Kids Today

Like, Dave Perry, I actually hate when people express a "kids today" sentiment. [I, like, Dave, especially hate it when the sentiment comes from someone who has built a career complaining about how kids don't read enough words, how they read too many words and not enough faces, and how they don't work enough part-time jobs. But I digress. I started writing a whole post about how dumb these recent pieces are, but it made me so cranky I had to beg off.]

And yet. Every new semester tends to bring with it some "kids today"moments. Mine came today, when, after noticing that most of my first-year students were writing "Mrs. Vane" in the headers of their papers, I wrote Mrs. Miss and Ms. on the board and asked what they signified. Dear reader, I shit you not, not 1 out of 25 was able (or willing) to tell me the right answer. Most of them thought they knew, for sure. But they thought they knew that "Mrs. means married, Miss means not married, and Ms. means a widow." That one got a lot of support. Also popular was "Mrs. means old, Miss means young, and Ms means in your 20s." (which, leblanc points out, can be more or less true, but still)

So I explained to them the various terms and offered the tip that they should always go with Ms, for the sake of professionalism and non-assumptive behavior. And then a kid raised his hand and said, "But you never told us whether you were married, so how are we supposed to know what to call you?" Never mind that this TOTALLY misses the point I had just laid out, the part that kills me is the way this suggests that perhaps I should have started class by announcing, "Good day, I am Sybil Vane and by the way I HAVE a HUSBAND." As though I ought start all conversations that way, in fact. Which, I suppose, if I wore my wedding rings, I would be doing.

So, I'll just stop the story there instead of going into the unflattering way I then yelled at the kid about how he should call me Dr. just like it says on the syllabus. In conclusion, please provide college-aged kids around you with a PSA about the various titles for women because they seem to be know nothing slackers.

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Speaking of PSAs, how horrifying is this shit? I won't even embed it because it ruined my whole morning. The message is very important, but still. Shit is gruesome in the UK.
By request, edited to add a "dead baby warning" w/r/t the PSA. Thought honestly given my description of it as gruesome and the title of the PSA itself, I'm not sure what you were expecting.

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Speaking of nothing else I am writing about, can I swoon for a moment about how much I love Heather Armstrong? Whatever, it's not cool, I know, but this entry is so classic dooce, and such a kickass story anyway and she's out there making bank writing about the normalcy of mental illness and parenting hell and the joys of kids and promoting artists and writers and so on. So I just felt like saying fuck the haters, that's all.

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Speaking of kids today, Ponyo? Is awesome. Also speaking of kids today, part of the reason this is all over the place is the fact that I have one. Today. And every day. In addition to a new job with a 4/4 load and a commuting husband and a mother-in-law who is staying with me and cooking. I've been up today since 4, when Mr V left to head back to his commuting town for the week and I had to stay at work long enough to avoid having dinner cooked for me, so I've been eating frozen grapes and drinking beer since I got home and am, frankly, a little light headed. I do swear t be a better blogger, especially with reflections about new job and junior faculty first year life, in the coming weeks.

Torture is Hilarious

An ad seen while reading this bizarrely horrendous article at Townhall:

Newsflash: college professors not overpaid

The attempt to blame the cost on the faculty is just another politically-motivated smear by people who hold grudges against the academy for failing to share their ideas of Proper Culture.

Chad Orzel provides some Actual Facts. Like, that the cost of *electricity alone* on a residential college campus is of the same order of magnitude as the cost of the *faculty*.

He doesn't challenge the implicit contention that faculty should be paid for teaching alone, but then he's just writing a short blog post. I want to point out, though, that valuing research at zero is also ideologically-motivated, and is completely of a piece with arguments that: the White Male Canon = Great Literature and those brown writers and white women writers are crap; science should be "balanced" with creationism; women studies and ethnic studies programs are worthless; professors "brainwash" students with "liberal bias," and so forth. One could also tie in hard-core far-right ideological bias against things like psychology (god forbid we try to understand why people do things we wish they wouldn't, or accept that behavior isn't easily categorized into "good" and "evil," or think of childrearing in any terms other than "spare the rod and spoil the child"); sociology (what, study marginalized groups? think of human welfare empirically? investigate the status quo?); anthropology (other groups are NOT as good as we are!)...

Feel free to add your own examples in the comments.

Sometimes I don't miss teaching

A prof (teaching gender studies, no less) writes to share a journal entry he/she got from a student. On the first day of class.

We've all dealt with these students. Thoughts on how to do so constructively?

"On the negative side I don’t like the “feministic” feel I am getting from this class. I am not a big adversary of feminism. I believe that woman have just as much privilege as men do. I don’t feel less important than men and I don’t think society is in that state of mind today. Feminism is a thing of the past. With so many women today having top paying jobs and high governmental status it’s hard to see why feminists still exist.With the numbers of women graduating from higher education growing and the numbers of men declining why do some women feel the right to parade around shouting for equality and “woman power!” We don’t need it. We got it. Those women need to turn around and help our young and struggling men get their power back."

Heroine of the week

update: turns out the story was false. My bad.

Cross-posted with permission from PostBourgie

Roxanne Shante, Ph.D.

When you write a battle rap at the age of 14 that just happens to become an insta-classic and a pioneering work of female-fronted hip-hop, you can’t be expected to think of everything. And you certainly can’t be expected to make sure your royalty contract is iron-clad, when you’re barely out of the eighth grade. Roxanne Shante, born Lolita Gooden and best known for 1984’s “Roxanne’s Revenge,” gave up on the fledgling rap music industry after two albums and paltry financial returns on her musical investments. Signed to Warner Bros., Shante had very little to show for her breakout hit and subsequent fame—until at the age of 19, she remembered the fine print on her recording contract.

Warner Bros. had included a clause promising to pay for Shante’s education. Faced with pennilessness, she decided to cash in on that promise:

She figured Warner considered the clause a throwaway, never believing a teen mom in public housing would attend college. The company declined to comment for this story.

Shante found an arm-twisting ally in Marguerita Grecco, the dean at Marymount Manhattan College. Shante showed her the contract, and the dean let her attend classes for free while pursuing the money.

“I told Dean Grecco that either I’m going to go here or go to the streets, so I need your help,” Shante recalls. “She said, ‘We’re going to make them pay for this.’”

Grecco submitted and resubmitted the bills to the label, which finally agreed to honor the contract when Shante threatened to go public with the story.

By 2001, Warner Bros. had funded Shante’s entire college education–up to and including the PhD in psychology she earned that year from Cornell University.

Total cost of education: $217,000. Roxanne’s Revenge: priceless.

Read more about the lawsuit, Roxanne’s fight for tuition money, and her current career as founder of a therapy practice for urban African Americans and funder of scholarships for female rappers through her nonprofit, Hip Hop Association.

In defense of privilege

Talking about Ted Kennedy's death, M. LeBlanc and I had an interesting chat this morning about the benefit of being privileged. "Privilege" is a dirty word in the lefty blogosphere, especially the parts of it that focus on personal stories as much as, or more than, what's happening in DC. So much so that I have secretly gotten completely sick of it and try never to use it: using it here in this piece is making me cringe. It's up there with "calling out" (usually "someone's privilege"), which usually means "denouncing," in the small collection of supposedly liberal buzzwords that are way overused as blunt instruments of one's own moral superiority.

Because the thing about being privileged is that hopefully it gives one *security*. It's actually a *good* thing to have privilege. Ideally--and it seems to me that, as social thinking animals, this should be the goal--privilege gives one not just personal advantages but also the security to be gracious, to empathize, to be kind.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about, from Ted Kennedy's eulogy for his brother Bobby. He's quoting Bobby here:

"What it really all adds up to is love -- not love as it is described with such facility in popular magazines, but the kind of love that is affection and respect, order and encouragement, and support. Our awareness of this was an incalculable source of strength, and because real love is something unselfish and involves sacrifice and giving, we could not help but profit from it." And he continued, "Beneath it all, he [their father] has tried to engender a social conscience. There were wrongs which needed attention. There were people who were poor and needed help. And we have a responsibility to them and to this country. Through no virtues and accomplishments of our own, we have been fortunate enough to be born in the United States under the most comfortable conditions. We, therefore, have a responsibility to others who are less well off."

Bobby's mentioning two things here: love and a social conscience. It's not clear to me if he realizes that these two things are connected; that the latter comes from the former, that the child who has the privilege of being fully loved grows into the adult who is self-assured enough to love others.

