My vision has never been spectacular and I’ve had periods throughout my life where things got weird optically, but it was university that really killed me. I think it was computer screens, dim lecture halls, and horrible powerpoint presentations on bad projectors that did it. Christmas break of sophmore year, I believe, I went home to England and got a pair of really nice glasses in a great shade of red so I could see the blackboards. I remember putting them on for the first time and the shock of realizing that the world wasn’t soft focus and fuzzy, it was full of sharp edges and bright breaks between colors. Looking around made frightened for a second that I could cut myself on leaves. Where had all of this been hiding?
Glasses perched firmly on face, I considered the matter closed. Unfortunately my eyes didn’t. Slowly the sharp bright world has needed more effort to stick around. At first I only needed my glasses to see things that were far away. Then the next year I needed them to slightly closer, and so forth. For about the past year I’ve needed them to watch TV.
So on Saturday I threw in the towel and got fitted for contacts and again went through the dizzying experience of discovering that the world looks differently than the reality I’ve been living with – and it isn’t framed in a rectangle of black. The mountains looked like they could slice and I could drive without hunting for face gear. I can read the clock on the microwave from the couch. I could read signs across the street without squinting. I’ve been kicking myself for not considering contacts earlier ever since.
It’s amazing how we can get used to things that don’t seem like a big deal until we take the trouble to fix them. It’s always good to be reminded that there’s a technicolor, HD world on the other side of only a little bit of bother.
“Oh thank goodness…tomorrow’s Sunday, not Monday!” “You forgot what day it is?” “We’re lying about in pajamas watching PBS, it’s a totally plausible mistake.” – C. and J.
“There aren’t enough days in the weekend.”
~ Rod Schmidt
It’s been another week of lunches mostly at my desk, except for Thursday when a lovely friend rescued me and dragged me to the university art museum – which is really quite an impressive place with an extensive collection, but for the point here also contains the best cafe on campus. A great and much needed interlude in a week filled with a lot of rejection (entirely vicarious, but it’s odd how it still smarts and still feels disheartening), and a bunch of changes at work, but that’s another blog post.
I’m tired, and grumpy, and not much feeling like myself, which is always a chore to get out of – like trudging through a pit of glue. The mere thought of cooking dinner fills me with a churlishness fearsome to behold. My weekend to do list feels acres long and two days to do it all in feels ridiculously short. I am, minions, in short, out of sorts.
I proscribe myself tea and taking projects one at a time. There’s nothing tea doesn’t fix. Here are your links, amuse yourselves:
Curry – sustaining desperate people since long before midterm cramming and last minute dinners.
It’s official, Richard III has been found! The whole story behind his body’s discovery is incredible, from finding the skeleton on the first day of the dig, to the confirmation of physical deformity that scholars have debated as being either truth or Tudor propaganda. History nerds, revel in the awesomeness.
We’re all about the genderswapping here at Small Dog Inc., it allows us to pretend we’re like Shakespeare.
Here’s the story of two girls who left the Westboro Baptist Church. Putting aside my own feelings about that organization, which are far from cordial, the tale of these girls and their journey from absolute truth to uncertainty is really powerful.
“If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.” – Napoleon Hill
Another day, another hectic week, minions. But there’s always a few bright spots:
I have lunch with an old acquaintance today who I haven’t seen in months.
The existence of my first godchild has been confirmed. My own godmother is candy coated awesomeness so the bar has been set pretty high, but I’m excited all the same.
Dad turned up a bond in my name long past its maturity date that I get to collect.
And on that same note, J. did our tax return last night and hooray, we’re poor! But we did get a nice return this year that will allow us to pay off a couple of things and put a small but tidy little sum into savings – a feat not as easily accomplished since student loans reared their heads.
Community, my favorite show and really the only thing off of PBS that I make a real effort to watch anymore (at least until Game of Thrones and Mad Men are back), returns tonight after a long and rather silly hiatus.
Any quick and cheap things getting you through this Thursday?
First to blackout wins the inheritance – or would if it wasn’t entailed! Pretty sure this could make a dangerous drinking game too, either tea or one of those newfangled cocktails the Dowager Countess is so baffled by. (Courtesy of Marie)
“You need to see this puppy rescue video.” “No way, those make me cry. Besides, I’m watching a murder mystery, those are much less upsetting.” – J. and C.
“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.”
~ Andrew Wyeth
So, a couple days ago I was begging benign forces to just let me make it to April, which seemed like an awfully long way off, and bam! Suddenly I looked up and it’s February already. Either my prayers were answered or I have a very slippery grip on the reality of space/time interactions. Probably the latter.
