Prednisone Nation

God Hates Fags: Northern Ireland Edition

2005-11-16T22:34:00.000-08:00

Maurice Mills, a member of the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party and a local politician in the town of Ballymena, thinks that Hurricane Katrina was punishment for letting gay people have a party. I guess it's no longer politically correct to say that New Orleans was punished for being full of Catholics.

2005-11-16T21:33:00.000-08:00

So I just had a pretty nasty conversation with the treasurer of my building, who left me a message on my answering machine informing me that I would be charged a $50 late fee for getting the rent in a day late. The good news is that I'm not being charged the fee. The bad news is that I was really rude, and I think the era of good feelings in my building may be over.

Another Public Service Announcement

2005-11-15T18:58:00.000-08:00

It turns out that Lance Berkman is not Jewish. He is, in fact, certifiably Christian. Sadly, or maybe not sadly, fans of Jewish Astros will have to make do with Brad Ausmus.

Something like half my google hits are either people searching for "Kate Moss anorexic" or "Lance Berkman Jewish," so I thought I should clear that up.

No word yet on whether Kate Moss is anorexic. I will keep you posted as information becomes available.

Michelle Malking: Ableist Jerk

2005-11-06T11:21:00.000-08:00

So Michelle Malkin thinks it's "in poor taste" for reporters to talk about Charles Krauthammer "doing a touchdown dance" in glee at the Alito nomination, since Krauthammer uses a wheelchair.

You know what's insensitive? Implying that disabled people can't play sports. You'd think that the buzz surrounding Murderball would have alerted Malkin to the existence of wheelchair sports. Perhaps Malkin should contact the Universal Wheelchair Football Association and ask them if wheelchair football players have ever been known to perform touchdown dances.

I bet the answer is yes.

2005-11-04T17:36:00.000-08:00

I'm in the market for a new cane.

Will this one make it look like I'm trying too hard?

I'm really fond of the Cane Lady, who sells hand-painted canes.

She does flowery ones, but she also has abstract ones and ones that are painted to look like cigars. And she does custom orders. Anyone have any brilliant ideas for something I could get painted on a cane?

Here's what I need from a cane. First of all, I need it to subtley but clearly make the point that, although I am using a cane, I am not only achingly hip and infinitely sexy, but also fun, witty, and intelligent. It needs to so distract people with its fabulousness that they will forget to ask me why I need a cane. Extra bonus points if it scares off potential muggers. Also, it needs to go with any outfit, and I need to be able to take it to work. I would also like to be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and solve the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle in a single sitting, but perhaps that's too much to ask of a cane.

2005-10-30T07:11:00.000-08:00

So would each of the three Americans who read this blog take a minute to call your representatives and ask them not to fund Bush's stupid war by screwing over sick people? Be sure to specify that you oppose cutting Medicaid, as well as Medicare funds. Elderly people have political clout, so it's likely that Congress won't touch the program that provides medical care for old folks. Poor people do not have political clout, so Medicaid is extremely vulnerable.

In other news, I need to get a humidifier, because the heat has kicked on and my entire body is in revolt, and I really, really want to get this one. Does it say something really bad about me that I'm drawn to appliances that are designed for nurseries?

Yes, actually, I did say my name was Rambling Rose

2005-10-27T14:16:00.000-07:00

I'm in a random, rambling mood today.

I ate lunch in the student cafeteria today, and someone had left behind today’s Wall Street Journal. I should know better than to read the editorial page of the WSJ, but there it was, and I was bored, so I read a lovely editorial about Wal-mart. Apparently, the editors of the Journal are distressed because, as part of a blatant bid for better public relations, the head of Walmart has called on Congress to raise the minimum wage. The editorial claimed that the minimum wage is bad for workers and that Wal-mart is a monumental boon for poor people, since it offers them wonderful products at cheap prices and since it provides employment for the little people. Folks who oppose Wal-mart, according to the WSJ, really just hate the idea of big business, because there is nothing about Wal-mart’s business practices that can rightly be criticized. Wal-mart should stop worrying about P.R. and concentrate on providing the same excellent service that they always have.

I would link to the editorial, but the Journal hides its content behind a paid subscription, to prevent the mere hoi polloi from getting our hands on it and laughing in their faces.

What’s so distressing about the WSJ Wal-mart editorial is that it comes the day after the New York Times published a story about Walmart’s plans to drive down the costs of benefits by discriminating against sick people. The Times got their hands on a lovely memo that includes a lot of sneaky suggestions for lowering Wal-mart’s health insurance costs, which have gone up on account of everyone’s health insurance costs sky-rocketing. Some of the suggestions are familiar to anyone who has been paying attention: they’ll hire more part-timers, who aren’t eligible for benefits, for instance. But one suggestion is to keep “unhealthy” people from applying for jobs by making sure that every job requires manual labor. An expensive cripple might be able to staff a cash register, but he or she certainly couldn’t get on a ladder to stock shelves. The plan is that Wal-mart will be justified in not hiring sick or disabled people who can’t do jobs that have been designed to be undoable by sick or disabled people.

I’m sure the WSJ just thinks that’s a super-smart business practice.

In other news, I am such a super stereotypical Jew that I not only wondered if thuggish-looking Astros pinch hitter Lance Berkman was Jewish; I also googled him to find out. It turns out that not only is Berkman Jewish, but Brad Ausmus is also an M.O.T., making the Astros perhaps the most Jewish team in baseball. However, I am not a stereotypical enough Jew for that to make a dent in my hatred for them.

Speaking of things Jewish, Salon informs me that the Pope has thrown a party to celebrate the 40th anniversary of it not being cool for Catholics to hate Jews anymore. Yay, I guess. But the article contained this little tid-bit:

He said that in the future, he hoped that theological dialogue as well as everyday contacts between Christians and Jews would offer a "shared witness" to the promotion of human dignity, the sanctity of life, and the need to build a world of justice and peace.

I’m curious about whether the Vatican’s idea of dialogue includes acknowledging that Jews do not believe that fetuses fall in the category “human life.” This is a position on which Judaism is completely clear, and on which the most orthodox and most theologically-radical Jews agree. I suppose I think this is some kind of litmus test about whether they really want equal dialogue or whether this is just about the Vatican being a little sorry for 2000 years of anti-Jewish abuse, and Jews being deeply, deeply grateful that they’re not telling people we drink the blood of Christian babies anymore. I’m not exactly holding my breathe for the Vatican to recognize that there might be any validity to Jewish moral teachings. It’s always seemed to me that they want dialogue strictly on their terms.

Public Service Announcement

2005-10-26T04:28:00.000-07:00

Apparently, it's normal for people with dry eyes to feel worst in the morning. Your eyes don't produce as many tears when you sleep, so when you wake up, they feel scratchy and painful. This is particularly a problem if you wake up an hour before your alarm is supposed to go off, and you're too tired to get out of bed and get your eye drops. This morning, this happened to me, and in an attempt to fully wake up and rouse myself to find the stupid drops, I turned on NPR. The first story I heard was an interview with a woman whose son recently died in Iraq. And then I was crying, and I didn't need my eye drops anymore. So if you have dry morning eyes, I recommend listening to the news. It's much cheaper than eye drops.

Maybe that's a possible new GOP slogan: "The Bush Administration: an effective force for ocular lubrication."

In other news, is it just me, or are Houston baseball fans particularly obnoxious? Maybe it's normal, because I don't usually watch baseball games from the very begining, but I was pretty horrified that they booed the White Sox players as they were being introduced. They booed completely fair calls, as if it were the ump's fault that their pitcher threw a ball rather than a strike. They booed good plays by the White Sox, not that there were too many of those last night. I may just be profoundly prejudiced against Texas, as well as against Barbara Bush, who was awfully conspicuous there in the stands, but they seemed to me to display especially crappy sportsmanship. Call me idealistic, but I think you should want your team to win because they play well, not because the other team plays badly or the umpire makes bad calls in your favor.

Probably any other fans, would be just as bad if their team were down 2 to 0, so maybe it is just that I have issues with Texas and Barbara fucking Bush.

I won't be able to watch the game tonight, which is a shame, because I really enjoy big sporting events. I think it's an extension of the same principal that makes me love Miss America and the Oscars. I like the kind of T.V. that you watch with friends and beer and pizza. I like events in which you can get invested but that have no real-world implications. It's like election night, but without all the angst about whether the world is going to end if the wrong person gets elected.

All About My Eyes

2005-10-23T14:53:00.000-07:00

On Friday, I had an appointment with the rheumatologist. I was nervous about this, because the old rheumatology fellow, whom I liked a lot, finished up her fellowship, and I was due to get a new primary rheumatologist. Luckily, the new rheumatology fellow seems to be as cool as the old one. Both of them talk to me like I'm a human being, explain what they think is going on and what they can't figure out, do not seem offended when I ask questions or express preferences about my treatment, and generally act like they respect my intelligence and autonomy. This is nice and sadly not all that common. The rheumatology attending is fine, too, so I actually have no complaints on the rheumatology front.

So anyway, the new rheumatologist seems unusually interested in my eyes. I have actually been complaining about my eyes pretty consistently for about a year, but this is the first time anyone paid any attention. Last time I went to the ophthamologist, she mentioned that my eyes were dry and told me to get eye drops, but she seemed unconvinced when I suggested that this could be related to my autoimmune weirdness. The problem, I think, is that she still refuses to believe that what's wrong with me really is autoimmune, even though if I had the kind of brain cancer that causes my symptoms, I would almost certainly be dead by now. But since she still thinks I have brain cancer or syphilis, my dry eyes were not interesting to her. On top of the dry eyes, I've also noticed that I can't read websites or magazine articles that don't have a lot of contrast between the background and font colors and that I'm having trouble focusing or reading small print. I've had a couple of weird instances where my eyes have randomly swollen up. And also, my eye has been doing something weird that I thought of as twitching. Nobody is interested in twitching, because that's just a sign of eye strain, which is a pretty normal symptom of being in grad school. But when the rheumatologist looked at my eyes, they did the twitching thing, and she told me that it wasn't twitching at all, but rather some other kind of eye movement that is cause for concern. (I really should have written down the medical term. I may have to call her and ask before I go to the eye doctor.) So I'm supposed to go back to the eye doctor and tell her that I need to have my tear ducts tested to see if I could have Sjogren's Syndrome, which is when your immune system attacks your moisture-producing glands. This would explain my various eye symptoms, as well as my ongoing stomach problems.

So here's how they test your tear ducts. They stick a piece of paper in your eye, and it's really uncomfortable. This makes you cry. After five minutes, they measure how many tears you produce and see if you're crying as much as is normal for someone who has a piece of paper stuck in her eye.

They honestly could not come up with anything more high tech than that.

They're also going to do another test where they put red dye in my eyes and run a special light over them to check for scratches on my cornea. I don't think I'm going to get an emergency appointment to do this, which is a shame, because it would be pretty awesome to dye my eyes red for Halloween. I've already got a witch costume planned out, and red eyes would make it much, much cooler.

Terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day

2005-10-18T21:48:00.000-07:00

I've had a day that was replete with suckitude. It was so bad, in fact, that I am too exhausted by its grimness to adequately explicate all the drama. Suffice it to say that the key source of badness was that my advisor called me at 3:15 this afternoon to say that she needed someone to present a paper at a workshop on Thursday and that she thought I should produce a chapter of my dissertation, which I have researched but not yet started to write, by 5 PM tomorrow. She thought that if I stayed up all night and called in sick to work tomorrow morning, I could certainly get it done on time.

I am not, in fact, staying up all night in a crazed attempt to write a chapter of my dissertation in 24 hours. It took a lot of weasling to get out of it, and I have now confirmed that stress makes my vertigo much, much worse. But I can go to sleep now, which is nice.

Would someone like to lend me a sane advisor? Please?

It turns out that every aspect of my being can be attributed to my wonky immune system...

2005-10-04T18:34:00.000-07:00

According to this story from The Economist, researchers now suspect that anorexia may be an autoimmune disorder. Seriously. There's a possibility that bulimia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and schizophrenia may have autoimmune components, as well.

How weird is that? Next thing you know, they'll discover that procrastination, PMS, and not liking raw tomatoes are all caused by overactive immune systems, because clearly my entire personality is a result of my being allergic to my own body.

Edited to add: in further what-the-fuck! news on the autoimmunity/ anorexia link, doctors at a children's hospital in Nebraska have identified a small subset of anorexic children in whom anorexia seems to be an autoimmune disease. The distiguishing feature is that their eating disorder occurs suddenly, soon after they have an infection or flu-type thing. And that's exactly what happened to me. I went to bed with a fever and a cough and came out with full-blown anorexia.

Freaky.

2005-09-27T20:54:00.000-07:00

Hello. This is me, chiming in for my weekly check-in so that nobody will think I have died. Here's what's going on in my life.

1. So you know how I can't drive because I have vertigo? Well it turns out that while I have not been driving or paying much attention to the car, someone smashed the tiny window behind the back passanger-seat window, let him or herself into the car, and has been sleeping there. That's right: my car has become a de facto homeless shelter. I realized this yesterday when I looked at the car and saw that the window was smashed and the passanger-side seat pushed all the way back to make a nice little bed. Today I got my act together and got the window fixed. I actually feel kind of bad about displacing the creep who's been sleeping in my car. How crazy is that?

2. During the foray to the glass place, my friend and I went to our favorite Asian grocery. There are two truly wonderful things about the Asian grocery: home-made tofu and Japanese gummi candies. I have a new rule that I can only buy one package of Japanese gummi candies, because I seriously have no self-control where gummi is involved. I bought leechee flavored gummis today. They were gone in half an hour.

The plan for the tofu is to slice it up, marinate it in some soy sauce and ginger and maybe some fish sauce, and stir fry it with green beans, red peppers and cashews. But seriously, it's so good that I could eat it plain.

3. Um, that's all for now, because I really need to get some sleep. Will try to have more interesting things to say later. It may be a lost cause.

2005-09-24T10:29:00.000-07:00

I have nothing to say about the whole "Kate Moss snorts coke!" mess that hasn't been said elsewhere, because the obvious points are, well, really obvious. (I should probably say, though, about the Salon article that, as someone who became anorexic well before "heroin chic," I'm a tad skeptical of the idea that Kate Moss causes anorexia. Kate Moss may cause girls to want to look like an anorexic, but you've got to be a special kind of crazy actually to pull it off. And I don't really believe that anorexia is a response to fashion trends. At the very least, if I hadn't lived in a society that encouraged anorexia, I would have found some other way to self-destruct.)

What I want to comment on is H&M's much-quoted dictate that models be "healthy, wholesome and sound." Am I the only one who finds that slogan a tad creepy? "Healthy" is a shitty thing to expect your employees to be. Is there something shameful about being sick? Should a business fire a competent employee who happens not to be healthy? "Wholesome" is a joke. For one thing, I don't really associate H&M with modesty-wear. I haven't been in H&M since I was in New York two summers ago, but I recall the clothes actually being a little trashy for my taste. And do most H&M shoppers really aim for "wholesome"? When I think of "wholesome" clothes, I think of baggy corduroy jumpers and floral turtlenecks: ugly, unflattering garments designed entirely to make grown women look like asexual little girls. Actually, in general I have a hard time coming up with a word with worse connotations for me than "wholesome." And I don't even really know what "sound" means.

Maybe it's a translation problem, and "wholesome" and "sound" are a bit less ridiculous in Swedish.

2005-09-16T19:50:00.000-07:00

I have been a very, very bad blogger. I apologize profusely. My life is a bit nuts at the moment, and if something has to give, it's going to be the blog.

Here are the causes of the nuttiness:

1. I'm working 20 hours a week. This is a good thing, really, what with the money and being able to pay the rent and everything. But it's also taking away from valuable blogging time.

2. I'm still working on the dissertation.

3. My vertigo went away for about a month, and then it came back. Also, I've been having serious fatigue issues, so much so that I've made an appointment to go in next week and ask the doctor if I should get my heart checked out. I'm not having any of the other "your heart is about to explode! Panic!" symptoms, but better safe than sorry. So anyway, I have vertigo and I'm exhausted. It's hard to blog when you're simultaneously spinning and falling asleep!

But these are excuses. I've actually cooked up two posts in my head. I will see if I can summon up the time and/or energy to write them.

2005-07-17T12:38:00.000-07:00

I have an odd admission to make.

Sometimes I enjoy having vertigo.

Don't get me wrong: my vertigo is a pain in the ass. It's been a particularly bad week, probably because I had my period, and I have not enjoyed being so seasick that I've puked. I didn't really enjoy cleaning the house this morning; it would have been easier if the floor had been willing to stay still. Getting around is still a hassle, and it's hard to do much of anything when it's really acting up.

