Eira Tansey

Posts for the ‘life’ Category

What men don’t do

Since the Me Too revelations last year, it’s become obvious how pervasive and all-encompassing misogyny is that most men only recognize its presence by its most violent manifestations. The prevalence of rape and sexual assault is a moral and public health crisis. It has to be eliminated. But the enormous amount of sexual and gender-based violence does not exist in a vacuum; it is a product of a misogynist culture that every one of us is marinated in from head to toe, from cradle to grave.

Rape is one of the most brutal and violent forms of misogyny, but eliminating rape and sexual assault will not eliminate misogyny. And this is where I find myself turning in circles. Although it’s been several years since I have had direct experience with threatened or actual physical violence by a man, the men in my life routinely act in ways that dehumanize me and other non-men. I believe that violence against non-men exists on a spectrum, where ignoring the needs and undermining the work of women and nonbinary people creates a subtle foundation for more overt acts of violence. Not all men commit acts of overt violence, but all misogynist-based violence is rooted in the dehumanization of non-men. And many men are exceptionally skilled at daily acts of dehumanization.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the ways in which the vast majority of my male friends, relatives, coworkers, and comrades routinely disappoint me and let me down. This probably isn’t healthy; it’s honestly pretty depressing. I also doubt I’m the only woman who does this. As a socialist feminist, I believe a better world is possible, and making a better world means prioritizing the healthy ways in which men, women, and nonbinary folks can build liberatory relationships with one another. Over the last year I’ve tried to articulate the common qualities among the men I enjoy spending time with, who I feel safe around, and who I trust.

I want to be clear that this list is not a shortcut or way to instantly eliminate misogyny. Men can still do all of these things and perpetuate misogyny. But it’s telling that I can count on one hand the men I know who consistently do all of these things:

1. They consume media, art, music, journalism, literature, and ideas by women and nonbinary people as much as men

From popular culture to various literary canons, the work of men predominates most of what we read, see, hear, and think about. It’s intellectually lazy and embarrassingly boring to only read and watch and listen to shit created by people like you. Casting your media consumption net wide and far helps one empathize with perspectives that are not their own. ALSO it seems like (most of) the men I know somehow have more time to read than (most of) the women I know, probably because they have less caregiving duties in their life (in which case, holler at me, I have hundreds of books from my dad’s library I need to find a good home for).

Women writers and artists and musicians are constantly having to fight against the notion that their work is somehow specifically feminized because of who created it, while men are more often afforded the honor of creating “universal” work. When men enthusiastically consume the work of people with different gender identities, it normalizes the idea that work written by people other than men has universal appeal.

2. They publicly cite and promote the work of women and nonbinary people who they aren’t related to or trying to profit off the relationship, and they trust the expertise and leadership of genders different from them

This is a huge one for me, partly because I work in higher education, and repeatedly during my life I’ve been one of a handful of women in men-dominated leftist groups that have veered uncomfortably close into toxic masculinity. Citing my work has major material benefits for me professionally. It’s really important that it’s not just me saying “I am a leader in my field, here are some articles I wrote” but to have leaders in my profession, which includes many men, behind me saying “Eira is a leader in our field, the article she wrote had XYZ impact on the profession.”

In political work, I need men to trust my expertise and to trust non-men’s leadership collectively. Leftist men who gatekeep and hoard cultural and social capital in political work are far more of a threat to leftist organizing strength than any right-wing troll. If your organizations and coalition-building activities don’t reflect the overall gender distribution of your corner of the world, and you aren’t concerned about fixing that, good luck with pulling off the revolution.

3. They volunteer to Do The Work and then actually do it

I have a tendency to take on a lot of work (no doubt part of gendered socialization) in the various professional and political arenas of my life, though I’m getting better at drawing my boundaries and making my limits visible. The men in my life that I really appreciate often say things like “I want to ensure this work isn’t totally falling on you, how about I write the first draft/call this person/organize this meeting?” Note: this is very different than saying “tell me how I can help.”

Telling someone you can help without a specific offer of assistance places the burden back on me, and then it’s easier to just say “No, I’m okay” instead of sitting around thinking of what I can delegate. The other thing the men I appreciate do is that they follow through. If they’re not going to make a deadline because Life Happened they’re proactive about letting me know when they’ll Do The Thing so I don’t have to ask them what is going on. I’m beyond overwhelmed with everything I’m trying to juggle between caregiving for my elderly father, dealing with the eternal “doing more with less” mandate of working in public higher education, maintaining my own sanity and relationships, and surviving late-stage capitalism. Men who don’t shoulder their fair share of the work, or men who say they will and don’t, make my life much more difficult.

4. They do emotional labor

Emotional labor is an expansive term, but from my perspective, it’s all of the small ways in which one tends the garden of their various relationships, professional, romantic, friendly, comradely, and neighborly alike. A garden requires planting new seeds, weeding harmful things, paying attention to it, and feeding it through sunlight, water, and nutrients.

Our relationships are the same way. Offering a hug to someone who is going through a rough time, remembering your family’s birthdays, checking in with a friend you haven’t heard from for a while, inviting people at work to go to lunch with you, expressing appreciation for both the daily work of others and when they go above and beyond – these are all vital acts of emotional labor that pay off enormously in building solidarity with one another. It means a lot to me when men at work ask me about how my father is doing even if it’s been weeks since the latest eldercare emergency, or when men from other areas of my life ask me about a specific workplace challenge I mentioned months ago. Women are very much socialized to do these things, and we tend to give more emotional labor to men than we receive in return. It is absolutely vital and world-repairing work that men need to take on.

These are the things I wish more men would push themselves to do – and hold other men to the same standards. Our collective lives and freedom depend on it.

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Bearing witness for our kin

The big change around our house these days is quite literally around our house. Working with an organic landscaping business, we ripped out our front yard and replaced the grass with a variety of native and pollinator-friendly plants. Whenever we tell people about this, one of the first questions folks have is “How do the neighbors feel?”

Bee balm

A robin playing near the ferns

I’m delighted to report the neighbors are pretty into it. The front yard still requires a considerable amount of weeding (something we hope will taper off as the plants grow together), so I’m often out working in the front yard on weekends. I’ve met more of my neighbors just in the last few months than I ever did mowing my lawn, and many of them stop to say how much they enjoy our yard.

But the sweetest joy of our yard has been seeing the bees and other pollinators working the plants. The world may be collapsing around us, and indeed bees are in the insect canary in the coal mine. But I feel like with every bunch of flowers, I’m throwing them a small life raft. There are few everyday sights that move me as much as watching bees enthusiastically buzz around flowers.

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I recently saw Robin Kimmerer speak at FGC Gathering (a large conference for Quakers). Kimmerer is a professor in the SUNY system, and the author of Braiding Sweetgrass. Robin’s talk was incredibly moving, but what stayed with me was her call for transitioning from the “it-ness” we ascribe to non-human animals and plants and natural elements. We refer to birds as ‘it,’ we refer to trees as ‘it,’ we refer to rivers as ‘it.’

Kimmerer called on us to consider using kin as “a pronoun for the revolution”, inspired by her indigenous language, for the creation around us. She notes how and why to use “kin”:

Kin are ripening in the fields; kin are nesting under the eaves; kin are flying south for the winter, come back soon. Our words can be an antidote to human exceptionalism, to unthinking exploitation, an antidote to loneliness, an opening to kinship.

