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Voyage to the End of the Block

February 8, 2012 Liz

Today I read Isabella Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), read a lot on Wikipedia and elsewhere about the Ainu and their history, and got about halfway through Finding Fernanda which I read about on Racialicious. It’s awesome investigative journalism, a good expose of the politics of international adoption and child trafficking.

In the morning I tried out the scooter. The battery heated up while charging to scary-hot and didn’t charge fully. I took the scooter for a spin anyway.

At the end of the block I came back up the hill feeling very doubtful that the battery was going to behave itself. Sadly I was correct as the scooter didn’t have the power to get me up the slope of a driveway that cut across the sidewalk much less the rest of the way up hill. I texted a couple of people and then realized there was still a charge but the steepness of the hill lowered the battery gauge to 0. So I serpentined my way up. About 4 houses away (at the steepest bit of the hill) Danny came out to rescue me and started laughing. “Are you TACKING?”

So I will try a new battery tomorrow. I called 6 wheelchair and medical supply stores and they didn’t stock this kind of battery. They all special order it and it takes 3 or 4 weeks. Weeks!!! Then I called someplace called Battery Plus, which had it and for much cheaper than the wheelchair stores. I hope it works. I’m counting on it to get around! But if it doesn’t I’ll find a more powerful powerchair.

After a rest and icing my ankles I tried going down the hill in my manual chair. It wasn’t too hard with gloves on to help me brake. So, that’s fabulous! That means I can get on the #24 bus. I hopped on and was on my way to physical therapy in the Castro.

On the bus I watched a very very old lady with a quad cane and a funny hat getting on the bus using the lift and walking with extreme difficulty. Obviously a regular. There was some fuss and rearranging as the driver made some people get up for her. Another very old lady said hello to her very happily. I eavesdropped on their conversation about shopping and then the lady with the cane said, “Now that I can go out of the house again I only go as far as 18th because I’m just afraid of getting tangle up with that Occupy stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with them 100% but I’m scared I’ll get caught in one of those crowds.” They agreed about liking Occupy but being scared. That was so sad….

Then it was my stop. I realized I had backed my chair into the claw thing that grabs and locks your chair down to the floor. I usually try to avoid those and just hang on tight. The lever was stuck and would not release my chair. This snowballed embarrassingly until 2 people plus the driver plus some sort of transit cop were trying to tug my chair free and not listening to my protests that they were going to pop the tire right off the rim. Finally I stood up (mostly because people’s armpits and crotches were in my face, very annoying, and i was being jostled way too much) There was a collective gasp from half the bus. SHE CAN WALK!!!!! The driver turned around and went “Girl, what are you doing standing up! Sit back down!” “Look… that’s what the boots are for, standing up!” The chair was freed, I thanked them all and then got out of there as fast as possible feeling angry and embarrassed.

Then it was very lovely to be in the parklet in the sun at Market and Castro. I had a cookie and wrote in my notebook and looked at people. I wonder if people still say “basket days” about days like this when it’s amazingly warm and everyone’s in tight shorts? NOT EVERYONE THOUGH since there was a completely naked dude wandering around all leathery and hippietastic, holding a sort of wizard staff walking stick. Okay then!

Physical therapy was reassuringly fine and was half massage, my favorite kind, not like the boot camp kind of PT. I took a taxi home. End of story! At least I mentioned books a little in the beginning of the post.

Here is how I watch livestreams and twitter events as they are happening, btw:

And in other news, this article ticked me off because of the framing: Activists and Anarchists Speak For Themselves at Occupy Oakland. The title says it. It is activists and anarchists speaking for themselves. Yet claiming to be speaking for “voiceless” people in an “empty” city and a battlezone, a riot, a war zone. I am deeply suspicious of framing events and places and histories in this way. It in fact goes with occupying to describe a place as empty and its (non)inhabitants as voiceless (a clear Denial of Agency attack) and thus making that place suitable for a battleground. This audio clip from an activist named Soul is more like it. Work with the people doing effective work rather than writing stuff about how great it is to have a battle with riot cops.

Ankle-bustin' in the wild west

February 7, 2012 Liz

A little bit more about ankles before I move on and talk about all the books I’ve been reading!

After a couple of weird and frustrating visits with a new doctor I switched doctors again and hit the jackpot, with a kind, earnest, detective-like internal medicine dude who sent me off to the UCSF Orthopedic and Rheumatology clinics and then saw me afterwards to mull things over. The upshot of that is I have tendinitis in both Achilles tendons, some messed up other ankle tendons plus bursitis on both sides. My theory (and everyone seems to agree) is that I got too enthusiastic about walking and stair climbing and was treating pain as something to make me pause slightly and then “push through” so as not to be lazy or malingering. Tendons don’t play that way… They would like three to five months of ridiculous attention in order to recover. This is depressing though it is nice to hear the word “recover”. It means I can’t really go home to my boat. I am homesick and sad. I miss driving. It is daunting to get around in my wheelchair while in this much pain (and with giant boots on). I am on leave from work and I don’t have energy to do anything much.

I now have some clever heel wedge things that peel off in layers, big old space boot thingies to walk in, some lighter and comfier night braces for being in bed, lovely velcro ice packs that go around my ankles, and NSAID topical gel (voltaren) since I can’t tolerate regular NSAIDs. I was begging for prednisone but it looks like prednisone is exactly wrong and makes your Achilles tendons rupture. I do have some emergency Vicodin and now this Cymbalta stuff which seems promising but which is putting me through side effects… dizziness, nausea, jaw-clenching, and all that (but it did help me immediately not to feel so upset).

