Fragments: Sex

When I was in high school, I heard all the stories about teenagers having sex. Oh, the horror! But I wondered, how are so many people getting away with all this sex?? Apparently a lot of them are doing it right in their own bedrooms! My parents didn’t work typical 9-5 jobs, so at least one of them was often around, and even if they weren’t, their schedules were so irregular that they could pop in at any moment. Sex in the house would be a foolish risk, and I had absolutely no clue what would happen if I was caught – but I was terrified to risk finding out. So in high school, for me, sex was in cars. (This was senior year of high school.) I became adept at searching the roads of Augusta for concealed areas. I always had at least three potential places up my sleeve. One time, parked at the top of a cul-de-sac where nothing was built yet, I am 99% sure it was a cop car that drove up and turned around. Surely they saw the car parked there, in the middle of the night. And they didn’t check it out? I still don’t understand. But I know I was lucky that night. As soon as I saw those headlights, I hopped down to the area under the dashboard on the passenger’s side, trying to cover myself with my retro 1970s green polyester shirt. The thought racing through my head was, “I’ll never go to college, I’ll never go to college, I’ll never go to college.” But they turned around and left.

Senior year of high school was a tumultuous time – a mix of highs and lows from one end of the spectrum to the other – but there was nothing tumultuous about sex, not in a bad way, I mean. Everything about it felt right and I felt like I was being true to myself, freed somehow, even for just a little while.

I debated the politics of blowjobs with a friend. Ridiculously, it’s basically the same debate that occurs ever few months in the feminist blogosphere. He said he wouldn’t let a girl give him a blowjob, because that was degrading to her. I said, excuse me? Let? What is this “let” business? In that scenario, the woman is just as passive as if she’s “getting fucked” or similar language we use wherein the woman is the recipient of whatever the man does to her. I said, what if I want to do it? Are you saying I’m not able to make that decision? Because I find that pretty insulting. If I want to do it, how is it degrading?

I don’t remember his answer, I think he just muttered something. Years later he apparently still had odd ideas about sex, but that’s another story altogether.

We went to senior prom together and I heard later from a mutual friend that he said he “wonder[ed] if Amber is going to try anything.” Try anything! Ha! No, I did not “try anything” – because, I did not subscribe to the idea of sex as a game, where you have to pull one over on the other person, con them into having sex with you. I don’t know if ‘consent’ was part of my vocabulary at the time but I smelled bullshit when I saw the way sex was portrayed in media, pop culture, society, everywhere, and it didn’t jibe with common sense, to me.

The people at my private school were way more progressive about sex than the people at my public school. A few of us had this silly goal to get everyone laid before graduation. We knew it wouldn’t happen but it was a fun thing to talk about, at the time. It seems stupid looking back, but hey, we were 18.

This picture was taken in France, which is apropos to nothing, but it seems like a good choice for inclusion in this post:

Me and Baker in France, 1998

Jun 12 2009 11:35 pm | Category: Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

LiveJournal, maybe?

Once again, and more and more, I am considering starting a friends-locked LiveJournal. Yes, LiveJournal! Why not continue to do password-protected blog posts on here, you might ask? Well, I have to send out the password each time and that feels dramatic. People who don’t have the password can see that the post is there and that has led to stupid drama in the past. And somehow I feel like it would be comforting to steal away somewhere that’s on a completely different system, totally third-party managed, not a domain I own and a platform I manage myself. Might not make much sense but for some reason it appeals to me in a way that doing password-protected posts here doesn’t, at the moment.

I won’t abandon this blog (and hell, I might not even start that LJ at all, I might just talk about it forever and never do it) and I actually hate blog posts where the blogger talks about how they don’t feel comfortable posting anymore because of what people might think. But that’s my situation and it’s not as simple as “what people might think” in the reductive sense of, OMG I base my entire self-worth on the approval and validation of strangers. No, it’s just, like Mary J. Blige, I too do not want drama in my life. And I’m sick of feeling eyes on me, of people who have their own expectations of what I should write or should do. Or people who have just decided I’m The Enemy and no matter what I say, they’re going to pounce on it and tell me how wrong I am. Or my mom will read my posts and call me up and say she doesn’t want me to get mad but am I okay, really, am I, can I please take care of HER needs by NOT working shit out in a way that’s helpful for me? For some people, I’m not enough of an activist w/ my blogging – it’s too personal, everyone hates navel-gazing, I mean no one CARES, get over yourself, geez. For others I am not personal enough, they want to know more, they feel entitled to every detail. And for still others I’m just doin’ it wrong, no matter what.

