Permission to Speak

On By MezzoSherriIn Flagrantly Feminist, Meta-Blogging, Self-Acceptance, The Voices in My Head, Uncategorized4 Comments

One week later and I’m still reading and link-collecting and doing a lot of thinking about the Isla Vista murders. Part of me feels apologetic about this, even self-indulgent. After all, I wasn’t even remotely affected directly by these events. I have no six-degrees-of-separation ties to any of the individuals involved or to the locations where the events occurred. (I mean, yes, I was born in the same state, but we moved away from CA before I turned two, and I have zero sense of myself as a west coaster.* I don’t even know where Santa Barbara is in geographic relation to my birthplace.)

gag orderSo there’s lots of ways that I’m privileged to have some distance from these events: a fact for which I am extremely grateful, and one which also makes me somewhat embarrassed to be giving it such brain-space and blog-space. I even felt the temptation to title “Yet Another Post” from me about these events with some variant on the plea “Stop me, before I post again!”

But then I read this post from the Standing on the Side of Love blog.** In it, the author juxtaposes the legacy of Elliot Rodger’s misogynist writings and videos with the passing of Maya Angelou and her legacy of speaking out about the existence and effects of sexual violence. Then both of these events were further counterpointed against the simultaneously bombshell and matter-of-fact observation that in the week prior to writing her post, the blogger herself had been sexually assaulted.

These milestones all occurring this week make it so clear to me that patriarchy still rules our society, that sexual assault and misogyny are not limited to one incident but are a ubiquitous threat, in varying levels, to all of us. The humanity of every person is threatened by this reality. I wanted to share my story both to help me heal personally, and to provide information that yes, all women, and all people of all gender identities might find useful.

And then, in following the links from that post and my Facebook feed, I came across two other sites. First, a report on a study which reveals the way adolescent and tween girls understand (and wildly under-report) sexual harassment “as ‘normal stuff’ that ‘just happens’ because it’s what ‘guys do.'” Then there’s the tumblr analogue of the #YesAllWomen twitter movement: When Women Refuse, a collection of stories about domestic and sexual violence that is intended to demonstrate “that Rodger’s mass murder was not an anomaly, but instead part of a larger cultural pattern of violence against women.”

And I thought about my own checkered history of experiencing sexual violence, street harassment and misogyny. The rape in college. Years in Philly which were very mild, all things considered, but still contained a few catcall/honking incidents, the occasional groping, and a couple drunken “encounters” where I wasn’t entirely sure in my (inebriated) head that it’d be a good idea to “back out now.” And all of that happened soaked in the cultural miasma of a patriarchal system. For example: the many incidents throughout my schooling where the message from peers (and some teachers/administrators) was that I was too smart, too ambitious, too opinionated for a girl to be. And so part of the lessons I took from my childhood were about learning to live small, stay quiet, conceal the truth of my mind’s intelligence and my heart’s wisdom.

I am not sharing this in hopes of earning my own “victim cred,” nor to make a simplistic point about how my past experiences make it “okay” for me to be as deeply affected by last weekend’s events as I have been. Well, maybe it’s a bit of yes and no on that last point. Yes, it’s likely my resonance with these events and the ensuing discourse has been deepened by my own past traumas. But no, I don’t need any sort of excuse to be thinking or feeling deeply about this — or about anything else, for that matter.

It’s a messy tangle, rather than a straight line trajectory (this is why the metaphor to miasma is so present with me right now), but I am certain there’s a web of connections between the cultural expectations of women’s silence,docility, and availability; the patterns of sexual violence, harassment, and patriarchal retribution that have come so harshly to light this past week; and my own instincts towards self-silencing as I considered writing “Yet Another Post” touching on these issues.

But it’s a knot that needs untangling. And so I keep writing — even if sometimes all I’m writing about is about the right to write.

Every hard-fought sentence, every awkward phrase, every word a prayer. May we release this. May we be healed.

* Nope. I’m a New Englander, through and through, no matter what my birth certificate says.

** Yay, Unitarian Universalists!!

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Image credit: http://ravenblackcat.com/blog/2012/5/18/countdown-to-blackout-anxiety-a-gag-order.html

A Dinosaur with a Quill

On By MezzoSherriIn Life-Long Learning, Meta-Blogging, Self-Acceptance, Topics of Study5 Comments

I work in a very laptop-obsessed office. Every meeting we have is vaguely comical: all of us clustered around a table together and making zero eye contact because so many of us are staring at the screen and/or typing busily away taking notes. It’s especially funny in the offices furnished more by a bistro table than an actual conference table — imagine, if you will, some bizarre version of office jenga.

DINO_PEN_COL_921211fI’m not going to say I’m immune to exhibiting some of these behaviors myself. I carry my laptop into most meetings, in case something comes up in conversation that I need to pull down off a website or pull up out of my email or the document server. But unless I’m capturing the formal minutes of a meeting, I don’t usually use the computer to take notes. Instead, I use the old-fashioned tools of pen and paper.

