Found Money

On By MezzoSherriIn Blogging Challenges, Gratitudes and Thank Yous, Life-Long Learning, Meta-Blogging, Self-Acceptance2 Comments

[Set-up] It looks like I’m going to continue to need a little flexibility and creativity with Writing 101 . Today’s actual assignment is the completion of a three part series I started back on “Day 4.” Of course, I haven’t actually written part two of this three-part series — because that’s one of the pieces I skipped during last week’s work insanity. So I guess I won’t actually be jumping right into this week’s assignments. Instead, there will be a targeted reach-back to last Wednesday’s assignment, as a precursor to whenever I get around to doing today’s.

So, Day 13, written on what should actually be Day 16 of the sequence:

On day four, you wrote a post about losing something. Today, write about finding something. . . . Today’s twist: if you wrote day four’s post as the first in a series, use this one as the second installment — loosely defined.

You could pick up the action where you stopped, or jump backward or forward in time. You might write about the same topic, but use a different style, or use the same style to tackle a neighboring topic.

[/Set-up]

———-

So, gentle reader, when I last left the abbreviated summary of my life’s career trajectory, I had drifted into both an environment (academia) and a profession (faculty) for which I was profoundly ill-suited. To some degree, the inner rumblings around that ill-suitedness began very early. And yet, I struggled to persevere. Buckled down to overcome the deficiencies of my mass-market, public school background. Shifted graduate programs to one where I had more natural gifts and talents than my first Ph.D. curriculum.

Why was I so damn stubborn? In part because I am really, truly so damn stubborn. But a lot of it was rooted in a basic survival-level fear that there wasn’t anything besides teaching/professor-ing that I could ever make a living at.

calvin-on-fund-raising

I dare say I kinda fell into my career. It’s not like I wandered around elementary school saying “I want to be a fund-raiser when I grow up!” And, really, who would go around saying that? Do the ins-and-outs of non-profit management get any airplay in the Sesame Street/Richard Scarry “People in my Neighborhood” set?

Nowadays there’s definitely more awareness at the college level of non-profit careers. But that’s a big shift from when I went to school, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

I actually wrote my first successful grant proposal as a bit of volunteer service for a community choir where I was singing. I’d somehow talked my way onto the choir’s board as a general member-at-large, and was eager to find ways to prove my worth and contribute. So when the Board president asked for someone to help write some grant proposals, I figured it’d be an easy thing to do. I’m a good writer. I even know how to teach writing, don’t I? A grant proposal should be simple!

And here’s the kicker: it kinda was.

This is not to minimize the ways that grant-writing is intensely different from the stylistic and argumentative conventions of academic prose. But where I always found myself struggling and straining against those academic conventions, the general transparency of grant guidelines, and the need to build a tight, compelling argument out of plain language was a genre of writing that made instinctive sense to me.

And then we got the money.

So suddenly, something that both came naturally to me — writing plain, strong prose — and that I had studied intensely — how to analyze genre and build written arguments* — had real, honest-to-goodness street creed and value to it. I had worked for less than a weekend, and my choir now had several thousand dollars to show for that effort.

Now, obviously, that initial grasp of what it took to be a grants professional was, in its own way, appalling naive. I had a lot to learn in the first few years of my career — though the learnings were sufficiently connected to my existing strengths and background knowledge that success was possible.

And I still have moments where I question whether fund-raising is really the “forever career” for me. The division and tension I have seen at every non-profit between those who raise the money and those actually out doing the work is one that troubles me. I know the privileges of being in the fund-raising camp. But I also have never entirely been able to let go of a nagging self-quesitoning about whether I really want to spend the rest of my life being “just a fund-raiser” — after all, the Gospel of Matthew suggests that “you cannot serve both God and mammon” (6:24).

But even with those ongoing questions about whether there is a third career yet to unfold in my life, I remain profoundly grateful that I was able to lose academia and find my way into grants and fund-raising. I have become very good at what I do, I have seen the benefits of my efforts take shape in programs and services and buildings, and I have been able to make a living for myself.

* Or “analyze funder guidelines and build a responsive case for support.”

———–

Image credit: http://s102.photobucket.com/user/pb82/media/Cartoons/calvin-on-fund-raising.gif.html

What I Learned in Grad School

On By MezzoSherriIn Blogging Challenges, Life-Long Learning, Meta-Blogging, Self-Acceptance, The Voices in My Head2 Comments

Okay, so the big super-huge work project got even more intense than I’d anticipated, so I went full-out on it till Thursday night. Then, instead of sleeping and catching up on my rest and my writing, Mr. Mezzo and I have been out of town for the past two days celebrating my niece’s graduation. So, suddenly I missed an entire week’s worth of Writing 101 assignments, and the next crop of assignments is due to start up again tomorrow morning.

Now, one thing I learned in grad school is the strategic folly of always trying to go back and play catch-up.

Let’s say you fall behind on your reading for Week 3 in a particularly dense syllabus — like, say, the kind of syllabus where the professor keeps adding new articles to the reading list year after year, without taking away any of the older, less-academically-relevant ones. (Not that I ever had any grad classes like that back in the day. This is all purely a hypothetical exercise…..)

lawrence-wink

Anyhow.

