Big Day Tomorrow: the Big 3-0

It's almost like the Huffington Post reprinted Glamour's 1997 list of "30 Things Every Woman Should Have and Should Know by the Time She's 30" (by Pamela Redmond Satran) today in honor of my turning thirty tomorrow . . . .

The whole list is awesome and on the money - and here are some faves.

Things you should have by the time you're 30: 

7.  The realization that you are actually going to have an old age - and some money set aside to help fund it. 

9.  A resume that is not even the slightest bit padded.

11.  A set of screwdrivers, a cordless drill, and a black lace bra. 

15.  A solid start on a satisfying career, a satisfying relationship, and all those other facets of life that do get better [after 30]. 


Things you should know by the time you're 30: 

10.  That your childhood may not have been perfect, but it's over. 

11.  What you would and wouldn't do for money or love. 

12.  That nobody gets away with smoking, drinking, doing drugs, or not flossing for very long.  

14.  Not to apologize for something that isn't your fault.

Here's hoping for a heck of a birthday and a heck of a decade - and many more - to come!

Calling all you waistlines

Once upon a time, I actually had a relatively little waistline. That time was about 7.5 months ago. Being a woman raised in the U.S. in the latter part of the 20th century, however, I did not think it was small enough. I was convinced that I had a "thick" wasit, that being able to see 5 ab muscles was insufficient ("Why don't I have a six-pack after 14 years of ab work?!"), that I had love handles. 

Wow, how one's perspective can change :). 

I saw a pre-pregnancy pic of my belly the other day and gasped, "Did my stomach ever really look like that?!" Apparently it did. And while I've finally made peace with the pregnancy weight gain (me and baby are tipping the scales with an additional 27.5 lbs here in the middle of week 33) and this huge (kicking and punching) melon protruding from the front of me, I've got to say that picture made me wince more than a little bit. 

I have faith that I will, in time, get my waistline back. The question is, Just how much time are we talking about? 

Amanda and Laura, the prof who's directing my independent study this semester, have warned me about the post-delivery flabbiness and the need to wear maternity clothes for several months after giving birth. And they have prepped me for this from the beginning. 

But then there are people like the PA at my OB's office (who's 4 days younger than me and has a little boy of her own) who asserts, "I bet you'll be one of those women who leaves the hospital in her regular jeans and I'll have to hate you!" And I'm like, Wait, do those people exist? If so, how do I become one?! 

Let's just say that my regular jeans are pret-ty tight, and I'm not that delusional. (Plus, I haven't done a crunch or a plank since the onset of morning sickness at 7 weeks.) 

But, man, it sure would be nice to head back to school in the fall comfortably wearing the clothes I haven't worn since the middle of December (and even then, I sure wasn't comfortable!). It's not like I'm begging to wear a bikini by June or anything. In fact, I hate bathing suits with a passion, so I basically hide from my bikinis whenever possible. Even so, I miss my flat belly - and I even miss those dastardly crunches - and I hope I don't have to miss it alllllllll summer long . . . . 

Best and Worst in Politics this Week

The "Best" award goes to a real headline that sounds both like it's straight out of The Onion and completely accurate: 

"Fox News Viewers Known Less Than People Who Don't Watch Any News: Study" 

Maybe I should clue my dad in - ? He watches all the new channels though (constantly), so maybe he's breaking even. 

And the "Worst" award goes to Herman Cain for declaring that should he be elected president (dear goodness, please no) he will do whatever he can to defund Planned Parenthood. Yeah, sounds like a great idea. NOT. How do these idiots get into the position to run for the most powerful job in the world?! 

Guess my politics are pretty obvious at this point :). 

Words cannot express how awesome this is

Though I am decidedly not pro-princess fairytale (save the saving for small animals!), this is simply fabulous: 

Don't ask me where it's from. I won't tell you that it's from Pinterest, even if you suspect it may be . . . . 

(And, as an admission, I love The Little Mermaid. Sentimental favorite. Even if there is so much un-feminist b.s. in there.) 

Boo on you, Shape magazine

In the days before I fell in love with This Old House, Shape was my favorite magazine. I've read it for years, had a subscription a handful of times, and generally enjoyed the content (however repetitive it may - and ultimately, must - be). 

Recently, however, magazines like TOH and Better Homes & Gardens and the Woman's Day issues that my mom has finished up with have tended to grab my attention whenever I have a (rare) 15 minutes to sit and enjoy a dozen or so pages. But today I took up the August 2011 issue of Shape (yes, I'm a little behind), and after feeling, well, only vaguely engaged for the first 70 or so pages, I then found myself more than vaguely enraged. Here's why: 

I turned to a multi-page article entitled "Look Good for a Lifetime" and immediately recognized the format: it charts changes/issues decade by decade (20s, 30s, etc.) and makes suggestions based on those age-specific issues. This particular article, I quickly learned, took up the subject of skin and how to keep it beautiful through the aging process. 

