sexism

I have of late had several interactions with people, mostly male, about sexism.

In general they do not go so well. They do not degenerate into name calling, barely and only through immense patience and a damned good sense of humor on my part (no really, I AM laughing at them usually). However, they always leave me tired and somewhat repulsed. Oh I know what it feels like. There was this place in Michigan called Heath Beach I think. It was not much more than a slightly large, chlorinated farm pond. It was chlorinated mud full of people, mostly kids swimming and peeing and their attending adults standing knee deep in the muck - a long neck in one hand and a cigarette clenched between their lips which they removed with the free hand only long enough to yell something like "Krystal-Lynne, you stop holding your brother Kyle down under the water!"

After these interactions, I find that I often I feel like I went swimming at Heath Beach.

There are some, mostly female, who will think me silly for trying to have a decent if difficult interaction with people about sexism at all. If someone doesn't come with some sort of anti-sexism pedigree, I should say "fuck it, fuck them, and fuck that". This goes against a good slice of my core reasoning, core reasoning being part of what keeps me chugging. This chunk goes something like "If I'm going to be part of this, I will not be a passenger."

In short, I do try to drive the bus sometimes. It's that or let it do things like drive off the cliff, and since I'm ON the bus, I have a problem with it going off the cliff.

Suspense

Years ago:
Towards the end of my marriage, my exhusband Flounder and I went to Vancover for a conference. It was his conference, I was a spouse. Since this was one of those closed-type conferences (sponsored by some auto safety organization...my ex had published research on accuracy of accident reports - go Flounder!) I had two options. Poke around Vancouver on my own or go to some of the fun-filled spouse field trips the conference had arranged for us. I'm not great on my own and Vancouver was fucking expensive so I opted for the spouse package.

The fun-filled field trips were not quite fun since I didn't know anyone. To make matters worse, they all seemed to know one another already - happy to see one another and catch up on how Madison and Gregory were doing, which prep schools they had already picked out for the little darlings, and how many horse show medals the kids had won this year. It felt like Stepford Wives on the road. Like some kind of bizzare Lifetime reality travel show - "Plus One" or "Et Ux" would've been the title.

Thankfully, I found a cohort. She was a rather flat affected but quite nice woman who it turns out lived down the block from me back in MI. She was childless, like me, which put her a little out of the "in" crowd" although she did know them from past conferences. Her name was Lynn.

Lynn and I spent most of the "social" time smoking and talking about Ann Arbor. When she made her obligatory rounds with the other wives (she had attended these things before and apparently needed to do some social maintenance with the Uxes) I spent my time alone writing in my journal or taking pictures. It was beautiful there, and while the trips were not at all fun, there were at least things like heartbreakingly beautiful woods and parks to absorb my attention.

One of those beautiful places included some park or something with a huge suspension bridge. It was so narrow and so very long. I stood at one end of it looking across. The children were on it and would occasionally for fun rock the damned thing and make it swing. My chest thudded and the palms of my hands got sweaty just watching it. Each swing and sway made my feet tingle like there was an electrical current running under them.

I honestly can't remember if I even went out on the bridge. I know I thought about it. I know I imagined going out. I know stood at the foot of it and looked down at the rungs immediately near me, the ones still close to firm land and bridge anchors. I know I used the picture of those rungs to build the bridge in my head, to put myself out, considering each how each step would feel. After I adjusted to the idea of walking on it, I let myself forget each step and think just about each moment. "Wow," I thought, "I'm doing it! I must have gotten so far out..." and I turned to look back only to make the shameful realization that I was still in spitting distance of the bridge's entrance. There was a decision to continue, to convince myself I was tough enough to do it, then striding ("probably slinking," I thought) forward with a squared shoulders kind of bravado. Children yelled and shrieked, you know, that happy howl they can make. Under the howls and hoots, I could hear their feet hitting the bridge, see it bucking here and there. And small but heavy feet landed too fearlessly ahead of me while I was close to half way out.

What happened after that I am not sure of. And this is why I am not sure if I imagined all of it or if I did actually walk out.



Here and now:
There is a woman I know and like from the radio station I used to work at (I'm still on staff but only for sporadic projects and production work). Her name is Susan. I have met and chatted with Susan at staff and committee meetings but I interact with her mostly through the station email list.

This morning I read Susan's post of the day while I drank my coffee and decided if I should or shouldn't risk troubling my intestine with anything resembling breakfast. Susan posted about McDonalds trying to get the OED to drop the word "McJob". I wrote back that Mc- is now a productive prefix in the English language. In support of this I mentioned McCollege. There was some back and forth on list which lead to me to a tangential post (rant) about my McGrad Program and what I fear will be a McPhD.

