Delayed joy in mudville

I believe I’ll close out this utterly craptastic week by leaving you with something I came across in Houston last week:

Turns out that the Texas Taco Music Fest is a whole thing, although I was unable to find out the story about the mud. The Fest is held at Discovery Green park, which is next to the GRB Convention Center, the site for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, and there was no discernable mud there.

But I assume that delays due to mud are also a Texas thing.

Raising our voices

My ex-manager and I had our regular catch-up session yesterday; our first in several weeks, what with one thing and another. At one point the conversation veered onto the Brett Kavanaugh…drama last Thursday, and he asked me my opinion on a couple of related issues.

One was ambient sexism, the double standard for male/female behavior. An egregious example was Kavanaugh’s drama queen performance, flouncing into the Senate chamber and alternating belligerence with sniveling and sobbing. The entirety of the Republican party applauded him and gave him full-throated himpathy, for having his life completely torn apart by not having the greased slide into SCOTUS that they’d all promised one another.

I reported that at GHC last Friday, Anita Hill mildly commented that no female nominee to SCOTUS (or any bench, I’m betting) would have the license to throw a meltdown even vaguely resembling that witnessed the previous day. And therein lies the ambient sexism.

In the business world (and politics, and pretty much everywhere), behavior that in men is considered strong, direct, no-nonsense and effective, in women is seen as strident, angry, unattractive and aggressive. If women don’t speak up they’re mowed down. If they do speak up, they’re too forceful. Performance evaluations will tell women that they’re not assertive enough, while at the same time they’re too bossy.

If a female nominee had pulled a Kavanaugh, Senators would be clutching their pearls and every news outlet in the nation would run banner headlines that include the words “hissy fit”.

Essentially what this ambient sexism does is tell women everywhere that we have no place in the greater world, so we should remain at home; behind; out of sight; silent.

We also discussed this exercise: a professor asked a classroom full of students what tactics they employ generally to avoid sexual assault. Here’s the result:

Men (outside of prisons, I suppose) never think about it; women pretty much always have to. (My manager made a good point: if the professor had gone back and asked white and black men what precautions they take to avoid crime, the white side would probably still be largely empty while the black side would be full. “The resulting table would be full on the black male and all-female sides, while the white male center would be empty. And therein lies white male privilege.”)

That came across my Twitter feed, and I tweeted that, while most of them have been in my arsenal, the one that resonated deeply was the one about never renting a ground-floor flat. I have always steered clear of them. Several people engaged on this, with one pointing out that you have a greater risk of dying in fires if you’re on upper floors. I said I’ve consciously considered that I’d hang from an upper window and drop—not jump—and take my chances.

(I also don’t even have my actual home address programmed into my sat-nav, and even entering it into Uber and Lyft creeps me out.)

But in response to my manager’s question, I said this kind of ambient sexism is like trying to walk in the ocean when the water is up to your waist. The effort to take even a few steps just wears you the hell out before you even get to your destination. And why the fuck are women having to weigh which risk they’d rather live with, death by fire or sexual assault?

Then he asked what my response would have been had Kavanaugh said something along the lines of, “Yes, I drank way too much in high school, and I did things I’m truly not proud of. I don’t recall the incident Dr. Ford describes, but if I did it, it’s an appalling thing, and I apologize profusely for the pain it’s caused her, both then and now in coming forward,” and then proceeded to itemize what he’s done in the intervening three decades to turn his life around and be a net-positive citizen. How would I respond to that statement?

Well, I’d be inclined to accept that acknowledgement and move on to considering other things, like his crackbrained notions about imperial presidencies and whatnot. Because here’s the thing: high school is when kids are supposed to do all kinds of stupid stuff (although you’d hope that assaults aren’t part of the repertoire). They push boundaries, and sometimes they push way too hard, especially where alcohol or other substances are involved. They commit crimes—sometimes felonies—and they make mistakes. Even in college that kind of shit happens, because 18-22 year olds are still trying to transition from children to adults. If every kid who did something lamentable during this time had to carry it around his or her neck forever, well, we’d very few of us escape.

It’s what you do after you realize what appalling choices you made (and what harm you've caused) that counts—how you turn your life around, make something good of yourself because of those experiences. If Kavanaugh had taken that approach, I think there would be a lot less derision and contempt, certainly from me.

I mean, I would definitely keep an eye on him, monitor his alcohol consumption and probably never share an Uber anywhere with him, but I’d move on from him being a prize prick in his youth to examine what kind of a putz he’s become since then. And he certainly does not disappoint on that count.

However, as I went on, it’s his arrogant denial that he ever engaged in any kind of non-choirboy behavior—despite his paean to beer—that I find reprehensible and unforgivable. For sexual assault survivors, the denial that the attack occurred (or that they were involved in it) basically constitutes a second assault. It denies us our experience, demands that we pretend it never happened, makes us less-than our attacker, assures us that we imagined it and that there’s therefore something wrong with us even bringing it up, even thinking about it. It also denies us the opportunity to heal fully, because that begins with bringing the pain and memories into the open for validation and when those loud bass voices drown us out, it’s just so much harder.

I did not speak in the first person with my manager, but I felt my throat tightening in anxiety and my eyes beginning to water, so I changed the subject, although I’ve not been able to shake the conversation.

