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May 29
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TBNS has broken down one too many times, and I have packed my digital bags. http://jdwise.blogspot.com
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May 21
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I think I’ve figured out a big part of why white men, at least stereotypically, can’t dance. Revelation came in the form of two three-year-old girls telling me excitedly that their dance recital was that evening and that their mommies were going to come watch them. I have no idea what kind of dance one teaches three-year-olds, but the point is that it’s only taught to girls. In the suburbs, small boys are carted to martial arts studios where they wear little white uniforms, and small girls are carted to dance studios where they learn some semblance of ballet and tap but mostly enjoy wearing pink leotards and twirling a lot. Whether or not we actually go to the lessons, we’re trained from birth to believe that girls dance and boys kick things and yell.
Fast forward twenty years or so to a college party. A crowd of girls is in the middle of the room dancing, some awkwardly, some not. A ring of guys is sitting or standing around, just watching. It's creepy even when the guys don't mean it that way.
Now fast forward another twenty years. A ballroom studio is packed with women, but men are in short supply. The man leading the class is a svelte Latino who wiggles better than the women. I would read his dress and mannerisms as gay if I didn’t know they were the height of masculinity in some countries. If only the white middle-class US concept of masculinity had some room in it for hip-wiggling.
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May 14
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Two words of advice to any single men out there looking for (middle-aged and up) women: ballroom dancing. I went last night for the first time, and the demographics were very curious. Lots of old people, almost no young. A couple of English men but no English women that I noticed. A good number of Asian women but no Asian men. Not quite two girls for every boy, but boys could definitely manage a good 1.3 girls each.
A very nice Englishman named Alistair showed me how to rhumba, then took my arm and escorted me very formally back to the chair where I'd been sitting. He said his mother told him to always put a girl back where he found her. I can just picture him bringing dates home decades ago as a teenager and his mother shouting, "Alistair! I don't know where you picked up that hussy, but you put her back where you found her right now!"
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May 11
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Why is it that criminals' gender is never specified in news reports unless the criminal is female? "Mr. so-and-so was murdered by a female assaliant. She was arrested the next day." The murderer's gender has nothing to do with the story. Even if you want to include it for the man-bites-dog factor, you already have "she" in there, so why do you need to specify "female"? Same with "Bob Smith is a male nurse."
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May 10
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There seem to be two models of people I admire, the artist and the activist. The first are the kind who have weaving studios in their attics, play music, go to contra dances, write novels in their spare time. I’ve sort of been resisting this model because I felt it precludes the second model – the type who are active in politics or social movements or what have you. The problem is that while I’d love to live the first lifestyle, to live life for the sake of its own beauty, I can’t justify that in a world where so much is so bad and needs to be changed. Ideally one could do both, but I’ve almost never heard of people who take time and money for beautiful houses and clothes and music and art and still have time and money enough to make the world a better place (in some way more significant than making it prettier.) This month my compromise has been putting up a Pre-Raphaelite poster Ellen gave me on my wall and going to the contra dance in Shepherdstown last Saturday.
Lately I find myself looking for role models – for people who’ve done what I want to do, just to convince myself it’s possible. I can find people who have done each of the things I want to do with my life, but I haven’t found anyone who’s done it all. I hear an NPR story on a white woman who adopts a black baby – but it’s a baby, not a child from foster care, and the woman isn’t doing anything else noteworthy for the world. Or I read the book of interviews with second-wave feminists and their grown daughters that Eli gave me, but most of those women are living in posh suburban homes and sending their children to private schools. Or I read about women community organizers in low-income urban neighborhoods, but their children were stuck going to the worst schools in the country. Or I read about parents home-schooling their children but giving up their own lives and work to do so and ceasing to make much difference to anybody but their own family. (And by “parents” I mean “usually mothers.”)
