mis lentes y la crisis financiera

I rode the metro home yesterday and was looking at my new glasses in the dark reflection of the window as the train sped through tunnels. i was thinking about how damn much i spent on the suckers. i am usually pretty prudent in terms of spending habits, but glasses are my one splurge. i justify it in that they are something i wear every day (if only for an hour or 2), and usually keep for at least 5 years. further, glasses are in many ways (and much because you wear them every day) part of identity performance. they become the fetishized notion of who someone is visibly, and we often believe they indicate certain traits intellectually, artistically, or otherwise. This is why I refused to have laser surgery on my eyes a few years ago. I have worn glasses for 18 years. I can't imagine myself without them. And, because i place so much importance in them, I'm willing to spend some dough on them.

But back to the metro...I started thinking about some crappy NY times article I read a few years ago. In retrospect, its actually surprising that I took the time to click on it on the home page. But I was proabably working at Studio A+T at the time or maybe it was a slow day at NYRB, but I digress. This article argued that a growing trend among women (presumably upwardly mobile, early 20s to mid 40s urban women) was a tendency to forgo bigger/nicer/more conveniently located housing in favor of having disposable income available for purchases such as designer handbags or shoes.

so maybe the glasses are my designer purchase (they are bvlgari). I did spend more than a month's rent on them (well, on them & the exam, and they threw in an extra set of lenses for my old frames for free).

But then I started thinking, maybe this is a good thing. Certainly, at least a few places I've lived have made me feel like a dirty gentrifier. Most notably, my many apartments in Jersey City were all in a neighborhood on the cusp of condo building. I spent my last year there waking up every Saturday morning at 8 am to the sound of Jackhammers tearing down the old hospital on the corner, and then rebuilding the structure as condos with a view of Hamilton Park. And my point is not that gentrification is good in any way at all. But this all begs the question-Is it better to spend the extra money to live in an already gentrified area or shun these for the up and coming, but still cheap places.

Both seem to have their merits and problems. On one hand, living already gentrified areas arguably keeps the gentrification confined. Its not displacing new people. Its not directly contributing to the building of a new starbucks on the corner (speaking of which, I hope Basic hasn't been replaced by a starbucks). But at the same time, a young white college-educated person such as myself moving into such an area reinforces biased housing markets and the neoliberal system which creates optimal conditions for gentrification.

Now moving into an affordable neighborhood also has its drawbacks. You move into a rennovated apartment, and the landlord builds capital and buys more buildings and rennovates them, and suddenly you have mysterious fires displacing people from their long-time rent controlled homes. New businesses pop up. Uncle Joe's closes and LITM opens. The artists' studios are condemned to make condos. Suddenly you can see the Trump building as you stand in line outside at the 24 hr McDonald's walk up window. Mark or Matt or whatever his name is buys your favorite bar, replaces the orange vinyl with leather, gets rid of the tubes and loses the book of questions in the process. And suddenly you've gone from paying $450 a month (granted, for a room without a window) in 2 floors of a house with a lovely stoop and backyard and washer & dryer, to barely finding a 2 bedroom for under $1700. And while you've contributed to your own displacement, you've also displaced all those people speaking languages you don't understand at Shoprite, and the kids that egged Bow on halloween, and people like Randy Moss or Brendon (though he got some fancy wall st. job, right?).

I guess the point I'm realizing I'm making (though not necessarily the one I set out to make) is that it feels like there are no right answers. Its shitty to move into some fancy neighborhood, and spend 60% of your monthly income on rent, because not only does strain you financially, but it contributes to this whole machine which continually finds new areas to gentrify and new people to displace. But at the same time, to be the direct displacer is also shitty. And there don't seem to be areas outside of the system. My god Rhode Island & New York Aves are the next on the list (at least Alva's glad). This is all to say that this system is really screwed up. And one of the best explanations of how and why I've found is David Harvey's. It doesn't seem to be out there much, so instead of linking to another blog, I'll just post it below. But I'll sum up here rather than after his words. I don't have the answers & Harvey doesn't necessarily have practical answers, but I'm hoping this crisis will call these things into question. And then maybe next time I move I can have a little more peace of mind about where exactly it is that I'm putting all my boxes of books.

David Harvey

Right to the City

January 29, 2009

Urban Social Forum

Urban Reform Tent-Opening Speech

"I'm delighted to be here, but first of all I'd like to apologize for speaking English which is the language of international imperialism. I hope that what I have to say is sufficiently anti-imperialist that you people will forgive me. (applause)

I am very grateful for this invitation because I learn a great deal from the social movements. I've come here to learn and to listen and therefore I am already finding this a great educational experience because as Karl Marx once put it there is always the big question of who will educate the educators.

I have been working for some time on the idea of the Right to the City. I take it that Right to the City means the right of all of us to create cities that meet human needs, our needs. The right to the city is not the right to have - and I'll use an English expression - crumbs from the rich mans table. We should all have the same rights to further construct the different kinds of cities that we want to exist.

The right to the city is not simply the right to what already exists in the city but the right to make the city into something radically different. When I look at history I see that cities have been managed by capital more than by people. So in this struggle for the right to the city there is going to be a struggle against capital.

I want to talk a little bit now about the history of the relationship between capital and city building and ask the question: Why is it that capital manages to exercise so much rights over the city? And why is it that popular forces are relatively weak against that power? And I'd also like to talk about how, actually, the way capital works in cities is one of its weaknesses. So at this time I think the struggle for the right to the city is at the center of the struggle against capital. We have now - as you all know - a financial crisis of capitalism. If you look at recent history you will find that over the last 30 years there have been many financial crises. Somebody did a calculation and said that since 1970 there have been 378 financial crisis in the world. Between 1945 and 1970 there were only 56 financial crises. So capital has been producing many financial crises over the last 30 to 40 years. And what is interesting is that many of these financial crises have a basis in urbanization. At the end of the 1980s the Japanese economy crashed and it crashed around property and land speculation. In 1987 in the United States there was a huge crisis in which hundreds of banks went bankrupt and it was all about housing and property development speculation. In the 1970s there was a big, world-wide crises in property markets. And I could go on and on giving you examples of financial crises that are urban based. My guess is that half of the financial crises over the last 30 years are urban property based. The origins of this crisis in the United States came from something called the sub prime mortgage crises. I call this not a sub prime mortgage crisis but an urban crisis.

This is what happened. In the 1990s there came about a problem of surplus money with nowhere to go. Capitalism is a system that always produces surpluses. You can think of it this way: the capitalist wakes up in the morning and he goes into the market with a certain amount of

money and buys labor and means of production. He puts those elements to work and produces a commodity and sells it for more money than he began with. So at the end of the day the capitalist has more than he had at the beginning of the day. And the big question is what does he do with the more that he's picked up? Now if he were like you and me he would probably go out and have a good time and spend it. But capitalism is not like that. There are competitive forces that push him to reinvest part of his capital in new developments. In the history of capitalism there has been a 3% rate of growth since 1750. Now a 3% growth rate means that you have to find outlets for capital. So capitalism is always faced with what I call a capital surplus absorption problem. Where can I find a profitable outlet to apply my capital? Now back in 1750 the whole world was open for that question. And at that time the total value of the global economy was $135 billion in goods and services. By the time you get to 1950 there is $4 Trillion in circulation and you have to find outlets for 3% of $4 trillion. By the time you get to the year 2000 you have $42 trillion in circulation. Around now its probably $50 Trillion. In another 25 years at 3% rate of growth it will be $100 trillion. What this means is that there is an increasing difficulty in finding profitable outlets for the surplus capital. This situation can be presented in another way. When capitalism was essentially what was going on in Manchester and a few other places in the World, a 3% growth rate posed no problem. Now we have to put a 3% rate of growth on everything that is happening in China, East and Southeast Asia, Europe, much of Latin America and North America and there is a huge, huge problem. Now capitalists, when they have money, have a choice as to how they reinvest it. You can invest in new production. An argument for making the rich richer is that they will reinvest in production and that this will generate employment and a better standard of living for the people. But since 1970 they have invested less and less in new production. They have invested in buying assets, stock shares, property rights, intellectual property rights and of course property. So since 1970, more and more money has gone into financial assets and when the capitalist class starts buying assets the value of the assets increases. So they start to make money out of the increase in the value of their assets. So property prices go up and up and up. And this does not make for a better city it makes for a more expensive city. Furthermore, to the degree that they want to build condominiums and affluent housing they have to drive poor people off their land. They have to take away our right to the city. So that in New York City I find it very difficult to live in Manhattan, and I am a reasonably well paid professor. The mass of the population that actually works in the city cannot afford to live in the city because property prices have gone up and up and up and up. In other words the people's right to the city has been taken away. Sometimes it has been taken away through actions of the market, sometimes its been taken away by government action expelling people from where they live, sometimes it has been taken away by illegal means, violence, setting fire to a building. There was a period where one part of New York City had fire after fire after fire.

