This Post Comes To Y9o From The Stratosphere

Good news, y'all.

I saw the surgeon today! And wow. Did he give me some good drugs or what.

No, wait. That's not how I meant to start this.

But yeah! Give it up for doctors who do give sufficient pain medication.

Also: I have to say this was the best clinic experience I've ever had.

Listen to this: I walked in there with a 9:00 a.m. appointment and, bitches, not only was I back with doctor by 9:00 a.m., I had already -- by then -- had an X-Ray done, talked to two nurses, and been whisked through receiving and insurance. I mean, yowza.

Every step of the way, also, each nurse and tech led me directly to the next step; and each one was very kind about doing so. And when I got to the examination room, the tech that led me there brought up the X-Rays I had done (about three minutes before) on the computer in that examine room. It was like medicine as art, I have to say.

Or, you know, like seeing medicine done the way it ought to be done in the 21st century.

Then the surgeon appeared, maybe three minutes after the nurse had left me, and talked to me about being an English professor, and then he showed me the X-Rays and told me what they might mean, and what they might not, and then he outlined what we could do, and then he asked what I wanted to do.

Then he scheduled an arthroscopy --what we decided to do -- for (get this) six days from now.

And told me he'd call in script for pain meds, no problem.

I left the clinic thinking I must have fallen into a alternate universe.

This can't be American medicine?

Farmers' Market

We drove up the hill to Fayetteville today, despite the blistering heat (104 here, and I think it was hotter there). Visited the Farmers Market, among other places, and got some lovely grapes and figs, more of the tiny peaches, beautiful tomatoes, red ones and orange ones, nice little purple potatoes, and Obama buttons all around.

Fayetteville is much more blue than Fort Smith, I think.

We also visited the best used bookstore in Arkansas (in our opinion), Dickson Street Bookshop, and got too many books, as usual. And then to the Ozark Natural Foods, for more lovely items -- rainbow colored carrots (orange, red, white, purple -- each carrot a different color, I mean, not the carrots colored like rainbows) and more grapes, because a different sort, and locally-grown free-range hens, deep-frozen.

The air conditioner on our ancient heap went out (as it usually does when the weather gets over 89 degrees) so we did most of this in the vicious heat, and now I am so exhausted.

But it is nice to have food in the house that is not frozen peas and crackers once again.

That Never Happened.

At the beginning of Joanna Russ's book, The Female Man, she has a quotation which talks about the various ways men silence women.

One of the main ways is to discount their experience. To say, in effect, that never happened. Don't be silly. You're exaggerating. I don't remember it like that.

I have (almost entirely) stopped blogging about my family here, because, well, the flak I get afterwards from them IRL isn't worth it. But I find I'm compelled to blog on this one.

Over on FB, my brother -- the one I like best -- and I got into a wrangle about the Tosh incident.

I posted a link to another of Tosh's very funny rape jokes, this one with several boys sexually assaulting another boy, with a header that suggested I found it shocking anyone could find Tosh amusing when he was making this kind of joke.

My brother asserted, basically, that one bad joke didn't make a bad comedian.

I argued back (a) not one joke and (b) rape jokes were different from "bad" jokes.

It went downhill from there.

Now reasonable people can disagree, clearly. But here is why I can't let go of this argument.

I made the point, to him, that Tosh had used the "joke" of raping the woman in his audience to silence her. I argued that this is how rape gets used in our culture fairly often -- as a tool to silence and oppress women. I said that I -- like many women in America -- had been threatened with rape by random strangers as well as by guys I knew almost constantly from the time I was eleven years old; I said that he (he's six foot four and hefty) could have no idea what that was like.

He said, "I'm sorry you let fear rule your life."

He said, "Seriously, you've been threatened with rape since you were eleven? By whom?"

And when I got more specific (listing an example, one out of about ten thousand, of the very first guy whoever yelled out of a car window at me, when I was eleven years old, "Hey, cunt, want to get fucked?"), he said, "Really? When?"

Because, you know, that never happened. Don't be silly. You're exaggerating.

I am really incapable of communicating how angry I am at the moment.

Even though, you know, this is nothing new. How many times has this happened -- not just to me, of course: to any woman who tries to talk about this to men. To any person of color who tries to talk about racism to white people. To any LBGTQ who tries to talk about their experience to a straight person.

