406 Not Acceptable

Some years ago, I went to Las Vegas for the first time with an ex and his primary, and had a blast. It's become a place I miss when I haven't been there in a while. I was extremely surprised by this, and if you know me at all, you probably are too.

I just wrote up an email to a friend who I am trying to tempt into visiting Vegas with me, full of my favorite things to do and eat in Las Vegas. I've edited my gushing slightly for a blog audience.

I should also say that even the awful parts of Las Vegas turned out to be interesting to me in ways I didn't expect. Seeing all of it firsthand, especially in contrast to the deserts and mountains and vastness of the land, gave me many thinky thoughts about the meanings and values of plenty and excess. It is always an intensely interesting sociological experience for me.

Nature stuff, ordered from nearby to farther away:

Springs Preserve has botanical and educational gardens, natural and social history stuff, and a museum. This is where Las Vegas keeps all 16 of its hippies! Their educational gardens explain xeriscaping and sustainable planting in the desert, and even feature exhibits about gardening for the blind and low-vision and for the mobility impaired.

The next-door city of Henderson, NV has a water reclamation facility that is also a target for incredible numbers of migratory birds, and you can walk the trails and see both local and traveling species. If you are a birdwatcher at all, this is the place to visit.

Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area is right outside of Las Vegas and has a lot of stark mountains, amazing exposed geology, a natural desert spring, and sometimes WILD BURROS. I saw and touched my first waterfall there. It was a seasonal snowmelt waterfall in March 2010 (just after I got off the crutches after being hit by a car at the end of 2009). The water made the air around it cold and there was ice at the foot of the waterfall. This is one of my favorite memories.

The first time I visited the Valley of Fire, I was alone. I'd been traveling in the southwest for about a week and a half at that point, but this was the first time I saw rocks that were actually the colors of flames. They were the color of red rocks on TV, and I was completely unprepared for that shade of red to exist in nature. (Then I drove round a curve in the road and saw a giant TV boom vehicle parked by the side of the road. I cleverly concluded that that is WHY the red rocks here look like the red rocks on TV.) The shrubs are silver-blue-green, which is strictly incredible against the rocks and the red sand, and there are petroglyphs and you can walk up to a natural tank (a place in the rock that holds water most of the year round). I heart this place so freaking much.

Lake Mead is a little farther than Valley of Fire in the same direction. It's a giant reservoir in the desert formed by the Hoover Dam. However, the water levels are at record lows, and it's usually full of people with yachts and jetskis that they towed across the desert to go recreating on Lake Mead. It's worth seeing, it's lovely, but I don't personally consider it a primary attraction.

The Mohave Preserve is probably the best place to experience the ecosystem of the Mohave desert (deserts are named and delineated depending on where certain key species live, so the Mohave desert ecosystem is larger than the preserve). The preserve is an excellent place to just be overwhelmed by the desert- flatness that goes on until suddenly mountains, joshua trees and cholla and other things that barely look like plants. It also has a cinder cone (a former volcanic eruption site) and singing sand dunes, neither of which I've gotten to see yet. The Mohave is definitely a full-day trip, it's about a two-hour drive from Las Vegas to the Visitor's Center in Kelso. There's nowhere to stay or buy food in the park, but there are a few teeny communities on the edges that have some food and might have bare-bones lodging.

Death Valley is a little farther than the Mohave, about 2.5 hours of driving. There's lodging in the park, and also camping. The lowest point in the US, Badwater Basin, is there, and you can go walk on the salt flats, which is an unreal and otherworldly experience that I cannot recommend too highly. There are also cinder cones and mountains. One of my trips to Death Valley involved a day where it was 30F and snowing on the lower slopes of the cinder cones and 60F and sunny at Badwater. The park is huge, and the roads are slower than the Mohave, so getting to different parts of the park can take time.