So what this does is to create a situation where the rich can increasingly take over the whole domination of the city. And they haveto do that because this is the only way they can use their surplus capital. And at some point however there is also the incentive for this process of city building to go down to the poorer people. The financial institutions lend to the property developers to get them to develop large areas of the city. You have the developers but then the problem is who do the developers sell their properties too? If working class incomes were increasing then maybe you could sell to the working class. But since the 1970s the policies of neoliberalism have been about wage repression. In the United States real wages haven't risen since 1970, so you have a situation where real wages are constant but property prices are going up. So where is the demand for the houses going to come from? The answer was you invite the working classes into the debt environment. And what we see is that household debt in the United States has gone from about $40,000 per household to over $120,000 per household in the last 20 years. The financial institutions knock on the doors of working class people and say, "we have a good deal for you. You borrow money from us and you can become a homeowner, and don't worry, if at some point you can't pay your debt the housing prices are going to go up so everything is fine".

So more and more low income people were bought into the debt environment. But then about two years ago property prices started to come down. The gap between what working class people could afford and what the debt was was too big. Suddenly you had a foreclosure wave going through many American cities. But as usually happens with something of this kind there is an uneven geographical development of that wave. The first wave hit very low income communities in many of the older cities in the United States. There is a wonderful map that you can see on the BBC website of the foreclosures in the city of Cleveland. And what you see is a dot map of the foreclosures that is highly concentrated in certain areas of he city. There is a map beside it which shows a distribution of the African American population, and the two maps correspond. What this means is that this was robbery of a low income African American population. This has been the biggest loss of assets for low income populations in the United States that there has ever been. 2 Million people have lost their homes. And at that very moment when that was happening the bonuses paid out on Wall street were coming to over $30 Billion - that is the extra money that is paid to the bankers for their work. So $30 billion ends up on Wall Street which has effectively been taken from low income neighborhoods. There is talk about this in the United States as a financial Katrina because as you remember Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans differentially and it was the low income black population that got left behind and many of them died. The rich protected their right to the city but the poor essentially lost theirs. In Florida, California and the American South West the pattern was different. It was very much out on the periphery of the cities. And there a lot of money was being lent to the building groups and the developers. They were building housing way out, 30 miles outside of Tuscon and Los Angeles and they couldn't find anybody to sell to so they actually went for a white population that did not like living near immigrants and blacks in the central cities. What this then led to was a situation that happened a year ago when the high gas prices made it very difficult for communities. Many of the people had difficulties paying their debt and so we find a foreclosure wave which is happening in the suburbs and is manly white in places like Florida, Arizona and California. Meanwhile what Wall Street had done is to take all of these risky mortgages and to package them in strange financial instruments. You take all of the mortgages from a particular place and put them into a pot and then sell shares of that pot to somebody else. The result is that the whole of the mortgage financial market has globalized. And you sell pieces of ownership to mortgages to people in Norway or Germany or the Gulf or whatever. Everybody was told that these mortgages and these financial instruments were as safe as houses. They turned out not to be safe and we then had the big crisis which keeps going and going and going. My argument is that if this crisis is basically a crisis of urbanization then the solution should be urbanization of a different sort and this is where the struggle for the right to the city becomes crucial because we have the opportunity to do something different.

But I am often asked if this crisis is the end of neoliberalism.. My answer is "no" if you look at what is being proposed in Washington and London. One of the basic principles that was set up in the 1970s is that state power should protect financial institutions at all costs. And there is a conflict between the well being of financial institutions and the well being of people you chose the well being of the financial institutions. This is the principle that was worked out in New York City in the mid 1970s, and was first defined internationally in Mexico it threatened to go bankrupt in 1982. If Mexico had gone bankrupt it would have destroyed the New York investment banks. So the United States Treasury and the International Monetary Fund combined to help Mexico not go bankrupt. In other words they lent the money to Mexico to pay off the New York bankers. But in so doing they mandated austerity for the Mexican population. In other words they protected the banks and destroyed the people. This has been the standard practice in the International Monetary Fund ever since. Now if you look at the response to the crisis in the United States and Britain, what they have done in effect is to bail out the banks. $700 billion to the banks in the United States. They have done nothing whatsoever to protect the homeowners who have lost their houses. So it is the same principal that we are seeing at work - protect the financial institutions and fuck the people. What we should have done is to take the $700 billion and create an urban redevelopment bank to save all of those neighborhoods that were being destroyed and reconstruct cities more out of popular demand. Interestingly if we had done that then a lot of the crisis would have disappeared because there would be no foreclosed mortgages. Meanwhile we need to organize an anti-eviction movement and we have seen some of that going on in Boston and some other cities. But at this historical moment in the United States there is a sense that popular mobilization is restricted because the election of Obama was a priority. Many people hope that Obama will do something different, unfortunately his economic advisors are exactly those who organized this whole problem in the first place. I doubt that Obama will be as progressive as Lula. You will have to wait a little bit before I think social movements will begin to go in motion. We need a national movement of Urban Reform like you have here.

We need to build a militancy in the way that you have done here. We need in fact to begin to exercise our right to the city. And at some point we'll have to reverse this whole way in which the financial institutions are given priority over us. We have to ask the question what is more important, the value of the banks or the value of humanity. The banking system should serve the people, not live off the people. And the only way in which at some point we are really going to be able to exert the right to the city is that we have to take command of the capitalist surplus absorption problem. We have to socialize the capital surplus. We have to use it to meet social needs . We have to get out of the problem of 3% accumulation forever. We are now at a point where 3% growth rate forever is going to exert such tremendous environmental costs, its going to exert tremendous pressure on social situations that we are going to go from one financial crisis to another. If we come out of this financial crisis in the way they want there will be another financial crisis 5 years from now. So its come to the point when its no longer a matter of accepting what Margaret Thatcher said, that "there is no alternative", and we say that there has to be an alternative. There has to be an alternative to capitalism in general. And we can begin to approach that alternative by perceiving the right to the city as a popular and international demand and I hope that we can all join together in that mission. Thank you very much."

lengua lavender

i've been at a conference for the past two days on glbtqia language (that's gay, lesbian, bi, trans, queer, intersexed, ally).

today, i got to introduce the woman i would choose to be my advisor out of all possibilities (except maybe the gill). she thanked me twice for such an "amazing" introduction.

but what was perhaps a more important moment for me (and no, it has nothing to do with the free food) happened conceptually. sure there's this tired debate about whether homosexuality (as well as transexuality/genderism) are biological or a choice. Obviously there are problematic aspects of looking at this either way (especially in terms of politics). most academics conceive of these phenomena (in the broad sense of the term) as somewhere between biology and choice. and i hadn't given it much thought. but as my mind wandered today during some paper on the scripting of "coming out" stories, i realized something. and now that i'm thinking about it, i don't understand why i didn't get it earlier...let alone why much of the less-left-leaning don't get it.

so here's the deal: have you ever had a crush on someone? someone who's bad news? someone who will clearly screw you over, or lead you on, or has really awful politics, or wines a lot, or smells weird, or spends their free time watching countless episodes of law & order (just kidding on that one...)? And you try to stop yourself from liking this person, but you just can't? Maybe you can put them out of your mind, but then you randomly run into them and it starts all over again?

Well, i don't think anyone would argue its biologically coded that you're attracted to this particular person. But I certainly wouldn't argue that you are choosing to like this person.

And not to say that many glbtqia people are trying really hard to put their love/sex partners of choice out of their minds. or that they should. i'm just saying this all helps me conceptualize the space between biology and choice (which is obviously quite large). there are a lot of other factors in there, and no amount of gay gene or "reorientation" camps are going to change that.

yay for v day reimagination.

el arbol

i'm a few minutes too late, but i was planning on writing a "happy birthday darwin" post. i don't really have much to say except that darwin was 28 when he drew his first evolutionary tree.

i guess i better get busy in the next year...

mi amiga preferida

Last night, as I was falling asleep in otto’s bed, I was thinking about how hesitant I would be to ask most people I know to house sit. And it dawned on me

For the first time…in years…I have a best friend.

And a girl/woman//female at that!

