Corporate Socializing

So, it turned out a couple people didn't show for our corporate golf outing, so I got shut out of chauffering the boys around in the Beer Cart - fine with me. I hung out at Borders for a couple hours, then met up with the Boys at the steakhouse.

The Boys arrived an hour late (I was liason with the steakhouse), drunk and in highly good spirits. It doesn't get much more surreally interesting than hanging out with a bunch of drunken executives (the least senior of which makes just over 90K a year) at a posh steakhouse while running up an exorbitant bill on a corporate card.

I was worried that this would be one of those staid, fake roundabouts with smily, boring people. I need not have worried. Only about fourteen people showed for dinner, which ended up being a perfect batch. Blaine was in high form, drunk and expositing football stories. Ned, the Big Cheese from our group, was just as sloshed and fun (and everyone was very careful with their hands - nobody put a hand on me anywhere but my arm or shoulder, though Yellow ended up sitting next to me, and had his arm on the back of my chair for some minutes, which nearly set off my "pissed off" radar. But all in all, I appreciated being treated like a real person).

As they all arrived drunk (lots of cigar smoking and beer drinking on those golf courses), I had to do a lot of catching up. Pete, who works with the firm we're partnering with, ordered the wine. I sniffed and sipped the first glass and was surprised at how good it was. These are a bunch of blue-collar background types who've worked their asses off and done well. Very few of them actually came from old money, so I wasn't expecting fireworks when Pete ordered.

Turns out the wine was $85 a bottle.

It *better* have been damn good.

The damn good wine flowed all night. We took out at least a case and a half, and wiped out the restaurant's whole supply of the stuff.

I got a great table, Ned on one side, Yellow on the other, sitting across from Sarah, who's one of our on-the-ground construction managers, and Bettie and Pete, who both work with our partner company. Everybody was damn fun. Yellow took the opportunity to announce to the table that I was selling a book -- I knew I should have shut my mouth in the car during our three and a half hour drive down to the golf course. He kept prodding me for more information about my books. After admitting that I had wall maps, languages, and had, in fact, written eight previous books before trying to sell this one, he announced:

"You're a Trekkie!"

"No, Yellow. No. Some kids had ballet lessons or football practice. I wrote books. We all have our things. What the hell do you do every night?"

"Probably fuck around with my motorcycle."

"See," I said. "We're all weirdos."

After Yellow's speech about my writing at the table (we'd pushed the round table between two longer ones, so we were all at one big table), he sat back to watch the conversation fly.

Ferdinand, a big mucky-muck from our corporate offices, was very interested in what I was doing.

"He wants to know how the company's computers are actually being used all day," Yellow said.

I think my biggest gaffe of the night was saying to Ferdinand, "So, you grew up in Switzerland --"

"Sweden," he said.

Blah. I knew that. But hell, if that's the biggest gaffe of the night... I didn't even hit on anybody. A night when I don't hit on anyone present is generally considered a successful one (though Yellow was looking damn fine the next morning in tight, long sleeved white shirt and baggy gray cargo pants. But my twinges of attraction for Yellow are few and far between. Most days, I just think he's damn funny).

After dinner, we migrated to the bar and drank still more wine, and smoked cigars.

"I've got to see Kameron smoking a cigar," Ned said, doling them out.

So I smoked cigars (god only knows how expensive they were) and ended up talking with Bettie and Rhea. Rhea's also working with our partner company. She and Ned have known each other for something like 20 years. You can't throw a rock around this business without hitting someone you've worked with before.

I think Rhea's damn cool. She's gotta be over fifty, has bleached short hair, a deep tan, and wears skimpy shirts that show off her bellybutton ring. And she's wildly successful. She apparently got her engineering degree in 1978, and was the only woman in her class.

"I wasn't trying to make a statement or anything," she said, "I just really wanted to be an engineer. My dad was an engineer. I never really wanted to do anything else."

She also imparted a valuable bit of information to me - when I told her and Bettie that I didn't make enough money to afford a cell phone, Rhea leaned into me and said, "You'll be all right. Blaine *adores* you."

I had suspected I had a pretty secure job place, so long as Blaine could afford me. Now we just have to sign another contract, and I'll be taking advantage of this liking to get myself a frickin' reasonable wage (like, say, *double* what I'm making now).

After we wiped out the last of the restaurant's case of our chosen wine, we migrated back to the hotel. I tried to flick the ashes of my cigar out the window of the car and ended up losing the whole damn cigar. That was one of those stealthy, "Gosh, I hope no one noticed that" moments.

By this time, it's after midnight, and we're all plastered. Those of us staying at the same hotel congregated in the lobby's bar, and I had another cigar, and part of a glass of cheap wine which then made me sick. Blaine was in fine form, likely talking more football stories, though honestly, I don't remember actual conversation topics from that point in the night. He and Ned finally bowed out, as they had an earlier flight back to Chicago, and the rest of us said goodnight.

The next day, at breakfast, Yellow said, "Kameron, you must have talked the most of *anyone* all night. I knew you were going to have a good time."

I've found that the older I am, the more I know, and the more I've done, the easier these social bullshit things are. And, let's be honest: I really liked the people. I thought Bettie and Rhea were awesome, Ned treated me with total respect, Yellow kicked up conversation about my writing and his motorcycles, Blaine was just a big sweetheart puppydog drunk (which I suspect is his default form), Pete and Bettie had great stories, Sarah and Garret (our construction managers) spent an hour before the dinner talking shop with me while we waited for the drunken golfers (I really need to know more about the actual groundwork than I do), Rhea was just a frickin' powerhouse, and everybody was really easy going and cool. I had a great time.

At the end of the night, Ned handed me the bill so I could add on a little extra tip to the automatic one and write the new total before he signed it (he was toast, and had forgotten his glasses). I was a little dumbstruck at the sight of the bill total. I've never seen a dinner bill with that many digits. I was also pretty drunk by this point, and my math was off. I undertipped by at least $40, but seeing the "automatic" tip added in ($400), the thought of writing more hundreds underneath it made me vaguely nauseous.

When we moved to the bar and I caught site of the bar tab as I handed it off to Yellow (almost $300), I realized how addictive this sort of life could become for people. I mean, I was sure as hell fired up about it. Wouldn't it be great to be like Blaine or Ned, and do these things all the time? Order $85 bottles of wine and sign off on dinner bills that cost more than most undergraduates' first cars? Hob-nob all night with movers and shakers in companies worth billions of dollars?

It's gotta be addictive.

Me, Yellow, and Dee (our lead architect for the project) drove back the long drive to the office, and then I went straight home, packed for my Vegas trip where I'll be meeting up with my writing buddies (let's talk about my real addiction), and slept for 12 hours. Seriously. I was so exhausted and hung over I thought I was going to fall over.

That was damn good wine.

And, surprisingly, damn good company.

Work-a-do

Yellow just took off for the day (it's, um, 10:30am). I love working for these guys.

Anyway, I've got about 3 short stories I need to finish up and get out Cheira-Cheira, Heros, and Locust Dreams - today's gotta be a pure working day. So, for your amusement:

I've finally picked up Nick Mamatas' book, Move Undergound, largely because I'm enjoying his blog, and have given into the "buy my book," "have you bought a copy of my book" comments. We'll see if he's worth all his posturing. Of course, he's got a great review from Matt Cheney, which also helped push me over. The book is Cthulu meets Jack Kerouac, apparently. Not exactly up my alley, but I like the internet personae behind it, so we'll see.

I've also got a couple more book orders coming in: Christopher Priest's Fugue for a Darkening Island, Iain Banks' A Song of Stone. Very much looking forward to this set of books. These last two are absolutely brilliant writers (I may have mentioned that I've read Priest's The Affirmation about five times. It's a brilliant, brilliant book about a man creating and living in his own fantasy world. A great making and breaking of the world book).

OK. No ranting today. I really need to be working. Really.

On the Morbidity of Flora

I live with a lot of plants.

I managed to kill about four batches of basil and cilantro through lack of light before I got a potting table and tossed it out on the enclosed balcony at the back of the house. This'll be fine until, say, late September, when I'll need to buy a heat lamp and move everything inside. I'm adept at slaughtering plants. I went out the back today and realized I missed a watering day on my basil - it was deathly ill. I repotted and rewatered. Another batch bites the dust...

In other news, I got a very nice personal reject from Sheila Williams at Asimov's for my story, The Women of Our Occupation, (my first personal rejection from Asimov's in, what, 8 years of sending stories to them? This new editor switch over there is a damn good thing for shaking things up) and I'm going to go ahead and slip it off to Datlow and see what happens. It's the last of my latest batch of Brutal Women stories I finished up a few months ago that Datlow has yet to see. Invariably, she appears to end up liking them, and I get personal rejects every time - they just aren't "Sci-Fiction" types of stories. I won't go on a rant about what that means. This is a public forum, afterall.

