Going to school in Bob Dylan's home town of Hibbing, Minnesota, by high school I developed a pretty ferocious potty mouth. My friends and I considered ourselves burnouts and therefore the "f-bomb" and other expletives needed to be sprinkled, mostly as adjectives, liberally into any conversation, including that of library books or the relative merits of Snickers vs. KitKats.Thus I developed a bad habit of needing to compensate--badly--whenever I was in a situation where using foul language was either forbidden or severely frowned upon (e.g., you should hear me talk after church). For instance, I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, "We Koreans Need an Al Sharpton," which was about the fact that no Koreans publicly decried Ice Cube's racist "Black Korea" rap song. However, after basing my essay on quotations from the song (I even went out to Tower Records to get the album, to make sure I was accurate), I was told that the Times didn't allow for profanity and therefore I had to excise all those parts. I can't remember the next essay I did, but it was full of #_)($## and )(*#$)_#$s.
In any event, after my stint at Adoption.com, for which us writers were told repeatedly that it was a family site and to treat it as such, most basically, no profanity. Thus in sort of a cheeky backlash, I thought of continuing my column as FertilityBitch. But that seemed a little too aggressive considering my green life philosophy. Then I thought perhaps FertilityBitchGoddess (see above for statue of Demeter, Greek fertility goddess) might have that right mix. GreenFertility seems a bit nerdy, if not (Ralph) Nadery. But I guess I'll stick with it, for now.
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