Being a Supreme Court wife

There's been a lot of fervor over the fact that Ginni Thomas, wife of super-conservative misogynist Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, was running a teapartyish group called Liberty Central. She's recently stepped down very quietly now that the mid-terms are over.

There's been a lot of talk about how when you agree to be a Supreme Court justice, you give up certain rights, like expressing political positions. I agree with this overall, especially since a few of the ultra-conservative justices have been making public appearances at conservative fundraisers. But when we talk about "Supreme Court spouses" and how they agree to give up their rights, I can't help but sense the sexism in this assertion.

Of all the Supreme Court justices in history, four have been women. Three of those currently sit on the Court. Two of them do not have spouses. When we talk about who has to sit down and shut up, especially because their spouses have voices that overpower every law in the country, we are talking about women, though we conveniently call them "spouses." We are talking about yet another reason that women shouldn't just be overshadowed by our spouses' careers, but we should be controlled by them. Because "we" have "agreed" to accept a Supreme Court post.

It's true that spouses' political opinions often give a window into Supreme Court justices opinions, but it's not true that their spouses' actions actually do anything to affect their rulings. The fact that Ginni Thomas founded and headed a super-conservative political group doesn't tell us anything we don't know. Let's take a vote. Raise your hand if you didn't know that Clarence Thomas is a misogynist, conservative asshole.

Right. That's what I thought.

Datafail and Truthiness

Yet another well-respected philanthropy journal, which I am choosing not to name, is marching forward with the same "Generation Y doesn't care" trope that seems to be so popular as my generation goes out on our own and makes our own brand new adult trends. We are the generation born between 1981 and 1991 -- roughly, my brother (1981), myself (1984), and this year's college freshmen and sophomores (1991). In the article entitled "Charities must find multiple ways to persuade people of different generations to give, study finds," the article rightly makes the point that marketing, solicitation, and cultivation tactics work as a multi-pronged single strategy, not as separate strategies for separate demographics. And somehow, they fit this in:

Members of Generation Y...tend to be less loyal to an organization and hold high expectations for online attempts to attract them. But they also have a strong desire to help others and to raise money and attention from friends and acquaintances for their favorite causes.

As datafail to back that up, we get this.

Donors born since 1980 gave an average of $341 to an average of 3.6 groups, while members of Generation X gave $796 to 4.2 organizations.

Anyone else see the problem here? Yes, that's it, in a typical career environment you make more money as your career progresses. Anything else? Right, a good chunk of Gen Y are still in college! Assuming typical matriculation and graduation, the oldest GenYers graduated around 2003; the youngest won't graduate for another three years.


When you report data inaccurately, it doesn't help that you grant that we "have a strong desire to help others." It isn't okay to acknowledge our intentions are good if you're also insulting us based on your own preconceptions about what you'd like to find. So let's remember some things about this generation that is sooo picky about where we work and who we give our money to:

• The total amount of student loans borrowed by students increased by about 25% from the 2007-08 academic year to 08-09 academic year. Compare this to the increase from 1997-98 to 98-99, which was 1.7%.
• Two-thirds of college students take on student debt, with an average of $23,186 after a Bachelor's degree. Compare this to the numbers from 12 years ago, when 58% of students borrowed to pay for college, and the average amount borrowed was $13,172.*
• This burden keeps us from doing things we want to do, like having a kids, buying a house, or throwing a wedding. (Things, I should note, that are big ol' important milestones for adulthood which we're criticized for "delaying.")
• On average (using a median) starting pay for men is $8,400 more than starting pay for women in the same graduating class.**
• More women than men graduate college (this trend is growing); more women than men donate to nonprofits. The bulk of the donors and likely donors in our generation are making less than our peers.
• The third of Gen Y who are still in college are largely living on borrowed money and thus aren't giving as much. Maybe we should count the interest I'll be paying for the money I donated when I was in college, and then see where the averages end up.
• Many of us opt to work in nonprofits as a moral decision, rather than an economic one, and thus make far less money than we would in for-profit organizations. For example, I am in the 16th percentile for jobs similar to mine in responsibility and region. If we consider the $9,312 between my salary and the average market value of my work to be a contribution, I wonder whether we'd still be decrying how stingy and flighty Gen Y is.

I've been reading The Canon by Natalie Angier, and I just finished the chapter on probabilities. The moral of the chapter was a warning that it's easy to be hoodwinked by statistics with poor or, in this case, a lack of analysis. I expected better; perhaps that's foolish. This is truthiness at its best: "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true."


*These data come from the Wall Street Journal article, Students Borrow More Than Ever for College.
**These data come from here and originate in a cnn.com article.

Cream cheese icing and Death By Chocolate cake from The Grit

Though The Grit's cookbook has been out for many years now, it's oddly difficult to find its recipes online if, say, you can't currently find your copy.

So here are recipes for a phenomenal vegan cake called Death by Chocolate and the very un-vegan cream cheese icing.

Death by Chocolate

• 4 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 3 cups sugar
• 1 cup cocoa powder
• 1 tablespoon baking soda
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
• 2 tablespoons pure vanilla extract
• 3 cups strong brewed coffee
• 1/4 cup cider vinegar

Chocolate Icing

• 1 (12 ounce) packages firm silken tofu
• 3 cups semisweet vegan chocolate chips (many semisweet brands contain no dairy)

Directions:

Prep Time: 25 mins
Total Time: 50 mins 

Cake:

1. Preheat oven to 350. Grease 3 (9-inch) round cake pans, dust with flour, and line bottom with parchment or wax paper.
2. Sift together dry ingredients in a large bowl. Add oil and vanilla extract. With electric mixer on low speed, blend until fully combined. With mixer on medium speed, gradually blend in coffee. When mixture is smooth, add vinegar and blend on low speed just until combined.
3. Divide batter evenly into prepared pans. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes or just until a knife or toothpick inserted in the center of layers comes out clean.
4. Remove from oven and cool 15 to 20 minutes on a wire rack. Remove from pans and allow layers to cool completely before icing.

