Word Presser

Sadness

2012-01-27T11:01:00.000-08:00

It returns. I'm going to blame the NPR report that implied that SSRIs don't help depression. Apparently, there's not definite proof that serotonin causes depression. I don't believe that the first statement necessarily follows from the second. But after the PMS that I had last week--while I was taking my medicine--I can't help but doubt. Now, I'm a couple days off of the medicine. I can recognize when I'm having feelings that I ought to ignore, when thoughts occur to me that aren't true, when I should push myself to do things that I don't want to do since I know that I will want to do them once I'm doing them.

But I still sometimes don't do those things. And I'm starting to lose track of which thoughts are true. I'm scared.

There are reasons. I'm behind on my revisions for a dissertation that's due in one week. And by "behind," I believe I mean "haven't started." I'm lost without Molly. I'm as hurt as ever by the girl on the couch who dates a strange woman I don't trust. When I think about my friends, and my lonely thoughts, I get so sad. When something little goes awry, I get so angry. This is not good.

I wish I knew what to do. Take my medicine obviously. And push through. I call Molly. I apologize to my friends and try to swallow the not so funny bitter remarks that burp out of me.

I made it out of bed today. I was even happy to do it. Then I was mad that I was waiting for someone whom I oughtn't to wait for. After the boyfriend, I swore I wouldn't wait again. But here I am. And it's windy, so my ball is not going in the basket as it should.

So I feel so sad. But I'll read a bit. All is not lost. I compensate with binge-eating and sugar and fat. With side-effects that I hate. But this hazelnut latte is tasty.

So I'll get back to reading and hopefully be ok in the end. I just hate really really hate the feeling of being unloved.

Because Friday Was Just Yesterday

2012-01-21T13:23:00.000-08:00

I can still post this special Poetry Friday edition. Alternatively, I could save the post and schedule it for next Friday, but I am an impatient person. If I write this now, I fucking want people to see it now.

This poem is on my mind because I used to teach it as an example of a sonnet in my Introduction to (writing about) Literature class. I recycled that syllabus yesterday for a job application.

"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

I have loved ee cummings since middle school. I like that his poems are funny. I like that they do cool shit with language that works both sonically and textually. I like that they can be political or tawdry.

This is a great poem to read in the middle of an election season full of politicians who appear all to happy to ignore the decade-long warS that we are fighting, yet who nonetheless manage to produce these same kinds of sounds in their never-ending debates.

I love the "of course" in the first line. I love the jumbled words, and the sonic and conceptual ironies like "every language even deafanddumb." I love how well the poem exploits the iambic meter and uses the worst rhymes imaginable, like "go/oh." I love love love the broken, unrhymed "beaut-" at the end of the ninth line. And the nonsensical threat in the thirteenth line combined with the empty consumptive silences of the last. This is a damning poem that delights in its own wit while conveying a kind of realistic speech. The ultimate irony, of course, is that jingoism never fails to be powerful and never begins, outside of the poem, to appear as ridiculous as it is. Newt Gingrich is a man of family values and ideas.

gah.

Nope, but it will be fun!

2012-01-07T12:34:00.000-08:00

Such were the hopeful words sent by my friend. In a fit of depression after my first date, I had messaged her to note that dating after the Barista won't be easy, will it.

My first dates with the Barista were magical. We were both super excited to get to know each other. See, we'd established that we were into each other already. With the online dating, I'm meeting a practically random someone to see if we're into each other. I was nervous and excited, but I wasn't blown away. I guess I shouldn't expect to be blown away all the time. But still, this woman is very cool--a drummer, with friends, and crazy cool hobbies, and a good job.

I felt somewhat overdressed. And I couldn't answer two of her questions. What was the coolest thing I've ever done? What was the craziest thing I've ever done? All I could think about was the Barista; she is the coolest thing I've ever done.

Maybe I shouldn't date again until I don't think that way.

The Epistemology of My Closet

2012-01-06T16:02:00.000-08:00

The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde

The black unicorn is greedy.
The black unicorn is impatient.
'The black unicorn was mistaken
for a shadow or symbol
and taken
through a cold country
where mist painted mockeries
of my fury.
It is not on her lap where the horn rests
but deep in her moonpit
growing.
The black unicorn is restless
the black unicorn is unrelenting
the black unicorn is not
free.

I'm not sure what a "moonpit" is, but I'm sure it's hella gay. I mean, the longest line in the poem clearly states that the horn is not "on her lap." I don't know too much about Audre Lorde, tho I clearly remember the first time I learned about her. I took a Women's Studies class to meet the school's multiculturalism requirement. She was a married mother of two and successful poet when she announced that she was a lesbian. For me, then, and now, I think the lesson I drew from that information was that it's ok to change. I'm not a huge fan of the part of the closet story that says that one may have been lying to the world her whole life and only now with this announcement speaks the truth. Perhaps some people have that experience. But take that path of logic and you wind up in the land of Gays Are Immoral, populated by bigots who fear that queers can't be trusted. All the movies in this land explain how murders are committed by gay people, who are fundamentally sneaky liars.

I don't know whether Audre Lorde was a liar (Plato says all poets are). But I do know that she was courageous as hell. She must have been a unicorn in the eyes of a world that thinks that reproduction and race have something to do with sexuality (to the exclusion of all else). You can't be a lesbian; you're married! You have kids! From the black community, she would've heard, but you're black. From the white community, she would've heard, but you're black. From the queer community, but you're black.

To all of them, she publicly asserted, I am a black unicorn, "unrelenting" tho "not free."

Such is my take, anyway. I would like to think a bit more about the distance between the speaker and the unicorn, tho--I may be taking liberties by asserting the confessional nature of the poem.

I don't see myself as such a unicorn. It's true that people are frequently surprised to know that I'm queer. Even other gay people, though most everyone has taken things in stride. Even my sister! and my aunt and uncle and cousins!

But not my mother. She nearly stepped on the land mine earlier today. It happened because I actually had thought that maybe she'd already figured it out. If one were to look at my facebook page, one would see a billion pictures of me with my Barista, including a picture taken at SF Pride. I spent holidays with her, I traveled with her, I took her to family celebrations, and then, I broke up with. I sort of understand that talking about my "girlfriend," even though I have never used that word to describe my friends before, might be misconstrued. Or I do now that it has so frequently. But the phrase "I broke up with my girlfriend and I'm really sad about it" seems harder to misunderstand.

But it was misunderstood and the land mine remained, fuse at the ready. So when I said that I have a date tonight with someone I met on OKCupid, I only half expected the question--boys or girls? I mean, I expected some pressure to come back to the fold, so I answered truthfully: I've tried finding guys to date online, on all kinds of sites, but no one really worked for me. Sensing some kind of storm, I tried to be reassuring: I'm not necessarily looking for a relationship right now, I'm just going on a date.

I nearly heard the bomb click. What do you mean by relationship? she demanded to know. I reeled, trying to find my footing, I summoned some innocence, what do you mean? I asked. What kind of relationship?

I'm a coward. The conversation had already had a few argumentative sallies that I'd backed away from. And I have a date tonight; I do not want to meet a new person, freshly shredded from my mother's closet. (I mean, really, who's in the dark here? It's not me.) So I rambled about how lonely I've been, all my friends are out of town, I just want to meet new people.

When I stopped, a good thirty seconds of silence burned through the telephone. I can't remember her exact word, I think she said, ok. I said good-bye. That was that.

Only with the deepest irony can I say that I can't wait to see what happens next. Oh lord. Luckily the girl on the couch called me to debrief. She thinks I'm lucky to be dealing with this now that I'm "stronger" and older and know myself better. Maybe. I feel like a late-blooming adolescent idiot. Because I wasn't in the closet; I simply didn't know what I wanted or why every time I talked to a guy online I felt disgusted with myself. I had thought I had some sort of antipathy toward dating people online rather than meeting them in person. But the thing was that I very rarely met men in person that I wanted to date. And there must've been some reason the girl on the couch made me so nervous....

So that's not a closet I'm describing. Though it is queer. And I'm not as unicorn-y as I think. Because I'm not a black married mother of two. But I certainly am restless. So I've returned to OKCupid, updated my apparently "sexy" profile, and already have a date! She thinks my profile is sexy!

I'm not worried about her being a girl. I'm worried about thinking too much about the barista and the couch. Is it too perverse to bring a date home to the couch when the owner isn't there? Ha. I'm worried about not having dated in so long; turns out I was one of those people who kinda let herself go when she was in a relationship. Hopefully she'll have fun with me anyway! If not, I could always just respond to this other lady who messaged me an hour ago. Women seem so easy to me and so right, so I just hope my mother will come around. I wonder if Lorde's family ever forgave her?

Worries

2011-12-27T00:28:00.000-08:00

I am worried about money. I am worried about loneliness. I am worried about self-esteem. I am worried about my friends who are worried about money. I am worried about my friends who are worried about illness.

I'm worried that I've upset the balance of my life too much with my two break-ups. I'm worried that I will continue to fail at taking care of myself. I'm worried that one will have to do with another. (Woah, who worries about the cascading qualities of their worries--that's championship!) I've never been able to avoid internalizing my mother's own worries about me.

I'm worried that my parents don't care that I am sad over my girlfriend but are focused on the breakup as an opportunity to reel me back to the Church. I asserted in my last post that I'm an adult, yet I'm worried that my autonomy will slip.

I can see a way out. I was hoping to fall asleep early tonight and sleep till 6 in the morning. But fell asleeep at 8 and woke at 11:30 PM! An earlier version of me would be angry at myself, I think, so I'm relieved that I'm not as worried as I could be. I'm worried that I should be taking advantage of this time to read or write, but there's something in me that keeps me from doing it.

What is this thing that keeps me from exercising? or from brushing my teeth? or from eating properly ?

Maybe I'm hedonistic; I can't be limited. Maybe that's why I suck at discipline. Maybe that's whay I ruined my relationships.

Maybe an old habit of mine that I haven't yet broken is finding unique ways to blame myself for all the problems in the world. Did I ruin my relationships? Or did I just let other people know how much our relationships were hurting me? That's not the same thing. Someone told me I have to right to do it. I hope they're right.

I need to remember that my rent is paid, my food is bought, my ideas are good, my support network is still mostly in place. I have necessaries. So I need to stop worrying because I can take care of myself and of the future. I need to trust myself. I need to drink more water.

I am somewhat worried that I can't take care of a new person. I'm worried that I won't be able to play the game long and slow the way it needs to be played. Part of me is more desperate than ever to find love and sex. I'm worried that I will find someone too soon. I am worried that I won't be able to move on from my break ups. I'm worried that can't literally can't afford to go out with a new lady. I'm worried that my way of coping with all my worries the past two years will make me too unattractive for a new person.

Now that I see it written down like this, I think it makes sense that I feel awash and overwhelmed. I need to trick my worries; let them think I'm impervious; let them think I'm too busy to see them. Clearly not all of these worries are warranted. But I don't think it's worth much to keep even those worries that make sense. I just need to take care of myself.

Thoughts on Behn, Poetry, and Love

2011-12-26T01:32:00.000-08:00

As I begin blogging again, I pick up again with PoetryFridays.

Like all good things, the idea’s been stolen from otherbloggers, probably Michael Berube’s Theory Tuesdays.

Like all good things, the idea requires discipline, which Ihope still to acquire even now that I’m 33, which seems a rather adult-like age and one capable of discipline.

I didn’t choose this poem with any purpose. I’d pulled theNorton Oronooko and Other Writingsoff a shelf, having wanted to read it ever since my first quarter of gradschool when I made the mistake of taking the class that did not read thisstrange little book. (Would one call it a proto-novel?)

The first half of the book is all legend and fairy-tale. It concerns aprince whose honor and love are quite challenged by his kingwhen the old man falls for and demands to have the young beauty who’d alreadygiven her heart to Oronooko. The second half of the book describes how thenoble savage is mistreated by slavery in South America where he confronts aChristian system of honor much different from his own. If the first half readslike a lay tale, the second is a travel narrative told by an English woman with mixedfeelings about rebellious, if honorable, slaves.

So the word “honor” quite stuck out to me about this poem.But also the frank title: I’m always trying to impress upon my students thedegree to which propriety about sex etc is so much a bourgeois fiction than itis something from “olden days.”

The poem is also much like the book—clunky and strange.

I most like how this abstract thing, Desire, is figuredas a concrete thing to be apostrophized as if it had agency. The speakerdemands that it inform her how it is able to hurt her though it is small. It derivesfrom an “infection,” is “new-found,” and is a “part” of her body-part “heart.”It’s an interior, ghostly thing, that one might think weak to “fame” and “honour,”those exterior virtues.

The third stanza interests me because the poem turns with noapparent reason or even formal cue. First the speaker descries the restlessnessdespite what “should” be, before she demands to know where Desire has been her wholelife.

The next stanza explains the problem: the speaker wonderswhy could she not have fallen for all the awesome men and princes before,despite all the love they offered? I'm not sure that the speaker finds an answer. One might could argue she wasn't ready for it yet, or that she'd not yet found 'true' love. There's also a line about how Desire comes when it is reciprocated, not that that's a real answer.

I’m struck by the sense that when one feels desire one feelsadult. It’s certainly been my case: when I fell for the girl on the couch, Ifelt alive and fully come into myself as I had never felt before. I ended inrecognizing myself as I had never fully allowed myself to do before. “[T]heunformed something” had been warmed; like the speaker, I had been asking all mylife where love had been. I literally sought it first in “silent groves” (sexon pine needles? ‘Meh, please stop, this isn’t working,’ I had to tell him).After that, I’d lain on “flowery beds,” sincerely wishing the ginger-headedwoman meant to crown my heart as well as my head with the flowers she knittedtogether and gave to me.

Once it had been found, I finally understood it had beendormant. My sister recently said something about my being “in the closet”; andI suppose there’s some truth to that though I had never been fully in thecloset nor aware of the fullness of my desire. I’d like to say that I’d neverbeen tempted by the “interest” or “business” of love, yet my heart was full-onbroken the first time by a man with whom I stayed over long out of a sense ofduty and powerlessness.

By the end of the poem, Desire no longer derives from asmall infection but from “god.” Perhaps her respect has grown for it, as minehas now, that she recognizes her own susceptibility to Desire. I sometimes think that I only now understand why people care so much about sex. She touches herlove, feels the desire, has sex, “die[s]” in all her doings. Perhaps thereciprocal nature of Desire—that she recognizes and he has “conscious” fire—makesit the more painful and combustible. She compares the mingling of theirrecognition to the mingling of idols and gods (has Sharon Olds read this poem?).She strives to love the god, but her desire for the person, his flesh, his “consciousfire” win out, though it may be “superstition.” She chooses worldly love. God, I hope to do the same.

Poetry Friday

2011-12-23T00:22:00.000-08:00

"calenture": a tropical disease affecting sailors with delirium or fever.
Aphra Behn, 1688

On Desire--A Pindaric

What art thou, oh thou new-found pain?

From what infection dost thou spring?

Tell me-----oh! Tell me thou enchanting thing,

Thy nature, and thy name;

Inform me by what subtle art,

What powerful influence,

You got such vast dominion in a part

Of my unheeded, and unguarded, heart,

That fame and honour cannot drive ye thence.

Oh! Mischievous usurper of my peace;

Oh! Soft intruder on my solitude,

Charming disturber of my ease,

That hast my nobler fate pursued,

And all the glories of my life subdued.

Thou haunt'st my inconvenient hours;

The business of the day, nor silence of the night,

That should to cares and sleep invite,

Can bid defiance to thy conquering powers.

Where hast thou been this live-long age

That from my birth till now,

Thou never couldst one thought engage,

Or charm my soul with the uneasy rage

That made it all its humble feebles know?

Where wert thou, oh malicious sprite,

When shining honour did invite?

When interest called, then thou wert shy,

Nor to my aid one kind propension brought,

Nor wouldst inspire one tender thought,

When princes at my feet did lie.

When thou couldst mix ambition with my joy,

Then peevish phantom thou wert nice and coy,

Not beauty could invite thee then

Nor all the arts of lavish men!

Not all the powerful rhetoric of the tongue

Not sacred wit could charm thee on;

Not the soft play that lovers make,

Nor sigh could fan thee to a fire,

Not pleading tears, nor vows could thee awake,

Or warm the unformed something------to desire.

Oft I've conjured thee to appear

By youth, by love, by all their powers,

Have searched and sought thee everywhere,

In silent groves, in lonely bowers:

On flowery beds where lovers wishing lie,

In sheltering woods where sighing maids

To their assigning shepherds hie,

And hide their blushes in the gloom of shades:

Yet there, even there, though youth assailed,

Where beauty prostrate lay and fortune wooed,

My heart insensible to neither bowed

Thy lucky aid was wanting to prevail.

In courts I sought thee then, thy proper sphere

But thou in crowds wert stifled there,

Int'rest did all the loving business do,

Invites the youths and wins the virgins too.

Or if by chance some heart thy empire own

(Ah power ingrate!) the slave must be undone.

Tell me, thou nimble fire that dost dilate

Thy mighty force through every part,

What god, or human power did thee create

In my, till now, unfacile heart?

Art thou some welcome plague sent from above

In this dear form, this kind disguise?

Or the false offspring of mistaken love,

Begot by some soft thought that faintly strove,

With the bright piercing beauties of Lysander's eyes?

Yes, yes, tormentor, I have found thee now;

And found to whom thou dost thy being owe:

'Tis thou the blushes dost impart,

For thee this languishment I wear,

'Tis thou that tremblest in my heart

When the dear shepherd does appear,

I faint, I die with pleasing pain,

My words intruding sighing break

When e'er I touch the charming swain

When e'er I gaze, when e'er I speak.

Thy conscious fire is mingled with my love,

As in the sanctified abodes

Misguided worshippers approve

The mixing idol with their gods.

In vain, alas, in vain I strive

With errors, which my soul do please and vex,

For superstition will survive,

Purer religion to perplex.

Oh! Tell me you, philosophers, in love

That can its burning feverish fits control,

By what strange arts you cure the soul,

And the fierce calenture remove?

Tell me, ye fair ones, that exchange desire,

How 'tis you hid the kindling fire.

Oh! Would you but confess the truth,

It is not real virtue makes you nice:

But when you do resist the pressing youth,

'Tis want of dear desire, to thaw the virgin ice.

And while your young adorers lie

All languishing and hopeless at your feet,

Raising new trophies to your chastity,

Oh tell me, how you do remain discreet?

How you suppress the rising sighs,

And the soft yielding soul that wishes in your eyes?

While to th'admiring crowd you nice are found;

Some dear, some secret youth that gives the wound

Informs you, all your virtue's but a cheat

And honour but a false disguise,

Your modesty a necessary bait

To gain the dull repute of being wise.

Deceive the foolish world---deceive it on,

And veil your passions in your pride;

But now I've found your feebles my own,

From me the needful fraud you cannot hide.

Though 'tis a mighty power must move

The soul to this degree of love

And though with virtue I the world perplex,

Lysander finds the weakness of my sex,

So Helen while from Theseus' arms she fled,

To charming Paris yields her heart and bed.

My Birthday

2011-12-22T22:30:00.000-08:00

would have been better if she had been there. She's so sweet and would've really had fun with all my friends; she would've filled this personality hole that was missing in the group, a sweetness that our bitterness, our rough jokes, our anger, our fear pined for.

She wasn't there, but she posted this.

i laughed, but was sad. I would've had so much fun on our birthday adventure in the City. She was going to take me to the Muppets' movie and probably would have included some culinary or oceanic or beautiful adventure.

I think i'm gonna ask one of my cat-sitting kits to marry me. Probably this grey one on my lap.

I must be crazy

2011-12-10T15:24:00.001-08:00

My girlfriend is adorable. She's masculine and feminine; she has beautiful blue eyes, perfect red lips, scattered freckles, and a cute little chin. Her features are delicate. Her walk struts. Her digits end in frog-like pads--if she heard me say that, she would surely be upset, but I love her fingers and toes. I love when she grabs me and cooks for me and tells me she's proud of me. I love to hear her talk when she's excited about something she loves.

And I broke up with her.

I must be crazy to break up with someone who loves me. I love her, and when I think of her in pain or in trouble, I have trouble breathing.

I have a shelf in my closet that I cleared off. I bought a box so that she could keep some stuff here. But it's always been empty. She loves me, but she can't put me first in her life. She has a lot going on, and I understand how hard it is for her.

But I can't make her love herself. I can't make her put herself first. I can't make her take care of the things she needs to take care of. I can't make her get a job. I can't make her call her friends or her sister. I can't even make her leave pajamas at my place on the shelf I cleared for her.

No I can't go to the storage unit. No I can't cook for my mom. No I can't make my mom do this or that. No you can't help me. Stop. No I can't do what you want to do. No don't touch me there.

When I touch her, she shrinks away. It's an automatic reaction. It's nothing personal. Except that it's everything personal. I love sex. I love that she loves me; and I love when she grabs my hand or randomly touches me or throws me down. But none of those things ever happens. I would love to be invited to her house, to be asked to spend time with her. But I'm not.

So I broke up with her. And I feel like shit.

I Want to Take Her Home to Christmas

2011-11-30T14:21:00.001-08:00

Today, for the first time, one of my family members met one of my professors.

He was (not, I'm sure he'd swear) baiting me into an argument about the recent protests on my campus in Not so Utopic Small Town, USA. One of the last times he and I spoke in person, he complimented me by saying that I argue much better than I used to. I suppose this is true. After all, I have had ten years of training in graduate school and have been teaching argumentation that entire time. Also, I used to be a child and then a teenager. So I'm betting that I argue better now. But somehow, his saying so didn't make me feel good. With a wallop of patronizing and a dash of cowardice (I don't know how to answer her, so I'll duck through this door), he tried to set me up as a sparring partner for life.

Since the protests, I have been covering my facebook page with information about the problem, teaching my students how to analyze the rhetoric, and applauding my friends, colleagues, and professors who have been answering the latest crisis in public education. Spreading the word is my way of being involved.

In response, my brother warned me to be "careful." I am intent on translating everything from my family into good-happy vibes no matter what they actually say or come from. So I wrote back to thank him for the support and to assure him I'd be safe. He didn't mean "safe," he shot back.

I never figured out what he did mean nor why he's writing at all. He seems to want me to be careful to be supporting the "right" cause. He says he wants an "interesting conversation," but he doesn't really care what is happening. It reminds me of my cousin's dinner friend who asserted that the protesters are out of line because they don't all know why they are there. I feel that if I can't persuade my brother that I know what is happening, he won't find my support of the movement acceptable. In other words, I feel as if any conversation I have with him about such things will be inherently unfair. But I am not an expert on this situation, just well informed. And the last thing I want is to piss him off or get into any kind of argument. So I try to use "well" and "I think" or "I believe" to distance myself from speaking for the whole movement, while trying to speak as clearly as I possibly can to someone I don't trust.

He comes back with ideas that miss the point, displaying a basic misunderstanding of the difference between public education and private enterprise. And making distinctions that don't matter between pay increases and the decisions to increase those incomes.

And all of a sudden, my friends and professor join in. Furman Prof speaks clearly, but he misunderstands her. Asian American Prof speaks more abstractly, and he rejoins in a (surely unintentioned) patronizing way. Then, to clarify a point about faculty I had buried beneath an "as far as I know," one of my professors jumps in with clarity, anger, the same middle-class privilege my brother thinks he's defending, and force. She speaks in exactly the same way that an earlier version of me would have but no longer dares to. And he stopped! Did his work day stop? I don't know. Will he learn that there's a lot going on here that he doesn't understand? I don't know. Will he recognize that his (and so many others') real intention had been to prove once and for all to the wayward academic children that they must now face up to the facts that they live in the "real" world? No way.

But I've long wanted an ally as articulate as I who could talk sense to my family. Someone who could show them that I'm not crazy; that I do live in the real world. Someone who could explain that what is happening matters to his children would he just see it. In that spirit, the next time I go home for Christmas (I'm not ready yet), I would like to invite these three awesome professors to come with me, to normalize me, to make my family ask new questions!

There's a Reason She Doesn't Talk to Her Mom

2010-07-18T17:39:00.000-07:00

Her Mom wants Artemis to apologize to her sister for the time when she arranged to have her nephew break her wrist.

I don't think it's worth while to apologize to people who didn't hear her the first time. And I don't think it's worth while to try to fight a story that everyone else has already decided they know--even though they weren't there and one of the people who was there and who is not Artemis is a known liar. I certainly don't think it's worthwhile to fight a story that has changed over the course of the last year and a half.

Artemis doesn't know if she'll be able to constitute for herself the kind of family and enduring bonds that she believes it's best to have.

But if her siblings want her to be part of their family, they are going to have to treat her as if they love her. She needs to be treated as if she were valuable.

One thing about dating someone new, it turns out, is that it becomes clear to you that it's possible to demand and expect that people value your time rather than simply taking advantage of you. It turns out there's all sorts of good advantages to dating!

On Days Like Today

2010-07-14T11:52:00.000-07:00

You feel it's unfair that your cat had to die.

When your roommate, whom you love, moves out, you miss your kitty.

When the Girl Regains Her Couch, and you can't hardly remember why the couch mattered, but you remember that it did matter (and her eyes are so bright) and see that she doesn't give a shit at all, you miss your kitty.

When the brave, cute, funny, smart, coffee-flavored girl (whose eyes are thus far indescribable) that you've been dating moves far enough away that her car-less ass can't see you nearly every day as you wish, you miss your kitty.

(And no, for those who are interested, it is not the case that Artemis wishes she'd never started this thing that maybe can be seen any further than a couple of weeks away. For one thing, she and the Coffee-flavored Girl have, in her opinion, been very good adults about making no promises and thinking no futures out loud together. For another, both she and CfG needed this to happen in whatever form it took. No matter how it ends, it's surely precious to them both. Also, can it be noted that Artemis believes CfG walks taller now? How great is that?)

When you know your friends are beautiful and smart and funny and kind and super supportive and so many other superlative things, you still miss your goddamn kitty cuz he was all those things (maybe not smart but what need did he have of being smart?) and a kitty--with unbelievably soft fur (that stuck out between his toes and in his ears! and the ruff! The ruff!) and a gloriously loud purr and a comfortingly melancholy face.

On days like today, you miss kitties like Charlie.

Can't Stop Watching Alex and Twitch!!!

2010-07-01T18:56:00.000-07:00

I'm sure this link won't last long. Arte's writing partner is watching her watch this video and says, "You love him!" But not really. Artemis is not in love with this man's personality in the way she is with Jose or Ade. She's in love with the performance. The performance was magic and not just cuz the man is outside of his comfort zone. It's because he discovered, and we with him discovered, new zones of comfort that aren't so much comforting and fucking exciting as hell. All she can say is that he hit it so hard. He hit it so hard and the audience felt it and rose to their feet and shouted for joy. And they didn't shout for joy cuz they're tweens who are crushing on a cute boy or because a girl is sweet or a boy has charisma. They're shouting at brilliant light that shone through the attitude derriere all the way through the gut into the ground and then back up to the sky again.

Arte's voice teacher has talked about the transition in the voice's register as the sound moves up through the chest into the singer's head. Especially because Artemis is in no-way a singer and because she doesn't practice or have any kind of range at all. There's an exercise they do where Arte's voice is supposed to slide up and down the scale on a single syllable, Gaaaaahaaaaaa. It's the transition that's hard.

This is what SYTYCD is supposed to be testing on its contestants. Can they transition their movement skills from one area of expertise to another? Alex doesn't just dance hip hop here. He does both! He's both at once. And I'm late for dinner now, and this might not completely capture what I mean to say, but that'll have to do for now. The performance is incredible.

Progressives and Racism

2010-06-17T12:15:00.000-07:00

Totally :

Nowadays Stephen Colbert has to work hard to make sure he's still doing a parody, and not a realistic portrait, of a certain kind of wounded, self-righteous white man.

I'm still wrapping my head around this moment on the "Sport Report" from the Colbert Report last week:

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Sport Report - Soccer Debate - Marc Fisher & Mark Starr

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Fox News

One thing is clear. Artemis has always and probably will always like Charles Barkley. The man is entertaining. But Colbert himself confuses us. Notice how many times he breaks character in this one segment. He always does a great job of walking the parodic line with a twinkle in his eye, but there's no subtlety here: the man is not in character.

Also, the Washington Post guy is a douche. His thesis (8:40ish)? The rest of the world has simplistic, childish tastes, but Americans are grown ups who prefer sophisticated, complicated, action-oriented games.

The other guy argues that soccer is a better sport because its players are "the greatest athletes in the world" without being "freaks of nature." When the man defines "freaks" as 7'5" or 350lbs, Stephen in his "shocked" voice, exclaims, "Freaks of nature?! They prefer to be called African Americans." The audience responds right away with "ooooooooooh" no, he didn't. And Stephen plays it out, pointing his finger at the man and scolding, "I find that offensive; [glances at the audience] that is a terribly offensive thing for you to say." The man, having not said it, just sits there, and Stephen says, "I apologize, ladies and gentlemen." The audience laughs, the guests laugh, and that's it.

So who's being racist here? The anti-soccer guy clearly. The pro-soccer guy?

A friend of Artemis argues that since the man is clearly referring to the players of black-dominated sports, he is indeed saying that African Americans are freaks of nature rather than the world's best athletes. But Artemis thinks of futbal as a nonwhite sport (see simplistic asshole, above). So she finds it odd to distinguish between basketball, football, and soccer in racial terms. It's just not the first thing she thinks of. Instead, she's weirded out by Stephen's interpretation--the image is excessively large, out of control bodies, and the first people he thinks of are black?

Maybe he's calling the other guy out on his latent racism. Or maybe he's betraying his own racist impulses. Maybe it's impossible to say one way or another because both of these men are white. And it must be said, in Stephen's defense, that in the US, soccer is (I think) a predominately white, upper middle class sport. But it's really hard to tell whether this is parody or a realistic portrayal of white (heterosexist) male privilege when the man keeps breaking character. So at the very least, Artemis and I can say...step it up Colbert!

Emotion

2010-06-11T16:57:00.000-07:00

Does emotion help you write? Sometimes it's distracting, Artemis finds. But I think it's suspicious how little focused work she's done since she's begun this Prozac business. She's done a lot of work. She's written a lot of words. But they have been having a lot of trouble coalescing into essay and dissertation format.

She confesses: she has not so steadily been taking her Prozac lately. And she reports a definite emotional difference. She's been more defensive. She's been more angry. She just cried at the sight of fb pictures of her entire family on a camping trip that she didn't know about. Well, entire, except, now that she thinks about it, her arm-breaking neveu. Which maybe would not send her into tears as quick, Prozac or no.

She's been second-guessing all sorts of interpersonal investments and decisions that she's been making this year. And--oh, there's one right now. A message from a crazy woman. It should be noted that Arte does not like to throw around that word lightly. But sadly this woman is something like every bad impulse Arte has ever had in the last twenty years wrapped into one small and technologically enabled package. I suppose Artemis ought to block the girl's messages so that she can chat with other women in peace, but apparently Artemis finds herself incapable of being that harsh. I bet if we can time it so that the girl bothers her when Artemis is drinking, we'll have better results.

