kids – Composite

Progesterone daze

November 13, 2024November 13, 2024 Liz Henry

Not a lot to report here – but that won’t stop me from over blogging about it. I did want to mention I had a nice dinner out and a gossip with “Criplishus” and then over the weekend had the “Sunday Loaf” with radgendervibes where we hung out and did little projects – I mended some things, conditioned some boots and a jacket, and tried stripping the dye from my boot toes and re-dying them to see if I could get them brighter red while she sewed something that was going to be a pincushion but turned out to be a tiny jewelry bag with a ribbon instead. We had tea and cookies and gossip and then tried some ways to modify the skirt of her dress. I am going to her dance performance soon so I heard all about that and what “heels dancing” is.

Anyway, I love mending and maintaining things. and i love my crafting stuff and sewing box(es) and tool bags and my little carton of leather maintaining stuff and the supplementary box of leather dye and deglazer etc. It is like having this quiet superpower. Danny and I are thinking to make the Sunday Loaf a regular and low key event.

I am still working out how to organize and store my wheelchair fixing and modding tools and materials, right now in 4 different toolbags, a shoebox, and a giant bag full of weird clamps and camera tripod parts, and then some PVC pipe of different widths and lengths.

I am reading through the entire series of Inspector Rostinov detective novels which are set in the USSR in the 80s. They are grossly sexist but still readable (somehow). I also started having a look at a giant doorstop of a book I got at the SFPL main library bookstore, called A Treasury of African Folklore, figuring I will at least look at the rabbit trickster stories in honor of Uncle Wiggly but it’s likely I’ll just read through it too!

I am not feeling 100% right now as some hormonal weirdness kicked off. Because of extremely heinous hot flashes I started taking estrogen a couple of years ago, which works amazingly well, except you have to take progesterone pills for the first 12 days of the month along with that in order to decrease your risk of uterine cancer and if you screw up the timing of the progesterone, or just think bad thoughts, or look funny at the sky, then you suddenly get either “breakthrough bleeding” or just a regular old period depending on if you think you are actually in menopause or not, which is NOT really well defined.

Either way, it makes me feel quite blah, with moments where it takes a huge effort of will just to get up and Do a Thing, and I am suddenly bleeding all over after months of Not Bleeding (I had to go search the basement for tampons) and also am having regular old painful cramps. I also have some fairly gnarly fibroids including some fibroids inside the uterine wall and adenomyosis which, if you have heard people complain about endometriosis I have that too but ALSO have it INSIDE THE UTERINE WALL. I am not knocking my uterus, which did its job as well as it could. But i wish that it would be done doing things, growing things, leaking, being lumpy in strange new ways, feeling heavy, sloshing around in there like a, I don’t even know what. Like a heavy sloshing crampy thing.

Have you seen those videos where guys wear a period simulator and some giggling women slowly turn up the knob from 1 to 10? It is best when it’s more than one dude at a time so they try to out macho each other but fail. I would love to try one of those machines and see if it really approximates the pain! It does appear to from the stunned look on the dudes faces and the way they bend over and then when the dial turns up higher, the pain goes skittering down their leg and they freak out. Truly accurate. I think the period pain simulator is nothing without pouring about a quarter cup of blood into their pants though.

I spent an hour on a video call with my nephew looking at bits of his college essays and offering light editing analysis. He is always a bit mysterious, has exhibited a sort of strategic flare, or genius, from a young age as well as being able to inhale vast amounts of detail and analyze things at a high level.He is a very interesting thinker and has mastered a certain kind of rhetoric that made me think he will make a quite interesting career doing policy or political work.

My ex mom in law died this weekend and I am thinking about her a lot. I am so glad I got to see her and sit with her earlier this year at my ex’s wedding (which was so lovely!) And feel that we still had a connection. She was a really amazing and very intense person. M. came over and we hugged a lot and looked at old photo albums and talked about her for hours last night. I found an old letter she had sent from her trip to Tanzania where she not only climbed to hut 2 of Mt. Kilmanjaro but also visited some hospitals and small clinics for kids with cerebral palsy and developmental delays or disorders. So most of the letter was about that and I know she worked on those connections for years getting them equipment and other resources.

It seemed so wild at the time (~20 years ago) that you could email some random hospitals in Tanzania and introduce yourself, then show up, inspect everything, give some lectures, actually work a lot, and create a lasting connection. Never mind “going on vacation” – far too dull. They stayed in hostels a lot and would cook for everyone and then just go around meeting random Korean businesspeople who lived in town. You could also count on her and her husband both to do things people told them not to that were dangerous or forbidden or generally unwise. If there was a sign saying caution stay back, they would take it as a sign to investigate…. Sometimes maddening but also endearing. She also set money aside for all 5 of her grandchildren to help them through university. But, my memories of her are more about how hilarious she was and how she was a sort of shrieker and blurter and witchy cackler, and a generator of chaos, in a way that made us kindred spirits in a certain chaos goblin way. She only retired a couple of years ago at age 86. I am sad she has died but a little comforted to know she had been doing things like, reportedly, declaring it was fine now on her way out to have THREE DESSERTS if she felt like it. Correct!!!!