Then I finished my breakfast of coffee and cigarettes and popped off for my last visit with my primary care doctor before she blows out of this wretched state (I'm very unhappy about that) and to briefly see my friend who got her biopsy results back from her mastectomy (I'm aslo unhappy about that). I cried on and off much of the way home. When I got home, I sat on the porch with one of the neighborhood semi-strays, a friendly black cat I've named Sylvester. I fed him and smoked, called A___ to come out and he took me out for lunch. He realized when he got ID'ed at the bar that he forgot his wallet. So we ended up with me taking him out to lunch and trying very hard not to sink into a foul mood. The wallet was part of the mood only in as much as it hurt to see how crestfallen he looked when he said "but...I had wanted to take you out" in response to my overly sharp laugh at him getting ID'ed and my reassurance that I could cover two sandwiches, a beer, and a soda.

I wanted to feel smitten and swept off my feet by even the gesture - which was quite sweet. But in the context of my mood, it was just another nice thing not working out as planned at the end of a damp, dirty, ambivalently bright March day.

We drove home sleepy with the sunlight turning appropriately sunny just in time for dusk. At home, we curled up with our cat and watched some old TV shows on DVD. Then I logged on with intentions to work on Tuesday's lesson plan or do some grading at least. In my email, I found a reply from Susan which I think summed up where I am right now with frighteningly exact accuracy.

It HAS to be frustrating and deadening and scary - like getting to the middle of a long swaying suspension bridge...

It is precisely like that, complete with not really knowing for sure if I am halfway out or still standing at the edge.

hippie import clothing store (I)

The hippie import clothing store was located not far from the state street theater, quite close to what I came to think of the multidimensional used book store (it had more rooms than it seemed it should or, I believe, could have had). The hippie import clothing store was right next door to to the dance club which according to my brother's recollection is alternately either named "The Mango" or "Tangerine".

One afternoon, my co-workers at the hippie import clothing store told me Leaf would be working with us that week.

"I hate it when Leaf is here," Sam said. "She sits on her ass. She doesn't DO anything."
"Wait, her name is [leef]? Is that 'L-e-i-f' like viking?" I asked.
"No, no...'" said Eva who was standing under the extremely large mermaid, picking through the cherry vanilla incense. Eva said "It's Leaf like tree," and held out her aromatic hands, fingers stretched into branches which she wiggled stiffly for emphasis.
"They named their kid 'Leaf' like tree? That's fucking horrible."

While we spoke of Leaf's arrival, I contemplated the girl's situation. Sure, she might suck to work with as much as the other employees seemed to think she did. And she might even be a rotten person. But how much of this could really be laid only at her feet? I mean, if ever there was a situation of mom and dad setting the kid up for shit, this was it. By this point, I'd been working at Leaf's parents' store for over a month. I'd heard and personally witnessed not good things about our employers, store owners N____ and B____. But finding out they had burdened their child with the name Leaf was up there for worst things I knew about them yet.

Maybe it's because I had grown up where I did - which very much wasn't here - that I thought giving your child a name like Leaf was a signal at least to the sensitive adults of the world that you were selfish to the point of cruelty. But maybe here it was ok, or at least less bad, to name your child something like that.

Here was Ann Arbor MI in 1996. We were downtown but away from the extremely undergraddy part. "The City" as people from the pokey towns around it called it. And why not? If they didn't come in for the congested football game days, they came during other super packed times like the annual art fair or hashbash. To them, I'm sure it looked like a city.

Here was where you were more likely to get hit by a spandex and hemp wearing bicyclist whizzing down the sidewalk than actual motor vehicle traffic since most of the time, the cars were caught in a web of perversely arranged oneway streets and power-pedestrians.

Here, there was a working class but it wasn't much like the working class culture where I grew up. Here there seemed to be a very large number of 18-25 year old refugees from the boring MI suburbs who were pissing off their parents simply by not being in college, simply by working a working class job for a working class wage, growing pot in the basement of a house shared with 4 to 7 other young people, and spending most evenings smoking happily on porches throughout town. Here you had some folks born into the working classes, raised in less suburban suburbs, people who were older and younger, but who collectively showed signs of having a larger degree of tolerance and wider range of social attitudes than what I was accustomed to from my rather parochial Irish/Italian south of Boston former ship building town.

Here, the working class households were the primary motivators for all the cool shit in town, like a 24 hour diner, bars without TVs, native plant nurseries, neighborhood/community art and writing projects, cooperative gardens, and those corner bakeries where if you volunteer to help out a couple of hours a week, you can get free bread. It had pockets of anarchists, open atheists, and self-proclaimed artists. Maybe, I thought, in a place like this, they could abide names like "Leaf". Where I grew up, if you'd named your kid that and sent her to public school, the kid was gonna get hit, physically or emotionally at least every week if not every day for no reason other than the residents' intolerant xenophobic inferiority complex attitude which caused them to necessarily hear names like "Leaf" as "My parents think they are better than you and yours (so please feel free to fuck with and/or smack me)."

