Being Amber Rhea

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:

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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

10 most commented posts of 2008

Here they are, folks, thanks to a plug-in called “Most Commented,” which apparently accomplishes the same thing as this sexy query. The number of comments don’t rival my most commented in 2005, where the top post got 100 comments and several others came close; I suppose that’s due in part to RSS and other technologies which detach people from the actual site of the blog they’re reading. Let’s all make a resolution for 2009: more blog commenting!!

1. Words matter, part 2,465,986 (28) – Written shortly after the Spitzer story broke, this is a post about the importance and impact of the language journalists choose to use when writing about sex workers.
2. Summation (26) – A post summarizing the shit that went down on the *OMG super-secret* email list I was a part of in late 2007/early 2008. The fallout of me daring to ask questions ended up putting me in a really bad headspace.
3. What’s kinky? (25) – “Kinky” is one of those words that’s tossed around a lot but doesn’t have a clear definition. Ask 10 people what it means and you’ll get 10 different answers – which is exactly what happened in this thread.
4. Quick brain dump (22) – Some thoughts on the treatment of sex work as a “different” kind of career (or even a job and not a long-term career) and how much of that is warranted vs. how much is just recycled patriarchal stereotyping; also, why it’s important for college students to be treated as the adults they are.
5. Three years! (20) – Rusty and I celebrated our 3-year anniversary this year. :) This is a breakdown of how it all came to be.
6. Tie for #6, with 19 comments:
   • Strip club etiquette – Pretty self-explanatory. A guy showed up with somewhat creepy comments, even though the people I was most interested in hearing from were (duh) actual strippers.
   • Feminist allies – The importance of men being vocal feminist allies instead of just throwing their hands up and saying they can’t be bothered.
7. Five-way(!) tie for #7, with 18 comments:
   • More thoughts… – Written the day after Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s death, this post covers (in somewhat rambling fashion) the problems I have with the typical form of “political discourse.”
   • Susie Bright on SATC – Mostly a blockquote from a post Susie Bright wrote about Sex and the City.
   • News and such – Short post written the day after my dad passed away.
   • Birthday photo shoot: the results! – A few shots from my birthday photo shoot and some thoughts about the experience.
   • Google’s No Fly List: Racism? A-OK! Sex education? Not so much. – The hypocrisy of Google and the continued ghettoization of sexual information. “Don’t be evil,” wasn’t that it, Google? :P
8. Three-way tie for #8 with 17 comments:
   • And again, and again, and again… – People clutch their pearls about pole dancing (again!) and my patience is tested.
   • Response to Hugo Schwyzer – Long response to a post Hugo Schwyzer wrote about anti-sex work viewpoints and his attempt to “bridge the divide.”
   • Libertarians! – Blockquoted comments I left at Ren’s blog, wherein I talk about different types of Libertarians and why even though I like some of what they say, for the most part I have trouble taking them seriously.
9. Three-way tie for #9 with 16 comments:
   • What’s kinky, indeed – Follow-up to the “What’s kinky?” post above, where I write about the different responses I received as well as my own conception of what kinky means.
   • 5th Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy – Doesn’t get much more self-explanatory than that!
   • Annoyed!! – A rant about vacuum cleaners, which ultimately inspired me to buy a Roomba (and keep the Dirt Devil because the crevice tool has some serious sucking power).
10. Who I am is good enough.* (14) – A self pep talk, including an early new year’s resolution to remember to trust my intuition. Most of the comments were very nice and helped me feel a little better.

Okay… onward to 2009!

Tuesday stuff (yet another in a long tradition of non-SEO-friendly titles)

This weekend I saw the movie Milk, commemorating the life of Harvey Milk. It was excellent all around; however there were two things that really stood out to me.

At one point Harvey Milk is talking to Dan White, who showed up at a party drunk. White says something like, “You’ve got an issue!” and Milk replies, with restrained hostility, “This isn’t an issue; this is our lives.” (I’m paraphrasing here; I can’t remember the verbatim quote.)

