Hippyish

Land of the Circle Scarf

2012-01-25T09:33:00.000-05:00

I have a theory about how one dresses stylishly in Ireland, or at least here at University of Limerick. See, as far as I can tell from a few days' observations, the thing about the Irish is that they really love their neckwear. A normal scarf is a good place to start. A knit cowl is heading in the right direction. But the truly chic will settle for nothing less than an enormous, bulky circle scarf.

Ideally, it will be a chunky knit, so thick that it reaches your ears when settled around your neck and so long that you can wrap it twice and then some. (Just twice would be fine, but then you wouldn't be able to have it both tightly around your neck AND with a cascade of knitwear covering your chest, which is the ideal look.) Garter stitch and stockinette with slight variations seem to be the patterns of choice; just get as much knitting around your neck as possible. If your scarf isn't quite bulky enough, fringe is an acceptable way to add more yarn to your person.

Needless to say, I will be buying yarn and making myself one of these as soon as possible. In America I usually think they look ridiculous, but after 3 days of walking to class in the constant chilly damp I'm starting to see the appeal!

25 Things to Do in Limerick - Numbers 6 and 10

2012-01-21T14:38:00.000-05:00

At orientation, they gave us a map of the city with a list on the back: 25 fun things to do in Limerick. This week I've done two of them: A open-top bus tour of the city, and a day at the Milk Market.

The bus tour was on Thursday evening, and was great fun. It was a bit wet (it's never not a bit wet, as far as I can tell) and quite cold (also pretty much always the case), so I was hesitant to sit up outside on the second level when I could stay huddled in the warm lower level, but I was talked into a seat out in the open up top, and I'm glad I did. The view was fantastic - it was fun being taller than everything else, seeing over all the other cars to the beautiful old buildings. The guide threw an amazing amount of history and trivia about what street was named for whom in which rebellion, and I wish I remembered it all, but the short version would be that in Limerick some things are named for reformers and most everything else is named for someone who rebelled against the British. Lots of the statues we passed show people holding guns or swords as if they were about to charge, and many of those were killed for their trouble. (There's also a statue of Richard Harris as King Arthur, which I aspire to find.)

The bridges over the Shannon are particularly beautiful - there's not as much shopping and fewer historical buildings, but it makes up for it in just the lights and flags hanging over the old stone bridges and amazing river itself. It's far enough away from the city centre that it's probably not the best place to visit at night, but I would love to sometime go walking around there at sunset.

Then today, we went to the Milk Market. I'm not quite sure I understand the history, but here's my best guess - Limerick City used to have lots of markets. A Hay Market, a Pig Market, a Potato Market (we passed that one on our way into the city today.) They all became irrelevant as the economy changed and grocery stores opened and things like that, except for the Milk Market, which no longer sells milk and is instead a very popular weekend-long farmer's and crafts market.

That table full of tarts is one of the first things we saw when we got inside, and we couldn't resist - after grabbing some vegetables for dinner Monday night and stopping by a few stalls just to browse, we had to go back and grab a fruit tart, which was possibly one of the best ideas I've ever had. Next time I really want to try one of the cheese tarts, or maybe even a meat pie. After we'd seen every stall we sat down at a little coffee shop where the owner knew a lot of the customers by name and had some tea, then went exploring around the town. Highlights included a tent full of used books for sale at one euro each, and an Irish Handcrafts shop, where a smooth-talking salesman told us great stories about the meanings behind Aran sweaters and convinced both of us there that really we need the $200 dollar hand-made ones to bring home. They're so beautiful and comfortable!

So that checks two items off of our "25 Fun Things To Do in Limerick" list. I'll keep you posted as I do them!

Days 1-3

2012-01-19T18:38:00.002-05:00

Let's see if I can't write out a proper blog post while keeping it under novel length, shall we?

My goal is at least a photo every day, which will probably get harder as I'm spending more time in classes and other routine things, but I'm certainly getting a running start. Check out what I've seen so far on my Flickr. (Those photos are from just today and yesterday.)

We got into Limerick on Tuesday morning, and when I say "we," I really mean a crowd - about twenty study abroad kids from the states were on my flight from Heathrow to Shannon. From there we were picked up by a bus and dropped off at Plassey Village, where I got a key for a very cute little 8-person house.

Tuesday I mostly kept to myself, getting settled and exploring the campus, but on Wednesday there were errands to run. First we made a shopping trip to Aldi, which was far more difficult than it sounds. We couldn't figure out how to get a cart, having never encountered the kind that require a coin to make sure you return it, so we could only get what groceries we could awkwardly carry around the store, and we didn't really know what we would need. We knew we would want food in the house, but we'd only just gotten there, so hadn't really given any thought to meal planning. And then, once we finally got to the check out, we held up the lines with both unfamiliar currency and being unaware of bag-packing etiquette.

Once the groceries were put away, I went into town with a few girls I'd met the day before. Limerick is an interesting city - I'm not sure yet how I would describe it. A lot of the parts between campus and the city centre are a bit run-down looking and spread out, but there's a much denser city center, with an odd and pretty combination of medieval buildings, a few Georgian blocks, and lots of more modern things (the city's been experiencing a lot of economic growth in only the past few decades.) It's mostly very beautiful, but it feels like quite a jumble, so I'm worried I'll get lost! The bus set us down right in the middle of city centre, across the street from a whole block of department stores. We found lunch in a bakery, avoided shoe shops and book shops in favor of finding practical things at a bunch of Euro Marts (like dollar stores) all right on the same street. It was hard to think of pleasure shopping when we were carrying around pillows and sheets - we'll have to go back for proper browsing soon!

When we all got back, we cooked dinner together at someone's house, which was really lovely - the four of us agreed at once that it'll have to be a frequent occurrence. But I hardly had time to finish eating before I had to run across the campus for fencing practice! Most of the Irish students aren't back on campus yet, since school doesn't begin until Monday, but the ones who were there recognized me from Facebook and were happy to have me - I make the fourth girl in the society, making a full epee team. Of course, I usually fence foil, so I had my first ever formal epee lesson that night with the coach, and I could well be at my first epee tournament within a week! I hope I'm a quick study at it!

Afterwards, we went to the campus pub for a while. We were there again this evening after a bus tour of the city and a day of orientation meetings, this time for a free dinner event for study abroad students, and I expect we'll be there again tomorrow night, for another study abroad event, this one tragically lacking in free food. I have a feeling I'll be spending a lot of time in Stables, so I'll have to grab a photo of it soon. Tonight I'm going to stretch - I'm sore from fencing! - and then start picking my classes! Also on the agenda is planning a trip to Wales for the near future, so if anyone knows the easiest way to get from south Ireland to Cardiff, please let me know!

Irish Vocab Lesson

2012-01-18T19:43:00.001-05:00

ACDC means "bisexual."

But the guy who used it was from Toronto originally, so perhaps it's a Canadian thing.

Went to fencing practice tonight at the end of a long, wonderful day. I wasn't sure if I should, but I'm so glad I did - I got a great epee lesson and fenced some fun bouts, and the few people who were on campus for practice (most students haven't gotten back yet) were incredibly welcoming. I might even be going to Dublin with them next weekend! To fence! A weapon that I just started learning today! Things move quickly here in Ireland!

Study Abroad at UL

2012-01-17T12:09:00.001-05:00

Study Abroad at UL, a set on Flickr.

Here's some photos from my day of travel and exploring University of Limerick. I'm off to a meeting, but I'll have stories to tell later!

Some Tangental Thoughts on "Bromance"

2012-01-15T23:08:00.004-05:00

I meant to write this yesterday and got distracted by my gaping open suitcase with its zippered maw of overstuffed doom.

So, the new Sherlock Holmes movie. I saw it with two good friends a few days ago, and really enjoyed it. It's not a particularly smart mystery or anything, but it's a good action movie, and the relationship between Holmes and Watson is pretty great to watch.

Last night I was at a party, and we were talking about the film, and someone quoted an interview in which Jude Law had been asked if the film was a "bromance". He responded by saying it wasn't a bromance - it was a romance. (I couldn't find the exact quote - the closest I found was a clip on Tumblr in which he calls the expression bromance belittling.)

So now I'm wondering about this. Bromance strikes me as kind of the equivalent of when guys follow up an expression of affection for one another by saying "no homo" - a way of acknowledging close platonic male relationships while also distancing from or making fun of sexual relationships between men. It's close but not too close. So when Jude Law says it's belittling, he's saying that it's okay for men to have close, intimate platonic relationships, and so what if they look a bit like gay relationships? Or at least, that's how I read it.

But there's no equivalent for women, as far as I know. I wrote a paper about "romantic friendships" earlier this semester, which seem to be about the same idea, but that concept doesn't seem to exist anymore. Female relationships now seem less intimate to me than what I read about for "romantic friendships" - ladies usually don't routinely kick their husbands out of bed to cuddle with their best friends anymore, as far as I know - but some degree of intimacy, maybe physically but definitely emotionally, is still expected in relationships between women, so there isn't any need for a term to specifically explain it.

Leaving tomorrow

2012-01-15T13:55:00.003-05:00

My bags are slowly getting packed, I've finished my last-minute shopping, and I've dyed my hair pink. (What, isn't that part of your pre-travel routine?) I'm leaving tomorrow afternoon, to arrive in Ireland Tuesday morning. Wish me luck!

RIP Eric Borges

2012-01-13T12:32:00.001-05:00

Eric Borges was a Trevor Project intern. He'd been rejected by his family, but was active in the California LGBT community. He killed himself earlier this week.

This is the second recent story I've seen where someone who made an "It Gets Better" video eventually committed suicide. I know that being on YouTube isn't code for having it all together, and I know that suicide is much, much more complicated than just the difficulties of being queer. But still, it seems particularly sad, when someone who spent his time helping LGBT youth through difficult times couldn't see a way out himself. My heart goes out to his friends, family and community.

Obama Sings Lady Gaga

2012-01-10T23:54:00.001-05:00

Can't sleep? Me either. Have some YouTube!

One Week

2012-01-09T14:34:00.000-05:00

This time next week, I'm going to be sitting at the airport.

And then I'll get on a 7-hour long flight.

And then I'll chill at Heathrow for a while.

And then I'll get on another flight.

And then hopefully someone from the university will pick me up from Shannon.

And then I'll be in LIMERICK.

You know, it sounds less exciting when you put the hours of travel time in there.

But still. OMG.

How Not to Report on Climate Change

2012-01-05T19:45:00.001-05:00

Tonight on the news, when Brian Williams asked some Weather Channel guy if the warm summer was part of a more permanent change, I got all excited. Was the news actually going to talk about climate change?!

There were so many possibilities! He could have linked the warm winter to the record breaking heat waves this summer, or the worldwide increase in extreme weather events. It would have been awesome.

Instead, Mr. Weatherman pointed at his weather map and said something along the lines of, "It's warm this year, so it won't snow. Back to you, Brian."

Sigh. I guess that works, too.

Bike Advice

2012-01-03T22:14:00.002-05:00

Found via Brain Pickings - a list of don’ts for female cyclists, from 1895. "Don't faint" seems to be particularly good advice, and I want to know what this person saw to make them feel the need to warn women against striking matches on their butts or screaming at cows.

Don’t be a fright.
Don’t faint on the road.
Don’t wear a man’s cap.
Don’t wear tight garters.
Don’t forget your toolbag.
Don’t attempt a “century.”
Don’t coast. It is dangerous.
Don’t boast of your long rides.
Don’t criticize people’s “legs.”
Don’t wear loud hued leggings.
Don’t cultivate a “bicycle face.”
Don’t refuse assistance up a hill.
Don’t wear clothes that don’t fit.
Don’t neglect a “light’s out” cry.
Don’t wear jewelry while on a tour.
Don’t race. Leave that to the scorchers.
Don’t wear laced boots. They are tiresome.
Don’t imagine everybody is looking at you.
Don’t go to church in your bicycle costume.
Don’t wear a garden party hat with bloomers.
Don’t contest the right of way with cable cars.
Don’t chew gum. Exercise your jaws in private.
Don’t wear white kid gloves. Silk is the thing.
Don’t ask, “What do you think of my bloomers?”
Don’t use bicycle slang. Leave that to the boys.
Don’t go out after dark without a male escort.
Don’t without a needle, thread and thimble.
Don’t try to have every article of your attire “match.”
Don’t let your golden hair be hanging down your back.
Don’t allow dear little Fido to accompany you
Don’t scratch a match on the seat of your bloomers.
Don’t discuss bloomers with every man you know.
Don’t appear in public until you have learned to ride well.
Don’t overdo things. Let cycling be a recreation, not a labor.
Don’t ignore the laws of the road because you are a woman.
Don’t try to ride in your brother’s clothes “to see how it feels.”
Don’t scream if you meet a cow. If she sees you first, she will run.
Don’t cultivate everything that is up to date because yon ride a wheel.
Don’t emulate your brother’s attitude if he rides parallel with the ground.
Don’t undertake a long ride if you are not confident of performing it easily.
Don’t appear to be up on “records” and “record smashing.” That is sporty.

New Year's Wishes

2011-12-31T15:22:00.000-05:00

Mr. Neil Gaiman always writes beautiful things for the New Year, and he has something of a greatest hits blog post which I fully recommend. Here's this year's wish:

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.

So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.

Make your mistakes, next year and forever.

While it's a fine and lovely wish, I hope that none of my mistakes in the coming year involve paperwork at the airport. Anything else is pretty much fair game, but I'd like getting through customs to be mistake-free. 15 days until I head off for Ireland!

I hope everyone had a really lovely 2011, and that you have great parties tonight, and an even better 2012!

Blog Changes!

2011-12-16T09:46:00.001-05:00

You may have noticed, I changed up the blog design today! I think it's still a work in progress, so let me know if you have any suggestions, or if anything doesn't work.

But far more interesting than the new banner is the fact that the content of this blog is about to change significantly. I'll be studying abroad starting in a month, and I have the feeling that I'm going to want to spend less time following odd little bits of American politics, and more time letting my friends and family know how I'm doing. So starting in a month or so, this space is going to get a lot more personal. I'm going to try for a photo a day while I'm in Europe, and I'll be writing about what I'm up to. When I get back in May, I assume blog content will return to what it's been since high school, so come back in five months if you're not interested in reading about the minutiae of my semester abroad!

It's midway through exam week...

2011-12-14T15:15:00.001-05:00

Do you know where your college student is?

Here's some lovely things I've been reading between studying for Women in US History Between 1600 and 1870...

The Atlantic has a detailed article about... pubic hair. Is women having pubic hair becoming a thing of the past? This article is fantastic both because it is highly informative, and because it has a truly incredible variety of euphemisms for pubic hair which I will immediately be adding to my vocabulary.

Time has an old but lovely article on fanfiction, in Harry Potter and other fandoms, particularly the legal and ethical questions about using someone else's character. It makes me want to read fanfiction instead of studying.

And finally, Danah Boyd asks some very difficult questions about media discussion of LGBT bullying. It's a good read, if not super-depressing. On a related note, what do you think of Facebook's new suicide prevention tool? I think it's pretty neat.

Out of the Closet in Uganda

2011-12-09T08:56:00.001-05:00

Mother Jones has an article about the gay community in Uganda, and this one passage at the end was so striking that I couldn't not share it.

When I return to our table, Dennis hollers at me. "Where were you?" He's got a bag full of lube packets in front of him, waiting for the friend who needed it to arrive. "I thought you were kidnapped for corrective rape."

My face turns horrified.

"Just kidding!" he says, grabbing my arm. Ha ha!

"Do you know a lot of women that has happened to?" I ask.

"Nooooo, not a lot. Like five." He laughs again: "It's not like South Africa."

Alright then. Let's party.

The entire piece is incredible for the resilience of the activists it describes. Under their conditions, I think I would just stay in the closet; it's pretty mind-blowing that they can go through so much shit and keep going anyway.

Gideon Bibles

2011-12-07T14:43:00.000-05:00

The Bilerico Project had a pretty shocking headline recently: "Anti-Gay Book Placed in Las Vegas Hotel," with a picture of a book titled How to Kill Gay, Lesbian, Bi and Trans Americans. The big reveal was that, of course, the book the author had found was a Gideon Bible, which is in basically every hotel room ever, and that he was no longer willing to stay in rooms that have a book calling for the execution of gay people, so he threw the book away.

I'd never really thought about the fact that hotel rooms usually have Bibles. I figured it was for the same reason airports have chapels - because travel is stressful, and if religion helps people cope with that, then why not make it available?

But of course, that argument might not fly if a hotel decided to allow an organization to put a Koran in every room, or a copy of the Gita. The discussion on the post seems to generally agree that he's overdoing it; whether you like the Bible or not, it's kind of rude to throw it away. A lot of religious people pointed out that the verses he finds offensive are often either ignored or can be interpreted to have nothing to do with modern queer people.