And I do think that for me, at least--and I suspect for Ted Kennedy--it is specifically love of children that underlies that social conscience. As the cliche goes, "everyone is somebody's baby," and when you see people that way, it's damned hard to hate or even be indifferent to them. (If not, then you are yourself kind of fucked up, and I pity you your own childhood.)

I'm thinking this in part after reading Pierce's discussion of Kennedy (liked here) this morning. Two anecdotes that got me going:

The private dinner the night before the Boston ceremony conflicted with the 11th birthday of McCain's son, Jimmy.

"[Kennedy] said to me, `I'll make sure he has a good time,' " McCain recalls. "So we brought him up here, and he got a ride on a Coast Guard cutter around the bay, and he had two different birthday cakes, and people sang `Happy Birthday' to him twice, and he had an unforgettable time.

"To me, in so many ways, that epitomized Ted Kennedy - this incredible outreach to a little boy who, I mean, what is he to Ted Kennedy? It was remarkable to me."

What is Jimmy McCain to Ted Kennedy? A child. Who as such deserves to be treated with kindness and love. (I think it speaks kind of badly of McCain that he seems surprised by this.) Here's the other story:

On April 27, 2001, a bus carrying band members from the Oak Hill Middle School in Newton overturned on a highway in the Canadian Maritimes. Four children were killed. In Washington, a man whose child went to Oak Hill boarded an airplane in order to hurry home. He saw Edward Kennedy on the plane. The man told him what had happened. That's where he was going, the senator had replied.

At the school, volunteers gathered from all over Newton to help out. Along one wall, they'd hung broad swatches of blank white paper so that the children could express their sorrow and say their goodbyes. On the second afternoon of the melancholy vigil, a volunteer looked out and saw Kennedy, alone in the hallway, no aides around him and no cameras in sight. He was slowly, carefully, reading every single message left by every grieving child.

That strikes me as the gesture of a man whose own losses--and failings; Pierce reminds us not to forget Kopechne--have made him kinder, not more selfish; who looks outward rather than inward; whose pain has made him generous rather than self-pitying.

That last, I think, is why one "forgives" him Kopechne's death; he seems never to have tried to say anything but that he was entirely at fault there. Yes, he benefitted enormously from the privilege of Who He Was; as Pierce says, if he'd been someone else, he'd have been in jail. But he seems not to have prided himself on that, or to have felt that it was a privilege he deserved but others didn't. He didn't turn awareness of his own guilt into the moralizing-others of the evangelical. He wasn't a hypocrite.

Therein lies the strength of true liberalism, I think. And the defense, if defense is needed, of "liberal elites" as such. The privilege of the elite can and should be the privilege of working to lift others. This used to be what "condescension" meant; now, of course, it means pretending to be polite while subtly asserting one's own superiority. That's not what I'm talking about, and I think that genuine liberalism absolutely abhors that kind of patronizing bullshit. Which is clear, I think, in the anecodes above: it's important that Pierce notes that Kennedy is reading the children's messages while alone in the hallway, that he took care of Jimmy McCain by making him feel important rather than shuttling him off to the kids' table in the corner.

Interestingly, though, the other thing I took from the Pierce article was the lovely job it did of showing the importance and value of the old boys' network; another phrase that's become a tiresome cliche, though I confess I don't disdain it the way I do the word "privilege." But Pierce shows, through Kennedy's work, that part of what underlies any functioning network, whether made up of old boys or young women, is the ability to recognize the humanity in others: to be fierce opponents but also friends. Again, as with "condescension," the network that functions that way can also be used to exclude outsiders--but again, doing so isn't truly liberal, inasmuch as "liberalism" connotes generosity of spirit as well as a political affiliation.

He Who Greets With Fire

Come lift up your voices

All grief to refrain

For we may

Or might never

All meet here again

How do you know school's back in session?

No one has time to blog any more.

So here's a cute video of a mouse. (PK has four these days: Squeaky, who is 100 almost three; and Star, Zebra, and Chiaroscuro, who are newbies because Cow died not too long ago.)

Sexist language?

Someone wrote to me about this, and I am seriously curious. Do terms like "birth," "aborted," "impregnable" etc., strike people as sexist in the same way that, say, "seminal" does? As in, say, "the Constitution was written after the aborted attempts of the Costitutional Convention failed to produce an impregnable document that could stand up to blah blah blah...."?

If someone's reading this and finds the language discomfiting, are they ahead of the curve on awareness of gendered language, or do academics and other people who care about usage see terms like this as problematic? Like, if you wanted to tell a friend and colleague that their lecture on the origins of the United States used language that might be uncomfortable for women students, would you be all, "this might be uncomfortable for women students, blah blah" or would it be reasonable to say "this is using sexist language, by the way"?

Pseudonymous Kid grows wise

I don't remember where this came from, but this morning PK declared that he doesn't want to be president at all when he grows up.

Even if the president does have his own private swimmimg pool, or movie theater, or his own bowl of his favorite snacks on his desk.

Because PK can have all those things here. He can "jog to the YMCA without breaking a sweat." (True; it's like two blocks away.) Movie theaters are easy to get to. Plus we have a beach.

And most importantly, no way would he want the stress.

How Can Lovin You Be Wrong When It Feels So Right?

Have you seen this horse apple?

How do these people do it? I mean, how do they keep their jobs? This fool shouldn't be allowed to deliver papers, much less write for one.

Whatcha doing in October?

Operation Rescue plans on protesting women's health clinics all over the country for 40 days, starting 23 September. You might wanna call you local clinic, if it's on the list--mine is--and offer to help in whatever way they need it.

It's Friday, and I <3 Michael Bérubé

MB, using the initials CA (it's complicated, but not really), interviews Teh Media:

CA: People are threatening violence because a Democratic administration might be considering public health insurance? That’s not exciting, that’s lunacy. Why doesn’t anybody explain the “public option” to these nutcases?

AMM: With all due respect, Michael, that’s not really our job.

CA: ...

And while we're on the subject, Matt Yglesias is uncharacteristically funny, too, comparing what people are saying about hcr to Calvinball (and also pointing out that the media doesn't fucking seem to feel compelled to actually *explain* anything.

Newsflash: school girls accept sexual harassment as normal

Okay, really I'm glad that someone is writing about sexual assault in schools, and is willing to call this kind of behavior "assault"--which it is.

But. The freshman comp-style intro really bugged me. Ignorance and false nostalgia ftw:

When you went to school, chances are the worst thing you faced was the schoolyard bully, the occasional fight in the field or some less than good-natured teasing. Hard as it may seem to believe, those were the good old days.

Bull. Shit. If anything, schools today are far more aware that this kind of bullying is unacceptable than we used to be, and far more willing to try to do something about it.

In fact, it wasn't until I was an educator myself, and therefore talking about pedagogical issues, that I even realized that some of the shit that had happened to me in school was assault. The time a seventh-grade girlfriend and I were walking down the hall, and a boy walking towards us reached out and grabbed my crotch? Until some time in the last five years--seriously--I had pretty much just taken for granted my girlfriend's response at the time, which was "you didn't know they were gonna do that?" I know that it didn't even occur to me to tell an adult about it. And I am absolutely certain that if I had, the response would have been more or less a shoulder shrug.

Or the boy in 4th or 5th grade who used to chase me at recess and stick pins in me? Again, didn't even mention it until Christmas break came and he gave me candy. I refused to eat it, and told my parents why, and they did the "oh, he does that because he likes you" thing. Really, that's it. My mom even threw in a little bonus class- and racism by explaining that probably his own dad hit his mom and then gave her candy so that was probably all he knew. (And no, she had no idea who the kid was, let alone anything about his parents. Other than that he was black, chased me at recess, wasn't in my class, and no, I didn't actually know his name, even but I thought he was a year younger than me.)

Or, to be fair, the game my girlfriends and I used to play in second grade, chasing a particular boy named David and trying to catch and kiss him? I don't remember if the grownups knew what was going on, or if David ever said anything, but certainly no one ever explained to us that that behavior wasn't okay. This was the same year, by the way, that a few older girls I knew formed the "we hate Sarah club" to pick on some poor girl named Sarah, which I *did* know was wrong and went out of my way to be kind to Sarah to try to counteract. I also stood up to (and was accordingly beaten up by) my next-door neighbor, for bullying the little kid across the street around the same age.

Point being that I remember being adamantly opposed to unfairness or cruelty, even when directed at kids I also disliked, but completely didn't consider chasing someone and kissing him when he didn't want to be kissed as bullying. And I'm willing to bet that most people still put sexual bullying in a special category as not "real" bullying, tending instead to offer the "oh, that's because he/she likes you" explanation.

