October 2005 October 3 2005 9:11 AM Despite the dreary, inevitable outcome there was one thing I learned listening to the Roberts hearings. Stare decisis. I love the way that sounds. It sounds like a good name for a seventies pop rock band. It sounds mystical. Whimsical. I was even encouraged by the idea that a case could be made that since women have been living with Roe v. Wade, especially younger women, they understand it as a norm. Or something like that.
It is one of those legal things that is subject to interpretation and after thinking about it I began to question the value of it. There are things that we have understood as a norm that I'm glad we changed.
The law is full of beautiful language. I sometimes wish I had studied more of it. But I know that it is also full of tedium.
I watched The Stepford Wives this weekend. It's just bad. I watched it because I wondered how they would portray the life of a Stepford wife. There was an interesting opening section featuring fifties commercials in which women are always cooking or cleaning and dancing at the same time. But the characters were too hyper and the plot didn't make sense and the ideas about the lives of women who work were too over the top.
It always seems to me that when we think about the problems of working women we ignore how many of those problems could be fixed if men took on more of the tasks of running a home and raising kids and if the workplace itself was more family friendly. There are all these shows now in which men take over the job of the wife. That's how odd it seems to us, speaking in broad cultural terms.
I also watched Casa de Los Babys, which was so much more substantive and filled with real images of the problems of the lives of women and men and how those problems change in a cultural context. It's a film that leaves you with lots to discuss.
It was kinda good to watch them both so close to one another. I often think about how entrenched our ideas of what it is to be a woman, or a man are. How full of mystification. No one is served by them. They act as stare decisis in the worst possible way.
October 4 2005 12:40 PM Welllllll. The good news is that I have a small piece in the new Bitch. It's about the Sims. I got paid. That was nice. The bad news is it was really rewritten. What they did goes past editing. Some of it is mine. But in one sentence they reference Lydia Lunch. I don't know who she is. Well now I do. But. Jeez.
There is this one sentence.
I don't know what it is about that sentence but I HATE it. I wrote:
Not in the paragraph they used part of it, which changes not just the words but how they were used in the piece as a whole. And I don't like the rhythm. Rhythm is big for me.
So. It is what it is. I am feeling really hurt and angry and frustrated. This was a good thing. Being published. Being published in a magazine that I dig. Making money on writing. But I don't really care if anyone reads it. It's just not that good. Maybe it was never that good. I have to get some perspective. It's probably not that bad.
October 10 2005 9:22 AM I've been curled up in a ball of cranky and, truth be told, I still am. Not physically so much but emotionally. Physically I've been cleaning. Cleaning always makes me feel better. And I watched a dear movie, which concluded with the thought - if a problem can be solved then why be sad? If it can't be solved then why be sad? I'm paraphrasing but coming at the end of the movie it made sense.
I wrote some text for Salt and Rain. It was great to work with Danelle. She called to say that it went well.
I did get a rather convoluted apology from Bitch.
Yesterday, this being North Beach, there was a parade. Today American Indians have taken over Alcatraz. It might be a clash of stories but everyone has their time and place.
It's also fleet week. The Blue Angels were flying all weekend. Noisy. Annoying.
So. You know. Life goes on. I'm just trying to uncurl.
October 12 2005 9:39 AM For much of my blogging life everything in my day was fodder for a post. I thought about that last week when I was coming up the back stairs and noticed four crows sitting on a lamp post. Kristina had done a number of birds on a wire posts. I thought I might be able to put something together.
And then there are those moments when I am walking to the pool and I notice all the people doing some kind of exercise. There's a tennis court behind the pool and a large open space beside in which I've seen soft ball games, Tai Chi, drill teams with flags, very small children on tricycles, joggers. Yesterday three men were doing some kind of martial art with sticks.
Or the furniture on the side walk. Last week, in the block before the pool, someone had put out a mattress and box springs. It looked like it was in good shape. It went away fairly quickly only to be replaced with a love seat, also in good shape. The love seat is still there. One drunken looking fellow made use of it for a nap. The loose pillows are gone.
I still notice things and thing I might write about them. But nothing forms. It's like the meaning making glue jar is empty.
October 13 2005 9:16 AM I stayed up late to finish Atonement. The writing is fantastic. There are scenes so richly drawn I will remember them as if I'd been there. And yet, I have the same feeling I had when I finished Saturday. I just didn't connect.
I keep thinking about it. There is nothing about the writing that I can fault. The plots in both books held my interest. The central character in Atonement is a young girl who loves to write. How could I not connect?
There are books that you don't want to end. You don't want to leave the characters. Fugitive Pieces was like that.
But I keep wondering if connecting is as much about me as a reader as it is about the book. Sometimes food doesn't taste good, sleep isn't restful, conversation feels like static. I don't feel like I'm that far gone. But maybe.
