Closed for business
In some ways I never thought this day would come, but I’ve been feeling the need for a while now: I’m closing this blog. Not necessarily forever – because I don’t want to be one of those bloggers that makes some grand exit statement and flounces off, only to reappear back at the same URL a few months later – but for the near future, at least. Who knows, I might end up back here at some point, writing about any number of things. Or this might become another internet artifact.
I don’t have a grand exit statement, other than this blog has run its course and is no longer good for me. I’ve written here for over seven years, and now it’s time to pack up and start over. You might say that’s just a psychological thing, and yes, I’m sure it is; but I need the feeling of a fresh start.
I’m tired of feeling the breath on my neck from readers ready to latch onto any word and twist it based on their own bizarre motivations. I’m exhausted from trying to explain myself and anticipate attacks. The imperative to self-censor has become too great a feeling, and as much as I’ve tried to soldier on, I’ve realized I can’t, and it would be foolish to continue trying.
I’m not going to be ultra secretive about my new location, and if you try hard enough (it’s not even all that hard), you’ll be able to find it. I’m not keeping it a secret, I’m just not publicizing it. If you do find and choose to lurk in my new space, there can be no misunderstanding as to its purpose. It is mine to do with as I choose, and its use is at my sole discretion.
In its time, this blog has been good to me and led me to some really great things. With any luck, the new blog will do the same.
See y’all later.
Once again…
…tonight, I’m having that thought, of what would happen if I really truly stopped apologizing for who I am, for taking up space, for having feelings, for having quirks, for being me? If I stopped cloaking my vulnerability in sarcastic self-deprecating asides about “navel-gazing” and being “emo?”
What would that be like?
Every few months/years/whatever I have this moment of, good lord, that would be REALLY different, maybe I should try it! And I’ve been steadily moving toward it for years, but let me tell you, it’s REALLY fucking hard. This isn’t just psychobabble, people.
What would happen if I really did enact that personal revolution?
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:
Fragments: Fear
Last night I was thinking about the fact that fear has been a theme throughout my life. It kept me in a state of inertia during my teen years when I was still living at home; I was being harmed but trying to take any sort of action was too risky because if the outcome wasn’t perfectly in my favor then I would be in trouble; I’d be harmed further. The same thing was repeated in my marriage (though ultimately I broke the pattern, in that case; yay for personal growth!). It’s also what stopped me from ever taking the step over the line and actually going into sex work. There are other examples. Is it what stops me from calling my health issues what they are?
Tonight, on the way home from Manuel’s, I was thinking again about all the considerations about whether depression should be called a disability. (I even have a hard time calling it a mental illness – hey, I grew up in the same society as everyone else, and we’ve all internalized the stigma to an extent.) I was having the usual back and forth in my head. I wondered what other people think of people who have mental health issues and identify as disabled. I wondered what my closest friends really think about my struggle with depression and my questions about whether or not it is a disability. I wondered how much it really matters what it’s called and why I’m so preoccupied with that question lately. I wondered if Rusty feels burdened or irritated or manipulated or limited or frustrated or exasperated or thinks I blow shit out of proportion or thinks I make shit up or thinks I do things just to get attention or rolls his eyes at all my ponderings on identity. But maybe that’s just because I roll my eyes at myself, a little (or a lot) and maybe I should stop that. I wondered how much of this comes from internalizing of the societal stigmas and how much is me being a responsible person who thinks of others instead of being too self-absorbed.
I wondered what it would be like if I could wipe the slate clean and not have all that baggage and all those wonderings.
Do other people think about this stuff, in the way I do? I often think about how we can never really know if the way we experience the world is “the norm” or if it’s an exception. We can never really know what it feels like to be someone else. But because I’m fascinated with people and interactions, and because it comes perhaps too easily to me to think of how I would feel/act if I were in a certain situation that someone else is in, I always wonder.
