ASK Musings

No matter where you go, there you are.

Monthly Archive: November 2014

Sunday

30

November 2014

0

COMMENTS

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Written by , Posted in Reviews

Five Stars

smokegets

Last year I reviewed a book about a forensic anthropologist, where I mentioned I do work related to death. It is one part of what I do, and (at least for now) has never actually involved me providing after-death care, or even arranging for it. It’s a possibility, though. And it is a field that I find unendingly interesting.

I can’t remember who recommended this book to me, but I’d like to say thank you. Its premise is one young woman’s experience working in a crematory. Most of the book – I’d say maybe 70% – involves stories from her time there, seamlessly woven with interesting notes about how different cultures have handled death of the millennia. She does a really fantastic job at this, especially since this is her first book. The book takes a bit of a shift towards the dark about three-quarters of the way through (I know, how much darker can it get? It’s a book about death! But it does), but it finishes up nicely.

Ms. Doughty’s book points out all of the ways that we have turned death into something to be hidden and feared. This is a relatively new construction – at least the hidden part. Many cultures have feared death forever, and some have just seen it as a way of life. Ms. Doughty, while a part of the death care industry, learns through her experiences that she wants to provide a different way of understanding and recognizing death. I’ve not yet read any of her blog posts (http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/) but I plan to, because I find her perspective interesting.

I bought this book at 1 P.M. today; I’m writing the review just before 6 P.M. I literally only put the book down to use the bathroom and to fold some laundry. That’s it. And at 240 pages, it’s not a short book. But it’s an interesting one, and one that I think has value not just for those who find the death care industry interesting, but for those who think that maybe there’s something missing from how we handle death in the U.S.

Sunday

30

November 2014

0

COMMENTS

Bad Feminist

Written by , Posted in Feminism, Reviews

Four Stars

bad-feminist-roxane-gay

I’ve heard many people reference this collection of essays, to the point where I sought out the author’s twitter feed so I could get a feel myself about what her writing was about. After having enjoyed her (often random) tweets for a while now, I finally picked up her book. Well, I downloaded it. And now I’m mostly just mad that it took me this long. I really should have just read it the second I heard about it.

Ms. Gay writes about many different cultural topics throughout this book, each fitting loosely into the categories of gender and sexuality; race and entertainment; politics, gender, and race; and ‘me’ (the author). I appreciate the fact that I don’t agree with everything she says in every essay – that’s kind of the point. Not that the author expects us to disagree with her, but that she owns the fact that she is a complex and complicated person, with many different opinions that don’t always neatly line up. She listens to problematic music, she reads Vogue unironically, and she (gasp!) shaves her legs. She’s a bad feminist.

But she’s not. She’s a fantastic feminist, because she approaches things with a critical eye. It is, in fact, possible to like things that are not good. Her essay on the song “Blurred Lines” is a great example of this: the lyrics are horrifying and basically an ode to justifying rape, bat damn if the song isn’t catchy. She is also able to provide a different perspective than so much of what we see in mainstream feminism. Ms. Gay brings the perspective of not a white, straight woman but of a Haitian American queer woman. That doesn’t mean she speaks for all black women, or all bisexual women, but it does mean that her commentary comes from a place that doesn’t get nearly enough coverage in most of the media out there.

For some reason I had some trouble with a few of the earlier essays. Part of that may have just been the mood I was in. But for me the last 200 pages of the 300+ page book flew by, and I was sad it was over. However, thanks to the interwebs, I can still read her writing, as she is the editor of The Butter, a subsection of The Toast.

