Apparently Women Aren't People

 In a move surprising no one except perhaps Susan Collins, the US Supreme Court has decided that women aren't people - they are baby incubators. 

I knew this was coming and it was still a shock. A friend of mine is looking for marches and demonstrations to attend. I just feel...despair. 

Not just despair -  of course I am angry -  but I don't see how my anger can do anything when justices appointed for life have ruled on this. 

This may be one of the 5 stages of grief, but I find myself  thinking how very weird this all is. We talk about constitutionality - when our constitution was written by men who thought it was okay to own people. Is the right to an abortion constitutional? The question itself is ludicrous as the constitution was written by men - some of which may have had an option on this, but many of whom had probably never considered it (because it wasn't their problem.  

I'm not even going to talk about the guns. 

FWIW - though I am sure there are a large number of creeps who think that women are just baby making machines, I suspect that a good portion of the right wing politicians who have banged this drum have done so in the service of  "Let's You and Her Fight" (So their corporate sponsors can co back to robbing us all in peace) This does not make me feel any better, however.

I'm almost 50, so getting an abortion is less likely to be my problem than it is to be my niblings problem -  but that doesn't make this less of an affront. It is still an affront to women's bodily autonomy. Anyone who thinks this decision is isolated and won't have repercussions elsewhere is far up de Nile.

Alison Bechdel’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength

 

I love Alison Bechdel’s work—I have since my college roommate El brought home a volume of Dykes to Watch Out For as part of the reading for a women’s studies class my junior year in college. 

 

I told myself I wanted to read it because a book about women, living comfortably sans men. But more likely I wanted to read it because it was *not* a textbook on chemistry or a book in French or anything else I was required to read---it was certainly the lightest reading material available in our rooms*—but I was drawn in by the characters. When we went to the Cities and hit Barnes and Noble I found the next volume in the series—spawn of Dykes to Watch Out For. 

 

I was not the only one of my college friends to be seduced by DTWOF. Even the men were interested. Some of this might be the growing interest in comics/graphic novels, but it was one of my former boyfriends who found DTWOF online in a weekly queer publication.

 

Or, it could just have been her interesting characters that kept us all reading. 

 

I need to read like I need to breathe. My senior year in college, I went home to NY for Christmas break. I brought about 50 pounds of books I needed to read for my Comps. I needed to read these over the December break, so I took a job as a part time hire at Macy’s. I thought 3 days a week would allow me more time to read. Foolish me. By the end of December I was working full time. This was not my first experience in working retail in December, but it was probably my most intense. I barely left the cashier’s box for the entirety of my shift. When I did leave it—to find the price of a garment that was missing a tag—customers were mad at me because I couldn’t help them-“you’re going back to talk to your friends instead of helping me!”

 

The other cashiers gave me advice that served me well the rest of my career—“kill them with kindness”  and “this is not about you as a person—they don’t know you.” 

 

At the beginning of December  I’d been reading De  Beauvoir in French (for my comps) in the break room. By the end of December I was re-reading Dykes to Watch Out for in the break room (and on the subway and on the ferry) because I was too tired to do anything else. A graphic novel soap opera with a snarky sense of humor was about my speed**. Not just then, but other times in my adult life, I have noticed that reverting to comics to read is usually a measure of exhaustion

 

Now, 25 years later I find this ironic. Alison Bechdel has just put out her third graphic novel, and it took me (me! I eat books!) 3 weeks to read it because I was too exhausted to do so sooner.

 

Some of this is normal—I need reading glasses to enjoy graphic novels. Bechdel’s books are much heavier fare than her comics were. But really. I met one of my boyfriends when he was reading Gravity’s Rainbow (I was reading Bleak House at a bar). I didn’t read the book until he went to Ireland for two weeks and I needed something to do with all the spare time on my hands. And yet, I plowed through that after work, for fun. (People would come up to me on the subway and say “Oh my God—you’re reading that? I never made it through the Crying of Lot 49.”) And fun it was—if a more than a bit disturbing.

 

And now I can’t even read a graphic novel in the evenings because I am too tired?!? 

 

Yes that was 15 years ago and we do change as we age but….I have 1  talent, which is similar to my 1 constant need. I read.*** And now I can’t even do that anymore, because of work.

 

No—not because of “work” but because my work drains me like a gelfling in the grip of the Dark Crystal. I read. That’s what I do. I read novels and history books—even badly written ones—because I want the things between the covers.  I retreated to Dorothy Sayers and Georgette  Heyer at the beginning of 2020 because I was scared, but now I find that while I am no longer as scared as I was last year, I am too exhausted to read anything less formulaic.

