I am in an easily frustrated mood today.
For reasons beyond my ken, the text in the Compose window now displays one font size smaller than it used to, though it all appears the same in the Blog view. Also, hitting [Return] earns me one carriage return, not two. Though really, it was more like one and three quarters.
The two main reasons - I am a listy person today! - I despise WYSIWYG and HTML:
1) I have never seen WYSIWYG-generated HTML that wasn't complete and utter ass. This must have gotten better than early Frontpage days, since now we have JavaScript (I assume that's what lets me hit [Ctrl][I] to italicise text), but still. STILL.
2) I don't know what's going on with the code, and I am a goddamned control freak when it comes to that. I like MS Word better than Corel WordPerfect in quite a few ways (comparing MSW '97 to CWP 7, I think), but one way in which CWP is vastly superior is Reveal Codes. I could see where things began and ended, where I had mistyped something, where a bit of styleness appeared when it shouldn't have. Brilliance! The closest thing I have with MSW is better using styles and Reveal Formatting. To which I say, bah.
I want to be able to very specifically say "Here is italicised text (don't include that space), there is a link that didn't take twice as long to create, and hey lookit, paragraph breaks and I know when they're happening!".
To be fair, I don't get this fussy about LJ, and LJ assumes paragraph breaks left and right. Still, that's all it assumes, plus I can switch between plain and rich formatting if I want to.
*searches for a list of my previously-used tags*
*becomes deeply annoyed*
I don't want a list of my 100 most-used tags. I want all of my tags. In a list. Fucking goddamn clouds - give me numbers. I'm not tagging my shit for others, I'm tagging for me, and I don't want to have to squint in order to find that tag I only used the once.
Honestly, I can't explain at the moment why I don't just move to some other blogging area. (My Yarnum Knitsum blog does not count, as I use that exclusively for yarnings, and don't want to confuse the issue.) Maybe I'll do a little shopping around today. I've already explained why I have a journal that is not my LJ one, so the question of "Why even look?" is already answered. I think the excessive complexity of Vox ("Do you want to know what tags you've used? Then go to the main page, click on this link, and you get a cloud of popular tags; for all of them, use a searchbox that's impossible to find!") has just bugged me one too many times.
*grumbles mutinously*
Lord save me from the concept of shiny-over-useful. I admit that though I wish form and function to be balanced, I'm more in function's camp. Still, I can accept shiny - I can accept shiny that's slightly slower than non-shiny - if only being shiny didn't often mean compromising usefulness.
Later, I bite the heads off of stuffed dolls. News at 11.
ETA: Of course, Blogger.com, the only other blogging site I can think of that isn't Vox or LJ (or its clones), is down for maintenance. I think I am now too grumfulous to be anywhere near the computer.
I thought some more about why I don't care about or for the "Am I wearing too much patriarchy-approved clothing to be a feminist?" argument. This is a symptom of being me, not being interested in the topic itself but spending plenty of time discussing the discussion. I'm so frightfully meta.
I don't particularly care about the clothing for feminists discussion because it is an unimportant discussion, after a certain point. That point is sometime roughly after women are informed that they can choose how to dress, and they make that choice. It's entirely possible that I think I'm choosing for myself when I wear a skirt and makeup to an interview, but instead am really bowing to societal pressures. Frankly, there are bigger fish to fry than nitpicking about where the line between personal and socially-influenced choice lies.
The only reason I'm getting all meta about this is because I recognise this tendency to burrow further than is perhaps necessary, because I do this all the damn time. There are times when I've had to physically remove myself from a situation because I was focusing too hard on one aspect of one topic. "I have to send this resume out today, so what say I don't spend an hour fixating on making all the pixels line up correctly, hm?"
In other news, every time I write something like this, I think that it would probably serve me well to pepper the post with indicators that the views expressed are my personal views and opinions. Then I figure that if I'm writing the words, then of course they're my views and opinions. I've never quite gotten the "You think it should be like this for everyone!" argument, since my response is both "Of course!" and "Of course not!".
"Of course!": I'm human, and my appreciation of diversity comes after my desire for things to be easy. By which I mean, I appreciate diversity in things, I try to push myself towards new and challenging ideas, &c, but my gut-level "I want" response is "Why doesn't everybody do things my way?". It's been hard work getting past that, honestly. I try not to let it out, unless I'm ranting about something and not caring anyways. I wish I had psychological terms to throw at this...
"Of course not!": This would be the appreciation of diversity, not to mention the "Aren't you a human being in your own right, to make your own choices and form your own opinions?" thing. (With a side dish of "I have no interest in living others' lives, thanks".) I am displaying my argument on a topic, and others are welcome to engage it, accept it, dismiss it, or print it out and set it on fire. (That last, only if they take pictures.) Filling a post with "In my opinion" and "That's just me, though" and all that detracts from the argument (", in my opinion"). They pull the punches, so that it's less "Engage me!" and more "I'll just be over here with my thought, don't worry about it".
