impatience

I am not patient with adults in general, which may be why my reaction to this article is "grow the fuck up." I like what Tim Burke says about it: that it's fine for a single person to have a hang-up or issue and need therapy to deal with it, but that to suggest there's a "social problem" of men who can't deal with seeing their wives give birth is silly. Grow the fuck up, people.¹

It's true that it's often harder to watch someone you love in danger or pain than to be in danger or pain yourself, especially when you feel helpless. But part of loving someone is wanting to offer whatever support you can: one way to do that is to be in the delivery room, if that's what the person you love wants and needs. Offering support isn't just something you do when it's convenient. Not if you love someone.

I think this is the general source of my impatience: if you are an adult and you sign up for something (say, get married and decide to have kids) you should be willing to accept what goes along with that. It's the same reason I'm impatient with men who want to sleep with women but are grossed out by menstruation. Dude, it happens. You want to be involved with women, you're going to have to deal with its existence.² The same reason I have trouble with teachers who say totally inappropriate things to their students, whatever. If you're an adult and you make a choice, you should be willing to accept the obligations that go with it. If you want to have kids, one of those obligations might be to help in the delivery, and not to make too much fuss about it.

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1. The disclaimer: I haven't had kids, been married to someone who was having a kid, been pregnant, or witnessed birth. I completely believe people who say it's scary and gross.
2. There may be similar things for women (straight women being grossed out by semen?), but overall I think women's bodies are treated as sources of contagion and disgust in more and deeper ways than men's, at least in the society we live in right now.

Commander in Chief

There's a billboard in the Philadelphia subway that says, "this fall, a woman will be President." It's an advertisement for a new ABC series called Commander in Chief - short version, Geena Davis plays a woman vice president who takes over when the president dies unexpectedly, before he can enact his plans to force her to resign so the [male] Speaker of the House could take over instead.

The clips don't look great. ABC wants you to know that there will be a strong focus on her family life, and the interactions I saw between her and her kids were total Hollywood shlock. It is Geena Davis, and she's pretty cool. She's also almost old enough to be president, which is nice. She's seriously femmey, but I guess that cuts both ways: still no images of non-femmey women, but more reminders that that kind of self-presentation has no relationship to the actual qualities of a good leader. The writing is almost certainly going to be blah and the acting unconvincing. No matter how good a president she is, she'll be judged on her mothering more. The political premise - that she's an Independent VP in a Republican administration - is absurd.

But who cares? There's going to be a reasonably prominent media image of a woman as president. We've never had a woman president, and we've never had any very good images of one, and I think it's made it very difficult for people to imagine that it could really happen. Even if the series is bad - even if it's poorly written, badly acted, and full of silly gender roles itself - at least it's addressing sexism head-on. At least it's showing the possibility that a woman could be president. It's a huge deal to create that image in people's minds, and I think that we lefties should acknowledge that, and not criticize it (too much) for not being utterly revolutionary. Interestingly, some of the crazy conservatives on the Free Republic message boards are, in between some sexist drivel, arguing that it's a liberal plot to normalize women in the presidency in time for Hillary Clinton to run in 2008.¹

I don't think it could possibly be that causal, but who cares? It's great to have this image out there.

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1. Others argue that, because it's a Republican administration encouraging her to step down before the president dies, it's an attempt to discredit Republicans if they run Condoleezza Rice as the VP on the 2008 ticket. I think this betrays a basic misunderstanding of how media images work: that kind of complexity is totally ineffective in a mass media image. Subtleties work, yes, but they need to be organized around basic elements of identity and social interaction. The difference between Republicans and Democrats is not strong enough or basic enough to anyone's identity to actually work its way in through this kind of imagery. Gender, on the other hand? Yes.

public service announcement

I am not a Jedi, much as I would like to be. I am not English, Irish, German, French, or "from the islands." I do not have an accent. I am not gay. I am not straight. I do work too much, but I am not interested in hearing about it from 16-year-olds. I am not from New York City. I am not in my early thirties. I am not seventeen. I do not eat meat. I am neither an anarchist nor a communist, nor am I a hipster. I am not a ninja, the Terminator, or your mom. Especially not if you're 40.

scenes from some trips

wild raspberries and black birch
He's 16. He's smart, he writes reasonably well, and he might see more living things - birds, spiders, raccoons at night, toads in tiny crevices, green-gold flies - than anyone I've ever met. When he's listening, he looks at you with a fixed intensity that humbles you: better have something worth saying to someone like that. He knows when he's being a fool, which is not true of most people his age. Maybe not of most people.

He's not going to graduate from high school. He's been on probation since he was 14, and he got kicked out of school. I don't know the details, but here's what I know: he deserves another chance. Watching him discover the river, the stars, climb a mountain for the first time and not even realize it, seeing him eat wild raspberries and be amazed at the taste of sassafrass, black birch, Indian cucumber, seeing everything I've never noticed about the woods where I spend half my year: the awe and wonder of it would be enough, even if he weren't one of the coolest students I've ever had. He's not patient, but he cares a lot about other people, and if you can talk to him when he's just starting to get frustrated he'll listen with that deep focus and then you can see it in the next conversation he has. When he cried at our graduation it made me tear up. I can think of nothing better than to have him as a student on his first canoeing and backpacking trip except maybe to have him as a student in his first field biology class.

He's a Native American kid from inner city Baltimore and he lives in a violent, aggressive culture. He got in trouble young, and now he can't go back to school. At least he's getting his GED. At least his family seems good. At least the piss tests keep him off drugs. But I worry about his safety and I worry about his future and I can't let it go, because I so desperately want to make something more available to him, and all I can think of to offer is a letter of recommendation and some ways to get in touch with me. Pitifully little.

trust
Second day of a two-week trip, at breakfast. Kid puts his hand up like he's testifying and says, "I don't tell anyone this. Not even my best friends. But since we're going to be out here together for two weeks, y'all might as well know. I like James Taylor and Steely Dan."

disaster and premonitions
At our climbing site, a 17-year-old kid I don't know comes running up a trail screaming that he needs help. His friend just took a 40-foot fall off a cliff. The three staff members who aren't instructors are the first responders to that incident. They breathe for him and pack him into the helicopter cradle and get covered in blood and bile. He dies two days later at a hospital in Baltimore.

Earlier that day, one of our students said he felt death around him, that it felt like it did when his grandmother died. We thought he was just nervous about climbing, but he insisted it was something different. I have no idea what to make of it. It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

loving it
Me: "You know it's not just the AT, right? There are two other big trails: the Continental Divide Trail in the Rockies and the Pacific Crest Trail out west."

Student: "I'm going to hike them all. I want to stay out here forever."

priorities
I know it's a sign of good judgment to watch the sunset at one of the best views in the state instead of setting up camp during daylight, but it still makes me damn tired.

blessings
At least eight bald eagle sightings in two days. Sometimes two at once. A hunting osprey. Two red-tailed hawks circling twenty feet overhead near the top of a ridge for maybe fifteen minutes. Turkey vultures flying within ten feet of rappeling students.

being hardcore
I got off my second two-week backpacking/canoeing course in a row and didn't shower, eat, or finish my paperwork. Instead I got in a whitewater kayak for the first time and got my ass kicked. I flipped nine times, at a conservative estimate, mostly in this one wave I was trying to surf. I might have gotten it for about five seconds towards the end, and I mostly figured out how to stay upright.

I'm just a little worried about my future.
I have a great offer from the place where I'm working now, and another option that I'd pretty much decided to take. Should I stay or move on? How should I make this decision?

reasons to ride your bike

1. Bike seats don't stick to your back when it's way too hot and way too humid.

2. Being outside is better than being in a big metal box.

3. You're not spewing greenhouse gases into the air or supporting authoritarian states and repressive corporations.

4. $100 for a decent used bike, $50 for a lock, $30 for a helmet. What kind of car will you get for $180? What kind of insurance?

5. You can ride fast if you want exercise, slow if you just want a little air.

6. All the other bicyclists will be happy you're there, making us all more visible.

7. When the oil-based economy collapses, you'll be a step ahead.

8. You become 35% more attractive. You get 45% for riding the bike, but you lose twenty points on the chance that you're a member of some stupid hipster/poser/anarcho-punk subculture. Then you get ten of those points back for wearing a helmet, which suggests that even if you're a stupid hipster/poser/anarcho-punk you have some kind of sense; but not all the points, because helmets are still doofy. Even better, you can be more attractive in whatever style you like. European single-speed doing the grocery shopping with a basket and some baguette; tough fearless bike messenger moving way too fast; cute interesting person going to a non-profit; teacher with a backpack full of books; hipster/poser/anarcho-punk; you're still 35% more attractive.

9. In San Francisco, you start at 60% more attractive, and go from there. Gets you all the way to 50%.

hobbies

There's an entry on One Good Thing about reading. Flea says, "If you don't read, how do you think?" and I basically agree with this. I'm an intellectual snob. But here's what struck me. In one of the comments, someone mentions a situation where "reading" is listed on a survey of potential hobbies, but "socializing" is not; apparently this annoyed some non-reading socialite. I'm sitting here thinking, reading is a hobby? Socializing is a hobby? What the hell kind of life does someone who doesn't read or talk to other people have?

