YOU CAN HATE ME now ::::: this document is called “smart things I say that I should be paid for but won’ t be”

listen up boys

this document is called “smart things I say that I should be paid for but won’t be”

&

the folder is entitled pragmatically          :::::

but not totally accurately :::::

“journalism 2015”

some smart people

just ignore

talking

about  anything

that

depends on

really ugly

white capitalist dudes :::::

the best people do that.

i want to be the best.

i am not the best.

:::::

god & jesus help me.

+++++

(((((they, god & jezus,  don’t seem to like helping ladies.  especially the super fertile ladies like me with all the kids.)))))

+++++

plus

plus

plus

plus

plus

so many things I should be doing.  Folding clothes into my kids’ drawers for school tomorrow. griddling some hamburgers for dinner.  Heating up yesterday’s mashed potatoes for dinner.

grading poor :::::

hungry & hungry & very hungry papers written by poor hungry students.

+++++

babies.

baby.

i know.

i seriously know.

it’s hard to know.

+++++

what we should pay attention to.

i like beck, beyonce, & kanye.

i mean, there are some things I like.

AS

there are things I like about d’angleo, hildegard, machaut, marina abramovich.

kanye  had a point.

none of which.

baby

:::::

i can’t be owned

:::::

even if I want

here and now.

(((((yeezus is my shepherd/not my shepherd & i shall/shall not want)))))

cn b dvrcd frm sck cptlstic stm.

if you can read that baby

<3

i don’t hate you as much

a  system with no vowels, no mothers, no wymn.

++++++

but fuck.

what’s the fkn difference?

people.

you need to go deeper.

beck resorted to a singer songwriter schtick &

he resorted.

he did.

he forsook harmonic & rhythmic interest

& he got money for it

mormons call that preistcraft

julie told me I would get bored of yeezus

& I did

&

\/ venice (LA) sunsets.

never disagree that LA doesn’t control the world.

i’m sorry that

i don’t hate it

it reminds me of my (white) childhood

like sstrada & shit (((((ponch)))))

+++++

carole king or james whats-his-name. the brill building heroin (white) guy. 

W (((((hite)))))

white guys pissing scared.

i’m not going to parse.

white guys R skeered.

i heard yesterday

(((((again)))))

that I am not good at parsing.

i’m sorry that you

 ((((( I )))))

have to do better, baby.

thought for a second there was

a

u & i ,

baby

i’m sorry.

i probably never will be.

should I keep

be sorry like always?

yeah

i          know

you say yeah

like always baby

like five babies, baby

+++++

i was lying in bed.

thinking

that

+++++

(((((fck)))))

there’s so much more :::::

baby yeez

++++++

ingrid marie at 22: a brief history

22nd birthday twirl.

twenty-two years ago, i gave birth to a unicorn named ingrid.

ingrid, day 2.

this child has known her own heart & mind from her first day on earth, when she wanted to sleep in her own bassinet, and let me know with great certainty that she did not want me to sing twinkle, twinkle little star to her when she was sleepy.

ingrid's first of many international trips, funded via the limerick.

she knew she wanted to travel with her school on international trips, and that she would have to earn her own funds in order to go;  that's what she did, selling limericks, chocolate and greeting cards door to door, spotted from time to time in a vintage '70's prom dress by various friends and neighbors who would start out, "i think i saw your daughter. . . . "  i could always just interrupt at that point and say, "yes--that was ingrid."

ingrid, 2014 bryn mawr college graduate.

she knew she wanted to attend bryn mawr college when she saw some like it hot at the age of thirteen, and that's what she did.

ingrid receiving aclu scholarship.

she knew her high school peers deserved better sex education when she was a lowly tenth grader, and she worked towards that.

she knew that everyone should be treated equally, and she has fought for lgbtq rights from the time she was in middle school.

ingrid with bff gloria steinhem.

she knows that women need stronger rights and protections, and she works hard every day to make that happen.

president of the beekeeping club/bee activist.

philly keystone pipeline action.

she knew that bees and mountains needed protection, and she has worked to protect them.

the wings.