I'll admit I'm not always good at having discussions. I get flustered, I don't have a good memory, &c. The way around that isn't to avoid discussions, it's to get better at them. So, I do what I can.
I lost track of where I was going with this. I started out with feminism, and ended up with realising I haven't had enough coffee just yet.
Today, it is about random feminist-related thoughts.
* Every so often I wonder if feminism really isn't necessary any more, if it has served its purpose, and so forth. Course, then I read about a woman who couldn't get EC because she wasn't married or raped, and about women who prefer to tsk at her rather than learn about the facts, and the number of emails she's received expressing their collective desire for her to suffer and die, and I realise that I'm wrong.
I don't have a cheap and simple answer for the issue of pharmacists with morals that are different from those of their customers. Generally, I figure that pharmacists should butt out of people's lives or find a different damned line of work, but I'm sure I'm missing something that would make the counterargument ("They should totally be allowed to keep a job where they're not going to perform a lot of it based on morals and not facts!") make sense. However, I do know that it's not only reprehensible that doctors would refuse a woman EC because she wasn't married or raped, it's a sign of deep and abiding hypocrisy - because could you even imagine a doctor refusing to perform surgery on someone who's been shot until they prove they weren't doing something immoral to earn being shot? Yeah, not really.
At any rate, check out Emergency Kindness: "Emergency Kindness is run by a team of "Janes" spread throughout the country. EC is hard to get in America due to the widespread practice of doctors and pharmacists refusing to give the pill because it conflicts with their personal beliefs. If you are having trouble procuring EC, we will do everything in our power to get it to you before your 72 hours are up." If I had any way to contribute, I would; I will keep this link in mind when I'm again employed.
* Also at Pandagon, Amanda writes about what to do for men, during this whole feminism thing. I like this article because... how to put this... feminism isn't personal for men the way it is for women^. I know a few men who are feminists (or pro-feminism, or whatever), and I know women who aren't feminists (in the "I don't approve of the movement" way, not just the non-labelling way), so clearly this isn't me saying "All women and no men are feminists!". Rather, it's me saying "Things you're not aren't as compelling to you as things you are, overall". To compare, I am all about anti-racism, and I do research from time to time on ways to root assumptions out of my skull, but it's not going to be as personal for me as it would be for a black person, because I don't have to deal with all the negative shit of racism. It's not bad, it just is.
Bah, I got off on a tangent. Back to the link, there's a lot of great discussion there, including discussion of class differences, the effects of industrialisation, and so forth. I endorse that post, I do.
Of course, how much of my support of this is due to a feeling of misplaced guilt, as though it were my responsibility to assist men in becoming better people? Fie, I shall leave such introspection for another day, one wherein which I don't have a headache already.
^ I should point out now that while I try to use non-all/nothing language, sometimes I don't feel like further enclunkifying a sentence with moderate language. By which I mean, don't assume that "You're making rash generalisations and saying 'all $this' and 'no $this'!" as an argument will fly here.
* I wanted to write a bit on clothing choices and whether they're pro- or anti-feminist or what, but I honestly can't be arsed. There is a point after which women are making choices for themselves, not for men, and since I figure I've gone past that point, I don't really care about my clothing choices and what they say about me.
* No, I'd rather link to an article on how men invented humanity, point and laugh in order to avoid baffled sputtering, and then link to a terrific and scientific rebuttal. Somebody actually thinks "feminism, in its most obviously primitive forms, is undermining human evolution" on purpose and without sarcasm. Ahahahahaha.
* In conclusion, I'd love to write about an encounter with a "But we're all equal!" woman, but yknow, headache. Plus jobless. Back to the analgesic grind for me, for now.
First off, if you're here and not there, I exhort you to read this post about depression.
There are many terrible parts to depression, and I don't intend to give the impression that I spend my time ranking them, but one of the more terrible parts has to be the transitions.
When I'm doing fine and getting depressed, I feel like I'm letting everybody down because I've been depressed before, and shit, here I am again, didn't I learn anything? This, of course, is very effective in keeping me from finding treatment, since the mere fact that I've gone through this before means I'm obviously doing it for the attention.
When I'm depressed and I'm getting better, I feel like I've been lying to others about how bad off I've been. Like I've been lying to myself about how bad off I've been. For example, when I'm in the middle of a depression, my sex drive goes straight into the toilet. I can barely stand to be touched, hell with having sex. When I start to pull out of it, my sex drive starts to come back... and it feels like I was just refusing sex because I was in a snit.
Yeah.
