Flea Market Spectators

I love these two photos... I feel like it captures something very American about the social disengagement.


This was at the kettle corn stand, which included a spectator/eating station. With vintage chairs, of course.

more bad cell phone shots. But I'm trying to be a bit more fieldworky in my every day life. Even when it takes me to bars and flea markets. I'm an Americanist, so I can totally justify such indulgences. No?

"Me, you, and everyone we know"

I steal from Miranda July, whom I love sometimes and who drives me up the wall other times. Though, I suppose that's true of almost everything and everybody, so at the very least, I want to give her credit for a perfect summation of life these days.

I was writing to someone about what I miss about the neighborhood where I grew up, and I said,

I'm pretty heartbroken over how much the city has changed, and I miss the neighborhood I grew up in -- which was a pretty rough, but very community-centric place. I learned a lot by being raised there, and it makes me sad that the things that made it distinct are quickly being erased.

I feel like I keep coming back to the problem of individuality and what a supreme fallacy this is. America seems very obsessed with originality and proving one's uniqueness, especially in a city like San Francisco. It's kind of exhausting. And I'm not sure what the anxiety over proving one's inimitability is about. I suffer from it -- feeling that I need to be different in my own way. I guess that's why I quote myself (the arrogance), to point out the romanticization of my unique upbringing. It was unique, and it was irreplaceable, but I'm not sure why that matters in the scheme of things.

A friend recently told me that after spending a number of days with me at a wedding that he hadn't realized anthropology was an actual "skill" (his words, not mine). So maybe my main point is that specificity of experiences may in fact have a value -- that it allows you to perceive the world in certain ways. But then...I'm not entirely sure why or how that matters. So what? Another friend has noted that I'm an expert at discarding my emotions and moving forward, always asking, "what's the point" of dwelling on inconvenient feelings or past disappointments. So I guess I integrate this willingness to find no meaning in anything (nihilist!) into my larger research conundrums right now. But then, I get these weird moments of pollyanna-ism, and I'm much more positive (though not a positivist). Perhaps others out there in my mini-audience will weigh in (you are not adequately participating in my expectation of public discourse...) as to whether one can find a point to all this uber-self-reflection.

Solicited

I got asked back to teach an "intersession" class I taught last winter. It's kind of awesome to a) be asked to teach; b) be paid to teach; and c) be paid to fly back east to teach. I really enjoyed teaching that class last year, and I'm looking forward to refining it and thinking about it more critically. Plus, it's Baltimore-centric, and I have a major soft-spot for that city. I like the ability to influence the freshmen's perspective on the city (as it's a freshman-only class). Makes me feel like occasionally, what I do is respected...by someone...somewhere. As I'm about to re-embark on grant-writing (endless chore of academia that I really hate with a passion), it's these sorts of affirmations that make such a difference. Unfortunately, they're too few and far between and they require so much work (usually) to come together. Hence the delight in being solicited and not having to throw myself shamelessly at the deciders. Sometimes, it's nice to make a quick buck.

Fieldwork @ the bar

I wish I had my proper camera with me, as my cell phone camera doesn't do it justice. I had been telling my bar companion about my work (a fellow academic who may have been indulging me or may have been genuinely interested in my rambling, time will tell, I suppose), had to pee, went to the bathroom and discovered this...


yeah...I don't think it's legible. I'll have to go back and bring a camera with flash. (bad anthropologist, not ready to whip out her research tools even when out on a social call.) I'm not sure it's actually all that interesting, but it was weird timing. And who decided "pabst smear" was a good idea?

I...just...can't...resist...the...fucking...analysis....

