The Baby Bachelor

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So this may be only the second-best Bachelor parody out there, but it provided both today’s guffaw-till-I-cry moment of the day* and the very real hope that my kid will be much easier to understand in just six months or so!

* Isn’t it weird how much we expect this now? Pre-internet, I feel like I had a laugh-till-my-stomach-hurt moment maybe once every two weeks or so, and now, it’s seriously daily. Have I grown much better at finding things that tickle my funny bone, or am I just supremely sillier than I used to be?

(Photo courtesy of Someecards)

Bike Questions

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When we moved to our current neighborhood, almost six months ago now, one big plus for us was the location. There’s so much close by, and the paths to our nearest “main street” drag, to the park/playground, and to Zoe’s daycare are pretty and residential. With our sparkly, new-house-buying eyes, we exclaimed, “we’ll get bikes and ride everywhere!”

So, of course, it’s been almost half a year and we’re still driving (and sometimes walking) everywhere. Part of this is probably due to this small, really minuscule speedbump: I don’t have a bike. I actually haven’t regularly ridden a bike since I was a kid, but I take strength and enthusiasm from one of our society’s most tried-and-true (and trite) adages, and I am ready to ride again.

But guys, I’ve been doing some veeeeery minimal research into bikes, and this shit is daunting. I feel like I thought it’d be like buying a rug (“I want this color, and it should be around this size. Ooh, that fits — done!”), and instead, it’s like buying a goddamned car when all I know is that I want to drive something pretty.

So I need help! Here is what I want: to go on very short trips, 2-3 miles roundtrip at the most. These short trips would primarily be to/from daycare (which is 8 blocks away), the boba shop (don’t judge.), coffeeshops, that sort of thing. I am not concerned with being fast, and my neighborhood has moderate hills, but nothing too intense. I want to have some way of attaching (is that the right verb?) Zoe — a bike seat or trailer or something. I’d prefer it be pretty simple to operate. I’d reeeeeally prefer it be pretty, because, well, I’m shallow. And finally, this brings me a teeny bit of shame, but: if possible, I’d love to hear what bikes I could easily ride while still wearing heels/wedges. Because that’s just reality, man.

I’m willing to spend a decent amount (what is that for bikes anyway? $500? $200? $800?), because I plan on riding it a little bit every day. Do you spend a lot on bikes after you buy them? Like a certain amount a month or so? I’d probably be storing it outside, if that matters.

AAAAH, so many questions. Let’s calm down and focus by looking at more pretty pictures of ladies on bikes:









PS Unlike all of these stylish ladies, I plan on wearing a helmet. Ugh, another thing to research — where do you get a cute one?

(Photos courtesy of 1 & 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10)

Dealership Plates

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Like anyone who’s lived in LA for a while, I’ve sat through some serious traffic. Living and working in this city doesn’t necessarily mean you go through traffic hell every day, but it does mean that you lower your expectations a lot, at least if you’re concerned with your blood pressure and overall health. So you hopefully buy a car with a comfy interior, figure out a way to create an ideal music/talk radio/podcast/audiobook setup, maybe work out a great bluetooth situation so that you can make calls during your commute, and just sit back, at least somewhat content in the realization that if you’re going to be crawling along for 45 minutes (to go six miles!), at least the sky is a clear blue and the sunlight’s streaming in.

But at some point, you also realize that it can be quite boring, so if you’re like me, you start cataloging the minutiae of your particular commute: obsessing over how the gardener on that corner lot always misses the same section of lawn, counting down the days till that terrible-looking blockbuster comes out and they finally change out all its equally terrible billboards, and — my favorite — taking note of every single other car around me. I try not to stare, because we’re all pretending to be in our own worlds, but c’mon, if you’re a beat-up purple (old) VW bug with a Colorado plate and a large number of bumper stickers advertising various peace-related causes, I’m going to be making up a story about what your life is.

One weird phenomenon that I noted in my hours on the road is, to my knowledge, a predominantly LA thing: the dealership plate. By my count, every tenth car in LA is driving around with no real license plate (not even a temporary one in the rear window!), but instead sporting an advertisement for where they bought the car. I gave myself a few days to see if I could capture this, and I was able to take the below pics with close to no effort:



I guess it’s possible that each of these cars was fresh from the dealer, or even out on a test drive, but… probably not. And given the sheer number of these driving around, I’m pretty sure people just leave them on their cars for months and months, or basically as long as they can get away with it. Frankly, why not? Without identification, you’re essentially not accountable for any damage or reckless driving that you do, and I have never ever seen a car with one of these plates be pulled over — I’d imagine if one was, you’d be in trouble for not having a real plate? I mean, technically, you could be going around committing all manner of crime, because how are they going to identify you? “It was a dark blue Durango… from Keyes in Woodland Hills?” Real helpful.

