State of the State of the Cat

So I've spent the last three days eyeball-deep in Reaper, cutting and pasting suggestion tracks that my Wonderful Collaborator sent me to send my suggestions back.  This has been wonderful fun--all the fun and interest of playing with sound tracks; none of the fiddly little grumpiness of getting every transition perfect.  But it has kept me busy.

And in the meantime all the regular commitments I made with my life are still active.  I am giving a concert at the League of Women Voters Annual Meeting (kind of out of the usual for us, but people seemed to like the idea, so...) so I'm practicing for that.  I promised to roast a chicken so that we would not end up with buckets of leftover KFC this time; it may have been poor judgment to combine that and a concert on the same day.  My schedule this week does not particularly encourage me to take today off as regards either the album or the proofreading I promised.  I promised to write a song for the League (which ended up being not so much about the League but about the Convention at Seneca Falls in 1848 that is widely seen as the start of the women's suffrage movement) and that's done but I'm hoping I know it well enough to perform it because I only wrote it a week ago.

And now Mossy Creek Network is trying to get started up again, and urgently wants to meet this week, and I had to tell them "not Tuesday" (the day of the LWV meeting. )  Because I need to get my mixing done and I need to do my proofreading and I want to fit at least one more practice in, because last night's, while it went well considering I had been working from 8 am to 9 pm with breaks for lunch and dinner(it was my day to work 3 hours in the morning at the Rural Clinic, which kind of added to the load) did not go as well as I would like for the day before a concert.

And I got a book called "Just One Thing" about things to meditate on (sort of) and this week's thing is "Be On Your Side" meaning take care of yourself: treat yourself with kindness and compassion.  I don't think I generally have a problem with that, but I kind of wonder if I should start pushing back against all these worthy organizations I would like to support and get some of my time back from them, at least until July.

Alice Day

We're also overdue for an Alice Day post, I think.  I've had this one on the back burner for a while, which makes it easy to put up.  The Seneca Falls song is coming but I'll have to record it, and I don't know that I'll have time to do that this week.

I Am Like You
lyrics and melody by Catherine Faber 2012
a capella mp3 here

         D                     A
We are alike, in strength and need;
     G                 D                  G               A
The tears we shed are salt; if something cuts us we both bleed.
               D                 A
Our lives are dear, and all too brief,
    G                  D             D         A      G
We both reach out for happiness; we both must suffer grief.

 A            D                A
   I am like you, you are like me
              G              D                           A
   With our spirits held in common, in our shared humanity.
                  D                A
   We can choose love, instead of strife,
        G               D              G    A        G
   And work to bring together what we value in this life;
A             D
   I am like you.

We can give pain; we can give mirth
We can give comfort, love and knowledge, as a measure of our worth.
We live our lives, and take our shot:
Let's make this life the best we can, in case it's all we've got.


The world is wide, the sky is old--
Fairness, freedom, care, these fragile values I will hold
Our mayfly lives can heal or kill;
Our choices here define us as a force for good or ill.

Pretty Much Out Of The Blue

So.  I'm a feminist.  I believe that women are full human beings with full human rights and should have the full range of human options when it comes to our choices.

I like a lot of things that are considered "masculine" like woodworking, and pants, and short hair.  I don't like a lot of things that are considered "feminine" like high heels and makeup.  But you know, that is me--my personal tastes.  It has nothing to do with feminism as I understand it.

When I was younger I despised (or sometimes pretended to despise) feminine things--because I had absorbed society's belief that feminine things were less important, less competent, less worthy than masculine things.  Shop was important and interesting; home ec was dull and foolish, and girls who settled for that were patsies.  But, you know, that wasn't feminism; that was its opposite.  (Though it did push me to complain to my Mom, who then went and pushed the school until they announced that any boy who wanted could take home ec and any girl who wanted could take shop, which was both a good outcome and a feminist move.) Now shop was important and interesting (or at least a lot of fun) and I'm glad I took it, but learning to sew and cook also would have been useful when I needed those skills, just like learning to type and drive came in handy.

There's nothing wrong with anyone of any gender choosing the feminine option--as long as you're doing it because that's what makes you happy.  It's when you're doing it because you're socially pressured to do so, or because the option available to men isn't as available to you, that I have a problem with it.  And even then my problem isn't with you--it's with the situation and the people causing the situation. 

Feminism should be about widening the field of choices available to women--indeed, in the larger sense, about widening the field of choices available to *anyone*--not about substituting one constrained set for another constrained set.