Probably this means it’s impossible. Probably I can’t have a life’s work that makes a difference in the world and keep only a bare minimum of my income and not turn my kids over to the monster that is inner-city public schools and not go crazy from it all. But I’m sure going to try until I find out for sure.
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April 30
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Tomorrow is May Day, which is a big deal at Bryn Mawr, and it's raising some questions in me that it didn't before. Two weeks ago I was in Boston and saw my friend who went to Bryn Mawr in in the seventies, and she sent me home laden with May Day gifts and white May Day dresses that she and her friends had worn.
Listening to her stories from thirty years make me realize how much the school has lost its old-fashioned feel. The dresses she gave me were both much more vintage-looking than most people would wear to May Day now, and I mean vintage earlier than the 70s. She talks about High Table, which sounded almost like the dinner parties from the Oxford of Brideshead Revisited - witty debate, candles, etc. By now it's evolved into a picnic basket with a tablecloth and some candlesticks that's brought to Erdman dining hall every week at Sunday Brunch by a small crew of girls with unbrushed hair generally attired in cloaks and sandals with socks. The one time I joined them the conversation was wholly uninteresting. (Granted, maybe High Table was always like that, but somehow I see Ellen as having been much more socially aware?)
Also, the frequent teas held by everything from the math department to the DIY club no longer involve any tea, and sometimes no food or drink at all. At my Lantern Night tea this year we watched Sense and Sensibility and had scones and real tea from a real teapot with milk and sugar, but I think I was the only one who drank much of it.
On the other hand, I understand why traditionalism isn't always good even at a school that prides itself on its traditions. In 1900 when we first started holding a May Day celebration, the campus was entirely white, so recreating an English folk holiday made a lot more sense. Any time you want something to be historical, you have to ask whose history you're talking about.
But I still want teas with real tea.
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April 24
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I'm having big doubts as to the usefulness of assignments in English classes. As far as I can tell, studying literature at the college level has two basic purposes: self-enrichment and perpetuating the study of literature. If you're going to be a professor, you're supposed to contribute by the field by writing articles and things that basically only other literature scholars will read. There's a quarterly journal just for Edmund Spenser, for Pete's sake, and my college probably spends a lot of money so that all of 3 English majors can reference it in their theses.
Unless you're going to be a professor and try to get published to get tenure, what's the point of writing practice essays? I've enjoyed the class, but the point of the class was discussion, not actually picking up skills you'll need in some future job. I've done the self-enrichment thing, and I'm not interested in being an academic forever.
Hmm. Yes, in other words, off to think of ten pages of things to say about The Faerie Queene.
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April 20
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The bumper sticker ended up on my door, not my Nalgene.
I'm really excited about working downtown this summer. I've never lived or worked in the city, and I think it will be a good change. My favorite part of the bus ride from Philadelphia to Boston is always going through New York, past Central Park and the endless restaraunts, through Harlem out to the giant brick apartment towers. I'm always happy to see the skyscrapers of Philadelphia, but I've probably spent less than 24 hours in the city itself. Richmond is a smaller step towards living in Philly after graduation, I suppose. Even using public transportation regularly for the first time holds some appeal. I'm really looking forward to the whole thing.
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April 12
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I'm in a quandary about my newly-acquired Oxfam “Make Trade Fair” bumper sticker. I ran a movie-showing tonight on getting fair trade coffee onto campuses (pointless since no one showed up and we already did that at Bryn Mawr anyway) and one of the girls in the video had the bumper sticker on her Nalgene bottle. I had a box full of the same stickers in the back of the room, and I immediately thought “Hey, I could do that!”
The problem is that Simon and I have been talking a fair bit about activism lately, and I've gone on at least one rant about the college activist clique. There are times when I feel like I don't have enough holes in my jeans or piercings or handknitted Bolivian items of clothing or bumper stickers on my Nalgene to be an activist. On the SOA trip last fall I seriously questioned whether my hair was messy enough to ever fit in.
