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.docx will drive me to drink

I have a pile of files here that need opening and they’re all in this file format I’ve never seen before: .docx. It looks vaguely familiar — probably a Microsoft something, related to the .doc format. Read more

Grocery Musings

A few things I’ve noticed about grocery stores, groceries, and grocery shopping:

• During the day on a weekday, the grocery store is filled with women with babies and old people. Even in this factory town where a large number of people are shiftworkers there are few men, fewer men with children, and very very few families. Not the most statistical of surveys but it’s been my observation. This is partly why I like to do my errands during the day when possible — the lines are short, the store mostly empty (compared to evenings and weekends), and people are mostly in a casual mood. Yes I’m lucky I can still negotiate my schedule this way.
• The plastic shopping bags they’re giving out at Zehrs these days have (what I’m certain is) a strategic hole in the bottom. It’s in the same place in every bag and (conspiracy theory) they’re intentionally making these bags defective so that people have to purchase bags for their garbage cans and cat litter. Mostly I use reusable bags and bins but I do need a handful of disposables each week for my son who cleans the cat litter. It’s taking twice as many bags now to do the work of one, just so we don’t stream litter across the house.
• The stores cannot decide where to stock the organic produce and other products. Some stores have a separate section so you can skip the huge store and just go for the gold. Other stores have the organics spread throughout so that you have to hunt each shelf — and so you can’t skip anything. I prefer keeping it all central because it speeds things up for me.
• Vegetable does not necessarily mean vegetarian. I’m always surprised at the fish sauce, anchovy extract, etc in vegetable meals. sigh I’m so tired of reading labels.
• It was only last year that the local Zehrs got self-serve checkouts. I first used these in 1993 in Nova Scotia in a grocery store. Go figure it took until 2006 to get them to Ontario.
• The grocery bins that the store sells as an alternative to bagging your groceries do not fit on the self serve checkout stands.
• The Zehrs in South Windsor does not offer paper bags, claiming that Zehrs did a study and found that the paper bags break down at the same rate as plastic. Seems awfully strange then that the stores on Dougall, in Lasalle and in St. Clair Beach all still offer paper bags.

Got any more observations?

Bucking the System

When you decide that things aren’t quite right and that you have the power to make changes in the world, however large or small those changes might be, you leave the path. You can no longer follow the map of your youth, the instruction book your parents gave you, or mimic the decisions made by those around you. Breaking new ground is just that — you’re on your own.

If you’re lucky you’ll find like-minded people along the way and together you can chart this new territory, consult before making brave new choices of your own, or stumble along, helping each other pick up broken pieces from the mistakes that come from any learning experience.

Love and relationships are a site of potential change as gender roles and relationship power dynamics are being navigated and changed by more and more couples. Heteronormativity is no longer the only relationship model, but what’s an individual to do when they are conscious of historical imbalances and there is a desire to leave hegemonic power differentials behind, but yet there really isn’t a clear cut working model to follow?

Start with divorce. In North America right now anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of marriages end in divorce. So many people are divorced which means their fantasy picture of the happy nuclear family with white picket fence, etc. is not their lived reality. I’m divorced but most of the people I know who are divorced are close to my age. I don’t have a whole lot of elders to look to for help navigating the fallout of divorce (like co-parenting with someone when we’d rather never see or speak to each other again). It’s not possible to just walk away from that person forever, in a way that it once was. Where is my role model? Someone to tell me that “one day this will be ancient history and here’s what worked for me”?

And single parenting. Where are the supports for parents who are doing it on their own? Shouldn’t this be worked out by now? If so many families in Canada are managed by single parent head of household and most of the families headed by single mothers are living in poverty why hasn’t it been dealt with? We’re doing things differently than our parents’ generation and there is no one to drive the soccer team around, bring cupcakes to school, or even attend PTA meetings. Time for basic family maintenance and survival is precious. There are no extras.

Regarding fathers, many today are more than breadwinners. Divorced or not, how many of them are following their own father’s parenting style? The supports and guidance for these men are minimal and those that are around are underutilized. Whether for lack of time or anxiety/inexperience with the support structures that do exist, there are lots of dads who are winging it.

Next, more and more adult students are turning up in university classes. Many of the ones I’ve encountered are women post-divorce who hope post-secondary education will be a way out of poverty for themselves and their families. The supports for us, the roadmap for how to study and parent and juggle work (sometimes more than one job) has yet to be drawn.

People are redefining what a relationship entails. Sex in a culture of AIDS and STIs (on top of the fear of an unwanted pregnancy) has to be negotiated. Rape and sexual harrassment are real things that could happen to you and could come from the people around you. It really could (or really has) happened to you.

