Go big or go home

(Is “go home” bad? Because I like being home)

Photo by Nina Hill on Pexels.com

At the grocery store, a woman and I stared across a space that was too small for both of us at once.

I stopped and gestured her to go.

She scurried and apologized.

“You’re allowed to take up space!” I told her.

She shook her head and answered, “Not too much.”

I want to take up space.

I am so tired of the expectation that I should be small. That I am not allowed to consume space. That I should subordinate my needs to those of others.

I’m done.

Mr T and I argue about this when we are walking. He maintains a hyperawareness of his surroundings, including what’s behind him.

If someone is walking behind us, he will squeeze over so that person can pass.

I refuse to think about who’s walking behind us.

If I am driving, I need to be aware not just of what’s in front of me and to the side of me but also behind me, but walking?

No.

The person behind me can do what I do when I am behind someone and want to pass: She can say, “Excuse me.”

But I am not going to live my life anticipating and reacting to what someone else might want.

We were on the London Underground from the airport to town. The coach was getting more and more full, but the young man across us had a backpack on one seat and his legs sprawled open so wide that he took up a total three seats.

Nobody asked him to pull in his legs so they could sit. Or to move the backpack.

I probably would not have asked, either. For one, it was a foreign country and I didn’t know what the rules were, but also, this was 15 years ago when I had not reached Woman of a Certain Age Who No Longer Gives a Shit stage.

(I love this stage.)

I watched in fascination as new passengers boarded and stood rather than say anything to this scowling jerk.

I used to stand instead of asking someone to move a coat or bag on a bus seat or at the airport.

No more.

Now I (politely) ask the person to move the item so I can sit.

The purpose of a seat is for human butts, not for bags.

I also have reached the stage of Saying Something to the seatsavers on Southwest Airlines.

Southwest does not assign seats. You board by group. There is no saving of seats. If you are in Group A and your spouse is Group C, you probably won’t sit together.

Yet people save seats.

Last time I was on Southwest, a woman near the front had her bag in the seat. I asked her to move it because I just didn’t feel like walking all the way to the back.

She refused, telling me she was saving the seat.

I didn’t care enough to fight, but I did say out loud that there is no saving on Southwest.

It was a moral victory.

And as I write this, I think about Patriarchy Chicken, which I started playing years ago.

I wrote about it years ago.

When I was searching for the post, this one also came up: Another “Go Big or Go Home.”

Looks like I have a one-track mind.

Looks like I am still angry about this issue.

I was wrong about almost everything

They lied to me. They lied to all of us.

“These textbooks did not include a single woman artist until 1987” source

Why did my high-school boyfriend, Shep, a white male raised in what I presume was a middle-class family, and I turn out so differently?

I admit it’s not like we were soulmates or anything. We dated for a few weeks and that dating consisted of going to see “Animal House,” spending an evening at a Panamanian casino (I borrowed a blue cotton sweater from a friend and I think I spilled something on it – I am praying that I got it cleaned before I returned it to her), and necking during lunch.

He broke up with me right before the prom and asked a girl from my gym class instead.

Wait. Did he even break up with me? I don’t even remember.

Anyhow he and his buddies spent prom night in a Panamanian jail. I don’t know why. Speeding, maybe?

He was not a catch, that’s for sure. (But he was a very good kisser.)

So maybe our paths always diverged. But we share some pretty significant background (dictatorships, colonialism) that, once examined, leads – or at least it led me – to interrogate what I was taught as a kid and to adjust my opinions.

I’m trying hard not to posit that I am somehow superior and more enlightened and that I now know All The Stuff, but I think I can safely say that someone who votes for a convicted felon who tried to overthrow the government and who thinks vaccines are bad is perhaps not a deep thinker.

Hence I will posit that I am, indeed, superior to an anti-vax felon voter.

I will also say that life and education is a journey and as much as I have already realized that I was so, so wrong about so many things, it’s possible that I will be wrong again.

If I am wrong, I will admit it and adjust my behavior, as I note in this post:

Here’s the thing.

I have come to realize that so much of what I was taught in school is a lie.

Maybe not a deliberate misstating of the truth, but man did they leave out a lot of facts.

