Another bitesize Monday (with added navel-gazing)

So this is day 13 of 30 blogs 30 days and I don't feel ashamed to admit that, on top of everything else I have going on right now (which is a cocktail of jobseeking weirdness, ridiculous self-imposed academic targets and the continuing rearrangement of my room so that I can have a music corner, yes a music corner oh my god how exciting), I am well into mid-project stress on how to keep this up. So many people have given me some really excellent ideas but I am currently devoid of research time. What can be done?

The answer for today is "leave you all hanging and go to Oxford, ha ha ha ha ha". I think the answer for other days is to start serialising some more, like I did on Thursday/Friday last week (although that was two full-sized posts with a tenuous common thread)? Whatever happens, things are going to become much easier when furniture assembly becomes a less significant part of my life.

For today, let's do a rundown of a couple of generic things apropos of nothing:

I saw Hyrule Historia in the local bookshop and it made me 1) start my AJ-mas wishlist and 2) think of this awesome thing

For those who are not Zelda fans, Hyrule Historia is the epic english-translated artbook of ALL THE ZELDA EXCITEMENT and ownership of a giant hardcover book about videogame timelines is pretty much the only thing I need to complete my collection of things-that-sound-absurd-when-you-put-it-that-way. Sadly, spending £25 on majestic nerdy coffee table books is an activity for a different life phase, so I must put it in the "ONE DAY" category and hope that that day is this year's Annual Present Time. We shall see!

Zelda isn't very feminist though (no video games are! alas) because apparently even more than American studios, Japanese video game makers are a bit perplexed about the idea of female protagonists or non-stereotypical gender representations being possibly a good thing? That's why, even though I'm not an enormous Dresden Codak fan (how can you do a webcomic full time and still update it that slowly), I absolutely love his concept art for an actual Zelda-driven Zelda. If you haven't seen it, look at it, if you have seen it, look at it again and be reminded of it and how awesome it is.

It's *steampunk* because Aaron Diaz is *steampunk* but we can forgive that. I think.

Anyone with a freezer can make ice cream

After Wednesday's cake baking experiments left me with a large burn in the shape of a Geth dreadnought on my wrist (not even exaggerating), I decided to abandon the idea of heating food in favour of making really cold things instead. To be specific, I have been making ice cream! It turns out that even without a fancy machine, this is very easy to do (total credit to an awesome artist's tumblr for teaching me how). You need 3 cups combined of double cream and whole milk (more cream is better but also more expensive, I tend to use 1 1/2 cups cream and 1 1/2 cups milk), around 1/3 cup sugar, exciting things for flavour (suggestions: peppermint extract, vanilla extract, chocolate chips, fancy honeycomb pieces from the ridiculous Waitrose baking section, dried fruit, cocoa powder, Bailey's Irish Cream, sweet potato, beetroot, wasabi...) and a freezerproof bowl.

Put everything EXCEPT any "heavy" ingredients (like chocolate chips or fruit pieces) into the bowl, whisk like crazy for a bit, put in freezer. 30 minutes later, remove from freezer, stir with wooden spatula, return to freezer. 15 minutes later and then for every 15 minutes after that until FOREVER, stir again. You'll eventually get something which looks like mousse but super cold (same viscosity as soft serve ice cream, pretty much). When this happens, add any chocolate chips or whatever you want, then leave it in the freezer until you get an actual properly frozen thing.

Remove and eat! You'll have something that will be denser and icier than shop bought ice cream but will also have the expression of your personal flavour ideas in every bite. TOTALLY worth it. If you do this, let me know what exciting (or generic but amazing) combinations you come up with!

#inspiringwomen was, in the end, a better hashtag than #twittersilence

Honestly, I'm not quite sure why "not being on Twitter for a day" needed a hashtag, it's not like anybody could actually use it seeing as how they weren't on twitter, so all that happened was it got filled up with criticism from people who were still on Twitter. But aside from serious questions about whether not doing a thing for 24 hours really constitutes a meaningful boycott, as somebody who did use twitter yesterday I have to say that I enjoyed the people filling it up with awesome stories about women much more than I enjoyed the people who weren't there.

