bitchlab's blog

Editor's/Liza's Note : Unfortunately none of the editors here at www.culturekitchen.com were aware of the "Blog For Choice" blogswarm. Enjoy BL's entry (posted yesterday) but promoted and re-dated.

** The previous note was misconstrued as a swipe to the good people of NARAL. Apologies for the tone. Nice does not come easy to me.

A while ago, I mentioned to Thagmano and Rachel that I would probably post my "I'm not sorry" story.

I had an abortion last January. I wasn't exactly pleased about that. Inn my dotage, I'm just fertile goddamned myrtle. I guess I'm just a horrible person, but I didn't feel the slightest bit of anguish over anything but the fact that I DO want children with R but, uh, with both of unemployed at the time and hoping to move out of this state, it wasn't exactly the best time was it?

So, no anguish here. Nothing but relief and love and admiration for my sisters. I can safely say that it was a wonderful experience, with terrific women with whom I'd have loved to have become friends.

We talked about my underwear.

Carrie, the woman who did the intake counseling that day, came in to say "Hi" after the procedure. I don't know why, all I could tell in that hazy state was that she seemed interested in hanging out. We ended up chatting and the conversation became more animated when the other nurse, Patty, also came in. Patty was the one who'd taken a blood sample and other tests earlier. We'd talked about my blood pressure -- which was surprisingly in a healthy range given that I'd thought I was going to die from the stress of my job just two months earlier.

Patty started asking Carrie about her new beau. Carrie was blushing like crazy and I was wondering if I should try to pretend that I was otherwise occupied. Patty wasn't going to let up, even though Carrie obviously didn't want to answer the question Patty kept hinting at.

Finally, Patty just blurted it out: "Is he, you know, doable?"

I sat there in a haze of nitrous, smirking. I waited for Carrie's blush to return to a more normal pink because, the minute Patty said "doable," Carrie had turned a bright, high red. But, as it turned out, it was an obligatory blush. Her pink-cheeks smarting, Carrie smiled and her eyes twinkled as she related to both of us just how doable he was. Mostly, she talked about where they'd had dinner, what they planned to do the next date, and some concerns she had about this new man in her life, the date, and where she thought the relationship might be going.

When Patty left, Carrie and I started talking about nursing. Like my mother, she'd become a nurse later in life. I told her that my mother was a nurse who specialized in geriatric care. My mother often gets right in bed with someone as they are dying. She hugs them, the only person by their side as they die.

We talked about how emotionally draining that kind of work could be and Carrie mentioned that she'd one done hospice work before she'd gotten her LPN. Her eyes filled with tears as she thought about the people she'd cared for. We talked about death and god and taking care of our loved ones as they died from a long-term illness -- something with which I'm all to familiar.

Age. Illness. Death. God. She talked about faith and how she knew God was in the room when her mother passed.

I smiled, which was about all I was capable of. All I could hope was that she saw in my eyes how amazing I thought she was -- how amazing she and so many people like her are. People who take care of their loved ones. People who sacrifice. People who do the work that makes this world go 'round. People who hold hands with and hug dying people, to comfort them. People who feel God in the room as a body passes away.

She asked if i thought I'd like to stand up as it was likely that the nitrous had worn off enough.

I smiled and nodded and thought how nice it would be if everyone who believed in God could work for ob-gyn's who provide abortions.

I haven't been a lot of doctor's offices, so I guess I can't compare, but that few hours at the ob-gyn office was one of the best medical experiences I'd had in my life. It was far better than the way I'd been treated when I had to have a broken tooth repaired last August. It was better than most of the reception I received at the hospital when sonshine was in his accident last year.

Thanks to local area tech blogger and author, Robin ‘Roblimo’ Miller. I guess Brett’s busy — and I couldn’t find an e-mail to let him know — so I figured it’d be fun to let y’all know why you probably got more traffic today than you might otherwise.

