C. K. Francis, 1909 - 2005

My grandmother passed away this morning at her home in Arlee, Montana. She was 96. Born in New York but raised on the desolate prairie in Saskatchewan, her parents sent her to live with family friends in New York City in her early teens so she could have a better education and learn about the world. She returned to the West in 1928 to attend college at Montana State College (now the University of Montana) in Missoula - also my alma mater. She graduated with a degree in journalism in 1932, one of few women at that time to do so. She worked on a gorgeous ranch nestled in the Jocko Valley outside of Missoula in a little town called Arlee, which is on the Flathead Indian Reservation. She married the man who owned the ranch, and never left it - she lived on that ranch for over 70 years, the last 39 years by herself (my grandfather died in 1966). She loved literature, reading The New Yorker, and all animals.

I'll write more about Cornelia soon.

Dr. Gini! Paging Dr. Gini!

Congratulations to my good buddy Gini, who defended her dissertation yesterday!!! What a truly awesome event this is. To commemorate this milestone in her life we got together and kicked out some serious karaoke jams til 1am. Gini wowed us with selections from the Cranberries and Guns 'n Roses (she does a mean "Paradise City"), while Marshall tried out some David Bowie and Air Supply. Now if we can just get him to follow the words on the monitor.... My fave of the night had to be Katie singing "It's Raining Men." Nice. Laura displayed an uncanny knowledge of contemporary dance/hip-hop numbers. I got off to a shaky start with "You Can't Hurry Love" (too fast!) but recovered a bit on the Bangles' "Manic Monday." I think I may be hooked! Which is progress considering how traumatized I was by my first & last karaoke experience: in college in the early 90s, to "Bust-a-Move" by Sir Mix-a-Lot. Hoo boy.

Passover

I forgot to report that i went to my first Passover dinner last weekend - it wasn't the super-formal kind, but Gini did her best to explain some of the traditions and she did have reference material in case we wanted to learn more. We learned about how it's an anti-oppression holiday - how cool is that to have a whole holiday set aside to remember slavery and how wrong it is to oppress people for their religious or political beliefs. To illustrate this, scallions were passed around to symbolize the flogging endured by jewish slaves. M. proceeded to run around fake-flogging everyone which prompted K. to say, "I hate being a slave." Funny how the Christians don't recognize such things as anti-oppression, eh? Well, except for Jesus being the perpetual underdog and unjustly crucified I guess. I should stop talking about religion. But it was cool to go to the dinner because I have jewish ancestry on my mother's side, but it's been kept hush-hush and I never learned any of the traditions. My grandparents actually had to flee Germany because of their ethnicity in the 1930s, and while the immediate family members all survived (by fleeing), some of my grandparents' more distant relatives didn't make it.

so i've just discovered rosie o'donnell's blog, and it's really interesting. she writes these sort of clipped poetry-style entries that in total can be pretty powerful. i guess it's just interesting to read something so personal by a really famous person. i'm not famous at all and i find it hard to write personal things in this blog, so i don't know how she does it. This entry is about her decision to be a foster parent - a gay foster parent.

Why does watching a 65 year old man carefully folding his underwear at a laundromat make my heart break?

Edna Rocks

Thanks to Kim B. for sending me this gem:

The Prisoner

All right,
Go ahead!
What's in a name?
I guess I'll be locked into
As much as I am locked out of.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

(isn't it cool that we have time to read poetry now?)

Yippee!

Woo hoo! I passed comps and can now officially get on with life. The past few months have brought new developments in my consulting biz -- I'm going to be presenting a three-hour workshop in August at Austin'sGreenlights for Nonprofit Success on nonprofit program outcomes and evaluation! There is a chance that some consulting jobs might come my way after the workshop, which would be awesome. GENaustin also might contract with me to head up the evaluation of their after-school mentoring program, clubGEN. I should find out in the next month or so. It feels so good to get back into consulting - and it really makes me realize how much I learned at ORS before I came back to school. The skills I developed in my five years there with Jane, Marc, and Anne pretty much set me up so that I could be a reasonably competent independent consultant. Which isn't anything you can learn in a PhD program.

Post-Comps Fever

I am back from the land of comprehensive exams and quickly purging the memories of endless hours of studying and hair-pulling. My faculty committee meets this afternoon to discuss my exam and decide whether to pass me, pass me with conditions (i.e. re-write a section or two), pass me with "distinction," or not pass me at all. Nothing like a bunch of professors sitting around a room talking about your work to make you feel really jumpy and skittery. My supervisor at the Hogg said I looked "dazed" today. Just what you want to hear.

