March 2005 – Page 3

Projects, Illness, Etc.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Open Blog Wednesday! We had some awesome posts here, and if I get some time, will highlight them individually.

I’ve been busy completing a Super Top Secret Web Project that will be all of cool, awesome, and funny, in addition to taking care of E who has been sick with an unidentifiable fever for the last 2-3 weeks. Since no one can decide what is going on, I have officially diagnosed it as either hay fever or ebola.

In the meantime, I’m still seeking submissions for the project I outlined yesterday. Other topics I’m thinking of having people cover are how to start and maintain a container garden, ways to find cheap everythings, and technological innovations that help us circumvent or cut down on monthly bills. I’ve had a few takers already and am trying to figure out how we’ll do this in an egalitarian manner.

As soon as this and a few other projects are done, I will be back to my regular blogging schedule.

Indiana, Oh Indiana…

I don’t have a blog, or a livejournal, or anything fancy like that; I’m just a lady who gets paid to read books and write papers and teach other kids how to read and write papers. Or at least I’m training for it. So I often read the blogs of my fellow-women in education, and Ms. Lauren’s Feministe is the first on the list.
I could write about all kinds of things: I could add my two cents to the Schiavo national embarrassment, and ruminate on the meaning of law, now that our legislative body has taken it upon itself to legislate for the particular individual, rather than for the “universal,” or for the nation at large. But I won’t. Or I could echo all of the rumblings and ramblings about the sorry state of the Democratic party, still sore from a whuppin’, trying to figure out how to be a party of opposition, and how to strategize a comeback. I won’t do that either, except to humbly suggest that looking beyond the New England corridor will probably help, and I don’t mean that in a “those latte-drinkin, Volvo-drivin, sushi-eatin’ Ivory Tower yuppies just don’t understand good ol’ fashion red state ‘Mericans, with their big trucks and their guns and their churches an’ all.” I mean that I haven’t seen a lot of evidence that establishment Democrats have finished the whole dazed from defeat thing and are ready to really try to be the voice for working people, women and minorities, because the other side certainly isn’t. That’s how to be an opposition party, guys. And next week we’ll introduce universal health care coverage, re-introduce the capital gains tax, and have a talk about proportional representation.
(Oh my God! I’m a woman and I started talking about politics, in my first ever blog entry, EVER. Or are those two mutually exclusive? Help! What do I do now? Don’t blame me; I’m the new girl.)
What I really meant to write about was the Midwest. I love the Midwest. I once visited a friend in NYC, a friend who was born and raised (and put up a hell of a fight for the DNC) in Ohio. I had never seen a map of NYC; in fact, I am embarrassed to say that I didn’t even know that NYC was south of Boston. It’s true. I would simply go down one hole, get on a train, and come out another hole, where everyone looked just as strangely serene and urbane and thin as they had been before I went in the hole. I couldn’t wait to get back to Chicago, where there were some people who were ugly or poorly dressed and didn’t really care (not that I dress in such a way of course, dear friends), and would walk around with this odd look on their face, as if they had just smelled something really bad, but would meet your eyes and smile at you in the street, strike up a conversation with you in the corner store, or give you directions and advice, welcome or not.
Folks from the Midwest are warm and friendly and even-tempered; they can also be shockingly xenophobic, parochial, and hateful towards anything new and strange. Midwestern small towns can be cozy and charming and safe places where everyone knows everyone else because they all went to the same high school and work the same service jobs for years on end, trading favors between the pizza joint and the bar. They can also be stagnant dead-end towns where those who aren’t satisfied with sameness are treated as pathological and find themselves isolated and stuck.
At any rate, these are my people and to them, and to Lauren for sticking it out with them (and being one of them), I raise a can of Old Style. Now back to my thesis…
-Sina
skramer1@students.depaul.edu

I know how hard it is to be you

My blog is called Redfish for no particular reason. I’m a student at the University of Toronto majoring in classics and classical civilization. I love everything about the classics program. In fact, I love it so much that I’m aiming for grad school (fingers crossed!) I’ve just started to visit feministe, but I love the idea of an open blog day. So I had to put in my two cents:

I hate it when people tell me they understand how hard it is to be a black woman. It’s usually people who are otherwise fairly progressive who do this, and it drives me nuts.

Let’s get one thing straight: it isn’t hard to be black. It isn’t hard to be a woman.

What can be hard is the way people in this society treat me because I’m a black woman.

It seems like such a small distinction. Most people I’ve explained this to dismiss it with “it’s really not that big of a deal.” But you know what? It kinda is.

