Loooong Weekend

Enjoyed a very relaxing weekend, and am having trouble coming back to just about everything. Got some writing to work on...

Snow in December is Sexy

Snow in March is not.

Yellow came into the office at 10am yesterday and left at 3:30pm.

I have no guilt about my workday habits.

In other news, I'm subsisting mainly on weak echinacea tea and contemplating skipping out of work at noon today, because I'd rather be in bed.

It's been one of those... months.

Just a Note on Downtime

When I started blogging, I discovered a compulsive need to open the tattered edges of my emotional raincoat and expose the nasty parts beneath.

That's Ayelet Waldman at Salon, touching on the first of several reasons she stopped blogging.

I wanted to throw this up here real quick this week because it says so much about why I decided to take another breather and stay away from hacking through a bunch of emotional turmoil here moment-by-moment. Some of that has abated, which is why I wanted to post the link above. The other part is that she's very right about the other big problem with blogging: the blogging is fucking with my real writing. When your goal is to write books, and someday make a living doing it, well... this moment-by-moment knee-jerk gut-reaction real-time stuff is a very different type of writing from the mull-over-your-experiences-distill-reimagine-setup-imaginary-template-plot-out-cut-distill-squeeze type that I do in my book and story writing, and switching gears is a bitch.

And that's a problem. And I don't have a solution to it, except to close up shop a few weeks a month, or stem the tide of posts, limit myself to once a day.

I'm going to need to find a way to balance a lot of things in the coming weeks and months, and blogging's going to be one of them...

She-Blogger!

via Tild

Blog Down

Well, it's another crazy week. I've got lots of backlogged writing to do, and a whole house to clean, and etc. etc.

So I'll see you all on Monday. Have a great week!

Well, at Least They're Being Obvious About a Woman's Worth

Paying a woman to have a kid?

You know, considering that the cost of that kid over it's lifetime is way, way more than 10K, I think it's a pretty bum deal.

A Couple of Good Finds

Today was goodie-finding day. After becoming incredibly irate again at the "But if there are so many women bloggers, why doesn't anybody know about them" thing, I decide to... add more women bloggers to my own woman-blogger site.

Why the fuck not.

I was cleaning up the blogroll (if I don't check a site regularly, I tend to cut it out, and this inspires me to go looking for new people). You must check out:

Sisters Talk: a fantastic blog by Genia Stevens.

Pseudo-Adrienne's Liberal-Feminist Bias: I'd known she was out there via comments on another's blog, but have just now (finally) got around to blogrolling her...

Cool Beans: Beans of Alas has her own shop, of course...

A Bird's Eye View

One Good Thing: Yea. I've really been needing to update my blogroll for awhile...

XX Blog: a group blog

Those Pesky Fat Women: Remember When the Curve of a Hip was Sexy and Not a Sign of Moral Disease?

What the hell is this?

Not only is it pure junk to keep using that stupid BMI formula to calculate a person's "healthy" weight (it doesn't take muscle mass into account, bone structure, body struction, etc., so Brad Pitt and George Clooney get classified as "obese" and if you're applying that shitty formula to this broad a template, what you're gonna get back as "results" is nothing but sheer junk), but why the fuck did they do this study only on women? Do men not get fat in a way that should be "worrying" since women are the ones we're all supposed to be looking at? Or do men just get a "get out of jail free" card? They don't spend enough on dieting products, I guess. Better work on changing that.

The leading causes of death in the world are still from infectious diseases and malnutrition: that means most people in this world are dying because they have shitty healthcare and poor nutrition. In fact, I'd bet that a lot of those "fat" people in developed countries who're below the poverty line are suffering from malnutrition, too: living on macoroni and McDonald's isn't exactly a great step in healthy living.

Shit, you fuckers: women are supposed to be carrying around an extra 35,000 calories for babies and nursing. That's what estrogen does. That's why I've got an increased appetite now that I'm back on female hormones. Did they take pregnant women out of this study? Nursing women? Women who were within two years of having a kid?

No, probably not.

Let's just continue telling people how fat and stupid they are, so they get so frustrated about it that they binge eat and stop exercising all together because it won't make them "thin enough."

Bah.

You can take your concentration-camp chic elsewhere.

