The Old School Lunch

If there’s one thing you learn about what happens to a country/society/people during and after any sort of conflict or war or series of wars, it’s that violence against women (as it was likely present to being with) leaps off the charts even when things are “starting to get better” (or at least when people think they are). So one of the absolutely worst things a country could possibly do is to purposely hyper-sexualize the imagery and perception of women even more under the guise of placating the anxieties and fears of those inside and outside Israel for tourist dollars: “it’s alright, Israel’s alright..see! We’ve got beautiful women here in bikinis! They’re here waiting for you to take them!”

It’s another fall season and yet again i’m sitting here wondering what to do with my life. There’s little as frustrating as not being able to decide (or is it just not knowing?) if you want to go one of several directions. I was so hell-bent on going the grad school route and teaching but then yet again the research scares the shit out of me. Is that something I really want to do? Law school almost made a strong case for a while and then it just sort of sputtered out because I got caught up in work. Then I thought, “hey, why not just get that domestic violence focused MPA in Colorado and work for a bunch of cool non-profits…you know, climb the ladder?” Then it became, well, if you’re not going to go for the full Ph.D then should I just go for the M.A.? But won’t I only be able to teach at “really, really small community colleges” as someone once told me? Will that leave me with enough room to go for the eventual Ph.D later on? What the hell do I want to know about public administration? I want to write and teach, not crunch numbers and work on policy and committees. Then, I realized that I basically want to do what Jackson Katz does for a living: talk to men and young men in particular about sexism, homophobia, racism, etc and be able to “coach boys into men” as the Family Violence Prevention Fund saying goes. I think he went Masters in Education and now he’s getting his Ph.D in something but obviously he had a pretty unique experience in the movement. I think I have an opportunity to do my own very, very small scale sort of “coaching” men against sexism at my workplace because I work closely with men who act as mentors for young men and boys but that’d mean i’d have to stick around for a bit which isn’t something I originally planned on doing because the pay isn’t so great. But maybe I should.

When I shelled out for a premium flickr account, I decided to make the most of it and really put a bunch of stuff on there. One idea that popped into my head was to put online the stuff that I had saved up on my computer, namely, scans of magazine ads which had really sexist advertisements. This became a series of a few dozen different advertisements and i’ve gotten a bit of view here and there. However, I start to wonder when the pictures that get the most views are the ones that are more revealing/crude…

So 3 months of “training” are done and over which means that I am now covered with the job’s insurance. Which is good. This was made effective September 1st and I had all my paperwork in order and on the insurace provider’s website (where I was a member with my old job) it gives me my member ID and new group number so I went down to the local drug store to pick up a prescription of some stuff that i’m running low on, really need and, of course, is ridiculously expensive. I tell the pharmacist my info and say that I don’t have a card yet. He says “i’ll give it a try” and 5 minutes later while waiting in the magazine aisle, he calls my name and he says that nothing came up, “sorry.” I somewhat knew this was going to happen with the weekend and especially the long weekend but was still cautiously optimistic given that my information was already on their own website and it seemed like everything was in order.