because if i really think about the scooter libby thing, my head might explode.

instead of banging on this keyboard until my fingernails bleed about the sickening corruption and audacious abuse of power that is the libby commutation, i will post about fashion. trends, in particular. you fellow children of the 80s, you know the ones:

the leggings

the big belts over the shirts

the off the shoulder shirts

and, god help us all, the jelly shoes

now, i can honestly say i've never been tempted to cycle back around to any of these blasts from the past. none. zero. and frankly, i'm kinda horrified by those who do. i'm horrified by the kids who do it, because holy crap, they didn't live through this! and i'm horrified by the young women who do it, because holy crap, they did live through this!!

this is all to say that i found some succinct and sage advice on the matter over at lemon gloria's that bears reiteration. please, if you ever find yourself thinking, "well, maybe i do need some more neon in my life," repeat this mantra to yourself until the feeling subsides:

I learned a long time ago that if you were there for the trend the first time, you should never, ever repeat it. No matter how cute you think it is.

in five years, you'll thank me.

in my mind, i'm gone.

ok, it wasn't technically carolina, but it was certainly the stuff of which escapist song lyrics are made.

our house

our pool

our dock

the view from our dock

the town marina

the perfect way to end a day

this place was incredible. truly. as the end of the week approached, we all considered buying some shotguns and telling the next week's vacationers, when they pulled up the driveway, that there'd been a change of plans. unfortunately, we are all pacifists. damn.

more from me later, after i've done a better job readjusting to a life not filled with poolside drinks and waterfront sunsets.

one more thing.

i couldn't leave for a week and not tell you to go over to pandagon and check out amanda's most recent feminism friday offering. amanda is always great, but dammit if she isn't spot-on with this one.

lakoff and his framing are nothing new, of course, but amanda does a great job of employing this idea - especially how people think in, and relate to, metaphors and similes - to explain the fundamental divide about sex in this country, and ultimately between fundies and feminists. to be certain, these frames she uses are two ends of a spectrum, but in a media where everything is binary, i think it's reasonable to talk about it in these terms.

a snippet:

I’d say the two major metaphorical frames about sex would be the conservative-sexist one and the liberal-feminist one. The conservative-sexist metaphorical framework of sex is Sex As Conquest. In this frame, women’s bodies are objects and sex is about the struggle to conquer the pussy...If sexual intercourse happens, by definition, the man who gets to fuck the woman has won...[s]ex happens when women surrender, in this model.

...[t]hese separate models of what sex is explain why threads about rape turn into hellholes pretty quickly—sexists and feminists aren’t even speaking the same language, in a sense. The conservative-sexist model of rape is the same one used to define a foul in basketball. Basically, when sexual intercourse happens, the man team has scored a point against the woman team. Each team is allowed some strategies and disallowed others. In basketball, you’re supposed to snatch the ball from the other team, but you can’t cross certain lines or you’ll get a foul. This explains why rape trolls are so eager to find out what the “rules” are, i.e. when they are permitted to force sex. (”Is it rape if she’s drunk? What if she says yes and changes her mind? Is it okay to bully someone into it, so long as you don’t actually hold her down and force her? Are guilt trips okay?, etc.”)

ok, i'm really leaving now. all packed and everything. see you next weekend.

friday cat blogging, attitude adjustment edition.

CatCat does her best to visually expresses how i feel, at this moment, about the city of DC and all of its inhabitants.*



in other words: "DC, back up off me. now."

no wait, i have a better idea! i'll back up off you. way up, into a whole 'nother state. for an entire week. and while i'm there, i won't have to deal with assholes on the metro, or sullen unfriendly co-workers, or pervs who leer at you on the street, or mentally ill homeless people who flick lighters in your face, or cops ticketing people for jaywalking in dupont circle while people are getting mugged at gunpoint for $20 in my neighborhood, or...

anything like that.

can you tell i need a vacation? tomorrow morning, BoyCat and i are off with the family to the chesapeake bay for a lovely, relaxing week on the water. i'll see you when i get back - hopefully with my attitude adjusted accordingly.



*oh, not all of you - there are at least a dozen of you that i genuinely enjoy! to those twelve of you - hugs and kisses and rainbows and unicorns. to the rest of you - piss off.

babes and books.

my friend amy had the wild and crazy idea to try to read 20 books in about two months. then she had the ridiculous notion to see if anyone else wanted to undertake the endeavor with her. i, unsurprisingly, was foolhardy enough to say "sign me up!"

you can watch us (along with four other literature loving ladies, including two frequent commenters here, roni and cinnamon) chronicle our progress at babes and books, the site that amy kindly set up to document our (mis)adventures in bookland. so stop by and mock us comment - we'd love the conversation!

i'm bringing four books on vacation, with the sincere intent of reading them all. somehow i worry about sleep and wine drinking getting in the way of this goal, but if that's the case, well, that's the case. reading versus sleeping versus drinking? these are not bad decisions to have to make.

your wednesday one-liner.

god bless that city cynicism, courtesy of overheard in new york:

Conductor: This is the last stop, Newark Penn Station. No passengers. Please take all your suspicious packages.

--WTC-Newark PATH Train

stuff. literally, my stuff.

as i rifled through my bag as i while walking out of my office building this afternoon, i was amused by the fact that it contained both a pair of sunglasses and an umbrella.

it's good to be readiness.

while the contents of my bag are not nearly as voluminous or as interesting as jack's, i thought i'd list them here, for both posterity and amusement. ok, just for amusement - in the future no one will ever care what i hauled around DC in my workbag except for me.

at this moment, my bag contains the following, in no particular order:

empty tupperware container
pair of brown sandals
cell phone
keys
wallet
sunglasses
umbrella
palm pilot case
pocket sized pack of tissues
mapquest printout of somewhere in maryland
CVS receipt - shampoo, neutrogena shave gel (for BoyCat), trail mix
COSI receipt - caesar salad
contact case
tampons
pay stub
post-it note with books to get at the library
new hairdresser's business card
post-it note with directions to a bar
green jelly bracelet won at an arcade on coney island
make-up: concealer, pressed powder, burt's bees lip gloss
peppermint tin (empty, tragically)
my business cards
band aids
band-aid blisterblock stick
nail file
sinu-tab allergy meds
actifed allergy meds
spare pair of contacts
three pens
two pairs of earrings
eleven cents in change


this list says something about my life, i am sure, other than that i am an injury-prone girl who has allergies. what exactly it says, i have no idea - in fact, i am sure i prefer it that way.

i love culture jamming.

check it.

sorry, Kellogg's®, but i think i'll definitely take option number three.

fantastic.

news bulletin that is not really news to anyone, especially me.

it is hot here.

after work, i walked four blocks from the columbia heights metro to a friend's house, and almost passed out. i don't think i'm cut out for these summers south of the mason-dixon. and there's how many more months to go?

also, twin peaks is so good. people, seriously. we are halfway through our summer viewing sessions - jason and i managed to amass about half a dozen other crazy people who wanted to see the series for the first time, or had only seen parts of it and wanted to go through the whole thing - and i kinda can't believe how crazy it was, and how it's so unbelievable that they put that shit on network tv! the FCC wouldn't let them get away with a quarter of that stuff today.

i guess that's why we have cable now, right? so instead of david lynch and dancing midgets, we have david chase and self-reflecting gangsters. though lynch, even with his own penchant for ambiguity, saw fit not to cut the final twin peaks scene mid-moment.