One of the best timelines, that's now a storify for your post-#trolliday viewing pleasure, was Fern Riddell's 12 women, 12 hours. I don't know how I feel about her ending with Queen Victoria but other than that that it's fabulous history that includes a mixture of well-known and depressingly obscure 19th century figures. I think it's always worth going out of one's way to learn about awesome women from the past, because history has an enormous male bias that a lot of people assume is because men have just done more things worth remembering. Nope, it's because history has an enormous male bias. Damn you, history!

A man has become a welder

In times of writer's block, when it feels like absolutely nothing in the world is worth writing about or that you are not qualified to write about anything, it's nice to know that journalists at the China Daily often have the same problem.

This actually turned out surprisingly long! Expect tomorrow's post late, Oxford is not going to visit itself.

Stuff I like Sunday: Of Monsters and Men, Metric

Gosh is it that time of day already? I've spent almost all day putting together flatpack furniture and moving things around my room to make it look more like a twenty-something's bedroom and less like a closing down sale in a next-millennium antiques shop. I have still not figured out where my extensive collection of Doctor Who figures is going to live, but perhaps I should wait until I find out whether I will need room for expansion after today's announcement.

As anybody who knows me in real life has probably guessed, I definitely have some Things to Say about said announcement, but honestly today I am tired of that sort of nonsense. And Sunday is a day for unapologetic fangirling! So, combining the themes of "I spent all day putting up a flatpack wardrobe" and "things I really really like", here are gushing reviews of the two things I have been listening to a lot to get me through the day. Both are female-fronted! And in more than just a figureheady "we would like to sell albums to teenage girls, here is a song I wrote for a woman now sing it" way.

First is "Of Monsters and Men", who, like Kerry Katona, come all the way from Iceland!

Apologies to my international audience for this completely impenetrable joke.

Nah not the supermarket really, they're from the country Iceland, the one with the volcanoes and the population smaller than Luxembourg.

So they have more excuse than most bands to take posey nature pictures...

So I am unapologetically not a music journalist. In fact, having spent many of my high school years being a Girlfriend to a Boy in a Band, I have found myself with a mild allergy to the entire scene of Supercool Musical People. Needless to say being a Girlfriend and not a person in my own right did not really suit me, but being a person in your own right in Boy in a Band World involved more effort and talent and inherent coolness than I could muster. The combination of not liking things I am not automatically good at and accepted into, and the mildly traumatising nature of anything that happens at high school, means that knowing things about music all just feels a bit inherently depressing for some reason. But anyway, now I am a single accordion-playing feminist so perhaps it is time to move on! I'll start by reading the Wikipedia page of this band I like.

Of Monsters and Men! Their lead singer is that epic woman on the right and she is called Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir because people from Iceland have epic names with gendered surnames that I am not inherently enamoured about but because it's feminine and Viking I am wholeheartedly behind that name in general. She plays the guitar, and another one of them (the one called Raggi, probably but not definitely the one in the leather jacket, not looking it up because men, pah) plays the guitar and sings also so they can sing awesome duets like Little Talks. They are quite new and therefore only have one album, My Head is an Animal (that's a Spotify link Eff Why Eye) but it is brilliant slightly-but-not-overly twee folky guitar stuff. Also they have an accordion which is like plus a million points and the only way it could possibly be better is if Nanna Hilmarsdottir played the accordion. Unfortunately, their accordion player left the band to go to university instead, but they have a session playing accordion for when they go on adventures tour.

The song that got me into them that you should all listen to is King and Lionheart, which was one of the most important tracks on my unofficial "leaving Beijing" soundtrack. Turns out it has this super weird video to go with it too!

The other thing I have been listening to ‒ and only a year late! ‒ is Synthetica, the 2012 album by Metric. I've loved Metric unintentionally ever since watching the Scott Pilgrim movie in 2010, where they provided "Black Sheep", the song the Clash at Demonhead perform at their gig. Good movie, great comics, epic song. 

That's the Brie Larson version, which is not as good at the original, but has the added bonus of invoking Scott Pilgrim feels and we all need more Scott Pilgrim feels in our life. It took another six months for one of my friends from the Staircase of Feminine Awesomeness to introduce me to the band behind Evil Ex Number Three, in the form of Fantasies, Metric's 2009 album. This was a turning point in my life. Seriously, I'm not somebody to say something like this lightly, because telling people what to like even as a joke always rubs me up the wrong way, but here's the thing. If you are the kind of person who has an unofficial (or official!) list of songs that would be in the biopic of your life, and you haven't got a single song from Fantasies on said list? I'm not sure you're living your life right. I'm sorry, I know Differences In Musical Taste is a thing, and not everybody's life is an epic feminine indie drama, but... seriously. This album is literally all our lives, no exceptions.

