Two Things I'm Unhappy About Today:

1. That the press thinks it's necessary to identify a murderer as a "transgendered wife", and
2. That Mr. Obama thinks it's funny to joke about Special Olympics.

My First Therapist

My first therapist was a leftist Black social worker with a 'fro out to here. She looked like Angela Davis: Initially I suspected she might even be Angela inexplicably gone to ground in the South. I mention all that not because race per se is the important thing here but to demonstrate the power of social expectations of women to seize hold even of someone like her.

I knew a little about her: The VietNam war was raging at the time, and when her boyfriend's II-S wasn't enough to keep him out of the war any more, she married him to give him a higher deferment. When they started drafting married men, she got pregnant to get him his III-A. I knew that she was not happy being married, and she was not happy being a mother, either: She did it because she didn't want another Black man to die in some godforsaken jungle on the other side of the planet. That's a hell of a personal sacrifice to make for a man, and I have often wondered what she would have done to keep him out of that war if they'd started drafting married men with babies. What else of herself could she give up?

She did me a lot of good. Looking back, I know it must have been hard for her to listen to my middle-class white-chick whine for 45 minutes every week, but listen she did. Unfortunately, she laughed when I told her I intended to keep my own name when I married. She worried that I was emasculating my husband when I dreamed of living in a home that belonged to my family and having a house full of foster kids instead of going to live with him in his house and having his babies. In short, she'd swallowed the gender paradigm hook, line, and sinker--she would wrench her entire life off course to save a man the inconvenience of serving a little jail time or going to Canada. And she would worry more in my sessions about a boyfriend/fiancé/husband I didn't even have yet than about the real (female) me sitting right in front of her.

I don't know why exactly I have been thinking about her today, but I have. And I'm not sure exactly what I'm trying to say here, either. But there it is.

What I'm Reading Over Spring Break:

Web CT hates me

Neek, originally uploaded by wherepineswhisper.

According to the Urban Dictionary Online, a "neek" is a cross between a nerd and a geek. I needed one today.

I was happily reviewing and returning proposed bibliographies to my Personality class, when I logged out for something or other. When I tried to log back in, it wouldn't let me! I could get into WebCT, and from there to my Ethics class, but clicking on Personality just got me a blank screen. Not even an error message.

So. I'm proctoring the Ethics exam and so can hardly get on the phone. I go to the Support page and start a Chat. The first fellow tells me my problem is because I am using Mozilla Firefox (not). So, knowing it will do me no good (I mean, it's never been a problem before, and I can get into one class, so how could it be Firefox??), I log off, close Firefox, and open Microsoft Internet Explorer. Of course, it does not work.

So I log back into Chat and get another fellow, who asks me to wait one while he reads the report I just filed. Which identifies me, by the way, as the Instructor for this course. So I wait. And wait. And wait.

And then I get a message from him asking, "We haven't heard from you in a while. Do you still want to talk about this problem?" I answer politely that he told me to wait. I think, what, you want me to whistle or something while I wait?

So I wait some more. Then he asks me if can see the "My Computer" icon. I'm a bit of an impatient person, so I fire back, "What does the 'my computer' icon have to do with anything?" A reasonable question, in my opinion. We exchange a few more lines, and then he asks if I'm sure the Instructor has given me the necessary permissions to access this class! He tells me that it is up to the Instructor to do that.

I'm betting if I had logged on with a man's name he would not have said that.

Again, more polite than I'm feeling, I respond nicely: "I AM the Instructor!" OK. Sort of nicely. I only yelled one word. And I didn't call him names.

We finally got on the same page, as it were, and he had me do something esoteric in Java, and it works fine now. But good Lord!

Question:

Do you read your student evaluations?

Do you even open the envelope?

My first job: food service

My very first job ever was at a cafeteria-type restaurant. I don't even remember the name of it. It was a summer job, and I lasted approximately the summer. I don't remember the name of it, or how much I made, but I do remember that when I got home every night my feet hurt so bad I'd tiptoe into the house so as not to wake anyone up, fill the kitchen sink with water as hot as I could stand it, climb up on the counter and stick my feet in. Then I'd fall asleep leaning against the cabinets. I had fun because my best friend worked there too, but I hated the job qua job.