Monday Misc: inadequate eyelashes [Friday] edition October 9, 2009

Some rapidly aging links I’ve been hoarding for a while:

In the ideas-change-over-time category, I’d like to publicly state that this article from Feministing has officially changed my mind about Zero Population Growth and the idea that trying to get people (i.e., women) to have less babies (which I still think is a splendid idea) is the very best way to accomplish environmental goals.

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Sweet seed librarian Ken has a good article all about—what else?—seed saving here at Civil Eats, which is a pretty rad site overall, actually.

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I didn’t mention this on the blog because it was pretty upsetting, but now things have calmed down a bit, so here we go: my best friends Noel and Selma’s restaurant, Bloodroot, was robbed a few weeks ago. Selma was slightly injured when she confronted the robber because he was stealing her precious knitting bag (which he most likely thought was a purse). Selma and I had a good chat about the whole thing last week, and she seems to be back to her serene, bizarrely-energetic, beloved self. Here’s a piece of our exchange:

“So, anyway, the day after the whole thing we were scheduled to go to our Weavers Guild [which is exactly what it sounds like]…”

[at this point, after Sel has told me the story of how she basically attacked this robber and a serious melee resulted, all I can think is: "Wouldn't you want to just stay in bed the next day?"]

“…and, you know, I figured, what am I going to do, just stay in bed all day? So we went.”

That’s my Selma.

You have to register to read the articles, but you can pretty much get the gist of what happened here and here’s a nice blog post about it (in the end she recovered the knitting bag, can you believe that? A kid apparently found it in the water while fishing!).

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Ready to be completely blown away by a product that is the absolute epitome, the perfect zenith, the utter apex of that age-old dynamic duo of capitalism + misogyny? I bring you: latisse. Warning: “there is potential for increased brown iris pigmentation which is likely to be permanent.” Um, this shit is gonna stain your eye?

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And sorry to end on a downer, but have you heard about Condé Nasty ruthlessly murdering Gourmet? I know it’s not vegan (though their “Vegetarian Tonight” column pretty much rocked it), but it’s by far the best food magazine out there…argh, it was. I’m really broken up about it. Now Gourmet subscribers are doing to get stupid idiotic stultifying Bon Appetit—LORD HELP US ALL.

in which I officially admit to liking something a dude did September 24, 2009

Happy fall, darlings!

I happen to hate fall, but I take it that apart from me (and blogreader Brittany—to me she is BFF Brittany, but you probably know her as blogreader Brittany) fall is universally beloved, so have at it. It’s pretty, I’ll give you that. And it seems that some people actually like dead things littering every inch of the earth that you have to painstakingly capture and discard, so I hope those weirdos are really living it up (and when you’re done living it up at your place, please feel free to come over to mine and do some raking, for I am already behind).

I’ve been busy cooking and chocolatizing and preparing to have a few friends over this weekend for fried green tomatoes (East Coast peeps: go to any farmer tomorrow and I guarantee they will give you all the green tomatoes you can haul away—go!)  then the Last Supper art show thingie on Saturday–busy week! If you’re in the Brooklyn area be sure to come check it out. I am totally tickled that I am officially an “artist” (because everyone knows that what makes you an artist is being called one online).

I had a bunch of tryouts for the poem I’d be writing in chocolate for the Last Supper event, and finally settled on a Susan Griffin number called “Bread.” It’s pretty, and it fits on a large sheet pan that will fit in the back of my car, which is apparently what I look for in poetry these days. You might remember Susan Griffin as the author of the seminal ecofeminist text Woman and Nature—I had no idea she was a poet until I stumbled across a book of her collected poetry at my friendly local bookshop (discounted to $6 because of a stain on the spine I am resolutely telling myself has to be coffee).

One of the runners-up for the choco poem was pretty much anything by Matthew Dickman, my current poet crush. In the end I had to rule anything of his out because I couldn’t find a suitable poem that was the requisite sheet-tray length, but I’ve been mightily enjoying his one and only book, All-American Poem.

My god, what a giantly sweet mass of cotton candy of a treat this little collection is. You can read it like a novel and it’s just as tasty as if you read each poem slow like an English major, coaxing out all the allusions and flourishes. And it’s magnificently, generously sexy too—as sexy as the author photo on the back, which is saying a lot.

