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THIS, I need to remember…. I take everything so very seriously too often!

A Note To My Readers

How strange that I read this post, today, chosen from a long and titillating list. Today, being another one similar to the last few, where I find myself glued to these machines and contemplating how I really should begin to seriously consider blogging, regularly and not once every few years. Hmmmm, but this gives me pause. Maybe I should just go back into the studio and paint and leave the writing to others. Life is where we are. Right here. Right now. It’s all we really have. Ever. Choices…. I feel your angst…..

The Dish

One of the things I’ve always tried to do at the Dish is to be up-front with readers. This sometimes means grotesque over-sharing; sometimes it means I write imprudent arguments I have to withdraw; sometimes it just means a monthly update on our revenues and subscriptions; and sometimes I stumble onto something actually interesting. But when you write every day for readers for years and years, as I’ve done, there’s not much left to hide. And that’s why, before our annual auto-renewals, I want to let you know I’ve decided to stop blogging in the near future.

Why? Two reasons. The first is one I hope anyone can understand: although it has been the most rewarding experience in my writing career, I’ve now been blogging daily for fifteen years straight (well kinda straight). That’s long enough to do any single job. In some ways, it’s as simple as that. There…

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Some Thoughts On Identity & What’s NEXT @ about.me

I’m finding about.me a fascinating platform both to personally utilize and quite interesting to uncover tons of interesting people form all over. It is clean, beautifully designed, easy to use, and does fill a niche unlike any other social networking platforms I am familiar with.

Tony Conrad

The story of about.me‘s creation, acquisition and recent spin out tends to generate a lot of interest and conversation. “Why did we start about.me?” very quickly leads to “what are you going to do with it next?”

When I think about the “why” behind building about.me, I tend to reflect on my own history with other founders. Over the past decade and a half, I’ve been lucky to work with a number of entrepreneurs I consider to be “founders of movements”: Matt Mullenweg (WordPress), James Freeman (Blue Bottle Coffee), Bre Pettis (MakerBot), Kevin Rose (Milk, Digg), Philip Rosedale (High Fidelity, SecondLife), and Jeff Veen (Typekit) to name a few. These founders create more than great companies, they put things in motion, envisioning at their inception a way of life that doesn’t exist yet. They have an innate sense of how others will engage with the products they build and…

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If I Had a Dollar (Why I Am a Feminist)

Because for the first thirty plus years of my life I thought I was fat and I wasn’t.

Because my mother was so intelligent and talented but her dreams were sublimated to being my father’s secretary and finally she never played the piano again.

Because after watching what my mother had to do, raising five children, running my father’s medical practice, and doing practically everything except making ‘money’, I decided when I was very young that I would never make the mistake of marrying a doctor, but I ended up doing just that.

Because I was afraid learning to type would doom me to a life of typing for someone else.

Because my mother had so many burdensome responsibilities no one human being could ever manage to keep up with them. However, she felt it was her personal failure and meant that ‘she was not good enough’.

Because I was raised to be a wife and a mother and a caregiver, first and foremost, and to earn a college degree doing something like law or medicine just in case my future husband might die, or get sick, or leave me.

Because I wanted to be an artist or an architect. The first was outrageously impractical and the latter, I was told that ‘girl’ architecture students were treated horribly by fellow male students and all the professors would make my life hell. I ‘chickened out’ and majored in Interior Design/ Housing which was in the College of Home Economics, where there was not a single male student nor professor.

Because I was so inculcated to be a ‘people pleaser’, it took me half a lifetime to stop being a morphing chameleon in order to satisfy men.

Because when my employer, an acquaintance of my parents, grabbed my ass in the back room of the store as I was closing up, and told me he knew how much I wanted it.

Because every time I had to walk alone at night I was afraid and still am.

Because guys can hike a trail or backpack or go out to a bar alone and when women do things alone, if she is attacked by a man or group of men, there is this insidious attitude that she was either stupid or asking for it.

Because the court system slants its rulings in favor of the successful, professional white male. Frequently.

Because even now, when we should all know better, the jobs that are most often taken on by women, such as child rearing, care giving, home making, teaching, are consistently undervalued and grossly underpaid if paid at all.

Because when I became a professional artist, other artists, both men and women, said, well, she is just a doctor’s wife.

Because an art professor told me that if I got married and had children there was no way I would or could ever be a serious or successful artist.

Because things have changed in the last fifty years, but for the most part, the insidious presence of male domination is a vicious force around the globe.

Because when I was a forty something divorcee with a child, young and disabled, and moved into a new neighbourhood only one of the many married women in the neighbourhood welcomed me. I might as well have been wearing a huge scarlet letter across my bosom.

Because while I was married my husband expressly did not want me working ‘outside of the home’ and almost all my male friends disparage the alimony I was awarded after twenty two years of marriage as never having been earned.

Because I am almost sixty and youth and beauty in women is still worshipped, even by women themselves, who undergo invasive and sometimes damaging surgical procedures to do so, only now at younger ages and more frequently.

Because women who set aside careers to be homemakers and raise their children are considered to have it easy. Indeed, now, most women are expected, by themselves and others, to do both. Well.

Because the inequality of the feminine and male roles are so inculcated into our cultures, religions, education, etc…that I still surprise myself with an ever expanding awareness of my own unquestioned biases.

Because this conversation is far from being over.

girl in the hat

image courtesy Devil Doll

Because my mother was a painter and a beauty when artists had patrons and a woman like that needed a man to take care of her, so she married a money man.

Because my mother’s mother was a beauty and her mother was, too, and that’s what people said: “She was a beautiful woman,” as if that was the only remarkable thing.

Because I was born in 1966, the year Betty Friedan and others started the National Organization of Women and challenged an industry which required flight attendants to quit if they got married, pregnant, or reached the age of 32.

Because when my mother had me, she stopped painting and started cleaning house and throwing dinner parties and smoking too many cigarettes and crying in the mirror.

Because my mother never told me that I looked pretty because she did not want me to grow…

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