Being Amber Rhea

Jobs I’ve had: Baxter Street Bookstore

Not much to say about this one since I already mentioned it in one of the shitstorm-predicating class posts. I worked at Baxter Street Bookstore in Athens for about a week in, I think, May of 2001. The job paid minimum wage and no one was scheduled for more than 20 hours a week. I distinctly remember a coworker, a 21-year-old girl in a pink Lacoste shirt, talking about how she had just had laser eye surgery. All my coworkers seemed to be from another planet, and they looked at me as if I were from another planet. (They always seemed to be looking me up and down. The fucking nerve of them.) When I asked the manager if I could have more hours, she took me aside and said that this really wasn’t the job for me, if I was trying to actually support myself. I was pretty pissed off. During the interview (at least I guess I had an interview?), no one had seen fit to tell me this wasn’t a job for people who actually had bills and rent to pay, it was a way for rich kids to make some extra beer money.

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This is a follow-up to my first jobs post and my subsequent “jobs I forgot” list.

All you need to know about networking with System 6

Now that we’ve all recovered from my attempt at video-making in 1998, it’s time for some 2009 video-making, which is actually less fancy – but, oddly, has editing! I guess it all evens out. Here, I talk about the PowerBook 145B and Farallon PhoneNet connectors, and mention the moon landing.

7-year retrospective

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!

Class consciousness: all I can do is write my own story

Instead of constantly writing from a place of “what if” and “what does it mean” and trying to find the right words when talking about class and privilege (yes, the two are different and distinct), I thought I’d write down some memories that shaped my class consciousness, as you might call it. Some of the comments on this post by Hugo Schwyzer inspired me to go ahead w/ this. And, yeah, I agree: if your parents can pay your way for seven years of college and grad school, that’s not “comfortable,” that’s rich. And I say this as someone who has problems w/ the word “rich” and the reductive way in which it’s often applied. But it bugs me when people try to act like they’re not as well-off as they really are. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective. Here are the notes I wrote down when reading the comment thread there:

What does it mean to be rich

When you *are* rich, do you try to deny it to “fit in” or “get cred”
And is your perspective skewed?

Or is everyone’s perspective skewed w/ their own experience at the center? (other than the VERY poor and VERY wealthy)
Back to why I was so uncomfortable at the financial planner’s office

Was I poor? Working class? Middle class?
I’ve come to identify as working class bc all the descriptions I’ve read, that one seems to “fit” best with the way it felt

But idk

“As for teaching, I have to admit that the maxim “If you do what you love, the money will follow” is intensely dangerous and irresponsible if not qualified with supplemental information.”

Yes, this quote has ALWAYS bothered me
It has always reeked of so much privilege it’s painfully obvious

My own experience mirrors this, somewhat
http://hugoschwyzer.net/2009/02/12/the-thoughts-of-six-hundred-pounders-professional-feminism-class-privilege-and-the-responsibility-to-teach-wisely-and-well/#comment-498164 (except UGA was actually a *good* school, not second-rate; I felt the quality of my education there was excellent)

So, memories:
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Class and Oppression Olympics

Sometimes I wonder if there’s a kind of Oppression Olympics with class-related stuff. For one thing, when you start talking about class, this is what most people associate with the word “privilege.” And I feel like discussions involving class sometimes descend into a kind of oneupsmanship.”Our lights were always getting turned off because we could only afford rent or bills, not both!” “Oh yeah? We lived off of food stamps when I was growing up!” And so on and so forth.

I get annoyed by class discussions for reasons at both ends of the spectrum. This bit from a recent comment at Anji’s blog really rubbed me the wrong way:

However, your own photo you posted to this entry (and the other flickr photos) shows the pro-sex work protesters to be white, and visually middle class.

“Visually middle class?” What the hell does that mean? That’s just supporting the idea that you can tell what a person’s current financial/economic situation is, as well as their background and personal history, just by looking at them. And frankly I find that extremely condescending. There isn’t one way to be middle class, working class, poor, whatever. Thinking you can clock someone based on a set of external markers is reductive at best and downright offensive at worst.

