me faith in the power of positive thinking. Back in July 2012, sitting in our lawyer J’s office, signing the representation agreement, Jill and I both in pain from our injuries (which we didn’t know the extent of at that time), I said that I wanted Pig’s pilot’s license, his law license, his marriage and his money. I was specific that I wanted him to lose those things, but not specific in how (I hoped to be the catalyst for these losses but again, it was an open-ended desire). I never lost sight of that goal, no matter what, even when it seemed impossible. I don’t know what he has in his bank account but he must be feeling a bit of a pinch, at the very least. And he still has his law license but considering that his felony arrest was for crimes committed while he was acting as an attorney…he might not have it for much longer.
updates
10/21/15 — We finally got some information on what Pig has done to the Godwin family and it’s Pig being Pig. Basically, he created a trust for a young man who was in an accident. The trust was funded by insurance settlement money. The young man needs lifelong medical care for his injuries. Guess who wiped out the account, and requested even more money to cover his expenses? This began on October 2012. So, if you’re an escort who saw Pig after that date, chances are he paid you by stealing from a fund to take care of a permanently injured person. It makes me wonder just where the money he paid me was coming from. (I also assume the Godwin trust funded the crew in January 2013 who came to Dallas expressly to beat and kill Jill.)
11/13/15 — Pig also stole a dead man’s money. Nice. Classy. (Document to be uploaded when I can, but this info is available in Harris County.) We found this out due to the lien against Pig’s house, an effort to force repayment of the funds he stole, all of which I find very amusing.
Jill and I have finally been able to get a restraining order against Pig, after one of his goons admitted to planning on killing Jill via email. Some of these emails are public, some are not. It is nice, after three years, to finally get some legal support. How loud do we have to scream to be heard? Pig is not a good person, he is not honorable, he is not anything he purports to be. He is a thief and wannabe-murderer. But still a practicing lawyer in Texas. Texas is a fucked-up state.
11/29/15 — One of Pig’s goons mentioned on the restraining order went ahead and broke it by harassing Jill’s family. He was arrested, then released on a $25 bail. It was reasoned that since he was a former police officer turned PI, he just got carried away “defending” his client. Pigs helping Pigs.
life, death, and trust
This is the far more spectacular story I once promised to tell.
I began this history in mid-May, when Jill received her terminal diagnosis. Jill has read this fully and contributed. To the disappointment of many, she hasn’t yet dropped dead. But we have both decided it is time to make public the true story of why and how she is dying. This story started as something else. Not a eulogy, not a memorial, a written memento mori of incidents and echoes.
If there is purpose in all of this, I leave it to someone else to find.
This is what Jill wants to be said, what I want to say, for now, so that it is said.
The history begins and ends with Jill.
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