The day after I heard Robin speak, I was checking the news and saw one of the most profound acts of bearing witness to our kin in recent memory. A mother with her child on her hip confronted Scott Pruitt, a man who probably thinks of anything winged or feathered or mossed or leafed as “it”, saying to him:

“Hi, I just wanted to urge you to resign because of what you’re doing to the environment and our country,” Kristin Mink told Pruitt inside a Teaism restaurant in downtown Washington, not far from the EPA’s Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters. “This is my son. He loves animals. He loves clean air. He loves clean water. Meanwhile, you’re slashing strong fuel standards for cars and trucks, for the benefit of big corporations.”

And a day later Scott Pruitt resigned.

I don’t know whether he resigned because of the mother and her child. I don’t know if it was because Pruitt realized that being a sleazy capitalist selling out future generations involves less harassment if it’s dictated from a board room than a public office. I don’t know if all that righteous Quaker energy pouring out of Toledo was bending something in Washington DC.

But I know that bearing witness for our kin, kin who are collapsing en masse, kin who cannot speak for themselves, is one of the most sacred acts we can engage in as a way of trying to repair so much of what has been broken in the march towards elevating innovation over creation. I’m so grateful to that mother and her child for speaking out for our kin.

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A few weeks after I was in Toledo I joined about 75 others to go speak out against proposed deregulation of Ohio River pollution control standards at a public hearing, the only public hearing to be held in a region of 5 million people who get their drinking water from the river. As I was driving down the highway the only thing I prayed for was to pack the hearing. And as I crossed the Brent Spence bridge and could see the Ohio river below out of the edge of my vision, I silently said to kin, “I’ll do the best I can for you.”

Many members of the various faith and political communities I’m connected to showed up. And then I yelled at the commissioners for my allotted 5 minutes for public comment and after that I ended up getting interviewed by a local news station.

This is what I said in my testimony:

Good evening commissioners. My name is Eira Tansey. I am from Cincinnati, and I get my drinking water from the Ohio River. I am a member of the Metro Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky Democratic Socialists of America. The Democratic Socialists of America is an organization of over 45,000 people across the United States fighting against a capitalist system that silences the voices of working people.

And that is why I am here today: because only a few years after the water crises of Flint and Standing Rock, we are on the verge of another nightmare in which regulators are more interested in carrying out the wish list of polluting industry than protecting the health of the public.

Make no mistake: the public does not want this commission to abdicate its authority and responsibility for setting regional unified pollution control standards. Many of us want you to make existing standards stronger. Over 97% of the responses from the 900 pages of first round public comments called on you to do just that.

We have been told that a majority of ORSANCO’s commissioners favors Alternative 2, a path towards deregulation that happens to line up with the interests and stated preferences of polluting industry. We have been told that the federal Clean Water Act is sufficient to clean up the river, but this is anything but reassuring. As Mary from West Virginia wrote to you on February 22: “If state and EPA agencies’ work is adequate, why do I keep reading that the Ohio River is the most polluted inland waterway in the country?”

Ohio’s status as one of the dirtiest rivers in the country can be directly traced to several of the companies who have requested this commission to gut pollution standards. Alcoa, AKSteel, American Electric Power, ArcelorMittal, FirstEnergy, Duke Energy, Jupiter and Aluminum have all had dozens of Clean Water Act violations in just the last 3 years.

The majority of the commission has not acted in good faith. ORSANCO’s own reporting has found over 100 pollutants for which it has issued standards that are not found elsewhere within federal or state guidelines. It is outrageous that the only public hearing during this comment period is happening at an out of the way hotel in the middle of the week. It suggests the commission is not very interested in hearing from the public. So we must ask – why is a majority of ORSANCO leadership more interested in protecting polluting industries than in protecting the 5 million individuals who depend on the Ohio River for their drinking water?

Could it be because half of the commissioners have ties to polluting industry themselve? They have either worked directly in the mining and energy industries, or they represented them as clients of their consulting firms and law practices. Commissioner Snavely of Kentucky retired from Excel Mining. Commissioner Caperton of West Virginia worked at Massey Energy. Commissioner Flannery of West Virginia is on the National Coal Council. Commission chair Potesta of West Virginia has represented clients like DuPont, who has been one of the worst polluters of all.

This is not sound science or policy making. This is the fox guarding the henhouse door. If the commission guts regional pollution control standards, it is selling out the health and safety of everyone living downstream from polluting industry for the ability of corporations to make more money.

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I don’t know what’s next, for the river, for the bees in my yard, for the animals and the toddlers who love them being carried on their mother’s hips. I’m worried for my kin. Bearing witness on their behalf is the only thing I know how to do right now.

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A decade later, and circling back [some thoughts about visiting New Orleans]

Ten years ago last week, I received a job offer to work at Tulane University as a paraprofessional archivist. I was graduating from the University of Cincinnati in the summer of 2008, at the same time the economy was collapsing. I had been a student worker at UC’s archives, and thought maybe I’d like to become an archivist. So I sent tons of applications for staff positions out into the wind, hoping I could get a paraprofessional job for a while before deciding whether I wanted to pursue my MLIS. The only response I got was from Tulane, and all my interviewing was over the phone. The first time I ever set foot in Louisiana was when I drove down there, with my dad, to move in to my new city.

I spent five years at Tulane, during which I got my MLIS while I was working full-time. It was probably the most formative five years of my life. New Orleans is where I became an archivist, where I met my husband, where I learned a lot about how the history of a city as complicated as New Orleans is both a warning and inspiration for how to navigate a chaotic future. I moved back to Cincinnati in 2013 for professional and family reasons, and I’ve now lived back here almost as long as I lived in New Orleans. As a lifelong Ohioan, Louisiana is the only other place I’ve ever built a life, and I carry a bit of New Orleans in my heart always.

I’ve been back to New Orleans a couple times since moving back to Ohio, but the trip  back for this year’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Section conference hit me right in the Feelings Department. The 10-year anniversary of my job offer at Tulane also meant that I’ve been an archivist for a decade. In 2008 I took my first leap into archives in New Orleans, and in 2018 here I am, back in the same city where I got my start, presenting about the impacts of climate change on the profession. I go up for tenure later this year, which comes with all of its own anxieties. Cincinnati is my home – it’s where my family lives, my roots are, where I have a house, and where my husband and I are very deliberately cultivating our communities for the long haul. But I’m so profoundly grateful that even several years later, New Orleans still feels like a very familiar second home.

New Orleans is not an easy place to live in. When I moved down in 2008, I had to evacuate just a couple months later for the first mandatory evacuation after Katrina. I rode out another hurricane a few years later, but my now-husband’s apartment lost power for several nights. The heat was insomnia inducing, to the point where we had to go visit some wealthy family friends with a generator out in the suburbs just so I could sleep for a few hours. When my husband and I had been back in Cincinnati for several months, at one point we turned to each other and said, “We haven’t had to boil our water for several months.”  My salary in New Orleans was just a hair above the poverty line, and there was a house down the street from my second apartment in the Lower Garden District where a man had been murdered in a mistaken identity drug dealing ordeal. I jogged past it early on the mornings I would go for a run, and I tried not to look at the front door very hard.