Which is actually true some of the time; kids *don't* always know how to express affection. Especially in a culture where boys are taught that "girl stuff" is lame/ooky/stupid/embarrassing, and girls are taught that "boy stuff" is lame/ooky/stupid/worthy of disdain. Yeah, kids are gonna fight. And yeah, they can be awfully mean to each other. But it's our job as adults to teach them that that's wrong, and help them learn better ways of expressing both positive and negative feelings--not to excuse and normalize it.

The best revenge

Since I graduated from law school and began my practice as a lawyer, I've been surprised by two things: 1) how I have not had to deal with even the faintest whiffs of sexism from other people in my office; 2) the extent to which I have had to deal with sexism/racism/ageism from nearly everyone outside my organization. I wrote about this topic previously here.

The first one makes sense, I guess. A lot of women who work at corporate law firms seem to have to deal with a fair amount of sexism and/or sexual harassment. But I have only worked at civil rights organizations, where people are rather inclined to behave differently. Indeed, they are inclined to see the world differently. I can't even explain how gratifying it has been to work under men in their 40s and 50s who have the utmost confidence in my abilities. They are happy to let me carry out depositions and trials, praise my work, listen to my opinion and discuss strategy with me as equals. Coming from a world where women are subjected to constant slights in every academic environment from professors and fellow students, and the rest of the working world, I consider my workplace an incredible haven that is free from sexism.

Apart from the fact that I adore the work and that I feel incredibly passionate about it, it is one of the primary reasons that I intend to continue working in civil rights organizations in the United States. People often ask me whether I want to return to Egypt to live and work. I don't—because I simply don't think I could function as a professional with the level of sexism I'd be forced to face. I feel mildly ill just thinking about it. I am incredibly privileged to be able to live here and work with people who uniformly share my vision of social justice, who share my vision of a world free of invidious discrimination. Do these people still harbor prejudice? Of course. I still harbor prejudice; nearly all of us do. Anyone who claims they're completely free of prejudice is full of something else.

So I continue to be shocked when faced with #2. In my current job, I've had to do a lot less interaction with lawyers outside our organization, so I've been a bit surprised when I'm reminded of how other older, male lawyers treat me. For the past few days my supervising attorney and I have been taking depositions for a major case we're working on. We deposed nine people; he took 4, I took 5. And this was not the first time we'd met the opposing counsel. They had taken depositions of our witnesses last month, and I defended 5 of the 6 they took.

But none of the lawyers for either of the two defendants seem to be able to remember my name. Even though I've introduced myself countless times to them, to each witness, to the court reporters, to their clients, spelled my name for the record. This is in addition to all the phone calls I've made, emails I've sent, pleadings upon which my name has been written.

So when, at the beginning of the 8th of 9 depositions, I seemed slightly exasperated when one of the lawyers came around to introduce me to the witness and looked at me blankly, it was pretty understandable. I raised my eyebrows, paused and then said my name slowly and clearly for the umpteenth time. And then the other lawyer, who was sitting next to me, turned to me and said:

"You know, we only have two kinds of people here in [name of town]. People with blue eyes, and people with brown eyes."

I stared at him. Unable to formulate a response.

"You know, we just don't have a lot of diversity here."

More staring from me.

I truly couldn't think of anything to say, so I looked away and said "are we ready to begin?" and the reporter swore the witness in. I curse everything on heaven and earth that that exchange wasn't on the record.

These lawyers, like every other lawyer I've gone against, keep seeming surprised that I'm there. They keep seeming surprised as I question and cross-examine witnesses, take depositions, argue motions, and make objections while my male supervisor sits there quietly and watches. And they let me know what they think of me by barely acknowledging me. By conveniently refusing to remember my name, by mistakenly attributing things I've said or arguments I've made to my (male) boss. By apologizing to me for using profanity or making crude remarks, as if to remind me: you're not supposed to be here. By asking me whether I'm an attorney, by asking me how long I've been an attorney, by asking me where I went to school and whether I'm married or whether I have children, questions that my male colleagues never seem have put to them.

And occasionally, by making openly sexist or racist remarks like the one I heard yesterday.

I was too stunned to respond. But after the deposition was over, and I chatted with my co-counsel and my client and they confirmed my "wtf?!" reaction, I had to excuse myself to the bathroom to shed a few hot tears. I'm fucking tired of being ignored, forgotten, disregarded, condescended to, and treated like a curiosity.

I'm not too humble to say that by the standard of my experience, I'm a superb lawyer, negotiator, and advocate for my clients. I think I am by any standard, in fact. Last night, I was relaying all this to The Bear, and he said something I've heard many times before, that beating them, being better than them, is the best revenge. And I must confess that I've taken great pleasure in winning cases over counsel who have slighted me in the past.

But I don't want "revenge." And I become weary of the notion that I have to work to "prove" myself to these people. It's a burden, sometimes an unbearable burden. I hate the burden of feeling that any mistake I make, any omission or error, any time when I don't perform not only well, but stunningly, I am confirming their racist, sexist, and ageist opinion of me as incompetent. I do not want to "prove" myself to them, because they will never reconsider their initial opinion of me just because I happen to beat them. My stellar performance will never mean, to them, that they were wrong to disregard me because I'm a young brown-looking woman. It will only mean that I am an exception, that I am an oddity, that I am "special." Or perhaps it will mean that there was some other reason I bested them, that it was that I had a better case, or the jury was biased, or the laws were unfair or the judge was against them. It will never vindicate me.

I don't want revenge. I want respect.

is the tide turning?

Apparently the White House got inundated yesterday, and the news today looks a little bit different than it did last week.

Robert Reich says, okay, let's keep the momentum going, and calls for a March on Washington:

“We won't get a public option, or anything close to it, unless people who feel strongly about it make a racket.”

The “first step is to be very loud and very vocal: Write, phone, e-mail, your congressional delegation and the White House. Second step: Get others to do the same. Third step: Get voters in Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, and other states where Blue Dog Dems and wavering Senate Dems live, and have them make a hell of a fuss. Fourth step: March on Washington.”

Lookie here: the Blue Dogs have a handy little "contact us" page. One imagines that if they, like the White House, get a ton of pressure from Democratic voters--especially if the individual members also get a lot of emails, letters, and phone calls from constituents in their state.

Even if the fuckers are too beholding to the insurance companies to be swayed, I bet we can make them verrrry uncomfortable. They deserve it.

Listen to your mama

Love this post commemorating the anniversary of the 19th Amendment's final ratification.

Burn later explained that upon hearing that he would vote against suffrage, his elderly mother had sent him a telegram asking him to change his mind. And like any good son, he eventually agreed.

Teh awesome. Click through to EotAW for more, including video.

Who needs health care?

The coverage of Remote Area Medical's Los Angeles Clinic is pretty fucking informative. They've been turning people away, in part because there aren't enough providers volunteering. Part of the problem is that it is actually illegal--in every state but Tennessee--for licensed practicioners to cross state lines to provide free care to those who need it. The clinic is literally asking CA providers to show up with their medical license in hand because they're so short-staffed.

God forbid we should make it hard for those seeking a profit to compete! (Which seriously, is an argument I just totally Do. Not. Get. in this context. Isn't the issue getting people health care rather than making sure that huge for-profit corporations can earn money? I mean, isn't being able to earn money *their* business, and serving the public good the government's?)

Anyway, so this is what's going on in Inglewood this week:

On Tuesday, the turnout was so large that hundreds had to be turned away.

"We're shorthanded," said the mobile clinic's founder, Stan Brock. About 100 dentists were needed, but only about 30 showed up Tuesday. Twenty eye doctors were required, but only about five were on hand, Brock said.
....
Doctors, nurses and other medical workers who donated their time said most visitors' ailments were basic. But "many have chronic diseases -- high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma -- conditions we can't deal with in just one day," said Dr. Nancy Greep of Santa Monica. Some had problems, such as a recurring cancer, that demand long-term treatment.

Nice, hey? Thousands and thousands of people--some who've travelled hundreds of miles--clamoring to see a doc. (It's not illegal to cross state lines *seeking* free medical care, thankfully. Yet.)

Who are they? One volunteer says she's seen

Most of us have worked in county facilities and charity hospitals our entire careers and felt that nothing could shock us about the needs of America's uninsured.

When the Forum doors opened each day we could not believe our eyes. Thousands of people had lined up. These were not the homeless, drug addicts or psychiatric patients. The people we took care of were embarrassed to admit they needed help. The people we did eye exams on and prescreened for root canals had jobs, had lost jobs, had lost homes, had lost hope. The people whom we shook hands with were fellow Americans without health care. People just like you and me. Our neighbors of every race, color, creed and religion. Our American brothers and sisters seeking basic dental work, eye glasses, mammograms, cancer screenings, blood pressure medications and refills for cardiac medications.

