Thorny does stuff besides knitting...

So, as I mentioned yesterday, I think I'm going to take this blog in a bit of a different direction.

See, lately I've been getting all uppity and Missy Feministy with myself (reading a lot of Feministing lately, among other things). I've also been doing a bunch of other things, and I'm realizing that I just don't compartmentalize well. I'm more of an all-or-nothing kinda gal.

Which means either folks reading my blog get the whole long-winded, chatty package, or you get the occasional anemic update with earnest-but-doomed promises to post up pictures soon.

So I'm going to be making some changes to the template and that kind of thing, to reflect some of the branching out I'll be doing as far as subject matter on this here blog o' mine. But, in a gesture of "walking my talk", I'd like to begin with this:

I recently came across a bit of a mention of how Geena Davis has founded a group called See Jane, which is looking into children's media programming and gender stereotypes and representations within it. If you've got time, you should check out their research, because it's... well, it's kind of shocking. Things like how 72% of speaking characters in 101 G-rated movies (live action and animated) are male. How even in crowd scenes, male faces outnumber female faces by almost 3 to 1.

And I read about that and went, "Well heck, no wonder boys grow up thinking girls don't have anything interesting to say and that girls' stories aren't worth paying attention to."

Which is something that had been kind of percolating in my brain anyway. See, we wound up picking up a little series of books for the boys a while back - there are like 4 or 5 books, and they're all about a different animal. "I love my bunny because..." and a cat, a dog, a duckling.... Okay, I guess there are four books. And the thing is the only female animal in this whole group is, of course, the cat.

Which is kind of ridiculous, because none of these animals are presented in any way that requires gendering. And yet all the animals apart from the cat are presented as boys. These animals aren't even given names, here. No Fido, no Patches, no Squeaker, nothing. And yet they're all male creatures.

So even before I found out about the marvelous See Jane, I was doing things like making sure to read these books with alternating pronouns. One time I'd read it as female, the next time as male, back and forth. And since my boys are still in the stage where they want the same books read 50 times a day, it's been fairly easy to do. I also, in a moment of Indignant Scientific Accuracy, refused to read a book about a bumble bee as written, as if the hard-working, honey-making bee in the book was male. As we all know, the bees which make the honey are female, and damned if I was going to let the male bees take all the credit just because some author was lazy.

But now that I know about See Jane? Well, I'm getting more diligent about it. There were the few things that really caught my attention, but there were lots of other things that I just didn't pay any mind of. I'm trying to fix that. Especially when it comes to the animal world - there's no reason for my kids to watch their favorite Baby Einstein DVD thinking that every creature shown is male. It's ludicrous. Of course not all the animals are male. Heck, some are rather demonstrably NOT male, like the cows, for example. So when we sit and watch and talk about the animals, an awful lot of them I'm labeling as female.

I can't change what human faces directors of children's movies put into their work. Well, I can't change the ones that are already sitting on my DVD shelf (I'll be joining See Jane in encouraging directors to make the faces in their movies more reflective of reality, though). I can change how many of those stories my kids see, however, and I'm going to be watching things a lot more carefully from now on.

Will it do any good? I don't know. But I figure it can't hurt.

A year ago, my mom was visiting for the boys' first birthday, and one of them fell and whanged his head hard enough to cry over. And my mom, I kid you not, told him that boys don't cry, and he needed to calm down. I about exploded. Instead I managed to tell her that wasn't the way we did things in my home, and we kind of went on from there.

But I found it pretty ironic. On the one hand, she's always carrying on about how men her age are so "emotionally stunted", and then on the other hand, she's doing her part in trying to stunt the next generation.

Oh, which reminds me - I've got to go sneak this book out of the kids' circulation. I have no idea where it came from, but I know it got hidden once before and must have gotten unearthed in all of the moving. The last day or so the kids have been all about it, and when I read it last night and found myself carrying on past the last page, saying things like, "Mommies are for organizing peace rallies. Mommies are for splashing in the mud. Mommies can start camp fires with one match. Mommies can be heartless cold-blooded corporate lawyers..." I knew the book needed to go.

Also, anyone have any suggestions for a book that talks more about what actual mamas are about? Because I tell ya, that book just sets my teeth on edge.

Joss Whedon was onto something...

...when he decided to set Buffy the Vampire Slayer in high school, because it had so much "horror" potential.

So here, swiped from Cara is a sampling of my own personal reflections on the senior year of high school:

1. Who was your best friend? I had a number of good friends, but my best friend senior year was probably an exchange student from Spain named Laura Gomez Garcia. We lost touch long ago, and as you might imagine, trying to Google her hasn't been helpful, but I would love to find out what she's been up to since she went back home.

