The way it goes

I have a pretty sweet childcare set up. I don't have enough childcare (for 2 years now I've been working 40-50 hrs/wk on 24 hours of care) and we spend more on it than we do on the mortgage, but it's good care.  My kid (she needs a pseudonym handle, doesn't she?) hangs out with 2 other kids her age under the care of a nanny we share with a couple other families for 3 full days.

The nanny, who is AMAZING, has a 6 yr old son, who often spends part of the day with her/our kids. Rarely a full day, just a couple hours here and there, a bit more frequently in the summer. Whatever. He's a good kid, thoughtful and funny and the little kids adore him. The house is more of a wreck after he's been there, but, again, whatever. Overall, a totally sweet set-up.

Until today, when one of the other moms, decreed that her son was to have no more association with the 6 yr old because she felt he was in danger of picking up negative behaviors. The cited examples were trivial (6 yr old overheard saying 'damnit', 6 yr old rolls eyes when asked not to dump sand in yard, 6 yr old calls someone a 'jerk').

The first problem here is that none of these things is a big deal. At all. I mean really, get the fuck over it. The second problem is more paradigmatic. Let's say for the sake of argument, that one of the observed behaviors actually was repeatedly problematic (but not violent). Let's say the 6 yr old made a game out of throwing food all over the place or dug up a garden or yelled nasty things at neighbors from the sidewalk. Let's say, in other words, that the 6yr old was engaged in behavior that *actually* suggested a need for more direction/guidance/correction from his mama.

That's not what he would have got. Instead, he would have gotten, and will get, less time with his mama because somebody feels that her kid's care, because paid for, is much more important.

I am having a hard time figuring out exactly the right way to state the problem: yes, the nanny is an employee, yes employers have a right to dictate (some) terms of employment, yes, one is entitled to look out for one's kid. But you are not allowed to not look out for other kids in your purview. You just aren't, that's a Sybil Vane rule for being a Decent Human.  

And yet it doesn't play that way. The decreeing mom is, at least in her view, an attentive and involved parent who intervenes when necessary to secure the best environment for her son. The nanny is a possibly slipshod parent who can neither effectively stop undesired behavior or secure appropriate placement for her son while she works.

In other words, the woman who pays for childcare makes the rules so her kid gets the most focused attention, and is therefore the Good Parent, while the woman who provides childcare has to follow the rules so her kid gets even less attention, making her the Less Good Parent.

It's a fucked up paradigm.

I hate my superego

Alison Bechdel gets it right.

True about writing too.

That said, I "have" to do some writing this weekend for a talk I'm giving on Monday. Needless to say, I have a list of errands that suddenly really neeeeeed to get done....

About motherfucking time

The National Partnership for Women and Families released this news story today. All emphasis is mine.

Pregnant women with substance abuse problems can have successful pregnancies if they receive treatment early in their pregnancies, according to a Kaiser Permanente study released Thursday, USA Today reports. Women who use illicit drugs, alcohol and tobacco usually are at greater risk than other women for complications during pregnancy.

The study was conducted by Nancy Goler, an ob-gyn at Kaiser Permanente Northern California, and colleagues. Goler says the key to success for the mothers was the approach to care at KPNC where pregnant women with substance abuse issues are provided care in one place. KPNC screens all pregnant women for illicit drug, alcohol and tobacco use. Pregnant women with substance abuse problems can receive counseling with on-site social workers and licensed therapists directly following their regular prenatal care appointments at KPNC.

For the study, the researchers examined a population of 50,000 pregnant women who sought care at KPNC. Of those women, 2,100 women received treatment at KPNC for substance abuse, while 160 women declined such treatment.

The women who received substance abuse treatment during their first trimester were no more likely than the other pregnant women who were not substance abusers to have a preterm delivery, or develop a condition in which the placenta detaches from the uterus, the study found. In addition, women who received substance abuse treatment were no more likely to deliver stillborn or low-birthweight infants or infants who required ventilator care, according to the study.

There's a little more at the link, but that's the jist of it. And thank fucking god.

As long-term readers probably know, I'm a big fan of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, an organization that focuses on defending the rights of pregnant women with drug problems. Yes, sometimes the cases they handle are uncomfortable ones--as is going to be the case with anyone who's doing really progressive work that challenges conventional beliefs. And yes, as they often point out, they are defending the rights of *all* women; if pregnant drug users get sent to jail for "chemically endangering a child," then every pregnant women who is exposed at any time to any chemical substance that is known or believed to pose a risk to fetal health could face the possibility of criminal prosecution.

Not to mention the incentive that such prosecutions provide to pregnant women not to seek care. That's the thing that bothers me the most about this kind of thing. Let's say you're a pregnant smoker. Maybe you don't know you're pregnant for two, three months (I didn't). So you smoke, and you go out drinking with your friends, and then at some point you realize that these PMS symptoms you've been having have been hanging on for an awfully long time and omg, could I be fucking pregnant? So you go take a test and it's positive.

God fucking forbid that that pregnancy not turn out well in a country that prosecutes pregnant drug users for murder.

Sure, most educated middle-class white women will figure, "oh, those laws don't apply to *me*," and they'll go on to get good prenatal care, and their pregnancies will turn out fine (not least because, contrary to popular scare tactics, drinking or smoking or even drug use during pregnancy does not actually guarantee problems--the placenta is a marvelously protective organ, and most pregnancies where women drink or smoke or use drugs turn out fine). But also because we tend to assume--rightly--that we aren't the target of this kind of shit, and that if we accidentally get caught up in it, well, we can hire lawyers and explain ourselves and judges and juries will listen to us.

But educated middle-class white women aren't the only ones who have babies. Even though, if the statistics for pregnant women reflect those of other populations (and why wouldn't they?), whites are *more* likely to use illegal drugs than any other group except Native Americans. And, of course, the presumption that this kind of prosecution won't affect us is a direct rebuttal of the idea that we are all equal under the law--and sooner or later, some average white middle-class college graduate good mom is going to find herself in jail, like poor women before her, because she was unlucky enough to have a problem with her pregnancy.

And in the meantime, women who don't assume that discriminatory laws don't apply to them--mostly poor women of all races--will be faced with that choice: could I be fucking pregnant? And if I am, do I dare go see a doctor or am I going to get my ass arrested by doing that? And if you're poor and marginalized already, and you have a drug problem, and you lack health care, and god knows what other already-existing barriers to finding a doctor you're dealing with, that threat is probably enough to keep you putting off making that appointment. I know it would me. And then, if problems develop, you're fucked.

So. Thank god Kaiser's realized that the proper approach to this is to realize that pregnant drug-using women are *patients* with two health conditions: drug use, and pregnancy, and that what they need is *treatment* for both. There may be some problems with testing all pregnant women for drug and alcohol use, sure; I'd rather se such testing be offered but not required. And it's definitely got to be free of charge to the patient, and the results have to be confidential. But I think that with a guarantee of confidentiality and non-prosecution, making such tests an "opt-out" rather than "opt-in" feature of pre-natal care is probably a good idea, just like vaccinations and amnio for older women and all the rest of it. But that's a side issue.

The real point here is something we've known for ages but that, in a culture that doesn't trust women, we all too often forget: if you want to ensure healthy, happy babies and healthy, happy children, you need to make sure that women, mamas, are healthy and happy themselves.

my kingdom for a link

It's humid in Chicago and I'm swamped with the gov's insane budget plan so I'm throwin' out links:
Tom Colicchio has some thoughts on women in the culinary world and might actually get it. (via Postbourgie)

Jonathan Weissman, unfortunately, does not. (via Jack and Jill)

ABC thinks big soft girls are in. (I'll believe that when I can buy clothes in JCrew.)

Girls Read Comics has an interview up with Kate Beaton ,whose work sounds eerily like the frakked up conversations on the couch I have with Roomie.


(There's also an interview up with the writer of Genius, a new comic that asks the question: What if the world's best military strategist was a 17 year old black female gangbanger in LA? Interesting. But what's more interesting to me is that the artist is a woman of color, Afua Richardson.)


And, yes, because I'm a dork and am pretty tired of hearing the question 'Where are black/brown people/women in comics?', these links from Racialicious about race and comics are particularly useful. (Go, Wizard World Chicago!)


Tim Wise (that 'angry' young man) breaks down some problematic comparisons between Katrina and recent midwest flood victims.

If you haven't read the blog from The National Women's Law Center, you should.
There's a call for submissions for the Fat Women of Color Carnival over here.