Fair enough. 

I was a bit shocked to learn, on the first page, that 20-somethings whose skin is "less radiant" than in previous years (due to decreasing fat stores in the skin) ought to invest in a $100-$300 chemical peel - monthly, no less - but it's a relatively painless and non-invasive procedure and I turned the page to the next decade, expecting something about creams and ointments and maybe an Rx for a product with Retin-a. 

Imagine my surprise: women in their 30s are encouraged to have their faces injected with muscle relaxers (e.g., Botox) or "fillers," the second of which requires a painful procedure costing (the first time) upwards of $1000. I flipped the page again, thinking, Surely when I hit the big 3-0 next year, my only options for skincare and improvement are not medical procedures?! 

What greeted me for the 40s and 50s were no less ridiculous. For you women in your 40s - hit up the lasers and the "tightening devices" (that sounds to me a little too much like a medieval torture device); those of you in your 50s, I hope you've been saving your dough: Shape magazine suggests you go under the knife (for more than $2500) to have an eye lift or, at the very least, using Latisse to thicken your eyelashes. Forget buying a $12 tube of Max Factor - get a prescription! 

Silly me! I thought this was a good
way to enhance your lashes! 

Basically, I'm calling bullsh*t. 

Hey, I'm all for looking good as you age, and before the attack of rosacea took over my cheeks at age 23 (one of my sisters also has it and it's nearly impossible to get rid of), I had great skin, which I miss on a daily basis. But if looking good and being "confident" (this is the article's word) comes at the cost of, well, a ton of money and a whole lot of pricking and injecting and lasering, I have to wonder what exactly it means to be "confident." 

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I believe in hard work and its benefits. When I work our hard and look good, I feel good and proud and confident. Would I look good if a got lipo? Sure, who wouldn't? But would I feel good about myself? I know I wouldn't, and I don't think that our culture - especially our women and girls - need to be hearing that it's okay to strive to "look good" no matter how you have to fake it, buy it, or suffer physical pain for it. 

You've let me down, Shape. You really let me down. 

Here comes the bride

Before asking me to marry him, Brad did not ask "permission" from my father. We went to the Clark Building in downtown Pittsburgh with my mom and browsed around, I picked out the stones and setting I wanted, and when he'd paid all the necessary cash months later, he picked up the ring and popped the question in the most romantic of ways (a scavenger hunt). 

When we got married, surrounded by our immediate families on a dock behind PNC Park, my father did not "give" me away. In fact, my mom stood next to me and he stood next to her. 

Nope, I didn't wear white! 

None of this ever fazed me. It didn't seem weird. And after reading Gayle Rubin's "The Traffic in Women" last night, I might have figured out why. Or if not "why" (which might have just been that I'm very practical about some things and never had the big dream about the fabulous, $30,000 wedding - I actually find the wedding industry obnoxious and totally wasteful [don't cringe, Shannon!]) then at least a great reason for why it absolutely should not have. 

Rubin explains that the exchange of women in marriage by men is one of the founding principles of society - all the way back to way back when. Women, given as "gifts" from one man of one family to another man of another family, helped to create alliances, right wrongs, etc. Basically, to build networks of kin that serve as the basis for civilization. The notion that a father "gives" his daughter away in marriage, then, is not the innocuous, sweet tradition that people would claim it is. Rather it harkens back to one of the oldest bases of women's oppression by men. 

Brad didn't ask my dad if he could marry me b/c, well, he was young and dumb and undoubtedly didn't know much of anything about the conventions of marriage proposal beyond "get down on one knee." But the important fact is that neither Brad nor myself needed permission - from my father or anyone - to get married. We were both capable adults. 

As for the wedding ceremony, I wasn't my father's to give away in the first place. I'm an autonomous being, whether married or unmarried. The notion that a woman belongs first to her father and then to her husband initiates in me a gag reflex so strong I can barely describe it. And it probably does for most other people, too. Well, that's precisely what we're okay-ing when we okay things like giving away the bride. And don't tell me about how it's a nice tradition and convention blah blah blah. The ideology that underlies this (and so many others) tradition is detrimental to women and relationships, sexist, and just plan wrong. 