I’ve been walking around for about a week now whispering Matthew Dickman wonderfulness, feeling the special deep-down happiness that only taut lines strung together in surprising and ultra-clever ways can create. My sweetheart, a dude who bore witness to me spending the last two years of college only reading women poets and who didn’t bat an eye when I literally segregated our books by gender and put all the feminist books and poetry in a separate room so they could “breathe,” has been amused by the whole thing.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say you liked a poem by a guy before,” he said, all bemusedly and shit, the other day. He’s probably right. No one says they like Shakespeare (verily though, I do, and I have the iPhone app that proves it) or T.S. Eliot (do I dare disturb the universe? In truth, though I very much like Eliot, my thoughts about him are mostly in the “I wonder what Virgina Woolf really thought of him?” vein. In truth, I very much wonder what Virginia would think or did think about a great many things in a week…is this weird? To wonder what Woolf would make of Facebook? I would so like to know.) When Jacob’s not home and I can’t sleep I read Rimbaud in French out loud to my cats…and that’s about it. A little Donald Hall here, a dash of Mark Strand there (you know: ‘Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.’)  that one W. S. Merwin book about Hawai’i—done with dudes.

Dudes are usually such fantastically boring poets, you know? But the ladies: my Adrienne Rich first and foremost, then that sad old Plath who will never get out of my head because she does not do you do not do any more black shoe & I’ll probably be mumbling about eating men like air on my deathbed, and Denise Levertov and Joy Harjo, Haunani-Kay Trask and of course the doomed Sexton, my BFFFF Dorothy Parker and her polar opposite,  Emily Dickinson. Audre Lorde Audre Lorde Audre Lorde. Marge Piercy and Grace Paley and yeah, now and then, maybe just a little Katha Pollitt too. Katherine Mansfield and Anais Nin. Be still my heart, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, Christina Rosetti and Nikki Giovanni and Phyllis Wheatley and even good old Sappho, sure. Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton and Carolyn Forche and Louise Gluck–even Erica Jong, in high school, under the covers, secretly.

Once you start only reading novels and poetry by women, it’s so easy never to stop, to just forget that whole fucked-up boy world exists. I heard this fucking doucher James Ellroy on NPR the other day, and it reminded me all over again why dudes like him have ruined novels by men for me–seriously!

But, as my 73-year-old BFF Selma is fond of pointing out: men these days are different. Softer. Matthew Dickman is one of them, and, rightfully, his poetry reminds me of that great lesson we’ve been letting poetry teach us forever: how amazing it is to be alive, right now, here.

This book in my hands, these words in my head.

“What you call ‘love,’ men like me invented to sell nylons”: Don Draper and the Nihilistic Sensibility of Mad Men August 12, 2009

Oh my. Oh, my. Oh…..my. That furrowed brow!

Part Two in my four-part series all about Mad Men! (Read Part One here before you read this).

Hey, please be aware that there are spoilers galore in here. In case you’re not caught up (Mary! Veronica!), you might want to avert your eyes.

That said, let’s get into it!

So, I truly believe that Mad Men is the most feminist show on TV right now, and though I say that without actually owning a TV, I think I Hulu and Netflix enough to know what’s out there, and I’m pretty confident in that statement. Saying that that Mad Men is the most feminist show on TV is not saying much, but it’s saying something, for sure. Right?

The mistake, it seems to me, is thinking that the drinking and smoking and capitalist crap and sexual anxieties the show depicts in are its true point, when in fact the true point is the fragility and deep-down horror of the world the characters inhabit.

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So, let’s start at the beginning, with our broken down anti-hero, our sexy sexy, dead-inside unreliable narrator, our little boy John Galt, our living, breathing Howard Roark, requisite white skin and square jaw and the whole package (double entendre intended): Don [swoon] Draper.

“What you call ‘love,’ men like me invented to sell nylons.” – Don Draper.

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Oh, Don, you and your catchphrases!

Beatnik: “[Ad men are] Perpetuating the lie—how do you sleep at night?”
Don Draper: “On a bed made of money.”

