Day 75: When a joke isn't

I am teaching my language and gender class this semester.  And I am a linguist, which means that I'm always thinking about the ways in which the use of language serves to (re)create social structures, especially structures of power.  And I have a fantastic student doing an independent study this semester on toxic masculinity and ways of changing the production of masculinity to avoid toxicity. 

All of this is to say that, when a dear friend said this weekend, as someone who believed he is doing a favor for us in watching over our younger daughter while she's at college, that he'd get a pitchfork to fend off the droves of people who would want her, it arrested my attention.  When I pointed out that she's more than capable of making informed and intelligent choices about her body, relationships, and sexuality, he said he was just kidding, with a bit of a wink and a nudge.

I didn't point out all the ways that it wasn't a joke.  I didn't point out that, for that statement to be a joke, it must rely on our shared understanding and acceptance of a set of social structures that have been labelled patriarchy, the oppression of women, toxic masculinity, and rape culture.  I should have.  But I did that social smoothing over thing, and copped out.  I should have, though, because when we put "jokes" like that out in the world, we repeat, believe, and create the structures that those jokes rely on.  In other words, they aren't jokes - they not only reflect but also make the world we live in.

Basically, that joke assumes that: men are sexually aggressive; women should be sexually pure; the sexual purity of women is of consequence to the men to whom women "belong" in some way (older brothers, fathers, etc); those men become upset when other men advance on those women and thus have to fight those other men off. 

Those assumptions are at the heart of the structures I mentioned above. They subordinate women to the will of men (either men's will to have sex with them, or their will that women not have sex).  They license aggression on the part of men by presuming that it is natural and innate (the evidence is strongly in that it is not).  Those two things coupled make rape culture seem natural (rape is what happens when females are available to male sexual aggression, which is why women are often blamed for their rapes - they shouldn't have been available, which is something they control; while men are not blamed, because their aggression and their sexuality are assumed to not be under their control).  All of these are hallmarks of patriarchy - a world which centers male stories and perspectives.

For this reason, I absolutely loathe the jokes about fathers waiting in the bushes with loaded guns to scare their daughters' dates.  They depend on the same idea that daughters are their fathers' possessions, and that fathers don't want them to be taken away by boys/men.  I also hate the "don't hit women" trope - it assumes the male violence is normal and that it must be restrained to protect weak women.  Why don't we say, don't hit people?  Honestly - why don't we say that?

Don't hit people, y'all.  And please don't make jokes that aren't.

Day 15: Making progress

When Tess went off to college, I knitted her a blanket. 

 

 Knowing how long it had taken me to knit it, I decided to make sure that I'd have plenty of time to knit Kivrin's, as her time for college approached.  Like her sister, she has very good taste (and no sympathy for how long it might take to knit something), and chose this. 

Sigh.

I ordered the yarn, and got started last fall, figuring I'd have lots of time.  I knew that I also had some graduation knitting to get done (I decided years ago that each of my friends' kids would get something hand-knitted when they graduated from college: shawl-type objects for the women, and socks for the men; I have a few who have gone a different route, and so I need to figure out a nice milestone-type occasion to knit them something)(the flaw in this plan is that they tend to come in batches, which has meant some very busy knitting years for me).

Then things, which had been difficult, kind of fell apart.  (I write all this with Kivrin's permission.)  Briefly, Kiv has several learning disabilities* which don't have an impact on her ability to actually comprehend high-level course material, but which do have an impact on her ability to process verbal instructions and to organize herself.  And her school has the most ass-backward way of managing disability accommodations that I have ever heard of.  Basically, her teachers decide what they think she needs, on the basis of, apparently, watching her in the classroom.  (Rather than, oh say, reading her diagnosis.  Or talking to a professional.)(Some of the teachers who were deciding what  accommodations were reasonable literally did not know that she had cognitive disorders, and the school counselor kept trying to tell us she has ADHD, suggesting that they did not read the diagnosis put together after an eight-hour battery of tests by a neuropsychiatrist.**)  Because she is smart and articulate and (and I kid you not, this is what one of her teachers said in a meeting) dresses well and looks put-together, and because she was working towards her International Baccalaureate diploma, they decided that she was using her "disabilities" as an excuse to get extra stuff (they actually said this).  And that she therefore didn't need the most crucial of the accommodations that she requested: assignments and due dates, ahead of time, in one place (read: a syllabus); and the ability to turn things in late when she missed getting the assignment because they wouldn't give her that first accommodation.  Teachers also refused to proactively check in with her (as in: I'm collecting assignments now, do you have yours), or to help her remember to get a list of what she heard them assigning in class signed to confirm its accuracy.  There's more, and I won't go into it all, but there was a very strong sense of, smart and learning disabilities don't go together, so she must just be trying to get away with something. (That was actually said out loud several times at one memorable meeting, where it was suggested that she stop doing the IB program, and stop doing theater tech, rather than providing reasonable accommodations for her disabilities.)(Pointing out to them that she was very successful in a college summer class when she was given - gasp - a syllabus with the schedule of assignments so that she could track them more easily was totally dismissed.) 

The last two years of high school have been brutal, frustrating, and exhausting for both of us.  For some time, I was reading textbooks out loud to her each night, and taking dictation on assignments (just to name one example).  Long story short, there came a point in her senior year where it was unclear whether she'd graduate in June or have to finish up in summer school.  And since she was waitlisted at the two colleges she really wanted to attend, we were all rethinking this coming year as a year for her to take classes that interest and excite her at our local college, regain some confidence in her ability to function in an academic setting, and participate in some of the fantastic theater programs in the area. 

In the middle of all that, the college blanket took a backseat.

And then, Seattle University (her top choice school) accepted her.  And she graduated.  (I literally had so braced myself for things to go sideways at the last minute that I couldn't believe it, even once they handed her a diploma with her actual name on it.)  And, in July, she received her International Baccalaureate diploma (which is totally no joke at all, dudes - that's a demanding program). 

So guys, she's going to college.  In September. 

!!

I have been knitting madly since it hit me that this is all real.  I did the math at one point, and calculated that it's taking me about five hours per square of knitting time; then there's the putting it all together.  I figure if I have the squares done by the end of August, drop dead, I should have enough time in the first two weeks of September to put it together.  Right?  (right?)

 Twenty-one squares down, half a square OTN, eight and a half left to go.  I've got this.

*Dyslexia, auditory processing disorder, visual-spatial processing disorder.
** Guys, if we had this much trouble, with all of the resources we were able to access, up to and including an accurate diagnosis, can you even imagine what it's like to be fighting this system without time, money, and information?  Your kid would be on ritalin, sitting in the back of the classroom, faster than you can say, get out of our hair.  As we come out of the other side of this, I keep wondering where I can leverage what I know and have to benefit folks who just aren't as lucky as I have been.  The system seems intractable, though.  At some point, I may expand on this with a post about what I learned about disability accommodations in education, and what we learned from the lawyer we consulted.  In any case, I'm mulling it over.

Day 9: Intent and impact

A lot of ink has been spilled in recent days over whether or not Trump is a racist.  I want to contend, perhaps controversially, that it doesn't matter.  And, in fact, that arguing over whether or not he (or anyone else) is racist doesn't serve those of us who are deeply concerned about this kind of discourse.  It doesn't serve us, not because what he's saying isn't racist, but precisely because it is.  And this is where the distinction between intent and impact really matters.

I'm a linguist (I may have mentioned this before).  And, in fact, I'm a linguistic anthropologist.  So you might say that my stock in trade is based in the understanding that speech* is action.  To say something is to do something in the world.  (Maybe reread that, because it's the foundation of the whole rest of this post.)

What this means is that we are not responsible only for what we mean by our words, but also for what they do.  I understand that this is the point where all of us, including me, to one degree or another, feel resistance.  But surely I can't be responsible for all of the possible impacts of my words - what about people who are hypersensitive?  What about stuff I didn't know could be hurtful?  Why can't people give me the benefit of the doubt?  And I get it.  I truly do.

