Comeback player of the year

A few quick notes from the just-now and the right-now:

1. I think about food a lot. Just now I had an outstanding crabcake sandwich. Crabcake sandwiches are tricky. If the bread is too hearty (french roll, ciabatta, whatever) the sandwich becomes almost impenetrable; given the nature of the crabcake, most sandwiches feel like bread-on-bread. The remedy, via 42 N Latitude, is to serve it on wheat toast. Also it comes with avocado and bacon, which are both delicious.

2. I finally got around to watching Confessions of a Dangerous Mind yesterday. Yeah, it was great. I'd watch Sam Rockwell in anything. Etc. On the other hand, "hideously miscast" is kind of that thing Julia Roberts does, isn't it?

3. Oh my god please stop making commercials for baseball with Dane Cook. You're ruining MY LIFE.

You take the good you take the bad you take them both and there you have...

Hey, remember how I said I liked to talk about lady problems? Thought I was joking? WRONG.

There's some talking 'round the way about a new pill, Lybrel, which is intended to be taken continuously so ladies skip their lady time. (Also, of course, William Saletan, who for some reason got put on Slate's lady problem beat and also who my dad thinks he knew in high school (coincidence?) weighs in). This is like, the biggest non-issue in the world to me to the extent that:

a)pills make you skip your lady time anyway and replace it with a fake one, so can we please go back in the past and bicker about this when it mattered, if it did.

b)it is like, not important to me whether people skip their lady time or not. I happen to be kind of attached to mine for completely sentimental reasons, but I'm not interested in condemning anyone who is eager to rid herself of cramping and ruined undies and general inconvenience. I guess if I kept mine and everyone else got rid of theirs and my relative productivity was thereby reduced by like, my having to go to the bathroom more often than everyone else, it would be a problem for me in the modern market economy. But somehow I can't get worked up about that. (also, consider that perhaps the reason I am able to be attached to mine is that it is not all that crippling, and so keeping it, even as gals with more badderer periods ditched theirs, would not really have an effect on our GNP. I can craft widgets and bleed at the same time.)

b1)though I should register my opposition to any paradigm shifts that result in the choice to maintain lady time being received as peculiar and gross like not waxing, eew. Ok? Great.

Anyway, this is old news, but it got me thinking about some even older news, PMS. I suck at PMS. I get sad and mean and pimply and tired. It is real, I mean, those hormones get up in my brain. At the same time, woe betide the person who suggests that perhaps I am not stabbing them for A Perfectly Good Reason and that maybe I am PMSing. I think what I resent here is the insinuation that what I am experiencing is not within the scope of Normal Human Variation. I think this speaks to the nature of my feminism in general - the idea that yes, sure, the lady stuff is real and different from some of the man stuff, but the idea that it happens on some exclusive spectrum of experience, that it's not all part of the same stupid human soup, that it's not just a fact, but a THING chaps my ass. And that is why it chaps my ass super duper when people get fussy about parents working, and how much time they do or don't need off and how should they be accommodated. People, particularly ladies, have kids. They just DO. It is just a thing that happens. Maybe not to you, but to humans as a species. And yes, sure, it is a big deal and they need taking care of, but it's not really that big a deal in the sense of anything exceptional happening that should be outside the realm of what our institutions and models are constructed to deal with.

Anyway, I'm PMSing, so I don't think I am making sense today.

Updated to note that the fact of pregnancy confounds a lot of things.

Double updated to note that I am not pregnant, just saying.

Happy Something, Rusty.

Food always looks so appetizing in black and white.

Meeting Men on Public Transport

I am the one person in the world who is not annoyed by loud children in confined spaces. I understand why they're annoying - I'm just not personally wired to react that way. My thoughts are less "I want that kid to shut up so I can read," or even "I guess I was a baby once too..." and more "Well! THERE is a young person with whom I could have a great conversation about the sounds different animals make!"

SCROTUS

Am reading the SCOTUS opinion on Gonzalez (booo!) vs. Carhart. I got it from feministe, where they tend to know what's what on reproductive rights. It is gnarly*, of course, but kind of captivating in the insight it provides into a weird sort of essentialist logic. Try this on for size: intact D&E is "perverting the proccess of birth." That almost sounds like dirty hippie talk, no?

*Bad gnarly, not Bill and Ted gnarly.

Mutter

It was my idea to go, and a focus of our trip to Philadelphia, the four of us, two young couples obsessed with greasy food and silly movies, arcana and the kitsch and trash. "They have," I said "SKULLS there. And GROVER CLEVELAND'S TUMOR. Can you handle it?"

It was everything I could have wanted in a museum full of skulls. It was small and a little dusty, specimens were kept in old-fashioned cabinets that lined the wall. It was gothic and delicious and symptoms of ravaging disease and deformity were everywhere, thrilling me. That's what syphillis does? Wow. Would you divorce me if I grew a horn like that? It was touching, too - the exhibit on Siamese Twins, on their recognizable reality and love for each other, their conjuncture hardly seeming a hardship, at least in these histories sketched out on poster board, behind those same old-fashioned glass cabinet doors. Maybe it was true, or just issued as a corrective, but in any case.