There's also Joshua Tree National Park, which is another part of the Mohave Desert, but it's more rolling hills and spiky trees. It's also 3.5-4.5 hours from Las Vegas, so an overnight away from the city is definitely recommended. It's amazing, but I think the Mohave is cooler.

Food:

Aburiya Raku is a yakitori place that makes their own homemade tofu (with green tea sea salt!). They do meat on skewers, lovingly charcoal-grilled. Yep, they're pricy. Also they are maaaaaagical. Their bacon-wrapped asparagus is a transcendent experience.

Madhouse Coffee is a socialist (Marxist maybe?) 24-hour coffeeshop. TAKE MY MONEY. They're fucking adorable.

Aloha Kitchen is a smallish local Hawaiian barbecue chain. It's hard to describe what Hawaiian barbecue is, besides full of meat and carbs, but it's really good.

Poke Express doesn't have a website. They serve poke (poke-ay), which is Hawaiian. It's raw fish in a sweet, soy, or spicy sauce (or multiple of those adjectives) with seaweed salad salad on warm sushi rice. It is amaze.

Fat Choy (warning: PDF) is a restaurant in a small casino (outside the main Las Vegas mess) that serves handmade bao (Chinese savory buns). Since they're handmade, they're a little like tacos- a soft, steamed bread wrapped around meat and vegetables. They're worth going into a casino for, and the waitstaff have always been surprised and gratified to see people come in specifically to eat bao.

Hash House A Go Go is a smallish local chain specializing in Food Bigger Than Your Head. It's intimidating quantities of food. It's sort of "American farm food" with a little bit of fancyness and entire branches of rosemary, from places where rosemary is a TREE. I like going there for breakfast and having leftovers for picnicking in the desert later. :D

Luv-It Frozen Custard has excellent frozen custard and excellent toppings, such that if you get banana custard with a banana, they both taste like real actual bananas!

Hue Thai's Sandwiches is a Vietnamese restaurant (no website) that sells excellent Vietnamese sandwiches. They're inexpensive and travel well and also make good picnic food.

So the other day, one of my coworkers posted a video to the fun list at work. It was a compilation of video clips to music called "People are Awesome 2014". As I watched this video, I started to get a funny feeling- not that the things depicted weren't awesome, but that they were all the same kind of awesome, a dude-culture-fueled kind of awesome, a "sports that are extreme even for extreme sports" kind of awesome. Most of them featured what seemed to be terrible judgement and a complete disregard for personal safety. And every so often, there were a few frames of bikini-clad lady crotches with their heads cropped off, posing on a beach.

That's how I feel about MAKE.

(Hello. I have a new job and a new disease. How are you?)

I was raised with Christmas being the overwhelming gravitational source (sink?) of the year. Christmas in my mother's home was as gigantic and all-consuming and ever-growing as it is for the modern consumer economy, and topped off with motion-sensitive electronic garlands that played a few bars of some banal Christmas music every time you got too close, like a festive child detection system. "Here comes a daughter who can be roped into a chore that serves no purpose but to sustain the Santa juggernaut!"

As an adult I've gone back and forth on how distasteful I find the season and the consuming and the gifting. I still prefer not to celebrate, and I still have a "no gifts" agreement with everyone I am close to, but I haven't been able to shake how much I love that things are lit up with thousands of tiny lights during the dark nights. But what about all of the work and time and money that goes into things that do nothing but sustain the juggernaut?

This year, I am thrilled to be the instigator of a Federal Holiday Party at seattleattic. It's exciting to have a community of noncelebrants, such that we still have something to do that involves quantities of food and humor.

I still find it frustrating how much of a deathgrip Christmas has on our economy and our culture. I still exist in relation to Christmas, no matter how I try- the way we grow up in patriarchy, breathing racism, I have found it to be inescapable. (Friends who were raised here in a non-Christian faith, do you have that feeling too? Or is it truly different to know that you aren't just against a faith/the culture of Santa, but for or about something else?) It sure is nice to have a day off, required by the government (because we didn't mean CHRISTMAS when we said separation of church and state, amirite?). If I didn't have the day off I wouldn't have the spare emotional energy to write this ambivalent meditation on all things red, green, and bearded.