For instance, I didn’t know until a few years ago – despite an entire year of Texas history in 7th grade – that the Texas fight for independence from Mexico was because Mexico had outlawed slavery and the Texans said hell no you will take our slaves from our cold dead hands.

The Mexicans were the good guys in that war, y’all.

I was taught that the US was empty and that the land was there for the taking, not that it *had been emptied* by the genocide of about 90% of the population thanks to the European importation of disease plus deliberate relocations and killings.

I was taught that there were three races and that they were separate and distinct and different.

I was not taught what a sundown town was.

I was not taught what redlining was.

I was not taught that the GI Bill, which is how my father was able to afford to go to college, was not available to Black veterans after WWII.

I was taught – by inference – that only men did important things. The only reason I knew who Marie Curie, Harriet Tubman, Shirley Chisolm, Wilma Rudolph, Florence Nightingale, and Elizabeth Blackwell were was because the base chapel had a small library with a shelf of biographies of famous women. I did not learn about these women in school. They were not part of the curriculum.

My college art history textbook, by HW Janson (in the image above) did not have a single woman artist in it when I took the class.

I didn’t know the details about abortion. I was raised to believe it was pure evil. I didn’t know how many pregnancies went bad. How many women were raped.

Or, even more importantly, how so many people want to see women controlled and trapped and want to take away our power to make probably the most critical decision we can make in our lives, which is if and when to have children.

I didn’t know I didn’t know I didn’t know.

But.

Now I know I didn’t know.

Which means now I am responsible for knowing. For educating myself.

And that’s where I think Shep and I diverge.

Either he’s never realized he doesn’t know.

Or he knows and doesn’t care.

Because the world as it is?

It suits him.

Eating the apple

Maybe sometimes it’s better not to know

From Geoffrey Goins, who says, “I updated to the clearer version. This information is from the Centers for Disease Control.”

Did you know that if you look up someone on LinkedIn – let’s say an old boyfriend from years and years ago, that person can see who looked him up?

So if you have had no contact with a boyfriend from decades ago but are just a curious, NORMAL person who wants to know how the story ends and you do a normal person lookup on LinkedIn, you could possibly look like a deranged stalker?

That’s why, I discovered, you change your settings.

And it’s why you start with Facebook for looking people up because there’s not a way to know who has looked at your profile.

And that’s how you discover that your (very short time, as you go through a short list of names) high school boyfriend has turned out to be an antivaxxer trumper.

How does that happen?

How does it happen that someone who you thought you knew – who seemed reasonable? – is actually kind of – stupid? (Someone you spent a lot of time kissing behind the portable classroom at lunch?)

Shep – not his real name of course – Shep is not the first person in my life to turn out to be a trumper. I have several trumper relatives, including one who won’t get vaxxed because she thinks the vaccine will change her DNA.

Oh and she has a gay daughter who is married to another woman but yet, she voted for trump.

You don’t get to choose your relatives.

But what does it say about you when your friends are trumpers?

In my defense, this was in high school.

I paid no attention to politics back then. The only thing I knew was that the Panama Canal treaty negotiations meant that we had bomb scares at school, which meant we got out of class, and that the school bus drivers would go on strike, which also meant no school.

I was very happy with the situation.

This was also when Archbishop Romero was assassinated, just a few hundred miles away.

The staging for the recovery effort from the Jonestown murders happened just two blocks from where I went to swim practice every afternoon.

My neighbor flew the helicopter that took the Shah of Iran and his gold-laden suitcases from somewhere on the Panama mainland to the island of Contadora.

We lived in a dictatorship!

I was in the middle of world events but I never talked to Shep about them. They were background noise, issues my dad and his colleagues were dealing with. Why would I talk about my father’s work with my boyfriend?

Shep no longer lives in the Panama Canal Zone – he moved to Texas for college, I think, and stayed there.

I also went to college in Texas and stayed there for years until being forced to move for a job.

I wonder how two people with such similar backgrounds – our big divergence is that he had lived in the Canal Zone his entire life and I was there only because my father was in the military and happened to be stationed there – could end up with such different mindsets.

How does someone who has lived in a dictatorship and knows the dangers embrace a presidential candidate who says he wants to be a dictator? How does someone who grew up in a country run by dictators write something like this in 2024?