We hear a lot of messages in the media and pop culture about being an over-medicated society; people talk about kids getting ADHD diagnoses and roll their eyes because that’s just a scapegoat, that’s not a real condition; we get angry at people who can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps and shake things off. I admit I feel that way sometimes, when I hear about someone filing for disability, and then their disability turns out to be… PTSD. Anxiety. Depression. ADD. Etc. C’mon if I can force myself through the day certainly other people can too! Plus Americans love to focus on individualism (which, let me be clear, I do not think is a bad thing at all) – why should I subsidize someone else just because they have depression, right? Not on the tax payer’s dime, etc.; all the Libertarian/Republican talking points. And even as I push back and say, that’s spoken as someone who has never dealt with mental illness, sometimes those thoughts go through my head too.
Monday stuff
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.)
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!
Jobs I’ve had: the all-in-one lightening version
Rusty started a meme, and I can’t keep track of everyone else who’s hopped on board at this point, or I’d link them, too. For now I’m doing a condensed version.
My first job, in 1996 when I was a sophomore in high school, was at a T-shirt screen printing shop. My job was to take people’s design requests and turn them into graphics that could be made into printing screens. I have no idea how or why I got that job. I had never done graphics work before and had no clue what I was doing. Another employee showed me how to use Corel Draw and apparently I did well enough at it that they didn’t fire me. One time I spelled Hephzibah (a small town near Augusta) wrong and nobody caught it til after we’d printed like 200 shirts. I don’t recall getting in trouble or anything. I did get a free shirt w/ Hephzibah misspelled to sleep in.
Senior year of high school I got a job at Waldenbooks. I think I talked about JD Salinger during the job interview; you can imagine what I was like as a 17-year-old. I was first hired as seasonal help for the calendar kiosk they had in the middle of the mall from September to December. A creepy college-age employee sexually harassed me and another girl; we reported him and he was fired. After the seasonal gig was over, the manager let me stay on and work in the actual bookstore. I worked there until I left for college, then when I came home for Christmas break freshman year, and then again the summer after freshman year. I made minimum wage the whole time, even when I was a keyholder that last summer (which I was very proud of), but at the time it didn’t bother me; I had a job that I liked that managed to pay my bills, and I got an employee discount on books.
During the second semester of my freshman year at NYU, I worked in the Faculty Records Office. I don’t remember a whole lot of what I did there other than a lot of it involved going through the files for every professor and pulling their original CV. Some professors had been there so long that the original CV was a tattered old carbon-copy from the 60s. I don’t remember what was done with the CVs after I’d pulled them. One time, my boss, who was a born-again Christian in her late 20s or early 30s, overheard me talking on the phone with my boyfriend, arranging logistics for the apartment we were going to rent that summer in Augusta. She told me I was playing the whore in my father’s house. I was caught so completely off-guard that I had no idea what to say.
Sophomore year at NYU, I tried to get a job at the Waldenbooks on Wall St. but they wouldn’t hire me because I hadn’t sold enough Preferred Reader cards in the final month of my employment in Augusta.
I babysat off and on throughout high school and college. For some reason I don’t consider that a job though. My steadiest babysitting job was freshman year (and then a little bit of sophomore year) when I babysat a baby from the time she was 4 months old until she was a year old. She was usually already asleep for the night by the time I would come over; so I would hang out in this swank Upper East Side apartment while her parents went out to dinner, a play, whatever. The dad was a lawyer and the mom was an NBC executive turned stay-at-home mom. They paid me well and gave me cab fare. You might expect that they were snooty, but they really weren’t at all.
Also, sophomore year at NYU (which was really just fall semester because I transferred to UGA in the spring), I worked in the NYU ResNet office. We helped students set up their ethernet in their dorm rooms, that kind of thing. I really enjoyed that job. Our boss was a hoot. He encouraged us to pad our hours so we could take more of NYU’s money since we’d be in debt to them forever anyway. The ResNet office was tucked away in the back corner of one of the campus computer labs, with no windows. That didn’t bother me, though; I liked all my coworkers and the work was interesting. There was a BeOS machine in the office that I enjoyed playing with. BeOS was a really underrated OS.
