Facts, Figures, and Profoundities from Sexual Harassment Class

- Ten percent of American women have quit a job because of harassment.
- Make friends with the homeless men in your neighborhood (women too, but especially men). They are the ones who will hear you when you scream on the street in the middle of the night, and they're more likely to help if you've made friends. Homeless individuals often stop assaults.
- Coors beer donates money to the Klan.
- Harassment is worse in D.C. because it is such a power-driven city.
- Privilege is having blinder on: you don't have to see it if it's never done to you.
- Consent shouldn't be our standard for sex, enthusiasm should be the standard.
- The oppressed always knows the oppressor better than the oppressor knows them.
- We continue to lock up women women to "protect" them from "inevitable" male violence rather than sanctioning men.
- It is a privilege to not have to walk down the street doing constant risk assessment.
- People who need the law the most are those who can least afford it.
- If you need a pro bono lawyer, the local NOW chapter usually knows where to find them.
- People don't change when we call them stupid, they change when they call themselves stupid.
- Being a screaming crazy person does not encourage allies.
- You are far more likely to be sexually assaulted by someone of your own race and socioeconomic status.
- Anger is not a strategy. Anger is a sign you need to do something that works.
- It isn't about men versus women: it's about all of us versus the jackasses.

St. Valentine

I have, at multiple times in my life been in a relationship on Valentine's Day. Interestingly, I have never done anything with that person, and rather, have always gone out to lunch or dinner at a Mexican restaurant with my parents (when I was little I also used to consistently receive pajamas as a gift). My dad always gets me flowers, my mom gets me a card or candy. Last year was my first year away at college and my high school boyfriend and I happened to be dating at the moment (just accept that that is, indeed, the way that sentence must be written to be accurate). He, however, was working (or something) and didn't want to come down to D.C. for the evening. So, my mommy and daddy swooped in and came down to have dinner with me. We went to a restaurant called Tia Queta, which happens to a be a restaurant the two of them used to go to when they were dating. My family is cute like that. I had a delicious meal and got a gift (the board game Betrayal at the House on the Hill) from friends at home. Altogether, one of the best Valentine's Days I've ever had. This year, despite being in the midst of the most stable, loving relationship I hav ever encountered, I had yet another chance to spend a Valentine's Day with my mom and dad at that same restaurant they used to go to. My current boyfriend had class until late in the evening on Valentine's Day and so, yet again, I found myself in a relationship and unoccupied on the day of lovers. I got to eat the same delicious black bean and parmesan dish I ordered last year and visit with my parents who I hadn't seen in a over a month. I know that it is a cheesy tradition and that it inevitably has to come to an end and I move deeper into the world of my own relationships (plus my parents would probably appreciate finally getting one to themselves), but I love it. It is one of the strongest traditions I have with my family. Other things I've been holding on to my whole life have been slipping away for the last few years, mostly holiday traditions, and perhaps it's just me being stubborn, but it makes me sad every time I lose one. I suppose I just need to start some new traditions, and chicken pesto parmesan and a poem certainly seems like a good one. It just always surprises me how bad I am at letting go of the past. 

Girly Gone?

I've written before about Girlyman, an incredible, although not well-known, group of talented musicians who let there listeners in to an amazing degree. It's why I loved them. They were people I got to know intimately (well, I suppose music has a habit of doing that). The second you know the whole impetus for a song suddenly that song is the artist wearing his or her heart on their sleeve. Anyway, for better or worse, I've been drawn close to these people who I've only met three or four times. Their music has been a constant in the tumultuous life that is being a teenager: it has followed me through relationships, break ups, uncertainties, jubilation, sadness, and fear. Almost every morning I hop in my car they're playing and I thought they, essentially, always would be.

Girlyman is breaking up now (they refuse to call it that because they assume at some point they will no longer want to be apart, but as far as I'm concerned at that point they will just be getting back together). It feels like my parents are getting divorced (having never had my parents get divorced I am uniquely unqualified to make that statement), not so much in that it is traumatically emotional, I haven't cried over it, but in that something I saw as so concrete and stable appears  to be able to come tumbling down so easily.

Most of me is mad at them, which, reasonably, I have no right to be. I feel betrayed by these four people I have spent less than 15 hours of my life with because they made this silent promise to always be there, for each other, for me, and they're breaking it. 

Maybe It's Beautiful

One of my all-time biggest pet peeves is when people say things to the effect of "Well, we have a black president," with the implication that because Barack Obama, a half white man as much a half black man, is president, clearly racism isn't a problem in America.