(i don't even watch the sopranos, but as i've told a number of people lately, i'm kinda obsessed with the ending and the controversy around it. i keep reading articles and debates and crackpot theories. i am convinced that a) tony did get whacked and b) the ending was brilliant. for what it's worth, coming from someone who's seen about three episodes of the show in total.)

feminisms?

in my aforementioned trip to the DC library, i picked up a bunch of good books - some fiction, and some non-fiction i've always had on my "to read" list. two of these are feminist theory: the dialectic of sex by shulamith firestone, and feminist theory: from margin to center by bell hooks.

i've started in on the bell hooks first. i've read a few of hooks's books before - talking back, which i thought was fantastic, and teaching community, which i thought was awful. i saw her speak at BC when i was there, and she was a really engaging presence, still evidently committed and passionate after all this time and all this work. so, i was intrigued to pick up one of her earlier (i guess one could claim more "seminal" works, but i wouldn't, because i think the word seminal evokes the word semen and who wants that kind of association for a feminist book? ok whatever i'm weird, what with the words sounding like other words and all. deal.) books on feminist theory.

it didn't take long for some points to start resonating. her second chapter, "Feminism: A Movement to End Sexist Oppression," tackles the essential but often glossed over question of what the fuck is feminism, anyway? and the problem is: we don't know. even feminists don't know. in feminist circles it is often spun, with varying degrees of conviction and plausibility, that this is an asset instead of a defect - that we are talking about "feminisms" here. i have done this myself; i find the reality of the situation to be pretty evident, but the arguments about its efficacy as a basis for social change dubious.

hooks points out that this diffuse notion of what feminism is will harm us more than it helps us in the long run. whatever the good intentions of feminist movements of old, the concentrated, concise idea of what feminism actually means somehow slipped out of pandora's box way back when, and we seem powerless to be able to get it back, to distill it back down. she quotes author carmen vazquez at length:

We can't even agree on what a "Feminist" is, never mind what she would believe in and how she defines the principles that constitute honor among us. In key with the American capitalist obsession for individualism and anything goes so long as it gets you what you want, feminism in America has come to mean anything you like, honey. There are as many definitions of Feminism as there are feminists, some of my sisters say, with a chuckle. I don't think it's funny.

hooks goes on to point out how the predominant definition of feminism as a struggle for social equality with men served only the interests of white, bourgeois women, and that because white, bourgeois women dominated the discourse, their concerns took precedence. feminism as hooks would like to define it - a struggle to end sexist oppression - is an entirely different story, which aims to deconstruct systems of oppression rather than gain favor within them. it's also, to be realistic, much more of a pipe dream - when is the demolition of an entire ordering hegemony ever anything less, really? but regardless of where one falls on this spectrum of "feminisms," i find it hard not to be troubled by this multiplicity of perspective and position falling under the moniker of feminism, especially when they can be so drastically different in both actions and aims.

i mean, if you take it up to the bird's eye view, is progress possible if we don't know what progress is?

to take it up to the bird's eye of the bird's eye, is the term "feminism" as a locus for an theory and ideology obsolete? (i know, i know, i hate to put the words "feminism" and "obsolete" in the same sentence, because it seems like every five minutes, someone somewhere is doing just that.) i mean in the sense of being useful. is it too dispersed, stretched too thin to have any practical value even to those of us who adopt it willingly?

these are frustrating questions, because even if they were easy to answer, they're most likely moot - the term "feminism" isn't going anywhere, of course. these discussions about semantics are exercises in futility. sure, maybe it's worth starting to turn the wheel of titanics like "feminist" or "pro-choice", but it would be decades, if ever, before any meaningful change happens.

on that cheerful note, i will end. it doesn't mean i don't think the questions are worth asking - hey, i just asked them here - just that the more i think about them, the more depressed i become for feminism's prospects in this cultural moment. the lack of central purpose seems to me to be a glaring omission in anything that wants to call itself a movement. but when you can't get that central purpose back (if you assume it ever really existed in the first place), well, where do you go from here?

paradise regained.

the internets, they are back. we are still bound to the comcast modem with wires, and thus when we sit with the computer on the couch, we also pull the ethernet wire about two inches off the ground right in front of the kitchen doorway. i feel that this is an excellent way to ensure that neither of us trip and twist an ankle before our upcoming vacation!

anyway, more later. today only involves much baseball watching (three hours of red sox under our belts, three hours of white sox to go), lounging about on the couch, and unfortunately, some allergy medicine in my near future.

hey, so guys?

the free internet gravy train has dropped us off at the station. that's it. done. the ride's over. so, we are internet-less until saturday (hopefully, at least, as long as the comcast man can give us legitimate and capitalism-approved access).

i'm posting this from a friend's house real quick, but given my no-work-blogging thing, you won't hear from me again til at least the weekend.

ok, urgent bulletin over. you may now continue with your existences.

"like any other pollutant."

a highly recommended read from the WIMN's Voices blog, this offering from Guest Blogger Shakes details the disturbing and seemingly increasing trend of portraying rape as comedy.

shakes is, as usual, blistering and incisive, cataloging the recent prevalence of rape "comedy" floating about in the societal ether, and pointing out how this is a perfect example of something being more than the sum of its parts:

I refuse to let any of it slide, humorless hyper-reactionary though I may be seen to be, because the problem with all of it, each piece of it, is that there are plenty of people who will look at this one ad or video or “joke” and decide it’s defensible. Or that one ad. Or that other ad over there. Or this TV show. Or that movie. Or this radio program. Or that comedy bit. Or this rape joke. Or that rape joke. Or another rape joke over here. Or that guy saying he got “raped” by the IRS. Or that guy having sex with his date who drank too much and passed out. Or these guys who gang-raped an unconscious girl and blamed her for it. Or the local DA who didn’t think the gang rape of a 17-year-old — with witnesses — was not worth prosecuting.

The media-manufactured trail from “lighten up” to “she wasn’t raped even though she had some else’s vomit in her mouth and no memory of multiple men having sex with her” is all too clear. Each ad or video or “joke,” every news article that blames the victim for assaults against her, every radio owner that profits from shock jocks’ misogynistic pandering — each piece of it is part of a rape culture from which it cannot be extricated. All of it contributes, all of it desensitizes, all of it enables, all of it is garbage. Dangerous, toxic garbage. We breathe it in like any other pollutant. And the inevitable result of letting it accumulate is the same as with any other poison — eventually, someone gets hurt.

click over and read the whole thing.

duly noted.

today, on the metro during my commute home, i was sitting in a seat near the doors. the train pulled into my stop, and i got up to leave. there were two people perched on either side of the vertical metal pole between me and the door; they were facing the other direction and hadn't noticed me get up. the doors opened.

"excuse me," i said.

they were both slow to turn around and acknowledge me - slower than i would expect someone to be when the phrase "excuse me" is uttered two feet from them, anyway. but, in light of their delayed reaction to my need to get past them and off of the train, do you know what the next word out of my mouth was?

"sorry."

this is going to take some work.

praise the lord and pass the ammunition.

as if he were not already my favorite person in the world, BoyCat arose at an ungodly hour this morning and dragged himself to the DMV to register our car. three hours, a mountain of paperwork, and one battle of wills with a DC municipal employee later, we have DC license plates! and a DC registration! and a parking permit!! (you know, not that temporary kind that parking enforcement officials can't understand and thus ticket you while you're legally parked on your own street.)

words cannot express my relief. am i slightly anal-retentive? yes. but did wrangling with the DC DMV nearly drive me to the looney bin? yes.


BoyCat: now officially my favoritest favorite person in the world.

***

in other news, i have been wide awake from 4:00 am to 6:00 am the past two nights. i try in vain to sleep, but i just toss and turn and get cranky and sigh a lot. is this some kind of biological prank my body is playing on me?

so, it follows that i've been very tired during the day.

so, it follows that it took me until 11:30 am to realize that i had never taken off my ratty, commuting flip-flops once i got to the office.

so, it follows that i didn't give a shit, and tromped around in them for the rest of the day.

so, it follows that when i tromped over to CVS during my lunch hour to buy shampoo, i nearly threw a temper tantrum in the hair care aisle upon realizing that a 17 oz. bottle of paul mitchell costs $11.39. why did this vex me so? i've paid far more for far less of a necessary hygiene product. and yet, with the whining and the stamping of the feet.

the ugly flip-flop shod feet.