And everyone I'm hearing talk about it is saying, god, wouldn't it be nice if the president and lawmakers would show up and talk about the problem here, where you can actually see what the problem's about.

All I know is that I have BCBS, and it sucks

Blue Cross/Blue Shield controls 90 percent of the market, and it wants to be the exclusive not-public-plan Conrad Co-op to provide an alternative to . . . itself.

Blah blah industry lobbyists blah blah. Fuckers. Via FDL.

Link-o-rama

Hey Omahatians (and other plains state types): pass it along. Please do this for me, because I got married in Omaha and all but I don't live there now and can't do it myself. " Being pro-choice, doesn't have to be about being pro-abortion, it is about trusting women to make the right decision about what to do with their body and giving them the choice to make that decision, not the government."

Yet another reason why we need a decent freaking health care bill.

This is gross. As is this.

This is beautiful. (Via PostBourgie.)

Damon Weaver finally got his big interview. So. Damn. Cute.

If you haven't yet seen it, I highly recommend Ponyo. That said, I couldn't help thinking of the trailer for The Cove, especially during the beginning. Want to see The Cove, too, but I don't think I'll take PK.

Speaking of PK, This had him wandering around the house singing.

"I am your mother"

Ta-Nehisi talks a little bit about his vacation. If you don't read his blog (and why not?), he's been doing a ton of reading and thinking about the Civil War lately, so he dragged his kids to all sorts of monuments and the like, and has been talking about thinking about that war as a black man. Really gripping stuff, and there are a lot of interesting connections to contemporary public topics like oh, say, the "birthers" and health care reform and the like--as reading his blog regularly makes clear.

Anyway, so I felt compelled just to share this anecdote about the fall of Richmond (but you should read the linked post and all, if you haven't already).

Once inside the city, one of the colored regiment's chaplains explained how he'd been a slave in Richmond as a boy, and had been sold off from his mother. A short time later an old woman comes upon the man, who is talking with some other colored soldiers. She wants to know his name, where he's from, and how he came to the city. After he satisfies all her queries, she looks at him and say, "I am your mother."

God. Having to quiz your son to find out that he is your son, and having to tell him who you are, because he was stolen from you as a baby. And having him come back to liberate you. I can't imagine what all that woman must have felt (or her son, either), but even what I can imagine brings tears to my eyes.

Get to work

Those of you who don't also subscribe to my Twitter feed (and why the hell don't you, bitches?) might have missed my tweeting a bit ago about the White House's apparent decision to let the public option drop from health care reform. If, like me, you are really scared about the president's apparent willingness to fritter away an enormously popular agenda for the public good to the blue dogs and screaming birthers, please write the White House asap to say so.

It's clear that Obama will walk himself back if there's enough of a storm. So blow a bit in his ear.

Below is my letter, which borrows a bit from this one.

Dear Mr. President,

My husband and I worked hard for your election, and one of the things I had high hopes for was your promise to work for a single-payer health care system.

I realize that campaign promises sometimes have to bend to the realities of governing. But there is a difference between compromise and capitulation. The American public overwhelmingly supports health care reform. You and the congressional Democrats have already compromised, moving from the idea of a single-payer system to reforming private insurance with a public option for some. I beg you to rethink your capitulation to the small but vocal group that has hijacked the discussion with lies and scare tactics.

I am an American citizen, and I want legislation that serves the American people. Not corporate interests like health insurance companies that have clearly demonstrated that their primary interest is profit rather than the needs of the people they ostensibly serve. Please, please do not back down on this fight now. Please do not let the blue dogs and hard right, who do not want health care reform, carry more weight with you than the vast majority of Americans who do.

Staff Sgt. Bitch

Two pieces, companions to one another, that appeared in the New York Times yesterday had me getting choked up as I read them on the train on the way to work. Steven Lee Myers and Lizette Alvarez deserve accolades for doing fine reporting that manages to avoid the pitfalls of on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand truth-ignoring journalism that we see 95% of the rest of the time from the mainstream media. Because, you see, in the world there are more than opinions. There are more than partisan political platforms. On every single salient political and social issue of our day, there are actual facts. I always thought the job of reporters was to suss out those facts, and compare the facts to the words and opinions coming out of the mouths of the relevant players. But I've gotten used to not getting that, which I why I was truly shocked to see Alvarez and Myers use both their pieces to advance truth.

Here's Myers' piece. It looks like Alvarez and Myers were working together on a piece, with Myers contributed reporting from Baghdad, but they came up with so much good stuff that they wrote two pieces, which is awesome; the pieces are very similar in topic. I loved this part:

Staff Sgt. Patricia F. Bradford, 27, a psychological operations soldier, said that slights, subtle and not, were common, and some were easier to brush off than others. Women are still viewed derisively at times in the confined, occasionally tense space of an outpost like Warhorse.

"You’re a bitch, a slut or a dyke — or you’re married, but even if you’re married, you’re still probably one of the three," Sergeant Bradford said.

At the same time, she and other female soldiers cope with the slights, showing a disarming brashness.

"I think being a staff sergeant — and a bitch — helps deflect those things," she added.

First, it's awesome that that quote got printed. And it's a stunning quote: a succinct, evocative demonstration of what it's like to be a woman not just in the military, but in any male-dominated environment and, to a slightly lesser extent, the world.

But Myers doesn't just take Bradford's word for it about what it's like to be a woman in the military.

Sexual harassment in a still-predominantly male institution remains a problem. So does sexual assault. Both are underreported, soldiers and officers here say, because the rigidity of the military chain of command can make accusations uncomfortable and even risky for victims living in close quarters with the men they accuse.

This is not presented as someone's opinion. Myers is reporting this as fact. It's not a particularly controversial fact, but it's a fact, and it's a fact a lot of people would rather deny, explain away, or blame anyone else besides the institution itself. I really like how Myers presents this as a challenge, but doesn't do it in a way that implicates victims, that names victims, or presents it as some kind of cautionary tale. No, the piece is much more focused on how bad-ass the women he talks to are, how competent, comfortable, and professional they are in the military environment. Myers' piece also does powerful work to dismantle the notion that women, and by extension and analogy gays and lesbians, are "disruptive" to the military effort:

At the outset of the war, the introduction of women into outposts like Warhorse raised fears not just of abuse or harassment, but also of sex and pregnancy. The worst of those fears, officers say, have not materialized.

In fact, sex in America’s war zones is fairly common, soldiers say, and has not generally proved disruptive.

You really have to read the whole thing. It's brilliantly written, the quotes from the women he interviews are gold, and it's peppered with bold statements of fact about how preconceived ideas about women in the military were just wrong. I heart this piece so much.

Here's Alvarez' piece, which focuses a little more on the attending policy issues surrounding women in the military. She breaks open the notion that women don't serve in combat, and discovers that women are actually serving in "ground combat" despite the prohibitions against it, simply because 1) they are needed there; 2) there is no "front line" in Iraq. Since everything is the front line, restricting women from serving in ground combat--i.e. any environment where they have to shoot at people, would mean that qualified women would be staying home while posts were vacant.

"Iraq has advanced the cause of full integration for women in the Army by leaps and bounds," said Peter R. Mansoor, a retired Army colonel who served as executive officer to Gen. David H. Petraeus while he was the top American commander in Iraq. "They have earned the confidence and respect of male colleagues."

Their success, widely known in the military, remains largely hidden from public view. In part, this is because their most challenging work is often the result of a quiet circumvention of military policy.

I find it very telling and curious that the men who command the military have no problem with, in fact, herald the full integration of the military, but the men who make military policy in Washington and the vocal constituents who elect them into office seem to have a problem with it. And not only are women just as good as men at performing all sorts of military and combat tasks, they are specifically needed in these wars because of their gender:

Nonetheless, as soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, women have done nearly as much in battle as their male counterparts: patrolled streets with machine guns, served as gunners on vehicles, disposed of explosives, and driven trucks down bomb-ridden roads. They have proved indispensable in their ability to interact with and search Iraqi and Afghan women for weapons, a job men cannot do for cultural reasons. The Marine Corps has created revolving units — “lionesses” — dedicated to just this task.

A small number of women have even conducted raids, engaging the enemy directly in total disregard of existing policies.

