Monday, June 28, 2010

I've just spent a week crashing with friends and milling about with radicals in Detroit ("a really good place to convince people that capitalism isn't a good idea," says E), and the idea of writing it all down in a blog seems like the logical next step. The problem is, I don't want to. I mean, I want to, but I don't want to sit in front of a computer screen all day. I did that for a while today when I had to do work that was only on the computer, but I'm sort of over it. I'm sure I'll phase back in to spending many many hours each day on the computer and phone, but right now I want to make rubber stamps and read and sew. I'm even craving time outside. After spending many hours driving through the plains of the Midwest, I woke up this morning feeling as if I had slept on a very comfortable field. The last week is still in my bones. I'll capture it in words as it seeps out, but not a moment before.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

U. S. Social Forum

When E first mentioned going to this year's USSF, I was skeptical and not too excited. This is the post from my semi-private journal:
Plans to go to the U.S. Social Forum are now as definite as they're likely to be. I have the time off work, we've got placed to stay on the way and in Detroit lined up, and I'm thinking about what I need to finish before I leave. I think it'll be a good time, but I'm sure it'll be emotionally intense. I need to find a way to deal with the emotional intensity that isn't dependent on E. Feedback I heard from the last USSF indicated that I need to be very prepared for
1- privilege guilt
2- pretentious people
3- more fail than I might assume, especially in the assuming experiences area
and 4- being overwhelmed

I'm excited to be going, though. In the last several months, a few of my good friends have stepped back from doing trans/gender activism. Without intending to, I did too. I've found myself dealing with issues where I'm not the privileged party -- especially with sexism at work. I generally prefer focusing on areas where I'm an ally because it lets me avoid my own shit. I have a lot of allies around me -- especially men who are so very tied up in feminism and anti-misogyny -- so it doesn't feel as scary to deal with it. I'm eager for the renewed energy that I'll have after USSF, and the people I know I'll meet. I decided to bite the bullet and read The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, even though I know it'll make me hate my job. I've mostly shrugged out of any illusions I had about my job being as radical as I'd like.
It took two days to drive up here, and I had good company (with E being notably easy to get along with even when I'm crabby). Stayed a night in Lexington, Ky., and got to Detroit around 5 on Tuesday. We're staying with E's friend Dessa, who is amazing and sweet and has a beautiful apartment located conveniently in downtown, about two or fewer miles from the various workshop locations. So, next post will be about specific workshops...because it's going to take a while. 

Monday, June 14, 2010

Why I really hate "informational" magazines from for-profit companies but less so from nonprofits

I checked my mail on Friday and found a multi-page glossy thing from Geico. Sure, they provide my car insurance, so they send me mail. That's fine. But why did I need this waste of ink and paper and postage and staff time?

Since I'm a nonprofit fundraiser, I hear a lot of criticism about nonprofits spending too much money (or, more accurately, appearing to spend too much money) on glossy mailers. Most of these mailers are what we call "soft asks" -- they aren't a direct request for funds, but they make the larger case for why you should donate and often include a return envelope or reply card. They serve the dual purpose of getting money back and educating/advertising. When I get soft asks from nonprofits like Heifer International, I cringe, but only a little. It takes money to raise money, and the two major ways to get money are to ask for it, and educate/advertise. I expect that any money I give to a nonprofit supports, in part, some of their fundraising activities, and I also expect that they use appropriate fundraising strategies to turn my money into more money. So, for example, our direct mailers at work generally make 150-200%. If we spend $1,000 (which would be a very small mailing), we make back $1,500 to $2,000. If Heifer** made a 150% return overall on their fundraising each year, and has an average-to-low overhead amount of 20%, that would mean my money is spent like this:

I give $1.00.
$0.80 is spent on sending milking goats to formerly colonized countries*
$0.20 is spent on sending out fundraising materials, and makes back $0.30 overall

My money is now worth $1.10, even though I only gave $1. Do this with a few more people, and their overhead shrinks as a percentage. Sure, it would be nice if the whole $1 went to sending milking goats around the world, but I'd rather they make my money grow into something more sustainable and more impactful.

When Geico sends me a glossy mailer, this presumably does something similar. They get more customers (except they're sending it to existing customers...) and thus more money but the final outcome isn't "more people get help," it's "Geico's bottom line grows." That's not really where I want my money going.

*I say this rather than "third-world" because it puts the onus of continuing poverty on the pillaging the West has done. Also "third-world" means something now that it didn't originally.

**I should note that these are numbers from my job that I'm applying to Heifer, since they do a lot more in the soft ask area. I have no idea what Heifer's numbers are.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Discrimination minus intersectionality...

Since I graduated in 2006, I've stayed involved with my alma mater's LGBT Office. A month or so ago, I was on a career panel called Out At Work, co-sponsored by a bunch of queer/trans* groups on campus. There were five of us on the panel, all white, two female, one male. All identified as gay/lesbian and none mentioned being trans. The moderator was also a white gay man. I was the youngest by about four years, and I think I was the only one who had gone to the school as an undergrad. Three people had post-grad degrees -- one doctor, one lawyer, one MPH -- and the other may have, but I'm not sure. (I do not.) This sort of crowd isn't unusual to me when I do work with this particular school. It's a very white, very heteronormative, very patriarchal crowd. It was an old-money Southern school that now has significant regional, if not racial, diversity. This may be obvious, but it's also a private and very expensive school with a huge endowment, so everyone expects to end up in white-collar and/or professional jobs.