Yes, I know: this makes me a veritable dinosaur in the contemporary work world. I’ve even read a viciously dismissive article by an Evernote aficionado* that talks about how anyone who takes pen and paper notes automatically loses her respect:

I knew right away, when you walked in here with a paper notebook — a paper notebook! — I realized that this meeting was not going to be a good use of our time. . . . You could be one of those romantic types who say that the visceral process of putting pen on paper liberates your creativity and engages lateral thinking. If you’re an after-hours poet, then, yes, that paper notebook will come in handy. For this, though, can you please go back and grab your laptop?

I’ve tried multiple times to adopt electronic note-taking methods. Nothing yet has worked to my satisfaction. I’m not sure that nothing ever will, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself, some stretch of time in the future, trying another technique, another structure, another iPad app, to crack the note-taking enigma.

But for now, I’m at peace with my antiquated habits. Especially now that I’ve tucked away these two articles (one and two) that suggest my handwriting habits may not be such a bad thing after all. Both articles summarize a study done at UCLA (or was it Princeton? the study authors split their affiliations between those two universities, but I’m fuzzier about which campus actually housed the research) comparing the efficacy of typed note-taking versus handwritten notes. As summarized by Wray Herbert in HuffPo:

Those who took notes in longhand, and were able to study, did significantly better than any of the other students in the experiment — better even than the fleet typists who had basically transcribed the lectures. That is, they took fewer notes overall with less verbatim recording, but they nevertheless did better on both factual learning and higher-order conceptual learning. Taken together, these results suggest that longhand notes not only lead to higher quality learning in the first place; they are also a superior strategy for storing new learning for later study. Or, quite possibly, these two effects interact for greater academic performance overall.

The scientists had an additional, intriguing finding. At one point, they told some of the laptop users explicitly not to simply transcribe the lectures word-by-word. This intervention failed completely. The laptop users still made verbatim notes, which diminished their learning. Apparently there is something about typing that leads to mindless processing. And there is something about ink and paper that prompts students to go beyond merely hearing and recording new information — and instead to process and reframe information in their own words.

Take that, bitchy Evernote ambassador! Science trumps your unfounded assumptions and prejudice! (Actually, science probably won’t do a damn thing to chip away at Ms. Evernote’s preconceptions. We always cling mostly strongly to the myths that are most unfounded.)

Anyhow, I’m sure there’s a connection between my old school pen-and-paperness at work and the continued parallelism of me blogging while maintaining a pen-and-paper journal as well.

Sometimes my diarizing feeds into the blog: keeping a physical journal can help me have space to process and synthesize things prior to presenting them out here. Sometimes the diarizing stays contained on the notebook pages: a place to process things that are too raw, too private, or just too far off-topic to make sense here. So, partly because of the ways it supports my writing on JALC, and partly for how it supports my life outside of here, I see myself happily filling more notebooks with pen-scribbles for years to come.

* Who is oh-so-coincidentally hawking her own “How to Use Evernote Effectively” e-book.

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Image credit: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/with-ipad-and-notebook-around-who-needs-a-pen-anymore/article2883480.ece

Tipping into Jealousy

On By MezzoSherriIn Flagrantly Feminist, Practicing in the Heart, The Voices in My Head, Topics of StudyLeave a comment

This morning, I spent some time writing in my pen and paper journal* to study the eruption of anger and envy I was wrestling with last night. Given everything I said — even in the moment of my emotional tantrum-ing — about my heartfelt wish for a full-society evolution past the chokehold of patriarchal, misogynist structures, then why was I so quick to fall into that resentful funk?

As best as I was able to sort it through, there are two primary threads to it: a sense of distrust and, more prominently, my addiction to being accepted and acknowledged.

First, the distrust. I’ve already written about the eerie sense of similarity I feel between Elliot Rodgers and George Sodini’s actions, and the ways both those mass murders are part of a long and ugly tradition of misogynist crimes. So even as I try to hope that things might finally change in the culture, I’m also feeling a lot of distrust that anything really will. Maybe there will just be this temporary explosion of rhetoric which quickly sinks back into complacency and the status quo.

I very much hope that isn’t the pattern that unfolds. And for all my snarky distrust, I have some portion of hope in my system. The tone of the discussion just senses different this time around. I’m not naive enough to think that everything will unfold as uninterrupted progression from today forward, but I wonder if we’ve reached (or if we’re approaching) a tipping point of cultural awareness. Once enough folks wake up, I believe, the old opiates won’t work to stop evolution.

blue-ribbonBut the deeper, darker piece of self-examination has had me taking a really close look at how my addiction to being right and being acknowledged is so strong that part of me is really envious and resentful around the idea of the culture reaching this tipping point.

