Bus talk

Bus etiquette is different from etiquette on other kinds of transit. Buses are cheaper than faster, more convenient forms of transit (rail, cars, planes), so you get a poorer clientele. Maybe the etiquette difference is cultural, but I think it also has to do with the correlation between poverty and mental illness.

In any case, there's this woman who rides my Tuesday evening bus. She's always trying to get other passengers to go to church with her, and I once heard her propose marriage to a stranger. She also doesn't know how to regulate the volume of her voice. This week when I got on the bus she was talking loudly on her phone.

After a while, a man behind me began shouting back. "Blah blah blah. Blah blah blah! Shaddap!" Talking Woman did not appear to notice.

Once Angry Man voiced this complaint, other passengers apparently began to see Talking Woman as an actual problem (though Angry Man was far more annoying). A well-dressed woman who looked like she normally would not speak to anyone on a bus approached the driver. "Excuse me, there's a woman who's been talking nonstop on her cell phone." The driver grunted that there was nothing he could do.

But now Angry Man turned against Bourgeois Woman. "Nobody can stop her from talking! She's got a constitutional right! What is it, third amendment? Freedom of the press!"

This doesn't happen on the commuter rail.

Another world

After reading a post on a feminist blog about the Biblical womanhood movement, I had to learn more about it. I've spent the last few days immersed.

There are several main components. There's the modesty piece, about how you should dress, sit, and stand. There's the work piece, about how you should work at home or in a family business because no human but your husband or father should be your boss. There's the courtship piece, about why dating will ruin you for marriage. There's the fertility piece, about why you should have as many babies as possible. And there's the stay-at-home daughter phenomenon, which holds that home and not college is the right place for young women until marriage.

There's backlash, obviously. Commenters on feministe.com said things like, "Disgusting . . . I’m beginning to think I ought to go vandalize a church." Within Christianity, there are some more thoughtful and compassionate responses.

But I was surprised at how much I found to like. While I'm not a fan of the denim jumper look, I share the distaste for skanky clothes. I don't want men or women relegated to anyplace based on their gender, but I cheer the revival of homemaking and homesteading. This family's 1200-square-foot house with twelve residents? Awesome. And I have to admire the courage of people who live a profoundly counter-cultural lifestyle.

The movement is all about the family. This article on how daughters can treat their fathers better made me do a double-take - don't we normally advise parents on how to treat their children? Filial piety is totally out of style. And while a lot of the writing around daughters makes me want to gag, these people are on to something. Look for the good in each other. Communicate. Try to function as a unit instead of everyone striking out on their own. Give more than you take, and don't be "thing-hungry". (I can imagine that would be very important to men who are the sole wage-earners in large families).

Despite the stereotype of evangelical Christians as ignorant hicks, it's such a text-based culture. Take this argument by an eighteen-year-old homeschooled blogger. She goes through several texts, analyzes them and their historical contexts, finds flaws in her prior beliefs, and comes to a new conclusion. How many teenagers do that kind of thing without any arm-twisting?

Granted, sometimes the textual analysis goes horribly wrong. Please, please, do not use The Taming of the Shrew as your model for marriage.

Liberty and justice at age seven

In the school where I intern, there’s a bulletin board where a teacher has posted second graders’ writings about freedom, having rights, laws, trust, fairness, and equality. I found it really interesting what the students said about these topics.

Young kids have quite a sketchy understanding of what any of these are. A lot of them just spewed a list of “things we’re supposed to do”, interspersed with bits of the Pledge of Allegiance:

Justice for all. Be someoen’s friend if they have none it dosen’t matter what coler you are. Be respectful. Have freedom. Care for others. Keep your hands to yourself.

Laws is for try your best and foloing laws is aluled like if someone is copeeying you you say stop.

indivisible

laws is to respect people and be kind. and laws is to try your best. and also when you make a mistake don,t erase cross it or line it. and also you can’t alwy always say the bad word.

Some of them had a pretty good operational understanding:

Trust is when you keep a seekret for someone. If you don’t keep a seekret, thats no good.

laws are rules if you brack brak bracke brack them, the police will come, and arrest ou and that is bad, and you will go to jail.

There was only one that seemed to actually have an understanding of how any of these concepts intersected:

freedom means to be free and do what ever you wat but you can’t do stuff bad that’s why there is laws.

Two recipies for fall

Midterms are over. I have time for baking again!

