"If you're shy, you can hang out with yourself and put headphones in."

Today, I had one of those shocks when you realize that, even though you thought that you'd achieved that new level of being a consciousness where you are above all of the things that used to hold you down, you're really just where you started. All of the old insecurities still have a hold of you, and you haven't really been as dedicated as you thought to becoming that new, better, more whole version of you. I have been single for almost two years now, and my original intent was to become comfortable with myself, because I saw that something in the way I dealt with others wasn't healthy. Everyone kept telling me that I had to love myself before I loved someone else, and yet I just kept plowing forward with men's attraction and interest in me creating the foundation for my self-worth. Well, thank goodness, I realized this was unhealthy and needed to end. Thus began my challenge to love myself and get to a place where I wasn't looking for a relationship to complete me and give meaning to my life. I've made a lot of guy friends, which I'd never done before, and I thought that I was finally in that place that I'd been looking for. I wasn't trying to date every new guy I met, and I was really getting to know the guys in my life instead of construing them to be The One instead of themselves. Then I kind of fell head over heels for someone that is now one of my best friends. That was one of the hardest things that has ever happened to me, because I had never before been interested in someone that I actually knew and spent time with who didn't want to date me. It was actually a good thing, because now he's one of my close friends, and I value our friendship so much more than I would have if we'd dated and burned out. The fall out between the crush and the friendship was brutal and heart breaking, and had me questioning everything I was doing. I started to wonder what was wrong with me, even as I was making better and deeper friendships with men and women and starting to live an honest, and therefore more fulfilling, life. Then, tonight, I found myself across the table from another southern gentleman who had, until that point, seemed like someone I could want to date. Then, when I dropped him off, he patted me on the shoulder... and I knew what that was. The last crush debacle had taught me to heed the warning signs and to recognize when I was firmly seen as a friend. On the way home, I proceeded to cry and to listen to angsty, melancholy Hanson songs. I started wondering when I had gone from the girlfriend to the best friend in the eyes of all of these awesome guys, and started to wonder if it was worth it. "It," of course, referring to my newfound feminist way of being. Turns out it's a lot harder to date everyone you meet when you're more firmly grounded in who you are and no longer able to mold yourself to fit the men around you. I realized, then, that I'm still not comfortable enough to be myself. I am still scared to death of being undateable, for reasons that are completely at odds with everything that I say I believe in. How can a person say they believe in breaking the gender norms when they're completely consumed with being attractive to the opposite sex? When this other guy, who seems like excellent friend material, came across as not interested in dating me, I immediately wondered why I wasn't attractive enough instead of thinking that he just wasn't the right person. Obviously, I still have a long way to go. Until then I'll just listen to Hanson and hang out with my best (girl and guy) friends and try to face down my insecurities as a strong, feminist woman. Hopefully, when I'm ready, I'll find a man who can handle that.


"I'm cookie dough. I'm not done baking. I'm not finished becoming who ever the hell it is I'm gonna turn out to be. I make it through this, and the next thing, and the next thing, and maybe one day, I turn around and realize I'm ready. I'm cookies. And then, you know, if I want someone to eat m- or enjoy warm, delicious, cookie me, then that's fine. That'll be then. When I'm done."
-Buffy, "Chosen"

thinkin 'bout something

I meant to go to bed at midnight. An hour and fifteen short minutes later, I am still awake grooving to Hanson's new CD, Shout It Out. Though the album does not come out in physical CD form (or in the downloadable form, for those of you tech-savvy ifolk) until June 8th, AOL has kindly provided all the tracks online. Yay! This is bad for my sleeping habits, but good for my Hanson devotion, as I feel that they only continue to improve with age. I'm only on their fourth track so far, so here is my incomplete assessment of the newest CD: It isn't nearly as activism-driven as their last release, The Walk. Of course this is slightly disappointing for me, but good lord I could listen to their bluesy harmonies all day long whether they're urging me to pay attention to the fire on the mountain or some weird ass dude from Milwaukee. This album is so much... fun! That's the exact word that I would use to describe it. I'm now on the fifth song, and every single one has had me shimmying around and tapping my feet to the beat. So it isn't as deep and existential as when they were dying to be alive and looking for a song to sing. Who cares? Not this girl.

