cozy

I'm at home after the post-last official day of work semi-mandatory work party at the house of my boss. She's fun, but it was an outdoor event and the outdoors in the backwoods of CT scare the hell out of me since I caught Lyme in 2002. Lest I forget how much that sucked and how much the physical symptoms I have had since contracting Lyme continue to suck, my left ankle's been hurting a lot the last two days. (I blame the wacky weather. It's been overcast, warm, and humid all week. Today's nice weather comes courtesy of a front that moved in yesterday, hence more joint pain.) It was fairly throbbing earlier. I thought about wrapping it but then remembered my bad luck with such things and bagged it, opting instead for medication.

I went to the party today covered in DEET and spent most of the few hours I was there sitting away from the grass, trees, ornamental shrubs, and other tick-havens. While my choice of seating left me a bit removed from the rest of my co-workers, I did have fun chatting with another woman who wouldn't come out onto the grass either. "Holy shit, so basically we're going to a fucking Tick-nic!?" she had asked last week when told about the location of this get together.
On the way home from the party, I started feeling really gross, probably on account of being drenched in DEET for going on four hours. I got home to find A____ making food - some kind of mexican beef thing which smells great now that I've had a shower and a blueberry muffin and shook off some of the ick feeling.

It's nice and quiet here right now, just the sound of the fan, some birds, and a faint but comfortingly familiar, specifically non-rural traffic hum from the highway about 1 mile to the south.

Like the sore ankle, my anxiety over not having a job yet is still lurking around the edges but it's such a pretty day and I'm so happy to be home early and to be able to have some down time with my fella later this evening that I'm determined not to let either of these bring me down right now.

job posting of the day

Assistant to the Vice President of Institutional Advancement
institutional advancement is one of those terms that makes my skin crawl.

cranky

The cat woke me up at 5:30 (a half hour before my alarm was set to go off) for food. He's been crying on and off throughout the night most nights these days. So up I got, and stumbled out to the kitchen. I bent down to get a can of cat food from a low shelf and smacked my head off the corner of the counter.

My day followed in a similar vein at work. No injuries, but it was not a good day. Lots of fuckery, some preventable and some not. The latter I can accept with some grace. The former however, tends to push my buttons, especially on a day that started out as unpleasantly as this one did.

Today was my last official day at work, and I don't have a job or even an interview.

My siblings, who were both just down for my sister's birthday, are both cranky right now too. And my fella's in some kind of semi-depressed or possibly sick state so he's sleeping a lot and feeling like shit.

On the plus side, I've never been a fan of July. Aside from my sister's birthday, the month generally is one of my less favorites. Too hot and lots of stagnation. So this July sucking already, well, it's not like it's wrecking a month I love and that's a little sliver of a bright side.

birthdays

It's the fourth of July. For me this means two things. There's the whole holiday, fireworks, barbecue, etc thing but more importantly, it means my sister's birthday.

Yes, my sister is a yankee doodle child, but only by an accident of biology. If you imagine the kind of person who would love the idea of being born on July fourth, someone who would wear red, white, and blue, who would want a cake dripping with patriotic frosting buntings, who would jump around doing a sparkler dance in the evening while singing patriotic tunes and wearing a straw hat decked with stars and stripes, then you are imagining someone who is largely the opposite of my sister.

Aside from AM's not terribly patriotastic disposition, there was also the fact that our dad was firmly against allowing us to attend any parades or fireworks. Thus, for me the fourth of July has a weaker association with the national holiday than it does with AM's birthday and AM's birthday tastes. So here's what I think of as we near July fourth.

AM liked chinese restaurants, especially the kinds with ornately carved dragons and red fringed laterns. I say "liked" but I think actually this still applies. (My use of past tense is simply because I am speaking of the conditions of our childhood, the ones which shaped my associations with this date.) And indeed, this year I was thinking we could order chinese food. Or maybe I should make some kind of sweet and sour dish with rice. Or a sesame noodle thing. Chinese food and such dishes have featured prominently in my plans for her birthday since becoming an adult. When we were kids, AM's birthday celebrations often included going to a pond or lake with a group of kids. We should find somewhere to swim, I find myself thinking when considering how to celebrate her birthday. Other memorable AM birthdays included the sundae party and a tie-dye party (clearly this was in the late 70s or very early 80s). These condition my up to now unexamined belief that I must get ice cream and perhaps plan some crafts on her birthday.

My brother was born late in November. His birthday usually falls within a week of Thanksgiving, sometimes on the actual day. Needless to say, T____ has had many a turkey birthday cake. Other than a turkey shaped cake, T's birthday wasn't necessarily associated with any food in particular, probably because there is so much cooking going on around it that we just didn't establish a set meal or type of meal for the birthday proper. When his birthday comes around, I (usually) suppress the perverse desire to order him a turkey cake since as an adult, T has forbidden turkey birthday cakes, opting instead for a standard birthday cake decorated with frosting flowers in "autumn colors".

My own birthday is near a set of Jewish holidays. My family's not Jewish, which is good for my birthday I think because of the two holidays my birthday falls near or on, one involves a fast and the other involves gefilte fish.

So it's my sister's birthday and my sibs are both coming down tomorrow so we can celebrate. I'm off to go plan meals and order unpatriotic cake and whatnot. Assuming one can order any cake, let alone an unpatriotic one, on the fourth of July.

tgiao?

My job is not that hard. There are some organizational issues which end up making more work for everyone, but providing it gets shared fully among the people whose slack caused the extra work, it's not so bad. There have been I think two days that I've been annoyed by this, and on both days I was feeling shitty enough physically to have it impact my mood and general outlook.

Our boss is kind of hands off, assuming we'll all self organize into a more or less efficient system. What makes for problems is that the system which academics naturally self organize into when confronted with tasks like those at this job (e.g. filing, organizing paperwork, tracking down administrative details) is not a more or less efficient one. For that goal to be achieved, someone has to take on the job of herding, coaching, cajoling, or whatever. It's a largely thankless, rarely respected, and much maligned job and so I can't blame my boss for avoiding it somewhat. And perhaps it has worked out in the past, however I think a few factors conspired against a more efficient outcome this year. One is that we had a shitload of students accept admission this year. Another is that the office was down a program assistant. That would be one of the people who would at least peripherally herd. And a final factor is that the staff consists of a lot of new people who didn't come in with a good idea of what needed doing or the best way to do it.

Anyhow, aside from the extra work we sometimes make for ourselves due to our tendency to self organize into a mini-goat screw, it's a decent job. I like it ok and I thought my coworkers did too. It has nice hours aside from being up early but I thought lots of people were early risers. Several of my coworkers have told me they are up and out by 7 most days even when they are not working here. There are reasonably decent people to work with, e.g., there is not a single person who is chronically tweeking or zombified, who is angry all the time, or who is all up in your face with whatever ("let's have a birthday party!!!"). Everyone says "good morning" and usually talks to one another if they are in the same room.

My coworkers are not disgruntled or maltreated workers. Our work is not physically or emotionally draining. It is not terribly cognitively demanding and while there are challenges and some problems to be solved, we have at our disposal the tools to meet and solve them. Many of us leave quite early most days because we think that although we were hired to work until 4:00, if we are done by 2:30 with whatever routine work we were doing in the afternoon, then 2:30 or very shortly after is quitting time. Sometimes this is true. Either way, we are actually underworking and getting paid for lots of time we aren't even there. Generally, no one gets too uptight about that either. Sometimes something slips through the cracks and it sets of a flurry of catching up and running around later but it's not like anyone gets viciously chastised or ostracized for having ditched out.

And finally, the students we work with (who do tend to make up the larger topic of complaint when any specific complaint is made) rotate through so fast that if there are some not so great ones in the bunch, they are out of your hair quite soon after they start getting on your nerves.

Thus, by all accounts, I'd say this job is a pretty sweet gig. Therefore, it strikes me as odd that over the last week or so, a lot of people have been making statements like "Thank god it's almost over!" While I consistently question what the motivation for this attitude is, I have different overt responses to these statements. Sometimes I try to look and sound agreeable because I know they assume we all share this sense of relief and to indicate otherwise would mean touching on a disclosure moment I'm fairly certain is not considered terribly polite. I sometimes ask "why?" And sometimes, when I'm feeling a little tetchy, I can't stop myself from saying I'm having a hard time feeling psyched about being unemployed. Yeah, gotta work on that.

Anyhow, I've decided that this "thank god it's almost over" attitude is similar to the "you don't have to be crazy to work here... but it helps!" type of comment/attitude which is repeated without much thought about whether a job or place of work really is all that nutty/rough/busy/hard/etc. This line of thought naturally called to mind Maria Bamford's "Crazy Office" routine, which I present below for your viewing pleasure.

