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The wonder of sleep, even not enough of it, is that it offers perspective. Last night, everything seemed very big and overwhelming. Today, it just seems big.

Although, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't freaked out about this trip. The part where I'm going to Cardiff to see Patty is grand. The part where I'm going to CH for work is expected. The part where Patty's going to visit me in CH is SuperExtraSpecial bonus. The part where all of this adds up to 5 weeks instead of 2 and change? IS FREAKING ME OUT.

I am, at heart, a homebody in certain ways. I love to travel because it's glamorous and interesting and because travel is hard and it makes you know yourself. So a bazillion weekends going on little adventures with Patty? Awesome. A few two week trips here and there? Fabulous. Big epic journeys? Kinda set off my control-freak buttons, but totally have their place. Yet, this trip has no clearly defined category and there's very little of it I'm in control of, and so I'm a bit weirded out.

This is, of course, compounded right now by being really artistically busy/productive (both in actuality and in the related to particular narrative matters of my existence playing in my head on the repeat loop of late) and the fact that fall, even as we're starting to edge into the cold crappy part of it (as opposed to the glorious October part of it), is my favorite season, not just in general, but in New York. I write about New York so much, but I don't always talk about the love. Not enough. This is my home and this is my lottery ticket. It leaves me more powerful than most people I know, and it too leaves me wanting and bereft. I talk a lot about my innate melancholia and romanticism; blame my city of decay.

Mostly, I am just a big bucket of oh, shit! about leaving here for five weeks. Does anyone remember if I did this before I went to Australia? Does anyone think that's remotely comparable in anything but duration? I think, maybe the biggest part of the problem is that I'm lacking a framework. Patty goes. I stay home.

I keep trying to tell myself it will be fine. It will, in fact, be good. A sort of hermitting stage -- I won't really have a social life in CH beyond the days Patty comes to visit, and I won't have a very excessive work schedule but for a handful of other days. That means I can be holed up with my laptop the rest of the time and sending files back and forth with the folks I'm doing collaborations with. I'll also be working on stuff for that screenplay competition, and I've not shortage of solo projects that need me. I'll also be flogging the hell out of the Kickstarter fundraising.

When I get to Cardiff, I can unplug for the Thanksgiving week where no one gets anything done anyway. Plus, Patty's better than any ol' city.

New York will survive without me; and Patty plus random Americans in Cardiff will survive my putting on an apron and attempting a feast. It'll all be great. Too bad I know there's really no talking me down about this. It's just going to be like this until it happens.

While I'm being neurotic, things are happening in the world:

First, the recue of the Chilean miners is underway. As of this writing the 13th man has just been brought up.

Yesterday, a "permanent injunction" was issued against DADT. The justice department can still appeal, and there's significant debate as to whether this should be handled by the courts or the Congress. Don't get me started about the bullshit our current political climate has been heaping on the Judiciary Branch. Anyway. Good-ish news. Strange times. Long-term outlook: crystal. Short-term outlook: motherfucking hazy.

Anti-gay New York politician Paladino's gay nephew speaks out; after Paladino referenced the guy's existence while trying to argue that he's not homophobic.

Women, equality, and France.

Stress, inflammation, disease, oppression and health.

Holy crap: 20-year-old half-Egyptian US-born citizen finds FBI tracking device in his car (yeah, really, the FBI showed up to get it back) and it turns out he's being tracked because his now-deceased father was an Muslim community activist. Not, cool, FBI. Not cool.

Hey, my friend Mirabai has been interviewed about her steno technology and philosophy at the Geek Feminism Blog. Read it. This is how you do an interview: concise storytelling, cadence-aware, enthused, invitational.

reannon links us to a good post and a lot of funny comments about crap people did (some of it really frigging stupid, some of it really normal) in their 1960s and 70s childhoods that would get parents the fuck arrested today, but wasn't _that_ outrageous then.

Many of you have no doubt heard of the guy running for Congress in Ohio who used to dress up like a Nazi soldier in WWII reenactments. I have a lot to say about this, because the topic is both complicated in general, because I'm a reenactor (in other periods), because I'm Jewish, and because, in this case it's actually really clear cut (and it's not always -- there are places and contexts in which I'd argue it can be a relevant, necessary choice if handled correctly) that this was entirely not the fuck appropriate. I've not found myself motivated yet.

Look, I haven't seen The Social Network yet, which means my opinion is sort of crap, but having worked for dot.com start-ups aplenty, let me tell you, there's basically no amount of misogyny that could be present in this film that would surprise me or that would make me blame the writers/producers/directors for its presence. I may be proved wrong, once I've seen it. But that world was/is ugly.

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At one point in my dot.com career my boss ordered me to clean up sex trash in the office after a night with hookers to impress clients.

So I'm not sure how that's possible.

I can see where it would be really difficult to get your head around the idea of your Opa being involved in that. It's just not how we think about our grandparents.