Chocolate Icing:

1. Drain excess fluid from silken tofu, crush and place in a medium saucepan with chocolate chips.
2. Stir together over medium heat until chocolate is very soft. Transfer to food processor and puree until fully blended.
3. Cool to spreadable consistency and frost between layers, and top and sides of cake.

 

Cream Cheese Icing

• 2 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese, slightly softened and cut into small pieces
• 1/2 cup butter, at room temperature
• 4 cups powdered confectioners' sugar, sifted
• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract  

Directions:

1. Using an electric mixer, beat cream cheese in a large bowl until smooth.
2. Add butter and beat until smooth, creamy, and fully combined.
3. Add powdered confectioners' sugar and vanilla extract and beat slowly until sugar is incorporated.
4. Beat until consistency is extremely smooth and fluffy.

Radical respect

This started as a post about Park51.

I wrote the post and asked a friend to read it, and then tried to revise it based on her feedback. It was a post where I showed a great counterexample of what I was saying. It was the post of a white person trying to tell other white people to stop being mean to non-white people. I don’t think such posts are categorically wrong, but it’s not what I mean.

So this post isn’t about Park51. It’s about radical respect, especially of the religious sort. It’s about how my medically treated anxiety intersects with the racism I was raised on, and creates a very uncomfortable storm in my head that I can only calm through the painful honesty of recognizing that that racism is now my own.

Okay, so maybe it’s a little bit about Park51.

I spent the weekend in Manhattan with my best friends from college – a New Jerseyan guy with Indian heritage, (we’ll call him Rouge), an Ashkenazi Israeli (Turquoise), and a white Alabaman who speaks fluent Arabic as well as some Hebrew and Persian (Daffodil). Then I spent two days with my very loud Italian-American family where each person is perfect and knows what’s best for everyone else. We’re mostly women, except those who married in or are under the age of ten. My brother and uncle weren’t there. My eldest cousin just had a very sweet, very cute baby, and there are four other mothers in the family.

We love each other fiercely, but for most of us, loving doesn’t mean trusting. Years ago, a playwright friend of mine wrote in Thorns of a Rose, “How can you think you know what’s best for me? I don’t even know what’s best for me.” We don’t trust each other to do what’s best for ourselves, or even to trust that we’ll be consulted if we can be a useful conversant. Instead of offering expertise, we are experts at jumping at the opportunity of someone else’s confusion to posit our own opinion, hoping it will be accepted out of sudden lucidity or perhaps simply out of exhaustion. We want to be right; rather, we know we’re right, so we want the shortest route to making you realize it. So we ignore that confusion and struggle are the midwives of intentionality, and get right to our preferred end while ignoring the means. Get people at their most vulnerable, and you don't have to worry about their personhood; you can conveniently supplant their needs with your own.

Fear-mongering uses this same method. Marriage in trouble (as many, many marriages often are)? Blame it on the gays. Crime statistics got you down? Blame it on “urban youth.” Worried about the havoc wreaked by drug addiction? Blame it on gangs in Mexico. Business going down the tubes? Blame it on a federal worker bee who happens to be black. Evangelical methods no longer catching the eye of the vulnerable? Blame it on another religion. Embarrassed that other fear-mongers have succeeded in making you scared? Take it out on Muslims. Rest assured that once you reduce the power of the gays, the urban youth, the entire country of Mexico, all black federal employees (or all black folks entirely?), all other religions, and especially all Muslims, your marriage, property, family, business, religion, and bravado will once again be in tact.

I tend to give the fear-mongers the benefit of the doubt and assume that they really are afraid; they came by their fear honestly. They know they're right, and they want the shortest path to making sure you know that too. It scares me to think this way, because it means we're fighting something genuine, no matter how abhorrent. It seems easier to dismiss people when you assume they're just evil.

What scares me the most is when I see this in myself. I have been raised in a racist* society, and I try to claim my part in upholding the racism that I’ve ingested, willingly or unwillingly. Still, I am alarmed when I catch myself doing the very things that I abhor. Rouge regularly gets selected for extra screening at airports, especially if he hasn’t shaved in a few days. While boarding the flight to Newark last week, a white family behind him in line seemed especially concerned when he began talking to his mother on the phone in Punjabi.

Every time I board a plane, especially if I am flying alone, I look around to see who the other passengers are. I get shaky if I see a young brown man. In my life, I’ve flown most to Newark, Orlando, and Detroit, in that order. Young brown men are pretty common passengers on those flights, as all three states have significant populations of people from Middle Eastern, Indian, and Hispanic families.

Yesterday I boarded a train in Newark that stopped in New York’s Penn Station before continuing on to points north and east, eventually ending in Boston. I found myself having the same fears, stoking the racist flame that I try on other days to ignore. I forced myself to hide it, but the racist fears kept dogging me.

At the same time, my mind whirled. I chastised myself, I felt terrible, I wondered how I could call myself an ally when clearly I’m part of the problem. So long as one part of me knows what's right, I can make proclamations, hoping the "fake it til you make it" method will eventually mean that I'm entirely free of racism simply by saying that I am. If I focus outward, I never have to focus on myself.

This post began as a way to say that Muslims have more of a right than anybody to build a mosque at Ground Zero [despite the fact that no such thing has been suggested] because 9/11 has been used as an excuse to kill millions of Muslims. Yes, of course I believe that to be true. But no, that is not my struggle.

My struggle is that it’s working. The fear-mongering – if not from this particular nontroversy, then from all of the rest of it – has worked. It’s worked despite the defenses I put up and the steel bubble I have built. It's worked despite the fact that I can make a convincing and spirited argument against racial profiling. It's worked despite the fact that my friends, the chosen family who I describe as being part of my soul, are the ones I would be afraid of. It's worked, and I can't make it stop working just by acting as if I'm immune.

