Women's Work

Supporting learning

I waited until now to do my learning post, because I didn't want to talk about my learning, but about supporting learning through my favorite charity, Donors Choose.

For the past three or four Octobers, Donors Choose has run a blogger's challenge to raise funds and their visibility.  Sarah at Tomato Nation has pulled out the stops every year, raising truly awesome amounts of money through her blog and her readership.  I'm not organized enough to put together my own blogger challenge, but I do have it together enough to come on here and plug her efforts.  Plus, she has tons of cool swag that she's raffling off through the course of the month if you donate through her page.

Contest '09: Deal is your handy link to her page, which will let you get through to her challenge page.  If you happen to have any spare cash laying around this month, please consider throwing some of it towards DC.

If you don't know anything about Donors Choose, I can sum up.  It is a charity that allows teachers to get funding for projects in their classrooms that they do not have the budget to get otherwise.  The teachers submit requests for funding for specific projects, ranging from small requests that might cost $150 to fund to grand ideas that might cost several thousand.  Donors can search on the website to find a project that they would like to fund and then donate money specifically to that teacher and that project. 

The beauty of this is that there are all kinds of projects, for all age groups and nearly every state in the country.  You want to fund a project in your own backyard or in a rural are or in a big city?  You can find one. You think that the lack of sports in elementary school needs to be addressed?  You wish there was more music or art in preschool?  You want to see teachers make history or physics or literature or astronomy come alive for their students?  You can find a project from a teacher who wants to make the same thing happen.  You can give a small amount or you can choose to fund the entire project.  You get to choose exactly how your money is used, and you get to help kids have a learning experience that they might not otherwise get, and it feels awesome!

My favorite part is that if you close a project or are a major contributor to it, you get an actual in-the-mail thank you package with letters from and photos of the children in the classroom that you helped.  Nothing feels better than that.

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Summer Reading

Although most people assume that summer reading is the light fluffy kind of reading you can easily do at the beach, because I'm a knitter, it is often when I dive into big meaty books that need a lot more attention.

See, I have little air conditioning in my house, and the room that DOES have AC has no television.  I have little desire to knit in a room with no air conditioning, and without the television for background company, knitting just usually isn't enough to hold my attention.  So, I take advantage of the summer months to read those books that I just can't get through when my only reading time is the fifteen minutes before I turn out my light at bedtime.

This summer, my thick book of choice is Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, and I'm quite enjoying it.  It's been a little harder to get through it than I was hoping - mostly because I'm having trouble still keeping all the different rivals straight in my head. 

I've also been taking advantage of the slightly easier pace of summer scheduling with my daughter, and using some of the downtime to read The Hobbit aloud to her in the evenings.  She's loving it, and I'm enjoying re-visiting a favorite story of my own with her.  Last night we left the Bilbo and the dwarves still deep in the forest, and we're hoping that it all ends up with everyone okay.

We head off for vacation at the end of the month, and that's when I'll be looking for the potato chip books.  My taste runs to mysteries and historical fiction.  Anyone have any suggestions?

My current beef

I had a humorous rant about restaurants and kid's meals all ready to go in my head for this month.  It's a favorite pet peeve of mine.  

And then, last week, an incident at my church gave me something far more interesting to write about.

I go to a Unitarian Universalist church.  We wear the label of weird hippie moonbats liberals with some degree of pride, although the reality is for most members of our congregation, our liberal leanings have a direct line of descent from the old school enlightment thinkers, abolitionists and suffragists bred in 18th century Boston.  We have dead presidents (2 of them!) in our basement, because they were members of the church, so our roots are deep here, and we own both our heritage and our current liberalism.

One of the strongly held tenets of our church is that we are, officially, a "welcoming congregation" of the UU church.  This means that we have made an effort, as a congregation to becoming as open to all members of the community, including all members of the LGBT community.  We were very active in working to keep same sex marriage legal in MA, and we hang a rainbow flag over the door to our parish hall as a symbol of our solidarity with the LGBT community.