Sunday

30

November 2014

0

COMMENTS

What I’m Reading – November 30, 2014

Written by , Posted in What I'm Reading

Police Killings

– “A Salt Lake Tribune review of nearly 300 homicides, using media reports, state crime statistics, medical-examiner records and court records, shows that use of force by police is the second-most common circumstance under which Utahns kill each other, surpassed only by intimate partner violence.” Killings by Utah police outpacing gang, drug, child-abuse homicides (via @sltrib)

– “[S]omeone called 911 describing “a guy with a gun pointing it at people,” but the caller twice suggested the gun was “probably fake” and that the individual was “probably a juvenile,” but it’s unclear if this information was relayed to police.” Cleveland Police Shoot And Kill 12-Year-Old Carrying A Fake Gun (via @ThinkProgress)

– “The family is outspoken in their belief that their son’s death was avoidable, had the police officers acted appropriately.”Officers Who Shot 12-Year-Old Holding Toy Gun Refused To Give Him First Aid (via @ThinkProgress)

– “Weekley says that another SWAT member had thrown a flash-bang grenade, which temporarily blinded him. That’s when he fired the shot that killed Aiyana who was asleep on the couch in the front room of the house.” Charges Dropped For Cop Who Fatally Shot Sleeping 7-Year-Old Girl (h/t @SueyPark)

Racism

– “Privilege is like oxygen: You don’t realize it’s there until it’s gone. As white folks, we can’t know what it’s like to go through life without racial privilege because we literally haven’t.” What white people need to know, and do, after Ferguson (h/t @AngryBlackLady)

– “Where he sees “opportunity” many St. Louisans see stone-cold murder. Everything about the announcement—the timing, the condescending tone, the weeks of militarized vehicles patrolling the roads—seemed designed to inflame and incite the region.”Ferguson’s Trial (via @SarahKendzior)

– “McCulloch essentially acknowledged that his team was serving as Wilson’s defense lawyers, noting that prosecutors “challenged” and “confronted” witnesses by pointing out previous statements and evidence that discredited their accounts.” Bob McCulloch’s pathetic prosecution of Darren Wilson (h/t @Milbank)

Sexism

– “A woman makes it impossible for men not see a truth that usually remains invisible to them: that men make our streets into threatening spaces. And in response, men threaten to kill her.” The masculine mistake (h/t @femfreq)

Prejudice and Humor

– “Reciting prejudiced comments (jokey or not) worsens one’s own attitude towards the group disparaged. Exposure to disparagement humor on the other hand doesn’t seem to affect the prejudices people hold; instead, it seems to affect how/whether people will act on their prejudices.” Sticks and Stones and Jokes (h/t @schemaly)

Reproductive Health

– “There is no universal connotation of the word “natural,” other than that it’s supposed to be wholesome and good. It’s like labeling a food as “natural” as opposed to, say, organic: Organic means food that is grown without pesticides, while “natural” means whatever the hell the manufacturer wants it to mean. And in the same vein, conflating “natural” birth with vaginal birth implies that other ways of being born are “unnatural”—in other words, inferior.” A Baby Coming Out of a Vagina Is a Vaginal Birth: There’s No Such Thing as ‘Natural’ (via @rhrealitycheck)

And Finally, Jay Smooth continues to bring the awesome:

Saturday

29

November 2014

0

COMMENTS

The American Way of Eating

Written by , Posted in Politics, Reviews

Two Stars

americaneating

Ms. McMillan decided to explore how food works in the U.S. To do this, she took a decidedly Barbara Ehrenreich approach: she went out and worked in the field. Literally. She chose to seek work in the California central valley as a farm worker, in Michigan as a Wal-Mart supercenter grocery employee, and as a cook at Applebee’s in Brooklyn, New York. She allowed herself a small cushion of funds with each new job to help with finding a place to live in her new cities, but if she ran out, she did what people who don’t have nest eggs to pull from: she took out an advance on her credit card, or just went without.

Each section starts out with a page that lists her hourly earnings, what that would translate to weekly and annually after taxes, as well as what percentage she spent on food, broken down by eating out and cooking at home. As expected, the work she did was hard, the money she earned was ridiculous, and in many cases it was just easier to eat shitty food than to find the money or energy to cook well.

