west of the moon

sense memory.

I'm drafting the last full chapter of the dissertation (yay!), and for the last week or so I've been sorting through my notes from the trips I took last spring.  I set up a file box next to my desk, and I've filled it with printouts and photocopies, everything labelled and paperclipped and sorted into manila folders.  (What a joy it is to have found a career path that encourages my love for office supplies!)  Reading through all of that material, I'm a little surprised by how strongly it triggers memories from the trips themselves.

Notes from the University of Michigan, for instance: it was cold and snowy when I was in Michigan, and my desk at the Bentley Historical Library faced the window, so I could watch the snow falling outside and dread the long walk to the student union for lunch.  I stayed two nights in a Holiday Inn in Ann Arbor, and the last night in a spare room at Kelli's co-op, where the furniture was identical to what I'd had in my college dorm room and I remembered why I once upon a time promised myself I'd never again have to share a bathroom with strangers. 

That was Ann Arbor in early March, all snow and icy roads.  In early April I was in Lawrence, though, which was warm and sunny, and every day I walked the mile-and-a-half from my hotel to the library, just because the weather was so beautiful.  One day, after I was done working, I drove down to the downtown area, walked up and down the main shopping area looking for somewhere I could pick up something to read with dinner, and every restaurant I passed had a teeny-tiny outdoor sidewalk seating area crammed full of college students. 

There's a folder in the file-box labelled "Kansas Normal", by which I mean the Kansas State Normal School at Emporia, now Emporia State University.  Every time I pick up that folder, I remember the horrible hotel room in Emporia, a tiny cramped thing that shared a wall with a room occupied by people who screamed at each other 'round the clock for a day and a half.  But the campus was charming, full of cartoon-looking statues of bees, and the historical archives were in a gorgeous old building flanked by forsythia bushes.  And then, of course, there's the "Nebraska Normal" folder, reminding me of two longs days spent in Kearney with the worst cold I've ever had.  I only spent half a day in the archives, then straggled back to the hotel in my rented minivan, feeling a little bit like death.  I stopped at a Wal-Mart on the way, picked up supplies (bottled water, tissues, cold medicine), and then slept for sixteen hours, waking sluggishly a couple of times to blow my nose or take more Sudafed. 

What's inside the file folders is ultimately more important, of course, and I'm increasingly pleased with the argument I'm building about the role of psychology in teacher training programs around the turn of the century.  But it's a nice grace note on the writing process, these small bursts of memory, seeing the brightly-colored walls in the AHAP offices in Akron or the really satisfying egg-drop soup I got as takeout in Terre Haute. 

that feminism stuff.

A couple of months ago, Matt and I spent a few days in Boston, which increasingly feels like the ancestral homeland from which we have been exiled. But that isn't the point of the story. During our long-weekend trip, we spent a long (long) evening at this bar we both used to frequent, and while we were there we ran into an old friend and his new girlfriend.  The dynamic there was more than a little bit fraught, in that this old friend is someone I was briefly involved with, Back In The Day.  Back when I knew him well, he had a habit of dating girls of a particular type: overly-intense intellectual girls who read a lot and liked indie films and made a hobby out of serious introspection.  His new girlfriend likes cheap beer and Van Wilder, and (to borrow a phrase from the vernacular) she's a slammin' hottie.  Please believe me when I say that I wish them only the best.

So we're at the bar, and he's complaining about work, and I admit I'm not feeling particularly sympathetic.  He has two major complaints about his job, apparently.  The first is that he's occasionally called upon to actually do work.  The second is that one of his coworkers has been really getting on his nerves lately because she "keeps getting worked up about all that feminism shit." 

He'd just ignore her, but she's also an old friend of his from high school (in fact, she's the reason he has this job, because she recommended him for it).  And my first instinct here is to just let this pass, because it's Saturday night and we're all just hanging out and I don't want to get into anything too serious, but then he turns to me and he says "I mean, you know how she gets." 

And, well, yeah, I do know how she gets.  The woman in question is also a good friend of mine, and we're pretty much on the same page in terms of "all that feminism shit".  When he says she's "worked up", what he probably means is that she questioned why women in their company have a harder time getting promoted to manager, or that she didn't laugh when he made some joke about chicks and shopping, or something like that.  As far as I'm concerned, what he means is that she's paying attention.  The stupid provocation of his expecting me to agree with him, in combination with my most recent bourbon and ginger ale, meant that I actually told him that. 

That's where his girlfriend got involved in the conversation.  "So wait, you're into that feminist crap too?"  And from there we were off!  It felt sometimes like I'd entered a weird parallel universe.  I spend so much of my time around people who take for granted that feminism is something worth talking about, you know?  That whatever we mean by feminism, whatever it does or doesn't encompass or address, that there's still something going on.  But this woman I was talking to, she was of the opinion that feminism is really just about making trouble where there aren't really any problems. 

There's not a lot of point in recounting the conversation in too much detail--we mostly just ran through a lot of the standard iterations on the standard issues.  I think I surprised her by not being, how to put this, strident.  Part of that is a stylistic thing; I think I've picked this up from teaching, this method of disagreeing with someone by first agreeing with them.  "No, you're totally right that it's nice when everyone in a family shares a last name.  There's a lot of power in that, even if it's just symbolic.  It's just that, don't you think there's something weird about the idea that it's always women who change their names?"  And then go on from there with the main part of your argument.  The other part of it is that I've spent so much time talking through these questions that I really do see them as complicated, so there's nothing deceitful about agreeing with elements of the other position.  It's all a big messy tangled set of questions, and I don't think there are any easy answers, so I didn't come off as preachy.

It's all about knowing your audience.  No one likes being lectured to, and no one likes being talked down to, and no one likes being told that they're wrong or stupid.  If you're in a conversation where you actually care at all (even if, as in this case, only a teeny tiny little bit) about persuading the other person of your point of view, you can't be unyielding, it will just make them defensive and shut them off.

Anyway.  It's all been on my mind lately, in a kind of loose shambling way, meandery and with no coherent argument.  I've been saying for years that I see feminism as less of an ideology and more of a framework, that it's about asking the right questions rather than thinking you have the right answers.  And to some extent that's still true (I mean, once you've condensed something to that tidy of a soundbite, how can you just abandon it?) but I'm also realizing that it's a filter.  Gender is generally the first lens through which I see any problem or situation.  (It's not the only lens, not by a long shot, but it is the first.)  I don't think this was always true, and to be honest I'm a little surprised to realize that it's true now.