U of I - Chambana

Today Travalon and I set off, and our first stop was the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. At first we were in a boring section of campus with lots of dorms, but then we found the heart of the campus with all sorts of neoclassical architecture and an observatory smack dab in the middle of the campus, which seems impractical. (It must have been far away from everything else at some point.) We took a long walk there, then we got back in the car and drove further south in Illinois. Our plan had been to go to Mass in Nashville tomorrow morning, but I suddenly felt compelled to find an evening Mass, and there was one in Salem at 5 pm, which according to the GPS on my phone was exactly when we would arrive there. We got to Mass just as it was starting, so it seemed preordained. We stopped in Metropolis to see the giant Superman statue again, and now we are in a hotel somewhere in Kentucky. Apparently the site is not letting me post pictures today. Hopefully tomorrow.

Famous Hat

Four More Photos

Here are a few more pictures. This first one is a fox that ran in front of me as I was taking my lunchtime walk. He stopped long enough for me to take a picture.

This is the pile of snow I climbed on top of. It was hard to see against a background of snow, but now that everything else has melted, it's easy to see. It was bigger...

This is the lute guitar I pondered buying at the silent auction.

And finally, this is a little setup I created at work for the money tree and the ti plant, since they like high humidity and my office is very dry. It looks like a professional setup, but there just happened to be a pinkish-red bowl the same color as the cheap plastic serving tray, or whatever this is. I'll tell you what it is: perfect for a plant setup!

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A Continuation of Yesterday's Rant

Continuing with my theme from yesterday, I have two examples I forgot to mention in my last blog post about this double standard regarding men’s and women’s physiques:

A woman I know grew up in Argentina, and at some point she went back for a class reunion. A guy from her class said, “You’ve gained weight!” She had gained about ten pounds, but he had gained more like forty, so she retorted, “So have you!” He cried, “That is so rude of you! I can’t believe that you would say that!” She used this story to illustrate why she prefers living in this country to Argentina, but I’m not sure we are that much better here. Male hypocrisy knows no national boundaries.

The second example unfortunately involves our local baseball team, the Mallards. Now my regular readers all know how much I love the Mallards, as much for their silly promotions as for their generally high quality of baseball. However, they currently have a promotion going on called “Dad Bod Jersey,” encouraging men to send in photos of their out-of-shape torsos to plaster on a jersey. I find it strange that they would glorify male unattractiveness, because you know darn well they would never have a “Mom Bod Jersey” contest. And I would argue that a mother has earned her flab more than a dad has, because childbirth wreaks havoc on the body, but the one thing the man had to do to become a dad does not cause weight gain, stretch marks, flabbiness, etc. In a man, it’s caused by pure laziness and gluttony, not from carrying a living, growing human around inside. I actually entered this contest, giving my name as “Famous Hat” so that I wasn’t obviously a female, and then for the front and back photos of my torso I provided shots of beautiful beaches with palm trees. In the section where I was supposed to explain why my “Dad Bod” was the one worthy of being put on a jersey, I let them know I was a loyal (for now) female fan who was very disgusted with this promotion, since women who don’t have perfect bodies are shamed in our society. So why are men with imperfect bodies glorified?

I think it’s because men are in charge, and so they get to make the rules. It’s hard work to have a perfect body, taking dedication and deprivation, so they say it’s fine – even cool – for their kind to have fat, flabby torsos. Since women are not in charge, we are not only expected to be perfect-looking, but to allow men to be totally imperfect. Any indication that we find them less than acceptable gets hit with the charge of being shallow, so that they can shame us into looking perfect ourselves but accepting total imperfection in them. Well, I for one refuse to play the game. As the Daughter of Denni once told Tiffy, “A woman can take up as much space as she wants.” Not that I am advocating obesity, just saying that it’s getting a little old to see so many sitcoms where a fat guy with a lousy job has a hot wife, as if women should have no standards themselves. As if our standards should be based on such things! How about we judge people by their kindness and reliability, which rules out the flabby sitcom husband hurling insults at his beleaguered, attractive wife. That is one sitcom trope I would love to see die!

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Women Like Me: A Study in Double Standards

There’s a song by Fifty Cent called “21 Questions,” in which he asks, “Girl, it’s easy to love me now, but could you love me if I was down and out?” I have always wanted to write a response to that song that goes something like, “Boy, it’s easy to love me now, but could you love me if I gained twenty pounds?” Even more aggravating, there was a video posted on social media a while ago in which a plain-looking guy approaches an extremely attractive woman, and she is not interested until she sees that he has a fancy car. The implication, of course, is that she is shallow because she is only interested in him for his money, but somehow he escapes the taint of shallowness even though he is clearly interested in her only because she is so hot. When a woman brings this discrepancy up to the men who engage in it (unlike, say, Travalon, who is not shallow at all), they have no idea what you are talking about because of course they are only interested in good-looking women, that’s normal. But if a woman scorns a man for his plain looks and/or lack of funds, then she is hopelessly shallow. Two real-life examples:

I have a very beautiful friend who is happily married now, but in her single days she was always being approached by men and having to turn them down. Rich felt she was being unfair by not giving these men a chance, and I had to point out that these men never gave us less glamorous women a chance, but they were scorning us by omission, not commission, so he didn’t notice. To his credit, Rich took what I said under consideration and had a talk with his housemates (that bore no fruit, as far as I can tell) about how physical attraction isn’t the only or most important thing to consider in a woman.