I don’t experience racism because I’m black. I experience it because some people are racists. Likewise, people don’t make sexist remarks to me because I’m a woman; they do it because they’re sexist. True, racism and sexism wouldn’t impact me in the same way if I wasn’t a black woman, but my being a black woman isn’t the problem. Racism and sexism are the problems.

This is just as true when it comes to the more invisible, systemic forms of oppression. The discrimination existing in society today is not intrinsically connected to the identities of groups being oppressed.

I know that it can be hard to acknowledge that the lives of women or black people can be incredibly, horribly difficult because of oppression without saying that it’s hard to be black or that it’s hard to be a woman. I don’t, actually, mind it when people use that shortcut–as long as they recognize that it is a shortcut.

I had this argument for the first time in high school. I wish I could say that it’s only teenagers who just. don’t. get it.

Being myself isn’t hard.

It’s the way some people react to my self that makes my life difficult.

Enyo Harlley
enyo_harlley@yahoo.ca

Cheating’s allowed right?

Working under the assumption that the only rule to guest blogging is that there are no rules, I’m going to publish something I posted on my blog last month. It was in honor of my sister’s 23rd birthday. As the NBC promos used to say, “If you haven’t seen it before, it’s new to you!”

****
It’s my sister’s birthday today.

When I realized I was going to have to step in and be her parent so many years ago I made promises to myself: to never hit, to always listen, to remember that in order to get respect you must also give it, to let her just be who she needed to be and to teach her tolerance and try and instill kindness towards others. I was young and I made mistakes but none, I hope, that did permanent damage. That’s about all you can hope for somedays.

She doesn’t know it but during some very dark, lonely times she was the spark that forced me to keep going. The person I am today was largely shaped by the person I needed to be for her. There’s no way to know what I would have been like had she not come into my life, but I can’t imagine that my life would have been any better. I’m certain that I would have felt the loss, even if I couldn’t name it.

There have been trials and tribulations, but they’ve been greatly outnumbered by the sheer joy of knowing her, of watching her figure out who she is and who she wants to be. Along the way I’ve experienced her joys and her pains. There were some things I was able to buffer her from even as I wondered if I should, if I wasn’t perhaps doing her a disservice by not allowing her to stumble and fall and learn from those mistakes. But the times when I couldn’t help her came often enough so I justified my meddling. The day that I had to say to her, “I’m extremely disappointed in you and I can not fix this” was one of the hardest, most painful, heart-renching days of my life. (It was a bold faced lie though. I would have turned things inside out and upside down to set things straight. And I almost had to.) It needed to be said, however, to wake her up from the daze that she was under. It’s such a fine line, to support someone while at the same time kicking them in the ass.

On these days I remember her first day of kindergarden. She was so excited, finally going to ‘big girl’ school. I worried that when the time came she, like so many children I’d heard about, wouldn’t want to be left behind. I shouldn’t have worried. She entered that classroom all smiles, not once bothering to look back. That’s what I’ve been striving for all these years: to fill her with the sense of security and confidence that lets her step forward without that look back because she doesn’t need to see me to know that I’m there for her. Ready to support her in all things, but also ready to kick some ass, hers or anyone else’s if necessary.

I love this girl, but better than that, I like her, a lot.

patricia … Thanks for the chance to guest blog. ♥

Score: I’m #191

Capping off the month of women and blogging, I’d just like to note that I’ve hit the top 200 in the Blog Tracker That Shall Not Be Named for the first time ever, and have more than doubled traffic for this month (Thanks, Amanda).

If you want to read other women of quality who deserve the same kind of traffic and more, see the links under “feminist blogs” in the sidebar, and for that matter, everyone else linked. For even more good reads, see Feminist Blogs, my poorly organized public bloglines account, and everyone who has posted here today. We’ve had some awesome posts.

FYI: Open Blogging Wednesday is on until 12 am EST. Post away.

Random stuff from the Random Liberal

So. My name is Robert. I actually comment as randomliberal (though I don’t comment anywhere all that often), but I sign my blog, Random Liberal, as Robert. My partner in crime–Joshua–and I had gone about five months without posting there until last week; hence, the dearth of posts. Sorry. We’re slackers. We mostly post about politics from a personal point of view, although I think that my portion of the blog is going to become more of an international affairs/politics blog.

I’m a college student at TCU in Fort Worth, Texas. TCU is an incredibly monolithic campus. An enormous proportion of the student body is upper-class and white. It’s also “Greece” away from Greece. About half of the undergraduates are in a social fraternity or sorority. To make things even better, I have been recently informed that Tarrant County, where Fort Worth is located, had the second highest proportion of voters in the entire freaking country pull the lever for Bush.* Yeah. Sometimes I feel kind of lonely here.

