Being Amber Rhea

All day I’ve been writing an epic blog post in my head, and now that I’m sitting here at the computer screen with a bit of time on my hands, I’m having performance anxiety. :P

~*~

This morning on the way to work, Rusty and I stopped at LottaFrutta. We drive by there every morning and always say we should go, and I’ve read nothing but good things about the place, so this morning we made a point to finally go. And it was awesome!! I’ve definitely found my new favorite place in Atlanta. I’m still thinking about the fruit cup with yogurt and granola I had this morning. There just aren’t many places where you can get really good, fresh fruit quickly and for a reasonable price - and certainly not at this quality! I chatted with the owner for a minute before we left, and she said that’s exactly why she opened the place - to fulfill what she was looking for and could only get all the way out on Buford Highway.

Before we went inside, when we got out of the car and were walking down the street, it just felt like one of those perfect moments. A beautiful day and I was with Rusty and everything was great. We watched some mockingbirds scuffle over a bite of food. Sometimes I think it would be great to live in that neighborhood, but I love our house and I know I can enjoy all the different parts of Atlanta without actually having to live there. But ever since the first time I went to Cabbagetown in 2005, I’ve just had a special feeling for that part of town. Of course, being with the person I love helps as well. And I think part of it is, some moments bring back a feeling from early 2005, when I hadn’t been in Atlanta long and was discovering lots of its treasures, but had been here long enough that I’d gotten past a lot of the rough stuff from 2004. I love it when I can recapture that feeling. I want to maximize those times and that feeling.

Back to Lottafrutta - in one corner, there was an “Energy Lemon” and I had to take a picture of it. The owner caught me in the act and was giving me a funny look, and I said, “I had to take a picture of your energy lemon.” She said, “That’s okay,” and I wondered if I’d committed a cultural faux pas. Probably not, but you never know.

~*~

Saturday was our housewarming party and it was a success. My mom was up for the weekend and had a good time. I’m still thinking about the delicious deviled eggs we made, and I think I’m going to make deviled eggs out of the 6 eggs leftover from the various cooking endeavors.

We definitely want to have people over fairly often - why not take advantage of our wonderful deck, back yard, and grill? But next time, people need to not leave the back door open! I get eaten up by mosquitoes enough as it is, even with mosquito repellent on and citranella candles and torches all around - I don’t need them inside the house, too! (And I don’t even want to talk about what would happen if a cockroach were to come inside. I would FLIP THE FUCK OUT, because that shit is NOT ON.) I will say, though, that even though they blatantly ripped off the WebMD logo, this BiteMD stuff does help after the fact.

At the party, Nikki pointed out that we have two pine trees in the back yard that are perfectly spaced to accommodate a hammock. As far as I’m concerned, this is going to become a top priority.

Sara’s Coca-Cola cupcakes were amazing, and she has posted the recipe on her blog.

My mom took a bunch of pictures and I still need to get them off my camera. I’m going to finally upgrade our DSL speed sometime this week after my most recent payment goes through, so after that, it shouldn’t be such an ordeal to upload pictures to Flickr. So, I don’t yet have pictures of the party to post, but I do have a picture of me with a weed that was taller than I am:

It grew in about 6 weeks in a corner of our back yard.

~*~

The woman who did the renovation on our house (I would say “the seller,” but since we bought it in January, that seems a little dated now) came to the party, and she was telling me all about what the house looked like when she bought it (mostly because I kept prodding her with questions). I find it fascinating. I asked if she would send me “before” pictures, and she was reluctant, saying that usually when people see the before pictures, they like their house less. I find that really bizarre. If anything, I would think it would make someone like their nice renovated house more. My mom told her I was used to it because I grew up w/ parents who renovated houses, so I saw the whole process. That seemed to make her feel better about it. I need to email her a reminder. Anyway, one of the things she said was that they built out the dining room onto what used to be part of the porch. (They did a fabulous job with the floor, because you cannot tell AT ALL where the original hardwoods end and the new hardwoods begin.) That would mean the original dining area was tiny! Barely enough room to fit any kind of table, much less one that would comfortably seat four people. She also said there was a door from the kitchen into the middle bedroom (what we made our bedroom). Trying to picture everything, it seems like this was a really weird house.

I’ll post the before pictures when I get them. For now, Google Maps shows a blurry version of the house in its pre-renovation state, and the porch does indeed wrap around:

I’m glad they got rid of that big stupid shrub in front of the living room window.

~*~

Speaking of things you can see on Google Maps…

Here’s the aerial view of where my birthday photo shoot took place:

Street names are cropped out since there seems to be some sort of urban explorers’ code of ethics in that regard, although if you really want to know where it is, it’s not exactly hard to find out.

You can track the path of a utility easement for as long as there are treetops to be cut away to accommodate its presence. I followed it for probably longer than I should admit.

And one of the places I followed it to was this, in Clayton County. What the hell is this?? It looks disgusting!

I can only assume (hope?) that it’s a sewage treatment plant or some other waste water facility?

Back in Dekalb, there’s what appears to be a giant dirt lot, right beside “Lake Charlotte,” which appears not to have any water. Or maybe the dirt lot is the former lake?

Shifting gears, Google Maps also has a (blurry, not so great) pictures of an early 1960s condo building that I love, and that I fear might not be long for this world, given all the development going on in that area. Here’s Brookwood Forrest:

One of the condos is for sale - $85,000 will get you a 2/1 in a prime location. Parquet flooring has never endeared itself to me, but I could deal…

Besides, look at those original features in the bathroom!!

I’m dying to see what the kitchen and bathrooms looked like in our house prior to the renovation.

Here’s another condo building I love, this one built in 1950 according to the MLS Listing where I got the following photos. This building is on 26th St., right behind the Mellow Mushroom where we used to play trivia. Every time we would go to trivia I’d see the place and think what a cool building it is.

If I were single and buying a place by myself, these are the kinds of places I would have given serious consideration.

I used to not much care for 50s and 60s architecture, but in the past several years it has grown on me. Sure, some of it is crap; but there’s also a lot of really neat stuff. I think my resentment toward the “urban renewal” from which many buildings of that era were borne colored my perception and made me not able to appreciate the unique features in those buildings. It’s not the buildings’ fault that they replaced something older and probably very cool in its own right. And it doesn’t mean we should continue the cycle of knocking it all down and starting over every ~30 years or so.

~*~

I’m going to wrap this up and keep this post relatively upbeat. This is only a smidgen of everything that’s been typing itself out in my head all day long. I don’t have the energy right now to write a screed about why I’m annoyed with pretty much everybody in my former feminist Blogdonia haunts, not to mention the bullshit happening on Tumblr right now. And I feel like I should save my post about my constant underlying fear of Something Very Bad Happening for another day. (The truth is, I’m scared to write it at all.)

Dan Greenfield commented on Toby Bloomberg’s “Atlanta Women In Social Media Marketing” post from yesterday (the one I’m in) and that reminded me of something.

In the post, I mentioned the anecdote of the guy who was completely condescending and dismissive toward me at SoCon07 and seemed to view social media as the realm of silly young-uns who haven’t entered the real world yet and when they do, they’ll leave childish things behind so they can be taken seriously. Surprise! He showed up at SoCon08, only this time he was a “social media expert” running a “digital consulting company.” (I see now he is also calling himself a “brand therapist.”) That experience is never far from my mind as I view the glad-handers keen on building their personal brands with a wary eye.

SoCon07 wasn’t the first time some “professional” know-it-all looked down their nose at me, and it wouldn’t be the last. For example, the one I remembered after seeing Dan’s comment:

About two years ago, Rusty and I went to a Social Media Club Atlanta meeting (this was when SMC-ATL was in its first incarnation). I didn’t mention it in the post, but the guy, Mike, who I talk about in that post? I remember him saying something exasperatedly to me about how, “Well, those of us in the corporate world don’t have time for all this stuff!” I was so fucking pissed off. Look at those assumptions. I didn’t try to conceal my irritation when I told him, “Hi, I’m in the corporate world, too. Why would you assume I’m not?”

I remember he was visibly surprised. I guess he assumed I just spent all day in my pajamas, maybe had a part-time job at Starbucks. People and their stupid assumptions.

Toby Bloomberg has started a series called “Atlanta Women in Social Media Marketing,” and I’m included in the first edition. When she asked if I wanted to participate, I said I didn’t really think I’d be a good fit, since I don’t use social media for marketing. But she said she wanted to include me anyway, so I tried my best to think of relevant things to say.

Here’s part of it what I said, and you know what, I think I was speaking a lot of sense here, if I do say so myself!

If [business is] not your primary focus with social media, you’re really looked down upon by a lot of people; some of them can’t even conceive of someone not using social media purely as a marketing tool. It’s frustrating because the people who are busy building their “personal brand” and establishing themselves as “thought leaders” wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing if it weren’t for those of us who got into blogging, etc. years ago, back when the business world as a whole scoffed at us.

Read the rest.

I love this! MondoHomo, a five-day festival of awesome, is entering its third year, and it’s all organized by local activist Kiki Carr (you might recall Rusty and I interviewed her back in February 2007) who just blows me away with her talent and devotion. Does she never sleep? Maybe I’ll learn her secret because after MondoHomo, she and I are going to be collaborating on a new project for Atlanta; but stay tuned for that.

