Maitri's VatulBlog

Sat up in bed early this morning, a Sunday morning, knowing this would happen. Changed into my Ashley shirt at halftime.  I knew they’d win, but didn’t know how or by how many points.  Three good dead-on Hartley field goals.  Then, the Tracy Porter interception and runback.  I have never been more certain of victory.

At this moment in time and history, I sit shaking in utter disbelief.  But why?  I knew all along.  Still, like Cade, I took the above picture and am posting it here, so that when I look at this blog tomorrow, I will know it’s not just a dream.  Thank you, Drew Brees.  We deserve this, New Orleans.  You deserve this, lifelong Saints fans.  A team that plays with so much heart had to have destiny on their side.

WHO DAT! WHO DAT! WHO DAT SAY DEY GONNA BEAT DEM SAINTS?  NO ONE.

I haven’t read much of Zinn’s work, but this essay for The Nation meant a lot to me during the dark days of the Bush II administration.  It still does.

In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?

… An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.

If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

If we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future.  I hope President Obama and congressional Democrats are listening.

In A Rant About Women, Clay Shirky observes that women do not mimic specific bombastic aspects of their male counterparts  in order to get ahead.  This isn’t about female diffidence, Shirky argues, but the apparent inability of many of us to be self-promoting assholes.

And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.

Now this is asking women to behave more like men, but so what?

The whole article is worth reading in its entirety, but its bottom line is captured in the quoted portion above.  It would be easy to negate Shirky with some hocus-pocus female social psychology.  Half-heartedly mumble something about women being honest, forthright, social, parallel-thinking, consequence-foretelling creatures who like to maintain equality and peace and move on, right?  Wrong.  Women can and want to get ahead just as much as men do, and are equally cut-throat if not more devious in some situations, but this is about unabashed self-promotion and the social perception of such behavior.

Three things came to mind and stuck as I read this article:

1. When advising them on their resumes, I tell other women to go for the moon, hell go for the next galaxy!  Sell, sell, sell, sell everything you have and more because you know you can get there once you have the job.  I cannot for the life of me do this with my own resume.  This is very telling.

2. The Girl Who Conned The Ivy League and how proud, not scornful, I am of her.

3. How my mother and I worked our tails off and have often cavalierly stuck our neck out there in selling ourselves, how this has worked with disastrous and stupendous results, and how we deal every single day with who we have become in the process.

This third and last thought is what I want to explore some more in responding to Shirky’s post.

When young scientists, my mother and I just did science – we studied hard, aced our tests, spent inordinate amounts of time in laboratories doing more than we were asked to do, raised our hands to ask pertinent and impertinent questions, graduated with honors, entered competitive graduate programs, published papers – and expected that the rewards would come automatically.  Not so.  As Richard Hamming from Bell Labs said in his You And Your Research talk, “The fact is everyone is busy with their own work. You must present it so well that they will set aside what they are doing, look at what you’ve done, read it, and come back and say, ‘Yes, that was good.’”  Fair enough.  Mom and I took our loud chutzpah and pitched our work.  I am the best representative of a certain department or for a certain conference for these reasons, mine is the ideal method to move this project forward and here’s why, I am the best-suited actor, play director or accountant because of this.  This energy worked wonders in getting ahead but, simultaneously, that’s when things started to fall apart in the interpersonal relations department.  Other people, men, women and bosses included, began to see us not as team players, but uppity blowhards because we knew we were better at something and chose to push ourselves ahead of the proverbial herd.  When guys in our peer groups did the same thing, but with lots less qualifications backing them, they were just being guys.  I tell you, Hell is other people.

Shirky addresses the Other People problem in his rant and advises, “The fact that [they] get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or not caring about the reaction.”   True, but then he starts the next paragraph with “Not caring works surprisingly well.”  Actually, it does and it doesn’t.  “Not caring” is often a lonely place to be.  But that’s not the point here, either.   I’ll bet you lunch that the reality is that we women sometimes do nothing and other times  do something and don’t at all care about the reaction, popularity be damned.   The real predicament lies not in not doing or not caring, it’s in whether our behavior meets expectation at any given time.