One approach to take to this conundrum would be to start Week 4 by going back to the things you missed in Week 3, hoping to address all of the backlog and all the new assignments. But, if each week’s workload is too robust to be handled in a week, the only thing you gain by that approach is to just get farther and farther behind.

So after one or two courses where I tried to do the virtuous “going back and catching up on everything” routine, I developed a new discipline around falling behind on homework.

Step one for me is to jump right back into the stream at this moment. Hit the reset button, start with the new crop of work, do all of it to the best of my ability — and then, if I do end up with some luxurious extra time after that, only then will I try to go back and fill in what I’ve missed, using my own instincts to triage out what’s most important and what’s most able to be let go.

So, tomorrow I’ll be jumping back into the Writing 101 flow with this coming week’s assignments, and I’ll go back and fill in the missed ones in whatever order I choose to do them.

I have some hope that the work week will be a little quieter than the past fortnight has been. If that turns out to be the case, I may get home early enough to manage a double-posting day or two throughout the week, which would help with the backlog. I also could get creative and see if there’s a way I can kill two assignments with one essay, as it were. Or there may just be an assignment or two that I let slide by, water flowing under the bridge of best intentions, never to be seen or recaptured again.

And I’m okay with that. Aside from the specific workflow strategies I am applying here to my bloggy-life, the main thing I learned in grad school was the complete psychic and energetic uselessness of perfectionism and how pointless it is to do that inner ballet of self-flagellation when one shows one’s humanity by doing an imperfect or fallible thing.

Admittedly, that main lesson only partly sunk in. I keep learning and studying and practicing into that one. Step by step, I continue ever onward — following the trajectory away from self-punishing perfectionism and towards maturity and self-acceptance.

Here, now, with Writing 101, is as good a time to practice that as any.

———-

Image credit: http://giphy.com/gifs/pzmTB7cwkfx0Q

Life Under Deadline

On By MezzoSherriIn Meta-Blogging, The Voices in My HeadLeave a comment

Huge proposal due Friday. HUGE. Things are progressing, but nonetheless rocky. Am buckling down for the next 48 hours or so, determined, dedicated, and a little scary.

bane-resists-fear

I anticipate that by tomorrow night, my mood will be closer to:

alladin-panic

And, if all goes well, I will be back posting Wednesday night in the triumphant glee of accomplishment.

ursula-triumph

Ciao till then, darlings!

When the Fat Lady Sings

On By MezzoSherriIn Fat is Just an Adjective, Flagrantly Feminist, Pop Goes the Culture4 Comments

BrunnhildeI am about a month behind the times in commenting on this, but back near the middle-to-end of May, I saw an NPR post about a distressing batch of reviews responding to Tara Erraught’s performance as Octiavian in Der Rosenkavalier at the Glyndenbourne Festival.

As summarized by Anastasia Tsioulcas (from a compilation gathered by Norman Lebrecht on his blog Slipped Disc),

What is stunningly apparent is just how much a woman’s body matters onstage — way more, if these five critics are to be believed, than her voice, her technique, her musicality or any other quality. . . . Bonus disgrace points to [Rupert] Christiansen [of The Telegraph], by the way, for going after the other lead in Rosenkavalier for having the temerity to be a working parent: “Kate Royal … has recently sounded short of her best and stressed by motherhood.” Kudos for pinpointing motherhood as the source of Royal’s putative shortcomings. She couldn’t possibly have been overbooked, or feeling under the weather — couldn’t have been any other reason, right?

Tsioulcas observes that the lone dissenting voice in this chorus of fat-shaming was a female opera critic; she also does a bit of counterpoint to see if these critics are as likely to mention issues of weight/stature when reviewing the work of male classical singers. (They’re not. In other news: water is wet.)

As tempting as it might be to reduce this controversy to some simplistic formula like “men critics are bad patriarchal meanies while women support each other,” that kind of reductiveness is not entirely what I see going on here. To shift to Maclean’s summary of the point-counterpoint:

Elle magazine accused critics of “fat-shaming” Erraught, who isn’t even particularly heavy by normal standards. It seemed to many like the culmination of at least a decade of unrealistic expectations for opera singers’ looks, especially among women. . . . Alice Coote, a star English mezzo-soprano, blogged on the music news site Slipped Disc to defend Erraught and remind critics that opera is “all about the human voice.” And Elle’s Natalie Matthews wondered “why bring up her weight at all?” finding the issue irrelevant to opera singing.

Others argue that it isn’t irrelevant at all. They fear that the view expressed by Coote and others could bring back the days when singers like Luciano Pavarotti were cast for singing alone, even in parts they were physically unfit for. “I don’t believe opera is all about singing,” says Wayne Gooding, editor of Opera Canada. “It’s all about music theatre. There are many reasons why somebody may not be appropriate for a particular role: wrong kind of voice, or wrong timbre, too old or too young, and yes, wrong look.” [Conrad L.] Osborne adds that “physical appropriateness, within reason, is a perfectly legitimate artistic consideration.”