But the thing about New Orleans is that there is no place like it on Earth. I sewed a new costume every year for Mardi Gras. I learned how to cook red beans and rice. I was too poor to drink good beer, so Miller High Life will always taste like a damn good night out. My friends and I made bike maps of the city, organized zines in the info shop, and baked each other deliberately ugly birthday cakes and beautiful homemade king cakes. I doubt I ever went more than a week or two without dancing at some live music. Before I moved in with the man I eventually married, I had four roommates – three of whom were locals. One, the daughter of a shrimping family, helped me find out my shellfish allergy wasn’t as bad as I thought it was and I’ve been safely eating shrimp and crawfish since. One made the best damn gumbo I’ve ever had and then his family guided me through my first Passover Seder. One would bring home fresh soy milk her mother made a few miles away in New Orleans East. I learned a lot about how to be sensitive to an entire city’s collective trauma around being drowned and forgotten. “Y’all” entered my vocabulary and has never left since, and I hope it never will.

It felt so good and so right last week to see old colleagues and friends, dance to brass bands, eat the kind of food that the Midwest can never manage to turn out, and sweat in the ubiquitous sauna heat of the city. This country – this world – is profoundly lucky to have New Orleans. And I feel so fortunate I got to experience it first hand for the time that I did.

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Congratulations, Ireland

(I originally wrote this on Facebook on May 26, 2018, the day my Irish sisters, brothers, and cousins voted to repeal the country’s abortion ban. And now Argentina might be moving in a similar direction. As the US slides into ever more repression of women’s basic human rights, it’s been a joy to witness these victories across the world.)

I’ve been crying on and off with joy and thankfulness since Ireland voted to repeal its abortion ban. I’m so glad to report that it looks like the tiny village of Gurteen in County Sligo, where my branch of the Tanseys came from, went narrowly for the Yes to repeal, by just a few dozen votes. I wrote a long reflection last night trying to figure out why I couldn’t stop bawling my eyes out. Here it is:

On the evening of the 2016 federal election, my dad was the one who phoned to tell me the election was called for Trump. I had gone into a total media blackout after finishing up my duties as a poll worker. I guess that after busting my ass for more than 12 hours to do my part for participatory democracy, I’m glad I learned the shittiest global news of 2016 from someone I love rather than from a TV screen.

Today I got to deliver equally dramatic election news to my father, but I’m glad to say it was far more joyful: that Ireland repealed its abortion ban. I had a much more emotional reaction to this than I anticipated – I saw the exit polls saying the vote to repeal was almost certain as I was getting home from work, and I started crying in the middle of the sidewalk before I even walked through the door.

I think, in large part, my emotional reaction is because of my father.

My dad carries a lot of identities, but probably the most consistent one is that of being an Irish-American. He has a picture of Ben Bulben as his laptop wallpaper. He has an old faded map of the counties of Ireland hanging on his wall. He has shelves and shelves of books about Irish and Irish-American history. He constantly rants about the Notre Dame “fighting Irish” mascot and the phrase “paddy wagons”: both are profoundly offensive to Brian Tansey. The only thing he finds more offensive than Irish stereotypes are people like Bill O’Reilly: Irish-Americans who forgot what kind of discrimination Irish immigrants once faced in the US, but who now turn around and spit on today’s immigrants.

My dad is old enough (85) to have briefly experienced the old-school anti-Irish sentiment that once circulated in bourgie WASP circles, and still talks about the time he got called a “mick” when he was attending Columbia University in the 50s. My dad schooled me on Irish-American history starting with coffin ships up through Irish-American city ward machine politics, and it was threaded through with tons of colorful family legends: like how when James Tansey left County Sligo in the 1890s with his buddy for Liverpool’s docks, they were stumped on where to go next. The coin flip decision turned up America – otherwise it was Australia.

And as if you needed any further proof of how seriously my dad takes his Irish-American identity, well, uh, he’s the one who named me “Eira.” Which, at least in my dad’s telling, was a feminine homage to Éire (the Irish word for Ireland). I’ve yet to find any scholars who can verify this as an accurate variation. Oh well, it’s on the birth certificate. And so every day, when I have to spell out my name on the phone or have someone ask me about it’s origins, I’m reminded that a larger part of my genealogy traces to Ireland, and that my Dad sure wanted me to be reminded of this every day until I expire.

My dad and I have travelled to Ireland together, twice. The first time was when I was studying abroad at the University of Sheffield back in 2006, and the second time was when I was living in New Orleans, in 2011. Both times we got a car and drove up to County Sligo where our Irish ancestors came from. On our most recent trip, we visited the tiny village of Gurteen in County Sligo where Dad’s grandfather came from. We visited with Father Joe, the parish priest, who took us on a tour of the area and pulled out some marriage records from his office desk that mentioned some of our family names. Father Joe even helped us meet and connect to some distant relatives. Dad still talks about the salmon dinner Father Joe served us, I still remember the Guinness pints we drank at the bar where there were pictures of the local darts team with men who had the last name Tansey and the same dark curly hair as mine.

With our newly found relatives! 02

While we were there, it was very clear that the country was moving apart from the church. This was when the Irish leadership and the Dail were told telling the Vatican off for their handling of the child abuse scandals. The stories of how generations of Irish women were systematically abused at the hands of the Catholic laundries were well-known. Ireland was definitely finding its way to an identity that stood apart from Catholicism. It was so affirming to see Ireland resoundingly and democratically pass gay marriage a few years ago. And now this? Y’all. I’m so happy.

Where I live in Ohio, it’s a never-ending horror show of how much politicians want to destroy women’s fundamental human rights to bodily autonomy. I have no doubt that if Pence and Kasich have their way, they would immediately try to create their own 8th Amendment in the United States. Goodness knows they’ve both tried everything up to that point in Indiana and Ohio. I’ve been mulling over what my moral responsibilities will be to my fellow women, and wondering how much we’ll have to relearn the lessons of the Jane Collective. Or more likely, Women on Web, which has helped many Irish women obtain an abortion in the last several years.

Victories for women’s fundamental human rights are so precious and rare these days. Every day I am reminded that I live in a country that profoundly hates women, that does not trust women, and that is led by men who only value women as grabbable pussies or as reproductive chattel.

To see that there is a country in the world today where a majority of voters cast a vote to trust women as opposed to inscribing hatred for them is extremely moving. And tracing some of my own background to Ireland makes me feel a profound connection to all the women whose stories were never told, many of whom suffered terribly, but whose work reverberates across the generations.

Thank you, Ireland, for giving us a bit of light in these dark times. I am so proud, but more importantly, I am inspired.

Guinness Storehouse

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Citizenship for our sanity and safety, Part 2

(Part 1)

Several months ago, I learned about John Hersey’s epic essay, “Hiroshima.” Hersey, a reporter in Japan between 1945-1946, interviewed several survivors of the atomic bombing. His magnificent essay appeared in the August 31, 1946 issue of the New Yorker, and was the focus of the entire issue. In typical New Yorker practice, the cheerful cover (illustrated by Charles E. Martin), gives no hint to what is in the following pages. Published just over a year after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hersey’s essay bore witness to the instantaneous deaths of more than 100,000 men, women and children, and the nightmarish hell the survivors navigated in the hours and weeks after the bombing.

I’m not sure when I learned about Hersey’s essay, but as soon as I did, I filed it away for when I knew I would have a couple uninterrupted hours to read it (yes, it takes that long; the essay is also a 160 page short book that’s been in print for decades). You can read it on the New Yorker website.

On a recent bus ride from Cincinnati to Chicago, I finally got around to reading it. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a more moving account of anything in my life, from the small graces most of us possess, to the way we harden our hearts and close our ears and eyes to others suffering more than us, to the way we traverse all the emotions in between in about five minutes. And yet, this is not any ordinary backdrop: it is a story in which a woman’s skin comes off her hand like a glove, in which men’s eyes have melted out of their sockets, in which a woman carries her dead baby for four days hoping her missing husband will be able to see them before the cremation. It is a story that is anything but universal, because less than 200,000 people are still living today who have ever witnessed being so close to the heat of the sun. Every day we run the risk that an accident could go terribly wrong, or men could become terribly vindictive. The tally of 200,000 witnesses could grow by several zeroes in an instant.