In South Africa, to say 'race is arbitrary' would be to engage in understatement. (via Racialicious)


I was going to throw up a snarky link to Eric Schaeffer's gross new show, but why? You'd all just want to claw your eyes out and bleach your brain.

On the other hand

Maybe some white liberals actually have a sense of humor. Eric McWhitey over at EotAW is selling this Obama bumper sticker.


Proceeds go to the Obama campaign. Because Eric's classy like that.

Patriotism is not something you have or don't have

Great op-ed in the LA Times today about history, American Indians and the nuanced ways we should understand patriotism. Michael Elliott writes about the Indians who defeated Custer in the iconic battle, and the lesser known facts that Indians also fought alongside Custer, and that many members of his opponents' tribes fought the next year with the U.S. Army against the Nez Perce. He moves from this example to the apparent conflict between high enlistment rates among Native Americans, and the fact that their tribes claim independence from the US.

Another example: 

The Lakota Sioux offered some of the most fierce resistance to the United States in the 1860s and 1870s, but in the decades that followed, Lakota artists regularly incorporated the design of the U.S. flag into their beadwork, painting and weaving. What those stars and stripes meant to the Lakota artists could vary widely: In their hands, the U.S. flag could be a gesture of their new allegiance, a plea for justice from the U.S., a symbol of the nation for which their young men were no fighting or simply a decorative motif they knew to be popular with collectors. It might have been all of these things at the same time.

Ultimately Elliott concludes that "genuine patriotism can still take place amid divided loyalties. Americans are capable of more nuanced thinking about what it means to be an American than we usually give ourselves credit for," and that this genuine patriotism is "too big to fit on a lapel pin."

Agreed.

What's wrong with this bridge?

Belle Waring's comment that "America's infrastructure looks baaad, people" reminds me of something I wanted to blog about a few weeks ago. My cousin, who is Egyptian and in his mid-thirties, works for a large multi-national corporation that sends him traveling all over the world. This June, his travels found him on his first visit to the United States for a two-week training, right here in Chicago! So naturally we hung out, and boy was it weird to see one of my Egyptian relatives right here in my town.

One of the first things he told me when I asked what he thought so far was "Why is the infrastructure so bad?" All along our rides through Chicago and the suburbs he kept pointing out to me rusty bridges and cracked roads and other structural problems (he's inclined to notice these things, being an engineer). But he said "I expected it to be more modern than Europe" and I kind of laughed. He was like "no, really! How can a country that's not that old look so bad?" He was horrified by the airport and said that overall, he expected the United States to be a lot richer and better kept. Who is responsible for these things? He wanted to know.

So I spent a long time trying to explain the many levels of government that are responsible for different kinds of infrastructure--city, county, state, and federal. He found this baffling. But he got the fundamental point right away: in the course of our several-hour discussion that followed, about race, class, government, taxes and accountability, he, without any prompting from me, just up and said:

"The first thing I noticed when I got there is that there are two Americas."

Congratulations, buddy, you've just landed a job as a political consultant.

Dear fellow white liberals

Please, for the love of god, think about what you're saying and then STFU.

Thank you,

Bitch PhD

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

I'm working up to actually blogging about the news again, or starting blogging about the news, whichever. But sometimes I like to give y'all a slice of life.

Reading this piece about Nancy Pelosi's sexism remarks "I'm the victim of sexism all the time" reminded me of the conversation I had with my boyfriend just last night. He's still looking for a permanent job, and I often try to help him think about just what sort of job he might be best suited for. More importantly, together we try and figure out what sort of job he might enjoy the most. Although I mention my dude frequently, I suppose the readers of this blog might not know very much about what he's like, which is: incredibly smart and verbal, outspoken and opinionated, light-hearted and joke-making, and extremely easily bored. He doesn't take well to tedium or repetitive tasks, which means being a lawyer is kind of a bad fit. Anyway, so I was telling him last night that I thought he'd make a good criminal lawyer and he should apply to work at the public defender's office.

And he said "why?"

I had to think about it for a bit. Obviously, intelligence, ability to think on your feet, confidence, and sincere empathy for your clients are important qualities that 1) he has and 2) are important for such a role. But I have all those, too, and for some reason I don't think I'd be as good as he would in that job. And I was trying to figure out why. I thought back to my few times in criminal court, and the vibe I got there was that it was a very clubby atmosphere. Everyone knew each other: the PDs, the prosecutors, the clerks, the sheriff's deputies, the cops, the judges. The pre-court environment was a banterfest. And I realized the quality that I perceived he has that I don't is that he could establish relationships with people where he was both liked, and taken seriously as someone who would not put up with bullshit, being dicked around, or being intimidated. I feel less confident in my ability to do so. And we both agreed that this particular fact has a lot to do with gender.

Since I've started practicing, I've found it very hard to know how to deal with lawyers outside my office (if I worked at a bigger organization, it'd probably apply to lawyers within my office, but I don't, so it doesn't). I always feel like I'm either falling on the side of being too friendly, or being too aggressive. As a woman, it's very hard for me to find a space where I am both liked, and advocating firmly for my clients. This is something that my confident boyfriend would have absolutely no trouble doing. But my problem isn't for lack of confidence.

Ironically enough, the problem is the word that happens to be the hallmark of this blog. That's right: bitch. I'm worried about being too aggressive, or even too firm and unyielding, for fear of being thought a bitch. But I also worry about being too accommodating; I don't want to be thought of as someone who can be backed into compliance.

I thought: maybe I should just give up on my desire to be liked. I'm here to advocate for my clients, after all, not to win a popularity contest. But being liked isn't valuable just because it makes you feel good. Being liked by opposing counsel makes it much easier to reach a favorable conclusion in your case, to successfully negotiate for your client, and makes the whole enterprise a lot more pleasant. And when you're a man, being liked and being tough aren't in tension with one another.

Would that it were so for the rest of us.

coolly arrogant v. hotly ignorant

Yesterday, pushing the privilege meme, Karl Rove called Obama 'coolly arrogant:'

"Even if you never met him," Rove said, "You know this guy. He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

So...if I stand around a country club with a martini, cigarette, a hot date and a healthy bag of snark, does that make me 'coolly arrogant' or just a regular old Gen X-er?

Rove's comment prompts some deep thoughts:
1. how many black people actually belong to a country club?
2. of those black people, how many would actually make snide comments about their fellow privileged country clubbers?
3. how many country clubs actually allow smoking?
4. since when does 'coolly arrogant' mean something bad when pop culture/books/cinema tells us 'coolly arrogant' men are frakking hot?

A Few Coolly Arrogant Men We (ok, I) Have Loved:
Mr. Darcy

Captain Wentworth

Toby Stephens

Cary Grant

James Bond

Daniel Craig, James Bond

Pierce Brosnan, Thomas Crown

Steve McQueen

Rupert Everett

Omar Sharif

Peter O'Toole (when he was less cadaverous)

Jean Reno

Morpheus

George Clooney

Clive Owen

almost every Regency romance hero ever written

Batman

Magneto

Bruce Willis

Prospero

Severus Snape

Nick Charles

Mr. Tibbs

Han Solo

Spencer Tracy

Paul Henreid

Humphrey Bogart

Spock

In the meantime, the GOP needs to resolve their collective cognitive-Obama-dissonance if the best they can come up with is calling Obama a milk chocolate WASP.

(Feel free to add your own 'coolly arrogant' object of desire in comments - male or female, all are welcome.)

(edited to remove all the misspellings of 'coolly.' geez. yeah, i'm edumacated.)

I had dental work today

This is kind of a cool new blog.

Recipe

For Exhaustion:

Prerequisite: delicate lame-ness

1) Travel to DC

2)Have drinks, 4pm - 7pm; resume smoking

3) return to friend's apartment to cook dinner

4) discover broken toilet; stress about it.

5) skip dinner for Home Depot trip, fuss with toilet, sleep on couch

6) next day, walk from Adams Morgan to the Mall, putz around museums with 5 trillion other people

7) Watch 2 of 3 Bourne movies, go to party to meet Important Friends of Friend

8) sleep on couch

9) Watch 3rd Bourne movie

10) sleep on couch

11) take flight home which is so bumpy flight attendants are never allowed to leave seats

12) exit airport to 95 degrees and Code Orange smog level; re-quit smoking

13) peer in fridge, see none of the component parts for any below recipes

14) die of petty exhaustion

You wouldn't think, given ingredients 7 and 9, that the exhaustion would turn out, but trust me, it will.

