"Social-service Lifers"

Shorter Nicole Brodeur:

OMIGOD, like, I can't BELIEVE you social service working people dared to get upset at the poorly-chosen wording of my recent article! When I expressed my fears that the King County Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness would be twisted and ruined once the "social-service lifers" get their hands on it, obviously the target of my withering scorn was the people who USE social services, not the ones who work in social services! Because those homeless people are the ones who will definitely ruin the plan. I mean, duh, if they would just get their act toGEther, the plan would be such a success!

I so totally did NOT mean to insult social workers and their ilk, and if you thought I did, well OMFG WTF are you stupid. I can use whatever words I want to use whatever I want, and if you misconstrue it, well shame on you. Especially you, Church Council of Greater Seattle, you stupid stupidheads. I love homeless people. You can tell because I once wrote about one of them for a whole year! And if you didn't take the time to re-read my entire archives (which you can easily access through a quick twenty-seven step registration process at SeattleTimes.com) to glean every word I have ever previously written about social services and homeless people, well I wash my hands of you, but not before I take up half my column sneering at your, like, total jumping of the gun, because it's so much easier to fill space that way. Love ya! -Nicole

Boxes

I picked up a cheap pack of boxes at Office Max this evening, the kind with lids and handles, and packed up all ten of them tonight.

Whew, ten boxes! That seems like a lot!

Er, at least, that's what I thought until I looked around and realized that I had only been packing up books. Ten boxes full of books. How on earth did they all fit into this apartment? And how many more boxes will we need in order to move everything else, when ten full boxes has hardly made a dent?

Oy. I'm going to be dreaming about cardboard containers and newspaper wrapping before this month is up.

Misogyny

Over at Bitch Ph.D. there's an ongoing discussion of the various ways in which misogyny manifests itself in everyday life.

This spring I posted about a couple of my own experiences, the kind that throw you off balance while you try to decide what just happened and what to do about it. It's often so subtle that you might not notice it, might not even think about it except to roll your eyes or laugh at it.

Notice it.

Today on our way back from a fishing expedition we stopped at a convenience store for something cold to drink. The guy behind the counter was talking to a friend of his at the counter. They were talking about taking a trip before August is over. "Yeah," said the guy behind the counter, "you know I won't be having any more fun after the wedding, so we'd better do it before then. One last good time."

There's an example of misogyny in every day life: the ingrained assumption that a woman is naturally just out to keep her man from having a good time.

Or the presumption that the primary function of any woman in public is to look pretty for you, so that you think it's acceptable to say, "Hey, smile!" to any female looking anything less than euphoric.

Or the idea that of course condoms are legal and unregulated, but we just can't let women get their hands on emergency contraception without really making it a challenge.

"Sarah in Chicago" left a comment in the discussion at Bitch Ph.D. that made it click in my brain:

Men's classification of women as moody, irrational, and emotional because of their PMS is misogyny because they are judging women on some male standard of not being hormonally effected. It's using a male default as the standard and then because (well, duh) women are different from that standard, we are found lacking.

That's it. That makes sense to me. Any time you find someone using men or men's behavior as the norm, and dismissing or belittling any behavior that doesn't match their ideal of how the mythical Exemplary Man would behave--that's misogyny.

Just something I've been thinking about. Other than that, it was another lovely day. We drove over to Cle Elum, did a little fishing, a little reading, a little basking in the sun (a little being careful to put sunscreen all over me, except for forgetting to put any on my face...).

I'd type a bit more, but this wireless keyboard seems to be dying on me. Plus, it's bedtime anyway. Sunday nights are my least favorite time of the week--all that weekend behind, all that workweek ahead... To bed, to sleep, perchance to dream!

Diablo Lake

As promised, K. and I left Seattle around 1:00 yesterday afternoon and were enjoying the sunshine at Lake Diablo by 4:00. We were only up in the mountains for a few hours; we walked a nature trail overlooking Gorge Dam and wandered around an overlook above Diablo Lake. Then we spent some time wading gingerly in the freezing water at Colonial Creek Campground before heading homeward.

The North Cascades Highway is such a gorgeous drive that I didn't spend much energy lamenting the brevity of the trip. I did, however, make note of several tantalizing trail heads along the highway with the strong expectation of returning for a backpacking trip someday soon.



More pictures from the trip are up at my flickr page.

Office Drone Escapees on the Loose!