But today, only 0.00002% of the world’s population can tell you what it was like to live through cruelest human experiment ever conducted by science’s most brilliant minds.

A few days after I read “Hiroshima,” news broke that John Bolton is going to be the new national security advisor. The Bush administration was bad enough, but bringing back the greatest villains from those terrible eight years is just too much. Bolton is a batshit madman who is the living embodiment of “some men just want to watch the world burn.” And a week later, we were bombing Syria because Trump felt like he had to back up his bombastic tweets with military action (and I felt more secure than ever that I made the right decision to leave Twitter, given its role as a platform for war-mongering).

Last year, I felt that my rights were hanging on by the thinnest of threads. I still feel that way, but I’ve also been mentally preparing myself for what I’ll do if and when the worst happens with the judiciary destroying everything I hold dear. But lately, at annual events like family holidays or professional conferences, I have a fleeting thought that whispers around the edges. I wonder if something so unspeakably bad will happen, plunging our country into some kind of civil war, that it would prevent us from gathering together again next year.

Going back and reading what I wrote last year, it’s clear I’m struggling to define and come to terms with ideas of citizenship and patriotism. They are concepts often profoundly opposed to one another. Although citizenship is far too often constructed as state-sanctioned legal residence, I’ve begun to appreciate that citizenship encompasses a much more holistic set of experiences than patriotism. One can be a citizen of a state, a city, their neighborhood, their nation, or the planet Earth. Citizenship implies personhood and identity (often in multiple instances), but patriotism implies a certain set of practices oriented around principles of defense. Citizenship is a concept that, in my mind, transcends boundaries and can exist within a borderless world. But patriotism is inherently bound up in the idea of the nation-state (you wouldn’t say your neighbor who picks up the litter in your neighborhood is a good patriot, but you would likely say they are a good citizen). And the geographically-bounded notion of patriotism and the nation-state is where patriotism begins to break down for me.

Historian Christian Appy has said “patriotism means never having to say you’re sorry.” After I read Hersey’s essay, I read a little bit about how it was received at the time. Apparently many people read it and wanted to know how much the victims of the bombings blamed Americans, and many were relieved to learn that many of the victims did not blame Americans. I guess discourse about collective trauma, responsibility, truth and reconciliation have come a long way since then, but it’s still a telling clue to how guilt is the essential magnetic force that orients our moral compasses.

When you remove a sense of guilt, you remove an obligation to apologize. Guilt and patriotism do not easily coexist. So instead we tell ourselves that the ends justify the means, that incinerating hundreds of thousands of people who don’t look like us is always a justifiable cost to spare American lives. That having the misfortune to be born in the wrong place in the wrong time in history on the wrong side of America means that you’ll never get an apology when our country fucks up. Hiroshima and Nagasaki took place decades ago, but similar body counts from the insistence on protecting American lives at any cost are still with us.

We are told by our parents at a young age to say we’re sorry when we hurt someone, but when we acquire the means to the most anodyne deadly weapon most of us have – a car – the advice changes. Insurance companies say, “Do not discuss whose fault it was (even saying “I’m sorry” may be considered an admission).” Lawyers and insurance companies advise us that if we screw up, if we hurt someone, if we hit a car, that we should not apologize. Because to apologize would be to admit guilt. And admitting something can be used against you.

It’s no wonder that saying sorry does not come easily to us, and that we cloak our refusal to say we’re sorry under a thicket of legal excuses and justification. It’s not just the US government. It’s our entire culture.

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This machine coddles fascists (or, why I’m leaving Twitter)

President Trump has engaged in utterly disturbing verbal threats of nuclear war for months, and on January 2 he escalated it to this:

Despite Twitter’s recent efforts to rein in the hellscape it has created, it still gives a pass to the President because he is noteworthy, because of loopholes created for military and government officials, and because Twitter somehow believes that enabling bellicose threats is part of “necessary discussion.”

If you really want the honest truth of why Twitter will never ban Donald Trump from its service, you don’t need to read their public relations statements. Read what they tell the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Twitter is a company that measures its success by how many active users (measured by both monthly and daily metrics, aka MAUs and DAUs) it has. Looking at their most recent SEC filing, it’s clear that the company is working on increasing daily active user activity – likely because they’ve probably hit saturation points with how many new users are using the system. SEC filings require companies to disclose risks, and Twitter states:

If we fail to grow our user base, or if user engagement or ad engagement on our platform decline, our revenue, business and operating results may be harmed.

The size of our user base and our users’ level of engagement are critical to our success. We had 330 million average MAUs in the three months ended September 30, 2017, representing approximately a 4% increase from 317 million average MAUs in the three months ended September 30, 2016 (see “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations – Note About Our MAU Adjustment” above). DAUs for the three months ended September 30, 2017 increased 14% year over year. Our financial performance has been and will continue to be significantly determined by our success in growing the number of users and increasing their overall level of engagement on our platform as well as the number of ad engagements. We anticipate that our user growth rate will continue to slow over time as the size of our user base increases. […] If people do not perceive our products and services to be useful, reliable and trustworthy, we may not be able to attract users or increase the frequency of their engagement with our platform and the ads that we display.

Twitter then goes on to state the following, something which is so brazen in its denial of the problem it has created, it’s actually kind of amazing (emphasis mine):

“[…]if we are not able to address user concerns regarding the safety and security of our products and services or if we are unable to successfully prevent abusive or other hostile behavior on our platform, the size of our user base and user engagement may decline. We rely on the sale of advertising services for the substantial majority of our revenue and a decline in the number of users, user growth rate, or user engagement, including as a result of the loss of world leaders, government officials, celebrities, athletes, journalists, sports teams, media outlets and brands who generate content on Twitter, advertisers [sic] may deter new advertisers from using our products or services or cause current advertisers to reduce their spending with us or cease doing business with us, which would harm our business and operating results.”

None of this is shocking or surprising for a company that notes the “substantial majority of our revenue is currently generated from third parties advertising on Twitter.” So when I see Twitter banning Next Door Neighbor Nazis and not banning Trump, I see Twitter trying to have it both ways: attempting to show they’re “doing something,” but also doubling-down on the fact that “world leaders and government officials” are the cash cows that keep on driving engagement. In other words, Twitter does not distinguish between any world leaders threatening nuclear annihilation and world leaders attempting to keep us from sliding into the gates of hell. They are simply content generators, like the rest of us, that lead to advertising. Global consequences be damned.

#####

After the 2016 presidential election, many people implored us to determine where our line was. To identify where angels fear to tread among where there be dragons. To draw a line in the sand. We were cautioned against letting the unthinkable become normalized, that doing so would be to cede the grounds of not only the American democratic process, but our basic humanity.

The problem with this framing is that it conjured up scenes of going up against the barricades, of hoping that the US would suddenly be inspired to go on a general strike when most folks had never marched around and chanted. It set up expectations that America’s citizens would run a marathon when most of us were still learning to walk for the first time.

Over the last year I feel like I’ve been plunged back into being a teenager – when my political baptism was protest against the Iraq War. My country invaded Iraq before I could vote. When I was 17, I somehow convinced my boring west-side-of-Cincinnati Episcopal church to kick in some money to help fund a bus of protesters to go to DC. I spent many dreary afternoons shouting chants on a street corner I can see from the windows of the library that I work at 14 years later.