If you're not sure which Fantasies song would be on your soundtrack, it's probably Gimme Sympathy:

(Also if you really don't want a thing from Fantasies, I will also accept "Monster Hospital" as an acceptable substitute. Video is a bit violent, you have been warned.)

The woman doing the singing (and the drumming, guitaring and synthing in the above video, and also actual keyboards and composing for the band) is Emily Haines, and she and her man-band are all Canadian and she's friends with Lou Reed which is basically an enormous stamp of approval right there.

Despite thinking this album is the best thing since "The Second Sex", new music comes to me slowly (a byproduct of actively wanting to be disconnected from any sort of Scene), so I... only just discovered there was a "new" album a couple of days ago. I do not have quite the same visceral attachment to Synthetica but it is pretty darn great. "Wanderlust" has Lou Reed doing vocals, which is strangely jarring but in the best possible way. I am already a very big fan of "Speed the Collapse."

So that is my very very short roundup of women in bands! Women. Who knew they had things to sing about, and that they can even compel men to help them sing those songs by playing fun instruments in the background? And they can wear nice clothes and take fun photoshoots in nature, just like the men. Wish somebody had told me this when I was fourteen...

All about men

Men like these!

Thanks Kate Beaton

Nah, not really. Actually, the most amusing thing that happened to me today, man-wise, was watching Tony Wang's Twitter feed. Tony Wang, for those who aren't up to date on their high powered businessmen, is the boss of British twitter, and has been in a fair bit of trouble regarding the Twitter Thing. Incidentally, update on the Twitter Thing: still a thing, though less of a thing. The Daily Mail got involved and printed an EXPOSEE (with an accent gris on one of them Es) on some of the men involved, some of whom apparently have fiancees (with another accent) and wives (no accent) and everything! I'm not linking though because at the end of the day it's still the Daily Mail. Back to Tony: After deciding that Twitter will indeed have a new abuse policy, the guy decided to Tweet a fateful statement:

I personally apologize to the women who have experienced abuse on Twitter and for what they have gone through.
— Tony Wang (@TonyW) August 3, 2013

Thanks Tony! Decent PR move there, give your team a pat on the back. The amusing part of this is that if you go on Tony Wang's Twitter feed, the message in question is now buried under several hours' worth of Tweets apparently responding to what may be every single man on Twitter, whose responses are all tragically predictable: what about the men? Where is my apology? How come this thing is not about me?

I have to be sympathetic here, because it must be extraordinarily hard to be obsessed with your own place in the world that you expect every single thing on Twitter of all places to be directly relevant to your life. The world of men is apparently populated with an inordinate number of clones of Zaphod Beeblebrox, getting constant reassurance that they are the most important thing in the universe at all times...

(Incidentally, when I went to look this clip up and listened to it again, I had totally forgotten that the Total Perspective Vortex was invented by a man, for a woman, because of how annoying it is when women suggest men should "get some perspective". Aaah! Et tu, Douglas?)

This is going to be a shorty so I'm not going to take this observation too much further (though oh my goodness, could I ever... maybe another time). I just think it's worth noting how absurd it is to react to a single instance of "this thing is not about me" with "why isn't this thing about me" ‒ and actually, (unlike gendered twitter abuse) this isn't just a problem for men, but for everybody who exists in a kyriarchal power structure. So, everyone then. There definitely are bits of feminism that are about men, and a few of them are even good bits! But many things are not, in the same way as many things are not about white people, or straight people, or able-bodied people. We would all do well not to get too shocked every time we discover this.

On saying what you mean. Part two

Before I begin this properly, a little announcement: some of my writing is now going up over at FEMUSINGS, a brilliant new(ish) feminist news/humour site. The bits up there at the moment are all cross-posted from my blog so you are not yet missing anything new, but that will soon change. It also means that my totally arbitrary self-imposed 30 day rules are changing, because averaging much more than one blog post a day will definitely kill me, no exaggeration. So on days that I post over there, don't expect anything here! Them's the breaks.

