You can’t move in this town (or probably in this country at this particular moment) without running into yet another Moment With Diablo Cody. I’ve always liked her work, but jeez. Regardless, I’m compelled to pluck out a snippet from the City Pages Triumphant Return Interview for you:

And it also bothers me when—this is a real paradox for me: My entire life I’ve been told I wasn’t pretty enough. My entire life I was told by people that I was ugly, that I was too tall, that I was flat-chested, that I was this, that I was that. When I was a stripper I was never quite pretty enough. I was never one of the beautiful girls. I was never one of the top earners. Suddenly I achieve something in my life that is purely intellectual and purely creative, and I'm being told that it’s because I’m pretty. To me that is the weirdest, most ironic thing ever. Like all of a sudden I’m attractive when it suits people’s purposes. But in the past when I needed to be attractive I was ugly. So let’s pick. Which is it?

Posted at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I’m on the far left in this photo, and you can barely see my friend Karen behind me. I don't know who the woman in the middle was. Benazir Bhutto is, of course, on the right, reaching over to shake my hand.

I was lucky enough to be invited to this closed session at UALR in September 2002, along with nine other women from around the university. We each were allotted ten minutes or so for questions with Bhutto. Mine were primarily about the education of women in the Middle East. The woman to my right asked about the embezzlement charges that Bhutto would be tried for a couple of years later. The photo has lived in my study since the day I bought it from the newspaper reporter who shot it, and until now it’s mostly served as a momento of the first time I was invited anywhere because of my scholarship*. With Bhutto’s assassination yesterday, it is becoming something different.

She was an extraordinary, complicated woman. Having completed her education at Radcliffe and Oxford before going on to serve twice as prime minster of a Muslim country that experienced fluctuating levels of conservatism, she had a unique vantage point on issues surrounding the education of women. During our brief conversation, we talked about the practical problems of providing education in that cultural context and the interpretation of relevant Sharia law. The problems were both very simple and enormously complex: funding, building structures, getting the girls there, and keeping them from being punished or killed for gaining an education. The majority of families wanted their girls to go to school. The problems came from a radical minority that remains sizable enough to pose significant barriers.

Her assassination is certainly a blow to many women around the world. And it is indeed partly about conservative interpretations of Sharia and killing a woman who might rise to power for a third time, but that’s not all of it. It’s also about killing the most visible remnant of the Bhutto political dynasty and assigning her the same fate accorded her father and brothers decades ago. It’s about killing the most visible current proponent of democracy in Pakistan. It’s about killing a visible representation of Westerness. It’s about the whole messy, bloody, inscrutable knot of religion and politics and people who want their own vision for their country to come to pass. The clash between politics and religion is not so different from America, especially over the past decade. We like to think we wouldn’t be so violent, really, and maybe we’re not, except for when we come close.

I’m no expert on Pakistani politics and Benazir Bhutto was no saint. The pundits rumbling on about her government’s flaws and the many charges of corruption seem determined to focus on that. Certainly we should be remembering that, but we should also remember that hardly anyone is all good or all bad. As far as I could tell in the very short time we were in the same room together, Bhutto was a politician to her core. But she was also strong, blazingly intelligent, persuasive, and determined. With her background, she could have taken academic posts and remained safely ensconced in some western ivory tower or another. She knew she was being hunted. But she decided to live a different life and, further, to push for a different sort of life for the country she loved. There’s a lot to admire there.

*At that time, I still thought my primary area would be feminist or queer theory. I had just completed a series of papers and an independent study on rhetorical strategies employed by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. Afghanistan is certainly not Pakistan, but it was close enough that my department tapped me to attend.

Update: The NYT has put up a slideshow and interview with Getty Images photographer John Moore, who photographed the rally, assassination, and bombing. It’s remarkable and brutal. (via Pascale’s Wager)

Posted at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Minneapolis topped the Most Literate Cities poll, and St. Paul is in the Top 5. Because what else is there to do for five months out of the year?

Posted at 8:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Guess what I got for Christmas?

