| thoughts from a cunning linguist | |
It's 80 degrees F here today (25 C). Given that I have a ton of work to plough through in the next month, I figured I'd best be scouting out the guilty pleasures that can serve as a counterpoint to sitting at my desk for hours on end. I started by getting some flowers for my room. I don't really have much of a view out my window (I can see the siding of the house next door), so a little greenery has gone a long way. I've also scoped out a good spot to get ice cream for afternoon snacks and breaks. So what then, if I have to chain myself to my computer and write thousands of words in the next warm sunny month?
I think I'm developing a new appreciation for spring. This is probably because in New Jersey, spring is a real season. It was never a real season in Newfoundland, just the move from slush to mud (and often back to slush again). Spring was more spring-like in Nova Scotia, but even then, it was like "mini-spring." I remember over the last few years, visiting the Queen of Sheba and the Grand Poobah of Culinary Delights when their magnolia was in bloom. I'm sure it was later than the middle of April when that happened. But two weeks ago, here in New Jersey, the magnolias has come and gone. I walked through the fallen petals of their flowers on my way to the grocery store. And the lilacs are already opening. Now if I could get my chapter to bloom, we'd be all set.
On Saturday night, when I was supposed to be falling asleep early in order to get up at 4:00 a.m. to go to Washington, I kept thinking about Steph's "Things to Do Before I Die" post. I kept imagining my own list of things. Here's what I came up with:
1. ride the streetcar named Desire in New Orleans
2. live in Manhattan with enough money to do culture
3. travel to Australia
4. become fluent in another language
5. write something very important in my field
6. have a threesome
7. learn to be a mechanic
8. hike in the Alps
9. own a baby grand piano
10. live near the ocean again
11. see the 7 wonders of the world
12. learn more about the history of art
13. see an opera in Prague
14. cruise the canals in Venice
15. ride in a helicopter
16. dive around the coral reef
17. own a fabulous suit
18. drive on the the autobahn
My favourite sign by far at the March on Sunday was this one:
"George W. Bush: The Abortion That Got Away."
But there some other good ones, too. Here's a smattering (of the ones I remember):
Patriotic girls say it's a free cuntry.
77% of pro-lifers are men. 100% of them will never be pregnant.
Old Broads for Choice
Keep U.S. out of my uterus
One of our delegation had a hanger from a dry cleaners that read "We
The march organizers estimated that 1.15 million people were there. I could not tell because when you're inthe middle of a crowd that big, you have no sense of scale. CNN reported that 300,000 people were there. I guess there's a lot of controversy about reporting the numbers for the marches on Washington, so offocial have stopped doing it. CNN got their numbers from the metro system: apparently 325,000 people used the metro on march day. The mall was packed, though, so CNN was clearly wrong.
On the way back, we were listening to NPR and heard a caller comment on how disappointed we were that Kerry didn't attend the March and speak to the crowd. His daughter did speak. And Kerry did speak to Pro-choice activitists in Washington on the Friday before the march. We had a debate in our car about whether he should have been there. I wish he had had the guts to address to be there and speak out. Others in the car thought he had to be more politically prudent. I wonder why it is, though, that the Republicans have no compunctions avout pandering to the far right and the Democrats seem so scared of their left-of-center supporters?
All in all, a very good day, though--that produced one very tired bush/bouche by the time I got back.
Tomorrow is the big March For Women's Lives in Washington, D.C. So at the ungodly hour of 5:00 a.m. tomorrow, I'll be piling into a car with some friends and heading down to join an estimated half a million other women to make some noise in support of women's reproductive rights. Having never really marched for anything in the U.S., except in the NYC Dyke March (most of my activist marching has been in Canada), I'm quite curious to see how the whole event will unfold. I've never been to Washington before either, and I guess pilgrimmages to Washington to agitate for some sort of rights or other are something of an American tradition.
One interesting thing about this event (and note no such women's march has taken place for about 12 years now) is the change in terminology. The issue of reproductive rights and the legal protection thereof used to be couched mostly in the language of "choice," which in turn really reduced to the question of abortion availability and legality. But the language of "reproductive rights" and their connection to "womens's lives" is much more broad. It includes agitation for adequate sex education, for emergency contraception availability, for proper support for women who choose to have children as well as for those who choose not to have children. I have to say, I'm very impressed with this change in the feminist landscape as well as with how diverse the leaders in third-wave feminism are. It's not just white middle-class women marching for economic liberal values anymore (not that there's anything wrong with that). But my sense is that the current movement is more racially diverse, more class inclusive, and that instead of declining in power, feminism has a great deal of energy and the statements of its goals are reflecting a very LIVE movement.
Some days, having to write really is a burden. I'm in the middle of writing a conference paper and I know what I want to say, but I'll be damned if I can organize the bloody thing. Arrggggghhhh.
On Friday, I went to a public lecture titled "A New American Empire?" It featured two really smart, interesting academics, speaking quite lucidly about the idea of American imperialism and the war in Iraq. On the whole, I like what they had to say quite a bit. But there is one thing I can't quite figure out. Why is it that so few people can take any distance from the word "democracy." It seems like anything can be justified, on either the right or the left, in the name of "democracy." It is somehow deployed rhetorically as an unquestioned good, as if everyone knows what is meant when the word is uttered. Bush uses it as a justification for the war (bringing democracy to the world, or to Iraq) and left activitist decry the assault on demoncracy in their critique of Bush. But no one really questions the rhetoric. I'm starting to think that until people can distinguish between the rhetoric of democracy and the practice of democracy, maybe we should have a moritorium on the word--on all sides of the political spectrum.
Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I went under the knife. It was nothing serious, really. I had to get a cyst removed from my scalp and it all happened in a family doctor's office. I've had several of these things (all benign) on my head for a while, but in the last few years, they've been growing bigger. Two years ago, in fact, one got really big and infected. I assumed that it would just settle down, but it didn't. One morning, I woke up and looking in the mirror and saw the face of a Kilngon looking back at me. All the pressure around the cyst had forced swelling down into my forehead and around my eyes. My glasses were no longer sitting on my nose, but sitting on the swelling. I knew then it was time to go to the doctor. So when I noticed that I had a few more of these suckers growing, I figured it was time to avoid the return the of the Klingon. I went to the doctor here last week and yesterday went in to have the first and biggest of the offending growths removed. It's the first time I have ever had stitches. (When I looked like a Klingon, after they removed the cyst, they didn't stitch it because of the infection.) Needless to say, I was not very much looking foreward to the whole affair yesterday morning. But it didn't take long and I comforted myself by insisting that the doctors explain to me what was happening at every step of the way. So they did. The medical practice I go to is a teaching practice, so it was a resident who performed the actual surgery, with his attending physician supervising. The doctor had just removed the monstrous beast and was stitching my up. His supervisor exclaimed: "Isn't that beautiful?" I guess she was referring to the stiches. But I have to say, doctors have a strange sense of aesthetics.