Archive for the ‘Unplugged’ Category
That dreaded question
Thursday, 4th March, 2010As a mixed Afro-Caribbean/white Londoner I’m no stranger to The Conversation and I’ve been meaning to write about it myself. I’ve had a couple of variations of it recently and each encounter lingers irritatingly in my mind.
Some of the commenters on the Guardian piece seem to be missing the point, perhaps intentionally. “Where are you from?” is a perfectly valid question in the inane small-talk that fills the void of initial acquaintance, right up there with “What’s your name?” and “Where do you work?”
The point is not the question, it’s the response to the answer.
It’s the “Where are you really from?” as if you’re lying, the confused look in response to “I was born here”, the “You don’t look like you’re from London” on the highly odd assumption that Londoners “look like” anything when the city has been a hub of diversity for centuries.
It’s the tone that differentiates The Conversation from straightforward sociableness and curiosity, the stilted probing until the questioner gets a satisfactory answer, which illicits an a-ha, that’s why then.
It reveals something about the person’s preconceptions, I think, which country they decide I must be from. I’ve had everything from Morocco to India to Brazil to Egypt, to Ethiopia, which I thought the strangest of the many uninvited guesses. I suppose hearing I was born and raised in an outer London borough must be a bit of a let-down.
As much as I want to, I’ve never even been to Barbados, where my mother was born, although I’m working on it.
Unfortunately, The Conversation has happened so many times, I bristle even when people are genuinely asking the question. Clearly I can’t do anything about attitudes, but what I can do is take it less seriously.
Certain publications should carry a blood pressure warning
Friday, 26th February, 2010I usually avoid reading anything in the “Torygraph” because it’s likely to put me in a bad mood (that applies double to The Daily Mail, known in journalistic circles as “The Daily Fascist“). But occasionally something will catch my attention on Google News and without thinking I’ll click on the link.
Case in point: There was a study out today about the effectiveness of group cognitive behavioural therapy in dealing with chronic back pain. The Telegraph’s lead?
Back pain may be all in the mind, according to researchers who recommend sufferers should seek psychological counselling.
Funny that, because the Independent article on the subject says this:
Zara Hansen, a member the research team from the University of Warwick said: “We are not saying back pain is all in the mind. It is very much a physical problem but the way you understand it affects the way you manage it.
Having suffered chronic back pain that became increasingly debilitating with my periods over the years and escalated to the point of sciatica, I’ve had my share of doctors and nurses suggest there’s nothing wrong with me except my desk job, as if I had nothing better to do with my time than subject myself to humiliation.
When laparascopic surgery a year ago removed bleeding endometriosis from my uterosacral ligaments (the sacrum being the base of the spine) and relieved the pain, I wanted to go back to those so-called medical professionals and give them what for. I often wonder how many other women have needlessly been condescendingly turned away with another pack of worthless paracetemol because their GPs and physiotherapists and orthopaedic surgeons haven’t done their research.
In the last year I’ve been able to work and travel like a normal person and — almost — forget what it’s like to be brought to tears trying to walk across my tiny living room. But last night on the Tube heading back from work I was suddenly struck with pain, not so much in the lower back but in the middle of my spine. It was there again as I sat at my desk this afternoon, and tonight as I stepped out of the building and walked down the street, shoots of pain from my pelvis down my leg caught my breath with each step and I hobbled towards the station, home feeling like a million miles away. Was that in my mind, hacks?
Goodbye to All That
Tuesday, 18th March, 2008“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
I’m probably the last person on the Internet to be posting about this, but such are the perils of procrastination. I have a backlog of half-written posts piling up. Anyway, feminist writer Robin Morgan has written this inspired piece, Goodbye To All That (#2), on the Democratic primary that encapsulates so much of what I’ve been feeling about the way Hillary’s treated. As I read it the first time I kept shouting “Yes!”, “Exactly!”, and “Right, that’s so frustrating/annoying/offensive!”
