sweet water journal

stuff i'm like totally into right now

2010-06-16T10:41:00.000-07:00

Well, okay. It's been two weeks since I announced that I would deliver a blog post every week of this summer, meaning I've already broken my promise. Lame. I went to Portland for a week and I thought I'd post there, but I was too busy, like, hanging out in Portland, getting tattoos, piercing various parts of my face, and resuscitating my early 90s wardrobe...well, no. Fine. I didn't do any of those things. I did, however, go to Portland, where I did Portland-y things like run and hike in Forest Park, go to Powell's bookstore about a zillion times (that place is the MOTHERSHIP), ride lots of public transportation, eat at a different microbrewery every night, and in general soak up the joy of being in a city set in a location of magnificent natural beauty and run by liberals. We never would have been able to afford such a vacation were it solely on our own dime, but Eric had a conference for epidemiologist types going on there, and as soon as I heard that such a conference was occurring, in Portland, in June, I said, bring ME. And it coincided with our ninth anniversary, so that was nice.

So. Anyway. I'm going to make this blog entry into a list of stuff I like and am all into right now. That's all. Because that sounds fun to me. And I warn you that at least half of this list will probably be books. Because I am momentarily free of the professional obligation to read nothing but ethnography and theory and have been rampantly indulging my true passion, which loyal readers know is YA fantasy. And people, I have had some serious finds. Let us begin.

Stuff I'm Like Totally Into Right Now:

1. Sunshine by Robin McKinley. Here's what blows. That atrociously-written, anti-feminist, simultaneously sexually conservative and sexually perverse load of Twilight garbage is floating around out there making crockshits of money while a mindblowingly good vampire book like this one flies completely under the radar. And you know, I hate to make this all about Empowerment and Agency in Female Leads and other such preachy stuff from a Feminist Concerned about the Self-Esteem of Young Girls, but if you are sick of fantasy universes that are all about manly conflicts between males in which girls are helpful sidekicks at best and helpless pawns/victims at worst, please, oh please, read this. Sunshine (and yes, her name really is Sunshine—sort of) is not a Buffy-style heroine in the sense that she does a lot of warrior-type stuff; it's more about her learning to rely on other, more subtle gifts while at the same time having to call on tremendous courage and problem-solving in the face of extreme duress and, you know, evil vampires. And there is nothing cheesy or at all romantic about those vampires, although there is some weirdly sexy and seriously intense chemistry between Sunshine and the main vampire character, who does not look like Angel, Spike, any of the vampires from True Blood, Brad Pitt, Edward “Glitter Boy” Cullen, or any Sexy Pop Culture Vamps of recent history. In fact, his skin is described as “mushroom gray.” HOT.

And for your information, there is no such thing as “vegetarian” vampires. Vampires suck your blood. Deal with it.

Also? Get this. Sunshine is a young, unmarried female character in a young adult fantasy novel...and she has SEX. And? And? She doesn't feel guilty about it, receive horrific cosmic punishment for it, die horribly as a result of it, or embody a man-eating whore archetype! It's amazing! She wants it, she has it, it is regarded, in this fictional universe, as, well, normal! Wow! Try it, authors! You'll be amazed how much there is left to write about when you totally leave aside the need to punish female characters for having sex!

2. The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan. This is a novel that takes place seven generations after the zombie apocalypse. Yes, you read correctly. The word “zombie” is not used once. It is intensely creepy. It is extremely well-written. It has an amazing girl protagonist. It really forces you to think about how horrible it would be people you loved became the undead, and don't you think that sounds like a valuable moral exercise? I don't know, folks. I really didn't care one way or another about zombies, but then, I had never seen the whole zombie trope, if you will, used this effectively. And in a spare, understated way, there is a lot in there about cultural isolation and control over historical narratives and how the passing of generations transforms history into myth. It's good stuff. There's a sequel I need to read next.

3. Graceling by Kristin Cashore. This book is stunning. Here is the author's website. Read it.

And yet again: Unmarried female protagonist has sex and it is just fine! Also professes a strong desire to remain unmarried, as marriage in this society would greatly circumscribe her freedom! Her decisions are not portrayed as tragic or neurotic! Unbelievable, I say! (There are many, many other things to recommend this novel as well. Again, read it. Just trust me.)

I tell you, I've probably been on about this before, but it's hilarious to me that the fundy Christian crowd got its panties in such a bunch about Harry Potter when the young adult section is in fact packed with any number of books that are way, way, WAY more subversive and just fly conveniently under that particular radar. (That's not a diss on old Harry, by the way. I do still love Harry Potter, but as fantasy novels/series go, others are closer to my heart these days.)

4. Emily the Strange. I know, I know, Emily started out as skateboarder insignia or something and now it's a whole franchise where you can buy everything from hoodies to home décor to express Goth attitude by means of the image of a scowling black-haired girl in a black dress, with cats. Which should probably make me cynical. But the Emily novels, The Lost Days (in which Emily has amnesia) and Stranger and Stranger (in which Emily inadvertently duplicates herself and creates an evil twin) are incredibly clever and hard to put down. Also, I was a scowling dark-haired girl who wore lots of black and loved cats. I was not, alas, a genius mad scientist, unlike Emily, who is. But let's just say we have some style simpatico. Therefore I construct my identity in this consumerist society by doing things like sticking Emily the Strange stickers on my planner.

5. The ocean. We spent one night on the coast last week, in the slightly rinky-dink tourist-y coastal town of Seaside. It was cold and rained for part of the time. It was overcast. The town was nothing special. But we had an inn with an oceanfront view, and the sand was firm enough to go running by the ocean, and it was marvelous. I feel that, given decently comfortable weather, I would be pretty happy sitting on a beach and just watching and listening to the ocean all day. How can anyone help but to feel connected to the ocean, regardless of how landlocked your home may be? We're all descended from marine ancestors. We are residents of planet Earth, a planet of water. I can barely stand to think about what's happening in the Gulf.

6. Getting stronger arms. No, not firearms, silly. I didn't up and join the Tea Party or anything. I'm speaking of my own monkey appendages. When I was a teenager, I was self-conscious because my upper arms were—get this—literally smaller in circumference than my forearms. I have become stronger over the years, and lifted weights or done a few lame push-ups off and on, and when I was doing a lot of vinyasa yoga I was fairly ripped, but during the school year, while I maintained my running schedule, I slacked on the upper body stuff. And I felt it, too. My backpack tired out my shoulders; my upper body ached midway through long runs. Once the summer started I bought myself some heavier dumbbells and got serious. This past week in Portland I carried a messenger bag around all day every day and even ended up running with it at one point, and not once did I feel tired of carrying it. This may seem like nothing to many of you, but I always get muscle pains in my shoulders if I carry bags or purses for too long. It's great to be stronger. Also, though I don't much like to think about it, good for osteoporosis prevention. I have every freaking risk factor in the book for that stupid disease, so it's best I start applying myself now.

7. Arugula pesto. I really should just submit this post to the Stuff White People Like blog already and have done with it. I've already mentioned Portland, a massive bookstore that is still independent, hanging out by bodies of water, microbreweries, running, a fictional character designed specifically for marketing to ironic hipsters, yoga, environmental concern, and the fact that I am a graduate student. All of these things are integral to my racial identity.

Yes, I love arugula pesto. I pick the arugula from my own garden. I eat it with homemade foccacia or whole wheat pasta that I purchased at the natural foods co-op. I freeze it for future use. However, my olive oil is the generic Kroger brand (still extra virgin, of course). Does this make me just slightly less white? Or did my need to assure you that my olive oil is generic and yet extra virgin in fact make me doubly white?

(I have very mixed feelings about that whole blog/book/concept. I suppose that could be a post at some point.)

OK, enough for now. I must put on some outdoor performance clothing, gather some fresh greens for my lunch, which I will eat alongside some leftover hummus. Then I'll take in my recycling (all the while grumbling how my liberal town should have curbside recycling), and perhaps make a stop at the aforementioned natural foods co-op on the way home, as well as perhaps picking up a six-pack of beer which I will justify by telling myself that at least it's a local microbrew, which I will share with my husband, who has two last names. And I hope that you all feel bad for not going outside.

I'm back.

2010-06-02T09:01:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I was on the phone with my friend Tess, who is married to Animal of Cranial Flatulence. As we were getting ready to hang up, Tess called to Scott/Animal, “Anything you want to tell Steph?”

“Update your fucking blog,” I heard him holler.

I didn't at the time, because I was in the middle of a Hell Semester. Or it would have been a Hell Semester, were it not for the fact that I quite enjoyed most of it. I tell you, people, whatever its flaws, academia is the place for me, and I was probably crazy to ever think otherwise. I had about four years of feeling like absolute crap about my professional capabilities because I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do, where I could realistically seek employment, what to say when people asked me what my job was. Which you know, if you were reading this blog during any of that time. Then I entered a PhD program, started teaching again, started working on research, and suddenly, presto-change-o, I'm a person with professional skills that garner respect. And an insane schedule. Nothing confers self-esteem in this culture like the badge of professional busyness. That, of course, is shallow, but I don't mean to trivialize my sense that I'm at last on a career path that fits me.

I get really excited about the work that I do. I often enjoy teaching. (Anyone who says they always love teaching is probably lying. College teaching involves humiliation, difficult personal interactions, paperwork, and freshman males. I hate much of it, but the rewards are still remarkably tangible.) I loooove my research. I wish I could write more about these things, but I still have the same confidentiality concerns I had a year ago. If I could write a completely honest blog about teaching, it would be the most side-rippingly fucking hilarious thing ever. I could tell you about the time...and the time...and the guy who...and the other guy who...and that paper with the song lyrics...alas. It would really cathartic and fun, but I'm not going to make that mistake.

It's kind of strange to be sitting here at my kitchen table, writing this. Part of why I wasn't really able to keep up the blog during the school year was that I was writing so much already, in every working moment in which I wasn't teaching, planning my teaching, sitting in class, or reading. So in my spare time, insofar as I had any, I just wanted to be with Eric, cook good food, see friends, run, and veg out in front of Netflix. Consequently it's been a long time since I've written anything other than e-mails that doesn't contain words like “ontology” and “discourse.”

It's also been a long time since I've taken out the trash. I'm pretty sure it's my turn to do it. I can smell it right now.

As a partner in housekeeping, I really dropped the ball this year. Eric picked up a lot of my slack, but he also likes to relax after work, so things have built up somewhat. Every time that we have noticed that something is covered in disgusting filth in a way not befitting mature adults, I have defaulted to “once this semester's over, I'll take care of that.” And now Eric is hitting a hell stride at work, so I have resolved to undertake some of these projects on my own. I have been free for over a week now, and have accomplished these domestic tasks:

1. Went through my clothes and stuffed everything I no longer wear into a bag to go to the Goodwill.

2. Rinsed out approximately 200 empty, dirty cat food cans on the basement floor for recycling. Received several really nasty cuts on my right hand in the process.

3. Swept under the upstairs futon/couch. Wow.

Uh...hmm. I really thought I'd done more than that.

OK, here's what I still have to do:

1. Take the clothes to the Goodwill

2. Take the cat food cans to the recycling center

3. Take a lot of other things to the recycling center—like, oh, I don't know, maybe an entire closet's worth of things

4. Go through a shitload of old bills and papers that I currently can't get to because of the recycling

5. Organize the books and papers in my home office, after removing the veil of cat hair covering them

6. Remove veil of cat hair from entire house

7. Paint the bathroom which has remained unpainted since it was remodeled over a year ago

8. Remove forest of weeds and small trees from between the neighbor's deck and ours

9. Figure out what's going on with the upstairs toilet

10. Clean the basement

In addition to these things, I plan to go to Portland for a week, do a weekend workshop on oral history, run a half-marathon, do some archival research for my dissertation, attend a family wedding, hang out a bunch with friends, and read every piece of quality young adult fantasy fiction I can get my hands on. Also, update this blog at least once a week. That's a promise.

I know there are probably only about four or five people reading, but those of you who kept me in your feeds and blogrolls despite my bailing on you for over seven months, and then gently prodded me to take things up again over the summer, thank you, thank you, thank you. It really does mean a lot to me to know I still have loyal readers. And friends. I missed you all.

Stay tuned for news of my cats, my shin splints, and my lousy housekeeping. It's good to be back.

i miss the blog.

2009-10-25T07:50:00.000-07:00

I'm still alive. Really. I just have no idea when to post anymore.

I have thought vaguely that I should write a graceful end-it post and shut down this blog, because realistically, I don't have time to keep it up. I haven't even had time to investigate the privacy options on Blogger. But the thought of closing up shop makes me so sad, so I do nothing, and this blog just languishes. I miss it.

I love graduate school. It's incredibly consuming, as I knew it would be, but somehow that still managed to take me by surprise, a little bit. Still, there are definitely things I miss about the old life, like having time to read (I read constantly, but now it's all feminist and critical theory; no fiction for me for a while), having time to blog, and most of all, having unlimited friend time. I really miss that. And being able to e-mail Suze about five times a day. And being able to form a sentence that doesn't contain words like "agency" and "normative."

But honestly? There's a lot more that I don't miss. Like being home all day, every day, having to create the entire structure for my day by myself, the constant career insecurity (not that this doesn't flourish in grad school, but I'm too busy right now to entertain it much), the lack of explicit purpose, never having anywhere to go that requires a decent outfit. And I love what I'm studying. I just do.

There are some areas in which I am immovable, though. We still cook good dinners. I still veg in front of Netflix with knitting, though for less time. I still run. I figure if the schedule gets really tight, I'll just run faster.

I don't know. I can't close down the blog, at least not right now. I know only about five of you are reading at this point, but that's okay. I am, by the way, mostly keeping up with your blogs, generally in post-teaching Friday-afternoon binges, which make me happy. Thanks for hanging in there with me.

grad school...boots...wasp

2009-09-11T14:38:00.001-07:00

Oh, dear readers. I’m sure the only ones of you still reading are the ones who subscribe to the feed. I’m sorry to be such a rotten blogger.

Suze told me that I don’t need to write big old long posts all the time and can just be short and sweet if I want. I fear getting stuck in the list format, but the time! Oh, the time! It just doesn’t exist anymore. If I am not in class, I’m reading, and if I’m not reading, I’m answering e-mails from students who may or may not have swine flu, and if I’m not answering e-mails, I’m trying to write book summaries, and if I’m not trying to write book summaries, I’m reading. And reading. And reading. Because, as I should have remembered about grad school in the humanities, they make you read a bloody library’s worth every week or so.

In spite of all that, I’m having a love affair with being back in school. I am especially having a love affair with my women/gender/sexuality studies class. (I’m planning to get a certification in that.) I forgot how much I love sitting in a room with smart and committed people talking about theory. I forgot how much I love being on a university campus.

I forgot how hard teaching kicks your ass.

I also forgot that graduate school requires a range of shoes. Or, perhaps I just interpret it that way. Perhaps I am a bit more hung up on shoes than I thought. I own very little ground between the sweaty running shoe area and the knee-high leather boot area. The sweaty running shoe area seems a little gross for a shared office, and the knee-high leather boot area, while conferring some hookey imagined mojo-type authority in the classroom (I am short and slightly built, ergo I compensate with footwear), is also, when paired with the occasional skirt, making me a little too popular with the bus driver. But I can never find basic flats that are, you know, me. I will look at a pair of flats on another women and think, those are lovely, I could wear those, and then I will try something like it on in the shoe store, and feel like an alien. I have to branch out before I turn into Boot Girl. The problem, of course, is that I am Boot Girl. I am not Loafer girl, or Tasteful Grown-up Mary Janes Girl. I have been Boot Girl since the Doc Marten days of the ‘90s. Boot Girl may have been in storage for the past few schleppy years, but Boot Girl lives. Also, Boot Girl has spent all her money on textbooks and a new laptop and has no remaining funds for new shoes unless she pawns her fawn-coloring leather riding boots, and you will pry those from Boot Girl’s cold, dead feet.

I’m not all that materialistic, really. I have this boot thing. That’s all. My clothes are from Goodwill. I even have some boots from Goodwill, but they make my toes go numb.

My gender studies course could probably have a heyday with that boot paragraph, but I’ll leave for the private recesses of SWJ. Which brings me to the privacy issue. As much as I respect the opinions of those who told me not to go private, I’ve also received some wise counsel from fellow academics who have encouraged me in that direction, and right now I think my plan is to just use Blogger’s privacy measures to limit readership of SWJ to those who have contacted me about it. But I haven’t figured out how that works yet, so for the time being, I’m doing jack, because I don’t have the energy to figure it out at the moment, and if I do manage to muster up some energy, I should probably spend it on reading this interminable book that I would so totally rant about if this blog were already private.

A wasp attacked me on Sunday; that’s my other big news. I was out at our compost bin, which is surround by a slight jungle, due to the fact that neither of us has bother about the pruning shears for a while, and suddenly there was a wasp on my hand. I thought it may have stung me, because it burned a bit, but as it turned out, that was just the warm-up, because after that it landed on my head and stayed up there, stinging me, while I whimpered like a frightened puppy. (I’m sorry. Don’t think about frightened puppies. It’s too upsetting.) Eric heard me through an open window upstairs and actually thought I was a dog. I crouched on the ground, trying not to move and freaking the hell out, until finally I realized that it was stinging the shit out of me anyway and there was nothing to be gained from letting it roost on my head indefinitely. I slapped at my head, trying to shoo it away, whereupon it stung me on the cheek.

Wasp stings on the cheek look sort of like cystic acne. I told Eric that it sucked that now everyone would think I just had a huge zit. He asked me why on earth it made any difference. I said that a zit just means you have bad skin, whereas a wasp sting means you have a story. He was not overly convinced. We both remained terrified of the compost.

That’s all for now, folks.

brief

2009-08-21T15:08:00.001-07:00

This'll be a short one, folks. I'm just checking in. In full-bore beginning-of-the semester mode, I am too frantic to come up with a real blog post, and having taught four back-to-back sections this morning and afternoon, too brain-dead. So some quick business:

1. I have not decided what to do about the blog privacy issue yet. Stay tuned. I'll figure it out. Thanks to everyone who has e-mailed me letting me know that you want to keep reading; I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. I'm sorry I haven't been able to respond to all of you personally. It's been that kind of a month. But all of your e-mails made me happy.

2. These are my kitties.

3. That's all, really. I wanted to have a number 3, but I don't have a number 3.

back from vacation, and some blog changes

2009-08-11T12:45:00.000-07:00

Hey, sorry for the long absence. I never seem to remember to mention when I’m going on vacation. We spent about ten days in Iowa and Wisconsin, and it was lovely, in spite of us both getting colds and schnotting up the homes of our gracious hosts. I washed my hands about a million times, but I still managed to inflict my illness on Suze’s kids, because really, what am I supposed to do, never pick up the baby? (Suze wrote about our visit here, with, as usual, more photographic evidence than I ever provide.)

Also, I learned that it is a bad idea to go running while under the influence of cold medicine, which I should never take anyway, because it is, essentially, speed, and my heart responds to the mere suggestion of ephedrine or caffeine by going like a racehorse. I went to the doctor not long ago because my heart was pounding and/or racing pretty frequently. This is not terribly out of the ordinary for me, and it isn’t the first time I’ve had it checked out, but it never comes to anything serious. After a normal EKG, multiple checks for mitral valve prolapse, and blood tests that proved I am neither anemic nor over-amped in the thyroid, we concluded that I am probably just going bonkers due to starting a PhD, and should probably stay away from caffeine and cold medicine. And I have barely noticed my pulse since then, which means I was probably going bonkers less because of the PhD and more because of the mere suggestion of the possibility that I was going bonkers, which will probably only make sense to you if you have ever had tachycardia issues.

But then I had to up and catch a cold. And I tried to stay away from the medicine sauce, I really did, but I was on vacation and sick of feeling like shit, so I succumbed. I felt better immediately, and decided to go on a run with Suze. A half-mile into it, I felt like a gerbil that had espresso injected into its jugular. Oops.

So if you ever meet me and happen to notice visible palpitations shaking my clothing, don’t flatter yourself that you make me nervous. It’s probably just the fumes coming off your skin from the Nyquil you took last night.

Let’s see, what other business? I set off a bit of a supernatural blogging trend when I wrote about the spooky river thing last month, here and here. So anyway, because everyone loves to have the piss scared out of them in the safety of their own homes, here is the Grand Assemblage of recent ghost blogs—and believe me, these are very engrossing and even creepier than mine:

Jessi: Here, here, and here,

Jenn: here, here,

and Strangeite: here.

Jenn also has several extremely powerful and affecting stories about the presence of her late sister interacting with her and her son. Bring Kleenex.

And finally, some blog business. As regular readers know, I’m about to start school again. Classes start next week, orientations are the day after tomorrow, and I’m already fretting over stuff like getting my student ID, which I was going to do this morning but didn’t because I decided I hate my hair. The point is, I’m going to get a lot busier than I have been for most of the life of this five-year-old blog. I have a teaching assistantship, a full course load, and a resolve to maintain a balanced home and personal life and continue eating right and sleeping and exercising. I’m a little nervous about keeping all this afloat, but I keep reminding myself that this isn’t like the last time I went to graduate school, back when I didn’t know a thing about balance.

All this doesn’t mean I want to stop blogging. But I think I’m going to have to change how I do it. I can’t imagine just shutting down shop at SWJ; if nothing else, I just like the people who comment here too much, and since I don’t know all of you personally, I’d completely lose touch with you if I stopped. So maybe you can help me out a bit, because I have two issues I’m trying to figure out, blog-wise:

1) There is no way I’ll be able to post with the same frequency as before. And it’s not like I’m a frequent poster to begin with; I probably average about one blog post per week. Less than one post per week and people tend to stop reading. And if people aren’t reading, frankly, I’m not interested. There’s a reason why I keep a blog and not a personal journal.

2) I don’t really want people in my academic life—people who don’t know me already, that is—to find this blog. I keep my full name out of here so as not to be too Google-able, but there are ways to figure out who I am, and I don’t know, I just don’t want to have to worry about that. It’s not that I write anything I’m ashamed of (at least, not usually). It’s just that I’ve written the majority of this blog during a time in my life in which I haven’t had huge concerns about the things I write here following me professionally. Plus I’m going to have students. And I have zero desire for my students to find out I’m a blogger or read any of this.

I’m kind of taking my cues from Feral Mom here, who, when she felt her public blog wasn’t serving her needs anymore, went underground, so to speak, and did an invitation-only sort of thing. (Which is why I’m not linking to her original blog here, although you can check out her new public venture.) I’m thinking about doing that. My fear, of course, is losing readers, some of whom may have never commented or identified themselves, who don’t want to go through the fuss of asking me for a special pass for the incredible privilege of reading my occasional posts. But at this point I’m starting to find that risk more palatable than the risks listed above.

So here’s what I think I’m going to do. I’m going to research my options in terms of having a private and/or password-protected blog. Anyone who has information, experience, or advice on such matters, please share! In the meantime, I’d like to start assembling a list of e-mail addresses of people who are interested in continuing to follow me once I go underground. Seriously, as long as you’re not a malevolent bastard or a mean person, if you are interested, please do contact me. If you’ve never commented before, it’s okay; as long as you don’t seem creepy, I still want to hear from you. My aim is not to restrict my current readership, which I think is probably pretty small already. I just want to get out of Google-able territory. You can contact me at sweetwaterjournal (at) gmail.com, and I will start making up a list. (Those of you who know my personal e-mail address can feel free to contact me there instead.)

So please keep reading Sweet Water Journal! I may be struggling to post in the next few weeks, so if you’d like to stay on top of my plans, please consider following me through Google Friend Connect (I put a link at the top of the page) or subscribing to the RSS feed. That way you’ll know when I post, and in the meantime, you won’t have to waste your time checking the site needlessly. I promise I’ll give a lot of advance warning before I do anything drastic. And again, I’d like your advice/thoughts/ideas.

thoughts while running, 7 a.m.

2009-07-28T09:33:00.000-07:00

So we just had a storm, and it’s obvious from the sky that there’s going to be another storm. So this is a storm sandwich. Everyone should get to run in a storm sandwich.

I LOVE this song. This song has everything I need. I do not need any other songs. There are no other songs. It is just THIS SONG, ALL THE TIME.

The elastic on this sports bra is too tight. Maybe I should have been suspicious when I practically dislocated my shoulder yesterday while trying it on.

The first half-mile always sucks. It’s going to get better. It’s going to get better. It’s going to get better. Replay the song.

What if I were in a spaceship, and I was looking down on Earth, and thinking, that is so most beautiful planet I have ever seen, wouldn’t it be amazing to be down there? And then I would get to visit, and it would feel like this incredible privilege? Why can’t I just live like that?

I could live like that if I could listen to this song all day long. REPLAY THE SONG.

How is it that I feel less shock in my body while running in these flat sneakers and more when I’m running in my Asics that practically stick a pillow between my feet and the ground? I think all that “shock absorption” stuff is bullshit. My legs feel great. Christopher McDougall is right about everything. Why am I even still using those Asics at all?

WOOOEEE!!!

---

Yeah, well, you felt this cocky one mile into your last run in flat sneakers, and by two and half miles your calves were singing a different tune and your shin needed ice, so cool your jets here.

Oh, YOU. Well, anyway. I think I’m going to turn into a minimalist running zealot. I'll monopolize dinner conversations by yakking about the biomechanical problems with heel striking, the “running man” evolutionary theory, and the capitalist conspiracies of athletic shoe companies.

That’s going to be really annoying for your friends.

Okay. Scanning for the big black dog. Here’s its yard. If it is there untied like it was on Friday and starts chasing me I am going to call the cops.

Don’t be an idiot. You are not going to call the cops.

I could. I have the station number right here in my phone just in case.

You are not going to call the cops on a dog. Anyway, it's not there.

And really, you should let the iPod go on to the next song. You like the next song too, you know.

OK, fine. But when the next song is done, I’m going to back to THE SONG.

Yep. I’m going back. THIS SONG RULES.

Was that lightening?

Yes. Which means you should probably—WATCH THE FEET.

Crap. I almost bit it there. I forgot that rain makes the sidewalks this slick.

It would really, really hurt if I fell right on my kneecap. Oh my God, I hope I never fall on my kneecap. I wonder if I fell with my knee all wonky, if my kneecap could pop right off. Then I’d never be able to run again and I would lose my mind.

Lots of people can’t run and don’t lose their minds. Stop thinking like a crazy person.

WHEEEE!!!! I’m almost at three miles and I still feel great!! I’m doing another mile. REPLAY THE SONG.

It’s seriously lightening over there. It’s going to start again and you’re almost home anyway. If you get caught in a deluge you will be really caught because no one is home to rescue you and there is no shelter past the overpass there. Plus you may be struck by lightening and that could kill you or cause brain damage. Get home. Now.

Now who’s thinking like a crazy person? I’m just going to do that hill yet, and then I’ll turn around. The storm isn’t close. That will put me over three miles. If I get this far and I still feel up to a hill, then goddammit, I’m doing a hill.

This really isn’t bad. This feels okay. I can do hills. I don’t have to be afraid of hills.

Except that you have no idea how to run downhill in these shoes. You are going to bust something.

Fuck off. I’m just going to haul ass and not think. Okay, here we come. Turn around…

HAUL ASS HAUL ASS HAUL ASS

Wow. OK. Breathe. Wow. Breathe. OK.

See? That’s exactly how I ran down hills when I was a little kid, in little kid shoes.

Whatever. You grew up in central Kansas, you dolt. There were no hills to run down.

There was that one in the park. I had at least one hill. And I ran. So shut up. Who are you, anyway?

Either your better self, or your worst. I don't think we've sorted that one out yet.

Maybe if I increase my mileage, you will go away.

I kept you from slipping on that wet pavement, didn't I? I have your back, don't I?

(...pause...)

I don't know. REPLAY THE SONG.*

* “A Moment So Close,” Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, from Outbound.

going pink

2009-07-23T09:27:00.000-07:00

I must enjoy banging my head against a wall, because I’ve sort of gotten myself wrapped up again in the fight for LGBT equality in the Mennonite church. “Fight” probably isn’t a good word, unless defined in a sort of broad, battle-metaphor sense that I would dig but many other Mennonites might find unnecessarily combative. Movement, then. Let’s say movement. It’s a sort of laxative process by which we hope to gradually eliminate, with the help of wholesome fibrous activities like hymn-singing, pink-t-shirt-wearing, story-telling, and networking, the gas-leaking bowel obstruction that is heterosexist religious conservatism. The Mennonite church, as I’ve written about on several occasions, has its wee issues with queer acceptance. Or, put differently, it has a massive brick yet to shit.

There are several reasons why I generally fear getting into this kind of thing. They may be recognizable to others who have been involved in similar church advocacy work.

1. I break out in aggression issues every time I hear the word “dialogue.” They have not invented a cream for this yet.
2. The phrase “agreeing and disagreeing in love” does not make me feel loving.
3. The phrase “fucking douchebag” is not considered acceptable in church circles, even when it is an accurate representation of the person speaking at the time.
4. I do not believe that discriminating against queer people is morally equivalent to the practice of calling out bigots, which is a premise you more or less have to submit to in order to participate in all this wishy-washy self-consciously centrist dialogue bullshit.
5. Despite this anger stuff, I also fear that my own rhetorical agility will alchemize with my Midwestern desire for everyone to get along and turn me into a two-faced, crap-jargon-spouting hypocrite before I even know what’s hit me.
6. What am I doing getting involved, anyway? It’s not like I even go to church. And part of why I don’t go to church is that I don’t, actually, enjoy banging my head against a wall.

Except it’s a little different this time. There’s a new movement of queer Mennonites (and straight allies) called Pink Menno, and they are trying to avoid some of the traditional pitfalls that have plagued past attempts to make progress with the ~~forces of darkness~~ status quo on these things. For one thing, they are strongly de-emphasizing denominational politics and placing their focus on grassroots networking and relationship-building, as opposed to haggling with church authorities over the wording of various resolutions and/or participating in officially-sanctioned “dialogues” that are rigged against them to begin with. Their inaugural effort was a big presence at the latest denominational convention just a few weeks ago, a presence that was notable enough to get Associated Press coverage. (The article was later denounced by the denominational authorities as a distortion of the “secular press,” which in this house prompted squealings of “Teach me, George-Michael! Teach me the ways of the secular world!” (If you haven’t seen Arrested Development yet, then go watch it already, for the love of God.))

So basically, the idea is to stop waiting for or begging for the denomination to become more accepting, and just start being a significant presence of unapologetic but approachable queer Mennonites and supporters. I don’t claim to have any breadth or depth of perspective on such things, but I think this is about the only approach that has any promise. In spite of all my snark, I do have some hope for things to change on this front, simply because I’ve observed over and over that knowing someone’s who gay, lesbian, bi or transgendered, or having a close friend or someone in one’s family come out, really does have the effect of making people come around. Not always, but frequently enough to be noteworthy. Hell, I was homophobic enough in my early teens to spend most of high school freaked out that people would think I was a lesbian, but I got over it when a friend came out to me my first semester of college, and by the end of the year I was writing speeches for my speech and rhetoric class on equal rights for gay parents.

I debated long and hard with myself about going to the convention (in Columbus, OH) and actually participating in the Pink Menno presence, though admittedly my interests there were more research-oriented than anything; I’m planning to do my dissertation on related issues, and it would have been good for me to be close to the action. But if I’d been there, I would have worn a pink t-shirt and sang hymns and all the rest; research and life tend to mix it up in my world, and I couldn’t possibility have resisted lending my presence to a movement that grows stronger with every participating body. In the end, I balked at spending the money, which would have been considerable. Still, I followed the whole thing pretty closely.

Closely enough to be amazed by how much good seemed to be coming of it. There were some ugly encounters, to be sure. But there was also a tremendous amount of positive interest in Pink Menno, and people seemed to be coming back optimistic.

It’s difficult to be explicit about what happened after the conference, and how I responded, without sharing details and mentioning names that, due to a nebulous sense that it wouldn’t serve the greater good, I’d rather not mention in my own public forum. If you’re Mennonite—or just curious—it’s pretty easy to get the basic scoop from the Pink Menno website. What happened, broadly speaking, is that a bunch of people called the central church office to complain about Pink Menno (whose worst offense was existing at all), and a major denominational executive sent out a really unfortunate e-mail to conference leaders, public chastising Pink Menno over some ambiguously-worded, nebulous charges related to literature distribution, implying that they were outside interlopers of some sort, implying that consensus exists in the denomination on queer issues (it SO does not), and generally using the kind of passive-aggressive hypocritical language that makes me want to run screaming from church and never look back. Then—maraschino cherry on the shit sundae—he signed off with “In Christian Love.”

I cried when I read it. I just broke down and wept, right there at my computer. And then I chided myself for getting so emotionally involved. Don’t I know better than this by now? Did I actually expect the powers that be to behave differently than this? I didn’t really believe that the official in question was as dickish as he sounded in the letter; I know a little about him, and I also know that ass-covering “let’s just keep the conservatives appeased so they don’t explode” language when I read it. Milquetoast Mennonite church leaders who are too scared to be progressive anywhere but behind closed doors are total pros at this crap; I’ve been hearing it all my life. (And of course it must be acknowledged that the job of serving a politically disparate group like Mennonites is not easy.) This analysis did nothing to make me feel better, though. And isn’t the point of not going to church to escape from having to care about this kind of garbage, anyway?

Having established to myself that like it or not, I suck at not caring, I spent three days chewing over words in my head and then sat down and wrote an e-mail to the church official in question. Not having been at the convention, I focused more on my personal convictions, including that my generation of Mennonites, queer and straight alike, is sick of being paternalistically dismissed and that, you know, your fear of social change will not defeat us, etc. Really, it was polite wording and all. Just emphatic. To understand the power of what happened next, you have to understand that as I was doing this, a whole bunch of other supportive Mennonites were doing the same thing. I can’t give you numbers, but there was an outpouring of letters in defense of Pink Menno. After sending them, we swapped copies in e-mails and shared them on message boards. People reached into themselves and pulled out the most powerful language at their disposal.

I had no idea to expect next, but what I wasn’t expecting was that the same executive who wrote the awful letter would respond to people personally. But he did. Within the same afternoon of my sending my letter, I had a response, and shortly after sending a response to that response the following morning, I had another response, a gracious one, assuring me that my letters would be passed on the executive board and that we were in this together. I’m not going to get into details about the contents of the exchange, because I don’t really feel good about doing that. I’ll just say that I came away from it feeling like something positive came out of something shitty, and that there might be more hope for change than I thought, and I am a cynical bastard when it comes to the church, so there is that. And it seems that others are feeling the same way about their exchanges with him.

And as further evidence that things are moving (in the continuation-of-colonic-metaphor sense), Pink Menno leaders are having a conversation with him later this week. Of course, they are rightly reminding all of us that the point of this movement is not to get caught up in denominational politics and the wording of letters and resolutions and whatnot. The point is not to bang at locked church doors and plead with those inside to open up. Because in doing so, we implicitly agree to the fallacy that the people who refuse to open those doors own the church. And they don’t. They don’t, they don’t, they don’t.

Still, a good conversation is a good thing.

Sometimes Mennonites kick ass.

the tyranny of felines

2009-07-16T14:40:00.000-07:00

In the recycling box next to my feet is my twelve-year-old cat, Djuna, who has, of late, been showing her age a bit. A little arthritis, finicky digestion, hearing loss. After I noticed her limping one day, I took her to the vet, where the doctor manipulated her poor joints and informed me that she has a “loose kneecap.” My own kneecap was burning and dripping with blood from the savaging she gave me with her back claws as I tried to cram her in the carrier, (seriously, you should see the scars) but I managed to concentrate as the vet prescribed a joint-supporting supplement and commented on Djuna’s weight loss. In the past six months or so, she has dropped a few ounces, which isn’t cool, really, as six months ago she was only eight pounds and some change. I was starting to get nervous.

The vet suggested blood tests, which didn’t turn up anything except an enormous bill. They failed to acquire a urine sample, but that’s a hopeless endeavor—Djuna pees the moment she’s placed in her cat carrier, so she’s never going to arrive at the clinic with a full bladder. I suspect she’s fine, though. She’s perky and friendly, and generally plays well with others. Even her limp has eased up, and she still negotiates staircases fearlessly, though on descent she looks a bit like an old-fashioned hobbyhorse.

Her main problem, and the likely source of her weight loss, is that she appears to be sick and tired of the food around here. The Green Peas and Duck Nightly Buffet isn’t doing it for her, and can you blame her? It’s not her fault that Bonzo has food allergies. The only time she ate Green Peas and Duck with any enthusiasm was after Bonzo’s dental surgery, when I bought the soft version. In food situations, Bonzo is usually the aggressor, but when a can of soft food is opened, Djuna is all Out of the way, bitch, and he ends up licking an empty can while she snorkels her way through the gelatinous contents.

In terms of substances that set off my gag reflex, soft cat food is only a few steps up from crusted baby mucus. It’s also freaking expensive. Nonetheless, I’ve been forced to consider it lately, because it is the only food that Miss Picky will eat with abandon. At the pet store, I weighed the options. Mature Adult with Sensitive Digestion? Mature Adult Hairball Control? Mature Adult Kidney Support? Don’t Mature Adults need all this stuff? In the end, I purchased age-appropriate food of both wet and dry varieties, and went for the hairball control. I want to feed her something with petroleum or axel grease that might possibly cut down on the puking jags.

