things to think about

1) actually do the thing I said I'd do when trying to apologize for my own racism. stop making it too complicated and just do it already.

2) find space between “IT'S ALL ABOUT ME BITCHEZZZ” and a self-obliterating humility.

3) stop trying to hedge my bets for the best thing at all times. the things I have are amazing. may this be a year of depth, not just breadth.

4) i would like to be at least 35% less needlessly self-critical and 35% more full of integrity.

5) give more dollars to more people on the train. get the rest of my giving back in order.

6) no more settling for good enough but no more letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. If 15 seconds is the difference, do it right, but maybe it doesn't matter so much if I don't have 3 stars on all the levels of my bubble pop game.

7) continue to cultivate a politics of being a good person, not saying the right thing. maybe do this for real this year.

8) learn how to lead without being so ego-driven

9) make even MORE kickass work and focus less on quantity more on quality and what I am excited to do.

10) do better at remembering that just bc you see class, that doesn't mean you get a pass for race.

11) excitement is awesome, but doesn't have to be the ruling force. no commitments I can't follow through on. no flaking by being busy.

12) this year: more friends fewer “oh sometime let's hang out”s

13) here is to balancing more effectively being a sparkle pony and being a kind of normal, if dadly, lez. no apologies and that means no apologies for either one.

14) here is to being kinder, less judgy, less shit-talky, and more wiling to be in someone else's shoes.

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Look, guys, it needs to be said. Buying things is not activism.

I dig that some crackpot group on the far right decided to boycott JC Penney for having Ellen DeGeneres be the new spokesmodel. I dig that it is disrespectful to gay people everywhere, myself included, and pretty effed up given that Ellen is a) a married paragon of family values b) a national star c) about as non offensive and unthreatening as you can get on every dimension possible. And I get it: it is ridiculous to condemn Ellen as inappropriate just because she is a homo. But the way to fight this has nothing to do with buying things!

We are not being discriminated against because of where we like to shop, and we are not being somehow kept from shopping at JC Penney’s for being homos. If we were, then shopping might be a big deal or some kind of statement (see: the fierce activists challenging Jim Crow laws in the South.) But this is not what is going on – Penney’s is actually being supportive. So what is the point of any of this? Saying thank you for doing the right thing, aka continuing with their planned campaign? How is that activism?

It isn’t. The idea that I am going to thank a giant corporation for having the basic decency to not be douchey makes me sad. Penney’s already decided that they were up to have Ellen, and they are standing by her, and that is how it should be. Sure, write a letter or something, but there is no proof that Penney’s somehow is in danger from this boycott or that there are actual rights to be gained from this. Penney’s is the wrong place to be focusing our energy.

You know what would be activism? Going to the American Family Association – the sponsors and energy behind One Million Moms – and inundating them with calls asking why they are so homophobic. (hey, try 800-326-4543×206 to start – be polite but be persistent!) Ignoring crackpot right wingers who use giant political organizations to pretend to be grassroots is another good suggestion. What about protesting the AFA by taking them to court for obscenity charges – I sure find their message indecent and against the morals of our community. There are so many ways to actually fight homophobia, and counter One Million Fake Moms, rather than throw some party about buying things at a company that gave no indication they deserved any kind of special attention.

I don’t object to the idea of rewarding companies for doing the right thing. If, for example, Penney’s announced they were giving health care to all their employees, or if they endorsed the Retail Action Project’s campaign for a living retail wage, I’d be into that. The HRC indicates that they are pretty gay-friendly, so that’s something. But really? What is this actually doing for anyone who is actually a homosexual? 

As far as I can tell, this was started by two people who aren’t homos, and I assume that part of the reason it has gotten so much attention is that two of the people write for blogs that are owned in part by ABC (per the link above.) I guess makes me feel better, because I like to think our people would be more creative and interesting than this. How can we actually bring down the AFA? How do we think of ourselves as change agents rather than consumers? I suggest you start with the phone number above.* Let’s start giving them something else to deal with.

* The only phone number on the whole site that I could find was for Diane O’Neal, Director of Planned Giving. So don’t be too mean to her. Just call and ask who you can register a complaint with, or who you can ask about family appropriateness. Good questions include: is it ok to let your kids watch Ellen to help them learn what to avoid, your daughter wants to wear Kedz but Ellen wears them and does that make her gay, or the good old fashioned “I think you are homophobic and contributing to the deaths of gay teenagers. Do you feel comfortable knowing you are assisting in murder?”