***

finally, everyone, humor me. take five minutes, click over to slate.com, and read this article by meghan o'rourke about the history of engagement rings. no seriously, i know we've been over this before and you think what you think, that's fine, but it is enlightening! i learned things! like this:

...as it happens there was another factor in the surge of engagement ring sales [in the 1930s and after] — one that makes the ring's role as collateral in the premarital economy more evident. Until the 1930s, a woman jilted by her fiance could sue for financial compensation for "damage" to her reputation under what was known as the "Breach of Promise to Marry" action. As courts began to abolish such actions, diamond ring sales rose in response to a need for a symbol of financial commitment from the groom, argues the legal scholar Margaret Brinig — noting, crucially, that ring sales began to rise a few years before the De Beers campaign. To be marriageable at the time you needed to be a virgin, but, Brinig points out, a large percentage of women lost their virginity while engaged. So some structure of commitment was necessary to assure betrothed women that men weren't just trying to get them into bed. The "Breach of Promise" action had helped prevent what society feared would be rampant seduce-and-abandon scenarios; in its lieu, the pricey engagement ring would do the same.

see? interesting. at least, as interesting as antiquated, mid-century legal matters can be.

aw, look, it's Baby's First Dust-Up.

as i noted yesterday, i was a little overwhelmed (not entirely in a bad way, but overwhelmed nonetheless) at the attention that a little blog post that i wrote on a wednesday night after work had garnered. i know how lots of us itty-bitty bloggers crack jokes about "my three readers" and such, but some days, i'm not really too far off of that mark! so this has been a serious surprise.

firstly, i just have to say that it's really amazing to see how this thing has actually traveled - i'm seeing people come in from other blogs, from livejounals, from myspace blogs, from message boards - and how people are responding to it. it's been an unexpected but really appreciated opportunity to see how it resonated with so many women - how i was not alone in this.

and of course, the comment thread went a little nuts. i know you didn't miss that. the tenor of things as they devolved was not unfamiliar to me - you can find exchanges and arguments like it on any big-level blog at any given hour of the day - but it was different for my own space. (remember, with the three readers here.) so yesterday, i'm sitting here thinking about how i respond. do i talk about what my commenting policy is? do i discuss what i intend with the blog, where debate fits in? do i try to lay down, like, rules or something?

and then i thought, you know, fuck that.

most of the people reading this blog either know me in person or have been reading my writing here pretty regularly - they know what i'm about. they know that i'm open to debate and discussion, and that i like (and often even explicitly ask for) engaging with people on questions and issues. i'm a generally civil person, but i'm up for some give and take. this is all, i think, pretty clear from the historical record of my archives.

but yeah, it's my blog, and i'm not going to start twisting myself into an FAQ-and-comment-policy pretzel. number one, that would be a little ridiculous, since in a week i'll be back to my merry band of commenters not usually outnumbering half a dozen. number two, it's never good enough. as at so many other moments, i presently take a page from twisty on her new and beautifully anarchic system of comment moderation:

...when [commenters] get huffy or become tedious, I may or may not delete their comments. I may or may not delete whole conversations. I may or may not delete comments just because they don’t have paragraph breaks. I may or may not delete comments wherein privilege is spelled priveledge. I might not delete any offensive comments at all. Hell, I might make an offensive comment...I may resent implications. I might bandy words. I may be inconsistent. I might miss the point. I may be in a bad mood, the way certain blamers always seem to be. I might use the word “motherfucker” even though it may be considered insulting to mothers and fuckers. I may never read the comments again. Who can tell what the heck I’ll do? Life is uncertain!

so yeah. i welcome comments. i really like comments. i welcome debate. i really like debate. but i'm gonna run things how i run things, however the hell that ends up being.

ok. lastly, in light of the way the comment thread did transpire, there are a few links that i would like to share and encourage you to peruse. hell, not just peruse, read thoroughly and studiously, as if you might be quizzed on them someday. these are people who have written about the phenomenon of feminist blogging, the commentariat, and those times when the two go together about as well as ammonia and bleach. (hint: this usually has to do with the manly men and the Nice Guys™ getting involved. i'm just sayin'.) the common thread of all these insightful posts is this: hey men, it is not about you.

somehow, just this one little sentiment can set off much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but that's another story.

without further ado, some enlightening thoughts on feminist blogular discourse:

FAQ: Men Hate You: twisty, as always, cuts quickly and perfectly through the fallacy of the singular "but i don't hate women!!" male response to patriarchy blaming.

Occasionally, Conversations with my Man Are Instructive: ilyka damen documents a fantastic conversation in which she explains why, though it can be painful to admit, men have to get over themselves - at least while attempting to participate in feminist discussions.

How not to be an asshole: a guide for men: the brilliant chris clark at pandagon lays it out in one incredibly simple and easy to follow step. that's right, step, singular.

friday cat blogging, it's a big blogosphere after all edition.

little kitty on a biiiiig couch. or futon. whatever.



she looks very small. small, like my little blog in the vast expanse of Teh Internets. you don't realize what a small shop you truly have until, with one link from a relatively big site, your traffic increases (i'm not exaggerating here, folks) 60 fold. on one day. and you get six times more comments than you've ever gotten on a post.

as the manolo would say: "that is wickity-wack."

as CatCat would say: "............" *blink*

as i would say: "i'd like something with vodka in it. please. now. thank you."

more on Attack of the Crazy Comment Thread later. for now, a cocktail. on the couch futon.

submitted without comment.

i would comment, because really, why would you not, except that i got up very early to go running, and did i mention that i've barely been running at all in the last month, and when that happens running is like wicked hard, and then i went to the doctor's office, and then i worked all day, and i took some meds earlier that "may cause drowsiness" and now omg guys i am tired lolz!

ok, that qualifies as comment. anyway, courtesy of broadsheet:

The American Life League finally tells the truth

above and beyond all this.

this morning, i sat down on the couch, put a bowl of cereal on the coffee table, and turned on the tv to check the weather forecast. after the weather channel gave me the only information i really needed from the morning news, i ignored my better judgment and clicked over to the Today show. the top of the hour news segment was about 18 year old Kelsey Smith, who went missing from a Target parking lot under very suspicious circumstances (security cameras caught what appears to be a woman being forced into her car in the hazy corner of their footage). the segment talked about the rewards offered, the suspects being searched for, the family's pleas.

i clicked the off button on the remote and thought, with a certainty that frightens me to recollect, "she's already dead."

they discovered her body this afternoon.

i thought about her on the train ride to work. and by this, i mean i thought about her and i thought about myself, in that we're both women. as far as we know at this point, she was merely a young woman in a parking lot - i am that woman a lot of times too. and these horrible moments in time, regardless of how long the odds of them happening to any given woman are, exist for all women in the sense that we know it could happen to us. that we could walk out of a Target at 7:10 pm on a saturday and not make it safely to our cars. that we could be the victims of such terrorism, such pointed destruction, such punishment.

and it is punishment. it's punishment for that supreme sin that we all commit every day, that heinous offense the feminist blogosphere has trenchantly labeled Living While Female. nothing galls our patriarchal society to see this offense on constant display - we walk about so freely, talking and making decisions, like we had some right to be acting with something resembling agency - and it makes every possible effort to discourage this behavior. since we are all, however, such uppity bitches who for some reason refuse to take direction and quit being so evident all the time, force is often necessary. harassment, intimidation, abuse, rape, murder: the price we pay for breathing.

you know what makes me sad, though, above and beyond all this? all this, for which i could already cry for a lifetime and despair until i die? what makes me so sad is that we believe it. we women believe, on some collective unconscious level, that the charges against us are true.

last month, joss whedon posted a lengthy lament about the way women are perceived and treated, uniformly around the globe, as inferior and detestable beings. his thoughts were in reaction to the infamous internet video of a kurdish girl, Dua Khalil, whose death by stoning was captured for posterity* by cameraphones in the mob that murdered her. this reminded him, somewhat randomly but understandably, of the trailer for an upcoming movie in which the sum of the action is the kidnapping, torture, and murder of a beautiful young woman. whedon writes,

The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is “I’m sorry”.

“I’m sorry.”

What is wrong with women?