Unfortunately, Djuna is still eating primarily Green Peas and Duck, because feeding the cats separately has me stumped. I’ve tried to feed Bonzo on the first floor and Djuna in the basement, but the cat door to the basement makes it difficult—Bonzo knows what I’m doing when I lock it, and when barred from the basement, puts up a big, pushy fight, complete with high-pitched yowling. The few times that I’ve succeeded in separate feedings, I’ve had to throw Bonzo halfway across the living room to get the basement door shut in time, and then, once I’ve fed Djuna, I’m stuck down there with her until she finishes. Otherwise Bonzo will break in and Djuna will have anxiety, and Bonzo will steal her food for Delicate Elder Kitties and probably break out in a horrible neck rash and require antibiotics and steroids.

They seem to be entering a high maintenance phase. As I write this, I am breaking every sentence or so to throw Bonzo off the computer table, pull Bonzo out of my bag of newly-purchased yarn, and get Bonzo’s ass out of my face. At this rate, I am especially looking forward to going on vacation in a few weeks. We’re going to visit Suze, which means that rather than attempting to control my cats, I can spend a few relaxing days watching my nephew impersonate them. (He loves them.) His latest thing is to put on an orange bathrobe with the cat tail from his Halloween costume, and pretend to scratch the carpet, whereupon Suze will pretend to squirt him, and he will pretend to shake off the water. He told me about this in an e-mail, the subject line of which was “EGG.” I am praying that he does not get tired of this act before I get to Madison.

Of course, the vacating puts the responsibility for my dysfunctional cats in the hands of my friend Dee Anna. Dee Anna seems to be a sort of Cat Whisperer. Either that, or she’s the cool babysitter to my mean mama. They adore her. Still, I think Djuna will have to stick it out with the Green Peas and Duck for just a little longer. You can only inflict so much drama on your friends.

Any advice re: separate feeding is more than welcome.

ghost story, part two (in which I go a bit meta, in an attempt to appear rational)

2009-07-07T12:58:00.000-07:00

I’ve never known how to tell this story, which is why I rarely tell it. Once, around a campfire in college, among friends and under the spell of flame in the middle of a dark, empty field, I told people about what I thought I saw in that river. Now and then, afterwards, a person who hadn’t been at the campfire would tell me that someone had told them my ghost story, and that it was one of the scariest things they’d ever heard. And I’d wonder what the story sounded like by the time it reached them. To tell a story like this is to release a hidden part of your self into the wild.

My impulse is to begin with a list of qualifiers. I’d like to tell you that I didn’t believe in ghosts before this happened, and I don’t know that I do now. I’d like to assure you that I’m mentally stable, that I’m not, as a rule, silly or credulous, and offer various other stories as means of proof. I’d like to write anything that would make me seem like a sensible person who knows the difference between real and make-believe.

But this is a story, which I will never get around to telling if I keep worrying about how it makes me look.

Which brings me back to the original problem, which is how to make a story of something that holds so little narrative shape in my head. I can set it up: I can tell you about how I came to be in a small Dutch town at age sixteen with two other girls my age, and how the three of us came to be at the banks of a river, after dusk, with two small, excitable dogs. I can tell you that when we got there, we were laughing, high-spirited, obnoxious, even, singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” probably because the stars made us think of it. (I should probably also mention that we were, in fact, completely sober.) I can tell you that there were no other people around. It’s easy enough to do this because my memory can produce a setting, and characters to move around within it. But once we settled in on the bank of the river—me, my two friends, and the two dogs—I lose track of the other characters, despite the fact that they were still there, reacting to something, just as I was reacting to something. From then on, I lose any sense of a credible “we.”

Color is what I remember, to start. I wrote that the sky was purple: a deep, dark, monolithic purple, the red of the sunset faded by then. I don’t know if there were clouds; I can’t remember a moon, and the only reason I think there may have been stars is the “Lucy” business—I can’t actually recall seeing any. I only remember the purple. The water reflected the sky, its surface shimmering purple as well.

I didn’t see anything rise out of the water. At some point I just became aware that there was a dark shape in the middle of the river, almost directly in front of me but a further distance than I could safely swim. It was a human shape, like a broad-shouldered man waist-deep in the water, but it lacked the meat of reality, and after a moment of panic, I understood that this was not someone or something that could be helped. It was a shadow with no person.

If desperation could cast a shade in the middle of a river, it would look and feel like this did. It came to me slowly that I was afraid—although by slowly I think I mean a few seconds. The fear wasn’t so much from the presence of the thing itself. It was the sense that I’d been plucked from the exuberance of the moment I’d been in and hauled into someone else’s emotional vortex. I felt a pull from the river, a grasping and clamoring.

I stood looking at the dark shape, and then—and this is the part that is clearest in my memory, and most difficult to articulate—it rose. It wasn’t as though a humanoid shape crawled out of the water. It was as though another shadowy humanoid shape shimmered out from the shape I had been watching, like a dark holograph, this one a full body with legs, and it began to run, but it ran as though through water, as though it couldn’t get anywhere, and yet it gave at least the illusion of forward motion, coming towards me. At this point I should say towards us, because actually I wasn’t alone through any of this, and while I can’t remember a thing that was said, I do remember that at the point that the shape started moving, the dogs started barking crazily, and that we all three turned and ran away, clearing several blocks before we stopped, panting, to say, “Oh my God,” and “What the hell WAS that?”

Here, the difficulty of the “we.” The fact that there were three of us might add credence to the supernatural element, were there any proof that we actually experienced the phenomenon in just the way I described it, individually, all seeing and feeling the same thing. But, while everyone claimed to have seen something, I can’t prove—to myself or anyone else—that we weren’t influenced by one another’s accounts or actions. And I have no real idea what either Jenn or B saw or felt.

I know that B, at least, has completely rationalized the experience away. Several years later, when we were both in college at different places and meeting over the summer, I asked her, hesitantly, if she remembered it. “Oh, that,” she said, and then made some comment about how silly it was that we’d thought we’d seen anything. I didn’t say anything else about it, because I felt stupid for still taking the experience seriously. I wanted to ask her: But what did you feel? Was I the only one who felt anything?

(I never talked about it again with Jenn. The last time we met was ten years ago, in a café in Ann Arbor. She told me that Anders and Natalia had gotten divorced, that her parents were thinking of leaving the seven-hundred-year-old house because they were getting sick of Anders, whose behavior was becoming erratic in the way one might expect of dubiously wealthy gentlemen of a certain age. Natalia called them one evening with a warning: “Anders is on his way to your house right now. With a WHO*RE.” Within hours, he was there, draped with a woman who was clearly not interested in his personality, announcing their plans to stay there for the night—an arrangement that made Jenn’s parents profoundly uncomfortable, to say the least. With gossip like that to get through, Jenn and I didn’t have time for much else.)

I called this a ghost story, but labeling the experience as a “ghost” feels presumptuous and a little cheap. My memory of the dark shape, the sudden powerful emotional shift, the running holograph, the terrible sensation of creeping Otherness—all of it’s still so vivid to me, even now, sixteen years later. But while the storyteller in me could make the interpretive leap needed to call it a ghost (a drowned man, locked in an eternally fruitless escape—oh, don’t think I haven’t gone there), other parts of me hold back.

Whatever it was, if it was anything, it is beyond my understanding. Every time I tell about it, I trust my memory a little less. When you turn memory into story, you loosen your claim on it. If the story takes on any life, eventually, you’ll lose the memory. Is it a good tradeoff, to gain a story in exchange for a memory? That’s a question for the ages, isn’t it?

And if we ever thought that memory was pure to begin with, we were probably fools.

ghost story, part one (which is mostly exposition)

2009-07-01T13:47:00.000-07:00

I’ve written before about how, when I was a junior in high school, I spent a semester in France with my folks and a good friend who was my age, and how she and I tore around the countryside with another American girl, Jenn, defacing the property of rock stars and the like.

If any story could sound more absurd than one involving three American teenagers, in rural France, year 1993, festooning Mick Jagger’s hedge with toilet paper, it would have to involve the supernatural. Even better: the supernatural, amoral Dutch people, and weiner dogs.

As absurd as it will no doubt sound, the following did really happen to me, as best I can remember. I will tell it in two installments, so as to avoid creating a post too long to read in one sitting. It was disturbing, and continues, at times, to disturb me, though not quite so much as the cheese booger does.

Back to rural France, 1993: Jenn’s family lived in a seven-hundred-year-old house. Once the parsonage of the village church, it had since become the property of a grossly wealthy Dutch couple, from whom Jenn’s parents rented the property. This couple—let’s call them Anders and Natalia—were amiable, as landlords go. Anders, a veterinarian, had married Natalia, a retired manager of exclusive hotels, in middle age, and they lived the kind of international, jet-setting lifestyle that I had previously only encountered in novels.

God knows where all their money came from. Natalia’s job may have brought in some hefty cash, but Anders surely couldn’t have made that much as a vet. There were whispers of Anders running afoul of the Russian mafia, which suggested extraneous business dealings. How a Dutch veterinarian comes to run afoul of the Russian mafia is a matter at which the likes of me can only speculate. The only thing I could really glean from the gossip was that Anders was probably not squeaky cleanest of individuals. Had I been a bit worldlier at the time, I probably could have surmised that just from the make of his car.

Anyway: the point is, they were rich—richer than almost anyone I’d ever met in my life. They went to haute couture fashion shows. They were both plain, but dressed so upscale that no one noticed. Natalia wore a fur coat and dyed black bob and carried two tiny, foul-tempered weiner dogs, Fifi and Zero (no pseudonyms there) with her everywhere, even into restaurants and posh boutiques. (The little dog thing sounds eccentric, but it’s not uncommon amongst a certain class of older European women, from what I’ve observed. Money buys you the right to make lesser beings clean up your dog’s shit, even if your dog uses Givenchy as a litter box. The world is not just.)

They lived in Holland, but when they were in France, it was expected that Jenn’s parents would accommodate them, should they choose to pop in. So the families had a relationship, albeit one with a severe power imbalance. Still, there was enough trust there that when Jenn, my friend (I’ll call her B) and I asked permission to go on a short trip to Amsterdam by ourselves, our parents agreed that we could, so long as we stayed with Anders and Natalia, who lived in small town near the city.

And yet, despite the fact that we were sixteen and heading for Amsterdam, which was, well, Amsterdam, my parents seemed more concerned about the influence of this homely, middle-aged couple than about any of the evils of the Sodom and Gomorrah variety. To their infinite credit, they knew better than to forbid the trip out of over-protectiveness, but they gave us a few warnings, the essence of which were, Trust your instincts. Don’t be too enamored of these people. I failed to see any problem with the arrangement, and accused my parents of prejudice against the rich.

But now I understand where they were coming from. To Anders and Natalia, Midwestern American girls like B and me were charming novelty items. They couldn’t get over us: We didn’t wear makeup? We went to Amsterdam in jeans and hiking boots? We were Christians? B was particularly exotic, as she actually defended her religion and refused to drink wine. “You girls are so natural, “ said Anders with relish, as we all sat around the dinner table in their plush dining room.

Our folks were right not to worry about us in Amsterdam. We took the train into the city from Anders and Natalia’s small town, and spent the day looking at Van Goghs and Rembrandts. Anders and Natalia would of course have adored it if we had staggered off the train in the evening stoned out of our brains; they would have poured us a cognac and celebrated our corruption. Denied that pleasure, they settled for amusement at our innocence. “You went to museums! How refreshing!”

Anders was more disposed to let us remain odd American curios and merely wonder at our strangeness, but Natalia seemed irked by our apparent purity. After our lackluster performance in Amsterdam, she called several of her twenty-something friends and arranged for us to go out to a club. How a Chanel-suited hatchet like Natalia came to befriend this posse of young punks, I did not know—it was one of the mysteries of wealth. Though I drank nothing, I recall little of the club experience, except for the strobe lights, my profound self-consciousness, and a friendly young man with long black hair and a tusk hanging from his ear.

I had been hoping that staying with people like Anders and Natalia would automatically bolster my sophistication, transforming me effortlessly from a stringy-haired high school junior from Kansas into the sort of person who could read French Vogue on the TGV without looking as though she was doing so on purpose. In the interest of this, I would tell Anders and Natalia that my religion was nothing serious, that I was probably going to come back to a French conservatory for college, and that I loved Belgian endive. Unfortunately, none of this felt as effortless as I wanted it to. Especially the Belgian endive, which turned my face inside out.

I was the only one of us three with this particular problem, this wannabe-Euro problem. Jenn, having lived in France for most of her teenaged years, was an authentic expatriate, comfortably bilingual, bicultural, and seemingly free of troublesome national identity issues. B was simply too wholesome to be taken in by glamour; at the end of the day, she answered to Jesus. Though they differed substantially in background and beliefs, they had one extraordinary thing in common; at age sixteen, each of them had a pretty good idea of who she was. I, on the other hand, was still trying on costumes, and would rather no one watched while I was changing. Like Madonna, I had to pretend that whatever I was at the moment, I had been all along.

In spite of that, though, the three of us got on magnificently, our bonds solidified mainly through our shared interest in anything medieval, magical and/or spooky. The paperback that got the most circulation between the three of us was Celtic Magic. In our natural habitat, the wooded, terraced backyard of Jenn’s seven-hundred-year-old house, we threw carnivals for the village children, dressing like witches and fortune-tellers. The beauty of my relationship to Jenn and B was how easily my identity worries dropped away around them, how easy it was to just exist together in the same loopy headspace that we had all occupied when we were hyper-imaginative children. (There were no boys around, either. That helped.)

Our trio was based on an idea of fun that was unintelligible to someone like Natalia, and so it wasn’t surprising that after a few days in her world, we were sick of her. By our last night in Holland, we were fairly itching to bust out, so we went on a walk. We figured we’d head for the river, which cut through the small town and was a workable distance from the house.

We kept up the pretense of gratitude, of course. At Natalia’s suggestion, we brought Fifi and Zero with us. They were the two most useless dogs in Europe, but we didn’t anticipate needing any protection from attackers.

By the time we reached the river, the sun had set. The sky was purple.

And then things started to get weird.

(To be continued, sometime next week.)

freerange

2009-06-25T09:58:00.000-07:00

So I’ve been entertaining various topics for blog posts, and they’re all tremendous uppers. I was thinking of writing about the horrendous video of a young woman dying in Tehran (no, I didn’t watch it, and I never will; the images I did see traumatized me enough) and my extremely complicated feelings about the uses of images of violent death and martyrdom and this crazy idea, widely circulating, that we are morally obliged to watch this video. Then I decided I just couldn’t bear to think about that for a moment longer. Then I thought about writing a letter to President Obama about how he needs to get cracking on LGBT rights, and making it as eloquent as I could and then posting it here too to encourage everyone else to do likewise. And then I thought about how much I wish that I could think of something funny to write about instead, because I’m sick of being all serious and political and I’m sick of the goddamned news, sick of people shooting each other, sick of going to these places in my head.

This is starting to sound the beginnings of heaven knows how many other entries that I’ve written for this blog. Stephanie gets het up about Something Important, Stephanie considers writing weighty post about Important Thing, Stephanie develops fatigue, depression, and/or disgust over her inability to stop obsessing over said Thing, Stephanie puts on a pot of chickpeas, recommits herself to the simple things, and writes a blog post about nothing.

Yup.

Regular readers will notice that I changed the header photo. I took that one yesterday morning when I was watering our little plot of chard, tomatoes and peppers. I really wouldn’t have had to water, because last night we got a big thunderstorm, complete with downpour, which barely caused a break in the relentless heat of the last few days, and instead transformed our streets into sizzling steam baths. It has been so hot that we dragged our air mattress downstairs to the living room and have slept there for the past three nights; even with air conditioning, our upstairs bedroom is nearly intolerable. The heat barely breaks at night; by 6:30 in the morning it’s already hit 80 and breathing the air outdoors is like having peanut butter spread on your lungs.

As a consequence of which I haven’t been out much this week. I’ve had a long list of household things to do anyway, things like clearing out all the hazardous waste in our basement (legions of half-empty paint cans, mostly from previous owners) and delivering it to the proper authorities; cleaning the freezer (longtime readers will be happy to know that the last two pints of tatsoi finally went to Jesus in the compost pile) and discovering that we still have what I might conservatively estimate to be six hundred jalapeno peppers from last summer in there; taking two online trainings required of foster parents by the state, trainings on medication administration and the prevention of bloodborne illness so poorly written and insultingly easy that they made me fear for the populace on several fronts; hiring a locksmith to outfit the basement, thereby making it easier for us to lock up the booze, exercise equipment, and cat litter, the latter of which we have learned is particularly irresistible to children.

I haven’t gone running outside for over a week, because I’m too wussy for this heat. I feel cooped up and sick of the internet, which is full of crappy news and endless e-mail solicitations from progressive groups proclaiming imminent catastrophe over one thing or another if I do not contact my elected officials immediately to demand A, B and C. I finally unsubscribed myself from the CREDO e-mail action alerts, and when I got the little box asking for an explanation for why I’m leaving (“DON’T LEAVE US!”), I was pretty close to honest: Your e-mails make me feel like the world is ending, and I need a break from that. I might also have added that while my representative is a moderate Democrat who might do with a call or e-mail nudge in the right direction now and again, my senators are Pat Roberts and Sam Brownback, and getting Pat Roberts and Sam Brownback to listen to reasonable arguments is as futile as, say, trying to convince Madonna that she is not the Savior of Africa.

I thought about switching to entertainment news, which I do sometimes when the world is too much with me, but entertainment news has become irredeemably sullied by Brangelina, about whom I do not give a flying fuck, and reality television, which I do not watch, understand, or know anything about. After writing NPR a cranky e-mail to complain about their recent use of one of those completely pointless, pseudo-news-generating, scientifically worthless online polls that infect almost all news sources these days (“Do you think Obama should be harder on Iran? Yes or No?” Thank you, NPR, for this invaluable forum in which to express myself), I turned to Entertainment Weekly, which is what I consider to be the highbrow source for entertainment news, to find another online poll: “Pick a side: a) Jon b) Kate.”

Look. It’s not that I’m not shallow. It’s more that I’m old-fashioned. I just happen to believe that in order to worthy of the vapid obsessions of the American people, a person needs to have revealed him or herself to have some degree of talent, or least a talent for tricking people into thinking he or she has talent. A hunger for publicity should not, in and of itself, be grounds for granting it to someone. There is something deeply weird about our culture’s current fascination with all these unremarkable nobodies who somehow managed to get famous for being famous, and while I’ll have to leave the analysis to someone with a better understanding of the phenomenon, I’d like to register my disapproval at their mucking up my efforts to downgrade my daily reading material.

I think I’ll switch to reading about British celebrities, and see how that goes. I read earlier on Jezebel that Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint went to a bar and got so soused they couldn’t pronounce the words “Harry Potter.” WOOO!! Now there’s a piece of news that won’t ruin your morning.

misc.

2009-06-22T08:55:00.000-07:00

Things that are on my mind this morning, in no particular order:

1) Finishing the foster licensing, for once and for freaking all: Our plan is to get this done this summer, so it’s not hanging over our heads once I’m back in school. We don’t have plans to become foster parents, but if we get our house into compliance with their standards, we can accept a foster-to-adopt situation if something like that comes up. We’ve made it clear to the agency that we want to wait a little while before considering any specific matches, because I want to get used to my new academic schedule before taking on parenthood. But fortunately, our social worker is very supportive and cool with this. In the meantime, we may provide some occasional respite care.

Most of what’s left is annoying house-related things, like putting smoke alarms everywhere, storing the kitchen knives above the sink (apparently it’s safer if they fall on my head than if they remain in a normal drawer), disposing of all the old paint in the basement, locking up anything that could be interpreted as a chemical, locking up the booze, locking up medication…I guess I should make sure there isn’t anything about knitting needles. Once we’ve been approved by the proper authorities, we’re allowed to backslide until the event of an actual child. My plan is to stumble around the house chugging Nyquil and dropping kitchen knives on the floor, just to get it out of my system.

2) Trying to offload my volunteer responsibilities. I’ve served as the communications officer on the board of an interfaith women’s organization for the past two and half years and am finally resigning, with a fair amount of burnout. I was hoping to be done with it this week, but the person who has taken over for me has, through no fault of her own, activated the spam filters of approximately one hundred members with her first bulk e-mail, and now I am trying to deal with that.

Also: There’s nothing more charming than a person who chooses the moment that you are trying to resign from a volunteer position to send rude e-mails suggesting that you should format all your communications in bullet points because it’s too hard for people to read actual paragraphs. My advice to this person? Learn to read, and then look up the word “volunteer” in the dictionary. Definition: Not paid to put up with your whining bullshit. (OK, I didn't actually respond with that. I wrote something about how my successor would appreciate her "patience and polite suggestions.")

3) Iran. The news is breaking my heart. I’m especially edgy about it because a friend and fellow board member left for Tehran with her children to visit her parents, just a few days before the election. She’s supposed to come back in July, and none of us has heard anything from her yet. I’m sure she’ll be fine, but it’s scarier to hear the news knowing someone who’s there. I hope she doesn’t have any trouble getting home.

Repressive governments suck.

4) On a brighter note, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has finally slain Edward Cullen of Twilight’s creepy stalker ass, and good riddance to the slimy bastard:

I think this may be the first time I’ve ever embedded a video on this blog. A suitable inaugural choice, this one. Although you can see it on a wider screen at here; it's kind of clipped off in the embed.

born to run

2009-06-17T12:41:00.000-07:00

After a week of storming and raining and refreshing cool-ish temperatures: Heat. The real stuff, the serious over-90 stuff.

This morning I went out on a run at seven o’clock, a habit that carried me through last summer and early fall, but that I’ve had the luxury of blowing off for most of the rest of the year. Usually I get up at 6:30, waste varying degrees of time on the internet, write a bit and/or catch up on e-mails, and then run in the late morning, or use the elliptical, depending on the weather and my level of motivation to leave the house. But recently, it occurred to me that if I don’t get back in the habit of early morning exercise, 1) I’ll have more trouble keeping it up when school starts and 2) I won’t get to run for the rest of the summer. At seven, I was already right at my personal edge, with a temperature in upper 70s that wouldn’t necessarily be so bad were it not for the crushing humidity that sits on my lungs like one of those silent smothering ghosts from Chinese folk tales.

I was doing an experiment. For the past few days I’ve been listening to the audiobook of journalist Christopher McDougall’s new book, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and The Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen. I probably wouldn’t grab this if I saw it on the bookstore shelf; I’m not usually drawn to stories about athletes, and my usual inclination would be to wonder why the hidden tribe can’t be left unpestered by journalists. But Eric sent me the Amazon link, and after reading a short interview with the author, I got curious enough to check it out.

If you’re a runner or like adventure stories, you’re going to like this one. McDougall is such a master of the suspense-tease that even his chapter on orthodics, sports podiatrists, and the development of the modern running shoe is kind of riveting. But maybe I found it riveting because I’m so intrigued by his thesis, which is that the modern running shoe is crap, and the blame for most modern running injuries sits at the feet (ha) of the Nike corporation, which invented it back in the 70s.

Before then, the world’s greatest competitive runners ran in the sort of floppy, un-engineered sneakers that we’re now told, with dire warnings, will incurably mess up our bodies. Sometime in the 70s, an entrepreneurial track coach got the idea that maybe it would be better for distances if runners started their stride by striking the ground heel-first. Because the human foot is manifestly not designed to do that, he created a company that made a shoe with a cushiony heel, then drummed up a market for the shoe by convincing people that their feet were deficient. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the gist. Now athletic shoe companies are enormous, sweat-shop-exploiting corporations and we’re all taught that we need to replace our shoes every 300 to 500 miles. Eric and I, like most runners, have an ever-increasing pile of dead running shoes hanging by their laces like a guilt albatross around our figurative necks. This growing pile violates our personal doctrine of non-consumerism and waste prevention, but we love running and hate injuries, so we always suck it up and buy the new shoes.

The thing is that it doesn’t work. I’ve been spared, so far, but I don’t run as many miles as Eric does, either. He is as injury-ridden as most serious runners are, constantly juggling the knee tendonitis, the Achilles pain, and the tweaky hip with his insatiable desire to run many miles a week. I’ve been told that I have a “runner’s body” and therefore will be less injury-prone than someone with Eric’s linebacker build, even as I add mileage. But I don’t believe it, because the statistics don’t back up that assertion; the fact is, runners of all sizes get injured, all the time, with tendonitis and plantar fascitis and stress fractures and weird shit like “runner’s knee.” And if the peer-reviewed studies that McDougall cites in his book are to be believed, the factor most strongly correlated to injury is the price of shoes. The more expensive they are, the more likely you are to be injured. And when you’re injured, doctors will either forbid you to keep running, or prescribe you even more expensive shoes.

The “hidden tribe” of the title is the Tarahumara people, an indigenous group in Mexico that has serious distance running built into its culture and routinely produces some of the fastest runners in the world. They aren’t competitive, though, and McDougall describes some of the predictable fiascos that arise when a typical exploitive Ugly American persuades a team of them to come compete in ultramarathons in the U.S. (A standard marathon is 26.22 miles; ultramarathons are typically 50 or 100. The Tarahumara, when they were competing, usually came out on or close to the top.) The Tarahumara have been stalked and terrorized by everyone from the conquistadors to, now, drug cartels, and they are not fighting folk, so running has a serious survival function in their culture. But it’s also social for them, and they seem to find it really fun. Another thing? They run next to barefoot, in sandals usually made from old tires. And they run well into old age, men and women alike, apparently without the sky-high injury rates that plague we of the Nike/Asics/Saucony-sponsored feet.

It’s a pretty compelling argument. I was listening to it yesterday, while running, and as a result, started mucking with my stride, trying to come down less on the heel. It felt impossible, though; the high-tech gel cushions beneath my heels were just too heavy to be denied. I ended up with a stride even clonkier and less natural-feeling than usual—and I’m pretty clonky on the best of days. I ran for three hot, miserable miles, and by the end I was completely spent, and discouraged.

This morning I decided to be crazy. I’m not quite willing to run barefoot; nothing would put this running stride obsession into perspective like impaling myself on a broken bottle or stepping on a hypodermic needle (not that I see many of those around here, but you get my drift). But I ditched my Asics and put on a pair of low-end, thin-soled Puma sneakers that are obviously designed for nothing but bumming around. No arch support, no nothing. I imagined the entire editorial board of Runner’s World screaming at me how I will shatter my joints without proper shock absorption, and then I told them to shut up, and I ran for two miles.

The stride, it fixed itself. Run barefoot across the room and you’ll see what I mean. In thin shoes with no heel cushioning, the foot reverts to doing what it undoubtedly did for the millennia that humans ran without encasing their feet in layers of gel-pumped plastic, and what it undoubtedly does for the Tarahumara when they run through the mountains with old tire bits strapped to their feet: it lands close to the ball. The heel is not involved. This is how I ran when I first started running, until I was corrected. Returning to it felt completely bizarre.

But by the end, my feet still felt fine. My calves, on the other hand, ached as badly as they did when I first started running, and I can tell they are going to be sore for days. They don’t feel injured-sore, though. I’m okay with muscle soreness, if it portends stronger muscles. A girl my size, I’ll take all the muscle I can get.

There’s another reason I’m tempted to persist with my experiment, though, and that’s my desire to experience the joy that McDougall sees as the essence of running. We think of running as this grueling act of conquest: against our minds, against our competitors, against nature, even, because we’re told that running is a dangerous, body-shattering activity and we don’t quite believe that we should be doing it, not unless we adopt a stride so counterintuitive that only a multi-billion-dollar industry makes it physically feasible. It’s an understanding of running that fits our narratives, our neuroses and our capitalism.

I don’t know it ditching my fancy shoes and altering my stride is the recipe for happier running, or not. But I love this idea, suggested by McDougall: that human beings don’t need to be excessively engineered in order to run. That all kinds of human beings can be runners, and that doctors or sports specialists who tell people they are too tall or too squat or too big-boned to run are spouting theories that are countered by the very fact that tall, squat, and big-boned people exist—meaning, at some point, that their ancestors had to run to survive. Of course, I don’t know any more about the workings of evolution than your average, humanities-educated layperson, so I probably shouldn’t get too enamored of that thought.

All the same, I like to think of running as an inheritance. Believe me, I’m not romanticizing a time when human beings who couldn’t run would have to perish. But I love to watch other runners when I’m on a run, or at a marathon, because despite what we’re led to believe, all shapes and sizes and ages of people are doing it, and it’s beautiful. I imagine us all, running with our ancestors. In cheapass shoes.

nuit of the cheese booger

2009-06-12T11:54:00.000-07:00

This blog needs a humor makeover. The story that follows is my attempt. It is also true, I swear. I tried to sell it to David Sedaris, but he didn't want it.

My junior year of college, I went to France as an exchange student. Looking back, it was the life-experience equivalent of castor oil. To say I had a wonderful time would be a stretch. I lived in a cold, northern city, populated with the kinds of people who generally populate cold, northern cities, the kinds of people who wear navy blue and austere expressions and bark at you when you violate some sacred code of French bureaucracy, like trying to get money out of your checking account on a Tuesday. While I didn’t arrive there completely ignorant of the language—I’d lived in France before—I wasn’t fluent or confident. Even after several months of immersion, I went to bed every night exhausted from the work of living in a foreign language.

I lived in an apartment so poorly heated that I slept under my coat every night. The bathroom was constructed in such a way that you couldn’t lean forward to wash your face without getting your butt stuck against the wall. The hot water was sketchy. My roommate was an operatic soprano who lived for male attention (THAT doesn’t get old) and threw tantrums over things like overly pithy orange juice. In retrospect, I grant her more leeway. She was just feeling cranky and damp. Our other roommate was a French-Italian supermodel lookalike who routinely arrived home from clubbing to loudly cook herself enormous quantities of pasta at 3 AM, and that put us both in a pretty foul mood, too.

The Soprano and I were both part of an American exchange program that was responsible for four other women at the time. All of us were twenty or twenty-one years old. Our program director—I’ll call him K—was a man in perhaps his early forties, one of those hardcore expatriates who love France with a convert’s zeal, refusing to speak English in all but the most extraordinary circumstances and taking a cheekily smug Continental attitude when talking to fellow Americans about alcohol and sex. (Once, when we were all out for dinner, one of my compatriots, whom I’ll refer to as Pot Girl, asserted that she was quite sure my married “host father”—i.e. my landlord—had a crush on me, a repulsive thought. K, the adult responsible for securing my room and board, looked at me puckishly, and asked “Do you find him attractive?”)

K was married to a woman who directed the exchange program in a nearby city, a program much more popular than ours because its students got to live in dorms with other Americans and speak English the whole time. Unlike him, she still seemed American. Her French, while fluent, was marred by a brazenly awful accent. “AAh,” she would sigh when a girl did something particularly reckless, “L’EsPREE D’oon Fee AmereeCAN!” We could not, for the lives of us, figure out how on earth these two people came to be married. For one thing, how could someone as Frencher-than-thou as K suffer that accent? For another thing, he was straight? Stereotypes are dangerous, and gaydars have been known to fail, but none of us could quite buy that he was into women—except for the one girl who was a conservative Christian, and had a crush on him.

“God! I mean, can you imagine those two having SEX?” Pot Girl would say. “Just try and imagine it! I mean, can you imagine her giving him…” And then, God help us, we’d imagine it, because thanks to Pot Girl, we couldn’t help but do so. (Pot Girl was very popular in France.)

“POT GIRL! SHUT UP! GROSS!!” Crush Girl would yell.

K and his wife didn’t live together during the week; because they worked in different cities, he kept a small apartment separate from their shared one. ”J’ai un studio,” he explained, somewhat cagily, we thought. (“Yeah,” said Pot Girl, “He’s got a studio. I’ll bet he does.”) On the weekends, he joined her in her city, which was, if one were choosing, the nicer of the two. Given our completely inappropriate curiosity about their personal lives, we were enthralled when the two of them invited all six of us to join them for dinner at their apartment one evening while we were visiting the aforementioned nicer city.

The apartment was decorated much the way you’d expect: tasteful colors, modern prints, and framed photographs of K performing in various theatrical productions. Despite the fact that everyone in the room was American, we sat down to a standard multi-course French meal, which was fine with me. I was perpetually ravenous, and when left to my own devices, tended to scarf entire baguettes in one sitting—simple carbs being the primary refuge of bad cooks short on cash. Unlike most of the French people we knew, K and his wife were sympathetic to vegetarianism, which meant that for once, The Soprano and I were as well-fed as everyone else. The wine flowed freely. And we were allowed to speak in English. “No French tonight,” said K. “Just relax and enjoy yourselves.”

And we did. Until the cheese course, when it all went to hell.

To give you a sense of the nightmare that was the cheese course, allow me a quick digression: Once, in grad school, my friend Marie was sitting in on lecture for a course with which she was assisting. The professor, a distinguished teacher with whom she had a close relationship, was explaining to a room of one hundred undergraduates the rich cultural context of a local cherry festival. “So you see,” he said, “it’s not just about popping some cherries…” And then, there was silence. Bad silence. The silence of one hundred undergraduates, one teaching assistant, and one incredibly embarrassed distinguished professor trying to pretend as though he had not just inadvertently made what may be the worst possible sexual reference that a professor can make in front of a college class.

If you can imagine that awkwardness, then perhaps you can imagine the awkwardness that descended when K suddenly acquired a ball of cheese on the tip of his nose. It was roughly the size of a tapioca pearl, slightly over his left nostril, and had to have been something sticky, something like Brie. It was almost certainly a piece of cheese, and not the even more upsetting alternative, but it was there. It was very, very there. It was so there that we, the previously content and slightly giddy exchange students, collectively lost the powers of speech. We just stared at one another in horror. How were we to proceed? What should we do with our faces?

The key difference between this cheese booger situation and the cherry-popping situation was that K, unlike the deeply unfortunate professor, did not realize what was going on. He continued, with great animation, to offer us various cheeses, describing their provenance and flavor in detail. Several of us died, then wondered why God did not arrive to take us away. Others searched for profundities in the depths of their wine glasses. Pot Girl excused herself to use the bathroom, and we all wailed inwardly, wondering why we hadn’t beat her to the punch. (How do I know that everyone else wailed inwardly too? I know.)

After several excruciating minutes, during which K seemed to begin to sense that something was amiss, his wife asked him to help her with the next course in the kitchen. “Oh thank God.” someone whispered when they left the room. We breathed; our shoulders dropped visibly. Then we focused intensely on the next challenge, which was defusing the Laughter Bomb. We could feel it coming. Our throats were tightening. Tears were already rolling down a few cheeks. But we could handle it. Pot Girl returned, and we shushed her desperately before she could say anything. Breathe, I told myself. Breathe. Think about cats, or sunflowers. Breathe.

None of us even considered the possibility that K’s wife would not tell him about the cheese. Imagine, then, if you will, how we must have felt when both of them came back to the table and sat down, normally, as if K did not still have a cheese booger on his nose.

Pot Girl looked as though she might cry. Crush Girl and one of the others spurted giggles. I started chewing on my tongue.

K smiled at the gigglers. “Now, what’s this?” he asked, in his favorite are-we-being-naughty voice. “A little bit too much wine, peut-être?”

I honestly don’t remember how long it went on. It felt like about a month. At some point, he brought his napkin up to wipe his mouth, or something like that, and the cheese booger disappeared. The evening ended amiably, without anyone falling off her chair or spraying wine out of her nostrils or saying anything to our program director about the cheese. When we got back to our hotel, of course, we screamed and hyperventilated for a while.

“That’s it,” said The Soprano. “He’s gay. If they had any sexual relationship at all, she would not have let him leave the kitchen with that thing on his nose.”

It took me a few years to get over my fear of cheese courses, but I’m happy to say that I have recovered. I’m still working on my fear of boogers.

and here's why i'm still not over it

2009-06-04T10:31:00.000-07:00

This article is dead-on in describing Kansas politics and why the Tiller murder is so devastating for us.

I know I'm heaping on the Jezebel.com links, but they are covering the Tiller case extremely well.

Eric and I are both feeling pretty down about Kansas right now. We're staying here, because I'm doing a PhD here and we have family here and in many ways it makes sense. But this event was a spectacular reinforcement of our feeling that the conservatives here are well and truly going nuts. And the loss of our governor to the Obama administration—as proud as I am of having her there—makes us feel like we've been left to the dogs. Without her or Dr. Tiller here, I have real fear for the health of Kansas women.

You know how they always say that if you're afraid of the terrorists, you've let the terrorists win? Well, that's my challenge right now. This murder was terrorism. It feels like an assault on my values, my gender, and my home ground. And knowing how many people are gloating over it—having to listen to such people, or read their comments in print—it's beyond awful.

Many of my friends here in Kansas are dealing with the same feelings of violation. And we're angry as hell. And it's really hard to let it go. So, I don't know...pray for us? Or whatever?

language, and why it matters

2009-06-02T15:13:00.000-07:00

I’m still feeling a lot of shock and grief over the Tiller murder. Yesterday it was hard to get my mind on anything else; thank God I had something non-cerebral to do like weeding the garden, or I would have gone crazy reading news stories. This morning I should be preparing the house for a visit from the appraiser later today (we’re refinancing), but I’m finding myself with a desperate need to write, to keep myself moving forward through this tangle of unpleasant emotions so I don’t get mired in them.