Obviously, if she's busy editing my blog posts, Artemis is not exactly "focused" on her work. But most definitely she's feeling more positive about it than she has in a while. There are other possible reasons for this change that we don't have space to discuss here, but still she wonders whether the medicine-induced happiness doesn't actually work against her ability to work.

How We Know She's Not Manipulative

2010-06-08T02:03:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, Artemis was accused of being manipulative. Like the times that she has been accused of being narrow-minded, this seemed extremely unlikely. She spent entire days after the accusation, looking up the word "manipulate" in various dictionaries. Aside from falling in love with the aspect of the word that is related to "hands" (and yes, Artemis does appreciate handling certain things), Artemis could not for the life of her figure out how anyone could in all seriousness accuse her of being manipulative.

Seriously, the girl just does not have that much game.

Let's examine how her evening progressed: she "stalked" her fave barista. She arrived at the appropriate coffee shop (and let's give her props for choosing an appropriate coffee shop) mid afternoon. Barista arrived later and passed by while Arte was scoping another girl. Bad Arte! Then, when Barista passed by once more pre-shift, she was distracted by one of her own friends in front of Arte. Bad Barista! Plus, Barista took her break with one of her own complaining friends. Bad friends! Bad Barista! Do you not understand how much more entertaining the grad student is than the undegrad who worries over her finals?! Please. Just because that other girl has cute eyebrows and brings you food, no reason to indulge her so.

Then, when Arte takes her leave of coffee shop, having satisfied herself that she's actually worked that day and accomplished things, Barista asks what her plans are. Artemis has progressed enough in half a week that doesn't dissemble and say "I don't know." She explains and asks the other girl's plans. Such foresight! But when the other girl expresses dissatisfaction with her plans--apparently she'd received a text about how her friends wanted to drink "about their finals"--Artemis fails to offer her a better solution. OBVIOUSLY Artemis' plans were better than anyone else's that night. She attended a pirate radio broadcast about queer sex before heading off to the bar for a drink. Two drinks. Whatever.

It was fun. But when it was over, and she hadn't run into her favorite barista, she realized that she should have told her Barista where she would be going after the radio show. She should have thought ahead, she should have been sensitive to her Barista's dissatisfaction over the vague plans her friends had proffered via text.

But no, she is simply incapable of playing such a long game. She cannot think that far ahead because she's so caught up in the empathic feeling of the moment. She felt her Barista's slight annoyance and wanted to, you know, pet her hair till it went away. But she couldn't think far enough in advance to invite her to join her peeps at the bar.

Oh well, soon enough, right? I mean, this whole chatting up and friendly so what are you doing now cannot go on forever right? I mean, (and this is what girlfriends always ask each other) Arte is right to think it is just not normal for people to ask their customers what their evening plans are, right?

Pretty soon, Arte is going to need a new crush.

Strange Gazing

2010-06-07T19:21:00.000-07:00

Nothing I will say will sound remotely revealing to any ordinary person. Only Artemis, late-blooming, shy, interior, self-conscious, romantic Artemis would think that making eye contact with people would be a rare and wonderful discovery.

What can I say? The girl never let herself gaze at strangers before. She looked at strangers, but always felt as if she weren't allowed to look at them. She had always thought that people would find her eyes intrusive or threatening. An early memory on a school bus of an older boy mocking her big eyes seemed instructive on this point. During mass, she had been taught that staring is rude; no one had bothered to convince her that staring is sexy!

If you had caught her sneaking a peek in the past, she would snatch her eyes away as fast as she could, ya know, to stare at the object that she had really intended to be looking at. She always pretended you'd come upon her in media res. (This is why she's always felt such sympathy with cats who do stupid shit and then quickly turn their off balance crash into a pose for licking themselves as if to say, hey, I'd meant to do that all along!) Or if you catch her, she might unfocus her eyes as if to suggest that really she's staring off into space in general and not--dear lord, of course not--at you directly and in particular.

She probably fooled no one. Or maybe she did--she never has felt that she's attracted any attention from strangers in whom she was interested. Once she was asked on a date precisely because she had seemed to be completely preoccupied with her thoughts. Or maybe she only fooled herself--her friends have told her that people have seemed attracted to her without her noticing. And I have to say that the law of averages, if nothing else, would suggest that would have to be true. After all, Artemis is not such an unattractive person that absolutely no one would ever express interest in her, even if she were oblivious to their attentions. Right?

Things may be changing now. Maybe it's the Prozac. Maybe it's the years of therapy. But suddenly Artemis has allowed herself to admit that she likes people. I'm sure this sounds strange. But her whole life she's been afraid of people, of starting conversations with them, of committing time to them, of giving things to them, of showing herself to them and losing control. She's always been afraid of embarrassing herself and fears that she may irrevocably prove to herself that she isn't worth their time.

Her therapist and friends tell her that when she interacts with people these days, she positively lights up. She's starting to believe them. It might be that she likes people, after all.

So now, when she signs up for the dating sites, she no longer feels so stupid. Is it because she's talking to women rather than men? Or is it that she's admitted that she actually wants to get to know people and isn't worried so much about whether or not she'll be able to entertain them?

Even her mother once said that all she has to do is meet people because once they get to know her bright personality they'll be charmed. (Her mother has never accused Artemis of being so charismatically attractive that she would ever bring people into her orbit based on her looks alone. But to be fair, that may just be because her mother's priorities are in the "right" place, not because her mother doesn't think her daughter physically attractive.)

Artemis always hated the online dating because she hated the idea that people were judging each other on looks alone. Not that they don't always do that anyway.

But of course, now that she's in a market where apparently her looks are worth a lot more ("You have a beautiful smile"; "You are super pretty"; "wink") she's definitely rethinking her position. "Looks" mean something to her, after all, though she's always thought there was some greater alchemy involved in whether she's attracted to people.

Maybe it's not the one-thru-ten ranking system that she hates so much but that the rankings are tied so rigidly to some completely arbitrary standard of beauty. And that the ranking system is so much a way that (unattractive) men end up punishing awesome women who don't fit into their stupid schemes. And I'm not going to say that these are "ordinary, every day" women in the fashion of those "real beauty" Dove ads. And I'm not going to say that a woman, say a barista who's cute because she's so obviously a dyke, is beautiful "on the inside." After all, Artemis recognized her long before they'd ever talked--there was no inside from which to judge.

All of this feels really obvious to say, but Artemis has never really allowed herself to think through all of these implications before. Because she's always been embarrassed to think that someone might realize that she's attracted to them, she's never realized how important it might be to have someone recognize her simply as someone who has the capacity to be attracted. How important it might be to be recognized as a sexual being.

When she asked out Girl Sans Couch, I think she underestimated how powerful it is to simply be recognized as sexually available. At the time, GSC had told her that her sister has trouble getting people to recognize that she's queer so much so that when someone at a hot dog stand had seen her for who she was, she came home right away, thrilled to tell her sister. On the other hand, GSC speculated, perhaps she was "too out."

Artemis did not know what GSC meant by this, and to be honest neither did GSC when she was asked to clarify. But maybe it has to do with the way that being open and available to people sexually, when it's done well, cannot be simply a matter of passively presenting yourself to the world. You have to make eye contact. It's not that aggressive. It's not necessarily, as Artemis once thought, a way of cheating romance whereby you could never be sure if the other person was really into you or whether they were just taking advantage of how easy you, in your staring, appeared to be. (That's a convoluted sentence, but it expresses a feeling that seems ESSENTIAL to how Arte used to think of dating.)

Hell, her gaze is a compliment you're paying to this other person; you're telling them that they're worth looking at. And since Artemis considers herself to be a very good judge of whether people are worth looking at, she believes this is one powerful compliment.

Plus, it's fun!

Next to the feeling that you have a crush on a totally beautiful person, the best feeling ever is that sharp stabbing feeling you get when someone looks at you as if they'd like you to know that they think you're worth looking at.

And the only way you're going to get that look is if you manage to hold gaze with a stranger.

Things to Say to the Woman with Confused Children

2010-05-26T08:16:00.000-07:00

A man recently wrote to the Slate.com advice columnist to settle a disagreement between him and his partner: should they argue with the straight neighbor who asked them to not kiss each other in front of her kids. (nb: these are kisses without tongue.)

The advice was to not pick a fight and not stop kissing.

I'm willing to bet that ignoring such a woman will cause tension anyway, so in the fantasy-land where I get to run things, I would say to her:

Why are your children so easily confused? (Artemis has a friend who changed her last name, which she dearly loves, so that her future children will be confused. Same question--why are you planning on having stupid children?)

Why have you confused your children?

The disingenuous approach: oh, do you not kiss in front of them?

Are your children confused or are you confused?

The academic approach: Honestly, I think that the heteronormative expectations can be changed most peacefully (if slowly) if we can make homosexual kissing a part of their every day lives.

OMFG, you're a Republican!

*smoochkissslobbermwahsmooch*

Analogy Fear

2010-05-24T13:43:00.000-07:00

I do not understand it.

And I do not understand why perfectly fine thinkers who manage to attract large audiences with good writing, unique voice, and substantive argument are willing to "concede" that analogies are a weak rhetorical device.

They are not. Audiences have weak argument skills. That's why they create the following straw man: analogies are homologies. The two things you have compared are not exactly similar. Even though the two things appear to work analogically, they really don't work homologically. Therefore, analogies are bad and flawed and lead to bad thinking where appearances obscure reality.

NO.

Analogies are not homologies. They only need to be similar enough to clarify a point in the argument. In the argument that I linked to above, the writer wants to say that kids are a class of people and we good liberals don't like to discriminate against people as a class--any class. To support her point that we don't like to discriminate against people as a class, she suggested we imagine ourselves not saying "I hate kids" but "I hate women" or "I hate Arabs" or whatever. In order for the analogy to work, we need to understand that "kids," "women," and "Arabs" share only one essential trait--they are all classes of people. The whole appearances--reality thing simply does not apply.

In this way, because of the kind of surprise that's induced by a good comparison, I would argue that analogies are STRONGER than homologies, precisely because of the way they are dissimilar. The dissimilarities highlight the similarity, the part that's meant to support your argument. If an audience does not like an analogy, they need to show that the dissimilarities somehow outweigh or obscure the similarities. And that they do so in such a way to undermine the original point of the argument. In this case, the point of the argument was not to say that kids are like Arabs. It's to say that kids are a class of people. If you think Arabs are a class of people and that kids are so unlike Arabs that they are not a class of people, then you have something to say--about this analogy. But not about analogies in general.

The hullabaloo over analogies and their supposed weakness (see Yglesias on this, too.) seems to come from the way that they too easily invite disagreement. It's too easy for us to find dissimilarities. A psychologist I work for suggested--in regard to a different topic--that our brains are hard-wired to find dissimilarities before similarites. We are very good at which of these things is not like the others sort of games. But that evolutionary trait does not make analogies either illogical or unreasonable. They are meant to help us focus on similarities we hadn't noticed before because of all the distracting dissimiliarities and politics that get in the way.

That said, I hate it when people say they hate children. A) Bad children, like bad pets, are usually reflecting something about the parents, and it's not fair to blame them for it. And B) like Sybil, I attribute the "hate" to unfamiliarity. On Saturday, a day in Utopic Town that was made for the super old, the super young, and many ages in between to commingle, I caught myself being annoyed by a loudly talking baby in the coffee shop where I was "working." The baby wasn't yet using words. I was annoyed and thought why do people bring their babies into this otherwise quite place. But then, to my credit I think, I thought that baby is just speaking another language. I am just feeling the same annoyance I would feel by any conversation among "foreigners" with different linguistic habits. And I thought it must be nice for the mothers to escape their homes.

That said, I find the mother groups around this town generally annoying because they gather in public places that are not necessarily kid-friendly and they let their kids loose as if they were on a playground. I'll never forget the time that I taught someone else's kids to roll not throw the ball in the coffee shop with computers and open cups of coffee every where. It's not the kids who are bad. It's the mothers who evidently don't want to treat their own children as people who need to be interacted with.

All of which is to say that I support both analogies and the substance of Sybil's argument.

Artemis Feels Like

2010-05-24T09:14:00.000-07:00

She's trying to swim through a giant jar of thick honey.

At least, I tell her, it's not a vat of molasses. Cuz that shit kills.

Poetry, Weekend-Edition

2010-05-20T22:27:00.000-07:00

Artemis is a Rilke fan. When they assigned All Quiet on the Western Front in middle school, she wasn't sure she would but she most definitely loved the language. So here's some more rich Rilke language to love.						I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone
by Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by Annemarie S. Kidder

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough to truly consecrate the hour. I am much too small in this world, yet not small enough to be to you just object and thing, dark and smart. I want my free will and want it accompanying the path which leads to action; and want during times that beg questions, where something is up, to be among those in the know, or else be alone. I want to mirror your image to its fullest perfection, never be blind or too old to uphold your weighty wavering reflection. I want to unfold. Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent; for there I would be dishonest, untrue. I want my conscience to be true before you; want to describe myself like a picture I observed for a long time, one close up, like a new word I learned and embraced, like the everday jug, like my mother's face, like a ship that carried me along through the deadliest storm.

In the Event of the Kitty's Untimely Demise

2010-05-20T22:19:00.000-07:00

Everyone has been more than kind. Artemis was most violently upset when her kitty went in one day from wobbling to complete floppiness. (She'd always called him the Floppy Kitty because when you pet him and scratched all along his back, he would stick his bony butt as far up in the air as it would go and when his legs could stretch no further, he'd flop onto his side and collapse into wiggles. His death perverted his passion into frustration.) Her roommate beautifully stepped in and brainstormed a way for him to eat (warm baby food!). Her Texan friend recommended a vet. Her London friend recommended a vet. She was angry. How is someone supposed to make this decision?! Her gym-friend friend helped her say good-bye to him with many pettings and roses. Her roommate drove; She cradled him in her arms. He whimpered. She cleaned everything outside of her room. A movie-friend brought a vase with beautiful irises, card signed by many. The vet sent a card signed by the office. Arte's parents separately said kind words. Bunches of Facebook folks were kind.

And the whole time, she thought this isn't so bad. I make mourning look easy. She maybe cried every time some said they were sorry. Even people she only knows a little have sympathized with her; the girl she'd met for lunch, Voice Teacher Eve.

But there's a slow burn. She worried that she felt nothing. She ate junk food. She worried. Junk food. She slept and then worried. Food. She dreamt she had to confess to everyone, just kidding, she hadn't killed her cat. She remembered that he had had motor problems before. She looked at Maine Coon Kitty porn. She waited, and the limps worked themselves out. Maybe the paralysis was gone? She saw shadows move, heard food rustle in the dish, felt the bed dip with weight.

Sooooooooooooo...maybe mourning isn't that easy.

Other people elsewhere have bigger problems. A brother's father died a painful, cancer-ridden death. A high school friend's high school husband is fighting off cancer. A London friend's NYC friend and her daughter were violently murdered this week. A Teacher is signing for her divorce.

This doesn't help me put things in perspective. It makes me feel worse. But Artemis knows she loved her pet for only a few years. And she is comforted by the idea that she saved him from a bad life.

More on Privacy, Or What are all these people doing in my bed?

2010-05-19T10:33:00.000-07:00

It must be rich for someone who writes pseudonymously to make the claim that worries about privacy are overblown. But it's important to distinguish between those who write pseudonymously and those who write anonymously. I would never argue that it's wrong for Anonymous to have a public presence. Anonymous sometimes makes necessary interventions into the public debate. But pseudonyms frequently have purposes to do with concerns other than privacy. Typically, pseudonymous writers tend to be write hyperbolically in mean, sardonic tones about matters of public importance. Like the blind items writers who persist today on Gawker, their pseudonymity often highlights the fact that public people are doing naughty private things in public.

Artemis is not that kind of political creature. Her pseudonym and my narrative existence are meant to open a space for experimentation and to highlight the ways in which her identity is multiple and unsettled. Very much unsettled. It's an identity that needs public expression but isn't ready for the main stage.

When it comes to questions about privacy, it should be noted that Artemis comes from a family known for paranoid fears. And it's their concerns about privacy that makes her suspect in the public debates at large some element of unfounded paranoia. But when her favorite people start blanking themselves out on fb, well, maybe it's time to think from other angles.

Artemis has a tight relationship with privacy. She grew up Catholic, and since the age of 8 has been privvy to (ha ha) the privacy of the confessional. Just her, God, the priest, the Church, everyone in the church, people who were not in the church...

I'm not saying that other people could hear her confessional. But they could see it. And they could see who didn't come. And they could see who didn't stay for penance. And they could see who genuflects and who doesn't. And they could see and hear emotions. And they could (and no doubt did) speculate about all of the above. Privacy, it seems to Artemis, and its breach, is all about setting the boundaries of your group. In the words of the immortal Heidi Klum, its extent lets you know if you are in or you are out.

In the past, we all put this kind of thing down to gossipy old women. We didn't fear it because old women have no power. Some times we imagined they did have power--so we burned them as witches or we wrote stories about how they ruin things with their "meddling."

When the social survey was invented, people freaked out about their loss of privacy. But how did Kinsey gather so much intimate information about our lives? People complain about the loss of privacy, but they love telling other people about themselves. They love feeling connected to a larger social group. I like anal sex and so do others? ZOMG I'm not a freak! or We're all freaks together! Surveys are fun. How many surveys have you taken since you've joined Facebook?

Even though the census this year was very much geared toward census-y type information--there were zero questions about anal sex--the people who were scared of it made the news. There were political fear-mongers like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann who apparently saw an opportunity to solidify a social group around the idea that the government was encroaching on their privacy. But considering these people's position on Roe v. Wade, it's hard to understand where this libertarian streak suddenly comes from. Well, not that hard. They are perfectly fine with the government peeking in on your sex life and your uterus; it's your wallet that needs to stay private.

Of course I think that's precisely wrong. Especially if you are a public figure or a public corporation, your wallet very much becomes my business. Even if you are a private individual, your wallet may become my business. For you, dear rich and successful person, owe support to the institutions that protect your wealth and encourage its growth. According to Andrew Carnegie, this used to be the conservative political perspective. Back when conservatives didn't just say No to everything. Considering how many poor people live on credit, their wallets do not seem to have a right to privacy either. And considering how our economy depends on consumers, I fail to see how the middle class can complain when they find people peeking into their Quicken accounts.

When I watch TV on Hulu these days, I must also watch commercials. Last night, they wanted to know whether the commercials were relevant to me, yes or no. I could have not answered. But I did not want to be targeted by heterosexist, breeding-centered, you are a woman watching Chuck so you must be interested in diapers and baby food ads. So I breached my own privacy and answered no.

Part of my deal is that "they" (whoever they are--the internet demons?) already know a lot about me. They know I'm female, probably a woman, over 30, probably white, living in Utopic Town, USA, and Sagittarius. That much is in the online phone books. Another part of my deal is that I'm interested in letting these people know that there are groups of people out there--say women in their early 30s who are not interested in child-bearing products--that are worth noticing. They have money, the consume things, and they are sick of being hailed by identities they don't share.

But what if you are not protecting your wallet? What if you are secure enough in your own identity that you don't care how people see you or maybe you take delight when they don't see you aright? What is it that you are protecting when you protect your privacy?

Artemis's sister might answer that she's protecting her children. This could work two ways. When the dad with the kid who was spaced out after going to the dentist posted his video on YouTube, a lot of people were concerned about the kid's future. Was his identity going to be tarnished before he could have control over his own tarnishment? I never understood this line of thinking, based as it seemed to be on the idea that identity is permanent. Besides, would the kid really want to befriend anyone who judged him for taking drugs at the dentist, no matter what his age?

Arte's sister approaches the problem from a second way: she's afraid for her kids' (sexual) safety. For her the problem with public information about children has nothing to do with their inability to control their own image. She has no problem crafting their images for them. The real problem is that you can't control what other people do with that information.

Let's say that the internet demon who wants to know whether or not the baby food ad is relevant to me is really a "pervert" who gets off on thinking about women who are in their 30s but hate the thought of baby food. Would Artemis feel that her privacy is violated if she knew that someone was jacking off at the thought of her turning her head away in disgust whenever she passes the baby aisle in the grocery store?

Of course this is a silly example. No one is really concerned about the baby food people. We're concerned about sex. Sex is the place where the public might meet the private in very frightening ways. The internet is the place where public meets private, too. Ergo, the fear-driven thinking goes, the internet is all about sex. In fact, it's in my bed right now, while I type, half-naked!

For Artemis's sister, the idea that you can't control who sees the information or what they will do with it scares the crap out of her. She doesn't like the idea that pedophiles could stalk her kids. Therefore, any information sent to the family must stay in the family. She doesn't even allow her emails to be forwarded within the immediate family circle.

Artemis thinks that this kind of vigilance only serves either to mask the real problem with information or to hide the real leaks where your information is going public with your informal consent. What made you think you could control the information before all this? What makes you think you are controlling the information now? Why do you want to control the information?

Artemis worries that ideas about protecting privacy mask the desire to withdraw oneself from responsibility in public life. For the sake of a healthy economy and a psycho-socially healthy nation, we need to encourage people to have social networks that extend beyond the family and the immediate circle of friends.

This is not to say that we support Zuckerberg's opinions about how it should be hard to hide one's self-generated content from her social networks. We don't like how Facebook line works against our having identities that are temporary, provisional, and experimental. Given that it started as a service for college students, this emphasis on stability is somewhat strange. But we also don't like the suggestion that the social networks are flat expanses that extend out evenly and linearly from the center of the individual. The fact that it's easier to hide status updates from others than it is to prevent your updates from reaching others is indicates how Facebook thinks of social networks as acting like radio signals. (an oddly analog image for a digital giant, but I think it fits.)

Artemis sympathizes with the woman on Crooked Timber yesterday who was trying to explain the difference between privacy for a man and privacy for a fifteen year-old girl. Several fears intersect here:

We believe young girls need protection because we believe that they are infinitely desirable.

We also believe they have no way of protecting themselves.

Both of these fears seem rationally suspect to Artemis. If young women are infinitely desirable (and since I don't think any of the regular readers of this blog would desire them, that's a GIANT "if"), then the problem does not lie with privacy but with patriarchal systems of desire. I would be more inclined to believe that "privacy" is an expression of the power working within those systems than that it is our last bulwark of protection against them. Maybe I'm wrong. But even so, the argument would be worth having before we jump to conclusions.

The second fear also seems problematic on many levels. First, if girls are unable to protect themselves from public predators, should we remove the girls from the public or should we teach them how to protect themselves? Maybe we, like certain Islam-governed nations, believe that girls are incapable of protecting themselves since they are infinitely prone to their own sexual impulses. Girls can't protect themselves from men whom they are busy seducing. Which they will do whether they mean to or not because they are girls (who are infinitely desirable and therefore desiring). We can't accept any of this sexist logic.

There exists a related concern from the center-left about whether 15-year-old girls deserve to have privacy with their doctors. It seems to me that the same arguments for the ironclad privacy of girls on the internet is used to justify their lack of privacy in the doctor's office. With the additional assumption that doctors are professionally gendered male. This apparent contradiction bolsters my suggestion that the real concern is not about privacy about the patriarchal control of young women's bodies.

A third fear, however, must be admitted. When we flatten all of our social networks, as Jeff Zuckerberg appears to want us to do, we do more damage to the already murky line between public and private personas. People like Artemis's sister (mistakenly) think of the family as the safest of all social networks. The more we interact with people virtually, the more we invite them into the safe circle without the guarantee of blood or marriage. (Even friendships are suspect in Arte's family. This sister only recently has developed a personal relationship outside of the family circle and is finding out how much friction that can cause. We might think of Arte's professional ties as posing a similar threat to the family circle.) And therefore the more open our information is to corruption.

Arte's family takes privacy to the extreme. In fact, she particularly hates the fact that her parents chose to retire to a private lot in the middle of nowhere, GA. Now that they are growing old, she fears that they don't have a strong social network to help them when they need it. But the question about whether or not the internet is too public a place for us to store our private information is still salient, even if not for the reasons the paranoiacs fear.

Perhaps this is all just a matter of etiquette, of learning how to speak to each other in public without the face-to-face interaction to guide our level of appropriate. Proper etiquette is all about recognizing that social networks are not flat, that not everyone is family, and that even family deserve to withhold things from each other. It's all about calibrating our behavior to match that recognition. Right now, Facebook's ideas about globalized flatness are nicely neoliberal, but they fail to capture just how conservative our private interactions are. Maybe Zuckerberg is right to be suspicious of the complaints about privacy, but if Facebook wants to be the one that facilitates how our private lives meet our public lives, it's going to have to figure out a smoother way to do it.

Meanwhile, Artemis values the social networks she's built up online. When Charlie died, it was super important to see that people cared. She's learned a lot about how to extend such networks beyond her immediate friends and family. She's an educated woman from a lower middle class family who has moved several times already in her 30 young years. This means that her nonweb relationships and networks are tenuous and stretched to the limit by distance and cultural difference. Facebook certainly seems a good solution to distance, but it sucks at cultural difference. And pretending that social networks are flat will not make it any better. Just ask her sister why she defriended Arte on Facebook.

Artemis' Anger and a Mini Digression about "Privacy"

2010-05-19T08:09:00.000-07:00

is directed at:

Brain tumors

Domino's Pizza's revamping. Did it taste bad before? Maybe. But it tastes worse now that they believe the answer is slavering their products with giant utensils filled with Flavor. Artemis knows the utensils are giant because the Flavor is applied so freaking randomly. She also knows that most people would buy pizza from elsewhere. But one of the requirements of depression eating is that one does not have far to drive.

Ill-timed changes. Is it really a great idea, dear Universe, for her to lose her kitty and most of her closest friends in one year? Thank you for bringing Sh and V into her life, but goddamn, she's still upset about the others.

Her own cowardice

Google's decision to change their spelling advice. It used to be that you could search for things with weird spellings, but then Google would simultaneously offer to search for more common spellings. They maybe even included a commonly spelled hit or two. Now you have to search twice for things with uncommon spellings.

She's also angry that most people would not think the above is racist. But it is. Just try googling "Shakeema and Kaliya."

Family members who choose to gossip about her rather than talk to her. Wtf?

Arte (searching for something anything good to talk about): Oh I got my hair cut!
Mom: I know I saw.
Arte: Oh? How did you see it?
Mom: On Facebook.
Arte: But you're not on FB
Mom: Someone emailed the picture around. It's not private, you know.
Arte: I know; that's not the problem. I wish you would've commented on it.

Her own inability to understand what the deal is with privacy. Privacy wrt to the government? Fine. They need to know that I exist. But not who with or how I have sex. Seems like a reasonable line to draw. The government are not allowed to peek into my bedroom. Are corporations--and Google I'm TALKING TO YOU--allowed to peek into my bedroom? They want to, the prurient bastards, because they wanna sell me shit. Or try to sell me shit. Is that a problem? Maybe yes and maybe no. How much identifying/disciplinary power do we want to grant to advertising? In the face of individualism, that is?

               IMO, the real problem with Facebook is not that it's trying to sell people information about Artemis. It's that its design sucks balls. Does it suck because of Zuckerberg's wacky views about privacy, integrity, and identity? Not yet convinced. But if the site were easier to use, if people felt more in control of how their presentation is presented, then maybe there would be fewer problems. I'm not speaking about the aesthetic changes. Yes, those are frightening at first, but then we all adjust. And I like how the simplicity of the design, ie, the uniformity across the different personal pages, makes Fb distinct from MySpace where "individuality" was so rampant that it overwhelmed the eye and intimidated the viewer. (certainly impeded my desire to build social networks--it felt too private.)
          Nevertheless, I believe that the simplicity of the Fb aesthetic masks the complexity of our social networks even while it helps build, expand, and strengthen these networks. The fb plan, as I originally understood it, was to mimic as much as possible our real life social networks. This is why we were encouraged not to use pseudonyms when we signed up. But there's a mistake being made wrt how social networks work in real life--they're not uniform. This doesn't mean an individual lacks integrity it means that an individual is comprised of diverse social networks that intersect and, to some degree, imbricate.

              Is this a problem of privacy? Or really a matter of lazy thinking among designers who think that looking simple is the same as being simple? One reason I know they're not the same is because it is extremely difficult to change my profile picture on Facebook. I have to click through a number of different pages and make a ton of different mistakes before I accomplish my goal. Is this related to the fact that we can no longer make the profile pic private? I don't really care. I think that technical engineers have two major tasks--present information clearly and make it easily accessible. Fb fail.

(Artemis wants me to add her suspicion that "privacy" is a relatively recent phenomenon, so the talks about "rights" to privacy are especially interesting given how they cross ideological lines despite their dependence on anti-foundationalist thinking. Whence the conception of and right to privacy?)

Relatives who defriend each other on Facebook. It's wrong. If you feel that strongly, talk to someone or hide them. To defriend them means that you end up Gossiping about them later and it deprives you of the opportunity to hate on brain tumors and such when the chance arises.

She doesn't have time to flesh out and make sense of the above ramblings

She ate cheese for breakfast

She isn't living up to her own expectations. She doesn't have time to stay in bed all day!

She got suckered by a Bey allusion into reading a Maureen Dowd column this morning.

She's pretty much run outta steam on this as so much else. Even though she's pretty sure she's angry at other things.

Poetry, Weekend-Edition

2010-04-30T23:05:00.000-07:00

From a recent discussion on top of a mountain with a dear friend; Artemis and I give you Sara Teasdale.

There Will Come Soft Rains

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Online Dating, the Latest Stab

2010-04-28T22:42:00.000-07:00

Artemis has filled out many an online profile o'er the years. But I have never seen her on a date. She seems to turn to these dating sites in moments of low desperation. Surely, she thinks, she can be proactive in her love life!

But she never goes on dates. People contact her. They say Hi; they invite her places. But she never follows through. Usually by the time she clicks through all the pictures and profiles, she's way too demoralized to follow through. She's never attracted to men online.

She once went on a date she arranged online. The most distinct memory she has of that loooooooooooooong hour is when she caught sight--through four lanes of traffic--of her best friend walking down a cross street on the opposite side. She looked longingly at him, telepathically begging him to come and save her. She ended up lying about something she had to do with a friend. No, she said. I cannot meet with you another time.

Could it have been that bad? Artemis explained that she had only briefly chatted with the guy but that they had been sexually flirtatious, an online art she'd been perfecting since high school. So she agreed to meet him at her favorite coffee shop. He showed up, late, in his mechanic's dickey straight from work. He was dirty. And no, Artemis is not classist; she's not a white-collar snob afraid of a little working-man's grease. She just doesn't believe it's right to wear the grease during a first date.

Maybe he thought the date had gone well; Artemis is a nice lady, after all. She probably grinned and bore his awkward conversational fumbling as best she could. But there was no way in hell she was going to flirt with this guy. And no way she was going to see him again. She could hardly believe he'd asked.