Again, you have to read the whole thing. I'm strongly resisting just excerpting massive portions of both articles, because they're both that good. It's incredibly heartening to read, in this year that has felt toxic with sexism, that the most macho, lionized men of the country, the ones who are held up as the ideals of masculinity, are willing to go on record in the nation's premiere newspaper and trumpet the notion of women's equality as truth.

jarndyce v dead cat

So the lawsuit that began here, or maybe here on the house that we had inspected here--and CHECK THE DATE PEOPLE, that inspection happened a year ago, and was *after* we'd made the initial offer, including putting $5k down, on that house--was supposed to come to a conclusion yesterday. Of course, it was *really* supposed to have come to a conclusion in June, but, well, you can read that post if you want to know why we had to show up in court a second time.

Anyhoo. This time they didn't show, either. Yay us! The judge asked a few questions and said yes, I agree that they owe you that money, I find against the defendants. Next?

Mr. B., who has been leaving the answers up to me, says, "uh, your honor?"

"Yes?" the judge asks.

"My understanding is that we need a judge's order to the escrow company to get them to release the funds without the sellers's signatures. Is that what we are receiving?"

"No. You'll receive a judgment in the mail against the defendants directly."

"Thank you, your honor."

We politely leave the court room. Mr. B. says "I thought we were supposed to get an order to the escrow company."

I say, "well, that's what the lawyer told me, for $1500. Guess not. I'll call them and see what's up..."

Mr. B. says "We"--by which he means "you," because I'm the one that's been doing all the actual lawsuit-related stuff--"need to tell them to return our money!"

"Um, I'm not going to do that...."

We get in the car and start driving. "Where's their office?" Mr. B. asks.

"Here in Ventura..."

"No, I mean, where is it exactly?"

I start getting snappy. "I don't remember exactly; I was there like nine months ago. Why?"

"Because I want to go there and tell them to give us our money back."

At which point I get reaaaal quiet in that bitchy way that I can do. Later, once we've returned home, someone says something--I don't remember what--which leads, quel surprise, to me sort of losing it. AND YOU'RE NOT EXACTLY HELPING BECAUSE NOW I HAVE TO MANAGE YOU WANTING TO RUN OFF TO THE LAWYER'S OFFICE AND SHOUT AT THEM FOR $350 A FUCKING HOUR, AND I AM SORRY BUT I AM NOT GOING TO "DEMAND" OUR MONEY BACK FROM A FUCKING LAWYER, WHAT DO YOU THINK I AM, CRAZY? AND STOP FUCKING SECOND-GUESSING ME ABOUT THIS WHOLE THING WHEN YOU HAVEN'T DONE JACK SHIT..."

You know, the kind of really pleasant scene that ensues when you and your partner are both pissed off at some third absent party. Le sigh.

So three or four hours pass, I rant briefly on Facebook, a lawyer friend sends me an email explaining that although she is NOT MY LAWYER AND THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE, in her experience generally a finding like the one we'll soon have in the mail should be enough to get the escrow company to release the funds. And if not, that the pro se public office should be able to tell us, for free, how to get that done. Which basically confirms the next steps I'd realized were the right ones, and, along with the passage of time, calms me down and Mr. B. and I no longer hate each other.

But we do hate the dead cat people.

Homesick: Amreeka

I went to see Paper Heart last night with friends, and I was blown away by one of the previews. The movie, Amreeka, is going to open in New York and Los Angeles on September 4.



It's the story of a Palestinian single mother who moves with her son to the United States in what seems to be a period right around the time of the beginning of the Iraq war. Although I suspect the movie will be more funny hijinks and feel-good family relationship stuff than downright sadness, the preview had me crying inside thirty seconds. That's how much I miss my family, my home country, my people.

I didn't grow up in the United States. I grew up in an expatriate enclave that is a suburb of Cairo. I was surrounded by Americans, taught by Americans, friends with Americans or those of mixed ethnicity. So my story isn't quite an immigrant story: it's the story of being an outsider within a group of outsiders. I wrote about my feelings of alienation and outsider-ness for my first-ever post on this blog. And since I've decided to get married, an institution that is intimately bound up with notions of identity and family, I've been thinking about it a lot lately. About how much I have wanted to have a connection, a sense of belonging, with family members, a connection I don't have outside my immediate family. My older sister and I are close, and I don't know what I would do without my connection to her. Sharing a gender, nationality, ethnicity, and religious history with another person is something that has literally only happened to me once in my life, and my sister is it. But even though I don't share much with her beyond Arab ethnicity and American identity, I totally want to be BFF with the director of Amreeka, a filmmaker and writer named Cherien Dabis:



Not only is she a director and writer (who worked on the L Word!), an Arab, and a total badass, she's an out lesbian to boot. Here's more of that interview, transcribed.

I can't wait to see the film.

Sing it, (Shakespeare's) Sister [Or, Empathy; Try it sometime]

Melissa McEwan has a fantastic post about what it's like to deal with men when you're a feminist. Particularly an assertive, argumentative feminist like she is, and I am. This part I found especially striking:

There are the occasions that men—intellectual men, clever men, engaged men—insist on playing devil's advocate, desirous of a debate on some aspect of feminist theory or reproductive rights or some other subject generally filed under the heading: Women's Issues. These intellectual, clever, engaged men want to endlessly probe my argument for weaknesses, want to wrestle over details, want to argue just for fun—and they wonder, these intellectual, clever, engaged men, why my voice keeps raising and why my face is flushed and why, after an hour of fighting my corner, hot tears burn the corners of my eyes. Why do you have to take this stuff so personally? ask the intellectual, clever, and engaged men, who have never considered that the content of the abstract exercise that's so much fun for them is the stuff of my life.

If I've had one conversation like this, I've had a hundred. And I consider it a major accomplishment, and a testament to us both, that my boyfriend—nay, fiance (whoa, using that word is weird)—doesn't really do this as much anymore. He still probes my arguments for weaknesses and wrestles over details and creates abstract hypotheticals, but he sure as fuck doesn't play "devil's advocate" (hatehatehate that term and the behaviors it describes) and he doesn't wonder why I get so goddamn emotional about it.

A couple nights ago, I had gone over to the house of my dear friends to celebrate my engagement and was coming home late. I was almost home, standing at the corner waiting for the light to change, when a man approached me.

Guy: Excuse me?
Me: Yes? What?
Guy: What's your name again?
Me: I didn't tell you my name.
Guy: Oh, well, hi. What's your name? [holds out hand]
Me: Look, I don't want to tell you my name, and I don't want to talk.
Guy: Why not?
Me: It's late. [looks at phone] It's 12:30 am. I don't want to talk to you.
Guy: But I'm just being friendly. [holds out hand again] What's your name?
Me: Do you have any idea what it's like to be walking around as a woman in this city, late at night? It's scary. It's late and I want to get home and I don't want to talk to you.
Guy: [stares at me]

[stares some more]
[backs away]
[retracts his hand]

Guy: I can respect that.
Me: Thank you. Have a good night. [light changes, I cross the street and go home]

It was really bizarre—I could really see him actually considering, what is it like to be a woman walking around late at night in the city, trying to get home? Answer: it's scary, and it scary enough that you don't want to talk to anyone you don't know, no matter who they are or what they're about.

I had a heated discussion with a friend of mine a few weeks ago about why I put so much effort into proselytizing feminism, anti-sexism, and the theory of patriarchy every time I have the chance. With friends, with family, at work, on my blog. He maintained that no amount of convincing and arguing and logic is going to convince people to change their minds, to rid themselves of the deep and insidious sexism and misogyny that pervades our culture. Although I stridently rejected that at the time, I think he's partially right. I think that logic alone and reasoned argument doesn't do it. But what I failed to articulate on that day is that a huge part of what I'm trying to do is teach people empathy. To consider, for a minute or an hour or a week, what it's like to be a woman, what it's like to grow up as one, to live as one. To not think of "women's issues" as some abstract philosophical question to be toyed with, but as a part of lived experience.

I truly believe that even in my short life, I've been able to do that for a fairly large number of people, and I don't plan on stopping anytime soon.

your end of summer reading list

Do you know Prof. Melissa Harris-Lacewell?
You should. (Really. You should. If you know all the names of all the asshat pundits on CNN and Fox, you should balance that knowledge by encountering someone sane. And ferociously smart. And also a woman of color. You can follow her on Twitter @ harrislacewell.)

