Sculpin

I know somebody whose daughter, a very small toddler, is starting to figure out the rules of human interaction. She likes to answer the phone and say, “Hello! How you you? Blahblahblahblahblah!” Literally “blahblahblahblahblah” — it’s what she says when she runs out of words, which happens often.

I can’t decide whether she’s not quite clear on what words are, or whether she has a precocious grasp on the realities of phatic communication, but I lean toward the latter. All she’s trying to express is, “I am talking now in a socially appropriate manner,” and she gets that intention across with admirable efficiency. I can think of a lot of adult conversations that could be reduced right down to “Blahblahblahblahblah,” though they’re not necessarily so friendly. It would have saved me plenty of time and trouble if I’d recognized that a couple of decades ago.

Fact is, I kind of wish we could all just go ahead and follow that kid’s lead. Blahblahblahblahblah, friends!

I swear, I’m not actually having a writer’s strike. It just looks that way.

For those catching up, it was about a year ago that I massively herniated a disc. Good ol’ L5S1. I can’t be accused of doing things by half measures; this thing was a centimeter in its smallest dimension. I pretty much extruded the whole contents of the disc. I basically put a bullet into my spine made out of my own meat — ewww.

The good news is, I had excellent medical care (Dr. Ren of the Polyclinic is exceptional!) and I’m making a good recovery. From what I’ve read, I’m way the heck out there on the lucky end of the bell curve. As of this writing, I’ve gotten away without surgery.

I still have some daily minor discomfort — my recovery may be miraculous, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Still, it’s rare that I need to take anything at all for it unless I’ve spent some significant part of the day doing some very particular physical motions. I can pretty much do anything I could before and now it’s more a matter of how long I can do it. (I do avoid long car trips and any kind of twisting under load.) My balance is coming back, slowly but surely, and I can walk a few miles now. Unfortunately, my post-herniation gait is something like what you’d see if you crossed Charlie Chaplin and an ambulatory pile of laundry. There’s no spring in my step at all; it’s flumph flumph flumph, dumpy and awkward, with my right foot kicking out to the side goofily. I’m working on it; it’s coming along.

The bad news is that my recovery’s slowed down and I have a lot of digging out to do. I guess I kind of expected that when I was able to walk again, however ridiculously, it’d all be gravy from then on out, but it doesn’t work that way, and ye gods is there a lot to do. The deconditioning alone… damn. I kind of fell off the face of the world last fall when I recognized just how much crap I had to do and how slowly and carefully I was going to have to do it. At that same time I was coming to grips with just how life-changingly crappy most of 2009 had been. I wasn’t prepared for how emotionally taxing having a painful injury like this would be, especially in the post-crisis stage. It overwhelmed me, and I apologize to folks who reached out to me and didn’t hear back from me. I’m back now.

One of the first orders of business is plain old housekeeping. At this point it’s more like Combat Housekeeping. When I was stuck in bed, I liked to imagine that Josh was keeping the rest of the house more or less in order. This was an obvious fantasy — Josh is one of the most clutter-prone people I’ve ever known. But since I couldn’t get out there to see it, I figured I might as well keep my hopes up. Well. It’s pretty much a warren of filth and disorganization, is what it is. But we have attic storage now, at long last, and together we’re digging out. At the rate we’re going, this could last until June.

Today I’m working on the pantry, which is full of food that expired last year. (The chickens are in heaven - so many treats!) What’s left seems mostly to be beans. This is largely my fault; whenever I see beans on sale, I think, “Oh boy, I like beans! Look how cheap!” And then I buy them, sometimes by the case. And they accrete. Looks like we’re going on the Legume Diet for the next who-knows-how-long.

Josh is taking the overthinking of beans to dizzying new heights; he’s made a project of recording the weights of the drained beans in various cans. Turns out that the bigger cans were a pretty lousy deal for us. I suspect that we got a bad case, but I’m hesitant to buy another can of beans to compare.

So that’s pretty much it: beans and cleaning up. Glamorous, huh?

ETA: I have ten jars of honey. Ten. Yes, a lot of them are different, at least one was a gift, some of them are varieties that are relatively hard to find, and yes, honey has a shelf life of centuries, but still. Cripes. I think that’s enough honey.

