I just took a test that was supposed to identify my top character strengths. I have observations about this, but here is the foundation for my observations. The strengths identified differed slightly from my own perception of same. Witness - the strengths identified by the test:
1) Capacity to love and be loved
2) Humor and playfulness
3) Appreciation of beauty and excellence
4) Love of learning
5) Kindness and generosity
What I perceive to be my top strengths:
1)Empathy for dogs
2)Looking good in hats
3)Communion with Kelly Ripa
4)Incredible knack for arranging furniture
5)Vegetarian chili-making
The test identified things I was maybenotsogoodat as Self-control/regulation, hope/optimism/future-mindedness, industry/dilligence/perseverance. That sounds about right.
Showing posts with label it's hard out here for a violet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label it's hard out here for a violet. Show all posts
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Saturday, May 26, 2007
list of things freaking me out about starting school
1) On FaceCity, everyone is talking about sports and/or drinking. I only like to talk about TV and lady problems.
2) Also on FaceCity, people are being big fat babies about what neighborhood they move to. Not really, that's not fair. But I get really defensive of neighborhoods I have no connection to when people suggest they might be unsafe. Dude, I was in Flu Spork in the '80s, and I was FIVE so I would have been really easy to mug and no one ever mugged me. I am just over young people trying to live near other young people, and this city, and everything but TV and lady problems and possibly grilled cheese.
3)Speaking of which, I was up in SchoolHeights the other day to meet a friend for coffee, and I wanted to punch every third person. Mostly because they were tousle-headed young men in sweatshirts and blazers. Also, some young people being Quirky (TM) at the grocery store and snuggling each other and talking about paella.
3b)The only thing I hate more than people who are too cool (see tousle-headed young men in sweatshirts and blazers also like 50% of my friends) are people who are NOT COOL ENOUGH. Be of the world, you know? Engage your universe. Jerks. There were a lot of those around, too.
4)Again, via FaceCity, too many people identifying as anything other than Liberal/Very Liberal. In theory, I am all about the discourse of ideas and viewpoints. In reality, I just want to get abortions and be left alone and not have to bother refuting anything with arguments more complex than TURN BLUE.
5)Also, lots of the college party pics on FaceCity which I am totally going to take screencaps of and send to these people's mothers. They oughta be ashamed.
2) Also on FaceCity, people are being big fat babies about what neighborhood they move to. Not really, that's not fair. But I get really defensive of neighborhoods I have no connection to when people suggest they might be unsafe. Dude, I was in Flu Spork in the '80s, and I was FIVE so I would have been really easy to mug and no one ever mugged me. I am just over young people trying to live near other young people, and this city, and everything but TV and lady problems and possibly grilled cheese.
3)Speaking of which, I was up in SchoolHeights the other day to meet a friend for coffee, and I wanted to punch every third person. Mostly because they were tousle-headed young men in sweatshirts and blazers. Also, some young people being Quirky (TM) at the grocery store and snuggling each other and talking about paella.
3b)The only thing I hate more than people who are too cool (see tousle-headed young men in sweatshirts and blazers also like 50% of my friends) are people who are NOT COOL ENOUGH. Be of the world, you know? Engage your universe. Jerks. There were a lot of those around, too.
4)Again, via FaceCity, too many people identifying as anything other than Liberal/Very Liberal. In theory, I am all about the discourse of ideas and viewpoints. In reality, I just want to get abortions and be left alone and not have to bother refuting anything with arguments more complex than TURN BLUE.
5)Also, lots of the college party pics on FaceCity which I am totally going to take screencaps of and send to these people's mothers. They oughta be ashamed.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Real Estate
I live in the big city. It doesn't matter what big city - let's call it Flu Spork for the sake of convenience*. I've lived in Flu Spork my whole life. When people meet me, they say "you don't seem like you're from Flu Spork!" I guess they think this because I don't shiv them?
The other thing people say when they hear I grew up in Flu Spork is "wow, there's nowhere to really go after there!" They mean that all across this grand nation, the young and ambitious dream of moving to Flu Spork, but where do the young and ambitious of Flu Spork move to? I'm young(ish, now) and more ambitious than I'd admit on a first date with a traditionally-minded man whom I nevertheless wanted to roger, but I swore up and down for the longest that I was OUT OF HERE. It's silly and expensive and there's just no way to really build a life for yourself, unless a life for yourself = a moron carnival paid for with credit. My parents carved their niche out when things were less rough, when it could be argued that Flu Spork was a good, cheap, interesting place for a young couple to be (not that there were not the lean times when I was a bitty Vi). Comparing my experience with theirs, my possibilities in Flu Spork seemed even more limited. It keeps pulling me back, though - the skills and priorites and proclivities you gain here bind you ever closer to the city. It's not that you're unfit to live anywhere else, exactly, leaving just seems harder and harder until it doesn't make any sense at all.