You know, because it didn't happen to him, he didn't get stalked by guys in malls, he didn't learn he had to watch his surroundings constantly, he didn't get chased by guys in trucks when he rode his bike, he didn't get get cornered in a bar by someone who was his classmate in graduate school -- supposedly his intellectual peer -- and have his tits grabbed, told he had to give it up or he was a frigid bitch -- these things didn't happen to him, so they didn't happen.

I'm exaggerating. We all are.

From the Everyday Sexism site:

...last Sunday the Olympic torch was in Trinity Great Court. Students, staff and fellows had to obtain tickets well in advance of the event to stand on the grass and soak in the atmosphere (maybe a bit of rain too), welcome the Olympics, and watch the Olympic torchbearer take one lap around it. I hear there is a reference to the Chariots of Fire in there somewhere. The nominated torchbearer was a girl of around 16, maybe 17 max. Cheerful, sweet, incredibly enthusiastic, with her entire family gathered to watch. As soon as she was handed the flame, a middle-aged man from the crowd (I presume still drunk from the night before) yelled at her at the top of his voice- "Get your tits out for the lads". My boyfriend and I were too stunned to react, and by the time we both checked with each other we weren't hallucinating, he had run off. He was within earshot of security, cameras and crowds of people. No one budged.

Challenged a (male) friend the other day for posting a cartoon of a buxom lady with the caption 'What's worse, me or a mosquito? Me, because a mosquito stops sucking when you slap it.' His friends rallied to his defence, including a woman (and several young women 'liked' this pic, on Facebook).

cycling home when white van drives slowly next to you while a man oggles & says ‘need a hand sweetheart’

Walking home at night is something I avoid now. After I was honked at multiple times, stopped by a stranger in a car, and chased down by a drunk who thought following me would be a good idea, I don't feel safe anymore. It's a sad world.

Bastille Day!

It's almost midnight here in Arkansas, and Bastille Day, as I have just noticed.

I've been working all day, writing, editing, doing laundry, doing dishes, reading and making helpful notes on student papers -- I started at 9:00 this morning, and it's six minutes to midnight now.

Tomorrow I'll do the same again.

Monday I teach, hold office hours, and then come home and do the same thing.

Good thing we professors only work nine hours a week.

But! I did get a chance, while I was eating lunch, to read this anti-Feminist bloggit lady, who says that women "naturally" belong in low-paying, low-competition jobs like nursing and teaching and secretarial work, because we are unstable and easily distracted -- that's if we're going to work at all: because obviously we should not be working. Obviously men should be working. We should be at home, raising six to ten kids each (or, as she calls them, consumers).

If women would leave the labor pool and stay home doing all that work of raising, nursing, laundrying for, and educating extra consumers for free, says The Thinking Housewife, we would have no economic crisis! It is only because we think we are citizens, and not Men's Servants, that these economic problems have arisen!

Now That's Just Common Sense.

And I have written past Bastille Day, right into July 15.

Start the Revolution Now.

Now You Must Write What I Say

This summer I have taught Comp I and Comp II back to back at our battered little university, which means 10 weeks of reading student compositions.

For the past five or six years, since we switched the curriculum toward making the Comp I & II classes more specifically aimed at teaching the students academic writing (rather than, say, the writing process in general), I have been running my classes more or less the same way. That is, in the first semester, students do field research on and write ethnographic papers about a sociological group (it can be a work group, a church group, any sort of subgroup in the society as a whole -- I've had papers about soybean farmers in the Delta, BASE jumpers, roller derby teams, Pentecostal choirs), and then write expository papers and argumentative papers on problems in those groups; in the second semester, students write one big paper about a problem in their own lives, with attached smaller papers that summarize and evaluate sources for that paper, and explain attempts to solve the problem, and attempts to research solutions to the problem.

My point here -- and I do have one -- is that for all of this work, I have been compelling students to find their own research topics. That is, they have to go out and find, on their own, the group they want to study for their ethnographic field work.

And in the second semester, they have to find their own problem -- ideally some problem in their own lives -- that they want to solve.

I designed the class this way in order to force the students to write about topics that are (a) things they actually care about and (b) small, manageable topics.

