Category — Uncategorized

When I have a big task to do, I drop it in my bullet journal, which means I never lose any item that needs to get done because it’s all there in black and white.  But I also keep a day-to-day list that runs from Friday to Thursday where I drop smaller segments of larger tasks into each day to prioritize what needs to get done.  I do this on a separate sheet of paper, crossing off each item, and then putting a diagonal slash across the square when all items are finished for that day.  It is huge satisfying.

But I realized three weeks ago that I was dumping these sheets of paper at the end of the week.  So I had no record of what I do on a daily basis.  Which sort of sucks, especially when you’re trying to remember how long it takes you to do X, Y, or Z.

I was thinking about getting a paper calendar so everything would be in one place, but only filling it in for Friday to Thursday, week by week.  But that becomes one more thing I have to carry around.  A piece of paper tucked into my bullet journal is easy.  An extra book is hard.

I’m still debating what to do, but I really love this idea of keeping a reverse to-do list:

As I cross things off the task list, I add them to the reverse list. And when something inevitably comes up that wasn’t part of the plan for that day—say, a co-worker with a quick favor, or a tidying task that kept you busy for a bit—you add it to the reverse list, too.  What you’re left with at the end of the day is quite the opposite of a to-do list… it’s a “DONE!” list.

That would be really motivating.  It would also make things like updating your resume a lot easier because you’d have a record of tasks you’ve done.

Passing it along in case you’re looking for a new system, too.

Thank you for sticking with the first part of this post yesterday.  Did I need that much space to explain the difference between hearing and Hearing?  Probably not.  If you’ve experience not being Heard, you get it.  I guess I wasn’t writing that for people who get it.  I was writing it to explain it to people who don’t.

Yesterday, I gave you the only time in the book (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing) that I believed the narrator was female.  She was letting you know she had a story and she wanted to be understood.  THAT is something I think we all think about — male or female — but if you are accustomed to being Heard, you may not be compelled to use your precious time on earth working to get your story out there.  In the same way that if you normally have food aplenty, you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how you’re going to get food.  You trust that food will be there when you need it, simply because it always is.  If you are accustomed to being Heard, you’ll get your words out there when you have something you really need to say.  You don’t need to tell people to “listen up” because you trust that they’re already listening.

Anyway, I wanted to highlight the flip side, where I didn’t believe she was female and how this book helped get me through the Kavanaugh vote by understanding the nomination conversation.

A few pages later, the narrator states that she didn’t see the point of her white, male friend’s podcast and now does:

They would stream themselves playing video games to tiny audiences, and they had a podcast about the best TV death scenes that they also filmed and uploaded to YouTube.  To me it just seemed like that incurable ailment so many well-off dudes have, believing despite mountains of evidence that what the world truly needs is another white-guy comedy podcast.  This sounds harsh, but that’s what it seemed like to me back then.  Now, of course, I know how easy it is to feel like you don’t matter if no one’s watching (p. 7 – 8).

She is referring to something a lot of writers/artists/videographers (et al) feel: Attention is limited and when you’re not getting it, it sucks.  You write a blog post, write a book, record a song, film a movie, and you want people to consume your creation.  You don’t even need them to love it; you just want it to be given someone’s time.  No one wants their effort ignored.

But here’s the thing: women already know how it feels not to matter.  We don’t have an epiphany; we know this based on experience.

Let’s say I enter a very diverse room and ask people to write down all the times they are shown through other people’s actions that their life/thoughts/opinions matter.  Not on an individual, moment-to-moment basis, but overall as they move through society.  Do they think they benefit from existing laws?  Do they see what matters to them reflected in the world around them?  Is it easy enough to get products they need in order to be themselves?  Do they see advertisements that are aimed at them, making it clear the product creators want them to know that they matter as a customer?

How long would your list be?  What if you were an African-American woman?  An immigrant?  A gay, Latino man?  Someone wealthy?  Someone uneducated?  Someone Jewish?  Someone healthy?

A woman?

A man?

I think our lists would be very different lengths.  There are places where I have privilege, and I know I matter.  But I’m a woman.  I KNOW I don’t matter to society as much as a man — and that’s not America; that’s the world.  I am my womb.  A man is his brain and his muscles, and I am a single organ located in my pelvis.

We get our rights and protections slowly, and once we have them, we still have people fighting to take them away.  We had to fight for the right to vote.  In fact, the 19th amendment wasn’t ratified here until 1920.  That upcoming 2020 election will be the 100 year anniversary of women having the right to vote.  We are still fighting for abortion rights, sexual assault laws, equal representation in office or the board room.

If you want to know whether or not we matter, all you have to do is look at the Kavanaugh conversation and the people who said his life shouldn’t be ruined just because he sexually assaulted someone in his youth.  HIS life ruined?  What about HER life, the woman he chose to harm?  Assault isn’t an accident.