I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.

whedon is at a loss to explain why the crime of Living While Female is so universally reviled. i am at a loss as to why we apologize for it.

and we do - not just in the movies, where such a scripted repentance could be read as wishful thinking more than anything else. we do it in real life, all the time, under both the most ordinary circumstances and the most unimaginable ones. the most sickening part of reading about the De Anza gang rape case, for me, was this observation from one of the female party-goers who helped the girl to safety:

This poor girl was not moving...She had her one shoe one, her jeans were wrapped around one of her ankles and her underwear was left around her ankles. To the left of the bed there was some condom thrown on the ground. When they lifted her head up, her eyes moved and she said 'I'm sorry.'

she was sorry. she knew enough, even drunk to the point of unconsciousness and physically incapable of movement, that she was sorry about something. because we always are. we are always supposed to be.

you know what i wish? well, i wish a lot of things, really, chief among them being that men would stop hating women so goddamn much. because it's not our fault. whatever it is that actually drives that misogyny, whatever fear is actually coiled up at the bottom of that vast heart of darkness, it is most definitely not our fault.

but barring these impossible dreams, you know what i wish? i wish that we would stop apologizing. it's not easy - we've learned to say "i'm sorry" to try to preempt the whipping, or to lessen the lashes, or just to quiet our own minds while it's happening. we've learned that "sorry" helps us survive. but i wish we could start fighting back, just a little, in little ways.

so women - you women i know, you women i don't, any women who happen to read this, women everywhere, right now - start by not apologizing. don't apologize for just being what you are - don't apologize for the big and little things you do because you're a woman, or because you're a human being who happens to be a woman. don't qualify your thoughts, your opinions, your feelings - don't beat people to the punch of implying that they don't matter. "i know this might sound stupid, but..." "i know this is a dumb question..." "this is going to sound silly..."

stop. it is worth saying. you are worth hearing. women, please, say it, ask it, take it, do it - don't apologize.

there is nothing wrong with you.



*this is a link to twisty's post about the video, which does contain a link to the video, but it doesn't begin automatically. i couldn't bring myself to watch it, and can understand anyone else who can't either.)

some day, yeah.

the doors of the red line slam open - the metro system in this city has very decisive ideas about when the doors will be open versus when they will be closed, and woe to the person who mistakenly thinks that they can influence this matter - and i turn quickly to the right amidst the crush of travelers. it's a right, then a left, and then down the escalator to the blue and orange lines for the second leg of the trip home.

the Five Stairsteps are on my iPod, singing O-o-h Child, telling me things are gonna get brighter. i sway my head a little, back and forth with the beat of it, as i make my way around the corner towards the escalator, dodging a woman with a double stroller to my left and avoiding stepping on the toes of a gaggle of teenage PIRG volunteers to my right. i am pulled along by the little commuter current; i like this song.

i am put so at ease by the sounds coming through the headphones that i almost don't notice that we are backlogged, for some reason, at the top of the escalator. i survey the scene, a bit confused - there are people moving down the stairs, but the group of half a dozen in front of me is not. why would this be? i see a few of them look at each other, bewildered-like, and i don't need to hear their conversation to deduce that they've never been to Metro Center and are trying to figure out whether this escalator is indeed the one they want. i am trapped by the ebb of other commuters behind and around them; i have no recourse but to wait until they make a collective decision.

luckily, this happens a few seconds later, and they step onto the escalator, with me directly behind. as we descend, i see the blue line train sitting there, doors open.

the people in front of me just stand there. this is not suprising, but infuriating nonetheless. when we reach the floor, i can finally dart around them, but i'm too late - the doors whip shut just a few feet in front of me. i curse silently, and make a kicking motion towards the tracks.

the Five Stairsteps coo, "things are gonna get easier...right now."

where was i?

how did i miss the news that last month tom brady was spotted out in public...in new york city...wearing a yankees hat??

the horror. it renders me (nearly) speechless.

thank goodness he has issued an implicit, B-logo-based mea culpa this past weekend, but still. tommy, what is up? i don't care how many other actresses and supermodels you go on to date and/or impregnate, but for god's sake, have some decency!

summer reading.

i don't know how many readers i've been able to lure back in the few days since my little self-imposed exile ended, however, i have a question for you all.

on tuesday, i plan on swinging by the library downtown and becoming the owner of a shiny new district of columbia library card. hooray for free books! (and hooray for a big city system that actually allows residents to renew books online! can you imagine?? chicago, i know you can't.) so, i am going to endeavor to actually utilize the library more than i did back in chi-town, because a) i really should read more and b) i am not made of money, so i can't afford frequent trips to barnes and noble and/or any more bookshelves.

the query here is this: i would love some "good read" recommendations. i have a few books in mind, but in order to adequately fuel my attempt to read more books for longer than say, three weeks, i'll need more than a few. plus, there's an upcoming family vacation in june that will involve little more than sitting around by the water, drinking, and reading - so in particular i'd love to hear about some lighter reads that you've recently enjoyed. none of that "confessions of a prada-wearing shopaholic good in bed devil" stuff, but i'm not looking for proust either, you know? fiction or non-fiction, i'm open to either!

sidenote: since i don't currently possess a library card, and after we moved in here we didn't have tv for about a week and a half, i was propelled to our own bookcases in search of my next read. as i scanned the shelves, i realized that i'd never read Jane Eyre. can you believe that? two english degrees, and that pillar of british fiction ignored for so long? what was i paying them for, anyway??

(i'm enjoying it thoroughly, by the way. i'm only about 100 pages in, but there's already much tromping about the english countryside, overwrought emoting, and of course a somewhat foreboding villian/hero who gallops around on a horse. i do love the classics.)

you know what's a great idea?

going out for drinks after work on a friday. generally, that is.

what is kind of a poor idea is going out for drinks after work on a friday and doing the following: 1) having three margaritas, two vodka tonics, one stoli madras, and one free rum-based shot-thingee from the bacardi promo guy 2) not really eating any dinner except some tortilla chips and guacamole, 3) staying out for five and a half hours, and 4) doing all of the above while conveniently forgetting that you have to get up early and help your friends move the next day.

sadly, i didn't receive the following newsflash from my biology until about 2:00 a.m.: you cannot drink like you did in college anymore. honestly. so stop trying. this unfortunate processing delay resulted in an awful night of sleep and a general feeling of zombie-like stupor upon rising. i was barely fit to lift my own two feet, never mind a couch.

but i survived, and luckily only had to do some light to moderate lifting in the process. and now it's a little after 1:00 p.m., and i've managed to eat an english muffin, half a bagel with cream cheese, and a salad, so i feel something resembling human again.

now i need another glass of water.

and so you're back. from outer space.

it's been so long since i've blogged, i blanked out on the website address to sign into this thing. i was like, "www.blogspot.com?? that seems logical, but for some reason, incorrect." and lo - it was. blog-ger, kate, blog-ger.

so anyways. i am back, and boring as ever. i regret that this blog has gotten boring. i plan on changing that (truly, i do, and not in the "my new year's resolution is to quit smoking" kind of way). i'm going to write when i write - which is hopefully fairly regularly, but i'm not going to pressure myself to throw up some blahdy-blah just because it's been two days since i last posted - and i'm going to write stuff with a point.

revolutionary, i know.

(and i'm kind of lying - sometimes i still won't have a point. this is a blog, after all. but hopefully it will be less often.)

ok, so, before we get to all that point-having, i'll tell you a little bit about what i've been up to. mainly, moving the fuck out of virginia. here are some pics of the new place (the apartment is long and narrow, which doesn't lend itself well to being able to capture a whole room in one picture - the following half-assed attempts will have to suffice):

the living room, as seen from the kitchen

the kitchen, as seen from the living room

the itty bitty bathroom

and the piece de resistance - and not just because i just spent 20 minutes in microsoft paint deciding how to best anonymize BoyCat - the bedroom

i think i just made up that word, anonymize. and i like it.

so this is where we live now. it's pretty great, but i'm not gonna lie, it's taking some getting used to. a new job and a big move are both big events in and of themselves, and the fact that i took both on within one month has left me a bit...overwhelmed. as in, i've had about three mini-breakdowns in as many days. i'm tired, and anxiety-ridden, and wound up, and freaked out, and....so on. i'm just glad that most of the major logistical hurdles are behind us (except you for you, DC DMV...and oh how i am sick just thinking about you. the story of our car inspection process is a tale for a whole 'nother post), and that soon i can start trying to do things like breathe. and relax. ideally at the same time.

