The scene- this evening, a group of students gearing up for our first physical anthropology exam. We are nervous. The exam review sheet is ROUGH. You know what happens when a group of people is collectively nervous?

Completely inappropriate ideas. Like instead of having a normal Halloween costume, how about a dirty, sweaty, sticky group meiosis party. Meiosis, for the non-sciencey is the technical term for cell division in sexual reproduction.

“I’m gonna come as a bitchy mitochondria diva!”

“Hey baby, can I replicate some proteins for ya?”

“Oh you naughty boy, I’m not gonna recombine my DNA with just anybody!”

And now I realize that my dorkiness is not nearly as well closeted as I imagined. What will I do if they find out I like trashy sci-fi TV shows? I am so gonna lose all my cool points.

No surprise- I pass with flying colors.

Radiohead put out their latest album on the web and let fans pick their own price (even free if they so choose),

And from the looks of it- they aren’t going broke. I have a feeling the record companies are going to be crying over this. I’m not feeling any pity though.

For way too long record companies have been fixing prices, dominating airwaves, and screwing artists. Oh and suing poor single moms for downloading a couple of albums. $17.99 is not the price the free market thinks a record should be sold at, and $1.50 per album is not enough reimbursement for an artist.

We music lovers get that artists need to make money. You can’t write songs on an empty belly. But we also don ‘t like getting screwed by a giant industry. So when downloading songs from p2p networks became feasible- people flocked to it. Bands like it (their music gets out there) and they can make money doing what bands are supposed to do- playing music live.

In every class, there is that one guy who takes over and derails the class into what he wants instead of what the class is trying to focus on. And that one guy is always always always a guy, women don’t do that very often.

Ruth (a genius brainiac math major) and I were talking about that one guy the other night. The current guy driving her to distraction has been nicknamed “Hairlip” not because he has one but because she says “If you saw him, you’d understand”. He likes to interrupt when other people ask questions in order to change the focus to him.

I don’t have a nickname for the guy that’s bugging me, but the way he derails my physical anthropology class every fucking time has started to get to me. The first night of class he made a comment about how “we all can agree that there are too many women having babies that they can’t raise”. Uhm – no we can’t all agree on that.

As class has progressed, it’s become really fucking obvious that this is a Nice GuyTM who is trying to find biological justification for why women won’t fuck him. He derailed the class the other night to talk about how we are biologically programed to choose a mate and that studies have shown that women all over the world want men who are 3 to 5 years older than them and financially secure and that men want youth and beauty. The professor (god love him) tried to tell him that it might be culturally based and not biological, but the guy just kept screaming about studies in babies. I interrupted his rant. “All of those attributes are culturally determined, name one country in that study where women have greater economic power than men- name one. You can’t and until women have economic power of course they are going to choose men with money over men with looks”. He continued screaming about babies for a minute. Then we took a break (It’s a 3 hour class).

Outside, a young woman, maybe 21 thanked me for interrupting the guy. Ruth, who interrupted Hairlip after another woman asked a question that Hairlip derailed, also got a thank you. Ruth and I both agreed that there was a sense of “fuck yeah” after finally getting the assholes to shut up for a second.

I wonder how long I can hold out until I just scream out in class that “the reason you’re not getting laid is cause you’re an asshole, not because of biology!” We’ll see how it goes.

Last night I finally got to see a band I have tried many many times to see before- the fantastic Sugar Skulls.

Let’s see- hot girls (and a guy drummer) playing rad music makes me a happy chica. Ursula- the bass player, came out in a bra and panty set complete with baby heads sewn in over the naughty bits so it looked a bit like she’d just given birth to plastic triplets. Awesome.

Per Ruth- “They make time changes sexy and dancable”. I just thought it was awesome to see a Seattle band actually get Seattlites (who are usually way to concerned with looking cool) to dance. Shit, Le Tigre couldn’t even get Seattlites to dance.

Check out The Sugar Skulls Myspace page to hear a few songs.

The Swiss are assholes

On a semi-related note: The French version of the Department of Homeland Security is called the Vigipirate. Seriously. (Scroll to the cloakroom and luggage section)

Via Feministing comes a story about a girl who found liberation and happiness through 6 kids, a husband and….. housekeeping.

Ohhh- she thinks she’s being a rebel by hanging clean towels and buying matching bedspreads.

No, seriously, she does.

I tell a lot of personal stories here, mostly to illustrate points and to show how it really is. I figure if I feel this way, I can’t be the only one. Today is no exception.

I am a slob. I’m a giant, messy creative slob. I have piles of papers, bits of jewelry making stuff, paints, cookbooks, clothing, scraps of fabric, brushes, whatever in every corner of my house.

I make stuff. I write, I paint, I cook, I sew. What I don’t do very often is clean. I hate cleaning. The only time cleaning has ever been the least bit satisfying to me has been when I was paid for it (I was a hotel maid in high school and work now when I can cleaning other people’s houses on the weekends to supplement my income).

This shouldn’t be a big deal, it’s my house after all. But I have a uterus and a child. These two things combined are supposed to make me preternaturally destined to like a tidy house. They don’t. Until things start to smell or I start tripping over crap- I can’t be bothered to clean. I have way too many other things to do.

