Category Archives: General

Housewifery

Posted on by

So. Spring is upon us and the school term has ended. This is by far my favorite time of year. The days are warming and lengthening, the plants are emerging in bright green freshness, and my toes aren’t constantly blue from cold. Also, I have absolutely nothing to do all day.

Well, no, that’s not accurate. I have plenty to do, but it is all at my own discretion, and that pleases me greatly. I had been contracted to teach an online class for Pitt’s summer term, but alas, it was cancelled due to low enrollment - I do lament that. I like to teach, and I like the money Pitt pays me to teach. However, even if I had been teaching that class, because it was an online course through the College of General Studies, my time would still have been basically unscheduled. And I love that.

One of the personality traits that has left me ill-suited to more traditional 9-to-5 work is a fierce resentment of schedules: I don’t mind doing work, but why can’t I do it on my own time? Why can’t I get up late and work into the night? Why can’t I work hard all morning and then goof off in the afternoon? What difference does it make, as long as the work gets done? I’m much happier when my time is my own. (I have similar feelings about direct supervision: I know what needs done, I have the skills to do it, just tell me when it needs done by, and I’ll do it - I don’t need someone looking over my shoulder all day, kthxbai.)

So here I am, with all the manipulable time in the world, and it turns out that when left to my own devices, I settle more or less comfortably into being a housewife.

Don’t misunderstand, I have my own interests to pursue. There’s swimming at the PAA; I am developing a summer reading list, and am currently reading Ivan Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (everyone should read the story “Bezhin Lea”); I’m hoping to get Sarah to my place soon to show me how to use my sewing machine (ahem); and I even have some knitting I plan to attempt, probably leading to much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

But day-to-day, I’ve been tidying and buying groceries and cooking. I’ve been trying to make lots of healthy stuff for Ted and I - veggies, whole grains, lean proteins - and so I’ve been buying stuff fresh every few days and hitting the farmer’s market, now that it’s open. Downstairs, I cleaned all the things, and Ted’s been making headway on the laundry, so next all the upstairs things will get cleaned. I’ve even been keeping up on the dishes.

I wonder if all of this could seem weird. I am a feminist, after all, and yet here I am, cleaning and cooking and not doing anything formal with my education and remaining completely dependent on my husband’s income. And I feel absolutely fine about that. To begin with, the belief that the work of keeping a commodious home for yourself and your loved ones is somehow less important than going to a job and earning money rests on two assumptions that I reject: 1) that there is such a thing as “women’s work” and “men’s work”, and 2) that “women’s work” is less important or meaningful than “men’s work,” and so women only achieve accomplishment and equality when they do not do “women’s work” and instead do “men’s work.”

Fuck a bunch of that.

Earning money is a nasty requirement for living in our dystopian late-capitalist society; it is not a measure of value or achievement in personal industry whatsoever. My husband is fortunate in that he earns (too little) money doing work that is at least not destructive and/or essentially meaningless. But the fact alone that his work away from the home earns money and my work in the home does not is not an indicator of the value of his work or of my work at all. Further, the fact that I happen to be a woman who is doing what is traditionally thought of as women’s work is moot to me - I am a person doing work that is worthwhile and enjoyable; the stereotypes others have ascribed to that work, or the history of its imposition on unwilling other persons, should not shape my opinion of it, or anyone else’s opinion of me my doing it. It is work that needs done in my home, and I am just the person to do it.

And luckily, I don’t have children, only cats, so the housewifery is still completed in plenty of time to read books and write blogs and attempt to sew skirts.

It also occurs to me that such a lifestyle as my own over the summer could appear lazy, and upon consideration, I think that this reveals a sad fact about our society: we’ve lost track of how much work is enough work. A friend of mine recently said on Facebook, “G.S.W. Gym, sleep, work. That’s all I do anymore.” Going to the gym is good - exercise is good for you. I know this person’s job is one in which she helps others, so that’s good, too. And everyone knows that sleep is good.* But what about hobbies, relationship-building and maintenance, and just free fucking time to listen to the sparrows in the hedge and sip a glass of cheap wine out of beautiful glass? I think Americans may have lost track of what work is for, and what it is not for. Work is for accomplishing things that need accomplished so that society can proceed as smoothly and happily as possible for as many different people as possible. Work is NOT for determining who is “better” than whomever else because of the nature or quantity of their work, for defining ourselves as individuals, or in general for anything other thing than maybe earning a little filthy lucre and, hopefully, improving the world or at least the city for ourselves and our fellows.