In Phase One of my conquest of space, we calm everything down, singing gentle lullabies to my ankles, avoid walking (while magically somehow achieving aerobic exercise) and wear these boot things with the wedges in them. I sit around distracting myself from pain and side-effects. Three or four times a day, I Voltaren up my ankles, do some PT exercises, wear the ice packs, and then it’s back into the boots. Through the magic of Amazon I got a shower bench (there is no bathtub.) At first I had a kitchen chair in there and then faced up to the reality that I needed a real bench with good stability and rubber feet and all the works. (Plus we only have 2 kitchen chairs and there are 2-4 of us in the apartment.) I get up and make my coffee or Danny makes it for me. Then I switch between reading books, reading stuff on the net, and doing my exercises and ice. At around 3pm, if it’s sunny out, the sun hits the sidewalk in front of the house, so I go outside to sit in a lawn chair (classily, on the sidewalk in my pajamas).

I went scouting to the local indoor pool and had a nice swim at the Disabled Water Exercise hour with a lot of fabulous women in bathing caps and some very friendly lifeguards who DJed for us and took requests. I used a lift to get in and out of the pool for the first time in my life. A confession here. I am not really able enough to push myself around in the manual chair to get there and back on 2 buses. The ramp up to the pool building just about does me in as my right hand and arm don’t cooperate and hurt a lot. But I can just barely do it. As of today (thanks to my fabulous boss at BlogHer and his wife’s late dad’s scooter which has been in the garage for a year) I have a little Zipr 3 travel scooter with a 12 Ah 24 V battery so I am hoping that will hold enough charge to get me to the pool (on the bus) and back. (I think I have to buy it new batteries tomorrow.) Otherwise it is around $30 in taxis plus $7 to get into the pool. I would prefer the bus at least one way since it’s cheaper and more fun. The pool was cold… I haven’t gone again yet because it’s been cold and rainy. I went to a day spa instead and saunaed myself for 3 hours.

I should also mention I started this trip with one ankle bandage brace that was moldering under the bathroom sink. Then got a second one. I felt that maybe people would see my ankle brace usage as some sort of Hysteria. Then I realized that part of why it hurt when I tried to leave the house was because my shoes touching my ankles hurt like fury. Then I got out the giant space boot that I used last July when my left ankle went all strange. The space boot was AWESOME. Then I mail-ordered a second boot from Amazon ($50, when the first one from the orthotics clinic cost me like $200…) The boots were slightly different from each other. So by the time I showed up at the orthopedist I had these embarrassingly unprescribed boots on. (No one minded or threw me out of the clinic for self-medicating myself with space boots.) I got the awesome Night Boots from their orthotics people, and the heel wedges to put in them. Over the last couple of weeks I realized I could do with a smaller size of matching walking boots. So I ordered them and a 2nd set of heel wedges so that I don’t have to switch the wedges from night to walking boots every time I switch which is like 10 times a day. Amazon Prime is very, very, useful if you are disabled, as is cold hard cash to buy things off it with.

In Phase Two about a month from now assuming my tendons have achieved a calm and stable orbit and the rest of me has not completely atrophied, I will progress to Strengthening which sounds difficult and scary. I resolve to swim Every Day Possible until I am amazingly healthy. I will pretend to be a polar bear. Physical therapy will happen three times a week instead of once. I will do amazing things with Thera-bands.

I think there is a Phase Three where I reach Mars but I’ve forgotten what happens then.

The pain has gone from being intolerable and maddening, to being just all-over stabby and achy ankle pain, to several separate kinds of pain behaving differently in different bits of my ankle depending on what I’m doing. I assume that means it is getting better!!! The sciatica-nerve pain I live with a lot of the time anyway. It’s very familiar. Also, numb/buzzing in both feet (and hands) aka peripheral neuropathy. The sharp splintery scary pain like million icicles is the Achilles tendons. The dull horrible pain at the base of my heels is the bursitis which makes it hurt to stand up at all (boots or no boots). The wobbly wrongnesses on either side of my right ankle are the posterial tibial tendons and, um, some other ones on the outside. That is the bit that makes me afraid to stand up in the shower. It’s important to get to know what’s going on with pain and what it means. If you’ve been in a lot of pain it’s still a surprise when it comes back or when you find out there are whole new kinds of pain and places to hurt. But once I can break it down into different things, I feel a little more in control of things (even if I’m not). It is getting to name it and knowing what it is, partly.

While it is scary and annoying and depressing to be dealing with this I have to say it is as good as it could be. I have tons of support, I have short term state disability while I’m not working, a warm and cozy place to live, and my partner and our kids are just great. I don’t feel like the most stellar parent (as usual while in lots of pain) but we get by. My parents also helped me out so that I can do things like do my errands with TaskRabbit, take taxis around instead of going through paratransit (though I am going to sign up for it anyway) and order books and space boots and Thera-bands galore off Amazon. I have a zillion beautiful friends who talk with me on IM and IRC throughout the day and night, recommend books for me, and say “there there” in comments when I complain and cry all over my not-very-secret-secret diaries. So I’m very grateful for all that and am also glad I have decent medical care and advice. I look forward hugely to scootering once I get a new battery for this little scooter beast.