(Okay, yeah, that passage also lends itself a bit to gender bifurcation, considering that once again the voices defending Erraught are female, and the voices defending body-policing are male. But that wasn’t what I was intending to look at. Move along, nothing to see here…)

Let me hone in on the pieces I wanted to chew over: the emphasis of opera as musical theater, and the tricky territory of artistic vision in creating a stage production of any show. As Anne Midgette summarized last week in the Washington Post*– the column that got me thinking that maybe, weeks later, it still was worth writing about this:

On one side of this debate are those who hold that opera is a musical experience and therefore looks are not as important as sound (witness the success of extremely large singers such as Luciano Pavarotti and Montserrat Caballé). On the other are those who aver that opera is also a theatrical experience and that appearance matters. Guess what. You’re both right. I’ve been at opera performances where the staging was awful but the singing was glorious, and nothing else mattered. I’ve been at opera performances where the production was so compelling that I was willing to overlook so-so singing. These things have to be taken on a case-by-case basis. Any time you make rules about what art “has” to be, you’re doing it wrong.

I do want there to be room for artists and creators and theater companies to be able to communicate a unique vision in their artworks, whether that be a painting, a poem, or a stage production. And it’s an uncomfortable truth that if your artistic creation has any focus to it, then there are likely other viable choices and representations that have been excluded in the creation of a particular emphasis.

Off the top of my head, I can think of three vastly different productions of Macbeth — one I attended, one was directed by a friend of mine, and the third had a friend as a member of the acting company. They all had fascinating “hooks” to them — one a meditation on ethnic violence with stagecraft that alluded to the Serbo-Croatian wars in the 1990s; one an all-female cast that thoughtfully turned the all-male productions of Shakespeare’s day inside-out; and the final one an exploration of the legacy of European colonization and of military dictatorship. Each one of these was a worthwhile lens through which to explore the original text, and there is absolutely no way that all three of those lens could have co-existed in a single production. So maybe it’s perfectly legitimate for a director to prioritize whatever he wants to prioritize in casting a show, whether it’s weighing voice over looks or vice-versa.

Except.

There’s a reason I used the gendered pronoun “he” in talking about directors, above. HuffPo: “According to Fandor, women make up a total of five percent — five percent! — of the directors in Hollywood, down from nine percent in 1998.” The Guardian: “Only 24% of directors employed by the theatres during 2011-12 were women. Looking at creative crews as a whole (directors, designers, sound designers, lighting designers and composers) only 23% of the total employed were women.”

To quote Midgette again:

The reason that “Taragate” has blossomed into such a focus of opinion and argument is that it encapsulates current flash points in our society: how we talk about weight and think about weight and how we look at and evaluate women and women’s bodies. . . . [T]here’s also a disingenuous way in which male critics (and the majority of performing-arts critics are still men) protest that it is perfectly relevant to criticize a woman not for what she does, but for how she looks. . . .

I will defend the right of critics to have strong opinions and unpopular opinions and to offer blunt and unflattering descriptions of performers. And I continue to aver that people would be even more upset if critics went away and there were no criticism at all. But it’s naive in a #YesAllWomen world to deny the implicit sexism of the discourse here. And to offer it is less an offense to our womanhood than to our intelligence.

Are there times that the emphasis on physicality can have artistic integrity to it, and if so, when and under what conditions? And when is that emphasis just another vehicle to reinforce patriarchal/misogynist cultural standards?

———-

One of the reasons this all has been so top-of-mind for me is that I am trying to decide whether to audition for a show this upcoming week. It’s been a production/audition cycle that’s been on my radar since I first started thinking about community theater a month ago, and I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do.

I’ve felt the pain of not receiving a part, knowing (and sometimes even having it acknowledged) that I was a better singer and actor than the woman cast, but also knowing that the woman cast was thinner and prettier than me. And so I wonder whether there’s any chance of goodness stemming from bringing my “overweight” body into the audition hall, or if that’s just such a set-up for judgement and rejection that it’s not even worth engaging in.

I’d better figure this out soon. ‘Cos if I’m going to do it, I need to choose in time to actually make the audition window. And if I choose against auditioning, I want that to be an actual conscious choice, rather than me dithering until the window of opportunity closes on its own and I never actually had to take ownership of my life and choices.

This lady’s still (and forever?) fat. Is she singing? The jury’s out.

* See, they do have some respectable journalists on staff!

———-

Image credit: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/it-aint-over-until-the-fat-lady-sings.html

Tempest in a Tent

On By MezzoSherriIn Meta-Blogging, Pop Goes the Culture2 Comments

Amaluna Girl Boy NetMr. Mezzo and I have tickets for the late-afternoon performance of Cirque du Soleil’s Amaluna. As any self-respecting couple out-on-the-town would be expected to do, we’re going out to dinner afterwards — although it’ll be a fairly low-key affair, given how batshit-early I need to get up tomorrow morning to knock out a 50-page proposal write-through before heading out to church choir.

All of which is to say: no lengthy post on JALC tonight.

I’ve seen a couple of Cirque shows in Vegas, and one touring production that was hosted at Temple University’s basketball stadium. However, even though I saw the big Cirque tent built at the corner of Broad and Washington for many-a-year during my time in Philly, I’ve never actually had the “big tent Cirque” experience till now. So I’m intrigued.

