This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on April, 2017.

Robin Romm’s Double Bind sounds like a good book:

In her introduction, Romm, who is in her early forties, writes about her sense, as a young woman, that “striving and achieving had to be approached delicately or you risked the negative judgment of others.” She felt a pull between the hardness of her ambition and the softness of her socialization, and calls this “the double bind of the gender, success paired eternally with scrutiny and retreat.”

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“PEANUT!” Ess exclaimed ecstatically from the back seat of the car.

Our confusion gave way to realization: Ess had chewed through to the middle her of apple and saw its seeds.

Some things we eat, some things we don’t.

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At the library, Ess found a toy stethoscope. Listening to its heartbeat sounds, she asked me what it was called and I told her.

Later on she declared that she’s going to have to use the check-up-scope to make sure her stuffed penguin was OK.

Check-up-scope.

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It’s easy to breeze through the times when Ess is happy, to let her play on her own when she’s content. There are always adult things to be done: cleaning, bill-paying, paperwork, planning, reading pieces on politics, philosophy, coding… and I have noticed I tend to conflate the important tasks with the urgent tasks. I can usually complete the urgent ones while Ess plays, but with that momentum I find I am sailing into important things and then… not very important things.

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I thought it might be fun to occasionally write down which library books we’ve checked out and are reading to Ess. This is the current stack on our nightstand:

Ess went through a big “Pete the Cat” phase; now that she has those two books just about memorized, she is moving on to other things. (That’s good, because we have to return these books to the library soon.) There’s a call and response in those two Pete the Cat books:

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It turns out that if you play the 1999 hit song “Say My Name” by Destiny’s Child to Ess while driving in the car, she’ll listen to it, and then ask you to play “Fooba Nane” again please. Then she’ll listen to it a few times in a row, and when the chorus says “Say ‘baby I love you’” she’ll go “no I LOVE YOU, Mama!” and it’ll become part of driving.

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“Ess, what do you want to do today?”
“I’m eat bear cereal all day long.”

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Here’s a nice excerpt from Walking, by Henry David Thoreau:

My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before—a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot KNOW in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun: “You will not perceive that, as perceiving a particular thing,” say the Chaldean Oracles.

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Jess Zimmerman illuminates more problems in our deeply sexist society with her “Where’s My Cut?”: On Unpaid Emotional Labor:

The originators and adherents of #GiveYourMoneyToWomen didn’t just suggest that women should get paid for existing, although yeah that too if you’re buying. Rather, women should get paid for all the work they typically do for free – all the affirmation, forbearance, consultation, pacifying, guidance, tutorial, and weathering abuse that we spend energy on every single day. Imagine a menu of emotional labor: Acknowledge your thirsty posturing, $50. Pretend to find you fascinating, $100. Soothe your ego so you don’t get angry, $150. Smile hollowly while you make a worse version of their joke, $200. Explain 101-level feminism to you like you’re five years old, $300. Listen to your rant about “bitches,” $infinity.

It was beautiful to watch #GiveYourMoneyToWomen unfold. Men got angry, and then women explained to them that to have their anger acknowledged, they would have to pay. This made them angrier, of course, but without a donation, who was listening?

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