Here are all the details about MondoHomo; yeah, it’s a lot, this is five days of stuff, people! Rusty and I will definitely be there Saturday night for a the Film Love portion (hosted by Andy Ditzler, whom we also interviewed… fancy that); the rest is still up in the air for us. But if you are on the fence about whether you want to go, take the time to read below (detailed info after the jump) because there truly is something for everyone.
Read the full post »

By now you might have heard that Craigslist is ending its erotic services section.

This is a little confusing to me, since they are replacing the category with a new category called “adult.” How this is not a simple renaming of an existing category still defeats me. Oh, right: because Craigslist employees are going to “review” the ads in the adult category. Well that makes me feel so much better. Because requiring sex workers to fork over their credit card information in order to post an ad wasn’t enough.

The ending of erotic services ads comes on the heels of the murder of a masseuse who advertised on Craigslist in Boston. Which is a bit like shutting down banks and opening new institutions where you store your money, but which are not called banks, because there are bank robbers out there.

Naturally, coverage from mainstream media has been what you would expect: sensationalistic, inaccurate, in many cases wildly irrelevant, and with a deafening lack of sex workers’ voices.

The AJC did a particularly stellar job with this article on the matter. Have a look at this lede, why don’t you:

Atlanta children will be a little safer now that Craigslist will no longer post prostitution and other “erotic services” ads, but additional precautions are needed, an Atlanta anti-child prostitution group said Wednesday.

WTF???????

Where to even begin?

When Rusty showed me this article in his Google Reader, I was all inspired and motivated to take Dacia’s message from this weekend about getting our voices heard in the media to heart and write a letter to the editor. I could do this! Short, to the point. On message. 150 words or less.

Then I read the full article and the WTF-ness of it was just so overwhelming that I felt paralyzed at the prospect of trying to condense a response to the necessary length for a letter to the editor.

I feel shitty about that because I do think it’s important to respond to the media in the media’s space. But all too often the media doesn’t offer space that’s meaingful, and so, I’m doing what I always do: using the space I’ve carved out for myself to spell out exactly what the hell is wrong with this, in way more than 150 words.

Looking just at the lede… I really don’t know what goes through people’s minds. Atlanta’s children will be safer? What?? Do these people truly believe that traffickers - yes, actual child traffickers, not adult sex workers posting ads for their own services - are going to go, “Oh, Craigslist shut down its erotic services section; shucks! Now there’s nothing we can do! Oh well, no more trafficking!” Because that’s what that line seems to be saying. And for anyone who believes that, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you.

Here’s the deal. Actual traffickers? Scary, dangerous, powerful people. Tough to go after. Lots of risk involved. And you know what else? Usually not posting on fucking Craigslist!! But of course (as Ren has pointed out) it’s far easier to make a big show of “cracking down on child prostitution” by arresting a bunch of adult sex workers, a situation wherein the state essentially becomes a pimp (for another nice dose of irony there) and keeps that door revolving, than it is to go after actual traffickers. Because that doesn’t titillate readers or make enticing headlines.

Like many cities, Atlanta had been doing police stings to “crack down on child prostitution.” What ended up happening? Law enforcement dollars and resources were devoted to giving criminal records to adult women simply trying to make a living, while violent crime continues to rise. The AJC played a nice role in that, too, by posting the full names and photos of many of those workers arrested (not linking to an article because I do not want to contribute to further outing of those women).

I feel so much safer now, don’t you? Now that those dirty whores aren’t earning money (and subsequently paying taxes) somewhere off in a hotel room?

It’s for the children!

These stings have been equally successful in protecting the children elsewhere across the country. Chicago, for example:

Perhaps you’ve heard about Operation Cross Country, a three-day, nationwide FBI operation that was supposedly targeting child prostitution trafficking. I didn’t realize it had happened right here in Chicago. “Of those arrested in the Chicago area, 5 were charged with running prostitution operations, 34 were charged with prostitution, and 5 were customers, according to the release. No minors were found.” (Emphasis mine)

In that case, SWOP-Chicago put it well:

To target child prostitution and trafficking is one thing. To scapegoat sex workers and crackdown on prostitution in the name of preventing trafficking is a horse of a different color. It’s a waste of money and it’s a waste of tax-payer resources. And if you really care about “rescuing” sex workers, why the fuck are you giving them felony records?

Operation Cross Country is not about ending the exploitation of children and those who are trafficked against their will. It’s using this exploitation as a smokescreen for persecuting sex workers on the altar of sex panic.

But back to the AJC article. I have a serious problem with this line:

As recently as February, 176 girls were prostituted for sex on Craigslist, she said.

There is no sourcing for this. Where did they get that information? Police reports? If so, of what nature? Or maybe sources other than police reports? And if so, what were those? I have seen all too often how “facts” like this are crafted in order to fit an agenda. Without knowing where this information is being drawn from, I don’t trust it one damn bit. Those 176 prostituted girls might very well be escorts who are legal adults. We don’t know.

The above was attributed to Kaffie McCullough, director of the anti-child prostitution group A Future. Not A Past. This group takes an “end demand” approach to ending child prostitution, according to their web site. Yet all the red flags are there. The conflation of exploitation of minors with consensual adult sex work. The vague and brief language on their web site. The lack of support for decriminalization of prostitution (which would be a huge help in the fight against trafficking of both children and adults, because far too often when either children or adults are “rescued,” they are entered into the criminal justice system; some rescue). Oh and did you know, according to A Future. Not A Past.’s web site, this is one of the warning signs that a minor might be a victim of trafficking:

Inappropriate dress, including oversized clothing or overtly sexy clothing

?????

Yeah. If she dresses like a slut or a weirdo, she must be trafficked! It’s that easy to spot!

How out of touch with reality are these people?

Furthermore, when someone who claims to care about children says something like this (again quoting from the AJC article)…

“I’m glad because with all the press Craigslist had been getting it was just way too easy for someone to buy an underage girl on the Internet,” McCullough said.

…well I have a major problem with that, too. Another red flag. You’re talking about trafficking victims having a future and yet you use incredibly dehumanizing language. Buy a girl? Are you fucking KIDDING me?

I’m exhausted. I’ve written over 1200 words and there’s still so much more that could be said about the AJC article. It really depresses me sometimes when I realize, yet again, that this is how much of the public at large views sex work. They think these tactics are okay. They think, I guess, that Craigslist truly is overflowing with ads for underage girls. I don’t know what they think, exactly. But I know it’s fucked up, seriously wrong, and perpetuates harmful conditions for sex workers and victims of trafficking.

I don’t know what else to say. I’ll leave you with words of wisdom from Jill Brenneman:

When I did need help, when I was facing violence and coercion in the sex industry, none of the current anti trafficking measures would have applied or helped, I couldn’t go the cops or the justice system because in the US being a prostitute is illegal, the clients getting arrested,,, so what??? Great so the whole thing which was underground in the first place just moves farther underground. Not to mention I went into the sex industry for a reason. To make money to survive. I didn’t need the clients arrested because they were clients, I was there to make money to eat, to live, there was a need for the clients. I needed the ones arrested that beat the shit out of me, or raped me, or forced me to do things without my consent. I needed them arrested for rape, for assault, not on some minor misdemeanor that they could wash away with a visit to “John School” in some lame ass plea bargain. I needed labor and human rights so that an abusive, sadistic pimp, didn’t have criminalization to use against me to keep under control. As long as the whole thing is illegal the cops were more his allies than they ever could have been mine as I was more afraid of being arrested, or worse, being blown off because I was a prostitute and sent back to him to face a very angry pimp. I needed human rights.

Seriously, sometimes I wonder what it’s going to take to get through to some people.

Oh, and on that note: I might as well publicly state right now that I want to bring the Speak Up! media training seminar to Atlanta, and I am going to work to make it happen.

I should have posted this last Thursday, on the date of my actual 7th blog birthday, but this is close enough! Here’s a retrospective of where I was…

Seven years ago: About to graduate from college w/ my BA in linguistics. Married, living in a pretty cool townhouse in Athens (bigger than my mom’s house in square footage!) with an approx. 2 ft. x 8 ft. “yard” out back, where I’d planted some shrubs and flowers and made the place look generally nicer than the exterior of most college students’ dwellings. Total Mac geek obsessed w/ old obscure hardware.

Six years ago: About to wrap up the intense, life-changing, really wonderful experience that was the MIT Program (which includes giving a presentation at UPS headquarters in Atlanta), and graduate w/ a degree that people don’t understand: “Yes, the degree is actually called MIT. No, it’s not an MS in IT. It’s a Master of Internet Technology. That’s a real, separate degree.” And speaking of life-changing experiences, living for four months w/ the secret that my husband is trans - and wondering what the hell I’m going to do, while trying to hold things together on the surface for the benefit of people in my everyday interactions (only Jenny and Niki knew at this point). Applying for a job at a technology non-profit in Dallas, Texas.