For Cala

If you don't want to turn the oven on for the cherry-almond gratin (which I gotta say, despite warning Squab that you have to eat the whole thing at one go, I ended up putting some of it in the fridge last night and am now eating it for breakfast, and it's still pretty good), make this for dessert instead:

strawberry/peach/lambic sorbet

First, make a simple syrup.

1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup water

Boil it until the sugar dissolves and it's starting to be a little thicker than just sugarwater. Take it off the heat and let it cool.

Take six cups of strawberries. Puree them in a blender, or with an immersion blender if you have such a thing. Add the simple syrup. Pour in half a big bottle or a whole small one of peach lambic. Blend it all up.

Put it in yer ice cream maker, follow the directions.

Makes enough for one ice-cream-maker-ful, and yes, it'll taste beery. Deliciously beery. Not for children.

This guy gave me the recipe.

Weekend plans

Continuing the hot weather cooking.

Cold roast lemon-rosemary chicken

Get a chicken. Rinse it out. Put it in a pan. In a bowl, mix up about a quarter cup of olive oil, maybe half, whatever; some salt, some pepper, the zest of a lemon, a crushed clove or two of garlic, and a bunch of snipped rosemary from the bushes out back (or the store).

Run your hands under the chicken skin (it is nice to have short nails for things like this). Then grab a tablespoon and pour about a tablespoon of the oil mixture into the skin of each leg, each side of the breast. Smoosh it around under the skin.

Poke a bunch of holes into the zested lemon and stick it and a few rosemary branches inside the chicken.

If you've planned ahead and used a big roasting pan, wash 10 or so potatoes and put them on either side of the chicken. Pour the remaining oil mixture over the potatoes.

Stick the pan into the oven at about 400 degrees. If you have a bbq, put it on that and close the top--that way you don't heat up the house. Check it after about half an hour; are the potatoes done? If so, pull 'em out and stick 'em in a bowl in the fridge. If not, check again in about 10 minutes or so. If you're using an oven, turn it down after you take the potatoes out, to 300 degrees, and check the chicken in another 20 minutes or so. If you're using a bbq, opening it up will cool it down quite a bit, so no need to turn it down and check the chicken in 20 minutes anyway. Etc. When the chicken is done, pull it out, put it on a plate or something, and stick it in the fridge. Unless your kid is hassling you about it, and then he can have a leg.

Drain the juices and put 'em in a jar or something. Use them for gravy, maybe.

Tzatsiki potato salad

If you roasted your potatoes, don't peel them. If you didn't, then boil the potatoes, drain them and put them in the fridge, then peel them when they're cold. In either case, cut them into potato-salad sized chunks.

Split and seed a nice big cucumber. Grate it and salt it and set it in a colander to drain for half an hour or more.

Mix the drained cucumber up with about a cup of yogurt (ideally, you want to have drained this too, with a cheesecloth--or use the thick greek kind). Add salt, pepper, about a tablespoon of olive oil, and a crushed garlic clove. Maybe some snipped mint or basil (or both) and/or oregano, if you like. Mix this all up with the potatoes, stick it back in the fridge.

Cherry-almond Gratin

I used the recipe here, with a couple changes.

Get a couple pounds of cherries. Don't spend two hours running around town looking for a cherry pitter, because you'll probably just get a cheap plastic one that'll break. If you want one, apparently the one from Oxo is the one to get--who knew? Anyway, if you're going to get one, call ahead. Otherwise you just have to pull the cherries in half and slide your thumb in to get the pit out. Sigh.

Anyway, so pit the cherries. Put them in a good saucepan on the stove with the juice from a lemon and a couple tablespoons of sugar, assuming they're nice sweet Rainiers (more sugar, obvs., if they're the tart kind).

Get your kid to stir them over medium high heat while you wash the coffee grinder. About the time you're done, the kid'll be bored with stirring, so put him onto grinding you a cup of almonds while you stir. Once he's done, have him pour the cup of almonds into a mixing bowl. Add a stick of softened butter and mix it all up. Add a couple eggs and a couple tablespoons of sour cream. Keep mixing. Then add (stirring by hand now!) a cup of powdered sugar and a quarter teaspoon salt.

Let that sit while the cherries finish cooking--basically the liquid wants to be a mediumish syrupy thing. Pour the cherries into a buttered 2- or 3-quart casserole or souffle dish (basically, you want something that's deep rather than shallow) and stick it in the fridge.

Have a beer.

After 20, 30 minutes or so, pull the cherries out. They should be cool enough to pour the cream mixture over the top without it melting. Do so, and then stick it into the oven at 375 degrees for about 20 minutes; it should be nice and brown.

Pull it out and let it cool. Have some more beer, eat some olives, go to the pool or beach or park, whatever. Later you'll have the fanciest yummy summer dinner in the world. Add a salad or some sliced tomatoes if you like.

Cool it

Go out and get yourself a honeydew melon. Or a cantaloupe. Or whatever.

Quarter it, seed it, and cut the edible parts into a blender. Add a li'l bit of water and the juice of a lime, one per blenderful (it'll take prolly 3-4 blenders to blend a whole melon). Puree it all and pour it into a big bowl.

Add a bottle of plain kefir, if you can get it. Or a tub of plain yogurt. Nonfat, whole milk, whatever. Stir it up really good.

Sprinkle a fair bit of sea salt on it to bring out the flavor. Maybe you picked up some mint, too, which makes a nice garnish and/or you can just put it in a mojito.

That's it. Great for a nice cold dinner with maybe some olives and bread and goat cheese, or dolmas (which I got at TJs yesterday, cheap!). Great for breakfast the next day.

If you wanna get fancy, maybe use coconut milk instead of the yogurt, and a teensy bit of fish sauce and maybe some cayenne or other spicy pepper. I bet it would be good with cold cooked shrimp or scallops like that.

I don't know what's up with the twigs on the soup in the picture, but I linked the picture to the recipe I stole it from. I guess you could do that if you wanted to get all fancy, but isn't that sort of inimical to the point of summer cooking?

Good Things, Bad Things

It's really shocking how I've basically stopped blogging altogether--I mean, my last post was 3 weeks ago, and it was about sunglasses, okay? That doesn't count as a post. Blogging has been a staple of my life for the last 4 years or so, although I officially started my first blog in college, back in 2002. I guess that's what happens when life is changing.

Last weekend, I moved into an apartment I will be sharing with my boyfriend. We've been dating for, let's see, about a year and 5 months. He's moving his stuff in here this weekend. It's a gorgeous 3-bedroom apartment in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. It's on the second floor, and the living room has the most beautiful built-in woodwork I've ever seen in a rental. I know a 3-bedroom sounds extravagant, but my share of the rent is actually less than it was when I was living alone in a 1-bed. You really do get more value for your money up here. And I have a garage to put my car in now. Did I mention I bought a car? Yeah, that was back in April. I guess I've been acquiring some stuff. What I really want now is to acquire a dining room table, one of those big old hulking wood ones that doesn't look very pretty but is sturdy, to put in our lovely dining room with the arched doors and the chandelier.

So this move is a good thing. It shouldn't seem like much of a change--we've spent basically 6 nights out of 7 together for most of the time we've been dating, but it does. When I leave the house every morning, leaving him in bed, and drive down the lakeshore to work, I feel good. When I think about spending at least the next year in this spacious apartment, orbiting each other's space, I feel a thrill.

My work is a mixed blessing. First, it's exciting. Crazy shit happens to me every day at work, and I continue to be interesting in the various problems my clients have, and feel passionate about helping them. I've become the sort of person I worried that I wouldn't be: the kind of person who gets shit done. In school and in my previous jobs I've always been basically a slacker, and I worried that in this job, too, I might sit around all day surfing the web and putting things off until the last minute. This was something I agonized about in the months before I started work, worrying that I would be a failure. But there is no time for that. Things are rocketing along and I am riding on, trying to keep up. My responsibilities increase. This week, I'm conducting a deposition and then defending one right after. I'll be doing an entire trial later this summer. I've done hearings and motions, and won and lost. I've had at least two major screw-ups, and I survived. This is all fantastic for my professional development.

But I am exhausted. And I don't even work that much--an average day is 8 or 9 hours, with an occasional 8-o'clock night or weekend day thrown in. But the toll of dealing with clients and trying to handle a shitload of cases all at once, and workplace frustrations, means that at the end of the day, all I want to do is go home to my boyfriend, eat dinner, watch a little cable news and pass out. I feel guilty complaining--all my other lawyer friends either have to work longer than me on less interesting matters, or are underemployed and need steady work. The work is great. But it's taken a toll on the other parts of my life. My friendships have slipped. I don't write much any more. I've all but stopped listening to music. I feel isolated, and like I haven't been having much fun.

