A bit of Fry and Laurie

A Bit of Fry and Laurie, "Tricky Linguistics"


"soupe de poisson IS soupe de poisson"


"Kicking Ass"

Chronic illness and telling our stories

Recently I received an email from someone I had met briefly a few years ago. He was inquiring about my experience with fibromyalgia because his wife has been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and they are searching for the right treatment, a process that can be quite frustrating. I ended up writing back with "my fibromyalgia story" and some links. I've taken out their names and the more personal parts of my message, but I thought I'd post parts of my reply. It's the short version of the story that every person with fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome has to tell. In my case, I am fortunate that I am able to manage my symptoms in such a way that I am not unable to work, but I know that is not the case for everyone.

I have had the symptoms of fibromyalgia since I was 17 (I'm now 49)but did not get a diagnosis until I was 32. There were many years of going to doctors, describing my symptoms (fatigue, flu-like symptoms without fever, all-over pain and severe pain in specific tender spots, a few others)  and meeting with bafflement or indifference, sometimes even the "women are hysterical and you are neurotic" attitude.  I knew the pain was not "all in my head" but for several years I simply gave up on seeking help from doctors.

I finally met a doctor at the U (who is now in pediatrics) who was able to show me that provide me with an accurate diagnosis, and who started me on a path of learning about the syndrome and how to manage it. At that time,  under the advice of this doctor, I undertook a holistic approach that combined physical therapy, counseling, trigger point injection therapy, major changes in ergonomics at work and at home, some medications to help with sleep issues and serotonin levels, massage, and even moving out of a noisy apartment that interfered with sleep. I attended a weekend clinic at Abbot Northwestern that was enormously helpful in getting me to take a systematic approach to improving my daily life.  Within a year, my health had improved immensely, although I have never been totally symptom free. I am enormously grateful to this doctor for helping me make major changes in my life that have alleviated the worst of the pain. For years, I resisted medications as part of my treatment regime but in recent years I have accepted that some medications are necessary for me, and I have found some whose side-effects are acceptable.

Over the years, I have studied any research I could find, and worked on diet and specific kinds of exercise as other factors that help me improved my quality of life. While I have never been symptom-free, and probably never will be, I can say that  the symptoms have never again been as severe as they were before I was diagnosed. For a while, however,, I struggled with the idea that this is a chronic condition for which there is no "cure" as it has affected my ability to work up to my potential, and as a professional I hated the idea that I was not going to be able to just "overcome" this with sheer power of will! I have considered leaving academia, but after considerable reflection and some changes in my work environment, I have found accommodation that allow me to continue with the work I love, but in a way that allows me to take better care of myself. This aspect is an ongoing struggle for me, but I continue to work actively at changing my approach toward work. I think it can be  hard for successful, highly motivated people to let go of an image of themselves that does not include these new limits.

With the support of  a doctor  I have seen for the last 14 years, I have continued to manage my symptoms (including depression) in such a way that I have continued to be able to work and be a good parent to my daughter who is now 12, and, most of all, to enjoy life.

My understanding of CFS is limited, and I realize that it is not identical to fibromyalgia (although there may be overlapping symptoms and it is possible that they are manifestations of an underlying disregulation of a physiological system) I have had a sleep test done that shows that my sleep cycles are not normal, and that is one of the factors that seems to accompany fibromyalgia as well as CFS.It was
useful because it ruled out a number of conditions (sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome).

I do know that in recent years, there has been much more research and support from the medical establishment both for more accurate diagnosisand for ways to treat and manage symptoms than when I first began to consult doctors in the late 70s.

I know that the search for treatment and the path to relief can seem long and tedious, and it can be frustrating to search for a doctor with real understanding and experience in treatment, but I can say from my own experience that my persistence has paid off for me in significant improvement in my life. I have been very grateful for the support and understanding of friends and family, and I have also learned to ask for help when I need it. Disability Services at the U has helped me get ergonomic furniture for my office, and has helped broker meetings with my department chair and HR to seek some official recognition of the fact that I am entitled to accommodation at work, although I still have to work more hours than are really healthy for me, and I am still looking for a balance in that aspect of my life. As I am a single parent
I have to balance my need to cut back on work with my need to maintain an income. Ideally, I would be working half-time.