The evening went mostly as expected. The five of us sat at a table in the front of a room, the moderator asked questions, occasionally students in the office would ask questions. There were two remarkable moments when it took effort to keep my jaw from dropping. First, one student asked about how to decide whether to put LGBT activities on his resume. I was surprised to hear the doctor on the panel, whom I respect quite a bit, say that it's entirely up to you because it's an activity, and there's nowhere on your resume where you would write in your sexual orientation. To the satisfaction of two women sitting in front of me, I interjected that actually, it comes up very often on job applications, specifically when they ask if you've ever used a different name, and how many people applying for jobs won't necessarily be using their legal name and/or may have an incongruous gender marker on their documentation. It does come up, it just never did for the people on the panel. The original respondent was sweet enough to say "oh duh, I can't believe I just said that" and correct himself, and mentioned it to me again after the panel. I wasn't surprised to hear this kind of gaffe, but I was heartened by the fact that I wasn't the only one with a quizzical look on my face.

The second moment was one I should have expected, but didn't. We had all had pretty pleasant experiences at our jobs, and found them to be queer- or gay-friendly. Sometimes, as with me, we had been standard-bearers who were able to change things in our offices without much of a fight, and we shared that. But the moderator, in an effort to get us to bring up and discuss some problems that could arise, said, "None of you have experienced discrimination at work, but what are some issues that you think could come up?" I didn't feel bad at all to nearly cut him off and say, "I haven't had any discrimination issues come up about my sexual orientation, but I work with a bunch of gay people. I deal with gender-based discrimination every day, and I'm really tired of beating that back." The moderator was dumbfounded. I kept talking about examples because I thought it was really important, and in the end, I was proud of how it went. But egads. Really? We exist in vaccuums?



*Most of the groups on campus use "LGBT," but they're moving away from it slowly. Overall it's a very LG(bt) campus, with significant differences between the experiences of cis queer folks and the experiences of trans folks (whether queer or not).

Friday, June 11, 2010

How to Have a Substantive Debate

A dear friend brought this to my attention earlier today. It's a nice outline of how to have a substantive debate, defining whether you're criticizing someone's tone, tactic, or ideology.

Confusion: How the LGBT movement still refuses to have a real ideological debate by Alex Blaze at Bilerico

More posts-to-be

Why I love other peoples' birthdays
Why I really hate "informational" magazines from for-profit companies but less so from nonprofits

Friday, June 4, 2010

Bagels!

I made bagels tonight! E and I tried to make some a year or so ago, and they did not work out well. We haven't tried since. But tonight, I wanted a bagel. There are no bagel places in town now that the recession took out the local family-owned bagel shop, and store-bought bagels are an entirely different food. So I found this recipe and decided to give it a go. Here's how it went.



4 cups bread flour
1 Tbls sugar
1 1/2 tsps salt
1 Tbls vegetable oil
2 tsps instant yeast
1-1/4- 1-1/2 cups of warm water
We put all the ingredients into the bowl of my stand mixer, attached the dough hook, and mixed it on "stir" speed. I added the extra 1/4 cup of water and pushed the speed up one level. The mixer is a pretty good one, but it wasn't liking the stiffness of the dough, so I kneaded it in there for about five minutes and then took it out and kneaded it by hand for another three or four. It got to the smooth point, and I cut it into eight equal sized balls. The plan was to let it rest for 15 minutes, but one thing led to another and I didn't get back to it for about an hour and a half. It had a slight crust over it, which may have happened even without the extra time, so I'm going to try putting a towel over it next time. Anyway, we followed the rest of the instructions:
Pre heat your oven to 425.
Now, take each of the dough balls and using two hands, roll it into a little snake on the counter. When the snake is longer than the width of your two hands, wrap it around your dominant roiling hand. The dough rope should be wrapped so the overlapping ends are together at your palm, near the start of your fingers. Now take the two overlapping ends, and use your palm to squish/roll these two ends together.
Let your bagels rest on the counter for about 20 minutes, and meanwhile, bring a pot of water to boil, and grease a large baking tray lightly. You can just rub a splash of vegetable oil and rub it around.
After the 20 minute wait, your bagels will start to look puffy, and it's time to get them boiling! Add them as many at a time as you can to your boiling water without crowding them. Boil for about a minute, turn them over, and boil for another minute. Take them out a let dry for a minute and then place them on your oiled baking tray. Repeat until all the bagels are boiled.
Add the tray to the oven, and after 10 minutes, flip the bagels over, bake for another ten minutes; and they're done!
Let them cool for at least 20 minutes.
You can add any toppings you like to these. To make sesame, onions, poppy seed, caraway etc. etc. bagels just have a dry plate ready with the seed or spice topping spread out on it. After the bagels have come out of the boiling water, place them face down onto the seeds, and then place the seed side up onto the baking tray. Bake and flip as for plain bagels. 

I timed the boiling for precisely one minute on each side because that seems to be where we went wrong last time. We made four plain, two with dried onion and garlic, and two with cinnamon-sugar. The toppings didn't go so well. They all burned, and turning them over at the halfway point didn't work. Our oven rack was also too close to the bottom, so most burned a little. There was a round cake pan left in the oven from another recipe that requires a water-filled pan to be underneath the bread, and we just never got around to taking it out. The bagels that cooked over that pan didn't burn on the bottoms.

Anyway, they're amazing. And if I don't go ahead with the other six businesses I really want to start, I'm totally going to start the Fort Snuggle Bagel Bakery. (Fort Snuggle is what we call our house. The Fort Snuggle Auxiliary Extension is what we call our chicken coop.) Come to think of it, we're going to a garage sale tomorrow that a bunch of friends are having... I should whip up another batch...

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Replace Normal

This is my favorite thing that Microsoft does:

I always click "yes."