I miss my boat, being on the boat with my son, seeing him during the week and helping with his homework, all our boat neighbors, the birds outside my window, the water and light in the harbor, the tide, kayaking, my bike, walking casually into stores and looking at things, grocery shopping at Chavez Market in Deadwood City, the nice people at the wash and fold laundrette next to Chavez, watching my son’s rehearsals at his hip hop dance studio and all the people there, picking him up from school, the library, driving alone with loud music on, randomly deciding to drive down interesting looking streets or going a new place on the map just to see what’s there, all my stuff and books and clothes, housecleaning (weird, i know…), bustling around a lot, doing Projects, my cooking stuff especially my toaster oven, and being able to drive people places and do them favors.

I have been to Noisebridge twice this month (and printed things on the 3D printer, finally!), went to lunch and the fabulous day spa with yarnivore and yatima, and another time with queershoulder; to physical therapy; and to half a day of She’s Geeky where I ran a discussion that was basically “What Would Black Hat Feminist Hackers Do?”. I also went to a cafe with my sister and to another cafe with my friend hazelbroom. That isn’t too bad for outings. I go kind of stir crazy in here staring out the window and at my screen and feel that life sucks if i have to be in bed for days and days and days. So any time I get to go out (even to the doctor) the world looks especially shiny and I love everyone and I come back all charged up with extrovert energy.

I’m about to go to London by the way because, fuck, free trip to London, I am dying to go to (and speak at) this conference, and I’ll be damned if my ankles not working is going to stop me. (See below for photo with airport gate tags hanging off my wheelchair.) I will have to spend a lot of time in bed in the hotel, but it’s a nice hotel, it’s accessible, there is room service and internet, and it’s near a lot of cafes and bookstores and the British Museum and the Central London YMCA, which I will pay 50 pounds to join for a week so I can swim. The bad part will be the plane ride but I have pain meds for that and will also bring my ice packs. I think the flight attendants might refreeze them for me if I ask nicely.

The sauna place deserves particular mention in being a bright spot in my month. It is fairly accessible, with a lift to get up a couple of entrance steps (they leave the key in it!) and no stairs anywhere else. In the entry hall, there is an accessible bathroom. There’s a smaller toilet once you’re in the locker rooms which would not be accessible to most wheelchairs (though I managed). I did okay with my manual chair in the bath house area which is a big open room with benches and showers (seated showers), wet sauna and dry sauna rooms, and a cold and a hot pool which are on a raised area i.e. not as accessible. I got into the hot pool by hitching myself up the side of it, hanging onto a pillar, and then sliding in like a seal. If you need help transferring then there is probably no way. There is tea and ice water and lemons and little cups of salt to scrub yourself with, which if you are foolish like me you think is an unusually un-hippie-ish nice touch of providing sugar to make lemonade with. No! it is not sugar. Perish the thought. Do not attempt to sugar your herb tea (like I did!). The other funny thing about this spa is that it is hipstertastically solemn and full of fake Zen. So there are buddha statues and lotus flower things all over and there is a gong you can bang on if people are having a good gossip or giggling in a way that perturbs your Meditative experience. I wish they had Loud Hour because I would far prefer, when naked in a sauna scrubbing myself with a slice of lemon and some salt, to be surrounded by gossiping laughing women rather than solemn culturally-appropriating church ladies with a lot of tattoos. While reclining in an Adirondack chair panting from the hot tub and sipping my iced lemon-cucumber water I was idly looking around and saw in the locker room window a strange paper cutout decoration that … that looked exactly like Jokey Smurf holding a present. Then the universe shifted and I realized it was the lotus flower logo of the day spa. I started laughing as I shifted the lotus flower to Jokey Smurf and back again and imagined the sort of sauna that would have an exploding terrorist smurf as its logo. I couldn’t TELL my friend my thought since we would be GONGED so I hitched myself into my chair, went back to the locker room, got my notebook, and settled back down in the lounging chair to write down all my silly observations for posterity.

Travelling wheels, and whoever invented the ankle was a jerk

January 11, 2012 Liz

Someone just tagged this very nice photo of me dressed to kill! It’s from linux.conf.au in 2010 in Wellington. Now that was a fantastic conference! I had such a great time with the Haecksen and at DrupalSouth. I gave three talks, “Code of Our Own“, “Hack Ability: Open Source Assistive Tech“, and one about Drupal consulting; went to some other great talks; did some fun hacking around; messed with Arduinos; went to a GirlGeek dinner; did touristy things (greatly facilitated by Daniel and Kelly driving me around half of the island, one of the nicest things ever); and met a ton of fantastic people. (Thank you Google “diversity” money, LCA, and DrupalSouth for helping me get there with some cold hard cash!)

I note that when you’re using a wheelchair and dressing up it is important to either wear pants that are about 3 inches longer than you’d wear walking, OR make sure to have on really good socks.

These stripey purple socks cheered me greatly! I have matching armwarmers, but that’s kind of overkill.

It was nice to wake up to see this reminder that I am a tough-assed world traveler.

That’s part of why I leave the dozens and dozens of airplane gate tags remnants on my wheelchair frame. Sometimes it bolsters me up to look down at at them and think, “I’ve been a lot of places with this chair.”

After months of doing very well and gradual improvement in walking, to the point where in December I was boldly walking around barely using a cane “just in case” and practically STRIDING, going up stairs just for fun and to “feed” my little FitBit friend, well, something went wrong in my ankles. I don’t really know what (yet if ever) but it began to hurt like hell. I took it easy every couple of days, but then it went *really* wrong, and I could not bend my ankles very well. That’s never happened to me before! A whole new kind of pain and limping! Right when I was cautiously thinking about my future years of “invisible disability” and the new challenges that would bring…

If your ankles don’t work, you can only shuffle very cautiously. Going up or down even a small step means turning sideways to take the step, while holding onto something for dear life. So, I’ve been in bed for two weeks, with my feet up on ice packs and heating pads. It is hard to take a shower. I can’t drive, because my foot can’t work the gas and brake pedals. For going to the doctor (or my one outing this week, to a cafe, driven by a friend) I am back in the wheelchair. I’m taking taxis for doctor visits and using TaskRabbit rather heavily while my partner is out of town.

