Resolution!!!

This chapter I am working on, it keeps growing and growing in the form of self-contained sections, and now it's so huge that I can't really handle reading through it or editing it. It's like 50 pages long!

Then I was complaining yet again about this to poor CC and I realized that this chapter is like The House the Pecks Built. Did you read that when you were a kid? It's about this family (the Pecks) who start out with this tiny house, but then they all build different rooms on their house so that they can do their favorite things (a bowling room, a sewing room (this being 1950), a play room, etc.; I kind of forget what the rooms were actually, but the point is) The point is that the house has like 100 rooms and the family members never see one another! And they get lonely. So they tear it all down to two rooms again.

Anyway, so I resolved that today, I am going to do what the Pecks did and delete 9/10ths of the Chapter! No, that is not true. But I resolved to like, just whip this chapter into some kind of "finished first draft" state and then declare it a finished first draft and get on with my life! So at Thanksgiving, like the European imperialist slave-owning pilgrims, I will have something to be thankful for (but unlike them, it will not be imperialism or slavery.)

Hey grant foundation ladies, bring on that cash!

YSA: Would you read my personal statement for this !#@#$$# grant application?
Tom: Sure.
YSA: oh, i should have sent this before. it's the specifications for the personal statement:

”...please state career goals...please describe your helping of other women, as well as how you have worked as a teacher and mentor.”
*************************************************
Personal Statement
I am deeply pleased to apply for the #!@$%$ of ##$%%^* Women Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a fellowship just for women PhD graduate students who need money to finish their dissertations, and especially targeted to help women who have a deep commitment to mentor other women, not only because I myself am a woman, but also because of my own deep and abiding interest in women. All my life I have supported and mentored other women, even going so far as to sleep with them. Indeed, I am still sleeping with them. One is here with me right now, as I write this.

My dissertation, “Women during the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933,” is about women during the Weimar Republic, in Germany. It is about how they mentored one another, for example by creating women-only work spaces (except for the male clients who came by, but they were not there all the time) and making money to support their (female) children, especially when they were working class. Some people who read about my dissertation might say, “Why do I want to read a whole dissertation about prostitution, venereal disease, pornography and sterilization?” But although my dissertation discusses all these things, it is really about women. Women mentoring other women. Mentoring them to run away when the police raided their bordellos, and to avoid venereal disease. Mentoring them to produce postcards of their naked nun cabaret act and not to get those postcards seized by the pornography police.

All of these things, women mentored each other, together. Women together. That is what the Weimar Republic (in Germany) was really all about. The tragic rise of the Nazis put an end to this mass mentoring by German women, but my own commitment to mentor women and girls lives on. As I taught an all-women class twice that was required and that students really resented having to take (and had no clear point), I learned the value of single-sex education and of all-women spaces in which to mentor, mentor, mentor. My commitment to mentoring women has shaped my personal, professional (dissertation) and professional (teaching) lives.

*************************************************
Tom: you should make your personal statement:
"I have achieved all my goals. Now, I am just f-cking around. Send me
some cash, suckas!"
YSA: stay low, bi-atches, and keep the cash comin.
Tom: That should be your motto. Or at least, the motto of your women-only university.

Ultimate Bowling

This game, recently invented by my relatives, is just about the most sporting fun you can have inside your house since knee football. It is full contact bowling. Each team has 4 pins. They set up their pins on opposite ends of the court (rug). There is one nerf bowling ball. The team on offense tries to bowl down the other team's pins. The defense tries to block them by tackling them and taking the bowling ball. (Recently, many teams have been using large red and purple pillows to block on defense, creating a linebacker rush type situation.)

The kinds of stuff I do at work

I pretend to have an "office" and "coworkers" because sometimes as I think to myself how I lack these things, my heart swells with panic (as in: Gosh, how is my work different from unemployment??) I have in my life had a more-readily-recognizable-as-a-job job and therefore I know what it's like in an "office" with "coworkers" and especially what you tell your sweetie at the end of the day with regards to "how was work, sugar lips?"

You think of the most exciting thing that happened that day. For me, it used to be stuff like, "I helped Alice fix the copy machine!" Or, "we went to cover a car fire!" (Some of my former jobs could be pretty interesting.)

Today it was: I remembered that a book just came out on the Weimar Republic. When I remembered this, I was at my "office" which is a desk in a library. I rushed to look--did the library already have this new book?? My dissertation is also on the Weimar Republic--!! What if the new book had scooped my dissertation?? Heart-pounding search for the book. Quick, consult in-library map of book stacks!

Yes, I found it--20 minutes of edge-of-seat consultation of book's index on things like "lesbian" (one mention) and "prostitution" (one mention)...Whew, the book doesn't scoop my dissertation.

Then I got sort of peeved. How could the dude write a whole book and not mention the stuff that's in my dissertation? Aren't my dissertation people important? They are! Dammit.

That is the kind of stuff that happens at work. It's no car on fire, let me tell you. I may not tell sugar lips about this one, I don't want to spend my boredom capital with her unnecessarily.

Running in NJ

I moved out of my old NJ apartment down south a bit, still in NJ but amidst a few more trees. This is my new run through the woods a block from the house. Picture taken about a month ago. I feel really lucky to have moved next to this great run! I didn't even know the park was there until we moved in.

Sex freedom!

Sex toys (including vibrators) are illegal to sell in several states, including Alabama and Mississippi. A 2004 circuit court decision upheld Alabama's ban on the sale of "any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs ... ."

Here is a law against queer sex (which I define as any kind of sex that violates dominant social norms) that both 'straights' and 'homos/queers/lgbt/whatever people' can join forces to oppose!

Yay for a sex positive coalition of lots of people! Sex toy shops like Toys in Babeland and Good Vibrations initially sought to market sex toys to women as a feminist act. But they've seen booms in business, and they seem to have made sex toys somewhat respectable even to straight couples. Now will the sex toy industry help build a sex positive political coalition for sex freedom in the U.S.?

(Shout out to HAL for the tip off on these laws.)

Spoooooky

This is our awesome pumpkin.