Giggles

This is the first day of a long weekend for the kids. They have a friend over to spend the night and the three of them have been happily building pillow forts in the basement and playing "snake family."

I've been toddling around upstairs, keeping an ear out for conflict or over-the-top craziness, but all I'm hearing is giggling. For something on the order of an hour, the trio has been giggling wildly. As adults, you know we would have puked long ago from all that mirth, but they are just cruising along.

Oh sure, there was that moment when exuberant play led one child to crash into another and then that child smashed his face on a hard doll head... but the tears didn't last. They shifted from the basement to the bedroom and the giggles resumed. Soon I will have to try to convince them to go to sleep and stay that way until a respectable hour in the morning, but for now, it is the easiest night I've had at home in a long time.

This allows me to ramble on about other things:

1)Cake. W and I stole away for lunch out on Thursday after my PT appointment. We split a hazelnut torta for dessert. It was super yummy. Don't worry, I didn't really lick the plate, I was only smelling the hazelnuts and gingered cream...









2)Sledding. We had the hill to ourselves yesterday for the Second Annual Valentine's Day Sled Fest. While there was lots of interest in the event, only my family, Andy, Matt, Stacey, and her kids came out. Yep, adults outnumbered the kids! The snow was not particularly fast, but it was still fun and nice to not have to worry about reckless sledders running anyone down. Well, Stacey did overtake O and knock him out of his sled at the bottom of the hill on one run, but no injuries were sustained. Andy wins the "most reckless sledder" award for trying to recreate the spectacular fall Andre took last year (sleds are not for standing on, people!) -- and his neck is hurting today, hmmm.... Geo and Warren win the award for longest run. Riding double on Uncle Bob and having received a nice push off the top from L, they were able to hit the snow fence at the bottom. Dinner at Aubree's followed. The place was pretty well empty (not a romantic Valentine's Day destination, I guess), which meant the kids could be left to play tag among the pool tables while the grown-ups drank tall, tall beers...

3)Dalat. We like this Vietnamese restaurant in downtown Ypsi quite a bit. After surfing around through the menu, we've now settled on our favorites and order the same thing every time: 61, 62, 64, 66 -- a good amount of food and enough diversity to please all. But the restaurant has been closed of late -- and not for their annual trip to Vietnam. A friend sent me a pic of the sign that is on the door, but it doesn't really clear things up. Anyone know what's up and when they might be open again?

4)BeerFest. It's coming. Feb. 23. Yep, I'm as excited as Daye! I think I'll go do a bit of delious warm up by checking out the scheduled beer line up. What could be better than drinking beer on a February afternoon in Michigan on an outdoor ball field? Sounds perfect to me :)

The Dirt on the Dirty Show

Checked out the Dirty Show last night. My second time there and I guess I am left with the same "eh" feeling I had last year. I certainly didn't have a bad time (helped along by the good Dark Horse Black Bier -- great beer selection on tap -- and the cute bartender at Slow's before the show), in fact I had a lovely evening out overall, but I had a hard time finding traction with most of the art.

The quality varies widely, not surprisingly, but most are photographs with a good number of paintings/drawings, etc. I really wish there were more sculpture, and more variety in the 2-D art. After a while, all the boobs, clits, and penises start to run together. What then made something stand out was almost always 1) interesting lighting or 2) a funny/clever title. I started to find myself actively annoyed at the huge number of "untitled" works. There are no artist bios with the pieces and when an artist did have multiple pieces in the show (rare), they weren't generally grouped together. These choices on the part of artists (lack of titles) and show organizers (displays) made it a hard to develop much connection to artists and pieces -- I guess I'm not willing to just take it all on face value. I want to see a larger vision, know why it was created, how things connect...