But that sort of reminded me of a book I'm reading right now, about a man who tried to follow the Bible literally for a year, without much guidance from religious communities and existing traditions of interpretation. The Gideon Bibles are placed there for the explicit purpose of conversion, but if you read a Bible without any context in Christian interpretation, it won't look anything like Christianity as it's regularly practiced. It'll look kind of like a lot of contradictions and, in the Hebrew Bible, a lot of commandments to put pretty much everyone to death for something or another. So having a Bible just chillin' in the hotel room, with its message taken for granted as self-evident, maybe is pretty problematic, both for people who have something against the Bible (or the Gideon's choice of translation) and for people looking to interpret the Bible a particular way.

(For the record, I end up agreeing with the commenters who say that it's legitimate to question why Bibles get placed in every hotel room, even if the Bible isn't necessarily just an evil source of anti-gay doom like the author portrays it to be.)

In Which I Want to Hug Secretary Clinton

2011-12-06T14:47:00.001-05:00

Obama issued a memorandum about GLBT rights today, announcing that fair treatment for queer people is to be a major part of the US's foreign policy and human rights policy. Clinton gave an address on the topic to the United Nations, and while I haven't seen the whole thing yet, just the excerpts made me almost teary.

“Well, in reality, gay people are born into and belong to every society in the world. They are all ages, all races, all faiths; they are doctors and teachers, farmers and bankers, soldiers and athletes, and whether we know it or whether we acknowledge it, they are our family, our friends and our neighbors.”

“To LGBT men and women worldwide: Wherever you live and whatever your circumstances… please know that you are not alone.”

What a thing to hear, coming from a world stage! Secretary Clinton pointed out that our country's own record is "far from perfect," but it still made me so happy to hear something like this being said for the whole world to hear, from us.

Occupy DC Update: 31 Arrested

2011-12-05T10:06:00.001-05:00

The Occupy DC twitter feed featured cheerful updates yesterday about their building of a non-permanent wooden structure, which was promptly torn down and everyone in it arrested. It sounds like it was an exciting evening:

One of the protesters landed with a flamboyant somersault on the inflated mattress. He was arrested as onlookers cheered as if he were a gymnast who had just stuck a landing. A few more protesters were then removed one at a time in the cherry picker basket.

The rest of the camp was undisturbed, and it doesn't sound like it go too tense. I think I have to agree with the police on this one - building a meeting hall in the park seems like it's crossing a line for park use, especially since it would take up the last open corner of McPherson. We visited Occupy DC last weekend, and while they've got some good things going on, including a shiny new library full of fantastic information, it feels the same way it felt when I visited over fall break: there's no momentum, and it's hard to say just what they're trying to accomplish. They released a pretty great declaration recently, so no one can say it's unclear what their goals are; I guess it just doesn't feel like the occupying technique is particularly effective for them the longer it goes on.

Steampunk Magazine Anthology!

2011-12-03T13:25:00.001-05:00

Steampunk Magazine has just released a BEAUTIFUL anthology of issues 1 thru 7 with introduction by Jake von Slatt and all seven issues for only about $21. I've got two pieces in it, and can't recommend the rest of the pieces included enough. You can buy it from AK Press or Amazon. Check it out!

Don't Buy Our Stuff!

2011-12-02T08:40:00.001-05:00

The Black Friday excitement has come and gone with only a little bit of pepper spray, but this was a kind of cool idea: Patagonia put an advertisement in the New York Times last Friday telling people not to buy their jackets. Which is sort of a nice message to hear on Black Friday. Don't buy shit!

Though I have to admit, I went out the very next day and bought some yarn on sale. But I'm trying to make all my Christmas gifts with supplies I already have. Which, I must admit, is going to take some creative thinking on my part. Wish me luck! Hope everyone has fun Christmas shopping or not-shopping, as the case may be!

What I'm Thankful For

2011-11-24T11:19:00.001-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving!

Here's what I'm thankful for right now:

My roommates, and our little home of overworked crazy geeky late-night vegetarian food with meatballs nonsense. I love you guys.
My family, who are endlessly supportive and awesome and recently bought me plane tickets to IRELAND. So much love!
The opportunity to go to Ireland! Oh my god guys!
The UMW Unitarian Universalist club, which went from three-people meetings to almost outgrowing our space, with an amazing new group of members.
Food! For having a kitchen I can cook in, and people to cook for!
All my fencer and guilty by association friends, who I have decided will be my carry-on luggage to Ireland. They're stackable!

Can you tell what's been on my mind lately? Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Pre-Thanksgiving Links

2011-11-22T15:14:00.001-05:00

Long time no blog! I've been working on a few different projects for school, which you'll get to see shortly. Right now I'm supposed to be packing up my apartment for Thanksgiving break, but I made the mistake of opening my blogroll first, and apparently a lot has happened in the past twenty four hours! And frankly, much of it makes me glad that I'm soon leaving the country! But here's what I'm reading this afternoon.

The Case Against Buying Christmas Presents by Leo Babauta.

A rant, but a good one. I like making and baking Christmas gifts! :D (Though that still means buying things, and stuff like fabric and yarn is often sort of treacherous environmentally and in terms of labor, being made cheaply far away, dyed with all sorts of suspicious stuff, and shipped miles to my local big box craft store...)

Some Occupy reading...

A short, interesting piece on Occupy Wall Street's office space from Mother Jones.

An amazing open letter calling for the resignation of the Cancellor of UC Davis from Professor Nathan Brown.

Occupy Minneapolis occupies a second foreclosed home from Think Progress

There's been some talk about what the Occupy movement should do next as cities make it more difficult to hold actual encampments, and I really like the idea of adopting Minneapolis's strategy of occupying foreclosed homes more widely. It targets a clear issue, brings real attention to the increasing poverty or near-poverty in this country, and has immediately visible results.

And finally, A long, detailed article on different perspectives of higher education by Steven Brint. As a college student, the question of "who should be in college and what should they be doing there?" is relevant to my interests.

Comment of the Day on Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-15T15:03:00.001-05:00

I couldn't get on Twitter this morning, so when I finally checked it between classes and caught up on the news about Occupy Wall Street, I was horrified. They destroyed books! They arrested journalists! They ignored a court order allowing the protests to continued!

But what everyone on my twitter feed was most upset about, and I agree: They threw away THOUSANDS of books! So here was my favorite comment on the subject, via Shakesville's open thread.

NYPD:
You smashed the library.
You smashed the library. 5,000 books gone and in a landfill because you had to be needlessly cruel and/or beat some protesters in effigy.
It is ON, motherfuckers. On like Donkey Kong. On like the Doctor facing down a bunch of aliens at Stonehenge with the Pandorica. On like Neo fighting Agent Smith one-handed. Because now the geeks, bibliophiles, and librarians are coming for you. And we have all the cool signs and cosplayers.

The Universalist Dilemma

2011-11-15T00:12:00.001-05:00

I just returned from our campus's queer group's discussion on religion and gender/sexual minorities and allies, and now I'm all full of religion thoughts.

I went as a representative of our Unitarian Universalist club, in addition to being queer myself. We Universalists have problems with ideas like "evil," so when someone said, referring (as I understood) to whether or not churches decide to affirm and accept LGBT individuals, that this was "a question of good and evil, acceptance and non-acceptance," I got thoughtful.

As a Universalist, I believe that everyone gets to heaven, or enlightenment, or whatever - I'm still unclear on exactly what that means. I like to think that everyone has an inherent and eternal capacity to both change the world for the better and be changed in turn.

And as a UU, I think that a central goal of our congregations - a religious duty, springing from our shared principles - should be to create spaces of radical acceptance, communities where everyone can come as they are and be welcomed and appreciated for who they are.

But that's tricky, isn't it? Because as a queer in a religious community, I go into my desire to accept everyone acutely aware of the danger therein. There are people who would like to see me stoned to death, because that's what the Bible says. How do I accept them and maintain my own safety?

So when I was thinking about queers in places of worship as a question of good and evil, that's what I was thinking about. A bit ironically, being a community of radical acceptance means setting some pretty clear lines about what sort of behaviors, and even what sort of beliefs, aren't permissible. How do we practice openness, forgiveness and love while maintaining our commitment to protect those of us who are marginalized for who we are? How does one call out evil where one sees it while still being a place where everyone gets to heaven?

Obviously, I'm not the first person to grapple with this. In fact, I'm late to the game, and should probably just go grab some books from the library. But that's the sort of thing I was thinking about tonight, and if anyone has any opinions, I'd love to hear them.

Happy Monday Morning!

2011-11-14T08:40:00.001-05:00

I hope everyone had a lovely holiday weekend! Veteran's Day passed without notice here at UMW. In fact, now that I think about it, I'm not even sure I could successfully name our fast-changing list of countries we currently have military operations in. But we discovered in my American Studies class that veterans get free meals on Veteran's Day at Applebees, so I guess that makes it okay.

This morning I'm reading a sad little piece in the Washington Post's Faith blog about a 30-something veteran's loss of faith in the leadership of our parents' generation.

Think of the world our parents’ generation inherited. They inherited a country of boundless economic prosperity and the highest admiration overseas, produced by the hands of their mothers and fathers. They were safe. For most, they were endowed opportunities to succeed, to prosper, and build on their parents’ work.
For those of us in our 20s and early 30s, this is not the world we are inheriting.

I am, of course, mentally excluding my own parents when I read this. I also am forced to note that the prosperity he describes back in the Good Old Days was in no way universal, and was distributed along race, gender and class lines that bear consideration. But it's still a good read.

He's not particularly optimistic about the ability of those of us in college to someday soon step up and do better, though - apparently we act like children. To which I respond: Don't worry! We fully got this! ...I think!

Listing the Names

2011-11-11T09:41:00.001-05:00

Transgender Day of Remembrance is coming up, and my club is working with our campus's Gender Neutral Housing to organize a vigil.

Obviously, hate crimes are tragic whenever they occur. But now, as the day I'm going to be holding a candle and helping read the list of the names of the dead from the past year gets closer, every headline I see about violence against hits me that much harder. Shelley Hillard, a transgender teen who went missing in October and whose body was just found burned on the side of the road, is the name I found today.

I'm sorry, Shelley. I'll think of you at the vigil, and I'll try to make it an event that educates and inspires so that someday horrible things like this don't happen. You shouldn't be just a name on a list.

Guy Fawkes Day!

2011-11-08T09:44:00.000-05:00

I didn't know Guy Fawkes Day existed until V for Vendetta came out, but it fell on a Saturday this year, so in true college style we had a party. We spent a little bit of time pondering how problematic the whole thing is - the masks in V for Vendetta as a symbol of revolution against an oppressive government when that doesn't really make a terrible lot of sense... And then we made scones and ran around and gave up on trying to make it make sense.

James Ford over at Monkey Mind, however, didn't give up on trying to make it make sense, and he has a really interesting reflection up. Here's a bit:

During the Occupy Wall Street and the whole ongoing “Occupy” protests, the mask appears internationally being used as a symbol of popular revolution. Artist David Lloyd is quoted saying: “The Guy Fawkes mask has now become a common brand and a convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny – and I’m happy with people using it, it seems quite unique, an icon of popular culture being used this way.”
I’m sure Warner Brothers, who must make a little money off of each mask worn, are happy as clams to have become the face of revolution…
And, of course, in a world where everything is connected, irony becomes the commonplace of communication.
Sometimes I like it. But. Me, I’m not so sanguine about the Guy Fawkes mask part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, with its undercurrents of violence, and frankly, with its misdirected zeal.

He talks about his hopes for the Occupy movement, which involve it shifting its focus entirely to electoral politics... which seems unlikely, and which I might disagree with him on. But it's an interesting thought. Read the whole thing!

Church and God Talk

2011-11-07T09:35:00.001-05:00

I went to church yesterday, and it was terribly thought-provoking. Yes, it's time for some religious rambling. Fasten your seatbelts, my friends.

The theme of the day was "Will Unitarian Universalism Make It?" It's a popular sermon topic, given that we're a teeny-tiny little slice of the population of religious folk and, like most denominations, losing members every year, especially younger members. My minister suggested that our problem is that we don't have a center; we all come from our different religious backgrounds with our different baggage and our spiritual/secular mentality, and we're hesitant to find something - ritual, or some theological concepts - to agree on and organize ourselves around. He suggested that a way to fix this problem might be getting over our aversion to God-talk, which is to say, mentioning the divine at all.

I have to admit, I have a problem with God-talk. Part of it's personal - what I'm looking for when I say I'm "seeking God" is different from what I'm looking for when I'm looking for some vaguely-named holy or divine. Part of it is a bit more political - I feel like when we take the divine, the awesome, the supernatural from any and all traditions and stick the name "God" on it, we're erasing important distinctions in how people experience religion. I might say "God" and be thinking of the expression "God is love," but that won't necessarily describe the experience of someone from another tradition, and I think that difference is worth talking about.

I want to talk about truth and meaning at church, but I want to use words other than God to describe the things that are too big and confusing to get our heads around right away. That probably makes it harder, because then we have to agree on terms first, but I think it would make for a really helpful conversation.

Rev. Ford, a minister/blogger who I respect a lot, gave his sermon this week on how to talk about spirituality-things, too, but his focus was on souls and how to understand them without assuming that it's something eternal that's going to zip up to heaven when you die. It's good stuff - a bit of psychology, a bit philosophy, a bit of thinking about day dreams and regular dreams and what those things mean. And he talks about the "center," the same way my minister did.

I wish that when we talked about how our church deals with truth and meaning, we sometimes looked for words other than "God," just to see where it took us. Maybe we'd end up coming back to God-talk, but it'd be a lot more full, I think.

Occupy the Banks' Mailboxes

2011-11-03T15:00:00.000-04:00

ThinkProgress and TreeHugger have both shared a brilliant idea: When credit card companies send you junk mail, send it back.

I get all my junk mail at my permanent address, so I can't do it at school, but it sounds like a great idea to me. To quote TreeHugger:

If enough people take a second to participate, this could irk the mailroom staff at JP Morgan et al enough to spur the sort of conversation [...]. Or better yet, it could provide the media -- ever hungry for the next 'Occupy Wall Street' angle -- with fodder for a new narrative.

TreeHugger recommends including a note with exactly why you're angry at the bank, but I've heard some other ideas - for example, my co-workers fold up all of the paper that came with the return envelope and just send it all back, sparing themselves having to throw any of it away.

So if you want some easy activism AND to get rid of some junk mail, send back those credit card offers!

A Lesbian Library Story and What I'm Reading

2011-11-02T14:44:00.000-04:00

Once upon a time, I was working on a research paper. (Hint: Is it at least halfway through the semester? Then I'm working on a research paper.) This one was about how historians interpret Frances Willard's diary, where she discusses being exclusively attracted to women.

One of the things that makes me very proud of my university is the amount of women's studies and queer studies books we have, so when I went into the library today, I came out with a HUGE stack of books, many of which had "queer" or "gay" or "lesbian" on the cover somewhere.

I'm really excited about this research, so I was annoyed at how embarrassed I found myself feeling at I went to check out. I worried the library staff would see what I was reading and judge me; I felt the urge to say, "It's for a paper!" (Because surely no one would want to know about lesbian history and queer theory just because?) What if they thought I was gay because I was reading about gay people? They'd be right, but I'd hate for someone to think it just because of what I was reading.

Naturally, all of this is silly. Obviously people can read about gay people for fun, even if they're not gay. But I was blushing, and I didn't even check out the Big Book of Lesbian Sex that was shelved next to the history!

Here's what I'm reading today!

The Supreme Court will probably decide that prisoners can't sue privately-run federal prison employee for cruel and unusual treatment.

The Supercommittee is likely to cut really awesome programs supporting organic farming and farmer's markets while continuing to support giant agribusiness.

Occupy Wall Street made bike powered generators!

Occupy Mary Wash Points of Unity

2011-10-31T07:52:00.002-04:00

Really quick, before I run off to class, here are the Points of Unity for my school's Occupy group. I like them.

Points of Unity
1. We, #OccupyMaryWash, stand in Solidarity with all Occupiers. With anyone who is oppressed by the top 1%. We stand in Solidarity with the 99%.
2. We stand in Solidarity with all who struggle for equality be it of race, class, age, sexuality, gender, disability, religion, and any associations. We are witness to and stand together in their struggles.
3. We see education as a human right and sky rocketing tuition as an obstacle to that right.
4. We see an organization composed of faculty, staff, and students as key to our success.
5. We recognize there has been a short coming of the administrative and bureaucratic structures of this university in protecting and elevating the voice and rights of all members of the Mary Washington community.
6. We believe in respect for all workers and a livable wage for all workers.
7. We believe in environmental sustainability as the only just future for this community.
8. We believe students and faculty are instrumental to the success and continuation of this university and therefore students and faculty must be instrumental in all decision making processes that impact the university.
9. We are committed to non-violence, non-hierarchical structure and respect for diversity of all types.
10. We are committed to the creation of a transparently run university.

Votes for Children!

2011-10-30T21:53:00.001-04:00

Allow me to copy almost in its entirety my favorite blog post of the day, which suggested that we just extend the vote to all American citizens, regardless of age:

Objections to this usually take the form of imagining a highly disciplined party of seven year-olds reliably delivering bloc votes to whichever candidate credibly promises endless kindergarten. If you think for five minutes about the practical problems of political organizing, and then for five minutes more about the practical problems of getting kids to do anything I think you’ll see quickly that this is a misguided worry.