But right now, it feels great. I'm lying on my bed, the overhead fan is on, I've got my half-finished Harry Potter book and a cup of tea, and I'm gently bouncing. My vertigo can feel like a number of different sensations. Often I feel like I'm spinning or on a plane that's banking, both of which are shitty and nausea-inducing. I sometimes have the sensation that I'm falling backwards or sliding forwards, which is ok as long as I'm sitting down but disconcerting if I'm trying to stand or walk. Sometimes I feel like I'm being pushed into the ground. I don't like that one, although I can't put my finger on why. But bouncing is fun. It's relaxing: it's a bit like having an internal rocking chair. As long as I don't have to get out of bed, I could very happily stay like this for hours.

The road-trip specialist, who knows more about the very rare condition than anyone on the planet, says that flares typically last for 3-6 months. The last one was almost exactly three months; this one has been almost five. I would very much like for this flare to end, and I won't miss it when it goes away. But I might miss the lazy, bouncing Sunday afternoons. I might even have to spend good money to buy a rocking chair and replicate the sensation.

2005-07-13T13:37:00.000-07:00

For the longest time, the only car ribbon magnets I saw were yellow and red-white-and-blue "support the troop" type ones and pink breast cancer awareness ones. Now, all of a sudden, I'm seeing a proliferation of random car magnets. A minivan on my block has a "spay and neuter" ribbon. At the dry cleaners, I saw a Mercedes SUV with an "autism awareness" ribbon. (That one was cool: it's got multicolored puzzle pieces on it. On the other hand, there is no awareness ribbon that could make a Mercedes SUV anything but obnoxious.) But the one that I'm seeing everywhere is a red ribbon that says "covered in the blood of Jesus."

Today I went to my neighborhood drug store, and I realized that's where the "covered in the blood of Jesus" magnets are coming from. There was a big stack of them by the cash register, next to the condoms and the "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" promotional chocolate bars. I'm a little weirded out by this. First of all, as far as I can tell, these red ribbons have nothing to do with AIDS. And to me, red ribbons belong to AIDS. You don't get the appropriate the universal symbol of AIDS awareness in order to further Christianity awareness. Sorry. But also, it just seems a little odd to me that the drug store is selling Christian paraphernalia. I don't have a problem with it, but I want some confirmation that the drug store is not run by religious nutjobs who are going to decide it's sinful to stock contraception or something.

Anyway, I took it upon myself to hunt for some progressive car magnet ribbons. Funky Ribbons has anti-war, vegetarian, geeky ("support open source") and random ("support local music"; "I like sex") ribbons. Here's a lovely blue "bring home our troops" ribbon. These guys make nice non-ribbon magnets. You can get yellow "support the troops/ end the war now" ribbons here. I will post more if I find them.

The Apocolypse

2005-07-01T07:35:00.000-07:00

Sandra Day O'Connor is retiring. We're all doomed.

2005-06-20T20:27:00.000-07:00

I'm currently working on the kind of knitting project that drives real knitters batty. I went to the craft store the other day, and they were having a sale on something called "Fun Fur", which the website describes as a "novelty eyelash yarn." So I bought myself some Fun Fur in hot pink, some extremely fine yarn in sparkly silver, and some huge-ass plastic knitting needles, and I am holding the sparkly stuff and the furry stuff together to knit myself a scarf. This represents pretty much everything that is wrong with today's young, pseudo-hip knitters: it's easy, it's silly, it's not particularly practical, and it's a fun knitting project mostly because it takes no skill or thought. And yet I am loving it. My scarf, which is knitting up super fast, looks a bit like it's made from a snuffalufagus pelt. I will have to inform passers by that no muppets were harmed in the making of my fabulous, shiny, furry scarf. I am sort of tempted to make sparkly "Fun Fur" scarves for everyone on my Channukah list, including my dad.

I think there's something wrong with me.

In other news, I decided that my exercise program was unbalanced because I'm not really doing anything to work my abs or my back and because I'm unflexible, so today I went to a pilates class. And now I can't move. It was seriously the most painful thing I have done in my life. I'm pretty sure that I'm going to stick with it, because anything that makes me this sore has to be good for me. Also, since my vertigo is a bit better, I have started swimming again. So far, I have not drowned.

And that, folks, is what's going on in my life. I apologize for not having anything more interesting to tell you about.

2005-06-16T21:26:00.000-07:00

I'm back from Toronto. I realize that I didn't mention that I was going to go to Toronto, but I did, and now I'm back. Toronto is a lovely city with truly excellent shopping, exceptional public transit, fab restaurants, and a lot of interesting, quirky little museums to visit. Toronto is also, however, home to a whole lot of panhandlers and other vaguely unsavory types hanging out on the street. I found this surprising, mostly because I assume that the reason that there are so many panhandlers in American cities is that our entire culture is a big mess. Canada seems like much less of a mess, and yet there are still drunken people staggering around at all times of the day. Of course, I was staying down the street from a substance abuse clinic, so I may have got a mistaken impression about this.

Anyway, if you're ever in Toronto, I recommend the textile museum. The shoe museum was not quite the thing of beauty that I expected it to be, but it is difficult to be anything but lauditory towards a museum devoted to shoes. Also, the gift shop at the shoe museum is pretty awesome.

Must go to bed now. Will try to be a better blogger tomorrow.

And pink's not the new black, either...

2005-06-09T00:04:00.000-07:00

Chiming in late to comment on this article from Newsweek about why Mexican-Americans are the new Irish. The author suggests that the Irish were outsiders who built political coalitions with other ethnics, and that allowed them to become insiders. The problem is that while that may be a sound strategy for Mexican-Americans, that's not really what the Irish did. The author really needs to read Steven Erie's masterful study of Irish-American machine politics Rainbow's End. Erie makes clear that Irish-American politicians generally did not build pan-ethnic coalitions. Irish-American political success was not good for members of other ethnic groups. What's more, it wasn't all that good for Irish-Americans.

Irish-American political machines like Tammany Hall were built on a system of patronage. There was an explicit bargain between the machine and the voter: the voter supported all of the machine's candidates, and the machine rewarded him (or later her) with tangible, individual rewards such as a public-sector job. The problem, according to Erie, was that machines did not have unlimited resources with which to reward voters: there were limits to how much they could raise taxes and how much they could borrow. In order to buy the maximum number of votes, they concentrated on creating blue-collar, rather than white-collar jobs. And in order to keep down the number of voters who were not beholden to them, they handed out those jobs to other Irish people and, as much as possible, discouraged members of other ethnic groups from voting.

It's obvious why this was bad for non-Irish urban dwellers. They were shut out of many public-sector jobs, which were reserved for the machine's constituency, and they were discouraged from participating in politics and from having their voices heard. What's more surprising, according to Erie, is how the machines hurt the Irish. Although individual Irish politicians and their cronies got rich off of patronage, most Irish-Americans ended up in blue-collar jobs, many of which were supplied by machines. Erie suggests that Irish-Americans might have moved into the middle-class more quickly if they hadn't relied so much on patronage jobs. And he also suggests that machines, which tended to be conservative, destroyed any possibility for a radical Irish political movement, something that seemed like a real possibility in the late 19th century. So all in all, Irish-American political success was not a really great thing.

So here's the thing. I don't think the author really cares that much about Irish-American history, unlike me. And I seriously doubt that he'd suggest that Mexican-Americans use patronage, corruption, and voter suppression to gain political power. He's using the Irish as a jumping-off point to suggest a policy for the group he really does care about. So does it really matter that his historical analogy is problematic? Should I care that the Irish didn't actually behave the way he thinks they did?

2005-06-05T19:56:00.000-07:00

I was pleased to see this basically upbeat article on autoimmune diseases in the women's health supplement of the New York Times. There's lots of good news there, especially for people like me who have rare autoimmune diseases. According to the article, there's a trend towards treating autoimmune diseases as a category, rather than looking at each condition separately. Eventually, there may be a speciality in "autoimmunity," like there's now a specialty in oncology to cover all kinds of cancer. And there are several promising treatments that are being tested or that will soon be tested. The article suggests that, after a long period of neglect, these diseases are finally getting significant research attention.

One of the things I liked the most about the article is that they used pictures of black women, and a story about a Latina woman, to illustrate their points. Most articles about autoimmune diseases acknowledge that they are more common in women of color than in white women, but the overwhelming majority still seem to focus on white women. Considering how difficult these diseases often are to diagnose, and what an important role patients often play in making sure that their doctors reach an accurate diagnosis, that seems like a problem. Not to mention that it's just another annoying instance of journalists assuming that white people are the default.

2005-06-02T18:31:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, my parents got some sort of free magazine dealie for donating money to something, and as a result, I have a subscription to both Time and Newsweek. I know we're supposed to hate Newsweek for being anti-American, or defend them for being sort-of-right, but my hangups about Newsweek are much simpler. Both Time and Newsweek are really, really stupid. It's all celebrities, Jesus, and personal health stories. The most surprising thing about the whole Koran controversy is that Newsweek was reporting something that might actually qualify as news.

So anyway, recently both Time and Newsweek have discussed the whole question of whether fat people can be healthy or are miserable and doomed. The results are predictably brainless.

So here's a letter to the editor of Time from Dr. Amir Mehran, who is identified as being from the UCLA department of surgery, but who does not say that he specializes in weight-loss surgery.

In "Is It O.K. To Be Pudgy?" [May 9], you reported that a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) concluded that people who are overweight but not obese are at no greater risk of dying prematurely than those of normal weight. You also reported the views of the food industry-sponsored group Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), which says there is no obesity probelm and it is all hype. The American public does not need the CDC, the CCF or anybody else to tell them what to think. Just spend a few weekends observing the crowds at amusement parks, the local zoo, or other popular spots. The obesity problem is glaring. If you don't believe your own eyes, ask foreigners visiting our country what they notice most about us.

Ok, let me get this straight. This guy makes his living providing surgery to correct a problem. Recent research has called into question whether the problem is really medically significant. And he's asking us to ignore science and instead trust our "eyes," which is to say our own socially-conditioned revulsion at the sight of fat people? Isn't that a little... anti-science. And isn't there a bit of a conflict of interest there?

Ah, but that's not all. This week's Newsweek is a special issue about fitness. (No worries that people in Afghanistan will riot about that, I guess.) There's a lovely article called "Can you be Fat and Healthy?" Here's how it starts:

By most measures, Kelly Bliss, 50, surely seems to have let herself go. The Landsdowne, Pa., resident stands 5'2'' in. in her stockings but tips the scales at nearly 200 lbs. Run those numbers through the body mass index (BMI)-- the statistical measure that factors height and weight to diagnose obesity-- and Bliss scores higher than 35. Anything above 25 is overweight, anythign above 30 is obese. In the nation's ongoing war with obesity-related health problems, Bliss is one more casualty, right?

Well, there's a positive note on which to start the story. The thing is, it's not correct to say that by most measures, she's "let herself go." (What's up with that formulation, by the way?) There's really only one measure that says she has a problem: the BMI. As the article goes on to explain, by every other measure, she's super healthy. And going by Dr. Mehran's very scientific "observing the crowds at amusement parks" test, the photo of Bliss reveals that she looks great.

Now, I know that one effective way to start an article is to set up a proposition and then knock it down. But honestly, this seems to reinforce the very proposition that the article seeks to argue against.

Like the Truman Show, but with racism

2005-05-30T19:38:00.000-07:00

I'm returning from my blog hiatus with this story about a new exhibit planned by the zoo in Augsburg, Germany. They're going to display people. Specifically, they're going to display African people, who will be shown in their "natural habitat," performing their "native customs." In the zoo. Ick.

There doesn't seem to be much English-language coverage of this. I'll post a better link if someone picks it up.

2005-05-08T09:17:00.000-07:00

Ok, so the chapter is done. It's not good, but for the moment it's finished. But I don't seem to be able to come down from frenzied work mode. Yesterday I spent 11 hours in the library reading up on World War I and the liberal state, for no good reason. (Well, ok, I have to read it all sometime. But 11 hours was totally excessive.) This morning the library is closed, so I'm trying to clean house. The combination of frenzied work mode and vertigo have conspired to make my apartment truly squalid, and cleaning is a bit daunting. But I have taken out the recycling, which was piling up, and I have attended to the pile of dishes in the sink, so at least a clean kitchen seems to be within reach.

I think the dissertation has finally pushed me over the edge. It's very sad.

Drowning in a sea of boring

2005-04-28T22:26:00.000-07:00

Still working on the dissertation chapter. It has to be in on Monday, so maybe I'll have brilliant thoughts to share with you all after that. Until then, expect more boringness. If that.

Tomorrow I go to the hospital to have the NASA-designed balance test again. I will be strapped into a chair with little electrode thingies attached to my head, and they will put the chair a tiny dark room and rotate me while lights flash on the walls. It's very exciting. It's the only medical test I've ever had that resembles something you would do at an amusement park.

Sadly, that is the most interesting thing going on in my life right now.

God help me, I'm becoming a sci-fi geek

2005-04-26T20:37:00.000-07:00

For all I know, this has been around for months, but I just learned about the trailer for Serenity

I am inappropriately excited. Pretty soon I'll be camping out at the wrong movie theater and brandishing a fake light saber.

2005-04-22T18:52:00.000-07:00

I wrote 16 pages of dissertation today, and I am too tired to be coherent. Sorry. So here's what happened with Dr. Obnoxious. He agreed that I should go off the steroids, which is lovely. On the other hand, he claims, with no evidence, that I'm better than I was a month ago and that the steroids made me that way. The stupid blood tests aren't even back yet, and all he has to go on about the vertigo is my word. But apparently, my word doesn't count for anything, even when we're discussing the sensations that I'm feeling.

Basically, Dr. Obnoxious is incapable of admitting that he is not omniscient. Rather than admit that there's some trial and error involved, which is the truth, he lies and pretends that whatever he has done has worked. It's annoying and insulting and it suggests that I'll have to fight the steroid battle all over again unless I can manage not to have another flare until I finish grad school and (hopefully) get on a better health plan.

But in better news, I wrote 16 pages of my dissertation today. And with that, I'm going to go to bed.

2005-04-20T17:12:00.000-07:00

So two medical developments tomorrow:I take my last dose of prednisone, and I have an appointment with Dr. Obnoxious, the ENT from Hell. Dr. Obnoxious really, reallly believes in prednisone. He thinks it's a miracle drug, which it often is, except that it doesn't seem to work for me. And he thinks, despite all evidence, that the prednisone made me better last time. (I got better as I was tapering off of it. But the Very Rare Condition is a relapsing and remitting kind of thing, so it's likely that the flare had just run its course. At least, that's what all the rheumatologists think, especially since it doesn't seem to have done a bit of good this time.) So anyway, it's pretty likely that he's going to want me to go back on steroids at a higher dose. And I'm going to have to stand my ground and say no. He can't make me take prednisone. But I am still struggling to get over my nice, obedient, good-girl impulses. I'm totally dreading the appointment.

2005-04-20T16:19:00.000-07:00

I just heard someone on The Newshour describe John Bolton as "the ultimate kiss-up, kick-down man." I've got to remember that description. It sums up way too many people i've met in my time.

2005-04-18T20:59:00.000-07:00

The good news is that I have written 1/6 of my dissertation chapter. And since my dissertation will have six chapters, that means that I've written 1/36 of my dissertation. Woo hoo!

The bad news is that I have not thought of anything but my dissertation today. And since I'm not about to bore you with the details of my dissertation, I have nothing to blog about. Sorry!

2005-04-16T19:18:00.000-07:00

Tonight I am supposed to be writing the first chapter of my dissertation. (I don't mean that it will actually be chapter 1. But it is the first chapter that I have tried to write.) So far, I have done the following things. I have walked to the library and collected all my xeroxes and notes from my locker. I have walked to the grocery store and procured supplies (which is to say gummi bears and hard candy.) I have checked my email at least 50 times. I have opened up a document, formatted it, and saved it. I have eaten all the gummi bears and half the hard candies.

I have not, however, written a single word.

I think I need more gummi bears.

Building a Better Pill Bottle

2005-04-15T16:07:00.000-07:00

You know how sometimes you hear about a solution to a problem and then you realize that you hadn't even recognized that the problem was a problem in the first place? I'm not talking about invented, fake problems that you come to believe in because of the marketing genius of people who are great at making you feel inadequate. I'm talking about things that genuinely weren't working very well, only you were so used to them not working very well that you didn't realize they could be better.

Take prescription pill bottles. Of course they're confusing, hard to read, and easy to mix up with one another. It didn't even occur to me that they could be anything but. But a design student named Deborah Adler has invented a much less confusing pill bottle, and Target, the source of all things cheap and well-designed, is actually going to make them. Aren't they pretty? Isn't the drug's name big and clear?

I don't get drugs at Target, and I don't think I'm going to start. For one thing, it's inconvenient, and I like my neighborhood pharmacy. But it's awfully tempting to make the trek, given the pretty, pretty pill bottle.

via Amy's Robot

2005-04-13T21:04:00.000-07:00

So in the ongoing immune system vs. inner-ear smackdown, my immune system seems to have developed a new weapon. I've had lots of vertigo and lots of ringing in my ear, but the intense ear pain is new. And it's really distracting.

