reason # 405 i'm glad i quit academia

because if some pissy ignorant undergrad decided to go after me because of my reading list i'd be one angry pissed off and BITTER brown professor.

and then someone would fail. jesus. why don't we just let undergrads teach the courses and grade themselves?

via michael berube (his photo makes me laugh...don't know why.)

the money meme: depressing

from wolfangel and dr. bitch.

1. how much money is in your wallet? enough to get me to work tomorrow. and some change.

2. how much money would you need in the bank to feel secure? rich? to feel secure (i.e, all my immediate responsibilities have been taken care of) 15k. to feel rich? anything above that would be gravy. (see? little dreams, little ones...)

3. if someone gave you $100 no strings attached, what would you do with it? i'd put it in my belly. in other words, someone is coming with me to check out the new bar by japonais.

4. if someone gave you $1 million no strings attached what would you do with it? in this order: pay off debt immediately; give some to my dad; give some to my sister; give some to my roomie; hammer out a financial plan; get a new laptop; go to england; go someplace warm for 5 days; worry about not giving all of it to the poor.

5. how much does something have to cost before it starts counting as 'real' money, as purchase to be considered and evaluated, but below which you’ll buy without really thinking about it?

i'm thinking about what i've done with shoes and bags...over $200 i'm wincing; below that i'm open. but it depends on what it is: up to 100 for skin care, up to 200 for shoes/bags, up to 50 for makeup; whatever i need for books; up to 60 for music (in one visit); clothes...i'm a plump girl so it's about what fits, damn the price. large ticket things? ugh. don't talk to me about that. it's why i'm still sleeping on a futon.

before bed: cultural criticism in the hinterlands...

this is my favorite part:

The aliens in War of the Worlds are supposed to represent terrorism.

I really feel we give terrorists too much credit when it comes to their organization and capabilities.


heh.

the supremes: abortion, choice and polling data (exciting!)

Lawyers, Guns and Money: Abortion, Public Opinion, and Selling Out

i would have linked to this on my kos diary but, you know? fuckit. his site makes my little girly head hurt.

via bitch (who is chock full of useful links to other useful things re: academic freedom, the supreme court, abortion rights and how volcanoes are rude).

judith miller: bad journalism, 101

the trib's public editor takes a step back from the miller/jail thing here.

i'm sorry but wasn't this the same judith miller who was also totally responsible for funneling less-than-credible reports about iraq's wmd capabilities and our ease with which we would win the war - which provided the foundation of the nyt's support of the iraq adventure? wasn't it judith miller who, way back in the day of 2002, wrote these stories also from anonymous sources? and wasn't her biggest 'anonymous' source ahmed chalabi (who later turned out to be a total con man and possible iran spy)?

and, when she was called out on it (and the nyt had to apologize), wasn't this also the judith miller who said that it wasn't her job to be a fact-checker? she was just reporting what someone told her? (listen to the entire interview or click here for the relevant bits.)

cuz if this is the same judith miller, i'd say that she has a habit of protecting rats who have hidden agendas - destructive and problematic agendas - she accepts without question.

speed of light

have been working so hard i'm like a one-legged man at a shit-kicking contest.

but i'm about to leave the office in 15 minutes (whee! summer hours!) to join my friend G- for a picnic with champagne to celebrate her new job. i can't wait to sit on a blanket in the sun and get totally roasted.

and, last night, i bowled an 85. not bad.
but in case the weekend is light for posting, have a good one y'all.

the supremes: to dream the impossible dream

heh.

i will change my party affiliation to republican if this ever happened.

found: african, gay and blogging

i fund this blog through an article on the bbc website: Black Looks.

the writer is gay african woman and it's great reading. (i'll add her to my blog roll as soon as i get home!)

especially take a look at her post 'we are not whales!'. it levels a very measured critique (and a useful one, i think) of the live 8 concert and effort.

the supremes: "...all signs point to extremist"

Eschaton

eschaton notes that the conservatives are 'poised to dump $18 million into this process.'
it hurts but it looks like we'll have to dig deep again.

it'll be worth it.

Bush v Choice: new to the blogroll

i'm taking a break from cleaning and watching the live 8 concert.

i'm adding this link to Bush v Choice to keep track of what's going on with the supreme court nomination.

updated: and this is SCOTUS blog - extremely well-informed.

oh crap: O'Connor is retiring from Supreme Court

via Bitch. Ph.D

let's lay a few bets...roe v wade toppled in...8 years? sooner?
crap.

[here's my favorite heretik with his always spot on take. can we hope the dems keep their shit together?]

dude. i used to like mexico...

problematic.

it's summer; what else have you got to do?

Back when I was 19, I was cranky. Crankier than I am now. (Hard to believe, but it’s true.) I was also president of my Black Student Union, a position I abdicated when I thought it was ok for a white guy to join and, uh, my membership disagreed.

I know, hard to imagine, but there you are.

Anyway, back when I was 19, I was very tired of being everyone’s Guide to Blackness so I thought there should be a basic reading list of sorts to keep everyone from asking stupid questions. I've sensed the same feeling swelling in my breast quite recently so here are the texts that shaped my thinking early on (books and sometimes just authors, because it’s, like, past 1 am – it’s also lit heavy because, well, that’s my training):

For the very basics of black women’s history (literary and otherwise):
Where and When I Enter, Paula Giddings;
Reconstructing Womanhood, Hazel Carby;
Reading Black, Reading Feminist, Henry Louis Gates
Subjects & Citizens: Nation, Race and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill, eds. Michael Moon & Cathy Davidson

For (colonized) black consciousness:
Black Skin, White Masks; The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
W.E.B DuBois

For white identity and performance, racial identity:
Love and Theft, Eric Lott;
How the Irish Became White, Ignatiev;
White Women, Race Matters, Ruth Frankenburg

For ethnicity:
The Invention of Ethnicity, Werner Sollors

Just because their essays kick ass:
Patricia Smith
bell hooks
Barbara Christian
Valerie Smith
Eric Sundquist
Richard Rodriguez (my old lover B- is actually in a correspondence with him…poor B-. Brilliant, yet unbearable.)
Hortense Spillers
Nellie McKay
Barbara Johnson
Paula Gunn Allen
Houston Baker
Homi Bhaba (incomprehensible but read at least one of his essays anyway)
Paul Gilroy (really terrific books on black Britain)
Ida B. Wells
The Grandissimes; Clotel; Passing; The Wedding (a bunch of tragic mulattoes)
Mary Louise Pratt
Gayatri Spivak (utterly incomprehensible, see Homi Bhaba)
Edward Said (cogent and rigorous on imperialism and colonialism)
Richard Yarborough (old prof at ucla)
Jean Fagan Yellin
A monster book titled something like ‘Critical Theory Since Plato’ (for terms)

The point of this list: know a little somethin’.

look what i did!

latest obsession: mythbusters

um...

roomie is mystified whenever i con her into watching this show. but i can't help it: dorks, machines, explosions and a guy with a mustache who - well, sort of makes me feel naughty.

(of course he's a survival expert, boat captain, animal wrangler and speaks russian. i am fascinated by freaking strange men!! aghhh!)

in mah belly!

i'm starving. i skipped lunch, worked all day, went to an after work thing for cheap white wine, met an old friend from grad school for drinks on michigan ave and walked home sweating like a puckered sphincter in polyester pants, it was so hot tonight.

no dinner. no snackage. hungry.

so here's a really good blog about eating, screenwriting and the delicate tension between an aging movie star and his bemused chef: Delicious! Delicious!: Near Miss: Gingered Peach Cobbler!

and here is my friend J's blog about korean food, l.a. and the art of living simply, well. her post about the nyt food critic who called korean food 'basically japanese food with spices' is priceless.

sweet baby jesus: a feminist man

This Space For Rent: I Am Not My Cock

via bitch, a glorious post about, well, not being your cock.