I said this post was about radical respect. Radical respect is starting from a place of conscious love, edification, and respect, and honoring others by fighting my own demons. Radical respect is about being intentional. It's about falling back on my belief that other people know what is best for them. It's about trusting that people make decisions rooted in their own experiences. It's about trusting my cousin to be the kind of mother she wants to be, and trusting that she will tell us when she needs something. It's about squelching the urge to grandstand when I want to hide my guilt. It's about fighting my susceptibility to fear-mongering. It's about becoming one fewer person who can be affected by fear-mongers. It's about being proactive about how to be a better part of this world. It's about knowing that "a better world" means a world where individuals treat each other with love, compassion, and respect.

 

*I’m currently using “racist” to be a bit of a catch-all for xenophobia and islamophobia because the way we “determine” who to be scared of is often by what race or ethnicity we assume them to be.
**I expect to be editing this for a while, despite the many many edits it's gone through.

razing public housing

This deserves much much more conversation than I'm going to give it at this moment, but hopefully I'll get back to it.

It's common practice to raze low-income public housing and replace it with "mixed-income housing," where some of the units are reserved for subsidized-rent units for low-income families. (The number of units reserved for low-income families is significantly smaller than the number of low-income units razed.) The idea here is to "deconcentrate poverty." The thing is, this is actually about destabilizing poor people.

Assuming that this will alleviate poverty (or help poor people) requires considering poor people as toxic. If you spread out a toxin, it gets watered down and is less potent. But poor people aren't toxins, damnit. Poor people are people, and if you put poor people in a nicer place, that's super, because poor people deserve to live in nice places too. But if there still aren't jobs, education, and childcare, as well as food stamps, welfare income, enough housing units, and sustainable community structures, you aren't helping anything! You're making the poor invisible, which makes non-poor people feel better. And that's not public policy, that's bullshit.

Fuck that noise.

Monday Malaise

First, a yawning baby bunny:

I can't get this video to embed, but it never fails to put a smile on my face.

http://www.globalcommunity.org/flash/wombat.shtml

This is what eight dozen cookies looks like

That's four dozen chocolate chip, and four dozen skulls or pears or alien heads.

They're like the Rorschach of cookies.

things that induce jac-rage

the non-cute kind:

When white boys tell women of color that the latter has no more right to talk about race than the former, and/or that the former knows "just as much about race" as the latter.

Glenn Beck's bullshit march tomorrow, on the anniversary of MLK's most famous speech, in the very same place.

The fact that Beck didn't plan it on that day on purpose. He didn't know, and when someone told him it was the anniversary, that's when he started making up some bullshit about how it's appropriate.

Mosquitoes' incredible, unequivocal love for me and the eating of me.

the cute kind:

When my chicken coop gets pounced upon by neighborkitty and my rooster and two hens go missing.

When one hen never shows back up and the rooster takes two days to get back home.

The cute, it burns.

My hunny's blog is adorable and pretty different from mine, but we often compare stats. I told him I never get people coming in through google searches. His top term for a while has been "bioluminescent puppies," and he joked that I should write more about bioluminescent puppies. Those bioluminescent puppies sure are cute, dontcha think?

See?

Also keep your eyes out for an adorable dialogue-style post about 20-somethings and how teens are treated like crazy proto-people. We have pretty awesome discussions that make me say "I've never heard it put that way" so we'll be making that public kinda soon.

Monday Malaise - Cherpumple!

Not only do I want to make this ridiculous dessert, I also can't stop giggling watching the video.

Distinction Without a Difference? The 19th Amendment.

I know it's risky to put it out there in internetland when I'm thinking about whether something is faily, but pretty much everyone I want to talk to about it reads this blog. So click on over to the blog from your reader program so you can comment on it. Go ahead, I'll wait.


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I went to an Atlanta Women's Foundation event last month for work, held at the Atlanta Girls School. It was their annual meeting and grant award ceremony, and my organization was getting a grant. I'm fond of AWF, and it was exciting to be in a room full of women. The audience, staff, and board were racially diverse, though I think most were white-collar, educated, able-bodied, middle- and upper-middle-class folks. Part of the celebration was a choreographed dance routine by five high schoolers from the school. It specifically celebrated the 19th Amendment, which outlawed sex discrimination in voting rights. They wore period clothes and carried suffragette-esque signs, and were all clearly very invested in the performance. There was just one thing. Four of the five women are African-American. I think I twittered it at the time.


I say the Amendment "legally ended sex discrimination" in voting (rather than "gave women the right to vote") because it did not give all women, or even all women citizens, the right to vote. It would be decades before most women of color would be allowed to vote in the U.S. The white women's suffrage movement was largely hostile to women of color. That history seemed to be erased from the dancers' performance, and I found no quizzical looks in the audience other than my own. In college, I told my friend N that I wanted to make college t-shirts that said "est 1836," as so many of ours did, but that also added the years that women and black people were allowed to matriculate. I'm proud of the fact that it was my alma mater that initially sued for the right to integrate, but they didn't do so until the 1950s. Yes, yes, it was a different time, blah blah blah, I don't care. That's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in claiming the fail that gets handed down to us. Is the school actually teaching women of color that they got to vote in the 1920s? Surely they aren't in so many words, but that situation seems to portray a lack of understanding of the bigger picture.


But then my meta side kicks in, and I realize that looking at the 19th amendment as a win for white women only ignores intersectionality. Women of color are full human beings, not half woman, half POC. So why do I expect to see a separation in the celebration of the end of legal sex discrimination? A win for women is a win for women of color, and women of color suffer from gender oppression in ways that are not separate. If it the racial makeup of the women dancing was intentional, then I would see it as a radical reclamation of the work women of color did in the suffrage movement, despite their exclusion in its outcome and the larger movement's failures.