Anyway, I've got hours of weekly prep stuff to do today. I've got a crappy corportate golf outing on Tuesday, and I'm off to Vegas Thursday to hang out with my Clarion peeps. I also really should go jogging today. Blah. Blah.

Ciao.

Blah

I'm drowning in RFPs.

Random Blog Slices

I think that what I like best about trolling through strangers' blogs is that you get these really random snapshots of people's lives:

Are You A Zombie?

The Tyler Durden Beauty Standard

My buddy Jeff was nice enough to give me permission to include his comments on my recent "Worklife" rant. He says:

...I don't think that the remaking selves for the opposite gender thing is as one-sided as you describe. Plenty of women talk quite brazenly about ideal men, and I think perhaps the most universal male experience (judging from milennia of literature anyway) is inadequacy. Plenty of men are intimidated by Brad Pitt. I know I am. Check out Chuck Pahlaniuk's books sometime. (He's the writer of Fight Club) He went through a phase of working out obsessively, taking steroids, and even having plastic surgery to get Brad Pitt-like beesting lips. This is why when the book made it big and Fox wanted to make it into a movie he insisted that Brad Pitt play Tyler Durden.

I'm a big fan of Palahniuk - I've budgeted in his latest nonfiction collection into this week's paycheck. He's doing some really edgy, visceral work: not a literary genius, but somebody's who's really tapped into the dark places in the social landscape (particularly relationships among men and men who find themselves unable to connect with others, including women) that nobody really wants to talk about. The ravaged, mad, bizarre stuff. "Inspiration," writes Palahniuk, "needs disease, injury, madness."

I would, in fact, argue that a lot of the failure of sexual equality has been the conception of "equality." Women have fought (and continue to fight) long and hard for the rights to be accepted as whole, strong, independent individuals. You can wave the flag of feminism all you want and say, "Now women are just like men," but you know what, maybe they shouldn't be. Maybe the social roles are the problem. I don't know that I'd like to suck up the "Bash people around as affection and show emotion only through anger" role. There are certainly a lot of the role qualities that I like, and I'd like to be just as free to choose which ones I like and which I don't, and until men are given the same option without threat of death or dismemberment, I still think we're a long way off from that breezy hippie liberal "equality for everyone" ideal that sounds really good to me on paper but looks trickier and trickier the more I see people trying to put it into practice.

Anyway. If nothing else, I'm inspired to catch up on my Palahniuk reading. I recommend him to you all, too (though I must warn you - he's not Mormon-safe).

Boxing Life

Had a great boxing class tonight. I had to wade through two months worth of classes and snag a yellow belt before Coach Fernando appeared to take me seriously, but hey... Coach made a point of partnering me with a great mitt partner tonight, Ray*, who's one of the two great female boxers I'd been watching jealously for the past two months. She's good, got great form, and snappy power.

Spent time getting my uppercuts and hooks down properly, and learning how to seguay between them. I've been having a shitload of trouble with these two moves, and snapping them together (right uppercut, right hook) was proving to be a problem of footwork (as most boxing trouble for me appears to be). I also worked on my doublejab.

Ray was a great partner. I got to the point where I felt comfortable enough with the forms at the end that I went ahead and started throwing with power - and hot damn, that's the best part of boxing. I get a kick out of it every damn time. Brutal women, indeed.

Ray confirmed what I'd suspected, "You've got the power," she said, "you just need to perfect the technique. You're really built for this."

Ah, yes.

I'm the boxer. Not the dancer.

And you know, I really like it this way. It's like I spent my whole life trying to be something I wasn't, and I'm starting to find the places I fit.

Really cool experience.

WTF?

I was randomly trolling through blogs on blogger (there's not much to do at work today) and found this.

In another of the posts, these two buddies share food thoughts.

Why is it I'm still so amazed when I discover other people who are as paranoid about food as I am? This is America, people.

My New Sign Off Quote

Oh. I love this.

"Anyway, back to work. I have characters to kill and deadlines to beat."
-- John Rickards (crime novelist)

Yea. It's official. This guy is now on my list of "read every day" blogs... Thank you, Matt Cheney.

Alaska Burning

I've been so caught up in Chicago life, gory Iraq headlines, and the media circus of elections and doublespeak, that it came as a surprise to hear from my buddy Jeff in Fairbanks that Alaska has apparently been burning all summer: As of August 6, a total of 5,566,358 acres have burned in the United States in 2004. Of these, 1,345,764 acres are in Alaska. The only good news appears to be that summer is more pleasant than usual when the smoke clears, because most of the mosquitoes are dead, or can't smell anything because of the smoke, meaning sitting on the cabin porch in July and August would actually be bearable.

Tuesday Prep

Finished my Tuesday prep time for the week in a reasonable amount of time tonight (laundry, switching over daily items from regular bag to workout bag, packing bag for martial arts class, cooking dinner, prepping lunch for tomorrow, etc). Sitting back now, relaxing, wishing I had a beer, and infinitely enjoying watching another writer scream at his own creations.

In other news, I bought a new hat,which I quite like, and I've got a Thursday group climbing extracurricular sort of event with a bunch of people from my martial arts school.

Gonna be a busy(ier) week, but now that I'm certified on the climbing wall, my weekends are utterly free...

Anyway. I should be writing.

Ciao.

Snapshots from my Worklife 2

I'm sitting in a meeting with Blaine and Yellow*, who are basically the upper management guys I've supported the last few months. We're trying to put together a golf outing for some clients, and Yellow says, "Have you seen those Norweigans in the Olympics? The rowers? The women are all six feet tall and blond!"

I nodded, as I have a six foot tall blond second cousin who moved to Amsterdam and married a six foot tall blond guy. These things happen. A lot of people raised in Africa have dark skin. A lot of people raised in Russia don't.

"Did you know that only, like, 8% of females, you know, women, have real blond hair? I read that somewhere. Heard it somewhere."

"I expect so," I said.

"That's where all the blond people in the world come from," Yellow said, "Those Scandinavian countries."

It occurs to me, listening to him, that there are days when I find Yellow attractive.

And there are days when I really don't.

There's a funny thing that happens when men start to talk about women in front of me. At all other times, I love the company of most sorts of traditional guys, because you know, I'm kinda butch myself. I love all the swearing, the giving each other (and me) shit, the smart-ass comments, the weird random rambling and butch posturing... but when guys start in about the sorts of women they find attractive, I read it as Male Gospel: not just "I find X woman attractive" but "All Women Should Look This Way."

And if you don't, there's something wrong with you, because you haven't even entered into the realm of possibility.

Who gave guys this power?

When I was younger, I would subvert this by simply changing my mindset: I decided I wasn't a "real girl." I wasn't a woman, so they weren't talking about me. I was one of them, buddy-buddy. I wasn't fem. I didn't carry a purse. I was sexless. It was the only way I could hang out with guys whose company I enjoyed without feeling like I was always being measured on how big my breasts were (or weren't).

This is all bullshit, of course.

Not being 6ft tall and blond, I found myself irked at Yellow's comment, particulary because it came just before he oogled the mother/child pictures sent to Blaine by one of his friends. Yellow wasn't interested in the child's name, but the mother's.

She was an elegant, stately blond woman.

And I get that little twinge, that irked feeling: goddammit, *I* want to be attractive. Goddammit, what's *wrong* with me... a feeling I quickly squash by pressing my fist to my gut and sucking it up.

It's a totally irrational response. I have no interest in Yellow, nor Blaine (Blaine is an ex football player with that good-old-boy charisma, Yellow is the guy in the leather jacket who'd sulk in the back of class - and he doesn't read books), and yet here I was, stomach churning because of offhand comments about the elegance of blonds. Not neccessarily because the comments came from these guys, but because I've heard this litany so often that I feel sick.

Stately natural blonds that I'll never be.

I wonder how early that yearning for male approval is ground into us. Very, very, early, would be my guess. Dress a male child in female attire, and he gets far different sorts of attention, and vice versa.

My sister, who's raising a boy, often makes the offhand comment, "Yea, he was eating sand the other day, but I mean, who cares? He's a boy... He's always banging into things, but it's fine, he's a boy."

I wonder if men feel this way when women oogle over certain sorts of men. Do men find Brad Pitt intimidating? Or, because women don't often oogle men in front of other men, or even talk or compare men to one another in front of men, if men just don't feel this comparison as much or as often as women do. Is there a lessor standard of male beauty? (I'm not even going to touch on same-sex attraction/standards of beauty right now - let's start with heteropatriarchy, and move from there. I'm addressing my own American upbringing where I was pretty well institutionalized with a dominant standard of beauty from the start, promulgated through media and then defined by the household culture I was living in. I grew up learning that same-sex attraction was certainly possible, and suited a very few people, but "they" were always "they" and "us" was always "us." Remaining "us" and not "them" meant I was pretty well wired into the male-approval system early on, no matter what sort of body would turn out to catch my fancy)

I suspect that men's expectations of female beauty are higher than women's expectations of male beauty -

Because women will submit themselves to the male standard of beauty, and men will readily perform it... and women will look down on imperfect women even more vehemently than men do. Because that imperfect woman gets to eat her whole wheat pitas, and all you get this week is apples and milk.

