Russ @156/229:
I am too late, but just in case the topic comes up again: I have *very* much appreciated The Quaker Reader, ed. Jessamyn West, from Pendle Hill. It's a collection of essays, from George Fox on up, with introductions that place each in historical context. If you can lay hands on it, I think it exactly fits your original idea.
Andrew M @111:
I don't *think* there's anything wrong with my technique-- I have participated suitably in any number of other con panels, and don't think I've changed anything. It was just... weird.
Adrian @103 Carrying a purse marks a woman as a customer
Hmm. Hadn't thought of that. I quit carrying a purse umpty-ump years ago, after leaving it under a restaurant table one too many times. I carry a wallet in a front pants pocket, and get rather snippy with people who think my personal plumbing dictates what I have to carry around with me. Never thought of the "no purse, therefore must have stashed it in a desk somewhere nearby" angle. Interesting.
Taking notes on the merchandise is not typical customer behavior.
Well, why the heck not? No way am I spending multiple hundreds of dollars on garden hardscaping or major power tools without some mighty detailed comparisons-- my momma would disown me for not shopping right.
Xopher @97:
Boycotting HD isn't the main thing here. Notice how many of the stories are from car dealerships and electronics-and-appliances places. It's only HD's fault that they don't have a day of employee orientation devoted to customer service, beginning with a unit on distinguishing them from the background noise.
Rather, investigate what businesses *do* have decent customer service, if you can find any in your area. Cherish them. *Tell* them that they have your business because they are decent to your female/POC/disabled friends.
S Miller @57 If you have a local hardware store, please support them. Yes, it is a few dollars more, but good small hardware stores will help you build your time travel devices. I frequently found myself going to Home Depot to build things that were never envisioned by the people who created the components.
Many people make this error: thinking that Home Depot is a hardware store. It is not. It is a project store. It is designed for the guy who told his wife that of course, he could build a deck, but lied; Home Depot is there to bail him out.
If you are not doing one of the Approved Projects, but rather need a specific item-- e.g. a small quantity of (literal) brass tacks, not brads, not wood screws, but brass tacks of a certain size to make a cosmetic repair to the brass fittings on a piece of furniture-- they can't help you. Go to a hardware store.
Debbie @68 My daughter was the only one to raise her hand. The teacher not only didn't call on her, he didn't look at her or the other girl; he actually asked the boys if they had ideas about how to answer the question.
You know, the weirdest experience with invisibility I've ever had was at a con, shortly after we moved to Chicagoland. There was a panel on a topic on which I had some professional experience, and I wanted to hear what the experts said. After all of the panelists did the I-have-no-idea-why-I'm-on-this-panel, but-here's-my-latest-book, it quickly became apparent that I was the person in the room with the most factual knowledge. Which I could not supply to the discussion, because the moderator could not see me.
I wasn't being rude; I was politely waiting to be called on like everyone else. It wasn't apparently a gender thing; there were other women getting recognized. I was of the majority race in that room, so that wasn't it. After others had all had turns and were getting called on for the second and third time, I did eventually blurt out a fact whose lack everyone had spent several minutes lamenting; that didn't make me visible either. I finally left because I couldn't stand to hear a discussion lurching along without any of the relevant information.
All I can think of is that I was a stranger to the community-- my badge color showed that I was a Saturday-only registrant, and no one knew my face.
I am a middle-aged woman, and I am extremely visible in Home Depot, and Ace, and Lowe's.
To the other customers.
Apparently, a woman in khakis, a collared shirt, and sensible shoes, studying shelves of tools and taking notes, must be an employee, orange apron or no orange apron. Sometimes I am able to answer people's questions, in which case I do so. Other times, when I have denied knowledge of the store's stock, I have had to put off the same questioner two or three times. Because I *must* be an employee.
@36 That's it exactly. As an occasional variant in a framework of another rhythm, they're nice. An unbroken stream of them joggles along, giving their freight of teen angst a terrible headache. And there's nothing worse than teen angst that's also cranky from all the jouncing.