This college experience was enough, apparently, to frighten her off from online dating forever. She can't imagine finding a man that she wanted to spend time with online. (She's easily frightened. She once gave out her phone number. Apparently unable to take a hint, that boy didn't stop leaving messages for weeks. Artemis was so frightened (not that she's often asked) that she never gave out her phone number again.)

Jon Stewart recently asked whether things were so bad out there for women that two of us agreed to date Fabian Tourre, the douchebag who designed the fall of our economy from his job at Goldman Sachs.

Yes, Jon. It is.

Arte's dad once told her it would take a special man to put up with her. She's recently realized two things: her dad's special men don't exist online or real life; her special men might actually be special women.

From all appearances, online women seem a good deal more special than the men. And Artemis is all set to meet one of them tomorrow.

She's nervous as all get out. The timing--will she be able to get morning things done and be on time? The place--where to park in Sacramento? What to wear? What to bring? What to talk about?

Ok, she's not all that nervous about that last part. But she does find herself hoping that she's attracted to this woman. I tell her that dating is all about trying to find and failing, but I keep seeing this glint of optimism in her eye.

She's always formed relationships based on friendships and networks at work. Tomorrow's date feels like a whole new thing to her.

The main difference between meeting this woman and potentially meeting other men from online is that she doesn't feel ashamed to meet her. Maybe it's just Artemis being at a different point in her life; maybe she's just finally ready to confidently meet strangers and walk away from them. Maybe she's finally gotten over the ignominious taste of that first dickey-covered encounter. But she's excited to get to know this person. And then move on to the next beautiful soul, to steal a phrase from the new woman herself.

One thing: Artemis, in the flush of an open heart, said in her profile that she doesn't mind if people have kids. A good move, perhaps, since so many people have kids. But now she's faced with the prospect of meeting someone who might have to arrange a baby sitter in order to meet with her again...Oof, she's feeling a bit like the Hugh Grant character from About a Boy. ("ello Barney. Ow are you." He gulps at one point. As if Barney were a regular adult and not a tiny monster.) She's not exactly sure how she feels about single parents. Or strange kids. Her friends' kids are awesome. Her siblings' kids are great until they hit 18 or so. But she's never contemplated sleeping with their parents, and that seems to put a whole new spin on things.

Nevertheless, Artemis is going into this with an open heart and an open mind. And have fun!

Family Blogging--Envy Edition

2010-04-25T11:10:00.000-07:00

On facebook, Artemis just befriended the sister-in-law whom she's never met.

She looked over her pictures. And didn't recognize her own parents because of how greatly they've aged.

Artemis misses her family. She misses her niece and her younger nephews. She misses her parents most of all.

She both admires and envies those who have nice relationships with their families.

Girl (currently) sans Couch, for example, is very close to her sisters and parents. The parents, especially, are supporting cheerleader types on facebook. They find common ground with her comments. They joke with her. They're the kind of parents who befriends their kids friends.

Not that that's necessary. But to be envied, for sure.

Artemis believes that she has become a better person in the past two years because she has been able to think of herself as separate from her family.

But now, as then, and as always, she wishes there could be another way to survive. She misses her parents.

Timing It Right: Arte Tries to Date People and Other Adventures

2010-04-22T15:44:00.000-07:00

Lately, for her own purposes, Arte has been thinking a lot about timing--a good thing since she obviously sucks at it in so many ways. She's never understood those people who say that we're better off living "in the moment" as if there were no future to worry about. These are the people who tell her that she, with all her seriousness, is unhappy because she doesn't live in the moment as they do. As if seriousness precludes happiness.

I think these new age presentists are totally wrong. Arte's problem--not getting out of relationships or jumping the gun or not finishing this diss or whatever--is that she is always forgetting about tomorrow. I want her to remember that the future is awesome cause it means she doesn't have to make herself do all the cool things she wants to do right now in this very moment--there's time enough. She doesn't have to either feast or famine herself, right? I can hear her dad mock her: "Oh, poor Artemis, always feeling deprived."

All this is to say that she can feel good about buckling down to work--she won't be missing out on the "cool stuff." (As I type, I see that this bizarre interlude is really about how she was born too late into her family and missed all the stuff they did!)

It would only be fair to mention that her future forgetfulness is not necessarily an integral part of her personality. Part of it is defense mechanism against scary unknowns. Part of it is feeling overwhelmed by all the things that "need" to be done. She actually winces whenever her friends talk about tasks that desperately need to be done. As if tasks had needs.

If she's anxious and nervous because she anticipates something in her friendships changing or some possible failure looming on the horizon, she either wants to confront it white-knight style, striding forward with sword in hand--and thus jumps the gun--or she runs away to secret TV land where the narratives all begin with a death and all end with the state's proclamation of the end. (She watches a lot of Law and Order type things.) With TV and novels she loses all sense of time outside of herself.

It's not for nothing that the form she filled out for joining a physical training group asked her whether she had a good sense of time.

But once she has something concrete outside of herself to look forward to, I've noticed that her sense of time lengthens and she can settle down more into the moments. Suddenly she has the time to do all those things she "needs" to do--she can work out, shower, brush her hair and her teeth and wash her face. Things that most everyone takes for granted. But that she's not always sure she has the energy for. A good conversation with a friend, a great seminar with really smart people, a trip planned, a date. She forgets these things are even possible. And then she forgets that she has a future to live for.

She even contemplated today the idea that maybe she had never imagined herself living this long. She's never been afraid of growing older like other people. But this is mostly because she never really loved all the things that young people seem to like about being young. Because her siblings are a generation older, she's always felt more connected to and comfortable and sympathetic to older people than her friends have been.

On the other hand, as we've seen, the idea of dating older people doesn't appeal to her very much at all. She wants me to say that she's trying to stay open to whatever possibilities come, but I'm telling her that that's the kind of thinking that makes you forget to think about the future. You have to make a decision about what you like and take a bet on a particular track for the future, I tell her.

She nods, but I can't tell whether she's convinced.

All I know is that Artemis has a date for next week. And a date that she might actually be looking forward to. Not something that she has very often. Taking Miss Margaret's advice, she's swinging the bat and maybe is actually looking out into the future. They're going to play scrabble over lunch.

Because really, you can try to enjoy the present moment all you want, but isn't it kinda shapeless and empty without some kind of horizon rounding it out beyond? (apologies for cliched philosophy. but seriously, these new age presentists need to stop making people feel bad when they advocate for things that they probably don't mean.)

Adventures in Not Dating, Part 53099

2010-04-17T22:58:00.000-07:00

Artemis has not got a love life, sadly. Or at least, not the one she wants, with, you know, more than one person involved in it.

Once upon a time, she had a crush on a real, live person. She thrilled to the thought that the person might like her, too. Then, on Valentine's Day--as a Direct Result of arranging to meet with her crush, Artemis screwed things up by being very late. She was so ashamed and so worked up about the ironies of the situation that she felt awash in a Sea of Friendship.

So she betook herself home to the internets and consoled herself with a dating site. She reasoned that if she were to be distracted by other people, she might better handle the nonreciprocity hell that one finds in the Sea of F. Maybe she would find love!

A couple of months have passed since that long night of answering profile questions. So I thought it might be nice to check in with Artemis to see how it's going. How many dates have you been on? I gently asked.

None, she said. And someone just canceled on me.

So, no on the dating thing then. And that probably knocks out the love thing, too. How about the distraction you were looking for? Find any?

It turns out that there have been some interesting distractions! The men, sorry to say, invariably have made her laugh. In her limited experience, men on dating websites tend to be super-pervy. There's a reason, apparently, especially in this man-friendly dating market, that these are the men who prefer to search for women, between the ages of 20 and 32, within a 50-mile radius, via instant message.

So to these men, Yes, what she says on her profile is true; No, she doesn't want to talk to you about how you don't like the book she's read because you read a blurb that made it sound dumb. She thinks pictures on the web are de rigeur these days, even though she admits that it's scary...that's the way it's done. And No, she does not want you to buy her coffee at the school cafeteria when there are at least four acceptable coffee shops in walking distance, for the same price.

OK, so pervy, awkward men are not working out for you. What about women? I mean, if you have a crush on a woman, maybe it would be best to try to distract yourself with other women. There's a sort of balance to it, yeah?

She hasn't heard back from the sweet older woman who wished her sweet-dreams. But that might be because she's freaked out by old people and never did more than return the good wishes.

Since she's frightened of old people, Artemis tells me, she thought it might be nice to try out younger people. So when the 22 y/o bi-woman messaged her, she went along. The girl seemed forthright and upfront, so Artemis invited her to coffee. They agreed to meet in Utopic Small Town. Can you pick me up, the girl wondered. Ummm, no. Artemis declined to be stuck in a car with someone she's never met, ferrying her to a coffee date in a town 15 miles away. Artemis suggested a coffee shop. The girl agreed, but noted that she wouldn't be buying anything since the shop is "so expensive."

Huh? Even if Arte were a bit harsh on the driving thing, this announcement surely deserves a few flags. Even if it were true, why announce it up front? And, how could it be true? If coffee seems expensive to you, you are either as old as Artemis's parents and still grumbling about how coffee used to cost a dime, or you are so inexperienced with coffee that you don't know how much it costs.

I guess there might be a scenario in which the 22 y/o truly can't afford the dollar and a half that it takes to buy coffee. In which case, I wonder how can she afford the price of the internet connection she's using to ask people like Artemis to meet her over coffee?

Artemis thought she was willing to meet with a young person, but maybe not. Or maybe this person is not as old as she claims to be?

So when Artemis finally suggested a time for their meeting and the girl backed out, there were no complaints from good ol' Arte.

Then there's Serafine. We don't know how you pronounce that name, but Artemis nevertheless pronounced it fine. She thanked Artemis for the compliment and keeps asking her random questions. It's funny how you get a sense of the person from this tid bit of contact. Artemis' sense is that she and Serafine are probably not made for each other but might make for interesting distractions...

The Odd Note from Teaching Land

2010-04-14T12:35:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, Artemis had challenged her students to define the word "nice." (Try it--it's hard!!) As expected they started with "the opposite of mean," which definition sadly did not help to solve the problem they were working through. Artemis asked them to think about other ways they use the word, and it didn't take long before a girl with very nice hair mentioned that she might say that someone has nice hair. (Arte loves this example because she's developing a theory about the correlation between standardized tests and corporate culture. Nice 'N Easy, ftw.)

Once they had gathered a few examples, Arte asked again--what does "nice" mean? They struggled toward the answer, so she asked them to explain how they knew when something is "nice." Thus enters the odd teaching moment: one of the women, staring straight at Artemis, started to explain why "nice" means "beautiful" (it doesn't) as in "Those eyes are beautiful because they are dark blue and big and round and ...." An uncomfortable Artemis interrupted.

Who knows whose eyes that woman was describing or what she really thought of Artemis's eyes. And even if Arte's eyes are beautiful (I hafta say I remain undecided on this point), it doesn't really matter since "nice" doesn't have that strong of a meaning. Think about it: Someone says to Artemis: You have beautiful eyes. And Someone Else adds: They're nice. Someone Else is totally weak, right?

Arte wonders what the woman was trying to communicate in that moment. She remembers that a friend recently told her that she thought a young woman in one of her classes might have a crush on her. She knows that her dissertation director inspires lust in many a young person's heart. (He has his own fan page on Facebook.) She knows she's lusted after or at least really admired the style of a couple of her teachers.

But she has no idea how one ought to deal with these moments of power-lust, or whatever they are. How does one use sex in the classroom?

Beth Freeman has this interesting article about how sexual desire ought to intersect with pedagogy if we wish to disrupt the humanities' production of neoliberal student-consumers.

A lesbian professor once opined that she'd be less likely to look in askance at gay relationships between students and instructors (in post-secondary and graduate education).

A friend of Arte's has a job in a small English Department where it is normal to talk to a male professor whose wife was once his student.

A friend of Arte's makes a point of "coming out" to her students; not as a come on, but as a way to open communication amongst the students and to make herself available as a resource for other LGBT students.

Artemis uses various anecdotes from her dating life to try to make the modes of analysis she teaches feel as if they have real world impact. She also loves teaching texts about sexuality. Sharon Olds' "Sex without Love" is an old fave. But only once did she encounter students who were open to the idea that the orgasm in the middle of the poem that is unmistakably about sex (it's in the title!!!!) was in fact an orgasm. Most students argue that the Oh God orgasm (have they not seen When Harry Met Sally? My God, Artemis says, she'd be pleased if they would even argue that it's a fake orgasm. But no,) it's always a cry to an actual God (this despite all the substitute for God talk) for help or a curse on those who dare to have sex without love. Cuz you know, that's a horrible thing.

Maybe Artemis should chalk this problem up to her students' poor reading skills. But she remains suspicious for a few reasons.

The substitute for God talk operates as much on the poem's semantic level as it does through the poetic mechanisms. So while she might be tempted to excuse the students' failure to read poetically, since that's the skill she's teaching them, she would like to expect them to be able to read in the "straightforward" way that they ALL claim to love.
It's in the title!!! The poem is, in point of fact, about sex. And sex is frequently about orgasms.
But since these people are typically 18 or 19 years old, maybe they don't know the above?
Since these people are typically 18 or 19, maybe they think that "sex" can be talked about abstractly, but that "orgasms" are too personal and inappropriate for the classroom?

Artemis feels that her students frequently see her as a motherly type. They often employ passive aggression to resist her authority, they frequently appeal to her sense of compassion when they want to get away with something, and they make various assumptions about her desires. One student's mother--in her office--actually told him that he was to think of her as his mother away from home. Over the years, she's tried to resist this by talking with a somewhat bawdy sense of humor, and by trying to treat them like the adults she wants them to be.

But maybe she needs to take herself more seriously as a sexual person. Maybe if she were to brave the student crushes and whatnot, the students would be brave enough to imagine an orgasm in the middle of that poem.

Artemis, the Age-ist and Size-ist Date

2010-04-06T21:56:00.000-07:00

Artemis is beginning to think that she's a bit age-ist. And maybe size-ist, too.

Why, she wonders, do older people like her so much. Who hits on her in public? Older men. Who hits on her online? Older women.

She's not sure that this is a bad thing. Her cousin prefers to date older men. But it kinda freaks dear Arte out. She just has enough older people in her life, I guess. Not that those people are in her life anymore. But still, I think it's safe to say that Artemis is the opposite of attracted to people who remind her of her siblings.

But, I interrupted her. You're always saying that your last boyfriend reminded you of your mom. And part of what you like about this woman is that she's so Scandinavian. (She listens to Finnish music for christ's sake!)

She got all defensive on me. (Girl is truly anxious.) And look how that relationship turned out! she demanded. And, yeah, I guess I'm interested in people who are Jewish and Scandinavian and Irish. I'm connected to each of those ethnicities in the most shallow of American ways, but I guess they each feel like home somehow.

I should cut her some slack, I suppose. Dating is confusing enough without worrying about how you are afraid of / unattracted to all the people who hit on you.

But is it fair of you to be size-ist? I asked her. She chewed on this for a minute or two and ultimately decided that she didn't know. All she knows is that she doesn't like how she looks as fat, and doesn't like how anybody who is bigger than she is looks either. She's actually pretty ok with people who are around her same shape and age. And frankly, people who are in better shape than she is make her super nervous--though she does think she could get over that with some effort and time.

PS. A picture-less 38 y/o man just im'd Artemis and asked her for a drink and whether she has lunch on campus. AAAaaaaaaaaaahhh.

ANXIOUS

2010-04-06T20:44:00.000-07:00

OH MY GOD I'M FEELING ANXIOUS!!!!

Artemis will NOT STOP screaming this over and over. I am getting pretty darn tired of it. She's doing her whole weird paralyzed thing, playing chicken with all the shit that she knows she ought to do and all the shit that she wants to do. She's doing that whole, I don't deserve to do the things I want to do thing. No dance classes.

She's putting in some good time with her bad habits, which she will not allow me to enumerate here. And she's spending a lot of time day dreaming and sleeping and reading stuff that is not important.

She claims that all this is partly my fault. She says that I had said something to her about maybe returning to those days of anxiety if only to get some fire under her ass to get some work done.

I may have mentioned something like that, I admit. I may have said that Miss Lamar had tried it, but I'm sure I said that it hadn't worked to good effect! I'm sure of it.

For some reason, she thinks this is a good time to invest in her love life, and she's been updating all the dating profiles and snooping around and such. And I admit that she needs to take some sort of positive action in her life. It's just that I would prefer that the positive action would be work-oriented, ya know?

She claims that she has no control over her drive towards positive action. She says this is to do with all the incredible fear she has built into her vision of her goals. She says she isn't even brave enough to read comments from her professors about her work, and she's not brave enough to read comments to this here blog.

Ok, so you can send anonymous emails on dating sites, but you can't handle "anonymous" commenters on your own blog, which you control? She reminds me that her therapist once compared her to a car without a bumper, who felt every crash, bump, and collision sans cushioning. She's the crash-test dummy of interpersonality. She's afraid she won't be able to handle whatever comes at her. And she's super afraid that she will hurt other people's feelings when she's just using me to think out loud.

She's using me!

She says this is not about me, so I should shut up.

To be fair, Artemis does feel the good stuff as much as the bad. This is why she sucks so tremendously at accepting compliments.

So why do you let me post these personal, half-baked thoughts of yours, I asked her? She shakes her head; she doesn't know why. She just knows that journaling isn't satisfying and that she hopes that the commenters will be kind to her. She hopes that blogging will turn into a positive action that will kick start some other area of her life. Make her feel like she's reached out to touch the world. Make her feel as though she's accomplished something.

That's something I can't really deny her. So I post the posts and hope that the positive action vibes will overpower her anxiety and propel her into the action that will pay dividends in her future.

Poetry, Weekend-Edition

2010-04-03T15:50:00.000-07:00

For some reason she can't remember right now, Artemis subscribed to Poetry Magazine. She fears the format might be a tad too precious; it's a 6x4'' paper back booklet with paper pages, an old-fashioned (think 80s) helvetica font and spacious margins round the text. And with all things potentially precious and pretentious, she has a hard time settling down to read them.

So she has a year's worth of unread poetry sitting on her shelf. But last week, having said good-bye to her friend at the airport, and stressed out about any number of other friend related things, Artemis grabbed the March 2009 issue to take with her on her lonesome hike.

Evidently she doesn't have a hard time being pretentious after she's climbed a mountain. Who knew.

The following is one of the poems she especially enjoyed in the sweat and dirt with the swirling hawks and buzzing bees and bee-munching lizards.

In Me as the Swans
by Leslie Williams

Not embittered
even while freezing
to the ice of their own lakes.

The night I was leaving for Madrid
into the noisy party a dazzling
friend-of-a-friend walked in: I want so much
(as a couple of kids on the dance floor want)
to slow the tempo, hold there longer,
to feel that seedly longing
to be pressed into the soil,
or that little lift the mothers get
when stocking larders, even now,
vestige of the primitive urge
to be provided for and to provide.

I went alone to see that balcony
in Verona, after the Roman dramas and luxuries
above the Spanish Steps, when an elegant
footman brought a pack of Reds on a silver
tray and all but smoked them for you;
after your towels had warmed in London's best
hotel, whose name I can't remember and am kind of glad,
glad now for the rest of empty August and
the convent hostel's eleven o'clock curfew,
glad now when I go to the distinguished dinners
that I have stood alone
wondering at illuminated books,
looking at Woolf's spectacles under glass
or standing under Bourgeois's giant spider
at the Tate--at times the best kept universe
was my own, no interceding docents
or guided tours, but a rivertine serendipitous
wandering--waif, naif.

I liked the light enormously so why
did I obey the bell that called me in?

Pet-Related Venting, or Why Arguing Might be Good for a Relationship

2010-04-03T03:47:00.000-07:00

To be fair, maybe Artemis had pissed her off. Party Companion, as per usual, ignored all the signals Arte was giving. She'd slipped on her shoes, pulled on her jacket, gathered purse and keys and stood for a good twenty minutes or so before she mentioned she needed to go. Ten minutes later, Artemis asks PC whether she's ready, and when she took longer than a couple of minutes (there were some noises about taking a pic) Artemis, having made her good-byes already, walked out to warm up the car.

One of the many new leaves that Artemis has turned over this year has involved an effort to avoid confrontation at all costs. She still, however, needs to find a middle ground where she can express dissatisfaction without hurting feelings and allowing things to escalate into an argument. Especially with PC, the best she can do now, is just change the subject.

So to make conversation on the way home, Arte mentioned that she didn't "understand" cats who bite even when you approach them cautiously. Syd Vicious the cat and Arte had been making friends earlier in the evening. Though she mentioned it, she honestly doesn't mind biting as long as the cat doesn't break skin or pursue you. The poor creatures don't have very many ways to communicate, and she just figures that with time everyone will figure out how to get along. Artemis prides herself on getting along with animals.

PC took the opportunity to mention that Precious Grey Kitty had bitten her. Knowing that Precious GK has very few faults, Artemis was not willing to so quickly accept blame on his behalf. Oh, she said, had he gotten too excited? PC hesitated, rightly, since experience proves that one has to spend more than ten seconds petting Precious GK before he gets that excited.

No.

Well, as long as the cat doesn't break skin--did he break your skin?

Yes, that's why I stopped petting him.

When he bites, Artemis always stops petting him, says No, and pushes him to the ground. She would totally approve of anyone who adopted her techniques. But for some reason, she probed further, asking, Stopped for good?

Yes.

I know that parents and pet owners always believe the best about their awful pets. But even so I really have a hard time believing that Precious GK bit down so hard he broke her skin. He has never done that to me, ever. Plus, I keep thinking Redacted to Protect the Cowardly.

Look, he does annoying things. He wants the right to enter and exit his bedroom at will. And right at this moment he's kneading Arte's shoulder, which isn't the most pleasant thing he could do cuz in a sec he's gonna get really zoned out and start drooling on her sweater. And if you care a lot about your clothes, I'm sure it's not nice to have a long-haired grey kitty in the house, especially since his owner is pretty lax about brushing him. (His fur doesn't knot! Sometimes his ruff'll get knots, but they pull right out!)

I just don't understand why it doesn't occur to her that maybe he bit her because she was petting him wrong. And the crazy thing is that, as long as you stay away from his tummy and don't pat him on the head and stay away from his paws and ears--all perfectly normal cat things, then you can pet him like a he's a dog. Artemis points out that this is a lot of caveats, but I still think it doesn't take much to learn them. He likes it kinda rough actually. But then, when you're rough, you gotta expect that he might get rough, too.

It doesn't really matter. The Precious GK seems happy enough to depend on only the one person, and Artemis is pleased that PC at least tolerates him, even if she can't care for him. But I can't help but wonder whether this doesn't prove my point about arguing.

If Artemis had expressed her displeasure in a more direct way, the worst that could happen--in her view--is that she could open herself up to a thorough review of all the crappy things she's done over the years. Horrifying thought. But the best that could happen is that she could somehow without hurting anyone's feelings mention that PC might find petting the Precious GK more worthwhile if she were somehow to be more sensitive to his needs.

That doesn't seem so bad. There has got to be a way to have a conversation like that without hurting people's feelings. But, as Artemis reminds me, things get out of control when people feel that they're not being heard. And a situation like this, entered into just because you want to "correct" a behavior or "teach" some one something about the proper way to deal with Precious Kittehs, is just the kind of thing to set people off in the wrong way. Because there are feelings involved, ya know? It's difficult for a pet owner to know that her beloved isn't universally beloved, especially by its roommates. She'd like to think that if, for some reason, she fell derelict in her job to protect the plants and pets she has, her roommate might pick up some temporary slack for her.

But how to communicate that? I mean, it seems like something like that is fundamental to certain habits of living that people either share or they don't.

Plus, Artemis actually thinks that biting is a serious offense. She thinks it's really embarrassing to have a pet or kid who misbehaves with other humans. PC must know that she takes great pride in thinking that GK is well-behaved. She wishes she knew what the situation was--had PC tried to pat his belly? Or had she just been walking by? Artemis doesn't tolerate human-directed aggression in her pets, and she'd like to be in a position to make sure that neither PC nor GK ever again felt that they needed to push the other one away. But even she could communicate wit PC about this, she can't really mediate a change in GK's behavior. After all, animals don't have very long memories for one-off events. So punishing them forever doesn't really do them any good. It's the humans who have first to change their behavior in a persistent way, if they hope to see any change in the animals.

OK, I thought that I was going to end up with a proof about why arguing might be healthy for a relationship. But I think I've talked myself out of it. What you want is some way to express negativity without horrible feelings and passive aggression and compounded issues all tsunami-ing up the place. Now that Artemis has all this wisdom, I wonder if she'll be putting it into practice. Will she, too, be able to just walk away from a fight in the future?

Artemis, Shocking People All Over Town

2010-04-03T02:14:00.000-07:00

Ummm....So this post took a turn down an unexpected road and may be too intimate and explicit for some readers. You've been warned.

Lately, it's what she do.

I'm kinda shocked that she's been shocking people, actually, because when I think of Artemis, I don't think of a mysterious person. Look at this:

Is this the picture of a mysterious woman? My god, if she could be more open, I'd be shocked again. She claims there's a kind of asymmetry going on with the eyebrows, which invites shadows and doubts, but I remain skeptical.

But yeah, sooooo, she keeps having to "come out" to people to tell them her romantic interest is occasionally piqued by women as much as it is occasionally piqued by men. I say, this is partly her fault. Obviously dropping the mixed pronouns and listing off all the actresses she just really loves is not doing it. Catherine Zeta Jones in Entrapment? Everybody loves her. She's not active in queer politics (or any politics, really. She helps out when she can but...). And she doesn't hang out with a lot of lesbians. Just a couple here and there.

Even her therapist, who has been talking to her weekly for the last five years, was surprised when she said she had asked a girl out. Are you attracted to her? He wanted to know. Most other people worked really hard to not seem surprised; ya know, cuz they're cool with it. When questioned about why she had been so completely silent (to Artemis) about her recent crush-confession, one friend said that she had felt that was the most "tolerant" response.

Seriously? Would Artemis ask someone out on a date if she weren't attracted to hir? Do people do that? Ok, ok, I'm sure people do that, but surely after five years you know Artemis well enough to know just how obnoxiously sincere she is. And "tolerant"? What does that even mean? Now Arte wonders whether "processing" means "not you, not ever" and whether "tolerant" means "ohmygodohmygodohmygod my roommate is queer."

Ariel, by way of contrast, wanted to know, "if i say that she looks like a cool person, is that weird?" But now, paranoid, Arte is a tad unsure of why that would be weird. Does it feel weird to say it's weird if you're straight? Does it feel weird to say it's weird if you don't know the Girl? Does it feel weird to say it's weird if you've only seen her picture? No matter which is the right question, in the moment, Arte said no, it's not weird; it's just true. The Girl is, after all, a cool person.

If she's obnoxiously sincere, then Arte is also obnoxiously unsure of herself, too. She's spent the past month questioning herself--am I really attracted to this girl? Maybe it's just a straight-girl crush? Why did I tell my friends in college that I am bisexual? I feel attracted to her, but what if I kiss her and find I'm not?

Oh, Ann. It was an Ann-without-an-E, but with red hair who had finally settled it for her in college. Artemis was in Park Hall, in one of those weird basement rooms where the chairs are bolted to the floor. It must have been that awful Medieval Welsh Literature class (to be clear medieval Welsh lit is not awful; the teacher was by far the worst professor she'd had in college). She remembers sitting near the front on the left side of the room, with her feet propped on the chair in front of her.

And she had the most vivid image she'd ever had. She wasn't asleep, but felt her friend, naked, in the room with her. It was vivid, not so much because she could see her so well, but because her whole body could feel her.

Does that mean she's gay? Does that mean she's bi? Artemis never wondered. Instead, she wondered about Ann. Why had she been spending so much time with her? Why did she make that little crown of flowers when they were picnicking in the forest? Did it mean anything that her best friend was a lesbian? Why did she not like the boys who were wearing themselves out chasing her? (She was one of those beautiful-but-doesn't-know-it girls.) One particularly handsome man fell for her hard. Was she not interested because he was black or because she wasn't interested in him or because she wasn't interested in men? She didn't seem to know, and Artemis didn't push her. But she always wondered why Ann felt weird holding men's hands. Why did she keep dating them when she didn't like kissing them?

After they moved out of the dorms, Arte never heard from Ann again, which was weird because they had been pretty close beforehand.

When the surprised people ask whether she's ever been attracted to women before, Arte always thinks of Ann's revelation. She tries to think whether there were earlier signs. She knew about gay people before college because she and her friends gossiped about Martin (totally) and Scott (Nui: totally; Artemis then: maybe not; now: probably). She'd wondered about some of the women. She was completely shocked when Elaine started dating Brian because she'd been pretty darn sure about her. She'd always wondered about Angie, but wouldn't be surprised if she were wrong.

Despite all this wondering about other people, Artemis never wondered about herself. She never wondered about who she was attracted to sexually, and she never wondered because she always assumed that it didn't matter. It didn't matter because she was sure the other people were not attracted to her. She assumed that if she expressed any desire for her friends or acquaintances, they would withdraw and drop her. Through the years, so many very close friends had withdrawn without any discernible reason that we can't really judge her too much for the conclusion.

When she tries to understand her sexuality, she sometimes thinks of herself as a late bloomer, but that's not quite right. Her period arrived in sixth grade, right on schedule, and her breasts weren't far behind. Never did she have to chant, "We must, we must, we must increase our bust!" Nor did she have any friends other than Judy Blume with whom she discussed her breasts anyway. She'd reached full height and physical maturity by seventh grade, and she'd sneaked in enough romance novels and adult books to know that sex was good and she wanted some. Johnny Depp was hot in Cry Baby, but it was that one book about a girl who was out to lose her virginity that really started her hands moving. Artemis claims not to remember much; apparently there was a lacy camisole involved. She didn't know what that was, but it had buttons and reading about it was exciting.

Artemis doesn't remember much about that book beyond how reading that scene made her feel. The male character was totally meaningless for both the narrator and Artemis. For Artemis, the scene was about imagining that she was the girl in the camisole, being caressed. For years, she day dreamed she was the girl who felt hands on skin. She never played the boy, but I wouldn't be surprised if she played his role, if in some ways reproducing that girl's feeling for herself meant she was the one producing that feeling. I suppose that would mean that masturbation is a fundamentally homosexual activity?

But she never (we would be the first, she says) talked to anyone about these things. Neither about the girl nor Johnny. She'd stopped sharing literary and intellectual interests with her parent-aged siblings early on in elementary school, and it never made much sense to talk sex with them either. She's had One sex conversation with her sister, the woman she'd thought was her best friend. Around the eighth grade, at a traffic light when they were alone in the car, her sister informed her that it was indeed ok to use a condom during sex, no matter what Mom or the Church says. Artemis nodded. C'est ca. She figured that meant that premarital sex was ok, too, but never asked to clarify.