Some examples: I used a certain tone and sales pitch to land a job once.  When I employed a similar optimistic level of enthusiasm on another project with the same manager, I was yelled at and sent back to my office.  A few months later, I was given a promotion but also told that I kept my head down too much.  In another job, one for which I was hired to be smart, a big criticism of me was that I talked too smart.  I would love to know how many guys are told these same things; I’ll bet you another lunch that that number is minuscule in comparison.  In effect, career women are expected to be assertive to get ahead but, when we are, it’s looked on as insubordination or cockiness.  Whether it occurs knowingly or not, a woman not caring about her self-aggrandizing behavior does have very real consequences on her job reviews and satisfaction and, ultimately, her job itself.  So, women do desire getting ahead as much as men, and in the process undergo some stress-filled, uncertain days nervously wondering if and when the axe is going to fall because we tapped our inner nutsack. That’s a huge surcharge.

Especially in this economy, cross-disciplinary innovation is key and college degrees do not guarantee career success.  I’ve taken risks and gone from biology to geology to 3d modeling to geophysics to project management to physics to geospatial technology to get where I am today, and I still don’t know where that is, but I get paid to be a scientist and invent technologies, it’s fun and I’m learning a lot.  So, I encourage everyone, not just women, to follow Shirky’s advice and take “opportunities which [we] might in fact fuck up if [we] try to take them on, and then try to take them on.”  This comes naturally to assertive, confident, social people who want to change the world.

But, once a woman is on that journey, channeling that aggressive behavior into immodesty to get ahead happens at great personal risk.  The weird, complex ecosystem of workplace expectations and interactions makes sure that she is rewarded rather capriciously, a lot more so than men in the same situation.  This deters some women and only makes others fight more and harder.  You want obnoxious car saleswomen?  Fine.  Then, this culture, this moody bigotry of “you’ll get ahead if you’re more assertive but to a point or only on the days when society is feeling particularly advanced” has to stop.  Asking women to change their behaviors, while excusing the fickleness of workplace responses as a given which we have to fight against, is a horrible double standard.

As hard as it is even for highly-educated, self-assured women of my generation, it’s not.  Consider my mother: A twiggy 24-year-old Indian woman in a sari and bindi in early-1960s Kuwait, leading a part-competitive, part-lazy horde of Arab nutritionists in the fight against the awful food choices of an increasingly oil-wealthy populace.  We have money, let’s eat Burger King, all the time!  So that her workers would understand her and each other and to keep them from plotting behind her back, Mom learned seven different dialects of Arabic and translated and placated over and above her actual work.  Volatile meetings, backstabs, obscene anonymous phone calls, death threats sent to the house, she withstood all of that, but what I think cut her the most was having to hand over credit for her work to Kuwaitis.  No way they were going to let a brown woman take bows on behalf of The Emirate.

America used to be like this, but it changed.  It has evolved to where someone like me has worked with and for black, Asian-American, Hispanic and white women in a traditionally-male-dominated oil industry.  It has transformed into older men working for younger women, a lot of ceilings removed.  There is a great power struggle yet among bosses, workers and colleagues, and this can never be taken as a given.  Ten or twenty or even a hundred years from now, no woman should have to say, “I guess I am used to temperamental, latent and unconscious bigotry, so I just work around it.”  Working around something is oceans away from being an arrogant, self-promoting jerk and getting rewarded for it.  I can behave like a man with the best of them.  The question is: Are they willing always to treat me like a man when I do?

In my new-found role as New Orleanian Emissary To America, I find myself having to explain this quite a bit to the folks n00bs up here:  Mardi Gras in New Orleans is not at all about boobies and meter-long what-passes-for-cocktails.  So, get off those four foul blocks of Bourbon Street.  And, for the record, you and your tourist frat kids made it that way.