The second example was when Tiffy said a male coworker of hers was bemoaning how easy women have it, they just have men falling all over them, but he couldn’t get any female interest. When Tiffy told him it wasn’t like that for her at all, she didn’t have men falling all over her, he just kind of looked at her in confusion and then said something like, “I didn’t mean women like you.” When she told me this story, I replied that his confusion was caused by the fact that, to him, unattractive women simply don’t exist – we are invisible. I have learned to live with this invisibility, and in fact have used it to great advantage – nobody notices a plain, middle-aged white woman – but that is a post for another day. Suffice it to say I have had plenty of men back in the day complain about how no women paid attention to them, when I was right there paying attention to them. Because, of course, by “women” they didn’t mean women like me.

Famous Hat

Cuban, Renaissance, and Irish Music Weekend

I hope my readers had a good weekend. Friday we had an interesting lunch hour program at work about Women’s History Month, and a third-shift worker sang “Cielitos Lindos” beautifully. In the evening Travalon and I had fish at Nick’s, then we saw the Afro-Cuban All Stars at the Overture Center. The concert was not that well attended, sadly, but the audience that was there was very enthusiastic. I love Cuban music!

Saturday I drove to Milwaukee to hang out with Tiffy. We had lunch at a Mideastern restaurant on Brady Street, then we walked to the university campus for a silent auction/chocolate reception. I did end up bidding on a sailboat ride for four (and won), but there was a lute-shaped guitar I was torn about. It was very pretty, but do I need another instrument? And how would I lug it the three-plus miles back to Brady Street? In the end I saw some people from the Madison Classical Guitar Society who said it was not worth what they wanted for the opening bid, so I did not bid on it… nor did anyone else. Then there was a concert featuring two of the greatest lutenists in the world playing Italian and English Renaissance music, and that was amazing. On our walk back to Brady Street, Tiffy and I stopped at an Ethiopian restaurant for dinner and got the vegetarian sampler for two, since I have given up meat for Lent. A really great day, but I did miss the fabulous birthday party for the Japanese professor who always comes to visit Rich. Travalon, meanwhile, was at the boys’ basketball state tournament.

Yesterday after Mass, Travalon and I went to Rich’s house to say goodbye to the Japanese professor, and he fed us leftovers from the night before. Then Jilly Moose and Luxuli joined us for the St. Patrick’s Day parade around the Square, with pipes and drums and crazy things like the guy in the giant hamster wheel and the other guy driving a sort of motorized unicycle, only instead of the seat being above the wheel, it was inside of the one big tire. Then we walked to the Brink Lounge for the Celtic Center’s St. Patrick’s Day extravaganza. Lots of Irish bands and dancers, and I knew someone there so we scored some free pizza because they had leftovers. When Prairie Man arrived, he ordered more pizza. After that I didn’t need dinner! I feel like we did St. Patrick’s Day justice, but of course I forgot to wear my Kelly green derby that I can only really wear this time of year. Oh well… next year.

Famous Hat

The Flying Egg Debacle

Today I was talking to a coworker, and suddenly her phone’s alarm went off. She told me it was to remind her to quit steeping her tea, or she would forget it until it was too strong to drink. That reminded me of a story in my distant past, and a quick perusal of my blog leads me to believe I have not written about this before. It was the Flying Egg Debacle, and the worst part? Nobody witnessed it.

It happened when I was in college. I was hard boiling an egg, so I set it in a pot full of water, set it on the stove, turned the burner onto low, and promptly forgot about it. You know how college is – you are always sleep-deprived. (Unlike the workaday world?) So when I got back from class that afternoon, one of my housemates accosted me and demanded to know why I had an empty pot cooking on the stove.

“It shouldn’t be empty,” I said. “I was hard boiling an egg.”

“There’s no egg there now,” she told me. So we went into the kitchen and looked around… and then we looked up. There was my egg, plastered onto the ceiling. My housemate started laughing so hard that she forgot about being mad. When I told Rich this story years later, he speculated that pressure had built up in the egg until it flew up to the ceiling. Someday I would like to replicate this experiment, preferably with a video camera available, but would it ever happen again that way? Maybe the time has come to find out…

Famous Hat

Pictures of Stuff in My Office

Here is Part Two of my pictorial post. Continuing the theme of the International Festival, here are a couple of pictures of Lolita the Llama, which I got at a vendor there.

This beautiful floral arrangement was in the church where I attended a Baroque concert.

This is a horrible selfie of me, but I took this picture for Jilly Moose because without even planning it I was wearing a hoodie with a moose on it over a T-shirt with a moose on it.

This is the painting I did at the Paint Night at St. Vincent de Paul:

And here is the wine glass I got to keep that night:

Here are the salt and pepper shakers that look like tiny Texaco gas pumps that Travalon got at the antiques store in Baraboo:

On Sunday when Travalon and I went out to Sauk to eagle watch, we didn't have much luck, but we were dazzled by the trees that seemed to be encrusted with diamonds:

These last photos are of things in my office. This first one is Justin the Giraffe I got at the Como Zoo gift shop, a ball that sticks on things that I won at a training session at work, and the pompom that came off of my purse.

One of the "Christmas" cacti I have at work is blooming! This is the one a coworker gave me when I left my last job.

This is my mystery plant. It was only $5 and unlabeled; the person at the plant shop said it was a dracaena, but it didn't look like a type I was familiar with, so I did some research.

I sent that photo to the Botany Department, and they were stumped too, but they suggested contacting Olbrich Garden. Someone there suggested it was a cordyline fruticosa, commonly known as a ti plant.

This is the money tree someone gave me for my birthday. It's supposed to bring good luck... and so is the ti plant!

Buddies!

Famous Hat