 

At the beginning of the pandemic, I struggled a little maintaining work life balance, but I found it. By January 2021, that balance was destroyed-there was always something that needed extra work, something that required that we work late (and call our boss and get yelled at while doing it.) I thought it was just short term stuff—by March it will be over, but here it is May and it is not over. 

 

I didn’t actually realize how bad this was until earlier tonight. I was sending a note to a friend about my opinion of Bechdel’s newest book, when I realized that an author whose work I could read when I was most exhausted, had become an author whose most recent book took me three weeks to read—and how very fucked up that was. And never mind novels <> comic strip.  Reading is what I do. And I can’t do it. 

 

 

*We had a triple—one sort of bedroom and a living room and a walk in closet *with a light fixture* because it was my room lottery number that drew the room I wanted the single. When we saw the room, I amended this to wanting to sleep in the closet which had a light and a door. As a consequence, I literally read my first DTWOF book in the closet. El had a great deal of fun telling this to to other people.

 

**Hey we’d gone to highschool with Julio and Marisol’s Decisions—of course a soap opera graphic novel was perfect subway reading.

 

***I don’t really care what Tyrion Lannister said, been doing this since I learned how to read with my mouth closed

 

****needs editing

Getting the Jab

 

I got shot #1 of the COVID 19 vaccine today (May 1, 2021.) It was a lovely Saturday and my husband drove me down to a pharmacy in Lynn to get my shot. As he works in construction, he’d gotten his (one shot) vaccine some weeks prior. While I had initially felt that given that I am working from home *everyone* in the Bay State is entitled to get a vaccine before me, I have changed my mind in the past few weeks.

 

For one thing, while there was an initial rush after the rules changed on 04/19 and anyone could sign up things seem to have tapered off a bit. I didn’t feel like I was stealing anyone eles’s place in line.

 

I signed in at the front of the store and got in line. The line went through the hallmark card aisle, so we all stood 6 feet away from each other in between shelves displaying Mother’s day cards and graduation cards in Spanish and English. Most of the people in line were Latinx, but there were a few black ladies and a very large Caucasian dude with a big mullet wearing a t-shirt advertising a local marina. 

 

They were playing 80s tunes in the pharmacy that day. I noticed the guy in front of me dancing a little bit to St Elmo’s fire, but I suspect he was just moving his limbs to keep his knees from feeling stiff.

 

The nurse practitioner who administered the shots was bilingual. She asked every one of us it we were excited to be getting our first dose—whether it was my middle aged self, or the high school kid who went two people after me.  How they found this woman and convincer her that her skills were needed in Lynn is a mystery to me but clearly they picked the right woman for the job.

 

Après jab, we all needed to sit for 15 minutes. During this time, we all stared at out phones. I was reading a book on my phone, but you’d never know. No one had a paper book or newspaper or magazine—just phones. The pharmacy treated us to Come on Irene and a reminder that Mother’s Day is May 9^th.  

 

I was feeling a little addled by the time I left, but I suspect this was more due to the fact that I couldn’t find a lightening cable than to the vaccine dose I’d just had.

 

One down and one to go

 

Getting vaccinated is your duty

 

 

The Horror of November 2020

 I told Christian he needed to come back from working in NC by November because I was afraid of what would happen in case of a disputed election I live in Beverly, MA—hardly a stronghold of yahoos—but after seeing the Trump Rally (unmasked, natch)  in October, I was worried.

 

All this is further proof that the danger never comes from the corner you expected it to come from. 

 

At the beginning of the month I had 2 dogs. During the month of November I  spent more that $1,000 on vet bills. And yet at the end of the month I only have 1 dog, because $600 or so was spent on my lab Hawkeye’s admittance and euthanasia by the emergency vet and the cremation of his remains. 

 

God.  I wish I hadn’t learned the phrase “Aftercare*” I wish a lot of things, but mostly I wish Hawkeye was still here.

 

It had always been Daisy that worried me—Daisy with EPI*** and behavioral problems. Daisy the German Shepherd who is clearly suffering the effects of overbreeding (see below***). In fact the first half of the enormous vet bill was because she was having exploding dog butt. 

 

My husband took her to the vet—which is no humans allowed in, due to COVID 19. Apparently after pitching a dramatic fit (lying down on the parking lot ) she agreed to go in with the vet techs and was deemed to be “a doll.” They gave us antibiotics for her.

 

I sighed with relief. The election happened. After a few days it was called (no matter the Orange Man’s mischief) I sighed with relief again. More fool me.