and finally, for the few of you that are still curious about what the unbloggable stuff was, i am going to have to remain mum on that for a little while longer. but really, don't waste any energy on it, because it's nothing bad and nothing really major - i'm not becoming an astronaut or having a baby or getting married or moving to portugal or anything. i hate bein' like that - you know i do - but i am. and when i finally do post about it, you all will be like "that's it? aw man. that's boring."

because boring is what i do best! did best, i mean, did best...things will be different this year, i swear. i'm gonna lose 20 pounds. and write a novel. and spend more time with my kids. and quit smoking, of course.

see you again when i have a point.

i would like to interrupt this blog hiatus to say...

i fell down today.

on the street.

in front of strangers.

note to self: purchase summer commuting sandals that have something resembling treads on the bottom of them, so that when the sidewalks are wet, you don't resemble a three-year-old at an ice skating rink.

good grief.

that dreaded term.

you know the one - the one that every blogger, at some point in his or her life, is going to find themselves forced to utter. no, it's not "unbloggable" - i've done that one already.

it's..."hiatus."

god, i am loathe to even type it. it sounds so self-important, doesn't it? tv shows go on hiatus. professors go on hiatus (no wait, that's "sabbatical." but whatever.). my little blog, with its 20-odd regular readers, should not warrant the term. but the blogosphere has deigned it so - any foreseen and somewhat lengthy absence from blogging shall henceforth be properly termed a "hiatus", it's there in the by-laws, look it up - and i am merely following orders.

i will be back at the turn of the month, after a number of crazy things die down around here. you know about the move - that probably would've resulted in a little blogging break all on its own! but add to that a little editing gig that is really not little at all (pages. hundreds and hundreds of them.), and another totally unexpected, totally exciting, and totally as yet unbloggable (oh god, i'm doing it again!!) development have all conspired to take me out of blogging commission for the rest of the month. but once i get everything done and regain some semblance of my sanity, i'll be back, and hopefully able to blog the unbloggable and continue to annoy you all with my generally self-involved blathering.

until that fine day arrives, though, go forth and read my blogroll. get to know each other. enjoy each other's company. and i'll see you later.

your wednesday one-liner.

he or she has a point, courtesy of Overheard in New York:

Law professor: Death is bad, but there is a tax advantage.

--NYU Stern School of Business

hmmm. and they wonder why us volvo-driving, latte-sipping eco-crunchy bleeding heart liberals mock them.

i am aware that by this point in time, making fun of NASCAR and its fans has something of a sad sheen to it - a violation of PC "diversity" ideals combined with the shame of picking the low-hanging humor fruit. it's just too easy, and it's kinda not nice to boot.

but whatever. because really? fans throwing beer cans onto the track is bad enough. throwing them in such en masse numbers as to warrant a front page Yahoo! story is worse. and doing it at the venue for which talladega nights: the ballad of ricky bobby is named? well, i don't know what kind of self-restraint you think us new england liberals have, but it's not *that* much.

christ. what's next? cans of skoal and ratty old confederate flag adorned tank tops? because that'd cover the triumvirate of your Stereotypical Hickness. so, think about it, if that's where you're aiming to go with this. until then, we'll be around, snickering behind our hands at your "sport" and its, um, unique displays of fandom.

"it seems unexceptionable to conclude..."

so, you've heard about the gonzales v. carhart ruling. you probably know it better as the court upholding the so-called "partial-birth abortion" ban (the right wing began its checkmate when it got that wholly imaginary term to stick with the mainstream media, but that's another post for another day). i highly recommend dahlia lithwick's article from slate.com about the ruling, as she does a great job of covering the waterfront of offenses to be found within its pages. it is tragic and infuriating on so many levels, and i don't need to detail them all here. (honestly, maybe i should, but it's too exhausting on too many levels.)

there are, however, three main aspects of the ruling that i think deserve emphasis. many others in the women's rights field and across the blogosphere have made note of them already, but i do it again here because on the off chance that you haven't considered them, i think that you should. because of all of it, all the absurdity and misogyny inherent in this ruling, these three things frighten me the most.

1) The Condescension

Lithwick's article focuses heavily on this aspect of the ruling - Kennedy's amazingly condescending language towards both women and the medical community. if you're like me (that is to say, basically a person without a law degree), you imagine supreme court rulings as full of legalese and dense, difficult to parse language. as decisions handed down by the highest court of the country, you imagine them to be complex and logically intricate documents. in many ways, gonzales is such a document, but in other ways, it is shockingly not. the assertion from the ruling that has gotten a lot of airtime is the following statement: "Respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child." these kind of platitudes are a foundation upon which we're suddenly basing constitutional law?? i don't doubt that many people would find that statement to be true - i don't, but again, another story - but regardless, for the life of me i can't figure out how such a sweeping assumption should be the basis for a federal ban on anything.

it gets worse, too. the decision goes on to assert, "whether to have an abortion requires a difficult and painful moral decision..." (of course, 100% of the time absolutely always it does), and then posits that the best way to prevent already regretful mothers from learning of the way in which their fetus was aborted is not to, you know, explain it to them beforehand and allow them to reconsider, but to ban the procedure all together. because obviously, these distraught and morally compromised women can't make that kind of decision for themselves.

and it's not just women for whom the court has decided the legislature can make unilateral decisions - it's the medical community as well! what can't these senators control, really? from the decision:

The Act's stated purposes are protecting innocent human life from a brutal and inhumane procedure and protecting the medical community's ethics and reputation. The government undoubtedly 'has an interest in protecting the integrity and ethics of the medical profession.'

in other words, women and doctors, fret not: we will protect you from yourselves. the level of patronizing behavior and rationale here is breathtaking, and guess what? it's now constitutional doctrine.

2) The Blatant Dismissal of Fact

now, we know that the bush administration has been no huge fan of "the fact" in its seven-year tenure. we know that this anti-intellectualism has seeped into many a corner of the government and indeed, society at large. but i guess i hadn't realized quite how bad it was, or just how disastrous this kind of disregard for the former basis of all legislation and law could be. because i couldn't conceive of statements like this being able to find their way into supreme court rulings:

While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.

i had to re-read that sentence after i read it the first time, because i truly couldn't believe it. "while we find no reliable data"? "it seems unexceptionable to conclude"?? ok, you seriously just based a federal ban on a medical procedure on the idea that "well, we can't prove it, but we have to assume that some women wish they hadn't done this." this - this ability to legislate and rule based on nothing more than the perceived "truthiness" of the matter - this is what bush hath wrought. i laugh when colbert ridicules it; i nearly weep when the supreme court codifies it.

3) The Ruling Between the Lines

this, of all of it, is the most horrifying, the thing that chills me down to my bones. this ruling is not about "partial-birth abortion." how do we know this? because, on a logical level, this decision is totally ineffective in achieving its stated aims. the language of the ruling reaffirms that "the state maintains its own regulatory interest in protecting the life of the fetus that may become a child." ok. but how, exactly, does this decision protect the life of the fetus? it doesn't. in sum, it merely tells doctors that they can't perform an abortion this way, they have to do it that way. the authors of the legislation tap-danced around this by saying that intact D&E (the real medical term for the procedure) is such a "brutal and inhumane" method of abortion that it essentially helps foster a disregard for human life. and that argument, as explicitly accepted by the supreme court in the ruling, is the golden ticket for anti-abortion activists. because who is now to say that regular old D&E (as opposed to "intact D&E", which is the now-banned procedure) isn't brutal and inhumane? or vacuum aspiration in the sixth week of pregnancy? on this level, the true intent of the legislation becomes clear, which is to open the door to further and tighter restrictions, and ultimately a federal ban on all abortion.

you heard about anti-abortion activists jubilation over the gonzales ruling. this is why. the decision is literally an invitation to start legislating on all kinds of abortion access restriction, because they can now be upheld via two things: weakened legal scrutiny standards (another long story, but suffice to say this ruling lowered the bar in a number of ways on how rigorously a court needs to protect the health of a woman in these considerations) and a nebulous desire to ban procedures that "coarsen society to the humanity...of all innocent human life." and it's coming. north dakota voters thankfully shot down a state ban that could have been used as the basis to overturn Roe, but that only bought us time. now, with gonzales on the books, another state will soon pass an all-out ban. it will be challenged. and it will start winding its way through the courts, on its way to the supreme court's doorstep, where it has an exceedingly strong chance of being upheld.

now, it's just a waiting game.

friday cat blogging, "get the hell out of dodge" edition.