I've been catching some really disturbing shows recently on TV. MTV's got "I Want a Famous Face" where a girl conspired to have plastic surgery to make her look more like the airbrushed form of Kate Winslet on the cover of GQ (Kate is usually a size 8, the GQ cover stretched and erased her into a size 2). I also just buzzed by what appears to be a reality show on E! about the life of a plastic surgeon and his pregnant wife, who adamently declared, "If I end up with stretch marks because of this pregnancy, I told him he has to fix me."

Whoa.

Talk about men molding what women should be (women should look like young girls, not mothers with stretchmarks). And I'm not even going to talk about the grotesquerie that was The Swan.

Keep telling women there's something wrong with them. Something only men can fix, with words or scalpels.

Keep that economy moving.

I've just recently gotten back to the point where I recognize myself in the mirror again:

"Oh, yes, you, that strong woman with the wild hair and broad shoulders. Of course. Where have you been?"

"Hiding from thin women," would be the answer.

This plastic surgery craze is really fucking tempting. You can get some gastic bypass surgery and suffer from malnutrition the rest of your life (but you'll be thin!), erase hair from "unnatural" areas where it, uh, naturally grew, get cosmetics tattooed to your face, cut out a slab of your stomach, remove excess skin and stretchmarks, change the very shape of your face by breaking your nose or getting some chin and cheek implants.

You can remake yourself into whatever standard of beauty suits you.

The freaks are going to be the people who choose not to, or can't afford to: the eccentric and the poor.

But Kameron! Wouldn't it be great if you could erase those worry lines on your forehead you first noticed when you were 19, that first year you were living in Alaska? Wouldn't it be great to erase the stretchmarks and take up that loose skin from when you were 270lbs living in a shitty hovel in Bellingham when you were 18? Don't you want to change the lips that gave all those kisses and smoked all those cigarettes; don't you want to carve out that glut of hip and thigh fat that kept your grandmothers birthing healthy babies? Don't you want to erase all those nasty scars: the one just above your left eyebrow from when you were 14 and got the chicken pox and thought you were going to die, the pain was so bad? What about those scars on your hands from sword fighting in the high school theatre department? The scar on your leg from when you were 9 and your cousin was throwing glass? Don't you want to irradiate those pesky sideburns that Ryan Nelson made fun of when you were thirteen, clean out all the fat that spurred his inquiries into what, exactly, was it you ate all day?

And the fat, the fat, the fat. Think of all the fat that can be sucked from your body! The fat from your cheeks that made everyone call you "chipmunk cheeks," the fat from everywhere that encouraged kids in the sixth grade to shout "earthquake" as you passed by? The fat that will keep you with a perpetual woman's curved belly for the rest of your life (all willing - unless you get cancer)?

Don't I just want to erase all that history stored on and in my body, purge it all and start over, have one of those sleek, healthy, shiny bodies enjoyed by those girls on the El train going through the Loop every night, those slack-faced, empty-eyed girls with the smooth skin and seemingly flawless breasts? Those girls with the uniform expressions who all look the same? The endless procession of footballers' girlfriends who wear their hair straight and highlighted, whose smiles are brilliant and cellphone chatter boring and incessant...

Gee whiz, I'd like to look like that.

And - looking like that - I would give up everything else.

I'm not yet 25 years old. I've done a lot of things. I've made a lot of mistakes. At every turn in my life, my body has boldy, sometimes awfully, sometimes wonderfully, given a perfect picture of this tumbling, uncertain, nuts, silly, crazy, stupid life.

I wear my life on my body. My body wears my life.

I will not look like those girls on the train, the poor girls whose own body-logic is probably even more skewed than mine, who probably look at my curly hair and think, "Fucking bitch. I bet her hair's naturally curly."

Here we go again, hating each other.

Who wins when we do this?

Not me.




*do I even need to tell you these aren't their real names?

Boning up on WiMax 802.16

As I'm sure I've mentioned somewhere, I'm a project support manager (read: Glorified Secretary) for a telecommunications firm (we build, design, and upgrade cell phone towers).

My boss recently told me to start in on some research for the WiMax 802.16 frequency band. WiMax is basically super Wifi. It allows for faster data transmission (up to 10 times faster than what phone towers in the US are pulling right now), and a greater signal strength, so towers have a range of 30 miles instead of 3 miles. This means good things for people in rural areas, like my parents, whose only option so far has been the exorbitantly expensive and finicky satellite internet. DSL *still* hasn't made its way out into the boonies where much of America lives (think: sprawling Midwest).

The proposal we're working on has to do with a small install of 802.16 (though, again, I can't say where or with who cause of all this confidentiality stuff). Hopefully, it'll get going September/October, with a finished project by December, so they'll be some operating WiMax by the New Year, albeit in a very narrow market (there are likely a number of other WiMax projects out there that my little firm/my little place in it doesn't have wind of: in fact, I'd bet there are already some towers upgraded for it, though again, I haven't read of them during my research).

So that's what I'm spending my work time doing right now: gearing up for the busy telecomm season. We've got talk of thousands of UMTS upgrades (upgrading from GSM), which means faster data for all, and, of course, the potential to get your own porn streamed right to your cell phone. Hey: I shoulda thought of that.

I'm interested in both projects, as they have the potential to get wireless internet hookups to just about everyone. I'm a big proponent of opening up the vast internet library to everyone. I recently switched from internet-cafe-ing in South Africa to wireless internet in my place in Chicago, and in the year since, I've discovered the blogosphere, got up my own webpage, and am probably better informed about weather, politics, and technology than I've ever been in my life. It's an incredible thing to be speaking to someone in your house and have them ask you something you don't know, and suddenly you're able to say, "I'll just look it up," without worrying about carting around 30 volumes of rapidly outdated encyclopedias.

It's a resource I think everyone should have. Unfortunately, the easier it is for everyone to use, the more the governement is making noise about internet regulation (all that Evil Porn... Frickin' Terrorists).

Happy 13th

Happy Friday the 13th.

Sorry. I just had to say that.

So, the higher courts have annulled all those Evil Gay Marriages performed in San Francisco earlier this year (cause we all know how Dangerous those Little Old Ladies are. Frickin' Terrorists). The closer it gets to election time, the more exhausted I'm getting with politics, so I'm not going to rant much except to say that Every God-Fearing Republican should *love* the idea of *more* people getting married. More people getting married means more people with combined household incomes, it means more children with more than one parent, it means a better economy (more wedding dresses, tuxedos, receptions, ceremonies, more work for flower shops, bridal shops, catering companies). It means more people are going to get sucked into the outwardly appearing monogamous pair-bonding ritual. The royal "we" can get that much bigger. On the other side, all of us hippies can rah-rah the great blanket of hetero instituitions now available to everyone, in a free and democratic sort of way. You know, the sort of way that includes, um, everybody.

To be honest, I didn't form a real stance about the issue of same-sex marriage (aside from: yea, whatever) until I thought of it this way: If I was born a man, and I wanted to marry a woman, I could. But because I'm born a woman, if I want to marry a woman, I can't.

And then, suddenly, my feminist lens clicked down over my vision, and lo and behold, I realized I - as a woman - was being denied one of the rights of citizenship. Regardless of whether or not I ever wanted to marry a woman (I do not personally believe in getting married, myself), society was telling me I couldn't because of the sex I was born with. Regardless of whether or not I want to be a lawyer, or graduate from Harvard, I want to have those rights. I want to be able to own my own property, earn my own income, and be financially independent of father/husband/son. In other words, I want to be considered a full human being and an American citizen.

One of my buddies got into a heated debate with a Mormon friend of hers about whether or not the Mormon church would ever perform same-sex marriages, if such unions became legal at the government level.

The Mormon vehemently replied, "The church would never do that!"

I'm sure they said the same thing about interracial marriages fifty years ago.

Institutions are not monolithic. There are no absolute truths.

And, on a final political note of news, this amuses me:

.

Touching Base

It's been a busy week.

My buddy and roomie, Jenn, has been in New Orleans all week doing a big social psych conference. I've spent much of my time being delayed due to all the filming going on downtown for the new Batman movie. I got to sit on a train for fifteen minutes while Batman got to direct traffic - they didn't want our El train riding through their shot. Mostly, Batman being directly in downtown has meant some blocked-off streets, and a bunch of camera boom trucks, huge lighting trucks (which I mistook for firetrucks when I saw only their front end), trailors for crew (complete with aircon, of course), and a couple of "SWAT: City of Gotham Police" trucks.

It's been a surreal week heading through downtown for my kickboxing classes, to say the least.