As I told various stories to my kid I had more of those stereotypical Gen X moments where i was just casually telling about something and the young person’s eyes go wide with concern and shock as they go “I’m so sorry that happened to you!” and they make you stop and get a hug. I cannot remember what the things were, because they don’t even register for me as particularly bad, but sometimes I can take the hug, step back, and think, Huh. OK. I’ll take a kind of care that I didn’t think was needed. Maybe it is! I can learn things!!!! I thought a little bit about older relatives and how curious I was or would have been about their war experiences but how reticent they were to share.

We looked at several photo albums of their babyhood and toddler years and both sets of grandparents holding them and playing with them and I think that was a good grounding thing to do that made some space for emotions around loss but that were also making space for love.

Some ideas on self-care, interdependence, and caring for others

May 16, 2019May 16, 2019 Liz

On self-care and care for others. I keep returning to the thought of care and interdependence. By caring for myself, I am modeling for others how to care for themselves. When I am cleaning up the environment or making some food or thinking ahead to make my lunch for the next day, I can do it while thinking of those actions as loving self care, and I can extend that to others as well (especially as a parent). That sounds simple, but in practice I don’t find it to be so easy. There is also a place in life for self indulgence: I feel bad, I had a stressful day, so therefore I will get some ice cream and huddle in the blankets and play video games. (Or, weirder than that, the idea that you go get a manicure or something….) That can be part of self-care but it shouldn’t be mistaken for all the work of care, which is 99% maintenance and chores. And who hasn’t had the thought, “Oh, god, here I am slogging through this work again, doing the dishes (or whatever) and then it will need to be done all over again!” and just brushing your teeth feels like this dreary sisyphean task. I have had very good luck practicing the work of transmuting maintenance and care, you could even call it service work, into love or doing it in a spirit of kindness to one’s self. If you have had the experience of trying to do those things, and getting abuse as a result (not doing it well enough, or right, being scorned, mocked, yelled at, or punished, for example) then it is even harder. I have to bite back my thoughts and words (Can’t you even ____?! Can’t you just???! ) A little patience is so useful. (With myself or with, well, teenagers). If a person is feeling depressed and anxious, they need more care, done in a good spirit, and to me, it honestly felt revolutionary to see that, and say outright, “You’re feeling so bad, let me take care of you, it’s ok to feel sad and ask for care from friends and family… and… we can figure out what can you do to take good care of yourself too” And then make some healthy dinner and dig them out from chaos. Because, what I’d expect myself when I was a kid was that my sad feelings and need of care would result in others being angry with me. Danny has pointed out to me over the years that my family’s ultimate insult is to call someone a baby. Don’t be a baby! What a baby! What does it mean to be a baby, in this family language? It means to need help or care. That’s a sad subtext that I want to correct.

Occasionally as an adult in the world I get a feeling of surprise care and humanity where I didn’t expect it. Like, I was moved nearly to tears when someone came round the grocery checkout and offered without fuss to put the grocery bag handles on the back of my wheelchair. She settled it carefully with the handles criss crossed just the way I do it myself, with out jolting me or doing anything strange (either she knows someone well who is a wheelchair user, or she just notices) and she made eye contact first – I can’t remember if she asked outright but we had a eye contact and body language interchange that was essentially asking and consent. True access intimacy. How rare and precious that simple interaction is. All our help and care for others should be in that spirit as well.

A nice streak of activity and social stuff

December 17, 2018December 17, 2018 Liz

Continuing my trend of feeling frisky and getting out of the house – in the last few days I went to a party with friends I haven’t seen in a long time (a white elephant xmas party), another fairly mellow get together in some guy’s warehouse with people I don’t really know at all, which was interesting, and another (birthday) party right down the street where I got everyone to try my new powerchair in the bar.

And went to Ada’s choir concert on top of that. They sang a song by Pentatonix, and something Beatles-ish, and then a jazzed up Little Drummer Boy, which I correctly flagged as resulting from Ada’s evil influence, deliberately pranking us all to make us lose the Little Drummer Boy challenge. The high school mariachi bands (year one and year 2) were also excellent!

It’s so nice to have both kids here at once for a few days with Milo back from university – they are so lively – Our tiny house is just packed full right now – I’m enjoying this time with them. Today I’m hoping to geek out on Inform7 with Milo.

