"Young wives are the leading asset of corporate power. They want the suburbs, a house, a settled life, and respectability. They want society to see that they have exchanged themselves for something of value."

-Ralph Nader

Confession: what I have been thinking about is fashion. Part of this taking-care-of-myself nonsense. How very women's magazine.

History? Armchair fashionista, all longing and anger and doom.

I started without a chance, no money, sacks of old hand-me-downs many times picked over, two blocks from the public library. I can tell you about the Dior dress. I can tell you about thread count, and rayon viscosity, and the de-constructed genius of Chanel. I can identify silk and cashmere from their synthetic counterparts by touch, from walking down the aisles of value village and examining every piece, from stealing into banana republic for moments at a time only to fondle and gape.

I wear enormous men's wool hiking socks under four year old sauconys, layers of plain threadbare t-shirts, black thrift-store jeans, sometimes hats.

I resent my passion, because this is what's expected of me, as a woman. I resent it because it at first was fueled so entirely by expectations of others which I would ABSOLUTELY NEVER be able to meet. But--there are things you need. Clothes to wear, for example; to sleep in and hike in, to work or work out or go grocery shopping.

I resent it also because it is most commonly followed with such vapid, brainless persistence. There's nothing say with clothes if your entire world is clothes, nothing but self-referential circles to chew off your tail in. It is social appropriateness; it could be art.

I definitely don't have this clothing and gender stuff figured out. It helps that my closest guy friend is an artist and dresses well--equality, or at least a taste--what would the world be like if everyone would dress well? Prettier, for sure. More expressive. Aesthetic preferences say something about your soul.

I've been coming together about it in pieces. Slowly.

My personal style preferences include a lot of steampunk, so I've been reading up on it. It turns out I love steampunk. There's a lot of darkness, and a sense of whimsy; it's creative, playful, passionate. They talk about maker culture; they resist the idea of a world they have to helplessly or passively accept.

I hate the fact that for so many people, it's about escapism. I want it streamlined, functional; I am hungry for a making of this same aesthetic that is grounded in the reality of here and now. I want to imagine the world is still alive, still dark and beautiful and dangerous worth exploring every inch of.

Very little delights me more than the elegance of an object that was made clean, simple, and strikingly gorgeous in both functional and aesthetic ways. Combine this with whimsy, creativity, violence, and that's exactly what I'm looking for.

Purity

is one of the most common measures of morality; it's about cultivating virtue and keeping out the things that don't belong. Among liberals and leftists it is often manifested through food. Veganism is not for everybody--only for the virtuous, those who care about ethics, those who are willing to sacrifice. Eating local, organic, produce and excluding whatever is ethically dubious will make you skinny and healthy and. . . virtuous. Right?

Maybe. If one is concerned with animal welfare and the environment, having a lifestyle that supports that is a spectrum, not a step, and it isn't just food. As humans in the first world, virtually everything we do has a detrimental environmental impact. How does your veggie burger hold up against your refusal to take the bus? The clothes you bought new at Wal-mart? Your soap from the dollar store? Do you know what oilfield your 100% vegan fleece came from? Is it really better, just because the bodies of the dead are rotting in the Niger delta instead of marinating in tariyaki sauce?

I don't mean to belittle the efforts of really dedicated environmentalist vegans. They have my admiration and support. I also don't mean to imply at all that any effort which doesn't cover everything isn't worthwhile. I even believe in being vocal about your ethical choices, and I want people to hold each other (socially) to a high ethical standard with regards to environmentalism.

My beef with this comes in when people think it's ok to try to invoke other people's sense of purity. Moral reasoning, I'm fine with. If you want to stop me from eating meat because of justice--because by eating it I'm doing harm to people and creatures who deserve no violence from me--I am absolutely fine with that. However, I'd rather have vegetarianism forced on me by violence than have people appropriate my understanding of virtue to get me to adopt it on my own.

When we disagree about what priorities are appropriate for the wider society to accept, that effects me but it is not an attack on my identity. When it comes to individual choices, there is only person one who should be allowed to decide what belongs in me--in my body, in my ethics--and what does not. This person is me. If I adopt an ethical standard based on selfish and inconsistent hedonism, as an individual you can think less of me, and as a citizen you can help enact laws that curb my outward behavior--and that's all.

I feel very strongly that trouble comes when outsiders try to arbitrate an individual's sense of purity. Religious readers might disagree with this, but I see this as a major problem in religious practice. When the emotional and ethical development process have not taken place for a teenager to reject pornography of their own accord, based on their own moral foundation, others will often attempt to impose this conclusion socially. The result is a massive cycle of guilt and shame. I don't know if it works or not, but guilt is an ugly motivator--and when allowed to fester and spiral into something huge, it does terrible damage to the person experiencing it.