The above is an example of a good Chicago Tribune article on Carnival celebrations down south.  This, however, is not.  Mardi Gras in Baton Rouge?  I think not.  And don’t even think about dressing like that in New Orleans.

I will say one thing about northern Ohio: The fabric and craft stores up here are extremely well-stocked and customer service very curious and helpful when it comes to our Krewe du Vieux and Fat Tuesday costume planning.  “Mardi Gras?  In New Orleans?  How cool!”  They really look at it as being a part of something bigger and brighter.

Lizzy Caston and I were to write a mode d’emploi for air travel in this day and age of the ever-orange threat advisory.  A sample: Lady, please do your best not to wear four-inch-heeled slouch boots and every metal ring and bracelet in your collection before entering airport security.  The grimace on your face as you hobble about like a startled flamingo while trying to yank that thing of your foot amuses no one and only makes us standing in line behind you at 6AM want to push you down and carry on. Ok, it wasn’t going to be snide and actually more polite and helpful, honest.  Given recent explosive and “explosive” events and evolving TSA guidelines, however, Lizzy and I are going to have to sit on a few more flights, visiting a few more airports in the process, before we can pen anything useful.

Lists it is, then.  Best of decade (never mind that the new decade technically does not start until January 1, 2011) and best of year lists.  Ranking things is not my cup of tea; all of my top five movies rate about the same.  But what motivates others’ sort algorithms and makes their #1? Let’s see.  As always, please add to the discussion and feel free to list your favorite lists in the Comments section.

TECHNOLOGY – Since my Precious iPhone has not been more than arm’s length away at any given moment this year, to the point that my husband thinks I need to “tweetox,” it seems only fitting to start with Wired’s 20 Favorite iPhone Apps of 2009.  Productivity is king, followed by games, travel and hobbies.  Am I supposed to be embarrassed that I’ve downloaded only 2 of the 20 – Runkeeper and RedLaser – or proud to have gone this long without spending money on some of these not-free apps? $5 for Instapaper when I can simply Safari over to reader.google.com?!  I think not.  What are some of your favorite apps and why?

MORE TECHNOLOGY – The Real-Time Web is all that excites me in this list of 2009’s disruptive technology. Augmented Reality has potential but, in my opinion, isn’t ubiquitous enough to have made a difference yet.  Google Voice and Wave haven’t shown me their value this year, either.  What do you think? PC World’s list of the 10 disruptors of the last quarter century rings truer even today – I highly recommend this read.

MOVIES and technology – Roger Ebert is a rockstar.  Here’s a man who can find a great movie in a stinking haystack, commit to his picks and explain patiently to you why.  Ebert’s on Twitter, where he points us to all four of his Best Films of 2009 lists.

Aside from watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Matrix trilogy, Harry Potter saga and a handful of pop and arthouse films in the theatre this decade, I have to admit that D and I are not the best cinema-goers, preferring to watch DVDs in the comfort of our home (Netflix – now there’s a decadal gamechanger mentioned little), and even that has fallen by the wayside.  But along comes streaming video, the Creative Commons (also one of the best concepts given form in the 2000s) and the notion of simply putting your art out there, the studios be damned, and you get beautiful genius like Nina Paley’s Sita Sings The Blues, which has been around a lot longer than you think.  Whether a movie has live actors or animated ones, the most important thing about it is the story.  To paraphrase my dear, departed 3D Arts professor, George Cramer, all the visual effects dreamt of in Hollywood cannot polish a turd of a story.  This is why I am not likely to watch Avatar and recommend Monsters, Inc. instead.  Excellent story + well-animated fur = WIN.