Last Monday night, that flag was stolen, for the fourth time in less than a year.  The time before this, it was pulled down and burned on the church steps.  Four times!  For a flag that is hung high up, secured to the building, and unlikely to have been pulled down by a kid pulling a stupid prank.  I'm both saddened and infuriated by what happened.  Partly because it's just so stupid and pointless, but more because I can see how it stands in perfectly for how we have, as an entire culture, gotten to a point where no one talks to one another, where no one tries to reach understanding of the "other" side's point of view, where scoring zinger points is more important than trying to find common ground.

And that's my beef.  I'm so tired of listening all day, every day, to people who have no desire to actually hear and comprehend what the other people around them are actually saying, dismissing any opinion that doesn't mirror their own as stupid, of preferring rip down a flag in the middle of the night instead of trying to understand why we hang it.

Cooking challenges

One of the things that has marked my food year in 2008 is that this is the year I have tackled a number of the things that I have been scared to try up until now.  Some of them are so astoundingly easy, it seems ridiculous that it took me this long to try them.

And every single one of them has been a resounding success.  How's that for a lesson?

I'm not sure why or how I've slipped into such confidence this year.  I suspect that is has a lot to do with simply wanting to get better at providing for myself instead of relying on the "kindness" of other people to provide.

To that end, this year I have tried and succeeded at making bread, homemade whipped cream, whipping eggs to soft meringue stage to bake with, actually baking meringues (SO MUCH BETTER THAN STORE BOUGHT), pastry based pie crust.  I tried canning for the first time, and I've mastered risotto to the point that I don't need a recipe for it. Risotto may be my new food best friend.

None of these things have been nearly as hard as I've made them out to be in my mind, but that's not stopped me from being absurdly proud of the fact that I've figured them out.  It's pushing me to want to try more and more and more; lately it seems like my only gating factor is time.

Tomorrow I embark on a new adventure.  I'm going to make my own cheese.  I've been wanting to try it ever since I watched from afar as a friend did it a few years ago, and I've finally worked up the gumption to try it myself.  Tomorrow afternoon, Shani will come over and we're going to attempt to make Fromage Blanc, which seems to be about the easiest of the easy soft cheeses.

So tell me, what are your cooking mental blocks?

Far too much for one lonely little post

So, raise your hand if you're surprised by my statement that food is an enormously complicated topic for me.  I didn't think so.  After all, if I'm the fat girl, how could my relationship with food be anything but complex?

And it is, of course, but it's also incredibly simple.  I simply LOVE food.  Definitely more than I "should", but I've reached a point where I just don't care.   Good food is one of the most wonderfully fulfilling things in the world and I love it.

The complexities are many, though, and if I can eeek out the time, I'm going to post about each one separately this month, since otherwise my post would be enormous and impossible to make coherent. 

Some of the things I'm hoping to talk about are

• The "locavore" and organic movements that are oh so popular right now.  They really resonate with me, and it's been prompting me to radically change how I buy and prepare my food.  There's lots of good reading out there on the topic - my three favorites so far are "Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver, "The Best Thing I Ever Tasted" by Sally Tisdale.  I'm wondering what other people are reading and if it's changing how they think about eating.  This is simply something huge for me right now, and something I've already written about in other spots. 
• Along the same lines, I've been learning how to do a lot of cooking things that have previously intimidated the heck out of me - risotto, pie crust, fresh whipped cream, meringues.  I tried canning for the first time this year.  I've become very interested in learning how to do for myself, instead of relying on someone else who doesn't exactly have my best interests at heart to do it for me.
• Helping my daughter figure out her healthy relationship to food.  She's only 7, but she loves food the way I do - you can see it in the way she wants to sample everything I cook, and in the obvious enjoyment she gets out of eating.  There's little on earth cuter than a 7 year old swooning over the taste of a perfect morsel of food.  Of course, I'm also aware that my relationship to food has maybe not always served me well;  how do I help her keep her love of food, yet not be unhealthy about it? 
• The dichotomy between loving food, loving to cook, and yet dreading the drudgery of preparing dinner for three people day in and day out.  How that impacts my thoughts about local eating (do you KNOW how hard it is to get take-out when you're trying to eat local?) and how my feelings around food reflect my feelings about the kind of family I want to have.
• Sharing some of my favorite non-fiction food writing - like Emily, I love food writing, but I tend to prefer the non-fiction, although I'll admit to be inspired on the do-for-yourself from by the descriptions of Laura Ingalls Wilder myself.