My knees and ankles are a little trashed probably from the party going (stairs!) But I am icing them and resting up today.

And then I have tickets to go see George Clinton & Parliament!!!!!! OMG!!!!!!

Happy National Coming Out Day!

October 11, 2015 Liz

It’s that day again! I wrote a coming-out story some years ago, and it’s in a book, Can I Sit With You?.

Here’s a link to the full story online if you’d like to read it. It’s called “The Sex Change of Zyax II“.

True story from my 5th grade life in Houston, Texas in 1980.

Here is a picture of me at around that time, in my big plastic glasses frame, slightly stringy brown hair, and a tshirt with an iron-on patch that says “Friends Are Forever”.

Liz 1981

While the legal and cultural situation for GLBT people has changed somewhat for the better in the U.S. since my coming out experience 35 years ago, I think that we can’t underestimate the damage that hateful bigots still do even with those changes taking place. LGBTQ youth are still at greatly increased risk of being targeted for violence, and at more risk for suicide, than straight kids.

I was pleased recently to see this new of a dude escaping from a bad situation from his family, and that he had good legal support: https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2015/10/06/trans-man-trapped-in-india-by-parents-allowed-to-return-home/.

Anyway, keep speaking up and representing, because this battle isn’t over.

Noisebridge! Best thing ever!

March 27, 2013September 24, 2022 Liz

On April 2nd and 3rd I am going to spend several hours teaching at least 70 high school physics students how to solder and some alluring information about contributing to open source software!

They are doing a project to design and build a solar home. If you know anything about electronics or solar energy cells please join us a do some teaching!

I spent $250 of my own money to buy a crapload of little LED kits so they can have a conveniently teachable soldering project – that is how much I love Noisebridge, and geeky things, and teaching, and non hierarchical anarchist/mutualist community spaces!

I am thinking of the Hackability group that meets at Noisebridge to fix and mod their wheelchairs and mobility scooters! We take over a classroom, gank all the workshop tools, and get on the floor where none of us think it is weird that we scoot and crawl and roll across the floor to pick up a screwdriver just out of reach, laughing at all this solidarity! We bravely dismantle our cyborg leg-wheels and bolt them on again covered with LED lights, jazzed up with arduinos to measure battery voltage, then roll on out into the town!

And the fierce, fun feminist hacker hive that is a chaotic unstructured network of strength and curiosity and information sharing, that stretches from Noisebridge to sudo room and LOLSpace, and beyond!

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I am thinking of all the people I’ve given tours to who come in from out of town and are all starry-eyed and inspired, who meet people and go to Python and Ruby and web dev and Linux classes and eat the strange productions from the Vegan Hackers, the laptops that people at Noisebridge fix and give away, the cameraderie I always find there and the fabulous energy of young people just moving to San Francisco to do a startup or find some kind of freedom or empowerment and hope to find at least part of it at this weird ever changing junkyard coffeehouse-feeling co-op workshop. We made this place that isn’t anything like any other place and it can also be YOURS. Meddle in it!f

SUBSCRIBE to support Noisebridge’s rent, its freely provided wifi, its bins of electronics parts that anyone can rummage through and pillage, its beautiful giant robot, its classrooms and electricity, its ADA-compliant bathroom custom built specially by Noisebridge folk, its elevator, its devotion to support accessibility for all, all its copies of keys that I and others have distributed as Keys to the City, the library of excellent technical books, well used and loved and read!

Our rent went up this year, and our people’s job security and income went down. It’s exactly at that point, when the economy is hard on us all, that we need collectives and co-ops and hackerspaces. We have to band together in the best ways we can come up with.

People visit Noisebridge and like it so much that they move to the Bay Area. They come to Noisebridge for education, to find peers and mentors, to teach, and sometimes to find as close as they can get to home and family when they are hackers down on their luck.

They come to speak in public for the first time at 5 minutes of fame. They sound a little odd and then they turn out to be geniuses. They drudge to clean the floors and toilets and scrub the kitchen and buy toilet paper, doing the unglamorous physical domestic labor of maintaining this place that’s used heavily 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

We do good work together as best we can. We give a lot to our community! We give access, tools, skills, time, belief, trust, fantastic spectacles, beauty and humor and art. With a sense of wonder and playfulness people walk in and look around – I see it on their faces – like they have just had a million new ideas churn around in their heads – So many possibilities and they know they can be part of it.

And we need widespread, ongoing support.

Donate, sign up for a monthly subscription, be a fabulous affiliate of Noisebridge!

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Hacking class for kids

May 23, 2011 Liz

My son’s school had a day this week called “Festival of Numbers”, a day where they invited the geeky parents and anyone else to come teach fun hands-on classes about science, math, engineering, or computer concepts. There were GPS treasure hunts along with classes on origami and code-breaking, probabilities in poker, bubble blowing, calculus, and gravity. The kids from grades 3-8 could sign up for whatever classes they liked throughout the day. It was an amazing event!

