zonkered.net

It’s apparently Pride Month. I didn’t remember, or know, but it does make sense that it would be June: that’s when the Stonewall Riots were in New York, and that was certainly a major turning point in the struggle for rights. But that’s not what this post is about. It’s about the accusations of trivialization that I’ve seen thrown around lately in several places.

See, here’s the thing. It’s Pride Month, which means there’s parades and festivals and articles, and this year in particular you have people coming out. Vanessa Carlton told her audience at Nashville Pride Fest that she’s bi. Christina Aguilera has said she’s bisexual. Cameron Diaz said that she’s been attracted to women, and overwhelmingly the reaction that I’ve seen on the blogs has been twofold. First, yeah, you have the people celebrating, and congratulating the celebrity about coming out…and then you have the other half, the ones who define a celebrity coming out as a form of famewhoring. Particularly if they come out as bi. I mean, really. They don’t really like the same sex; they’re just doing it for attention.

Lovely, people, really.

Beyond the celebrity connection, there’s also been a lot of sneering at the idea of girlcrushing (or…boycrushing, I suppose, I’m not a guy, so I’m not sure what they call it) because it’s totally just a play for attention, and they’re just gay lite, or doing it to make the dudes hot, and they’re trivializing the LGBT cause!

No. Actually. They’re not. I’m a bisexual woman. I figured out I was a bisexual woman because I’d girlcrushed on so many actresses that it made me realize I was actually attracted to women.

I’m also a semi-closeted bisexual woman. I’m out on the internet (and getting more out on the internet as we speak) but I haven’t told my family, and I’m not sure how. And stupid or not, every time a female celebrity comes out as bisexual – whether it’s Vanessa Carlton or Christina Aguilera or Anna Paquin – and has a generally positive reaction, it makes me think I could tell my own mom without it being a huge deal.

Bisexuals are not attention whores. Famous bisexuals are not famewhores. Bisexuals are people who happen to be attracted to both males and females, and frankly, it has nothing to do with you.

There are some days when I click on links even though I’m fairly certain they’re going to make me sigh. Maybe it’s because it’s a slow day at work – it is, today, and also one of those days when one wishes one could just be outside in the gorgeous weather – or maybe it’s out of sheer curiosity.

Ginandtacos.com‘s article Pretzels and Spite is a good, interesting blog with excellent points. I enjoyed reading it, but I keep coming back to one thing: The unencumbered free market is only good at one thing: lowering prices.

Perhaps this is true – something that’s certainly up for debate, and something that I, with my degree in economics (with a concentration in finance at that; I know, however do I live with myself) don’t agree with – but it’s not even an assertion that’s demonstrated in the example. The airline industry isn’t unencumbered; in all honesty, the “unencumbered free market” doesn’t exist in this or any other capitalist country. How can I say that? Because we have government regulation. Every capitalist country has some degree of government regulation, and there isn’t an industry that’s untouched by it.

To continue with the airline industry example, yes, price regulation has ended. But after 9/11, it was replaced with a who slew of other kind of regulations that affected airline practices, affected and continues to affect airline customer experience, and undeniably affect the bottom line. People don’t fly as much as they otherwise might. It’s a pain in the ass. It’s also something the airlines can’t directly do a thing about, and thus in order to stay solvent they have to cut amenities.

It sucks, but it isn’t an unencumbered free market.

This is not to say I’m against government regulations – I wrote my economics thesis on environmental regulations and the use of emissions trading to meet said regulations – but simply to say that we don’t have a true free market. Period. And I don’t think we should, but equally, we cannot judge what an unencumbered free market can accomplish when it doesn’t exist.

Hanna Rosin’s got an interesting article in Slate’s XX about the rise of the kitchen bitch, and frankly, after reading it I’m not sure that I’d want to marry a man who likes cooking as much as I do. And it’s entirely because of what Rosin describes: I have a feeling I’d end up with a guy picking (gently or no) at my techniques, ingredients, and recipes, and it would drive me up a fucking wall.