Five years ago: Newly transplanted to Atlanta after seven months in Texas. I would hesitate to say going there was a mistake, because I learned a lot and I don’t think I would be the same otherwise. (Insert cheesy platitude about every experience shaping who you are… blah blah.) Ultimately it was a positive, because I learned what I didn’t want, and it made the things I did want come into much sharper focus. Working at The Job (also known occasionally herein as PHS, and in a few scant places, by its real name). Still married legally but separated in most senses of the word, though she was staying w/ me after moving from Athens until she found her own apartment in May. A therapist I was seeing at the time gave me crap about us sharing the same bed and “how that looks,” and I promptly fired her (the therapist). Blog archives for April 2004 are lost to the ether due to a hard drive failure. :P

Four years ago: Been in Atlanta and working at The Job for a little over a year. Hanging out w/ Brent, Ryan, and Sam at Houlihan’s several nights a week after work, then walking home in the almost-dusk light. Recently met some local bloggers IRL; I’m starting to make connections in this town. Officially divorced now, for seven months. This place feels like home (and I selfishly wish Jenny and Niki would move here). Reconnected w/ Dacia and Dipika thanks to blogging. Occasionally fucking a not-so-closeted Republican, but getting increasingly fed up w/ the situation; got my eye on a local political blogger who, by casual appearances, you might not think is my “type.” Trying to hatch a plan to get in his pants.

Three years ago: Rusty and I have been an item for almost a year (the plan worked!). Moved out of my first Atlanta apartment a month prior, even though I didn’t really want to; but they wouldn’t budge on raising the rent, and anyway, it had been taken over by a new, shitty management company. Moved to the Ice House Lofts, into an apartment at the other end of the hall from Rusty. :) We call it our halfway house to living together. Working at Large Media Organization, after departing The Job in October ‘05. My dad had a stroke a month earlier and things are kind of rough in that area. Official launch of Georgia Podcast Network is imminent.

Two years ago: Surprise - back at The Job! This time as a contractor, and it’s all for the best. Coming back was one of the best “career-related” decisions I’ve made, and I told my boss this time I’m never leaving. Total site redesign and launch of new platform complete, and I raked up major overtime bucks with which I dug myself slightly out of debt (finally paid off that car I bought seven years earlier!). Rusty and I have moved in together in an ill-fated apartment. PodCamp Atlanta has come and gone and I’m exhausted and swear I’ll never organize another conference - and yet, I dream up the idea of Sex 2.0 and decide to try to make it really happen. In honor of my 5th blog birthday I’ve moved my blog off my homegrown PHP/MySQL system and onto WordPress. Due to peer pressure and the inevitability of “anything I hate on, I will be a fanatic about in 6 months to a year,” I’ve started using Twitter. I graduate from level 3 pole dancing and get my purple garter.

One year ago: Sex 2.0 really happened OMFG!! And it was a huge success w/ a full week of post-orgasmic bliss! But this time, I’m standing firm on my promise to myself to never organize another conference. What else? Back to being a permanent full-time employee at The Job. Performed in the second PoleLaTeaz student showcase. Rusty and I are living together back in Decatur and have recently brought Puff and Stuff to live with us. We meet with a super cool financial planner and lay out a plan for getting out of debt, saving money, and eventually buying a house together.

There’s more - much more. There’s no way I can accurately condense seven years into a “highlight reel” of a post. But, I felt like I should put something up, just to reflect on how things change over the course of [x] number of years, and how keeping a record of your life - whether a blog, a personal journal, or any other medium - is, I believe, extremely valuable.

Maybe later I’ll go back and edit this post w/ hyperlinks to relevant posts about key events!

Update: Post has been updated w/ a million links!

Five years ago, I moved to Atlanta after an ill-fated (but ultimately good in terms of what it taught me) 7-month stint in Dallas, Texas. It was one of the best decisions I ever made!

Here I am just after arriving at my new home:

Yay. :)

I won’t be able to make it because it’s during work hours for me, but get yourself downtown on March 25 if at all possible!

This year, in partnership with the Center for Women at Emory we welcome Angela Davis as our keynote for Legislate THIS! With the expansion of the prison industrial complex into our communities, it is vital that we explore and address the impact the prison industrial complex has on our bodies, within families, and in our lives. The expansions of prisons and the increased surveillance and detention of women of color and queer people of color is a reproductive justice issue. Join us as we fight back and begin to lay the ground work to set a public policy agenda as well as organizing to build community power and strength!

Visit www.legislatethis.org * Email Paris at paris@sparkrj.org

Then be sure to check out this event at Charis tonight!

Atlanta Transformative Justice Collaborative Dialogue

Thursday, March 12, 7:30-9:00pm

Over the past three years, a collaborative of Atlanta based organizers have been building a framework of transformative justice focused on transforming state, communal and interpersonal response to violence. From local neighborhood violence to international genocidal violence, from Gaza & the West Bank to intimate partner & family violence, the Atlanta Transformative Justice Collaborative (ATJC) seeks to transform the responses and conditions that perpetuate all forms of social control and violence. Join ATJC organizers Mia Mingus, Cara Page, Sonali Sadequee & Stephanie Guilloud at Charis as they discuss ways to engage communities through transformative justice and deepen cross-movement conversations within southern based strategies.

I just now found out about this, and as such won’t be able to make it tonight. But I can assure you these four ladies are all kinds of awesome, and the ATJC is the kind of organization I can get behind. I would encourage ATAC folks to attend and participate.

I feel obligated to write something about the astoundingly moronic SB 91, but whenever I try, I just find myself at a loss for words. I’m overcome w/ exasperation and wonder why I should waste my damn time. But then I think, well, if no one “wastes their time” spelling out, yet again, everything that is WRONG w/ this bullshit, then it’ll just keep on happening, like it always does. And far too many people, who are otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people, just accept these stupid lines about sex work that are built into society without any questioning. It’s not a conscious, “Yes, I accept that;” it’s just, you know, everyone knows that’s how it is, so what is there to question? Or maybe a political blogger here and there writes about it as an amusing one-off, w/ some stupid un-funny joke (e.g., “pole tax”) before moving on to the REAL IMPORTANT issues.

I get so fed up w/ constantly rehashing the 101-level stuff, but yet, I know it’s important. That’s how people’s minds are changed, when they’re able to see a perspective they had never considered before. (And, to clarify: I really don’t mind it one-on-one, w/ friends or people I know are engaging in good faith. Like when Lain DM’ed me on Twitter the other day asking why one would oppose an anti-sex trafficking event, and wondered if it was because law enforcement targets non-trafficked sex workers. I was happy to send him informational links.)

A related story. When Griftdrift wrote that Jack Murphy said there’s a direct correlation between strip clubs and child prostitution (don’t you just LOVE how these people pull this nonsense out of their asses and everyone just nods their heads sagely??) it reminded me of a freelance work offer Rusty and I had a few years ago. It was for an organization that purportedly provided resources to victims of child sex trafficking. I don’t know if it was Innocence Atlanta, but they did have Innocence in their name. Will Hinton was the one told us about it. So, who could be opposed to that, right? But we were skeptical from the beginning, because we know to be. We combed through all the verbiage on their existing site and found some shit that would slip under many people’s radar… like, “a business owner might give a reformed stripper a second chance with a job.” Wait, what? I thought you were an org focused on child victims of sex trafficking. What’s this talk of strippers? And reformed, what’s that shit?

We turned down the job. Couldn’t do it in good conscience.

I wish there was an active sex workers’ rights group here in Atlanta. I really tried w/ the 2007 International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, I really did. I was encouraged because two other people organized it w/ me, so hey, that’s two others that are interested in fighting the good fight! It was, in fact, one of them that proposed doing something in the first place! And we had a sign-up sheet for an email list that night, and lots of people signed up, and there was talk of doing a march through midtown on Dec. 17 the following year, and then… nothing.

A grad student (at least I think she’s a grad student) from the UGA Women’s Studies department, whom I met briefly at Sex 2.0, emailed me to let me know about an upcoming conference on sex trafficking in Macon. She thought a protest would be a good idea, and she wanted to know what I had in mind, too, as far as local action for sex workers’ rights activism (in response to my March 3 post where I sighed about the lack of activity in Atlanta). I told her, well, I wish there were more of us. I wish there was a critical mass. I wish we had a SWOP chapter, or something.

But I can’t do everything. And I’m worn out.

And sometimes I feel like that’s a cop out - even as I try my best to remember Melissa’s words of wisdom.

I’ve said before that I’m a reluctant activist, or even not really an activist at all, because I’m not made for front-lines shit. It’s true, because time and again I see how that shit exhausts me mentally, emotionally, and physically. And yet I still feel driven and have this extreme inner conflict. I wish I were one of those people who could organize, fight, rally the troops, not get discouraged; I feel like, why say I can’t do it, because then no one’s doing it, and this is important work that needs to be done.

Then it just all goes down the rabbit hole and I start thinking about the nature of civil disobedience and my mind drifts to the French Revolution… yeah.

If people don’t make their voices heard and agitate for change, then (surprise!) nothing changes. But maybe I also need to remember that there are many different ways to make one’s voice heard and agitate for change, and that real substantive change doesn’t happen overnight. I just worry that too many people are going to take the back seat and say, “Oh, I’ll just blog about it,” when it takes REAL WORLD action, too. But at the same time, some of us just aren’t cut out for a whole lot of real world action - but we want to do our part among a critical mass of others who ARE.

