In Which the Protagonist Has a Nervous Breakdown

I'm sicker than a dog (persistent, full-body, hacking cough, runny nose, headache, trouble sleeping), it looks like I've started running a fever, just got back an email reject from the Agent about the book (to be fair, it was very nice, and another request for a revision rather than a total reject), I am having trouble eating, I keep bursting into crying fits at work (me, yes ME), and I want to curl up into a ball and die. And my period is starting.

And I'll be 26 next week.

I'm going home now and drinking tea and watching mindless television.

Of course, even that may be more than I can bear right about now.

Note to Self

If you choose to write a writing contract piece on the origin of hamburgers, you must be prepared to spend the rest of the day craving hamburgers.

In Which the Protagonist Actually Stumbles Into Work On time

Sicker than a dog. Doing lots of novel writing. Pausing to do some writing contract work that's due Friday. My computer is still dead.

I am craving some chicken noodle soup.

Ug ug

What I'm Doing For New Year's:

Sleeping. Lots and lots of sleeping.

Well, and some writing. But that's a given.

The Old "Separate But Equal!" Argument

Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff over at Alas, A Blog has proposed creating women's-only threads there. Well, Radical Feminist Women's Threads, anyway.

Because that's what feminism is all about: creating a women's-only treehouse so we can sit up there and throw eggs at the men's-only treehouse.

Yea. That'll be real productive.

Leaving the whole "What's a radical feminist?" thing alone for now, I've gotta say, I was pretty shocked to hear this.

There are just so many anti-feminist posters here. There are way too many men here, and too many of them seem to be here for the express purpose of making feminist discussion unlikely to impossible.

"There are way too many men here" WTF??

Wow, we're in trouble.

Now, I support women's only spaces. When you're counseling women who've been abused by men, the last people on earth they'll want to deal with for awhile will be men. If they have the right counselors, that hopefully won't last more than a year or so.

Because I hate to break it to everybody: the world is composed of men and women - and even some people who are in-between - and we have to deal with all of them out here on the bus, on train platforms, at bars, in restaurants, on the street, on the plane, at work (oh yea), and at home.

Even the trolls and the assholes.

And if you can't deal with them in cyberspace, how the hell are you going to deal with them in real life?

If you're having such a terrible time with trolls and anti-feminist posters, somebody's not moderating properly. Take some advice from Teresa, and take back control of your boards.

Sure, I have a smaller audience than Alas, but I don't have trouble with trolls. Outright assholes just get deleted. I've only had to delete an asshole's post three times before he headed out for greener pastures where he could find some "radical feminists" to argue with. There are things I'm not going to engage with, stuff like "I think homosexuality is a birth defect" and "Come to my website! Feminists give the best head!"

Why would I put up with that crap? One asshole breeds more assholes.

I'll delete to my heart's content: it's my blog.

But one thing I will NEVER do is ban "all men" from my blog. That's as bad as what men do with "men's only" clubs and exclusive "boys only" military schools and "boys only" at the front ideas. Reverse sexism, silencing men's voices, is just as bad as silencing women.

I try to be a good moderator. If two people start a flaming argument, I tell them to cool down and get back on topic. I'll do that twice if it happens (yes, it's happened a couple of times), and if they don't do it, I'll tell them to go cool off and come back when they want to have an intelligent conversation. If the flaming continues (and it hasn't, yet, I have very good readers), then I start deleting (I really outta do TNH's disemvowling thing, but I haven't reached a point where that's neccessary).

Because here's a wake-up call to everybody in the blogworld:

People are going to disagree with what you say. They're even going to hate you for it. I'm sure I have "regular" readers who come over here just because they hate me so much (a lot of people on the Baen boards certainly did).

There it all was in familiar detail, the same dynamics I've seen play out over the years on so many boards where feminists have attempted to gather: the trolling, the misogyny, the endless diversion,the ongoing defenses of indefensible anti-feminist, anti-woman behaviors, and always a tiny number of dogged and persevering radical feminist militants who are relentlessly baited and goaded, to the point they respond decisively, vehemently, passionately, even angrily and (gasp) stridently, at which point all hell breaks loose, they end up accused of being "bullying" or "silencing" or "overbearing" or "domineering" or "rude" and "uncivil," to the point that, as with Ginmar, they end up leaving the boards entirely (or being banned).

