3.5.03 – lent, guilt and gendered deities

for reasons i don’t entirely understand myself, giving things up for lent is the only part of catholicism that i still practice. most of the world limits itself to fat tuesday; i’m stuck with lent. tack on a hefty dose of catholic guilt and the unconscious habit of referring to god with a male pronoun, and you’ve got a pretty complete picture of the catholic i’ve grown up to be. when i was a kid my brothers and i used to think we were really clever, coming up with promises like “i’m giving up homework for lent!” or “i’m giving up giving up things for lent!” which would cause our CCD teachers to give us withering, do you think you’re the first snarky kid to invent that? looks. these days, lenten sacrifices are usually centered around self-improvement. i don’t have much willpower of my own, but given that breaking lenten promises ranks way up there on the

fear-of-being-struck-by-lightening scale, its can be a handy way of reforming bad habits.

this year the plan is eating-habits reform with a focus on eliminating toxins and ‘unnatural’ elements – less processed food, more organic vegetables, only grain-fed, hormone-free meats and eggs, etc. i have big plans for a vegetable garden in the backyard this spring. when i was a kid we had a couple of fruit trees, and in the summer my dad would come inside with an armload of apples. i recall avoiding eating those, because they seemed too…i don’t know, dirty. they weren’t shiny and clean and perfectly formed like the ones from the grocery store. more importantly, they hadn’t come from the grocery store. and that’s where all the food comes from, right? that made sense as a kid, and i still sometimes find myself unconsciously leaning in that direction. i think this betrays a greater problem – the total disassociation between source and finished meal. in a world of processed food, its hard not to lose track of where the food comes from – hamburger comes in a plastic-wrapped tube from the meat locker, not that from lumbering holstein in the mucky stall or the dewy fields. that’s why i’ve largely given up meat in the past few years – i don’t want to eat something if i can’t reconcile the meat with the animal it came from. fish is easy – i’ve gone fishing, i’ve killed and cleaned and cooked and eaten a fish all on the same day. chicken proves more ideologically problematic, as i’ve never actually cut the head off of a chicken or plucked out the feathers. mammals are totally beyond my comfort level. i’ve been asked why it’s so important for us to reconcile the death of an animal to the meat on our plate, and i’m not sure i have a good answer to that. it just feels wrong. it’s one of those gut things.

reading Fast Food Nation recently only helped to solidify the notion that not knowing where your meat comes from can hurt you. (e.g., mad cow disease: a monster that humans created by fucking around with nature – feeding animal proteins to herbivores). not only did the tales of modern-day slaughterhouse horrors convince me that i never wanted to eat tainted, hormone- and antibiotic-laden meat from an animal whose feet had never touched the ground and had been force fed a cannibalistic diet nature had never intended, but it was the stories of the unspeakable The Jungle-like conditions that most slaughterhouse workers endure that turned my stomach. eating commercial meat isn’t just bad for your body, bad for the animals and the environment – it’s bad for largely migrant workforce, too. and the sweat of an exploited worker really can’t make that burger taste better.

3.4.03 – overheard

things you didn’t want to hear in the YMCA locker room:

i’ve got this athlete’s foot between the toes that just won’t go away. my eyes involuntarity slide down my locker and across the floor to confirm that, yup, the feet belonging to the speaker are indeed bare and in contact with the public-domain carpeting. my toes curl and i vow to wear socks in the locker room from now on.

3.3.03 – fuck you very much, turbo tax

it seems that filing in three states was more than poor little turbo tax’s brain could handle, so i ended up having to do the damn returns by hand. which was better, in way, because i’m a control freak and i didn’t trust turbo tax to get it right unless i could see all the math, but i’m horrified to realize how many hours i’ve spent in the past week trying to get it all straight – filing as a part year resident in new york state and a part year resident in idaho, as a non-resident in massachusetts, and then requesting tax credits for all the income that was double taxed by more than one state. dear god. this stuff should be easy – i don’t even own anything – no stocks, no bonds, no property. with turbo tax’s interpretation i would have been well on my way to an audit. which wouldn’t really matter, given that my generalized fear of authority prevents me from cheating on my taxes, but it’d be a real pain in the ass. i mean, who the fuck writes this stuff?

3.2.03 – captain procrastination

ways to avoid finishing my taxes tonight:

1) invite my grandparents in for coffee when they stop by to drop something off. this necessitates cleaning the entire house. 2) spoil andy, who broke his collarbone snowboarding this weekend and can’t move his right arm 3) watch boomtown, further desensitizing myself to violence and aggression. 4) cook dinner. wash all the dishes afterwards, even the ones that aren’t mine. 5) blog. 6) online scrabble.

