our bodies, our selves /  by mrm

There are several important issues that are being addressed by Peer Health Exchange, including obesity, alcoholism, and drug-abuse. And while I'm comfortable asserting that all of these issues have intersections with feminism, I particularly want to give PHE mad props because they're also tacking violent relationships and teen pregnancy. Which is important, because they work with high schoolers. Apparently one in three teenage girls in this country becomes pregnant. Meanwhile, conservatives throw their aprons over their faces at the thought of teenage girls taking sex ed. Because, you know, obviously all the girls who are pregnant had great sex ed classes in high school. Of course, the science doesn't bear that out. And while (predominantly male) politicians dither about if and how to teach our youth about consent, safety, personal boundaries, and contraceptives, girls are getting unintentionally pregnant. Male and female people are entering and staying in violent and unsafe relationships. Which brings us back to PHE. PHE targets "high schools that lack health education and in which the majority of the students live at or below the poverty line" and then "recruits, selects, and trains college student volunteers to teach high school students a comprehensive health curriculum consisting of thirteen standardized health workshops on topics ranging from decision-making and sexual health to substance abuse and nutrition." In a nutshell: Free, quality, no-agenda sex- and health-ed for underserved youth. Now you see why I'm excited. 

Was sex ed a lousy, insulting, awkward joke and complete waste of time when you were in high school? Yeah, me too. Wouldn't it be awesome if that stopped being the case? We talk a lot about individual rights in this country. But I for one refuse to believe that a parent's right to raise their child "the way they see fit" trumps a child's right for safe and honest information about their own body. Children and teenagers are also citizens, and it's past time we start treating them as such.

So, PHE? They're hiring and looking for volunteers. (And of course, they'll take your money, too.) Check 'em out, & spread the word.

hell yes we can /  by mrm

I think – I really do think – that pretty much everyone knows that female people are under-represented in science & tech. (But don't take my word for it, check out these transparently-sourced statistics.) Meanwhile, there's a helluva lot of money and jobs in science and tech. Anyway, the point is, if a girl wants to blow things up or build bridges or apps or robots, I'm all for it. Unfortunately, girl students' performance starts differing markedly from boys' right around middle school – just when science gets interesting! This is also the time when girls stop expressing as much interest in topics that are, culturally,"for boys." (There is so much research on this. You should check it out.) Enter Techbridge, an organization that "inspires girls to discover a passion for technology, science, and engineering, empowering our future innovators and leaders." They provide after-school programming to an impressively large group of East- and South-Bay schools (some of the higher-need areas in the Bay Area, in case you didn't know).

Icing on the cake? Their website includes a holiday gift guide of presents that encourage girls in science, technology, and engineering. Pretty charming. And rad radness itself.

How can you get involved? Well, they don't seem to be accepting volunteers, but they are hiring. And hey, I've said it before, but I'll say it again: You can give them some of your money! People, I'm serious. Think of all the money you spend on stuff that does nothing to improve the world. Now go out there and find your favorite 501(c)(3) who is rockin' it, and give them $15. You'll like it!

rooms of their own /  by mrm

Wait, literacy and a focus girls' education? Be still my heart! That's exactly what's going on at Room to Read, an international nonprofit organization based (yup) in San Francisco. Their website is full of shitty-but-true statistics like this one, "In the developing world, 42% of girls are not enrolled in school," and, "Of the 793 million illiterate people in the world, two-thirds are female." On the other hand, they also have awesome-and-true statistics such as, "Providing a girl with one extra year of education beyond the average boosts her future wages by 20%," and, "More than 13,000 girls in eight countries now have access to improved educational opportunities and holistic support as part of Room to Read’s Girls’ Education program." Can we just stop and look at that for a minute? 13,000 girls. 13,000, since 2000! Room to Read's programs focus on girls transitions into and out of secondary school, the organization engages with government officials and school admin, buys uniforms and ensures safe transportation, they get parents involved – and many of the girls they work with are the first in their families to finish secondary school. Let's think about that for a moment, too. The wasted talent, intelligence, and potential around the world. They're changing that.