My fellow office drone K. and I are taking off at noon for a brief day trip into the North Cascades. Yes, it's silly to have a day trip so far away and not even be able to leave first thing in the morning; this was all very last-minute. We might even just pop up a tent and stay overnight, although I doubt it. Just in case, though, I've been putting together all the things we'd need to make such an sojourn possible. I felt well-prepared as I surveyed my tidy bundle of supplies, but checked to see if I had managed to get all the Ten Essentials. Mr. Thel rattled them off: map, compass, firestarter & matches, water, food, extra clothes, flashlight, first aid, knife, and sunglasses & sunscreen. (Okay, we got stuck at nine and had to look up the final one, but it turned out to be something I already had packed anyway.)

"Hey, I already have all that together!" I said proudly.

"Well, I told you, you were trained by an expert," Mr. Thel replied.

True.

K. and I plan to drive up to Diablo Lake. She moved here from Florida last summer, and she has a specific memory of seeing a picture of Diablo Lake in a magazine on her way here and promptly deciding she wanted to see it firsthand. She's excited to finally realize that ambition, and I'm excited because I've only been there once before. If we stick with Plan A, we'll just drive up, spend some time looking out over viewpoints and taking a few tiny nature trail walks, bask for a lazy while in the glorious summer sunshine we've been seeing so much of lately, and drive back to Seattle. (With any luck, we'll be the only ones driving toward town, as all the SeaFair crowds clog the roads heading back out of town.) But if we go with Plan B, we'll have the supplies to make it easy.

I'll post pictures to my Flickr page after we get back. Hasta!

Dear Sir

Deer Mister President,

I was delighted and releaved to here you this weak reiterate your statement that public schools should teach all kinds of answers to a question if some people's beleafs disagree with the mere facts that answer that question.

When I was inn school I was very traumatized by a situation like this. If only yew had been my teacher, think of how many harmful facts I could have avoided! It was our study of the whether that confused me so. My deer mother had tot me that thunder and lightening are caused by angels bowling in the sky. But in school they only tot us about air pressure and warm and cold fronts, without allowing for the alternate explanation to be given. It was quite distressing to me to have my religious beleafs squashed on like a tiny bug this way.

Luckily my mother new that this so-called "science," invoking invisible air currents that nobody can even see or prove, was just a plot of the secular atheists to shake my beleaf in the great eternal bowling game played by God and His angels. From then on I new the importance of allowing children to hear every possible answer to a question, weather the controversial topic be the whether, the evolution, or the spelling, so they can just decide which answer they like the best. This is the beleaf I have always clung two since then, and no one can deny my intellectual suckcesses.

Keep up the good work.

Sincerely,

A fello defender of intellectual freedumb

Aside

To my recent anonymous commenter:

I don't know much about gnosticism, but I replied to your comment here. Thanks for saying hello.

Digs

The apartment I mentioned yesterday? In less than 24 hours we looked at it, applied, and signed the lease. I am boggled at the simplicity of the process, for a change. Moving into my current place two years ago involved all kinds of back and forth. First I filled out all the paperwork and the landlady offered it to me. Then, the day I was supposed to sign the papers, she said it wasn't available after all, that the current residents had changed their minds about leaving. Then, after I frantically resumed the search for a place (having already given notice on my previous place, and having only about a week left in which to find a place), she called me back and re-offered it--but now the rent was higher than she'd stated earlier! Alas, at that down-to-the-wire date, I had no other good options left, so resentfully paid the higher rent anyway.

This time everything came together so beautifully I felt like it must all fall apart at any moment. Surely some monkey wrench would throw the whole thing off!

I have, however, signed the papers and paid a deposit and even received the keys. And the garage remote. (Oh, that's right y'all, this place has a garage, in which we can store camping gear and carpentry tools, and in which occasional carpentry work can be accomplished.) Something could still blow the whole deal, I suppose, but I think the signed papers make that less likely.

My one source of grief is that the apartment isn't located in Ballard. *Sob* After four years of walking down to Turtle Press whenever I needed a paper crafts fix, or breezing down to Epilogue Books for a lazy browsing session, or just walking down to the Locks or to Golden Gardens for a nice quiet stroll... I'll miss it. And oh, I'll miss the girls at Firehouse Coffee, and the cheerful stickers they would plaster to the lid of my coffee in the morning! It seems a bit silly to feel sad about a mere four-mile move, but there it is. At least we'll be pretty close to Carkeek Park; my saddest loss will be the ability to cruise over to Discovery Park in a quick half-hour walk, but I think Carkeek will be within similar walking distance from the new place.