Now one might argue that I’ve had best friends. But for years, I’ve had sneaking suspicions that my best friends always had better friends. In essence while maybe they were my best friend, I was not their best friend. DWT always had Leo. The R___ had the R____. Bii Jih Bah had the fraudulent admiral, and now she has Sowa. Even the 409 boys always had each other, and I felt like a 2nd tier member. There were people I was close to in New York, but as a fine journalist (and roommate) once said, “dating someone in another borough is a long distance relationship.” Following this logic, a friendship is even more difficult to maintain (probably because there’s no promise of sex to entice you into that 2 hour subway ride). So basically, not since the woman formerly known as Kate have I had a real best friend.

Until now, I think. Otto asked me to house and dog sit while the Liberator is in the hospital in Bmore. She said the landlords (land people?) could walk Teddy, but If I wanted to get away from the airfresheners, I could stay in TP for a few days and hang with the Lhasa Apso.

But its not just that. We’ve finally gotten to a point where we complain about our other friends to each other. We tend to just hang out rather than go out. And we even, as fast eddie would say, “talk about feelings”—especially boys—(without being self-conscious).

Its funny, as an undergrad it took me about a year & ½ to make more than a few good friends. Here its taken me a year & ½ to make just one. And we’re very different. To begin, I don’t have an 11 year old daughter with major disabilities. But even though our lives and personalities are very different, we’ve found some good common ground. Things like hotboxing Althusser and enjoying Thanksgiving.

pollock

its Jackson Pollock's birthday, according to google. i thought i would take this opportunity to write about Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock?.

A pretty entertaining film, and for anyone who enjoys art, worth watching. There's quite a cast of interesting characters. What i found especially interesting was the tension between science and artistic knowledge.

(note that this picture is upside down, based on the way the painting is displayed in the film)

SPOILER (sort of)

I also was pretty convinced throughout the whole thing that this was not a Pollock. It just didn't look like a Pollock to me (as echoed by a number of "experts" in the film). It didn't have the rhythm, the intricacy, the organic feeling. But in the end, science proved(?) me wrong. But here's the real question. This was likely a painting Pollock discarded. And perhaps this is a stretch, but if he discarded it because he didn't like it, it wasn't up to his standards, he couldn't stand behind it, he wasn't proud of it, etc....is it still a Pollock? Is something a Pollock just because his hand touched it? Or is it a Pollock only when he declared it his finished work of art ready for the public to see?

And secondarily, if something is good enough to argue over whether its a Pollock or not, why does the value increase so significantly if it is proven to be true? I guess this is a matter of use value vs. exchange value here. Use value doesn't change (and really, do paintings have much use value at all?). But fetishization & commodification make that exchange value skyrocket. So I guess this leads me to believe that for the art world, it is his, just because it was made by his hand. But I'm not sure I personally agree with this logic. Maybe its just the Marxist in me.

and just for fun, here's my favorite Pollock, which can be found at the art institute chicago. Greyed Rainbow, 1953. I'm still convinced I can dance to its rhythm.

althusser

i'm not sure i really ever totally understood althusser's assertion that ideology is ahistorical until last night at happy hour. i scoffed at the idea that obama is "post-ideological."

el luchador

mamaH called tonight to tell me about an interview with aronofsky on npr about "The Wrestler." I especially liked what he had to say about use of the body as art, but he strayed away from questioning about a fascination with pain, unfortunately.

and this is just awesome!

viva la bolivia nueva!

so the constitutional referendum passed. here's a short write up (en espanol). basically evo says this will end the colonial legacy as well as neoliberalism in bolivia. i'm not sure i totally buy that, but its a step forward.

and i finally (better late than never) found a good english language explanation of the new constitution. though schultz claims he's no expert, his perspective is far more complete and insightful than mine. and in case you're interested, the jesus commercial he mentions can be found below:

dia de la constitution

today's the big day. the one we've been waiting for. the bolivian constitutional vote (you mean you haven't been on the edge of your seat for months over this?). All the "experts" seem to think it will pass. Which I suppose is a good thing, but I worry that this will just lead to further violence.

Today, reuters uk has finally layed out exactly what these changes are. Pretty much since last march I've been looking for some English language coverage of what exactly the changes are. They've been hard to come by. And I've been avoiding the Spanish language coverage partially because i'm lazy, and partially because Bolivian newspapers are notoriously biased (see Daniel Goldstein & Fatimah Willaims Castro, 2006 Creative Violence: How Marginal People Make News in Bolivia. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 11(2):380-407, or my own paper on the portrayal of indigenous women in Los Tiempos--but its unpublished, so I guess its a bit hard to come by...). For example, this radio transcript from a station in Santa Cruz is pretty horrific (here's the translated version). However, as of Thursday (Evo's 3 year anniversary), the Bolivian state now has its own newspaper. While certainly this might counter the views presented by primarily white/mestizo-owned private papers, I wonder how unbiased a state newspaper might be (for once, the socialist in me might be overtaken by the liberatarian?). I guess I just often see state-run media as less than open. But then again, things can't get much worse, so another perspective at least provides some choice.

I also must recommend this post from inka cola news, outlining some of the evo scare tactics used in foreign press and contesting the notion of "the two bolivias" (which I myself am guilty of perpetuating--see my paper on the Bolivian constitution as symbol of the imagined community--again unpublished. i just love self-promotion today). Plus, there's a pretty awesome photo accompanying it.

la lucha politico y fisico

i have been contemplating whether to write anything here about (sort of) seeing the first half-non-white (not to diminish this vast step forward) president's swearing in. in fact, last night in a somewhat sleep deprived stupor i even typed out a long blog that i had concocted in my head in a total sleep deprived stupor the night before. it somehow connected anti-pacifism, anarchism, the bolivian water war, marx quotes, and obama emblazoned toasters. and while that might sound amazing, i assure you that after reading it again this morning, you are lucky i never posted it.

writing about politics has never been my strong point. i tend to get carried away and take metaphors to irrational lengths and such. and while i wish to not publicize my own crafty ways of doing this, my old friend entropy posted this in a facebook note on the inauguration, and i just couldn't help but re-post.

* Along those same lines, it was not unlike watching live professional wrestling. The biggest heel heat came for President Bush and Joe Lieberman respectively, while the biggest face pops were for Almost President Obama, Bill & Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Ted Kennedy, Colin Powell, Al Gore, Jay-Z and Diddy, and me screaming enthusiastically for Walter Mondale respectively.*

the funny thing is, in an attempt to keep my nose from getting frostbite on tuesday, i was trying to think warm thoughts. one of which happened to be....i wonder how long before barak starts referring to his homeland security measures as "the people's elbow."

(for more on electoral politics and wrestling, see this earlier post)

el arte y sociologica

i have stumbled upon my new favorite image-related internet site. though time will tell how it might compare to strange maps or information aesthetics, or even the amazing, incredible, inspiring share some candy....sociological images combines my two loves (if one is willing to overlook the inadequacies of sociology as compared to anthropology).

my favorite post (so far...i've only gone through a few) is the second half of stereotypes of nationalities. I guess i'm just a sucker for that simple, graphic kind of art.

more tacos

in a strange twist of fate, paul brooks shows up as my #1 "people you may know" on facebook today.

weird.

tacos tacos, everywhere, tacos

whoa. paul brooks is famous. and if the pantagraph isn't proof, perhaps cnn is:

Watch CBS Videos Online

of course, you can rely on national media all you want, but the real story is at fuw.

colombia

the u.s. just declassified documents which confirm the government knew about para-military activities in colombia as early as 1990. this "war on drugs" is so funny. except not funny at all.

bigotes de nuevo

so, back in november of 2006, the r___ helped make a startling discovery. while watching a commercial for the pursuit of happyness i mentioned how good will smith looked with a 'stache. this was the third time in a week i mentioned someone looking good with similar facial hair. he declared, "nell, you have a mustache fetish."

the next day i began my new job at the latina institute, and ended up at the table across from hector. the only man among the 13 of us (including the board), sporting his amazing mustache. i couldn't keep from chuckling under my breath.

well, 2 years later, i'm contemplating attempting to shake my thing for staches. they're just getting too big. even the nyt is paying attention. more movies and indie bands have followed, along with general public personalities. i'm at a loss. it feels so deeply ingrained, but i hate being subject to such fads. what's a girl to do?

el restarante

the top 5 most interesting dishes offered at Heyworth Restaurant

5. Butt Steak
4. Beef Roll
3. the Belt Buster
2. Fiddle Faddle Club
1. Wing Ditties ("music for your taste buds")

gender, language, epicene pronouns, etc.

one small step forward.