[Oh, speaking of that point: Please be aware that yes, of course this anarcho-feminist believes that advertising executives are scum of the earth. I’m not a capitalist and have a trizillion problems with the advertising-dependent capitalist system. But while capitalism is of course the backdrop to Mad Men and informs its themes and provides much ironic thematic fun (and real money for the network), Mad Men, it seems to me, is primarily about hearts. So I decided not to get into a meta-analysis of how the inherent horribleosities with capitalism problematize all layers of the show. Ya dig?]

So, Don.
Remember my thesis about Mad Men?

“-It’s about feminism.
-It’s about nihilism.

Specifically: how a heartbreaking devotion to the latter held back the former. And: how that changed.”

Thus, Don is our chief nihilist: perpetually pushing away any troubling signs of morality (season two, episode eleven: “Why would you deny yourself something you want?”), mortality, or everyday reality in order to continue to….to, what, exactly?

What is the purpose of Don’s life? We’re all trying to figure it out with him. It certainly isn’t to have the typical late-1950s, early 1960s existence: good job, lovely home, wife, and children, because though his surface charms have easily attracted all these things, he spends most of his days ignoring, destroying, or fleeing from them.

In his most ham-fisted moment, his soliloquy in the pilot episode, Don tells his paramour-to-be, the Jewess (this most un p.c. word so perfectly suits how most other characters think of her) businesswoman Rachel Menken, “I’m living like there’s no tomorrow. Because there isn’t one.”

Isn’t that nice for him.

It seems to me that most of the male characters share a similar set of values—and if they don’t, and they make the ultimate mistake of caring for something besides their own immediate happiness and material success–they are severely punished (when Kinsey goes down South to register black voters, it is made clear that he is going not because he truly has a political consciousness, but because his girlfriend is black and wants to go, and because he believes it will elevate his status around the office, because to truly believe in civil rights would be to show weakness—a crack in the nihilism aesthetic.).

[One quick overly long bracketed note about that—this incident represents the entirety of racial politics on the show. I hope later seasons will delve into the intense civil rights issues of the era, because right now the racial politics of Mad Men are notable mostly for their absence---which is probably as it should be in a Madison Avenue office building in 1961. I hope that as the civil rights movement heats up, it will spill onto the show.

Hey, while I’m in this bracket o’ marginalization, I should state that (what is now called) GLBTQ issues are quite satisfyingly covered in the personages of Salvatore, a closeted gay guy of the older generation whose world is turn apart when the painfully young (and European) Kurt casually explains to the office that “I make love with the men, not the women.” Around the same time a nice fag hag dynamic is put into place with Peggy and Kurt and things start to look rosy for the younger generation. Not so for Salvatore, however, whose sad attempts to brush off potential d/l lovers as well as nervous assertions of his straightness are truly heartbreaking (see the pilot episode: after lovingly caressing an ad sketch he did of a shirtless man posing with a cigarette and stating that “My neighbor posed for that…he always looks very relaxed.” He {unconvincingly} tells Don that he doesn’t want to go to a bachelor party at a strip club because “If a girl’s going to shake it in my face, I want to be alone so I can do something about it.”)

And now I’m finished offensively sidelining all non-feminist issues!]

One of the reasons I am so in love with Mad Men is that the show refuses to simply explore the world of handsome men destroying the world: it peels back the curtain to show us the wreckage that nihilism leaves behind: the carelessly broken hearts, the dead-eyed stares and ruined homes. It takes what could be the most boring and clichéd topic imaginable and blows the roof off it to show us its horrible guts. In many ways it’s a crime show: we can’t turn away from the wreckage because it is filmed so tenderly and in such detail.

Anyway, by the end of the second season with the dramatic backdrop of the Cuban missile crisis, this point (“I’m living like there’s no tomorrow. Because there isn’t one.”) is driven home over and over: the end is near, perpetually. Nothing matters, nothing makes a difference. If it weren’t for the heart-stoppingly gorgeous sets and hairstyles and clothes, the show would be bleak beyond redemption, particularly toward the end of the second season, when everything feels like it’s sliding to a horrid stop.

Let’s back up a little though.

Don. He’s not a total nihilist, he has some sort of decalogue, and the flashes of it that occasionally peek out give us hope and keep him stringing us along and not writing him off as a beautiful, fucked-up-beyond-redemption human being. (For example, when his colleague Freddy Rumsen is so drunk at work that he pisses in his pants, he is angry at the way others in the office ridicule him.)

