Yes: it is always this busy.

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OMG internet! I checked my stats, and yesterday, there were seven (SEVEN), yes, seven (7!) of you. So I know you're out there, and you're reading the stuff I write (and looking at pictures!)

A few things before getting down to business:
You may have noticed that I seem to love rabbits. This is correct. None of the pictures of rabbits are my rabbits, however. If you are good to me, dear internet, you may someday see pictures of my rabbits (and they are the best rabbits ever). Similarly, deducing that I love smirnoff ice based on that lone picture will get you banned from my blog. For reals.

In news related to school, I had a great talk with a professor today about doctoral studies and comprehensive exams. Before these exams terrified me, and to be truthful they still do, but having an idea of what to expect tames the beast a little, if you know what I mean. She described the exams as this:
*you choose two sub-areas within your discipline to become an expert in (scary stuff!)
*you outline a list of 150 books! For each sub-area!
*you read 150 books. X2!
*you sit an exam that your supervisor writes for you.
*If you don't do well enough they make you write an additional essay.

This information is incredibly comforting (if you are thinking that feeling this way makes me crazy you are correct). Why? Because you get to choose your list of books and then read them- the whole thing is set up such that if you aren't a total failure you inherently know everything in the exam. I am not pretending that this is easy- 150 books is still 150 books. That's a ton of content, theory, and nuance to get through and understand. However, having the material beforehand is a major comfort. Maybe this stems from my grade twelve English class, when my teacher decided to focus really well on some of the texts that would probably be covered, so much that we didn't end up getting to everything. There were questions on my grade twelve exam on texts that I hadn't read (and I read everything for that class). We didn't even start talking about what would be expected on the exam until five days before it. No one bothered telling me that the essays I had been writing, that were getting 10/10 with my teacher would only get me a 3/5 on this exam (perhaps because the teacher didn't know). The whole system of standardized testing will get its own post, but let me just say that my grade twelve english exam is THE blackspot on my academic record.
I digress. The best part about the doctoral comprehensive exams, neigh, the second best part, is that if you don't do well enough they give you an additional essay. This suggests to me (and please, tell me if you've been there and know that this isn't true) that no one right-out fails. Maybe your score isn't as good as it should be. Here, write another essay. And, you know what? I LIKE writing essays. That's right. Sometimes I even love it. The really great thing about this is that you get to read 300 books related to the subjects that you want to teach. That makes for a wonderful background, and, ideally, a diverse one. The very word "comprehensive" suggests that in an ideal world you and your supervisor will devise a list of texts that covers the entire range of scholarly conversation in the area you are interested in, including scholars that disagree with one another, or that you disagree with, which can be very important in academia.
In other news, nest Wednesday I will guest lecture to the science fiction class that I am marking for on this . On the one hand, it is long, and dense, and interesting, and terrifying (this is not the extent of my literary analysis, for anyone who is doubting me right now, merely my initial reaction to the task) . On the other hand, I am interested in gender and feminism, have read the piece before, and will be lecturing to a second year class. Plus, the prof is willing to go over my notes with me the night before, and will be there to supervise/step in if need be. Not that she will need to (yes, she. She is the coolest professor ever, a wonderful friend of mine, and a lady who teaches sci-fi. No, you cannot have my friend group), but having that support makes the whole thing feel... safer. This is all probably mostly indicative of my own anxieties. Yes. Yes, it definitely is.


In the interest of knowing you are out there (because I do):
what has your experience in academia been like?

Sometimes I muse about stuff and then post vaguely related photos.

This photo is more related than you might think, but you have to read to the end(ish) to find out how!

The thing that prepared me most for feminism was encountering my own sexism, especially since I already had a big head about not being sexist by the time it happened. It goes a little something like this:
I started working as a server when I was 19. The food industry is full of teenagers, 20somethings, angry clientele, reasonable clientele, a gender hierarchy (cooks=male, servers= female, as always, there are exceptions and will hopefully continue to be more and more exceptions through time), male clients that think they've paid for your time with their tip in ways unrelated to food, and female clients that sometimes send food back. Obviously this list is not comprehensive.
I want to focus on that last category: the woman who sends food back to the kitchen. Or complains about it. Or who is suspicious when something doesn't look right.
Fact: restaurants screw up. Not at all the time, but often enough.
Fact: if you are paying for a meal, you deserve to get what you expected to get for the price you expected to pay, regardless of sex/orientation/skin colour/hairstyle/anyotherdamnthing.
Fact: if ever you get your food at a restaurant and the above is not true, send it back.
Servers occupy two spaces in the restaurant: the dining room, and the kitchen/back area (dealing with customers, dealing with each other). Often is a customer is being silly, stupid, sexist, annoying, or even, rarely, fun, servers will talk to each other about it. Yes, while you, the innocent (eye roll) customer is seated several feet away enjoying your pint and steak. It took me over a year (holy crap is that embarrassing or what) to realize that this trend is not uncommon, and was even quite common in the place I was working at the time (I can't speak for other places, but I assume):
Male customer sends food back. Server is polite to his face, grumbles a bit in the kitchen, sometimes argues with the cook who thinks the food is just fine, sometimes deals with an obvious mistake. Server takes food back out, apologizes, forgets about encounter.
Female customer sends food back: Server is polite to her face (most of the time). Server takes food to back to deal with cook. Server immediately starts bashing "that bitch" to other servers. Server is usually visually more disgruntled than they would be when dealing with male customer.
The worst part about my own participation in this behavior is that it didn't 100% occur to me why this behavior was sexist until my partner at the time and I were eating at a restaurant and I had to send something back. I refused to do so. I said I didn't want to make a scene, when really I was afraid of being "that bitch." I realized that if my partner had the same plate in front of him he would not hesitate to call the server back, and that if he did there might be grumbling, but not anger. I also realized that he was probably less likely to have the same plate in front of him. Servers are not stupid, they know who is stereotypically most likely to complain (maybe this is part of the reason we get so offended when they party we pegged as "easy" turns out to have the same standards as everyone else).
I have since tried to control this behavior, and made a conscious effort to:
*treat all customers equally in all situations
*confront my own anger/frustrations in certain situations in order to understand where it comes from and deal with it so I don't participate in reproducing the same behaviors and attitudes