All this is to say that Artemis has always felt herself as sexual and has always sorted sex stuff out on her own. She's not exactly a late bloomer, but she neither kissed a boy nor had sex with him until well into the first and second years of college.

She wanted to. But between fearing rejection and having no way of knowing how people go about arranging the Moment When You Kiss, it just wasn't happening for her. Her junior year in high school, she finally started confiding in her girlfriends about boys she liked. She finally figured out that's what you do. But of course, no one she knew was talking about girls they liked, so she just figured that maybe she didn't really like girls and forgot about it. It was stressful enough to try to figure out how to date anybody without letting her parents or siblings know that's what she wanted to do. The one time she did ask a guy out, she was so nervous about lying to her parents and not knowing whether it was really a date, that her stomach went nuts.

She kept waiting for some kinda narrative to make itself clear to her, but it never happened. It was a drunken college-level game of truth or dare, along with the conspiratorial help of some more adventurous friends, that finally got her rolling around with a handsome blond. She can't remember his name or what he looked like. She just remembers that Nui was afraid for her and opened the door at the exact second that Artemis first felt sperm.

By this time, Artemis was incredibly jaded about sex. Romantic physical contact seemed like a huge brick wall that she would just fling herself at to get over to what she presumed was a rather lovely other side. She'd hurl herself at the wall, and it would hurt like a mother fucker so it makes total sense that she'd drink before flinging. Other women would be feeling guilty and all the next day (to this day Kaleidoscope talks about walks of shame), but Artemis never understood those feelings. For her it was all part of conscious decisions she'd made about what was necessary to lay the ground for the possibility that maybe one day she'd want to touch someone she knew and liked. If only she could see over to the other side, she thought, the process of getting over the wall the next time would be easier.

She was definitely wrong about that. There's nothing easy for her in touching people she likes, even those she likes as friends. I guarantee you she wasn't the first to hug you, even if she hugs you now. Her momma once scolded her for going places uninvited, and she's been more than faithful to that one rule. The only reason she had the relationship she had is because she ran into Robbie when she was out drinking with a Boy. At the time, Boy had just broken up with one of Arte's best friends. Yet his broken heart was somehow not keeping him from hitting on Artemis.

So when she saw Robbie that night (to be fair, there had been a long hiatus and some drinking), she uncharacteristically gave him a big hug. Afterwards, Boy teased her for liking Robbie, which she denied as per her custom. But especially after Boy, like an ass, begged her to sleep with him that night (word to the wise--Artemis doesn't sleep with people who sleep with her friends. And she doesn't sleep with people who benefit from days and days of her comfort when they're lovesick over someone else. Ew. Oh and to the other completely handsome man she rejected around the same time, she would like to say that she doesn't sleep with people who whisper, do you want to fuck, in her ear. Not sexy), Artemis began to wonder whether she didn't like Robbie. Maybe Boy saw something she hadn't noticed?

Even with that encouragement, it was WEEKS before anything happened with Robbie. WEEKS of build-up. When it finally happened, people were kinda surprised, but they never said so.

(L had recently decided she didn't have a crush on him. But it still musta been hard for her to find out by walking in on them. Who just walks into a man's bedroom anyway? Just cuz it's the middle of the day; just cuz you think he's single; just cuz whatevs.)

Then, as now, people mostly responded with...nothing. With her family, Artemis felt she had to come out as a sexual being, not even a queer. Her sister mocked her for introducing Robbie as her friend by making him a cup that said "The Friend" in lieu of his name. Will introducing a girlfriend have the same effect? Who knows.

(This not talking about him really backfired on Artemis when the relationship was dying. She didn't exactly have anyone to advise her or help get her out of the situation.)

The point is that while Artemis is most definitely a sexual being, she's always had a hard time putting that being into action in any kind of satisfying, more than one person kind of way. So even though she talks raunchy sometimes (still can't do the scatalogical, sorry), she has a fairly hard time talking candidly about sex, especially sex that she hasn't had with women. And that's partly because she can't see over that brick wall, and has never been drunk enough with the right girl to throw herself over that (and since she doesn't really want to do that anyway) wall.

Used to be, Arte really liked shocking people, making decisions independent-like and saying Surprise! Like my new hair cut? (And even though she just dropped a good amount of money on a good hair cut, Artemis is thinking of doing that again. Something extremely different for her....) But she's getting kind of tired of surprising people and almost having to defend herself. Instead of talking about whether she's ever been attracted to women before, maybe she can talk about why she's attracted to this woman, particular? That's what we'd do if it were a guy...

And if she ever comes across another woman she's attracted to, she doesn't want to surprise her either. One rejection via surprise is enough, I think.

One way to answer these shocks might be to just swing that bat more often, to borrow Miss M's phrase. Hell, if making friends first, doesn't work, I tell her, you might as well go out with strangers. Yeah, right. The woman has like five profiles on different dating sites and has yet to actually date anyone met through them.

Looks like that goddamn brick wall looms supreme.

Ode to Friendship

2010-04-01T02:10:00.000-07:00

Artemis says this frequently in all other fora, and I say why not say it here, too:

She loves her friends. Without fail, they are cool, loving, sensitive, smart, beautiful people. And sometimes, they accede to her whims. And sometimes, they listen to her worry. And sometimes, they laugh at her lame jokes. And sometimes, they call her on her shit. And sometimes, they crack her up. And sometimes, they cook for her. And sometimes, they are unexpectedly kind.

At the beginning of grad school, she worried that she wasn't very good at making friends. It had always taken her so long to relate to people, she'd thought. In retrospect, it may be that it just took her a long time to believe that people could possibly want to hang out with her.

But now, towards the end of grad school, if she's learned anything, she's learned that she loves her friends, she loves having friends, she loves when her friends love her other friends, and she loves making new friends, too.

It appears that Artemis is very happy to spend time with her friends! She got to see her writing partner today; she got to catch up with her roommate; she got to write to her Texan friend; she got to chat with her exercise partner; she had a three hour video chat with her darling scientist friend; and now she's chatting with her friend at stone henge! And all that happened since 4 PM!

Now, if only all this happy energy can translate into an awesome day tomorrow....

Interpersonal Hell

2010-03-31T01:36:00.000-07:00

Oh Lord. A couple of weeks ago, I was so happy for Artemis to feel that beginning-of-a-crush excitement.

Then she felt that agony-of-not-knowing-whether-it-was-mutual, and I was still happy for her to declare herself to the Girl on the Couch. As the therapist said, it's nice that she did something so "human." Artemis thinks this is a fairly strange way to describe what she was doing, but what the hell. At least he was happy for her.

Miss Margaret put it differently: she was happy that Arte had "swung the bat" and that life is all about trying, or something like that.

Miss Delia was sympathetic, if slightly blustery. I have my theories, but Artemis says I need to move on.

Dit Dit was happy. Kaleidoscope silent. Miss Lamarr completely sympathetic and curious. And the Girl herself "glad."

Which meant Artemis was glad, too. At this point, however, I was not so sure. I encouraged Arte to refresh her online dating profile. I made her promise to take a vacation from her crush on her vacation to Texas.

In the weeks before the Girl left her Couch behind, Arte pretty much took her at her word about becoming friends and getting closer. They hung out when they could; the Girl made time in her busy schedule for Artemis, who was gratified to see that she was actually pretty goddamn busy, no lie.

But I was getting worried about Artemis. I was worried because she was beginning to wonder whether "backpedaling"--which never would have been possible--might not have been a better idea than staying friends and getting closer. Those good sleeping days were over. The irrational part of Arte's brain, sad to say, was starting to hit full gear, and she began questioning everything, but especially what "processing" means.

What the hell does "processing" mean? Does it mean Arte's not attractive? Does it mean she's not interesting? Does it mean not right now or not ever? How had the Girl interpreted the email anyway? Maybe she had taken it more seriously than Arte had intended? Or maybe Arte had taken the rejection as more rejection-y than the Girl had intended? Why are these things never ever fucking clear? And since they weren't any longer clear and since the Girl had left town, shouldn't Arte just forget about this forever?

But she'd gotten to drop the Girl at the airport. And they'd hugged. And they'd said they'd miss each other. The Girl had almost cried, but Arte is 90% sure the emotions were over the cats and the car. Evidently, Arte's stuffed seal, Castro, looks just like a possible stowaway kitty named George. C'est ca.

In the long week since, Artemis has had plenty of social options, which have been grand. But the sleeping, the eating, the working, the whole schedule feels out of whack. I may have been happy for her before and then worried about her, but now I'm kinda pissed that she did this to herself.

What the hell? Is she purposely self-sabotaging? How the hell did she let herself feel so attached to someone she hardly knows? Just because someone has eyes the color of the hot springs in Yosemite and just because she has long legs and a bright smile and just because she's so damn passionate about the places she loves that she nearly cries when she sees softly blooming dogwood trees that take her back and just because she seems game for adventures and is so awfully nice to people and so good at mirroring their body language and claims never to get angry at people and because she appears to read with a humanist bent and to love writing and fun words like "crepuscular" and because she talks really fast and is really serious and really loves her family; just because of these things, Artemis is in trouble?

After their last day together--during which both of them were incredibly productive--Artemis wondered whether there wasn't some weird ex baggage sort of holding them back. It sounds like the last relationship had been with a woman who was just enough like the Girl and just enough different from her to seem almost forever. But when one of those differences happened to be that the woman was crazy and when things kept preventing the relationship from ending properly--a death here, a sickness there, the relationship's problems apparently escalated out of control. In public. Maybe that left some scars?

Arte's stupid ex baggage makes her extremely paranoid in exactly the worst way she can possibly imagine. Oh no, she thinks, I don't want to be with someone who thinks this is ok, but I have been known to argue in public. But then again, I was left alone in the cold in the car for four hours that one time, so maybe she wouldn't hold that against me? But then again who wouldn't hold my commitment to that goddamn relationship against me? And so it goes, on and on and on, in reaction to a story that had nothing to do with her.

All this blathering from Arte comes in a situation where they're just friends getting closer and about to part for four months. So stupid. So stupid, in fact, that Artemis has recently considered whether Freud might not have something to say to all this. Freud! We think Freud is ridiculous! I screamed at her. (In private, don't worry.)

But, she whinged, that was the very definition of a Freudian slip, yes? When the Girl said I'll be "home" by three and she really meant my flat?

First off, I said, patiently, if that's a Freudian slip, it's incredibly boring. Secondly, even if it does refer to your house, there's no guarantee that the slippage was about you--after all, she was in the process of giving her home over to some strange young woman who evidently thought it was a good idea to move all of the Girl's belongings upstairs to make room for her own crap. (And thought it a good idea to do all this with the Girl's help on the very day she was packing to leave town for four months?) Thirdly, she was about to fly home to her actual home with her actual family. There's too many home references flying around in the Girl's brain to assume that this particular one has anything to do with you. Self-centered much?

When Artemis was sleeping better, I was convinced that there was no down-side to pursuing the Girl on the Couch. But now I'm not so sure. Somehow, as her therapist said, we have to figure out how to sublimate all this emotion into dissertation-writing energy. Ha. Well, if it's impossible to self-sublimate, then maybe something else will come along to interrupt this interpersonal relationship quagmire in which Artemis has found herself.

Oh god, the adolescent angst! Will it never cease!

PS. Upon editing this post, Artemis suggests that I get a wee overly dramatic in spots. She says that she will just do what she always does, which is try to stay true to her own feelings and try not to step over anyone's boundaries uninvited. I told her that I wasn't sure about that last part--maybe love is all about stepping over boundaries uninvited, but she said that she's got to go to sleep and I oughtta just post the goddamn post. So here it is!

Feelings

2010-03-23T09:20:00.001-07:00

Artemis is feeling sorry for herself today. She wishes she weren't, but she is.

Weekend Poetry

2010-03-19T21:13:00.000-07:00

From Dolly Parton, the latest song that Artemis is learning how to sing with her teacher. She loves this lullaby.

To know know know him
Is to love love love him
Just to see him smile
Makes my life worthwhile
To know know know him
Is to love love love him
And I do

I'll be good to him
I'll bring love to him
Everyone says there'll come a day
When I'll walk alongside of him
Yes just to know him
Is to love love love him
And I do

Why can't he see
How blind can he be
Someday he will see
That he was meant for me

To know know know him
Is to love love love him
Just to see him smile
Makes my life worthwhile
To know know know him
Is to love love love him
And I do

Loving Stupid Songs

2010-03-17T15:38:00.000-07:00

Unlike Girl on the Couch, who used to memorize the lyrics from her favorite records and recite them to herself in all moments of boredom, Artemis never really listens to the lyrics of songs. She was once, for example, a huge fan of Led Zeppelin. She listened to those vinyl sex maniacs constantly, but never heard the words. The narrative sounds satisfied enough of her attention. Some songs began in media res, some revved up slowly, but all went through the paces of a long foreplay and a big climax.

She sang along to bits and pieces of the songs but never realized that her favorite song, "Ramble On," alluded to the Lord of the Rings. She once added "The Lemon Song" to a CD she'd made in honor of her best friend's engagement. Some of the songs were jokes, granted, but even she was icked out when she realized just how raunchy that song's lyrics are: Robert Plant begs his girl to "squeeze his lemon until the juice runs down his leg." Yuck.

Though she rarely knows the lyrics to songs--and her Rock Band play definitely assures me this is true--she has at least once in her life convinced people that she knows the lyrics to every song ever made. When she worked at Pizza Inn, she used to roll dough and slice pies to the sound of the radio. For every pop song, in every genre, she could put together a few words and a lot of melody. Her co-workers were amazed. Honestly, she was a little too pleased with herself. The fact is that nobody knows the words to songs. (You have to be careful with lyrics web sites, fyi. Artemis has spent hours re-transcribing OutKast lyrics that are improperly quoted on these sites, and she's pretty sure they all copy from each other so that mistakes are usually replicated like a mutated genome.)

Nobody knows the words to songs, in part, because pop songs are stupid. In fact, a music critic at Slate, recently praised the Black Eyed Peas for writing incredibly catchy stupid songs. Ke$ha has also gotten a nod for her skill at stupidity--I gotta say though that I hate her songs. Artemis admits though that she likes the Black Eyed Peas a lot. Even Fergie, with her stupid lyrics that refuse to scan: "I'll miss you like a child misses her blanket!"

Neither Arte nor I are musical experts of any stripe, but Artemis thinks that she can defend her taste on this point. Part of her affection for Wil.i.am comes from his very public association with Michael Jackson before his death. She is willing to bet he learned a thing or two from the King of Pop. She also loves his shamelessness: his voice is attached to a dozen or so commercials, shilling for the most inane products from cars to soap to presidential candidates. And no one accuses him of "selling out." If anyone gets in trouble for that, it's hip hop in general or maybe Jay-Z in particular. Kanye, on the other hand, gets in trouble for taking himself and the genre too seriously!

The Black Eyed Peas and Kanye West have some things in common, lyrically. They're both invested in continuing a tradition of Afrofuturism, which has thrived throughout the past century. With the BEPs, though, their "futurism" appears stuck in 1975. They looked shamefully out of date when they produced boxy-looking robot dancers at the Grammy's. Maybe this dated-ness explains why their bragging is so much less threatening (apparently) than Kanye's. People think Kanye is conceited. People think the Black Eyed Peas are just having fun. Wil.i.am is having fun, I'm sure, while he's driving to the bank.

"Imma Be" has a great hook, catchy melody, good beat. And stupid lyrics. Artemis bought it without a second thought the first time she heard the first 10 seconds of the song. And she doesn't regret it, even though the lyrics make her cringe. She wishes she could go back to a time when she didn't hear lyrics well. But she's not sure it's possible.

This is just another change in her life that can be blamed on Michael Jackson. In recent onslaught of her obsession with his work, she has finally begun to pay attention to lyrics, song titles, album titles, release dates, producers, writers, and arrangers. She's never been able to keep track of such things before. And it's not mere love that has prompted the knowledge to stick now. It began with her doubts about music critics' claims that MJ's lyrics became increasingly paranoid with time. The evidence just didn't seem to be there. On the one hand, there are early songs, like "Workin' Day and Night" (written by MJ, released on Off the Wall in 1978), which seem to match later songs, like "Who Is It?" (written by MJ, released on Dangerous in 1991). The first song is definitely paranoid, the second, well, it could be, but the lyrics and the video both suggest that the girlfriend is in fact a cheater.

[MJ's angst with tabloids was also clearly represented by this earlier time as part of frequent sketches on the Jackson family variety show.]

MJ's "Money" (released on HIStory in 1995) is cited (by Jon Pareles of NYT, at least) as an example of MJ's paranoia. Artemis's first reaction is to point out that music critics might be better if they kept all aspects of music open to critique, not just the parts that no one (other than the Parent Patrol or the Rap Police) pays much attention to. A professional music critic who only talks about lyrics is like an undergraduate who only talks about the plot of a story. Both get bad grades from Arte. But even on its own terms this crappy thesis fails. The lyrics of "Money" fail to support the paranoia thesis. The failure is partly because Arte refuses to assume that his lyrics are purely biographical. (Although she gets why MJ wanted to encourage the speculation as a way to increase his mystery and entertainment value, she really doesn't get why the critics and audience want the work to be directly biographical.) The attempt at transcendence is the governing principle of MJ's aesthetic.

The thesis also fails because the lyrics, like the music, the performance, and the life from which they emerge, are more complicated than most people assume. In "Money," as in "Smooth Criminal" (written by MJ, released on the Bad album in 1988), there are two different voices, saying two different things, which unsettles the idea that the speaker in the lyrics is the same as MJ, that the songs are biographical, that there is a single message, and that the message communicates MJ's personal paranoid dis-connection with the "real" world.

"Smooth Criminal" is narrated in the third person. The limited narrator opens his story by saying, "He came into the window / It was the sound of a crescendo." These lines alone show that MJ didn't really write stupid lyrics. They begin a story as so many stories begin--with a rising event that explains the action that comes next, with a nugget of high contrast imagery, with dense description to set the scene, and with postmodern meta-commentary on the nature of the story-telling. This song and the whole album invites us to imagine that MJ--don't forget, he's an ~~black~~ urban man in the 80s!--might be a violent criminal. He knows that we assume that lyrics are biographical! To be fair, the sound of his own heartbeat opens the song. But the third person here, like the video of "Bad," undercuts assumptions about biography and black, masculine violence. The video of "Smooth Criminal" clearly plays with stereotypes: MJ is dressed as a criminal, charms the underworld, and is chased by the police. But he represents all of this in the style of the classic mythos of the urban, white, male criminal.

Neither is Jackson's diction stupid. The word "crescendo," for example, is particularly striking in this song. MJ's songs tend to follow George Bernard Shaw's famous credo to prefer to use short, old, Anglo-Saxon words. But here is this multi-syllabed, Romish, technical musical term, directly at the beginning of the song. And the word pops up repeatedly and repeatedly changes syntactical position, as if it were playing musical chairs with the rest of the phrase. It reminds us that the story is a song and a performance and something surprising to the ear and the mind. (MJ appears to have defined "entertainment" as a cross between structural surprise and feeling.)

This third-person narration sets up the chorus where Jackson demands--of the female victim--"Annie are you OK?" The hook, which Artemis had always thought nonsensically asked whether Annie was "walking," inserts the speaker into the action of the story, albeit in a passive way. He's not exactly coming to her rescue, is he? And there's not a sense of condemning the "smooth criminal" either. Are we admiring this criminal? Why is he "smooth"? Is smooth good? Is it bad? Is it "bad"? He's a witness on the sidelines.

What exactly does he witness? Is Annie OK? Well, the narrator tells us that it was her "doom." And he appears to see failed rescue attempts. But then, in falsetto, he also screams, "I don't know." Who is speaking at this moment? Is it the third-person speaker? Because the song appears to be as much about how we witness crime as it is about whether or not Annie survives her attack, we could say that the speaker is expressing some kind of anguish about not being able to answer his own question. Except that he appears to have answered: "It was [her] doom." Because the falsetto "I don't know" is interspersed with the lower-registered "Annie are you OK" in classic call-and-response fashion and because it's not outside the bounds of reason that MJ might try to challenge our ideas about gender representation and because he frequently writes duets, it's reasonable to conclude that Annie or Annie's ghost (what, MJ might be thinking that the dead can communicate?) answers his question. After all, this is a story, and there might be room enough in Jackson's aesthetic, dominant and clear as it was, for more than one voice.

"Money" similarly represents more than one voice. The first one, which dominates the song, must be the one that people think of as paranoid. Artemis, however, thinks of it as cliched. It says everything that everyone already says about money. In a harsh, low voice, the speaker condemns those who "lie," "spy," "kill," and "die" for money when they make the mistake of playing in "the devil's game" of "greed and lust." The same voice mocks "you" for going to church and being patriotic when "they" are screwing us in this way.

Is this paranoid? First of all, it's not completely self-directed. Yes, he claims they "use" and "do" him for money. But seriously? I mean, who hasn't said this about money? The expansion of wealth justifies systems of inequality, oppression, and exploitation--frequently in terms of labor and sex. It's a common critique. Also, is it really hard to believe that all the people who sued MJ and accused him of various crimes weren't trying to cash in--even if you do think he was guilty of some crimes? That's not paranoia so much as calling it like you see it.

We ought also to try to take account of the falsetto. In a higher, sweeter register, Jackson sings, "Anything, Anything, Anything for money / Would lie for you / Die for you / Even sell my soul to the devil." These are the lyrics according to the wisdom of the internets. Arte hears them slightly differently: "I'd lie for you / I die for you." The first person pronoun is barely voiced in the first line and used as an interjection in the second line. It's easy to see how a listener might not hear it as part of the lyrics, but given the change in tone and the second-person object of "for," it seems pretty clear that MJ borrows the perspective of one who would do anything for money. It's only fair for him to take this perspective; the man seriously sold his work for a ton of money. And the dual perspective, as an outsider who judges those who take money as well as those who don't realize how shitty money is and as an insider who would "die for money," is paranoid only insofar as one could be paranoid about one's own actions. Which is impossible.

The sweetness of these lines takes over the end of the song. The outsider's voice--"You're dirty"--is relegated to the background, and the harmonies of "Anything" take us out of the song. "Money," for Michael Jackson, is the dangerous Woman. He addresses her directly, as if this were a love song, singing, "I'd do anything for you!" But as his oeuvre suggests so often, the seductress may win him, but she's still damned. "Dirty Diana"? She certainly illustrates the whore / madonna complex that colors his work, and it may be admitted, his life. Who knows if he was gay or straight or something around else, but there's no argument that he didn't idolize his mother as if she were a saint. And he certainly imagined that sexualized women routinely fail to live up to her standard.

There are a couple of hard-to-hear lines near the end of the song, which are not sung but spoken. We'd wager that these lines, including the command to "earn your money with dignity," bespeak most clearly Jackson's resolution to the seductive binary. If we're right, then any biographical gleanings would suggest Jackson's neoliberal politics, whereby he appeared to believe that individual responsibility and morality would be enough to redeem the world. Artemis has long argued that Jackson appears quite old-fashioned despite his reputation for technical and artistic innovation. We might even say that he presents a neoliberal twist on the old Andrew Carnegie attitude towards the distribution of wealth.

Unlike the Black Eyed Peas, MJ crafted his lyrics as carefully as he packaged every other part of his performance. And unlike Kanye's, his songs--even, Artemis would argue, "Childhood"--walk a straighter line between biography and transcendent connection to his audience, on the one hand, and to American popular culture, on the other. Themes of danger and violence, especially as they might be associated with heterosexuality, abound in his music and visual art. But neither Artemis nor I can wrap our heads around why these themes necessarily signal paranoia. Arguments with regard to "Tabloid Junkie" and "Privacy" may be deployed in defense of the paranoid thesis, but considering the degree to which they quote actual headlines and the way in which Jackson was pursued by cameras during and after his life, it's hard to believe that his lyrics weren't grounded in a real connection to the world.

But the real question is, will Artemis manage to stick to listening to MJ's lyrics and avoid listening to the BEPs?

Queer

2010-03-03T00:25:00.000-08:00

After a long evening of reviewing her blog, Editor Artemis informs me that something important is missing. Where are the pretty girls?

There's the weird six-year-old chair-masturbation thing.
Then there's the pirate sex that was satisfying like once, and really only because it felt wrong and because there was this one especially gymnastic moment where she felt as if she were flying backwards. She likes when a little aggression cuts through the confusion. Then it was kinda fun to try to figure the pirate out. Then she just felt sorry for the dude.
Then there was the cute prof whom she admired. She thinks she really liked him. But then she wondered whether she really liked him or whether she wanted to be him. Two different things.
There's also a lot of posts that talk about getting married. But to be clear, she really wants to not be lonely, to pay the rent, and to have an ally who can help her deal with her family. "Marriage" is meant to be code for those desires, not for any concrete, endless, label of sexuality.

There's been a lot left out. What about that girl at Miss Margaret's parties who lived in the Noe Valley? So cute! What about that girl who endlessly flattered Artemis and petted her and loved her but also only fucked boys and then hated her? What about that girl who made Artemis the pretty flower crown and haunted her dreams for years? And then just girls wherever.

Why haven't they come up? There's just as many of them. Maybe the stories are way less exciting or sexy. She's considered visiting the LGBTRC to find better stories, but she doesn't think that seems all that romantic or sexy. She's signed up for all the online dating things, but she doesn't think that seems all that romantic or sexy, for either men or women.

She's had fun with men. She's had some fun with women. But not as many opportunities there. She's occasionally felt the need to "out" herself as bisexual, as her friends know. But she thinks the label is kinda embarrassing and half-assed. Like she should just pick a side already. To this day, Artemis is uncomfortable with the understanding that bisexuality is a way station to gay. Honestly, she just plain hates the word. It's too angular and unsexy. It sounds as if it describes someone who is split in two. But Artemis doesn't feel split anywhere.

Part of the problem goes back to an adventure she had during her first quarter of college. She'd attended some meetings of a group called Straight But Not Narrow, a gay rights advocacy group. The first night they'd met, the leader, whom Artemis certainly perceived as queer, insisted that the group was not a place to transition into being out. If they wanted to stay, they had to be sure they were straight.

This stricture had partly to do with the political legitimacy of the group's message of We're straight and we're not afraid of gays. Or to be more precise, we're not afraid of representations of gays--the only memorable thing the group did together was watch the Torch Song Trilogy.

Although she could not articulate this at the time, Artemis stopped going to the meetings for at least three reasons.

She doesn't like being told that she has to be straight in order to join something, even in this situation. She doesn't like being told she has to do anything actually. She has something of anti-authoritarian streak to go along with her authoritarian streak. (Kinda like how she has something of a queer streak to go along with her straight streak.)
She had intended to be part of a gay rights advocacy group and had ended up in a movie club. And
Her mother practically threatened to kill herself if she continued to associate with the group. People will think you're a lesbian, she wept and shouted for hours and hours into the night. Because in the end, Artemis will do almost anything for her mother--and despite her long and valiant shows of resistance--Artemis promised. She hates lying to her family. But she always took pride in the fact that the real reason was #2.

Then there's the closet. She gets why people need to come out. She gets that as a matter of public education and safety it is best for people to be out. Now, she gets that it could help people decide whether or not they want to pursue her since she seems to want to be pursued. (God, she is sometimes so fucking slow about the most obvious-sounding things!)

But frankly, she believes there's a kind of power in the closet, in secrets, in confusing the crap out of people when it's none of their business anyway. She's definitely not afraid of public displays of affection, so in that sense, I don't think I could say that she's closeted. But she doesn't talk about being queer very much. Sure, it would be a relief to just know where everything stood for sure. But then that wouldn't be very queer, would it?

Maybe Artemis isn't very good at being queer, but she certainly has perverse down pat.

One of the reasons why she wanted to confess her crush to Girl on a Couch--who, by the way, found the best video of Viking Kittens that has ever made you laugh--was that she didn't want to come across as a straight girl who took advantage of the Very Out girl. She definitely wanted to be real with her.

Last night, Girl on a Couch said that she might describe herself as "too out." Which description neither Artemis nor I understand. She didn't really clarify when asked. Today, she changed her profile pic to a version with the caption "Queer" underneath. And her call to the March 4 rallies is predicated on being "out and proud and proudly marching out." But how is that too out? Is Arte's roommate too out as Asian for predicating her participation on being part of the Students of Color group?

Queer for her--and I should say that I do NOT want to put words in her mouth. Not words--seems to be about much more than sex. For one thing, it's about presenting herself as masculine. Which Arte says she gets, but I'm not sure I do. I do think this picture of Marlene Dietrich is self-explanatorily hot.

And the dance number she does in the movie, even hotter. (See! says Artemis.) But I'm not sure I get a full time commitment to the look, formal or otherwise. For me, it only works because it's drag. Hot, hot drag. Way hotter than men in drag. Way. Way. She's so fucking feminine, but she can pull it out better than any man. And Artemis and I both love it. (In case you can't tell.) Artemis sometimes pretends to be in drag, with a lil' swagga, a jaunty hat mebbe, and clothes of a certain fit. And frankly, these days, when she wears tights and skirts, which she never used to do, she feels like she's performing something just as "fake."

Artemis points out that a bit of "masculine presentation" here and there doesn't mean masculine everywhere, even in contexts that are less obviously performative than a dance scene in a movie. Then she mumbled something about some Calvin Kleins that she wants to get her hands on? I'm not sure I want to pursue this line of discussion... But damn. Marlene Dietrich.

But speaking of self-presentation, Artemis is pretty aware of herself, especially lately, as presenting as feminine and straight. Part of it has to do with the roommate she's had for the last three years (the same stretch of time this other girl has been in town), who is as straight as the desert's horizon. But Arte had thought that people were aware of how loose that presentation was.

Then again, Artemis' life has been so screwy these past years with the depression and all, who knows how she presented herself. And as her therapist pointed out the other day, there are many straight girls who present as queer, just to confuse things, I guess.

Artemis had kinda just figured that someday she'd find herself attracted to a girl who didn't only fuck boys. And on that day, hopefully the girl would like her, too, and things would work themselves out. In bed. Or on a couch. Not in a car, because she's done that, and I think she can still feel the goddamn seat belt digging into her hip.

On the couch last night, Artemis asked the girl what had made her wonder whether she were anything but straight before Artemis surprised her with her love letter. The girl said that she had noticed when Arte had had said something about kissing girls and boys or a him or her pronoun thing or something like that. She said she felt stupid for not noticing because she has a sister who usually comes off as straight, too. She feels like she shouldn't have assumed because of her sister's experience.

Artemis kinda wonders if the high level of surprise is to do with her or if it's to do with the girl's lack of interest in her. And she kinda wants to go around to everyone to ask if they were just as surprised. But she doesn't really care what they think, is the thing. I mean, at this moment, when it comes to kissing girls, she seriously only cares about what the Girl on the Couch thinks. Although I suppose she ought to stop that, since they're being just friends.

On the couch last night, Artemis noted that it must be pretty nice to have a queer sister to go with the two straight ones. Artemis, as faithful readers of this blog well know, does not have such a thing, much less sisters who support her with regard to anything sexual. She once wondered about one of her cousins, but now that she knows her better, she's pretty sure it's a no. Who knows who knows what.