Particularly toward the end of Season Two, I think the writers’ are trying to show us that he is trying to fumble his way to some sort of authentic life. In season two, episode six, I think we are meant to see that perhaps Don is beginning to have a small awareness of the kind of world he is leaving his daughter—he has left a lover (Bobbie Barrett) tied up in a hotel room (this trope is so played out—I don’t even watch pornos and I can think of like four movies where the old “leaving your lover tied to the hotel bed” — is trotted out, argh.) when she admitted that she had bragged about his sexual prowess to another of his former paramours.

That’s all well and good, I suppose, but I think that he’s not trying that hard—I think he’s just having another set of experiences, still living like there’s no tomorrow. I’m not sure he is capable of becoming, as they would start to say a half-decade or so after the season is set, a fully actualized person. He’s a beautiful manikin, and I just want to watch him woodenly move through the world, with his cigarettes and beautiful clothes.

More than any other character I’ve ever seen on TV, he knows we’re watching, too (appropriately, there is literally a stage in the main office, where all characters must enter and exit.). He does everything he does for us, because he’s incapable of acting in a truly authentic way—because he literally has no authenticity. As his wife, Betty, says at one point when for just a second she lets down the guard she has spent an entire life constructing and decides to tell it like it is: “Stop it Don—nobody’s watching.”

In spite or because of this, Don’s small set of values is meant to mean something to us: whenever we catch a glimpse of whatever tiny heart he has underneath his expensive suits and fake name and entirely false life, it’s meant to sort of devastate us. He’s our protagonist, and we’re supposed to want him to be a good person. When he goes to California toward the end of season two, we’re supposed to see that after watching a presentation on the joys of nuclear annihilation he has a true psychic break. Something (and not just something: The Ultimate Thing, nihilism carried to its logical conclusion: mutually assured destruction of all life on earth) finally scratched the unscratchable surface of Don Draper, and maybe he is on his way to becoming a real human.

Thus, he literally goes toward the light, replacing his pinstriped Manhattan world with sunny California and metaphors of truth and sun. Everything is new in California in the early 1960s: the ultra modern house Don follows a lover (heavy handidly-named Joy) to, Mexican food, which he’s never had before.

“So Don, what’s your story?” one of the characters he meets along the way asks him, and for the first time he answers honestly:

“I don’t know how to answer that.”

Pretty Little Prisoners: The Sexual Politics of Mad Men August 8, 2009

Be still my heart!

Over the next week leading up to the Series Three Mad Men premiere, I’ll be posting some thoughts on the sumptuously heartbreaking AMC TV series. Here are just the first few paragraphs.

Start organizing your thoughts on MM so we can have good conversations in the comments, ok, friendos?

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Before we even get into it: I started trying to write a super scholarly treatise on Mad Men, but, almost 10 years after college days spent blissfully analyzing poems and novels to death, I finally realized that I wasn’t writing an essay for WST 205 (Something’s Happening Here: Manifestations of Social Change and Dissonance in 1960s America Through the Lens of “Second Wave” Feminist Theory). Thus, please enjoy my nonacademic rambly thoughts, and please add your own!

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After hearing me heap praise on Mad Men for months, a friend finally started watching the series from the beginning. He called me up after watching the first few episodes.
“I don’t get this show. Why you like it.”
“What?”
“You talked so much about the clothes and the set designs and the characters—I didn’t know it was going to be so dark. And it doesn’t seem like a show you’d be into—the women are so, I don’t know…oppressed.”

Yep!

Just as there are people who do not understand that The Simpsons isn’t a lighthearted cartoon but one of the most bitingly satiric shows ever to air on TV, there are people running around whining about how Mad Men is misogynist. Today seems like as good a day as any for a radical feminist to counter that claptrap by heaping praise on this most radical, most feminist show.

After watching every episode of both seasons three times and taking copious notes (as well as screenshots), my thoughts on Mad Men, can be boiled down to two:

• It’s about feminism.
• It’s about nihilism.

Specifically: how a heartbreaking devotion to the latter held back the former.

And: how that changed.

Tune in next Tuesday or Wednesday for more! BE EXCITED!

Monday Miscellany! August 4, 2009

You know what’s crazy?? This is not my photo, but I own a pretty much identical smock! It likes to hang on a clothesline too!

