feminist blogs

I need a new show.

The final DVD of Season 4 of The Wire is scheduled to arrive at my apartment on Thursday. After that, I’ll be waiting around for Season 5 to come out before I can NetFlix it. In the meantime, I need something else to keep me occupied. My other TV addiction is LOST, and I still re-watch the first two seasons of The West Wing with some regularity. So anything in that vein is great. I decidedly do not like anything Science Fiction or Fantasy-like — I know this is going to make you all hate me, but I can’t stand Buffy or Battlestar Gallactica. I’m leaning towards The Office or 30 Rock, as those seem to be good, light summer watching. Comedies are good — Curb Your Enthusiasm is an old favorite — but I really can’t stand shows like Everybody Loves Raymond or Monk.

But I am wide open to suggestions. What do you all watch and love?

Oh, Facebook:

In other news, you can now find out who’s stalking you on Facebook. Or maybe not. Anyway, you can type a period into the search box and get a drop-down list of five names that mean… something. First person on my list is someone whose profile I stalk the hell out of out, but #2 is someone who I don’t think I’ve ever searched for — although I did peruse through her photos when they came up on the Feed and I was bored during finals, so who knows. Long story short: It’s a mystery, and I suspect some sort of fluke. But if it really is the people who search you the most, then I’m glad to know that at least some of my stalking is mutual.

And am I the only one who wastes several dozen hours every week playing Scrabulous? Best/worst finals distraction ever.

Today marks three years for me at Feministe.

And in three days, after I turn in this one last paper, I’ll be done with law school.

It has been a good run (law school and blogging — although I think blogging has been slightly more enjoyable). I officially graduate next week, and I’ll probably return to full-time blogging here after that.

It’s been an excellent three years, and I’m eternally grateful to Ms. Lauren for starting such a great community here and inviting me to join it. I’m also incredibly lucky to share this space with such great co-bloggers, past and present. I’m looking forward to coming back. And as soon as the rest of my life is settled, I’ll start planning all kinds of fun things for Feministe this summer — including a return of Project Guest Blogger so that we can highlight more voices and build a wider-reaching community.

So, happy anniversary! Here’s hoping this year is a good one.

I need to leave the internets for a while.

About a month ago, I arranged to have a guest blogger start today so that I have time to prepare for finals. So as you can see from the previous posts, Thomas will be covering for me for a while, and of course the other Feministe bloggers will of course hold down the fort. And the new Feministe blogger will also be starting soon. The original plan was for me to keep blogging, just lightly — one or two posts a day. But I’m going to cut myself off.

It’s probably no big mystery why I’m bowing out for a while, but I’m feeling an unusual confessional urge, so here goes: I am not cut out for this. I have a big bleeding heart, but no guts. And after the past few weeks, I know everyone is feeling shitty and licking their wounds. I sure am. And I feel like every step I take, I screw up. I’m really questioning my own judgment, and every time I try to fix a mess I’ve made, I walk away feeling worse. After putting up this post, which in my head was nothing more than an alert to a feminist event that I was attending, I felt like I sold out an entire community, which wasn’t my intention, of course, but it never is. I thought I would at least feel a little better once I apologized, explained my thought process and tried to set things right, so this post came next. Instead of feeling like I accomplished anything, I feel like an untrustworthy back-stabbing bitch who threw someone she likes and respects under the bus in order to give herself some undeserved moral superiority and undo un-doable wrongs. That wasn’t my intention, of course. It never is. But that’s what it feels like.

And no, this issue isn’t about me, and yes I am being self-indulgent and whiny, but I figure an explanation is in order.

That isn’t to say that I don’t stand by what I wrote in the apology post. I do. I just I feel like I’m spinning in circles and I have no idea what I’m even trying to accomplish anymore. And when I look around, the one thing I’m sure of is that I’m being thoroughly self-destructive (Example A: Writing this at 3am when I have to get up in four hours) and that I’m doing a lot of damage to other people.

So I need to just stop.

I also need to focus on my real life. I need to take exams. I need to write papers. I need to get up in the morning and study. I need to do the job I actually get paid for. I need to go to sleep at night, instead of tossing and turning and obsessing over what I broke today and whether it can be fixed. I need to graduate from law school in three weeks.