Making strides towards gender equity when it comes to narrow, stupid beauty standards

2005-04-12T07:56:00.000-07:00

I just got around to looking at this week's Entertainment Weekly, which features a cover story on the men of Lost. On the cover, you have most of the male cast, looking all rugged and manly and sexy. But three adult male cast members are conspicuously absent. They are the actors who play Hurley (too fat), Locke (too old) and Jin (too Korean. I honestly can't figure out any other explanation.) This disparity continues inside the magazine. Each actor gets a profile, but the three non-cover actors have smaller profiles and much smaller pictures than the rest of the cast. This despite the fact that the characters are as central to the plot as any of the guys who made it on the cover.

How fucked up is that?

Of course, the core female cast of the show is all young, thin, and conventionally sexy, so the female equivilents of Hurley, Locke or Jin would never get on island, much less on the cover of EW. (I'm taking for granted that a Korean woman is differently positioned in American pop culture than a Korean man.) So I guess we haven't reached complete parity when it comes to the entertainment industry's narrow-mindedness. But it still depresses the hell out of me that no one seems to realize that there are people out there who find fat, middle-aged, or Asian men not just fun to watch but also attractive.

Incidentally, in his little tiny profile (accompanied by his little tiny picture), Jorge Garcia, the actor who plays Hurley, says that he hopes his character will get to have a romantic plotline. How about it, folks? Maybe Hurley can hook up with Jin.

And the reverse- Pulitzer for most inept and offensive review...

2005-04-11T22:19:00.000-07:00

should probably go to Charles Taylor's Newsday screed against Harriet McBryde Johnson's new book. Now, I haven't read the book, and for all I know, it's awful. But there's some serious presumption going on in this review. Where on earth does Taylor get off claiming that the author's understanding of her own disability is naive? "But even a polemicist needs logic to back up her passion, and Johnson simply is not a thinker."?! What the fuck? And how about this crazy paragraph:

The ugliness of Johnson's sensibility is common to ideologues of all stripes, the willingness to sacrifice people to dogma. Of the Lewis telethons, as grotesque as she claims they are, she says, "the money does some good, but the price is too high." Too high for what, her pride? What if you're one of the families with a disabled member who depends on MDA for financial aid? Should they refuse the money as a sign of solidarity? Have Johnson and the others protesting the telethons come up with alternative ways of funding?

First of all, objections to the telethon have nothing to do with "pride." The telethon depicts disabled people as objects of pity, as dependents, as charity cases, as permanent children. That's not just insulting: it's dangerous for people who have had to fight like hell for the right to live independently, to be educated, to hold jobs. I have a childhood friend who has mild cerebral palsy. When she started kindergarten, the school district said she couldn't attend a mainstream school and put her in a "special ed" class designed for kids with cognitive impairments. Her parents had to take the district to court to get her in a mainstream classroom aimed at kids of normal intelligence. Because she limped. If her parents hadn't had the money and wherewithall to sue the school district, or if she'd been more seriously or visibly disabled, she would never have had educational opportunities that Charles Taylor likely took for granted. She would have been sacrificed to the prejudices of a society that saw disabled people as not worth educating. The Jerry Lewis telethon reinforces the notion that disabled people need charity rather than opportunity. That's not trivial: disabled people, and the entire society, suffer because of that assumption.

It's likely that the hypothetical family dependent on telethon money actually exists, although Taylor doesn't provide any evidence that they do. And it's even possible that Johnson would expect the family to refuse the money as a gesture of solidarity, although Taylor certainly seems to be putting words in her mouth. But it's sort of stupid to claim that disability-rights advocates haven't come up with alternatives. DRAs spend their whole lives struggling to find ways to enable disabled people to live with dignity: it's kind of what they're all about. Johnson wants to change the society so it's set up to support all disabled people, including people with muscular dystrophy. Taylor, it seems, can only conceive of support for the disabled in terms of charity, so it seems cruel to take away the handouts on which some disabled people depend. But Johnson, I think, is arguing for a more robust theory of rights that would render charity unnecessary. Instead of demeaning handouts, purchased at the price of their dignity, disabled people should be entitled to the things they need to live full and meaningful lives. They shouldn't have to parade themselves on television or depict themselves as objects of pity to get that: it should be seen as their due, the same way social security or public education are seen as rights of citizenship. We would pay for that out of tax dollars, the way we pay for public schools and social security and other things that are necessary to have a just and decent society. It's really not all that complicated.

I understand some of Taylor's objections. I really do. It's reasonably likely that I'll go deaf sometime in the not-too-distant future, and I find the whole Deaf culture argument kind of not-useful in my particular case. I like hearing; I'm going to be profoundly bummed if I can't hear anymore; and I don't think I'll ever come to think of deafness as a different culture rather than a disability. I'll cope if I have to, but I don't want to have to, and I'm going to be peeved if someone suggests that being bummed is a failure on my part. It does sometimes seem like DRAs are a little condescending or judgmental towards those who haven't made peace with their disabilities, which is kind of shitty, since people are entitled to their messy emotions.

But you know, if it comes to that, Harriet McBryde Johnson is a lot more likely than Jerry Lewis or Charles Taylor are to help me fight for my rights to have a career and health insurance and access to public accomodation. And when push comes to shove, I much prefer the kind of condescension that suggests I should stop feeling sorry for myself and fight for my right to a normal life to the kind of condescension that tells me I'm an object of pity and treats me like a charity case. I don't need a movement to validate my feelings: I've got friends for that. It's heartening to me that there's a movement fighting to ensure that the society doesn't view my rights, my autonomy, my value as all contingent on my ability to hear. I'm willing to put up with a little annoyingness in the service of that goal. If that makes me an ideologue, I guess that's ok by me.

2005-04-11T06:15:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, my friend M. insisted that I watch Troop Beverly Hills, a mostly-forgotten Shelly Long vehicle from the late '80s that is most notable for featuring future Rilo Kiley front-person Jenny Lewis. My friend and I share a thing for cheesy teeny-bopper culture, and she thinks Troop Beverly Hills is a masterpiece of '80s kitsch. It's a totally silly movie, and it doesn't deserve serious scrutiny, but it made me think about something. It's actually typical of a whole genre that denegrates female ambition.

Troop Beverly Hills is an underdog story about the rivalry between two girl scout troops. (They're called "Wilderness Girls," but we all know what they are.) One is made up of spoiled rich girls from Beverly Hills. Instead of doing actual Wildnerness Girl activities, they shop, get their nails done, shop some more, and then they have Shelly Long's tailor create their own badges to celebrate these "skills." Instead of selling cookies, they get their parents' rich friends to have a benefit, hosted by Robin Leach. When it rains on their camping trip, they decide that sleeping in a tent is no fun, so they check into a four-star hotel, where they "camp" by ordering room service and play poker with the sexy bellhop. The other troop works really hard and has mastered genuine wilderness survival skills. At the end of the movie, these skills are tested in an orienteering competition at the annual Wilderness Girl jamboree.

Needless to say, the Beverly Hills girls are the underdogs and the hard-working, ugly, non-rich girls are the evil villains . They're led by the real baddie of the movie, a former army nurse who is so butch that people around her constantly refer to her as "sir." Now, this could partly be read as a celebration of being a decent person: the non-Beverly Hills girls are mean, and they cheat. We're given ample reason not to like them. But it's also a movie about the triumph of innate specialness over ambition and hard work. The bad troop's effort is part of what makes them so nasty, unfeminine, and doomed to humiliation. The good, Beverly Hills girls triumph because they do what is supposed to come naturally to the pretty and privileged: they shop, plan parties, and order room service. When they do what comes naturally, their innate sparkle and charm wins people over, and it ensures that they win.

This innate sparkle thing is something of a trope in ditzy literature aimed at women and girls. Take Kavita Daswani's Desi-themed chick lit book The Village Bride of Beverly Hills. In it, Priya, a young Indian woman who has just entered into an arranged marriage with a guy who lives in Los Angeles, struggles to deal with culture shock, difficult in-laws, and the tension between her desire for independence and her commitment to being a good wife. In an attempt to deal with all of this angst, she takes a job as a receptionist at an entertainment magazine. There, she quickly rises to become a reporter. Priya, it is made clear, knows nothing about journalism or about the American entertainment scene, and she doesn't even particularly want career success. But she's innately special. She's a good listener. Her guilelessness and simplicity make celebrities open up to her. She snatches the job away from a friend who is ambitious, competent, qualified, but just doesn't have that innate sparkle.

Now, I realize there's something really appealing about the fantasy of the triumph of innate specialness. It's a large part, I think, of the pleasure of the first Harry Potter book. I'm sure that a lot of picked-on, nerdy little kids enjoyed imaging that they had special powers and were destined to save the world. But the Harry Potter books also focus on the painstaking process by which Harry is educated to take on his destiny. His specialness may be innate, but it still has to be honed. What's unique about the way specialness is conveyed to women and girls, I think, is that it's contrasted with, not complimented by ambition and hard work. If you're a woman, your specialness is compromised if you try to succeed. You're much better off walking around in a cloud of fairy dust, confident that others will recognize your gifts and reward you.

And that's bullshit. I know someone who has succeeded as a reporter by projecting a Priya-like guilelessness and innocence, but it's a carefully-honed act. She knows exactly what she's doing, and she's worked hard to hone her reporting and writing craft. In real life, the girls who have worked hard to learn actual wilderness skills will win the Wilderness Girls competition. In real life, if the unambitious Beverly Hills girls get ahead in the world, it will be because of their parents' money and connections, not because of their innate specialness. (Tori Spelling, who has a small part in the movie, is exhibit A.) But most of us do not fall into that category, and it seems a shame that, even as the general culture is becoming more accomodating of female ambition, there's a whole genre of pop culture that still teaches girls that success will come their way if they don't put any effort into achieving it.

2005-04-10T19:24:00.000-07:00

So here's what my day has looked like:

At 7:00 AM, my alarm went off and I got out of bed, took a shower, and had breakfast.
At 7:45 I left the house, stopped to get some coffee, and made my way to the train station, where I got on a 8:15 train for Neighboring City.
At 10:15 I arrived in Neighboring City and got a cab to Neighboring University.
I arrived at Neighboring University at about 10:30.
From 10:30 until about 11:00, I tried to break a $5 bill so I could buy a copy card, since the copy card machine will only take $1 bills. I eventually bought coffee, but threw it away before I could drink most of it, because I couldn't afford waste any more time.
At 11:00, I settled down in front of a microfilm machine. I read and xeroxed microfilm until 2:00, at which point I got some lunch. At approximately 2:30 I returned to my microfilm machine and continued reading and xeroxing until about 5:30.
At 6:00 I got another cab back to the train station. The restaurant at the train station was closed, so I bought some trail mix and a bag of Skittles for dinner. I got on the 6:40 train from Neighboring City.
At approximately 9:00 I arrived at home.

I'm really tired. And I've been putting in far too many 13-hour-days lately. I need to hurry up and write the dissertation already.

In which I utter the scariest words in the English language

2005-04-07T13:58:00.000-07:00

I think the guy from the Cato Institute might have a point

The link, which is from Pandagon is about whether people should be able to buy drugs that the FDA has deemed are dangerous. They would have to sign a form promising not to sue the drug manufacturer before they could buy the drugs. I realize there are big problems with this, but I can see the benefits.

The thing is, people have a very mistaken notion that drug safety is a black and white thing. Either a drug is safe or it is not. And in fact, that's not right at all. All drugs, including very common and uncontroversial ones, carry risks. All approved drugs carry benefits. Someone has to decide whether the benefits outweigh the costs. And I can sort of see the argument for thinking that the patient, rather than the government, should get to decide when it's worth taking the risks.

This comes up most often, I think, with drugs that improve people's quality of life. It comes up with pain meds like Vioxx, for instance, or with hormone replacement therapy, which alleviates the symptoms of menopause. Because quality of life isn't quantifiable, it's hard for researchers to acknowledge the benefits. It seems irrational to risk serious illness or death, things that can be measured, so that you can live without discomfort, something that is difficult to measure or convey. Agencies like the FDA tend, I think, to treat quality-of-life concerns like they're trivial, and they tend to assume that people who give in to those considerations are stupid or weak. They may be right, but it seems to me that people ought to be able to make their own choices on these matters.

The problem, I think, has to do with ensuring that people have the information necessary to make informed choices. If I had terrible arthritis, I might be willing to take a drug that would take away my pain but had a 1% chance of killing me. I would definitely not take a drug that would cure my arthritis but had a 40% chance of killing me. If you force people to sign away their rights to sue, you also take away the drug companies' incentive to provide accurate information about the risks associated with their drugs. We'd need to come up with a better system to ensure that people got accurate information.

2005-04-03T17:40:00.000-07:00

So I've been trying to think about what rubbed me the wrong way about this post of Hugo Schwyzer's about an exercise he did with the church youth group he runs. In it, he had all the kids, girls and boys, go around a circle and discuss what they did and didn't like about their bodies. The value of this, he says, is that it taught the kids that everyone, including the conventionally attractive, has body issues. And then maybe they'll realize that everyone has body image issues and that their self-perception, rather than their bodies, is flawed.

Now, I think that Hugo is pretty well clued in to the aspect of our culture that tells girls that they should have "perfect" bodies. But he's not so attuned, I think, to the bit of beauty culture that tells girls and women that since perfection is unattainable, even the most beautiful woman must be engaged in a constant, doomed struggle against her own inevitable flaws. It's very Christian, in a sense: just as the good Christian will, try as he might, never overcome his own sinful nature, the beautiful woman can never, despite her constant vigilance, overcome creeping ugliness. And therefore, one aspect of appropriate femininity is the constant, doomed quest for that elusive perfection. This is enforced through fear (you're going to wrinkle! You're going to get fat!), and it's also enforced through fear of vanity. It's rude to admit you like you're body, and it threatens to make you look foolish. Chances are that you are not all that, so if you admit you're satisfied with how you look, you will appear to be conceited and have delusions of acceptability. Better to preemptively admit that you're aware of your imperfections than to look like you think you're better looking than you really are.

So I worry that Hugo's exercise is going to backfire. He thinks that the kids will recognize that their good-looking peers are insecure too and will recognize that those insecurities aren't grounded in reality. But I think that, for girls at least, it might just hammer home the notion that all women, no matter how beautiful, must criticize and discipline their bodies. And if the beautiful girls recognize they're not good enough and must fix themselves, what does that say about what the mousy girls should be doing?

That's what's going on with the girls who said they wanted to look like Mary Kate Olsen, I think. I mean, come on. Nobody really wants to look like Mary Kate Olsen: she's an overgrown munchichi. But she's our current celebrity anorexic, and they want to emulate her supposed self-control and self-denial. (It's sort of ironic in light of the persistent rumors that Mary Kate's thinness is of the more chemically-induced variety. But anyway.) They chose her as their role model not because of how she looks but because of what she does to look that way. Given that, I can't see why they'd see the light when they realized that their attractive peers felt their bodies also needed to be fixed and disciplined. It's more likely that they'll decide they should emulate the pretty kids.

2005-03-31T19:53:00.000-08:00

I feel a little guilty blogging about Terri Schiavo, becuase honestly, I don't think any of what follows is really about her. It's clearly about me: my health, my fear, my anger at my doctors, my current freak-out. And I feel shitty about being just another person who's using her and her family's suffering to further my own agenda, however inchoate that agenda might be. So I'm sorry, to all of the people who have been hurt by this mess, that I'm exploiting their hurt.

So anyway, here's a true story. My older brother was born with pyloric stenosis, a blockage in the stomach. This is a pretty common and not terribly serious condition, but it requires surgery. So when he was two weeks old, my brother had an operation to unblock his intestines.

At the time, pediatricians were convinced that newborns couldn't feel pain. They might act like they were hurt, but that was just an instinctive reaction to stimulus. Studies had shown that their nerves were not developed enough for them to really feel anything. My parents weren't crazy about the idea of subjecting their child to an operation without anesthesia, but the doctors assured them they were being irrational. Insisting on anesthesia would be abusive: there are risks associated with anesthesia, and they'd be taking those risks for no reason, because my brother was too young to feel anything. My parents were putting their uneducated, emotional, irrational feelings over the doctors' scientific expertise. Duly shamed, my folks agreed to allow the operation to be done with anesthesia.

The problem is that the doctors were wrong. Newborns can, of course, feel pain. The current policy of the American Academy of Pediatrics" is that infants should be given painkillers using the same criteria that would be used for anyone else. My brother's doctors were totally convinced that he couldn't feel anything, but they really just didn't understand as much as they thought they did about infants' nervous systems. And as a result, one of my brother's earliest experiences was the experience of being tortured. The operation took about an hour, and he was awake and conscious and in agony the whole time.

