Keeping up with Sarah

Not Knitting Related: One of my Cool Classmates is Running for State Senate

While at Harvard, I dislocated my elbow and ended up suffering major damage to my arm, almost losing it all together, were it not for the emergency orthopedic surgery that end up with me in the hospital like this:

For my knitting friends, let me tell you that as I was slowly losing the ability to use my left arm, I would stick a knitting needle in my paralyzed left hand and continue to knit by using my right to do all the work.

I also with this major injury, and yes, those are hole drilled through my arm, I continued to attend Harvard full time. Harvard has this handy service for the handicapped where they have a bus, driven by a lovely man named Elio, that picked us up from our homes and deposited us in front of our classrooms, or as close as the bus could get. Often on this route, Brooke would be the only other passenger, so we became acquainted.

She is a very personable, charismatic person, perfect in personality for public office, and exceptionally smart on top of that. And I'll tell you that she is kind and thinks of others. On our little trips back and forth she gave me unsolicited advice on the best word recognition software, which made all the difference in my classwork, and other little tips on getting by with my new handicap.

I will be sending her money for her campaign.

Here's an article on it in the New York Times today.

Secrets we share

I didn't write this, but I sympathize. For those of you who think Harvard's superior to any other school, think again.

The back of my card would have said, "But I'm too damn stubborn to quit."
From Post Secret.

The Difficult Position

Desiree Goodwin's lost her discrimination suit against Harvard.   I'm sorry to hear it.  Not because I believe definitively that she was discriminated against, but because only winning would alleviate the grief of exposing oneself to the media and jeopardizing future jobs.  For all those pundits out there who think this is a case of someone doing something easy to get something quick, think again.  The time, money, exposure and future pain of filing a lawsuit weighs against any outcome. That she felt biased against enough to take action suggests to me that there was bias there, whether or not it was proved in court.  Mild bias isn't enough to make most people move a finger, and sometimes extreme bias still doesn't, especially when weighed against potential lost wages. 

She's a hardworking, intelligent, cheerful and helpful librarian.  May she be allowed to continue to be.

Super nice, capable and smart...

and yet potentially discriminated against at Harvard.  NPR reported this morning that Desiree Goodwin, an assistant librarian at the Loeb Design Library at Harvard has filed a discrimination suit.  She states she's been passed over for 16 promotions and told that her race and her dress prevent her from succeeding.  I'm not surprised, given my own experiences in the work world.  The reality is that she is 40, exceptionally well educated and from my personal experience a fabulous resource at Harvard.  That she looks easily 15 years younger, dresses well, not inappropriately, and is of African descent are things that don't mesh well often in the work world's opinions of appropriate behavior for women and minorities.   Looking youthful, including being in healthy shape and in good spirits, are often declaimers for promotion of women; until they're then "old" and then they're too old for promotion.  I've found the people at Loeb Library to be nothing but kind and helpful to students, so please don't take my sympathy for Desiree as displeasure with the library as a whole.  But I recognize that there is a deep antipathy that runs counter to even so-called liberal ideals when a person of color is a good team player.  Another person I know was identified as a "non-promotable" by his supervisor: smart, capable, key to the business' success, youthful, deferential and congenial.  Given the quick promotions of less responsible, younger, inexperienced white men around him, it is very difficult to assume anything else except discrimination. 

My great hope is that Harvard will show itself to be a place that rectifies its wrongs: in the face of the scandals around Larry Summers, the environment is ripe for correcting an oversight as great as ignoring talent and making inappropriate remarks based upon race and gender.  Let there be a small haven of meritocracy some place in the United States under this evil administration.

The most haunting story

Take a look at this early version of Peter Pan.

Is the North more racist than the South?

This is one of those big questions that inevitably comes up over a beer in a bar: which is better overt racism or hidden racism. And is hidden racism really the way of northeastern states?

Supporting this view is the law behind the Massachusetts' Governor Mitt Romney's back-door attack on the Supreme Court affirmed right for homosexuals to legally marry in his state. He's attempting to uphold a 1913 law that prevents Masschusetts from marrying folks that would be considered illegally married in their home states. The law was created as the New York Times puts it "in part to bar interracial marriages."

This is the classic case of northeastern racism. The representatives of the state can not directly say that they believe that interracial marriage is wrong so instead they put in a law that depends upon the more direct racism of other states.