I didn’t grow up like this. I have an OCD mother who got more than a little Mommy Dearest on me pretty regularly. We weren’t allowed to leave the house unless it was immaculate, right down to color of hangars in our closets. She didn’t have much of a life outside of work and cleaning. She didn’t have time to read or write. She didn’t spend much time with friends. She did spend a lot of time with a box TSP scrubbing grout. And she spent a lot of time yelling at me about the state of the house (not my brother- me).

Now, I may have escaped the obsessive cleaning disorder- but I didn’t manage to escape the shame of having a messy house. For years I would reschedule visits from friends or make insane cleaning runs in order to be able to let people who love me into my space without them seeing how I really live. I don’t mean the quick tidy that you do as a normal person, I mean the obsessive type.

Then, I realized what I was doing. I am trying to quit. People come to visit me because I am awesome, I cook really good food (last week’s impromptu dinner party for 6 included the comment “Are you like super-chef?”) and I am kinda fun to hang with. They are not coming over to judge how well I dust. Well, some of them aren’t.

A year or two ago I was dating someone who we’ll call A. (Hi A!) A spent about 3 or 4 nights a week at my house, eating dinner that I cooked and bought, sleeping in sheets that I washed, and using the bathrooms that I clean. I think in the entire course of our relationship- he did the dishes twice- ever. He also did the cooking maybe 4 times and I did the cleanup after that.

One night towards the end of our relationship he started bitching about the pile of dishes in the sink. My response was- “You eat here enough- go fucking wash them”. He didn’t wash them, he just bitched about the mess while eating my cooking.

So for Ms. Corey, who thinks she has become a renegade with a dustmop- the real renegade will just stop cleaning. Seriously- our self-worth seems to be tied into how well our house is presented (bullshit) instead of who we are. I am no housekeeper. But I do make a damn fine spinach and pear salad with raspberry vinaigrette. I can also make you a purse or a necklace or a painting or an essay. But I don’t want to make your toilet clean, at least not unless you pay me my going rate of $20 per hour. I’d rather have the cash than the satisfaction of a sparkling toilet bowl and no more hard water stains.

I was 17 when Clarence Thomas had his confirmation hearing, and I remember the way Anita Hill was torn to shreds for daring to accuse him. I remember how Long Dong Silver became the joke of the day.

I believed her then, and I still believe her. Maybe I even believe her more now that I have 15 years of work experience under my belt. I know what it’s like to be harassed. I know what it’s like to not be able to say anything because you need the job. I am fortunate in only one aspect, leaving a job where I have been harassed has not hurt my career, only because I have yet to start in one. The best thing about the trap of pink collar employment is that all pink collar jobs are interchangeable.

Shortly after the Anita Hill hearings, I worked at a minimum wage job (I think it was $4.00 an hour) making pizza. I lived in an apartment with 5 room mates in a town with no jobs for a girl who wasn’t old enough to be a cocktail waitress or a hooker (legal in Nevada). The troll of a manager had a habit of “accidentally” slipping his hand onto our asses. He did it to me twice and each time he did it he had a smarmy look on his face when he fake apologized with a “whoops, my hand slipped”. The third time he did it I told him the next time his hand slipped it was slipping in to a lawsuit. He quit groping me after that, but I left the job anyway. He had put me on an insane schedule where I both opened first thing in the morning and closed at night (leaving work at 1 am to be back at 9am) but sent me home in the middle of the day so he wouldn’t have to pay overtime.

Then I went to work as the graveyard cashier of mini-mart. I worked alone from 11pm to 6am and I quit when I started getting threatening phone calls from a creep who had been watching me. The police were called but nothing could be done.

The next hell hole was a job I had been warned about. It was a little more money and it was an office job, so I wasn’t spending my days covered in pizza grease or gasoline. But the whole atmosphere of the place was misogyny central. “The girls” as we were called, were not allowed to wear pants- ever. I worked a swing shift and after 5 the only people there were me and a maintenance guy who had worked there forever. He would follow me around the office telling me stories about all the other office girl’s he had fucked and how slutty they were. He talk about the blow jobs skills of the black girls who had worked there and how tight the pussy was of the girl who I replaced. He brought in medical books about STDs to show me what the case of herpes one of the girls had given him looked like. No amount of telling him that I wasn’t interested would shut him up. My boyfriend started bringing me dinner every night and hanging around after to give me some space from the asshole.

I finally quit and moved to Seattle. The first job I had here I worked with a bunch of gay guys. It was the first time I had ever had a job where I wasn’t bugged on a regular basis.

Since then I’ve had many jobs, some good and some bad. Part of why I stay with my current job at the college (despite the low pay and lack of benefits) is that it is the first time I’ve been able to complain about harassment and have something good come of it. I had a former student who kept coming back to my lab after graduation and bothering me, asking me out, creeping me out. I merely mentioned that he was bugging me to the office manager and she was required to report it to the administration. He was asked to stay away from the campus after that I have not been bothered since. I also have the freedom to call people out when they say sexist crap without fear of retribution.

I believe Anita Hill because I know how common this shit is. I also know how rare it is to be in a place where people will take you seriously when you complain.