So, pals, I’m hosting bingo starting this Wednesday night at Sycamore, everyone’s favorite bar on Cortelyou Road in Ditmas Park. It’s going to be a once-a-month extravaganza with everyone’s favorite five-letter game, and I am so excited to be partnering with them. You should come! Really! January 25th, February 29th (leap day!), March 28th, from 7-9pm.

Here’s a little learning to get you started!

Where does bingo come from?!

Like everything awesome and folky, there are a couple of different stories out there.

The main thread has it that bingo has its origins in an Italian lotto game in which you select numbers in different patterns to win. It spread across Europe, ultimately taking shape as a game in which a caller called numbers on a card and people used a bean to cover them on their card – winners yelled “beano!” when they filled a line. At some point, bingo got to America and started being played at carnivals. Edwin Lowe, a travelling toy salesman, ran across it at a carnival and brought it up to New York, where a stuttering contestant changed “beano” to “bingo” by mistake.

Or maybe it is that Edwin Lowe brought it over from Germany, where he was travelling. At any rate, everyone agrees that it happened in or around 1929.

But there’s also the story of Hugh J. Ward, a Pittsburgh native son who came up with the game around 1924 (note this is mostly mentioned on lists of Pittsburgh accomplishments.) He took it around to travelling carnivals, evidently held a copyright (if only copyright research prior to 1978 didn’t require being in DC or paying!) and published a book on the rules in 1933. Maybe. Wikipedia supports this point of view, but citation-free = who knows.

At any rate, bingo made Lowe’s business. He made his fortune selling bingo and it took off around the US and then the rest of the world.

How does it work?

I will be calling numbers. When I call a number you have, you punch out the little number on your card. When you have the right pattern punched out, you yell — well, hopefully you know this part.

The fun comes in trying to make different patterns. Sure, everyone knows the five-in-a-row, but with bingo the sky’s the limit. Some of the patterns we will be playing:

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Eff that, dude, I want some music videos.

Okay.

BIG CAVEAT TO LEAD: This is going to talk a lot about non-trans vaginas, by which I mean my vagina, by which I mean the vagina of a non-trans woman. There are a lot of other vaginas out there – both trans man’s vaginas and trans women’s vaginas. Since this is personal, I am focusing on my own vagina and its particular experience, but these other kinds of vaginas get erased and that feels wrong. Also, especially for trans women, gynecological care information is incredibly hard to find (on Google? Everywhere?), which is its own whole topic. Which I will probably write about at some point. I tried writing this with “non-trans” in front of every “vagina” but it became unreadable. So every time I say “vagina” remember that I am just talking about one kind. END CAVEAT.

I am a professional well woman exam getter. I help med students learn to give gyn exams as a patient instructor. I did it in college and I’m getting back to it now. I have received approximately 15 speculum exams since September. I have a really reassuring voice when faced with a speculum and I can tell you exactly where my cervix is.

People are really surprised when I tell them this. I think they expect that, because I look like a man, I am supposed to be profoundly uncomfortable with the existence of my vagina. I feel weird sometimes about my vagina professionally for a ton of reasons that can be boiled down to “I grew up a woman in America.” I am a weirdo even in this work – hairy, fat, and I look like a man with my clothes on. I try to push past that out of a sense of righteous nobility – that no matter how fat, or hairy, or unexpected, practitioners are obliged to treat every patient with respect, and there are a lot of people that look like me who have a vagina and who deserve good care.

Given my funny job, I am something of a connoisseur in the vagina exam department. When I go for my annual exam, I am paying attention to the skill of the provider. Steady touch? Good with a speculum? Reassuring? Empowering? We take students through a script that is incredibly demanding in its level of detail and its ritualized patient interaction moments, but it is all to help future providers approach their patients with grace, dignity, and in a way that empowers and involves the patient. This knowledge – the gold standard in vagina exams – is knowledge that I wish everyone had because everyone should know the kind of care that they deserve.

I have never — never — had an exam that is nearly as empowering as the exam I teach students to give. I had my annual exam yesterday – make that 16 specula – and it was a textbook example of what not to do. She walked in on me while I was still changing! Suddenly there her finger was in my vagina! She would not have passed the exam I grade.