I was so, so, so glad to hear that sentiment expressed in the movie. it’s something I’ve written about before; but I really don’t think it can be stressed too much, and I also think it’s something that some people just don’t get. (And guess what that is? Ding ding – privilege!) Also, unfortunately sometimes the people who are marginalized and who have their lives cast as “issues” end up adopting the same rhetoric in an attempt to argue their case. It’s understandable, since it’s reactionary – but I think it misses an opportunity to address this very important point. Whenever someone talks about, say for example, abortion being “an issue that divides voters,” this is exactly the point I make if it’s a situation where I’m able to make my voice heard. That sort of dismissal (and really, “dismissal” is not a strong enough word – erasure is more appropriate) is so incredibly offensive that I can’t even articulate it. My life, reduced to a “divisive issue.”

All these various “issues” – they are NOT issues to be debated. I am not an issue. Don’t you dare call me a “single-issue voter” in that sneering holier-than-thou tone.

It also occurs to me that some people really do not have any idea how it feels, on a deep level, to be told that your life is worth less than someone else’s. Stories like this one can help drive it home for some people but that’s mainly on an individual basis (the importance of which I am not denying); how do we make EVERYONE “get it?” It’s a feeling that words cannot convey, so I won’t even try. But if you know what that feels like, there’s no way in hell you can prattle on about “issues,” I don’t believe.

The other part of the movie that stood out to me was this… I’ll quote Melissa’s tweet:

Still stuck on the Anita Bryant bit of MILK where she complains that prostitutes will have to get civil rights, too, if the gays do.

When the clip of Bryant saying that played, I muttered under my breath, “Yeah because that would be soooo awful.” No, we can’t give prostitutes CIVIL RIGHTS! God no! What bothers me is I wonder how many of the other movie-goers even gave it a second thought.

See also: Susie Bright’s reflections.

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I hope Daisy doesn’t mind that I lifted the little tilde-asterisk-tilde divider from her. It’s just so much more visually appealing (yet not overly distracting!) than three plain dashes. I think I’m going to start using it from now on in posts that contain numerous unrelated thoughts. (In other words: old-school blogging!!)

Coming back to privilege for a second… last week I promised GriftDrift and Sara I’d blog about it, in response to this post. Once again it is glaringly obvious that there is a lot of misunderstanding about the definition of privilege. It’s so frustrating. And I know I said I’d write a post, but I just haven’t had the energy. I don’t know how many times I and so many others can say the same thing. I know it’s important to keep saying it, for people who haven’t heard it yet; but at the moment I feel depleted. As I said in the comments on that post, privilege has nothing to do with intent. Once you start talking about intent it’s a completely different thing. Also privilege is not a personal failing, or something you can renounce. It is granted externally and you benefit from it, without knowing there is anything there to benefit from. That’s why Peggy McIntosh called it the invisible knapsack. No, there is not some grand white supremacist conspiracy dictating that most clip art, advertisements, media, etc. features white people – and that’s the whole point.

Sometimes I am just out of energy, I don’t have the energy to engage. Sometimes I’m able – usually on a one to one basis, in person. Sometimes online – it just depends. Once in a while it is really beneficial. I know it’s an important thing to do. I just can’t always do it myself.

Dacia wrote a post that mentions the importance of engaging rather than just lashing out. I totally agree with it. I also think that sometimes lashing out is okay, too. You can’t expect people to be totally patient saints 100% of the time when we’ve heard the same lines over and over regardless of anyone’s “intentions.” I guess it’s a balancing act. (See also Renee.) If you’re completely hostile all the time then nothing gets done, no one is reached, no alliances are made. But if you’re completely accommodating all the time then nothing gets done, no one learns, you’re basically a doormat. People have to take responsibility for their shit at some point, whether intentional or not. If you’re a true ally that means you listen instead of dismiss when you are called out on an -ism.

Really what it boils down to for me is, so much of this stuff has to be taken on a case-by-case basis. And it depends on many people fighting the fight in various ways.