CatCat has a very important request. she needs to get out of northern virginia. right now.




lucky for her, we are very compliant with relocation wants and needs. we went ahead and found her a cute one-bedroom in capitol hill, one block to the metro, hardwood floors, heat and water included. we applied. we got it!

so CatCat's burning desire to become a denizen of the district will soon become reality. and for that, everyone who lives here is thoroughly relieved.

newman. with a badge. for reals.

this has been a short week, technically. this has been a very long week, literally.

wait, that doesn't make sense. but you know.

so there is some apartment craziness happening. we are hopeful and nervous. (well, it's me with the nervous, mostly.) and really? the postal service can kiss my ass. it's the 21st century - an express overnight tracking system that actually works should not be outside the realm of possibility. especially when my ability to get an apartment depends on it.

(by the way - did you know that there are post office police cars? with red and blue lights on top and everything? as i was hustling over to a downtown post office this morning, i noticed what looked like a cop car parked out front. but it wasn't - it was the "postal police." seriously, i am not making this up. and it raises the question about what the "postal police" would need a police car for - are there postal emergencies that necessitate postal workers flying around the city streets, sirens blaring and lights whirling? if so, what are they?? because i would really like to know.)

your wednesday one-liner.

courtesy of Overheard in New York, a glimpse into what SisterCat would be like if she were your (as they were once quaintly known) "stewardess":

Flight attendant on PA: Be careful when opening the overhead bins. Items can shift during flight and fall on you, or even, God forbid, me.

--American Airlines flight, JFK

second verse...

ok, i survived the first day. yes, i deserve a cookie or something.

now it is the second day. the excitement has kinda worn off, so i'm mainly left with nerves. many of them. plus - an apartment hunt!

we started really, seriously looking for a new place this week. we've seen two places, and given two places the thumbs down. last night's candidate was a tough decision though, and me functioning on eight previous hours of first day stress did not help things. BoyCat and i were both conflicted about whether to take the place, and i ended up having - i kid you not, i wish i was exaggerating here - a two-hour long freakout about it. i hesitate to call it a meltdown, because no tears were actually shed, but i will definitely give myself an ulcer over the next five weeks if i continue to behave this way.

today - back at it! work, and then a possible viewing at 6:00. hopefully minus the kate tantrums.

damn.

i wrote a little post in my head this morning, before i got out of bed. but now i've forgotten it.

this is possibly because friday was my last day, today is my first day, and i'm nervous and excited and nervous and thinking about eight million things.

honestly, eight million.

friday cat blogging, last day edition.

as in, last day at my old job! wahoo!

as you can see, CatCat is ecstatic.



and the excitement continues, because i am soon off to the airport to fetch SisterCat, who is here for a three-day weekend visit! i have stocked the house with various types of booze in preparation. there are not many occasions in life that warrant purchasing champagne; the last day on the job and the arrival of a sister in town is indeed one of them.

so blogging will be light this weekend (unless SisterCat decides to take the mike - and that could be interesting). bask in the sunshine. go for a walk. drink something (outside). enjoy yourselves!

a tip.

i am really late with this one, given that if you did buy girl scout cookies this year, you have almost certainly eaten them all already. but, if you haven't finished them yet...

and some of the leftovers happen to be Caramel deLites...

here's what you do.

you put them in the microwave. for about 10 seconds, and not much longer. just enough to warm them up, and melt the chocolate on the bottom a bit. (oh, and tip within a tip - turn them upside down on the plate, chocolate side up, so you don't end up with all the melted chocolate sticking to the plate when you pick them up.)

i have been rationing for the past month. i have three cookies left. i just ate my second-to-last three, and their incredible deliciousness inspired me to share this little-known cookie trick with you all.

use it wisely. and often. definitely often.

a chill wind, indeed.

we knew it was coming.

but it doesn't make it any easier to accept.

the supreme court has decided not only to ignore legal precedent, but to completely disregard the logical idea that decisions about a woman's health should be made by her and her doctor, not by the state.

it is truly - truly - horrifying. and for anti-choice activists, it's only the starting gun.

veggie shoe shopping, or, how i learned to stop worrying and love the peep toe.

(i realize that blog posts appropriating the dr. strangelove title should probably, at this point, be subject to heavy fines. but i've gone and done it anyway. so there you go.)

i haven't talked much here about going vegetarian, which i did at the turn of 2007. there were a lot of compelling arguments for it, i had been leaning in that direction for a little while, and the beginning of a new year seemed like as good a time as any to make such a life change. so, i went veg. and it's been pretty great thus far (except for the popeye's chicken right around the corner from our apartment complex - damn that place and its delicious fry-a-lator aromas!). in addition to a vegetarian diet, i also decided to stop purchasing leather. it seemed fairly hypocritical of me to imply that killing animals to eat them is not ok, but killing them to wear them is totally fine. while i'm not throwing away the leather-based jackets and such that i already own (i'm also a big fan of reduce reuse recycle - i'm mid-90s old school in that way), i'm also not buying anything from here on out that involves leather, suede, etc.

so. do you know how hard it is to find nice shoes that are also leather-free?

because it's damn near fucking impossible.

today, i started at marshall's, browsing their sizable shoe department. i need a cute pair of more summery black shoes or sandals. now, to be fair, i'm kind of a picky shoe person to start with - i have definitive ideas about how high a heel i want, how strappy i want, what kind of texture i want, and blahdy blah blah. then add to that my new leather-less requirement, and you've got one big clusterfuck of shoe buying impossibility. i quickly gave up on marshall's and got serious. i went to DSW.

DSW - literally, the warehouse of shoes. if there was anywhere that i could find a manmade and cute pair of shoes, this was it. and still, i wandered the aisles, putting down shoe after shoe with "leather upper" stamped on the inside. "dejected" doesn't even begin to cover my mindset as i approached the final few aisles.

then, a discovery. black. decent sized heel. nice taper. good texture. "all manmade material"!! a total winner, right? the issue - they had a peep toe.

now, here's the thing. i know peep toes are all the rage right now. you can't go two feet without bumping into someone wearing them, or seeing a pair on display in a store window. the peep toes are hot. so what's my problem?? thing is, i just, well...i kinda don't like them. i don't have a rationale or reason for this - i don't begrudge anyone else for liking and/or wearing peep toes. i just always felt like, eh. not for me.

but today, today was a turning point. i was faced with a dilemma - accept the peep toe as it is and walk away from this two-hour shoe odyssey with something to show for it, or rule out the pair based on an inexplicable disinclination towards a tiny, toe-sized hole?

i bought them.



and they're pretty cute, right? i have to admit, they kinda are. so a day that i thought would never come - me, in possession of a pair of peep toes! - has, in fact, arrived. what's next? rope wedge heels??

no. never that. although they are in style now, too..

read the fine print.

you know what really amuses me? advertising. it never gets old. and often, if i don't laugh at it, i'll cry. so when something particularly odd or asinine in a commercial strikes me, i like to take a moment and fully appreciate the absurdity.

for instance. you've all seen that ad for the Ford Edge? it's apparently another attempt at making a littler SUV, a "crossover" vehicle, if you will. (which i won't, actually - it's a glorified station wagon. "crossover" my ass.)

anyway. the ad where the car is driving around in the sky, hugging building with two tires, and that annoying synth-y voice is singing, "i like to live on the edddd-juh"? if you watch the bottom of the screen, some fine print pops up about five seconds in. it reads,

Yes, this is a fantasy. Cars can't really drive on buildings.

there is so much that i love about this fine print. firstly, there's the way it (like most fine print) assumes we are all raging idiots. gosh, i was not aware that certain cars don't have the ability to suspend the laws of gravity - thanks for setting me straight on that one, Ford! secondly, there's the way they try to be all cheeky about it. some highly-educated person in the Ford marketing department realized that fine print = not cool, and "crossover" SUVs must equal cool at all times. such a conundrum! what to do? i know, let's fall back on the most overused cliche about the demographic we're trying to sell to - their deep-seated affection for sarcasm - and insult them with both form and content! it's genius. truly.

the other great bit of fine print i saw the other day was in a Red Lobster ad. i'm sure you've seen it too, it was on about every three minutes last week. it's gist was this: 30 shrimp! come eat 30 shrimp at a time at Red Lobster! doooooo it! you know the one. but have you noticed the tiny-lettered admonition at the bottom?