Now while I talk big about everything I have to say it was just plain convenient and nice to be able to walk so well. I am in pain and sad and upset. Actually I’d notch that up to “freaked the hell out and terrified of losing my independence.” So it’s nice to see this photo of myself from 2 years ago, happy and smiling, looking sharp, ranging (alone) so far from home. I do love my wheels!

And next year I swear I’m going to KiwiCon. . .

A frivolous post about tea

December 30, 2011 Liz

On my week off from work I spent a lot of time at Noisebridge. We have a little set-up there with coffee and tea supplies, coffee makers and so on, which people keep stocked with donations. As I sat there waiting for my tea to brew I cleaned up the shelves with a rag and straightened out all the supplies and cups. I had a sudden strong memory of Arrakis Co-op in Austin, where I lived briefly in 1986 after I got kicked out of the women’s co-ops on campus.

Arrakis was a beautiful but dusty and run-down little house in West Campus. (I think it was partly burned down at some point, and has now been rebuilt.) I just remember sitting in the kitchen there having tea with Jimi and Dennis as they talked with me about moving in. I was 17 years old, a little bit wild, instantly in love with the collective house’s feeling of comfortable chaos, its porch swing, and everyone’s laid back attitude. The main thing I remember about sitting there is being absolutely blown away by one thing, the 10 or so boxes of different kinds of tea. They had all these boxes of Celestial Seasonings tea. I had never seen that before in my life. Someone could have 10 different kinds of tea, in their house! The boxes had nice art on them and quotes from Emerson and funny little sayings and it was like HIPPIES had made a real THING… a business. You better believe I sat there and read all the boxes to see what they had to say. I couldn’t wait to move in and try all of the different kinds of tea one after the other. In fact I did, and I wrote them all down with my ratings so that I’d remember which ones were good.

Digressing further I remember having a similar hilarious epiphany a few months later while studying with my friend Abbey in 21st Street Co-op. She declared we needed a break and some ice cream so I followed her to the 7-11 where she bought an entire pint of Haagen Daas rum raisin ice cream. My mind was once again blown. It had never occurred to me that a person could just go buy a container of ice cream and personally eat all of it right then. I didn’t drive and I had never really helped my parents with shopping and when I bought food it was things like bread and cheese or a can of soup to get through the weekend. And we had “dessert” sometimes but it was occasional and a bit ceremonious, it wasn’t just like we had ice cream lying around at random. My realization was that $2.50 or whatever it was the ice cream cost was not completely impossible. I just went, OMG, it is not outside the realm of possibility that, not only could I have 10 kinds of tea someday, I could also, at any moment, if I have two dollars to spare, exercise my free will to indulge myself in a giant container of ice cream that is just for me. It was not so much about buying things but more about “things I could do that are amazingly luxurious”. And perhaps “joys of being a Grownup”.

I could wax rhapsodic in the same way about when my boss at the library would buy a bag of Milanos and put it on the table in the break room. Or the occasional Departmental Event or talk where some of us would horn in on the meager plates of brie and grapes like there was no tomorrow. These people at college were living the life!!

This has nothing to do with anything but the memory made me resolve to buy a whole lot of tea and put it at Noisebridge this week so that some young person might have that mildly pleasant experience of a random encounter with abundance. If someone ends up stuffing their pockets excitedly with the free tea packets, I completely understand.

Poems about Francesca Woodman

December 15, 2011 Liz

I was at the SF MOMA last night for a party and noticed that an exhibit is running of Francesca Woodman‘s photos. Woodman was a fantastic photographer. Her photos often make me feel startled — caught — as if someone had been able to see into my head and had violently extracted several ghosts, or xrayed a thought, a dream or a fear. Her photos are usually of female figures, usually naked, in landscapes of houses and rooms, full of light and shadow.

They aren’t just houses – they’re like non-cartographical mappings of inner geographies of House, of Room, and of embodiment and gender. I see them and have the sense of being simultaneously trapped and freed, of being shudderingly aware of the trap of gender and patriarchy and of, somehow, escaping.

A few years ago I translated a book by Zulema Moret written about Francesca Woodman’s photos, Un ángel al borde del volcán ardiendo. I really enjoyed the project. Honestly, they aren’t the deepest poems in the world, but I liked the way they interacted with the photos & my memories of the photos, and they were fun and challenging to translate. They’re evocative and delicate. I have a copy somewhere — it was published in Buenos Aires — and am thinking of taking it to the exhibit to read while I look at the photos.

At the party we couldn’t wander through the museum, so I’m going to have to go back to see the exhibit! It’s very exciting! I had a weird feeling just being in the building with them . . . haunted by Francesca . . . as I ate my sushi canapes and chocolate cayenne cream puffs and played with legos, a little tipsy and very exhausted since I WALKED into this party. Yes, you heard me! Walked! . . . The lights and projections of lights, and flowers, and all the food, was very beautiful. We hung out with Jon Callas a lot (restfully nerdy and culturally similar to us) and Helena (dearhelenab?) who was very amusing in her role as Manic Pixie Dream Girl. And Ryan from Wired and several more people from Long Now who I know I’ve met at conferences. I was saying to someone I hoped they would put the constructed feminist language Láadan from 1982 onto their disk thingie of all languages (along with Klingon). Talked also to an Awkward AnarchoLibertarian whose name I forgot but who is an internet pundit. I have started explaining myself at parties either as a hacker poet, or as an Internet Pundit, or both. Neither are good explanations, so I have no elevator pitch for myself… Someone asked me, Web 2.0ishly at this party, “Poetry! So how do you market, I mean, CELEBRATE, your poetry and your work?” I thought over the last 20 years of my life and poeting along and publishing tiny zines and books in very small editions and shrugged… A celebration of obscurity?

