Wrong Place Wrong Time

On my way into work this morning, I got $880 in moving violation tickets without even breaking the law.  No, this is not a joke.  This is for real.

$150 -- turning right on a red arrow (which was not a red arrow, it was a yellow arrow, and the officer admitted it was yellow before she wrote the ticket).

$150 -- Failure to pull to curb for emergency vehicle -- I was in the left lane of a two lane road, and there were no cars on the right lane (nor was there a shoulder)...and the cop was in the right lane...so, I would assume that pulling to the right would actually be the WRONG thing to do in that moment.

$30 -- Failure to Provide Proof of Insurance -- okay, yes, my insurance card is out of date, but I do in fact have the insurance, I just didn't have the card.

$50 -- Failure to Exhibit Current Registration -- this one sucks particularly bad because I actually did have the current registration, but after the fifth time of her asking me why I didn't learn such and such in my driver's school manual (as if instructions for getting pulled over are offered in driving school!), I got all flustered and couldn't find it until 5 minutes AFTER this encounter.

$500 -- here is the biggie! -- vehicle operating without proper insurance -- um, wait a minute...didn't I just get a $30 ticket above for this same violation?

As the officer approached the vehicle with tickets in hand, she said "now, here's your nightmare."  She proceeded to hand me each ticket -- one-by-one -- by the third I said, "this seems really excessive."  And she said "what?"  And I repeated, "don't you agree that this is really excessive"...apparently she did not since she threw the additional three tickets into my lap.

I mean, what a ridiculous world we live in when it is possible for me to not break the law and yet receive nearly a month's rent worth of tickets and a thrashing of verbal abuse from someone I haven't even personally offended.  Just by existing and driving a car, I got to be on the receiving end of someone else's power and control issues.  Awesome.  And because that person is given a badge, the consequences could increase my insurance, tag points onto my license and make it more difficult for me to even be able to drive my car.  Amazing.

Maybe this cop this morning was just having daymares?  I could have recommended hydrotherapy....

Possessed

I make my best decisions based on my emotions and passions.  I devote a lot of time to inner reflection and knowing myself so that I can take risks without calculating them and jump on opportunities without weighing options.  It's important to me to live like that because my way of thinking has really never gelled with reasoned analysis.  I have been most unhappy when I've done the "logical" thing.  Logic has never really meshed well with the kind of lifestyle I enjoy.  When I was in college, I thought that meant that I should embrace a reckless lifestyle since I didn't embrace a logical one.  And luckily, that turned out to be a rationalization, which proved to be based on faulty reason.  And so, I finally came into my own in the past few years and have cultivated a strong inner language that I rely on for all decisions, including who I date, how to spend money, and staying committed to my academic pursuits despite the many frustrations.   It has saved me from the exhausting malaise of not feeling enthusiastic about life despite having nothing reasonable to complain about.

All this is to say that I suppose that intuitively, I've always rejected Rational Choice Theory.  This article in the New York Times today expressed something I've already been thinking about since the current literary theory that I am pursuing as my intended career focus is predicated on the failure of rational choice theory.  I really liked reading this in a new context outside of the classroom!  It also gave me a boost of confidence in a week that has felt oppressively stressful.  The stress has been clouding my usual clarity, so it was nice to read this and find a moment of clarity in the day when I was actually connecting deeply with something in the news -- a rare occurrence -- and  reminded of how I really do think that reason leads us astray many times and can explain a whole lot of unhappiness if one is willing to dig deep and acknowledge that some decisions, despite brilliant reasoning, are crushing the soul.  

At yet another intersection between life and literature, my answer to the failure of reason in my personal life -- and increasingly in my intellectual pursuits -- is a significant amount of self-examination or autocritique.  I think that this is one of the strongest forms of resistance to the soul crushing aspects of our culture.  Knowing the deeper aspect of the self requires a certain rejection of the logical frameworks and reasoned analyses that lead us to believe we retain our agency.  In fact, calculated behavior is a limited form of selfhood because it denies our emotional intelligence and its role in making good decisions.    I'm mostly thinking about all of this because I'm starting in on a research paper, which is focused on possessive love...I'm currently thinking through the correlation between personal possessions and possessive love.  It seems to me that our culture's fixation on possessions -- be them material possessions, like wealth, or immaterial possessions, like power -- have perverted the way that we love and stunted our ability to develop deep emotional bonds by creating a cultural mindset focused on possessions, so that love and emotion become something to "have," rather than something to experience.  And what good is "having" love if you can't feel it?