I’m improving my world and Ted’s and the kitty cats’, and that’s good enough for me. And hopefully, since his world at home is a little improved, Ted can do his work of improving the world or at least the city with a little extra vigor - no one does their work, whatever it is, in a vacuum, after all.

And come the fall, I plan to go back to work, God willing, as a teacher full-time - work that earns a little money and suits my personality and improves the world. The housewifery will likely slip, then, and we’ll eat a lot more take-out. But for the moment, it’s vegetables all the way.

Vegetables and blogs in defense of housewifery.

*I don’t mean what follows to be a critique of my friend - I’m not saying that she doesn’t maintain her relationships, make time for wine, or that she defines herself or others through her or their work; I’m not saying anything about her at all, except that the particular instance of her status update got me thinking in general terms about the general American population’s views on work. Just to be clear!

Pants. Grr.

Posted on by

Today I would like to rant about pants.

To begin: I am fat. Not plump, not curvy, straight up fucking fat. And this is perfectly fine. I have tried to be not fat in the past, but the only way to achieve that was starving myself, which sucks, and doesn’t work in the long term, anyway. In fact, FYI, everybody, diets don’t work. That link leads to one particular study that proves it, as though everyone in the universe’s experience didn’t already, but there have been numerous studies to that effect. The fact that you still see millions of people and products claiming that diets work is because 1) the foundation of capitalism is lying for money, and 2) people are taught to be so ashamed and frightened of being fat that they lose the power of reason when the subject of fat and dieting comes up.

Look, this is a big topic, one I’m not the first to remark upon - there’s the entire fatosphere out there, after all - and I’m sure I’ll bring it up here again. The point for the purposes of my pants rant is: I am fat. I am fine with this. Pointing out that I am fat is like pointing out that I am tall or that my hair is long or that I am, in the words of a dermatologist I saw last year, “unusually mole-less”: it’s just another descriptor, and no matter how badly other people in the world would like to attach a value judgment to that descriptor, they don’t get to, because my body is my property, and my value judgments are my own and not subject to the bullshit spewed out into the world by dudebro trolls on comment boards or companies selling diets that don’t work.

However, there are downsides to being fat, and one of those is one that all marginalized people have in common: the world is not made for us. In this case, specifically, pants are not made for us.

Oh, sure you can buy plus-size pants, and I do, specifically jeans. But look, for one, they are expensive: you cannot get a good pair of fat jeans for less than $40. For two, they are seldom sold in “long” sizes, which I need: I’m looking at you, L.L. Bean and Lands’ End. For three, they are comprised of this very stretchy denim, such that after one day of wearing, the shape of the pants is nothing like what it was when you first put them on. This leads me to a secondary rant: WHY ARE WOMEN’S JEANS, OF ALL SIZES, MADE OF HALF SPANDEX? I do not want leggings, I want jeans. Blue jean denim cowboy motherfucking jeans. NO STRETCHINESS AT ALL. Stretchiness does not help the pants to “fit my curves”: I barely have curves. I am a big fat tube. Also, it fucks hardcore with the sizing - the jeans have completely different measurements at the end of the day than they did at the beginning because of all the stretching out with wear. WHY CAN’T I JUST GET STRAIGHT UP DENIM JEANS?

Yes, you should have read that as though it contained a lot of yelling.

Let me get to the actual incident that drove me to this ranty blog. I ordered three pairs of jeans online: one from Old Navy, one from Levi’s, and one from Lane Bryant. All were at least $40, plus shipping. All had size charts, purporting to offer measurements for each size. I took my measurements and ordered appropriately. One pair was a size 26, two were size 24s. I don’t care about the number of the size, or vanity sizing - manufacturers can call the pants Size Dainty if that’s what it takes to make some people feel better about themselves. But I expect that if you provide a measurement guide, and I take my measurements accurately, your pants should fit.

Well. The Levi’s were a billion times too big in all ways. I clearly needed a size 22, if not a 20. The Old Navy pair was a nightmare in general: the rise was enormous, as though they expected me to be carrying a low-slung fanny pack in my underwear. The waist was too large, and the material was questionable. The Lane Bryant’s seemed to fit well enough, although the waist came up OVER MY NAVEL. The waistband of these pants was designed for Urkel.