Read the whole thing at the link above, but here are some of the points she makes that I’ve been railing about to anyone who’ll listen for months:
Goodbye to the double standard…
—Hillary is too ballsy but too womanly, a Snow Maiden who’s emotional, and so much a politician as to be unfit for politics.
—She’s “ambitious” but he shows “fire in the belly.”
Goodbye to the toxic viciousness…
Goodbye to the sick, malicious idea that this is funny. This is not “Clinton hating,” not “Hillary hating.” This is sociopathic woman-hating. If it were about Jews, we would recognize it instantly as anti-Semitic propaganda; if about race, as KKK poison. Hell, PETA would go ballistic if such vomitous spew were directed at animals. Where is our sense of outrage—as citizens, voters, Americans?
Goodbye to pretending the black community is entirely male and all women are white…
…why should all women not be as justly proud of our womanhood and the centuries, even millennia, of struggle that got us this far, as black Americans, women and men, are justly proud of their struggles?
Why is it okay for 90% of black voters to support Obama but not for women to support Hillary? You can argue that neither race nor gender is reason enough alone to vote for someone to do the job of president, but why is one encouraged and the other belittled?
Goodbye to a campaign where he has to pass as white (which whites—especially wealthy ones—adore), while she has to pass as male (which both men and women demanded of her, and then found unforgivable)…
I was celebrating the pivotal power at last focused on African American women deciding on which of two candidates to bestow their vote—until a number of Hillary-supporting black feminists told me they’re being called “race traitors.”
So goodbye to conversations about this nation’s deepest scar—slavery—which fail to acknowledge that labor- and sexual-slavery exist today in the U.S. and elsewhere on this planet, and the majority of those enslaved are women.
Goodbye, goodbye to…
—blaming anything Bill Clinton does on Hillary… Let’s get real. If he hadn’t campaigned strongly for her everyone would cluck over what that meant.
—an era when parts of the populace feel so disaffected by politics that a comparative lack of knowledge, experience, and skill is actually seen as attractive, when celebrity-culture mania now infects our elections so that it’s “cooler” to glow with marquee charisma than to understand the vast global complexities of power on a nuclear, wounded planet.
—the notion that it’s fun to elect a handsome, cocky president who feels he can learn on the job, goodbye to George W. Bush and the destruction brought by his inexperience, ignorance, and arrogance. Goodbye to the accusation that HRC acts “entitled” when she’s worked intensely at everything she’s done—including being a nose-to-the-grindstone, first-rate senator from my state.
Goodbye to a misrepresented generational divide…
Goodbye to some young women eager to win male approval by showing they’re not feminists (at least not the kind who actually threaten the status quo), who can’t identify with a woman candidate because she is unafraid of eeueweeeu yucky power, who fear their boyfriends might look at them funny if they say something good about her. Goodbye to women of any age again feeling unworthy, sulking “what if she’s not electable?” or “maybe it’s post-feminism and whoooosh we’re already free.” Let a statement by the magnificent Harriet Tubman stand as reply. When asked how she managed to save hundreds of enslaved African Americans via the Underground Railroad during the Civil War, she replied bitterly, “I could have saved thousands—if only I’d been able to convince them they were slaves.”
This one perhaps resonates the most for me, and not just in the context of the campaign. The whole “I’m not a, you know feminist [shudder] but…” attitude of so many of my twentysomething friends drives me up the wall and round the bend. (Sars at Tomato Nation Nation has a great essay on that: Yes, You Are) It’s some form of generational delusion, the idea that we live in this post-feminist utopia.
I’d rather say a joyful Hello to all the glorious young women who do identify with Hillary, and all the brave, smart men—of all ethnicities and any age—who get that it’s in their self-interest, too. She’s better qualified. (D’uh.) She’s a high-profile candidate with an enormous grasp of foreign- and domestic-policy nuance, dedication to detail, ability to absorb staggering insult and personal pain while retaining dignity, resolve, even humor, and keep on keeping on. (Also, yes, dammit, let’s hear it for her connections and funding and party-building background, too. Obama was awfully glad about those when she raised dough and campaigned for him to get to the Senate in the first place.)