she watched simon schama's the history of art in high school and decided to study art history.  this was solidified during her exchange year in high school when she got to visit florence with our dear family friends and see the bernini marbles for the first time.  our friends reported the unforgettable sight of ingrid, wearing angel wings, surrounded by tourists in the streets of florence.  if you know ingrid, this won't surprise you.

missionary girl. 

ingrid has always wanted to serve a mission for the mormon church, and tomorrow, on the day after her 22nd birthday, she'll report for duty.  i know, as is her wont, she'll trail cupcake sprinkles & lipstick kiss marks in her wake as she accompanies seekers on difficult and joyous spiritual and physical journeys.

my girl is a rare creature, and as i send her off into the arms of the great world, i ask the world now to embrace her & keep her safe, as she has always tried to watch over the unprotected in her midst.

my own mormon moment, part 1

doobie brothers, when we were here together, 1971

when i was small, one of my earliest thoughts about being "born into the covenant," (what mormons call being born to parents who have been sealed for time and all eternity in the mormon temple) was:

damn.

what this meant to me as a child was:

don't::::

wear bikinis
smoke cigarettes
go on dates with boys who have vans with beds covered in faux fur spreads in the back (like my catholic best friend's sister did with her boyfriend)
play with face cards
drink alcohol
do drugs
gamble
go waterskiing or swimming on sunday

i was pretty bummed about all of these restrictions--and felt pretty sure that if i broke any of these rules i would:

be cast in to outer darkness with the sons of perdition

thereby

severing my family's eternal bonds and screwing everything up for everyone.

i really wanted to know what it felt like to be born "out of the covenant" and then to experience the miraculous conversion of a burning testimony of god, jesus christ, the divine origins of the book of mormon, and joseph smith as prophet and mouthpiece for god.

i watched the people at church and wondered how they felt inside, tried to imagine how jesus felt when he was crucified, when he sweat great drops of blood in the garden; as i partook of the torn pieces of sliced white bread and cold little cups of water during the sacrament service, i tried to imagine being visited by an angel, or writing a super long book that god put into my mind word by word, or being tarred and feathered for my beliefs, as joseph was, or walking across the plains to zion.

my imagination failed me.

and i had no burning in my bosom.

probably because i wasn't very righteous.

but still, i was like:

damn.

why couldn't i have been born catholic (i thought catholics were allowed to have a lot more fun than mormons, based on my side by side comparison with my across the street neighbor's older siblings, who were always smoking cigarettes and pot, drinking pepsi, making out, listening to that one doobie brothers album with naked people on the cover, all whilst sporting small bikinis by the pool in their back yard.)

even their wrinkly tan mom wore bikinis, smoked, and drank scotch by the pool in the afternoons.

(such glamour! such decadence! such ease!)

while my mom was vacuuming in a house dress and rinsing out cloth diapers in the toilet.

it was stunning to see a housewife relaxing, painting her nails, playing solitaire.  it was stunning to see a housewife relaxing and having fun during the day.  it was so stunning to me to see a housewife enjoying herself . . . . at any time, really.

and finally, my neighbors had cupboards full of board games that babies hadn't chewed on or strewn about the house and a kitchen full of american cheese, oscar mayer bologna, miracle whip, wonder bread, twinkies, honeycomb cereal, pop tarts, and so forth.  our own cupboards bore cracked wheat cereal--we ate it hot in the mornings with butter, honey, and milk, and it was super tasty, but not honeycomb! we had a goat, and sometimes drank her milk, beehives, orange trees, and a wheat grinder, and my mother made all of our bread.  at the time, i didn't appreciate this wholesome fare, often taken from our food storage, comprised mostly of buckets of wheat and dried milk, in order to be more economical in our diets.

i obsessed about when my best friend would next offer me a pop tart, or any of the other forbidden fruits of his kitchen.

when i got older, and i understood that i shouldn't masturbate or have sex, two things that, i heard from my grandmother, were so bad that it were better a millstone be hung about my neck and i were drowned than i commit these sins.

and i so wanted to commit them all, over and over again.

what would it all feel like?

what does it feel like to not worry about going to outer darkness?

why wasn't i born catholic or jewish?

trans::lucent/parent/

1.  materials which do not allow for the absorption of light are called opaque.