That doesn't change the fact that our words have an impact. And the more that those words ring with broader discourses and social structures that create and reinforce inequalities, the more we are responsible for their impacts.  A useful term here is "intertextuality", the idea that every text (spoken texts count) is understood in no small part through its links to other texts, past and present.  No speech event stands in isolation. 

I think it also helps to unpack what it means to say that a particular speech event is racist (or sexist, or misogynist, and so on).  (I should say before I go on that there's really no way to cover this well in a space this short - this is a massive national conversation we need to be having - and I was tempted to say nothing at all, but I think that way lies complicity, so here I go.)  A racist speech event is one that upholds and justifies the structures which legitimate one group of people's ways of being and doing as right and natural for our society as a whole.**   

As a relevant aside, I have been struck by the many people who are upset by those who criticize what they call "our" way of life.  Who is the "we" there?  It is white, Christian, and patriarchal.  The use of "our" is another racist speech event that upholds those identities as normative, right, legitimate.  And it simultaneously denigrates anyone who would hold alternative perspectives.***

A racist speech event is about power.  It upholds the power, in this country, of white folks to say what they want; it upholds and justifies the structures that allow that to happen.  It upholds and legitimizes the violences that keep people of color from speaking (physical, emotional, psychological, political, and so on).  A single speech event, through the process of intertextuality, draws upon and feeds the many other speech events that create a system of racism in this country.  In other words, speech doesn't just reflect what is, it creates it in an ongoing way.  It reifies structures - makes them real.  As fiber artists (which I know many of you are), we know that a single strand of yarn may be weak, but a knitted or woven structure is strong.  In the same way, a single speech event, all by itself, may not seem strong - but we must acknowledge and understand that each speech event is interwoven with many many others.  And that interweaving makes them strong.  It creates impact.

I started this off by saying that it doesn't really matter if Trump is a racist (and boy, am I having trouble not also writing this about misogyny).  And here's why.  When someone says that he (or anyone else who says something that justifies and reinforces structures of racism) is a racist, it's all too easy to duck that charge, as we are seeing here.  And then we get into arguments about whether a person really is racist.  (Check out this video, which I show my students each semester - Jay Smooth gets at this point in a fun and useful way.)  But it doesn't really matter whether someone is racist in their heart of hearts.  Instead, it's critical to focus on what their words are actually doing out there in the world.  As many have argued in their analyses of the implications of telling four women of color, all US citizens (and three of whom were born here in the US), to go home if they are going to criticize anything about the US, these words do a number of things out there in the world, all of them racist.  They say that some people are allowed to criticize the US, and others aren't. I'd like to point out that no-one has told Bernie Sanders to go home.  Or Elizabeth Warren.  That is a text (silence is also a text) which links to this one, and tells us that white folks (and especially white men) can engage in criticism of the US, but that women of color cannot.  These words tell us which folks can become US citizens, and whose membership in our national community, no matter how long they've been here, is contingent.  Barring Native Americans, we all came here from somewhere - some of us willingly, others as enslaved human beings.  No-one ever, not ever, tells white men to go home.  Their immigrant status is gone in a generation.  People of color do not get that consideration.  (This chimes with the birther lies about President Obama, which only make sense if the citizenship of people of color is always contingent.)

Even Lindsay Graham's statement reinforces this message: "I don't think [Trump's statement] is racist to say.  I don't think a Somali refugee embracing Trump would be asked to go back.  If you're racist, you want everybody to go back because they are black or Muslim."  It is not true to say that if you're racist, you'd want everybody to back.  Racism is about maintaining systems of inequality.  Insisting that people of color are OK as long as they agree with you is, you guessed it, part of a system of inequality.  It relies on and replicates racism. 

I know from teaching about this in my classes that it's really hard to step into the idea that our words are implicated in immense and intractable structures of racism and misogyny.  It feels too big.  I think we end up feeling frightened by the weight of responsibility that this implies, and when we're frightened, we often get angry (so much easier to feel righteous indignation than fear and shame).  As I try to help my students see (and as I try to remember myself), the fact that our words have so much power should give us not only pause and an incentive to be careful, but also hope.  If my words can reinforce structures of power inequity, institutionalized forms of violence, surely they can also help to undo them?  At the very least, I have the power to choose not to make real the things that I don't want to see in the world.

When someone calls us out on the impact of our words, and we respond by saying things like, "but I didn't mean it that way", or "why are you so sensitive?", we are speaking from and defending our smaller selves.  When we say, "but I didn't know" that it would have that impact, or that it does that thing out there in the world, that is true sometimes.  It seems, though, that once we know better, we can do better.  Not out of a sense of self-flagellation or martyrdom, but rather because there's something important about being actively engaged in creating the world we want to live in.  Something that speaks to our larger Selves, the selves that understand that we live in community, that interconnection makes us better.  Bringing about Martin Luther King Jr's Beloved Community, a world where we can look at one another and see ourselves in all other beings - it doesn't happen in isolation.  It doesn't happen if we indulge in guilt or shame, or if we hide from the consequences of our actions.  And it certainly doesn't happen without care for our words, precisely because they are action. 



*"Speech" is (not unproblematic) shorthand for language in both its primary - oral and manual (signed) - and secondary (written) forms.
**Please note: this is why reverse racism really isn't a thing.  Even if individual people are biased against white folks, they don't have the structures of power behind them, and their bias doesn't create structures of power which disadvantage white folks. I know that it's tempting to think that they do, but the data show otherwise.
*** Please also note: to believe that this was, at any point in its past, a white nation is to disregard the facts of history.  Our history books have been written to give that impression. Which, of course, implicates those books in this project of upholding racial inequities.  This is also why it's problematic to say that people of color (and women, and LGBTQ folks, etc) are playing "identity politics".   We're all playing identity politics - it's just that white, Christian, male identities are allowed to remain unspoken, so when policies are put in place that benefit that particular group, we call that business as usual.

Day 7: Who needs to "go back"?

This has been coming to mind over the last few days, so I thought I'd post, as it makes me laugh in a dark and sassy kind of way...

A slightly different perspective on belonging and respect, in response to this week's deeply problematic twit storm:

Mulling over harrassment - long and anguished

OK, you know this had to happen, right?  I mean me, sharing some thoughts about #metoo and sexual harrassment and Franken and Moore and the whole thing.  Please feel free to skip this if it isn't your cup of tea, and return next time for our regular programming.

I have, as I'm sure many of you have, been watching and contemplating and contextualizing and trying to understand and processing how I feel about each of these revelations and their consequences or lack thereof, and wanting to write something about it, but haven't quite been sure where to start.  It seems to me that there are so many threads that must be followed to come to even some sort of understanding of the whole fabric that, as it were, clothes this moment in history - which one to pick at first?

Having just spent a weekend at my annual conference (and there's a post in the queue about that), the American Anthropological Association's Annual Meetings, I've been thinking a lot about positionality.  The idea there is that the various elements of my position - elements which are commonly thought of as identity, but which I would think of as being much more fluid and less stable than the noun "identity" suggests - have a significant relationship to my perspective on the world.  They should, therefore, not be taken for granted; there is no objective or right or unmarked position from which anyone can stand and opine.  So, it's perhaps worth coming right out and stating that I am: a European-American, cisgendered, straight, married, upper-middle-class, non-theist/animist, feminist, progressive woman who has two daughters and a PhD in the social sciences.  And so much more, as you know (a knitter, a horse owner, a hiker, a reader, a friend - the list, as it does for all of us, goes on).

For the purposes of understanding my thoughts about sexual harrassment, the label "progressive" up there is perhaps the most relevant.  To me, being a progressive is different from (although with some overlap) being a liberal, and means that I believe that we, as a society, can do better than we have in the past.  Not by rejecting everything from the past part and parcel, but rather by learning from it, and reaching toward something better in the future.  For me (and I wouldn't presume to think that this is how all progressives think), that means doing my best to create a world that resembles the Beloved Community discussed as early as the early 20th century (the philosopher Josiah Royce), although it is perhaps most associated with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  The way I tend to think of the beloved community is this: that when we look at other human beings, we see ourselves.  As an animist, I actually would extend that to the planet as a whole, but that's a discussion for another day.  By seeing ourselves, I do not mean, being like ourselves; I mean seeing them as full and complete human beings, with the same desires for respect and peace and safety and well-being that we have.  Seeing here means holding all the complexity of another person with affection and acceptance.  If we look at another person and see ourselves, surely we would not want them to suffer, to be lacking in the resources that they need to live a full life, to feel fundamentally that they are not cared for and respected?  Love informs the beloved community, not power.

