There have been little events, and BIG ones, the past few weeks I've needed to write about but just didn't. So, here I am. Let's see what I can get down in 20 minutes before lunch.
1. The Move.
The Move deserves to be capitalized and memorialized for all time. Our Move from Iowa to Texas was truly horrendous. No kidding. Iowa gave us a big "Fuck you!" as we made our exit. Eric and I were much busier with school and loose ends finals week than we had anticipated and so the mad dash was exactly that- a mad, freakin' dash to get the hell out. Of course, two episodes of snow that last week in addition to temperatures below zero- way, way, below zero- only made it so much worse. And hey, did you know that diesel fuel gels and renders moving trucks inoperable in such temperatures? Neither did we. Eric and I caravanned with my in-laws out of Iowa when we could finally vacate the house, and I will forever remember driving through Iowa and Missouri that Sunday afternoon, alone with Katie, thinking just how dangerous it was if we were to break down in the middle of nowhere, knowing my mom would totally freak out when she got the message that we had FINALLY left Cedar Rapids at 3:45, and there was ice ON THE INSIDE OF MY CAR WINDOWS the entire way to Emporia, Kansas. That's how cold it was.
But, I must give thanks where thanks is due:
Regina- for embarking upon, like I said, was similar to a mission trip in a developing country and helping us pack. And letting us know just how what you thought about it, the entire time.
My in-laws- thank you for driving up to help, for watching Katie and working on all those things that needed to be fixed that we couldn't quite get to on our own.
Our realtor, Barry Frink- Thank you for re-finishing our hardwood floors. I hope it makes you some money. More importantly, I hope it makes us some money. Please sell our house. Quick.
Rob- one of my favorite people in Iowa. You let us sleep at your place when our mattresses were freezing in the moving truck. You came through in a pinch, despite all the attitude I gave you the past three years. You also let me veg out on your sofa and watch cable television. And yes, IFC does have lots of nudity late at night. I kept on flipping threw it- I can imagine you don't. ;)
Mom- Thank you for letting me gripe and complain when I was completely overwhelmed. I know you wanted to be there to help and if you had, it would have gotten knocked out that much quicker due to your superhuman powers. I'm glad we're closer to one another now.
Our fearless, if not crazy and half-drunk packing crew that Friday- we're still finding stray screws, nuts and bolts in various places and boxes or trying to locate those various places and boxes in which you placed those stray screws, nuts, and bolts, but thanks for venturing out into the weather and helping us pack and load our shit.
Dr. Fay Botham- you let me turn in a paper after deadline and shorter than expected. And then gave me a good grade. I will miss our class, but you'll be hearing from me as I expand that paper and write that one I emailed you about re: the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka and Rev. Jeremiah Wright because the abstract was accepted at a conference. Oh, and I think of you and Sarah Dees every time I see a billboard around here that condemns me to hell or reminds me that abortion stops a beating heart. Um...yeah. (Hopefully you'll get that joke because I think some folks wouldn't)
2. Life in the land of the Lexus
The other day, Eric remarked that he thinks people in Dallas skip over buying a house and just get the Lexus. These cars are EVERYWHERE here in Dallas, particularly in our apartment complex. This reveals, of course, our preference for buying a house and then getting a new car (which will really only be needed if and when we have another kid). The Lexus is to Dallas as the Subaru is to Iowa City. And we don't live in a totally swank apartment complex, but it's not a shithole. After living in our own, albeit modest house for six years, it was unconscionable to rent an apartment that looked like the cabinets were about to fall off the wall and it only had two bedrooms. We're in a cool location with about 100 restaurants and twelve high-end shopping malls within a three-mile radius.
This was the moment the move truly sunk in: I was driving around one Saturday afternoon by myself, looking for a particular crunchy-granola-type grocery store and instead came across the Plano Whole Foods. I've never been in one, so I decided to check it out (checking out grocery stories has been a big part my adventures with Katie the past two weeks).
I think I made it to the cheese area of Whole Foods when I got a little emotional. I wasn't in Iowa anymore and this sure as hell wasn't the Co-op, despite the bulk foods and spices aisles. I was in the consumerist, corporatist heartland of the U.S.A., in a chain store with no real soul and a parking lot jammed with luxury vehicles. I fully realized what I already knew: I had left the critical, pseudo-socialism of Iowa City for a state with questionable politics and a heavier drawl than I remembered.
Here was the moment my sorrow got balanced out, if you will: I called Yeon to say hello. She told me they were expected freezing rain that day. I was driving with my window down.
