Both Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon worked tirelessly for lesbians specifically and women in general. What started as a small social network called the DOB became a national effort to link together lesbians who found themselves isolated by a sexist and lesbophobic society. Martin, Lyon, and women who worked with them insisted that lesbians be visible, that our histories be uncovered, and that we be able to form strong social connections with one another. The Ladder, the print periodical developed by the DOB and initially edited by Lyon, did just that.

Perhaps the most important, or the most visible, aspect of Martin’s and Lyon’s lives for lesbians of my generation is their more than half century long relationship. Indeed, their relationship itself is iconic. Many lesbians and gay men have looked to Martin and Lyon as an example of the lifelong bonds that same sex partners can have. Sexism, homophobia, and the kind of poverty experienced by many lesbians (and, to a lesser extent, gay men) all contribute to making decades-long relationships even rarer for lgbt people than they are for our heterosexual counterparts. The not-so-cynical part of me has always found some happiness in the idea that patriarchy, and all of its accompanying garbage, couldn’t destroy something that was good.

In one of my Women’s Studies classes this week my students read the essay “A Day Without Feminism,” and we talked about how many things we owed to feminists. I am thankful for the many things they did to make my life easier, and I am particularly thankful to lesbian feminists who made the world better for me in a multitude of ways. Their work is neither underappreciated nor forgotten.

Notes:
1. Photos stolen from various websites that stole them from various other websites, etc.
2. I couldn’t find any pictures of one woman without the other.
3. Equality California has done a nice job of detailing Del Martin’s activist contributions.

Take 2:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zyrc/2365244174/

So until my brain is back to full working capacity, go take a look at Destee Nation. They sell t-shirts advertising small, locally owned West Coast businesses. They favor the kind of places that you would normally only hear about if you spent a good deal of time in an area — greasy spoons, bowling alleys, taverns. I wish I’d seen their site before we went to Seattle last fall; we missed some neat looking places. Speaking of which, when I get a few extra dollars I’d like to get this t-shirt. I was so bummed that the streetcar wasn’t running when we were in town.

I found their website the other day by way of some Internet lounging. You know what I mean; you look at some website that sends you to another website and so on until 2 hours later you wake up from your clicking-induced fog and realize that you haven’t done a single piece of work. It’s wonderful really — somnambulism updated for the 21st century! Anyway, I seem to remember reading that they had been featured in the NY Times if you care about that kind of thing.

Here’s Luna at the beach back in May. She actually fell asleep face down in the sand. Weirdo.

1. A few days ago Piig read about that insane bill in Mississippi that would have restaurants refuse service to fat customers. I wish she hadn’t told me about it, but there has been enough press coverage (and subsequent yammering about the dum-duh-duuuuuh Obesity EPIDEMIC) that I would have heard about it no matter what. Have we seriously grown so afraid of fat that we would subject people to public weigh-ins or BMI calculations before letting them eat out? Oh wait, that’s what Weight Watchers did for us, it (and a host of other diet programs) normalized public shaming of fat people while glorifying the loss of even the smallest amount of weight. Lose a pound? Yay!!!! Congratulations on your hard work and dedication! Gain a pound or fail to lose any? Awwww. You’ve let us all down with your overindulgence and lack of willpower. Willpower builds character and proves that you deserve things — like the freedom to live in your own skin.
2. If you are able to rip yourself away from the Abercrombie and Fitch scandal you might have heard that 5 women were killed in a Lane Bryant store this weekend. Call me cynical, but I can’t help but wonder if we’d be hearing more, if the story would have been more than a blip on my local news, if a bunch of Victoria’s Secret shoppers had been killed. Just the opportunity to flash pink thongs on the news probably would have made that story too good to pass up. I can see it now. Anderson Cooper would be interviewing witnesses in front of the Valentine’s Day crotchless panties and feathered negligees.
3. The Fat Avenger, Oprah Winfrey, had yet another weight loss surgery show. Never one to rest on the success of previous episodes, she made this story exclusively about teenagers. Viewers just didn’t get enough of the adolescents on Oprah’s other weight loss surgery shows, so she put several former teenage fatties on all at once. They expounded on the wide and various health benefits of having their insides tied up or cut out, and one young girl returned to visit the clinic in Tijuana where she’d had her surgery at the age of 13. According to the girl and her mother, she just mysteriously started to put on huge, massive amounts of weight. Suddenly her body started to change and she couldn’t explain it. It’s called fucking puberty!That’s right, I watched it. I had to; I couldn’t stop myself. It was like some sick obsession. In the end all it did was infuriate me, of course. And if Oprah had overemphasized the words hundred or two or three (as in two hundred pounds or three hundredpounds) just a couple more times I would have barfed. I expected to see the self-hatred oozing out of my tv screen like the not so uncommon postoperative anal leakage.

And I’ll leave you with that pleasant thought.