Utopian Hell on Gender Equity

"My mother is 5′3″ and worked as a police officer for ten years. She passed the very same physical fitness tests that the men did, and with little complaint. Every day, for ten years she faced angry truck drivers that were three times her size, and gave them tickets. She did more physically demanding work than your average police officer, including lugging around portable truck weights that weighed a couple hundred pounds a piece. The requirements aren’t that hard to get by, and I haven’t heard anyone, since I was a teenager, discuss lowering them. That’s not what gender equity is about.

Gender equity is about other things. Gender equity is about the fact that my mother, while working in this capacity, was given second-hand men’s bullet proof vests that afforded no room for her breasts, and never fit right. Gender equity is about getting paid the same as the male who’s doing the same job as you. Gender equity is what feminism is about. It isn’t about who has more muscles, or whether or not muscles matter.

What you’re really saying is ‘Go ahead and discriminate against me and the rest of the women in the world based solely on what you think our bodies can and can not do.’"

Read the rest

Fuck-ups and Mental Blowouts `05

I honestly can’t convey just how great it is to be back in the Chicago office. It’s great to be back in Chicago in general. I missed Cyllia and the lead architect (let’s call him Mr. T.), and getting calls from Sarah, and waiting until 10am for Yellow to show up, getting back to creating materials for projects I actually understand and have a handle on… yea, it’s nice. It’s nice to be sitting at my own fucking desk with my music at hand and coffee in my own coffee mug.

It’s the little things.

Not that things are terribly easy right now… Life is incredibly busy, full, stressful, both physically and emotionally.

I didn’t realize just how ragged I was running until last night, when Jenn and I went out for our usual Sunday Borders & Starbucks run. I sat down at Borders and relaxed, found a beginning runner’s guidebook (shin splints. Ah. That’s what I’ve got after Friday’s run. Ah. Yes.), then moved to the back, picked up a book of Alaska photographs… and was confronted by a rather irritated-looking Jenn, who snapped at me for not being more visible, as she’d apparently been looking for me for some time.

We exited the building, Jenn still pissed off, and she bit off at me for my ability to blend into my surroundings and make if very difficult to be found, and why was she the one who always had to come looking for me? Why couldn’t I go looking for her? Borders, the grocery store, it was all the same! I’d lose myself forever, and she’d have to track me down! How could I be so annoying!

Yea.

Jenn and I are a little stressed right now. Can you tell?

I took a deep breath and halted our course at the corner of Broadway & Lawrence and felt myself doing the little mental checklist backpeddle: if I start screaming at her for being silly and being upset at a silly thing, and effectively blaming me because she’s unable to find me in a room full of people, what’s going to come out is us just screaming at each other for a silly reason because we’re both tired, hungry, and incredibly, incredibly stressed out. So, effectively, we’ll be having a snippy verbal fight at the corner of Broadway & Lawrence for no fucking good reason except that we’re really tired, and then we’ll be pissed at each other for the rest of the night, which will be fucking stupid, as we hardly see each other anymore anyway, and during the time we’re together, it would be nice if we weren’t pissed off at each other.

So I said, “OK, how can we fix this?”

And just her talking about how pissed off she was seemed to make her feel better. We discussed why she was pissed off, which I really tried to sympathize with, but which I couldn’t understand because I wasn’t in any sort of hurry while browsing the bookstore. I didn’t think our Borders run was on a time schedule. I was just there to relax and read books, and when I got bored, I’m sure I’d have gone to find her. But she’d gotten bored before I had.

I couldn’t think up any good solution for this, except that whenever we went out, we should have a time schedule and a meeting place. But that seemed really counterproductive to me, as I reserve weekends for relaxing time, and having a time schedule on everything seemed incredibly stressful.

“Let’s just go home and skip Starbucks,” I said, putting my arm around her. “I’ll order the Thai food and go and pick it up. I know you’re totally stressed out. We’re stressed. Let’s just go relax, OK?”

After talking, she seemed to feel better, and suggested we go to Starbucks anyway, and my whole body relaxed, and I was like, “Oh, thank God, calamity averted,” and my mind and body sort of crashed, so that by the time we sat down at Starbucks, I was on the downside that comes after an adrenaline rush. I felt drained and tired; totally emotionally tapped out. Backpeddling, trying to avert a snippy argument in Uptown with, basically, the only friend I have in Chicago, trying to keep this relationship together and stable when we only see each other once a week or so, had blasted out the last of my emotional resources.