MUSIC and technology – NPR’s The Decade’s 50 Most Important Recordings Between YouTube and downloadable MP3s, my music collection grew and grew up in leaps and bounds this decade.  Ignoring the current obsession with emo-hipster bands, pop divas and American Idol ingenues, there was some real good stuff: Radiohead’s Kid A and self-released In Rainbows, Kanye West’s College Dropout, Madeleine Peyroux’s Careless Love, The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, The New Orleans Bingo! Show’s For A Life Ever Bright, Neko Case’s Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, Sasha’s Airdrawndagger, DJ Krush’s Jaku and OutKast’s Stankonia.  Coolest music videos of the decade: Ok Go’s On Treadmills, Clint Maedgen’s It’s A Complicated Life and Empire Of The Sun’s We Are The People.  Alright, folks, tell me what I missed and why.

BOOKS and technology – Forget the Kindle and nook.  And forget those who tell you this carefully-planned obsolescence is going to change the nature of reading.  Find a light laptop and/or smartphone you’re comfortable with, do actual work with it and download books to it.  A book is not an exotic bird to be placed in the gilded cage of DRM, but something to be owned, shared and, most importantly, read many times on any platform.  I’m against the iTunes model of book consumption – fit the media to the unique delivery mechanism – and publishing companies’ constant war on the public domain.  Hooray for copyfight and folks like Cory Doctorow who have the balls to self-publish quality literature.  True defenders of freedom will enjoy and be inspired by his Little Brother.

The Times Online’s 100 Best Books of the Decade. If you’re going to read only one of them, make it Junot Diaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao.  What a book.  A Dungeons&Dragons-playing Dominican-American college student, the gut-punching dialogue and relationships, the history, the profanity oh the succulent profanity, the future.  What a book.  Your best read?

SPORTS – An NFL junkie, my most important moment in sports was the New Orleans Saints’ 2006 return to the Superdome after the Flood and Tom Benson’s near treachery.  Granted, it contained no triumph of athleticism, but you’d think it rates (sorry, brimmy, but the Patriots-Brady-NFL-ESPN lovefest is getting old).  Again, is there another such moment in the 00s that I should be aware of?  Please comment away.  Lastly, for the record, I am very pleased with my quarterback and Athenae’s imaginary boyfriend, Aaron Rodgers.  His stats this season show that the team made the right decision and everyone else should shut it.

TELEVISION – When Babylon 5 ended in 1998, I despaired.  This is why God invented Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica, The Wire, Rescue Me and Futurama.  After Lando Calrissian and Kosh, the outstretched arms and biting sarcasm of Bender and Tommy Gavin beckoned. After Katrina and the Flood, the confused innards of Al Swearengen’s Deadwood, Adama and Starbuck made all too much sense.  The Onion AV Club’s Best TV Series Of The 00’s nails it.

LIST TO IGNORE – Ten Stories that Changed Our Lives This Decade: #10 Katrina. #9 Brett Favre.  Delete.  Any list that places Favre, whose family was very much affected by the hurricane, over the suffering of people goes right out the window.

THE WEIRD AND CHEESEHEADY, ‘cuz that’s how we roll – 2009 in Review: Top Weird Stories From Wisconsin: “A 37-year-old Fond du Lac man went to a motel room for what he thought was going to be a romantic tryst but instead was assaulted by four women who used Krazy Glue to attach his privates to his stomach. Police say it was all part of a bizarre plot to punish him for a lover’s quadrangle gone bad.”  Hey, we gave you Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer. Enough said.

ROUNDUP – I’m a sucker for New York Times graphics.  Philip Niemeyer pictures the past 10 years in a neat little 12×10 matrix.  The word “truthiness” gained popularity around the same time as Katrina/Federal Flood (they used a flood graphic and not a counterclockwise spinny one, phew).  2008’s maverick was Ron Paul and not John McCain – can’t keep pulling out the same old shtick every four years.  I often wonder what happened to 2008’s ardent house flippers.  Hmmm, Brownie was a Bushie term of endearment in 2004 but “tsunami” wasn’t big until 2006?  I really like the evolution of key nouns and verbs across the decade.  Would you have done this graphic differently?