'nuff said.

Bitch. Ph.D.: It's America, learn some black history

Bitch. Ph.D.: It's America, learn some black history

amen. amen. amen.
a-non said it's time for our cultural wiring to be ripped out.

this is the most basic way to do it.

ah, my new best friend. 

the split me

My roommate called me out tonight. In the middle of another ill-advised discussion of politics she called me out: “And what about you? You’re working for your non-profit but what do you really care about people in other states? What’s abortion compared to black men being in prison, our education system falling apart, the classes being separate? To get down on rich progressives for not doing enough and you’re as rich as the rest of us. What are you doing?”

And there it was. What was I doing? Here I am arguing for more grassroots activism from the left, but what am I really doing? (leaving aside what my roommate is doing aside, for the moment.)

I’m not a lawyer. I don’t argue cases in front of the Supreme Court to protect our basic rights.
I’m not a social worker. I don’t have daily contact with poor black women and girls every day. (Truth to tell, tutoring every week was a trial for me. My student’s basic ignorance of her own history made me angry.)
I’m not an activist. I don’t march in parades against the WTO; I don’t agitate against the government; I don’t get on federal watch lists because of my activities against the state.
I’m not even a local politician. I go to work every day and push paper and work for a women’s non-profit; I don’t have contact with the women who use our services. I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing so; their and my experiences are so different.

I’m sick of the way our national Democratic party only seems to agitate on behalf of elections instead of people’s real needs. (Abortion being only one of them.) So what am I doing?

I’m thinking that if my roomie really knew what I was thinking, she probably wouldn’t be my roommate. I think this is so for many black/white folks who are friends. We all like Nina Simone, but black folk thrill to "Pirate Jenny" a whole lot more than, say, "Autumn Leaves." For, to be as militant as I want to be means that there are things that go by the way side. Gone are the cocktail parties, decadent and meaningless, not really important in the big scheme of things; gone are the easy entertainments, insensitive when you think about what kind of entertainments others don’t really have; gone are the indulgences, products of a bourgeois life. What is a person like me supposed to do? I’m the product of a poor black childhood with miraculous access to higher education; to be the good black woman I’m supposed to succeed in this world – be articulate, social, mobile. But success here also means to be separate.

An acquaintance of mine, H-, grew up in a militant family. I wonder if she feels this double consciousness – to want to lift as we climb, but not knowing how, because to lift would be to cut ourselves off from white people. Because my roommate called me out, I had a rare chance to look at what my life has become but maybe this introspection is a long time coming. I met a black woman at a party over the weekend; we sat and talked with her boyfriend about the election results in Ohio, the need for grassroots organization in the black community, the need for mobilization against certain power structures in this country. I ignored everyone else.

Which is the true self? Is the real me the me who speaks well, who can cook peach-bourbon glazed pork chops, and reads Jane Austen, or is the real me the black woman who reads Angela Davis, doesn’t want white people to touch her hair anymore (or really talk about it at all) and wants to see the city aflame in revolution? (I’ll say it: when the LA riots happened and white people were scared, I exulted in it. Yes, even with all my ‘advantages.’) Which is it? Is it the me who wistfully thinks about shopping at Bloomingdale’s and what social events could fill the summer, or is it the me who wants to see the black community stop being quite so polite and start putting Frantz Fanon in action? Is the real me bill cosby (which makes my friends more comfortable, I think) or is the real me bell hooks (who would freak them out, if they even fucking read her)?

I don’t think they ever questioned the me they have; I don’t think I did, either.

(i'm not the only one with a split pov.)

texas: no place to be gay

i don't know how i missed this speech, but here is rep. senfronia thompson pulling all the relevant strands together in support of gay rights. here.

they passed that bill.
and that makes her words even more stark.

what a whirl: weekend update

Friday:
lovely gorgeous day. just cool enough you need to bring a sweater to the boat you and your coworkers will be on for the rest of the afternoon. just warm enough you're glad you tied your hair back. i discovered many things on the boat cruise with the non-profit folks: never eat chinese food when you're on a boat, it's important to target the non-drinkers in your group so you can use their drink tickets, and it's never a good idea to be in a soul train line in front of people who sign your paychecks. when will i learn?

toddled home to meet roomie who, bless her heart, rented The Corporation (which made me hate corporate capitalist america all over again) and carlo ponti's 'yesterday, today, tomorrow.' can i just say that sophia loren is my idol and i want to be her? really. i want to be her - all rounded, voluptuous womanhood and sassy hips and mouth. i especially want to learn how she can take off stockings like that.

Saturday:
slept late and went with roomie to evanston to see 'batman begins.' i rather liked it - for what it was. was it fabulous? no. i must confess that i preferred christian bale in 'equilibrium' than in this movie. i mean, how can you resist the allure that is gunkata? you can't. you are powerless to resist. roomie hated batman with a passion and so we passed the rest of the afternoon in silence, portraits of disaffection brought on by bad cinema. after reading a bit i dug out a cocktail dress for a martini party in river west, with a fantastic view of the Mart and the trains leaving the city. nights like this almost make me wistful for companionship. i hung out, ran into old friends, made dinner plans with a friend and his adorable little girlfriend (fresh like a daisy, she was, and made me feel like a hoary crusty old piece of toast), then came home where i ate half a can of cashews and watched the bbc.

Sunday:
rotarians descended on the city. did you know the rotary club began in chicago? i had no idea. neither did roomie as we left the apartment early to fulfill our church duties downtown. we skipped the actual services to drive down lake shore drive and michigan avenue, killing time. when we blithely arrived at the stately gray church, we were prepared to speed through church tours, intercessory prayer and a little glad-handing. the presbyterians know how to really make you relaxed, you know? no baptist-like stress or angst here.

i sat in the stone chapel, waiting for someone to come in for prayer. everyone had told me, 'it's no problem; no one ever comes in.' oh! foolish hope! the final hymn had barely finished before a neatly dressed woman stepped inside and shut the door behind her. she sat next to me and whispered that her brother had recently died alone and unclaimed in another state. so we prayed together. when she left, i stayed behind and sobbed for five minutes. (bad time of year for me to be thinking about dead family members.) my roomie was faring no better; her church tour was stalled at the transcept while a short asian woman grilled my roomie on the exact doctrinal tenets of our church and the specific wording of the apostles creed. i could see the sweat on my roomie's brow as she desperately tried to wrench back control of the tour group and direct their attention to the fine skinner pipe organ in our choir loft.

needless to say, we spent the rest of the afternoon shunning contact with our fellow man, watching taped episodes of british serial killer tv shows.

everyone likes good hygiene

this needs to be on a t-shirt (you won't be able to wear the t-shirt but the sentiment needs to be acknowledged):

Hobo: How you doin'? How you doin'? I'm doin' good. Yeah, you know I'm doin' good, cause I'm lookin' good! And you know why I look good? 'Cause I clean mah ass!

--1 train

and with that, i say good night.

ooh, hot

I’ve been having strangely erotic dreams lately. They aren’t the hot and sweaty dreams, the ones that make you wake up suddenly thinking ‘holy shit, if only I could meet five sailors in an elevator who want to take me to visit their pet donkey!’ No, these have been different.