I’d rather look forward to what a good president he might make in eight years, when his vision and spirit are seasoned by practical know-how—and he’ll be all of 54. Meanwhile, goodbye to turning him into a shining knight when actually he’s an astute, smooth pol with speechwriters who’ve worked with the Kennedys’ own speechwriter-courtier Ted Sorenson. If it’s only about ringing rhetoric, let speechwriters run. But isn’t it about getting the policies we want enacted?
Exactly. Just because Obama can read well doesn’t mean he should be president. I’m far more inspired by Hillary’s ability to speak off the cuff and in depth about the nuts and bolts of policy, because I’m in love with her wonkishness.
At the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, Hillary said:
“For too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words.”
Even today, they are trying to silence her words.
Goodbye to going gently into any goodnight any man prescribes for us.
A blast from the past
Sunday, 30th December, 2007Yesterday I unexpectedly ran into someone I haven’t seen for a couple of years, and not so unexpectedly it’s brought up some memories and emotions I’d rather forget.
It’s not that it wasn’t good to see her — as a close friend of my mother’s she was in my life for a long time and in some ways had a formative influence on me — it’s that she sees me through the distorted lens of my mother’s creation.
As much as I dislike stereotypes, I have a stereotypical relationship with my mother, an ongoing struggle characterised by miscommunication, misunderstanding, and resentment. I might have lived in her house for over 20 years, but it’s clear from repeated episodes over recent years that she does not know who I am. And to be honest I don’t know what makes her tick either.
Her friends regard me with a curious tentativeness, wondering how I could be such a horrible, ungrateful person when that sainted woman raised me and my brother by herself. I don’t care what she told most people about me, but it hurt that this person never seemed to consider that my mother might be less than objective in telling her side of the story.
So many times I would sit at the top of the stairs listening to her in the living room telling people either on the phone or in person what a “nasty bitch” I was. I didn’t think I was being a bitch — I thought I was saying it wasn’t helping any of us that she would constantly play me and my brother off against each other, or that I was frustrated that nothing I ever did seemed to be good enough. But once I became a teenager I wasn’t allowed to have a legitimate complaint about anything because it was invariably dismissed as mood swing-induced whining. Because as far as I can tell my mother has never been wrong about anything, ever.
No matter what I do in my work, or where I live, or how effusive I am about my travel experiences, I will always be made to feel like some kind of failure as a human being because I don’t care about being tidy 100% of the time. When she came over the day I had surgery in October she simply had to get in a dig about how messy the place looked with Frenchie staying in the living room. And by “messy” she meant that there was a quilt and pillows folded up at one end of the settee.
What helped me come to terms with the way things are with my mother has been my relationship with Miss J. My mother might be unable to tell me she’s proud of me or say those three words we all need to hear, but Miss J fills that need; she hugs me, expresses her pride in me, ends our conversations in “I love you” with an ease that moves me and enables me to say it back. She is my self-appointed “Canadian Mom”. It’s just a shame that she’s 3,000 miles away.
I don’t think I actually realised how messed up my relationship is with my mother until I came back from my year studying in Toronto. A few weeks later we were sitting around with this friend and a few other people and my mother came out with the most absurd comments, stuff like ‘woe is me, I’m a single parent and I can’t afford to pay for my daughter to get her hair braided so I have to do it myself even though it hurts my hands.’ (Fact check: She never paid for my hairdresser — I was working before I went to Canada and I paid for hair extensions myself every two or three months for three years. She only did it then because I came back broke.)