 

The Monday after the election, Hawkeye was suddenly drastically ill** and we bundled him into the truck to take to the emergency vet.  This was horrible. 

 

Unless you lead a charmed life, you don’t get to your 40s without some uncomfortable things, and some unbearable things happening to you.  So I hope you will understand that I am not exaggerating when I say this hurt as much as or probably more than the terrible things I have encountered in my adult life.

 

I will say this for the emergency vet—they were very good and very kind. The doctor who called us and explained what was wrong with him was very honest with us—we could spend $7,000 that we don’t have on a surgery, but we were likely to end up back there in 2-3 months.

 

So we said no. Or rather Christian said no because head experience with this before in other dogs.

 

There are many words and phrases that  I hate hearing other people use—“functionality” and “low hanging fruit” are usually at the top of my list but “so you are choosing to stop care now***” takes the prize for phrases that make me want to bite someone.

 

So we “stopped care” on our beautiful, sweet little boy. Which was awful. They allowed us to come in and visit with him for “as long as we liked’ and told us to press the doorbell on the wall when we were ready for the vet to come in. He looked like he was 100 years old when he stumbled into the visiting room—not the bouncy waggy boy he and been 12 hours ago. I don’t think he knew who we were. In some ways this made it easier—it was clear he was ¾ of the way gone—we were just stopping him from hurting more.  Even so, pressing that doorbell was hard.

 

I can’t help but think though, if he had been a human that came into a human ER they would have given him something for his pain but as he was a dog, they did not.

 

On the other hand, if he had been a human we wouldn’t have had a choice. They *would* have done whatever heroic treatment they could for him—he wouldn’t have been able to opt out of a painful and unpleasant end of life.

 

Everyone always says they want a surprise sudden death—not a lingering one, so this was the best thing for him. Suddenly unwell and then released from pain.

 

It’s less simple for us. We were shocked as much as grieved. Daisy, our German Shepherd and Hawkeye’s buddy, spent much of the day after we came back looking for her buddy “you left with him—where he now?” 

 

I have learned things from this although I don’t know that they make me feel better-I have learned that I don’t believe in heaven or the Rainbow bridge.  When he left, I knew he was gone. I have learned I can get through the most horrible things

 

When the Pet Crematorium called to tell us that they had Hawkeye “in their care” and asked what memorials we wanted from him I said yes to all of them because I was in shock and missing my little boy. Even as I agreed to them they sounded unappealing and ghoulish. Fur collected from him and prints of his feet would have been lovely—if we had collected them while he was still alive. As they were collected post-mortem they are…not something I’m going to put on my desk anytime soon.

 

 

 

*It appeared on my bill basically it means funerary expenses for my dog.

 

** Basically she has no pancreas

 

**Stomach cancer—apparently common in labs-which burst causing internal bleeding—also apparently common in labs.

 

***I give the vet credit—this was probably not her phrase—just something that the marketing people told her to say.  But really marketing people “stop care?” for a cherished pet? Maybe you should teach people to say “stop treatment?"

Save the Strand!

Now there’s a phrase I never expected to write. I was only briefly a Strandie—and only at the (now defunct) Fulton St Store. 

After graduating from Carleton College, I decided (for lack of anything better to do) to go home to NY, earn some money and go to France on a student visa, through an organization that arranged such things.

I applied for work at temp agencies, at head-hunters (I was—mistakenly, I believe—actually given an interview to *be* a head hunter) even at a French language temp agency, to no avail. So, not long after returning home with a college degree, I found myself applying for retail jobs on Broadway—the same as I would have done as an undergrad. On the 3^rd of July, I walked into the Bee’s Knees and asked the manager if they needed help. Reluctantly the manager agreed that they did need help and also reluctantly “hired” me but told me he expected I would never show up*. Immediately afterwards, I walked into the Strand and asked for work (couldn’t be worse than being hired by a guy who was waiting for you to fail/quit). As it turned out, they did need help, so they gave me the test.  Well, at the very least I am well-read so I did well enough—better on the French works/authors than those in English. Nancy Bass told me that she had just hired another guy but “We need someone here and someone at the Fulton St Store. I told him to go down there. Why don’t you go too, and whoever the manager prefers can work there and the other one can work here.”