I ended up keeping the Lane Bryant pair, basically because they fit (or so it seemed) least worst, and I was in desperate need of jeans, having been reduced to only two pairs after the crotch tore out of a third old pair. Old Navy provides free return shipping on plus-size items - this seems nice until you realize that they do this only because they discontinued plus-size items in their stores, so, natch, you can’t just be fat and go to an Old Navy and try the damn pants on and save yourself the hassle. I presume they didn’t want to taint their brand by having their stores full of fatties - fuck you, Old Navy. Levi’s I had to pay to ship back. (And, of course, I had to pay to have all of these things shipped to me, except for one pair I found a “free shipping” coupon for, so in total it cost $18 to try on three pairs of pants and decide to buy one. This is not something thin people ever have to do.)

As to the pair I kept: I knew the waist was ridiculously, unsexily high, but whatever - I don’t tuck things in, generally, and I need pants. The legs I liked: they were straight leg, as opposed to bootcut or flares, but not skinny jeans, which I’ve found to constrain the calf unpleasantly. I took the tags off, washed them to get rid of that plastic shipping smell, and put them on.

By the end of the day they were much to big. Like, falling down (off my diaphragm, ahem). BECAUSE OF THE DAMN STRETCHINESS. So now, to wear these pants I will have to belt them around my goddamn chest, try to shrink them in the wash, or maybe bribe Sarah into taking them in, if that is even possible.

This single pair of poorly fitting pants cost me almost $60, including the price of the jeans I kept, shipping and return shipping for all three pairs, and that was minus the shipping coupon and another, second coupon I found online. Without coupons I would have been close to spending $80 on one pair of very poorly fitting jeans.

Look, what bothers me is this: I am a human being, with (a little bit of) money to spend. I don’t deserve to spend twice what thin people spend, and at three times the inconvenience, on pants. And I realize that shopping can be tough for everyone, even thin people - clothing in a reasonable price range is rarely cut to fit people who are very tall or very short or very curvy or what have you. But we fats have far fewer options, and it’s just unreasonable that I can’t pay money for clothing I like that fits reasonably well. I thought that was the whole goddamn point of the American economy. And it further bothers me that I’m pretty sure it’s not that the reason I have so few options isn’t a dearth of demand - there are lots of fat folk out there. I’m pretty sure brands don’t make plus sizes because they, like Old Navy, don’t want to “taint their brand” by having it be worn by and seen on fat women. Old Navy pushes us into the ghetto of online shopping to make sure we’re never seen in their stores; other companies just push us out entirely, so that we’ll never be seen in their clothing, period. As an illustration: American Apparel sells plus-size menswear but not plus-size womenswear. Because there’s nothing, according to a particular prevalent bias and stigma, as unhip and unsexy as a fat woman.

That’s bullshit.

I have heard of a number of fats who have just given up on jeans altogether: they wear skirts, and tights when it’s cold. I wish I was femme enough for that, but it’s just not really my style. I suppose I could learn to sew (though see my “Mary Fucking Poppins” post for some thoughts on that), but I’m not sure that even if I could learn to sew, I could manage to make jeans. I’m also considering trying men’s pants, though given the different shapes of men’s and women’s bodies generally, I’m not sure how that will go. Maybe I just will have to learn to de-femme skirts, somehow.

The point is … well, actually, after 1500 words, the point is fuck this shit. Good day to you.

“Mary Fucking Poppins.”

Posted on by

In contemplating my inaugural blog for this site, I found myself growing increasingly pensive. With what topic should I begin? What impression should I make? There’s much to talk about in the news, I’ve several social activism subjects close to my heart, I’ve even got a topic in law or two that I think might be of general interest. These kinds of topics all require research and drafting, though, and that seemed daunting – I’d already been procrastinating on a daunting professional project, and there I was, procrastinating on a personal project as well.

Before Sarah approached me about writing a Pittsburgh lady blog together, I’d been ruing the fact that I no longer blogged on my own. I had previously been a MySpace blogger (yes, 100 years ago), and then I had graduated to my own website (some blogs from which I plan to repost here, as I still think they are of their interest and enjoyable). An entire website had proven too time consuming, and I don’t know that it got much traffic anyway. My blogging lapsed. Blogging, of course, it must be said, is not a necessity – everyone enjoys a little narcissism, and are usually willing to indulge it in others, but it’s not as though there is an audience hungering for my thoughts on the tyranny of other people’s Facebook posts, the awful, interminable nature of basketball, or the former Pope’s beatification. Nevertheless, I am actually a trained writer (and a big Fuck You to the University of Michigan, but that’s a subject for another day), and I always have a vague sense that I should be writing, though it’s not really a pursuit of mine anymore, excepting academic work.