In short, there's lots to talk about.  I hope you're not all sick of my by the end of the month.

Two cents from the fat girl

Well, always a bit of a slacker, I show my true colors by posting this terribly late.

Anyway, asking the fat girl about "health" is one heck of a loaded question.  Yeah, you heard me.  I'm the fat girl and the story of my relationship with health is very much the story of my struggle to accept who and what I am.  If I'm entirely honest with you, I go well beyond "fat girl", right on into morbidly obese.  Wow.  What a term that is, isn't it?  Kind of makes me sound like I'm going to keel over right here where I'm sitting, doesn't it?  Except of course it doesn't mean that - but the labeling of fat people in the US is a rant for another day.

The irony is that, for the most part, despite being badly out of shape, is that I'm NOT completely unhealthy.  I think sometimes that confounds my doctors on the rare occasions that I go to see one - not something I do often, because I hate them so very much.

With that in mind though, I do feel like I'm teetering on the precipice of now or never - approaching the point where if I don't do something to get myself in shape, I may not ever be able to do it.  My knees creak now if I walk to much, and so do my hips.  I don't have nearly enough stamina for extended exercise, and my balance, which has always been bad, is getting worse.

And of course, then the question becomes what do I do?  Diet?  Exercise?  Both?  Give up and accept my fate?

I've come to the conclusion that the fat acceptance movement's cry of "diets don't work!" is actually and essentially true.  I recently read a book about that very topic called Rethinking Thin, and the book and my own experience have convinced me that even if I manage to lose the weight, odds are strong that I'll end up packing it back on, plus another 20 pounds or so, for good measure.  (As an aside, that truly has been my every dieting experience.  I can always lose weight if I eat less, but as soon as I try to go back to normal life, it comes right back and brings some friends to crash the party.)  The only time I managed to even come close to avoiding it, I had a schedule that allowed me to go to the gym for an hour or more six days a week, which is something I've not had since my daughter started school - which tells me that regardless of anything else, I need to find the time to get to the gym.

Reading this book was depressing because it meant accepting "when I lose weight" as a false hope.  As I've processed it further, it has become freeing.  While I'm still coming to terms with the idea that I am likely to be fat for the rest of my life, I'm also beginning to realize that the "well, I'll do that once I lose some weight" excuse is holding me back from a lot. Without it, I lose my biggest few excuses left for not getting on with things.

I am coming to accept that one of the important "things" to get on with is exercising - the kind of acceptance that means I will actually start doing something about it.  I can live with being fat, but I need to be in better shape.  Exercise and I have such a love-hate relationship.  I hate getting started.  I hate the idea of it.  I really hate the thought of trying to carve out the time to exercise in my already packed schedule.  But I love the way it makes me feel.  I love the idea of being able to climb stairs without wanting to collapse.  I love the feeling of power I get from a good workout.  For a long time, the hate has been over-riding the love, but I'm trying to work my way back to the love.

I recently organized, canceling both my old gym membership and my husband's in prep for getting us a family membership at the local Y where we can all work out.  My best friend works out there - I'm hoping we can be buddies - and they have a kid's gym that I'm hoping I can get my daughter interested in using.  The only time I think I'll be able to work out is early in the morning, which will suck, a lot, but less than getting further and further out of shape.  Someone will have to remind me of that when the alarm starts going off at 5:45 instead of 6:45. 