Yogurt Power

The Yoplait commercial that was pulled off the air this week reminded me of this hilarious video on yogurt, "the official food of women," that a friend introduced me to a few months ago.

I love how the VP of General Mills really claims he had no idea and that it "didn't occur to anyone" that this Yoplait ad was troublesome.  Sadly, I see his point since shame is a normalized part of eating for many women.  Of course it didn't occur to anyone that this was offensive because on the scale of other offensive commercials -- like the ones in the video above -- it crosses a line that seems fairly arbitrary.  When Yoplait has been substituting food for yogurt for years in their commercials, why is it all of a sudden problematic to actually consider what might be running through a real woman's head when she decides to replace pie with yogurt?  Funny how when you connect this act with a potentially real thought process, it isn't acceptable...it's only acceptable as long as we pretend that this kind of advertising doesn't mess with women's head.

Boomerang

I first learned of the “boomerang” bus on my way home from the Easter Vigil in April.  It was quite a juxtaposition to be in my church attire and waiting for the Circulator to head to a café for a late night of paper writing when a converted school bus pulled up and 20+ overly-hyped men danced out of Lima and into the rocking...converted school bus.  Doesn't it feel a little creepy to be gyrating in a bus that was transporting school children in the not-so-distant past and is now retiring into a life of partying?  It was a pretty gross scene -- at least somewhat laughable -- and if I hadn’t been there with a male friend it would have been far less funny than I found it at the time.   

I was reminded of the Boomerang when I was driving to a friend’s place this weekend and one passed in front of me at 14^th and Franklin NE around 7:30 p.m….  Given the time of day, the fact that the bus was empty when it passed (i.e. on its way to pick up passengers), and that it was headed East on Franklin, It makes me wonder if this was the same bus that was shot at hours later in the madrugada.  Curiously enough, the “party bus” company has managed to keep its name out of the papers. I’m interested to know how that happened…although, the story is probably not very interesting at all.  I’m sure it was a simple monetary exchange, which is the tragically true and sickeningly boring nature of this story that gets traced back all the way to…drum roll…I bet you’ll never guess…a powerful male politician!  What an unlikely story line.

I was asked a few weeks ago if I’ve ever been to a strip club, and the answer is no.  I have yet to hear any stories about subverting patriarchy when strip clubs are involved, which is the only reason I would be inclined to explore them.  It really actually makes me feel sad to hear stories like this.  I’m surprised that I’m not outraged – a feeling I am well-accustomed to -- as you all know.   The sadness at this story stems not from some prudish understanding of nudity or reductive views of feminism, but rather the actual place itself and the whole mood of purely objectified desire that it embodies.  I’ve been in enough night clubs with underwear-clad pole dancers to know I’m not likely to feel more enlightened by a trip to the Stadium Club or the Camelot.  And, of course, the strip club is called out, but the “party bus” company has been able to keep its name out of the papers and referred to instead as “party bus” in quotes…as if the term is not as emphatic as it means to be.  Of course those naked women are to blame first and foremost for getting men all hot and bothered, the rest of the people making money off of women's bodies -- i.e. the party bus -- don't even get an honorable mention.

As is often (somewhat uncannily) the case, it seems like this week’s class readings also relate to this topic. Toni Morrison’s book Love, which is this week’s class reading, explores issues of sex, adultery, prostitution, and relationships (among others, of course…it is Toni Morrison!) and tells a story of “emotionally unprotected adults."  She opens the novel with this, “Before women agreed to spread in public, there used to be secrets – some to hold, some to tell.  Now?  No.  Barefaced being the order of the day, I hum.”  Bare bottomed or barefaced…it seems that all of these definitions relate back to shame. But are women supposed to bare this shame?

In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison warned of boomerangs, telling us to “keep a steel helmet handy.”  I supposed we can add a bullet proof vest to that advice as well.