What’s Slashdotted? (and if you’re a showoff geek, then you’ll want to write it like this: /. )

A slash and a dot. Clever, huh?)

You get Slashdotted when someone writes an article, as Roblimo did, and it’s featured at Slashdot.org which is a massive site for techies, geeks, and their groupies. Since these folks don’t do anything but surf the Internets ™ all day and night looking for porn and have less than demanding jobs (JK JK), they have nothing to do but surf every link posted to the forum.

The effect can be pretty noticeable and the phenom is called the ‘Slashdot Effect’: thousands of visitors may show up to a site and, for smaller sites, this can slow them or put you over your bandwidth limit for the day, if not the whole month.

So, everyone give a great big shout out and thanks to Rob for helping put TampaBLAB on the tech community map. And, of course, shower Brett with wads of cash and pearl necklaces, ‘k? Afterall, he implemented the great idea — at Tommy’s urging. So while we are at it, throw kudos Tommy’s (Sticks of Fire) way, too. He’s a model of generosity and community-building, if I’ve ever seen one.

I thought Sticks of Fire was mentioned in Rob’s interesting article, Building the “Social Internet

You know, I’d sat on the phone in voicemail jail hell today and it occurred to me that, in spite of claims that all sex positive feminism is is flaunting your casabas and having sex twice a day, every single day and three times on Sundays, that the people who are really obsessed with sex are the people who think that is what sex positive feminism is about.

Which is to say: there are gradations along a continuum to the point that, when they are most hostile to sex positive feminism (rather than just ignorant of it — not dumb, just not knowledgeable about a specific topic), they are utterly obsessed with discussions of it.

That was an assertion. I’m sorely tempted to stroke it. Get out the old Boy Butter and Go. To. Town. With Boots On!

But wouldn’t that be unfair? Am I not supposed to be firmly planted in the reality-based community? And what does that mean? That you actually back up your assertions with some kind of argument. This Bitch likes to try to do that and, if I don’t, I like to be up front and say: “I’m just rantin’ here so send me a klew by four if I’m out of line.

L Word preview.

I have to say that this really irked me, a real let down compared to the hype. I don't want to slag on Jill, but we are the same age and I'm trying to figure out, why so much of me wants to agree and yet I can't. Is it the fact that she appears to live in a world of striving upward mobility --and that's the problem? I'm not saying it's wrong for her to have done so. I am thinking that this might account for the different perspectives -- at least in part. Someone pointed this out at her blog, in the comments section. Living in the lower 25% gives you a different perspective: you never feel dependent on a man. Well, you do. What you know is: you are dependent on one another to survive, to have the basics, just to squeeze by.

And I'm not clear: the only enemy is men? Really? Am I asking too much of a blog post? I dunno.

But I'm thinking that, if anything, I'm a slave to a wage. I'm a slave to someone, man or woman, who's willing to pay my for my labor. I can't imagine a world where I'm not wondering what power and authority are thinking about me. I can imagine a world, though, where men aren't thinking much about me per se, where, if they do, it won't matter.

Still, what I can't envision, at least not with the tools I'm offered in the above link, is a world where I won't be a slave to having to earn a wage and, thus, subject to The Gaze (and, here, to my friend who asked, The Gaze isn't about men, it's about the Big Other. But more on that later.

I was in a feminist department in grad school. I'm here to tell you that it doesn't change much with feminist women as your boss. Some dynamics are different, but what I wore still mattered, it was just a different 'mattering'. But I still had to perform, be on display, etc. etc. And no, I'm not going to blame it on internalization of patriarchy or anything of the sort. I'm definitely not going to chalk it up to unique personalities.

We living in a system where the goods are limited. By goods I mean _everything_: approval, social status, money, things, time. Everything.

Think about it this way. When I taught sociology of work, the first day of class, we'd talk about grading. To that, there was always the usual grumble. One day, I ran with it. I said, "Well, hey, let's just give everyone an A. As long as you come to class, do your work, write your papers, you get an A.