Power informs sexual harrassment, not love.  Not only power, but a lens that views women as not-people, not-self - instead as available for the whims of men either because those men are in power or because they want to feel powerful.  (I realize that men are also sexually harrassed by other men; however, for the moment, I am going to center the perspective of women for two reasons: one, that perspective so rarely takes center stage, and two, the vast majority of those who endure sexual harrassment and assault are women.)

There are a number of threads that feed into a culture that accepts harrassment as part of the normal workings of everyday life.  One of the most insidious is the one that frames men as a) highly sexual, b) inherently violent, and c) out of control of both their sexuality and violence.  The onus for controlling men's sexuality and violence therefore falls on women.  It is of critical importance to note that this is a social construct: men are not inherently more sexual or violent than women, and they are certainly not more out of control of their impulses than women.  A culture of toxic masculinity both gives men permission to understand themselves this way, and traps them into that understanding, denying them access to their whole selves, selves that need and want love and affection and a full range of emotion, selves that often pay serious physical and emotional prices for locking away those sides of themselves.  The NYT had a great article today on exactly this, the power of touch and how critical it is for all human health, and how men's touch is so frequently given only two avenues for expression: violence, and sex (and how often those two then become conflated).

Another thread is one which treats women as somehow not belonging to the more general class of "people".  Women are framed as weak and in need of protection; they are also framed as the purview of men.  I can't tell you how many times I have heard people say, either "I was raised" (if the person is a man), or "I raised my boys" (a parent speaking of sons) "to respect women/to never hit a girl"; these often come in one breath.  To which I invariably respond (or bite my tongue to stop myself from responding), why just women and girls?  Why don't we raise our boys to not hit people?  And to include women and girls in the class of "people"?  This framing reinforces an understanding of women as weak, and in need of protection (usually by a man, which in turn reinforces our understanding of women as belonging to men).  Imagine how different things might be if we raised people to respect people, where respect means many things, including allowing all people the integrity of their bodies.

Related to this thread is that of our treatment of women when it comes to reproduction.  Women's bodies become the belongings of society.  We regulate their access to birth control, and to reproductive health services, including abortion.  Powerful men who enact the laws that regulate these things publicly sometimes encourage "their" women to make use of these services, up to and including the abortions that these men attempt to make illegal, when it suits the interests of those powerful men.  Our nation's handling of women's bodies is, to my mind, one of the places where we are farthest from the beloved community that I spoke of earlier.  If we truly value humans and human lives, why would we not do two things: ensure that women have access to safe, legal abortions, and, at the same time, work our hardest to create a world where that service is needed rarely?  By that I mean valuing all life: the lives of mothers before, during, and after conception and birth, and the lives of children after they are born.  This means easy and affordable access to: birth control; prenatal and postnatal health services; health care for infants and children; real food; high-quality public education from kindergarten through college; safe places to live and play; either support for mothers who decide to stay home, or high-quality affordable child care for those who need or want to work outside the home; a living wage.  Also, a world in which they do not have to fear sexual assault.  Do you see?  Women are vulnerable.  Laws which deny women full and free rights to their bodies and to choices about reproduction treat women as lesser humans and as society's possessions.  Our current system, which limits women's access to birth control and health services, and which doesn't support them in raising healthy children, a social system which simultaneously supports men in (and even encourages them) harrassing and assaulting women with few, if any consequences (and certainly even fewer when it comes to then raising and supporting children who might result from such assaults), is a nightmare.  It is also the natural result, and perhaps even definition, of patriarchy.

It is in the context of this nightmare that the assaults that we are hearing about occur, and have occurred for lifetimes.  It is in this context that women live with these assaults as the tax that they pay for being born in a woman's body.  If women were people, in the way that men are people, can you imagine how the world might be instead?  I am reminded here of Muriel Rukeyser: "What would happen if one woman spoke the truth about her life?  The world would split open."

And to some degree, that is what has happened.  I think it's time and past time that we split this particular aspect of the world open.  This is what I mean by being a progressive: I don't think that our past practices serve us here in creating the beloved community in which mutual respect and love govern our relationships to one another; the patriarchy that our current social relationships are founded upon doesn't allow for that - because it is, rather, a social order grounded in power relationships.

And here's where things get complicated.  It seems to me, in watching what's happening, that progressives such as myself are embracing this moment as a chance to split the world open, to try to realign our priorities to include all humans in our vision for a just, fair, and equal society.  The ousting of politicians like Franken, a man whose public face supported women's equality even while his private life included actions that were not in alignment with that, is a reflection of the desire to ensure that accountability happens, even for men whom we like.  What scares me is that it appears that conservatives are not interested in creating the same culture of accountability and change within their ranks.  (I want to note here that I'm speaking of general trends, not individuals.)  The fact that our current sitting President was elected after being heard on tape bragging about assaulting women, coupled with what looks like the immanent election of Roy Moore, is what points me towards this conclusion.  That worries me on a couple of levels.  If one of the two groups who struggle for political power in this country is trying in this moment to stand on principle and oust men who actually support policies that support women, while the other of those two groups is willing to abandon principle to elect men who are harassers, in order to maintain power - well, we have a problem.  It means that we disagree fundamentally on whether it is important to value women in this society that we are in the process (always and forever) of creating.  It also, I think, means that we have fundamentally different ideas about what it means to respect women.  The perspective that I have articulated here holds that respecting women means treating women like people; the more conservative perspective, as I see it represented in a broad range of public discourse, holds that respecting women means protecting them, preferably in the safety of their homes and roles as child-bearers and -rearers; it also separates the worlds of men and women, and holds that separation as natural and proper, instead of understanding it to be an aspect of a very particular historical moment.

At the same time, that isn't the only thing that concerns me about this particular historical moment.  I worry about due process.  To some degree, Franken and Trump are easy cases - there is documentation, visual or audio, of their harrassment of women.  That, however, isn't true in all cases.  And while I happen to believe the women who have accused Moore and, say, Weinstein, at the same time, I am not an advocate of vigilante justice, and there is something worrisome about, say, firing people (e.g., Matt Lauer among many others) without some kind of due process.  And yet, we all know that due process is deeply (and I do mean deeply) flawed.  There are cases upon cases of men being let off with few to no consequences for atrocities committed upon female bodies (Brock Turner, I'm looking at you).  So I understand the urge to grab this moment and make. someone. pay.

I don't even know what to suggest here.  I only know that I am troubled.  That I believe with all my heart that women are people and should be allowed a full range of expression and self-determination.  That I believe with all my heart that men are people and should be allowed a full range of expression and self-determination.  That I believe that we can create a world in which those things are possible. But that we are far away from that world, and, I fear, getting further.  I reread this and feel that it's too long, and yet there is so much I didn't get to say.  I welcome your thoughts and insights.

ETA: As a reward for getting through all that, two humorously serious takes on consent and harrassment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXRYlfjlFLk (Tracee Ellis Ross rocks)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZwvrxVavnQ. (tea and consent)

The F word

No, not that f-word, people.  The other one.  The one that should have come up during the Presidential debates this past week.  The one that people seem to avoid like the plague - and as a linguist, I always find it intriguing when people do that, and then I wonder why, and then I write posts like this one.  You know the word I'm talking about: feminism.  For those of you who are less in the mood for that kind of contemplation, there is knitting content in this post (ironically, in a post-modern sort of way); please feel free to skip to the end for that.

I don't know how many of you watched the debate this week, but at one point, one of the questions brought up something near and dear to my heart: a woman asked what each of the candidates would do in the next four years about the fact that women (still) earn about $.73 to the dollar compared to men (for doing the same jobs with the same qualifications, she didn't say, but I will).  There are a couple of things to talk about, vis-a-vis the answers. 