Some of my friends organized a vigil here in Lawrence on Sunday night (which made national news), and I’m wishing now that I’d made it a higher priority to go. Maybe I’d feel more closure now if I had. I got caught up in yard work and the Sunday night chore scramble, and made excuses to myself. It was easier than admitting that I didn’t want to go because of the possibility of crying in public at an event certain to be covered by the media.

This murder feels personal, to me and to a lot of people, because Dr. Tiller was such a symbol for the pro-choice movement in Kansas. It wasn’t just that he was willing to perform late-term abortions, as horrendous as those procedures are, in the rare instances when they are medically advisable. It was that he was well known as a physician who respected women, who trusted women, who treated his patients as human beings whose personal choices were of paramount importance to their healthcare. Since the murder, many of his patients have spoken about what a kind and respectful doctor he was. (This article is a must-read.) He was a feminist, who believed so strongly that women deserved this kind of respectful care that he was willing to risk his reputation, not to mention his life, to provide it. He also worked tirelessly on the political front to further the cause of women’s health and reproductive freedom. In a state where legions of misogynist legislators regard women’s healthcare as an acceptable casualty in their fight to restrict abortion wherever possible, his presence meant a lot.

I’ve been struggling a lot to figure out what I can do, besides just stewing with grief and outrage. I donated to Planned Parenthood in Dr. Tiller’s memory. I signed an online condolence book for his family. (If you’re at all moved by this incident, look at this book. You’ll see how much he meant to people.) But more than anything, I’ve been moved to look more closely at language—its relationship to violence, its relationship to peace, its relationship to social change. And ultimately, how I perpetuate these things through my own use of language.

I read a thoughtful piece yesterday on Jezebel.com, On George Tiller and the Profound Power of Language. It’s worth a read—skim the extensive quotes from anti-choice zealots if you can’t stomach them—because it raises some pithy questions about the relationship between rhetoric and physical violence.

And of course, these questions are being debated everywhere this week. Bill O’Reilly apparently went on a rant last night (does Bill O’Reilly do anything that doesn’t qualify as a rant?) about “far-left” groups blaming him for Tiller’s murder because he demonized Tiller so often and so venomously on his show. And anti-choice groups are scrambling to frame the fallout to their advantage, warning liberals against “exploiting” Tiller’s murder for “political advantage.” Meaning, basically, that if we suggest that the far right is perpetuating an atmosphere in which killing medical providers of abortion is considered morally defensible, we are the exploitive ones.

I said in my last post that I know I can’t hold the entire anti-choice movement (actually, I prefer “anti-choice” to “anti-abortion”—it offers further clarity) responsible for Tiller’s death, even if I feel, in my anger, like doing so. And I still believe that, very much. But I think Bill O’Reilly is guilty of more than he realizes. And I think the hateful people who lead Operation Rescue have almost as much blood on their hands as Tiller’s murderer. I do absolutely believe that the climate created by rhetoric matters greatly when it comes to the incitement of violence, and I’d be a fool of history not to.

Legal responsibility is a different matter, of course, and this isn’t a post about the limits of free speech. It’s personal responsibility I’m thinking of here, and for liberals, I think the lesson is less, “How can we make these people stop saying such hateful things?” and more, “Let us not become the evil we deplore.” Last night Eric and I talked about the article I mentioned, and then we got to talking about Dick Cheney and his latest load of crap. We were edging towards our usual language when it comes to Dick Cheney, which for me, goes something like, “I wish that foul son of a bitch would just drop dead before he fucks up the world any more than he already has.” And then we both kind of pulled back, thinking the exact same thing. Our angry words sounded uglier than usual.

Getting people who believe that abortion is morally equivalent to murder to stop calling people like Dr. Tiller mass murderers—I have no idea how to do that. Of course, it is worth noting that anti-choice leaders made a deliberate choice to shift from demonizing women who get abortions to demonizing the medical providers who perform them, meaning, perhaps, that the act of demonization itself is a powerful source of fuel, regardless of the target.

And I should know, because in my most profound moments of frustration with anti-choice politics, I’ve proclaimed the entire movement to be a pack of rabidly misogynist assholes who fear everything related to sex and want nothing more than to make women suffer for it. It’s cathartic, it makes me feel righteous, and it makes things conveniently black and white. It’s also inaccurate. It may characterize a large portion of the movement, but it’s not fair to call every anti-choice person a misogynist. I have also ranted that everyone in the movement who isn’t a misogynist at the very least subscribes to a paternalistic, infantilized notion of women as needing constant moral shepherding from dominant males. Again, certainly an accurate description of the ideology motivating many anti-choice folk, but also a generalization that would deeply offend some of the anti-choice women I know.

Why does it matter how clear I am about these things? Because lack of clarity, in the end, doesn’t make things better. I know this from the LGBT religious battles. How easy it is to brand every religious person who believes that queer sexuality is wrong as a hater. Many of them are. Hate motivates much of that group, too. And yet, while hatred has to be called what it is, casting the entire group as hateful has backfired on us. Many religious anti-gay people are now anxious to point out that they don’t hate LGBTs, that they “love the sinner, hate the sin,” and that LGBTs are still welcome to worship with them, so long as they don’t practice their “homosexual lifestyle.” Sometimes this is just manipulative rhetoric, with plenty of hatred behind it, but it also comes from good, well-meaning and often very narrowly experienced people who have been taught by their faith to believe things about human sexuality that I find utterly ludicrous. But I won’t get anywhere with these people by demonizing them, and furthermore, demonizing them provides me with nothing but short-term high. To keep it going, I have to keep demonizing, and the longer I keep demonizing, the more it looks like hate.

It’s hard, sometimes, to know where the lines are, to know what is polarizing, destructive rhetoric, and what is necessary and even prophetic truth-telling. So often, after appalling things like this happen, we make resolutions to speak with more kindness and compassion. Then we either backslide or slip into bland, status-quo-affirming moral relativity, because our definitions of “kindness” and “compassion” aren’t nuanced enough to incorporate the need, at times, to challenge injustice. And finally, we’re confronted by the fact that in many cases, such as in the abortion issue, we don’t agree on the definition of “injustice,” either.

So we don’t get an easy guide to this question of how best to use our power of language for just and nonviolent means. But precisely because language is so powerful, we aren’t allowed to throw up our hands and declare the problem impossible. We just have to discern, and learn from our mistakes, to grow in experience and hopefully in wisdom, and then ultimately to guide others by our example. It’s a tall order. It’s an especially tall order for a chronic hothead such as myself.

Language is where most of my personal power lies. When I’m truly angry, I have been known to completely eviscerate people with it. I once reduced my boss at a low-wage job to tears when I confronted her about her ill treatment of a fellow employee. (If I had needed the job as badly as the employee she was mistreating, I wouldn’t have had the luxury of confronting her.) As I watched this woman ride out an explosive wave of self-loathing, I stared at her calmly, thinking, This is power. I can use this.

That was a small-scale example of the high-wire act required when using language for the purposes of justice: How easily I could have slipped. I could have done the verbal equivalent of kicking her in the stomach, and stomp out, and I was powerfully tempted to do that—I was planning on quitting my job anyway, and I could afford to do it. Instead, I said something to indicate that I did not think she was worthless. Maybe it helped, maybe it didn’t. But I knew that treating her like a wretched sack of shit wouldn’t serve my ultimate goal, which was to make life better for the person she was mistreating.

I haven’t always done that. I’ve just as often gone for the stomach kick; I’ve gone for the stomach kick in arguments about abortion. But today, to honor this controversial man whom I greatly respected, I resolve to do better, to do my part to make this culture less violent and hateful. The research I plan to do for my PhD will lead me deep into the culture war. I won’t go in fighting.

(A final word: If you are one of my regular readers and are anti-choice, two things: 1) I value your readership, and 2) I respectfully ask you not to use the comments to defend or explain your position on abortion. Now isn’t the time for me. I certainly don’t mind if you identify as coming from that position in the context of responding to something else I’ve written here, but please, no political discussions on the rightness or wrongness of it. Not that I’m anticipating such comments, but I feel the need to add this, because I know how difficult this issue is for many people. Any disrespectful flamers will be deleted. I won’t acknowledge them, or give them any credence.)

dr. tiller

2009-05-31T14:47:00.000-07:00

I have been trying to work all afternoon on another post, but I’m having trouble maintaining my concentration because of the news about the murder of Dr. George Tiller, the abortion provider in Wichita who has been at the center of the abortion firestorm here in Kansas ever since I was old enough to decide for myself that I believed in a woman’s right to choose. This morning, he was gunned down in the lobby of his church. As of the last time I checked, it seems that police have already arrested a suspect. I’m relieved, and I hope they got the right man.

I remember the first time Dr. Tiller was shot, in 1993. In college, during one of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue’s relentless assaults on Wichita, I stood with other pro-choice demonstrators in front of an abortion clinic to help shield patients from the harassment of the protestors that surrounded it. I can’t remember if it was Tiller’s clinic—it may have been. I remember that the experience left me with the foulest adrenalin rush I’ve ever gotten from political action. Hate was everywhere. I felt it coming from the protestors, and I felt it in almost equal measure from my cohorts, some of whom screamed “When your daughters are raped, send them to us!” over the fence that separated us. I felt it, too—I hated every one of those Operation Rescue people with a virulent passion that I felt again today when I read their statement denouncing Tiller’s murder, a statement that ended with the words, “We pray for Mr. Tiller’s family that they will find comfort and healing that can only be found in Jesus Christ.” Their inability to extend comfort to the victims of a violent murder without making an exclusivist religious statement turns my stomach. But I’m sorry for the hatred that I feel, because I know that it doesn’t help, because I know that a never-ending cycle of hatred is responsible for this man’s death.

In recent years, Tiller had been the subject of endless legal harassment from our former state attorney general, Phil Kline, a man who essentially sought his office with the express purpose of tormenting Tiller. In the process, Kline has undermined the medical privacy of many of Tiller’s patients, not to mention the entire cause of women’s health in this state.

Tiller was especially reviled in the anti-abortion movement for performing late-term abortions. I realize these are controversial procedures, and my intent here is certainly not to provoke a discussion or debate about them. I only say this: Dr. Tiller helped many women whose lives were at stake, when no one else would help them. He helped many young girls who were the victims of rape, some of whom faced additional trauma at the hands of anti-choice protestors who swarmed them at the gates of his clinic. He helped these women in the face of grave personal danger, in the face of terrorism, in the face of endless hatred and demonization. He was a brave man, and I mourn his passing, not to mention the incredible brutality by which he died.

I know that it isn’t right to lay the blame for this act on the anti-abortion movement. (I refuse to use the term “pro-life.” It clouds the issue, and its inaccuracy is doubly apparent after an act such as this.) I know and (sometimes) respect a number of people who consider themselves to be part of this movement, and I know that they would revile an act such as this. Part of me wants to shake all of them, to say, “This is what your ‘culture of life’ has wrought.” But I know I can’t hold them accountable for this, any more than I want to be held accountable for the violent actions of someone with whom I might share a political viewpoint. Mostly I just feel despair at the way this is unfolding—I feared, after Obama’s election, that Kansas would turn yet again into a flashpoint for anti-abortion extremists, and with this act, I can only reach the miserable conclusion that my fears are being realized. I don’t know how to make it better. I know my rage doesn’t improve matters. I just don’t know how to stop feeling it.

If you are a praying person, please pray for Dr. Tiller’s family, for his church, for his patients, and for the Wichita community. And pray that we find a better way forward on abortion issues than that from whence we have come.

your basic vapid blog fodder here

2009-05-26T08:08:00.000-07:00

This meme is really just a placeholder, a way of letting you all know I’m still out there even when I let an entire shameful week go by without posting. I have a juicy post coming up later in the week, I promise. (I mean, I have an idea and everything!) I was going to write that post yesterday, but I was somewhat under the weather, due to my inability to remind myself that unlike my in-laws, I cannot drink a margarita for lunch at a Mexican restaurant, follow it with two glasses of wine in the afternoon and a beer and a half at dinner, and layer it all with Tostitos cheese dip and not nearly enough water. I am coming up on eight years of marriage, and I can still be found at 2:00 a.m. on holiday weekends, vomiting in my husband’s grandmother’s bathroom.

This meme has been going around my circle like a low-grade fever. I originally got it via e-mail from my aunt, Suze’s mom. Then Suze, Jenn, and Animal all did it. I am too lazy to link to their versions, though. You can find them if you’re determined.

1. WERE YOU NAMED AFTER ANYONE? No. My parents chose my name because it works well in both French and English. I was grateful for this later, when I was an exchange student in a French program along with two Heathers.

2. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU CRIED? I got sort of teary this morning when I saw a picture of two little girls in a refugee camp in Pakistan. Serious crying, though, I can’t remember.

3. DO YOU LIKE YOUR HANDWRITING? No, it’s demented and everyone thinks so. I usually print anything that anyone else, including me, needs to read. When I use cursive, I tend to lose control of my hand and make extra loops and whatnot. I blame the French.

4. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE LUNCH MEAT? Uh…chickpeas?

5. DO YOU HAVE KIDS? We have an almost-finished foster license and the likelihood of adopting one before too terribly long, but first I have to give myself a semester or two of grad school. I don’t want to be a new student and a new parent at the same time.

6. IF YOU WERE ANOTHER PERSON WOULD YOU BE FRIENDS WITH YOU? If I were another person and I met me, I would too busy interrogating my previous understanding of reality to be thinking about making a new friendship.

7. DO YOU USE SARCASM A LOT? Yes, although I’ve learned that it’s best applied with a light touch.

8. DO YOU STILL HAVE YOUR TONSILS? Yes. No one ever suggested I remove them. I guess I’m just young enough to have escaped that mandatory whip-‘em-out-itis.

9. WOULD YOU BUNGEE JUMP? Only if it were a choice between that and voting Republican.

10. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE CEREAL? I generally save money by avoiding boxed cereal and eating bread or oatmeal for breakfast. But if I’m honest? Corn flakes.

11. DO YOU UNTIE YOUR SHOES WHEN YOU TAKE THEM OFF? Yes, it really bothers me not to.

12. DO YOU THINK YOU ARE STRONG? Physically? For a petite girl, I’m pretty capable. I’m wiry and I occasionally lift a weight or two. The other, deeper kind of strong? I know I am when I need to be, but I often don’t feel that I am.

13. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE ICE CREAM? I have learned, after many painful attempts, to stay away from ice cream, much as I miss Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough.

14. WHAT IS THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE ABOUT PEOPLE? It depends on how close they’re standing to me, and whether they’ve said anything yet.

15. RED OR PINK? For what? The sky? My soul? My favorite t-shirt?

16. WHAT IS THE LEAST FAVORITE THING ABOUT YOURSELF? How easily I get angry.

17. WHO DO YOU MISS THE MOST? Well, in terms of people I’ve lost, I miss all my grandparents at times. But on a day-to-day basis, my friends who live in other states and countries. And my cousin-nephew Daniel.

18. WHAT COLOR SHOES ARE YOU WEARING? Black (flip-flops)

19. WHAT WAS THE LAST THING YOU ATE? A fried egg with Sriracha on flatbread leftover from last night.

20. WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO RIGHT NOW? Birds, and the highway.

21. IF YOU WERE A CRAYON, WHAT COLOR WOULD YOU BE? If I were a crayon, I wouldn’t care one way or the other.

22. FAVORITE SMELLS? Onions and garlic sautéing in butter; that toasty, early fall campfire smell; early morning in Kansas after a rainstorm; mountain thyme

23. WHO WAS THE LAST PERSON YOU TALKED TO ON THE PHONE? My dad

24. DO YOU LIKE THE PERSON WHO SENT THIS TO YOU? Assuming that means my aunt who e-mailed it to me originally? Like and love.

25. FAVORITE SPORTS TO WATCH? Kitty fu.

26. HAIR COLOR? Blackish brown.

27. EYE COLOR? Brown.

28. DO YOU WEAR CONTACTS? Yes. Last week I spent half a day thinking I had one stuck to the back of my eyelid but it turned out I had just washed it down the sink. Either that or my brain ate it. I have worn contacts for a decade, and this kind of thing still happens to me.

29. FAVORITE FOOD? I can’t choose. At the moment I’m quite partial to an asparagus noodle dish from a Deborah Madison cookbook, but that’s because asparagus is in season right now and so very tasty.

30. SCARY MOVIES OR HAPPY ENDINGS? A false choice.

31. LAST MOVIE YOU WATCHED? What the Bleep: Down the Rabbit Hole. It was for an event sponsored by my interfaith women’s group, and it was a last-minute substitution for a much better movie that we weren’t able to get in time. Two-and-a-half hours of insulting, poorly edited, credulous pseudoscience trying to assert that all of reality is created by human consciousness, and therefore we can manipulate it however we like, if only we believe that we can. I actually got up and left before it was over because it was so excruciatingly bad that I just couldn’t bear to sit there a moment longer. Also, it made me angry (see above re: anger issues).

32. WHAT COLOR SHIRT ARE YOU WEARING? White

33. SUMMER OR WINTER? As in, which do I like better? Summer, no question.

34. HUGS OR KISSES? Again, false choice.

35. FAVORITE DESSERT? I’m not a big dessert person, but I do miss my grandma’s rhubarb pie around this time of year.

36. WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING NOW? Dreams Underfoot by Charles de Lint.

39. WHAT IS ON YOUR MOUSE PAD? Some weird Dell design that looks like something from either The Matrix or X-Men. Have no idea where it came from—the computer is a Mac.

40. WHAT DID YOU WATCH ON TV LAST NIGHT? I don’t have any TV channels, but I did watch an episode of Futurama from Netflix while knitting.

41. FAVORITE SOUND? At this time of year, I’d say a Poncho Sanchez recording at 6:00 on a Friday evening.

42. ROLLING STONES OR BEATLES? Oh, I don’t know. I was born in 1976. I can’t really bring myself to get too partisan on the issue. I like the Beatles’ music better, and they did seem like somewhat nicer guys. On the other hand, I did TP Mick Jagger’s hedge. (And just broke my resolution never to mention that again.)

43. WHAT IS THE FARTHEST YOU HAVE BEEN FROM HOME? A hardware store in Versailles, Missouri where you can buy a leather belt monogrammed with Confederate flags and the words, “CSA / Our boys will rise again.” That was this weekend.

44. DO YOU HAVE A SPECIAL TALENT? Fidgeting

45. WHERE WERE YOU BORN? Madison, Wisconsin

flying snot

2009-05-18T14:55:00.000-07:00

Lately I have been hating everything I write on this blog. I post something and immediately have to fight to urge to take it down. Everything I write makes me feel like a snob, an asshole, a whiner, or a generally boring person. I would quit entirely, were it not for the fact that I have been through these phases of self-loathing before and I know that capitulating to them leads to dark places where I am afraid to say anything to anyone whose opinion I value for fear of seeming mean or stupid or wrong.

So, in the interest of pushing myself radically away from injurious self-consciousness, a story:

I was doing really well with this allergy season. Normally I am a swollen-faced snot rocket from April to June, and then again from August to November, but last month, drippy and miserable, I overcame my fear of needles in the face and asked the guy I occasionally visit for acupuncture to treat me for allergies. While I can heartily recommend this treatment to others based on the results, I add this caveat: First make sure you trust your acupuncturist with your life. Otherwise you will find yourself physically unable to submit to this procedure. I do trust my acupuncturist, but even so I had to fight a powerful instinctual urge to slide off the table and flee out of his front door. “Close your eyes,” he said. “I know this is unpleasant.” It was, and it was also worth it. For five weeks, I needed nary a Kleenex, let alone a Claritin. Even when the news reported a high pollen count, I was fine.

But this weekend, I noticed that the treatment was starting to wear off. Either that or the pollen count got higher than even my chi-flushed sinuses could manage. I’m okay today, but on Saturday and Sunday I was sniffling and sneezing a la usual.

Even when allergies make you look and feel as sick as a cold would, you have to go on with everyday life. I wish they would design a T-shirt for such days, something that said in large print, “IT’S JUST ALLERGIES. I’M NOT CONTAGIOUS. PLEASE IGNORE MY SNOT.”

I could have used that T-shirt yesterday. We were going to stay home all day and garden, but after turning over our entire backyard tomato plot with a shovel (ok, Eric did that part—it would have taken me days), we noted that the soil was pretty nitrogenous and messy, due to poor drainage, recent torrential rain, and my habit of making slightly goopy compost. Since we needed to go out anyway to take in recycling, we stopped by the garden center and picked up a bag of gypsum to dry things up a bit. As I was paying for the bag, reaching into my wallet for some cash, I mentioned to the cashier that I could give him four pennies, and as I spoke, to my horror, a drop of snot flew out of my nose and hit my right hand.

What does one do in such a situation? One option is to play through and act as though nothing has happened. This runs the risk of making you seem like the sort of person who sprays snot at strangers willy-nilly, oblivious to the inappropriateness, like those foul creatures who pick their noses and cough without covering their mouths in buses and subway cars. On the plus side, it minimizes further personal interaction with the person who has just seen you drip the snot, which carries a powerful appeal in and of itself.

There is also the humor option, which I considered for less than a nanosecond. One might remark, jovially, “Oh, dear me, please don’t mind my excretions. I just got back from a tour of pig farms in Mexico, and I must have picked up a bug.” Funny!

The last option, the one I chose, is to mutter “Excuse me,” then to use one’s left hand, the non-snotted one, to pass the cashier the four pennies and several bills, bills that are, according the New York Times, the perfect carriers for flu viruses, which can survive in mucus plastered to legal tender for over a week. Having given the cashier evidence that I am the sort of person who probably sprays my legal tender with mucus on a regular basis, I immediately regretted not using my credit card.

I am not overly paranoid about such things, but if I had been that cashier, I would have immediately disinfected my work surface, ran to the restroom and washed my hands in the hottest water I could stand for at least a minute, then fretted for the rest of the afternoon about what I might have inhaled.

I will now post this and see how many seconds pass before I regret it. And I might go get some more acupuncture.

scott simon and motherhood

2009-05-12T13:52:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday on Weekend Edition, Scott Simon delivered an essay entitled At My Place, Every Day is Mother’s Day. It was a sweet, tongue-in-cheek appreciation of his wife for her hard work as a stay-at-home mom of their two small daughters, laced with self-depreciating remarks about his own domestic incompetence.

I read it through once, and found it annoying, without putting my finger completely on why. This is my experience with most things that Scott Simon writes, and many of the things he says on air. I think he’s overrated, but there’s little about him that I can pinpoint as blatantly offensive. A friend once described him as a “sanctimonious bastard”; that comes as close as anything to describing my distaste for his work. But my dislike makes me feel like a bit of a pill. He writes affectionate essays about his wife and children and is generally liberal and peace-loving. He did, after 9/11, write an incoherent screed entitled “Even Pacifists Must Support This War,” an essay that made me feel even more miserable, bullied, and alienated than I already felt at that time, but few of us were on an even keel after 9/11, and I could probably forgive him for that. No, what bugs me is the drippiness, the holier-than-thou-ness, of Scott Simon. And is that really a reason to hate the guy? I could, alternatively, avoid his essays. (Unfortunately, they tend to come up right when I’m in the car on Saturday mornings.)

A good friend posted the Mother’s Day story, appreciatively, on Facebook. Rather than going back and reading the story carefully, to see if my objections held any water, I wrote a quick comment, complaining about several lines in the story that bugged me. (Note to self: Do not do this. If you are going to criticize anything, reread it. Twice.) My friend tactfully responded that she had read one of the lines that bothered me as irony, that in fact Scott Simon meant to criticize the very cultural daftness that I found annoying about that line. And she was right. Which was embarrassing, because nobody as sarcastic as I am likes to have to admit that they missed the irony.

Of course, even with that, the essay still bothers me, and having read it more carefully now, I have a better idea of why. It’s not the appreciation of his wife’s relentless workday—I know how hard stay-at-home parents work, or at least I know as well as a person who has never been one can know. It’s his cutesy depiction of himself as the Dad Who Does Jackshit At Home that irks. He describes a typical morning, with himself holed up in his office drinking coffee and reading baseball scores while his wife tries to pee with a 2-year-old on her lap and dress two squirming children at the same time. Yes, this is supposed to be self-effacing, and one might also reasonably conclude that Simon is in fact exaggerating, that he’s probably a much more active parent than he portrays himself to be here. My guess is he puts his girls to bed at night. But still, I don’t think it’s particularly funny. Because the implication that I read into it is that it’s okay to let women do all the work of child-rearing, so long as men voice occasional appreciation and admit that the women are probably working a lot harder than they are. This, of course, is the sort of reading that a lot of people would find clinically oversensitive.

After missing the irony and making the dumb comment on Facebook, I went back to the essay and read the online comments, something I very rarely do with NPR pieces. And I found that many people loved it, and the handful of people who didn’t voiced objections similar to mine. The one who said that Simon’s piece was insulting to all mothers was possibly a little over-the-top. The one who pointed out that she read similarly humorous writings on motherhood in the 50s and 60s in the “woman’s work is never done” genre and that she found the piece patronizing was probably onto something. All critical commenters were roundly dismissed by everyone else, Simon included, with advice to “get a sense of humor” and “take a chill pill,” which is such familiar language in this sort of online discussion that it should be codified.

(Sometimes I think that the equality movements will have finally borne their fruits when it is finally widely acknowledged that it is possible to notice that something was intended to be humorous without actually finding it to be so oneself.)

Of course, as I noted later to my friend in an e-mail, part of my reaction to the piece is pure, unexamined defensiveness. I’m about to start a PhD program, and when I feel like I’m settled into my new schedule, Eric and I plan to adopt from foster care. (For the time being, our adoption plans are on hold. I realized that I wanted to start school first.) I don’t plan to drop out of school when that happens. I don’t usually feel criticized for my choices, but as I confessed to my friend, I sometimes feel isolated by them. And isolation tends to foster defensiveness. At least it does in me.

But what the hell do my feelings of isolation over my career and parenting choices have to do with Simon’s piece? It’s possible to read the essay as a covert championing of stay-at-home-motherhood as a superior option, but that interpretation is a pretty big stretch. Here, I think the problem is mine. As much as I loathe the so-called “Mommy Wars,” I am already fighting them, incapable of reading the praise of one mother as anything but a criticism of women who do it differently.

Mothers who work outside the home take endless shit for it. Mothers who stay at home with their kids take endless shit for it. (Michel Martin, another NPR person, wrote a fantastic piece this week on the endless, pointless criticism that mothers face.) And as a society, we still have not let go of the idea that all women should want the same thing. We can’t decide what the hell that thing is, but we sure are fixated on it.

front porches

2009-05-11T15:50:00.000-07:00

When we first moved in to our condo community three years ago, we received in our mailbox one of the community-wide notices that our beleaguered, slightly gnarly office manager distributes on occasion. It contained a reminder that keeping a clean porch and deck is part of our condominium charter, and a plea for compliance. This document had, as far as I have observed, no effect whatsoever on the porch-cluttering behavior of the community.

I had very uptight, cluttered-porches-are-trashy views on the matter when we first moved here. But I’ve loosened up. A bit. People who live in single family homes often have garages or sheds to house their grilling equipment, outdoor toys, tomato cages, ratty gardening shoes, and the like. Condos just don’t give you many options when it comes to that stuff that really wants to live outdoors or at least in some middle space that holds up to regular dirt exposure. I’m still a little snooty about it, I admit—I do occasionally find myself prissily wishing that my favorite neighbors would clear their front porch of the old political signs and Christmas decorations (though at least the signs are for Obama). My own front porch, as it happens, currently sports a green plastic tarp and a five-gallon bucket, and has in the recent past also played host to two cloth outdoor chairs with mold issues, and a pair of tatty vinyl cushions. For a while, I tried to convince myself that my outdoor shit made more sense as outdoor shit than did my neighbor’s shittier outdoor shit, but dudes, this is a slippery slope. Face it, Stephanie. You fit right in.

I might also at this juncture mention the piece of scotch tape that lives on our front door. It has been there ever since we have moved in, and cannot be removed without a razor blade, which would remove paint, which could then only be replaced with the permission of the condo association board. However, you can’t tell how complicated this removal process would be from looking at it. Nope, it just looks like we are too indolent to be bothered with cleaning up the skanky old piece of tape on our door. This piece of tape is a daily reminder to me to keep a leash on the running commentary of suspiciously middle class-bred judgment that is one of the less enlightened things going on in my head at any given moment.

Unless I’m in the neighborhood about three-quarters of a mile south on our street, which I was several days ago as I returned home on foot from taking my car the shop. Let’s just say I have as much trouble keeping my judgment on a leash over there as some of the people around here have with their dogs. If anyone ever wants to make a coffee table book entitled “Redneck Tableaux of the Heartland,” I will direct you to this block, where you can find a certain two-story house with a “For Rent” sign in the yard. The boards of the low, wide porch are warped with water and age, and a large couch with battered orange and brown upholstery rests atop them. The couch, as well as the surrounding area, is strewn with clutter: clothing, knick-knacks, picture frames, small pieces of furniture. Two wooden signs, lettered with black spray-paint, are propped against the supporting beams. One reads, “FAMILY ONLY.” The other reads, “GIT UR SHIT.”

It’s hard to tell whether the residents of this house created this porch display out of a genuine desire to distribute lost possessions back to their proper owners, or because they take perverse pleasure in appalling and/or entertaining the sorts of people who are likely to go home and write about the porch on their blogs. Or some combination of the two. When I related the sighting to Eric, and pontificated over this question, he suggested that they—the porch people—probably have a complicated relationship with irony.

lonely werewolf girl

2009-05-06T19:48:00.000-07:00

(ETA: Here is a good review of Lonely Werewolf Girl that actually describes the plot, in case anyone's interested.)

Last night, as I was curled up reading, it occurred to me that entering a PhD program is really going to put a cramp on my young adult fantasy fiction addiction.

It’s been a while since I read a piece of adult realistic fiction that I got excited about. I don’t why this is, exactly. I’m constantly hearing about novels that I think sound like something I should read, but whenever I go into the adult fiction section of the library, I end up wandering the aisles listlessly, unable to generate an interest in anything. Plus I’m on an indefinite hiatus from reading books about relationships in which men are assholes and women are exploited and disempowered, which knocks out about half of it. The last adult novel (and I mean plain old adult, not adult wink-wink nudge-nudge say-no-more) that I really got into was The Monsters of Templeton, which, despite the relatively non-fantastical human storyline, also featured an enormous, quasi-metaphorical fish monster.

I have no idea what’s happened to me. When I was a teenager, I wasn’t reading fantasy or anything in the YA aisle. I didn’t read anything specifically geared towards “young readers” after the age of twelve or thirteen. Instead, I confused the hell out of myself reading Ellen Gilchrist, Francine du Plessix Gray, Iris Murdoch, and God knows what else. I just went into General Fiction and grabbed things, and no one stopped me. I now find it hilarious that I read Lovers and Tyrants in my early teens, before I had a clue about either one. These days I’d find such a book about as compelling as a manual of baseball statistics.

Before going to Long Beach last month, I scoured the young adult fiction aisle of Borders, looking for travel reading. The pickings were slim. The doorstop-sized Twilight its endless spawn took up about a third of the shelves, and another third was taken up with a parade of slutty Twilight knockoffs, their glossy black goth covers adorned with flowing black tresses, bare white necks, and various other pieces of silvery cheap dime-store vampire symbolism. The rest of the section was full of things like Preppy Bitch Academy Series 236. There were a few good books by Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, and Terry Pratchett, but I’ve read those already.

I had better luck at the library, where I made my own doorstop-sized find: Lonely Werewolf Girl by Martin Millar, the book that consumed three of my days in Long Beach and fulfilled every requirement for good travel reading and then some. I suppose this book would fall into the category of “urban fantasy,” a sub-genre that I haven’t really explored. If there were a continuum for fantasy stories, and at one end was the word “luminous,” and at the other end was the word “gritty,” urban fantasy would, as you might guess, be more towards the latter end.

This is certainly the case with Lonely Werewolf Girl, which features a homeless, illiterate, suicidal, anorexic, laudanum-addicted, borderline sociopathic seventeen-year-old werewolf girl named Kalix MacRinnalch. (Yes, laudanum. It’s out with poets, but apparently the wolves still dig it.) The book begins with her staggering through London, alone and delirious. Her family, a pack of power-hungry Scottish werewolves with a big old castle, has disowned her. Some of them are trying to kill her. Every time they make a move in that direction, however, she explodes into a murderous wolfy rage, dispensing with her assassins, fueled by nothing but anger, drugs, and werewolf mojo. Kalix doesn’t really want to be alive, but somehow she stays that way, and eventually is sort of okay with that. The plot—the plot is way too complicated to describe. It’s fast-paced and gripping, and there are literally dozens of compelling characters involved, but Kalix’s confused fight for survival is its power core.

I’m not sure I would have been able to tolerate Kalix’s story when I was seventeen myself. If this book had been around in 1994, and had I managed to pick it up, I probably would have put it down after three or four chapters. Kalix is so intense, so angry, so unlikable, and so self-destructive; I imagine that the teenaged me would have found her an excessive character, even without the werewolf thing. Which is backward, when you think about it. Young adult fiction often has protagonists in the grips of extreme emotions and experiences, and it’s generally the job of adults to find these things excessive and unrelatable, isn’t it?

But when I was seventeen, I didn’t have any friends who were on the brink of destroying themselves. By the time I graduated from college, I did. I know well by now what that looks like. If I met a real-life Kalix, I wouldn’t want to be near her, I’m sure. The last time I discovered a friend was a drug addict, I ended the friendship right there, too exhausted and frightened by my previous experiences with addicted friends to let that dark energy into my life again. Kalix has people in her life who play a role that I’ve played, trying to save someone who seems hell-bent on dying. If the story itself weren’t a fantasy, I doubt I’d be able to bear reading it.

But this is why I’ve come to love fantasy—because something about the unreal surroundings allows me to go places that I’m too overwhelmed to go in so-called realistic fiction. Kalix is a werewolf. That fact gives me some distance from her story; it lets me step into her world with a layer of protection. When fantasy is good, no matter how dark, it feeds a sense of hope and anticipation in me that acts as a buffer against the usual despair prompted by stories of violent and/or self-destructive people. Most fantasy works from the premise that redemption is possible. Maybe that’s why I crave it.

(P.S.: I know that none of us needs more evidence that the Christian Right is stupid, but still, I find it hilarious that they raised such a stink about Harry Potter when there is stuff like this on the YA shelves sliding under the radar. Furthermore, they didn’t even notice the aspects of Harry Potter that might actually be subversive and/or threatening to their politics—they just got their chaste white panties in a bunch over the effing witchcraft. For God’s sake, how many books on the YA shelf feature witchcraft? It’s a good thing these people are so culturally clueless, or they’d be banning half of the damn library. Lonely Werewolf Girl has a smattering of witchcraft, but you hardly notice it for all the other depraved behavior going on: blood feuds, bounty hunting, substance abuse, and lashings of ill-advised sex.)

teeth, knitting

2009-05-04T13:16:00.000-07:00

There are many things I could write about today. My sore, post-wisdom-tooth-removal mouth is the obvious one. Whining is attractive, so let me proceed: My mouth still hurts some but I can’t take any more ibuprofen or narcs because they have savaged my stomach, I’m thoroughly sick of yogurt and pureed fruit, my prescription mouthwash has a bitter aftertaste, my stitches make me feel like I have spider legs stuck in my teeth, I can’t have carbonated beverages for another two days and I want a fucking beer. And potato chips. ME WANT POTATO CHIPS AND BEER NOW.

Actually, that’s not strictly true. What I want right now is Grandma’s Tummy Mint tea and antacids that I don’t have to chew.

My oral surgeon looks like Stephen Colbert. With a mustache. In the two hours or so that it took for me to come out of general anesthesia, I estimate that I made some babbling reference to this fact approximately thirty times. Eric might be able to give an exact number, but I am too humiliated to ask him.

(I am not, by the way, of the ranks that find Stephen Colbert attractive. So you can get that right out of your head. And it's a good thing, too, because someone who looked like someone I find attractive would be an uncomfortable person to permit to render me unconscious, jack open my jaw, and fish around in my mouth with metal implements.)

The upside to oral surgery is that recovery provides an excuse to knit for hours on end. For most of Thursday and Friday, and substantial parts of the weekend, I did nothing but sit on the couch, knit, and watch Futurama and Buffy. I finished a pair of socks and cranked out over half of a sweater. I forced Eric to feign admiration of my prowess with cables. I slipped into serious knitting addiction, and I still feel it pulling at me now, suggesting that I don’t really need to finish this blog entry, deal with our refinancing application, file all the papers on the desk, clean the litter box, exercise, pull weeds, or take action on any of the numerous household projects that have to be completed before I start school next fall. Surely I could find some NPR podcast that would be constructive listening…something, anything to give me an excuse to knit some more.

My friend Dee Anna, in the throes of a work-related repetitive motion injury that renders her incapable of knitting more than a few rows at a time, distracted herself from the misery of yarn withdrawal by posting a list of questions on her blog to her fellow knitters, about how and why we began the craft. I’ve been wanting to answer them, so I will do so here, with my best attempt to make this interesting for non-knitters (Muggles). If there is a fiber whore in your life, perhaps this will help you to understand her/him better.