As the war drums start beating again, there is at least one line that has become increasingly uncomfortable for me over the last several days. I can no longer use a platform serving as a propaganda outlet for normalizing and trivializing the horrors of nuclear war. This is why I’m leaving Twitter, after using it regularly for over seven years.

Twitter is clearly committed to amplifying the voice of a racist demagogue with impulse control and the unilateral authority to launch nuclear weapons, and this is in direct conflict with my opposition to war and militarism. The President clearly has many platforms he can use to spread his propaganda besides Twitter – George W. Bush certainly managed to do so well before the advent of social media. By not shutting this down, Twitter is saying is that there is no line in the sand for them; that allowing their service to become a tool of nuclear propaganda is preferable to any possible alternative.

Nuclear proliferation is often discussed in coldly clinical supply-chain terminology. Some state acquired uranium, another is expanding testing of missile delivery systems, etc etc. What gets left out of deterrence game theory bullshit is that banging on the war drums constitutes a form of nuclear proliferation by repeatedly putting the option on the table. As we get further away from the cultural memory of what it means to industrialize war, to efficiently kill thousands (really, millions) of people, joshing about having a nuclear button that is “much bigger,” “more powerful,” and “works” just goes to show that the very person with the unilateral authority to annihilate much of the planet within minutes is treating global holocaust like a fucking game.

#####

Deciding to leave Twitter is not easy. I’ve taken several breaks from Twitter before, typically during Lent. After a while, I don’t miss it that much. But I’ve always hesitated to cut the cord entirely for two reasons: Twitter has undeniably helped me accumulate a lot of social capital in my profession, and it’s been one of the most efficient and fun methods of professional networking I’ve ever found.

Archivist Twitter is a real thing, and it’s been a huge part of my professional identity formation. I joined Twitter right around the time I decided that being an archivist was the career path I would set out on. I used Twitter to follow archives conferences before I started attending them, and then I used Twitter at my first SAA to network. I’ve lost count of the number of conversations that start “hey I follow you on Twitter…”

On Twitter, I’ve found professional development opportunities, cultivated new collaborations, learned so much about my profession’s history and culture, and forged affirming and wonderful friendships that are the real deal, with people I’ve broken bread with offline, who I know will be in my life for a very long time. I strongly suspect that a lot of the public profile I’ve built within my field has been thanks to my presence on Twitter. Walking away from that is really hard.

I know how silly this must sound to people who haven’t had this experience with Twitter. Even though I’ve received some pretty ugly harassment on Twitter, my good experiences outweigh the bad. And that’s why it’s taken me months now to come to terms with exiting a service that clearly does not give a shit about the safety and stability of the world at large. I don’t know what my career will look like without the networking and informational capabilities of Twitter, or how promoting my work will change without Twitter. That’s scary in a culture that emphasizes rapid engagement, developing a voice (the nice writer word for brand), and being easy to reach for any opportunity that might land in your lap.

#####

I’ve been thinking a lot about Quaker war tax resistance. Not because I think my decision is on the level with tax resistance, but because it’s about withdrawing one’s personal participation in the normalization of war machinery. On and off throughout history, many Quakers refused to pay taxes that fund militarism. This has often been at great cost to their livelihoods, liberty, and economic security.

I find the history of tax resistance refreshing within a current leftist atmosphere that tries to decouple personal individual morality from the political organizing work of dismantling larger systems of oppression. It’s a mistake for us to assume that choices made to reflect a personal moral stance are synonymous with the organizing work that dismantles oppression. Sometimes it’s a good thing just to make a moral choice that allows one to live with an easier conscience, even if the only person it “makes a difference to” is a single individual.

The phrase “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is true. But it’s not an excuse to step away from examining one’s life choices, and too many people treat it as one. You must start somewhere.

We’ve confused Twitter for a commons because it is fantastic at helping us find voices we wouldn’t encounter otherwise, which makes it easy to ignore that Twitter has been enclosed from day one because its only real goal is to make money. To continue to participate in the only form of capital it has – regular participation that drives advertising – is to enable its continuance as a platform that trades in bigotry, undermines democratic processes, and now, reaps money from the proliferation of nuclear threats.

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Listening to Women

[Content warning: brief references to sexual harassment/assault & current media coverage]

Two or three times a week, I go to the campus rec center early to exercise before work. Even though I love the repetitive monotony of the rowing machines, I generally do not row much these days because the rowing machines are in front of a million televisions playing CNN/Fox/ESPN/NBC/ABC/CBS. The sound is turned off, but the ocean of chyron shit is not how I like to start my day.

So I tend to exercise in the parts of the facility that aren’t in front of a million TVs. I often run on the indoor track, but sometimes when I’m feeling lazy, I walk on a treadmill so I can zone out and listen to a podcast. There are treadmills that don’t face the bank of chyron shit, but unfortunately too many new treadmills are souped up with built-in TVs that start up automatically before you can change it to something more benign, like an image of a stopwatch.

This morning I was in lazy mode, and I scrolled through my always-increasing queue of podcasts. I listen to a lot of current news podcasts, and have racked up several unplayed episodes covering the latest revelations confirming far too many men love power more than they love women. It’s too much, it’s all too much, and like many women who’ve experienced abuse and harassment in my past, I’ve mostly disengaged from the ongoing revelations beyond reading headlines. Engaging any more deeply keeps forcing open the places where I’ve packed my sadness and undiluted anger into a form that allows me to function on a daily basis. I picked a podcast about academic writing and hopped on the treadmill.

And no sooner do I hop on the treadmill than the built-in TV starts up with the TODAY show, and my jaw drops when I see what’s going down. There is no more wild distillation of the period we are in than to see Matt Lauer’s women co-anchors announce why he isn’t there. I grab my phone and take a picture of it because every time I think 2017 can’t get any more intense I take a picture or a screenshot, as if documenting all the bullshit insanity could make it stop.

I thought for a second about posting it on social media, and then I remembered how I don’t want to contribute to the problem I, and many other women, are trying to escape from: that most men (given the overwhelming majorities of women who are abused by an intimate partner or harassed by someone she knows) do not love us, do not value our safety, and do not acknowledge our personhood. We know this, and most of us are not shocked by any of this, because we’ve experienced it from men everyone else thought were “the good ones.”

I don’t know that there has ever been a time in patriarchal culture when it hasn’t been hard to be a woman. But the last two months has been an undeniably difficult period to be a woman. I don’t know how this all will end, and maybe thinking there is an end, as if there is a linear story here, is part of our collective delusion.

Since the post-Weinstein effect got rolling, I think I’ve read virtually every essay about women and anger. They speak to me, and I carry the image of Beyoncé smashing in the windows of men’s cars in my heart, all the time. There is a part of my rage that undeniably takes a small helping of solace knowing that powerful men are scared, that many are nervous that their bill will soon come due. But the fragment that’s stayed with me most was from Rebecca Traister’s essay:

…it’s easy to conclude that this moment actually isn’t radical enough, because it’s limited to sexual grievances. One 60-year-old friend, who is single and in a precarious professional situation, says, “I’m burning with rage watching some assholes pose as good guys just because they never put their hands on a colleague’s thigh, when I know for a fact they’ve run capable women out of workplaces in deeply gendered ways. I’m very frustrated, because I’m not in a position right now to spill some beans.”