Reason for the photo/ something funny:
I still complain about my customers, but in a non-gender specific way. This is because servers encounter stupid people all the fucking time. Case in point:

*group of students come into lounge area, order drinks and appetizers.
*I serve them.
*Person approaches me, and asks "hey, can you send a smirnoff ice to that guy in the green sweater. Put it on my tab, but don't tell him who it is."
*me: "I'm sorry, I can't. According to my serving licence I have to check with him that he wants the beverage at all, and also that he is okay with having a drink bought for him by you." (in my head: smirnoffice? I cannot condone this. I cannot condone that the joke is "hey look, you drink like a girl" either, and also smirnoffice is gross)
*Customer "No no no, it has to be anonymous."
*Me: "Sorry, I really can't do that. I realize that no one here is likely to get hurt by this or report me, but I've got staff in the back that are training to manage the new location, including dealing with liquor laws, and I risk a personal fine and a loss of our liquor licence by feeding alcohol to someone who may or may not want it." (<-- all true)
*Customer "are you saying that I can't buy a drink for someone?"
*Me "No, I am saying I can't send an anonymous drink to someone, or give someone alcohol that they don't want. If your friend was already drunk I would also refuse."
This customer proceeded to sit down and complain loudly enough for my manager to hear about how I refused to let her buy a drink for someone (which actually made me look very good in the eyes of my boss).
See? Stupid people everywhere.

Things that make me feel nice:

I am currently in a course on affect theory, werein we get to read all kinds of interesting texts on affects (I tried to find you a link to a definition of affect, but kept getting affect= emotion, which is not true. If you are actually interested I suggest Eve Kosofsky Sedwick's "Touching Feeling", or Sianne Ngai's "Ugly Feelings"). I came across this during my reading on envy the other day, and, as the titled text indicates, it made me feel nice:

"Let's say there is a certain model of femininity that I recognize as culturally desirable and invested with a certain degree of power. If from a feminist standpoint What I struggle with most is my having been acculturated into admiring and desiring that femininity, envy would seem to enable me to critically negotiate rather than simply disavow or repudiate this desire, which would entail positing myself as immune to acculturation. Moreover, envy would facilitate a transition from desire to antagonism that might enable me to articulate what I have been trained to admire as something possibly threatening or harmful to me." (Ngai 163)
(Ngai, Sianne. "Ugly Feelings." Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 2005.)

Yesterday I also had the pleasure of having two really amazing conversations about why it is not only okay but necessary for feminism to be open to all kinds of voices, experiences, and subject positions, even if they disagree with each other (as long as they're disagreeing in a manner that is still feminist, I am not suggesting that we let a bunch of anti feminists in to our club because they use the word "feminist" in their self description) because sometimes those disagreements are actually good for the movement. I still need some time to think about this, but will post some examples and more commentary when I come up with them, I just thought the realization was, for me anyways, a bit profound.

This also ties into my personal experience with self-identified feminist friends. When my husband and I announced our engagement I basically had a sector of friends that responded by saying things like "don't do it!" or "but you're a feminist!" No one had the ear to listen to our side of the story- that, while yes, there is a sketchy and unkind history of marriage, and that many people from a variety of political and personal stances have rejected it for some very good reasons that, well, we don't grow up in a vacuum. My husband and I had both lived with previous partners and neither of us wanted to do that again without some sort of long term commitment to the relationship outside of having decided to live together. We also both have families that would have been offended as hell if we had decided to have a civil wedding, or even to become common law: his family because they are culturally and religiously mennonite (well, most of them, my husband isn't religious), and my family because they are Ukrainian, and in that culture weddings= huge celebration with good food, dancing all night, and booze. That having been said, my experience of marriage has always been that way- I understand that historically it has not been, and would never deny anyone their right to decide that marriage= bad. But for us, we wanted to include family in our commitment, wanted to have a huge party to celebrate our future together (most of our anxiety was over how the mennonite half would take the drinking and dancing. It all turned out well). It made sense for us in this stage of our life (wanting to make that commitment, but also because I will be going somewhere else to do a PhD soon, and we wanted to be married before the hisband had to move his whole life and career (he has been in our city his entire life, and has been out of school for almost six years already). Is there privelige acting here? Yes. We could afford to have the wedding we wanted (we did a bunch of stuff the budget way, but even a budget wedding is super expensive). We could also afford to decide not to live together until we were married. Rent is expensive, living together can cut costs immensly. Does this make me less feminist? I hope not. I am still the same, radically thinking and acting person, still engaged with the same reading and writing and cultures (still examining my own choice through them, and ultimately feeling okay about it).