Like, I get that the awareness of misogyny has to become common knowledge for things to change, but if it becomes common knowledge then those of us who were at the vanguard, thinking and talking about these issues ahead of the curve, then we won’t get credit. And the truth is, even if I can claim a place in the vanguard, it’s probably only a molecule’s worth if real estate. But man, the desire to “get credit” for that molecule’s worth of territory is hella strong.

Ultimately, I tried to boil things down to the essence and asked myself baldly and bluntly: “What do I care about more? Humanity’s evolution or getting the credit?”

The answer is that the soul-force me DOES care more about evolution occurring than anything else. But it’s a closer race than I would prefer it to be, measuring my investment in evolution against my investment in acknowledgement.

It has been really sobering to see how virulent this addiction is, and then to force myself to face up to the truth of it. Facing up to the real truth — that yes, even this thing I am so tangled and addicted to, this yearning for acknowledgement, yes, even this I am willing to give up if it means the culture can shift.

But, of course, the giving up of the addiction is a day-by-day (minute-by-minute?) practice, rather than anything as simple as turning off the faucet…

So, as with so many things: more to study. Progress rather than perfection, ongoing awakening rather than an arrival point.

* Yes, I keep an analog journal in addition to a blog. Why? As with so many of the dangling participles I leave around here, that’s a story for another day.

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Image credit: http://nursegail.com/nursing-profession-most-trusted-gallup-poll/blue-ribbon/

More on #YesAllWomen

On By MezzoSherriIn Flagrantly Feminist, Practicing in the Heart, The Voices in My Head4 Comments

CassandraBoxGreat Galloping Gaia, it’s 10 PM and I’m just now starting to write. This does not bode well for my sleep quantity tonight or well-restedness tomorrow.

Ugh.

I was trying to come up with something coherent to say about the propagation of the #YesAllWomen hashtag that wouldn’t just be a bricolage of quotations from other authors about the topic.

https://twitter.com/wagnerfilm/status/470831393639890944

And then somehow, I started re-reading this post & comment thread about street harassment, and then this one about the ongoing mental calculations so many women must compute when faced with the question of  “Schrodinger’s rapist.” And down the rabbit-hole I went.

Yes, dear reader, I was a small part of the conversation when that term was coined and first unpacked. No wonder I’m so exhausted by this latest unfolding of bearing witness and backlash. I was charred by a small firestorm of bearing witness and backlash during JALC’s first life-cycle, 5 years ago.

My small hope is that perhaps this time around, there’s more of a chance for widespread awareness-raising and maybe just maybe some cultural change. Because at least this time, the bearing witness has leapfrogged out of the feminist blogosphere into wider communications channels. Here’s a few:

However, I’ve seen mentioned along the way that the woman who started #YesAllWomen has actually locked down her twitter account due to the level of harassment she was receiving in “thanks” for her activism. That’s not exactly the kind of detail that makes me feel optimistic for humanity’s evolution towards kindness and empathy.

And then there’s the ugliness of my own sexism and envy.

Don’t get me wrong: in my heart, I know that the patriarchy is bad for everyone, and that the best way to evolve past it is for everyone — woman and men, cis and trans, gender-neutral and any other form of gender self-identification I’m too ignorant to know — to work together.

In that spirit, the better part of me is glad and grateful to see the voices of male allies in the #YesAllWomen conversation.

Still, when I see a male author making a point like this?

and this is important, so listen carefully—when a woman is walking down the street, or on a blind date, or, yes, in an elevator alone, she doesn’t know which group you’re in. You might be the potential best guy ever in the history of history, but there’s no way for her to know that. A fraction of men out there are most definitely not in that group. Which are you? Inside your head you know, but outside your head it’s impossible to.

This is the reality women deal with all the time.

There’s a really ugly part of me that’s annoyed. Because this is the exact same kind of point we were making 5 years ago in the original “Schrodinger’s rapist” thread on Shapely Prose. And we got excoriated for it. Gas-lighted, name-called up down and diagonally across the feminist bingo card, the whole damn ugly she-bang.

And I want very much to defuse my annoyance. Phil Plait (the Slate author who inadvertently got my back up) has done nothing wrong. He’s respectful, insightful, he even walks himself back from the possibility of straying into mansplaining territory. In short: everything I would wish for in the family of allies working to build a less sexist and more humanist culture.

Still. D’you ever feel like you’ve been living the life of Cassandra? Why did so many years, so many deaths, so many acts of violence large and small have to occur before this kind of message was even remotely able to be heard across a wider landscape?

Maybe I’ll be more open-hearted and less cross and churlish after a good night’s sleep. (Which I might get tomorrow night, if I’m smarter about starting my writing earlier in the damn evening!)