Some things I’ve had on my mind and wanted to write about are:

There’s more but I’m forgetting it.

And to be fair part of why I haven’t written as much is time, but that’s also a cop-out as a full excuse, because if I didn’t feel so inhibited I would find the time. I would write this stuff instead of clicking around on Twitter and Tumblr and shit.

Jun 10 2009 11:35 pm | Category: Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments »

Just hit publish

[I started writing this several hours ago, so now the "Rusty in a meeting" part doesn't make sense. But he was in a meeting when I started it!]

While Rusty is at a meeting and I’m waiting for him at the office after hours since we carpooled to work, I should take this opportunity to blog. And there’s so much I could blog about.

Diva’s post about acceptance, sexuality, and gender identity. I don’t disagree w/ the premise. But a few parts of it felt like little barbs, because I’ve had the “acceptance” line used against me to punish me for not staying with my ex after I found out she was trans. You know: “If you REALLY loved her, you’d stay with her!” Love is about the person not the gender, etc. But what none of them seemed to understand is finding out she was trans was about more than the gender. SO much more. That was part of it, of course, and not a miniscule one; but people reduce it to that and draw this line in the sand when they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. Often it came from other trans people, probably projecting their feelings of resentment toward their own exes onto me, and at the same time using pronouns I was not ready to hear. Guess what: sometimes it’s not about you. And that’s why I created the SOTS Forum web site, to talk about these things that nobody else seems to get, to have a place where we didn’t have to constantly explain ourselves and do damage control. And this morning, I was cleaning up a few things on the site, and everything felt painful. I know I’ve neglected that site for a long time, and the message board has been broken for over a year and I recreated it as a half-assed Google group… but it feels too draining to try to maintain it, a lot of the time. I don’t think it’s healthy for me. But then I feel guilty because I feel like I’m leaving other SOs hanging out to dry – people who need the support like I needed it when there was nothing there for me (and so I created the group). The good news, though, is that in the years since 2003 a few other support forums/sites have sprung up. I haven’t really taken a look at them to see what they’re like, though; but at least I know they’re there. Then I start wondering about my responsibilities to myself vs. my responsibilities to others, and what the balance is. My dad used to say I should write a book about my experience, and there isn’t a book out there like it; and indeed I’ve referred to it as the book that scares me. That book would be filling an empty space and maybe helping to make some people feel a little less alone, less like bad people for not loving their trans partner unconditionally (not that that’s really what the situation is, but I’m saying, that’s what people spin it as). But for now, at least, I don’t think writing that book would be healthy for me. And yet I feel so strongly empathic to all the suffering people out there who have nowhere to turn.

I could write about going through a depressive spate – but lately I feel hyper-aware of writing about anything like that, even though I really want to. My mom reads my blog, Twitter, etc., even though we don’t openly talk about it (which is probably fucked up in its own right but I need to focus on one thing at a time), and I’m not going to try to stop her, because it’s the internet and we’re both adults. But I do think she has some responsibility, too, to realize that we’re BOTH adults, and if I need her help or support on something, I’ll tell her. Sometimes we’ll talk on the phone and she’ll preface something with, “I know this might make you mad but…” and inevitably it’s about something she read on my blog, and she’s saying she’s worried. Which I didn’t mind terribly the first few times, but it’s getting to a point where it’s starting to feel less like concern and more like, take care of my need to think you never have ups and downs in your life by silencing yourself on the not-so-great parts. Even though those are the parts I most desperately need to write about.

Then there’s this fucking post which makes my brain want to slide out of my ear – but if I write about that at all, I think I’ll do it in a separate post.