The thing to be avoided is manipulation--projecting your values over someone else's, or usurping their values so that they will act in support of your preferences.

Besides its modern incarnation, there's a very long spiritual tradition of using food to establish or symbolize moral superiority, using purity. My first bout with severely disordered eating was triggered--after many other things had been set in place--by a sacrament meeting devoted to how fasting can make you pure. You don't stop eating because of things you think; you do it because of things you feel. You do it because you want to feel pure and you don't feel like you deserve to live. When you associate purity with restricting food, you can get a double dose of self-destructive relief from one tragic course of action.

When others try to appropriate my sense of purity for their cause, I get defensive quickly. The idea that veganism isn't for everybody--only for the virtuous--pushes all the wrong buttons. I like to see myself as virtuous. I like to feel myself as pure. I enjoyed exercising for seven hours a day on a 1200 calorie, mostly-vegetable diet, and it makes me angry that people who were supposed to be my friends encouraged me to do so.

I think in dealing with these questions it's terribly important to get in touch with your own sense of virtue, your own sense of purity, your own moral reasoning--and to get in touch with your own judgmental side. Saying "I think you are in the wrong" makes it much clearer whose values are whose than saying "you could be pure if you were like me."



Someday, when there are less triggers associated with it, I'd like to become vegan with the exception of
a) foods I've raised myself humanely, and
b) significant cultural and culinary experiences.

I want to eat at the French Laundry, learn to make a spectacular saag paneer, and taste peeking duck when I'm in China. These moments will not come often, and I choose not to miss them.

My values lead me to think a lot about the ways my time and money impact other people and creatures, but they also lead me to assert my own claim to a rich and full existence. I am willing to take a stand for the things I care about. I am willing to make sacrifices, and I care passionately about changing the world for the better. I am not, and do not plan to be, vegetarian or vegan. This is what I believe about the purity and virtue of the way I eat.

Today was even more useless than yesterday, so this evening I decided it was time to be cheerful already. I took a hot shower, made some chamomile tea, and attempted to bake a sweet potato and some oatmeal cookies. I turned the thermostat up to a scandalous 72 degrees, turned on all the lights, and put on the Schubert cd I have out from the library. I curled up in a ball by my favorite heat vent. I called my sister repeatedly till she got home, and then we talked for over an hour.

It worked out pretty well.

It's lead me to thinking about all the predictable things that have a big impact on my ability to deal with depression. Here are the ones I thought of, in a pretty good approximate order of impact:

Hunger
Pain
Cold
Lack of exercise
Lack of social contact
Lack of quiet moments
Lack of light
Lack of being outside
Lack of dancing
Lack of music

And of course, there are the episodic things that can make it flare up and be harder to control:

Physical trauma
Negative social contact
Difficult internal goings-on, like some new insight about myself that sucks


One thing that I haven't sorted out--ironically, for a Marxist--is what to think of the profound impact material goods can have on psychological functioning. I read once that, after the point of having enough that you aren't worried about subsistence, happiness doesn't correlate to absolute material wealth at all--only to relative material wealth in the society you're in. I wish I remember where I read that, since I have no idea if it's true.

So many things are made so much easier by a little bit of money. . . it almost makes it look like money could really solve things like depression--but it can't. Material resources offer the possibility that material problems can be solved--but there are attendant challenges. Sometimes the psychological problems that arise with wealth are as serious as the physical ones they've replaced.

One IAF thing I really like is the iron rule: Never do for others what they can do for themselves. Following this rule creates localized autonomy, a sense of accomplishment, and actual accomplishments--things that can really help with a problem like depression. I think that's key to the material resources issue, with depression especially; they can only help insofar as people are also given a real opportunity to do what they can for themselves.

Fashion and Beauty

What isn't evil about it:

-Presenting the best of yourself; using creativity, craftsmanship, color, texture, line, drape, and function; self expression through physical appearance; fashion as one of the ultimate forms of art which is for people in an incredibly tangible and concrete way.

What is:

-Excessive valuation of physical beauty; beauty as an essential component, or even the most essential component, of identity--particularly for women

-Defining beauty as being some incredibly unhealthy and incredibly unobtainable standard

-Thereby a) generally screwing people over psychologically and b) making sexuality competitive, which diminishes the quality of sexual relationships



Solutions?


One obvious thing is an attempt at reclaiming; to use creativity, self expression, and craftsmanship to reject unobtainable standards of beauty. I see three problems with this.