I tallied up a couple more agent rejection letters ("We'll reject your manuscript without reading a page! Don't you love publishing!!?")and worked on some of the never-ending rewrites for book one, as I just can't seem to leave it alone.

In other news, gabe the agent poseur is imploding, which amuses me, the Columbine diaries are being released, idleness is one of the greatest virtues EVER, and (drumroll) my webpage is up.

Have fun.

The Wall. Next Question?

"No, I don't have prom pictures, but I have pictures of me on the Great Wall of China."

- Mary Lou Retton (Olympic gold-winning gymnast)

I'll be posting less this week - doing some heavy rewriting on several projects.

Ciao.

Settling by the Sea

I WANT TO BUY THIS PROPERTY....

This is why I go to work everyday.

Starbucks

Coming back to the US after a year and a half in South Africa, I made a startling discovery:

There really was a Starbucks on every corner.

I should have been tipped off when I came back to the parentals' abode for the holidays in Dec `03 to find my small, sleepy home town had acquired a Starbucks.



Here in Chicagoland, this is my local Starbucks that I visit on workdays. This is the Starbucks two streets over from the one above, which I go to on days off.

Want to add to the Starbucks on your corner photolibrary? Or just really geeky, like me? Check out Starbucks Everywhere.

Amen

Matt Taibbi cuts out all the bullshit from Kerry's acceptance speech...

"When I was done cutting, there were only two lines left.
I was born in Colorado.
America can do better."

In other news, this guy is fucked.

Too bad for him he's not a rich football player. Maybe he can blame Liberal Intolorence, or say he was Channeling God. That always works in those god-fearing states.

Changing Lanes

"Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still."
Chinese Proverb

It's after my strength training class on Monday, the day after my climbing class, and I've just lost about a gallon of water. Our MA school doesn't have air conditioning, just a bunch of big fans, and on a 95 degree day in Chicago, well, it feels like it doesn't have much of anything.

I'm sitting in the locker room, staring at the lockers while unwrapping my hand wraps, that slow, ritualistic unwinding that gives you time to space out or ruminate. I'm ruminating.

I hurt all over. Mondays are always the toughest, likely because they're coming just after my Sunday climbing class. And we did strength training today, meaning squats, weights, and martial arts stance drills (all of which still seem to baffle me), and then krav maga, which has more bag and mitt drills (which I bowed out of). I also managed my first jogging session last week, on Friday, which I'll be repeating again this week. It gives me four days of hard exercise a week, which contents me - for the time being.

And I'm sitting here thinking, "Fuck, this is hard."

My set point is "sedentary geek." I'll read a book a day and write you a couple academic papers a week while working on a novel and keeping track of US politics while teaching myself how to use PowerPoint, but ask me for a right front kick, left jab, right cross high, right cross low, front kick combo and I'm likely to spend most of my time during that drill trying to understand how all those things can go together and yet still find me upright at the end.

And I'm tired.

When I was a kid, I believed I was going to have a really interesting life. I believed I was destined for all sorts of adventures, that if I just sat around in my dusty little one-horse town and waited long enough, cool shit would happen to me. This is the "overlooked ordinary hero" syndrome common in just about every fantasy novel. That whole, "extraordinary events make ordinary people extraordinary" thing. So I sat around and waited.

At thirteen, I began to panic. I felt really old. A teenager all ready, and nobody had ridden up, tapped me on the head and said, "You are the One."

It was really depressing. What was the world waiting for?

I ran out of the house three days after turning 18 in a desperate attempt to make something *interesting* happen. Instead, the person I shacked up with turned out to be a flake, and I hit rock bottom at a really young age. I realized that no, despite all those mythological stories about "overnight" successes pervading the American media landscape, nothing was ever going to happen to me. I was going to work as a waitress my whole life.

Or not.

I keep trying to build up this life, this cool gift, with choices. Take the tough path. It usually hurts. And it's always hard. I've been making a life out of choosing the tougher, more interesting road for several years now, and I don't intend to cease doing it. My choices get me to interesting places.

Me. I do.

The people who help me along the way can only help me with my own choices.

So I'm staring at the lockers, my handwraps are on the floor, and I'm heading back to the showers. On Wednesday I'll be there again, wrapping up my hands, still sore from Monday, and bowing out on the floor before kicking my own ass in that lifelong pursuit: being better. Despite or because of the fact that it's hard, and it hurts.

I've decided on a place I want to be, a life I want to have, and these are the steps I need to take to get there. To be better than I was the day before.

Today's Quotes

From: Quotable Woman

"If you weigh well the strengths of our armies you will see that in this battle we must conquer or die. This is a woman's resolve. As for the men, they may live or be slaves."
- Boadaceia

"How many husbands have I had? You mean apart from my own?"
- Zsa Zsa Gabor

"A hundred years from now? All new people."
- Anne Lamott

"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."
- Hedy Lamarr

"When mom found my diaphragm, I told her it was a bathing cap for my cat."
- Liz Winston

"No more tears now; I will think about revenge."
- Mary, Queen of Scots

"People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."
- Rebecca West

"The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more."
- Colleen McCullough

"I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career."
- Gloria Steinem

"The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed."
- Edna O'Brien

Amusement

"Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Contrary to what you've just seen, war is neither glamorous nor fun. There are no winners, only losers. There are no good wars, with the following exceptions: The American Revolution, World War II, and the Star Wars Trilogy. If you'd like to learn more about war, there's lots of books in your local library, many of them with cool, gory pictures."

- Bart Simpson

From Alas, A Blog

and for something completely different...

I went to a local megastore to buy a computer hutch for my oldest daughter, and, while I was there, I ran into one of the most talented students I have ever known. She graduated a year ago with a major in English and a minor in information systems. Now she works as a cashier. She wore a red smock and a little plastic nametag with the word "Target"

And one more...

Who doesn't like Teresa? Oh. The ones who still think women should be seen and not heard...

According to the chattering class, Heinz Kerry is -- and I quote -- "too outspoken," "too opinionated," "slightly zany," "eccentric and unpredictable," "the queen of direct" and -- cover your ears, kids -- "says what she thinks, when she thinks it."

Where's Our Line?

I'll be fascinated to know where we'll draw the line. Concentration camps? Death squads?

"We caution people not to write about bombs because if they're going on vacation, their travel plans will be disrupted," she said.

Random

Some random miscellany:

Plastic surgeons today warned people not to have cosmetic surgery to try to gain celebrity looks.

And, in case there was any further dissent about the reason there are still more dead people in the middle east: Saddam controlled a country at the centre of the Gulf, a region with a quarter of world oil production in 2003, and containing more than 60% of the world's known reserves. With 115bn barrels of oil reserves, and perhaps as much again in the 90% of the country not yet explored, Iraq has capacity second only to Saudi Arabia. The US, in contrast, is the world's largest net importer of oil. Last year the US Department of Energy forecast that imports will cover 70% of domestic demand by 2025.

Alternative energy source, anyone? Might be a lot cheaper than invading a desert country and killing thousands of people. Oh, right, but then all those US oil barons would be out of a job. Well, shit, then. There are some interesting predictions in this article. Maybe it's just too much to ask people to tell the truth before they start killing people. Maybe it would be a lot harder to kill people if we told each other the truth.

On a lighter, distracting note: I just can't stop laughing.

About Brutal Women

So, at some point, I should address the fact that brutalwomen.com is a rather bad porn site. That is, that's why I don't own that URL. Though I'd prefer to have it.

Of course, any configuration of URL that includes words like "women" or particularly "girl" are likely going to be porn sites. Porn sites jumped on this internet wave pretty quick and early (I wouldn't go so far as to say prematurely...).

I still stick by my decision to use brutalwomen.blogspot.com, and I apologize to those whose internet filters cull me. There's censorship for you.

Things I Can't Sell

Two Girls

Two girls, a he and a she, married along the far shores of the Shadow Sea. They were both very small, delicate in the wrists and ankles, light enough to fly. Frost kissed their eyelashes. They lay in the snow, dressed all in martyr's white. We stoned then to death at dawn. The blood was very beautiful.

The Women of Our Occupation

The drivers were big women with broad hands and faces smeared in mortar grit, reeking of the dead. Their eyes were filmed over with memories of dust. When we did not see them passing through the gate, ferrying truck loads of our dead, they came to us in dreams, the women of our occupation.

Wonder Maul Doll

We'd set down in Pekoi as part of the organics inquisition team, still stinking of the last city. We're all muscle. Not brains. The brains are out eating at the foreigners’ push downtown, and they don’t care if we whore around the tourist dregs half the night so long as somebody’s sober enough to haul them out come morning. When the brains aren’t eating, they’re pretending to give us directions in the field, telling us where to sniff out organics. They’re writing reports about how dangerous Pekoi is to the civilized world.

Sho

There was a boy in the snow. He was not beautiful.