Seriously. Imagine a campaign directed entirely at 7-year-olds.It would be HILARIOUS. I fully support this proposition. I know plenty of high schoolers who were entirely informed enough and enthusiastic enough to vote, and the decisions made by elected officials - especially at the very local level, like the school board - can really effect students, so why shouldn't they have a say?And, I want to see campaign commercials featuring Muppets or Barney. They'd be smarter than Herman Cain's most recent ad.

Milk

2011-10-27T21:40:00.000-04:00

I just watched the movie Milk at our school's queer film fest. And I was thinking, wow. I am really grateful that I live in an age when I can go to school in the south, be openly gay, and not fear getting beat up for it. In fact, that's pretty awesome.Of course, it's not enough. I want gay kids to not get bullied or denied access to proms or scout troops or whatever. I want to not have to worry about not getting a job or housing due to my sexuality. I might even want to marry or adopt kids someday. And none of those things can happen in my home state. I want no one to ever be the victim of hate crimes.But I can walk down the street and know that I'm safe and I can be open about who I am and pretty much all of my school, students and staff, will be behind me and want all those things, too. Sometimes it's nice to remember that that's really a good, important thing.

Jobs and the Counter Protest that Wasn't

2011-10-26T15:48:00.003-04:00

My favorite part of the Occupy DC General Assembly was the announcements. During the day it was hard to tell what was going on, and the voting on proposals part of General Assembly was enormously frustrating (more on that later), but the announcements were great. We heard about the things that were going well - the speakers who were going to come visit and teach us about protest techniques, the victories from marches we'd participated in, and best of all, the counter protestors who were coming to visit us! We were invited to join a Welcoming Committee, to make sure they felt included and informed.

Sadly, the counter-protest never happened. The goal was to hand out job applications to occupiers. Of course, many of the occupiers have jobs and are in school; the rest of them can't find jobs, because there's an 11% unemployment rate in the DC area.

One of the demands I've heard thrown out by the protestors is a living wage for everyone (I can't cite that, of course, because they don't have an official set of demands, but it's an interesting ideas.) Which I take to include people working part-time and people who are unemployed.

I don't think the 53%-ers would like this. Bootstraps, man! They work five jobs and have no insurance and THEY DON'T BLAME ANYONE! So if they don't get a living wage, why should some unemployed person? They'd be freeloading, and if America hates anything, it's the idea that undeserving people might get some sort of help from the good hard-working bootstrappers.

But honestly, the idea of freeloaders really doesn't bother me. Even if the occupiers were all unemployed slobs who just wanted to live in the park and be pissed off for a while (which they're not, it should go without saying,) I would much rather they have access to health care and food and shelter than not. A living wage would provide these things! I'd rather risk some free loaders and have everyone healthy than deny benefits because someone might free load and have people suffer.

I mean, not that we can fix everything. Of course not. But I'd rather err on the side of helping people and trusting that they're not trying to screw people over than not. I don't know how much of a viable political position that is, but that's how I would like to think about things.

Occupy K St - Morning in the Park

2011-10-24T07:42:00.000-04:00

A week ago, I visited Occupy K St. at McPherson Square in Washington, DC. Of all of the Occupys turning up in major cities around the country, it's seemed to me that DC - both the occupation at McPhearson and the other one at Freedom Plaza - have gotten very little media attention. As a DC girl, this annoyed me, so I went up to the city over my fall break to check it out myself.

I got there first thing in the morning, before the occupiers had really woken up. I wandered over to the Information tent, where a gentleman who introduced himself to me as the infamous Bear asked me what I liked to do. When I said blogging, he sent me to the Media tent... And when I found nothing to do at the Media tent, I followed the smell of coffee to the Kitchen tent. There was water for tea about to boil, and I overheard the man staffing the tent mention to someone else that dishes needed to be done, so I asked, "Can I have some tea, and can I do the dishes?"

After jokingly checking my qualifications (I assured them that, as a girl scout, I am a master of outdoor dishes doing), he had me filling the wash bin with water from the water fountain and washing the previous night's dishes. As I was filling the plastic water jug, Bear stopped me to warn me that, "This is a revolution. You may be called to lay down your life at any time." I thanked him for the advice, finished the dishes, got my tea, and found a seat on a bench to write down my first impressions.

What I expected to be a brief writing session turned into several hours - by now the occupiers were waking up, and I couldn't get more than a paragraph into my thoughts before someone came over to strike up a conversation. I talked to a man from Louisiana who'd responded to Hurricane Katrina by stamping anti-consumerist messages on thousands of dollar bills and putting them into circulation; another man showed me articles about Mitt Romney's mother's involvement with the "negro problem" in the Mormon church decades ago stuck between the pages of a 60-year-old Time magazine book on religion; a mental health professional who was also one of the first occupiers explained the neurological problems of one of the homeless men in the park in great detail and how he was trying to help him. "Anywhere else he'd get long-term care," the guy said, taking a long drag of his cigarette. "Here he's homeless."

Having been so welcomed into conversation, I felt empowered to strike up conversations myself. The quiet place I finally found to get some writing done was at the center of the square, which was ringed by signs, and passers-by through the park often stopped to read. I asked a man what he thought when he was reading the sign next to me and looking confused, and we ended up chatting about the role of government in social services, the responsibility of the banks for making bad policies and the government for failing to regulate them, and the purpose of the occupation. We both agreed that, while we had different views of what the problem was, the occupation was a good thing. It was creating a community in the middle of the city, raising awareness about political issues and feeding the homeless.

But as the day went on, I came up against the problem that Occupy DC didn't seem to be doing much more than that. They'd had some successful marches, but the Monday I visited was quiet - the scheduled teach-in with the ACLU never happened, and the action planned for that afternoon didn't really seem to get off the ground either. I overheard people who'd come from Occupy Wall Street or who'd been involved in DC for a while complaining about the lack of energy and action; one man, who I worked with in the kitchen, said that he'd come here to protest, not to make sandwiches. Others seemed to like the more toned-down atmosphere of DC; I heard comments that New York had grown too big, or too confrontational, and they liked the DC occupation because there were more places to get involved and a strict rule of non-violence.

And there certainly was room to get involved in DC. Just a few hours into being there I found myself handling donations to the kitchen, explaining our signs to passers-by, and participating in an impromptu yoga class. But I'm not sure that's enough. We certainly attracted a lot of attention - around lunch time and rush hour there was a steady stream of people walking through the park, reading all the signs and asking questions, and there was a journalist for every three occupiers - but it was hard to answer the question "what are we doing?" when we didn't seem to be sure of it ourselves.

Student Loans and the 53%

2011-10-21T09:03:00.000-04:00

You've probably seen this already - it's been all over the internet - but recently, a gentleman on Daily Kos wrote a pretty fantastic (if a bit condescending) response to someone who had posted on Tumblr about being part of the 53%.

Here's the guy:

He says:

I am a former Marine.
I work two jobs.
I don’t have health insurance.
I worked 60-70 hours a week for 8 years to pay my way through college.
I haven’t had 4 consecutive days off in over 4 years.
But I don’t blame Wall Street.
Suck it up you whiners.
I am the 53%.
God bless the USA!

And Max Udago responds:

Do you really want the bar set this high? Do you really want to live in a society where just getting by requires a person to hold down two jobs and work 60 to 70 hours a week? Is that your idea of the American Dream?
...
Look, you’re a tough kid. And you have a right to be proud of that. But not everybody is as tough as you, or as strong, or as young. Does pride in what you’ve accomplish mean that you have contempt for anybody who can’t keep up with you? Does it mean that the single mother who can’t work on her feet longer than 50 hours a week doesn’t deserve a good life? Does it mean the older man who struggles with modern technology and can’t seem to keep up with the pace set by younger workers should just go throw himself off a cliff?

To which I agree. That really doesn't sound American Dream-y to me. But it seems to suit Paul Ryan, who said recently:

[Pell Grants should be done away with] 'cause Pell Grants have become unsustainable. It’s all borrowed money…Look, I worked three jobs to pay off my student loans after college. I didn’t get grants, I got loans, and we need to have a system of viable student loans to be able to do this.

Why do we want a world where students have to work 2-3 jobs to make ends meet? Frankly, that doesn't sound good for the country - people who have to work that hard are likely to have more health care problems, and generally not be as productive or creative or happy, and that can't be good for business. Not to mention it's just really kind of a crappy position - "As a representative of your government, I think you should have to work like crazy to get out from under a mountain of debt despite the fact that there is only 1 job for every 4 unemployed people. If you can't afford to do that, then what business do you have dreaming of college?"

I saw another 53%-er post that seemed to argue that people who can't afford college should all just go to trade school, get a job below their ambitions and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But the idea that it would be good for the country or for individuals to do less than their potential because it's frugal seems ridiculous to me. (Also, even if everyone did just go to trade school... nope, still not enough jobs.) This whole rhetoric of "when in doubt, work harder," seems infuriatingly counter-productive to me; as a student with lots of ideas for awesome things to do to help people, I don't want to be told that I need a mountain of debt and a bunch of shitty jobs to do it. My classmates and I have all sorts of amazing aspirations and ideas to help get us out of this mess, and we can't do it if we have to work 3 jobs to get out of debt first!

Vintage Tomorrows

2011-10-12T15:21:00.001-04:00

Anyone remember that awesome steampunk project I was working on over the summer? It's out in the world now, and you should check it out!

I did research for the book Vintage Tomorrows, but it's also a film, and there will be a sneak-preview at New York Comic Con this weekend!
Saturday 15 October 12:15-2pm. Details here. Open Facebook invite here.

Some Prayers for Sunday

2011-10-09T20:50:00.001-04:00

The Unitarian Universalist club that I run at our school led the church service at our local congregation today, so maybe I'm just in a religious mood, but I saw this prayer on a blog (followed by a sermon on Occupy Wall Street, which you might find interesting if you're into religious perspectives on capitalism) and I wanted to share it. As you may know, this weekend was Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. I'm even going to have a guest post about it for you soon! But in the meantime, I have this prayer...

The Al Cheit Prayer at Occupy Wall Street on October 7th, 2011

By Stew Albert & Judy Gumbo Albert

We have sinned
By yielding to confusion and falling into passivity
By indulging in fear
By giving in to anger
By not standing up for ourselves
By thinking about (sacred) values only on holy days
By tolerating global warming, global disease and global poverty
By being cynical about repairing the world
By not defending Israel
By not defending Palestine

For all our sins, may the force that makes forgiveness possible, forgive us, pardon us and grant us atonement

And I wanted to respond with this prayer, from my own personal stack of favorite prayers...

Prayer of Affirmation

I would be true for there are those who trust me.
I would be pure for there are those who care.
I would be strong for there is much to suffer.
I would be brave for their is much to dare.
I would be friend to all, the foe, the friendless.
I would be forgiving and then forget the gift.
I would be humble for I know my weakness.
I would look up, and laugh, and love, and live.

Here's to the Crazy Ones

2011-10-07T15:02:00.000-04:00

Judging from the blog posts I've come across today, practical, policy-focused liberals are coming to this conclusion: Yes, Occupy Wall Street looks sort of crazy and disorganized. But maybe it's time we got behind it anyway.

This was my favorite quote from this morning, talking about Occupy Wall Street, Steve Jobs, and the Crazy Ones:

The pragmatic progressives like me didn't start this movement. We thought about the long-term impact for the left and the short-term electoral optics for Democrats. When the economy collapsed, we were quiet, the tea party spoke up, and the rage the country felt was directed toward government, not Wall Street. In short, we were afraid.
Thankfully, the crazy ones weren't.
...
Perhaps it's a natural evolution, but it also seems likely that the movement is changing because the seasoned organizers and pragmatists are working alongside the radical idealists who were there from the start.
The only reason those pragmatists are there is because the crazy ones took the first steps.

Ok, maybe I object to the word crazy. For a variety of reasons, including that there's nothing sane about our current economic system, so anyone who's actively working against it, even if they're dressed in funny clothes or not quite on-message, looks pretty damn sane to me.

But it's not just progressive writers like the ones at Mother Jones who are starting to wrap their head around OWS. Paul Krugman wrote about it today in the New York Times. Here's my favorite bits:

What can we say about the protests? First things first: The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right.
...
Given this history, how can you not applaud the protesters for finally taking a stand?
Now, it’s true that some of the protesters are oddly dressed or have silly-sounding slogans, which is inevitable given the open character of the events. But so what? I, at least, am a lot more offended by the sight of exquisitely tailored plutocrats, who owe their continued wealth to government guarantees, whining that President Obama has said mean things about them than I am by the sight of ragtag young people denouncing consumerism.

Kevin Drum responded to Krugman by suggesting that no matter how off-beat some of the leaders of Occupy Wall Street look, the average liberal observer needs to remember whose side they're on - and if you're not with the protestors, then you're siding with the banks. (And again, I'm annoyed that they're not taking the anarchists/socialists/whatever who organized this so impressively seriously except as a jumping off point for some sort of standard policy ideas, but whatever.) Think Progress has a lovely roundup of what's wrong with our banking system.

And finally, Occupy DC had a busy day yesterday.. I wish I was there!

And now for... A Poem?

2011-10-06T10:30:00.000-04:00

Found this poem on Monkey Mind this morning. I've been thinking about feminism and body image lately, and this seemed fitting.

God Says Yes to Me

by Kaylin Haught

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

Have a good day everyone!

Some Occupy Wall Street Reading

2011-10-05T09:14:00.001-04:00

First, the latest on Occupy DC:

According to Huffington Post, the central group of protestors is about 40 strong, now half a week into their protest. They need warm clothes but have way too much bread. You can donate through their website, which also has information on upcoming invents, including a planned march on Koch Industries and a rally this weekend in collaboration with other Occupy-inspired groups.

The Huff Po article also has some interesting description of the leaderless, consensus-driven debates that go on at the General Assemblies in DC. On Monday they debated whether or not to have concrete demands, one women argued that they wouldn't need to; people would understand. Huffington Post said:

The media professed to not understand, but I suspect we all know exactly why those people are there. It isn't a sophisticated political position, it isn't an answer to the problem, and it doesn't fit our pre-fab protest narrative with a clear goal that is either won or lost, but at heart it's the same idea that's been expressed by President Obama and people on both sides of the proverbial aisle: the way our economy functions is really screwed up.

True fact.

Meanwhile, in New York, the New York Times isn't sure whether to blame police or protestors for arrests.

The media thinks it's anti-capitalist to protest the banking industry. Think Progress disagrees, and I agree with them. (Wow, that was confusing.) The banking industry received trillions of dollars in government money to bail them out, while continuing to screw over millions of Americans. The unfair business practices that we the taxpayers helped pay for are more of a problem then capitalism, Think Progress (and many Occupy Wall Street protestors) argue.

Though I have to say, I'm getting sick of the idea that's I've heard a few times in the past few days, which is that any protest/political opinion that challenges capitalism is automatically written off. I think there are lots of very legitimate grounds on which to challenge capitalism, and that there'd be benefit in listening to them.

Anyone else have any good readings about Occupy Wherever?

In Which Doctor Who Makes Marriages Stupid.

2011-10-04T21:00:00.001-04:00

So, uh, I watch Dr. Who. So naturally, I watched the season finale last week, and it was pretty cool. Kinda confusing. I really had just given up on understanding River Song.

Fortunately, Jess Zimmerman laid out for me quite clearly what the problem with River Song is. It's not that she's terribly confusing what with the time travel. It's that, for a character with such epic back story and so central to the plot, she doesn't actually get any character development of her own; she just fills whatever holes in the Doctor's story need filling. Which is why the random marriage at the end of this season just seemed so strange.

She also mentions, briefly, what I thought was the most annoying part of the season: When Amy's lost faith in the Doctor is indicated by him referring to her by her husband's name. "When you're sort of in love with me, you get to keep your own name, but when you're going to stop waiting and strike out on your own? Oops! Married name time!" Rawr.

This ends my geeky rant. We now return to our regularly scheduled programing.

Class and Steampunk

2011-10-03T16:01:00.004-04:00

Think Progress has some graphs today about just how big the gap between the top 1% and everyone else really is. They make a powerful point about who has the wealth in America. I think I've seen charts like these show up in my blogroll about once a month for six months now, but I think they bear repeating again and again.

This is percentage of the country's wealth by percentile. That's the top 1% with 42% of the nation's wealth, and the bottom 80% - as in, 80 times more people - with 7% of the nation's wealth.

This is the percent of the country's income growth taken home by the bottom 90% compared to the top 1%. While income for the top 1% has shot way up in the past 50 years, income for the bottom 90% has dropped steadily.

But you knew all that. Let's get to the fun part: What does this have to do with steampunk?