But the classic that I repeated incredulously over the phone to Kam (who’s always there to reaffirm my sanity on these occasions) was when one of the girls there invited me to a party she was off to and my mother interrupted with “I know my daughter; she doesn’t like going to parties…” blah reading books, blah something about people I don’t know, blah I have no idea what else because I was stunned into silence. She knows me? I don’t like partying? Wha…huh? Hi, have we met? Because all the friends I’ve met at parties seem to know more about me than that. But then, this is the woman who doesn’t know what I do for work, even after I’ve had the same job for four years.
It’s the accumulation of these stupid little episodes over time that stick in my brain and build up to drive me crazy. And then something like yesterday happens and it all comes tumbling down over my head.
Sympathy for the Devil
Sunday, 29th October, 2006So I finally got to see The Devil Wears Prada last night, and liked it as much as I hoped I would. Although, I fear I liked it for all the wrong reasons. As we were leaving the cinema, The Bookworm looked at me and said, “I’m never reading Vogue again.”
Maybe I’ve become a craven media type, but I had the opposite reaction. You’re supposed to cheer on the young put-upon assistant, Andy, but at several points I found myself cheering on the magazine people — e.g. “evil” boss Miranda’s monologue about how trends filtered down into Andy’s wardrobe even though she felt exempt from fashion, or an editor saying Andy was whining and only “deigned” to work there. She was, after all, only counting time until she could get a job somewhere with “integrity”.
As the Slate review put it:
Unfortunately, the film offers a simplistic moral: People who care about clothing are either nasty (Miranda) or irredeemably superficial (her minions). The more Andy tends to her appearance, the less she tends to those around her. Goodness, the film would have us believe, is next to dowdiness. But any woman (or man, for that matter) who dresses for a job knows that this notion is ridiculous. Clothing possesses a talismanic quality, a transformative power…
And why shouldn’t people care about what they put on their back, the way they present themselves to the world? I’m reminded that my grandmother discouraged M from becoming a fashion designer and pushed her instead to be a chef, because “people will always need to eat.” But people will always need clothes too, unless civilization collectively reverts to some Garden of Eden-like existence.
All this is not to say I didn’t laugh at all the snarky lines, or cringe at the bitchiness — Meryl Streep (who I don’t usually like for some inexplicable reason) was fantastic by the way, and turned the one-dimensional character from the book into a layered human being.
I read the book this afternoon, assuming that as always it would be better than the film, and I was taken aback by how much I hated it. Aside from the pedestrian writing style, the novel is so thin on plot that nothing actually happens until the last 20-odd pages and the whole thing reads like an extended whining session committed to paper. I could go on, but I’ll save my grievances for a Now Reading review. 
You call this ‘convenience’?
Saturday, 2nd September, 2006When did it become so hard to buy a loaf of bread? I just wanted a regular loaf of uber-processed white bread to go with lashings of peanut butter, but did the supermarket have any of this basic life-sustaining necessity? No. What it did have was wholemeal bread; organic wholemeal bread; Weight Watchers Danish brown bread; soya bread; seeded bread; and so on and so on for three shelves. Did you know they even sell loaves of bread with no crust? I was standing there like
You can actually buy bread with the crust already cut off for you? That’s even worse than buying frozen roast potatoes, or grated cheese, or ready-made pancakes, all of which this supermarket stocks in lieu of real food. Have people really become that lazy?? Is pre-chewed food the next step?Is ranting about this a sign that I’m completely unhinged?
Sex(less) in the City
Friday, 21st April, 2006This is bad, very bad…I’m lazing around Saturday night watching Sex and the City. I’m really not in the right frame of mind to be watching this. I’ve been having issues with singledom lately…
And I’ve had such a crap day. A real beautiful spring day and I can barely move off the settee. I tried to leave the flat (since you know, I haven’t for more than a week…A Week!) for some spring air and McDonald’s and now I’m regretting it, and not just for the bad food – I’ve been in agony since. I was supposed to go to the theatre tonight – Kate Mulgrew’s in town; I love her – but if I can’t make it to McDonald’s without wanting to die then theatre’s most definitely out.