Also at the party I nerved myself to go and (interrupting his endless conversation with Edward James Olmos the Battlestar Galactica guy) to fangirl all over Stewart Brand. Hiiiiiiii, um!!!!! I live on a houseboat toooooo and by the way my book coming out soon has an enormous long poem called Whole Earth Catalog that is homage and criticism of the last 45 years of your life’s work and our intertwined cultural histories of the Internet and communes and stuff! That’s all! I just wanted to say it! Have another canapé! BLUSH. He did a polite little double take and gave me his card and seemed quite kind. I wanted to ask Kevin Kelly if he liked my moon landing poem I gave him at foo camp, but I felt like it would be awkwardly putting him on the spot if he had never looked at it, so I just said hello and chatted to the other people as we stood around.

I survived the fancy Walking Party At a Museum by sitting down a lot and trying to lure people to sit with me to make things out of legos in the big bowls by the couches. Then would pop back up for a 5 or 10 minute Ordeal of Painful Verticality. Back at home, Danny gently massaged my calves and ankles till I fell asleep.

Pop music interpolations

December 13, 2011 Liz

This morning I was listening to the awesomely cheerful and cheesy first (and eponymous) album by Book of Love. I have to say of all the joys of civilization, aside from bathtubs, my favorite thing might be singing in the car to loud music. The privacy means I can totally belt out “Starman” while mangling the lyrics without being drunk or having a karaoke machine, but also that I can call up various embarrassing pieces of music to play at top volume without annoying anyone else.

As I sang “Happy Day” this morning I realized that when I listen to heinous pop music sometimes I’m mentally editing it, interpolating way more meaning or different meaning into it. There’s a whole category of songs I have to do this for, ones that are great but then burst into a verse that’s way too specific, like the verse about jumping into someone’s pool in Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Incentive Dealers’ “I Will Deny” or completely wrong. Book of Love is usually not so much wrong as it is simple like a coloring book. So my enjoyment of the fingerpainted lyrics and sweepy new wave music is usually enhanced by a sort of internal Greasemonkey script that shovels in the equivalent of “Howl” and several highly compressed Ani di Franco songs. I don’t think about this, it’s just what happens in the infinite spaces in between the actual lyrics, like the time compression in a dream. They’re like a shape and it’s like I”m having a complicated form of synesthesia (which I actually do get if I have some focus and can close my eyes). This morning I ended up noticing and observing my interpolations because they were so absurd. Yes. It’s like I’m high all the time and I have to suppress it actively. But everyone does that, right? Anyway!!! It went something like this, but way longer:

Can’t describe
What it was
yes exactly i can’t describe it because nothing is describable omg but here let me give it a try (long complicated holo-poem abstraction)
What shined
Shined so bright
flaming meteorites! but sort of fractal! phosphenes! some sort of magic fantasy world psychic power aura that reveals a giant glowing floating futuristic city in an alternate universe that’s infinitely complicated and sort of galaxies exploding and colliding

Hold on to the light
light! why do we hold onto it? what? LION!
Safe from the night
long thought about Novalis I don’t have time to explain
I can see
When you walk with me
but not “you” like a romantic you because that is all wrong but more like The Universe and stuff
Time to begin again
REVOLUTION!!!!!!! SWEEP IT ALL CLEAN! YEAH!!!

Lead us to a happier day
Except leaderlessly in a totally egalitarian way anarchically because that would be the best happiness!!!!!!
Happy day
Happy day

Say goodnight
Wake up you’re late for tomorrow
I’d like nothing to do
well not really
I would dream
Dream about you
YES, YOU, ANARCHY UTOPIA
Lead us
LEADERLESSLY WITH EVERYONE “LEADING” OF COURSE
To a happier day
HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY NYANCAT OF THE FUTURE REVOLUTION!!!!

What would you like to hear from me at BlogHer?

December 5, 2011 Liz

At every annual BlogHer conference I’ve given one (or several) talks and workshops. I’ve always gotten a lot of great feedback from my workshop sessions on coding and debugging, blog security and privacy, and other technical how-tos, as well as talking about politics, women’s history, feminism and identity, and how our writing online ties into the letters and diaries and activism from women in the past. Last year I spoke about what it’s like to be a small blogger who suddenly is on the crest of the wave of breaking news and talking with mainstream media. I also try to approach tech support for our bloggers and community as part of my personal feminist activism: tech support as empowerment!

Since I work for BlogHer full time, I’m on call as a speaker to fill in anywhere the organizers need me to, so I could end up anywhere. Still, I like to propose my own panels! I’m considering “A Server of Her Own” or “Feminist Hackers” . . .

If you’re thinking of coming to BlogHer ’12 in NYC next , what would you like me to speak about or teach? Any particular subjects or panels you’ve seen me run before, that you’d like to see happen again? Or, if you’re thinking of coming to speak, what kind of panel or workshop would you like to run *with* me?

Not that it’s all about me!

If you’re thinking about coming to BlogHer or putting in an idea or a talk proposal… read on!