Some of the author’s observations are quite interesting and good to see; her main take-away is that healthy eating isn’t just about the availability of fresh food, as so many campaigns want us to believe (have you had that ‘food desert’ ad, featuring two kids, in an endless loop on Hulu like I have? I now loathe that ad). It’s also about having a solid education in how to cook (which so many of us don’t), a job that provides the wages AND the time and energy to do that cooking, and a supportive public system like adequate healthcare and child care to allow people to cook instead of eating out.

From my perspective, the most surprising thing was how little cooking actually happens at a restaurant like Applebee’s. I spent one summer working as a hostess and busser at a local restaurant, and other than the giant vat of butter we kept cooling in a sink from which we would scoop a dish to bring out to the fancy tables, everything appeared to be cooked and prepared in the kitchen. Not so with Applebee’s. Yikes.

This book is written pretty well. She manages to weave in statistics and other information in well, and I found her sections on Wal-Mart and the private food supply chain to be very interesting. However, and I knew this going into reading the book – why did SHE need to tell this story? A college-educated, white woman? Come on. Couldn’t she have actually interviewed people who had their own stories to tell? I mean, obviously she did do that to a degree, but this was the Tracie McMillan story, and it absolutely did not have to be. I mean, at one point she is hired on part-time at a Wal-Mart outside of Detroit, and all I could think was that she was taking a job away from someone who actually needed it. I couldn’t get over it, and I don’t necessarily think this book needed to be written in this way. I’m not recommending it, mostly because I think there are a lot of other, better ways to learn about these industries, that don’t involve taking jobs away from people who need them, or replacing the voices of poor people, many of whom are people of color, with the voice of a middle-class white woman.

Sunday

23

November 2014

0

COMMENTS

Redefining Realness

Written by , Posted in Feminism, Reviews

Four Stars

janet-mock-book-coverYou might be familiar with Janet Mock. She has been a writer for People magazine (which I unapologetically read every week), and more recently has shared her story of being a trans woman of color in a feature for Marie Claire magazine. I first learned about her where I learn about many things that aren’t necessarily covered on CNN or in the New York Times: on Twitter. I’d see her comments retweeted by other people I follow, and learned about her book when it came out earlier this year. I had originally purchased Lena Dunham’s book to read this month, but exchanged it for this one because I realized I don’t really care what Lena Dunham has to say about things, but I do care what Ms. Mock has to say about things.

This book is a memoir that focuses mostly on her youth, starting with her memories as a young child in Hawaii, through moving to New York City for graduate school. Ms. Mock was assigned the gender male at birth, but never felt connected to that; she felt like a girl. Her story is fascinating, surprising, and at times heartbreaking. It can almost read like fiction, because it was difficult for me to realize that someone could experience what she did and come through it not just to survive, but to thrive.

Ms. Mock faced many disadvantages growing up, but she also recognizes that she had some things that other trans youth do not have. Early on she found her best friend Wendi, who was also trans, and helped her to not be alone at school. She is a very smart person and was able to earn a scholarship for college. Her family was supportive of her as she took more steps to make sure that her actions and appearance matched how she felt – she was not thrown out of her home when she shared her reality with her mother. That’s powerful.

Her writing about accepting who she is, and especially about what it means to be a ‘real’ woman, made a strong impression on me. This idea that we value trans people more if they ‘pass’ for cis people, or that someone is lying if they don’t share that they were assigned a different gender at birth, places cis as the center of ‘normal’ when in reality being cis is just common. This sentence, coming on the second-to-last page of the book, is one I want to embroider and hang on my wall: “We must abolish the entitlement that deludes us into believing that we have the right to make assumptions about people’s identities and project those assumptions onto their genders and bodies.” Spot on.

I should say that I’m not used to Ms. Mock’s style of writing. I’ve read loads of memoirs, but most of them are written by comedians, and thus have a very different feel. I think she finds her stride about three chapters in (although who knows in what order she wrote the book), but I nearly stopped after the first chapter because the writing was so very … descriptive. At times I felt like there was some sort of adjective word count she felt she had to hit, that I was reading a book that suffered from a lot of ‘tell not show’ sentences. It’s not the type of writing I generally like to read, but the story behind all of those words was so interesting and powerful that either I figured out a way to accept the style, or it became less prominent as the book went on. No matter – I’m very glad I stuck with it.