We at Thinkery hope you are warm and happy in whatever way you wish to be. Here, it’s snowing heavily again and the ham just came out of the oven.

Posted at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted at 1:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Woke up this morning to big, wet, fluffy snow. The kind that sticks to the trees and finally turns everything into a winter wonderland.

These socks were a present from C. She’s awesome like that.

Posted at 4:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

From the first stanza of And the Stars Were Shining, by John Ashbery:

It was the solstice, and it was jumping on you like a friendly dog.
The stars were still out in the field,
and the child prostitutes plied their trade,
the only happy ones, having learned how unhappiness sticks
and will not risk being traded in for a song or a balloon.
Christmas decorations were getting crumpled in offices
by staffers slumped at their video terminals,
and dismay articulated otherness in orphan asylums
where the coffee percolates eternally, and God is not light
but God, as mysterious to Himself as we are to Him.

Posted at 1:09 PM | Permalink

The word weblog celebrated its 10th anniversary on the 17th.

There’s now The Organization for Transformative Works, ‘a nonprofit organization established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms.’

Of particular interest to me because of the whole ‘agency’ angle of the diss: A program that can mimic online flirtation and then extract personal information from its unsuspecting conversation partners is making the rounds in Russian chat forums, according to security software firm PC Tools.

The artificial intelligence of CyberLover's automated chats is good enough that victims have a tough time distinguishing the "bot" from a real potential suitor, PC Tools said. The software can work quickly too, establishing up to 10 relationships in 30 minutes, PC Tools said. It compiles a report on every person it meets complete with name, contact information, and photos.

Fake Steve Jobs is maintaining one of the best repositories of of anti-OLPC writing around. He recently linked to a WaPo review of the product, which scratches the surface of the colonialist aspects of the whole project:

All in all, I'm conflicted. It's an absolutely amazing accomplishment -- this is a tough, high-tech computer that works, and won't break, and it sells for $200. On the other hand, I'm a little unnerved by the pukka sahib mentality you have to take to fully endorse it -- you know, it's a maddening machine, a devil to use, I'd never expect MY kid to be satisfied with it, but it's fine for the po' kids in loincloths?

The Last Supper in 16 billion pixels.

The Internet was closed so I thought I'd come outside today.

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The mail just brought this small piece from Bobbi Studstill's Cobaltika Studios. It’ll take the place of a couple of her other pieces that I’m moving to my campus office. It turns out that I really can’t work well without one of her word-and-image mezclados around, so it’s fortunate that she keeps them so reasonably priced. (This one was only $10.) She’s running a holiday special right now at her Etsy store, so if vernacular art is your thing, stop by and take a look.

My fondness for Bobbi’s work is such that I asked her to make our wedding announcements a couple of years ago. Since our ceremony was so small and private — just the two of us, two witnesses, and an interfaith minister — it felt right to be able to send family and friends a small, handmade piece of art that might let them know how much we appreciated their love and friendship as well as their willingness to respect our wishes for a closed ceremony. In retrospect, these announcements have become pretty integral in my emotions about the whole thing. I’m so glad that Bobbi was willing to make them in this particular fashion. Here’s what they look like:

Posted at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of Chambers’ favorite hobby horses was what he perceived as the corruption and/or dilution of the English language. He was also not the sort of man who would be afraid to insert his commentary or his wit into an encyclopedic entry. This sometimes results in entries like this:

ABAPTISTON, or ANABAPTISTON, a Name antiently given to an Instrument in Chirurgery, by the modern Writers call'd Trepan, Modiolus, Terebra, Terebellum, and Trafine. See TREPAN, MODIOLUS, &c.

The Word is a mere Stranger in our Language. It seems to be one of those Exoticks imported by the Dictionaries and never taken notice of but by themselves.

Posted at 9:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am perched in the Rare Books room with a three volume set of the 1728 Chambers Cyclopaedia. As I work my way across the A section, my mind dredges up a 20-year old memory.

I spent a fair amount of time in detention during my last years of high school, mostly for tardiness. Our punishment was to show up at school an hour early and copy by hand out of the dictionary until classes started. (Being tardy to detention earned another detention, so you can imagine how that worked out for me.)