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The winner of Miss Pole Dance Australia 2008 is the same woman who won Miss Pole Dance Australia 2006. As before, to say she is amazing is an understatement. However I think her performance this time is even better. It has more grace and fluidity in addition to the awe-inspiring pole work. And, this time she has short hair like mine!! :D

I hope to one day be this good. I have my doubts that it’ll ever happen, but it’s good to have goals. There is always something else to learn with pole dancing!

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I am annoyed by male hip-hop artists who mess up female hip-hop artists’ good songs. Examples: Nas to Kelis, Jay-Z to Beyonce. Stop messing up “Let’s Get It On In Public” and “Upgrade U.”

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In meta news, I realized I can’t redirect amber.tangerinecs.com to beingamberrhea.com like I was thinking about doing, because all my images live on amber.tangerinecs.com (and I don’t feel like moving them). Oh well. The pre-April 2007 blog archives will just continue to live in two places.

Houses, redux

Against my better judgment, I upgraded to the newest version of Twitter Tools, because Alex King kept saying it was crucial to update. Ever since I did, it’s been going crazy and posting my tweet digest like 50 times – and Alex hasn’t replied to my Twitter @ messages on the topic. I don’t want to disable Twitter Tools but I might have to, because this is stupid.

Anyway, in my zeal to delete the most recent batch of offending posts this morning, I apparently deleted the post I wrote yesterday about house-hunting, Whittier Mill, Ormewood Park, and other things. I can’t remember what all I said – it couldn’t have been that important – but I do remember I posted pictures. So here they are again.

We went to Whittier Mill Village yesterday and I had my camera with me. See the full Flickr set here.

And here are some houses we saw yesterday and liked. The first two pictures (exterior and interior) are of the same house – our favorite, in Ormewood Park.

Unrelated: can anyone tell me, quickly and easily, without telling me to go read some f*%&ng man page, how to restrict virtual directory listings?

The amazing script! – and an old-fashioned rant

So Rusty wrote a thing to import my old blog (first database, April 2002-January 2004; second database, March 2004-April 2007) into WordPress. Yay! It’s something I’d been wanting to do for a long time but hadn’t felt like doing myself, because I didn’t know how easy or hard it would be, and how much time I’d have to spend poking around in shitty documentation and message board threads full of haughty asses. As it turns out, the PHP was pretty simple – very similar to the PHP for my original blog, actually – it was just finding the WP-friendly XML format that was a pain in the rear. The documentation for that is (surprise!) shitty, and apparently Rusty had to do a lot of hunting around to find the right format. See, that is the kind of thing I don’t have the patience for. Like just today for instance, I was trying to find out how to edit my .htaccess file to restrict virtual directory listings. I actually don’t care that much (if I did, I would’ve done it a long time ago) but for some reason I got a wild hair today and decided it would be a good idea. First I went to see if there was an easy setting to check on or off in the Dreamhost control panel. (Control panels have made me forget a lot of command-line stuff; PHPMyAdmin, in particular. I used to do MySQL by command-line only. Now I just don’t care enough anymore.) There wasn’t. So I did a Google search hoping to find what to add to my .htaccess file. And I couldn’t find it! Everyone was trying to be so damn cute. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s these self-righteous uber-geeks on message boards. Somebody had gone on a message board and asked the very same question I was asking; well, to be precise, they phrased it like, “How can I restrict virtual directory listings?” You know what some asshole wrote in response? “By editing .hatccess.” Thanks for nothing, asshole! And then somebody else was like, you have to set the blah blah option, with a link to the Apache man page. And who can read that thing? Look, I’m a pretty hardcore geek (I just don’t feel like I always have to thump my chest about it and get into a pissing contest over who knows the most obscure terminology) but I don’t have time to sit around and try to decipher that stuff. I know it’s an Apache configuration thing. And you, Smart Guy, on the message board thread, obviously know how to do it. So why not just paste in the line of code, let Google pick it up, and then everybody else searching for it in the future will quickly and easily find their answer and get on with their day, instead of slogging through man pages like a “real” geek, or god knows what.

