“Does he not comprehend how harmful what he was saying could be to –”
– the women around the world who will be subjected to the stereotype Pfleger reinforces, of the overly emotional, unrelentingly ambitious, single-mindedly selfish woman?
Oh, no: “– Obama?”
Well, shit, I suppose my priorities are out of order.
Work Buddy,
Yesterday, four minutes after I walked in the door, you gathered your things and walked out the way I came.
You were my first friend in the eastern half of the United States.
You were the one who trained me at work. You were business-minded but fun at heart. You had a taste for profanity and indie music that mirrored my own. You had a lot of wisdom to share on the job, and you talent like whoa; when it came to the numbers, you out-sold everybody in the store — combined, some months.
Including our manager.
She is human. She can be fun to be around, and she keeps things running. But she has her flaws. And one of them is the fact that she treated you like shit. For whatever reason, there was tension between you two, and when something went wrong, you usually ended up taking the fall for it. When there was stress at work, you took the brunt of her negativity.
You had your own faults and you made your own mistakes. We all did. But the mistakes you made seemed to be disasters in her mind, while the mistakes she made were understandable, excusable. When you came up with a good idea for the store sometimes I would let her know it was you that came up with it and sometimes I would stay silent and let her think it was me. And almost without exception, she would narrow her eyes at the former and appreciate the latter.
And that is why you walked out the door last night, when she threatened to write you up and possibly even call the police over a couple instances of trivial human error, the seriousness of which she has more than rivaled herself in the time I have been here.
But really, when you get down to it, you are what made my work enjoyable. I love the job itself, but it’s hard to do in a hostile environment. And you helped keep that environment pleasant.
Now that you’re gone, I worry that the animosity will seek a new place to settle. And I wonder whether that place will be me.
She will be sorry for it when her store’s numbers plummet, and she feels more and more pressure from her higher-up, and the remaining employees get tired of her bullshit and follow your lead.
I may have to head that way myself.
But in the meantime:
You will be sorely missed, my friend.
Melissa explains it all. (OK, I admit I just wanted to make a funny there. I’m sure Liss has heard it often enough.)
But I had a revelation as I was reading it:
The reason we cannot dismiss “the little stuff” is that the little stuff would not exist if it weren’t for The Big Problem. Without institutionlized classism, homophobia, ableism, transphobia, racism, sexism, etc. there would be no reason for “the little stuff” to exist at all.
The fact that there is that little stuff, and the fact that it is so prevalent, is indicative of the existence of The Big Problem.
But instead we are urged to ignore the symptoms of the illness, instructed that there is no such thing and the abundance of those little things is just How Things Are, and we amble along, sick to our stomachs with this insidious illness, telling ourselves we are perfectly well.
***
Additionally, the little things are precisely what are used to enforce this twisted power structure called the kyriarchy. It is the casual acceptance and even embrace of these little acts of domination that strengthen that system.
And that is why people so desperately defend their right to those “little things” and so vociferously insist that they are “little.” If they were not little things, they would be worth our attention.
that most people never have to give any thought to.
Back in middle school, I noticed that my posture was awful and decided I was going to train myself to stand upright.
Moderate success;
my shoulders still slump forward but I keep my back nice and straight, and it did make a significant difference in my pain levels (I honestly wasn’t all that concerned with appearance). It’s been habit ever since I started paying any sort of attention.
With the new diagnosis and the spasms, over the past few days I’ve tried to retrain myself to sit upright. Normally I sit in any number of positions that aren’t exactly what you see in an office or even a casual classroom. I bend and contort in unusual ways, my legs and feet up and around in places they conventionally “shouldn’t” be — basically I move my body however is comfortable for me at that moment, stretching or contracting sore muscles as needed, etc. It’s rare that I ever sit with my back straight up, my shoulders neutral and my knees at perfect ninety-degree angles — in fact that position is very, very painful for my knees. Usually they end up drawn to my chest or stretched straight out resting on some sort of platform (usually the printer) to keep them fairly level.
But… I dunno. I spent ten minutes late this morning holding myself in decent posture (I was sitting normally, simply slumped) before I had to give up and arch my back over my drawn-up knees, and the relief I felt was incredible. When I can, I’m trying to hold tht posture, but I know better than to push myself too far.
I don’t know if I will be able to build up to sitting this way normally? or whether I just don’t have the werewithal. My muscles have been underdeveloped since childhood, so it’s not just a matter of habit; I have to actually build the strength and size of the core muscles to support the upper half of my body. I don’t have that now. Getting back to Pilates would probably help that, but then it would probably also hurt the endeavor some, as it would steal most of the energy I need to practice the posture in the first place.
Video, via. Well worth watching. It will take some time.
That said, I have something to ask. It has been brewing in my mind for some time now.
I am a white woman with ancestors straight out of Europe, married to a white man with same (mine Hungarian, his German), who grew up in white families, with predominantly white schoolmates, and mostly white friends. We live, and will continue to live, in an area that is 80% white (to be honest, that surprises me; I was going to write 95% until I decided to look up the actual figures for accuracy). To be fair, I grew up between two cities, one 54% white, and the other where Latin@s actually outnumber whites by 1.8%. My middle brother’s wife is Mexican (and therefore their child half) and I had several friends of color (Mexican, Filipina, Japanese) growing up.