That's why it's queer, right?

No Sex?

2010-03-02T20:39:00.000-08:00

Artemis should be writing her dissertation right now. Artemis should be commenting on midterms right now. Artemis should be sleeping right now.

But she wants me to finish my story. You can't leave people hanging, she cried.

I don't see why not. You're busy! But I love this story, she said.

I don't know why she loves this story. It doesn't end happily. I mean not in the happy way that love stories are supposed to end, ya know, with sex and babies and marriage and stuff.

Artemis would like to interrupt this broadcast to remind me that I am telling a story about a lesbian. Right. No marriage. No babies. No sex?

So Artemis hits send on this email without considering the time crunch. She was kinda worried the next day. Her therapist reassured her that she could just say a few things to make sure things weren't that awkward. Of course, that ended up being an apology for "bothering" Girl on the Couch. She, blessed girl, reassured Arte, saying, But I thought you wanted to bother me. Arte ducked her head. She wanted to bother her. But not in front of the professor who was coming down the stairs at that moment. Really Bad Timing.

That evening, Girl on the Couch emailed a beautiful email. Sex? No. "Very flattered" but "processing" because "her head tends not to be in a dating place anyway and had no idea it could be in a dating place with" Artemis.

I can't figure out why Arte's so excited about this email, frankly. She tells me it's the best rejection letter she's ever gotten. She tells me that she's just thankful she got a chance to be truthful and have someone else be honest back. She's thrilled that she could confess this crush and still remain friends! Girl on the Couch wanted to know whether it would be weird to keep on as they have, "hanging out and being friends and getting closer." Forget weird, man, Artemis thinks this is one of the two best possible outcomes!

She tells me that I'm not capturing how thoughtful and kind and perfect and right the rejection letter is. I suggested that heightened sense might just be in the eye of the beholder. She suggested I stop writing. I gotta insist, though: it's a happy story with no sex?

"Love Letter" sounds so much better than "Love Email"

2010-03-02T15:44:00.000-08:00

My God has Artemis gotten busy all of a sudden.

But it's not a bad thing. Just a, let's all hold our breaths and hope that she can keep up with everything despite the fact that she appears to still sound like a horribly contagious person that no one in her right mind would want to be around, kind of thing.

When we last checked in with Artemis, she was a tad confused by the couch-based attentions of one of her friends.

Well, confused and excited ;)

I love those moments when you first begin to look at someone in a new way. For Artemis, realizing that such new ways exist come so rarely, so they must be extra exciting for her. Then the nerve-wracking part of trying to figure out what the other person is thinking and how smooth you can be--it's tons of fun, if damn time-consuming.

Artemis can handle fun for a little while, but not for forever. She gets restless, she acts weird, unintentionally says mean things, and generally goes crazy. Even though she's having fun (and sleeping really well all of a sudden--hooray!), she can't go on like that forever.

Ariel said, Lay the ground-work. Artemis said, for me, cuddling is ground-work! Ariel said, I dunno.

After a frustrated evening of failed groundwork-laying, Artemis composed an email. Uh oh, said Ariel. All bad stories begin with, So I sent an email. Artemis pooh-poohed her worries. But, oh shit! Bad timing! Stupid Artemis had sent the email ten hours before she had to have the most awkward meeting of her life, which was really unfair to the Girl on the Couch.

Plus, what if this sort of thing, given how reticent the girl was to date anyone, was the sort of thing that would end a friendship before it had even really started? I mean, avoiding the Zone of Friendship is one thing, but what if she's overshooting? Ariel was worried. Artemis didn't worry until after she hit send. Then she really fucking started to worry.

Stress and The Humanity

2010-02-25T17:33:00.000-08:00

Artemis, Artemis, Artemis.

I thought we were done with this. I thought we were done with the self-doubting and the self-hating and the OH MY GOD I DON'T KNOW HOW TO COMMUNICATE-ing.

I give you props. You may still feel the blows, but now they're interspersed with some fun and good times and laughter. You are still wallowing, I think, but not wallowing with quite the same level of commitment and depth.

How, I wonder, will you be a professional academic if you can't handle criticism? I get that you are putting it in perspective and thinking about these comments with a long view, which is nice. But seriously, I had thought that we were past any kind of utter self-doubt.

And Prozac, seriously. I thought it was your job to prevent any kind of this scary-ness. What the hell? Falling down on the job aren't we? Or is it just that Artemis is going through such great changes right now that even you, powerful drug that you are, are overwhelmed?

Well, kiddo, you and Prozac better get it in gear. You just can't keep spending all this time building yourself up and then smacking yourself back down. Think about the children! Think about the humanity! The kittehs! The grand jetes in your future. If you want to have a life where your grand jete doesn't have raised shoulders and your stupid goddamn ankles don't roll over, then you have to stop doing this to yourself.

How to Make an Awesome Day

2010-02-16T00:48:00.000-08:00

Step One. Sleep in till 3 PM.

No, that can't be right. How does skipping a day altogether get you to Awesome?

Step One. Have a great previous day.

But did Artemis have a great day hier? Valentine's Day? I know it started it off well. She had a good Saturday because she sat her ass down and did some work with a friend. Then Ono avoided disqualification enough to win a medal. Short track speed skating is damn exciting.

Sunday meant thinking ahead, teaching for six hours, including a grueling three hours with sullen high school students. Those last three hours doubled as time spent revising a paper. She hopes that you won't tell her boss. She coulda been walking around authoritarian nun-style, rapping the kids on the wrist to make sure they were taking the time to practice the problems. But she didn't, and they didn't either.

So where'd the good day begin? She raced to another town for a wonderfully tasty and healthy dinner. She began a boring board game, which she had organized. Sadly, no awesome-ness in sight.

Then she got a text. That text arrived, the weather rocked today, she began strength-training and survived her jazz class.

And that's all it took to make an Awesome Day.

I know, I know. I told her that that is a hell of a recipe. First, receive something. You have no control over that! Second, receive something else. Still no control! Third, ok, if mere survival is ok with you than go for it.

On that last point, she referred me to the section of her dissertation titled "Mere Survival." I told her that when she finished writing that section I would be more than happy to read it.

On the first two points, she explained that she does have control over how the attitude with which she receives things. And with that, she won the day.

It all has to do with L-O-V-E love. It was Valentine's Day. Everyone was wishing each other happy lunar new year. She loves the moon in its fullness not its tininess, so she wasn't gonna jump on that wagon.

As for V-day, there were those who ~~bragged about~~ celebrated the length of their love-making. She's not really into that kinda thing cuz it's the kinda thing that makes the singletons feel bad. Arte will never have her parents' 50 year anniversary. She's happy for her parents and understands that time is significant when it comes to institutions like marriage. But she thinks these people get enough benefits without forcing the rest of us to give them gifts and congratulations.

Then there were those who don't really celebrate V-day. Those people seemed to feel they were ducking some kind of huge pressure to visit Hallmark. They're the people who are above the cheesy, heteronormative traditions ~~craved~~ celebrated by the rest of the world.

Artemis wished all of them happy Valentine's Day anyway. In her family, people celebrate all kinds of love on Valentine's, not just the romantic kind. Her mother invariably gave her a Hallmark gift stuffed with spicy hot candies--mmmmm. Her sisters called her and gave her cards.

This year, even though she's been admitting that she finds her family's commitments to all holidays even minor ones oppressive, she felt like celebrating love. She wished her therapist and the grocery store clerks happy Valentine's. She wished her friends happy Valentine's. She composed Valentine's serenades in her heart for the weather. And she decided she'd like to fall in love.

This is a big deal. Artemis has not found love for a very long time. Some have called her picky. Some unlucky. Some note that she's in a crappy profession in a crappy town, utopic-ness notwithstanding, for finding love.

But Artemis can't fake it, and she's usually too scared to think about it or even pursue it if she doesn't think that spark could be there.

Then there was this spark! This unexpected, beautiful chance to believe that she could find love, cheesy or passionate. It's just a chance. It's just a chance because it comes at a mighty inconvenient time for both people. And because Artemis cannot for the life of her figure out what the other person thinks. Are they friends? Or is it a spark? Goddammit.

But goddammit it in a good way. Cuz no matter what the other person thinks, it's crazy awesome for Artemis to have the chance to even wonder whether something could happen. It's crazy awesome that she can be nervous and happy and excited about someone real and alive. It may not, but something might happen, and who doesn't love that time on the threshold of things?

As always, it's a friend. Artemis certainly has her patterns. They recently started hanging out alone. And Artemis' recent powers of psychotherapy told her that when she had the urge to eat a ton, it meant she was nervous about something. She's always scared when her friendships transition like this--what if they have nothing to talk about?

It was fine. Witty and funny they both were. It wasn't perfect, but they rolled through the problems: the other person was late, the movie wasn't perfect, the restaurant was closed. No one called it a date--how can you tell?

Next week, Artemis had to ask for a rain check, but the other person was wonderfully kind about it. OP arranged to squeeze their plan around her plans with other friends. Arte's stomach was totally nervous. But the dinner rocked, and Arte asked the other person to take her for a drink. OP was clearly happy to show off her fave bar; they had more fun. The party was fun, but they left early and hung out and watched TV. There were grey kitties and petting grey kitties and couch closeness, but that was it.

Repeat the TV the next evening.

Arte was nervous. Knew by now what she wanted. Could not tell what OP wanted. Ran into her at a bar with other folks. Tried to be flirty. OP had to leave and nothing happened. Paranoia. Was she pushing too hard? Tried to arrange another dinner. No go. Tried to realize that people don't always drop everything the way she does. Sometimes they are what is called "responsible."

So she consigned herself to boredom with others. (She has to say, she loves this game and doesn't know why she was bored.) Text arrived. Excited, not bored because she had somewhere to go, someone to see. She suddenly began to win the game. After winning, she prepped the ground for leaving before it was time to go but after it would be rude.

Then the time struck her. She was late, and Artemis HATES being late, especially when it means that she's inconvenienced someone she cares about. And she super HATES letting people down. Goddammit. In a bad way! She raced home and was, let's admit, kinda proud that she was only forty-five minutes late, which in the large scheme of things isn't too terrible.

But then she opened the door and let a gray cat escape. And she didn't corner it. And she couldn't catch it because she was afraid if she ran after it, the cat would dash somewhere she wouldn't be able to find it. So began a ridiculous race led by a trotting cat, followed by a trotting Arte, followed by OP. They cornered the cat in an alley and with some team work that required OP to get her jeans wet and made Arte feel so fucking guilty, OP scooped up the kitty.

When Arte rounded the corner, she found them standing there. Arte played guilty because she felt guilty, but her head played another scenario where OP was standing there to welcome her with a kiss. Ha. No such thing. She doesn't know whether it was her guilt or what, but the whole evening felt very friendship-oriented. There was TV and kitty petting but no couch closeness. And definitely no escalation.

So maybe that's the end of it. Goddammit. In a semi-serious kinda way. Only semi cuz Artemis is still really glad to know that she can crush on people and that she can feel that desire to throw everything else to the winds. You cannot believe how well she's been sleeping these past weeks. And the work that she's been getting done! The sleep is definitely related. So even if nothing happens with OP, Arte has been briefly inspired and for that forever grateful.

And with that feeling, she made an Awesome Day.

On Her Birthday

2009-12-21T03:19:00.000-08:00

Artemis reports she is well.

She is in her bed.
She is with her cat.
She watched a wonderful movie this evening, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.
She earned money today, twice.
She had a lovely conversation with her mother, who seemed in good spirits.
She made a good dinner.

She is not in Georgia, running all over the state trying to see people after she flew across the country.
She is not in Georgia, with an immune system burned down by airports and strangers and off sleep patterns and family stress.
She is not in Georgia with family stress.
She is not in Georgia, hiding in her room to avoid public crying and defense and opinions and Fox News and her sister's rolling eyes.
She is not in Georgia where people are surprised to hear that she doesn't want to watch Ann Coulter say anything.
She is not in Georgia where her work means nothing.
She is not in Georgia trying to meet up with people who can't make time for her.
She is not in Georgia with a broken wrist.
She is not in Georgia crying so hard that her phone dies (btw, Happy Birthday New Phone!).
She is not in Georgia checking into a random hotel at 6AM accepting birthday wishes from the clerk.
She is not spending tons of money she doesn't have to be in Georgia with a family that has trouble with people who differ from them.

She's not sure if that is her family's trouble. But she is sure that things have been out of control for a long time. And 365 days and one hour ago, she decided to leave all that behind.

All she could say was that she was done. She was done fighting blame for things not her fault. She was done trying to get everyone to talk to one another. She was done caring whether they lied or told the truth. She was unconcerned with whether things could be better and how.

Not so true. She still cares. She has concern. But she no longer cares actively. She no longer tries beyond what seems absolutely within her control.

For one year, she's communicated with some of these people mostly over email and fb. Don't feel sorry for her though. One of the best side effects has been that she has talked to her dad on the phone more than she ever has in her life. Has he ever had such long conversations with anyone, she wonders?

She knows her mother must be hurt. But Artemis doesn't know how to approach her mother. She doesn't want to put her mother in a position where she feels she has to defend her other children against Artemis. Neither does she want her mother to be against Artemis at all.

Artemis is done fighting. They won. They think she's an outsider; that she's too serious; too radical; too strange; too emotional; too narrow-minded. Let em. She simply doesn't have the energy or the will to convince them otherwise.

She's sad. She still thinks about them all the time. They still have the power to make her life stop on a dime, and she can feel the self-doubt drag in on the necks of their point of view.

But she's safe in bed in California. Her kitty is snoring, and her bones are whole. She is 31 years old now and thankful she has survived this long. She hopes to survive even better next year. There's something about odd-numbered years that she's always liked; she's always been especially attracted to those prime numbers. 17 and 19 were both good years, and even if 29 ended with spectacular badness, she has to admit that 31 is already a ton better.

Thank God.

UC Is Burning

2009-11-23T22:38:00.001-08:00

Artemis reports that she is being aurally inflicted by fatuous stupidity--a young man is being encouraged by a young woman to be the most asshole-ish of assholes, passing judgment on pot smokers, student protesters, his dates, and his school's poor library. He has the gall to say that his colleagues have chips on their shoulders. Maybe all he can see is his own chip; he's projecting it onto these other people. Please god, let the come uppance come and quick! (Oh, my god, she just told him that he has an IQ level that rises above the people who have evidently refused to befriend him at his new school. Ha. I have a different theory.)

Although she lives with one of the main organizers of the collective action at UCD, Artemis has not been hardly at all involved in the protests. If you count her dissertation, she has four jobs that she's already barely covering. And then there's some personal changes she's making. The fifth priority on her list has barely shown itself in action therefore.

Nevertheless, she's made it her business to try to understand what's happening. She knows from experience that she will have to act as a liaison to other more conservative factions in her family, and she felt the need to be informed. So, as annoying as it must seem to more enthusiastic supporters outside, she has taken a skeptical stance toward the action.

In terms of the organizing, the leadership faces classic problems. The impetus for action has come from three men, two of whom are ladder faculty. The men theorize. The women make posters. Classic.

Arte's roommate is the single person of color in the leadership. Most of the protesting students are Californians of color. The media reports that the protests are student-led, but their cameras show the Ladder Men rallying the support. We just wish that the men could be better teachers who push the students to the front. A's roommate reports that the men didn't show up for the second day of protests, so perhaps her wish will come true.

For the most part, however, there's only admirable things to report. The students are responding to a very clearly defined problem. They have clearly defined reasons for their dismay--raising the fees by 44% this year alone (not counting the consistent and steep raises over the past years) means that UC will eventually fail to serve its citizens as it has done in the past. UC service to the state will decline because the student population will change; out of state students will gain preferred access to the best institutions, lower middle class students, working class, and underclass students--all of whom will not receive financial aid--will either have to accept a disproportionate burden of debt or have to forgo an elite education. There will be corresponding effects at the CSU and JC levels of education, which have been adequately addressed. (Hopefully, that will change in the future.) There will be effects among the faculty, who will leave the UC for greener and intellectually freer pastures. This is not a problem for those faculty. It's a problem for all Californians. Without excellent faculty, the UC will lose grants and even more money and, well, we all know what a death spiral looks like.

As far as I can tell, the protesters face resistance that comes from a basic misrepresentation of the university's mission. When the Sac Bee commenters harsh on the "brats" who don't want to suck it up and pay for this elite service, Artemis is reminded of D-Ho and his mission to grant students intellectual rights in the classroom. According to this strange story, activist judges, I mean, activist professors brainwash their students into radical leftist beliefs. Many teachers follow centuries' old methods of thinking that suggests that educating people to think logically will effectively liberate those people--liberate them to apply those thinking skills for their own interests and / or the interests of society at large (in a somewhat reductive sense the fault line in liberation pedagogy lies between individualism and communalism). D-Ho's cohort would take this as evidence of activism. But then he'd be wrong. Moreover, evidence--actual empirical evidence--indicates that students are much more likely to align themselves with their families' values than with their professors. And given what Artemis tells me about how students resist her authority in the classroom, she does not doubt these findings. Contrary to conservative rumor, academics are not all that charismatic.

Nevertheless, the D-Ho cohort has successfully convinced students, administrators, and the public at large that universities provide a service to students. In this story, students are clients who pay to receive grades and a diploma and a job offer. Under this rubric, a student can sue her college when she does not receive a job after graduation. How conservatives reconcile this logic with their fears that students are never failed and their grades are always inflated, I don't know. As far as I can tell, they are totally willing to be illogical to achieve their political purpose, which appears to be the destruction of public education.

Artemis has only been educated in public schools. Although she's in debt right now (which she owes to a certain weakness she had in listening to bad advice from sexy men), she's never had to pay for her education. The states she's lived in have rewarded her merit. This is pretty great because it means two things: whatever state she ends up in will benefit from the work she does. No matter what work she ends up doing, she'll be making more money than her uneducated siblings, and she'll be making it more consistently. This benefits the state how? Taxes. You might have heard of them. You wouldn't know it to talk to conservatives, but it's in the state's interest for people to do well economically. Plus, no matter what she's doing, she'll be helping other people to do better economically as well. Either her participation in someone's business or her own or the public sector will accomplish this task. Because she'll be jumping to a new class, should she marry and reproduce, this means that she'll have given the state generations of economic growth and potential.

All because they invested in her education.

Any benefit Artemis receives from her education is incidental compared to the benefit that the state, and by extension, her nation receives. Therefore, it makes more sense to think of the state, not the student, as the customer whom the university serves. The customer owes a bill.

Most of the comments that oppose the student protests fail to understand this key point. Both the Sac Bee regular folks and the "experts" from the New York Times agree:

Since most of the financial benefits of college go to the student, he or she should pay a large portion of college costs.

This wrong-headed logic is compounded by the idea that the costs of running the university are a) covered by student fees and b) spread evenly across the class system. The expert claims:

Most attendees come from moderately to very prosperous families that can shoulder this extra burden. Lower income students are largely protected by U.C. financial aid policies and by an increasingly generous federal student assistance program.

First, it's not cool that the continually rising fees have already whittled the student population to those from prosperous families. Other structural factors may apply. That doesn't make it ok, and it doesn't make it ok to compound the problem willingly. It's also unclear to what part of the financial aid policies he refers. The policies Artemis tells me about have become more stringent and more dependent on loans. Loans are not an acceptable form of aid; the students who pay for the UC with loans are being taxed twice--for the fees and the interest. (Do you trust tax credits to even things out? I don't. There's a financial reason that the state prefers that method; I know it's there even if I don't know what it is. Secondly, what saves you more money? Spending it on education rather than the economy or your bank account? The tax credit means you lose interest and opportunity.) (Another response to a similar argument about financial aid and ponies in the sky.)

Though he doesn't think students have got it right, this expert does see other problems in the mix:

However, all students and their parents, not to mention taxpayers, have a right to know why the vast majority of the U.C. budget goes for non-instructional expenses, why teaching loads are so low, and why there is a bloated central administrative bureaucracy. If they want the students to pay more, the University of California administration should be more fully accountable to those who are increasingly paying the bills.

Oh, god. D-Ho would be proud. My first question: whose teaching loads are "so low"? Surely not the graduate students! Surely not the adjunct faculty, who teach a major part of the courses offered at UC. Ladder faculty? When are they supposed to research? UC is a research university. The state and the students benefit from this institution because of the research that is done here both in the sciences and the humanities. The common misconception about the University's mission is compounded by common misconceptions about the nature of academic work in general.

"Non-instructional expenses" usually refers to things like the gym, which has for centuries been considered an essential part of education. Artemis says that while she thinks it's bad form for UCD to rebuild the student center at this time, she's not opposed to it as a matter of course. Let's pay student fees before we pay for a cooler place for them to buy lunch.

Everyone agrees that the administration is crazy bloated. They shouldn't be "more accountable." At this point they have absolutely no accountability to anyone, including the Governor. They are not elected officials. They do not take the students or the faculty into account in their decision-making. President Yudof, for example, asserted "emergency powers" for himself to justify making decisions that ran contrary to a large majority of faculty voters. Shared governance, a key part of the University's mission, is dead.

But some of these experts really don't want Artemis and her friends to protest. They say that:

no amount of resource planning could have forestalled a crisis at this level. That said, retroactive finger-pointing at the Regents and the administrators isn’t going to solve anything.

Without finger-pointing, I wonder how the hell we're supposed to demand accountability? Should we wait around for the Governor or Jesus or something? Secondly, if it's their job to "right this ship," how can we "hope that they will" if we believe they fucked the ship in the first place?

If the regents and administrators have the responsibility to liaise between the University and the state in order to protect the interests of students, faculty, and Californians in general, then the state is not "the bigger problem" with the "lion's share of the responsibility." The share is equal. Besides, if we don't pressure the regents, who's going to pressure the Governor? Obviously the electoral process alone is not enough to prevent a crisis that EVERYONE saw coming.

What's wrong with a world in which conservatives continue to make arguments that privilege state power over the individual's right to demand better education on behalf--not of the student--of the state?

Other "experts" at the Times think that the students need to stop whining because UC is still cheaper and better than other public institutions even after the fee increases. Two things are wrong here. 1) How on earth will things be better for the state if we divert our resources toward educating wealthier out-of-state students in lieu of Californians? and 2) The faculty are not going to stick around at a university without shared governance and recognition for their research contributions to education and to the state. UC may not yet be as private as Stanford, but it can no longer claim to be open to the public either.

Maybe this is why the police and the DA refuse to allow the students to occupy the buildings without charging trespass.

The UC problem is similar to the problem that health care reform faces on the national level. Conservatives appear to misunderstand who benefits when health care and education are publicly available. It seems unfair, for example, to grant health care benefits to illegal immigrants. They don't deserve to be addressed by the law since they broke other laws, the thinking appears to go. This thinking is illogical on a number of levels. Laws are not all equal for one. And they don't always match the reality of life on the ground. Secondly, illegal immigrants pay taxes, so they meet one big requirement for fairness in receiving public services. They pay for them. Lastly, like the students at UC, these illegal immigrants are not the primary beneficiaries of health care. Sure, they benefit, but the state benefits more and more consistently if it insures all people. This is true both in terms of public health--conservatives seem to forget that diseases are contagious and know no class bounds--and in financial terms. As Timothy Noah convincingly demonstrates on Slate, it's more expensive to take care of uninsured people. And it's not just more expensive for those people--it's more expensive for All of Us, including the state.

Even if you don't think that education and health care are human rights, you have to admit that they offer high public good, which deserves our investment and support.

There's no reason not to support the students and faculty at UC who are asking for greater accountability from their administration. It is their job to find the money, not ours.

PS. Some people offer the added objection that the UCs are elite institutions; how can we worry about them without worrying about K-12, JCs, and CSUs? Artemis says that this is a legitimate worry though it should not get in the way of progressive goals. Supporting the Master Plan requires supporting JCs. Hopefully, we'll see this problem reflected in future collective alliances. Part of the problem is that UC faculty are not unionized.

PPS. Title via

Blogging Energy

2009-08-18T10:07:00.000-07:00

One reason that I have not been blogging as much (since I fired my alter ego) is that my blogging energy has been directed toward long-form emails, formerly known as "letters," which I've been sending to a select number of my family members.

I've chosen to communicate with them through email because I discovered over Christmas that some terrible things were happening with the phone conversations. Apparently, I'm some kind of politically radical sexual pervert? This was news to me, so I decided to try to take some control back over my image.

Directly contradicting the information was no good: "I am not politically radical," I'd say. "I'm not an adulterer nor have I committed some other heinous kind of sexual offense," I'd explain.

But my interlocutor inevitable trusted her own faulty memory over my protestations. Faulty memory or Fox News, whichever has the strongest pull. One would insist that her long years have prepared her to recognize a socialist when she sees one. Another would insist that I had indeed said that I was having sex with a married man, never mind the fact that I had not met the man in question until long after his divorce.

Contradiction wouldn't work, so I changed the medium. The medium is the message, they say. Maybe my family had some sort of problem with oral communication that would disappear with something more old-fashioned? I turned to writing letters.

Email solves all sorts of problems for me. For one, being able to address the letters to the group saves me time. It's not that I'm too lazy to write to each individual person. It's just that I don't have that much to say to all of these individual people. My uncle bets on football and drinks brandy and water, tall. My parents volunteer, garden, and watch TV. My sister is a mom, who does mommy things. Her husband does not apparently read these emails (reverse coverture?).

Although my mother is clearly not satisfied with this form of contact, neither is she going out of her way to change the new pattern. I'm sure she knows that phones work both ways. My sister has been a bit harder to read. Her responses sounded to me as if she didn't trust what I was saying. It was as if she sensed that this was about my control and figured I was lying about myself: "Your writing makes it sound as if you're doing well. If that's true, I'm happy for you."

If that's true. Whah? She'd said this a couple of times and then nothing for a long while. I figured she hated the emails as much as she liked the perverted image of me she'd constructed. I was worried that my new plan had backfired. I thought maybe I had the strength to adjust a bit. I left a brief message--no emotion--at her house.

When she called me yesterday, I took the call even though I was in the middle of something. She still quizzed me about whether I was as happy as I sounded. I tried to explain to her that I have always been happy with the work that I've been doing--it's just the poverty and stress of no employment always looming overhead that kills me. I tried to distinguish between structure and content to make things clearer for her. I think maybe it worked, I don't know.

I was most surprised, though, when she insisted that she liked reading my emails. I know that in the past, she's felt that she can hear my voice when she reads my writing. But I think, now, the vivid details of the homely things I describe also interest her. She mentioned particularly liking the story about how Charlie locked himself in the bathroom. And the details about the spiders crawling everywhere. Hopefully, this is a good sign that my image rehabilitation is working at least insofar as she is concerned.

If the letters generate responses, they attract only certain readers. My Uncle Andy, who never devolved to hate me like the others, and who once actually asked, "Why are they mad at you?" And then said in response, "Oh, that's not a reason to be mad at you," he responds most reliably. He's lonely where he lives and has a lot of retired time on his hands. But then, so do my parents, and they don't write to me. I think it's just a personality thing. My youngest elder sister just cares more. That's why I included her in my emails even though she'd greatly hurt my feelings just as everyone else had.

My eldest sister? Nope, not gonna make an effort. She made it clear that texting was her only source of communication. She doesn't do phone calls or Facebook or email. Why should I bother reaching out to someone who sets so many rules at the outset? My brother? Well, he's clearly established a pattern of lying and ignoring and deleting my emails, so I don't know why I should bother with him either. My nephew unapoletically broke my wrist. Plus, he also lies and ignores and acts badly with communication. So he's out. I'd include my brother-in-law if I didn't think that would be weird. I suspect he's probably a cool guy. He's at least kind. My other brother-in-law I'd include, too, if he had a separate e-address from my sister.

I'm more thrilled at the positive response I'm getting from my sister than I am worried about leaving the others out. Of course I want to include them. I've been trying to set up a family blog for years where people could communicate to each other in round-robin. But if I have learned anything over the past year, it's to set my goals small and reachable. Stop aiming for people who don't want to be caught.

I'm afraid of the blog audience, too. I care even as I'm afraid of what they'll say. If I am true to myself--especially since myself is so aware of how provisional all my thinking is--then I hope to be able to defend myself or back away quickly if any problems arise. But with my family, I'm trying to keep thinking to a minimum. No judgment, no discussion, very few worries; only quotidian descriptions. When Michael Jackson died, I dared to mention the impact his death had had on me. I was deathly scared that any MJ talk would veer close to discussion and raise the specter of my radically political and sexually perverted image. But my sister responded with wonderful comment about how she felt for him and his family, too. I had connected! I was safe!

I'm gonna have to continue this letter writing. I might gradually mix things up and bring phone calls back into the picture if I feel on safe ground. But for now, half of my immediate family is just not gonna be part of things. Maybe someone is forwarding these notes to the others. I don't know. If I received a forward and wanted to be in on the communication cycle, I would email the source directly and interact with them in some way. But that hasn't happened. And they aren't me. I don't know how the blogging will continue or what it will look like in the future. For now, much of my writing energy is siphoned towards familiar image control and rehab. God, I hope this works.

Weekend Poetry

2009-08-14T16:59:00.000-07:00

John Donne (1572-1631)

The Canonization

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love,
Or chide my palsy, or my gout,
My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune, flout,
with wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe His Honor, or His Grace,
Or the king's real, or his stampe'd face
Conte'mplate; what you will, approve,
So you will let me love,

Alas, alas, who's injured by my love?
What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned?
Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?
When did my colds a forward spring remove?
When did the heats which my veins fill
Add one more to the plaguy bill?
Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still
Litigious men, which quarrels move,
Though she and I do love.

Call us what you will, we're made such by love
Call her one, me another fly,
We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,
And we in us find th' eagle and the dove.
The phoenix riddle hath more wit
by us: we two being one , are it.
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit,
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.

We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tomb and hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs;
And by these hymns all shall approve
Us canonized for love:

And thus invoke us: "You whom reverend love
Made one another's hermitage;
You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;
Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes
(So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize)
Countries, towns, courts: Beg from above
A pattern of your love!"

I don't want to be one of those literary types who insist ye ol' masters of the canon are the best. But damn, I had to admit this is one good poem. Even if it's a tad heterosexist, the language is so taught, the imagery so vicious--I'm reminded a bit of a good Sharon Olds poem. It appears to reach its goal of heightening what otherwise would be a cliched Hallmark card emotion about a pitiful old man and his persisting love. There's a lot I'm not sure about here, nor do I have the time to really read this, so I'll just end with this question: does anybody know whether the line "if no piece of chronicle we prove" refers to an almanac or other prophet-y prediction type thing? Or is "chronicle" more of a history or journal/newspaper type thing?

Facebook Still Amazes

2009-08-14T13:52:00.000-07:00

I did not jump on board Facebook right away. I think I remember a time when I wasn't really sure what the big deal was. I must've signed up early on and found that when you don't have a lot of friends on there, it's not all that much fun. But after I found a job for this past year, I remember deciding to stop being depressed. I Facebooked the hell out of myself. I added tons of friends, played lots of games, and updated everyone who cares about my life--just like all the rest of you!

