Only in Las Vegas… I wasn’t a fan before, and I’m not now, but playing minigolf under blacklight with dayglo balls is some kind of cool. Also got video clips of some rather sad animatronic robots.
Category Archives: bio
Shopping in Delhi: Central Cottage Industries Emporium
I’m not much of a shopper on my home territory, but love shopping in India, especially Delhi, which is well supplied with everything from roadside stalls to glitzy shopping malls, plus a good selection of handicrafts from all over India. The oldest and largest place to buy handicrafts (probably in all of India) is the Central Cottage Industries Emporium on Jan Path. It was there when I was in high school in the 1970s and 80s – already seeming to have been in existence for decades – and hasn’t changed much since.
It’s an unusual building (wish I could find out who designed it), a labyrinthine series of mezzanines build around an open interior. Though better lit now that it used to be, it still feels cavernous, musty, and strangely underpopulated. (This last is reason enough to spend some time there on a hot day in Delhi – away from the crowds of people on the streets, many of whom, in this part of town, are trying to sell you something.)
Many of the goods here are items that have been sold to tourists in India for decades, if not centuries. There are innovative twists on handicraft tradition available in India nowadays, but you won’t find them here. However, for the usual stuff, you’ll get a large selection, decent quality, fair prices, and no shopkeeper at your elbow, constantly urging you to buy.
^ Gold-plated dishes as tourist tat was actually new to me, I can only guess that it’s aimed at the Middle Eastern market.
CCIE has a nice, though relatively limited, supply of textiles – silk, cotton, wool; printed, dyed, batik, embroidered; for clothing, curtains, and upholstery. If you love fabric (I do!), this is a good introduction to the breadth of traditional cloth available in India. Note the remnants bin – great for finding decorative pieces suitable for framing.
More in the photos below, and there was much more that we didn’t photograph – books, clothing, toys, tea, perfume, jewelry, bedding, cushion covers, furniture, even architectural pieces like carved doorways and columns. (I assume they will ship that sort of thing, no idea what it would cost.) There’s also a cool, quiet coffee shop on the top floor.
Actually buying anything is a bit of a process. In each section of the store, hand over your selections to the waiting personnel – that they merely wait, and don’t hassle you, is a huge improvement on every other tourist shop in Delhi! The staff write you a receipt, your goods are whisked away, and you continue shopping. This is dangerous – you end up carrying a handful of paper, with no clear idea of how much you’re acquiring.
When you’re finally finished, you take your receipts downstairs to the “cash desk”, and pay for everything at once via cash or credit card. Each of your receipts is firmly thwacked with a “paid” stamp, and the whole pile given back to you. You trot over to the nearby pickup counter, and are handed a dozen or more recycled-paper bags in various sizes, one for each section of the store you bought from. It is permissible to consolidate these into fewer bags for easier carrying. Then you’re done, and step back into the heat and roar of Jan Path.
All of Brendan‘s photos of CCIE from our October India trip are here:
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Stuff I Do: dtrace.conf 2012
^ above: the famous DTrace laser pony designed by substack. Why a pony? Read here.
This week was eventful for me professionally. I organized and ran dtrace.conf 2012, a highly technical conference, for my employer and others of the tech community that works with this technology. Yes, this is the same DTrace as in that book that I edited in 2010.
I also filmed it and ran a live video stream, while publicizing it via Twitter. And making sure everyone got fed and, at the end of the day, had beer to drink. A very busy day, but all went very well. The final, edited video is now making its way to YouTube, see the playlist of videos above.
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Who You Calling “Slut”?
“When you judge someone, it doesn’t define the person you’re judging – it defines you.”
Tulisa Contostavlos (story in The Guardian)
A few months ago I had a Twitter exchange with a woman in the tech industry, who wrote that girls the age of her teenage son should not be allowed dress like “skanks”. I assumed it was her son who defined them thus, and gently suggested that he should be taught not to use such terms. She replied that it was herself, not her son, who made this judgement. Her son, she added, being a teenager, was happy for them to dress that way.
I resisted the impulse to argue, because I may have to deal with this woman professionally someday. But it saddens and angers me that so many are prepared to pass judgement on other women based on their mode of dress and their (real or perceived) social and sexual comportment.
I’ve lived in places where women are judged far more harshly, and consequences for “transgression” can be severe. In Bangladesh, I was appalled that most of women on the street – and they were few – were covered head to toe in black burqas, only their eyes barely visible through black mesh. Though I was a skinny, innocent 14 year old, uninteresting to the average male gaze in my own country, in Bangladesh I didn’t feel safe, exposed to the eyes of men who assumed that any woman not completely covered up was somehow sexually available. So I dressed conservatively, by American standards (covered to the ankles – in tropical heat), and never went out alone.
Once I took a bicycle rickshaw somewhere with a woman friend. We were puzzled as to why the driver was pedaling so erratically, stopping and starting and weaving all over the road. We finally realized that he was masturbating furiously through his lunghi – apparently irresistibly turned on by the sight of our (not very) naked flesh – or by whatever fantasies and assumptions he entertained about unchaperoned foreign females. Had I or my friend been alone with him, we might have been in danger. By our own cultural norms we were modestly dressed: long skirts or trousers, loose, high-necked blouses. But those same clothes, in the eyes of the rickshaw driver, branded us as available sexual objects: our hair, faces, and arms were uncovered! Obviously, we were sluts, and lucky that we got no worse than a display of public masturbation.