Hobbies are optional. They're entertainment and puttering - sometimes very useful entertainment and puttering, like when my grandmother knit me a lovely hat or my dad built me a bed. They usually involve some degree of skill, like flyfishing, crocheting, building model airplanes, making fancy desserts. But they're not a basic function of life, the way I see reading or talking to people. I feel kind of the same way about music: being really into music, as a listener or a musician, might be a hobby, but music is just a basic thing about life that everyone needs. I know there are people - even people who don't have difficulty actually doing those things - who don't care about music or reading or talking to people and think those things are optional, like hobbies. But I find myself totally baffled by them.

scale

There was an article in the New Yorker, back in April, about the Matthew Thornton Health Plan up in New Hampshire, which worked phenomenally, for a few years. It was a clinic, with an internist, a general surgeon, a pediatrician, a family practitioner, and an obstetrician, and you bought into the clinic for some kind of monthly fee, totally bypassing insurance companies. All the doctors got a flat salary - $30,000, in 1971 - and referred things they couldn't deal with to specialists, and after a while they asked the specialists to accept a flat-fee contract. Those who did eventually started training the general practitioners to deal with simple problems, so instead of referring all patients with blood in their urine or runny eyes the GPs could treat some of them and send the ones with serious or just confusing problems to the specialists.

Basically it was a little tiny HMO, and it was wildly popular. They had reinsurance in case someone got catastrophically ill. It was substantially cheaper than most other plans, so employers loved it. The salaries meant that doctors could see their jobs as jobs, not full-life commitments, and they liked that. Patients got good care: fewer referrals, so they had to go fewer places to get the same care; and their doctors were committed to what they were doing and cared about their patients. And it exploded, becoming the second-largest insurer in New Hampshire before Blue Cross bought it and the whole thing was over.

As I see it, the Matthew Thornton Health Plan did one really good thing, and it had two really good consequences. They radically simplified the administration and overhead that went along with getting and providing health care, without giving up the benefits - lower costs to patients, risk pooling - of a health insurance company.¹ No reimbursements, no need to worry about whether a particular procedure was covered or which forms to fill out.

This certainly cut costs. The US medical system costs about twice as much to administer as the medical system in comparable countries (31% of US medical costs in 1999 were administrative, compared to 16.7% in Canada),² which is part of the reason US health care costs are so high (15.3% of GDP, compared to 9.7% in Canada).³ The Matthew Thornton Health Plan was cheaper because it didn't have to pay someone to be the CEO, or people with M.D.s to decide what care to pay for, or lots of people to process claims and fax paperwork to one another. That's partly a consequence of being a small organization, partly a consequence of its flat-fee structure, and, I suspect, partly a consequence of attracting doctors who didn't expect to make zillions of dollars.

The other benefit may not even be clear in the article. I may be making it up. But I'm guessing that one of the reasons the Matthew Thornton Health Plan was good was that it promoted good doctoring. Doctors weren't providing more expensive care to make more money, like they might in a fee for service set-up. They didn't have separate HMO oversight, so they didn't have to fight with the insurers to get reimbursement. They could focus on treating patients appropriately. The egalitarian set-up - every specialty made the same amount - and the extra training from subspecialists like urologists and opthalmologists promoted a working culture that valued patient care and the health of the organization more than the doctor's ego.

And it died. It was great, and everybody loved it, and it no longer exists.

You can read the article and draw your own conclusions about what went wrong, but let me get up on my soapbox for a minute and tell you: they got too big. I know all about the desire to serve more and more and more people with your essentially not-for-profit program. You've got a good thing, right, and more people should have access to it. But there are things that only work on a small scale. There are practical benefits to having a small program. With an office of ten people, say, you can have weekly meetings with everyone. You don't have to write twenty memos to find out what people think about something: you can just walk around and ask. If you make a change and everyone hates it, you can change things back. There's not enough confusion and complication to have much of a bureaucracy. But it goes beyond that: getting bigger changes how people feel about a program, and that can kill what made it work.

This program depended on a particular ethos: the GPs and the specialists had to believe in what they were doing, and they had to understand exactly what they were supposed to put in and accept that they got less money, more stability, more equality, less hassle. It's easier to maintain an ethos and a sense of mission in smaller groups. You can have a meaningful, experienced identity with people; the inner workings of the group or organization end up being pretty transparent, usually, so you understand how that identity affects the actual program. Each individual is also responsible for more of the program itself: even people in basically administrative jobs are closer to the management of the program and thus feel more responsible for its over-all quality. They feel invested.

At the heart of it, programs work better if the mission of an organization and the people working for it are really close together. Not just non-profits: the reason small businesses often have better food, objects, whatever is that people start their businesses with a certain pride in their work. The bigger it gets, the more capitalist, the more that basic organizational goal around which everything should grow gets distorted. How can the CEO of Nabisco, for example, have pride in its products? The CEO's job is layers and layers from the people who are actually doing something that could involve what the organization actually makes. What this tells us, of course, is something we already knew: Nabisco is about making money, not about the quality of what it produces. The quality is only a means to an end. In most small businesses I know, though, there's an underlying care for the quality of what they make. Not that they're indifferent to money, but it's not the only consideration. The quality of the food or how interesting the clothes are or their relationship to the community are also important: they come from a felt need or desire for something, and want to fill that need or desire well. That care can also spread throughout a small organization, where it can't in a big company. As organizations get bigger over time, even the people who had been really invested in their distinctive quality - like the doctor who started the Matthew Thornton Health Plan - become absorbed in the culture of bigness, bureaucracy, and capitalism. That doctor is now a CEO at a conventional health plan.

For a small program that depends on its smallness, the way you serve more people is not to expand your own program. It's to offer a model that others can replicate. It's hard to hold on to that idea when you start thinking about the money you could make or the people you could serve if you would just expand. But scale, in and of itself, affects program and business quality. There are ways around it, of course, but big organizations can never completely avoid the problems of bigness. I think that's what the Matthew Thornton Health Plan found out when it started expanding.

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1. The same article mentions a surgeon in the L.A. area who doesn't accept insurance: if you want him to do your surgery, you pay cash and either just deal or fight with your insurer yourself. It's a radically simple process, but it's only an option for patients with a lot of available cash.
2.Physicians for a National Health Program, 2003.
3. National Coalition on Health Care, 2004.

who gets to say what?

Someone has come by and left an anonymous comment about this aside I made in my last post. I'm intensely curious about who this person - let's call her Anonymous Jew and use girl pronouns, for the sake of argument - is and how she found my blog, but let's put that aside. If you want to know what she said, go read the comments; but she does bring up two interesting questions.

First, does the fact that I'm Jewish change what I can say about Jewish issues? Anonymous Jew says, "Your being Jewish is not a carte blanche [sic] to make inane generalizations about Jewish people." Which is true, to some extent. But the rest of what she says suggests that she thinks me being Jewish has no effect on what's ok for me to say, and I disagree. I think that when people are talking about what their own communities do, they get more slack than people who aren't in that community; they can speak more loosely, use different words, be frank about sensitive issues.

Partly this is because when I'm talking critically about Jewish stuff or feminism or queer stuff, you can be pretty sure I feel sympathetic toward the people I'm talking about, because I'm one of them. When I use words like queer or dyke or whatever, I'm not using them as slurs; there's a whole conversation about whether you can reclaim words like that at all, but the conversation you can have with me is about that, not about how I'm slamming queer people and am really homophobic.¹ The same thing operates with other kinds of identity, though its rarely as clear as with the language issue. It does mean, though, that I can make casual asides about Jewish stuff and get the benefit of the doubt. So. The presumption of sympathy.

There's another reason, though, which is that because I grew up Jewish, etc, and am part of that community, I have a pretty intimate knowledge of its virtues and vices. When I have something to say about my own community, there's a lot more nuance and experience that goes into it than when I'm saying something about other people's communities. Less perspective, maybe, but more background knowledge. You might call this the presumption of knowledge - you can argue about whether something's true, but my identity means I get some slack about backing things up. It's worth pointing out that people who aren't actually members of a particular community but hang around it a lot and feel strong identity with and concern for it also get presumed sympathy and presumed knowledge, but in more limited ways.

Second, was what I said true? Like other people, I've been known to say things that, in the cold and sober light of other people's scrutiny, I regret. This isn't one of them. The pope's past as a child in the Hitler Youth has received at least as much attention as his active complicity as a powerful adult in AIDS deaths throughout the developing world, just for example. Lots of Jews are incredibly socially engaged, and there's a lot of good in the world that's done by Jewish social action organizations; but I wasn't denying that. I was referring to the way Jews talk about the Holocaust, as if it's a trump card. In some ways it is. Its horror was unique. But you know, every historical tragedy is tragic in its own way.² I'm not being flippant. Rwanda was uniquely horrible; so was slavery. They were different, but they were also terrible, and to act like the Holocaust trumps them is to misunderstand the nature of horror and tragedy. The point I was making earlier is that this is a specific situation in which the Holocaust has particular moral relevance, and in which someone's behavior with respect to it is genuinely, seriously worth talking about. This is not
always the case.