Nothing, really, but Margaret Killjoy has a fabulous article on Tor.com about how steampunk can never be apolitical, and it made me think of those numbers. He argues that, coming out of Cyberpunk as it does, steampunk has deeply political roots: "Cyberpunk was the punking of science fiction, introducing as it did the corporate dystopia and a strong sense of class struggle, taking the stories away from interspace travel and back towards the problems here on earth." Being rooted in the 19th century, which we often remember as a time of deep inequality - Charles Dickens' street rats on the one hand and ladies in ball gowns on the other - steampunk seems to me uniquely positioned to play with themes of economic inequality and its consequences. So maybe if you're sick of seeing graphs like the ones above, you could stop reading blogs and pick up some good science fiction, and get a pretty similar message.

Occupy DC and Other Cool Things

2011-10-01T14:31:00.001-04:00

Occupy DC, a local version of the Occupy Wall Street protests which have been going on for the last two weeks or so (and which made the front page of the New York Times this morning), is starting today at McPhearson Square. Their primary demand is that the Citizens United case which made corporations count as people be overturned, among with the general "this sucks and should change" attitude that's been fueling Occupy Wall Street. I wish I could be there! I recommend following them on Twitter, and I'll try to post any exciting news about the DC protests here.

In other news, this letter made my day:

Apartment Fun Times

2011-09-28T15:45:00.002-04:00

Today, my apartment-mates and I gathered around for a group reading of the pamphlets passed out on campus by our local Crisis Pregnancy Center. (And oh, did they have lots of pamphlets. I hate to think of the forests cut down to print this stuff.) I expected the cover of the tabloid-sized piece my friend was reading from to be something pink with babies, but instead it showed a homeless person, a child in Africa, an obviously battered woman... and said "You can stop injustice."

And then you turned the page, where it said, in big letters, "Starting in the womb." With that one picture of a fetus they always use.

And then I think I swore a lot. All of the ridiculous, medically false, emotionally manipulative claims my roommate had been reading from flew out of my head with pure fury at just how completely awful that title was. "The greatest injustice of our time," it said. As in, the way to fix homelessness or poverty or sexual trafficking or domestic violence or racism - all things mentioned on the cover - is not to pay any attention to the people currently in those situations, but to SAVE ALL THE BABIES.

I don't know about you, but I don't read that as a convincing argument for 'life'. If anything, it's a complete disregard for human life, to suggest that the proper way to fight injustice is to coerce women into carrying unwanted pregnancies to term, rather than actually addressing the problem itself, whatever it might happen to be.

(Fun side note, every page in the pamphlet was marked "advertising supplement," which I translated as "we're allowed to lie.")

Small Solutions vs. Small Government?

2011-09-26T09:45:00.002-04:00

Right now I'm reading Eaarth by Bill McKibben. It's an interesting book, if not rather depressing, about how global warming has changed the world irreparably, and how we should go about living on our now kinda freaky planet. I'm in the habit of assuming that if it cites reliable science it's probably written by a liberal, so I was surprised when the chapter I read last night included a critique of big government that would have made any Tea Party member proud.

Ok, granted, it was better argued than most Tea Party arguments. His point was that a strong central government was useful when we had big national projects to accomplish - building the land grand colleges, the interstate highway system, putting a man on the moon. Now, we don't have so many big national projects, and we have a lot of issues that might be better solved at the community level. I think that's not a bad idea. There was an article a while ago in the Daily Beast about local communities being improved by smart small-scale reforms in everything from law enforcement and criminal justice to education and health care. Programs like that, rooted in the needs and resources of a community, might be more efficient and successful than the big government programs it's so popular to criticize nowadays.

And yet...

Take, for example, Texas. Texas has pretty much the worst health care in the country. All of the small community leaders in the state could do their best to provide good care to their community, but Texas would still probably have pretty awful health care without some major incentive to change, which, given that their governor seems pretty damn satisfied with the situation, seems unlikely to happen.

That's where I feel federal government programs are important. It's not fair that someone in Texas is more likely to die of any number of things than someone in Massachusetts, when we as a country could have the resources to look out for everyone. Small-scale community solutions are great, but they seem to me to leave a lot of gaps in care and resources for people who need them, and that to me is unacceptable. Maybe our current system of trying to smooth those disparities isn't the most effective, but I think it's better than the alternative of not having anything to try to fix regional inequalities. (Also, sometimes communities screw up. See the Alabama judge who wants to make criminals go to church or else face jail time. Uh... just no.) So, while I appreciate that small-scale programs have a lot of potential to be awesome, I'm not ready to jump on McKibben's critique of big government just yet.

Congrats, Saudi Women!

2011-09-25T16:23:00.001-04:00

I wanted to write a "congrats!" and "keep fighting!" to women in Saudi Arabia, who were given the right to vote today. As Think Progress points out, they still aren't permitted to drive, and need male permission to travel or receive certain medical operations, among other things. But hopefully this is a step in the right direction!

As a blog note, I now have share buttons! Want to like this on Facebook, tweet it, +1 it on Google, or e-mail it to everyone you know? All those exciting options are now just one click away, so get on it!

Optimism and Fact Checking

2011-09-23T16:00:00.000-04:00

Last night my roommate and I curled up with two giant mugs of tea and a bowl of popcorn to watch the Republican primary candidates debate on Fox News. I consider myself incredibly fortunate that I didn't break my tea mug chucking it across the room in annoyance at the two hours of debate that followed, but I'm trying to look on the bright side, so here's the things I liked about the debate last night. I'm afraid I don't have candidates name's down, so they'll all be "that guy" except for Michelle Bachmann, who gets to keep her name.

I appreciated that some guy supported withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

I was pleased that Rick Perry stood up for giving undocumented young people in-state tuition at state colleges. He even called the other candidates heartless!

I was glad that they let the gay soldier from Iraq speak, even if he got booed. I also liked that they pointed out that 66% of Americans support raising taxes on the wealthy, despite the overall mega-conservative tone of the debate.

I liked that the winning option on the question "What should we do about immigration?" was "Create a path to citizenship." I also liked how uncomfortable this seemed to make the hostess.

So there you have it, the highlights of last night. I recommend checking out the New York Time's fact-check page on some of the claims made last night.

AP says I'll Probably Be Unemployed, Living In My Parents' Basement

2011-09-23T10:30:00.000-04:00

The Associated Press has an article on the toll the recession is taking on young adults.

To summarize: Way more of us are unemployed or under-employed, WAY more of us are choosing to live at home or stay close to home rather than moving out, and about 1 in 5 of us risk living in poverty. Young adults are more unemployed now than we've been since WWII.Quote:

"Their really high levels of underemployment and unemployment will haunt young people for at least another decade," [Economist Andrew] Sum said.Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard University, added, "These people will be scarred, and they will be called the `lost generation' - in that their careers would not be the same way if we had avoided this economic disaster."

I really wish the AP had broken down those numbers a bit more - is the drop in employment in any way matched with an increase of young people in college, graduate school or trade school, for instance? But either way, the picture is kind of a grim one. My classmates and I are getting freaked out, so we'd better fix the economy soon. Get on that, grown-ups!

On Troy Davis

2011-09-22T08:47:00.000-04:00

The first time I did National Novel Writing Month, I remember crying at the end, because I knew I'd have to kill off my bad guy. I didn't want to, but I couldn't think of any other satisfying way to end the story - the bad guy has to die, right?

There's a scene like that in the film The Princess Bride. The bratty little boy interrupts his grandpa reading to ask, "Who kills Humperdink?" When the grandpa says no one does, the boy finds it unacceptable - someone has to kill the villain.

Last week Fox News aired an interview with the mother of the victim in the Troy Davis case, Annelise MacPhail. "“They make it look like we after blood," she said, "but we are not. We are after justice."

I'm sorry, but I don't think what you got is justice. I don't think, as a country, we should have an idea of justice that ends like a story book where someone has to die at the end so the good guys can live happily ever after. I think justice is what happens when all of the evidence is examined, and if there's doubt - as there most certainly was in this case - the error is on the side of the accused, not the accuser. I would much rather the victim's family not get their 'justice,' their story-book ending, than run the risk of killing an innocent man.

Nathan Thornburgh at Time Magazine has a much more in-depth article about the idea of closure in this case that you should check out.

A Fencing Story

2011-09-18T16:44:00.001-04:00

Today an older woman at church came up to me after the service and asked, "Do they let women fence sabre?"

It took me a minute to realize I was wearing my fencing club track jacket, with our club name and a picture of two stick figures bouting, so I very eloquently answered, "Huh?"

"Can women fence sabre in your club?" she repeated.

"Oh, yeah," I replied. "I mean, I fence foil, but we have a few female sabreists."

"That's good," she said. "When I fenced they only let the girls use point weapons."

I assured her that our girls did as much wild slashing as anyone, and she looked quite pleased.

Liberty and Health Care and Stuff

2011-09-17T15:02:00.001-04:00

We had a campus speaker for Constitution Day today! Ken Cuccinelli spoke to a crowd of a half-dozen supporters and about 60 protestors in our science building today, inspiring some fabulous chants like "If you don't believe in science, get out of our building!" While I disagreed or was baffled by a lot of what he said, he made one particular argument about health care that I found curious, because I'd seen it just yesterday being argued by Ron Paul.

The idea, as Cuccinelli and Paul explained it, is that back in the good old days, hospitals would provide free health care to those who could not afford it, and then the government stepped in and ruined it by making it law that they HAD to provide emergency room care to anyone who needed it. Cuccinelli argued, in particular, that not only should government completely be out of health care, so that the poor rely on generosity of hospitals, but that hospitals should be able to turn away people whose concerns weren't serious enough and only give free care to cases they deemed emergencies.

The financial problems with Paul's idea that we should get rid of Medicaid and Medicare and people should save for medical emergencies on their own is broken down in this fabulous analysis at Mother Jones, but there was something else about this idea that was just rubbing me the wrong way. Cuccinelli kept talking about how government shouldn't have the right to compel us to buy a product - that requiring people to buy health insurance is taking away our freedom. (He also said that choosing not to buy insurance isn't economic activity. I think the emergency rooms that pay for it would disagree, but that's beside the point.) That's how he kept framing it - our "liberty" to not buy a product, regardless of the consequences to ourselves or the community at large.

What I kept wondering was... is health care really a product? Or if it is, should it be? When someone is sick, I don't think about my liberty to choose what products to buy to make them better. If the means to make them better are available, I think they should have access to them. They have a right to care. (I feel weird typing that - the part of my brain that's been too long in American politics thinks, 'you don't have a right to be healthy! it's too expensive!' But I know I believe that we as a country have a responsibility to give everyone the best care we can, and that means they have a right to it.)

Thinking of health care as a product we have the choice to buy or not buy, like tea (yes, he compared it to the Boston tea party) seems contrary to how we talk about it and how we feel about it. Clearly, everyone is uncomfortable with the idea of just leaving the uninsured to die - we expect them to have some emergency care available to them, whether ensured by by the government or by charity. So we can all agree that people have some right to care, but above that bare minimum, it's a product? That just feels wrong to me. (Not to mention problematic to implement and expensive - emergency care costs more than routine care, and is higher-risk.) I wonder if, rather than fighting litigation battles over the Commerce Clause as used in the health care bill, we wouldn't be better off agreeing that health care is more than just a product. We can even disagree to what extent, but it'll be a better conversation with that as a starting point, I think.

Happy Constitution Day!

2011-09-16T07:36:00.001-04:00

Did you know it was Constitution Day? I didn't, either, until just now. And then I decided that if Constitution Day is to be a proper holiday, and not just something Senator Byrd made up, it should have cake.

There! Consider the Constitution celebrated.Though maybe it'd be better to have cupcakes. We could have different flavors for each amendment! The 19th could be strawberry, because it's related to women, and therefore must be pink.

Plentitude Economy?

2011-09-15T10:37:00.000-04:00

I saw this headline this morning and proceeded to be really confused: Why Masturbation is an Economic Act.

Um. Well. Tell me, TreeHugger, why exactly is masturbation an economic act?

I'm glad you asked, said TreeHugger. It's an economic act because EVERYTHING is an economic act, and we just wanted to shock you into reading about economics!

Ah, clever, I responded, since I'll gladly admit that I usually don't spend much time reading about economics. TreeHugger proceeded to explain using Gross Domestic Product as a primary indicator of our well-being (economic or otherwise) isn't necessarily effective because it leaves out a lot of variables. "Economy" includes all wealth and resources, not just those traded by big banks. So, for example, when we grow our own food, we're replacing commercial farming - that'd look like a loss in the GPD, but it's not a loss of resources. And certain, um, extracurricular activities might replace the entertainment industry in some ways, but the entertainment value remains. So when they say "OMG the markets are down!", that doesn't necessarily mean everything's gone to hell - using less products or services doesn't necessarily mean a loss of wealth, resources, or happiness.

I thought that was a kind of cool idea, but there's a problem - if the market going down means you've lost your job, then yes, it does mean a loss of wealth, resources and/or happiness. Our economy and our way of living is set up around this particular idea of what consumption means, and it has very real-world consequences outside floaty happy thoughts of abundance and collaboration and gardening.

The blog post offered a solution in the form of a video by the Center for a New American Dream called the "Plentitude Economy." It has a few small suggestions for how to reconsider the economy, like having everyone work only 4 days instead of 5 (more jobs, less stress (and thus less health problems), more time to participate in the economy in other ways) and encouraging DIY and neighborhood-based activity. It's a cute little video, check it out:

New Dream Mini-Views: Visualizing a Plenitude Economy from Center for a New American Dream on Vimeo.

What do you think? Is that a useful/realistic way to understand the economy? I think I kinda like it, but I must admit I'm still a bit confused.

Tea Party Highlights

2011-09-13T10:07:00.000-04:00

Did you watch the Tea Party GOP debate last night? I didn't even know it was going on, so imagine my surprise when I opened my blog roll to find more offensive things posted in the past few hours than I usually get in a week. I thought I'd share some highlights and try to figure out what they mean in terms of policy...One much-played clip from last night is this one, where Representative Ron Paul implies and the rest of the crowd frankly states that society should just let uninsured people die:

Here's the quote:

Blitzer: Let me ask you this hypothetical question. A healthy, 30-year-old man has a good job, makes a good living, but decides, "You know what, I'm not going to spend $200 or $300 a month for health insurance because I'm healthy, I don't need it." Something terrible happens, all of a sudden he needs it. Who's going to pay if he goes into a coma, for example?

Paul: In a society that you accept welfare-ism and socialism, he expects the government to take care of it.

Blitzer: Well, what do you want?

Paul: He should do whatever he wants to do, and assume responsibility for himself. My advice to him would be have a major medical policy. But not forced—

Blitzer: But he doesn't have that. And he needs intensive care for six months. Who pays?

Paul: That's what freedom is all about. Taking your own risks.

I will give him props for being internally consistent with his vaguely distressing philosophy, though he shied away from actually saying we should let the man die. I guess my follow-up question to him would be that, if the government doesn't have a stake in its citizens welfare in the form of emergency medical care, what responsibility does it have to them? If people should be entirely responsible for themselves, should the government, say, help fund hospitals or medical research, as it does now? There's a lot of ways the government is indirectly involved in supporting people's health, from requiring nutrition labels on food to offering free flu vaccines to students, and that seems to be generally in line with the mandate in the Constitution that Congress "support the general welfare." But in Paul believes that people without insurance shouldn't receive any care, what does he think about the role of government in health more generally?

Meanwhile, Rick Perry thinks we should "free up" Wall Street, even though a bipartisan committee concluded that doing so was what led to the financial crisis in 2008. I don't know much about finance, to be honest, or what it is Wall Street does except look at those numbers on the big screen and run around looking panicked. However, I've gathered from the past few years of economy implosion that it involves playing lots of high-stakes games with other people's money. So I gather that what Rick Perry wants to do is take away the rules to the game. Which is sort of like giving a bunch of 2-year-olds the board game Life and expecting them to play properly and not choke on the tiny plastic cars.

And finally, Rick Santorum misspoke and said something about the "illegal" vote before correcting himself - he meant the "Latino" vote. My reaction to that was as follows: "Wow, what a douche."

Ten Years

2011-09-11T17:50:00.000-04:00

Via Think Progress, here's some things the United States could have done with that money we've spent on wars since September 11th:

– Provide 63.3 Million Scholarships For University Students Every Year For Ten Years
– Give 58.9 Million Children Low-Income Health Care Every Year For Ten Years
– Give 23.6 Million People Access To Low-Income Healthcare Every Year For Ten Years
– Provide 20.68 Million Students With Pell Grants Worth $5,500 Every Year For Ten Years
– Provide 15.12 Million Head Start Slots For Children Every Year For Ten Years
– Provide Veterans Administration Care For 14.7 Million Military Veterans Every Year For Ten Years
– Hire 2.01 Million Firefighters Every Year For Ten Years
– Hire 1.76 Million Elementary School Teachers Every Year For Ten Years
– Hire 1.73 Million Police Officers Every Year For Ten Years
– Retrofit 69.4 Million Households For Wind Power Every Year For Ten Years
– Retrofit 26 Million Households For Solar Photovoltaic Energy Every Year For Ten Years

Court Martial: The Video Game!