I’ve had this post by Daisy saved in an untitled draft for two months, and the thoughts about blogging and what it means to me and how it feels have been hanging around, mostly unwritten, since that time, too (actually more like three months now). That last round of bullshit in late February changed something for me. I actually have mentioned this briefly before. But speaking of being hyper-aware, I’m now hyper-aware of writing about ANY part of my life because someone might pounce on it and attack me for my “privilege,” (never mind I spend half my time calling out ACTUAL privilege), twist my words to fit their own agenda, use me as a convenient punching bag, etc. All that kind of stuff had been in the back of my mind for years – it comes w/ the territory of being a woman blogger, particularly a feminist blogger – but somehow that last crap made it feel even more stark. I’m trying to push it down and push it away and just press on like I always have before, but it feels way harder this time. I was reading back through some of my archives recently, looking at some of the bullshit I was handed by commenters before I either banned them or they got bored and stopped coming around, and to look at it objectively I wonder how I stood it. And how can people be so awful that they think it’s okay to talk to another human being that way? But then, that’s MALE PRIVILEGE for you.

I’m getting off track here. I want to write more about class and my experiences, but I feel like there’s no good way to do it without someone using me as an example for something. I hate the feeling of being analyzed and picked apart under a microscope by people who don’t know the half of it. You don’t know my life. So who the fuck do you think you are?

I think maybe part of it, for some people (the ones I’m at least willing to give the benefit of the doubt – a list which, admittedly, is getting shorter), is that they have a hard time understanding differences in blogs. This is a similar thing to what I mentioned when Toby interviewed me, and I’ve experienced it plenty from that direction too – where people who use social media for business/marketing purposes simply can’t conceive of the fact that there are bloggers out there who have different goals, non-business-focused goals, and that those goals are just as valid as theirs. Likewise, people who use blogging primarily for activism/advocacy can have a hard time differentiating the personal and the political. Yes, sometimes they mesh, and yes, sometimes I write posts of that nature. But my blog has never had one “theme” for me to feel boxed into (I started blogging before there was much of a concept of themed blogs) and sometimes my posts are just PERSONAL. As in, there is nothing here to debate or question. This is my truth. It is not a political statement aside from the fact that I think any woman speaking her truth is an act of personal revolution. But when I talk about my experiences with class growing up, I’m not talking about CLASS in the big-picture, societal, analytical way. I’m sharing something with you, the readers, and if you get something out of it, that’s awesome. I do hope that sometimes my personal posts will help someone out there feel less alone, or whatever. But if you don’t get anything out of it, or you want to project all over it? Just leave it alone, because it’s not that kind of post. Some things are not up for debate.

This is the same kind of thing I mean when I said, for example, reproductive justice is not an “issue” to “debate.” This is MY LIFE. You don’t get to “debate” about it, and fuck you for thinking of it as a dehumanized issue; THAT is one of the hallmarks of privilege.

But back to blogging and how I feel about it… Basically there’s a lot of goddamn drama in the feminist blogosphere and I’m sick of it. I barely read any feminist blogs anymore because I don’t have the energy for all the bullshit. We talked about this a little at Sex 2.0 during the Naked on the Internet panel… Dacia said something like, “I think we’ve all been in the position of getting righteous in a comment thread on Feministing and then saying, ‘Oh, fuck this!‘”

But I will always call myself a feminist. I know that the drama and bullshit is with the feminist blogosphere (and really just part of it – a loud part, but not the whole), not feminism itself. I am continually baffled by people who conflate the two, and I really don’t have much patience for it.

I don’t have a lot of patience in general (except when I do – but that’s another tangent) and I’m fucking DONE trying to explain privilege, feminism, class, etc. I should also be done w/ trying to appease people who are going to complain about what I say no matter what I say. But I just hate that w/ some topics there doesn’t seem to be a good way to write about it that doesn’t make me sound like someone whose views I disagree w/ equally.

I know what I really need to do is what I’m constantly telling myself: write like no one is reading. That is what blogging is about, for me. But it’s not always easy. And of course I always keep in mind issues of where my life intersects w/ other people’s lives, and that even though there are things I might want to talk about, they might not want their life made public in that same way. But that’s a whole other can of worms and not what I’m rambling about here. That can of worms, I actually feel pretty equipped to deal with and I can happily discuss the ins and outs of it all day long!