The giant colon downstairs terrified me - a swollen black eel the size of a man - to have that inside of you would be to know demonic possession. The ribcage of a boy woven through with overzealous bones, the babies in jars.

It sounds funny, it is funny! Babies in jars! The punchline of an intentionally tasteless joke that you'd tell on a first date in order to suss out whether this was someone you could spend your life with or not, whether they, too, love tasteless jokes. Babies in jars! And that's what they were. They floated in honey-colored fluid just like they had in the womb - their skin was waxy and dull, but they had petal-like feet like as live babies do, and smooth little noses. Some were twins, but instead of manifesting the loving symbiosis I read about upstairs each had been joined to the other in such a way that she had prevented her from ever taking even a first mewling gulp of air, some had been killed by forceps, or just born wrong. Babies used to die all the time, I remembered, an effort to steel myself in solidarity with history. I sought out the foeti in various stages of development and looked carefully at the very earliest, in which I could discern no human feature.

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.

A bunch of different kinds of update.

A what does Seth Stevenson Look Like Update - I google-imaged Seth Stevenson but all I got were stills from the commercials he's reviewed. Which is like thirty different kinds of post-post modern. In my mind he is now a chimera with the faces of the Mac ad guy, the BK king and a bowl of soup from Malaysia.

A what does Violet Do Instead of Playing With The Dog Update - I read this post on this obscure little blog I found. It is by a "No Nym," not by the main blogger who is some professor chick? Or something? Here's what happens:

This blogger-academic types says, I found a job that does not crush my babies in to paste and my getting perspective on what I WANT as opposed to what grad school told me I want helped with that. Everybody normal is all yay, then everybody crazy is all, why did you even have babies if you didn't want them to be crushed into paste, because I mean, there are plenty of us academics out here who would be totally willing to crush our babies into paste for the right job, and you are just wasting everyone's time and gumming up the works but not with baby paste which is actually good for the works.

Observations and Commentary:

Uno) I am the child of one and a half normal academics, one half Indiana Jones and zero stay at home parents. I totally did not turn out being paste.* Sometimes, we ate lots of mac and cheese because no one had time to cook anything else, but sometimes we also went to the zoo or played Candyland. This is all, I think, more about parents – and parents’ marriages – then about babies, who tend to grown up into dysfunctional nuthats like the rest of us no matter what, though they do need to be fed and not beaten, no matter what. Parents want to feel good about what they are doing for their children, but a lot of jobbsers count on encouraging feelings of inadequacy that ripple throughout an employee’s existence. I think it is supposed to be motivating. **

Dos) However, I kind of sympathize with the crazy people, because whenever anyone talks about their own experience, I read that as a criticism of mine to the extent it differs. And I guess, if someone" had peed in your coffee that morning, you could read the post as a little bit of The Secret-Style you are the engineer of your own destiny think happy thoughts blah zee. He could have gotten only one of those job offers, or none at all, and then there would be no happy story about how he told the fancy robber baron school that no way no how was their steel mill getting built on his pristine farm, nuh uh. But. There would still be a story there about how there is a whole lot of weird professional dogma that got all put up in our brainpiece and it’s a liberating exercise to reject it, even if it’s still just you in your hovel rejecting.

Tres) I am really, really curious about bringing up family stuff being a no-no in interviews, causing bad reactions in hiring committees and the like, only because I hear about it often and from people whose perception of their own experiences I trust, and I’ve seen what seem like its effects on the broad social level and in my own brainpeice, but my actual experience with jobs/schools etc. has been v. much the opposite. I’m literally incapable about being anything but totally candid about my personal life, because I have a huge huge mouth and am obsessed with myself, and will have been talking to total strangers (whom I need to impress because they own my job) about my reproductive decision making within thirty seconds of meeting them. I applied for a very staid-sounding scholarship at Big Shot Professional School for Big Shot Profession and it was all corporate corporate corporate, and one of the interviewers, who was wearing cufflinks and everything was chatting to me about his granddaughter, and I was literally like, “I’ll have to get started on kids in school, because I want like thirty.” I got the scholarship. And that is one example out of many. My theory is that corporate types in cufflinks find me a charming breath of fresh air because I am and they are like, let’s give our money to the flighty girl with the runs in her stocking and see what enchanting indiscretions she commits with it, and that if I were someone who were more like them or didn’t have runs in my stockings, the dissonance between my persona and my family concerns would make them all who does she think she is? Or maybz, because I know Goodman Beekeeper is all babies all the time, and I know I can count on him to hold that shit down no matter what, I don't display any anxiety when talking about this and that works in my favor? Or maybe I have just dealt with awesome people so far?

*My brother, on the other hand, starved to death during MLA ’89.

** The academics of whom I am the child, upon hearing that I was considering applying to X-Subject PhD programs were like, so, what about nursing school? And then all their friends revealed a secret desire to have gone to nursing school. And these are some people who have totally won the professor game. Meanwhile, my friends in nursing school really like it. I am not going to school for X-Subject.