———-

Image credit: http://mysteryarts.blogspot.com/2009/12/breaking-curse-of-cassandra.html

 

 

 

Be Still, My Weeping Heart

On By MezzoSherriIn Pop Goes the Culture, Practicing in the Heart, Topics of Study, Uncategorized1 Comment

Hulk-YAWPMr. Mezzo and I watched Ryan Murphy’s HBO adaptation of The Normal Heart this evening. I’d not seen the original play performed, although I had read it numerous times as part of my teaching and dissertation work. So I was really interested to see what differences there might be between Kramer’s play and Murphy’s film.*

The play debuted off-Broadway in 1985. And its initial impetus and power is summarized by Mary McNamara in the LA Times thusly:

In the early 1980s several things were obvious to writer Larry Kramer. Gay men were literally dropping dead and neither the government nor the medical establishment seemed to be doing much to stop it. Moreover, no one, outside of other — increasingly terrified — gay men, seemed to care.

So Kramer wrote “The Normal Heart,” a blunt instrument of a play debuting in 1985 in which his thinly disguised avatar, a New York writer called Ned Weeks, watches friends die, helps form the Gay Men’s Health Crisis center and does a lot of yelling. About homophobia and the Holocaust, about the perils of the closet, about society’s unforgivable hypocrisy and gay men’s own self-destructiveness.

“The Normal Heart” was a howling call to action, designed to push people out of their ignorance, complacency and seats to demand justice, and funding, for all.

Almost 30 years have passed since the play’s debut, and more than 30 years since the CDC first reported mysterious cases of kaposi’s sarcoma. With the unfolding of so much time (and the waves of cultural change wrapped in these decades), I’ll admit I was among the many individuals wondering a little bit about whether the movie would be meaningful, or effective.

It was. In a different way, but yes: deeply effective. To quote Tim Goodman in The Hollywood Reporter:

The movie is a way to remember. It takes something revered in theater circles and give it a wide release with a cache of bright stars. It will get seen, and the message about the horrible history of the beginning of the AIDS epidemic won’t be forgotten. . . . For those people who didn’t see the play or, more importantly, weren’t there to witness or read about the onset of what was first described as “gay cancer,” The Normal Heart works best as modern history. Knowing what we do now, it’s hard to fathom that so many people looked the other way.

It’s a bit hard for me to judge the film’s effectiveness as “modern history” because of the peculiarity of my knowledge around the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. I’ll unpack that story in full some other day.**

Suffice for the moment to say that much in my adolescence — socioeconomic privilege, suburban home, mainstream media diet — worked to keep the spread of HIV/AIDS completely off of my threshold of awareness. However, since I chose to write my (ultimately unfinished) dissertation about artistic responses to the AIDS epidemic, I made up for my early years of sheltered ignorance with a lot of research and study.

Still, it’s one thing to research a topic, and it’s quite another to bear witness. And it is in bearing witness to those first years where I am was most profoundly moved by Murphy’s film. To my ears, Kramer’s play had always functioned better as a piece of agitprop than anything else. A howl of outrage, a wake-up call — a piece that condemned inaction but perhaps not one that opened the heart to sympathy or empathy.

And don’t get me wrong: I don’t intend this observation to suggest I have any less respect for Kramer’s play. I am not a member of the tone police, and I know that yawps of outrage and agitprop are vitally necessary. I also believe that acts of witness and stories that inspire empathy are necessary, too. Which is why it’s such an amazing thing for the seed of Kramer’s work and activism to have offered me both of those gifts.

Back in the day, Kramer’s play was one of the things that woke me up to AIDS, to its early spread, and especially to the devastating effects of prejudice and homophobia. The play opened my eyes; it made me angry.

And tonight, Murphy’s film helped re-ignite my empathy for what it might have been like to live through the early years of HIV/AIDS. It bore witness to a time when a community felt such sorrow and loss and — because of cultural disdain and indifference — it faced those losses alone. The film opened my heart; it made me cry.

Both gifts of awareness. Both gifts to be grateful for.

* For lack of a better coinage, I’m going to talk about these two different adaptations as “Kramer’s play” and “Murphy’s film.” I haven’t yet done a textual comparison, but the screenplay sure senses different enough from the original script that I think there’s some validity to addressing these as distinct — though related — artworks, rather than talking about them as two interpretations of a core text.

** I wrote a damn novella last night, so I’m trying to be a bit less loquacious tonight. Especially since I have to get up early tomorrow for work.

———-

Image credit: http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Tom-schulman-dead-poets-society-yawp-freestyle-scene-annotated#note-1685661

 

Misogyny Taking Aim — Again

On By MezzoSherriIn Flagrantly Feminist2 Comments

Isla-Vista-memorial-900x600Here we go again. Six murdered, 13 wounded, by a young man swearing “retribution” against the women who “never gave [him] a chance.”

Although news of the Isla Vista murders broke into my awareness yesterday morning (as I’m sure they did for many of the east coasters who were safe a-bed when the shootings occurred), I couldn’t find the words or the courage in last night’s blog-post to touch into my feelings about this latest explosion of misogynist violence.

