Answering the “Undomestic 10″
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people. – Rebecca West
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For several months now, I’ve been reading a blog called The Undomestic Goddess, written by Amanda ReCupido. One of her regular features is to ask ordinary people — male and female, self-identified as feminist or not — to answer a set of ten questions about “everyday feminism.” The answers are usually thought-provoking and occasionally cage-rattling, and I always come away from an “Undomestic 10″ post saying, “Huh. That was really interesting.”
A couple of weeks ago, I realized a couple of people I know had answered the “Undomestic 10,” so I emailed Amanda to ask how she chose participants. Easy, she replied: they volunteered. So I responded, “Let me at ‘em!” And a few days later, I was sending her my own answers to the “Undomestic 10.”
Now, it’s no huge secret that I consider myself a feminist. I don’t even see how that’s controversial. Women have come a long way, but… just witness the uproar over whether Roman Polanski should finally pay the piper for a crime he committed 32 years ago. Why is this even a question? As Salon’s Kate Harding elegantly put it, “Roman Polanski may be a great director, an old man, a husband, a father, a friend to many powerful people, and even the target of some questionable legal shenanigans. He may very well be no threat to society at this point. He may even be a good person on balance, whatever that means. But none of that changes the basic, undisputed fact: Roman Polanski raped a child.” Until we live in a world where even making that argument is unnecessary, we still have a long way to go.
So, yes, I am a feminist. And I’m willing to say so, in public, with my photo and my name on it. And it’s a little scary to put myself out there like that, because there are crazy people out there who hate women, especially women who call themselves feminists. But I’m not going to treat it like it’s a dirty word.
Filed under triumphs | Comment (0)Forty-two
That number (at least according to Douglas Adams) is the answer to life, the universe, and everything. I turned 42 today, so I’m hoping for an epiphany. That failing, I’ll settle for a few small revelations about who I am, what my purpose is, and where I can find jeans that actually fit for a reasonable price.
How is it possible that I’m 42? I don’t feel a bit older than, say, 35. Other than in my knees. Those feel older than I am.
I’m sure I’ll have something pithy to say about aging later. Right now I’m full of cocktails and pizza and I’m going to bed.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)Spiritual autobiography, part 2
I made it pretty clear, in a post last week, that I’m an unrepentant heathen. I’ll sometimes go so far as to say I’m an atheist, but it’s just as accurate to say that I’m a pantheist — I believe there’s a little spark of something-unexplainable in everything, and that it’s all connected somehow, in a way that we’ll probably figure out someday, if we don’t poison ourselves or blow ourselves up first. That’s also why I find things like brain imaging so fascinating. I’ve always loved psychology — why we think what we think and do what we do, and what that means as we move through the world. But did you know that we can now take a picture of the brain forming a thought? Or see how meditation actually changes the the brain’s very structure? We think what we think and do what we do in part because we’re big bags of chemicals shot through with electrical impulses, which is amazing to me. And everything else we know about is made of chemicals and electricity, too, and that’s also amazing. And the connection is in there somewhere.
Which is why it’s only somewhat surprising that this avowed secular humanist is also, not at all secretly, a damn good Tarot reader. Do I believe that little pieces of painted cardboard tell the future? Don’t be ridiculous. But do I believe that certain universal archetypes live in all of our hindbrains, in Jung’s collective unconscious, and that we can use tools that refer to those archetypes to see what’s going on in our lives from a different perspective? Oh, now you’re speaking my language. And then there are two traits that helped me navigate my messed-up youth — the ability to notice tiny cues in people’s words and actions, and the empathy to interpret those cues and infer what they might be thinking and feeling. As an adult, I’ve learned how to harness those skills so I can say to people, “I hear the situation as you’re explaining it to me; now, let me use these cards as a tool to show you another way to look at it.”