In one, I was a fabulously devastated widow. My husband had died too young and I couldn’t let go. I carried his ashes in a beat up metal box that would sit in the front seat beside me as I would drive up the California coast, the ocean to my left, and the brown hills on the right. On one of these trips I drove toward a black mountain with a tunnel running through it. My convertible Mini chugged through the broken terrain inside the tunnel and I complained to my dead husband’s ashes about the broken axle I was sure to get, the damage to the tires, my hair getting all messed up and how fucking long it was taking me to get out the tunnel. When I finally emerged, it was into a beautiful department store, all honeyed wood and velvet curtains, like a David Lynch movie.

I parked my little Mini in the special parking lot for special guests and a thin blade of a man was about to escort me away from the car when I remembered my husband – I went back and scooped up his box, as well as a couple of pounds of his favorite cheeses – a Morbier and the Humboldt Fog.

I walked slowly through the department store, carrying my stinky cheeses and my dead husband’s ashes, and I passed Gil Grissom (yes, from CSI) in the men’s fragrance department. I’m twisting open a small dark green bottle shaped like a twig and the scent makes me cry. He comes along to tell me some obscure story about smell and an equally obscure culture; he offers to walk with me. We’re looking at beautiful glass things and there’s something about his spectacles, his rumpled little jacket, his bow-legged walk and his weird little stories that makes me decide to put my husband’s ashes in the trunk of my car along with the stinky cheeses.

We leave the department store and then we’re in an empty house by the ocean; we’ve made love. (Yes, my dream had completely skipped the sex!!) Like a cheesy French perfume ad, the sheer white curtains at the windows overlooking the beach are fluttering, the sun is either setting or rising and Gil Grissom and I are nestled snug in a bed with a quilt on it. It’s quiet and I am filled with such lassitude it almost makes me want to cry. I can hear his voice rumble through his chest, can feel him stroking my back and he begins to tell me another queer story. This is how it ends.

Yeah. An erotic dream where NOTHING happens. I woke up feeling like I had a secret.

shrill? me?

via feministe

clearly, it's abortion week here on screed

t r u t h o u t - Ann Crittenden | The Price of Denying Choice

more flames being thrown over at the abortion=autonomy diary on kos (there was a side thread about why women don't just get sterilized if they don't want kids so much and this was my cue to take a breather) but who cares what's going on over there?

over here...nothing much is happening. just abortion, slavery, lynching...

sigh.

see? not scary at all.

Liberal
You scored 33% Gender-Abolitionist, 100% Sexually Liberal, and 40 % Socialist

You are the Liberal Feminist. This means that you tend to think the women's movement would best succeed through legislative changes to the system as opposed to radically restructuring our governments or ideas on gender. You tend to be mainly concerned with sexual liberation, and think that much of the oppression of women is leveled against them as a result of oppressive sexual morality. Men who sleep around are pimps and women are whores. You would claim that the negativity associated with a female's sexual freedom is only a blatant attempt to repress femininity into a submissive role. Also, you probably believe women should have access to reproductive controls such as abortion and contraception. You most likely embody the ideals of the typical American Democrat: you are pro-choice, sexually liberated, and politically active (though your political views aren't very extreme).

The other feminist types:

The Housewife

The Marxist

The Liberal

The Liberal Extremist

The Gender Abolitionist

The Radical

The Gender-Liberal

The Revisionist

gag

Next Generation of Conservatives (By the Dormful) - New York Times

so, since the media is all balanced and shit, i'm sure an article about the new crop of progressives will pop up, right?

(how many times do we have to read this story? it's in every magazine and newspaper every quarter. why not really have a challenging feature - find conservatives of color. any color. do it. write about how they're invited to the heritage foundation. really. i'd really like to read about it.)

no? didn't think so.

choking big bird

Free Press : Put the Public Back in Public Broadcasting

do what you gotta do, people.

sigh.

you're effing kidding me.

a week after my rather long and rambly musing on the lynching exhibit, the senate issues a cosmetic apology for not outlawing lynching earlier - well, except for 12 senators who shall remain nameless (thanks, procedural rabbit hole.)

our nation is amazing. really. look the other way while over 4700 black men, women and children get lynched and then, at a symbolic moment of reconciliation, show how begrudging you really are. nice.

Bitch. Ph.D.: Do you trust women?

over at kos, i'm afraid i let my rhetoric get the best of me. yes, big surprise. some guy said that he was 'queasy' at the tone and tenor of the comments in response to the diary i posted below. and, well, ding took it upon herself to say 'get over your nausea.' i mean, come on. who cares about your wishy-washy pro-choice 'but i'm uncomfortable with abortion' queasiness?

then the guy said 'i'm just saying there are moral questions that need to be considered and the reservations of pro-choice allies should be...blah blah blah.' and i said 'so your moral quandaries and reservations matter more than a woman's decision to have an abortion or not? give me a break. your moral quagmire isn't the point.' or something along those lines (or more strongly worded.)

so, for that guy and others like him, here's an oldie but goodie from our favorite bitch:

Bitch. Ph.D.: Do you trust women?

boys club - again

in the heat of the election, i read kos every day (hence the link on my blogroll). but after the election, during all the post-mortems, i started noticing an alarming trend: more and more calls from the boys' treehouse over there to take a step back from abortion rights because it's so 'narrow' and 'single-issue' and scares the moderates out there. hm. it mirrored the mewling backpedaling going on in the democratic party at the time and it enraged me so much, i stopped reading so regularly. now, to be honest, i stop over only to check out the big-boy gossip. it really is like a tabloid magazine of what's going on at the DNC. infighting, schisms, breakups, hookups.

well, the 'no girls allowed' sign on the daily kos tree house gets good treatment in the comments section over at Bitch. Ph.D.

and here is a very good (and angry) diary on kos telling him to stuff his 'abortion isn't really important to our strategy' up his ass.

update: here is the original post (with his update) that started the whole thing. um, check out the references to 'sanctimonious,' 'humorless' , 'extremist subset' and 'important shit' (as if to say that feminist concerns aren't important compared to masculinist strategies and shit like that.)

know your fucking feminist history, kos. [deleted because even i recognize what i said made no sense.]

update 2: since the original post humorless, women-studies types and unshaven hags alike have weighed in and found kos, his treehouse and his posse wanting. heh.

Angela Davis

now, isn't she more interesting than audie murphy?

did you get the memo?

in case there's anyone out there who's just emerged from a cave and still thinks our iraq adventure was justified, here's the memo that says 'uh...no.'

come on, we impeached clinton for a blow job!
how about impeaching someone for something REALLY important!

an excellent composition exercise

who says politics can't be useful? Bush Aide Softened Greenhouse Gas Links to Global Warming - New York Times

the attached graphic is a textbook example showing how vague language destroys a paragraph's intent. yay for the white house.

[Update: according to the white house, global warming is a myth. so...why are these people moving again? things are melting, but it's not global warming. just...melting. got it.]

man-hula

guilty confession of the week:
dwayne johnson sort of makes me wanna see him do the man-hula.