Bird watching, bird reading.

While I was in San Francisco, my mother and I did some bird watching. Then I came back to Minneapolis, to the gray, brown mud that appears after the snow melts. This photo is from a walk around Lake Calhoun; the ice has not yet melted, but it is turning to slush, and this pair of mallards was hanging out around the open water.

But we have had glorious spring weather--rainy days mixed with record breaking warm temperatures (one day it got up to 80 degrees! in March!)--just what we need for the spectacle of regeneration that is spring in the north. From one day to the other, we have gone from muddy brown lawns to stubby green grass. In my neighbors' gardens, green leaves are poking up, almost 2-3" in just a few days. They will be tulips, daffodils, and irises. Soon, the bleeding heart that I planted next the fence will send up its dark curly stems and the peonies will shoot up.

The cardinal that sits in the very top branch of the tree outside our house every year has been hollering his cardinal song. I love hearing a cardinal and then looking for that little red spot high in a tree that has not yet budded. I'm not a great bird identifier, so I get a lot of pleasure out of being able to recognize at least one or two! My bedside reading is Red-Tails in Love by Marie Winn, about the Regulars, the community of birders and nature observers in New Yorks Central Park, and the story of a pair of peregrine falcons that made a nest on Fifth Avenue. I am enjoying the book especially because it is as much the story of the community of birders and the presence of nature in the city as it is of the red-tails themselves. My edition is the first; she has published a new edition with many excellent additions, and more about the story of "Pale Male". For updates and links, this entry on the blog Science and Sarcasm has more information.

Sharon ("Birdchick") Stiteler has been posting the most spectacular pictures of all the hot spring bird action. She was featured in Randy Sala's Star Tribune's column on birders along with some other birder sites. I visit her blog just about every day. I found her through Cute Overload because of her rabbit pictures, but I added her to my blogroll for her wonderful writing about birding. A new page of rabbit disapproval photos has been posted! Salas also features a site called ebird which harnesses the power of the blogosphere to the dedication of birders and nature observers, both professional and amateur. A partnership between the Cornell ornithology department and the Audobon Society, it gathers and integrates bird observations world-wide to create a database, make the information accessible, and maintain a portal through which we can all learn more about birds. I'm happy to be discovering these portals to images and stories.

Ferry Tales and women's spaces

Ferry Tales is a documentary about a group of women who take the Staten Island Ferry to work every day. It was nominated for an Academy award in 2004. The women know each other because they put their makeup on in the powder room. Outside that space they may occupy very different worlds, but they have created bonds in unexpected ways, across race and class lines. The women are shown in the bathroom and also in interviews, both alone and in groups. They talk about how this group and this space nourishes them in the transition between family and work.
I'm supposed to facilitate a discussion about it this coming Thursday. I was especially interested in the way the women policed the space (keeping the men out, enforcing a hierarchy of who got to sit and where, which kinds of activities were considered OK and which not).. I'd love to pair this film with Dean Spade's Toilet Training--it takes the idea of the women's bathroom and turns it inside out; who is a woman and who gets to use these public spaces? What would happen if a transwoman joined the group in the Staten Island Ferry?

what is femininity?

Twisty's post over at I Blame the Patriarchy asks readers to respond to the question "what is femininity?" for a friend's art school project. The answers in the comments are heartfelt, hilarious, smart, earnest, searing, brilliant, pissed-off, and just plain amazing. Take the time to read, and add your own. Many folks were particularly inspired by this comment by anuna:

Femininity is the bandage society enjoins us to wear to hide the wound it has made of our womanhood. Woman is what I am. In my woman’s body I find my strength and the expression of my creativity, my sexuality, my dreams and desires. To be a woman is good. It is NORMAL. A woman is not a damaged man, or a lesser form of man, or a creature designed to take second place to man or be a slave to man. Indeed, if “man” supposedly means “human,” then a woman IS a “man.”