I’ve also seen tell that Amaluna is (loosely!) based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which adds a whole other level of interest for me. (It’s actually that core detail which moved Mr. Mezzo and me instantly from “do we want to go?” into “hell yes, let’s pick the date!”) The fact that the show was conceived by Diane Paulus, whose revival of Hair I looooove just adds an extra extra attraction.

I wonder if this show, and my desire to say something about it, will turn out to be just the inspiration I need to “phoenix up” my other long-neglected blog.

A girl can hope — such stuff as dreams are made on….

———-

Image credit: http://tapeworthy.blogspot.com/2012/06/shakespeare-without-words-hamlet-and.html

 

Melting My Heart

On By MezzoSherriIn Blogging Challenges, Detox Journey, Meta-Blogging, Pop Goes the Culture, Self-Acceptance, Stuff about Stuff3 Comments

Years and years ago, I saw a Christmas-themed TV commercial where an adorable redhead is running to tell her parents that Santa had arrived! As they walk into the living room to see mountains of gifts piled up, Dad says something about “Those must have been some cookies you left out for Santa last night.” And the adorable redhead says….

Wait, let me do a Youtube check and see if I can embed the punchline for you to see with your own eyes:

(I [heart] the Internet.)

cheese-dogI have remembered this commercial with shocking clarity because it made such a profound impression on me. I, like this fictional Santa, am much more a lover of cheese than of cookies. Y’all may recall that different times throughout my HCG journey I talked about missing cheese, and when I was in that last stage of partial food restriction (fats okay, but still no carbs or grains), the thing I was most happy to bring back into my daily routine was cheese. I’m still having a cheese and egg white omelet for breakfast most mornings,* and there’s plenty of days where my late afternoon protein boost is a cheese stick or two. (Except the days it’s a small container of cashews.)

From childhood into adulthood, when I had toast or an English muffin for breakfast, I would always want to have a slice of melted cheese on top, instead of jelly. And my absolutely favorite food during my childhood was  macaroni and cheese. Lest I oversell the contrast between my childhood self and my sage maturity today, let me be really clear: I have not outgrown that love for mac & cheese. (Nor do I ever want to.)

But, even though I feel greatly abashed and embarrassed to say this — especially on a week when there’s been this whole kerfuffle about the FDA’s attempt (thankfully abandoned) to ban the making of artisanal cheeses — I have a confession to make.

I love Velveeta.

Your toxic kisses make my heart race
Faster than a cheetah
I’ve been stapled and spindled
My willpower’s dwindled
You melt resistance down like hot Velveeta!

~Reefer Madness, “Mary Jane/Mary Lane“

I know, I know. Velveeta isn’t even really a cheese. The label on the box says “pasteurized recipe cheese food,” and I don’t know exactly what that means, but I do know it means “not really a real cheese.”

And yet, it was a core pillar of my formative cheesy experiences. Something about its peculiar, pasteurized and processed nature gives it that uniquely “liquid gold” melty-ness. So, for many many childhood foods in my memory — the melted sauce for mac & cheese, melting a slice of cheese on top of that English muffin, cheeseburgers on the grill, cheese melted into an omelet for Sunday brunch, or even our cheese fondue on Christmas Eve — Velveeta was part of the recipe.

During those few years when we lived in Brasil, whenever Dad would head stateside for a business trip, we’d send him with an extra-large suitcase. It’d be mostly empty on the flight to the USA, and then would return chock-full of Velveeta cheese blocks and cans of Campbell’s Tomato Soup. Mom would host her own personal Velveeta cooking festival,** and I, hopelessly picky about food and struggling always to adjust to the heat, the flavors and the concrete surfaces of Sao Paolo, would feel, if only for a few dinners, like I was home.

As years have worn on, I have come more and more to replace Velveeta with really real cheeses in my life. So now, the morning omelet is made with colby-cheddar shred, the afternoon cheese sticks are mozzarella or cheddar, and if I’m melting cheese on top of toast it’ll be swiss or provolone. As for that Christmas Eve fondue? My brother-in-law, who is quite a talented cook but who doesn’t get much of a chance to express that with his work schedule, has taken that over and concocts a new and yummy combination every year.

But still. A block of Velveeta has been a perpetual staple in my fridge for my entire adult life, maintaining its prominence for two specific dishes: mac & cheese and queso. There’s even an unopened package in my fridge right now. (Why do you think it was so easy for me to get the precise wording off the box describing how it’s not really a real cheese?)

I bought it on autopilot right before I started the HCG journey, so it’s been sitting there a while. That hasn’t especially worried me — I figure the expiration date is probably 2023 or something. But I haven’t quite figured out whether I’m going to start eating it again, or toss it out unopened. I’m also not sure which imagined outcome of eating it scares me more: the possibility that my reset palate will find the flavor to be not-very-enjoyable and that my nostalgic love for Velveeta will be tarnished, or the possibility that renewed relationship with Velveeta will slide me right down the rabbit-hole of over-processed food all the time….

Until I can figure that out, I guess the package will just sit there on the bottom shelf of the fridge.

[Post-script] Writing 101, Day 10 prompt:

Tell us about your favorite childhood meal — the one that was always a treat, that meant “celebration,” or that comforted you and has deep roots in your memory.

Free free to focus on any aspect of the meal, from the food you ate to the people who were there to the event it marked.

Today’s twist: Tell the story in your own distinct voice.