Now, when we last left our train of thought (or what passes for a train of thought around these parts), I had just had a lengthy whinge about the misuse of the word "troll" in current discussions, only to suggest that as word misappropriations go, it doesn't really matter. Leaving aside the question of what kind of crazy person would write that much on a thing they know doesn't matter (A: a crazy person who has to fill a blog post a day, that's who), the next pertinent question would be "when does this sort of word use matter"?

My answer to that is lovingly contained in a 70-page Master's thesis currently locked in a vault somewhere in Tsinghua University's library, and if you want to know more you should go and look it up, the end. No, just kidding ‒ about you reading that thesis, not about its existence. It's long and dry and Chinese visas are getting more expensive and harder to obtain so let me just tell you what I think is interesting and then we can all move on with our lives.

So. International Development, at its heart, involves a lot of one group of people (development professionals) talking about another group of people (poor people, often women, generally entire countries' worth), for the benefit of a third group of people (i.e. the ones with money). This all takes place with the best of intentions, but still involves an uncomfortable amount of neocolonialism, generalisations, oversimplifications and the occasional hidden neoliberal agenda. (That's neoliberal the "open all your markets and buy all our stuff" economic policy, not "wouldn't it be nice if everybody could do what they want" ‒ the latter generally doesn't get as much airtime as it perhaps should). What this situation leads to, aside from a lot of potential for frustration and a fascinating thesis, is a particular kind of development discourse

Let's step outside the British feminist bubble for a minute and consider what might be general international problems for women, because it's still not a great world for most of us most of the time. Most of the list involves violence from men. Rape still happens everywhere, at appallingly high rates, and is explained away far too often. Sometimes it is used as a weapon of war. Marginally less awful but even more likely to be ignored is the prevalence of domestic violence. There were a couple of high profile cases in China whilst I was interning over there which activists hoped would change public opinion somewhat, but it remains intractable there as everywhere. If you are a woman you are more likely to be worried about your general security, about having enough to eat and a place to sleep and stuff that you actually own to help you live; more often than not you have to worry about those things for your children as well. And then there's maternal mortality and natal healthcare, good luck with those. It's extremely unfashionable to talk about the world as if it's bleak and hopeless because of course it isn't, few people have unrelentingly awful lives all the time, but some of these things (especially the violence) are just endemic. No number of uplifting "woman gets microloan and improves village!" anecdotes

Some of these are big, complex, international issues Instead of this, too much "development" (Full disclosure: I speak specifically from gender and climate change here but I'm not so overspecialised that this generalisation is inaccurate) stops at telling us that women in developing countries (in itself an enormous simplificitation of most of the world's states) are "vulnerable". They might not be suffering right now, because being vulnerable doesn't imply present harm. But something might happen! Like climate change could happen. To that figurative woman. And then there would be a problem, because of farming. And then her husband might get mad, or move away. Whoops! But she's only vulnerable right now, we're not saying any of these things are true now. Being "vulnerable" in development is sort of like the negativity equivalent of describing a person as "interesting". What you mean is a whole range of different nuanced things, some more serious than others! What you have said is one, not very interesting thing. "Vulnerable" = generically bad. But maybe not even happening yet! So no worries.

What we must strive for, is for women to be the opposite of vulnerable. And the opposite of vulnerable, in development-speak, is "empowered". Being development-empowered is great because it can be applied to literally anything, from high-falutin' metaphors about helping to bring up the rising sun of prosperity on a golden dawn of happiness (not a literal example but some things come close), to "woman x is empowered to take her cow to market on Thursday". What women are rarely empowered to do is actually be in power. Usually, empowerment involves talking, or being able to do things that women were doing anyway but a little bit more efficiently. Occasionally there are role changes involved. FUN FACT: Studying what "empowerment" means when it is used in development literature has given me a general hatred of the word. 99 times out of 100, a person using "empowerment" in any context does not actually want to talk about power relations, because talking about power relations at its heart involves a discussion about why so many men rape and hit women, even women they claim to love, and men don't like talking about that, it makes them angry and defensive and anyway women have been known to hit men so the gendered point is irreverent, case closed. Whoops, that was a tangent. Anyway! When women are "empowered", we can assume that generic good things are happening to them, and they are hopefully less "vulnerable". Hurrah!