Awesome. The students were thrilled.

Then I said, "Wouldn't be cool if the whole department did that? Everyone got As?"

"Yeah Bitch, that would be so totally awesome. Everyone in the department, including majors, gets As. Wow! Let's start lobbying to see to it that the entire school gets As."

And they would be all abuzz about how great that would be. After all, students at an elite liberal arts college knew that it didn't matter what they learned, it was about their connections after college as to what kind of jobs they'd get. That was consistently confirmed for them by siblings, parents, and alum. College was just a hoop you jumped through, more important for the social connections you made or the reputation of the school than the actual stuff you learned at school. Everyone knew that. It's not what you know, but who you know.

Then I said, "Well, hey, after, say, 5 years of everyone at this college getting As, where would the reputation of this school be?"

Oh. Long faces.

You see? Grades have to be doled out in a certain way, otherwise an A would be worthless. As have to be limited for As to mean anything in particular. And, if we are anything at all, we are meaning making animals. What does it take to make an A mean?

Not A.

And there you have it. That's the system we live in.

It's one where we can't all have the best, well-paid jobs, where we can't all get As, where we can't all have the most highly-trafficked blogs.

We live where the goods are limited -- that's where we are. The goods are limited, they are scare, they are doled out, not generously, but in a miserly way.

Whether they are limited for real or artificially or some combination -- it doesn't matter. The goods are lmited. The system simply doesn't work without the scarcity, without the lack, without the limit, without them empty, without the competition for a job, with the competition for a wage, for a freelancer's salary, for anything.

You own your own business? You're competing for customers. You write books? You're competing for the best contract, for the best publishing house, for the best readers, for the most money, for the widest audience, for the best reviews by the most important reviewers. March, march, march. We throw our bodies, our minds, our hearts, our souls under the juggernaut, listening to our bones crack and our organs explode. March march march.

You think the worst thing in the world is to sell your fingernail for advertising space? Would you sell your opinion on your blog? Aren't you doing that every single fucking day? So you can be the most linked to blog on other people's blogs? So you can watch the traffic and the stats grow? So you can sell blogads? So you can be important, listented to, read, heard? so you can influence people? I'm not saying any of those things are bad in and of themselves. I am saying, though, that they are scarce goods and it's time to ask yourself why?

The goods are limited.

But more: We are all, whether we like it or not, slave to someone paying money for something we make, do, think, feel, write, teach, opine. We sell a piece of ourselves every single day to earn that buck to pay that bill to buy those groceries to fuel that habit to see that movie that everyone's talking about.....

Buy the dildo.
Buy the vibrator.
Buy the sperm.
Buy the cock.

Rotate.

We live in a world where the goods are limited. And those goods include social status and identities, don't they? The goods are limited. The IT is this, not the other. It is that over there, not the other way over there.

That's how they are limited.

A not A. I am not that there. I am not that here. I am not that. I am not that under here. I am not that up there. I am not that over there.

You can not say, I am this here, without implying that you are not that over there.

I am a not.

For, in that limit, in that lack, in that empty, in that nothing -- that is where the I lives.

I am not.

The economy of desire as lack, as limit, as empty, as nothing.

I am not.

The goods are limited. We live in world where we believe that some women are whores and some women are, well, women -- because dog knows, if we let every so-called woman in to be called that name, women, then where would we be? That wouldn't do, because some of "them" might be here, near me, and I'd have to call them something other than "not me."

Some of them still have to be relegated to the sidelines, to bear the burden of social dope, complicit with patriarchy, women who know not what they do, women who perform for men, who wouldn't know how to be for themselves and other women if they tried, duped by patriarchy. Poor dears.

You want to talk about angry and sad?

let's talk.

Speaking of which, I was pleased to see that, while a few feminists don't think Bitch is really one of them (you know who you are), feminism is still a top draw at Bitch | Lab for 2005!

Liza's Note : I love this question posed by BL : Do you use fiction writing to write about real stories?

_____________________________________________________

Continued from (as a Coda?) Second Sunrise of the Day, part 1

So, you might be wondering, what’s become of Stone Creek hill today?

It’s a cow pasture. Always was. Smiling

Where’d that come from? It was ­another among my weird little meditations that Mike B. thinks are fiction. Since I barely edit and only proofread as much as I can stand it, the early ones I'd produced, they didn’t seem much like writing fiction to me. They were just babbling. Or 'tellin' stories' as my gramps always called it.

This one feels more like writing fiction. But the experience was so odd. And now I’m curious if others do the same thing. Is this how fiction writers do it? That it’s happening so frequently lately, is odd and a little disconcerting.

I can’t even begin to explain it. It was the weirdest experience of memory becoming so vivid I could smell, I could taste, I could see, I could feel these memories. I swear. It was surreal. I could feel the bristle of Dad men’s five-o’clock shadows. I could see, as if it was right in front of me, the tan of a Dad man’s arm and his black forearm hair.

Very strange.

So, this built off this:
Shakespeare’s sister was prompted to ask about childhood toys. Responding, I realized that toys didn’t figure prominently for anyone in my neighborhood of girls.

I can’t really remember toys being a big part of our world. We had some, we just didn’t have very many or even have things we lusted after enough to remember being upset we didn’t get them or being told ‘no.’

The * only * one I can remember is Operation.

We had the hand-me-down Crissy doll. I vaguely recall a baby doll with closing eyes as a very tiny one. Mostly, I remember board games. The rest? Toys were things like ice skates, bikes, sleds. I think the big thing both my younger sister and I wanted and never got: a race track or a train track. I lusted after race tracks and train tracks. My very little sister had a Fisher Price Garage and at 9/10 years old, I played with it, reveling in finally getting something that resembled a race track. Wheeeeee curving ‘round the parking garage ramp.

But, all-in-all, toys weren’t much a part of our lives. We had adult castoffs to play grown up games like "office," "store," "diner," and "house."

Otherwise, it was all outdoors stuff: forts, fishing in the creek, building boats, hiking hills, swimming, sledding, snowshoeing, ice skating, putting on mini-Olympics shows, dance shows, tennis in a parking lot.

And then, all of a sudden, I was typing. I was literally typing at times, my eyes out of focus. because I was in another state, looking toward some spot on a blank wall that was transformed into a vivid pastiche of feelings, sounds, taste, smells, imagery.

It was fucking strange. I could see myself doing it and I couldn’t stop typing.

I told my partner, R, that I thought I might be going a little crazy. Well, craziER. Smiling

Second Sunrise of the Day (part 1)

Happy New Year and a strange first post submitted to this interesting project, Culture Kitchen. Wasn't sure how to start or where to start really. Just learning my way around Culture Kitchen space. So, I figured I'd be bold. I took the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz and I have very little in the way to worry about in terms of pride, you see.

This post was prompted by something Shakespeare's Sister asked. While responding, I ended up writing the following.

Every summer, we built a fort by the creek. We’d scavenge lumber, oil drums, and corrugated tin and cinder blocks, metal tubing, and railroad ties from the state agency building across the street.

We’d raid dad’s workshop­which I used far more than dad ever did. The only time I remember dad venturing in there was to capture one of the gerbils that had escaped and squeezed beneath the closed door. Unfortunately, Herbie scooted under the gas furnace and that was the end of Herbie. Hammers, nails, latches, saws­all were carefully trundled to the creek along with stolen lighter fluid, matches, and marshmallows. Not far away was a carpet store where we’d raid remnants of carpet, padding, and vinyl flooring from the waste bins. We’d roll it up and one would hold one end between the handle bars on the bike taking up the back end of the caravan. The other, the one out front, would hold onto the roll from behind, peddling the bike up the small hill, balancing the carpet between the two bikes.

