The Partial Muse

BROWNFEMIPOWER IS BACK!!!!

*does a dance for joy, goes back on hiatus*

Ok, so I haven't posted in about a week anyway, and things are getting really busy around here, so I'm just going to put this blog on hiatus until after June 5th, when I return from my honeymoon. See you guys then!

Emily

The big news of the household: we finally got a spice rack! Behold:

It doesn't hold all of my spices, but it does hold a big portion of them. I used to have them just sitting on the stand beside the oven, and you'd have to pick them all up and look through them to find which one you wanted. No more! The 18 spices I use most frequently are now visible and accessible. It really was becoming a problem. This old photo shows the spice-crowding that was going on, and it was taken almost two years ago:

I've gotten lots of spices since then, so the tea pot and measuring cup were nearly crowded off the edge.
 

In other news, I'm still in the process of writing the wedding ceremony. So far, I have readings from John Clare, Robert Browning, and Bertrand Russell. How cool is that?

I just got this book Wedding Readings today (although it has a much cooler cover than the one pictured here.) It has lots of good stuff, very literary, for the most part. I figured I might as well buy it because, not only do I have to pick readings for my own wedding, but my sister wants me to do a reading for her wedding in November.

Nothing else is really going on, except for this cool picture of my shoes:

Ahem, now that I've got all my angry ranting out of my system, it's time for something a little more light-hearted: FOOD PORN!!!

I have been cooking a lot in the past week. I've made gazpacho (twice), the Sun-Dried Tomato Dip from Veganomicon, the Spinach-Chickpea Curry from Vegan with a Vengeance, a half-batch of Golden Vanilla Cupcakes with Fluffy Vegan Buttercream Frosting from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, a half-batch of Green Tea Cupcakes from the same, and yesterday, to try out recipes for the wedding, my mom and I made the Potato-Eggplant Moussaka from Veganomicon and made the Golden Vanilla Cupcakes into a cake, and frosted it with the fluffy buttercream. I don't have pictures of everything, but here's what I've got:

I literally spent all day at my mom's house yesterday, cooking. So, I've made a point to not cook anything today. Because I'm trying out so many fatty foods for the wedding, I'm trying to cut back with everything else I eat, hence a ton of gazpacho and the spinach curry, which is all vegetables and legumes except for one tablespoon of oil.

So yeah, that's mostly what I've been up to.

I'm sorry for not posting in so long. I've been very self-absorbed lately, planning for the wedding. I don't have much to blog about, but I DO have to comment right now about the loss of another of my favorite bloggers: Blackamazon (blog now private).

For about the past month, there's been a lot of conflict in the feminist blogosphere. What started out as two separate conflicts now show themselves to be intermingled. It goes like this:

1) At the recent WAM conference, Adele pitched an anthology of hers to Seal Press. Seal Press is a small feminist (I use the term loosely) press. This is what happened:

An informal meeting with an editor from Seal Press at the WAM conference regarding the proposal for my anthology left me feeling frustrated and deflated. I was not seeking or particularly interested in having them publish the anthology, but merely hoping for advice on my book proposal. The editor, while impressed with the format of the proposal, advised me that anthologies don’t sell, and I should get someone like Gloria Steinem or Katha Pollitt to contribute, even though, as she said, I wouldn’t be able to get access to them. I was struck by the fact that she did not suggest I contact Daisy Hernandez, bell hooks, Andrea Smith, or Alice Walker. I might not have access to them either, of course, but given the intent of the anthology is to highlight the voices of people of diverse backgrounds, especially those we’ve not heard from in other works, I found her comments discouraging. [Emphasis mine. For those who don't know, Gloria Steinem and Katha Pollitt are famous (and kind of outdated) white feminist writers.]

Angry for her friend, Blackamazon simply said "Fuck Seal Press" on her blog. Two Seal Press employees found this and reacted badly. I understand that they felt hurt and defensive, but their behavior towards Blackamazon was poor and unprofessional. At some point, they must have figured out that they were showing their asses as well, because they deleted a post about the conflict that they made on their blog (entitled, I think, "Seal Press and Women of Color," as if Blackamazon and Adele represent all women of color.)

