the week in pictures

When a student of mine graduates from high school, I always buy them Michael Jordan’s I Can’t Accept Not Trying. I found the book way back in the ’90s, and found it to be inspirational and to resonate from athletics to music to life, as so many things do.

It’s been out of print for a while, so when I need a copy now I must buy them used. I have a student graduating, and an upper-level high schooler moving this year, so I just acquired two copies. Opening them up to write a little note, I discovered this:

Isn’t that sweet?

The book has never been opened.

Mark’s a loser. Mom clearly overestimated his ability to read, process, and appreciate the messages regarding tenacity, discipline, and commitment contained therein.

Is that ironic?

Actually, that’s not even the case, since Mark never bothered to read it. Mark didn’t even respect his loving and devoted mother enough to READ IT.

Mark’s a loser. Mom’s admiration is misdirected. I’m deeply saddened by the dismissiveness embodied in the fact that this book was sold to me for $1.99 (I paid a LOT more for shipping than I did for the book; is that ironic?), discarded by a thoughtless and inconsiderate young man.

Next.

Three guesses which magazine this is on the back cover of:

 My letter to the editor:

I am profoundly disappointed by the photo featured on the back cover of the June 2013 issue of Yoga Journal.

I read the magazine as part of an ongoing pursuit of a balanced, meaningful, enlightened life. A reference to, and picture of, a pole dancer does not seem to be in support of this.

I try to overlook the fact that the majority of your yoga models have super-model body types; I try to overlook the ads that feature women who are “skinny” rather than healthy and fit. But this seems to go too far. There are so many images in the media portraying unrealistic body types for women, sending subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle messages to women about how they should look and conveying the idea that women are primarily sexual objects. I would hope that YJ could be one place that didn’t.

I also like to leave the magazine out for piano students, friends, my daughter, to leaf through. This one I feel I need to hide. 

Kathryn Budig is finally clothed, but we have an image of a woman participating in the sex trade on the back instead.

It seems that more thought could be put into these types of things, and some editorial guidance might be more judiciously applied. 

Meanwhile, I will be looking for a different yoga magazine to subscribe to.

Sigh.

***

In pursuit of a balanced, meaningful, enlightened life, I planted some perennials and annuals and a bush and a tree yesterday. I decided, in my infinite wisdom, since I was planting some 4″ pots in the midst of a lot of very persistent ground cover, to use the small planting shovel.

Here is my right palm:

The circles are around bruises (the arrow thing wouldn’t make an arrow).

They really hurt.

I’m a pianist. This was really really stupid.

I could barely stand to push the cart at costco today, and this is NOT a commentary on the sizes of the packages contained therein (although do we really need to buy ziploc sandwich bags 600 at a time?).*

Hopefully next week will be a little less ridiculous.

*We are spending a lot less on groceries.

why I hate Don Draper, and can’t stop watching

I’ll admit I’m kind of a latecomer as far as Mad Men is concerned.

Heard about it now and again for a while, but didn’t start watching it until about 6 months ago. Caught up through Season 4 on Netflix, and then waited, and waited, . . .  and waited. . . . . . . for Season 5. Just noticed a couple of weeks ago that it was available, I believe the day before Season 6 started airing on AMC, so have been playing a frantic game of catch-up.

Some of it is a bit overblown, although I wonder if it seems overblown in the “enlightened” two-thousand-teens  compared to what it was really like in the 60s. (ha!) I fear that maybe it’s not overblown at all.  I do especially love the depiction of Peggy and Joan in their efforts to be taken seriously as professional (women) while not really wanting to give up actually being perceived as actual women. Unfortunately some of their battles don’t seem all that different from battles still being fought.

But except for Henry, all of the men are pleasepardonmyFrench assholes. And of course, Henry, not being an asshole, is married to a woman who is so bored she’s gained 30 pounds. (Of course, within 2 episodes, she’s lost it all, despite the “half pound a week” or “maintaining” progress noted during her Weight Watcher’s meetings.)(No one said it was a true story.)

But Don. What’s to be done about Don.

The writers do a good job of, just when you have decided that Don has no redeeming qualities at all, re-humanizing him. He displayed great sympathy (albeit in retrospect) for Peggy when she unexpectedly  –  to her and everyone else (really? she didn’t know she was pregnant? this is a reasonably smart woman, how would you not know you were pregnant?) — had a baby, gave it up for adoption, and suffered some kind of breakdown afterwards. He displayed great empathy when he went to Joan to tell her not to sleep with a potential deal-maker-or-breaker for a new ad campaign (too late, but he didn’t know that at the time).