And I've been thinking a lot since I moved about how the US conception of Christmas, like the US conception of knitting and many other things, partakes solely of New England white people's cultural heritage. US Chrismas can barely conceive of places like LA or Houston or Las Vegas (despite the strong influence those places have on our culture in general), much less of Christmas in Melbourne. That's at least a whole nother post's worth of being difficult.

Happy Federal Holiday, since I think that is a Thing for pretty much everyone I know here. I hope that you have ways to be comfortable and happy and to care and be cared for.

I think hypatiadotca retweeted this from iamdanw, and it's everything that made me suspicious about services like AirBnb, Lyft, and Taskrabbit that I didn't know how to verbalize:

If there is one thing that makes me angry, it is people appropriating the language of collective and progressive politics for financial gain. And that’s one thread of what’s going on here. As we shall see. It does seem that Executive Director Natalie Foster’s heart is in the right place, but that’s one of the tragedies of the sharing economy: well-intentioned people end up contributing to immiseration and injustice when they think they are doing the opposite.

These services are a race-to-the-bottom, crabs-in-a-bucket scenario. The providers are incented to provide more for less, with no lower bound, no worker protections, and no worker benefits. They become complicit in their own economic exploitation. Providers are set up to compete against each other and the users are set up to apply pressure to provide more for less. This is oppression recapitulated, it's the problem with hourly, no-benefits, no-union jobs, it's selling a marginal or nonexistent living and long working hours as if they were freedom, flexibility, self-determination, and good experiences. The seductive idea is that like low-cost retailers, a provider can make it up in volume. But there is a hard limit on the volume that can be produced in this scheme- the limits of one person or one household. There's no volume on this scale, just a zero-sum game. And the people who benefit are the ones running the scheme, who set up the pathological system and take a cut of its every transaction.

Of course, as oursin says, it's always more complicated than that. I've used and benefited from Airbnb, and I am an occasional Etsy shopper. These services are surely providing things people need (or at least want), and they are surely ways to make money outside a standard office job (inaccessible to so many people) and, to at least some extent, on your own hours and with your own boundaries. I am completely certain that signing up as a provider for these services is saving the bacon of many individuals- and as a person with mobility issues, being able to get an Airbnb apartment near the event I was attending last year was a significant accessibility boost for me.

And it's tempting to say that providers don't have to sign up for transactions that aren't fair to them, so people aren't being forced into offering services at rates that won't support them. But there will always be someone more desperate or without kids or a little healthier or with slightly lower rent, who will take the deal if you don't. In these systems as they currently stand, rock bottom is the limit.

It's also important to look at these services in the context of reports of 0 to negative wage growth for the bottom 60% of Americans over the last decade (which I also saw on twitter, but I can't remember where). This suggests that people are or will be searching for income outside of normal wages. Sharing economy services position themselves that way for providers, and no doubt that's true in many individual cases- but in the aggregate, it seems to me that they're contributing to the unsustainability of making a living in the US.

The sharing economy is not an alternative to capitalism, it’s the ultimate end point of capitalism in which we are all reduced to temporary labourers and expected to smile about it because we are interested in the experience not the money. Jobs become “extra money” just like women’s jobs used to be “extra money”, and like those jobs they don’t come with things like insurance protection, job security, benefits – none of that old economy stuff. But hey, you’re not an employee, you’re a micro-entrepreneur. And you’re not doing it for the money, you’re doing it for the experience. We just assume you’re making a living some other way.

(As distinct from "fat clothes", which have a specific meaning in diet culture.)