First and most obviously, it doesn't address the incredibly excessive emphasis placed on appearance. This is a huge problem, and I'm unaware of any easy solutions to it. I can only suggest we try and remember that it's always more important to be amazing than to look amazing--always.

Secondly, reclaiming is not going to win the war. This kind of action alone, contrary to liberal mores, is never going to create a world where people have a healthy attitude towards their bodies, their appearance and their sexuality. The best you can hope for is to create a liberating subculture, a chance for a few people to practice democracy in discourse, a chance for a few people to have freeing experiences. If reclaiming does not win the war, and something else--say, lobbying for restrictions in advertising--possibly could, should we be spending our resources on this?

Thirdly, lots of things about aesthetics are not universal. Current aesthetic standards will influence what we find to be appealing; this is inevitable. I haven't studied aesthetics a lot, either practically or philosophically. However, it seems that to an extent, you would have to play into the current consumption-oriented aesthetic standards to successfully create something beautiful. I need to read and think more about this.


The other obvious thing is to simply disengage--to act in a way that doesn't accept making yourself an object for the aesthetic consumption of others as a value. It seems like an ineffective and unsatisfying option; it's not going to win large scale against corporate hijacking of aesthetic values, it has lots of practical disadvantages in day to day life, and it looses all of the potentially healthy things the art of personal appearance has to offer.



I have some sort of idea about the balance on this that I personally want to strike, but I'm interested in other people's thoughts. :)

Streetcorner ballerina

Today was an altogether new job experience; I started work as a Sign Holder.

I'd thought that this would be a straightforward matter of selling my body to the market in a whole new way, but no; not at all. There's much more to it. Perhaps this wouldn't be so if I weren't such a perfectionist, but here we are.

You see, there are people in all those cars. People who are bored, hurried, tired, stuck. Waiting, at the light. Captive people, who will expect a fake and tired smile, half hearted sign wiggling, whole hearted efforts to avoid eye contact. They will watch me count the minutes. We could all be zombies together, I supposed, and I would still get paid. . . But I am not a fan of Terrible.

So it goes something like this. I walk; sign held aside, arms moving adagio, third and fourth. I am listening to well tempered clavier on guitar without an ipod, feet pointed, tracing, articulating; torso lifted, ever so subtle the epaulement. I am open, projecting, concert hall virtuoso making sparkling eye contact with every passing car. At the change of the light I return to the corner and hold the sign out like a barre, doing a few rounds of exercises while the audience returns again.

And they watch; they more than watch. My favorite expression is on the faces of the ones so clearly delighted it can barely be contained.

After an hour I can't hack the precision for ballet. I try African, ballroom; general overplayed goofiness. They stop watching; some give the ultimate insult, too cool to make contact, eyes resolutely ahead. I am tired. I wonder why the coffee shop doesn't put just their advertising money into sponsoring community events in the arts, and then remember--this is not expected of me. We are all used to be zombies.

It seems a little elegance and calm, warm-wrapped in irony, has clearly been the order of the day.

the social cost of financial responsibility

Lately I've been reading Amy Dacyczyn's The Complete Tightwad Gazette, which is a compendium (nearly a thousand pages) of advice on saving money. The suggestions range from obvious to extreme, but I find it generally useful. For example, she points out (and expounds upon the fact, pp.42-43) that there are three ways to save money on something; you can buy it cheaper, make it last longer, or use it less. Another example is this tidy and useful summary of the principles (her word) of frugality, from an article on pp. 64-66:

1) Record Spending
2) Regardless of your income, do not spend everything you earn
3) Use creativity and thrift to improve the quality of life, rather than spending more money
4) Avoid convenience foods and instead prepare from scratch
5) Buy in bulk
6) All family members should develop hobbies that save money, rather than ones that are non-productive or cost money*
7) Whenever possible reuse materials you already have rather than buying new at shops
8) Don't try to keep up with the Joneses; instead live within your means

She elaborates on each of these throughout the book, and as far as I can tell she's covered all the major bases except two--try to avoid rent, and don't let anything (rebates, vegetables, surprisingly many other things) go bad on you. So far so good, no?

Now that you have the general gist of the book, we can move on to the hard part. What is the right thing to do about social spending?


You're aware of the situation, I'm sure; old friends who you haven't seen in years or new ones you're very interested in knowing suggest a dinner out. If you've been resigned to overspending, this may come in stride, but if--like me--you're on a strong frugal streak, it presents a dilemma.