If we were talking in the other direction -- additively, about compounding oppression -- I would say that oppression against people of color (in general) is oppression against women (in general) because it's not acceptable for racially privileged women to ignore the other types of oppression that affect other women. We're all women, and oppression against some of us is oppression against the general category of us. But somehow, when working in the other direction, removing oppression for some of the group doesn't feel like removing an oppression for all. It feels like erasing other oppressions without actually undoing them. Maybe that's because it was only removing oppression for the more privileged part of the group. If it had been a win specifically for black women, maybe I would see it as a win for all women? But then, when have we ever had a movement that focused on the least privileged among us and refused to take incremental rights?


Am I thinking about this in a strange way? Am I missing something big? Is this one of those times where my privilege leads to parsing things in a nonsensical way?


Now that you've clicked on over and can comment, please do. K thx.

(Also please note that I am intentionally not making a regional distinction. Much of the legal oppression of African-Americans happens/ed in the South, but there was and is significant legal and situational oppression in every region of country, against black folks as well as other people of color. I'm thinking especially of Chinese and Japanese folks in California.)

Monday Malaise

I live in northeast Georgia in a town that's the urban hub of a rural area. I work from home three days a week, and drive 65 miles to Atlanta twice a week for facetime and meetings. I love my job and I love my coworkers, and I'm willing to do this because it's been a good thing for my communication with my boss and other folks. (Also because I don't want to leave my job but I love living where I live.) I don't drive in on Mondays because it's exhausting and it makes Sunday nights kind of suck. Today is Monday, and I drove in for a very good reason: I had friends in town who needed to get back to Atlanta for work, and driving them back in on Monday meant that they could stay all day Sunday. I liked this plan. Anyway, it's Monday and I'm not in my pajamas or on my couch, which seems unacceptable to me.

Thus, allow me to introduce Monday Malaise. My partner sent me this video last night because I was feeling cranky and it's amazing. Also because my best friend and I have a multi-year joke about turtles and chomping. This is the inaugural installment of Monday Malaise.

Read the fine print on marriage

I have a lot of issues with the legal institution of marriage, and I have for a long time. For one, marriage equality isn't "gay," nor is it exclusively about same-sex couples. Before the slight expansion of marriage rights, legally married couples were usually "heterosexual," but I know several couples who are married and aren't binary-gendered and/or are same-sex  because one partner's documentation has the wrong and/or pre-transition sex. Further, the things that are often tied to marriage -- like employer-based spousal health benefits -- are things that I think are fundamental rights that shouldn't be tied to relationships status. Overall I don't think the government should be in the business of recognizing marriages. If there must be some government-sanctioned definition of family, then we should get to choose who that is, no matter what. Legal unions shouldn't be about "love," they should be about legality. Healthy relationships of any sort are about consent, and consent is not possible without knowledge and understanding. Which leads me to my big issue.

Marriage equality activists talk about 1,138 rights denied to couples* who can't get married, and most of those aren't solved by state-specific civil unions or domestic partnerships, according to the Human Rights Campaign (who I do not usually trust, but they happen to be deeply involved in this issue).

I count 12 rights on the list at the above link:

1. Power of Attorney to make medical decisions
2. Family Medical Leave (for spouse, elder, or child care)
3. Legal entry for immigration sponsorship
4. Non-adoptive parental rights
5. Joint right and responsibility to property/debt
6. Social security retirement income for non-working (or lower income) spouses
7. Limited tax liability for "dependent"spouses/children/elders
8. Disability income based on household size and/or receiving income for your partner
9. Military/veteran support and death benefits
10. Automatic property inheritance
11. Health insurance through COBRA
12. Federal benefits for widowed federal employees

Of course, there are permutations of these. So let's say there are ten different specific rights in each of these issues -- that's 130. Where are the other 1,108? What are they, and why don't I know?

And the thing is, I'm one of those queers who's supposed to know this stuff! I should know what rights I'm being denied. But I don't. And neither do you. Neither does my mother, who's been married and divorced twice. Neither does my friend who married the love of her life last weekend. Even when we do the legal paperwork right -- like Janice Lengbehn who, with her children, was prevented from seeing her partner (and their mother) as she died because the hospital refused to accept her POA -- it's misunderstood or ignored because somehow a marriage certificate (or lack thereof) is more powerful than equally legal documentation stating who my family is.

I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but these are government-sanctioned relationships, which are limited to only some kinds of people and couples, and whose terms are unknown to the vast majority of people who receive the applicable license. These are not agreements made between people; they're agreements each person makes blindly with the government, binding two people together on either side of an unchosen middleman. It's the government saying, "Here, take these 1,138 rights and responsibilities for me. You won't know what they are until I'm screwing you over using that paper you signed without knowing what it meant."

Look, I'd trust my partner with my life -- I already do. But am I going to foist responsibilities on him without either of us knowing what they are? Am I going sign my life, livelihood, and who-knows-what-all-else away through some unknown pathway that was decided by the government and not me or my partner?

No. Because I don't sign contracts without reading the fine print.

*I'm told by a colleague/buddy that this number comes from an audit of state laws that show 1,138 times that spouse rights/responsibilities are mentioned.

How to Engage 20-Somethings in Your Cause (Hint: Insulting us isn't it)

I'm 26. I work in a nonprofit. My first part-time job out of college was at a nonprofit, and six months later, my first full-time job was at a nonprofit. I'm at the same nonprofit now. Many of my friends work for nonprofits; many of us knew that it was where we wanted to work even before we found the specific cause we'd be working for. I volunteer for nonprofits; I give monthly and annual donations to nonprofits. For years, my holiday (and often birthday) gifts have been donations in the name of the giftee. I'm a fundraiser and I work closely with our marketing director, so I read a lot about engaging different demographic groups (and a lot about twitter and facebook). So imagine my amusement when I got an email from guidestar.org titled "How to Engage 20-Somethings in Your Cause." I'm a 20-something. All my friends are 20-somethings. Let's see if they have a new read on us. *click*

Today's 20-somethings, sometimes called "slactivists," are often cynical of corporate efforts.

