Datapoint: I'm a Quaker. I often wear Quaker plain dress, which is modest, distinctive, and includes a head covering.
When I've challenged liberal friends and acquaintances to explain what precisely makes me any different from the Muslim women they're calling oppressed, I've gotten a variety of answers, ranging from "your culture doesn't expect it of you" to "the Koran says [$foo]" to "You're educated!" (I will leave the obvious counterarguments as an exercise for the readers; I'm tired of them).
What I have never gotten, not even once, is "you're not any different. You're oppressed too."
I don't mean to paint the people I've had this conversation with as terrible awful Muslim-hating bigots. But I suspect that the real thing that makes me different is that they know me. They live and work and laugh with me. And because they know me, I am not a faceless oppressed Other who couldn't possibly be independent/liberal/educated enough to stand up for what I want for myself.
Familiarity challenges and erodes assumptions. People who are not familiar with me make assumptions about me, too--that I'm simple-minded, politically conservative, technologically illiterate, somber, and, yes, oppressed. When they get to know me, they realize that their assumptions are wrong. I imagine that people who have veiled Muslim women in their lives might have similar experiences, if they're open to them.
It's not a matter of paying - it's being able to get it in the first place.
this^10.
Until this month, I was ineligible for individual insurance because of headaches. I would have happily written the check, but no one would take it from me.
I've been lucky enough to get onto the federal payroll, so now my health insurance is fantastic. I want my friends to have what I have. I want Gregory Malone to have it. I want the small businesses I patronize every day to be able to offer real benefits without committing fraud or going under. I want to be able to smile at random strangers I pass on the street and know that my country won't just throw them away the next time they get sick.
If the rest of the industrialized world can work that one out, I'm pretty sure the country that put a man on the moon can manage a go at it.
When it comes time for me to plan my next vacation, I know who's getting my tourist dollars.
Hmm. Serge, I think you'd have to flip that about.
--actually, it doesn't scan that way, either. Carry on.
BSD, I think what's wrong with "life should not hurt" is that pain (physical and emotional) is a perfectly natural thing. Pain is not necessarily a system failure. Often it's a system failsafe. An alarm that warns us when we are doing something injurious. And that means that, yes, sometimes life should hurt. It should hurt when we stick our hand in boiling water. It should hurt when someone or something in our life is tearing us down emotionally.
The alternative is, we get the injury without the warning. In many ways, we have a culture that strives for painlessness instead of striving to understand, prevent, and overcome the underlying causes. That colors how we look at medicine, mental health, conflicts, social systems, everything. And not in a good way.
Yaaaaaaaaaay NEIL!
He says on his blog that he didn't swear when he was told, but he also says that his agent's first question was "you didn't star swearing, did you?"
Datapoint: it's 6:49 EST now, and I'm getting the following error message: "Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at www.absolutewrite.com."
I'll assume you guys are still working on it and check again tomorrow. Thanks for your work!
Yay for recent backups, and for MAcAllister and Dawno for their hard work, and for Making Light for the free coffee.
In the "lemonade out of lemons" vein, who's planning to get some BIC time in while we're waiting for AW to come back? Anyone?
I don't know him, but I wish him well.
Man, that game would be a lot more fun if it were not obscenely right-handed (WASD: it's just not rocket science). It would also be great if you could jump with the up key instead of having to use the space bar, because then the controls would be one-handed, ergo innately ambidextrous.
Other than the poorly-constructed UI, though, it's certainly cute.
Where conspiracy theories all fall apart for me is the old "three can keep a secret only if two of them are dead" bit. Even if you're willing to swallow an entire team being involved in Kennedy's assassination, you also have to explain how we've gone forty-five years without anyone snapping up a multi-million-dollar book deal about their recently-departed family member's role on said team.
Same with all the 9/11 and Anthrax conspiracies. I'd be willing to buy one or two people getting the idea that fake terrorist attacks would be a good idea. As far as we can tell, that's what Bruce Ivins's motivation for the anthrax attack was. But whole teams of demolition experts, spooks, and federal agents who were both sociopathic enough to be ok with killing all those people and discrete enough to keep it to themselves? Yeah right.
oh, papyrus.... what abusive photoshoppery have you been coerced into this time?
I would like to see the "step by step instructions" for use of a pad and pencil.
1. A small music box my mother gave me as a graduation present. It plays "I Hope You Dance," and it makes me smile every time I open it.
2. A 1919 treadle-powered sewing machine I just got up and running again. I learned to sew from my mother, who learned from her mother, who learned from her big sister. Sewing has become our heirloom. We have no others.
3. My motorcycle. Because I bought it my very own self, and it's totally awesome.
Following up on: Pictures, desktop backgrounds, buildings with history:
My favorite desktop background is of a small brick enclosure on the senate side of the US Capitol's back lawn. It's called The Summer House, and it was completed in 1881 to shelter travelers from the district's oppressive summer heat.
Inside there's a fountain, and a window into a grotto where water splashes down over the rocks and under the building. Even in the middle of August, when the temperature's over a hundred and you can see the humidity rising in waves off the pavement, there's always a cool breeze coming through that window.
I used to take my lunch there when I worked on that side of the hill. I'd sit in the grotto window with my sandwich and read a book. On my plain Quaker dress days, tourists would come through and tell me I looked like something out of an Austen novel, or a costume drama, or just "something out of the past." And I would smile at them. Because everything in The Summer House looks that way.
I'm making a polonaise and matching skirt. I use this particular pattern for my Quaker plain dress clothes, but this time I'm using a pinstriped fabric and adding ruffles, contrasting piping, and (gasp) an open square neckline instead of a jewel neckline, so it's way too festive to be plain dress. It's a halloween/convention costume.
I'm planning to finish it tonight, but I may steampunk it up a little when I'm done, just because I think attaching goggles to my bonnet would be hilarious.
As far as why I make clothes, in my case, my plain clothing is a very visible sign of my faith (my office clothes notsomuch, but I don't usually make those). On a practical note, that means that acquiring it elsewhere is difficult and expensive. On a personal note, making it myself helps me maintain a connection with what I'm wearing and why. It's a conscious way that I connect myself to my life, if that makes sense at all.
Also, it's a lot of fun.
There once was a woman from big town
whose skills as a mod were renown.
She disemvowelled the asses
to the delight of the masses,
who all hope that soon she'll be home-bound.
n+1 on the well-wishes.
A companion to Uncle Jim's permission to write badly, from an elder at my Quaker Meeting: "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly."
And two from motorcycle training:
1. You will go where you're looking, so look where you're going. Never stare at problems; always keep your eyes on the safe way 'round them.
2. Keep the rubber side down.
I heard this reasoning as an argument against open source recently: "well if you're in favor of open source, you shouldn't care about border guards looking at your laptop because all your information should be free and open to the public!"
Ah, not so much, no. My files aren't proprietary; they're personal.
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| 2006 | 40 |
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