Dating can now include all kinds of technology: emails and text messages and messenger clients. Profiles on myspace, facebook, and other social sites can lead you to potentials as well as the older sites specifically for finding a match. Some people still think it’s wrong to look for a date through a matchmaker site, others wouldn’t dream of going out with someone until they’ve sussed out their language skills and interests via the distance and safety (perceived or real) of online communication. Each person has to navigate this themself; there is no consensus as of yet.

More re: dating: the question of who pays for what on a date is no longer such a big deal — for some people. There are still traditions in place about who drives, who opens doors, who sits first. For some couples, these things are reciprocated but for others old habits die hard. For those in the new water, it can feel good to know your relationship is on equal footing and that a gift of kindness is just that: a gift, given and accepted altruistically, not in order to create debt.

Couples use language to show they are part of this new movement: descriptors like “partner” and S.O.for a significant other show real effort to reflect how we feel about another person. Gender-neutral language is a big part of this. Calling someone your partner reflects that they are truly an equal: equally responsible, equally knowledgeable, equally capable for maintaining the relationship and all it entails. It shows that a couple is committed to working together and is helpful in preventing one part from blaming the other for any difficulties. You are partners.

It can also be a way to reject the traditional marriage model of husband who rules and wife who is chattel and obeys. Rewriting the language helps us to reflect the true nature of our relationships. The term partner is also useful for describing same sex relationships since there is no implied gender in the word. The term partner opens up minds as to what a relationship can be, in an attempt to breakdown heterosexist culture.

Language isn’t the only changing thing in relationships today. Choosing cohabitation or longterm dating with each partner maintaining their own residence are practical alternatives to marriage for a lot of couples. Having children or not are greater options as methods to control fertility and prevent pregnancy are further developed. If a couple does decide to marry for legal or religious reasons there are a greater number of choices for language used in a ceremony to reflect equality between the individuals and the diversity of couples marrying. It’s no longer assumed that a woman will change her name when marrying a man — many couples choose a hyphenated name for all or a hybrid name.

We are an individualistic society. We have a lot of choices to make and there aren’t a whole lot of examples to follow. We do the best we can, with the information we have at the time, but are we really making informed choices? Do we just rationalize when we make a choice that follows a tradition?

If we were truly lazy we wouldn’t do anything differently. Because we do endeavour to make changes, to reconstruct our families, our language, our ideologies we mustn’t t be lazy. Doing things differently takes effort, but it’s worth it: for us, our families, other people breaking ground along side us, and those who will follow.

Winter Projects

I turned in my application to the MA history program with an exciting proposal to collect oral histories from the last women to give birth on Pelee Island,Ontario, back in the 1950s. By then most women were relocating to either mainland Ontario (Leamington or Windsor) or to Ohio to give birth. I’m excited because there’s a personal connection – my grandmother was one of the last women to give birth at home on the island (to my father). Even though she died over 10 years ago from breast cancer, I feel connected to her through this project. It also means I’ll get to go to Pelee to talk to people and talking to the older generation of islanders is always a hoot. (photo credit Jonath, flickr.com. Click the image to go to the photo’s flickr page.)

I’m working on a directed study this semester, cross-listed between the Women’s Studies and History departments about how the emerging technologies of blogs and user-generated media have changed the form and content of communications between mothers and information about mothering. I’m not a mommyblogger but I’ve followed the flurry with interest since BlogHer 2005 where it was identified as a radical act by Finslippy. I’ve watched La Leche League change from a personal mother-to-mother organization for breastfeeding help to an organization with a strong emphasis on online helping and information sharing – including providing mothers and health care professionals with links to Dr. Jack Newman’s video clips for help with latch and positioning and the online Community Network for leaders, and forums for mothers. It’s still mother-to-mother, but it’s changed. Online communities help with the sense of isolation mothers can feel after having a baby, but the technology changes the style and who has access to helping. The project is still too large and it’s hard to cut out pieces of the research in order to make the project more manageable, but it’s getting there.

I’ve begun writing a summer project grant that will (hopefully) allow me to make podcasts of historical Canadian texts in the public domain. I’m excited about it and hope to work with Toronto’s Mitchell Girio for production quality and also hoping for some original music from Mitch and some local Windsor artists. I’ve had some skeptical response to the idea from traditional historians who wonder if people would actually be interested in downloading and listening to Canadian history on an mp3 player — but I see it as a great way to encourage interest in our past — and to give attention to works that maybe haven’t been included in the traditional canon of what is Canadian History. I think it’s incredibly exciting and of course, you never know until you try. I know I would do it, and I know my kids would be into it too. That’s enough for now, for me.

