The (other) World of the Dynamite Lady

Christmas is a hard time to be generous and a feminist. We all like to think that we shun the consumerism of chain-store-sanctioned gift sections, but it is becoming ever more difficult in shops to dig out anything that a real person might like among all the "gifts for him" (golf balls) and "gifts for her" (soap). And then you come to the children's presents...

Now let's get one thing straight. I don't think pink intrinsically 'stinks'. It's on the same part of the colour spectrum as red and purple, so it has to have something going for it. My Escher gang in Necromunda wear pink*, because I like the idea of pink-clad ladies with large weapons beating the shite out of a range of Enforcers, Scavvies, Van Saars and whatever else Ducki acquires. Some of the aforementioned weapons are pink and one is getting a pink sparkly heart-shaped nail art sticker when I can be bothered. My study in the new house will be pink until that (preexisting) paint gets tatty enough to replace - it'll have my usual books, desk and various accessories in rather than Disney Princess pictures, but it does nonetheless have pink walls and curtains. Not what I'd choose, but not bad enough to repaint on entry. I own various pink items of clothing, some of which are even appropriate to teach class in. I don't feel that wearing a pink t-shirt or nail varnish weakens my brain** or makes me less good at my job. I prefer purple, red and quite a lot of black, but it's nice to have a change sometimes.

What does stink like dog poo before it goes white is the idea that everything for girls - and to an extent grown women - MUST be pink. And that girls can't like anything that isn't girly, and that women have to have a pink version of everything (none of my household tools are pink, not because I didn't think the pink sparkly ones looked nice but because I'd already heard that they were considerably flimsier than plain ones of a similar price) in order to be able to use it - and that men and boys CANNOT touch any of this stuff or their willies (which in the case of white guys are ironically pink) might fall off.

It also stinks that people make sweeping assumptions about what a boy or a girl might want, right from the moment the child sticks its head out from you-know-where*** with no knowledge of that child's preferences. It's a baby. It wants lots of things to look at and make noises with and chew, Genuine preferences come later, and involve CHOICE at some stage. Don't say that outside influences don't have an impact. I hate Emu to this day because there was a replica at the preschool I went to and one of the teachers used to attack kids with it if we were naughty, and it totally stank. I have a residual impression of being chronically thick because that was what my classmates called me, even though any low marks I got were down to being too busy crying or beating them up to do the work. So if girls are directed towards the frilly pink stuff and boys away from it, then yes that is going to stay with them, regardless of what goes on at home. Even if the family avoid stereotyping at home, the time kids spend out of the house will influence them.

And now more than when I was young - as in when it is my friends having babies rather than my friends' mothers, the linked article having been posted on facebook by a colleague who has just given birth to a baby girl - everything seems more firmly divided into pink and blue, even nappies. (I can incidentally see the point in different boy and girl nappies, because lets face it the pee comes out of different places. But why do girls' ones need princesses on? I would love to let a child of mine shit on Disney, but sadly the illustrations seem to be on the wrong side.

Let's face it - tiny babies don't care what colour they wear, just how the fabric feels against their skin and in their mouth. Ducks, trains, cars, dinosaurs and other imagery popular on kidwear isn't gendered - or shouldn't be. Pink and blue are not the only parts of the colour spectrum. I came to my liking for pink (and purple, red, black, green, etc and ducks, trains, flowers, spiders, murder stories, Canaries and all things goffik) after a childhood which, while far from perfect, at least contained a full colour spectrum.

Luckily Ducki tends to agree with me on this point (although not every gender or childrearing issue) - luckily for him or I might have to do something regretful with a certain pink sparkly item that has been in where babies come out.****

*The Amazon Blood Bowl team, however, will be in yellow and green and have the provisional name of the Birds of Paradise. I may even come up with the Lustrian pronounciation of Delia Smith if necessary.
**Except insofar as inhaling any nail varnish is a bad idea - that's why I don't breathe it in directly... :P
***Because directly mentioning ladyparts would clearly be the last straw in a gender rant post - whoops...
**** And again ;)

Stage 1 of Very F***ing Stressful December is nearly done. My revised thesis is off to be printed. Now for the travel and family bits.

