May 2007 Archives

First off, something is wrong with my blog roll and I don't know how to fix it.... I used to have all these links to all these great blogs, and they're still there, somewhere in the html.... but they don't show up on my actual blog. This is what I get for neglecting the place for the better part of six months, isn't it.

The same can be said for the Supreme Court. I remember a conversation I had at a barbeque in Iowa City back in the summer of 2000, in which the members of the Green Party I was talking to argued that it really wouldn't make any difference for anyone in the long or short term if a Republican instead of a Democrat was elected president. And then, we read something like this in today's NY Times, all about the recent ruling limiting the time an employee has to file a lawsuit regarding pay discrimination:

As with an abortion ruling last month, this decision showed the impact of Justice Alito’s presence on the court. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, whom he succeeded, would almost certainly have voted the other way, bringing the opposite outcome.

What can I say but "I told you so."

Here's why I've hardly blogged at all this year: a few people, working both individually and together, set out to make my life as miserable as possible. While they didn't succeed as well as they would have liked, they succeeded far better than I would have liked. Eventually the harassment became so bad that something official had to be done, at which point there was all kinds of trouble and I was offered some sort of restitution. It's actually kind of a nice deal but I would have simply preferred not to have had to deal with so much shittiness.

I stopped blogging not only because I was often busy and distracted dealing with all that nastiness, but because one of the ways these people tried to hurt me was through my blog. I'm not sure exactly what their goals with regards to that were, but at one point I considered deleting the whole thing and doing my best to erase my presence in the blogosphere. But I didn't, and I'm glad, both because I like my blog and because I don't want to succumb to that kind of intimidation.

Blogging, as we all know, involves not only writing your own blog, but reading and commenting on blogs you admire and enjoy. I'm sorry that as part of my withdrawal from blogging I also stopped reading blogs, but frankly, it hurt to read everyone else's blogs when my own felt so vulnerable and unsafe.

Before all this happened I was doing pretty well, both in terms of maintaining my own blog and keeping up with the blogs I enjoy most, and I'm confident that I can manage it again. I can only hope now that having failed in some of their primary objectives and faced some unpleasant consequences themselves, the assholes who were after me will leave me--or at least my blog--alone. In any event, it's summertime, and the living is easy. In addition to pleasure reading on my back porch, sewing, quilting and gardening, I plan to blog, because like sewing, quilting and gardening, blogging is a kind of "work" that is rewarding in multiple ways: the activity itself is fun, and then you get this great product as a result.

And that's really sort of all I can or want to say about that, so on to other topics.

As if there weren't already so many, many reasons to love Joss Whedon, latest on the list is his speech at Equality Now, discussing his responses to the question he is invariably asked: "So, Joss, why do you write these strong women characters?"

Here's what I'm told every single morning, via my shower curtain:

I admit, I don't always believe it. I admit, sometimes I want to believe it but know better. And sometimes I find, to my flat-out amazement, that some things really are all about me.

Take, for instance, the answer to the acrostic on page 68 in the April 29, 2007 issue of the Sunday NY Times Magazine. I learned, thanks to an email from a friend, that the various answers combine to reveal a quotation from one of my essays, the title of the essay the quote comes from, and my name.

I don't subscribe, so I had to track down a copy and work it for myself. Turns out she's right.

If you get the Sunday NY Times and haven't already sent the last Sunday's off to be recycled, check it out youself. Remember: the first five words in the clues spell out

h
o
l
l
y

It's the strangest bit of recognition my writing has ever received. Once I got over being astonished, I've been flattered beyond belief.