Tarte tatin is French for caramelized upside-down apple pie. Essentially, you melt butter and sugar in a skillet, then cook your fruit in that. You put a piecrust on top and bake the whole thing in the oven. Then you flip it. Ta da!

- Preheat the oven to 350.
- Take a heavy-bottomed skillet. It must be able to go in the oven, so be sure it doesn't have parts that will melt. Turn the heat to medium high and add:
a chunk of butter (2-4 tablespoons)
1/2 cup sugar
Stir it around and let it melt. Meanwhile, cut in slices:
3-4 apples or pears
- Lay all the slices into the bubbling liquid. Mmm. You could sprinkle on some cinnamon at this point.
- Let it cook 10 minutes or so, while you make a piecrust. (Piecrust: mix 1 1/4 cups flour, a pinch of salt, a tablespoon of sugar. Cut in 1/2 cup of cold shortening or butter. Stir in 1/4 cup cold water, adding more if needed. Keep everything cold and handle it as little as possible.)
- Roll out the crust and lay it on top of the fruit. Tuck it down around the edges a little. Put the whole thing in the oven and bake about 30 minutes, until the crust looks reasonably done.
- When you take it out, flip the tart onto a plate. Flip it now, not later, or it won't want to come out.


Project two was breakfast rather than dessert. I recently ate a cinnamon bun with cheddar cheese, and I was trying to recreate the experience.

Vaguely:
- Make a sweet bread dough. I made a basic dough with white flour, milk, an egg, butter, sugar, salt, and yeast. Let rise.
- When dough has risen, shape it into a rectangle. Sprinkle with grated cheddar, chopped apple, cinnamon, and sugar.
- Roll up the rectangle and slice it into buns. Lay the slices on a greased baking pan. Let rise again for an hour or so.
- Bake at 350 - not too long! Check after 10 or 15 minutes.

Invisible

People like to claim that foreign aid doesn't work. Obviously it doesn't always work as well as we hoped. But sometimes it succeeds in invisible ways.

This week, cholera hit Haiti. Know what's amazing? That it didn't hit sooner. Since the earthquake in January, the country has been crowded with tent cities. Sanitation is a real problem, and waterborne disease was always a huge risk. When I worked at Oxfam, donors were sometimes puzzled that we focused more on water than on food. Cholera is why. Yes, it's important that there were agencies dealing with food. But the fact that Oxfam and others were digging latrines and trucking in water are the reason there's been so little disease in Haiti since the earthquake.

Clean water isn't that exciting, especially to those of us who have constant access to it. We can understand hunger, but we've never watched a child die from diarrhea. And an absence of disease doesn't make for news stories. There are no headlines proclaiming "No Typhoid Again Today In Port-Au-Prince."

This is why aid matters, even when you can't see it.

Pathologizing princesses

I guess I shouldn't have expected social workers to be perfect. In general, I think the profession is oriented to meeting people where they are and helping them in a non-judgmental way. But there are times when I'm disappointed. Don't get me started on phrases from professors like "the opposite race" and "everybody has sexual desires."

As part of my social work training, I'm interning with a school counselor. This week as I looked through the child psychotherapy manual in my supervisor's office, and I saw the section on Gender Identity Disorder. I knew that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual lists it as a mental disorder, but doesn't prescribe any treatments. This book does. Apparently if I get a girl who wants to dress like/act like/be a boy, or vice versa, I'm supposed to talk her out of it. We're supposed to talk about her mommy - doesn't she want to be like her mommy?

Gag me with a spoon.

I've seen the fear of children's gender-bending. I've seen teachers deeply uncomfortable about the idea that the child over there with the short hair and cargo pants - that one? really? - is a girl. After a nail polish extravaganza at daycare, I've seen a boy gleefully show his mother his purple-and-gold nails, only to be yanked to the sink and scoured. (She was so upset she forgot you can't take off nail polish with soap.)

It doesn't have to be like that. Take Cheryl Kilodavis, author of My Princess Boy. At first she was worried about her four-year-old son's taste for high heels and sparkles. But his family rallied around him, and when he decided to be a princess for Halloween, she called the school. And the school made it clear to everybody, students and staff, that nobody was to laugh at Dyson. On Halloweeen, some of the male teachers came as ballerinas and performed a dance for the school. The kids loved it, of course.

When he's older, maybe Dyson will transition to living as a woman. Maybe he won't. Do we really have to wrestle with a four-year-old about this?