Obviously, rather than following the suggestion to the letter, I ended up following the thread of a beloved food throughout multiple times and events. I also didn’t fret overmuch about “finding my voice.” If there is nothing else I am certain about in writing JALC, I do know that my voice here is authentic and authentically mine.

I can’t remember if I’ve talked about this before, but every time I sit down to write a post, and every time I feel blank or blocked within the process, the same prayer runs through me like a mantra: “Say it plain, say it true.” And yeah, my version of saying things “plain” is a slightly unusual version of the term.*** But that prayer, that compass guides me to true north. Every time. [/Post-script]

* Okay, it’s really one whole egg and a half-cup of egg whites.

** Our family’s separate body of Campbell’s Tomato Soup cuisine will, alas, have to wait for another day.

*** Perhaps the understatement of the year.

———-

Image credit: http://veryhilarious.com/i-notice-you-have-cheese/

A Matter of Perspective

On By MezzoSherriIn Blogging Challenges, Fat is Just an Adjective, Flagrantly Feminist, Health at Every Size, Meta-Blogging, Pop Goes the Culture, Topics of Study4 Comments

different-perspective-238x300Back in college, I took one creative writing class. One of the exercises was to create a scene and tell it from two different perspectives. Being very much in a “write what you know” place, I concocted something about one student dropping by another’s dorm room to pick up notes from a missed class.

I created laughingly amateurish levels of contrast between the two characters and a somewhat tense snip of dialogue for this hand-off. Then I presented the exact same dialogue, Rashomon-style, through both POVs, trying to suggest the truth beneath each set of false assumptions. The borrower, who through the eyes of the lender looked prim, overdressed and snobby, was actually tense because she was late meeting her parents for a dinner out. While the lender, who looked through the borrower’s eyes as disorganized and a slob, was…actually, I can’t quite remember what angle I took for her inner life.

I was unaccountably proud of myself for the discipline I’d shown in reproducing the dialogue so precisely within both pieces, and how I’d worked so hard to make sure that neither girl came off entirely the villain. Which is why the most instructive piece for me about the whole experience was the response of one of my classmates — when the conversation turned to my pieces in the weekly portfolio, it became very clear that she’d bought so entirely into the perspective of the notes-lender that she’d disregarded everything I’d tried to show to explain and justify the borrower’s behavior.

———-

The lens of one’s perspective can be incredibly strong in the way it filters our understanding of what we see and experience in the world. Last fall, I saw coverage of a research study by Yale law professor Dan Kahan:

Kahan conducted some ingenious experiments about the impact of political passion on people’s ability to think clearly.  His conclusion, in Mooney’s words: partisanship “can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills…. [People] who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs.”

In other words, say goodnight to the dream that education, journalism, scientific evidence, media literacy or reason can provide the tools and information that people need in order to make good decisions.  It turns out that in the public realm, a lack of information isn’t the real problem.  The hurdle is how our minds work, no matter how smart we think we are.  We want to believe we’re rational, but reason turns out to be the ex post facto way we rationalize what our emotions already want to believe.

This study is merely the latest of a healthy line of investigation, much of it done under the umbrella of behavioral economics, into human irrationality, manipulatability and decision-making. My passing interest in this work is one of the reasons I’m so certain that cultural transformation needs to be rooted in both the head (facts) and the heart (emotions).

But the odd offshoot of this is the ways that I’m also a little more suspicious of the notion of “putting myself in someone’s else’s shoes.” I mean, there’s lots and lots of time where the practice of compassion, the striving to understand another person’s perspective is valuable.

Sometimes, though, I wonder if the gulf of perspective is wider than can be crossed in an imagination event. A co-worker of mine back in Philly always talked about the risk of “conversations with disbelievers” — wouldn’t our advocacy energy, she wondered,  be better spent speaking to people who shared some (or all) of our core values but didn’t yet see the connection between those values and our work, rather than by trying to “convert” individual holding values drastically different from ours?

I think there’s something to that.

I also worry about the many, many ways that the news media “ideal” of balanced coverage of an issue is actually a subtle way to reinforce the assumptions and lies of the cultural status quo.  By now, the slogan “Fair and Balanced” has become self-parody, an eternal punchline:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/618470

There’s also the longstanding tradition of stories presenting two talking heads, each on one side of a controversial issue. But what are the cultural prejudices that get reaffirmed by the decision of which topics are controversial and need the point-counterpoint treatment. Remember back when I talked about media response to the book The Obesity Paradox? That story, which dared to suggest that fat prejudice might not be a good idea, required GMA’s medical editor to show up and talk about how we all still need to watch our BMI and monitor our weight. But the 2,600 diet tips and programs that have been profiled on GMA since then? Do you think there’s been any requirement for our sage Dr. to talk about how weight isn’t an accurate measure of health, and the physical harm caused by dieting/weight cycling behaviors? Of course not! (Citations here.)

And then there’s the flip side, when crackpot theories are given far more cultural dominance than they deserve* in the interest on presenting “both sides” of a story. To continue on the thread of climate change:

I’m a week behind on my John Oliver, so it’s possible that he did something so incredibly kick-ass this past Sunday night as to take the top spot on my list. But, barring that possibility, I think this moment from Episode 3 is the best damn thing he’s ever done:

(Though bringing down the FCC comments site over net neutrality preventing cable company fuckery was kind of cool, too.)