The Holocaust is not the most important issue in every conversation, nor is it appropriate to bring up with respect to every issue. And I have to say, if you hang out in Jewish communities, you will see this happen. True story: when I was 14 and someone in my confirmation class smoked pot on a class trip, one of the parents brought up the Holocaust. I mean, can you be any more absurd? In many Jewish communities - less so in college-age activist ones, more so in older, more conservative ones like the one where I grew up - the Holocaust is this enormous deal and other tragedies are secondary, marginal, one step above irrelevant. What did I hear about in Hebrew school as a kid? Anonymous Jew, what did you hear about? Because in my Hebrew school, it wasn't how the Holocaust should make us extra-sensitive to other people's suffering. It was all about how this was the biggest deal ever and nothing else was as important. How we should never forget.

I'm tired, and I need to do something other than write, so let me leave you with this:

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it -- and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again -- and that is well; but she will also never sit down on a cold one anymore.

--Mark Twain

and with a link to this post about Ratzinger on Body and Soul (a beautifully-written blog, by the way) which says things like what I said, but better written and with actual citations. Also this follow-up about sin. Hipster Monk and Political Schmientist, I think you'll both like these.

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1. OK, funny story. I got my hair cut last time I was home, and said something to my sister about how dykey it looked. My very straight, very earnest sister looked at me and said, with no discernible sense of irony then or after, "But isn't that just a stereotype?" People, I had this spiky pixie haircut that was almost exactly the same as my little brother's, except for having pointy things by my ears. It's practically the regulation dykey haircut. And it's not like I haven't been doing queer activism FOR THE LAST TEN YEARS. My sister clearly knows about two queer people, total.
2. Thank you, Tolstoy.

about roles

I am nearly beyond words in my fury about Joseph Ratzinger being the new pope. I don't even know where to start explaining why I'm so angry: with Opus Dei?¹ with his doctrinal conservatism, which makes him describe homosexuality as an "objective disorder?" with his membership in the Hitler Youth?

And here is where people will say, as they have already, that he was required to join, that he was not enthusiastic about it, that he was never a member of a combat unit in the Nazi military. All these things are true. He probably wasn't a serious Nazi, he was probably just trying to get by, he was 14. I know. I know. It was a long time ago. I'm as sick as anyone of Jews talking about the Holocaust like it was the only bad thing that ever happened in the world.²

But he's the pope. And if you're going to be the pope, you have to expect to be better. Maybe it would be ok that he was in the Hitler Youth, if he had spent a lot of time repenting and praying and wishing he'd been a member of the resistance. This is a man whom God calls to the priesthood, and he never returns to that part of his past in pain and anguish, wishing he had done less to serve the machinery of genocide and more to save at least one of the Dachau slaves he worked beside? He dismisses it as just something he was required to do?

All the pretense that there was no way around it diminishes the great sacrifices made by other Germans in the name of resistance and human decency. It also diminishes the papacy. There are certain offices - the papacy, the presidency, a few others - that are so important that I don't really acknowledge the right of people to hold them and be imperfect. I think that if you're going to be pope, or president, you should be willing to give up just about anything - your life, your free time, your wandering eye, the innocent fiction that there was nothing more you could have done - to hold them. You are responsible for so many people and so much of history that whatever your own personal problems are, you should just deal. Skip that vacation, stay up late, don't have a dog, take whatever rest you need to make it possible to do your job, but no more. If you don't want to make those sacrifices, someone else will. We only need one.

The President of the United States, as the Venezuelan with whom I used to wash restaurant dishes pointed out,³ is responsible for the whole world. I have zero sympathy with Bush as a president, but it's not just the appalling policy his administration makes: it's the fact that he doesn't seem to care. That faced with the enormous responsibility of being one of the most powerful people on the planet, he goes to his ranch, he goes to bed early, he slacks off. I disagreed with a lot of Clinton's policy decisions, but at least I knew he took it seriously. He was up nights worrying and studying and being responsible. ⁴

I'm not Catholic, but the pope can affect my life, directly and indirectly, and he is the spiritual leader of a billion people. I know that people are people, and fallible. I know that people get to do stupid things and not be sorry for them and still be good people. I'd be ok if someone with Ratzinger's record were a member of the German parliament, and I'm sort of ok with people who used to be hardcore racists being senators (hello, Robert Byrd). I'm ok with members of Congress taking vacations like ordinary people and not being available because they have to raise their kids. There's a feminist argument - most recently applied to high-powered science professors - that not acknowledging workers as people with obligations hits women hardest, because we are more likely to have no one to give our obligations to. Yes. People need time and money and accommodations, and are imperfect. People don't always take things as seriously as they should. It's ok.

But not for the pope. And not for the president.

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1. It's a cultish, fundamentalist "personal prelature" with an incredibly undemocratic governance structure. There's an official site, a "source of information," and the Opus Dei Awareness Network.
2. I'm Jewish, people, back off. I get to say it.
3. He was super-cool.
4. I actually find this really painful, because I would love to be able to affect policy that way. Seeing Bush have the opportunity and not caring is like watching someone destroy da Vinci sketches or something.

city magic

I went to the grocery store last week, exhausted and starving, and found it both incredibly frustrating and kind of nice. Grocery stores freak me out. Too many products, too many choices of ridiculous things (the world does NOT need six hundred kinds of toothbrushes), and where are the damn batteries? Not in the aisle marked "Batteries and Batteries," that's for sure.

The good thing about it was the random human interactions. I needed ziploc bags, which were roughly impossible to find, but this really nice guy who was doing his own shopping, but still wearing his Safeway tag, tracked down a woman who was in no sort of uniform but knew where the ziploc bags were.

At the check-out line, a 4-year-old boy was running around saying, basically continuously, ooh-ooh-ooooh-oooh-oooh. He grabbed a pack of Starbursts, ran up to his mom, and held them up to her: ooooooooooooh. She looked at him and said, "NO." He put them back and ran off. Ooooh-ooooh-ooh-oooooooh-oooooooh.

The cashier took my discount card and was confused about whether it was a Safeway card or not (it's from a local subsidiary, but not local to where I am), and I said something about people in California thinking I was crazy when I handed it to them. She got really really excited and started telling me how she was going to fashion college in LA in the fall.

This is the stuff that makes it worth it for me to live in a city. All these little interactions with people you don't know. So here are a couple more.

The other day I was at a little produce market in the suburbs and there was a girl - probably about six - behind the counter with her sister or aunt or mom or cousin or something. Making faces at babies is like, the best thing ever and they hide and then laugh, so I forgot that she wasn't a baby and made faces at her. But she was old enough that she made a fish face back at me, and I blew out my cheeks like a pufferfish and she laughed.

Today there was a tiny, toy-looking white dog - probably a bichon frise - at a city park. It barked at another dog and then walked past me and the Hipster Monk sitting on a bench eating ice cream, and I barked at it. It got sort of confused and excited and came over to sniff me and be petted, and stayed interested for a while, til its owner - this woman who looked sad generally and confused because I had barked at her dog, but eventually smiled about it - decided it was time to leave. Off they went. The old couple on the bench - old enough to have started looking frail, and to dress in a way that was noticeably old-fashioned - across from us laughed and started talking to each other and then to me. "Did you see that?" said the old man. "That was funny." "Yes it was." To me: "Do you have a dog?"

I told them I didn't have a dog, but that I grew up with them and love them. They nodded and talked a little more, and then walked off arm in arm, slowly.

perennial champion Bob Dylan

If, like me, you're surrounded by hipsters in hooded sweatshirts, their even more hipster siblings, and college public radio,¹ you might have heard someone say Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes is the new Bob Dylan. Of course! He's a folksinger-songwriter boy with a scratchy voice, floppy hair, and a brooding expression. He's even a good poet. But it's a really basic misunderstanding of why Bob Dylan matters.

Bob Dylan was a fucking prophet. He was a poet, yes, and a musician, and his music amplifies his words in a way few people can duplicate. That's why, despite how unbeautiful his voice is, his versions of his songs will always tell you something new about them. But he was important because he was a prophet. Prophets don't know the future, but they see the present more clearly than most, and they give us their fury, their vision, they tell us our own stories and make us cry. They see our sins and tell us about them, and woe betide those who refuse to listen. Every time I hear The Times They Are A-Changin' (song or album) I think about what it must have been like to hear it for the first time in 1964 and know that it was about you. Especially to be young, and to hear the voice of this new world you were going to inherit singing about the massive disruption that was creating it. To hear the voice of the prophet.

There are still musicians who do that, but they aren't Conor Oberst. They're not Bob Dylan either, for that matter. I'd nominate, with the approval of my friend the Red-Headed Stranger, Ani diFranco. Like Dylan, she's important. People care about what she says, even if a lot of them do it in this sort of annoying teen-age feminist way.² People imitate her music, but more important, they listen to her. They hear something about themselves and the world in her music. The fury and vision of prophecy.