The couple we saw in Providence this weekend, beaming and newlywed, don't have jobs that different from mine, or Hazzard's. They live, paying the same amount we pay for a little place in a walk-up in a peripheral neighborhood, in a enormous loft with bamboo floors and a wall of ten-foot high windows. Their building is a converted department store full of chatty young people who knock on each other's doors and met on the rooftop patio for drinks. (I know, barf. But let's just examine the SIGNIFIED here. Besides, it would be nice if I had someone other than my parents to dogsit.) It was a little plastic, and lord knows Providence, a neat town, is not Flu Spork, but it felt like a life. Not transient. Not a holding cell. They seemed content, or at least I imagined them to be, as I fiddled with their track lighting and admired their view. They were reaping already, whereas I feel like Hazzard and I just sow and sow and sow and wait, where we put off everything we truly want. Which isn't track lighting, really.
*NB - someone should make and market cheap sake in six-packs or something and call it sake of convenience.
The other thing people say when they hear I grew up in Flu Spork is "wow, there's nowhere to really go after there!" They mean that all across this grand nation, the young and ambitious dream of moving to Flu Spork, but where do the young and ambitious of Flu Spork move to? I'm young(ish, now) and more ambitious than I'd admit on a first date with a traditionally-minded man whom I nevertheless wanted to roger, but I swore up and down for the longest that I was OUT OF HERE. It's silly and expensive and there's just no way to really build a life for yourself, unless a life for yourself = a moron carnival paid for with credit. My parents carved their niche out when things were less rough, when it could be argued that Flu Spork was a good, cheap, interesting place for a young couple to be (not that there were not the lean times when I was a bitty Vi). Comparing my experience with theirs, my possibilities in Flu Spork seemed even more limited. It keeps pulling me back, though - the skills and priorites and proclivities you gain here bind you ever closer to the city. It's not that you're unfit to live anywhere else, exactly, leaving just seems harder and harder until it doesn't make any sense at all.
The couple we saw in Providence this weekend, beaming and newlywed, don't have jobs that different from mine, or Hazzard's. They live, paying the same amount we pay for a little place in a walk-up in a peripheral neighborhood, in a enormous loft with bamboo floors and a wall of ten-foot high windows. Their building is a converted department store full of chatty young people who knock on each other's doors and met on the rooftop patio for drinks. (I know, barf. But let's just examine the SIGNIFIED here. Besides, it would be nice if I had someone other than my parents to dogsit.) It was a little plastic, and lord knows Providence, a neat town, is not Flu Spork, but it felt like a life. Not transient. Not a holding cell. They seemed content, or at least I imagined them to be, as I fiddled with their track lighting and admired their view. They were reaping already, whereas I feel like Hazzard and I just sow and sow and sow and wait, where we put off everything we truly want. Which isn't track lighting, really.
*NB - someone should make and market cheap sake in six-packs or something and call it sake of convenience.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Things I Am Not Buying
Somehow, this issue of immigration came up at dinner, which was about as fun as you might imagine.
Latino immigrants just don't make enough of an effort to assimilate/learn English. Discuss. Attempts to refute don't work It didn't work, obvs, because at this point the vocabulary of the resources/language/jobs debate is just a flimsy cloak for fear of brown people that doesn't engage reason. Though my opinion isn't really reasonable as in here's-a-workable-solution, either - I want everyone to lean Spanish, I want every public school to be bilingual, I want to see the US move toward being a country with two official languages and no official culture.
I do the same thing with every big problem I'm presented with. Flip it upside down, find the least feasible solution, and become deeply attached to it. So it's been pretty difficult for me to stand idly by and watch the women-working-or-staying-home parade trod the same now-grassless ground for the past few years. While I think all the standard criticisms about how this is a problem one is lucky to have apply, I don't think that means there is not any interesting thinking to be done anymore. Unfortunately, I just don't care. The next person to cash in on the desire of everyone in the entire universe to jizz all over the tits of young mothers while telling them what poor choices they are making gets a sharp stick in the eye.