 If you wanted to board a plane, eat at a restaurant, enter the country (legally), have a job, etc you must be vaccinated. Same thing for wearing masks. I know this is all in the past now but we should never forget the tyranny of our government or we’ll go down the same road again.

How does someone who saw the inequalities created by a colonial power vote for someone who wants to increase inequality?

Although maybe if you are on the colonial power side, you think these inequalities are OK.

And maybe if you are a white man in Texas, you think things are OK.

Were there signs? Maybe. Who knows? We were kids.

But damn there are red flags all over the place now.

Shep shared this photo on his page last week.

He’s not talking about trump.

I don’t think I will be sending him a friend request.

Happy new year

Stay healthy we have work to do

This sweet boy is Duke. We are fostering Duke while he recovers from an upper respiratory infection. He is mellow and relaxed and just wants to sit in the box in the basement, although part of it might be because he is sick. He’s a stray, but was clearly someone’s beloved pet – he’s affectionate and lets me brush his belly. But he feels crummy because through no fault of his own, he is sick.

Don’t get sick!

I know you are all already vaccinated against covid, including all the boosters, and that you do not do stupid things like fly without a mask. (We mask anytime we’re indoors around other people – we’re not messing around.)

But did you know that because of certain stupid anti-vaxxers, who have decided that it’s not just covid but all vaccines that are bad, that we are seeing a resurgence of whooping cough?

That’s right. That disease that you thought existed only in novels set in Victorian England has returned. And it’s highly contagious. And it’s miserable. And even if you’re vaccinated, you can get it. (But presumably, it’s less bad if you’re vaxxed.)

It’s so contagious that when my friend’s 7th grade son got it, the doctor prescribed preventive antibiotics for the entire family.

PREVENTIVE ANTIBIOTICS!

You’re thinking, “But I was vaccinated against whooping cough/pertussis as a child! Hasn’t that disease been eradicated?”

We would laugh at the idea of a resurgence of old-timey diseases if we were living with normal, intelligent people.

But — you know.

Those People.

Anyhow, check to make sure you’re current on your DTAP (Tetanus, Diphtheria, Pertussis). Who knew that it was something you needed boosted? But you do.

And be thankful that you are probably (if you are reading this) among the people vaccinated for smallpox. Who knows what craziness this new administration will unleash?

Will nobody think of the CEOs?

When will this senseless reign of terror against wealthy, privileged white men end?

What are we even supposed to do about these CEOs?

They don’t feel safe.

Every day, they’re afraid to go to work.

There’s nobody between them and a shooter.

Not even a substitute teacher, standing behind the door with a pair of scissors in her hand.

When will we do something about their pain?

HOW MANY CEOs MUST WE LOSE BEFORE WE ACT?

Maybe we could teach them to hide in a coat closet?

Maybe we could teach them to dial 911?

Maybe we could install metal detectors at the entrances?

Maybe we could have active shooter drills in the office?

Maybe we could arm the administrative assistants?

Every CEO is precious to someone and certainly cannot be replaced.

We continue the fight

We cannot let them win

Photo by Bhavesh Jain on Pexels.com

All I can think about is when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Chile in the ’90s – shortly after Pinochet had stepped down from being dictator but was still wielding power as a senator for life – and a Chilean woman told me that when Pinochet was running things, there was no rape – that women could walk the streets safely.

I just looked at her and started laughing.

No rape?

In a dictatorship that disappeared people?

Yes there was rape, I told her. There was rape. It just wasn’t reported.

There was a movie years ago about a military coup. The first thing the rebels did was take over the radio station. (This was before the internet.) The most important thing for their coup to succeed was to be able to control the narrative.

I think about these things when I read the sanewashing of that man in major media.

Don’t let them fool you. Read these wise women:

I also like

(These organizations can all use your donations, BTW.)

I asked a man in the Aldi parking lot if he was registered to vote.

He told me he had stayed out of politics for the past few years. “They don’t never do anything for people like me,” he said. “Look at these streets. Look how bad they are. My car gets ruined and I have to pay to fix it.”

I told him about how the Republicans had put such hard restrictions on the cities’ ability to tax that public services were underfunded. I said that I understood why he was frustrated. And then I said that we can’t quit – that if we don’t vote, the people who put that man into office will win.

And that’s what I have for now – I will not let them win anything else. And if they do, it will not be because I didn’t do everything I could.