One of the perennial conversations around fat acceptance (or HAES or whatever your preferred term is) is the one about clothes and sizing. People who aren't fat and are learning about fatness are shocked (and hopefully upset) that it's so damn hard to find clothes worth wearing as a fat person. (I am trying to use language that's as neutral as possible, since each individual decides what's worth wearing for them.) Among fat people, the conversation about why the selection sucks so much gets frustrating but remains relevant.

People who are served by the "normal" size range are usually floored when I explain that various brands have gone on the record saying that they don't want their brand associated with fatness. (I'm sorry, I don't have references right now but I would welcome them if you do.)

I've been reading the blog of Kathleen Fasanella lately (thanks to malka for the tip). Today I ran across a post from the archives about why women's clothes sizing is so different from men's. I think there are a bunch of good points in it and lots of stuff to talk about.

Here's a summary of the main points Fasanella makes about why measurement sizing for women's wear would suck from an economic/supply chain perspective (but you should still read her post):

• There are lots of styles of women's garments where it would be difficult, not meaningful, or even *deceptive* to use measurement sizes, which she illustrates with a loose, flowing outfit.
  
• The number of styles available at any given moment would make it prohibitive for any one manufacturer or retailer to produce/display their garments in all of the sizing combinations possible. (If every manufacturer did, that would make the problem even harder.)
  
• If a manufacturer or retailer didn't make/carry all sizes, customers would be angry and those who were left out would feel slighted.
  
• The speed of stylistic change would mean that manufacturers and retailers could expect a lot more "waste"- items that don't sell.

To throw another wrench into the works, I'd like to note that we haven't even defined what "all sizes" would be!

Fasanella also asserts that men's proportions have a smaller deviation than women's do. I find this fishy, personally. That's the sort of gender-based assertion that sounds like "men are stronger than women", and it also sounds like it might even be true for "normal" (read: skinny) people but my intuition says it probably doesn't take fat people into account. I'm not aware of any research on proportional deviation between men and women- if you are, I would love to see it (and scrutinize its methodology).

However, what we can take away from this is that men's clothing comes in nice numerical styles and can be stocked in a comparatively vast array of sizing options because of three factors:

• The shape of men's clothing remains pretty constant
  
• The difference between the shape/size of the clothes and of the body ("ease") remains pretty constant
  
• Men's clothing styles change slowly

And even for men's casual clothes (which are more fashion-vulnerable), the first two statements are true and the last is still true in comparison to women's wear.

I would also assert that men's clothing can be more effectively displayed/sold in cubbies because the shapes of the garments aren't intended to be surprising. So it's likely easier to display menswear than womenswear because for men, pants are pants and shirts are shirts, but for women you have to see what kind of loose, flowing, dagged-hem, non-closing cardigan THIS one is.

So in conclusion, the problem space for defining women's clothes in a standarized manner that's easy to parse sucks. And we'd likely all care less if there were standardized clothes for women (the way that men's clothes are now) and stylish, rapidly-changing, we-do-the-best-we-can-and-the-target's-always-moving clothes for men (like women's clothes are now). BRB, overthrowing the patriarchy and the gendered order of Western society.

But this was the part that moved me to post:

A woman we mutually and greatly admire was once entertaining the idea of a plus sized line, what she learned was shocking (to her). She said that the plus sized women she interviewed wanted regular clothes, styles that could not possibly look good on them, only cut larger. Like mini skirts and crop tops to fit women weighing 250 to 300 pounds. She concludes that the perception of their appearance is vastly different from others. By the same token (playing devil’s advocate), it shouldn’t be up to us to say what people should wear but it does represent a design blindness in that we don’t make those items. We can’t say we won’t make it because people would be disappointed so retailers don’t carry it if our bias of what looks good conflicts with some consumers expressed wishes.