At first it was indeed punishment for me, but then I started to look at the language and actually read what I was copying, and then I started to be more selective and copy only the words that I was interested in, and then I started using the word selection to construct elaborate, oblique fuck yous to anyone who might bother to read the pages. I don’t anyone ever did read them. I mean, would you bother to skim a bunch of dictionary copying created by the mildest delinquents in the world?

It only now occurs to me that what I got out of those hours of punishment was an abiding love of reference texts. I suppose this is only one of many ways that The Little Southern Baptist School’s efforts had unanticipated results where I was concerned.

Posted at 9:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

(Read Part 1 and Part 2 here.)

Like most women, I had thought about appearance in terms of audience since just about always, but once I began to seriously work toward becoming a rhetorician that awareness increased. Appearance has everything to do with audience and kairos and other elements of persuasion, and it also has to do with communicative ethics. The fine line between persuasion and manipulation is one that women face constant pressure to deal with. (The effortlessly persuasive outfit = “She’s so confident and well-dressed.” On the other hand, an outfit that’s perceived as self-consciously constructed and manipulative = slut. Not so unlike the broad difference between conceptions of rhetorician and sophist.)

So I had to figure out how to manage my physical presentation within a new professional/rhetorical situation. Specifically: how would I transition from a corporate-business-development-type into a humanities-writer-type? Idgie and Bridget both commented on the specifics of this problem. The sort of pretty that plays in one sector of the academy doesn’t work in another. Luckily, my particular brand of pretty adjusted fairly well to my field. I have never been able to do super-girly-glitter-pink-femme. Never even wanted to. My brand of femme (corporate era) tended toward being a broad. Shoulder-length or longer red hair, curvy, v-necks-but-otherwise-covered, good bras, good leather shoes. Dark and neutral colors, strong tailoring. Smart, quick, a fair amount of cursing. Drink your liquor straight, no blended drinks and forgodsakes no fruity cocktails. A dame, in the American sense of the word. Played correctly, this sort of construction is approachable-yet-reasonably-intimidating, reasonably hot-but-not-necessarily-obtainable. It’s for a woman who’s one of the guys, only completely not. It works fairly well for me, and I still use it in particular situations — when I was working frequently with my lawyer last year, for instance.

I probably could have just transitioned it into my academic persona wholesale, but for several seasons. The primary problem was pragmatic: it’s a very expensive construct to keep going. To make it work, you have to be buying quality stuff. You can shop sales, but good wool costs what good wool costs, and so do Cole Haans. A $300 piece on a steep, steep sale is still $125 or maybe $80, if you’re really lucky. It’s not a look for a grad student to maintain, and I hadn’t kept my closet in shape, as I described in the last entry. Secondly, it’s a look for a woman who works in a heavily male-dominated profession. I could have just kept it without any problems except money had I gone to law school. But at the time, I assumed that it would never work in a female-dominated profession like Rhet-Comp. It especially doesn’t play well with southern women. Up here, I could probably get away with it more easily, assuming I was faculty. And finally, I wanted something easier. I had already gone from full-on broad to khakis-and-a-polo in my last year on the job, and I was purposefully leaving corporate life. In other words: I really wanted to wear jeans.

Which is what I did. I took some of the elements of my work-look and casual-ized them. It worked just fine, except that it made me look like a well put-together co-ed in sort of a contemporary, slightly edgy Nancy Drew sense of the term. (If that makes any sense at all.) And that accorded me just as much respect as you might expect the patriarchy is willing to give: “Well, aren’t you just so cute and smart? You’ll go so far.” Pat you on your head. Pat you on your ass. And when I say ‘patriarchy’ here, I don’t necessarily mean just men. I mean the people who were in charge. Professorial crushes by students are always strange, but even stranger is the reverse professorial crush. What do you do when a professor develops a crush on you? You accept the friendship, if you genuinely like the person (which I did and still do), and you accept the encouragement and help and just don’t mention it, but it’s still an issue. There’s still subjectivity and power imposed, despite everyone’s best intentions. It encourages a smart woman to feel like she’s not being evaluated strictly on her work, that she’s not really being taken seriously. And so one begins to look for ways to negate the issue.