I'd been living in Ann Arbor long enough to know that the exact context for judging the cruelty of her parents, my bosses, N____ and B_____ might need some adjustment. I hadn't thought I'd get culture shock moving from south of Boston to Ann Arbor. I knew the "r" thing would be a problem, but I had assumed it would be one way. I wasn't prepared for things like completely failing to understand a nurse's declaration to me that "mrrstrrr strrjrrs in room threethrrrrtifrrrr wants a vrrrrnrrrrs"

"So you go to school with Leaf?" I asked Eva. Eva filled me in on how Leaf was tormented by people at school and how Leaf herself was in fact quite mean to the few people who tried to be friends with her (like Eva). I couldn't help wondering if Leaf would've been less mean and less tormented had she been named something else. Spoiled, being raised by people who never matured past 17, and named as she was, it seemed to me Leaf was pretty much fucked from the word go.

I looked around the store, noting the nearly life-sized llama ("it's an alpaca!" N_____ had corrected), the half strung balinese instruments, the grateful dead batik-like printed wall hangings ("tapestries"), and the many mermaids, mercats, merdogs, and frogs holding mirrors hanging from fishing line from eyes N_____'s husband and store co-owner B_____ had screwed into the ceiling.

When they swung, I wondered how much coke B____ had done the day he installed them. I hardly ever stood under the large mermaid. Seeing others under it as its cracked and puttied body swung lazily over them made me feel a little funny, like the way you get when you're too close to the edge of a building.

Who the fuck would name their kid "Leaf", like a tree? These people would.

* = "Mister Sturgers in room three thirty four wants a Vernor's**"
** = Vernor's is a kind of ginger ale.

tea bag fuck up

I don't adhere to a whole lot of beauty product. I have stuff, but in general I consider all but a basic moisterizer and a face cleanser which a dermatologist insisted I use (because the regular shit was ripping up my face) more or less dispensable.

So I don't have eye cream, firming gels, exfoliants, royal anything that came out of a bee's ass, lip venom, lightening creams, darkening sprays, and so on.

If I'm wanting to exfoliate or tighten my pores or whathaveyou, I am as likely to make something out of ingredients in my house as I am to buy a product. Usually the results are innocuous if not better than what I'd get with a $50 wee bottle of synthetic goop.

That said, this evening as I was washing my face I happened to remember a completely terrible outcome of a home "beauty aid". It involved tea bags.

You know the classic cucumber slices on the eyes, hair in rollers, mud mask look? Have you ever wondered about the cucumbers? They are supposed to reduce puffiness. Well, there is another version of that putting things on your eyes to reduce puffiness trick which calls for tea bags.

Many years ago when I was living in Michigan, I developed a seasonal allergy. It involved my eyes pretty much exclusively. They'd puff up so bad they were practically swollen shut every morning for a few weeks in the late summer. Having never had seasonal allergies, it took me some time to realize this was what was going on. In the meantime, I was just stuck with puffy sore eyes. I thought "Oh I read something about putting tea bags on your eyes when they are puffy" and I promptly got some tea bags cooking. I let them cool off, then applied them to my eyes.

After a short time I took them off and looked in the mirror to discover bruise-like rings around both of my eyes. No, they weren't tea dyed. They were covered in dark purple-red bruising. I showed my (now ex) husband, Dr. Flounder. He was horrified and amused, but could offer no explanation. "My god, people are going to think I hit you!" he exclaimed. Ah Bob was a sensitive soul.

It didn't take long for the bruising to go away. It's possible a different tea wouldn't do that but you know, I'm just not planning to go there again.

So I'm wondering. Anyone ever heard of this happening ever? Possible explanations will be entertained. Post them in the comments section.

Old news

I hang onto things that look useful. This is easier now that shit is digital. Back in the day, it was news clippings, handouts from lectures, whole journals or photocopied bits of them.

I recently ran across an article I clipped from the newspaper while I was living in Ann Arbor. Hence I assume it was from the Ann Arbor News. There's no date but it was definitely between October 1993 and February 1997.

The headline was "Group seeks relabeling of contraceptives - the coaltion wants pills labeled for 'morning after' use."