BlogHer is an extremely friendly and open conference. 80% of our speakers each year are new speakers at the conference! It started with 300 women in San Jose years ago, and now I think our numbers at the annual conference are closer to 4000. Yes! Four thousand blogging women! (And sundry.) The parties are great — the people are the best thing though. Some people are nerdy, some are more writerly, some personal, some blogging on particular subjects, some very commercially oriented and many not at all. As with all the best conferences the sessions are good but the hallway and lobby conversations that happen informally are even better.

Read through Polly’s (very helpful) Call for Ideas, and Jes’s How to Become a Speaker at BlogHer! And if you have any questions for me personally about the conference, feel free to ask in comments or email me at liz@blogher.com.

The epistemology of KBURD

December 4, 2011 Liz

Most of my talking about OccupyWallStreet and my local Occupys has been on Twitter and Google+ rather than here on my blog. I drop in and start twittering what’s happening in a General Assembly or try to connect up the streams of what’s happening and report on a situation. But now I feel moved to post. This morning I woke up still full of beautiful dances I was watching online, links from a friend from various powwows around the country. This is a Men’s Fancy Dance,

This one is of a Grass Dance,

Bear with me. Okay meanwhile this long and deep conversation about racism in the Florence and the Machine video for “No Light, No Light” has been going on. Here’s an overview from Racialicious. A lot of bloggers spoke up to point out the giant bundle of racist belief systems that result in works like this being made and being viewed uncritically by many white people and people of color and that PoC are more likely to notice the outrageousness of it while white people don’t see it until it’s pointed out and maybe not even then. As usual, (see #RaceFails of time immemorial) the resulting backlash of white people getting defensive and then extra offensive feels worse and exposes more nonsense than the original cultural artifact that inspired the critique. That can be disheartening and in the middle of that alienation it’s refreshing to the deepest bits of me to see this video response from lebanesepoppyseed which was on the KBURD tumblr. Yay, rant on! I feel less alone in my rage and bafflement. (Bafflement is not quite the right word. Deep political and personal WTF that goes with alienation.) KBURD:

Short for “K but u rong doe”. Used when you know arguing is pointless but you need them to know they’re still wrong.
Person 1: women are partly responsible for getting raped
Person 2: kburd.

Ha! Yes. What a useful and amusing word.

But what does this have to do with powwows and dancing? Not much. But as I watched a bunch of videos and entered a happy click trance going between YouTube and Wikipedia and various Native American history sites I thought about knowledge and cultural contexts. I went to a powwow once in like 1982 and have read some books of stories and some histories of North America but I have no way to understand what I am seeing in these dances. And I have no particular knowledge of dance in general, at all other than having heard a friend once talk about some other dancer’s “placement”, after which I began to notice “placement” everywhere; so I realize there is a whole bundle of criteria that serious dancers would use to watch and understand and critique other dancers that I can’t tap into. I can’t see right off the bat very much of what it is that my friend (who is showing me the videos) sees and loves. So I can barely begin to appreciate these dancers — and I know that. I can see some guys dancing around in awesome looking outfits and get a vague feeling or mood and watch on that level. I can judge on the level of “I like how that dancer leaps”. But the art of it is on some level not visible to me. Reading the comments on the videos opens up a little bit of the context for me as people compliment a particular dancer. I watched a grass dance video about 6 times to be able to pick him out and to see even a glimmer of what they praised him for. Even that glimmer of vision makes me super happy as I see the depth of all the knowledge in the world and the way that epistemology is socially constructed and therefore more complicated than some sort of static objective Knowledge-Bit floating around in imaginary space. I get the feeling contemplating our inability to understand everything that’s like watching Cosmos and hearing Carl Sagan drone soothingly on about the emptiness between the stars. It’s not like abjectly going “oh I’m so ignorant” it’s appreciating the beauty of the immensity of what there is to know and love.

And that relates to everything about literary judgement and what people say about universality or scope of a story and they judge one kind of story to be profound and artistically wrought and then, lacking the tools to see a whole swath of the sky, declare that other things don’t reach those levels of complexity or universality or quality or goodness. It is incumbent on us to find out some depth about a thing, if we want to understand how to appreciate it, see its beauties, techniques, and craftedness, and judge its qualities. Education, it contributes so greatly to enjoyment! Context, people! This seems so obvious! But it isn’t, if you’ve not had some kind of double consciousness of truth and cultures and knowledge in general! Which people not in a dominant culture have more likelihood of thinking through and encountering! (Which…. rant…. you aren’t going to see if you don’t even accept that what is coming out of another person’s mouth is language, or thought, or makes any sense because you’ve already dehumanized them in your tiny racist white mind to the point where they’re a babbling mob howling about trivial unimportant things!) Why is this not obvious! I have to accept that it’s not. But then how to explain it.

The countless explanations are out there and then all the ignorant can hear is “KBURD” and a giant eyeroll and then they are back to whining about feeling excluded from where all the black kids are sitting at the cafeteria table and then I lose any semblance of patience and am KBURDing myself. But given that this idea about artistic or literary quality or judgement might be just a little bit accepted or accessible, then let me jump to critique and anger and #Occupy.