And if your brain has been broken by the tenor of these crazy town hall meetings, check out her Required Reading for Health Care Town Halls, in brief:

James Madison's The Federalist #10
Karen Stenner's The Authoritarian Dynamic
Ida B. Wells' The Red Record (one of my personal favorites; if you haven't read her account of lynching you are missing out on a critical piece of investigative journalism as well as a critical piece of early US history that connects the dots between black financial, social or civic empowerment and white violence.)
Tali Mendelberg's The Race Card
James Cone's God of the Oppressed
Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Inyengar's Going Negative
Kelly Dipucchio's Grace for the President (a children's book)

Well. I have some reading to do.

I think I'm dumb (maybe just happy)

I've been thinking about happy, about how many people around me are thoughtful about looking for it, about tending to find it somewhere else, not where you're looking. And of course about my coblogger's happy. Which is itself right where she knew it was, but about how surprised she avows feeling that people around her are so happy. We chatted about it, she and I, and she observed that she would have more expected the oodles of happy to be distributed throughout the course of the relationship, as it became clear that she had found someone she really loved being with. The event of engagement itself is largely a formality once you know these things. But people, the friends and family who make us happy, they are always eager to cathect onto an event that signifies happy in some culturally recognized way, I say to her. People, most of them, love to share in happy. Not on the internet, of course, but you know what I mean.

I expected to have a difficult summer. Selling the house, moving, husband commuting most of the week, leaving very close friends. Getting ready to start a new job, my first actual job. Challenging. And it has been. We hit an extra loathsome bump last week when little V and I were involved in a car accident, which left us both fine (me with some temporary staples in head, her with the impulse to play "car accident" and "head trauma" games with her dolls), but which was terrifying. And also there have been some nasty jellyfish stings. (those two sets of challenges appear to be exactly equal in traumatic measure to the little one)

So, many of the challenges were anticipated and a few just cropped up, in the way challenges do. But one of the things I was most worried about for the summer has been more amorphous. I dreaded the summer for all the aforementioned transition aspects, but also because I would be doing it mostly without childcare. Just me and the little girl, packing up the house, moving to a new one (Mr V has precious few vacation days), transitioning to a new town, on our own, for 6 weeks before school started.

I have never been very good at spending long periods of time without parenting help. Not having Mr V here every night to help with dinner, with bedtime is its own challenge, but the long days in a new place without playdate partners, without babysitters, without family and with two sets of anxieties - one 4 yrs old, one 31 yrs old - daunted me to the point of nausea. Partly, I do not enjoy playing with my kid for long stretches. She is interesting as a human, she says funny interesting things, she is smart, but she plays boring games. And I can only fake it for so long. But the bigger part was knowing she would need a lot of comfort, a lot of stability from her caretaker, and being terrified that I didn't have it in me to take care of both of us.

In a lot of ways, it panned out like I expected. I became impatient, lost my temper she whined and complained about everything, she had meltdowns at the worst moments, I had meltdowns at even worse moments. I got her in a car accident. On her birthday. I needed to be working, I needed my job, she needed friends and someone whose job was her, was just to be with her.

But then in the middle of the week this week I woke up at 4 am and felt totally crushed by sadness at the thought of going to work next week. I just could not imagine not seeing her for 8 or 9 of very day's hours. And when I tried to parse through why (because, as I noted, her actual ways of filling the days are pretty dull for me), I realized how much I had come to think of her as my partner over the last 2 months. She moved with me. She helped me find the rhythms of a new town, she helped me figure out the best way to bike to the library. We learned which farmers market was best together. We made some new friends together. And I suddenly felt like, oh god, not only will I miss her, but who is going to help me figure out this new campus and this new job and these new students?

It's not like I want to formulate it as though she has been taking care of me; I am not so prone to Hallmark-y formulations and frankly we all know I have been taking care of her - feeding her, cleaning her, sleeping with her, acting out "staples in the head for Simba" again and again. But it's that taking care of her actually forced me to slow down and take care of myself and to actually appreciate not working on anything academic for the first time in my adult life. I am a terrible non-worker. I need the work. And yet here I am needing to be on campus on Monday, dreading the work, because I had just come to see this alternate work as productive.

I know that will change. I will get into the job, I will need it as much as the other ones, it will continue to make me a better parent in the way the other ones have. But, for now, I have gone from feeling crushed about my revelation to feeling so happy knowing that I *know* something about the last 6 weeks of my mothering, maybe more than I knew about the 4 years that came before it. Well, that last part may be a bit much. But I found some happy, is the point, in the place that I was sure would make me insane. That's all.

Prepare for the Marriageblogging

It was with a sheepish grin and a bit of uncertainty that I woke up on Tuesday morning and emailed my co-bloggers to tell them I'd gotten engaged. That's right, even before I called my dad. It took me until about noon to get up the guts to call my dad in Cairo (also, I had to buy a phone card) and tell him the big news. I spent at least thirty minutes nervously trying to figure out what I would say, until I decided to wing it and ended up going with "[The bear] and I are engaged." Dad: "Who?" Me: Me! I'm getting married!

It hasn't been too much of a shock to anyone and I don't suspect I'll have to deal with any significant unpleasantness from family members or friends. Which is nice. But a few things are surprising. 1) I feel sheepish and moderately defensive. 2) People are so fucking happy.

These two things are seemingly at odds with one another. Blame feminism! One of my first identifiably feminist moments that I remember was sitting with a bunch of girlfriends for dinner when I was a freshman in high school, when one of the girls described what sort of shoes she'd want to wear at her wedding. I remember thinking "what the hell?" Despite having been raised Mormon, which is the religion most obsessed with getting married (and weddings) that I know, I missed out on the childhood princess-wedding-dream. Actually, I missed out on thinking about weddings altogether.

I was much more concerned with whether I'd be fortunate enough to meet the brilliant and compassionate partner I'd wistfully dreamed of. As I became an adult and became vaguely aware of people getting married around me, I thought about a potential future wedding, but only in negative terms: things I wouldn't do. I wouldn't wear white, I wouldn't be "given away," I wouldn't promise to obey a goddamn person, I wouldn't have a ceremony under the auspices of a religion, I wouldn't change my name, and perhaps I wouldn't even wear a wedding ring.

I always figured I'd want to have kids. I was pretty certain that I wanted to have a serious, hopefully decades-long relationship with a person I loved deeply. But marriage? I was less sure. I struggled between a fervent desire to commemorate my relationship with a public identity as a couple, and an anti-authoritarian streak which tinged my feelings about marriage with antipathy toward the patriarchal roots of the institution. I did not want to belong to anyone. I did not want to be Mrs. Somebody. I did not want to have increased social constraints or expectations on what I could and couldn't do in my relationship.

I met The Bear in the fall of 2004, when we both began law school. We were in the same section, which meant we were in nearly all the same classes. I disliked him intensely for a brief period, probably about a few weeks to a month. I remember seeing him in a deli near my house, which was somewhat far from school (and thus an unlikely place to run into fellow students), and thinking "this guy?" When I saw my friends the next day I ranted to them about how that guy I hated lived in my neighborhood!

He was funny, but I didn't get his jokes. He was smart and articulate and talkative, and I think I was jealous. He was confident, and I felt terrified because I wanted to be confident, was used to being confident, but was temporarily scared shitless. He didn't take notes in class, didn't sit pecking away at his laptop like every other law student. No, he sat with nothing in front of him and listened intently, like he was actually having a good time.

Fucker.

One night in October we had a gathering of a few law students who lived in the neighborhood, at a bar just down the block from my house. I was nervous and wanted people to like me. He showed up late, and instead of looking cute but slightly disheveled, as he usually did in class, he looked sharp in a sportcoat. Turns out he had just come from the symphony, which he attended alone (who does that?). I think the first tiniest seed of a crush on him began that night. It was so obvious to me that he really didn't much care what others thought of him, in the best way--and at the time, when I was deeply insecure, coming out of a crappy relationship, I found that very appealing and it also pissed me off. Give me a break. I was 22.

A couple weeks later I ran into him on the way to the gym and while we chatted, he offered me an extra ticket to the symphony and gave me his phone number. I didn't think he was trying to hit on me (he wasn't). I was, again, shocked and impressed by his confidence and lack of fear. But I didn't take him up on it.

Fast forward a year. I think it would be a stretch to say we were friends during that time. We said hi in the halls, we chatted when we ran into each other at the coffee shop or at the bar. He remained very funny and I remained jealous. I was becoming friends with a friend of his, who invited me to study with them for a course we were all in. I had just gotten dumped by a guy I'd been dating for the preceding year. He had a girlfriend, but that didn't stop me from developing my tiny crush into a slightly larger crush. The following semester, I teamed up with him and another friend for a research project in a comparative law course. In retrospect, I think it's hilarious that law school, which he hated, ended up being the vehicle by which we became friends. Through actual coursework, no less. Over the course of that semester, I found out that he was much more than just a funny, confident, very smart guy. He was not a "nice guy." He was nothing short of the most emotionally open, caring, authentically compassionate, powerful, insightful person I'd ever met. To call him "nice" seems like an insult of understatement.