We get to see him wrestle with his demons — his dead-too-soon prostitute mother, his resentful, dishonest father, his disillusionment with his chosen career despite his virtuosity at it, his need to be taken care of and his refusal to be vulnerable. But he is newly married to a stunning woman, Megan, (who adores him), and still needs (?) to have an affair with the doctor’s wife downstairs. This is the wife of a doctor he has befriended; a woman who has offered understanding and sympathy to Megan despite the fact that she is SLEEPING WITH HER HUSBAND, and then humbly admits that she has no right to be jealous.

The fact that Don was faithful while Megan was working at the agency with him, and still when she was basically staying at home while pursuing an acting career at which he had no faith in her ever succeeding reveals his vulnerability. The fact that the day she acted in her first professional role he apparently (it was only implied) resumed his previous role as a five-star cheating sleazeball is also probably supposed to reveal this vulnerability. I wonder if it is the writer’s goal that this also seems to reveal his complete lack of maturity and character. Probably. Maybe this is the kind of nuance that keeps me watching. Or maybe I’m making more of it than there is.

I will also admit that I am still completely puzzled by the bizarre scene when Megan was upset with Don because he was unhappy about her throwing him a surprise party, so she begins cleaning up the apartment in her black, lacy bra and panties while scolding Don like a shrew. Don was oddly turned on, apparently as much by the scolding as by the attire. What he actually needs is his mother?

The depiction of the struggle of women to find their place both professionally and in the home is compellingly told. Many of the wives seem to know that their husbands are unfaithful — how could they not, really? — but don’t mind as long as they’re discrete. (Pete’s busted as of last night. What a whining sycophant he is. I still can’t figure out why Don brought him along when they began their new agency. He clearly loathes him, as do we all, and as we should, although he displayed a bit of humanity toward one of the women he had an affair with, but that hardly counts. I guess he’s good at what the agency needs him for — to be a sycophant.)

Joan could gain more of my sympathy if she didn’t use her feminine (ahem) qualities so blatantly — could her dress be any tighter? Could she sway her hips any more when she walks? She is a partner now (albeit for nefarious reasons, see paragraph 6 above), does she still have to wear that pen around her neck so it dangles right there between her quite ample bosoms? It reminds me of my post once about this “professional” outfit in Victoria’s Secret:

Nothing like a bandeau top to tell the world to take women seriously in the workplace.

I do love that she is a full-bodied, fearless, ambitious woman playing the role of a real person, living comfortably and happily in her skin and not wishing she were a stick. Maybe we should just focus on that.

All part of the idiom I guess.

And I can’t stop watching.

you will be pretty ________________ (wait for it)

is it really true?

Two thoughts, as I head off to bed to start reading Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In.

I commented to Husband tonight that the three most loyal and vocal followers on my blog are all men* (and he’s not one of them; guess he hears enough from me in the real world). He replies that he thinks that there are quite a lot of men out there who really appreciate and enjoy women, and that women, often, are not really all that supportive of each other.

While I think this is not true in terms of personal relationships — except for him, all of my truly close friends in my “real” life are women, I do think it can be true professionally.

And this got me thinking about something Ms. Sandberg apparently says in her book (I am remembering this from an interview; perhaps the NPR one I referenced a few posts ago) — that women look around at the few other women around “the table,” and realize that only one of them is going to get promoted, as the token Woman in a Position of Power, so, therefore, the other women are her direct competitors. And not in a we’re-all-going-to-do-our-best-and-whoever-does-it-best-gets-the-prize-GO-Team!!!; but in a we’re-all-going-to-do-our-best-and-whoever-doesn’t-piss-off-the-most-men-by-appearing-to-be-shrill-or-godforbidbossyassertive-is-g0ing-to-get-the-prize.

She wants us to demand a place at the table, to raise our hands, to speak our minds.

But what about when we’ve done that, over and over and over again, and it’s only hurt us?

Then what?

. . .  Guess I’ll have to read the book and find out.

Or maybe not.

*Thank you oldblack, Quieter Elephant, and TEStazyk

March is Feminist Manifesto Month

(Because I say so.)

Shall I read this first?

Or this?.

Or this?

and we’re just not horrified enough

The woman, whose intestines were removed because of injuries caused by a metal rod used during the rape, has not been identified. She was flown to Singapore on Wednesday night after undergoing three abdominal operations at a local hospital. She had also suffered a major brain injury, cardiac arrest, and infections of the lungs and abdomen. “She was courageous in fighting for her life for so long against the odds, but the trauma to her body was too severe for her to overcome,” Dr. Loh’s statement said.

As many of you have been, probably,  I have been thinking and thinking and thinking about this horrific story. I hesitate to lead off with the gruesome description above. Do any of us really want to think about this in such a graphic way? But it happened. Do we have a right to pretend it didn’t? Do we have an obligation to look at it, directly, and talk about it? t can’t even really decide if I can write about it — what can I possibly say that we either aren’t already thinking/don’t already know or that can make any kind of change in this world in which we live?