*sigh*

Posted by zeusface on Flickr, this 1972 Atlanta map shows the routes of two highly controversial expressways that were stopped by public opposition - but not before the state had destroyed countless homes and businesses, including a huge portion of historic Inman Park, and created a wasteland that sat empty for nearly 20 years.

Click through and view the large size to be able to see the proposed highway routes more clearly.

More info from Wikipedia:

The Stone Mountain Freeway shares state route number 10 with Freedom Parkway, a two-mile (3km) road in northeast Atlanta that connects with the Interstate highway system at a major highway interchange on the Downtown Connector. As that designation suggests, state officials originally intended the Stone Mountain Freeway to continue west, through Decatur, Druid Hills and Candler Park, to downtown Atlanta. In pursuit of those plans, in 1969 the GDOT purchased an X-shaped swath of land designed to carry two roads: Interstate 485, running from east to west, and another freeway connecting what are now Georgia 400 to the north and Interstate 675 to the south.

Neighborhood groups and local preservationists worked together to block road construction of the highways. After 20 years of litigation and political maneuvering, community groups and state and local officials in 1991 compromised and set much of the state-purchased right of way aside as parkland, later named Freedom Park. The land proposed as the interchange of the two cancelled highways, by then, had become the site of the Carter Center.

Freedom Parkway – the last vestige of the planned downtown link of the Stone Mountain Freeway – opened in 1994.

I’m still curious as to how this all fits in w/ Sherwood Harrington’s 1963 photo of (what became) Freedom Parkway under construction, if the land wasn’t purchased until 1969. On Flickr, zeusface says:

At the time this photo was taken, this highway was going to run all the way to Stone Mountain, but was thwarted by residents of the upscale Druid Hills area. That’s why there is so much park space around the Carter Center, North Avenue, and Little Five Points. It was originally cleared for this highway. That’s also why there is so much undeveloped land bordering the North DeKalb Mall parking lot. The Stone Mt. Freeway would have continued where the QT and Saturn dealership now stand, and would have gone through Medlock park where that new nature trail is.

But if the photo was taken in 1963, how does that jibe? Does anyone have any insight?

[Cross-posted from my Tumblr]

(Am I the only one who always reads “sundries” as “sun-dries,” like the plural for sun-dried tomatoes?)

Been busy w/ work and the new house. Hate saying something like that because it sounds so cliché, and also because I hate when people use “I’m busy” as a go-to excuse for everything. Hello, everyone is busy, it’s nothing special.

Anyway, here are some summaries of what’s been happening.

~*~

Monday I went to the Feminism2.0 conference in Washington, DC, with Ren. The subject matter and issues discussed were not new to me, but overall it was interesting and I’m glad I went. I liveblogged the following sessions:

• Feminism on the Move - Where we were and where are we now?
• Media and Culture: Feminists and the Media - Speaking Out
• Bloggers and Activists: An Intimate and Frank Conversation

I also posted a few photos on Flickr, many of which show the linkfluence node map thingy that was blowing everyone’s mind. I thought the top 30 list was pretty neat - and that’s all. Such things should be taken with the appropriate serving of salt. Or to put it another way, Technorati rankings are not character judgments.

Predictably, there are now conversations ensuing about who was “excluded,” and it’s driving me batty. I really try not to get all “snarky tech geek” on people, but this isn’t an issue of exclusion/inclusion. And honestly at this point it seems like there’s no pleasing some people. As I said at Renee’s, if WOC bloggers are not highly ranked by algorithms like that, it’s likely because of a lack of interlinking, which may happen because WOC bloggers feel that other feminist blogs are hostile environments and therefore don’t link to them. This is not condoning anything, it’s a straightforward explanation. Example: if you make your blog private, it’s not indexed by Google. That’s just the way the internet works.

Frankly, I’m sick of these conversations because they always seem to be Oppression Olympics and too often it seems like people who don’t understand the way SEO works are making outrageous, spurious claims. And more and more, I get a sense of people not wanting to be proactive, but rather just passively snarking about how everything is so unfair.

And I hate that saying that makes me sound (to some, perhaps) like the assholes who deny that privilege exists; the people who, when someone points out an instance of white privilege, male privilege, hetero privilege, whatever, take it as a personal attack. I can’t STAND those people! I hate that there seems to be such a dichotomy set up, though, that you can’t have a legitimate critique with being painted as identical to those people. And I’m afraid it will make people not listen to me when I raise legitimate critiques (e.g., exclusion of sex workers’ voices; myriad instances of male privilege and institutionalized sexism, especially the “unintentional” kind). -Of course, the corollary to that is, if people can’t make a distinction between a legitimate critique and passive snarking, that’s their problem; but we all know that common sense is not so common.

~*~

SoCon09 is tomorrow. I’m glad Rusty and I are going this year; we went in 2007, but missed it last year in favor of going to PodCamp Nashville. That turned out to be a mistake, because PodCamp Nashville sucked. We still had fun in Nashville and the rest of the road trip, but seeing all the tweets and liveblogs from SoCon08 made us realize we’d chosen the wrong unconference for that weekend!

I’m leading a session tomorrow called “Online Etiquette: How to Balance Your Personal and Professional Image Online.” I didn’t pick the name. The session was already named and Sherry “assigned” it to me. I would not have used the word “etiquette” in this context, because to me that belongs in a completely separate discussion, and I’m bothered by the way the two are often conflated. But, I plan to bring that up in the session! Hopefully there will be some good discussion generated (and hopefully I won’t end up with a massive headache). If it’s anything like my BlogOrlando session, I’ll be pleased.

And, I have an order in at Office Depot for 80 more Buzzword Bingo cards. Josh initially prodded me; J motivated me and offered to chip in to help pay for them! Nik offered twenty bucks, too. So I’ll give the people what they want! There won’t be a formal game or anything, but it’ll be interesting to see how many Bingos people get throughout the day. ;)

~*~

Progress is being made (how ’bout that passive voice!) on the bedroom at the new house. The first coat of paint is complete and we’ll be putting the second coat on this weekend.

I feel like we’ve been very fortunate w/ this whole home-buying process. Everyone has been very nice to us. We’ve gotten gifts, for crying out loud!

From Stacia, our agent:

She also gave us two types of birdseed, a card, and a Lowe’s gift card.

The home inspection company made postcards with a picture of the house, the address, and “Just Moved” on them; and return address labels with a picture of the house.

Last weekend, we discovered champagne and chocolates in the fridge, from the seller:

And last night, when I went over to the house there was a package on the doorstep…

It was from the listing agent. It’s a stained-glass bird!

The bird is actually their logo, but it doesn’t look like a logo. (Rusty and I have discussed how this is very smart marketing.) They gave one to the seller at the closing, and I guess after finding out that we’re “bird people” they decided to give one to us, too. It was a really nice surprise.

On a geeky note, I should mention that I uploaded some of the closing pictures to Facebook, and immediately friend requested and tagged most of the people in this group shot.

~*~

New favorite recipe: Macaroni and Cheese with Cauliflower, from Real Simple Magazine. It’s really more of a casserole. Rusty was skeptical at first, but after he made it, all the skepticism was gone. It makes enough to feed a small army. After we ate a bunch of it the first night (photo is of my first serving only), we made six individually packaged portions and put them in the freezer. We ate the last of it yesterday. Maybe we’ll make some for our eventual housewarming party.

~*~

Not sure if I ever blogged about this, but Rusty posted a really fascinating interview with his great-aunt Jane, who was working at Grady Hospital the night of the Winecoff Hotel fire in 1946. She ended up taking in almost all of the bodies at the morgue. This is the kind of priceless history that is imperative to preserve.

After watching the video a few times, I had a dream that I was in the Winecoff Hotel fire, only it was happening now, and I knew in advance what would happen, and there was a social media conference going on at the Winecoff (Tessa and other Atlanta social media people were there), and I kept trying to convince the people on the upper levels to get out now because the fire was slowly coming up the building and I knew the people on the higher levels wouldn’t be able to escape, but they were all nonchalant and ignored me.

~*~

Am I becoming old and boring because I post about things like recipes and painting the bedroom of the house my long-term partner and I just bought? Hey, at least I’m not posting photos of my kids and blogging about the cute things they did today. Stop me if I ever get to that point! (Probably moot because I don’t plan to have kids - but of course, I reserve the right to change my mind.)

I want to attempt to clear up some muddying of the waters re: my feelings on the ATACC thing. I realized that in some posts and comments, and particularly my post from last night, it comes off as if I’m conflating two separate issues. I want to address this because it’s the kind of thing that bugs me when I see other people doing it, and in my haste to just write my thoughts w/ little or no proof-reading, I’ve ended up doing the same thing.

Is crime a problem in Atlanta? Does it need to be addressed post-haste? Is it a good thing for people to organize and mobilize their communities, using the tools that work best for them? Do people have a right to defend themselves against robbery, burglary, etc.? Should people feel safe in their neighborhoods?

The answer to all those questions is a resounding YES!

That part, I really shouldn’t have to say. But I felt it best to just be explicit about it. I do understand that in an emotionally-charged environment, things that aren’t personal or aren’t meant a certain way can be taken that way, and really piss people the fuck off.

And that’s maybe the hardest thing about trying to sort this all out in writing: I can see how it must look from the eyes of someone who lost a loved one. I’ve always been good at putting myself in other people’s shoes, sometimes even to my detriment. But ultimately I believe it’s a good thing, because we need more sympathy and compassion in this world.