How did you learn to knit? Let me backtrack. When I was nine years old, we lived in France for a semester and I was often lonely, scared, and above all, bored. My mom, probably in a desperate attempt to stop me whining, taught me to crochet. I still remember the chunky red and white variegated yarn she bought me, the white plastic handle and silver hook of the crochet hook, and the bumpy, uneven scarf I created. But most of all I remember the calm and sense of protectedness that came to me when I was crocheting. It was a magic shield that I made myself, at a time when most of the outer things in life were foreign and strange.

A few years later, someone, I can’t remember who, gave me a long implement that was a cross between a knitting needle and crochet hook and attempted to teach me a knitting/crochet hybrid that I have never encountered anywhere else. For lack of a better term, I will refer to it as croshitting. It did not stick.

I crocheted off and on for the next seventeen years, making mostly afghans and later, when my friends started having children, baby blankets. I enjoyed it, but that elemental need that it fulfilled for me back in France was ultimately replaced with boredom. Crochet…no offense to any crocheters out there, but it’s a craft with definite limits, particularly for those whose tastes don’t run in the seventies retro direction. I knew that knitting was superior, but I believed that knitting was an art akin to glass-blowing, so intricate and disaster-fraught that one misstep would ruin hours of hard work. I was wrong. Mostly.

About six years ago, when we were living in Ann Arbor, my cousin Liz sent me a rave review of Debbie Stoller’s Stitch ‘N Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook. Along with thousands of other twenty-something Third Wave feminists, I taught myself to knit from this book.

Did you have a teacher or any outside guidance? I lied—actually, my aunt taught me to knit, in my early twenties. The thing is that my aunt knits the way most Americans knit, by holding the yarn in her right hand. For some reason, I am constitutionally unable to do this, and was constantly trying to put it in my left. Knitting did not take for me until I got this book and learned that holding the yarn in one’s left hand is a perfectly viable method of knitting. Continental, even.

At various points, I have sought counsel from the much more experienced Suze, but I usually just figure it out on my own.

How was it in the beginning? Obsessive. It took over every evening, and I took it to work with me and knitted during all my breaks. I considered possible methods for knitting while conducting phone interviews with clinical directors of outpatient drug treatment facilities, which was my job at the time, but fortunately my desire to remain employed kicked in.

How long did it take to learn to love knitting? Just a few days. That’s about how long it took me to master the basic movements. Almost immediately after that I had that magic shield experience again. And that’s a big part of why I still knit: because the world feels so scary sometimes, and knitting makes me feel safe, and calmer about things. And then there’s something about hope and regeneration and tapping into creative forces and living metaphors that I’m not really capable of articulating without sounding silly.

I also had a fellow twenty-something Third Wave feminist knitting friend at work, who learned that soaking one’s feet while knitting a white cardigan and drinking red wine is a bad idea, so that I didn’t have to learn for myself.

What was your first project? Promise you won’t laugh? It was a cell phone cozy, with orange and pink stripes. Eric pronounced it the most absurd piece of fiber known to humankind, and I have to say he was right. It muffled the sound of my cell phone ring so that half the time I missed it, and when I did happen to hear it, I couldn’t get it out of the cozy in time to answer it. Also, at that time I didn’t know that they had invented such a thing as a keyguard, so while my phone was cozied, it was randomly calling my friends and family and treating them to the sounds of the inside of my purse.

What do you wish you had made for a first project? The Princess Snowball Cat Bed from Stitch ‘N Bitch. Because I’m sure it would have been a spectacular failure from every possible angle, and would make a much better story.

long beach

2009-04-28T07:07:00.000-07:00

Long Beach is not necessarily the place that comes to mind when people think “southern California tourist destination.” Eric suspects that his conference was held there because the CDC got the hotel for cheap. The day before we arrived was the last day of the Toyota Grand Prix, which was held right outside our hotel, and the cleanup lasted for the duration of our stay and beyond. When we first arrived, we were unaware of this fact, and kept wondering what all the concrete barriers, miles of sponsor signs, enormous Eastern bloc-looking metal barricades, and squeal-y tire marks all over the streets were there for. Eventually we saw a sign from the race and figured it out.

The first night, before we had figured out the utterly baffling system of stairs and raised walkways that allows pedestrians to bypass the littered streets, we ended up literally on the racetrack, then in a junky parking lot, then in another junky parking lot, until eventually a maintenance truck drove by and we managed to get instructions that freed us from the post-Grand Prix labyrinth. The experience prompted a teensy rant from me about how my first night ever in California I end up walking in circles in a deserted backalley shithole, which is exactly what happens to me in every place that I ever travel, ever. I have a backalley shithole radar in my brain, and it operates completely without my consent.

Once we were freed, however, we found a lovely brewery, which made the restaurant decision easy. When traveling, Eric and I have a tendency to wander endlessly along city blocks, debating the merits of various restaurants until our shared indecisiveness catches up with my blood sugar and I loudly threaten to drop to my knees on the sidewalk. A brewery, though, solves everything. We are brewery folk. We ate there twice because we were so happy it was there.

Southern California is so weird looking to a person from the Midwest. Palm trees? I thought they made those out of plastic for movies.

I probably wasted the whole week, but I don’t really care. I wasn’t feeling intrepid enough to locate transportation and go explore LA by myself. We were right next to a harbor, and I have never gotten over the novelty of anything related to the ocean, so I just sort of sat around, staring at the water and reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and an excellent book about drug-addicted werewolves in London (I hope to write more about this one later—it was quite stunning). It was the path of least resistance, and that was the kind of mood I was in. The whole harbor area was on the touristy side, but I’m not nearly as tourist-averse as I should be. In fact, if there are pretty parks and views of bodies of water at hand, I can deal with all manner of tourist crap. Mallish restaurants, piped-in elevator music on the boardwalk, battalions of hungry pigeons—sign me up. As long as I have a book. (With zombies. Or werewolves.) For me, this vacation was really just an excuse to read fiction for many uninterrupted hours without guilt. I would add, “under the California sunshine,” except that it was overcast for three days out of five. Still, it was lovely. I can see why people are attracted to So-Cal—such an even-keeled, moderate climate compared to tempestuous tornadic crap that we came home to.

My biggest splurge was an afternoon at the Aquarium of the Pacific, which coincided nicely with Earth Day—a fact that probably explains the battalions of schoolchildren who were there as well. Aquariums are a dazzling experience for me—they generate a cathedral-like awe, a renewed sense that this planet we live on is a place of absolute wonder and endless evolutionary creativity (though a little less of the same on the flu front would be spiffy). I loved the goofy puffins with their torrid love lives, the stunning and gregarious sea lions and sea otters, and all the fish: the cute, little ones; the weird, warty ones; the gender bending ones; the florid, deadly poisonous ones, the ones that just look like pieces of old tire. Did you know that there is a fish called a humbug? (Apparently it starred in Finding Nemo, but I never saw that, so it was new to me.) A Picasso triggerfish? That there is a creature known as the sexy shrimp, and it is no bigger than your thumbnail? I can stare at marine life for hours, which is why I’m best off going to aquariums alone. I learned this in Seattle, when I emerged at the end of the aquarium to find my spouse and his entire family sitting on a bench, wondering which creature might have leapt from its tank and eaten me.

I hope to write more later this week, when I will be holed up recovering from my upcoming wisdom tooth surgery. I may be completely high on narcotic pain meds, but that can only ease the writing process, right?

holding on

2009-04-27T07:28:00.001-07:00

Sorry for the blog silence. I've been in southern California with Eric for the past week, tagging along to give myself a vacation while he attended a CDC conference. (No, he has nothing to do with any swine flu stuff.) Right now I have household matters coming out of my ears, but I promise a more substantial post soon. Please stay tuned.

and of course, it's not simple at all

2009-04-15T08:57:00.000-07:00

I’ve been feeling uncomfortable with the More-with-Less post I wrote a few days ago. Maybe it’s just my tiresome Mennonite issues running in circles and snapping at their own ankles, or maybe I just have too much time on my hands. Something about it bugs me, though—like the worry that I’m being as smug as I think that cookbook is.

It’s this trap you fall into when you’re trying to distance yourself from something that you used to be part of and are still sort of part of but would like to define yourself independently from, using all the tools of irony and higher education and feigned smartness at your disposal: you doth protest too much. I once knew this Mennonite—and I won’t say when or where, just that he was of the baby boomer generation—who continued to attend a Mennonite church and participate in that community, but who obviously had a lot invested in seeming more sophisticated than Mennonites in general. He was a well-traveled, high-achieving person with great success in his career, an upstanding liberal who valued knowledge and education and skepticism. I liked him, and yet there were times when I would think, “You’re really working hard, aren’t you? To not be something?” I wasn’t sure what was going on there. I think he was raised by very, very conservative people, and I don’t know what that’s like. I don’t judge him too harshly, but there were times when, somewhat against my will, I found him terribly annoying, a too-cool-for-school sort of annoying. I have a fear of coming across the way he did—like someone who can’t quite hide his pleasure at being worldlier than his roots. (The problem, of course, is that striving to seem worldlier and more sophisticated than other Mennonites is pretty typical Mennonite behavior. There’s no escape.)

I fear the smugness disease from all sides. I linked More-with-Less to Mennonites at large when I wrote how self-congratulatory it is. I’m not the only one who has noticed. Back in the seventies, my mom gave it to an earthly crunchy hippie friend, thinking she would love the values therein and all, and instead her friend’s response was, “Wow, Mennonites sure think they’re smart, don’t they?” So here is my other fear: being seen as part of that.

I grew up with a conception of Mennonites as a persecuted minority, but now I can see how insufferable we can be to the people around us. Even when we’re right about a war being wrong or people consuming too many resources or what have you, we’re often so humorless and superior about it as to hurt our cause. I thought of this not long ago when this quiz, “How Mennonite are You?” was circulating among my friends on Facebook. It was just over-simplified Mennonite trivia, so everyone was scoring “100 percent Mennonite.” Two of my non-Mennonite high school friends took and aced it, and one left a comment on the other’s quiz result: “See? This is what we get for growing up around…them.” And I had to laugh, realizing, God, yes, we must have been a pain in the ass to grow up around. We were so proud of ourselves for our peace stance and our suffering ancestors and our liberal arts colleges and our ethical food choices. When I was a young adult I clung to that pride because I was insecure in every other way.

These days that kind of tribal identification does nothing for me, at least not spiritually. But a blog is not necessarily the best place to stake out a resistance to, for example, the kind of personal lifestyle pride epitomized in More-with-Less. Blogs easily devolve into personal lifestyle catalogs. And sometimes that’s just fun. How many memes are based on this mundane curiosity we have about fellow bloggers, and this mundane desire to reveal our own habits? It can be narcissistic and/or snoopy, but more often it’s just harmless and amusing entertainment. Recently, though, I stopped reading several blogs that I’ve read for a long time because it seemed like in every post the authors were either describing how much work they had to do or explaining the contents of their pantries in minute detail. I didn’t fault the bloggers or think there was anything particularly wrong with what they were writing, but I did find the posts tiresome, so I told myself, for heaven’s sake, don’t get annoyed, just stop reading. Save some time. It’s no big.

Then I came back to my own blog and promptly started worrying that I am just as tiresome. After all, I write a lot about the everyday, especially food, and I write a lot about how I feel my everyday actions affect the whole, and that kind of thing can be self-righteous, or just plain dull. (I’m not fishing for reassurance here, I promise.) That paranoia folded conveniently into my various Mennonite paranoias.

I have two competing urges I’m dealing with here. One is the urge to never incite criticism from any quarters, ever. That urge is Mennonite, or female, or Midwestern, or whatever—take your pick. The other urge is to be unapologetically all those things that I am that might incur judgment on the pages of More-with-Less, and by extension, from the chorus of Mennonite standard-bearers that still lives in my head: Collector of glossy cookbooks. Drinker of alcoholic beverages. Consumer of large pieces of fitness equipment. Lover of diverse and sometimes popular entertainment. Religious pluralist. Profligate user of profanity. One-time co-habitater-before-marriage. Rabid political partisan. Most of the time, I just am those things, without making a big this-is-my-identity song and dance out of it. Identity fixations are part of what drives me crazy about the Mennos. But when I try to explain my life and my choices in the context of my Mennonite background, I end up in this identity hall of mirrors, imagining conversations with all the Mennonites who piss me off with their righteous certainty. You’re too prideful! No, you’re too prideful! No, YOU’RE too prideful!

I started thinking about More-with-Less again because I was trying to figure out a way to write about anti-consumerist simplicity after struggling with myself over a large and arguably non-essential purchase. I got so caught up in my continued frustration over the preachiness of the cookbook, and everything it represents to me, that I’m not sure I explored what I meant to explore, which is my ambivalence about the whole concept of simplicity as a desirable ideal. I find the various movements against mindless consumerism that have been springing up in recent years to be very encouraging and completely necessary, but I’m always uncomfortable when I hear people credulously idealize the Amish, or even when I read about the “voluntary simplicity” movement, as sympathetic as I find most of its ideals. I’m uncomfortable because I’ve seen how easily anti-consumerist simplicity morphs into ideological simplicity, resistance to learning, and dogmatism against any challenge to one’s worldview.

When I rave about all my international cookbooks, I wonder if I’m ranting at the writers of More-with-Less, or if I’m really aiming past them, back to my ancestors who believed that the only books worth reading were the Bible and the Martyrs Mirror. They were always trying to lump the whole world into one big evil entity that they could define themselves against. Now I find myself struggling to be who I am without always using opposition to measure my place. That’s part of what they gave me, I suppose. If only escaping it were simple.

oh amazon, for heaven's sake

2009-04-13T14:13:00.000-07:00

You know, in this day and age, the idea that an enormous online retailer of books would strip the sales rankings from books with LGBT content, thereby rendering them difficult to impossible to find through search function, then defend the move by stating that they are doing the same to all books containing “adult” content even as the sales rankings remain on many works of straight pornography, thereby creating a virtual bizarro world in which Playboy is a wholesome read and theoretical works by Michel Foucault are for filthy smutbags, and would do so without anticipating the massive shitstorm that such a boneheaded move would generate, seems outlandish at best.

It happened, though, and since the aforementioned shitstorm began, Amazon is apparently scrambling to fix it and blame it on a “glitch.” But what the hell? How does a “glitch” produce that specific brand of censorship?

(Maybe this way.)

Again, sales rankings are a big deal because without them, you can’t find books on Amazon. For better or for worse, a lot of us use Amazon more or less the way we used to use the card catalog—to search for books related to our interests. So for instance, if this ranking censorship were to stick—which it won’t, especially if we shame Amazon good and well for doing it in the first place—I could look forward to a good many of the books I would need for my LGBT-related graduate research not appearing in an Amazon search, due to their apparently being porn. Not that the inconveniencing of my research would, by any means, be among the most damaging consequences of such an idiotic move on Amazon’s part. From a writer’s perspective, being de-ranked by Amazon amounts to a significant hit in visibility for his or her book, because Amazon is so dominant. And it might be a book that somebody really needs to read.

The linking of all LGBT-related anything with “adult” content…well, I don’t need to tell anyone who reads this blog how offensive that is. I could rail about the injustice of American Psycho being A-Okay while the children’s book Heather Has Two Mommies is “adult”….but you get it. And probably a lot of people at Amazon get it too. I have a hard time believing that this is some nefarious new underhanded company policy, especially given how they’re scrambling to fix it. But I agree with Neil Gaiman that an apology and a fuller explanation would be nice.

I’m sure Amazon is hoping the whole thing will blow over so they can pretend it never happened. It seems important, though, to set a precedent of consumer disgust, so that they—and any other online book retailers who are getting ideas—don’t go away with the impression that this kind of screw-up isn’t a freaking big deal. To quote the blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, “fuckwittery should not go unrewarded.”

The aforementioned blog suggests we all Google Bomb Amazon by creating this link: Amazon Rank. Use the words “Amazon Rank” in your link and link to http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/amazonrank. What you will find there is a newly-created verb for the modern lexicon. If you Google “Amazon Rank,” it’s the first hit that comes up, thanks to a bunch of pissed-off bloggers putting the link on their pages. If you are feeling bad for the people at Amazon who are eating shit for a mistake that may have been not so much evil as just profoundly ill-conceived, you may think this is overkill. But it made me laugh, and I’m not particularly nice sometimes. Hence my link.

Here’s an update from the same blog that discusses why it may have happened. Many other good links are included. This may be the one and only time that I link here to a romance novel-themed blog.

Best quote of the day on the subject, again from this post by Patrick Neilsen Hayden:

A great deal of racism, homophobia, etc., happens not because anyone particularly wants to be racist or homophobic, but because the ground has been tilted that way by arrangements made long ago and if you’re not constantly on the lookout it’s easiest to roll downhill.

ETA: Excellent coverage on Jezebel.

simple, spicy

2009-04-08T15:35:00.000-07:00

When I moved into my first apartment, back in my early twenties, I owned one cookbook. It was the More-with-Less Cookbook, a spiral-bound Mennonite production, first published in the same year I was born. The cover featured the symbol of Mennonite Central Committee, half cross, half dove of peace, outlined with a handful of black-eyed peas and barley and a fragment of Swiss cheese. It was subtitled (and still is): suggestions by Mennonites on how to eat better and consume less of the world’s limited food resources. I grew up eating from this cookbook, and the recipes in it were for the food I knew best.

That first year on my own, More-with-Less really suited my lifestyle. I made it a goal not to spend more than twenty-five dollars a week on food, twenty if I could help it. I didn’t buy spices, olive oil, or any dairy product that cost more than, say, $2.50. Garlic was too posh for me. I remember that I cooked a lot of lentils and that I baked bread. Cheap spaghetti. I remember cooking rice one time and burning the bottom of the pot. I didn’t cook rice for months after that, because I didn’t own a pot scrubber. Most days I could smell the sumptuous meals of my Pakistani, Indian and Chinese neighbors, sometimes so fragrant they seemed to seep through the walls. I had a recipe for lentil curry, flavored with ½ teaspoon grocery store curry powder. I may have considered the curry powder an acceptable extravagance. More-with-Less calls for miniscule amounts of any ingredient that could conceivably impart flavor.

That year, I ate to live. I didn’t take pleasure in eating, but I did take pleasure in the righteousness of my frugality. I ate so low on the food chain I was dangling by my finger. This was in part because I didn’t have much money to spend, of course. But I also loved the idea of this austerity. I loved the idea of feeding myself from one simple cookbook.

I've changed. These days I’m a little flabbergasted that More-with-Less remains such a standby. It was radical for its time, the same way Diet for a Small Planet was radical for its time. And like Diet for a Small Planet, its messages about consuming fewer planetary resources and processed foods are as pithy and relevant as ever, though a lot of the content is dated. But I’d rather read Michael Pollan, or Barbara Kingsolver, or Ruth Reichl, or Mark Bittman, people who deliver this message without religious dogma and with a sexy passion for good food that is far more infectious, to me, than the sanctimony of poor old More-with-Less.

More-with-Less has become a symbol for all the ambivalence I feel about Mennonite notions of simplicity. I can’t just diss it for being bland and self-congratulatory, though I do find it to be both those things, just as I find those qualities rampant in so much of Mennonite culture. I was raised on the values in More-with-Less, so much so that I take them granted, forgetting that in 1976, a cookbook that suggested people eat less meat and make meal preparation easier by sharing housework rather than dumping all responsibility on women was a pretty feisty piece of business. I tend to dwell on the sweeping exhortation against alcohol, the knocking of “multicolor cookbooks,” the subtle preaching against getting too much pleasure out of eating, of turning it into a “superexperience.” And then, to make sure no overly sensual or lurid “superexperiences” cloud our devotion to Christ and good works, a battalion of recipes for thoroughly unstimulating food.

But of course, I live in this locavorous farmer’s market-supporting artisanal international post-Alice Waters culture, where pleasure and ethical eating have managed to find each other again and make sweet love with alarming frequency on the front tables of Borders. This was not the landscape in 1976. I know this. And if the reactionary, let-us-not-be-tainted-by-the-excesses-of-the-world tone of More-with-Less irks me, I’m irked in full awareness that were I my parents’ age in the seventies, it would probably be the best and most international thing on my cookbook shelf.

Still, it’s 2009, and we keep More-with-Less around more or less as a relic. It sits on a pile with the two successive Mennonite community cookbooks, Extending the Table and Simply in Season, both of which are better than their predecessor, if not go-to favorites or anything. Next to those are seven or eight multicolor, glossy, visually appealing, world-embracing, mostly international cookbooks, loaded with real flavor.* They are an investment made over the course of years, each one carefully considered, all of them far more costly than the Mennonite books. These books are the means by which I finally learned to cook. On our kitchen bookshelf, you get what you pay for. We still shop frugally and eat low on the food chain. But as one of us says to the other at least once a week, damn, we eat well. (ETA: Just reread this. My God. How self-congratulatory was that?)

The joy that I take in cooking and eating great food is the engine behind my political passion for sustainability and change in the world food system. Every human being deserves to eat this way. While I credit More-with-Less with awakening my conscience, I need passion and variety to sustain me, both as an eater and as a political animal. I need cookbooks that aren’t written by missionaries.

Every now and then, though, when we’re trying to think of something to make, we remember a recipe in More-with-Less, something we can use as a template. With any More-with-Less recipe, our rule is to double the spices. Or even triple the spices. And then add some more spices. Somewhere in there is a metaphor.

*In case you’re interested, our core cooking library is made up of all six books by Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford, who deserve all the praise that has been heaped upon them. Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone is the Bible. And after renewing the library copy of that hot babe Marcus Samuelsson’s book on African cooking, The Soul of a New Cuisine a few times, we bought it. Gaggy title. Amazing food.

in which a significant purchase provokes much self-examination, justification, and, as usual, swearing

2009-04-03T15:11:00.000-07:00

I have a confession: as of late, we have not been behaving as though there is a recession on. In fact, we’ve probably spent more money in the last three months than we did in the previous twelve months combined. Of course, our personal financial circumstances have actually improved, if anything, and most of the money we have spent has been on improvements to our home that we either needed to make it child-safe or needed in order to be able to take a shower in the absence of mold. We’re still wearing the same old clothes and driving the same old cars, but behind the scenes, we have been writing sweaty checks right and left. Or at least it feels that way.

This week we bought an elliptical trainer. I’m not sure we’ve ever straight-up bought a single item that cost that much money, with the exception of my flute (which—trivia!— cost over five times as much as the elliptical trainer), unless you count our house. Our cars are hand-me-downs. Our furniture is hand-me-down. I suppose we’ve spent that much on computers before, but our priciest current computer was a graduation present. Our appliances came with our house. We don’t own a working television. We have the crappiest stereo equipment ever owned by any person with an advanced degree in music. Can you tell I’m in justification mode? We would not have bought it if we couldn’t afford it. We can. But being able to afford something has rarely been a good enough excuse for either of us when it comes to justifying purchases.

We were raised to be frugal, to attach moral significance to the spending of money. Exercise equipment has always been the sort of thing that falls in the category of Shit That Other Kind of American Spends Money On. I felt reasonably okay about myself when I bought a fifty-dollar treadmill I found on Craigslist from an undergraduate living in a grubby downtown apartment, but standing in the Sports and Fitness section of Sears, I felt like…a consumer. Which I am. A consumer of a big pile of plastic and metal that will, someday, end up in a landfill somewhere, polluting the planet.

We discussed and debated this purchase for a long time beforehand. As I’ve written before, both of us are runners, but Eric is in a much harder-core category than myself. He’s been running for over a decade; he’s done two marathons and is trained up for another half-marathon in April; he has The Calves. Unfortunately, like many of the hardcore, he’s also plagued with a few persistent injuries. I never understood why not being able to run made him so frustrated until I started running myself and became an endorphin addict. “Why can’t you just go on a fast walk?” I’d ask. Now I get why he scoffed. I may as well have asked him why he couldn’t just drink a Coors Light when we were out of India Pale Ale. A fast walk is the kind of beer with a low enough alcohol content to be found in a Kansas grocery store. A run is a microbrew brewed by former chemistry majors living in Colorado who grow heirloom tomatoes in their spare time and make yearly vision quests to Belgium.

I’d used an elliptical before, and found it to be safely up there in the ultra-hopped seven percent alcohol range in terms of post-exercise buzz. Eric remained skeptical until we went to Sears, where he really pushed the sales people to make their best pitch. Does it exercise the same muscles groups as running? Do you really get the same level of cardiovascular workout? He pressed them for a good twenty minutes, and they gave us the full pitch, complete with a mini-dissertation on the Evils of Running. According to these guys, running is roughly equivalent to giving your joints a daily pounding with a jackhammer. I’m pretty sure they overstated the case, but never mind. The important thing is that we decided to buy the sucker, along with a five-year guaranteed repair plan, because if you’re going to spend that kind of money, you may as well go whole-hog and protect your investment.

After saying, “I can’t believe we just fucking bought an elliptical trainer” about ten times apiece, we accepted that we’d just fucking bought an elliptical trainer. The fact is, we are both insane without regular high-intensity exercise, and we can’t fit gyms into our schedule without encroaching on the time we spend together. And Eric has this injury issue, and I hate running in high winds and inclement weather, which we have a lot of around here. We will use the hell out of this thing.

But it also provoked a big old huge conversation about simplicity and consumerism, and the ideas of simplicity that we grew up with, and the ideologies behind “simple living” movements, and what we like about them and what we don’t. (We’re Mennonites. It’s a whole big baggage thing.) So expect something about that from me in the next week or so. And if you will leave some comments suggesting questions on and/or aspects of this subject that I might explore here, I promise not to write anything more about running or fitness equipment.

cats and kiddos

2009-03-30T20:19:00.000-07:00

I had grand housekeeping plans today, but I sliced open a capillary or something on a chipped plate this morning while trying to wash the dishes and that just shot my focus all to hell. It didn’t hurt much, but my finger bled all over the damn place for about twenty minutes, ruining the dishwater, dripping on the counter and down my arm as though I has some sort of ghastly slicing injury rather than an innocuous nick. That set me back by about half an hour, because the thing would not stop bleeding. I had this moment of wondering if I could possibly experience harmful blood loss from a nick on my finger, and then I grew up enough to put on a Band-Aid and awkwardly finish the dishes. Then I went running, ate lunch, took the overflowing recycling to the Wal-Fart recycling center, bought groceries, and came home, and here I am, the afternoon practically gone, and only half of what I wanted to do accomplished.

Also, I am getting an enormous zit under my nose.

The bloody finger did give me an excuse to empty out the cache of stored-up profanity that backlogged while the wee squirts were staying here. Suze and the kids left this morning, after visiting for four days and some change. When they pulled up, Wednesday evening, Suze rushed to the door first without the kids to get some cleaning supplies for Daniel, who had mercifully waited until five minutes before they arrived to hurl all over himself and the back seat of their spanking new Prius. We headed back out to the car, armed with paper towels and wet rags. I braced myself for the sight of cranky, pukey toddlers. But when we opened the car door, Daniel, still strapped into a car seat and covered with his own vomit, beamed and held up both his index fingers. “Aunt Teffnie you have TWO CATS!” he said.

Oh, man. Daniel luuuuurves the cats. As for the cats…they think he’s okay. You know, for a little human, I think they find him relatively inoffensive. Daniel is a quick study and a gentle soul, and with some coaching, he learned to approach the kitties delicately, particularly Her Royal Fragileness. Djuna spent the first two days crouching in the basement, then sort of got over it and ventured upstairs now and then, where she sat on the blanket that wraps Eric’s beer fermentation carboy. Bless her, she thinks she’s invisible there. Daniel imitated me: “She’s little shy,” and “Well, hi Djuna!” and “You’re okay, Djuna!”, and eventually, she allowed him to pat her. Bonzo is less phased by small children and can allow himself to be patted without it being some huge personal issue, although he tends to look colossally bored and so done with the whole thing.

We thought the cat love might get old after a day or so, but it did not. The first thing Daniel said to me every morning was, “You have TWO CATS!!” And randomly throughout the day: “You have TWO CATS!” And when Suze was trying to get him interested in food or sleep: “You have TWO CATS!!” Always with the two index fingers. “What are their names?” I would ask. “Djuna and BONZO!!” “Djuna has black stripes!” “Bonzo scratch carpet get sprayed water!” “Bonzo in window jump high!” “Djuna not jump so high!” “Kitties go crunch crunch!”

When it got too much for Djuna, we would go visit her in the basement. This, we learned quickly, was best conducted as a strictly with-grownups-only activity. The first night we made the mistake of letting Daniel stay down there by himself, because we were bored out of our gourd watching him watch the cat crouch on a filthy pillow and glower. We sat upstairs for awhile, drinking beer or whatever, until Eric popped down to check on the laundry.

“Oooh…boy. Uhh…”

“What?” Suze called.

“Uh…You don’t want to know,” called Eric.

“TELL ME,” Suze said.

“TELL HER,” I said, just to be helpful.

Litter boxes do sort of look like sandboxes, and litter scoops do sort of look like sandbox toys. We learned. From then on, Eric and I took turns spending time with Daniel in the basement and coaxing him to give Djuna a wide berth so that she wouldn’t go wiggy. He was actually wonderful at this. He would crouch down at her level, a few yards away from her, and coo, “You’re okay, Djuna. You’re okay.”

Anya is still getting my number. The first time she met me, back in November, her face lit up and she held out her arms to be picked up, a reaction to a stranger unprecedented in the History of Anya. But I’m pretty sure she had me confused with her mother, who was at a rehearsal at the time. Suze and I are first cousins, and resemble one another so strongly that we would probably make a good heist team of some sort. (After this incident, the family took to referring to me as Fake Mom, until I got cranky about it.) There is, however, a limit to the heists one can pull on one’s own daughter. The gig is more or less up come feeding time. I can safely say that at no point in the last four days did Anya believe me to be her mother. However, I would like to think that she believes I do a very good wrinkly nose face. Goofy faces are, for the time being, the basis of our relationship.

“Why you live so far way?” Daniel asked me about fifty times. I don’t know how to answer that, sweet boy, but I miss you all already.

i half-assed this one

2009-03-24T16:01:00.001-07:00

It’s been so hard for me to write for the past few weeks. Every blog topic I think of just evaporates when I sit down, or lasts for a couple paragraphs before I just give up in disgust. It’s been an intense month, for various reasons—not bad intense (except for that plumbing part), just a lot going on; some big decisions; a lot of working really hard at being a grown-up. I’m kind of exhausted, and my concentration is shot to hell.

This morning I went out for a run on a long, hilly stretch of main road. I have to drive to get there, but it has a good sidewalk, seemingly designed for runners, and I’m trying to get better at hills in preparation for a 5K in April. I find running on this stretch so difficult, as though three miles here is twice as long as three miles in my own neighborhood. The road cuts through what was once open prairie, a landscape so open and vast that even commercial buildings and a major thoroughfare can’t tame it down to psychologically manageably pieces. This morning I had a full-fledged misery run. Too much snot, too much spit, earbuds constantly torn out of my ears by wind, hair in the face, dry contacts, the constant and nearly overwhelming desire to give up and walk. I felt like a wretched peon in the face of the elements. By the time I got back to my car, it was all I could do not to literally stagger.

But lately my own neighborhood has been…let’s say unpleasant. Twice last week I had drivers honk and holler vulgarities at me. I also saw two enormous men yelling at each other on the sidewalk near our condo community, a scenario so intimidating I literally turned on my heel and fled in the opposite direction (dragging a friend along with me). And a few weeks ago there was a crack house bust on a residential street that I have walked or run a million times.

For all that, I know that running in this neighborhood is safe. There are way rougher neighborhoods in this town. The cops swing through fairly often (inspiring feelings of ambivalence and distrust on my part, but I suppose from a lone female runner’s perspective I should be grateful for them) and I never go out except in daylight hours. And I never run without my cell phone, and I have the police station on speed dial, listed as “A Police,” to put it at the top of the directory for handy access. But I’m sick of having these little incidents that make me feel both vulnerable and enraged. When I started thinking that castration seemed like an appropriate punishment for a male driver who yells any sentence containing the word “fuck” at a woman (or at anyone, frankly), and that I would be happy to execute that punishment myself, I decided that I needed a break from these particular streets. Violent anger is messing with my endorphin fix.

And I can’t figure out how to fix the bloody treadmill. I suppose I can’t expect too much of a treadmill I found on Craigslist for fifty bucks, but we got so reliant on that thing; neither of us has ever been in such good shape at the end of winter as we are now, thanks to it. But now it seems to be toast. And lately Eric has been plagued with chronic running injuries in his left leg (he got a third-degree sprain about nine years ago, the kind of injury that messes with you for the rest of your life), which I may use to justify buying an elliptical trainer, if I can convince him how much sense this makes.

Okay. This is why I haven’t been blogging. Because when I sit down to write, I end up talking about my desire for new exercise equipment, or something else that is about that interesting. I could pontificate on the fantastic ending of Battlestar Galactica, but I’d hate to ruin it for anyone who hasn’t seen it, or bore anyone who doesn’t care. (To BSG fans: Has anyone else had “All Along the Watchtower” stuck in your head for the past four days? How do you get it out?)

Hang in there with me, friends.

Oh, and tomorrow Suze arrives for a visit, with her kiddos in tow, and if that doesn’t cleanse me of all my mental blocks, it should at least give me something fun to write about. We’re going to dye sock yarn with Kool-Aid. So be ready for THAT.

ETA: Ahem. Battlestar Galactica spoiler alert in comments. Some people cannot restrain themselves. You have been warned.

some grousing, some happy

2009-03-17T08:57:00.000-07:00

Jenn left a comment yesterday asking me to update because she’s getting worried that we’ve been eaten by subterranean plumbing reptiles and the like. Thanks for your concern, Jenn, and your offer of a search party. I realized I probably should have peeped at some point in the week to let you all know that we have made it through relatively unscathed, with nothing worse than a few minor water stains on the ceiling. Up until yesterday, we weren’t using the new sink much. Our contractor came back and fixed a few things, though, and now it seems safe to use. I still check the pipes and the base of the sink for leaks every time I wash my hands or brush my teeth, but assuming things continue to go well, I will probably manage to overcome that compulsion by the end of the week.

I envy people who have this home improvement stuff mastered. While I feel incredibly fortunate to have the means to make our house a bit nicer, especially considering the current economy, the process has me drained. I don’t know anything about plumbing, wiring, flooring, painting, or any of that stuff—just cleaning taxes my expertise. Eric doesn’t know much about this stuff either, although his ambition and capacity for cleaning certainly outstrips my own. At his initiative, we finally cleaned our basement, which has been a catch-all for crap ever since we moved in almost three years ago. We made it so nice that running on the treadmill down there actually became a pleasure. For a day. Then the treadmill broke.

I am very, very unhappy about the treadmill. I googled “treadmill repair,” stared blankly at a few of the hits, and then went to the couch and curled up in a fetal position.

It is entirely possible that as I write this I am still a little high on varnish fumes. Yesterday’s project was staining the new banister that we had built almost a month ago. Due to torn window screens and an inquisitive cat, we can’t open about half of our windows, so rather than ventilating properly, the fumes just hung around, clouding our judgment, which is probably what made us decide to spend half our evening frying catfish.

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Between the home improvements, the foster/adoption licensing, the soul-searching around the foster/adoption licensing, and my attempts to find a convenient time to get myself knocked out and have my wisdom teeth yanked, I have been slightly overwhelmed lately. And I’ve been worrying about money. Specifically, I’ve been worrying about money for next year, and whether or not I can afford to go to back for a PhD. When I decided to go back to school, I also decided that I wasn’t going to add to our collective educational debt. If I don’t get it paid for, I reasoned, I just won’t go. Ever since I got my acceptance news in January, I’ve been waiting to hear about what kind of cash they can offer me, if any.

My department nominated me for a university scholarship, but I had to compete with other nominees from across the humanities, and I didn’t get it. I got a letter on Saturday morning telling me as much. Although I had never gotten my hopes very high for the scholarship, I still spent several hours imagining my not-in-school future and wallowing in self-pity.

Eventually I snapped out of it and went to the basement to help Eric fix the dryer. It’s too complicated to explain what’s wrong with it; let’s just call it “duct tape failure.” Fixing it involves wedging myself behind the dryer, whacking things with pliers, and hurling profanity-laced conspiracy accusations at various inanimate objects, including my cell phone, which was stashed in my back pocket, and chose, at the moment when I was most thoroughly stuck, to beep at me.

People never call me. People never call me unless my phone is two floors away from my person, in my zipped purse while I’m driving, or forgotten in my car, or unless I have just poured myself into the six-inch space between our dryer and the south wall of our basement, with my cell phone on digital roam, our basement being out of the range of cell phone towers.

I de-wedged myself and went upstairs, where, for some inexplicable, maddening reason, my phone remained on digital roam. It had been a long week, and I was getting testy. “Son of a BITCH!” I hollered. “What the FUCK?!” (Like Jon Stewart, I was raised by feral longshoremen.) Eventually I restored my regular service by turning the phone off and on again. It beeped. I had a new message.

