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!

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Hah hah. And thus began a long, stupid saga of not being able to get it done. But at last we had the spot all picked out; we had some pull-down stairs; we had some expert help. There was just one thing. Josh wriggled up to the attic to move one puny light fixture, and realized that the wiring here was kind of bizarre. We decided to hire someone.

And thus did our troubles really begin: we’d call people who swore they’d show up to give us a bid, and they wouldn’t show; we’d get bids from people who swore that they’d have to rewire half the house (which is not so bad, as we’ve meant to do that anyway), and then they wouldn’t return our calls. It was almost pleasant, by comparison, to deal with the people who simply never returned our calls in the first place. Meanwhile, I was often heard to mutter grouchily about living in a storage depot. Clutter can make me crazy.

The Electrician Problem became a running joke, because pretty much anything we wanted to do around here was stymied by all the junk we own getting in our way, and getting that out of the way had reduced to an electrician problem. (”Hey, let’s make ravioli! Well, first we’ll need to get an electrician…”)

So finally we joined the Home Owners Club, which I’d heard some good things about. It was a dream: they sent out a very nice electrician (Current-Flo from Snohomish) who showed up on time in a small time window, took a look at the problem, and just went ahead and fixed it (without rewiring half the house, thanks). The Home Owners Club called us within a few days to be sure we were happy. I’m pretty sure that the membership has already paid for itself. It was incredibly easy and hassle-free.

Next Tuesday we’re scheduled to start working on getting the stairs in. Hot damn. We might actually be able to eat in the dining room again by Christmas.

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.

Time seemed to slow while I decided. I hadn’t played the case since February, but I knew I could do it, and Bob looked like he was in a lot of pain. Knowing isn’t enough to keep the adrenaline at bay, though. ZAP! Run run run go go go! I slammed through the house at speed, talking myself through the case as I showered quickly, the old case notes flooding back to me, and then it was into the clothes and out the door and into Bob’s car and away we go. Poor extroverted Bob was already having a long day, and I hope I didn’t offend him: I forgot about social skills, I was that task-focused. The civilized veneer, such as it is, dropped; I was 100% doing the thing.

Half a mile from work, Bob gets a call: oh, hey, they canceled that session. *pant pant pant whew* It all worked out elegantly, but damn, that was a rush. I’d compressed half a day’s worth of preparation and performance anxiety into about half an hour, and it felt like my brain was on fire.

Nothing calms the nerves like making something. What I made was ratatouille. Almost all of this came out of our own garden — it’s been a great year for peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes. There are a hundred thousand ways to cook ratatouille; this just happens to be what I did today. A little rosemary and savory wouldn’t go amiss in here, maybe some cayenne, maybe even a tiny touch of lavender. Normally I’d add the tomatoes at the end, but these were so startlingly sweet that I wanted them to fall apart entirely so they could coat everything else. No need to peel the vegetables, by the way — nobody’s getting that fancy ’round here.

Ratatouille
(enough for two generous bowls)

olive oil
generous amount of garlic — I used about 2 T in roughly a 3mm mince
1/2 large onion, chopped
5 smallish, very ripe tomatoes, chopped (about 2-3 medium)
2 Japanese-type eggplant, chopped in roughly 1-cm dice
2 large zucchini, diced
1 green pepper, diced (I used a fabulous yellow Gypsy pepper)
1/2 cup of vegetable stock or less
a dash of vodka or other mildly flavored alcohol
a small handful each of basil and parsley, chopped or chiffonaded
three stems’ worth of thyme

Gently sweat your garlic and onions in a little olive oil until they’re translucent. Add tomatoes and cook with a dash of vodka, stirring often, until they’ve fallen apart and reduced into a paste. Add a little vegetable stock to deglaze, then your chopped vegetables. Stir it all up, adding vegetable stock as needed to lubricate the vegetables for easier stirring. Simmer until tender. (About fifteen minutes with this particular batch of vegetables, iirc.) Add the herbs and let them wilt and perfume the dish. Salt and pepper to taste.

This would be good served with crusty bread, or even as an omelet filling, but I just ate it as-is and was perfectly well satisfied.