This is all probably my fault. But I knew it would be like this and I didn't do anything to stop it. I was terrified when I graduated--having spent 20 straight years of my life in school, I knew how good I'd had it. Each new semester with its new slate of classes and professors, new ideas, new books I was forced to read. School-wide controversies that inflamed my passions, however petty or small the matter, gossip, competition. Now my work world is filled with drama, but it's a horrible drama--people getting evicted, arrested, relapsing into drug abuse, disappearing for weeks at a time, going into the hospital and finding out they have cancer. I don't let myself feel sadness about much of it because it would destroy me.

But I do feel sad about my own life, and how I feel like my world has gotten and continues to get smaller, and a lot of what I want is fun, and I'm not getting it. And I don't even take as much joy in arguing any more, whether it's online or in the real world--I just feel sort of defeated.

Maybe I just need a vacation.

A musing

If you missed Judith Warner's piece in the NYT today, click on over.

late in life, I’ve come to some realizations about Making Choices and the impossibility of Having it All.

These realizations don’t turn around the usual poles of work and family, but rather, embarrassingly, around a series of much greater banalities: the impossibility of having pedicures at the same time that you’re meeting deadlines, of wearing unstained clothes when you haven’t the time or the inclination to buy a full-length mirror, the basic fact that sustaining a thought and applying a full face of makeup — without, say, forgetting one eye — are mutually exclusive. At least for me. With middle age, these things have become much more important than they ought to be.

I spent the last couple days hanging around with my grad school girlfriend, the one I christened Mira Sorvino back in the early days of the blog. We hung out at her mother-in-law's house, letting the kids play in the huge backyard with the fun moveable sculptures; took the kids to the zoo (after jumping my car battery, grr); and then last night she and her husband and Mr. B. and I went out to see a band! Just like real people! And were amused to be a solid 20 years older, probably, than most of the kids in the coffeehouse/bar.

We kept saying to each other things like, "we just had a ten minute conversation about baby wipes" and then laughing. We reassured each other that we're just the same as we used to be, but secretly, of course, we're both a tiny bit softer around the middle and there are a few more lines on our faces. She laughed when I told her that I'd "meant to wear makeup, but I forgot," and cracked me up by layering on lip gloss thickly and then saying, in her dumb teenager voice, "do you think this'll look good on your cock?"

The not-too-hidden subtext of the evening was how startling it is to find ourselves at midlife, more or less, and as mommies; we were checking in with each other for resassurance that we're still the same people, right? Even though in our day-to-day lives we're amazed (and amused) to hear the eye-rolling mommy things coming out of our mouths.

Part of the fear-of-mommyness, I suppose, is internalized misogyny. But part of it isn't, I don't think; it's a nervous recognition of the confines of the role. That one finds oneself saying and doing irritating, fussy things and on the one hand, there's wisdom in realizing where that fussing comes from, but on the other, one isn't *just* this irritating, fussy person.

My current working theory is that the isolation of mommies is the real problem (blah blah nuclear family blah blah). That when I get together with women friends, in person or over the phone, and we can laugh at ourselves and the ridiculousness of monitoring other people's pee, for god's sake, that we get to be more than just that little role. But on a day-to-day basis, without that laughter and camaraderie, when the people you mostly turn to in order to see yourself reflected back are, in fact, the people whose pee you're monitoring and whose messes you're cleaning, questions like "do I *look* like a middle-aged mommy?" take on way too much importance.

Civil Rights

Hey, the ACLU is having a cool week-long symposium on LGBT rights. Check it out.

An honest question

For real, why peel carrots?

Dr. Vane Goes to Washington

A mama-blogger that I very much like had a post a weekish ago about going with her young kid to Washington DC and touring about. She noted the sort of squeamish conflict between the kind of idealism and awe a city full of landmarks and history can inspire, especially when you are narrating the city to your kid, and the cynicism she feels when she considers what goes on in DC and what it has come to mean for her.

It's an interesting point, I thought. I go to DC with some regularity to visit my closest friend and am leaving tomorrow for another visit. I've not gone to landmarks or museums in years, but wonder if I should make a point to this time. There's something about an election year, right? And a finally-concluded, exhausting primary? And worry about whether legislation can solve our energy crisis? And worry about what my daughter's America will look like?

I love going to DC because I love seeing my friend and because we tend to laze about. But I wonder if this isn't precisely the right time to force a little cognitive dissonance into my experience of place, and if a weekend away might be even more restorative if I saw it as a chance to confront more of what I love/hate about how things are done in this country.

This is maybe a just a long way of saying I'm off for the weekend, and I don't have to take any toddler entertainment on the plane with me. Whee!

A great step forward for racial harmony

Ta-Nehisi Coates doesn't get some "tribes of whiteness."

Belle Waring explains cucumber sandwiches. Which are, indeed, yummy.

Courtesy The Edge of the American West.

Happy gay marriage day

Pseudonymous Kid wants you to know, however, that he sympathizes with the little boy in this picture, because "it probably is kind of boring."

Someday hopefully it will be.

Beyond comment

This button is for sale at the Texas state GOP convention.

Needless to say, officials had no idea that this was going on. They "wouldn't have let [the vendor] sell it."

That's it. No "we're shocked" or "we're deeply ashamed" or "the vendor is banned for life." Just "we didn't know."

Craven bigot assholes.

Can't we all just get along?

Reader Diane sent me a link to this article, with the following email:

So I got this article forwarded to me by a friend who can sometimes come across as, well, I hate to say it, but a little too crazy-liberal for me. - she has really sent me some off the wall stuff in the past and so I tend to look at things she sends me with a somewhat tainted view.
I don't even know where the article is from and I think I have had such a long day at work that my brain isn't even allowing me to get through the article. But is it wrong of me to first want to tell this guy to get off his soapbox, and then even though he says, "Your disappointment at the electoral defeat of Senator Hillary Clinton is fresh, the sting is new, and the anger that animates many of you--who rightly point out that the media was often sexist in its treatment of the Senator--is raw, pure and justified." I still feel like he's being condescending. And I just feel like he's roping all white women into this article.....I don't know anyone that would vote for McCain over Obama -even if they were 110% behind Clinton. Where is he coming up with this stuff? Am I just not getting the articles that tell me that if I was a real Hillary supporter I would vote McCain?
So my question to you is this - Am I just having a rough day? Am I reading too little/too much into this article and should I be sitting here thinking, "wow. how true." should I go back and read it tomorrow morning when I am a little fresher and not so end-of-day bitter?

The rest of this post is my answer.



Ugh. Yes, there are some strong Clinton supporters saying things (mostly on blogs, I think) about not voting in the elections. And a lot of Clinton supporters who believe (wrongly, imo) that Obama's campaign was itself misogynist (he made some blunders, but I believe they were genuine blunders and expressions of yer everyday kind of sexism, the stuff we all have, rather than Really Bad Sexism).

And a lot of the black women bloggers I know do feel like this is a "white feminist" position, inasmuch as a lot of the rhetoric about feminists voting for Clinton has talked about the choice between a woman and a black candidate in ways that people can be either women or black but not both.

So I think he has a point. *I*, personally, think that the "I'm staying home" reaction is strong disappointment, and frustration focusing on voting (mistakenly) because voting or not is something people can *do*, whereas being angry at generalized misogyny and media coverage is the kind of thing it's very difficult to figure out how to *act* upon.

That said. "I left the Democrats twenty years ago when they told me that my activism in the Central America solidarity and South African anti-apartheid movements made me a security risk" is pretty much just as My Moral Purity Means More Than Party Politics as any woman saying she's going to stay home is, and I'm on tenterhooks at the possibility that this latest little intra-lefty spat could turn, once again, into the condescending (no, you're not wrong) lefty men telling the feminist lefty women that their issues are more important than ours, blah blah blah. The article would have been a *lot* better coming from a woman. Then again, I don't think many women would write that article, in that way. (I could be wrong.) And I do think that what's going to happen is that, as Clinton demonstrated with her concession speech, she's going to be 100% behind Obama and urge her supporters to do the same, and by and large we/they will.