He was left to me because I am an old person, a man by right of absence, not presence. I had all those organs removed years ago. The boy was carried and set down -- not gently -- in the gutter along my street, three doors from my stoop. The streets were bitter cold. If I left him where he lay, no doubt, the unbeautiful boy would become as the trees, coated in icy frosting and pushed into the sewers by the street sweepers in their growling machines.

I'm thinking it has... ahem... something to do with the themes...

Gaping Void

I love this guy....

More on the Politics of Fear

President George W. Bush may be tapping into solid human psychology when he invokes the September 11 attacks while campaigning for the next election, U.S. researchers said on Thursday...

"A lot of leaders gain their appeal by helping people feel they are heroic, particularly in a fight against evil," Greenberg said in a telephone interview from Hawaii, where he presented the findings to a meeting of the American Psychological Association...

Greenberg, Solomon and colleagues then decided to test the idea further and set up four separate studies at different universities.

"In one we asked half the people to think about the September 11 attacks, or to think about watching TV," Solomon said. "What we found was staggering."

When asked to think about television, the 100 or so volunteers did not approve of Bush or his policies in Iraq. But when asked to think about Sept. 11 first and then asked about their attitudes to Bush, another 100 volunteers had very different reactions.

"They had a very strong approval of President Bush and his policy in Iraq," Solomon said....

The volunteers were aged from 18 into their 50s and described themselves as ranging from liberal to deeply conservative. No matter what a person's political conviction, thinking about death made them tend to favor Bush, Solomon said. Otherwise, they preferred Kerry.

"I think this should concern anybody," Solomon said. "If I was speaking lightly, I would say that people in their, quote, right minds, unquote, don't care much for President Bush and his policies in Iraq."

Snapshot from my Worklife

I work at - shall we say - a Dilbert sort of office. As I've signed a confidentiality agreement, that's about all the background I can give you.

Try this one.

And, another, for a good idea.

Watch This.

If you haven't watched this yet, you should.

And... Ah, consumer America: buy a loop of red string for $25.99. I mean, it's "mystical," man (via Boingboing)

Weighing In

Ranting:

I loathe clothes shopping.

I've hated shopping for clothes since I was about eleven or twelve, when my mother could no longer find my size in the children's section and had to drag me - kicking and screaming - into the women's section of Mervyn's to find a pair of jeans that actually fit me (this was back before there were "teen" sizes/sections). At the time, I was horrified at what I saw as the out-of-control escalation of my weight. I'd been hounded about being overweight since I was about five or six, and being dragged to the women's section of the store just before the sixth grade was just about all I could handle.

I had failed. It was all over.

A year or so later, I started bleeding.

Women's section, indeed.

What, did I expect I was going to stay on the kid's side forever?

But in fact, most women I know rebel with mortal terror against the escalation of fat that their bodies kick in during and after puberty. All that hip, thigh and butt weight is quickly being toted as the next big "epidemic" threatening the Civilized World, `cause someone with a fat ass is taking up too much room on the subway.

You want to know what the number one cause of death is, worldwide?

Infectious and parasitic diseases, also related to poor health care and malnutrition. Funny, I wouldn't have guessed that.

But let's not get too far off topic. I was ranting here.

So I went looking for a pair of pants the other day. I'm not a small woman. I've vacillated between 175lbs (my preferred "fighting weight") and 270lbs (my highest benchmark, which I hit briefly when I was 18) for the last twelve years. The war against my body is ongoing.

According the infamous and ludicrous BMI "charts" that the US health and diet industry continues to promulgate, I have to be 168lbs in order to be at a "normal" weight for a woman. Most of the people I go to high school with would say 150. Hollywood would say 130. Everyone would say, and has said: Less is more.

As a woman, there should be less of you.

For the entirety of my life, I've been told that there should be less of me. Going clothes shopping reminds me of this.

I am fascinated at the American fear of fat people not only because it was so often directed toward me, but even more because I direct it at other people. I'll be at the grocery store, watching some fat-ass stacking up doughnuts and rice crispy treats, and I'll start an internal diatribe against The Fat. I'm standing next to my own cart whose contents rarely change from week to week: strawberries, bananas, lean ground pork, skinless chicken breasts, string cheese, half & half, eggs, tomatoes, onions, cilantro, green onions. There's not an ounce of shit in my entire cart. If I'm feeling especially rebellious, I might add some whole wheat pitas or rice noodles.

All this health: boxing classes twice a week, a climbing class on Sunday, bike ride on Saturday, and starting today - jogging once a week: and I don't look like a fucking supermodel. I will never look like a supermodel. I will never, in fact, be even 150lbs, unless I want to work out three hours every day and look like I walked out of Auschwitz. I don't have that sort of body, or that sort of metabolism.

So I stare at my whole wheat pitas and growl at the Fat Masses who allow themselves the luxury of chocolate eclairs and doritoes.

And, of course, I am ever cognizant of the woman behind me: a thin blond cheerleader type sneering at *my* fat ass and lusting after my whole wheat pitas while she looks down at the apples and non-fat milk she's bought to sustain her for the week.

I've been told my body's all wrong for most of my life. First, because I was a "girl" which somehow had a world of meaning outside of the way I actually viewed myself (you know - as a person). There were and are things that "girls" do that make them girls, and if you don't do them, you start to feel a little like a failure. I don't wear makeup. I don't carry a purse. I don't dress fem: that means no skirts, no dresses. I can't dance. I can't sew. My cooking skills are merely adequate. I'm not thin (a recent addendum to the "being female" camp). I'm too tall (5'9 is the average height of the American male, not the American female). My feet are too big, like giant portable skis (size 11). My breasts are too small. I have the wrong color hair (brown, not blond). I don't like soap operas. I don't like romance novels. I don't like big butch men. I don't like girls enough. I can defend myself from most threats. I know how to change a tire. I have too much education. I'm loud. I'm opinionated. I speak out of turn. I swear a lot. I drink beer. I don't care much for roses. I find syrupy sentiments exasperating.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to be smaller, quieter, to dress the way I was supposed to, to stop talking about myself, to pretend I was stupider, to pretend I read less and partied more. But at the end of the day, that only made me more miserable.

I remember a highschool boy friend hauling me home after school one day and saying, "I have to show you something."

He pulled out a book of ancient Greek art and opened it to full color pages of nude and partially nude statues and portraits of women. Anyone who's seen a lot of Greek work and its Renaissance imitators knows that their female subjects tend to be hourglass or pear-shaped women, fleshy, intimidating figures big in the hips and thighs. They often look like they could thwart an onrushing chariot merely by holding out one strong arm.

"See," this guy said to me, reverently turning the pages of the art book. "These are real women. This is the way women are supposed to look. This is how you look."

I likely should have been flattered. A lot of the men I've met expect me to be flattered when they compliment me, as if their opinions are some sort of manna from heaven. In fact, I was startled.

"How women are supposed to look?" Isn't that the whole problem? Men deciding how I'm supposed to look, and giving me a grade based on their opinion? Who the hell gave you white male assumption of privilege to assess my worth? Oh, that's right: you were born white and male. Congratulations. Manna from heaven.

And really, this is what it all came down to.

When I stepped back and looked at the Fat Issue as being about class, about affluent people looking for another way to look down on poor people, sure, that made a lot of sense too. Weight loss symbolizes sacrifice and restraint and good pious Christianity, which would, of course, be really popular in Puritan America. Hungry women get more media attention. Hungry women get more attention, period.

"You're so thin! Did you lose weight!" is considered the highest of compliments.

The reply to that, in fact, should be, "Yea. Do you think I have cancer?"

So, fat is a class issue, sure. Yea. And it's a feminist issue, because the vast majority of dieters, the vast majority of people hounded about weight, are women. Because women generally have a higher ratio of body fat than men (women with less than 10% body fat do not menstruate. If women don't menstruate, the human race dies out. So...).

To get us back to the beginning: Why do I really care about my pants size anyway? Is it because I think people will look down on me? Sure. Because I won't find attractive clothes? Sure.

Hey, wait a minute. Why do I want to be so attractive? Who am I trying to attract? I am not, in fact, attempting to attract anyone, and have not been trying for quite some time. So what gives?

Fat is, at its heart, about standards of beauty. And who controls them. By controlling standards of beauty, you can control people.

What do you do to silence a strong, smart, financially and emotionally independent woman so that you'll feel superior to her?

Tell her she's fat.

Make her neurotic about something she can't change, or worse, something she can only change with thousands of dollars of surgery performed by a (male) doctor, dollars she'll earn working in a crap job she hates for a (male) boss. Tell her the same sorry story that I've been getting since I was six years old: there's something wrong with you. You have the wrong body. You have the wrong bones. The wrong shape. The wrong mouth. The wrong hair. The wrong eyes. It's just all wrong.

Who's telling you this? Pretty much every loud, blaring media outlet around. The vast majority of them owned by... Huh.

Men.