(don't tell me you don't know the man-hula. aka, the angry, 'we're gonna kick some missionary ass-making us wear this baggy baptist dress shit' hula.)

gimme

look.

pretty. (did you know they make lunch boxes? wouldn't this be cute, on the cta, going to work with my sammich in it?)

update: credit where credit is due. via my friend at delicious biting.

and now for something lighter: chick lit

Nerve.com Screening Room

we have a friend who has a friend who, last year, wrote just about the worst chick lit book EVER and got it published. my roommate, bless her stalwart heart, read it and grew so angry she'd interrupt her reading to shout, 'this is crap!! aghh, i hate her!'

well, roomie shouted again when she read that this woman has written a second book (please let her have kept out her crappy ass poetry) and has been invited to the printers row book fair this weekend. 'aagh! she wrote another one! god!' was my roomie's refrain.

i have to agree. while i enjoyed bridget jones (years ago) i don't think i want to read another book about a mediocre woman who deserves to get run over by a bus get romance instead. quite frankly, i'd never be friends with any of those women. or, if i was, i'd tolerate them in silence and wonder why the hell i didn't just shoot myself for having bad taste in companions.

i blame this crapload of chick lit on an apalling misreading of austen and her domestic fiction, and a complete ignorance of bronte. why not have some kick ass chick lit based on the bronte model of female behavior: be the smartest girl in the room and don't apologize for it; get the hots for the hottest man in the room and don't apologize for it; get wet, often; run away from the lame ass social mores of your society; get wild; get destitute; get dirty; get punished; get even; get wet again. burn down someone's house.

Chicago Historical Society - Without Sanctuary

this was not a picker upper. as soon as i got off the bus in front of the chicago historical society, the skies turned black and a wall of rain blew horizontally down the street. inside, the mood was just as somber, if not less violent.

we all know this summer is the 50th anniversary of emmett till's lynching. pairing that anniversary with this exhibit showed it wasn't an isolated incident. it wasn't just the event that made white america open its eyes about what was happening down south. till's death was a tiny death in a huge group of deaths from reconstruction to 1968. that's a year before i was born. that's only 35 years ago.

the rooms were dead silent. post card after post card, photo after photo - of black people hanging, burned, mutilated. it was intense. these aren't images you see every day - or at all, anymore. did you know there's barely a state in this country that didn't have a lynching in it? illinois, california, minnesota, washington, connecticut. these are nothern states. montana, nebraska. oregon. did you know that women and children were lynched? immigrants, jews, communists, chinese. lynched because they were the other. what was the very academic phrase the society used to describe it? 'extra-legal deaths at the hands of unknown persons.'

but in the photos you see who did it. they aren't unknown. they're whole crowds of people. imagine wrigley field on a game day. imagine what wrigleyville looks like. the crowds, the vendors, the traffic, the holiday spirit. buy a hot dog. drink a beer. now imagine, on the mound, dusty baker naked, covered with gasoline, swinging from a telephone pole, about to be torched. that's what a lynching was. an event. a public spectacle. everyone out in the open, staring at the camera, holding their piece of the body. looking at those faces in the background was hard. they're smiling, relaxed, excited, pointing to the corpse.

the exhibit came from a book i found a few years ago: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. i found it in a bookstore while i was still living in boystown. i felt like i was looking at pornography so i had to shut the book and walk away. but the images alone aren't what make you set your mouth and try not to make a sound. there are only about 100 photos, after all. the stories behind the images make you sick. this man and that man were accused of rape...of talking back to a white man...didn't get out of the road fast enough...dragged from the jail...courthouse burned to the ground. the narratives of violence, insanity and hysteria make you look at your fellow human beings and want to vomit.

they had a story of a man named caldwell. he owned 400 acres of the prettiest cotton land in the county. he financed a school. he was a big man at his church. had 12 kids, all lived on his property and the land was their legacy. one day he took his cotton to town to sell it; he wasn't given a fair price so he said someone else would pay more; he was accused of lying; he became angry and cursed the man who called him a liar. he was hit with a hammer, driven into the street where a mob of 200 men stabbed and beat him until the law stopped them; he was jailed, dying from his untreated injuries, when the mob came back and got him, dragging him behind a cart through the black and the white part of town. then he was lynched. the next day, the mob ran his family out of town and seized his land. (did you know blacks owned between 12-15 million acres of land at the turn of the century? did you know that number had decreased to just a little over 1 million acres by the 30s and 40s? a journalist said in an interview, 'follow the lynchings and you'll follow the land. they run side by side.')

this man's great-granddaughter was there. she read his name out at the naming ceremony and a little ripple moved through the crowd. this is all her family can think about. they talk about the murder like it happened yesterday. they tell you how they ran and hid in the woods while their land was taken. better the land than your life, they say.

what was it the president of the historical society said..."There is nothing more powerful than a people, and a nation, steeped in their own history." too often, we're presented with the history of lynchings or the civil rights struggle or anything about black people as black history - like it has nothing to do with white people, or anyone else. but this afternoon showed me that's not true. this is our history. it shouldn't be isolated and cut off from the people who descend from it.

givin' a brother a chance

i thought this idea had gone the way of the dodo.

but, alas. idiocy, in the form of thomas lopez-pierre and the women who actually applied to this buppie bordello, knows no bounds. perhaps his next venture will be quadroon balls.

ass.

[via gilliard]

diddle diddle ding

today...blew. (how can you tell? it took me three tries to spell blew.) went into work early to get a head start of prepping for board meeting and annual meeting; all sorts of things went wrong. (note to vendor: when you fail to do your job three times, do not bother to invoice me.) went to meeting site and set up meeting; attended board meeting, noting that female philanthropists in the city like the color beige; drank white wine while tangling in name tags and registration forms; sold books; broke down meeting; drank more wine; got book signed by local author; walked halfway home, discovered i have $17 in my checking account and am grateful that masturbation is free. got home, said hi to roomie (who, poor thing, languishes with phlegm) and ate a late dinner of leftover homemade fried rice (the garlic content is way too much - for a while there, it opened roomie's sinuses!)

what will i like about tomorrow? i get to wear jeans and i get out of the office at one. (i'm so poor i'll just come home and touch myself.)

Blogebrity: The List

just in case you didn't feel bad enough about yourself, they do it for you.

la shawn barber is a b-list blogger? i guess that's what you get for sucking the cock of patriarchy.

waxing turkish

ok ok. i know i vowed not to blog at my new job because i loved it so much. but it's the end of the day and this is the best story of best friends, hot wax, back hair and turkish masculinity that i've read - ever.

gaggle: scottie bobs and weaves

if you don't have the stomach to read all the way to the end scroll almost to the bottom and catch the exchange between scottie mcclellan (our fave rent-boy loving press secretary) and les, a journalist who just wants to know:

does bush oppose contraception?

*crickets*crickets*

whoops.

i still don't get why contraceptives aren't automatically part of a woman's health care plan... anyone? anyone?

look here.

things have been lackluster here, haven't they?
i'm sorry; i've been spending all my time with the goody two shoes over at church gal.

it seems when you turn into a do-gooder, things get a little boring. i'll try and sex it up later.

must read this

'Vindication' - New York Times

wollstonecraft has always been a major figure for me.

' they made up their own rat pack song!'

did you know there's a mormon version of the movie pride and prejudice?

no?

neither did we when we started to watch it.

(20 minutes into it, after the crucial party scene, i say to my roommate, 'um, i think this is a church movie.' she says, 'no way.'
later, after the heroine chastely rebuffs the rake, i say, 'i bet this was made by the church of latter day saints.' check it out. as movies made for religoius audiences go, it's not...that...bad.)

happy memorial day: 'what i heard about iraq'

between the barbecues, the war movies and the parades, let's think a little bit about where we are now. when this national moment has its own place in some memorial day montage in the future, let's remember what we heard.