I guess in a way this very post is indicative of me trying to take back my own blog… half of it doesn’t make sense, I’m talking in circles, making sense to no one but myself, and it’s fucking LONG. Yay!

I had a few other things on my “could write about” list but they’ve flown out of my head at the moment. So I suppose I’ll do what I thought I’d be doing a few hours ago: just hit publish!

May 28 2009 10:35 pm | Category: Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

7 years… and radio silence?

Friday is my 7th blog birthday (or “blogiversary” if you prefer), and I have no idea what to say. I haven’t done any substantive blogging since late February. I have so much inside of me that I want to get out, but I don’t follow through w/ writing a post; it doesn’t feel right. I go thru these phases from time to time but this one feels different. I can’t even put it into words. Or maybe I just don’t have the energy to try. And that’s part of it, in general.

I’m hoping my “blog itch” will come back soon. It always does. I’ve been a writer all my life. Maybe one night I’ll start writing and just pore it all out here. Who knows. But I’ve had to detach myself from a lot of the “communities” I previously associated with on the internet. I’m hoping this is just another instance of me, introvert, recharging the way I need to: by reconnecting w/ myself.

I’m tired of explaining the concept of privilege. I’m tired of having the same damn conversations over and over again. I’m tired of defending my right to speak about my own life. I’m tired of people running their mouths about shit they know nothing about. I’m tired of being reminded of what the REAL IMPORTANT POLITICAL issues are, thank you very much ma’am. I’m tired of monetization and thought leadership and personal brands and identity management. I’m tired of knowing all too well that the people I trust live very far away.

And, yes, out here in meatspace, I’m busy. That’s the truth. But to pretend that’s the full explanation for relative blog silence would be a lie.

I love our house. I love Rusty. I love that we’re taking a road trip to Fitzgerald, Ga. this weekend to see wild chickens. I love that the chickens were released into the nearby woods in the 1960s to be game birds, but instead they all came into downtown Fitzgerald and have been there ever since.

I also love tags. Here’s a tagged retrospective of blog birthdays past. I didn’t observe the first birthday because I was too busy throwing up, and the second one, unfortunately, is lost to the ether due to a hard drive failure. (Along with it, so are my blog chronicles of landing The Job in Atlanta, moving away from Dallas, etc.)

Apr 14 2009 10:22 pm | Category: Blog | Tags: , , , , | 4 Comments »

*continues work on carving out nice little echo chamber of my own*

Good lord. I got sucked into the various “o-spheres” (from which I had mostly extricated myself over a year ago, btu occasionally visited due to links from blogs I actually enjoy reading because they’re interesting, thoughtful, funny, challenging, insightful, personal, etc.) tonight and was reminded why this blog break has been so important in the first place. The levels of ridiculousness, drama, passive-aggressiveness, double standards, and overall STUPID BULLSHIT continues to astound. You want a concrete example? (EVERYBODY DOES!) – look at this comment from Belledame at ye olde untouchable BA’s blog -

BA is speaking for herself. It doesn’t matter if you think she’s wrong or what; it’s intrusive and invasive as hell (at minimum) to keep pushing at her like that.

Oh really! Well that’s rich. And quite interesting. ‘Cause when some of us (ME, that is – god forbid *I* be passive-aggressive too and not NAME NAMES!) do the same thing, we’re the subject of 100+ comment blog threads straight of high school and random interlopers coming over to dissect whether we REALLY know the truth of OUR OWN LIVES, demand EVIDENCE, break out the litmus test for Are You Really [insert fave oppression here]®, and better have those creds at the ready. </royal_we>

One thing I can say for myself about that thread on Belledame’s blog that I finally visited about 2 weeks after those jackasses came over here – it didn’t *hurt* me or anything. Not anymore. I looked at it and thought, you sad sad people. This is what you’re doing? How old are you. And it’s mostly the same small handful of people, I noticed. Belledame’s a classic bully and queen bee. Fortunately I graduated from high school many years ago. And being asked to leave (’cause it “just wasn’t working out”) that Den of Dysfunction Top Secret email list in late 2007 was a very good thing, it turns out.