On a lot of lefty blogs, people are suggesting that if you don't take doctors' word as Gospel, you're anti-science, and if you don't take the courts' verdicts as the last word, you're anti-law. And I don't buy it. If you don't believe me, look up Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court case upholding the right of states to sterilize "feebleminded" or insane people. Doctors held that this was necessary to protect the population from hereditary birth defects. The court held that necessary safeguards were in place to prevent abuse. And they were all wrong. Forcible sterilization was a huge evil, a real blot on American history. The fact that it was legally and medically sanctioned doesn't make that any less true.

I really don't know what I think about the Terri Schiavo case, except that I feel huge amounts of sympathy for her entire family. But it bothers me and frankly scares me a bit that people on the left seem so willing to take for granted medical and legal expertise. I know that it's the best we've got, but it's still imperfect. And there's nothing anti-intellectual about pointing that out.

2005-03-28T15:45:00.000-08:00

Before reading this post, I would like you to consult the date on which it was published and note that it is actually not April Fool's Day....

A year after it went into effect, pretty much the entire population of Ireland now approves of the ban on smoking in public places.

96% of Irish people think the law was a success, including almost 90% of smokers. 98% think workplaces are healthier.

Oh, and another thing...

2005-03-26T13:07:00.000-08:00

I'm back on prednisone. If I seem to develop a completely new personality over the next few weeks, that's probably why.

On Doctors

2005-03-26T08:03:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to post about this for a couple of days, but I've been distracted by work and my pathetic attempts at a social life and by my annual hamantaschen-making extravaganza. (It is, apparently, possible to bake with vertigo, although I'm still finding little bits of prune filling in various nooks and crannies in my kitchen. I can bake while the room is spinning, but it's not particularly tidy.) But the cookies are done and I'm taking the morning off of work, so I'm going to post about it now.

In the course of the Terri Schiavo discussion, I have seen several guys on lefty blogs express shock and outrage that medicine is being politicized and that they wil now need to find out the political beliefs of their doctors. No offense, but on what planet do these men reside? How sheltered could they possibly be? Is there honestly anyone out there who doesn't realize that the practice of medicine is totally political and that the doctor/ patient relationship is frought with power?

I've had a lot of experience with doctors over the past year. I have seen three rheumatologists, two ophthamologists, a dermatologist, an otolaryngologist, a neurologist, an endocrinologist, and an internist, not to mention scads of fellows, residents, nurses, and techs of various kinds. And it's become pretty clear to me that there are two kinds of doctors: the ones who see me as a body and the ones who see me as a person. To doctors who see me as a body, I am an object, not a subject of medical care. They take care of me, and my role in the process is to present myself for inspection and then comply with the treatment they prescribe for me. If I don't like that treatment, don't think it's working, don't think the side effects are worth the supposed benefit, etc., I should keep those opinions to myself. My opinions have no bearing on the process, because the doctors are the experts. My only role is to be acted upon.

The doctors who see me as a person, on the other hand, recognize that I am a partner in my treatment. They are willing to admit that they don't have all the answers, something that is nice considering that they don't really have any answers. (My condition is so rare, and my particular presentation so staggeringly rare, that nobody really knows what treatment works best. And my diagnosis is still provisional, so they don't even know if I actually have the thing they're treating me for.) They recognize that any treatment is a calculated risk: we're weighing the possibility of a favorable outcome against the the possibility of debilitating side effects. They realize that as the medical experts, they are best able to determine how likely something is to work and how likely it is to harm my body, but that ultimately I have to be the one to decide whether the risk is worth taking. It's my body, and I'm the one who has to live with the outcome.

This is a political issue, if you accept that the exercise of power is always political. Doctors are people with power: the power to dispense or withhold drugs, for instance. They also have extraordinary social power. It's very difficult to defy a doctor; it goes against a whole lot of social conditioning. I've had enough doctors dismiss me as silly and irrational to know that my first instinct is to feel stupid and ashamed, rather than furious at the asshole for thinking he or she has more right to control my body than I do. And it's an issue that intersects with all sorts of other power relations. Doctors are much more likely to see some people as able to make rational decisions than others. It matters a lot, for instance, that I am young and female. I don't think my otolaryngologist, who is old enough to be my grandfather, is capable of seeing any woman my age as a rational creature in charge of her own destiny. It also matters a lot, I suspect, that I am highly-educated and white. I have realized that my doctors are much more likely to treat me like a person rather than a body if I present myself in an adult, professional manner. I make an effort to dress up for doctors' appointments. I wear makeup. I am careful to speak in complete sentences and to modulate my voice so that I don't sound too young or overly-emotional. I treat my doctors' appointments like a job interview.

I think that for a lot of healthy people, and especially healthy straight white guys, the Terri Schiavo case has been something of a wake-up call: it's made them realize that on some level, medical care is about power. In this case, it's about the power to decide when to end someone's life and who, if anyone, ought to be able to exercise that power. But for sick people and for people who can't take for granted that their doctors or the larger society will respect their judgement and autonomy, the power relations in medicine have always been evident. We've never had the luxury of thinking that medicine is apolitical.

Scenes from a Quiet Revolution

2005-03-22T12:02:00.000-08:00

I've noticed, over the past year or so, a quiet change in the way the media depicts gay families. There are still big, exploitative stories about "the contraversy" over gay parenting: I know I can't be the only person who saw that awful episode of Wife Swap where they had the lesbian mom switch with a fundie. (It was some of the most painful T.V. I've ever seen, and I usually like Wife Swap.) But it's much more significant, I think, that we're starting to see more shows and articles that take gay and lesbian parents for granted, that actually treat them as normal rather than loudly pronouncing that they're just like everyone else. That, I think, is why conservatives were so horrified by the Postcards from Buster that depicted lesbian parents: the problem wasn't that the show acknowledged the lesbian moms, but that it didn't even bother to point them out. Slowly but surely, the media is beginning to treat gay parents as normal, unremarkable families. If you think the media has any influence on the culture, and I do, this bodes well for those of us who believe that real family values don't discriminate.

This week's example comes from Elle, which is not generally thought of as a progressive journal. The article is called "Bailing Out Your Parents," and it discusses Gen X-ers who find themselves financially supporting their parents at exactly the moment when they are taking on increasing financial obligations of their own. Their main example is a guy whom they call "Matt Swann." I'll let the article tell his story:

"It was right after my wedding," says the 38-year-old New York production manager. "My mom has a knack for hitting me up following a big expense, like when I bought my first apartment. This time, she said she was trying to pay down a credit card. I'd helped her out with small amounts-- $500, $1000 at a time. So I asked, 'How much do you need to take care of everything? What's the total? She was sort of like, 'Well, a few thousand.' Then, 'Okay, maybe around ten thousand.' Then, 'Maybe twenty.' That's when I got it-- this wasn't just one credit card."...

After he learned how much trouble his parents were in, Swann called a family conference among his parents, one of his sisters, and his partner, Tom. After sifting through the bills, they came up with a game plan. The sisters, younger and more financially strapped, would pay for an accountant to straighten out their parents' business; Matt and Tom would use their savings to buy the house from Matt's parents. Where would the money come from? Three years' worth of savings that they'd been planning to use to adopt a baby.

"When we walked out of closing on my parents' house, Tom said to me, 'Well, we don't have any of our adoption savings left, but we do have a house in upstate New York that we don't live in,'" laments Swann. "I wouldn't say we've fought about it, but we've had some discussions."...

Just last summer, Matt and Tom found that they had saved enough money to look into adoption again, and at Christmas they became the parents of Lucy, a newborn. As with many of their cohorts, the biggest lesson they're taking away from their parents' situation is: Don't let it happen to you.

"We're going to see a financial planner and have her tell us what we need to do to make sure that Lucy is set," says Swann. "We're very aware of the necessity of a nest egg. Watching my parents has made us borderline cheap."

So there you have it: a normal, responsible couple that makes painful but unremarkable sacrifices to help one of their families and then decides to make sure they don't require the same sacrifice from their own kid. It's the kind of challenge that could happen to anyone. And that's exactly the point.

2005-03-21T04:34:00.000-08:00

I have finally put my finger on what's been bugging me about the Terry Schiavo case. Maybe someone can clear it up for me.

I don't get what animates the people who think Schiavo's feeding tube should be removed. I understand their position that Schiavo is not really alive. I even think they might be right. I certainly understand and sympathize with Michael Schiavo: I think it must be horrible to be emotionally tethered to someone you consider a corpse. I get why he has fought passionately and tenaciously to bury his wife so he can move on. But I do not understand why people who do not know Terry Schiavo and who do not have an intense personal interest are so vehement that her life should be ended. I do not understand what principal is at stake here.

I really do understand why people would vehemently argue that Schiavo should be kept alive. I don't know that they're right, but I understand why they care so deeply. I understand why many disabled people feel threatened by the argument that some people are so impaired that they are actually not alive and that therefore it's ok to kill them. I don't think it's crazy to think that once that precedent is set, we could see considerable movement in the line that distinguishes a disabled person from the living dead. I understand why some folks don't buy the concept of living death and don't like differentiating between people who it's ok to kill and people who it's not. As a dyed-in-the-wool death penalty opponent, that argument makes sense to me.

But in other instances I'm willing to put those considerations aside because there are compelling arguments for the other side. I believe in organ donation, even though I'm not convinced that "brain death" actually exists. I'm not a pacifist, either: I believe that there are occasionally times when it's necessary to kill in self-defense, although they're few and far between. But I don't understand the compelling arguments here. What do we lose if we allow Terry Schiavo to continue her current existence?

If Schiavo had made it clear that she wished to die if she were in this sort of situation, I would understand the principal at stake. People have a right to make their own choices about their medical treatment, and they have a right to die on their own terms when it comes to that. But she didn't make her wishes known, so I don't see how that right is threatened here. Is it about protecting the centrality of marriage in our culture and legal practice? We've got rid of the ugly aspects of coverture, in which at marriage possession of a woman was transferred from her natal family to her husband, but we still assume that the marriage bond trumps all other relationships. I'm not sure, though, that's a concept that I, as a feminist, want to fight to protect. Is it Michael Schiavo's very real suffering, and if so, why does that trump the suffering of Schiavo's parents? Is it that it's expensive to keep someone alive on life support?

Assuming that Schiavo really is dead, it doesn't matter to her what happens to her. She isn't in pain, and she can't mind that her body is being kept alive after her mind is gone. So what do we lose if she continues to be fed and kept as alive as she currently is? Why would that be such a terrible thing?

Happy Green Beer Day!

2005-03-17T10:03:00.000-08:00

As careful readers of my blog may have figured out, I am a bit of a Hibernophile. Oh, heck, who am I kidding? I'm totally obsessed with Ireland and have been since I was ten. I saved my pennies to go for a summer program in Dublin when I was 15. Two years later, I conned someone into paying for a "peace activism conference" that was supposed to solve international conflicts but ended up being a two-week-long drinking session fueled by lots of cheap Russian vodka. In college, I did a junior year abroad in Dublin. I've been back twice since, once for two weeks and once for a month. I don't at all consider Ireland a second home and am not even sure I could live there permanently, but I'm deeply enamored of the place. I don't know where this comes from: I'm not Irish-American, and I don't think I've fallen for the whole sentimental shamrocks and leprechauns thing. My obsessions are as mysterious to me as they are to anyone else.

As a sad, sick Hibernophile, I have generally not been a big fan of St. Patrick's Day. It's too plastic, too commercialized, too dependent on creepy Irish-American stereotypes about Ireland rather than anything genuinely Irish. But I'm slowly begining to come around. Part of it, I think, is that I've stopped being hung up on authenticity. There's nothing really Irish about St. Patrick's Day as celebrated in the U.S., but it is truly Irish-American, and Irish-American culture is an interesting phenomenon in its own right. And there's actually something a bit fascinating about how ethnic cultures get commodified in America. It's not a new phenomenon at all, and it's an important and understudied part of American ethnic history. Instead of being annoyed about green bagels and shamrock shakes, I'm going to see it all as part of the way in which ethnicity gets mangled and recast and sold back to us as something totally new.

So in honor of my new tolerance for St. Patrick's Day, here are some of my favorite Irish links. Sorry there's no green beer or leprechauns.

First of all, as part of their St. Patrick's Day Project, the Institute of Irish Studies at Queens University Belfast wants to know how (and if) you celebrate St. Patrick's Day. Fill out their questionnaire and send them pictures!

Even if you don't like Irish traditional music, you should check outMartin Hayes and Dennis Cahill .They're true to the tradition, but they're also influenced by their classical, blues and jazz training.

On a similar note, Fermanagh-born, Chicago-based flutist Laurence Nugent is awesome.

And lest you think I only like the diddly-dee school of Irish music, I give you The Undertones. (Warning: that link has music. Mute your computer if you're in the library or your boss is around.)

I haven't yet been able to make Phantom FM's internet stream work for me, but maybe you'll have better luck. It's supposed to be a great way to hear new Irish (pop, not trad) music. Phantom is currently pirate but has been issued a license and will be 100% legit starting this summer. Why isn't there more pirate radio in the U.S., by the way?

I think that Hob Nobs may actually be English, not Irish, but I practically lived on them when I was in Ireland and every time I go to Ireland I bring an extra duffel so I can take loads of them back. They are the biscuits of the gods, and they are even better dunked in tea.

How To Succeed in Journalism by Towing the Anti-feminist Party Line

2005-03-16T21:51:00.000-08:00

There's exactly one female columnist currently working for the Washington Post. She is Anne Applebaum, and she would prefer we not mention that she is the only woman columnist at the Post. She would also prefer that we not point out that women are grossly underrepresented on editorial pages across the country. You see, it makes her feel bad. It makes her feel like a token. She worries that now that the issue has been raised, women who do get columns will wonder whether it's because they're women, not because they're smart. Of course, she's not overly concerned about all the smart women who are wondering whether they didn't get columns because they're women. After all, Anne Applebaum played the game right: she's right of center, she writes about appropriately tough, "serious" issues, and she only writes about feminism to dismiss feminists as silly and frivilous. She's got her column: why shouldn't she concentrate on her own fee-fees, rather than considering whether that opportunity is open to any woman who deviates even slightly from the tough, right-wing, anti-feminist stance that women must adopt if they're going to have any chance of being taken seriously by the big boys?

The thing is, Anne Applebaum isn't wrong to worry about being perceived as a token. She rightly points out that it's unfair that women are expected to write about "women's issues," for instance. But that wouldn't be true if there were more women op-ed writers. It wouldn't be assumed that the one woman must be filling some sort of women's slot. The solution to her problem is to get more women op-ed writers, not to make the frankly ludicrous suggestion that we should all shut up about how few women editorial writers there currently are. One wonders on which other subjects Applebaum thinks we should practice self-censorship, or for that matter on which subjects she censors herself. And you've got to wonder how competent she could have been when she was covering real news. Journalists are, it seems to me, in the business of airing information, not covering it up for the good of society. If she doesn't want to be a token, she should worry about why she's the only woman columnist on her paper, not shoot the messenger who pointed out that fact.

2005-03-16T13:56:00.000-08:00

So I saw Nanny 911 the other day for the first time. For those of you not up on your reality television, Nanny 911 is a Fox ripoff of a CBS reality show, which may itself be a ripoff of a British reality show. In it, fucked-up American families with out-of-control kids are visited by British nannies, who stay for a week and show them how to make their little monsters into well-behaved children. It's highly compelling television, in a sleazy, Fox-reality-show kind of way.

But it gave me pause. Obviously, all reality shows are sleazy and exploitative on some level. But this one exploits little kids. Even though the nanny made clear that the kids were horrid, nasty little monsters because of their immensely inept parents, not because there was anything inherently wrong with them, you've still got to confront the fact that the entire premise of the show is that the kids are totally out of control. Can 8-year-olds really give meaningful consent to have their family dysfunction laid bare on national television?

Brief Medical Update

2005-03-10T09:17:00.000-08:00

The good news is that the doctors conferred and decided that I should hold off on going back on prednisone, at least for a couple of weeks. If I do go back on, it will be at a lower dosage than last time, when I was on the highest dose that someone my size can take without checking into the hospital for an IV. The bad news is that they came to this decision because they had me do a bone scan, and I'm well on my way to osteoparosis. Prednisone thins the bones, for some reason, so in the future they're probably going to be a bit more careful about prescribing it to me.

I'm a little confused about why they didn't think about this last time, since I have every conceivable risk factor for osteoparosis, but apparently it just occurred to them on Monday that I should have my bone density checked. I've got to be more on top of this stuff. I should have asked them to do the bone scan a year ago.

Also, vertigo + sinus headache is a very odd sensation. So odd, in fact, that I'm at a loss to describe it.