I won’t pretend that I consciously decided to gain weight as a way of being taken more seriously. I have a tall, sturdy peasant frame, and Irish peasant genes that are always storing up for the next potato famine. All that exercise and dieting that I mentioned back in Part 1? That sort of obsessive attention will whittle me down to a woman’s 14 (American). On my frame, that size generates compliments. (A period of disordered eating in my mid-teens — which eventually contributed to a raging case of pneumonia — brought me down to the mid-150s and comments that I was actually becoming rather thin. When I finally went back to eating more than just a small french fries in a day, I regained every bit of my normal weight as well as a decent amount of nutrition. Don’t ask me why I chose fries and sometimes calamari. I don’t know.) Without constant vigilance that borders on the obsessive, I will gain weight. So will anyone else in my family. That’s the way we’re built. And as anyone knows, grad school has a reputation for encouraging one to pack on the pounds.

I especially gained during my thesis push and PhD program search. It appalled me so much that I became much more vigilant after we moved to Minnesota. I actually lost weight during my first semester of PhD work, which says something. But during my second semester I broke my ankle, and that meant four months of sitting and a pretty solid year of pain. This, combined with the professional pressure to sit and read and write, set up very strong sedentary habits that I’ve not yet successfully broken.

I’m not happy with my current weight, and don’t want to maintain here. But it is also not lost on me that transitioning from big-boned to thick to fat has solved a lot of my pretty problems. Out in the world, everyone knows that heaviness causes credibility problems. If I was still in business development or if I had gone to law school, this weight would be a huge problem that would have to be dealt with immediately. (Or really, I would never have let it get this far in the first place.) But here within the academy, and especially within Letters, we have a higher tolerance of freaks and geeks and less tolerance for pretty. At this weight, I am simply taken more seriously. People look me in the face instead of in the chest. They pay closer attention to what I’m saying and writing. When I sit in a committee meeting full of men or go to breakfast with a male colleague, the dynamics indicate that they are more generally registering me as ‘colleague’ or ‘additional mind/opinion’ rather than ‘omg female!’. My heft and height contribute to my authority in the classroom (and I’ve been lucky enough to keep a reasonably pretty face, so there hasn’t been much evident appearance-based impact on my teaching evaluations.)

Of course, there are other factors. The realities of shopping for a plus-sized body means that I’m dressing less hawt than before. I’ve experienced these bodily changes in a very liberal part of the country; it might be different if I was still living down South. As I’ve become more educated, I’ve simply become more confident in my arguments and public speaking.

But I read so many blogs written by smart women academics in various disciplines all over the country. They’re publishing and speaking and making names for themselves. And I can’t help but notice that the ones who most rigorously defend their right to the pretty (as they should; everybody’s got a right to be pretty) are the ones who also complain most often about physical and verbal sexual harassment, about not being taken seriously, and about issues with classroom authority. One old colleague of mine, who is simply wired up to like pink and glitter and girlieness and works hard for her slenderness, has had so many problems along these lines. The sad cultural fact of the matter is that pretty is not often respected. Even the academy, which theoretically evaluates on smarts and merits*, isn’t so sure that pretty and smart can really exist in the same human package. And for me, oddly enough, weight has been a way out of this problem. So much so that when I think about getting back to my former weight, I also can’t help but think about the price I might pay for doing so.

*Yes, I know this is a fiction.

Posted at 8:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

There comes a time in the process when young graduate students thoughts turn to home ownership. In an effort to sate my horrible house lust, I have begun developing a list of criteria for the future abode:

- a weather vane (There’s a nice small exhibit on these currently at the MIA, btw. If you’re local and still haven’t seen the O'Keeffes, duck in while you’re there.)
- a turret
- bay window(s)
- a moat
- a drawbridge for to cross the moat
- an attached greenhouse that shall contain the carnivores, a bit of my ancestral fig tree, and Leonard
- enough groundspace that I can justify both a potager and a night-blooming garden
- a library

The library, big-ass kitchen, and Mister Husband’s fish room go without saying.