In last week's New Yorker (missing the stick in the eye threshold by only a few days!) is a review by Rebecca Mead of a book by Leslie Bennetts about how stay-at-home moms are deluding themselves and fucking everyone else over and laughing about it at their monthly symposia. And Rebecca Mead is all, but staying home is a valid choice and emotionally fulfilling and baybeeezz why are you all up in their grillses? "Interview after interview reveals a woman who seems, actually, pretty happy with her lot," Mead writes "at least until Bennetts sweeps in and points out how terrible things will become if her husband leaves her."
Where is he now? Sure as fuck not in this article. Where are the dads in any of these articles, these descriptions of the ecosystems in which all of our professional and feminist choices bind us inextricably? Just working away on autopilot, oblivious to any of this? Patented Violet Beekeper problem-flipping coming atcha - why don't we start approaching this problem by looking at the choices men make ... and at men who make unconventional choices? Is there no thinking to be done there? Is this opt-out revolution discussion not really a discussion but instead an excuse to shame women a la everything else ever? Noooo. Couldn't be.
"But," you say "it wouldn't work! The mens, they are obviously too attached to their provider role and its perks to give it up! It is totally like when they killed antelopes on the veldt, and women stayed at home giving interviews to itinerant authors working on projects about the state of contemporary feminism. I mean, we are talking about i-bankers here."
And I say "why?" Seriously. Do we need a book and loads of commentary on a book about this? Holy shit, THIS JUST IN: SOMETIMES I- BANKER WIVES MAYBE A LITTLE BIT SHALLOW AND LAZY. I- BANKERS POTENTIALLY ATAVISTIC AND EMOTIONALLY INVESTED IN THEIR EARNING POWER. NOT CHAMPIONS OF PROGRESSIVE GENDER ROLES MORE AT SIX. I only know the dudes I know, and the dudes I know are mostly dippy urban liberals (hi!), but I guarantee you a hundred percent that if you proposed to them that maybe you should start discussing how they could work less and hang out with babies more, they would be on it. HERE IS A BIG EFFING SECRET: dudes totally like babies. And they're not even all assholes! Some of them don't even like to go to Hooters, even ironically! I know, right? It's enough to make you want to totally want to punch modern male mythology in the cock.
And I think that journalists who have any investment in feminism would be well advised to punch it in the cock with me. To divest from an anti- feminist-even-when-it's-feminist media paradigm that gets paid for picking like a zealous facialist at women's contradictions and ugly compromises. To examine men's choices and ask them to examine their own - many of them aren't well served by their current options and know it - maybe, if we try solving this equation for Y, interesting things will begin to emerge. Just a thought.
Things not addressed here -
How the constant and consistent preoccupation with stay-at-home-or-work bs has probably done more to alienate black feminists from media feminism than anything else.
The tricky fact of pregnancy. Not that I don't have theories about this.
The awesome New Yorker article about the Pirahã - I also feel like Tavis Smiley is kind of what would happen if they had developed a broadcasting tradition parallel to ours.
Latino immigrants just don't make enough of an effort to assimilate/learn English. Discuss. Attempts to refute don't work It didn't work, obvs, because at this point the vocabulary of the resources/language/jobs debate is just a flimsy cloak for fear of brown people that doesn't engage reason. Though my opinion isn't really reasonable as in here's-a-workable-solution, either - I want everyone to lean Spanish, I want every public school to be bilingual, I want to see the US move toward being a country with two official languages and no official culture.
I do the same thing with every big problem I'm presented with. Flip it upside down, find the least feasible solution, and become deeply attached to it. So it's been pretty difficult for me to stand idly by and watch the women-working-or-staying-home parade trod the same now-grassless ground for the past few years. While I think all the standard criticisms about how this is a problem one is lucky to have apply, I don't think that means there is not any interesting thinking to be done anymore. Unfortunately, I just don't care. The next person to cash in on the desire of everyone in the entire universe to jizz all over the tits of young mothers while telling them what poor choices they are making gets a sharp stick in the eye.