I tend to get really emotional about changes like this; even when the changes are wholly positive, I get preemptive nostalgia for all my familiar routines and scenes. When last I moved, my roommate and I camped out on the living room floor of our emptied apartment on the last night of our lease. We stayed up most of the night talking and sniffling about the good times we'd had there. I'm not sure Mr. Thel will be up for any tearful reminiscing, but for the rest of our lives this apartment will be preserved in our memories as the first place we ever lived together. For more than two years we've cooked dinners, baked bread, battled ants and spiders, viewed three Tours de France, watched the fireworks over Lake Union and Elliott Bay (and had some rather less pleasant fireworks of our own...and survived), squeezed dozens more books into our full shelves (did you know that a KEXP membership gets you 20% off all purchases at Third Place Books--both new and used? Ho ho ho, is that ever going to be handy this year!), made music, love, and popcorn.

I'm not even going to try to tally up how many pizzas Pagliacci has delivered to us.

On the other hand, the new apartment's bedroom window lacks a Sloop Tavern below it. That single fact goes a long way toward evening out the ratio of regret to excitement. Add in the new garage and yard, and the scales are decidedly tipped. After all, we'll still be near all our friends (and, in fact, nearer to some). We'll become regular customers at some other coffee shop, and find new routines and secret pedestrian passageways. Now that we have a yard we can even have a proper hoedown/shindig/barbeque kind of thing. Friday nights will remain Firefly nights for the next two months, and you're all still invited, Internet.

So: onward! Upward! And other motivational words! Hey, somebody call Pagliacci. We're gonna need an Agog Primo, stat.

Hello, Internet!

There are so many things I want to tell you. Like all the details about my adventure last month on the fastest vacation ever (Seattle to Sacramento and back, via train and truck, in less than 36 hours!), and my tentative steps toward getting back into the career field I belong in. I've written about half a post about why I am firmly pro-choice (after being raised among folks that revered people like Operation Rescue nutball Randall Terry as saints and angels), and why any talk about repealing Roe v. Wade is a direct threat to people's parenting choices above and beyond the question of abortion. I have stories about blandly quiet alcoholic vagrants down the street and the obnoxiously disruptive police force that came to roust them the other afternoon, and stories about the unintentionally hilarious bits of the SeaFair parade in downtown Seattle last weekend (with pictures!), and so many other things.

Alas, Internet, whenever we meet our time together is completely devoted to the things you have to say. You have so many things to say, Internet, that I can't bring myself to get a word in edgewise sometimes. So I'll just say this, for now: After two years and two months of living right above a tavern and a VFW hall (and of the two, the VFW hall has roused us cranky from our slumber at two a.m. far more times than the tavern has...it's not that the little old VFW men are loud, but they rent out their space to such very loud people on the weekends), along an arterial street which frequently hosts ambulances and firetrucks in full siren, as well as the occasional late-night impromptu drag racer along its perfectly straight length below us...Ah, as I say, after two years of this, we are finally in a place (financially and mentally speaking) where we are able to pursue Better Options. Not, that is to say, home ownership--not yet!--but at least finding more reasonably priced digs along a less aggravating street. Maybe a place where my car won't be broken into on an annual basis.

We looked at an apartment sort of place today. It comprised a small living space (kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom) above a spacious garage and unfinished storage space. It's connected to the house on the lot only through the laundry room between them; the two spaces share no walls. The apartment is in back, along the alley; the neighborhood is completely residential, but within walking distance of, say, the shopping district in Greenwood. And the rent is $100 less per month. The landlady seemed really nice, and I suspect we were the first ones to turn in an application for the place (she was showing it to several of us at once, but the other man left as soon as he saw the inside, saying it was too small for him, and the other couple hadn't shown up by the time we departed), so I have my fingers crossed for it.

One big bonus: Mr. Thel could set up his drums in the storage space off the garage and leave them set up there, instead of stacking them in a corner of the living space the way we do now. He was instantly smitten by this possibility (and I can't blame him); when I started thinking out loud afterward about how we might be able to fit our furniture into the smallish living space, he said, "You do whatever you want with the furniture as long as I can have that garage space."

It's a deal. I hope.

One More Tiny Argument for Contraception!

Seduced by their sunny fragrance, I bought a little box of cherry tomatoes at the Ballard Market today. They were packaged in an open plastic container with a small mesh covering secured over the top with a rubber band. When I got home and removed this mesh cover, I absently slipped it over my hand, the rubber band holding it in place.

Hmm, I thought, this would probably be the perfect size for an infant hairnet.

Although I could think of no good reason for an infant to need a mesh hairnet, for a few seconds there I fervently wished I had a baby handy to model the plastic headwear; moreover, I'm pretty sure that were I in possession of an actual baby, I would have tried it. Just for a second, you know. Just to see what it looked like. I mean, it's not like I'd be hurting her. And the baby would never have to know as long as I never showed her the pictures, right?

Yeah, okay, we'll stick with the contraceptives.