But yeah – blog break continues, at least for a while, bc there is jut so much BULLSHIT. I feel I should write *something* in light of my approaching 7th blogiversary – not sure what yet. Maybe I’ll NAME MORE NAMES and INCITE DRAMA. Who knows. What I do know is, at the moment I’m refocusing and re-centering (as I said at Amani’s today). I need that once in a while. This blog was started for ME and no one else, and as such that’s how it shall remain, in whatever form it continues to take.

Apr 10 2009 11:34 pm | Category: Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Depression spacetalk (as Kim would say)

Even though I take my meds and practice the techniques learned through over 10 years of therapy, every once in a while I feel myself teetering on the edge of slipping back into depression.

It happened again this weekend when nobody could be bothered to come out to a thing I wanted to do. This has happened several times and I’m starting to get a complex about it.

And then I start having horrible thoughts. Who is really my friend? If something horrible were to happen, who would really be there for me? I’ve know far too many fair-weather “friends” in my life. I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting them. But sometimes they still trip me up.

I’ve mentioned I don’t trust people easily.

Would they do what they did for my mom when my dad died? Would they help me the way Mary Lou, Kim, Angie, and Maria helped her?

These thoughts are horrible, I know, I know. But they creep in.

And I get scared. I remember exactly why I need my meds, to keep me functional. If anything were ever to happen so that I didn’t have access anymore, I’d be in a pretty bad place.

People who haven’t experienced depression like to talk a lot of shit about anti-depressant medication. They say it alters your personality and makes you numb. Complete and utter bullshit. Depression alters your personality. Depression makes you feel like someone other than yourself. Your body has betrayed you and there’s nothing you can do to make it stop, even though logically you might know what’s happening. Just like with any other medical condition? The meds bring you back to yourself, let you function as yourself.

Nobody ever says this shit to diabetics who give themselves insulin shots, people with asthma who carry inhalers with them, people with a high blood pressure who take medication to keep it under control.

I know the signs and the triggers, and I try to manage them. But it’s hard. Especially because sometimes I don’t know what to do. I’m starting to get stressed out about some relatively minor stuff relating to the house and I can feel it threatening to spiral into something more serious. I’m trying my best not to let that happen… cue cognitive behavioral therapy. But it’s damn difficult. (Side note: I really do need to find another therapist I like. But the ones I’ve been to in Atlanta have all been lackluster at best and downright bad at worst. For now, I don’t have the energy, time, or money to keep shopping around.)

In the blogosphere fairly recently I encountered a term I’d never heard before… “non-neurotypical.” Some people use it as a self-descriptor. I think it’s interesting – and of course I support anyone’s right to self-identify as they deem appropriate. Not sure if I’d claim it for myself, though. My ongoing struggle w/ depression isn’t something I’ve ever viewed as part of my identity. And it’s not because of the stigma or anything – because I will talk openly about it. But for some reason I don’t see it as an identity, just one facet of who I am.

Anyhow. This depression stuff? It’s just another one of those things… if you haven’t experienced it, you don’t KNOW.

Feb 23 2009 05:17 pm | Category: Blog | Tags: , , , , , | 12 Comments »

Sharing your life… all or nothing(?)

I was wondering how long it would take! A drive-by commenter (totally not anonymous, mind you) has swooped in to tell me that I shan’t identify my background as working-class; that’s “bullshit.” This commenter knows my life better than I do.

And now this commenter has me defending myself.

I shouldn’t bother, I know. But it raises some points that I don’t mind addressing, again.

Really a lot of her comment proved the point I was trying (laboriously and probably unsuccessfully) to make in my first post about privilege and class: that a piece of information in isolation tells you effectively nothing. So, for example: yes, I went to NYU for three semesters. This doesn’t tell you a whole lot. To draw conclusions about my entire life (present, past, and future) based on that alone is pretty ignorant.