I proposed teaching “Computer Hacking 101” which would be a hands-on tour of Unix (in this case Mac OS X) with a little bit of Python thrown in at the end. The school officials reacted with mild dismay to the word “hacking” and I think the issue was kicked up to the district level. I hadn’t realized that popular opinion, even in Silicon Valley, equates hacking with criminals. So, they changed the class’s title to Command Line Secrets along with a kind of silly description about “robo cops and techno spies”. This made me laugh in that it was a weird endorsement of state violence (spies, cops) while rejecting individual power to learn skills and wield knowledge. Well, of course I went ahead and taught the same things I had been planning to teach.

The class was about 30 middle school students. A core of them seemed to be there because they heard from my 6th grade Python student that I was a decent teacher. We opened the class with the IT guy from the district logging them all in from a central computer under the same temporary login that let them access Terminal. As he did this, I read out the points of the Hacker Ethic and explained why I think it’s important for us to be able to tinker with the guts of the computer and of the Internet and the servers where we keep our information.

1. Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-on Imperative!
2. All information should be free.
3. Mistrust authority—promote decentralization.
4. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race or position.
5. You can create art and beauty on a computer.
6. Computers can change your life for the better.

Of course it’s the Festival of Numbers not the Festival of Subversion, but cultural background is important!

I explained that knowing how to mess around with Unix or Linux was useful because tons of Internet servers use it. We went through a few basic commands like ls, pwd, and cd to understand the idea of moving around in directories and knowing “where you are”. Most of the kids didn’t catch on to this too well, but they managed. It’s really best to teach this kind of class with an extra helper for every 5-10 students, to get them all on the same page.

Then I asked who would like to see the super secret master password file for the computer. There were some actual screams of delight and disbelief. EVERYONE WOULD! What a surprise. We cd-ed into /etc and typed “more passwd”. I didn’t dwell on this too much, but told them to google it to understand all the bits of /etc/passwd, and said that the passwords won’t actually show, even if you have root, but you might be able to see the encrypted passwords in another file. A tall girl raised her hand. “So… um… how do you understand that encryption? How do you know how to encrypt things?”

We didn’t go into that. Instead I moved on to some more commands like touch and mkdir to make a file and a directory. Then they were getting a bit restless. Many people had moved ahead on the handout and there were more shrieks from around the room as people had typed ps -x or top and were stuck with lines of green text scrolling by in a Matrix-like way! There was another bit on the handout that explained to try control-C, control-D, q, quit, escape, and so on to get unstuck, but it was information I repeated many times over the next two hours!

At that point I was peppered with questions and some kids demonstrated to others that in Mac OS X you can type “say I like farts” and the Mac computer synthesized voice will say it out loud. Hilarity ensued. I let that go for a few minutes (laughing) and then the “say” chorus mostly stopped. Another kid in the back of the room raised his hand. “Ms. Henry how could I see someone’s IP address?” Other kids wanted to know what an IP address was so I gave an extremely condensed explanation that it was a number that shows at what point you’re connecting to the net. We moved on to the “Nifty Network Tools” bit of my handout, and tried: whoami, who, hostname, whois, ping, dig, ifconfig, and traceroute. It was impossible to keep the whole class together and still move as fast as I wanted to. But I did show whoever was paying attention how to do an nslookup on baidu.com, then traceroute to it, which is fun because you can see that it goes to China and that the time lag keeps increasing.

A couple of kids asked how they could get to Terminal to experiment with all these things when the computer lab at school locks them out of it. I recommended they ask teachers with computers in the classroom if they can experiment there, since those computers aren’t under central control. When they asked further if there was some way they could hypothetically get around the lockout in the computer lab I asked the IT guy if they had Terminal and a browser on a USB drive and ran it from there, if that would work. He wasn’t sure!

At some point in response to all their “how to get around school policy” questions I recommended they propose what they wanted to the school and see how they could get it, maybe through a computer club, or a promise of good behavior and to report any serious security holes immediately to a teacher or to the IT staff. And also, that they agree with their friends to try and hack each others’ accounts, then do harmless pranks — not anything malicious or mean. For “password cracking” questions I steered the conversation towards the importance of picking good passwords, but I did mention dictionary attacks, keylogging, and man in the middle attacks as well as simple social engineering or shoulder surfing.

It was a fascinating experience, I loved the kinds of questions they asked, and really wonder what they’ll do with the information! It seems to me too that I should teach an identical class for their teachers and parents, to demystify the subject and let them know the landscape.

What would you teach to middle school kids in a Hacking 101 class?