It's My Dog's World: I Just Live In It

The power of telling a painful story in a culture that tells people to shut up

The New York Times published an essay from Jenny Wilkinson, who writes about her experience both with the legal system and a university panel following her sexual assault on a college campus. This happened almost 20 years ago.  The tag line reads: 

After being attacked by a fellow student, I won my case before a university panel. But winning wasn’t really winning.

I am sharing this not because I agree with all the writer's conclusions, but because it has occurred to me, over and over again, but especially lately, that there are lots of good, kind people who don't know what a rape survivor goes through in order to prosecute her attacker. This is in part because they never hear anyone they know talk about their rape. It becomes too easy to imagine you don't know anyone who survived a rape; it's something that happens on Law and Order.

And rape survivors have very good reasons for not talking about what they went through: the stigma remains profound. The onus remains on the survivor to "translate" for the listener. I am grateful to Jenny Wilkinson for providing some of this translation. And I long for a day when this will no longer be necessary.

On World Domination, and Why It Might Be a Very Good Thing

Okay, I just came back from the World Domination Summit in Portland.  

Which is not a cult.

Or a secret neo-fascist meeting.

Or a collection of merry kinksters.   

The World Domination Summit, created by traveler/author/entrepreneur (and confessed introvert) Chris Guilleabeu, brings together  a number of people who have done really interesting things with their lives with a larger group of people who are interesrwd in doing really (or more) interesting things with their lives.

For me, the highlights were a slick brilliant presenter on presentation who quoted Jesus AND Eva Peron, a guy who looked like Santa Claus and quoted the Bible, and a Christian author who used to drunk-tweet after watching TED talks.  

Any conference where the bathrooms remain immaculate is my kind of conference. 

Any conference where this confirmed cheerful atheist says to herself, "You know, I really ought to read the New Testament again," is..my kind of conference? 

I want to be snarky, but I can't stay snarky. The first speaker, Nancy Duarte, used Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech to make major, powerful points about how to present to an audience.  And the last speaker, Don Miller, analyzed a picture of Dr.  King marching with Ralph Abernathy.  I believe it was the March on Selma, and you'll have to forgive me that I don't remember. But it was clearly one where people were sure they were going to be killed.  

And many of the attendees put on a life jacket, jumpedi in an inner tube, and together with some other brave souls, jumped in the Willamette River, and held hands in the longest continuous in-the-water chain on record. 

So...it was like that. 

If You Are A PITbull lover from PITTSBURGH...

Which I am, actually, but I don't live there anymore.  Hello Bully, a terrific rescue organization, is doing a candlelight vigil this Friday night to  protest Breed Specific Legislation that may be coming to Pennsylvania way too soon.

Real Life is What Happens When You're Making Other Plans

Gentle reader--readers?  Sorry to be so long away from the blogging world.  I've been doing more work for FetchDog, and I've been doing more work at the Other Place Where I Work, and I've been volunteer teaching at a place I adore, and I've been reading a lot (Richard Price's LUSH LIFE, Peter Kuper's STOP FORGETTING TO REMEMBER, Brian K. Vaughan's Y: The Last Man series) , and...oh yeah, I wrote a tiny little play and entered it in a competition.  Which is the first theatre-ish writing I've done in half a billion years.  And it felt amazing just to finish anything...

Pluswhich, as we say in Pittsburgh, I went to a really fun performance/reading of the six-word memoir thing, and got to read my own six-word memoir at the lovely McNally-Robinson bookstore. 

It's spring, and I am making things, and I am so glad the ice is melting.

Goodbye, Marie

Well, there's no easy way to put this: my mother-in-law died late Sunday night.   

I am glad she is at peace. I am very sorry she is gone.   She was 84, a slight, blonde, pretty woman with a Polish accent and just the vaguest hint of Gracie Allen about her.  If you didn't know her well,  you would never have guessed that she had survived the Holocaust by masquerading as a Christian.  This didn't mean she evaded the camps--it just mean she had a slightly higher chance of surviving while she was in them.  More than 50 years after the end of the war, she could recite all the Christian prayers in Polish--just in case she was ever tested again.   She rarely spoke specifically about the time, calling it, with just the slightest bit of understatement, "When I was pretending not to be Jewish."

When the war ended, she discovered she was the only member of her family to survive.   She ended up in Germany, where she met an educated young man from Poland, who had once attended yeshiva, but had ended up driving trucks for the Russian army.  He didn't like her hat, but they still ended up dating. They later broke up, still in Germany, because his family discouraged him from bringing anyone over to the United States.  He lied and said he had a fiancee in Israel.  So they made their way separately to the United States.

To New York City, where so many things are reborn.

The young man, now working in a relative's electronic store, was instructed to deliver a repaired toaster to a dentist's  office in the East 50s.

And there Marie was, waiting for a dental appointment.

As my mother-in-law told it, "Who bumps into anyone in New York?"  And so she and Joseph, the young man, began to date again, and when they married, Joseph, still shaky in his English, shouted "Yes!" when the justice of the peace asked, "Do you take this woman?"

Yes.

They were married 56 years. They had three sons.  It was hard, starting over as adults, mastering English, becoming the only Jewish family in their Staten Island neighborhood, but at the end of her life, Marie's neighbors crowded the sidewalk outside her house, asking about her.  Marie went back to school when she was 38, getting her GED, driver's license, and college degree over the years. She taught crafts to the mentally ill, and told me, confidentially, that she had gone back to school because she wanted her own money.  She walked through life both haunted by her wartime life, and illuminated  by an undeniable charm. 

Less Junk on the Street, Less Junk in the Dog Trunk

Something Jeff and I have both noticed about our new home:

Less food litter.  A LOT less food litter.  Hoboken is the undisputed capital of dropped (or, more likely, hurled) half-eaten pizza slices, and our dog took full advantage.

Now, there are lots of nice restaurants in our new home--even an Argentinean cafe!

But in the three full days we've been here, we haven't seen a single pizza slice on the ground.

No wonder Faith looks very confused. These lovely streets, decorated with monuments from the Revolutionary War, paved with red brick, must appear positively bare to her.

But she's looking very svelte, too--so I'll take it.

An Entirely Other Day

Link: An Entirely Other Day.

This is great. It's about drowning in information.

I'm drowning less than usual because we don't have a TV yet.  And while our very kind landlord has wired us up, this feels...peaceful, right now.  Remember back in the day when if you missed a TV show, you...missed it?

Remember when you missed phone calls, and there was no way to redial?

No, I bet many of you don't.

Of course, who am I to judge:  I just e-mailed someone to tell her I couldn't call her.  So this is Ms. Pot here, calling the Technology Kettle black.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

That's the title of a book by the fantastic Grace Paley, and it's sort of the theme of the week and the month and the year.

Most of the enormous changes are good.  Some are not.  Some I'll write about. Some I won't.

I'll say this: I am very interested in anything anybody has to say about the Boston/Cambridge area.

And I'll probably be complaining less about Hoboken.  Although it has been fun.

And while we in our little nuclear dog/human unit are just fine, thanks, if you'd like to offer any prayers/vibes for our immediate relatives, we'd be so grateful.