So, (e:fellyconnelly) and I went to see Melissa Ferrick and Ani DiFranco last night at what was formerly known as "The Church" but has be renamed "BabeVille". Very cute. The church us on W Tupper and Delaware and is actually two seperate buildings that are smushed together on the outside. The concert was in the sanctuary part of the church which was completely redone inside, new paint on all the walls and ceiling and all the pews ripped out to form a giant open space in front of the stage, along with the balcony which still retains the original historic pews (where we old folks sat for the show). Yesterdays concert along with one on Tuesday night represented the grand opening of The Church's new state of the art sound system and performance venue. Aparently they are working on a little bar/lounge in the basement for smaller performances and there is also a modern art gallery in there somewhere too.

Anyway, the show was fabulous. I must admit, I really like Melissa Ferrick, but when you are able to compare the two so directly it is obvious who has been around awhile. Ferrick generally stood in the same spot on stage and while the crowd certainly loved her, she was nothing compared to Ani. Ani came onstage and the whole crowd erupted to the point where it was almost painful because of the noise level. And when she started playing, dancing around stage, doing the oh so typical Ani leg lifts in sync with her guitar strums along with great chemistry with her band, which consisted of a stand up bass player, a drummer and a "vibraphonist" who added a unique sound to the whole thing, well she rocked.

The music was a delightful mix of old and new, along with some of her poetry/spoken word mixed in. It was enough so I was never bored waiting for her to play a song I knew. I also was happy that she so outspokenly talked about motherhood, love, growing up, and sang new songs about her daughter. It is this kind of things that remind us all that she is human.

Anyways...I had a fabulous time and when she sang the song with the words "I built my own empire out of car tire and chicken wire" it became very apparent that she indeed has.

So yesterday our friends girlfriend took us to the sculpture fields or something like that out past spring...field? view? i dunno. anyways, it was super cool and I really wish I had know where we were going so I could have brough my camera. But I guess it was kinda nice to be without it...I guess.

Anyways, we started walking and this chick leads us up up up this trail and we stop at some arbitrary point and she's like, uh, let's turn around. And so we did. Overall it ws very fun and I would much like to go back and am glad that I know where it is now.

But the point is...that after we returned I started noticing that my legs hurt, and were almost to the point of shaking whenever I stood up. Of course I knew it was a result of our upward climb, but I was surprised that my body couldn't handle that type of excercise.

Before I had a car I often walked to work which was about a 15 minute walk. Later after getting the car I stopped this and noticed a slight decline in my ability to walk without getting cramps or what have you, but I was still on my feeet 8 hours a day and was often doing heavy lifting such as crates with 4 galls of milk in them. But now, I don't walk because obviously, the campus is not within walking distance and I admit to being inclined to laziness.

So now, a day after, my legs still hurt. I was hoping it would go away with a good nights sleep, but I was sorely mistaken. Now I am thinking, damn girl, you aren't getting any younger, what are you going to do about this pathetic inability to move your body? I guess this is something I need to work on.

Also, seperately, I would like to say that I enjoyed our time spent with Jim and James at Colter Bay, although it was way more crowded than the first time we went there, so we hid in the back part. However, I will admit that my jaw and cheeks hurt because I had been laughing so much. This is not a bad thing.

I am currently reading an article that is comparing racial purity and anti-miscegenation in the US and Nazi Germany. Fascinating. So, Did you know....

"In 1954, the Supreme Court for the first time held one component of the US apartheid sysetem, segregated education, unconstitutional. It did not hold antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional until 1967, over ten years later. At the time of its ruling, sexteen states still prohibited interracial marriage."

From
Racial Purity Laws in the United States and Nazi Germany: The Targeting Process
by Judy Scales-Trent
found in Human Right Quarterly


ahhhh. 40 years ago. Thats IT!!! I dunno, it grosses me out.
I will hold myself back from writing about how "race" is a social and political construct of those in power to define the "other" for their own gain.

Oh yes, and one more fun little tid bit.

Did you know that at one point in Nazi Germany they believed that children who born of "mixed race" were STERILE??? Ya know, kinda like how when a horse and a donkey produce a mule? Yeah, like that.