So now that I’ve come face-to-face with how incredibly prevalent this is, I’m baffled at how it’s anywhere close to legal. I only vaguely recall the details of my last car purchase, but don’t you have to have a temporary plate showing before you get your real ones in the mail? Is there some special exception here for which literally one in every tenth Angeleno qualifies? Does this happen in other cities, or is it a total LA thing? And how did I manage to get four pictures and not one is of the biggest offender, which I’d see MULTIPLE TIMES A DAY on my commute: the Mercedes-Benz dealership in Beverly Hills?

All good questions. Someone help me out here?

Pregnancy Dos and Don’ts: A Lit Review

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This is a month or two old, but I didn’t see it the first time around, and it’s the perfect encapsulation of what it is to be pregnant in the era of internet “information”:

How to Have the Best Pregnancy Ever

My favorite part:

And your husband should have a suitable job, because what he does for a living at the time of your child’s conception could actually cause birth defects. So make sure your child’s father is not a mathematician, physicist, computer scientist; artist; photographer or photo processor; food service worker; landscaper or groundskeeper; hairdresser or makeup artist; office or administration support worker; sawmill operative; working with oil or gas; working in a chemical industry; printer; or operating cranes or diggers.

Two ways to look at it:

  1. You can’t win.
  2. You’re always winning!

Trying my hardest to always go with #2, especially because the chatter hardly dies down once the kid is out…

(Photo courtesy of Jezebel)

Magic Johnson and EJ(3!)

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Living in LA, it can be hard to escape the presence of Magic Johnson — besides the fact that he’s obviously one of the greatest Lakers ever, he also owns a million companies, including a chain of movie theaters and, I swear, a TGIFridays that I see every time I drive home from the airport. Of course, most recently, the biggest purchase he’s been involved with is the LA Dodgers, a news item that highlighted how much people in general and Angelenos specifically seriously, SERIOUSLY love Magic.

And I get it, Magic is a great and really inspirational guy. But I don’t think I ever really had a strong opinion on him till I watched the below video, where he proves himself to be an incredible father and gay advocate. Some backstory: Magic’s son EJ(3!) was just “seen” stepping out with his boyfriend (aside: when you watch the video below, it’s hard not to realize that EJ’s TMZ moment — like so so many — was totally orchestrated in conjunction with some involvement from him, which is its own weird thing that I don’t even think is so sleazy any more (they’ve worn me down), but still a very strange part of the business of celebrity). A few days later, of course also on TMZ, a sit-down with Magic ensues where he talks more about EJ coming out (with Magic’s help!) and his support of his son. Obviously it’s savvy, great press for the whole Johnson family, but I don’t care — Magic as a proud dad makes me all snuggly inside:

 

PS Another great, recent insider perspective on homophobia in sports, written by one of my favorite football players, Scott Fujita (who happens to play for the Cleveland Browns, hurrah!).

(Photo courtesy of Radar Online)

The Little Reader

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I’ve just emerged from a fog of sickness that descended over House Phoenix — a disgusting stomach bug that first hit Zoe, then Evan, and finally (and most whiningly) me. But those small, almost cute (stomach bug!) words don’t even begin to describe the all-engulfing, emotional, wrenching experience that was having the whole family be sick for weeks. Ugh, gastroenteritis begone — I’m just so incredibly glad to see the end of you!

So one thing that happened as a natural result of being cooped up together for days on end without visitors is a lot of contemplative conversations between Evan and me, which often devolved into sentimentalities about our little girl (blame me — I get very emotional when I’m sick… or hungry… or when it’s cloudy out…). As much as we take detailed note of all the changes that she’s going through from day to day now, it’s hard not to still dream about what sort of older kid and young woman she’ll be one day.

With that in mind, when I ran across this video of 13-year-old Neveah Mosher today, I found myself with really mixed emotions.

On one hand, I was a huge reader as a kid, and have all sorts of memories of not wanting to be bothered by life, because I’d prefer laying in a sunny spot of my house and just getting lost in a book. That’s a pleasure that’s really hard to describe to non-readers, and it’s one that I still enjoy so much as an adult. Reading really does open you up to so many other worlds, incredible storytelling is a thing of magic, and skillful deployment of language can be a revelation.

But at the same time: 325 books a year is a LOT, and you do wonder what else in her life that leaves time for Neveah to do. The video seems to suggest that perhaps her upbringing is such that losing herself in books is one of the safest things that she can do, and she truly seems like a mature, determined young woman. As with most 13-year-olds, she’s a bit absolutist, but black-and-white opinions like “without education, you’ll be a nobody” are certainly more welcome than “Joe Jonas or NOTHING.” I’m just not convinced that I’d be psyched if Zoe ended up as a 300+ books a year reader, though I can’t quite pinpoint why…

Rape Culture

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Last week, I wrote a post about the current state of feminism where I was actually quite positive and upbeat. I concluded that, though it can be daunting that there’s so much work to do, our very vigor for engaging in that work is inspiring, and maybe even enough. I thought, out loud and in a public venue, that it’s enough that we continue to have a discourse about gender inequality.