Prices higher at Times Square and Hawaii locations.

now, this first caught my eye while i was on the treadmill at the gym. and i pondered it for a good two or three minutes. Times Square and Hawaii? it's like a brain teaser. what do these two places have in common when it comes to....shrimp? ready, go.

honestly, i still haven't totally figured it out.

a frustration, and a vindication.

today, i opened the mail. this is an ordinary occurence. what is unusual is the amount staring me in the face when i looked at the water bill. 96 dollars. what?? the last one was half that.

and can i back up a wee bit and also point out that we even have a water bill? we rent, for chrissakes! we're shelling out over $1400 a month on rent alone for a one bedroom near the edge of the metro's reach in virginia. and there are no utilities included. that's right, not even water. for which we are now paying $100 a month.

i cannot wait to find a new place in six weeks. i don't care if i have to devote my life to it during the month of may, by god, we will find a place that isn't costing us close to half our net income to live in.

before i got home and had my evening semi-soured by a stupid piece of paper, i was thinking i would post about the day's little vindication. i emphasize little; it will probably please no one else but me, really. but when i pulled up twisty this afternoon and read this post, i felt a twinge of recognition. in reference to the comment thread of a previous post about the kathy sierra situation, she opines,

I find that feminists of the empowerful, slo-mo kickboxing variety are sometimes impatient with women who have been publicly screwed over by the Establishment. These feminists seem actually to be critical of women on the wrong end of a beatdown...According to these feminists, the women who cry uncle have allowed themselves to become “victims rather than people.” But look here. Who are they trying to kid. Women can be kept in line with intimidation, and the whole world knows it. Aren’t people who have been raped and intimidated and harassed and threatened with death “victims”? What the fuck is wrong with that word? It describes the situation perfectly.

so it took about a year and a half of strolling around the internet to find a post that mirrors my own stated discomfort about the way "victim" has become something of a dirty word in feminist circles:

but in all of this clamoring for empowerment, have we lost the ability to make people see why women deserve to be empowered in the first place? are we unable to convince people that the reason we need empowerment is that we still lack societal and cultural power? women are still victimized, all the time, all over the world. we are victims of sexual harassment. we are victims of rape. we are victims of pay inequity. we are victims of impossible beauty standards. we are victims of double standards. we are victims, every day. why are we so ashamed to admit that?

i posted this almost eighteen months ago, and twisty's post is the first time i've seen the sentiment echoed since then. not just in explicitly feminist circles, but anywhere. what is that about? why is this a question that we are reluctant to take on - hell, that we apparently aren't even considering taking on? i don't know, but i'm just glad to see that i'm not the only one wondering about it.

a recommendation.

you all get comcast on demand, right?

well, if you do, you should go there. open up the tv entertainment section, and go to the sundance channel. then pick the Iconoclasts episode with dave chappelle and maya angelou.

watch it. it's great. engaging. thought-provoking. and all those other robert-redford-ish, park city-esqe liberal-minded adjectives.

that is my only insight of the weekend. but trust me, it's a good one.

friday cat blogging, guest kitty edition.

courtesy of

Meme Cats

because often, i feel exactly the same way.

some understanding.

many people around the world took a moment yesterday to eulogize kurt vonnegut, and i appreciated that. and while i have nothing new to add to the mountain of melancholy over his death or to the eloquent expression of why his work mattered (for me, tart's observations hit most close to home), i didn't want to let the occasion pass without marking it here in my own little corner of the universe.

much has been made, in all these obituaries and rememberances, about vonnegut's humanism. i'm happy about that. while i don't consider myself a humanist per se (i don't consider myself anything, really, but that's another issue for another day!), vonnegut's discussions of humanism always struck me as both eminently rational and beautiful in their simplicity. the quote being most circled, understandably in this circumstance, is this one:

I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an A.H.A. memorial service for my predecessor I said, "Isaac is up in Heaven now." That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles....When I myself am dead, God forbid, I hope some wag will say about me, "He's up in Heaven now."

the passage i'd like to share here is only one page removed from the prior quote in Timequake, vonnegut's odd little autobiographic last novel. i take the time to quote it here now, sitting in my bathrobe and still rubbing sleep out of my eyes, because it seemed when i first read it - and still, when i re-read it today - an amazing encapsulation of what human kindness should be about.

Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the Universe has been to us unknowable so far. We serve as well as we can the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community.

i was just talking to BoyCat yesterday about my fear that my pessimism will overrun me at some point, that one day in middle age i will just throw up my hands and say "fuck it. humanity really isn't worth it anyway." but when i read this, i hope that day never comes. because it doesn't have to be "worth it," humanity, in order to deserve my care and effort and concern. it just has to be the biggest thing that i know how to handle, that i understand in a small enough way to be able to help.

so bless you, mr. vonnegut, for reminding me of that.

nothing but a number?

body image is a feminist issue, no doubt. sometimes it is tempting for us to relegate it to the back burner, given the myriad other problems facing women in our society; we often feel that there are "more pressing concerns" than how we feel when we look in the dressing room mirror. But the societal bombardment of dysfunctional aesthetic ideals is a real problem and a big one - i don't think i've ever met a woman unaffected by it.

all this said, yesterday i read this post on feministing and its varied comment thread, and something about it has been needling me ever since. not needling in the sense that i necessarily disagree, but needling in the sense that i find the whole thing complicated and kinda exhausting.

the article, in sum, cites a study proving that most people who "diet" eventually gain the weight back. the intro paragraph:

The world's largest study of weight loss by a group of researchers at the University of California has proven, once and for all, that two-thirds of those who diet gain the weight back and put themselves at risk for a host of scary side effects—like heart attack, stroke, and diabetes—in the process. Diets also commonly lead to eating disorders, afflictions which affect 10 million Americans and rising.

not surprising, right? of course. and i even agree with the post's assertion that we, as a society, are continually and blatantly duped by a diet industry that has zero interest in helping us lose weight and every interest in separating us from our paychecks.

but wait - that's not exactly the post's point. it concludes, in bold lettering, "It is your emotions about those numbers [on the scale], not the numbers themselves, that have the power to make or break you." and here's where the rubber hits the road in the comment thread.

there have been many a feminist blog post about weight and body issues, and many have resulted in the same sniping arguments about fatness, thinness, health, and acceptance. i don't mean to rehash it all in detail here. but i'm troubled by assertions like these, made after a few commenters chimed in to say of course yo-you dieting is insane and beauty standards are wack, but there are more holistic, lifestyle-based ways to lose weight if you need to:

"I'm sorry, but any conscious restriction of food intake with the goal of losing weight counts as 'dieting' under any reasonable definition."

"So when researchers say that dieting doesn't work, they literally mean that any effort to restrict food intake is likely to be unsuccessful, or even harmful."

and this is where i start saying, out loud, to myself, wait, what?? you're trying to tell me that "any effort to restrict food intake" is probably a bad idea? newsflash: we do that every day. does this commenter actually know a living person who eats whatever they want, whenever they want all the time? because that's absurd. there are things called biology, and physiology, and nutrition - they are important! they matter! i "restrict" my food intake at a baseline level because it's proven as the healthy thing to do.

maybe you can say i'm stretching the meaning of these arguments past what they were supposed to mean. in parsing them within their context, i could cop to that. but i think the argument you see play out in the rest of the thread is that same old binary of "fuck beauty standards, total fat acceptance!" versus "fat is not healthy!"

of course, the "fat is not healthy" crowd does themselves no favors by often vastly overgeneralizing and thus donning the strawman suit. (hey, i'm all for health as a realistic and worthy goal as far as one's weight, but there are women who've got 30 pounds on me and could slaughter me in a 5K. so, your premise sucks.) and i dunno, the whole thing is so tiring, and you start to feel like whatever you think and however you feel must be wrong somehow. wanting to eat healthier? well, you're obviously "restricting your food intake" and thus a failure to the feminist movement. want to tell the world to kiss your fat ass and bring you another slice of cheesecake? well, society knows full well how to shame you for that one.

and for most equality-minded women, we just ping-pong in between the two arenas of guilt. different scenery, but essentially the same place. and this is feminist discourse, feminist thinking! how is there ever any hope for rehabilitating mainstream media? i dunno. i just came away from the whole thing a little sad about this state of affairs.

sigh. pass the ben & jerry's.

observed, today.

on the walk from work to the metro:

two yellow gummy bears, about a foot apart, lying on the cobblestone by a lamp post.

i like to pretend that this is some sort of sign from above. but...