2) A few days later, the event happened which I blog about here. A certain individual, who shall be called A.M., since she's a bit too fond of googling her own name, wrote an article about how anti-immigration policies and sentiments affect women. The article, in and of itself, is a good article. BUT, what A.M. doesn't mention is the work done by her fellow bloggers on the subject, especially Brownfemipower. Brownfemipower had been blogging about this for about a year, and considering that, a few months ago, a pattern developed where Bfp would blog about something and then A.M. would have a post about the same thing the next day or so, we know that A.M. read Bfp. Many of the articles in A.M.'s article were those also found by Bfp months or weeks earlier. It could be just a coincidence, but usually, since mainstream media outlets don't really care about the plight of women immigrants, those news sources are out of the way and not very wide spread.

So, somebody, although not Bfp, pointed out that A.M.'s article owes a lot to the work of Bfp and the work of other women of color, both bloggers and published writers. A.M., however, acted as if she came up with all the sources and ideas on her own. Huge debates ensue everywhere. Despite the fact that people are telling her over and over that it's about the larger issue of white feminists using the work of woc feminists without giving credit, A.M. is convinced that Bfp and everyone else criticizing her are just jealous of her book deal and writing gigs. It's not about feminist politics or history, oh no. It's about people who don't like A.M. and are trying to sabotage her career.

3) A.M.'s new book comes out --a book of feminist humor which, in an attempt to be ironic and kitschy, included these images of a white woman fighting black "savages." Oh, and to top it all off, the book is published by Seal Press. So far, Seal Press has offered a non-apology (the usual, "We're sorry that you were offended.")

As a result of 2 and 3, Brownfemipower and Blackamazon took down their blogs. I don't think they were silenced. It would take a lot more than A.M. and Seal Press to silence these women. Instead, I think both of them have gotten to the point where arguing with white feminists on the internet is draining too much of their energy to be worth it, especially when they have other activist work to do. I cannot speak for them, but that's my interpretation of events, at least.

A.M. and her cheerleaders, though, remain convinced that all this is personal. I have held my peace about this until now, but I'll say it once and be done with it, because this is exhausting: It was not personal until you made it personal. It really was about larger issues until you acted like an asshat made it about you because of your shitty behavior. It was not personal until you kept insisting that all this happened because "I’m a blogger with a lot of traffic and a book deal." It was not personal until you said "I fail to see the point of linking people who are more interested in [non existent] vendettas than good writing or social justice." Well, I fucking fail to see the point of linking to people who are too worried about their own careers to listen to criticism. If you go to the thread I'm linking, in EVERY fucking comment A.M. makes, she talks about her career and how it's terrible that people are trying to ruin it. She'll respond to someone else's comment, and then add some version of, "And it's horrible that they're trying to ruin my career, isn't it?" What she doesn't get is that if she'd apologized from the very beginning, none of this would have happened.

The other day, I was looking through a book catalog and found a book called Five Things We Cannot Change by David Richo. Usually, I'm not in to self-help books, but once I saw this book, the first thing I thought of was A.M. and this whole conflict. Here's Richo's list of the five things in life that we can't change and therefore have to deal with:

1. Everything changes and ends
2. Things do not always go according to plan
3. Life is not always fair
4. Pain is a part of life
5. People are not loving and loyal all the time

A.M. showed her inability to deal with all of these, basically. Richo apparently has another book called How to Be an Adult. If these books are legit and helpful, maybe someone should buy them for A.M., or at least tell her to grow up.

But what REALLY gets me about all this is this comment:

I’m extremely eager to address racism, but I won’t be made a scapegoat who has to roll over to scurrilous accusations to make anyone feel better.

Which means, "Accuse me of being racist, as long as you mean old women of color don't try to sabotage my career," as well as "If I'm racist fine, but don't use the race card to argue with me."  Guess what, honey? Your appropriation of, mischaracterization of, villainization of, and lumping together of women of color and their works IS the same thing as your racism. Full stop. You cannot stop being racist until you understand why you are wrong about this. And the fact that you didn't catch the blatantly racist images in your book before it went to print is more proof of your blindness to your own racism and privilege. In retrospect, after somebody complained, you could see what was wrong with those images and apologized for it. However, you are still unable to see your mistakes with the AlterNet article. This shows me that your concepts of racism and anti-racism are pretty shallow.

I'm not the anti-racist queen. I fuck up. I think, say, and do racist things from time to time. Any criticism hurts. Accusations of racism hurt. But when you would rather be called racist (because that means you can get your anti-racism cookie when you've completed level one of the course) than be criticized as a writer and a professional (because that means you won't make as much money), something is deeply wrong.

Truth be told, these comments would have been much more timely about two weeks ago. At that time, however, I was determined to hold my peace about it because I didn't want to pile on and add to the conflict. However, the racist images and Blackamazon's departure piss me off too much, so here's what I have to say. I'm really done with this now.

PS. Look at Sudy's wonderful post just to get an idea of why this isn't about A.M. Despite my gripes, it isn't, really.

I think one of the biggest misconceptions about vegans and vegetarians is that we care about animals, but not about humans. In the context of social justice, animal rights advocates are often dismissed as people who focus on trivial things and can't see what's really important. [NOTE: Although AR people are accused of this, few meat-eaters want to admit that they're guilty of it. Why were people so upset over Michael Vick's cruelty to dogs, when so many stories of cruelty to humans pass from the news without comment?]

It's true that there are a small number of animal rights people who advocate harming or killing humans who hurt animals. It's this kind of animal rights activist who makes it into the news. It would stand to reason, however, that most people stop eating animal products because they don't want to kill or harm anything, whether it be animal or human.

I will freely admit that I stopped eating meat mainly for the sake of animal welfare. However, after I became a vegetarian, I read for the first time of the human rights abuses in the meat industry. Simply put, the meat industry is one of the most, if not the most, abusive and exploitative industries in the US. On top of the grueling, degrading work of killing and cutting up animals, working conditions are abysmal -- unsafe, slippery floors, few or no bathroom breaks, intimidating employers, and almost guaranteed repetitive stress injuries.

Blood, Sweat, and Fear, a Human Rights Watch report from 2005, sums it up thusly:

Constant fear and risk is another feature of meat and poultry labor. Meatpacking work has extraordinarily high rates of injury. Workers injured on the job may then face dismissal. Workers risk losing their jobs when they exercise their rights to organize and bargain collectively in an attempt to improve working conditions. And immigrant workers—an increasing percentage of the workforce in the industry—are particularly at risk. Language difficulties often prevent them from being aware of their rights under the law and of specific hazards in their work. Immigrant workers who are undocumented, as many are, risk deportation if they seek to organize and to improve conditions. 

Meat and poultry industry companies do not promise rose-garden workplaces, nor should it be expected of them. Turning an eight hundred pound animal or even a five pound chicken into tenders for the supermarket checkout or fast food restaurant counter is by its nature demanding physical labor in bloody, greasy surroundings. But workers in this industry face more than hard work in tough settings. They contend with conditions, vulnerabilities, and abuses which violate human rights.

Employers put workers at predictable risk of serious physical injury even though the means to avoid such injury are known and feasible. They frustrate workers’ efforts to obtain compensation for workplace injuries when they occur. They crush workers’ self-organizing efforts and rights of association. They exploit the perceived vulnerability of a predominantly immigrant labor force in many of their work sites.²  These are not occasional lapses by employers paying insufficient attention to modern human resources management policies. These are systematic human rights violations embedded in meat and poultry industry employment.

As this excerpt suggests, the problems with the meat industry go much farther than poor working conditions. These jobs, although probably some of the toughest and unpleasant in America, are low-wage. In order to keep wages low and productivity high, employers are abusive and ever-vigilant, they illegally keep their workers from forming unions, and probably most importantly, they knowingly hire people from marginalized groups, especially immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, because these people will not know their rights.

If you've been paying attention to the news, you may have figured out that this post was prompted by the recent ICE raids which resulted in the arrests of 300 poultry plant workers in Texas, Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Since Elle's excellent post digs up a lot of good research and pretty much expresses my feelings, I'll quote it at length:

What do you call companies who make a practice of hiring immigrants, knowing full well some are undocumented, depend on their labor, subject them to brutal, crippling work, pay them low wages, set them in opposition to other exploited workers, and aggressively combat the workers' efforts to organize for better conditions, then turn them in to ICE?

Me, myself, I'm sitting here saying, "Them motherf*ckers!"

[. . .]

If you think anyone is pulling the wool over poultry companies' eyes, that they are unwittingly hiring undocumented immigrants, please allow me to disabuse you of that notion. Let me point you to two newspapers series: The Chicken Trail, a 2006 Los Angeles Times series (abstracts free, articles cost), and The Cruelest Cuts, a 2008 Charlotte Observer series. An excerpt:

Of 52 current and former Latino workers at House of Raeford who spoke to the Observer about their legal status, 42 said they were in the country illegally.

Company officials say they hire mostly Latino workers but don't knowingly hire illegal immigrants.

But five current and former House of Raeford supervisors and human resource administrators, including two who were involved in hiring, said some of the company's managers know they employ undocumented workers.

"If immigration came and looked at our files, they'd take half the plant," said Caitlyn Davis, a former Greenville, S.C., plant human resources employee.

Former Greenville supervisors said the plant prefers undocumented workers because they are less likely to question working conditions for fear of losing their jobs or being deported.(emphasis mine)

Also, Russell Cobb's The Chicken Hangers, much of which is part of a paper he wrote for a series of occasional papers sponsored by UT-Austin's Inter-American Policy Studies Program about poultry workers.* Cobb recounts the story of Esteban, an immigrant poultry processing worker:

[A]fter a year on the job, Julio Gordo, a manager at Peco Foods, called Esteban into his office. (To protect his identity, Julio Gordo is a pseudonym.) According to Esteban, Gordo told him that the Social Security Administration had notified Peco Foods that Esteban’s Social Security Number had repeated as a number for another worker.
At first, Esteban feared he would be fired by the plant and deported for document fraud — a fate not uncommon among undocumented workers. “Gordo told me he could have the cops here in five minutes if I didn’t cooperate with him,” Esteban confided to me later.

After Gordo allegedly threatened to deport Esteban, he reassured him that he could stay on at the plant if he could get a new ID and Social Security Number. Esteban knew this would be difficult; fake documents cost hundreds of dollars and were sold by only a handful of people in southern Mississippi on the black market. Furthermore, Esteban knew he would run the risk of being fired or deported if he bought a new Social Security Number, since he would be admitting his old one was false. Even with a new I.D., his seniority — including the two raises he had received for a year’s work — would be revoked. Esteban would be starting over from scratch.

Then, according to Esteban, Gordo told him he was willing to do him a “favor”: Esteban could buy a new Social Security Card from Gordo for $700. This was a favor Gordo had done for many other Mexicans in the same situation, he claimed.

So, given the current employee makeup, poultry processors depend heavily upon the labor of immigrants, including undocumented immigrants. In order to obtain work, these immigrants often become involved in a "fake document" black market,** risky actions that can see them deported or land in jail. Employers are well aware of the risk immigrants take. Federal prosecutors certainly believed so when they charged Tyson "of conspiring to smuggle immigrants to work at the company's poultry processing plants."***

Yet, despite the fact that "immigrant labor" has become a necessity to the poultry industry, immigrants have not. Poultry processors are used to high turnover--the UFCW suggests that annual turnover is well over 100%--and treat their workers as interchangeable, a disposable workforce. They themselves incur no risk. The article on Pilgrim's Pride lists a number of charges that immigrant workers will face then states succinctly, "Pilgrim's Pride faces no charges." Tyson beat the federal case by disavowing claims that they recruited and smuggled immigrant workers, blaming those actions not on company policies but on a few "rogue" employees.

And the immigrant workers who are fired, jailed, deported with little recourse will simply be replaced.

Those who would say that boycotting meat is more about animals than people don't see the complex intersection of oppressions involving the US meat industry. It is an industry guilty of 19th century-esque labor conditions, that intimidates workers and illegally keeps them from organizing. It is a racist industry that purposefully hires people of color to work in its low-wage positions. (In Beth Shulman's The Betrayal of Work, she interviews a white man working at a slaughterhouse. He is a knife sharpener, the highest paid employee, and the only white person there. And yet, even he only makes something like $8 an hour.) It is an industry that is fully aware of the vulnerability of immigrants, and chooses to exploit that vulnerability for its own profit.

Of course, vulnerability is more acute for undocumented workers who come into the United States without work authorization and are liable to immediate deportation if they are found out. Undocumented workers shrink from exercising rights of association or from seeking legal redress when their workplace rights are violated for fear of having their legal status discovered and being deported. For the same reason, they rarely testify in legal proceedings even when their testimony is essential to another worker or group of workers seeking legal remedies. Fully aware of workers’ fear and sure that they will not complain to labor law authorities or testify to back up a claim, employers have little incentive against violating their rights.²⁸⁸

Immigration status is directly related to health and safety on the job. An Associated Press investigative report published in March 2004 revealed that Mexican workers in the United States are 80 percent more likely to die in the workplace than U.S.-born workers, and nearly twice as likely as the rest of the immigrant population to die at work.²⁸⁹  Moreover, the rate of Mexican workers’ deaths at work is increasing dramatically. Just ten years ago, Mexican workers were 30 percent more likely to die on the job than U.S.-born workers, about the same as other immigrants.

Those animal rights activists who villainize slaughterhouse workers do so because they can't see the larger picture. These workers are abused by their industry, and in turn, often take it out on the animals. Workers who are cruel to the animals, who torture and abuse them in addition to killing them, are ultimately responsible for their own actions. Nevertheless, the animals are only at the bottom of a long chain of power abuses. Most people don't take jobs at slaughterhouses because they are sadists -- they take jobs at slaughterhouses because it's the only work they can get. In some ways, they are nearly as defenseless as the animals.

So, to those who have stopped buying sweatshop clothing and have stopped shopping at Wal-Mart, I would say this: if you're really interested in making consumer choices that are free from human rights abuses, stop eating meat. Whether or not you care about the animal who died to be on your plate, a lot of human suffering went into that cut of meat as well.

PS. I would also give this advice to people who are concerned about the environment, but that's another post for another time.

Near the end of February, I posted a picture of my commonplace book, which I had just started and probably had about six poems in it. I said at the time that it was a work in progress, and that still holds true. I've been keeping a list of the poems that I've copied in over the past nearly-two months, so here's what I have so far:

1. Sir Phillip Sidney -- Astrophil and Stella I
2. Lady Mary Wroth -- "In this strang labourinth" [sic]
   
3. Sir Walter Ralegh -- "What is Our Life?"
4. Charlotte Smith -- "The Partial Muse"
5. "Westron Wind"
6. "The Corpus Christi Carol"
7. Emily Bronte -- "The night is darkening round me"
8. William Wordsworth -- "Fragment -- Yet once again"
9.     ''                    ''               -- "Fragment --  Not the more failed I to lengthen"
10.     ''                    '                -- "My heart leaps up"
11. Marianne Moore -- "To a Giraffe"
12. William Shakespeare -- Sonnet  116
13. Frank O'Hara -- "Why I am not a Painter"
14. Marianne Moore -- "The Fish"
15. Alfred, Lord Tennyson -- In Memoriam I
16.              "                                          "           V
17.              "                                          "           XXI
18. Edward Thomas -- "Aspens"
19. Emily Dickinson -- "Wild Nights"
20.    "          "            -- "I'll tell you how the sun rose"
21.    "          "            -- "After great pain, a formal feeling comes"
22.    "          "            -- "I started Early -- took my Dog"
23.    "         "             -- "It dropped so low -- in my Regard"
24.    "         "             -- "There is a solitude of space"
25.    "         "             -- "Volcanoes be in Sicily"
26. Edmund Spenser -- Amoretti  45
27. Geoffrey Chaucer -- "Troilus' Song"
28. Robert Herrick -- "Delight in Disorder"
29.     "            "          -- "Upon the Nipples of Julia's Breast"
30. John Donne -- "The Canonization"
31. George Herbert -- "Prayer"
32.     "              "           -- "Jordan"
33. Richard Crashaw -- "To the Infant Martyrs"
34. Edgar Allen Poe -- "The Lake: To -------"
35.    "          "          "    -- "Eldorado"
36. Sylvia Plath -- "You're" 
37.     "         "       -- "Mirror"
38.     "         "       --  "Fever 103°"
39.     "         "       -- "Death & Co."
40. Elizabeth Bishop -- "Behind Stowe"
41.       "             "        -- "Sonnet" 
42.       "             "        -- "A Cold Spring"
43. Samuel Menashe -- "The Niche"
44.      "              "            -- "At a Standstill"
45. John Clare -- "Songs Eternity"
46.     "        "    -- "The Yellowhammers Nest"
47.     "        "    -- "The Pettichaps Nest"
48.     "        "    -- "The shepherds almost wonder where they dwell"
49. Gerard Manley Hopkins -- "Strike, churl"
50.     "            "              "        -- "Repeat that, repeat"
51.     "            "              "        -- "All as that moth"
52.     "            "              "        -- "Spring"
53.     "            "              "        -- "As kingfishers catch fire"
54. William Wordsworth -- "The Solitary Reaper"
55.      "                  "                -- "I wandered lonely as a cloud"
56. Gerard Manley Hopkins -- "That Nature is a Hericlitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection"
57.     "           "               "             -- "The Windhover"
58. Charlotte or Emily Bronte -- "Stanzas" ("Often rebuked yet always back returning")
59. Lord Byron -- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III, Sts. 92-97

(Poems in bold have earned my official Best Poem Ever status.)

So yeah, you can sort of gather my taste in poetry from this, although it's obviously skewed towards shorter poems. Often, my love for a poem is directly proportional to its length. The excerpt from Childe Harold is the first excerpt I've posted. I don't know if I'll do it in the future, but it might be useful.

Just thought I'd share. You know.

As a trial wedding dish, I made a half-casserole of this recipe today. I've always wanted to try it ever since I got Veganomicon, and since the lasagna didn't quite work out, I thought I'd do this.

You MUST make this dish. It's sooooooo good, and it's going to be at my wedding, now. If this doesn't convince people that vegan food is edible, nothing will.

Hint: if you give them an opportunity to speak, they can.

Lots of stuff going on in the feminist blogosphere right now, but I wanted to take a little moment to speak up for Renegade Evolution. Background: RenEv is a blogger and a sex worker. She is a stripper and a porn performer. She doesn't fit the stereotype of the oppressed sex worker (homeless drug addict with a history of abuse), nor does she think of her work as oppressive, but I used the word "oppressed" in the title because I think the situation I'm blogging about is a reflection of a larger state of affairs.

RenEv has been invited to speak at a debate about sex work, and especially pornography, at the College of William and Mary. One of her debating opponents is Sam Berg, an anti-porn radical feminist. Both are big online presences and have clashed several times over the issue. In one particularly heinous blog war, about a year ago, I think, where RenEv was threatened with being outed by several radical feminist bloggers, she said in an angry on her blog that she wished they'd fall under a truck and die.

Because of this comment a long time ago, apparently Sam Berg now fears for her safety at the debate. Which, you know, that'd be fine, but instead of declining to come to the debate out of concern for her safely, Berg has asked that Ren be uninvited, because she's afraid that Ren wants to push her under a truck. As Ren says in response:

Ah yes, well all know of what Sam speaks, no? She speaks of this post, made by me, in a moment of anger…a post which has been “reframed by radical feminist thinking” to stand as “Ren hates all rad fems and wants to push them to die violently”, yet, never mentioned Sam at all. Never mind that three of the women mentioned in it: Laura, Andrea & Faith were radical or radical leaning feminists, never mind that several of the other women mentioned were WoC bloggers putting up with some really vile racist asshatery at the time, never mind that several of the women mentioned were putting up with some really vile sexism and misogyny at the time, never mind that at least one of the women mentioned, an atheist, was putting up with some really vile godbaggery at the time, and never mind that I have repeatedly explained this before and apologized profusely for making the statement, time and time again…oh yeah, and never mind I got threatened with outing and the publishing of parts of my legal name and unedited photos of myself at a time before I had started posting such things myself-by a radical feminist…oh, and never mind that to the best of my recollection, in all the situations that prompted my angry and ill-advised response, Sam wasn’t participating…I want to push her in front of a truck. So she doesn’t want me at William and Mary.

Now, I saw this whole thing go down, OK? And I can attest to what she's saying. If Sam Berg really fears for her safety at the hands of a 100-pound woman who a year ago typed some angry words on a blog that weren't even directed at her, that's fine.* BUT, by asking that Ren be uninvited, instead of uninviting herself, she makes it clear that she thinks debates on sex work can be carried on in the absence of sex workers. Ren is the only sex worker invited to the debate.

Berg's stance is not new. Instead, I'd say that it's par for the course among anti-porn and anti-sex work activists. It seems that Berg cannot stand the idea of dealing with a real human being -- someone who doesn't fit her idea of what a sex worker should be, someone who does not fit in to her agenda. And that's what it really is -- an agenda. If Sam Berg had any respect for the people she pretends to defend -- namely, sex workers and women in general -- she would not think it's OK to silence Ren. I don't use the verb "silence" lightly. If she really cared for women, even as she feared Ren, she would drop out and let the debate go on so that a real sex worker could spread her words and ideas among a larger audience.

A few other voices on this issue.

----------
* It's my opinion that Berg doesn't fear for her safety, but rather, she just doesn't like and doesn't want to deal with Ren. The "threat" that was not directed at her or anybody in particular. But this is my opinion only, since I'm not Sam Berg and I'm not one to question women's feelings about fearing violence directed against them.

Not counting today (since it's almost over), I have 44 days until I marry. Although my wedding will be small and simple, there's still a lot to do. I had a lengthy conversation with my mom today about various preparations, of which food will probably be the biggest issue. At this point, we're looking at feeding 25 people, me and Thom included. Too big a party to go to a restaurant, too small a party to actually justify getting a caterer. So: we're going to make everything. Well, almost everything. I mean, picking up a fruit tray from somewhere is no big deal.

On Sunday I went over to my parents' house so my mom could try out some stuff. The wedding will probably be in the afternoon, so we'll be serving everyone dinner. The thing I'm most excited about at this point, though, is the cake. Trying to make a traditional, tiered wedding cake would be a disaster. I mean, my mom and I are good bakers, but we're not freaking pastry chefs, you know? So, we're going to make a small, simple layer cake, and then so everybody actually gets to have some cake, CUPCAKES!!!

Oh, glorious day that gave me an excuse to order Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World! We want to order a cupcake tree like this one, and have it sitting out beside the cake. I'll probably make a batch of cupcakes that match the cake, and then a couple of other flavors. I'm already looking to this Flickr pool for inspiration. I actually don't have any cake decorating skills, but it looks like I'm going to have to acquire them pretty quickly.

Although plunking down $500 or so to have the party catered would be easier, I'm actually looking forward to this as a chance to flex my vegan cooking skills. It'll be nice to be at an event where I can eat everything. Plus, I always like making other people try vegan cooking, especially when they don't know it's vegan cooking:

"Hey, you just ate some hummus and pita chips."
"Yeah, I know."
"That was vegan."
"AHHHHH!!!!"

That kind of thing. So, yeah, I'm not actually going to tell people that all the food's vegan. Well, not until after they've eaten, at least. The goal is to make it suitable for omnis, and to let the vegan food itself do the talking -- no fake meats or cheeses. Before I decided this, I made the lasagna from Veganomicon (which is really good, BTW) and as Thom and I sat there eating it, we thought, "This is good for us because we know what's in it, but anybody who doesn't know otherwise is going to think this is weird lasagna." So, I'm not going to attempt to recreate animal products -- I'm just going to make vegetable dishes.

Other aspects of the wedding are going well so far. It'll be a lot of work, and a lot of cooking, but I think we can pull it off.