Miscellany

1) How is it possible that last night was the first time in my life I ever made brownies?

 

2) My pocket-sized organizer handily provides "this date in history" radical-history facts for me every day.  Yesterday, they recognized a gathering of 20,000 people in 1969 to protest the closing of the People's Park in Berkeley, but did not recognize the anniversary of the execution of Joan of Arc.

 

3) There will be a dyke march in Portland for Pride this year!  More details soon…

 

4) I sent my last packet of schoolwork yesterday; now all I have to do is read in preparation for my July residency .

 

5) There's a Rebecca-sized hole in my day.

 

6) Going to a talk by my buddy Dugan tonight at the Free Space about the history of Portland.   Also, dinner at Tu Casa and, later, hand-drilling rusted bolts to avoid police attention.

 

 

 

Fogey

fogey
Originally uploaded by bec.w.

I discovered this weekend that the line between old-man aesthetic and dyke aesthetic is very, very thin.

I was getting dressed for this geriatric-themed costume party in a button-down, blazer, and driving cap, thinking that I would go as a dapper old gent. But then I realized that I wear that *exact same* outfit pretty often when I'm not dressing up for a costume party.

Hence the bow tie.

As if that makes it different, since I borrowed the bow tie from an ex who wears it non-ironically.

And at the party, no, I did not drink any of the milk of magnesia shots going around, although I did play Dan C's polyamory love song in response to a misogynist "joke" song.

And cried, a little, after I got home.

Dentist Poem

I suffer from karma of the mouth.

 

My tongue is a dried snail

in a strange cave of machinery

and metal

which clinks on my teeth.

A fine powder of ground bone and cold water

spray up from the tools

and the smell is like the end of the world;

my bones cast up in dust drifting through the afternoon sunlight

 

One hour in the chair:

penance for years of

floss-less bedtime, for

the unwillingness of toes

to touch the January floor

for the ten steps to the bathroom;

 

Failure to clean the bony crevices,

flush out the last of dinner,

brush away the accumulation of the day.

 

In penance, I lay with a drill

shaking my skull,

a stranger's hands in my mouth

which is wide

open to the failings

of my character.

The Great Purpose:

(a.k.a. "why I'm going another $20,000 into debt")

 

People die of pernicious stories, are reinvented by new stories, and make stories to shelter themselves. Though we learned from postmodernism that a story is only a construct, so is a house, and a story can be more important as shelter: the story that you have certain inalienable rights and immeasurable value, the story that there is an alternative to violence and competition, the story that women are human beings. Sometimes people find the stories that save their lives in books.

 

from Welcome to the Impossible World

I Heart Mattilda

From the online edition of LiP, about how the oppressed so quickly can become the oppressor.

 

My favorite quote:

Homo now stands more for homogenous than any type of sexuality aside from buy buy buy.

 

But power feels so gooooooood...

 

The Girls are Catching Up Part 2

There's more in the Press Herald today about the study released about how males are "falling behind" women in college because of a disparity in enrollment. 

 

On the editorial page, Dugan Carlson Slovenski gets hysterical--oops, I mean, upset--about the fact that there are special resources available for women but not for men (like women's studies programs, the Women's Resource Center at USM, and foundations that support the work of women and girls), and blames this lack of attention on men for the reason males' enrollment at Maine public universities is dropping. 

 

My favorite quote is this one:

Boys need our help. Putting feminists on a task force to study boys was the equivalent of asking the fox to guard the henhouse. Let's not allow overzealous advocates for girls to derail this long overdue look at boys.

 

It's inevitable that people in power feel threatened when the social order shifts (even slightly).  But it's crazy to suggest that a few years of increased college enrollment has undone thousands of years of patriarchal oppression.

 

Would someone please direct Mr. Slovenski to a women's studies 101 class?  Please?

Too Much Free Time

I love formulas.  This one tells me:

 

As of 5/3/2006 8:59:05 AM EDT
You are 29 years old.
You are 353 months old.
You are 1,532 weeks old.
You are 10,724 days old.
You are 257,384 hours old.
You are 15,443,099 minutes old.
You are 926,585,945 seconds old.
 

Your age is the equivalent of a dog that is 4.1972602739726 years old. (You're still chasing cats!)

There are 233 days till your next birthday
on which your cake will have 30 candles.

Those 30 candles produce 30 BTUs,
or 7,560 calories of heat (that's only 7.5600 food Calories!) .
You can boil 3.43 US ounces of water with that many candles.

May 1

The CEO of ExxonMobil makes $150,000 a day.

Happy International Workers' Day.