So, it's all well and good to point you to interesting scientific analyses of human phenomena. Because, yes, attempts to "legitimate" human phenomena are interesting as cultural productions in and of themselves -- but that's also what I find so irresistable. The idea that we should just take scientific knowledge, nod our heads, and accept its self-evidentness. A year ago, I forwarded to some friends the Guttmacher Institute's article on the fact that most people in the U.S. have engaged in (or are engaging in) premarital sex. Its very obviousness was fascinating to me -- what I find compelling about these sorts of studies is how information needs to be disseminated and how there's an anxiety about not having hard cold data to defend any sort of position or attempt at re-imagining our current intervention methods. The article I linked to below is sort of in the same camp as the "most people have had pre-marital sex" (I mean, you wonder about all those people who never marry or those for whom legal marriage was never an option to begin with, in most states). Quantifying everyday human behaviors somehow makes it all seem more substantive and worthy. My investment in qualitative research methods comes partially from the desire to allow the messiness of human behavior to bleed into research. Surveys get you only so far. And hearing how people think and talk about behavior seems important to me....

I'm not sure why I wanted to defend this position (and perhaps this is totally redundant as I've said things along these lines many times before). Still, I think it's important to clarify and re-clarify why I find certain kinds of science interesting and useful.

A link -- and not so much damn navel-gazing

From HL. All hail camera phones.

I've been a slacker on the linkages...
Today, I keep the meta and the analysis a bit tamped down and offer this fun link/site/information about hyperventilation, sex-noises, and sex. It's all scientific, and shit. Because I believe in being as erudite and research-y as possible even when (and maybe especially when?) talking about sex.

Wheeee....

Plus the blog has the great name of Neurotic Physiology with the sub-heading of "are you sci-curious" -- and that's pretty awesome in and of itself!

The personal on the blog

Is it too meta to try to figure out how personal I ought to be on this -- or more meta to try to share my figuring it out in the process? This has always been my resistance to blogging more generally (I once even titled an unfinished project "solipsistic, navel-gazing, and self-reflection" in an attempt to remind myself how absurd the whole process was). But here, in particular, I've worked to keep up a modicum of anonymity. Most who read this are people who know me, and therefore, I do censor myself somewhat. Though the truth is, most who read this, who also know me, are people with whom I'm close and to whom I would say all this and more.

But...occasionally, I share the site with someone who may indirectly be mentioned or criticized, and then I freak out about how my (solipsistic and navel-gazing) comments will be interpreted. (I try only to write nice things, and genuine things, for that matter, about people directly, thinly veiled with acronyms and nicknames.) And lately, because I'm a lazy-ass researcher, I've not been writing about my work directly at all (that is because I have not been working in the fieldworky sense of the word).

So, there has been a fair amount of "personal" stuff on here, even though sometimes it's a bit cryptic, it's not that hard to decipher. I realized I'm a bit relieved that my father never bothers to read this, though I'm sure he would not be terribly disturbed to read about his daughter's "abstinence and diaphragm" contradictions, it still feels a bit unsettling to publicly proclaim this purported birth control method. (Do note the "purported" -- since I've obviously been committed to medical flouting.) It's also weird to announce such things in a public forum. Part of the advice of the writing intensive summer institute I just finished was to put yourself back into the work. It's true that much academic writing is dry and distant. I'm grateful that anthropology allows for the personal, but it's also such a fine line between the personal and oversharing. And fieldwork is not about "you" -- though it's hard sometimes to figure out where "you -- the researcher" and "you -- the human being" begin and end.

I guess this is part of why the blog format appeals to me. It allows me to play a little more with the boundaries, so that there can be "me the human being" a bit more in my work. My work is personal...I think no matter what I do, I will always want to be doing something that has significance to me. I don't really understand the friends and acquaintances whose jobs are just time-fillers. I do understand the allure of good money (sigh), but I know of a number of people who sound like they're just keeping on keeping on. They complain about being boring and they let their jobs get them in terrible moods. I suppose I ought to be more sympathetic.

Still, I'm not sure about what it is I'm trying to accomplish here. I think the August goal will be to document a bit more the process as I careen into the remaining quarter of fieldwork, as it's something I need to do in the non-virtual world, as well. Or maybe I'll just start logging my progress of being allowed to run again. Or my bike itineraries. Or something equally dull -- thereby losing my mini-readership. Perhaps I ought to start a poll -- what should misanthrope hate next?! Maybe I'm not actualizing the populist potential of blogging sufficiently.

