searching for the ineffable
From The Guardian:
The distractions of constant emails, text and phone messages are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis, according to a survey of befuddled volunteers.
Doziness, lethargy and an increasing inability to focus reached “startling” levels in the trials by 1,100 people, who also demonstrated that emails in particular have an addictive, drug-like grip.
(See also this article in The Register.)
Was just responding to a friend’s blog post, and thought I’d post this here, since it more or less sums up my feelings about the new pope (aside, of course, from great disappointment, apprehension, disgust and red-hot hate for the entire Church.org).
(…which should not be confused with my attitudes towards the faith itself, and towards its devout followers. Okay? Okay.)
Anyway, the blogger said:
the Church needs to be willing to talk about social issues realistically if it doesn’t want to become increasingly irrelevant in the face of massive drop-offs in churchgoing across Europe.
I believe that process is already well under way. In Italy, Italy!, not many people are going to church on a regular basis:
“A Frank Bruni article in The New York Times on October 13, 2003, pointed out that 33 percent of Italians described religion as “very important” but as few as 15 percent are going to church every week, according to recent polls.”
The institution of the Catholic Church needs to get even more ridiculous before real change can be effected. Either that, or it will lose its power, and you know what? That’s not a bad thing. Devout Catholics might be heartbroken, but they really need the courage, and the incentive, to find their way to their God despite the corrupt, backwards, power-hungry and actively harmful people who stand between the populace and their faith.
It’s not that I don’t believe anything good can ever come out of the Vatican. It’s that it usually doesn’t. Quite the contrary.
Down with the corrupt Church! Viva la fede!!1!
No, there’s more nuance to it. And, lucky you, I feel like spilling it all over my blog.
This is me at one of my more negative moments. The other end of the spectrum can be just as intense. But right at the moment, things are pretty bleak over at words’ end.
I’ve been thinking about feminism. It’s hard not to these days, really. Jill is this awesome, shiny, curly-lock’ed powerhouse of a blogging theorist and head of her department, and writes on feminist topics to do with both politics and with her work. The misbehaving posse are eloquent and on point without coming across as gratuitously bitter, by which I personally am inspired. Hanna is kicking all kinds of arse as a Debian developer and advocate for women in computing.
Humanities computing is by no means a boys’ club. I don’t have any actual statistics, and it’s likely that men do outnumber women in the field, just like most (any?) other academic fields. But I’ve never felt shut out because I’m female; and certainly there is no lack of role models to follow.
Ethan and I talk about gender, its physiology and its politics, quite a lot. In him I have found the kind of feminist I hope every man – and woman – would be. He is well read and astute in general, and his interest in evolutionary biology has led to some very interesting conversations about how gender differences have evolved, how they’re expressed in other animals, how different human societies deal with them.
(As an aside, have you ever read Shanshan Du’s Chopsticks Only Work in Pairs? It’s a great read. The Lahu have their problems, but they’ve got the gender stuff worked out.)
OK, so do we all agree here that men and women are different? Because we are, right? In many, many respects. A tiny change in physiology (and it really is tiny, all things considered) results, in most of us, in different attitudes, different… orientations. In most of us. Lately gender identity has come to the political forefront, and we’ve discovered that it’s not quite so black-and-white.
I am most decidedly female. Perhaps a little more outspoken than some, perhaps a bit harsh at times, but a woman. I watch myself behave in ways that have been pegged as stereotypically female, and find that this is where I want to be.
So, here’s where I want to be: I want to be secondary.
Seriously. I want to be someone’s assistant. I make a good administrator. I am happier making sure that things run smoothly than I am writing papers. This bothers me on a fundamental level.
It’s possible that these are years of being a student speaking: I’m tired of being a student. Even now, on a leave of absence and with a “real job,” I’m a student and will need to write a dissertation by something like May of 2007. I’m sick of writing papers, because I don’t feel like expressing new opinions. Doing research is absolutely equivalent in my head to proving myself – to professors, to colleagues, to myself. I hate it. I hate the insecurity, and I hate even more my conclusion that this insecurity is not the result of The Man puttin’ me down. Nobody’s been putting me down. Nobody but me.
There’s a conflict here: most of me doesn’t feel put down when I think of a life as a mother and keeper of the homestead, possibly working part-time making food for people or pulling espresso shots (both being alternate-reality dreams of mine, that I will quite possibly pursue when I retire… or sooner). Most of me has been actively developing this aversion to putting myself on the line, proving myself to anyone. A large part of me wants to only ever do for money what I already know how to do, and doesn’t want to learn anything new.
For money. That’s a crucial thing. I don’t think I could stop reading, ever. Learning new things, fiddling with XSLT, finding cool ways to keep my occasional students of Italian excited about the language, all these things are great. As long as I choose to do them.
Classic, huh?
The feminist in me is all up in arms because of this. I’m capable of More Than That. (What in the seven hells does that mean?)