That is, by making them write ethnographies on groups they had actually researched, in person, themselves, and then write about problems attached to those groups; and by making them write about problems in their own lives, I hoped to avoid those horrible, useless, impossible papers that are the bane of every English professor's existence: Why Euthanasia is Bad. Should the Death Penalty Be Overturned? ABORTION: SHOULD IT BE BANNED?

These papers are horrible not just because students have nothing new to say about them; but also because it is seriously impossible for a freshman at a university to describe and solve these problems in a 10 page paper, no matter how many brilliant sources he or she uses.

On the other hand! A paper on what sort of physical training you need to be a competent BASE jumper? That paper a freshman at a university can write most brilliantly in 7-10 pages.

So what's the problem?

The problem is these papers keep making (some of) my students sad.

They don't want to find their own topics. They want me to provide topics for them. (I suspect they would also like the topics to be things like Why Euthanasia is Bad and Why Abortion Should Be Banned.)

I have been resisting this. But now. Lately. I've been wondering whether it wouldn't make everyone's life simpler if I didn't just divide the class into five groups and give them five different topics. And give each group a dozen different sources. Maybe even an outline of the paper.

Why not?

Attacked by Giant BUGS!!

The kid and I take our walks in the early evening these days. We just about have to, with the weather Fort Smith has been having lately -- summer's vicious heat having arrived. Today was the first day in two weeks that the temperature did not go over 100, and usually the high was closer to 110 to 100. Also, no rain and few clouds have combined to dry up our world.

So just at or just past sunset (9.00 or so in these parts) is when we go walking.

Which has been fine until lately.

Just lately, and I can't say why -- maybe it's attached to the drought? -- all the cicadas have taken to dropping out of the trees. While this is sad for the cicadas, who struggle around and die on the pavement and roads and among the dry stubble of dead grass in people's lawn, it is worse for me and the kid, because when we're out walking at night, giant cicadas keep landing on us.

I don't know if you have ever seen a cicada up close. Here's a picture of one on Wikipedia.

Our are bigger, and MUCH UGLIER.

Especially when they land on you. And yell at you.

The kid thought it was funny when it was me it happened to. Because I made a sound like this: "AAAAGH!"

But then it happened to her.

Not so funny now, huh?

Enough to put you off exercise, I swear.

Working Working Working

Spent the entire weekend either writing writing writing (I've got a novel, plus a story I'm finishing, plus a new story I'm starting) or reading reading reading (other people's stories) or grading grading grading (Summer I grades R due tomorrow) so I am worn out.

For fun I cleaned house, as much as I can clean house as broken as I am.

Me: (starting to pick up laundry basket, growling.) Dr. Skull!

Dr. Skull: (Playing guitar loudly)

Me: DR. SKULL! (Adds a bad word.)

Kid emerges from her room, where she has been drawing for the past 15 hours: What now?

Me: Carry this, will you? (Another bad word.)

Kid: Oh, Mom. You're so sad. (Carries basket for me.)

(In Dr. Skull's defense, when he is not playing the guitar loudly, he does all the heavy lifting for me these days.)

Better Living Through the War on (Some Kinds) of Drugs

So I have these shoulder spurs.

And I've been to my PCP. And she's referred me to a surgeon (after jerking me around with steroids and other horrible "less aggressive" approaches for weeks).

The surgeon tells me he can't fit me in until August 2nd, which at that point was two months away. That's just for the initial appointment, the intake. Who knows how long after that we will have to wait before the surgery can be scheduled. (Yes, thank shit we don't live in Canada! Why, I might have to wait months to be treated there, with their evil socialized medicine!)

Meanwhile, my PCP says she can't prescribe pain medication for me anymore, since she has already referred me to another physician.

And the surgeon's nurse says they can't prescribe pain medication for me yet, since they haven't seen me yet.

"The fuck am I supposed to do?" I demanded on the phone to the nurse. Only more politely. I did not say fuck. I wanted to. "I'm in pain. I can't sleep. I can barely work. It hurts all the time. I'm not seeing you people for over a month."

The nurse repeated, like a robot, "The doctor will discuss pain medication with you in the initial appointment."