Room to Read also builds schools, school libraries, provides reading and writing instruction, and, in an especially cool twist, produces children's literature in local languages. Are you excited yet? This is so awesome. You should really consider giving them some of your money.

bang bang bang /  by mrm

Today I want to talk to you about Tom Tom Magazine. This is so transparently cool, I'll let it speak for itself: "Tom Tom Magazine® is the only magazine in the world dedicated to female drummers. It serves as the ultimate go-to guide for the latest and hottest info on lady drummers and beatmakers. Tom Tom seeks to raise awareness about female percussionists from all over the world and hopes to inspire women and girls of all ages to drum, all while strengthening and building the community of otherwise fragmented female musicians." They have a tv channel, the aforementioned magazine, a shop, and they even host events.

Can I get a hell yes? To community building, and to making loud noise. It's only been around since 2009, but I hope it's here to stay. 

that money is just sitting in your bank account anyway /  by mrm

People, I am late. As a matter of fact, I am very late. But I am not so late that I won't start. 

It's March, my friends, and that means it's Women's History Month. Loyal readers may recall that two years ago, I ran a "lesser-known-but-exceedingly-awesome-woman-of-the-day" feature. Other loyal readers may recall that last year I did nothing. This year, I've decided, will be based on action. Everyday for the rest of the month, I'm going to tell you about an awesome organization that's doing rad things that empower women, fight the patriarchal hegemony, etc. You will have the opportunity to Take Action. And so, without further ado, I present:

Kiva.org
You may already be familiar with this microlending site. After all, it's been around since 2005. Their mission statement is pretty straightforward, "We are a non-profit organization with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Leveraging the internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions, Kiva lets individuals lend as little as $25 to help create opportunity around the world." What does that have to do with women? Well, investing in women in developing countries is generally a good idea (there are so many articles on this, you guys, check it out). Women don't have access to the same opportunities or education. But they're damn good at running businesses, at investing back in their community, and at raising up their society right along with them. You don't have to take my word for it; in addition to reading the above, spend five seconds on google.

What I especially like about Kiva is how easy it is to loan someone your money. It is $25 (min.) to you, but that money goes a lot further in poorer parts of the world. And you'll get it back. And maybe then you'll be so inspired, you'll loan it again. That's my plan, anyway. In January I made a loan to Yadira, a baker in Nicaragua looking to buy a refrigerator to expand her business. My $25 just covered a small part of the expense, of course, but she's already started to pay it back. And once it's paid back in full, I intend to loan it to someone else. Because how much interest was $25 collecting in my bank account, anyway? Next to none. I don't have a lot of money. But I can use just a little bit of what I have to do some good for struggling women in the world, and I urge you to do the same.

Cheers to March!

accidents /  by mrm

I haven't quite hit on a way to talk about it that isn't melodramatic. Maybe that's unfair, though. Maybe this is just dramatic. I've been defaulting to jokey exuberant (surprise, surprise, I know). Arms wide, eyes wide, voice bright, "You guys," I say, "I got hit by a car!" 

It's much better and less alarming in person than in print, of course, when you have me, alive and whole, standing right in front of you – although I expect the reader to make the key deduction: it can't be too bad if she's blogging about it. And that's true. The fallout has been minimal: some bruises, a scrape on my elbow. More damage was done to my bike, but even then not enough to total it. 

The car drove off. I don't think it's likely they'll be caught, but I'm hoping to be proven wrong. I don't feel vengeful, but I do think this should go on their record, and that they should reimburse me the expense of getting my bike fixed. That's pretty much all I want in the way of outcome.

What beautiful, illuminating, reflective thing do I have to say about this? I don't know. It was terrifying. I thought I was going to die. I probably could have, if a few angles had been different, or if I wasn't wearing a helmet. (I always wear a helmet.) I didn't die. A few days before I was hit, I watched an incredibly disturbing and sad film called Margaret and a few days after I had dinner in pitch blackness at Opaque. So there are some strange collisions of experience in my life lately.