I’ve mentioned before that for all the talk of the definition of privilege as not referring simply to economic advantage and/or being a personal fault, it seems like an awful lot of bloggers who should know better fall into this trap. This was particularly evident to me with that “class privilege” meme that was going around a while ago. Talk about annoying. No, class is not something you can determine by ticking a few boxes on a form. An empirical fact such as “when you were growing up you had a lot of books in the house” carries, by itself, not much information. It’s all the backstory, the complex stuff that can’t be represented by a tick-mark, that contains the real information.

I also keep coming back to what Queer Dewd said: “Class is not a sweater that you take on and off.” I hate the way some bloggers have been guilty of pointing to a person’s current perceived (because let’s be honest, for the most part they don’t know much about anyone else’s personal situation) economic status as if it exists in a vacuum. There is also a conflation of income and wealth which I find very frustrating and, again, reductive. (We’ve discussed this at some length at Octogalore’s blog, but I can’t find the thread now.)

On the other hand I’m also annoyed from the other side, when people try to act like economic privilege doesn’t exist, or minimize its importance. Sometimes I wonder if I’m slipping into the Oppression Olympics game, but I really do feel it’s worthwhile to talk about the differences in perspective from people who have never really known what it felt like to not “have enough” as opposed to people who have felt the very real effects of the lack of a safety net. To pretend these differences don’t matter, or to minimize their effect, is foolish.

Hugo wrote a post yesterday about college graduates who end up having an existential crisis after graduation and I just can’t get too worked up about feeling sorry for them. Yes, I know I went to college; but these are the kinds of people who annoyed me in college. They didn’t seem to have any sense of perspective. They never had to worry about paying the rent or paying their tuition or anything like that, because mom and dad were taking care of it. Or like on the Suze Orman show the other night, this couple was asking whether they should focus on saving for retirement or saving for their child’s college education. To me the idea of saving for a kid’s education is so foreign. I wonder what it would feel like to be someone who had a college fund or whose parents paid their tuition. Personally I think college students should pay for their own education, take out loans, get jobs, figure out how to make ends meet, because otherwise you get this protracted adolescence and a lack of understanding of the real world. Or maybe I just think that because I’ve always been so independent, by nature. I wouldn’t have wanted to be supported by my parents even if it had been financially possible. I was an adult and I wanted to live accordingly – which is why I used to get so annoyed by people talking about college students as if they weren’t adults. I probably even wrote about it on this blog back in 2002.

The above, about paying for college, might sound draconian. You might ask, why shouldn’t someone’s parents pay for their college, if they can afford it? And, yeah, I get that. It’s not like I’m advocating making a law or something. :P I’m just saying I think being able to fend for yourself is an important skill that should come sooner rather than later. And it’s a skill many people don’t have the luxury of foregoing.

So is it Oppression Olympics, to say that? Or just fact?

Conversation about sex work, college, money, and more

Today I had a rather lengthy email exchange with Christopher Penn about sex work, economics, financial aid, and stereotypes. (Yes, all of those things together!) I was frantically typing away in multi-tasking mode while at work, and somehow my replies ended up being longer and smarter-sounding than I’d expected, so I figured I had blog material on my hands. (I did some minor editing to fix typos and such in the parts I wrote.) Hence:
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Quick brain dump

I don’t have time for much of anything other than work today, but I do want to post something real quick in response to a discussion at Ren’s place. Over there, I said:

Octo,
As I said before, I agree w/ a lot of what you are saying re: the gendered tilt to “sex week” being problematic. In fact, we agree on much more than we disagree on here, so I don’t want it to seem like I’m nit-picking. But this did irritate me a little:

And “age is just a number” notwithstanding, college girls and guys aren’t that savvy about longer term issues.

Now I realize I have this thing where I personalize everything. I’m not sure how to stop doing that, or even if I *should* stop – but what it boils down to is, when I see a general statement made that doesn’t apply to me, a little red flag goes up, because that means the general statement isn’t so general. And sure, I could be an outlier, and there is value in speaking in generalities if they apply to a large majority – I certainly understand that. And yet, that statement rankles. When I was in college, I absolutely was savvy about longer-term issues, and I was very annoyed and insulted by people assuming I wasn’t, simply because of my age or because I was in college.

I really like and respect Octogalore and so I didn’t snap at her or anything. I want to understand where she’s coming from. But it might end up being a fundamental difference in perspective, and I do take umbrage at the suggestion of college girls being “impressionable” and, basically, infantilized.