Ultimately thrift should be about being aware of how you expend your resources, and using that awareness to direct them to the things you value most. Generally I believe very strongly in behaving--insofar as such a thing is possible--as if things are less important than people. I really love dining out, but at times when my money can be put to really, really, really rewarding use elsewhere, social comfort is about the only thing that can compel me to do it.

Dacyczyn would call this "Keeping up with the Jonses." In fact, the quote (from an 1833 manual called The American Frugal Housewife) she uses to illustrate "Keeping up with the Jonses" is this:

"To associate with influential and genteel people with an appearance of equality unquestionably has its advantages, but like other external advantages, these may have their proper price, and may be bought too dearly. Self denial, in proportion to the narrowness of your income, will eventually become the happiest and most respectable course for you and yours."

The problem is, it's not a simple matter of individualistically renouncing consumerism or giving up ostentation. Social spending is about making other people comfortable, or about holding a certain position--and not necessarily a dominant one--in the social sphere, a sphere that is just as much about relationships as about consumption. If you don't have a place to entertain, it's the cost of creating a comfortable space in which to connect with people. As someone who never pays more than 10$ for an outfit and balks at a 5$ garlic press (which I'd use constantly), a hundred dollars or more a month on gifts and other social spending often seems an eminently worthwhile use of funds.

It is likely, of course, that the friends in question are not much more "influential and genteel" than myself, but merely have different priorities, or are less aware of their resource use. . . and this brings me to my main conclusion; I think it would be nice to foster a culture where social spending is not so obligatory. Let's encourage the use (and existence) of public social spaces and events, and bring back picnicking and home cooking. After all, the less time we spend on earning money to spend time with each other, the more time we have to spend with each other.



*I actually disagree with this one--what is money for, if not life? Just make sure what you do is worth it to you.

unabashed rambling

organizing books is one of my Favorite Things In The Whole Wide World.

Back when I was in high school, it was my primary sane-making pastime. . . there was something incredibly calming about bringing order to something, particularly since it was such a tangible something and it managed to carry such a potent subtext of Future. I wanted to learn almost everything, and the books I owned were my tool kit, their untapped wisdom the best shot I had at getting to who I thought I wanted to be. When I was upset, I would make myself a challenge--get rid of ten books, or in extreme cases fifty. . . and since I had a source of free books, this lead to a constant refining and re-organization process rather than true personal-library anorexia. :)

Organizing books can be a bit like organizing your brain. When I left the home of my teen-angst, I would often satisfy this craving to externalize my thoughts by way of the library. Thirty interior design books spread about you on the floor are like a specialized meditation garden on the subject at hand. . . I've often been known to wander for an extra forty minutes or an hour looking for exactly the right combination of items to express my mental state, then take them home and wallow in the creative fecundity of my acquisitions, reading a chapter here and another there in attempts to pick up exactly the information I was seeking.

These days I'm a little less spontaneous with my reading and a lot more serious about my study habits, but I've discovered that my "books to read" document has come to serve a deliciously similar function, except even better--The Future is now. It's like the Wheaties of book organizing; book organizing for now and the long haul. Here are the books I plan to read in Philosophy--in Science--in French--entire lists of books imported from friends on interesting subject matter, a list of topics to research (and find the best books to read on them), everything I'm currently reading highlighted in bold. . . and, of course, the singularly satisfying act of deleting items from the list, productive if I've read them and cathartic if I've decided they no longer need apply.

It might possibly be the case that the list is shrinking slower than it is growing. It does include such list items as: "items in my library which don't belong to me," "the rest of the major Russians," and "other items in my library which do belong to me." For the moment though, it is finite, motivating, exciting, extremely reflective of my goals and progress towards them, and, as perhaps I've said, deeply, deeply satisfying.


As soon as I've done writing this, I'll be off to return to my roots--organizing my physical, material personal library for the first time in almost a year, with space to keep my books where I can see them, and all in one place. I finally have the bookshelves, and I've been looking forward to it for days.

Organizing my books right now has two kinds of additional significance, above what it had when I was a teen. For one thing, as I have scarcely begun to believe, it seems that I have a home. While I don't see myself loosing my taste as a minimalist and I think I'll always be aware that it costs money to maintain Things (including a personal library of any size), I no longer need constantly to imagine how many camels it would take to carry all this, or how exactly I would pack the entirety into my Geo, or what I would leave behind and expect never to see again when I depart for Europe. I'm perhaps a bit too scarred to become attached to Things--which is not all bad--but it will certainly be a different thing to approach the project from the perspective of having a single, stationary, almost permanently allocated home.