Toward the end of spring, when summer recess hadn’t begun, but the smell of summer was in the air, we’d start the yearly fort building. Each year was an opportunity to build one bigger and better and longer-lasting than the year before. We’d start then, working long into the evening after school and all day on weekends. We wanted it ready for summer when the trees and bushes would grow heavy with leaves and clusters of deep red sumac berries. By then, our fort would be completely hidden from our parents and the weird kids who attended a little red school house that crowned the center of the street we all shared. They wouldn’t play with us, even though we would easily play on their playground, ball field, and sidewalk (for hopscotch and jump rope).

It was behind the little red school house where we’d build our fort, at the foot of a small hill. In the winter, it served as a slick, challenging hill for sledding and tubing. We’d build snow forts, elaborate snow people, and sled for hours in the snowy cold. Little red-cheeked girls bundled up in snowsuits or layers and layers of winter coats, leggings, pants and 5 pair of socks. We’d be out there so long, we’d warm up and sweat, the moisture quickly turning to icicles hanging from the wisps of hair that escaped from our hats, scarves, and hoods.

With sledding, the trick was to work up the most speed and swerve at the last minute to avoid the not-yet frozen creek. Or, when it finally froze solid, to get up enough speed to land on the creek and­whee!­swerve at the last minute to finish up the run racing like maniacs along the swollen, frozen solid creek slick with that dusting of snow on ice that makes for­whee!­speed.

After the winter flooding and freezing of our creek, we’d be left with a creek shore that was slick, soggy mud even in the late spring. We didn’t care. It was the perfect place for fort building. By the time summer recess liberated us, it would be solid, cracked clay earth beneath our sneaks. The creek-side fort building, legend had it, had been going on for generation after generation of boy kids. But this was a neighborhood with only girls. For whatever reason, all the families had girls around the same 7 year span. Not a single family of the thirteen had a boy that wasn’t an infant or wasn’t over 18.

Fort building would carry on, even if it was the domain of boy kid space for generations before us. The generation that had done the annual fort building before were mysterious once-boys, now-teenaged and young adults. They were home for the summer from college or a job in a bigger city. They had long, unkempt hair. So different from Dad men. Sometimes we’d catch them haunting their old fort space, sitting around our fort space, surveying the scene and laughing deep, hearty laughs. We’d hide in the tall grass in the overgrown abandoned field behind fort space, watching and noticing that they had a musty sweet scent that was a lot like Dad men, but just a little different. Nope, they weren’t Dad men. They were odd. They disrupted our world because they were something-in-between-boys-and-men. So, we crouched in the tall grass and breathed deeply, taking in the scent of musky sweetness that was not-men-and-not-boy, the mark of the not-quiet-dad-men and-the not-boisterous-boy-kids.

What did they do, we wondered, that was not what we did? Why were they boys, but not really boys? Why were they men, but not really men?

Dad men, they were quiet. The not-dad-men-not-boy-kids? They talked. They laughed. They whispered in deep conversations to one another. They sat around, sometimes silently, together, kicked backed while a fire burned brightly spilling a wide glow of excess and absence beyond fort space. Not-dad-men-but-not-boy-kids, though, did something that both Dad men and boy kids did.

We’d watch, sshhhing each other as they became silent, a quiet comfortable silence filled with excess and absence. A fire crackling. A bullfrog croaking. A fish splashing. And we waited, as the wind whistled over the tall grasses where we hid. Waiting for that inevitable moment when the silence would be broken by the breaking of wind and a round of “he did it, not me

Happy New Year and a strange first post. More on all that later.

Every summer, we built a fort by the creek. We’d scavenge lumber, oil drums, and corrugated tin and cinder blocks, metal tubing, and railroad ties from the state agency building across the street.