(Before I go any further, let me promise that I'll be offering my own thoughts after I finishing berating the offense that turned up in my mailbox.)

My partner is familiar with the term slactivist, and according to him, it does in fact mean what it sounds like. I wanted to make sure, so I checked wikipedia:

The word is considered a pejorative term that describes "feel-good" measures, in support of an issue or social cause, that have little or no practical effect other than to make the person doing it feel satisfaction.

Guidestar's article went further, to "explain" why we 20-somethings are lazy do-nothings:

After all, at a formative age they witnessed dramatic institutional and corporate failures. But they were also born during an age of riches, are highly educated, and have been told that the world is their oyster. So they are a very optimistic group.

So, we're self-centered slackers who click through online petitions, have too much money, too much education, and too much idealism, because we grew up during "dramatic institutional and corporate failures"? How can we be disengaged while still being engaged enough to have witnessed and understood the Enron catastrophe? But I digress.

This argument fails not just because it doesn't follow its own logic, but because we are not all highly educated (though we do have a record amount of student loan debt), we did not all grow up with riches (though we did grow up in a second gilded age with exploding consumer debt), and we're being told here and elsewhere that we're lazy slackers, not that the world is our oyster. We grew up knowing that we were supposed to save the world, to go to college, to get PhDs, and every day, we are keenly aware of just how far off the mark we are from perfection. And idealism is not the same as optimism.

We grew up in the era of 9/11: I was a senior in high school when I watched the twin towers fall during third period AP English class. I was only 17 when we started fighting a war, not quite 19 when we started a second. My youth and my "formative" years are pock-marked by depression and anxiety; by militarism and steadily increasing death tolls; by a narrative that racism and sexism are over when we can see so plainly that they're not; by deciding which library books to check out based on what story they would tell about me if my records were ever subpoenaed. It's this last part -- the recognition that nothing I do or say is private -- that has most shaped how I see myself. I am permanently conscious of what story the minutes in my day are adding up to.

I went to a college that was among the first ten that Facebook opened up to, back when it was an online version of the Freshman Facebook we were all encouraged to send our pictures in for before we got to campus. I was on Twitter before it ballooned, and my first iPod was a mini, which is now out of production. So here's what you should know about our generation:

• We have a healthy dose of cynicism mixed with idealism, and we struggle to think we can make a difference in the world.
• We want meaning. Some of us want 2.5 kids and a dog, but we want to choose that, as part of the meaning we've found in life. We don't want to think we're just floating through life until we die.
• We expect immediate, polished ways of communicating. I have about 15 email accounts, three laptops, two facebook accounts, two twitter accounts, two personal websites, two cell phones, two blogs, two liverjournals, one work extension, one work direct line, one myspace, a blackberry, and an almost-constant gchat presence. I can be reached anywhere, any time. Social media are tentacles, not lives.
• We forward emails and facebook posts and internet petitions and such not because we don't care enough to do more, but because we get 1,000 requests and only care about five of them. So we invest time, money, and energy in the five, and hope we can at least get the word out about the other 995. We are stretched thin, and still we're trying.
• We don't trust institutions. My grandparents trust institutions because they lived through the Depression, when government worked. My parents don't trust institutions because they lived through the 70s and 80s, when working institutions were dismantled. My generation doesn't trust institutions because we're used to the smoke and mirrors. We know when we're being swindled or cajoled, and we find it insulting to our intelligence.
• Don't handwave at what you want; just tell me, and trust that I'll decide if I care. If I don't care, don't try to change my mind. I'll just get pissed off, and then I'll care about not caring.
• Believe it or not, we're adults now. If we're not the kind of adults you were at 20-something, that doesn't mean we aren't adults. It means that adulthood is being redefined. Stop mistrusting us and treating us like children. 
• We know that the internet is used for creepy things like preying on children, but that doesn't mean everything internet-borne is creepy. I have met friends and lovers on match.com, okcupid, and craigslist, and I have reconnected with long-lost friends (including my partner) on livejournal and facebook. Internet connections and blog-posted information are no less real just because they involve the internet.
• Bombardment is just a click away. When an email is sent to my work address, it comes to my blackberry, my work laptop, and the PC partition of my personal mac, and gets forwarded to a work-specific gmail address that gets picked up by mac mail and is easily searchable online. This isn't exactly normal for my generation, but it's close. If I hear about something three times, I know it's a big deal. If I hear about it five times, I wish you would shut up. This is the Information Age, and information is everywhere.
• We believe in the value of our elders. Our grandparents will live longer than any grandparents have before. We know them as people, not just in family lore. My eldest cousin is 40; I'm the youngest. We have our own relationships with our grandparents as people, not just as family roles.

I moved eight hours away from my mother when I went to college, and we have spoken on the phone every single day in the eight years since. My family live in South Carolina, Florida, and New Jersey. My best friends live in Boston, Princeton, Austin, D.C., San Diego, Indianapolis, and down the street from me in Georgia. We are in constant communication on google reader, through googlegroups, on googlechat (notice a theme?), on free conference call lines, through text messages, and on facebook. There are few cities I could go to where I wouldn't have a place to stay, even if I didn't know anything there personally. There is a reason facebook tells us who our mutual friends are.

We are not disconnected; we are not disengaged. We have woven webs of experiences and relationships. They may not look like yours, but if you fail to recognize that they are as important as yours, you will be missing the point entirely.

Hire a 20-something to do your marketing to 20-somethings. Clearly nothing else will work quite as well.