Thing the first is the one that's been all over the interwebs ever since: Mitt Romney's answer and his (now-infamous, and probably never-to-be-lived-down) binders full of women.  As soon as he said that, I thought - this one's sticking, and as a linguist, of course, I find it interesting to think about why that is.  What is it about that part of his answer that is so utterly meme-able?  There were so many other things about his answer that I found noticeable that didn't take to the airwaves in the same way.  For example, when he said that he received no female candidates for posts in his cabinet, the question I think he should have been asking right away is not, how do I get binders full of women to ask to apply, but instead, why aren't women applying to work in my cabinet?  What message am I failing to get across that makes women feel that they don't want to apply?  What broader social forces are at play that make women not apply to positions of power more generally?  What is going on here?  But OK, he didn't.  The next issue with that answer was the fact that his protestations that he knows qualified women sounded all too much like a recognized trope when a person with prejudice is confronted with that prejudice, and they respond: "But I have lots of friends who are X".  That phrase usually doesn't mean what it sounds like it means.

The binders full of women, though, that's what struck a nerve (judging by the amount of space devoted to it on social networks).  Interestingly, it's the way that it's been used to mock another powerful man altogether that I think gets to the heart of the problem with it.  I'm not sure if any of you have seen the Bill Clinton "I heard there's a binder full of women!" pictures going around (I've seen at least three iterations, and heard about several more), but it seems to me that those point to the issue here: it's about objectification.  It's about the idea that women are interchangeable, available, tokens.  Because the binders full of women don't get at the real problem - why women didn't apply, why women are still paid less than 75% of what men are paid, why there wasn't a woman standing on that stage answering those questions - and because those binders don't get at answers to those questions, they seem far too much like a pat on the head, a brushing-aside or covering-over of a very large problem.

Because let's be honest - neither candidate answered the question worth a damn.  Both of them talked about access, about the idea that women should have access to jobs.  They're right, women should.  But if we end up doing the jobs that men do for 25% less, then do we really have access to the "same" jobs, with the same benefits?  Does that really address the question of why women are considered to be 25% less valuable in the workplace?  Or of why that number has been going down again in recent years, rather than up?  Does it address the fact that most single-parent homes with children in them are headed by women, who then must support those families on 3/4 of the income their male counterparts would get for working as hard as they do?  Does it address the fact that when women do, finally, begin to get access to a particular career, that career loses prestige and, concomitantly, pay?  (If you think I'm wrong, look at the difference in pay in medical careers like family practice as opposed to surgery - still male-dominated; or look at what's happened to professorial pay since women gained more, although still not equal, access to the halls of academia; look at the differences in pay between the areas of academia that have more women in them relative to those that are still male-dominated.)

Speaking only as an N of 1, I have seen this same thing happen to me.  A year after I was hired in my current job, my department hired a male professor who had not yet completed his Ph.D.  He earned more than I did, even though I had both the degree and more years of experience in the classroom.  More recently, my department hired another male professor who is, as yet, untenured (note: I have held my job for nearly eleven years, have had tenure for five years, and I am currently the chair of my department); he is paid almost exactly what I am paid.  Both men are valuable colleagues, worth their pay.  But why are my experience and skill (and my degree), not worth more?  I have published as much, earned as many awards, taken as little time on leave, etc etc.  But I am not worth as much.  And for anyone who would say that money isn't everything - that is true in a philosophical and existential sense, but in a capitalist society (which, for our sins, we are), money is one of the most central ways by which we judge, and reward, our perceived sense of what a person is worth in a particular role.  More practically, money is how we feed ourselves and our families, clothe our children, give them opportunities, help others in society.  It might be nice to think it doesn't matter, but it does.

So, what I want to know is, why did neither of those presidential candidates talk about (here it is, brace yourselves) feminism?  About the idea that there should be a social movement that advocates for women, and that continues to do so until women are treated as equal citizens, and that people of both sexes should proudly sign on to such a movement?  Why did neither of them mention the Equal Rights Amendment - you know, the one that would acknowledge, under the law, that women are the equal of men?  Why do people insist that there is no point in such a thing, that women are already equal to men under the law?  If that were true, why is it that women still do not have the opportunities that men have?  Why are we treated differently?  I have two daughters, and I hate like hell the thought that when they grow up, they will still be part of a world that values them less, that tells them that their roles as mothers are critical to our society but then says that their roles as mothers makes them less-valuable people (and it is still true that mothers are paid even less than their single counterparts, while fathers are paid more than their single counterparts - in other words, parenthood makes men good risks, but women bad risks in the workplace).

Dudes.  I am a feminist.  That doesn't mean that I hate men.  It doesn't mean that I think all women should burn their bras, neglect their children, go into the workforce, be the same as one another, create a society in which women dominate men and abuse power.  It does mean that I think that women should have access to a full range of options for personhood, that they should be paid equally to men when the option that they choose is to enter the workforce.  I also think that women who stay at home to raise their children should have access to social security earned during the years they are at home with dependent children, in their own names (rather than having to depend on their husbands' - or, worse yet, trying to access some portion of their ex-husbands'), and, maybe, even access to affordable healthcare?  Call me a socialist, but if we tell people that one important path a person could choose to take is to be home with their children for part of their childrens' growing up, then we should put our money where our mouths are.  (Note: I think stay-at-home dads should have the same benefits.)

I don't think that's going to happen until a couple of other important things happen first.  One of those is for women to stop back-biting when their compatriots choose a different path than their own.  I work outside the home, and have since my girls were little.  That does not make me a bad mother.  It doesn't make my husband a hen-pecked man whose masculinity I have taken away by refusing to allow him to provide for his family alone (I have been told both things more than once).  A woman who stays home with her children is not an anti-feminist by definition.  Breast-feeding neither makes a woman a great mother, nor a bad feminist.  Not breast-feeding neither makes a woman a bad mother, nor a great feminist.  When did we get so judgmental of one another?  When did we decide there was only one path to successful womanhood?

The second thing is that men need to get in on this game.  Until fathers are willing to demand paternity leave in equal amounts to women's maternity leave, until they are willing to say, "I need flexible hours so that I can get home with a sick kid if I have to, so I can leave at 5 and get the kids to soccer, so I can leave earlier two days a week since the kids' #$%*!! schools insist on having early-release days, as if 2:30 weren't already a ludicrously early hour to get out of school", until that happens, workplaces will still think of mothers as drains on company resources.  Until women are paid equally to men, families will be stuck in a cycle of protecting a father's job more than a mother's, because he brings more back to the family.  Men have to stop buying into the (empirically untrue - go ahead and do the research, I have) story that men aren't nurturers, they aren't good at raising children, they don't "bond" with their children the way mothers do, so they don't "like" being with their kids the way mothers do; they have to stop allowing society to cut them off from the pleasures of living a balanced life.

I realize that my rant here has focused on families, on women who have chosen the path of motherhood, and that the choice not to have children at all is yet another one of those equally-legitimate but all-to-often-criticized options that women should have access to.  I also haven't talked about the issue of double jeopardy, women who face both sexism and racism in trying to access their right to the options that should be available to everyone.  I am not ignoring these things because they're not important, but because I was mostly focusing on my personal experience here - I'd love to get comments from folks who are dealing with those things as well, to bring voices of experience to the table here - middle-class white working motherhood isn't the only story (it isn't even the majority story), it's just the one that I know best.

Basically, it's time to be talking about this (again).  It's always been time, but maybe the total non-answers to that question suggest that we need to get a little louder.  Maybe we even need to think about doing what Iceland did a few elections ago - to say that men have had their chance, kick them all out of government, and elect women instead.  Radical, I know - kind of fun to imagine, though, maybe?