We’d raid dad’s workshop­which I used far more than dad ever did. The only time I remember dad venturing in there was to capture one of the gerbils that had escaped and squeezed beneath the closed door. Unfortunately, Herbie scooted under the gas furnace and that was the end of Herbie. Hammers, nails, latches, saws­all were carefully trundled to the creek along with stolen lighter fluid, matches, and marshmallows. Not far away was a carpet store where we’d raid remnants of carpet, padding, and vinyl flooring from the waste bins. We’d roll it up and one would hold one end between the handle bars on the bike taking up the back end of the caravan. The other, the one out front, would hold onto the roll from behind, peddling the bike up the small hill, balancing the carpet between the two bikes.

Toward the end of spring, when summer recess hadn’t begun, but the smell of summer was in the air, we’d start the yearly fort building. Each year was an opportunity to build one bigger and better and longer-lasting than the year before. We’d start then, working long into the evening after school and all day on weekends. We wanted it ready for summer when the trees and bushes would grow heavy with leaves and clusters of deep red sumac berries. By then, our fort would be completely hidden from our parents and the weird kids who attended a little red school house that crowned the center of the street we all shared. They wouldn’t play with us, even though we would easily play on their playground, ball field, and sidewalk (for hopscotch and jump rope).

It was behind the little red school house where we’d build our fort, at the foot of a small hill. In the winter, it served as a slick, challenging hill for sledding and tubing. We’d build snow forts, elaborate snow people, and sled for hours in the snowy cold. Little red-cheeked girls bundled up in snowsuits or layers and layers of winter coats, leggings, pants and 5 pair of socks. We’d be out there so long, we’d warm up and sweat, the moisture quickly turning to icicles hanging from the wisps of hair that escaped from our hats, scarves, and hoods.

With sledding, the trick was to work up the most speed and swerve at the last minute to avoid the not-yet frozen creek. Or, when it finally froze solid, to get up enough speed to land on the creek and­whee!­swerve at the last minute to finish up the run racing like maniacs along the swollen, frozen solid creek slick with that dusting of snow on ice that makes for­whee!­speed.

After the winter flooding and freezing of our creek, we’d be left with a creek shore that was slick, soggy mud even in the late spring. We didn’t care. It was the perfect place for fort building. By the time summer recess liberated us, it would be solid, cracked clay earth beneath our sneaks. The creek-side fort building, legend had it, had been going on for generation after generation of boy kids. But this was a neighborhood with only girls. For whatever reason, all the families had girls around the same 7 year span. Not a single family of the thirteen had a boy that wasn’t an infant or wasn’t over 18.

Fort building would carry on, even if it was the domain of boy kid space for generations before us. The generation that had done the annual fort building before were mysterious once-boys, now-teenaged and young adults. They were home for the summer from college or a job in a bigger city. They had long, unkempt hair. So different from Dad men. Sometimes we’d catch them haunting their old fort space, sitting around our fort space, surveying the scene and laughing deep, hearty laughs. We’d hide in the tall grass in the overgrown abandoned field behind fort space, watching and noticing that they had a musty sweet scent that was a lot like Dad men, but just a little different. Nope, they weren’t Dad men. They were odd. They disrupted our world because they were something-in-between-boys-and-men. So, we crouched in the tall grass and breathed deeply, taking in the scent of musky sweetness that was not-men-and-not-boy, the mark of the not-quiet-dad-men and-the not-boisterous-boy-kids.

What did they do, we wondered, that was not what we did? Why were they boys, but not really boys? Why were they men, but not really men?

Dad men, they were quiet. The not-dad-men-not-boy-kids? They talked. They laughed. They whispered in deep conversations to one another. They sat around, sometimes silently, together, kicked backed while a fire burned brightly spilling a wide glow of excess and absence beyond fort space. Not-dad-men-but-not-boy-kids, though, did something that both Dad men and boy kids did.

We’d watch, sshhhing each other as they became silent, a quiet comfortable silence filled with excess and absence. A fire crackling. A bullfrog croaking. A fish splashing. And we waited, as the wind whistled over the tall grasses where we hid. Waiting for that inevitable moment when the silence would be broken by the breaking of wind and a round of “he did it, not me