Dudes!!! The blog seems to have become a link dump lately, and for that I most heartily apologize. Regular screaming original programming returning soon—promise!

It’s actually really annoying when bloggers apologize for not blogging, isn’t it? It’s sort of a huge peeve of mine—who cares if you fucking blog or not??—so I’m sorry to do it now. I’m in that post-vacation work/housework/paperwork tornado, and while doing all my chores I’ve been thinking of lots to get angry about/recipes to post/Mad Men thoughts, so I guess I’m apologizing to myself for not getting it together to organize my thoughts on anything.

So whatevs, let’s get to it:

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Bitch Magazine on PETA, then Carol Adams on PETA (she, like I, must get so tired of rehashing this over and over and over and over and over. Can we just say it once and for all and be done? PETA IS FUCKED. Done!)

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All my BFF farmers (Kira! Billiam! Polly & Jay!) are interviewed in this heartbreaking NYT piece on how big box stores have ruined local organic tomatoes and we will have no tomatoes this year. Veronique and I usually turn 60 lbs of tomatoes into a few gallons of roasted tomato sauce every week that I freeze and use throughout the year. My goal for this year was going to be 800 lbs (100 lbs a week for 8 weeks, it sounds manageable, doesn’t it?), because I constantly run out of tomatoes by March or so. My heart is broken 20,000 times over, and I am steeling myself to pay in gold for what little bit of nightshade love I can get. Argh.  (Thanks for all the alerts to this article!)

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Amanda at Pandagon has a great analysis of women and porn, particularly this:

I hate to trot out the term “objectification”, because people really misunderstand what it means, including a lot of feminists who are really fond of it.  It doesn’t mean being looked at with lust.  It means that your subjective reality is dismissed in pursuit of upholding someone else’s, reducing you to an object.

Yeah, I find people constantly are confused by the difference between “we’re making out, please look at me lustfully,” and “you are nothing but a thing to be used for male gazey pleasure.” What a world of difference there is between those two, no? The whole article is super rad really, go read it!

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OK, and: did any of you read the New Yorker Nora Ephron profile? It was written by the lovely Ariel Levy, and I was so excited that she said just exactly what I feel about the Julie and Julia book (and now movie): it sorta stinks. I listened to the audio book of the book, and I will go see the movie because (veganosity not withstanding) I am madly in love with Julia Child, but man oh man I found that Julie lady to be, in a word, INSUFFERABLE. I’m disheartened that it seems the movie is a faithful representation of the book—why not a good old fashioned Julia Child bio-pic? Her life had enough drama and intrigue in it to fill up days! Why put in boring claptrap about some blah blah mall-clothes beige office drone?

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And this is getting long, but: WOW. This dude is doing some amazing chocolate….stuff. I found out about him through people making fun of me, and now I’m totally obsessed with his work. Fucking amazing, yo.

Je vous adore,

Lagusta

Monday Miscellany: serious is the random July 12, 2009

Rasta resto in B-more!

David Byrne’s blog is everything a blog should be: smart and informed and stylish and personal. I don’t know exactly that our interests overlap so much, but I’m still really liking it, and how nice is that?

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I’m always curious about what everyone is doing with their pubes, aren’t you? Of course. So you’ll be as interested as I was to read this Feministing thread all about this very topic. I don’t understand how people can spend all this time shaving and waxing and shit—who has the time?

AND! You know how I’m shaving my legs these days? WTF, leg hair—can we talk? Why do you reappear in mere minutes after shaving? I know it’s weird that I’m only starting to shave my legs at age 31, but I really thought I wouldn’t have to shave, like, every day. Between constant stubble and that I refuse to shave above my knee, my legs are pretty ridiculous looking still, which hasn’t stopped everyone in my life from being stunned/amazed that I’m shaving at all.

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Heirloom bean blog! Super fascinating.

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HOLY FUCKING SHIT. Wow wow wow wow wow wow puke puke wow wow. (via TBTL!)

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Want to hear the cutest thing my moms has ever said?
“When I was younger I tried to suppress my optimistic nature, because I wanted to be an existentialist. But now I don’t try anymore.” Aww—how adorable is it to have a mom who wanted to be an existentialist when she was a kid?