And then things got crazy. Not all of a sudden, of course, but all of a sudden into my limited, sheltered world, and now it seems that every day brings more reports of men raping women, of men threatening to rape and kill women, and of men using 1) women’s completely reasonable fear of being raped and 2) the system that sustains and normalizes that fear as tools to keep things the way that they want them to be. And all I want to do is wail and cry and punch and honestly, delete the naive stupid hope that I put out there mere days ago that we can all have a reasonable shared discussion on gender equality and that that conversation’s mere presence is enough.

The most recent situation that I can’t stop dwelling on is Adria Richards at PyCon. I fully admit that while this is tangentially my industry (I work in tech, but I’m not a programmer), I definitely don’t have the level of contextual familiarity with this particular conference or community to comment on the inciting conflict. If you can believe it, what Adria witnessed and how she acted is actually not the main story here. There was a conflict, and it escalated to the level of real-world consequences (the offenders were fired from their jobs) that I’m assuming were not her initial intentions, but if it’s how the cookie crumbles, that’s life. Whether or not what they were saying was appropriate for the situation, whether or not the offense caused to those who heard them was enough to merit being reported by Adria, and whether or not the action that she took was the appropriate one — all of these things are worthy of debate and discussion. When you add in the context of it being a very male-dominated field and our culturally-entrenched norms of how women and men communicate with regards to conflict, it’s an interesting conversation that I’d be interested in having. This is what I was trying to be generous and empathetic about in my last post — these are the discussions that I think it’s worthwhile to have, regardless of what conclusions are reached.

But what happened next is chilling and frankly, incredibly depressing. Much like Anita Sarkeesian before her and tragically, probably like many future women who speak up about entrenched sexism, Adria Richards has been the target of an avalanche of vulgar, demeaning, and very real threats of rape and death (NOTE: that link features VERY violent imagery and links to violent language. But I feel it’s important to draw attention to how ugly and terrifying this all is). Her real-world address has been publicized — this is not internet shit that you just shrug off (which, to begin with, SIGH). And the most terrible thing about this is that to many women, like me, it almost seems inevitable.

When I recently turned 30, an idle thought popped into my head: “Huh, good for me. I made it to 30 without being raped.”

On one hand, that’s a ridiculous thought — who would think something like that? I have a fairly risk-free lifestyle and have for ages — a steady partner for the last 12 years, a social life that rarely if ever involves being in a compromising situation, and c’mon, a 30-year-old body that gave birth to a human, and shows it. So why would I even think that? Because I was raised with the expectation that it could happen: if I wore too short of a skirt, if I got too drunk, if I said something provocative, if I gave the wrong impression, if I strayed too closely to the whore end of the virgin/whore spectrum that we’re all supposed to know and obey. Being raised with that expectation has nothing to do with my particular upbringing or anything my parents ever said. It just is a fact: we live in a society where a large number of men rape a large number of women. Obviously it’s not a reality that we should blindly accept, but ignoring the fact that it happens is as ignorant as pretending that we can achieve societal color-blindness (aside: one of my favorite Girls scenes this season is when Hannah, arguing with her black boyfriend Sandy, tells him that she hadn’t ever thought once about the fact that he was black, to which he retorts “That’s insane. You should, because that’s what I am.”).

So here I am at 30, and I’ve never been the victim of rape. And possibly, neither have Anita Sarkeesian nor Adria Richards. And yet: almost every woman in our society has been the victim of the systemically-regulated fear of being raped — the thing that keeps fueling rape culture. That fear can operate on a largely dormant low boil for ages, when you’re in a situation where you actually innocently don’t realize it’s a possibility or you simply forget because it’s not really your reality. That’s often for the better: fear is incredibly stressful and paralyzing, and obviously, it’s way more advantageous to go on and live your life without it. Worry does no good, the sayings all go. But then! You read about very real women who make public contributions to the ongoing discussion about gender equality (and you see, whether or not you feel that those contributions are positive, it’s beside the point), and all it does is draw the attention of faceless men who threaten to rape them senseless, murder them if they ever met, and otherwise violate every facet of their lives. And the fear returns. It feels very very real. And while I don’t often identify primarily as a mother, yes, it’s killing me to think about how I can introduce my daughter into this world where this fear is so real.