I’m just so over the days of trying to “prove my creds” as a geek. I just don’t care. I have a Master’s in IT, but even the minute I say that, I look like an ass. But I do. I’m a programmer, and if I have to prove my creds, I can always say I wrote my own blog with PHP. But see, I don’t have to prove anything. When I was in school, there were always those guys (always guys) who would make everything a competition about who was geekier. Does anybody like being around them? That shit is fucking annoying!! And it always stuck in my craw in a particular way because they always assumed I didn’t know anything. Because I was the girl. So surely I must need their “computer help.” I mean, even tonight, I said something on Twitter about importing my old blog into WP, and somebody @ messaged me and said something like, “Let me know if you need help or advice.” And I KNOW this guy was just trying to be nice and friendly, but I’ve heard stuff like that for so many years, from guys who maybe sincerely thought THEY were trying to be nice and friendly, but were assuming I was technologically illiterate, that it rubs me the wrong way.

Anyway, like I said, I’m done feeling like I have to prove anything. I guess it’s like my hardware phase, which was roughly late 2000-early 2003. I collected old computers (mostly Macs). I loved delving under the hood of a Mac. To earn extra money, I did things like install RAM and configure software. I built PCs (but felt dirty doing it, so I stopped; I just couldn’t in good conscience keep foisting Windows onto people). Even well into 2004 I had a server in my bedroom, for godsake.

I remember walking into Best Buy in Athens, with my husband, to buy parts (in my PC-building phase; call me a mercenary, I guess) – inevitably the person (usually a guy) at the front of the store would look at my husband and ask what we needed. And even when I spoke – saying something like we need a blah blah watt power supply – he would REPLY to my husband!! Infuriating!!

But anyway, one day I woke up and realized I wasn’t interested in hardware anymore. It hadn’t happened suddenly. My interest had just faded away, without me noticing, until one day it dawned on me: oh, I no longer care about this stuff. And it’s true. Now, I could not give two shits about hard drive maintenance (I guess that’s more of a mix of software and hardware, but I digress) and finding cheap motherboards on Overstock.com.

And now the same is true with a lot of programming-related stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I still think PHP is great. I just don’t sit around at night creating database-driven applications for fun like I did a few years ago. If I need to whip out some PHP, I certainly can; but that’s the thing, nowadays it’s more about need than, I guess, creating a need. I write HTML, CSS, and Javascript – and the occasional smattering of XML and XSL – all day at work and I love my job; but I don’t create random web sites at home for the hell of it anymore. I do think CSS is awesome, of course, but it’s just not the centerpiece that it once was to me. I’m much more focused on getting stuff done, finding the tools to do a job and using them, than messing around with code just because I can.

And yeah, I do get testy when people assume that because I don’t sit up at night coding, that I can’t do a certain code-related task, or that I’m not “geeky enough,” or whatever. Every once in a while someone will start explaining something to me (this reminds me of that NY Times editorial, or maybe it was LA Times, I don’t know, one of those, entitled “Men Who Explain Things”) and I get pretty snippy with them because I don’t like this assumption of ignorance. They always seem so proud of themselves. “Oh let me explain to the girl how the DOM works!” No thanks; I know. Just because I’m not talking about it every second of the day, why must you assume I don’t understand it?

It’s just a matter of how I want to spend my time, and I’ve found other things I choose to devote my time to instead. And this isn’t a judgment on those who DO still enjoy such pursuits; I mean that was me until pretty recently! Just for whatever reason, it’s not fun to me like it used to be. (And I really don’t mean that in the sort of sad way it sounds here.) Such is life.

So all this is a very long-winded way of saying thank you to Rusty for writing the thing to import my old blog! I am very grateful, and better you than me, because I just don’t feel like messing with it, even though I know I can. :) You even converted the old categories to tags… awesome!! :)

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As of this moment, I know I have an issue w/ an unclosed div in the old posts because the comments are closed, but I’ll fix it later. Update: Fixed!