So I need to leave the internets for a while. I know it’s time to stop blogging when it’s doing me more harm than good, or when I’m doing others more harm than good. Right now, both of those things are true.

I’m putting a bunch of Feministe Feedback posts, short news pieces and link round-ups in the queue, so those will go up throughout the week under my name, but I probably won’t be checking comments or writing anything else (and definitely not anything analytical or long). I’ll come back in a couple of weeks.

See y’all around.

You know, the jungle. Where the savage brown people and ferocious animals are defeated by heroic white folks:

Jill is writing her own follow-up post about this subject, but I feel so nauseous and sleepless about this whole thing that I felt the need to weigh in as well. I felt the need to post these pages, which I saw in person earlier tonight at a bookstore. The images were scanned by Wolfa and posted by Ico after being poitned out by Radfem. These pages are chapter headers from It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments, published by Seal Press and written by Amanda Marcotte.

More than 20 years ago, I made my very first contributions to feminist writing in a book that was published by Seal Press. This might be a little surprising given that I’m in my early 30s. But at the time, I spoke better English than the editor and translator of that anthology of fiction by women authors: my mother, a Japanese immigrant and a lifelong feminist. She grew up in a city that was devastated by American bombs when she was a young girl, and then run by American soldiers. When she got older, she attended the first women’s college in Japan, and eventually immigrated here, although she never naturalized; she couldn’t stomach the “swear to defend and bear arms” loyalty oath. In the early 80s, Seal started publishing her collections of translated stories, fiction by Japanese women writing in the 19th and early 20th centuries, before the war. I was a little too young to help out with the first book, but as I got older she’d ask for my help with editing and choice of words more and more. I was so proud to be helping out.

Today I don’t know where that pride has gone.
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This isn’t a real Feministe Feedback, just me using the blog for my own selfish causes.

I’m taking the Bar exam this summer, and I have about a month to travel between the exam and when I start work. So I’m planning a trip to South East Asia. A month sounds like a long time, but now that I’m actually sitting down and planning my itinerary, it’s frustratingly short. So I’m looking for feedback from anyone who has traveled to that part of the world. And really, anything you can give me is helpful — as broad as “You should definitely go to Vietnam” or as narrow as “There’s this great cafe in Bangkok that you must try.”
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Live on air discussing feminism, abortion, women in the military and other fun stuff. Listen now — or check out the archives later.

In a great article about using women’s bodies to promote charity causes.

NYU’s spring break always starts on St. Patrick’s Day, and I usually leave as soon as I can, so I’ve never been in the city for St. Patrick’s Day before. Like most of you, I thought the holiday was on Monday. I was wrong. It apparently starts today. And the entirety of Murray Hill — a neighborhood that amounts to Greek Row in Manhattan — and what appear to be large swaths of New Jersey and Long Island have descended upon my neighborhood.

I don’t resent people going out and having fun. I do resent them having screaming drunken fights outside my window and puking on the street. I do resent trying to walk to the gym at 1 in the afternoon and being hollered at by loud-ass frat boys who can’t do any better than “Hey hottie!” — which they’re only yelling because I don’t look like I’m having St. Patty’s Day fun. I deeply dislike not being able to walk down my street because it’s swamped with people in green shirts yelling “Woo.” And yes, I am whatever the St. Patrick’s Day equivalent of a Scrooge is.

But really — there are lots of white hats. Some of them are on backwards. I suspect most of them say “COCKS.”

It’s going to be a long night.

Two awesome articles that mention Feministe are out this month, one by guest-blogger Jaclyn Friedman in Bitch and one in the Utne Reader. Buy the mags and check ‘em out — both articles are really good.

But I think the coolest thing about the coverage was, as the lovely Bitch-reading Ezra* pointed out to me, the fact that the Bitch article referenced Feministe with no description. The lead was simply about Jaclyn “guest-blogging at Feministe” — no need to add “a feminist weblog” or anything else. Kinda cool that the editors assume Bitch readers know who we are.

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*Yeah, he scored total points this weekend when he mentioned the Feministe Bitch shout-out, and then offered to let me read his copy of the magazine, which he was carrying around in his bag — then added, “But you can’t have it, because I’m not done reading it yet.”