In both cases, words are being undermined. The vulnerability is a very specific state with a very specific meaning, and that meaning exists because it is useful to have in the english language as more than just "generic bad thing". Empowerment likewise. If we want to talk about generically good and generically bad things, we have words for that too: "good" and "bad". Unfortunately, this is where it becomes problematic that the issue of development is effectively a conversation between three groups of people. Group two (actual affected people) and hopefully most of group one (development professionals on the ground) understand that things are complicated and nuanced and there are no big international simplifications to be made. But groups one and two also need money and support. They need to talk to group three, to movers and shakers and policymakers, and sometimes also to the average Jo on the street who has just been accosted by fundraisers. Group three are unlikely to be affected by entreaties to "stop this generic bad thing" if it's written like that, but if it's sprinkled with some important sounding words... well. Who can argue about vulnerability and empowerment? And thus, ridiculous meaningless discourse is born.

I hate it! I know this is is a very arrogant and hypocritical statement coming from a woman whose development career hasn't even reached the "employment" stage and whose favourite form of humour is "say something ridiculously wrong in a deadpan manner and hope people trust you enough to know you're joking", but when the most used words in your vocabulary are meaningless flourishes, meaningful debate is becomes incredibly difficult. I'm not defending precise language in the grumpy old man way of refusing to believe that English ever changes, because it does, I love it for that, please look back to my enjoyment of "sexting" (the word not the act!) as irrefutable proof of this fact. But there's a difference between change and decay, especially in some fields. To return to yesterday's example, if "troll" becomes synonym for "abuser", the internet will easily adapt, because the internet can invent new words ridiculously easily (unrelated: today I learned what "subtweet" means. I wish there was a facebook equivalent because that is a phenomenon that needs a name). But what do we call empowerment, if "empowerment" doesn't mean empowerment any more? Particularly if the strength of the new use of "empowerment" relies on the power (oh god) of the old use. It's all too much!

This has all gone on too long, and I feel this is not the entry for flowery closing words, so: Dear everyone. Say what you mean. From Adrienne. The End.

On saying what you mean. Part one

I promised an argument today and I think I have been doing too much arts and not enough social sciences during this EXTREME BLOGGING MARATHON. I am now going to partly deliver on that promise. Today's blog is going to be the first of a two-parter on "Adrienne gets extremely worked up about language use!" I'm afraid this part of the two-parter is about the Twitter Thing again. I'm as sorry as you are about that. The Twitter Thing has been blogged about enough, but here we are again.

The Twitter Thing (and I have now seen several other people refer to it as The Twitter Thing so I'm glad I'm not the only one who can't figure out anything else good to call it) is still a Thing. A pretty big thing, which has made international news and is going to lead to a government inquiry with the bosses of Twitter UK. The legal question here is how much responsibility Twitter has for its uploaded content, and because 1) this is not the main point of my writing, 2) I have no good legal insights on this and 3) this isn't an academic essay so nobody is going to call me out for hedging, I am going to say the answer to this question is "some".

There have been calls for Twitter to require real addresses during sign-up, which is disturbingly similar to Sina Weibo's (government mandated) requirement for a real ID number to be attached to people's accounts. Generally speaking, if you think a thing you think is a good idea for protecting progressive thought in civil society ‒ because allowing women to have a violence-free platform for speech is still a progressive idea, god help us all ‒ it does not help your argument if said thing is already law in China. There are some good green policies worth copying and their poverty reduction track record is impressive (and let's not get started on how much we all love their resources for infrastructure aid model), but civil freedoms? Not so much.

The China in Africa reference above was utterly tenuous but when should anybody need an excuse for a China-Africa solidarity propaganda poster?

But this is unlikely to happen, and given how many other governments Twitter gives its data to (sucks to be you, one thousand monitored US citizens!) there is probably nothing extra to worry about anyway. The most likely outcome here seems to be this:  Twitter will increase its report abuse functions. The government will repeat what I said above about Twitter having "some" responsibility, except in Policese not English. A significant number of men who were sending abuse simply because it was easy will find a new hobby, whilst a few very persistent abusers who create constant new accounts and spend enormous portions of their lives being abusive will have trouble will get a call from the police. The morons in the middle of this spectrum, who actively believe it is worthwhile to put women in their place but don't do it so regularly that it flags up serious attention, will keep making empty accounts with lots of letters and numbers in the name and sending their little gems of wisdom to whoever they choose. Abuse will be lessened but it will not go away just as a result of this. The effects themselves depend on how serious Twitter is about employing real, sensitivity-educated people to sit at the other end of its "report abuse" button and figure out what is and isn't abuse. I am sceptical about this.