@13 I just tend to break out in anapests. The reading public never did anything to deserve that.
Renatus@14:
What I thought was a particularly terse and vigorous statement of that point seems to have been lost amid the noise and the haste.
I quote Gelfin: I dream of a day when all people can experience the unbridled freedom to do what I think is normal instead of suffering under oppressive conformity to what they think is normal.
P J Evans @33: That book is officially my Best Birthday Gift Ever. I've made couple of the toruses therein. I also have yarn on hand to do a Baby Surprise Jacket with Fibonacci stripes.
I'm fortunate to live just a few miles from the excellent Fox Valley Folk Festival, so that's my Labor Day weekend every year. Maybe that doesn't count as making our own fun, because there are national and international notables imported for the occasion-- or maybe it does, because we don't wait to be invited before we start singing along in harmony.
Although now I'm going to be mere feet away from such luminaries as John Roberts and Peggy Seeger, and I'm going to start giggling at all the wrong moments, and it's your fault.
Well, I've described one pathology, but to be fair, most of the places I've worked have been delightfully free of the Culture of Blame. We've all just grimaced and gotten on with fixing it, without too much energy spent on gloating over the errors of others. Except the one fellow I mentioned, my direct supervisors have all made it reasonably safe to swallow my pride and 'fess up when there was need.
That's one of the things many of my students need, is that safety-- I have quite a few perfectionists who had rather not try, and my role is sometimes to reassure them that a certain amount of flail is all part of the process. I wound up quoting an article from (ACM Communications? Something my favorite developer left on the dining table) about how to answer bosses who spout "get it right the first time." The argument was: on a software project, if it's even *possible* to "get it right the first time," you are wasting your time, because you are not learning anything or creating anything, you are rehashing something.
Caroline @89: Everything I do know seems hopelessly naïve and trivial. I'm nearly always the stupidest person in the room, because the other five people in the room are full professors with thirty-five years of experience apiece, and I feel like I have to measure up to that standard after just a couple of years.
What will happen after a couple of years is that you will better understand just how much those experienced people are-- not BSing, precisely, but winging it. They have seen a lot, but have also forgotten stuff. When you ask them to explain, that is, to be precise, they are often exposed as being rather fuzzy on important points. Etc.
I am a chemistry grad-school dropout, and my career has chiefly been in organizations structured as one man with a PhD and a bunch of women who know what's going on. Including one guy who, under the guise of "soliciting our input," kept asking for a solution to a problem "if we see anything in the literature." (Well, bub, you may be allowed to sit on your kiester staring at journal articles all day, but I'm actually expected to turn out some work around here.) When I did propose a solution based on my experience, he literally acted as if I had not spoken. No journal reference, therefore not an idea.
Someday I'd like to have a job where I actually feel competent on a daily basis.
For this, I recommend teaching. Not so much for the molding-impressionable-young-minds, which is actually a bit scary, but for the realization that yes, I can actually navigate my way smoothly among these concepts. When asked a question, I can answer it coherently. When asked a perceptive question by a bright and engaged student who is getting way ahead of where this class was supposed to be going, I can be excited and creative all over again. I am not stupid; I know stuff I didn't realize I knew; I'm actually pretty good at this.
Nicole @ 165: In the argument for a la carte marriage, I hear a sentiment similar to the scolding people get who protest some unforeseen outcome of a contract. "Well, then, why didn't they read it more carefully before they signed it?" As if every person who signs any contract could be expected to be a lawyer specializing in that sort of contract. It's not a fair expectation
If you mean me, the point I've been trying to make is that it's not possible to read the whole thing before signing it. The laws aren't laid out in the county clerk's office when you go in for the license, nor can you know whether you will move to another state or whether the legislature of your current state will change the rules on you. It is possible to wind up with grave legal obligations that you never meant to take on.
Now, if certain things do not go wrong, you will never care about this. If there is a divorce but it is amicable and adult, you will not care about this. My divorce was not so much amicable; rather, my ex was not crafty enough to realize that he could have taken me to the cleaners by asserting things that I never agreed to.