It’s an accumulation of little things, and the last little thing broke me.

I’ve spent the last week living out of a hotel room and trying to negotiate a relationship with an actual guy that includes not only the friendly part (which is difficult enough), but the sex part (and everything that comes with it), and both of us bring our own emotional baggage into the mix, and that’s gotta be dealt with up front, and that’s what I’ve been dealing with all week, on top of the fucking hotel living, the mostly non-existent workouts, and the incredibly, incredibly, stressed out and fucked up work environment at our office out there. It’s a fuckfest.

But what really did it was the emotional stuff, because I’m so bloody fucking sick of emotion. Because I was pulling out of myself as much care and nurturing and understanding as I had left in order to not get into a pissing match on a Chicago street, and it blasted me out.

So we sat in Starbucks, and I started to bleed out this stream-of-consciousness thought on what I’d felt in the street, and how that fed back into everything else that’s gone on this week, and this year, just to sort of bleed it out so Jenn would know where I was at. What it comes down to is that I’ve got one friend in Chicago, and she’s tapped out: she’s got an SO, too, and her SO and her Ph.D. responsibilities take up a lot of emotional energy, which means she’s just as tapped out as I am… and honestly, I’ve reached the point where I realize I’m so broken down that I’m willing to ask for help – and the only person I’ve got around to ask for help is tapped out (Jenn insisted this wasn’t the case, that if I ever needed anything – but she’s tapped out. Trust me. She can’t take any of my bullshit onto her already full plate. It just ain’t gonna happen, unless she’s willing to have a mental blowout, too, and I’m not gonna incite that. There’s a point at which being a good friend means not asking things of your good friends, because they don’t know how to say “no” to people they care about any more than you do).

So I was forced to realize just how much trying to start up a relationship after six years of being on my own has taken out of me. It’s been about a month now, which is about the point you both realize the other isn’t a psycho, and you start trying to build stuff up and work things out, and there are a lot of ghosts and demons I’ve got tagging along behind me, stuff I didn’t even realize I had.

The problem with having been in a really unhealthy/abusive relationship and not having any real “relationship” since then is that you’ve got a really fucked up template about how things are supposed to go; and yea, I mean, sure, any time you’re with somebody new, you learn a new set of rules and preferences, but for me, there are weird ones like when I said something that really cut him (not realizing what I did), and he went a little quiet and stoic before responding, but during that long silence, that little light went off in my head, “I’m going to get hit. He’s going to start screaming at me. He’ll throw something at me. I need to practice some defense moves in case he freaks out on me.”

There was no violence or screaming, of course (I’d really like to think I’ve made a better, more adult choice this time around, and instead, we spent several hours talking this over), but the fact that I had that reaction when I realized I’d irritated/hurt the guy in bed with me was really telling about how fucked up my expectations are of what a relationship entails. Says a lot about why I’ve avoided them for so long.

If I wasn’t so crazy about this guy, of course, I wouldn’t be doing this. It’s too much for me to do right now, and I wasn’t ready for it… but shit, let’s face it: it’s time for me to get over my bullshit. I can’t go on avoiding intimacy forever because I’m afraid that every guy around the corner is going to turn out to be just like my ex (charming and passive for a year and then screaming, demanding, controlling, blah blah, insert your domestic abuse cliché story here). I’ve reached the point in my life where I have enough confidence in myself to walk away if somebody ever tries to pull that bullshit again, and I’ve read enough stories just like my own to (I hope) recognize the danger signs and pull away before I get too entrenched, but of course, there aren’t any guarantees. People change. Shit could happen. I just need to know that I’m strong enough now to walk away from a relationship with somebody who seeks to take away my agency and confidence. It’s not my job to mother people, or fix people, and the last thing I need is a guy around who’s condescending and who holds me back from doing what I want in order to make himself feel better about his own choices.

It’s funny; I’ve read lots of stories about women who’ve been in abusive relationships, but I haven’t read many accounts of women trying to get back into relationships after having been through a shitty one where your template has become “relationship=me not being a real person/putting up with someone else’s draining bullshit/losing myself to someone else’s desires.”

For me, it’s not easy in the least. In fact, it’s one of the most emotionally draining things I’ve ever done, because every time I turn around, I’m finding something else that I’m weird about. I had a very, very, fucked-up relationship template.