In other non-related news (although seeing as my life has been lived to a Hanson soundtrack since 1996, maybe it's all more related than we know) I now have a job rolling burritos and getting food to the masses near my house. I will not mention the name of my new employer, not because I'm afraid I'll say anything bad or that they'd be upset, but because in my Service in Women's Studies class everyone seemed to agree that mentioning the name of the company you work for on a blog was a big no-no. I guess unless you work for the government, decide to cook your way through Julia Child's cookbook, and eventually get a book and movie deal. Then it's OK. Anywho, this is my new occupation. It's weird. I somehow expected this summer to be different, but it's exactly the same. I'm still at a minimum wage job that requires little to no analytical brain power and a lot of chipper excitement about activities that seem otherwise unexciting. I do hope that Cat was right, and that these experiences will one day provide a chapter of hilariosity in my memoir. This chapter will most likely be called: 1-2-3...shoot me. If you worked where I work, you would get it.

Man, this Hanson CD rocks. I can't wait to buy it on June 8th. I am so serious. It isn't just because I'm a huge, huge, monstrous fan. It's because this is the perfect summer CD to listen to with the windows down and bright yellow sunglasses on. It is also the perfect CD to dance around a new NYC apartment in, and I can't wait! It will also be sweet to be able to say I have 8 Hanson CDs. Yup. Cannot wait!

I feel like I had all of these profound commentaries I wanted to make, but the upbeat tracks are completely distracting from all the feminist angst that was previously building up. I feel like one thing I did want to discuss is that new commercial for tampons that claims to be revolutionizing the way we talk about periods by revolutionizing the tampon. So, I googled "tampon commercial" and it turns out I'm not the only one trying to figure out the point of this new marketing ploy. I'll be the first to admit that my gut reaction was pretty predictable: how can continuing to use tampons, which treat your period like something you don't want to touch and need to dispose of while putting you at risk for TSS and polluting the planet, be revolutionary? Once I found the site responsible, I was pleasantly surprised by the 'cause.' Of course, I'd rather all of the girls taking kotex's pledge to be real about their periods and bodies and to develop a more healthy relationship with their bodies and their cycles get a diva cup instead of neon tampons. But anyone who wants to normalize periods is fine with me. I just like Vinnie's way better. I'm always a little wary of a big, established corporation that claims to have women's best interests at heart. But, if their 'campaign' convinces just one girl to think that her period isn't gross, I approve.

I'm going to tear myself away from the last four tracks of Shout it Out (or maybe just fall asleep listening to them) and go to sleep. I have off work tomorrow (yay!) and will get to go do friend things. That's what the summer is about anyways, right?

Until later, I am yours in sisterly solidarity and would like to leave this song from SATC 2 (which will, hopefully, be the focus of an upcoming post) as a parting gift.

I biked to the store today: the life of a college graduate

Yup. That's right. Today, I biked to the store. It's only fifteen minutes away by bike, so don't worry, I didn't risk death by humidity asphyxiation. I needed yogurt to go with my grapefruit breakfasts, and I didn't have time to make it to the gym, so I thought riding my bike to the store would do for today.

It was surprisingly enjoyable! I am one of the remaining U.S. citizens without i technology, so I had to go the whole 30 minutes there and back without groovy tunes. I was impressed with how nice it is just to listen to neighborhood noise. I noticed that I could tell when a car was coming, and if it turned behind me I could tell which way. That may sound really unexciting, but I realized today that I hadn't gone for a bike ride or a run without some kind of bud in my ears in a very long time. So, I rode around looking like a total hipster in cut-off jeans and toms and smiled at the ability of my ears, most likely putting everyone around me on their guard. People in Houston aren't used to happy hipster bikers.

I have been going to the gym every weekday since I got home, and I find that books are actually a better distraction from the fact that I'm sweating than music. I have started checking out a ridiculous number of books from the library and taking them with me for my 45 minute cross country bike trip through the YMCA workout room. One book that I have finished while sweating is Janet Evanovich's first Stephanie Plum novel, One for the Money. A friend recommended the series when I told her I was looking for something fun to read this summer. She said they were hilarious, because they're about a bounty hunter (Stephanie Plum) who is really bad at her job. She also said that I would probably like how Evanovich uses different kinds of characters to save Plum's ass, from a hott male fugitive to a grandmother, because she thought it would appeal to my feminist ideals. With about 16:00 minutes and one hundred pages left, a scene with a character called Benito Ramirez upset me so much I had to concentrate on moving my legs and not breaking down in the gym.