Goddamnit, I love humanities computing. I love my current job. I love gradually getting a wider and wider perspective on the wonder of human communication via language. The parallels between us and people who lived hundreds, thousands of years ago are often unexpected and always great fun to discover. So why am I periodically so torn up, why do I want to hide and never tell anyone who professionally matters to me what I’m thinking? Why am I terrified of this?
The cards are stacked in my favor, here. Ever since I decided not to pursue the Italian Studies PhD any longer I’ve been happy in academe. It’s been home. The papers I’ve given have mostly failed to suck; my boss has recently called me a dynamo to a third party; my doctoral committee have been very supportive of this unorthodox track of a PhD in humanities computing. Gosh darn it, that oughta count for something.
I’m going to finish this two-year gig, and immediately after that I’ll finish the PhD, and these things aren’t true because I’m feeling the need to prove something. They’re true because I want to do this.
But I’m terrified, and am tired of being so scared, and every time it comes back it’s stronger and harder to deal with. A large, visceral part of me is screaming every time I realize that I’ve put myself out there and seem to have no energy to see it through. The fact that this happens more often when my hormones are all out of whack is only important to a point, since (a) this isn’t an absolute correlation, and (b) the hormone jumps don’t make any of this shit less real.
Energy always comes in the end, from someplace or another. But right now, I just want to hide.
Academe is a lonely place, but for better or worse it’s home. I’ve only got one life. How do I know the wisest way to spend it that will also make me consistently happy?
[Re-reading this, it occurs to me: among other things, what I actually want is acknowledgment on the part of Society At Large of the importance and relevance of my work to itself. Fat chance.]
Oh my goodness gracious. What the hell is this?!
Warning: you may have to wash out your eyes afterwards. This isn’t for the faint of banality tolerance.
Just spent a few minutes in the car listening to today’s Talk of the Nation on NPR. The topic is, why are there so few female voices in political journalism? The answers are, of course, complex, and the issue extends far beyond political journalism.
And a thought occurred to me, as I’m writing a paper to present this weekend at a conference: I tend to quote men. It’s true. Like most other people, I have an implicit bias towards men when it comes to giving automatic credibility to expressed opinions or published research.
Not getting into the whys and hows of this issue, nor indeed into whether it’s a problem (after all, there is more writing authored by men in the first place). But I’m going to make a conscious effort to cite more women over the next few conference papers, and see what happens. I’m curious as to whether I can actually find enough such citations to get to a 50-50 ratio.
George W. Bush has told reporters he’s unfamiliar with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
*head meets desk* four… more… gah.
Okay, so the latest on the New York police randomly harrassing and arresting people, not to mention confiscating their bicycles despite a federal judge ruling that illegal, got me annoyed enough that I actually called the NYPD switchboard and asked where I can lodge a complaint against them. The lady referred me to the Civilian Complaint Review Board. I called them, spoke to an investigator doing intake today, gave him a bunch of information.
We’ll see if this goes anywhere. I do appreciate the difficulty of a policeman’s job, but in New York of all places there has got to be actual work to do.
We bomb an Iraqi house by mistake, fourteen people reportedly die including seven children, and we apologize for the loss of “possibly innocent lives”??
Un. believable.
Good weekend. No, great weekend, thanks to the kindness and all-around coolness of a friend and his stunning video art. More later.
A December 2nd editorial in the Nashville Scene:
No doubt some might think it heresy for us to suggest how Jesus himself would come down on the medical marijuana issue, which state Sen. Steve Cohenpromises to bring to the legislature in the new year. But we’re going to do it anyway. Frankly, we think he’d offer a light to sick people who can’t get pain relief any other way.
And related, by Rev. Steven B. Thompson:
Cannabis was not only known, it was widely used in biblical times. Jesus would have been familiar with cannabis; it was used at the time in healing unctions and temple incense and was fed to both man and livestock. In fact, it is not outside the realm of possibility that the Blessed Virgin Mary used it to ease the pains of childbirth. There is a wealth of documentation attesting to the safety and efficacy of this natural, healing herb stretching back over 5,000 years. It’s mentioned repeatedly in the Bible. Yet, nowhere does Jesus caution against its use. Alcohol yes, cannabis no.
Look out, Mr. President. There are thinking people in the Bible Belt who do their research and have their priorities straight. Booga booga.
Apologies accepted. This was obvious before, but it’s nice to have sweet confirmation that the world doesn’t unequivocally hate us.
I was in Dobbs Ferry, NY for most of this week, helping out with some family logistics in the mornings and evenings and getting mad amounts of work done in the daytime. I’m pretty satisfied, all told. Now it’s back home with my love (oh, reunions are sweet)… and more work. Good stuff, though. I’m happy with how the week has gone; got to spend a decadent amount of quality time with my brother, hang out with the best nephew in the world, and, uh, miss my sister-in-law, whom I saw only briefly before she left on a business trip.
It’s hunkering-down weather. Frozen rain is scritching the air conditioner’s metal butt outside my window. More work to do today, and this weekend I’ll catch up on the world’s happenings.