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Another Feministing find, isn’t this quote beautiful?:

War is easy to abhor, but it takes a serious passion to unravel the tangles of financial manipulations and to understand the pain of sweatshop workers or displaced farmers. And maybe this is what heroism looks like nowadays: occasionally high-profile heroism in public but mostly just painstaking mastery of arcane policy, stubborn perseverance year after year for a cause, empathy with those who remain unseen, and outrage channeled into dedication.

Totes.

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I can’t wait to see this movie about women surfers. The trailer is just about the most rad thing I’ve ever seen.

Onward!

summer in the city July 4, 2009

Did you ever take a self-taken photo that makes you think you might actually be a serial killer and not even know it? My Dexter is showing a little in this photo, no?

I’m following my sweetheart around on tour for the next few days, and today the laminated piece of paper attached to my belt loop says we are in New Haven.

I have a tour routine: while he’s working, I scope out the city, then we have lunch, he works more and I settle into computer work and more wandering around.

After walking around the Yale Campus for an hour or so today, checking out the current college fashions and thinking about how everyone passing me had done better on the SATs than me, I hopped up on an old stone wall and sunbathed while reading this week’s New Paltz Times.*

And the troubles began.

Is this outfit just too skimpy to wear out and about? Ladies, please let me know. I’ve got the little slip that prevents the dress from being too short and everything!

So today, I was sitting on the wall, legs crossed all tidy, not laying out in the sun lolling about or anything, and a dude whistles at me.

Of course, New Haven is 20 or whatever times bigger than the town where I usually hang out, and this sort of thing happens in cities, I know that. A whistle, who cares. I’m reading the paper completely happy. But combined with three other incidents, it all added up to some annoyance on my part that I think I need to blog out of my system.

So I’m sitting on the wall, and after 10 minutes or so I suddenly become aware of a figure creeping toward me around the corner. I jump about fifty feet in the air and literally gasp, and a very white, very withery 70ish man straightens up and says “I was just going to tickle your foot–it was just dangling right there.”

UM.

I jump up and gather all my crap and start hustling down the street, literally too stunned to say one word. Should I have laughed it off? It freaked me out to a ridiculous degree, to be honest. Before I could tell that the dude was super old and possibly insane, his creeping form seemed like an attacker who was going to snatch me away to a certain death—seriously.

As I was booking it, he was on the other side of the street, and he said that he was “just kidding! I didn’t mean anything by it!” and I yelled back over my shoulder, “No worries, it’s fine!” when in reality in no way was it fine.

Why do we do this?

Most women do it: the desire to be nice above all. My concern is always that if I am my interior brutal self, I will have misjudged the situation and everyone will know what a serious asshole I am and how badly I overreact. I felt bad for being so jumpy, to be honest, and just exactly how fucked up is that?

So then I go back to the venue and tell Jacob the story and head out for a walk. While window shopping, a (pretty cute, actually) dude walked up to me and asked if he could ask me a question. Warily, I said OK. “Are you part Japanese?” “What? Um. No.” “Oh, because you look sort of Japanese from a certain angle.” “Ah.” And I wished him a good day and walked on.

I know pretty much all women get flirted with in this way pretty much all the time. I just don’t leave my little bubble that often, so it doesn’t happen to me that often. But I am also afraid that my love of the world—my wild, intense joy at having a day to spend walking around in a brand new city in the summer sun—was palpable. My heart felt very open today, and how depressing that if you’re putting out open-heart energies you attract crazy dudes.

People who live in cities have a public face that they put on—a blank, impassive, dead stare that repels panhandlers and overly friendly tourists. If I’m in a city for a few days I can get into that routine, but yesterday I didn’t have a city face at all. I was open, very alive and wildly happy. The world will not tolerate this in women who are wearing short dresses.

Why did it have to be dudes, though? (Don’t answer that one.) Why couldn’t cute girls ask me where I got my dress? I could have told them the best story: I got it in Tasmania, at a music festival in the rain and the mist at the very bottom of the world (yes, even at the bottom of the world there are vendors selling cheap China-made dresses).

