Stories from LA

I’ve lived away from home long enough that when my mother says something about getting pop in a grocery store with a lot of ambient noise my mental word filters don’t parse that she’s talking about soda.

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I’m in the process of switching this blog over to a self-hosted word press blog. I might even start writing in it regularly.
So you know, under construction, blah, blah, content coming soon, blah, blah. Etc.

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I wish I had something insightful to say about Schwarzenegger’s decision to deny clemency to Stanley Tookie Williams. For me it comes down fundamentally to the fact that I am firmly against the death penalty. Given that, I need not delve any deeper into the questions of guilt vs. innocence or whether Williams has […]

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So there’s been some discussion in various places of an article in the NY Times about a coffee shop in Chicago that put up a sign saying “children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven.” This dovetails with something else that I’ve been […]

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I started writing this over a month ago and never finished. Story of way too much of my life right now. But the thoughts seem coherent enough as started. So you get that.
Twisty at I blame the patriarchy has been critiquing the patriarchal nature of fashion this week. There’s a whole […]

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What does my body mean? What is it worth? Who does it benefit? How much are you willing to pay for it? Despite four years in women’s studies classrooms and half a lifetime of personal feminism, the questions still sound a little strange to me even as I ask them. […]

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How do we negotiate anger in an ethical way? I ask this question because it is rooted very deeply in a personal situation right now. But I think it is important, too, to think about in situations that are less immediately personal and more about community, about institutions and the people within them. […]

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Ok. I think last night I fixed the formatting problem. Indeed I think I fixed it in both firefox and I.E. (different renderings of CSS in different browsers are the bane of my webdesigning). I haven’t tested it on any of the Mac browsers so if anything looks rabidly amiss let me […]

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A woman on a livejournal community this morning posted that she’s stressed out because her husband wants a baby and she wants a baby too, BUT she also wants to finish her PhD, to teach, to write, to publish (presumably to get tenure). I responded that it’s not an impossible situation if her husband is […]

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I live near downtown L.A. in a beautiful reasonably well-maintained Victorian house (see photo). It really is lovely, and it makes me very happy to live here. Our lovely, well-maintained house, however, is flanked by two horrendously dilapidated houses. Since I don’t actually own property, the state of the neighboring houses is […]

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