LRB | Eliot Weinberger : What I Heard about Iraq

The Well-Timed Period: EC: Just Ask For It

The Well-Timed Period: EC: Just Ask For It

a smart woman is a woman who's well-prepared. at your next pelvic ask for a script for EC. i will. (whoo hoo! july.)

week #3 at national non-profit is over and that last day sort of tried my last nerve.

the plan was rather simple. our office closed early but then my department decided, 'hey, let them leave even earlier!' yay, so happy were we. so i took a meeting at our annual meeting site, walked down wacker drive and helped two business men find the hyatt regency, bought a coffee at starpricks and then began to edit a document and clean out my inbox. i was going to be outta there by 1.30 and on my way to see B-. (more on that later.)

then our annual meeting awards arrived. i had to unwrap and check each one and, of course, found three that had come completely apart. two hours unwrapping, wrapping, checking, fed exing, complaining to awards guy. sweating. my white cotton ramie coolness that B- was to later unwrap and defile was soon grunty dusty papercut and funky.

(jesus. on the annoying music show, they're singing about anthropology and the classification of the 'races of man.' they just said negroid.)

speaking of B- the afternoon tryst was a little lackluster. not on his part. on mine. i wasn't present at all. sort of discouraged. he and i have nothing to talk about. i thought that was an impossibility, but it's sort of true. after dozing on the train ride up north (while an old black man stared at me the whole time) i arrived at B-'s, spilling half a bottle of water all over myself crashing through the front door. we sat on the couch.

i said, so how are things?
he said, i don't want to talk about work.
i said, ok. what about the B- that isn't work? how are you?
he said, i really don't have much time other than work. it was a really tough semester. i really don't like talking about work. i mean, if you were really interested in my work, i guess.
i said, i am interested in your work. why wouldn't i be?

so he shrugged and vented for a good while about his department and review last week. i didn't mind this at all. i like watching men talk about their work, especially if they enjoy it. and he does. he's good at what he does. he's smart and tough. i like that.

so we talked about other things. sort of. it wasn't real conversation. just interjections, non sequitors. my dad may be moving to chicago, i just started a student newspaper, i love my new job, i have to teach over the summer. one thing, though. when i told him how i'd been afraid about this choice i'd made about my life, my new job, he said, really? i don't think of you as being much afraid of anything.

this misreading is the heart of our problem. we don't know each other at all, despite knowing each other for about three years. (there are those who know how afraid i am; there's one man i've never met who knows me much better than B- does me. he knows how i fear failure, intimacy, commitment, change, the ocean; others know how i fear acid thrown in my face, blindness, prison and leprosy.) i could assume the blame for our gulf, but i don't want to carry it all on my own.

anyway, the rest of of the evening sagged. my mind was racing to other places far from that gray lit dusky apartment; he was valiant in the effort to bring me satisfaction but when i couldn't i just became generous in my willingness to make the rest 'about him.' the only time i caught a glimpse of the inner B- was when i was stretched out on the floor of his living room, watching him pick obscure chicano rock albums from his time in san antonio, listening to him sing offkey to question mark & the mysterians.

it was the most naked i had seen him and when he lifted the needle from the last record and began to kiss my neck i was sorry it had to end.

just in case you needed to know when my unseemly attraction to bearded men wielding hammers began: Screed: why colonial house rocks

oh, why can't a cute unemployed carpenter live across the street from me?? (he's read guns, germs & steel!)

dork love

lordy. i found my old Colonial House object of obssession.

hee.

(hm...i never noticed how much he looks like the librarian.)

ok. last one before going to bed.

so you're a brown woman looking for a kick ass job in corporate america.
where do you look?

maybe here.

like feministing, i gotta wonder where the worst companies are...

war: apparently, there's a lot of down time

whose military is this??

[via dc media girl]

so i changed some things on the sidebar to reflect how i do my blog reading every day. it's a mixture of friends, political sites, riotous women, very serious men who think very DEEP thoughts, and then there's fluff.
...
this friday our office closes early and i think i'm going to meet B- when he's finished teaching. think? i know i'll meet him. we circle each other like pigeons pecking at a crumb. after i eat the crumb, like persephone, i say, 'ok, that was one for the road. never again.' but then a month passes and...'hey, wanna grab a glass of wine?' funny. he doesn't even have a bottle opener.

yay, i guess.

Justice Choice Could Rekindle Filibuster Fight in the Senate - New York Times

hey, let's congratulate ourselves for pulling back from the brink of 'nucular' disaster. hey, good for us and our moderation. let's hear it for compromise. yay for us...

*crickets*

you do know, don't you, those three wacko judges are gonna be confirmed.

yeah. good job.

if anyone can find my churchgal blog, that would be great.
it seems to have run away from blogger...

this is ding's house.

maybe this is why i left grad school. i wasn't balanced enough. when i did my research, i was dedicated to what would prove my point. things that disturbed my point were either absorbed or...my point was changed to reflect these new findings. this, however, was rare. i was disinterested in finding whether or not something was 'true.' it was all a game, really. it was whether or not i could make the argument stand. point-counter point. your counter point beats mine? (shrug) i just find another point. so, to all those out there who want fair and balanced from ME, you're shit outta luck. i'm just as flawed and biased as the next person. (note to roomie: hey - i didn't erase your comment!)
...

today was a hard day. right under deadline, i finished writing my first non-profit sanctioned proposal! yay! it was fun! i love my job. i know i'll get tired of saying it, but for now, i am loving where i am. i've NEVER felt that before. yes, there are things i wish for, like a free pantry with a fridge full of soft drinks and a cupboard full of snacks you can order from pea pod. but when you're asking for pocket change to fund a program against sexual violence and abuse, i guess i can suck it up and bring my own effing soda.

i'm pretty sure this is wrong.

I am Indie Girl Click on the picture below to read more: Take the 'What Kind of Girl Are You?' quiz at CookingToHookup.com

i'm hot.

no. literally. i'm hot. don't know if there's a thunderstorm entering the area but it's muggy and i'm sitting in the buff in front of my laptop at my bedroom window. (no one can see me from the street.)

gorgeous weekend in chicago. police officers tasered a belligerent baseball fan (those cubbies), a mother got her kidnapped baby back, a teenager was lost in the lake and never recovered, and oprah did a show on why women are most likely wearing the wrong size bra. (more on this later.)

saw star wars: RotS. or, Why George Lucas Can't Write Motivations for Shit. yes, it was 'better' than the others, but some quibbles:

1. so...it's ok for padme to be pregnant and shacking up with her jedi boyfriend (secret husband), but not not ok to be pregnant AND a senator?
2. despite it being 'the future', no one can figure out she's carrying twins?
3. despite it being 'the future' no one can figure out how to stop a woman from dying in childbirth?
4. and why, if he's all a jedi stickler, can't mace windu just wait to bring the chancellor to trial? why fly off the handle?? heat of battle? didn't search his feelings enough? huh?
5. and isn't it really clear that the jedi aren't really all that smart? i mean, come on - who ELSE could have slaughtered younglings in the temple? maybe if there was a little less meditating and a little more investigating, this whole thing could have been avoided? shouldn't you have an intelligence network, at least?
6. wouldn't anakin have been better off if everyone stopped telling him to 'search his feelings'? seems like it was his 'feelings' (i feel you're going to die, i feel like you don't trust me, i feel stupid) that got him in trouble. how about telling him to use his brain?
7. how come, despite it being 'the future', everyone dresses like crap? no one is hot in the future.
8. and who are the sith? a people, an ideology, a club? do i care anymore?
9. AND, if R2D2 can do all this cool stuff, how come it didn't do it later? it forgot??

back to oprah and why she cares about my breasts. i have been wearing the wrong size bra. did you know that, in a correct bra, the apex of your breast is supposed to be the midway point between your shoulder and your elbow? new to me. i hate my bra. i can't wait to take it off when i get home. well, i may have found something to replace my bra. this. in fact, i love the whole spanx line. i wear their fishnets and they rock. they hold everything in, smoothes your lumps - who doesn't like that? it's not necessarily sexy, but then again, i'm not dressing to get it on in the office.