Yea, it's called life. Sucks, doesn't it? The same thing will happen if you're in a group of frat boys or radical conservatives. In fact, it'll likely happen if you're in any of the southern states or 98% of the midwest. If you're the lone "feminist" (let alone "radical feminist" - whatever the hell that is, what, the ones who want a world without men? What's that mean, "radical." I don't think free healthcare, equal pay for women, better laws against rape and etc. is all that "radical") you're going to get harrassed about it. What better place to cut your teeth than online? There's less threat of physical violence, there's usually fewer people trying to attack you at once, and you have time to sort our your reply before you make a fool out of yourself.

Of course, if you choose to hang around a place where everybody thinks, acts, talks, and behaves just like you, you won't have any experience with debate, with a free range of ideas. You won't really be forced to think. You can all sit around and smoke cigars (or knit. Something tells me some of these "radical feminists" she's talking about are likely big on the knitting) and thump each other on the back for being so good-natured about being repressed by "the system." Which, of course, they won't feel they have to engage in because they have their own club.

After all, who needs to engage with the other half of the population?

What's the point of talking to men? All those men so set in their ways.... what's the point of engaging them with your ideas, getting their arguments, creating one of your own? I mean, if they can out-argue you, maybe you'll realize you need to go back to the drawing board and refine the way you speak about things, and what a lot trouble that would be!

Which means, of course, that the radical feminist voice and presence is ultimately silenced, erased.

Well, they weren't so radical then, were they? If you can't argue or ignore flamers, you must not have much of an argument.

The world is not full of sugar and spice. And worse than that - you make feminism a "woman's space" and you cut out half the people who have help move feminism forward. Cut them out and they won't see it as anything that effects them anyway. Why should they care? They aren't even allowed to talk about it. You think they're going to take it up in a locker room?

Ha.

Let's just shut down all the feminist blogs and boards to "women's only" spaces, only let women talk about "women's issues" like, say, equal rights (fooled me. This only effects women?).

Seperate spheres doesn't solve anything. It just drives us all further apart. It drives yet another wedge between the sexes, both of whom - guess what? - are human.

I hope the feminists at Alas aren't forgetting that. If they are, they're no better than the old boys.

The solution is proper board moderation, not cutting out half your audience.

I Didn't Realize Women Still Did This

So, what's up with douching?

I always thought it was a kind of vagina-hate type of thing. Like, "My parts are sooo gross no one will like them unless they smell baby-fresh." (which might say something right there. Yuck). I grew up hearing it was basically something that ruined the natural cleansing mechanism of your vagina, and so caused infections and etc.

Looks like Moms was right:

But health professionals generally advise against douching because it's thought to raise the risk of certain health problems, including bacterial infections and pregnancy complications like preterm birth. Though it's not clear that douching is the cause of these problems, experts believe that the practice may disturb the normal balance of beneficial bacteria in the vagina.

I just never understood the practice. I like my vagina. I think it's neat. I quite like the way it is. I don't see guys going around looking for something to stop themselves from ejaculating cause it's "gross" or to change the consistency of their ejaculate to a more "acceptable" texture. Sure, they may eat a little more pineapple on weekends, but c'mon, if your partner thinks your parts are gross, you need a new partner.

(via Twisty)

Secrets

I've been working out for awhile now, and dropped some of my stressed-in-South-Africa weight, which is nice. But beyond getting back to a comfortable size, a lot of people work out to get specific body results.

My secret I-want-it-to-look-better spot isn't my abs or my breasts (the myth still persists that if you do enough chest exercises, somehow your breasts will look bigger. They may hold out on sagging a little longer than usual, but that's about it. I've also never been a big breast person. I'm quite happy to have breasts that don't get in the way and are easily contained for jogging). My look-better spot is my collar bones, shoulders, and that thumb-sized imprint at the base of the throat. I always thoughht that women who had these areas clearly defined were terribly sexy.

This morning I put on a new thin black shirt with one of those wide collars, and was startled to see that I could see a bit of defined collarbone and some nice trianglar trapezius muscles there along my upper shoulders and the back of my neck. Not bad.

I've been thinking a lot about how I was killing myself last year living on 1700 calories a day and doing morning weights and intense workouts twice a week and pilates on Saturdays and wondering why I felt like I was going to die and my waist size stayed the same. But every "Women's Fitness" type magazine you pick up will give you meal plans for 1400-1700 calories a day. The eye-opener was when I read Hers, a women's body-building magazine, and they said 2-2500 calories a day was totally OK if you were working out and wanted to build muscle.

And whoa boy, what a difference it's made. I bumped up into that range and I feel fucking great. Now, granted, I'm pretty big. I'm the height and weight of the average guy, and telling a *guy* to live on 1700 calories might tick him off(there's a great study about a "starvation" experiment where twenty men or so were put on 1700 calories a day for sustained period. They became irritable, lethargic, and after a time started freaking out in the you're-kind-of-crazy way). For people who are smaller than me, this might work. For me, it doesn't.