el fin del ano

2008 was a good year. It had its minor frustrations, but no major complaints. And countless amazing moments, but inspired by kj, who was inspired by sherm, here’s a list of the top fifteen 24 hour periods of 2008 (in chronological order)

1. The last day in Tobago

2. The Warden, the Widowmaker, and the Overfiend converge in New York

3. Public Nudity at the Green Lantern

4. Scammellot (May edition)

5. Stroh Day

6. Kickapoo camping

7. A massive night

8. Gordo’s wedding

9. Scammelltoberfest!!!

10. A wedding in Milwaukee

11. Northwestern Reunion

12. Drag Races on my Birthday

13. November 5 at the White House

14. Thanksgiving Weekend

15. Dancing at the Marx Cafe

obligatory heyworth bar blog

[i originally started writing this as the power went out in heytown on dec. 27. sorry for the delay but amaren is really to blame]

it seems that every time i'm home i find myself at one (or more) of the three local establishments dedicated to alcohol consumption. and usually, something significant happens, about which I want to report. Things like crying over CT. sophomore homecoming dates becoming plumbers. jody singing while doing a shot. spartacus. my girlfriend from nap town. getting invited to house parties by 9th graders. the list goes on.....

but three things of significance happened last night at C2. first, i saw the necessary. it was not the first time i'd seen him at the circle. in fact, the very first time i went there on a thursday night with the butter cow crew he was there. the night it all began...but last night, the conversation was a bit more intense. he was one of the first people i saw after walking in with lou and mamaH. he said not much is new, except... & held up his left hand to display a wedding band. and then he very directly looked at my left hand. it was strange. i know plenty of married or engaged people. i know r___ & r____'s elaborate code system for communicating the presence or absence of a ring. but i've never felt so scoped out before. not to say that his scoping was due to romantic interest, but i guess i've never felt subject to such curiosity, presumably because i've always felt so far from the marriage stage. so i lifted my empty hand and said "nope" to which he responded with a slicing off the head motion, and said "don't do it." maybe i'm making too much of this, and by no means do i think this really means he is unhappy, but its very strange to be told by the man you went on your very first date ever with that marriage is a bad idea.

now, however much i'm blowing necessary's comments out of proportion, this is the type of thing i expect to happen when i make my rounds at the heyworth bars. i have bizarre conversations about children, marriage, jobs, school, and mostly the past with people i marginally knew in high school. but the second noteworthy event was entirely unexpected. i was standing by the flocked christmas tree with mamaH, and lou had gone to the bathroom (in which, taped to the mirror, is an utterly ignored sign that says "no smoking comrade" just below a newspaper article explaining the unconstitutionality of the illinois smoking ban). mid-conversation, i felt a swift and strong slap to the ass. i expected lou to be returning from the bathroom. but i looked around and she wasn't there. i searched behind me for b.s. or some other character i've known for 20 years that might feel such entitlement, but mostly just saw a bunch of kids about 6 years younger than me playing pool.

Then I saw markH. I didn’t know him well. His sister was on my high school basketball team. I believe we went to the same church as children. I once bought a pair of jeans were likely his from his family’s garage sale. But I wouldn’t say any of these connections might give one reason for thinking they have any business slapping my ass. Well, upon realizing through his drunkenness what he had just done, his face turned a bright rosy shade. He apologized. And I, being in a jovial mood didn’t yell, but laughed and eventually excused him. This of course, was the wrong move. I’m not sure any logic was functioning in his brain at the time, so perhaps my excusing was unrelated, but at this point, he started putting his hand on my waist and asking my age. When he discovered I was a mere 5 years younger than him (as opposed to one of his former girlfriends, who was 8 years younger), he pressed on. He paused to say “that’s kind of young” at which point I thought to myself- Oh, honey, if only you knew…but I kept quiet. The conversation finally ended with him attempting to get me to kiss him with the convincing line “come on, why not?” He walked away and rejoined his friends.

Later, Dana, who I had seen earlier with the elder Fox at H3, came over to say hello. We had lovely conversations about her sisters’ children, connie, and the Arkansas connection. The conversation was nothing extraordinary. But an hour after leaving the bar, I got a text from BS saying he ran into Dana at a gas station and she told him I was in town. The night before, I ran into little Mr. Burns at the AL and he texted his sister to tell her I was around. Last summer, BS’s brother saw me at the GLT summer concert and without my knowledge BS was informed. It sort of feels like being stalked. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me, and in a way its comforting, but you just can’t go anywhere in this town and get away with it. Word travels fast. My face is too familiar. This is not the place to hide out if I ever need to be anonymous. But on the other hand, it sort of feels like walking into the Cheers bar.

el fin

there's something about finals that heightens the senses.

maybe its that there is a sense of time that Fabian never accounted for. that sense that everything is about to end. The world, at least in its current state, will cease to exist after the next week. the clock is ticking and the sand is running out. nothing matters beyond next thursday. everything is urgent.

I spend all day in climate controlled environments, florescent lighting, the hum of the heater, the clicking of the keyboard. The copy machine blinds me. It is dark when I arrive and dark when I leave. The only light I see is the brief walk outside to the library.My bed is just a pitstop. I shed clothing leave it on the floor and find something new in the morning, just to repeat the cycle, leaving a mounting pile of discarded apparel next to the bed. My life is in disarray.

i carry books home just to set them down, pick them up 7 hours later and carry them back here. For all intents and purposes I live at this desk.

My sustenance comes from the convenient store downstairs, the free bread from some random event nearby, oatmeal that’s been sitting on the shelf for over a year and tea that we bought last spring for a department event. I have not eaten a meal at home in a week. Cookies, canned soup, an occasional bag of jellie beans.

Its as if everything is about to end. And suddenly everything must be solved now. This paper, which should be the pinnacle of my academic career thus far must be concluded. Anything I am passionate about cannot wait. I cannot be patient, I cannot take a deep breath and think about it. i cannot breathe except to write more. the feeling of time constraint makes it feel like something has to be secured before it all ends. it makes temptation scandal and excitement explosive.

But even in acknowledging it, I cannot fix it. I cannot slow it down. I cannot stop the keyboard clicking in my head, that blurs into the ticking of the clock and the heater’s rhythmic buzz, and the flipping pages, and beating hearts and churning stomachs and blowing wind, and my cell phone alarm buzzing and the coffee maker percolating and scanner screeching and I just can’t wait for it all to stop.

But when it does, as always, it will be a little too quiet. A little too lonely.

genero de nuevo

yes, once again, i have a comment about that whole gender debate i can't get over.

but i was reading david harvey's The Body as an Accumulation Strategy (1998 Environment and Planning 16:401-421), which I fall more in love with every time I read, and came across a sentence I thought appropriate.

But first, to contextualize: Basically Harvey is saying that the body is not "finished" but is malleable in certain ways, both by external and internal forces. Following from this, the body has a dialectical relationship with the processes that "produce, sustain, bound, and ultimately dissolve it" (402). Basically, similar to the way Butler conceives of the body (as not existing outside of discourse) Harvey is saying the body is very connected to the socio-political formations in which it is embedded.

And then the kicker

"And the representational practices that operate in society likewise shape the body, making any challenge to dominant systems of representation, as, for example, by feminists and queer theorists in recent years, a direct challenge to bodily practices" (403).

ok, back to writing. just can't get enough of the cholas...

prop 8

its late, i'm tired and stressed, and i have a full week of nonstop work ahead of me.

but this is just too good not to share.

dia de SIDA

today is world AIDs day.

and i have a number of disjointed thoughts on the matter.

1. i have never been tested for HIV. i always think i should do this. my excuse is that everytime i go for a checkup, most of the other tests are free. things like chlamydia, herpes, syphilis, etc? all covered. hiv, not so much. this just seems ridiculous now that i think about it. not ridiculous enough to be an appropriate excuse, i admit, but still. bizarre and counter-intuitive.

2. facebook tells me i should buy a cup of starbucks coffee today and they will donate a portion of profits to the global fund. and as lovely as this might seem, i have a real problem with the notion that the way to fix the world is to buy more. perhaps that $2 spent on overpriced coffee (even if it is free trade) should be directly donated to the global fund. its all so very sickeningly neoliberal. why is the technical solution to the problem always consumerism? why isn't the emphasis on education? or volunteering? because that would cause rethinking of cliches, and that's risking too much (to paraphrase tom robbins). instead we'd rather go about our daily lives changing very little, merely giving the appearance of caring through our commodified lifestyles. we've now fetishized caring about the world. i'm certainly guilty of it too, but i'm trying to be more conscious of it.