I am about to make my FIRST cup of coffee of the day. That is all.

You'll be pleased to hear I haven't been trying to fit a new toilet by myself. (although if I did I'd be tempted to use the old one as a garden planter - my parents had TWO of the things in their garden at some point but were total spoilsports and didn't put plants in them) No, this is about the various homemade and apparently 'natural' substances I've plastered myself with today.

Hair things first:

( Deep conditioner )

( Vinegar hair rinse )

My hair is soft and shiny but feels a wee bit greasy, and isn't quite as 'big' as usual. That's disconcerting. We'll see what it's like in a few days.

Now for other stuff:

( Ylang ylang and lavender bath salts )

( Moisture cream )

( Deodorant )

I'm not quite doing 'buy nothing Christmas' this year, but 'make almost everything' is a pretty accurate description of what I'm going for.

Today's shopping:
-Huge pot of coconut oil (established that the independent health food store does this cheaper than the chain one, nice)
-Box of rock salt (ironically it is from Essex, so if we give any to Ducki's family members it will have done a round trip)
-Bag of coarse pink salt crystals
-Bag of fine pink salt crystals
-Half a dozen bottles of essential oil of various sorts - didn't go out intending to get quite so many, but they were on two for three!
-Plastic clip-shut pots and zip-seal sandwich bags
-Christmassy (in a secular way) sticky gift labels

I've made a few batches of bath salts and one of melts already.

( To make bath salts )

( Making bath melts )

So that's what I do when I get time off at the moment! I'm hoping that constantly inhaling aromatherapy oils does me some good...

I am chronically embarassed today. I have two students with the same (slightly unusual) first name. Normally I'm not conscious of this, as they are in different groups so I'm not thinking about one when the other is there, if you get my drift. Let's call them Sabrina - no resemblence to the real name, but has a similar level of infrequency among people their age.

Sabrina #1 was a bit high-maintenance when the first essay was due. She doesn't quite beat the record of one of my Nottingham students who sent at least one email each day in the runup to the deadline and at least one a week at every other point in the term, but there were a lot of emails. So when she emailed me a question yesterday, I did wonder if it would be the start of a deluge. Of course I answered constructively, because at the end of the day I want them to do well.

To set the scene this morning. Enter decaffinated tutor stage left and Sabrina #2 stage right. Sabrina #2, understandably I guess, asked a very similar question to Sabrina #1. Being in a decaffienated state and having pretty much just woken up, I just read the name 'Sabrina' and felt my heart sink - surely nobody could need to ask pretty much the same thing twice! My reply was polite but terse and involved something along the lines of 'you were on the right track yesterday with...'

Then, after hitting send and logging out, I thought 'OH FUCK I have two Sabrinas don't I' and logged back in to discover my mistake. Cue apologetic email, qualified with 'but [debate] is the way forward for you as much as it was for her'. Coffee #1 was downed before the fuck-up fairy could have any more input. Amazingly I've only now started drinking coffee #2. More on that later.

Today,
I did NOT manage to locate the book I needed in a stack in the living room without first doing my back in going through all the packed crates
I did NOT make a greater than usual use of the computer purely because I had it to myself
I did NOT operate at full capacity, whatever that means
I did NOT go for a walk unless fetching the recycling box from the far side of the street counts.
I did NOT get around to the craft project I'd been thinking about
I did NOT blog at Veganicity, because inspiration didn't present itself - although today's lunch might end up on there soon...
BUT
I also did NOT have a total crash day, which often happens the day after the bulk of my teaching. If I can quantify how I achieved that I'll share it...
AND
I DID read the equivalent of two work-y books (one and two halves) and haven't quite given up on doing more
I DID cook nice healthy food and eat it all, rather than living on crisps and toast
I DID regulate myself and not freak out at any point
I DID keep within my normal limit for caffiene (four cups of the black stuff, all before 5pm - probably looks like loads to some of you but Gobby in particular will remember how much I put away during finals, supplemented with Red Bull and the odd Pro-Plus. Which btw DOES make you need to pee, without replacing the liquid like coffee does - so don't fall for the rumours!) rather than resorting to extra supplies.