I know it's a crime novel. I get it. But does that mean that sick, sadistic, psychotic rapists have to be characters? No, I don't think it does. I finished the novel, because I wanted him to get what was coming to him (don't worry, he does)but I'm a little torn now about whether I should check out the second book, Two for the Dough. Can you boycott a series of crime novels because they had a bad guy who was a rapist? I mean, the tone of the novel was obvious: this character was someone who was supposed to make you angry and uncomfortable. He was a completely bad guy. No redeeming qualities. The author wrote him that way. But, I am not entirely sure that he was a necessary choice. Or, is it good that the author chose to show such an awful part of our culture that often goes unnoticed? Could this character's presence cause people who otherwise don't spend much time thinking about the issues of rape and domestic violence to give it some thought, and to be moved? If someone doesn't have a close friend or relative who has survived rape, could the violence of this character against Plum and other female characters in the book push them to care? Or is it just more violence porn in the worst sense of the phrase?

I don't know, but I do know that this particular scene was so awful it made me want to go out and buy a handgun, take lessons, and get a license to carry and conceal. Not only that, I wanted to go all Kickass on the faces of all the rapists in the world, just instead of beating them up in a green jumpsuit, I'd shoot them in the dick. I'm just saying. Wouldn't it be nice?

Skippin class... because I am NOT going to watch another Star Wars is Realism clip.

So, for me this was all "epiphany!" ish, but other people may already be on the bandwagon and will probably think, "seriously... how did you not get this already?" but I was doing... something... I think I was at a talk at UT about sex education and worry, and it was like my head suddenly expanded, or something, to accommodate this thought:

All of the feminist causes I care about come down to the same basic thing. Violence against women, FGM, inequalities in wages, the glass ceiling, the oppression of female sexuality, the objectification of women, even sex education in public schools, they all come down to one basic thing. It doesn't matter what people tell you about how women have moved forward and have made so many gains. It doesn't matter that now a minority of people call those who have been raped or experienced domestic abuse survivors instead of victims. You want to know why? Because women are still experiencing job inequality, still being raped, and all together still being held down. If we look at all of these different issues as different, then we may fall into a trap of thinking of them as unrelated. If you focus on one issue at a time, they can become separated in your mind. It is hard to look at the big picture when each different campaign is a different issue, with different articles, protests, and campaigns around them. But when my mind expanded, I was able to see for the first time how they are all connected, because they are all springing from the same point: society must still devalue women, because if it didn't, these issues would not exist. You might say, "No, Genevieve, that's not true. Society just moves in baby steps." To which I would reply: "If people really respected and valued women, there would be nowhere to take those baby steps to!" Women are given less value in society, and the presence of all of these issues is the proof. My question is: WHY?

What is it about women that has allowed all different groups and peoples to devalue them? From women on Native American reservations to the comfort women of WWII, societies across the world have adopted this idea of women as less, as the slightly less complete version of man. If this is the reality at the core of all of our issues, how do we deal with this? How can we stop this? I seriously wish I had the answer.

Day One

OK, now there's a new assignment for this blog: keeping track of my internship for service in women's studies. For my internship, I'm going to be a feminist activist on a catholic campus. Yeah. I'm supposed to count all of the hours that i spend working on the group, which includes research for meetings, writing emails, and, I guess, doing this. Today I woke up thinking about everything I needed to do for the meeting... so, does that count?

I thought it would be good to set some goals:
1. Create sustainability through a solid leadership structure
2. Fundraise enough money to guarantee that at least two girls will get to go to feminist winter term next year, without university help.
3. Teach and learn.
4. STIR THE TURD!!

So... today's time log:
11:00-11:15 [planning for Vagina Monologues at UT, on the 20th]
3:30-5:30 [planning discussion for tonight: "what is feminism?", creating powerpoint to breeze through important school things: topper cup classic sign up?, group fundraiser sign up?, collegiate link training sign up?, bake sale sign up? creat event for next week's meeting on collegiate link]
5:30-6:30 [meeting]