I wonder…

I’ve been pondering what it would be like – or if it’s desirable, or even possible – to take a “write as if nobody’s reading” approach to this blog. What if I actually did that? I wonder if it’s doable, because then I could potentially be compromising other people’s privacy where their lives intersect w/ mine. That’s always one of the biggest considerations w/ “life blogging” (or, “blogging,” as we old-schoolers call it) to any degree. But also, if I actually wrote some of the stuff I think, without a filter or an appropriately saccharine coating, about, say, certain happenings in certain portions of Ye Olde Blogosphere, would I be inviting exactly the drama I try to avoid in my life? Can I really expect to “talk smack” (that’s how it would look to readers, anyway) and not have people talk back?

So should I keep quiet, or at least reserve certain thoughts for my super-old-school paper journal (which I write in sporadically at best), out of a desire to minimize drama?

I really do not like drama.

Blog comments: ebb and flow?

Has RSS caused blog comments to dramatically decline? Is it an effect of one’s blog getting more popular? Is it random?

None of those answers make much sense to me, but I and several of my friends (Dacia, Rusty, Jen, Duane… just to name a few) have noticed that we don’t get nearly as many comments as we used to.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Quality is way more important than quantity. The “great post!” comments are certainly nice, but if those are the only comments, well, something is lacking. And I certainly don’t want assholish or outright trollish comments. I mean why do you think I banned valeko, Andisheh, and a few other repeat offenders?

Interesting conversation is what we all want, right? And shit, people, that’s not unique to blogs. That’s life.

And yeah, unfortunately, sometimes when there’s been a lot of conversation on a post I’ve written, it happened to coincide with a very busy time in my off-blog life, so that I simply wasn’t able to sit down and write in-depth replies. Other times, I admit, the flurry of conversation has been a little over-stimulating, and I’ve been content to sit back and enjoy it vicariously – and I don’t mean that in a negative way; what I mean is, I like listening to smart, interesting people talk!

So I hope you all will comment more. I know that lots of smart, interesting people read my blog (flattery will get me everywhere!), and we have lots of good conversations elsewhere (even if they’re getting kind of fragmented, with things like Twitter and Tumblr) – so yeah I guess I’m being selfish and saying, I want some good conversation here!

I don’t want flaming, or stupidity, or trolling… but good conversation. Like hanging out at a (non-smokey, not too loud) bar, except you don’t have to leave your house or spend money. (Unless you want to!)

(I am resisting the urge to create a “navel-gazing” tag to use with this post. Frankly I’m sick of my own self-deprecation. As Fred Stoeker would say, “It stops here!”)

Possible theme weirdness

Note, I’ll be messing with my theme today, so you might notice some funkiness on the site. I tried to use a plug-in called Preview Theme, where you can specify a theme in the query string and it’ll show it to you if you’re logged in at a certain user level, but it didn’t work. So I’ll just mess with the live site. Fortunately I didn’t have to change any HTML, only CSS (because I rule).

Other than that, my day looks like this:

(Jenny sent me this e-card.)

Now we’re all six

Today my blog turns six. (It’s also the one-year anniversary of me moving to WordPress. Oh, and I’m celebrating by being at work and being sick.) Hard to believe all that’s happened in that timespan! I’ve graduated from college, started and graduated from grad school, gotten the biggest shock of my life, moved to Texas, gotten divorced, moved to Atlanta, worked at… let’s see… at least five different jobs, met some great new friends, reconnected with some old friends, and most importantly, met the GDBF (and our three-year anniversary is coming up in a few weeks!).

What will be the next chapter in my life with a blog?

Impending server nap

Just reposting what Thomas wrote, since it applies to this site as well.

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Got a notice from Dreamhost that the web server that hosts my blog (that’s this blog, this one right here) is going to be undergoing a physical move from one data center to another on Friday night, from 10pm PST until 6am PST the next day. In all likelihood, this isn’t going to be a big deal and everything will be right back to normal by Saturday afternoon.

Of course, if the Prius (or Mini Cooper or Yugo or some other mode of vehicular transport) carrying my web server gets a flat tire or something more detrimental … well, we’ll just try not to think much about it and hope for the best.