So yes, I am a feminist.  AND I knit (not BUT I knit, please note).  And I am knitting, in fact.  I knitted all the way through that debate on Tuesday, and I ended up with these (started fairly recently, out of a need for some quick success):

Those are Plain Jhaynes, a pattern of Anne's that I somehow have missed all these years, made specially for using up a little bit of special yarn.  As soon as I saw them, I realized that they were the perfect pattern for the mitts I've been wanting to make to go with my babushka scarves, which, much as I love them, use a skein and a bit of some very nice yarn, leaving quite a bit to be used up in other ways.  This yarn is Jade Sapphire silk/cashmere 2-ply, and I love it.  The two babushkas I've knitted (this one and a blue one) are probably my most-worn bits of knitting, and I'm really glad now to have mitts to go with one of them.  So, to recap, these mitts are Plain Jhaynes (Anne Hanson), knitted on size one (Signature - how I do love my Signatures) dpns, out of Jade Sapphire silk/cashmere 2-ply, in a size medium.  They are meant to fit fairly snugly, to add just that perfect bit of warmth without getting in the way of, say, typing, and I think they're going to do the job perfectly.

The other thing I've been working on this week is my new version of the Wine Dark Sea sweater.  You may remember from the old version (here, on Rav) that I knitted years ago, that I aimed for a sweat-shirty loose fit.  Well, I got it.  In looking at my old pattern notes and measurements, and comparing them to the measurements I tend to use now for sweaters, I realize that I built in about eight inches of positive ease (!!) when I designed and knitted the first one.  I ended up with quite a bit of yarn left over after I knitted it (my very favorite, can't-get-enough-of-it yarn, Briar Rose Sea Pearl), and after weighing and doing some math, I decided I had enough left to knit another, more fitted (less than 1 inch of positive ease) version.  So I put together some notes for myself, and did some math based on my gauge swatch.

And off I went.  I'm almost done now with the waist shaping.

Only one more set of increases to go, then a bit more plain knitting, then I'll split for the armholes.  At that point, I'll be able to slide it on (I'm knitting this part in the round from the bottom up) and see how I'm doing, both in terms of ease and length.  And I'll go from there.

There are also a few acquisitions of yarn and fiber, plus a cookbook that I'm totally psyched about, but I think I'll save those for the next post.  In the meantime, peace out.

Hunh

Summer's over!  Summer's over!  Eeeek!  (I feel like Chicken Little.)  Classes started on campus today; my classes start tomorrow.  I've spent all day finalizing my syllabi (why does that always take so much longer than I think it will?), and getting them uploaded into our online course containers (and why does that always take so much longer than I think it should?!), not to mention fighting with our lovely management program to get it to fork over class lists and permission numbers (that would be the multimillion dollar system that takes longer to load pages than my aged grandmother pouring molasses in the Arctic)(note: no aged grandmothers were harmed in the writing of this post).  But that's mostly under control, leaving me to hyperventilate quietly in a corner, worrying that I've forgotten something and that I'll walk into class tomorrow with lipstick on my teeth and toilet paper on my shoe.  You know, a usual beginning-of-semester day.

What this also means is that, although I've been knitting, and have even finished some knitting (Stripe Study is done!  Younger Daughter's socks are done!), and have cast on for something new (more on that next time), I have no photographic evidence of the aforementioned knitting successes.  Alas.

However, I did see something on Erica's lovely blog that caught my attention.  It was a link to this article, entitled Tough Gals: Do They Still Exist?  (Note: The use of the word "gals" in the title probably should have alerted me to its blood-pressure-raising content.)  In that article, knitting (along with, oddly enough, making cupcakes) is explicitly blamed for modern women's lack of toughitude.  (Gun-toting and car-hot-wiring are apparently the skills that we knitters lack that would help us to achieve modern feminist womanhood.  I don't think that the word "feminist" means what the author of the article think it means.)

Now, my first reaction was to foam quietly at the mouth.  I thought long and hard about writing a post about all the reasons why this kind of thing makes me foam at the mouth, but Erica already did it for me, and did it beautifully.  However, after taking some deep breaths, drinking some tea, and spinning with my lovely little office spindle (pttthhhbbttt!), I had calmed down enough for my inner linguistic anthropologist to take hold.

And my inner linguistic anthropologist said:  Hunh?

I love "hunh" moments.  I tell my students to watch for them.  Because the moment you say, "Hunh.  I wonder why that person did/said that, in that way?", in that moment, you've got a little string to pull.  A little string that hangs off the whole fabric of a particular cultural world.  And if you pull on that string, tug at it patiently, slowly but surely you can get to see all kinds of interesting things about how that fabric is put together.  Just as dropping some stitches down a piece of knitting and then working them back up to the needles can teach us more about the structure of a knitted fabric than almost anything else, so can pulling a little "hunh" thread teach us about the world we live in.

In the end, it's all data.

So, hunh.  I wonder what it is about knitting that makes it an index of anti-feminism?  (And I should say that this is by no means the only place I've seen or heard this.)  I mean, as something that is indexical of women, couldn't it also become a symbol of feminism?  Is it a particular kind of womanhood that knitting calls to mind?  (Come to think of it, is it a particular kind of knitting that calls unfeminist womanhood to mind?)  And why knitting and cupcakes, of all things?  Why are cupcakes particularly anti-feminist?  Why isn't woodworking considered a backward-looking symbol of luddite masculinity?

So many questions.  This is why I think the knitting community is worthy of study - we are clearly oversimplified in the mind's eye of the culture within which we live.  And this is just more data, right?

Warm Hats Not Hot Heads

I finished the hat for my Representative!  I need to block it before I send it, but it's done.  I may knit another (Ellen, I'll be sure to tell you who the next one is for if I can get to it in time).

Something happened the other day that drove home to me (as if I needed any more evidence, after reading about the death threats levied at a 78-year-old woman, for example) the need for everyone to see the humanity of not only those with whom we agree, but also those with whom we disagree.

I was getting blood drawn at my home (nothing serious - just an insurance thing), so the insurance company sent someone to my house early on Friday morning.  We chatted a bit as he set up his briefcase and got out the things he'd need to get the job done, and he settled down to fill out my forms.  When he saw my name, he said, "Jocelyn.  Huh.  Do you remember Joycelyn Elders?"  I agreed that I did.  He went on, "Talk about a waste of a human being."

I was floored.  Waste of a human being?  Really?  I couldn't believe that someone was sitting at my kitchen table, saying something like that, as if I would agree with him.

He went on from there, and you can imagine what it was like.  But it was that initial statement that stuck with me.  Talk about hateful and inflammatory rhetoric.  There are grounds upon which one might disagree with someone's politics.  But to dismiss their humanity, that's something else again.  That's dangerous.  To relegate someone with whom one disagrees to sub-human status is to free one up to do some pretty frightening and inhuman things.  It is exactly this sort of demonization that we all need to stand against.

I'll tell you something else.  I was a coward.  That man, sitting in my home, was about to stick needles into my body, and I said nothing.  I mean, actually nothing - I sat in total silence until he ran down and changed the subject.  That was pretty cowardly.  I hope that this hat is a little louder than I was. 

Warm hats not hot heads

I don't know about you, but I was disheartened to the point of paralysis by the events in Tucson, and by the steadfast refusal of some folks to step back from hateful rhetoric.  I have spent a lot of time and thought over the last two years and more, trying to figure out how to encourage thoughtful and respectful public discourse when a not-insignificant group of people refuses to see the importance of such mutual conversations.  What has caused me even more distress is the fact that these hatemongers are not abjured by those for whom they claim to speak.  Where are the people who should be saying: No.  You don't stand for me.  I may share some of your goals, but I do not want my goals promoted with hate and fear.

I'll tell you where some of them are.  They're right here among our fellow knitters.  And I'll also tell you how glad I am that Ellen and Alison haven't been paralyzed, but instead have decided to do what knitters do best: to knit, and to use that knitting to remind people of their common humanity.  They have begun a project called Warm Hats Not Hot Heads, with the goal of getting people to knit hats for as many of our Congressional representatives as possible, to remind them that, in the end, we all have the same basic needs even if we go about getting those needs met in different ways, and that respectful discourse is crucial in working together as a nation to meet our common goals.

Looks like I'll be knitting some hats this month.  Who wants to join me?

On budgets and the stories we tell ourselves

Classes started yesterday, so I'm buried in the usual beginning-of-semester madness (I know that many of you are in the same boat). It was wonderful to see my students again, especially in my upper-division class, which has many students who have taken some of my other classes. That feeling of pleasure is what convinces me, semester after semester, that this really is the job I love best.