3. sure, i think world AIDs day is a great idea, but what about local AIDs day? I live in a city where 5% of residents are thought to have HIV. Not that we should not be concerned about "Africa" (as long as we can do it in a way that doesn't reek of paternalism), but maybe at some point we need to focus closer to home. Start questioning the ways in which HIV is closely connected to systemic inequalities here in our own neighborhoods. Start looking at the ways we reproduce the conditions that foster such high rates of HIV daily. Once we get that figured out, then its time to move on to the rest of the world.

So, in essence, my feelings on world AIDs day are crazy-isolationist, anti-capitalist, and hypocritical. what's new?

thanksgiving

As much as I like to think of myself as an optimist, I often focus on the bad more than the good. Earlier today I thought about writing something about all the things I’m thankful for, but I never really got around to it. And then I went off to thanksgiving festivities and didn’t give it a second thought.

Though I had quite a good time, I came home to my empty apartment, and couldn’t help but feel a little sad. It reminded me a little of thanksgiving 2003, walking home from work through grand central station the day before thanksgiving. Watching everyone rush off to their trains to see parents, siblings, cousins, grandparents, and family pets. Everyone in a good mood. Everyone with somewhere to go. And I just had to catch the 6 train downtown. Back to an empty apartment. At least this time I have windows in my bedroom.

And maybe its just that I tend to overanalyze everything. Or that I draw too many associations between tonight’s events and things that happened 5 years ago. But I was feeling pretty gloomy by the time I put my raw lasagna leftovers in the fridge.

But strangely, from the oddest of places, I was given hope. I ended up talking to tex, and despite all the complications and hurt feelings of the past, he was insightful, encouraging, and probably most importantly rational.

I am so very thankful for so very many things in my life, but at this moment, this is the one I want to write about. I have so many amazing friends that seem to pop up in the right time and place (even if via phone or email). I feel so lucky to have somehow happened upon people who really care about me. Who somehow see the best in me even when I’ve given them every opportunity to see the worst. And even though many of the situations we’ve found ourselves in over the years haven’t turned out quite as planned, I value them all so deeply. And their love manifests itself in many ways. Chocolate or cds randomly arriving in the mail. Love advice from once-scorned lovers. Text messages recounting random grocery store shelves or inside jokes about fishnets. Macabre postcards. I often ponder how much these people mean to me, and but its always nice to know I mean something to them too.

ok, enough with the mushiness already...

piensas terceras en hablando sobre genero en nueva york

i am in the midst of writing my paper on the fighting cholitas and am revisiting Cholas and Pishtacos for the 6th or 7th time. one of my great regrets about college (and there are probably only 3 or 4--and no, not even dillo day sophomore year would count as a regret) is not taking advantage of mary weismantel's wisdom. i've essentially sainted the woman in my mind.

so, of course, whenever writing about gender, race, ethnicity, rurality, the body, really anything...in bolivia, i consult my now tattered, dogearred, noted, penciled, penned, highlighted copy of the book. usually, i only read through the things i've underlined or highlighted, since i basically try to go through the entire book in a matter of an hour. but today, for some reason, i randomly found my self reading a paragraph i had overlooked before.

"passing--whether racial or sexual--is a signifying act that attempts to con the viewer into misreading the relationship between the clothing and the body; if it is successful, the error may never be discovered " (Weismantel 2001:111)

and for a woman with her personal politics, i find this treatment shockingly problematic.

words like "misreading" and "error" construct the trans (whether it be transgender, transrace, transclass, or trans-anything else) body as inherently its "prior" state and only superficially its post-trans state. and ironically enough, just half a page before, Weismantel invokes Butler, saying:

"Identity, Butler says, is not an epistemological fact at all, but an ongoing, improvisational performance, which takes shape through the 'mundane signifying acts of linguistic life" (Butler 1990:144 in Weismantel 2001:110)

so if its all signifying--if there really is no sexed body prior to the gendered body--then what is the mistake? what is the error?

but what i find most problematic is the word "con." it, of course, elicits similar meaning to "duped," but with a moral valuation. it is not merely "misrecognition" but intentional trickery, deception, and cheating. the more i think about it, the more i decide that "dupe" really is a rather appropriate word. perhaps this isn't pc, but in the same way i dupe people into thinking i know what i'm talking about in terms of bolivian wrestling...in the same way i dupe people into thinking i am "studious," "feminine," "kind," or "laid back," trans people--really all people--"dupe" others into reading their bodies in certain ways. and not just bodies, we read material goods, language, clothing, corporeality, and even facial expression as indicative of identity constantly. so why must we talk about it as if this is something bad?

perhaps what this all means is that we, as a society (or whatever you want to call it) lack the language for talking about this without stigma. (or maybe that's too much of a linguistic determinist position)

transgender day of rememberance

stated (as usual) more eloquently at feministing, and even more so by bear, but i just wanted to do a little part as well.

there have been at least 30 trans people killed in the last year, specifically because of their gender identity. say what you want about "duping" and "biology," but it baffles me that with so many problems in the world people feel compelled to spend energy tormenting each other.

so, the least we can do is remember

Kellie Telesford. Brian McGlothin. Gabriela Alejandra Albornoz. Patrick Murphy. Stacy Brown. Adolphus Simmons. Fedra. Sanesha Stewart. Lawrence King. Simmie Williams Jr. Luna. Lloyd Nixon. Felicia Melton-Smyth. Silvana Berisha. Ebony Whitaker. Rosa Pazos. Juan Carlos Aucalle Coronel. Angie Zapata. Jaylynn L. Namauu. Samantha Rangel Brandau. Nikki Williams. Ruby Molina. Aimee Wilcoxson. Duanna Johnson. Dilek Ince. Ali. And two other Iraqi transgender women.

and if any of you happen to be in san fran at the aaas, there's a great trans activism panel going on in about an hour.

decepción

to paraphrase charlie brown: nothing takes the taste out of soy hot chocolate quite like disappointment.

i know i should be writing about being 15 freakin' feet away from evo morales last night, but instead in need to indulge in self pity.

perhaps i am naive for being confident. shouldn't i have learned after all those rounds of applications that maybe i'm not as great as i thought i was. but no, i really thought it was going to work out this time. i thought it had all come together. i thought the reasoning was sound, the support was there, i even did the budget the way they told me to. and all for naught.

of course, this isn't the end of the line. there's always next semester. there are always other options. there's always debt. there's always reconfigurations. there's always the internet pain photos route to take (coincidentally about which i wrote an abstract today). but i guess i'm just feeling utter disappointment. not failure, but confusion. not sadness, but frustration.

i just need to remember, that when dwight couldn't get into bon vanai as an anthropologist he went as a public health worker. i need to be savvy...

luchando con la governadora

the rest of you out there in blog land might not share my fascination with wrestling, but you can't deny the absurdity of this

yes, sarah palin has been invited to attend TNA's december event, and not only that but to join the knockouts. at risk of reinforcing stereotypes about who watches wrestling and being complacent with the totally unnecessary sexualization of palin during the campaign, i just want to say that this seems all too appropriate. if there really is a palin 2012 in store, this seems like just the way to begin the pre-campaign.

hopefully my humor is shining through. in case its not though, i'll let rachel maddow cover me

en mis suenos

ok, i know i post things about mustaches all the time, but this is just too good to pass up.

piensas segundas en hablando sobre genero en nueva york

i had an interesting conversation today about the advantages of good argument, and it made me reconsider my previous thoughts.

first, i definitely tended to side with ee in the argument. though i was keeping quiet at first, then trying to frame the argument as an important point of exploration in understanding where others "come from," i still definitely thought of one person as "right" and others as "wrong"--though distinguishing between "unfortunately uninformed" and "closed-minded asshole." However, i think its important to understand that its not productive to judge peoples' true reactions. Granted, we all do judge neo-nazi reactions, gay-bashing reactions, etc. But first, I think many would argue those are not necessarily reactions but decisions. And that assumption aside, wouldn't it be more productive to understand the bases of those reactions, rather than immediately jump on them? Not to say there was immediate jumping in the conversation friday night, but when we get so utterly wrapped up in our research or cause we lose sight of they way it is situated in quotidian life of others, we lose sight of the ultimate goal.

Second (and on a less-philosophical, more practical note), the conversation today made me think about the way I argue. And here I will offer self-critique with this blog as a prime example. As in the previously linked past blog, and probably others, but i'm too lazy to look through old posts right now, I often make rhetorical points in rather sarcastic ways. And it is my hunch that this (rather than pointing out the social construction of race) was the fiend's tactic in the argument friday night. And really, that's not a very productive way to argue. Its that sort of thing that lends itself to the eruption of shouting matches, rather than dialogue that ends in mutual understanding, or even a more nuanced way of looking at a situation.