So, back in New Haven, after the sunbathing and the window shopping I go to a charming little indie coffeeshop for lemonade and computer work at a table outside, and a Yalie prof. comes up to me after a few minutes, saying he is sitting inside and is wondering if it’s too humid to sit outside. And even though he is in this 40s and is interminably blah (fuckin’ chinos and a blue cuffed shirt), he begins blatantly flirting, saying I have an interestingly-shaped face (was that even a compliment?) and asking what I’m studying (“Um, I’m 31. I’m not in school.”) and the whole fucking thing. He was a brain scientist dude…what’s the word? Where you do MRIs on people’s brains and shit? He did that sort of stuff. Eventually I scratched my head and my luscious armpit hair entered the picture and he seemed sufficiently bored with my non-answers (“Where are your ancestors from?” “It doesn’t matter.” “It doesn’t matter in a larger sense, or you’re just saying it shouldn’t matter to me?” “The latter.”) that he drifted away, but not without me telling him my real name for some stupid reason and him saying a whole long thing about gusto and tongues and ick ick ick.

And we’re beyond the need for feminism, right?

Even though we can’t walk down the street with open hearts and short skirts without dudes jumping into our lives?

Please.

*Speaking of: I generally cannot find fault with newish Town Board member Jeff Logan—he was super sweet when he was my nurse when I went to Dr. to get a part to a tick extracted from my back during the Lyme Disease scare a few months ago—but I was more than a little weirded out by the fact that all of the sudden he is apparently obsessed with some New Paltz medical imaging company getting rid of a trailer they apparently shouldn’t be allowed to have that they use for MRI scans (I don’t have the paper in front of me right now for the details). It seems more than a little sketchy that he works at a clinic where MRIs are available [update: maybe not---their website doesn't mention it], which he comes pretty close to pointing out in the article, even—I’ll toss the quote up here when I get back to my car with the paper in it.

What gives, Jeff?

(late) Monday miscellany: tiny readings June 30, 2009

Ick.

Totes.

IN LOVE.

Made me puke. You?

I’VE BEEN SAYING THIS FOR YEARS!

Thanks to Carol Adams’ Facebook for this ridic link.

Thanks to the THREE! friends who posted this on FB! So not surprising, and another reason to eat real food, duh.

prepare to be shocked: PETA people are misogynists + stupid June 26, 2009

So I’ve been dealing with a really & truly & seriously dumb customer for the past three weeks, and I am in no way above laughing about her to all of the internet for two reasons: she is obsessed with PETA and literally cannot say the word “feminist.” Quelle surprise that these two go hand-in-hand, non?

She has a vague connection to PETA and called me up to order truffles for Ingrid Newkirk’s 60th birthday. In our many phone conversations (it’s taken me more time to talk her through the ordering process than to make the truffles) she has namedropped Ingrid’s name about 60,000 times, and each time when I respond with polite silence or a flat”hmm” I can tell she is utterly perplexed over why this vegan chef she’s talking to is not falling all over herself to get these truffles to *****INGRID*****NEWKIRK****!!!!!

As you know, I CANNOT STAND Ingrid Newkirk. This made for many conversations in which I am the most polite and fake person you have ever met–the consummate business owner who is 100% business—kind in a closed-off sort of a way, answering her many many extremely idiotic questions in a cheery, vapid, detached monotone.

It is clear to me, from our hours together on the phone, that this woman has no idea how the world works and has never had to work a day in her life. She clearly fritters away her life on various boards of directors, and she clearly had her “consciousness raised” (I’m sure that is the phrase she would use) about animal issues in a complete vacuum and has no greater understanding of their connection to larger concerns.

I’ll try to restrain myself from getting into the myriad hilarious details about how much trouble this poor (in all but money), sad sack has had in ordering three boxes of truffles. It’s taken three weeks and six phone calls (yes, I looked back into my caller ID to see). It’s taken me repeating the same simple sentences many times over, sentences like:

“I know the last time we talked you said that you were trying to order from a file of my website from two years ago that you had copied and pasted into a Word document. I just want to mention again that that information is outdated, and the words that say ‘order here’ aren’t actually links, so you’ll have better luck if you go to the website and order them there.”

“Yes…I hope I explained it well last week—when you called on Friday and I mentioned that we make everything fresh and ship truffles every Friday, I hope I mentioned [I KNOW I DID] that you need to place an order by Wednesday night, since as I said we make them on Thursdays. Um…now it’s Friday again and unfortunately because I didn’t receive an order from you…” (she will say that she thought that last Friday she called later on and maybe this week since she was calling earlier and…I could go on and on and on.).