A few pieces did stand out. There was a bronze of a woman doing an almost downward facing dog pose with a wild spray of hair on the floor -- it was cool and her round rump was just begging to get a playful grab. :) The Lego mosaics (below is an example) were fun -- though the one in black and white of female figure was the best because the effect was much more subtle and you had to be up close to see what it was made of. There were certainly also some photographs that captured interesting textures of skin and light. These were scooped up early -- didn't see anything I would even have considered buying that wasn't marked "sold" already.

People-watching is, of course, the other reason to go to the Dirty Show. My suspicion is, however, that the real freaks who come out are not the folks in vinyl fetish gear or garter belts thongs and tape over their nipples, but the folks in jeans and sweaters.

Oh yes, and there are live shows going on, usually with bad techno music playing along. So much potential, but the shows generally just ended up being cheesy stripteases. In general, I think folks did remember that humor is erotic, too.

A New Blog

I've been getting into posting about my research and would do more, except that it seems to be taking over the blog. I actually like that so many strands of my life come together on this blog, but I don't want it to become lopsided. I also thought there might be a time when I want to direct colleagues or even students to some of my public space ramblings, so I've decided to make a new blog where more of these things can live.

If you like, check it out.

Zoe

I wanted to pick just one picture and tell the story of just that one day/event/outing with Zoe, but there were just too many pictures and too many stories. Here are smattering of images of our life together. You'll notice that W and I look mighty young in some of these pics. She lived a good, long life (14 years) and I'm so glad she lived them with me.

[sniff]

News Roundup

As I've wandered about on the internet lately doing research and lounging about, I've come across a couple of interesting articles I thought I would share.

First up, and very much related to my research, is this article on Mexico City introducing sex-segregated buses in order to protect women from harassment. The piece does a nice, quick job of summing up many of the tricky issues involved in addressing public harassment. Segregation provides small, temporary "safe" spaces for women, on the one hand. On the other, however, it smacks of "protectionism," which only reinforces women's inferior status (i.e. they can't take care of themselves, so the bus company or city government must take care of them) and limits their options (what does it mean if you are a woman and don't take the "women's" bus?). I am both amused and saddened to see that this article from 2008 is still stuck on the same issues that trouble feminists in the early 1970s.

Next up, and hopefully more related to my life than my research, is the release of a research study completed last year at Rutgers that found that folks who identify as feminists have healthier intimate relationships. There are some blogs about this study and this article in the The Guardian that, to my mind, wanders off topic a bit, but has the basics of the study. As the blog and comments note, the mainstream press didn't report much on this study.

Sickness, a party, bikes, and bars...

I had a couple of intense days of parenting lately with a short school week last week and a boy who sprouted an unexplained but lingering fever. After pulling full-time duty on Friday and Saturday, I was mighty happy to head out to the Burns' Night festivities -- even if I did show up a bit late. Andre once again hosted a lovely party with a fine mix of academic friends, music friends, neighborhood friends, and friends of friends (and yes, some people fit into multiple categories). The kitchen reeked of Scotch by the time I got there, but considering the occasion and the host, that seemed fitting. I somehow ended up staying until 3:00am!

I don't sleep-in well and had been out way late the night before and that made getting my butt in gear for the Worst Day of the Year ride on Sunday a tad difficul. It was a realtively balmy 32 degrees and the roads were wet but plowed -- though the promised sunshine never appeared. I had a stupidly hard time choosing which bike to ride, but finally committed to the road bike (which has commuter tires and an insufficient back fender on it at the moment) and headed out to grab Andy on the way to the start at Kerrytown. We rolled up just in time to grab some coffee cake and jump onto the back of the 12-mile group. People bunched up and strung out quite a bit, so we opted to push up toward the front, but eventually ended up riding mostly with only each other. We would pick up another rider or a pair here or there, but there wasn't much "group" on this "group ride" -- and where were the ride leaders? I only saw one and he had this sort of annoying habit of riding way out into the lane in order to look back at the group and yell at us. I didn't mind losing him. Anyhoo, after a bit of creative route taking and a bit of cursing (on my part) of route planners that had us climb that stupid Broadway hill (I know North Campus is nice to ride through, but I'm still suffering a "decline in fitness" post surgery) we rolled up to Arbor Brewing for a beer and munchies at the after party. It was interesting to take in the crowd and find almost no bikey people we knew. Definitely an older crowd, but lots of pretty committed pedalers, which was very cool.