It’s really not much different from the point I make whenever the issue of “feminist choices” comes up. You can’t tell, from looking at an act alone, whether or not it’s a feminist choice. Because to know that for sure, you have to know the person’s motivation. And the things that drive motivation are messy and complicated and multi-layered.

Or, as I’ve mentioned, my frustration with the conflation of “income” and “wealth.” So, someone makes [x] amount of dollars on paper, and you think, gee, that’s a good income, they must be doing pretty well. But what’s the rest of the story? I’ll just quote myself from here:

Plus – and this is kind of a tangent – too many people seem to jump to all kinds of conclusions based on how much money someone makes, or how much money they think the person makes. A person’s salary doesn’t tell you much at all. There’s a mountain of information you don’t know. Are they raising children? Do they have student loans to pay off? Are they caring for an ailing parent or relative? Do they have a special needs child that requires expensive medical treatments and care? Are they a single parent who spends much of their income on daycare? Do they write checks to local charities every month? Do they get health insurance through their employer or do they have to find their own – and if so, do they have a “pre-existing condition” that makes them uninsurable? And of course, if they are self-employed or work in any job that doesn’t come with a reliable paycheck every two weeks where they know what the amount will be, the uncertainties are even higher.

I came to identify my experiences growing up as fitting most closely with “working class,” after learning more about what that means. I said before, I had associated working class with specific types of jobs – factory workers, auto mechanics, garbage collectors, that sort of thing. But when I started reading Bitch|Lab and others she linked (can’t remember names now; there was one guy whose name started w/ a D, he was very influential) I realized that it’s not about jobs at all. For the first time I was reading about the gradations of class experience that I had struggled to put into words for a long time. And I felt weird about claiming “working class,” as if I was appropriating. But, from whom? And why? Because, after all, it fit.

We all make assumptions. It’s not a cardinal sin; it’s part of being human. But hopefully most of us also have the human capacity to recognize when our assumptions don’t match up with first-hand accounts of people’s lived experiences.

So: I went to private school for the last two years of high school. I went to NYU.

Verdict? Not working class! Privileged asshole!

It’s this kind of identity policing that gets me so fed up w/ a lot of activists I’ve worked with – and bloggers I’ve read. I am passionate about social justice activism, and yet, too often it devolves into policing one another, instead of focusing resources and energy on the goal of social justice. (SPARK doesn’t fall into this trap; yet another reason I love them.)

Of course, it’s no surprise that this policing and shaming seems to be applied especially strongly to women. How dare you bust your ass and accomplish something you’re proud of? Maybe get yourself a little financial stability? How dare you get into a place to support yourself and give back to the community?

My mom always told me: it’s VERY IMPORTANT for a woman to be able to support herself financially. I think she said it as a wish for herself as much as for me.

I know simple answers are appealing. But they usually aren’t realistic. (Except when they are! -Hey, if there’s one thing I do well, it’s acknowledging contradictions all the way down the rabbit hole!)

Ahem. In discussions of class and such, though? Simple answers do not apply.

God forbid I talk about my life – bits and pieces, a broken narrative – on my blog. Remember when that’s what blogs used to be, de facto? Before people strategically positioned them as part of leveraging social media? Yeah, I guess part of my head is still stuck in 2002.

And good lord, I better remember from now on – DO NOT FORGET the little divider lines in blog posts about multiple topics! Because if they’re not there? It MUST be all connected.

Carry on. Time to go make the donuts, as Griftdrift would say! Sorry for the drama, all.

Feb 23 2009 03:18 pm | Category: Blog | Tags: , , , , , | 24 Comments »

And…

I know I maybe sounded harsh in the first few paragraphs of the last post, about the drama queen bloggers (Apostate uses the phrase “noisy group” instead). My thoughts are really much more complex, but I was writing from the hip, because I’m OVER IT with that Professor What If post. I might have clarifications later this week. Or maybe not. We’ll see. But just saying, I don’t want to come off like one of those assholes I can’t stand.

Feb 22 2009 11:31 pm | Category: Blog | Tags: , , , , | Comments Off

Private school and diversity in snark quotes

I’ve had a post perpetually in draft mode for several days now, about this, but at this point I just do not feel motivated. I’m over it. Here are a bunch of links to response posts:

There are more here.