I’m going to take this opportunity to plug an event I attended last week during my Spring Break. I was in Austin for an anti-death penalty alternative Spring Break. It was an opportunity for high school and college students (and non-students who could manage to get a few days off) to learn about the death penalty and learn how to take direct action. Last Tuesday, the 15th, we went to the state capitol and held a rally, then went inside to talk to our legislators. As you can imagine, we were not very successful in reaching the legislators, but we were able to talk briefly with some of their staff members. While we may not have had much of an effect on the representatives’ opinions on the death penalty, it was at least a good experience on lobbying the legislature. For more information on the activities of the week, or to learn more about the fight for a moratorium on the death penalty in Texas, go to the Texas Moratorium Network’s website.

My thanks to Lauren, who is awesome for doing this experiment today.

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*For those who don’t know, the county with the highest proportion of Bush voters in the nation is some obscure southern California county. I’m having trouble remembering the name, though…that one blogger guy Kevin Drum lives there…also I think there might be some sort of TV show on the DubyaB network…and it’s possible that some random ska bands are from there…why can’t I remember the name…?

Open Blogging on Women and Expectations

I’m Erin of the fshk blog, which has recently taken a swing from every day minutiae to politics and feminism because, despite attempts to ignore, I just can’t anymore. (Also, my mom helms the far more famous mahablog, and knows a think or two about where the women bloggers are.)

It’s pretty awesome to have the opportunity to guest-blog anywhere.

Anyway, since I’ve decided to stop writing about Terri Schiavo (despite my inability to look away from that, too) I’ll link to this very good post at Pandagon about a recent Salon article by Rebecca Traister (whose articles I usually like) about a new generation of men who are desperate to get married. Actually, the post is in response to the angry letters responding to the article, most of them written by men, most of them indignant that a woman dare critique male behavior. Amanda at Pandagon is much more snarky and clever than I am, so go read the post, but bask in the knowledge that all the old double standards are alive and well. *sigh*

Big & Beautiful

Intro: I’m Trish and I’m normally at Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman. Thanks Lauren for giving us all the chance to guest-blog! I thought I’d take this opportunity to share a link.

Leonard Nimoy has taken a series of beautiful photographs of large nude women. Note that this link will lead you to photographs of naked women. They’re artistic, but use your best judgement as to whether or not that’s work-safe.

Nimoy’s second book of photography will focus on the women of the Fat Bottom Revue. He says: “They are interested in fat liberation. Their self-esteem is strong. They will tell you that too many people suffer because the body they live in is not the body you find in the fashion magazines.”

via Big Fat Blog

You: In 17 Syllables

Aaron of aanthems.com, recently reemerged from a long break from blogging, tried to register and post and somehow blacklisted himself from my blog. Good job, dude. Aaron is my blogdaddy, the first blogger apart from Anne I ever read, but Anne doesn’t count because I’ve known her since the fifth grade, peered over her shoulder one day in 2000 and said, “What’s a blog? Can I have one?”

In responding to a request I made of him in December 2001, he says:

Miss Lauren commanded, “write a haiku that encapsulates you.” I shot off the cuff, without much design or hemming. Now that I re-read it a couple of days later, I kinda like it.

These large, warm hands open
a shoulder, an ear, for you
find yourself within.

She and I silently disagree whether “open” constitutes one or two syllables, but I have Merriam-Webster on my side. My psyche flushes at the thought of violating the Haiku rules.

Making others write haiku used to be a fond pasttime of mine. I still do it on occasion if someone says he or she is bored. The key is to always supply a topic for the poem: oneself, farticles, defenestration, etc.

And for the record, I maintain that “open” has two syllables. So there.

Google Bombing and the “Culture of Life”

Hi! I’m Aldahlia.

Ms. Lauren’s recent “Culture of Life” series of posts, got me to thinking about a little thing known as “Google Bombing.”

Essentially, it’s manipulating enough links to affect Google’s page-ranking system. Like, what (mostly) bloggers have done with “miserable failure.”

What I’m proposing, is indeed… a link-based high-jacking of the question “where are the women bloggers.”

All it will take is enough folks creating a post that looks something like this:

where are the women bloggers
where are the women bloggers
where are the women bloggers
where are the women bloggers

Of course, you can add similar links to just about any female blogger (preferably political bloggers) you want to, including this place. The point is for someone to punch the phrase into google and get some women bloggers, instead of getting some moron bemoaning the (theoretical) absence of women that blog, or some singular entry by a frustrated woman trying to assert her visibility, our visibility, on her own.