Posted at 9:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

(Read Part 1 here.)

Now, years later, I’m toting up the time investment now and marveling at it, but back then I didn’t mind it at all. It’s good to have a project, it’s good to be achieving your goals, and all of it made me feel good about myself. I still don’t think there’s anything wrong with that in itself. The problem, I think, is that it made up such a large proportion of my self-worth. I didn’t have much else to balance it out with, really: I had dropped out of high school and then college, and only had a GED. This didn’t particularly bother me at the time — and I still believe that degrees do not the person make — but it also meant I couldn’t point to education as a source of self-worth. I always read and wrote, but I wasn’t publishing much in my early 20s, despite a rash of continual publication in my mid-late teens. I hadn’t traveled much; in fact, I hadn’t been outside the state in about five years. So not much breadth of experience to point to, other than my adventures in the southern queer underground. I was just starting therapy then, and so hadn’t yet worked through much in the way of my issues. So not really a lot of self-knowledge, either. Everyone always agreed that I was smart and sometimes funny. But when I turned 20 and started a progression from presenting as baby-butch to fully femme, my place and valuation in the world shifted to the point that I still, to this day, present as femme*. And so I pursued the pretty. It brought me a lot, but it also caused a lot of problems. Bridget at My Beautiful Wickedness touched on them a couple of days ago in an insightful post on raising a girl:

In our society, the general perception is that you can either be smart or pretty — to be both, and to be nice on top of it, is some sign of greediness or something. I (who was both smart and somewhat pretty) copped out and eventually gave up on being pretty in favor of being smart. (Smart endures, but American fantasies of pretty take too much work to maintain and one eventually ages out on hottie-ness.)

Being smart and pretty and reasonably nice is indeed a difficult thing to deal with socially. Even as I’m writing this, I’m imagining a fair number of readers saying that laying claim to all of those things at once in public is pure arrogance and selfishness. The other half will say that at least one and maybe all of them were never true. (I actually think the second response is fairer, given that all those things really are in the eye of the beholder. Also, I’ll readily admit that pretty is generally my limit. I am not necessarily capable of achieving beautiful or stunning within in the usual cultural parameters.) Because of all this, there’s a peculiar elimination that occurs in daily social practice: at best, one of those attributes will simply be ignored. Which one becomes ignored depends on what an individual audience can deal with. This resulted in a common refrain in my dating life: someone would ask me out based on my attractiveness and break up with the explanation that I was too smart. It was more often than not smart people who were telling me this, and it happened more times than I can easily count. It also caused problems in the mostly-female office I worked in, with the end result that I let myself slip into not caring about being nice so much. Strangely, that worked better, since we already have an archetype of the smart and pretty but not very nice woman. Everyone knows what to call that and how to work with it.

So that’s where things stood for awhile. And then I went back to school. And I liked it. And I couldn’t quit the job because it offered full tuition reimbursement, so I did both. And the more I liked school the more I piled on the coursework. And even more time reading and writing left less than 72 hours a month (give or take) for devotion to prettiness. I kept up all my rituals full-steam for quite awhile, but eventually I had my hair cut a little less often, and then I went back to doing my own manicures on my real nails, and then I didn’t do double abs on the weekends because I would rather have the time to read more, and then I decided that I’d rather spend my money on books than on clothes. Eating on the run while driving to school added a few pounds and when my nice clothes no longer fit I started wearing khakis and a UPS polo shirt most work days. (By that time, I also planned to quit the job when I finished the degrees, and thusly I was damned if I was going to spend thousands of dollars on more suits I didn’t want to wear.)