But that does not change the underlying reality that concerns me: our children are going to grow up in a sheltered, privileged white community. And I want to know what I can do to counteract that.
This is smalltown southwestern Pennsylvania; there is, needless to say, a fair amount of racism about. Obviously I plan on making it clear to my children that is not acceptable, and trying to foster a sense of community with a wide variety of people, to try to make sure they just have that basic sense of the humanity of every person, to make sure that they grow up to approach difference with appreciation rather than skepticism.
Watching this video I got the idea that any dolls my children play with be representative of various races, to reinforce the idea that there is something to relate to in every person because they are human, not because “they look just like me.”
I don’t know — I know that due to my privilege there are things I might not see.
What else can a parent do? Are there any other tactics, activities, etc. that can be used by a parent trying to raise her children to feel that strong sense of identity with every person, not merely those who are most like them?
I’ve got a couple years to keep learning, at least.
Amanda elaborates on the bullying of disabled children, centered around the case of an autistic boy whose classmates, encouraged by the teacher, voted him out of the gifted program he was more than qualified for.
I don’t think there’s really anything I can add, so I won’t. But I simply adore her for her perspective on this (emphasis mine):
And I remember as well that when I was bullied so mercilessly — at an age where I understood far better what was happening — that I was afraid to go to school and lashed out defensively at nearly anyone who tried to interact with me at all, I was the one who got counseling, and I was the one who was talked about by teachers as if there was something wrong with me. And I was the one who had to repeat a grade and change schools. The bullies were left to go on doing their thing, because it was only natural to be nasty and cruel, but wholly unnatural to be terrified of people who acted in this manner.
…
I also want to know what on earth it means that it’s considered “good social skills” to learn to be one of the people that excludes…. But it’s sheer ugliness that these horrible things are treated as normal, and being the target of them makes you seen as somehow worse than the people doing the targeting. And the people doing the targeting are seen as the ones to emulate, it seems like.
OK, it’s time to put together my diagnosis/treatment list.
This list is limited to diagnosed medical conditions. It does not include the stronger symptoms of those conditions or the limitations they create, or the secondary conditions I haven’t bothered to seek diagnosis for (IBS, Raynaud’s, etc.) because there’s nothing that could be done for them anyway. It also does not include the physical idiosyncracies that contribute to those conditions (flat feet, long neck, excessively tense shoulder and neck muscles, low muscle tone, hair loss, chemical sensitivies, low blood pressure, and so on).
I’m sitting here shaking and taking deep breaths. I feel overwhelmed. I am constantly encountering some new way that my body is deformed, deficient, deviant, wrong somehow. And I can deal with that just fine; I’ve never fit in anyway. But all the limitations that are imposed upon me because of these conditions, and the stress and burden of caring for these conditions, are just too much to bear. The worst of it is the knowledge that this list is not yet finished; I am only twenty-two years old and I have many years left.
It is a struggle, understanding this body of mine, coping with the changes it requires, and then trying my best to have a positive self-regard through it all. I try; that is all I can say.
An enlightening post by zuzu. Be sure to read the comments too; I understand the process far better now, and I only wish the national conversation had been something more like what’s going on there. (Edit: errr, a bit more like it was before I posted this and went back to read the new comments and saw it all go to hell. O Great Internet, I do love you, but some days I can’t help but hate you.)
But I wanted to highlight this, because it strikes at the heart of just why this primary season has been “divisive”:
The only reason that this is a problem now is that everyone expects that there will be a winner by early March. That didn’t happen this year, which means that a lot of the flaws in the process have been exposed rather than covered up and swept under the rug for the next cycle. With luck, we’ll get some additional meaningful reform as a result.
What I want to know is, why are we quibbling over who did a better job at gaming a fucked up system, rather than working to make the system better?
Why do we automatically assume that if the system is broken, that’s just How Things Are and we should move forward with working the system for our benefit? Why don’t we stop and make the system fair to begin with?
Before January, everyone was talking about how the fuxxored the current primary system is. All of a sudden when their candidate seems to be doing well within that system, they forget about the very people who are being trampled over on the path to the convention. Those people whose cause they claimed to care about. Do they really?
tired, increasingly tired, of this body of mine.
Normally, it is what it is, and I deal, and I move on. I have done what I can do to make things easier for myself, but unfortunately God forgot to imbue me with my magical powers when He created me, and so goes life.
But it’s too much lately. Too much. The deep fatigue, stiffness and weakness. This back pain that hasn’t abated since its onset six months ago, which is the longest-lasting severe body pain (I am not counting migraines here) I have had, ever, that I can remember. Not that my memory is doing that well either. These fucking spasms, the pain and shock to my nervous system that come with them. And this weakness, the dizziness, the throbbing temple, the faint spells. I’ve not actually dropped to the floor yet, but I did begin to black out one time, and I’ve only barely avoided it the several other times it has happened.
I’m just tired of it. It’s too much. I spend my every moment, sleep and waking, dealing. I have spent my entire life dealing. I’m tired of dealing.
I wasn’t going to publish this, because it’s just a passing frustration, and in time I will adjust and move on. But I just wanted to push that image down because it makes me sick every time I see it.
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