And perpetuating such a tradition, like it or not, perpetuates the ideology that objectifies women and subordinates them to men - the fact that it's hidden from view, that we don't think of it as being rooted in anything other than ceremony, is precisely why it's so effective in country that, today, prides itself on its equality. I'm all for tradition when it's equitable and reasonable. But when it isn't, I'm sorry: it's got to go. 

This again?

Unless I'm dreaming - and the whole point here is that I'm not, unfortunately - then yes, I am up again at 4:30 a.m. Working. 

This time, I'm not dealing with grading, but with a paper on a poem by modernist poet Mina Loy, visual culture, and feminist theory. Basically, it's about marriage/female objectification and commodification/consumer culture/dept. store display windows/the male gaze/mannequins/and possibly prostitution (why not throw a little bit of that in there?), which, I realize, sounds anything but basic. 

Why such odd timing, you ask? Well, I've got Mr. Snores-a-Lot to thank for that. He somehow managed to go through not 1, not 2, not 3, but 4 varieties of snores in about 15 minutes. Every time I nudged him awake, he shifted slightly and proceeded to snore differently. Unfortunately, once I'm un-sleepified even the tiniest bit, I'm pretty much done for the next few hours. So, with no time to waste during this final week of the semester, I dragged my 4.5-hours-of-sleep arse out of bed and down here to start working on this paper. Again. 

Sigh. 

Before this proceeds, I think I need some Word Bubbles Rising to get my mind going . . . okay, really I just love that game. 

Don't tell me you're not a Feminist IF

you believe women and men ought to have equal access to the educational, professional, political, and social arenas. 

you believe women and men are equally capable, intelligent, and creative. 

you believe women, like men, should have the opportunity to determine their own paths in life. 

*** 
Contrary to what my students may think, being a feminist does not equate to burning your bra and hating men. (That's not to say some feminists don't do those things, but I'd venture to say with the cost of undergarments these days, most savvy women aren't buying 'em just to burn 'em.) 

Feminist is not a dirty word. It's not a shameful word. It's not an ugly word. It's a beautiful word, and you should be proud to use it to describe yourself. I am.

A feminist is someone who supports women, their opportunies, their abilities, their dreams. You don't have to believe men and women are "exactly the same" to be a feminist. What you must believe is that men and women are both worth the same. If that's the case, it follows both should be given the same chances in life. 

So, don't tell me you're not a feminist unless you also tell me that I don't have the abilities and/or intelligence of the guy next door. In that case, get ready for a brawl. 

And don't even talk to me about heavy lifting - I don't know many guys who can squeeze into the tight spaces I can wiggle into, and that's as handy as hauling a flat screen from one room to the next anyday.

In the Trenches

Tomorrow I will begin teaching The Hours to my class of freshmen for the second half of our fiction unit. The above title might at first seem more applicable to the first part of the unit - for which we read The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien's classic, 1990 National Book Award-nominated collection of short stories about the Vietnam War, memory, and storytelling - but I assure you, it's not. 

My students loved O'Brien's book even more than I hoped they would. And it makes sense: I was their age when I was first introduced to his work, and over the years he has come to be possibly my favorite author (though there's a strong case for the award going to Hemingway). 

While for me and certainly those generations older than me (read: those who were alive during the Vietnam War or its immediate aftermath), the potential stickiness of the topic is obvious. But these students are too young to have any investment in Vietnam and, to a large extent, anything more than the most superficial knowedge about Vietnam. And so, while the book's stance (anti-Vietnam Wat, though decidedly not anti-American soldier) is surely contentious to me or you, none of them seemed to interpret this as a political issue and, therefore, none took umbrage with it. 

Michael Cunningham's 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours (which was the original working-title of Virginia Woolf's 1923 novel Mrs. Dalloway), however, is a littttttttle bit of a different story. 

Some of you may have seen the (very gripping) movie with Meryl Streep (love her!), Nicole Kidman, and Julianne Moore (who I could totally do without). It came out when I was a junior in college, so, 2003 or 2004. If you have seen it, jog your memory a bit. Yep, there you go - now you know why I'm anxious to see how teaching this book will go over with a group of freshman. Two of whom are in seminary. Many of whom have probably never interacted with a person they knew to be gay. 

Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf 

Basically, the novel follows the lives of three women in three very distinct historical time periods - the 1920s, 1950s, and the very end of the 20th century. One of these women is an open lesbian, another (a fictionalized version of Woolf) suffers from debilitating mental illness that leads to suicide, and the third contemplates suicide b/c she feels suffocated by her role as a 1950s suburban housewife. Oh, and did I mention Richard? He's a gay man suffering from AIDS, which has basically eaten away a large part of his brain. 