2.  In the field of optics, transparency (also called pellucidity or diaphaneity) is the physical property of allowing light to pass through the material without being scattered. 

3. 

Herr Stimmung on Transparency

BY KEITH WALDROP

To those of a certain temperament, there is nothing worse than the

thought of something hidden, secret, withheld from their knowing—

especially if they suspect that another knows about it and has even,

perhaps, connived at keeping it concealed.

    D. H. Lawrence seems to have been irritated no end by the thought

that people were having sex and not telling him.

    Freud too.

   —Ah but then Freud arranged it so that everyone had to tell.

    His psychoanalysis lights up the depths, makes our tangled web

transparent, to the point where I can see all the way down to It.

    And the process moves outward in increasing rings:

    The Master analyses his disciples. Who thereby—transparent

now—become masters and, in turn, take on others, patients or

disciples, to analyse.

    So that eventually there are no secrets.

    Except, of course, those of the first Master, the Self-Analysed.

    Which is to say, the only private One, sole Unrevealed. Opaque

center of His universal panopticon.

    While we see only His words, His daughter, His cigar.

    Poor Lawrence.

4.  on the sunday after prom, it's traditional for mormon boys and girls to wear their formals to church, complete with boutonnieres, corsages, and wrist flowers.  bedraggled updo's.  last sunday a plethora of modest prom dresses rustled into church--the cap sleeve is the sign of orthodoxy in our most orthodox (or, perhaps more aptly named orthopractic) of neighborhoods and congregations. down the hall i spotted a girl in a peachy-pink gown, sleeveless, a mini-dress ensconced in a sheer maxi overlay.

elizabeth smart

it's been a week of discussing the perils of emphasizing the mandate for young women to be modest, to avoid tempting (not temptation, so much) to sometimes hammer at and punish young mormon women for dressing "immodestly", which could lead to becoming an already chewed stick of gum.

i was thrilled at this young woman.  her dress was beautiful, she was beautiful, and i applauded her unwillingness to bow to the dominant culture.  it gave me hope that some of the damaging, unexamined orthodoxies of our sometimes utopic culture might drop away.

5.  one last thought:  as the months of struggling through darkness have dragged on, with small pricks of light helping me to hang on through yet another depression, i'm starting to wonder how much truth, honesty, transparency has to do with the darkness i'm living in.  what would it be like if it were easier, more common to speak the truth, to think about the actual rather than the ideal?

if light could pass through me without scatter.

Gurley in a Tight Place: RIP Helen Gurley Brown

Lara, I always have to remember the road paved for me by former rad Girls in Tight Places--women who resisted with every fiber of their beings the narratives that were handed to them, and so I feel compelled today to muse about Helen Gurley Brown, who died yesterday at the age of 90.  (And here is a contemporary version of a women escaping an imposed tight-place narrative.)

Here's what HGB says about her own inherited tight-place narrative, from her obituary today's New York Times:   “'I never liked the looks of the life that was programmed for me — ordinary, hillbilly and poor — and I repudiated it from the time I was 7 years old,' Ms. Brown wrote in her book “Having It All” (1982)."

As for myself, I learned about "culturally appropriate narratives" for girls early in my life while persuing my mother's high school yearbooks that were stored in my grandmother's basement.  My mother graduated from a small Utah high school in 1956.  All of the seniors had "future aspirations" printed beneath their portraits.  The  female classmate's future aspirations were as follows:  "wife/mother," "nurse," "teacher."  I remember being stunned by this.  Three choices?  Really?  Talk about your tight places.

Anyway, it made me feel very thankful I had more than three choices for my life.   

 From today's article in The Daily Beast: 

"In 1962, a decade before Gloria Steinem launched Ms. magazine as the bible of the women’s liberation movement, Brown published her first culture-buster, Sex and the Single Girl. That little book liberated the minds of millions of homely, working-class girls stuck in hardscrabble towns across America where life after high school held no more promise than a job at the 5 & 10, a bossy husband, and no control over the birth of too many children. Brown challenged them to take the same liberties as young men: to enjoy a long and lusty sexual prelude to marriage and to use the rest of the time to build a successful career."

