Category — Uncategorized

You’re voting today, correct?  Because the importance of how we vote and the laws we create is contained below.

I saw two stories last week, both concerning pregnancy loss.  You may want to save this post for later if you’re not in a good place to speak about loss.  (But, please, go vote.)

.

.

.

The first is a disturbing piece from the New York Times looking at miscarriages and stillbirth that occurred due to poor working conditions.  A woman at the top of the article clutches an empty receiving blanket:

One evening in January 2014, after eight hours of lifting, Erica Hayes ran to the bathroom. Blood drenched her jeans.  She was 23 and in the second trimester of her first pregnancy. She had spent much of the week hoisting the warehouse’s largest boxes from one conveyor belt to the next. Ever since she learned she was pregnant, she had been begging her supervisor to let her work with lighter boxes, she said in an interview. She said her boss repeatedly said no.

It’s a side of pregnancy discrimination that we usually don’t think about, one that hits close to home for our community.  The public gets angry about the fact that women are often passed over for promotions or lose their job due to pregnancy.  We’re less comfortable speaking about how the workplace can cause loss.  That the items around us may have contributed to someone else’s pregnancy loss.

It’s a sobering piece, especially when you consider our 40-year-old laws concerning employers and pregnancy:

Under federal law, companies don’t necessarily have to adjust pregnant women’s jobs, even when lighter work is available and their doctors send letters urging a reprieve.

And the fact that the company in the article is a contractor of Verizon.

*******

The other piece is more moving.  It weave a personal story of loss with historical tales of loss.  Nursing Clio explains how she felt after learning her baby had no heartbeat:

More than anything, I felt how I had lost a story of the future that I had built up in my mind … What has followed in the last two years has been even more difficult than I could have imagined and has required many alterations to our pregnancy story. The loss of the expected narrative and the discovery of new narratives is what I want to focus on here.

She uses her background as a professor of eighteenth century literature to try to make sense of what she lost.  Of how women have processed their losses over the ages, especially how male authors (vs. female authors) discuss loss and the concept of mourning pictures.

It’s an incredible piece weaving the personal with the academic.  And I found it hugging my heart after I read that first exposé on loss.

There was a great question asked in my post last week about reading diversity that I want to unpack with a story.  There’s a very good reason why I fret when I realize that I’m only reading white men, and it all goes back to high school.

[Pretend there are wavy lines indicating that we’re going back in time.]

I am taking the AP English Literature exam, and I’ve entered the free response section.  The task is to read a short excerpt and write an essay.  I have 40 minutes.  I begin reading the piece and realize that I do not understand it.  I do not know what a nativity scene is.  I do not know the word crèche in this context.  I cannot picture what this is about any more than you can picture a scene set in a sukkah and write a timed essay about the importance of a lulav and etrog.  (Unless, of course, you come into the exam knowing about Succot.)

I go to the proctor and explain to her that I don’t know what a nativity scene is.  She looks at me in alarm as she reads the prompt and then says, “I can’t tell you anything.  Just do your best.”

[Wavy lines again, back to the present.]

At 15 years old, I had never seen a nativity scene and didn’t know much about Christmas.  It sounds silly, but it’s really easy to not learn things if you don’t expose yourself to them.  I knew the most basic, surface information about Christmas.  Knew about Christmas trees because I saw them in the shopping mall, candy canes because people passed them out at school, and that the holiday celebrated the birth of Jesus.  But I didn’t know at that time about the three wise men or midnight mass or nativity scenes.  All of that knowledge came later during college and beyond.

If I had read the excerpt outside the walls of the exam, I would have looked up “nativity scene” and understood what it was.  Reading would have introduced me to this foreign idea that was outside my life experience.

Instead, I had to struggle during the exam and find out what it was after the exam was over.

The inability to understand applies to everything in life.  We need exposure.  You can do that through an experience — for instance, celebrating someone else’s holiday and asking questions or traveling to a different place and experiencing a new culture firsthand — or you can do it through a book or movie.  It’s a cheap form of travel: You can read a story from someone else’s point-of-view and get exposed to all the things they know that you don’t.

EVERY person who is not me has something to teach me, but if I stick with authors from a single background, I am likely to encounter the same ideas again and again.  Even when a person is not specifically writing about their culture or race or sexuality or gender, they are still writing through it, and it weaves its way into that science fiction or horror or fantasy story.  Maybe not directly but indirectly.  Authors write about what they know, even when they’re making up a fictional world.  And what they know is what I’m trying to glean.

So when I say that I’m worried because all the authors I’ve been reading lately come from the same white, male, British background, it’s because I’m thinking about that AP exam and how much I don’t know.  I would say the same thing if I was reading mostly Canadian women authors or mostly young African-American men authors.  If I want to organically encounter what I don’t know (because without knowing about it, I don’t even know to look it up), I need to pay attention to the authors I’m reading and shift things around when I see I’m reading too much of the same thing.

I’ll never pick up what I don’t know if I don’t expose myself to it.

I have very complicated feelings about online shopping.  I love it because it’s convenient and the thing I want is usually available and I don’t need to leave my house to get the item.  And I hate it because it feels wrong and it makes me purchase more than I probably need and I can’t touch/try on/ask questions before I purchase.

I dislike it more than I like it, and I know I’m in the minority saying that.

I feel really uncomfortable buying clothing online unless I’m buying a new copy of something I already own.  Like my jeans.  I always buy the same jeans, so when I need a new pair of jeans, I feel comfortable ordering them online.  Everything else, I’d rather go to the store and try it on or not get it at all.  Because I hate returning things and tracking the reimbursement.  So if I’m not sure that I’ll get it right the first time, I’d rather forego the new clothing altogether.