I remember when, that summer, I found out that he had broken up with his girlfriend of 5 years. I thought, "uh oh." I was dating someone at the time, but I knew that my crush would have a hard time staying the friendly admiration-crush of friendship if The Bear were single. That fall, he withdrew for a semester and left school after rejecting a job offer from a prestigious law firm he realized he didn't want to work for. At all. I know that that semester was a really tough one for him, but in a way it was an important one for "us" because it was while he was gone that I realized I had developed some pretty deep feelings for him, and apparently he for me. And it was during that semester that I again, got dumped, and for the first time since we'd met we were both single at the same time.

It was only a matter of weeks after his return (now we're at January 2007) that, in the middle of the night at a 24-hour diner after a concert, he told me that his admiration for me was more than just a friendly one. Looked straight into my eyes and told me. I would have spent another 3 weeks trying to figure out a way to make my "move." Thank god I didn't have to.

We stayed up until nearly nine o'clock in the morning.

I realized over the course of the next several months that this was going to be totally different from any relationship I'd had before. I was ecstatic. We couldn't talk enough. For months I was sleep-deprived as we would stay up late talking night after night. We argued. We confided. We cried a lot, in the good way. We hatched plans, we challenged each other. I found out that he had a totally different view of my autonomy as a woman and as a human being than any person I've met. Since the very beginning, we've sought not to exercise any control over one another. I'd always thought of relationships as being very pleasurable but somewhat constraining, but in this one I was less constrained than even when I was single. I felt more ambitious. My feminism became more radical. I became less attached to the idea of monogamy, less jealous, less worried, exponentially less insecure.

I don't believe in the idea of "soulmates." I don't believe in the idea of "the one." That there's only one person out there who's just exactly perfect for any other person. I'm certain that I could have met a number of other people that I would have been happy with, could have built a great life with. But this, this is more than just a good life. This is more than a good match. This is.. something else.

So, in conclusion to the sappiest post that I have ever and will ever write on this blog, I'm getting married. I am thrilled at the thought that our marriage will be what we make it. I am thrilled at the thought that our marriage will be open until we have some really good reason to decide that it isn't, a reason I doubt will materialize. I'm thrilled at the thought of a partnership of true equals, a partnership that diligently endeavors to reject notions of authority and control, a feminist partnership. An intellectual and emotional and artistic and sexual partnership that makes me not less, but more free.

I've been contemplating the question of whether I want to get married and answering "probably" for a few years. But it was this post by avowed marriage-rejecter Amanda Marcotte that finally made me sure. It's not a defense of marriage, but an explanation of why people get married that I happened to find incredibly liberating. That people do it because they want to. Because there is pleasure in it. There is pleasure in love and partnership and commitment and there is pleasure in celebrating all that.

My marriage isn't about rational reasons. It's not about health insurance or social security or "for the kids" or making things easier or more secure or more certain. It's rational in the sense that it's obvious to me that me and my partner are a great match and have a very passionate friendship that will endure for decades. But other than that, it, like so many of my other undertakings, is about the combined goals of a lofty aspiration towards greatness, and and a not-so-lofty simple pleasure.

Because, boy, is it fun as hell.

You lawn care people get offa my lawn

Swear to god, did people in regular middle-class neighborhoods used to have yard care services the way they do now? Because I do not remember the sound of the damn leaf blowers and shit all the time. Though I suppose people did mow their lawns, so maybe I'm just forgetting or have become old and noise-sensitive or something. It feels like someone in this neighborhood has some goddamn loud machine running every damn day: jackhammers breaking up concrete to get to plumbing, leaf blowers (not for leaves, at this time of year), weed whackers, god knows what. It's driving me batshit.

A friend of mine pointed out that at least peak oil promises that we may have peace and quiet in our old age.

yo mama needs health care reform

One thing the government hasn't done for me is start picking up my mom's medical bills yet. Which is a problem because she's got god knows what form of mental illness that she refuses to deal with and as a result hasn't worked in years.

Thankfully, Remote Area Medical is offering free vision, dental, and medical services this week in remote Los Angeles, not far from where she lives in Long Beach. I just sent her the link.

An acquaintance of mine proposes that if politicians really wanted to talk about health care reform, that would be an excellent location. I think he's completely, 100% fucking right.

What have they done for you lately?

Publius says people need to understand how government benefits them personally. He then says,

After all, that's why progressives are progressives. We think the way we do because we think government can play (and has played) an extremely valuable role in people's lives. Otherwise, I wouldn't writing this, and you wouldn't be reading it.

Now, I don't know if this was his intention, but that statement immediately made me think, "literally. Literally you wouldn't be writing and people wouldn't be reading webpages without the government." (Al Gore jokes aside, check out this history and note the importance of DARPA in it.)

Which kind of gave me a giggle, thinking about all the right-wing blogs and the way that youtube and online information sources have helped the teabaggers get organized to protest imaginary socialism.

So, okay, there's the internet. Then there's the image to the left and the things it points out. Then there's stuff like most of my husband's career, which has been with the DoD in various capacities, and my graduate education, which was at a public university. There's the money I used to pay for my private undergraduate education, which came from government grants and government-backed student loans. There's my elementary education, which was likewise at public schools, and my kid's education, which is at public schools. There's my parents' jobs while I was growing up, both of which were in the public school system, and their credentials, which were earned at state colleges. There's my dad's retirement, which is paid for by the state.

There's the bus we took just the other day to go to the fair so as not to have to hassle with parking. There's the fair itself, actually. There's the beaches we like to go to (for now, anyway--Californians might want to join the state parks foundation, as I recently did). There are most of the pets I've had throughout my life, adopted from pounds. There's the small claims suit that will *finally* finish up, I hope, on Friday in a public courtroom, and the fact that there's a law that exists to give me some recourse to get my escrow money back when the people who didn't sell me a house refuse to sign the release forms. There's knowing that when I buy gas I'm actually getting the full measure I'm paying for, and being able to read (government-mandated!) labels on the food I buy to see what the ingredients are.

There's my doctor, who like me was educated at a public university, and the veterinarian that takes care of my pets, who was as well. There are our family vacations at state and national campgrounds. There's the unemployment benefits my husband was getting just as PK was being born and he was between jobs. There's not having worried when my bank (WaMu) was going under because I knew my money was insured by the FDIC. There's my husband's 401k and my son's 529 plan. There's the VA mortgage we used to buy our house. There are the (government-mandated!) seat belts in our car, and the car seat we used when PK was little. There's the fact that the air my son breathes in CA today is much cleaner than the air I was breathing in CA when I was his age.

I think you get the idea.

A Night at the Opera

Because I live in the remote hinterlands, I have to put up with a lot of sniffy booshwah from people who think rustic cultural life is, well, rustic.

Not from you all, of course. But you'd be surprised at the number of city folks who think entertainment in the countryside is largely goat-ropings, cow-tipping, and drinking beer cooled in the refrigarator on the front porch while surfing Univision to catch Rosa Franco in a tight skirt.

Not that we don't do alla that. Who doesn't? But there's plenty of high culture far from the great ceremonial centers of our Republic.

For example, I've seen three performances by ensembles of the State Symphony Orchestra since Memorial Day, each of them in cities of less than 50,000 population. One performance was just up the road in a hamlet with a permanent population under 2000.

That hall was packed for a program of Verdi. Have you seen The Four Seasons performed this summer? Um-hmm. That's what I thought.

Saturday, I have a date. That's right, a date. She's taking me to the great Opera House of Santa Fe.

Have you been? If you have, you know its the greatest opera house in the world. Let others wax poetic about La Scala, the Novosibirsk, the Sydney Opera House, el Teatro Colon. You and I can only smile. And sympathize.

Because we know, you and I, until you've heard La Boheme under the open sky of the altiplano, 7500' above sea level, you haven't heard opera at all.

And the tailgating! Dayum!

Except for Churchill Downs, I've never seen tailgating at this level of elegance. And try getting you some Chili Colorado like this anywhere near Louisville, Kentucky. It can't be done.

Saturday's program is La Traviata. We have seats in the loge. Excellent seats but they raise a certain problem in logisitics.

I started a new cycle of chemo this week. If it follows the same pattern as previous, nausea and weeping will set in by the end of the week.