A word about the Fulton St Strand—there had been a tiny little Strand by South St Seaport for quite some time. It was dark and not much bigger than some of the “museums” which were really souvenir shops dressed up by an entrance fee. When I got back to NY I had been to South St. Seaport and had gone looking for this mini-Strand amongst the outlet shops and tourist traps (for the purpose of book-purchasing) only to discover it had move to much nicer, airer digs on Fulton St. So I knew where the Fulton St Strand was (even though I’d seen it for the first time a week ago.) It was so airy, and so much less cramped than the regular Strand that I even thought it might even be air-conditioned (I was wrong.)

The next day—July 4^th—I showed up at the door of the Fulton St store with the staff right before opening hours. I was wearing a dress I had borrowed of my sister—not the suit jacket and skirt combo I normally had for interviews, but a step up from the t-shirts and jean shorts worn by the staff standing outside with bagels and coffees in their hands.

The manager of the Fulton St Strand was unaware of Nancy’s plans. I explained. “Well that’s rather..Machiavellian. She wants you both to come here. On the 4^th of July and compete against each other?” I got the job. I was working in bag check when my competitor showed up.**

I was hired as a cashier, which left me plenty of time for surreptitiously reading books behind the counter, which is nice work if you can get it—even at minimum wage. After going to school in the mid-west for 4 years, I couldn’t *not* be polite and so I got a raise after my first week ($.25 more an hour!) for my politesse. 

The Strand is named after the Strand in London, but as I got to know the other people who worked there—not just in the outlet where I worked, but after going to the main store to pick from the stacks for overtime in December I felt that the name was fitting from the perspective of the employees—a  strand—as in the shore or sandbar where one might wash up for a time.

My colleagues included playwrights, poets, anarchist Buddhist managers, artists and (it was rumored)Ca guy who had been big in real estate until he threw a client through a window. I met a man whose cat had saved him from a burglar and a woman who had contacts in Paris (met through the same program I was going to use to get a visa.)

However, the Fulton St store where I worked was not the 12th St Strand. We did not have rare books. We mostly had discount versions of Whatever Was most Popular (Angela’s Ashes and Underboss by Sammy The Bull Gravano) for the Wall St crowd to buy on their lunch breaks, as well as dollar carts out front and a dollar table in back. We also had Advanced Readers Copies (ARCs)—books given to reviewers and booksellers not intended for resale (which many reviewers did sell to the Strand, clearly) but not as big a collection as the 12th St store—although I did find a copy of Les Trois Mousquetaires in French ( I read it while sitting behind the counter.)

As far as we knew this store—on paper—was basically a warehouse from which (bonus!) the Strand occasionally sold books. At the time the Strand was the biggest used bookstore in the world. However, we knew that most of the trade came from mail order sales (I’m not even sure the Strand had a website yet.) 

We thought that the Bass family owned the building on 12^th St along with—who knows what other real estate in NYC. 

As I was trying to save up money to go abroad, I took overtime in December on my days off to pick from the upper floors of the 12^th St store. This—I was told—was where they kept the real weirdos. Not just the anarchists and the people who wrote  “Puddin Tane” on their name badges (so that when the customers complained about them the management could say “we don’t have any employees named “Puddin Tane.” Yes, that happened.)

“When you get there—there’s going to be a guy with black hair that will stare at you. You can explain that you’re there to pick for the Fulton St. store. And he will continue to stare at you” was what the manager said before I went out to the warehouse for the first time. This was an accurate description of my reception there.

Not unlike the bookstore downstairs, or downtown, each area had a custodian in charge. They were almost all young men. Most of them were listening to a Walkman. Every single one of them was polite to me and asked me to let him know if there was something I couldn’t find. Most of them were young dudes, but even the elderly guy with long hair (who I was told was a junkie and didn’t normally speak to women) was helpful.

I am shocked that the Strand is in bad way—we always assumed that the Bass family had all kinds of resources—how could this be. But of course, I worked there in the late 90s, and my sister worked there in the early aughties. The Strand at the time did a lot of mail order business. And these days, when one wants to order a book one doesn’t think of the Strand—one thinks of Amazon. I suspect this is the problem (along with the fact that the other money maker—rare book sales—is kind of an “in person” transaction.)

When I think of this threat, it is not the customers that I worry about, or even the demise of another NY institution. I’m thinking of the Strandies—the poets and junkies and the artists and the bibliophiles and the merely confused who washed up on the shore of the Strand and found they could stay there. I’m thinking of my sister—who went to baking school while working as a paperback sorter, of her leftist (ex) boyfriend, of the ex-tennis pro who I worked with, and the guy who had one more college class to take before he graduated, and the poet and the manager that had dumplings every Sunday while arguing in a Beatrice and Benedict fashion.  I’m thinking of a place that people can come and work and *be* without having to put a tie on or makeup and heels. It doesn’t pay well, but you’re allowed to be an intelligent person without having to catch the early train (boat) in clothes that must be dry cleaned only to be admonished by a manager to “think outside the box.”