Notice the language in the paragraph above. The men who are doing these things (and yes I assume it is just men, sorry not sorry) are "abusers". They threaten violence or attempt emotional manipulation in order to change people's behaviour, because they believe that their control is under threat or because they just like exerting power. As I mentioned at the end of Saturday's post, however, the word that's being used most to describe this behaviour isn't "abuser". It's "troll". And no matter how much I want to ignore this and focus on the argument at hand, every time I read arguments about trolls I cringe involuntarily.

This is not what we mean when we talk about rape threats on Twitter. There is a huge difference between "derailing a discussion" and "coming into a discussion and graphically threatening to murder someone for being in that discussion", and trolls are on the right side of that line. Trolling is the internet equivalent of a little kid asking "why" to every single thing a parent says, then triumphantly assuming the argument is won when the parent resorts to "because I said so!". Trolls regularly do use sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic and ableist language but usually just in tired stereotype, because they know that tired stereotype is most irritating to targets. Hence the endless calls for sandwiches. Trolling is immature, annoying and morally bereft, and it does have emotional impacts which trolls themselves tend to get defensive about, because at the end of the day they honestly do think they are just having fun. On a systematic level, they contribute to some shitty power structures, but individually? They are just iterations of Scumbag Steve.

Fucking hell, That GUY. This guy. Scumbag Steve. What a guy.

For those who are not familiar with this part of the internet, Steve is one of an ever-expanding series of advice animal memes, where stock images are overlaid with different captions which all play to a particular character. There's socially awkward penguin, foul bachelor frog, courage wolf (and my personal favourite, insanity wolf), good guy greg, philosoraptor... really just google any of those and you'll get the idea. A good advice animal meme is one where the character's behaviour is immediately recognisable to viewers as "oh this is me!" or "this is someone I know". Scumbag Steve is specifically the arsehole in one's friendship group who ruins parties, "borrows" (steals) all your stuff and is generally socially inept in a way that is infuriating but never quite bad enough to not hang around with him any more.

So perhaps what we need is a "tiring sexist troll" meme, to make it easy to test what is trolling and what is abuse. For any given comment, try writing it in 36pt Impact on top of a picture of a middle-aged man in a fedora (sorry, innocent fedora wearers, I'm gonna borrow the stereotype feminists have of you for a minute). Is what you have produced funny to other people, in a "oh god, haha, I totally identify with that, what a tiring moron that archetype is, this meme is fun though"? If yes, the behaviour is trolling ‒ overwhelming in quantity and more emotionally affecting than it ideally should be, but in the end a product of a man's stupidity, not his (conscious) hate. If, on the other hand, the comment is "I am going to tie you up and then kill you slowly" or any one of the much more awful and creative thing which women in the spotlight receive on a daily basis, your picture will not be funny at all. This is because abuse is not funny, even to the people who write it. And this should be called abuse, and fought against as abuse.

At the end of the day, this distinction does not matter all that much. Internet terminology is relatively fluid, and the fact that a weaker term (troll) is being used in place of a stronger one (abuser) is unimportant when the actual behaviour is being made public and can be judged by all. Even the false dichotomies of "omg conventional wisdom says don't feed the trolls but I AM GOING TO" aren't particularly affected, because while losing the (usually valid) "don't feed the trolls" maxim is annoying, conventional wisdom for verbal abuse also insists that we "just ignore it", which is equally stupid and wrong. I suspect what will happen here is that "troll" will come to mean what Twitter feminists want it to mean, and the parts of the internet that want to use it as a word for irritating but not directly malicious behaviour will find something else to call it. The world will balance once more, and maybe get a little less sexist in the process.

There are times when words really, really do matter. But let's think about that tomorrow.

Desktop poetry from another Adrienne (30 days of blogging day 8)

I accidentally let it get to almost 10pm without coming up with a topic for this blog, because I have wasted the entire day on frivolous thing like job hunting, playing accordion music on the piano and making chocolate ripple teabread. These things all went pretty well, except the chocolate ripple teabread went in for a little too long and got stuck in the oven and I gave myself a massive burn trying to rescue it. I regret nothing. Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that this is going to be quite short and most of the words will be somebody else's. There will be something a bit longer and more rigorous tomorrow!