Again, I sense I’m in the minority saying that.

I don’t like to buy shoes online unless I’m buying a new pair of something I’m already wearing.  We can extend this sentiment to anything that goes on my body — from socks to coats.  All of it.  I need to hold it in the store or not get it at all.

I prefer to get books in the store because sometimes a copy has a wonky page or a crease in the cover.  And I don’t want the wonky copy.  I want the pristine copy that speaks to me from the pile, whispering, “Melissa, purchase me.”  I’m less picky about DVDs or CDs because they tend to come in wrapping and the outer case isn’t really part of the experience of interacting with the media.  And I’m okay purchasing hard-to-find toiletries, cleaning products, or food items online because purchasing them online is usually my only option if I want an obscure gel specifically made for curly hair.

Of course I love the time saved from not getting in the car and driving to a store, but I miss the people I see and the agency I feel choosing one jar of peanut butter over another.

The Atlantic recently did a piece about online shopping, pointing out the obvious:

Before the advent of the internet, we had to set aside time to go browse the aisles of a physical store, which was only open a certain number of hours a day. Now, we can shop from anywhere, anytime—while we’re at work, or exercising, or even sleeping.

Some of it didn’t reflect my experience.  I don’t have Alexa ordering underwear for me.  And I feel no impulse to shop just for the sake of shopping.  But if we’re already ordering my gel, sometimes I throw in a carton of mints no longer carried in the store just because it’s there on the same site.

Like I said, I have all the feelings when it comes to online shopping.

What are your feelings?

A friend recommended Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz.  It is so much fun, he promised.  Totally your thing.  And he’s right: I just read Magpie Murders, and it was totally my thing.

But I felt enormously guilty when I was about twenty pages in because I was looking back over my reading list for the year and realized that the vast majority of the books were by white men.  And here I was starting yet another book by a white man, and I was loving it.  It was like eating a veggie burger for every single meal: it’s a protein source, so we can’t say that it’s “bad” for you, but it’s never a sound idea to have a single item defining your diet.  Even if you love veggie burgers.  Even if veggie burgers tastes really good, and you’re now a grown-up and not having your dietary choices dictated by another human being.  (That’s, like, an analogy to being in school and being told what to read.  Or something like that.  I hate being told what to read.)

I spent the duration of reading Magpie Murders talking about this realization with friends and family, and everyone kept missing the point and making book suggestions.  It’s not that I don’t know about other books.  My TBR pile is very diverse.  Building my TBR pile isn’t the problem.  I’m talking about this because I’m bothered by this.

The problem is that I tend to read a lot of genre fiction (science fiction, mystery, horror, or fantasy) to relax, and those genres are clogged up with white men.  They write enjoyable books, and they’re prolific writers.  When they produce another novel, I’m likely to grab it and push the other options on my TBR list to the bottom of the pile.  I tend to go with an author I know I like over someone I don’t know yet.  It’s book choices without deep thinking.

Anyway, I’m chasing Magpie Murders with Jade Chang’s The Wangs vs. the World just because I felt like I should have something other than another veggie burger.  It’s totally enjoyable (I’m still in the middle of it) — a case in point; there are other delicious books out there.  But I’ll also admit that post-Magpie Murders, without thinking, my hand was about to grab a Robin Sloan book I just bought.

Then I checked.  He’s a white man.  I went back to the TBR pile and consciously brought Jade Chang to the top.

If I made a list of my favourite books of all time and looked down that list at the authors who created those books, there are a lot white men.  What do you do when you have a set of authors you love, ones where you’re willing to give every book they write at least a chance, but they’re mostly white men?

And you don’t know if you like their voice because you were taught to like their voice, or you like their voice because it honestly appeals to you and entertains you?

All I know is that when I look at my favourite authors, they tend to be British and they tend to be men and they tend to write genre fiction and they tend to be white.  Some are alive and some are dead.  But it’s like eating meal after meal after meal of veggie burgers, and knowing it isn’t healthy but loving veggie burgers at the same time.

I don’t apologize for liking Lev Grossman or Neil Gaiman or David Nicholls or Jasper Fforde or JRR Tolkien or CS Lewis or Blake Crouch or, now, Anthony Horowitz.  But I clearly need to slip other writers in between or risk having a limited point-of-view when it comes to fiction.

What does your favourite author list look like?

I read about the Rose-Coloured Roundup on one of my news listservs.  It’s happy news stories, I was promised, and only happy news stories.

My first reaction was sign me up.  I like happy news stories.  I’m more likely to tell Josh about something funny or heartwarming I read on the Internet.  I don’t click on click-baity news, though I certainly absorb the headlines as I scroll past.

But my second reaction was maybe not.  We need to stop thinking about news as negative or positive.  Isn’t it just… the important facts we need to know?  Shouldn’t we just stick to presenting the news and stop trying to manipulate it in one direction or the other?  I refuse to read inflammatory articles that are trying to make me feel scared, so why should I read the opposite; something trying to manipulate me into feeling good?  And… all is not right in the world.  Isn’t it a bit ostrich-like to subscribe to a roundup that is going to curate only the happy news?

But we live in a world where 11 people died in a synagogue yesterday.  Where people are sent bombs and people are shot in grocery stores.

I signed up for the roundup.

Does it make me feel good?  I don’t know.  It doesn’t erase the rest of the news.  It just brings a little breathing space in a very tumultuous world.