It was the graduate director of the department, offering me two years’ guaranteed assistantship. I called her right back, and when we were finished talking, Eric went out and bought champagne. We blew off the dryer.

bad plumbing

2009-03-10T14:45:00.000-07:00

Happiness is:

1) A strong gin and tonic at cocktail hour, courtesy of one’s loving and wonderful spouse

2) Turkish red lentil soup with lots of butter, mint, and red pepper flakes

3) Mustard greens, as perfected by one’s loving and wonderful spouse

4) Eating in front of 30 Rock, courtesy of Netflix Instant

5) The not-so-distant dream of a taking a shower or bath in a new bathtub, a bathtub unblemished by mold murals or flaking, the bathtub, in fact, that you chose from Home Depot a few days ago, the installation process of which began that morning by two contractors who have already done excellent work for you in the past

Happiness is not:

1) One’s loving and wonderful spouse yelling from downstairs: “Oh my God! Stop whatever you’re doing!”

2) You yelling from upstairs: “What?! I’m not doing anything!”

3) The spouse yelling, “There’s water pouring into the kitchen cabinets from the ceiling.”

4) And: “And the dining room light fixture.”

5) Everything that comes after that.

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These condos were built in the early 1970s, and I’m starting to think that whoever did the plumbing was hired based on his skill with bong piping. Maybe he found a way to hook up a line of about six bongs to each other so that a hit from an individual bong unit reverberated throughout the entire bong community and became a shared experience among bong users. Everyone thought this was pretty awesome, so they decided to try it with sinks and showers. At that point, the awesomeness wore off, shared plumbing offering little improvement over mind-altering substances as a social lubricant. They threw up walls between the kitchens and bathrooms and retreated into their individual holes, which they came to call “condos.” Next, they succumbed to the lure of free market individualism and started selling the condos to unsuspecting passers-by, who moved in and lived in ignorance until the day when they decided to redo their bathroom, whereupon the vestiges of a failed and bitterly repressed communal past came gushing in, riding a flood of the neighbor’s shower and sink water.

As of now, at the end of a grueling day for our contractors (who I do not blame for this problem; it isn’t their fault our plumbing was designed by complete jackasses), and, frankly, for me, we seem to be closer to a solution to this mess. They’re coming back tomorrow, though the head contractor, as gentle a man as you would ever hope to run across, commented that the person who plumbed these condos should be shot. If there is another deluge between now and then, I am going to the basement with the gin bottle, and I am not coming out.

Well, that’s not true. If there is another deluge, I will grab buckets and towels and I will hyperventilate and between Eric and myself we will use every article of profanity in our vocabularies and then, after whatever comes between that and sleep, assuming sleep is in the cards, I will probably take a Xanax. But I am choosing, for once, extravagantly and in defiance of superstition, to operate under the assumption that we will not have another catastrophe.

There is a lot more to this story, but I need to go take a walk or do some similar sanity-generating activity.

foster kids, LGBT parents, and Ken Starr

2009-03-05T09:29:00.000-08:00

Last night Eric and I went to a first aid certification class, which we need for our foster care licensing. One of our fellow foster/adoptive parent trainees was there too; I’ll call her N. Because our training is designed for small classes, she and her partner S are the only other people in our class, and we’re getting to know each other pretty well.

N had good news: she and S have already found a set of siblings who interest them and are up for adoption, and received a positive response to their interest. The boy is autistic, and N has already lined up a bunch of community resources for autistic kids. N and S are gung-ho about adopting kids with developmental disabilities; N did her master’s thesis on disability-related issues and they are really well prepared for this. It was impossible not to share in her excitement, especially since our social worker had described these particular kids to us at our last class.

The foster system needs people like N and S a lot more than it needs people like me, frankly. When I first heard about those two kids, my first thoughts were: 1) can’t handle siblings and 2) can’t handle autism. We are meeting the kids on Sunday, because their foster parents are coming to talk to all of us, and I’m pretty sure that seeing the two of them with the two women who may well become their parents is going to set off my tear ducts something awful. (I hope not, though. I hate tearing up in public.)

This morning, I had an action alert in my inbox from the Human Rights Campaign, the national LGBT advocacy organization, reminding me that today, before the California Supreme Court, Ken Starr—remember him?— argues in favor of forcibly divorcing all of the same-sex couples who married in California before Proposition 8. His argument? That the state must “protect the welfare of children.” By divorcing their parents.

I wish I could talk to Ken Starr a little bit about the welfare of children, though I suspect he’s too hate-driven to be moved by the miles of professional opinion debunking his claims. As it is, I had to make do with signing yet another HRC petition, which you should sign too, by the way, because it’s the least we can do, and we have to do that much. I did that, and then I went over the Waiting Children pages from Kansas foster care agencies, and looked at kids, dozens and dozens and dozens of kids, most of them older than most people want to adopt, many with developmental disabilities, many described with subtle language that implies they are still coping with traumatic pasts. Many of the kids, when quoted, described themselves as “helpful.” If that doesn't break your heart, then I doubt you have one. Imagine any of the teenagers you know feeling like they need to be helpful in order to deserve parents.

My impression is that the foster system would take an enormous hit if fostering and adoption by LGBT parents was universally banned. This 2007 study has some interesting finds in that direction; scroll down to “Parenting and Foster Care.” (I found the abstract elsewhere, but the presentation I linked here is more readable.) I also have the impression that the biggest hit would be to foster kids with disabilities. According to that study, thirty-two percent of foster children in same-sex couple households have disabilities, a higher percentage than is the case for any other demographic of foster parents.

The study also estimated these figures:

* Prohibiting GLB people from fostering would cost an estimated $87 to $130 million dollars nationwide.

* Prohibiting GLB people from fostering would result in the removal of 9,000 to 14,000 children from existing foster families.

So when we argue for the rights of LGBT people to be parents, we’re not only arguing for equal rights to parenting for a minority group. We’re also arguing for the right of every child to have a caring family.

I wish I could be more articulate on this, but after looking at all those Waiting Children—none of whom I feel equipped to adopt myself—I’m too heartbroken to come up with anything smart. People like Ken Starr are the enemies of children and families and love and human decency. They would rather leave foster children parentless than investigate their ludicrous notions of what constitutes an acceptable family structure. And leaving foster children parentless is the logical conclusion of the policies they pursue.

the dentist

2009-02-26T15:56:00.000-08:00

So the plan, as I stated before, was that the wisdom tooth pain would just go away. That’s what usually happens with me and tooth pain. I’ll feel a bit of tenderness for a few days, and think, “oh, well it’s probably just my sinuses,” or “if it doesn’t go away in a week, I might think about getting it checked out,” or, “maybe I should try a different mouthwash,” and then it will disappear, and I’ll forget about it.

That’s how it always goes, and that’s how it went back in November, when I first noticed that I had some nasty-feeling tooth bits sticking out of my gums back where I was pretty sure a wisdom tooth would be. It hurt, and I thought, “huh, this could be a thing,” and then it stopped hurting so much, and I forgot about it. Except when I happened to touch those tooth bits with my tongue. Then I would shudder, just a bit.

In the comments on my last post, Animal asked what on earth I was doing with wisdom teeth still in my mouth. I know many people get these suckers whipped out before they’ve even hit twenty. But here’s the thing: I don’t go to the dentist. Ever. When I was eighteen, I moved out for college, and realized that my mom couldn’t make me go to the dentist anymore. (My dad never had much moral authority on the issue, because he doesn’t go to the dentist himself.) Wheeee! I remember my mom saying to me once, my freshman year or so, “Have you seen a dentist since you started college?” And I said, “No, I have not,” and she said, “You better make yourself an appointment,” (all of my mom’s best sentences begin with the phrase “You better”) and I said “YOU CAN’T MAKE ME,” and she said, “No, I suppose I can’t,” and so I didn’t.

Once, when I was twenty-four or so, I started having pretty bad pain in a few of my upper molars, and it hung around for a while. I was a grad student at the time, so I had enough piddly insurance to go to the student health center, where they whipped up a quick X-ray and told me the roots of my teeth grow into my sinuses. It sounded ghastly, but they said it was normal. So for the next eight years I blamed any and all tooth pain on my sinuses. And did not go to the dentist.

Now might be a good time to point out that I actually have really stellar teeth. Really top-notch, first-class specimens. I have good genes and even better oral hygiene. My habits were cultivated back when I was practicing the flute for hours a day and lived in dread of blowing festering chunks into my instrument. I had a flute teacher in high school whom I now recognize was a bit compulsive on this whole oral hygiene=flute hygiene issue, and thanks to her example, I brushed my teeth pretty much constantly. I brushed after meals. I brushed after eating an apple for snack. I brushed after one bite of someone else’s potato chips. I have eased up a little bit in the intervening years, but I’m still very much a brush three-times-a-day/floss at least once a day kind of girl.

So until last week, when I started feeling as though someone was inserting a paring knife in my gums every time I moved my jaw, I was pretty okay with my policy of ignoring the American Dental Association’s recommendations. (Every six months? Come on, people!) I’d always measured my dental visit record by what I’ve come to think of as the David Sedaris Model. In one of his pieces, he says (and I quote from memory), “In my mind I’d just been to the dentist. But in fact, a child born on the day of my last dental appointment would be thirteen years old, with bleeding gums of his own.” I’d gone that one time when I was twenty-four, so by the Sedaris Model, I had until age thirty-seven before I was due for the next appointment. That’s five more years! Never mind that when David Sedaris did finally go to the dentist, they cut open his gums and removed “what smelled like human feces” from his mouth. In my mind, that information is not relevant to the Model.

On Tuesday morning, when I realized that I needed ibuprofen just to face breakfast, I dispensed with the Model and made a dentist appointment for the next day.

As I drove there, I thought of excuses I could give for why I’d missed so many years of appointments. I have some good ones. For one thing, I have to take antibiotics before any dental procedure, even a teeth cleaning, because of a (thankfully asymptomatic) congenital heart condition. I’m not clear on why this is; it has something to do with an increased risk of bacterial endocarditis, which apparently can be set off by the seemingly benign actions of your friendly dental hygienist. But I hate taking antibiotics. I hate it enough to skip dentist appointments. Also, the insurance thing. It’s true that for several years in my twenties I did lack dental insurance, but I haven’t had that excuse now for over three years.

As it turned out, excuses weren’t needed. “You’re here now, and that’s what matters,” said the dental hygienist. She started off with X-rays, revealing, unsurprisingly, that my jaw is too small for my top wisdom teeth. Then she got out the scraper.

In order to distract the patient from the goings-on in his or her mouth, this dental office had helpfully placed a large television, tuned to The Weather Channel, in front of the patient’s chair. It was on mute, but The Weather Channel, which, as as I’ve written before, is essentially a porn channel for storm fetishists, has closed captioning. And what a relief that was, because what with the global financial collapse, increase in civil unrest, nuclear missile tests by governments run by insane people, and ominous global warming news, I had completely forgotten to start pre-emptive fretting about tornado season.

Well, The Weather Channel had the cure for THAT oversight. It was the 2009 Tornado Spectacular Preview Morning, complete with repeated images of mile-wide twisters tearing apart Midwestern towns and glassy-eyed, traumatized children being carried away from scenes of wreakage. I started a mental checklist of emergency supplies. Do we have extra gallons of water? Flashlights? A weather radio? What I love about The Weather Channel, in a twisted way, is that they are so overt about the fact that they are trading in the anxiety business (unlike CNN, say, where they act as though they have a higher purpose—as if). They literally state outright, “It’s almost time to start worrying about tornadoes!” Thanks, friends!

Every ten minutes or so, the dental hygienist checked up on me. “You still doing okay?” she’d ask. I’d say, “Yeah, I’m fine.” After what felt like at least an hour of this—scrape, scrape, tornado porn, scrape—I started wondering if we were in a time warp. The cleaning session had begun with extravagant praise of the condition of my teeth: “You have really great teeth! You must be a really good brusher and flosser! I don’t see any surface cavities!” Then she started the scraping, adding that, “even the best brushers have some tartar buildup after eight years.”

And then I started thinking…that last dentist appointment, when I was twenty-four, and had the X-ray? I don’t think they bothered to clean my teeth at that one. Which means, assuming my last bona fide tooth cleaning was back when my mother could still force me to go to the dentist, that she was scraping about fourteen years worth of tartar buildup off my teeth. Even by the Sedaris Model, this is kind of gnarly.

I didn’t know if disclosing the information would make me look better or worse, so I said nothing, which was the path of least resistance anyway, what with all the dental instruments in my mouth. I wondered, idly, if dental hygienists are capable of eating tartar sauce with their deep-fried fish. Would they be so over it, or would the mere suggestion of the word “tartar” applied to a chunky white sauce be enough to set off a series of unpleasant, work-related images? I felt a little gaggy then, but I fought it. My hygienist was doing heroic work. I didn’t want to complicate her job by throwing up in my mouth.

Finally she finished. The dentist popped in his head for about thirty seconds, long enough to look at my X-rays, concur that my top wisdom teeth need to come out, and give me a referral for an oral surgeon. He reiterated that I have “great teeth.” (He missed out on the tartar.) The he added that I should come back to him for another appointment, as he wants to replace an old filling, which is made of aluminum foil or pencil lead or whatever the hell they made fillings with back in the eighties.

The sad thing is that I have to do all this around the same time I am taking care of my cat’s skanky mouth. His dental surgery is scheduled for this coming Monday, and like me, he has to take antibiotics beforehand. On Tuesday I went out and picked up antibiotics for both of us. Mine, with insurance, cost sixty-eight cents. His were $19.95.

At least he gets general anesthesia. I have a feeling my insurance company is going to make me suck it up and go local. I have a couple weeks left to eat ibuprofen and build up my nerve.

bullet points

2009-02-23T08:21:00.001-08:00

Bullet point day!

* A wisdom tooth situation is rapidly deteriorating in the back of my mouth. I’ve been trying to pretend that it isn’t there for several months now; it’ll hurt for a day or so, and then the pain will go away and I’ll stuff it back into the dusty closet of medical denial for a few more weeks. Now it’s acting up again, and instead of going away, it’s getting worse. This morning it hurt to chew my breakfast. The worst pain is when I yawn. This is bad, because realizing this makes me think about yawning, and thinking about yawning makes me yawn. (Ow. Ow. OW!) I know I need to see a dentist and get the thing out. I know. I just don’t want to. But I will. Probably. Unless it goes away tomorrow. Right now the plan is that it will go away tomorrow.

* The toilet won’t stop running. Shit.

* The economy is making me so depressed, I can’t read the news anymore. Last week we spend two days wondering if Eric and a few dozen other people we know would be paid because the Republicans in our legislature thought it would be fun to hold up state employee salaries as a means of blackmailing the Democratic governor into signing their budget. It all came out in the wash (thanks to our governor’s skillful use of the line-item veto) but confirmed our feeling that the person standing between us and complete social breakdown is our governor, who is likely to be snatched up by Obama for the HHS cabinet post. Kathleen, don’t leave us to the wolves! (I won’t blame her if she does, though.)

* We watched about ten minutes of the Oscars last night, through the fuzz of crappy reception. The hyperactive production number Hugh Jackman thing wasn’t doing it for either of us, so we mostly discussed my inability to “get” Brad Pitt’s hotness. Eric, my heterosexual husband, maintains that I just haven’t seen the right Brad Pitt movies. I said it was hard enough for me to get Brad Pitt before the facial hair. Why is it that we all now have to pretend like mustaches and goatees are classy, just because Brad decided not to shave? I said mustaches are gross, and that’s the end of that. I said that if I was forced to choose between Brad Pitt and Hugh Jackman I would go for Hugh and that was saying something, because at the time he was jumping around the stage doing musical theater, which is pretty low on my list of turn-ons. I also said that Angelina looked like a freaky emaciated Goth cadaver with stupid hair and that I thought Jennifer Aniston looked prettier than both of them. And that Tina Fey looked better than everyone else put together, except maybe Freida Pinto, who even a bitchy cynic like me has to admit is pretty gorgeous. And that the only reason to watch the Oscars was to see what the actresses were wearing. Then Eric acted shocked, like he thought I was deeper than that, or something. Whatever. He’s the one who thinks Brad Pitt is all that.

I did, however, get completely teary at Dustin Lance Black’s Best Original Screenplay acceptance speech, for Milk. I probably would have gotten teary at Sean Penn’s too, had I still been watching at that point. (Yes, I got the scoop on Entertainment Weekly in the morning.)

the traditions of my ethnic group or culture

2009-02-18T07:34:00.000-08:00

Last night, while Eric bottled his latest batch of beer, we worked on our foster/adoption training homework. Our general approach is to take turns reading out loud to one another from the workbooks while the other does kitchen tasks: dishes, cooking, the creation of alcoholic beverages.

So last night we got to the section on Culture, Ethnicity, and Heritage. Did you know that Culture, Ethnicity, and Heritage are three completely separate, independently definable concepts?

After offering these definitions, the book asked us, “What is your ethnic background?” Because everything seemed so concrete and straightforward, I found myself really wanting to give the one and only right answer. I agonized briefly, then wrote, “Mennonite, Swiss.”

Next I was asked to describe some “special customs, values, and traditions of your ethnic culture.”

I wrote: “Music-making, simple worship services, non-violence, self-righteousness, oppression of women, cheese dumplings.”

I’m not sure why this section makes me so cranky. They definitely need to talk about ethnicity, culture, and heritage here, because these are some of the big issues for foster and adopted kids. In a lot of ways the fact that this section is even included is revolutionary. Eric and I once watched a documentary by a filmmaker who was a transracial adoptee; his parents are white, he is black. He was a kid in the seventies, and in part of his documentary he interviewed his parents about how they approached the raising of an African-American son. This couple, obviously loving and well-intentioned people, repeated phrases like, “We didn’t care if you were black or brown or purple or green or anything. To us, you were just a child.” In the gentlest way you can imagine, he pressed them on it. “Didn’t you see that I needed to have an identity as an African-American? Do you see why it hurts me when you ignore that?” They smiled at him. “We don’t think about race. The way we see it, people are people, and that’s just the end of that. And whether you’re green or yellow or purple or pink, you’re still our son.” Something like that.

It was heartbreaking to watch. So yes, I am completely in favor of making people think about this, especially clueless white people who have a tendency to be all, “Oh, I don’t think about race! Everyone should think like me and all those race problems would go away! La la la!”

I think the problem I’m struggling with is more mine than the curriculum’s. I immediately rankle when I see a definition of something like “culture” offered as though it’s that obvious. To me, culture is the sort of thing that you explore, not something that you define. I hate when things are oversimplified. This curriculum is always asking us to sum up situations and ideas that are complex and multifaceted and nuanced with leaden, witless questions. “Describe what you are feeling right now in one word. Describe the traditions of your ethnic culture. Describe what a nine-month old baby might feel about being neglected by his drug-addicted mother. Describe how the mother might feel about being unable to care for her baby. Describe how you would feel if you were removed from your home and family against your will. Here are three lines on which to write your answer.”

I can tell that awakening an empathic imagination is one of the primary goals of this training. If you go into the class looking to affirm an idea of yourself as a saintly rescuer of children, it will kick your ass, and probably in the exact way it should be kicked. The intent behind most of these questions is worthy. Certainly the intent behind the “culture/ethnicity/heritage” section is worthy. It upsets me, though, because like so many other instances in this curriculum, it’s asking me to address a complex reality with a one-to-three-line response. In my experience, when you have that little space to say something that should really take pages, you will invariably choose the stupidest and least accurate five or six words with which to do so. It will convey the impression that you are callous, clueless, blunt, rude, or resistant. When in fact you are just a chronic overthinker who is obsessed with words and their meanings.

“Are you sure you really want to put that?” Eric asked, after I read him my list.

I thought about it. Yes, I do. Because a list that includes both “oppression of women” and “cheese dumplings” is as close as I can come to capturing my ethnic background in two lines of prose. And so far, it’s as close as any of my short answers have come to some semblance of truth.

joss whedon and the feminist premise

2009-02-16T14:01:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I heard an interview on NPR with Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, on his new show Dollhouse. It was with Jacki Lyden (for those of you who keep track of your NPR personalities), whose interviewing tactics were unrelentingly combative, so clearly angered was she by the premise of his show. The show, if you haven’t heard, is about an organization that rents out young women and men who have voluntarily agreed to have their memories wiped clean, then reprogrammed with whatever personality the hiring client desires. The main character is one of these “dolls,” played by Eliza Dushku. Yes, ick. I cannot imagine a premise that would make me less likely to want to watch, were it in the hands of the kinds of people who normally make prime-time television. But Joss Whedon? Joss Whedon has more than adequately proven that he does not make television motivated by the desire to display powerless hot chicks being exploited. Listening to Lyden grill him like a filthy suspect misogynist was disheartening.

Much of Lyden’s anger seemed to stem from the contrast between the premise of Dollhouse and the premise of Buffy. She can’t seem to accept the idea that the same guy who made an ultra-empowered female superhero would come up with a premise where the female lead is so disempowered. Her entire line of questioning was based on the assumption that Whedon’s fans will be furious at him for this and feel utterly betrayed, and how will he respond? A valid hypothetical question, perhaps, but having asked it, and received a pretty thoughtful response from Whedon that might have generated more thoughtful follow-up questions, she refused turn the damn page.*

It makes me wonder if Lyden ever actually watched Buffy. Look, if making a girl character who is physically strong enough to beat up bad guys were in and of itself a terribly radical or feminist premise, Buffy wouldn’t have been news. There were other female superheroes before her. What makes Joss Whedon a radical feminist maker of television is not the fact that he writes about girls who kick ass, though of course that helps. It’s the way he writes about power: the losing of it, the gaining of it, good power, bad power, ambiguous power, power-over, power-within.

It’s a given, in Buffy’s universe, that she can throw grown men across a room. It isn’t a given that she can operate as an autonomous agent with control over her own destiny. At the same time as Whedon creates this girl hero, he creates a back story which puts her under the control of a patriarchal institution, the Watcher’s Council, that has been using girl vampire slayers as dispensable drudges since the beginning of time. Picture an organization that crosses the most elitist, sexist, and out-of-touch professors you ever had with mob bosses; that’s the Watcher’s Council. (Alas, academics rarely fare well in Joss Whedon’s worlds—the guy obviously had a shitty time in college.) They show zero concern for Buffy’s physical or personal well-being. She’s a tool for them, and if she dies, they’ll just get another slayer. Throughout the series, they patronize her, deprive her of basic knowledge about the opponents she’s fighting, and attempt to cut her off from meaningful relationships that might make her a less efficient tool for their purposes. Oh, and by the way, they don’t pay her anything, either.

Hello? Tell me that’s not exploitive. A lot of the story lines in Buffy are about her finding the strength and strategy to defy these people who would like her to be their warrior/whore. And then, having bucked that particular hierarchical model, she has to figure out what to do instead. Go solo and cut off all her friends anyway? Form her own alternative organization and turn into a big boss? Try to cooperate with people who don’t fully understand what’s going on? How bluntly is she going to wield her weapons? When is it acceptable for her to just knock the people who can’t see it her way unconscious?

This is why Buffy has such a following, I think. The creators of the show make her power so ambiguous, so malleable, that it works extremely well as a metaphor for personal agency in general. Also important: Buffy’s power isn’t less complicated or potentially harmful by virtue of being housed in a female, and it isn’t treated as such. As a feminist (and an observer of this past election), I find this nuance terribly important. To say that women's power is simpler than men's power is a stone's throw away from saying that women are simpler than men, and we all know that's crap. Buffy is a complicated and morally challenging narrative about a powerful woman operating in a male-dominated society, and she screws up plenty, because the challenges are huge. This is why I hate when people talk about Buffy as though it’s some candy-coated girl power story about a blonde cheerleader who happens to do some nifty kung fu.** (Besides which, Buffy’s cheerleading career goes down the toilet in the second episode, due to some unfortunate witch stuff.)

I haven’t seen the premiere of Dollhouse yet (having no working television, and, at the moment, little appetite for anything deeper than 30 Rock), and won’t speculate too much on what will happen with it. I suppose there’s a pretty sizeable chance that Fox will find a way to ruin it, so my hopes aren’t super high. But it doesn’t surprise or alarm me that Joss Whedon would be attracted to a story that puts a female protagonist in an essentially powerless position. Lyden would have had a much better interview if she acknowledged in her questioning that as a storyteller, Whedon has never shied away from the depiction of misogyny. He’s quite obsessed and haunted by misogyny, and seems very aware of the enormous responsibility he takes on when he puts a representation of it on screen.

Which is not to say that he always gets it right. If anything, I think Whedon’s shows dismiss their misogynist villains too expediently; if anything, the line that connects female empowerment to the defeat of misogyny in his narratives is too simplistically drawn.

But one thing he doesn’t do is add to the exploitation of women by using victimized characters as fodder for voyeuristic depictions of used, abused bodies. Exploited characters remain people to him, with histories, complexities, and possibilities. The biggest danger in abuse stories is that they become pornographic; that the camera’s eye becomes the stalker’s eye and the viewer is left either titillated (ew) or horrified, or possibly both. I can’t watch anything that toys with those boundaries.

Whedon has said in a million interviews that he invented Buffy because he was so sick of exactly that sort of story. And given the unconscionable profusion of such stories in Hollywood, it’s understandable that thinking viewers might be leery of Dollhouse’s premise, and wonder why the creator of a subversive icon like Buffy would be attracted to it. But if there’s one thing I've learned from watching Whedon’s shows, it’s that in storytelling, you can’t regard premise as anything other than what it is—a starting point. It’s all about the execution. The premise was never the most subversive thing about Buffy. Which is why I won’t judge Dollhouse by its premise, either. And why I think Jacki Lyden really messed up that interview.

(I cannot believe that this interview riled me so much. Have I really become that much of a geek? I want to say that I am just geeked for Joss, sort of like the straight Frank on 30 Rock is “just gay for Jaime,” but as Liz and the gay guys at the dance club say to Frank, “I don’t think that’s a thing.”)

* David Bianculli does a much better interview with Whedon on Fresh Air.

** The original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie actually is like that, as I learned when I watched it with some friends a few weeks ago. It really sucks, and Joss Whedon had nothing to do with it other than creating the premise and an original script that got tossed. It is, however, excellent fodder for loud and profane mockery, which is always what we are looking for in a knitting night movie.

how about a fluffy kitty post?

2009-02-12T10:14:00.000-08:00

This day is shot for anything serious, so it seems like a good day to blog. There are two contractors in the house right now whipping up two sets of banisters for us, one for each staircase, and it’s loud in here, so it’s hard to think. I just fished my scaredy cat Djuna out from behind the washer and brought her up to the bedroom to shut her in there for the duration. As soon as I set her down, she crouched close to the floor and scuttled away from me, pausing once to look back at me over her shoulder. “Don’t think for a minute that I trust you, you traitorous bitch,” she said, or would have, had she been able. The last time I shut her in the bedroom, a week ago, I followed with a cat carrier, which led to a visit to the vet. She’s wary and pissed.

My childhood cat, Apricot, was a similarly delicate flower. The summer after my sixth grade year my parents decided to remodel our house to make the attic into a second floor. My mom’s two brothers, who are professional carpenters, did the job, subjecting the kitty to loud male voices and power tools for weeks on end. For the remaining ten or so years of his life, Apricot would have nothing to do my uncles. The minute they walked in the house, he shot under my parents’ bed and would not resurface until they were gone.

Bonzo, while less emotionally fragile, is also mad about the confinement. I have to keep my eye on him, that one. Unlike Djuna, his M.O. when things get crazy is not to hide, but to work mischief. He is itching to bust out. I can’t let him free, though, because he will do one or both of two things: 1) Head-butt the contractors or 2) Run out the front door, which is wedged open by multiple power cords.

Generally the Bonz is something of a little shit, but lately I’ve been indulgent of his bad behavior. According to the vet, he has some nasty lesion in his mouth, which is, from what I understand, more or less the feline equivalent of a cavity. The only solution is to extract the tooth. Alas for the bank account, it turns out you can’t pull a cat’s tooth at home with some gin and a pliers. (I winced as I wrote that. Just so you don’t think I’m a monster.) It has to be done by multiple trained professionals while the cat is under general anesthesia. It costs…don’t ask. I considered not doing it, thinking about all the kids in this country alone who don’t get decent dental care. But the poor guy is eating less and has gotten ridiculously clingy, and the vet assured me that he is in pain. So not doing it would be tantamount to cruelty. I am responsible for this animal, after all. I wield complete authority over his life. (Don’t ask me how long it’s been since I’ve been to the dentist.)

“Our cat has a lesion,” I told Eric. “A leeeeeesion.”

“You’re weird,” he said.

It could be worse. It could be a pustule.

Soon after I’d scheduled his surgical appointment, my parents called, and we talked depressing animal news. I told them about my mother-in-law’s beautiful, adoring collie Roy, who had to be put to sleep. I loved Roy, so I’m kind of bummed about it. He was flatulent and pathetic and had breath that could repel armies of the undead, but he was pure of heart. My parents responded by telling about some close family friends whose cat just died while in surgery.

“Uh…she what?”

“She just didn’t make it through the operation. They’re so sad about it.”

Silence from me.

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” my dad said, reading my mind. “I mean, she was seventeen years old. A young cat like Bonzo, I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

I know that I am a little overwrought about this because when I went to the informative web page that the vet referred me to, in order to learn more about this lesion condition, I was emotionally affected by the picture of a cat lying unconscious on a surgical table, having its teeth cleaned. It’s a wonder I can make it through any given episode of All Creatures Great and Small.

Don’t leave a comment that says, “Wait until you have a kid.” Just don’t.

in which i gesticulate wildly and wish i could calm down

2009-02-09T15:51:00.000-08:00

I know I’ve said this repeatedly in the past, and I never follow through, but this time I mean it, goddammit: I need a break from political news. Either that, or I need to renew that Xanax prescription that I scored in October when I called my doctor’s office complaining of “pre-election insomnia.”

During the election, when I was up to my neck in Salon articles, Daily Kos postings and New York Times editorials and hanging breathlessly on every word of the divine oracle Nate Silver, I often imagined the future I was hoping for. In it, Obama had of course won, and I could release my white-knuckled clutch on the fate of the country. I’d listen to ten or twenty minutes of NPR in the morning and maybe a few more in the late afternoon, and when the President spoke, I’d relax at the sound of that deep, sonorous, confidently reassuring voice, knowing we were in good hands. Then I’d go back to reading novels, writing ethnography about Mennonites, and watching DVDs of Arrested Development, the only pleasurable form of Bush-era nostalgia. Eric and I would chuckle to each other: “Remember when that ‘Mission Accomplished’ joke was fresh? Ahh, good times, good times.”

In fact, I had no model for imagining how my level of political engagement might take shape under a decent Democratic president, let alone a figure like Obama. Look at it this way: I was sixteen years old when Clinton took office. My parents were Democrats, and Clinton seemed like a decent bloke, so I was happy enough to have him there. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, however, I was more or less consumed with figuring out myself: my education, my career goals, my love life. Sometimes I ranted about the hypocrisy of the “family values” crap, but mostly I coasted. I didn’t lose sleep over Newt Gingerich or the other Republicans in Congress leading the “conservative revolution.” I barely knew who those people were.

In a theoretical way, I knew that my security and my fortunes were tied to politics, that the society around me was held in place not by inherent stability but through the careful maintenance work of responsible citizens, by democracy. But when I look at all the college kids and early twenty-somethings who mobilized for the Obama campaign, it seems to me that many of them get it on a level that I never did at that age. The world has changed so much. Would I have been less conceptual and more applied in my understanding of politics, had I come of age under George W. Bush rather than Clinton? Or do middle-class kids who grow up in relative stability always enter their twenties with the complacency that I had, regardless of who’s running the government?

I don’t know. I did finally wake up, of course. The 2000 election left me genuinely devastated, and by the time George Bush took office I was awake and paying attention, with all kinds of new reasons to be pissed off. Then there was 9/11 and a major realization of my adult political life: Things can get bad. Like, really, really craptastically sucky. And nothing can be taken for granted.

So for a while, I fought like a citizen should. I went to marches. I wrote letters to my elected officials. And then it became apparent that this administration could not be reached through petitioning or collective action or anything that I could participate in. The more I knew about what was going on, the worst I felt. Sometimes I went for weeks without reading or listening to news. During the Bush years, a lot of the energy that I might otherwise have channeled towards political action went into just making sure that I and the people I loved were doing okay, holding on, hanging in there in spite of all the shit going on.

So now what? It turns out that the flip side to all this new and shiny hope and change—and it’s the hope and change thing that keeps me engaged; if McCain had won I’d be permanently curled around a jug of something cheap and red, pretending the world didn’t exist—is that being constantly engaged in what’s happening politically is bloody exhausting.

I have been meaning for the last week or so to write a post about how now that we have Obama in office, an imperfect but reasonable man with a brilliant mind and genuinely great intentions, we need more than ever to be politically active. The temptation is sit back, put all of our faith in Obama’s obviously remarkable abilities, and trust him to do a good job without our criticism, but that’s the last thing we should be doing, as it will ensure that the people who have his ear the most are the ones with the most money, which will not be very hopey/changey, and unlikely to produce the best possible Obama. We have to agitate, and organize, and when he screws up we need to let him know. No coasting. We don’t get a functional and healthy democracy just by electing a decent leader.

Yes, I do believe all this, very much. I think I may have just said everything I have to say about it for the time being, though, and anyway, my preachy side is not my most attractive.

I am a fairly passionate political animal, in case you haven’t noticed. I get embarrassingly over-the-top het up about everything. I’m sort of like that in general; apathy is not my strong point, unless we’re talking about sports. But lately I’ve been wearing me out. The week before last I was apoplectic over the House Republicans. Last week, I had fantasies of drowning the Senate Republicans in John Boehner’s vat of self-tanner. This week, I am stewing over the possibility that the stimulus package isn’t big enough and Paul Krugman is right about everything. I’m sick of caring this much. Can somebody tell me the secret to being tepid?

And don’t suggest healthy balancing activities like exercising and playing outside and throwing myself into the cooking of delicious affordable meals and cultivating crafty hobbies and contemplating the beauty of nature and poring over seed catalogs, because I already do all that shit and I’m still a deranged creature who snarls at the radio and emotionally invests myself in the fate of congressional legislation. Help me.

choose one word

2009-02-04T09:10:00.000-08:00

Hey, thanks for the congratulations and well wishes, everyone. I appreciate it.

It strikes me that for the past few weeks I haven’t delivered much on the blog front, with the exception of a few short, profanity-laced posts that make me look awfully cranky. I’d like to sink into a meaty, substantive post, but all this boring life crap keeps getting in the way.

One thing that has really come through to me in the past week is a strong reminder of where my strengths lie. Yesterday I sat down and read the graduate handbook of the program I’m starting next fall pretty much cover to cover. In the past, when I have considered graduate programs, I have found such handbooks terrifying. Not because I don’t feel up to the tasks described therein, but because the sheer quantity of those tasks, heaped up one on top of the other like that, makes the degree seem like Mount Impossible, or Mount Only-for-the-Truly-Brilliant, or Mount Only-for-Suckers. Or a live volcano. Anyway. As usual my metaphors are getting away from me…let’s just say handbooks make grad school look really, really hard.

That’s how I felt before completing book one and two of the state foster/adoption training program—which, incidentally, is supposedly written at a seventh-grade reading level. Now, I am much more scared by homework questions such as “Describe one of your strengths, after reading this book, in identifying the strengths and needs in children between the ages of five and seven in finding constructive ways to express their feelings.” In order to make the material less intimidating, the trainers emphasize to us that we should not worry about grammar and spelling. Which is good, because the thing that most worries me, when answering a question like that, is the possibility that I might inadvertently use poor sentence construction.

Even worse are the questions about one’s own feelings. They usually stick them at the end of a long description of a hypothetical situation that could lead to a child being placed in foster care. Upon reading one of these sobering, complicated hypothetical situations, invariably we are asked to “Choose one word that describes what you are feeling right now.”

I understand the intent here, I do. They need to make sure people aren’t drowning. The material they are presenting us with is far more daunting than anything in a graduate school handbook. The sheer scope of human tragedy that this system manages, and in some cases perpetuates, renders me speechless and numb. Which is why I find this ubiquitous, facile instruction to describe my feelings in one word so maddening.

A social worker might reasonably respond that however inadequate they may be, words are what we have to work with, and asking doofus questions about feelings is better than ignoring them. She or he may well be right. Due in part to years of difficult experiences with members of my extended family who bill themselves as communication professionals and inflict paternalistic linguistic workshopping on the rest of us in transparent attempts to control everyone and everything, I am very jumpy around such language. When someone asks me to name a word that expresses how I am feeling, that very request sets off a whole new set of much more potent and less complicated feelings than did the nuanced situation to which I am being asked to respond. So the first response that comes to mind when I read the question, “Choose one word that describes what you are feeling right now,” is always “angry.” Fearful of being perceived as a chronically angry person, I instead leave it blank.

As out of the loop as I feel in the world of academia, as difficult as it can be to pick up a dense, multi-stranded article and make sense of it, or crystallize a ten-page paper into a 300-word abstract, or use theoretical language without sounding gimmicky, I am eager to get back to it because it gives me the capacity to be analytical—to explore and to respect the sheer complexity of things. Most professions deal with complexity, but academics have the advantage of being able to acknowledge it, and entertain it thoroughly.