We get it.  Women don’t matter.

So the idea that Green’s narrator would ONLY understand how good it feels to be heard and how awful it feels to be ignored due to the fickleness of attention on social media doesn’t ring true.  That feeling of not mattering is something little girls pick up and carry with them their whole life, even if it’s just background noise in their brain as they push forward.

But moreover, I didn’t believe that a woman — even a woman who individually adores her male friend — would take precious moments of telling her story to point out how she understands now that white boys need attention, too.  Unless she’s part of the Patriarchy.  Or written by a white male.

So what is your list?  Do you feel heard?  Do you get the sense that you matter?

On a side note, it feels incredibly unfair to use Hank Green’s book to make this point; it’s an enjoyable story and I hate the idea that anyone may not read it because I’m pointing out the problems in the narration.  So, please, read it and come to your own opinion because… it has robots and robots are awesome.  But really, this embodies why we need diverse books.

I was reading the perfect book at the perfect time through the whole Kavanaugh vote: An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green.  It is an easy, enjoyable read AND it’s an embodiment of how little men can imagine the lives of women.  It was how white males think about their voice vs. how the rest of society sometimes (or always) thinks about their voice.  I know… probably not the most generous read or, frankly, orthodox read of a book about robots, but there it is.

And really, before this post goes any deeper, I want to pause and say that I liked this book.  At the same time, I was disappointed by this book, but disappointed in the same way that I’m disappointed with JK Rowling for what she has done with Nagini.  I’m still going to watch the next Fantastic Beasts — this isn’t baby with the bathwater — but it feels false to not point out how issues with this book (or that movie) reflect issues in society today.  And even with all that, I still think people will enjoy it, and I apologize in advance to Hank Green for using his book to make a point.

So Green goes with a female narrator — a bisexual, female narrator no less — and weaves this story where she finds fame as a YouTuber because she happens to be the first to make a video about these giant robots who show up on earth.  She builds an enormous following and she is being HEARD in a way that women are rarely Heard.  I mean, yes, people hear sound coming out of our mouths, but after the vote last week, I think we can all agree that we’re not Heard (with a capital H to connote important, close listening).  But she was Heard and was actually creating change.

It made me think about why I started this blog in the first place, over 12 years ago.  I wanted to find other people going through the same experience.  I wanted a place to set down my story.  And, if I’m being honest, I wanted to be Heard in a way that infertile women aren’t Heard in today’s society.  A case in point, it is well-documented and reported in face-to-face interactions and the media, from infertile people to psychologists to doctors, how hurtful it is to be asked when you’re going to have children.  And yet… has anything changed in 12 years?  What was asked then is still being asked now will still be being asked 120 years from now because some voices are Heard and other voices are not.

Our voices, a lot of the time, are not.

Oh, I’m sure you’re Heard in small circles.  You’re Heard by people who already love you and are preconditioned to listen.  You’re Heard at work because they know you well and know you’re an expert.  That’s not the type of hearing I’m speaking about.

I’m speaking about the idea that lawmakers listen to you.  White men get to experience that… a lot.  Not always, but a lot.  I’m speaking about the idea that culture listens to you.  We wouldn’t have hashtags like #OscarsSoWhite if we didn’t have ample proof that only some voices are Heard.  I’m speaking about the idea that people who don’t know you consider your words.  When you speak up, when you vote, when you have an idea, it’s Heard.

I think what we saw last week, even more than the hurt that male lawmakers weren’t listening, weren’t Hearing us, is the idea that female lawmakers weren’t Hearing us, either.  When people called Susan Collins a traitor to women, they weren’t saying that because of the way she was voting.  They were saying that because of the way she wasn’t listening.  She wasn’t Hearing.  She was putting politics before people; party before situation.  She had thousands of silenced women trying to open her ears, and she chose not to Hear them.  Yes, she can recite what they said to her about sexual abuse because she heard in the literal, physical sense of incoming sound.  But she didn’t Hear.

I have more thoughts that I’ll finish tomorrow, but I’ll leave you with this opening from Green’s book.  It’s the reason I read the book in the first place, and the reason I was disappointed that his experience as a white male limited him from truly understanding how it feels to not be Heard as a woman and/or as a bisexual (and therefore, he misses so many opportunities to weave this feeling through the book rather than focus solely on the emotions of fame).

It could have been a deeper book.  I thought it was going to be a deeper book.  I’m not saying you must be exactly like your narrator to write a compelling story, but depth of understanding is key in jumping that chasm.  I never believed that the narrator was female except for this paragraph on page 1:

I am in the wonderful position of having you by the short hairs. I have the story, and so I get to tell it to you the way I want. That means you get to understand me, not just my story, so don’t be surprised if there’s some drama. I’m going to attempt to come at this account honestly, but I’ll also admit to a significant pro-me bias. If you get anything out of this, ideally it won’t be you being more or less on one side or the other, but simply understanding that I am (or at least was) human.