I had actually heard mention of this probably a dozen times before I could even bear to look for and read about it. Contrary to the belief that what we imagine is usually worse than the truth, this is even more horrifying than I could have imagined possible.

I can’t help but wonder about the other people on the bus. About the bus driver. How do you watch something like this happen and not do anything? I get fear, and self preservation, and all that, but what about humanity?

I shudder to imagine.

Sohaila Abdulali posted this op-ed in response, to the rape and to the protests which followed. I watched her being interviewed, and thought what a remarkable, courageous, articulate woman she was, and what a triumph it is for her that she has obviously moved past her own horrifying ordeal so that it no longer defines her. I don’t know if I could do the same. I am grateful for her that she had a family that supported her and didn’t fill her head with rubbish about how it was her fault and how she should be ashamed and how she brought that shame to the whole family.

Seriously?

There’s a lot of talk about how women are treated in places such as India and Africa and the more fundamentalist-Islam countries like Iran and Syria and Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. They are objects, to be owned and beaten and manipulated and controlled at will, and the loss of their virtue somehow not the loss of THEIR virtue, but the loss of their “owner’s” (brother, father, husband) honor.

We’ve heard the stories of the women in refugee camps in Africa whose legs are slashed by their rapists so that their husbands will know of their dishonor and not allow them to return home TO RAISE THEIR OWN CHILDREN. We’ve heard the stories of the young woman in Afghanistan who was attacked by her brother WITH AN AXE because he believed she had left her husband (much older, by an arranged marriage) and gone to another town with another man. This belief was unsubstantiated, but it didn’t really matter, because if it was rumored, even possibly true, the dishonor was too great to be borne by anyone. We’ve heard the stories of clitoral circumcision and of pre-pubescent girls being married to men in their 50s and of girls not allowed to go to school or drive or walk on the street with anyone but their brother or husband.

And we’re just not horrified enough.

Or the woman who had acid thrown in her face. Or how lesbian women in Africa are subjected to “corrective rape,” as if being brutally assaulted by a male will convert them from feeling a stronger romantic pull towards women.

And we’re just not horrified enough.

Girls and young women in India are being encouraged to stay home after dark; or to go out and to challenge the police to actually protect them. (Hmmm, why does this not sound like a good idea?) Boys and young men in India are being encouraged to behave properly, but female fetuses are still aborted at an astonishing rate and males are served their meals first, and sometimes separately, and sometimes need to finish before the females eat at all. One of the protestors viewed in one of the NYTimes articles was holding a sign beseeching men to “imagine she’s your sister” — but brothers are doing horrifying things to their sisters in the name of “honor.”

How about “imagine she’s a person”?

It’s so easy to demonize or dehumanize our enemies — Saddam Hussein in his “spider hole,” etc. I have always wondered if that describes the perpetrators accurately, or if it just makes it easier for us to hate them. And then I imagine these men, who were capable of such brutal cruelty, and try to imagine them as “people.” I just can’t. But I think part of the bigger problem is that they couldn’t possibly have seen that this woman was a person. I can’t imagine they would do this to another man, or even to a dog they found on the street. Yet they had the capacity to attack this woman so viciously SHE HAD TO HAVE HER INTESTINES REMOVED.

I feel such tremendous pain and sadness, from my head to my heart to the deepest part of my being. We can get all up in arms because Hilary was told as a young girl that girls didn’t become astronauts, or that op-ed writers think it’s appropriate to question her extensive travel as an exercise in vanity. And yes, we should be horrified about these things as well — all, in a way, part of the same problem.

We’re women, so we’re told that we’re less. Less smart, less strong, less capable, just less. We should even weigh less, talk less, be satisfied with less.

And we’re just not horrified enough.

does less = more?

As those of you who have been reading this blog for a while probably know, I would usually like to weigh a little less* and fit into my clothes better. I oscillate between wanting to live life fully, enjoying good food and wine and meals with family and friends and striving for better habits in terms of eating more healthfully, getting more exercise (yoga, walking, an occasional training-for-a-theoretical-5K every once in a while) and drinking more water (and less scotch). To varying success, all of it.

When I recently realized that I was even “outgrowing” my “fat pants” I decided that drastic measures needed to be taken. I am now 5 days into the 14-day first phase of the South Beach diet — no potatoes, no bread, no rice, no pasta, no sugar, NO WINE or alcohol or any sort. Lots and lots of water.

Today I actually find myself 600 calories under what I’m allowed/supposed to eat, and I don’t even want them. I had kale for dinner (Only Daughter conceded that it “wasn’t awful,” high praise from an 11-year-old gymnast-turned-ballerina. It’s a long story. Another time.) I’ve lost a few pounds, and feel pretty good, and am not actually starving, etc. etc. But I don’t want to do this by starving myself either, because I know then I’ll just put it back on.