(This is why, I think, I am attracted to academia and not to mass media. At its core, the question American mass media seems to be asking is “Choose one word to describe what you are feeling right now.”)

Having said all that, I find that the complexity of the issues I am flirting with in this post is beyond me at the moment. I need to go on a run, call a contractor, get my tax materials together and figure out the most financially workable time to have my cat’s rotten tooth pulled out. Let’s just say that while I’m doing all that, I’m thinking a lot about language, and hoping that in all my endeavors I find the right words at the right time.

i rant even when i'm happy

2009-02-02T09:01:00.000-08:00

The other night, while cooking dinner, Eric and I were telling each other about our days, as we often do.

“Well, I started off this morning yelling at the radio because of all those dumbshit House Republicans not voting for the stimulus package,” I said. “I mean, those fucking smug bastards going on about how bad ‘spending’ is, like investing in health care and infrastructure is indicative of some sort of moral looseness, what’s their solution instead? Fucking TAX CUTS? AGAIN?!? Eight years of disaster and these sons of bitches still think that what we really need to fix everything is TAX CUTS? And they get up on their high horses like they have some level of moral authority that hasn’t been completely fucking discredited? Did they even NOTICE that they lost the election? It just makes me LIVID!!!”

“You really should stop being so emotionally invested in the news,” Eric suggested. “You should try to disconnect a little bit.”

Yeah, okay, I get that, I said. But in fact, I wasn’t in such a bad mood as all that, because half an hour before I’d gotten some really good news. Which is that next fall, assuming things go according to plan, I’m going to start a PhD program in American Studies. I got in exactly where I want to go. We’re not planning on moving, so if you know where we live, you can figure out where I’m going.

If I can't stop obsessing about American culture, I may as well try to make a career of it.

But the House Republicans can still bite me, the assholes.

grrrrr

2009-01-27T09:07:00.000-08:00

I have so much to do that I have become paralyzed. There is a conference paper that granted, is not due until this summer, but I have absolutely no idea how it might come together, so I really should be working on it. There is an oral history project that I need to figure out how to un-stall. There are my seemingly-always-growing responsibilities as a board member for an interfaith women’s organization. There is the responsibility, nay, desire, that I have to make this blog as interesting, absorbing, and readable as possible. (Especially after—forgive the bragging—Feral Mom awarded me Best Political Blog and a tie for her Smarty Pants Award in her annual Best (And Most Feral) of the Blogosphere. These totally made my year and helped me feel that this blog is a worthwhile endeavor and not merely a distracting time-suck.)

All these things, I could handle gracefully and without too much freaking out, under normal circumstances. I mean, come on, it’s not like I have a real job to distract me or anything (not that I haven’t looked), and I’m done with the grad school app, so I’m not expecting another bout of pathological career-related insecurity until roughly the end of February. But the foster/adoption licensure is so demanding that it has almost completely reshuffled my priorities. It’s a little overwhelming. And I haven’t even mentioned the part where I’m terrified of the whole thing. I think that’s supposed to be normal or whatever.

Also, the car’s broken down, with an as-yet-undiagnosed ailment. We got a forty-dollar ticket while waiting for the towing company to show up and haul it to the mechanic. My laptop has been at the Mac repair shop for the past four days acting out with some bullshit involving permissions. The muscles between my shoulder blades are so tight you could bounce a rubber ball off of them.

My brain, at the moment, is functioning as a sort of rusty list keeper, like a Palm Pilot from 1999 that someone’s dropped in the toilet. I’m planning on getting over this total freakout by at the latest tomorrow afternoon, at which point I will morph into Superwoman.

What I really want to do is just knit, and knit, and knit, obsessively, until I finish the cabled hat I’m working on, at which point I’m going to move on to these steely-gray mitten/gauntlets. They were inspired by a pair in the movie Twilight, which sucked, but, well, featured some sweet-ass mittens. Just looking at these mittens makes me wish I lived in the Pacific Northwest. If I don’t screw them up, I’ll probably still be wearing them in May, as a consolation prize for the failure that is my breastless sweater.

Yesterday while I was out running errands related to cars and computers, I swung by the yarn store in hopes of scoring the needed materials for the mittens. I knew the exact name of the yarn I needed, so I figured I could get in and out of there quickly. Instead I got a dose of yarn-store snobbery, a common affliction well known and much discussed amongst the knitting populace. When I couldn’t locate the yarn I was looking for, I asked a young employee, who asserted that this yarn did not in fact exist, and I must have been confused by the pattern. Her tone was not, “Oh, let me help you figure out what you need,” but rather, “You know nothing, and are shit.” Is there a special training program in hostility that yarn store employees take alongside French waiters and French grocery clerks?

“Where the hell do you think you are, a Chanel boutique in Cannes?” I said to her. “This is the Midwest, and you’re wearing an old T-shirt, so make with the friendly customer service or I will ruin you on the Internet!”

OK, I didn’t say that. I just told her, ever so slightly snippily, that the yarn did in fact exist, and that apparently they just didn’t have it there.

I came home and immediately found the yarn online at a discount price, and sure enough, it fucking exists, so take that, bitch. From now on I’ll just go straight to the Internet for my yarn needs, and the local yarn store can just eat me.

I’m afraid the only structure that binds this post together is the overarching theme of my foul mood.

inauguration, and why facebooking about gitmo with teenagers is a tricky but rewarding business

2009-01-23T10:12:00.000-08:00

Despite lacking a working television, I was determined, on Tuesday, to watch the inauguration proceedings live. I didn’t want have to wait and watch everything later on YouTube. Because the Internets are so modern and cool, I assumed this would be no problem, but I did have a moment of panic right at 10 a.m. CST/11 a.m. EST when I could not get the CNN.com/Facebook web streaming to budge. The nice thing, though, was that I could immediately rant on Facebook, whereupon my Malaysian friend Flory who has a more global perspective on media told me to try out the BBC site. So I watched the whole thing narrated by the Brits, which was fun, and appropriate, given that I am an America-hating terrorist Marxist and should really just move to Europe with all the other godless liberals.

Ahhh. Isn’t it nice, how stale and dated that joke sounds now?

I heard a few commentators grouse, at least mildly, about how somber Obama was, how withholding of the “soaring rhetoric.” I was genuinely surprised by the criticism, as I found the speech no less than cathartic and got teared up about ten different times and was generally just ecstatic about the whole deal. I suppose that’s why they asked former speechwriters to critique it, rather than asking sops like me. “Stephanie _____, what did you think of the inaugural speech?” “I thought it was [sob] so [weeps] wonderful…”

Of course, sops like me have lived through the past eight years too. I was grateful for Obama’s bracing sobriety, because I had all but forgotten that politicians were capable of being honest about how badly things suck. What scared me most about the Bush years was not that everything was falling apart, but that everything was falling apart and the president denied it. No instance of human suffering was too profound for him to blithely trivialize it with a shit-faced grin and a smirky remark. What was horrifying about Bush was not that he was evil, but that he was indifferent. There is a point, I suppose, where indifference and evil amount to the same thing.

I don’t know if I could choose a favorite quote from the speech, but it might be this:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers, faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all the other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and we are ready to lead once more.

I don’t know what the American networks did, but the BBC zoomed right in on George W. Bush’s face during that bit, and sat there for awhile. He looked like he was stoically enduring a rectal exam. Either that or he was thinking, “Expedience? Wazzat mean?”

(That, however, was not my favorite visual. That would be a tossup. There was John Lewis taking his wife’s hand (I assume it was his wife) to stand and applaud when Obama said, “a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.” And then there was Malia watching her dad give one of the most monumental speeches in modern American history through the little window in her digital camera. Maybe she was making a video. You know, in case no one else got around to it. We as a nation are in for some relentless cuteness from the White House in the years to come.)

And then, just so we know that he meant it, he ordered the closing of Gitmo. Of course, we shouldn’t get complacent and assume it’s all taken care of because an executive order is just the beginning and a lot of difficult questions remain etc etc but still! People! Practically the first thing he did was this! I could not possibly ask for anything more encouraging on Obama’s first day. (Aside: reading Glenn Greenwald’s Salon blog, the source of that link, is SUCH a buzzkill. It’s like castor oil for starry-eyed Obamatons. I hate it. He is, so far as I can tell, nearly always right. Right as in correct, that is. I read everything he posts. My first reaction is usually, No, Stephanie, no drinks until five.)

Cue the Republican relatives, whom, as I’ve stated earlier, were never a problem before Facebook. And really, it’s not like we get into it or anything. My cousin’s wife left a fairly innocuous message on one of my happy post-election status updates that was something to the effect that the entire world was watching and he had better not screw up. I mean, seriously, that’s as heated as we get. None of us wants politics to mess up our relationships.

But then last night her 17-year-old son had a status update: “closing GITMO is stupid anyone agree w/ me”

Oh, suck. When things like this happen, I have no idea which voice is that of my better nature. Is it the cautionary one? The one that says that nothing I write to him in response will override the influence of his parents and his church and Fox News and for the sake of family harmony I should just let it pass? Or the one that says that this boy is seventeen and he is smart enough and strong enough to hear some challenges to his views and be forced to think about them a bit more than perhaps he wants to, and if his mother doesn’t like what I have to say, she will probably forgive me?

Let’s get one thing straight: I love this boy. He is such an innocent. I have loved him since he was a baby and at the risk of sounding unbearably old, he is still a little kid to me, a sweet boy who carried gifts at my wedding and always hugs me even at height of surly adolescence. He once sent me an Obama piece of flair on Facebook even though he wanted McCain to win, because he knew I liked Obama. He is a dear. So it is no problem to keep the rage in check with him—there is no rage.

Of course, I ended up writing something; otherwise I wouldn’t be telling this story. Two quick paragraphs are all Facebook gives you. I told him that they torture people at Gitmo, that some of them are teenagers, that there are undoubtedly some nasty folks there but that they need to be brought to justice in trials that the world will respect. I told him that many people around the world think that America has forsaken decency and justice because of Gitmo. I told him that an open legal system is one of the things that makes America great, and that if we forsake that, we are not much better than the Romans were in the time of Jesus.

What I wanted to say was, “…our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.” Someone beat me to that punch, though.

I don’t know how he processed my reasoning, but I think I probably made his guts churn. His next status update stated that he “regrets that last status update,” which made me feel a little guilty. Then he thanked me for my point of view, which was, I think, pretty classy.

But something was still nagging at me. I wanted to challenge for him this paradigm whereby torturing is something that we do to “protect the nation” and if we don’t torture, we put ourselves at risk. (“we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals...Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up—“ Oh, right. I did mention that bit.) Because one of his friends was mentioning a “cool 24 subplot” that presented this exact supposed conundrum, I gave him the link to an article by a retired Army intelligence officer about how 24 lies about the efficacy of torture. (I did not use the word “efficacy.”) I gently suggested that he and his friends should discuss it, and then I promised to stop being teacherly and leave him alone about this stuff.

I don’t know if I did the right thing in pushing him, or not. It felt like the right thing to do. Apparently the news is now drenched with fear-mongering Republicans trying to terrify people about all the evildoers who will now be brought to American soil and how closing Gitmo is going to endanger us all—you know, Variation Three Zillion on the standard crap. My little Facebook challenge probably won’t amount to much in the face of their assault.

Still, I can’t help feeling this: that if I have shown him that there are passionate people on the other side, people who believe strongly enough in the goodness of our cause that we are willing to state our views in adamant moral language, I have done both him and liberalism a service.

Thanks, President Obama, for helping me out with the language part. I’m pulling for you.

an attempt at clarification, and thanks

2009-01-21T08:30:00.000-08:00

I am realizing that the beginning of my adoption post from the other day is the exact sort of thing that could make all my friends needlessly paranoid about every single thing they have ever said to me about adoption and every expression of support they have given me regarding our process. And I hate to think of this, because my friends have been overwhelmingly supportive and classy and tactful about the whole thing, and I have always felt that I have safe places to talk about this stuff when I need to talk about it. Why is so much easier to rant than to acknowledge this?

I struggle a lot with how much information to give people, always fearing that if I say too much it will lead to questions down the road that are too painful for me to answer. The reality of the adoption process is that most “leads” dissolve into nothing, and after that happens, you really don’t want to talk about them to anyone, at all. When I wrote that I fear expressions of sympathy, I think it was because I want to normalize the unpredictable nature of this process for myself and for everyone I discuss it with. I don’t want to hear “Oh, how sad that such-and-such lead didn’t work out for you,” because if it didn’t work out, I need to believe that it was meant to not work out.

It wasn’t really accurate to say that I fear expressions of sympathy. What I fear are expressions of pity. Anyone who has struggled with infertility, who has sweated over how best to adopt—anyone for whom the process of having children has been less straightforward than the average—probably understands what I mean. We need to handle these situations in ways that don’t make us feel perpetually defeated. When I am part of a situation over which I have so little control, I claim my own agency by surrendering to its unpredictable nature, by refusing self-pity, and by recognizing that this is quite simply how life works. Sometimes it’s hard for me to hold on to the distinction between this kind of mature detachment and a complete denial that I am facing emotional challenges.

But again, I have to repeat how great my friends have been. The few uncomfortable comments I have received have been mainly from people who come from a generation for which adoption is not particularly normalized. Most of my friends seem to understand that I need support but not pity, that thoughtful inquiries about how we’re doing on the adoption front are helpful, but also that I need to discuss this at my own speed. And believe me, not everyone who goes through adoption is so lucky. So to all of you have been so patient, who have listened to me and to Eric as we try to figure things out, and who have, through your compassion and insight, moved us closer to knowing our own intentions and our own hearts, thank you. We’re going to need you more than ever in the months and years ahead.

I want to write about the inauguration and how good it felt to watch the sun rise this morning on a new Obama-led America (WOOOOOO!!!!), but I’ll save that for later in the week. We have foot-high pile of foster care training homework to get through before our second training this weekend, and due to severe Obamamania, it has not gotten any shorter thus far.

ETA: Rereading. For a so-called clarification, this post strikes me as lacking in clarity. Short version: Apologies if I made any of you get all worried about things you have said to me that have actually been totally supportive and cool. Attempts to explain continual process of personal figuring-it-out-ness. Many thanks to my friends.

Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson's Prayer (yesterday at pre-inaugural kickoff)

2009-01-19T13:39:00.000-08:00

Please consider posting this on your own blogs or sharing it around with your friends so that everyone reads or hears it, in spite of whatever colossal screw-up led to it not being properly broadcast at the time.

You can see a very bad YouTube video of it here. The video sucks, but the audio is fine. You could always listen with your eyes closed.

“O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will bless us with tears -- tears for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women in many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless this nation with anger -- anger at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort at the easy, simplistic answers we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth about ourselves and our world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be fixed anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility, open to understanding that our own needs as a nation must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance, replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences.

Bless us with compassion and generosity, remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable.

And God, we give you thanks for your child, Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, inspire him with President Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for all people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our ship of state needs a steady, calm captain.

Give him stirring words; We will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking far too much of this one. We implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand, that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity, and peace. Amen."

what to do when a social worker from foster care is about to visit your house

2009-01-15T13:17:00.000-08:00

First: Put the wine box in the cupboard.

Second: Find the smoke alarms you meant to install last year. Read instructions. Learn that installing smoke alarms requires a drill, which you do not have. Swear. Improvise with long nails. Hammer your finger. Swear some more.

Third: Freak out. Run around the house with a broom.

Fourth: Finally pry the tacked-on Obama sign off the porch rails with a putty knife, in case social worker is a Republican.

Fifth (ten minutes before social worker is to arrive): Remember the giant hookah that really is just a souvenir from Dearborn, Michigan, but looks exactly like a bong. Fish out of closet and cram into box in basement. Put other box on top of this box.

Sixth: Freak out. Run around the house with a broom.

I don’t write much about our adoption process, for a variety of reasons, the biggest one being that the more I write about it, the more I think about it, and mostly I try not to think about it, unless I am attending to some piece of vital related business. Also, even when I do consider writing about it, there are things I prefer not to reveal and thus I would end up writing in that aggravating blogger code language, you know, the kind where people say “Something happened/is going to happen/may happen/probably won’t happen but there’s a miniscule chance that it may happen, and I can’t say anything about it but it’s a thing, so everyone be curious now and I will tell you nothing.”

Also, I fear expressions of sympathy. Nothing makes this process more difficult than expressions of sympathy. My least favorite ones, which I should add I have never heard from any known reader of this blog, go like this: “You guys would be such great parents! It’s so unfair that they make it so hard to adopt for great people like you when there are stupid people having babies all the time.” Yes, that’s helpful, thank you. I never even know where to begin with this kind of remark. It’s offered in kindness, so you don’t want to be a bitch about it. But such comments are not just, nor truthful. They presume a world where unjustly detained adoptive parents are prevented from saving hoards of needy, parentless babies by soulless bureaucrats bent on creating obstacles. I ranted about this here, so I won’t retread the territory, other than to say that this assessment of the situation is drastically off the mark. Potential adoptive parents go through a lot, but we are still by far the least victimized parties in the adoption triad.

And beyond that, ranting about the perceived injustice of undeserving people having children does nothing, absolutely nothing, to make me feel better about anything at all.

About two weeks ago, I hit a wall on this adoption thing; I felt just utterly discouraged. That meme I did earlier, where I said I was “fine where we are with this”? That was sort of a lie, or maybe wishful thinking. I am not going crazy for a baby—honestly, parenting terrifies me now more than ever—but I got hit with this wave of discouragement, the this-will-never-happen-it’s-all-pointless kind of discouragement. We’ve been officially looking for about a year, and nothing has panned out so far. Figuring out the best, most ethical means to domestically adopt in a red state where reproductive issues are a never-ending battleground has been really tricky. We don’t feel good about hardly any of the agencies in this state. Our litmus test, when we were at that stage, was to go straight to the “For Birthmothers” information. If they presume the term “birthmother” in a preliminary, advisory stage, we’re already suspicious, because pregnant women who are considering adoption are NOT birthmothers. They are expectant mothers who deserve unbiased information about all of their options. If the information that the agency offers such parents includes admonitions against abortion and/or any sort of coercive language (language that even subtly portrays the hypothetical waiting adoptive parents as more deserving of a child than the hypothetical pregnant woman seeking advice), well, that was it. We crossed that agency off the list.

And thus, we crossed off almost every agency in the state, and settled on private adoption, which has its own problems. One of them is that it requires “networking” in order to find a baby. We never really found a way to be okay or comfortable with that—which is not to diss on this particular means to adoption, it can be done thoughtfully and well—but just to say that it is really not us, and our attempts thus far have been fairly half-assed. And we hate talking to lawyers. So nothing much has happened on that front.

In the past few months, a series of events has led us to consider foster care adoption. This is not to say that something is going to happen tomorrow or next month or with anything resembling immediacy. [Insert obfuscating crypto-bloggerese here.] But we are going to start training to be licensed by the state as a foster home. Even if you’re only interested in adoption and not foster care, this is a necessary step, for a variety of reasons I won’t go into here. Suffice it to say that this is why, on Tuesday morning, I was going through the pre-social-worker-visit chicken dance.

She knocked on the door at noon, and the second I opened it, my cat Bonzo made a rush for the door, which he does sometimes, despite being an indoor cat who would not last two seconds in the wilds of the condo parking lot. This is how I came to completely ignore her offered hand and instead dive for the floor to restrain my hell-cat. Apologizing for the unintentional diss, I invited her in, transferring the cat to my left arm so that I could offer my right hand. At this point, she dropped her purse. I liked this woman immediately.

Her accent was Scottish or Irish or something British Isles-y, and she looked about my age. The minute she sat down on the couch, Bonzo assaulted her with a series of head-butts, which are his way of saying, “You seem cool. Pay attention to me now.” She assured me that she loved all animals and the head-butting was no problem. Then she suggested that we do a run-through of the house, so she could point out to me everything that would need work to get us up to foster licensure standards.

Rather than putting it off, I took her straight to the basement, with the same blurted caveat I offered the last time a social worker visited us: “Our basement is full of beer bottles because my husband is a brewer so we look like total alcoholics but I promise we’re really not.” She was not phased. (Relax! I told myself. She’s Irish! Or…Scottish! How can someone who watches as much BBC as I do not place this accent?) We did a complete tour, during which I learned that we need the following: Two handrails built, for both staircases; child guards installed at top and bottom of both staircases; knives to be placed in location unreachable to small children; locked cabinet in which to store alcohol; three more smoke alarms; two more carbon monoxide detectors; outlet plugs; a two-story ladder; and locked medicine chest to store medications, medicines, and any other substance that might be in any way toxic. Then we talked about paperwork.

This all sounds like a tremendous drag, but by the time she left I felt better about everything, the whole deal. She was just so real and approachable, and unlike every other adoption professional I have spoken to, she did not seem to be making a pitch. She did not candy-coat the difficulties involved in foster adoption, which made me trust her more. With every difficulty you encounter, she said, there is a supportive community of people involved in foster care who will help you out. Just hearing that made me feel less isolated.

And she did not make me feel defensive or insane for wanting to go back to school and parent at the same time (her response was to tell me about a single working mom she knew who adopted three kids out of foster care), and the first thing she did was compliment me on our house. The house thing may sound trivial. But it meant a lot to me. We live in a slightly scrappy condo in a working class neighborhood and have been known to have some class-related insecurity around this whole adoption thing.

Eric and I talked about it later (he was at work during her visit, but since we both have to go to a bunch of trainings he’ll have plenty of time to get the score), about how pursuing adoption has made us feel perpetually inadequate about our careers, our income, our religion (re: undefined nature of or lack thereof), our modest home, the state of our front porch. It isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault that we feel this way, other than perhaps our own for allowing ourselves to be so dogged by these insecurities. But talking to someone from the foster care world was such a different experience from talking with the lawyers and social workers we’ve encountered thus far. There was no inkling of judgment from her, nothing that set my teeth on edge, no weird class tension…the main thing that came across was her experience and her love for foster kids. She seemed like someone who has seen every kind of family under the sun.

As I said to Eric, I think this may be more our scene. We’ll see.

condolences for Jenn

2009-01-12T16:09:00.001-08:00

Jenn over at Stinkbumps the Wonder Boy just lost her dad. Please keep her and her son in your thoughts and/or prayers. She is one hell of a courageous woman.

the rick warren thing

2009-01-08T13:18:00.000-08:00

Though I vowed to myself not to write anything about the Rick Warren inauguration controversy, and though enough has happened since then that part of me barely cares anymore, I find myself still slightly obsessing over it.

Things I could write about instead: Gaza, and how monumentally fucking depressed I am about that horrific situation. Why I’m pleased with Obama’s recent CIA and DOJ appointments. The rising cost of hypoallergenic cat food. How much I love our new stainless steel saucepan. Nasal congestion.

No? Rick Warren it is. I read a ton of columns and analysis about Obama’s selection of Warren to speak at inauguration, not because I really wanted to, but because I am a helpless junkie for discussions involving religion and queer sexuality. As I read, I thought, “OK, I see her point.” “OK, I see his point.” “OK, I see that point too.” I see the point of people who believe that this gesture has some positive healing potential, and I see the point of people who think that this gesture is a complete betrayal of Obama’s LGBT supporters. I see the point of people who think that the LGBT rights movement has pushed too hard too quickly on same-sex marriage and the backlash is bringing us things like Proposition 8 and same-sex adoption bans, and like it or not we have to slow down and reach out to people like Rick Warren, who are not virulent haters and could potentially be reasoned with. I see the point of people who label Rick Warren and his like “smiling bigots” and point out that approaching such folk in the spirit of reasonable discussion has never yielded much in the past, and that all we can really hope to do now is defeat them politically.

I wasn’t at all surprised that Obama made this selection; he has given every indication that he wants to reach out to evangelicals, most notably with his participation in the forum/debate/whatever that Warren hosted at his ginormous megachurch back this summer. I do wish he hadn’t chosen Warren. I don’t like Warren and I certainly don’t think he deserves such a platform. At the same time, there are things about him that I find encouraging, at least marginally. His work against poverty and for HIV/AIDS-related causes can be easily dismissed; there are scads of people, religious and otherwise, who do as much as he does, and one can easily argue that he doesn’t deserve greater accolades just because he does such work and happens to be an evangelical Christian. I remind myself, though, that within the evangelical world Warren inhabits, he has taken significant risks to do this work. Modern evangelicals are deeply fearful of work that furthers social justice. I’m not sure of all the reasons for this; I think “because they’re all hateful and smug” is far too simplistic. Evangelicals seem to have bought into a worldview that pits social justice against personal spirituality. Warren has struggled openly to figure out how they can be instead be balanced, and he seems to have convinced a lot of evangelicals to seek that balance as well.

This, of course, is not an argument in favor of the choice of Warren to deliver the inauguration invocation. Progressive Christians might legitimately ask why someone like Warren gets this gig, when so many of their ranks have done as much to alleviate poverty as he has, and have managed to notice that LGBT equality is a social justice imperative as well. (Such as the guy who’s giving the benediction.) For non-Christian, equality-minded folk, the notion that Warren is somehow radical for emphasizing the doing of good works is likely to be unintelligible. The fact that Warren is one of the less offensive leaders of one of the more offensive American political tribes is not a reason to give him a big cookie on a national stage.

Still, I’m not ready to proclaim Obama a complete enemy of LGBT equality for doing this. Obviously, he’s being calculating. (He may have miscalculated how much he can take LGBT support for granted.) In an interview he did with Rolling Stone last summer, Obama said that he advocated civil unions over same-sex marriage because he believed it is most effective to start where you have consensus, and he perceived that there was popular consensus at least on some basic civil rights for same-sex couples, if not marriage with a big “M.” (Just read his comments here; I’m not summarizing it very well.) I’m not saying his stance is necessarily the right thing; I don’t know if it’s the right thing. I don’t know if it would be a better idea to stand firm and fight like hell for marriage equality or to quietly focus on civil unions and on keeping anti-gay adoption laws off the books while waiting for younger and more progressive leaders to rise to power. To employ the language of a newly ubiquitous and already suspect dichotomy, the former is “ideological”; the latter is “pragmatic.”

The reason I find that dichotomy suspect, by the way, is that the “ideologue” charge can be used to handily dismiss people who are, frankly, fighting for what it right. I don’t think my belief in marriage equality makes me an ideologue. I don’t think that queer activists are ideologues or extremists for asserting that they are as entitled to the right to marry as straight people. We on the left are still flailing for a resonant language of morality. That’s a problem for another post, I guess.

But for argument’s sake, suppose we are to go with the “pragmatic” approach, which is Obama’s game. Is reaching out to people like Rick Warren and his evangelical fans a necessary part of the equation? A few days after the Warren selection was announced, Melissa Etheridge wrote a piece on Huffington Post entitled The Choice is Ours Now, addressed to her fellow LGBT activists and describing her own positive experience with Rick Warren. Warren, it turns out, is a big fan of Melissa Etheridge. She initiated a conversation with him when she realized that they had both been asked to perform at the same event by the Muslim Public Affairs Council (which is a pretty cool thing in and of itself, actually), and during their conversation he told her that he regretted some of the more extreme things he had said during the campaign for Proposition 8. They “agreed to build bridges to the future,” and she encouraged her readers to do likewise, writing this:

Brothers and sisters the choice is ours now. We have the world's attention. We have the capability to create change, awesome change in this world, but before we change minds we must change hearts. Sure, there are plenty of hateful people who will always hold on to their bigotry like a child to a blanket. But there are also good people out there, Christian and otherwise that are beginning to listen. They don't hate us, they fear change. Maybe in our anger, as we consider marches and boycotts, perhaps we can consider stretching out our hands. Maybe instead of marching on his church, we can show up en mass and volunteer for one of the many organizations affiliated with his church that work for HIV/AIDS causes all around the world.

Maybe if they get to know us, they wont fear us.

I know, call me a dreamer, but I feel a new era is upon us.

I posted this story on my Facebook page after reading it, mostly as a gesture of peace towards my evangelical Republican Facebook-using relatives, whom I know are big Warren fans. Of course, I doubt these relatives click on any article that I post on Facebook anyway, so it was probably futile. The only person who responded to my posting was a friend who is both an Etheridge fan and a lesbian, and liked it enough to post it on her own page.

But plenty of people were unhappy with her piece, and some made good arguments in response to it. (I could provide a bunch of links, but just Google “Melissa Etheridge Rick Warren” and you’ll find them yourself. It gets complicated, because Etheridge’s wife also wrote a blog post defending Warren, and people responded to that too.) Etheridge’s call for peacemaking sounds really good, but I had to remind myself, after reading some of the responses, that the bridge-building she advocates, particularly with religious people, sounds a lot better on paper than it often ends up being in practice. Here’s what I’ve observed among Mennonites, and I suspect it’s mirrored in other Christian denominations: LGBT people have already reached out, again and again. They have participated in “dialogue”; they have submitted to the terms of discussions that are stacked against them; they have listened ad nauseum to the “concerns” of bigots who are most interested in the sounds of their own voices; they have been patronized to and treated like truant children and at worst, exploited as objects for the sexual fascination of a church that still addresses sexuality primarily through denial and repression.

The lack of progress isn’t because queer people aren’t reaching out. We’re stalled on this because most church people are unwilling to engage in a discussion about queer sexuality unless the terms of the discussion are dictated by straight people. John Linscheid, a gay Mennonite activist who has been at this stuff for years, wrote a great piece about why he’s fed up, describing how “dialogue” makes him feel “sucker-punched.” (It’s a newsletter; scroll down to page five.) He writes, “…what the institution defines as ‘loving dialogue’ is inherently condescending. By entering the dialogue, I accept the implicit proposition that our human worth and our status as children of God are questionable and must be proven.” How can LGBT activists possibly be blamed for being sick of trying? None of my queer friends have any interest in these kinds of “dialogues”; they’re not masochists.

The most compelling and hopeful suggestion in Etheridge’s column, I think, is her suggestion that LGBT folk volunteer en masse alongside Warren’s followers to fight HIV/AIDS. Of course, I can see the resistance to working for Warren’s specific charities (“I’m sure as hell not volunteering for his AIDS charities,” writes Kevin Drum on his Mother Jones blog). I’m not sure I’d be comfortable working for his charities either; I’d have to learn a lot more about them first. But I’m still somewhat attracted to the proposal because it’s a way forward that has nothing to do with this dialogue crap. Most conservative Christians have been taught to believe in a fiction they call the “homosexual lifestyle.” They seem to think that queer people are selfish, wounded, and unable to contribute to society, and these prejudices are too entrenched to be easily dislodged by mere conversation. I’ve often wished that I could make some of my more conservative fellow Mennonites, who think of themselves as so communal and selfless, see the deep values of found family and mutual care that exist in many queer communities. While it’s not the job of queer people to prove these things to intolerant heteros, there is something wonderfully subversive about Etheridge’s volunteering suggestion. At its best, such action could get people off the endless loops of the culture war battles and work some magic we may not yet be capable of imagining. I’m sure it’s already happening somewhere.

At the end of the day, what this whole flap has most reinforced for me is how easy it is to coast on hetero privilege. How easy it is for even well-meaning straights to wag our fingers at the queers and suggest that they should not get so upset about people like Rick Warren. It’s a paternalistic role that has practically been written for us. I see the temptation. I would love to just write the Warren thing off as smart politics on Obama’s part so that I don’t have to start off 2009 thinking ill of my beloved Barack. But at the end of the day, I think it’s probably good that so many people gave him heat for it. He needs to know that the LGBT community will not just continually roll over and take it, and he needs to know that straight allies will fight too, that we will not just turn to our queer brothers and sisters and tell them to suck it up again and again and again.

And I also hope that Melissa Etheridge is right about Warren and about his followers. I want a way forward. I want to see a transformation; I don’t think we have to give up on changing hearts. I am jaded about this stuff, jaded enough to more or less leave my church over it, but nonetheless I still believe that homophobia is mostly the product of fear. And fear, we can do something about.

(ETA: I just reread this post. How on earth did I manage to use the phrases "roll over and take it" and "suck it up" in one exceedingly earnest sentence? What is wrong with me?)

a sweater difficulty

2009-01-05T14:20:00.000-08:00

I’ve been knitting a lot lately. My enthusiasm for knitting sort of waxes and wanes, depending on a complex algorithm involving weather patterns, the suitability of my WIPs (works in progress, for you Muggles), my current emotional needs, the state of my wrists, the orderliness of my yarn trunk, and the degree to which my everyday life requires an engaging and yet relatively mindless handcraft to sustain me through otherwise trying activities. The Yarn Harlot, in her wisdom, has written that people who say they could never knit because they “don’t have the patience” are misunderstanding the fundamental nature of knitting. Knitting imparts patience. Knitting—I just have to interrupt this broadcast right now to let you all know that there is an absolutely enormous black spider approximately three feet away from me—knitting…oh boy. I lost my train of thought. This is a SPIDER.

(…)

I just spent five minutes fencing with the spider with a size 7 knitting needle while it skittered around avoiding me, and I have conceded defeat. It has crawled underneath my alma mater sweatshirt, which I am thankfully not wearing. Anyway, I was saying that knitting imparts patience. It allows a person to endure tedious conversations, waiting rooms, and assuming one is not driving and it is light outside, car trips. It makes hospitals bearable. The past few days we have been spending a lot of time in the hospital. No need for alarm: it’s not Eric or me, and the person it is will be fine. Let’s just say, though, that between the ER and visiting time, I have had a lot of time to knit, and particularly in the ER, where the frustration of waiting for doctors who don’t arrive in a remotely timely fashion is combined with the difficulty of watching someone you love in pain, knitting is a godsend.

I’ve been working on this sweater. It’s for myself: I never knit sweaters for anyone but myself, unless you count the occasional baby, which you shouldn’t, because a baby sweater, in terms of cost and commitment, bears no resemblance to the demands of an adult version. I once knitted a sweater for Eric, with disastrous consequences. In attempting to accommodate the shoulders of a former high school football player, I ended up with a tent that would comfortably hold two NFL linebackers, assuming they were able to overcome their homophobia long enough to snuggle in there together. Eric was heroically gracious about it, but of course he could not reasonably be expected to wear the thing. As you might imagine, epic stretches of my life were spent on this monstrosity. It really soured me on gift knitting.

Knitting for men is now out of my repertoire. I happen to believe that the number of men out there who actually want a hand-knitted sweater is roughly the same, or possibly less, than the number of men who are capable of knitting such a thing for themselves. Most sweater patterns for men are designed by women who have forced themselves into serious denial about the fashion proclivities of the North American male. Some deceive themselves with the idea that at least gay men will wear the things, as they will not be weighed down by the crippling fear of appearing gay that afflicts many straight males when choosing clothing. This, to me, is dubious reasoning. Are we prepared to assert that gay men are more likely to accept the risk of lumpiness, dated styling, and ill fit inherent in handknits? Fishy.

When it comes to fit, I’m a somewhat choosy customer myself. I have Requirements. The major one is that I cannot bear the slightest bit of oversize. Snug sweaters are warmer. And I am small-boned; anything with more than an inch of give makes me feel like I am about to audition for The Cosby Show or Flashdance. That doesn’t mean, of course, that I want my things all skintight and skanky. I just want a reasonably close fit. Also, I don’t want to flash my midriff every time I raise my arms, nor do I want vast expanses of bare lower back to come into view every time I reach for something in a lower cabinet. I am over thirty, and I lack the appropriate tattoos. And I don’t want it too long, either, and I want shaping at the waist, and then, of course, there are the arms, which are the reason I started knitting sweaters in the first place. The sweaters you can buy for women my size rarely take into account the possibility that even small women can be proportioned like apes. It’s all very complicated, and I can never find patterns that accommodate all these needs, which is why I tend to make up my own.

This sounds advanced and impressive, in theory. In practice, I still barely know what I’m doing. My first invented attempt worked out fine in that it does strongly resemble a sweater, but it hangs on me like a sack, and I never wear it outside of the house. After the second or third, I caught on to the waist shaping, sort of. Of the eight sweaters I’ve made for myself over the past five or six years, four are more or less my own invention. One I recently threw in the Planet Aid bin in a parking lot. The others…well, they’re tolerable. But I don’t wear them anywhere that I want to look good.

Which brings me back to the sweater I mentioned. It is supposed to be the pinnacle of my design adventures, the one that will look professional and not end up on the Frump Pile after three weeks. I measured and knitted and ripped and re-measured and re-knitted. After almost five straight hours of knitting in the ER, it was almost done.

The sweater, a cardigan, zips up the front, or it will, once I buy a zipper for it. Which means that when I try it on for fit, I try to hold together the two sides to approximate how it might look zipped. This is how I came to notice that while the waist is shaped perfectly, and the sleeves are adequately long, and the neckline is as nice as anything I’ve ever done, I forgot to figure in the presence of breasts.

Frankly, I could be forgiven the omission. I am not in the possession of such attributes as to require elaborate wardrobe-related accommodation, as a rule. However, in a close-fitted garment, my inattentiveness is somewhat apparent, at least to my eye. It’s not apparent in the sort of way that is going to provide an entertaining, look-that-chick’s-bursting-out-of-her-sweater visual for men on the street—that will never, ever be my problem. If anything, the effect is minimizing, which…well, great. No, the people who are most likely to notice will be other knitters, who will look at the ever-ever-so-slightly straining cables and think, oh, she forgot the boob increases. Poor thing.