October 16 2005 12:49 PM When I went to bed last night I had the sense that it was an effort in futility. I wasn't quite tired enough. My neighbors were being noisy. I just knew sleep would elude me. I slept in fits, never quite diving down very deep. I had dreams that felt interesting when I first woke up from them but didn't stay with me.
Sometimes a dream will come back to me in the middle of a conversation, or when I'm walking along. Some fragment will pop up. Sometimes I can't tell if it's a dream or a memory.
One of the most romantic things I ever saw was when I walked out of the guest room at Tom and Susan's house. She was in her studio, which was up in a loft and he was standing blow in the living room telling her his dream. I just wanted to have that kind of moment with someone. Which isn't to say that I haven't told my dreams to my friends a time or two but ... it was the idea of a romantic relationship in which the search for meaning was a welcome part.
Another most romantic thing was a picture I once saw of a room in Joan Didion and John Dunne's apartment. There were two desk back to back in a room full of books. I thought of that again when Kristina and I were talking about Didion's new book and a picture of their living room.
I do actually have romantic thoughts that are more carnal in nature but ... it's been awhile. It's been almost two years since I had any feeling for anyone and that was a loopy and misguided thing. Truth be told I have not quite let it go, although it's beyond pathetic that I haven't. So I feed on dream fragments and sneak peeks.
I dunno about romance. I think it's just one in a long list of things I've decided aren't going to happen for me. I feel no agency, no will, no magic.
I'm not tired. I've been awake for awhile. Eaten breakfast. Listened to Larry. Cleaned the kitchen. Read some stuff. I feel fine. Sometimes I go through phases in which I have to nap in the middle of the day. Not a long nap. Fifteen, twenty minutes. It's only been true for the last few years. Some age thing I suppose.
At 2:00 I'll go for a swim.
October 18 2005 1:45 PM
After I watched the Einstein show I watched two discs worth of the Elegant Universe and have been wondering about string theory ever since. Not that I have the brain for it but string theory is one of those places metaphysics and science meet up and have a conversation. I like hangin out there.
Too often in metaphysical circles there is a tendency to think in hierarchy and dualism. So when we think of everything having a vibration we talk about higher and lower vibrations and raising the vibration. We talk in terms of good vibes and bad vibes.
The other day on my soap one of the women asked Iyanla how she was and she answered with a sting of superlatives,. "I'm so beautiful and spectacular and (more), I can hardly stand it." I'm paraphrasing. So all those positive things are somewhat negated by the idea that it's hard to stand it. I think if I told Iylana that she might agree. But I think her idea would be that she needed to have a higher thought. And that's not what I'm thinking.
None of us is able to be positive all the time. Or negative, for that matter. We all travel in circles. Small ones in any given moment and larger ones that span years. Some of are more given to a glass half full way of seeing the world and some of us lean the other way. Generally.
When I go to the pool I feel instantly better. Even before I swim. Maybe it's the light and the water. And then there's the rhythmic moving and the breathing. There are days when none of it gets through my bad mood but most of the time I feel good there.
But then there's the other people.
Today I met a woman in the pool. She said it was the first time she'd been swimming in twenty years. The last time she swam was in China. Before we were let into the pool I noticed her doing some Tai Chi moves so I asked her about it. She teaches it. Her English wasn't good and I have no Chinese but we had a nice chat. Watching her in the pool was uplifting. She was like a kid. Joyous. She was all over the place.
But there are times when there are too many people in the pool with too many agendas and I get cranky.
String theory talks about how a specific vibration from a specific string happens in a context.
We are all living in a multi layered context and we have semi permeable boundaries. I'm always trying to feel into my own fundamental resonant frequency but I'm also mindful of the world around me.
I had what I thought was a mild disagreement with a friend once. Her default is to think of what an individual needs to do to solve a problem and mine is to think about what in the system needs to be challenged. We both acknowledged the importance of the other person's perspective. And, for my part. I know that sometime all we can do is work on what we can change about ourselves. I guess it was a bigger deal than I knew because we are no longer friends.
The past few years have been tough and I am so grateful for the people who have hung in there with me. Too often the positive thinkers can't handle difficulty. If you need to cry and rage you don't need someone talking in affirmations. You need someone who can be with you and hold your hand.
And yes. Sometimes we need to pull ourselves up. Sometiems we need to ignore the voices of gloom and doom that live in our head.
Anyway. Now I have a mad crush on Edward Witten.
Heh.
October 20 2005 1:42 PM A few weeks ago Bravo had a series of shows: Great Things About Being ... and there was one on being fat. I tried to watch it but it took me a few times. They repeat shows over and over. I'd watch till I got too irritated and then click away knowing I could catch the rest another time. I'm pretty sure I saw it all. The show was irritating to me because it was full of cliches and bawdy, lampoon humor. It's just not my thing.