If I were a close friend or relative of John Henderson, for example, I’d most likely say something like, “Are you fucking kidding me?? He is DEAD and you’re wanting to prattle on about this privilege bullshit and looking for root causes. Well excuse the hell out of me, but no amount of identifying root causes is going to bring him back.”

I get that. Which is why I want to be clear.

When all the Full Frontal Feminism crap went down in the blogosphere, the reason it annoyed me so much was that legitimate frustration with a systemic problem was getting played out as criticisms of an individual. People were pissed off at a system that privileges certain voices over others, but what ended up going around were a lot of personal attacks on Jessica Valenti. The systemic problem is not her fault. The book is a good thing. And if she hadn’t written the book or it had been a massive flop, that wouldn’t have magically made more WOC authors get book deals.

It’s also an all-too-familiar trope in conversations about the sex industry. Instead of criticisms of the way the industry is constructed, we get personal attacks on individual sex workers - denying their choices, questioning their feminist creds, and so on.

So back to ATACC: the formation of the group is a good thing. The press attention it’s getting is a good thing.

But that’s not where my main quarrel lies.

It’s a systemic problem. Why does this group and this set of events get coverage? Why don’t you see coverage of peer-on-peer violent crime in southwest Atlanta? Why is it considered “business as usual” in certain areas of town - even if, as Karsh and others have pointed out, often that’s more perception than reality? Where does that perception come from? Why are some lives tacitly designated as more important than others? Etc., etc.

And remember, none of that has anything to do with intent.

Admittedly, the waters are getting muddied too because I have major concerns about the way the group is turning out. As I said before, I know many individuals involved and know that they have good intentions and truly want what’s best for their community. But when an organization reaches a certain point, it takes on a life of its own (whole vs. sum of parts, and all that); and the racism, classism, pro-police mentality and encouragement of vigilantism I’ve seen from its ranks make me want to run far away from associating myself with ATACC. -And, too, at a certain point, good intentions aren’t enough. For example, I’m sure in his mind Steve Gower has good intentions; but his actions are harmful, and the MNA and MPSA are dangerous groups with significant economic pull.

Getting to the root of a systemic problem does not equal absolving people of responsibility for their actions. An explanation is not an excuse. But without explanations, where would we be? It’s how we learn and make informed decisions. If we never modified our actions based on the results of deep analysis, we’d never get anywhere. Now I’m going to pull out the 9/11 analogy. The attackers who crashed those planes bear full responsibility and blame for their actions and should be punished accordingly. No amount of “the middle East distrusts America” makes what they did okay. However does that mean it’s not important to look at what circumstances may have fostered an environment that ultimately led to them doing what they did? That’s what we must do, unless we want to stick our heads in the sand and wait for our society to either get blown up or blow itself up. I repeat: an explanation is not an excuse. Analyzing is not condoning.

Reading back over this, I feel like I still haven’t done a good job of explaining what I mean. With this issue, I seem to be better at it when I talk about it w/ people face to face, but hey at least I tried.

I know I’ve alluded to it before, but lately I’m seriously wondering if I’ve reached my tipping point w/ social media. It’s true that I’ve been really busy in the past week, but come on, everybody’s busy, that’s not much of an explanation. Like I mentioned in a podcast a while back (would link but our site is down at the moment), I wonder if it’s finally gotten to the point where there’s just too much to keep up with. I haven’t been spending as much time on Twitter, and certainly not attempting to read everybody’s tweets. I haven’t checked Bloglines in days and have given up trying to read all my feeds - and I don’t even subscribe to an insane number of feeds, and certainly not the kind of blogs that post 20+ times a day! Then I end up reblogging shit on Tumblr and half the time I don’t know why, other than it’s a convenient way to help me wake up in the morning or unwind at night without using too many brain cells. I’ve been meaning to write Jenny and Niki an email for weeks now - and of course trying to find time to blog. It all seems so ridiculous, but more and more everything for me seems to be moving to quick little updates of 140 characters or less, no time to sit and write anything of substantial length.
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Rusty and I decided, when we started looking for a house, that we didn’t want a “diamond in the rough,” as Crystal says. We wanted an older house, but one that had already been renovated, because neither of us wants to do that kind of stuff right now - plus it takes money, and I’d rather focus on paying off credit cards/student loans and saving. My parents renovated houses (before anyone called it “flipping”) in the 90s and early 2000s, and I know there can be lots of annoyances involved. I don’t want to deal with old systems crapping out and the like. Fortunately our house has a new roof, new appliances, new HVAC, new wiring, new plumbing, and mostly new windows.

However I think that one day, when we’re older and hopefully have some extra money, it would be fun to buy an older house (older than the house we’re buying now, which was built in 1955) and renovate it, preserving its original charm and historical significance. Old houses have so many little details that I just love. When I was a kid, my mom and I would go into old vacant houses and just look around, for fun. Don’t worry, she’s a Realtor; we weren’t breaking and entering! Sometimes we would find really neat stuff in the houses.

Like Steffi at the Westview Bungalow blog, I hate when people come into an old house and just rip everything out and make it look like a generic boring 80s/90s house on the inside. The details like fireplaces, doorknobs, windows, etc. are part of what make an old house special. Fortunately there are people who do it right - look at the pictures in Steffi’s post for an example, and in fact look at her entire blog, which is about she and her husband’s old house and the renovations they’ve done while preserving the features that make the house special.

One of my favorite things about old houses is the windows. Every day on the way to/from work, Rusty and I drive by houses on Oakdale Rd. that have beautiful old windows - many of them stained glass. I know sometimes old windows get a bad rap for being energy inefficient, but recently I was doing some Google sleuthing about windows and read something a home inspector had written about old windows that were well-made being really damn good - not a significant loss of energy, and plus, they’ve held up just fine for 100+ years in many cases, vs. the newer Thermopane windows that have a typical lifespan of ~30 years. (Of course, now I can’t find the link, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.)

And as a quick aside, I know this is all very US-centric! Not surprising since I live in the US. But sometimes I’ll read stuff written by people who live in the UK or Europe, talking about the old houses in their towns… and I realize their definition of old and our definition of old are very different. European countries have way longer histories than the US, so a 100-year-old house isn’t old by UK standards. Across the pond there are 500-year-old houses still standing and in use.

Old houses have personal history in them; they have stories. Even if you don’t know the stories, there’s a certain feeling you get (or I get, anyway) just by knowing that there are stories. There must be, due to all the people who have lived in the house and passed through it. Not to sound too hippy-dippy but it’s like the energy of the people who were once there gets imprinted on the house. It reminds me of a conversation Rusty and I had with the Henry Ghost Hunters, speculating on what “haunting” really is. If sounds can be imprinted and recorded on vinyl, who’s to say other materials can’t capture sound?

When an old house is lost I feel a deep sadness - like all the stories that the house preserved (even if no people survive to actually remember them) are lost as well.

Reading the Westview Bungalow blog inspires me. Just look at their dining room! Maybe one day Rusty and I can lovingly restore an old house like that. When we do it, I want to do it right; I don’t want to do anything half-assed. That’s yet another reason not to do it now - because I wouldn’t want to have to cut corners on anything. I have fantasies of discovering an old house in a tucked-away intown neighborhood that “investors” haven’t discovered yet, w/ its original details intact (if in need of TLC).

Look at these subway tiles around the fireplace:

You just won’t find that anywhere else. It disgusts me to think of people ripping that out!

I surprised myself by, seemingly out of nowhere, having an appreciation for mid-century ranch houses. Not the cheaply built ones, but the really solid, usually earlier ones. I used to think ranch houses were boring, but now I find myself appreciating original details about them, such as brightly colored glazed tile. If a 50s/60s-era bathroom is well-preserved, I think it looks great w/ the bold colors. Look at this one for example:

And look at that sink. Love it. (Is that ceramic? Not sure what the material is.) I love the style of sink with the two legs, towel bars on each side, and empty space underneath. There’s a blog I found recently that’s dedicated to mid-century pink bathrooms. Some of the pictures on the pink bathrooms blog remind me of Catherine’s bathroom; if you’ve ever been to her house, you know her bathroom looks super cool.

Are ranch houses interesting now because they’re becoming scarce? Do we forget what they displaced? Although they were often built in new suburban (read: car-focused) areas, in many cases they displaced older houses that were demolished in the name of “urban renewal.” On the other hand, it’s not the houses’ fault they displaced something. (Arguably I have a problem with personifying.) Does scarcity = appreciation? Will we one day appreciate harvest gold and avocado green, and those godawful kitchen floors? Do people have positive memories of some things simply because it’s what was around when they were kids? Will I end up appreciating the generic boring 80s/90s houses I referred to above?

The last thing I was thinking about that I wanted to write about was “imposter old houses” - for example, here’s one we looked at when we were house-hunting. We thought it was an old house that had been renovated, but we found out it was built in 2007! If the original house is too far gone to be saved, I don’t mind “tear-down” infill housing when it fits the character of the neighborhood like this. It’s the McMansions I can’t stand.