I got into an epic 3 days long and counting argument on Twitter about #ows with this dude “geekeasy”, Adam Katz. I know him a little from other political meetings and communities. One of my friends pointed him out getting into an argument about, I can’t even remember at this point; it had occupyoakland, I think the suggested name change of it to decolonize or liberate, the tipi that Running Wolf set up in Oscar Grant Plaza, a blog post by Andreana aka queer black feminist, and all sorts of stuff roiling around in there, but it seemed to be sparked by something he said about not wanting the General Assembly to have a progressive stack; ie, instead of just lining up to talk or getting your name on a list by raising your hand and being called on in order, the stack-keeper helping the facilitator would try to alternate between genders and races to make sure that the stack isn’t all white men standing up to speak because they are more likely to do so out of entitlement and more likely to be listened to out of white male privilege. So, i just went to link to an explanation of some examples of a progressive stack in action, but Christ on a cracker the top links are all to neonazis and MRA people and libertarian and the intersections thereof rejoicing that the progressive stack will unite all of them and all the other Folk of Reason against the coming Decolonization Mau-Mau, so, fuck. Okay. Yeah so. That’s a sampler of what happens when you even dare to suggest, Hey white dudes, how about you potentially wait 15 minutes to get your next chance to talk so that we can invite and make space for women and men of color to have a say? I swear to god it’s like asking a toddler to take a turn at a game and watching him lose his ever loving mind. Problem is he’s driving the fucking car!

Back to the discussion. What happened was, geekeasy was answering me and some friends and then increasingly other people jumping on into it, but answering us from a second twitter account, geekeasy2. I noticed that right off but then ignored it figuring he maybe had an account from his phone and one from a computer, and answered him there but like a day later realized he was still doing his “real” occupy twittering from his first account! As if all his increasingly amazingly racist stuff needed to be off in the corner so as not to pollute his main stream? As if the conversation we were deigning to have with him were somehow going to dilute his real message or bother his real followers or something? I don’t know. Along the way he said some epic and amazing things about black men’s privilege, black women’s privilege, “quotas” and affirmative action in every sphere, racism among PoC, racism against white men, continually quoted MLK to try and prove his point that everyone should be “colorblind”, somehow also it got all about black people when we were talking about Native American people in the beginning … I believe he may have told jay smooth (who talked with him for 2 days straight) that he was remarkably polite and articulate or something… holy hell!! It was like a hundred red alerts on the U.S.S. Enterprise were going off flashing because a bunch of us all hollered BINGO on our 4 dimensional hyper-bingo cards. Well, again, what does this have to do with “Art” and my watching a dozen Grass Dance videos last night, I am not sure I have the patience to keep outlining the connection and my kid wants breakfast now, but, it’s that I think, how can Adam judge whether someone else’s anger is justified or its meaning or background without him listening to or knowing that history and background? I am automatically really curious about his own personal situation and where he got to his thoughts, maybe his class rage is factoring into this big time, but then, go there and talk about that rather than invalidating the entire political thought process of a group of people you’re talking to. Like, he’s over there claiming that the lurkers support him in email, ie that he has talked with large numbers of white people who will leave the Occupy movement if there is a progressive stack, or if there is a serious meeting to change the name of Occupy Oakland, but he’s *saying that to people who are telling him they personally aren’t going to be part of the movement unless there *is* a progressive stack* without any seeming consciousness that he values his unseen white people not in the conversation more than he values the people of color he’s actually speaking with in that moment and that further, he expects the PoC he’s speaking with to also value those white people he invokes more than their own selves and feelings! It boggles the mind! My point though, is that he and so many white people feel free to judge the validity of women’s and people of color’s response, of our and their angry responses, of our humor, of our political experiences and beliefs, of our very capability of judgement and taking offense and finding other things acceptable, without even first listening to us or knowing anything about our experiences. And that, even aside from some sort of evenness in intrinsically making space for people to speak who might not otherwise get a chance to be heard, is the point, if white men would make structural changes in actual real life to pay attention to and value the opinions of people who aren’t them, they might get that depth of understanding necessary to develop some judgement! Why can’t they know that they don’t know, and take some time to look some shit up, like I just did automatically in googling for some history of Grass Dance, reading some comments from people talking to each other not to me about it, and making like 1 iota of effort! I realize that someone like Adam will instantly respond that that is why I need to listen to THEM more because omg what about the white menz, but my god! I spent my whole life being brought up to listen to them and judge everything else in the world according to their standards of importance and quality, and what an epic struggle to turn one’s attention elsewhere! The struggle of my whole life! And even then I still of course listen, especially to individuals who, like Adam, are in my community and directly up in my political arenas. And then they’re all like, Oh but we don’t get it, what is wrong, why aren’t there any (women in this hackerspace, women of color at this tech conference, etc etc) What can we do, please educate us on this subject and p.s. could you also do our Diversity Outreach unpaid and uncredited to get your friends to be tokenized and used and offended by us! And then when we fucking try to educate them even a tiny bit they’re all like Oh god reverse sexism/racism, my girlfriend says I’m not sexist, I have a black friend, Running Wolf said I get to have this tipi, You are oppressing me and now because you all dared suggest you get some of the time and I give up 1/10th of my privilege which I won’t even admit exists, I’m going to throw the internet’s biggest hissy fit for days on end so you will all pay attention to meeeeeee. (And even that is a bad framing that the point of things is for the benefit of white men to do their CR work for them. But, okay someone has to try.) At that point I am quite grateful to have the word to be able to simply say, “KBURD”. But then what? I mean I assume (with no real knowledge but in good faith) that geekeasy (in his non-geekeasy2 incarnation) does some useful and good and dedicated activist work. But then what do we do with his strangely split off alter ego, geekeasy2? We still have to live with these people after the revolution, if you know what I mean, so, damn, really, what now? Ally with the allies I guess and keep on fighting the good fight and leading by example. And this is what almost every day is like, in my head, during these months of #occupy #decolonize #liberate and all the conversations around it, so complicated and swirling, beautiful, inspiring, friend-making, and then, infuriating. It’s hard to blog because there is so MUCH of it. Is that how it is for you?

