blogging

BlogHer 09 is in Chicago!


I have been watching the BlogHer site for news on the annual conference. Last year they were in San Francisco, as you may remember because I was dithering with the idea of attending. It just wasn’t feasible for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which is my aversion for sleeping sans husband. 

This coming summer however is a must go and it’s Chicago locale couldn’t be more perfect. It’s just hours away from my mom who loves nothing better than having her granddaughter stay over. While Rob and I marvel at the fact that other people find BabyD sweet and a joy to look after, we don’t look these gift horses in the mouths but take them at the words coming out of said mouths. 

So it looks as though I will be able to fly into the hometown with BabyD, stay a few days and take off for the convention on my own. I asked Rob to come along but the estrogen fest nature left him feeling he could sacrifice our blissful bedding for a week or so of renovation and manly tools. My being out of the house will allow him to kick up dust – literally – that he can’t when I am around due to my allergies. I also have this habit of checking on him at too close intervals because I am sure that long silences mean he has a) fallen off something and is dead, b) sliced off a body part and is dying or c) both. It’s nothing really. Post loss syndrome. I still check on both he and BabyD in the night to make sure they are breathing. I hope to get over that someday.

BlogHer will be under one – expensive – roof, but no schlepping from here to another here. I haven’t been to a convention of any sort since my former school district gave up on the idea of once a year spring conventions. They used to drag us all downtown to the convention center on what nearly always turned out to be a cold, drizzily March day to listen to speakers and wander around peering at education wares which none of us aside from special ed people had budgets or authority to purchase. I think they were hoping we’d just dig deep and buy text books ourselves. My strategy involved attending one speaker session where I would be seen by an administrator or one of their minions among the staff and making sure that I strolled the exhibits until I ran into at least four co-workers who could vouch for my presence, and then I went to the mall and met up with other shirkers like me for lunch. I was the type who gave teaching a bad name. 

I am looking forward to meeting people I blog with however and others whose blogs I admire and/or comment on. By then perhaps I will have my memoir done and can network a bit to find out how to publish the darn thing. Actually I might have met a publisher yesterday at a workshop my writing group sponsored who might be an inroad, but I have to finish writing before I approach her with my questions.

Anyone else up for Chicago at the end of July? Yeah, not it’s most appealing season, but I am going this coming year.

Becoming Jane


I lured my husband into watching an uber long film about one of the many possible scenarios for the tragic long affair which put author Jane Austen off the idea of marriage. As if the early 19th century views of women as chattel and marriage as a financial arrangement wouldn’t have done that without any help from a failed romance.

Having watched Pride and Prejudice not long ago, I have to say that Austen is not for those who prefer mono-syllabic dialogue or characters who, when they insist on speaking in sentences, do so using very small words. Austen makes my brain hurt. It’s like an episode of Gilmour Girls with better diction, grammar and word usage.

One thing that struck me over and over again during the movie was how much it sucked to be a woman. The only thing we were good for was marriage and then motherhood. In fact Jane’s reverend father practically begins the film with a lecture to his congregation on the virtues of a stupid woman because being clever will bring all women to misery.

In the course of the story Jane, whose prospects are portrayed as poor despite the fact that at least three men are panting after her, falls in love with a young man who is dependent on his uncle for university and eventual career. Since the young man’s mother had married for love, he is their only financial assistance and hope. Farming out one’s children to wealthy, childless relatives was a common practice. I wonder why that stopped?

Jane and the young man are eventually forced to run off, which is scandalous for her, but she decides in the end not to marry her love because his family depends on him and she can’t live with their ruin and her own too.

As I thought about it, I realized if the social structure of that time had survived my dad would have had three daughters to marry off and one son who wouldn’t have been able to hold on to any inheritance he was left. My younger sisters were pretty and complacent and wouldn’t have posed much of a challenge, but I would have ended up a dependent old maiden auntie.

Rob though would have simply forged a trail of his own. All that handymanlyness he possesses would never have saddled him with the onerous task of sucking up for his keep.

This made me wonder about Jane’s young suitor. He had a new world to flee to and start again, but he let her convince him to stay within the confines of a social system which was designed to assess people monetarily and cage them within polite expectations of family, neighbors and community at large. How sad.

She at least was able, mostly due to her modest gentry origins, to maintain her freedom and pursue her writing, but what about women who hadn’t “talent” or tolerant family? What happened to them?

It was, as I mentioned earlier, a long movie with ear grinding dialogue and unless you enjoy pondering the larger questions of sexism and societal impositions on personal choices, it is a movie better left alone.

Soundtracking Life


I was never a fan of Ally McBeal despite having far more in common with her than I care to go on record about at this point in my life. There is one episode of the show that still sticks out in my mind however. Ally saw a counselor who urged her to adopt a theme song for her life. I knew it was meant to be a joke, but I was struck by the fact that I did this already. My life was as scored as a Broadway musical. Read Full Article