Sunday

23

November 2014

0

COMMENTS

The Perfectly Imperfect Home

Written by , Posted in Reviews

Four Stars

I found this book at this local store called Watson Kennedy, which is the kind of store I could easily spend hours in. It’s the kind of place where everything costs just a little more than it probably should, and where items are organized by color instead of type. It’s the kind of place that sells several kinds of olive oils as well as antique etiquette books. Anyway, the reason I share this is because it’s also the kind of store that leads people to buy books they really don’t need.

This is just such a book, but it was actually a joy to read. It’s a coffee-table-type book filled with lovely illustrations and tips for decorating your home. The tips are great, and only a little ridiculous at times. It’s a well-written and useful book (hence the four star rating), and I found it inspirational. The only problems are that a) I don’t really have a budget to start adding things to our house (although my husband and I both dream of a new couch, and maybe a coffee table that isn’t a $19 shoe rack from Target) and b) we rent our apartment. So a lot of the suggestions – especially ones involving painting walls or hanging a lot of items on the wall – just aren’t practical for us right now.

However! Someday we will figure out a way to buy a place, and at that point I will pull this book out again and look it over. The suggestions about lighting were especially great, which is a sentence that really makes me feel like an adult. I don’t think 13-year-old me would think that I’d enjoy a book with a lot of talk about lamps, and yet I did. If you are lucky enough to be about to buy a house, or trying to figure out ways to decorate your home, I think this is a nice book to pick up.

Sunday

23

November 2014

0

COMMENTS

What I’m Reading: November 23, 2014

Written by , Posted in What I'm Reading

Injustice

– ‘One is Stites’ cousin, Judy Mitchell, who is convinced Fennell is the real killer. “I just know he did [it],” she told The Intercept. “We’ve got to do something to stop this execution.”’ Is Texas Getting Ready to Kill an Innocent Man? (h/t @JeremyScahill)

Capitalism

– “Over dinner, he outlined the notion of spending “a million dollars” to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists. That team could, he said, help Uber fight back against the press — they’d look into “your personal lives, your families,” and give the media a taste of its own medicine.” Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt On Journalists

Reproductive Health

– “Comparisons between abortion and slavery are popular among the anti-choice crowd because most people agree that slavery is morally wrong.” Abortion Is Not Like Slavery, So Stop Comparing the Two (via @AngryBlackLady)

Rape and Celebrity

– “One reason that we have collectively plugged our ears against a decade of dismal revelations about Bill Cosby is that he made lots of Americans feel good about two things we rarely have reason to feel good about: race and gender.” No One Wanted to Talk About Bill Cosby’s Alleged Crimes Because He Made White America Feel Good About Race (h/t @ProfessorCrunk)

Language

– “Swearing, profanity, cursing, obscenity, and scatological terms are all different things. (Swearing is a subset of profanity, as we shall see, but it’s rather like squares being a subset of rectangles; there’s a good reason for the distinction.) They are not interchangeable.” This Is Thin Privilege

Size Bigotry

– “You may note that I’ve left off things like crying babies, tantruming toddlers, etc. That’s because I don’t think that people existing in an airport or on a plane should be treated as an annoyance.” 10 Things More Annoying Than Fat People On a Plane

Health

– “Health departments must work to sort out what medication is needed, what is available, and what is the best way to get it to those who need it. Who has you covered during a public health emergency? (via Me)

Racism

– “Western charity songs like the one being proposed by Geldof are not only patronising, they’re redundant and unoriginal. Producing an Ebola song now to raise money, nearly one year after the first reported case in Guinea, is belated at best. It reeks of the “white saviour complex” because it negates local efforts that have come before it.” Africans Respond to the Re-Release of “Do They Know It’s Christmas”

Unparalleled Joy

Wednesday

19

November 2014

0

COMMENTS

Pro

Written by , Posted in Feminism, Politics, Reviews

Four Stars

After the shit show that was the (legislative side of the) election in the U.S. earlier this month, I needed to read a book that would both make me angry and inspire me. I hadn’t heard about this book before I saw it at our local bookstore, which surprises me, as I thought I was on all of the feminist killjoy mailing lists.