By the time I finished up my two bachelors degrees in 2002, my priorities had shifted. There was still a fair amount of pretty left when I started grad school, though. The Queer Theory seminar that semester was perhaps the prettiest I’ve ever sat in: a stunning and brilliant Greek and a beautiful and quirky pagan, both more beautiful in a way I could never hope to match, Mister Husband, and me. I was probably the least pretty in the room, but I didn’t feel unpretty or that I couldn’t hold my own. And I wasn’t the smartest or most well-read, either, since both Mister Husband and the Greek ran circles around me. It was an arena in which the pretty was always faintly present, since classrooms do in fact hold bodies and we were talking very frankly about queer sex and various theories of the body, but what counted more was our brains. I read more faster and further in that course than I ever had before. And I came out the other side of the course having garnered respect largely because of my wit and intelligence.

I want to say purely because of it, but probably not, now that I think about it. By the time the semester ended, I was dating one of the other seminarians (whom I eventually married, yes), and been the recipient of an undiscussed crush from another participant (who was also very cute). I had declined several propositions from various graduate students in the Astronomy Department, where I was assistant-teaching, as well as invitations from the secretary. (I eventually quit going into that office except to meet with my supervisor or drop off paperwork.) In the spring, I ended up declining another couple of offers within my own department. It’s odd that I had forgotten all of this, because at the time, after having been subjected to a no-dating-within-the-company corporate policy when I spent every spare moment at work, it was all tremendously validating. Not to mention a huge surprise.

(Jeez. If those last couple of paragraphs don’t demonstrate how confused I still am about all this, I don’t know what could.)

So yes, the pretty still mattered. But, increasingly, so did being smart, and since I was now working solely within the Academy, smart counted so much more than it had in my corporate life. You can be average looking or even ugly at the university, and as long as you are hella smart and also nice you’ll likely do well enough within that social context**. One quality is also generally taken more seriously than the other. When my social landscape changed, I inevitably changed along with it. The fact that I was in my mid-twenties also had something to do with this shift, I suppose. At that age it begins to occur to you that while many, many years of pretty might indeed lie ahead, it will require more and more running in place for less payoff. The culture will always categorize you, and eventually you’ll “look good for your age” at best. As Bridget said, you just age out of the subjectivity of hottie-ness. You can do it gracefully, but it’s still inevitable.

*It’s not that simple, really. Part of the reason is also that my inherent curviness simply doesn’t bend effectively to a more queered presentation. While I’m most comfortable with very short hair and masculine suits, it results in a very awkward look. I have a femme body and a femme face, I’m not interested in surgically altering any of it, and that’s that.

**Not always, and that’s part of the next post. Lots has already been said on this subject, as some sectors of my audience are all too aware of.

Posted at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

For starters, don't cite it — use it. Great post on Gearfire about ways students should use Wikipedia, which takes what I’ve been saying and goes one better.

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It’s been awhile since I’ve thought about the concept of pretty. Not as in, “What a pretty vase!” or, “It’s pretty to think so, isn’t it?” but “Is she pretty? I can’t really tell.”

Lately, it’s come up several times in conversation. “She’s pretty, but not really so pretty with her makeup off.” “She has to be pretty.” “She’s sweet and smart and funny and mature and probably much better for me than the other one, but she’s just not pretty enough.” And then there was a smart blog post that finally pushed me over the edge into writing about this, but I’ll link it in the next post on this topic.

Do you really know what you’re asking of someone when you ask them to be pretty? Do we know what we’re asking of ourselves? And does it really matter? I think about pretty less today than I have at probably any other time in my life, but at the beginning and end of the day I still spend a few minutes with the mirror assessing the situation and the damage. There’s no escaping the expectation and weight of prettiness.

This used to be something I thought about a lot, every single day. When I worked in business development — that is, sales — pretty counted. And so every day, I worked out for at least an hour right after I got up. Double sets of crunches on the weekends. Hair and brows done once a month, nails and facial once a week. I also quit cooking in the exploratory way I had and went all-organic, mostly low-fat. Breakfast was reasonably extravagant: a bowl of bear mush with stewed fruit and soy milk in the winter; tomatoes, bread and cheese in the summer; scrambled eggs and turkey sausage other times. Lunch was fruit or turkey chili or turkey spaghetti or hummus and lettuce sandwiches. Dinner was usually a salad with turkey and low-fat dressing or broccoli and rice. Low-fat yogurt for a snack. I drank a gallon of water and swallowed a handful of vitamins a day. No caffeine, occasional tobacco and alcohol. A fair amount of spare time was spent on shopping for clothes. Daily weigh-ins.