This was, of course, proclaimed during the relatively small window of time in world history between the advent of the Pill and the onset ofAIDS, but you can imagine how radical this sentiment was in 1962.

Helen Gurley Brown of course became the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine--or Cosmo.  I remember in high school being very afraid of this magazine.  It was sexually bold, way too advanced for me, a girl still waiting for her first kiss, a girl who left high school still waiting.  As a Mormon college student, I thought Cosmo was tacky--the covers lurid.  As a budding feminist, the over-sexualized cover girls--displaying not just their face but provocative, cleaving-baring bodies--offended me. Besides, I was taken with the second-wave feminists who were anti-sex, anti "girlie"--a girl couldn't be both "girlie" and empowered, could she? Fashion-wise, it didn't matter--it was the androgynous, boxy '80s and I looked like a boy anyway.  Andrea Dworkin's strident thesis that all intercourse was rape intrigued me.  But for me, it was all theory.

It wasn't until I graduated from college (single, which was a definite swerve from my expected narrative--although I probably would have let someone sweep me off my feet if they had wanted to) and moved to a new city--San Francisco--alone, that I finally understood Gurley's premise without ever reading her:  that empowerment could be dressed many ways, and that what really mattered for women, according to HGB, was to be financially independent (preferably in a career rather than a job).   In San Francisco, I supported myself with a job that might have become a career, had smart friends, a studio apartment, a boyfriend, a Betsey Johnson dress, and a pair of Doc Marten's.  I went out at night and alone, a far milder version of Diane Keaton in Looking for Mr. Goodbar and without the moralistically tragic ending (due, no doubt, to the fact that Mormon girls don't enact the Sex and the Single Girl narrative very impressively).  The summer I turned 25, I tried lipstick for the first time at B. Altman's in New York--(up until then, I always thought my mouth was too small for lipstick, but that's another story), kick starting a life-long addiction. Plus, by then the riot grrrls and third-wave feminism had ascended-- sex-positive, mini-skirted, punk rockers, displacing for me the chambray- bloused folk singers of the second wave. 

Many second-wavers decried Gurley Brown, but third-wavers owe a lot to her, in my humble opinion.

This older New Yorker article sketches out her in detail, including how problematic HGB can be.

This again from The Daily Beast:

"Helen is usually left out of encomiums to the early pioneers of women’s liberation, because she was nothing like the movement ideologues. Helen cultivated a low and seductively breathy voice and gushed with compliments to win people to her wishes. She loved men and sex, and enjoyed using feminine wiles, and she encouraged women not to give up on any of that, ever. But she worked hard to reconcile those natural drives with boosting women’s self-confidence to take charge of their own lives. She believed in chutzpah, “the drive to put yourself ahead,” as she defined the Yiddish word. A woman had to know when to push and how hard."
HGB on her feminism:

a faint cri de couer

i think that, buried somewhere in the ridiculous number of posts i've written this year, is something about the viral article from the atlantic from anne marie slaughter, but i don't feel i've yet articulated what has bothered me about the fervent discussion of slaughter's piece, so here it goes again.

today i read a response to this article that moved me, that was salient in so many ways, but that i also feel compelled to rebuke just a little bit.

marie myung-ok lee, a writer and professor at columbia university (not exactly a slouch) talks about the limitations she lives with because of her severely disabled son.  here is one of my two favorite parts of her article (the other part is when she talks about how incredibly adequate her '69 hotpoint stove is for cooking three meals a day, despite her realtor's insistence that no one would cook on that stove.  i really hate renovation fever more than almost any of the other insane white middle-class trends of the 2000's):

When I look at friends and acquaintances, many with perfectly beautiful children and wonderful lives, and see how desperately unhappy or stressed they are about balancing work and family, I think to myself that the solution to many problems is deceptively obvious. We are chasing the wrong things, asking ourselves the wrong questions. It is not, "Can we have it all?" -- with "all" being some kind of undefined marker that shall forever be moved upwards out of reach just a little bit with each new blessing. We should ask instead, "Do we have enough?"