It begins:
A group of organizations concerned with women's health issues wants the Food and Drug Administration to require relabeling of six brands of oral contraceptives to tell women how to use them as "morning after" pills.
...
The petition says six oral contraceptives sold in the United States are proven effective as emergency contraception: Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories' Ovral, Lo/Ovral, Nordette and Triphasil, and Berlex Laboratories Levlen and Tri-Leveln.
....
At the very end of the article is this bit of info.
Yet labels don't say how to use them as "morning after" pills: two Ovral pills no later than 72 hours after intercourse and two more 12 hours later, or two four-pill doses of the other brands, the first no later than 72 hours after intercourse and the second 12 hours later.

another new year

Last year my resolution was to learn three new recipes.
Here are some of the recipes I'm counting towards that total.
One - sesame noodles (with a peanut noodle variant)*
Two - sweet and sour sauteed carrots and red peppers
Three - Greek chicken
Four - Broccoli and cheddar risotto
Five - New version of chicken parmesan

*This one was from 2005 I think but I am counting it anyhow since I kept working on it into 2006.

It's past the end of the year, but I am going grocery shopping today and I'm planning to pick up stuff to try carrot ginger soup. I've been losing weight again and I need to find some nutritious food that might be easier on my stomach than tomato or other spicey/acidic creations. I'm very excited about trying the soup since I had some in Ann Arbor when I last visited and it was quite good.

This may have been the first time I can happily report I have kept my resolution. Most years I resolve to undertake some big life and perspective changing attitude or growth. I remember resolving to learn to rely on other people better. I got sick of having my resolutions turn into trials. Although I do realize that the resolution itself wasn't causal (more likely it went in the other direction), I got sick of the sense of uncomfortable ironic self fulfilling prophecy that such resolutions raised. So I resolved to make only silly resolutions.

This year, I resolve to post fliers with something like what Rob Brezsny would call "sacred advertisements". Back in 1999 a friend and I conspired to commit similar acts. We researched quotes on women, academia, and women in academia. We collected them, printed them up on colorful paper, then snipped each out so we had a handful of individual brightly colored quotes. Over the next few months, we occasionally taped a set of them around our building on campus.

This year's resolution is to commit similar acts but involves expanding the repertoire a bit.

tagged

I got tagged by Daniela at Lingo Franko.
So here we go....

4 jobs I have had
1. florist
2. unit clerk (medical)
3. ESL instructor
4. salesgirl

4 Movies I could watch over and over
1. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
2. Nearly any Coen brothers movie but especially The Big Lebowski
3. Airplane
4. Mystery Men

4 places I have lived apart from where I live now
1. Quincy, MA
2. Waltham, MA
3. Ann Arbor, MI
4. Various towns in CT

4 tv shows that I love (which are on DVD/itunes because I don't have cable)
1. The Office
2. Scrubs
3. My Name is Earl
4. 30 Rock (not LOVE but the buying all the hotdogs was just too great)


4 places I have been on hols
1. Peaks Island, Maine
2. Leenalau, Michigan (stayed at a nice B&B, went to the dunes park which was GORGEOUS, saw the biggest snake I've ever seen right smack in the middle of a trail)
3. San Francisco
4. Vancouver

4 websites I visit daily
1. Google
2. The Boston Globe
3. Weather Underground
4. Pandora

4 favourite foods
1. Minestrone
2. Lasagna
3. Greek chicken (mint, oregano, peppers, red onion, feta cheese, and grapes – yum!)
4. Chips – nearly any kind

4 places i would rather be at right now
[I noticed that there aren’t as many places as there are states (of being), so below are places or ways i'd rather be right now]
1.In the house I rented in Ann Arbor the last year I lived out there, but with a slight change of cast. Cat and dog are still there but no ex. I miss that place. With the exception of my ex husband’s presence, it felt right to me.
2. Heading up to Boston to meet my little brother for dinner as I had tentatively planned yesterday morning. I made those plans before I spent the day with pain and nausea (they make rotten guests btw – came about a week before thanksgiving and they won’t leave). I am currently waiting to see how food treats me today but I suspect that I will not be making my trip as planned.
3. Brave again.
4. In possession of the kind of trust which has more than one (somewhat superficial) apparent level.

4 people I am tagging
Vengicar
Winterwheat
Gypsy
and of course cjblue

squished

I had been writing a post when poof, I lost power. It's back on again, but who knows for how long. If I were a lesser person, this would be really trying my patience.

Hey, wait, it is trying my patience. I guess I'm lesser.

Poor A___. He came over before we were planning to head up to campus only to find me nowhere near ready to go, stomping from room to room inspecting the leaks, and pondering whether or not I should move my bed. My mood was not swell, and possibly the resulting argument was unavoidable. I want to believe there is a good way to deal with me when I get like this, but I often suspect there isn't.