I know why this is, of course. Here in Arkansas, the local "problem" for the DEA is prescription drug abuse. That and meth. So they've been cracking down on the physicians, doing a witch hunt of anyone who gives out too many prescriptions for pain medication. Physicians who do give out too many scripts for pain meds are in danger of losing their licenses. And what does "too many" mean?

And someone like me who is in pain, and can't get medication? Tough luck, I guess. Collateral damage in the great War on Drugs.

It's all worth it, if we can JUST GET AMERICA CLEAN!

So We Can Fix You -- Maybe --

...but the cure will make you wish you were dead.

I'm actually off the steroids now, and have been for a solid week, but I'm still recovering.

Just head's up? If anyone ever suggests you go on these evil bastards, and you aren't actually dying -- which I understand they're good for people who are actually about to keel over -- just saying no.

Wait.

Don't say no.

Say fuck no.

Although my physician suggests (tolerantly) that not everyone reacts to them as strongly as I did.

Which -- yow -- I should hope not.

I can still barely work. I have no energy. I lie about thinking cheery thoughts like, well, if I did get pneumonia from lying on my back too long, and I died, then I wouldn't have to deal with any of this stupid shit at school anymore, that would be so nice. I don't want to eat. I don't want to drink rum. I don't want to write. (Which -- if you know me -- those last two are just -- wow. I always want to write and drink rum.)

I hope this goes away soon.

What Devilish Sort Of Science Fiction Is THIS?

So last night Dr. Skull and I went to see Prometheus.

It's hard to even begin on how much fail exists in this movie -- which, BTW, I so much wanted to like. I loved Alien and Aliens, though I do my best to pretend the other sequels just don't exist; and Blade Runner is one of my top favorite movies of all times, so while I didn't have great expectations, due to all the bad press it had been getting, well. I had hopes.

But my shit.

First of all, doesn't Ridley Scott know any scientists? Or if he doesn't know any, couldn't he arrange to find a consultant who could talk to some? Because I will just tell you, Ridley, this is not how scientists talk, this is not how they act, and it is not how they react. And I am guessing these are supposed to be among the best scientists of their generation, given that they got hired to do this way-cool scientific expedition out among the stars?

But they act like guys we've hired off the street to move furniture. Our "geologist," who claims at one point to "love rocks" wakes up here, two thousand light years from home, or however the fuck far it is, I don't know, about to land on a new planet, where no one has ever been before, and is he going o cool, I can't wait to see what the rocks are like? Is he saying, A planet! We're the first ones ever to land on a planet that isn't Earth! We can learn so much about rock formation from this!

No. He's saying, dude, I just came out here to make bucks. Fuck this job.

And once on the planet? He never once takes a rock sample or even looks at any of the rocks. That's right. Not once.

Same for our biologist. (Who, by the way, calls evolution "Darwinism.") When our intrepid explorers encounter the remains of the space aliens -- this would be, remember, the very first sign of any sort of non-terrestrial life anyone has ever found anywhere -- does our biologist want to have a look at it?

No. He barely glances at it. Then he wants to go back to the ship. Because dead bodies are scary.

Nor does he, ever, except for one time when it is vital for the plot, ever look at any of the life which is around him on this planet -- the algae, the worms, the other crawly bits -- nope. Not interested. Because scientists are like that.

And our main scientists, Mrs. Shaw (okay, Dr. Shaw, except I don't believe for one shitting minute she's a doctor) and her sweetie boo Charlie, who have convinced the head of Wayland Industries that if he spends a BAZILLION TRILLION dollars to come out here he will be made immortal (gah fuck?), they are just not scientists.

First, Elizabeth Shaw tells us she "chooses to believe" that the "engineers," which is what she calls the aliens, have created mankind. (She's come all the way out here to meet them and ask them why they created us.) Does she have evidence that these "engineers" created us? No. None. (Or at least none we're told about, and none the movie presents us.) So -- she's operating on faith alone. Yeah. There's your scientist at work.

All through the movie, clutching her cross, she operates this way -- moving on faith, not evidence. At the end, for instance, why does she trust David? Who has, after all, done nothing but betray them all, over and over? Including that charming bit where he killed her husband (the movie clearly shows that she guessed that) and tried to force her to carry an alien fetus to term? I'm guessing it's faith. It can't be sense, because there is no rational reason behind it.