At the same time I’m reading Hungry, the book/memoir (if one can call a book written by a 23-year-old a “memoir”) by the “plus-size” (12. As if.) model Chrystal Renn. Here are “before” and “after” photos: before, contrary to the usual arrangement, being when she had managed to starve herself into a 98-lb vacant-eyed, non-menstruating version of her former self, and after being when she had begun to eat again and had returned to a healthy weight, where she now stays and has a wonderful modeling career as a vibrant, healthy, voluptuous woman:

;

The one on the right is “plus size”? Seriously?

So, I am my usual conflicted self. Am I eliminating carbs and sugar to regain some control over my food cravings and get my body to a healthy weight, or am I succumbing to the pressures of society and trying to conform to a weightmeaningimage imposed upon me by people whose only concern is that they make me feel badly about myself so I buy their product/join their gym?

Husband was not home tonight, so I sat on the couch after a very long and busy day and watched Frasier reruns. Amongst the awful and incessant commercials aired during an hour and a half of television there were 11 commercials for diet programs and/or “diet” foods, 2 commercials for anti-aging makeup, as well as one commercial each for an artificial sweetener, the “Curves” exercise facility, and for Gorton’s grilled fish, “only 80 calories per serving.”

Is it any wonder we’re all so filled with self-loathing? Does makeup really keep me from aging? Is aging such an awful proposition? Is buying processed, pre-grilled fish really a healthy alternative for someone who cares about the food he or she is putting into his or her body? (I should just say she/her — in all of those commercials, only ONE of the “protagonists” was male — and he was having his powdered donut being crumbled into bits by his loving and “supportive” significant other.)

Maybe it’s just me, but the one on on the left in the photo above is clearly starving; the one on the right is vibrant and strong and sexy and alive.

And not that far off from where I am right now.

Maybe if I just lose 5-10 more pounds.

Sheesh.

*Is it Freudian? I actually just started to proof this and realized I had written “I usually want to weigh a little more. . .” Pah.

do “they” just not get it, or don’t I?

Apparently, there are a lot of women, (the NY Times cites them as being white, not-college-educated,) who are having difficulty deciding between voting for Obama or Mitt Romney.

This woman is described as representative of the sample:

She voted for Barack Obama in 2008 but is now torn. Mr. Obama has not lived up to his promise, she said. “My husband and I both have to work full time, and we’re just getting by.”

But she is not thrilled with Mitt Romney either. She said he would set women back because he did not understand their needs.

“Women worked so hard to get where we are today and to take our rights away from us is — no,” she said, shaking her head.

Behold the coveted female swing voter of 2012.

Let’s see: You have to work full time to pay your bills. (Um, btw, so do most of us, as we did before Obama was president, and will certainly have to do after Mitt’s president. Or does she think Mitt’s going to chip in to pay the cable bill?).

But Mitt doesn’t understand women’s needs.

Why do I not see these as equally valid, equally weighty arguments?

I must be missing something, because apparently this is not just this one person, but a measurable trend across the country.

Can somebody explain it to me? I don’t get it, and, actually, (believe it or not,) I want to understand.

I’m Not a Mother First, Updated

Tried to re-blog this through the original post, but it doesn’t seem to be working.

Excellent blog post here commenting on an article from The Nation by Jessica Valenti regarding the rhetoric of motherhood here. Some really interesting comments and discussion.Reminds me a little of this post I wrote a while ago.

My favorite bit of the article: “Fathers are never expected to subsume their identity into parenthood the way that mothers are. If President Obama were to tell us that he is ’father-in-chief’ first, America would balk. How could a man be an effective president if he put the needs of his children above the needs of his country?

Yes, we are mothers and sisters and daughters and wives. We’re also much more. And declaring our individual importance as people and citizens does not diminish the depth of love we have for our children or the central role parenthood plays in our lives.

When we tout ourselves mothers first, women give those who would enshrine their dehumanization more firepower and assure that their domestic work will only ever be paid in thanks, not in policy or power. Until that changes, I’m a mother second.”

What do YOU think?

Ugh.

Read this.

Just two questions:

1.  How can a woman be a Republican any more than a woman can be a Muslim?

2. “Forcible” rape? As opposed to the other kind?

This paragraph in particular stands out to me:

“What is very disturbing to me is that people like Mr. Akin who have postulated this secret mechanism for avoiding pregnancy have developed their own make-believe world of science based on entirely self-serving beliefs of convenience or just ignorance,” he said. “I don’t think we want these people to be responsible for the lives of others.”

Sounds too much like too many versions of religion.

Ugh.