Good vid

Can ya tell A____'s been busy? Ok, one last thing and then I'm off to bed. Thanks to Winterwheat for the link.


Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

yum?

Another radio commercial, this time for The 99 Restaurant featuring their new spicy cha-cha corn on the cob! Spicy cha-cha? I couldn't wait to get home. I whipped out my headset to call my brother to share. "Do you get it? Cha-cha?!" I spluttered into the phone as I drove down one of the more charming (i.e. deadly) rural CT roads.

I'm glad my brother has the same stupid sense of humor I do.

Out of the tower

I've spent the last few months doing a good deal of repackaging as I try to make a less than rocky transition out of an academic, teaching/research career path. There are several challenges in this, some unique to me and my situations and some I believe shared. Given my health status, any direct consideration of career involves evoking that anxiety producing question "what CAN I do?" I'm not talking what kinds of jobs will I be happy with or what kinds of work do I have the skills to do. I'm talking at a basic level - what do I reliably have the energy, physical fortitude, and emotional and cognitive resources to do? But that's me and my health, which is an issue I do try to save the in depth discussion of for a different blog these days.

Shared among myself and anyone who is at or considering approaching such a boundary are the more general questions like "how does all this experience I've racked up in the traditional academic track translate into a less traditional or completely non-academic career?" "Do I need to start at entry level in a new job (say, in human resources) or can I reasonably expect to be attractive to employers seeking experienced, mid to upper level workers?"

Probably this is a topic I will return to as I am in the throws of another job search. My current job ends in about two weeks and so far I've sent out resumes but haven't heard back from any prospects. My brother assures me this is in no small part due to both the crappy economy plus the post-graduation resume flood - and he says that as summer wears on and hiring managers work their way through the stacks of replies to job postings, I will probably hear something. Of course, that doesn't address the economic problems and the tight job market. Still, I have no choice but to try to be an optimist, to keep going and to keep looking as much as the process sucks. While I wait, and keep searching, and keep sending resumes and cover letters, I intend to post here about some of it. Well, what I can stand to anyway. For now, I present a nice article on translating your CV into a resume, again from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Why can't we all just get along?

Below are some excerpts from an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education. I will have to think about the author's final analysis on the function of dysfunction. As it stands, I came into this essay more properly on the side of the author's friend, although I don't usually put it into exactly those words. I am more sympathetic to the kid who retreated from the social scene of primary and secondary school than this phrasing (below) seems to be, although the sympathy has some rigid limits. One is that we are not children anymore. We're grown ups and should be reasonably expected to at least TRY to have a perspective which incorporates that fact and which is wider than our own shoulders. The author seems concerned with exonerating the shitty behavior of his cohort, but then I suppose I would be too if I were to stay in academia. It's the other extreme of the spectrum, the opposite of the bitter pill/sour grapes phenomena.

The Function of Dysfunction
An associate professor ponders the cause and effect of academic infighting
...
As I was describing our latest departmental dust-up to a friend who is not an academic, he interrupted with an observation. "The problem with professors," he said, "is that they never learned to get along with others." According to my friend, your typical professor is the socially awkward kid from high school who didn't fit in anywhere outside of the library. Unable to cut it in the real world, we just opted to stay in school. Eventually we ran out of classes to take, so we had to start teaching them. But at no point did we acquire basic social skills.

One of my faculty colleagues (who actually has pretty good social skills) offered another perspective. He pointed out that academics, especially humanists, are wholly invested in the idea of intellectual exchange. "Look at our classes," he reasoned. "What do we do? We circle a bunch of people around a table and talk. What we want more than anything is to create and participate in intellectual communities."

job posting of the day

package handler

job posting of the day

Non-Destructive Inspection Project Manager
I could and did parse this in ways not intended by the HR rep who posted it. Here's what kind of thing came to my mind.

Wedding album

I finished (I think) the wedding mix I'm making for my friend. Here's the playlist and cover art.
The Taco Bell Canon (artist unknown, CD lost)
Spam Song - Monty Python
Heart of Glass - The Bad Plus
Willimantic USA - (artist unknown, recorded before 1950 I think)
Connecticut's for Fucking - Jesus H Christ and the Four Hornsmen of the Apocalypse
My Generation rx - rx
Big Balls - Hayseed Dixie
Seasons in the Sun/Hustle - The Squirrels
Flower Girl - Joe Henry
Herbs, Good Hygiene and Socks - Lovage
Love You Madly - Cake
Gopher Mambo - Yma Sumac
A Hard Day's Night - Peggy Lee
You Oughta Know - Richard Cheese
Always on my Mind - Lewinski
St. Paul's Mix - me (sort of - I mixed it. The artists are Eddie Izzard, clips from Airplane, the Simpsons, the Marx Brothers, Pat Boone, and an anonymous MIDI composer who made a version of Mama Told Me (not to come)).











Now, I just need to hope I still have a date for the wedding Saturday. A____'s family stuff is looking grim.

Dump day

As you can perhaps surmise from the title of this post, today was not a good day. The list is just sort of depressing crap, some trivial and some not trivial. While I'm a fan of venting, putting it all down here isn't going to help right now. I know because I just started to and realized it was only winding me up more. So here's the abridged version.

- A____'s parents can't afford their house and are moving under less than exhaustively planned circumstances next week. Everyone's sick, so A____'s doing a very large amount of the work. Just what he wanted, another move. He's so damned busy and stressed over this (understandably) that he probably can't go to the wedding this weekend with me, which makes for the not super pleasant prospect of going alone. I tried calling some pals, but no one is up for it, or more to the point, everyone's out of town, chronically unreliable, or sick.

- Along the everyone's sick theme, my cat Max is sick. The only thing that was odd in his bloodwork from last week was an elevated calcium level. The vet told me today that this can be a sign of a particular kind of cancer that attacks or affects the intestine, which his symptoms are consistent with. We were really hoping it was thyroid, not because that would be great but because it would be less bad.

-In about two weeks, I will be unemployed and nothing (zero) has come of all the applying I've been doing. Last night, between the cat and the prospect of joblessness, I couldn't get to sleep. This hasn't helped my mood. Not one bit.

So it's officially Dump Day here in Connecticant.
I'm hoping tomorrow is better.

8 dirty words

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advise

So the job search continues. Yes, I am currently employed but this job ends in mid July, which means unless I want to go on unemployment I need to get my ass in gear and get me some job prospects. Bad market for someone looking to change career paths, right? Yeah, well that's me. A master of timing. There are two recent postings which look decent. One is an academic advising position and the other is an office coordinator position. Pros and cons? Of course, for both. My pros and cons even have pros and cons. I am Libra, hear me deliberate!

Advising is what I'm doing now and I like it, a lot. This is what I've always done. Whether or not it was warranted or desired, I give advice quite freely. On the up side, I've learned to avoid speculation when giving advice. Short of gagging myself in the presence of someone discussing a problem or challenge, this seems to be the best strategy to accommodate my need to let loose with a stream of "helpful" suggestions while (hopefully) avoiding the pitfall of spewing a load of crap. Speculating is what I call it when someone doesn't have any hard empirical evidence or explicit knowledge of a thing but continues speaking as if he or she does. To me, this is a cardinal sin, and really damned annoying. The speaker who finds him or herself in such a context should at least have the good grace to say "Well I don't know for sure but based on A (b, and c), I think X", where A (b, and c) are spelling out at least minimally. This allows the listener to know how to rank the particular advice being given. I've given this much thought. How much? Most of my late twenties in fact. I went through this big communication crisis in my late twenties, which I chalk up rather superstitiously to being part of my Saturn return, and which made me a very difficult person to talk to during the time. But I'm clear of it now and I do believe I've learned some useful lessons so in the final accounting, including how to temper my need to advise with some acknowledgment of the limits of my experience, so this is a good thing I suppose.

But back to the jobs and deliberating about which one I should pin my hopes and wishes to, at least until the next round of searching comes along. The one job is advising. It's full time and if it is not flexible time then I'm screwed. Moreover, it is at an institution with a religious affiliation. Not great. However, it's my sense that religiously affiliated institutions may have more respect for needs like caring for family (i.e. my brother) and an institutional understanding that, well, shit happens in life. I am hopeful that I'll be less likely to encounter that wretched secular Calvinism which marks so many professional cultures in the U.S. if I work for a catholic institution, but my distrust of organized religion is so strong that even typing that last phrase gives me a small internal shudder.