Don't take it personally

Has someone ever told you this?  I hear this a lot from people, and it really really enrages me.  It is a sure fire way to ensure that I make things personal and get outraged!  Someone at work does something that is out of line and I'm told "don't take it personally."  I get harassed on the street and a friend tells me "don't take it personally."  Well, there are two problems with this admonishment...the first is that I am not actually taking these interactions personally, I am simply responding to an experience I am having.  The second problem is that I AM in fact a person...so, how else am I supposed to experience inter-human interactions?  Does this statement imply that I am too real of a person, and I need to be less so?  I try to explain to people that my outrage is not actually personal.  I'm not letting other people impose values onto me or absorbing their comments into my sense of self, for example.  But that doesn't mean that I don't FEEL the interaction. 

There's a difference, and I find it really hard to articulate, which is why I am overwhelmingly satisfied with a book that I am reading right now, Kathleen Woodward's Statistical Panic.  She talks about how our society is overly mediated -- from 800 numbers being answered by music or automated voices to the student at a large state university trying to navigate the proper forms and departments to ensure the proper credits for graduation.  The consequence of this mediated society is that we feel these interactions (she coins the term "bureaucratic feelings") in ways that are very impersonal and alienate us, but that still influence us and make us feel a certain way.  Consider for example the outrage you feel when trying to deal with a bill or service by phone and you are speaking to a nameless person who is not being helpful and you get frustrated/outraged.  Impersonal feelings are not the same as personal feelings, which are defined through emotions like love and grief that connect us with people.  I like thinking of how much I feel impersonally versus how much I feel personally.  The distinction is a pretty clear line in my mind, and it was an awesome revelation when I read it today.

I think this distinction between personal and impersonal FEELINGS is one that is not given much credence in our culture.  It leads me to pontificate on one of the many reasons that I really dislike Ralph Waldo Emerson.  It no doubt has to do with him being the uber-individualist.  I know this is an unpopular position, especially in an English department.  But it's a burden I'm more than willing -- and in fact happy -- to bear.  In his essay, "Self-Reliance," Emerson says "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.  Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this.  They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side.  Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another."  

Really, Emerson?  A connection that I make with someone because they share the same sentiments that I do is supposed to shame me only because I wasn't in a position to shame them first by speaking something before they did?  This kind of individualist nonsense is precisely the kind of talk that perpetuates privilege and masquerades it as intellectual power rather than social power, which is really its source.  It leads to alienation and inauthentic interactions because it puts each of us as individuals in a race against the other.  But before I digress too far, I brought up Emerson because yes, he is my own personal punching bag, but also because the reason I dislike the excerpt above is because it actually gives me great joy to read a stranger's works who speaks what I've thought and felt all the time.  I feel hopeful about our culture and society when I read that someone far away from my experience is thinking about these things and publishing them...it brings me into a conversation that invites me to contribute and encourages me to continue with my thoughts and what additional insights I might be able to provide.

I just can't get my head around Emerson's quintessential American "coolness."  For the obvious reason that I am not cool and so, I resent his coolness.  But moreso because of how much emotional language he uses in these lines: "come back to us with a certain alienated majesty," "affecting lesson," "take with shame."  Emerson's detached perspective seems to stem from personal emotion that he intellectualizes and makes impersonal.  He takes what is meant to connect us in community with one another through sharing of ideas and experiences and manipulates it in the service of individualism, which I see as somehow...shall I say shameful?  

You're a vegetable

Michael Jackson's lyrics to "Wanna Be Startin' Something" still elude me.  The chorus chants "You're A Vegetable, You're A Vegetable/ Still They Hate You, You're A Vegetable/ You're Just A Buffet, You're A Vegetable/ They Eat Off Of You, You're A Vegetable"....?

I got to thinking about these lyrics this week because of a work retreat.  At the retreat, we played this game "Two Truths and a Lie."  Out of a room of 70-ish people, about one out of every five women had the statement "I'm a vegetarian" as their lie.  So, these women would have something like 1) I love to cook (also a popular truth, but this post is about the lie not the truth....), 2) I love to garden, 3) I'm a vegetarian.  Turns out the woman likes to cook, loves to garden, and the lie is the vegetarian part.  Why is it that this was such a popular lie?  Not a rhetorical question, a question I really wanted to know the answer to.  It seems like such a lame lie to me that there had to be something behind it.