My Politics teacher engaged in a very interesting experiment to show us how easy it was for people to get swept up. (It's a long story, but I'll tell it if you want me to.) It shocked the hell out of me for its effectiveness, but my classmates...I think it broke their hearts. The difference in their reactions vs. my reaction was astonishing to me.

(Geez, I've been back home for 22 years, and I STILL learn things from my exchange.)

Yeah. It's... yeah.

And I'm hardly religious, but it is a key part of my cultural reality. And I also know from my travels elsewhere that the idea of secular Jews doesn't make sense everywhere (I met, for example, many conservative Jews in Australia, but no secular ones that I can recall), so people often ask me things I have no feelings or answers for. And while it's hideously uncomfortable to be addressed by Germans about Jewishness as a racial identity, since it's an ethnic identity for me more than a spiritual one... what am I gonna do? It's just WEIRD.

Not really. A dot.com startup is still a dot.com startup; it's just now, the CEOs are younger. Tech males in power are still, by and large, pompous jackasses.

It seems like different flavors of misogyny to me. (Speaking as someone who knows nothing of Hollywood but that which comes out of it, and whose experience in the greater tech world has been the better part of a Computer Information Systems degree, interacting with IT as a woman employed in a non-technical job, interacting with the in-house developers of an in-house web-app as a theoretically non-technical end-user, interacting with in-house geeks as the creator of a database using *wince* Access [it was what I had to hand], serving as volunteer tech support on LJ, serving as cat-herder on

suggestions, working front line tech support for a registrar with bells whistles email and hosting, and currently serving as volunteer tech support/spamwrangler/cheerleader for Dreamwidth...) Tech world, the good folks don't care if you're an alien blue poodle as long as you can do the job -- but part of doing the job is getting taken seriously, and part of getting taken seriously involves some hazing in very pointedly socially masculine fashions.

I gather from the output that Hollywood doesn't seem to care whether you have a brain or not, or if your personal habits include *sleeping with* alien blue poodles, as long as you have the right look or can be made to have the right look, and can act.

Neither of these strike me as particularly healthy things for humans, and even less so women and other classes vulnerable to exploitation.

The misogyny in the tech world thing came up for me yet again this morning because of something mentioned in IRC, and I went Googling around after something or other, and I ran smack into some big wheel named Randal making an ass of himself in the comments, which I shouldn't have read. The phrase "yelled at for breaking the build" came up, in context of people who can't take the heat and run away, and people who stick around and become better coders through trial by fire. And it's over a year later, and I'm looking at a sudden plethora of wonderful devs, and it strikes me that Mr. S seemingly doesn't know the difference between a code review and verbal abuse, and apparently has linked the two, so that if your code's broken, you get berated for it like a kid who's just smashed the cookie jar in an attempt to snag a few. Why? Because it's always been that way. It builds character. And yet I'm staring at this channelful of strong spirited devs who've never had a harsh word from the leads in their lives, just "That didn't work; see here and here and here; how do you propose to fix it?" and half of them were just babydevs or not even that the same time last year. Open source is not boot camp.

D:

What was your role with the company at the time? D: D: D:

(Though I'm unsurprised. Because the woman is also the cleaning lady.)

Customer service/user management. So, yeah, exactly. But hello, used condoms in the center of the office floor. Like, really... really, you couldn't handle that yourself?

Both of my grandmothers were off full German ancestry. Their grandparents were the immigrants and came over in the late 19th/early 20th c. By the time WWII rolled around they'd been here 30+ years.

But, one of the reasons I've not done any research into those sides of the family is that I know we still have distant German relatives and I really don't want to find out I've got relatives who were Nazis.

Our German ancestry was mentioned more as a footnote and not made much of. We're more likely to attend Celtic gatherings (our Scottish boat people on both sides arrived before the Rev War) than Oktoberfests and Polka Parties, even though my German ancestry is much more recent.

I think it is directly linked to the horrors of both the World Wars. (I seem to remember a lot of midwestern German newspapers going out of business during WWI because of the anti-German sentiment.) And even though I'm far removed I still feel a little bit guilty because I've got German ancestry.

I once had the lead developer at my start up (where I was the QA Manager) ask why I wasn't home barefoot and pregnant. I responded because there were dicks like him the world and not nearly enough people like me to undo the damage they caused. It sounded more impressive in the break room when I said it (I even got a standing ovation from some of my colleagues).

I do not miss those days at all.

I think the whole process of trying to raise venture capital tends to favor pompous jackasses (among the entrepreneurs and their early-stage employees).

Speaking as someone from Austria, the thing is that the discussion is still ongoing. Here especially things were conveniently swept under the carpet after the war, repressed, forgotten, Austria was also a victim after all; parents didn't talk to their children, children on the whole didn't ask. In Austria the discussion only really started in the 80ies and 90ies with the generation of the grandchildren, and it was only in 1991 that our chancellor apologised for the part Austria and Austrians played in the holocaust.