The best part is that the recipe is very flexible. I used red cabbage because that is the only thing the grocery store had. I also used one can of vegetarian broth in place of 2 cups of water. I didn’t blend the tomatoes, chopped the cabbage in not so little pieces, and used a regular block of tofu instead of the baked tofu that the original recipe calls for. You see, I have this problem following directions. That’s why I’m always appreciative of recipes that can handle substitutions. You can even add more water or veggie broth after the fact if you decide that the soup is too sour for your taste. I like it puckerific though.

The next time the wind is howling, and all you can think of is something warm, try this soup.

Here’s what mine looked like the next day. I like that deep purple color, though violet tofu is slightly disturbing. VeganYumYum’s picture is much nicer and looks more like the hot and sour soup you’d get in your neighborhood Chinese restaurant.

As I drove to my morning classes today I heard a report on NPR that pointed the finger at high priced medical equipment as being the number one cause of rising health care costs. (I would like to include a link to the clip from Morning Edition, but I couldn’t find the story in the archives.)

You can’t turn around these days without hearing about the dum-duh-duuuuuh Obesity EPIDEMIC.* What’s worse, fat people are being blamed for skyrocketing health care costs while insurance companies and high priced specialists sit back counting their money. Nowhere in the typical fat-is-horrible-and-scary story are these or other issues mentioned. The NPR blurb just goes to show that, of course, the issue is never as simple as so many make it seem.

Oh, and those overweight medical machines obviously need to go on a diet.

* I swear, one of these days I will record an audio file to do that for me.

This nagging diffidence pervades every part of my life, but today it is staring my teaching abilities square in the eye. I feel absolutely unprepared for the work I’m doing. My composition classes are going okay. After three years of teaching the first two semesters of composition I have something of a grip on it, but this first semester with American Literature is leaving me feeling bruised and battered. I guess it doesn’t help that I have a cold right now which cuts down on the time and energy I have for preparation. And I had little to no time to prepare in advance with such a short break between fall and spring classes. Regardless, I feel like a failure and a fraud.

I am a product of the public school system, and most days I’m okay with that. I got the basics. I think I’m a relatively intelligent person capable of interpreting, analyzing, and understanding the world around me to one degree or another. I’m fairly well read compared to lots of people I know, and I have a passion for literature and language that can only help in the classroom environment. I don’t, however, have a very good memory for history. I wasn’t trained well in classic literature and am too unsure of myself to ever broach the subject with anyone who seems to know even a little about it. My parents didn’t read to me; they didn’t do much reading at all in fact. It was rare as a kid to be around an adult who liked books. My mom read a little, but the books I remember seeing her with were ones like Flowers in the Attic and If There Be Thorns – sordid thrillers about violence and incest. As for my dad, I’m not sure he has ever read a book. He read magazines about car repair (he’s a mechanic), but even that happened infrequently.

I, on the other hand, loved books. My middle sister and I devoured them, and I still remember how much I loved the elementary school library. I’d visit, over and over again, the shelf to the left of a rarely used door near the back of the one room library. At eye level on that shelf was Misty of Chincoteague, a hardback book with frayed edges about the wild ponies of Assateague Island in Virginia. I must have checked that book out a dozen times or more until it felt like I was loaning it to the library rather than the other way around. I wish now that I’d stolen it, just never returned it to the library one of those times, but as a kid I wasn’t brave enough for such a thing.

I’m getting sidetracked here. I guess my point is that I’ve always loved to read. My sister and I would do it every moment we had the chance. I still remember Pa, my paternal grandfather, telling us that we were going to go blind once after he’d watched us hold up our books and read by the light of his headlights. We were all headed to a little steakhouse for dinner, and he was driving behind our parents.

Despite all this reading, I feel drastically under-read in the stuff that counts. I’m especially worried about what this means when I start to do my PhD work. I’m afraid I’ll be surrounded by graduate students who can quote Baudelaire, Socrates, and Thomas Hardy at will. It bothers me now, too, as an adjunct professor. I’m always waiting for someone to stump me with a question that I can’t answer. I know that a lot of it is first semester jitters. After all, I had them when I first started teaching composition, but knowing and feeling aren’t always the same thing for me.

I am not sure what to do with all of this academic self-doubt. I came back to my office this morning resolved to work out a reading chart. I thought I’d make a list of all the books I think I should have read already, put them on the chart, and figure out how to become well read within the next six months. Luckily, it only took me half an hour or so to see the ridiculousness of that idea. It isn’t possible. I’m teaching 5 classes, working as copy/style editor for the university and freelancing on the side, and trying to figure out how to start applying to PhD programs and study for GREs. Oh yeah, and I am also obsessing about foreign language requirements for most PhD programs, so I would also need to add “pick up a second language” to that list.

What is wrong with me? It isn’t normal to think you can do that much at one time. Either I am seriously delusional about my ability to work nonstop or I think I’m SuperBadger, possessor of extraordinary strength and willpower, able to leap giant stacks of books in a single bound. Or maybe I like to set impossible goals for myself in order to pat myself on the back later and say, “I knew you couldn’t do it. Good job.”

“We will increase the presents of a [technical support] staff members in these
buildings during this time.”

I really shouldn’t scoff, though, because I sometimes confuse incidents and incidence.