I was talking about this at one of my temp assignments this winter, and one of the other temps suggested Ice T, saying that his moral stature and his position as a role model make him the Bob Dylan of our generation. I have no idea. I am white as they come, and don't know enough about Ice T (musically or otherwise) to say anything about it. I listen to the occasional bit of hip hop radio, though, mostly because my students like it, and it's the only mainstream radio I've heard that might, maybe, possibly, have some prophetic leanings once in a while. Most of it is crap, a lot of it is just sexually explicit for its own sake, but Kanye West has given me goosebumps once in a while. I had one of my Outward Bound groups perform All Falls Down (their choice of song) once, and it was the first time I'd ever really heard the lyrics. One of the kids said, "Kanye West speaks the truth." That's the feeling Bob Dylan and Ani diFranco give you at their best. It's not on the radio very often, so not that many people hear it. But you're not a prophet unless you can get some attention, unless you become culturally resonant.

Anyway, I think these are all better proposals than the people David Dye named when he was doing a "new Bob Dylan" top five at 5 on XPN.³ They were all just young guitar guys with scratchy voices.⁴ No prophecy at all.

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1. Affectionately. I say this affectionately. And while wearing a hooded sweatshirt.
2. Let me point out that I get to call them annoying because I was a teen-age feminist Ani fan. Boys, don't try this at home.
3. The top five at 5 is a daily themed list. Like, songs about New Jersey. Or songs about rain. Or songs by people who might be the new Bob Dylan.
4. Conor Oberst, David Grey, Ryan Adams, Bruce Springsteen, and someone else. Bruce Springsteen is the only one I might consider.

training

Staff training for my outdoor ed job started this week, and we talked a lot about tools and judgment. It reminded me of the many first aid trainings I've done, and how totally split they are between wilderness focus and front-country focus. The front-country courses - CPR, lifeguarding, the EMT classes I've heard about but not taken - are all about getting people to the damn hospital NOW. Preferably five minutes ago. You isolate body substances, you maintain potentially damaged spines in alignment, you perform CPR, but before you do any of those things you tell someone to call 911. The real treatment comes from the hospital.

There's a mentality that goes along with this that you should only do exactly what you've been trained to do, with the materials you've been trained on. My lifeguard instructor actually said, "You're only as good as your equipment," and told us about all the stuff he carried. Rescue masks, cravats, an arm splint, maybe even a blood pressure cuff. It's the lifeguarding tube that makes you a lifeguard, not your skills.

Since my primary training is as a Wilderness First Responder, I'm used to a really different attitude. It came out most clearly in my most recent recertification class, where we spent basically the whole time talking about bad situations where you don't have equipment or support and have to make the best of it. In a wilderness situation, you have to know how to splint people's arms comfortably enough for a 20-mile hike out, you have to make sure your patients don't get stressed because they're hungry or need to pee, you have to make judgment calls about what's really serious and what can wait. And your back-up is far away. You are the real treatment. You are also only as good as your head, your heart, and your ability. I think the idea that you're only as good as your equipment is utter bullshit: you can improvise cravats and splints out of t-shirts and sticks and do just fine. You can tell how people are actually doing without taking their blood pressure.

It's a totally different attitude, and I like it a lot better. Philadelphia Boss said he quit teaching Red Cross classes because it was basically a matter of teaching a bunch of morons not to fuck up. If that's what you teach people, it's not surprising that they follow protocol and nothing else.

Now I'm going to get out of bed and celebrate the fact that I don't have to work 14 hours today.

30 things

With that melodrama out of the way, allow me to further undermine my illusions that this isn't really a blog. Courtesy of a variety of people linked to by New Kid on the Hallway, ten things I've done that you probably haven't.
1. Paddled a canoe in the Arctic Ocean.
2. Testified before a joint session of my state legislature.
3. Skipped a grade.
4. Had sex in my professor's bed, but not with my professor.
5. Dug a snow cave.
6. Packed pomegranates in my lunch in high school.
7. Spontaneously sung She Has a Girlfriend Now (by Reel Big Fish) with three other people on the exact middle step of a tower in a monastery in Ukraine.
8. Worked as a professional bread baker.
9. Slept in a treehouse in a city park.
10. Gotten a vibrator as a birthday present from my aunt.

And ten things I haven't done that you probably have.
1. Gotten stitches. I'm lucky.
2. Broken a bone. Still lucky.
3. Seen any of this year's Best Picture nominees.
4. Been to therapy voluntarily on my own, not counting visiting family members in residential treatment or that time when I was 13 when my parents made me go.
5. Gone without health insurance.
6. Had a membership in a private health club (if the Y doesn't count, which I don't think it does).
7. Eaten pepperoni pizza.
8. Been in a theater production of any sort after elementary school.
9. Changed the color of my hair in any way.
10. Gone without a bra for more than, like, 10 minutes after I got up.

Finally, ten things about me which seem improbable.
1. I used to take aerobics classes. At 6 am.
2. I really like Cheetos.
3. Once in a very great while, I can sing very nice, non-standard harmonies that I make up on the fly.
4. I don't really know how to sharpen knives.
5. I used to teach pottery classes. (Was I qualified? Absolutely not. Were there other options? Not really.)
6. I hate broccoli.
7. I have a stylist. She lives in my hometown, and every time I'm there - even if it's just for three days - I get her to cut my hair. Everyone in my family goes to her now, and she apparently got my dad to let her wax his eyebrows.
8. Despite the giant mess which is my room, I can and do organize the living daylights out of work situations.
9. I read basically all of How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household, the "Know Your Ingredients" sections of The Joy of Cooking, and a bunch of other books about keeping house when I was a young adolescent.
10. I have a blog.

coming home

Dear California,

I love you. I love going running at Inspiration Point at sunset: I've been doing it at least three times a week for almost two months, and it never gets old. I hope it never does. I don't think it ever could. I can see the Bay to the west and the San Pablo reservoir on the east side of the hills, and the weather is different every time. The first time I went, there were thick bands of cloud that turned fiery colors as the sun went through them, and the Bay and the ocean beyond the gate sparkled. I've been when it's raining and the world feels full of secrets and growing things, and when there's not a cloud in the sky and the sun sets in glory beyond the Golden Gate. Tonight there was a layer of clouds across the whole landward side of the Bay Area, but the sun went down past them as I ran and turned the Bay golden. The hills are green right now, but I know I'll still love them in the summer when they turn golden-brown as the grass dies, and I will still love them as I'm watching the fog creep over the Bay.

I love that it's February and there's a full-blown rose on the arch above the steps, and the magnolias in the back yard are covered in flowers. I love that this summer, there will be the world's most amazing blackberries, and raspberries will cost 89 cents a half pint at the Berkeley Bowl. I love that Tilden Park has coyotes and hawks and baby newts and cows and people with babies and dogs. I love how drivers stop for pedestrians and pedestrians don't jaywalk and people line up in the subway before the train even gets there. I love Telegraph, even if it's commercial and stupid, and I love the gourmet ghetto, even if it's elitist, and I love the Mission, even when it's scary, which is less often than it used to be. I love all three bridges.

I love San Francisco, the city itself. Telegraph Hill is beautiful, because you can see so much, but the whole city and the East Bay are all full of places with beautiful views. Ocean Beach is full of surfers and swimmers and people walking along the beach, and I could sit at Land's End for hours watching the surf come up the rocks and the ships go out to sea and the sun go down past the keyhole rock. I have. I will. I love the city part of the city too. At City Lights, they tell you to have a seat and read whatever you want. The Pride Parade I went to was wild, a carnival of topless dykes on motorcycles and guys in assless leather chaps, firefighters and teachers and the local police and half the city. There's a bar I like at Valencia and Duboce, full of bike messengers and punks. Like every bar I've been to in San Francisco, it serves good beer. I love the city's stupid obsession with internet access, crepes, and sushi. I love that everything's painted light colors. I love how people dress - it's not like the East Coast, where everyone dresses up, but it's also not like the Midwest, where no one does. There are people in fancy clothes and people in sweatpants and lots of people who dress like me, but with better style.

And the East Bay. People in my neighborhood have lemon trees. There's a plum tree at the bottom of the stairs in my house. Everyone drives battered old cars, because the climate allows it. The Monterey Market has the best and cheapest produce I have ever seen in my life. They have things I've never heard of. Every library in Berkeley has a shelf full of books at 25 cents each, and one library will lend you tools, including a 30 pound electric demolition hammer and a piano dolly. The Albatross will lend you a board game to play while you drink your beer. All the houses in the Berkeley hills are different, and each one is surrounded by some perfect, riotous garden.

San Francisco isn't just San Francisco. It's the East Bay and Marin, and most of all it's all the beautiful places around it. Sometimes I think I should live in Bolinas, this tiny town near Point Reyes, so I could go walking and see pelicans circling below me along the side of the bluffs. Sometimes I think I should live in Big Sur. Any weekend that involves breakfast at Zachary's in Santa Cruz and a trip to the central coast is a good weekend. I could move to Big Basin. Or the Sierra. Or northern California, in with the redwoods.