2005-03-09T09:37:00.000-08:00

Did anyone else hear Frank Deford's creepy Morning Edition story about the "Miracle League," which was created to give disabled children the chance to play baseball? At least, it seemed creepy to me. It was partly the tone of the whole thing: there was a pervasive idea that it's a "miracle" when "broken," "unlucky" disabled kids get to do perfectly ordinary things like play sports. It would be nice if disabled kids playing sports would be considered normal, not miraculous. But also, the kids in the Miracle League don't actually get to play baseball. They get to pretend to play baseball. Here are the rules, according to the Miracle League's website:

Every player bats once each inning
All base runners are safe
Every player scores a run before the inning is over (last one up gets a home run)
Community children and volunteers serve as “buddies” to assist the players
Each team and each player wins every game

It seems to me that competition is kind of the heart of youth sports. Part of what you're supposed to learn is how to be gracious in victory and defeat. You're supposed to learn that sometimes you work your ass off and lose anyway, and that sometimes working your ass off matters more than whether you win. You learn that your teammates are still your teammates when they drop the ball. All of that stuff is supposed to benefit you later in life, and you can only learn it if you're allowed to lose. But the Miracle League assumes that disabled kids are so special and fragile that they can't handle competition. It's not just that they need the sports to be modified to meet their physical needs: in fact, there don't seem to be a whole lot of modifications involved in the Miracle League. Instead, they need to be protected from the very essence of sports. And I can't help but think that it's partly because it's assumed that they don't need to learn all those sports-related life lessons, because they're not going to do much with their lives.

There is, of course, another model, and that's the Paralympics. The Paralympics isn't about "special," "miraculous" people playing fake sports in a highly protected atmosphere: it's about athletes being athletes. It's also largely ignored in the U.S. Maybe next time Deford could do a piece on the Paralympic Academy, the youth outreach organization of the U.S. Paralympics.

An even more radical model might be Bankshot Sports, which were designed not to favor either people who use wheelchairs or people who don't. Feminists have pointed out that most sports were designed to stress the areas in which men tend to be stronger, thus reinforcing the idea that women are the weaker sex. It would be possible to create sports in which women would be equal to or even better than men. Similarly, it might be possible to invent sports that would allow disabled and non-disabled athletes to compete equally. A real "Miracle League," I think, would be one where disabled and non-disabled athletes played together and nobody thought it was a big deal.

Weirdest Doctor Exchange of the Day

2005-03-08T16:53:00.000-08:00

So today I had a conversation with an ophthamology resident that went like this:

Ophthamology Resident: Do you have a thyroid disorder?
Me: No.
OR: But you've been tested, right?
Me: Not that I know of. Should I have been?
OR: Yes, because of your bulging eyes.
Me: I have bulging eyes?
OR: [somewhat sheepishly] Well, yeah. Don't you?
Me: Um, I hadn't noticed. My eyes look pretty much the same as always.
OR: Oh, ok. You probably just have kind of bulge-y eyes.

WTF?! I am reasonably angst-ridden about many of my features and body parts, but I think I have perfectly lovely, not-at-all bulging eyes. If he'd mentioned my overbite, or my stumpy fingers, or my thick ankles, I would have to grudgingly admit that he had a point. But must he make a medical problem out of my one good feature?

And the blog name again becomes accurate

2005-03-07T16:41:00.001-08:00

I went to the internist today, and she wants me to go back on oral prednisone. I am extremely unexcited about this. I'd be willing to do it if I had any faith at all that prednisone would make me better, but I don't. And it's 100% guaranteed to make me miserable.

2005-03-07T16:41:00.000-08:00

2005-03-06T09:05:00.000-08:00

The weird thing about having vertigo is that it's difficult to know when you're hungover. I have the spins, but I always have the spins. I'm a little quesy, but that could be because the room is whipping around me. My stupid body doesn't work properly, which makes it very difficult to gauge why it's not working properly at any given moment.

So anyway, as per usual after my mortifying alcohol-related incidents, I'm thinking again that I need to quit drinking. The bad thing about this mortifying alcohol-related experience is that I actually think I was totally in the right. I didn't want to get into the damn argument. I tried to get out of it once I was in it. The person I was arguing with was both obnoxious and wrong. And yet I can't get rid of the feeling that I've made a total fool of myself.

I really need to stop drinking.

2005-03-06T00:30:00.000-08:00

Please remind me not to get drunk at work-related things. Furthermore, please remind me that when I get drunk at work-related things, I should by no means allow anyone to goad me into a discussion of Zionism or anything having to do with the state of Israel.

Thank you.

2005-03-01T23:11:00.000-08:00

I have all the usual objections to women's history month: it's a ghetto; it suggests that women can be relegated to a single month; it brackets women's history off from everything else. It suggests that the study of women is about identity or women's self-esteem, rather than the real stuff of history. So this isn't really in honor of women's history month, unless you'd like it to be. But I stumbled across this today, and it reminded me so much of women's contemporary struggle to get our issues regarded as "serious politics" that I thought it was worth noting:

From Jailed for Freedom, Doris Stevens's history/ memoir of militant women's suffrage, written in 1920:

A few days later the first deputation of suffragists ever to appear before a President to enlist his support for the passage of the national suffrage amendment waited upon President Wilson. Miss [Alice] Paul led the deputation….The President received the deputation in the White House Offices. When the women entered they found five chairs arranged in a row with one chair in front, like a class-room. All confessed to being frightened when the President came in and took his seat at the head of the class. The President said that he had no opinion on the subject of woman suffrage; that he had never given it any thought; and that above all it was his task to see that Congress concentrated on the currency revision and the tariff reform. It is recorded that the President was somewhat taken aback when Miss Paul addressed him during the course of the interview with this query, "But Mr. President, do you not understand that the Administration has no right to legislate for currency, tariff, or any other reform without first getting the consent of women to those reforms?"

"Get the consent of women?" It was evident that this course had not heretofore occurred to him.

"This subject will receive my most careful consideration," was President Wilson's first suffrage promise.

He was given time to "consider" and a second deputation went to him, and still a third, asking him to include the suffrage amendment in his message to the new Congress assembling in extra session the following month. And still he was obsessed with the paramount considerations of "tariff" and "currency." He flatly said there would be no time to consider suffrage for women. But the "unreasonable" women kept right on insisting that the liberty of half the American people was paramount to tariff and currency.

There was a lot wrong with Alice Paul and the National Women's Party. If you know anything about the history of first wave feminism, you can probably fill in the next bit. They were fixated on the vote and ignored many of the problems facing non-elite women, even as they worked to include working-class women in their movement. To their eternal shame, they were willing to sell out African-American women. But you've got to give them credit for insisting that their issues were real issues, and that they shouldn't have to take a back seat to tariffs or currency reform. They insisted that it was hypocritical to tell them to shut up and concentrate on winning a war to make the world safe for democracy, since they themselves were denied the vote.

So it's been almost 90 years, and we're still hearing the same bullshit. We're still hearing that there are no women political bloggers, because feminism isn't thought to be real politics. Somewhere, Alice Paul is rolling in her grave. Somewhere, Alice Paul is telling us to go raise hell, chain ourselves to the White House gates, get arrested, make them hear us whether they want to or not. Somewhere Alice Paul is reminding us that half the human race is not a "special interest."

2005-03-01T08:07:00.000-08:00

It is my own damn fault for watching The View, but I just witnessed the following horrifying segue. They were discussing Michael Jackson, and Elisabeth (the young, vapid, reactionary one) changed the subject to The Bachelorette finale. And she said, "speaking of assault, I was assaulted by The Bachelorette I was raped of three hours of sleep."

Crap on a cracker. What on earth made her think that was in any way an acceptable thing to say? And did someone tie her down and force her to watch three hours of stupid reality television?

So far the frontrunner in the cane Olympics seems to be the ones made by the Cane Lady. I'm still not totally wild about them, though. They're awfully floral. Doesn't anyone make canes with lovely insects painted on them? My friend M. thinks I should get a cane that is painted to look like a candy cane.

Fun With Canes!

2005-02-26T07:27:00.000-08:00

Last time I had vertigo, I held off on getting a cane. It just seemed like too much of a statement. Canes say "sick." Canes say "old." Canes say "disabled." But I am well past that this time, and I'm getting a cane. I am not going to fall on my ass again just because I'm in denial.

But I do want a hip, cute cane. Is that so damn much to ask? I want a cane that does not look like something that my grandmother would use. So I have been searching the internet for quirky, fashion-forward canes. And I'm not having much luck. I have found patriotic canes. I have found a cane in the shape of a pirate. I have found a cane that doubles as both a sword and a watch. But none of these appeals to me very much. Actually, that's a huge lie. The sword/watch/cane combo appeals to me immensely. But I can't justify spending three hundred dollars on a sword/watch/cane.

So where does a girl go to get a cool cane?

2005-02-25T13:23:00.000-08:00

I am going to take a break from whining about my vertigo to link to this awesome idea: buy a custom-made salwar kameez on ebay. Essentially, you buy directly from a tailor in India, who makes your outfit to your specifications and then mails it off to you. I'm not convinced I could pull off a salwar kameez, but what a great idea.

2005-02-24T15:28:00.000-08:00

So the vertigo is definitely back. The timing couldn't be worse: I have an incredibly hectic couple of months ahead of me, and there's really nothing I can let slide. I'm going to have to be as productive as is humanly possible, and I'm going to have to do that while feeling like I'm on a sit 'n' spin. Crap.

I need to call my various doctors and let them know what's going on, but I can't quite bring myself to do it.

Aaaargh. I'm actually surprisingly calm, but this really isn't anything I want to deal with right now. At least this time they know what the problem is, and I shouldn't have to do all the stupid tests to rule out all manner of dread disease.

2005-02-23T19:54:00.000-08:00

Ok, the room has stopped spinning, and I'm a bit calmer. But I'm still a tad freaked. That's the first sustained vertigo I've had since I spontaneously got better in early June. Also, my hands are freezing and blue, even though the heat is on. It's probably just stress: I'm freaked out, and stress makes my Raynaud's worse. But I'm afraid I'm having some sort of autoimmune meltdown.

Bleh. Maybe it was just a one-time thing. Here's hoping.

Fuck

2005-02-23T16:55:00.000-08:00

I'm having a vertigo attack as I type this. I honestly don't know how I'm going to deal with this all over again.

Vagina Monologues Controversy Goes International

2005-02-20T09:50:00.000-08:00

Every year the feminist group on my campus stages a reading of The Vagina Monologues for Valentine's Day, and every year some conservative students grumble about it. It's anti-romantic, it's anti-men, it takes all the fun out of Valentine's Day. There was even a "Take Back Valentine's Day" campaign last year. I haven't seen The Vagina Monologues, and I'm pretty certain it wouldn't really be my thing, but there's something kind of annoying about the backlash. Nobody is being forced to spend the evening watching an ode to female genetalia. The performance is popular on campus because people want to go to it. If you'd prefer to do something else on Valentine's Day, by all means, do something else. What exactly is the big deal?

Anyway, the stupid "Take Back Valentine's Day" campaign can't hold a candle to the play's reception in Uganda, where the government resurrected censorship laws so that the producers could be forced to change it beyond recognition. For instance, the word "vagina" in the title has been declared obscene. Seriously. Apparently, in Uganda, one cannot use the technical term for women's genitals. The production was intended to raise funds for women who have been kidnapped and raped (the article says "abduct[ed]...to serve as forced 'wives'") in the war in Northern Uganda. It looks like the show will not go on.

The play was censored at the behest of Christian lobby groups, which objected to frank discussions of sexuality, particularly lesbianism. But African feminists have raised more legitimate objections.

But Ensler's play has also attracted criticism for offering a universal treatment of women's lives. 'It seems extremely arrogant that The Vagina Monologues remains the same everywhere,' Wainana said.

Although the drama draws heavily on American womens' experiences, the Nairobi performance touched on its Kenyan context with references to female genital mutilation and the high incidence of rape in the city's slums.

Ain't that America, land of the free...

2005-02-19T21:51:00.000-08:00

Did you know that under the Sedition Act of 1918, an American could be sent to prison for 20 years for, and I quote,

uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language intended to cause contempt, scorn, contumely or disrepute as regards the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution, or the flag, or the uniform of the Army or Navy...

(There are a bunch of other things after that elipses, but they're not as interesting.) So you literally could be sentenced to 20 years in prison for saying "I think the American flag is ugly." There were acutally some people sentenced to 20 years for doing exactly that, although I think they were all pardoned after a couple of years. But still. Can you imagine spending two years in prison for saying "those knee breeches are a little goofy?"

So much for the First Amendment.

I'm sort of kicking around the idea of trying to track down the descendents of some of the people convicted under the Sedition Act. I'm curious about it. Do they know their great grandfathers went to prison for speech crimes? What do they make of that? Does it influence how they think about civil liberties issues today?

2005-02-18T19:25:00.000-08:00

I really should have something deeply brilliant to say today, but I'm facing an exhaustion crisis. Essentially, I'm so stressed out about my dissertation that I can't sleep. But then when I try to work on the dissertation, I'm so exhausted that I'm not very productive. And that means that I'm not getting enough done, so I'm more stressed out and can't sleep. It's like the vicious cycle of dissertation angst. I'm so tired I'm having trouble making my eyes focus.

Actually, I think I need new glasses. The problem with my current eye issues is that, even though I go to the ophthamologist every three months, she never checks my vision. She checks for glaucoma and cataracts and uveitis and all sorts of real eye diseases, but not for your basic "your eyes have gotten worse and you need new lenses" stuff. (She's also, I'm pretty sure, secretly convinced that I have syphillis or brain cancer, and she's constantly suggesting I get a spinal tap, something that every single one of my other doctors finds totally insane. Oh, and she claims that the only reason that I don't want a spinal tap is that it's in an erogenous zone, which frankly tells me more than I want to know about my opthamologist's sexual proclivities. I guess the small of your back is an erogenous zone, but I don't want a spinal tap because of the whole "sticking a very long needle into your spine" thing. As Freud said, sometimes a really long needle is just a really long, sharp, scary needle. Also, she's the doctor who stood in the waiting room and told the receptionist to order a brain MRI for me, using my full name, oblivious to the fact that a professor from my department was sitting right there, waiting for her eye-doctor appointment. Since nobody in my department, including my advisor, knew that I was MRI-level sick, this was kind of a breach of confidentiality. Come to think of it, maybe I need a new ophthamologist.)

So anyway, that's a long-winded way of saying that I'm having trouble focusing my eyes because I am very neurotic and exhausted, but also maybe because I need new glasses.

By the way, is it very, very bad that I really want to make twinkie sushi? And I want to do that even though I should be spending every waking hour working on my dissertation, so that I can sleep?

Learn English or We'll Take Your Kids

2005-02-17T16:40:00.000-08:00

According to this article, a family court judge in Tennessee has been ordering immigrant women to learn English or risk losing custody of their children. The most recent woman had been brought before him on relatively trivial charges: failing to immunize her child and missing some doctor's appointments. These are, needless to say, not things for which a middle-class white woman would be hauled into family court. The judge has told the woman that unless she can speak English at a fourth-grade level in six months, he will consider revoking custody. He also ordered her to use birth control, something that may well be against her religion. Lovely.

Now, I believe that immigrants to the U.S. should learn English. It's a vital skill to survive and get ahead in this society. Frankly, I've never met an immigrant who felt differently. But, as anyone who's tried to do it can attest, learning a language is not that easy. It takes a lot of time and effort. And this woman is facing a lot of burdens on her time, such as work and childcare responsibilities. Something will have to give, and you can bet that whatever it is, her child will suffer. This is a stupid, bigoted, punitive decision that goes against the very things that family court tries to accomplish: looking after the best interests of the child. It is not in the child's best interest to be neglected by her mother. Nor is it in the child's best interests to be wrenched away from her family because they happen to be immigrants. Hopefully, the mother will eventually learn English. If not, the child surely will anyway, as children have throughout American history. But this threat isn't going to help matters.

More than that, I suspect this isn't really about the best interests of the child. It's about the judge's attitudes about immigrants. He's not trying to protect the child: he's attempting to use her as leverage to get the mother to behave the way he wants her to. And that's a huge abuse of his power. There's really only one child abuser in this scenario, and it's not the mother.

2005-02-16T20:27:00.000-08:00

Bleh. I'm in a reasonably shitty mood. Today my rheumatologist, who is by far my favorite doctor and the only one who treats me like an actual person rather than a fascinating specimen, informed me that she's leaving in June. Immediately after that, the senior doctor came in and started bombarding her with a bunch of questions about me, as if I wasn't even in the room. (And since some of the questions boiled down to "is her heart about to explode?", I kind of wish he'd waited until I was out of earshot. I know that my heart might explode, but I don't really want to think about it any more than is strictly necessary. And no, "explode" is not the technical term.) And I'm not making enough progress on my dissertation. And I'm pretty sure I'm annoying and everyone hates me.

I think I may be premenstrual.

So today I am going to post about Veronica Mars. Have I mentioned that I love Veronica Mars? It's like the antidote to every crappy, male-centered teen drama that I also love.