But isn’t there such a thing as naturally pretty? If one was generally a cute kid with a well-balanced face, wouldn’t one grow up into the sort of woman for whom all this work is not really necessary? Even if she underwent an awkward adolescence, wouldn’t she stand a decent chance of coming out the other side fairly unblemished, in a state that doesn’t require such rigorous attention? I’d say no — certainly not psychologically, and likely not physically. The cultural signifiers required for an adult woman to present as beautiful are not anywhere near the same as those required of a child. Dolly Parton’s line in Steel Magnolias is so dead on, especially in the South: “Honey, there’s no such thing as natural beauty.” Even in Minnesota, where a more un-made-up, outdoorsy beauty is the norm, one must be well-kept and certainly fit. The pretty, it demands upkeep.

So, here’s what the upshot was for me: at least a couple of hours every single day spent on the basics of being pretty: exercise, a little tweezing here, a little shaving there, a little extra hair conditioning, a little nail repair, putting together an outfit that was neatly pressed and matched, and then doing the hair and makeup). More time on the weekends, when I did at least extra abs and often went shopping and did the heavy maintenance. So, let’s say roughly 18 hours a week, or 72 hours a month, give or take. Another part-time job worth of time invested. And it worked: people told me I was pretty. At the office, on the street, when I was out at night. I dated enough, I closed sales, I got the maximum possible raise every year. Part of that was hard work and a decent personality. But part of it was looks, in the most conventional sense of the term, and on top of that I was a workaholic. And while those two things were not necessarily related, and also not entirely the sum of me in those years, they certainly accounted for the bulk.

(An aside: in spite of all that effort, there are no pictures of me from this period. Probably because I was always going to lose just a bit more weight or get just a bit better looking. My current state was never good enough to preserve; I remember refusing to be in a group shot for my best work-friend’s 40th birthday. Now, part of me regrets that there’s nothing left to document it.)

Posted at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“You will ruin your eyes, Henrietta, in such bad light,” her mother warns. And she’s right! Never since the beginning of the world has there been so little light. Our winter afternoons have been known at times to last a hundred years.

Charles Simic, The World Doesn’t End, via Erasing

All of my reading life, I have preferred to curl up somewhere rather dim to work. I loathe overhead lights, choosing instead to fill my study with lamps. But my real preference is for no artificial light at all. Every childhood weekend spent at Grandma’s was filled with admonitions that I would ruin my eyes.

And I have. I began reading at two, and the optometrist started noticing problems by the time I was six or seven. I got contacts at 13, bifocals at 20, reading glasses to wear with the contacts at 23. Now I’m at 4.25/3.50 contacts plus reading glasses plus artificial tears. (The dryness is a product of the drier Minnesota climate added to already heavy computer use.) Cataracts run on my mother’s side of the family.

I do my best to be diligent these days, wearing the reading glasses and putting in the drops. But the afternoon before last I could not resist stretching out in the bedroom to read. I had opened both window shades to let in the light and a view of the falling show. The afternoon light these days is a deep blue that fades by four, but I could not bear to turn on the lights, and the reading glasses obscured my view of the snow. Reading Kant and the Playtpus in the blue light, there was a specter behind my left shoulder whispering, You’ll ruin your eyes. There’s not much to spare. Still, I lingered as long as I could before I lit the lamps, because there was so much beautiful gloaming seeping through the panes.

Posted at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

It was snowing when I got up and went out to teach.

It’s still snowing now as I’m getting ready for bed.

There is snow forecast for three of the next five days, none of which will be over 20 degrees.

This is so my weather.