I could rip it back to the appropriate spot and address the issue, but I’ve lost my gumption. Ripping back to that spot would be roughly equivalent to undoing all the work I did in the ER, which somehow seems just unbearable. I’m going to keep the sweater, and wear it. But I doubt I’ll ever zip it all the way up.

And next week I am getting out that old sweater that I knit Eric, unraveling the whole thing, and knitting it back up to fit a girl—or rather, a woman.

new year's meme

2009-01-02T21:50:00.000-08:00

What the hell. Here’s a new year’s meme. I stole it from Dawn.

1. What did you do in 2008 that you’d never done before? 
Joined a social networking site. Oh, and I got acupuncture. Anyone who says you don’t feel the needles is fibbing.

2. Did you keep your New Years’ Resolutions, and will you make more for next year? 
Oh, I think I probably resolved never to join a social networking site. I guess I have resolutions, sort of. Start lifting weights again, and as always, be as good to other people as I can. There’s always room for work on that one.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? 
Yes! My cousin and his wife had a girl. My friend Zeina had a girl. My friend Katie had a boy. It was a good year for babies. But other dear friends had awfully rough times with pregnancy and fertility, so the joy is not undiluted.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Yes.

5. What countries did you visit?
Seattle? Sure felt like a different country.

6. What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008?
I would love to have a successful adoption placement and a child. But I am surrendering that one to my higher power. We are fine where we are with this.

7. What date from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Dear God. November 4, of course. Everyone knows why.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Becoming a runner felt like a big personal triumph. It wasn’t a big achievement year, anyway; more of a growth year, one could say.

9. What was your biggest failure?
All the times I was cranky and impatient and pointlessly anxious.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
I guess having surgery for ovarian cysts and endometriosis would count as illness. But I didn’t have cancer, and the endo doesn’t bother me anymore, and I am really happy with the shape I’m in. So I feel pretty blessed.

11. What was the best thing you bought? 
New tires probably saved my life, so I’d say those.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? 
My family had some serious struggles this year and a lot of people I love came through with pretty celebration-worthy behavior.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? 
Republicans. Robert Mugabe. The Israeli government. Fundamentalists of all stripes.

14. Where did most of your money go?   
Bills and car maintenance.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?   
The possibility that Americans and not, by and large, total dumbshits.

16. What song will always remind you of 2008?   
Radio Tarifa’s album Fiebre was on in our kitchen just constantly, and it was a soundtrack to some of the best of 2008. But don’t make me choose a song.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:   
i. happier or sadder? Happier. This time last year I was really stressed about my high-maintenance right ovary, plus there was another year of George W. Bush to look forward to. ii. thinner or fatter? About the same, but I hope I look less gaunt than I did. iii. richer or poorer? Slightly richer. We may be lower middle class, but we are better off than an awful lot of people right now.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?  
Writing. I did do a lot, but I don’t feel like I have much to show for it. And sleeping. This was kind of a crap year for sleep.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?   
Worrying.

20. How did you spend Christmas?   
In rural McPherson County, KS with my wonderful, wonderful extended family.

21. What LJ users did you meet? 
I’m not on LiveJournal. I didn’t meet any online pals I don’t already know. Sure would be cool to do so sometime, though.

22. Did you fall in love in 2008?   
I love Eric more than ever.

23. How many one-night stands?   
Does ruthlessly-discarded-after-one-chapter bedtime reading count? I had a few of those. Lewis Black wasn't nearly as good in bed as I'd hoped.

24. What was your favourite TV program?   
I was going to say Battlestar Galactica, but all in all it really was The Daily Show. Let me be the umpteenth liberal to proclaim that this show is how I kept my sanity during the election.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year? 
Sarah Palin. Last year I didn’t know she existed, which is the only reason on earth why I did not hate her then. However, given happy circumstances, it’s a sort of casual-ish hatred now.

26. What was the best book you read?   
Dude, I hate this question. The minute someone asks me what good things I’ve read, I forget every book I’ve even looked at for the past year. Let’s see…for sheer entertainment and a few moments of wrenching heartbreak, David Sedaris’ new When You Are Engulfed in Flames. For inspiring-but-not-cheesy hope for humanity, Greg Mortenson and David Relin’s Three Cups of Tea. For fabulous and eerie and quirkily deep storytelling, Neil Gaiman’s latest, The Graveyard Book.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Seeing my friends rock out on tango was definitely my live music highlight. But I don’t know if I could say I discovered them.

28. What did you want and get? 
An obsessively consuming research idea.

29. What did you want and not get?  
World peace. Possibly a cop-out answer, but the truth.

30. What was your favorite film of this year?   
Oh, frak. I don’t know. I didn’t see hardly anything. Hellboy II, maybe?

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?   Thirty-two, and according to this blog post, I took a break from studying martyrs to study vampires.

32.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?   
If someone had paid me for the martyrs and vampires.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008?   
I trashed the yoga pants and rediscovered my love of clunky boots, tight jeans, and bitchy black, and have never felt more like myself.

34. What kept you sane?  
My friends, my parents, my spouse.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? 
Sorry to be boring, but it is JON STEWART FOREVER.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?   
Everything in my life felt like a political issue. Everything was stirring. I cried while canvassing for Obama. I cried on election night. How could I possibly choose an issue? Saving the goddamned world, for God’s sake!

37. Who did you miss?   
All the friends I didn’t get to see. All of my grandparents.

38. Who was the best new person you met?  
I’ve met some great people doing interfaith community work. Mostly, though, this has been a year for discovering the greatness in people I already knew.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008.   
Action always feels better than brooding.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.  
This is sort of an inept question, but something still comes to mind:

I love this hour
When the tide is just turning
There will be an end
To the longing and yearning
If I can stand up to angels and men
I’ll never get swallowed
In darkness again
(from “Anywhere on This Road,” The Living Road, Lhasa de Sela)

But you really just need to hear the music to feel it.

curse of the tatsoi

2008-12-31T08:23:00.000-08:00

In the midst of cold, recession, and the general barrenness of winter, it’s lovely to have a freezer and cupboard full of food that we grew and preserved ourselves back in the summer. We did pretty well this time: canned tomatoes, canned green tomatoes, turnip pickles (you know you want some), canned pear chutney (we didn’t grow the pears, but my uncle did), stacks of frozen poblanos and jalapenos, frozen pesto, a few bags of frozen chard, green beans, and beet greens. We’re likely to run out of the tomatoes in the next month or so, and we’re making pretty good time through the peppers too, in spite of the staggering amount we managed to put up. But however you look at it, it’s a nice stash.

Then there’s the tatsoi.

Tatsoi seemed like such a good idea last March. This small, delicate Chinese mustard green is bok choi’s cute cousin. When it’s really young, it’s lovely in salads with toasted sesame oil. When it gets a little more mature, you toss it in stir-fries. The flavor is sort of a delicate peppery cabbagey something, subtle, ever so slightly kicky. It’s a sassy little brassica. Nice, if you like that kind of thing.

I do, or did, at any rate. My friend Sarah, on the other hand, with whom we garden, wanted nothing to do with it. She likes her greens with about as much kick as a béchamel sauce. Butter lettuce is her speed. However, the garden space in her backyard is large, and having plenty of space for her milder choices, she didn’t begrudge me the huge, long row of tatsoi I put in, all the while rhapsodizing in a superior manner about the greatness of spicy greens that I was sure she could come to love if she would only open her mind.

My comeuppance has arrived in the form of a freezer that spews pint bags of frozen tatsoi at my head whenever it is opened. I’ll be headed for something way more inviting: the pesto, perhaps, or the smoky Spanish paprika I keep fresh in there, and the tatsoi will assert itself. The message is always the same: Ignore me, and I will still be here in April when the farmer’s market is full of arugula and baby spinach and mesclun salad mix. I will gather frost, and acquire freezer burn flavor, and you know damn well that you will still be too much of a Mennonite to throw me away. You will be forcing me down in May, and in June you will desperately invent a bread recipe involving whirled tatsoi that will make everyone in your house throw up.

Sometime around the third week of August, when I was spending every other evening cramming steamed tatsoi into baggies, I questioned the wisdom of planting a huge crop of a green that is most at home in cuisines about which I know next to nothing. Every year I resolve to learn more about Chinese food, and somehow I always fail; it’s just too vast. I can make you the same pan-pseudo-Asian tofu stir-fry that you will find in the home of every vegetarian, and I have been known to toy with the odd Sichuan peppercorn, but really, I have no clue. I exhausted my tatsoi potential in June. By August, I was well into my usual late-summer Mediterranean tomato orgy and wanted nothing to do with the stuff.

I do not believe people who tell me that suffusing plants with “good energy” makes them grow better. Every time I sawed at those tatsoi stems, I sent them horrid thoughts: Die, you relentless bastards, or worse, I WISH YOU WERE CHARD. And yet we were harvesting it by the bushelful on a weekly basis. I could have let the whole patch go to seed and no one would have missed it, but I’m a Midwesterner and I don’t do things like that. If there is edible vegetable matter to be harvested in my vicinity and a workable means of preserving it, I know my duty.

We eat a lot of greens in this house; kale, collards, napa cabbage, turnip greens, chard—we love them all, and it requires so little effort to make them good. And generally speaking, all these things hold up well in the freezer, and have a thousand culinary uses. But all we really have left is this effing tatsoi, which, due to that squirrely brassica edge it has, cannot be workably substituted for any of these other lovely greens in any recipe worth its salt.

Last night Eric made a Thai curry, as he generally does at least once a week. When it comes to Mexican or Thai food, my job is to cook the rice and wash the dishes; his versions are much better and I am hopeless with coconut milk. I did offer to make greens on the side, however. “Oh yeah, that’d be great!” he enthused, perhaps thinking that I had some nice kale in the fridge. I opened the freezer and reached for a baggie. “Oh,” he said. “You mean that.”

While he was finishing up I did my standard tatsoi preparation: a little chili sesame oil, a few crushed Sichuan peppercorns, a quick sauté. Eric finished his curry, which was golden and fabulous, scattered with exquisite flecks of cilantro. I’m talking cooking magazine cover material here; I don’t how he did it, but it was perfect. My tatsoi, on the other hand, looked like something that Popeye might dump out of a can, a deep green muck scattered with stringy stems. It tasted only slightly better than it looked. But maybe that’s just because we’re so bloody sick of it.

I haven’t counted, but I think there are at least twenty more pints of it to go. If there are any frozen tatsoi experts reading, now would be the time to step forward with your wisdom.

december is often viral

2008-12-29T09:12:00.001-08:00

I promise I’m still around. First there was Christmas, and now I’m sick with the same nasty cold that has infected almost every other member of my extended family. I’m sneezing and coughing and my throat feels like a cheese grater. (I’m not sure exactly what I mean by that, but it sounds awful, and awful is what I’m going for.) I’m not really in the mood to write or do much of anything except hang out on the couch and knit. So I’ll post more once I’m feeling better. Happy holidays to everyone. ☺

wish list

2008-12-19T14:54:00.000-08:00

I’ve decided it’s officially time to lighten up. No more serious political brooding. No more complaining about the media. Nor more weighing in on important issues of the day. That Rick Warren inauguration thing? Not even paying attention. LALALALALA. I am moving to Planet Oblivion. Or Planet Christmas. Or Planet Entertainment Weekly.

Yes, let’s go with the last. I flatter myself that I am highbrow because I read Entertainment Weekly instead of People. I don’t have a working TV and hardly see any movies (with this notable exception), so I don’t know what the heck they’re on about most of the time, at least not since Battlestar Galactica went on hiatus and I stopped watching Mad Men because I became preoccupied with ways to murder the male characters. But I still feel more with it reading EW than reading People, because it requires less knowledge of all the various Haydens and Haylees and Mileys of the younger generation. And right now I prefer it to Salon because even though I do know what they’re talking about on Salon, I wish I didn’t. So in that escapist spirit, here’s my wish (and anti-wish) list for next year.

1) I want Lhasa de Sela to come out with a new album. Last month I went on a jag and listened to The Living Road approximately eight times per day. It was healthy.

2) I want an Arrested Development movie, dammit. What is Ron Howard doing wasting his time with all this serious and thought provoking Frost/Nixon nonsense? Along with similar-minded friends, I have been reduced to getting my Jason Bateman fix from Mock-a-Movie Knitting Night featuring Teen Wolf Too. Lord deliver us. I want more Michael Bluth. Now.

3) I don’t want Adama or Roslin to be the final Cylon, unless there’s a really damn good explanation.

4) I want to see a lot of Michelle Obama, minus the fascination with her clothes/fitness level. But that might take this out of the realm of entertainment and into news. None of that. LALALALALA.

5) I want that dishy bald British Mark Strong to star in a movie I can actually watch, one that doesn’t involve guns, torture, bombs, or Satanic rituals, though I don’t hold out much hope, because he seems to be a career villain. For the uninitiated, this is the guy who tore out George Clooney’s fingernails in Syriana. Or so I’m told. The movies I have seen him in, he has been the most riveting thing on screen. Recently, while pursuing weightier news stories—really, I swear—I happened to discover that he stars in that new-ish Ridley Scott movie where lots of shit blows up, Body of Lies. (Really bad title.) I am this close to watching it because his performance in it is so well reviewed, but I dunno. On the up side, I don’t think he tears out anyone’s fingernails. On the down side, I think it’s probably still the type of movie where bad things happen to fingers. It’s about spies and terrorists, never favorite subjects of mine, plus it has Russell Crowe (ick) and Leonardo DiCaprio (yawn). Is an ick plus a yawn worth it for one serious yum? These are the kinds of questions I ask myself.

6) I know this is not strictly about entertainment, but I’ll include anything frivolous here: I want boot cut pants to stay in style. Yes, of all things to concern me, this. Why am I worried? Because I was just downtown and I saw no less than twenty young women wearing high fur-lined boots over top of their skintight and just profoundly ass-hugging jeans. Boot-cut jeans could not have fit into those boots. Now, this is all fine and good, and I am all over the high boots thing; I am pretty in love with my own pair. But if this boots-over-jeans look is to become the next big trend, the boot cut pants will disappear from the stores and once I wear out all my jeans I will have to buy stovepipe pants again even though I have vowed to stay with boot cuts forever and ever. Can’t we women just agree that we all look better in boot cuts and should keep wearing them so they will always be in the stores? Because it’s true—young, old, slender, curvy, grandmas, granddaughters—we all know we look better in boot cuts. No one looked good in the eighties. Trust me. I just watched Teen Wolf Too.

7) I want to not be called “ma’am” by any individual, particularly if he or she works in a liquor store.

greed, fear, hope

2008-12-17T08:30:00.000-08:00

ETA: Relevant and new: this and this.

At 6:40 yesterday morning, I staggered downstairs to the kitchen in search of tea and breakfast. As usual, Eric had already tuned the ancient radio perched atop our refrigerator to NPR, despite the fact that the only NPR station we can get from that radio is the local one—we both prefer the Kansas City station—and the local Morning Edition anchor missed his calling hosting Music from the Hearts of Space. With his flat, unappealing voice, slow delivery and musical selections that range from contemplative synthesizer mood numbers to Celtic-inspired New Age nocturnes, he has the singular ability to make a dark, cold, early winter morning seem like the threshold to a heartless underworld.

After the latest depressing weather report came the latest depressing story of insanely wealthy people exploiting less wealthy people to become even more insanely wealthy themselves. Usually I half-listen to at least half an hour of Morning Edition, but this morning I lost my stomach for it about five minutes in. It’s ugly to hear about all this naked greed, so close to the holidays.

More tiring even than the unfolding of these sad events is the endless analysis about whether or not Americans have it in us to get out this mess. This is the real reason why I keep resolving to go on a news freeze (and never do, somehow, but I have cut down). The other night I told Eric that I felt as though every other headline I saw could be summed up like this: “Proposed Solution May Not be Good Enough to Fix Humungous Problem.”

Part of what pisses me off about the coverage of the Blagojevich scandal is that I sense mainstream journalists clamoring for a chance to feel morally relevant, and I feel unsympathetic to their desires. On all the major moral crises of the past eight years, most of these people have completely dropped the ball on us. Our government has been run by liars, and rather than trying to discern the truth, the media, in lieu of actual journalism, has defaulted to an utterly lazy form of relativism that people like Karl Rove know exactly how to manipulate. People disagree about whether or not the media as a whole swings right or left, but Americans do seem to more or less agree that the media isn’t worthy of respect. And journalists probably know this. I suspect some of them are searching for a little redemption at the moment, though that might be my imagination.

Which is why Blagojevich is such a godsend for them. Unlike all the weird, subterranean crimes of the Bush administration, the Blago shit is a gimme. Here is this feckless raving man-child who engaged in blatantly corrupt dealings while being taped by the FBI. He is a cartoon of greed and avarice, the qualities that we know to be at the core of our national meltdown. It requires no discernment or journalistic skill whatsoever to display eloquent outrage at such a cut-and-dry case of douchebaggery. But it probably feels good. It makes them feel like righteous whistle-blowers. It must be fun for them to play that role—it must almost feel as though they are actually doing their jobs. Nothing feels better than ranting about crimes that are more or less out in the open, their offensiveness agreed upon by almost everyone.

It’s really a shame there are no FBI tapes of Bush and Rumsfeld authorizing the use of torture on military detainees and replete with saucy entitled ranting and nasty expletives. As a matter of fact, there’s a Senate Armed Services Committee report, released last week to no media aplomb whatsoever, that makes it clear that prisoners have been dying horribly in US custody in Iraq because of specific decisions about prisoner treatment made by high-level Bush officials, Bush himself included. I did not have the stomach to read all of it, but what I read is utterly damning. And processing it requires a grownup sense of ethics and a grownup attention span. Blagojevich is so much easier.

To me, the most obvious symptom of the mainstream media’s abandonment of their moral obligation to inform the public is their incessant tendency to spin meta news. Thus the question is not, for example, “Is there any evidence implicating Obama in Blagojevich’s wrongdoing?” Because the answer to that question is thus far—and likely to remain—a very boring no, the question has become, “Will Obama escape the taint of Blagojevich?” This is where they set aside facts and evidence and speculate about what direction the narrative will take. Doing this, in and of itself, shapes the narrative in a certain direction. It’s probably unavoidable that the media is going to shape such narratives to a large extent, but is it too much to ask that they do so responsibly, with a sense of history and proportion and respect for the evidence, rather than through ludicrously speculative sensationalism that is actually a thinly-veiled pontification about how they themselves are going to present and interpret the news? Is it just me, or is there a gigantic vacuum in the middle of this system? A vacuum that should be filled with something resembling integrity?

The Blago part of this rant is probably a little dated already. The story, or at least the wannabe-Obama-linkage part of the story, seems to be losing some steam, and with more bleak economic crap coming out every day that can’t be ignored, there isn’t room in the headlines anyway. The American people seem to be too stressed out about money to care much about this silliness.

But here’s what I wish we cared more about: serious accountability. Not symbolic accountability, where we find a temporary whipping boy like Blagojevich to whale on, and then, once we have our righteous fix, forget about all the other vile behavior that has gone unchecked. I thought that I’d be in a more forgiving mood at the end of the Bush administration, with such a fine president-elect as we have. The conventional political wisdom seems to be that elections are all the accountability we need, and since Bush’s party was trounced, those of us who would like to see Bush and his people prosecuted for their war crimes are being excessively vengeful. But since when is the administration of justice under due process equal to vengeance? Have you ever met a Republican who would jive with such an interpretation when it came to, say, a mugger in the inner city?

The mainstream media was complicit in Bush’s crimes. Most of the Democrats in Congress were complicit as well. Maybe that’s why this accountability thing is so difficult.

I have a lot of faith in Obama’s moral guideposts, and that gives me hope. But Obama isn’t our government; he’s just the guy we elected president. If we want to restore the health of our democracy, if we want to model for the world a way of holding criminal leaders to account that is based in law and not vengeance, if we want to have a reasonable degree of faith that this kind of administration will not plunder our country and our planet again, we need to hold these people to account for what they have done.*

“Let’s not focus on the past, let’s look to the future.” How many times have we been silenced with that platitude? How many times has Bush himself used variations of it? Let’s not dwell on past wrongs. Let’s not play the “blame game.” But how do we move forward if we don’t reckon with what’s happened? How do we avoid repeating these mistakes if we haven’t truly investigated why they happened in the first place?

I argue this from a place of hope. I believe America can be better than we are. But it sure would help if we could look at the recent past, if we could admit that as a nation, we really messed up, and honestly try to figure out how and why.

The media’s penchant for meta-narration is also in high gear over the questions of Bush’s legacy; how will he be remembered, etc, etc. I’m reminding myself of something my advisor at MSU told his class on 9/11/02—I think I’ve written about it before here, but I’ll repeat it. He told us: Don’t let the media narrate this anniversary for you. You experienced this tragedy; you own your own trauma. Remember it for yourself. I will not forget how awful so much of life under this administration was, how fearful these people made me, how much I grieved and how much I struggled to hold onto hope sometimes.

But I learned things, too. I learned that letting the government and the media prey on my tendency to fear moves me no closer to truth. I learned that hope is a conscious decision I make, that while circumstances may make it easier or harder to hope, ultimately I still have to make that decision for myself, and sometimes I have to make it again and again and again. I am using those lessons right now.

As individuals, we can’t do much to hold the Bush administration accountable for the past eight years. But we can recommit ourselves to building the kind of culture that contains more power in its goodness and mercy and justice and interdependence than can be shattered by greed or fear-mongering. Perhaps I’m naïve for believing that’s possible. But I know a lot of good people, and I’m going to focus more on them than I do on the news.

* I just read Glenn Greenwald’s column in Salon, and he said a lot of the same things, only with more force, eloquence, and information.

STEPHANIE SLAMS MEDIA

2008-12-12T08:46:00.000-08:00

I need to go on a news freeze.

Under normal circumstances—if anything in the past eight years can be perceived as normal circumstances—I shield myself from the news, somewhat. I have gone through periods of up to a year where ten to fifteen minutes of All Things Considered and/or Morning Edition per day is all I take in. In general, overindulgence in news has caused me to vacillate between constant mid-level anxiety and grief paralysis, depending on what’s going on. I believe in staying well informed, but I know that if I spend lots of time every day taking in sad or frightening headlines from all over the planet, I will become depressed. I can only carry so many burdens at once. I am hard-wired for immediate empathy. I know people who can take in vast amounts of horrific information, digest it, form opinions about it, and build careers on it, without ever letting it ruin their evening. People like this think that documentaries about Halliburton are a fun way to spend Friday night. I admire them in some ways, but I am not that, and I have accepted that about myself.

The election got me started on a few more news sources than I used to consult. We still have no functioning TV, a situation I don’t regret, but at the height of election fever I did a daily online check of Salon, the Huffington Post, the New York Times, CNN, and Daily Kos. Since the election, I have cut down a lot. No more Daily Kos. No more CNN. I glance at the New York Times, but not much more. Salon I still read a lot of; Huffington Post I still at least check, though I usually don’t read more that an article or blog or two. I listen to NPR a fair bit.

There isn’t a single news source that isn’t irking me at this point. I have backslid a bit this week to glance at the mainstream stuff, which has predictably sent my blood pressure into the stratosphere with all the pseudo-journalism attempting to tie Obama to this Blagojevich crap. Has any politician in recent memory received as forceful an exoneration from political scandal as Obama got from Mr. Pottymouth’s rants against him on those tapes? Are we going to ignore our liquefying economy for untold weeks while supposedly qualified jackasses like Campbell Brown and Massimo Calabresi opine righteously about “taint”?

But it’s not just the Blago story that’s in my craw. It’s headlines in general. For example, Huffington Post. I admire some things about that publication, but their entire layout is dependent on sensationalism; their tabloid presentation encourages tabloid headlines. This morning I was particularly annoyed by Colin Powell Slams Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, which covered an appearance Powell made on CNN, an appearance in which he gave calm, measured, and completely non-inflammatory remarks about the damage he feels these individuals have done to the Republican party. “Slam”? Despite Powell’s calm demeanor throughout the interview, a stock photo of an open-mouthed Powell looking furious accompanied the story.

Then there was a Salon story today about the potential dangers posed by the release of undersea methane. The headline was apocalyptic: “Some geologists say rising temperatures will uncork vast deposits of undersea methane. If they're right, we're cooked.” This accompanied by an image of our planet in a frying pan. Uh…shit? I read to see if I should bother taking a shower this morning, or if we will all be burnt to a crisp by lunchtime. Read it yourself if you’re interested, but let’s just say the contents of the article, while certainly worrying and worthy of attention, were not worthy of the paralyzing, alarmist headline.

I appreciate a lot about Salon. I like their editor, Joan Walsh. They have some great writers. Usually I count on them for some integrity, which is why I get so pissed when they resort to cheap headlines. The most annoying one came earlier this week: “Can Democrats defend their gains in 2010?” Oh, for God’s sake. The Bush administration isn’t even out of office yet and we’re already playing this game? I thought of a scene in Battlestar Galactica in which President Roslin is being asked about her cancer prognosis by a reporter. “Madame President, how long do you have?” the reporter asks, in her best down-to-business, I’m-asking-the-important-questions tone of voice. “I don’t know,” the President fires back. “How long do you have?”

So, news freeze. I’m thinking I’ll do it. If I get lonely for the headlines, I’ll buy myself a ouija board.

december cheer

2008-12-09T15:09:00.000-08:00

I decided last night that today would be a good day to hole up, forget about everything else, and write a long blog post about…something. It’s supposed to snow today; outside is gunmetal gray and bleakness; it would be all-too-easy to be mopey and spend this blog post on petty bitching about everything that is wrong. December can be a rough month for me if I’m not careful. I think most people feel the same way.

But you know, I’m not going to let myself go there. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from a decade-plus of Decembers as an alleged grown-up, it’s that you cannot reasonably expect December to do right by you if you spend all your spare time tyrannizing yourself and those around you with negativity and crankiness, hating your schedule, the weather, the state of the world, the state of your home, the surrounding culture. Two days before Thanksgiving I hyperventilated in a consignment shop that was blasting the most right-wing arrangement of “The Little Drummer Boy” known to God or man. I became enraged, then hopeless, then nauseous, then started all over again with rage. Determined to find a wool coat for less than thirty dollars, I tried to muscle my way through it. I was miserable; I hated everyone; I could not make eye contact with any store employees for fear of growling. I started having an argument in my head with Bill O’Reilly. Then I came to my senses and went to TJMaxx instead. It is possible to take control of these situations.

Why is December so…challenging? I’m not sure, exactly. Sometimes it seems like nostalgia for the holidays of my childhood might be the root of it. I don’t know. I don’t miss being a kid, but I do miss December being all about anticipation for the holidays. I miss my grandparents.

But there are antidotes to December broodiness. Here is the list I have honed over the past few years. Most are domestic in nature.

1) Exercise. Everything is better under the influence of endorphins. I am wed to my iPod Shuffle and the treadmill. (It’s too cold to run outside. I’m a wuss.)

2) Baking. I’m not a cookie baker—I leave that to my mom—but I do bread. Slow-fermented loaves, foccacia (which Eric insists upon calling fuck-uh-shuh), naan, crackers, quick bread: anything that requires a hot oven. The infusion of bread-baking smell throughout the house on a cold day is the most effective form of aromatherapy I know of. After I’m done with the oven I leave it open and then stand in front of it, soaking up the heat.

3) Hot local apple cider with a capful of bourbon. I call this a “hot toddy,” although the Scots would probably consider such a label to be heresy. No doubt they pour peat-flavored whisky in black tea and drink it for breakfast.

4) Constant music. No silence allowed. We don’t have a lot of Christmas music here, but all Baroque music sounds like Christmas music to me, and I have plenty of that. In the evenings we listen to everything else: Colombian salsa, flamenco, all kinds of jazz, lots and lots and lots of tango. Last night while making dinner I listened to Cesaria Evora’s Mar Azul, an album that counters everything that is wrong with winter in the Midwest. If you had to ask me what I think the voice of God sounds like, I’d say like her.

5) Knitting. I had to lay off of knitting for a few months back in summer and early fall because my tendonitis situation was so bad, but in the past month or so I’ve found that if I’m careful, take breaks and don’t go too fast, I can still do it. Suze went on a stash purge and sent me a bunch of cool yarn, so now I am making myself a sweater. That, in addition to the beautiful yarn she gave me in thanks for turning her recital pages, has caused the members of my knitting posse to ask if she will adopt them. She has become a sort of legend here, the Munificent Cousin of Stash. (For those of you of the non-knitting persuasion, the word “stash” does not mean that all knitters are hoarding reefer. We’re talking about yarn. If you did not already know this, you are what we call a Muggle.)

6) The Two Fat Ladies. After years of checking out old VHS tapes of these from the library, Eric and I splurged last week and bought each other the DVD box set for Christmas. We love these. They are absolutely the best antidote to winter blues to be found onscreen. I’ve raved about them before.

7) An unfocused but powerful sense of spiritual goodness: the solstice, Advent. Jesus has warned me to stay away from cheesy right-wing Christmas carol arrangements. “They just make you angry,” he said. “They make you judgmental and bitter. Go listen to Bach and bake something.” (Why, yes. Jesus speaks to me, and tells me exactly what I want to hear.)

what I end up doing when I am desperate not to clean the house

2008-12-04T09:32:00.000-08:00

(But I did take in the recycling, by the way. It took two trips.)

So here’s the deal: like many if not most bookish liberals, I listen to a lot of NPR; it’s probably my primary news source. (Incidentally, are they covering this Canada situation, or what? Am I just missing those parts?) I discuss my favorite and least favorite newscasters with friends. I have “driveway moments.” I download NPR podcasts to put on my iPod while exercising. Often their coverage disappoints me; particularly during the election, I thought their major news shows sort of dropped the ball, giving maddeningly disproportionate airtime to a handful of supposedly undecided voters who were too stupid to be capable of choosing their own toothpaste. But I keep listening out of a) habit and b) the desire to avoid everything else on the radio, namely Top 40, right-wing Christians, and a student station specializing in the music of apathy and despair.

Hence my intimate familiarity with the many NPR musical themes. An inveterate NPR listener such as myself, particularly a musically inclined one, is bound to form opinions about such things, though my husband claims that as a postmodernist, I should be utterly impartial in my tastes. Whenever I go into a snit about some music I think is crap, he deadpans, “You should be an ethnomusicologist.” He really knows how to get to me.

What follows is for serious NPR geeks and those with a high tolerance for unrepentant snobbery.

All Things Considered: It’s crisp, it has an appropriately heraldic quality; that’s all fine or whatever, but to me, what those trumpets really say, and have said for the past twenty years, reaching back to childhood, is “time to cook dinner.” Likewise, the opening chord and theme of Morning Edition is too tied to the routine of my morning to mean much to me other than, “yeah, okay, morning.” Both themes are serviceable, inoffensive; they just do their jobs. I have trouble thinking of them as music. They’re more like the strokes of a clock.

Weekend Edition: Objectively, I have to say that this theme has no real problems. It sounds like a brisk morning walk—a power walk, perhaps. The air is clear, and you’re wearing white sneakers and jogging pants with elastic at the ankles. You are smiling, and you are whatever age you have to be to think Scott Simon and Liane Hansen are witty and emotionally effective. Perhaps because I find Scott Simon in particular to be cloying, insipid, and completely in love with himself, I find the Weekend Edition theme to be a bit the same. It’s a little too proud of its surprise harmonic progression; it’s a tad self-important. What I really hate—I mean reeeeeaally HATE—is when, in the middle of the program, they take the theme and slow it down to a funereal, quarter note-equals-forty-beats-to-the-minute Largo, an interpretation that in no way whatsoever serves the musical integrity of the melody. It is clearly meant to convey a misty and slightly contemplative mood—like you’ve finished your invigorating walk and are now settled in on the set of a Folgers coffee commercial—but it is just too goddamned slow. Once you are half-dead from this crime of tempo, Scott comes back on and finishes you off with one of his pretentious, overstuffed, morally dubious, badly organized personal essays. I don’t listen to him much these days, but I’m in the car for part of Saturday morning and my car radio is permanently tuned to NPR, so I always get a dose. It’s like an outdated sweet liqueur.

The Splendid Table: In spite of a slight cheese factor (heh), I kind of like this one. It’s expansive, yet intimate; mostly piano, a little oboe, a slight touch of atmospheric crap, but I can forgive that, because this theme is so perfectly suited to both this show and its host, Lynne Rosetto Kasper. She’s a sparkling personality who just casually happens to be an encyclopedic culinary genius—and if you think I’ve overstated the case, listen to her handle the call-in section. The hokey ascending modulations—and no one scorns ascending modulations like me—are like her bubbly, ubiquitous laugh: slightly irritating, but part of an overall package that is so heartening and generous that I let them slide. Ascending modulations? Ah well, chacun à son gout. More wine, please.

On the Media: I like this show, but it has one of the most ill-conceived musical themes in the NPR repertoire. Or maybe it’s supposed to be minimalism. Meaning that perhaps there is something very subtle and yet compelling going on that I am missing because I am unsophisticated. All I can hear is a banal, harmonically static, rhythmically dull outlining of a broken chord. It’s about as appealing as listening to someone use a hammer. They try to sex it up with jazz combo instrumentation, but this just makes it worse, sadder, more wannabe. This theme is begging to be taken as edgy. Desperation is so unattractive.

The Diane Rehm Show: I reserve my most vehement dislike for this one. Again, it’s not the show that bothers me; Diane Rehm is okay, though she’s not on my local stations, so these days I don’t listen to her. I don’t miss her show, but what I really don’t miss is its priggish little trumpet theme with a blah piano accompaniment. Someone completely dropped the ball here; it sounds like a college composition assignment. You’d probably get a decent score on it, but the professor might point out the lack of interesting harmonic progressions, the leaden interplay between the trumpet and piano. I can’t even be that generous, because for some reason this theme makes me think of Young Republicans. It sounds like uptight young men with rigid Christian views who wear starchy suits even when they don’t need to. The show really deserves better.

Speaking of Faith: Now here’s an example of a minimalist theme that actually works. The instrumentation is all percussion: the marimba maintains a pleasant, loping rhythm while the rest of the instruments build very, very gradual momentum while Krista Tippett, the host, explains what’s on for this week. In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I’m a huge fan of this show, so I’m probably predisposed to give them the benefit of the doubt. Not only is the theme good; the entire program has great musical editing. After the opening theme, they always segue effortlessly into another minimalist piece, Joseph Curiale’s “The Multiples of One,” which also works well in the context (background to Krista Tippett’s description of whomever her guest is). I like this piece mainly because the very beginning sounds exactly like the opening of “Battlestar Galactica,” which somehow is exactly the right association to start off a program on spirituality and religion. (Of course, SOF was around long before BSG, but let’s not split hairs.)

This American Life:

(Just kidding.)

And finally, you didn’t know this was a contest, but the winner is…

Hands down, it is the theme of Fresh Air. Everything about this theme works. It’s brash, but not smarmy. The ensemble is tight. Rhythmically, it’s alive and kicking, and the beginning even swings a bit, enough to make you lean into it. The melody and harmony are actually headed somewhere, and they make you care about their destination, which is a quality to be celebrated in an NPR theme; even some of the better ones have a tendency to get bogged down in directionless ambling. On Fresh Air, I’m actually sorry to hear the theme end and the show begin, because the music builds real excitement and is so genuinely good. You can hear the musicians enjoying themselves, and you feel like you are in on their party because you are smart and urbane enough to be listening to Fresh Air.

And what nobler goal could you ask for in public radio, than to make its viewers feel smart?

canada

2008-12-03T16:36:00.000-08:00

I want to let any interested parties know that the Yarn Harlot has a fantastic, comprehensive post on exactly what the heck is going on with the Canadian government. Yes, it’s a knitting blog, but this post has nothing to do with knitting. She lives in Toronto, is famous for her witty knitting books (I personally own all of them), and has a lot of American readers. So she gives us a sort of Constitutional Democracy for Dummies lesson, then goes on to explain the current situation. Go read it, and then you can explain the whole thing to another American and make like you knew how the Canadian government worked all along. I will admit: all I knew was that they have a Parliament; they don’t directly elect their Prime Minister, just his party; they still have some weird connection to the Queen; and their current PM is pretty much a dick. This ignorance is pathetic, frankly. Not only are they our neighbors, but I have good friends who are Canadian and have periodically threatened to move there, as has pretty much every liberal I know over the past eight years. In a just world, we would be following their politics as closely as they do ours. (My cluelessness may stem from the fact that my boorish high school government teacher was the sort of person Jon Stewart was parodying when he referred to Canada recently as the “gay us.” But that’s no excuse.)

I'm writing a post on NPR theme songs, so NPR geeks, stay tuned.

pile o' crap

2008-12-01T07:23:00.000-08:00

We were in Iowa for part of last week for Thanksgiving, hence the not posting. And while I have several post ideas, today probably won’t be the day for them. My list of things to do today is going hydra and sprouting fangs. (Out of curiosity, I just looked up “hydra” to see if my usage was anywhere close to appropriate, and found this: “a freshwater polyp with a cylindrical body at one end and a mouth surrounded by tentacles at the other.” My list of things to do is an independently-functioning tentacular polyp, threatening me with its gaping maw of destruction.

Sorry. I’ve been sleeping kind of funky lately.)