If I was not a professional vagina haver, I would have been freaked out, embarassed, and unsure what was happening. I was still these things, although as much out of a sense of professional rage as personal discomfort. I like to think she was like this because there was a note in my file saying “this person is chill and comes in annually” so she figured I didn’t need much care. But I have no proof of that. All she had to do was say “do you mind if we work quickly” and it wouldn’t have been so bad. Instead there I was, on the table, trying to decide how much of a fight I wanted to pick.

We have to learn to fight with doctors when we need to. We have to get over the idea that healthcare should be disempowering or that we ought to feel alienated and out of sorts Kelli Dunham and Jessica Halem talk about this as just one resource – there are tons more – but I just want to say it. I am a professional and I still felt bad fighting back, knowing I was getting treated poorly. The doctor/patient relationship is intense and power-laden and we have to find ways to force our own empowerment and understanding.

I am mad about the exam I got yesterday for everyone who has to push themselves to go to the gyn at all. I am mad that I wasn’t paid more consideration or engaged in the exam. I am mad for everyone who doesn’t know they deserve better, who expects it to hurt, who is embarassed and afraid and who has no idea why there is a finger in there or why the doctor didn’t ask before putting it in.

A few days ago I was heading down to occupy Wall Street for a little while before Simchat Torah. I had had a shleppy, run-around day – 8:30-12 work in the city that kept me late until 12:30, run to the PATH train, go to Newark, training for 3 hours, back to the city, you get the gist. I looked it, too – wrinkled all over the place. I looked the worst kind of busted.

Anyone who knows me knows I am a vain person. I am a horribly vain person, and more than that, I am vain in a Capricorn way – which is to say, I obsess over fashion rules and then feel guilty I am not doing it right. Light shoes after Labor Day? Oh god! No! Brown shoes black bag? I’d rather die. God forbid I wear a bow tie out of proportion to my shirt collar. I know these rules are completely made up and yet I cannot help myself. I am forgiving (well, mostly) forgiving of other people’s lapses but I? Must remain above the fray. God forbid I should end up in public undone.

So I did what any reasonable person would do before going to a giant anti-capitalism protest: I stopped in at the department store to get a little something to wear.

I spent probably 45 minutes there in the men’s furnishings department, worrying about which socks were most appropriate given the color of my pants. Is there any finer illustration of the contradictions of our times?

I talk a lot about fashion as a weapon and a way to navigate all the complexities of how we walk through the world.  I feel nervous about being judged – for being a fat person, for having an ambiguous gender (well, ambiguous to other people). Fashion is my way to try to control how people see me. I think at best I go for a “well, that one’s clearly making choices” response. I look good, and I know it, and I know that the way I look good probably doesn’t resonate for a lot of people, but at least they cannot pretend I’m being unintentional.

But blah blah motherfucking blah, fashion is revolutionary, my gender is precious and excuses my consumption, that’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is what it means to really, actually, in the moment fail to live up to your own ideals.

Why did I feel a need to go buy a motherfucking bow tie? What would really have happened if I showed up all wrinkled? Wasn’t my presence at the radical protest synagogue more important than whether my socks were too dark for my pants?

I bought that bow tie because I thought it would make me feel better. And it *did* make me feel better. But that’s because I’ve been trained to feel good about myself when I fit certain tropes of capitalism, like looking done a certain way and having nicely maintained things. By looking a certain kind of good, I am exerting a certain kind of control: sure, I might be a fat gender weirdo, but at least I am participating fully in the capitalist tropes of spending money to look appropriate! See! I’m not so bad!

Again, I believe in people doing the work to be themselves for whatever that means for them. And I also really want to honor the ways in which people around the world get killed — actually — for their fashion choices, especially when they’re rolled up with non-normative gender. But for me, here, in NYC, those aren’t the stakes for me, and I need to be more critical of the ways in which I let myself off the hook in the name of my own revolution.

Sometimes, I’m a capitalist, and always, it’s better to own our flaws than pretend it isn’t the case.

And the bow tie? It was too short anyways.

Yesterday I went undercover as a frum Jew. I put on a long black skirt and stockings, made sure my knees, elbows, and collarbones were covered, and went down to Kingston Ave. It’s kol hamoed Sukkot, which is to say that it’s basically a 24/7 party. All the families are out and about, enjoying each other, eating snacks, and there I was, Lubavicher ground zero, toodling about in my skirt.