As I understand it, things were a bit different in Germany, but even there there still was a huge controversy over the exhibitions about the crimes of the Wehrmacht in the 90ies.

The situation is changing, though. Since the end of the 90ies there's an increasing amount of defensiveness or even anger, and people essentially saying that everyone should already get over it already, which is all kinds of problematic in entirely different ways.

Edited 2010-10-13 19:35 (UTC)

There were a lot of interesting things in that Paladino article, from his nephew not working on his campaign since he made the comments, to Carl collecting rent on gay bars. The most interesting one is that his son ran one of them though. Methinks that there are a lot of skeletons in that closet that aren't skeletal, but rather real human beings in his family that he hurts every day with this bigoted crap.

I hope more of this continues to unravel and make him unelectable...

When I lived in Germany (in '87 and '88), the discussion was only just then getting serious and being brought into schools. And I never did figure out if it was harder for my teachers or harder for my classmates. It definitely wreaked havoc on my first host family's nerves. They were deeply ashamed of their own HJ memberships.

I'm sure my presence in the classroom - and the knowledge of my family history - did not make things any easier for either of them. Certainly my teachers were...I don't want to say antagonistic, because that isn't quite right, but my Politics teacher especially had the attitude of "Say something. I double dog dare you." My classmates were deeply, deeply uncomfortable with all of it, and were terribly scandalized that I took it upon myself to visit KZs. (Even knowing why I was visiting.)

Since the end of the 90ies there's an increasing amount of defensiveness or even anger, and people essentially saying that everyone should already get over it already, which is all kinds of problematic in entirely different ways.

There was some of this sentiment amongst many of my classmates. I'm sure most of it stemmed from their deep discomfort regarding the subject. We did talk at the time about the difference between letting go of guilt that they did not earn themselves and pretending that it just didn't matter any more. Those were hard, hard discussions.

But, one of the reasons I've not done any research into those sides of the family is that I know we still have distant German relatives and I really don't want to find out I've got relatives who were Nazis.

Heh. It was an open family secret that we had people on both sides of the firing lines. I met a couple of my distant cousins while I lived in Germany. They had both fought in the war (infantrymen), and had both held NSDAP membership, and they had both explained that you were either a member, or you were dead. They were pretty matter-of-fact about their experiences. Things were Just That Way, they said.

It was very hard to confront this part of my family history, very upsetting, but I don't regret it. I needed to know. And now I do.

Edited 2010-10-13 21:21 (UTC)

I'm very much stuck on the question of motivation to do Second World War re-enactments outside of educational settings. In some sense, re-enactment is always about interfacing with history, but I think most people (or at least the adults) living in participating countries have known someone for whom the war is in living memory. It's accessible in ways that most other conflicts aren't, even if the people who remember don't talk about it much, we put it together as we get older and we realise how it impacted them and how that impacted us.* In that context, I'm having a hard time seeing re-enactments as something other than a denial of history one way or another (not necessarily glorifying Nazism, but a re-enactment is, by necessity, a sanitised version of the event).

One thing I keep thinking about was an activity in my German 3 class. We were supposed to be learning about German history from, I don't know, maybe 1918 through reunification. Inevitably for a Berkeley German class, this involved small groups and skits. With a few minutes preparation, three of us were supposed to silently re-enact 1933 to 1945. This is probably the most taxing thing I ever had to do in a German class. I think everyone's natural impulse is not to deny Nazism exactly, but to deny anyone like you could have been involved and here we were getting asked to re-enact a genocide. That one activity (I think it's canonical German 3, but maybe not) was probably more effective than any previous efforts I'd seen to teach about Nazism.

*I have a friend who can see the impact of the First World War on his family, but I suspect our access to that war has faded considerably outside of the places that saw combat.

I suspect you're probably right; it take a very specific type of person to fit in with venture capitalists. I may miss the work, but man I don't miss the misogynistic crap. I hated starting a new job and having to "prove" myself because I was female. Having tits does not effect my ability to code.

...seriously? Wow. I thought my former boss flagrantly committing fraud was bad, but at least we never had an office full of hookers.

Seriously. There was also a filing cabinet where the drugs were organized. 1995 was pretty sketchy in the dot.com biz.

The timing probably makes a lot of difference--this was in 2003. (We found out later that the guy was on parole for his first fraud conviction while he was running the company. And had falsified his educational credentials. And his co-owners had no idea. Impressive stuff.)

I loved that NY Times "Room for Debate" you linked to. Kenji Yoshino rocks.

Aaron Sorkin (screenwriter) on The Social Network and misogyny:
http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2010/10/aaron-sorkin-responds-to-commenter-in.html

I am left wondering if that was the same Randal S that I would have come across back in the late 90s while programming using Perl…

This. Also, icon love.

*stands and aplauds*

Middle initial L? Yes.

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