Monthly Archives: January 2018

This is a sync test

Posted on January 31, 2018 | Leave a comment

Nothing to see here – only posting to test the setup with Beeminder.

Actually, that’s something I can explain.  I’m trying to commit to writing more.  Over the last year and change, ever since I went to Camp Nerd Fitness, I’ve been trying to revisit many of the things I lost along the path of becoming what I thought an adult looked like. Some of those are my creative crafts, my love of writing, and my love of playing music.  Therefore, I wanted to commit to giving myself the time to do those things.  And, of course, every time I block off an hour labeled “Write a Blog Post” in my Best Self journal, it turns into something else: cooking, cleaning, volunteer work, or even just goofing off. I spend more time reading terrible work by other people than I do working on my own craft.

So I set up Beeminder and connected it to WordPress so I will actually do some writing.  Now, when I post to any of my owned blog space, it will count towards my 3 post a week goal.  Hence the need to test the setup to be sure it worked.

I have, over the last few years, debated what to do with this blog.  I’ve kept it online because,  while there is PLENTY of inappropriate behavior recorded in it, it’s all Youthful Hijinks that were age appropriate at the time.  It’s not like a prospective employer now is going to read a tale of why I am banned from UBC Housing and think I’m less of a hiring prospect for it.  If anything, a prospective employer should recognize that the flip side of all those pranks and bzzr gardens was actual student leadership.  And none of my grownup friends, the friends who only know me as an adult, should think less of me because I spent my first year and a half in L.A. behaving like a normal twentysomething , albeit one who perhaps should not have documented everything in quite so much detail. (I was smart enough to keep some of it password protected).  Still, there is a level of vulnerability to writing about oneself as an actual adult, when there are fewer superficial things to write about, and only the meaningful things remain.

Still.  After listening to a season of Magic Lessons, I wanted to put some of that fear of exposure aside.  There is something terrifying about writing in a public forum, even one that garners so little traffic as my own page.  And yet, it is a positive challenge.  Part of the craft of writing is to be able to convey a nuanced thought through words, to someone else’s brain. That is a worthwhile craft to practice, even in a short form, personal blog medium.

Writing blog pieces is critical writing practice. It is the word equivalent of playing scales or arpeggios on the piano.

So yesterday, I created a goal to make myself more accountable to…myself.  To prioritize giving myself the time and space to engage in these small writing exercises that are blog posts.  To that end, I tested a sync between Beeminder and WordPress.  The Beeminder financial threat isn’t the big reason I prioritize writing, but it will be a small day to day impetus to do so.  And those small day to day triggers add up to a full resolve to re-engage in this craft.

 

 

 

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unfeminine

Posted on January 16, 2018 | 1 comment

The last few months of open conversation around sex and power have been both enraging and illuminating.  It has been like flipping on a light switch to see horrors that were only barely camouflaged by darkness, that we all knew were there.  It is the way we have now shone lights on the society we have built, the way we have encouraged male and female roles to the point where men are expected and encouraged to prey on women who feel trapped.

This is a many faceted discussion, and it will be a long one.  It will take years to identify all the points at which behavior is conditioned towards inequality, and begin to change it.  But for right now, I’d like to just look at three minutes of the conversation, in which Aidy Bryant sums up how she constrains her behavior in order to make her statements palatable to men:

“I, like most girls, have been taught to be accommodating and nice.”

“I’m trying to keep it cool and chill so I don’t come off like a shrew!”

“That’s a straight up sports reference for the boys!”

Yes.  That, right there.  That is the behavior that women are expected to adhere to.  We put, “I think,” or “I feel” in front of our statements to appear non-threatening.  We do not negotiate hard enough or push for what we want, because we don’t want to be seen as threatening.  We try to take up as little space as possible.

What angers me about this is that this is the behavior I learned and taught myself.  It doesn’t come naturally to me, to shrink back, to be quiet.  It comes naturally to me to be loud and vocal.  I don’t “feel” something is right, I usually know I’m right, and I’m ready to argue it.  And yet, over the years, I’ve considered it a positive to have learned how to polish my behavior to be nicer and more accommodating, less aggressive, more passive.  I have tried to be quieter.  I have tried to take up less mental and physical space in an attempt to be more likable, less threatening.

Perhaps I was better off unpolished after all.  Perhaps I placed too much value on the idea of what acceptable adult female behavior looked like, a series of gender constraints and tropes that are just incongruous with who I am.  Now, I’m just furious that women are expected to function within these lines and boundaries, and, worse, that so many of us still think we have to adhere to these unwritten guidelines of being nice, being accommodating, and never speaking up to make anyone else remotely uncomfortable.