[I just want to insert a little bit here about how I know that LL can be an annoying business to order from---orders go out every week, not every day, for one thing. And if people are on a time deadline and have questions about the ordering process and whatnot, I am more than happy to talk to them about it and help them out in any way I can. Of course! I love 99.99% of my customers dearly, and they are almost always amazing, interesting, brilliant people that I am proud to attract.]

It took three weeks, but finally the order was placed today—well, she says it was, but clearly something went wrong because I haven’t received any notification of it and I’m sure that’s going to entail another round of calling and me suggesting again that instead of using a credit card, something she seems absolutely incapable of doing, she just send a check—after she called me with perhaps the most hilarious question of all:

“So, I am placing my order and it says that it needs a 3-digit confirmation code from the back of the card. I have a MasterCard, and there are seven numbers on the back. Can I give you the seven numbers? Four are on the signature place and three are in a little box.”

“Ah. It’s just asking for those last three numbers.”

!!!

And people wonder why I am a grumpyass bitch all the time? For $45, I have spent THREE WEEKS on the phone with this person.

None of this would annoy me, however, beyond the little pinch of annoyance that comes with daily life when you are smart and awesome and the rest of the world is not, if not for one thing. Because of this one thing, I am pretty much enraged by this woman.

She kept telling me that she wanted to get these truffles to Ingrid ASAP. I kept explaining the truffle schedule (see above) and she kept missing it. I refuse to sell people truffles that are more then 2 days old, so I wasn’t about to make extra just in case she ordered them. I make truffles to order, end of story. On the other hand, I explained to her about 50 times that 4 of the 6 Bonbons are not as perishable and we mostly have them on hand all the time. If she wanted Vandanas, Vulvas, PB Cups or Patties, I could send them out THAT DAY.

But she didn’t want anything to do with that shit. She started reading the little bit about the BBs over the phone, and her mouth could barely even say the word “feminist.” That put the kibosh on everything. No matter how many times I tried to tell her how lovely the boxes are (I always steer people to the BBs and away from the truffles because although I like making them both, the BBs boxes are so much prettier—true confession!) and how so many vegans order the peanut butter cups and peppermint patties (they do), the “f” word just clamped her mouth shut and that was that.

She kept saying that “getting my candies [insert truffles-are-not-candies rant here] into the hands of Ingrid would be such a great opportunity for me” and that “PETA has an online store where they might want to sell them” [this would never happen for 80,000 reasons] and I was just gnashing my teeth and thanking her profusely and trying to be polite.

Because she was a very nice lady.

A sweet sweet idiotic dumbbell.

And now I’m off to call her to see why her order did not go through.

In happier news, I read Noel (pictured above) a very very very XXX note a vulva customer wanted included with her vulvas to be sent to her long-distance girlfriend, and, as I knew she would, she laughed and appreciated and loved it. If I didn’t have the Noels of the world to balance out the PETA people, what would I do?

ecofeminist primers June 23, 2009

A pal emailed to ask me for some ecofeminist book recommendations, so I thought I’d toss them on the blog. Ecofeminism was my main squeeze in college, but I haven’t been keeping up with the new awesome books I know have come out in the nine years since I was a coed. So here are my picks, what are yours?

-Anything by Carol Adams. First you must RUN to read the Sexual Politics of Meat and/or The Pornography of Meat. I love them about equally, but SPOM is the classic. After that:

-Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development by Vandana Shiva (yeah, my BFF.)

-The Death of Nature by Carolyn Merchant—a classic. A downer. Great.

-Woman and Nature by Susan Griffin—awesome. Another total classic.

-Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva—a great reader.

-Reweaving the World—another great reader.

-Women Pioneers for the Environment by Mary Joy Breton (I can’t remember this book, but it’s next to everyone else on my little ecofeminist shelf, right next to my college senior thesis on the radical ecofeminist politics of the poetry of Adrienne Rich)

-Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx, and the Postmodern by Ariel Salleh—I vaguely think there might be better books of hers out there, but this is the only one that appears to be visible right now.

-Ecofeminist Literary Criticism—Awesome! If you’re into that kind of thing.

-If you want something totally wild, settle down with some Mary Daly. Gyn/Ecology, yes!! It’s crazy! Oh, I adore that Mary Daly.