So I’ve spent my afternoon sketching dresses – since I can’t, you know, actually go shopping and try some on – and writing whiny emails to friends in far-flung places who won’t get them until tomorrow because hello, it’s Saturday, and they have lives. Meanwhile Bookworm’s off to New York today and another friend popped in for coffee (hot chocolate for me, I’m addicted) on the way to see a musical (Mamma Mia). Have I mentioned how much this sucks?! Dammit the highlight of my day was stretching out on the settee while the sun was streaming through the window — it felt so good shining on my face. I am such a loser.
London Flatlife
Monday, 5th December, 2005You know, being solo in London really sucks sometimes. Not only is there the keen sense that everyone else is having a great time living/holidaying with their friends and/or significant other, but you’re penalized for your aloneness. Like when you’re flat hunting. Why is it that the price of a one bedroom flat is almost the same as two? I mean, here I am tired of feeling like I’m living in some practically squalid flat from a bad Victorian novel, where mice propel themselves across the room at increasingly frequent intervals, even though I hand over almost everything I earn for the privilege of renting the dump, so I go browsing the listings and oh look, a one bed flat for £[x] million per week, and a two bed flat for £[x + 20] million per week, so you can be paying half the price for a bigger flat.
And why is it that everyone I know already has flatmates, or is truly rich enough to live by themselves, unlike me, who can only afford spacious, yet mouse-infested holes. Don’t get me wrong, my flat isn’t actually a dump really, it’s just old and holey, and I would be happy enough if it wasn’t for the unwanted squatters. And it annoys me to no end that I’m considering letting the suckers chase me out of my own home. But the thing is, once they’re in, they’re staying, and I can’t take much more of it.
Actually there is one person who I know is looking and who in fact suggested we share a flat but there are at least two reasons I know it won’t fly. First she wants to pay some ridiculously small (by West London standards, anyway) amount of rent that’d get her half a studio, and rather more importantly, I suspect we wouldn’t make it much past the first month without me contemplating some horrific murder/suicide incident that’d make it onto the evening news:
“We’re back with London Tonight, I’m [x teleprompter reader]. A young technology reporter in [trendy W London neighbourhood] stabbed her flatmate to death with a kitchen knife this morning before killing herself…”
Ahhh, okay so I’m already contemplating it. There goes that idea. I’m not generally a murderous type, honest. Guess I’m just destined to live alone. Have I mentioned lately how much I miss having a cat? It could even solve my vermin problem; then I wouldn’t even have to move!
Grrrr…
Tuesday, 15th November, 2005Landlords! Agents! Honestly what is wrong with these people? You leave messages to call you back and instead they go around doing stuff and don’t bother actually telling you. Why?
I’ve just had a totally confusing conversation with a contractor who it turns out had been called in to replace the one I’d been dealing with before. Of course, I didn’t know that because the managing agent never bothered to respond to messages I left days ago. Anyway, maybe these people will actually do something about the mice propelling themselves around my flat, because this place? It’s above a certain restaurant that shall remain nameless. Gross.
One mother is quite enough
Tuesday, 7th June, 2005As I type this, I’m enjoying a brief respite from Miss J, although her stuff is still strewn all over my flat – evidence of the tornado passing through. Don’t get me wrong, I love Miss J a.k.a. my “Canadian Mom”; in some ways she’s been more of a mother to me than the real one, but she’s one of those people you can only take in small doses. And we’re on Day 5 here – she arrived in London on Friday for a 10-day visit and she’s staying at my place.
I don’t have the time, space or inclination to go though her untidy and overbearing ways, but let’s just say I’m enjoying the peace tonight as she visits some friends. I’m kind of fascinated by the thought of what will happen tomorrow when she meets M – she’ll either be on her best behaviour (whatever that is) or she’ll create this awkward situation where she’s mothering everyone in sight, especially me, in front my actual mother. Can we say friction?