I'm still not that fanatical about it. I don't friend everyone I know, but neither do I have rules about not friending families or professors. I don't really enjoy the games that much; it is a pain in the ass to kill zombies, and I always lose because my attention wanders. I'm sure someone has killed all my knights by now. I like sending people drinks and goofy karate chops, but I get annoyed by applications that require you to send things to 20 people in order to find your answer. I don't find listing things about myself that interesting, I rarely take quizzes (though I can tell you that I have read a lot of BBC books list).

But I love when you take quizzes. I love all the things my friends post. I love that there's some unspoken rule about how you don't use Fb to complain too much about life. I love the people who inspire other people to start conversations. I'm always surprised when I manage to evoke a response. I found, today, that people (from the Midwest) are just as excited about avocados in California as I am.

Some people have surprised me. One of the people I loved dearly has become a zookeeper! So many people have kids. Some are divorced. One is an ex-priest. I love sticking my nose in people's business without the pressure of necessarily being involved in their lives. I love being involved with people whom I value even if I don't have the time or money to see them.

I am especially interested in the women with whom I went to high school. It's so cool to know that each of the women who meant to have become doctors. It's so cool to see that they've spread their wings and gone to new places just like I have. It's so cool to see my best friend from back in the day post her baby's pics. It's so cool that she's not the kind of mom who only posts her baby's pics or who uses her baby as her profile pic.

Which is not to say that I'm not fascinated by the women who do use their uterus as their icon. I've learned from two new moms that PSX90 kicks your butt. And I'm trying to figure out what is so charming about the sheer consistency of a woman who's updates inevitably involve the word "hubby."

Facebook is amazing precisely because of the way it refuses to deal with the subtle rough edges that prevent so many relationships. I don't think I could spend too much time with a woman who uses the word "hubby" so frequently. She and I had figured out pretty early on in high school that ours was not a friendship for the ages. But now we can still be remotely aware of each other's lives just as were before. There are some people who are better Fb friends than they were in real life, but I don't think we should think too poorly of the people whose friendships carry the exact same value as before.

I recently friended one woman whom I remember best for throwing The Scarlet Letter across the room when we were in eleventh grade English. I never understood exactly what her problem was--I liked that she was so feisty, but I think she had some sort of moral problem with the way Dimmesdale sorta gets away with things? I was confused; I felt as if she'd wasted this awesomely feisty display on a bad reading of the book--isn't the text critical of the characters?

I liked this girl, but usually only from a distance. I liked that she was angsty, but I was suspicious of the way she made friends. I didn't trust her. Then there was that time when we were next to each other at a red light: for some reason, I swore heartily, This goddamn light is so fucking long, right?! (I've been using hyperbolic, mock reactions for a long time. Sometimes I get a laugh and sometimes I don't. This time) The other people in the car laughed, but this girl seemed genuinely shocked that I, a 17 or 18 year old person, had cussed.

She'd confused me again. Was she surprised because she judged people who cussed? Did she not cuss? Did she not think that I cussed? Had we really gone through seven years of school together without her knowing that I'm a low class freak?

Anyhow, now that she's on Facebook, she's surprising me again. It sounds like she bounced around, trying out different things, before ending up in the army. She married some other army person and has already born three children. She's just begun a blog--I commented but I got no reply, so I totally judge her. She wrote something about Michael Jackson after saying that she didn't understand what the big deal about Michael Jackson was. See, I'm confused again. Does she think he's a big deal or doesn't she? Was she only writing about him as an excuse to say that she was glad her childhood crush on MJ had been replaced by her love for her fecund army husband?

It's both fascinating and so unsatisfying to see how conservative this woman and other people have become. Or maybe I'm only just remembering how things always were? Or only just now realizing? A woman with whom I spent a lot of time in dance classes growing up is currently homeschooling her children. Why? We knew another girl who was homeschooled, and I don't her ever approving of it. She went to public school. Why can't her kids?

I don't know why the conservatism surprises me. I have one friend from college who is always cheering Obama on. And I have two or three friends who think he's a socialist. Seriously? I'm shocked enough that my mother thinks that, but other, connected and presumably informed people think that, too?

I think I've been pretty good at avoiding any too direct political statements. I don't want to be as shocking as my red light-hating self. But then again, it probably isn't that hard to read between the updates and posts and comments. I believe I probably made a few comments to other people's updates about Skippy Gates, for instance. What do the other people think about that? I hope they take a look at the things I say and don't just ascribe them to Utopic Town, USA grad school brainwashing.

I don't know what I'm afraid of. Something makes me pretty conservative when it comes to friending people that Facebook recommends. Pretty much, if I friend you, it's because I genuinely like you and would really like to hear more about your life, no matter what your politics or reproductive orientation (were all those people in high school so straight?!). I've not friended some men who I wanted to like but never really got to know all that well. I dunno why not. I figure they're also not friending me.

The symmetry and pleasure I find in my high school friending does not extend to my family. My sister refuses to join Fb even though half her family, including our 86 y/o uncle, is on it; she turns down all the invites from her friends. I wonder if her friends find that as frustrating and weird as I do. Do they want to invite her to parties or inform her of events in their lives without leaving her out every time? Do they find her paranoid? I don't know why other people like Fb, but I love knowing about all the cool things people are up to--all the hard work they're doing and all the fun they're having. I'm learning tons. It's a source of news, personal and public. I've discovered new artists and concerts. It's a source of encouragement from colleaugues and friends.

Considering that she doesn't like email, doesn't use the phone, doesn't tweet, or Fb, or send letters snail mail, I don't know that I'll ever figure her out. But now with Fb, I have so many other mysterious people that I can try to figure out. I wonder if that one woman will ever have a memory of reading Hawthorne in Ms. Beals' class?

Internet Piracy

2009-08-04T10:07:00.000-07:00

I have a lot to say on this topic without actually being all that knowledgeable about it. So I'm not going to go into much detail here. But, I want to point out that the AWESOME video of MJ's "Man in the Mirror" in Bucharest has "been removed by IFPI."

After his death, I admit that I had been surprised by the access we had to all of the videos. I remember being grateful that the rights' owners were allowing the videos to stand during the frenzy. Only HARPO seemed unwilling to share. And I don't think too highly of them for it.

About two weeks in, I began to notice that some companies were pulling their videos from YouTube. Fine. I'm sure they're going to try to make money off of them.

But I love this performance so much, and I'm upset that it's not available because of some group I've never heard of before. So I googled them to see who they are. In their own words:

IFPI represents the recording industry worldwide, with a membership comprising some 1400 record companies in 72 countries and affiliated industry associations in 44 countries. IFPI's mission is to promote the value of recorded music, safeguard the rights of record producers and expand the commercial uses of recorded music in all markets where its members operate.

This pisses me off. These people have no direct interest in protecting this video. Their only interest is in "preventing "piracy"" (yes, those are quadruple scare quotes). I am neither convinced that ending piracy is the key to the music industry's woes, nor convinced that their woes are real, nor that the "rights" of record producers are in need of protection, in comparison to, say, the rights of artists. I am not even sure anyone can convincingly identify where the line between consumers and artists is. Plus, unions are for workers. Double plus, I don't believe that record producers operate in the non-commercial arena that is my blog.

Therefore, I am pissed that this company has the power to flush this incredible video from the intertubes.

My New Life in West Utopic Town, USA

2009-08-04T08:38:00.000-07:00

Oh, wait. I already lived in West Utopic Town! I didn't move very far :) Just closer to the freeway. I can hear it at night now. But it's OK. It makes me feel like I'm on vacation. In fact this whole place is so nice that I can't shake the feeling that I'm living in a hotel or something. The first nice thing you notice about this place are the wood floors throughout. Images of a cat-hair-free-floor swim before your eyes. Dizzy, you don't even notice that there's no microwave. You dimly recall the gazillion spiders posted outside the front door, but the wood-paneling in the kitchen and bathroom and all the lovely nooks and crannies to display your stuff distract you. OMG, there's a garage! You no longer have to drive around , wasting gas, lugging all your camping and bike gear in your car trunk!

That was my first impression of this house. I could tell there were a few problems. Spiders galore, gutters begging for attention, and an overgrown yard were the chief annoyances. I didn't even notice the absence of a microwave until after we moved everything in, when I went to re-heat some leftovers. As you know, I wanted to move to the city, any city, this year, but when Cat decided to stay--I should send a thank you to her diss adviser for that--her parents persuaded her to contact her uncle Gerard who lives in town. He lives so close to here that we walked from his place one afternoon, and by the end of that day, I had signed a lease--without any deposit and for less rent than I had been paying in the apartment--and I had a belly-full of the best Chinese food I think I have ever had. Unless you count the Chinese food he bought for us after we painted the house last week. My friends and I were so exhausted--I was in the middle of a marathon week of traveling. After painting almost the entire interior (and de-wallpapering and priming the bedrooms), he took us back to that same restau in Sac. We could hardly believe our luck. The food was AMAZING. And the next night, he had us over for a dinner that he cooked for us! (He claims to be the best cook in Utopic Town--he's not wrong).

After learning that he likes peach cobbler a lot (and halibut--he's a very good story-teller; I feel like I've learned a lot about their family already), I decided that the least I could do for the World's Best-Ever Landlord would be to make him a cobbler. I'm gonna hit the farmer's market tomorrow to sniff out some good peaches. We may be near the end of the season, but I have hopes.

I can't believe I made it through the last two weeks! After working and traveling and moving and even doing some writing, well, I've ended up sleeping a lot the past couple of days. But today, I'm jumping back into the game full-time. I have tutoring, reading, several writing tasks, more tutoring, some invoices to prepare. Basically, it's a good thing I woke early today.

Oh, I forgot to mention the worst moment of the moving!

Charlie.

Although he catches on when I'm packing to leave town, he didn't seem to realize to the purpose of all the moving activity. After all, I may have been packing, but I came back every night, which seemed to satisfy him. I had planned to shut him in the upstairs bathroom just before the movers came for the furniture, but when they arrived early, I had to man-handle him out from under Cat's bed. I shoved him into the bathroom and ran off to Sac to work.

I already knew I was reaching the end of my miraculously long tether. The U-haul guy's slow ways were annoying me to no end, and I ended up walking away before getting the receipt after I dropped the truck off. The only thing left for us to do was to pick up Charlie. We loaded the car with some other stuff (thank goodness Cat was there), and I went to grab Charles. The door wouldn't open. And I had no idea what to do about it.

The stupid cat had managed to open one of the drawers in the vanity near the door, blocking it. Some of you know that Charlie has some weird habits. Staring out windows at empty spaces is a favorite past-time, for example. He also loves to explore cabinets. In the morning or after a day away from the house, I'll come home to find drawers and doors mysteriously left open, as if someone had rifled through them and not cared whether I knew. He never closes anything after he's done.

This amusing habit became scary when Cat pointed out that the hinges on the door were on the inside of the bathroom where we couldn't reach them. I couldn't stick more than two fingers into the crack. Neither was his little paw forceful enough to open the door.

Cat fetched a fire poker we hadn't bothered to move yet, but all we were doing was ruining the door jamb. Suddenly, at the last possible moment, the purpose of paying a $600 pet deposit for a ten pound cat without claws became very clear to me.

There's a happy ending, of course. Despite my visions of being charged for leaving a cat to die in my bathroom (these people will charge you for anything. I am so glad I don't have to deal with them any more), the very nice maintenance man proved to be more adept with the poker than I. By the time I grabbed Charlie and wrestled him into his crate and released him into my room (you're supposed to introduce cats to new environments gradually, one small space at a time), he was so traumatized that he immediately climbed over all the junk I had stuffed in my closet during the move in order to find the safest place to hide. (I suppose that climbing over a pile sounds normal for most cats--just yesterday I witnessed my friends' cat blindly leap over a seven foot tall box to the shorter perch on the other side. But such climbing is a sign of desperation for Charlie.) It's been almost a week now, and he's pretty much acclimated to the new place already. Maybe more than I am. He's not hardly walking low to the ground any more, and his tail is up and waving.

And this morning, I woke to find my bathroom cabinet-doors open. So, no lessons learned. When I opened a drawer to grab some bobby pins, he climbed right in. I'm just thankful these drawers are nowhere near any doors. And at this moment, I can hear him snoring from underneath my bed.

Weekend Poetry

2009-08-01T13:46:00.000-07:00

Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther
by
AE Stallings

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night,
The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?
Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons
And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night?

Joy

2009-07-16T09:50:00.000-07:00

Surely the Michael Jackson Obsession Will Soon End?

2009-07-04T20:37:00.000-07:00

Watching Michael Jackson's videos on YouTube gives me the sense that I'm watching my childhood. I was born in 1978, sixteen years after he first started performing in public, ten years after he signed his first contract with Motown, and one year before he released Off the Wall.

My parents are older people; my eldest sister is less than a year younger than Jackson, and she didn't live with us. My parents kept the radio on constantly; it was always only tuned to the local country station. I know a lot about the Oakridge Boys. Occasionally, the car radio would find its way to the oldies station, which spun some Jackson 5. And then there was the Lawrence Welk show on New Year's Eve and church hymns every Sunday morn.

By the time the I became aware that I might choose my own musical tastes, my sister had moved into my bedroom. She always played the radio while we were going to sleep; we listened to adult contemporary music. Ya know, Delilah at Night or something soothing and sexy and sans beat like that. I probably heard quite a few Lionel Ritchie songs but not so many Michael Jackson beats. By middle school, I had discovered my brother's old classic rock albums and spent most of my time listening to Zeppelin and Queen. I was allowed to go to one dance in fifth grade, and I remember going to a party in sixth grade where I heard some dance tunes. I think the roof was on fire.

But then Nirvana hit, and I was the perfect target audience. I was really pissed. I was angry. I wanted to wear plaid, and I wished my jeans were baggier. I hated anything that said GENDERED. I hated pink, and I hated accessories. (Or, worse, I hated losing accessories--I have very small wrists, which is inconvenient for bracelets and such.) And in the end, I know very little about 80s pop culture even though I grew up at the time. Between an apparently traumatic moving experience in 86, which practically erased my memory of anything prior, and not watching any television until ER came along, I just didn't have much of a chance to catch on.

Michael Jackson is all about gender. Yet I now obsessively watch his videos on YouTube, and I marvel at how familiar his dancing is to my bones. I had never been aware of his song lyrics. I hadn't seen the 80s videos before, hadn't known what Thriller looked like until I saw the movie 13 Going on 30.

But as time has gone by, my interest slowly ratchets up. I was aware of his videos being released in the 90s. But I didn't see what the big deal was. I knew there was some question about his sexuality and gender, and I could clearly see that the videos were addressing that question, but as far as I could tell, there was no definite answer they provided. I thought it was pretty doubtful that he and Lisa Marie really had anything going on. Together, I mean. She clearly has something going on with us and the camera. Frankly, I was embarrassed by what I thought was transparency. So I made it my duty to carefully note and ignore the hoopla surrounding MJ. I just did not care.

In college, my friends had different musical tastes than I. Some listened to JLo and some to Britney and Christina and the boy bands. With few exceptions, I avoided all of this music. I was pretty committed to bluesy alt rock and still suspicious of pop's sentimentality--oh, Delilah!--and gender cliches.

It wasn't until I realized that my best friends in grad school knew the lyrics to ALL the contemporary pop tunes that my tastes began to go pop. When I saw that movies aimed at me expected me to recognize Thriller and when I found myself smiling and nodding to all the 80s references flying past me at parties and when I just up and accepted myself as feminine, well, then, I thought I might should pay some more attention. When the trial started, I read the Slate dispatches with interest. Although it seemed pretty obvious that he felt like shit, no one could fathom what MJ was thinking. I read a lot, but I still didn't get why anyone cared. He was acquitted, and I forgot all about him. I downloaded Dangerous and was unfamiliar with most of the songs. I didn't listen to much of it.

After years of studied detachment, however, I remain shocked by his death, and I can't figure out why. We're all obsessed, and now that I pay attention to pop culture, I'm not as above it all as I was when I was a kid. I still generally do not at all care about celebrities; I don't ask them for autographs when I run into them cuz it seems too embarrassing. So maybe it was because I realized that my sister, 49, and brother, 48, were so close to him in age; what if they died, too?

There's something about being aware of and open to pop culture that has opened me up to enthusiasms I have never had before. I have always dismissed claims of genius and brilliance: usually, it seems to me, they come from guys who are expressing some sort of patriarchal allegiance to other men. My reluctance to embrace famous people has always set me apart from other people who study art and literature as I do. I think it's made me a good critical reader, but sometimes I wonder whether it might not be nice to fall in love. I always have a hard time listing my favorite things for people (also because I have wide and ever-expanding tastes). I used to debate with myself over whether I would reach to save Little Women or the Bible should our house be devastated by fire. But my obsession wasn't with the author of the book; it was with the narrative itself.

Plus my father is constitutionally suspicious of all things popular. My parents were huge fans of the would-you-jump-off-a-bridge if everyone did variety of sayings. They are an inch away from being libertarians.

(I've always thought that this stupid warning was because they wanted to maintain strict control over me. I couldn't do as others did, but I must do as my parents demanded. I see now that my mother has simply erased any interests or enthusiasms in things cultural. If it's not related to her children, she doesn't much care about it. My father is capable of being affected by enthusiasm in the most charming ways. But he is so out of practice with engaging with the popular world that he gets frustrated very easily.)

Maybe my current obsession with Michael Jackson slipped through these cracks in my upbringing. Maybe I'm getting sentimental in my old age. I don't know why I've wrung the internet dry looking for all things MJ.

The image has definitely resonated with some of my recent research. I realized that Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange alludes to Jackson's Heal LA campaign, and there's likely other points of convergence with MJ's image. And I keep thinking about James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, which I've recently read. I feel like Michael Jackson's image instantiates a particular turn in global capitalism (sorry to be so vague; I have not really thought this through.)

I'm going to be using MJ in my teaching from now on, that's for sure. My tutor-ee is 53 years old from Hawaii. I'm really interested in finding out if she's a fan and what she thinks of this mess. I'm bringing her a copy of the lyrics of some of his most famous 80s songs. We're learning how to navigate the internet right now, so I thought we should start with the most popular thing on the net, right? She'll choose a song, and then we'll go to YouTube where she'll learn to search for and choose the video she wants to watch. One of my main goals is to teach her how to bookmark websites.

But I also want her to read the lyrics. She's just a beginning reader, but I think she'll do well. One of the many amazing things that I "found" in his lyrics (everyone probably already knows this) is how simple the language is. George Orwell would be proud at all of the short old English words at play. "Crescendo," from "Smooth Criminal" is a rare exception, and it's not surprising that it's a musical term. Because the words are short, the rhymes are generally simple, but like Dickinson, yes, Emily Dickinson, he relies a lot on slant rhyme to create a sophisticated sound of creepiness. My tutoree learned what rhyme was last week, so she's well primed to catch up on this. Plus, she already knew what rhythm is--so much smarter than certain college freshman is this "illiterate" woman! We can talk about the way the lyrics redefine "bad"--a word whose meaning otherwise seems so firmly established. We can talk about call and response and his literacy with extra-lingual sounds. Imagery makes its appearance in bloodstained floors and crescendoing windows, and the syntax of the "Annie are you OK" lines is beautiful. Maybe we'll even get to the insistent metalyrical stuff, too!

She is going to be so sick of Michael Jackson by the time I am done.

But I'm not finished. I want to write this bit about Baldwin still. And then there's my childhood. I've been really good at not getting down about my family. But I was in tears about them last night just like the old days. There are quite a few physical reasons that could explain away these salinated boogers. But I can't help, in the sappiest and most sentimental way possible, thinking about how my sudden education in all things public about Michael Jackson has struck my soul and with force.

Ultimately, I think it's about my dancing. I see him dance, and I try to imitate it like everyone does. And the movement feels familiar. I don't know the lyrics; I don't know the stories, but I feel that I have moved this way since I was very young. I'm a classically trained dancer. I suck at modern dance and jazz. But when we first started to go to clubs in college, well, I knew how to dance. And it felt like this.

In an interview or two, MJ talks approvingly about other performers who have good counter-rhythm. I was really excited about this information because I'm super interested in knowing more about what he thinks about craft. I'm not sure what counter-rhythm is though. It reminds me of two men in college who told me I wasn't dancing right. Both times, they hit on my rhythm. The first, a trained percussionist, a pianist, and my best friend at the time, I believed. Kinda. It took me forever to figure out what the problem was. I had been marking time with my hands as if I were doing degages, a balletic move where your foot leaves your center and kicks off the floor a couple of inches, leg straight. Anyhow, the percussionist must have expected the beat to hit when my hands, or legs, were together. But I wasn't doing that: I was emphasizing what I think of as the outbeat. My legs were coming in on the and striking out on the beat. I never explained it to him because I thought maybe I was still wrong.

And the other guy--I think he played guitar maybe? I knew him less well, but I liked him and wouldn't have minded sleeping with him if had less of a rep for being a whore. Well, anyway, we were dancing at a club when he made me stop and listen for the beat before we started swingin hips again. I think about that almost everytime I dance; and almost every time I'm proud to say that I break that god-damn rhythm.

For I am with Michael Jackson. Great dancing isn't thought. You think the choreography, you practice your ass off, your muscles memorize the movement. And from there, you listen to the music. I don't know if I have good counter-rhythms that these boys couldn't see or what. But I do know that I recognize something in Michael Jackson that resonates in my guts.

So the obsession? It's probably not yet over. I leave you with my one of my new favorite videos. It's a performance of "Man in the Mirror," with which he always appears to invoke James Brown. I picked this one over the 1988 Grammy's, which I love because of the way the movement and sound crescendo over the course of the entire performance, because both Michael and the audience appear to embrace enthusiasm in the most complete way. He's falling on the floor and crawling on the stage because he "can't" hold himself up. And boys and girls are both fainting left and right in the audience. Like good Pentecostalists, they are overcome.

eek. I just re-watched it. I should warn you, the vid disappointingly cuts off before he's carried off stage :(

I'm also gonna leave with the performance from the Super Bowl. I don't have anything to say yet about the militarism, but who can deny how goddamn exciting it is to watch him just stand there. And then. Then, he turns his head. That's all he does. He turns his head, and the crowd is insane. Can you imagine what it was like to be him to just stand still for that long. That's hard to do when no one is watching! Adrenaline courses through you. What is he thinking? Is he counting? The people must have been instructed to begin the music only after he started moving. But how did he know the time? Was there some sort of signal off camera?

Arte's Favorite Holiday

2009-07-04T11:34:00.000-07:00

Although I didn't realize it when I was living at home, the Fourth of July and its related holidays--Memorial and Labor Day--are my favorites.

My family celebrate every. single. possible. holiday. I remember one year pursuing a new friendship with a girlfriend down the street: it was the start of spring; it was light out; it was warm but not humid; we were riding our bikes like crazy. And I got in a shit load of trouble because I was holding up St. Patrick's Day with my parents.

St. Patrick's Day. You thought that was just for bars, didn't you? Oh, no. It's a Very Important Day where I'm from. And so is every birthday. Every sacrament. Every Day of Obligation (it's a Church thing). Every time my parents decided to do something, my schedule was nil.

Now, I'm not complaining too much. I would have preferred a wee bit more independence, but I love my family, and I used to love spending time with them.

And when I moved away, it was the Fourth that I missed the most. I've been trying to figure out why that is; don't most people love Christmas the most? Isn't that the most family-holiday of the year? Well, slowly but surely, my Christmases have turned cliche. It is not fun to go home to my family. And this last Christmas, despite what I know will be major protests to the contrary--my family really believes in itself--I finally figured out that they just don't want me there.

In years past, I've noticed the symptoms without really understanding the big picture. My mother simply insists that everyone is busy when I ask why it was so hard to arrange an evening, one evening in the entire year, when I could hang out with my siblings. Busy. Huh. Well, I'm sorry to inconvenience them with my one visit a year, I'd think.

And now, I just don't want to bother. And with that turn of events in mind, it seems to me that the difference between the Fourth and the other holidays is that the Fourth is about bonding with strangers not family.

I've always been scared of strangers. I'm sure this has something to do with my sheltered upbringing and my family's insistence that they loomed largest in importance over all else. I've always loved watching the Godfather movies because I really vibed to the idea of a Catholic family who would kill for each other. Even though they were Italian and we were mongrels with pale freckled skin, I totally identified.

And I'm not crazy. How many of you have heard your mother say, "Artemis, you should know that you can always trust only two things in this world, and trust them absolutely: the Church and your mother"?

This was after the sex scandals. I don't blame the entirety of the Catholic church for these scandals, but I do think there's probably some institutional flaws to say the least. I appreciate my mother's faith, but did she really truly think that this was a convincing point? It only convinced me that I needed to tread more carefully around my family.

And the Fourth is the perfect time to do that. It involves suntan lotion, boats, beer, light food, music and That's IT.

No stress about decorations. Is the flag facing the right way? Do we have a spotlight for night time? Check and Check and Done.

I hate decorating with my family. They remember how it was ten years ago, and they remember that everyone seemed happy with that, and they will kill you if you don't make it look exactly the same as before. "Move that fake vine over a couple of inches; it needs to droop down just so." "Last year the bells were turned on all the time." "You used to love the bells!" (I'm referring to fake plastic, electric bells that shrilly chime to the tune of Christmas carols. Yes, Mom, I used to like those shrill bells when I was ten. And now that I'm thirty--and yes, I am old enough to ride in the car with my teenage nephew. I am thirty years old. I have continued aging while I was away.) And so on. OMG so frustrating!

Don't forget the gender dynamics: who cooks on the Fourth? Everyone (if you count grilling meat prepared by women as being cooked by men). Who cooks at Christmas? The women (unless you count the carving of the turkey as cooking, and I don't because the five minutes that my dad spends doing that before dinner is NOTHING compared to the HOUR my mother spends after dinner deboning the damn thing). Who does the dishes on the Fourth? Plastic cups!!!!!! Who does the dishes on Christmas? It used to be just the women. Things have improved to such a point that my brothers are pitching in now. Good for them. Especially since this year someone in the family had helped me to break my wrist a few days earlier, and I was in no fucking shape to do any dishes myself. And last year, that same person passed on a virus to me that made me unable to stop shivering with a fever that raged well above a 100 degrees. There was not much dishwashing that year, either.

Who talks on the Fourth? If you play your cards right, and playing cards on the Fourth is tons of fun, you don't have to talk about anything at all. The TV is on at Christmas. Fox News. Bill O'Reilly. Ann Coulter. Karl Rove. People of EVIL. Natural disasters happen at Christmas. The TV is on all the fucking time. And I hate it. But on the Fourth, you compare sunburns and water tricks. Things you all share in common.

Then there's all the terrible food and its excess. Do we really need a birthday cake for Baby Jesus? I never had one as a kid; we only started to do it a couple of years ago for the little ones. Who aren't all that goddamn little anymore. On the Fourth, kids are treated age-appropriately.

On the Fourth, no one's cranky and tired. No children have to compare gifts with one another. No one has to give the sister they don't like cheesy pencils. No clothes have to be tried on. No one has to look at you funny for eating those cookies. (Granted, this year, I didn't eat all that many cookies while I was there. But I'm sure that I got some looks for the bottle of wine I kept in my room by my bed.)

Nope. On the Fourth, you invite the neighbors over. The priest comes over to swim and have a sec of fun. The dogs run like crazy. The frisbee zings. The water splashes, and the sweat runs. The AC is sweet. The craut and brauts divine. The sparklers spell my name. And everyone has a turn.

And then you can do it all again the next day.

I haven't spent the Fourth with my family for a long time, so I don't know if it's still like this. Maybe it's changed like Christmas has changed. If they don't care about me at Christmas, why would they care about me at the Fourth? I mean, hell, they've added family members whom I've never met since I was away .

(And, yes, this pisses me off. Who the fuck lies for years about whether or not you're dating anyone or whether or not you have friends and then calls to say oh by the way I'm getting married, I thought I should tell you since Mom has already told you, and who, me? Lie? Delete your emails? Never communicate with you? Encourage paranoia in our sisters so that they change plans that they made with you? Who? Your brother?)

Part of what's changed is that Mom and Dad are over 70 now. They don't take the boat out. They sit and watch Fox.

If my family were to read this post, which they won't, but if they were, they would respond with an offensive defense. I don't mean "offensive" like the opposite of "pure" but the opposite of "defense." They would lash out at me, saying that I was narrow-minded and offensive in the opposite of pure sense. They would say they are busy, insinuating that I'm not and that the work I do isn't real compared to raising children and negating yourself for a stupid corporate job in traffic two hours a day. The idea would be that I'm totally unreasonable to expect people to welcome me back home when I was the one who chose to move so far away and for so long. The idea would be that I'm totally unreasonable to make the same kinds of complaints that they make all the fucking time about how difficult it is to alter the traditions in even the tiniest and most inconsequential ways.

And this last year, they added a nice veneer of sexual deviance to their usual dislike. Nice. I'm an adultress, doncha know? My brother has been married three times, my sister twice, and it's not like my other sister's life is as perfect as every pretends. And I'm the bad seed because I expressed the fact that I had a crush on a man who had been divorced?

Whah?

Now I know it's bigger than that. Heck. I use birth control. Oh wait, they do, too.

I have gay friends. I think my gay friends should marry each other if they want. Or not if they don't. I think my cousin is perfectly within her rights to date men thirty years her senior and to declare her desire to never marry and never bear children. I think my gay friends and my women friends should be able to go to clubs without fearing that other men will beat them unconscious and maybe kill them. If they want to rear children, why not?

OK, I've really gotten off topic. But it's all in my head right now for some reason. I remember one Fourth when I was reading Lady Chatterly's Lover on the boat while we were hosting our priest. My mother acted mortified. For a woman who doesn't read anything more than John Grisham and doesn't keep track of high literature, she sure does have a very clear idea of which books were once banned by the Church. And here I was reading in front of a priest! A priest, who, it is my feeling, didn't give a goddamn what I was doing.

This same mother has convinced herself that there was some period of time when I was different from what I am now. That I was once innocent and pure and holy and not friendly with gay rights and not marching in the streets and not saying things like, "It's not a good idea to spread the rumor that Barack Obama isn't Christian" or "I don't like Ann Coulter" or "Barack Obama is not a Socialist."

But the Fourth. Even though all my friends are out of town, I'm gonna walk to the fireworks this year. I can't wait to see all the people. And all the different kinds of people. You see people that you had no idea that they lived in Utopic Small Town, USA. You can make fun of the hokey songs the old folks sing and browse through the silly political buttons. No one is going to tell me that I'm offensive or narrow-minded because I don't like Ann Coulter. No one is going to be shocked that I watched the Daily Show last night. (And by the way, Jon Stewart is progressive, but he's not some raging radical lefty. He worked with Dennis Miller for Christ's sake.) I might buy a beer and settle in for some appropriately cheesy orchestral music and sentimental booms and flashes. The kids will ooh and aah. The teens will sneak off. And the old folks will hold hands.