Yesterday was particularly hot, as others have mentioned, and I had to get in my car and drive to campus to get books, much to my dismay. While chuggin along the highway I noticed that were there is often a message reading 90 W Expect Delays, there was a new message. It read: High Ozone Today, Try the Metro! On my way back on the opposite side another sign read: High Ozone Today, Combine Trips!

So my first question is, what is the idea behind this? To stay inside to avoid the toxic fumes, or to lessen our output of waste because it will only add to the nastiness of the situation. And why is this only a priority when we are having High Ozone days? Shouldn't this always be something to consider?

I myself am a country girl and have never lived in a city, so this was indeed my first experience of a high ozone day. I looked it up and found that it results from excessive heat hanging around in our breathing air, which causes the high ozone and is associated with urban areas, supposing the concrete holds the heat in. Fascinating. I am sure it is more complex than that, but I got the idea.




The house is clean and ready for company. Our first real guests since we have completely finished our aesthetic transformation of this apartment. I am actually excited to show it off. I also get the pleasure of sitting in a nice clean apt. all day with noone here to eff up my lovely cleaning job. This always brings me great satisfaction.

I have to drive to campus today because my Prof forgot to bring the syllabus to class on Tuesday and didn't send it to us until last night and told us not to buy the books until she told us to, which she never did, but the readings for next class are from the books sooooo, needless to say, I'm annoyed.

Tomorrow we have a friend coming to visit and she is brining along her current girlfriend who is also staying with us. Apparently the new girlfriend is from Buffalo and is going to show us "where to go". If she takes us to Roxy's, I might laugh a little. Perhaps there is some secret lesbian bar we don't know about it, but I doubt it. Either way, we are going out on Saturday night.

Ok, I want it to be known, first of all, that I am writing this more for my own pleasure and release than out of an expectance that others will read this, let alone enjoy it or be fascinated by it.

Ok, so this terribly boring liberal feminist philisopohical type book I am reading is by a woman named Martha Nussbaum who is apparently some big shit in the academic world. Wooopty Doo. I decided to cheat a little and look up some critiques of her work in hopes of wrapping my mind around what exactly it is that she is talking about and I found this fascinating little tidbit of info:

"Martha's Protestant father was horrified by her decision at N.Y.U. to marry a Jew named Alan Nussbaum, a linguist she met in a class on Greek prose composition. But she was an eager convert. "I had an intense desire to join the underdogs and to fight for justice in solidarity with them," she has written. For Nussbaum, Judaism offered a sense of community lacking in her own upbringing."

Now, I might be wrong here, but isn't this like, really fucked up? Did she really love this man or had she simply fallen in love with the idea of being an "underdog"?? Was this her pathetic attempt to dissolve her own priveledges and to feel like she was more worthy of attacking oppression, because by marrying a Jew and converting to Judaism, she too could now join the ranks of an oppressed group? This to me, sounds similar to women who, during the 2nd wave of feminism "converted" to lesbianism not because they loved other women in a romantic way, but because it was seen as a political necessity because sleeping with a man was sleeping with the enemy. Gross.

Maybe I am being over dramatic, ridiculous, I don't know. but something about it just scratches at my very core and I can't quite get it to go away.

I am still not quite used to this whole sit on your bum allllllll day and read thing I've got going on. I guess maybe it's partially because today is an exquisite day and I know summer is running it's course and soon to be over and I am stuck sitting on my bum reading. Granted I could go outside on my porch and read, or even drive to a park somewhere but my attention wonders easily and I would start thinking about hiking or swimming or something that involves activity.

I am hoping this feeling of couped-upedness will cease when winter comes and I have an awesome excuse to stay under my electric blanket all day long. And of couse, I get summer vacation! I spent the majority of this summer serving ice cream to little kids who got to be at the pool all day...not that I would want to be at the pool with them, but you get the point.

Anyway, in case you haven't figured it out, I use (E:strip) as a temporary distraction from reading...I have been reading now for about 2 hours...the most awful book about liberal political feminism. Boooooooring! I can't tell if it is this particular author's writing style that drives me nuts (very academic, fairly abstract writing that does nothing but makes her sound smart and make me want to kill myself) or if it the content (which basically is making a case for universalism in an attempt to create equality through political consensus on human rights, or "capabilities" as she argues). Either way, I don't like reading her boring ass book and although I think she has a nice idea, I just don't think it would work when it comes right down to REALITY.