A big disclaimer goes here about how if I sound like any of the asshole white male “liberal” bloggers, just, good god, remember I’m not, and we all share a mutual loathing of them and their put-upon white man’s burden routine. Tiny violin, sad trombone.

All I will say is this. Yep, I called some of the WOC bloggers drama queens on Octo’s blog. No, I’m not naming names, because even though I agree w/ Aunt B, I also don’t really give a shit, because this is my blog and I’ll name names when I want and I won’t when I don’t want. If I were writing something that was trying to be more “formal” or was a public calling-out, yeah, I’d name names; but not in this case.

I just wonder what the hell they want – what would the solution be? There never seems to be a solution proposed. And then, oh, it’s not up to them to propose solutions, the white feminists expect them to do all the work… bullshit. I’m sick of it. And have I ever said they’re “just jealous?” Nope. However, I suspect some of them are jealous, but not “just” jealous, so it’s neither here nor there. And does them being drama queens mean they don’t have some legit critiques? Also nope. But it’s damn hard to get to through all the drama.

And once again I’m reminded how glad I am that I’m not using my blog as a way to try to make money or promote my career. I don’t need that kind of stress. And it means I don’t have to think about all the questions of representation and if people were to treat me the way they treated Courtney, I’d say kindly fuck off and be done with it. I love this post by Lauren at Feministe but I don’t think she should have to explain anything. See, most feminist blogs that are now “big blogs” started as just someone’s blog, and then they got attention, and then they grew, and it was very organic. I couldn’t believe how ignorant Mandy and Brittany appeared to be about the way the blogosphere works.

I had a note in the perpetually-in-draft-mode post about Pam Spaulding, a lesbian WOC, being one of the longest-standing and most well-known feminist bloggers. I don’t remember where I was going to go with that. Anyway: Pam is awesome. I met her briefly at ConvergeSouth 2006 and got all fan-girl about it.

Update, 2.24.09: THE DIVIDER LINE GOES HERE! OMG!!! —-> ~*~

What I am motivated to write about is… ME! Because I’m so selfish, you see? But here’s a few things I wanted to add after the last post about class consciousness.

After starting at private school, I encountered for the first time people whose mothers were stay at home moms, housewives, homemakers, whatever you want to call it. I was really surprised by this. I was like, “Oh; women still do that? Really?” Everyone I knew prior to that, their mothers had jobs. I honestly thought the woman staying at home while the man worked was a thing of the past.

Most of the kids at Augusta Prep had been to something called “social” when they were in 7th or 8th grade. I had never heard of it, but apparently it’s just what you do when you’re a kid from an upper-class family in Augusta. It was this whole other world I had no clue about. Apparently they teach you how to ballroom dance and other etiquette stuff. I still find the concept very weird.

I mentioned in the last post that my friend Kate, in Kansas, lived in a huge house. But the other thing about her house was, it was a total mess. They had a maid but I guess there was only so much the maid could do! (She seemed to concentrate mainly on things like laundry anyway.) And they had these incontinent dogs that would piss and shit all over the carpet. They had these absorbent sheets of paper laid on some areas of the carpet in case the dogs pissed there (of course, the dogs pissed anywhere but there). I thought it was disgusting. And I found myself feeling angry. Although I couldn’t articulate it, I was offended that someone who had such a big, nice house would treat it so poorly. It seemed to me like they were taking the place for granted, not appreciating what they had and how fortunate they were. Even though our house was comparably much smaller (though not tiny; it’s the same size as the house Rusty and I just bought, within 2 square feet!), it was always neat and clean. My childhood wasn’t perfect (not by a longshot), but my parents got some stuff right, and I was brought up to understand that you respect the place you call home and don’t trash it.

As for diversity. A criticism I’ve heard people spout about private school more times than I can count is that it doesn’t have enough diversity, and public school teaches kids about “the real world.” Fuck that. Now, I know there are plenty of private schools that really are just a bunch of super-rich white kids who have no clue how people outside their charmed circle live. And, maybe, there are public schools where kids from all different racial, economic, religious, etc. backgrounds mingle and learn from each other in “We Are The World”-esque harmony.