Pro is a well-researched, well-argued look at why abortion rights are so important. That “pro” stands for pro-choice, and it is explored from multiple directions and through different lenses. Ms. Pollitt’s main argument is that those who are “pro-life” aren’t actually pro-life, but more interested in policing the sexuality of women. This isn’t exactly ground-breaking; feminists have been saying this for years. But this book differs in that it lays out literally all of the arguments in favor of banning abortion (either at all stages of pregnancy, or at specific stages, or for different circumstances) and knocks each on down, showing the inconsistencies as well as the impacts these views have on very real women.

The book is over 200 pages long but it only has eight chapters, because each chapter is devoted to going really in-depth into an area of discussion. Early on she shares with us the data on U.S. views on abortion, and how they aren’t really that consistent with the actions U.S. voters support. She then explores the idea of “personhood,” and whether those who oppose abortion really do view the blastocyst, embryo, or first trimester fetus as a person with the same rights as the pregnant person (ultimately arguing that they don’t, because of the other actions they take). This is followed by an exploration of whether women are actually people, some myths about abortion, and then the concept that it isn’t so much abortion, but what abortion represents (woman’s increased control of her life) that pro-life people oppose. Finally, she ends with a look at why compromise isn’t actually an option, followed by what it would mean to truly support women as mothers.

The only problem I have with this book is one that I have with any book that talks about reproductive rights, and it is the complete lack of recognition of the trans issues involved. Yes, it is usually women who are the target of laws restricting abortion, but trans men can also get pregnant, and are victimized by these laws as well, and there’s just no mention of that.

The author claims the target audience of the book is people who aren’t really sure where they stand on the issue, and I agree that these folks might find this book interesting. I think it’s also great for those of us who are very clear on where we stand but could use a little additional education.

Sunday

16

November 2014

0

COMMENTS

What I’m Reading – November 16, 2014

Written by , Posted in What I'm Reading

Harassment

– “Under this system, WAM! escalates the reports they receive to Twitter, collecting detailed data about Twitter’s responses to those reports. Once the program is out of its pilot stage, WAM! promises sit down with Twitter in order to “improve their responses” to gendered harassment.” If Twitter Won’t Handle Its Massive Harassment Problem, These Women Will (via @SLAwrites)

– “Australians were outraged after discovering Blanc, a so-called “date coach”, was holding seminars to teach men how to “pick up” women using physical force and emotional abuse.” US ‘pick-up artist’ Julien Blanc forced to leave Australia after visa cancelled (h/t @JShahryar)

Criminal Justice

– ‘The investigation by the Medill Innocence Project, she said, “involved a series of alarming tactics that were not only coercive and absolutely unacceptable by law enforcement standards, they were potentially in violation of Mr. Simon’s constitutionally protected rights.”‘ Duped by Medill Innocence Project, Milwaukee man now free (h/t @sarahjeong)

Sexism

– “There had to have been at least one young lady in that room who had been the victim of sexual assault who had not reported it,” Rev. James Thomas, whose son is a junior at Lincoln, told the Inquirer, “and there was nothing that was said by the president that would have given any comfort.” College president: Women lie about rape when sex doesn’t “turn out the way they wanted” (via @Slate)

– “At issue is whether pregnant workers should be afforded the same type of legal protections as disabled workers who would be allowed special accommodations that would allow them to do their jobs.” Democrats denied a proxy vote to a pregnant congresswoman. Here’s the issue. (h/t @scATX)