Mary Daly has died. It was with mixed emotions that I learned that this afternoon. When I read Gyn/Ecology and Wickedary in 1991 or so, I thought they were the biggest piles of bullshit I’d ever seen, in content and in form. Having started in on that line of thought, I could hardly help pursuing it — her work was such irresistibly loopy, maddening crap, so fractally obnoxious in ways that cast unexpected light on what I thought, felt, and knew. I didn’t give a good goddamn for her status as a grande dame of feminism; she had bats in the attic, all right, and I set out in a private fury to identify them, bat after bat.

That’s how Mary Daly wound up being important to my development as a young feminist, not to mention my development as a person who can fail to give a good goddamn. Even almost twenty years later, rereading a little of Gyn/Ecology’s preface, I find ways in which she is juicily wrong. I feel lucky to have had her work to react against. For all her flaws — and there’s a vast taxonomy of them, as I recall — she was brave as hell, and her work scratched open a small, new opposing bravery in me. Ave atque vale, old Lunatic.

Glenn Greenwald reported last Thursday that the ACLU has lost a major donor who was responsible for 25% of the organization’s budget. This donor, who got caught in the credit crunch, was the ACLU’s largest single source of funding. This on top of the major cuts they took last year due to the economy.

Josh and I used to be ACLU members, but I’d dropped them from the donation list after they sent what seemed like weekly beg letters to our address. I still support their work, though, and this seemed like reason enough to open my wallet.

There’s no good way that I saw to avoid getting on the ACLU’s dead-trees mailing list if you give via the website. But if you call them at 1-888-567-ACLU, they’ll make sure you’re not mailed. The fellow I talked to was charming and helpful as I explained that I did not want to be contacted by anyone at any time for any reason. He was right there with me on that one.

Makes a great Xmas gift! Merry Christmas, Josh! Seriously, if anybody reading this is wondering about a last-minute present for me, I’m not kidding about donations being great Christmas presents. That’s why they’re on my Amazon wishlist.

I don’t quite get it. I like gingerbread houses and one of these days, I swear to myself, I’ll make one just for the minor engineering challenge of it all. But they do confuse me a bit.

I mean, do you actually eat such a thing? It seems to me that by the time you’re ready to eat it, it’s probably gone stale. (I suppose you could pick the gumdrops off, assuming you can pry them loose.) So you’ve just made a celebration of sweetness that you won’t actually eat. That seems a little daft.

The most recent episode of House followed awfully close to this script.

I scan a few philosophy blogs once in a while, and every so often I see something pop up again: why are there so few women in philosophy? Wikipedia tells us that “U.S. Department of Education reports indicate that philosophy is one of the least proportionate, and possibly the least proportionate, fields in the humanities with respect to gender.” Huh. Well, I’ve made no particular study of the matter, but I can tell you exactly when I decided not to go into it.

I spent a couple of years out of college, and during that time I really got into some aspects of philosophy, especially the philosophy of science. I read Mayr’s Growth of Biological Thought and a little Kuhn, and those led me to Popper and Quine and Feyerabend (who drove me up the wall) and Ruse and Lewontin and Sober and I don’t know who-all. When circumstances allowed me to go back to school, I was psyched. This was gonna be great. I was gonna take “History and Philosophy of Science” right away. I was gonna read all sorts of awesome stuff and have all kinds of awesome arguments and watch out I was gonna kick some butt, oh yeah. I was looking forward to diving in and giving it everything I had, because I liked it with all my nerdy little heart.

So, that’s not how it went. There we were, the very first week, when the prof sat on a desk all friendly-like and threw out to the class this question: what do we need, philosophically, in order to do science? What do we have to assume is true? We sat there in awkward silence. I broke it by saying, haltingly, that we have to trust that the world exists and induction is valid.

I remember exactly what he said: “That’s just stupid.”

You are fucking kidding me was my thought. I may have been hesitant and unused to being a student again, but there was no way I was stupid, and neither was what I said. If you’re going to define the space of the problem, I thought, define the fucking space. It didn’t even occur to me until years later that “That’s just stupid” is not the way to talk to an undergraduate. What threw me was that he went for “stupid” without even bothering with an argument.