But I wish the people who talk about public school being so great would pull their heads out of their asses. I didn’t learn a damn thing in public school after elementary school (with the exception of Mrs. Cody’s class!). That “lowest common denominator” thing? It’s true. And Isabel, this is why Harrison Bergeron scares the shit about of me. Of course, even if I had been challenged and intellectually stimulated? I wouldn’t have had time to focus on it because I’d be too busy trying to avoid projectiles in the lunchroom or getting my head slammed into a locker door. Public school brings out the most anti-social, awful human tendencies, I’m convinced. Or at least mine did.

The reason I said I started to suspect that when people said “diversity” they meant “black people” was that my private school was very diverse, although we had comparably fewer black students than my public school. A major segment of Augusta’s Jewish population went to school there. There were also a lot of Indian students, some Muslim and some Hindu, students of other Asian descent, and students of Middle Eastern descent. There were exchange students from Germany, Lithuania, and Belarus. There were quite a few openly gay students – no small feat in Augusta! And yes, most (not all) of the students came from upper-class or upper-middle-class families; but so what? Overall I found them to be much more tolerant of differences than at public school. Or at least, if anyone did have a problem with anything, they never raised a stink about it or slammed your head into a locker. None of the gay kids ended up with broken noses (as happened to an openly gay student at my public high school).

Yes, there were your garden-variety white Christian kids; but there wasn’t one-tenth of the proselytizing that there had been at my public school. It was at public school that the health teacher showed us a video called “The Jesus Factor,” and Jenny and I marched to the principal’s office to complain about separation of church and state, knowing even before we got there that no one would give a shit. They had Meet You At The Pole at public school, not private school. There were the kids that met the stereotype – like the two rich white kids, a steady couple, who got drunk and drove an SUV onto the middle of a golf course and passed out – but they were seen as entertainment at best and caricatures at worst, and they didn’t work hard in school so they were kind of looked down on, rather than reified as they would’ve been at public school.

Interestingly, all the people who yammered about “diversity” in a way that made me suspect they meant “black people” were white – and so that concern fell particularly flat because if you know anything about Augusta, you know they have a lot of WEIRD issues with race.

To be fair re: the issue of being challenged in public school, I should say that according to Jenny, Niki, and Dipika, it did get better in 11th grade, when they were able to start taking AP classes. But that’s when I skipped out. For me, Evans High was much better hearing their amusing stories of their AP teachers from afar. And the school separation didn’t stop us from speaking Swahili in Niki’s jeep. :)

Feb 22 2009 11:04 pm | Category: Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 60 Comments »

Exposed!

In case you were curious what my massive multi-topic rambling blog posts look like while they’re still in “notes to self” mode, before I craft them into whatever it is they end up being… well, we’ve got a live one! Yes, here is a real specimen, unedited and straight from the drafts folder. Perhaps I will get around to writing the actual post from these notes one day; or maybe I’ll just cop out and let this stand on its own, and you, dear readers, can try to fill in the blanks! I have not yet decided.

Ahem:

—

Consolidate a bit from the “making us look bad” draft, perhaps

Sex 2.0 worries, stress, and is it time to give up on this whole “community” thing? am I becoming a curmudgeon? (find more appropriate word)
Remembering why I’m an introvert
Getting depressed about the world… etc.

I will always document my life but more and more I realize I need to stop trying to do the other shit
Focus on MY goals, like Penelope Trunk says
also, Sherry’s post about wanting to point someone to a blog but it’s filled w/ profanity – my hope is that someone looking at my blog will get something of value out of it w/o me having to alter my language, bc MY goal is not business oriented or even all that focused on outside people

Capitalism, maybe
Bring up the point again about “anti-capitalists” automatically shaming and dismissing anyone they perceive as having money
SnowdropExplodes says, in latest comment on my blog, that ppl would have everything available to them to further their talents. But he also said earlier that everyone would know how to do everything – no one would specialize. Contradiction?

And house stuff, of course

Feb 15 2009 10:47 pm | Category: Blog | Tags: , , | 2 Comments »
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