The basic premise of Veronica Mars is this: Veronica is a high school junior who lives in Neptune, a sunny, Southern California town populated by rich people and the working-class folks who work for the rich people. The children of the two groups do not get along. Until last year, Veronica's father was the chief of the Neptune police, and she was in with the rich, popular crowd, mostly because she was best friends with uber-rich-kid Lily Kane. Then, in rapid succession, a number of terrible things happened. Lily was murdered. Veronica's father apparently botched the investigation in particularly spectacular and embarassing fashion and lost his job. Veronica's mother, apparently unable to handle the humiliation and loss of status, took off and hasn't been heard from since. Veronica's father set up as a private detective, but it doesn't pay very well, so the family had to sell their home and move to an apartment on the bad side of town. All of Veronica's friends ostracized her. And at a party she only went to in an attempt to show she was still standing, someone drugged and raped her. Now, she goes to school and helps run her dad's private detective agency. Every week, there's a mystery that is solved by the end of the episode. But there's also a season-long arc as Veronica attempts to figure out who raped her, who killed Lily, and what the hell is going on with her missing mother.

If this all sounds pretty dark, it is, sort of. But it's also a funny show, and Veronica is a great character. For one thing, she's the rare "smart girl" on T.V. who actually projects intelligence. But also, her wariness and sarcasm seem earned. In flashbacks, we see the more innocent Veronica of a year ago, when she was the earnest good-girl foil to Lily's wild child. If she's not that girl anymore, it's because she can't be. Veronica isn't cynical, but she's trying desperately to salvage her dignity and make sense of what's happened to her, and she hides behind sarcastic one-liners because she can't afford to show she cares. There's a real undercurrent of pain beneath the glibness.

So this show is the anti-O.C. For one thing, Veronica, the protagonist, is certifiably female. She is surrounded by supporting male characters, such as her father, her friend Wallace, her sometime-ally Weevil, her ex-boyfriend (and Lily's brother) Duncan, and Lily's ex-boyfriend Logan. But the show is named for Veronica, and it's told from her perspective. She does not merely exist to be someone's girlfriend. Also, this is a teen show that is not, fundamentally, about romance. There are and have been romances: Veronica used to date Duncan, and she has a crush on a cute policeman. But at the moment, Veronica is focused on surviving, on solving the mysteries in her life, on helping her father, on standing up for what's right... that kind of thing. Watching other teen shows, you'd get the idea that dating is the only concern in a high-schooler's life.

So anyway, the show has terrible ratings, may be canceled, and will almost certainly not be coming back for a second season. Probably, it will be like Firefly: one of those shows that people discover when the DVD comes out. I can live with that, I guess. But I'm going to be really irked if they take it off the air before we find out who killed Lily.

Happy Sts. Cyril and Methodius Day!

2005-02-14T08:16:00.000-08:00

I hope that everyone is doing something really fun to celebrate the feast day of Saints Cyril and Methodius, the Apostles of the Slavs. Today is a day to celebrate everything that is beautiful about Slavic culture. Eat some Slovak food. Read some poetry by France Preseren. Listen to some Bulgarian folk music. Today is a very special holiday celebrating a very interesting part of the world, and we should all find time to make the most of it.

2005-02-13T14:53:00.000-08:00

Chiming in on the O.C.controversy here. Short version, for those of you not following these things: the hit T.V. show The O.C., following a precipitious ratings decline, is featuring a romance between two female teenaged characters, a romance that is carefully scheduled for February sweeps. Is this a sign of progress for gay rights? Is it a cheap ratings stunt that relies on straight guys' fantasies about hot girl-on-girl action, fantasies that are rooted in porn and in male dominance, rather than in respect for real lesbians or bisexual women? It's hard to tell.

A while back, I posted about my issues with The O.C.". I adore The O.C., but I still think it's a pretty sexist show, in which men and boys are real characters and women and girls serve the plots of the men and boys. The real characters here are endearing geek Seth, his smart, wounded pseudo-brother Ryan, and their father/guardian Sandy. The women are mostly real or potential love-interests for those three characters. And even though Marissa and Alex's same-sex relationship seems to break that mold, I'm not really on board with it. I'm tending to the exploitative ratings stunt camp.

The problem with the plot is that, although when viewed in isolation it seems to be handled tastefully and sensitively, the audience isn't viewing the plot in isolation. We're aware of these characters' histories, and that our influences our interpretation of their romance. So it matters that both Marissa and Alex are both pretty screwed up. Alex seems to be basically functional: she has a job and an apartment and hasn't been shown doing anything really stupid. But we know that her parents kicked her out of the house after she was expelled from at least three different schools, and her friends all seem pretty unsavory. And Marissa, the one who is a permanent character and who will still be on the show after this romance ends, is defined by her self-destructiveness. In the year and a half since the series began, Marissa has attempted suicide, been caught shoplifting, got in a fender-bender while driving drunk, and jeopardized her boyfriend's probation at least twice. In the first episode of the whole series, she ended up passed-out drunk in her parents' driveway. She puts vodka in her morning coffee, and she carries around a flask out of which she drinks at school. Her last two relationships were both with working-class guys whose appeal seemed to be, at least in part, that in her wealthy, privileged world, dating a blue-collar man is construed as rebellious. When she was dating Ryan, she made his life a living hell, constantly getting into trouble and demanding that Ryan rescue her. In a show populated by needy, manipulative damsels in distress, Marissa has always been the most needy and the most fucked up.

If you're already inclined to see same-sex relationships as good things, you could view Marissa and Alex's romance as the first healthy relationship Marissa has ever had. But if you are inclined to think that all queer folks are sick or sad, you can see the relationship as part of Marissa's usual pattern. You can see Marissa and Alex not as two teenagers in love (yay!), but as screwed-up, self-destructive characters who have found another way to act out and self-destruct. And I suspect that the show, which has generally depicted all sorts of teenaged behavior, from drinking to drugs to sex, in a pretty non-judgemental fashion, is deliberately keeping this ambiguous. That way, they get points from gay-rights groups, but homophobes can see what they want to see.

Incidentally, The O.C. has dealt with homosexuality once before. Last year, uber-jock Luke found out that his supposedly happily-married dad was gay when Luke and Ryan accidentally observed Luke's father kissing another man. The resulting fallout made for the closest thing that The O.C. has had to a Very Special Episode. When Luke's father was outed, Luke's jock asshole friends ostracized him, which kicked off Luke's redemption arc and his transformation from a violent bully to a goofy, loveable lug. The outing crisis allowed various characters to weigh in on what it means to be a good man and a good father: the message was that what matters is being there for the people you love, not being straight or otherwise conventional. (That's in line with the show's overall message about what it means to be a man, an important theme in the first season.) Because Luke's father always loved and supported his wife and kids, and because he stuck around and dealt with the pain caused by his deception, Luke was able to forgive him. Last we heard from Luke, he had moved to Oregon to live with his newly-single, newly-out father. When Seth needed to get away from his family, he went to Portland to stay with Luke and Luke's dad. This aroused comment because of the running-away thing, but nobody seemed to think it was a problem that Seth was staying with a gay man. In fact, they seemed relieved that he had found a safe place to go.

I wasn't crazy about the Luke's gay dad plot. For one thing, it was a lot more heavy-handed and moralizing than The O.C. usually is, and I like my moralizing done with a lighter touch. For another, I never entirely bought that one trauma could transform a character as outlandishly horrid as Luke quite that quickly or smoothly. But from a gay-rights perspective I thought it was pretty well done.

However, two things are different about Marissa and Alex. The first is that they're women. (Actually, they're girls. Alex is supposed to be 17 and Marissa 16 or so.) There's the whole hot-girl-on-girl porn element, and you get the feeling that the guys who produce this show do like their porn. There's been one positive, humorous mention of porn, two episodes featuring strippers, and one featuring wacky hijinks involving prostitutes. Fun! And in general, as I've said, this show tends to objectify women, even as it produces nuanced, sympathetic male characters. So that doesn't bode well. But also, the show's creator has told reporters that he's been pressured to back away from controversial subjects and that he doesn't want to alienate conservatives. And frankly, a lesbian storyline that doesn't irritate conservatives is not necessarily one that I want any part of.

And with that, I am off to watch Desperate Housewives. They're going to revoke my feminist credentials any day now.

2005-02-12T08:34:00.000-08:00

I am holed up in the library, where I really should be painstakingly working my way through newspapers from 1918. But instead, I am going to venture into the abortion debate, something which I usually avoid, mostly because I don't think I have anything all that new or interesting to add.

But over on Alas, a blog, amp has linked to a post by John a pro-lifer in New Zealand who initially claimed that abortion is all about control. And that's a bad thing. Pro-choicers can't accept that the world is not entirely controlable, and supporting abortion rights is our pathological response to our need to believe we're in charge of our destinies. Amp pointed out that we try to assert control in many ways: through mainstream medicine, for instance, which tries to treat disease rather than just allowing nature to take its course. The reason that John thinks that it's pathological to support abortion rights is that he, unlike pro-choice people, thinks that a fetus is a person, and therefore that abortion is an illegitimate and not a legitimate means of controling our lives. John has partially conceded the point although he still seems to think that women's desire to control what happens to our bodies is a bit different from his desire to control what happens to his.

Since the "control" issue doesn't really work, he shifts tactics and starts talking about fetal personhood. He says that "From the moment of conception to birth, there is no morally significant dividing line at which the foetus could be said to magically transform herself into a baby." Viability, he says, is not a good dividing line because it isn't static: babies become viable at different stages in the pregnancy depending on the quality of medical care available. Since the only fixed, static, clear moment of magical transformation is conception, we have to accept that a fetus is as fully a person as you or I from the moment it is conceived.

I would argue that this line of thought stems from John's own inability to confront the world. John needs certainty: he's terrified of ambiguity. But sometimes that certainty isn't available. Sometimes we have to make due with imprecise solutions, because certainty and precision aren't the highest goods.

If it's not clear when life begins, it's also no longer clear when it ends. Death used to be pretty straightforward: at some point, you stop breathing, your organs stop working, and everything shuts down. Thanks to modern medicine, that's not true anymore. Certain systems can be kept alive even as others die. There's great controversy over when a person is actually dead: is it when all systems stop, or can we declare someone dead even while machines are still keeping parts of their body alive?

The unambiguous, precise answer to this would be not to declare someone dead until every bodily system had ceased to function. The problem with that has to do with organ donation. If we wait until the entire body has shut down, it's too late to harvest organs for transplant. Instead, when a person's brain has ceased to function, we declare that person "brain dead" and begin the organ donation process. "Brain death" is, according to many medical ethicists, a fiction, but it's a fiction that has saved or improved the lives of countless people. In fact, we routinely harvest organs from people who are certainly dying and who have no chance of recovery but who could be said, in some sense, to still be alive.

It's a little bit scary to confront this ambiguity. It's a little frightening to think that I could be in a car accident tomorrow and someone could cut out and take away my still-beating heart. But we tolerate that ambiguity because almost everyone recognizes that the good done by organ donation outweighs the moral problems associated with killing someone who is, at least according to some systems of belief, still alive.

There are a lot of other complex issues that don't lend themselves to clear, simple solutions. For instance, we have to decide at what age a person is an adult and can be held legally responsible for his or her actions. Sometimes, we set an arbitrary age, even though not everyone is equally developed at 16 or 18. Sometimes we try to determine on a case-by-case basis, but then all sorts of biases come into play. In a perfect world, every person would be evaluated semi-annually by a completely impartial observor who would determine whether that person was old enough to drive, drink, marry, sign a legal contract, give informed medical consent, and/or be punished for committing a crime. But we can't achieve that perfect world, so we do the best we can. We don't do well enough; we will never do well enough; we must always try to hone our systems and make them better. But we're never going to come up with a magical formula for determining when someone is an adult, or when they're dead, or when a fetus is a person. And we just have to have the courage to confront a world in which some really important things will never be clear and certain.

It's scary and it may be sad, but we can't come up with rules that will reduce moral questions to obvious, black and white issues. There will always be shades of gray. We will always, sometimes, have to come up with the best possible but still unsatisfactory solutions to ethical quandries. John seems to suggest that moral certainty is the highest good. He seems to think it's ok to sacrifice people's lives or happiness so that we can draw an absolute line, so that we can reduce complex and possibly unanswerable questions to clear, easily-dilineated categories. And I just don't think that people should be sacrificed to his need for certainty. When the clearest answer produces real suffering, we need to consider that maybe the moral imperative to reduce suffering trumps the imperative to find the solution that is ethically pure.

2005-02-11T13:31:00.000-08:00

Great. So according to Find Your Spot, the U.S. city for which I'm best suited is the city in which I grew up and near which my parents still live. That is to say, the city I fled at the earliest possible moment and have been badmouthing ever since. I have become what I despise!

I think I need to retake the test so that it will tell me I should live somewhere immensely more fabulous.

2005-02-11T06:27:00.000-08:00

I woke up about fifteen minutes ago, and I planned to do what I normally do: turn on NPR and stay in bed for a half an hour. But then I heard something that made me sit up in bed and rush out to preserve it for posterity. Honestly, I've heard a lot of shit over the past few days, but this takes the cake.

The story was a commentary by , Ev Ehrlich, Clinton's undersecretary for commerce, about why Democrats need to think about Social Security reform. He said the issue was important to two key constituencies over whom the parties will be fighting: young people and Hispanics. The reason it's important to Hispanics is that the work-force will increasingly be comprised of them. In the future, the number of Hispanic workers will rise and the number of white workers will fall, as the white population ages and retires. Hispanics will be the people paying into Social Security, and white people will be the recipients. And then he said the following thing, which I believe I'm quoting verbatim:

"To put it crudely, and to exaggerate, in the future white people will expect to be supported by their domestic workers."

What does it say about the Democrats, or for that matter about NPR, that their representatives think it's ok to equate Latinos and domestic workers? Maybe the only Latinos that Ehrlich knows are the people who clean his house and make his garden pretty, and maybe he assumes that's true for NPR's predominately white, predominately well-off listeners as well. But it's insane to revert to that stereotype in a commentary that hinges on the fact that Latinos are an increasing economic force in this country. And if the Democratic Party wants to appeal to Latino voters, it might be helpful to banish the racist stereotypes about them. Similarly, if NPR is serious about appealing to diverse audiences, it could start by asking commentators not to equate entire ethnic groups with the household help.

(And for that matter, it's dumb, offensive, and bad strategy for the Democrats to assume that all white people are wealthy enough to be able to hire domestic workers. Eeek! And also, aargh!)

ETA: a half an hour ago, sitting at my micro-film reading machine, I panicked. I thought "I wrote that blog entry about Ev Ehrlich, and it can't be right. He can't actually have said that: it's too stupid and offensive and... stupid. I must have heard wrong. I must have been half awake. I've probably slandered Ev Ehrlich!"

So I went and downloaded the audio and listened to the piece again. And there was no mistake. He really said it.

And there, folks, you have another reason to vote for the Greens. That is, if you're American. Otherwise, you should just be glad you're not. There seem to be very few oases of non-moronic-ness in this country.

2005-02-10T18:38:00.000-08:00

Some student group on campus is having a big Mardi Gras party tomorrow. Doesn't that seem kind of wrong? I mean, it's great to have a Mardi Gras party the Friday before actual Mardi Gras, since a lot of students can't make it on Tuesday, but the Friday after? Isn't it, um, Lent? Aren't Catholics, the people who, after all, invented Mardi Gras, supposed to not really be partying on Fridays during Lent? It seems kind of like throwing a big Passover pork sandwich barbeque. I'm all for using any excuse to have a party, but if you're going to co-opt other people's rituals, you should at least respect their traditions.

Am I over-thinking this?

2005-02-10T10:12:00.000-08:00

Oh, dear. Three years after everyone else, I have just realized that I can plug my computer into the ethernet connection at the library. I am currently doing just that, and my internet connection is so damn fast. It zooms. It downloads pictures in the blink of an eye. Internet radio, here I come!

This is seriously dangerous. I will now never leave the library. And I have no idea how much money I'm going to blow on iTunes now that I don't have to wait 15 minutes to download a single song.

2005-02-09T18:59:00.000-08:00

It looks like one of my least favorite right-wing, misogynistic columnists, The Irish Times's resident nutcase Kevin Myers, has finally got himself in serious trouble. You see, he's trying to resurrect the term "bastard" to describe the children of unmarried couples. He also likes "MoB" or "mother of bastards" to describe the women who give birth to such children. In a country where about a third of children are born to unwed parents, and where within living memory women were terribly shamed for having children out of wedlock, this has not gone over well. Myers has been forced to offer an abject apology, which sadly you can't read without paying 80 euros for an Irish Times subscription. No word on whether he'll keep his job, although I'd be surprised if he didn't.

Ever since the Magdalene Sisters came out, I've found myself trying desperately to explain to people that Ireland really isn't like that anymore. That's not to say that Ireland is a feminist paradise, because clearly it's not. But Irish attitudes about sexuality are more complicated than people think. And to me, the outrage at Myers seems much more typical of contemporary Ireland than his attempts to stigmatize the children of unmarried parents.

Bush to Sick People: Fuck You

2005-02-05T08:28:00.000-08:00

Wondering how Bush is going to pay for his little Iraqi adventure? Today we learned how: he's going to screw over sick people.