this is middle age, isn't it? when you start wondering about comfortable shoes and wearing support underwear.

because we argue about policy too late at night: tort reform

if you look for 'health care' and then click on 'search' you'll come to a page with quotes from the administration about policy. (my roomie was telling me why she's in favor of tort reform and why the dems are hurting regular people for being against it. love my roomie deeply, but i totally disagreed. and was too tired to debate.)

if you scroll down to the 9/4/2003 quote, click on the reference for the CBO report.

the money quote:

"The percentage effect of H.R. 4600 on overall health insurance premiums would be far smaller than the percentage impact on medical malpractice insurance premiums. Malpractice costs account for a very small fraction of total health care spending; even a very large reduction in malpractice costs would have a relatively small effect on total health plan premiums. In addition, some of the savings leading to lower medical malpractice premiums--those savings arising from changes in the treatment of collateral-source benefits--would represent a shift in costs from medical malpractice insurance to health insurance. Because providers of collateral-source benefits would be prevented from recovering their costs arising from the malpractice injury, some of the costs that would be borne by malpractice insurance under current law would instead be borne by the providers of collateral-source benefits. Most such providers are health insurers." [emphasis mine]

so. are outrageous malpractice suits damaging the country and ruining ordinary people and small businesses? i don't think so. neither does the congressional budget office.

love you!

priorities

so, i'm blowing off B- tonight to watch the CSI finale. it looks more exciting than an awkward glass of wine on the northside.

and then i'm going to wash my hair.

uh, and the deadline for the grant i'm supposed to be writing is coming up and i gotta work on that, too. dude.

some things caught my eye while i hurriedly read the news late wednesday afternoon (i'm not blogging or anything at work because that'll just suck me into a hole of inactivity.)

1. wow. god really does protect idiots. (come on, you know you were thinking the same thing...)

2. maybe i'll include this on my list of science reading for the summer. but a question: in this entire article, isn't there some implicit understanding of the orgasm as a fundamental heterosexual function? i mean, what about masturbation? or even lesbian action?

3. a thought: i don't want to frolic with B-- when i meet him for a drink. yes, he was incredible the last time we were together but now...i'd really like my sex to actually mean something important. i was telling my ex-roomie this while we crossed the river this morning and a man walking behind us guffawed. but i'm serious. i want sex to actually start meaning more than just a way for me to burn calories and get my hair all messed up.

4. another thought: i need a really hot black shoe to wear with an office dress. one what won't make me walk funny or slow or slip off while crossing the street or get stuck in a grate or pinch my toes or hurt my knees or inflame my sciatica. any suggestions?

eats, shoots and leaves

i love steve gilliard's blog. really. i do. but this pisses me off:

"Wal Mart comes from a culture where there is no accountability for the rich. And it's corporate practices, largely taking place in rural America, were not under any real scrutiny. But as the company grows, the management hasn't grown into it's responsibilities to match it's size."

say it with me, people: pronominal possessive!! aargh! ITS!!

in the week that i've been re-immersed in work i think the world has gone insane.

sanctified FDA administrators sodomizing their wives against their will; holy books flushed down phantom toilets; anti-gay activists advocating man on mule action; school boards redefining science until it resembles...religion.

you leave the room for a little while and all hell breaks loose. what the hell?
...
when you look at the world have you ever just wanted a huge flaming comet to hurtle straight toward us and put us out of our obvious misery?
...
in other news, i am the current object of fantasy for sub-dom play. i'm having trouble seeing that.

i'm catching up all at once so shut up: Emergency Contraception

need EC? go here.
and once i have the time to figure out the button thing (why don't i know computer whiz people who live down the block from me?) then i'll add it.

[thanks, bitch.]

a day without mexicans...

Mexico's Fox Defends Comment on Blacks - Yahoo! News

yikes. hm. did fox mean to imply that blacks are the natural workers for menial jobs? did he mean to refer to an american working class that has seen a shift in labor from black to brown? (for instance, the fact my father used to be a bus boy in ihop back in the 60s and now most of those we see in those types of jobs are latino)? did he mean to racialize the hiring practices of most of the american service industry when the reality is a confluence of economics and exploitation?

who knows? all we heard him say was something bad about black people.

wunnerful

great. the only real thing i read regularly from the times and they're making it part of their special package. will i really miss david brooks and his asinine view of an america that doesn't exist? will i miss MoDo and her weird pseudo-sociopolitical cocktail chatter?

guess i'll have to start pilfering the print edition.

the glow still hasn't dissipated (or is that with two p's?). work at Large NonProfit is totally fun and i've already been given a couple of grants to write. terror? yes. excitement? yes. this is exactly why i did what i did.

of course, check in with me in a couple of months, or even next week, and maybe i'll have a different story. (changing my story has been known to happen...)

blogging will pick up over the weekend when i have a chance to catch up.

prom season

uh. not for the faint-hearted.

i should go to bed now because, clearly, i've just entered some bizarro universe of wickedly bad taste.

[thanks to siditty]

Siddity In The City

i've found a new blog and i like it like it like it: Siddity In The City.

a sample:
We come in different colors, heights and bone structures, people. A slight, thin-boned, narrow hipped woman looks like she should be skinny, so when she is, it doesn't usually look awkward. But a super-skinny woman who has solid bones and broad hips just looks like she starves herself, and her too-skinny-to-ever-meet thighs look like the warped, dried-out swinging doors of a ghost-town saloon when she walks down the street.

that made me snort. read her! now!

the best decision

the first day of social good-doing is over. and it was so GREAT!

who cares that the office is a little tiny? who cares that there are no supplies? who cares that this one office creates more paper than a small nation?? one small grant project is on the horizon and other projects are on my desk. i'm so thrilled.

of course this giddiness will fade as i go further, but for now it's perfect. perfect.
...
in other news, it was really hot today. and sticky. wrong time to have a 'fro.

no mothers day here

Ms. Magazine | "Not Women Anymore": The Congo's rape survivors face pain, shame and AIDS

the article is brutal. and shaming.

resources from the bottom of the page:

Anglo American, Banro and First Quantum are among approximately 20 multinational mining companies working in the DRC; they might be pressured to focus some attention on the crisis endured by Congo women.

The Panzi Hospital is run by PMU Interlife, the Swedish Pentecostal Mission, the sole funder for the hospital; they promise to channel all specified donations directly to Panzi: Box 4093
SE-141 04
Huddinge, Sweden
e-mail info@spm.nu

Letters to urge more funding for the U.N. mission and to express outrage at the involvement of U.N. peacekeepers in furthering the abuse of Congo women should go to:
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan
United Nations
First Ave at 46th St.,
New York, NY 10017

[via blackfeminism.org]

aesthetics, darling

i'm getting a little bored with the drab olive look of screed. just thought i'd share that thought while i prepare to enjoy my last day of unemployment...

for the Librarian (or, moonless nights bring me low)

I guess we didn’t have legs. I don’t know how you are – if you’re well, with someone, not well, alone, happy, busy, angry, indifferent or living in a yurt. I wish I knew how you are.

I met someone the other day. We only had one conversation but he reminded me of you. He even looked a little like you – tall, bearded, broad. He recognized the Billy Collins line ‘pages with tiny sentences.’ He named bands that flew right over my head. Talking with him felt familiar. That kind of recognition happened only once before. Reflected in you I saw a friend from my past, a friend I should have held closer. In this one’s conversation, you’re the shadow in the mirror.