Sorry for that little outburst. Back to the joys of grad school.

So on my way to school I was driving on 290 at a reasonable speed, perhaps 60mph. I saw the car in front of me swerve to the left and then, there, in the middle of the road was a giant piece of carpet. When I say giant I mean it took up the entire middle lane, which I happened to be driving in. The highway was fairly busy and at the precise moment I needed to swerve I could not because people were passing me on both sides, so I hit the breaks. I luckily stopped right before the carpet...I could have driven over it at a slower speed, but at that point I was already at a dead stop in the middle of the road.
So at first I was scared that I was going to get rear ended... and then that the person behind me would, which would then cause a pile up. Luckily, this did not happen. I got around the carpet finally, as did those behind me, but as I looked back, quite a long line had formed in the center lane as a result of this carpet.
I considered calling someone (who?) but before I got the chance I saw someone pull up to one of those cops sitting in between the median. I am hoping that they told those cops to go out their and risk their lives to pick up that piece of carpet, cause it sure as hell wasn't going to be me.

Moral of the story: Make sure your shit is tied down, strapped in, super glued to your bumper, whatever it takes to keep it attached to your vehicle AND watch out for killer carpet.

I was in my Black Women and US History class yesterday and she had opened the course with a book called Black Feminist Thught. Basically from a very broad perspective it addresses the various interlocking oppression that women of color are faced with including but not limited to race, class, and gender. Now, keep in mind that within this class there are not only a wide variety of disciplines represented incluing History, Enlgish, Political Science, and me, Women's Studies, but there is also everyone from 2nd semester undergrad to almost done with their PhD. This makes things interesting to say the least.
Getting to the point, I was sitting next to a pretty, young, blonde haired blue eyed white girl during our discussion of this book. An it became quite obvious that she didn't get it. I can't say exactly what she said, but she basically said that she gets discriminated against and she is really white so why does race matter? I wanted so badly to sit down with her and have an extended discussion about white priveledge and whatnot but I just didn't have the time. I think, now, looking back I could have given some really good examples that perhaps would have made more sense than what I did say. Either way, when we were walking out of class I said to her, ya know its great to ask questions, and then let her say her little speal about how a lot of this stuff is over-arching and why its a question of race, and I said well, white women have talked for a long time with out talking about race and now it is black women's turn. This obviously doesn't even begin to touch the tip of the ice berg...how could I tell her that she was being so completely ignorant and that it was exactly that kind of thinking that marginalzes women of color from feminism and many other realms of academia, let alone social and instituional systems.
The point here is not to rant about some dumb white girl. The point is to say that I used to be her. When I first came to New Paltz and had a real, up close look at my own white privledge, my own racism, it was scary as hell and I wasn't exactly open minded about it. I wanted to be but there is something that tells us that its ok.
Alright, I am rambling.../anyway the thing is...the ONLY way to move beyond this kind of thinking is to talk about it, so I walked down the hall with this girl, trying to make some type of small coalition. Can I fully explain to her what it is like to be black and female? Hell no, and I have no intention of taking that voice from those women, but I can talk about what it means to be a white feminist in a racist world. Why we have to talk about color, about class, sexuality, ability, citizenship, the list goes on..SO if she will talk to me, I sure as hell am gonna talk back.

I am putting of going to class. I have ONE class this week and I don't wanna go. Unfortunatly, these are the once a week gotta go cause I'm in Grad school now kinda classes. I didn't read one of the assignments either, although I did read the ENTIRE book that was required and as a result of my already existing feminist background, I think this should be sufficient.

Theory is like riding a bike. I thought that maybe somewhere between two years off of school and a "dead end" job at a gas station I would have lost the nack for interpreting and analyizing theory, but this is not the case. In fact, I have all of a sudden sort of regained a certain area of feminist consciousness that had been temporarily replaced with HGTV and Animal Planet. Not that these don't bring up some interesting starting places for theory as well! But that is another entry.

I have to go.