Marked
I’m sitting here with a huge shiner under my left eye, courtesy of a woman named Jessica in fight class.
Heh. Two weeks ago I gave another Jessica a black eye. I guess it’s karma.
She and I were practicing ground fighting, and in the process of trying to get out, she elbowed me in the face. It hurts.
When James saw it, he gave me a high five. And another guy said if he wasn’t married, he’d hit on me because of the shiner.
I think I’m probably a little too proud of it.
Jessica asked the instructor if black eyes happened a lot in jiu jitsu, and he said, “Yeah, with beginners.”
A double meaning? Really?
Here I am blogging when I should be working.
I'm doing a query integration (after the manuscript comes back from the author, the copyeditor goes over it again and enters the author's changes, responses to questions, and so on), and I like to listen to music while I do QIs.
I was listening to "Love Shack" and decided I just had to know what "Tin roof, rusted!" really meant.
Here's a link:
Song FactsDoes it really refer to being pregnant?
I have to confess that until a few months ago, I thought the first word was "Hen-reeeeeeeee!" I can never understand song lyrics.
Compulsory gender
Finally I'm going to reply to
Callan's May 5 reply to my
earlier entry about what "genderqueer" means.
In a comment, Callan wrote: "Transgender isn't rejecting male and female, at least not to me. To me, it's moving beyond complusory gender, accepting indvidual essence and choice over generalized rules about what males and females SHOULD do."
I couldn't agree more, but the problem is, gender is such an insidious thing, far more ingrained in the social fabric than race. I think that's why racial politics have changed more than gender politics since the 1960s.
I'm not sure how a person like me--as Callan said, "someone who feels that their gender is centered in their body, who feels normatively sexed/gendered"--can move beyond compulsory gender easily. I've always had what I thought were some unusual ideas about the roles men and women should play in relationships and society, and occasionally I wish I could switch to a male body so I could know what it feels like for a man to have sex, but that's about it.
Callan said: "Until you have seen your gender shift in the eyes of someone you are engaged with, like when the police officer sees your driver's license and stiffens, well, you don't know what it's like to feel the gender slip."
No, you're right, I don't. I do know what it's like to feel like a woman with a capital "W." By that I mean those times when a man tries to fit me into one of his fantasies about women when I'd really rather be doing something ordinary, like the laundry.
Take the time I was running an errand, trying to mail some letters at the Boulder post office, and two men standing nearby started discussing me. One of them thought I was cute, apparently. How unsexy it is to have a man start discussing me as if I were a piece of meat! Especially when it's dark out.
Both situations can produce fear. And I guess both situations involve somebody trying to impose perceptions on us. But I don't think mine fits into the "genderslip" category.
Maybe if I'd kicked them in the balls, it would have.
Back to Callan's post: I like the idea of feeling like both genders; it sounds wonderfully liberating, until you try to shoehorn it into the reality of everyday America.
Silver Screen
Lately I've been dabbling in movies because my husband is pursuing a career as a sound man for film. I acted in one short film, "Seven Cups of Joe," that was directed by Patrick Sheridan as a
Group 101 film. And I told Todd recently I wouldn't mind being his sound assistant on a future film. I don't know a damn thing about sound, so I figure I might as well start learning.
The other night the two of us went to see
"The Goal," a film about quad rugby by a local director named Darla Rae. The movie itself wasn't that great--it had too much going on--but the story was inspiring. Not bad for a first feature.
I learned two things from this film:
1. Quads can die from urinary tract infections.
2. The wheelchairs for quad rugby are really cool. They have tilted wheels to improve balance, and the players are strapped in at the knees so that they can run into each other but not fall out of their chairs.
Recently another film came out on the same subject:
Murderball.
At the movie screening, I also met Miss Wheelchair Colorado, Nichole Campuzane. I asked her what she had to do to win that title, and she said that she filled out an
online application. In the competition, contestants are judged on their plans for advocacy and their speechmaking ability.
There's a quad rugby team in Denver. Go to the
Harlequins site and scroll down to Quad Rugby.
Personally, I prefer Elvis
Here I was, Friday morning, casually browsing the news before heading off to the Denver Botanic Gardens yearly plant sale, and so I decide to find out how Tony Snow is doing as Bush's spokesperson.
And then I was stopped dead by this paragraph in the article:
"For instance, one reporter asked about the government's abrupt end this week to an inquiry into a warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance."
I'm not sure I read that right. The NSA gets to decide who investigates it?
Under this president, apparently it does.
Oh, and just so you know, both the current president and his father think that Jeb Bush would make a fine president too.
Welcome to the monarchy, baby.
Here's the link:
Snow Makes Solo Debut
What if it really came true?
Watch this short film:
http://www.renewus.org/index.htmland tell me what you think.
Drowning in email
I’ve been reading Grist’s Poverty and the Environment series again.
Here are some salary facts:
$51,138 -- median annual income of a white man with a bachelor's degree in 2003
$41,916 -- median annual income of a black man with a bachelor's degree in 2003
$33,142 -- median annual income of a black woman with a bachelor's degree in 2003
$30,082 -- median annual income of a white woman with a bachelor's degree in 2003
Source:
“Holding a Four-Year College Degree Brings Blacks Closer to Economic Parity With Whites,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.
Looking at some of the salary figures for people with master’s degrees in the article above, I’ve never come close in terms of yearly salary. In terms of hourly wages ($22 to $30 per hour, just for copyediting), I’m around the median income, but here’s the sad fact of freelance life: to earn a decent yearly salary, you probably have to work 60 hours per week. And I've never been able to manage more than 30 hours of editing per week. My eyes just can't take it.
Check out some of the articles in
Grist. Click on the Poverty and Environment ad in the upper right-hand corner, or type "Poverty and Environment" into the search pane. Once you've reached the introductory article, scroll down to the end and click on the list of articles. Under Weeks 1 and 2, read the article titled "Facts and Figures." That's where I got these salary figures.
Forty-something and bruised
Just when I thought I was magically aging backwards like Rachel in the Hyperion/Endymion series, actually getting/looking younger, I go to the eye doctor and get a prescription for bifocals.
That pisses me off for two reasons.
Three years ago, I had LASIK. Aaaaaaaaaaah, goodbye to four-eyes forever!
It wasn’t perfect, though. They didn’t correct my right eye quite enough, so I was still slightly nearsighted in that eye, and it’s gotten worse. Not bad, mind you, only about half a diopter, or 20/50. I could probably drive with two eyes like that—so what if I turn into one of those drivers who veer onto the exit ramp because they’ve just managed to read the sign! With just one eye that blurry, I can still read tiny type on bottles, but when I’m working on the computer, my eyes can’t sync up. It’s tooooooooooo much of a difference.
My husband got “computer glasses,” and he says they help. But me, the one in this house over forty (violins here)—I get bifocals.
Only now they call them “progressive lenses.”
Yeah, I feel sooooooooooo much better.
And they only cost $213 with insurance! How will I afford my Chanel sunglasses now?
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In case you’re wondering, there were too many vowels in my life, so I put them in this post.
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I went to Krav Maga to work it off. Actually enjoyed going to a Level 1 class—the workout is harder and simpler, all at once. I don’t have to focus on technique, which takes me longer to get than most other students at my level.
We did 360 defenses against haymaker punches (or is it rainmaker punches, as in a rain of blood?). Anyway, must go ice my arms now.