Anyway, I like February. It’s a quirky little month that likes to throw people off with how short it is – clearly, we’ve got something in common. It’s also the month of Chip and Dip For Three Meals Sunday (the Superbowl), the excuse to have a really fancy dinner (Valentine’s Day), and the Small Dog Annual Couture Smackdown (the Oscars). Delightful things to look forward to, yes minions? Here are your links:
So, most of our friends long ago left our university town for bigger things which should mean we’re not doing anything for the Superbowl, right? Wrong, minions! Honestly, don’t you know us at all? We’re throwing a two person party complete with pizza and homemade dips and salsa. Anyone left in the area is welcome to just show up, throw yourself on the sofas, and indulge. J. is also hilariously excited about this relatively new tradition. Which doesn’t help our puppy lust.
For a variety of reasons, personal and political, I want about fifty copies of this. I want to paper whole walls with it!
Another useful thing to hang on a wall, since I can never remember the exchanges.
One of the strangest things to watch is how a word or idea with a certain definition takes on a new meaning within a group. I have personal fascination with the word “modesty” when used by various religious groups – it’s anthropologically engrossing and personally discomforting to see how a word originally describing a behavior or mindset has come to refer to how long hems or sleeves are, almost solely for women.
This article comes recommended by Peregrine, and is doubly hilarious to me because recently I was channel surfing to find something to watch while I folded laundry and flicked through a station where one of Suze Orman’s programs was playing. I only got a sentence fragment: “I realized that all the financial advice I’ve given is wrong -” And yet, somehow, people are still paying her to give it.
Caitlin Kelly, friend and favorite of the blog, shared this on Facebook and I giggled mightily at it.
My father hiked the the Grand Teton (edited: corrected by Dad) when I was young and we were living in Germany. Apparently somewhere along the way, a marmot chewed through his knapsack and ate his trail mix. In commemoration, he bought me a plush toy marmot that I’m pretty sure is still tucked away safely somewhere. Where my father failed to bond with the beasts, this boy did not!
“The man who doesn’t relax and hoot a few hoots voluntarily, now and then, is in great danger of hooting hoots and standing on his head for the edification of the pathologist and trained nurse, a little later on.”
~ Elbert Hubbard
Oh, C.. Your continued faith in me, contrary to all evidence and experience, is so cute!
I knew, in my heart of hearts, that when we finally got a front desk officer back in the seat my workload would balance out. I believed it with my whole soul. The rack couldn’t tear this truth from me, I’d have gone to the bonfires with it.
The universe, it seemed, let me wallow in this conviction. And laughed and laughed.
Eighty background checks in three days, annual supervisor interview where I was told that if I were staying they would probably review my job description to see if I qualified for a raise (gee…thanks…), having a Rape and Aggression Defense metal training helmet fall on me in the supply room bursting a vein in my hand and wrist, student uniforms by the metric ton, and I came home to find a chunk of the lawn in front of our apartment complex dug out without explanation. Which is never anything but ominous.
I also found out about a few of the plans to replace me and the main one… Well, I have some major reservations, let’s put it that way. And not the this-job-was-my-life-for-years-and-someone-new-is-taking-my-baby reservations (as I’m sure I need not tell you that I’m grateful for what I’ve learned here, but I am more than ready to move on), honest to goodness I-don’t-think-the-person-they’ve-picked-can-do-it reservations. The next few weeks and months are going to be interesting. And stressful.
Spare me, Universe, until April. That’s all I ask.*
*(Which is of course a bald lie. Spare me until April, let us move to the East Coast for the summer, allow me to find a menial evening job that allows me to concentrate fully on freelancing and the MP, let us sell the car for decent money, let J. get the awesome summer internship, let us get to London without further incident, and don’t let our flat collapse around our ears in the meantime is all I ask. Not much, really. Hardly anything.)
“Why are sex and violence always linked? I’m afraid they’ll blur together in people’s minds – sexandviolence – until we can’t tell them apart. I expect to hear a newscaster say, “The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex.”
~Dick Cavett
Today a man came into the office and told me that he and his wife got into an disagreement about rape in our university town, because she wanted him to escort her even extremely short distances when it was dark, and he saw no need because we live in a “good” place where bad things “don’t happen.” Couldn’t I back him up since he was clearly right? I told him in no uncertain terms that he was wrong, that rape and other forms of sexual crime happen in our town just as much as anywhere else. He tried to argue with me! I refrained from what I wanted to say, which was, “Of the two of us, only one works in a police department and deals with this regularly. It isn’t you.” Instead I gave him facts, statistics, personal anecdotes (cheered on, as it happens by a – male – student waiting behind him with silent grins and thumbs up, which were very much appreciated), most of which he tried to counter. But what finally seemed to make an impact was when I told him the estimated statistics for sexual crime versus the (much lower) actual reported ones – and told him bluntly that seen through a pair of female eyes, those numbers meant the world was a hostile and frightening place where the chances of us becoming a victim of sexual crime (from mild harassment – still criminal – up through rape) were higher than than our chances of not. His tone changed after that.