Which is to say yes, I think that the women saying "I'm staying home" are overreacting. But I also think that the men saying "you selfish feminists, how dare you" are *also* overreacting--to the expression of female anger, disappointment, autonomy. Plus ca change. It's reasonable for someone to think that electing Clinton was *their* overriding goal, and that now she's out of the race, they won't vote, just as it would be reasonable for someone to think that electing Obama was their overriding goal, and if he was out of the race they'd stay home (as a *lot* of men on the left were saying during the primaries, and as a lot of other people were worrying, but I didn't hear a lot of people *lecturing* them the way this article is doing).

What I want is for someone to say yes, it sucks; yes, the coverage was misogynist; yes, Clinton's had an uphill battle for her entire national political career (and yes, her decisions about how to address/handle that, e.g. being hawkish, were flawed, in a lot of ways). And yes, the reality of party politics means that in this election, women who care about women's rights (reproductive freedom, financial support for single moms, poverty, equal opportunity, employment non-discrimination, etc) should *of course* vote for Obama, because McCain is opposed to to all these things. And maybe some of the feminist outrage is indeed an expression of white entitlement and/or class entitlement--since, after all, representation at the top is more of an immediate issue for professional women than it is for working-class women. But that doesn't mean it isn't a legitimate expression of anger against sexism as well.

(P.S.: I also just got this email from People for the American Way. I think they get it exactly right.)

I never really thought I'd see the day when a woman or an African American had a real chance to win the presidency in this country. Yet in this amazing year, we saw both.

It made me think about how far we've come, and how far we still have to travel.

[June 11th] was "Loving Day," the anniversary of the 1967 Loving vs. Virginia Supreme Court decision that allowed interracial couples to marry in this country. Mildred Loving died this year, but I'm glad she lived long enough to see the child of an interracial marriage run for president.

It's proof of the profound influence of the Court, and the importance of a Constitution amended to reflect increasingly progressive and egalitarian values. This is a nation where once women couldn't vote, and black children couldn't go to school with white children. The changes demanded by the Constitution and enforced by the Supreme Court over the years led directly to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama making history.

Yesterday also brought a different kind of victory in the Supreme Court. By the narrowest of margins, 5-4, the Court rebuked President Bush and his quest for limitless power, and ruled that habeas corpus must apply to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

This is precisely what the Court should be doing: standing up to the abuse of power, guarding our civil rights and demanding justice. I'm grateful to all our members and supporters who signed our petitions and supported People For Foundation's amicus brief in the Guantanamo case. The case was won, by a single vote.

But I fear for the day when the balance on the Court shifts. Had there been one more Justice appointed by President Bush on the Court yesterday, the outcome would have been very different. That's why People For's 2008 Supreme Court campaign is so important. John McCain has promised the GOP that he will nominate exactly the kind of judges George W. Bush nominated. We can't let that happen.

NCMR2008: Organizing Locally at the Grassroots

(Audio of the presentation available here)

If the Faith Based Organizing panel was up my alley, this panel was in the big broad street that led right to my door. Panel participant Nancy Doyle Brown, representing the Twin Cities Media Alliance was someone I’d worked with on several events, panel facilitator Steve Macek who was working with the Chicago Media Action and I knew each other from left-wing third party politics days, and I’d met Tracy Rosenberg of the Media Alliance several years before. New to me was the work of the Media Mobilization Project, which was represented not by Todd Wolfson but by Nijmie Dzurinko and I’d long been a fan of the kill-your-TV Reclaim the Media, represented by Karen Toering.

Since I only went to two panels, I’m not sure how this was replicated across the convention, but while the faith based panel had three men and one woman, this panel had one guy (the facilitator) and four women – and at least two of them were women of color. So if this represented the people who are in the trenches doing real organizing, the movement is clearly not another white liberal male phenomenon. (Although many of the people in my faith-based community organizing group – the volunteer leaders – are women and it’s my perception that by and large the bulk of work in social justice work gets done by women. No great secret. Another post.)

The Media Mobilization Project is doing groundbreaking work in Philadelphia. They were described as the descendants of Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s March and Philly Indymedia; their central tenets are that “1) issues of media democracy, justice and reform cannot be detached from larger socio-economic questions, and 2) new participatory media tools offer the possibility of fusing otherwise fragmented struggles for justice.” The representative, Nijmie Dzurinko, is the director of the Philadelphia Student Union, which is organizing in West Philadelphia high schools. The campaigns bring new media into standard grassroots organizing; their YouTube channel has clips like this of taxi drivers organizing with each other around the central taxi authority.

Tracy’s Media Alliance has been doing good grassroots work for a good long time – thirty years. They’re from the West Coast, out of the Bay Area. They are the fiscal agent for groups like the SF Bay Area Indymedia, the anarchist-run A-Infos Radio Project, what looks like radio pirates San Francisco Liberation Radio. They’re somewhere in the traditional non-profit realm (as far as I can tell) but don’t seem to have problems working with the more grassroots/radical elements.

Reclaim the Media out of Seattle is going strong doing their work on the barricades side of grassroots activism. They have no paid staff, and have worked on media policy, supporting community media, and media literacy.

The Twin Cities Media Alliance, like several organizations in the Twin Cities, was assisted by the takeover and subsequent shelling of the Star Tribune. Several of the principles there came out of the paper as it was shedding employees. They have succeeded in putting together the great community media portal, the Twin Cities Daily Planet, which brings local ethnic, neighborhood, and activist press together in one site (as well as doing some original reporting.)

Chicago Media Action has done a number of things including challenging FCC licenses of our unresponsive corporate media outlets, working on cable contracts for public access channels, net neutrality, etc.

This panel was a 10 of 10, in my mind, even with the technological issues with Steve’s recalcitrant laptop. This is how new media makes a difference; these were the stories of how local people were holding their local corporate media accountable.

(Crossposted at nihilix)

Congratulations, queer Californians

Sorry for the non-blogging this weekend. I'll be back tomorrow. I think.

In the meantime, here's a li'l wedding present for y'all. Enjoy your wedding nights!

NCMR2008: Faith Based Organizing and Media Reform

Howdy! I’m nihilix, a community organizer and media activist from the Twin Cities, which as Bitch said was host of the National Conference on Media Reform. Having met Dr. B at said conference, I’m contributing my convention report. (Crossposted at nihilix, lord knows the site needs the update)

I got to the first of the panels I attended, Faith-Based Community Organizing and Media Reform, a little late, so missed out on why some of the listed folks weren’t there. Attending were Rev. Ben Guess from the United Church of Christ (a cute gay preacher in jeans, a white shirt, and a top-of-the-ear piercing), Rev. Romal Tune in suit with kerchief (the muted/flashy black minister outfit), local organizer Vic Rosenthal (imagine a Jewish Garrison Keillor) and Kathy Partridge, an energetic and competent Unitarian head of a feisty faith foundation.

The program promised to:

(highlight) the successes of the faith community in social justice organizing, while looking ahead to how media justice organizers and faith organizers can reinforce each other's message. The media is often a barrier to social justice organizing, but working together, the two sectors can further strengthen their communities.

Media reformers and faith based organizers are in the early stages of getting to know each other. They United Church of Christ has been involved in communication as a justice issue for a while; they got a royal corporate media smackdown when NBC and CBS refused to run some of their commercials in 2004. Saying the commercials were ‘too controversial’, they were denied access to our privatized airwaves. (The real controversy – the UCC were calling out the biased churches of the cultural Right for being closed to whole sectors of society)

The UCCs rock pretty hard. They give grants for churches that are part of their radio ministry, so long as they

• Communicate God’s radical acceptance and extravagant welcome;
  
• Reach out to the alienated, the excluded, the spiritually homeless, the questioning;
  
• Make a home for all in the life of their congregations.
  

A lot of the panel was the explanation of what faith-based community organizing WAS, and less how the two are getting together. Romal Tune and Vic Rosenthal gave their perspectives – Romal from that of black churches, and Vic told the story about the immigration raid on the big kosher meat plant in Iowa. They spoke more about how the media is not your friend, if you care about workers, or black folk, or immigrants.

A big part of the narrative of this convention – which was also the case at the first convention in Madison, which I also attended – was about whether the ‘reform movement’ was broad enough for everyone, if it focused too much on legislative solutions and electoral politics and not enough on poor people, black people, and those who need a bigger dose of media justice. This panel seemed to be laying the table for a discussion around just those issues in the context of faith based organizing. Here’s what it is, media movement. Where are we going to be able to move together? What can we do?