The other job is office coordinating. This one is a part time, 35 hour a week position. Pros? Less committed time for work, less responsibility (hopefully). Cons? Less money, less responsibility (yes, it's a pro and a con), and more of that low man on the totem pole shit. There's a tendency in academic culture to treat administrative support staff like crap, which can manifest as explicitly shitty behavior or as seemingly benevolent but ultimately condescending attitude, and god knows I don't deal gracefully with either.

The list of pro and con goes on, but I don't feel the need to put all two of my blog readers through the full, winding process - especially since with this job market it could end up I don't even get an interview for either position. I'll be sending resumes for both today, so wish me luck.

weddings

Well only one I'm going to, so properly that should read "wedding", however it is wedding season and thus the plural. Maybe it should be a mass noun, like oatmeal or brick. I'm going to a wedding at the end of the month. Unlike many joyous unions I hear of, this is one I approve of. The participants, that is the blessed couple, are both fully self-aware adults for starters. Moreover, the bride (B___) and hubby (R____) to be have wonderful senses of humor which I'm sure will influence the ceremony. E.g., they have titled the wedding "The Motorcycle Marriage of the Martians" and sent B-movie themed invites. Excellent. They also requested no presents unless they are d.i.y. and out of sentiment, like a pair of knit socks - no seriously, this was in their invite. They're very cool people. So I made a special Letters to the Corinthians mix for them since B____ and I have a running joke about this being a necessary part of ANY wedding ceremony. As in "so how was the wedding?" "Oh you know, Letter from Paul, dyeable shoes, chicken polka, oh yeah and Pachelbel's Canon."

While the Letter from Paul mix (called "Love is Patient" and featuring Pat Boone, Eddie Izzard, Airplane quotes, and the Marx Brothers) is hand made, I have a prefab but still totally excellent version of Pachelbel called "the Taco Bell Canon". I have it somewhere. Somewhere in the boxes. I hope to unearth in it time to burn to the cd for B___ and R_____. Time's a ticking though, and speaking of, it's bed time for pfg, so I leave you with this google gem I found while leaning how to spell "pachelbel".

jobs

If you've used online job sites like Career Builder or Monster lately, this isn't news to you. For me, it's news. It seems no matter what I'm searching for, apparently the US military offers me employment opportunities which are an excellent match. E.g., are you looking for work as an entry level professional hummel duster in Duluth, Minnesota? Well apparently the United States Navy Reserve is the place for you. Cat washer in Sweetwater, Texas? You'll want to try the Army. And just wait 'til you see what you get after 6 months of active duty...

hicks

Below is an excerpt from a news story from Vernon, CT. I don't live in Vernon CT, but I've lived near it on and off since living in CT.

Vernon is a combination of the backwoodsy ruralities - the hallmark of the Northeastern section of CT - and a few miles of traffic filled, stripmall lined roads. They have a Price Chopper. There are some diners in Vernon. I feel this makes it distinct from other more truly rural places like Coventry or Ashford. The town of Vernon boasts one lane roads over covered bridges, a paucity of street lights, no sidewalks, and other elements which the residents of this foul state apparently consider quaint. Adding to the quaintness factor are the locals in Vernon, who do what they can to preserve that good old country feel. What makes a CT local? In part, it seems to be many generations of careful breeding, often among just a couple of families who can be traced back to some of the earliest settlers of the area. This results in as little brains as teeth among the lot of them and news items like this one from the Hartford Courant.

VERNON - — Armed with tin snips and fortified by an evening of drinking, a Vernon man led an assault on an electronic speed sign mounted to a utility pole near his South Street home early Sunday.

After noticing the sign missing, police launched a search and soon found its charred remains in a fire pit behind the home of Ben Gardiner.

Gardiner, 22, of 291 South St., admitted, police said, to taking out his anger on the sign after it flashed his speed as he arrived home about 1 a.m. Sunday.
...
Gardiner and friends took the sign to Gardiner's backyard and took turns running toward it to measure their speed. This apparently caused much delight, police said.

The fun lasted until a woman in the group suggested that the sign might have a tracking device or camera on it that could lead police to them. That caused the group to "to freak out," witnesses said. They decided to burn the sign in the fire pit.

work

Yesterday at work my boss announced "Tomorrow afternoon we are having ice cream with mental health..."
I asked "Is ice cream with mental health like ice cream with sprinkles?"

When I got home, I told A____ about ice cream with mental health tomorrow. "Is that like sprinkles?" he said, beating me to the punchline.

Work is going well. The early mornings are dealable, not great but mostly ok. I can tell I need to find a more local job or a later start date before the year swings around into dark, snow, and ice. But it's a good thing to know, a learning experience in a relatively low risk environment.

Here are some other things I've learned.
- I still have a visceral dislike of men. I knew this and experienced it very strongly in my early 20s but being a student masked it for a number of reasons which I invite you to ponder if you're inclined.
- Despite having some physical shortcomings, I am a good worker. E.g., I believe if something needs doing and those present and aware can do it, they should. I believe there is no point rushing through a job if the only goal is to finish fast (and leave earlier) and if rushing is likely to make far more work for you or someone else later on. My beliefs guide my actions.
- I can't take phone calls after 9:00 PM if I want to get to bed on time.
-I can't hit snooze more than once in the morning or I'll be late.
- I need more work clothes.
- I am good at counseling and training and should probably be looking for human resources jobs.
- I still have a hard time working through irritation or impatience (usually at blithering incompetency, likely coupled with an attitude which strikes me as indicating a lack of even minimal age appropriate social and identity awareness) without it showing. I'm planning on using the rest of this temp job to work on that. I'm sure I'll have plenty of opportunities.

Glut

I'm a radio listener. Regular old radio, not satellite HD pay per whatever radio. Want commercial free? Listen to public radio. Even if NPR and their various elitist programs sets your teeth on edge, if you live in or near civilization, a little walk through the lower end of the band will find some public radio stations which play interesting and varied community based shows.

Unfortunately, today I was on my way to work during Democracy Now and I wanted to hear music. The other public radio stations were playing polka-jazz-bluegrass fest or something, so I wandered up the dial until I found some music I could stand. And sing along to. Yes, I am a car singer. As "I Will Survive" ended, the station segued into an ad blitz leading with an Applebee's ad. I was busy merging and got stuck listening to it rather than scanning on to avoid it. I tuned out most of it but I caught this punchline... "Applebees. So much food, so little time."

Holy shit.

I understand that a long work day can create meal planning and executing issues but that is not the gist of this closer. I doubt that too many of us truly find ourselves thinking "That was yummy but I sure could use more time so I could stuff even more food into my face.", and if we do, this is a sign of either an unhealthy relationship with food or a life completely out of balance. Given the upbeat, snappy FUN tone of the ad and the delivery of the line, it's clear the advertisers assume the message of glorified gluttony will resonate and that it will resonate not just with some of us but with many of us.

I spent the rest of the way to work with thoughts of gluttony percolating in the back of my head, thinking of the many forms gluttony can take. SUVs in particular spring to mind.

Here's a short list -
Carpet plush lawns and domestic landscaping involving non-native plants, especially those maintained during droughts.
Super sized anything.
Professional pedicures.
Throwing away all the spare stuff and furniture you don't want to or can't move with you rather than finding someone or somewhere to give it away for re-use (every time someone moves out, take a peek at the dumpster if you live in a complex).

I was also wondering what in my own life counts as gluttony. I am a participant in this culture. It is unreasonable to expect that I don't also have habits which reflect this aspect. Is my air conditioned car gluttony? Does my plethora of office supplies count as gluttonous? (something I discovered in the move is that I have a shit load of office supplies).

And on that note, I am signing off. Thunder outside and there have been a lot of lightning strikes with these daily heat wave induced storms here in CT.

R.I.C.E.

Stands for
Rest
Ice
Compression and
Elevation

Why this snappy acronym today you ask? Because we finished moving. We ended our move on the hottest day(s) of the year, although this is not a record high for PFG moves since my move in 2005 was also on the hottest day of that year as well - both with temperatures around 92°F and fairly dripping with humidity. Last weekend we moved the bulk of the stuff. I say "we" but I mean my fella and two extremely excellent people. That was the end of the help. We were expecting more but this move was whatever the opposite of serendipitous is. Thus we struck out early yesterday intending to push through and get all the stray bits out of the old place and then clean. It's a big place to clean.

I learned some new things about my body and what it now affords me. E.g., I discovered that dusting 3 very large rooms with a long and flexible duster followed by sweeping and mopping said rooms is quite bad for the wrist (literally "unwieldy"), hence my cleaning came to an abrupt end late yesterday afternoon and it was R.I.C.E. for me last evening. A____ went back over while I RICEd, before the monsoon started. He managed to finish an embarrassingly large amount of cleaning by himself. I iced and elevated and then put an ace bandage on my wrist. It felt so much better that I started doing stuff around the new apartment - mostly unpacking kitchen stuff, discarding the "R" part of the equation. After some time, I thought "wow, my hand feels way better. I bet I can take this bandage off now..." and I gave a test wiggle of a finger. Numb. I quickly removed the bandage.