I wonder about the thought that went into the bill originally: did the legislators abhor interracial marriage and were too afraid of their constituents to ban it out right? Or were they true fence sitters, unwilling to take part in the debate and holding out a view that gave both sides some comfort and some discomfort?

I also wonder about their constituents. It is obvious to see that urban Boston is in favor of gay marriage: Somerville, Provincetown, Cambridge and other cities are already issuing licenses to in-state and out-of-state couples. Is this a urban vs. suburban issue? Was this true in 1913? Were certain cities or certain classes of people open to the idea of interracial marriage, and others not?

Most importantly I wonder if the compromise needed to bring about resolution in our democracy is somehow more deeply damaging to the psyche than fighting it out. Perhaps this 1913 law came about as a result of a compromise that forced a pro-human rights person to cave on their universal values in order to save the rights of their constituents. This tells our minority residents that their civil liberties, their basic freedoms, are compromisable in order to have order.

How does that make a non-white or homosexual person feel about their safety in their community? Do you look over your shoulder more, or less, if your enemy is quietly around you instead of yelling their gills off? Is this the basis of the indirect prejudice the North is accused of?

I'm so proud of my baby!!

See his article in Gizmodo on E3!!

More about body image

I find this article disturbingly apt and while deeply sad, cosmically just. I think our only choice to win this is to unplug from the matrix.

You're never thin enough

During my illness, I've lost weight. I lost some weight coming to school and riding my bicycle everywhere, which was probably good for me, but I lost even more from two months of exceptional pain and disability. Pain killers dulled my appetite, and I came out of this whole experience looking gaunt.

But only some people noticed: some of my girlfriends and some family members remarked upon my "peakedness" in consternation. Peaked means two things, tapering and having a sickly appearance, and it must come from back in the good old days when being too thin was a sign of wasting illness. Others, mostly men, and oddly all of the men at work, remarked upon my fabulousness. Even those I hadn't seen in person, but had heard from me, "I've been ill, and as a result have lost a lot of weight."

"Why, you must look fabulous!"

Hmm...why is this not comforting to a convalescent? Should I, a la a movie star, become addicted to the affects of my vicodent and continue to starve myself for these compliments?

I'm not a particular large person in any respect, except for personality, nor am I petite, tiny, delicate, or rail thin like all of the ladies on magazine covers. So I have no personal agenda - I don't excuse a lack of love or friends by my weight, or find jobs hard to find, or whatever else can be seen as fat-bias. But I am very, very concerned that the men that I talked to thrill that any woman, even a fit one, should lose weight.

Where does this extremely thin ideal come from? An extremely thin woman has no chest, hip or butt padding, so why is she attractive? She's not: unless she engages in plastic surgery to extend flesh selectively over the skeleton. Where do these unnatural images play out as normal? Fashion magazines, of which I am a consumer, fictional movies and television and pornography. Ahhh...perhaps that's why it's the men who don't find me too skinny.

For further reading, I suggest The Big Fat Con Story at the UK Guardian.

And I submit to all of my female friends who some how feel fat under this critical eye (and this includes myself and probably almost every American woman in the country), that we stop putting out to it. Let men suffer for their body disfiguring obsession in loneliness and frustration. They are disgusting, and my belly is not.

More horror at Gauguin

This article in the London Telegraph entited "Be Amorous, Be Happy," Gauguin 's credo, briefly reviews two books about Gauguin. Weirdly striking is that while they point out that "...he entertained his mistresses – one of whom was 14– drank quantities of absinthe, and took morphine to dull the pain from the symptoms of the syphilis which was slowly killing him" they don't seem even slightly phased by it.

And while the article notices his middle-aged lust for teens, it blithely skims over the fact that the disease he was suffering from, killing him, was sexually transmitted, and that some poor 14 year old would also lead a shortened life, probably without the expensive drugs that kept Gauguin aloft.

I'm thoroughly appalled at this world in which female children are chattle in the name of higher expression. While it's a felony to engage in those acts here, and appalling, in our HIV conscious world, to knowingly give someone a deadly sexually transmitted disease, it's okay for those we admire to have done so.

So Gauguin living in Tahiti had two credos: Be Amorous, Be Happy and Be Mysterious. I would suggest that the whole one would be Be Selfish and Spread Misery to Others in order To Be Amorous, Happy and Mysterious.