Update: I found out some more info about the blue sink pictured above. The brand name is Crane and the type is Drexel. More info at Bathroom Machineries:

The Crane Plumbing Company was famous for it’s high-end faucets and fixtures. Crane used dozens of sylish and innovative designs, most utilizing non-standard features. Crane was bought out in the 1970’s, and the new owner discontinued all parts. Finding parts for some of these fixtures can be a challenge. Below are some of the solutions we at Bathroom Machineries have managed to come up with with links to our repair parts pages.

And based on this thread (yes, I know, it’s Yahoo Answers), I’m guessing the color is either Sky Blue or Powder Blue.

Lots of stuff in my head. I’ve been itching to write a long-ass blog post since last night, but I haven’t had the time nor do I think I’d be able to find the right words to really convey what I mean. I have a post in draft mode w/ all my notes to self saved for reference, in case I ever do write that post. (I also have a post in draft mode that’s been there since September, but let’s not get into that.) I’m halfway tempted to just put it up as-is, even though it would make absolutely no sense. It’s all sentence fragments and typos and weird abbreviations that make sense to no one but me.

But the truth is I’ve been bothered all day by the EAV shooting that I wrote about yesterday. I spilled it all out to Rusty at lunch and hopefully I made more sense than if I’d been writing. I even used an analogy to 9/11, and even though there should probably be a Godwin’s Law for that, in this case it fits.

I just feel sick about the whole thing and the way people are reacting - all these reactions that are making me use the word STRAWMAN, which I loathe. It makes me want to withdraw from humanity. If this is really how people think then how can I feel safe around them?

Might come back to this later and finish the fabled post. We’ll see. For now, there’s a twisted knot of sickness in my gut that won’t go away. I’m going to try to ignore it by changing the subject for now.

~*~

I continue to be paranoid (not really the right word, because it is a justified concern) about losing my nearly 7 years of blog posts to the bowels of the internet. I want this record of my life, such as it is, to be around for a long time. Recently I read about a woman who periodically makes hard copies of her blog posts for a specific period of time through lulu.com. That’s a damn good idea. For a while I was printing out all my posts and saving them in a big binder, but it got to be too much work and unmanageable. (”Admitted that my blog had become unmanageable…”) Plus - and this would still be an issue w/ the lulu.com solution - it doesn’t preserve the comment threads. But I suppose preserving the posts w/ no comments is better than preserving nothing at all. I might look into this. Someone really needs to form a start-up with venture capital from angel investors (more Bingo words!) that specializes in multi-format, redundant blog backups - NOT just copying stuff to whatever the latest form of magnetic storage is and being done w/ it.

~*~

Back to serious stuff for a minute - another thing I want to write about, in conjunction w/ the rest of my thoughts on the EAV shooting, is the false concept of the innocent victim and how it’s a red herring anyway. But I’m definitely too sleepy to get into that right now. Consider this a personal, mental bookmark.

~*~

Speaking of bookmarks, did anyone else notice that del.icio.us now redirects to delicious.com? Maybe it’s been that way for a while and I just wasn’t observant. Did that happen after Yahoo bought them? (Yahoo did buy them, right? Sometimes I can’t keep track of who’s zooming buying whom.)

~*~

Tuesday is the inauguration and originally I was planning to work from home. Rusty is working from home that day because he has an appointment in the morning, so he’ll work 12-8 from home. I figured I’d work from home so I could have the inauguration coverage on in the background and just work on the couch w/ my laptop. But today they sent out an email saying they’ll have live coverage on the “big screen” (read: conference room projection screens) and free lunch! I’m sure it’ll be crowded but the free lunch always gets me. I’ll be going into the office.

God speed to those of you who are going to DC - including Crystal and Dominque, who are staying in Philadelphia because that’s the closest room they could find. I say, better y’all than me. Being in a crowd of that many people does NOT sound fun to me, even though I understand on a theoretical level wanting to be a part of history. I’ll just enjoy the history from the conference room at work w/ a plate of free food, thanks.

~*~

Today our Realtor scheduled our closing, so barring any catastrophes next week (and you better believe I’ll be emailing EVERYONE on Tuesday to “follow up”), as of January 29 in the late morning/early afternoon, Rusty and I will be homeowners! It’s so hard to believe. Not sure how I’m supposed to be reacting, but it’s really weird. Every so often it’ll hit me and I’ll realize that this is our house and we can do whatever we want - this happens w/ a start, like one of those “OMG where’s my purse??” moments, only to then remind yourself you left it in [x] place on purpose. We can paint the walls whatever color we want and no one can tell us otherwise or charge us a fee to paint them back! We can drill holes in the ceiling and floor to mount a permanent pole and there’s no security deposit to lose! The list goes on.

And indeed, one of the first things we plan on doing, before we move all our furniture over, is painting. So we have to think of colors! Rusty might paint the kitchen Tennessee orange, which despite my obligatory protestations, I’m actually okay with. We know for a fact we’re going to have a yellow room. Other than that, we haven’t decided.

The order of events will go like this:

1. Install security system
2. Have the pest control people come out for the works
3. Put sealant/protectant (whatever you call it) on deck so rainwater doesn’t damage it
4. Paint various rooms
5. Put up lots of birdfeeders, nestboxes, and birdbaths in the backyard. Also plant shrubs that produce berries that birds like to eat.

Initial heads-up: we’ll be selling our washer and dryer because the house comes with a new set. I’ll also be selling my pole/stage. We can give you our microwave for free because the house comes w/ one and I doubt this microwave is worth much in terms of money, but it functions just fine. If you want any of these things, let me know. We also have some unraveling wicker chairs, and you can have those too if you want them. I was figuring they’d go to the Goodwill donation center.

~*~

It’s cold outside and we have the little space heater set up next to the bird cage. I have it on the almost-lowest setting. The first night we ran it, I had a nightmare that it cooked Puff and Stuff to death in their sleep. It was awful and I hate that I even mentioned it because now I’m thinking about it again. I’m really concerned about it not being too hot for them, while at the same time keeping them warm.

For those who are curious, here are pictures of Puff and Stuff. Sometimes I can’t get over how adorable they are.

I apologize for the state of the perch Stuff is standing on in that picture. Rusty and I are very responsible birdkeepers and we clean their cage and perches regularly.

~*~

Rusty is sitting next to me on the couch playing a game of NCAA Football on his X-Box, and I just looked up and this status bar thing said “Commencing graduation ceremony,” and then 2 seconds later it moved on to the next thing. Ha.

~*~

It’s a three-day weekend so maybe I’ll finally get off my duff and write some damn emails. I feel like a bad friend. :P I should get over that, because we’re all constantly connected thanks to Twitter and Facebook, but still. God.

Okay, turning off the ramble spigot for now and hitting the sack. Commence adding a million tags which take up 3 or 4 lines.

On Twitter I saw a link to this post and then I saw some back-and-forth @ messaging between Sara and Griftdrift. I really don’t have time to be getting sucked into blog threads or writing one of my own right now; I’m at work and need to focus on work. But I do want to dash something off, because reading the thread at Griftdrift’s made me feel sick to my stomach.

I know the usual BS talking points: liberals are soft on crime. Whatever. This isn’t about being soft on crime. It’s about not taking such satisfaction, wipe your hands and be done w/ it, in the death of another human being.

Someone will probably say I’m trying to excuse what he did or say it’s okay. Um, hello, tell me where I said that. I get so frustrated when people put words like that in my mouth.

Far be it for me to tell anyone how to react in the face of a crime but it just seems to me like the guy in the car who shot and killed the guy over-reacted. That’s not really the right word because it sounds too much to me like people making excuses for rapists (even though this is a totally different situation, there are always assholes who will try to pretend that they’re not). But something just feels “off” about it. And it really, really bothers me.

Now, everyone has a right to defend themselves. Of course they do! And I don’t like how sometimes it seems like some people who identify as liberal or progressive are saying that people can’t defend themselves, don’t have a right to personal property, etc. To me that’s ridiculous and that’s not what I’m saying. Hello, I live in the city too and yes, we have a crime problem and no, I would not fault anyone for defending themselves against a crime, and no I do not think anything makes robbing “okay” nor do I care more about the robbers’ humanity/well-being than the victim’s!

However it’s not going to fix anything for everyone to be packing and go around shooting anyone who dares to ask for money. Until we address the underlying systemic issues that lead to so many people being in a position where they are begging for money and/or robbing others at gunpoint, we won’t actually make any progress. There has to be reform to the broken system rather than just reaction. And this is not to say some reaction is not necessary. (I feel like I can’t even get out what I want to say because I’m constantly anticipating strawman arguments in response. And I hate that word “strawman!”) But you can’t have just reaction; otherwise nothing changes. 1 in 100 adults in the U.S. are now incarcerated; tell me the system isn’t broken.

The other reason this disturbs me so much is because I’m afraid these same people (and in some cases I know it to be true) would take just as much glee in the antics of Steve Gower in midtown, persecuting and terrorizing street-based sex workers. It’s okay w/ them because it’s “crime” and who cares about those people anyway, who cares about their lives and circumstances, just get them out of my face where I don’t have to be made to feel uncomfortable. People have said “yay” and “good” to what Gower and others like him are doing and it makes me feel sick.

Situations like this really just make me worry about humanity. It makes my heart hurt and I’m not just being metaphorical when I say it makes me sick to my stomach. This is part of why I have such a problem trusting people. You never know when they’re going to turn around and rejoice because another human being is dead.