They did a kind of count down thing and one of the great things about being fat was ... Oprah.
Uhhuh.
That hit me in more than one way. It seems like no matter what size she is, Oprah will always be fat. I'm never the best judge of size because so many people who are considered fat, or plus sized, look fairly average to me. And of course bigger people are the average but I'm just saying that what the culture determines to be fat almost never looks fat to me. I would not say that Oprah is fat right now. But she certainly is a person with a genetic predisposition to be fat.
I'm not always sure how useful it is to talk about who is fat enough to be fat. Maybe sometimes.
There was this commercial years ago for some kind of weight loss thing in which the catch phrase was - "inside every fat person there is a thin person waiting to get out." I thought that was like suggesting that I was somehow sub - somatic.
Being fat is part of my identity. Maybe all the adjectives should be stripped away and what's left is who I truly am but being white, 52, tall, Gemini, all kinds of things make up how I experience myself.
I don't think there's anything wrong with people talking about Oprah as a fat person. She is the model of the obedient fat person. She took on an athletic level of physical activity and hyper-vigilance about food and she still makes adjustments when she gains weight, which she does because she's always fighting her genetics. I don't really care what she does. She seems happy with her choices. They aren't choices I would make. When I was watching the show I wondered how it would feel to be her, work that hard and still be talked about as fat.
Saying I am fat should have as much impact as saying I have brown eyes. Some people like blues eyes better. That's OK. But saying I am fat, owning it in that way, is an action that I take. It's like coming out. I am saying that I am a member of group of people who are marginalized and discriminated against.
I've been thinking a lot about a post by Pattie with which I very much agree. I never like tropes of pop psychology. Victim mentality? I have sometimes judged people for what seemed like a way of interpreting the world as a hammer with which they are hit. And I know that some times it seems like the deck is stacked against me. And sometimes it is.
Great things about being anything are only part of the story and too simple and not useful and I doubt the show ever intended to be anything more than what it was. I didn't watch it because I hoped for more. I'm still thinking about it though.
October 23 2005 3:13 PM When I walked out of the dressing room to get in the pool yesterday I looked up and out of the windows. There, on top of the twisty part of Lombard, was a trolley. There was lots of fog so the trolley was in silhouette. It was a post card SF moment.
I've mentioned the group of Autistic kids who swim in the pool on Friday mornings and the one kid who runs from the dressing room and heads for the deeper, colder pool. He is intercepted but then he runs up and down the steps of the warm pool. There's lots of yelling until he settles down. The other day he got under the buoy rope, into the deep end. He seemed to swim well enough. What he wanted to do was get up on one corner of the pool, dive in and the do it again and again. And again. The pool manager was there and is a pretty easy going guy. One of the teachers was trying to get the kid back into the shallow end but the kid was just so tenacious. Eventually they indulged him. He was kinda buggin a few swimmers and I know it might not have been the best thing to do but I just loved how willful the kid was. Willful and jubilant.
And then. Another kid, who likes to play on the buoy rope and slip over to the deep end was fully into the deep end. The manager and the teachers were doing their best to control all of this and still be flexible. I was giggling.
But then one too many swimmers (not a kid) came into the deep end and I decided to get out. I'd been there long enough.
On Sundays I go the pool during the last hour and there is a vibe. The staff is pacing. Ready to go home. It's not too bad.
My muscles are thrumming. My head is clear.
October 24 2005 8:57 PM I've been defrosting the refridgerator. ALL DAY. It's such a messy job.
While I was doing that I fooled around with something I learned about from Willa. Kinda fun. You can store 200 books for free. I hit 201 and didn't stop me but I didn't want to keep pushing. I added the widget to the bottom of my page so you can see five random books. I tried to get them all right. Sometimes I added a paperback when I have a hardback. You can serch for them with the ISBN and I did do some of that but it got to be a bit much. None of my cookbooks are there. Only two poetry books. After I was done I kept walking past books and thinking I needed to add them. It's only ten bucks a year, or 25 for a life time.
Fun with books.
October 27 2005 8:57 PM When I heard the news about Rosa Parks I was struck by the fact that it had been fifty years since she held fast to her seat on that bus. I was two. So much has changed.
The other day I was flipping channels and I came across one of those selling-things channels. The product was one of those hot iron hair combs. It was being used to straighten the hair of a young African American girl. She looked bored and mildly irritated but not in pain. Someone off camera obviously told her to smile and she did. It made me sad. I remember reading about hair straightening in Macolm X's autobiography. And I remember Afros and corn rows and dreads, all of which were part of the new natural world we were creating, back in the day.