2011-09-02T19:17:00.000-04:00

Alyssa at ThinkProgress wrote a brief blog post about how some video game is banning killing civilians in the game, and suggests alternatives to addressing random acts of in-game violence:

If you think that players wanting to act out in a game is a problem, it might actually be more indicative of how strong that desire is to see what price people will pay to engage in it than to ban it altogether. It’s one thing to see what people will do in the absence of realistic restrictions, like investigation, court-martial, and arrest. It’s another to see what they’ll do under constraint.

Wouldn't it be kind of cool to see a game where there were realistic restrictions, though? You go along thinking you're playing just another war game, shoot the wrong person, and suddenly you're in a Law and Order type game where you have to gather evidence and argue with your lawyer in order to proceed to the next level...I hate violent video games. If the things I'm supposed to kill look anything like people I don't like to play. But I would totally play a lawyer.

John Calvin and Me

2011-08-31T18:21:00.003-04:00

Today, I tabled at our school's Club Carnival for my club, the University of Mary Washington Unitarian Universalists. It was fun to watch people's reactions - either then squinted at the sign, figured out it was a church club, and speed-walked away, or they made a beeline for our table because they already knew about UU and were excited to see us there, then hurried away to see all the other clubs.

I got to chat with a few people, though, and one was a new minister on our campus. He said, "We're very similar, but more trinitarian," which I think he thought was a funny joke. He asked if I'd grown up UU, and I answered no, I grew up Presbyterian. When he asked how I made that switch, I gave an answer that in retrospect wasn't exactly complete or satisfying, so I'm going to try again here.

I've always loved church as an intellectual exercise - so many interesting names to remember in Sunday school! - and as I got older, I also grew interested in the spiritual side. And I found the spiritual aspect of our high school youth group really fulfilling, but the intellectual side - the theology they taught us in youth group - got more and more troubling. I think it's fair to say that while our youth group wasn't anywhere near as conservative as some I've come across, it took a pretty strict Calvinist view of theology and had an evangelical flavor to it. My most vivid Sunday school memory is learning about the "spiral of depravity," wherein humans are inherently bad and everything we do, even our attempts to do good, only further our ultimate sinfulness, but there are some other gems, too. I remember tearfully hurrying to the front of the church to pledge that I would try to convert some of my unsaved friends (and further tears at my failures to convert my unsaved friends.) I remember being confused and conflicted as we learned that it was dangerous to associate too much with nonbelievers, when my non-believing friends supported me more than my church acquaintances ever did.

And I was learning about other religions at the same time my church taught me, more and more, that all of them were wrong. In Sunday school we did a series on "cults," which included not only groups like Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, but Agnostics and Deists. Meanwhile, in school, I learned about Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, and found things that were beautiful and useful in all of them. I even met a Satanist girl, and found myself defending Satanism in Sunday School.

So that was pretty much the end of that.

I still find parts of Christianity valuable, and I understand that the way I was taught its symbols and beliefs isn't the only way to look at them, and that some are much... shall we say, friendlier. But for me, trying to reconcile what I'd learned and struggled with about Christianity to what I understood intellectually about faith and its place in life wasn't what I wanted. So I joined a church where I could keep nurturing my spirituality without feeling the need to struggle with my intellect, and it worked out!

This is the answer I wish I'd given the campus minister who asked me about my faith. Oh well, maybe next time.

Loose Lips...

2011-08-28T11:46:00.002-04:00

I just finished reading A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski. It was an interesting book, if a bit over my head - he tried to cover a lot of broad social, political, and cultural movement in a small space, and sometimes I felt like he was just dropping in a quote from some book or journal, saying "yup, there were gay people at this time," and moving on without really tying all his ideas together. He said in the introduction that he was trying to avoid the "add one gay and stir" method of history, just elaborating on historical queer's biographies, which, while generally a cool idea, meant that he would drop names of famous historical figures as queer and not elaborate any further, leaving me wishing for all the scandalous details!

But overall, it was a good read, and there was one bit in particular I wanted to share with you...

During World War I, conservative British politician Noel Pemberton-Billings wrote an article called "The Cult of the Clitoris," claiming that "a legion of lesbian spies" led by actress Maud Allen were hurting the war effort. Quote: "In lesbian ecstasy the most sacred secrets of the state were betrayed." Because nothing quite turns the ladies on like state secrets, you know.

While it seems unlikely, I do think that his idea would make the best spy movie ever, and suggest that Hollywood get right on that.

Send Me To Ireland! ...Please?

2011-08-25T23:11:00.000-04:00

You may have heard (because I think I've told everybody in the world by now) that I'm going to University of Limerick, Ireland in the spring! I'll be studying multiculturalism, gender, and Irish politics and society - the interplay between religion and politics is one of my favorite research topics, so I'm really excited to get to study the Good Friday agreement, while also taking the really unique classes Limerick has on theories and practices of multiculturalism (which seems particularly relevant after this summer, for a lot of reasons.) This is also going to be my first time traveling outside of the United States, and I hope to see lots of exciting things in the UK and maybe even elsewhere in Europe!

Buuut...

While I got a scholarship that covers some of the program costs, it'll still be more than I can afford, and I'd like to get out of school with as few loans as possible, so I'm asking anyone who's willing and able to help me make up the difference. If I can get about $2,500 I won't have to take out a loan, but really, any amount I end up with helps! You can donate at SmartyPig. The trip is sure to provide endless inspiration for blogging and I promise frequent updates!

Thanks so much!

Can't Imagine

2011-08-24T20:22:00.004-04:00

One of the things I got to do in my internship at Human Rights Campaign was go through all of the documents posted to the HRC website (close to a thousand of them) and organize them. What? That doesn't sound exciting? Okay, well, while I never want to see a spreadsheet again in my life, it kind of was, because I got to read about twenty years of documents and get a peak at a history of GLBT activism that I'd never seen before. And one thing that I kept coming up against was the HIV crisis.

The HIV crisis is one of those things that I sort of understood in theory. "In the 80s, lots of gay men died of AIDS and they made a quilt." I liked the movie version of Rent and got appropriately teary-eyed at that song during the support group, but it seemed a bit over-the-top to me that most of the characters were HIV-positive.

Then I came across a document that HRC published 10 years ago, called "Two Decades of Fighting for Life." It's a 22 page timeline, starting with the first known deaths in 1980, and ending in 2001. I read through the entire thing, watching the italicized numbers at the beginning of each year climb - 5,000 people diagnosed, 10,000 the next year, 23,000 the next year.

Can you imagine? I certainly can't.

There was an article published this week called Life After Death, about the impact of HIV/AIDS on the gay community now that the crisis is over, in that the life of the gay community doesn't revolve around AIDS as it once did. It was an interesting read - even growing up near DC, where HIV/AIDS remains a massive public health problem, I found myself relating to the author and the people he spoke to who weren't quite sure how they understand the disease. I mean, for me it's never been something to be particularly worried about - it was mentioned briefly in health class in a bullet list with other STIs, and that's that.

But there was this guy I met at General Assembly one year, with a tattoo around his leg - a pattern of black triangles in several rings, with a center one colored rainbow. I complemented him on it, and he told me that each triangle represented a friend he'd lost to AIDS. There were dozens of them.

So I feel like this is important, like it's a part of history that I should try to understand. But I just can't get my head around it.

Protect Teh Ladies!

2011-08-18T11:41:00.002-04:00

Today's my last day at Human Rights Campaign! I'm going to miss it a lot - my job at school is much less fun, I don't get nearly as much access to crazy awesome website things and inside information on gay rights campaigning.

I'll write more about my summer soon, but in the meantime, please enjoy this 1915 political poster from Massachusetts, in which women ask men to please not force them to have the right to vote:

I particularly like the combination of feminists, socialists, and Mormons as a coalition of evil suffrage.

I guess their argument is that if women wanted to vote, they would all get together and ask their husbands to please give them the right to vote now?

Guest Post: Masculine/Maternal

2011-08-17T09:30:00.000-04:00

A while ago, I asked several of my friends how they thought about their gender - then, when their answers proved really interesting, asked them to write them down for me so I could post them here. This post is by my friend Michelle, who can also be found blogging at Paladin and Dragon. If you find all this personal identity stuff interesting, please feel free to write a post of your own and send it my way!

It took me too long to write this. I over-thought how I would phrase this part or that part, and then wondered if I would sound too extreme or too moderate. I feared that I would leave something out and sound ignorant.

Now, the irony does not escape me that I was the quickest to respond to my friend’s question about how I identify myself, and yet, quite late on my promise to write for her this guest post.

I am a female. I have the anatomy of a woman. But, in terms of my personality in light of today’s gendered culture, I would say that I have a masculine personality. I am aggressive. I like to be in control of things. I like to be the leader. I am independent.

And I am still female.

My most recent thoughts on how my gender and personality co-exist are that I often assume a maternal role. Mothers are generally accepted as protective, and in doing so, aggression, strength (emotionally and physically), and assertion pay off.

Perhaps some would argue that mothers should be subservient to their children. I doubt they are reading this, but I would ask them this: who is most likely to be a child’s first role model? I certainly know mine was my mother, and her mother, and my father’s mother. This isn’t to say that I have horrible paternal figures. That is far from the truth. Rather, I identify with women who were not ashamed of themselves.

I identify as myself, and all that that may entail. I over-think things. I want to be a nice person. I like playing with my hair. I don’t feel entirely comfortable in skirts. I was the girl who terrorized boys on the playground. I am the woman who wants to solve the world’s problems, and the woman who sometimes needs to remember to step back and solve her own, first.

But in the end, I know who I am. Do you?

Political Daydreaming

2011-08-16T11:28:00.002-04:00

There's a really interesting (if slightly over my head) discussion going on at Feministe, where one of the guest bloggers, Kristen, asked readers what their ideal "just world" would look like. Or, put in the way I was thinking about it - if all of the system changes we social justice activists try to create could come to pass, what would the world look like?

I was thinking about this question a few months ago when I went to Netroots Nation. Obviously, a convention full of liberals isn't going to give the best perspective on conservative policies, but I was learning about topics I didn't know very much about and trying very hard to see all sides, and I found myself running up against the wall that I just couldn't understand how Republicans wanted the world to look. I can listen to your average list of progressive policies and imagine a future where they're perfectly implemented - where there's universal health care, for instance, or policies ensuring equal pay for equal work, or better public transportation. I can't hear policies arguing for further privatizing health care, for cutting all sorts of social services, or for getting rid of protections like the minimum wage and imagine how that would play out. And maybe your average Republican has the opposite problem, I don't know.

But I think it's an important question when you're thinking about politics - what do you want the world to look like? If all of your political dreams came true (or if you could tear the whole thing down and start over), what would your priorities be? I feel like if that vision were more clearly articulated - by politicians and by voters alike - maybe it'd be a more interesting discussion than all the crazy shit Rick Perry says.

Fun with Protests

2011-08-15T12:03:00.002-04:00

Time Magazine has a nifty slideshow titled A Brief History of Women's Protests on their website today in honor of DC Slutwalk last weekend (which I was sadly unable to attend, but I've seen some amazing pictures from it.) It really is tragically brief - you'd think politically active women just stopped existing after 1920 then magically sprang to life in huge numbers around 1970 (though, actually, that might not be too terribly inaccurate...) - but an interesting read nevertheless!

"Thank God That Childbirth Was Impossible Before The Invention Of The Internal Combustion Engine"

2011-08-12T16:42:00.002-04:00

That headline made me smile lots, so I stole it from Think Progress. My mental image was some complicated gasoline-powered baby-removing device, but actually it was about a woman who lived three blocks from the hospital where her child was born and was prohibited from walking him home. The hospital said it was too dangerous.

In addition to that ridiculous story, please enjoy this military cover of Rolling in the Deep:

Let no one say Republicans don't support the arts. They just support the arts if the arts budget is hidden inside the Department of Defense budget.

Poverty, "Us" and "Them"

2011-08-11T09:49:00.002-04:00

Mother Jones has a brilliant article by Barbara Ehrenreich called, Since When Is It a Crime to Be Poor?" which got me thinking about the things I was writing about yesterday.

She talks about policies - from national welfare programs to city laws - which end up punishing people for being poor. For example, TANF, or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, is a welfare program for working families, which is based on the idea that there will always be enough jobs for everyone, even though the average length of unemployment is currently about 35 weeks - clearly, there aren't enough jobs. Unemployed people enrolled in the program are expected to apply for 40 jobs a week, but are given no assistance for things like gas expenses or childcare to help them get to turn in applications or get to interviews. And the entire process is slow and humiliating - "applying for welfare is a lot like being booked by the police," says an expert quoted in the article. Then there are city ordinances that make it illegal to sleep or loiter in public places - fair because the apply to the rich and the poor, say the lawmakers, but who's really going to get in trouble for that? Ehrenreich gives other examples, but you get the idea - rather than helping people, government actions seem to make life more difficult for the poor.

Which brought me back to what I was thinking about yesterday, about people feeling so disenfranchised by their community that they don't see any problem destroying it. Policies which treat poor people as lazy and potentially criminal aren't really likely to make people feel invested in their community. And laws that criminalize things like sleeping on park benches or feeding the homeless (yes, people have been arrested for feeding the homeless) create this narrative where Us, the good middle-class job holding people, need to be protected from Them, the lazy criminal immoral poor who could take care of themselves entirely if only they weren't so bad. But really, most of Us aren't that far from poverty - in fact, according to Ehrenreich, 29% of Americans live in what could reasonably be defined as poverty, even if they're above the national poverty line.

But that's a pretty clear message from the government to 29% of it's people, isn't it? "Once you're poor and/or unemployed, you're not the people we care about. In fact, we need to protect good citizens from you. Call us when you're back on your feet."

I can't really think of anything to tie this train of thought up in a cute little bow, but it seems like the idea of people not being invested in their communities and people being told that they're not worth much without a high enough level of income are pretty linked...

The UK Riots

2011-08-10T12:18:00.002-04:00

I'm in no position to write about what's going on in the UK right now; while I'm reading news as it comes up, I'm unfamiliar with the politics there, and no one seems to have any idea what's going on. It seems like the news has a new cause every day. But Shakesville made an interesting point that I wanted to repeat...

An Associated Press article quoted Manchester assistant chief constable Garry Shewan, who claimed:

"We want to make it absolutely clear — they have nothing to protest against," he said. "There is nothing in a sense of injustice and there has been no spark that has led to this."

To which Melissa McEwan responded:

I feel like I'm stating the obvious here (although this idea appears to be anything but obvious virtually everywhere the riots are being discussed), but "hundreds of youths" don't go on a "rampage" without any reason, even if that reason is simply having no incentive not to. And, truly, feeling utterly devoid of any reason to not take to the streets of your community and destroy it is a profound injustice.

She goes on to talk about youth clubs which were closed a few years ago in London, and teens were concerned that having nowhere to go and no outlet would increase gangs and violence.

The whole post is entirely worth a read, and I think that point is an important one. If such a large population feels so unsupported by their community that they don't have any problem destroying it, then that's indicative of a political problem, not just widespread immorality or bad parenting.

Why Go To College?

2011-08-09T21:11:00.003-04:00

A while ago, a series of articles questioned whether or not college is really worth the exorbitant costs of attending. Fortunately, when a friend at school posed the same question - "Why are we even at college?" - I had an answer ready right away.

"So we can make as much as a man who graduated high school."

That statistic as changed - now, when I graduate with my B.A., I'll be on an equal playing field with men who only got some college - but Think Progress has a chart up today inspiring even greater achievement. If I get my Ph.D., I could make as much in a year as a man who got his B.A.!

Hiatus

2011-07-27T19:46:00.001-04:00

I love posting often enough that when I plan on not posting for a while I get to declare a hiatus.

I'm working on a super-top-secret project, which mostly means I won't have time for blogging, and possibly sleeping, for the next week or so.

If I'm very lucky, some of my esteemed lined up guest bloggers will throw me some posts for your enjoyment, but otherwise, see you in a week or two!

Who's In The Kitchen?

2011-07-25T14:53:00.002-04:00

Do you remember this? It's Jamie Oliver's TED talk, which came out about a year and a half ago. It's well worth a watch, if you have a moment, but the summary is obesity is bad and unhealthy food is bad and people need to learn how to cook properly and school lunches need to suck less. Some blogs I read had qualms with his discussion of obesity, for good reason, but other than that there seems to be nothing objectionable about suggesting that healthy food should be more available and people should be educated in how to prepare it.

But I remember, when I finished watching it last year, something about it felt... off. To me. I tweeted: "It sounds kind of like he's saying, 'women, get back to the kitchen.'" A teacher disagreed with me - He heard: "everyone, get back to the kitchen." But I went back through the transcripts he gave, and found it striking that all the examples he gave - with the exception of a minister - were women. He talks about a young woman whose poor diet led to serious health problems, a mother who doesn't know how to cook and whose children are obese, another woman whose obese father died in her arms. (Why not just tell us about him? Why make the story about her, as though she had something to do with it?) He talks at length about lunch ladies, called that, because men don't cook school lunch. He waxes nostalgically about a time when cooking knowledge was passed down from grandmothers and mothers - presumably to daughters, though it's not stated that way.