So when you are doing R.I.C.E., remember ice only for 15 to 20 minute intervals and don't try bandaging your own right hand because odds are you won't be able to wrap it properly and it will either be too loose or too tight. Too tight and you're numb (which happens to rhyme with "dumb"), resulting in either
Dumb
Ice
Compression and
Elevation
...or if you're a real winner like me and you go and use your too tightly wrapped hand as a lever to heave up heavy kitchen items for over an hour, D.I.C.K.

I am sincerely hoping that the next move we make, we can afford to pay people to help. It's done and I'm happy for that, but this was not a great move. Not the worst (which was 2002 - I caught lyme disease right at the start of it, had to deal with Tom's evil family who were pointedly not helping, had to help a friend re-claim a cat she had given away in the middle of the move, and then at the end went up Amherst way to look at apartments with my sister who was starting college out there that Fall - all of which was just plausibly tiring and ache inducing enough to have masked the start of the lyme symptoms), but definitely not something I want to repeat.

May

What happened to my May? What the hell?

School ended, work started, we found a new apartment (have to move from the lovely place we're in now because the landlord is becoming a slum lord), and life life life.

Work's good. It's necessitated a change in schedule though - I've gone from being an evening person in all ways to needing to be at work (over 15 mostly country miles from my place) at 8:30 AM. Ugh! But I'm proud to say I managed to do it, mostly. I overslept a bit today but made it in on time with some rushing about. I had been expecting this to be just a short term summer job but I guess they like me because my boss mentioned that she was looking into hiring me "during the semester". I need to follow up on that. At the time, I was on my way off to do something (work related) and so all I had time for was a quick "Oh that'd be great....especially since I am in need of employment".

I like and am good at what I do, which is also a relief.

The down side - there's always a down side. The temporary negative right now is that we're moving, like NOW. My fella's been awesome, as usual, and so he's taken care of much of the move stuff. His diligence, as wonderful as it is, happens to be taxing my "gimp-guilt" as I call it, which relates to potentially more enduring down side of my post-graduate school, employed life my new smaller life on account of having less than stellar health. I swear to god my warranty ran out at 31. Since then I've had more health shit than you can shake a stethoscope at, none of it fully resolvable (by which I mean "curable"), and some of it only marginally treatable. I hate giving the full list of ailments but the highlights includee the endometriosis/adenomyosis and the shitty immune system which is better at attacking me than it is at doing its job on viruses, bacteria, or even (as I've recently learned) fungi. Now that I've put this miserable body to work for normal work hours and something approaching a full work week (so far it's been more like a 30 hour than 40 hour work week), I am confronting the question which was hinted at by my soon to be former advisor when she asked so casually "are you healthy enough to have even a regular job?" I found this question to be rather insulting for a number of reasons but I knew even then that while the context was fucked up, the content is in many ways legitimate. And the answer is...it's hard to know. Perhaps this is just denial, but for now I'm going to say the jury's still out. What I tell myself is that I need to give it more time to know for certain whether the massive fatigue I feel throughout the day even after plenty of sleep and no strenuous activity is just a by product of changing my schedule or if this is a permanent and fixed aspect of my life post 31. If it turns out to be the latter, then yeah, I'm kind of fucked.

For now, there won't be lots of posts here because I'm either at work, asleep, moving, unpacking, or sick and exhausted. The moving and unpacking should be done by mid June and hopefully, the daily sick and exhausted will let up as I adjust. If not, well, there could be lots more posts later while I chronicle the apparently wretched process of filing for disability.

graddeled

It's like addled, but with grades. Or grads. Or grads grading. Fortunately, there are people out there who make things like this for times like these.

but if you try sometimes you get what you need

I was on campus today for a student meeting. It was set up at the last minute, one of my least favorite kinds of meetings, and I nearly canceled it because A____'s car crapped out last night but he needed to get to New Haven today for a meeting which might determine whether he's funded over the summer. The grads who live near me were kind enough to respond to my request for a ride into campus, but all of them were leaving much earlier than I needed to be in. Again, I thought of rescheduling my meeting, but if I did that I'd be leaving my student hanging. He's a non-trad, commuter student and I felt bad about that.

So I bit the bullet and car pooled in, getting onto campus 3 hours before my meeting with nothing in particular to do that necessitated being on campus 3 hours before my meeting. Man am I glad I was there though! I was checking email and grading (mostly the former). I got an email from the student I was meeting asking to bump the meeting to an hour later since he got tied up off campus. Grrrrr...fine. Whatever. I'm stuck here until my ride is ready to take me home this evening. The next email I read was a job announcement forwarded by someone in my department. "What the hell, I need a job and apparently I have close to 4 hours to kill now" I thought and went down to talk to the woman who forwarded the announcement. She filled me in on the details. It's a gig advising incoming undergrads. A temp position, so it's only 7 weeks but it starts right at the end of the semester, it pays decent, and so far all my job leads have left me hanging (post interview, but still no word yet). Also, none of the job prospects were all that thrilling, offering either too few hours with no room to pick up time or too many hours with no room for flexibility. After about 10 minutes and one phone call, I had an interview. About 30 minutes later, I got the job offer. YEEeeeeehhaaaa!

The supervisor seemed very cool. I get holidays off, it's a 40 hour a week commitment but both the interviewer and the contact in my department told me it ends up being more like 30 although you need to be available for the full 40. The supervisor told me that if I desperately need a day off or to leave early or come in late, I can. I didn't ask, she volunteered this info.

I know I'll still have a job search on my hands but now it'll be in late June since this one ends mid-July. This is kind of nice, since aside from the temporary relief it provides, the job search was getting hard with grading, grading, student meetings, grading, big student project presentation, grading, last minute assignment fuckery, and more grading. Also, being offered a job that fast and having such a nice interview makes me feel a little less like a loser, which I was kind of starting to feel like after sending applications and resumes into the void.

All in all, I'm pretty damned happy with how today turned out. The sun is out after two days of nearly non-stop rain. I caught an early ride home with my office mate so now I'm home with coffee (and food) and cigarettes and ready for more grading. And I kind of feel like fate finally said "hey, let's cut her a little break..."

Thank you Ms. Silverman

Gah.
I just watched some Sarah Silverman Show episodes before returning to grading and now I have "Poop Song" in my head. Not totally irrelevant to grading these essays, but a song I'd rather not be humming for the next day or so. I think I'll have to get a Bonnie Tyler fix to bump it out. While I don't love Bonnie Tyler, few songs have the perseveration power of Total Eclipse of the Heart. We'll see if it can overcome the apparently quite catchy refrain "We pooped at the mall today!"

Monday, again

Yes, I know it does this every week. It's Monday again. This week holds last minute meetings with students (panicking), a phone call or two to my doctor's office (irritating), and looking at still more job postings. The panicking is the typical state of undergrads engaged in research with a public deadline looming. The irritating is that this rash I've been dealing with for over a month now is still not knocked down. The jobs? Well, it seems I have a shotgun approach to job searching. I apply to a bunch, interview, keep applying, keep interviewing, etc. until I get offers. I'm already starting to freak out a bit about what to do if I get a less desirable offer to start with. This happened to me in Ann Arbor. The first job I was offered (and accepted) was with what seemed like nice people but for peanuts-pay and very part time with no overtime or extra shift options. The day I accepted the offer, I got a call for an interview at a better (money and time wise) job. I wound up kind of dissing the former and taking the latter. But in Ann Arbor, it was a slightly bigger job market. Here in nowhere CT, it's not and I'm not sure I can afford to pull a stunt like that out here.

feminot

Wouldn't it be nice if feminist organizations like N.O.W. started actually DOING things like arranging day care, work and professional training, teen activity centers, and other community works? I was thinking of this the other evening, possibly as a tangent from thinking about a recent murder of a woman I used to be neighbors with (by her husband*, in front of their kids. She was pregnant with his third kid).

In the news, it said the cops had been called for a fight between the husband and wife earlier in the day. I can attest to the constant yelling coming from the man's mouth when A____ and I lived in that apartment building. Another news story reported that a neighbor had said she was planning to leave her husband. She and I weren't close but we were neighborly. We hung out in a neighbor way, you know? Not like the neighbors you never talk to, like the neighbors you say hi to and stop and chat when you have time. The neighbors you stand outside looking at a rainbow with and smoking a cigarette between the small raindrops.