So then, shifting his entire body, he turned to a boy near me and got his answer, which was something like, “We have to, uh, be sure that we’re doing good experiments?” And the professor was all “YES!” and I was all, Dear professor, please choke and die.

I believe I switched to auditing the class, but I might as well have dropped out. Except for two very good presentations by my fellow students at the end (history of birth control and history of chiropractic) there was nothing much for me.

It’s like this: imagine there’s some guy you’ve seen around campus, and he’s awfully attractive and seems really smart and funny. And then you’re at a party and you finally have a chance to go up and introduce yourself, whereupon he calls you a bitch and throws up on your shoes. Maybe he’s just had a really, really bad day, but too bad: odds are very good that he is out of luck where you’re concerned, because you’ve got better things to do than determining whether he’s a chronic misogynist shoe-vomiter or just an occasional one. There are too many fish in the sea for that kind of thing. Whether or not he cares, he’s lost his shot.

So that was it. If that’s what passed for a philosophy course, I wasn’t having any. This wasn’t about my inability to handle vigorous argument. I already had a history of thriving on vigorous argument. No, this was about how willing I was to be all but spat on by my professor, and the answer is, not so much. I wasn’t about to invest my time in looking into whether that kind of thing was typical of the discipline or merely tolerated. Not when there were dozens of competing programs that would have been delighted to have me, spit-free. So right there and then, the philosophy department stopped being a contender for me.

Edited to add: What’s sad, looking back, is that I don’t think the jerk professor was even part of the philosophy department. I believe he was actually some kind of hanger-on to the biology department. If I’d realized how disconnected he was from the actual philosophy faculty, I might have given WWU Philosophy a chance. Or I might not have; he may not have been been part of the department, but he was an academic philosopher.

Like a lot of folks, my journal’s gone pretty quiet lately. Part of it is the usual move to Facebook. But a lot of it, too, is that for the last several months I’ve been thinking things that I’m not quite sure are ready for prime time. Things about authority, power, racism. Things that would piss off a whole lot of people, including people I’m fond of, and that I’m not sure I’ve really got worked out anyway. It’s not exactly what I envisioned for this journal. I’m basically a no-longer-political person who’s mostly interested in what to do with all that extra eggplant. But once in a while, something gets under my skin and sticks.

Such as. There’s a guy I’ve met who makes a great big deal over what a great big feminist he is, but the idea of actually listening to a woman like she’s some kind of human being — he’d rather drink bleach. (I know I’m not a mind reader, but eventually one does have to say Oh come on.) It’s not about being a feminist, for him. It’s all about using the righteousness of feminism as a club to beat other men into submission so he can be King Dude. He can talk all he likes about Marginalization and Otherness and the Discourse, and it still doesn’t count for a goddamn thing. It’s just a more sophisticated way of exploiting women, and I hope his head falls off.

I’ve met plenty of men whom I’d consider basically feminist, and it’s interesting how few of them have made hay out of being feminist or even identify as feminist. Their feminism — like mine, in a lot of ways — tends to be a particular case of their general commitment to the idea that authority should be prepared to justify its existence in some kind of way that makes sense. Patriarchy is nonsensical and harms people; therefore it should be burned down. If you really have a gut-level commitment to egalitarianism, a whole lot of sexism hits you where you live, especially when you see it screwing over your friends. Where I say “feminist”, these guys might say “not totally full of shit,” and it’s more or less the same thing here. It’s not about expertise in the discourse of feminism or gender; it’s not about whether they’ve got their “knapsack” memorized. It’s about the click. It’s in the gut. It’s personal.

I’ve noticed that when I read something about racism that strikes me as sane and true and real, I’m often rooting that oh just this one time let this sane thing be by somebody who identifies as white and it pretty much never is. I’m coming to the conclusion that when people of color talk about racism, they’re generally talking about, y’know, racism, and that when white “allies” talk about racism, they’re generally talking about the dominance game they’re playing with each other. White people in the left talking with other white people about racism are, too often, much less interested in racism than they are in getting out the long knives. (Again, not a mind reader, but again, oh come on.)