So, i hereby officially take back my comment about rolled tongues and attached earlobes. I'm not editing the previous post, because, well, i kinda think that picture is funny, and it wouldn't make sense if I deleted that part of the post. But I want to formally apologize to all 4 of you that read this for my unproductive argumentative skills. I'm going to try hard to argue in more productive ways. Hm...maybe that will be a new year's resolution. Or as jk used to suggest, a thanksgiving resolution.

ay dios

i'm guessing the number of people who read both this and the monkeyhippy's blog is between 0 & 1, so i'm not feeling guilty about reposting.

this is just ridiculous. but at least it demonstrates in one fell swoop how incompetent our healthcare and immigration systems are.

hablando sobre genero en nueva york

jster was in bklyn for a conference this weekend, so ee & i decided to take a little road trip. friday night, we had dinner with fiend, the r___, his relatively new ladyfriend, and scamz. of course, during dinner ee mentioned his research, followed by scamz engaging in a curious, interested conversation on the topic. but of course, others had to jump in with "biological" reasoning. now, this might be interesting in a case in which present at the table would be say, a biologist who studies the hormonal differences between men and women. but listening to a law student and a formerly radically libertarian anthro student defend the "naturalness" of the sex/gender system was rather unfortunate and uninformed.

The latter claimed along the way "i've read the same literature you have"--obviously not, and the former suggested "well, then i can just say i'm black." Ok, interesting reasoning, and at least this takes into account the socially constructed essence of race (though i'm not sure that was part of his reasoning). But what i really think would be a better analogy would be someone born in New Jersey claiming to be a New Yorker. Or perhaps someone who liked to listen to jam bands in their youth now claiming to be part of indie music culture. i think the point is that gender, like other forms of identity, has nothing to do with the past. it is instantiated in the moment and solidified by repeated iteration. much like the way "being a new yorker" doesn't necessarily mean you had to have been born somewhere between van cortlandt park and coney island, but relies more on an intimate knowledge of the subway system, or ability to wear stupid hipster clothes while taking oneself completely seriously.

And while ee is usually the first to get aggressive in the face of such attacks, i was rather shocked at his composure. he also didn't bring up the personal nature of the conversation, and i can't help but wonder how the conversation would have gone if this had been part of the mix. in the end, i'm not sure much was accomplished, but i was heartened by the way scamz seemed genuinely curious, and open to questioning his perceptions, even if the other two were not.

interestingly enough, today i came across this article on gay marriage in mexico city. sidestepping the marriage argument as a whole (and you might guess how i fall on this one) what i find most interesting about the article is the thought that marriage be defined as a union between “two biologically distinct persons.” now, this may be a product of poor translation, but i'm not sure, even if we don't question the ideology behind science and "biology," what two people would not be biologically distinct. identical twins? a cloned person?

and then further assuming that there is something "biologically" similar about certain people, wouldn't this mean that a black man and a white man could be married? or someone who is xxy could marry someone who is either xy or xx? or perhaps, like we all did in 6th grade science we should be paying more attention to who can roll their tongue and who has loose vs. attached ear lobes (yes i can roll my tongue and yes my ear lobes are attached, for those who might be interested).

saturday at dinner, i joined a less heterosexual, but just as normative crowd. they had just been to see mr. russell's casting genius in wig out (based loosely on paris is burning and ball culture), and mr. rhodes greeted me with "the legendary!" when i walked in. apparently dwt had mentioned dinner would involve a mystery guest, but hadn't told them who. later in the dinner, rhodes mentioned jk, and the table erupted in laughter. russell defended his previous statements. though i certainly have my own opinions about what actually happened (and those opinions certainly grant little legitimacy to the words of a man who lied about visiting his sister for a year and a half), i think this is at least demonstrates how, even for some of the most bourgeoise, homonormative, fabulous, bitchy (and i use that word, not in degradation, but because they do) men i know, sexual identity and practice do not necessarily coincide at all times.

ok, so yes, sexuality is very different from gender, and i don't mean to conflate the two. in fact, i think one thing that this weekend really solidified in my mind is how completely divergent sexuality, desire, love, and compatibility really are. and all for the best.

el sol

i was lying in bed this afternoon, listening to music, sort of "napping." I was listening to Kate Nash and her lyrics really struck me

I can be alone, yeah
I can watch a sunset on my own

how very appropriate.

of course, only my anthropology nouveau folks in the dale would really understand. and they don't read this, but i wanted to somehow commit it to memory. i should probably call mom and make sure she's fed the lizard too.

mapas

since i'm kinda obsessed with maps, and since we've all still got the election on our minds, here's a little eye candy.

4 de noviembre

tuesday when i got home from class i did laundry and watched cnn. but of course, nothing much was happening before polls closed, so there wasn't much point, except to see wolf blitzer and anderson cooper say the same things over and over. lou called shortly after i arrived, to say that she wasn't going to grant park as planned. i told her i was disappointed because i wanted to live vicariously through her.

but at 7:30 i went to julie's to watch the returns. the truth is though, i wasn't paying much attention to the tv. rumagin, ezra & i made some predictions as to timing and electoral numbers, but mostly i was concentrated more on my whisky and a conversation about umphrey's mcgee.

then ohio went to obama. and florida. and virginia. i had said to rumagin earlier, that if ohio goes blue, i'd be pretty convinced of victory. but somehow when the cnn powers that be announce such things with 14% of precincts reporting, it just doesn't feel real yet. so we continued to watch. the crowd of 15 slowly dwindled until it was just julie, phil, ee, and I.

and then mccain conceeded. i had a bottle of champagne that dvine gave me for my birthday, which we opened during his speech. However, we had to sort of work the cork out. no popping across the room. which is, unfortunately, how the announcement felt. but we toasted. it looked like obama wasn't going to speak for a while, so ee and i hopped in my car and i started to take him home.

but as we neared his place, the streets were getting crowded and we decided we should probably head down 16th street. we got to M and we were seeing more and more people, so we parked and walked to the white house. and there was a small crowd. there's a fence along the back side of the house, across the street from Lafayette Sq. and we worked our way through a few hundred people to it. there wasn't much going on other than chanting and singing and really we were both sort of tired and just taking in everything around us.

we stayed for about an hour, both running into students in the classes we TA. But things weren't too crazy. when we decided to leave, we realized the crowd had grown exponentially around us. by the time we got back to the car, and npr, they were announcing that the crowd had reached "several thousand." there were GW cross country team members running and singing, a guy wandering around in his underwear, people in suits, people with cameras, off duty security guards, kids who looked 15, old hippie activist types, young punk activist types. but everybody was happy and yelling. the streets were basically a constant stream of cars honking continuously, and pedestrians running with their arms up down the middle of the street shouting happily.

dc returned 92% in favor of obama by the last count i saw. and on the streets last night you could certainly tell. everyone was out. everyone was shouting or honking. and for once, nobody seemed to care how slowly traffic was moving.

jesus

i watched jesus camp tonight. which was a bad idea. (i'm not going to give a full recap, but there's interesting commentary here)

but first, the bright side. i noted during the credits that both directors, both producers, and both DPs were women. Assuming these people are normatively named, that's quite a feat. and that, in itself is a little depressing. what does it say about the state of affairs in film that i watch a fairly low budget doc, though well-distributed, and get excited that these 6 positions are filled by women?

but on to the real scary part. i think my timing in watching the film was a bit masochistic. Pastor Ted Haggard, President of the National Association of Evangelicals, representative of 30 million people, and advisor to President Bush said "Its an awful lot of people and we're growing...its got enough growth to essentially sway every election. if the evangelicals vote, they determine the election." Now, of course, I'm not taking ol' Haggard at his word, but it does give one pause. And I'm not about to write off the 2000 election as a time when the hidden masses of evangelicals made their voices heard, or even error. But it makes me question my faith in democracy in some ways (different ways from when i question whether one could really call the U.S. a democracy). Do I believe in a system in which a majority, no matter how oppressive or poorly guided their principles are allowed to make decisions for all, simply based on numbers (a la Hamas)? I suppose the one thing that Youth Pastor Becky Fischer and I agree on is "I think that Democracy is the greatest political system on earth but that's the problem. It's earth." Of course, she goes on to say, "It is ultimately designed to destroy itself because we have to give everyone equal freedom and ultimately that is going to destroy us." which I wouldn't really agree with.