It wasn't a direct line of thought from this woman to the end point of thinking of feminism as hands on community activism and agency. It was more that the issue of access to pro-woman resources are very limited. E.g., that area of CT (where I used to live) has NO women's shelter, no women's community center, and the NOW chapter at the college less than 5 miles up the road busies itself with feel good activities like being pen pals with girls in juvy.

Fuck, you know?

So that arena of thought made me think, what if there were feminist based women's services in this area? Would my former neighbor have utilized them? Would she have sought them out? Possibly, but my experience in a working class, low(er) income population is that the concept of a "women's center" evokes notions of hairy legged ladies holding patchouli drenched menstrual lodges and the like. Ok, possibly not so extreme but you get the idea. But what if there were actual useful services to be had? What if we took a page from the neo-fundie-cons and started actually providing practical resources to the community? Would this woman have gone someplace that offered free day care and laundry facilities? Yeah, probably. Even if it was staffed by hair legged patchouli stinkin' feminists.

Anyhow, those are my thoughts from this week. There's been lots of "fear and loathing" here in CT lately - the shooting last week rocked me a bit. My closer to home life is good though. I'm leaving grad school, the departure is imminent and I am truly, honestly, and openly relieved. Yes, looking for a job freaks me out a bit but I've had some interviews and I am holding my own. It feels good.

* = technically I'm not sure they were married but they had been together for years and had two kids.

dizzy

Sitting here waiting. I'm waiting for my fella's mother, who I invited to come to a job fair with me today. We made plans to meet at 9:30 at my place then head over to the thing (which runs 9 to 1), and she was going to call before she came over.

Then 9:00 came and went. Then 9:30. My fella called her. She was running late. Ok. So I waited. Caught up with a friend on the phone. Thought "wow I can't believe I was up and going at 7:30 on a Saturday!" and felt a smug, happy sense of impending productivity. I steamed my jacket sleeves, which were a little rumpled.

By about quarter after ten, small waves of vertigo from what I guess is a sinus/ear thing were starting to creep up on me. My fella offered to call her again. I counter offered. He said it would probably be better if he did. She got tied up with this and that but she's leaving in just a few minutes, and will call when she's on her way.

I can feel my productivity evaporating. I want to be patient, I really do, but I'm starting to get annoyed.
Grrrrr.
Parents.

Ah....

Sometimes in life, you just have to sit and wait for it to come around. I love the "back around" moments.
Yahoo/Google deal is anti-competitive: Microsoft
Seattle (Reuters)
Microsoft Corp said on Wednesday that any definitive agreement between Yahoo Inc and Google Inc would make the market for Web search less competitive.

Granted, it's not as deeply or personally satisfying as finding out this Fall about the marital strife and upcoming divorce of one of the professor's who had been using my IMMENSELY slow progress through my PhD program* as a lesson for junior grad students. It isn't as warm and fuzzy as how I expect I'll feel when I hear that my (former) department head's smoldering type two diabetes contributed to the first of many toe amputations two months after he's had his first heart attack (yeah, keep eating them skittles!). But Microsoft making a plea to "anti-competitive" does have a touch of satisfying irony, doesn't it?

* = I'd just finished 5 years, had 3 publications, and was collecting data for my dissertation proposal when I discovered he'd been using me as a cautionary tale of a (mal)lingering grad student

motivation

I have a student who moved to the US only a few years ago, who started learning English by checking out free English language materials from the public library, and who then took English courses at the community college. I'm grading her first individual writing assignment and I gotta say, this student's writing is seriously kicking the ass of my "But I took AP English!" squealing, native English speaking, born and raised in the USA students.

Mother of god, I wish I could teach adult students who feel they have a personal stake in their education only. I might be tempted to actually stay in education if I knew I could do that.

boys part 2

I mentioned I have boys. The infestation is still ongoing. I've had many opportunities to hear and even interact with them because I've been home a lot this week fighting off a steroid enhanced throat/sinus thing. Which by the way, feels fucking awful. What does it feel like? Like a viral infection, on steroids. Get it?

Anyhow, I'm home lots and feeling shitty lots and the kids are here, not lots but loudly when they are. Last night featured kids in the hall, then kids down in the basement. I have to wonder, what possible appeal can it hold for them? Is it a throwback to when they were still living at mom and dad's house, 3 months ago, and they had to hide out in the basement to smoke their weed? I was going to say "to smoke a joint" but I'm doubtful these kids smoke out of anything other than overpriced glass bowls or vaporizers.

I found out this week that my landlord helpfully told the boys that "the people downstairs called the police on them". He told them this, he claims, to try to stress upon them the gravity of the situation (the situation being my landlord's inability to consistently and place screen tenants).

Here's who called the cops on whom. I called on people in the parking lot last weekend. The lady across the hall called specifically on the boys several weeks ago, and either the guys down the hall or the lady in front called on the boys as well two weekends ago now I think (I wasn't here for that one). But it turns out the boys assumed "the people" who called the cops were me and my fella. Why? My best guess is because my fella and I have spoken to them in person when they are being loud. Alone that's not really great reasoning, certainly wouldn't be sufficient for me unless I was 8. I think the rest of it goes something like "and the boys are not very smart thus they assume things like the 50 something year old disabled woman who had the misfortune to move in below them last month would not have called the cops on them for any one of their post 1 AM beer fueled fun-fests. Why would she? Afterall, she never came up, knocked on their door, and asked them to keep it down in the middle of a party".


Tonight's been quiet so far. Aside from some very occasional thumping and bumping, and the sounds of someone running down the stairs, a slam of the door which sounded like it was going to take the side of the house off, and then more running all the way across the porch and onto the pavement around the house and past the window just next to my desk, it's been peaceful.

And hey, my temperature is finally down a bit. I'm going to go celebrate by reading on the couch.

not what I called them

When I was a child, I called them "teens". As a teen, I called them "yuppies". As an adult, I refer to them as "Disco kids" or more properly, "the disco kid generation". This is the set of people who came of age in the days of disco, from the mid-seventies (by the time it was properly the seventies and not left overs from the 60s) to the early eighties. They sometimes call themselves babyboomers, and if they were raised in some rurality, odds are they are more properly babyboomerific. But on the whole, there was always something about them which was not quite babyboomer and not quite the same as my generation.

Truly - and I say this after years of experience with this age group and recognizing there are people of that age group who do NOT fit that type - I don't like many of the characteristic traits of this age group. Listing them would be exhausting so I'll try for a summary statement. They are ungodly self-centered. At least the babyboomers had something to be self-centered about. They did try. They made changes. They raised consciousness. Sure, they sometimes can get gloaty or possibly worse, maudlin and bitter, but they came of age at a time when even just acting contrary was having a point. The disco kids? Nah. They tried some of the same shit, the "look at me! I'm different! I'm wearing a denim vest!" approach, the tendency to confuse being contrary with being intellectual for example, but it is stale. Not that this is odd in its proper context. It's a typical adolescent thing to be fascinated with yourself to the point where you believe deeply and unselfconsciously (about the only thing an adolescent is not self-conscious about) that you and your uniqueness are the center of so very many things. What makes the disco kids special, what marks them as a generation for me, is that they never fucking grew out of that.

Needless to say, I don't like them. Working with them is always a chore, and working under them is irritating to the point of a near physical aversion.

Tonight I looked them up. Turns out the fuckers have their own name. Generation Jones. Go figure.

Tuesday and fate

Well, no poetry for now. I'm off to get my resume critiqued and to fax a lab req to a doctor's office. The doctor forgot to sign it, I called on Friday, they were off for the holiday. I called yesterday, they said they'd fax a new (signed) req to the lab. I got home last night around 8:30 and found a message telling me the doctor can't remember what he ordered and asking me to please fax the req back to them.

Which causes me to wonder....have these people heard of cell phones? I know I put my cell phone number on the chart, even listed it as my primary number. "Ok, so I guess I'll be doing that blood draw Wednesday," I said to A____ after playing the message. A____ started to chuckle. "What?" I asked. He said "I just had an epiphany. What we consider 'Fate' is often the consequence of other people's stupidity."

what to do with a bad movie?

My fella and I watch a lot of movies. We see some good movies, although we're convinced that the post 9/11 film industry approved a whole lot of CRAP. That's another rant for another time, and no, there are no government conspiracy theories. Just a notion about what movie execs think the American people want when the American people are acting like or being portrayed as, well, idiots.

So we watch a lot of shitty movies too. I refer you to a (possibly already redundant) past blog post devoted to this topic for a more comprehensive discussion.