I'm taking a class this semester called Race and Incarceration in the U.S. Whether you believe it is a systematic and intentional phenomenon or not, you have to be able to look at the numbers and see that blacks are incarcerated in this country are disproportionately affected by the penal system. Another student in my class said yesterday, seeming exasperated with some of our more close-minded cohorts in the way I frequently find myself to be, "Just imagine if in Germany Jews were six times as incarcerated." Take a second to really think about that. The world would be in utter uproar if something like that were occurring, so why is blackness a ticket to being ignored in this country, and, quite frankly, around the world? It cannot be that black people are simply more prone to commit crime (and yes, I agree that poverty breeds crime, but check yourself for a second, climb off your I-know-everything horse, look up some statistics, and realize that there are far more whites in poverty in this country than blacks, even though a larger percentage of the black population lives at a lower socio-economic level). I hope you can tell that this is an issue that absolutely infuriates me.

But then another student said something really remarkable.

"The people that cant see that more black people are being arrested and that that must mean something: that's beautiful, because that means they don't have frame of reference."

And you know what? Maybe. Maybe it is kind of beautiful (in a twisted and really counterproductive way) that some people don't see American racism as a problem that exists because they simply never see it happening. I think it might be beautiful to have my children grow up in a world where they can't comprehend what racism is because they never see it affect anyone.

But, one the other hand, I'm not quite sure if I'm ready for us to forget, even if we do manage to keep fixing the problem. 

Happiness: A Statistician's Dilemma

How do you measure happy? Subjectively, I measure "happy" everyday. I see friends looking stressed and my personal happy-meter bings, "Uh, oh, you are not rating well today." Well, I get asked if I'm happy a lot more than I used to and I pretty much always say yes. The levels of happy that I am when posed that question are presumably different, and, objectively, I am probably always a little unhappy, too, but I know intrinsically that "Yes," is the right answer. And not right in a you-will-feel-better-if-I-tell-you-I'm-fine kind of way, but right in a this-feels-right kind of way. More importantly I don't think one can (or should) rate their happiness against others, ie "I am happier than you are." In my current relationship I have a no one-upping rule (although to be honest I'm not sure he really knows it except to the extent that I shut him down immediately if he ever says anything that qualifies). This means no "No, I love you more,"s and no "You're the best." I don't want to measure that emotion against someone else's (besides, you should already know you're the best). Why measure something unquantifiable? I'm happy. Can that be enough? Can we stop trying to be happier? 

What Mexico Stole from Me

So my closest female friend at school is off on the adventure of a lifetime (which isn't really true, since I know she'll have many more) studying abroad in Mexico this semester. This isn't that tragic on the surface, except she has been one of my closest friends for eight years and in a very real sense I have never had to do anything without her. She is always there to quote Koala Lou at me gossip be a sounding board for dilemmas. Whether this semester is just hard or whether it is specifically harder because of ehr absence is a mystery to me, but without my closest confidant I have to admit I'm floundering a little. To his credit, my boyfriend (rightfully) assumed he'd have to pick up some of the slack and has been remarkable. She is in Mexico having a very real sink or swim moment which will prove to her and everyone around her that she can make it in the real world, and, in a much more quiet way, I have to figure out how to swim, too. 

Something Stuck

My friends would probably say I have a hard time getting along with people I disagree with. I would probably try to discredit this accusation as false. What I have a hard time getting along with, is people that never listen when disagreeing and people that seem to be incapable of changing their minds even when presented with clear evidence. My best friend as school is a Republican. This is notable because frequently this has been a deal-breaker for me in relationships. There was a time when many of my friends joked that the only men I could be friends with were gay Democrats, so this straight conservative was quite a find, but that's another story. Anyway, my views, while continuing to liberalize socially have become drastically more conservative (let me just stop here and clarify that I mean a lot more conservative for me) fiscally. I presume this is due to the close contact I have with many of my friends' views (I also managed to make friends with a bunch of Libertarians, go figure). At any rate, I get along with my best friends because I alway know he hears me, not agrees necessarily (although increasingly frequently as we both move to the center), but hears and, most importantly, considers. I try to always do the same for him. I'm pretty sure we both know this is happening all the time, but we are also both a little too proud to readily concede to the other in the moment and, at least for my part, that system works. Well a week ago I turned 19 and got one of the best birthday presents in the world: a blogpost, similar to this one, in which I was cited as a driving force in the changing of one of his opinions on an issue very near to my heart.

I get the impression that a lot of people, particularly young people, have grandiose notions of the ways in which they will affect the world, but it isn't the big ways, its the tiny ones that all, hopefully, add up to meaning something. This particular man intends to go into law, a place where he might get a chance to keep a woman safe, or at least find some justice for her, and I always get to know that I was an itty bitty part of that. Perhaps not grandiose, but pretty damn grand.