The ocean makes me happier than I have words to express. Whenever I'm sad, I can, eventually, take a bus out to Land's End and sit on the rocks and look at it, and I will be happy again. I can feel it filling me up with its own kind of peace. The Pacific is wilder than the Atlantic. The coast is rockier, and sometimes you can't even get to it - you just stand at the top of the cliff looking at the waves smashing into the cove, and the waterfall coming down to meet it. I could watch the sun set over the Pacific every night and never get tired of it.

I know I have no right to be here. There are too many people here anyway: 35 million and counting. LA is worse, but there are too many people living in northern California too. We're going to wreck this place I love if some of us don't give up on living here. That's not why I'm leaving. I'm leaving because my friends aren't here, because I have promises to keep 3000 miles away, because much as I want to be here - the only place I've ever been where I wanted to live in the place itself - it's not home. Not yet. Maybe some day.

I love you, California. If I come back, will you still be here?

the declining value of truth

I've been thinking a lot about the Bush administration's ability to pile up lies and not get caught. All presidents have a bit of it, and Clinton had more than most, but the Bush administration beats the pants off anyone else I've ever read about. Weapons of mass destruction? Compassionate conservatism? All these lies get exposed, of course, so in a sense you could say they're getting caught, but nobody seems to care. I think it's partly a problem of the intellectual value of truth, both in academia and in the popular imagination. Because no matter what people say about the ivory tower, theoretical perspectives eventually get out and affect people's self-conceptions and the way policy gets made.

Here's my theory (in the basic basic version). Back in the day, when the Enlightenment was getting started, Enlightenment philosophers looked around for a basis for morality, and decided that, like truth and thought and being and all sorts of other things they were interested in, morality was universal and followed universal laws. In fact, morality was made up of universal laws, all of which stemmed (said Kant) from the categorical imperative. So, ok. Morality is a universal law. Where does this universal law come from? Really, ultimately, this is the biggest problem with Kant. Why is it this rule instead of some other rule? Who decides? And he and people like him go through a lot of verbal gymnastics about this, but they never really answer it.

Social contract theory is the same kind of thing: Locke goes on and on about natural rights and he and Hobbes tell all these stories about the state of nature and how we came together for mutual protection. The Hipster Monk said it best: "Oh yeah, remember when that happened? That was great. Sheesh. I love fake histories." When your theory of morality is based on a series of events that never actually happened, you're in a bit of trouble. The basic problem is this: why are life, liberty, and property the 'natural' rights? How are they defined? Where do they come from?

Mill and Bentham disagreed, and said that instead, morality was all about the outcome: the greatest good for the greatest number, or the utility, of an action. Which is nice, but there's something intuitively wrong with a theory that says that morality is all about pleasure; they also run into a bit of trouble with minority rights, which Mill at least was very big on. Someone other than me put it this way: if you get enough screaming Romans into the Coliseum, the misery of the Christians they're watching get eaten by lions is going to be outweighed by their pleasure, so feeding the Christians to the lions is the right thing to do.

The basic problem with both systems of morality - the absolute law and the total relativist - is that they don't provide a decent theory of the person. If your moral actions are predetermined by absolute law, you become an automaton, unable to respond to change and circumstance and totally indistinguishable from anyone else; if they are determined only by pleasure, you have no constancy from moment to moment and become unrecognizable as a single individual. Man, I wish I could remember who wrote the article I got this from.

Anyway, the other basic problem with both systems of morality is that they assume that there is a universal and constant truth, and that there is what Nietzsche calls a "pure will-less timeless painless knowing," either of the universal law or the maximum utility. This started to fall apart with people like Kierkegaard writing these little vignettes about Abraham, the modernist writers really did a number on it, and it kind of collapsed on itself, as I see it, under the weight of finding out that that "universal" truth had actually been the truth as the people with power saw it. Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of Morals, went to the edge of this and looked into the abyss in which truth could not exist; but he didn't jump. That took longer, and it took post-modernism.

Now I'm going to talk about post-modernism, with the disclaimer that I don't really know much about it. I think that puts me in the same boat as most of the people who talk about pomo, though. Maybe even a little better than most. As I understand it, pomo has this basic idea that truth is all perspectival and contingent, that the self basically is fragmented and inconstant, and that we should accept our overlapping and interrelated identities. In terms of thinking about truth, pomo mostly sees it as largely a matter of perspective and function and contingent factors rather than universal.

If truth is perspectival, if it's all really a matter of where you sit and what's useful to say, then having respect for other people's opinions becomes really really important. And I think you can see that: people talk about how what they do or think is no better or worse than anything else: that's just my opinion, they say. It's a sensible, reasonable response to a world where "truth" was and is so often used to justify repression, violence, discrimination. But it also has a lot of problems.

One of those is exemplified by Condoleezza Rice's response to Barbara Boxer's questioning: Rice just kept saying that she was a good person, and claiming that the war in Iraq had been about something that can now be justified rather than about weapons of mass destruction. She, like other members of the Bush administration, says things which are just shy of demonstrably false (e.g. have demonstrably false connotations) and it gets reported with something someone else says but with no evaluation of the truth. Two opposing perspectives is all the media can provide. And, importantly, that's what people see in such arguments: two opposing perspectives, and truth nowhere. Truth is inaccessible, and maybe non-existent.

I don't really blame the Bush administration for this problem, though they're certainly exploiting it. In our adversarial political system, someone would have eventually figured out that this trick worked. The right is milking this for all it's worth: in fact, there was an article on Inside Higher Ed about "The New Repression of the Postmodern Right" that talked about a bill in the Ohio legislature as an expression of radical subjectivity in service of the right. They do invoke absolutes all the time, but in this way that makes it unclear what, exactly, the absolute means. What is freedom? Freedom is whatever the Bush administration defines it as being. There is no knowable history, even for the last four years. Terms have no real meaning. Except, possibly, within the religious right - but that's not what crops up in Bush's usual speeches. He may actually be a religious absolutist, or he may be trying to manipulate the religious right into supporting him: you can't tell. And that, my friends, is post-modern.

I don't know how to address this, really. I like the neo-Aristotelian critique of pomo and the Enlightenment both, but I'm not sure how it applies to a national government with international power. I also have to go to the grocery store.

everybody's favorite asshat

Sadly, today we have two people nominated to be everybody's favorite asshat: Larry Summers and John Negroponte. So.

Larry Summers finally released the transcript of his speech about women in science and engineering. A lot of other people, like Bitch, Ph.D. and I'm sure some other academics I can't track down yet, are writing about it with far more personal knowledge of women's situation in academia than I have. So I'm going to confine myself to this: the president of Harvard University can never not be the president of Harvard University, at least in public. If he wanted to kind of shoot the shit about women and science, he should have gotten some people who knew about it together and had a private conversation, like you do; if he wanted to give a speech to people who have invested an enormous amount of time in studying exactly what he's talking about he should have done his goddamn homework and thought about the implications for the university he's supposedly responsible for. Context is absolutely relevant: his bullshit "provocations" are going to make women feel less welcome at Harvard and give the distinct impression that he doesn't give a shit about the fact that fewer women have been offered tenure every year that he's been president. He should no more "just try to think about and offer some hypotheses" on this than Bush should "just try to think about and offer some hypotheses" on the potential benefits of invading Iran while he's addressing Congress.

Also, Summers forgot not only his role, but his audience. There were people in that room (like Nancy Hopkinson) who had spent an enormous amount of time and energy studying this problem, and his remarks ignored all of the work and study they'd done. If much of your audience knows more about this problem than you do, either from personal experience or from academic research, you should probably pick a different topic, or at the very least do your research beforehand so that you're not demonstrating a total ignorance of stuff they know and have published. I mean seriously. This is the president of Harvard University?

John Negroponte. Now I'm sure we'll get honest intelligence with not terribly brutal methods. I seriously am not sure I can think of a worse person for this job. This part of the post is going to be updated later with some kind of actual information. For now, I'm going to go bang my head against a brick wall, because it feels better than reading the newspaper.

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1. http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=505218, via http://slate.msn.com/id/2112799/.

not everything I do is a feminist act

Yes, let's talk about false consciousness. I find myself getting really annoyed with a lot of what passes for empowering women¹ these days. Echidne recently wrote a post over at Alas about Elle magazine. Now, I have never read Elle, but I read women's magazines occasionally, like when someone else buys them and leaves them around. Mostly Cosmo, which is a lot trashier than Elle, frankly, and therefore somewhat more fun.

They all have this particular attitude, which is something I see a lot in Third Wave feminism: anything a woman does and enjoys doing is a feminist act. Thus, it can be empowering and somehow feminist to buy fancy shoes, wear makeup, get cosmetic surgery, pose for Playboy, write for Cosmo, sleep around, not have sex until marriage, wear a corset, whatever.² I think this is really silly, and I also think it lets a lot of people off the hook: instead of having to look at themselves and their lives and actually figure out what their actions mean in a political context, they get to write off their actions as feminist because they are women.