On Monday, the boy was still sick, so I accomplished little work but did make it out to the Bike Ypsi meeting. Put May4 on your calendars, people -- it'll be our big spring event with morning rides, some food, and afternoon exhibits/polo/other fun bikey stuff to be determined.

After the meeting there was a movement afoot to grab a beer at the Corner. Most folks bailed, however, which is a shame because it turned into a much later night than I was expecting, full of frivolity, flirting, new acquaintances, odd conversations, and general silliness when we ran into Bethany and her buddies. We were in a bar and we were drinking, so I'm thinking that the stories from the table should not be blogged about, but I'm gonna encourage ya'll to come out to SheBang when they have live music and meet Bethany (who does the organizing and sound). She's a hoot and I've enjoyed both bands I've seen there so far.

What's wrong with this picture?

I've been reading some classic treatments of social behavior lately. On my lap this morning was Goffman's Behavior in Public Places (1963). The book (tho he persists in calling it a "report" for some reason) came out of his experiences observing patients in a California mental ward. Basically, watching all these people not following the conventions of society, convinced him that the rest of us actually do a pretty damn good job of following the "rules" of the societal game -- so much so that we don't even notice that we are doing it.


The only time the rules generally come to the surface, is when someone does something that breaks the rules -- and then they receive negative sanctions. In general, however, responses only go in that negative direction. In other words, we receive little direct positive response for doing the "right" thing, but people are free to call us out if we do the "wrong" thing.

Take this fine specimen spotted in an Ann Arbor coffee shop yesterday:


Yep, he is flossing his teeth. In public. And the price he had to pay for having the broken the rules was to be heckled, photographed, and blogged about by me. (Great, now I'm the enforcer of all things proper?!?!?)

But what is it that he is really doing wrong? Well, part of the rules are that we are supposed to show up in public ready to play the game. Goffman refers to the combination of "controlled alertness" (behavior) and appropriate appearance as "interaction tonus." It is something that is supposed to be "on" all the time when in public, not something you put on when you get there or, as was the case with the flosser, you drop and readjust and then put back up while you are there.

Fortunately, there are spaces and props in public space that help us to maintain the fiction that our interaction tonus is our "natural" state. If we need to drop it temporarily or adjust it, we can retreat to the bathroom (a semi-public space with its own set of rules that allow for such activity) or hide behind a newspaper.


BTW, and this continues a conversation Steve Krause and I have had, I'm liking the Primo coffee shop in AA (on Liberty and Fifth). They have two walls of windows overlooking the street, it is warm (even if the fireplace is fake), and they serve their coffee in real and big ceramic mugs.

The only part that disappoints me is that they have single-occupancy (one-holers), gender segregated bathrooms. Riddle me that one, batman. I checked them out -- both bathrooms are the same. No gender specific equipment in either one. But labels matter, as evidenced by the man that showed up to use the restroom and found the men's locked. I had just checked the women's, knew it was empty (and the door was even open), and encouraged him to go on in (he had a sense of urgency about him...). He hesitated. I encouraged more. It took a promise that I would stand outside the door to get him in there. Now what was that all about? Was I there to protect him? Nah, there was a lock on the door. Nope, I was his "excuse" -- if he got strange looks coming out (as he might -- he was acting out of role by presenting as a man but coming out of a door marked "women" so others who were sticking to their appropriate roles would be playing by the rules to call him out -- just as I had done with the flosser), I was supposed to explain it away. As in, "it's okay, the other was full so I told him to go in there." And yes, that I am a woman is the largest part of what would have made that possible. If I'm a woman, and I gave him a pass to use the "women's" room, it must be "okay."