But this sick, crazy culture tells me that as a woman, I am somehow much less than that. A woman is less than human. My vagina is defined as dark and dirty, my vulva as smelly and messy. My sexuality is either too much or too little, and always to be controlled by men and their definitions and desires. My body is not my own, to do with as I please. It belongs to others, to the hands and eyes of others, who define, defame, deride and detain me. My body is not supposed to be a source of pride or strength for me. Instead, my body becomes an object, not only to others but also to me. It is an animal to be tamed and imprisoned, an artifact to be carved up and operated upon. I’m not allowed to feel my own body. Nor am I allowed to know my own mind. A woman has no self.

Femininity is what I am issued to replace my woman-self, which has been found dangerous to men and declared non-existent. Femininity tells me what I can like and not like. Femininity tells me what to eat and drink. Femininity tells me what work to do, and how to do it. Femininity tells me how to speak, how to look, how to stand, how to walk, even how to lie down and sleep. Femininity is a muzzle that restricts my food intake. Femininity is a set of handcuffs that restrains me from picking up a gun, or a hammer. Femininity is shackles for my feet, making sure I walk in bondage even when I seem to be free. Femininity is an abuser who crawls into every crack of my body and mind and stalks me mercilessly even in my dreams, even on my deathbed. I can never relax for a moment, because I must maintain my femininity, like a mask that has to be maintained over the hideous scar that, in the minds of the patriarchy, constitutes naked womanhood.

If I ever stop being feminine for a moment, I will be revealed as nothing but a woman, and that would be so horrible to the patriarchy that they would no longer be able to tolerate me. Femininity makes the world safe for men. It turns a free-striding goddess into a simpering slave. Through femininity, we are forced to bow to the protection racket of the patriarchy. We agree to our own diminishment, hoping that if we don’t defy them, they will pity us and let us live. We agree to divert them and be pleasing to them, hoping to buy some time. We know that time will eventually run out–old women are despised, no matter how many years they’ve spent being feminine–but we don’t know when, so we live in this uneasy pretense of security.

I say “we,” but I shouldn’t, because I both reject femininity and am excluded from it. Femininity is that which declares me, as a woman, NOT to be a woman. Femininity makes it impossible for me, as a woman, to buy “women’s” clothing or “women’s” shoes. Because, as defined by femininity, no woman could be the shape or size I am. Femininity is that which declares my woman’s arms to be “man arms” and my woman’s walk to be “walking like a man.”

Conundrum: Q: What is the only force in the world that can un-woman a woman?
A: Femininity.
If femininity pertained to being a woman, or was relevant to being a woman, then how could it be that a man could conform to its standards better than a woman? My conclusion: Femininity is the anti-womanhood.

Anuna, Pennsylvan

Hedonistic Pleasureseeker, a blogger I highly admire, stayed up late to do a marvelous riff on the comments.I love what she's done with images to illustrate her response.

"What is femininity" is also an integral question in the work of artists Teresa Kupin and Esme Rodriguez at Two-Faces Studio.

And just as a reminder of why this question elicits such highly charged responses, we can visit Chasingmoksha where she posts the latest example of corporate wrangling of women into woman-hating norms of femininity in which pornified negligee-clad people of the female persuasion are paid to act out a sneering "war" between blondes and brunettes in order to sell hair-damaging chemicals. Femininity, indeed.

Master class

Maria Callas shows us how its done.

So you think you can sing?

I love it! The brilliant Barbara Herrnstein Smith is quoted in this essay about American Idol and the teacher-student relationship around evaluation.

Yes, this season I am watching American Idol. Tonight they are covering songs from the "British Invasion". I don't like the mean elimination auditions, but once they get to the final rounds, I find it fascinating to watch talented people work with the challenge of choosing a song, a style, a look, and trying to hit it. Every so often, there is some magic that happens, and someone knocks it out of the park. And tonight there have been a lot of surprises. But my favorite is still Melinda Doolittle. She not only can sing, she can interpret a song, tell a story with it.

Hommage a Bob

The poet Anne Waldman will be here to talk about Dylan and the Beats at a symposium on the early Bob at the Weisman Art Museum. Many serious scholars will deliver talks on Dylan's thought, his impact, his influence; his music has been covered by innumerable artists. In honor of this influential figure, I give you Wierd Al's Bob, a song completely in palindromes

here, for comparison, is the original:

Harvest Moon

This weekend, my sister and her husband celebrated their wedding anniversary. At their wedding, they played this song because it was so special to them. Happy anniversary!