———-

[Post-script] This meditation was prompted by the Day 9 prompt for Writing 101:

A man and a woman walk through the park together, holding hands. They pass an old woman sitting on a bench. The old woman is knitting a small, red sweater. The man begins to cry. Write this scene.

Today’s twist: write the scene from three different points of view: from the perspective of the man, then the woman, and finally the old woman.

It’s another prompt that seems more aptly designed for fiction writers than for the memoirist/cultural gadfly kind of writer such as myself. But no complaints: it was a fun topic to think about, even if I took the assignment a little “slant” once again. [/Post-script]

* Actually, a “crackpot theory getting more cultural dominance that it rightly deserves” is a pretty damn accurate description of fat shaming/fat stigma, too….

———-

Image credit: http://www.questforanewperspective.com/simple-living/why-have-a-different-perspective/

Me and Garcia Lorca, in the Produce Aisle

On By MezzoSherriIn Blogging Challenges, Meta-Blogging, Practicing in the Heart, The Voices in My Head3 Comments

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the
streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit
supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles
full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! — and you,
Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

~ Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California“

When did I become someone who shops for groceries at 9’o’clock on Wednesday night?

800px-Refurbished_Coles_supermarket_in_BerwickWho am I kidding? I know when it happened — it was when I decided that instead of sacrificing all of my life for my career, I was going to use this fresh, Bostonian start to become a master juggler. Remain dedicated to my nonprofit and reengage with singing and tend to my home life and also have this whole sideline as a feminist blogger.

None of those pursuits erase the body’s need for sustenance. So, the post-choir stop has become a Thing for me. And here I am.

Late-night groceries aren’t the same here as they were in the big city. Not as many college kids and grad students keeping their crazy hours. (I remember those crazy hours. I miss those crazy hours.)

It isn’t exactly like that scene in the post-apocalyptic film where folks find their way into a grocery store and forage for sustenance. But it’s close.

We seem to have an unspoken agreement, the other customers and I. Do not acknowledge one another’s presence. There’s lots of aisles and few shoppers: everyone gets their own territory and no one will get hurt.

I feel like a spy tonight, stretching the boundaries of the unspoken code. Glancing, looking, watching. Wondering and assessing.

A young woman wearing scrubs and tennis shoes: I guess she might be getting off-shift. The fabric is patterned with hearts — red, black, white. Does she work in the children’s ward? There’s an older gentleman, keeping his jacket zipped up to his neck. A mother and her school-age son: isn’t it past his bedtime by now? More professionals like me, decked in their work attire.

Also: a few guys who I’d place as from the one little college that is up the road from here. The casualness that encompasses their wardrobe — baggy shorts, loose tank tops, unshaven faces — makes me wince to think about gender programming and the self-consciousness that persists around what clothes I will allow myself to wear in public. Even when “out in public” is as banal as grocery shopping.

After ringing out, as I take my bags in-hand to depart, there is a break with protocol. A flash of recognition, acknowledgement. She works here, and this Wednesday shift has become a Thing for her, too. With the regularity of our seeing each other, why not take the risk to connect as humans, even if it’s the lightest of touches?

“Have a good night.”

A shy smile and head-nod in return. “You too.”

There’s a saying confettied across Facebook and Pinterest. The wording shifts, and the attributions are fantastical. (Plato? The ever-popular Ms. Anonymous?) But the gist of the message is: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.”* If I were to hold this knowledge to my heart, rather than pretending knowledge while preserving my separate-ness, how would my heart open?

What connections might I risk to make?

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[Post-script] This was a response to the Day 8 prompt for Writing 101: “Go to a public location and make a detailed report of what you see. The twist of the day? Write the post without adverbs.” I haven’t done a super-intense editing pass to make sure that every single adverb was erased. In fact, there’s one adverb I left in on purpose — I tried and tried to write around it, but I couldn’t make the set-up to the Zombieland clip work as elegantly sans adverb as I could by leaving that lone “exactly” in the texture. Sometimes rules were made to be broken, right? [/Post-script]

* The most credible sources for this I’ve found thus far: Ian Maclaren and Wendy Mass.

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Image credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Refurbished_Coles_supermarket_in_Berwick.jpg

Hashtag Feminism

On By MezzoSherriIn Flagrantly Feminist, Life-Long Learning, Uncategorized1 Comment

#wecandoitI had so much else to say last night about that damn George Will op-ed that I didn’t have time to touch on one thread of the counter-discourse against his misinformed and misogynist rant: the hashtag conversation about #SurvivorPrivilege.

Feminist writer and activist Wagatwe Wanjuki states in an interview on Buzzfeed:

I honestly started the hashtag as a way to share my frustration with the notion that survivors have privilege. It’s one of those situations where I felt like I should laugh so I don’t cry, so I used my sarcasm to start a conversation about how difficult it is to be a survivor. I hope the hashtag will help highlight the absurdity of George Will’s column and that survivors are struggling in the aftermath of sexual violence. No one wants to be the victim of a violent crime.