So, what Texas doesn't know is I've brought my Iowa training with me. It kicked in as we left a pound of flesh in exchange for our driver's licenses and men with guns (okay, state troopers) literally patrolled the building, leering over people waiting in line and asking them what their business was that day. Intimidation? I think so. But more on that later. My chariot- that is, my husband coming from church, awaits outside.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Sunday, December 7, 2008
it would end this way...dammit.
We are under a winter weather watch starting tonight until 6 am Wednesday morning. Up to six inches of snow is possible. And the ten day forecast- bear in mind we have exactly two weeks left here in Iowa- predicts snowfall EVERY day.
Great.
Great.
Four black sacks of trash, four more for goodwill, and seven boxes (and counting) packed
Assessing our house right now, there's no way it'll be ready by morning to go on the market. We originally set our goal to get it on the market as October 15. Obviously, that came and went. Then, it was last Thursday. There was just no way.
Numerous times I've wished Mom were here because I know she and I could knock out all the mess and cleaning and just get it done. After Katie was born, I remember Mom helped me straighten up the rest of the house that she and Dad didn't get to the day they spent cleaning when the baby and I were in the hospital (Eric and I are that messy); like magic, the dining room was clear.
Right now, the dining room is the hub of the chaos and I'm ready for the junk to disperse, either by some trickery or by sleeping it all away. It's a gauntlet, and Katie scrunches up her shoulders every time she walks through like a little pinball trying to avoid all the corners and obstacles. I think as soon as we get the stuff we're keeping downstairs and the stuff we're tossing to goodwill in the morning, once again, like magic, it'll be clear.
So, in the meantime, I'm looking forward to being closer to many of my close (and majority-pregnant) girlfriends in about two weeks. I told Steph yesterday that she and the girls can make it up for never coming to Iowa or making it to my baby shower by helping us unload the truck on the 22nd, pregnant or not. And, of course, the drive home is much less painful from Dallas than from Cedar Rapids. No more frozen tundra, no more six months of winter and a blip of a summer (beautiful as it may be).
Numerous times I've wished Mom were here because I know she and I could knock out all the mess and cleaning and just get it done. After Katie was born, I remember Mom helped me straighten up the rest of the house that she and Dad didn't get to the day they spent cleaning when the baby and I were in the hospital (Eric and I are that messy); like magic, the dining room was clear.
Right now, the dining room is the hub of the chaos and I'm ready for the junk to disperse, either by some trickery or by sleeping it all away. It's a gauntlet, and Katie scrunches up her shoulders every time she walks through like a little pinball trying to avoid all the corners and obstacles. I think as soon as we get the stuff we're keeping downstairs and the stuff we're tossing to goodwill in the morning, once again, like magic, it'll be clear.
So, in the meantime, I'm looking forward to being closer to many of my close (and majority-pregnant) girlfriends in about two weeks. I told Steph yesterday that she and the girls can make it up for never coming to Iowa or making it to my baby shower by helping us unload the truck on the 22nd, pregnant or not. And, of course, the drive home is much less painful from Dallas than from Cedar Rapids. No more frozen tundra, no more six months of winter and a blip of a summer (beautiful as it may be).
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
A fear of disaster capitalism: My comment to the New York Times
Here's a passage from a story in the New York Times:
"Mr. Obama, who has largely been secluded from public view since being elected three weeks ago as the 44th president, is taking steps to be more visible in the next phase of his transition. He is scheduled Tuesday to name his budget director, Peter R. Orszag, who held the job under President Bill Clinton, and is expected to outline new budget reforms that will call on Americans to make sacrifices." (emphasis mine)
And then this passage:
"Mr. Obama noted that he still intended to pursue a middle-class tax cut. “The very wealthiest among us,” he said, “will pay a little bit more in order for us to be able to invest in the economy and get it back on track.”
And now the background:
This story is about Obama's economic proposals to get the U.S. economy market going, and the members of his economic team. Great, fine, whatever.
Okay, here's my problem. I've been reading Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine- it's wonderful and provocative. It connects the dots- something mainstream journalism rarely ever does- between Friedman free-market policies and the atrocities the U.S. has been involved with around the world. In short, she shows how the implementation of so-called free market policies around the world, that is, the privatization and denationalization of markets and commodities, is intimately connected to violence.
In fact, she argues, free market policies rely on the a "shock" doctrine to unsettle and erase a population's reliance on Keynesian economic policies. The startling realization I had while reading this is our "work" in Iraq identically matches the work done in Chile, Brazil, Argentina and other countries around the world where interventionist American foreign policy, either covert or in public, overthrew democratically-elected governments (Salvador Allende, for instance) to implement through violence free market policies. These policies strip government funding from social services, increase interest rates to control inflation, but entail atrocious violence to control populations and result in massive poverty. This is a fact. This is neoliberalism. This is the free market that Bush has been touting the past few days to "calm" the markets.