Here’s the truth.
The statistics on sexual crime are appalling, and the majority of that crime is directed at females.* From our perspective (when we admit it ourselves or anyone else), the world is a sexually threatening place for us and the possibility of it intruding is very real.
As a kid several of my favorite playmates were boys, and the trend continued into university. With the exception of The Girls, I’ve mostly hung around with guys – many of them dear friends to this day. But I remember the specific day that boys took on a more threatening aspect for me. My first year of high school I was accepted to a magnet school for writing that required being bussed to the next county to attend the class every day. I was the only girl chosen for that class that year and that meant I spent a couple hours on a bus everyday with at least three boys from my school and a few boys from another school. There were older girls but they often drove themselves to the program rather than taking the bus.
These boys were the normal sort of teenage males, a bit loutish and inclined to show off for one another, but not malicious I didn’t think. There were tons of discussions between them that made me uncomfortable (being a nice, boring, bookish sort who mostly read on the bus ride), but nothing negative was directed towards me until I started standing up for myself against mild picking on. When I voiced opinions counter to the boys, when I told them I didn’t like the conversation topics, when I spoke up. I don’t remember what the conversation was about but one day (when I was the lone girl on the bus) I said something contrary to the general opinion. The next thing I knew one of the boys loomed over me and told me to, “shut your mouth and spread your legs.” I don’t even remember how I reacted (except for the fact that I marched into the classroom when the bus pulled in and told the teacher straight away), but I remember the realization that I was much smaller than even the shortest boy there, that there was nowhere for me to run to, and that the bus driver was awfully far away. I remember realizing that in that moment that these boys, if they wanted to, if they chose to, could hurt me. I remember realizing that I was suddenly scared of these boys who I sat in classes with every day.
They didn’t hurt me, he pulled away laughing and they got back to their which-sexual-superpower-would-you-prefer meditations. To some of the boys’ credit they looked deeply uncomfortable about what had just happened, but none of them had stood up against their friend and none of them apologized until a teacher and another school authority made them.
My fear turned to fury at the fact that they had chosen to try and shut me up via sexual intimidation, which is what motivated me to tell my teacher, but I’d by lying if I said I’ve forgotten how scared I was in that moment before anger propelled me into action. That experience stayed with me, and if I’m honest it has colored every relationship I’ve ever had with any male. And to reiterate, most of my friends have been male, so clearly permanent damage wasn’t done. But that was the moment I realized for the first time that beings who I previously saw as playmates were growing up bigger, stronger, and more able to enforce their will that I was. On me and on my body if they chose. Believe me, that is a realization that sticks.
I’m not the same girl now. I’ve grown up. Since that day I’ve been catcalled, I’ve been grabbed at by strangers, I’ve had dates get unwantedly frisky, but I’ve handled myself just fine with more confidence than I had at 14 and much more sass. Cultivated, if I’m honest, for the purpose of being able to stand up for myself against people who would always be bigger and stronger than me. Frankly, these days and after working where I have for four years gleaning the perspective I have, I’m just glad nothing worse happened on that bus – and I know exactly how statistically lucky I am that nothing much worse has happened since. Although, to be morbidly honest, I’m barely a third of the way through my life – there is plenty of time for sexual crime to happen to me still.
And I think that there are so many men out there – good and decent men who are, I fervently believe, the vast majority of their gender – who don’t realize that most women live with that thought, whether conscious or not, everyday. They walk into parking lots with keys held out ready to stab, cancel exercise plans when their partner does so they don’t walk alone at night, refuse calls to avoid people who intend them fear or hurt. And we don’t do any of this for amusement, we do it because we honestly live with the threat of grievous harm – for no other reason than we are female and we either know from personal or trusted anecdotal experience that there are people out there who think their desire trumps our willingness. That they have a right to do us harm. Sexual violence against women is pandemic; yes, even in First World countries in “good” places filled with “good” people.
This man at my counter thought expecting an assault walking to the mailbox and back in the dark was silly. His wife knows that, while on this particular Monday it’s not exactly likely, it’s more than possible.
“Their pretensions are naked and vulnerable and for that reason, to me at least, rather charming.” ― Julian Fellowes, Snobs
Make this your mantra, and all will be well.
Judging from social media, the entire fandom is just about ready to riot and tear Dark Lord Fellowes limb from limb, to which I say: really? I love Downton Abbey with the deep affection of pretty costumes, good actors, and clever writing, but the truth is, it’s a soap opera. A gorgeous, sumptuous soap opera in a marvelous setting with (usually) higher quality characters, but at this point I don’t think the soapiness can be denied.