2. What sports did you play? All the ones they told me I would flunk gym class if I didn't. Otherwise? Forget it.

3. What kind of car did you drive? A 1977 Chevy Impala wagon. I named him Sherman, on account of his almost Army-ish green paintjob. The prevailing theory was that Sherman had started his life as a tank, and then some enterprising fellow stripped the guns off of him and slapped on a Chevy label and somehow passed him off as a sta-wag.

4. It's Friday night, where were you at? If you were to ask my mom, she would say I was bowling. Again. In truth, I was probably hanging out at a park after dark with some friends, eating candy, drinking soda and being dorkly. And in winter, we were at Kellie's house hurling mini-Reese's at each other.

5. Were you a party animal? Not in the vaguest, slightest, most generous sense of the word. Not one little bit. Practically all of my friends were either in DARE (and took it kinda seriously), or were Girl Scouts.

6. Were you considered a flirt? Not hardly.

7. Ever skip school? Yes, once. On "Senior Skip Day". And my mom called me in sick. (See? Total dweeb.)

8. Ever smoke? Not until college.

9. Were you a nerd? I wrote fanfic before I knew what fanfic was. I read sci-fi/fantasy novels in just about every class. I was working on writing a couple sci-fi/fantasy novels, come to think of it. Oh yeah, I was a nerd.

10. Did you get suspended/expelled? No, but I was a regular in detention. My struggles with punctuality began at a young age, sadly.

11. Can you sing the Alma Mater? Sure. "On ye Lions! On ye Lions! Blah blah blah blah blaaaah! Blah de blahblah, Blah de blahblah. Blahde blahblah blah blah blaaaah! Blahblahblah On ye Lions! On ye Lions! Blah de blahblahblaaaaah! Gooooooo, Lions, fight fight fight to win, this game!" See?

12. Who was your favorite teacher? Mrs. Fiore. The irony here is that I don't think she actually liked me very much. And meanwhile, there was another teacher who seemed to think very highly of me, but uh... he gave me the mega-wiggins. *shudder!*

13. Favorite class? Interpersonal Communication and Film as Literature. Great classes. Also, Creative Writing was good too.

14. What was your school's full name? Lisle Senior High School.

15. School mascot? Lion

16. Did you go to Prom? Nope. There wasn't anyone I wanted to go with, so instead Laura and I took the money we would have spent on Prom and did a 3-day whirlwind of complete and utter teenaged abandon. One night at the video arcade/pizza parlor place spending quarters like mad. The next day we went downtown to the Lincoln Park Zoo, and the day after that to Great America with all our friends who /did/ go to Prom. It was AWESOME. We had just the best time.

17. If you could go back and do it over, would you? If you paid me a couple million dollars and promised I wouldn't have to live with my parents for it... no, even then I still wouldn't. (However, if I had no choice of whether I was repeating high school or not, senior year is absolutely the one I would prefer to repeat.)

18. What do you remember most about graduation? Sweltering.

19. Favorite memory of your senior year? Probably that "Prom" weekend. Though there are many. Senior year was, to be fair, probably the best year I'd had since I was like, 11. I did a lot of making up for lost time.

20. Were you ever posted up on the senior wall? Like Cara, I don’t know what this means either.

21. Did you have a job your senior year? I actually didn't. My parents refused to let me work that year, even though I had worked from the time I was 11 - first babysitting, then at the local library once I turned 16. I hated not having my own money that year, but I did get to do a lot more dorking around and having fun.

22. Who did you date? Um, for the first few months of senior year, I "dated" a guy named Ryan via the US Postal Service. We'd met the summer before senior year, but lived several hours apart. Nowadays we would just have IM'd all the time, but back then? Snail mail and cassette tapes, baby. I used to drive ol' Sherman around and talk into my tape player to him.

23. Where did you go most often for lunch? Toxic Hell, that haven of super-cheap, mostly edible food.

24. Have you gained weight since then? Yar.

25. What did you do after graduation? Went straight up to Girl Scout camp to work for the summer. Pre-camp had already started, so since I'd missed the bus, my dad and my godfather drove me up there.

26. When did you graduate? 1991.

There you have it, folks. My old yearbooks are still, um... in a box somewhere. So I can't find a picture for you (nor do I have a scanner, come to think of it). But imagine, if you will, a chunky girl with a lopsided-bowl haircut and big ol' Jodie Watley hoop earrings.

I've got some actual knitting content built up (and some thoughts about changing the direction of this blog a bit, but more on that later), and we're nearing the end of this "Month O' Deadlines" we've been in for Caz's writing projects, so hopefully I'll be able to be on the computer when I've actually got some mental juice to apply to things like blogging more often.