(While we're on it, when Elizabeth Shaw goes to have the med pod remove the alien fetus, WTF is with calling that a Caesarean, and not an abortion? I guess it just goes against her faith to say the A-word? My hell.)

Mind you, there were some good bits to the movie. The little mapping drones were very cool. And I liked some of the byplay among the crew. And the opening scenes, where David is minding the ship, those are fun.

Not enough to carry this crap of a movie, though, sadly.

Exiled From the Academy

So we're driving home from the Harps, my child and I, last night, one of these long sunny nights in Fort Smith, Arkansas, with storm clouds on the horizon, but no actual storm clouds, talking about the issues we talk about, art and being artists and trolls on the internet and the latest iterations of QC and I was telling the kid about how much I too loved the smell of books and how one of the happiest moments of my life was the morning I got off the bus onto the campus in Fayetteville, Arkansas, after three years working a 9-5 job, and in the cool fall morning I caught the scent of books coming clearly from the basement of the library -- which vented right there by the bus-stop -- and I knew I was back in the academy.

"Back where I was meant to be," I told her. "The happiest moment of my life so far."

She burst into tears.

"What?" I said. "Baby, what?"

"I..miss...Fayetteville!"

"Oh...sweetie."

"It's a real university! I miss going to a real university!"

"Oh, baby-cakes. I know. But you'll be at a real university again some day. I promise."

"Fort Smith isn't anything like a real university!" she sobbed. "The buildings are so ugly! They don't have any Greek and Roman influences at all!"

Shoulder still Hurts

So it's four days now (I think, though math is not my best point) and the shoulder is still killing me.

Drugs ain't helping, IOW. I'm half convinced they're making things worse. Last night was the worst night yet.

In alternate new, my American Epics class is going well. We're on Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here now, his book he wrote because he (like many Americans in 1935) was terrified that the People Yes! were about to rise up behind a powerful progressive leader (specifically, in Lewis's case, behind Huey Long, down in Louisiana) and America was going to turn into something like Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy.

Of course, he had no idea (probably) how bad Hitler's Germany was going to get.

Still, he's unfair to Huey Long and to the working class in It Can't Happen Here -- he gets,in more than a few places, more interested in writing a polemic than in writing a novel. I think 1935 must have been a really frightening time to be alive.

Trying to be Zen, But...

...the election in Wisconsin has me eating my nails.

And the steriods I'm on are helping exactly nothing, I am sure.

Voter turn-out is up, which conventional wisdom says favors Democrats. OTOH, Nate Silver is predicting a win for the Evil One, Scott Walker, and Nate is almost always right.

OTOH, no one was expecting this level of voting. So...?

OTOH, RW is already wailing about fraud. So we can expect challenges even if the Evil One is cast out.

OTOH, how many millions of dollars did the RW Corporations pour into Wisconsin, basically buying this election? Whereas the Democratic Party refused to chip in anything?

Because -- frankly -- unions, the working class, the middle class, the rising up of people who want to take this country back from the oligarchs and plutocrats -- why should the Democratic Party care about or encourage anything like that?

You see how I've been stewing and fretting all day.

My Shoulder

I know you've been waiting for an update.

I saw my physician, who I love to pieces, by the way. She's great. She put me through an exam, being very careful with my poor wounded shoulder, and then gently told me we couldn't take a scalpel to the bone spurs this afternoon, which was kind of what I was demanding.

"We need to follow a more conservative path," she said. "We'll try two weeks of steroids and anti-inflammatory medication, and re-evaluate-"

"NO!" I roared. "WILD LIBERAL PATH NOW!"

No, not really.

Really I gave her my wide-eyed astounded look and said, appalled, "Two weeks?"

Because, seriously. Two hours more of this and I will be climbing bell towers.

But we compromised. She gave me some nice pain medications and I am going to sob quietly to myself after they run out, which will about six days from now.

More Whining

I called my doc and whined enough that my appointment has been moved up to Monday afternoon.

I might make it until then.

Although I am seriously considering going to the doc in the box this weekend -- or maybe today -- and seeing if they can't shoot something directly into the joint. I don't know what sort of thing might get shot into the joint. I just have this dream (a reoccurring fantasy, in fact, at this point) of a physician shooting a giant needle filled with I do not know what, liquid ice or something, into the joint, and the pain stopping for just one minute.

Gah.