New Richard Thompson song

"(Bagh)dad's gonna kill me" by the great Richard Thompson, courtesy of Crooks and Liars Late Night Music Club.

Leo in motion

Here's some exciting action footage of Leo the large, just being his big self.

Spring break

The day before I left for San Francisco, we were still recovering from our two blizzards. This bike was abandoned in the snow. A few days later, we were strolling through the Half Moon Bay Nursery, and this bike-planter caught my eye.


Magnolias were in bloom everywhere, in Half Moon Bay,


and in Berkeley.

Down by the bay

Crissy Field used to be an airstrip; now it is a lovely place for bird watching. That's a cormorant out there (my mother has binoculars and a bird guide in her glove compartment for moments like these).









Ravens or crows? They let us get quite close. Although they were the same size, it seems that one was a youngster wanting to be fed.

Some SF places I love

The wonderful shoreline park that used to be an airstrip and is now one of the best birdwatching sites in town: Crissy Field.

The Strybring Arboretum and Botanical Gardens in Golden Gate Park

The market in the Ferry Building

Fillmore Street, especially the hardware store.

SCRAPS or "Scroungers Center for Reusable Art Parts" (like the Twin Cities' Art Scraps ReUse store).

I"m going home

If I'm lucky, I'll get to catch the lindy in Golden Gate Park

Feminist conversations

Over at I Blame the Patriarchy, folks are reading Shulamith Firestone's book The Dialectic of Sex (1969, written when she was 25). It's not a perfect book, parts of it are dated and wrong--but it was so daring, and is still so thought-provoking that I am loving the discussion folks are having about it.
I just got my copy of The Nation, and the cover features Ruth Rosen's extremely good article The Care Crisis:How Women are Bearing the Burden of a National Emergency. It says a lot of importantthings about the structural inequalities that grind women down, and recommends real groups and actions, steps people could make in the current political sphere to make a huge difference. It's a really astute article. She's trying to appeal on a pragmatic level to US citizens in the hopes that we'll try to reframe the national political discussion around policy reforms. But it is trying to appeal to the good will of liberals--not a bad thing in and of itself, just not enough. Do I mean she's wrong or she doesn't get it? Not at all--she's adopting an important rhetorical strategy of seeking to move her readers to action, rather than articulate a theory. For the radical discussion, hop over to Twisty's to check out the Shulamith Firestone book club, where B. Dagger Lee is rockin' the house.
Professor Zero linked to Feminist-reprise where Amy's Brain Today put up this wonderful passage by Joanna Russ. Thank you, PZ, Amy, and everyone sharing your thoughts today.
Here are the words of mi tocaya

"...it can certainly be objected, although women's work as wives and mothers is not paid for with money, it is nonetheless recompensed in another, quite obvious way. Women are, after all, supported by their husbands. All women? Not quite. After all, the family wage was never available to the majority of women who were married to working men. Only those women married to middle-management men or the labor aristocracy benefit from it. In fact, it never affected most working men or the women married to them and it still doesn't. It is, in fact, becoming less and less of a reality all the time. Indeed, we have reached a point (at least in industrialized countries like the United States, Canada and Britain) where "women's work" is being required of most women in addition to paid work--at which women are being underpaid on the grounds that they're being "supported" by the very husbands who aren't doing so because they can't do so...

Nor is the marriage contract one into which just any two people can enter, nor can six or eight people enter into it, nor can those who enter into it change its legal provisions to just anything they like. For example, men may not marry men nor women, women (we are fighting over that right now, a fight that would have been inconceivable thirty years ago), nor can I marry you with the legal requirement that you balance a grapefruit on your head every morning to amuse me at breakfast and then divorce you when you don't, on those grounds alone. (That is a "personal" matter only, like the standard of living provided by a husband to a wife, over which the laws have no say.) Nor is it legal, in any other contract, to require that your employee allow you to fuck her...Such a tangle of the personal, the state-run, and the customary is the institution of marriage that it resembles no other work contract in capitalist society. Instead, marriage--which is certainly the key institution of the patriarchal mode of production--strongly resembles the feudal system of exploitation and oppression that existed in Europe before capitalism arose.