Online and offline, I’ve been saying over and over that one of the most important things people can do if they care about women is to proactively consume, cite, and promote the work of women. Because all of these stories are not just about getting your ass grabbed, they’re about who has visibility. They are about who gets more bylines (men), who gets more invitations to keynote (men), who gets more citations (men), who gets installed in the cannon (men). They are the stories of who we listen to, and who we regard as authorities.

You often hear a lot of people say at times like this, “listen to women.” And while yes, obviously, duh…. to my ears, this phrase positions listening to women as a choice. It betrays an acknowledgement of the reality that, as a rule, our culture does not choose to listen to women. It especially does not listen to women of color and poor women.

One of the most underrated beautifully radical things said by a famous woman in the last few years is when Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that the Supreme Court would have enough female justices when it has nine of them. I think about this all the time, and it is powerful as fuck because no one has the choice but to listen to the Supreme Court.

When I talk about how people should consider only reading books by women, or some other avenue of basically transferring their attention from the works of men to the works of women, this is what I’m getting at. I’ve recently learned that some men in my life who talk a good game about supporting women are beyond threatened by this idea, implying that I’m advocating shutting out their voices. The insinuation is that women owe men their attention. It isn’t clear in this equation what, exactly, men owe women to overcome generations worth of hoarding intellectual, legal, and cultural authority.

Is it because they are worried they won’t be writing the stories any longer?

That they won’t be the editors?

And that today’s fact-checkers, today’s women, aren’t afraid to demand an honest story?

 

 

 

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Semi-Annual Review, June 2017 edition

Someone in library/archives land used to do a periodic review of their life’s work on their website, and while I can’t remember who it was, it’s an idea I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I maintain a detailed yearly activity report for my day job, but no one really sees that beyond a few people. I thought it’d be nice to maintain a public record of what I’ve been busy with that includes not just my salaried work, but the work I do at home and in my local community, which are as much a part of my identity as being an archivist. Sorry (not sorry) that this is long, I’m a busy gal.

Work at UC: A lot of the records management work I do has dramatically shifted in the last several months after I put out the first university-wide general records schedule. It’s been an invaluable resource, and it’s spreading greater awareness of records management obligations at my institution. As a records manager, I frequently get asked to step into interesting roles concerning compliance at the university (like serving on search committees in the administrative side of university life, or reviewing procurement proposals for information systems). I always appreciate that I have a window into higher education administration, because it’s a perspective I don’t think many faculty often see.

I also took over the reins of our library’s Digital Preservation Policy working group recently, and it’s been an exercise in realizing how many digital preservation policies at other institutions are a) based on this model and b) are focus-format driven as opposed to content-driven (I cannot be convinced that format alone should drive appraisal and preservation decisions). I’m kind of throwing out the play book and drafting our own policy, because I want it to serve areas of the library that include both central and decentralized approaches to digitization and born-digital work, and also comprehensible to people who are not digital professionals. Later this summer, I hope to finally write down the workflows I’ve started putting in to place for handling incoming born-digital materials within my unit.

I was recently accepted to ALI, and my practicum proposal is to develop a better method for acquiring student archives, since our university archives is very administration-focused. I’m really excited about spending a week in Berea with a bunch of smart people.

Work in the profession: I’m moving up into Chair this year for SAA’s Records Management Section. I think we’re one of the more active SAA sections, thanks to the recent leadership of recent chairs, especially Beth Cron and Brad Houston. I’m also serving as the Midwest Archives Conference 2018 Chicago Conference program committee co-chair, along with Daria Labinsky. We’re working on getting the CFP out before SAA, and I’m confident it will be an amazing conference.

I’ve been the Resident Caretaker of ProjectARCC (Archivists Responding to Climate Change) since the November presidential election, and for a while was hosting standing monthly conference calls where people could dial in and share what environmental cultural heritage stuff they were working on. I also tried to coordinate a thing called Project mARCCh to get librarians and archivists to turn out at the March for Science and People’s Climate March. Fellow #AdventureArchivist Stephanie Bennett and I marched together in the People’s Climate March in DC which was exactly the form of group therapy and group exercise I hadn’t realized I needed so badly.

People frequently ask “What is ProjectARCC doing about this?” and I have to explain that ProjectARCC isn’t really a cohesive organization right now, but a leaderless entity that people can have the freedom to do whatever they want with, as long as they aren’t assholes about it. For example, I’m seriously considering launching a podcast under the ProjectARCC banner. For the time being though, a couple of us occasionally check the blog and social media accounts. So when folks ask, “Would ProjectARCC consider doing XYZ?” I typically encourage them to write up a plan and go for it. (NB: people are far more likely to suggest things than to follow through on implementing them).

What I’m writing/researching/editing/speaking about:
My main solo writing project at the moment is trying to tease apart the way in which records and the legal emphasis on documentary forms were (are) an integral part of white colonial settlement of American land, pre-and post-Revolution land tenure, and the dispossession of indigenous lands. So I’m learning about things like surveys, land titles, and treaties, all within the context of American history between the 16th-19th century. I quickly realized that I have a shockingly limited understanding of native history, and I’m kind of worried about fucking this up as a non-native white person. So I’m trying to take my time, go slow, and prioritize reading as much material by native writers and scholars as by white historians. The very rough draft will be the paper I give at SAA (Session 107) and I am planning to send off a manuscript by September.

Work continues with my Penn State colleagues on mapping archives’ exposure to climate change. Ben Goldman and I were awarded an SAA Foundation grant to begin building a comprehensive data set of archival repository location data. The museum community is way ahead of the game with the Museum Universe Data File, but there is no analogous data set for archives. Capacity to do spatial analysis of archives is severely hindered without such a data set. The data set we’ve been using for our mapping work comes from OCLC, but it way overrepresents research-institution based archives.

I’ve been speaking a lot this year, which is great because I LOVE doing it, but it’s also a lot of work. I generally do not give the same talk twice (because it’s boring, and because jetting around to give the exact same talk is an appalling waste of fossil fuels), which means whenever I’m asked to do one, I’m writing a new talk, slide deck, etc. I’m really proud of the talks I gave at PASIG and as part of the Beinecke Speaker Series.

I made my first foray into non-academic writing recently, and published this piece about experiencing weird weather as a Midwesterner in Belt. I’ve long admired Belt for providing an incredible outlet for regional writing, and good gravy did it feel good to get paid for my words after only experiencing the gift economy of academic writing. All praise to fellow archivist Stacie Williams who helped me navigate the world of freelance writing.

At home: My husband and I recently bought a beautiful 1930s brick cottage in one of Cincinnati’s old streetcar suburbs. My two main criteria were “must be on a direct bus line to work” and “not in a flood zone.” Transitioning from renting to first-time homebuyers has been a wild experience that provokes a lot of hand-wringing about The Future, permanency, and economic security. Cincinnati has always been my home, and it feels good to put down some permanent roots as I enter my 30s. Our friends are really important to us, and a huge priority in finding a house was enough space for our friends to come over and just hang out. I have a bit of a yard now, and am trying to figure out a long-term plan for landscaping and gardening. We’re considering replacing the front lawn with native plants because a) fuck mowing and b) pollinators need all the help they can get.

In my local community: For the last couple years I’ve been involved with a local Planned Parenthood supporters group, and I’m not exaggerating when I say the women in the group are critical to maintaining my sanity. Ohio has been in dire straits for years now with regards to reproductive healthcare, and it’s probably only going to get worse. We’ve had a noticeable uptick in volunteers and requests for tabling since the election. I’m winding down my 2-year stint at Secretary for my Toastmasters club. I say No to a lot of requests from my local faith, civic, and activist communities in order to protect my non-work time for the decompression I need plus time with my husband/parents/friends. I don’t really feel guilty about it anymore but it does feel kind of weird to be saying No to otherwise very cool projects on a regular basis.