Today TreeHugger has an article making a similar point: part of increasing access to healthier food would have to be teaching people how to cook. In my middle school, cooking class was a co-ed, several-week affair, of which the only thing I remember is how to lay a formal table setting and that wrapping croissants around marshmallows is incredibly delicious. So perhaps it left something to be desired on the health and nutrition side. But everyone knew that cooking was the 'girls'' part of the year - later that year, we spent a few weeks in shop class learning how to use big fancy tools, and that was the boys' part.

I think if we're really going to have a conversation about teaching people how to cook healthy food, we have to make it a conversation about gender. I know Jamie Oliver probably didn't mean to, but he managed to lay the blame for unhealthy food at least in part on the backs of women. Why not ask the boys and men in those families he interviewed what they think about cooking, and whose job it is, and whether or not they're able to do it (or that it's worth their time)? Maybe it's just because I think everything about gender, but I think that'd be a much more productive conversation in figuring out how to encourage healthy cooking for everyone!

Girls with Swords

2011-07-23T12:28:00.003-04:00

This article totally made my morning:

There were way more female Vikings than we thought, and they got buried with their swords, too.

Previously, Viking remains had been assumed male if they were found with swords and shields, but recent studies show that about half of those bones actually were women. As a girl with a sword, I was inspired by the broadsword-swinging Viking ladies to start thinking of what tortures, I mean, fencing drills, I'll have for the new members of the fencing club in the fall!

Guest Post: A Bit of Each

2011-07-21T19:54:00.003-04:00

Today's guest post is by my friend Heather Brady, who got roped into it after making the mistake of saying something interesting in my hearing, and even volunteered to write multiple posts! So stay tuned for more from her.

We were sitting in a coffee shop when the topic came up. Spiffy, who was sitting cross-legged on the large windowsill next to our table, bounced her knees excitedly a couple of times before asking us about it.

“So, do you think we could talk about gender identity?” she said, pressing her fingertips together thoughtfully.

The general response was positive, a curious yes from those of us around her. She seemed like she had something on her mind.

Spiffy said she’d been thinking a lot about gender identity ever since she had participated in a session at her workplace on the transgender experience. She had been trying to figure out where she fit into the gender equation, and she said she most strongly identified with femininity. But when she tried to conjure up an image of what that would look like, all she could think of was Belle from Beauty and the Beast.

As we went around the table and each shared what we identified with, I remembered an online brain gender test that I took a year and a half ago. I answered all of the questions seriously. The result? I was dead center between masculine and feminine.

I have felt this way for a while, that I can see some of each gender’s standard definition in my personality and the way I think. I spent many of my teenage years working to prove that I wasn’t girly or stupid. I was smart, and I didn’t think smart could blend well with femininity. I wanted recognition of my intelligence and ability to contribute productively to society, and I thought that being feminine would hurt my cause. I focused on strength and force of intellect, rather that what I looked like or some of my more girly desires. I even wore boy clothing like cargo shorts for a bit, just to flaunt gender roles even more.

Then, in the pages of my AP U.S. History textbook, I discovered Abigail Adams. This brilliant, smart, funny woman was a driving force in her husband’s presidency, despite living in a society that looked down on strong women. And she wore fantastic dresses. I began to learn what it means to be a strong woman, and how a string of them in American history have had a defining impact on the U.S. and the world as a result.

I could see femininity in action, and it spurred me to action. I began to dress how I wanted to, rather than how I felt I should. I discovered that I liked pearls, cooking and sewing—traditionally domestic, feminine things that housewives embodied. But I also learned that a woman can be strong and graceful, smart and silly. She can like lace and hiking. Heels and Chuck Taylors. Sewing and living outdoors.

Having mastered the societal perception of gender, my next struggle has become gender in the workplace. I’m still struggling with this concept. How do I find a job where I can simultaneously be nice and tough? A good listener and an opinionated talker? Creative and analytical? And will anyone take me seriously if I use all of my strengths in these areas, without regard to gender roles?

The semi-scientific online test I took did help to articulate what I was thinking, but the significance of gender is more than what a test can prove to us. The lines of gender are so blurred that it’s easy to see bits and pieces of both genders inside of us. After all, Belle might have been a Disney princess, but she did fight bravely for what she believed in. She was a nerd, an intellectual with Stockholm Syndrome who stood up for what she believed in, even to the point of interfering with mob mentality. Don’t be fooled by the sparkly yellow dress; Belle was a badass in a ball gown.

So where does that leave us? Well, if our different replies at the coffee shop were any indication, there’s a mixed bag of gender inside pretty much everyone.

But I think the key isn’t to focus on a definition that puts us neatly into a category. I think the key is to find what makes us unique, and then work like hell to bring it to the table, sharing ourselves so that the world may grow and change. I’m not sure what the end result of that would look like, but I do know that it starts with a whole lot of self-honesty and love.

Perhaps, then, the only definition of gender that we need is the one staring back at us in the mirror.

Photo by Kathleen Bennett

I'm a Girl Cuz I Sew

2011-07-19T15:22:00.004-04:00

Recently, in one of those random Facebook discussions that sometimes just happens, a friend said that if we had a Greek gods themed party, I'd be Hestia - goddess of the hearth, the "domestic goddess." I thought this was awesome. I often joke that it's a shame I was born too late for compulsory heterosexuality, because I would have made a hell of a housewife. (Perhaps in multiple senses of the phrase, even! What fun!)

And then, in typical me fashion, I started thinking about it, and got all confused.

I do like a lot of traditionally feminine things - in fact, they're very important to me. I cook, I sew, I dabble in knitting and any other craft that strikes my fancy, I follow interior design blogs and recipe blogs and crafting blogs like it's my job. I know men who do all these things too - some much more skillfully than me - but always with the gentle teasing, "are you sure you're not gay?", and I have this unexamined idea that for them the experience must somehow be different.

The only thing I can think of to compare it with is my academic work. I like to think that, if I were to write a research paper and a recipe, the two would be of equal value, theoretically. But if you asked me to pick one or the other, I would probably always go with the research - it feels like a more worthwhile endeavor overall, something I can put on my resume and brag about out in the Real World in a way that I can't brag about my kick-ass lemon scones.

But at the same time, I'm not confident in my voice when I'm doing academic work, even something as mild as, say, writing a blog post with my opinions. I feel, as a student, as a young woman, that my place is probably to listen more than talk, and that I should tread carefully, because there aren't enough hours in the day to read all the books and learn all the theories I would need to understand to speak confidently on any given topic. I tend to defer to experts, and find mountains of citations to back up the smallest thought.

For me, my "voice" when baking, sewing, whatever, isn't like that. I sew the most, so I can speak to that in particular - I feel completely free to experiment, ask questions, and make mistakes in my sewing. If I want to do something and don't know how I trust my friends or Google to help me figure it out, and I can wing it from there in a way I wouldn't dream of winging writing.

I think part of the difference is how I understand those two different skill sets. Sewing is something passed from my great-grandma to my grandma to my mom to me. I hardly had to do anything other than learn how to use the sewing machine without breaking it, and I felt able to sew. I don't use patterns very often - it's all rather slapdash and intuitive. And that's considered feminine, right? Compared to the more stereotypically masculine logic and forethought needed in, say, writing an essay. (By the way, this post did not get that much logic and forethought. Sorry.)

Actually, that reminds me of something we talked about in Psych of Men. "Manliness" is something earned, acted on - as in the expression "man up!" You never hear women told to "Women up!", because "womanliness" is something natural and inherent. I describe my "domestic" hobbies as something intuitive, inherited, easy, compared to always needing to prove myself out there in the "real world."

So maybe that's part of why I identify so strongly as feminine. Because even if that whole public-private, logical-intuitive dichotomy is a bullshit social construct, I personally experience the tension it creates and find myself turning to the "feminine" side for comfort and fun.

Leah Says: "Less brain more tongue!"

2011-07-17T12:00:00.000-04:00

My fabulous friend Leah sent me a series of text messages about what gender means to her, sending my phone ringing like mad while I was trying to nap, so I'm making them the first in a series of guests posts on the topic!

I think girls are pretty! I think boys are pretty! I like making out with both! I think people who aren't girls or boys or are maybe both are pretty! I like making out with them too! In fact I don't really think there are separate kinds! And therefore I have vajayjay but that doesn't mean I'm going to be smart or sporty or pretty or good at cooking. It means I might get pregnant. Some boys also have vajayjays! Things are complicated! Think less make out more!!!

Gender: WTF Does It Mean?

2011-07-16T13:10:00.005-04:00

Recently, I read Julia Serano's Whipping Girl and Kate Bornstein's Gender Outlaw, and they have me thinking.

Serano considers gender identity - femaleness, maleness, femininity, masculinity - to be to some extent innate, in part because of her own experience growing up socialized male but with an unavoidable sense of her own femaleness. Bornstein, on the other hand, comes to the conclusion that all of gender is a social construct, and our own sense of ourselves as one or the other is just a result of buying into an inherently oppressive system.

A woman at my office to talked to all of us HRC interns about trans issues described gender identity of how we understand ourselves in relation to social categories of maleness and femaleness, which could encompass a little bit of each of Serano's and Bornstein's ideas, and which I found very helpful.

But all of that has me thinking. I consider myself both female and feminine, and this is a pretty important part of how I identify, but I've never given a lot of thought to what it means, to me, to be female or feminine. I've been going around asking my friends, and I've been surprised at the diversity of answers I've gotten - female friends who consider themselves more masculine, or equally both, or neither, but rarely one or the other, and always having put significant consideration into it. (I haven't had a chance to chat with any men about it yet.) For myself, when I try to define my femininity, the first images that come to mind are Belle from Beauty and the Beast, fairies, and the photo I have on my wall of girls about my age in a Victorian women's sports association, but obviously that doesn't explain anything.

So that's been at the front of my mind lately, and I want to keep exploring that question - what does being female/feminine mean to me? How do other people identify, and what does it mean to them? I'll be putting up posts as I come up with more thoughts on the subject, and I hope you'll join the conversation and tell me about your own experiences!

In fact, if you want to write about what you think on the topic of gender and gender identity, e-mail me at katie@casey.com; I'd love to share some other perspectives on the blog!

Morning Musings

2011-07-13T10:17:00.003-04:00

I took some time to catch up on my blog reading today, and here's what I'm thinking about...

The New York Times has a beautiful opinion piece from a few days ago titled The Good Short Life. It's written by a man with Lou Gehrig’s disease, who writes thoughtfully and compellingly about deciding to end his life when he's no longer able to take care of himself, rather than have it extended through expensive medical care. It reminded me of a film that came out recently that I want to see, How to Die in Oregon, about the same thing. I think Clendinen, the author of the New York Times piece, is right that we don't really know how to deal with death. Thinking about it makes me kind of uncomfortable, but I appreciated his honesty and his beautiful writing.

Treehugger has a post about a city that offers people the opportunity to trade in their car in exchange for a lifetime of free public transit. As someone who aspires to live in the city and never own a car, I love that idea - though, I guess as someone who hopes to never own a car, I would also never qualify for the free transit! Damn. Still, I think it's a good idea in that it'll reduce the number of cars in use and increase demand for public transportation, which will hopefully allow their public transit system to grow and be more efficient. I do wonder if it might be best for an offer like that to include access to a program like ZipCar - using public transit takes very careful planning, and there are situations where you need to be able to get somewhere quickly on your own terms, I think.

Finally, today's Cheat Sheet at the Daily Beast featured the headline "Wife Cuts Off Husband's Penis." This made me roll my eyes and wonder why I was supposed to care, but then it occurred to me: Why are stories like this of wives' violence against their husbands so much more talked about and widely publicized than (much more common) violence by husbands against wives? Lorena Bobbit was often referenced in high school, but I can't think of any men equally infamous for attacking their wives, and I'm sure it's not that they don't exist. How strange...

Let's talk about sex!

2011-07-10T14:09:00.000-04:00

But first, let's take a moment to appreciate the shocked looks I imagine on the faces of my family and neighbors who read this blog after seeing that post title.

Ah, that was fun.

Do you remember getting "the talk"? In my memory, it went like this:

A good friend, who had been teasing me for my lack of sexual vocabulary basically since elementary school, informed my mom that I needed "the talk" when I couldn't understand yet another bit of gossip. (This was probably seventh grade or so, and I couldn't tell you the difference between french kissing or making out, and all I knew about the bases was that I didn't particularly want to go to any of them.) So, on the car ride home, my mom informed me that there were two kinds of sex: The regular kind, which was embarrassing but okay maybe when you were much older, and the oral kind, which was gross and kids sometimes did it on the back of the bus. (My mom tells me that there had been news stories about something like that happening, and that was the bit of gossip I failed to understand, but I really didn't know the context at the time.)

So that, and an equally mortifying presentation about STDs in a wild, overcrowded 8th grade health class, was pretty much the sum of my sex education.

What made me think about this was kind of unusual: At work the last week we shared our coming out stories. I couldn't come up with a nice clean narrative, but the one thing I always remember is that I though was just never into boys, but I didn't know there was any alternative. I don't think I knew what a lesbian was until high school, and all my experience about what relationships looked like came from middle school: all of my friends had a new crush every week, or boyfriends who they kissed and went on dates with. I asked a boy to the 8th grade dance because we talked about fantasy novels and all my friends called him my "friend with benefits" and didn't believe that I didn't like him, so I figured that must be what a crush was. When he wanted to go on a real date after that, I stopped returning his calls and never saw him again.

And then in high school, I dated a boy because he asked me out, (note that "dated" in my high school meant "we're a couple, but don't necessarily do anything together or talk or anything.") I spent a lot of time avoiding him, too, but discovered something odd when we saw each other: Kissing was kind of nice.

Now, that thought had never crossed my mind before. I remember figuring out the mechanics of sex in sixth grade and deciding right then and there that I was never doing that shit, and I had assumed that all the rest of that icky boy-girl stuff was ruled out as well. After my "boyfriend" and I broke up, I started wondering about this whole kissing thing more seriously. When I imagined kissing boys, even boys I really liked, I got the same vaguely uneasy feeling I'd had kissing my "boyfriend" who I'd otherwise avoided. But when I let my mind slip over to the thought of kissing girls, well...

So I decided I was probably bi. Obviously.

Most people's coming out stories had to do with telling their parents, or friends, or whatever, about something they'd always known. But for me, I just remember being so confused about sex and romantic relationships and "crushes" - what it entailed, why anyone would want to do such nonsense, who could have a crush on who and what it was supposed to feel like - that I could hardly begin to sort out who I might be interested in.

The first time I heard the word "gay," in elementary school, my friend smugly told me that I shouldn't use that word if I didn't know what it meant, making it clear that she for sure wasn't going to tell me. How was I supposed to begin to apply that to how I thought about relationships? All I had for an example was my friends and Disney princesses, and it all felt so forbidden and wrong that I couldn't begin to imagine what or who to ask.

And it certainly wasn't a bad coming out, all things considered. After I figured out that kissing girls seemed nice everything kind of clicked together. But hearing my coworker's stories, I wonder if coming out to oneself - figuring out and accepting that you're gay - is always quite that fraught with questions about what romance should look like. I guess heterosexual kids can see themselves in Cinderella or some stupid show on Nick, and in the information given in a standard "talk" or sex-ed class. But for me, it all just felt so confusing and forbidden, that the hardest part was wrapping my own head around the fact that I even had a sexuality, not telling anyone else about it.

Casey Anthony

2011-07-06T12:06:00.004-04:00

I have to admit, I didn't follow the Casey Anthony trial at all. I really didn't understand why it deserved to be such a media circus, and didn't much care.

But now pretty much everyone wants to talk about the verdict and how wrong it was, I have a thought.

I don't know anything about the evidence, so it's not my business to guess whether she did it or not. (Even if she did do it, I don't believe she deserved to die for it because I believe the death penalty is both immoral and impractical, but that's another point.) The media's crazy focus on the case did the justice system a disservice. The Daily Beast says it better than I could, talking about the problems with the coverage.

But many of [reporters] failed to make the crucial distinction between when someone seems guilty as hell and whether prosecutors have proved their case beyond a reasonable doubt--especially in a death penalty trial. (Emphasis mine)

We don't send people to jail, or execute them, for things we think they probably did and also we just don't like them.

(Okay, well, we do, but Casey Anthony is white, so in this case we don't.)

Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather the justice system err on the side of the defendant, rather than being comfortable accidentally locking up innocent people. And so, no, I don't care that Casey Anthony got off, I think the court did its job.

And on top of that, this case was because it fit into a flawed, classist, racist narrative about motherhood that the mainstream media loves about the constant threat of bad mothers, who women with children must be constantly reminded of lest they think of having lives beyond their kids for just a second. Oh, don't get me started on that. I wrote a paper about this nonsense, I could go all day, or for at least 9 pages worth.

Summer of Stash-Busting!

2011-07-04T09:00:00.001-04:00

Crossing some wires here from my blogging life to my crafting life...