There is so much talk these days about teaching kids about how to speak up against bullying, against inappropriate touching, against any of a litany of abuses. But how can we do that and still allow that, yeah, it’s totally possible that those instances of speaking up will target you for threats against your innocence, body, and life?

I just don’t know.

(Photo from Muslim Women Exposed)

VERONICA MARS MOVIE.

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I fully realize I’m internet-shouting. I AM REAL LIFE SHOUTING TOO.

The best news of the month: no doubt encouraged by the success of both Netflix’s resurrection of Arrested Development and Amanda Palmer’s Kickstarter-funded album, Rob Thomas and the cast of Veronica Mars have announced a new Kickstarter campaign to fund a Veronica Mars movie.

I adore that this is the weird media landscape we live in now, where a great project that not enough people saw, but those who did grew veeeeeery passionate about, can get a new life due simply to enough willpower and gobsmacked media executives who are all looking for some way to monetize growing internet fanbases. And, oh shit yeah, it works.

I’m giving money towards this, and for those of you who saw and loved this TV show, I’m hoping you will too. If you never got to see it while it was on, please take this as my sincere recommendation to try an episode on Amazon or iTunes. And while you may not agree with everything I love (which is as it should be), please know I love Veronica Mars like I love Friday Night Lights, not like I love Top Model. Translation: this is not my idiosyncratic taste — this is a truly great piece of art, and the world can only be better with more of it.

So please give. You’ll get to see this face!

(Photo from Cinematic-Orchestra’s Tumblr)

What is feminism in 2013?

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One of the most common topics that it seems society grapples with over and over again these days is gender equality. Do we have it yet, should we really be striving for it, what does it look like, when will we know when we’re there, and of course, is there even any merit in continuing to ask these questions? You’d think that the sheer resilience of the obsession would definitively answer that last question, but no, there are always those who are ready with the classic response, “UGGGGH, are we still talking about this? BORING.”

I feel like, in very recent times, there’s been even more attention being drawn to the questions of what it means to be a woman these days, and separately, what it means to be a feminist. Whether it’s conversations (deliberately focusing on the positive here and not the vitriolic name-calling from trolls that can result) about working mothers, changing one’s name when getting married, feminist fatigue, or women’s responsibility to other women, it’s obvious that we’re all still grappling with these questions and not finding answers that satisfy us, at least not enough to move on.

And that’s honestly okay.

One thing many folks don’t know about me is that I have a master’s degree, and while it’s technically in Communication, in my mind, it’s also in Gender Studies, since the overlap between the two was the bulk of my academic interest. I mention this primarily to underscore that — while I no longer ask anyone to refer to me as Master Abby — I do have a strong, abiding interest in the theories and questions of modern feminism, and I’ve read (at least the introduction and conclusion to!) quite a large amount of feminist literature.

Based on all that, my incredibly informed, educated conclusion? I’m still unsure about it all. Which is as it should be. Yes, I have specific opinions, but they’re not written in stone, which is okay, because this is something we all (I shouldn’t have to specify, but yes, I mean women AND men) live every single day. And every new perspective I read, every new life phase that I enter has the chance to change my worldview to some extent. For me, the true work of being a cultural critic, besides having the pretentiousness to call yourself one, is to be open and agreeable to that change, to want to grapple with those questions, even if you never arrive at a satisfying conclusion. So, yes, it can be incredibly frustrating to see questions and issues of gender inequality everywhere, especially if you do take a dip into those aforementioned nasty name-calling areas (comment sections are just The Worst); but not engaging and not caring is the choice to work against sexism, against racism, and against all forms of inequality.

I’d never tell you what to think, but I fervently would ask you to think, and to continue doing so as you hopefully allow your worldview to be challenged. To my earlier point implying that men can (and should) be feminists: one of the privileges inherent in being in the norm (e.g., being male, being white in America) is that you can go through a lot of life not thinking about your gender or race — not because you don’t want to, but because you don’t have to. The awakening of this consciousness in those populations is absolutely vital work, and frankly, beautiful. I don’t vaunt male feminists above female ones simply because of their Y-chromosome, but because it is much easier for them to choose to keep their eyes closed, and to ignore the work that I feel we must all take on to truly change our world for the better. So when they make the choice to open themselves to this struggle, as we all should be doing, it is 100% a positive thing for our whole society.

At least, that’s what Master Abby thinks.

PS If any of you are in Seattle and want to warm the cockles of my heart, go check out my thesis. No, seriously, it’s actually a checkout-able book. It’s been nine years, but that still gives me a thrill!

(Photo courtesy of the genius XKCD, titled “How It Works”)

2460…

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Who knows what makes things funny? Is that a scientific field, like humorology or some such?

If you are one of those people, please tell me why I can’t watch this nine-second video without breaking into insane giggles, even though I KNOW WHAT’S COMING EACH TIME?