I think it's pretty criminal to go around saying women should starve themselves, and I think it's what keeps us binging and purging. First we're on a diet where we can only eat eggs and salad, then we give up and live on donuts and pasta for three months, then eggs and salad, and yo-yo all over the place until we break our metabolism.

We've got to find sustainable programs. If I was doing something, some routine, that I didn't believe I could sustain, I'd be in trouble. Instead of 5 days a week at the gym, I decided on two, and five mornings a week of weights. That was doable. I also cut out exercises at the gym that I hated and/or dreaded doing. Sometimes I would skip the gym because I couldn't handle the idea of spending half an hour on the elliptical machine. I switched to half an hour on the bike and I feel much better about it. Same thing with some of the machines. I had a terrible time with one of the leg extensions, and cut it out after a couple of weeks. I hated it.

And I think that's how it has to go. You can't tell somebody "Here's the only way to do it." You've got to start with a program, sure, but then add and subtract according not only to the results you want, but how much you enjoy it.

And that'll keep you working out long after the New Year's resolution gym rush has died down.

Cool

I just got a 4.5% raise.

There's no other place I could work that would pay me this much to do what I do. I'm stunned.

heh

The Olympics: On 800 Calories a Day

The 25-year-old Mariash has been a runner for nearly as long as she can remember, and began competing in triathlons in 1998. Like many female athletes, she strictly limited her food -- dipping as low as 800 calories a day -- to improve her performance by losing weight.

But her results were just the opposite.

"I used to wake up really tired," she said. "I used to take a lot of time off training because I was so exhausted."

No shit. Holy crap! 800 calories???

"In high school track, we all starved. That's not how you get to the Olympics," she said. "Now I can train harder, farther. Things I was afraid of, like a four-hour bike ride, are easy now."

Read the rest

In Which the Protagonist Returns

Got back home to Chicago after reasonable airport delays and promptly fell into bed. I caught my mom's cold, and it's a crappy one. Had a great time spending Christmas at the Oregon Coast, at the Goonie beach.



It was incredibly relaxing, which is just want I needed. I was pretty burned out on everything. Got to catch up with a couple friends and did a lot of shopping. All my clothes are too big, and a belt will only get you so far.

Looks like I won't quite reach my book deadline, but I blame that on the fact that my computer crashed and I'm now using a backup laptop whose internet connection doesn't work for some reason, and swapping files back and forth without gmail is a bitch. Wrote out the final outline for the last part of the book so I have a map that ties up all the loose ends. Should bang out a lot this weekend.

Anyway, back to Chicago, piles of half-melted snow, but at least it's 30 degrees out instead of 10. Sorely in need of sleep and grocery shopping tonight.

Because of the dead computer, things may be quiet here until I can get it fixed or get a new one.

So it goes.

Off to the West Coast

I'm flying into Portland tonight for a holiday with the folks in WA.

Good wishes to all.

Modern Love

Thus Collins elegantly demonstrates the power of public perception in determining whether or not we manage to be happy in love. If, at the start of a century when women allegedly have it all, everyone is having the same arguments that were going round when women did not even have the vote, then progress is obviously not going to come from changing the law. We will have to change our minds instead.

Russ Appreciation is Up

My appreciation for Joanna Russ's story, "When it Changed" is up.

Check it out.

Computer Death

My laptop has died.

That's the third computer I've killed in the last 5 years.

I really need to start buying those stupid fucking warranties. I'm getting ultra screwed.

Let Me Tell You About Bravery... Ah, Those Sweet Gay Cowboys

The media seem to be running with a recurring theme around this movie: (Brokeback Mountain) the “bravery” of the actors playing the roles, the “courage” it took them to do it, and the “speculation” about whether America is ready for a “gay cowboy movie.” Certainly not a position a liberal would take, so it befuddles me how the media is labeled “liberal.” Because the media has all but compared these two to war heroes for their portrayal of two closeted cowboys in a story of unrequited love and personal deception...

Now, there can be no doubt it took awhile for this movie to be made. And there can be no doubt there was a lot of fear surrounding it. And that’s what the media should be talking about. Instead of playing into the homophobia about how courageous it is to play gay, the media should be examining why it’s OK to play a rapist, a demon, a vampire from hell, a serial killer who eats his victims with fava beans and nice chianti, or any of the hundreds of sick, warped, twisted characters Hollywood puts out and we gobble up. Why do studios green-light films all the time that have gruesome plots or despicable characters, and why did this film languish for years? ...