After settling on my pair of pants and bundling it into my bag, I walked down Washington and stopped in at a sandwich shop for dinner before my boxing class. I settled on an Italian sandwich packed in thin bread, no sides, and an iced tea. I stared vehemently at my sandwich. I wanted to eat the whole thing. I wanted to eat the whole thing not only because I was hungry, but because I wanted to wave a big "fuck you" at the entire marketing industry. How can the opinions of other people have so much weight on my mood? Why do I give a shit about what number is on my pants, as long as they fit? Who the fuck cares? I WANT TO EAT THIS GODDAMN SANDWICH.

I ate half the sandwich, set it back on my plate, and stared at it. I was satiated, but not totally full. I would be hungry again in two hours. I stared at the sandwich. I WANTED TO EAT IT. I WAS VERY HUNGRY.

But I couldn't eat it. I went through a list in my head of what I'd eaten that day. A protein shake. A string cheese. Half a cup of brown rice with chicken.

AND I WANTED TO EAT THE REST OF THE SANDWICH.

I thought about health, and losing weight, and what were people going to think of me at Christmas? I thought of the numbers on the tag, I thought of the girl who was a size 8, standing in front of me in the line to the dressing rooms. She was not built like me. She didn't have these broad shoulders and these bones. She also didn't have these arm muscles. Mine are much scarier. I thought of the fact that I was not, had never been, and would never be one of the Beautiful People. My face would not launch a thousand ships - and that was a good thing. I was a writer, and a human being, and I really liked who I was and what I was doing with my life.

I went through, again, an inventory of what I'd eaten that day.

AND I WANTED TO EAT THE REST OF THE FUCKING SANDWICH.

And then...

Greedily, rebelliously --

I did.

I ate the rest of the sandwich. I was full. I was happy. Then I had a great boxing class. I went home to my own place that I upkeep with my own money and curled up in my own bed that I paid for myself, in a room that was all mine.

I'm not even 25, and I've been to lots of places, met really strange and weird and funny people... I've done some crazy things. I've done some wonderful things. I write books. I sell short stories. I can pick people up and carry them around the room.

And there I was, sitting in a sandwich shop, spending 15 valuable minutes of my time obsessing about whether or not to eat another serving of bread.

There is something fucked up about a society that's ground at me so much that I still catch myself performing these perverted parodies of self hate.

Who are other people, to tell me how to look, what to wear, what to eat?

The answer is, in the end: they're no one.

I think the greatest fuck-off of all is that the world conspires to make you think that it's got you in a corner, that there's no way out. No way up that wall.

They're wrong. And the minute we realize that, I think, everything changes.

Wouldn't that fuck things up.

Speech! Speech!

Great speech by Al Gore on the politics of fear... wouldn't it be great to have an educated president again?

Fear drives out reason.

It suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction.

It also requires us to pay more attention to the new discoveries about the way fear affects our brains...

The root word for democracy - "demos" - meant the masses of common people, who were an object of fear in the minds of many of our country's founders.

What they wanted was an orderly society in which property would be safe from arbitrary confiscation (remember the Revolutionary War was in significant measure about taxation).

What they believed was that a too pure democracy would expose that society to the ungoverned passions of what today we call "the street:" of people with little to lose, whose angers could be all too easily aroused by demagogues (note the root, again) and turned against those with wealth.

So the Constitution of which we are so proud is really an effort - based at least as much on fear as on hope -- to compromise and balance out the conflicting agendas of two kinds of Americans:

those who already have achieved material success, and those who aspire to it: those who are happy with the status quo, and those who can only accept the status quo if it is the jumping off place to something better for themselves.

That tension can never be fully resolved, and it is perfectly clear at the present moment in the profoundly differing agendas of our two major parties.

Neither has the fear that underlies these differences gone away, however well it may be camouflaged.

Somewhere along the line, the Republican Party became merely the name plate for the radical right in this country.

The radical right is, in fact,

a coalition of those who fear other Americans:

as agents of treason;

as agents of confiscatory government;

as agents of immorality.

This fear gives the modern Republican Party its well-noted cohesiveness and its equally well-noted practice of jugular politics.

Even in power, the modern Republican Party feels itself to be surrounded by hostility: beginning with government itself, which they present as an enemy; extending to those in the opposition party; and ultimately, on to that portion of the country whose views and hopes are represented by it - that is to say, to virtually, half the nation.

Under these circumstances, it is natural - perhaps tragic in the classical sense - but nonetheless natural - for the modern Republican Party to be especially proficient in the use of fear as a technique for obtaining and holding power....

In many ways, George W. Bush reminds me more of Nixon than any other previous president.

Like Bush, Nixon subordinated virtually every principal to his hunger for reelection.

He instituted wage and price controls with as little regard for his "conservative" principals as Bush has shown in piling up trillions of dollars of debt.

After the oil embargo of 1973, Nixon threatened a military invasion of the oil fields of the Middle East. Now Bush has actually done it.

Both kept their true intentions secret.

Like Bush, Nixon understood the political uses and misuses of fear.

After he was driven from office in disgrace, one of Nixon's confidants quoted Nixon as having told him this:

"People react to fear, not love.

They don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true."

Holy Crap

Viacom's launching a new channel: Gay Channel Now Set To Launch Feb. 17

No shit. That's cool.

Climbing

Had my first climbing class last night. The place I go to has a featured outdoor wall with overhangs and optional lead climbing areas that's at just over 70ft. I haven't done any climbing in over three years, when I was back at the U of Alaska. When I lost my belay partner, I spent five days a week bouldering, and I loved it. But all of that climbing was pretty much freeform -- I only ever did a quick certification test, and the wall itself was pretty basic; only about 50 ft or so of flat concrete wall peppered with handholds, tagged with routes. There was a shorter tilted wall banged out of wood that simulated an overhang, but nothing fancy.

This time around, I'm doing four classes of actual instruction over four weeks, then switching out to a regular 1-2 per week climbs for the rest of the summer. After that, I'll need to decide if I want to join the indoor wall downtown or quit for the winter, as the outdoor wall closes Oct 1st.

It's funny how much you forget about climbing. In my case, I had a belay partner in AK that I trusted; we were buddies, and by the time I managed to get to the top of the wall, we'd been climbing regularly for a couple weeks. This time around, I was in a class of newbies, facing a 70 ft wall that definately wasn't flat.

I got about 15ft up before that heart-pounding terror hit me: funny, how I forgot the terror part. There was a newbie on the other end of the rope, and one instructor, and he was busy flirting with the little girl who couldn't figure out how to tie a knot. I got bunched up at that point, and sat back, rested a bit, let myself hang on the rope to assure myself that no, really, falling is mostly safe. Then I started back up.

I've got a lot of work to do -- I went up twice, and only managed to get halfway up both times. My body just wimped out on me and broke into violent muscle shaking at the halfway point. I forgot, again, what an intense workout climbing is. And here I was thinking that all these boxing classes and bike rides were doing me some good. Ha. Climbing uses totally different muscles.

I have a long way to go. And it's a fun journey.

What's Happening?

Referee shoots coach from visiting team... I thought for sure this headline was referring to a crazed bunch of adults coaching and refereeing Little League games in the Midwest. Turns out, no: they're South Africans. Go figure. If this is all CNN will cover in its "World News" section, why does it bother having a "World News" section?

And... Does this stuff bother anyone? Don't harass single women. They're single because they're more likely to be murdered by a spouse or boyfriend than a random stranger on the street. Self preservation, much?

Feel increasingly frustrated about the state of the US of A and its fucked-up foreign policy and increasingly totalitarian view of women's rights and sexual freedom, but don't know what the hell to do about it? Try running around here.

Crazy Times

I'm not sure how any work gets done...

Speaking of work, I'm getting out of here. All the bosses are gone, and I've got some juicy PTO time still on the books.

Have a great weekend, all.

Ciao.

The Doughnut Nazi

We've got a couple people in from corporate this week, so the Friday doughnuts are back.

Two dozen of them.

You know what I'm going to start bringing to work on Fridays?

A fucking fruit tray.

The Evils of Potter

So there's this gabe person who lurks on SF/F boards. He employs the use of words like "putzfucker" to "wake up" his "audience" (all three of them), deletes posts from all but his groupies, and tries to make noise even in the most upstanding of debates where heavy hitters like Robson, M. John and Mieville are playing.

gabe is, unfortunately, one of the many with nothing to say who just keeps on saying it. He's also one of the many - though one of the least eloquent - to state that there's something terribly wrong with the SF/F ghetto and its lurid epic fantasies and endless questing romances, and perhaps young children will be permanently damaged by their exposure to Harry Potter novels.

I pick on gabe's ranting to open this post because he's the easiest target: the rants are prolific unresearched blather that feel to me as if they're spewed out as a rehashing of something said better by a more informed writer (like, say, Mieville), and he tends to pop up all over the place. But then, when Strange Horizons is publishing stuff like this, it's no surprise that gabe's mindless wandering manages to find blogspace (yes, I realize the irony).