This is something that always bugged the shit out of me in college, the way some people insisted on treating college students like high school students in slightly bigger bodies. (I saw more of this at UGA than at NYU, but I have no doubt it happens to a degree at every college.) I was always like, goddammit, college students are adults! We are over 18. Hence, ADULTS. So fucking treat us like adults!! If you continually treat college students as NOT adults, what good does that do? It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And yeah, some people come from sheltered backgrounds. But you know what? They’ve gotta grow up and learn how to deal in the real world at some point. So quit with the coddling, because it’s fucking offensive!

I may have even blogged this sentiment when I was in college, because I’ve had my blog that long.

As for this Yale Sex Week business, hey, Gail Dines, did you even bother to look at the schedule? The “Who Looks Most Like a Vivid Girl” contest contest is one part of a full week of diverse programming. As in many situations, parts of the programming might not be nearly as “progressive” as they are marketed to be. Color me skeptical. And yeah, if I were at Yale, that contest would likely stick in my craw. But as far as the actual women involved, it all boils back down to a pretty simple concept for me. I don’t have to like or endorse or sing the praises of every woman’s choice. DUH. But see the thing is, other women don’t NEED my approval to do whatever it is they want to do, and vice versa.

Drunkblog update #3

I just finished my 3rd fuzzy navel. They ordered me a shot of vodka and red bull. (ANd I ordered water so I don’t get sick.)

Now I feel like I should talk about some history of me and drinking. Watch out, I may start to emote all over the place. The first time I got drunk was when I left my old/new job the first time – Oct. 7, 2005. I blogged about it … Im too lazy to link to the post tho, so if you just search the archives you’ll find it. Since then I have been drunk maybe 3 other times… actually, Ryan was invilved in all of those, ha! He is a bad influence! (Or a good one?)

In college at UGA, I once wrote a letter to the student paper about why it’s possibl;e to have fun in college without drinking. I always felt uncomofrtable around drinking, actually. This is, I’m sure, largely due to the firsthand experience I had wuith it since I was a little kid all the way thru my life… bc my dad is a serious alcoholic. And it took years of therapy for me teven to be able to SAY that! Even though I always knew it in my heart, saying it, admitting it, somehow makes it “real”… and I couldn’t do it, for the longest time. I never really had a model of healthy drinking. And let’s be honest, the way college students binge drink and all that shit is not healthy. And it never appealed to me anyway… who wants to puke all over the place? That does not sound fun. Maybe if you grew up in a really religiouslly moral household or something, where there was NO DRINKING AT ALL, then aybe you would need to let off some steam and indulge in all that shit? But it kind of seems like acting out, but whatever, who am I to judge… people need to do what they need to do… but I still don’t want to be around it, and people should’t try to make me feel weird becayse of that (like some of them did in colege). I say FUCK THEM!

So now that I’m in a more supportive enviriboment, I can have fun with it, but I still don’t drink very much AT ALL, nor do I want to. And here’s the other thing! I don’t like the taste of most alcohol! It’s disgusting as far as I’m concerned! Beer is gross, I cannot drink it. And the kinds of drinks I like, they have to have enough flavor in them to MASK the taste of the alcohol itself. Hence fuzzy navels, amaretto sours, hell even screwdrivers…

And now the glass of vodka on ice and TWO cans of redbull has arrived… oh god. We’ll see how this goes, won’t we!

once I get to my porn rant (that’s coming soon), i hope I’m still coherent enough to make sense and not make too many typos. I know I’m already making typos, but I’ve decided not to go back and correct all of them bc it would take too long… and for some reason using the ‘backspace’ key seems to take longer than regular typing. I don’ tknow what that’s about.

Stay tuned, I hope my rant will at least make some sense and not just be stupid idiotic drunken jibberish. :P

College is so passé

This quote from an AJC article (login) about a new “career-oriented” high school in Rockdale County disturbs me:

“Too many kids throughout the state have been going to college when they didn’t need to,” [Mike Lott, Rockdale's economic development director] said. “A career-oriented school like RCA gives them another option for finding a meaningful career.”

I guess he has a point, though; why focus on such pointless endeavors as higher education, when our military needs all the money it can get?

This entry is only a link, nothing more

Required reading for anyone about to graduate from college/grad school/whatever.