For some time now, I've thought it would be fun to record commentary tracks to these truly shitty movies, you know, MST3K style. We could do specifically feminist commentary (guest starring my sister of course) as well as just your generic, run of the mill knocks like yelling "LINE!!!" every time Keanu Reeves graces the camera with one of his signature blank stares.

Well it turns out someone's had this idea - and I am very glad for it. There was a niche which demanded filling. And someone has stepped up to fill it. Specifically, the MST3K folks (or folk). You can get the commentary or "riff" track for movies online then synch them up to movies (or get a special player which allows you to play a DVD with this audio track without needing to manually synch the two playbacks). It's called RiffTrax. Tonight, we are watching Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer. Here's the RiffTrax synopsis.
The Fantastic Four are back! Or the Fantastic Four is back! Depending upon whether one is referring to the title of the film, the four individuals who are fantastic and number four, or the group of four fantastic people who use that title! The point is, they're back! And this time, unlike the first, there's a surfer made out of silver and he rises! It's fantastic!

This means I can finally watch ALL the new Star Wars movies without wanting to chuck things at my screen.

Tuesday Poetry

Well I woke up late for a day which is late heavy. I have a doctor's appointment this afternoon in Hartford and immediately after I need to race to campus to work. Campus is not close by. And I am apprehensive about the doctor appointment. I already saw one guy in this office and he was a jackass.

So for today, we get one of mine because it's here. And it's seasonal too. How about that.

Spring 1999
Her hair ribbon's on the counter.
Blue green coil, a plaid crisp when she first bought it
brought it home fresh from the store
still holding the shape of the spool it was cut from.
My mother lifted it out of the bag and held it up to be admired. She had made a big deal of ribbons that month. I don’t recall the details, just the quest: To find a ribbon for her hair.

The bathroom scale is broken, and has been for a while. I still weigh myself on it when I'm home, hearing something stony crunch against the charcoal porcelain tiles.
I wonder when she wears it, why? And how she fastens it around her head. With a bow, small and almost perfect, perched on the top, or worn to the side? In a slipping knot underneath, in the back, so all that shows is a neat thin strip of blue green plaid? What is she thinking when she ties it? When she tries this side, then that, and the shades of lipstick to go?

I would rather not see her hair ribbon wilted and knotted,
obscured by the tumble of cremes and powders,
or lost in the midst of lacquers and gels,
or sulking behind splashes and ointments.
Seeing it crumpled there over rings of rust
caked with dried soap lather, I fight the urge to clean.
I comfort myself by blowing a bit of powdery lint off a corner of the counter.

She is a christian again, or seems so since she goes to church now.
On the door, the useless one that has loose hinges and no knob, she's hung a calendar from the church. It has a picture of jesus and some lambs.
She says she doesn’t WANT to be angry. She asks God to forgive her for hating.
My sister says “if she really wants to stop hating, she should practice on the small shit”.

She wakes up 5 minutes before I leave to drive two hours in the car to clear my head before Monday starts. She comes into the kitchen dressed in a pink robe holding her reluctant cat. The cat jumps to the floor.
She sits on the foot-stool and sighs.
The dogs greet her with wags and snouts, and she pushes them away.
She shoves and says “No, God damn it, No! Go away, fucking dogs”.

She tells me I wouldn’t understand, that it is loathsome to me. I ask her if compassion is really so bad.
We have been given the wrong scripts, I realize this as I am saying my part. Or we are not on the same page.
I flip ahead and back, looking for where she is. She says she hates February. I watch jesus pat his loving lambs above her, calmly waiting for her to turn to April so he can die and come back as a fluffy bunny with candy and plastic grass to teach us that an egg is just an egg.

Today is March 1, but I do not tell her. Any contradiction will be taken as a blow, and I'm still looking for a smooth ride home. And anyway, God will forgive her for not knowing what month it is, for blaming the days and weeks, for hating Februrary, for hitting the dog in the face for trying to give her a kiss. Everyone knows God likes plaid.

erin go...aarrrrrrrrrgh!

Oh boy, oh boy.

biology n'stuff

CNN/AP
Quaid and his wife are the biological parents of the twins, who were born November 8 to a surrogate mother.
Biological seems like the wrong word here. A woman (the surrogate) had the embryos implanted in her uterus, carried two to term, and did the whole labor thing. In my book, that makes her "biological". Perhaps "genetic" is the better word the AP folks are (or should be) casting about for.

Ferraroh-no

While searching for some kind of context for Ferraro's comments, I came across this, in a piece delightfully named "Ferraro: 'They're attacking me because I'm white'", Ferraro apparently had this to say.
....[Ferraro] told a FOX News interviewer: “I got up and the question was asked, ‘Why do you think Barack Obama is in the place he is today” as the party’s delegate frontrunner.

“I said in large measure, because he is black. I said, Let me also say in 1984 – and if I have said it once, I have said it 20, 60, 100 times – in 1984, if my name was Gerard Ferraro instead of Geraldine Ferraro, I would never have been the nominee for vice president,” she said.

Oh. I see. Well there's a very simple response to Ferraro's sentiments. Actually, there are several responses from recent history:
*Al Sharpton
*Carol Moseley Braun
*Alan Keyes
**L. Douglas Wilder
**Lenora Fulani
*Jesse Jackson
*Shirley Chisholm

This is a nice set, isn't it? I think it pretty handily tears Ferarro's point down. In her defense, she may have just been ignorant that other women had run for president before her. But even granting ego centrism fueled ignorance, she'd still have to have noticed Jesse Jackson since she ran against him, right?

I am always annoyed when my choices, attitudes, and principles are called "PC". It's such a dismissive and invalidating term. It suggests the person who holds such views did not arrive at them each individually through a process of reasoning, rather that she picked them up as a package off the shelf at "Philosophies R Us". And I kinda get the feeling this is what Ferraro is implying. That if I'm a liberal feminist, I'd vote for a woman because she's a woman. That if I'm a liberal and apparently more racially motivated than sex or gender motivated, I'd vote for a black guy because he's black.

Here's why I didn't vote for Clinton in my state's democratic primary (which I declared a party affiliation simply to vote in). Clinton is an old boys' girl. She has all the proper hand stamps, ones which the feminists I came of age with were expected to embrace simply because they came attached to someone a bit more estrogeny than your average good ol' boy. I don't want more of that shit. If I had, I'd have voted for Gore in 2000 (yeah, I'm one of those "assholes" who voted for Nader mostly because I wanted something ELSE). I was on the fence for a while, seeing most people who get as far as Clinton and Obama do in party politics with a very large degree of skepticism. I looked over both of their position statements on their websites the week before the primary and from what I saw, they looked pretty damned similar. The details were slightly different. Experience has taught me that expecting a politician to stick that rigidly to a set of campaign promises is foolish so I decided the minor detail differences which were likely to be most of them swept away in a tide of people and party pleasing further down the road were not going to be enough to sway me one way or another. Truly, what did it was disability law and the fact that the Obama campaign had seen fit to even bother addressing it (that the ADA needs to get some teeth put back in it after how federal courts have handled it) and the Clinton campaign didn't.

To me, this reaffirmed my already brewing view of Clinton as more old boysy than Obama. People whose lives have been so insulated that they never had to think about how shut out someone can be based on physical factors are not people I am going to support as policy setters or leaders. And that is that. Not race. Not sex or gender. Health and equal access and disability.

All that said though, I'd be a liar if I tried to claim that Clinton's apparent pandering to a certain kind of feminine quality (presumably either shared or expected by her possible voters) didn't annoy me on a personal level also. My guess is if I were black I might feel similarly about Obama when it came to constructs of race.

So back to Ferraroh-no. My search for context dug up this quote from her in 1988: "If Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn't be in the race."
From the same reference, Jackson punted back with his own below the belt (or bodice as it were): "Some people are making hysteria while I'm making history."

I guess while it's still fair (pardon the pun) to say she was talking about race and racism in her recent comments, I need to update my reaction to her February 2008 commentary. I'm naive when it comes to shit like this. It seems in context, her later comments (above) and much, much earlier comments (more immediately above) do make it clear she was indeed saying something along the lines of "black people get it easy because they're, you know, black..." That she included in her recent comments that she was nominated as VP primarily because she was a woman, to me, makes her seem more an apologist than anything else. I guess chalk it up under another woman with (an overblown case of) imposter syndrome.

* = Two sources (1, 2) list these people as recent candidates for the US presidency.
**However, the above two sources do not give fully equivalent sets in that one names L. Douglas Wilder and not Lenora Fulani. The other names Lenora Fulani and not L. Douglas Wilder.
Thus, here are some extra references for Wilder 1, 2 and for Fulani 1, 2.

Context?