There's a certain truth to this, which is that feminism shouldn't require women to give up their self-presentation: women shouldn't have to dress like men to be taken seriously. That requirement in itself is anti-feminist, because it takes men as the norm. But when I look at appearance culture, for example, I see a lot of requirements that are reasonable for men and restrictive and time-consuming for women. I also see a lot of women enforcing those requirements, and that is also not a feminist act. It's possible that there are people who are writing for Cosmo or posing for Playboy who are feminists and can argue that they're working to change the system from within. I have nothing against people who work within the system, but I think they'd better have a really clear sense of exactly what their plan is, because it's really really easy to get sucked in to the value systems you're trying to fight. Plus you have to weigh whether the feminist subversion you're doing is stronger than the anti-feminist reinforcement you're lending your name too: I don't know, but I think it's a calculation people have to make.

You know, all these cultural standards are really powerful, and maybe the reason people enjoy meeting them is not that it's genuinely empowering and subversive to do so, but because you get a lot of praise for it. I get about a bazillion times more compliments on my appearance when I'm all femmed out than when I'm wearing my usual clothes, even when I think I look great. That's nice in its own way - I like the ego boost - but I wouldn't say it's feminist.

The other important thing is that not everything any given person does has to be empowering or feminist. Sometimes, I put on my girly clothes because I actually feel girly; other times, I just want a little praise, or I don't want to make a stir at whatever event I'm going to. Everyone has vices and weaknesses and things they just plain like, regardless of the sociopolitical context, and I think we'd all be better off if we agreed to look at our lives as a whole. Then we wouldn't have to say, 3-inch heels are feminist! Just like everything else women do! Because we'd actually be feminists, and empowered.

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1. Not feminism. Oh no. That's too scary.
2. Not that any of those actions is necessarily bad, in and of itself. At all.

I won!

I got an award! From Media Girl, for my post about Valentine's Day.

Good for me. All three people who read my blog can now go look at the list of winners.

coffee

Flea writes, in the middle of a long post about her son being in the hospital:

I managed to weasel a styrofoam cup of harsh, boiled coffee from one of the nurses. It was oily and black and tasted like hate, but I was glad to have it.

I've never had a kid in the hospital (never had a kid, either) but I've had that cup of coffee. It was oily and black and tasted like hate, and I had just sent four kids home in the middle of a trip after they threw four separate tantrums. The rest of our students were running around hitting each other over the head. It was noon; I had been up for 6 hours; I had had no food of any kind.

I still think of the woman who brought me that cup of coffee with utter gratitude.

is this the future?

There's a New York Times article right now about robot soldiers (registration required; free til next week). Apparently there are a couple of versions already out there clearing bombs in Iraq, and there are going to be more, including one with guns that's heading for Baghdad (under control of a soldier with a laptop) in the relatively near future.

This kind of thing freaks me out. I've read a couple of sci-fi books lately where one premise is that the culture involved rejected long-distance weapons at some point in their history because it was going to wreck their society.¹ One society rejects distance weapons because they had disastrous wars using mental weapons, and the other won't use bows and arrows for anything but hunting because they live on a sort of vast steppe where running away is too easy, so honor is all about facing your enemies with a sword. I look at the history of wars, and you know, it mostly doesn't seem to be like that. People have always been all about using whatever advantage they can get and killing as many people as possible. Certainly no one swore off distance weapons or explosives because it was cheating, and war back in the day of knights in shining armor was all about putting the peasants out front to get cut to pieces so the aristocracy wouldn't get too many of its own killed.

Not a lot of honor in that long and sordid history. But it does seem like there have usually been lines people aren't willing to cross, whether for fear of hurting their own interests or because of honor, and with that, there have always been people willing to cross those lines. The biggest one, recently, is the idea that there's a significant moral difference between conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction. Nerve gas is no longer in use, except occasionally by people like Saddam Hussein; nuclear weapons have been used twice, and only twice. We rely on the existence of certain rules for combat: the Geneva Conventions, not attacking civilians, whatever. It's the same thing as trying to live with other people: you know that lots of people could beat you up and steal your money, but you count on the fact that most people won't do that.

I think the same thing happens in war. We won't target children. We won't use chemical weapons. People break those rules, but basically we rely on them. And I think those rules require a certain responsibility for our actions. The closer you are to the evil you're doing, the harder it is to do it. So in the Civil War, people didn't aim or didn't shoot, because they could see the people they were going to kill. If you're dropping a bomb, you don't see that. Having a conscience depends on that direct relationship to your actions.

Robot soldiers are even worse. They will allow us to go further and further away from what we're doing, to program soldiers to kill and then not see the consequences. I'm not a pacifist, really, but I think people should be able to look at their actions and own them: the further we get from that the worse war (and everything) becomes.

All this is quite aside from how completely silly it's going to be if robot armies start taking each other on. Then it'll be just like Magic the Gathering or Warhammer. "My Salamander Hunting Pack can beat up your Daemon Prince!" Except, you know, real. And paid for by my tax dollars.

If that's really what they want, I have an old deck of Magic cards they can have. It's not very good, but it'll get them started. Even better, it won't kill anyone.

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1. The Darkover books by Marion Zimmer Bradley and Jaran and its sequels by Kate Elliott. Jaran is awesome, and some of the Darkover books are pretty good too. The Shattered Chain is total adolescent wish-fulfillment for a certain kind of person.

I need a mentor

The other day I went to the library to look at the US News & World Report rankings of grad schools. I'm seriously considering going to grad school in 2006, or possibly 2007, but the only people I've told are two of my closest friends and the woman at the reference desk in the library. I looked at it for a while, and then looked through the Peterson's guide, and thought, this is not useful.

I don't need a reference book. I need a mentor. I need someone who's older than I am, who understands my situation (where I'm coming from, how I approach decisions, my academic interests, the rest of my life) or at least thinks kind of similarly to me, who has more perspective than I do, and who is in a position to give me decent advice about what I should do. I don't know anyone like that. My parents kind of know my deal, but they so clearly have their own ideas of what my life should be like that I don't trust their advice; they also really don't understand me that well, which is fine. My friends are basically all my age, and have no clear perspective on this stage of decision-making because they're in the middle of it; on the other hand, they understand me pretty freakin' well. My professors are 3000 miles away, and they all obviously chose academia; the two I'm closest to might be able to help me think about what I want, but the one who probably seriously considered a non-academic life seems more like a peer than a mentor. My boss has never really considered going to grad school, and what he wants out of his life is totally different from what I want. I'm living with my grandmother, but if there was ever anyone whose advice I shouldn't take, it's her.

How do you find a mentor? How do you approximate one? I've tentatively decided that by the fall of 2006 I'll not only have a long-term plan, but be in the first stages of getting it done (i.e. going to grad school, or enrolled in a teacher certification program, or hired by some company or organization where I'd like to work for at least a couple of years). But I desperately need perspective outside myself on what grad school in the humanities-oriented social sciences is actually like, and what it feels like to be a professor, and so on. Whether the thing I would want to study is even an option in the field I think I'm interested in. What my alternatives are. Academic blogs are my distractor of choice lately, but they only tell me so much.

about love

Kameron is writing about love again. It's funny, she talks about the people you'd walk through fire with, the people you look at and think, I know there are so many things wrong with you. But I will love you forever.

I think there's something strange about me, because I feel that way about four people, maybe five. There's one on his way to being there, and a couple more who are sort of more distant. I've gotten it on with precisely one of them - my ex - and intend to get it on with precisely none of them in the future. But I love these people. When she writes

You better get giddy. You better be thinking about them when you go to sleep at night, when you get up in the morning; you better be thinking of them in the middle of the night, shit, when you can't sleep. You better be wondering about what they'd have to say about your day, about that bizarre person you bumped into on the train. You better know when you see the absolute perfect thing for them. You'd better want nothing more than to move heaven and earth to hang out with them.

I think about my friends on the East Coast. They don't make my blood boil, but I don't ever really want to live apart from them. I want to raise kids with them, in a loose, extended-family sort of way. No one knows me better than they do - certainly not my biological family or the people I've considered sleeping with lately. I see things and I think, oh man, when can I talk to Hipster Monk about that? I call the Ex from the grocery store to tell him about the produce 3000 miles away, because I know he'll be interested.

And the more distant people? One of them got stupid drunk the last time I saw him, and his boyfriend and I walked him home, stopping every so often to let him throw up in the bushes. He almost never drinks, and I've never seen him that drunk, so it was interesting. Taking care of him I thought a lot about love, and how much I love him, and how I hadn't seen him in a year but there's this part of me that goes with him when he's in Europe or that midwestern I state or wherever. Because love is funny. Love is about what you feel when the person you love is being a moron as much as it is about how awesome they are. It's about affinity, and excitement, and what makes you both laugh, but it's about way more than that. I don't really know what it's about.

I've felt that blood-boiling insanity for a couple of people - one in high school, one in college, a few more people who were just overwhelmingly attractive - and I have to tell you, I'm not impressed. I don't really like any of the people I've felt it for anymore. I actually saw one of them recently, for the first time in three years. He's much the same. He's still a jerk. His life was and remains a mess partly because he can't make promises to people and keep them. He made me so crazy then: whenever I was around him, it was like this switch flipped and my body felt totally different; when he left, it was like I imagine withdrawal is. I don't feel like that about him anymore, and thank goodness for that.