I have made my decision for myself-- I am well and truly Done with letting the government define anything at all about my personal life. I am bummed that we cannot get privileged communication status without taking on all the other interference. But that wills and powers of attorney and so on are more hassle than one-stop-shopping with a marriage certificate does not trouble me-- that is the trade-off for the level of control I want.
CHip @ 144 Oh, sure, there can and should be boilerplate contracts in the Office Depot for those who don't want to write their own from scratch. It's the "any color you want, as long as it's black" that bugs me.
And the unquestioned assumptions that go with it bug me-- that "a marriage" is just one thing, and you are doing it right or not doing it right, and therefore making it work or not-- not that your problems may stem from stuffing yourself into a Procrustean bed. The nasty surprise your mother had-- were all the laws laid out for her to read over in the county clerk's office before she signed? Other contracts are, even if one is so foolish as to skip ahead to the signature page-- has analogs in the heart as well.
And the *existence* of the a la carte approach, and maybe three or four boilerplate packages in the Office Depot, might make more people sit down beforehand and think, now which one do we want? Conservatives upset about the divorce rate make noises about making divorce harder, when it's marriage that should be harder. Or at least better examined.
Lorax@136: "And to line up the 1000+ such benefits that marriage carries..."
KeithS@140: "I was pulling that out of a hat as one of the more common issues when marriage comes up. I don't know that much about the minor, fiddly details"
This is some of my point-- marriage in the US is a huge, complex package deal, and almost nobody knows what it is, even when getting into it themselves. Plus it can change, without consent or notification, years after you've entered into it. Equally, or even more, true of common-law, with which I have a problem. It shouldn't be possible to create such a contract almost by accident.
Do Not Want package deal. Want a la carte. Yes, that's more work upfront-- but how much work is a nasty divorce? How about if everyone is clear about what they want, what they are getting, and what they are promising? How about if we start from a presumption of all adults being responsible for themselves, and then those who want to give or receive lifetime dependence sort that out the right way to suit them?
Emma's suggestion @139 for a chosen next-of-kin, which might confer helpful privileges but not controlling rights over other adults and their property, sounds delightful to me.
Me, I'm not about to sign any contract whose terms can be changed by third parties, *without* my consent. Sign it who will, but caveat emptor. We write our own, thankyouverymuch.
Meanwhile, I'm trying to pick up a habit of using marked terms for majority traits. Where relevant and/or useful, anyway, but I'm trying not to let is slide that *of course* the Nineteenth-Century Pioneer Chemist was male and Western European-- because sometimes, she wasn't.
I'm very fortunate that, on the few occasions when I have taken some blow to the head, there was someone on the scene who knew what to look for. I once walked off a loading dock in the dark-- at an observatory, there are no lights in the parking lot, and some yutz had neglected to put the chain back after the nitrogen truck pulled away. As B.Durbin@46, I was surprised that, klutz that I am, I still managed an instinctive roll that protected the drinking glass I was carrying, so no gashed wrists. And one of the astronomers was an EMT, and was able to assure me that, despite seeing stars without benefit of telescope, I was going to be fine. The satellite-image-of-Chesapeake-Bay bruise from my right hip to knee was probably more of a threat to my health.
On the other occasion, I was on my way to TA a class, and one of my students was an EMT. Strange role reversal, that was-- in a chemistry lab, *I'm* the one meant to be looking out for my kids' health and safety...
Carol Kimball @117: Knitting generates patience and stability
Absolutely. I am not by nature a patient person; any patience I have I learned from textile crafts. I have seen some people state that they are patient becase they knit, meaning that knitting while waiting keeps them from going nuts by keeping them occupied.
I maintain that assorted textile crafts (I started with cross-stitch, and have been wandering randomly through various branches) have actually changed my personality and made me more patient. They're a sort of intermediate gratification-- certainly not immediate, oh no!-- in that you can *see* progress, like training wheels for faith that it will all come around in the end.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 22 |
| 2008 | 2 |
Total: 24 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Zelda:
Show all comments by Zelda.