That’s where I leave you.  That we each have a story to tell, and we hope that other people will listen to it.  Not for the story itself but for the understanding that comes from being Heard.  More tomorrow.

I used to believe that we had a base standard, a low bar that people had to clear.  We would, of course, disagree on the best way to run the country, but there would be a few things that we’d all agree on and if anyone didn’t accept and honour those few things, they would never be voted into a position of power.

I know, silly me.

So we can argue until the end of the day whether capitalism works, or whether we should give more assistance to individuals, but I always believed that our leaders would agree that they would represent and give guidance to all people in their district.  Not just the people who elected the leader, but they would represent and care for all the people who were in their city or state or country.

I thought we lived in a world where lawmakers were elected solely to listen to the people, to represent the people.  Not to impose their own opinions but to be collective voice.  If that is true, there is no place for Mitch McConnell to say: “I don’t care how many members they chase, how many people they harass here in the halls, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: we will not be intimidated by these people.”  These people?  These people are the people you are elected to represent.  Your job is to listen to “these people.”

I thought we lived in a world where opinions of experts mattered.  Where headlines such as “‘Unfathomable’: More than 2,400 law professors sign letter opposing Kavanaugh’s confirmation” would make our lawmakers pause and say, “We need to slow this down and carefully consider what we’re doing.”

I thought we all agreed that if someone engaged in criminal activity before or during their time in elected office, they were not fit to lead.  And in the case of grey matters, where it wasn’t clear that the act was truly criminal or just an abuse of a loophole in a system, we’d employ something akin to the Golden Rule.  If we placed ourselves as the person harmed by that individual’s actions, would we still want them in office regardless of other reasons why we may want the person in power?  If the answer was no, we would ask someone else to step into the leadership position.  Though, of course, lying under oath is criminal.

There are many more people who would like a leadership role than there are leadership roles.  It is usually pretty easy to find reasonable people who fit this simple criteria: Treat all individuals as equal individuals regardless of their race, sex, gender, sexual identity, culture, political leanings.  And keep criminals or loophole abusers out of office.

And yet, on the eve of this vote, we can’t seem to accomplish that; that very simple task.  We have people in office who are more obsessed with staying in power and representing their political party than following those two simple criteria.  How else would we be considering allowing a lying sexual abuser onto the highest court in the country?

I’ve lost faith in the system because we’re no longer arguing about the best way to help all the people in our nation.  We’re no longer talking about whether it’s more important to direct money towards a strong military or education.  This isn’t about whether we should have more social programs in place or whether communities should step in to help vulnerable people.

This is about not clearing that lowest bar.

First and foremost, even if you don’t plan to click over to read the article itself, click over just to see one of the coolest uses of special effects on a webpage.  I know.  I’m totally distracted by shiny tricks.  And this story is about the shiniest trick of all.

So what if you were given a score — a number like a credit score — but instead of it measuring how responsible you are in paying off purchases, it measured your behaviour.  So you get points for the times you hold open the door for someone and you lose points for the times you cut off someone in traffic.  And the world works exactly as we always claim we want the world to work: the good get rewarded and the bad get punished.

Except, unlike a credit score, which is black-and-white (you’re either on-time with payments or you’re not), behaviour is in the eye of the beholder.  Who decides that holding open the door is a mark of good manners rather than a way of demonstrating control?  Who decides what is polite and what is rude and what is the right thing to do and what is clearly in the wrong?

The article reports:

What may sound like a dystopian vision of the future is already happening in China. And it’s making and breaking lives.  The Communist Party calls it “social credit” and says it will be fully operational by 2020.  Within years, an official Party outline claims, it will “allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”

The system is already in place and it’s mandatory, though it won’t be fully operational for a few more years.  Your score updates in real-time, so there is clear cause and effect — you can trace what you just did to the drop or rise in your social credit score.  Live a decent life and you’re rewarded.  Be a bad citizen and you’re punished.  Again, exactly as we hope life will work.  We want good things to happen to good people and bad things to happen to bad people.  Don’t we?

Except: “Who your friends and family are will affect your score. If your best friend or your dad says something negative about the government, you’ll lose points too. Who you date and ultimately partner with will also affect social credit.”

Of course, as the article points out, I’m seeing this system through American eyes.  And that does carry weight because I have a feeling we may not understand this system in the same way an insider understands the system:

For many in China, privacy doesn’t have the same premium as it does in the West.  The Chinese place a higher value on community good versus individual rights, so most feel that, if social credit will bring a safer, more secure, more stable society, then bring it on.

I already give up my privacy when I participate in social media or walk around outside where there are cameras, so I can’t say that we have the privacy we crave here.

I don’t know how this will unfold when it’s fully implemented.  If other countries will follow suit.

What do you think?