Will nobody think of the straight white Christian men?

How long must their suffering continue?

Yesterday, I let myself get trapped into a long, unproductive conversation with a voter.

Lordhavemercy what on earth made me think I could change the mind of a 30something white Christian man who is convinced he is being persecuted and that abortion is the “biggest human rights violation of our time?”

I won’t go into the abortion stuff, except to say he wants to know why the baby should be punished instead of the father in the case where a ten year old girl becomes pregnant as a result of rape. (All pregnancies of girls under 16 are the result of rape.)

I tried to explain to him that the body of a ten year old girl is really not ready for pregnancy but he brushed that off.

I didn’t even bother with “why should the life of the ten year old girl be less important than the life of the fetus” because although I am a fool who can get trapped in conversation, I am not that much of a fool.

But his absolute assurance that he should be running things and his annoyance that he is not – where on earth did that shit come from?

He said he was raised in the hood by “social justice warriors.” (The annoyed tone in quotation marks was his.) That his parents are “woke” and that his mother will be voting for Kamala.

What we really need in this country, he said, is for God and the gospel to be part of government. That feminism had ruined things for everyone. (Except for women, I noted. Feminism has not ruined things for women.)

I pointed out that all feminism did was force men to up their games so that we would want them instead of needing them, but I guess the opinion of a woman does not count. He did, however, appear to be startled at the idea that a woman should be able to have a choice about whether or not she stays with a man, but then, this is a man who appears to think that only men should be choosing anything.

I didn’t ask him what about people who aren’t Christian because by that point in the conversation, I had realized there was no changing his mind or even getting him to reconsider his opinions and I was trying to get away.

Note to self: It’s really not necessary to be super polite to people who are pissing you off. Although I think there is always, with women, the fear that if we directly contradict a man that we might set him off so we have to be very careful.

He told me that as a straight white Christian man, he is seen as The Oppressor and that the only path to redemption was “anti-racism,” which was when he launched into his “the Dems and Kamala are communists have you read what Marx has to say about this?”

I finally got some courage and interrupted him – Lord do these men count on women maintaining the social norms of not interrupting – and said I had to go.

W.T.F?

Where do these men come from? Clearly, it wasn’t in his raising. It’s sounds like his parents did the best they could.

But this was one seething white man who feels as if something has been taken from him that should have been his.

Even though I have encountered this attitude before, it still surprises me. A VP at my old job – very smart, very educated – UW Madison, not exactly a breeding ground for White Nationalists – had joked to me about how he had a hard time finding a job when he graduated from college in the early ’80s.

“I was a straight white guy,” he said. “What chance did I have?”

As a straight white woman, I got asked questions like “What do your parents think about your having a career?” Men grabbed my ass when I was a cocktail waitress. Male co-workers my father’s age massaged my neck and then got all butthurt when I didn’t want to go to dinner with them.

The right answer was, of course, “Every chance in the world. This world has been built in your image.”

Don’t let this Halloween nightmare come true!

This weekend, find a way to help Kamala and all your local Democrats win

Vote as soon as you can. Once you show as having voted in the Democratic databases, nobody should call you or knock on your door, which means volunteers can focus more time on people who are still undecided.

(I know but they do exist and they can be swayed!)

And volunteer. Make phone calls or text or knock doors. Knocking doors is actually not that bad! Yes, a woman literally slammed the door in my face the other day and you know what?

I just shrugged and moved on to the next house, where I had a lovely conversation with someone who does support Kamala and all the women (in my neighborhood, it turns out all the Dem candidates are women). He had just moved to the new place this year and didn’t realize that his voting location had changed, so I was able to give him that information (it’s all in the little app you put on your phone – MiniVAN has the voter name and where their polling place is and any notes from previous conversations) and tell him when early voting started. Our early voting starts on Tuesday and Tuesday is his day off, so he promised to vote on Tuesday.

The house above? For some reason, it was also on my MiniVAN list, but the only name was a woman’s name.

Because I am a chicken, I didn’t knock on the door, but I noticed there were some packages on the front porch. One was addressed to a male name; the other was addressed to the woman on my list.

So I put one of my little sticky notes – I keep a batch in my purse and you should do the same – on the package addressed to the woman.

Volunteer! Click this link now and sign up!