Actiongirls is getting busy too. We’ve planned a pile of Stitch n Bitch sessions with more to come. This project is slowly attracting community interest. There was a reporter from the Windsor Star at our meeting yesterday who asked plenty of baited/leading questions. No doubt there will be an article filled with misquotes in the paper on Monday. /sigh/

So… I’ve discovered that there are places where people with ideas like mine gather and brainstorm and plan and develop and change the world. One of the conferences I’m trying to get to is later this month: Norther Voice 2007. They’re offering a travel subsidy (deadline today, Feb 2 at 12 PST). I never considered that I might be able to go to this since travel across Canada is crazy expensive but when I found out about the funding assistance I decided I should try. With the bursary I could get there and learn and contribute my experience as a women’s-studies-history-IT-student-mom-activist-artist-geek. Without it, there will be nothing but homework and dishes and laundry for me until I save more pennies. Maybe it will help me sort out where I’m headed, trying to combine computer science, history, feminism, activism, and art. Either way I’d get to see the Rockies.

Yahoo and Flickr: ’til death do us part

There’s unrest about the latest development over at Flickr. As of March 15th 2007, old skool members will be required to retire their old flickr logins and use a yahoo id to access their accounts. Yahoo and its supporters call this a ‘merge’, hardcore old skoolers call it abandonment.

Take a look at how some are showing their feelings, via flickr’s tagging mechanism. Nothing like dismantling the master’s house with the master’s tools à la Audre Lorde:

4123

I know I’m tempted to drop my account — I hate being forced to join a MegaCorp(TM). I feel like the local bookstore who was put out by Chapters, the local fruit market taken over by Loblaws, the many many many shops forced under by Walmart. Sure, maybe the merge may feel seamless, but when a community is overtaken by something powerful against its will you have to start wondering what is next – it’s a slippery slope… Start removing choices one by one so that people don’t complain too much or too loudly and soon it’s a dictatorship.

Drop your account or create a Yahoo! id: what’ll it be?

Google Calendar: scheduling every other week

Google calendar has some handy features for scheduling repeat events. For classes this works fabulously because I can set “repeats Mon, Wed, Fri” or “repeats Tues, Thurs” or repeats weekly, monthly, daily, or yearly. Birthdays naturally go yearly, and aikido and gymnastics go weekly. I can set a stop date: “repeats weekly” and then use the date picker to browse through the calendar to summer vacation or whenever the event ends.

The thing I cannot set that is driving me buggy Read more

Meaningful work

If I lived in Vancouver, was done school, and looking for work, this job opening at Social Signal would be the one for me. In the meantime, maybe this is the one for you? Here are some excerpts from the posting. For the entire job description and more about Social Signal, click through to Alexandra Samuel’s post.

Wanted: Web services consultant

Who you are: You enjoy working with technology, and want your work to have social value. You like knowing that the work you’ve done each day has made a real difference – to your colleagues, your clients, and the world. If you’ve got a free evening you’re torn between spending it online checking out a new site you’ve heard about, or heading out to meet your friends at a community gathering or demonstration.

Specific responsibilities include:

• configuring and troubleshooting web sites for socially-oriented online communities (you don’t need to be a programmer or web designer, but you do need to enjoy learning new software programs or web tools)
• advising on site strategy and design as part of a development team
• researching, writing and/or copy editing blog posts and online community contentwriting how-to guides to help community members use advanced online tools with ease and confidence
• identifying and exploring new web sites, tools and strategies

Skills:

• tech skills (Mac/Windows/Linux, software programs you know, web tools you use)
• solid writing and communication skills
• personal organization and time management

Experience:

• technology work (paid or volunteer) for community organizations, socially-oriented businesses, or government agencies
• projects where you have developed or managed a web site or blog
• professional or personal projects that have required you to learn a new software tool or technical skill
• situations where you’ve resolved a technology challenge
• situations where you’ve been the primary tech support for colleagues or friends
• writing for work or fun, on a regular basis, possibly on a blog
• volunteer work for community organizations or causes
• situations where you’ve worked independently with minimal supervision
• situations where you’ve gone the extra mile to get the job done

Interests:

• commmunity groups, projects or issues you’re involved in
• web sites you like or web tools you’re excited about

Bonus points for:

• having your own blog
• demonstrated knowledge of Drupal, WordPress, PHP, HTML or CSS
• knowledge of one or more scripting or programming languages
• a personal take on the relative virtues of open source and proprietary software

We’re looking for a progressive, tech-friendly person whose passion for social change is matched only by a fascination with technology. This sixth member of our team will have a hands-on role in developing and implementing online community projects for our diverse range of clients. We don’t need a programmer, but we do need someone who enjoys working with computers and is a quick learner. We can help you learn the tech skills you need for the job; you need to come equipped with your own communications savvy, political smarts, and love of new tech challenges.