In last week's New Yorker (missing the stick in the eye threshold by only a few days!) is a review by Rebecca Mead of a book by Leslie Bennetts about how stay-at-home moms are deluding themselves and fucking everyone else over and laughing about it at their monthly symposia. And Rebecca Mead is all, but staying home is a valid choice and emotionally fulfilling and baybeeezz why are you all up in their grillses? "Interview after interview reveals a woman who seems, actually, pretty happy with her lot," Mead writes "at least until Bennetts sweeps in and points out how terrible things will become if her husband leaves her."
Where is he now? Sure as fuck not in this article. Where are the dads in any of these articles, these descriptions of the ecosystems in which all of our professional and feminist choices bind us inextricably? Just working away on autopilot, oblivious to any of this? Patented Violet Beekeper problem-flipping coming atcha - why don't we start approaching this problem by looking at the choices men make ... and at men who make unconventional choices? Is there no thinking to be done there? Is this opt-out revolution discussion not really a discussion but instead an excuse to shame women a la everything else ever? Noooo. Couldn't be.
"But," you say "it wouldn't work! The mens, they are obviously too attached to their provider role and its perks to give it up! It is totally like when they killed antelopes on the veldt, and women stayed at home giving interviews to itinerant authors working on projects about the state of contemporary feminism. I mean, we are talking about i-bankers here."
And I say "why?" Seriously. Do we need a book and loads of commentary on a book about this? Holy shit, THIS JUST IN: SOMETIMES I- BANKER WIVES MAYBE A LITTLE BIT SHALLOW AND LAZY. I- BANKERS POTENTIALLY ATAVISTIC AND EMOTIONALLY INVESTED IN THEIR EARNING POWER. NOT CHAMPIONS OF PROGRESSIVE GENDER ROLES MORE AT SIX. I only know the dudes I know, and the dudes I know are mostly dippy urban liberals (hi!), but I guarantee you a hundred percent that if you proposed to them that maybe you should start discussing how they could work less and hang out with babies more, they would be on it. HERE IS A BIG EFFING SECRET: dudes totally like babies. And they're not even all assholes! Some of them don't even like to go to Hooters, even ironically! I know, right? It's enough to make you want to totally want to punch modern male mythology in the cock.
And I think that journalists who have any investment in feminism would be well advised to punch it in the cock with me. To divest from an anti- feminist-even-when-it's-feminist media paradigm that gets paid for picking like a zealous facialist at women's contradictions and ugly compromises. To examine men's choices and ask them to examine their own - many of them aren't well served by their current options and know it - maybe, if we try solving this equation for Y, interesting things will begin to emerge. Just a thought.
Things not addressed here -
How the constant and consistent preoccupation with stay-at-home-or-work bs has probably done more to alienate black feminists from media feminism than anything else.
The tricky fact of pregnancy. Not that I don't have theories about this.
The awesome New Yorker article about the Pirahã - I also feel like Tavis Smiley is kind of what would happen if they had developed a broadcasting tradition parallel to ours.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
A Window on a Twisted Soul
I have been busy setting goals for myself - I am a big procrastinator, and one way to avoid getting things done is to create complicated schemata detailing exactly what things I will get done. However, it might work this time, because I have broken it down into big motivating goals and their subsidiary task-goals, and because I am out here on the internet holding myself accountable.
First Category: Family!
The Big Picture: Act like an adult re. my parents. Be nice to my brother and cultivate that relationship. Help fairly around house and do not pick on Hazzard (which is what I think I am calling M. Beekeper 'round these parts) about work.
The Really Big Picture: Get things in shape to get a baby up in me within 7 years. Look into being more Jewisher than I am
Down in the Mud With the Peasants:
Second Category: Jobbsers!
The Big Picture: Actually put some effort into my pay-the bills job even though it is stupid crazy easy. Finish manuscript. Get to know folks at Professional School For Professionals. Be productive. Don't be unproductive.
The Really Big Picture: Be Nancy Pelosi.
The Wheel to Which I Am Putting My Shoulder:
Third Category: Save The Whales!
The Big Picture: Live in a way that is increasingly consistent with my beliefs. Have some idea of how to articulate my beliefs, "I love Mexicans!" does not count.
The Super Big Picture: Total Transcendence.
The Protestant Work Ethic:
Fourth Category: Strong Teeth And Bones
The Pig Bicture: Control Athsma. Be Hottt.
The Really Pig Bicture: Be Really Hottt. Some day, far off, eat less cheese.
Hottt Was Not Built in a Day:
Fourth Category number 2: Monies
Blah Blah: Pay off Credit Cards. Save 10,000
Blah Blah Blah: Don't be poor.