I'm trying, without dieting, to make better food choices as well.  This ties into more of my life goals than just fitness - there's the frugality of cooking more of my own meals, the ecological impact of cooking more of my meals from simple ingredients not packaged to the hilt, and from ingredients that are more local in their origin (there will be more on that in my official July posting).  Some people call this undieting - small healthy choices each day.  No guilt if you choose badly, no obsessing over this or that - how many calories have I eaten?  how many carbs can I have? how much fat went into this? - I don't do well with having to count and measure everything.  These seem like the kind of changes that I can manage, and that might be long-lasting.

That sounds like something that just might work.

More than just hobbies

Last week, one of my co-workers and I were discussing retirement, as we'd just heard that a long-time favorite customer of ours was taking a buyout from his position and essentially taking early retirement.  We both marvelled over the fact that he had expressed concern about not knowing what to do with himself once he had officially stopped working.  We agreed that we didn't think we'd have ANY trouble at all filling that spare 8-9 hours a day with more interesting things than coming to our job every day.

Like Shani said in her earlier post, I have to force myself to limit where I focus my attention - if I didn't, my house would be buried even further in my hobby supplies, and I'd be unable to focus long enough on any one thing to ever accomplish anything.

It's probably because I am interested by so very many things that what is more important to me than exactly what my hobbies are at any particular moment in time is the effect they have on my life in the larger picture.  I can honestly say that in at least two cases, my hobbies have changed my life.

I joked in my introduction that I wondered if you could consider the internet a hobby.  I've thought some more about that, and I would have to say that I abolutely can and even should.  I mean, I spend at least 10 hours a week wasting time here, I get a good deal of satisfaction out of the time I spend, and the truth is that without it, my life would be very different. 

I first started using the internet my freshman year at college, when my boyfriend insisted that I go sign up for an e-mail account with our school - that they weren't automatically handing them out to every incoming freshman should tell you how early this was in the online world.  I watched as he got sucked into all kind of things online - MUDs and MUSHes and IRC and I don't even know what else.  I watched as a few of our friends got kicked out of school for failing grades, mostly the result of spending too much time online.  I had too much riding on my GPA to do that, so I mostly posted a lot in newsgroups and our school's little bulletin board.  I thought it was amazing that you could easily have conversations with people on the other side of the world. 

As we moved through school, W (boyfriend then, husband now) settled into a few sites that he played a lot on, one of which was a MUSH called TinyTIM.  At that time, there was a large group of players living in Boston and they used to get together for parties and activities fairly often - we lived in Worcester, but since W still had high school friends in Boston, we drove in pretty regularly to join in the festiviess.  Once I got to know the real people behind the characters, I started logging on too.

Once I did that, I meant a whole lot of interesting people.  Most of them neat and interesting and geeky, a few of them weird, most of them nice.  I tend to be fairly quiet in person when faced with a lot of people - I'm the one sitting on the fringe, watching everything, not saying much until I have a handle on everyone in the room.  TIM was perfect for that - I could hang out in the main space, watch everything that was going on and not stick out while I was doing it.  Once I got to know people, I started making friends.  A lot of them were in Boston, where we moved soon after.  A number of them were further afield, but that didn't matter.  In the community's strongest period, we would have parties that players would travel hundreds, if not thousands of miles to attend, and even now, more often than not, when I travel I know someone who lives near my destination.  My co-workers joke that I must know everyone, since almost anywhere they can think to send me, I have a friend I can call up to have dinner with me.

TinyTIM is a lot smaller now - there were always little dramas happening in small scale, and the group as a whole went through an upheaval of sorts a few years ago.  The advent of new and different online amusements and ways of keeping in touch with people have siphoned off a lot of the players as well.  I miss it sometimes, but even I rarely have the time to spend in an environment that is busy that needs constant attention - my internet times comes in little stolen moments over the course of a day.  At the end of my time as a frequent player, I can't complain about what I got out of my time there - of all my dearest friends, and of all those friends I see the most often, and spend the most time with, the vast majority of them are people I met on TIM, people I would have been unlikely to meet any other way.