Compensation will be commensurate with skills and experience. Please note that this is an entry-level position.

Theory and practice, geekdom and activism… what an awesome way to contribute to the world.

Poverty Diet

Best diet I’ve ever heard of. It worked well, steady weight loss over time, kept it off well too. The secret? Not having enough money to buy food. Pay the shelter bills first – hopefully you’ve enough for those. Next: feed the kids – peanut butter, pasta, tomato sauce, and dried beans from the food bank. The parenting centre would let me scan their shelves for foods my kids liked. Other places I’d be handed a pre-packed brown bag. Grow a garden for vegetables. In the winter grow sprouts.

No food = no eating = get skinny. No exercise required, though since I didn’t have a car or bus money walking everywhere probably speeded up the process.

This method worked for me and my friend, another single mom. Of course there are side effects: no energy, depression, and hopelessness. And clothes get droopy. But isn’t it worth it to be thin?

Ahhhh those were the days.

Aikido, violence against women, and my daughter’s sensei

Prompted by a discussion with my daughter’s sensei I felt a need to review some violence against women stats. All images in this post are by fotografer.ru.

Check this out:

in Canada, from WAVAW:

• One half of all Canadian women have experienced at least one incident of sexual or physical violence. Almost 60% of these women were the targets of more than one of these incidents. (Statistics Canada, “The Violence Against Women Survey,” The Daily, November 18, 1993.)
• One in four Canadian women will be sexually assaulted during her lifetime. In BC this number is almost double(47%). ( J. Brickman and J. Briere, “Incidence of Rape and Sexual Assault in an Urban Canadian Population,” The International Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol. 7, no. 3, 1984.)
  
• Sexual assault is not most often committed by strangers who jump out of bushes or wait in alleys for their victims. Over 80% of sexual assaults are committed by someone known to the victim.

  

• Most assaults occur in a private home (60%) and the largest percentage of these occur in the victim’s home(38%). (D. Kinnon, “Report on Sexual Assault in Canada,” Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women, Ottawa, 1981.)
• Studies of rapists show that rapists are “ordinary” or “normal” men. The majority of convicted rapists assaulted for the emotion gratification they received from the violent act, not out of sexual frustration. (Helen Lenskyj, “An Analysis of Violence Against Women: A Manual for Educators and Administrators,” Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1992.)
• Men who commit sexual assault come from every economic, ethnic, racial, age, and social group. As well, women who are sexually assaulted are from every economic, ethnic, racial, age, and social group.
• Legally, women have the right to say ‘no,’ to any form of sex with anyone, including their spouse or the person they are dating. Sexual assault within relationships has been illegal in Canada since 1983, however many people still do not recognize it as a crime. Even within a relationship, each partner must give consent each time sexual relations occur.
• Legally, a woman has the right to change her mind about having sex at any point of sexual contact. If her partner does not stop at the time she changes her mind and says ‘no,’ this is sexual assault. As well, just because a woman is in a relationship with someone or has sex with a person before, does not mean that person cannot assault her. Consent must be given every time two people engage in sexual contact.
• According to Statistics Canada, in the year 2000, sexual assault came in third for the highest number of violent crimes committed in Canada. The number of assaults committed accounted for the highest number of violent crimes.
• Anyone can be sexually assaulted. However, most sexual assaults that occur are against women and are perpetrated by men.

and in the United States, from the Kansas District Attorney’s office website:

• Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between the ages of 15 and 44 in the United States; more then car accidents, muggings and rapes combined.
  “Violence Against Women, A Majority Staff Report,” Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 102nd Congress, October 1992, p. 3
• About 1 out of 4 women are likely to be abused by a partner in her lifetime.
  Sara Glazer, “Violence Against Women” CQ Researcher, Congressional Quarterly, Inc., Volume 3, Number 8, February, 1993, p. 171
• One women is beaten by her husband or partner every 15 seconds in the United States
  Uniform Crime Reports, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1991.

• Three to four million women in the United States are beaten in their homes each year by their husbands, ex-husbands or male lovers.
  “Women and Violence,” Hearings before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, August 29 and December 11, 1990, Senate Hearing 101-939, pt. 1, p. 12.