After all, last time I dipped my toe into these waters, it prompted a festival of “not all men” defensiveness and mansplaining that wore me the hell down in ways I can scarcely articulate.

[Sidebar]  Let me get this on the table from the get-go. If your first reaction in the face of these events and whatever I have next to say about them is to enter a self-avowed feminist space (see that tagline, above, about me being “fat, feminist and feisty”?) in order to proclaim some variation of “not all men are like that” and/or “patriarchy hurts men too,” then you, my friend, are part of the fucking problem. Please go do some self-edumacating about the ways those observations — though in their own way true — can function in the wrong contexts as yet another expression of patriarchal privilege. (And just to be super-duper crystal clear: this place at this moment would be one of those wrong contexts.) [/Sidebar]

Of course, the horribly, bleakly comical aspect for me at this very moment is that after this whole big lead-up, I can still scarcely find words to express my anger.

At some bone-deep culturally and emotionally worn-down place, I can scarcely find my anger among the feelings of cultural exhaustion and repetition. Because Elliot Rodger’s rampage, and the videotaped and diarized vitriol that has emerged in the two days since, are incredibly awful and horrible and exceptional and at the same time so very, very banal and familiar.

As Katie McDonough writes in Salon:

But it also denies reality to pretend that Rodger’s sense of masculine entitlement and views about women didn’t matter or somehow existed in a vacuum. These things matter because the horror of Rodger’s alleged crimes is unique, but the distorted way he understood himself as a man and the violence with which discussed women — the bleak and dehumanizing lens through which he judged them — is not. Just as we examine our culture of guns once again in the wake of yet another mass shooting, we must also examine our culture of misogyny and toxic masculinity, which devalues both women’s and men’s lives and worth, and inflicts real and daily harm. We must examine the dangerous normative values that treat women as less than human, and that make them — according to Elliot Rodger — deserving of death. [. . .]

I have seen these videos before. Women have heard these threats before, and been forced to consider how seriously they should take a man who tells them on Twitter that he knows where they live and that, “You are going to die and I am the one who is going to kill you.” If Rodger had posted his angry monologue to YouTube or fired it off in an email to a woman online and then gone about his day — seething privately and without violence about his wounded sense of entitlement and the sting of having his resentful and warped desires unfulfilled — the country wouldn’t be talking about him. Because until the moment that he is alleged to have killed six women and men, Elliot Rodger was every bit the same as the other men who are defined by their resentment toward women and their sense of bitter victimization in the world.

McDonough and I are far from alone in having this awful sense of deja vu all over again. The Belle Jar and The Guardian both remind us that just last month, a young woman in Connecticut was stabbed to death for the ultimate crime of declining someone’s invitation to prom. The Free Republic connects the dots between the Isla Vista murders and numerous similar hate crimes, including the Ecole Polytechnique shootings that came strongly to my mind, both five years ago and yesterday.*

Even the connections between Rodgers and the Men’s Rights and Pick-Up Artist communities feel terrifyingly old hat to me. I don’t know for sure that George Sodini was involved in similar groups/endeavors — my five-years ago post doesn’t make it clear, and I only have the stomach tonight to pull links on two sets of misogyny-fueled crimes, rather than three — but it certainly has that tone on it in my memories.

[UPDATE] Because the scholar in me is constitutionally unable to leave dangling assertions without back-up, I’ve done a bit more digging in the clear light of morning. Sodini did indeed attend some “pick-up artist” seminars, and was at least marginally connected to that community. So yeah: the more thing stay the same, the more things stay the same. [/UPDATE]

So, what is there left to say? All I have tonight are a few semi-coherent musings.

The patriarchy is broken. Please, by all that is ethical and holy, let us as a society — as a humanity — find a way to break beyond these structures.

If you have any doubts that the attribution of these crimes to a seed of misogyny is disproportionate, check out the diversity of sharings being offered online via the hashtag #yesallwoman. As observed in The Atlantic:

Like all widely embraced hashtags, #YesAllWomen encompasses content so diverse that everyone is bound to disagree with some of it. I submit that the vast majority of men who explore it with an open mind will come away having gained insights and empathy without much time wasted on declarations that are thoughtless. I hope that the inevitable backlash doesn’t dissuade anyone from taking a look.

And finally, all I can say now is a variation of what I said five years ago. The more that we as a society (ad our media outlets) paper over the connections between Rodger’s misogynist views and the matrix of patriarchy and misogyny that infiltrates contemporary culture, the less of a chance we will have to evolve beyond this tragic state of affairs. And the more inevitable it will be that more shootings, more stabbings, more violent rampages will occur in the name of patriarchal pride and of women’s assumed role as sexual property.