The insider "backlash" against pulp SF/F and the rise of bizarre groups like the Interstitial Arts Foundation have fascinated me. There's an interest in getting popular fiction recognized as "literary" fiction - Stephen King recently chided the American Book Foundation for its disregard for popular fiction (during his acceptance speech for their Distiguished Contribution to American Letters award), and I've heard lots of chatter at cons about attemps to separate the slash n' hack from the M. John Harrison. Effectively, the SF/F circles appear to want to cut themselves into at least half: the "speculative fiction" books and the slash n' hack media tie in books.

But, you know...

WRITING IS FUN.

Epic fantasy is great. I read it. I write it. It's candy. It's where you stop for a breather between the Brontes and Tolstoy.

Because there's got to be a pit stop along that highway.

There is a kind of story laid, not in the world as it is or was, but as - to an armchair adventurer - it ought to have been. It is an adventure-fantasy, laid in an imaginary prehistoric or medieval world, where magic works and the scientific revolution has not taken place. Or perhaps it is in some parallel universe, or in this world as it will be in the distant future, when science has been forgotten and magic has revivied.

In such a world, gleaming cities raise their shining spires against the stars; sorcerors cast sinister spells from subterranean lairs; baleful spririts stalk crumbling ruins; primeval monsters crash through jungle thickets; and the fate of kingdoms is balanced on bloody broadswords brandished by heroes of preternatural might and valor. In such a world, men are mighty, women are beautiful, life is adventurous, and problems are simple. Nobody even mentions the income tax or the dropout problem or socialized medicine. Such a story is called "heroic fantasy" or sometimes, "sword-and-sorcery."

The purpose of heroic fantasy is neither to solve the problems of the steel industry, nor to expose defects in the foreign-aid program, nor to expound the questions of poverty or intergroup hostility. It is to entertain. It is escape reading in which one escapes clear out of the real universe... Heroic fantasies combine the color, gore, and lively actin of the costume novel with the atavistic terrors and delights of the fairy tale. They furnish the purest fun to be found in fiction today. If you read for fun, this is the genre for you....

There are still.. many readers who read, not to be enlightened, improved, uplifted, reformed, baffled by the writer's obscurity, amazed by his [sic] cleverness, nauseated by his [sic] scatology, or reduced to tears by the plight of some mistreated person, class, or caste, but to be entertained.

- L. Sprague De Camp, Introduction to Conan of the Isles, 1968.

So let's have some fun, OK? Frickin' relax. And start writing some fiction, instead of snarling at it.

Speaking of Totalitarian Theories...

From: Running Scared @ The Guardian

This is an extraordinary moment in American history. Half the country - including all the people I know best - believes it is trembling on the very lip of outright tyranny, while the other half believes that only the Bush administration stands between it and national collapse into atheism, socialism, black helicopters, and gay marriage. November 2 looms as a date of dreadful consequence. A bumper sticker, popular among the sort of people I hang out with, reads: Bush-Cheney '04 - The Last Vote You'll Ever Have To Cast. That's funny, but it belongs to the genre of humour in which the laugh is likely to die in your throat - and none of the people who sport the sticker on their cars are smiling.

Fat Isn't a Health Issue

From: The Impact of Weight on Your Wallet

A study by John Cawley, a professor of policy analysis at Cornell, found that overweight Caucasian women earn 9 percent less than those with svelte silhouettes. And a University of Michigan study reported that the total net worth of moderately to severely obese women falls as much as 60 percent below average.

And women seem to suffer more job discrimination than men. According to Rothblum, while 40 percent of the overweight men in a study group she ran reported that they have not received a job they sought because of their weight, the statistic for women -- 60 percent -- was even more dismal. And how do they know that their weight disqualified them? The hirers told them.

Says Rothblum: "Americans aren't afraid of saying that they hate fat people."

What I'm Reading

So, I have a confession...

I read Conan novels.

Yes, that's right. The old-school Robert Howard Conan books with the lurid covers of gigantic barbarian man slaying Nameless Terror. Now, I know better than to read these books. I occasionally tote one of them with me on the train and giggle my way through my morning commute. Conan books, like Stephen King books and Neil Gaiman's highly entertaining American Gods, are "train books." They're the sorts of books that make for easy reading on the train (if I had to count the number of copies of The Davinci Code I'd seen people reading on the train, I'd have lost count a long time ago). Are these "brilliant" books? Paragons of English literature? Will they join the English canon? Aside from, perhaps, an obligatory King book, no, they probably won't. But damn they're fun.

And honestly, after getting through Women and Madness, several Balzac books, and enough Hemingway to shake a stick at, we all need our candy.

Subsisting primarily on Conan books, with all their sexism, overt or subtle racism, cheesy dialogue, simplistic plots and macho-masculinity, and have I mentioned the sexism? probably isn't good for one's psyche. Am I a fiction elitist? No, I'm a reading elitist. I think you should read as many sorts of books possible -- from Howard to Hemingway; from Morrison to Woolf; and if you're not reading erotica and epic fantasy with your Balzac, well -- you're missing out.

1984

So, you wanna live in a Total Survelliance Society?

Random Linkage

And... Some random linkage:

Nick Mamatas on the latest Nonsensical Drivel

The Daily Show on the Free Democratic Tradition of Election Cancellations via Boingboing

You Know You're About To....

You know you’re about to get laid off when –

1) Your job duties consist entirely of printing stuff out for your boss
2) Everyone shows up around 11 and leaves before 3
3) The accounting girls go missing
4) No more Friday doughnuts
5) You’ve begun tracking your internet usage in Excel
6) Your boss comes in to announce he just got past level 8 of Tetris
7) You become increasingly irritated about those blocked internet sites
8) You’ve checked your private e-mail account 343 times in 4 hours
9) When meetings are actually held, they are more often than not closed-door
10) Your e-mail banter with co-workers becomes increasingly infantile
11) You begin color-coding all of your file folders
12) You’ve caught up on all your clips of The Daily Show

Girlfight

I was watching Girlfight again last night, and enjoying it infinitely more now that I had a conception of what exactly it takes to learn stance, do lots of jump roping, and try and get the combo punches down ("watch your footwork!" "don't overextend, snap out, bring it back against your body," "keep your hand up by your face," "watch your chin," and etc. all suddenly had more meaning for me).
 
I was paired with a guy on Wednesday who was way more advanced than me (it was the first time I'd been paired with someone who wasn't near my own beginner status - my classes with Sifu Katalin have generally just been strength training and Krav Maga), and the guy was going full-board. Even though we were just doing mitt work (I hold up the mitts, he hits them using punching combos, then we switch) and he was actually smaller than me, I found my teeth on edge -- when you get your footwork down and twist your hips right, you hit fucking *hard*, and this guy was just whailing away. He had to assure me several times, "It's OK, I'm not going to hit you," because I caught myself cringing (as this was mitt work, I wasn't wearing any gear but the mitts). Coach Fernando switched out the pairing halfway through the class, and put me back on bag work, but it was a good lesson in the sort of power you can muster once you get this shit right.  
 
I love it.
 
I am going to be scary.

295 Miracles a Day

In this month's Scientific American, Michael Shermer points out that, per the Theory of Large Numbers, those one-in-a-million miracles happen 295 times a day in America.

Yea.

I am such a geek.

The 1/4 Rule

I find the 1/4 rule facinating.

According to my social psychology Ph.D. candidate roommate, people believe that women make up 1/2 of any group when only about 1/4 of the group is populated by women. My roomie and I tested this theory on various movies and television shows. The "token" female anchor or female character generally shows up in groups of four on shows that purport to be paying attention to that sort of thing (we found that those shows that *we* considered to hold an equal ratio of male/female actually abided by the 1/4 rule as well). The one show that seemed to us to feel full of women ("Buffy" of course) was actually about 1.6:1 for main characters and actually male-dominated when baddies were included in the mix (not counting season 7, unless all the ubervamps are male). I think the ratio of main characters likely fluctuated between 1:1 and 1.6:1 throughout the run of the show as characters died off, ran away, or were replaced.

Main title characters, through show's entire run:

Buffy Summers------------Rupert Giles
Willow Rosenberg---------Xander Harris
Cordelia Chase-----------Spike
Anya---------------------Angel
Dawn Summers-------------Daniel 'Oz' Osborne
Tara Maclay--------------Riley Finn
Joyce Summers

When women make up 1/3 of any given group, men (and women) generally believe that there are "a lot" of women in the room, and believe women outnumber men (as soon as I find this study, or a mention of it, I'll post it here...). This gels with the African National Congress's law reserving 1/3 of its parliment seats for women -- women campaigned for 1/2 of the seats (women make up over half the population, after all -- shouldn't women have representatives filling just over half the seats?). Eventually, a comprise of 1/3 was reached. Look at any government body in the world, and I think you'll find that 1/3 of said body being populated by women "seems like a lot." Because, well, what are we comparing it to? In the US Senate, women hold a miserable 14% of the seats. And let's not even try and break that down into women of color -- it'll get more depressing.