The reaction of the woman doing the market research- that is another reason for the scarcity of plus-sized clothes. Let's break down the assumptions in her (reported) reaction:

• Assumption of an objective standard of "looking good"
  
• Assumption that the women she talked to wanted to meet it
  
• "She concludes that the perception of their appearance is vastly different from others" makes it sound like she assumes that these women believe they aren't fat, or that they believe these styles would make them look skinny

(It's also sort of amusing to see 250 to 300 pounds held up that way (whether that was Fasanella or the friend is not clear to me). I'm 250 pounds on the nose, I wear a size 18-20 in most plus size ranges, and Nordstrom (at least) makes some of that stuff in my size and in several much larger sizes.)

So none of this "invisible hand of the market" bullshit- the prejudices of the producers and retailers have a direct effect on what is produced and sold. The whole "invisible hand" theory presumes businesspeople who are both extremely observant and perfectly rational. However, last I checked, businesspeople were subject to the same expectation biases, prejudices, and stereotypes as the rest of us- with the added stress of a monetary risk.

This is one more example that shows that at least some designers/manufacturers/retailers think that fat women are delusional, and that they say they want clothes that they wouldn't buy if those clothes were available. And, you know, that's probably true- but I don't think it's more true for fat people than for any other kind of market research. (If you're interested in knowing more about how what people say is not very related to what they do and how they think, look at UI research or the growing body of experiments that are proving unconscious biases.)

I think Fasanella's response hits it on the nose- "We can’t say we won’t make it... if our bias of what looks good conflicts with some consumers expressed wishes." I am totally buying her book.

And I should totally be in bed but there was one more thing I just remembered that I wanted to write about.

I was in the consuite at Fogcon, talking to wild_irises (maybe you're sensing a theme? I'm happy we got to spend so much time together!) when Guy (stonebender) and one of his partners (loracs) joined us. Someone in the group asked what I was knitting, and I explained that I had to wear a knee brace, and it was irritating my skin, and I was knitting something as bland and boring as possible to go under it to try to address that.

When I started knitting this knitting project, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about how I was going to answer the question "what are you knitting?", which is a natural and often benign question from knitters and bystanders alike. What I wanted to avoid more than ANYthing was the "Go you! You are a good disabled person! You don't let your challenges get you down, not YOU! YOU make LEMONADE out of LEMONS!" This would have been very upsetting because it would have forced me to try to set them on fire with the power of my brain, and I am pretty sure I still haven't mastered that (otherwise there would be an alarming number of spontaneous human combustion cases among customers of my employer). So I would have had to face the fact that I haven't learned pyrokinesis, and that's always a downer.

So I spent a while trying to figure out how to frame my explanation so that it would be clear that I didn't want to be congratulated for being resourceful or some shit. I eventually found, more or less by accident, that leading with "I have to wear a knee brace" and aiming for somewhere between "matter of fact" and "cranky" conveyed that none of this was voluntary or to my taste and that congratulatory language was out of line.

Out of habit, I framed my answer that way during our conversation in the consuite and waited, with some curiosity, to see what would happen. I knew that Guy and wild_irises had been thinking about body politics as they relate to ability for way longer than I had, and I suspected the same of loracs. So the lemonade nonsense was out of the question, but I wasn't sure what I should expect.

What I got back was a very matter-of-fact "good for you for taking care of yourself". Their reaction acknowledged that the brace sucked, the issues with it sucked, and the boring knitting sucked, and was supportive of my frustration and also of my project as an act of self-care.

Talking about a problem with other people who have it (or ones in the same family) really does help so much. How is it that I forget this so often?

(Why are you looking at me like that? Your FOOD eggs. In the fridge.)

I know I've talked to some people here about how Americans are really very exercised about food safety and foodborne illness in a way that I assert is directly related to the fact that we have so little experience with it. (This is similar to cities that have small light pollution problems becoming the first International Dark Sky Communities, or to evangelical Christians feeling extremely persecuted by secularism. Basically, I posit a dynamic where people are very concerned about things that barely affect them because they have almost no direct experience with the threat. They don't have a good calibration.)