Self-care: I’ve been good about waking up to go to the gym early, but I’m still working on getting to bed early enough every night. But…surprise, somehow I have been doing way less hiking now that I’m not going out once a month like I did last year when I section-hiked the Sheltowee Trace. I’m getting a little squishier around the middle than I typically prefer, and I really miss the forced highly oxygenated focus of being in the woods all day, so I’m planning to re-hike the ST again next year. A friend and I backpacked in a state forest right after the Paris Agreement withdrawal, and it was incredibly therapeutic to sleep in the woods where the wind sings you to sleep and birds wake you up in the morning. It was also a good dry run for a backpacking trip a friend and I have planned in Yosemite next month (yes, we got a permit!!!)

What I’m currently obsessed with: I recently went to the Georgia O’Keefe exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum and it was mind-blowingly great. I didn’t know she sewed many of her clothes, and in my dream world, some woman-owned clothing business would reproduce and sell the beautiful white tunics and shirts she made so I can have a Georgia O’Keefe wardrobe.

I also recently discovered The Effort Report podcast, which features two professors talking about academic work life. The episodes get super into the weeds, and the perspectives are heavily STEM-skewed (a good example is this actually-quite-interesting episode on indirect costs), but the topics are great: time management, research productivity, and prioritizing the various forms of work demanded in a research institution. And in important food news, I finally tried some Albanese gummy bears and they are next level.

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Pack Your Bags Archivist Style

Between late March and mid-May, I attended three conferences (Chicago, Omaha, New York), marched in one protest (Washington DC), and gave one invited talk (Yale). I’ve always been a pretty good trip packer, but after all this travel I have it down to a science. Now I feel the need to help people save themselves from their worst packing instincts.

I have always been a light packer (I once traveled an entire week in frigid December Berlin with just a purse and a small duffel bag), and my experience section-hiking a 300+ mile trail last year made me even more ruthless about packing. Hikers take a lot of pride in finding ways to shave ounces off their load, and not bringing home anything they didn’t use at least once (and preferably multiple times) on the trail. I try to apply the same philosophy to packing for any personal or business travel, especially if it involves flying.

Flying is a totally unbelievable hellscape, and packing lightly is one of the few things within one’s increasingly narrow window of control I can make choices about that helps me maintain some notion of sanity. I have the same packing practices whether I’m on vacation or work.

Like IUDs, packing lightly is one of those things people tend to obnoxiously evangelize without realizing it’s not possible for all people (folks with medical equipment, parents with small children, etc). So I should preface this by saying when I pack, I really only have to worry about myself. Whenever I travel with my husband, the most entangled our packing gets is sharing a bottle of contact lens solution.

  • Start with good luggage

Buy the best luggage you can possibly afford, and if you have the physical ability, choose a squishy bag that can convert into a backpack instead of a roll-aboard. I am a big fan of a smaller squishy bag because the gate agent rarely makes you gate check it, you can jam it into the smallest overhead bins, it’s easier to make a mad dash across an airport terminal with something on your back than dragging behind you, and roll-aboards are almost too much room.

Bad luggage eventually becomes demoralizing if you travel often. A few years ago the handle on my crappy roll aboard totally fell apart on the D.C. Metro right before SAA. There are good carry-on rolling suitcases out there, but I prefer to save them for super long trips where I don’t want to do laundry, or road trips. My main MO is to bring my main bag for clothing and shoes, and a smaller everyday bag for my “daily” items. Since I often do not stay at the conference hotel, the everyday bag has to contain my electronics, a water bottle, notebooks, a couple snacks, and room for a light sweater and be light enough to carry for a 15 minute walk from my hotel.

It’s expensive as hell, but I finally started buying good luggage and bags primarily for my work travel. I really like Tom Bihn (and it’s made in the USA), and I’m currently using the Western Flyer and the Co-Pilot.

  • Join the cult of packing cubes

Packing cubes seem like total bullshit until you start using them to corral your clothes (basically anything that can be rolled up like a burrito) and then you NEVER. GO. BACK.

They are like some combination of Felix the Cat’s bag of tricks plus the Chronicles of Narnia wardrobe where you can somehow keep on squeezing things into them that you can’t otherwise squeeze into the intimidatingly narrow space of a small squishy space of your main clothing bag. I have a set of them, but I usually just use 1 or 2.

Because a huge part of my travel experience is informed by “How much will TSA make my life unpleasant at the airport?” Packing cubes have the additional advantage of preventing the indignity of having your underwear catapult itself over some germy inspection table the second you start unzipping your bag.

  • Unless it’s made of paper, pack everything else in pouches or ziploc bags

Just like packing cubes corral all your clothing, you need to corral your other gadgets, tchotchkes, geegaws, and flotsam. I have little zippered pouches I use for makeup, snacks, pencils, cords and chargers, and essentials (wallet/phone/transit card). I store my shoes I’m not wearing in drawstring cloth bags so they don’t get grossness over other stuff. I use two ziploc bags for toiletries (dry and TSA-screening). That bag on the bottom comes from archivist Allana Meyer’s shop where she donates proceeds to the SAA Mosaic Scholarship.

  • If you must be separated from your suitcase, pack a toothbrush and clean pair of underwear in the bag you keep with you.

Once upon a time, I got caught in an awful delay/red-eye/layover mess that almost led to me missing a friends wedding. I didn’t have access to my main luggage, and not being able to change at least one article of clothing or brush my teeth made the entire experience that much more miserable.

  • You don’t need as many outfits as you think

If you are smart about what you pack, immediately hang up your clothes to air out, and hand wash the ones that get stinky, you can often get away with 4 outfits even if you’re at a conference for a week (your plane outfit*, a work-casual outfit, a work-work outfit, and a dressy work outfit). If you really need to, at some point you can do laundry. Many hotels have a washer/dryer, you can find a laundromat, or you can use drop-off service.

Let me explain the plane outfit. This is what you wear from leaving your house to your destination and vice versa. This should strike some combination of comfy enough in case you suddenly find yourself in airport purgatory, flexible enough that if you have to sprint to your gate you can, quick enough to delayer and deshoe at security, but also protective enough that you don’t feel even more violated if TSA pulls you out for a pat-down.

I wear skirts and dresses for probably 3/4 of my waking hours, but I always wear jeans and sneakers when I go to an airport. Once in a while TSA selects me for state-sanctioned bodily assault an enhanced pat-down, and I shudder to think of how much more invasive this would almost certainly be in a skirt.

This is actually what my fully packed suitcase looks like:

  • Rethink what electronics you really need to bring

Laptops are heavy. I’ve stopped bringing mine because it’s not worth the weight. When I’m at a conference, I don’t need that much computing power. And depending on where you fly, you might be restricted from traveling with one anyway.

Are you tired of me talking about TSA yet? Well so am I. You probably know that airports are the new testing ground for how much bullshit the combined powers of capitalism, policing, and surveillance can get away with, whether we’re talking about your right to travel in the first place, your right to not be shamed for your body or groped by some blue-gloved stranger in a uniform, or your right to privacy, especially the privacy of your digital life.