It seems like when guys march into the kitchen, a lot of them make it a competitive arena. The ingredients have to be fresher, the techniques have to be fancier, and the tools have to be the most badass tools available for the job (I blame Alton Brown for the last. Have you seen his immersion blender?) And for myself, I tend to cook the way my mom does. I don’t have problems with canned vegetables. I do tend to bake from scratch, because I like to bake, but my tuna noodle casserole is most certainly not made with sushi grade ahi and cremini mushrooms. It’s made with Chicken of the Sea and Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom. I cannot evenly chop an onion to save my life. I use pre-chopped garlic from a jar. I own a Rachael Ray cookbook.

But I still love to cook, and it’d piss the hell out of me if someone was standing over my shoulder critiquing my technique; if I wanted that, I could go to culinary school.

I’m not saying all, or even most guys are like that, and maybe I’m getting all New York Times Styles here and building a trend from a couple of random data points. I don’t really think so, though. Food Network has gotten increasingly testosteronized over the past few years – the only pure cooking show left in primetime is Good Eats, and while I dearly love me some Alton, we’ve already mentioned his propensity for superpowered kitchen equipment. Other than that, it’s approximately 10 million competition shows and a few reality shows. The faces of baking is Ace of Cakes‘ Duff, mentioned by Rosin, and the dude from Cake Boss. I don’t watch Cake Boss, but he’s a burly Italian guy from Hoboken.

The fact is that increasingly, there are less and less female voices in the culinary press and pop culture, and as a woman who likes to cook, I worry about that. Do I want to be tethered to the stove? Not really. Do I want cooking to be yet another arena where I get mansplained to? No. I’ve got plenty of those as is.

Dear New Yorkers and New Jerseians traversing the streets of Manhattan,

It’s pouring down rain today. As it is late fall/early winter in New York City, this isn’t exactly a rare occasion. It rains in New York for three-quarters of the year, and the months of November and December tend to be more water-logged than most. One would think that would mean we’d all be experts at traversing the streets in downpours by now. One would be wrong, clearly, so here are some tips and tricks for not pissing the soaked girl in the purple wool coat off to the homicidal point.

1. A fallen umbrella is not a car accident. It does not require slowing down, it does not require rubber-necking, and it definitely doesn’t require both of those things at 8:40 am when two trains have just emptied out at the World Trade Center site. Move. Walk. Please.
2. Golf umbrellas are great for when you’re sheltering several people in an open air space like, say, a golf course. Golf umbrellas are horrible for when you’re using it solo in an extremely densely populated area. Get a smaller umbrella for the commute, all of you. The head you keep ramming into thanks you.
3. The usage of an umbrella of any size increases your space requirements. Keep this in mind, and other pedestrians’ hair won’t get caught on your umbrella, thus making you both late for work.

This public service announcement is brought to you by the fact that I’ve been at work for two and a half hours, and my feet are still wet.

Lindsay at Jezebel posted a video yesterday of one of the Gap’s holiday ads in a post entitled: New Gap Commercial With Little Girls Is, Yeah, A Little Gross. I’m…not seeing it, honestly.  Neither are most of the commenters.

The sticking point is apparently at :08, where one of the girls does a hip-pop. Now, I can’t dance. I really can’t dance. I can’t dance so much that I took weight training in college instead of a class in modern dance (which was considerably closer to my dorm, I might add), and even I know that hip popping is pretty much a standard in jazz and modern dance, not to mention modern cheerleading. The move itself isn’t sexual. It’s certainly not inherently sexual when performed by little girls in sweaters, tights, and boots.

But about 500 commenters agree with me there, and it’s not the thing that’s bugging me now. What’s bugging me are the comments like this one:

“it’s sick, quite frankly, that little girls would care so much about their clothing– how materialistic.”

This isn’t the only comment of this kind on the post – there are several in the vein of “they’re too young to care about their shoes!” – but this was definitely the most to the point.