[Hitting post w/o proofreading - no time at the moment. Not that I bother most of the time anyway!]

Woo! Time for another packed-full-of-too-much-stuff, non-SEO-friendly, old-school-blogging post!

Speaking of SEO, Rusty and I were talking yesterday about how everyone wants high search engine rankings, and they’ll invest in all the whiz-bang SEO stuff but they won’t do the one thing that really matters: making sure anyone else knows their site exists so they’ll get some incoming links. Is that ironic? Or just unfortunate?

And that reminds of me of the scene in Reality Bites where Winona Ryder’s character (a journalism major who was valedictorian of her class) is asked, at a job interview, to define irony, and she stumbles over her words and can’t come up with a definition. Then she goes home and tells Ethan Hawke’s character what happened and complains that no one can define irony anyway, and he immediately defines it as when the actual meaning is the opposite of the literal meaning. When I first saw the movie, I remember thinking that that definition sounded awfully fancy, but when you think about it, it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. Now, searching webster.com, I see they include the same definition:

Main Entry: iro·ny
Pronunciation: \ˈī-rə-nē also ˈī(-ə)r-nē\

Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural iro·nies
Etymology: Latin ironia, from Greek eirōnia, from eirōn dissembler
Date: 1502

1: a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other’s false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning —called also Socratic irony
2 a: the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b: a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c: an ironic expression or utterance
3 a (1): incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2): an event or result marked by such incongruity b: incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play —called also dramatic irony tragic irony

To me it seems like 3a is the definition that makes the most sense.

~*~

But enough of that. The big news is, re: the house… we are officially under contract!! We have binding agreement as of Thursday. This morning, we had our home inspection, termite inspection, mold test (will get results by Tuesday), and appraisal. The appraiser was so stereotypical. He struck me as someone out of a 1960s movie. But he was apparently impressed enough with the house to actually speak to us and say as much. Ha! As for the home inspection, it went well. The inspector found a few issues (naturally), but most of them are small things that the workers should have done in the first place during the renovation.

Now that I’m not quite as nervous about jinxing the sale, I’ll post a few more photos:

There’s also an old wooden swingset in the backyard that’s super cool.

I’m so excited! Thank you to everyone who has @’ed or DM’ed on Twitter about the house. I really need to write emails to people. I don’t want to become one of those people who constantly whines on being soooo behind on email, blogs, etc. But I think I’ve reached a tipping point where it’s all getting to be too much to manage. More on that later, though. The point: Thanks for all the well-wishes about the house! I’m going to be a home-owner, holy crap!

~*~

I don’t know how to write about this without upsetting someone, because regardless of my intent I know emotions are (100% understandably) a bit raw right now. Yet I still feel the need to speak, and I admit I’m doing it after Karsh did the hard work of speaking first. Ever since I heard about the vigil at The Standard and the formation of the Facebook group against rising crime in Atlanta, something about it didn’t sit well with me. Karsh articulated it well:

Yes, citizens in Atlanta need to feel safe. But I get the overwhelming perception from people I’ve talked to and read about that because this happened in East Atlanta, things must really be out of hand. I’d disagree with that. What if this happened in Bankhead or East Point or Buckhead? Would the public outrage be this great or this social-media oriented? Why start organizing now? Because it happened at a familiar haunt? I can almost smell a Twitter hashtag forming. (I’m partially kidding about that.)

I don’t disbelieve Maigh’s sentiment, and yet the fact is, we haven’t seen this type/level of outrage over other murders. To me it kind of smells like when I call a guy on sexist behavior and he insists, “I’d treat a man the same way!” Well, we don’t know that for a fact, now do we? And it’s moot anyway, because you haven’t treated a man this way. (Yet another clumsy analogy [I'm all about those lately] but I can’t think of a better one right now.)

Note this is not about accusing individuals of being “racists,” as in, a noun. People always latch onto that kind of thing and it derails discussions, because once again racism is cast as something that individuals perpetrate against other individuals, and you are either “a racist” or you aren’t; rather than racism being acknowledged as the systemic, ingrained, oft-unnoticed (by white people) issue it really is. Oh and if someone didn’t mean something in a racist way then it’s not racist. Except, that’s the entire point.

There are systemic issues here that have to be addressed, and if they’re not addressed, nothing will change. Yes, the cutting of the budget and reduction in police force is part of the problem. But far too many people are either ignorant of, or willfully ignoring, the deeper issue.

I’m sure someone will come over here and comment that I’m being disrespectful of John Henderson’s memory and that it’s not the appropriate time and that I’m just being an asshole. If they do, I understand. As I said, emotions are raw right now, and maybe it’s not the right time - but then, I wonder when the right time will be. I know what it feels like to deal with the loss of someone close to you, and the desire for “rational discourse” on a blog FFS is pretty much priority zero. So I understand and I’m sure I would feel the same way if it were my friend who had been murdered. But I just wanted to say my piece.

~*~

I admit I am a bit annoyed with this discussion of sex-positivity at Ren’s. Obviously I respect Ren’s right to like or dislike any terms, and to identify however she chooses! I get frustrated, though, when sex-positivity is constantly portrayed as meaning “I like sex.” Too many people have taken too many steps to explain why this is not the case for the myth to continue to be put forward. I know it’s a hard one to fight against because the marketing world has co-opted the term and applied it to things like fashion magazines, expensive shoes, and men’s body spray. As I said in the comments at Ren’s:

The sex-positive feminism wikipedia page and sex-positive wikipedia page actually have a much more detailed history of the term than the about.com article. I’m always a bit wary about linking to those pages though, because sometimes they get edited by anti-sex-positive people with an ulterior motive.

Anyway, personally, I’m not interested in debating the meaning of the term. It’s been spelled out pretty clearly in many places. For me, it’s part and parcel of feminism because it centers women’s sexual health and the way women’s sexuality has been pathologized under patriarchy. I provided links in order to help clarify some of the history behind the term; most people are not familiar w/ the history and unfortunately the way we most often hear it now is in the co-opted marketing sense, where it’s been twisted around so that it stands in for “anything vaguely related to sex, at all.” Often it’s applied to things that are completely the *opposite* of true sex-positivity.

Again, for me, I find that the term fits, and I will continue to self-identify as a sex-positive feminist. Everyone else is free to do what they want, of course!

See also my page of sex-positive feminism reference material, especially Queer Dewd’s post from two years ago on the matter. I (or anyone else) will never be able to say it better than she did.

~*~

This has been saved in my Bloglines for weeks, and I’m not sure what I can say about it, because you just need to check it out: $pread’s excellent cultural analysis of anti-trafficking posters. Seriously, read it. And tell me those images aren’t fucked up.

Thursday night, I led a discussion at the January Social Media Club Atlanta meeting. The topic was Online Identity and Buzzword Bingo - and yes, there was a real Bingo game. I was pretty proud of the cards, if I do say so myself; although I realized yesterday I left out a good one: “folksonomy.” Rusty did the design in Photoshop and I just love it. Note the iPhone-style letters at the top, and the Beta violator as the free spot. Here is J’s winning card:

Photo by j. brotherlove

The markers, btw, are magic beans which, if planted, will sprout a series of tubes leading to Robert Scoble’s house. Hardy har har.

The first two people to arrive at the meeting were new to Social Media Club, and one of them asked me if the Buzzword Bingo thing was a joke or for real. I said, “Well, it’s all in good fun, but yes, I really did make Bingo cards.” The point of the Bingo cards was to hopefully give everyone a self-referential laugh while at the same time getting people to stop and think about some of the language we use when we talk about social media. As I explained at the beginning of the meeting, one of the biggest problems I see with these conversations (G-47!) is that people use these words but we don’t have a common understanding of what the definitions are. It’s the same problem my BlogOrlando session addressed. I’ve seen similar problems happen in feminist circles when there isn’t a commonly-accepted lexicon (e.g., words like “objectification” and “degradation” can mean any number of things to different people). If we don’t share a common definition and just assume the other person knows what we mean, we end up talking past each other.

After explaining the Bingo game, I started by reading an excerpt from Sarah Dopp’s totally completely absolutely awesome post, “Why I Write About My Life On the Internet.” Here’s the part I read:

I write about my life on the Internet because it creates a space for these connections. What else could make a complete stranger feel safe emailing me to say, “I’m queer, and I can’t tell anyone, but I wanted to tell you“?

I’ve been writing about my life on the Internet for about nine years now. I’ve learned by trial-and-error what works and what doesn’t, and I manage my presence in a way that nourishes me. Sometimes I make mistakes and have to face negative consequences, but they’ve never come anywhere close to outweighing the benefits.

…

I write about my life on the Internet because it changes the way I connect with my own experiences. In order to write down a story, I have to sort through all of the details and focus on the ones that made it significant for me. I believe our stories shape us – the way we remember something affects who we are and how we relate to the world. Writing things down empowers me to consciously decide how I want to remember something, and to me, that’s an act of personal revolution. Then, when details get echoed back to me in someone else’s words – either through a comment or another blog post – my way of seeing things gets a little bit stronger, and my voice gets a little bit more steady.

Later, in response to something a participant said, I read this part as well:

I’ve worked through some very hard stuff through blogging, and I’ve made some powerful connections in the process. People have thanked me for telling stories that opened doors in their own lives that they didn’t know they were missing out on. Other bloggers have done the same for me.

I believe in telling stories, I believe we’re more powerful when we’re connected, and I believe in telling fear to f*ck off.

I couldn’t read the hyperlinks, of course, which just goes to show part of what is great about social media - the social aspect!

What motivated me to read the second part was a guy who seemed to be having trouble with the idea that forming relationships and deep connections is a valuable thing. I tried my best to hear him out and see where he was coming from, because I really cannot conceive of not seeing that as a valuable thing. I was trying to suss out whether he was confining it to just social media, and I pointed out that this really isn’t something that’s limited to social media - it’s what humans have been doing for millenia. It’s about socializing and connecting. I truly cannot understand how someone would not see that as valuable, but I acknowledged that even though I don’t understand it, I can grant that it’s possible. (It still boggles my mind, though.)

Something I really want to get at in these conversations is that the questions being raised are not new, or unique to social media. They’re the same issues we’ve always grappled with: What, and how much, do we share with whom? How do we make that decision? What if someone finds out something about us that we don’t want to be public information? The difference now is simply that social media is giving more people the tools to speak their truths candidly, to whatever degree they want. At the meeting I mentioned the transgressive potential of social media, how it can enable members of traditionally marginalized groups to speak without a filter. I said that’s something we need to always remember, instead of just falling into the trap of replicating existing power structures online. This was met with a lot of blank stares and I was afraid people were either bored or lost, so I stopped. But I really feel passionately about this.

As I said on Joseph’s blog, it frustrated me how much of the conversation focused on business, as these conversations often do. The topic of my BlogOrlando session was directly related to the concept of “professionalism,” but the idea behind the SMC-ATL meeting was more general. Certainly, business plays a huge role; but there are other reasons people self-censor as well. I think some of those deeper reasons need to be examined, because it seems like sometimes people use business as a go-to excuse (”my boss might see!”). I do get the sense, whenever I facilitate a discussion like this, that a lot of people really do feel held back and as if there’s something putting a gag on them. I see people really yearning to break out of all that and speak their truths. I see an internal battle happening because often these same people are defending compartmentalization, using words like “professional,” and bringing up red herrings such as not wanting to hurt someone’s feelings by writing something mean about them. But I can see the struggle in their eyes. I know that sounds really corny, but it’s true.

In a new post entitled “New Brand World: What’s Your Brand?”, AV Flox says:

Image matters. How other people perceive you is as important as what you’re actually doing.

I have to take issue with this. I think there are two very different issues being conflated here. For example, you might think you’re Jesus, but everyone else knows you’re a crazy person; in that sense, I completely agree with her statement. But it’s the other issue that bothers me: that we should measure our success or failure by what other people think. Don’t you remember hearing, back in grade school: “Don’t worry about what others think of you. Be yourself.” That’s sage advice, and again, this is nothing new to social media. When people start basing their identity on external perceptions, it’s a dangerous road to go down. Surely we can all agree that basing your self-worth on something other than external validation is a good thing.

It’s also part of being a grown-up. Children and teenagers seek external validation, and teenagers in particular are in the process of forming their own identities, and as such take a lot of cues from external feedback. Or, in layman’s terms: they’re awkward and self-conscious.

But as you get older, you start to get more self-confident, and you realize other people’s perceptions don’t matter and if you spent all day worrying about them you’d be exhausted. It’s why the 18-year-olds in the locker room hide behind their towels and surreptitiously change inside their clothes while the 50-year-old women walk around stark naked without a second thought.

I have a negative reaction to all this “personal brand” business on a very fundamental level, and I think AV Flox’s statement gets to the crux of it. Saying “how other people perceive you is as important as what you’re actually doing” leaves out the essential question of, which people? I did not spend 10+ years in therapy working through this shit to see high school rehashed on the web among a bunch of adults. And yes, everyone deals with self-consciousness from time to time, or feeling discouraged by what someone said about them; to pretend we live in a vacuum where we’re not at all affected by others’ opinions would be foolish. But that is a far cry from giving precedence to what other people think over what you know. Because, as my favorite therapist once said, “You are the expert on you.”

I also got a bit flustered when, as I was talking about this very thing, Dave mentioned something about how you have to aware of how your actions and words affect other people. Well, YES, of course! I was flustered because to me that’s such an obviously, completely different thing. Yes, self-awareness is a GOOD thing and is part of what it means to have basic social skills. For example, if you identify as gay, you probably won’t explain the detailed mechanics of gay sex to your conservative Christian grandmother. Know your audience. However, that’s a very different thing than being in the closet and being afraid of your sexual orientation being “found out” because someone might be made uncomfortable. (I admit it’s a clumsy analogy but hopefully it gets the point across.)

Finally, one thing I tried to make painfully clear at the meeting was that I would never judge someone negatively for the choices they make in what information to share or not share online. That is each person’s call to make for themselves. I know I probably got repetitive with this at the meeting, but I wanted to make sure there was absolutely no misunderstanding. As I said to Nikki a while back, the point is not to mandate that people must have a certain level of openness online, but rather for all of us to respect each other’s choices and boundaries without prejudging. That means that if I don’t prejudge you because you don’t write about sex, you also don’t prejudge me because I do.

At one point Dave brought up the different (mostly inadequate) methods of restricting online content to only certain people, and he mentioned that I’ve written some password-protected blog posts. After addressing the technical side of things, I talked about how I’ve been dismissed as a hypocrite because of my password-protected posts - and why that dismissal doesn’t parse for me. Yes, I am fairly open with what I write; but that doesn’t mean I don’t have boundaries. The failure of some people to grasp this, and instead their insistence on a black-and-white view, confounds me. I mentioned that a lot of my password-protected posts were about my dad’s death. It’s simply not something that I want to be available for public consumption. That’s my choice to make. Someone else might prefer their writing on their father’s death to be available for all. That’s their choice to make. Both are equally valid.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the meeting and helped make it an interesting discussion. People weren’t talking much at the beginning and I was worried the topic was a flop. But eventually people got warmed up and the discussion really got going. I wish I could’ve stayed all night to talk about it! These are not questions that have easy yes or no answers or problems that can be solved and done away with; we’ll continue to deal with this stuff as social media trends evolve, just like we’ve been dealing with it forever.

One week from today, I’ll be here; will you? (note: link is a Facebook page)

SMC ATL: Online Identity and Buzzword Bingo

When: Thursday, January 8, 7:00pm - 8:30pm
Where: Manuel’s Tavern - North Avenue Room

Thanks to Amber Rhea for leading the conversation and bingo game! Bring your bingo dauber and POV on these identity topics!

• Is your online identity different from your IRL identity?
• What does it mean to “manage your online identity”?
• Are there any off-limits topics on blogs? Who decides?
• Rethinking the personal/professional dichotomy and tearing down the walls of compartmentalization: yea or nay?

If you would like to add to the topics or join Amber in a panel format - please contact Peter or Tessa about your interest.

January sponsors needed! Please contact us if you can offer event food and beverage support.

Like the description says, if you’re interested in doing a panel-ish format, get in touch w/ Tessa or Peter (or me!) in the next day or two.

Next week Rusty and I will be venturing out with our Realtor for the first time to go look at houses - as in, actually go inside. I’m very excited and also nervous. We sent her a list of seven houses we narrowed it down to that we want to look at. (What a grammatical nightmare that sentence was; Mrs. Cody would be shaking her head in disgust.) Here are exterior photos of the houses and descriptions of what we liked about each of them. I’m mainly posting this for my own purposes, so I can compare it with my thoughts after actually visiting the houses! If you happen to be interested for whatever reason, read on…
Read the full post »

I’ve just come from the December Social Media Club Atlanta meeting and am feeling both discouraged and motivated at the same time. Discouraged because social media has reached that tipping point where people are just trying to cash in on it but losing the original spirit of what it’s all about (and those same people scoffed at it 2, 3 years ago - and yes, I have specific individuals in mind), and because yet again tonight some dude tried to tell me I’m “too open” online and “guys are jerks.” Hello, how is this my problem or my responsibility?? As for blogging losing its original spirit, see also Cecily and Tiffany. And me, over and over again.

But I’m also motivated, because I like encouraging people to think about things, really examine them. That’s why I enjoyed my BlogOrlando session so much. I could really (but not literally!) see the wheels turning in some people’s heads. Every time someone would use a buzzword, I’d stop and say, “Let’s define what we mean by that.” Because without a common understanding of definitions, there’s no way to have a productive conversation. And too many people use buzzwords as verbal shortcuts, effectively saying nothing. And there were so many buzzwords tonight. I lost count at some point. But I talked with Tessa, and she’s open to the idea of me leading a meeting and focusing on this. People really need to deconstruct some of the stuff they say. It’s the same reason I asked the question tonight about, sure we all sit here and talk about monetizing and tools that integrate with Twitter and etc. etc., but really, would you WANT your Twitter stream to be full of that? You, as a person, who uses it on a day to day basis - not as the figurehead of a company or god forbid a “social media expert.”

I’m just dashing this off before bed, so I’m sure it doesn’t make much sense, particularly if you weren’t at the meeting tonight. But I hope to be able to write more tomorrow or this weekend.