Sculpin

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?

Josh and I have been getting a crapload of hangup calls lately, at least some of which are spoofing an ID of 408-999-1234. Sometimes I’ll pick up the phone and it’ll be someone talking fast in Spanish; that gets me wondering if they’re working the same common scam that caught Josh in 2003. More often I pick up and say “Hello?” and I’ll hear background murmuring or whispering in what sounds like Spanish. After a few seconds they hang up. Day after day after day. It’s enough to make me ask Josh if we can change our name to Johansen or something, just in case we’re getting targeted as likely Spanish-speakers.

I’m pretty well fed up with getting up to get the phone, so I’m not going to do it anymore. Most folks email me, not call, but if by some chance you do call me, please leave a message. Odds are good we’re screening calls.

Via Ted.

Pick Your Artist

Aimee Mann

Are you male or female?

Just Like Anyone.

Describe yourself:

I Know There’s a Word.

How do you feel about yourself?

You’re With Stupid Now.

Describe where you currently live:

I Was Thinking I Could Clean Up For Christmas.

If you could go anywhere, where would you go?

Ghost World

Your best friend is:

Beautiful.

Your favorite color is:

Invisible Ink.

You know that:

I Should’ve Known.

What’s the weather like?

I Can’t Get My Head Around It.

If your life was a tv show, what would it be called?

“The Fall of the World’s Own Optimist”

What is life to you?

Little Tornado.

What is the best advice you have to give?

This Is How It Goes.

If you could change your name, what would it be?

Frankenstein

I’m still alive. Just wiped out. I signed up for a pretty stressful couple of months, working some emotionally demanding gigs at Bastyr and the UW.

Now it turns out that I have to make some lifestyle changes this month, too. When we got married, Josh and I made some compromises, of course; when it came to food, I did most of the compromising, I think. My diet used to be pretty much tomato-based, but Josh hates tomatoes; for the past five years, my cheese and sausage consumption has skyrocketed. Well, it’s finally caught up to me, and now I’ve got to clean out the garbage dump I’ve made of my bloodstream, and fast. So I’m returning to my tomato-based diet; Josh and I will just have to fend for ourselves for a while.

It’d be nice if I could exercise, too, but I can’t really move right now. I don’t know what I did to my back last week, but I suspect it has something to do with the ongoing psoas problem from last November. I am wondering if an MRI might be in my future.

Today I can walk very slowly and carefully on level ground, if I don’t try too hard to straighten up. I know! I could use the treadmill! It goes slowly and evenly! But wait, I can’t. Why, you ask? Because it’s folded up with boxes in front of it. Which I can’t lift. And there’s nowhere to put them anyway. Why? Largely because we don’t have attic storage, a year and a half after trying to start that project. What’s the holdup now? We still do not have an electrician. We get these recommendations, we call them, and we never get callbacks. WTF. I’ve gone past “steamed” and right into “gritting my teeth and ready to snap”. Often I think that we should call it all off and just throw away half our stuff. (Does anybody need a small women’s wetsuit? Size sixish, I think.)

So, all my processors are busy right now. How in hell I am going to make the next six weeks work, I do not know.

But there’s good news, too: the chickens are laying! More about that at House of Cranks.