If you peruse the tweets reproduced in that article, or in similar articles at DCist, Feministing, Ms., and PolicyMic — or, for the moment, if you follow the live twitter feed, though batten down the hatches for the inevitable MRA backlash in 3, 2, 1… — you will see an array of experiences that is likely every bit as heart-breaking and outrage-inducing as you would expect it to be.

For example:

https://twitter.com/wagatwe/statuses/476056156792954880

https://twitter.com/sarahnmoon/statuses/476099428756242432

Meanwhile, in another corner of the galaxy, Shonda Rhimes gave the commencement speech at Dartmouth this past Sunday. (Transcript here.) Among the customary mixture of self-revelation (“Shonda, how do you do it all? The answer is this: I don’t”) and platitudes (“Don’t be a dreamer, be a do-er”) is a passage about the importance of activism in the world:

And while we are discussing this, let me say a thing. A hashtag is not helping. #yesallwomen #takebackthenight #notallmen #bringbackourgirls #StopPretendingHashtagsAreTheSameAsDoingSomething

Hashtags are very pretty on twitter. I love them. I will hashtag myself into next week. But a hashtag is not a movement. A hashtag does not make you Dr King. A hashtag does not change anything. It’s a hashtag. It’s you, sitting on your butt, typing into your computer and then going back to binge watching your favorite show. For me, it’s Game of Thrones.

Volunteer some hours. Focus on something outside yourself. Devote a slice of your energies towards making the world suck less every week.

(Emphases added by HuffPo.)

As part of an ongoing work project, I’ve been having some conversations with colleagues about the nature of societal and systems change.* We’ve been talking about this topic within the context of educational reform, but the core principles around creating change carry across contexts and topics — including misogyny, patriarchal structures and rape culture.

Let me distill these conversations down to a kindergarten level.  The research suggests that in order for real change to occur, real, lasting, sustained change, three pillars all need to be in place:

  1. People need to know the truth about something (especially when evidentiary truth goes against your assumptions or beyond the limitations of your personal experience)
  2. People need to care, to think that a particular issue matters and that the effort of making change is worth something
  3. People need do-able, impactful actions they can take to make individual change or influence systemic/societal change

So in one way, Shonda’s right: talk alone is not enough to “make the world suck a little less every week.” But I think she goes too far when she says “A hashtag is not helping.” Because action alone isn’t enough — or maybe action would be enough on its own if we lived in a miraculous utopia where everyone was instinctively knowledgeable about and motivated towards right action.

But we don’t live in that magical utopia, so unless people are given information to help them drop their privilege blinders, and unless they are inspired to give a shit, then nothing is gonna evolve.

In other words: hashtags help.

* There are moments my job sucks, and then there are moments when it is really-super-cool.

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Image credit: http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/12/can-feminist-hashtags-dismantle-the-state.html

 

Either George Will or He Won’t

On By MezzoSherriIn Flagrantly Feminist4 Comments

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and other sexual assaults; quotations that show profound misogyny, slut-shaming and victim-blaming; and rebuttals that share stats and stories about rape and rape culture, and yeah, with a lot of profanity. A LOT of profanity.]

causes-of-rapeI am totally cheating tonight. The Day 7 prompt for Writing 101 is about creating a sense of contrast: “Focus today’s post on the contrast between two things. The twist? Write the post in the form of a dialogue.”

But I am currently so enraged and stabby-feeling over George Will’s latest exercise in newspaper-subsidized misogyny that it was inevitably going to be my topic tonight, no matter what I had to do to shoe-horn it into the Writing 101 structure. (Honestly, as far as ideological contrast goes, we have that in abundance. As far as dialogue is concerned? That’s more of a stretch.)

———-

Women, Higher Education, and Sexual Assault: a Point-Counterpoint Between George Will and Mezzo Sherri

Colleges and universities are . . . learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.

Dude, even though it didn’t exist by the same name, the conceptual underpinning for our current understanding of microaggression has been around since at least 1905, when Freud first theorized about the sublimated violence/victimization cycle in so much of modern humor. And even if your current status as rich, urbane, white male — sort of the royal flush of the privilege poker hands — makes it hard for you to perceive microagressions with “an untutored eye,” here’s a tip from Charles Davis at VICE: “You don’t need a reference manual to not make people feel bad; you just need to listen every once in a while, learn a thing or two, and try to be more considerate, particularly around people you just met. Since when did stopping to think before you open your stupid mouth become such a bad thing?”

And excuse me? Being the target of sexual violence is a “coveted status”? In whose bizarro world is that true? After all, the rest of your column just oozes compassion and acceptance for those individuals who have experienced sexual assault. Oh wait: the rest of your column is actually “contributing to a society that is utterly dismissive of their experiences.” (PolicyMic)

Consider the supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. “sexual assault.”

1. Here’s some basic set theory for you: all rapes are indeed sexual assaults, but not all sexual assault is rapes.  (Or, to break it down even further, here’s how I used to explain that concept to my SAT students back in the day: All of my bracelets are jewelry, but not all of my jewelry is bracelets.) I point this out just because if you’re going to use irony quotes to make fun of a term, it might be best to actually understand the term you’re mocking, and oh, maybe to check in and see if your mockery actually functions as humor or instead just shows your own woeful ignorance about a topic. (Also see above, re: microaggressions.)