I don’t like this.  I believe in making people uncomfortable when they deserve to face some sort of social consequence.  As an example, last week at a bar, my friends and I were discussing a play we had just seen.  A drunken boor kept coming over to hang over one of my friends at the table.  She was charmingly polite to him, hoping he would go away.  I ignored him entirely and continued talking because I didn’t think we needed to be polite to him – he was in our space, uninvited, and distracting from the conversation.  His response to this was to announce that I was “the Professor”, a lecturer, and yell that I was lecturing about something boring.  (I was comparing the play we had seen, Mankind, to LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness).  I wouldn’t participate in the female accommodation of a rude man, so I was labeled with something sexless.  Then he came back to the table and grabbed my friend’s ass because she was nice to him, and he thought he could get away with it, even though he was a drunk slob and she’s about a zillion levels above him on the social attractiveness scale.

This wouldn’t be a big deal (other than the entertainment factor when we had him kicked out) except as a metaphor for male response to female behavior: if you are nice, you are inviting sexual behavior.  If you are kind, you are open for grabbing.  If you are neither nice nor kind, you are neuter, devoid of the femininity that is the only coin of value in these social transactions.  I am certain that the “neuter” response a lot of men respond to me with has just as much to do with my size as my behavior – I’m literally the size of most guys at five-ten – but this has happened to me my entire life.  If I challenge someone, if I am not nice and accommodating, I am no longer feminine.  I can be dismissed, because femininity is of the utmost value in these kind of low-meaning, public interactions.

I spent ten minutes at my next workout getting this out of my system, beating a punching bag at the gym while muttering, “take THIS patriarchy!” All the years I’ve tried to behave in a more female manner so I would receive a positive response from the world.  All the times I’ve been dismissed for not being female enough.  All of it from men who have no right to assign or deny any woman her value, and yet who feel they have the right to judge us.  I thought about that and it gave my jabs and hooks even more power – enough that I think Paul looked slightly worried when I came out and headed over to the leg press.

This is a minor offshoot of the greater conversation we’re all having right now, about the way our society has formed to give men this ultimate social power over women, and how women are punished if they try to step outside subservient behavior.  We’re all engaged in this question of how we re-write our everyday social transactions to be on equal ground, because right now it feels like every encounter between the sexes is one where men have the advantage, and choose to take it.  My quibble with gender roles is minor in the scope of what many women have experienced, and what they are now brave enough to voice and share, one by one.

And yet, my quibble is part of the foundation that leads women to be taken advantage of, over and over, without recourse.  It’s the invisible barriers.  It’s the rules that say we must shrink back, or be punished with labels, insults, social consequence.  It is a small piece in the scaffolding that is holding up our society in this inequal structure.  Perhaps if we change the way women feel comfortable behaving, and reward those women who choose not to be nice, choose not to be accommodating, we will be one step closer to the balance we need.

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Posted in equality, politics, thoughts

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art vs craft

Posted on January 12, 2018 | Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few months about art and craft. They seem as if they should be interchangeable terms, as they go together so often in our language. Yet it is only art that we apply the term “fine” to. The “Fine Arts”: drama, music, writing, visual arts, etc.

This, to me, exemplifies the difference between art and craft. I believe Art is based in talent, a calling to create. It begins as a gift of creativity, an ability to transubstantiate emotion and thought into something others can experience. Creating something is an astonishing process, one Elizabeth Gilbert called, “Big Magic” for a reason.

Craft is more achievable to me than art. Craft is when you practice crafting something. It is ironic we call a craftsperson an “artisan”, a word that conjures up images of a handcrafted product. Craft is what we associate with making things, with shaping and perfecting aesthetics, perhaps, but ultimately with a functional product. That may be something as prosaic as a clay bowl, or as decorative as jewelry, but it is a tangible, functional item meant, mostly, for use.

In an age where so much work is now knowledge based, where does that leave us for craft? Are we no longer artisans? I believe that means we have to adapt our ideals of craft to intangible work. Knowledge work is now a craft. My expertise in digital marketing and in business is my craft. It is the work that produces something functional which I practice every day.

Art, however, remains art. The arts have always been a form of knowledge work, producing intangible, cerebral creations. That has not changed. That’s what makes art, the idea of transforming neutral, bland materials into full neural responses. And still – every art is also a craft. There is talent involved in art, but how does one become adept and skilled at transforming that talent into a chosen medium, unless one practices? That’s where art and craft dovetail again, in the requirement for practice, repetition, that constant refinement and polishing of words the same way a blacksmith would polish and re-shape a sword. It’s the challenge of making something that’s as perfect when formed as it was in it initial ideal. Without the same practice one would apply to a craft, art has far less impact and may not even be viable.