According to this New York Times story, Bush's budget contains deep cuts in health programs. The Centers for Disease Control's budget would be cut by nearly 10%. Funds to train nurses would be cut by 64%. A program that treats people with traumatic brain injuries would be eliminated altogether. The National Institutes of Health, the agency that performs medical research, would get a tiny bit more money, but not enough to keep up with rising costs, so it would have to scale back its research efforts.

Meanwhile, abstinence education programs would get a 50% raise.

In which I mindlessly follow blog trends...

2005-02-04T08:07:00.000-08:00

My Friday random top ten. I'd cat-blog, too, except that I don't have cats.

1. Poor Little Me, Eliza Carthy
2. Sometimes, My Bloody Valentine
3. Honey and the Moon, Joseph Arthur
4. The Banks of the Suir, Laurence Nugent
5. Criminal Piece, Ted Leo
6. Ear Wax, Bauhaus
7. Lightening Strikes, The Clash
8. The Sick Bed of Cuchuliann, The Pogues
9. You're Wondering Now, The Specials
10. Care of Cell 44, The Zombies

That list is awfully heavy on stuff I listened to in high school.

2005-02-03T22:16:00.000-08:00

I was all set to write a fascinating, or at least vaguely coherent, post when I heard brakes squeeling and a big crash and saw flashing lights out my window, and then three minutes later a cop came and rang my bell to tell me that someone had crashed into my parked car. She, the crasher, is ok, she has insurance, and my car doesn't look too badly injured, so I guess it's not a big deal. But I'm now cold and tired and a bit frazzled, so I am not going to aim for fascinating or even coherent.

I'm just going to link to this awesome website about African-American migration, which I found via <blackfeminism.org. In general, immigration historians have not paid much attention to the African diaspora, for a variety of reasons, none of them very good. Also, we tend to think about transnational migration and migration within countries as if they're two totally separate things, which makes sense if you're talking about the modern era but not so much if you're talking about anything before the 1920s (later for Caribbean immigrants), when a stricter regime of immigration control was put in place. That's all beginning to change, which is lovely, but if you're not an immigration historian of fairly recent vintage, chances are very good that you weren't taught much in school about African-American migration, especially voluntary international migration. This site discusses both voluntary and forced migration, and it looks at both international and internal migration streams. And it has lots of pictures and maps, which are very slow to load on my pathetic dial-up connection but which will probably be extremely fascinating to all of you lucky people with DSL. Yay!

Credit card debt? Irresponsibility?

2005-02-02T18:11:00.000-08:00

This isn't news, and in fact I think I've blogged about it before, but a new study from Harvard confirms that the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in America is medical debt. The average medical bankrupt, according to the survey, is a working to middle-class woman in her forties. Over three-quarters had insurance at the onset of their illness. Their average out-of-pocket medical bills were over $10,000.

So yeah. We need national health care. Nobody should be financially wiped out by illness. In a just society, nobody would be. This is, dare I say it, an issue of moral values, albeit one that neither party much wants to talk about.

I hate utility companies

2005-02-02T09:31:00.000-08:00

And that's all I am going to say on the matter, because otherwise I will turn into a howling, seething rage monster, and that will scare the neighbors.

Living off the grid has never looked so appealing.

2005-01-30T20:50:00.000-08:00

I have been a very, very bad blogger recently. I think my mind has turned to mush. I've also been busy, but that's not a good excuse. I will try to be better next week. I will try to have fascinating thoughts and exciting adventures and to convey them all in a lively, witty, and engaging style.

Barring that, I'll at least try to blog about television.

2005-01-22T14:05:00.000-08:00

I'm in a lousy mood. I've been in a lousy mood for days, and I'm dealing with it by whining a lot and baiting trolls on feministing First of all, it's snowing, and while snow is lovely, it's also very cold. And I don't deal well with cold. I used to think that I was cold-blooded. Now, thanks to the miracle of rheumatology, I know that I have Raynaud's phenomenon and livedo reticularis (Note: you may find the livedo pictures gross. Which is to say, you may find me gross, at least when I'm cold. Sorry about that.) Neither of these things is particularly serious or rare, but they do mean that it hurts to be cold. I used to wonder why I was the only person I knew whose ears felt like they were going to fall off when it got below about 50. Now I know. So anyway, I hate the cold, and I've been holed up in my apartment for two days.

Also, I kind of feel like shit. Yesterday I had a back ache, and it seems to have morphed into an everything-ache. Because everything aches, I can't sleep. Despite my now-almost-entirely-lactose-free diet, my stomach is bothering me. I have an itchy rash. I'm tired, I ache, I itch, I feel like I'm going to puke, and it's all very annoying.

So I'm spending the night cooking, watching T.V., and downloading embarassing pop tunes from iTunes. Seriously embarassing: I just downloaded Britney Spears's "Toxic." I feel a little better already.

Incidentally, I'm watching a BBC profile of ice dancing team John and Sinead Kerr, who are siblings. And I'm thinking that's a little sketchy. Isn't there a kind of couple-y vibe to ice dancing?

2005-01-20T08:52:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about the Larry Summers flap. I'm sure everyone who reads my blog has heard about this: basically, the president of Harvard suggested that the reason there are so few women elite scientists is that women are innately bad at science and math. And this made me remember a story about the smartest girl in my high school

She was a couple of years ahead of me, and I was friends with her younger sister. She was fierce, and she seemed to be good at everything. She took AP calculus, physics, Latin, English and US history, got 5s on all of them, and ended up with the second highest GPA in her class, even though my school didn’t weight grades and pretty much everyone else was taking an easier course load. She made the all-city track team twice. She worked construction in the summers, which was just not something women did where I grew up. She used to have funny stories about the guys' attempts to harass her and make her uncomfortable, and she at least seemed completely unfazed by it all. She was unusually good looking, even in a school full of really pretty girls. She was so cool that she could wear all black, listen to Skinny Puppy, and instead of people thinking of her as a freak, she just made them think that wearing all black and listening to Skinny Puppy was cool. There was no way in hell I could ever have pulled that off. She was the most intimidating woman I'd ever met, and she was 17. I was totally scared of her.

So anyway, she went off to the most elite college in the country, and naturally she signed up for the most advanced math and science classes she could find. Her first day of classes her freshman year, she showed up for a super-intensive physics class, and the professor asked her to stick around after class. And then he told her to drop the class because, and I quote, "pretty girls are distracting." She had done as well as it was possible to do in the hardest math and science classes she'd had access to until that date, but when her physics professor looked at her, he didn't see a future scientist. He saw someone who distracted the future scientists.

This story was reported to me by her younger sister, and I don't remember if she dropped the class or got the prof to reconsider. She did eventually major in physics and get a PhD, and last I heard she was a professor at a big-name research institution. So although it would be hard for anyone to deny that this was an instance of bias in the sciences, maybe the Larry Summerses of the world would point out that it didn't dissuade her from pursuing a career in elite science.

But then I thought, what if it had been me? I was not a fierce 18-year-old. I completely lacked intellectual confidence. I didn't expect to get into the college I eventually attended, and I spent my time there believing that my good grades were a fluke. I secretly spent my entire college career pretty convinced that I was about to be exposed as a moron. After I graduated, one of my professors convinced me that I was capable of going to grad school and sort of shamed me into overcoming my insecurities. Looking back on it, I was a pretty obvious candidate for an academic career, but I required encouragement to think of myself that way. And I got that encouragement because I had a professor who saw me as a potential historian, not as someone who would distract potential historians.

I'm not a scientist, and I don't really have the skills necessary to evaluate whether there are gender differences in men's and women's brains. But I do think there are some pretty big differences in how men and women are taught to view their intellectual capacities, in how much they're taught to assert themselves, and in how much encouragement they get from authority figures. And honestly, I think we should concentrate on correcting those imbalances before we start talking about innate inequality.

Someone is trying to tell us something...

2005-01-19T14:46:00.001-08:00

This just in: unexpected snowstorm mars Bush inauguration

Someone is trying to tell us something...

2005-01-19T14:46:00.000-08:00

2005-01-16T15:45:00.000-08:00

Trish Wilson linked to this list of Maryland ghost stories. I was particularly amused by this one:

Ellicott City - St. Mary's College - Hell House - The building was founded in 1866 and it's main building was erected in 1868. It is actually in Ilchester, MD not too far from Ellicott City. It is said that it was a catholic all girls school and the cardinal had impure thoughts which he took out on 5 nuns. A nun came foward and told the archbishop and the cardinal had to leave. The nuns were later killed and place above an inverted pentegram. Later more girls and nuns died and the school was closed down in 1972. Some say that the nuns at the school were practicing satanic rituals and some say that the cardinal came back to get his revenge. Unfortunately, the school burned down Halloween night in 1997 and authorites still do not know the cause of the fire. Some people have heard screams, girls laughing, and have seen a strange shadowy figure on the premises. There are tunnels underneathwith drawings in red of pentegrams and other markings. - A note to all who go, be careful because the building is no longer stable.

That story, minus the ghosts, could be taken straight out of a 19th century anti-Catholic convent novel. (I'm slightly obsessed with these things. They're salacious, sometimes quasi-pornographic novels or "memoirs" that purport to tell about the horrible, horrible things that supposedly befell nuns in convents. It was, of course, deeply painful for the authors to discuss these horrible, horrible crimes, but it was nonetheless necessary to describe them in exquisite detail, so that virtuous Protestants could avoid such a fate.) It has all the right elements: underground tunnels, lecherous priests, murdered nuns, sinister rituals... it's only missing the pure, Protestant maiden who will see the light of Scripture and rescue herself from a life of Catholic sin. I don't think anyone writes or reads convent novels anymore, but it's interesting to see that the basic plot seems to survive in folklore.

2005-01-16T10:41:00.000-08:00

I don't have very much to say about the flap about Prince Harry and the Nazi uniform. Was it in poor taste? Sure. Does it suggest that he's been raised to be a clueless dingbat? Yes, but I think we knew that already. But honestly, the outrage seems a bit disproportionate to the offense. Given all the truly awful things going on in the world right now, I'm inclined to save my outrage for other targets.

But I do want to comment on calls for a ban on swastikas." I heard a German politician on the BBC last night advocating this, and he seemed to suggest that it should extend to the U.S., since the internet has made American swastika-laden stuff available to Europeans. "This is not a free speech issue," he said.

The thing is, it is. Actually, I think it's a freedom of religion issue. Hitler did not invent the swastika. He stole it from India, where it was and continues to be a symbol of good luck. It's used by Hindus and Buddhists, and it's an emblem of the Jain faith. It's even been incorporated in the officialJain symbol. I stayed with friends of friends in Bombay, and they chalked little swastikas all over their front walk, because swastikas are decorative and are thought to be auspicious. My hosts were totally taken aback when I flinched at the sight of swastikas. They knew, of course, that Nazis had appropriated the symbol, but they'd had no idea that Nazism was the primary (indeed, the only) thing that people in the West associated with the swastika. "But we used it first!" they pointed out. And that's true.

In my experience, South Asians in the U.S. are hesitant to display swastikas, for obvious reasons. But that's a far cry from saying that they shouldn't be allowed to do so.

For me, the swastika will never be redeemed. I'm always going to associate it with the people who murdered my great-grandparents. But my associations are not the only valid ones. I don't believe in banning symbols anyway, but this one seems especially problematic. Would the law require governments to prosecute Jains for displaying the symbol of their religion? The irony is that a law meant to protect minorities would actually criminalize expressions of minority faiths.

2005-01-15T19:28:00.000-08:00

When you study history, you are supposed to keep a nice, critical distance on your sources. You are supposed to recognize that they are products of their time, and you are not supposed to get offended or bothered by them. And honestly, I work on relatively inoffensive sources. I know someone who is writing a dissertation on lynching: she must get upset all the time. But I only occasionally encounter something that really gets to me.

And for some reason, the journal I read today bugged me. It's a high-brow Catholic magazine from the early 20th century, and it just struck me as a nasty, meanspirited little enterprise. The people at this magazine seemed to think that the number one problem facing early-20th-century America was that there was just too much niceness and fun going on. There was, for instance, far too much compassion, which they liked to call "sentimentality." Prisons were much too pleasant. People felt far too sorry for prostitutes, who were, after all, lured into prostitution because they were especially evil. Catholics felt bad about perfectly reasonable aspects of Catholic history, such as the decision to force Jews to live in ghettoes. (One should be kind to Jews, because although sinful, they are people, too. But one cannot allow them to corrupt Catholic morals by, say, wandering around freely as if they were decent people. In certain circumstances that could have a very bad effect, and surely the church knew better than us when those circumstances existed.) Students had the insolent and insubordinate idea that they ought to be able to choose some of the classes they took in college, and they complained much too much about Catholic college curricula not preparing them to do anything useful. It is for priests, not mere students, to decide what is useful. (And let's not even talk about Catholics who went to non-Catholic colleges. They were going straight to hell.)

The writers worried a lot about the so-called "boy problem," which was that working-class youths were engaging in fun activities that were not supervised by proper authorities. But they also worried about the morals of middle-class young people, who had money and leisure and who could therefore also engage in sinful, unsupervised fun. The solution was to have the middle-class young men and women help the priests run "clean," uplifting evening entertainment for poor kids, "clean" being a euphamism for "extraordinarily un-fun." In this publication, "clean" stands for such a load of misery that I'm tempted to boycott soap.

In the grand scheme of things, none of this is particularly horrifying. It just bummed me out. It's like spending all day watching the early-20th-century equivalent of Bill O'Reilly or something. It is possible that in a hundred years, some historian will have to watch O'Reilly for days on end. And I feel sorry for that person. It probably won't be any better for her mood than this has been for mine.

2005-01-12T21:21:00.000-08:00

Update on the food pyramid issue: the USDA has released its new dietary guidelines, and they're pretty much the same as the old guidelines. About dairy products they say in the "key recommendations" section: "Consume 3 cups per day of fat-free or low-fat milk or equivalent milk products." That's actually an increase from the old requirements, which called for 2-3 servings. (The dairy industry recommends 4.) In the text of the recommendations, they elaborate:

If a person wants to consider milk alternatives because of lactose intolerance, the most reliable and easiest ways to derive the health benefits associated with milk and milk product consumption is to choose alternatives within the milk food group, such as yogurt or lactose-free milk, or to consume the enyzme lactase prior to the consumption of milk products. For individuals who choose to or must avoid all milk products (e.g. individuals with lactose intolerance, vegans), non-dairy calcium-containing alternatives may be selected to help meet calcium needs.

At least it mentions alternatives, I guess.

2005-01-12T13:17:00.000-08:00

I'm very prolific today! I don't know whether it's because I'm excited about all the additional traffic that's been generated by Amp's link or whether I'm just in a frenzy of procrastination.

Anyway, I'm a fan of No Rock & Roll Fun, and it's nice to see a male music geek who actually occasionally notices gender-y stuff. But I think he's missed the boat a bit in his post on musician Seal's remarks condemning hip-hop. Commenting on misogyny in rap, Seal said that it was particularly bad that black people were attacking their own. He suggested that other ethnic groups don't do that kind of thing . "Take for example the Jewish culture. They've been persecuted just like the black people, right? But you never see them eating their own."

Simon has issues with the "eating their own" bit: he thinks it harkens back to the blood libel that Jews eat Christian babies. I think that's kind of a stretch. But the quote bothers me anyway.

First of all, it's not true. If he's specifically discussing misogyny, he'd have to know exactly nothing about Judaism to argue that Jewish men have never oppressed Jewish women. When scholars try to tease out why Jewish women have been so active in the feminist movement, they often point to the explicit, theological misogyny in Orthodox Judaism. And plenty of Jewish entertainers have offered highly problematic images of women. We are, after all, the people who originated the borscht belt mother-in-law joke.

More than that, like pretty much every oppressed and ghettoized group, Jews have a history of internal oppression. In the early 20th century, Jewish garment factory owners paid starvation wages to their Jewish workers, and Jewish workers fought back by founding unions. Jewish gangsters demanded protection money from Jewish small business owners. As Jews have been given wider opportunies and more access to the mainstream society, this kind of intra-group oppression has probably lessened, although I'm sure you could find instances today. But at any given time, I'd say we've been no more and no less guilty of "eating our own" than any other similarly-situated group.

The problem, for me, is that this kind of apparently-flattering comparison seems to put a slightly positive gloss on what are, in the end, potentially anti-semitic stereotypes. "Jews don't eat their own" sounds an awful lot like "Jews take care of their own," which sounds an awful lot like the conspiricist language that has Jews plotting for world domination or at least increased ethnic power. The folks I study were constantly talking about how their constituents should emulate "the Jews," who were expert at getting politicians to listen to their concerns. But implicitly and occasionally explicitly, they relied on negative stereotypes about a highly-disciplined, close-knit community which used cunning and manipulation to achieve disproportionate power. And when a Jewish person behaved in ways the writer didn't like, the author would immediately revert to the uglier, anti-semitic aspect of this idea.