Sure, I can do that knife-fighting too, but it’s stupid and wrong. It’s a distraction at best; it pretty well guarantees the shutdown of any deeply felt statements (especially by naive white people who aren’t trained to the knife) that might actually get somewhere; it usually privileges talking prettily over doing anything useful; it tends to put racism into airy Theory Land. And above all it’s a way of using people of color to get an edge for ourselves. Meanwhile, people I like are dealing with the actual fallout of actual racism. I put the one dynamic next to the other and it makes my teeth grit hard. I try to think about how I can be part of a conversation about racism without being another asshole “ally” type.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. And I’m sick of it. So knock it off, assholes. Just stop. Drop the shit. Remember how we were going to have a better national conversation? Did you really imagine that the obvious racist wingnuts were the only white people who were going to have to change?

Anti-racism… It’s not so you can display your social capital, and it’s not so you can have a really righteous way of Coming To Voice, and it’s not so everybody can know that you’re the smartest and bestest person on the block. It’s not about your expertise in saying “structural oppression” unselfconsciously. It’s not about having a really sophisticated mental machine with which to perform a calculus of racism on the naive statements of people you wish to dominate. This is really, really not about your lack of vulnerability. This is personal.

I’ve just come home with the best garage sale score of my life, plus something to think about.

The score: a Pilates reformer with accessories for twenty-five bucks. And this thing is rock-solid. The same model is going for about a thousand dollars on Craigslist right now; it was about $2400 new. My jaw dropped a bit when I tried the machine out; I’d expected that I’d at least have to replace some springs.

It’s perfect for me. I’m perfect for it. We are precisely the right match for each other. I’ve got the half-decade of Pilates experience and the recovering back injury that makes mat work imperfectly tenable. And I am oddly serious about Pilates — I tend to treat it like other people treat martial arts. This is going to be fantastic for my recovery.

Here’s the thing: the fellow who was selling it wasn’t ignorant. He knew exactly what he had and I’d bet he knew what he could get for it. But he was an interesting man. It looked for all the world like he had made a deal with the universe: he would allow his reformer to go out into the world at an unbelievable price, and in return, his reformer would go to a person who would make unusually good use of it. I had the unnerving feeling that he was seeing me as completing some kind of magickal circuit, and that this was completely ordinary for him. When we were chatting, I mentioned the disc injury; I expected him to perk up a little in happy surprise — it’s nice to know that your old stuff is going to go out into the world and do good work — but instead he relaxed. He gave every impression of thinking, “Oh yes, good, this is the one I made the appointment with. I thought so.”

It makes me wonder — what would it be like to live with that faith that things will work out for the best? It seems to be working for him.

Josh: *lifts his head, listens*
Cam: *takes out the earplugs*
— BANG BANG BANG –
Cam: “Gunshots?!”
Josh: “Yep.”
Cam: “How many did you hear before?!”
Josh: “3, maybe 4.”
Cam: *checks the clock* “1:48. From the north maybe?!”
Josh: “There’s no way to tell really.” *goes back to sleep*
Cam: *big-eyed look of WHAT WHAT WHAT*
Josh: *HOOOOOONK*…*ssss*…*HOOOOOONK*…*ssss*…*HOOOOONK*…

Nobody in earshot has called an aid car, according to Realtime 911. Whatever that was, I hope… well, it’s hard to know what to hope, isn’t it? So now I’m wide awake and vigilant. But even if had been were something to hear, the vigilance has done me no good because I can’t hear a darn thing over the snoring anyway. How does he do it? And how is it that he’ll stay up until 4 am when someone is wrong on the internet, but goes right back to sleep next to an exterior wall when someone is shooting a few blocks away? (Okay, I admit it. I understand the first half of that. I mean, someone being wrong on the internet is a powerful motivating force. Also, um, “a few blocks away.”)

We also smelled something on fire this evening. Josh even walked around the neighborhood wondering which house was on fire this time. And of course we’re just around the corner from where the big flood was. I wonder what will be next. Plague seems insufficiently local, as do bears, and we did the fleeing-bankrobber thing around here a few years ago. Falling space junk? Mini-tornado?