The other difference is that as I've become more serious in reading, I care to depend on other people's libraries less and less. If I've put significant time and effort into reading this, I want to own a copy--I want to keep notes about it, maybe even (God forbid) underline sections in pencil--I want to be able to reference it and find the right parts when I need to, because someday soon I'll be using this to do my work. Personal library has become not just a projection of future destinations, collection of past favorites, and source of occasional reading material, but something far more vivacious, almost constantly interactive.

Exciting. Tasty. Very filling.

As I said, Satisfying.

So thank you, Mary, for sharing your library organizing experience. Sometimes when your favorite things are--we'll say quirky--its nice to know how other people enjoy them to. . . and as it turns out, writing (and sometimes reading) about sorting books can be almost as fun as sorting them. :)

How to win friends and influence people

“To be sure I was paying her to say it; but why bring that up?” -p. 227

It's a book that's been so popular over most of the last century that it's title is a catchphrase.

The primary message seems to be that one should develop a "genuine" interest in other people because it will be to one's material interest. All in all, I've come to the conclusion that this is a fantastic lot of advice if you excise the lie. Of course, at that point it becomes basically a religious text. :)


Here's the outline:

3 fundamental techniques in handling people
Don't criticize, condemn, or complain
Give honest and sincere appreciation
Arouse in the other person an eager want

6 ways to make people like you
Become genuinely interested in people
Smile
Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in the language
Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
Talk in terms of the other person's interests
Make the other person feel important—and do it sincerely.

12 ways to win people to your way of thinking
The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it
Show respect for the other person's opinion. Never say “you're wrong.”
If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
Begin in a friendly way.
Get the other person saying “yes, yes” immediately.
Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.
Let the other person feel the idea is his or hers.
Try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view.
Be sympathetic with the other person's ideas and desires.
Appeal to the nobler motives.
Dramatize your ideas.
Throw down a challenge.

9 ways to be a good leader
A leader's job often includes changing your people's attitudes and behavior. Some suggestions to accomplish this:
Begin with praise and honest appreciation.
Call attention to people's mistakes indirectly.
Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.
Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
Let the other person save face.
Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be “hearty in you approbation and lavish in your praise.”
Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.
Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.
Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.

We're not going to discuss what this says about me

xkcd on revolution

Yes, I know. There's a reason this is under the category "dreams." But, to paraphrase a friend, what can be gained by asking if xkcd is “ours or theirs?” The better question is, “How can one use xkcd for some liberatory project?”

and so we see xkcd--

Exulting the joys and efficiencies of life under capital
http://xkcd.com/23/
http://xkcd.com/325/
http://xkcd.com/223/
http://xkcd.com/277/
http://xkcd.com/77/
http://xkcd.com/488/
http://xkcd.com/164/
http://xkcd.com/137/

celebrating the fruits of a high-functioning democracy
http://xkcd.com/154/
http://xkcd.com/129/
http://xkcd.com/463/
http://xkcd.com/285/
http://xkcd.com/84/

considering violence?
http://xkcd.com/81/
http://xkcd.com/101/
http://xkcd.com/279/ (the roll over text)
http://xkcd.com/393/

Don't even get me started on cultural revolution.

* just fixed the link for number 81, which is funnier than 84 over again.

do not shop gently into that good night

A citizen's introductory course in economics.




http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1473370760428862272&hl=en

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=life+%2B+debt&hl=en&emb=0#

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9016886482738598023&hl=en

extra credit--less well made, but to quote a friend it gets the job done.

If you've already seen all these, kudos to you! and, what did you think?

Gender Studies, Plus!

When you have a spare hour or two, I'm interested in what any of you think of these cultural critiques. They were both produced by the most excellent Media Education Foundation.

This first one is about the essential role of violence in our culture's idea of masculinity. (53 minutes)

The second one is about what advertising says about/to women's identity. (34 minutes)

I'd have rather posted this and this, which I feel address the same material more potently (less than ten minutes to watch both) but all I could find were previews.

I know for me, these ideas and some related ones have really changed the way that I see my culture. . . Especially when considered in combination with realizations about how fantastically, destructively materialistic*(55 minutes) our culture is.

It causes me to want to become a buddhist nun in Thailand. . . no wait, it makes me want to take a vow of non-materialism and renounce media constructions of gender. . . no wait, it makes me want to be a buddhist nun in Thailand.

*sigh*

Decisions, decisions. . .


*if you watch one, start with this one (unless the other ones specifically seem more interesting to you). Fantastic work from PBS, featuring the disembodied voice of that guy from NPR!


P.S. Edit: ok. . . so I promised you the *cough* judicious *cough* use of pictures and links. . . and so, for kicks: