I have come by most of my feminism secondhand. I went to a women's college and took no Women's Studies courses. Which means I never read any bell hooks. None. Which sucks, because I've read about ten pages of her now and I NEED MORE. But I am poor, and the library's copies are perpetually gone.

So! Any suggestions on where I can get more bell hooks for cheap (or free!)?

Allow me, for the moment, to forgo to the traditional groveling about my failure to post- there is little excuse.

Rather, I have a question about standard American English usages of contractions with the verb "to have".

I'm going to provide a number of sentences that would sound weird to me, and then rewrite them to what sounds "normal" for American English usage as I understand it. Please tell me if I am full of shit and the original phrasing sounds perfectly normal American English to you.

CONFUSING: I haven't any money.

REWRITE: I didn't have any money.

***
CONFUSING: I haven't any money.

REWRITE: I don't have any money.


But things like, "I haven't had breakfast," where "haven't" serves as a "helping verb" sounds perfectly fine to me.

Am I out of my mind on this? Is this just a part of normal US English that I have totally not stumbled upon before? Or does this sound weird?

So, one aspect of my job, currently, is to gather contributions for a silent auction fundraiser. This is terrible, because it means a great deal of my job right now is to shop online for organic and ecologically friendly things and *not* buy them, but ask them for donations.

This has meant buying a fair amount of stuff I did not mean to, and preventing myself from buying things I shouldn't. This is difficult.

I am so far behind on talking about my life, that I am just going to randomly mention things.

Mood-
Gloomy. There's still oil jetting into the Gulf of Mexico, my boyfriend is leaving for six weeks on Sunday, I have a headache that I can't shake, copyright law is insane, I'm only now catching up to Doctor Who after being behind for weeks, fandom is in the midst of several fails and I kind of hate human beings right now. It's hard to focus on the positive when my head hurts and my knees hurts and still have a final paper that I need to write and I just can't make myself care about it right now. And I could probably make myself be/act/feel more positive, but right now I just don't have the spoons to keep myself from spiraling down for a little bit into a funk.

Fandom:
I've been following the J2 BigBang "What do you mean, a Haitian might read this?" RaceFail only sporadically. I remember seeing the summary for the story go up way back when, and I remember noticing it, and thinking something about it, but I am not going to claim that it was any real kind of fair recognition for the rather massive fail that was coming down the pike. I just remember looking at it, and noticing briefly that it was going to be set in Haiti. And I don't know if I should I have followed up on that more, and maybe mentioned it, but that time has passed.

I don't know that this is really a fandom issue, but was following the story about the intersex children (identified by the media as female without qualification) who had cliteroplasty before they could consent to it. And, I had an inkling there, before it was made much more explicit (very eloquently) by others, that it was really, really an INTERSEX ISSUE, that maybe the children were intersex/had medical conditions that fall under my vague and really poor understanding of "intersex conditions" (and I realize that this is probably not the correct term, please please correct me if you have the spoons to do so). But I can't follow the story anymore because I find a lot of the medical terminology and procedures described to be rather distressing to consider too closely- scary like most of surgery is vaguely scary to me, and more so because it's small children, and it's people who love them inadvertently possibly fucking over their lives because we live in a society where being anything but cis and hetero is considered "weird."

Life:

I'm working fulltime at an internship, it's kind of boring and the people really don't need two interns, but it's fine and it's a great place. I keep getting up at 6am. It kind of sucks.

I helped my boyfriend move last week. We both seem to be so tired all the time that we just sort of wave at each other before we fall asleep. And he's leaving in a few days, so it's kind of imperative to get some actual time with him when we are not both incredibly tired. And he will be seven hours ahead of me. And I basically need for him to pet me and reassure me in convincing ways, and I kind of hate myself for putting the burden of my emotional problems on him when he must already be kind of stressed out, but I've tried "just sucking it up" for a while now and it's just. not. working.

and.
and.
and.
I need to read some fucking Meg Cabot, stat.

I've gone three days without posting, which is kind of a lot for me. So!

-I'm working full time at a nonprofit in my town for a small stipend.

-I have bought the most expensive pair of shoes that I will likely ever own, and as they are being made for me, I think that this is probably pretty fair.

-I still have three papers to write, one of which is getting done for Monday, the other for two weeks from now, and one which is getting done by the end of the summer.

The ghost of dead oil magnates wander the halls of this institution, whispering in scholarly ears to strive till their legs cramp and their eyes water, that there is never an "enough" to anything in the halls of this institution, that there is no escape.

Only not right now.

This portion of a post from healingmirth got me thinking about career women in media these days.
"...but I'm not sure I can handle another hour of the.... and the hardworking "hilariously" uptight woman who's been ripped from her planned and promising career path without any explanation. I have a sinking feeling that in the second half her tragic past will be revealed as the reason she threw herself into her work, and that she just needs someone to heal her heart."

This reminded me of a comment I left on a postabout the upcoming film Morning Glory, which also looks like it features a young career woman who will lose it all and find that she needs to get out of her office to fulfill her life and/or find that an unexpected problem that distracts her from work contains more meaning to her than her career.*

I keep getting this feeling like all these movies don't want women to succeed. These career women so often seem to find that they are unhappy in their jobs, or that something unexpected will happen that will make their happy jobs disappear or force them to leave it.**

Your job is probably not going to be the most rewarding part of your life. For some people, it is, and that's a wonderful opportunity to have in your life. But much more often, even a good job is challenging and difficult and will have parts that you really hate. So the fact that these career women are shown as finding their jobs less than fulfilling is not a bad message- it's realistic to a point, and the message is not bad. But the fact that the message seems to be sent so much more often using a female character, (with whom presumably, women in RL are more able to relate, and men in RL may have problems relating) suggests that this is something women need to hear more. If women worked more often out of the home than men, or if there were a prevailing stereotype of woman as the provider, then this message would be a great thing to target at women- progressive and thoughtful, even.

But that's not the case. There are more men with full time work than women. In most companies, there are more men in higher positions than there are women in higher positions. But, regardless of numbers, the normative gender roles show women's careers as less important than men's. Women in film cannot find fulfillment in their jobs, because they are supposed to be fulfilled by other, more feminine things. And TV and movies are showing that in these characters, and that, frankly, bugs the hell out of me.

Because I am currently living a life that is about the kind of scholar I want to be, and yes, that is my job. It's also my calling, and the most intellectually satisfying thing that's happening in my life. I have made is explicit with my Significant Other that school comes first, and he agrees, because he is doing the same thing. And if something came along and disrupted that part of my life, I would not "move on." I would come back, brandishing my fists, and get back to doing my job, because it's a big honking important thing in my life.


Footnotes-
* I posted at the time that overall, the idea that you need to get a life beyond your highpowered career, is itself not bad, but I notice it being played a lot with female character and not so much with male, and the discrepancy bothers me.
** Am I the only one who sees this as a pregnancy metaphor? Suddenly and unexpectedly having to leave your present life behind because of some gigantic change that you don't really expect and don't have much time to prepare for? That sounds like your birth control failed.

I have recently discovered little sticky Post-It notes made of plastic. They are AMAZING when you want to keep easy track of several concepts in a book while taking notes for later reference. I mean, right now I am keeping an eye out for "ground of being," "Method of Correlation" and "process thought" in Tillich, and I have a little colored sticky note for each concept, and it's kind of a perfect way of being able to really quickly reference things. I'm still taking notes, writing in the margins, using a colored pencil to highlight words, and now I have these little sticky tabs.

I begin to think that I will not even try to resell these books. I've done too much to them as it is . I need to keep them.

In the past two days, I have had two presentations, a great epiphany on author, a great epiphany on another author that I will now be incorporating in my paper, and also gotten a pretty good night's sleep most nights.

Left to do:
Two papers about 20 pages each, some of which can be totally moved from one paper to another and incorporated in both. Life is good. I will be eating porkchops and mushrooms with my boy this evening.

has a certain anticipatory charm to it.

Currently, I am waiting for:

Greg Rucka's No Man's Land novelization- I've read this before, and it's a lovely, complex read that gives depth and scope to the characters in the Batman-centric crossover, No Man's Land. Great Two-Face characterization and really interesting look at Jim Gordon's brain. I keep meaning to read the trade paperbacks of NML that preceded the writing of this, but I'm content at the moment to wait for this plain-text version.

Handmade soap- I bought a very large lump of handmade soap from an online vendor with a startlingly barebones site (we're talking geocities-level, here). I will post more on it when it arrives, but it should be here this week or early next.

Matcha- The last year I was at my undergrad, Swelles (not the real name), I got a free canister of decent powdered matcha green tea, which is incredibly strong and yet has no unfortunate aftereffects like jitteriness. I've been missing it recently, so I decided to buy some. That will probably show up sometime after finals ends, but that's okay, really.

Huh. I just realized that I start work in a week, only I'm kind of too busy at the moment to be scared or freaking out. Huh. Kind of nice. We'll see how long that lasts.