“Why do men feel threatened by women?” I asked a male friend of mine. So this male friend of mine, who does by the way exist, conveniently entered into the following dialogue. “I mean,” I said, “men are bigger, most of the time, they can run faster, strangle better, and they have on the average a lot more money and power.” “They’re afraid women will laugh at them,” he said. “Undercut their world view.” Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, “Why do women feel threatened by men?” “They’re afraid of being killed,” they said.

Margaret Atwood, Writing the Male Character

* The Belle Jar made a similar connection in an earlier version of her post — that text was deleted between last night and today, and I, for one, am sorry to see it go.

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Image credit: http://www.thechannels.org/news/2014/05/25/isla-vista-community-mourns-tragedy-with-candlelight-vigil/

What We Measure Matters

On By MezzoSherriIn Pop Goes the Culture, Practicing in the Heart, Topics of Study, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I don’t usually write about the details of my 9-to-5 work (0r 8-to-6, or whatever) here in the Wild West of the blogosphere. Besides my general level of caution about being “inappropriate” or “indiscreet,” I also know someone in my circle of acquaintance who was quite literally Dooced, some years ago. So yeah: I consider discretion to be very much the better part of valor.

Marshallville-One-room-Schoolhouse-300x225What I do feel comfortable saying is that I do advancement work for an educational non-profit — which is the field and non-profit sector I’ve been working in for 11 years now. And, because it’s helpful to my work AND because I have a genuine interest in the topic, I regularly make the time to read books, articles, blogposts, etc. that help me expand my understanding of the challenges, trends, concerns, and opportunities that exist in schools and in the educational field writ large. Sometimes I even borrow books from the office “library” to help me stay plugged in.

And today, in that spirit — between the truly massive amount of sleeping I did last night, the tiny bit of laundry-folding/house-puttering that occurred, and then the lengthy nap that was required ‘cos I hadn’t slept enough last night* — I finished reading Mike Rose’s collection of essays Why School?

Rose’s subtitle, Reclaiming Education for All of Us, is suggestive of his desire to refocus the lens of educational discourse away from the usual obsessive focus on knowledge and workforce preparation as signaled by the results of high-stakes standardized testing. This desire is summarized by Rose in this HuffPo post about the book:

There’s not much public discussion of achievement that includes curiosity, reflectiveness, imagination, or a willingness to take a chance, to blunder. Consider how little we hear about intellect, aesthetics, joy, courage, creativity, civility, understanding. For that matter, think of how rarely we hear of commitment to public education as the center of a free society. . . . My hope is that “Why School?” contributes to a more humane and imaginative discussion of schooling in America.

The book is an engaging and thought-provoking read, and I definitely recommend it for folks interested in education. Be aware going in that the book is about asking big questions and providing answers that rest at the level of ideals, values, and visions. Not so many concrete implementable suggestions, but that’s okay by me.

Rose lays out a cogent analysis of how current educational trends are the inevitable flowering of a flawed set of values. I found some of the middle essays in the collection most persuasive and illuminating on this score.

For example, “Business Goes to School”  highlights the self-serving contradictions of a corporate culture that demands the education system prepare critically reflective problem-solving workers-of-the-future while also selling an easy economy of glitz and glamour and anti-intellectualism:

So many of the commercially driven verbal and imagistic messages that surround our young people work against the development of the very qualities of mind the business community tells the schools it wants. (61)

“Reflections on Intelligence in the Workplace and the Schoolhouse” calls out the intellectual laziness of intellectual snobbery around defining “intelligence” as solely located in the institutions of schoolhouse and university:

If we think that whole categories of people–identified by class, by occupation–are not that bright, then we reinforce social separations and cripple our ability to talk across our current cultural divides. . . . To acknowledge our collective capacity is to take the concept of variability seriously. . . . To affirm this conception of mind and work is to be vigilant for the intelligence not only in the boardroom but on the shop floor; in the laboratory and alongside the house frame; in the workshop and in the classroom. This is a model of mind that befits the democratic imagination. (86-87)

And, finally,** “Re-mediating Remediation”  draws on Rose’s own teaching history to argue that the most effective way to increase literacy skills for teen, college and adult learners is to address reading and writing challenges in the context of challenging, engaging, age-appropriate metrical, rather than through the usual menu of “dumbed down” workbook assignments:

[W]riting filled with grammatical error does not preclude engagement with sophisticated intellectual material, and that error can be addressed effectively as one is engaging such material. (130, emphasis added)

I am inclined to agree with Rose’s analysis that a lot of the flaws and misguided obsessions in the U.S. educational system are rooted in these flawed values and prejudices. Given that reality, I would suggest that an essential first step in effectively rethinking American education would be to plant the seeds of different, more functional values. And I’m grateful to Rose for carrying that task forward so persuasively.

* D’you think last weekend’s work finally caught up with me? I think so, too.