Yesterday, after they finished their peer workshop on their papers, I put a few of the book's "thematic concerns" on the board for them to consider as they read. My list looked something like this: 

Gender - questioning the traditional definitions and roles; questioning the relations b/t genders 
Sexuality - homosexuality, heterosexuality, bisexuality 
Mental illness/"madness" - how is it represented in society? in fiction? what are the effects of its being stigmatized? 
Performing "roles" - what does it mean to be a "wife," "mother," etc. 

There were not a few wide eyes when I mentioned "homosexuality." I was impressed, however, that when I asked for the difference b/t sex and gender (which, interestingly, we also talked about in my theory class later in the day), someone actually had an accurate answer. That, if nothing else, seemed promising. 

After a book focusing on all male characters, I'm glad to throw some female in the mix, but this experience might end up being one minefield after another. However, if I don't expose them to these issues, who will? I guess we'll see how this goes . . . .

I think I've found my calling

Every day is Women's Day. Or at least it ought to be 

Okay, that whole calling thing is a bit of an exaggeration, especially b/c you most likely need to have a lot more energy than I do to respond to a calling, but I do think I've found something (finally!) that I like re: literary/critical theory. 

It should surprise, well, no one that what I'm talking about is feminist theory. It doesn't surprise me, as I always figured if something was going to interest me in terms of theory, it would be feminist, but even so, it's a pleasant revelation b/c I've definitely got no love for deconstruction and the rest of post-structuralism nor for reader response theory. 

And, as it turns out, this year in my papers I've actually been using some of these fem. theory concepts (and even some of the theorists) without knowing it. And, just as interestingly, the little that I've read so far is ridiculously applicable to my own fiction. It's making me think about my own work and its preoccupations in a whole new light. 

Talking about the prevalence of illness in women's fiction/poetry, for instance, Susan M. Gilbert and Sandra Gubar (whose Madwoman in the Attic I read part of - and loved - last semester, having no idea it was feminist theory) explain, "the woman writer feels herself to be literally or figuratively crippled by the debilitating alternatives her culture offers her, and the crippling effects of her conditioning sometimes seem to 'breed' like sentences of death in the blood shoes she inherited from her literary foremothers." Um, yeah - like, this kind of stuff is all over my work. Who knew I was writing in some kind of tradition (albeit - and I have to say this - one hindered by the patriarchy)? I kind of feel empowered. (Brad is now officially wary of my taking feminist theory this coming fall - and to think, not two days he was encouraging it.) 

Just the other day, one of my classmates asked me if all this theory stuff is affecting my creative writing. I responded, "That's such a cute idea - like I have time to write creatively right now." But had I answered her seriously, I would've said, No, I think most of the stuff is either nonsense or it's interesting and has no place in practical discussions of creative work and no place in actually doing that work. Now, I'm not so sure about that. 

As for a theoretical stance apart from my own fiction, this fits me pretty well; it's in line with my interests, my politics, and my concerns (even while Kristeva and surely a host of others seem like idiotic nonsense to me). To end, an oh-so-true thought from Simone de Beauvoir's brilliant The Second Sex: 

"Thus, as against the dispersed, contingent, and multiple existences of actual women, mythical thought opposes the Eternal Feminine, unique and changeless. If the definition provided for this concept is contradicted by the behavior of flesh-and-blood women, it is the latter who are wrong: we are told not that Feminity is a false entity, but that the women concerned are not feminine."

Rock on, Ladies (and some of you Gents)

Okay, I have no idea what International Women's Day is, but the Google homepage informs me that today is its 100th anniversary. (Thanks, Google; your completely random information is appreciated in this instance. Now, please don't take over my identity/mind/country/the world.) 

I've never heard of this day, it's true, but then again I've never heard of most things. So I'm gonna take this opportunity to say: 

1.  Women rock. 

Mum and me 

2.  My mom rocks. She is the awesomest woman I know, and if I'm just a little bit like her, then that makes me happy and proud. 

3.  Being a woman rocks. Yeah, cramps suck and we don't play in the NFL, but high heels make me feel sexy. There's so much about being a woman that I love, and I wouldn't trade it for $10 million. Anyone who knows me knows that's true. 

4.  Betty Friedan, Margaret Sanger, and Gloria Steinem rock. Oh, and Judy Brady, too. (Please read her 1971 essay from Ms. magazine "Why I Want a Wife." It's so good - and short! - it's scandalous.) 

5.  Men who are feminists rock. This includes John Stuart Mill and my hubby. 

Rock on, ladies, rock on.