And, of course, relationship issues are never one-sided, and we both bring stuff to the table, and negotiating all of that while trying to have a life… yea. It’s not easy. I didn’t think it was going to be. And it’s taking a lot out of me right now.

I don’t know yet if it’s going to be too much. I’m hoping that now that I’m back in Chicago, things will ease off. I’ve got my martial arts class tonight (FINALLY, after four or five weeks of NOTHING), jogging tomorrow, some cleaning to do. I’m back inside my life, and it’s a life I’ve built up that I really, really like.

Today was the first time I actually considered staying in Chicago after next year. I love this place, this life. I might not be able to afford to stay in the place I have now, but I could just get a studio or one-bedroom, or, if I can get a better-paying job, I might be able to figure something out. There are law schools in Chicago, if that pans out. If not, there’s plenty of writing to do here, and a community college down the street where I can pile on some extra classes to keep my atrophying brain in gear.

There’s a lot up in the air right now. I don’t know how it’s going to pan out. Usually, I take great comfort in not knowing what’s going to happen. It’s how I know I’m doing the right thing. But here, now, there are so many variables that they’re weighing deeply on me, and I need some time that I don’t have to really figure out what I want over the next couple of years. More and more, I want to throw off the law school idea and run away overseas for another stressful blowout year where I sleep on a mattress on the floor and work a crappy job or live as a poor student… When you realize that the next big birthday is 30, you tend to want to go out and live that crappy poor student life as much as possible with the last decade you’ve got to do it with any respectability.

I don’t know. I don’t know. I suppose that’s what it comes down to: there are a great deal of things I don’t know, and I’ve hit the tipping point where that’s actually starting to matter to me.

Quote of the Day

"Man [sic] cannot live on beer and the Polish smoked sausage in the fridge alone. Sometimes, he must send out for curry." - Empire of Dirt

"Stitching Time" By Stephanie Burgis

Check it out at Fortean Bureau:

"Imagine a farmhouse surrounded by snow. Not a thin layer of soft, flaky whiteness, the kind you might see in more civilized climates--this is Northern Michigan, where the snow falls and falls until it buries the roads, covers the windows, and mounts up before the door. The nearest neighbors are a mile away, impossibly far. Every morning, the men in this scattered community dig their way through to the barn where the livestock are sheltered from the cold. Every winter, some of the wives go mad.

There is a special asylum for these women, and in the spring you can watch the line of farm horses pulling them away in carts, plodding down the familiar road once the snow has finally melted. Women who were mail-order brides from the East Coast, seduced by the idea of family and land. Women who carried on correspondences with lonely Western farmers for years before they took the plunge. Dr. Horace Q. Grace will care for all of them, for a very moderate price. Some of them will return to their husbands, almost cured, by the fall. Others will be less lucky, and then their husbands will start all over again, biting on the tips of their pencils as they try to recollect spelling lessons from long ago. A lonely farmer hopes for a woman’s touch....

Thank God for the invention of cross-stitch. As the snow mounts up over the window, we count the months of snow: October, November, December, January, February, March, April, May.... Our husbands tunnel out to the barn, and our needles move, silver flashing through endless reams of fabric. Up and down, count over twice.... Samplers that will hang on our walls, covering the inches, more and more of them as the eight months pass. As the clock in the corner (brought from Boston at great expense) ticks away, ticking away the seconds of our lives. As the bright colors spread across the fabric, mimicking our wildness and our despair."

Read the rest

When the Lights Went Out In Parsippany

The power throughout most of Parsippany, NJ went out this morning around 6am, and by 10am, all of us in the office were figuring out ways to get the hell out of town for the weekend.

I hopped a train(s) into Brooklyn, and am currently spending my time hanging out at Brendan's until Saturday's touchdown back in Chicago...

Ah. To be home again. Jiggety-jig.

Looking forward to getting back into my old routine. Attempted a co-run with B, and found myself in staggeringly bad shape. I've seriously got to get my eating and exercise schedule back into shape.... very, very sad.

We're Watching You!

Right-wing Eye for the Left-leaning Guy.

I snickered.

via feministing

Homegrown Terrorism

I've been holding off talking about the killing of federal judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow's family in Chicago because, literally, it happened about 8 blocks from my house. A little fucking close to home.