** “Finally” insofar as it’s the final essay I’m going to specifically highlight — not that this is the final insightful thing Rose has to say…

———-

Image credit: http://www.hcsv.org/visit/tour-the-village/marshallville-school/

The Challenge that Wasn’t

On By MezzoSherriIn Detox Journey, Fat is Just an Adjective, Health at Every Size, Pop Goes the Culture, Topics of Study1 Comment

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/10/fed-up-poster_n_5127876.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/10/fed-up-poster_n_5127876.html

This morning, Dan Harris and Katie Couric were on GMA reporting out on their separate experiences trying Couric’s 10-Day “Fed Up Challenge.” Basically, the challenge is an awareness-raising publicity stunt designed to accompany the release of the new documentary that, as Mark Bittman describes in the NYTimes, presents “heavy-hitting facts about the dangers of the overconsumption of sugar and other hyperprocessed food.”

Couric and the other filmmakers encouraged a sugar-elimination regime that may sound familiar to followers of my HCG journey: fresh fruits and natural sugars are okay. The challenge instead is about avoiding anything that has added sugar in it. And I’m assuming part of the motivation behind issuing this challenge was to raise some level of public awareness about the shocking number of packaged and processed foods that contain added sugars — even when you might not expect them to.

Of course, the funny thing about Couric’s challenge, when seen through an it’s-all-about-me lens, was the ways that this “new” 10-day challenged overlapped so perfectly and precisely with the final days of my HCG journey. So for me, the “challenge” to avoid added sugars was pretty much routine by the time Couric was talking about it on the news shows.

But that’s just me. I find myself wondering how many folks have chosen/will choose to take this project on.  The website currently lists close to 28,000 registrants, but my mind is racing with so many possibilities — some significant portion of those folks may have tried and stopped, or there could be many more folks who are doing the challenge without registering, and there may be folks who come across the film and the challenge in weeks to come who add themselves to the list of participants — that I can’t tell if the figure of 28,000 participants is a Mama Bear, Papa Bear, or Baby Bear kind of number. (Too big, too small, or just right?)

And whatever the number of participants is, I wonder how many of them are being impacted by the experience. Do they find the preponderance of sugar on food labels as shocking as I did? Are they contemplating changing the structure of their food habits, or are they waiting out the time before going on the next sugar binge? (And, to stop deflecting and judging others and instead to take my own damn inventory: which of those possibilities will be my path? I’ve already had some cheese popcorn and a small piece of chocolate tonight, so it didn’t take me hardly any time post-HCG to dip my toe back into the addictive waters…)

Bittner is hopeful that the movie will make an impact on the American public:

The movie addresses what the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner David Kessler calls “one of the great public health epidemics of our time.” The greater public needs to know that.

As of this writing, the movie is in 19 markets, and doing well. If it were in hundreds of theaters, it would probably change more lives than any movie released this year, because if people see the film, they will get the message. It’s not a subtle one.

And it certainly seems as if there’s enough fear of impact that the inevitable backlash from the corporate machine has started. (As, thankfully, has the backlash against the backlash, most cogently embodied by Boston’s own* Union of Concerned Scientists.)

So, I remain curious to see how this will unfold.

———-

I’m also feeling into the question of whether I’m going to see the movie, and if so, when and where I will choose to do so. I have some hesitation because of all the ways I expect the film will give me stabby feelings. Both in the desire to strike out against the food industry, but also, I fear, in my desire to take a knife to the filmmakers themselves.

Because I am pretty damn sure that the film’s argument in many instances is going to boil down to “It’s sugar’s fault for making us fat!” After all, the HuffPo teaser for the film from which I got the poster, above, leads not with the scientifically accurate and scarier facts about diabetes and the food industry, but instead with society’s true monster-under-the-bed: being fat!**

The more nuanced and accurate perspective would be to say: “Sugar causes numerous health challenges and deficits which are sometimes but not always correlated with (not causing) weight gain, so we should focus on the sugar and not on monitoring people’s body size.”

Anyone want to quote me Vegas odds for that possibility? Don’t bother: I know full well there’s not a snowball’s chance in Rome of seeing that inconvenient polemic anywhere in Fed Up. More’s the pity.

* Okay, “Cambridge,” not Boston proper. I’m still having some hometown pride…

** And believe me when I say that was the least offensive of the options I found to link to as image sources.

Completion

Celebrating a Finish Line

On By MezzoSherriIn Detox Journey, Practicing in the Heart, Spirituality, The Subtle BodyLeave a comment

I’ve talked before about how I’m not thinking of the end of my HCG journey as some sort of arrival at a mythical “I never need to think about detoxing again” kind of place. Nonetheless, a former co-worker of mine always talked about how necessary it is to celebrate the finish lines you achieve. Yes, there’s always a next thing, next task, next project right around the corner, and that deserves attention and energy. But it’s also essential to honor the tasks/things/projects you’re able to complete, and honor yourself for being able to complete them.