How We Do:
Now, I figure if I am hitting at least 75% of each category and at least 85% overall at the end of a month, I can get a reward. But what? I was thinking I would go get a massage, but then that costs money and then, then I would be like, well, actually it would be bad to meet my goals because then it would cost me! So I should just go watch My Super Sweet 16! The perils of being a nutbar.
First Category: Family!
The Big Picture: Act like an adult re. my parents. Be nice to my brother and cultivate that relationship. Help fairly around house and do not pick on Hazzard (which is what I think I am calling M. Beekeper 'round these parts) about work.
The Really Big Picture: Get things in shape to get a baby up in me within 7 years. Look into being more Jewisher than I am
Down in the Mud With the Peasants:
- Do not call/email about help on dumb things I can do myself (daily)
- Do not borrow money except for discreet, pre-identified expenses, eg, tooth fillings (daily, I guess. This isn't really a problem I have, more of a reminder. )
- Call das brutterstein once a week and stay on phone 15 min even if he is not saying anything which is likely. (1x/week - Fridays?)
- Do not bug H. about work stuff (daily)
- BUT have once weekly family meeting to allay my concerns (1x/week)
- Do dishes OR cook 5x/week (5x/week)
- Walk dog 5x/week (5x/week)
Second Category: Jobbsers!
The Big Picture: Actually put some effort into my pay-the bills job even though it is stupid crazy easy. Finish manuscript. Get to know folks at Professional School For Professionals. Be productive. Don't be unproductive.
The Really Big Picture: Be Nancy Pelosi.
The Wheel to Which I Am Putting My Shoulder:
- 90 minutes/day 5 days/week on my pay-the-bills job (my job is honestly so easy that this will be a stretch) (5x/week)
- Write 1000 words/day 5 days/week (5x/week)
- Plan next day's writing 5 days/week (5x/week)
- Don't be on internet for more than 1 hr/day (daily)
- Only watch pre-deteermined tv for a max of 2hrs/day (daily)
- Write 3 Prof. school emails/week
Third Category: Save The Whales!
The Big Picture: Live in a way that is increasingly consistent with my beliefs. Have some idea of how to articulate my beliefs, "I love Mexicans!" does not count.
The Super Big Picture: Total Transcendence.
The Protestant Work Ethic:
- Phase out incandescant light bulbs, 1/week (1x week. This is really hard for me. I am going to need to put yellow gels on all my energy-save lamps or something.)
- Don't drink milk out of carton (daily. This lets me buy the more expensive organic milk, since it does not disappear as fast.)
- Volunteer (schedule deferred until Thurs, when I have a meeting re. this.)
- Get Green Energy Info (deferred until I know whether I am moving or not)
- Write 1 letter to a publication 1x a week. (weekly. I am really really good at getting letters to the NY Times published, let's see if this carries over.)
- Read newspaper. (daily)
Fourth Category: Strong Teeth And Bones
The Pig Bicture: Control Athsma. Be Hottt.
The Really Pig Bicture: Be Really Hottt. Some day, far off, eat less cheese.
Hottt Was Not Built in a Day:
- Yoga class (3x/week)
- Practice at home 20 min a night (daily)
- Dessert only twice a week (I guess I will define that as no desert 5x/week)
- Meat only twice a week (ditto - 5x/week)
- No cigarettes EVER (daily)
- When drinking, 1 drink per 75 min, maximum 4. (daily, I guess? It's not really an issue daily. Also, I realize that may sound a bit stringent for a hip young person - or not? - but I am literally the pukiest drinker EVAH. So less = better).
- Find some cardio ish thing to do (deferred)
Fourth Category number 2: Monies
Blah Blah: Pay off Credit Cards. Save 10,000
Blah Blah Blah: Don't be poor.
How We Do:
- Save $75/week (weekly)
- Pay $75 to credit cards/week (weekly)
- Don't buy any clothes/shoes/makeup for one month (uh? check in weekly?)
- Only one iTunes album every 2 weeks. (bi-weekly or biweekly?)
Now, I figure if I am hitting at least 75% of each category and at least 85% overall at the end of a month, I can get a reward. But what? I was thinking I would go get a massage, but then that costs money and then, then I would be like, well, actually it would be bad to meet my goals because then it would cost me! So I should just go watch My Super Sweet 16! The perils of being a nutbar.
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