What’s new here, other than a great time in Iowa? A spider just dropped down from the ceiling to rest next to my hand. My elderly cat Djuna, who is a little crazy in the head at the best of times, is loping around the house with her knitted toy in her mouth, making low, mournful lowing noises. There are two litter boxes full of turds in the basement, no clean cat litter, and hardly any food (for cats or humans). I want to turn in my grad school application today for once and for all, but despite having all the elements in place I have a feeling that my protracted anality will force that into a day-long process, which means I am torn between a pressing desire to complete that and a pressing desire to do something about this filthy hovel in which we are attempting to live. I have a high tolerance for clutter when I am preoccupied with other things, but clutter makes the house feel oppressive, and December is a bad time for the house to feel oppressive.

How filthy is our house? It’s so filthy that the recycling no longer fits into its designated closet and we are piling our empty bottles on the counter. It’s so filthy that my GRE flashcards are still on the coffee table even though I took the test a month and a half ago, along with a printed article from The New Yorker, two permanent markers, the audiobook of The Audacity of Hope, a large cookbook, two library books, a copy of Journal of American Folklore, a plastic report cover, someone’s phone number, and an update disc for World of Warcraft. It’s so filthy there is a huge Igloo cooler sitting next to the couch and I have no idea why it is there. It’s so filthy that it’s easier for me to sit here describing the mess to you in minutest detail like the lamest stereotype of a blogger than to actually do something about it, even though I know I must, because I can’t bear to live in it any longer.

Maybe housekeeping would be easier for me if I worked to become one with mundane tasks and came to view cleaning as a spiritually cleansing activity. I love this in theory, but secretly feel that people who achieve perfect oneness while cleaning are smug and no better than they should be. Eric and I both clean because we reach the edges of our tolerance and become repulsed by ourselves. We only get through it by granting ourselves ample license to whine.

Which I'm doing right now, more's the pity for my readers. Sorry—meatier posts in the offing, I promise.

twilight

2008-11-23T21:25:00.000-08:00

I went to see Twilight yesterday afternoon with my knitting posse. I had no plans to see this movie, which looked like the most regressive piece of hokey vampire crap ever, but my friends convinced me that it would be fun to sit in the theater amidst the teenaged throng and be queens of snark. Several of them had actually read the source material. I haven’t. I thought about buying a copy of the book in an airport bookstore last summer during a bout of desperate layover boredom, but when I opened it to a random page, I encountered some very bad dialogue and the word “throbbing,” and it put me off. I bought Wicked instead. Still, I went along, for social reasons.

If I say that Twilight sucks, or bites, it’s going to seem overly cute, seeing as it’s about vampires, so I’ll put it this way: as serious drama, Twilight blows. Not that I was really expecting otherwise. As unintentional comedy, however, it has some stellar moments. The premise: Bella, a cute but sullen teenaged girl who I think we’re supposed to buy as bookish, moves to a small town in Washington to live with her dad. At school she meets a broody hot guy, Edward, who turns out to be a vampire. They experience powerful and immediate mutual attraction, which he expresses by looking at her with intensely tormented loathing and then staying home from school for the rest of the week. His “I love you/don’t tempt me!” facial expressions are so torturously belabored that everyone in my group started snorting, probably pissing off all the teenaged girls in our vicinity. He looks like he’s trying to pass a kidney stone, but actually, he’s so turned on by Bella’s pheromones that he fears he will “lose control” and break her or eat her or something. But she doesn’t care! Because he’s so freaking hot!

Indeed, Edward is so inhumanly, explosively, uncontrollably hot that the first time the actor came on screen many people in the audience applauded and audibly swooned. It was an interesting cultural experience. The actor is pretty in a slightly freakish, over-the-top way; on the rare occasions that he smiles, you can see the sex appeal, but from some angles he just looks bizarre. His nostrils look overactive, though I suppose that’s apropos, seeing as he filters most of his sexual experience through his nose. The makeup and hair departments of this movie abandoned all restraint and logic, forcing us to believe that high school students would actually buy Edward and his equally pasty vampire siblings as normal humans and refrain from commenting on his lipstick. And let’s not even get into the hair gel. He puts Buffy’s Angel, previous holder of the Most Lofily Gelled Vampire title, to shame. This bloodsucker likes him some product.

On a much deeper level, Twilight is the most sexually perverse movie I have watched in recent memory, despite the complete absence of actual sex in the plot. I came home afterwards and watched The Matrix: Reloaded with Eric and there was a scene in which the entire city of Zion is gyrating in a barely-clothed dance orgy while Trinity and Neo screw each other in a cave somewhere, and I thought it was refreshingly wholesome. Twilight has been called the vampire story for the abstinence-only set, and I’m obviously not the first person to notice that there’s some icky gender stuff going on. Bella is a textbook case from Reviving Ophelia; the girl has absolutely zero instinct for self-preservation. Much of their dialogue goes something like this:

Edward: I am a vampire. I am a dangerous monster and like to suck people’s blood.
Bella: I don’t care. I trust you.
Edward: You shouldn’t trust me.
Bella: I do.
Edward: If I get too close to you I might lose control and hurt you.
Bella: I don’t care. I just want to be with you.
Edward: You need to know what I am. You could never defend yourself against me. I could kill you.
Bella: Then I could be like you and we could be together forever.

I suppose Romeo and Juliet is pretty creepy too, when you think about it. Still, at least they expressed themselves with some eloquence. While Bella declares that she is “unconditionally and irrevocably in love” with Edward, he goes for cheap drug metaphors, telling her she is his “personal brand of heroin.” (This, again, provoked inappropriate laughter from all of us over the age of seventeen.) The closest they get to physical intimacy is one night when he slips into her bedroom and they sort of kiss. “Don’t move,” he orders her. Apparently the only way he can kiss her without turning into a ravaging fiend is if she remains utterly inanimate. When she does actually respond like a red-blooded woman, he throws himself across the room and looks as though he has just had a run-in with a giant man-eating vagina monster.

Perhaps I’m a bit sensitive to subtext, but I found this troubling. I’m not sure if this twisted repression bullshit is more insulting to male sexuality or female sexuality, but I’m pretty sure it’s insulting to somebody. Troubling me further was Bella’s complete okay-ness with Edward’s revelation that he has been sneaking into her bedroom for weeks and watching her sleep, and the seeming non-issue that this behavior is in the fucked-up universe of this story. Apparently having one’s bedroom invaded while unconscious and completely vulnerable is also Totally Hot. Archetype-wise, Edward vacillates between prudish Victorian gentleman-protector and possessive stalker. One thing you have to say for this story: it is pitch-perfect Gothic. I think Charlotte Bronte would approve, even if I don’t.

Look, I’m fine with stories that use mythical elements to show how dark and dangerous and weird and ill-considered sex can be. Buffy took some flack from feminist critics for depicting catastrophic consequences when the teenaged Buffy has sex with her vampire boyfriend, but I think those objections are more ideological than logical. Buffy is brutally honest about the messy aspects of sexuality; what’s absolutely radical and cool about Buffy is that it’s a mythical universe where a woman’s sexual mistakes do not equal her annihilation. There’s a frame of Buffy that I thought about after seeing Twilight: Buffy has just ended an unhealthy, sadomasochistic relationship with another vampire, over his deluded protestations, and as she leaves him, her face is lit with this lovely, quiet hope; you can see her relief at finally ending this thing and finding a self that she can recognize as her own.

You don’t get the feeling that Bella’s ever going to get a chance for that kind of post-screw-up redemption. Her sexuality is pure kryptonite; she’s not even allowed to make out without sending her boyfriend into an animalistic craze. As for her own personal self, she doesn’t seem to give a rat’s ass for it. The only solution she can think of to their dilemma is to let him turn her into a vampire, so they can be together forever without all the pesky constraints of mortality. Bella strikes me as casually suicidal, though I’m sure her desire could also be interpreted as a typically excessive expression of teenaged passion. Whichever it is, I guess it’s moot, since broody Edward, card-carrying member of the undead chapter of True Love Waits, is driving the bus. He is too honorable to vamp her. In the course of the movie, he saves her from a rogue SUV, a gang of potential rapists, and a truly evil fellow vampire; apparently he can also save her from herself.

I watched a Buffy tonight, for cleansing purposes.

My friends Lora and Dee Anna posted their own, considerably funnier, takes on the movie, with more scene-specific details involving vampire baseball and body glitter. Dee Anna has actually read the books, and says the movie is much stupider. Did anyone else see it? Share your comments!

mentorship

2008-11-21T10:46:00.000-08:00

Animal told me to mine my past for blog topics; Feral Mom asked for the story of why I stopped performing on the flute. I’ve already flirted a bit with that subject, here and here, but funnily enough, it kind of intersects with something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and wanting to write about, namely, my relationships with the two main academic mentors of my twenties. I know, this sounds riveting. Keep your trousers on.

I said “academic mentors,” but the first was my flute professor, who wasn’t anything I’d describe as academic. He was what, in university music school parlance, is known as an “artist-teacher,” meaning he had a master’s degree in performance and a big resume and an ego to match. He was the subject of infinite obsession on the part of his students, which sounds sexual, but really wasn’t, at least not for the female grad student cohort I was part of. (It might have been for a few of the guys.)

While it wasn’t sexual obsession, it was a little bit sick. His relationships with students were all a little too intense, a little too personal, way too co-dependent. Again, I’m slightly icked by the metaphor, but there’s no question that most of his students had a sort of romance with him, characterized by intense connection in the beginning and intense disillusionment later on. He needed to be adored; we clamored for his approval and lived for his praise. When I was in his studio and he was concentrated, utterly, on my playing, it was almost subsuming; it was terrifying, and an extraordinary high.

After a while, we’d come to understand how inconsequential our specific relationships with him actually were in the grand scheme of his me-drama. By year two or three, people started to figure it out. At that point it became a question of how to protect oneself from his moodiness without cutting oneself off from his considerable gifts as a teacher. We formed informal support groups and huddled in our TA offices, helping each other survive the lunacy of it all. This is how Animal’s wife Tess and I first became friends.

Once when I was trying to write a conference paper on performance issues I ended up distracting myself by writing this, the very non-scholarly story of my applying to his program, and meeting him. Forgive my pretension in putting my own unpublished work in italics; it just works better, okay? Here:

I’d almost forgotten that playing music amounted to anything but the relentless intricacies of self-presentation. How had I already become so jaded? I decided I wanted to be a professional musician at the age of sixteen, playing in youth symphony. The first time I played my part in a Brahms symphony amidst the full orchestra, something fundamental came alive in me. So much communication was happening: between the conductor and the orchestra, between sections, between individual players, between all of us and the audience. This was where I wanted to live, a place where the sounds around me were all I needed to understand I was part of something greater than myself.

I found an odd redemption in the required application essay, a dumb exercise in which I was to describe why I wanted to be a musician. Here was where I could shine: my resume was thin, but my ideals were ardent. I believed in music as love and divine essence. I believed it was possible to lose oneself in music and to lift up everyone else in the process, with no ego intruding anywhere. I was reasonably certain I’d never done this, but I believed in it. So I wrote about that.

A few months later I stood with my flute outside the studio of a flute professor at a major university music school. It was the last graduate school audition on my schedule, and a few other schools had already accepted me. But I wanted to study with this teacher more than anything. I’d heard him speak at the National Flute Association convention (a fearsome event—my teacher at the time described the gathering of hundreds of flutists under one roof as “unnatural”), an impassioned speech in which he’d expressed his worry that the aggressive competitiveness of the music industry was driving away the most sensitive musicians, the ones who might have the most to offer. I felt an instant affinity that was cemented the next day when I heard him give a transcendent performance of Cesar Franck’s flute sonata. The flute hardly ever moved me like that. I’d come to view my instrument as a musically inferior to the violin and the cello, and often wondered why I’d chosen it in the first place. But my future teacher played the flute with an expressive capacity I hadn’t realized the instrument possessed.

If the flute can make that kind of music, I thought, I must learn how it’s done. From this impulse, I planned my future.

My future teacher walked out of his office. A small man, but strong looking, with a generous and yet commanding attitude—that much was obvious from the beginning, although later I came to see him also as capricious, distractible, and broody. Knowing him as I do now, it’s clear that my audition day must have already started off on the right foot for him. In a good mood, he was both gregarious and inquisitive: gregarious enough to greet me warmly, inquisitive enough to pick up my essay while I was arranging my music on the metal stand.

His manner set me at ease, or the best approximation of ease I could manage with my heart pounding and every muscle in my legs threatening to liquefy. Something else was happening too, not attraction in any physical sense but a found kinship, a sense of shared passion and intent. Each of us possessed something the other was craving. We recharged each other.

Here’s what I think happened. I think he was starting to get burned out on teaching. He was beginning to see that being charismatic and charming and obscenely talented wasn’t enough to make his job enjoyable. He wanted it be all about music, but it wasn’t: a lot of it was about the thankless grind of faculty politics, of trying to groom students for a musical world so ruthlessly competitive that probably only the sharks would survive. Half the time he spent loathing those sharks; half the time he was in the water with them, shredding everyone more vulnerable than himself. Like me, he clung to pesky dualisms that made him crazy. He wanted to be a guru in a temple on a mountain, revered, beatific, above the din. Instead he was a professor at a university music school. The din there was inescapable.

But it was sunny outside, which is rare enough in that part of the country to lift everyone’s mood when it happens, and then I walked into his office with my hope on my sleeve and an essay that professed music to be a devotional and altruistic calling. No one else I’d auditioned for had bothered reading that essay, but he was glued to it. I’ve long since lost it, and I’m sure it would embarrass me now, but it contained something he wanted to believe.

“I’m very interested in you, Stephanie,” he said when I’d finished playing. He wasn’t being forward; he meant me as a student. But his phrasing was revealing. It went like salve to all my Mennonite wounds (self-inflicted or not)—God help me, I was worn out of trying to be an empty vessel. My teacher’s words took account of me as a whole, and I finally realized what a crock my whole act was, the pointlessness of trying to distill my music out of the rest of my self as though I could somehow purify it for the purpose of offering.

Strangely enough, it was my idealism and belief in musical purity that grabbed my teacher and made him pay attention to me. To this day I wonder if he didn’t accept me based not on the way I played the flute, but on the essay I wrote.

Reading this again makes me so happy that I’m not twenty-two years old anymore.

This post is supposed to be about mentors, but this relationship was not about real mentorship. Teachers are not necessarily mentors, and generally speaking that’s a good thing; they don’t always need to be. My flute professor was, in fact, a good teacher to me; I became a much better musician under his tutelage. But “mentorship” implies a more grown-up relationship than what I had with him. “Mentorship” implies mutual respect, and the guidance of mentorship has to grow out of that respect. Ever since this experience, I’m really big on boundaries in mentoring relationships. I don’t ever again want any kind of mentor who tries to seduce me (literally or figuratively) or be my parent. And if, God forbid, I ever become that sort of mentor myself, somebody just put me out of my misery.

If anything in my graduate career has been providential, it’s this: that at the same school where I encountered such dysfunctional mentoring, I also found the opposite. But I’ll save that story for another post.

cars and creative stumpage

2008-11-19T09:36:00.000-08:00

My entire plan for productivity yesterday was built around the necessity of picking up a particular interlibrary loan book at the library, a book which contains a chapter which I somehow convinced myself was the key to everything else I needed to accomplish. Then the car wouldn’t start, and that just screwed everything. I thought about having a big crying fit and screaming at the car for being such a big needy cash sucker, the bitch. You and your sister Corolla, both of you, STOP RUINING MY LIFE!! We’ve dropped close to a thousand dollars in the past month between the two cars with all their fussy demands for new starters and tires and turn signal switches. It’s just getting embarrassing to show up at the mechanic’s week after week, a trip I generally incorporate into a run when I am carless, which means they all know what I look like sweaty, makeup-free, with Arctic morning snot at the tip of my nose. I just didn’t want to face it again, and neither did my credit card.

Rather than weeping, I made as though I understand a thing about cars and tried to figure out what the problem might be. It became apparent that it was battery-related, particularly when I noticed that the back door wasn’t closing all the way. I thought about the price of body repairs and considered weeping again. Then I had a I-wish-I’d-just-fucking-gone-to-law-school moment, which was followed, as always, by a wave of that brand of self-loathing that arises when I realize that I am economically worthless. Then I noticed that the seat belt was hanging in the doorframe. Oh.

So in the end, all the car need was a jump. But it was parked between two neighbor’s vehicles, and I think they are the scary neighbors who get the occasional police visit, so it would have to wait. Thoroughly defeated by my lack of transport, I came back inside and decided to spruce up my blog. So if you like the new look, thank my stupid car. (Actually, I was the one who was stupid enough to not notice that I had closed the back door on the seat belt, causing it to remain unlatched and thus burning out the battery. In my defense, it was 5:50 in the morning and I had been on a train half the night.)

Blogger got all kinds of new features when I wasn’t looking. I can even use my own photograph in the heading! On the downside, with the photograph I chose, you can’t see the name of the blog. I could probably fix that if I knew how to write HTML, but I don’t. The picture, by the way, is the view from our back porch, sometime last winter. As for the blogroll, if you were on before and aren’t anymore, please don’t be offended; I decided to get rid of the links that are never updated. Basically, I stuck with the eclectic list I check regularly, and added a few friends who have started blogging. Plus Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, because they write my favorite cookbooks ever and I am a fangirl. Oh, and you can subscribe to this blog now, if you want. Subscribe!

I’m at a weird juncture, life-wise. (Sorry to be random.) I’m really hoping to go to graduate school next year, although I’m only applying to one place this fall, so if that doesn’t work out, I’m going to have to hold off until we can move, a prospect that depresses me so much I can’t really think about it. Other major life things are up in the air too, making it very hard to plan anything. (Nothing bad, but not really discussible here for various reasons.) I haven’t settled into any kind of flow this fall—it’s been just lurching from one obsession to another, with no projects that provide much continuity. Taking the GRE and applying for graduate school should not be a full-time job, but somehow it’s managed to become pretty consuming. I’m sort of switching fields, turning into an interdisciplinary slut. I feel like I have all this catch-up to do, trying to learn enough about my new chosen area to be a credible applicant. The election was a colossal distraction, and other areas of life are also demanding a lot of attention this fall. The long and short of it is that right now, today, I am feeling like a completely unproductive loser. I really need to get some focus back.

I miss being seriously immersed in a writing project. I have a conference paper coming up next summer that needs some more research and a lot of work yet, but I’ve mostly ignored it for the past few months. I’ve been pecking at writing projects like a chicken, too scattered to really apply myself to anything that isn’t immediately urgent (i.e. everything that isn’t directly grad school related). I am thirsty to sit at my computer and create things again, to be in the writing headspace rather than the editing headspace. Right now the editing headspace is pretty much where I hang out, when I’m not in the completely unproductive and defeatist why-didn’t-I-go-to-law-school-so-I-could-be-rich-and-have-self-esteem headspace, or standing on tiptoe looking wistfully over the fence towards the happy-in-creative-flow headspace. It’s getting so complicated, I need a map just to find my way around my own head.

To top it off, I got my GRE writing score back. I wasn’t really worrying about it much, because I was almost deliriously happy with the rest of my GRE scores, but I probably should have, because according to the experts at Educational Testing Services, I write about as well as the average business major. Nothing against business majors, but they have other means of supporting themselves; I am in the humanities, and if I can’t at least write well, then I got nothing. I did more impressively on the freaking math section, and I never even got around to remembering how to do long division! For God’s sake, the GRE analytical writing section assigns topics that would insult the intelligence of a competently literate high-school junior. It took a pretty large glass of wine before I talked myself into deciding that standardized tests don’t matter. All that much. Really.

I need to get my writing voice back in shape. Not because some asswads at ETS decided that I am Average. (Um, yeah. Still not completely over it. Need more wine.) More because, well, I just need to. I need to feel productive and fluent and worthy again, like the things I produce have the potential to reach people where they live. Help me out, will you? Give me some meaty blog post topics. Get me off the subjects of broken-down cars and self-flagellation. If not, I will be forced to draw upon my severely cramped creativity muscles and drag up my own sad self.

a dream and a meme

2008-11-18T08:54:00.000-08:00

So Suze had her four-hand recital on Sunday and it was stunning. It seriously rocked the house. I’ll let her give you the details, once she has recovered from driving back to Wisconsin from Kansas with little ‘uns in tow and hopefully gotten some sleep.

I turned pages for the recital. Performing itself is scary enough—that’s why I stopped doing it. You know what’s scarier? A seemingly mundane maintenance task that has the potential to completely destroy someone else’s performance. Turn two pages instead of one? Miss a repeat? Lose your place on a page in which every measure is rhythmically identical? Knock the entire score onto the pianists’ hands? It’s over, and it’s your fault. I did almost all of these things in the rehearsal on Saturday.

On Saturday night I had a huge performance anxiety nightmare, the kind I used to get about once a week, back in my uber-flutey days. Frequently in those dreams I was on stage with some instrument that I have no idea how to play, but in this one I was giving a flute recital, my senior recital, actually; in the dream, I was in college. As for the structure of the dream, it was really just the classic. The notes on the page were unintelligible and no sound that came out of my flute bore any resemblance to actual music, I was slowly dying, etc. The mercy was that after two pieces, a thread of consciousness penetrated the nightmare world. You are not a music major at Bethel College, it said. You are thirty-two years old. This is a dream and total bullshit. Wake up. I did. It was about 3 a.m., and I laid awake, thinking, OK, dodged that one, but I still have to turn pages tomorrow. Today. Bugger.

Of course it ended up going just fine. Turning the pages of gigantic music scores while reaching delicately over and past the visual ranges of two intensely engaged pianistic wizards is actually something for which I am extraordinarily well qualified, due in part to my wasted musical education but mostly to my freakishly long arms.

Now, because I need further procrastination fodder, here’s a meme I swiped from Feral Mom:

Three Things You Want To Do Before You Die:
1.) Publish a book
2.) Visit a Middle Eastern country (yeah, right)
3.) Become a calm person

Three Names You Go By:
1.) Steph
2.) Schmeff
3.) St. Stephanie of Assisi

Three Physical Things You Like About Yourself:
1.) my extremely prominent arm-veins
2.) my lethal elbows
3.) my Fester Addams undereye circles

Three Parts Of Your Heritage:
1.) Swiss
2.) Kansan
3.) Faculty brat

Three Things That Scare You:
1.) Hospitals
2.) Financial ruin
3.) Baby boogers

Three Of Your Everyday Essentials:
1.) Decaffeinated black tea
2.) Cast iron cookware
3.) Cats

Three Things You Are Wearing Right Now:
1.) Workout pants
2.) Alma mater sweatshirt
3.) Grandpa reading glasses

Three Of Your Favorite Bands/Musical Artists:
1.) Lhasa de Sela
2.) Charles Mingus
3.) Radio Tarifa

Three Of Your Favorite Songs (at the moment anyway):
1.) Leon Redbone, “She Ain’t Rose”
2.) Charles Mingus, II B.S.
3.) Charlie Hunter Quartet with Norah Jones, “Day is Done”

Three Things You Want In A Relationship:
1.) Humor
2.) Kitchen harmony
3.) Love, duh

Two Truths And A Lie (in no particular order):
1.) I have not been to the dentist for ten years.
2.) Every guy I have ever dated or married plays the guitar.
3.) I find Joe Biden mildly attractive.

Three Things You Want To Do Really Badly Right Now:
1.) Not edit my grad admissions essay
2.) Not write the bills
3.) Binge on all things Jon Stewart (excluding his film oeuvre)

Three Careers You're Considering/You've Considered:
1.) Flutist
2.) College professor
3.) Arabic pastry chef

Three Places You Want To Go On Vacation:
1.) Michigan
2.) Northern California
3.) Ireland

Three Pet Names You Like (not sure if this means affectionate names for humans or names for companion animals, therefore these are affectionate names for my companion animals):
1.) Junebug
2.) Bonzoid
3.) Little Rickety Kitty

Three Ways That You Are Stereotypically A Girl:
1.) Gravitation towards the arts and humanities
2.) Good with babies (minus the boogers)
3.) Aggressive disdain for football

Three Ways That You Are Stereotypically A Boy:
1.) Foul mouth
2.) Hatred of clothes shopping
3.) Competent jar opener

late train

2008-11-13T20:52:00.000-08:00

In a little more than an hour I am catching the train to spend the weekend at my folks' place (about 2 1/2 hours away by car) and listen to Suze give a duo recital with an old prof of ours, meet her baby Anya for the first time, and take care of some other stuff, like interviewing a very cool 88-year old woman for an oral history thingo (maybe more on that later) and just generally seeing folks.

After pouring hundreds of dollars into my cars for various ailments over the past two weeks, I am just sick of everything car, including driving, and decided to take the train. The plus is that I don't have to drive. The minus is that the train between here and there only leaves one time of day, and that would happen to be 12:30 in the morning. The trip is a little under three hours and I can't sleep on trains, especially if I'm seated next to an even mildly crazy person, as was the case last time I did this a few months ago. But I can't read either, because everyone else is asleep, and I'd feel like a jerk turning on my overhead light. So instead I just sit and get increasingly bitter.

This time I'm banking on my iPod to get me through. I just loaded it with an Anne Lamott book on tape from the library. I'm hoping that, in the absence of adequate sleep, it will impart me with spiritual generosity.

I'm so tired already. My parents have no problem picking me up at 3:30 in the morning (or so they claim); indeed, my parents seem not to need sleep. I, however, am already toast. It is 11:05. Sorry this blog entry sucks--I'm too tired to think.

a meditation on patriotism

2008-11-07T11:34:00.000-08:00

After all my predictable joy and elation on Tuesday night, I went to bed gnawing over something that my cousin’s college-aged daughter wrote on her Facebook status, that she was “disappointed in America.” Get over it, I told myself. We won. This is a momentous night, not to be tarnished by the grumblings of Republican relatives.

Other people are better at this sort of dismissal, out of necessity and practice. I have very few Republican relatives, though, so I’m bad at it. My cousin’s family is the only enclave, and they live several states away. We have a tacit agreement on this side of the family to avoid any mention of politics when they are present, because we all know they are Republicans, and they know we are all Democrats. We love each other. It works out fine. As a result, of course, I don’t really know why they vote the way they do. I have theories that I am hesitant to trust too much.

Oh, hell, Facebook. What a cesspit. It’s impossible to hide your political affiliations on Facebook during an election—or at least, it’s impossible for me. All my other Facebook friends are fellow neurotic liberals swapping Salon and NYT articles while trying to survive these last few weeks without having nervous breakdowns. Now my Republican relatives know definitively just how liberal I am, and I know that my cousin, a young woman whose common sense and maturity I have long admired, is, at this moment, “disappointed in America,” presumably because we chose Barack Obama to be our next president. It’s hard not to think less of her, and that pains me tremendously.

It kicked me in the gut from a particularly pithy angle, because patriotism and pride in America are things I’m trying to understand now, for myself. I can say without equivocation that on Tuesday night I had never been prouder to be an American (a feeling that ebbed somewhat on Wednesday when I learned about all the homophobic ballot initiatives that passed). I had that actual thought, though the language is so foreign to my personal lexicon that I felt as though I was thinking in Armenian. My first impulse was to shoot back via my own Facebook status, “Stephanie has never been prouder of America.” And then I thought, no. That will look like precisely what it would be—turning my cousin’s comment into fire, and returning it. Am I now going to get into the business of haranguing people who don’t show the proper pride in America at the same moment I do? It’s an ugly game, and the fact that I considered playing it, even for a moment, creeps me out.

Patriotism has always been fraught terrain for me. Growing up Mennonite in the God-and-country Bible Belt has a lot to do with it, of course. Mennonites are perpetually getting their asses kicked for not showing proper love of America. The brand of Mennoniteism in which I was raised bred a distrust of all things nationalist. I can’t recall any particular educational moment that led to my aversion to American flags, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the national anthem—it was just part of our ethos and culture, something I absorbed easily. More traditional Mennonites than my parents might state it more explicitly: Nationalism is an idol, a distraction from God. My family tends away from religious austerity. Their message was more pragmatism than doctrine: Nationalism makes us think we are better than people in other countries, and then we end up killing them.

By the time I got to grad school, my vaguely tribal distrust of patriotic culture had morphed into a more civic-minded disgust with patriotic mindlessness, a disgust shared by all of my fellow progressive friends. The response to 9/11 was, of course, the greatest catalyst for our frustrations. When it came time to protest wars, though, I noted a tension between camps: those who wanted to renounce nationalist symbolism altogether, and those who wanted to use it as a tool to legitimate the peace movement to the wider American public. To wave the American flag at the peace protest, or not?

I just had no idea what was the right thing to do. I’m not a very ideologically-motivated person; it may just be the nature of my theory-laden education, but I tend to deconstruct symbols, insisting they lack intrinsic meaning and must be judged solely on their utility for the situation at hand. (That is probably an ideology in and of itself. Crap. There’s no escape.) Sometimes it makes me look like an utter mercenary. For me, the question was not “Is it right to wave the flag at the peace march?” but rather, “Will it help the cause to wave the flag at the peace march?” The answer to the latter question seemed to be yes. It seemed, at that time, like the reappropriation of patriotic symbolism was needed to challenge the dominant “Everyone who opposes this war hates America” climate that the neocons were exploiting to do their dirty business.

But I’d rather let someone else do the reappropriating. I never got over my discomfort with nationalist symbols. At the Obama rally in KC a few weeks ago, the proceedings began with the Pledge of Allegiance, and as the entire crowd turned to the gigantic American flag hanging over the World War I memorial, I underwent the same dilemma I have had at every civic event since elementary school: what the hell do I do? At best, the words of the Pledge of Allegiance strike me as a weird semantic puzzle—are we asserting the nation actually possesses these qualities, or that it might? Are we pledging to a supposed reality, or an idealized abstraction? Can I configure the meaning of these words in my mind so that they are somehow tolerable coming from my lips? At worst, it just feels like a lie. I have resorted to a sort of mumbling fakery on several such occasions, but I can never manage the hand on the heart. As 75,000 people recited the Pledge, I willed myself invisible, paranoid that some random camera would catch me out of all of them and I would be the evidence that Obama supporters are flag-averse America-haters.

Michelle Obama won my heart during the primaries when she made what I suppose is considered her biggest gaffe: she said something to the effect of, “For the first time in my life, I’m proud of my country.” Obviously I don’t share her experience, but I so related to the frustration implicit in her comment. I always hear the phrase “proud to be an American” as a belligerent conservative code, daring me to challenge their monolithic vision and threatening to string me up the moment I do. (When did that start, anyway? Reagan? Nixon? McCarthy?) It seems like we’re ordered to be proud of America at the moments when our government is doing the most egregious things, or when people would rather not remember that our nation was built not only on transcendent, revolutionary ideals but also on slavery and genocide.

Did I limit my ability to be a responsible citizen by accepting the jingoistic definition of patriotism that I encountered in the Bible Belt? I think I probably did. I saw patriotism as a culture of stupidity; growing up, the only people I knew who spoke of America with pride were xenophobic dipshits. The baby-boomer activists and intellectuals of my parents’ crowd imparted the opposite on me: concern for international peace and understanding, despair over American military excess. I learned to appreciate the privileges of America through the lens of guilt; we have too much, we are robbing someone. This was the heart of my understanding of America—frustration, anger, sadness. It’s what makes liberals so pathologically ineffectual, the morass of these emotions. And how easily they are passed along. So many of us Gen Xers came of age under the weight of our parents’ disappointment at what America had become.

When George W. Bush started pillaging the Constitution, I realized I hadn’t read it since high school. Unwittingly, I had seen this country’s founding documents as nationalist symbols, and therefore alienating. I’d always thought of the founding fathers as hypocrites, as indeed they probably were; I never took the time to fully appreciate the brilliance of the government they created.

The Bush administration took advantage of our collective ignorance about these documents, and insofar as I was ignorant myself, I was complicit. Oh sure, I signed MoveOn petitions and worried about wiretapping, but I didn’t really understand what we were losing. To protect my sanity, my policy towards such matters became Try Not to Think About It.

Sometime during this past election, I got interested in America. And so much of it had to do with Barack Obama. In The Audacity of Hope, (which I have yet to read all the way through, but I just got the audiobook), he lays out his own ambivalence about the way this country was founded. He faces the paradoxes and contradictions of America without fear, and he trusts his readers, the American public, to think of America in a way that can’t be captured in triumphalist narratives or bombastic rhetoric. What the founding fathers did, he asserts, is create a governmental structure that guards against absolutism. They didn’t agree on everything by any means; they didn’t even agree on what role the Constitution should play in that government. But to protect against absolutism—that was radical, and enduring. It is still radical. It’s what Bush almost succeeded in taking away from us.

When I first read parts of this book in a Borders aisle last fall, I felt a surge of hope that I crushed immediately with my post-Bush jadedness: There is no way Americans will go for this. Americans like the language of purity; Obama refuses to speak it. Americans only have the capacity for simplistic visions; Obama says such visions are dangerous. What a joyous revelation, a year later, to find myself proven wrong. My own understanding of America was in danger of being as monolithic as that of the Americans I most resent.

The success of this political season has inspired in me something that I could work into a definition of patriotism, if I so choose, and for the sake of argument, let me try. When I was out canvassing in Kansas City, I was assigned to low-income black neighborhoods. I had all these neurotic white worries about pateralism itching the back of my mind at first; my assignment was to educate, and would that look bad? Never mind that I was given my orders by a heroically well-organized young black woman who had just educated me on the minutiae of Missouri voting procedure, so that I might pass on the knowledge—I still managed to stew about this. Could you get the hell over your whiteness and get to work? That was an order, from some other place in my head. After about three minutes of canvassing it became apparent that the majority of the people in that neighborhood were fervently hoping for the same electoral result that I was. The anxiety dissolved, replaced with something else—community. I was being welcomed, in the spirit of common purpose.

When that Nigerian-American six-year-old girl told me how excited she was about Obama, about having the first black president, I felt the grandeur of what was happening, this girl’s place in a historical narrative we were all aware of living and witnessing, a narrative of near-intoxicating power. And then the narrative fell away, and there was this: My child. My sister. My fellow American. I will work to make this country a place where you can have a future.

I think Obama would call this patriotism. And I'm so happy, at long last, to call him my president.

canvassing

2008-11-03T07:16:00.001-08:00

When Obama gave his rocking speech on race on March, he had a great story about a young white woman who did organizing very early on his campaign, in African-American communities in South Carolina. During one organizing event, she described how when she a kid her mom was diagnosed with cancer, and they had trouble with the medical bills. Ashley helped pay the bills by convincing her mom that the food she loved more than anything was mustard and relish sandwiches. And then she ate mustard and relish sandwiches for a year, to cut down on food costs.

After telling this story, she went around the room, asking people to explain why they were supporting Obama. And finally she gets to an elderly black man who says, simply, “I’m here because of Ashley.”

Yesterday I was out canvassing in Kansas City. My canvassing partner and I were in a townhouse complex where we had a long list of registered voters to reach, just to give them encouragement, voting info, counsel on how they should stay in the lines, even if they’re long, tell them where to report problems—all that last-minute GOTV stuff. Everyone who answered the door welcomed us and assured us they were voting for Obama. When they weren’t home, we left door hangers that gave them polling info and numbers to call if they had any problems. People came up to us in parking lots with their voter registration cards and asked questions about what to do if they’d moved, what to do if their driver’s license was from a different state; we answered what we could and referred them to the appropriate phone numbers for the rest.

By the way: I am here to tell you now that what they say about the Obama campaign’s lean, mean, efficient organizing machine—it’s all true. (Except for the lean part. It’s an army.) These people have their shit together. After we finished canvassing and were sitting in the car—me, a Peace Corps-bound recent college grad, a forty-something disabled Gulf War vet and a Lawrence baby boomer hippie—we heard an old Republican phonebanking lady in Missouri saying on NPR how all Obama’s people are too young and fresh and don’t know what they’re doing and she’s sure they’ll just flake out in the end. We just laughed. And laughed.

But back to the townhome complex. At one house we met three little kids and their dad. He was Nigerian and not a citizen yet, but he went in the house and got his wife’s voter registration card to show us, and told us he was praying for an Obama victory. His kids ran up to us and asked if they could have some voter information hangers. I gave them some, asking them to please give them to grownups they knew who were old enough to vote.

We stayed to chat for a little longer. One little six-year-old girl in particular was very interested in talking to us. She had a green t-shirt with a flower on it, and pigtails, and a missing front tooth.

“Did you know that there has never been a black president before?” she said. “Obama will be our FIRST black president!”

My partner was ready with some enthusiastic response. I tried to hide the tears streaming down my face, but I have a feeling her dad saw me.

A second later her little brother ran up behind me and made me get a grip. “I gave mine to that man next door already!” he said. “Can I have some more?”

An hour later these children were still helping us track down difficult-to-find numbers in the complex. When I called my partner to check up on her after we had temporarily split, I heard little voices behind hers, yelling, “Obama! Obama! Obama!”

Before we left the complex, we went to say goodbye to their dad and thank him for letting his kids help us. Just as we were leaving, their mom pulled up in her parking spot. The kids ran up to her car and jumped up and down while she tried to get out: “Obama! Obama! Obama!”

I have to go back to Kansas City later this morning and do this for one more day. That old man is doing it for Ashley. I am doing it for those three kids.