So far, it seems like most of the searches of people’s digital lives are taking place in the context of international flights, through CBP. CBP currently has the legal right to search your personal digital effects due to the greatly expanded powers for doing searches within areas of the US border (PSA: if you want to protect your digital privacy while traveling internationally, this guide from the EFF can help) To be clear, CBP is a different agency from TSA with different policies and procedures, though they are both part of the Department of Homeland Security. That said, my personal experiences with TSA are so abysmal that it would not surprise me if they begin to push for expanded power to search people’s digital lives even for domestic travel.

For the last few months, I’ve been traveling with minimal digital data whenever I have to fly. If you do any kind of activism, or are friends with any activists, please consider carrying only the minimal data you need when you travel lest you find yourself in a situation where the Fourth Amendment no longer seems to apply. You may also want to consider having dedicated travel devices, like a Chromebook or a pay-as-you-go mobile phone.

  • Even if you don’t use cash at home, pack small bills for tipping housekeeping

If you didn’t know you were supposed to tip housekeeping every night of your stay, I’m here to inform you that you really need to do this, no excuses. If you can afford a hotel room, you can afford $5 every day for the people who clean up after you. Especially because those people are usually women who work for shockingly low wages and literally do back breaking work. Tip every day, not just at the end, because you may have different housekeeping staff at the end of your stay than at the beginning.

  • Books are the devil unless they are the size of Oxford Very Short Introductions, bring magazines instead.

I like to bring a trashy magazine along with something that’s a little smarter. I’ll let you guess which one I usually finish first.

  • Pack frou-frou items that make you feel at home (for me, it’s a bathrobe and face masks)

If you aren’t packing a full-length fluffy bathrobe, most knit or silk bathrobes pack down pretty small, and are a really nice item to have around when you want to lounge in your hotel room. My skin always looks like shit when I fly (or maybe just when I go to New York), so I like to pack some bourgie face mask stuff I can put on after I get back to my hotel room. It’s a good excuse to splurge on one of those super creepy mummy-esque sheet masks. I avoid wearing them at home lest I scare the shit out of  my husband and cat.

  • Pack something that offsets a tiny amount of the disposable culture of travel

Travel involves a horrific amount of trash. I always pack my small Nalgene bottle and a coffee mug. I also have this cute little set of reusable bamboo flatware I toss into my snack bag.

  • You are only allowed to overpack one thing, so choose wisely. I choose a couple extra pairs of clean underwear.

‘Nuff said.

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What I learned from my third annual social media fast

tl;dr: it’s all bullshit, folks, and it’s bad for ya

This is the third year I’ve done a Lenten social media fast, where I cut myself off from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. With a couple of exceptions I feel OK about, I haven’t purposefully pulled up or logged in to any social media platform services except when really necessary (i.e. I had to get in touch with someone and had no clue how to reach them through phone, email, or snail mail). And unlike past years, this year I really, really, REALLY haven’t missed social media except for a couple of fleeting moments where I thought “Hmm, wonder what archivist twitter thinks about this?” or “Hmm, this would be a really cute picture of my cat to post.” I think 2016 was the year of binging on The Internetz during the election, and in the wake of the (Electoral College) election of (Popular Vote Loser) the 45th President, I needed a fucking break. And this third fast I have felt so unbelievably free and liberated. Let me count the reasons why:

*It feels GLORIOUS to not instantly know what a shithead Trump and his merry band of mediocre white guys are. I still pay attention to the news, but there’s only so many times you can refresh the NYTimes and Guardian apps, whereas Twitter has an endless hot take firehose. Sometimes I do feel behind on the scary shit going down, but the stuff that is truly heinous usually makes it on to my radar in multiple ways (e.g., the passenger that United dragged off the plane), whereas the stuff that is more of a viral outrage du jour (e.g., a tone deaf advertising strategy) sort of shambles onto my radar once or twice before mercifully receding into the viral trash heap. I’m pretty good with the trade-off of not knowing INSTANTLY about everything in order to be able to sustain a slow burn outrage over the truly long-term bullshit that will affect us for decades, like changing the tax code, court cases, and the gutting of environmental and science programs.

*I have far too many shitty experiences with men on social media, including some men I actually know and (used to) respect who act like assholes when there’s a screen between us. I’ve often thought about setting up a folder I share with selected people (i.e. other women) of screenshots titled “Men Explain Things To Me,” but hey, living well is the best revenge. I have been semi-doxxed, insulted, harassed, and had my work erased on every social media platform I’ve ever had an account on, except instagram (probably because I mostly post pictures of my chubby alien cat and trees from my hikes). A lot of what Lindy West said in this interview resonated with me. (Also, in general I love the Twitter quitter genre)

Given that post-election there is emerging evidence of a rise in aggression against women, why should I spend my time in spaces in which women are devalued at best and actively harmed at worst? Shit, who knows when the nukes are going to start launching. I might as well spend my screen time liking instagram photos from my hair stylist who makes me and other curly-haired women around this city feel like goddesses rather than dealing with men who make me feel awful.

*And on the flip side, sometimes I can be the asshole on social media. I like not worrying if I put my foot in my mouth or offended someone because most of what I share on social media is, by default, a first draft. And often it’s a shitty first draft that ends up requiring an apology, slice of humble pie, or deep and exhausting introspection.

*My attention span returned. I can actually sit down and read long and involved complicated books and not get distracted after 5 pages. It’s amazing.

*Unlike that time I tweeted about the Ohio legislature rushing through some totally bullshit abortion legislation and it got retweeted like 2,000 times, I enjoy the feeling of not worrying that something I tweet will go viral and I’ll have to babysit it in case anyone starts making actionable threats.

After my first two social media Lenten fasts, I went right back to my normal interwebz habits. This year I’m putting some protocols in place once Lent is over, because I think I need it to recalibrate my relationship permanently with social media, especially to mentally handle an unending terrible news cycle, and continuing to focus on projects that ultimately bring me joy and meaning, rather than succumbing to an unending exercise in passive horror scrolling.

Ultimately, speaking only to my own personal experience, social media is very similar to alcohol in that it can quickly become too much of a good thing. A few years ago, I dialed back my alcohol consumption, because I didn’t like the way I acted when I drank too much, and dealing with hangovers is a ludicrously stupid waste of time. I have a set of protocols to keep myself in check, and as a result I now enjoy alcohol responsibly without turning into an asshole juggling hangovers and guilt. Similarly, I’ve found that when I’m on social media too much, I don’t like the person I turn into.

I’ve honestly entertained deleting all of my social media accounts entirely (so tempting!) however I’ve noticed that despite my repeated pleas to get my friends to holler at me about upcoming social justice-y type events (whether we’re talking local activism, or library/archives professional stuff), it somehow hasn’t taken, and the vast majority of these things are primarily shared on social media. But I don’t feel lonely – the folks I’m closest to I either see in person, call, email or text back and forth with on a pretty regular basis.

So… I’m trying to figure out what a recalibrated social media experience looks like. I’m not breaking the fast until the protocols are in place. I honestly don’t know what the answer is yet. Maybe it’s logging in once a week to do a brief check-in on upcoming events and actions, maybe it’s deleting some accounts, maybe it’s setting up a metering system to charge myself for social media use (this is probably more tracking than I want to do, but I love the concept – like a micro-tithe to the EFF or something for every time I login to twitter!) And given that social media is designed to be addictive and the favored delivery method via smart phones captures a disturbing amount of our waking hours, I realize that uh, there’s a reason why we hear a lot more about people quitting altogether than saying “Here’s how I use social media less than I did before.”

I don’t really know what the long-term answer is, beyond “whatever works for me,” but I know that this fast was really necessary, and was the reset button my brain desperately needed. I am trying to heed the words of Wendell Berry:

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

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