So, I phoned a friend and asked my vegetarian friends about this.  They explained how stating you are a vegetarian immediately makes people look at your size as if being a vegetarian is directly related toward the purpose of maintaining a certain weight rather than for political reasons.  She also mentioned the notion of food morality and how people judge you positively or negatively based on what you eat.  Michael Pollan tells us to eat mostly plants -- and he says to do it for political and health reasons.  Our "national eating disorder" as Pollan calls it, makes this seemingly innocuous choice of a lie for this game more revealing about how women think about food and how important what someone eats is to knowing who he/she is as a person.

Of course I'm interested in language...but as I'm increasingly focused on emotions and emotion theory, I'm also interested in appetite and the relationship between language and appetite...not only what we hunger for food-wise, but what we hunger for spiritually and emotionally and the words we use to communicate that hunger.  So, if what we eat and the make up of our diet reveals something about our personhood, then I am tempted to turn back to Michael Jackson and his catchy yet stupefying chorus.  Of course, being a vegetable as a human is being a body that has no physical or mental capabilities.  It comes from Late Latin vegetābilis  animating, from vegetāre  to enliven, from Latin vegēre  to excite....  Hmmm.  So, how in the world did the roots of this word get transformed to mean the exact opposite...instead of an enlivened or excited human, we get a human vegetable as a total void?

The OED defines vegetable as "A living organism belonging to the vegetable kingdom or the lower of the two series of organic beings; a growth devoid of animal life; a plant in the widest or scientific sense."  So, I guess that a human vegetable came to be called such because it is a person who is "living," but devoid of animal life....?  What does it say about angolophone culture that we use a food-related term to describe this state of being?  The word first seems to have appeared around the 1850's in England to talk about the uneventful and monotonous lives of peasants.

Once again I'm brought back to the intersection of labor -- peasants being low paid workers -- and objectification and how our culture dehumanizes workers by reducing them to objects.  Workers in effect become defined by the "fruits of their labor." 

Miseryyyyyyyy

Okay, that's a little dramatic.  But honestly, lately I consistently have the Monday blues.  It's a relatively new feeling for me that hasn't been easy to deal with. I think that the huge hill outside of my apartment that I have to bike up in order to get to work is often where it begins...it's like an uphill battle that I literally and metaphorically start my day with every day.

I'm really trying not to let the blues get a hold of me, but ya know, even when I can psyche myself up to bike to work and enjoy a beautiful morning...after a stupid landscaping trucks squeezed me between parked cars on cleveland road and then, I began delving into the lingering annoying tasks that I didn't finish last week...by 11 AM my good attitude reserves were already spent.

Ah, what to do? Helium and Strindberg, that's what.  Strindberg somehow reminds me that working hard, trying to make gold is rough...and I do take joy in knowing it would take a lot for me to be as miserable as him.

http://www.strindbergandhelium.com/index.html

Living Feminism

I saw the movie Bridesmaids this week, and I really did not like it.  I've been thinking about why, and I've had a hard time putting my finger on it.  There are some easy targets...I don't like potty humor, for example.  But really, there is something more that made me dislike the movie so much rather than just thinking it was kind of "meh."  I think part of my big problem with it is how it makes fun of the problems that females today face without honoring the truths that belie those problems.  Things get on the right track in the movie when the main character accepts that she is her own problem, she is the one in control, she is the one messing up her life and needs to take action.  I know it is supposed to be a comedy, but this kind of thing really gets under my skin because it just isn't funny.  I get really tired of the self-blame game because it is so pervasive. 

I feel like the lack of humor for me was that it hit so close to home on the issues women face -- the man who just wants to have sex but not a relationship, the independent woman afraid of marriage because it feels like she is losing her identity...but instead of doing something interesting with it and truly funny, the movie falls on its face by thinking that the only way they can talk about body issues while the women are trying on dresses is to make it about uncontrollable vomiting and bowel movements.  It is not just gross, it's gross to reduce a challenging issue for women into potty humor and to stifle it.  Women don't obsess about their bodies because we are simply superficial, it is a symptom of a culture that reduces women's bodies to sex objects and vessels necessary for reproduction that are more important than the person in the body.  

I often think about what it means to be a feminist in a real-life way. And one of the ways I live that is in fact by risking frustrating myself and others by being "too intense" and not more chill about a silly movie...but I really do think that popular culture has a role in shaping how people think as much as it reflects it.  I have to get upset about it and say something rather than just laugh it away or ignore it because then, I become the same source of inaction that condones these attitudes and portrayals of women.

