Frank

12 years ago I was fortunate enough to meet a man who became a second father to me. From the minute I met Frank, he treated me like a daughter. He was indulgent when I was very obviously trying to impress him, always listened when I needed to talk, was gracious when I needed help, and proud of anything I accomplished.

Many of our extended friends and family benefited from Frank's generosity. He gave away homemade sausages, pasta sauce, canned tomatoes, antipasto, and of course, Plate Cove cod. If you ever ate at my house, odds are you enjoyed one of these foods. Frank loved to cook from scratch, and took great joy in sharing the fruits of his labour (as long as you didn't steal his cod tongues). My best memories of Frank involve working with him to figure out how to make something else from scratch. The day we made pasta from scratch, we took over the kitchen, the dining room, and two laundry racks to dry the noodles. It was a messy but delicious experiment. It also happened to be the day that about four unexpected guests decided to drop by. Frank was unrepentant about introducing his flour-covered daughter-in-law to his friends, in fact, I think he enjoyed it.

Frank's sense of humour was quick and mischievous. He dropped off a case of pasta sauce at my apartment in Toronto with the label "Pasta 2010, rabbit". I gave him my thanks but reminded him that I was a vegetarian. His response was "don't worry, so were the rabbits." Take me out for a beer some day, and I'll re-tell you his favourite story about the falling cows back in Italy.

Frank seemed to embody the values that make a community thrive. He was beyond generous. He probably did 30% of the renos on the house, helped me move several times, helped John's friends move, he even washed my laundry when I broke my foot at Queen's. With children he was gentle, patient, and loved to teach them how to work with their hands. He was kind to those who were older and would always be there to drive a friend into town, bring over some some food, or listen to the old stories again and again. 

He introduced me to long lingering meals, with good wine and good food. We would sit at the dinner table for hours, laughing and telling stories.  Although the table will now feel emptier,  I know there will be many more dinners where the wine and the conversation flow, and we idle at the table, telling stories about Frank. They will be happy, funny stories that we've told 100 times before, that Frank loved, and that he told again and again. For me, these simple pleasures and old stories will be his legacy.

Sooo Pissed Off Right Now.

Yes, I know I am writing a thesis, but I just couldn't hold off on this...the anger is just too much.

Warning, the following post contains intense sarcasm.
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I was perusing my google links the other day, and something has repeated come up in the feminist and sociological blogs I follow. This website (http://everythingidoiswrong.org/#/), has been raising a lot of emotional ire. Long story short it is a website dedicated to helping men deal with their ladies PMS issues. I was so inspired by this site, it has forced me to re-contemplate my life and my relationship with all the men in my life. After some in depth soul searching, I have composed this letter to the milk companies to thank them for highlighting this enduring problem.

Dear California Milk Processor Board, lobbies, advertising agencies and everyone else responsible for the subject discussed herein,

From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Until I visited your website http://everythingidoiswrong.org/#/ I had not realized the pain and suffering that my Pre-Menstrual Syndrome (PMS) has been causing the men that I love for the past Seventeen years and five months.

You may ask how I know that I have had my period for seventeen years and five months. Well, you see, as this milk advertising campaign has understood, my whole life is defined by and revolves around my period. It affects every aspect of my personality making me the thoroughly unpleasant person I now only realize myself to be.

So milk, thank you for making me realize what a burden it is to the men in my life when once a month I can't walk from the pain of my cramps, am completely exhausted from depleted iron for two days, when I faint from the dizziness, can't eat because of the pain from constipation, cry because of the low self esteem from my acne outbreaks, feel depressed and have increased difficulty concentrating.

Oops, sorry, I mentioned constipation, forget I said that. Women don't poop.

Thank you also for showing the men in my life how to soothe me and my raging PMS with gold and silver trinkets and chocolate. I am sure your meter showing the gold, silver, and cocoa futures so my husband can invest our (sorry I mean his) money according to my biological schedule.

Thank you also for showing my husband how my love can be bought with cute puppies, flying kittens, heart shaped balloons and other cute things. Until this point I had been foolishly assuming that mutual respect and communication were the foundation of our relationship. I now realize it is teddy bears.