Brownie bites with fondant and hearts

I was dying to try this recipe I found for fondant that actually tasted good and didn't cost a fortune, so I did. I had no reason to be baking, nowhere to go, and no one in particular to feed them to (except, of course, for myself and my hunny), but that didn't stop me. I used my classic brownie recipe to make brownie bites and the fondant recipe here on Bake at 350. The fondant was sticky and messy, but way cheaper than buying gumpaste or fondant at the store, and tastier too. I made the hearts by cutting a (new, clean) pencil-top eraser into a heart (which I've done a few time for paper stamps) and dipping it into gel food coloring. I think liquid food coloring might work better because it would be less bunchy. I used corn starch to make it less gel-ish and more stampable. I brought these little nomables to my friends at Honey's Salon, which I have decided is my new experimental test kitchen.

 

So that plate. It's a random plate my partner picked up at a thrift store eons ago. We have no idea who Carla is, and it's a little creepy that it's positioned so perfectly to look like some Carla-person made the brownies.

Exhaustion and empowerment

On Monday, my work husband called to see if I had a meeting with our boss. We both had meetings scheduled, but the way they were laid out led us to believe he was being laid off and I was not. I baked him four dozen of his favorite cookies (molasses) and brought them to work. As we thought, he was out of a job by Tuesday. Much of his work will fall to me, but more than that, we'll lose his energy. His main purpose over the last two years has been to keep pushing us forward and to refuse the status quo. I don't mean this in my usual lefty radical sort of way; I mean that he pretends not to understand explanations when they sound like excuses, and he's good at motivating a team even if he's not actually leading it.

We had lunch on Tuesday and I felt a very strange feeling of loss. We talked again Wednesday, planned to meet Thursday but then cancelled that when various other things came up. Since we've both been working from home for the last year, it felt very much the same as usual. Except with a cloud over my head. It feels as though my best friend is moving away.* B, my now-ex coworker, has been laid off nine times in his 30 years since graduating college. Nine times. He's used to the drill, but I've never been in a company that had layoffs before. He knows what to do, who to call, what to talk about, what forms he needs. I asked him how our boss and HR director seemed when they were meeting with him, and he said they seemed sad and a little nervous. Our boss was so shaken up (though B was the first of four layoffs, which is about 10% of our staff) that B felt like he might need to support our boss. At the end of the day, those of us who remained had a meeting with the executive director (who is my boss) and the HR director, who let us know that yes there were layoffs (not everyone was aware), but they're done for now. They had made changes in benefits last year (bringing us from really good benefits down to average for our industry) to avoid layoffs, but not this year. They could do any more.

On Wednesday I emailed our HR director and my boss to tell them that I appreciated how they dealt with it all. I felt an equal balance of compassion and professionalism, and they look more like they'd lost a finger than dropped dead weight. This is the nonprofit I've worked for since I graduated college four years ago. They hired me to run a program, trained me to write grants, then gave me a promotion. They've invested in me, even when I've had run-ins with coworkers and supervisors (and when I had a staff, with them too). Every time I think about leaving, I remember that it does feel like a family (and that my retirement account isn't fully vested for another year and some).

When my best work friend (and former boss) left two years ago, it was at the same time that I was being promoted out of her department. She moved across the country, but my job was so different, it felt like a friend moved, not like my work environment had changed. At the same time, we hired B, so I had a whole new nuclear family. I feel like I'm on my own again...and I feel like my whole organization is back where we were two years ago. We're back to survival instead of growth...or at least that's how it looks from my perspective. I had trouble sleeping all week. Which is to say, I either had insomnia or struggled to stay awake until I went to bed at 11 p.m., several hours early for me. I couldn't focus, I could barely finish specific tasks. I felt lost...like I wasn't quite sure what my job was anymore.

I had been planning to take Friday off for a belated anniversary celebration of kayaking on the Broad River, and I went ahead with those plans. I feel guilty for surviving the layoffs, especially because someone so close to me did not. It took me the first full hour, maybe two, to stop thinking about work. About three hours in, a thunderstorm hit, and we kept on kayaking through the rocks (that I called sea monsters) and their semi-choppy water (that I called slow-pids). Half an hour later, some fellow kayakers convinced us to get out of the water for fear of lightning, and we spent half an hour feeling dirty, cold, and awkward. We got back in and were done about an hour and a half later.

It felt badass to be on the river, in a kayak, in a storm, with the thunder and the rain. I felt strong. When we first saw that clouds were rolling in, I was annoyed and a bit anxious. E asked if I wanted to pull off onto an island until it passed, but I didn't. So we just kept going. I realized after a while that since I was already wet and in a river, the rain wasn't such a nuisance. What was it going to do? It wasn't windy, the water wasn't choppier, the river wasn't rising much (and it was so low to begin with anyway). It was just that the water was coming from above instead of just the sides and below. I'm sure that's a metaphor for life, but after the week I'd had, it just felt good to be doing something. I knew I wasn't in control of it, but I had a pretty firm grasp on the paddle.



*This is compounded by the fact that my best friend actually is moving 1,500 miles away in a few weeks.

Love Cakes

I keep wanting to pre-cook food for the week ahead, and we've slowly been doing that. We made black bean cakes for lunch using a modified recipe from the Flying Biscuit cookbook. Flying Biscuit serves them with a garnish of raw red onions, tomatillo salsa, feta cheese, and sour cream. We modified them by adding cheese, then ate them as burgers with melted cheese slices and ketchup/mustard. FB also serves them with eggs and potatoes for breakfast. Prep time is about 20 minutes because of all the mashing, but they cook up in about 5 or so minutes.

Servings: 8 burgers, 16 small patties (served two per person)

Ingredients:

• 2 (15 ounce) cans cooked black beans
• 2 tablespoons canola oil                                                                        
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 tablespoons minced yellow onion
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup medium white cheddar (or similar)
• 1/4 cup masa de harina (finely ground corn meal)

Directions:

• Rinse and drain black beans in a sieve.
• Sauté 1 tablespoon of the canola oil over medium heat and onion, garlic, cumin, and salt until onions are translucent.
• Combine drained beans, cheese, and onion mixture in a bowl and mash with a potato masher until well combined.
• Gradually add masa, allowing mixture to absorb it before adding more. You’ll want to do this mixing with your hands, as I’ve never found another combine it well. Keep adding masa until dough doesn't stick to your hand and holds the shape of a ball.
• Divide dough into 16 small balls or 8 medium balls and flatten into cakes. Warm the remaining tablespoon of canola oil and sauté cakes until lightly browned on each side, about 3 to 5 minutes per side.
• Garnish and enjoy. Patties should freeze well, but we'll find out later this week when we try out the ones we've frozen.