Peace out as I go make some eggs for my child and start my morning for real.

Tangled up money

November 22, 2011 Liz

I made a stab at moving my money to a credit union in support of #Occupy, or (as I wish it were) #Decolonize, but ran into a bunch of problems! Because I live on a boat, and my harbor doesn’t handle us receiving mail, I can’t prove a fixed address that the two credit unions I’ve talked with will accept. I get most of my mail at my ex’s house, which I also still own half of. I get some mail at my partner’s house in San Francisco. But what credit unions want is a utility bill and a credit card bill to prove my address, or my residency, or something. I have all sorts of Documents Which Can Prove I Exist and Am Contactable, but none of them count. So, my dollars are all in Ally.com for now, until I can find a credit union that will take me as I am or until I start paying Oblomovka’s electricity bill.

Online payment systems are very handy for me. I buy a lot of stuff online — sometimes to spare myself the physical cost of running errands. I now have everything set up so that I can use Amazon payments, PayPal, Dwolla, and (naturally, since I’m a crackpot and a neophile) a few token, languishing, Bitcoins which I think of as the Pet Rock of currencies. I kind of like having all those possibilities and having them all tie into Mint.com, which displays everything in a way I can understand. I’m no financial tycoon but I do have some resources, and I really like being able to see the data about the bit that I have at my disposal. I had a good conversation lately with my friend Ian about how strange it feels to have that (and not be living paycheck to paycheck) and what we think we should do with it or about it. We talked about ethics and whether we would ever be someone’s landlord (No.) And the fact that we can’t figure out how to pool resources with other people and do things collectively other than through becoming a non profit, a corporation, or getting married. Are those structures enough? What other structures might be possible? How can we make co-operatives easier to create?

Anyway, back to money, banking, and software. Dwolla looks very promising! It has a nice web interface, elegant and non-stupid, which counts for a lot with me. It charges 25 cents to the person receiving the money. I think that’s it for the fees. Can it last? And could this be the magic platform/app/currency that enables us to pay content providers for stuff? I’ve written a few times about payments for music. I’d love to see music players with built in direct “tip jar” for all the artists. So while I’m listening to something, I should be able to not just star it or rate it; I could send a dollar (or even 50 cents) to the artist directly using Dwolla, alleviating my occasional torrent-guilt. I know people talk a lot of smack about micropayments. But this one, not really micro, and not ambitiously trying to be pervasive-over-everything, could work!

I have a list of posts I want to write a yard long, about music, books, politics, software development, poetry, feminism, and nifty techie things, but feel weirdly blocked up and so this uncharacteristic post in order to get what’s in my head out onto the page.

Tourist in the library

October 28, 2011 Liz

I am on vacation in England visiting Oblomovka’s relatives and have about 100 blog posts to write, about books I’m reading, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and my trip, and some things about music that have been building up & that I need to write about. And I owe an update on my book coming out this winter from Aqueduct Press. But until that happens… here’s today’s burbling!

Today we drove to Oxford (from Essex) and I was super happy it was sunny & everything was gorgeous. I enjoy driving on the other side of the road as it feels like a superpower to concentrate and master it — just a tiny bit scary.

We went to look at the exhibits at the Bodleian Library. A page of Frankenstein! Hooke’s Micrographia! Sappho! Kalila and Dimna!!!! Suffragette flyers! The Whetstone of Witte, Book of Fixed Stars, amazingly beautiful Urashima scroll, Marco Polo, Kalidasa, Chinese poems in jade book covers, Gutenberg Bible, Wilfred Owen poem which I enjoyed b/c I just read 2 of the Pat Barker trilogy about WWI poets & conscientious objectors …. Well, I beamed happily over too many things to list and had a fantastic time. When I come back someday I’ll find something here that relates to my research and dig into their reading room!

Description of a flea: “But, as for the beauty of it, the Microscope manifests it to be all over adorn’d with a curiously polish’d suit of sable Armour, neatly jointed, and beset with multitudes of sharp pinns, shap’d almost like Porcupine’s Quills, or bright conical Steel-bodkins; the head is on either side beautify’d with a quick and round black eye….”

I thought as I looked at all the books and scrolls and fragments — this is what I love to do and what I’ll always do — even if I weren’t from this time I would have done something like this as best I could. I thought of all the people spending their lives doing this strange, esoteric, beautiful thing and felt like I loved them and I’m so glad for them that they got to make books and write whatever they wrote and that other people still appreciate it. A bit sentimental & simple really. And feeling like I could a message sent back through time to say “Hi Mary! I love how you made the moonlight shine in the monster’s hair as he convulsed! You’re awesome!” simply because her handwriting is real & right in front of me. Though I can’t quite approve on another level of the mystical fetishization of objects. Still, I’m swayed…

We then walked around High Street, Queen’s Lane, Broad St. and back up. I thought about how nice it would be to live right next to a little library/study hall and barely have to go anywhere and just write all the time. Hell yeah!!!!! Bought a notebook and pen & had cream tea.

Then I was going to go to a women-only Take Back the Night march and rally but realized I was far too tired and it was uphill both ways with cobblestones. Thought about maybe Taking Back the Taxi to the rally at the end of the march, and then wussed out. I am sorry, nice feminists of Oxford, that I missed meeting you and supporting your rally… Instead it is time for #occupymybathtub.