Moving anything, even contemplating moving or doing anything that involves physical strain, puts me in a foul mood. I'm not a large person and was never terribly strong. Now that I have whatever it is I have, it's just that much harder. So I'm here pondering moving shit, which would involve asking him to move it for me mostly, and thinking that I don't want to be so dependent, and thinking that if I weren't so freaked out about dependency and independence we probably could have moved in together when A___'s lease was up, which would allow us to afford to live somewhere that doesn't feature gaping moldy holes in the ceiling.

But I am very reluctant to move in with him. The reluctance alone is enough to make me think I shouldn't. I worry I'll sabotage the relationship out of fear and insecurity. Since that is the case and since there are so few decent and affordable single apartments around here, I remain in this one. But this is a catch 22, right? Because by remaining in this one, I continue to be dependent when one of the problems with this apartment manifests in a physical way.

While A___ was out (he went out shortly after we had a fight), I decided I could manage to move my bed by myself. I did. It's moved, however, after I moved it I realized three things.
One - The only placement where the bed fits and where it will be clear of the leaks requires that several other pieces of much heavier furniture be moved.
Two - I have hurt myself moving the bed (ow).
Three - There is yet another dark spot forming on the living room ceiling directly over where I have stacked my DVD player, VCR, and stereo. If that becomes an active leak, all of that will need to be moved as well.

Sometimes when I was younger, I would rearrange my furniture for a change of pace. It was a little tiring and sometimes sweaty work which I saved for when I was in some kind of manic cleaning/housekeeping burst. It was ultimately very satisfying to do this when I lived in larger quarters and had more energy at my disposal. This though, this is not fun and it is not satisfying. It is soggy, annoying, frustrating, and very tiring.

I have bad luck with water. That's what it comes down to. I used to joke that it is because I have a lack of water in my birth chart so water is like my kryptonite. In every single place I have lived, I've had some kind of destructive water related event.

Ann Arbor - at the end of my first month in my new apartment, my (then) fiance Bob and I woke one morning to the sound of water in our bedroom. It was pouring down the wall behind the bureau, soaking everything on and in it. Turns out the neighbors upstairs were leaving on a trip to Europe and had decided to wash everything at once in the small washing machine. This threw it off balance and resulted in the machine pulling out of the wall, with water gushing uncontrollably out of the pipe.

Ann Arbor - my last year there we moved to a house. I was in my basement office (it was very pink) working when I realized that I could hear water hitting cement in the unfinished part of the basement. I ran upstairs to find that although I had closed the window to Bob's office on account of a nasty rain storm, the water had filled up inside the window frame like dam. The dam had finally broken and a small spill off pond had formed under the window. In this pond, the power strip for my husband's computer floated, still plugged in and on. Before I could get back to the basement to turn off the power, something shorted and we lost Bob's brand new printer/scanner/fax machine.

Connecticut - within the first week of buying our house, we discovered the roof hadn't been finished properly and a retaining wall in the basement were cracked. We discovered this because during the first rain storm, water came in through both. The roof water ruined a sizable chunk of the ceiling and wall in my office that I had just finished painting.

Connecticut - One of my friends flushed the toilet in the guest bathroom and it got stuck. it ran all day, draining the well. It took several days to recover, during which time my siblings were down for a holiday. My brother refused to crap in the house since we were conserving flushes to one a day. He was so concerned that someone might see his waste that he decided he would shit in the woods. This did result in one of the most amusing moments of tormenting him I have ever had, but it did suck a whole lot too.

Connecticut - Very shortly after moving into my new apartment in 2000 (middle of separation and end of the semester), I got sick. I went to my doctor on a Friday afternoon, and he sent me straight to the hospital for an ultrasound. When I returned to my little apartment much later that night, I found a note from my insane landlady saying that the hot water heater had exploded in the basement and that I would not have r cornered me in the hallway with a barrage of questions about what I was doing earlier thatunning water for a day. She later evening since she swore she could hear water running in my apartment. She all but said I had somehow broken the heater. This woman eventually threw me out because of this and other imagined offenses (i.e. that I was running up and down the stairs pounding on the other tenants doors).

Connecticut - Various problems with the well in another apartment. It ran out, cracked, was contaminated, and the pump blew, all on different occasions. We also had a tenant whose dishwasher broke loose much like the washing machine at the first place in Ann Arbor. The tenant wasn't home and hot steaming water was flooding the basement and coming into the kitchen of her next door neighbor, Karen. Karen pounded on my door (why me?) and we spent the next few minutes in the basement while my landlord begged me by cell phone to just turn all of the faucets I could find until it stopped.

Connecticut - This place has just been chock full of water problems. Really it's the same problem. This place is like a sieve and my landlord and apartment manger are cheap bastards who have tried to get away with cheap quick fixes for too long.