In my classes today we discussed illustrious personages such as Stanley Milgram, Fred West, and scariest of all Rebecca Wade (in the context of riots outside alleged paedophiles' houses). Milgram was pretty early on, and I think he's going to be a standard example in classes on moral responsibility - it's a situation where people could justifiably claim they were causally determined by another agent to do something apparently immoral (electrocute someone - thankfully it was actually an actor behind the screen), but where they were also making a reasoned response to circumstances (assuming none of them electrocuted people to death for a hobby outside that scenario). The ability to do the latter suggests that the person has some free will and is morally responsible for their act.

On the nonce-hunting front, the purpose was to give a concrete example of why we might want to take moral anger out of criminal justice. Dirk Pereboom sees this as a major advantage of removing free will (which he doesn't believe we have or have need of) and by extension moral responsibility from the equation. The debate in class today was whether moral anger, outrage, repugnance etc was a destructive force in dealing with crime or a necessary element in telling right from wrong.

Fred West only came up in the second of today's two classes, I'm not sure I'll make regular use of that example, but I was getting a bit desperate to convey how someone's arguably immoral and definitely harmful to others acts might be causally determined by their past. I'm not convinced by that view, but can give it some credence - the students weren't even doing that, at least bringing serial killing into the equation focuses their attention...

Oh, and I also managed to derive some innuendo from reading up on the Zapatistas. Did you know members of the EZLN army have to ask their commander's permission to have sex? The idea being that the commander then knows two people will be indisposed if there is an attack, so s/he needs to be sure they are not skiving defensive duties to go and shag. Unfortunately - or fortunately for me since corrections-related stuff brings about a need for light relief wherever I can get it - Subcommandante Marcos chose to phrase this as 'I need to find someone to cover their positions.' Which in context sounds a bit dodgy...

I feel I made a bit of a breakthrough at work today. No, not in how to traumatise students avoid traumatising students, but in a matter of more mundane significance. I worked out the layout of the toilets in our main teaching building. This building contains nearly all the lectures and seminars that take place on campus, plus a fair few academic departments, so it is naturally large and sprawling. Most of it is on a grid system (two main corridors and half a dozen 'link corridors'), with a few random outcrops. There is a very smart bit around the principal's office, a flashy new-ish corridor where the classroom computers generally work, and the rest is a mildly disturbing example of the best of seventies architecture. Lots of concrete and glass, badly-lit stairwells and so on.

I have a slightly weak bladder. I can hold on if I have to, but will use a bog if I get the chance. This is partly because I use coffee as a stage prop in class. I've often found myself using the really grotty bogs (there are two possibilities for what is smeared over the sanitary towel bin, and neither make me want to touch it - and there's no guarantee that the floor has merely been dirtied by wet muddy shoes) because I didn't know where else to find one on that particular floor.

Now I've worked it out. For most of the building, the loos are located near a link corridor or a stairwell, and probably both. And if you're a woman standing near a men's room, you have the choice of going to the opposite end of the link corridor or up/down a flight of stairs. I shared this with two of my students, who seemed to find it useful.

It's a small thing, but it makes life easier...

Sometimes I still fail at domestic science, even though being a homemaker is a second part-time job for me right now and I blog about food. When this happens, it sucks. Thankfully it tends to happen with smaller snackier things rather than our main meals. Today's cockup? Thinking that maybe, because coconut oil solidifies in colder temperatures (as in, needs to be left out of the fridge for an hour in order to chip enough off to cook with) that flapjacks made with it wouldn't need to go in the oven. I was wrong. But also sensible - the tasty, crumbly, gooey mess is now in the oven rather than disappearing down my throat...