Completion
http://www.learntarot.com/todesc.htm

And tonight is a moment where I may not have reached the finish line on my detox journey, but it certainly have reached a finish line. Because today was my last day under the post-HCG dietary restrictions, meaning that I have successfully navigated through and to the end of this nine-week experience.

So: yay.

Though no exclamation point on that, because I am decidedly of mixed feelings.

I am truly proud to have accomplished this, to have found the self-care and discipline to live within the rules of the protocol. I am also looking forward to releasing the strictness of these rules — to being able to start weaving grains, legumes, and carbohydrates back into my diet. (In fact, I think there may be a batch of my famous three-bean “chili” to cook up some time soon…)

I am grateful for the opportunity to get a clearer sense of the distinction between physical and emotional hungers, though there’s another post to write about how I don’t actually think “emotional hunger” or “emotional eating” are necessarily a bad thing. Even though I’d sort of known about this already, it was truly shocking for me to really see and understand the quantity of foods that have added sugar in them, and I’m going to try and limit my intake of added sugars as I move forward.

From an energetic perspective, I am also glad to have taken this HCG journey. Obviously, as last night’s post revealed, I still have many ways in which I am limited and lots of places to keep learning and growing. But it does sense as if the nurturance in this experience — the role of HCG as a sort of “mother vitamin,” allowing myself to be supported by the center and my coaches, practicing maturity and self-care — has really helped take my victim identity off-line. Some significant piece of chronic resentment and suppressed rage that I’ve been carrying with me for rather a while seems to have resolved itself.

Ultimately, though, I also feel slightly embarrassed at the notion of being too proud about this “accomplishment.” Because, honestly, it wasn’t that difficult an experience to go through for these months.

Still: there were some moments of difficulty here and there, and I did manage to weather them. So, honor the finish line, honor myself for getting there, and much honor to Spirit and to my teachers for aiding my way on the path.

water well

The Well of Intuition

On By MezzoSherriIn Detox Journey, Flagrantly Feminist, Self-Acceptance, The Voices in My Head, Topics of StudyLeave a comment

This great power, intuition, is composed of lightning-fast inner seeing, inner hearing, inner sensing, and inner knowing.

Over generations, these intuitive powers became as buried streams within women, buried by disuse and unfounded charges of disrepute. . . . I think we can be confident that things lost in the psyche are all still there. So, too, this well of women’s instinctual intuition has never been lost, and whatever is covered over can be brought back out again.

~~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves, 76

Although my focus with the HCG journey was on detoxing rather than the usually-marketed weight loss routine, I will admit that I wondered whether the experience would support me in being able to move more fully towards intuitive eating. After all, the dietary regimen has given me a chance to get out of the habit of processed food, and I also had lots of opportunity to study the ways that my hungers are sometimes more about emotional needs than actual physical sustenance.

However, having been out of my dietary/cooking routines during the four days of the retreat, I’m not sure that intuitive eating thing has really kicked in. Instead, I can recall several moments when I kept eating — taking cashew after cashew out of the bag for a snack, or going back for that extra little bit of egg salad at lunchtime — well past the point of physical hunger. Responding instead to emotional tension or anxiety.

I don’t say this out of some self-flagellating, confessional instinct. After all, as I’ve said before (and will surely say again and again): I am not striving for a perfection movement.

What instead interests me is the awareness that I don’t yet have a lot of faith in my ability to eat intuitively.

Or, quite honestly, in any level of my intuition.

water well
http://brianmercerbooks.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/when-the-well-runs-dry-part-1/

The concluding movement from the weekend was a highly creative and individualized one, a movement that very much asked us to tune into our intuition. And although I have enough admiration for Clarissa Pinkola Estes that I will not choose to argue with her when she suggests that the well of intuition can always be mined and revived, I still gotta say that my intuition is feeling pretty far underwater.

I’m still too much trapped in my brain, caught up in the fear of “getting it wrong” to have the kind of surrender, the clear channel that allows my intuitive wisdom to come to the fore. And, as with my witnessing around those “extra” cashews, I am trying to name this in the spirit of honest self-examination rather than in a blaming/shaming tone. ‘Cos that sort of beat-up is the same kind of mind voice and ego eruption as the ones that kept me bottled up during the weekend.

Now I know, even in my self-imposed containment, I had some small offerings of intuition to make. And I also take some comfort in trusting that my faith and believing were contributions of their own flavor — perhaps an energetic support to those individuals who were more able to open up their creativity and intuitive insights.*

Still, it’s an area where I can keep studying, an area I can look to grow and express more fully. Which is why I started listening to the audiobook of Women Who Run With the Wolves during this morning’s commute. It’s probably well past time for me to become acquainted with this classic of feminist spirituality.

* Yeah, I know: coming up with this kind of justification to feel better about my contribution does serve also as a between-the-lines admission that, however much I’m trying to stay in witnessing rather than in self-castigation, there’s a little bit of that “mad at myself” piece going on. So, yeah: that happened.