On behalf of my husband, I want to thank you for teaching him how I was always right. Until now we had both foolishly shared blame when we disagreed. We now know that he is always wrong, not necessarily because the facts are on my side, but because I have a uterus. A utreus that bleeds. Once a month.

Oops, sorry again. You probably don't actually want to think about what a period is.

To the men in my life, I apologize. Up until now I have only been taking hormones that change my physiology and painkillers that make it illegal for me to drive in order to ease the pain you feel from my PMS. I have foolishly asked you to do things like buy Midol, fill a hot water bottle, or, and this is my deepest regret, buy pads or tampons. I am deeply sorry for this. Should I be so foolish in the future to make a request of you, please set me straight and buy me milk, that should solve everything.

Dear milk company, lastly and most importantly. Thank you for portraying me as a dumb bitch who is a slave to her hormones and a complete burden to live with. Thank you for portraying the men I love and respect as stupid idiots who can't have a reasonable conversation and are too immature to help me through something we all know is natural. Thank you for perpetuating sexist myths that hurt all of us. Thank you for giving medical advice based on spurious research. Thank you for teaching young girls their bodies are something they should be ashamed of and laughed at for. Thank you for teaching young boys that the period is something to be feared. Thank you for including one black man on your entire site (you wouldn't want to be racist). Thank you for doing what years of guilt have not been able to do and make me consider veganism, not because I dislike milk, but because I think you are a bunch of misogynistic douche bags who I don't want seeing a cent of my money.


And mostly, thank you in advance for taking a minute to go fuck yourselves. It is greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,
Shelly Belly





See http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/09/02/milk-is-mens-work/ for an analysis of another one of this company's charming ads.

Git'er Done!

My Mom said this to me the other day. Seriously. I was whining and crying about my thesis. After about 5 minutes of sympathy (which is is about what you get in my family before you are told to suck it up and move on) she said:

"Seriously Shelly. Just git'er done"

Another friend recently told me that writing a thesis was just like factory work, you just pump out a product that meets the minimum standards you need it too.

Part of me hates this, I want my thesis to be perfect, and to change the world. I want my friends and family to read it and be awed by my genius. The reality is that it really is slog time and I just need to finish it, I can perfect it when I publish it. I am just plugging away. Some things I write knowing they will be completely scrapped later, but I just have to get something on the page because you can't perfect what isn't there.

Still a long way to go, but thanks Mom, I am no longer aiming for perfection, I am just trying to git'er done.

Hamlet the Grad Student

Sometimes, my creativity gets the best of me and gives me a little procrastination inspiration. Here is what I think Hamlet would say if he were a grad student (a religion grad student in particular).

O, that this too too solid essay would finish
Organise and resolve itself into a thesis!
Or that the Committee had fix'd
Their canon 'gainst grad-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this study!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unfunded research,
That grows to seed; theories rank and gross in nature
Publish it thusly. That it should come to this!
But two months to the deadline: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent an advisor; that was, to this,
Socrates to a Plato; so harsh my editor
That he might not ignore the errs of grammar
Mark my paper too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Must I quote Orsi? why, McCutcheon would critique him,
As if increase of appetite had grown
By when it fed on free food: and yet, within a month--
Let me not think on't--Frailty, thy name is funding!--
A little month, or ere those dollars ran cold
With which I called for money from my poor father,
Like Niobe, all tears:--why he, even he denies me--
O, God! Foucault, wants discourse of knowledge,
Would have deconstructed longer--Derrida with Gramsci,
My committee’s theorists, but no more useful to my paper
Than breasts to a bull: within a month:
Ere yet the salt of most stressed-out tears
Had left the flushing in my strained eyes,
I defended. O, most wicked speed, to post-doc
With such dexterity to ambiguous questions!
It is not nor it cannot come to good:
But break, my heart; for I must get my tenure.

I also want to caveat: my thesis committee is great and very helpful, this poem reflects the expereinces of other grad students as well who have dealt with less helpful committees. I should also note, Dad would probably give me money if I cried, but then he would make fun of me for crying. I also think I get suck-up points for comparing my advisor to Socrates, even though my advisor is much smarter :D.

