Sunday, October 15, 2017

stretching out (and some thoughts on the "me too" posts. As in, me too).


LucyFur, slowly repossessing the house after Walter Gomez's departure for Minnesota (though with helicopters circling overhead right now, dropping water on what we hope is a little fire in Griffith Park, maybe we should all have moved to the land of 10,000 lakes.  She and Moth are currently in the bedroom, since we could pack them up in a hurry, should we have to, most easily from there).  I digress (and the helicopter activity seems to be quietening down) ... Lucy has always favored certain spots of morning sunshine, and even though there's a certain amount of shuffling and growling involved in asserting her rights to them, she's coming back into her tabby own.

Oh, and of course, "me too."  But this covers so many different things, from being whistled at by workmen to the cab driver who drove me off to a dark and scary destination in Greece; from a colleague in my first job who came round early on a Sunday morning to see if I "wanted any help in settling in" to those stray hands that came round from the seat behind on buses in Turkey and in Mexico; from an eight year old boy whom the 17-year old me was baby-sitting, to older and much more powerful academics in my field who Should Have Known Better.  What intrigues me much more is what we've all done in all of these circumstances; how we might have acted differently; how - in my case - my tendency to be a Nice Girl (and yes, my wanting to be liked) led me into positions of quasi-complicity that then became very hard to extricate myself from.  I could give my past self a lot of good advice about speaking up and Not Wanting to Offend.

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