Posted at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My affection for B (and C and Z) movies is no secret. And so you will not be surprised at my joy in the in-progress Daily Mole seminar on The Cinema of Patrick Swayze*. Crucial excerpt:

Though he is invariably haunted, the male B-movie lead cannot really be said to have an inner life, because he works ceaselessly at projecting everything he is feeling–through his face. Many b-movie actors build entirely satisfying careers out of just one expression (Keanu Reeves: How confused am I in this scene? Harrison Ford: How constipated am I in this scene?), but Swayze’s face reaches a five-octane range in this tour de force performance: confused, bemused, tender, mad, real mad.

I am evidently a renegade: though I have deep affection for all elements of the Swayze ouvre, my very most favorite is Point Break, closely followed by everyone else’s favorite, Road House.

*I know Mister Husband loves me because he forwarded this to me.

Posted at 2:11 PM | Permalink

A little reflection on the November Writing Initiatives is probably due.

NaBloPoMo: Success. 30 days of continual posting. 37 posts in all. What exactly did all that accomplish? Getting back in the habit, I suppose. But after nearly six years of graduate school, I already know that I can undertake an incremental (and seemingly pointless, depending on who you ask) project and push it along for however long it takes. Nobody makes me blog, and nobody is forcing me to write a dissertation, either.

InaDwriMo: Fail or Not Fail? It’s a little hard to tell. I wasn’t sure what a reasonable goal was, so I set it at 20,000 words because that was definitely enough to push me. If I wrote a page a day, then it was high. If I wrote 1,000 words a day, then it was low enough to allow for weekends. All of that assumes incremental writing, of course.

I did not manage to break my terrible writing habits, since I still binge wrote. I actually ended at 10,006 words, but didn’t update the meter in time for that last 1200 words to count. 10,000 words — 40 pages, give or take — is not a bad month’s work. But I was sorting through prior work, putting it together in some sort of logical order, and writing connective tissue, so I had hoped to do more than that. If I had written every day, I’m pretty sure I would have.

It did accomplish some concrete things, aside from just page counts. I have enough of a chapter that I was comfortable sending it over to Compatriot G for preliminary comments. I can see the shape of what’s there. I can see more clearly what I need to be reading. The process dumped me out of the meta-obsessing and fragment creation I’ve been doing and into the process of construction, which is what needed to happen. So, in the end: word count, FAIL. But process-wise? Success.

Posted at 5:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Because Jenny says I hafta.

1. I’ve noticed recently that I horribly overuse the words actually and though.

2. Signs that I have been distracted this semester: a) we are already out of the local, organic garlic because I forgot to order a couple of pounds more when it was available and b) I am just now getting into the pumpkin ale.

3. But I have not necessarily fallen down on the cooking. Things I made for the first time this semester: apple butter (two batches, the second of which marked my inaugural venture into canning), hominy (not including the lye process, just from dried instead of from a can), blueberry compote (easy peasy), and chile verde (still in progress). I’m fairly sure there were a couple of other things as well.

4. Speaking of which, snow storms are apparently an impetus for Mexican food. So far we've had chorizo burritos and chile verde. Tonight is pozole.

5. I am rather amazed by how emotionally honest I’m willing to be lately, and how much importance I’m starting to place on that policy.

6. Next year, the new camera and I are going to throw down until I win.

7. Ten days, a big round of grading, and then I’m done. Last night, while we were watching the 4 1/2 hour director’s cut of Until the End of the World, it occurred to me that this was the first December 1st in our relationship that such an evening has even been possible. Every other year, the holidays have been consumed with seminars and exams right up until the 20th or so.

Posted at 5:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

December means time for a new banner. This London street scene from frizzyLogic replaces Mister Husband’s SoCal roadside shack. Rachel’s one of my oldest blog-friends, and I’ve been watching her flickr stream since she started habitual shooting several years ago. She was good to begin with, but it’s been so much fun watching her stretch and grow over the years. In fact, my occasional macro obsession is largely her fault, and I will never do trees as well as she does. (Susan, you really must look.)

So thanks for the banner, Miss Frizzy. It’ll be here until March 1, when a new artist will go up.

Posted at 2:32 PM | Permalink