My media plus organizer dream would be the creation by the faith communities of the left of a communications infrastructure like the right-wing churches have, particularly radio and cable. With a possible political sea change in the wind, maybe the low power FM licenses will be available again, and we can see gay pastors from welcoming churches rubbing radio elbows with black preachers and anti-poverty advocates on new neighborhood stations.

On not quite halving it all

Hurrah for Lisa Belkin, who writes a very rare NYT piece on shared parenting that isn't stupid or condesceding. Very, very worth reading.

Gender should not determine the division of labor at home. It’s a message consistent with nearly every major social trend of the past three decades — women entering the work force, equality between the sexes, the need for two incomes to pay the bills, even courts that favor shared custody after divorce. And it is what many would agree is fair, even ideal. Yet it is anything but the norm.

She talks a lot to Francine M. Deutsch (whose bookI swear I've blogged about but can't find the link; in any case, I recommend it highly), and Deutsch helps her spell out what these articles all too often fail to say, that

Choices are made in a context. It is rare that you choose something you have never seen. So men who do more around the house than their fathers and spend as much time with children as their neighbors feel that they are doing their share and their wives feel grateful to have such involved partners. That is why the single-most-predictive factor of how equal a couple will be, Deutsch says, is how equal their friends are.

Messages, loud and soft, direct and oblique, reinforce contextual choice. “A pregnant woman and her husband,” Deutsch says, “how many people have asked her if she is going to go back to work after the baby? How many have asked him?”

Looked at through that lens, what seems like an external institutional barrier to equal sharing becomes something else entirely. He makes more money than she does, so of course she should be the one to step back her career; she has a more flexible line of work than he does, so of course she should be the one to work part time. Those may seem like choices, but they have their roots in social norms.

I will admit that, much to my surprise (and dismay), my own marriage has turned out to be far less equal than I ever expected. I am the primary parent, by a long stretch--and even when I was working and Mr. B. was staying home, I made a lot more effort (despite crushing depression) to spend time with PK during the week than Mr. B. does now. Part of this is that my daily work schedule was a lot more flexible than his is, and that I was able to do things like take PK to work with me, which he can't. Part of it is that he was and is more likely to take PK out to the park or the beach for most of the afternoon on a Saturday (I'm more likely, these days, to plan a "family outing" for all of us). But part of it is that I'm a lot more invested in the parent role than he is.

There's a bit in the article about one couple deciding to get a dog as a practice child, to see if they'd both be equally invested in taking care of it, which was a real eye-opener to me: my god, the cat (and now the mice) has *always* been primarily "mine," how could I not have realized that it would be the same with a child? Hiliariously, though, I didn't; in fact, I didn't realize that my doting cat mama personality would transfer so easily to a human child, and when Mr. B. would point out (as he did) that of *course* I'd be a doting mama, look how I was with the cat, I would say stupid shit like "cats are different than kids." Which assuredly they are--but I'm the same person.

Anyhoo. As I said, the article is very worth reading for feminist parents, parents-to-be, or maybe-someday-parents of all genders. It even gets into the research on gay and lesbian parents (there's more on lesbians than on gay men, hint hint to any clever graduate students reading), which reveals one absolutely fascinating piece of information for all straight women who bitch about husbands not doing housework.

Lesbian parents, gay parents and heterosexual fathers all look the same on paper when it comes to cooking and cleaning — they all report doing between 6 and 10 hours a week.

In short, women, your husband might be right when he says that your standards for housework--as opposed to childcare--are too high.

I will say that I think that Mr. B. and I are pretty damn equal in terms of housework. Which is why our house is basically a huge mess most of the time. When I was the working partner, he said (initially) that he would keep the house perfectly! And I doubted it, I argued that housework had never been his big priority and what made him think that would change suddenly? He argued that it had never been "his (primary) job." So we tried. And, in fact, I was kind of right: our house, when I was working and he was staying home, was usually a lot messier than it had been when I was a grad student and he was working full-time.

But. Because I was in the position where housework was explicitly not *my* job (and because I was seriously depressed), I learned to fucking ignore it. After twelve years of living together, I finally learned to really lower my standards. And that has stuck with me, even now that I'm the stay-home mom. Yes, it bugs me--it bugs him too--that our house is a mess. And yes, we still fight about it (the one lingering bit of sexist crap around the housework issue is that he thought, for a long time, that he was doing more than I was; I think we've fought that issue out to the point where he realizes that's not true).

Interestingly, the messiness of the house actually bothers me, now, a little less than it does him--at least when it comes to inviting friends in. I've decided that fuck it, the mess is my Feminist Statement that keeping a beautiful house is Not My Damn Job, so I invite people in (with a little tummy-tightening and a warning that we do not keep a clean house) and let them deal with it. Mr. B. has a lingering housing complex that makes him freak out about this, and if he knows that people are coming over he goes nuts cleaning, often staying up all night beforehand. (Knowing this, I often don't let on if I've invited someone in for coffee on the spur of the moment.) And we're currently at a point where the combination of his housing complex and our mutual feeling that we "should" both be tidier means that we usually do a half-decent job of keeping, at least, the dining room table and living room reasonably presentable, so that having people step in (and being able to set the table for dinner) doesn't mean that dirty dishes and piles of mail and computer equipment need to be cleared away before anyone can sit down.

That's housework, though. With kids, we're less evolved. I've reached the same conclusion as one of the lesbians Belkin interviews:

“You need a rabid N.G.P. — nongestational parent. The N.G.P. has to push if you are going to get an equal relationship.”

That's it exactly. If you're straight, and you want equal parenting, the man has to want it more. Feminism needs men, which means we *all* have to get over our gender essentialism.

It looks like pace the religious right, gay marriage might actually save us straights from ourselves yet.

Hey 19

Over at Unfogged, Ogged has a post up about aging and men's body, how they deal with the changes and slow erosion of some abilities. I read the post last night, and it intersected exactly with my preoccupation of the evening - how women, and this woman in particular, deal with aspects of aging.

The occasion for my preoccupation: I went to a concert, and I don't want to say what concert, at least not right out here on the main page, because it's sort of dorky. And I'm not sure how totally objectively dorky it is, but I know it is dorky for me because, honestly, I was a little young to be at this show. I am 30 and this was a crowd of Boomers. And I'm not someone who thinks too much about age in regular life and I definitely am not someone who is antagonistic about Baby Boomers. But really, a person couldn't *not* think about it in this context.

So I found myself spending a lot of the evening wondering what I would look like in 20 years, how my shape will have changed, what my face will have done. I mentally evaluated women around me, making notes of good and bad things that can happen. It was pretty loathsome of me.

But this is part of what getting older has meant for me. I notice the things that Ogged notices, to a certain degree: I get sick more easily, it is much harder for me to recover from sleep deprivation or over-consumption.  I used to able to replace breakfast with cigarettes for 3 days and lose 3 lbs. But on many counts my body is much stronger and more flexible on account of I now do yoga and I didn't before. 

But here's the thing about my relationship to my body that really bugs me out: I no longer feel at all confident of my own perception of it. As in, I feel pretty sure the mental picture I have of myself is stuck at around 24. When I see pictures of myself these days, they are not precisely what I expect them to be. And when I am surrounded by women in their 50's, I think, "Hmmm, do I look more like this one or that one?" I do not see any reflections in my college students anymore.

I can't over-emphasize how radically unsettled I feel by the idea that I can't get a good picture of my body anymore, That I may not be able to trust my own portrait of my physical self. And I think this unsettlement has very much to do with the value women are socialized to place on hyper-awareness about their forms. I suddenly feel like Im not doing my job both because my body is aging and because I am less sure that I know how it looks.

I guess these are mostly mundane observations, but I think it is telling and more or less disgusting that my female perspective on getting older is bound up in the arena of appearance, but more precisely one's ability to monitor appearance. And the comparison to a piece that dwells on the male perspective of noting what one's body can and can't do any more seems equally telling.*

*Obviously, I know neither of these are exclusively female or male preoccupations. But I find them instructive when considered in these parameters.

i'm sorry, i was an english major: for the math geeks among you

A lawyer friend, caught in an online election fight with a colleague, sent me this site: FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right

I looked it over and my eyes instantly rolled to the back of my head. When I regained consciousness, I thought, "Hm, maybe some folks haven't heard of it. Let's throw it up on Bitch and see what they think."

So let the statistical geekery begin.

I do Like List-Blogging

A few take-away points from my recent trip:

1)  Don't bother, the DVD player will likely and mysteriously not work once you get in flight.