Along with the Windows Sticky Notes I have on my desktop reminding me of important things like my government gateway password and the chinese word for "pervert" （色狼), I also keep my absolute favourite Adrienne Rich poems. If you don't know anything about Adrienne Rich ‒as I didn't, for a shockingly long time given that she comes up every time I google my own name (i.e. often) ‒ you should start at the obvious place. The short story here is that she was an incredible poet who had an incredible life, wrote "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" which is an important piece of feminist writing on the position of lesbians in the movement, and also wrote several decades worth of poetry books, the vast majority of which I have not yet read. This is a bit silly given that what I have read, I loved. There's just so much!

A better Adrienne.

But here's the best of what I have read. The first poem on my desktop is "Ghost of a Chance":

 You see a man

trying to think.

You want to say

to everything:

Keep off! Give him room!

But you only watch,

terrified

the old consolations

will get him at last

like a fish

half-dead from flopping

and almost crawling

across the shingle

almost breathing

the raw, agonizing

air

till a wave

pulls it back blind into the triumphant

sea.

This is quite a pessimistic sentiment to start one's all-important "inspiring poetry" Sticky Note with, but I absolutely love it despite identifying with its situation depressingly often. Like every self-identifying feminist, I've dealt with my share of man-ostriches, armchair anthropologists,  "egalitarians-not-feminists", outright sociopaths and otherwise awesome friends who just can't see how I could ever find love with hair on my legs, ew. When this all gets too much, it's nice to have words to fall back on as a sort of structured despair about the world. Yes, some men are terrible and even the good ones say terrible things. Forgive them, because you are asking something that the rest of the world makes almost impossible. Thinking is hard. Feminism is hard. Harden up, Adrienne! All will be well. Moving on.

The second, equally depressing thing is an excerpt from "My Dream of You":

What if I told you your home

is this continent of the homeless

of children sold taken by force

driven from their mothers' land

killed by their mothers to save from capture

-this continent of changed names and mixed-up blood

of languages tabooed

diasporas unrecorded

undocumented refugees

underground railroads trails of tears

What if I tell you your home

is this planet of warworn children

women and children standing in line or milling

endlessly calling each others' names

What if I tell you, you are not different

it's the family albums that lie

-will any of this comfort you

and how should this comfort you?

I keep this one because it reminds me why I study development. I don't really have anything more to express about it, to be honest; the whys and wherefores of my development career path is a navel-gazing entry for another time.

Three is "Delta", which is somewhat more uplifting:

If you have taken this rubble for my past

raking through it for fragments you could sell

know that I long ago moved on

deeper into the heart of the matter

If you think you can grasp me, think again:

my story flows in more than one direction

a delta springing from the riverbed

with its five fingers spread

If "Ghost of a Chance" is a response to most men some of the time, this is a response to a few men all of the time. It is a reminder that sometimes people have useful criticism and provide chances to grow, and sometimes the chance to grow comes from learning who to ignore. In particular, I learned to ignore That One Guy who once told me I was obvious and predictable and he was deep and complex, and this was one of many reasons why he is going far in life and I am just wasting my own gifts. I expended more energy than I should have wrestling with this, and his other proclamations on my worth as a person. But in the end, it didn't matter whether it was wrong or right: the important part is that he was irrelevant. I long ago moved on. Thanks Adrienne Rich!

The final excerpt is probably that affected me most, because it's addressed to me! It's part of Contradictions, which is a long series of standalone stanzas dealing with love, life, pain and age (Rich had bad arthritis for a lot of her life).

Dear Adrienne:

I'm calling you up tonight

as I might call up a friend as I might call up a ghost

to ask what you inted to do

with the rest of your life. Sometimes you act

as if you have all the time there is.

I worry about you when I see this.

The prime of life, old age

aren't what they used to be;

making a good death isn't either,

now you can walk around the corner of a wall

and see a light

that already has blown your past away.

Somewhere in Boston beautiful literature

is being read around the clock

by writers to signify

their dislike of this.

I hope you've got something in mind.

I hope you have some idea

about the rest of your life.

In sisterhood,

Adrienne

Dear sister ghost: I don't know what I am going to do with the rest of my life. Neither did you, I assume. But in a small way, you make my choices and my path easier. So that is something for both of us. Thank you.

Oh, readers! Are you still here? Well, if Adrienne Rich was not your cup of tea, maybe try some Hollie McNish?