This all of course reminds me of tanasha reemer. I wonder how she's doing, whether she and her husband and children ever made it to Africa to spread the word. Oh, excuse me...the Word. I wonder how her family is, and I hope they are all well. But moving back to the democracy issue, I truly hope they don't vote on Tuesday. And I hope that JeFF and Brewski don't vote on Tuesday. And those guys from Florida who lived in my hall sophomore year (2000). And for me that's scary. Because I believe so firmly that we should all have a say, but I guess deep down I'm a hypocrite. I only want the people who think like me to really be enfranchised. Maybe I should just go find a commune of like-minded people and cut myself off from the outside world.

Well, if there is a god, i hope that god is a sensible one and uses their godly powers to shape positive change in the world, because as i've mentioned before, its so screwed up i'm pretty sure only some supernatural power could make much progress.

bigotes

i am reexamining my lack of belief in a benevolent divine being.

halloween

and what a halloween it was...

i hadn't dressed up since 2004. and i didn't plan on it today. i left the house and 9 so i could get to school, write a welcome speech, and do some reading before class. i got the speech done, but i ended up collecting pictures for the remaining gill for his media room. after class i rushed to butler for the opening session and to give my welcome speech (it went fine). after the radical cheerleaders did their business, i rushed to battelle to meet with despina. instead i sat outside her office with julia & catherine for almost an hour. it was there that i learned that no one likes yellow scarf girl. finally catherine & i got in and we discussed everything from austrian performance art politics of the 70s to why americans like conquest movies to much, and even the historical trajectory of cindy sherman's art. strangely, though, i left feeling still bewildered. but charging ahead, i rushed back to butler to make sure there was water in nina's session. there was. finally, the conference ended and i went back to the basement of battelle to get my shit together for the panel i'm facilitating tomorrow. but of course the printers weren't working at first, and it took me almost 20 minutes of fiddling to fix one. then i walked to guapos.

there things got better. i had my first sustenance (aside from a reeses peanut butter cup) of the day, along with 2 margaritas. i ended up talking to naomi, david, & his prof from Wesleyan for a long time, before going to rumagin's party.

the geico caveman outfit was quite a success. in fact, it looked way better than i had expected. ee & i felt left out so we decided to exchange clothing and go as each other. someone donated a blonde wig, and we used rumagin's fake hair scraps to fashion facial hair for me. it was quite the experiment in embodiment. the jeans were very tight on my hips, but having so much shit in my pocket definitely made me stand differently. and facial hair (or maybe just fake facial hair) certainly changes the way i drank and ate. though, i'm not sure ee got the full nell-embodiment effect, because i wore a skirt today, which generally throws me off as well. its just so damn hard to sit in those things! but i think this may play well into our binding video we make for our "creative project" for despina. we shall see.

in the end, i ripped the hair off my face, and drove home. the places where the sideburns were glued feel a little raw. hopefully, i won't wake up tomorrow, bright and early, ready to facilitate my anthropology and activism panel with giant red splotches on my cheeks.

regalos de cumpleaños

an especially large & unexpected gift this year got me thinking about the amazing gifts i've been given in the past. i'm always amazed by the generosity of my friends. i generally try to put a lot of thought into the gifts i give, and my mom often tells me that i'm "such a good gift-giver." but these things go far beyond that. so in a gesture of appreciation to both those wonderful friends, and the grand generosity of the universe, here are the 10 best birthday gifts i've received since 1999

10. the family guy evil monkey patch & jesus coloring book, from the cladistics, age 23
9. a white russian (because it directly followed a 3 wise men shot), from the 409 crew, age 21
8. entrance to the co-op's halloween party, from dwt, age 19
7. a fetish necklace from the rez, from biijihbah, age 25
6. a poem and thai food, from scamz, age 20
5. a hand constructed bar, from dwt, age 21
4. a ring made from polish amber, from lou, age 26
3. a vintage 1965 french bike, freshly painted mint green, from ee, age 27
2. my purpleish scarf, i bought it for myself, age 23
1. the navy hoodie that i call home, from mom, age 18

i'm either paranoid or too intuitive for my own good

please excuse the vagueness. i have my reasons.

i'm feeling like i'm about to be very disappointed and i'm not sure i can take it. i've already had my heart ripped out twice in the last year, and i'm sick of it. i keep telling myself that good things happen to people all the time, and i shouldn't be so suspicious, and damn, just look around...

and when this all started, likely due to the previous rippings, i proceeded cautiously. but after what seemed like some perfect communication i started to throw caution to the wind. now i think that probably wasn't the best idea. i'm usually far more reserved, but after countless gchats with kj, it seemed like that was the way to go. maybe that's what we had been missing all along.

and i've decided that friends forseeing happy things in my future, usually means brief bouts of happiness followed by disappointment. last year when the now short-haired dirty hippie suggested something good would happen in the next 6 months, i only had to wait 2 weeks. then two months later i felt like i had been trampled.

this summer, gina cottone-divito-cottone's former future ex-husband told me something would be "seriously wrong with the world" if something good didn't happen soon. and a few weeks later, something did. but am i so terribly cynical and bitter that i can't just be happy and enjoy it. why am i so suspicious that things couldn't possibly work out. why must i read too far into simple things that should make a giant smile spread across my face. instead, i call the lou frantically saying i'm sure its a method of avoidance. i wish i could just let go and enjoy things as they happen, for better or worse. maybe this time, things are different.

i must be totally insane.

but then i think back to instances when i tried to convince myself i was just paranoid, but really, i was just seeing the first inclings of bad news. the spell right before finals. that conversation so many years ago about mcCait while lying on the floor of the zbt chapter room. or worse, the "i think i just need to deal with the tension" phonecall (though that one i really wasn't all that upset about). that look accompanied by "oh, dj nellie." its always subtle, but i can always see right through it. and damn, i really hope this is not that.

mejor

today was a much better day than expected. especially considering the fact that my archaeology midterm was due tonight.

it started like any other. i woke up later than planned and tried to throw some more ideas about marxist archaeology on the page. then off to the class i TA. afterwards, i had had a lot of archaeology reading to do and a project proposal to turn in by 5. i decided my desk at school was the place i was least likely to be productive (especially with rumagin around), and scoffing at the coffeehouse options near campus i headed to admo. basically, after hearing mention of unicorn two weeks ago, and then walking past it last saturday, i've realized i crave a space like that here. i wasn't a frequent patron of the 'corn, but i have fond memories of it. i'm pretty sure i composed a few poems there, back in my bard-esque days. but here, the options are couches in the student center, starbucks, or the "mud box" in the basement of the library. rumagin actually suggested there's a coffeeshop in the arts center, which i didn't know, but i thought today wasn't right for exploring. i needed something reliable. so i hopped on the red line and headed to tryst. i called e.e. on my way, and he met me there. i got a decent amount of reading done, finished my proposal, and had a tasty sandwich too.

at 5, we left, and i decided to take the bus back since it was running more frequently. on our walk east, we stopped into city bikes, where e.e. wanted to get some sort of elusive bolt for otto's bike. they didn't have it, but the guy behind the counter said if he brought the stem in they could figure something out. behind the counter there was a half full bottle of vodka. they had a little feat cd playing. i like that place....if only i had a bike. but i do have a suspicion that i might be getting one soon. i was confused as to what gift would require my inseam length but not my waist size. but when i mentioned that e.e. should build me a bike, he reacted strangely. then he said he had been painting today, and when i asked what was being painted he responded "just something i needed to paint." i'm suspicious. or maybe its just wishful thinking. i suppose i'll find out soon though.

after all this, i took the bus back to campus, finished reading, did one quick last edit of the midterm, and printed it, using the secret hidden toner stash.

finally, at 8 it was time for class. archaeology is usually the bane of my existence. its been almost 7 years that i've been saying "never trust an archaeologist" (and i keep finding new reasons why its true). i find the discipline marginally interesting on good days, and dreadfully mundane anytime after 6pm (and the class is 8-10:30pm). but instead of meeting in our usual classroom, we have moved our class to d-say's new lab. sure, its in the basement, but its littered with paul simon posters, and maps of the great dismal swamp (sounds so upbeat!). and to celebrate our new location, we had a lab-warming party with pastries, pakistani potato balls, cookies, and pumpkin bread. our new seating arrangement was far more conducive to discussion, and i was more awake than usual tonight. perhaps because we were discussing inequality and resistance as visible in the archaeological record. dan even asked if anyone really got into resistance. his example was "you know, when you hear the word resistance, do you say 'fuck yeah!'?" I responded that maybe i didn't say those exact words, but i did get into resistance. of course slight ironies were not lost on me. i noticed every liquid in the room was a coca cola product. a 2 liter of coke. a 2 liter of sprite. a 16 oz coke. a 16 oz diet coke. a McDonald's medium cup full of coke. a 20 oz dasani (porcupine) water bottle. a 16 oz dasani (porcupine) water bottle. and i even drank some coke, but only because rafi poured a cup for marvine, but she already had one. i simply offered to consume what would have otherwise gone to waste....