Part of my reaction to it is increduality – I was pretty tomboyish after I got over my initial frilly dress phase around age seven, and I spent elementary school dying for a pair of Guess jeans. I got to go to the Gap for my back-to-school clothes for the first time when I was 12 and was so thrilled. I wanted my tennis shoes and sturdy sandals that I ran around to be cute.

And this is from someone who didn’t pay attention to fashion and what really looked nice until sometime in college, or possibly grad school.

There’s nothing wrong with being interested in clothes at the age of 8. There’s also nothing wrong with not being interested in them at that age (or any other). Kids are just as individual as adults, people. Really.

So it’s that time of year again.  Another crop of prospective library school students have been accepted to their programs, and in between trying to find affordable housing in Madison/Urbana/Ann Arbor/Austin/Pittsburgh/LA/Seattle/every other hipster-y enclave in the US, they’re worrying about how hard library school will be.

And people are agreeing with them.  Seriously.

Okay, I’ll admit this much: I did, in fact, pull my very first all-nighter while at Madison for graduate school.  Did I spend it putting the finishing touches on my network design project? No.  Did I spend it improving my grasp of the Library of Congress classification system? Nope.  Finishing my paper on the use of MCSH and LCSH in periodical indexing? Not that either.

Did I spend it writing epicly overwrought Prince of Tennis fanfiction? Um, yuuuuup.

Here’s the thing, people: you will learn things in library school.  Cataloging may well cause you to pull your hair out.  Your practicum supervisor may well drive you insane.  Job hunting will be pretty much hellish.

This will not be the hardest thing you do academically.  By a long shot.  Compared to my undergrad, grad school was like a very expensive, two year long break.  Yeah, I had classes.  Yeah, I had to work – two jobs at once for most of that time.  But I was never stressed over the school part.  Ever.

Entirely unrelated: WORDPRESS.  TELL ME WHEN I HAVE COMMENTS IN MODERATION.  In other words, Ealasaid, your comment’s been approved.  Finally.

There’s a post on Jezebel today on college students with entitlement complexes, and as usual when it comes to posts on Jezebel, the subject has gone away from the subject at hand and onto the broader issues – in this case, the purpose of higher education in the United States.  Several people are postulating that education should, simply, be for self-actualization, for the pure pursuit of knowledge, be about learning what you love.  It’s not that I disagree with this, per se; it’s a nice idea.

Maybe I’m just cynical.  Maybe I’m a product of my midwestern middle class upbringing, where money was was tight – or at least tighter than my classmates – and when I went off to college, a major part of my major-choosing decision was based on the consideration of what would help me find employment in after graduation.  This was expected, even if it was for the most part unspoken (my brother quadruple majored in accounting, finance, and two other business fields whose names escape me, and my sister, like me, has a degree in economics); if I had majored in what I loved rather than in what I hoped would get me a job, I would have a degree in East Asian history, not one in financial economics.  For the most part I don’t regret my choice; it allows me to understand at least some of the economic disaster we’re in now, and its a great help at work, but let’s face it:  if the history department had been as diligent as the economics department in providing students with examples and contacts for post-graduation employment, it’s pretty damn likely I would have dropped econ like a hot potato.  But they didn’t, and this was unfortunately the way most of the humanities departments worked – they didn’t give the students or the prospective students much of an idea of what they could do with their degree once they finished it.

And while finding out what you love and enlightenment and self-actualization are all extremely important parts of education, so is employability.  And employability – especially for those who come from strained financial circumstances, or even those like me who just had to weather times that were more difficult than my classmates – this is a huge deal.  Huge.    It’s a major worry, and it’s not necessarily about doing what you’re “supposed” to do by getting a job and a house and a car and 2.5 kids.  It’s about being able to live comfortably.  And living comfortably is almost as big a deal for me as any sense of enlightenment is.

So if you want to reform society and education so that the education is more important than the end product, have at it.  I hate No Child Left Behind just as much as the next child of two teachers, and I think we’ll be far better off if more of an emphasis is placed on learning and less on testing.  But while we’re doing this, we can’t forget that what happens after college is still important.  And it still needs to be part of education too.