I am grateful for Christine Blasey Ford’s courage, her steadfastness and her grace, which has driven a crack through the wall of belligerent denial and shouting, and released a tsunami of accounts from women of all ages, conditions, locations of their own assaults. As Anita Hill said to Ford, “You will feel isolated, but you are not.” Ford has freed us from our isolation. There are tens—probably hundreds—of thousands of us, and our voices are rising together. We will not be silent ever again. As for strident—these guys ain’t seen nothing yet.

Window view

A while ago I came home and saw my neighbor’s cat in the front window, sporting the Cone of Shame.

Man, there’s something about that collar that makes every animal in it look super miserable. And this cat had it on for a while.

However, eventually it came off.

I like a story with a happy ending.

Houston, we have a problem

I came back from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing with a little something extra—IT Band Syndrome. For those who’ve not experienced it, the iliotibial band is a ligament that runs between the thigh and the knee. ITBS is an acutely painful inflammation that generally results from overuse, as in, say, walking in excess of 16K steps per day on concrete floors, as I did last week.

I thought I was prepared this time around, having returned from GHC17 with the same. Last year the pain was so bad I actually wanted a cortisone shot. (My doctor wouldn’t give it to me; she prescribed only stretching exercises and OTC anti-inflammatories, the cow. It took several weeks before I could sleep through the night, because there was no position that did not come with teeth-grinding agony.) Before heading to Houston last week, I’d upped my walking routine so that I was regularly logging between 10K and 13K steps per day. I took two newish pairs of walking shoes this time (instead of one), so I could alternate in the humidity. And I swore I wouldn't overdo it.

But apparently that wasn’t enough. Wednesday night was okay, but Thursday night it was so bad—waking me up with great burning stabs of pain at the knee—that I thought I might need to go to the ER. Overdoses of Naproxen, topped up with half-tabs of Vicodin left over from surgery didn’t make a dent in it, so I stopped taking them; just had to tough it out.

By Friday I recognized what it was, and fortunately had brought a tennis ball with me, which I used to massage the band in lieu of the foam roller I have to use here at home. I amused myself by fantasizing about taking a scalpel and nicking the ligament just enough to release all the tension. I half sat up in bed and propped my knees on a pillow to kind of immobilize me so I wouldn’t turn over and start yelping. I made it home, where I hit the foam roller and tried to ease through it.

Sadly, it’s clearly got hold of me, and I’m going to have to take more tennis balls to work, and maybe WFH so I can use the foam log and apply ice packs to it. I can feel the IT band under the tissue, both stiff and sore, as though the entire line from hip to knee is bruised. It’s a cruel twist of fate that moving around isn’t so bad (I am, of course, not logging 15K steps per day); the pain only starts when I try to get some sleep.

This is a souvenir I could have done without.

Gratitude Monday: First Monday in October

The final day of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing was kind of the high point for me, to some extent because hearing Anita Hill talk about the Past, Present and Future of the #MeToo Movement resonated so deeply. She wasn’t exactly the antidote to the previous day’s shitshow in the Senate Judiciary proceedings, but her measured discussion of where we are gave me heart.

One of the things that struck me most deeply was when Hill assured Christine Blasey Ford that she is not alone; the audience burst into applause at that. There cannot have been a woman there who was not channeling personal experience into the clapping of her hands. Further, and stating the blindingly obvious WRT Brett Kavanaugh’s pucker-faced, flouncy angrylittlebitch performance, she commented, “No female candidate for the Supreme Court would ever have the license to cry or get angry at her hearing.”

Again, a wave of concurring applause.

Hill’s message would have been relevant even had it not coincided with the SCOTUS hearing, although I’m pretty sure that the timing accounted for the session being at capacity and GHC having to livestream it. (Most of the conference’s 22,000+ attendees were not born when she testified at Clarence Thomas’s hearing in 1991; from what I observed, the preponderance were focused on finding internships/jobs at cool companies, getting cool company swag and going to cool company parties. I suspect that they heard someone cool was speaking, so they wanted in on that, too.) But coming as it did within 24 hours of that entitled white male attack on Ford and the cringeworthy meltdown of Kavanaugh, Lindsey Graham and other entitled white males enraged that non-entitled, non-whites and non-males are calling bullshit on them—well…

On the one hand, it’s just heartrending to realize that we’re 27 bloody years on from the Thomas hearings, but we’ve appeared to regress to decades before then, to a time when entitled white males had everything, ran everything, took everything, destroyed everything without fear of questioning, much less of accountability. The arrogance of Graham, McConnell, Hatch and the rest of the Republicans representing the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries as they steamrolled this nomination through what they claim is a Sacred Process (although of course it wasn’t for Merrick Garland) attests to that. I experienced a wave of nausea at that realization.

On the other hand, I believe these little pricks with their hissy-fits and their patently desperate attempts to pervert democracy so they can retain all the power have woken a sleeping giant: the monstrous regiment of women they’ve feared for millennia, and our allies, who have had enough of this shite. Nemesis and her lieutenants, the Erinyes, are suiting up for this battle, I can feel it. And I’m ready to serve in their ranks.

So here’s what I’m grateful for today: we are taking on these angry bitches with dicks—on the Senate floor, in restaurants, at their offices, on elevators; every single place they are, we’re in front of them. And we’ll take them down, however long it takes.