The situations of a woman in Western European/North American society today and that of a peasant in Europe in, say, the tenth century, show some striking similarities. For example, a woman enters the labor pool for certain jobs (among them the job of wife and mother) by being born into a certain group, her sex, just as peasants were peasants and nobles noble, and peasants did peasants' work because they were born to it. Her job as wife and mother is the result not of an impersonal money contract but of a personal relationship, as were the relations between monarchs and subjects, liege lords and vassals. Her status (insofar as it's the result of her sex) is an ascribed one, that is, one into which she was born, just as medieval European peasants were peasants and nobles nobles because their daddies were, and that status has, as it had in feudal social systems, the most far-reaching and marked results on her sexuality, her dress, her manner, her gait, her appearance, the way others treat her, her immunity from or susceptibility to violence and her freedom, wealth, health, and the amount and kind of her work.

If the feudal, personal relations between lord and peasant were a matter of exploitation and oppression--which of course they were--and if they produced wealth for one class at the expense of the other--which they most certainly did, by giving the one class control over the unrecompensed work of the other class--then I see no bar against applying similar terms to the patriarchal organization of production, which includes reproduction. If we do this, we are led, I think, to the inescapable conclusion that feminism is the study of the patriarchal system of unrecompensed labor and the politics and propaganda that maintain it."

______
From "Is Labor Labor?" in What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism by Joanna Russ (St. Martin's Press, 1998)

Wake up!

So Congress is finally going to investigate the criminal neglect of US Veterans at Walter Reed and maybe even other VA centers. What took them so bloody long? The Washington Post finally got up the guts to publish the truth about what has been gong on right under their noses for years.
Seven years after the silent coup, the New York Times Editorial this weekend made a to-do list for Congress. It says we should try to clean house on the worst of the ongoing abuses perpretrated by BushCo, but it doesn't say the obvious: these criminal acts cry out for justice, and the whole lot of them should be impeached for their crimes. Here's how Scarecrow over at Firedoglake reads the article: first a summary of its main points, but then he takes it a step further:

"Restore habeaus corpus

Stop illegal spying

Ban torture, really

Close the CIA prisons

Account for "ghost prisoners"

Tighten the definition of "illegal enemy combatant"

Screen prisoners fairly and effectively

Ban extraordinary renditions

Ban the use of tainted evidence

Ban secret evidence

Better define "classified" evidence

Respect the right to counsel

All Americans should take a close look at that list. It is not simply a list of things America could do better or a list of policy preferences from one side of the respectable political spectrum about which reasonable people might disagree. It is not a list of things that happened in the past, but are now discontinued, and shown here merely to preserve the historical record. No, this is a partial list of egregious and continuing violations of the law by the Bush/Cheney regime.

These are actions the Administration is carrying out today that are violating the United States Constitution, federal statutes, international law and treaties the US has signed and solemnly agreed to obey. Many of them are felonies, which means they also qualify as high crimes and misdemeanors. If these were drawn up as criminal indictments, there would be multiple counts under each category; hundreds of them. Several of the categories probably qualify as war crimes. They have been committed by officials who are still in the US government and have not been brought to justice; they are still being committed by the US government today, and in our name.

We have seen lists like this before, and we need to be honest about where. Lists like this have been compiled to describe the crimes of fascist dictators in Argentina or Pinochet's Chile or Generalissimo Franco's Spain; they are the signs of lawless behavior of regimes on their way to becoming dictatorships or totalitarian regimes. When we talk about regimes like Chile's or Argentina's dictatorships and compile similar lists of their crimes, it is always with the recognition that we are describing outlaw regimes who turned their backs on democratic principles and became a menace to their own people and international pariahs.

Lists like this describe regimes that deserve and eventually receive almost universal condemnation from civilized nations. And when these regimes fall, as they all have, the crash is always greeted with universal relief and cheering, followed by a commitment to bring to justice those responsible and a promise, never, never, to allow people like that to gain power again. Does anyone really believe that officials in our regime will escape this history? Can any patriotic citizen believe they should?