The Target boycott - "When I throw a brick, I want to know who's going to say 'ouch'"

Everywhere I turn, someone is talking about boycotting Target. Friends on facebook, a coworker in the office, an email from moveon.org (and let's not talk about their last email, which was filled with agenda-pushing misinformation). Here's the story, as I see it:

Supreme Court strikes down limits on corporation spending for campaigns. Target gives money to a big-business PAC to the tune of $150,000. The PAC supports a pro-business, super-conservative, anti-gay candidate in the Midwest. Everybody freaks out.

The first person to bring it up to me was a coworker and my response, in short, was "I'm too far left to care." I'm not saying we shouldn't sweat the small stuff, or that we shouldn't fight something just because we can't fight everything. Boycotts are effective when they build your own political consciousness, when they satisfy your personal morality, when they make a direct, large, and specific hit to corporate profits (including the mass sell-off of BP stock of the last 107 days), or when they are large or loud enough to be heard inside the top-floor corner office of a building with solid-gold walls. I have yet to hear an articulation of why this is the time to boycott Target. What, exactly, are we mad about?

My coworker said he hopes they fix the situation soon because he loves shopping at Target. But when I asked what the "fix" would look like, he didn't know. When the guy loses? When Target asks for the money back? When it's apparent that nothing is going to come of it? When the admin of the facebook group forgets that he's the admin and stops updating it? I get that this is something my coworker and many others care deeply about, and I applaud his proactivity in sending letters, doing the math of how much money Target would lose if all 30,000 facebook supporters really do boycott, etc. If it's about satisfying our morality, that's fine, but let's be clear about that. Let's not confuse masturbation with an orgy. I think there is benefit in political action, even if the outcome is not achieved. But if we put all our energy into a short-sighted issue, we need to recognize that we're maintaining the status quo.

Last week, I had lunch with a local progressive colleague, the Executive Director of Southern Energy Network Stephanie Powell. She mentioned a story about trying to stay focused on a target (no pun intended, I swear) when planning a direct action campaign: "When I throw a brick, I want to know who's going to say 'ouch.'" Who's going to say 'ouch' at Target? And what do we want them to do?

I also asked my coworker why it's this issue that got him so interested. He agrees that the Citizens United case is a big issue, and this is one of the first giant gifts to come after it. I asked why he isn't opposed to giant corporations for the typical crappy pay and benefits, for centralizing profits in an extremely wealthy few, for using exploited labor in other countries, for razing public housing and turning entire towns into single-employer compounds. He didn't really answer, except for saying that he knows those are problems too. My boss has told me that he gets frustrated with his partner because his partner only seems to care about specifically gay issues. When seniors in Atlanta are getting screwed, my boss cares because it's his job and because it's his passion, and he doesn't ask if those seniors are gay (some presumably are). Why do we only care when we're the ones getting screwed, even if it's someone gave money to someone else who gave money to someone else who supports us getting screwed? Low wages, ghost towns, poverty, public housing -- these are all issues that affect queers and trans folks, and probably affect more of us than a single candidate's not-so-unusual views.

Why aren't we worried about the fact that Republicans are blocking legislation that would address the outcome of Citizens United*? Why aren't we boycotting every big-business, anti-healthcare corporation out there? Or every corporation who gives an amount over $2,000 to any candidate? Why aren't we boycotting every corporation that doesn't pay a living wage, or that gives money to local candidates to get zoning variances? Hell, why aren't we against the idea of being pro-big-business at all?

This is capitalism. This is what we've got. Big business and creepy homophobic conservatism are not strange bedfellows. They are the very same bedfellows that go home to each other every night; we just haven't been paying attention.

*Let's remember that the Supreme Court doesn't decide what's moral or ethical or right -- they decide what's law. I don't know the decision as well as some, but my understanding is not that no legislation could get at the same aim, but that the particular way the legislation was figured was unconstitutional.

Anniversary gifting

I realize the last week has been all "my partner this, my hunny that, my boyfriend's so cool, blah blah blah," but the fact of the matter is that he IS, and it's our anniversaweek. I glow about him pretty much always, but this week, I'm doing it more often.

Anyway, we're in the habit of giving each other birthday and xmas gifts, always very personal, and usually handmade. For example, it's been at least two or three gifting times that E gave me tickets to a show and the newest album by that performer (first was Madeline, second was Nana Grizol). For things like our anniversary or Valentine's Day, we like to do things together to make it special, which may or may not include making/buying things. For our first Valentine's Day, E surprised me with this, pinned into a large cigar box that says "The heart is a muscle the size of your fist." This year, I made him a mini-book of 52 reasons I love him, with the reasons pasted onto each card in a deck, and bound with binder rings. I really love that our gift-giving isn't out of obligation. It's always about what we want to do to celebrate each other, and I gotta say, he gives me lots to celebrate about.

This week was a few bundles of surprises, beginning me cooking a pancake breakfast in bed on Monday. He went to Atlanta to take a friend to the airport on Tuesday and came back with a book I've been wanting to read (really, it's a book that I wanted to write, but it seems someone else already did an awesome job). I spent the last few days making a needle case out of materials he likes, which was actually an afterthought. He had planned to make himself a glasses case, but his dyed yarns didn't come out like he wanted, so it never really took off. So instead, I sewed him this one:

The outside is brown corduroy and the inside is green microsuede. The mushroom top is also the microsuede, and the stem is corduroy inside-out. The eyes are tiny beads, and the stitching around the edges and on the glasses and mouth are single-stranded black embroidery thread. It's open only at the top.