• Women of all cultures, races, occupations, income levels and ages are battered by husbands, boyfriends, lovers and partners.
  For Shelter and Beyond, Massachusetts Coalition of Battered Women Service Groups, Boston, MA 1990.

I’ve seen these state before. And I figured someone who teaches defense classes would be familiar with them too. But sometimes, just when you think someone is all enlightened and that there’s hope for the planet you talk to them and you find out that enlightenment is categorical. They may be great at meditating and teaching traditional techniques but when it comes to applying it to the contemporary world maybe it’s more abstract and theoretical than useful in a practical way. I’ve discovered that there’s a divide between the theory and practice of aikido…

My daughter has been doing aikido for about a year and a half now. She loves it. There are lots of girls in her class of age 10-13 kids and although most of the adults are male there are 2 adult-late teens women with black or brown belts who assist and make good role models along with the men who are also great at what they do. I’ve talked to the sensei on several occasions and he’s got a great philosophy of teaching and the kids love him. I think the classes are valuable for her. It’s just really unfortunate that sensei’s knowledge about the type of violence women face isn’t all that current.

Actiongirls has been talking about the various self-defense courses available around campus and nothing has really caught our fancy yet. I knew that sensei had started teaching some self-defense classes for women for the parks and rec department and approached him about maybe doing an one day workshop for our club. We specifically want strategies for dealing with the most common type of attacks that women face – not the ones that are perpetuated in myths. So I told sensei that the members of the club want to learn to protect ourselves for real life situations, for example, in a car or in bed — to which he replied “woooahh what are you doing in bed with someone then?” Uh duh?? most women do not planned to be raped. I mean, if we did, maybe we could just change our plans and stay home and bake.

So sensei told me about purse snatching strategies and parking garages and walking down the street defense techniques, saying women need to use their brains and not put themselves in dangerous situations, this being the best way to not get attacked. Good grief. Blame the victim and disregard that the majority of attacks take place in the home with someone the woman knows.

So no, sensei wasn’t arguing with me but just telling me what he teaches. Too bad it’s not going to be useful to the majority of women and ignores the violence against women stats. The problem is that a sensei is an authority figure. People listen to him – especially his students. If a woman takes his self-defense class and he tells her to avoid walking down the sidewalk, going to parking garages, and other “dangerous places” she might do this. But it tells her it’s her own fault for being a woman, perpetuates stereotypes of women needing protection, and gives her a false sense of security that now that she can escape a purse snatcher she is “safe”. It’s not going to help her at all for the types of attacks she is most likely to face. In this regard, sensei is misleading.

We’re still looking for a useful self-defense class. One that doesn’t blame women and prepares them for the type of violence they are actually likely to face. If anyone has a recommendation I’d be happy to have it. Maybe there are materials so we could do our own?

Thanks again to fotografer.ru for the great CC-licensed photos.

No amount of capsaicin

No amount of capsaicin will kill this cold. At this point, officially Day 3, I’ve lost my appetite anyway though if someone wanted to make me a bowl of spicy lentil soup I would give eating it my best effort. I’ve drained a bottle of hot sauce and it doesn’t seem to have done a thing.

This happens every end of semester it seems. I think I’ve even written that before. I’m fairly certain that this time it isn’t stress but because I froze riding my bike home on Monday but maybe I was actually sick before that since I remember being freezing while studying at the U and not even taking off my coat while I was there.

I had to skip volunteering in my daughter’s class today. Last thing I figure the kids in her class would want is to spend their 2-week holiday sick like me. Rather than go in and spread my germs there I decided to put together her new loft bed. That went alright since it came on the heels of a hot shower with eucalyptus soap. Gee it felt nice to breathe. Unfortunately there was a lot of dust and it’s done me in. I’m planning to take another gram or two of vitamin C, another dose of echincacea/goldenseal tincture and sleep for half an hour before I have to go over to the university to do a pick up. Unfortunately I was too sick last night to finish the marking or else I could have dropped those papers at the same time. Maybe I’ll try really quick to finish them now instead of sleeping…. /sigh/ workaholic.

I did have a marvelous birthday. Rob took me to dinner and we had huge amounts of roasted garlic and a very very very spicy stir fry with tofu that was so good. Buffy Season 2 episodes 1-6 were as good as I’d hoped and the cozy flannel pajamas Rob gave me must mean that I can wear flannel in front of him now. I struggle to stay warm. He says I have no blood, and I figure that must be why I like Buffy tVS so much.