This needs to be said, loudly, clearly, repeatedly. Yet I watched the news/talking head shows this weekend, and every weekend, hoping to find someone who would say this. I've read the columnists who pretend to be the guardians of what matters in this country. Most have been silent. Should I conclude they are indifferent? Complicit? Afraid? By their silence, they have forfeited the right to be taken seriously."

Check out Impeach for Peace for a look at the many organizations that are working together for peace and justice. The trials can't end with Scooter Libby as the fall guy for Dick Cheney. And here's a very thoughtful set of responses to the question: "Is it fascism yet?"

What I do when I can't sleep at 2 AM

Every month, David Byrne puts up a streaming mp3 playlist around a theme. Click on "radio" to hear this month's show, or look in the archives to see the playlists of earlier months (no longer streaming). Each playlist is a couple of hours of amazing music. As one might expect, the rest of the site has links to his music, art, performances, press, etc, but there is also a journal ("just don't call it a blog") that is quite wonderful to read.
I remember the first Talking Heads song I heard on the radio as a revelation: "Don't Worry about the Government". I saw them several times throughout their career: the first time was in 1977 in SF when they were promoting their first record-they were so serious, so young and skinny! And the bass player was a woman! I was 20 years old, and I NEEDED to see a woman musician on stage who was not singing.
The next time I saw them play was a free concert they did on lower Sproul Plaza in Berkeley. I was just about to leave my shift at Kingpin Donuts (before Andy sold it) when someone came bursting in with the news that Dan White had just murdered San Francisco mayor George Moscone and City Council member Harvey Milk. We were all horrified and scared--yet another political assassination. I ran to the plaza where a huge crowd was gathered just as they began the first song--they played was "Psycho Killer." Were playing their hit or did they know?

Later I saw them perform in their "big band" incarnation, when they had Adrien Belew and Nona Hendryx with them (in the Fillmore, I think) and then outdoors in the Greek Theater when DB was wearing his "big suit." Brian Eno and David Byrne's collaboration "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" was way ahead of its time. Here's their song "Heaven" from Stop Making Sense.

Total lunar eclipse tonight

Astronomy Picture of the Day informs us that there will be a total lunar eclipse this evening. Those of us in the midwest will not be able to see the whole thing, but in the East and in Europe you should be able to see the Earth's shadow pass across the moon, so go out there and look!


And if you are astrology-minded, look up your sign to see what the lunar eclipse on the full moon can mean for you. Mercury is retrograde in Pisces right now. Astrobarry says that moments like this can be like turning a page in a novel.

The day after the blizzard

As usual, MNStories comes through with an excellent vlog post, in which they edited together some of the best moments of our recent "Winter Weather Event" to be found of YouTube video clips.
UPDATE: some great pictures from the Strib photo gallery
Here are some special Minnesota winter sports events;
Snow belly flops

Snow angels and snowball fights

It's a Snow Emergency!

Hey, our second blizzard in a week, and this one is even bigger than the one on the weekend. When I got home from work at about midnight last night (yes, it has been that kind of week) it had not yet started to snow, but when I shoveled this morning, there were about 4" of new snow. I made it home alive mid-afternoon and shoveled another 4-5". It is coming down at a rate of about 2" an hour.
I just ran downstairs to thank my wonderful neighbor Jeff who owns a snowblower and was out there cleaning my sidewalks AGAIN--bless you! We yakked about the spin-outs and the fact that the U of MN actually closed down today (only the second time it has happened that I remember in the last 18 years, although I could be wrong).
Minneapolis and St. Paul have declared a Snow Emergency--sounds cool! but it just means that if you park on the street, you need to make sure you don't get towed when the snow plows come through. Minneapolis has this arcane system where you have to know if it is Day 1, 2 or 3 and whether you can park on the odd or even side of the street, yada yada. I've learned the hard way to keep on top of it. Nothing like standing for three hours in -10 degree weather in front of the impound lot before paying $145 to get your car back to make a person pay attention.