I've found myself wishing that at least some of my bruises were more prominent. (They're pretty much all covered by my clothes.) I've found myself waiting to be asked, how've you been, what's new, etc., because no one looks at me and says, oh my god, what happened to you? And that's damn lucky. But that level of fear? I'm still working it out. And I'm back on my bike.

you think it's like this but really it's like this /  by mrm

I'm reading Self-Help by Lorrie Moore.
"Pace around in the kitchen and say that you are unhappy. 
But I love you, he will say in his soft, bewildered way, stirring the spaghetti sauce but not you, staring into the pan as if waiting for something, a magic fish, to rise from it and say: That is always enough, why is that not always enough?" 
The whole damn book is like that. Explaining it to housemate Josh, I said: It's as if in each story, she slaps you in the face and says 'Does that hurt?', slaps you again, 'Does that hurt? Here, do it to me.' 'No,' you say, 'why are we doing this?' " even as you feel you hand rise, even as the welts spread across her face. I'm taking a break.

last night's popcorn /  by mrm

was chili lime. I humbly recommend it to you: Pop kernels in olive oil, drizzle with melted butter and fresh-squeezed lime juice, then sprinkle on salt and powdered cayenne pepper (all to taste). Bam! Makes your lips tingle a little bit when you eat it. 

llamas and peacocks /  by mrm

I spent the weekend on a ranch – or, as I like to call it, a "ranch." However, as Marc Antony didn't say, I come not to bury Caesar, but to praise him: This ranch included a pool, a hot tub, a ping pong table, a pool table, foosball, air hockey, tennis courts, basketball courts, two old video game machines, a jukebox, beds for twenty-some-odd people, multiple kitchens, more. Also the ranch was populated with horses, cows, dogs, chickens, burros, llamas, uncountable peacocks, and wild bunnies. I passed my time sleeping, eating, walking, talking to the llamas, eating, drinking, sleeping, talking to people, walking, drinking, sleeping, reading, and eating. I think that's a pretty comprehensive list.

I enjoyed talking to the llamas immensely, and yes I was anthropomorphizing them, but every time someone points that out, I think so what? They were obviously trying to communicate with me, too. If we both failed, that doesn't mean I can't have my own translation of it all.

It seems like it must be pretty nice to live on a massive ranch in Paicines, to make your own olive oil and host guests. To entertain your hobbies to your heart's content. How does one ever get here? we wondered. Not so much here but here in life. The quiet and the valley and the stars. I have trouble looking ahead into my life and planning backwards in this fashion, where would I like to be in twenty years and then think how to get there. But I also have trouble thinking where I'd like to be in five years. Or twenty months. And I was reading about the restlessness of Bruce Chatwin on this trip, his strong and genuine sense that surely we were not meant to be sedentary, that putting down roots was against his nature, and yes from that he extrapolated, so for all humanity, and wrongly so, but perhaps it is true for some of us, this difficulty of settling, this urge to move. That movement for the sake of movement is not at all bad. That there is a sake of movement.

dancing and failing /  by mrm

I took a hip hop class yesterday morning. This wasn't the first hip hop class I've taken, but I haven't had many. Perhaps five? Over the past few years I've taken a grab-bag of classes, including Afro-Brazilian, Modern, Bhangra, Salsa, Afro-Cuban, and Vogue. And Nearly every one has been a small study in fear and disappointment.

Warm-ups are usually ok. We stretch and it feels good. But after about the first fifteen minutes of choreography, I usually want to leave. I think, You could just walk out. The door's right there. No one will care if you leave. The instant feedback loop in a dance class can be terribly disheartening, even shaming. The teacher does a move. You are supposed to do the move. You try. You fail. You try. You fail. You are staring into the mirror, watching yourself fail. There is no outside agent, no intermediary, no tool or device on which to place the blame. It is your body, it is not doing the thing you are telling it to do, you are failing. Over and over. 

And it seems like it should work, that it should be simple: Your eyes take in information, your brain tells your body to replicate it, and bam! there you'd be. But it's as if someone says to you, "Repeat after me: cucumber," and you respond with "tennis racket." Why? you ask yourself frantically. Isn't this my language? 