Things have changed. But women like to play with their hair. Somewhere a Caucasian girl is trying to sit still while she get a perm. It's the tyrany of notions of beauty. It's also just fun. It's really not a big deal but it just hit me.
I heard Tim Wise on the radio the other day talking about privalge.
And then last night I watched Crash. It's just an amazing movie. Amazing.
Lots has changed. And more needs to change.
October 30 2005 1:06 PM I love a good philosophical conversation. It would be fair to say that I live for good philosophical conversation. But I gotta say. Most of the conversations about feminism, especially the ones that happen on the web, give me a headache. All the where-are-all-the-women-bloggers hand wringing, teeth gnashing, yadda- yadda. It gives me a head ache. I've never had any trouble finding them. Are they linked? Do they get called for the pundit shout shows? I don't really know. I don't really care.
I have come to believe that my ideas about feminism must be ... oh ... I dunno...just, different. I mentioned feminism to a guy a few years ago and that was the last I heard from him. In all fairness there were other things going on but it was the mention of feminism that seemed to fuel his departure.
But I've had some loopy conversations with women as well. It's like saying the word feminist means you hate men. It's one thing to commiserate about pay and respect and representation and another to take on a political identity that might make someone uncomfortable.
Susan Sarandon, who I admire as an artist and as an activist, is on a commercial for age defying makeup. So all the talk about how hard it is for woman of a certain age to get roles in Hollywood and there she is pimping makeup. I don't really care if she gives all the money she makes away, that ad is tired. Instead of defying our age why not enjoy it?
And then there was all the chatter about the Dove girls. Those courageous fat (cough) women (I mean come on. They really are not fat.) who posed in their underwear to sell ... FIRMING products. Help me.
So when Mike points to a couple of articles about Maureen Dowd's new book I read with some trepidation. Which turned out to be wise.
Yeah. Um. Huh?
But really. Trying to talk about how women feel about how they look is just exhausting. Many of the smartest women I know still poke at their face in the bathroom mirror. It's what Ms. Dowd says about feminism that made me want to walk into the bay.
Which nano second was that? Was it the nano second in 1917 when women won the right to vote? Which, ironically, was six years after Jennette Rankin became the first woman elected to congress.
I like Maureen Dowd. Generally. Even if she does wish she looked like a cartoon drawing. I get that she is being tongue in cheek. Maybe I am guilty of that most often mentioned (albeit imagined) feminist attribute. Maybe I have lost my sense of humor.
I watched Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall and Spring Again. It is a lovely movie. And it gave me pause. It begins with a monk and the small boy monk who is his student. The boy is cruel. But I didn't think it was male cruelty. Just human cruelty. When the boy is older a young woman comes to the monastery in search of healing and the two begin an awkward courtship. When the old monk discovers this he says it is natural and that it must have been good medicine because now the girl is well and she should go home. The young monk is driven by desire to leave the monastery and returns after he has murdered his wife. It isn't clear if he was married to the young woman. As the movie comes to an end the old monk is dead, the young monk has become an adult and returned again to the monastery.
There were ways in which women seemed to cause all the trouble. Or maybe it was just sex. Either way it gave me pause. There is a wonderful scene in which the young monk has a statue of Tara and well ... you should see the film.
After the film I thought about the antipathy between men and women. None of us is necessary. We are all essential. They aren't contradictory ideas. I long for a complex feminism that articulates how the needs of life too often bring out our cruelty.
Do I wish I was a carton red head on a subway full of leering men? Not really. I want to look like myself. I want to feel comfortable in my skin. Sometimes I do. And I want to look into the eyes of a man and forget about power. Just for a minute or two. At least the kind of power that needs one person to be less so that another person can be ... necessary.
October 31 2005 9:55 AM I had such a nice evening. Someone gave Deb tickets to see Arlo and she took me. Even if I had money for such things I might not have gone, which should not suggest that I am not crazy about him. I just don't get out much.
He was wonderful. I saw him somewhere in Maryland, back in the day. Way back. So it was a sort of full circle moment. For all my railing about celebrity culture I must confess that when he walked on stage I was over come with the need to walk up and hug him. I think if I saw him on the street and told him I just NEEDED to hug him he would hug me. He's just sweet like that.
The Mammals opened and joined Arlo for a few songs. They were wonderful. Tao Rodriguez-Seeger is Pete's grandson and Arlo's son plays with Arlo. So Pete Seeger's grandson and Woody Guthrie's grandson were on stage together. Something about that rocks my world.
I'm not big on the whole Halloween thing. But Marie's pumpkin is too cool for school !!!
And ... uh. I'm not sure what this means. But ...
I found it at Maria's Blog. I could use the cash.
And Barry made me smile this morning. As did Dale.
I've been withdrawn from blogging. But this morning I am clicking and smiling. My heart feels open. I blame Arlo.
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