The way I love my friends feels more real than that. The crazy-making attraction feels so sudden and disconnected from everything else that I suspect it of being just physical. Some kind of pheromone trip. I know loving someone you're sleeping with (or want to sleep with) is different from loving someone you'll never sleep with, but I don't know how. I suspect they're less different than usual for me: the Ex and I are really close, and while for me it feels a lot like my other friendships, it's a little different for him, I think. I think it's partly because my serious friendships are a little romantic, a little exclusive, a little intense. We're still friends in large part because I refused to believe that the end of our relationship meant we had to stop loving each other. It's different now, but not that different.

People have said to me that friendships, even ones that seem really serious, shift and move and go away. People leave. People's priorities change: they care more about their partners than about their friends. That doesn't make sense when I think about how I feel, or what I need. I miss my friends; I need my friends. Whether I'm dating someone or not doesn't change that. Bitch, Ph.D. has been writing about her open marriage and her boyfriend, and the way she writes about those relationships makes me think that maybe these long-standing, unconventional ways of loving more than one person can work. Lately I've been thinking that I might actually be able to do non-monogamy, if a good situation ever came up; and part of that is because I feel so strongly that I love my friends, but I can have more than one of them. Who knows. We'll see. I'm young yet.

good bad stupid

good:
Finally finding my good tamari, after I thought my grandmother had nearly used it up and somehow accelerated its aging so that the label was all faded and dusty. It was in the refrigerator, where I'd put it.

bad:
I still can't find the brown sugar. Where does she put most of a pound of dark brown sugar if it's not in the refrigerator, the cupboard, the cooler, or with the big jars of grains?

stupid:
The measuring cups at IKEA. Not only are they round on the bottom - a stupid design, but the kind of thing stores like IKEA do - but they are half in metric and half in US measurements. Thus, the set is 1/2 cup, 100 mL, 50 mL, and 1 tablespoon. Totally useless. I know they're not an American company, but they could have a set that's consistently in one unit of measurement. At least then I'd know what the problem was.

semi-voluntary poverty

I'm an outdoor educator. This means I have a really awesome job, that I spend most of my time playing in the woods, that I get to be part of someone's life-changing experience pretty much every week, that I go to professional development trainings on whitewater canoeing. It also means I'm poor.

I make less than minimum wage. I also get no benefits of any kind, including unemployment, because I am a per diem employee and my wages are regulated under the same laws that regulate camp counselors. I get a sort of grim amusement out of reading articles about labor laws and people who are underpaid. Sometime last year, the New York Times ran an article about hot dog cart companies that don't follow labor laws. One of the enforcement agents said, "No one should have to work from sun-up to sun-down for $65 a day." Guess what? That was my per diem rate last year,¹ except that I work round the clock. There was an article about grad student unions in the US News I was looking through today, and a UPenn student organizer said you can't live on $15,000/year in Philadelphia. That's about half again as much as I make, and I live in Philadelphia. Last year I think I cleared the poverty line, but by maybe two thousand dollars at the absolute most. My job expects me to spend two or three months every year going to unpaid training. This year, things have improved: we'll get a stipend between $100 and $300, depending on which trainings they decide to offer, for nearly a month of more or less mandatory training. There's a bumper sticker I like, somewhat bitterly, that says, "I work 40 hours a week to be poor." More, actually, in my case.

Of course, I'm not selling hot dogs. I'm doing something I love. It's also not like I don't have other options: I could probably make more temping half-time in California than I do at my outdoor ed job. I could do something like the New York Teaching Fellows Program.² I could go back to school. My whining is the whining of a college-educated kid with plenty of other opportunities, and I know that. It's also not like the organization I work for is making a huge profit off my work.³ They're kind of broke too. And outdoor ed norms are to pay poorly and expect people to be more or less homeless: live in a staff house that makes me miserable, live in a truck, whatever. That's how their budget is laid out, and the courses are still way too expensive for any of my students to even consider if they had to pay full fee. The extra from my work, the value I'm not getting paid for, goes to my students.

I've heard a lot of arguments about gentrification, which is rampant in Philadelphia, and I've heard a lot of people say vaguely nasty things about white lefties who kind of slum it for a couple years after college by working for non-profits and saying that they're poor. It's true that some people seem to take the fact that they work for a non-profit for less than they could get at a corporate enterprise as evidence that they're saints, and it's also true that some of those people are actually making a reasonable living and are complaining because they come from wealthier backgrounds. But I've worked for a lot of non-profits, and let me tell you, most of those white college-educated lefties are not getting paid much. They're usually getting paid more than I am, but the organizations they work for would be in trouble without people to run the office, write the grants, teach the after-school classes, and recruit the volunteers for substantially less than their skills are worth on an open market. Non-profit funding gets stretched and stretched and stretched, and much as it's true that my organization would do better with more staff stability, it would cost them money they don't have.

But I keep coming back to the fact that I'm living in Philadelphia, not Colorado or California. I'm giving up a lot of the options for natural beauty and playing in the mountains so that I can have some kind of normal life and be near my friends. And I'm busting my ass for my job: when I'm working, I'm working. I am doing nothing else. It's really important to me to eat well, but if my students have a crisis one morning, I deal with that. I don't have breakfast. I sleep six hours a night so I can keep track of them while they're awake and make plans for the next day with my co-instructor. I spend more than half and sometimes all of any given month away from home, I give up the opportunity to take martial arts classes or Spanish or pottery or just have a weekly discussion group, because I cannot say that I'll be somewhere once a week. I haven't tried to have a love life with this job, but there's a reason for that. I have some kind of a normal life, but not really.

So I'm putting a lot in, and even if the organization is broke, they could make it a priority for us to get paid a reasonable amount. The outdoor ed programs in other cities pay more, and frankly, one of the reasons I came back this year was that my Philadelphia Boss promised me they'd be paying us what people get for this work in Boston and New York. They're not. We're also not getting paid enough for training to cover my rent, which Philadelphia Boss also promised.⁴ Tomorrow I'm going to talk to the Director about training, the stipend, and whether I'm willing to work a month straight with one or two days off, and I have to think about how I want to frame it. I want her to pay me more, and I think one place where I have leverage is in being willing to stick around if I get paid more.

But I'm not convinced I do want to stick around, because I'm going to have to have this conversation every three months forever; I've been thinking that I want more stability in my life anyway, and thinking that this coming year might therefore be the end of it. I might leave Philadelphia next September and spend the fall working with adjudicated youth and the winter skiing, and apply for grad school or a teacher cert program for fall 2006. My job is kind of not going anywhere: I can stay and be a lead instructor for a few years, but I suspect that two years of doing this particular job full-time will be more than enough, and I'll stop learning from it and therefore stop wanting to do it. Then I can either look for instructing gigs that will teach me more - either technical skills in some other part of the country, or teaching skills working with a different kind of program - or start thinking about transferring to administrative work, which, maybe. But at some point, no matter what, I'd have to go work for other programs and see other models. I don't want to tell the Director I'll stick around for a long time, and then not do it. On the other hand, I might come back next spring if they take care of me, or stay for the fall, but I sure won't do either of those things if they don't.

The truth is I hate being poor. I hate it in a lot of ways, from being dependent on my parents for health insurance to not being able to buy new clothes when I put holes in my jeans, and what I hate most is that it makes me think and talk about money all the time, and that makes me feel like I'm greedy and materialistic. It makes me resent my organization. I need to leave before I start really resenting them, because busting your ass for something you resent is no good at all, and it will mess up my teaching.

---

1. Small raise this year. Woohoo.
2. Except please, not in New York. I am apparently one of two people in the entire world who never ever wants to live there. It feels like too many rats in too small a cage, and I worry that I would have babies and chew their heads off. Or perhaps not have babies and just chew my own fingers off.
3. When my boss told me that he came in $20,000 under budget last year, I wanted to scream. But I also know that our national organization is broke and the local isn't that flush.
4. Philadelphia Boss apparently desperately wants these things to happen, and promises them because he thinks they're important. He's great. But he also needs to stop promising me things that he wants to be true and are nevertheless not certain, because it makes me not believe him.

sex for roses

I hate Valentine's Day, but not as much as I should. It makes my sister completely miserable, because it's another reminder that she's single and makes her feel undesirable and sort of failed. She cares a lot more about cultural norms than I do. She's also had a less satisfying romantic life than I have, though not because mine is superlative.¹

I've never spent Valentine's Day with someone I was dating. The one year I was dating someone on February 14, my little brother's bar mitzvah was that weekend. Bar mitzvot have to be scheduled nearly a year in advance, so when my mother asked how I felt about the second weekend in February I couldn't think of any problems. My euphemism² was sort of disappointed: he's a bit more of a romantic than I am, and I think he wanted to actually do romantic things on Valentine's Day. I was perfectly happy to go out to fancy-dress dinner with him the next weekend, and in fact probably happier about it than I would have been if we'd gone on the 14th itself.