Here's my concern with the New York Times article, and really, even though these are just excerpts, they are not taken out of context. I've been nervous about just who Obama will appoint to his economic team. I'm worried he will appoint devout neoliberals (a.k.a. neoconservatives) to his cabinet. He sorta has. But the line where the Times writers state that he is asking Americans, broadly speaking, to make sacrifices really got me worried.
And then, the next quote, where Obama clearly states that only the wealthiest will have their taxes raised. This is my problem, and it may seem minor: the conflation of the general American public with the wealthiest overall by discursively connecting all Americans, as in the first quote, with the wealthiest, as in Obama's quote. This functions to diminish the actual economic anxieties and realities of those of us who do not make millions of dollars a year. Moreover, it masks the discrepancies that exist between the rich and the poor, or that there even is a discrepancy.
Media scholars have shown, and the world's unreal expectations of what life is like in America- that we all drive nice cars and have gads of money, that there are material consequences to rhetoric like this in the news. People understand the world increasingly through representations in the media, and in this instance, a number of things may occur: policy makers may underestimate the need for truly "bold" economic policies that the Bush administration and other Republicans would NEVER dream of putting into place, the circumstances of the poor and struggling are underestimated and diminished- relegated to, "it's their own fault"- by such stories.
But, on another note, to connect to Klein's work, I do worry that we may not see progressive economic policies from the Obama administration but something else. Larry Summers was President Clinton's Treasury Secretary, and the Clintons are not Keynesians, for sure. I like his ideas so far...but we'll see. It's too early to tell.
"Mr. Obama, who has largely been secluded from public view since being elected three weeks ago as the 44th president, is taking steps to be more visible in the next phase of his transition. He is scheduled Tuesday to name his budget director, Peter R. Orszag, who held the job under President Bill Clinton, and is expected to outline new budget reforms that will call on Americans to make sacrifices." (emphasis mine)
And then this passage:
"Mr. Obama noted that he still intended to pursue a middle-class tax cut. “The very wealthiest among us,” he said, “will pay a little bit more in order for us to be able to invest in the economy and get it back on track.”
And now the background:
This story is about Obama's economic proposals to get the U.S. economy market going, and the members of his economic team. Great, fine, whatever.
Okay, here's my problem. I've been reading Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine- it's wonderful and provocative. It connects the dots- something mainstream journalism rarely ever does- between Friedman free-market policies and the atrocities the U.S. has been involved with around the world. In short, she shows how the implementation of so-called free market policies around the world, that is, the privatization and denationalization of markets and commodities, is intimately connected to violence.
In fact, she argues, free market policies rely on the a "shock" doctrine to unsettle and erase a population's reliance on Keynesian economic policies. The startling realization I had while reading this is our "work" in Iraq identically matches the work done in Chile, Brazil, Argentina and other countries around the world where interventionist American foreign policy, either covert or in public, overthrew democratically-elected governments (Salvador Allende, for instance) to implement through violence free market policies. These policies strip government funding from social services, increase interest rates to control inflation, but entail atrocious violence to control populations and result in massive poverty. This is a fact. This is neoliberalism. This is the free market that Bush has been touting the past few days to "calm" the markets.
Here's my concern with the New York Times article, and really, even though these are just excerpts, they are not taken out of context. I've been nervous about just who Obama will appoint to his economic team. I'm worried he will appoint devout neoliberals (a.k.a. neoconservatives) to his cabinet. He sorta has. But the line where the Times writers state that he is asking Americans, broadly speaking, to make sacrifices really got me worried.
And then, the next quote, where Obama clearly states that only the wealthiest will have their taxes raised. This is my problem, and it may seem minor: the conflation of the general American public with the wealthiest overall by discursively connecting all Americans, as in the first quote, with the wealthiest, as in Obama's quote. This functions to diminish the actual economic anxieties and realities of those of us who do not make millions of dollars a year. Moreover, it masks the discrepancies that exist between the rich and the poor, or that there even is a discrepancy.
Media scholars have shown, and the world's unreal expectations of what life is like in America- that we all drive nice cars and have gads of money, that there are material consequences to rhetoric like this in the news. People understand the world increasingly through representations in the media, and in this instance, a number of things may occur: policy makers may underestimate the need for truly "bold" economic policies that the Bush administration and other Republicans would NEVER dream of putting into place, the circumstances of the poor and struggling are underestimated and diminished- relegated to, "it's their own fault"- by such stories.
But, on another note, to connect to Klein's work, I do worry that we may not see progressive economic policies from the Obama administration but something else. Larry Summers was President Clinton's Treasury Secretary, and the Clintons are not Keynesians, for sure. I like his ideas so far...but we'll see. It's too early to tell.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
I'm hoping the San Diego airport looks nothing like this today
After being closed for two hours yesterday from fog, this is the scene at the airport when I arrived.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Some serious ridiculousness
Perhaps my friend Shaina's headline was best: "This just in: Racism solved overnight!"