I was coming home from O'Hare the night of the day the story broke, and found a host of television vans with their huge telescoping satellite dishes lining both sides of the road. It wasn't until the next day when I saw a couple of crosses up in the alley and a couple journalist newsvultures vying for space that I realized this was her house.

This one creeps me out, and it hit me deeply because of the sheer guerilla terrorism of the act. If you have some kind of problem with me, come and fuck with me. You don't go after the people in somebody's life who they care about. You just don't. Random violence is reprehensible in itself, but there's something deeply jarring, deeply offensive, about going after somebody's family. It's not cool. You just don't fuck with that shit.

It now appears that they've found the guy who did it; a pissed-off guy who's life sucked cause she dismissed his case. Instead of sucking it up and getting his shit together and finding another route, he went into a spiral of depression and despair and lashed out. He took somebody out, or had them taken out; or maybe he's just been framed, who knows?

For now, what I do know is that murdering somebody's family, trying to stir up fear in others, is homegrown terrorism. In fact, until 9/11 the biggest threats to our security - and, as a woman who makes use of reproductive health services, I'd say it's *still* my own personal biggest threat - are pissed off white guys with US citizenship who feel it's their God-given right to deal out death and judgement whenever they're pissed off.

You've got a social system that isn't set up to provide help to people, a bullshit masculinity culture that says violence (especially against uppity women) is - if not totally OK - usually justifiable, and a government that turns a blind eye to the fact that women live in fear of getting LEGAL health procedures in the US because of wacko guys who feel that God gave them a dick to point around like the finger of His will, to smite whom He pleases whenever He feels like it.

Wake up, dickwads.

You want to fight terrorism? You want to live in a country where nobody lives in fear?

Get the troops back from Iraq, work on your fucking social institutions, provide some goddamn assistance to people who's lives are falling apart and who feel they have no way out. Nurture a culture that *REALLY* preaches how valuable each actual LIFE is - you want to save life, protect quality of life, maybe you should start with actual children, go volunteer to teach actual people how to read, spend a couple days a month sorting files for Planned Parenthood. Become a counselor. Help people.

Violently lashing out cause you're pissed off violates the human rights of an actual person. People who've got families. Lives.

Real fucking people.

*That's* terrorism, and if we'd spend even a quarter of the money dealing with that bullshit as we are bombing foreign countries, we'd be living in a lot less fear of ourselves.

Cause make no mistake: the biggest threat to your security (especially if you're a woman) is other Americans. The ones who make the laws. Who fund the wackjobs. Who believe it's their God-given right to control you and your body and everything you give a shit about.

And they're a fuck of a lot closer than a couple of kids in Baghdad.

Ah, Women's Boxing Fuck-Ups

Why the fuck her trainer put her in a "pro" fight after less than two months of training... shit. This is why women's boxing gets a bad rap. There's nothing inherently wrong with ritualized violence (sports), so long as everybody knows what they're getting into and everybody plays by the ritual's rules.

When you don't, shit happens.

I couldn't imagine getting into a ring after less than two months of training. After six months, a year, sure. Less than two months? Who's running this bullshit gig?

But you know, if this was a man, this would be a different story. People'd be like, "What the fuck was he thinking? Gosh, that was stupid," in addition, of course, to saying, "Why the fuck didn't anybody stop this fight?" Somebody should have thrown in the towel. They didn't. And that's their fuckup, too.

Sports are brutal. That's what they are. They're physical tests of skill and endurance. Sending somebody in there who doesn't know what the fuck they're doing is like sending some 19-year-old kid who signed up straight out of high school, putting a gun in his hand, and telling him to run flat-footed into enemy fire.

After all, he signed up for it, right?

Sure he did. But just as much as it's his responsibility to take care of himself, it's a lot of other people's job to help him get to that point.

And a lot of people fucked up.

Nuts & Bolts

So, Ikea's getting tapped for its sexist male-only assembly brochures. Living in a place where Jenn and I (yes, that's two women, no men) put together every stick of the copious Ikea furniture in the place, I find the idea of hiding the sexism in furniture manuals by pleading it's about "not offending" people (like Muslims, apparently) to be really stupid.