It isn't, of course; that's the catch. Dance is its own vocabulary, with ideas and conjunctions, intonations and nuances, formalities and slang. It's easy to forget that, though, at least for me.  

Lousy as I am (by my own estimation, I am usually in the bottom 30-40%, skill-wise, in most any class I take), my competitive brain and threatened ego at some point start judging someone else who's also doing something wrong. The irony, of course, is that as soon as I do I'm lost. There is perhaps nothing else in my life that requires my full focus and attention so thoroughly as dance class. The instant I start paying attention to what someone else is doing instead of what I need to be doing, I mess up. Every time. It's a great lesson in being present, and in humility. And I think that having regular reminders to be humble is good for me. 

The class is an hour and a half. The feeling of miserable failure usually lasts through about the first forty five minutes of class. And even when, eventually, I start having some physical understanding of what I should be doing, I continue to make mistakes. Pieces I'd thought I'd mastered ten minutes ago suddenly trip me up and throw me off. But by the end of the class, I have a loose grasp of the piece. There are a few moves I do passably well. And my sense of accomplishment is wild, overwhelming and entirely out of proportion to the small task I've accomplished. And after ninety minutes of dipping and shaking, trying to be beautiful, tough, elegant, cool, it is incredible to feel near to that grace, that fluid elegance, to feel that if I have not grasped it, I am at least reaching in the right direction.

So I keep going back.

transitions /  by mrm

I've just come back from vacation in Chile and I feel intangible. As though wafting through. It's rather pleasant.


The opening up of the mind and returning to San Francisco where I like the air, the welcomeness of riding my bike, a dance class and I think: Maybe this is it. Maybe I have it. The feeling passes, or settles, or slides off, but it lightens me. Maybe it is only ever a feeling, not a state achievable. Love and a home. I feel improbable, and infinitely fortunate.

it's beginning to look a lot like /  by mrm

Today is SantaCon in San Francisco. Earlier in the week, I'd read that this was going to happen, but promptly forgot until biking just now past the groups and clumps of people dressed in Santa costumes, or at least Santa hats, heading...where are they heading? They don't even seem to be moving in the same direction. Maybe it's over.

(Pocket definition of SantaCon: People dress up in Santa costumes and go bar-hopping. Lots of people. There are official bar stops and routes. Then they get drunk and peel off as their sobriety/tolerance levels dictate. This is not unique to San Francisco, and it's only quite recently that it's become a big-deal thing here.)



All of this raises a lot of questions.

Why is this happening? is, at the most superficial level, the easiest of my questions to answer. SantaCon started in San Francisco, and it started as a weird prank. Now that flash dance mobs are everywhere and all the time and unimpressive, it's harder to imagine how a sudden and unannounced appearance of a group of Santas might have felt in, say, the 80s. But SantaCon used to be culture jamming, and now it's just pub-crawling and public drunkenness. More on that later.

Why Santa? Some quick theories would be, in no particular order:
1) It's funny/ironic to deconstruct/dismantle/demythologize/you-get-the-picture the childhood arbiter of Goodness by putting on his signature uniform and getting publicly drunk.
2) Santa is supposed to be unique, so again it's funny/ironic for him to suddenly be multiple.
3) The costume, or some version of it, is readily available on the cheap.

Why public drinking? or, Why is this happening, part 2? Now this is where I start to get confused. Because I'm not really sure what this is really about. As in, I'm not sure why it's fun to dress up as Santa and go bar-hopping with a whole lot of other people, some of whom you know and some of whom you don't, also dressed as Santa. I'm not sure why that is the thing one would want to do with one's Saturday afternoon.* We can look at some of the obvious answers: People like drinking, and even more when they're with their friends. But what is the specific appeal of the crowd? This, for me, is the most intriguing part. I tend to not enjoy large drunken crowds. It is a guarantee that some people will get too drunk. They will vomit, maybe near you, maybe on you. They may get pushy. The bars will all be crowded because you are bringing a crowd.