So while I can hardly blame Seal for being distressed when black men insult black women, I wish he wouldn't revert to sketchy ideas about Jewish ethnic cohesion.

2005-01-12T11:52:00.000-08:00

I don't think I need to rehash the Cosgrove controversy here, because other people have done it better than I could. So I'm only going to comment on Del. Cosgrove's stunned, outraged response.

He's horrified, he says, because some of the emails were less-than-polite and because he's "never been blogged before." He makes it sound like being blogged is some sort of horrible assault: it's like being kicked or stabbed. And while I know this is preaching to the choir, it's really not. "Being blogged" is an awkward synonym for "being discussed." An elected official did something, it was discussed and analyzed by his fellow-citizens, many of them determined they didn't like it, they contacted him to communicate their disapproval, and he changed his mind. What we have here is a perfect example of democracy in action. This is how things are supposed to work. Citizens are supposed to be interested, informed and engaged. They are supposed to convey their wishes to their representatives. Their representatives are supposed to take their feedback into account. This is a feel-good, Mr.-Smith-goes-to-Washington type story. This is a story about how blogs can function as an updated public sphere.

It's too bad that some of the emails were rude. Maybe it's just because I started writing letters through Amnesty International, and they stress that you should always be scrupulously polite, but I tend to think that rude letters are less effective than civil ones. It's fine to vent, but when you're writing to a politician, it's not a good way to get your point across. Still, politics can be a rough-and-tumble business, and I'm not sure why Cosgrove is so worked up about it. Surely he can see why his bill would cause an emotional response in some people.

Cosgrove sounds like a jerk, but I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. We all screw up occasionally, and maybe he just drafted his bill poorly. What seems damning to me is his response. He has no business serving as an elected official if he's outraged by the effective practice of democracy.

2005-01-10T21:08:00.000-08:00

File this one under TMI...

So the night before last I made a cheese-laden veggie lasagne, ate a big piece, and promptly became ill in ways that I will not describe, because there are actually some limits to my willingness to share. And it dawned on me all at once that perhaps the reason I've been nauseous for months is because I have become more lactose intolerant.

People who are lactose intolerant can't digest a protein in milk and get an upset stomach after they eat dairy products. I realized a while back that I had issues with lactose, and I've tried to cut down. I buy the expensive Lactaid milk, which contains the enzyme that allows people to digest lactose, and I'm not eating ice cream anymore. But like a lot of lactose intolerant people, I could tolerate small amounts of dairy, so I still put normal milk in the coffee that I buy from the student coffee shop, and I still sometimes eat cheese or cheesecake or other delicious, lactose-filled goodies. I've figured that good food was worth the occasional discomfort. I don't know whether the prednisone triggered some change or whether it's just that I'm getting older, but I'm thinking that maybe my cut-back-and-ignore-the-occasional-tummy-ache compromise is no longer working. Maybe I need to be a little more careful and systematic about it.

In an effort to learn more about lactose intolerance, I did some googling. And I was sort of horrified to find that most of the information I could find came straight from the dairy industry. According to these websites, I am probably not lactose intolerant. (Never mind that something like 75% of members of my ethnic group are.) And even if I am, I can probably eat quite a bit of dairy without feeling too sick. (Never mind that my concern is prompted by the fact that I am feeling sick.) And even if I can't, I can buy expensive pills that will enable me to digest lactose. (And they are expensive: the ones I bought are $10 for 32 pills. You take either one or two pills each time you eat dairy. Assuming I eat the recommended 4 servings of dairy a day, I'll spend between $1.25 and $2.50 a day just on lactaid pills. That's hundreds of dollars a year. That's a ticket to Dublin or an iPod. Possibly two iPods, not that I actually need two iPods.)

The sites that aren't funded by the dairy industry mention alternatives. I can get calcium from other sources, or I can take calcium supplements. They point out that most adults in the world are lactose intolerant, and you've got to figure that few of those people can afford to spend $2 a day on lactaid pills. They raise the possibility that, rather than making myself miserable or bankrupt in order to get four servings of dairy a day, I should just figure that the food pyramid is not right for me.

And the thing is, the food pyramid is not right for most people. I'm not weird: Northern Europeans, most of whom can tolerate lactose, are the weird ones. I suspect PETA is probably right (how it pains me to utter those words...) that the dairy industry influences the nutrition information that the American government provides. But I'm even more certain that there's racial bias involved. Most white people, especially those from Northern Europe, can tolerate lactose. Most non-white people can't. Guess who mattered more to the people who designed the food pyramid?

These days, you can get your hands on alternative food pyramids. Check out the Asian Food Pyramid. (I like the little leaping stick figures to represent exercise.) Here's a Mediterranean Food Pyramid, which would have worked for my old diet, but probably has too much lactose for the new leaf I'm trying to turn over. The Vegetarian Food Pyramid allows dairy products but doesn't require them. On the other hand, the USDA's Native American Food Pyramid looks a whole lot like the plain old food pyramid, and it requires a ton of milk and cheese. Is that really going to work for people who almost universally can't digest dairy products?

2005-01-10T13:21:00.000-08:00

In a fit of totally misplaced generosity (and also because it was free), my parents have given me subscriptions to both Time and Newsweek. I'm sort of irked about this: if you put a magazine in front of me, I will read it, and I certainly have better things to do with my time than read more than one bland weekly news magazine. Also, it's a recycling hassle. So anyway, my first issue of Newsweek has arrived, and I'm sort of shocked to realize that the magazine appears to have completely given up on covering the news. It's all about celebrities, gizmos, fitness, drugs for acne and other not-terribly-serious conditions, and assorted other "news you can use," as long as you have no use for politics or other issues that actually matter. Don't get me wrong: I'm all for frivolity. I have a subscription to Entertainment Weekly. I read Lucky, perhaps the most frivolous magazine in the history of magazine publishing, on a pretty regular basis. But I don't pretend that Lucky or EW will keep me informed about current events.

2005-01-08T21:06:00.000-08:00

Life Swap CD

Lauren at Feministe set up a CD exchange. It was supposed to be a mix-CD-as-autobiography thing. I'm not much of a lyrics person, so this was a difficult assignment. Here's what I came up with:

Runaround by the Undertones: I got this album my freshman year of college and immediately decided that this was my theme song. What that means depends on whether you listen to the lyrics, which would suggest low self-esteem, or the music, which would suggest sheer, blissed-out exuberance.

Thirteen by Big Star: Thirteen was actually a pretty miserable year for me, and this song doesn't really capture the craziness and awfulness of that little bit of my life. But it does, I think, speak to some of the awkwardness of early adolescence: things like discovering sexuality and dealing with clueless parents. And it's a lovely song.

Pink Bullets by the Shins: blah, blah, blah, romantic angst, blah, blah.

Roadrunner by Modern Lovers: in high school, I spent a lot of time driving around in friends' cars, listening to the radio. Hence this song.

Meadowlands by Nancy Jacobs and Her Sisters: I got involved in the anti-apartheid movement when I was really young. I think it was sixth grade, which would have made me 11. Years later, I read an article that suggested that anti-apartheid activists had all sorts of sinister motives for seeking the participation of elementary school kids like me, and I think the article might have been right. And you could argue that by protesting apartheid, I was concentrating on distant evils instead of thinking about the pretty glaring inequities from which I benefited. But for me, anti-apartheid activism was really important: it made me feel responsible for the world in which I lived; it made me feel like I was part of a global movement to fight inequality. This song, I think, captures some of that ambiguity. Meadowlands was an area in Soweto to which black South Africans were forced to move after they were kicked out of their homes in Johannesburg. The lyrics of Nancy Jacobs' song seem to support the forced relocation program, which is why it got past the government censors. But South Africans quickly decided the lyrics were ironic and adopted the song as a protest anthem. Did Nancy Jacobs intend it that way? Does it matter? At any rate, it's also a testament to people's ingenuity in the face of oppression and censorship. And that's probably not a bad thing to remember, considering the state of the world right now.

Satellites by the Doves: the lyrics to this one are a bit melodramatic, and really, my life is not as bad as all that. ("All I've known is sadness..."? Not really.) But I've had a pretty tough year, and I suppose I relate to the "hold on" bit.

Drowned Lovers by Kate Rusby: this one is autobiographical. Ok, it's not. But there's something very appealing about a cheerful, upbeat, major-key song about tragic death.

Orange Sky by Alexi Murdoch: it occurred to me after I made the mix that this might actually be a Christian thing ("in your love my salvation lies"), which would be singularly inappropriate. But that's not how I read it. I think it's about being redeemed by your connections to other people.

Me and Mia by Ted Leo: I listened to this song about a zillion times before I realized that it's explicitly about eating disorders. It's a little weird that a 30-something guy wrote the song that best sums up my late teens, when I realized that if I wanted to do anything with my life, I was going to have to gather up all the energy and willpower that I'd spent starving myself and redirect it towards the goal of becoming something more than my diet. "What's eating you alive/ might help you to survive" is exactly right.

Snakes/Mna na hEireann by Susan McKeown: when I lived in New York, I used to go see Susan McKeown at Fez all the time. This song reminds me of that heady post-college time, and also of the friends I hung out with then, who are now scattered all over the world. This isn't Susan McKeown's best song, but it does refer to two of my pet obsessions, Ireland and feminism, so it went on the CD.

The Gulf of Araby by Katell Keineg: I take this song to be about living in an imperfect world and realizing that you can never make it perfect. It's a downer, but it's beautiful.

Waterloo Sunset by the Kinks: I really was in a strange mood when I made this mix, wasn't I? And here we have another song about being happy in the face of loneliness and misery.

Pass in Time by Beth Orton: I've been thinking a lot about mortality: my own and that of the people I love. I suppose this song's message is kind of trite ("you might as well smile/ because tomorrow you just don't know..."), but whatever gets you through, I guess.

2005-01-06T15:41:00.000-08:00

The inventor of the bundt pan has died. I'm sort of surprised that there is an identifiable inventor of the bundt pan. I'm also surprised that the mainstream popularity of bundt cakes only goes back to the late '60s. And I'm very surprised that bundt pans were created at the behest of Hadassah, the old-school Zionist women's organization to which my great aunts and sundry other elderly relatives belong. Who knew that so many tasty desserts were bestowed upon the American people by the world Zionist conspiracy?

2005-01-05T09:38:00.000-08:00

I'm back from my trip to warm, sunny Georgia, which was actually very warm and sunny. However, my internet access is a bit of a mess at the moment, and I don't know how often I'll be posting for a week or so.

2004-12-27T09:25:00.000-08:00

A little googling shows that I'm a bit behind the curve on the "The Incredibles is quasi-fascist bullshit" thing. Let's just say that I hadn't heard it when I saw the movie, and I came to that conclusion on my own. So you know which side of the argument I'm coming down on.

2004-12-26T22:06:00.000-08:00

It is very difficult to post from my parents' house. For one thing, my parents have serious issues with blogging. They think people with blogs are, if not necessarily bad people, then certainly deeply flawed and a bit pathetic. Needless to say, they don't know about this blog. Also, they don't necessarily believe in privacy. For instance, the computer is located in the laundry room, and the door to the room doesn't close. When I'm on the computer, my parents like to wander in and read over my shoulder. They must find my email a lot more fascinating than I do. Have I mentioned that my parents are driving me a bit nuts?

Anyway, in an attempt not to drive each other up the wall, we have been seeing a lot of movies. Today we saw The Incredibles, which everyone in the world seems to love. Everyone but me, that is. To me, the movie's heavy-handed message seems deeply objectionable. It seems offensive and reactionary, even. Why am I the only person who seems to be bothered by this? Am I missing something?

Warning: spoilers follow!

So The Incredibles is about a couple of superheroes: Mr. Incredible, who is superhumanly strong, and his wife Elastagirl, who can stretch like a rubber band. When the action starts, they are young lovers about to be married, and they devote themselves to helping humanity and stopping wrongdoers. Because of this, they're worshipped by mere mortals, and Mr. Incredible is dogged by a non-superhero kid who is a member of his fan club and who wants to be his sidekick. But the kid doesn't have powers, so he just gets in the way, and Mr. Incredible sends him away. Because of this slight, the kid grows up to envy and resent superheroes. Thus is born our villain.

Meanwhile, the government decides that it's a bad idea to have superheroes roaming the cities doing good, so Mr. Incredible and Elastagirl are forced to enter the Superhero Relocation Program, where they must suppress their talents and pretend to be ordinary suburban citizens aptly named Mr. and Mrs. Par. When the story resumes, they are desperately trying to pretend to be normal, as are their socially-maladjusted but superhumanly talented offspring, 10-year-old Dashell, who can run really fast, and teenaged Violet, who can make herself invisible and create impenetrable force fields.

Enter the villain, the normal guy who hates superheroes because they're exceptional and he's not. He's grown up to be an inventor, and he's invented a bunch of machines that give him strength that rivals real superheroes'. He has concocted a dastardly plan to kill off the genuine superheroes, create a lot of havoc, pretend that he's a superhero, and then save the world, earning people's respect and gratitude. Then, he says, he will make his inventions available to the public, so that everyone can be a superhero. The Incredible family foils this plan, and in the process they redeem the public reputation of superheroes. They must be modest about their superiority to other people, the movie suggests, but it's also important that society recognize and give free reign to their superior powers.

The movie isn't subtle in its social criticism: it also takes potshots at the litigious society and uncaring insurance companies, for what it's worth. But fundamentally, this is a movie about the social role of talented people. I read a review today that said that it was a polemic against mediocrity, but I don't think that's right at all. The movie's real target is not mediocrity but equality. Some people, according to The Incredibles, are just born better than the rest of us. This superiority is innate and inherited: superheroes make up a kind of master race. The movie doesn't just suggest that it's destructive to stifle talented people; it also derides the notion that everyone has talents that should be celebrated, and it raises and dismisses the idea that ordinary people could make their way into the elect. You don't choose to be a superhero; you can't earn it through ingenuity or hard work. You're either born super or you're not.

An unstated but necessary corollary to the idea of an innately superior group of superheroes is the notion that they will always use this power for the common good. Otherwise, we might have to confront the pesky notion that powerful elites might use their strength to oppress others. It's not that it's impossible for ordinary people to become super-talented: with the help of his inventions, the villain becomes an equal match for any member of the Incredible family. The problem seems to be that it's unnatural to elevate people who are destined to be ordinary; it messes with the proper order of things. When given extraordinary power, normal people will be corrupted. Only those born superheroes can be trusted to use their powers for good. This movie says that powerful, hereditary elites are good for society not because they're more talented but because they're more moral. It's a nineteenth or even eighteenth-century version of how society should be ordered: it's a celebration of natural aristocracy and the concept of knowing your place.

Another unstated but clear assumption is that real, important powers are physical, not mental. The Incredibles' powers all reside in the body: they can lift, throw, contort, run, or disappear. There's no thinking involved. In fact, Mrs. Incredible tells Violet that in case of an emergency, she should not think. Thinking just trips Violet up, and she's more effective when she shuts her brain off and just acts. The villain of the piece, on the other hand, is depicted as that comic-book cliche, a genius inventor. His powers reside in his mind, and he is capable of creating machines that could give everyone extraordinary powers. This mental prowess, however, is not a super power. His ability to design and create makes him an imposter, not a superhero. His intelligence is a destructive force, while the Incredibles' bodily strength is a force for good. The movie suggests that the whole society should mirror the social hierarchy of your typical high school: the football players should lord it over the losers in the chess club.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that this movie is such a hit in the U.S. After all, our newly re-elected president is an anti-intellectual jock whose main qualification seems to be that he's a member of one of the most elite families in the nation. I guess it's a sign of the times. But I'm a tad disappointed that so many liberal critics seem to have been taken in by this reactionary garbage.

2004-12-21T21:29:00.000-08:00

I'm off to not celebrate Christmas at my parents' house, after which I'm going someplace warm and sunny with some friends for New Years. (Well, I hope it will be warm and sunny. At any rate, it will be warmer than here.) I will try to check in. If not, I will be back on January 3.

2004-12-20T19:42:00.000-08:00

Still not sure what to get for the pre-schooler on your holiday list? How about this fun toy, an electronic timer that is designed to improve children's eventual performance on standardized tests. I say eventual because the thing is designed for kids as young as four. We're not making four-year-olds take standardized tests yet, are we?

I shouldn't mock this. I don't have kids, and it's easy for the non-parents to make fun of people's concerns about their children. And I've never understood the SAT-angst, because I'm good at standardized tests. (I'm not showing off by saying that: it's a freakish, meaningless aptitude, like being double-jointed or able to wiggle your ears. It just happens to be a stupid skill that has allowed me all sorts of unearned educational opportunities.) But I can't help thinking that this is disturbing. Parents have long bought boring educational toys for their kids, and kids have always managed to have fun anyway. But shouldn't parents be worried about their kids' actual education, rather than their performance on tests? And if you want your kids to ace the SATs, aren't you better off buying them a book, or better yet, taking them to the library once a week?