Thus, 2009 comes to an end.  The ox gives way to the tiger.  Here’s wishing all of you a safe rest of the year and a great 2010 filled with pleasant surprises and many new buzzwords to learn.  Peace.

Guernica, the “magazine of art and politics” has lately featured, in a surprisingly synergistic manner,  many topics I muse about and folks I “know” from Sepia Mutiny and other diasporic blogs.

In I Don’t Want To Fight, V.V. Ganeshananthan (aka Vasugi, Sepia Mutiny contributor extraordinaire) and Amitava Kumar discuss what makes a South Asian book and whether such a creature will forever serve up the same old themes of “at least three of the following: a large family or two, arranged marriage, misery, some violence, Bollywood, the interior design of nostalgia which uses the furniture of loss.”

I laughed out loud when I read this. Not so much at its apt round-up of South Asian literary devices, but at the fact that that is a large chunk of my life, minus the arranged marriage.  Oh my god, my life is a book! An open one, even.  Chew on it some more and you realize this is how much of the world lives, has lived, even in Northern Asia, South America, Africa and parts of the United States and Europe.  And now, after 9/11, our subsequent wars abroad and Katrina & The Flood, Americans are catching that general conflict-ridden bug.   That hum which varies greatly in amplitude and frequency given the situation but never goes away.  Vasugi on fiction, politics and people:

… All fiction is political in some way, and it’s interesting to see fiction play out in some South Asian spheres in which talking about politics has become dirty, something polite people don’t do. And of course fiction does all sorts of things, goes all sorts of places, that polite people don’t go. So I was fascinated to ask some terrific fiction writers about politics and war and see what would rise to the surface, what would bubble up, and what would stay in the background.

And some things also stay in the background because in parts of South Asia and its diasporas, war and a kind of unstable politics have been normalized. I am always fascinated to watch characters dealing with their personal lives without explicitly acknowledging the hold politics has on them, even as it affects everything they do. Have they become desensitized? And how does one write about violence without fetishizing it?

In many ways, we are the same and identify with the same.  Yet, new stories continue to emerge from that same, so is the novelty in the subtle twists and each extremely individual experience?  Is X’s arranged marriage different from Y’s?  Is one story of loss in wartime different from another overall?  Is my mom’s experience in the Kuwait of August 1990 different from that of Kathy Zeitoun’s in the New Orleans of August 2005?  I would argue not.  It is dangerous, however, to draw the same conclusions of good guy vs. bad guy and winner vs. loser from stories that are strikingly similar in their motifs.  Stereotypes do not always determine motivation and outcome.

As the world gets smaller, we turn to generalization and compartments to make things easier on us.  We like to say, “I’ve seen this before” and extend those comfortable parallels, and then vote and create foreign policy from our decisions.  This month’s Guernica also carries a wonderful piece by Sadanand Dhume called The Colonized Mind.  Dhume comments on his piece over at True/Slant:

In this essay for Guernica I examine the ongoing Arabization of Indonesian Islam through a visit to the Dieng plateau in central Java, home to the oldest Hindu temples on the island. It’s a snapshot of a civilization in transition, a place caught between an Indic past and an Arabized future. It has nothing to do with terrorism, or for that matter with textbook radical Islam, the drive to order every aspect of society and the state according to sharia law. Yet, I can’t help but feel that twenty years from now, when we look back on Indonesia, it is this moment of cultural change that will be seen as more important than the much more narrowly focused war against the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah.

This is all so much larger and more subtle than we immediately perceive.  Who knows what will eventually rise to the surface, and what will stay down?  More importantly, how could it not give us new stories?

In related news, Vasugi’s Love Marriage just showed up at my doorstep.  (Look, my reading list is two years long as it is.)  Will report back with my take on it.