I was there to, of all things, see a movie. I somehow ended up on a listserv for a whole world of observant Jewish women’s arts. Women are forbidden from performing? singing? in front of men. My impression is that this has historically meant that women just don’t get to do much of that, or maybe that’s just my outsider bias. But I saw an ad for this movie, The Heart that Sings,  and I watched the trailer and I was won over. A musical! About frum girls! How could I not?

The movie itself is a touching and movie-musical-worthy story about a young Jewish woman (Miriam), a Holocaust survivor, who ends up the music and drama teacher at a summer camp for rich and pampered Jewish girls. Will she pull off the annual camp show? (Yes.) Will she finally resolve her past? (Yes.) Will the other counselors grow to like her? (Yes.) You know. It’s all wrapped up in frumkeit – long skirts, Yiddishy language, watching Miriam wash before eating, music praising and praising Hashem but also encouraging the girls that whatever their dreams are, they can do it if they pray. The story itself unfolds differently than the standard “nerdy teacher who wins in the end”; the girls end up liking and trusting her because they feel bad they have been so mean after all she has been through, rather than because she finally wins them over in a montage. She wins over the camp at large only after she is the beneficiary of a real miracle. There are dance numbers, and a hundred songs, and a couple of Holocaust flashbacks.  The film itself was beautifully shot with all of the lighting and period-accurate props you could hope for.

The movie is the work of this fierce woman, Robin Saex Garbose, who – as she put it yesterday, after the screening – saw a niche market and realized it needed to grow. She has a serious theater background in the secular world, although clearly has become more observant. She was teaching classes for frum girls, realized they needed a place to perform and build as artists, and so she made that space vis a vis two feature length films. Two feature length films!

I kept thinking, though, how good this is. How awesome it is to see women making their own art, for each other, and taking each other forward. This movie passed the Bechdel test higher than almost any movie I have seen – not just because there were no men, but because women actually talked about themselves and each other caringly and all got to be real characters. It was no Fiddler situation where the women are only characters inasmuch as they get married or have opinions about marriage. These were observant women, acting religiously, having adventures and singing about being strong and taking risks and so on and so forth.

The Q&A was super interesting inasmuch as 1) clearly the women and girls present were REALLY GLAD that this movie existed, leading me to believe there is not yet much content out there; 2) the concern that showing frum girls bullying each other might somehow reflect badly on the frum community, as if somehow those of us out here in secularlandia really expect that these things don’t happen everywhere. The filmmaker also, in passing, talked about the difficulty of finding conflicts that still reflected the morals she wanted to espouse, saying that (for example) she would never be able to do a film of a girl going off the derech (ie, becoming less traditionally observant.) It’s a huge bummer – I can only imagine how that could be a really interesting and thoughtful film, even if it ended up with her coming back into the fold.

This is the part where of course, it’s easy to roll your eyes – oh lord, those fundamentalists and their propoganda. But really, look at any other teen movie – the tropes are just as strong, the plots just as predictable. Of course nothing revolutionary is going to happen. Teen movies are about reinforcing the prevailing morality, not analyzing or deconstructing it.

I liked The Heart that Sings. I liked that it passed the Bechdel test so well. I like that it gave girls a chance to think about what they could do. I liked that it was a film about girls learning and growing and not a film about girls worrying about dating boys. And I like the idea of women doing it for themselves – I hope that this goes even further, that more girls and women make movies, that we get to hear more voices and more stories and the nuance that goes along with it. Because that? Is feminist. And I? Am not nearly enough a part of that community to be passing judgement.

It is so easy to be cynical about The Movement.

Manarchists and unchecked white privilege and unchecked class privilege and ideologues and grandstanding and the need for ideological perfection and lack of forgiveness and hidden trust fund babies and white person dreadlocks and lack of ferocity and willingness to infight and a hundred other things make it so easy to pour a tall glass of haterade and drink, drink, drink.

I don’t go to actions that don’t have at least one woman as a featured speaker. I don’t go to protests that aren’t backed by people of color-centered organizations that I trust. I don’t go to protests that I think are foolhardy, or pointless, or about marching around to prove we can march around. I hate protests, period, really – it’s not like they change anything, they just are a good reason for us to feel good, and whatever, half the people there need to shower anyways.