This is guilt: when a person makes a mistake that goes unacknowledged, that person is doomed to repeat it, to keep living it, until she gets it right or, at least admits her mistake. Here is my guilty admission: my legs gave out and I never told you. I couldn’t go the distance. I broke my word.

I still wish I knew how you are. Selfish, I know. But in that I'm consistent.

rendering unto caesar...

i forgot about this story.

so, as usual, i was just under the wire this year filing my taxes. i filed online and was set to receive a not too shabby refund. i looked forward to this refund considering this is my LotD period (Lady of the Day, for the uninitiated.)

so i waited the requisite 5-10 business days. no deposit of healthy influx of cash from my government. checked a week later...and so on. then, monday, i received a bland white envelope from our friendly dept of the treasury. if i was slightly paler i think i would have blanched when i opened it.

in a crisp tone i was informed that since i still had an outstanding debt (bad student loan, bad!) they decided to apply my tax refund to the debt. helpful of them, huh?

here endeth the lesson: do not fuck with uncle sam's money.

a crushing blow

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Shaw's poetic put-down up for sale

i guess shaw wasn't a big fan of the 3-up/3-down method of constructive criticism.
ouch.

[via bookslut]

the reference saga continues. large national non-profit will make a decision today after speaking with another reference but on tuesday i have a meeting with a colleague's husband who's starting his own non-profit in the south loop and he really really needs someone to help run it.

yes. RUN it. he's involved with the grant and development aspect and now he needs someone to organize and take charge of one of their three main program areas: charity, outreach, or education.

silly fears: huh? that's too much! if i'm interested and he wants me to come aboard, what if it's too big? what if i can't handle it? what if what if what if? what if (gasp) i'm doomed to FAILURE??

i hate spinning in circles like this, being caught in a vortex of cowardice. where is the fearless woman i thought i was? where is the woman who up and left the safety of academia to come to chicago and live in a studio apartment in boystown just because? where is the woman who bravely decided not to fight for a job she hated and quit? where's that foolhardy chick who, once upon a time, traveled to far cities to meet boys she only just 'met' online?? where's that woman?

if you find her, please tell her to give me a call.

UPDATED: The national woman centric non-profit just called to make me an offer and I SAID YES!! I'm in! I no longer have to prostrate myself before the hog of Capital!! Instead, I'll be laid out in front of the little squirrel called Service to Others!! I'm so happy I could make myself a celebratory margerita right now!

In fact, I'll do just that! (In the meantime, if anyone knows of any nifty budgeting tricks and ways to get by on less than 32k/yr, I'd love to hear it. Really. I'm not kidding.)

Yay!!

...
meanwhile, the Worst Romance Novel in the World is chugging along nicely. our hero and heroine have just successfully snogged and are presently experiencing recriminations and just barely bridled lust.

oprah update: cheating

yes, i'm a lady of the day and i like watching oprah while catching up on the news online. so far this week we've had nate birkus' return to interior decorating after recovering from the loss of his friend to a tsunami and sitting naked with other refugees on a littered beach; brooke shields has confessed she hated being a mother; and new skin care/plastic surgery techniques because that's what security moms in the burbs of chicago are all about.

this morning was a room full of married men talking about their cheating (while their wives listen from another room, no less). the best part? when gently confronted by his wife a skinny husband starts to cry; the sight of his wimpy tears incurs the wrath of the Mighty O who berates him - 'your tears don't mean a damn thing. you're playing at relationship and you need to strip yourself naked in front of your wife and be honest! be honest! stop your cryin', step up and be a real man!'

the lesson? do NOT confess to cheating and cry in front of Mighty O. she will kick you in your ass, yank off your pud and then make you eat it - on TV.

technical support

i've been wanting to add a button to my sidebar and can't figure out the effing thing.
jp?
anyone?

i'm tech-dumb.

ah, san francisco.

sometimes i miss my home state.

and, no.

that is NOT ME on the right of the not very work-safe poster.

[thanks nam]

so. reference checks.

what a pain - especially when you're pretty sure the lukewarm words from your ex-ceo will totally drive a nail in your employment coffin. perhaps i didn't do enough to hide the boredom and contempt i had for my job. hm. always a problem. and perhaps i necessarily wasn't inspired by the endless tedious task of managing her calendar. and maybe i hated my job with a hatred that burned hotter than a sunspot. and maybe they knew that.

but that's no reason not to LIE and say, Ding is a fabulous wonderful person and you would be lucky to have her at your non profit agency. hire her!

see? that's not so hard.

highlight

of dad's visit:

breaking into an enthusiastic and impromptu toast to birth control toward the end of the cocktail party i threw for my father.

heh. i think there will soon be a photo.

Things

There are things that I absolutely love about my dad:
He can talk to anyone
He’s smart
He’s funny
He’s dedicated to his ideas and lives with integrity
He’s emotional (sometimes too emotional – dude, you cry more than I do!!)
He looks really handsome in his clerical collar and women dig him (heh)

Then there are the things that make me want to scream:
He still doesn’t understand women (he loves us, but he doesn’t quite get us)
His ability to read a room is still uneven
His way of listening bears a strong resemblance to talking over you

I don’t think I truly understood until this weekend how much distance stands between his generation and mine; he was genuinely puzzled by my assertion that lovers should be friends and I was totally in the dark when he tried to explain what it meant to be ‘female’. Some of our conversations seemed to be at such cross purposes we may have needed a translator.

But there isn’t such a distance that I couldn’t see why I’ve chosen the life I have and the people I share that life with. You see, despite all my father’s weird-ass 61 yr old befuddlement at pop culture (Desperate Housewives almost killed him) and birth control (do NOT get him started on why black men don’t like condoms) my dad’s a guy who knows what he knows and will dig in the dirt until you finally eke out a position of your own to stand by. He honestly doesn’t care what you think of him (in that good way – though there are disturbing similarities to george w bush’s ‘resolve’ that makes me want to hit somebody); he just cares that people are thinking. And he honestly wanted to know what my friends thought about everything – sex, men, relationships, the Bible, our families, each other. (I think he freaked out my friend T- who was mortified at his whole idea of femininity and church; unsurprisingly, my father is a big fan of patriarchy.) His strong personality made me used to the strong personalities of my own friends.

In him, as much as they might shudder, I see aspects of my friends (or is it the other way 'round?):
They can talk to anyone (especially people like my dad)
They’re smart
They’re funny
They’re dedicated to their ideals and live with integrity
They’re emotional
They look really good and people dig them

gassy

that's me.

it's 2 in the morning and i've rearranged my closet, thrown out a few pairs of shoes, set up my new bookcase, rediscovered the two chapters of my dissertation and i have such bad gas right now i can't possibly to go bed right now.

it's the kind of gas that makes you look forward to making a lot of noise, know what i mean?

see, look. i'm all pooched out.

guess who

my father (the only man on earth who gives me a nervous breakdown as well as the only man i really listen to) will be visiting and so i will be less regular about writing.

our plans this weekend?
drinkin'.

shudder.

i had an incredibly vivid dream last night that the only non-profit job i was offered was working for an abstinence-only sex education program.

fear not, little one

don't be afraid of the word 'anarcha-feminist.' really. it's not going to walk into your neighborhood and scratch up your saab.

this is a great (if wordy) article looking at the ways race and class intersect with reproductive autonomy - and raises questions about the basic assumptions we have re: who should have the right to have children and who shouldn't.

it gave me pause and made me begin to look at my attitudes toward my own community, particularly why i'm so impatient for black women to use birth control. it's good stuff. wordy, but good.