For spring semester 2000, I transferred to UGA. My jobs in Athens are a little hazy and I think I’m probably forgetting at least one; but I’m pretty sure my first job was at Copy Services. Sometimes I’d work in the Main Library and sometimes I’d work in the Science Library. Boy oh boy what a boring job that was. I’d go around to all the copy machines and fill them with paper and check the ink levels. Sometimes professors would bring in orders for big print and copy jobs, but the full-time employees were usually responsible for handling those. One of the full-time employees was always talking about his band, Boulevard. Everyone’s in a band in Athens.
I quit Copy Services after a few months because I got a job in the UGA Computer Science lab. That was another favorite job of mine. There were Sun Solaris machines all named after Georgia towns, and some Windows PCs in the back of the lab. The Windows PCs were for use by 1301 (the intro class) students; you didn’t get a Unix account until you took 1302 – or worked in the lab. The two guys who were in charge of the lab really hated the Windows machines and did only the bare minimum to keep them working, and they only did that because it was a job requirement. One of them was from Poland and one was from rural north Georgia. They both had long hair and were super-cool, not obnoxious and condescending like a lot of male geeks can be. One time, one of them told me I was one of the only lab employees who “knows what you’re doing,” and to me that was a big compliment. Another lab employee who was the obnoxious and condescending variety of geek sexually harassed me; I don’t remember if he was fired or not, but I do know he got a talking to from the Polish guy. I made a bunch of signs with brightly colored markers that answered frequently asked student questions, and they’re probably still there today; I know they remained at least until I finished grad school in 2003. It was during that job that I was first acquainted with the term “the world’s largest outdoor cocktail party” – I showed up for work one morning right before fall break and there was a sign on the lab door saying it was closed for that.
In retrospect I shouldn’t have quit that job. I quit about a month before my wedding because I thought I would have too much to do with wedding planning and school. Later I tried to get the job back but the boss above the two guys previously mentioned wouldn’t hire me back, even though they both wanted to. :P I had a hard time finding a job in early 2001 and finally ended up working at Haband, which is a mail-order clothing company that makes clothes that elderly people LOVE. I worked in the call center, taking orders over the phone. There are several highlights from that job that really warrant a separate post. That job sucked.
I worked for about two weeks at Five Points Deli but I don’t remember where in the chronology it fits. When I quit, I lied and said I’d gotten an internship that conflicted. Really I just hated the job but didn’t want to say as much to the manager.
After I quit Haband was around the time I most seriously considered various forms of sex work. One night I decided I wanted to become a stripper, and immediately began researching it on the internet. My husband and I visited the two strip clubs in town to check them out. Clubs in Athens are topless only. I ended up being too intimidated by my lack of dance ability and lack of walking-in-heels-without-breaking-my-ankle ability.
I also checked out a place (can’t remember the name) that wasn’t a jack shack, it wasn’t a place with those booths… I don’t know what you’d call it. In the front they sold lingerie. Customers could also buy time with one or more of the women working there. For example, they could pay to watch an adult movie with two women. My husband and I went and the owner gave us a tour; I remember asking, “So what do you DO here?” because I really wanted to know, and she was appropriately (and annoyingly, to me) vague. She said something like, “The better your tips, the more intimate and personalized your experience will be.” I decided not to work there because I thought I’d probably have to deal with a lot of jerks. Whether I was right or wrong on that, I’ll never know. Looking back, what’s really weird is that when the owner gave us the tour there didn’t appear to be anyone else there, employees or customers.