And to all you straight actors who want pats on the back for playing gay: Until you’ve lived gay, until you’ve been denied a job because of it, or had to hide in a Hollywood closet; until you’ve had your jaw smashed or watched a generation of your friends die of a disease while government did nothing (like in the Reagan era), don’t speak to me of courage.

It takes courage to be gay and out, not to play it.

Read the rest

I was flipping through the channels last week and found a Fox "talking heads" segment where they gave airtime to some nutjob who thought Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal gettin' it on on the range was promoting "the gay agenda." When asked what this gay agenda was, he responded that it promoted anal sex and the destruction of the family.

When asked if he'd actually seen the movie...

Well, no, of course he hadn't.

But come now my fellow straight women and gay boy buddies and romantic straight boys who sigh over love stories: all politics aside, how the hell can you pass up a movie where Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger are gettin' buck nekid in the tall grass?

I intend to pay money for that.

It's a romance movie, people. With hot guys. Get over it.

And I Would Just Like to Say

I'm really happy Christmas is coming up and I've got a week off work (sort of. I'm working remotely for an hour every weekday morning so I can run our daily reports. Partly because I'm too lazy to teach someone else to do it and partly because I don't have the PTO hours to take a "real" vacation. Maybe next year).

I'm very happy we're doing our family beach trip to Cannon Beach on the Oregon Coast (the "Goonie" beach, you know), and I'll be really glad to get away from my weird house for a week.

I leave for the west coast from work here on Thursday. Jenn's leaving today (she's orginally from California), and K's out tonight. I'll have a couple good nights to myself at the old place, anyway.

I have a shitload of writing to do.

No, I Don't Want to Be Your Friend

Mr. Grande Latte Enema has given all the admins a bottle of wine for the holidays. When I saw the bottle on my desk, I had a surge of affection because I thought it was from Blaine or Yellow, you know, the guys I actually know and work with. Instead, it was the new mucky-muck office head sent straight from corporate who's been having a hell of a time making friends with all us cynical bastards.

As with last year, when Juan the closet misogynist gave all the admins Godiva chocolates, I am vaguley annoyed. It's like, if it was from somebody I actually had a working relationship which, it would be cool. I'd be delighted to get a bottle of wine from Yellow. But getting a gift from the office head who you never speak to is like getting a Valentine's card from the popular girl in school who you know only gave you a card because her mom made her give *everyone* a card. There's no affection behind it, no relationship, only something that feels uncomfortably like it's either obligation or a like-like-me present, or both.

Eh, at least it's red wine. I was worried I'd have another bottle of white cooking wine on my hands.

News From the Trenches

Just in time for Christmas, I got back word today that my story, "Wonder Maul Doll" has been accepted for the war anthology "From the Trenches," to be published next year.

I am really, really happy about this.

15 Things About Me & Books

1) The first time I had sex was in a bookstore

2) The first best friend I ever had was a kindergardener who sat in front of our first grade class and read us a fourth-grade level book. He read all the time during class, and our friendship was based on the books we recommended to one another.

3) The sexiest present I ever heard of anyone getting was Kelly Link: on her thirtieth birthday, Gavin Grant gave her thirty books, each individually wrapped.

4) For the last two years, I have lived with a woman who has a book fetish. She counts our books and encourages my book-buying frenzies.

5) Buying books makes me feel good.

6) I enjoy reading books as foreplay

7) The book by my bed that I'm constantly re-reading is Michael Cunningham's _The Hours_. The book I've read the second-most is Cunningham's _Flesh And Blood_.

8) The first fantasy saga I ever read was not the Lord of the Rings (which I've never read). It was the first three Dragonlance books. At the time, I thought it was the coolest thing I ever read.

9) I own almost all of the Howard Conan novels. And I enjoy them. I find them deeply funny.

10) I considered trading, giving, borrowing, and recommending books to other people a bonding exercise. That is, if I really like you, I will buy you books.

11) I have never read _The Left Hand of Darkness_. But I feel really bad about it.

12) I would rather write like Joanna Russ than Ursula LeGuin. Unfortunately, this may mean I will die poor. On the other hand, if I can figure out plot, the world may be ready for bloody brutal women fiction now. You never know.

13) I would like to own at least 5,000 books.

14) I own 30 years worth of National Geographic magazines. I consider it Travel Porn.

15) I would like to buy a bouse so I can stop culling my books every damn time I move.

Off to NY

Off to NY for the weekend. Happily, as I could use the rest and it appears my household is imploding.

I need a vacation.