It is hard to create art in a form that one isnt innately familiar with. When I noodle on the piano in free-form mode, I still use music theory to pick out the harmonies and chords. I still calculate the relative minors and majors, dominant sevenths, diminished minors. I couldn’t create without that framework.

So an art must be practiced like a craft. Craft can also, at its most practiced, become art. Once an artisan has the practice of creation down, they can take it to the next level, embellishing and decorating, stretching the medium into something extraordinary. This is where craft becomes art, where the statements and thoughts, emotions and intellect, are added to a piece to make it resonate in our minds instead of merely functioning.

What are my arts and what are my crafts? I see writing as a craft. I see my work as a craft. I see music as my art, although I work at it like a craft. No matter what the medium though, I feel the same part of my brain light up when I translate a thought into a medium outside my brain. When I have the right answers at work, when I have just the right word for a blog post, when I hear music in my mind and replicate it on a keyboard, it all hits my brain the same way. It lights something up in me. Whether it is art or craft, do we not all need to have something that lights each of us up?

Perhaps I am thinking about this too hard. Arts and crafts are what each of us have, on some level, to make us extraordinary. It’s what lights our brains up and, if we practice hard enough, we can even extend that to other people and their brains. Both are miraculous that way.

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Yay, winter solstice!

Posted on January 1, 2018 | 1 comment

This will come as a possible surprise to anyone who knows me: I love the winter holiday season.  This is mostly because it is such a special time to spend with my family around the Northeast, as we do the loop from Brooklyn to Toronto to Pittsburgh to spend the season with the people we love the most.  But I also love this time of year because it is a season of light.  No matter which side of my heritage I’m celebrating, this is a season of kindling light.

Hanukkah is the festival of lights itself, during which we light candles for the sole purpose of looking at them and celebrating the light they give.  Yet Hanukkah is a festival celebrating a historical event, although it could well be related to the solstice.  Being from a dark northern climate, I also feel kinship with the solstice festivals that began millennia ago as celebrations against the dark.  What I love about the winter holidays is the celebration of light and life, the warding off of the cold and dark and the fear and sadness the winter elements bring.  I love the winter solstice festivals that are basically a giant “f–k you” to Death.

We’re gonna get at LEAST 12 days of NOT FREEZING out of this Yule log

Growing up in a household heavy in English customs, I also have a deep nostalgia for the heavy use of greenery during a winter festival.  We trimmed the living room with holly off the holly bush from the backyard, which was a nice counterpoint to the traditional fake Christmas tree (the kind from Sears, of course, that Dad bought in 1975).    The use of these symbolic plants dates back to the Druids in the UK, and show understanding and respect of the changing of the seasons.  I like having those traditions to celebrate and respect nature.  After all, even with all our technology, all our artificial light, we still cannot stop the days from becoming shorter every year.

Recently, in researching Santa Claus’ origins to explain to Ben, I also ran across a great article linking Santa Claus to Odin, and his eight reindeer to the eight legs of Odin’s horse.  I loved this concept.  “Don’t take the Christ out of Christmas” is not nearly as cool a statement as “Don’t take the Odin out of Yule.”  After all, the Norse were running England up until the Norman invasion in the eleventh century, and still had sizable pockets of influence well into the twentieth.  It is completely plausible to me that these old Viking beliefs merged with the German traditions into the codified Merry Ye Olde English Christmas imagery forever preserved as documented by Charles Dickens.

At the heart of all these traditions though, we still see the light.  We have the Yule Log.  We have candles galore.  We have the tradition of extravagance of light.  Imagine, in an era where materials for candles are limited to bees wax or tallow, where light is expensive.  Imagine lighting those candles with abandon, as a celebration of life, against the long, cold dark winter of northern places.  It’s enough to make one want to sing for joy.

We light the Hanukkah candles and eat fried foods in a similar sense of joy celebrating the miracle of the oil that lasted eight nights.  We say the prayers each night saying that we “kindle light”.  This is where the two disparate halves of my heritage come together, in the kindling of light against the dark, and in the celebration of the shortest day of the year…and in the time we spend with the people we love in the process.

Speaking of which, we are back from our long, cold loop around the Northeast!  It’s been another successful year of driving the wintry freeways from Brooklyn to Toronto to Pittsburgh.  Those adventures, however, will have to wait for a future post.

 

 

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