I've been undertaking an epic project I call the Summer of Stash Busting, in which I take all the strange little bits of fabric I've accumulated over the past several years and make them into things. The goal was one project a week, and while I haven't managed quite that, I've come pretty close! So at halfway through the summer, I wanted to do a round-up of my projects so far and share it with everyone.

Week 1: Circus flags
Week 2: Scrappy quilted coasters
Week 3: Rainbow potholder
Week 4: Ruffled pencil skirt

Week 5: Pieced-edge tea towel
Week 6: Another pieced-edge tea towel
Week 7: Rainbow checkbook cover and pencil case

So there you have it! That's what I've been up to this summer. We now return to your previously scheduled programming.

Squeeing over Marriage in New York

2011-07-03T18:35:00.005-04:00

Ok, I never posted about gay marriage in New York - in fact, I have to admit, I slept through the announcement and bailed on the HRC victory party - but I read an article today that made me smile a lot.

"Gay Marriage Gets Cold Feet" was the headline, and it was an article about how now that gays in New York can get married, they're feeling the pressure to do it, with everyone suddenly wondering when their gay friend/child/whatever will set a date. It's full of cute quotes from various gay folk about "oh my god we've never had to deal with this before!" (which sort of covered up the only serious points the article made, but whatever.)

“It used to be that when you came out, your parents would say things like, ‘Now I’m never going to see you in a wedding dress, never going to get to have grandchildren,’” says Cathy Renna, a local activist who runs an LGBT-focused communications firm. “Now it’s the opposite: ‘When do I get to see you in a wedding dress?!’ The more options you get, the more challenges arise.”

Isn't it awesome? We (speaking broadly, because as a Virginian I'm still not included in that technically) get to fret about whether or not to get married! About how long one should date before popping the question, public or private proposals, big wedding or running to the courthouse in jeans. I mean, it's weird that it's news that gays would feel the same conflicted way about marriage that straight people do, but yay that some of them get to!

(PS: This image is a cake topper from Offbeat Bride. Ten points to anyone who catches the reference.)

Pregnant Women who Miscarry Facing Criminal Charges

2011-07-02T13:36:00.003-04:00

As is often the case when I come across something profoundly messed up, I have no idea what to say about this article except that you should read it and also note how profoundly messed up it is. Today, it's an article from ThinkProgress about pregnant women in the South facing criminal charges for losing their babies.

Kimbrough [who was charged under a "chemical endangerment" law after her child died shortly after birth] is now facing a 10-year sentence if her case is not reversed on appeal — a 10 year sentence that will deprive her three other children of their mother.

A common tactic by prosecutors is singling out a group of women who are unlikely to draw public sympathy — women who may have used drugs while pregnant — to blur the line between abortion and homicide. Rennie Gibbs, for example, was 15 when she became pregnant and lost her baby in a stillbirth. Prosecutors charged her with a “depraved heart murder” after they discovered she had used cocaine, although there was “no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby’s death.” She now faces life in prison in Mississippi.

ThinkProgress rightly notes that targeting women who use drugs legally is exactly the wrong strategy - rather than encouraging women to seek out pre-natal health care to help them get off drugs and have better health outcomes for themselves and their children, it forces them to hide and put themselves and their children at greater risk. But it's more than the practical outcomes of the policy that's bothering me.

I remember in my women's studies class a few semesters ago reading an article about how our culture wants to control pregnant women's bodies. We tell them not to drink, not to eat too much of this or too little of that, to get some kinds of exercise but not others, or OMG THEIR BABY IS GOING TO BE RUINED FOREVER. And obviously, maternal health and prenatal health is important, so to some extent all that is probably helpful. But...

We have serious problems with maternal and prenatal health in our country. We have high maternal mortality rates and high infant mortality rates, so all of our yelling at women about what to do and not to do doesn't seem to be working.

And maybe micro-managing women's behavior, from bombarding them with parenting books to arresting them when they fail to meet our intense standards for how they should treat their bodies, isn't the best strategy. Maybe more access to pre-natal care, childcare, education, birth control... maybe those things would be a better idea than insisting on controlling women's bodies but giving them no resources.

I think really, what I want to say, is that it's not the government's business if I were pregnant and drank or took drugs or whatever. It's sad. It's a failure of my own health and the health of my child, but in that case it should be a health issue, not a legal one.

"Family"

2011-06-30T14:12:00.003-04:00

A few different things have me thinking about family and the nature of it.

First, a press release that I was very please to put on the HRC website yesterday, about the re-introduction of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which would allow a domestic partner, same-sex spouse, parent-in-law, adult child, sibling, grandparent or grandchild to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected medical leave to care for a sick relative or for themselves. (Granted, it should be paid, but that's a whole separate battle.)

But when I think about who I would want to be able to take off their job to care for me, or who I would want to be able to take off my job to care for, beyond my parents and siblings the first people who come to mind aren't on that list. My neighborhood is really tight-knit, and we help each other out in a lot of different ways - I feel like they should count as "family," in that we would want to help take care of each other if there were a need. The fencing club at school often, jokingly or seriously, call ourselves a family, and do go out of our ways to look out for each other. I remember last year when my roommate unexpectedly had to go to the hospital, and I wished I could leave work to go with her, but I couldn't think of any way it would be allowed. My "Uncle" Don just passed away - not really an uncle, but my grandparents' close friend - and has me wondering precisely how I describe that relationship and how it works in my family. ("Great-uncle-more-or-less" is the best I've come up with.)

So my excitement about the Family and Medical Leave Act quickly turned to being confused about what a family is. The act, I guess sensibly, is based entirely on legal and medical definitions, but my experiences have me much in the habit of thinking of "family" as a group of people who make a point to take care of each other.

Which brought me around to this much-circulated op-ed from the New York Times a few weeks ago, Same-Sex Marriage Is a Mixed Blessing. The article was mostly about people losing domestic partnership benefits once marriage equality happened, based on the idea that "marriage ought to be one choice in a menu of options by which relationships can be recognized and gain security."

On the whole, I would rather have marriage equality than a domestic partnership any day. I'm the sort of girl that swoons over wedding dresses and occasionally imagines what sort of centerpieces she might someday make for the reception. But when I think about it, that sort of daydream really doesn't come near encompassing my idea of what a family is. I agree that there ought to be ways for people who care about each other but don't fall into a nuclear family arrangement to have some kind of recognition, especially in case of emergencies. But I'm really uncertain about what that would look like.

In Which Comics are Important

2011-05-25T15:24:00.004-04:00

Confession: My favorite genre of movies is super hero films. (Preferably Marvel.) Yes, they're full of racism and sexism and generally everything bad... but still, I find them awesome. I read a few comics, but I don't really have the time or money to keep up with the series I like regularly, so instead I enjoy the movies.

So I was really excited to read Fanboy by Alexander Chee, an absolutely awesome article about why he loved X-Men as a kid. But it's not just about that - it's about race and politics and ability and culture and how all of those things are reflected in comics, both when he was reading them as a kid and now.

Though, in talking about the problem of race in contemporary comic books, he didn't point out my favorite character Dust who is the token Muslim woman in Young X-Men, so I want to give her a shout-out, because she's a fantastic character.

Thus ends my fangirling. Seriously, read the whole thing.

Accessibility and Disability Ponderings

2011-05-24T21:00:00.000-04:00

I can't remember if I mentioned this, but I'm working with the Human Rights Campaign on their web team this summer as an intern. It's only my second day, and I've already learned a lot!

One of the things it has me thinking about is accessibility, and the needs for accessibility within the LGBTQ etc. community. A lot of my training on how to code HTML has included making sure content is accessible, particularly for blind users or users otherwise unable to see the content.

Which has me wondering...

How else can websites be made accessible? (The other thing that springs right to mind is transcripts/subtitles on any content with audio and maybe taking steps to insure readability, like how on the HRC website you can make the font bigger easily on each page. But I feel like there are things I'm leaving out.)

So then I was wondering about how disability affects LGBT people in general and particularly their ability to reach resources. The HRC website talks a lot about protecting yourself from discrimination in health care, finding accepting health care providers, hospital visitation, things like that. It also talks extensively about HIV, which is obviously a big medical issue for LGBT people.

But then I was wondering... aren't LGBT people disproportionately affected by mental illness? (Or at least, they're at a higher-than-average risk of suicide, and maybe substance abuse? I would have to look up statistics, I don't have them off hand, but both of those seem familiar to me.) Do they have unique mental health needs, and are there organizations and resources to address those? I know that some therapists will list a specialty in, or at least openness to, helping LGBT clients, on webpages and provider search engines. But are community orgs doing anything to address mental health things? What would information, services, or resources specifically for mentally ill LGBT people look like, other than projects like It Gets Better?

And then going back to... How could that go on a website, in a way that's accessible to viewers coming from a wide variety of potentially difficult situations?

So that's what I'm thinking about. I'm curious about what resources for LGBTs with physical disabilities would look like, too, because I can't recall ever seeing anything of the kind, though of course it probably exists somewhere and I just haven't looked.

But think of the children!

2011-05-18T12:23:00.004-04:00

This comes up every time a same-sex marriage law is being considered somewhere, and every time I just don't understand it: The idea that we need to protect school children from Teh Gay.

For example, these fliers from New York, by the National Organization for Marriage:

Here's what I don't understand, and perhaps someone can explain it to me... Why does it hurt a child's innocence to read a cute picture book where two people of the same gender live happily ever after? Or why is teaching "gay history" (whatever the hell that means - all I could think of was the Stonewall riots, which we learned in high school) a horrible thing? And same-sex sex ed - well, shouldn't LGBTQ students be included in sex ed? Otherwise, they're on their own to learn about safe sex.

So nothing there sounds like a threat to me. It sounds more like acknowledging that LGBTQ students exist and making an effort to include them and help other students understand them.

Maybe that's the problem? NOM thinks that if we continue ignoring them, allowing false information to spread, and mocking them they'll go away?

I remember when the Prop 8 trial was going on I was so frustrated, because the pro-gay marriage side had put together such a good argument, and the anti-gay marriage side just didn't even seem to be trying. If they were going to duke it out like that, I wanted both sides to do their best, so we could see the merits of both sides. I really want to give them the credit of having maybe some inkling of a legitimate argument, but all it seems to boil down every time to is hating gay people.

Hello Summer!

2011-05-10T16:46:00.003-04:00

My sophomore year is OVER! Can you believe it? I'm halfway done with college!

This semester I studied a lot of interesting things, and I feel like you all might be interested, so here's a summary!

In my Intro to American Studies class, we talked about what it means to be an American. (Hint: It's often about race.) Our final project was a paper researching an American city through a primary source, so I looked at how a mommy blog called Nat the Fat Rat portrays motherhood in New York, mostly based on the work of the fabulous Susan Douglas.

In Native American Religions, we talked about Native American spiritualities from around the country and how they've changed since contact with Euro-Americans. (Hint: This class was almost mostly about race.) I got to babble about cultural appropriation, which is always exciting! (ie here and here.)

In Psych of Men, we talked about cultural constructs of gender and how they affect men's psychology. Alas, I have no links for you, but it was good stuff.

In Religion and Sexuality in Western Religious Tradition, we talked about women in Christianity through history (or, more often, what men said about women in Christianity). My very favorite was Jerome, who said that the only point of sex is to produce more virgins. When asked about, you know, carrying on the human species and all that, he said, "There will always be prostitutes." My final paper was a story, based on The Christmas Eve Dialogue by Schleiermacher, which examined a couple of different approaches to feminist Christology. (That stuff made my head hurt, but it was well worth the effort!)

And then I took a Spanish class and learned how to talk about gender and sexuality in Spanish. Whoo!

This summer, I'll be working with the Digital Media team over at Human Rights Campaign, helping out Standing on the Side of Love at General Assembly, and attending my first ever Netroots Nation conference! Yay!

Small things

2011-05-02T00:15:00.002-04:00

So, in case you missed the news, Bin Laden is dead.

The news was listing people who had given statements or were preparing them. They included George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and "Bill Clinton's wife."

...You know, the Secretary of State?

Responding to a major foreign policy situation?

Do you think we could maybe call her "Secretary Clinton," not "that former president's wife?"

This is a little thing. But it annoyed me.

Are YOU a Good Wife?

2011-04-22T09:30:00.004-04:00

Being a woman in college, I know what my real goal ought to be: my MRS. Screw this BA in Religion and Women's Studies nonsense, I have my priorities straight. (Haha, straight...)

So, um. Here's a chart from the 1930s about being a good husband or wife. :D

So both of them have to be good conversationalists. He shouldn't bring unexpected guests over, but she'd damn well better be ready for them anyway. Also, I want to know why "seams of hose often crooked" is on there. Like, really, 1930s husbands, are you driven to distraction when your wife doesn't put on her tights carefully?

Phones...

2011-04-20T10:30:00.002-04:00

I was thinking about etiquette last night, so when there was a blog post in my google reader titled "It's Not Just Rude, It's Ruining Your Brain," I got all excited. Alas, it was not about "please" and "thank you" and proper addressing of e-mails, it was about smart phones and students who have them out in class or while socializing.

This is the way kids these days think. My administration calls it "the millennial student" and apparently we are supposed to cater to their habits. ... [but] multitaskers are not only bad at multitasking, but they are also worse than nonmultitaskers on every individual one of the tasks.

That's the millennial student and it isn't something to be catered to. Put the damn iPhone down before you make yourself stupid.

While I love the quote "put the damn iPhone down before you make yourself stupid," and wanted it on my blog, I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I hate being on my phone when I'm trying to do something else - if someone texts me while I'm in serious homework mode, I will literally throw my phone across the room rather than check it. (Ask my roommate.) On the other hand, it took me 15 minutes to start this blog post because I had to read other things, watch a YouTube video, play a game and a half of Solitaire, and help someone who came into the office. So, uh, guilty.

In a less harsh post also about etiquette, Jennifer Grayson talks about how giving up her Blackberry for a year helped her to appreciate flowers and trees and stuff. Kind of corny, but related and also kind of sweet. But when I'm locked in a windowless basement office or at my desk in my dorm, there are no flowers to enjoy instead of technology, and the green background of the solitaire game or the pictures of flowers on my phone background are kind of like nature.

I'm not sure if I had a point with all this. Just something I'm thinking about this morning. I'm going back to playing solitaire now.

This Government Shutdown Thing

2011-04-07T08:46:00.002-04:00

As is often the case, I have only the slimmest idea of what's going on with this whole government shutdown thing. The blog posts I've been reading have been doing a lot less explaining the situation and a lot more guessing who will get blamed if it happens. Latest polls apparently show that people will either blame the Democrats or share the guilt.

So, someone tell me if my understanding is about right:

The deficit, which obviously has existed for ages and been going up for ages, but which I don't remember being such a hot political issue prior to this year, is suddenly OMG SO BAD WE HAVE TO FIX IT. Therefore, the Republicans are demanding a certain number in cuts, regardless of what gets cut, without raising taxes, and aren't willing to compromise down, and in fact keep raising the number. The cuts are mostly from discretionary spending, which makes up a tiny percentage of the government, and they're politically charged, like cutting Planned Parenthood, while making little impact on the deficit in the long term.

The budget discussions leave in things like the corporate loopholes which allowed GE to pay no taxes at all last year, and the Bush tax cuts, so they take essential services from the most needy in society to benefit the most wealthy.

Do I about have the gist of it?

Because if that's the case, yeah, it's the Republican's fault.

(Pardon the lack of citations. I wrote this off the top of my head before class and didn't have time to go looking for links.)

I love my representative.

2011-04-05T20:01:00.002-04:00

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) wants to change the title of a bill that would permanently block Environmental Protection Agency climate regulations to the "Koch Brothers Appreciation Act," a reference to the billionaire brothers who are active in Republican politics.

Connolly has submitted to the House Rules Committee a series of amendments that would change the title of the bill to everything from the "Middle Eastern Economic Development and Assistance Act" to the "Head in the Sand Act."

Others include the "Protecting Americans from Polar Bears Act” and the "Oil Producing Economy Capitulation Act.”

Silly, yes. But it made me smile.

(Via The Hill.)

A Quick Note

2011-03-30T14:22:00.003-04:00

The flood of legislation attacking women's reproductive rights the past few months has been too massive and incessant for me to try to keep track of each bill considered, but Shakesville has a post on a bill being considered in Indiana that's well worth a read. The bill would make abortions illegal after 20 weeks; fetus viability is usually considered to start around 24 weeks. Republicans are hesitant to include exceptions for maternal health, rape and incest, because women "could just lie and say they were raped."

The quote that jumped out at me so was the following:

I'm going to go ahead and flatly say that I believe denying access to a legal medical procedure to women is so thoroughly unethical and so thoroughly breaks faith with women that even if they did have to lie to gain access to abortion, it would be entirely reasonable.

Um, yes. That.

An Experiment

2011-03-19T14:13:00.009-04:00

I just finished reading the book The Story of Stuff, and it inspired the following two things:

One, I want to write like Annie Leonard. Describing potential environmental laws as a "delicious smorgasbord" is simply awesome.