 E found this locally produced wool roving that's dyed a complicated and beautiful set of purples that cannot begin to be shown in this photo. It's in a cute project bag, and he's working on making me a drop spindle! (Our drill's battery craps out after about five minutes with the circular bit.)

That's some pretty awesome metametacrafting. Making the drop spindle to make the yarn that will be made into something else. Now all we needs is the goats/sheep to make the yarn! Alpacas? Bunnies? Anything snuggley.

Why bother with satire when there's the news?

I happened upon two stories from The Daily Beast tonight. When I read aloud the first line of the Palin one, my partner's face froze. Then he said, "Why do I even bother with satire?" The facts...they're just too ridiculous. My headlines, Daily Beast's lede.


Former half-term governor Sarah Palin uses a Spanish word, prompting universal facepalm

On Fox News Sunday, the ever-spirited former governor of Alaska lambasted President Obama for his lack of "cojones" on immigration reform, insisting that Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer possess the, er, mettle to secure America's border.

Arizona's police force is too busy comparing skin tones to crayon colors to keep inmates in prison

On Friday night, three convicted murderers cut a hole through a fence and escaped from a medium-security northwest Arizona prison before kidnapping two truck drivers at gunpoint and using a freighter as a getaway vehicle. 

Picture courtesy The Daily Show

Fuck your fascist beauty standards, OR, Nike and my ass

My ass is amazing. It's not really a big ass proportional to my chubby body, but it's not a tight little tiny ass either. My partner's got a nice ass, too, and I think his is cuter. Body image is tricky, and I know no one who has sailed into a positive body image, regardless of our relative sizes or shapes or genders. So when I saw this post when it was shared by a friend on Google Reader, I bristled. Yes, I like images that support women, our body images, our agency, and our needs. But no, this ad doesn't do that, nor does the little bit of commentary around it.

Stop using my body to sell things. When you're saying nice things about my lovely ass, or when you're telling me it's too big, shaped funny, doesn't look good in these jeans, whatever, you're still using my body as an object to pump up your bottom line.

Between the model's skin and hair color and the fact that the ad is about her ass, Nike clearly means for us to assume it's a Latina ass they're objectifying. Great, because women of color don't have enough media attention focused on their bodies? (My mind is a puzzling place, but this called to mind Queen Emily's post from last year about visibility and invisibility, particularly this quote:  "...to whom is one visible, and why? Under what circumstances, and in what light?") Hyperfocused approving attention is not an antidote for hyperfocused disapproving attention. The point is that we pay attention to the bodies of women of color in a way that is overly sexualized, fetishizing, and creepy.

To add more race fail, the model is wearing a cutoff tank top and too-small spandex shorts. If you're so proud of her ass, why is she wearing shorts a few sizes too small? Do you not make them bigger? The cutoff tank top looks like something out of a sexy version of West Side Story, complete with people (especially women) of color wearing clothes that are too-tight, "urban," and torn. Her hands are wrapped like she's boxing or overly prepared for a streetfight. (In productions of West Side Story, including the 1961 movie, the white "jets" wear light, cool colors and are prim and proper with tucked-in shirts and clean sneakers. The Puerto Rican "sharks" wear warm colors, torn clothes, black jeans, and boots.) 

She's standing on her toes. Her shoes are flat sneakers, made for running and jumping and doing athletic things, and she is standing on her toes, as if she's in high heels. What are high heels for? Oh, to make our calves and asses look better. (Or to make us totter like we need assistance crossing the street. I love my high heels, but that doesn't negate the sexism of their cultural significance.)

The post's author opines that this ad is "exactly the type of message that women need to hear and see." Oh, so the author is a woman, perhaps a woman of color as the model appears to be, who has struggled with body image issues and is relieved to see a positive, butt-approving ad, right? No. The author appears to be a moderately sized trim white dude, and his blog is about fitness and being a personal trainer. Please, sir, tell me more about what I need to hear and see. (To be fair, he says it's what he "thought" when he first saw the ad, and he didn't state it as objective fact. Fine, whatever, he can have half a point back.)

At the end of the post, the author writes, "I’m so sick and tired of seeing models with no ass, no muscle, and no shape being touted as the ideal 'look' for women to aspire for.  Why not just get a 2×4 and put a dress on it?" Aside from the fact that the woman in the ad still has a figure that is unattainable for the vast majority of women, why do we have to hate on skinny women? Eating disorders and unhealthy body images are not just the business of fat women. Some of the smartest body image talk I've heard came from a friend who battled an eating disorder for a good part of her life. She told a story about grabbing available food for lunch on her way out of the house to go to her job at a feminist health clinic one day. As she sat down to eat the cheesesticks and tofurky that were the easiest thing to bring with her and eat on a short lunch break, a coworker of hers began bemoaning how she could never eat so little and not be hungry, and she wishes she was as skinny as my friend. That is not a compliment; that is not helpful. It took years for my friend to gain weight, and even more years to be ok with the fact that she did. And clothes shopping is still a trigger, and cooking is a trigger, and eating in front of other people is a trigger. Let's quit with the question of who has it worse. Any "perfect" size is still going to be oppressive for every woman who isn't that size (and is likely oppressive for that woman as well).

I know, I know, it's a Nike ad. It shouldn't be touted as the new perfect ad campaign, but what more do I expect for products made in sweatshops that exploit workers (who are often women and/or people of color)? How about this? "these were made in a cooperatively owned factory" or "we pay a living wage, support a unionized workforce, and would like for you to buy our products, thanks." Maybe "these shorts will keep you from chafing" or "these shoes provide great arch support." That might convince me to buy an overpriced pair of shorts or shoes. But "hey, look! New standard of beauty, complete with new and improved racism and sexism"? No, that's not going to sell me anything.