To be fair to Ikea, the manual I just had for the bed I put together showed a man and a woman assembling it; but yes, there's a default to "man" for the smaller pieces, and you'll never, ever, see two women putting a bed together, no matter how often this actually happens in real life.

And that, perhaps, is my biggest problem with sexism trying to co-opt the language of the "politically correct" for its own purposes: you're trying so hard (in their own words) to not offend somebody's belief that you stop telling the truth. You stop protraying the world as it really is. You start preaching abstinence-only education and filling up textbooks with lies that parade around as politically correct lingo when it fact, it has nothing to do with not offending Christians or Muslims or Athiests (nobody ever seems to care about offending athiests). It has to do with using "liberal, PC" language to reinforce stereotypes and tell lies.

There are a lot of women who spend time putting together Ikea furniture. The fact that Muslims (or whoever) don't believe women should doesn't mean that they don't. And deleting women from history, from life, makes your portrayal of life a lie, a disservice. You start trying to tell people how to live and what to do, so that each new generation of women has to start all over again from scratch, and thinks they're crazy because they're putting together their own furniture, aren't married at 25, and never have children. They think they're nuts until they get older, start digging up feminists texts, start running through blogs, and suddenly find this huge group of people just like them.

The problem, as I see it, is placing somebody else's belief before the way the world actually works; imposing somebody else's worldview on everyone else.

In the real world, both men and women put together furniture. Pretending they don't won't make it any different: it'll only make one subset of people feel better about their place in the world, while oppressing somebody else.

Unkempt Wenches of the Wilderness

From a speculative essay on the origin of human history, by our dear friend and philosophy canon member Immanuel Kant:

"In the course of time, however, the growing luxury of the town-dwellers, and in particular the seductive arts in which the women of the towns surpassed the unkempt wenches of the wilderness, must have been a powerful temptation to the herdsmen to enter into relations with them and to let themselves be drawn into the glittering misery of the towns."

I want a T-shirt.

Can it be any more obvious that men who write books with stuff like this in them aren't actually talking to real women at all?

Frickin' hilarious.

via kelby

Work Again, Work Again, Jiggedy-Jig

Another day, another dollar. Back in New Jersey. Last fucking week in NJ, dammit. Only mildly sleep deprived, because I was smart enough to take a Tylenol PM last night.

Stuck in the Tuesday conference calls of doom: eight to nine hours of `um. Yum. Here's a great idea for running your project - Fly people into New Jersey for conference calls that everyone else is calling into. What a grand idea. I suppose the fact that I'm here to make copies, too, justifies the $2200 in expenses I'm racking up. Ha.

Work out tonight, dinner, catch up on some story reviews. Maybe. Entertain a guest. The usual.

Can't wait for this week to end.

Thoughts on Polygamy/Polyamory

Jason's got some thoughts up on polyamory (I'm going to say polyamory as opposed to polygamy, because I feel that polyamory implies that everyone involved is marrying *each other* as opposed to polyandry or polygmany, in which it's more along the lines of one person of one sex marrying a bunch of people of the other sex, and if we're gunning for equality, you've gotta get all the polys into one word).

I went through a couple years of serious thought about my sexuality, and about the time I came up with the realization that yea, boringly, I was mostly straight, I also realized I was boringly hardwired for monogamy, no matter how alluring the idea of polyamory was (I have a lot of fun playing with polyamory in my fiction). So I've done the research, looked around at places like alt.polyamory and had discussions with a woman who had an open marriage, read about other people's open marriages, and am always fascinated with finding out how other people negotiate their sexual pairings.

As somebody who's liberal-minded, I realize that what works for *me* obviously *doesn't* work for everyone (which, I think, is the typical conservative mindset - "If *I'm* a man who thinks that kissing a man is gross, *all* men must feel that way!"), so I'm really interested in what'll happen if people do start pushing multiple marriages in this country again (the polys not being anything new under the sun). So far, I don't have too much of an opinion on the matter, though I tend to think consenting adults should be allowed to enter into whatever pairing they wish.

However, my mind immediately turns to Heinlein and his massive political/financial marriages in Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Friday, just to name two. What you can do with marriages like these is wed not for emotional/sexual feeling but for consolidation of money and power, so all the heavy hitters keep the goods within one family.

If you think there's a huge rich/poor divide now, think of the day when multiple billionaires consolidate their funds into one huge family-corporation.

Heinlein saw it.