Last week was lovely, though - two days before the exam Anna gave me a survival kit in a "brief case" (a zippered pouch in the shape of a pair of tighty-whiteys) plus a lucky vinyl wrist cuff in wonder-woman colors. On the last day of the exam Marshall met Kim and I at El Chile (I am proud to say I had a top-shelf margarita in my hand no less than 30 minutes after leaving the exam) and gave us hilarious congratulatory cards. He also had a dozen roses waiting at home - awwwww. I proceeded to stay out the rest of the night and had a great time. Charlie even worked Kim and I into his holy happy hour act.

Marshall was awesome the last few months - he fed me, didn't get mad at me for not cleaning, came home early when he felt like staying out but I needed to go to bed early, stayed out late when I needed more study time, and even scooped the litter box a few times. Marshall is super rad but everyone already knows that. I am just giving some concrete evidence.

Hegemonic Femininity

I lied. Here I am again. Here is a handy term - feel free to try to work this into casual conversation.

Hegemonic Femininity:

"Simultaneously expected to behave and conform but not perform (at least not in subjects that 'really' matter, like physics, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and so forth), 'women learn that they are not as worthy, that they do not count as much, and that what competence they may have is usually restricted to a specialized sphere which does not rank high in the male scheme of values.'"

from Simpson and Ellis, "Doing Gender: Sorting Out the Caste and Crime Conundrum," Criminology,1995.

I probably won't be writing for a week or so while I am busy psyching myself up for comps next Monday and Tuesday, and I have been saving up several miscellaneous little nuggets to post here - so I will do that now and then I'll have no excuse but to get to work on this pile of readings on gender and crime.

First of all, if you are so inclined I highly encourage you to vote for Ms. Led for Best Seattle Indie Rock Band. The link above will take you to the online ballot for the Seattle Weekly Music Awards.

Next, if you are glued to the show Alias like I have been for four seasons, you might be interested in this reluctant critique by a fan at Alternet.org who, like all of us, must come to terms with the show's unrealistic, positive portrayal of the CIA (e.g. they hardly ever kill anybody and are always the "good guys"). But that's OK. I watch West Wing to pretend that Martin Sheen is actually the president, and I watch Alias to pretend that there actually is a Sydney Bristow who works for the CIA. It's all part of an elaborate coping mechanism.

And finally, I can't seem to find the article anymore but a couple of days ago the Austin American-Statesman reported on a rape trial where the defendant, who was representing himself, was allowed to directly question his accuser about her sexual history because the rape shield law was recently overturned. Since the 1980s these shield laws (most states had them) were in place to protect rape victims/survivors from being questioned unnecessarily about their sexual history on the stand, as they had been since time immemorial. Defense attorneys love nothing more than to show that the accuser and defendant had sex previously, or that the accuser has had sex in the past - because, don't you know that when you consent once that means you've consented to sex with that person in the future, whenever he wants? Or with anybody, for that matter? Of course. Good GOD this is scary.

The argument against these shield laws is that it inhibits the ability of a rape defendant to defend himself like other kinds of defendants. Ok, but do defendants accused of robbery ask their victims if they've carried money on them before? Have they previously given the defendant money willingly? These kinds of questions are pretty ridiculous in that context - as they are for rape.

Holy crap that's a lot of people!

Using International Women's day as a catalyst, around 30,000 people kicked off the start of a worldwide march for global women's rights in Sao Paolo, Brazil last month. The relay-style march will go through 50 countries, calling for a global equal rights charter. Fittingly, it ends in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta - I did a country report on it in 7th grade) a west African country with few protections for women (as a general rule: the poorer the country, the worse things get for women relative to men). Also see the Boston Globe.

So in case you or your family members or people you know think women's rights are so passe and "so 70's" and that we need to get over ourselves, it's instructive to look beyond the borders of our privileged shiny frosted cake that is the U.S. on the global picnic table:

-70 percent of the 1.3 billion people living in poverty are women (International Confederation of Free Trade Unions)

-The incidents of mass rape in war zones like the Congo, where the military and rebel fighters have raped tens of thousands of women and girls during the conflict in the east of the country, have gone virtually unpunished (Human Rights Watch, Africa Division)

And that's all I can bring myself to share today.

Girlstown Productions Launch Party!