So what's the upshot? The upshot is I have to find some way to make this tolerable so I'm not cranky with people like the nice sexy man I essentially just chased out of my apartment today for the crime of what, being too quiet? Jeez.

I am thinking of offering a barbie doll in ritual sacrifice to Tlaloc, the scary Aztec rain god (that's him up there on the left).

Sure, she's plastic and the Aztec gods are more the flesh and blood types, but she's a symbol of so much that is revered in our society. I think that it is fitting, plus, apparently Tlaloc likes the smell of burning rubber.

Rainfall data for my area (for yesterday):

	Actual	Normal	Record	Last Year
Precipitation	0.70 "	0.12 "	1.50 " ( 1944 )	0.00 "
Month-to-date precip.	7.02 "	3.13 "	--	1.36 "
Year-to-date precip.	27.41 "	22.06 "	--	20.16 "

(from wunderground.com)

Charity

I saw this in the news about a university I went to for three years before deciding I could grow up more cheaply outside of college:

PROVIDENCE, R.I.
A legal battle continues over the naming rights and funding for the Center on Hunger and Poverty at Brandeis University.
Rhode Island philanthropist Alan Shawn Feinstein filed a lawsuit in 2003 in the U.S. District Court alleging the center's director, J. Larry Brown, breached a contract by denying him the right to put his name on the center....

Feinstein told The Providence Journal it was important to have his name on the facility because anonymous donations encourage no one to follow suit.

"If you make a donation and a name is not connected with it, people are not going to be moved to give a donation, but if it's someone they know and like who gave money, then they may be moved to give money, too," Feinstein said. "So modesty does not always work well when it comes to charity."

Personally, I couldn't disagree more. Here are two instances of anonymous charity which are not even remotely dulled by the fact that they are anonymous.
- Last year's donation of $100 million to Yale's Music School. According to ABC News, this donation will make advanced music education (at Yale) free beginning in 06-07.

- "The Kalamazoo Promise". This is a program which will provide four year tuition scholarships to students from the Kalamazoo public school system who will attend any public university or college in Michigan. According to the Kalamazoo entry at Wikipedia, the program is sponsored by private donations from several anonymous individuals.

Mr. Feinstien knocked "modesty" in defending his lawsuit against the people he once thought worthy of his money. To me, that modesty is a very large part of what made the Yale and Kalamazoo donations so fucking amazing.

Then again, I don't have a zillion dollars. I don't know what it's like to have friends who have a zillion and one dollars and who, because they made more named charitable donations than I did this month, get to dock most of their yatchs in the best places at the marina and jeer at me over the buffet at the country club. That could be really difficult to deal with.

Me versus a bag of chips

Hey, fun. This poster is part of the American Cancer Society's Eat Right campaign. If you go here, you can make a customized poster for yourself (I chose my comic book porn name/alter-ego, Muffin Force, as drawn by my sister) versus whatever diet/nutritional challenger you choose. For example, mine is bag o'chips. Some advice to avoid frustration - don't use the back button on your browser while creating your poster or your work will be flushed. Also, when you finish your poster, select the print option, then "print to file" and save it as a jpeg. I didn't the first time and because the link generated when I chose the e-mail option didn't work, the poster was flushed (again).

The poster game is a gimmick intended to get you into the contentful part of the site (the "interactive tools" part). Unfortunately, the eat right campaign is partly funded by Weight Watchers - although they are not the worst of the diet peddlers out there. As a point of comparison, Jenny Craig is horrible (I feel their ads irresponsibly prey on and promote unhealthy body image ideals as well as anti-female sentiment in general).

Back to the American Cancer Society.
The "tools" are a little hokey, full of flash movies that are clearly intended for people who, well, people who aren't really like me apparently. This is probably a sign the tools will have the intended broad appeal in the larger target audience though - people like my ex mother in law and my friend Tory from Michigan.

The messages seem quite reasonable and hokey or not, I'm glad the ACS put this together. The overall point is to eat healthy, not simply to lose weight by any means possible ("Weight Watchers asks Have you tried crack?"). On the healthy eating pages, while there is a constant subtext and assumption that people accessing this information are overweight, it is not something they hit you over the head with like some sites I've seen do.

The simple fact is you can be over or underweight and still be malnourished to the point where you are doing serious damage to your health short or long term. Contrary to the commercial ideals we receive, skinny doesn't always equal healthy. Unfortunately, our bodies will work on total shit for fuel (e.g. a diet consisting primarily of items from the hostess, frito-lay, and sarah-lee food groups) allowing you to starve your body of needed nutrients while filling your belly (and perhaps your arteries with fat....MMMmmmmm). Human bodies are really very good at going on as if the shit we are consuming is what we need. But eventually, if you keep running on crap, you're gonna pay for it.