Every time you see documentaries about global activism, you have clips of chanting peasants in Argentina or South Africa or wherever, and it's all so inspiring until you cut to the clip of a mob of dreadlocked white activists in the US or Canada banging on plastic buckets and dancing. And the bankers inside the nucleus of the protest are looking out the windows with disdain – and who could blame them? When it looks more like a street party or Halloween than people with a goal in mind, I have to cringe.
And it shouldn't be about that at all. It shouldn't even just be about one political ideology – there are some causes just about everyone can agree are right (check out Amnesty International,) so it shouldn't just be a crew of college radicals. I would like to see everyone taking action to improve the world around them, whether that's through protesting or talking with friends about issues or writing their representatives or starting a recycling program. That's what activism should mean, not your Birkenstocks.
This is why my Nalgene is still naked.
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April 4
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I've known for years that I want to adopt chidren instead of having my own so as to a) give a home to a couple of kids who would otherwise grow up in foster care and b) not contribute to overpopulation, but I just recently started looking at the listings to get an idea of what's out there. Turns out infants are incredibly hard/expensive to get, so it looks like I'll be adopting older kids from foster homes. Most of the younger ones are severely disabled, and most are black.
So I've been thinking a lot about the rather new concept that my children will probably be black. There's some movement against whites adopting black children so as not to remove them from their identity, but I figure even a white mother is better than none at all. It makes me rethink a lot of the ideas I always had about my life as a parent - the books I was going to read to them, the neighborhoods we were going to live in, the names I was going to give them. I never realized how white-specific my entire life is until I started thinking about transmitting it to people of other races.
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March 30
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I got a pair of nice pants for work at the thift store today only to discover they're just small enough to look trashy while still being viable enough to be tempting to wear. Not my fault, since the store doesn't let you try on stuff from the 50 cent bin.
After realizing exactly how fabulous Mandy from my Russian class is, I'm in a funk about my own wardrobe. I want to have pretty clothes, but I don't want to be one of those girls who spends all her money and energy on pretty clothes. Hopeless situation.
I am being petty and I know it. Don't worry, I'll get over myself.
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March 9
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The good news: a new movie of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is coming out in December, and it looks like it should be well-done. The bad news: there's going to be a video game. I wasn't as attached to all the Tolkein before it got all media-ized and omnipresent, but I'm kind of sad that the Narnia books won't just be for geeky kids who read a lot anymore.
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March 5
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Nothing says "welcome home" to a wannabe vegan like walking in the door after a month and a half to find your mother has prepared a home-cooked meal of . . . chicken. I understand that vegan protein is more of a hassle than meat, but seeing as I cook every other meal while I'm here, you'd think she could handle something at least vegetarian on the first night I'm home? This happens every time.
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March 2
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In my sociology class we cover lots of ways of defining people's class -
economic, prestige, etc.
As we go though them I always think, okay, that's where Simon will be, that's
where Dad is,
that's where I'll be, that's where Mom is. People can have lots of education
and a prestigious job
but earn little money (think artist or religious leader) or vice versa (think
trash collector or
electrician.) In my midterm just now, I was using my mother as an example of
someone with a
decently high prestige job (teacher) but low wages ($4/hr at one point when she
was the
assistant director of a preschool. And she mopped the floors at night.) And it
suddenly dawned
on me that part of the reason I like my mother's family best is that nearly
everyone in her family
has a job I respect but doesn't earn much off it. It's not that I have a
problem with people
earning money, but I respect these people for getting by on ministers' and
teachers' and
farmers' salaries. Dad's side is kind of old money, which I'm rather ashamed
of. You'd never
catch any of that crew joining the Peace Corps or making their own clothes like
people on
Mom's side. Their jobs aren't helpful to anybody but themselves, either, and
sometimes even
harmful (my horrible millionaire cousin the janitorial contractor.)