*pauses for dramatic effect*

what could it mean?

that i will one day be mauled by a bear - near a post of some kind? that someone i know will soon bear asian twins? that i'm eating too much sugar?

so many possibilities.

the truth?

for some strange reason, i'm afraid to say it. embarrassed to say it. why? i'm not sure.

i am worried. all the time.

i am afraid. all the time.

this is true.

i stand on the corner waiting for the light to change, my hair hanging low against my ears, vertical blinds swinging through my peripheral vision. the sun's angle casts my shadow long against the curb, and a steady stream of water - from where, i have no idea, as it has not rained in days - curls around the edge of the street and past my feet. i realize that i don't know in which direction i'm moving; i realize that a little part of me is suffocating, somehow.

i'm a dull edge. i'm a butter knife. no, worse - i'm a spoon, sliding thick through life in a strange, indiscernible arc.

there should be a euphoria in me, now. have i misplaced it? has someone stolen it? has it deemed me an unworthy vessel and left me alone entirely?

i'm not sure.

but i have to get out from under this.

inspired by the employment gods, the baseball programming gods smile upon me as well.

what a day for lounging around! white sox game on WGN at 2:00, red sox game on ESPN at 8:00. love that cable television.

we were just discussing, though, why new england seems to be the only area of the country that doesn't carry the WGN Superstation. jason was perplexed by the fact that, upon my arrival in chicago, i had never heard of WGN - apparently it has both a local incarnation and national presence. who knew?

i mean, even his grandmother in rural georgia gets WGN! wherefore not boston? tragic indeed.

though apparently the loophole is if you get DirecTV, you get the Superstation, regardless of where you are. so, whenever we find ourselves living back in new england, it looks like we're gonna have to consider the dish...

pick up the receiver, i'll make you a believer.

at 12:15 this afternoon, i put in my two weeks notice.

i did this because half an hour earlier, i received a phone call from the head of development for a women's rights organization here in DC. and she offered me a job in her department. and a lot more money than i'm making right now.

so, i quit my current job. and i have a new one. an amazing one. an almost unimaginably ideal one. one that doesn't even quite feel real yet, because the perfectness of it all has yet to fully sink in.

people, this is why i have been a walking (and writing) embodiment of The Crazy for the past 30+ days. this is that annoyingly unbloggable stuff. but now, after a full month of interviewing and agonizing and chewing my fingernails to the quick (which, ok, i do regardless), i can tell you about it.

well, in a sense i can tell you about it. that sense is pretty much what i've just said. i've decided to go the overly way-über-cautious route and not provide any more identifying details about my new employer, and i certainly won't be blogging about any work-related stuff. the last thing i want to do is sabotage my dream job with my irritatingly self-absorbed ramblings! i also, as has been customary since i moved to DC, will not be blogging from work. ever. no matter how much the chicago tribune and/or manolo's shoe blogs tempt me. so, sad as it makes you, my internet peeps, you'll still only be hearing from me on evenings and weekends.

wow, that sounded really boring. like some kind of legal document or usage contract. so did i mention that i got a new job?? and a raise??? holy motherfrigging sweet baby jesus of incredibleness!

i can't even convey to you how excited i am. if i even attempted it, it would involve enough emoticons to choke a horse. and the written renditions of high-pitched squealing sounds. and no one likes those - not even me, the one making them. so suffice it to say, i am happy. very, very happy.

and thanks for putting up with me and my internet weirdness for the last month.

your wednesday one-liner.

courtesy of Overheard in New York, another precocious city kid. so young, yet so wise to the ways of urban life:

Little boy: The pigeon knows no fear.

--Central Park

how very obi wan of you, child. now what can you tell me of the cockroach and the rat?

and a picture.

this got me near hysterics the other day while i was at the office. this was a problem, as i work in a cubicle. i have never fought so hard in my life not to just lose it and laugh uncontrollably, you know, in that "holy shit i'm cracking up and i can't stop and now i'm cracking up more" kinda way.

this says something about my mental state as of late, i think.

courtesy of Meme Cats

a comparison.

things that i like, generally:

thunderstorms.

things that i don't like, when they descend at 4:30 am on a tuesday, causing the power to flicker on and off, electronics to beep and squeal angrily, and me to not be able to fall back to sleep for 45 minutes:

thunderstorms.

strange days.

i always knew that the first few bursts of spring weather after a long winter made people do strange things. however, i think yesterday takes the cake.

i was standing at the corner of M St., waiting at the crosswalk to continue my daily morning trek from the metro station to the office. the forecast for the day was 80 degrees, but it was starting off slowly - it couldn't have been more than 50 degrees as i stood there. i watched a woman approach the curb direct across the street, stop, and wait along with everyone else for the light to change.

she was probably in her mid-20s. short, maybe 5'3'' or so, and rail thin. her hair was lazily pulled back in a knot, and she had on a blue button-down shirt and khaki capri pants. she had two bags, one laptop and one smaller catch-all, slung across her shoulder.

she had no shoes on.

and i don't mean like, "and you should've seen how flimsy her flip-flops were, i mean, she might as well have not had any shoes on!" or "who walks around the city in gym socks, anyway?"

i mean, her feet were bare.

i stood there, aghast. i tried not to stare. but i was thoroughly flummoxed. i mean, no one walks around the downtown of a major urban center with no shoes on. not even bums and crazy people. the only rationale for such a behavior that i can imagine is waking up and thinking, "you know, i'd like to get a communicable disease today. oh, and perhaps step on a needle or a rusty nail!"

the light changed, and we walked past each other, me surreptitiously scanning her face for any latent signs of mental illness. and, though entirely inconclusive and inadmissible in a court of law, my spot-check deemed her clear of The Crazy. so what on earth was she doing wandering down a city street with no shoes on? and seemingly completely unperturbed by it??

baffling.

am i weird?

so i've developed this little habit.

when i run at the gym, i like to watch the food network. that's strange, right? in a very counter-intuitive kind of way. but it's actually not some weird masochistic thing or anything - though the food does often look really tasty - i just find it makes the time go by a little faster.

while on the treadmill today, watching gia de laurentiis make an eggplant, tomato, and penne dish, i pondered why this habit of watching the food network is working for me. i think that it's largely due to the fact that cooking shows are easy to watch with the sound off (rachael ray, i'm especially looking at you here). at the gym in our apartment complex, you have to plug into a little machine attached to the cardio machines in order to get sound, and really, i'd always rather run to music that the chatter of the tv anyway. so i can watch a half hour cooking show on mute, easily follow what's going on, and even play little guessing games as the meal progresses: what kind of raw meat is that, anyway? hmmm, what kind of salad will rachael ray serve with buffalo chicken pizza? and what kind of crazy cocktail will sandra lee come up with today??

however, i have to say, the cooking show combined with a 5K run has its off days. for example, at about the 2.9 mile mark today, i could no longer bear to watch ina garten making french toast. the milk, the butter, the big floppy pieces of bread squishing around in it - gack. if i'm going to puke on the treadmill, i damn sure want it to be because i've just freakishly run a half marathon, not because of televised dairy products.

overall, though, i highly recommend the food network as an amenable running companion. hey, maybe you'll even get an idea for a new dinner to make when you get off the treadmill. (i wouldn't know, as i usually get tripped up somewhere between the "boil water" and "drop ingredients in" portion of any recipe, but hey, it might work for you.)