However, the real reason I was reminded of this factoid was because a Clarion compatriot of mine forwarded me this picture. And I then discovered the list of final nominees for the Campbell award:

2004 Finalists

Max Barry, Jennifer Government
Philip Baruth, The X President
Greg Bear, Darwin's Children
Greg Brotherton, Star Dragon
Michael Flynn, The Wreck of the River of Stars
Kay Kenyon, The Braided World
James Lovegrove, Untied Kingdom
Jack McDevitt, Omega
Syne Mitchell, The Changeling Plague
Linda Nagata, Memory
Robert Reed, Sister Alice
Justina Robson, Natural History
Sheri S. Tepper, The Companions
Amy Thomson, Storyteller
John Varley, Red Thunder

Going purely by the "gendering" of each name, that looks like about 15 nominees, 6 of them women, which sounds really good (yet... still about 1/3), until you look at 2003 (1/5 of nominees are women), and the actual winners -- 1 winner, two runners-up - Justina Robson was the only woman to place. That's about 1/3

Looks about equal to me...

And you put one foot in front of the other...

Exhausted. Lots going on this week. The boxing classes are kicking my ass, and work is ramping up into something like... actual work.

In other news, it's the same old battles.

Makes me feel even more tired.

Ah, China

And, I just have to share an almost blistering review of China Mieville's latest, Iron Council. As the SF/F genre has a terrible tendency to overhype/overpraise their own, it was nice to see somebody take China to task for some of the purple prose.

He's got some great stuff, fantastic ideas, and I fully intend to own all of his books. But yes, having a hard core editor would likely do his work some good.

Matthew Cheney has some critique and discussion of the review at the always good Mumpsimus.

Pro-choice feminist vs. Pro-abortion Femi-Nazi?

According to this article 52% of Republicans polled believed a woman's right to choose whether or not to have an abortion was a personal choice, and Roe vs. Wade should not be overturned.

However:

Substantially fewer Republicans than Democrats defined themselves as "pro-choice" even when they articulated pro-choice values, responding that they believe women "should have the full range of reproductive choices such as abstinence, contraception, motherhood, adoption and abortion."

Slightly more than half of the Republicans and 84 percent of Democrats called themselves "pro-choice," although, 70 and 92 percent, respectively, support a full range of reproductive choices.

I find the use of labels fascinating. The side-stepping with the above reminds me of the "I'm not a feminist, but..." line that many people who support women's rights/equality will parrot in that divine dance around the scary word "feminist." Like the confusion over "pro-choice" meaning "pro-abortion" (which is does not), I think there are still a number of people who become confused with the term "feminist": Does that mean you have to hate all men?

Choice and equality are not either/or scenerios. We've already proven that "seperate but equal" is just spin covering up deeply rooted biases. Maybe it's time to look past labels.

Same Story

I've just finished reading Susan Faludi's Backlash (yes, I know, it's a classic I have no excuses for not getting to sooner). It's a fantastic, slightly exhausting and anger-provoking book about the backlash against women's rights in the 80s.

Now I'm reading about the latest on the mess of sexual harrassment against women and blatantly unequal pay and opportunities for advancement for women at Wal Mart (the US's biggest employer, according to the Guardian).

I'm not sure why it's so difficult for men to treat women like people. Does that mean they'd have to go back and redefine themselves? If women are "people" what does that make men? Just people too, I guess.

What's on my Plate...

via: feministing.com

As many as one in ten college women suffer from a clinical or nearly clinical eating disorder, including 5.1% who suffer from bulimia nervosa.

According to Washington Post writer Shankar Vedantam, women are over-represented in ads for psychiatric drugs and "are usually shown as being submissive, sexy or asleep." Nothing sexier than a sleeping, drugged up lady.

Some brief easy-reading articles on queer history and literature. I haven't looked at these in depth, but they're a nice primer for identifying interesting topics I might want to look further into. My rant on my abhorrence at the use of "gay" and "gay history" will have to wait for another time. Suffice to say the term "gay history" or "queer history" is about as offensive to me as the term "women's history," as if the royal "we" only refers to Old White Hetero Boys. But, alas, I'm at a lack for terms...

In other news, please, please at least vote in November. The least you can do is vote every four years for a president. It's been a long, hard road to get to that place.

I'm sorry...

I'm sorry. I laughed. And laughed. And laughed...

Here's the deal: I don't think it makes you gay just because you beat off to images of Brad Pitt.

Doctorow

Turns out Cory Doctorow has a new book coming out. The cover art kicks ass.

I survived another boxing class last night. I think I'm getting addicted to it. Trying to figure out how to up the number of classes I take every week. Ha.

Another Day Another Dollar

My long weekend came and went. And look, I'm still here.

Not much going on in the real world -- Kerry actually has a VP that I might have considered voting for alone, so in tandem, well... (the election this year -- as in the last whirlwind around -- is a "lesser of two evils" contest populated by Old White Men. Still. How does this happen?). I love how Bush and Kerry are being toted as "down home" rich old boys, which they are. Nobody's even trying to pretend to be a real person anymore. They have young children wandering around, like a brood of Young Kennedys. Ah, America.

Things I'm more interested in?

Legalized prostitution in Berkley

How to write a Bestselling Fantasy Novel (it's all true)

Thoughts on Ugly Women

And... I've got a whole list of fem history stuff I need to post from another terminal. Catch ya in a few.

Black Russians

It's the beginning of a four-day weekend.

Sitting here sipping black russians, going over agent query letters. Things at the day job are fantastic. Looks like I might be moving into writing bid proposals, which is a fantastic step. I'm excited.

Life is fantastic. I am blessed.

Enjoy every minute.

A Fun Little Drug Addict

One of my favorite new characters for my latest novel, Over Burning Cities is Saronia. I wanted to make a POV character out of a drug whore -- and make her a "hero" in the classic sense, as opposed to a villain. She's going to be lots of fun:

Chapter Three: Songan

Saronia Chazhis Anaar stepped off the Shardin Rose and into the tepid heat of an Arnaldian afternoon. She pulled her hat down over her eyes and spit a bloody pulp of sen on the planking at her feet. She squinted up at the sprawl of the reeking harbor, and decided there were far worse places an outcast novice could end up. She could be dead, for instance.

She stood around with a rude cluster of Gift-less Drakes, terrible specimens, all; skinny, spotty, sickly, with the glazed look and hunched posture of sheep.

“Have you seen any Arnaldians before?” one of the twittering nitwits next to Saronia asked, nodding out at the buzz of male bodies plowing around the docks. His eyes were wide.

“Met one,” Saronia said, “never fucked one.” She crammed another pinch of sen leaves into her mouth. Her fingers were numb.

The boy twittered away, just as well. Saronia had done some rumor work at the Wayfarer Inn before she headed out. Her and her sisters had spent the winter sitting out on the pier all day smoking Thordonian cigarettes and plying sailors with free drinks. The sailors would spend more, later, once they’d loosened their tongues and trousers. From what she gathered of Arnaldia, it wouldn’t be much different than any place else. It might be better than Khindarak, even, for someone like her. Women were bartered around a bit like herd animals, but every shepherd had his favorite sheep, as the Coris said, snickering over their beer in the evenings, and she could wear a sheep’s skin for as long as she needed to hide the wolf underneath.

Fight Club

Tyler Durden is alive and well...

I love people.

Boxing Stance

So, I've been working on learning how to box for about four weeks now. There's been some learning, but it's not quick, and it's not easy. I chose boxing because I liked the raw power of it. It's brutal as opposed to beautiful. It's taken me a long time to get used to the fact that I'll never be a delicate, fine-boned creature -- so instead, I'm conspiring to be an even more intimidating one.

I'll be beginning sparring next week, which should be cool. I have an aversion to hitting people -- I'm always afraid I'll hurt some one, or worse; I'm afraid I'll *like* hurting someone. Getting hit has never been a concern. I don't mind taking hits. I don't mind blood or pain or any of that. I'm afraid I'll knock somebody down who won't get up again.

Suffice to say, however, that I expect to be getting my ass kicked for the next six months. Hurting other people shouldn't be an issue.

Query Letters

Query letters, I've decided, are the bane of my existence. I hate them. I hate marketing. I think it's ridiculous. I think that people should magically get paid to do things they're passionate about.

Unfortunatley, I've been told, mostly, it doesn't work that way.

After a 1 to 8 interest to flat rejects for my last round of agent query letters, I'm totally rewriting it again.

Lynn Flewelling has a good sample up, but it's tough to find good ones for SF/F work. Most of the ones I've found online are for romance, crime lit, or non-fiction work.