So me and Bag O'Chips are gonna go a few rounds. Since today is a grocery store day for me, I think I'll pick up some nuts and popcorn (the kind w/o the goop). Bag O'Chips, you're going DOWN!!!!

Mothers to me

I was thinking that there are several women I have known in my lifetime who have, even in small ways, been like a mother to me. Which is a good thing because if that job had been lfet entirely to my actual mother, I would have turned out pretty scary (er?).

Since it was mother's day recently, I figured I'd recognize these women and my gratitude for what they contributed to my life. There are some women who I have left off the list because they were more professional/mentor type people, although they certainly have helped me as well.

Various childhood friends' mothers - notably Carolyn's mother (Mrs. Rossi) and Liz's mother (Mrs. Kurpeski). No, not a cozy and squishy happy mommy type thing, but they were mother models that were in many ways superior to my own. They also provided safe homes for their daughters and by proxy, if nothing else, provided a place for me to stay (sometimes for days on end it seemed) when I was a kid without making me feel like an interloper.

My friend cjblue's mother, Rena. Again, not someone I have a lovey mother-daughtery relationship with but someone who always treated me kindly and respectfully, who made me feel welcome in her home, who hosts a great brunch, and who is poised, considerate, and an excellent mom.

My friend Marion Aitches. She was a professor in my undergraduate program in Michigan. I had her for a literature course, but I became friends with her first through interactions as her student and then after completing her course and graduating. I visited her on a few occasions and her house always felt homey to me. She's elegant and articulate, intelligent, and quick to laugh. Her life has been very rich, providing ample topics for stories of growth and the difficult processes of becoming a self possessed person, always told with a great sense of humor.

My friend Beverley Goodman. She is amazing. Beverley was my undergraduate advisor. She started working in the department towards the end of my time at college but quickly became one of my favorite teachers ever. She's candid, honest, outspoken, insightful, very funny, considerate, and full of some great contradictions (idealism and cynnicism, informality and diligence, pacificism and rowdiness). Also, her advice and support for me has always been so unbelievably well timed and appropriately irreverent. She's one of those quiet rebel types. I admire Beverley immensely for all of her personal and professional acheivements that she shared with me, but also more recently because she was able to take on a bum of a husband and a life threatening, life changing illness. Even superhuman strength won't help make that kind of combo anything less than torture. Beverley was honest about how much it sucked and I was so relieved she didn't bullshit me. Getting through something like this takes incredible strength and she did it, honestly and as always, on her own terms.

What's my age again?

Ah another blogthing.
It says I act like I'm 27. Not bad I guess. My life was on the wrong track when I really was 27. I was married to the ER doctor and living in a boring yuppie apartment complex in Ann Arbor...you know, the kind with muted beige carpet, a gas fire place, and vertical blinds. I had one of those "This just isn't me" moments around christmas that year and although it took me a few years, I got it sorted out. Life's not perfect now, far from it, but at least it feels like MY life.
Hm...now that I think about it, I think 27 was the year I saw the Tea Room exhibit this blog is named after.

You Are 27 Years Old

Under 12: You are a kid at heart. You still have an optimistic life view - and you look at the world with awe. 13-19: You are a teenager at heart. You question authority and are still trying to find your place in this world. 20-29: You are a twentysomething at heart. You feel excited about what's to come... love, work, and new experiences. 30-39: You are a thirtysomething at heart. You've had a taste of success and true love, but you want more! 40+: You are a mature adult. You've been through most of the ups and downs of life already. Now you get to sit back and relax.

What Age Do You Act?

Original tea room

I was looking for some old journals today. As I was going through my closet, I found a suitcase full of old pictures. And in the suitcase of old pictures, I found the picture I took of the description of the tea room exhibit in Ann Arbor, MI.
So here it is.

Sniffle

The mild winter is being mean to my allergies. I never had "allergies" growing up, not of the sniffling sneezing itchy eye type at least. Not until I was in my late 20s and living in Michigan did I finally know what misery people go through. Since that started, I have learned to I look forward to snow, cold, and dryness after a November of leaf mold has had my head spinning, literally. But with this weather, I am finding my allergies active in January. It's just wrong.

I spent too much time today in the soundbooth trying to troubleshoot "noise" in our recordings. We don't know what it is or why it's there, but we do know that you shouldn't have to filter recordings made in a fucking soundbooth. It sort of defeats the purpose. Sadly, I am not an engineer so I can only use trial and error to isolate and eliminate the variables in a very mechanical way...this mic, that mic, this jack, that one, high, low, etc. Frustrating and cramped, I fled finally knowing nothing conclusive. I think there's a soundbooth psychosis that sets in. By the end of two hours in there, I started saying things like "La la la...I'm Brittney Spears" for the soundcheck (for some reason, wearing a headset mic makes me feel like a former mouseketeer turned pop star). These recordings sound especially great since I have the allergy thing going on. I sound like Maryann Faithful.