Sometimes I don’t get it until after the fact. Earlier this year, I kept running into the Two of Cups. Reading for myself, having a reading done for me, seeing it at random, you name it: the Two of Cups. The card of love, romance, sweet affinity. At the time, I was in a situation in which I was getting exactly the opposite, and I couldn’t understand why I kept getting that card. But in retrospect, I’m choosing to interpret it as a message from my subconscious mind: “This is what you want, this is what you deserve, and I’m going to remind you of it repeatedly so you don’t settle for anything less.”
Tarot is as close as I get, at the moment, to a spiritual practice. It’s not in the cards, though. It’s in me. It’s useful because it helps me turn disconnected facts into a coherent narrative. And for a writer, after all, isn’t storytelling what it’s all about?
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)No pain, but no gain either
I am pondering a work relationship which is neither bad nor good, just there. It’s not a problem; on the other hand, it’s not a benefit, either. We meet from time to time and have a good discussion, and I leave feeling like it’s going to lead to something, but it never does, for either of us.
I worry that if I say, “You know, neither of us is getting anything out of this relationship — perhaps we should just let it go,” it’ll end up harming me somehow. On the other hand, I’m starting to think that I could invest the time and energy in creating a more productive, lucrative connection elsewhere instead.
This may be one of those cliffs I have to jump off of. But how can I know?
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)Up the down escalier
Have you ever been on the receiving end of behavior so baffling that you couldn’t figure out whether the other person was being deliberately rude or just plain clueless? And then come down with a bad case of l’esprit d’escalier, the “spirit of the staircase,” in which you don’t come up with the perfect way to say, “Hey, WTF?” until some time after the fact?
Me too. And today I got to make up for it.
Necessary background: there’s a coffee shop near my apartment which I basically use as my second living room. I’m there just about every day, either to hang out with friends or to get work done or to sit and contemplate the crema on my espresso. I talk to a lot of the other regulars, and some of them have become good friends. So it’s not unusual for me to start conversations with people if I’ve seen them there a few times.
Some months ago, I started having conversations there with someone I found intriguing: frequent traveler, food and wine lover, international background, well-read. You know, a good conversationalist. And after a few good conversations, he invited me to meet him for a drink at a new local watering hole one evening. Which I did, although I had to run off after just an hour because I had another commitment. So I figured I’d reciprocate with an invitation to my own favorite bar, on an evening where an artist friend was having an opening.
So. On the appointed evening, my new pal showed up with another friend in tow, spent the entire evening at the far end of the bar, and came over just long enough to meet the artist and inform me that he was going to escort his (by then very drunken) friend home. And then he vanished. And I was astonished. Boggled. Flummoxed. And, frankly, insulted. Mind you, it’s not that I was expecting some hot romantic date — I had actually suspected my new friend played for the other team. It’s just that I think it’s astonishingly rude to show up to an event and ignore the person who invited you! I thought of several dozen cutting things to say when I saw him next. The only problem is, I didn’t see him next. Not for two months.
Then I walked into the coffee shop this afternoon and there he was, standing in line right in front of me. He smiled broadly when he saw me, told me he’d been busy, asked how I’d been. And I cocked my head and said coolly, “You know, I have to ask you something. What the hell happened the last time I saw you? I invited you to do something and you showed up with a friend and didn’t interact with me the entire time, and frankly, I found that shocking.”
Even as the words were coming out of my mouth, I was thinking, Is this me? The person who tries so hard to be nice and give everyone the benefit of the doubt? The person who hates being at all confrontational? Go, me!
My erstwhile coffee shop pal stammered something about having misunderstood, that he’d thought I had just told him about the event and not actually invited him there as my guest, that he was sorry. Then off he went to drink his coffee in another part of the cafe. Oh, how proud of myself I felt! But wait, it gets better. A little while later, he came over to my table and said that he appreciated how honest and straightforward I had been, and he apologized again. And I said it was water under the bridge, in a slightly less chilly tone than I’d used before. And that was that.
Boundary set. BS not taken. The end.
Filed under progress, triumphs | Comments (13)