I also remember thinking about independent escorting, though I didn’t know that term at the time. My husband and I had a discussion about how much I could reasonably charge for a blowjob and expect to make decent money in a college town. We figured frat boys probably had plenty of disposable income. If the price were high enough I was fine with sucking frat boys’ dicks, and in fact I thought I’d love to take their stupid money. I ended up not doing it because I was too scared of getting arrested, and/or of something like this happening. :/
After Haband, in the summer of 2001, I landed quite a coup of a job: call center operator for the Distance Learning department at the Georgia Center. Wait, don’t get too impressed. It definitely looks good on a resume. But I was the call center (they didn’t have any form of support before), and they converted a broom closet to an office for me. The only way the desk would fit in was all the way up against the back wall, so I had to sit w/ my back to the door and I was always paranoid about people sneaking up on me. But the job paid $10 an hour, which at the time was huge, and I got a neat magnetic nametag that I wore proudly, and it was an office job, even if my office was a broom closet. I began learning SQL there because they used an open source ticket management system called Keystone, and it had a few basic built-in queries, but for anything actually useful, you had to input a SQL query yourself. I worked there throughout my final year of undergrad and into the summer.
In the summer of 2002 I got a job at Borders. The job at Borders and the one at the Georgia Center overlapped for about a month. I was working full-time hours at Borders and part-time hours at the Georgia Center, and taking a Java class (1301! [see above]) that was a prerequisite for the graduate program I’d been accepted to. When I woke up one day and realized how thoroughly exhausted my body was, I knew it was time to quit the Georgia Center. It was convenient because my husband took over that job and stayed at it for quite some time, and was damn good at it.
By the time I got the job at Borders I already had this blog – and indeed, if you go back to my 2002 archives, you’ll see that I describe some of the finer points of the ordering and cataloging system in excruciating, probably fireable detail. But it was 2002 and nobody there knew what a blog was, and I didn’t think twice about posting all kinds of details, full names, etc. I think we’ve all been there, right bloggers?
Okay, that’s all for now. Maybe later I’ll do separate posts on individual jobs, if the mood strikes. I’m putting this up without proofreading!
Vignettes
I’m taking a sick day from work today, because I knew I would be spending two and a half hours at the dentist (but my ordeal is finally over!) and would probably want to sleep afterward. I’ll be doing that as soon as I finish eating my soft lunch. I feel requisitely guilty about missing work, but Rusty reminded me that I have a ton of sick days, so I shouldn’t feel too bad. And he’s right; I hardly ever use sick days. (When I got the flu in 2006, I was a contractor, so those days off were all unpaid.) Back in 2005 when Ryan was my boss, he forced me to take some days off to use up some sick days.
My dentist has a satellite radio station that plays 70s music. Usually it’s good, with occasional really bad exceptions. The last two times I’ve been there, I’ve heard the Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin’ Man.” Every time it gets to the line, “I was born in the back seat of a Greyhound bus / Rollin’ down Highway 41,” I can’t help but think, “Wow, what a mess that must’ve been.”
If I feel better today after my ibuprofen-induced nap, I might go to Ace Hardware or Lowe’s and get some flowers to put in containers on the deck. So far the begonias out front are doing good. Fortunately for me, the birds seem to like the window basket outside my office window. On Saturday a female house finch was hanging out in the basket, and this morning I spotted a mockingbird pulling out a piece of the fiber of the basket for nesting material.
On the deck, I’ve seen a baby cardinal being fed by its father. And in the big pine tree in the front yard, I’ve seen two baby chickadees, which are even cuter than adult chickadees.
Also, yesterday there was a cat orgy in the back yard. It was two cats having sex and another one watching, so really more like voyeurism. At one point the voyeur cat looked up and, I don’t know if he could see Rusty and I watching from inside the kitchen, but his expression seemed to say, “What are you looking at, sickos?” Then he went back to watching the other cats have sex. Rusty suggested I get my Kodak Zi6 camera and record it. “What an auspicious start to my video making,” I said, as I went to get my camera. But the orgy was over by the time I made it back.
Finally: if you were at Sex 2.0, don’t forget to take the survey! We need your feedback. There are only 18 responses so far but 166 of y’all were there… come on!
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!
Auspicious anniversaries
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. :)