Of course, she's sarcastic. Much like me in my sheer disgust with white people thinking that with the election of a non-white guy to the presidency, all things are equal. As if it only were that easy.
But that's white privilege for you, to assume that racism is simply some complaint that people use as an excuse to get things for free. To say so is to deny the trenchant institutional barriers that remain against equality in this country, despite the ability to elect a non-white guy as president.
What started this line of thought was a post on MySpace, "White Guilt is Dead," from a guy I knew from high school. I knew it was something I shouldn't read and expect to walk away from unaffected, but I read it anyway.
The very premise of this post could be summarized by the post I saw by someone else on the Oklahoman's site after the election, something to the effect of, black people can no longer play the race card. The very premise of this line of thought, that racism can no longer be used as a valid "excuse" for inequity, is in and of itself racist. It excuses the racist structures that still persist, even with Obama's glorious election; in fact, the reactions to his election can be said to exacerbate the racism in this country. And don't even get me started on the white victimhood shit. Until white men no longer control the majority of this country and make the majority of the major decisions in the U.S., hush your mouth. You ain't got shit to complain about, alright?
So I hope someone will check out this link:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/11/16/13346/058/190/661895
I think it counters very nicely the way so-called conservative Christians talk out of both sides of their mouth in regards to living a Christ-like life while simultaneously condoning and perpetuating racist screeds like the one to which the Dailykos poster, and myself, responds.
To close, I plan on making a hobby out of confronting people head-on when they pull racist crap like this. I don't care how good a friend you are- you'll hear it from me. One of my best friends sent me a polite response to a post I made on MySpace informing me she and her husband were voting for McCain. That would be fine, if her response to me wasn't in reference to an article I posted that discussed the racist and violent outbursts at McCain/Palin rallies. Implicitly, she was condoning that behavior. And I just can't stomach that anymore. Not even from her.
I've already sent an email today to some wack job church in Wichita, which can only be regarded as the epicenter of Christian wingnuttery, in response to their sign outside their church that states something like America has a Muslim president (um, he hasn't been sworn in yet folks) and how a Muslim president was an sin or an abomination of God. All I've got to say about that is, are you fucking kidding me? Oh, and this: that whole bearing false witness thing. I guess it doesn't matter, eh?
Of course, she's sarcastic. Much like me in my sheer disgust with white people thinking that with the election of a non-white guy to the presidency, all things are equal. As if it only were that easy.
But that's white privilege for you, to assume that racism is simply some complaint that people use as an excuse to get things for free. To say so is to deny the trenchant institutional barriers that remain against equality in this country, despite the ability to elect a non-white guy as president.
What started this line of thought was a post on MySpace, "White Guilt is Dead," from a guy I knew from high school. I knew it was something I shouldn't read and expect to walk away from unaffected, but I read it anyway.
The very premise of this post could be summarized by the post I saw by someone else on the Oklahoman's site after the election, something to the effect of, black people can no longer play the race card. The very premise of this line of thought, that racism can no longer be used as a valid "excuse" for inequity, is in and of itself racist. It excuses the racist structures that still persist, even with Obama's glorious election; in fact, the reactions to his election can be said to exacerbate the racism in this country. And don't even get me started on the white victimhood shit. Until white men no longer control the majority of this country and make the majority of the major decisions in the U.S., hush your mouth. You ain't got shit to complain about, alright?
So I hope someone will check out this link:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/11/16/13346/058/190/661895
I think it counters very nicely the way so-called conservative Christians talk out of both sides of their mouth in regards to living a Christ-like life while simultaneously condoning and perpetuating racist screeds like the one to which the Dailykos poster, and myself, responds.
To close, I plan on making a hobby out of confronting people head-on when they pull racist crap like this. I don't care how good a friend you are- you'll hear it from me. One of my best friends sent me a polite response to a post I made on MySpace informing me she and her husband were voting for McCain. That would be fine, if her response to me wasn't in reference to an article I posted that discussed the racist and violent outbursts at McCain/Palin rallies. Implicitly, she was condoning that behavior. And I just can't stomach that anymore. Not even from her.
I've already sent an email today to some wack job church in Wichita, which can only be regarded as the epicenter of Christian wingnuttery, in response to their sign outside their church that states something like America has a Muslim president (um, he hasn't been sworn in yet folks) and how a Muslim president was an sin or an abomination of God. All I've got to say about that is, are you fucking kidding me? Oh, and this: that whole bearing false witness thing. I guess it doesn't matter, eh?
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