Enough with sardonic commentary

I realized I've been awfully negative. Gripe. Gripe. Gripe.

Perhaps the change in my mood is due to triumphing over the FDA and the inane "iPledge" (not to be pregnant, to comply with multiple forms of birth control (perhaps they'd like to simply set up surveillance monitors in my uterus?), and to spend money having my blood tested to verify that I am not an incompetent, untrustworthy slut....ok that's a wee bit over the top, whatever). I rocked the system, and yes, I am quite proud. At one point one of my doctors wanted to prescribe me birth control pills, and I told him, he could prescribe it, but I wouldn't fill it. Is it crazy to want to challenge the system by proving how such a hyper-compliant, semi-hypochondriac fantasizes about giving the feds the proverbial finger? The reality, of course, as S/z pointed out in another context, is that really I exert a lot of energy getting mad at straw men, and really the only person who's exhausted in the process is me. Nobody "wins", though I do generate fuel for blog. Not exactly the most productive use of my energy.

In other, more interesting news (though if you consider the many ways I'm flouting my "abstinence and diaphragm" magical birth control methods and failing to be pregnancy tested when I'm supposed to interesting...well...then....), I'm writing -- or trying to write on absence. It's kind of a harkening back to my philosophy glory days, yet taking it beyond the armchair. How do we write about absence in the context of concrete objects that actually create and generate forms of absence? Perhaps I ought to get tattooed -- "ambiguities, uncertainties, and absence" -- since these are the themes I am finding so fascinating. And, I have to say, personal conversations of old have actually crept in interestingly --- there was a particular word I used in a non-drama drama that is resurfacing in productive ways in my work. Funny to re-appropriate terms and find that their resonance at one point is actually directly related to something much more interesting and complicated than trivialities.

What I'm trying to say is that all these terms and theorizing all come back to the very mundane -- an awful lot like life in its banality. And yet the only thing that makes the banal interesting is to make it complicated. I love circularity, even as it makes me want to hit my head against the wall.

Blame the patient games...

I've written before about the weird female requirements for one of the prescriptions I'm on...I've now found myself caught up in their labyrinthian rules that make it impossible for me to pick up my prescription until I again have a pregnancy test, talk to the doctor, and then answer the quiz online (also known as money and time). Mainly because the pharmacy didn't fill the prescription when I dropped it off, and then failed to contact me when they'd filled it -- I fell out of the 7 day window from my last pregnancy test. I wonder what the male experience with this medication is -- as they don't have to spend the money or the time proving that they're not knocked up with (as one friend called it) "flipper" babies.

What disturbs me is the expense and complication and the power of failure that is laid at the (female) patient's feet. The error occurred when the pharmacy didn't fill the prescription, and I waited a few days to go get the prescription, thereby dropping out of my eligibility window. So whose fault is it? Probably mine...I didn't check immediately, but I also assumed the pharmacy would call me when they filled the prescription. How naive. Again, I am fascinated (in an irritated sort of way) at how economics factor into this, how an entire industry of multiple commercial sites (the testing site, the pharmacy, oh and definitely my posh doctor's office) can coalesce around my one action.

This is a very science studies way of interpreting the situation, but it's important. In fact, it's not just a question of economics (though that's explicitly embedded), it's about entire systems that determine how individuals can access care and medication.

More on this later, as I must go off to write and write -- ostensibly to create a finished document at the end of the week.

Love the bikes, time for an identity politics around the chicks and their rides

Two weeks of identity politics, and I keep trying to remind everyone to bring back in desire into the conversation. Why must the conversation keep returning to specifications of sexual identities (not sexualities, even, not desires)? I know, I know, privilege makes it hard to fully understand the vulnerability of claiming a political and sexual identity. But what I'm asking for is about moving further down (urgh...sorry about that), exploring the constructions of desire, which is not exclusively about sexual identity, and I would argue is more than the performance of desire and lust and love and politics.