[via black feminism]

i don't get it.

venezuela is a sovereign country.
their president was democratically elected.
his recall was overwhelmingly rejected by the citizens.

what's the problem here?

updated: oh. now i get it.

and on this note...

i fantasize alot.
no, not the run of the mill stuff about being stuck in traffic in a yellow cab while entertaining three sailors (make it two.) i mean stuff like: if you could ask a powerful national figure anything, what would you ask?

and i think and think and think.
and never come up with something this good.

i'm going to bed. g'night.

did you know...

the bachelor can be educational?
especially when you're killing time writing the worst romance novel ever (because that's EXACTLY what the world needs now).

(oh, kim wild. we'll miss your ability to get down no matter the occasion.)

those of us who can't use the Pill, the sponge is about to reappear!!

but there are caveats. so - everything you've wanted to know about the sponge here.

SO disturbing.

'morning.

why is it interracial marriage/dating/whatever is always framed as black/white?

it's nice kristoff wants to see more interracial couples represented in pop culture (so do i) but jumping the color line isn't always about replaying plantation paradigms, you know?

to be honest, i'm puzzled why kristoff is taking this up. he's usually into stories about buying asian women out of sex slavery.

blackfeminism has more on it and it's a good post.

boy blog roundup: steve gilliard and microsoft

Steve Gilliard's News Blog : Gutless surrenders rarely work

in the interest of feminist solidarity, i've segregated my blog reading into girl blogs and boy blogs. every morning, i go down my list of blogs written by women. i love it.

but the boy blogs are good, too. they have their fingers on the hot pulse of boy politics, manly debate and testically important matters.

like, did you know microsoft totally caved about endorsing gay rights recently? i didn't. go read.

odd messengers

T- lives across the street from me. He and his partner are artists; unlike wannabes these two guys live on their art. They sell it on the street, they donate it to friends, they have shows in local cafes, they work out of their basement. My roomie and I met a girl friend of ours at our local bar and T- sauntered over when he saw us. And the conversation between the two of us touched me more than I would have expected.

I was dumbstruck at how open this man is. With his southern accent, his long elegant body and his eye for beautiful things, he hangs out with the homeless people under wacker; he gives money to the crazy naked lady on halsted; he walks to the bus stop and invites the women from the mission to wait for the bus in his living room while serving them egg nog. When he digs in trash and finds the stuff to make his art he doesn’t think this is strange; to him trash is the equalizer – we’re all on the bottom, he says. Some of us just don’t know it.

And when I told him of the decision I’d probably have to make tomorrow morning (yes, it’s drawn out this long) he suddenly excused himself and went to his apartment next door. When he came back he had a short string of fresh water and black pearls and crystal in his hand. At the end of the short strand a tiny medallion of the Virgin Mary and a crucifix hung. He laid them on the table between us.

‘I don’t know you very well,’ he said. ‘But I know that when you talked about working with the Y your voice lifted and your eyes lit up. When you talked about the other, you stumbled. There are things we all have to give away and pride is one of them. Life has taught me humility; I’ve lived paycheck to paycheck, I’ve eaten peanut butter sandwiches and thought them feasts, I’ve counted pennies when I used to have thousands. But I’ve never lost faith that my life had meaning, that there was something I was meant to do. I don’t have religion the way other people have but I’ve always thought I’d have to answer to … some … spark.”

He gave me the short strand. They were beautiful – creamy misshapen pearls, gray black pearls and crystals the color of a girl’s blush.

“It’s better to know you’ve done the right thing rather than the convenient thing. A comfortable man is not safe,’ he said, quoting Benjamin Franklin. ‘When you pray about your decision, use these beads. This is the beauty of humility. This is the beauty of sacrifice.”

And, in all places – my neighborhood bar – I felt my eyes fill with tears as I wound the strand around my fingers.

[cross posted at church gal]

he's kidding, right?

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Roe's Birth, and Death

please tell me i'm hallucinating:
"Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better."

mommy's choice

Being a Lady of the Day (aka, unemployed) means that I have the occasional moment to sit and watch Oprah while eating cereal in the morning. Monday morning I watched Jon Stewart cavort with Oprah until we were rudely interrupted by the Conclave; this morning it was a mother’s shocking confession that…she loves her husband more than her children.

Yes, Ayelet Waldman (wife to Michael Chabon) made the stunning announcement that she is in love with her husband and not her children; that if he died she would be devastated while, if one of her children died (God forbid), she could dare to imagine a life for herself. The stay at home mothers gasped in horror as if she had said, I would stab all of my children and drink their blood rather than be apart from my husband. These mothers were horrified that she, another mother, could pick her spouse rather than her child; one woman had even asked her own daughter what she would think if she knew her mommy loved daddy more and brought a note to the show to chastise Waldman – ‘Bad mommy,’ she said. (What an inappropriate question to ask a child.) The outrage and insecurity these women showed seemed out of place to me.

In the essay that sparked the discussion, Waldman had written:
“…my husband will say that we, he and I, are the core of what he cherishes, that the children are satellites, beloved but tangential.”

It was this marginalization of the child that outraged the mothers in Oprah’s studio; how could she say that, they cried. How could she call herself a good mother when she’s told her kids they don’t matter to her? Their blatant misunderstanding of Waldman’s position aside, my roomie and I found the other women’s attempts to get her to reorient her passions toward her children away from her life partner bizarre and rather cult-like.

It seems logical to me that a woman would feel for her husband more than her child(ren). Yes, I’m blatantly commitment-phobic but there is enough of a Catherine/Heathcliff-type romantic in me who thinks that’s the whole point of being in a relationship: to shout to the world that the metaphysically impossible has happened. You’ve met your soulmate.

I remember a day when it was made very clear to me and my sister that our father loved our mother more than he loved us. We had discovered a part of our mother’s past – a secret that my father had known all along; feeling hurt and betrayed we confronted him – how could he keep something like that from us, his children? My father’s answer was firm and quiet.

‘She and I – we – chose each other,’ he said to us. ‘That woman is my wife and I will not stand for anyone, not even you, stepping in between that.’ My father’s love and loyalty, we learned, was absolutely unwavering, as was my mother’s for him. My sister and I, as loved as we were, stood outside of their circle, only curious observers to what happened inside of it.

I’ve never been a mother so I can’t speak to the special bond one feels when breast feeding, blah blah blah. However, feeling so much passion for my partner it turns me into an oddity at Gymboree?

Sounds good to me.

[cross posted at church gal]

guess who's coming to dinner?

sometimes it's sad when one person makes a whole ethnic group look bad. for instance, take stanley kauffmann from the new republic.

The New Republic Online: Woody and Wine

you need a subscription for the whole review but here's the good part:

Twice in the film young black men figure in the story, and in neither case is there a mention by anyone of race. Both of these men are attractive and intelligent, fit companions for any young woman. But none of Melinda's friends ever notes that these men are black. Her friends are civilized New York whites; still, it seems odd that none of them says something like, "That man is very nice, but does Melinda, in her present emotional state, need to add racial problems?" Omitting any mention of the men's race seems factitious, an attempt to bring into being a social state that doesn't yet quite exist. May the day soon come when awareness of race is irrelevant; but that day is not yet here. [emphasis mine]

shorter stanley kauffmann: racial harmony is still a dream so when we see black people, let's point and shout really loud!

i think that this review says more about mr. kauffmann's social state than anyone else's. clearly, if he had any friends of color he'd know how immediately he'd get his ass handed to him if anyone said or did any of this shit.

i wonder if he'd be interested in knowing that, while this world fractures into tinier fiefdoms of myopia and isolation, there exist actual pockets of interracial harmony. (mine, for instance.)

[thanks to dc media girl]