2. Supposed epidemic? Really? I know you’re gonna quibble with this statistic later on below the fold, but let me just lay it out there anyhow. The CDC reports that 19% of undergraduate women had experienced “attempted or completed sexual assault” since entering college. Now this is a statistic you’ll see reproduced by lots of advocacy and service organizations (sometimes rounded up to the “1 in 5” phraseology we’ll be discussing soon), but please note I did not go to a partisan or activist source here. I went to the C-D-motherfucking-C. 19% of undergraduate women experience some sort of sexual assault, and 37% of female rape survivors are first raped between the ages of 18-24. And yes, that final age range admittedly extends beyond the usual age window for undergraduate students, but still. How much more of an epidemic do you need?! How many women need to suffer before you can get up a compassion boner for them?!?

Herewith, a Philadelphia magazine report about Swarthmore College, where in 2013 a student “was in her room with a guy with whom she’d been hooking up for three months”

Slut-shaming at its finest. Because of course, once you’ve said yes at one time in one context that means automatic consent for all future times in all future contexts. And by the way, just emphasize how foul your perspective is:

“They’d now decided — mutually, she thought — just to be friends. When he ended up falling asleep on her bed, she changed into pajamas and climbed in next to him. Soon, he was putting his arm around her and taking off her clothes. ‘I basically said, “No, I don’t want to have sex with you.” And then he said, “OK, that’s fine” and stopped.. . . And then he started again a few minutes later, taking off my panties, taking off his boxers. I just kind of laid there and didn’t do anything — I had already said no. I was just tired and wanted to go to bed. I let him finish. I pulled my panties back on and went to sleep.’”

Six weeks later, the woman reported that she had been raped.

Well, she reported having been raped because that’s actually the legal definition applicable to the events as described here. But hey, why should an insignificant thing like factuality matter between friends?

Now you’ve been nice enough not to state the most evil of your assumptions outright, but they’re palpably there, oozed between the lines of suggestion and innuendo.

Why didn’t she fight harder after saying the first “no”? Because we’ve been trained (over and over again) NOT to do so! Even if it’s slightly off the subject, perhaps this video will help explain the level of understood threat that might cause a young woman to decide against “fighting back.”

I had a friend in college who was date-raped sophomore year. (I know: I must be lying about this, and this event couldn’t actually have really occurred because George Will has decreed that college sexual assault is merely a “so-called epidemic.”) She carried some guilt for a while about not having “struggled more” — and I remember her sharing the moment of insight that emerged during a session with her therapist where my friend realized that she had, to the best of her ability in the midst of this awful experience, made a threat assessment and consciously concluded that if she didn’t stop struggling that she would be killed, or at least seriously, seriously wounded. It is perfectly understandable that someone may make a decision to stop resisting, wether because of cultural programming, threat assessment, or some other reason(s). That choice to cease actively fighting back in no way excuses a rapist from the legal and moral responsibility of having committed such a harmful act against another human being.

(This is also, by the way, why affirmative consent standards are so necessary. Yes means yes!)

Why did she wait so long to report this crime?* Maybe because she knew that jerk faces like you would blame her or doubt her. Maybe because even the most “casual look at our criminal justice system, military justice system and the academic disciplinary system under scrutiny right now reveals that each tend to punish survivors, not reward them.” (Salon, emphasis added.)

I could find story after story that demonstrates the ways women reporting sexual assault get interrogated about their clothes, alcohol use, sexual history, and general behavior/decorum, but to save us all some time, here’s a photo gallery that both captures many of these victim-blaming attitudes but also wonderfully eviscerates them.

(I’m skipping ahead a few paragraphs because I only have enough patience to dialogue with one last passage.)

The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12 percent of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12 percent reporting rate is correct, the 20 percent assault rate is preposterous. Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute notes, for example, that in the four years 2009 to 2012 there were 98 reported sexual assaults at Ohio State. That would be 12 percent of 817 total out of a female student population of approximately 28,000, for a sexual assault rate of approximately 2.9 percent — too high but nowhere near 20 percent.

Oh, I see what you did there: it’s like SAT algebra all over again! (98 over x equals 12 over 100; and then once you solve for x put that number over the total population number to get your percentage…)

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: CDC. The 19% assault rate has been confirmed by the C-D-motherfuckin’-C.** So rather than taking the 12% report rate as the hard-and-true fact and using that to invalidate the CDC’s confirmed statistic, why not try this idea on for size: maybe the 12% number is wrong! And that notion is even kind of awfully plausible, since this figure can only ever be “an inferred estimate, because there is no directly measured number of unreported assaults.” (Pharyngula.)

Oh, and by the way? If a 2.9% rate of sexual assault is “too high” by your assertion, and considering the fact that the actual assault rate of 19% has been confirmed by the C-D-motherfuckin’-C, do you want to go back and rethink any of your prior statements about a “so-called” epidemic?

Just wondering.

* I almost put the word crime in those mocking irony quotes (as I assume George  would have done), but I just couldn’t do it.

** I swear, if I ever go back to writing anything based on my dissertation research, I am working this phrase in there somehow.

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Image credit: http://michonnemicheaux.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/before-you-make-excuses-for-rape-tw/