The administrative side of things, though, is not my happy place. This semester we are facing a particularly interesting situation, which manifests in increased pressure not to take crashers over our class cap numbers. Now, I actually approve of not going over class caps for a number of philosophical and pedagogical reasons. I can teach better when my classes have the number of students (and no more) that they are designed for. More generally, I can teach better when I have fewer students; when I started here, the goal was for faculty to have about 90 students each semester among their various classes. In the fall semester before furloughs, I had 120+. I just can't do for 120 students what I can do for 90 (up to and including learning all of their names). Note also that we are not paid more for teaching 120 students, even though that adds a third again as much work in terms of grading, etc, and none of our other workload decreases concomitantly. Hence my philosophical approval of the maintenance of class caps.

The added wrinkle this semester has to do with funding. As a state school, we receive a certain amount of money per student. We also receive a target number of full-time equivalent students (FTES) for each academic year. And, we must accept all students in our service area who meet the minimum requirements for entry into the system. All of this seems very reasonable, until I tell you that this semester, we are close to 700 FTES over our target, and that if we can't bring that number into line next semester (by cutting many sections from our schedule), our campus will pay a fine for every full-time equivalent student that goes over our cap + 2%.

That's a lot of abbreviations and numbers, but here's what it boils down to: we may end up paying a fine for teaching too many students.

Yes, you heard that right.

The upshot is that I had to turn away students who are working harder to pay more tuition for a smaller number of possible classes and increased time to graduation. It broke my heart.

In the meantime, I am seeing increasing numbers of bumper stickers around here lambasting big-spending Democrats (the president in particular, but there's a general sense that lefties spend too much money). And I'm getting pretty cranky about it. Because every single time I see one of those, I want to stop the person driving that car and ask them: which of the two presidents prior to this one left us with a budget surplus and actually had plans to pay down our national debt? (Hint: Not the Republican.) And which of those presidents spent hundreds of billions of dollars that we didn't have and left us deeper in dept than we have ever been? (Hint: Not the Democrat.)

In other words, it's not that simple. Let's be completely honest here: both parties spend money. Lots of it. It costs serious amounts of money to run a nation (or a state, or a city). Period. The difference between the left and the right is not in how much they spend. It's in what they choose to spend it on, and where they get the money that they do spend. Do they spend it on corporate welfare or social welfare? Do they spend it on education, or on tax cuts for top earners? Do they get money by raising taxes, or by reducing social services? There are arguments, both philosophical and fiscal, for either position, but we can't have a conversation about the merits and consequences of choosing one over the other if we're busy stating categorically that Democrats are big spenders and Republicans aren't. 'Cause it just ain't so.

No good deed...

That's how I was feeling at 5:35 on Friday afternoon, as I walked out of the county courthouse. I'd appeared as per my jury duty call at 1:30 on a Friday afternoon, rather than writing in for a postponement. The call said (as these calls usually do) that most jurors serve 1-3 days, and I looked at my schedule and realized that I wasn't teaching Friday, or Monday, and I'm furloughed on Tuesday, and that I could, if absolutely necessary, cancel meetings on Wednesday. In that way, I could do my service without postponing or rescheduling. I should say right now that I actually (in that terribly idealistic way I have sometimes) really believe in doing things like jury duty, the same way I believe in defending freedom of speech, even when I think that people are saying really really stupid things, and in paying my taxes, even when I think the money is being spent on ridiculousnesses. It's the principle. And sometimes, principles are important, and worthy of defense, and worthy of some time and effort.

So, off I went, a pile of grading and a sock to knit in hand, prepared to either wait or be a juror in a short trial. (I should mention, by way of proof of my generally good attitude towards these things, that the last time I was called, I went and served as the forewoman of a jury for a three-day trial.) It turns out that they are looking for jurors for an eleven-week trial. And it turns out that, when looking for jurors for an eleven-week trial, there is something about seeing a juror form with the box for "government employee" checked that just charms them to pieces, because the government will pay its employees for the duration of their jury service, rather than just for the required five days, so that they can't claim financial hardship for serving on a long trial (code: LT). Note to self: do NOT check the "government employee" box on future jury forms.

They also say that there are five possible excuses for not serving on an LT (they use that code, not I). Those excuses include necessary care of others. So, I checked that box (quite truthfully) and said that I have an 11 and an 8 year old, who are out of school at 3 each day, except on Mondays when the 11-year-old is out at 1:45. And that I'm the picker-upper. This is true. And quite frankly, I think it's a lot to ask of any parent of young children that they serve on an 11-week trial. What if one of them got the flu? Or...? Another acceptable excuse is pre-paid, non-refundable travel. As in our trip to Cincinnati in October. But I didn't put that, because I kind of thought the first one trumped all, since it starts mattering this week, when I'm supposed to be picking them up from school. And I didn't put (because this is not considered a valid excuse) the fact that I'm teaching 117 students in classes for which there are no available substitute faculty (ask me how I know), in a semester when they were limited to registration for 13 units, in classes that are required for their graduation.

I have to appear again on Tuesday afternoon. Apparently once I appeared, I was bound to the court, and if I don't come back when they tell me to, they can and will put out a bench warrant for my arrest. Now, if I'd decided to be a laggard, and just sent in the dratted form requesting a postponement, I would not be in this predicament, and my need to be available to pick kids up after school would have been acceptable. But since I went to the court, they can now call me back in to question whether that excuse is a valid one. Rick is worrying (there's no way he can pick up kids every single day for eleven weeks), and my department chair is worrying (there are no adjunct faculty available to teach the classes I teach; we've tried to find some to teach extra sections, and they're just not out there), and I'm sick to my stomach. No good deed, indeed!

On the other hand, sometimes good deeds are worth their weight in gold. Today, Yarning For You hosted a Knit for the Cure, a good deed which deserves three cheers, and the girls and I all went, to be greeted by the statues out in front of the store, dressed up for the occasion.
They were all dressed up in the donations that have been received thus far (these will be auctioned off to raise funds for the Susan Komen foundation).
There were goodies laid out for snacking.
And good company for knitting with.
It got a lot more crowded by the end of the day. The girls had come so that Older Daughter could earn some of her required volunteer hours for school by helping out. They cleaned up the back/sale room by straightening out the bins of yarn, and rewinding yarn that had come out of shape.
Older Daughter also started a baby hat to donate to the auction; it's quite darling, and I'll be sure to share pictures when it's done. I started a pair of fingerless mitts with the rest of the Lime and Violet Intentions yarn that I used to knit socks last year for my friend who was doing the three-day walk. At the end of their volunteer time, the girls each got two balls of yarn from the sale room; apparently some good deeds do get the rewards they deserve. It was a wonderful day, with lots of good conversation and laughter, and it was exactly what I needed before starting a new week.

I also spent some time doing recovery knitting this weekend (as in: recovering from the last week). I'm making serious progress on the Urban Aran. Here's the completed back:
And one front half plus some of the second (the back is also in that picture, there on the right).
At this rate, I think I might have a shot at finishing this in time for our trip to Cincinnati after all. Assuming that I'm not a juror in an eleven-week trial. Can everyone please think non-jurist thoughts in my direction, please? Meanwhile, I'm going to go read Lord of the Rings to the girls; we've just caught back up with Sam and Frodo, and they're dying to hear what happens next.

Trying to find the track

Because how can I get back on it if I can't find it?

It doesn't help that the track keeps moving.

I think that a lot of you know that I came home from my various travels to find that I will be on furlough (close to 10%) for at least the next academic year. Probably two. I was expecting it, and had, in fact, voted to give our union the power to negotiate the side note to our contract that made it a reality. Those of us who voted for it did so, overwhelmingly, because we wanted to avoid, as much as possible, laying off any more non-tenure-line faculty members. While for various reasons those faculty members do not have the (increasingly scant) protections that come with tenure (nor do they have the same service and research requirements, although I know for a fact that they have the same drive and ability to do research and to serve their institutions), they are valued colleagues who serve a critical role in creating the educational experience that we offer to our students. So we'd all really like for as many of them to keep as much of their jobs as possible. That means that I (and just about everyone else I've spoken to) am willing to take a hit to my bottom line to make that possible (and yes, I do realize just how privileged I am to be able to afford to do that without being afraid that I won't meet my basic financial obligations). (Let me add here how glad I am that I have a stash to draw on right now, though.)