I will think, "Garrison Keillor isn't so bad," and wonder whether I might try yet again to forge some kind of relationship with my family over our shared sentimentality for holidays and gatherings and peoplehood like this?

I'm Gonna Blame It on the Other Blogs I Read Plus, If I Could Interview Michael Jackson

2009-06-29T22:19:00.000-07:00

I have been remiss in my blogging duties now that I have taken over; yes, I know. No, I don't think this is a reason to invite random third-person voice back to take over. It's just that I've been super freakin busy lately, man. I don't take days off anymore. I take hours off. And the hours I take off I don't want to spend doing more writing. Right now excepted, of course.

I've been busy working my three mini-jobs. Four, actually, for this week only. I've been busy avoiding things like my family, my Jewish Studies job, and the gym. I've been busy parceling out other personal duties like wash the dishes and dust and etc. And I've been busy steadily writing.

I've been writing really awfully bad prose. Really bad. The kind where I use incredibly vague language and hope that I think of something to replace it with later. The kind where I use the same word three times in one sentence. The kind where I just copy in huge chunks of quotes cuz I don't want to take the time to figure out which part of the quote is essential for that nook of the argument and which belongs in some other cranny.

But I have faith that my really bad prose will lead to an argument with a really great shape. If I want to live up to my diss chair's enthusiasm, it damn well better, at any rate. I'm slightly disappointed that I found a note that I had already written that already articulates the shape of the chapter that I'm looking for. Disappointed because I wrote that note about two months ago. What was I waiting for my computer to issue an invitation to write the chapter?

I wish I had better writing endurance.

And running endurance. I hope to be able work the gym back into my schedule. I want to work everything into my schedule! I confess that I truly want to be the woman who can do it all. Luckily, I only want that sometimes and other times I manage quite well to say fuck it, I'm out-y.

I'm a little worried about the small dent I've made in my reading list. Best get back on schedule, I say to myself!

It's hard to do all of this stuff and maintain a sudden and unexpected obsession with watching Michael Jackson on YouTube. One night last winter, I stayed up long into the night watching old Queen concerts. I love Freddie Mercury and always have. But I have never loved MJ. He confused the crap outta me. Like every other person in the 90s, I didn't understand the skin thing. But then I met a kid in high school who swore that he has the same skin disease as Jackson; and I'm here to report that my white friend's skin was very splotchy and very very very much whiter than regular whiteness. But why wasn't MJ splotchy...?

Then there was the Lisa Marie Presley thing. I didn't know the word, but I understood the concept of a beard. And I didn't understand why someone would try to completely undermine a statement he was making about his sexuality like he does in the You Are Not Alone video.

And his music at the time, like Madonna's, like every pop star then except Janet Jackson, seemed way sentimental to me. If I had had money, I'd've bought the Nirvana album that pushed MJ off the top of the charts in the early 90s.

I feel very differently now. I think maybe he was completely out of touch with what the mainstream thinks is normal? I think maybe this doesn't matter at all. In my recent obsession, I've come to think the man is a genius. He is fascinating. His relationship to "the public" is fascinating. His relationship to music and dance and costume and performance history is fascinating. His body is fascinating. His sexuality is fascinating. His fame is fascinating.

I wish I could interview him. I want to know who his favorite fashion designers are. I want to know if he could pick a time in history to live in, what would it be and why? I want to know what he thinks about the American musical, especially West Side Story. Has he ever taken a dance class; and if so, what form? Who is his favorite artist today? I want to ask him if he misses his nose. I want to ask him how he feels about food. I want to ask him whether he has any adult friends and what does he value most about friendship? I want to ask him whether he watches television or reads or listens to music or designs clothes or cooks or grows things or any other kind of artistic thing. I want him to tell me what gender is. I want to know whether he'd like to teach anything and if so, what? Can he describe his relationship with Quincey Jones? Can he talk about late-aesthetic? Or is the thought that an artist changes and evolves and--wait for it--grows up completely foreign to him? What does he think about adulthood? Has he ever wanted to travel to outer space? What was his favorite part of the 80s? In your opinion does art, particularly pop art like yours, have any relationship to politics and/or history and/or the future? Can you describe that relationship, please? Would he ever consider, if it were possible, growing a fro again? I love the idea of wearing costumes to court; what thought was behind that decision? If you had it to do over again, would you make any concessions to normative demands, especially those concerning race and sexuality? Assuming you never sexually molested those kids and assuming that everyone thinks you did, would you, if you had it to over again? Do you have a teddy bear? How do you get to sleep at night? What do you do to welcome the day?

Oh my gosh, now that he's dead, I have so many questions for Michael Jackson! What would you ask if you could?

News Good, Bad, and Neutral

2009-06-22T18:29:00.001-07:00

Good News: I am meeting my dissertation chair tomorrow.
Bad News: I didn't nearly accomplish what I wanted to today to prepare for that meeting. I realize that I put too much on my plate to begin with, but I swear I had a scaled down version in my head. And I didn't cover that either.
Neutral News: I have lots of thoughts that I want to post about the News from Iran. A lot of these thoughts have been expressed by other people, but I still want to share them. Possibly tomorrow?

Who Says Poetry Is Just for Fridays?

2009-06-18T15:44:00.000-07:00

Not me!

The End of the Book

(by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern from The Golden Peacock, 1924; trans. Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, American Yiddish Poetry 429)

So I ask my dear wife
How to finish the affair
Of my little booky--
Says she: Let happiness leave on a train
And wave back with a hanky.
Says I: Hanky-panky--
Says she: Booky-shmooky--
And asks me whether I'd like
With my coffee a cooky.
Says I: Cooky-shmooky--
And tell her to put a case on my pillow
And not to play hooky.
Says she: Hooky-shmooky.
And tells me to repair her shoe
By hook or by crooky.
Says I: Crooky-shmooky.
So she jumps up, and points at my head:
I am bald and spooky.
Says I:
Spooky-crooky-hooky-cooky-hanky-panky-booky-shmooky.
But she cannot say it as fast as I can, as fast as I can:
Spooky-crooky-hooky-cooky-hanky-panky-booky-shmooky.
So we laugh together--
Laugh so nice.
Till she closes my eyes--
Closes my eyes.
And rocks me with a song of rain and light,
Rain and light,
That you sing to little children at night
Children at night.

Her Big Return, and in First Person, Too!

2009-06-18T14:21:00.000-07:00

After what seems like an incredibly long hiatus, I give you....(drums)....(rolling)....

Artemis in first person!

Hello! Sorry to take so long to show up. I am now officially too poor to have anyone else write my blog other than me, even if that someone else is fictional. So sorry to those who liked the nameless one. She's retiring.

After what felt like the month of hellish busy-work and grading and life-work, I am finally returning to myself (and hence the first person). I have a schedule. I have goals, both long term and short. I have a budget. I have three jobs right now. I have a research agenda. I have a lovely, already tenured Dissertation Chair returned from the depths of Socal. I am ready to roll!

I am also in the process of watching my roommate slowly move out. (oh! that reminds me, I need to add--find a new roommate/place to live to my list!) I am in the process of watching my other best friend move her life to Texas. (Hmmm. Dear Craig's List, Wanted: two best friends exactly like the last two. K, thx, bai.)

My schedule is hugely ambitious. But I still feel fairly confident about it. I mean, there seems to only be me to get in my own way if there's a problem. And if all works out like planned, including the awesome on campus interviews and job offers I plan to get by March, I'll be on track to finish my dissertation in the Spring without too much stress or hassle. I've bought myself another year folks, so let's make this happen!

Now I'm off to bask in the sun to finish reading about Yiddish literature in the US; it has three components, doncha know: Hebrew-Aramaic, Slavic, and Germanic...

Dear Ms. Sotomayor

2009-06-16T09:44:00.000-07:00

Dear Ms. Sotomayor,

Thank you for being brave. I don't know if you'll reason the way I'd like you to reason, though I take some comfort in that you don't seem extreme, you are aware that people exist within the law, and you appear to deliberate carefully and explain yourself well.

But you are personally bearing the racism directed against three different races of people. You have been linked to a KKK, you have been orientalized in cartoons, you are called an "alien."

If I were you, I'd be afraid for my life, especially after Dr. Tiller's murder. But you gracefully, with a smile even, continue on.

I'm amazed and grateful.

Blogging the Anger

2009-06-05T00:32:00.000-07:00

Artemis is too angry to sleep right now. What kicked it off?

Well, the foundational issue is that she has a lot of work right now that she needs to do for money but that she terribly resents because it is preventing her from writing things that she wants to have written before the last week of June when her darling diss director returns to Utopic Small Town, USA.

Plus she wants to exercise and work out, but there's no fucking time. Especially since being stressed and angry means she loses sleep.

But then. But then the woman who treated her like a little ten year old girl when she turned in her receipts to her last week sent her an email. This email informed her that the $900 she had thought she had to spend was $500 and that the computer that she bought with this money was not acceptable because it had not been pre-approved by the IT guy.

Had she been told the limit was $900?

Yes.

Had she been told she could buy a computer with the money?

Yes.

Had she been told that the computer purchase had to be approved by the IT guy?

NO!

Is she afraid to check her bank account balance because of this month's rent?

Yes.

Is she afraid that she can't afford rent for the summer months when she won't be paid?

Yes.

Can she afford a $900 computer right now?

NO!

FUCK.

She should have addressed this before the smart receipts person who did not treat her like she was ten had left.

But at that time, her other computer had not decided to flip out and stop working reliably. (A hinge is pressing on the cord from the hard drive to the monitor and so the monitor is on occasion unreadable. At least two repairmen suggested it wasn't worth repairing. Hence the computer purchase. But maybe she'd've pressed harder on the third repairman if she hadn't thought, hey, I fortuitously have $900 coming my way.)

Whatever. Hopefully something can be worked out so that Artemis manages to have RENT MONEY and MONEY FOR FUCKING FOOD.

I can't believe this woman.

And then. And then. After spending much of her fucking time this week researching the descriptions of movies that people teach in her Jewish Studies program, and researching where the movies could be found should anyone wish to use them in their classes; after all that, she's told, "sorry to be so negative, but you aren't doing what I told you to do. If you can't do what I tell you to do, let me know so that I can be sure to dock your pay for June."

More than the receipts woman, who after all in her arrogance could have just fucked up accidentally, THIS PISSES US OFF.

Artemis both did what the program director asked and MORE. And for that, she wishes to dock her pay?

Oh man.

She should really look at her bank account to double check what's going on here. But she's still afraid. She's putting off till tomorrow what absolutely has to be done tomorrow, and she knows that the to-do list, especially the pre-10 AM to-do list is growing out of control fast.

She tried to address the woman's issues, apologizing for mistakes she made, trying to explain perceived discrepancies away. She made new charts. She ignored all the other information she had spent hours and hours collecting. She believes the director might say to this tirade, well, I didn't ask you to collect that information, so I'm not going to pay you for it.

All she can do is be cheerful--there's an event tomorrow--and hope that the additional two hours she put into those charts tonight will satisfy the woman.

But in the meantime, Artemis is angry. Blogging the anger helps, so sorry if you don't enjoy these types of posts.

Artemis is Busy and Poor

2009-06-03T13:04:00.000-07:00

in money, not spirit, of course.

So, Arte, how busy are you? You have to read a book for Women's Studies by Monday and learn Psychology for test prep teaching by Saturday? You have to grade about 30 more papers by Monday? You have to find a place to live? You're looking forward to grading some 50 finals on Tuesday and Wednesday? You have a desire to research and write your dissertation? You have some tasks to do for the Jewish Studies Program by the end of the week? You volunteered to help a professor find out when and where Miles Davis said, "Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself" by the end of next week? You have a social life? And other personal responsibilities?

Holy Cow. And all I do is write your blog. And I don't even do that all that often. But I do do it for free. Which is a good thing considering you are afraid to look at your bank account to see how little money you have. Artemis, get it together!

Oh, you wrote a budget for the summer? Assuming you keep your summer jobs, eh? Assuming no accidents or terrible emergencies. Assuming that all goes according to plan, you maybe will be barely afloat?

How much money do you plan to deposit in August? $240!!!! Will that be enough? Oh, that's why you're too chicken to look at your current balance and pay your current bills.

So have you found a place to live? Ok, a one bedroom for $700, not bad. Maybe you can talk em down to $650? Can you afford that? You think so, ok. But it's not ideal, is it? What are your other options? Live with strangers and pay only about $500 in rent. That doesn't sound so bad. You'd save $2400. But you'd have no strangers and friendly landlords for $700? Is that worth $2400?

That's understandable. I don't think I could decide either. Plus, you have all that work to do! So get to it!

Interesting Story of the Day

2009-05-29T13:04:00.000-07:00

Mathais Rust, a crazy kid, enabled the fall of the USSR when he flew from Germany to Red Square. He wore a motorcycle helmet for protection. After all, the last time a civilian plane flew into Russian airspace, the Soviets shot it down and killed almost 300 people.

Gorbachev used the incident as an excuse to fire all the military people who were unfriendly to his reforms, and the people lost trust in the totalitarian military. I wanna know if Gorbachev ever read the kid's manifesto on peace.

Crazy. h/t

Fight or Flight

2009-05-24T09:35:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Arte was studying with a friend who was hit with sudden anxiety. She's down to her last three days of graduate school, trying to accommodate the last bits of advice that she might get from her committee. Between worrying about finishing on time, worrying about pleasing her advisers, and worrying about the what comes after, her body freaked out on her. That's what I call it, cuz I'm squeamish about these things. But really it's just the second half of the fight or flight response that's hormonally programmed into our bodies. As she rushed home to deal, she bemoaned how childish this anxious response seemed to be.

I guess this made Arte think back to the times when her stomach had freaked out. She remembers some early times quite well: Every year, on the morning of the first day of school, Arte sat on the toilet right until the bus came. She liked school, but the anxiety of so much social interaction was overwhelming. Since then, she's always had trouble with "firsts" and become very much a look before you leap kind of person. Don't blame her; blame her stomach.

Sometimes these episodes make funny stories. The night before graduation, her boyfriend spent the night at her place. The man never ever did anything on time in his life. Her family never ever wasn't early to anything in their lives. (Artemis has made a life-long practice in the middle, always aiming to be exactly on time to things.) Imagine a square slab of a parking lot, where everyone parked facing the edges. Imagine every single edge was taken. Imagine Arte's father. Waiting for an edge to open up. Which it did, once the boyfriend ran out of the apartment and drove away home. No one ever said anything, but Artemis' stomach spoke volumes. She drank PeptoBismol all the way to the ceremony.

Artemis ignored her stomach's warnings at her peril. Warnings turned into extreme pain like she had never felt before or since. Dear Arte has a high tolerance for pain--she managed to walk around with a broken wrist for ten days without slowing down. (Much. She didn't actually use the wrist. She's not superwoman!) Warnings turned into shoutings. Arte had no health insurance, but finally a more experienced woman took her to a clinic, an option which middle-class and sheltered Artemis had no idea existed. Warnings had become gastroenteritis. Did she heed the warnings? She should have. She was under a lot of stress in her relationship with the boyfriend and with her family. She should have walked away. But middle-class, sheltered, and slow-blooming Artemis wasn't completely aware of her options.

But these weren't the moments Artemis was thinking of this morning. She was thinking of a time in New Orleans after an ugly spat with her best friends. The four of them had decided to do Bourboun Street, hurricanes here and dancing there. It was fun, but Arte was a drag. She'd driven the entire seven hours in what seemed like the precursor to an actual hurricane and was bone tired. Her friends had insisted on making her promise not to leave them, so she did her best to keep up. It really wasn't enough, I suppose, and once the friends felt comfortable with the scene, they urged her to split off.

Since this is what Arte had wanted in the first place, she should have graciously accepted the offer and bid them adieu. One of the group didn't drink, so she'd have someone to walk with her. And the other two women were very smart and somewhat experienced. They'd have been fine.

But for whatever reason, tired (and stupid) Artemis decided to stick to the promise she'd made earlier, not to leave them no matter what. Unfortunately, she's not one to back down from a fight. She reasoned that they'd insisted on the promise when they were sober, and she should insist on it now that they were drunk.

You're whispering and consipiring about me behind my back! Was the eventual cry from one of the other women. Artemis was shocked. She'd done no such thing and had no idea why the woman would make what seemed like such a paranoid claim. Then her best friend from childhood took the other woman's side. Artemis was even more shocked.

The best she could figure, the women were freaked out that Artemis was getting along with Ariel. As roommates, she and Ariel had months earlier had a STUPID fight (Arte is still sorry!) about religion or a missing shower curtain or something that probably really had to do with Arte feeling weird about interrupting what seemed to her like private moments on the couch whenever she wanted to fetch a drink of water. (It was a small place. See parking lot example, above.) But for whatever reason (probably because it was about damn time--and also vacations are this extra worldly time that provides just enough escape room to maneuver relationships into new positions), Arte and Ariel were having a grand ol' time together. Could this shift in the relationship have freaked out the other women?

Arte had no idea. Luckily, she gave up her defense of her promise and left the women to their own devices. She went off to their lovely hotel room to sleep it off. The whole thing was surely compounded by her fatigue. But the paranoia and the fear that she had fucked up and was maybe losing her best friends really got to her. She stayed up all night long. Her stomach would not let her sleep. The pain was less than the gastroenteritis but seemed like more than she'd ever had before.

Though they had fun, the rest of the weekend was tense. Despite some plans for a Sunday walkabout, the two ladies went out again. Artemis finally got some sleep, and this time it was the other two who were flagging behind. Artemis was disgracefully annoyed; but she felt that she'd warned and reminded the other two about the early start. In her mind, they'd prioritized their desires over the desires of the group even though the plan had been laid ahead of time.

Now, the question at hand is whether the stomach warnings are childish. And thinking back to this particular episode, Artemis thinks there is so much that she would do differently. She's afraid that she was paternalistic, in true Arte Family fashion. She was inflexible--even though they had eventually come around to her original point of view. She's still willing to take the private into the public, she admits. (The distinction between the two has never seemed all that useful to her, or rather she gets off on the distinction. PDA? There's nothing like being caught by random people, evidently.) But she probably would not have gotten into this shouting match. And she's not so much committed to the logic of a personal argument anymore. She's learning more and more about how to commit to a peaceful outcome above all.

It should be mentioned that Ariel and Artemis are tall-ish and white. The other two women are short-ish and brown. This was not the last time that Artemis faced what felt like paranoia from her friends. A more politically savvy friend once accused Artemis of belittling her and making her feel small. It's true, Artemis did comment on their relative heights: she'd bought new platform sandals and was wearing them out for the first time. She was surprised how much they added to her height!

Because Arte has a false air of confidence, which is really just due to the fact that she can't stand waffling, she can often be in a position of deciding things. Even when she's trying to reassure people, she ends up sounding bossy. One of these women was once throwing up in a bar. She was still in the booth. We got her outside, and she puked in a trash can. Artemis wanted to reassure her that no one cared, and she started saying this stupid shit about how all that matters when you puke is that you have good aim. (Ok, it's not all that stupid. Good aim is really important when it comes to puking.) So Arte starts to "teach" this girl about proper protocols for puking, partly because she's appalled that she threw up on a table, and partly because she wanted to joke the pressure away.

Standing on Bourbon Street, Artemis thought she was so right. She thought she was trying to protect these drunk women from themselves. She thought her relatively sober but fatigued mind was somehow in a better position to make decisions. What the fuck was wrong with her?

From her position now, Artemis just wants to shake her old self. ABORT! AVOID! HAVE FUN! Even if the friend had resorted to paranoia to snatch back whatever sense of autonomy Artemis was willing to let her have, even if the friends had seemed to elect her to this position of authority in the first place, Artemis never should have acted as she did.

The Bourbon Street incident had a profound effect on her life. She repaired her friendship with Ariel and has remained close to her ever since. Despite what Arte had thought was a growing closeness before the trip, her friendship with the paranoid woman was permanently severed. And her relationship with her best friend from high school? Well, they'd been growing apart for a while. It's just that Artemis was too stupid to realize it. And then, under fatigue again and more stress, Artemis made another VERY POOR decision on her friend's birthday. She decided to confront her friend's boyfriend about hitting on her and trying to sleep with her while he was still claiming to be in love with Arte's friend.

Arte no longer believes that "truth" is so important. She's way more flexible now. But she wishes she didn't have to pay such a high price; she hates losing friends.

You would've thought that the flight response would've kicked in over Christmas, but it never did. Maybe broken wrists keep the adrenaline levels elevated? Or has growing up made the stress easier to handle. Considering that her stomach's flight response kicks in even during uncomfortable movies--that one about the Aristocrats? Man, was Arte squirming! She couldn't handle that parent sitting there with his eight year old son--she's not convinced that the respose is all that childish. As she grows older, surely she'll be able to better handle stressful situations, oh please god let it be.

Part of what was so hard about the freaking out stomach was that it was difficult to tell where the problem came from. She gets the same response when she eats too much sugar and/or dairy. Even though Artemis knew fight or flight responses existed, she didn't connect them to stomach freak-outs until her therapist explained it to her in grad school. Often, it just seemed like one more stressful factor, not a response to it. Now that she thinks about it, the flight response may not have kicked in over Christmas because Artemis actually fled the scene and stayed on her own in a hotel for a few days.

With adulthood, then, you know more about interacting with people in a productive way, and you just maybe don't care as much. Hopefully, with less fight in her there'll be less flight? And with adulthood, comes the means, the know-how, and the will to actually run away from bad situations. None of this will help the friend in her last days of dissertating. But once Tuesday comes around, we just know she'll be rocking it out. Even if she has to crash for a bit at first after the big fight.

Trained as a Biochemist, Living as a Literature Researcher

2009-05-22T09:25:00.000-07:00

Arte's parents were disappointed. But she'd worked in a lab; she'd seen the red ink spilled over her paper. But I hate passive voice! she'd cry. She'd spent hours trying to get a god-damned electrophoresis gel to stop leaking (gah!). She remembers pipettes with satisfaction. And she was and continues to be fascinated by the relationship between genetic expression and the bio-structures that emerge from it. She was flattered by the post-docs in the lab. She'd been chosen to work in the chair of the department's lab. She liked the idea of working in a place that everyone approved, in a beautiful building. The access to funding was clear. She was helping to discover how a bacterium's metabolism helped make it possible to live near hydorthermal vents in deep ocean trenches, where temperatures can reach to 572 degrees Fahrenheit. Most bacteria would never survive much beyond 100 degrees. That's pretty cool.

In retrospect, she probably could have continued with such work. And she may not have been that unhappy doing it.

But her strengths, her strongest strengths lie in the more underfunded areas of research. She decided to follow her strengths instead of the funding.

When she first heard the story of Sheri Sanji, she thought, aha! I have clearly made the right decision. With the exception of that West Virginia incident, very few literature professionals have died in the line of duty, right?

But this story isn't about a career choice. As this article makes clear, the real story is about academic labor. It would be easy to say that Sheri should have known better than to use this nasty chemical while wearing flamable clothing. But as industry has painfully learned, safety can be greatly increased by attention to structural concerns in the lab environment.

Artemis has been lucky to attend graduate school with a unionized student body. The English and Sociology departments appear to have the strongest interest in the union, for obvious reasons. English grad students work more than any other students on campus. And Sociology grad students are generally intellectually sympathetic to unions, knowing their history and purpose in ways that the average worker doesn't.

At this school, known more for its scientific research than anything else, the science grads have low rates of participation in the union--even though they benefit with health insurance among other things. In some ways, it seems more difficult to differentiate between the work these students do in the lab from the work they do for learning. The time Arte puts into class prep, teaching, grading, and mentoring, on the other hand, is clearly separate from her research project. She is not writing about Freshman Composition in my dissertation. Of course her teaching is affected by her research, but it still seems easier to separate the two. (There are weaker objections: her practice as a teacher prepares her to be a better professor, should that occasion arise. But between the problem of differentiating between practice and doing and the problem that a professorship turns out to be an imaginary carrot dangled in front of 2/3 of us, I don't find that objection convincing at all.)

Scientists, however, are writing about topics that are directly related to the work they do in the lab for the primary researcher. The training they get to do this work is training that is necessary for them to dissertate. They get lots of funding and intellectual support in such an environment, and past the health insurance that the union has won for them, they evidently don't feel much solidarity with the other grad students on campus.

But when this distinction becomes a matter of life and death, as this article suggests that it has, then perhaps science grad students should rethink where their priorities lie. Academic researchers already get paid less than they would in private industry. There's no reason that their safety should be compromised, too.

OSHA would not have investigated Sanji's death if she had been a student? The safety belongs to the lab not to the person. This is not to say that there's no individual responsibility for safety in a lab. But if you're going to regulate safety, you have to do it on a structural level to generate the best results.

The humanities have a huge labor problem. But at least we don't have to die for our contributions to knowledge. (There might be some hungry stomachs on food stamps, but surely these people aren't starving to death, right?)

How Come I'm So Different from My Parents?

2009-05-20T18:06:00.000-07:00

And why do they keep sending me forwards? Here's the latest:

Besides objecting to the presidential disgracing/slurring of our country, this piece is very timely as we remember our fallen heroes and all those that have and still protect us today.

1. The American Cemetery at Aisne-Marne , France . A total of 2289 of our military dead.

We Apologize.

2. The American Cemetery at Ardennes , Belgium . A total of 5329 of our dead.

We are arrogant.

[A bunch more just like this, all in England and France.]

Apologize to no one. Remind those of our sacrifice and don't confuse arrogance with leadership.

As Americans, let's all look forward - like to the next elections - to find a President who doesn't think we need to be ashamed.

On my way to the airport last Christmas, my brother opined that the main difference between Obama and McCain supporters was age. Now, I think there are many many other differences, and I don't buy this idea that Obama encouraged tons of "young" people to vote. But the difference between middle-aged and the very old? Well, maybe my brother's on to something. Obviously this email was sent between people who are obsessed with WWII. Maybe some of these sites are from WWI, I don't know. But they sure as hell aren't from any other wars fought in the last two and a half centuries, including the war that my father participated in. He's willing to ignore his own experience at the expense of spreading this myth about WWII. That kinda blows my mind.

Course, my mind was already blown when I read that POTUS has disgraced or slurred our country. It's been just over a 100 days. How did I miss this disgrace? A war exists that he thinks never should have started; is that a slur? (Are all wars equally good?) There was that time he gave an iPod to the Queen--was that a disgrace? There was that time his wife gave the Queen a pseudo half hug. Or the time he shook hands with a foreign leader whom he'd met. Or the time he bowed to a foreign leader.

I'm sure it was a combination of the last two, the Spanish indictment, and some sense that this hubbub about torture is ridiculous since "American leadership" means that the United States somehow exists outside of international law, including the treaties it's party to.

Aside from the fact that I disagree with this kind of thinking, what I CAN'T STAND is that people disseminate it through sentimental, factually inaccurate, vague-ass forwards.

I know people are always wishing this, and I'm not asking for the end of rhetoric or wishing we could kick all the poets out of the city, but why can't we disagree about politics on civilized ground? Why can't we talk about what you mean by "American leadership"? Why can't we talk about the usefulness of law and debate about how to wield power in the world? Why can't we talk about the power of images and debate its limits? If you want to talk about WWII, be comparative. Recognize that dying then is different from dying now. Talk about just war and whether it exists. What are you so afraid of, I want to ask my parents, that you constantly feel that it's worth reminding us young'uns that people died in France? Is this really about France? Is this about socialism? What will curtail your freedom more--the lack of a social safety net in the midst of a bad economy, or maybe even complete anarchy since you seem to hate "government" so much, or the universal provision of health care? What's freedom? What's government? What's the relation between the two? What effect does the government have on your life. DO YOU EVEN KNOW?

I know that the last great time government affected your life was when it decided your older brother had to go fight in WWII. Or when your family was able to buy a clothing store because the owner had gone off to fight in the war. It must have been tremendous to hear those victory bells ringing when you were young. And maybe you haven't felt that way since. But I still don't see how that authorizes you to ignore all of these very reasonable, not at all radical, and very basic questions. I don't see how that gives you the right to alienate your daughter, whom you know to be very intelligent and well-informed. I don't see how that gives you the right disseminate misinformation. And, really, do you think sardony will help your noble cause? If you're going to use rhetoric, at least be nimble and good about it.

Work, In Her Own Words

2009-05-14T15:46:00.001-07:00

At first, talking about time seems easy. I remember precisely how and when I learned about time. First, I learned to tell time. I had an owl clock with two green hands that ended with holes so that I could still see the numbers. Hour hand, minute hand, got it. I remember it was fun to push the buttons to see where the time would land. My second lesson with time came soon after my family and I moved to Georgia, when I was eight. I have no idea why, but I think I got in an argument with my parents about how long time lasts. I claimed that fifteen minutes was no time at all—how fast the owl’s hands whirred round when I pushed that button—and I could totally stand still for fifteen minutes straight. I stood in the middle of the hotel room, staring at the Murphy bed. Fifteen minutes, I discovered, is a very long time. Later, when the teacher asked us to give speeches, and she warned us that a minute was a long time to speak, I believed her. Later still, when I first taught a class for two hours, I thought the time was interminable—how could I hold people’s attention for that long? Now, I never have enough time. That’s the third thing I’ve discovered about time; it moves way way way more quickly now that I’m older. Days will go by and I won’t have worked. Days will go by and I won’t have talked to a single soul. Hours will go by and I’ll have written two sentences. Months will go by and I’ll have begun twenty books and finished none. Under the best conditions it will take ten minutes to get to downtown from where I live. But I no longer operate in those conditions. Now, I have a purse that I carry. With indispensable tools I have to collect from their plugs and what not. Now, I try to look more normatively presentable: a swipe of lipstick here, a dash of mascara there. Now, I feel more responsible to put the dishes away, to take out the trash, to feed the kitty. Twenty minutes have gone by, and I haven’t even made it to my car. The red lights are always against you if you’re in a hurry here. Then the parking. Then the walking. Your ten minutes away has turned into a half an hour and even though you live in town, it’s a pain in the ass to do errands on campus. Because time works differently in grad school.

And it’s always changing. The twenty plus hours it takes me to research per week has dwindled from thirty. And will some day dwindle more. My professors work about ten hours per week on their research, while they’re teaching. And that’s after trying to figure out what to count as work time. Do you count the long ass time that you stood in line at the Reserve desk to get the book you wanted? Do you count the time it takes you to return the frame you didn’t choose to use for your GSR? Old answer? No, you don’t count the time it takes you to get to work. New answer? HELL YES.

Do you count the time it takes to blog stupid things that are only tangentially related to your work? Still not sure. How is this related to your work? (Maybe that will clear things up.) I’m writing about the experience of secular time. I guess I thought I’d begin with my personal experiences with time.