Ok. Enough whining. Today's daily kitten is adorable - go check her out. She looks like a smaller fluffier version of my cat Max. She even has the Max pose down, on the back with the legs every which way.

got cookies?

Yesterday, A___ and I made a trip to the fabric store. It's a terrible place to be. I mean, it's nice but depending on how busy it is, it can really suck a lot.

The goal of the trip was to pick up some heavyweight fabric for A___ to use as winter curtains. I say to use as since although I own a sewing machine and presumably do know how to sew, the machine sucks severely. It's the Singer Touch and (Don't) Sew. I just found the machine on a page with the title "Relics", so that tells you what we're dealing with here. It's not a good relic either. You can go see pictures here. Years ago when I was living in Ann Arbor, my mother pulled a switch on me. She said she'd bring my machine out but instead used the opportunity to substitute her piece of crap Touch and Don't machine for my own, which was much nicer and genuinely easy to use. Now this may not have been actually as devious as I make it out to be. She might have just been so drunk that she didn't know which machine was hers and which was mine. Either way, I'm stuck with the relic. Which means larger scale sewing endeavors involve glue guns and oversized safety pins more often than they involve any actual sewing. Given this sorry state of affairs, I was not about to use the Singer to teach A___ how to sew. My contribution to this project was helping to isolate areas of the massive fabric store where there would be stuff like cheap heavy fabrics (remnants table in the home decorating section) and velcro ("What the fuck are notions?").

After navigating the parking lot and alternately cringing and laughing at soccer moms and dads in SUVs - they drive as if the SUV could somehow be made smaller and less offensive through ambivalence and hestitancy - we were greeted at the store entrance by a table covered in GIRL SCOUT COOKIES!

Two young girls were dressed up like cookies and two women sat at the table handling the cookie money. One of the girls wore a Peanut butter Patties costume (aka Tagalongs) and the other had on a Peanut butter Sandwich outfit (Do-Si-Dos). As people came through the entryway, the girls were deployed. "Would you like to buy some girl scout cookies?!" they shouted, dancing around. "Oh yes indeed I would" I said. I went into the store, promising to catch them on the way out. Surprisingly, I thought the kids looked cute. I still do. But in retrospect, I realize it may have been the proximity of all those cookies casting a sort of enduring glamour over the scene.

On our way out, A___ got hung up because even though he was buying the entire 2.8 yards of remnant left on the roll, he had to have it "cut" before he could check out...which he found out as the sales clerk rang him up. Who knew? While poor A___ had to go back to the cutting table, I ducked out to choose my cookies. I ended up buying a box of thin mints and a box of what are now known as "Carmel Delites" but which in my cookie selling days were called "Samoas". Standing there in my cookie daze, I watched as women passed the table, looking tempted but refusing the cookies, mostly on stated grounds like "Oh I sure don't need cookies!"

I, however, sure DO need cookies. While my weight is finally no longer going down, I still can't break 120. The antibiotics I've been taking for the ear infection I got (the result of the cold that was kicking my ass all break) aren't doing wonders for my appetite this week. So eating right now is sort of a chore. I was also one day premenstrual and in a bit of a shitty mood on account of having the last week of winter break wasted in febrile, dizzy, and half deaf stupor. I feel I quite legitimately need the cookies.

After I realized it had been a while, I called A___'s cell phone. "Hey...I've got cookies...where are you?" "Still at the table" he said. I could hear forlorn note of store fatigue in his voice. Largely loathing shopping myself, I empathize completely. I came to the table wearing a garland of green and white silk carnations, waving my bag o'cookies, and yelling "Erin go braaarrrrggggh!" The women waiting in a semi-organized cluster around the table glared at me and then went back to glaring at A___. "Is there even the semblance of a line here?" I asked, too loudly. "No, I don't think so," said A___. "Ok, Fuck this, come on -" I said and headed for a counter in a less hostile section. We found one in quilting. "I think they were mad at me for standing on the wrong side of the cutting table," A___ admitted as we walked. Probably. I'm sure my festive Irish foliage didn't help.

As I left the store the second time, the Peanut butter sandwich jumped in my path. "Would you like to buy some..." she started, then pulling her hat off her eyes she laughed and said "Hey I recognize you! You bought cookies!" "Yep. Get him though!" I whispered to her and pointed at A___. A___ bought another thin mints and a box of shortbread cookies (aka Trefoils). We are way stocked up on cookies, to my complete and utter delight (caramel, minty, and otherwise).