i completely agree with her on this.  .  

what should we be asking?  

how do we know when we have enough, or, how can we re-train our collectively disordered thinking to appreciate our blessings rather than despairing out lacks?  

i don't know.  i suck at that, especially today.

but, 

i can't leave without also speaking in defense of slaughter, whose work has been mischaracterized too often, in my mind.

so many responders, including myung-ok lee, seem to think that slaughter mostly cares about the individual woman's ability to fulfill her personal potential and live a life she feels deeply satisfied with.  certainly individual liberty is very important. but

i think slaughter makes a much broader, more encompassing, and more important point:

when we don't have women in the highest echelons of power, all women of all classes suffer.  and so do all men.  and so do all children.  and trees.  and animals.  

without the female perspective in the halls of power, something crucial is missing.  and, if i may be permitted to generalize, one of the things women seem to bring to the boardroom table is bigger, more communal or collective thinking.  thinking that takes into account the needs of the whole as much as if not more so than the needs of individual parts. there seems to be a world crisis looming, if not already here, because we have not been working holistically enough as a human family.

check out the work of valerie hudson for data that convincingly bears up this assertion.

i just wanted to say, and this is today's cri de couer, that getting sisters up there is more than a matter of individual fulfillment. it's necessary for community survival.

it's late, and i've had a rocky day.  a rocky couple of months, really, so 

hope i made any sense, 

or said something meaningful today. 

Fascinating Unfascinating

This was a very unfascinating day. I had the whole day free to get work done, but only ended up reading and commenting on three student papers. THREE! It was a day of trying to be productive and then getting thwarted both inwardly and outwardly. (One example: showing up at a cafe all ready to work and figuring out I did not have my wallet only to go home and discover I DID have my wallet the entire time, and then it took me two hours to leave the house again.)

And then I missed a Seaport Music Concert because I felt some weird obligation to see what everyone else was doing of a Friday night. Is that wrong?

The best thing about today was discovering The Fascinating Womanhood Kickstarter page. Fascinating Womanhood, published in the '60s, was a book I discovered with glee and horror in the '80s. It was an instruction manual for how women could build strong marriages by appearing more "fascinating:" in this book, fascinating is defined as demure, girlish, and utterly helpless and dependent. One page instructed women to purposefully mount the bathroom paper cup dispenser upside down for their husbands could have the pleasure of correcting them. Isn't that adorable? It was blatantly anti-feminist, a direct response to burgeoning feminism, and it seemed to be folded like doctrine into the lives of Mormon women a generation or two before mine. But my roommates and I had a great time mocking it and even writing a song about it.

I remember being in a Relief Society meeting in Park City for a roommate's missionary farewell, and watched in horror while a middle-aged member of that ward defended Fascinating Womanhood. It was shocking--that non-mocking! Anyway, I wish I could be at Lara'as Lalage concert tonight. Sometimes there is so much to do here, I end up doing not much of anything at all. P.S. Lara, I just read that the author of FW, Helen Andelin, was a BYU drop-out in home ec (left to get married, of course) and no doubt a Mormon AND from your hometown of Mesa, in the bustling Mormon west. No wonder it was embraced as "doctrine."

no reason you can't be powerful & stylish too

this is where i was today, watching my beautiful daughter graduate with the barnard class of 2012.  i couldn't have been prouder, i couldn't have been happier to know that she is one of the women obama talked about in his speech who would give a hand back, use her privileged position as an educated, empowered citizen to increase the amount of justice in the world.

(i know this not only because she has been like this from day one, but it was confirmed as i helped edit & proofread her final term paper on the dalit women's movement at 5.45 this morning, 2 hours before we left for graduation.)

during the graduation ceremony today i, too, like julie, thought of my community college students who work so hard, who perservere and face obstacles both economic & personal and don't get the kind of recognition or prestige that is due every human being.

i made a resolve today to recognize more the worth of every human being, to be less aware of status and hierarchies and more aware of the beauty & power in each individual, to be a tool for making the world a more just place, as our president has been, as my daughters are, as we all have an obligation to be.

p.s.--eva snow is not only powerful, but stylish, too.  pics tomorrow.