Lest you think I’m being judgey and turning up my nose, never fear, I’m still sucking it down in gulps. I just find it odd (and sometimes morbidly hilarious) that story arcs, once finished are seldom referred to again – and when they are resurrected, the effect is sort of stilted. Lavinia’s father leaves Matthew a fortune, but Matthew is too guilt ridden to accept it. Until he’s miraculously not anymore. Ta da! Problem solved. Slightly more hilarious to me was Cora trying to ask Mary if she wanted any sex advice on her wedding day – lest we forget this wedding almost didn’t happen because she once took a lover. In soap operas, characters go from one crisis to the next and somehow life goes on and past dealings are forgotten – despite the fact that the disfigured man may be your cousin, you lose the use of your legs, you do battle with your siblings, you get left at the altar, your fiance blackmails you, and papa’s just lost the family fortune. Again. The disfigured possible cousin will literally vanish never to be seen of more, all the doctors will be wrong and you will walk again, you’ll still do battle with your siblings because drama is as permanent in this world as death and taxes, you’ll go on to start a column (Dear Downton Abb[e]y?), the blackmailing fiance goes the way of the cousin, and money will present itself in an improbable way.
Which means, cynically, that as ticked as I am that my favorite character was killed off, I doubt it will make much difference in the show. It’s formula is largely season contained crises with a cliffhanger at the end. It’s a successful TV model, there’s a reason soaps ran for decades, but I wonder how long it’s sustainable. Soaps are also dying, you may have noticed. But as long as the writing’s good (and Maggie Smith’s involved), I’ll feed the addiction.
With that in mind, we bring you a play by play of tonight’s episode:
“Lord Grantham dislikes medical detail.” No kidding. With dire consequences.
O’Brien, you scheming cow. Soapiness.
Thomas, keep your hands to yourself.
Ha! The proof is, literally, in the pudding! Pastry will out!
Isobel meddles so cheekily.
I still can’t tell exactly what got up the nose of Bates cellmate and the gaoler, they seem to be evil for absolutely no reason. Soapiness.
Being business like is being middle class – quelle horreur.
“I’ll get a baby out of you one way or another!” Words I hope never to hear a doctor say to me. Pompous ass.
Tom is truly a tame revolutionary now, an evening jacket at dinner? For shame, bolshevik.
Matthew wants to talk about his gentlemanly area, doesn’t have the words. Britishness.
Edith makes progress as a person, high five. Immediately smacked down by Robert who knows better than everyone, especially women and peasants. Snobbishness.
“Nobody could look at you and think that Mrs. Byrd.” *Snicker
Another love triangle in the kitchen, Daisy gets uppity. Soapiness.
“I hate to get news second hand.” First Dowager quip of the night.
And downstairs, Mrs. Patmore lays down the law. There’s only one queen bee in the kitchen, thank you very much. Soapiness.
Everyone knows that men with titles give better medical advice, you silly plebe doctor. Snobbishness.
Kidney souffle. That sounds absolutely dreadful.
“Or the footmen!” Carson the Butler, guardian of young boys’ virtue. Britishness.
The Dowager Countess is not put off by bodily functions – one wonders how her son turned out so boneheaded.
“The decision lies with the chauffeur.” This woman. I want to be her. Fabulousness.
“Isn’t a certainty stronger than a doubt?” And there we have the trouble with this particular class system summed up in one sentence.
It’s a girl!
Thomas, hands off. Soapiness.
Everyone’s happy. Brace yourself, that always means Fellowes is about to do something evil.
…And here it is.
Sir Phillip is a useless ass. Surprise.
Lavinia Swire gets a saintly death, the nicest character on the show dies horribly and much more realistically. Yep. About par for the course. Soapiness.
“But this can’t be.” Says the man who categorically refuses to look any sort of reality square in the face.
The baby cries – direct hit in the upper left quadrant of the torso.
“Is there anything we can do, Mr. Carson?”
“Carry on, Daisy.” Britishness.
Thomas is crying – good grief the evil guy is human.
Oh good, someone’s mad at Robert! We’re squarely on Team Cora here.
“Do you think we might get along a little better in the future?”
“I doubt it.” Oh Lady Mary, never change! Soapiness.
Matthew gets along with business, Mary shuts it down with a surprising amount of class given that she looks capable of ripping off her husbands face. Delicious self-restraint. Britishness.
Will I be shot for saying that I’m beyond ready for the Bates in prison storyline to wrap up?
Evil guard and evil cellmate twirls their mustachios evilly. Soapiness.
And Maggie Smith out-acts everyone by walking away from the camera slowly and suddenly looking old for the first time in the whole series. Second punch in the chest.
Small Dog Syndrome 