My dislike for Valentine's Day falls into two major categories: the political and cultural criticism category, strongly informed by my feminism; and a certain bemusement towards the actual practices by which people observe it. Flowers? Well, roses are nice, but I don't really care about them. Plus, what little energy I put to thinking about flowers focuses on wishing I could afford them regularly. Chocolates? I like chocolate, but chocolates are usually not too interesting. I'd rather have a bar of really good plain dark chocolate. Cards? I made a couple of nice valentines (one has a sort of artsy green butterfly; the other has red polka-dot trim and a purple heart and little blue spangles and a red fishnet wrapping), and I really enjoyed the process of making them. But I also made really pretty New Year's presents for my friends, and enjoyed that just as much. I like strawberries, but they're not any good right now; I don't eat steak or oysters. Even the whole needing to have a date thing is sliding off me right now, because I don't really mind being single.³ The only thing I really like that's associated with Valentine's Day is champagne. Man oh man do I like champagne. But since I can't afford it, and neither can most of the people I know, it's not really an issue. So I just sit there and look at the circus and go, huh.

The one thing about this feeling is that I really hate it when people assume that the way to make me happy on Valentine's Day is to give me culturally approved signifiers. Come on, now. There are lots of reasons to give people presents, but two of the primary ones are to give people things they will actually like, and to impress them by showing them how well you understand them and how thoughtful you are. But you know, it takes no creativity or thought whatsoever to get someone a dozen roses for Valentine's Day. And if that's what you get me, I will not be precisely annoyed - it's a nice gesture, after all, and it's kind of ungracious to be annoyed when someone gets you pretty flowers - but I will not be nearly as impressed as I would have been if you'd glued interesting pictures to a piece of cardboard and made me a card. Or written me a note about why you like me. Or made me a cd of songs I don't know but would like. Or baked me cookies. Or bought me warm socks or a bar of dark chocolate. All of those are things that are personal. All the standard stuff is just a way to express generic affection without bothering to learn anything about the person you claim to care about.

That kind of substitution of the generic for the personal is one of my big political problems with Valentine's Day. Another is the way all the approved actions are so strongly gendered, with women cast as the people who want reassurance, love, and romance, and men cast as the ones who provide it (by spending money, of course). Professor B links to a favorable article about online dating,⁴ which mentions that women are more sexually adventurous and men are more emotionally open online. I don't know why they're so surprised. The internet cuts people out of their usual social contexts, which can be scary, but can also free them from the kind of social coercion that makes men pretend to be emotionally dead and women pretend they're not interested in sex.

Valentine's Day is all about keeping all those roles in place. Women provide sex and want romance and money; men provide romance and money and want sex. Eew. I hate thinking of my relationships, romantic or not, in that transactional mode. The relational part of being human is really strong, and really wonderful, and I think it cheapens and sours it to talk about it like it's a widget exchange. Not to mention the way these enforced gender roles damage women, damage men, contribute to sexual violence, and completely fuck over anyone who's not straight.

One consequence of the heteronormativity of everything is that shows like the L Word (a guilty pleasure if ever I had one) usually make the characters take recognizably masculine and feminine roles, even when there's not a butch woman among them. There was this one episode in the ongoing struggles of the central couple to find an appropriate sperm donor in which they considered a threesome with some guy who was hitting on them.⁵ After it failed, Bette - the bigshot curator who's always really busy with work - asked Tina - her partner, who would have been the one getting pregnant - if Tina had been attracted to the guy. There was never any question of whether Bette would be attracted to him: after all, only the person in the "woman" role can possibly be attracted to a guy, even when there aren't any butch/femme dynamics going on. I'm betting that if they'd had a Valentine's Day episode (which, because of scheduling, they didn't) Bette would have bought Tina flowers and taken her out for dinner. These shows slot their characters into gender roles because without them, they don't know how to tell the story. There's no spot for the generic cultural signifiers, because those signifiers are totally dependent on gender for their meaning.

Come on, people. Live a little.

---

1. If you know a nice boy in the Boston area who wants to date a lovely, intelligent, practical, somewhat insecure, and totally inexperienced college junior, please let me know. But he has to be nice. And, you know, appropriate.
2. That's what I called him for a long time. I still dislike all the actual options.
3. Or, you know, whatever.
4. Which I have never tried and probably will never try, despite the minor kick I get out of writing profiles.
5. What a terrible idea. Unprotected sex with a complete stranger can have all sorts of nasty consequences, even aside from the ethics of specifically trying to conceive a kid with someone who may not want one.

miscellaneous fauna

During my run yesterday, I saw cows. Cows! In a public park in Berkeley. I came around a corner in the trail and there they were, lots of them, just kind of hanging out, eating and chewing and looking at the scenery. There were a few calves, including one who nursed while I was there. It was great.

On Saturday, a raccoon ran across the street in front of me.

And a week or two ago, there were newts out on the trail where I run. It had been raining, and they were crawling everywhere. Apparently it's newt breeding season here. One of the park roads is closed for it. They're beautiful and kind of astonishing: burgundy above and burnt ochre underneath, and when you pick them up to move them off the road they feel dense and muscular and a little slimy from the rain.

There is also the ever-present Pongo, my grandmother's dog, who is a prince among dogs. My mother is his fairy dogmother. She rescued him and brought him to California.

safety questions

I've had a number of conversations with my parents that start out with me telling them about my exciting ideas for cool things to do, and end up with them telling me to be careful, usually by taking someone else with me. The most recent was today, about going up to Yosemite Valley; the most memorable is something I'll probably never forgive my dad for saying. I was talking about hiking one of the long trails - the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, and the Continental Divide Trail - and he said, "I'm sorry, but there has to be a male on that trip." They're mostly not worried that I'll twist an ankle and not be able to call for help for a couple of days; instead, they worry that I'll be attacked, raped, and murdered. One of my grandmothers has the same worries: she insisted on lending me her cellphone when I drove from Chicago to Philadelphia alone, and regularly sends me those stupid forwarded emails with new schemes that kidnappers, carjackers, rapists, or whatever supposedly use.

So let's put aside the fact that I'm a lot less likely to need protection from lascivious or violent humans on one of those trails than in my daily life. Let's put aside the fact that any help I'd need from another person would almost certainly be some kind of medical care, and in that case I'd want someone with a cellphone, emergency medical training, or ideally both. Let's also put aside the fact that I have pretty darn good wilderness medical training myself, and am at least as likely to be doing the helping as to need the help. Instead, let's talk about women and safety.

There are a lot of supposedly basic precautions I don't take. I don't feel I need a partner to go backpacking, although I don't often go alone because it's so much more fun to go with someone. I walk home alone at night, sometimes in sketchy or unfamiliar neighborhoods, sometimes when I've had a fair amount to drink. I take the subway or the bus instead of a cab, because I don't have money. I took a ride up to my snow skills training from some guy I'd met once, and I'd take a ride from people I'd never met if I knew them through some context, like as friends of someone I'd once met. Tonight I went running: there was plenty of light when I started and I had originally planned to do a short run and be back before dark, but I really wanted that long run. So it was almost fully night in a public park and there I was alone, doing some stretches next to my car.

I've only been hassled twice, once at 11 am on my way to the train station three and a half years ago, when a guy riding by on his bike grabbed my breast, and an evening that same summer when I was waiting for the bus in a neighborhood I didn't know and ended up waiting for about half an hour. Someone who seemed to think I was a prostitute came up to me and kind of mumbled at me in a language I didn't understand, and someone else drove by and offered me a ride and then came back to repeat his offer after I refused, which frankly kind of scared me. It was my first time living in a major city, and I don't think I knew the kinds of tricks I know now about how to walk so you look confident and aware of your surroundings, even when you feel like shit.

Not looking vulnerable only does so much good, though, especially since I'm small and female and that makes me look vulnerable even when I'm walking assertively. The worst part is that I can never tell which fears are rational and which aren't. Is it reasonable to go for a run at night in a city? Is it reasonable to have four beers at a bar and then walk home by myself, because my friends want to stay longer and I'm tired? What's reasonable? The woman at the temp job I'm doing tomorrow said they'd pay for a cab on Tuesday, because they want me to work til 9 pm. That's nice, but of course I take bigger risks than a bus ride in a posh SF neighborhood all the time.

And the real question: what's the alternative? I could decide not to run, but I really want to run; tonight, I really wanted 6 miles instead of 4. I also like (by which I mean love and need for my own sanity) to be out in pretty places by myself: should I give that up? I could take cabs back from all my social events, but then I couldn't afford to go to social events. I could make my friends walk me home from the bar - something they'd probably do, if I asked - but I'd feel like a burden. I could stop drinking except at home and at friends' houses where I can spend the night. I could always drive my own vehicle. Not walking alone at night was kind of reasonable in Des Moines, where everyone drives everywhere, but try doing that in a major city. Basically, I could spend a lot more money and fuck up my life to deal with a relatively minor risk, because most people who attack women are people those women know. Not to mention the fucking highway, which is way more dangerous than Yosemite Valley and all three trails combined.

The really ridiculous thing is that all these nonspecific fears don't actually help me - or anyone - stay safe. They don't help me make good decisions, because I need or want to do so many "unsafe" things. They don't help me respond to bad situations. They don't address the bad situations I'm actually likely to encounter. They just give me a big pile of guilt and worry to take the edge off my joy in my life and my independence. Thanks, culture, and fuck you too.