Two, after putting down the book and proceeding to throw some useless bit of packaging away in the trashcan, it occurred to me to wonder just how much waste I actually throw away in a day. So, I'm going to try to keep track! I expect to be grossed out.

Two single-serving oatmeal bags
Tea bag, wrapped in a little plastic bag
Thread and fabric scraps from a week of sewing.
Banana peel
Cup, straw, and straw wrapper from a milkshake
Cup, straw, and lid from a drink at dinner
Soup cup and lid from dinner
Tea leaves
More fabric scraps from an evening project

So mostly food things. Some of that could have been composted, but we don't have a composting program at my school, and I don't think the groundskeepers would take kindly to me just throwing things in the yard!

But isn't it strange to think about? Someone's job was to design that cup or straw or single-serving oatmeal bag, which I used for a couple of minutes and then threw out. In fact, there were probably a whole lot of people involved in designing the packaging and actually getting the materials and producing the object and then getting it to the ice cream shop downtown or the campus sandwich shop. Surely all those people could have come up with something better than a wax paper cup that can't be recycled.

Pretty Things

2011-02-14T18:08:00.003-05:00

This blog has been tragically quiet for a while, and I'm afraid I have no profound political insights to share today. Moved by the spirit of being locked in the library researching on a beautiful day, and reading depressing budget stories, I am going to write a post of things which are awesome.

1) It was warm and sunny today! Words cannot express how happy this makes me, so I'll just say it again. It was warm and sunny today!!

2) I went to a fabulous concert last night in DC, still managed to get a decent amount of sleep before class this morning, and walked around all day with fabulous songs stuck in my head.

3) The crocuses are blooming on the hill which my dorm is at the bottom of and the rest of campus is at the top of. I swear every time I walked up and down those 55 stairs to my dorm today, there were new flowers blooming, and I anticipate that the walk to class and back is going to get very beautiful as spring gets closer.

(See also: The shoes, dining hall mug, and spray can tied with pretty ribbon to the tree that stretches over the staircase. It's like some charming hipster Christmas tree ornaments.)

4) Thinking in Spanish. I may not have finished my Spanish homework for class today, but I could come up with a whole lot of grammatically-correct excuses!

5) Getting a valentine from "Casanova" in my mail box. (It had a Hello Kitty sticker.)

And so, today is awesome. We'll get back to your regularly scheduled blogging when I'm not drowning in homework. (So maybe never. Who knows?)

ReBlogging from Cairo

2011-02-03T16:42:00.003-05:00

Via Monkey Mind and reposted in its entirety.

The blogger and activist known as Sandmonkey, who many of us have been following for the past 10+ days has been taken into custody in Cairo Egypt. It has been reported that his arrest was due to his final blog post on his website which has now had the account suspended. Many people have copied it and are mirroring it around the world...

Sandmonkey’s last post is entitled Egypt, right now!

Since posting this NellaLou has gained contact with Sandmonkey. He had been badly beaten but is at least as of now free. You can follow communications from him at NellaLou's Smiling Buddha Cabaret.

This last article of Sandmonkey blog, before arrestation and censure !

PLEASE COPY IT, SHARE IT !
Thursday, 3 Feb 2011
Egypt, right now!

I don't know how to start writing this. I have been battling fatigue for not sleeping properly for the past 10 days, moving from one's friend house to another friend's house, almost never spending a night in my home, facing a very well funded and well organized ruthless regime that views me as nothing but an annoying bug that its time to squash will come. The situation here is bleak to say the least.

It didn't start out that way. On Tuesday Jan 25 it all started peacefully, and against all odds, we succeeded to gather hundreds of thousands and get them into Tahrir Square, despite being attacked by Anti-Riot Police who are using sticks, tear gas and rubber bullets against us. We managed to break all of their barricades and situated ourselves in Tahrir. The government responded by shutting down all cell communication in Tahrir square, a move which purpose was understood later when after midnight they went in with all of their might and attacked the protesters and evacuated the Square. The next day we were back at it again, and the day after. Then came Friday and we braved their communication blackout, their thugs, their tear gas and their bullets and we retook the square. We have been fighting to keep it ever since.

That night the government announced a military curfew, which kept getting shorter by the day, until it became from 8 am to 3 pm. People couldn't go to work, gas was running out quickly and so were essential goods and money, since the banks were not allowed to operate and people were not able to collect their salary. The internet continued to be blocked, which affected all businesses in Egypt and will cause an economic meltdown the moment they allow the banks to operate again. We were being collectively punished for daring to say that we deserve democracy and rights, and to keep it up, they withdrew the police, and then sent them out dressed as civilians to terrorize our neighborhoods. I was shot at twice that day, one of which with a semi-automatic by a dude in a car that we the people took joy in pummeling. The government announced that all prisons were breached, and that the prisoners somehow managed to get weapons and do nothing but randomly attack people. One day we had organized thugs in uniforms firing at us and the next day they disappeared and were replaced by organized thugs without uniforms firing at us. Somehow the people never made the connection.

Despite it all, we braved it. We believed we are doing what's right and were encouraged by all those around us who couldn't believe what was happening to their country. What he did galvanized the people, and on Tuesday, despite shutting down all major roads leading into Cairo, we managed to get over 2 million protesters in Cairo alone and 3 million all over Egypt to come out and demand Mubarak's departure.

Those are people who stood up to the regime's ruthlessness and anger and declared that they were free, and were refusing to live in the Mubarak dictatorship for one more day. That night, he showed up on TV, and gave a very emotional speech about how he intends to step down at the end of his term and how he wants to die in Egypt, the country he loved and served. To me, and to everyone else at the protests this wasn't nearly enough, for we wanted him gone now. Others started asking that we give him a chance, and that change takes time and other such poppycock. Hell, some people and family members cried when they saw his speech. People felt sorry for him for failing to be our dictator for the rest of his life and inheriting us to his Son. It was an amalgam of Stockholm syndrome coupled with slave mentality in a malevolent combination that we never saw before. And the Regime capitalized on it today. Today, they brought back the internet, and started having people calling on TV and writing on facebook on how they support Mubarak and his call for stability and peacefull change in 8 months. They hung on to the words of the newly appointed government would never harm the protesters, whom they believe to be good patriotic youth who have a few bad apples amongst them. We started getting calls asking people to stop protesting because "we got what we wanted" and "we need the country to start working again". People were complaining that they miss their lives. That they miss going out at night, and ordering Home Delivery. That they need us to stop so they can resume whatever existence they had before all of this. All was forgiven, the past week never happened and it's time for Unity under Mubarak's rule right now.

To all of those people I say: NEVER! I am sorry that your lives and businesses are disrupted, but this wasn't caused by the Protesters. The Protesters aren't the ones who shut down the internet that has paralyzed your businesses and banks: The government did. The Protesters weren't the ones who initiated the military curfew that limited your movement and allowed goods to disappear off market shelves and gas to disappear: The government did. The Protesters weren't the ones who ordered the police to withdraw and claimed the prisons were breached and unleashed thugs that terrorized your neighborhoods: The government did. The same government that you wish to give a second chance to, as if 30 years of dictatorship and utter failure in every sector of government wasn't enough for you. The Slaves were ready to forgive their master, and blame his cruelty on those who dared to defy him in order to ensure a better Egypt for all of its citizens and their children. After all, he gave us his word, and it's not like he ever broke his promises for reform before or anything.

Then Mubarak made his move and showed them what useful idiots they all were.

You watched on TV as "Pro-Mubarak Protesters" â€“ thugs who were paid money by NDP members by admission of High NDP officials- started attacking the peaceful unarmed protesters in Tahrir square. They attacked them with sticks, threw stones at them, brought in men riding horses and camels- in what must be the most surreal scene ever shown on TV- and carrying whips to beat up the protesters. And then the Bullets started getting fired and Molotov cocktails started getting thrown at the Anti-Mubarak Protesters as the Army standing idly by, allowing it all to happen and not doing anything about it. Dozens were killed, hundreds injured, and there was no help sent by ambulances. The Police never showed up to stop those attacking because the ones who were captured by the Anti-mubarak people had police ID's on them. They were the police and they were there to shoot and kill people and even tried to set the Egyptian Museum on Fire. The Aim was clear: Use the clashes as pretext to ban such demonstrations under pretexts of concern for public safety and order, and to prevent disunity amongst the people of Egypt. But their plans ultimately failed, by those resilient brave souls who wouldn't give up the ground they freed of Egypt, no matter how many live bullets or firebombs were hurled at them. They know, like we all do, that this regime no longer cares to put on a moderate mask. That they have shown their true nature. That Mubarak will never step down, and that he would rather burn Egypt to the ground than even contemplate that possibility.

In the meantime, State-owned and affiliated TV channels were showing coverage of Peaceful Mubarak Protests all over Egypt and showing recorded footage of Tahrir Square protest from the night before and claiming it's the situation there at the moment. Hundreds of calls by public figures and actors started calling the channels saying that they are with Mubarak, and that he is our Father and we should support him on the road to democracy. A veiled girl with a blurred face went on Mehwer TV claiming to have received funding by Americans to go to the US and took courses on how to bring down the Egyptian government through protests which were taught by Jews. She claimed that AlJazeera is lying, and that the only people in Tahrir square now were Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. State TV started issuing statements on how the people arrested Israelis all over Cairo engaged in creating mayhem and causing chaos. For those of you who are counting this is an American-Israeli-Qatari-Muslim Brotherhood-Iranian-Hamas conspiracy. Imagine that. And MANY PEOPLE BOUGHT IT. I recall telling a friend of mine that the only good thing about what happened today was that it made clear to us who were the idiots amongst our friends. Now we know.

Now, just in case this isn't clear: This protest is not one made or sustained by the Muslim Brotherhood, it's one that had people from all social classes and religious background in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood only showed up on Tuesday, and even then they were not the majority of people there by a long shot. We tolerated them there since we won't say no to fellow Egyptians who wanted to stand with us, but neither the Muslims Brotherhood not any of the Opposition leaders have the ability to turn out one tenth of the numbers of Protesters that were in Tahrir on Tuesday. This is a revolution without leaders. Three Million individuals choosing hope instead of fear and braving death on hourly basis to keep their dream of freedom alive. Imagine that.

The End is near. I have no illusions about this regime or its leader, and how he will pluck us and hunt us down one by one till we are over and done with and 8 months from now will pay people to stage fake protests urging him not to leave power, and he will stay "because he has to acquiesce to the voice of the people". This is a losing battle and they have all the weapons, but we will continue fighting until we can't. I am heading to Tahrir right now with supplies for the hundreds injured, knowing that today the attacks will intensify, because they can't allow us to stay there come Friday, which is supposed to be the game changer. We are bringing everybody out, and we will refuse to be anything else than peaceful. If you are in Egypt, I am calling on all of you to head down to Tahrir today and Friday. It is imperative to show them that the battle for the soul of Egypt isn't over and done with. I am calling you to bring your friends, to bring medical supplies, to go and see what Mubarak's gurantees look like in real life. Egypt needs you. Be Heroes.

Thursday, 27 Jan 2011

I AM UPDATING TWITTER

Follow me there:

http://twitter.com/#!/Sandmonkey
All the updates are there!

Careful, I'm Trying Theology

2011-01-21T21:33:00.002-05:00

Today was Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom day at my school, because Jefferson started writing that bill here in Fredericksburg and it's pretty much the only thing of significance we contributed to the country other than a battle which the Confederacy won.

So, to celebrate, we had a Muslim and a Christian scholar come in and discuss their views on the document in particular and religious freedom in general. One idea that came up a lot was free will as a value which underlies Jefferson's notion of religious freedom. The Muslim speaker talked about free will with particular eloquence, and really, the best description of how an omnipotent deity could allow for free will while still knowing what was going to end up happening came from the imam at a mosque my Sunday school class visited.

He explained it like this: Think of human activity as a machine and God as the mechanic. He doesn't point to a particular gear and say "You're going to break now." But, because he knows the machine so well, when the gear does break he'll have seen it coming.

Which is a brilliant metaphor, in my opinion.

But doesn't really solve anything. By that logic, free will is a flaw in the design. I mean, you could argue that the machine only started breaking after the Fall of Man from Eden, and before that it was running along just dandy, but the possibility of error, in the form of free will for Adam and Eve, was always there. Either it was built into the design because it's somehow valuable, and if so, why are people punished for exercising it...? Or it was a mistake all along, in which case God isn't omnibenevolent as he's supposed to be, because he put people in a position to be damned for something that he knew was going to happen.

Though both of the speakers, the Christian and the Muslim, spoke about how coerced religion isn't true religion. So I guess the spiritual value on free will is that religious decisions can be freely chosen, though in practice of course they aren't necessarily. But if the free choosing is going to result in damnation, and God had that planned all along, then is it really spiritually valuable? If God had said from the get-go, "This is how it is, guys. Everything else is fair game, but stay with me on this salvation thing..."

Well, then it'd be fact, and not coercion. And obviously it can't be fact. Thus, I suppose, the value on free will (and thus the ability to choose faith even in the absence of evidence), even if it puts God in the questionable position of putting a flaw in the system from the start.

This thought, while entirely irrelevant to the discussion at hand, was in my head for the whole lecture, so I wanted to write it out. Anyone have any ideas on the subject?

You're Doin' It Wrong

2011-01-12T09:52:00.004-05:00

Sarah Palin has had it rough lately. After the shooting in Tucson, a lot of people realized that a climate of violent political rhetoric is probably not really very awesome, and her campaign image featuring gun crosshairs ("Don't retreat - RELOAD!") over various districts, including Representative Gifford's, has come under particular criticism. She accused the media of manufacturing a "blood libel" for calling her out in this way.

I learned about blood libel in my first freshman year religion class. Know what it is? Historically, blood libel means an accusation against Jews claiming that they murdered children and used their blood in rituals. Such accusations resulted in the expulsion of hundreds of Jews from their homes, or the arrest, torture, and murder of hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of people.

I'm sorry Sarah Palin feels picked on, but it's probably not about equivalent to accusations leading to the murder of thousands of people.

And furthermore, responding to accusations of violent rhetoric with MORE violent rhetoric is, well, entirely missing the point.

See also: Glenn Beck.

The headline says we should "Stand together against all violence" next to a picture of Glenn Beck holding a gun. This is also missing the point.

(Via Think Progress and Shakesville)

Guns, Violence and Mental Illness

2011-01-10T09:01:00.003-05:00

The Question of the Day over at Pam's House Blend is an interesting one: Should someone with a mental illness be allowed to own a gun?

The entire article is well worth a read, but here are the cliff notes:

There's reason to believe that the alleged shooter of Representative Gabrielle Giffords was mentally ill, and that he shot her BECAUSE he's crazy. No need to explore motive - he probably didn't have one, right? (or rather, any motive he had is taken as a symptom of the aforementioned crazy).

Like the Virginia Tech shootings a few years ago, this will probably spark a discussion about whether or not people with diagnosed mental illnesses should be able to buy or use guns.

However, it's not necessarily fair to use mental illness as a primary explanation for violence, explains Vaughn Bell over at Slate:

This presumed link between psychiatric disorders and violence has become so entrenched in the public consciousness that the entire weight of the medical evidence is unable to shift it. Severe mental illness, on its own, is not an explanation for violence, but don't expect to hear that from the media in the coming weeks.
Seena Fazel is an Oxford University psychiatrist who has led the most extensive scientific studies to date of the links between violence and two of the most serious psychiatric diagnoses -- schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, either of which can lead to delusions, hallucinations, or some other loss of contact with reality. Rather than looking at individual cases, or even single studies, Fazel's team analyzed all the scientific findings they could find. As a result, they can say with confidence that psychiatric diagnoses tell us next to nothing about someone's propensity or motive for violence.

But really, that's how we're talking about it, isn't it? "Oh, he was crazy, that's why he shot all those people." A Representative is talking about banning crosshair symbols of the kind Sarah Palin used to "target" Rep. Gifford's district, and he described it like this:

Asked if he believed the map incited the gunman in Tucson, he replied, “I don’t know what’s in that nut’s head. I would rather be safe than sorry.”

(Source)

"That nut". The unfathomable crazy which almost necessarily leads to violence. But there's scientific evidence that a psychiatric condition, even a serious one, doesn't say anything about whether or not someone will be violent, or why, so I'm uncomfortable dismissing the shooter's reasons and actions as the exclusive result of some incomprehensible madness.

Then again, it's more comfortable to blame the mental illness, because then, if we can just do the right screenings and keep guns out of the hands of the right people, this sort of thing wouldn't happen, right? If we caught the signs that someone was going off the deep end and got them into the hospital quick enough, such tragedies would never occur, right? But if mental illness isn't a good indicator of violence, and "sane" people are as statistically likely to commit such acts as a schizophrenic or bipolar person, then is it really fair to keep talking about mental illness as if it were the sole or primary cause for the violence, even if it's more comfortable that way...?

This is what I'm pondering as I'm off this morning to beg my way into a full psych class that I couldn't register for. Wish me luck!

EDIT: Feministe also has a really good look at the Slate article.