* To be fair, I did not—having been hired by the Strand

**Apparently after being told to report to 12^th St, he showed up the next morning, clocked out at lunch and was never heard from again 

What Else Will This Change?

Amazon is sold out of toilet paper and the Boston Marathon is postponed.

The president has declared a state of emergency and there are calls to close NYC's schools. The Met is closed--as is the MFA in Boston.

I am about to get an up-close and personal experience of what my dogs lives are like.  

I am glad we* are all taking a proactive approach to the prevention of the spread of Corona Virus. However, I am worried about which measures adopted in crisis may become normal business activities.

Not all of these are bad things—companies adopting paid sick leave policies are long overdue and any steps we take toward providing universal healthcare are also good.

My concern is with other things—crisis measures adopted that ”prove” that whatever services are withheld or replaced were never really necessary. I’m worried about in-person classes. It’s great that we can offer distance learning so that students (from grade school to grad school) do not have their education thoroughly disrupted, but these are not replacements for in-person classes in the same room as the other students and the professor.

Museums and libraries are closing as a way to stop infections—this does not mean that we don’t need museums and libraries.

The City of NY has banned gatherings of more than 500 people. As a stopgap to disease spread this is a great idea, but this does not mean that we do not “need” the ability to gather more than 500 people in one place ever again.

It is a good thing for the moment to allow hospitals to relax rules on where they can treat patients, but in the long run this is a terrible idea—this is why rules about this were set up in the first place.

Working from home—It’s awesome that we are now in a position (technologically) where many of us can work from home. Is it a good thing that this proves that many jobs don’t need in person attendance? I love getting back 3 hours a day because I don’t have to commute, but this plan relies on employees using their own internet service and their owns phones and their own second monitor—there’s a lot of BYOD** in there. I am also worried that this will “prove” to cities and states that they don’t need to invest in infrastructure such as public transit or highways as this crisis proved we all could work from home.

Crises are times when we need to try out new ideas (because the old ones don’t work—see also “Crisis”) some of these innovations are leaps forward  that never would have been possible in normal times (think of all of the surgical advances made during the Civil War.)  Crises are also a chance for the powers that be to erode our civil liberties or present us with reality TV. 

*in this case “we” means our corporate maters

**SAHAUYOD (Stay At Home And Use Your Own Devices)

Bo Rho in 2019

I watched Bohemian Rhapsody a few weeks ago on Amazon. I loved it--I was thoroughly impressed, but partly for reasons I never anticipated.

This film had been in the making for quite a while--with various complications. In 2015/6 someone  (Brian May?) said the best part of the film was halfway through when Freddie died. Which made no sense, for a film that was about Freddie.

Sasha Baron Cohen was going to play Freddie, but then he quit. And no--I don't follow this kind of thing, but I just did a Google Search on "Freddie Dies Halfway Through" and it reminded me of this stuff and served up another page which claims there was never a script where he died half way through the movie.

So yeah, this was a movie that had a bit of a rocky road to screen, apparently.

I was interested, because Queen was not a band I knew much about. I first really noticed Queen when Wayne's World came out my junior year of high school, because the film brought Bohemian Rhapsody back into vogue.*

In many ways it has a lot in common with other music bio-pics--Walk the Line, Velvet Goldmine, Amadeus**, etc. Artist starts in obscurity,  artist makes it,  fame goes to artist's head and he becomes a dick, resolutions afterwards vary.

In one way however this film was different (at least from my perspective). By 2018, everyone has access to youtube, so anyone--even those of us who didn't know Queen existed in 1985--can see Queen's Live Aid performance. This means that when Rami Malek and his and the rest of the cast do the Live Aid concert, they are redoing something that anyone in the audience could have seen. They are not giving their interpretation of the characters-they are reproducing the characters every gesture. I'm guessing this made for an interesting acting experience.

I'm sure the production team was aware of this and played with it--the film starts with a man in a wife-beater  and stone washed wrangler jeans with a studded arm band going on stage (without showing his face). But they don't have to--we all know recognize the outfit.



*While waiting in the East Caf to go on for Sing the song came on the radio and we all--actors, singers, orchestra, techs sung along.

**yes, this is part of the same swim lane as Walk the Line. Don't believe me--consider Freddy playing the piano underneath it/backwards--total hat tip to Amadeus