So anyway, food safety. Because of a combination of factors (like being a reluctant cook and therefore a reluctant food shopper (because I am terrible at using things up while they're edible) and because of knowing some women with more experience in telling food is bad (basically though family histories of food insecurity)), it turns out that I have more experience than a lot of my US age peers in telling when things are bad and knowing what won't kill you.* Tonight I cracked my first rotten egg, and I thought some of my friends might want to know what that's like.

( In case you don't want to read about rotten eggs )

Thanks to tb for teaching me so much about food spoilage.

* I am not discussing commercial or large-group food prep here- this is not related to catering or the sorts of things that can go wrong when you prepare complex food with a mix of ingredients and leave it sitting out. I'm talking about how to tell if your raw ingredients have gone off when you're cooking for yourself or your family or whatever.

I keep posting intermittently and saying I'm sorry for not posting more. It's true but is beginning to sound thin even to me.

At the moment, I'm in the airport, waiting to fly back to the west coast. There are a pair of women sitting across from me with amazing colorwork sweaters and I am covertly staring, trying to decide if they're handknit. One of them is black with white, instead of the more usual pale color with darker pattern. I love this reverse video effect.

In January, I went to Las Vegas for a long weekend. We saw Red Rocks Canyon National Conservation Area, Springs Preserve (where Las Vegas stores all 16 of its hippies!), and Death Valley. My one hard goal for the trip was to be at Badwater Basin at sunset, because it is an amazing unreal landscape that looks like the laws of physics have been suspended and like the sun is setting into the salt flats and you are walking on sunbeams. We did it, and it was not quite as transcendent as the first time I did (I think the time of the year made a difference, as well as atmospheric conditions), but it was definitely incredible. We even saw Ubehebe Crater, which was stunning. I believe the crater was at about 5,000 feet, and it was cloudy with light precipitation, approximately 30MPH winds, and sub-freezing temperatures. Badwater was nearly still, sunny, and almost 70F, a really incredible contrast. Another point of interest on our way from Las Vegas to Death Valley is the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel. I still love the desert. I just came back from it and I miss it again- and not because of the sun, because of the absurd landscape and incredible vistas and tiny, perfect plants and large, spiky plants.

A few weeks later I visited my father's parents in greater LA, because my grandfather had a colon resection and he's in his 90s. Both of my sisters were there, which means I got less connection with my grandparents than I had hoped. Family dynamics are tricky- especially when one is estranged (by choice) from one's parents.

The week following that was the Madrona Fiber Arts Retreat (which I call a knitting convention. :). I took six classes and pretty much overbooked myself, but it was a really amazing experience. I got home fired up and ready to knit ALL THE THINGS, but of course I promptly got a cold and was sick for a week.

This past weekend was a square dance weekend with my club in Boston. It was awesome, but I am too injured/sick to dance more than a few times all weekend, so it was also bittersweet.

This coming weekend will be Fogcon. I'm going to be home for two days in between. I'm desperately hoping I don't get sick again, since at that point I will have been away from home for four out of five weekends running.

I have thoughts about LA, and knitting conventions/knitting culture, and the classes I took, and Las Vegas, but I have been too rushed and distracted to write about them. I would answer questions if you left them in comments, though.

...it gives him a new context and scope in which to express his misogyny!

This coffee shop appears to be playing "Do-Wop Inspired Misogynist Love Songs for the Ages". Headphones deployed.

I am Not Pleased that our collective mining of our cultural past (also known as the fad for all things "retro") has brought the appalling "adult contemporary" "love songs" of my child and teenage back into currency. They were terrible the first time around- why do we need to revisit them?

( Read more... )

I'm leaving comments on because some of you knew her. I will probably not reply to them, though I will read them. Thanks to everyone who helped me make this decision and helped and are currently helping with is consequences.

No Rainbow Bridge/next life stuff, please. I am an atheist and those things upset me more.