Now my central problem lies, I suspect, where it so often does: a failure to understand the appeal of doing something because a lot of other people are doing it. I think I've always been a contrarian, and mass culture and its seeming desire to get me (and everyone) join in has always gotten my back up. This may just be a fancy way of not calling myself an elitist. I'd like to think that's not all there is to it, though. The strongest feeling I have when viewing SantaCon (which, yes, I'm using as a stand-in for a lot of things right now) is not superiority, but confusion. I have a fundamental distrust of things that say, "If you do this thing that other people are doing, it will make you happy," that there is an objective "happiness" that we can all work towards, at the same time, in the same fashion, and that once we get there, it will be the same for all of us. I just don't think that's true. Nonetheless, that seems to be the messaging that most people receive and act on.

I know this is getting long, but I can't help but feel that this is also related to my confusion around beauty, and the ways in which most of us most of the time work so hard to change our appearances to chase after an abstract beauty. And then some people end up not looking like people anymore. They're going after the Form "Beauty," which is presumably something they've seen in a magazine, on TV, in films, etc., but it's not what they actually look like and then people end up looking generic and interchangeable.

I want people to be encouraged to pursue an individual idea of happiness, an individual idea of aesthetic. I guess I'm that much of an idealist/hippie, I guess I'm that naive. But I think it could work.

I invite your comments.

*I have friends who were at SantaCon today. I'm positive. And I'm positive that they're people I like and think are awesome. What I'm trying to say is that I'm not so much interested in criticizing SantaCon as I am in trying to understand it.

grl lookit that body /  by mrm

For reasons too complex and irrelevant to detail here, I've spent a fair amount of time this fall driving around the suburbs of the south bay listening to contemporary pop music. There only seem to be four or five songs in contemporary pop music right now. At least, that's the conclusion I've been forced to draw, since the radio plays the same four or five songs every hour over a six hour period. This is enough to make me lose my mind.*

But it got me thinking about pop music again (which doesn't happen all that often) and it seems to me that with the rise of the internet, culture is experiencing a simultaneous unification and fracturing. We seem to me to be moving towards an increasingly graphic, increasingly bland, hyper-mass culture, while simultaneously creating countless increasingly specialized micro-cultures. And perhaps we are losing (or eroding? or destroying?) our middle ground. I'm not sure what I think that means, quite frankly. Except that it does seem to only deepen issues of access and diversity when the "dominant" culture is only becoming more dominant and more narrow in its message and representation.

What is that message? As far as I can tell (and as the above links more than suggest), it's party like there's no tomorrow. And it doesn't even feel like editorializing to say that this sounds like the music of a civilization in decline.


*Hey kids! Want to do something really surreal? Watch those music videos with the sound off.

the external world /  by mrm

I've been thinking a lot lately about validation, about what is worthwhile, about – at the risk of putting it far too dramatically – what it is we live for. Not to pretend it is or should be the same for everyone; more, I've been trying to find a means to measure myself and the best means I can find is myself. I do not think there is a thing that exists that is the thing I want. I think the external world lacks it. And if I do not value existing metrics, what can will read true to me? To stop this constant pushing away, this dismissal, this roving for a way to know.

I think I need to create my own ruler. This is a strange problem, once you think about it, because it is more than a question of scaling a system to me. The question is: What is the system and what is the scale? 

how our garden does grow /  by mrm



Hooray for summer, for green beans and fresh potatoes! I will freely confess: While I knew a fresh potato to be an exceptionally delicious thing to eat, I had no idea how much fun they would be to harvest. (Yes, I am the smallest of small-scale farmer/gardeners. No, I do not romanticize farm life. My mother grew up on a working dairy farm. I have already heard all about it. Now, let us move on.) Potatoes are fun to harvest because you have to stick your hand deep into the soil and then feel around, thinking: Is there a potato here? How big will it be? Oo, is that one? No, that's a stone. More dirt. Oh, wait!! A potato!!! It is better than finding Easter eggs, and much better than panning for gold, because when you are done, you get to cook and eat delicious potatoes!