2.27.03 – it’s not you, it’s me

i’m such a tomboy. i actually feel physically incapable of accomplishing ordinary tasks when i’m wearing a skirt. got home late from this benefit dinner thingy, and i’m sitting here, clicking mindlessly around the web, thinking, “i should clean the litterbox, do some dishes, hang up my clothes,” and none of it appeals because i feel so physically restricted by my dress-up clothes. this is not a logical complaint; technically, my legs are freer in a skirt than in pants, but i always feel this way. it’s good that i’ve choosen a profession where i get to wear highly practical clothing (ie, machine-washable, can get dirty, can stand some wear-and-tear) all of the time. my skirt-wearing tolerance is generally about 4-5 hours – enough time to go out to dinner or an event or something, and then i’m running home to put on jeans. curiously enough, i can wear the hippy-dress-over-jeans thing and feel perfectly comfortable. so i guess the problem is the lack of jeans, rather than the addition of a skirt?

dresses and cookbooks fill the same role in my life: items that i purchase, and then never ever use. i have a whole shelf of cookbooks with the spine hardly cracked, and a closet full of dresses that got out of style before i can even dry clean them for a second wearing.

2.24.03 – mr. right

andy (wearing powder blue pj pants printed with skiing penguins): umm, will you record Buffy for me tomorrow night?

[grin] what more could i ask for in a guy?

2.23.03 – j.cruel

from the index page of a j.crew catalogue:

men’s: 22 items in big & tall sizes!

women’s: 63 items in petite sizes!

look what this reinforces about body size: that it’s okay for guys to be “big and tall”, but women still need to be petite. when i was in college i went through a phrase where i desperately wished to be a petite woman. i didn’t just want to be skinny; i wanted to be short, small-framed, fragile-looking. this might have had something to do with the fact that i was dating a man who had always dated petite asian women before me (and after me, incidentally), and because we did a lot of swing dancing. the smaller dancers could be flipped and tossed in the air, while my 130-lb boyfriend could only swing my 5’8″ frame around so far.

sometimes i can split my psyche into two neat halves: the half that wants to be the pop-culture archetypal woman, and the half that is acquainted with (and likes) who i actually am. on one level, i’ve always wanted to be the sort of fragile woman that awakens a desire to protect; in real life, i’m deeply self-sufficient. my desired body type vs. my actual body type reflects this same relationship: i wanted to be small, fragile and feminine; in actuality i’m tall, strong and tom-boyish. it’s like those arms that get smaller just below the shoulder. i know they aren’t normal for my body, but that doesn’t mean that the culturally-conditioned part of my psyche doesn’t still admire/desire them. on the other hand, i know that i’m never going to have arms that do that, so i opt for having biceps instead. which are, ultimately, more useful, and the healthy part of my psyche appreciates them for their own functional beauty.

it’s funny how we idolize things that we wouldn’t actually want for ourselves.

2.21.03 – you know you’re a geek when…

recent online time has been consumed by the discovery of e-scrabble: the key is the chat box, which allows players to talk smack between turns. you know you’re a geek when you leave the bar early because you want to go home and play bravura. now, sleep calls.

2.18.03 – reasoning with a search engine

trying to teach google the difference between “diana son” and “diana’s son” proves impossible, so i’m spending the evening digging through articles about Prince William in order to find interviews with playwright Diana Son. BCT’s production of Valparaiso closes this weekend; the next project will be assistant directing Stop Kiss. the total lack of stage management jobs this spring in boise has helped to push me into challenging myself in other areas in the theatre – sound technician, assistant directing, and also teaching children’s acting classes at the Drama School. i feel fumbling and incompetent, but i’m learning, and that learning curve is what keeps me alive and interested.

one of the hardest things about the tour i was one last fall was that no one, myself included, really believed in the quality of the product. the show didn’t do its job – it didn’t make kids excited about theatre or literature, or even just engage them for two hours with great story telling. the opening of Valparaiso earlier this month was a reminder of just how good it feels to work on a project that i’m proud of. it doesn’t matter that i’m just the sound technician (not that the job is easy, but it’s not what i want to do with my career), because i’m collaborating with twenty amazing, talented people to create something really good. that’s all i need. well, that and a paycheck, if we’re being practical here. :)

andy’s watching something with lots of gunfire on the tv right now, i can’t write a coherent sentence to save my life.

2.15.03 – american civics lesson

well, after my tirade about the uselessness of grassroots campaigns, i suppose i ought to comment on the fact that boise’s mayor resigned yesterday under the pressure of a grassroots campaign. it seems he’s been spending the city’s money on boondoggles to new york city and accepting bribes from insurance companies, among other things. when the story broke about three weeks ago, a group of volunteers in bumble-bee-yellow t-shirts emblazoned with “repeal mayor coles” took to the streets and began collecting signatures. they managed to collect more than 30,000 signatures, which equals about a third of the registered voters in the city, and yesterday under the pressure of the repeal action, as well as impending legal action, the mayor stepped down. i didn’t feel strongly the enough about the issue to sign a petition, and besides, i didn’t really think it’d work. an interesting side effect of ousting (republican) mayor coles, however, is that boise’s new mayor (for the next two weeks anyway) is an african american democrat. so yay for grassroots campaigns.