2) Visiting with one's family and one's in-laws in 4 days is not quite as relaxing as going to Italy.

3)  The new Indiana Jones? Perhaps not worth your time or $8. 

4) This sums up the basic karma surrounding air travel for me: pulling into airport, we realize we need to fill up tank on rental car. Make way to airport station, expect to be gouged. Are pleasantly surprised at $3.89 (same price we've seen about everywhere in the state on this trip). Pull up to pump, see sign that credit card machines are down, must use cash. Who the hell has cash? Enter station to use ATM, expecting to pay $5 in fees. ATM is out of cash. Exit airport, drive 8 miles to nearest exit with gas station, pay $4.29.

oh, italy.

I LOVED Italy.

The views, of course, were stunning and gorgeous. (Even the rainy days were glorious. They were the kind of days that made you want to throw open your windows overlooking the Arno, lean out and belt an aria. You don't get days like that in Chicago.)
The wine, natch, was unbelievably good. (Even the cheap farmers' wine we guzzled at the villa. All 50 bottles of it.)
The local roads in the countryside leading to the villa were, indeed, treacherous and the Italian style of 'driving' terrifying. (Yet energizing in a 'you're going to meet your Maker very soon' kind of way.)

But you know what I really liked about Italy?

Their pace was my pace - slow.
I don't think i saw anyone actually 'hurry.' You really could sit and drink and eat all day and no one looked at you like you were a wastrel.

Sure, I could have stuffed my days with shopping and touring and running from this museum to that old church. Instead, in Siena, I sat on my butt in the main piazza and read my book for a few hours; in Volterra, I eye-flirted with a hot Syrian alabaster sculptor and then ate a load of gelato that gave me gas. (Hello, Lactaid.) In Florence, I sat with friends off the Duomo and ate lunch and ordered liter after liter of wine, smoked at least two packs of cigarettes, wandered to another cafe for several glasses of prosecco, had a round of drinks bought by the kind old Israeli vendor who liked Obama (and our friend K-), then stumbled across the street to the restaurant and stuffed myself full of rabbit, beans and more wine.

I LOVE Italy!

Photos, recipes and commentary will be posted (at our trip site) when they're all downloaded so I'll be sure to leave a link here. Currently, I'm furiously strategizing how I can move to Italy without placing an ad asking to marry a personable, orphaned Italian man who might be in need of a brown American wife. Hm.

I want to continue learning Italian, I want to go back to Italy (this time with JP!) and I want to look at those hills again. I'm in love with a country.

Ciao!

PS: Incidentally, the best public bathroom in Florence is inside the Salvatore Ferragamo Shoe Museum. (Yes, the only museum in Florence I went inside.) It's worth the 5 euro to pee in it. Look for a photo of it in our upcoming Viva Italia! photo gallery.

Oh, and where can you find the most unnecessarily snooty perfume spritz girls? The overrated Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella. Yeah, I said it: it's overrated. Sure, the building is beautiful, and how nice to look at the ancient mortar and pestles they used to grind herbs, but it's still just a place to buy soap and perfume. Avoid the snooty girls and, instead, throw your euro at the nicer older woman in the soap room in back.

I *am* writing this post from my boyfriend's apartment

Flea posts her scores as a 1930s husband and 1930s wife. The results are unsurprising.

I'd post my scores, but doing so under the circumstances seems somewhat tacky.

NCMR2008: copyright, copying, and rights

I came to the "Copyright Wars" panel thinking, well, I use the Internet, sure: but I also like getting paid for what I write, on occasion. So I'm expecting Knotty Discussions of Complex Issues.

Five minutes into Alex Curtis's talk, the phrase "fair use" comes up, and it becomes clear (duh): letting (requiring, as the Big Media folks would like) ISPs filter content to prevent folks from posting political speeches or Daily Show videos online, you're effectively getting rid of fair use exemptions. ISPs aren't going to monitor content, and we definitely don't want them to do so.

Which Alison Hanold from the Center for Social Media points out in so many words in her talk outlining the work that the Center for Social Media is doing in this area.

It isn't enough to differentiate between the "use" portion of fair use and simply making things available, without comment or editing, either. Robert Millis works with Hudson Street Media, which makes such
material available--so that people can exercise fair use. (Readers should have no difficulty recognizing the problem, which comes up in discussing abortion, too. Rights are fairly useless if they only exist in theory; you have to be able to use them.)

Elizabeth Stark, new law professor (yay!) and member of Free Culture gets a big laugh by saying this more succinctly: "fair use means the ability to hire a lawyer." In short, we're dealing with a paradox. For writers and artists to be able to create the things we want to get paid for, we need access to raw material. And if we're to write about or comment on things that already exist--politics, culture, media--we have to be able to exercise fair use, to access and show relevant portions of videos or articles or audio files. The folks who have the money to hire lawyers are often the same folks who have the money to influence those who write and enforce the laws.

Yes, artists need to get paid. But we're not helping artists when we preemptively control the means of reproduction or distribution. Freedom is always going to allow people to do things they shouldn't (and when they do we need ways to correct the wrong, if a wrong has been done.
We aren't free if we can't fuck up.

classy broad

IMHO, Clinton's concession speech showed her at her best.

NCMR Blogging for realz

So now that I am back to my home away from home, complete with laptop and internet connection, some notes.

1. As I wandered through the book exhibit, I spotted the crazy 9/11 "Inside Job" people being interviewed on camera. Irony: was it the mainstream media conducting the interview, trying to portray media reform people as crazy anti-gubmint wackos, or was it some alterna-media outlet, confirming that media reform people are crazy anti-gubmint wackos?

2. Also in the book exhibit, I met Jeffrey Scheuer, who was signing copies of his book The Big Picture. We talked about books and blogs for a while, and he kindly offered to send me a free book to review but (being half-assed, as you recall) I didn't have any business cards. I SWEAR I meant to make some up but then I got busy with other crap last week. So he gave me his card and told me to email him, and though I'm sure he was thinking "omg this woman is so half-assed," he was too gracious to let on.

3. Later I went to a panel about How Independent Media Creates Change, with FireDogLake's Jane Hamsher, Brave New Films's Robert Greenwald, ColorLines's Daisy Hernandez and the Center for Independent Media's Jefferson Morley speaking. Greenwald started out by exhorting everyone there (and it was a very full room) to "be polite to our adversaries," i.e. the Fox News people in the front row, who were filming the panel--which is how I discovered that yes, indeed, the filming I'd seen in the book exhibit was the mainstream media cherry-picking wackos to discredit media reformers. Good call me! I rather wish The Boyfriend had a television, so I could see the carnage for myself, but alas, I will have to merely imagine it.

Sadly, Fox is unlikely to report on what an excellent panel they filmed. Greenwald showed a video about how BNF got McCain's own pastor problem onto the mainstream news (basically by getting the blogs to cover it; yay the blogs!), Hamsher talked about the activism/journalism hybrid that characterizes a lot of blogs and showed a highly (and dryly) entertaining video of herself filing a complaint with the FEC over McCain's violation of campaign reform laws (itself kind of a funny story, in a hoisted-by-their-own-Republican-petard sort of way); Morley talked about going after a fradulent "Iraq war veteran" who tried to start a "private disaster assistance" corporation in Michigan; and Hernandez talked about founding ColorLines and pissing off Phoenix Republicans by reporting that cops kill brown people (and that despite dropping crime rates, the number of police killings hasn't dropped).

Afterwards, I went up to introduce myself to Hamsher, and we talked bloggy mutual admiration briefly (so gratifying!). I expect I'll run into her again at the DNC.

Which brings up something that all the panel presenters agreed upon, by the way: the fact that doing Actual Journalism online costs money, and that *making* money while doing it is still kind of elusive. As Hamsher put it, there's "no viable financial model for the progressive blogosphere." My own model, of course, is to rely on the Husband Grant Agency, but clearly this method has certain limitations.

Which leads me to something I've been needing to mention--the upcoming DNC blogging, my laptop limitations, and my lack of a camera. In short, GIVE ME MONEY people. I need a camera. And I need to fix the power outlet on my stupid laptop, because at the moment it's not terribly portable because the cable is TAPED TO THE MACHINE because I busted the connector pin and it only works if it's in the absolutely perfect position.

It looks awesome, in a well-used-machine way (and I noticed that Jane Hamsher's powerbook is as dirty with grubby hand grease as my own is). But it does sort of need fixing.