What was Ferraro talking about when she first made her "race remarks", the ones which I read today had triggered "fury" from the Obama campaign? (quoted phrases from the press)
By my reading of what the comments quoted, I don't have an automatic interpretation. It's clear to me from the quoted remarks that Ferraro was talking about racism and sexism. Ok, so is talking about racism is automatically racist? Is assuming that sexism exists automatically sexist*?

Answers to those questions aside, it seems Ms. Ferraro, even if we take a less reproachful interpretation of her comments, is guilty of failing to accommodate a cardinal rule: you can't talk to the media about the media's biases and expect them to play nice. It's not like this is news to Ferraro. My god, the woman's been involved in politics for over 30 years now. I think it's fair to say she's someone who should know the deal by now.

After seeing headlines about the "fury" over her race remarks, I had to track down the remarks myself. (the "full" interview is below)

What I see is Ferraro speaking about racist** and sexist** attitudes and motivations as if we all knew they existed. I can see that there's room for interpretation, or more properly, interpretations. What I mostly notice is that Ferraro's commentary, as excerpted in the "full" interview below, seems to be a candid discussion about the social implication of what is clearly for some people a contest between their racist or sexist attitudes.

Do we have to pretend the world isn't sexist or racist when we speak of public, media, and media fueled perceptions of the candidates in terms of race or sex? Is there a list of words which have to be preceded by "alleged", "purported", or some other qualifier - even in a context where we all supposedly understand that racism and sexism exist?

I would have so much rather seen a response to Ferraro's comments which addressed what I see is more the point. I want to see a public discussion of institutional sexism and racism, how the manifest and interact. An open and intelligent discourse about this is so notably absent, I can't help feeling in part because as soon as a person says "sexist" or "racist" or something about sex or about race, the conversation becomes a hazardous material and we are all required to stand at least 20 yards away while the men in suits come to clean it up.

Racism and sexism are toxic, that's for sure. But discussing racism and sexism, well, that's more waste than toxic waste. More shit than poison. It can be ugly. It smells bad. It reminds us of something disgusting about ourselves, a thing we'd prefer not to think about perhaps. When we are confronted with it, we want to deal with it carefully because god knows no one wants it to hit the fan and go all over the place. Hell, there are even some people who, in a discussion of the shit, will decide to throw shit at others because they are fucked up and mistake an occasion about shit for an opportunity to revel in shit. But the shit alone, it's not going to kill us or even harm us unless we fail to dispose of it properly.

So shit's there and it's not going anywhere. It's piling up while we alternately pretend not to notice it, or notice it each time anew as if it was NEVER there before with cries of OH MY GOD HOW DID THAT SHIT GET IN HERE???!!! and then an often short lived shit storm ensues.

Well, below is the latest shitstorm. The selection below is representative. So far, absent from the reaction in the press is the reasoning behind the interpretation that Ferraro's comment are racist. I am definitely interested in hearing comments from anyone who has that perspective and can discuss*** it with me. If there's some reasoning which would make this something other than a "YOU SAID JEHOVAH!!!" reaction here in the press, I'd truly like to understand it.

* = I've experienced the latter accusation first, second, and third hand in a variety of contexts.
** = I mean these terms to include so called "benevolent" forms of racism and sexism, not just the other more familiar kinds. Benevolent racism is what underlies the "That Barrack Obama/Condoleezza Rice is so articulate!" sort of comment. Benevolent sexism is what my neighbor was spouting last month when he told me he'd vote for "Hillary over Obama" (note which names are used) because "women's hearts are more peaceful. Women are more caring. We need that right now."
*** = No shit throwing allowed. Please keep hands and feet inside the cart at all times while the ride is operating. Do not taunt happy fun ball.


Geraldine Ferraro let her emotions do the talking, now people are talking!
The Daily Breeze
By Jim Farber, Staff Writer
As the only woman ever to be selected by a major political party for the position of vice president of the United States, Geraldine Ferraro is uniquely suited to comment on the political events of the day.

An outspoken advocate for women's issues and a staunch supporter of presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, Ferraro offered her views on the state of the nation and the race for the White House.
...
Speaking by phone from her New York law office, the 72-year-old former Democratic congresswoman outlined the themes of her talk. She also offered pointed observations regarding the Barack Obama juggernaut and what she sees as a sexist media bias against the candidate of her choice.
...
When the subject turned to Obama, Clinton's rival for the Democratic Party nomination, Ferraro's comments took on a decidedly bitter edge.

"I think what America feels about a woman becoming president takes a very secondary place to Obama's campaign - to a kind of campaign that it would be hard for anyone to run against," she said. "For one thing, you have the press, which has been uniquely hard on her. It's been a very sexist media. Some just don't like her. The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign.

"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," she continued. "And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept." Ferraro does not buy the notion of Obama as the great reconciler.

"I was reading an article that said young Republicans are out there campaigning for Obama because they believe he's going to be able to put an end to partisanship," Ferraro said, clearly annoyed. "Dear God! Anyone that has worked in the Congress knows that for over 200 years this country has had partisanship - that's the way our country is."
...

Reaction:
Obama fury over Clinton backer Ferraro's race remark
AFP
"That's a really outrageous and offensive comment," Rice said on MSNBC television after Ferraro, who sits on Clinton's finance committee, had said: "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position."

"It is the sort of comment that we have heard repeatedly, I'm afraid, from some of the Clinton surrogates," said Rice, Obama's leading adviser on foreign policy.

She said Ferraro's remarks were "far worse" than those of another foreign policy aide, Samantha Power, who was forced to resign from the Obama campaign last week for calling Clinton a "monster."

"I think if Senator Clinton is serious about putting an end to statements that have racial implications, that diminish Barack Obama because he's an African-American man, then she ought to really repudiate this comment and make it clear that there's no place in her campaign for people who will say this kind of thing," Rice said.

break

It's break here. My fella says since he's on break he may just start randomly flashing people. I told him if he starts doing this, he'll also have to adopt other pop culture spring break behaviors like grabbing whichever same sex friend is nearby and making out if someone trains a camera on him. (If he were to wear chaps while doing this, we'd know we had entered an evil alternate dimension)

Flashing and other popcusexual* shenanigans aside, I think we'll be having a pretty tame and lame break. He's got a paper rewrite deadline on Saturday and I've got hey, what else is new....job searching, grading, and doctors' appointments. Oh yeah kids. Hold onto your hats (and lunch) - it's Spring Break, grad student style!

* = Popcusexual. N, Adj. /pȯp-kyü-sek-shə-wəl/ (only because the more morphologically transparent /pȯp-kə-sek-shə-wəl/ seems a bit anemic - although the usage board is divided on which is preferred). Apparent sexual orientation and/or preferences primarily determined by believed appeal to a pop culture audience. Also, popcusexuality.

bed time kitty

According to the cat, it's bedtime. He's developed a new habit of insisting on a bedtime. This means he starts meowing any time after 11 and is inconsolable until we get INTO bed. If I get into bed and then out (as sometimes happens), he seeks me out and finds me. I'm really not at all exaggerating on this. I know I have a tendency to read into my pets' behaviors but truly, the cat is acting like it's his job to ensure A____ and I are in bed well on our way to sleep by a decent hour every night.

Tonight I bribed him into letting me stay up with a fresh catnip fest on the living room floor a while ago. It seems the high has worn off though and it is most definitely bedtime.

not what they meant

I'm pretty sure this isn't what they meant to say:
Medical Secretary required for busy Consultants Rooms Blackrock Clinic to cover Maternity Leave commencing March '08 on a part time basis, 3-4 days a week. Salary will commenstruate with experience.

Candy is dandy

I have noticed the personalizable M&M ads lately. It could be they've been there for a while and I just didn't notice them but since I don't tune out moving stimuli well, I am often more than subconsciously aware of what ads are flashing, dancing, or whirling at me from the borders of any given website. To my recollection, the slow rotating M&Ms are new. One thing though. I am disturbed - likely for no good reason - by what is apparently reinforcement for the notion that formal statements of sentiment are best conveyed in a rhyme. Also, "Mona" does not rhyme with "Diploma".

I am quite taken with the idea of printing up some M&Ms for my department head. I wonder if the M&M people would reject an order to print up candies reading "Eat Shit" "And Die"? And if so, would it be on the basis of form or content?

I suppose I could see if they'll print up a batch of "eat shit" "you tit" candies if the "and die" line were to be rejected...although if that happened, I'd never know whether "tit" was preferable due to the rhyme or the non-violent word choice.

Other M&Ms I'd like to print.
for the mean gossipy granny grad student: "bad woman" "no baby"

Er, the one for my department head's wife won't fit. I'm sure of it because I just tried. Damn. Well I guess just "PhD Whore" works.