Trans Rights

– “According to medical experts on this issue, the assumption that a transgender girl or woman competing on a women’s team would have a competitive advantage outside the range of performance and competitive advantage or disadvantage that already exists among female athletes is not supported by evidence.” Heroes, Martyrs and Myths: The Battle for the Rights of Transgender Athletes (via @ParkerMolloy)

Health Care

– “On Jan. 1 this year, I started on the Obamacare insurance. I now pay just $126 a month for insurance; a federal government subsidy covers the rest. If we had to cover the full cost of our health care, we would have just $574 left each month for all of our other expenses, including food and medicines. Without Obamacare, I would have died. I’m scared the Supreme Court is going to gut the part that saved me. (via @drgrist)

– “Correspondents say all the women came from very poor families. Those who survived are receiving treatment in three different hospitals in the district.” Indian botched sterilisations kill nine women in Chhattisgarh (h/t @ClinicEscort)

Policing

– ‘The document says Brown’s killing and force used by police officers during protests that followed the killing “represent violations of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.”‘ Michael Brown’s parents address U.N.: ‘We need the world to know’ (h/t @roqchams)

– “This increase sounds notable, but the underlying data continues to be nearly useless. As we outlined in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in August, the FBI’s UCR program undercounts what it classifies as justifiable police homicides (while skirting the issue of non-justifiable homicides), and should not be considered a useful estimate.” Reminder: The FBI’s ‘Police Homicide’ Count Is Wrong (via @FiveThirtyEight)

Parenting

– “In America, today’s parents have inherited expectations they can no longer afford.The vigilant standards of the helicopter parents from the baby boomer generation have become defined as mainstream practice, but they require money that the average household earning $53,891 per year— and struggling to survive in an economy in its seventh year of illusory “recovery”— does not have.” How baby boomers ruined parenting forever (via @SarahKendzior)

Racism

– “It could be that the head of the police union wants me to stop working to raise the standards of police culture and accountability. It could be that he objects to the community policing and relationship-building measures that I am acting on, and attempted to use this non-story to discredit this work. I share the public’s speculation that this is the real option.” #pointergate (via @MayorHodges)

Saturday

15

November 2014

0

COMMENTS

The Need for Sick Leave

Written by , Posted in Feminism, Politics

About two weeks ago, Austin got a bad cold. He missed three days of work, but was basically fine by Saturday. Yay! But the next day I woke up with a cough. For two days it wasn’t so bad, but by the time I got home on Wednesday, it had taken over, and I was sneezing and sniffling and just generally miserable.

Obviously I do not like colds. However, this one has reminded me of how grateful I am for paid sick leave, and how disturbed I am that every company isn’t required to provide it. Me at work on Thursday would have meant sneezing every five minutes, disrupting colleagues, and spreading germs, all while doing no real work because I would be fuzzy from cold medicine. Instead I got to take the day and sleep, rest, drink fluids and blow my nose as often and loudly as needed. I had Friday off already, which means that I’ve been able to take care of myself to the point that I will be healthy when I go to work on Monday.

Without that leave, the cold could have gotten much worse. It’s been literally freezing here, so an upper and lower respiratory infection could turn into bronchitis (as it often does for me) or even pneumonia. But I didn’t have to make the 30 minute walk to and from work, or sit in freezing conference rooms. I could stay on the couch, with the kittens and the Gilmore Girls and multiple boxes of tissues and let the illness work itself out.

I do not understand the argument that if someone is sick they should either come to work (and risk making everyone else sick) or forgo that day’s pay. I’ve heard small business owners complain that they can’t afford this or shouldn’t be responsible, but I disagree. They say they can’t afford it, but can they really afford multiple illness stemming from the guy who couldn’t stay home because he needs to get paid? Paid leave of all kinds is what we should expect and demand as part of the total compensation. If I’m going to give you most of my waking hours five days a week, you should be responsible for more than just a paycheck. You should be care for the wellbeing of the worker. We are not just widgets that are a cost ti be calculated.

But as I said, in my case, I’m lucky. I have sick leave, thanks to my employer recognizing my humanity.