What I also came home to, however, was the news that our administration had come to the conclusion that the best way to balance the university's budget would be to increase tenure-line faculty courseload by an additional class each semester.

I can't tell you how that made me feel. Sick to my stomach is the least of it, and outrage doesn't even begin to describe it.

First and foremost, to increase our courseload would be to reduce the number of courses available to our non-tenure-line faculty, thereby leading to exactly the lay-offs that we all just voted to take a pay cut to avoid. Furthermore, the impact on student education would be incalculable, just at the time when we're raising their tuition by 20% and cutting their professor contact time by 10% (fire sale now! less education for a higher cost!). Not to mention the way that class sizes have increased in the past seven years (my average class size is now 45, instead of the 30 I started at). To add salt to the wounds, such a decision implies that faculty weren't really doing anything else that matters with that time. That our service to the university doesn't count. (Note, by the way, that a lot of it already doesn't count, officially: my faculty meetings, Academic Senate meetings, committee meetings, time spent filling out forms, answering administrative email, etc etc etc, none of that is allowed to count towards the 45 hours per week that I need to be able to show that I work for my university.) That our research, which brings so much to our teaching (and many of us actively involve students in our projects) can just be abandoned by the wayside. (Note that U.S. News and World Report has stated explicitly that the first thing that they look for when ranking a university is whether its faculty are actively engaged in research.)

In other words, it is the action of an administration with no respect for its faculty or students. And last I checked (I admit to some bias here), the core of a university's mission is to facilitate the relationship between faculty and students in order that students can learn something.

You can imagine our collective reaction. The administration has since backed off enough to say that it's just one option on the table. But it shouldn't be. The preservation of the quality (what remains) of the education of our students should be the central concern of everyone at the university. Not the preservation of administration jobs (in the last several years, we have continued to hire administrators at a very high rate, while reducing our hiring of faculty to almost zero), or the preservation of administration perqs like housing and car allowances (which are not affected by the furlough cuts and which will remain at their ludicrously high levels). Alas, though, those things do seem to be the foremost concern of our administration.

Of equal and further-reaching concern is the fact that the state of California's revenue stream has gone down consistently over the past thirty years, because her citizens have taken every opportunity to cut taxes. There appears to be a collective fear that someone is using "my" tax dollars to get something "they" don't deserve. Our education system has tanked in my lifetime, going from one of the best in the world (the world, people), to, quite frankly, one of the most embarrassing. We spend less per student than almost every other state in the union, even though we are the eighth leading economy in the world. This lack has shown increasingly in every year that I've taught since 1994. Students come to college worse and worse prepared, less and less able to perform basic reasoning and analytic tasks, less and less confident that they can acquire the skills necessary to do so. And it's not because they're stupid. It's because they're in schools that are so full that teachers' jobs are becoming more about crowd control than they are about nurturing cognitive development. They are in an educational system that cares more about their ability to pass a test than to actively engage with difficult material.

They are our future.

And they deserve so much better. From every single one of us. Whether we've got kids of our own or not. Whether we send our kids to private or public school. Whether we are in the top tax bracket, or earn so little that we pay no taxes at all. These children and young adults are the voters of tomorrow. The mothers and fathers of tomorrow. The senators and presidents and teachers and businesspeople of tomorrow. They'll be running this country when we can't or don't anymore. And they need access to a quality education (I won't start on health care today, I promise) in order for them to be successful. And let me be frank. Most of us can't afford the total cost of a quality education for even one student. We all benefit from the ways in which the public trust supports the maintenance of our institutions of learning. Every one of us, even those of us who never used the public school system, because somewhere, sometime, someone we rely on to make our lives a success did use that system, and we are successful because they are.

I keep wondering when we forgot that. That we do need to protect the public weal, because we are the public.

Good weekend

Is it Monday already? How did that happen? The weekends go so fast sometimes, and those two precious days of not having to wake up at yeurgh-o'clock just aren't quite enough. We did do a lot, and a lot of fun things, this weekend though, so I can't complain.

Saturday, we got up early to go to Older Daughter's soccer game. They lost, but not badly, given that they were playing one man down (no, the other team didn't pull a player from the field), with no substitutes. I've been thinking a lot lately about teams, and kids not showing up for things like practices and games, and the reasons why that happens. I know that sometimes, something comes up -- a family trip, or an emergency, or being sick, or one time when two games get scheduled at the same time -- and that's just the way life is. But I also know (from talking to their parents) that for some of these kids, the reason that they regularly are late to games, or miss them completely, or don't come to practice, is because they're involved in so many other activities that the overlap means that they simply are not able to make it to every practice or game that their activities involve. Let me state that more simply: they are so over-committed that they inherently cannot, under any circumstances, meet all of the obligations associated with those commitments.

Now, it would be easy to say that hey, they're kids, and these are just sports (or music, or whatever), and come on, lighten up. And to a large degree that's true. But I've been thinking about what I see my college students doing, and about how often my fellow faculty members and I complain that our students are regularly late, don't come to class, miss meetings with us, fail to complete assignments, etc. Between the classes that they're taking, and work, and clubs, and teams, and family and and and, it is physically and temporally impossible for them to be able to do all of the things that they say they will do. And so they skip important classes, miss tests, don't do homework (and I can only imagine that they're doing similar things in other areas of their lives), and then are completely and utterly floored when they're told that no, special accomodations will not be made for them because they didn't meet their obligations. Or, they state baldly that they know they can't do everything, and so doing things half-assed is what they've chosen to do instead. And we wonder where they get the idea that it is OK to say they'll do more than they can, and then expect it not to matter.

I guess one interpretation could be that this teaches kids to judge what is most important at any given moment in a busy life. And that is truly an important life skill. But I also think that it is an important life skill to adequately judge what one can actually do. It also seems important to realize that letting other people count on you when you know that you're not going to be able to do the job you say you'll do is generally a bad idea. I'm not sure that this one has easy answers, but it's something I've been hashing through in my head, and you all get to share, heh.

After soccer, and our usual visit to the farmer's market, we had a quick lunch and headed out to Balboa Park to the Museum of Natural History to see the Body Worlds exhibit. We all thought it was truly amazing (this is definitely a ymmv sort of thing); the exhibit was well-arranged, and the explanatory placards included just the right amount of information. I'm pretty sure that the comparison between a healthy lung and a smoker's lung put the girls off smoking forever (and made me glad that, of all the unhealthy things I've done in my life, I somehow escaped that one!). The plastinate that included a spinal fusion like the one that I had was particularly fascinating one to me, in a sort of shuddery kind of way. Human bodies are amazing in their complexity, and this particular exhibit really conveys that viscerally (literally, haha). All in all, though, it was well worth the visit, and we were all happy we went. We also popped over to the zoo to see the new elephant exhibit, but it hadn't opened yet. Alas. So we visited the polar bears and the tree kangaroos instead, and declared ourselves satisfied. (Although I remain convinced that they put those poor kangaroos up in those trees; no way did they get up there on their own.)

After a fabulously yummy dinner at Saffron (thanks for the recommendation Kim and Anne!), we headed home, happy; we even had time for me to read a chapter from Fellowship of the Ring before bedtime.

Yesterday was a quieter day. I stayed home and admired all the flowers in the yard.
And did laundry.
Nope, no pictures of laundry. No pictures of the knitting I did, either, but I did work on the linen shell. I read, and finished an excellent book that I highly recommend: Fieldwork. Talk about a fascinating read. The author gets right into the minds of anthropologists and missionaries, and does it as if he, himself, were doing fieldwork; he does an amazing job of representing their lives, as they themselves see them, all without actually saying that he's trying to be an anthropologist himself. Extremely well-done. A friend loaned it to me, but I may have to own this one myself. I ate it up in record time, and there are parts that were well worth savoring more slowly. Luckily, books, unlike meals, can be re-experienced, and don't cause indigestion.