Tuesday Poetry (a little early)

Interactive sound poems, jörg piringer (thanks to M. Sock for the link).

rumblings

I woke up to hammering. It took a while to identify the location of the origin of the sound as probably my upstairs neighbors' apartment. I don't think is is a peculiarity of my apartment, although the high ceilings may do something to scatter the noise. Rather, I think it's just a 9 AM on a Sunday after several aborted post midnight attempts at sleep.

The boys had some company over last night. I found a little intoxicated girl in the hallway around 1 AM. I had come out to ask them to kill or at least stop revving the engine on the monster truck idling in the parking lot. We're ground floor facing the parking lot so any gunnings of engines, squealings of tires, and slammings of doors are done in a space about 4 yards from my not highly insulated bedroom wall.

9 AM is certainly a reasonable hour. The sounds of well shod feet hustling across the floor every Sunday morning tells me the younger woman directly above us probably goes to church when she's not hammering a bed apart. She was testy when I went up to ask if the noise was coming from her apartment. I'm not sure she realizes that she's been quite noisy in fact. She's one of those people who leaves their shoes on inside, and she is a "hard sole woman" too. Then there's the dogs, who after an initial quiet period started the occasional fits of barking for little reason.

But then it could have been worse. Although my current but soon to be former upstairs neighbors were not quiet, I could have someone like The Boys up there, and man that would suck.

The landlord is still trying to sell the place. Meanwhile, he tells A_____ he's got a job as a manager in training at a chain restaurant. I guess the finances didn't work out as he'd hoped. I still don't really know what happened with all that. I'm not sure I want to know, just so long as my rent doesn't go up and he's contactable for things like the driveway being an ice rink.

The upstairs neighbors' moving a reminder that it's the season for moving. Regardless of whether my landlord rents the upstairs apartment to more of The Boys type, A_____ and I will probably be moving within the next few months. Partly because when the landlord DOES sell, it seems at least plausible that whoever buys will want to raise our rent, and we can just barely afford this place as it is. It's too bad. I've liked this place. I think of all the rentals where I've lived here in this wretched state, the current one has been the nicest.

Tuesday Poetry

Folk Song, by bongwater (Ann Magnuson)

I met an anarchist in Tompkins Square Park
he was an angry man
spinning words so dark
he called for death to rich men
death to Yuppies too
death to art fags, bourgeois blacks
death to landlord Jews.
Kill the bankers
kill the cops
kill him her and me
kill them all for CBS, NBC, ABC, TBN, CNN, HBO, "Live At Five", MTV Spring Break
Party Weekend, Sally Jesse Raphael,
Geraldo,
Oprah,
Arsenio,
Regis
and Kathy Lee...

And I said,
Hey, I admire your get up and go,
your youthful brooding and sexually charged enthusiasm and all your
other utterly naïve and thoroughly endearing adolescent qualities
and I bet you can keep it up all night, can't you?

But I bet you don't even use a rubber no you don't even use a rubber,
no you don't, do you?
Because you
think you can live forever.
Or do you have this adorable and misguided notion
that death is something really radical and cool?
But I still can help being wildly attracted to your
fresh-faced uncompromised tattoo'd rebel stance
and goddamn
I'd like to help you sing your tune.
But I've been making friends with this here death
and it seems a might too soon.

And I said,
Hello death, goodbye Avenue A
I'm getting tired of waiting, tired of being afraid.
Joseph Campbell gave me hope
and now I have been saved.
So I say, Hello death, goodbye Avenue A.

Now I'm not trying to be flippant here,
or irreverent, or exploitive, or sarcastic, or ironic, or post-modern, and this is not
a parody.
Get it? Got it? Good.

I've been thinking what he told me,
that it's okay to cry
when we held the crystal Tina Child
spent 12 Grand to buy
homeopathic mantras
fresh-squeezed wheat grass juice
doctors up in Bellevue
Doctors Salk and Suess.

And it's time we'll all be going home
if you can find the way
Yes, everyone is going home
going home to stay.

And it's time we find a way to cope
a way to find some hope
for some it's the Bible
or Buddha
or Mohammed
or Krishna
or cheesecake
or bourbon
or the Butthole Surfers
or Giorgio Armani
or Romeo Gigli
and you really can't afford it
but it looks so fabulous on you so why don’t you take it on home
and speaking of home
isn't it about time
you move out of that
East Village hellhole
you know the one with the Honeymooners view
of the brick wall out the window
because you deserve something more life affirming
like a tree, or a flower, or a patch of grass,
or a singing little bluebird
or maybe you just want to take your boyfriend to Europe because he's never been
or quit the job you always hated
or learn how to play the guitar
it's easy
or get obscenely drunk in a piano bar
and sing show tunes
show tunes!
and don’t be embarrassed,
because at this point
I'd rather see "Brigadoon" than "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer"
or maybe you'd like to get politically active
so you disrupt a Presidential press conference by shoving a 5 pound week old stalk of broccoli between those thin lying lizard lips
that no one can read anyway
because half the country is illiterate and the other half is apathetic including the First Lady
who couldn't step just 500 feet out of the overdecorated White House to visit the goddamn Quilt or maybe you'd like to put a bullet into Jesse Helms pea brain
but you know when you start thinking like that
when you start thinking like they do
then it's time to let go of the material world,
so maybe you'd like to get yourself some religion

because Jesus is the Way
Jesus is the Way
Jesus is the Way
Jesus is the Way
Jesus is the Way.

Besides, it's a lot easier to accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior
when he looks like Willem DaFoe.

But maybe that stuff turns you off
so you rent "Power of Myth"
it made me feel really good (for about ten minutes),
or maybe you'd just rather do acid and listen to Led Zeppelin

Then again, the last time I took hallucinogenic drugs
was about five years ago
I took mushrooms in Joshua Tree
looking for that Carlos Castaneda kind of experience.
I got off, my boyfriend didn't
he fell asleep, left me alone with the television.
Turned it on, put on PBS,
you know what was on?
"Berlin Alexanderplatz"
So I started watching it,
and you know what?
I got really bummed out.

And that's when I said No to Drugs
No to Drugs
no no no no no
hell no to drugs,
and maybe you'd like to say no to drugs too
or maybe you want to join
Atheists of America
or the Madonna Fan Club
or watch Richard Gere follow the Dali Lama across the world
and then do those oh-so-Zen like movies with those oh-so-Zen like messages like
Hey! It's fun to be a prostitute!
I can't wait to spread my legs across Hollywood Boulevard
because then maybe some rich, handsome billionaire in a Jag
will come driving up and take me shopping on Rodeo Drive
and that's what a woman's all about anyway, right?
Sucking and shopping
Sucking and shopping
Sucking and shopping
Sucking and shopping
Sucking and shopping
Sucking and shopping
come on, it's a sing along
Sucking and shopping, sucking and shopping, sucking and shopping, sucking and shopping but hey Who am I to argue?
because this is the the feel good movie of the summer,
it's the feel good movie of the year
it's the feel good movie of the Nineties
it's the feel good movie of the Millennium
and you know what?
If it puts a smile on your face
and a song in your heart
and a spring in your step well
whatever makes you happy,
whatever makes you happy,
whatever makes you happy,
whatever makes you happy,
whatever makes you happy, whatever makes you happy, whatever makes you happy, whatever makes you happy
Whatever gives you hope.
Even if it's a truly tasteless joke.

So fax a manifesto.
Pencil in a date.
Let me know when something gives I hope it's not too late,
because I'm getting tired of waiting,
tired of being afraid.
Joseph Campbell gave me hope and now I have been saved.
So I sing, Hello death, goodbye Avenue A
Hello death, goodbye Avenue A
Hello death, goodbye Avenue A
Hello death, goodbye Avenue A."

wiping the wood

From Combine meat market a little disturbing
By Michael Silver, Yahoo! Sports

INDIANAPOLIS – Four years ago in the RCA Dome, a small-school defensive line prospect named Isaac Hilton nervously awaited his moment onstage at the NFL scouting combine. Chugging water to add every possible ounce of weight to his 6-foot-3 frame, the former Hampton University star wore only spandex boxer briefs, and his legs were shaking as he walked up to the podium.

A combine official began taking Hilton’s measurements as several hundred coaches, scouts and front-office executives carefully examined his musculature. And then, to the shock and dismay of everyone in the building, Hilton had an extreme physiological reaction to a very unnatural situation.


“The poor kid pissed himself,” recalls one scout who witnessed it. “He was standing up there … and it all just came out. Craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Says another team’s personnel director: “All of a sudden people were running up there with towels and spraying the stage and wiping down the wood, and they led the guy away, and he just looked stunned.