Compassionate Academics

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2010/02/02/que-rochefort-hearing.html#socialcomments

and

http://thestar.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bf8f353ef01287636a9a7970c-pi

Yes, there are douche-bags out there who want to celebrate a Marc Lepine Day.

Sometimes as an academic I put on a pair of rose coloured glasses. I spend most of my time with men who respect me intellectually and am surrounded by friends who support my choices, be they to pursue my career goals or have a family without judging me for either.

Outside of Academics though (and in some parts of it to be honest) I forget that there are still bigots out there who hate, who hate muslims, who hate women, who hate Black people, disabled people, the list goes on.

As an academic and a person who believes in higher power, I believe I have a responsibility in my research to disseminate ideas of compassion. I don't do academics for the pay (what pay?) or the glory, I do it with the hope that maybe an idea of mine will someday trickle down into common parlance, and people will think, and try just a little to learn about a group they don't understand before rushing to a judgement.

So today I salute gender studies scholars, who take the time to make us question everything we know about gender. Who make us aware of privledge. Who work to remind us that men and women aren't that different, and when we are different, that's OK, and it should never be seen as a basis for hate.

And to clear the record, I have met and studied some of the most passionate and intelligent gender scholars in the world, and while some of them are controversial, they all advocate compassion. So if I ever meet that man hating feminist women's studies proffessor who advocates killing off all men that the people commenting on the CBC article seem to be so afraid of, I will let you know. Because he she exists, she is a bigot, not the norm.

Handy little tip - objects in text

Is your thesis one with a lot of diagrams, illustrations and tables like mine?

Unless you are a formatting whiz, a lot of people have trouble making sure that their text looks right after they insert a photo, diagram or table. Instead of inserting the object at the beginning, keep it out until your last round of proofreading, if you are editing on paper, just put a sticky note where you want the corresponding object and keep track of the numbers. That way if you switch the position of two objects, their numbers will match up in your list of diagrams.

Another alternative is to take a brief online Microsoft word tutorial on setting up indexes if you don't want to edit on paper, you can train your computer to update your table of contents for you, but don't rely on it, always have your final editor check to make sure all objects match the table of contents, are properly labelled and in order.

Women of childbearing age say the darndest things.

I don’t have kids yet, in fact I don’t know if I ever will. However, being a young married woman under 30, people do like to ask when I will have kids. They never ask “if” I will only, “when”. Regardless of my answer, these same people like to take what they feel is a weird quirk about my life and ask if I will force my children to adhere to said quirk. Let’s take one older woman Kassie who cornered me at a family event a few weeks ago.

“Hey Shelly” she said “You are one of those feminists, are you going to raise your kids gay?”

I wasn’t sure of the connection, I guess most feminists do support gay marriage, but having had millions of similar conversations I responded:

“No, I plan to make them miserable.”

Not my best response, but it ended the conversation. However, Kassie is both persistent and unimaginative, just two days ago she asked me:

“Hey Shelly” she said “You are one of those vegetarians, are you going to raise your kids vegetarian?”

“No, I plan to MAKE them vegetarian by giving them a pet turkey as a Christmas present then pretending to be too broke to buy food at Thanksgiving.”

You may think this is a bit harsh, but if you have a womb, you understand how the entire world feels as though they have a uterine time share in your pelvis, with your in-laws and your own parents going splitsies on the ovaries, your friends discussing your cervix, the media putting up advertisements on your uterine wall and complete strangers taking a slide down your fallopian tubes. It isn’t just women, men do it too.

“Shelly,” Hank from the art gallery where I volunteer asked me just last week “what are you going to do if your kids want to join the conservative party.”

While the reality is that I would be very happy to have politically engaged kids, Hank needed to be put in his place.

“Hank” I responded “I would buy them Karl Marx bed sheets and sneak into church and put Tommy Douglas’s face in place of every Jesus I found."

My favourite question came from a co-worker (and I won’t say when or at which job).

“Shelly,” he said asked with a voice of concern, “If you wait any longer will you even be able to have kids, won’t your uterus just dry up?”

Now I want it clear, I have never before asked a man about what he intended to do with his sperm, or if his testicles were slowly shrivelling from lack of use, but in this case, I made an exception.

Oddly enough, no one has ever asked if I will raise my kids to be sarcastic.