The thing that made me happy in the middle of my exam was that I fit in with my
mother's side,
not his. As soon as I graduate I'm off to Costa Rica or wherever the Peace
Corps sends me, and I
won't be rich, but I will be useful and I will bake my own bread. It's a
good feeling.
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February 26
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Whereas, catalogues like Boston Proper and J. Jill make lots of pretty clothes that look great on their tiny models; and
Whereas, EmJ and Nadine always look great because they have lots of really pretty clothes and tiny frames; and
Whereas, it doesn't matter what I look like in really pretty clothes because the probability of finding cheap yet really pretty clothes in free boxes and thrift stores are ridiculously low;
Resolved, I should stop drooling over the boots on Ebay and picking up other girls' catalogues of pretty but expensive clothes from the trash and instead simply put them in the recycling.
But I probably won't.
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February 25
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I've been thinking a lot about causes and what makes me consider something my cause or not my cause. I'd been thinking it was odd that I could see people on campus who care a lot about Darfur and mentally know that it's really important, but still not consider it one of “my” causes. Due to a couple of events on the topic this past week, I've come to consider it more mine.
Today I went to a discussion about the meaning of the word “feminism” and whether the name of the Feminist and Gender Studies department here should be changed to Gender and Sexuality Studies. Basically everyone at the talk was pretty wedded to the word “feminism” and didn't want to change it, and it made me wonder why this is the cause I feel more unquestioningly identified with than any other.
Another odd thing brought up by the talk was the concept of eco-feminism, the idea that women and the earth are abused/oppressed in similar ways. There are also a number of animal rights activists who consider animal rights and women's rights interlocked. Ms. Magazine ran a section on causes feminists should be interested in, among which were things like anti-tobacco lobbying. What? Why do these other causes have to be sold through some other cause? I understand that all oppressions have some similarities, since they're basically created by the same system, but I find it strange that they're telling me I should care about something because I'm a woman and a feminist. I should care about it because I'm a human! I should care about it because it's right to care about it.
A few weeks ago I heard Kevin Powell speak here, and he was amazing. It was the first time I'd heard a man get up on stage and say that all men need to be feminists, the first time I'd seen a straight person up there saying all straights need to be allies to LGBTQ people. The first time I'd seen anyone up there say that whites need to be aware of white privilege, though that might just mean I'm going to the wrong speeches. It was really good to hear someone say that causes aren't just specific to the group they're about – everyone should be involved. As Megan said today, the best you can say to most guys is "Well, you're not a misogynist . . . congratulations?"
It really made me want to get involved with the gay-straight alliance and the black culture group here. I'm really not going outside my comfort zones on those issues, and I should be. There was a surprise protest against campus racism last night, and I know Sisterhood is planning more. It worries me that there's a need to protest, and I want to find out what I can do to make Bryn Mawr better in that regard. But being active in, let's see, six organizations already, I really can't join without dropping other things. I don't know what to do.
This is one of those times I'm really sorry I don't have a blog on a big site so you all could reply. I'm really curious to know what other people think about this. Email me or something.
In other news, I've become addicted to Romanian pop. Also, this morning at breakfast two seniors performed Les Miserables with potatoes in the dining hall. It was awesome.
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February 13
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I find it very strange that Patagonia markets thongs. The catalog is filled with photos of people hiking in the Himalayas and skiing in snowstorms. Nearly every product description emphasises some design feature that makes this item just perfect for outdoor adventure - even the bathing suits are marketed as being designed for surfing. And then there's . . . the thong. Why? Why slip an item of clothing so obviously impractical into a catalog full of clothing that's supposed to be functional? I doubt there are many people whose wardrobes consist entirely of Patagonia-style clothing - you can't wear ski pants to your sister's wedding, no matter how waterproof they are - but does anyone really want to be reminded of that while looking at pictures of people backpacking in the Rockies? Is nothing sacred? Let us buy underwear at Target. Can't we have just one catalog that doesn't include the word "panty-line"?
