There’s no one specific topic that I’m burning to write about tonight, so I’m re-instating something I did a couple times back during the HCG journey: stringing a series of random thoughts/vignettes together in a bricolage sort of post.

It’s a way to get some of the hamsters out of my brain, and at least ensures that I will get a post up here on JALC after skipping last night. (The pace of Wednesday night choir rehearsals finally caught up with me.)

Below the jump: more pumpkin spice, the endurance part of “endurance performance art,” and the futility of boob-plate armor.

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It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Mother-Fuckers

My Facebook and WordPress feeds have shown me all the ways that the annual pumpkin spice festival is in the zeitgeist, as it were. Perhaps funniest was this essay from McSweeney’s (originally printed in 2010) in the form of a letter expressing the sense of loss and betrayal at pumpkin spice’s previous cycles of betrayal and abandonment. It plays a little bit too strongly into old cliches around “You left me! I hate you! Please take me back!” — at least for my comfort level. Nonetheless, the level of passion and the artfulness of the conceit (including notes of a rebound fling with peppermint in December): all this passion and spleen for pumpkin spice, ye gods, just makes me giggle.

There’s another McSweeney’s essay from 2009 — whose title I have shamelessly cribbed here — but I found the tone to be too mean-spirited for me to enjoy. Nonetheless, the title is worth enjoying for its own brilliance, and can even be purchased in mug form for your next autumnal cuppa cuppa.

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Carry that Weight a Long Time

This article from art-blog HyperAllergic includes pieces of an interview with Emma Sulkowicz, a bit more than two weeks into her performance of Carry that Weight/Mattress Performance. The article contains one factoid that I very much appreciate:

“I’ve only had to do one walk entirely by myself, and that was because there were reporters swarming me and no one was willing to break through the flock.”

It comes back to something my friend Alice said in her comment on my main post about this piece (and the Carry the Weight Together solidarity movement that has been organized in response to Sulkowicz’s piece):

I suspect the most powerful impact will emerge, as it usually does, not in administrative reaction to large rallies but in conversations and allyships forged by small groups of people, finding each other over shared space of common cause.

Now, Gaia forgive my naive heart, I do still fervently believe that policies and legal precedents matter tremendously. (Did you see me back when the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision came down? Here’s a recap: initial outrage, growing anger, full-blown rage, never again, and a ray of solidarity. So suffice to say: I’m emotionally invested in big-policy.) But I also kinda think that the only way big policy change ever really sticks is when there’s a groundswell within the population that things must change and evolve — and that kind of groundswell is absolutely rooted in those small conversations and perspective-shifts. In that kind of yes/and space (or “having my cake and eating it too?”), I am pleased to see how Sulkowicz is receiving support from both formal and informal networks.*

But the other part that hit me more with this article than with earlier coverage is the endurance part of this “endurance performance art piece.” The article name checks some other practitioners of this genre — which I’ll admit I haven’t looked up yet — and has made me more aware of the particular kind of energy and discipline that is needed to sustain this piece.

Yeah, in all of the coverage from day one, the possibility has been voiced that Sulkowicz’s rapist may remain on campus without problem and that she would then be carrying this mattress until her graduation day. But something in reading this new article really settled into my body the sense of how likely that possibility is, considering Columbia’s less-than-stellar record on these issues. Sulkowicz could very well be carrying this physical weight, this talisman of trauma, until next June.

Talk about the kind of courage that’s demonstrated moment by moment and step by step.

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Death-Trap Boob-Armor

As a more whimsical follow-up to my snark about the plate-mail bikinis worn by so many of the Disneyfied princess-warriors I featured about a month ago, here’s an article from Tor that uses science (Science!) to show what a bad idea boob-shaped armor would be:

Let’s begin by stating the simple purpose of plate armor—to deflect blows from weaponry. Assuming that you are avoiding the blow of a sword, your armor should be designed so that the blade glances off your body, away from your chest. If your armor is breast-shaped, you are in fact increasing the likelihood that a blade blow will slide inward, toward the center of your chest, the very place you are trying to keep safe.

But that’s not all! Let’s say you even fall onto your boob-conscious armor. The divet separating each breast will dig into your chest, doing you injury. It might even break your breastbone. With a strong enough blow to the chest, it could fracture your sternum entirely, destroying your heart and lungs, instantly killing you. It is literally a death trap—you are wearing armor that acts as a perpetual spear directed at some of your most vulnerable body parts. It’s just not smart.

Consider this a sliding-towards-Hallowe’en public service announcement: boob-shaped-armor will get you killed.

* Though not the TV networks. C’mon oppressive reporter-flock — could at least one member among you have been awake enough to let the helper-bees through? Or were you actively cordoning Sulkowicz off in order to get a better shot?

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Image credit: http://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/its-decorative-gourd-season-motherfucker-mug