I say this because I lost my job this week, and that should've drawn me further down into the depression I've been in... except, I've almost (almost) felt like my usual pragmatic self. ("Almost" because I still feel like an utter waste of the nation's resources, but that's for later.) And it feels like, shit, why'd I put my friends through all this if I was going to react to a real problem with generic pragmatism, as versus getting more depressed? If I was really depressed, I would've gotten worse, not balanced out. So I keep to myself more, because I can't stand the idea that I was just faking it, though I really wasn't, this I promise, but how'm I gonna prove that?
It's no wonder I effectively stop thinking about depression when I'm transitioning from it - the spirals of thought are enough to drive anyone mad.
Shit, it's complicated up here.
The context is the recent Amish shooting incident. kittikattie on LiveJournal made a post about it, which was good, and then replied to a commenter to the post, which was fuckin' great.
When followers of Islam attack people, it's considered standard for an entire faith to be tarred as "terrorists" and hating freedom. When women do shit like drown their kids, everyone starts tarring them as bad mothers and uncaring bitches and feminism is making them hate babies or something. When a kid shoots up a school, the gamers and goths are at fault and stalked for weeks (and smeared for years). When one black man attacks someone in the hood, everyone's suddenly scared of the black man at work even if he'd never even offered them overly hot coffee. Minorities in American society always see themselves being nothing more than a crime profile until they prove otherwise.
But if the EXACT same standard is applied to repeated attacks or offenses by white males--serial killers, people who shoot up schools (two in less than a month!) because they hate women, child abductors, fundies, whatever--they're suddenly individually crazy. And that shit shouldn't fly. Either we are ALL individuals and the crazy people are individually batfucking insane and don't cover a whole people, or we ALL are nothing more than groups to be painted with the darkest shades when someone that looks like or believes like us fucks up. You (generic throughout, as always) don't get to tar everyone in a certain faith or culture or race as a group of crazy with some good people, and then claim that individualism applies when you're getting poked at with a brush.
And the blatant tarring of people who are not considered the norm in society--which is overwhelmingly seen as the middle to upper class white nuclear Christian family--is bullshit.
I'm going to ramble, because rambling is nearly always useful to me.
"No right to be assumed harmless": more on men and suspicion"
I come down firmly in the middle here. On the one hand, a commenter reproduced the post, replacing male/sexism terms with black/racism terms, and I can totally see how awful it can be. On the other hand, whenever I read men getting indignant that they are being treated with suspicion just for being male, I don't see any suggestions for what I should be doing differently. I shouldn't assume that all men have the potential to cause me harm, but 90+% of attacks on adult women are perpetrated by men. What should I do?
I mean, seriously. If I can expect at least a sexist comment from three men in seven (I'm feeling gracious today), and there's a chance that one of them may bring it to a physical level of some sort - and a chance from there that it'll end really poorly for yours truly - how am I supposed to assume 100% clean-slated goodness for each man I meet? Especially since there's no decent way of telling beforehand who'll be That Guy?
What I do is I maintain my wariness anyways, but don't let on to the guy that I'm doing so. As I'm female, he's male, and I'm squarely in the average as regards strength for women, I don't want to be stuck in a situation where I might have to protect myself physically. Check my exits, check for other people, and maintain a distant friendliness and a feeling of having something else to do but no offense, it isn't you.
I want to insert some language here about the difference between 100% guilt and reasonable base assumptions, but I'm not finding the words for it. Besides, people who can't well see the difference there probably won't agree with this post either, so it's just as well.
This in no way means I can't be friends or friendly with men, or even such with men I've just met. It does mean that I think about these things because I have to, not because I'm a terrible person. When I balance my safety with another's feelings, my safety comes first. I've not heard a better suggestion for how to behave or feel.
The comment that best represents this, by mythago in that post:
"It's just that it is (sadly) sometimes difficult to know who can be trusted and who cannot."
And if you make the wrong choice, you're either a bitch or deserved whatever you got. Sometimes both.
--
I swear to god, now I want to write out that language. Curse you, the internets!
There's some huge semantic oliphaunt shitting on people's arguments, and I can't find the right words for it. The problem people run into is the difference between being wary of someone because of past experiences with their group and not trusting someone because they're a member of said group. When I don't trust a man I just met because he's a man, I'm accused of being sexist; when I'm wary of a man I just met because I've had bad past experiences with me, I'm mostly sensible. (Some people would still call me sexist.)
The analogy leaks into gays meeting Christians, men meeting women, and white people meeting black people, among others. If Bob (who's gay) has had some nasty run-ins with Christians in the past, and he meets Joe (who's Christian), is he justified in not trusting him, or is he being Anti-Religion?
My solution to the whole megillah is this:
Trust and mistrust are in the same category as love and hate - they both involve an investment in a person. I have to know someone enough to be able to make a judgment as to whether they get my love or hate, my trust or mistrust. (Or none of the above, but let's not cloud things too much just yet.) Thus when I say "I don't trust Joe Randomguy when I first meet him", the assumption is made that I know him well enough to have judged him worthy of mistrust, and the fur flies. What I'm really trying to say is I am wary of Joe Randomguy when I first meet him. That, to me, gives off more of the impression of "The only thing I know about him is that he's male, and I've had bad experiences with men, so it serves me to be on my guard until I know him better", and less of "The only thing I know about him is that he's male, and that's enough for me, dammit".