class ended with a rousing tale of how d-say didn't drop out of college due to one amazing archaeology professor. the story also included the fact that he graduated from high school 4th from the bottom of his class of 2000, and at one point in his college career had a 1.65 gpa. i guess that gives one hope that no matter where you start, you can get a ph.d.....and a job....

after class we all hung around a bit finishing off the last of the snacks, and i ended up offering k squared a ride home. i've decided he's my new favorite friend. along the way he told me stories about when he and his wife were in the peace corps in romania. and he made a joke about celeine dion music.

so maybe the day wasn't quite so remarkable, but the paper is finished, and all i have to do tomorrow is go to class and write my (now 2 days overdue) questions for the panel i'm facilitating next weekend. and then on to birthday partying this weekend....

constitución

just in case you're not paying particularly close attention to bolivia, the draft constitution was ratified!

gracias a dios

there is a lot i want to write about my weekend, but this is more important for the moment.

i'll only say this.

there is a person i have found supremely annoying, insincere, and abrasive for a little over a year. however, it seemed that no one else saw those qualities in this person. in fact, most of my friends were quite fond of this person, so i've been biting my tongue and trying to deal with the hours i spend with this person daily.

however, tonight i discovered that an entire cadre of people feel exactly the same way. and its so relieving. so vindicating. i feel like a burden has been lifted, and like i'm not such a bitch for having negative feelings about this person.

las políticas de zappatos

this weekend i went to a wedding. while it hasn't been uncommon for me in the last few years to end up at the weddings of people I only vaguely know, i had never met either the bride or groom this time. i'd like to think this gives me a unique perspective.

weddings always hit me in a strange way. partially because for so many years i was pretty convinced that i had no marriage (nor the desire for one) in my future. partially because wedding ceremonies make so clear the ways in which "traditional" gender ideology continues to be reinscribed. i'm not the biggest fan of phrases like "man and wife" or all the talk about the aim or marriage being reproduction. and to all of that add the blatant commodification of desire.

not to say i don't enjoy weddings. other people's grotesque overspending usually results in me having a pretty fantastic time (and this wedding was in no way any exception). and the truth is, though i wouldn't be particularly concerned with the save the date magnets matching the bridesmaids' hair-dos, if i ever get married i can imagine myself eating every angsty word i've ever muttered about the ridiculousness of weddings (though thankfully, consueloZ, from the midst of wedding planning, assures me that it is possible to keep a level head about these things--no sand art!).

but this i will never take back...the ceremony had already begun when we found a pew on the wrong side of the aisle. the priest launched into a long metaphor of the ephemerality of flowers and the necessity of roots for lasting love. and then he turned to meaning of sacrifice in a relationship. here i will try to loosely quote: "John, sometimes you'll just want to come home and watch TV, but Casey will want to talk about her day, and you'll have to sacrifice. And Casey, when you're out shoe shopping and John just wants to go home, you'll have to sacrifice and take him home."

what struck me as so brialliant about the phrase was the complex interweaving of gender, consumption, and identity. the priest constructed the neoliberal formations at work here as naturalized (see lancaster 2003) and traditional enough to be in what many consider to be a sacred ceremony.

i'll side-step the television reference, and focus exclusively on the shoes. shoes represent a particuarly feminized realm of consumption, even in an age in which men's clothing style as become important and indicaive of lifestyle (see mort 1996). shoe shopping also connotes a level of wealth which allows for shopping as a leisure activity, rather than the procurement of a necessity. Finally, the positions of quitting shopping as "sacrifice" positions it as not only normative, but a right.

and so, in this most important of moments, neoliberal gender ideology forms the way we conceputalize partnerships, the family and the meanings we associate with "love."

la política electoral

I had a meeting today for our conference on supporting social movements, during which, among many other things, we discussed who would moderate the closing panel. some people felt this was a particularly important decision because a) the topic is political b) the panel includes at least one politically outspoken person c) Laura Nader (Ralph's big sis) is on the panel and d) it takes place a mere 3 days before the election. a democratic party leaning professor was decided upon.

what followed really bothered me. there were half joking comments about turning people's mics off if disparaging comments about (or merely disagreements with) Obama or his stances were made. I muttered something under my breath about free speech. the conversation then turned to blaming Nader for Gore's defeat. The Jag said, "Nader should be banned from the ballot in swing states." A lone undergrad spoke up and said "maybe the democratic party should stand for real change." I kept my mouth shut.

i find it really frustrating that people who consider themselves so liberal, the kind of people who dedicate time to a conference on supporting social movements, code pink enthusiasts, radical activists, trans rights workers, people with close relationships and vested interests in subjugated groups around the world, would be so closed-minded. i don't care who they vote for. its none of my business and frankly, if people want to write in Ann Coulter for president I won't judge them for it (well, maybe just a little, but i'm sure they have their reasons). but to limit people's options or access seems to me to be the opposite of democracy. and these are people criticizing Palin for suggesting that a democratic Hamas victory didn't count as democracy.

el comunismo

at the age of 13, i decided my composition class final paper, essentially an 8th grade thesis, would be on "communism." now, as a child of the cold war, my concept of communism certainly had far more to do with stories about east Berlin and the Soviet breadlines than any sort of political or economic philosophy. as part of this exploration, i embarked on the Communist Manifesto and found that communism was not some exotic or even evil philosophy of domination but was actually somewhat sensical. i imagine the paper was a monumental (by my standards of the time) length of 10 pages (10 hand-written pages of course), and how i managed to even delve into something like "communism" is laughable.

well, fortunately, i have now had a chance to read it again. and after having read das Kapital (vol. 1) last year, i felt pretty fluent. in fact, in a class with 11 other silent parties, i felt like the know it all, answering question after question following a pregnant pause.

until last year, i never really contemplated my stance on marxism/socialism/communism. however, after hotboxing althusser, harvey, gramsci, wolf, and voloshinov for a few years, i guess i'd have to admit a pretty marxist leaning in my academic work.

...i guess some things are just inevitable.

la idioma de amor

i've written before about the politics of affectionate nickname usage here, but feministing clued me in to a recent nytimes article that discusses diminutive nicknames used toward the elderly. obviously, this demonstrates parallels between sexism and ageism, but it really makes me wonder how this came to be. how did words that should be wonderful to hear become such a burden? in both cases, i suppose, false or unwelcome affection is taken as offensive. i suppose its all (as usual) about power, and who is able to manipulate others via language.

iglesias bolivianas

sometimes i feel like i've been looking at all the angles. then i see something like this that reminds me just how wide the spectrum is.

so, i guess the one thing we might agree on is that we'd all be happier if bolivia were a little less violent, and relations with the u.s. were a little less strained. of course, i doubt we'd agree on who exactly is at fault in that relationship.

adición

home baked vegan banana bread makes everything better

lluvia

i'm in a shitty mood tonight.

first, i went to the bank today to deposit my giant stipend check, and according to the bank's computer, the account I've had since the fall of 2003 is a "new account" so i must wait 3 days for my funds to become available. the guy let me take out some cash as a "special favor" and then criticized me for wearing a sweater in the 65 degree weather.

class was actually alright, and afterwards, i went with ee & delf to get 1/2 price veggie burgers at a bar in dupont circle. $5 instead of the regular $10. but of course, they were out of veggie burgers, so i ended up paying $7 for a small bowl of lentil soup.

on the way home, i stopped to buy some neosporin (which seems to be the only thing that makes me not itch my crazy dry ankle until it bleeds), and i thought i had a bit of luck. the sign in cvs said it was on sale for $4.49. but, of course when i took it to the register it rung up for its regular price, $8.99. whatever...i was going to buy it anyway.

finally, i got home and found an email from the anthro dept.'s student activities advisor who basically told me that it was "impossible" that the people who were supposed to get reimbursements last year never received them.

i'll deal with it tomorrow when i'm in a more diplomatic mood.

i also had my ipod plugged into my computer to charge all day, and upon returning home found that not only did it not charge at all, the computer isn't recognizing it, and its stuck on the "do not disconnect" screen.

sorry for complaining. hopefully tomorrow will be better. unfortunately, thursdays are the worst day of the week.

ugh.