And hey, maybe this was work. After all, a second ago, I thought, you only notice your experience of time during moments that are pushed somehow into the foreground. This noticing is a kind of aestheticization of time…

Maybe not really profound, but hey, you know, maybe it’s good enough to start. I’m gonna open up a new document to see where it takes me.

Still Thinking...

2009-05-12T09:23:00.001-07:00

I tried to embed this video but something isn't working right. Click here for an interesting interview with Fr. Alberto Cutie (name is not a joke), star of EWTN and the latest sex "scandal." I suppose it's important that he's not gay or a pedophile and that he's media-ready or savvy. But neither Arte nor I have come to any conclusions about this. But we are on record with our discontent about the Church's attitudes towards gender and sexuality.

Watch CBS Videos Online

Feelings, Low and High

2009-05-06T00:50:00.000-07:00

Artemis hates that feeling she gets when she feels the slightest bit of resistance from professors. Sinking depths of soul follow when a professor suggests she doesn't know her work well enough to recommend her for a job... Maybe completely true and completely justified. Sinking feeling still ensues.

OTOH, when a professor is interested in her work--look forward to hearing about your research when I return, he said recently--well, then her heart rises up and up!

Not cool that Arte's feelings are so tied to these people. But what the heck.

Everyone Says Going to College is the Smart Thing to Do (in a Recession)

2009-05-05T09:58:00.001-07:00

As everyone knows, Arte's problems with her family came to a head when she suggested to her nephew that his idea of dropping out of college was not a good one.

She had many reasons, but mostly she felt that even if he had plans to enter into a blue collar profession--which is hopefully unionized; ack, she still doesn't know and worries about that!--that a college degree could grant him a certain amount of status and bargaining power, now and at the beginning of other choices when/if they come. If you hate college, but you're three semesters away from graduating, it seems to her, it's still worth suffering for a little while to accomplish your goal.

Her family though doesn't agree with her. They think that people who stay in school are hiding from the real world, etc etc etc. They are very upset that she isn't graduating this year. She's explained: I could graduate this year and be poor and have no health insurance. Or I could graduate next year and be poor and hopefully have health insurance.

Is this really difficult to understand?

Anyhow, despite all these misunderstandings, Arte's family are fully capable of getting into their heads that people tend to go to school when they get laid off during recessions.

This makes sense, right? Brush up on your old skills, get new ones, increase that social capital and bargaining power I mentioned earlier. And as a writing teacher, one would think that Artemis would be in high demand.

But. The R1s didn't accept as many students as they usually do. The state schools didn't accept as many students as they usually do. The community colleges? Well, they're not hiring right now. So where are these students--both the usual ones and the supposed extra ones--going? They don't seem to be entering the work force. (It should be said that unemployment numbers don't actually measure the number of unemployed people. I think they measure the number of ex-unemployed people, yes?)

At any rate, no school is going to hire full time to teach these students. So really the recession is less an economic opportunity for Artemis than a chance to further exploit her. Less reason to graduate. Not that nongraduation means she won't be exploited in exactly the same way. Or even that she'll have health insurance.

But these risks are difficult to negotiate and difficult for her family to understand, so why don't they just lay off her already?

But this is ostensibly a post about those people who want to go to school during the recession. Well, you should try to get into a good school--it matters. But you should realize that you'll probably be forced down the ladder. Which is fine. The adjuncts teaching at CCs are great. They just have no time, no money, no office, no autonomy, and little real/material motivation to help you.

But let's say you get into the R1 of your dreams. Even then, you might be screwed. Here's a story.

An up and coming little Program on campus has hired some very bright scholars. Three of these scholars win fellowships to continue their research. These three profs give notice: they won't be able to accept their teaching loads because they've already accepted these fellowships. (People don't give away their money if you aren't going to use it, so don't go thinking well, they should just be teaching anyway. It's confusing, I know.) Normally, the de facto rule is to hire contingent faculty to teach these courses.

Do the students get screwed here? Their classes aren't taught by "real" profs. Maybe yes and Maybe no. My roommate is teaching this quarter and kicking ass.

But now the university can't afford to hire the lecturers. So these classes won't be offered. So the U accepts students who think they're coming to this great school and when they arrive, they'll find that the great school no longer offers its great classes. Cuz surely this is happening in other places across campus.

As a grad student during a time of transition in her department, Artemis got screwed. The seminars offered to today's beginning grad students are way more cutting edge than the ones she was offered. Not that hers were bad; things have just changed now. And today's first year students can take courses in their field, which Arte has never done.

Undergrads can get screwed in the same way. And the Program, which is just a program and not a department, will get screwed because they won't be able to attract students to it. And it might set them back in terms of growth, security, and stability on campus.

So should you go to school? The answer is probably still yes, if you can afford it. But don't take out loans for this kind of shit unless you have a chance to get to know the academic circumstances you're jumping into.

But that sort of knowledge is very hard to come by. Arte "researched" before applying to grad school. But she didn't know what she was looking for. And even someone who does isn't going to know about the fellowships. Here I am telling the story and I'm not telling you who or where or when this is all going to happen. (I'd do it on an individual basis, I think, but not here. Besides none of my readers will care :) )

It still seems as though if you're already in college or grad school, you should stay there. But whether you should run off to college now--tuition's rising and the quality is shrinking. I'm not sure it's the best idea.

Of course, if you're talking to people totally encourage them to take comp courses at the CCs, so they'll hire more adjuncts :)

Artemis pokes her head in to to say

2009-05-04T08:30:00.000-07:00

That it used to drive me crazy when everyone would say, oh, your brother doesn't call you or actively ignores you because he's so depressed. He's such a depressed and lonely and poor man. Artemis tried to tell them he was fooling them, but they wouldn't listen. (Instead, they said things to make make her feel bad, ed.) And look who was secretly dating a woman for the past two years, bitches!

Breaking Up with Family

2009-05-04T00:17:00.000-07:00

It's not something you want to do. It's sometimes something you have to do.

When Artemis discovered her wrist was broken, when she added up the nights in the hotel room, the conversations where her sisters told her why they don't like her (she's narrow minded, offensive, etc.), the pain of getting them to talk to each other and to her about their parents' anniversary party, inevitable rounds of Christmas tears, and all the rest; she decided something needed to change.

No matter how she'd tried, such events as these recurred. So she'd try to stop trying. She only communicated by email. Ooops, turns out they can hurt you over email, too! So she stopped emailing. One of her sisters has found reason to call her twice, and the conversations have been pleasant. Artemis thought she had found a holding pattern.

Not that things were perfect. She misses her father a great deal. And she can't quite seem to stop talking about her family bullshit to people--she muses aloud a great deal as a way to try to talk herself into some sort of way to understand what the fuck these people are thinking when they treat her like shit (cf, broken wrist). She knew she was going to a party this weekend where she'd meet new and probably interesting people--she sure as hell didn't want to open up with Wow, what a great family you have. I no longer talk to my family. I never thought I'd be in this position because I love my family more than myself, but here I am, and I really don't know how to be happy when they hate me and I don't know how to finish my diss when I'm not happy but I'm so glad that our mutual friend finished his 524 page dissertation and published the book version so that we could meet at this party and I could--for some godawful reason--confess my pain.

She was worried that would happen. It didn't but she should have been more worried about subjecting her friends to this crap, cuz Arte found her way into confessing to their sympathetic ears.

So why am I writing about this, even though I promised never to air her confessions on the blog again?

Her mother called her today.

Artemis called her back immediately. And heard a tired, weak, stuffy voice. Her mother called to find out if she is really not graduating this year because if not she wants to go to her brother's wedding.

Artemis, who is not often, was struck dumb.

First off, did her mom think that by writing an email that demanded she would graduate, she would then as a matter of course graduate? How much power does the woman believe she has?

Second, her brother is getting married in six weeks? WTF?

You've heard of Arte's brother before. He of the deleted emails. He of the change everyone's mind about mom and dad's anniversary party without consulting Arte who had put the whole thing together. He who claims no friends even though he had just said he was talking to his friends. He who claims his girlfriend is not his girlfriend.

He has been secretly dating this woman for two years and actively lying about her to Artemis. And now her mother is calling to ask whether Arte can arrange things so that she can go to her son's wedding?

Are there invitations? Who is this woman? Just. Dumb. Struck.

This pleasant news is followed up with some explanation about Artemis in grad school. Are you still a student, her mother asked.

More Dumb Striking.

What do you mean, Artemis wanted to know.

I'm not sure they ever got that question straightened out. But Artemis said some things that were meant to explain why the graduation is not happening now and why that may even be a good thing. She said--and I'm very proud of her for this--and that's why your email upset me so much. Her mom? Well, I was upset, too. I know, says Artemis, and I'm very sorry about your plans.

Once again, her family gets her to apologize for something that's not her fault. Or at least is not blameworthy.

A minute after this conversation, her brother calls. And an extremely awkward convo about the marriage and the dating and the Artemis not knowing ensued. He seems happy. He seems confident that this is a good thing for him and his daughter. So great. We're happy for him. We feel that Arte's pretty much been invited to go now. So that's good. She'll check to see if she can afford it. She probably can't. She's decided to send a nice gift. Unless some kickass kind of ticket shows up. Once again, a sugar daddy would be helpful.

I haven't heard anyone in her family offer to fly her out.

This sucks. Artemis doesn't like this; she wants to be close to her family. She doesn't want a family who can't handle the irony embedded in the word "affair" when she uses it describe a man at work with whom she wants to have ]wet and sloppy intimacies. Who from that moment onward, despite having known her their whole lives, decide that she's not dedicated to family, doesn't respect marriage, and has offensive sexual values. Plus, she apparently identifies with those bra burning feminists--Arte: I don't know if that's how I take feminism to be, exactly; Sister: Well, I grew up in that era, so I know!; Arte: Silence. Backing away slowly.

She just freakin is ready to fit in somewhere. Her feelings are hurt about her brother. But what the heck. He's just not capable of caring. So why should Artemis worry really? And she actually feels somewhat better about her mother. After all, she had a chance to announce that her feelings were hurt.

It'd be nice if someone were to say, you know that time when one of our number broke your wrist? That must've really sucked for you! I'm so sorry!

But that's never going to happen. I'm just thankful that Artemis has some really great friends. I hope she only gets more great friends. I know that her biggest Old Maid-related fear growing up was that she would be lonely, and I'm more than sorry that she has been lonely. But I know she's smart and friendly and caring and amusing and surviving. My hope for her is that she continues to find loyal friends who can reciprocate these values she holds dear. She already has such friends. She's always wondered if she should collect things. Maybe she collects friends who are like family to her.

Alternatively, she could fall in love and get married. But I tell her she should start small.

Test Scores

2009-05-01T15:41:00.001-07:00

She's always been a good standardized test-taker, so Artemis is applying to be a Test Prep Instructor. (Anyone in the Sacramento area interested in hiring a qualified tutor? Artemis would be awesome. She works with adults, teens, and children!)

And so she's taken a gander at her test scores for the first time since never. She never looked at her scores. Well, that's not true. She had looked at her GRE scores, which were pretty good. Based on the percentages, everyone must do well on the math part. But not everyone did as well as she on the logic section. And almost not everyone did as well as she on the verbal section.

But she had never looked at her Subject GRE scores. Some people talk about studying for that test. Artemis remembers looking at the questions and thinking she was going to study but then not doing anything at all. It was hard to concentrate given that her boyfriend had abandoned her in San Diego where she knew no one and had no neighbors--there were literally no people around the house where she lived.

She was scared and freaked out and lonely. And she was pissed because she wanted to "support" her boyfriend, but she didn't want him to promise to move to San Diego with her and then join a cult in North Carolina and then fly back to NC a week after they arrived in San Diego and then promise to come back when he said he would (who needs to promise to keep his promises? Arte why oh why did you not dump him earlier?!) and then a day or two before the Subject GRE inform Artemis that he wasn't coming back because he needed to stay to do one more workshop with the cult and the awesome thing about breaking his promise to her, which she had hoped he would keep because she was lonely and desperate and scared and not sure how she was supposed to be living without knowing any people in a 150 mile radius, is that he was going to learn how to be a good boyfriend in the workshop and learn how to have integrity.

Maybe, Artemis suggested, instead of learning, he could just be a good boyfriend who has integrity by keeping his promise to return to the place to whence he supposedly moved.

(Later there were intense discussions on winding dark mountain roads about the definition of "moving" and how since he rode across country with her, he had kept his promise to move there. Artemis took a slightly different view: in her mind "moving" somewhere means that you are going to live in that place to which you've moved. Not drive there and then fly back to your mommy's house to live.)

Dear ex-boyfriend. Wanna know a secret? It's impossible to learn how to have integrity if you have to lose your integrity in the process of doing so.

At any rate, this was Artemis' first big love. First big relationship. And the days before she took the GRE Subject exam were the days of her first big heartbreak. They didn't break up just then--oh, they should have!--but her heart was broken. She didn't sleep or eat well. She barely made it to the test. And during the test she ACTUALLY fell asleep. She has fallen asleep in exams before, but usually only after she'd finished a section long before it was time to move on to the next thing.

Evidently, she did well enough to get into grad school. But she didn't do as well as she'd done on every other test she'd taken in her life. And she's always wondered whether she would have done better if she hadn't been out of her mind with worry and grief and heartbreak.

So the first thing she's going to tell her students when she gets this gig: don't break up with anyone the week before the exams.

More Artemian Sleeplessness

2009-04-30T05:52:00.000-07:00

Well, she's done it again. I wish I could say that Artemis was doing something really cool--dancing all night? Wild sex?--on these sleepless nights, but she's not. Just now she's been obsessively checking craigslist for jobs. Should she apply for a "real" job that will help her pay rent, food, and loans? But not much time for writing/research? How will she hide the fact that she's "overqualified" for the jobs that require little experience and little expectations? How will she hide the fact that she's going on the academic job market next year and probably the year after at least, if not the year after?

She could try to pile together a bunch of part time gigs, which sounds like it might be more time/effort than it's worth. But could allow the requisite flexibility to finish the diss. As long as she can keep from being overwhelmed and freaked out about making rent from month to month.

And without a job, how will she find a place to live? Hmm. Such problems she has! Could this be why she's not sleeping? When her roommate is stressed out, she loses weight. Artemis has been wondering why she gains weight under stress. Not fair! But hard to go to the gym when you haven't slept, I suppose.

At least insomnia leads not to ill-formed endless diatribe about how she doesn't understand what's wrong with having a tenure system.

Thinking Critically about the University on No Sleep

2009-04-28T07:44:00.000-07:00

Update: Such musings ought always to be accompanied with this link to How the University Works

Why did Artemis not sleep last night? It might have had something to do with the four-ish hour nap followed by coffee last night. I still think she must have dozed off at some point, but she's not so sure. What oh what glorious haze will today bring?

Well, we're kicking it off right by reading the NYT (sans coffee, oddly enough. Arte, DRINK COFFEE IN THE MORNING, will you?)

And we've finally made it to the latest How to Fix the University System op-ed that's been making the Facebook rounds the past couple of days. It's the most emailed article, after being out for a few days, which probably says something about the NYT readership.

Artemis has two vague reactions, which I thought worth sharing. 1) This is a conversation that needs to continue (and seems to be continuing, if this year's MLA is any indication). And 2) The conversation--at least in the form that it appears in the public sphere outside of academia (has anyone studied how academia participates in the public sphere? The consternation at Edge of the American West over Amity Schlaes--why don't these journalists just listen to academics, they shout over and over--is evidence of what might be a deep decline in academic authority. But is it really a decline? Was it ever that great? And whose academic authority is declining? Just humanities? Humanities and social scientists? (ah, Kassandra Krugman) those other kinds of scientists, too?)--is not yet rigorously defined to do any good.

We have not yet heard a clear explanation for why the tenure system is supposed to be responsible for the exploitation of graduate student labor. Any ideas? Maybe the problem isn't that I have to wait for people to retire or die until I'm employed in the profession for which I've been trained. If I have to compete with those people for employment, will more jobs open up? Will there be less of a need for exploited labor? In the article's imagination, there could still be those with seven year contracts and then those with one year or one quarter or whatever contracts. Besides, if bank executives need such bonuses and pay-incentives in order to do their work well, why wouldn't the academics, too? In this hypothetical, where is that extra money going to come from? Without tenure, is it suggested that suddenly full professors will do all the work that the other people have been doing all this time? This thinking falsely suggests that tenured professors sit on their asses doing nothing (some may and some may not--but the fact that this is assumed suggests some fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of the work of the academic professional).

The article's point about the low degree of public funding seems well-directed. Except, don't private universities have the same problems? Don't they also have an exploited pool of labor? Tenure does cut across the public/private divide; but that cutting doesn't seem a strong enough explanation.

The corporate structure of university funding, which privileges administrative over faculty governance, and the production of scientific over humanities knowledge, might be a better culprit. But laying blame in that direction doesn't appear to provide an easy solution like "get rid of tenure," so it's not that attractive of an option in these tense times.

I wonder if, as one of the comments does, we do more to link university and college issues to k-12 education policies, will we make more headway? K-12, after all, provides much of the raw material with which the university labors.

Let's assume that the point of universities is to produce knowledge, workers, and citizens. This is a model where the customer is not--as some assume--the undergraduate student; but the employer, the state, the public sphere, the professor, and the grad student. (I'm not sure that lecturers count; their labor is contingent in this way as well, perhaps.)

One lesson from this model: when you say, but I know I'm the student-customer, my parents and I paid a shit-load of money/fees, whatever, to get in here; think, I'm getting screwed! I'm paying to be a product! This production of me should be free! The consumer of me, the person who benefits from me should be paying for this.

Now, presumably, the product-students will benefit from their production with higher than otherwise salaries and cultural capital, so maybe we can keep tricking them into paying for their own production, yes? Luckily for the system, these benefits accrue over the long term (minus the original capital lay-out, the interest on the student loans, and any bad-breaks in the meantime), so it doesn't hurt too much to give back a little, right?

Persuading the broke-ass states to ante up their investment in the production of workers, knowledge, and citizens--especially since they're getting such a huge return in the long and short runs--sounds like a great idea! Except they're broke-ass.

What about the employers? What's that you say? That's the kind of thinking that leads to the corporate model that encourages the exploitation of grad students and lecturers and diminishes the humanities and threatens tenure? Well, how do we get around this kind of thinking? Unionization, that's always been the ticket to fighting corporate labor exploitation. We're trying, but it's a hard slog. For some reason, many universities are fighting organization. And I'm not sure how unionization is really helping contingent labor, in any serious kind of way. The article suggests greater regulation. For some reason, the regulation is supposed to be directed at faculty-governance, but the reason for this is unclear. Shouldn't we be regulating the structures of corporate governance? Regulation might be a reasonable idea (what would we be regulating? I don't know--no sleep, remember!), but it needs to be directed at the right places so that the friction works against the sources of exploitation, not vehicles like tenure.

Maybe solving the problem of student-athlete exploitation will provide a viable model. Arte, for one, is sure there would more incentive to help star athletes than to help the grad students who teach them.

The article is right to frame this issue as a matter for all educated people and all people who wish to be educated. It's not just an in-house problem for academics. You want it to be free-market? Then let's align the incentives so that we can produce more knowledge, more workers, and more citizens.

I don't know how the hell you get the public sphere to pay. It's not like it has a checking account. The state has double the reason to step in, I suppose.

This line of thinking suggests that professors and grad students ought to pay a price for their consumption, yes? Should we think of them as a special class? They double as workers and consumers. Do they not cancel each other out, ideally? Is anyone suggesting they shouldn't pay? The should pay their professional dues, right? They should work up a (meritocratic, hahahaha) ladder. Should they be required to labor for less than a living wage? At the expense of knowledge production? At the expense of their being able to consume the same product they ought to be producing? Look at the math in the comments: CSU pays $4000 per semester per course. Three month semesters. That's just over $1000 per month. You need 4-5 courses to live. Just to live. Where's the time and money required to do research? (And where's the time you need to apply for your seven year program? For christ-sake you need graduate students just to be able to apply for the work--it's not like the humanities is structured like a lab with a PI who writes grant apps all day while the others research and teach.) What about your professional responsibilities?

If we want the people, the state, to pay for higher education, perhaps we need to work harder to educate people about the form, if not the content, of our professions. Is the problem with specialization? Many people, like her mother, may think that Artemis spends her days only thinking about one special arcane thing like medieval citation (OMG, questions about medieval citation are important--Artemis has had them and she's nothing like a medievalist and she can so totally see how it could impact her work on contemporary literature and epistemologies of religion and secularism. How does a professor pretend otherwise?) with no connection to the "outside" or "real" world. What if, without getting into the conceptual, empirical, and methodological details of medieval citation, we could teach people to understand how academic professionalization--including the search, the research, the study, and the dissemination of knowledge in order to produce knowledge, workers, and citizens--benefits their state, the public sphere on which they depend, their employers, and by extension, their employment?

Is this a problem of rhetoric and not structure? Is that why we ran back into the corporate money-bags back there a bit? Would rhetoric--where's Don Draper?--and regulation be enough? Are we way too fucking idealistic? To be honest, such idealism has totally failed with Artemis and her family. She's no Don Draper and she's no Peggy Olsen, and no amount of supposed family love or smarts on her part was enough to prevent her mother from advising her to stop pampering herself and hiding behind her books.

Even if idealism and rhetoric aren't enough, surely it will help to persuade the public that being part of an exploitative labor system isn't pampering. It's not avoiding the real world; it's integral to and very much a part of it. I don't agree that relying on empirical sciences and problem-orientations or policy issues would be a good solution to convincing people that academia is part of and integral to the real world. It's just the simplest way. Not the best. It would be like succumbing to the symptoms of a failing system, rather than diagnosing the disease. There's a paradox here: the tenure system explicitly works to separate part of the faculty's work from the state and the public sphere, heretofore known collectively as the "real world." But you know, when we regulate banks, generally, we continue to think of them as part of the real world. In fact, it strikes Artemis that a failure to regulate banks recently created an environment of belief that allowed the operators of the banks to act as though they didn't live in the real world and were not accountable to it. Huh. Let's just think of tenure as regulating the production of knowledge, workers, and citizens. Thou state, thou corporation shalt not control the kind of knowledge, workers, and citizens that I produce. My discipline, my professionalism, will control that.

Arte's most palpable reaction to the article is much simpler: I am so glad that guy is not my professor!

2009-04-24T18:22:00.000-07:00

Sleepy Artemis Shouldn't Be in Public

2009-04-19T12:36:00.000-07:00

1. Stumble out of bed.
2. Pull on clothes. Need a bra? Nah. Too early to look in mirror. No deoderant, no toothbrushing, no hairbrushing, no facewashing.
3. Ready to go outdoors!
4. Drive down town. Will not speed up to please the tailgater.
5. Coffee in hand. Check.
6. Bagel ordered. Check.
7. Is it slow in here or is it just me?
8. Bagel done. Stuffed in bag. (Artemis likes to pretend she hasn't actually ordered a bagel when she goes out on the street. Dumb, I know.)
9. Two people in front of her at the register. One fits in with Arte's early morning fuzzy brain expectations. She's paying. Another is standing there with an empty coffee cup. Doing nothing. Taking up space.
10. Payee leaves. Empty Cup Dude stands there.
11. Artemis, she of the fuzzy brain, stands there.
12. An order is up. Is it yours ECD asks. No. Artemis steps up to pay for her order. Pulls out her card, smiles at the bagel woman. All is going as per usual.
13. What are you doing? A voice in alarm says.
14. Artemis continues to pay, as per normal behavior when one orders and receives food.
15. Are you cutting in line? It's ECD, not content with hogging the counter space for no discernible reason. He owns counter and line now, policing according to his will.
16. Fuzzy brain feels slow anger burn. Brow furrowed. What the hell kind of question is this? Short, firm "no" ought to do the trick.
17. What are you doing? He demands.
18. "I'm paying."
19. Cashier gets card and large tip to pay for STUPID UNDERGRADS.
20. She turns to get out as fast as possible. "Excuse me" a boy shifts left. a girl, unable to bear her own weight by herself, leaning as she is against her boyfriend, fails to move more than a centimeter from her position directly in front of the door.
21. Artemis trips, and blindly apologizes to the STUPID GIRL.

Angry breakfast doesn't taste as good, she reports.

WTF, Empty Cup Dude?!! Since when do you ask dirty, crazy-haired, bra-less women, ten years your senior, whether they are cutting in line? Forget that she was standing behind you for five minutes while you hogged the counter space for NO REASON. Ought Artemis have pulled out her bagel from its spot in her bag to id herself as worthy of paying for her food next even if her food is not on a tray in front of him before she proceeded to pay? GAH.

In all fairness, it should be disclosed that Artemis once got frustrated with a young man who cut in front of her at rally headed by Bill Clinton. But he was six inches taller than she, so when he got in front of her, he really affected her experience of the speech. It's not like he improved that much by getting one foot closer to the stage that was thirty feet away. She was justified. And maybe this young man felt justified, too, ON BEHALF OF A STRANGER. He may have felt that way, but we submit that he wasn't and wish that karma acts quickly in response.

And now we retreat to a nap. Possibly to wake up refreshed later and mortified about this complaining. But for now we don't care!

Artemis Needs to Write Her Dissertation

2009-04-10T14:26:00.000-07:00

And stop telling me to blog things. But she couldn't resist this post from Dayo Olopade via Slate.

I am pasting below part of her quote from Esquire:

...this month’s “How to Be a Man” feature was so disappointing. From the cover story:
A man carries cash. A man looks out for those around him—woman, friend, stranger. A man can cook eggs. A man can always find something good to watch on television. A man makes things—a rock wall, a table, the tuition money. Or he rebuilds—engines, watches, fortunes. He passes along expertise, one man to the next. Know-how survives him. This is immortality. A man can speak to dogs. A man fantasizes that kung fu lives deep inside him somewhere. A man knows how to sneak a look at cleavage and doesn't care if he gets busted once in a while. A man is good at his job. Not his work, not his avocation, not his hobby. Not his career. His job. It doesn't matter what his job is, because if a man doesn't like his job, he gets a new one…

I highlighted a sentence that especially stuck out to Artemis. It reminded her of a recent conversation she had with a colleague about The Road. He wondered whether the book weren't more critical than she gives it credit for. (She's not happy with the reception, esp. Hear Oprah--men are caregivers, too! OMG.) Isn't it critical of all that he asked? Artemis briefly but doubtfully puzzled that over--how critical is the novel of its own celebration of masculinity and its systematic annihilation of femininity?

Not very, she thought.

But. This ridiculous paean to a certain out-dated form of masculinity reminded her of this conversation. The Road clearly illustrates a man whose vague know-how is passed on to his son as a tool-kit for survival in the worst possible of all conditions.

But the man's know-how is vague, poorly transmitted, and a faulty kit anyhow--he (SPOILER) dies at the end. And, as my colleague pointed out, even though the kid seems safe and maybe even redeemed at the end, he too could easily die in such a world. The book is not at pains to reassure us about this.

I'm still suspicious of the book. It seems to me that the manly know-how still stands as a standard that our late modern world has corroded from the man and left him ill-prepared to withstand the new world. The novel represents the son born into the postapocalypse as better equipped to survive a world bereft of luxuries he never knew. His father is haunted by dreams. And I can't forget the spectral images of the suicidal mother. She's one of the lost luxuries, evidently.

All of which reminds me of another blog post from the Edge, which presents three images of breasts in The Great Gatsby. The first image describes Jordan Blake as a boy (very Brett Ashley, I suppose):

a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet.

The second image presents the overly feminine Myrtle Wilson after her death:

they saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a flap and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath. The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.

Her breast, her open mouth, her vitality have been destroyed. The car has ripped the femininty right off of her body. And the third, most famous image is a day dream of a possible, prehistorical America, an:

old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes–a fresh, green breast of the new world.

The island is circumscribed, aesthetic, pretty, young, vital, and feminine.

I don't have much time to go into now, but the masculine women, the masculated (?) women in the novel contrast pretty sharply with the feminine ideal dream of an island that never existed actually as an island. Or if the Dutch thought it was an island, surely they disabused themselves of the mistake rather quickly? It might seem the novel longs for a return to that pure femininity, but it's not like it likes Myrtle, as feminine as she was once. Daisy seems feminine, but there's money in her voice. Nothing fresh and green, really. The novel end saying that man was

face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And this sounds like something, a redemptive sort of nostalgia on the part of the narrator, at least. But if the image never existed and it

compelled [him] into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired,

then it doesn't seem as though some sort of return to a heterosexual ideal is being called for here. Instead, we have something like what Esquire and The Road present, something anti-aesthetic, a masculinity shorn of its breasts that mentions the dream every now and again, but somehow also thinks that the world is just fine without it. After all, Nick Carroway "enjoyed looking at" the Jordan-boy.

Here's the rest of Dayo's quote from Esquire:

A man loves the human body, the revelation of nakedness. He loves the sight of the pale breast, the physics of the human skeleton, the alternating current of the flesh. He is thrilled by the snatch, by the wrist, the sight of a bare shoulder. He likes the crease of a bent knee. When his woman bends to pick up her underwear, he feels that thrum that only a man can feel.

A man doesn't point out that he did the dishes.

Who knew that looking at woman-parts is as much a duty as doing the dishes? And Dayo's point about the "pale"ness is right on. Who is this guy?

My Own Personal Obamania

2009-04-10T11:43:00.000-07:00

It continues with Artemis and her personal Obamania. These people can do wrong, mind, but they are so awesome in so many ways.

Here they sit at a seder with friends and family. The picture is striking in a number of ways. The first thing Arte noticed was the decor. This is the type of old fashioned room--yellow paint, romantic portrait of no doubt famous woman, formal table--that Artemis has frequently visited throughout her life in dreams and vacations to famous old American mansions like the Vanderbilt house and the White House. These rooms are always empty of people, and Artemis always tries to imagine what it was like to live in them, to sit and eat and chat and let time pass and mess chance in.

And here is that sort of room being lived in! The President is dressed in suit and tie, but nobody is too too formal. They seem to be having fun! (They tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat.) Sasha has braids! Michelle's hair is just as in the garden. The kids are sitting at the table with the adults. One person needed a pillow for her back. Someone has set her briefcase and purse behind her chair.

Artemis particularly noticed that last detail because she is always wondering what to do with her purse and coat and things. For the longest time, she just didn't carry a purse because she didn't want to be bothered to keep track of it. Once a masseuse warned her that it was bad luck to leave her bag on the ground, but she always is shoving it as far out of sight as possible under a chair and whatnot anyway. She hates making noise and being in people's way, but she equally likes being prepared with makeup or money or whatever. It's a real problem. She needs a bigger bag for conferences to put her shoes in. And here's a real dinner where someone else is making do with her accoutrements even though the President of the United States sits fifteen feet away! What if he got up and tripped over it?!

At any rate, it's cool to see these pics of casual Obamas acting like a friendly extended family, with a wide group of friends, very hospitable, using the rooms made for use.

It does seem weird though--is this just my imagination?--that all the Jews are on one side of the table.

And how is this the first-ever seder celebrated in the White House?