Neither did the lovely meal that ended the weekend: homemade fish tacos and strawberry-rhubarb crumble. Mmm...

In which technology fails me

Yet again.

I actually had time to post this past weekend, and plans to do so as well. Which isn't to say that it wasn't a busy weekend. On Saturday morning, the girls and I got up fairly early and headed to the farmer's market, where we bought all kinds of goodies, including three ears of corn (seriously, who has corn out this time of year? I must admit I'm wondering how good it'll be, but I had to try) and nopalitos that I'll be cooking up for dinner tonight (once I remove all the little thorns). Mmm... Not to mention the lovely fresh asparagus and English peas. I adore English peas.

Then it was off to a soccer game (and can I just say that I really hate it when we have soccer games at elementary schools whose bathrooms aren't open? way uncool), and from there straight to a birthday party quite some distance away. Home for a few hours, then back out again across that distance to pick Older Daughter up, then out to dinner with some friends. Whew!

Sunday was a bit calmer, but it included a (longer than I thought it'd be) bowling fundraiser (Bowling for the Animals; it raises money for a spay and neuter program), which was great fun, but from which I'm still recovering (turns out I must do some funny thing with my forward leg when I bowl -- my muscles hurt). I got to knit during the game, and during the raffle part of the bowling. I also got a comment from one dad during the soccer game who declared that I couldn't possibly knit during the game -- I'd drop a stitch. I told him I only knit simple stuff, to which he replied "Ah. Knit purl knit purl." (I'm imagining a knitting mother or grandmother somewhere in his history.) To which I responded, "Nope. Knit knit knit knit." Either way, I got a lot done. I even got to think about the new (very simple) lace project I wanted to start.

But here's the rub. I had no internet access. Nope, nary a bit nor a byte was moving across the ether. I rebooted every little box in the house associated with the internet (and probably even a few that aren't), to no avail. I called Rick, who suggested that I should reboot all the little boxes. I did it again just to humor him. Nada. I decided that I would just have to reach back into the depths of my brain to remember what it was like during the Dark Ages, when there was no internet, and to survive the weekend by relying on those things which don't require electricity, let alone a cable connection: books and knitting (not to mention kids). I will admit that it was rather disconcerting to notice how often I reflexively head to my computer to check email. It made me kind of glad that I was on an inadvertent ban, and it also made me wonder whether I shouldn't schedule some enforced down-time. But that's another post.

Rick got back into town on Sunday night and called our cable company. It turns out that the problem was quite simple. They'd decided to stop supporting our modem. Without warning. Oh. Well, if that's how you feel about it.

Sigh.

But it's back up and running, and a day has gotten me caught up on email, and this afternoon I finally got a chance to take a few pictures of what I'm working on so I could share. And then my camera wiped everything off of its little chip in one fell swoop.

Sigh.

I don't have the energy to retake all of the photos, but I did finally convince the camera to take, retain, and download a couple of pictures, and I'll share those and then retire from the ring, bowed and bloody and cursing the name Technology.

First, the linen shell.

AAARGH!! Internal errors! Fire! Destruction! The desolation of Smaug! (Oh, wait, that last one is leaking in from our bedtime reading.)

No pictures today, apparently. Trust me, the shell is now about five inches past the joining below the armscye. I also had a credit at The Loopy Ewe and got myself this, and am having a great time playing around with it to find the perfect stitch for a little shoulder-covering stole, and if you want me, you can find me curled up in a corner as far away from anything with a plug as I can get.

I have to say it

Fair warning: Political minefield ahead.

I've been contemplating this post, or one like it, for some time now, and have mostly put off writing it because I don't know that I have the words or the eloquence to convey these thoughts that are vitally important to me and that I have been refining in my own mind for so long, and because there are times when I feel that saying these thoughts badly would be worse than staying silent.

Several things have happened lately that have changed my mind about that; in fact, I have come to the conclusion that to not say anything would be immoral, that there comes a time when it's vital to stand up and speak. Thing the first. A friend recently put up election signs in his yard. They happened to be signs for Obama, and against Prop 8 (the proposition in California that, if passed, will create a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage). In the end, though, that is really neither here nor there in my story. What is important is that he posted his signs in his yard, and woke up the next morning not only to find them gone, but to find a Yes on Prop 8 sign posted smack dab in the middle of his lawn.

Thing the second. A colleague of mine got up one fine morning, threw on a t-shirt, and headed out to walk his seven-year-old daughter to his local public school. About halfway there, he realized he'd put on his Obama t-shirt, but figured ah, well, such is life. Apparently not so much. Upon arriving at school, another parent, seeing him across the school yard, shouted, with no apparent humor, "You're lucky you don't get shot wearing a shirt like that around here."

These incidents, combined with the slogans "freedom of religion" and "freedom of speech" appended to signs which support Prop 8, and combined with the latest rhetoric in the political campaigns which equates paying taxes with socialism, have me in a state of total horror.

Before I say more, let me tell you one thing about me that might sound silly, but you've got to know it. I believe, in the strongest possible way, in democracy. Not democrats, not republicans, not my senators or my representatives per se. But democracy as an institution. I am passionate about it, in a way that I don't talk about very often because it sounds idealistic or downright insane, but I truly believe in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. All people. Not just the ones I agree with, or whom I like, or with whom I'd share a beer, or to whom I'd entrust my children. But all of them. Even the ones I think are complete blithering idiots with the brains of half-grown newts. Because that's what democracy means. (I'll be honest here and say that I think that good public education is a vital part of a working democracy, but that's a rant for another time.) When I vote, it gives me chills. Real, live, honest-to-god chills. People all over the world have fought and still do fight and die for the right to do something that I, and women like me, have been able to take for granted in the United States for the past 85 years (and yes, it has only been 85 years for those of us with a uterus, but that, too, is for another time). And I believe firmly that we should all feel that way about government, and about what it's for, and about voting. I tend to think that if we did, things might be a little bit different around here.

Because frankly, a proposition like Prop 8 is appalling. Not just if one is a supporter of gay rights (which I happen to be). I think that there are plenty of people out there who may think that gay marriage is a wrong thing for any one of a number of reasons who should still be terrified at the notion of creating a constitutional amendment to tell consenting adults how to conduct their private lives. A constitutional amendment. To me, this is one of the most upsetting things I've seen happen in politics in a long time. This is using one of our most powerful legal constructs to impose morals upon the population (Prohibition comes to mind as a lovely historical example of how well this works). Constitutions, state and federal, exist to protect the rights of all citizens. They do not exist to abrogate those rights.

Moreover, while laws in our nation exist to protect our rights as citizens, they do not exist to protect our sensibilities. It is not the job of law to protect us from seeing people whose lives offend us. A belief in the freedom of speech and of the right of our citizenry to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness must apply equally to all members of our society, or it's a farce. So it seems to me that this particular proposition is not a referendum on marriage; it is, at its heart, a referendum on democracy, and on freedom and rights. Do we feel that the laws of our nation, and the voice of our people, exist to protect the rights of all citizens, or not?

I think that what it boils down to for me is this. With rights come obligations. The right to vote, the right to freedom of speech and the freedom of the press, and the freedom to believe as we will, those rights are matched by obligations of equal depth and breadth. And at the core, those obligations come down to the obligation to support and uphold those social structures which give us those rights in the first place. Education, so our population can read and understand those matters put before them in the vote; health care, so all the people of this nation can participate in the possibilities offered by an open society; law and safety enforcement, so that we can safely exercise our freedoms. These things aren't free. And for them to mean anything at all, they must be available to everyone. Even those people whom we don't much like, or with whom we don't agree.

Because the day may come when we are the people with whom others don't agree, and what leg do we have to stand on then? If we do it right, then we have the strength of a society that protects the rights and freedoms of all citizens, however poor or marginalized. We have a society that acknowledges that its history is not a history of shared religion, or shared language or shared race or shared gender, but rather a firm and unbending belief in the rights of individuals under the law, and in the obligations of those individuals to the whole.