Now, weeping at La Traviata should go without notice, I would think. Hurling in the loge, though. Its simply not done.

You might could get away with that shit in Novosibirsk. Not in Santa Fe.

More police bashing

Excellent piece by Digby today over at Salon (she's subbing for Greenwald). Skim the (rather dry) first few paragraphs, and get started with the paragraph that contains block quotes, which is where the meaty stuff is.

Some key links and a video, embedded here because I know some people are going to be lazy and not read Digby's piece above or follow her own links (I'm often lazy that way myself). First, for the non-lazy, a really fascinating academicish piece about technology and torture.

Wherever electric torture is depicted in the popular imagination, in movies like Lethal Weapon or Rambo, electric torture belongs to evil forces such as the Gestapo, French Fascists, cruel US Marines, the KGB, the Viet Cong, or Latin American Fascists. There is another story of electric torture, one that is in the grey patent documents. It follows on the trail of various devices created for the convenience of a democratic public: for the consumption of meat, for personal safety in the dark, and for airline safety. It culminates in a range of 'acceptable' torture devices such as tasers and stun guns to be found in our everyday life. This forgetfulness seems much in evidence in the civil rights histories which don't note the growing use of electric stun technology. We all remember how badly Rodney King was beaten by L.A. police but no one remembers how many times King was shocked and how much voltage he received.

Second, for the cyclists, the story of a man who rode past a speed trap and ended up getting tasered seven times, apparently because bikes piss that cop off, or something. Third, this video, which I find interesting in part because, as with the video of the old woman a couple of posts down, the reaction of the onlookers is pretty illuminating. They're shocked that the cops are reacting the way they are to something that's clearly not threatening--and maybe that the cops are willing to use violence in front of a huge crowd like that.

Round the House and Mind the Dishes

Here's a little Irish reggae for youse.

I'm reclining here, lolling in the chemical drip and surfing the net for Sinead O'Connor and what do I find but this reworked IRA standard.

Not speaking the Irish myself, I've been told it says some cruel shit about driving out the foriegner and so on. I'm a son of the diaspora so I can't really get with that but it also addresses the nation as the old woman who was so afflicted. That would pretty much describe my current situation to a Tee.

The chorus, is, I think, Oro, you are welcome home! which is where I wish I were now. If anyone can help me out with the lyric, I'd be obliged.

Anyway, the words are nearly impenetrable unless you're Granny is from the Gaeltacht but dig that beat. Just the thing to set it off here in the chemo lounge.

"The daughter of a sea captain and a masseuse"

RIP Roberta Fulton Fox. I had never heard of her, but she sounds like she was a helluva woman.

A few good links

Hey, my fellow Californians: if you know a valley girl--and I mean *the* valley, as in the Central Valley, not that San Fernando bullshit--who's a budding feminist, California NOW is accepting nominations for their 8-month leadership program. They're especially interested in young women of color. Nominees should be 16-23 years old.

Interesting photo essay: "Men at their Most Masculine". Top picture is sfw, but one or two show Actual Penises. What I found most interesting is that the two academic types are the only two that actually seem to define their masculinity through sexism. I'll leave speculation about that up to you guys.

Shortly after the murder of George Tiller, I wrote in frustration about the media coverage--or lack thereof-- of abortion on a day-to-day basis (as opposed to in the wake of murders, or as a political issue. My bad: the NYT has been doing a pretty good job lately. Like with this piece about illegal abortion.

You tell me what to think about this

From the very interesting Cop Watch blog. Which provides a handy link to a forum, ostensibly for cops, where the consensus seems to be that the cop did a "good job" knocking down an old lady who could barely walk.

Teh. Awesome.

I think this pretty much wins the health care debate.

You know, in the internet sense of the word.

The After Is The Before

Our chief blog proprietress IM'ed me this story, about how a caravan of famous and not-so-famous anti-abortion militants have been traipsing through the lockup in Sedgwick County, Kansas. They are all visiting Scott Roeder, who is alleged to have assassinated Dr. George Tiller last month. At first blush, it's not at all surprising. The visitors include: "two convicted clinic bombers. The man behind the Army of God Web site. Several activists who once signed a declaration that defended the killing of abortion doctors." All these people believe that they must "take matters into their own hands," that these murders are justified. And they are supported by a larger network of individuals who talk out of both sides of their mouths—one the one hand saying that they don't encourage violence, and on the other hand saying that the violence was justified. From the second page:

Leake, who for years has vocally supported the use of force against abortion doctors, said he is not talking to authorities and has forwarded their inquiries to his attorney. He said he didn’t think anyone persuaded Roeder to go after Tiller.

"I don’t believe anyone in good conscience could encourage someone to take a step like that," Leake said. "That’s something they’d have to do on their own."

He added, however, that "I support the shooting of George Tiller as justifiable homicide. I only wish that it would have happened in 1973, before he was able to murder his first child."

Okay, let's try to parse this, if we can. You wouldn't encourage someone to murder, but you support the murder. It seems bizarre to make this distinction, but I know why they're doing it. They're trying to avoid making any statements that could implicate them as part of a conspiracy. As most of you surely know, conspiracy to commit a crime is a separate charge from committing the crime itself. Being part of a conspiracy, and taking material steps in furtherance of the conspiracy, is something you can be criminally charged with even if you never actually committed a crime. Whereas giving someone money and a knife isn't a crime, if you give someone money and a knife as part of a plot to kill someone, that is a crime.

In law school, I took criminal law like every other law student. We were taught that crimes carried out by multiple people, who are engaged in a conspiracy, can be much more damaging and much more far-reaching than those carried out by individuals. They are less easily thwarted and often have complicated schemes for concealment. Just as the formidable human capacity for cooperation and division of labor enabled the development of or civilization as we know it today, that same capacity can enable far more frightening and complex criminal activity than what a single person is capable of.

Thus, we punish conspiracy as a separate offense with separate (i.e. additional) penalties from those than attend the commission of the crime itself. In fact, even if the crime is ultimately foiled, those who formed and furthered the conspiracy can still be prosecuted.

As far as I can tell, this is the main reason that we haven't had a scandal about some anti-abortion activist or group funding Scott Roeder's legal defense. As I tweeted with blog buddy Amanda Marcotte a couple weeks ago, no one has come forward to help out with the legal bills. Roeder is being represented by the Sedgwick County public defender's office. The day he was arraigned, multiple news articles mentioned the names of his lawyers, one of whom, Steve Osburn, is actually the chief public defender for Sedgwick County. Which I thought was a big deal, because I live in Cook County, where the public defender's office has hundreds of lawyers. As it turns out, Sedgwick County, Kansas, has about twenty-five. Presumably Roeder's getting the best they can offer.

But as much as I'm sure Randall Terry or similar would love to foot the bill for Roeder to get a private lawyer, I think the attention that has been drawn in recent months to Joe Scarborough's acting as defense attorney for the last iteration of abortion practitioner murder is standing in the way.

Money talks. And a private citizen or organization paying money for Roeder's defense fund suggests more strongly than almost anything could that there was a conspiracy before the crime was committed.

I've often felt discomfort with the public calls demanding for one party or another to condemn the words or actions of another party. I found it tiresome when anti-Muslim politicians complained that Muslim clerics didn't condemn 9/11 strongly enough (even though, really, they did). I found it tiresome when Barack Obama was pressed to "reject and denounce" the words of Jeremiah Wright. Indeed "reject and denounce" was actually a blogospheric punchline for a couple months.

Instead, I thought, it's more important to condemn these things before they happen, rather than condemn them with sufficient outrage after the fact. It's more important to refrain from engaging in rhetoric that implies that violence is justified, or rhetoric that whips your supporters into an outraged frenzy against health care personnel.

But I was missing something crucial. This is not a one-time incident. Far from it. Anti-abortion activists are engaging in violent or proto-violent activities on a weekly, if not daily basis. Shouting at women as they try to enter abortion clinics is violent. Shoving placards bearing (doctored) disturbing pictures of aborted fetuses in a woman's face while she is trying to obtain health care is violent [warning: that last link contains photos you may find upsetting].

The after is the before. We are not in a phase where we are "after" the violence. The rhetoric of anti-abortion activists making the distinction between "encouraging" (before) and "justifying" (after) the killing of abortion practitioners makes a false and meaningless distinction. What they do now, what they say now, is a message to the people who have not yet committed violence. What they say is "you will be a hero to us."

And being a hero, for these self-styled martyrs swept up by hatred and fear, is worth much more than any material support for a conspiracy could ever be.