And I HATE a manarchist. I hate them deeply. I hate the whole culture of white man manarchy where you show up SUPER RADIKKKAL and take up all the space and don’t think critically about how you are being oppressive in the name of “being an activist.” I hate name dropping manarchists and maoist manarchists and bearded manarchists and especially the ones with the white man dreadlocks. ESPECIALLY THOSE. They are everywhere, in every movement that isn’t explicitly queer or people of color-centered and sometimes, even then, the manarchists roll out and make stupid choices that end up screwing people over.

I have no idea why Occupy Wall Street has not succumbed completely to the manarchists. I saw them there, this morning, when we were there to hold the park in case of police attempt to shut it down. I heard them – I think I heard them, it’s hard to tell on the human mic – orating broadly about the way we will rise up together. You can always tell a manarchist. They like to orate broadly about the way we will rise up together.

But somehow OWS hasn’t fallen into that rabbit hole. The plan for civil disobedience in the face of the park considered all of these things like people who can’t get arrested and varying levels of willingness to risk – because the direct action committee, according to my friend, is largely made up of women of color. The kitchen staff isn’t just women, although there are a lot of women there. Somehow things have not dissolved into partisan tantrums, or hopeless fracturing. The manarchists are there, smelling up the joint and running their mouths and trying to take people on ill-advised “civil disobedience missions” that are mostly excuses to look macho. But that force of ew has been resisted by a much larger and smarter force that seems to be thinking critically about how much danger that kind of manarchy can have to the larger cause.

My other friend was telling me that the whole thing got started by a bunch of white man college students. This could not be a larger red flag – except that no one knows who these white man college students are. Rather than stay up there and manarchist about, they pulled back and started creating structures for many people – any people – to take the mic. That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s enough to make this hardened cynic start thinking about how maybe I should not just bitterly sign another internet petition and, instead, take it back to the streets.

I marched yesterday as part of Occupy Wall Street. I was trying to think of the last time I was at a march this big – probably the immigration march in 2007 or so. It poured down Broadway and kept coming and coming; unions, assorted radical organizations, and tons of people who were just SICK OF IT.

I love this protest. I love this occupation of Wall Street. I love this nascent growing community. I love it in a way that is almost irrational; somehow this is cutting past my usual skepticism. There are so many white dreadlocks there! The demands are so poorly defined! And yet I love it.

I love it because of how many people I know who are walking around with their mouths dropped open in anger. We have all been systemically screwed: my friend’s parents, who lose their entire retirement savings due to the greed of some Wall Street bankers; the tons of people I know who are looking for work and can’t find any, or can’t find enough; those of us who are lucky enough to have jobs and still can’t make ends meet. I have a job that I have been at for almost 5 years (!!!) and there have been no raises or cost of living adjustments in 4. My benefits have been systemically slashed. This isn’t even about greed on the part of the management, it’s about simple ability to keep the organization afloat at all.

I have inadvertently turned into one of those people who is very heavy on matters of personal choice. I have no sympathy for people who choose not to work day jobs and are consequently broke. I have no sympathy for people who spend too much and end up in debt. I hold myself to these standards, too – it’s not like I let myself off the hook. I have turned down a lot of things because I was not sure I could afford them. Parts of this really hit buttons for me because who ARE these people who can just take time off, who will sleep on Wall Street, who have nothing better to do than hang out? I am uninterested in anything made up of entitled people who do not take responsibility for their own actions. (Which, ps, describes the 1% pretty nicely!)

But, being down there, I don’t think that’s this. I think this is a space that is trying to do better actively, trying to be as un-racist as possible, trying to make it possible for people to take this space to do good work. I think it’s made up of people who have tried to find jobs and failed; who have jobs and come after work; who are unemployed and underemployed. The lifestyle hippies are there too, but there’s more going on than just that.

My feelings on how the US economy has been going are best articulated by a gurgle of agony and rage and some frantic gesticulation. I feel best about this movement/space/etc because it is making room for all of us who greet the world with this rage and pain to come down and figure out what happens next. There are many steps between a gurgle of agony and rage to a well-articulated mission. But for once, it seems like the space to do that work is actually being held. Here’s to the 99%!