It got me thinking about something that is really hard to fess up to, which is my personal frustration with failing to live up to my own feminist ideals.  I rail against the portrayal of women's bodies, and then I all too often turn around and say the same things to myself about my own body.  I talk about women's empowerment and then, I give my own power away freely to people who harass me on the street or in a bar, etc.  I talk about assessing the value of things outside of patriarchal views, and then, I find myself buying into those same views I'm theoretically against by thinking up quick and easy diets, telling myself I need to be more rational than feeling, etc.  It is so easy to compartmentalize and talk about things in one context and not live them out in another.  I so often critique social constructs and institutions, for example, and I critique myself, but somehow it often stops at critique and I find myself unable to transcend critique into a new way of being.

So what does it mean to live your feminism?  I think one of the ways that I'm working through this is by focusing on the inner chatter first.  Every time I tell myself hurtful things, I've stopped giving myself a free pass to do so...and I've also put away the torture tools that I use on myself when I get angry for hurting myself.  So, the moment I beat myself up for gaining weight in graduate school, or not knowing something that I felt like I should know, or whatever the case may be, I sit in that moment, and I sit in the discomfort of that moment.  I acknowledge that I am a product of a social environment that tells these stories all the time.  I also make sure that I resist feeling isolated in these moments -- which is why I'm willing to share something that is so shameful to me on this public blog.

By resisting isolation, I feel that I am disengaging in self-blame and allowing myself to both take responsibility for my inner chatter while also recognizing that it comes as a result of social forces far stronger than me.  I let myself experience the hurt rather than just trying to patch it up as quickly as humanly possible in order to feel better.  Sitting in those moments for longer periods of time has made me less likely to enter those moments.  When I really feel the depth of that pain, I am less likely to re-enter it. 

I know this is not exactly a topic that many people want to discuss...but do any of you have thoughts on living your feminism?  (and if you think you have to be a women to be a feminist, you might enjoy reading this article:  http://www.theroot.com/views/growing-pains-young-male-feminist)  

At the least, maybe you might be willing to share whether or not you decided to see Bridesmaids...and if you did, what did you think, and if you didn't, why did you decide not to go?

Supermarket Sweep

More like Supermarket Weep.

I love to cook and that means I have to shop well to cook and eat well.  Grocery shopping is my least favorite part of the cooking process, but I'm resourceful, so I've figured out how to be the most effective I can be at grocery shopping.  I ALWAYS make a list before I go, and I even order it aisle-by-aisle so that my list follows the sequence of the aisles (this is what David Ruprecht would call "smart shopping")...fruits and veggies first, canned foods/dried foods, cheese/yogurt last....  In fact, I could do some damage on Supermarket Sweep, which is pretty much where I think I learned to shop so effectively. Cooking has been one of the casualties of full-time work and full-time school.  Just not enough time to do more than cut open a grapefruit for breakfast or assemble a quick salad for dinner. 

Now that summer school is a lighter load, I've been cooking a bit more.  And I'm pretty sure grocery stores have been making incremental changes over the past 9 months that have added up to a totally confusing experience for me at the grocery store!  I walked into Safeway today and picked up my fruits and veggies.  Then, I moved to the second section of my list -- Orzo.  I had to go down three different aisles until I found Orzo under the heading "hispanic foods"...?  Kosher salt....found on my second try in the baking aisle.  Who bakes with kosher salt?  Not me.  I'm pretty sure most of us use it for curing and/or seasoning meat, and as a final touch to certain dishes...but for baking?  I really don't think so. Then, I went to get granola bars and I had to back track 10 aisles to get back to snacks...since when are snacks like aisle 2 and not aisle 14????  I think I cured myself of my pita chips addiction because I was so ticked off by the time I found them...NOT on a snack aisle, but in some random bin in the middle of the store.

I do feel entitled to complain since I worked at Winn-Dixie for 9 months in high school.   My parents gave me a choice between making money or sticking out one more year in the marching band, and being the excellent capitalist I used to be, I opted for money rather than talent (although to be honest, bassoon players get stuck on random sideline instruments and the large bass drum was not my forte).  I knew that store like the back of my hand.  I only checked people out as a cashier, but I should have been a stocker...the only reason I couldn't was because of my height and stature since they really only let guys stock groceries.  Am I still bitter?  Maybe.