I am just not convinced that any of us can speak fully about ethnic/racial/sexuality positions without first discussing what desire means or looks like. And further, as I'm on the soapbox, the presumption that these identities exist in direct opposition to a predictable and definable heterosexual desire irritates me. The (presumed) staticness of heterosexuality upsets me. I have yet to see forms of my desire, or the powers that come out of engaging with one's sexuality and desires, represented in any of the conversations these last two weeks.

Part of it is that I feel quite uneasy in any political identification with sexual groups, which of course leads to inevitable alienation everywhere (can this be my identity politics -- the politics of alienation??), and part of which is due to a confusion about my ethnicity in general. The labels I sometimes claim are much more about the labels I assume have been ascribed to me. Too tiresome to express ambivalence about ethnicity, when I tend to think my class has defined me far more than my ethnicity (though even as a teenager, I felt very aware of how groups of teenagers in stores in NY were treated, and I knew that my white skin and uniform skirt made me far more invisible than the public school, non-white kids). And because the fact that I hold dual citizenship in a Latin American country and the U.S., and yet feel that I've been seriously uneducated about that ethnicity, it all makes me uneasy. And because I think American identity is wrapped up in strong forces of assimilation that make it difficult for many of us to find ourselves, or stake a claim anywhere, I hesitate before I sigh and call myself white, heterosexual...blah blah.

Oh, wait. What I wanted to say is that I want to start a coalition of women in skirts on bikes of some sort. Today one of the women on her bike, as I rode up Market St., complimented me on how cute I looked, and that it was hot (desire represent!), and how much she liked my boots, and we talked about riding in a skirt and how we preferred it. (She was not wearing a skirt, but she explained she often does.)

A) I want a solidarity of women biking in the city, which I think is really important. As much as I enjoy men on their bikes, and checking out their asses, I also like passing them, and speed-demoning and weaving out of traffic. Most of them don't know how to do a city ride. It's a unique biking form. Really.
B) As she and I discussed (it was amazing in our red light-length conversation how much came out!), there is a form of power in biking in a skirt. She suggested that it makes people pay more attention to you -- which can be good in a defensive biking sort of way.

My skirt biking days began early. From 2nd grade until 7th, my dad and I rode the tandem everywhere. He would "drive" me to school, and until 4th grade (when I asserted my independence and right to use mass transit), would pick me up and drive me home. Whenever we went out to the theater or to doctor's appointments, we'd ride the tandem. By 7th grade, I switched schools and had to start wearing a uniform, and I decided I wanted my own bike. It never occurred to me (and probably not to my dad, either) that a girl on her bike, in a uniform skirt, might have been just asking for attention. But I also learned to be tough and challenge the catcalls, and I think it made me pretty fearless.

I find biking a powerfully liberating way to inhabit space. There are no spaces that I don't feel safe on my bike -- even places that might be a little scary on foot suddenly feel like places I can reclaim. The freedom of zipping around and getting directly from point A to B without depending on anyone else is phenomenal. I used to bike down 5th Avenue after being at high school parties, and the streets would be empty at midnight or 1am. I've (recklessly) biked home drunk, and I once had a serious accident on 8th Avenue at 14th Street (a major intersection and merging of avenues) with no cash in my pocket to take a subway home. I've biked in snow and rain and sleet.

What's strange is that for the last six and a half years, I hadn't biked much. I've had a spate of stolen bikes, and I started to feel that I wasn't meant to have a bike. Last summer in the desert, I had a bit of a bike revelation -- and decided to confront the endless parade of stolen bikes by learning more about how to use and fix my own bike. It was a further level of independence, since for so long I've depended on my dad or the repair shop to fix the flat or tighten the brakes.

And, I've never owned a woman's bike. Not sure if I want to.