The best feelings I get are when I can put words to concepts. Wow. This is better than singing.
It's not my most favourite of hers, but I still like it.
I've seen the play once, and listened to the soundtrack countless times, and this is still my favourite track. (I'm not certain that the name's right.) For whatever reason, this always gives me chills.
Ages ago, a net-friend asked: what do you first watch for when you're out walking alone, and you see another person walking your way? What is your hierarchy of wariness, as it were?
I didn't answer at the time; since that's not a conscious process for me, I needed to self-observe for a bit. What I found was too varied to be combined into one great lesson. The data contained one man, one woman, a group of each, and a mixed group. ("Group" includes a couple of people; I state when I distinctify otherwise.)
- Group of women = paranoid, self-conscious in a non-displaying fashion.
- Group of men = depends on the type. With higher class, I'm effectively invisible; with lower class, I am moderately wary and stone-faced during the day, and deeply paranoid during the night. At night, I'll make non-obvious detours if necessary, just in case. With frat boys, I tend to act normal during the day, and act invisible towards night. (I lived in Boston, so there's actually a distinct category for frat boys.)
- One woman = vaguely self-conscious, also checking her out in a comparison sense.
- One man = depends on the type; see above for "group".
- Higher class = I'm generally invisible. I'm not high-class enough to register.
- All classes = if I'm dressed comfortably, I feel like I stand out a bit; if I'm dressed business-normal, I feel judged. I can't be certain how much is them and how much is me.
- Mixed group = They're too busy with each other to fuss about me, so it's all good.
I am more likely to be judged by women, and more likely to be wary around men. Weirdly, race didn't seem to be much of a factor, apart from what I noticed about the juxtaposition of race and class (which I am so not getting into right now). There's probably more data, but I don't analyse this enough to have it just yet. Regardless of what I'm doing or how oblivious I seem when I'm out and about, I am always aware of my surroundings, partly due to my paranoia, and mostly due to my safety.
I always try to carry myself in such a way as to be "safe" - invisible, joking in just the right tone when engaged, feigning temporary deafness (in a sincere fashion, not in a pointed fashion - provides me with an excuse), et cetera. I don't like the idea of someone taking offense at me not reacting to their commentary as I walk by, and getting close to me to make a point.
I'll just note that while I'm trying to use non-gendered language here (I try to do that in general, despite my distaste for almost any non-gendered pronoun, including "they" - the linguist in me, alas), I cannot come up with even one time when a woman has done any of these things. The day I get a woman shouting "Woo!" while she drives by, or a woman making comments at me while she's working outdoors, or leers or suggestive comments or intrusive actions from a woman, I will post it here in big bold flashy letters. In a serif font.
Perhaps it's just the (USA's) society's upbringing that creates women who compare and judge, and men who leer and prey. To which I observe, most of my social circle (back East, anyways; don't have one here just yet) behave in unapproved-by-society fashions. So frankly, I don't really feel like excusing behaviours based on the belief that "society made it happen!". I don't like that excuse in my personal life, and I don't like it elsewhere.
My usual carousing through the internet sparked this. I try my best not to interact with people, really, so I rarely encounter this stuff. But, I have to get around somehow, so the data comes in.
(To be fair, most of my interaction with the world is via my commute to work, which is filled with mid-day people (who're tired) and crazies (who span all sorts of bounds, and aren't included in the above data). Still.)
In conclusion, the more I read about feminism-related topics, the more uncomfortable I am with a lot of things around me and in me. Part of it is, I'm sure, due to having yet another port opened to the usual vagaries of constant observation. Like I bloody needed another thing about which to be self-conscious. (Sic.) The rest of it is, what percentage of me is, to put it bluntly, buying into the mainstream culture because it's easier? I fear the answer is "A great deal, you ninny", like it often is whenever I ask myself this. Which means change. Dammit.
I am not being coherent here, because I am exhausted like whoa. It is, after all, four o'fuck in the morning. (A normal person's 11p, apparently.) It's possible that I'll rewrite this later on. It's more likely that I'll draw from this post when I post about some other aspect of feminism-related stuff that's pissing me off. C'est la guerre, I suppose.
1) I want to have size/placement options default-settable.
2) Uploading an .mp3 via Compose > Insert From Computer on Firefox caused it to hang like whoa. I'm making this using MSIE, and having previously uploaded the .mp3 via Organize. *shrugs*
3) KMFDM remix of Rammstein covering Depeche Mode's "Stripped". It's really truly awesome, and much better than both the original and the cover.