I had conceived a blog that I might begin myself. In my head, I had already titled it “The Duncan Street Palimpsest” and I planned to make it a repository of many projects and meanderings I wished to undertake. For instance, I am constantly saying that I will cook more, and so I thought I could do recipe blogs; I am constantly saying that I want to improve my knitting skills, and so I thought I could chronicle my crafting challenges; similarly, I am constantly asserting my desire to learn to sew, to garden, and to in general undertake the kind of betterment of self through skill acquirement that ambitious bloggers have been documenting for years now as they cook their way through massive tomes, recycle rubber bands into minidresses, and create communities for social justice activism and fatshion haute couture.

The problem, of course, is that I almost never undertake these projects. There are all sorts of explanations that a casual observer might surmise to be the cause of this inaction – laziness, fearfulness of failure, a variety of other unpleasant character traits.

As to fearing failure: meh. I’m pushing 30 and haven’t yet earned enough money, total, over my lifetime, to qualify for social security. I have two degrees I don’t use, I’m overdue on pretty much every bill, and none of this troubles me at all. I don’t pluck my eyebrows or shave my legs, and my dining room is filthy at the moment. I’ve got a different sense of the word failure than other people do, let’s say.

In my further defense, let me say that I am lazy, but not when I find the work to be important or enjoyable. I’m a good employee (I teach part-time), I’ve donated hundreds of hours of my time in the past to local political campaigns, I devote time to my own academic pursuits, and I read in my spare time with an eye towards what I hope is my intellectual improvement – nonfiction on various subjects, classics of literature, et cetera. But, true enough, I am sometimes lazy: if the task seems thankless or unimportant – say, that time I worked answering phones for a living – I do the bare minimum, if that. I don’t feel bad about this, either; my time and energy are finite and precious to me, and I see no reason to fritter them on anything other than what I personally wish. “Pride in a job well done,” without taking into account the nature of the job, is a capitalist lie inculcated in the working classes (blue- and gray-collar) to discourage them from refusing to work at degrading tasks for the enrichment of others, and I’ve no truck with that, thank you.

Still, learning to knit or sew, gardening, cooking, deploying my writing to the work of a worthwhile activist community, expressing myself through art or photography or music … these are not thankless or unimportant tasks. Many people undertake them with joy in their hearts and soon see gratifying results. And yet …

Well, a friend of mine put her finger on the problem quickly and succinctly: “You don’t want to do that shit. You just want to be the sort of person who does that shit. You want to be Mary Fucking Poppins.”

I think she’s right; I think, in the cases of many of my ambitions, I don’t actually want to do that shit – I just want to be the sort of person who does. Who doesn’t want to move through the world productively and creatively, mindful and ever-improving, delighting in the growth of skills and the expansion of interests, and receiving the just accolades of all who bear witness to their march of progress?

Except that shit’s hard. And there’s school, work, housekeeping (shudder), maintaining personal relationships, errands … and then I’m supposed to exercise, follow the news, do the basics that a human is supposed to do, I guess, and frankly, once all or at least a respectable amount of that is accomplished, I want to sit on my ass and read a book with a cat in my lap. Go to the bar. Go on a date. Take a fucking nap.

Still, I’m not a child, and I should make myself do some of the shit done by the people who are the sort of people who do that shit. I should write thoughtfully and undertake some of those projects; I should improve myself before I’m dead (though why I should do this, I can’t quite say).

Sarah says I’m completely thwarting the premise of this blog, which is meant to be the solution to both she and I feeling overwhelmed trying to take on bigger and more extensive blogging projects. Just write something. Toss something off. Whatever’s on my mind, it doesn’t have to be a project. That’s good advice. And you see, today, I’ve taken it – this blog required no research, no drafting, and no careful consideration whatsoever, nor did it require me to knit, sew, cook, read, watch, visit, learn, or work in general. High fives all around?

Still, in the future, I’d like to, y’know, maybe try to do some stuff. So if you see me blogging about falteringly attempting accomplishment, pat me on the back, internet-style. But if you also see me running on about where I just had dinner, y’know … don’t hold it against me. We can’t all be Mary Fucking Poppins.