NCMR blogging

How half assed am I? Halfassed enough to be at a conference about media reform with an iPod touch thais almost out of juice and no laptop (laptops are heavy!).

Not so halfassed that I'm going to pass up an opportunity to say hi to firedog lake's jane hampshire, though.

Halfassed enough not to type in HTML on an iPod screen.

Insularity

Nobody better bring a petition like this my way.

Though she acknowledges it is a difficult sell, Horbal said she and other feminists are promising not to vote for Barack Obama and write in Hillary Rodham Clinton's name in November if the disputed Florida and Michigan delegations are not fully seated at the Democratic National Convention and Obama becomes the presidential nominee. A petition drive to get feminists across the country to make a similar pledge began


A "difficult sell?" I'd say. Especially given this:


"I don't care," Horbal said of the possibility that the move might cost Obama votes. She said she also would not be bothered if the write-in campaign indirectly helped elect John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee. "Let McCain clean it up for four years, and then we can have Hillary run again," she said.

And by "clean up" do you mean reduce my reproductive rights even further? You "don't care" about that so much?

Fuck you and your fake feminist petition.

If you were on am 8am flight, would you mind Finding Nemo playing on a laptop next to you?

I'm off for the rest of the week to a delegate-rich state to hang with my folks and let them get some precious grandparenting time in. I wanted to drop a couple quick notes, though:

1) Leblanc's post below is awesome and brave. I have my own myriad and shameful racist and sexist impulses, but there is one in particular I have been reflecting on today: I am biased against women who breastfeed longer than a year-ish. Not because I think it is in some way "inappropriate" or "icky" or whatever dumb shit people say, but because I am apt to conclude that the woman in question is more self-sacrificing (of her time, her body, her patience) in the name of motherhood than I think is warranted. This is obviously really shitty of me.
Especially as I would never dream of judging any paternal behavior in a similar way. Leblanc nots in the post below her "disdain for the idea of being a 'stay-at-home' mom." I think this is my version. I don't have a bad feeling about SAHMommying, but for whatever sexist reason I tend to internally condescend to the extended breastfeeding.

I wish I didn't do this because I wish I weren't so sexist, but also because -

2) I am flying alone with the toddler for the first time this week and I wish to god I were still nursing her. I don't care what kind of looks we might get if I had a surefire way to keep her happy. I am really super wimpy about planes.

Playing Cards

By now, everyone's already blogged about this horrible op-ed in the Boston Globe by Geraldine Ferraro (see, for example, Jill at Feministe, Ta-Nehisi at Matthew Yglesias, and Megan Carpentier at Jezebel). Most have zeroed in on the most ridiculous sentence in the piece, where she says:

They're not upset with Obama because he's black; they're upset because they don't expect to be treated fairly because they're white. It's not racism that is driving them, it's racial resentment.

Because obviously racism and racial resentment are totally different things, the latter of which being justified, and the former being A Very Bad Thing That We Can All Agree Is Evil. Her framing it this way demonstrates two things: that racists are trying valiantly to come up with new words to describe their feelings toward black people, and that the word 'racism' has lost much of its usefulness in public discourse.

But I want to go a little deeper. Like Geraldine Ferraro, I'm about to make comparisons between racism and sexism. Luckily, I'm not an idiot, and I'm not going to say which is worse (for the record, I think doing so is like trying to compare apples and oranges). Instead, I want to think about these two concepts as analytical constructs to describe the world around us. We use 'racism' and 'sexism' to describe things as small as a single word ('nigger' or 'bitch') and as large as entire institutions, laws, governments, cultures, bodies of literature or eras of history. We might say that a joke is racist or a comment is sexist. Or we might just say that some particular individual (say, your old grandpa, your boss, or Geraldine Ferraro) is sexist/racist.

But when we use these words, we also make value judgments. Strong ones. You will find few people in the United States who will declare their belief that racism is a good thing or sexism is right. No, these concepts have become very heavily laden with condemnation. So people balk when you try to apply the concepts to anything they've done. "How dare you call me racist?" "I didn't mean to be sexist, why do you have to go there?"

Bringing up sexism or racism has become, in the minds of those outraged by accusations that they might be sexist or racist, "playing the gender card" or "playing the race card." Ferraro herself uses this formulation in her op-ed, although she fails to notice how the very same "card" rhetoric is used against her and her fellow feminists. Compare:

They see Obama's playing the race card throughout the campaign and no one calling him for it as frightening.

with

The reaction to the questions being raised has been not to listen to the message and try to find out how to deal with the problem, but rather to denigrate the messenger. Sore loser, petty, silly, vengeful are words that have dominated the headlines.

Those very same people who brush off and dismiss complaints about sexism call what the Hillary campaign does "playing the gender card." Yet Ferraro uses the very same rhetoric with respect to race.

I've been astonished at the degree to which "playing the race/gender" card has flourished as a phrase and concept in the conversation about this primary race. I've heard it from so many bloggers, pundits, straight-up newscasters, and even some of my personal friends. I want to be as absolutely clear as I can: it's a bogus concept, and using it makes you part of the problem.

Race and gender are not "cards" that you play, like laying out trump in bridge and winning the hand. Because when you have to bring up racism or sexism to explain what is happening around you, that means you're already losing. "Playing the _______ card" has become a way to refer to conversations about racism/sexism while not-so-subtly implying that whoever is playing the card is whiny, not playing by the rules, petulant and, ultimately way off-base.

But I've never understood what's so unfair about bringing up race and gender. It's like those who decry it as card-playing are annoyed by the fact that we all won't play by their rules of pretending that everything is equal now, since we can all vote and everyone will pay lip service to racism and sexism being Bad. But now that we've placated you by agreeing that they're Bad, how dare you accuse anyone of being racist or sexist? Especially someone who is supposed to be your political ally/friend/co-worker/acquaintance?

Racism and sexism have become far, far too loaded as concepts, and have come to be associated in the public consciousness only with Evil People. I think we need to take back those words, and own them, because denying that you think about men and women, white people and black people, in culturally-sanction insidious ways is doing no one any favors.

So I'm going to play cards against myself.

I'm racist. I'm not precisely sure why, since I grew up in an environment with virtually no black population, and I've never had any particularly negative experiences with any actual black people. But I know that I am fear black men more than I fear white men. I know that when someone I don't know is mentioned to me, I automatically assume that person is white unless there are clues that the person might be black. If I find out that someone I've never seen who I believed to be white is actually black, I find it jarring. I have assumed things about black people that I am less likely to assume about white people, like that they have been arrested or have tried drugs. I privately apply unpleasant cultural assumptions to black women: I am surprised when I interview a black woman in her thirties who has no children, although I would not have the same surprise if the woman were white. I have considered whether people I went to school with got scholarships or special consideration because they were black. And I could go on. I have thought about all these things, wondered why I think this way, make these assumptions, and I can not answer. They trouble me deeply.

I'm sexist. On this one, I'm much more sure why. Because I'm a woman, I see all the sexism directed at me even as I'm directing it at others. So it's easier to name. I prefer having male friends to having female friends. I enjoy being told that I'm like "one of the guys." When people tell me that I have masculine qualities, I feel a sense of pride. I feel somewhat less pride when people tell me I am caring, emotionally open or self-sacrificing because I associate those qualities with femininity and they are thus denigrated. I have disdain for the idea of being a 'stay-at-home-mom'. I have privately assumed that women who have lots of sexual partners must have emotional issues. I internally criticize women for dressing too provocatively or not provocatively enough. I have been disdainful of movies and books that are associated with women. Like above, I could go on. These are only some of th things I have thought about, and am self-critical of.

I'm certain there's a whole other list of things I think and feel that I haven't even examined yet. At that's why it's important that we stop reserving "racist" and "sexist" only for the bad guys and start being able to applying it to anything that fits the bill.

I challenge you to play cards in the comments.

Sunday links

1. Momocrats asked Obama some questions about things like family leave, affordable housing, and torture--you know, the kind of things that matter to moms. Here are his answers.

2. ABB boils the "race vs gender" nonsense down.

3. The Democratic Convention's announced its state blogger corps--a group of blogs, one per state, that'll have press credentials to the convention. Go check out the list; there are a lot of small blogs on there that deserve a larger readership--especially if you're politically savvy enough to know that (almost all) politics is local.

4. Should you be richer than you actually are? It's not just you. (I have got to get this book.)

5. Mama PhD blog over at Inside Higher Ed.

6. An old post from someone I thought had quit blogging years ago (but apparently they didn't), about original sin and the Bush administration.