These days, LiveJournal plays the same part in my life that TIM did then.  Many of my "friends on LJ are people who have also migrated from TIM, but many are new.  It's different, of course, in that it's not real time and I've not yet found anyone organizing huge sleep on the floor parties (that may have more to do with the passage of years than the medium), but it's allowed me to connect with those I would consider my tribe.  For someone who's never quite felt like she fit in anywhere, that has been a wonderful thing.

My experiences with knitting have been remarkably similar - when I walk into a knitting circle, I know I have something in common with everyone else in the room.  Our knititng works as an entirely comfortable ice breaker as we discuss projects and yarn, patterns and techniques.  We all have a reason to be there other than socializing, so the occasional silence is rarely uncomfortable, and again, I don't stick out very much as I sit on the outside of the circle waiting to figure out how I fit into it. 

Many more eloquent knitting writers than I have noted how astonishing it is that knitting is such a strong common denominator that it allows people who would never otherwise have any reason or desire to meet one another to get to know one another and become friends.  I'm not sure why it happens, but it is true - I have made friends at knitting circles who are all kinds of people - and yet, we find we become real friends, and it is something I count myself wildly lucky to have found.

I have other hobbies of course, and endless things I enjoy trying out.  I get more out of all of them than making friends or finding connections with other people as well.  But I still think the the best hobbies are the ones that take me beyond myself and into the wider world when I do them.

Introducing Jenn

Hi, I'm Jenn. 

I’m looking down the barrel at both my tenth wedding anniversary and my 35th birthday coming at me in the next month.  I live outside Boston with my husband and our daughter (nearly 7), three cats, a snake and a tankful of disposable fish.

I work for a small software company that you’ve likely never heard of, where I get to work with newspapers that you most certainly have.  While technically my job is only tech support, the reality is that at a company as small as mine, nearly everyone does a little of everything.  I’d say that the only thing I’ve never done is write code, but I’ve even done that (only the easy stuff, but that still counts).  I just passed my tenth anniversary there as well.

I’m a dilettante when it comes to my hobbies.  I knit.  I spin.  I dye.  I sew. I cross-stitch and needlepoint.  I garden (lackadaisically).  I love to cook, when I can do it on my terms.  I've successfully (but just barely) resisted jewelry making, scrapbooking, cardmaking and all those other hobbies that would require a whole new and different kind of stash building.  Can you call “the internet” a hobby?  I hope so, considering how much of my life it has eaten in the last 15  years.

I'm a liberal but ultimately pragmatic idealist with a strong belief in personal responsibility.  I am a feminist, and will happily carry any baggage you want to load onto that word.  I have an independent streak a mile wide combined with a naturally ornery nature.  I'm terribly shy among strangers, but so not shy among friends that no one ever believes me when I say it.  I have a sharp tongue and a temper that I've not yet learned to control all that well and I hate looking stupid more than about anything else in the world.  I take an absurd amount of time to choose meals in restaurants.  I possess the ability to see issues and problems from many different points of view.  Mostly this is a good thing, right up until I stare like  deer in the headlights, unable to make a decision.  I'm slowly learning that if I want something to happen, I just have to roll up my sleeves and make it happen instead of sitting around talking about it.

I've started and re-written this intro about 17 times this week, because I haven't yet found a good way to say that while I intellectually recognize how blessed my life is (a steady job where I’m well paid, a loving husband, an adorable daughter, a house, near a city that I love, with more friends than I ever thought I would find), I'm still often left looking around asking myself "Is this it?".  I'm not even quite sure what it is I'm expecting to find, if I'm honest, but that doesn't seem to stop the question from coming.

I long for the chance to push the reset my own life (you know, quit my job, move to tibet?) but recognize that my loyalty to my family means that I'm unlikely to get to do so anytime in the near future.  For the time being, I'm focussing instead on trying to be more mindful and organized in the choices that I do have, figuring out what my long term goals really are and how to get there, and how to enjoy where I am right now while I'm on my way.