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January 28
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The other night I went over to Haverford for what was advertised as the "Gypsy Jazz Project", which ended up being a showing of the documentary Latcho Drom and a talk by a French Roma (Gypsy) musician and activist for the Roma in Europe.The film was beautiful, mostly scenes of groups of Roma dancing and jamming in countries from northern India to Romania to Turkey to France.
It made me think a lot about the different ways we read behavior. There were a lot of scenes with men playing various instruments and women dancing, and then they'd cut to little kids imitating the adults. The funny thing is that most people would read the little girls trying to bellydance like their mothers as weirdly sexual for a child. If a ten-year-old girl were seen dancing like that in public here people would chalk it up to the corruption of girls by the media and the fashion industry, turning them into little prostitutes before they even know what they're doing. But in the context of this crowd of Turkish Roma the atmosphere didn't seem sexual at all or even that public - quite domestic, in fact. After the song ended and the woman who had been dancing on a wooden platform finished, someone handed her child up to her and she stood there nursing it for a bit while somebody else got up to dance.
I remember watching the scene in Selena where Selena's Mexican mother is teaching her to dance on the beach and being a little jealous that no woman in my family ever dances like that, let alone the little girls. Heck, you'd think we didn't have hips for any purpose but bearing children and laundry baskets. But it's not like it was something risque to them like it would seem to us - that's how everybody danced.
Mexicans and Roma sure seem like they're having more fun when they dance than we do. Maybe we should take a hint from them.
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January 17
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I’ve been taking the Greyhound instead of the train to and from college lately because it’s cheaper (though it’s my parents’ money so it doesn’t actually make any difference to me or anybody who needs the money more.) But aside from that, it’s a valuable experience. Being the only white person in a terminal or on a bus makes you think about what it’s like to be the only person of color in another situation. Also, I think it’s a good idea for people who are born to privilege to seek hardship out to a degree just so they can identify a bit more with the rest of the world. Not that the bus is that bad.
I like how the focus I've been hearing from people on MLK Day seems to be community service and social justice. It’s good that we have a holiday that stresses those things. It should be more recognized.
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January 13
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A while ago I thought I was suddenly getting the PMS from hell because I spent three days crying and generally feeling awful for no apparent reason. Turns out this is just my normal state from time to time. I suspect teenagers have some biological impulse to feel angsty even when there’s nothing really wrong, like those Japanese girls attempting suicide because they can’t afford Prada handbags and have to buy knockoffs.
I spent yesterday evening counting the hours until I could reasonably go to bed. I wanted to see Simon, though that was silly because we never see each other two days in a row. Cried a lot, beat up on my already-pulverized pillow, ran around the block a lot, came in and worked on a shirt I’m making, and sewed one sleeve on inside-out but successfully resisted the urge to shear the whole thing to shreds. Sat on the floor debating the wisdom of selling most of my stuff and giving the money to Heifer International. Cried some more. Read “Tacky the Penguin,” which was the one bright note.
What on earth is my problem? Having a crummy job shouldn’t count, since most of the world has that. I thought it was lack of sleep, but even this morning I woke up with the urge to hit someone.
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January 12
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Maybe it's true that youth is wasted on the young, but I feel this is at least partly due to scheduling rather than missed opportunities. By the time anyone's parents and siblings have gone to bed (or at least vacated the living room) it's time to go home and get some sleep before work the next morning. Yet once people are actually old enough to live together, they appear to mostly lose interest in whatever it was they wanted to do without their parents around. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong.
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January 5
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Is it good to worry about grades, because it shows you have high goals and will look good on your resume? Or is it just one more stupid quantifier to worry about, like weight?
In other news, I'm on winter break and back to working at the daycare. Yesterday the four-year-olds were talking about what they did on their birthdays and one informed us, "My dad took me to Hooters. We ate spicy chicken." The good thing about four-year-olds is that they don't pick up on a lot of stuff like their teacher laughing.
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