In some countries, particularly those under Islamic law, it’s considered sluttish behavior for a woman to ride in a car or speak with a man who is not a relative, and punishments can be severe. Many girls worldwide have been murdered by their own families for “dishonoring” them by falling in love with the “wrong” men.
So, to define a girl or woman as a “skank” or “slut” is not just insulting: it implies a threat of physical harm as punishment for her “transgressive” behavior. Even in America, how many times have we heard – even from authority figures – that a woman “deserved what she got” because she was in the wrong place, dressed the wrong way, behaved provocatively? When you call a woman a slut, you have judged and condemned her to… whatever she gets.
Most Americans reading this were probably shocked and disgusted at the rickshaw driver’s behavior I described, but your definition of “slut” comes from your culture, just as much as his did. I don’t necessarily agree with any of you. Actually: your right to have an opinion ends where my body begins.
If you think you’re more civilized or enlightened than that rickshaw driver was, then it’s time for you to stop judging girls and women based on their dress or sexual behavior. Who a woman has sex with is none of your damned business. The idea that it might be comes from the notion that women are property, whose ability to bear children must be kept safe for a socially-approved man.
Legally and culturally, most of the people likely to read this page should be well past that. It therefore follows that you should not be using words like “slut” to threaten, shame, control, and silence women. Or you’re really not so different from that illiterate, ignorant rickshaw driver on the streets of Bangladesh.
Thanks to Brendan for insightful comments during the writing of this piece.
further reading:
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Viva la Mamma? Motherhood, Menopause & Culture
I’m a US citizen, but I lived and raised my daughter Rossella (now 22) in Italy for 17 years. I left Italy in 2008 while Ross was at boarding school in India, and subsequently separated from my Italian husband (we were already geographically apart – he did not follow me to the US). My daughter is hurt and angry about all this; I’m told that’s normal for children of any age whose parents divorce. But Ross is further angered that I am not behaving like the mammas of her Italian friends.
During my years with Enrico, I was of course aware that I was in a cross-cultural marriage, and thought I was dealing with that well enough (maybe not). But I now realize that I had not accounted adequately for the weight of Italian cultural norms regarding la mamma.
I had worked hard to be a good wife and mother, while still trying to maintain other things I care about: work, friendships, travel. In early 2006, we were living in Lecco, I was working in Milan, and my life had settled into a steady, if hectic, groove. But I found myself pondering the many foreigners who had moved to Italy in pursuit of a dream, who were willing to sacrifice far more than I to live there.
I also began to re-examine the old wounds of a very messy childhood. I felt waves of anger – perfectly legitimate anger, but why was it coming up now? I thought I’d resolved all that, with years of therapy, and didn’t particularly want to revisit it. But I couldn’t seem to help myself.*
In the autumn of 2006, Rossella and I began discussing her desire to go to Woodstock School, and in early 2007 we began the process of getting her there. I foresaw that her going would profoundly change our family life, but the scale of those changes soon grew beyond anything I’d anticipated.
It became clear that a year at Woodstock would not be just one year away for Ross. Her school in Lecco let us know that, upon returning from her senior year at Woodstock, Ross might have to do the Italian fourth year as well, before going on to do the usual fifth year and then the maturita’ (school leaving exam). Having already repeated a year (common in Italy), she’d be in high school til age 21 – an absurdity none of us was willing to contemplate. Without the maturita’ , Ross couldn’t attend Italian university. She would have to go to college in the US. Ready or not, she was likely leaving home for good.
This was financially difficult: we had not anticipated nor saved for college in the US (university in Italy is nearly cost-free, if the student lives at home). Enrico’s salary covered our normal expenses, but would not extend to such an extravagance; I would have to find a way to pay for that, as well as the year at Woodstock. I was earning 17,000 euros (yes, that’s per YEAR) in Milan. Something would have to change.
Rescue arrived: I began working for Sun as a contractor in March of 2007, which met the immediate need to get Ross to Woodstock. But the money would have to keep coming in, so I was delighted and relieved when, after a year as a contractor, Sun offered me a full-time job. Though that offer was contingent on my moving to the US, I did not hesitate a moment in accepting it; I moved back to the US in March, 2008.
All this change occurred so quickly that I’m still processing what happened and why (while enduring still more upheavals). In retrospect, I’m more surprised that I put up with so much for so long; the sequence of events now seems almost inevitable.
And yet, for most of the time I was living in Italy, I didn’t feel that I was “putting up with” my life there. I was generally content with my home, my family, cooking, gardening, etc. Until Sun asked me to move to the US, I had no idea that I was so ready to leave Italy.
How was that possible? Was I that good at concealing inconvenient emotions, even from myself?
Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain
This “mommy brain” tells you that your child’s welfare is the most important thing in the universe, with your own needs and desires coming a distant second (or third, or fourth…). As long as my child was safe and well – and those hormones kept flowing – I was content.
It now seems clear that Ross’ departure for boarding school coincided with my early menopause, when “There’s a new reality brewing in [a woman’s] brain, and it’s a take-no-prisoners view.” I’ll let Dr. Brizendine explain the details (I strongly recommend that you read the book, if you are a woman or have any women in your life), but, simply stated: the connecting and nurturing hormones (estrogen and oxytocin) are diminishing. “What had been important to women – connection, approval, children, and making sure the family stayed together – is no longer the first thing on their minds. And the changing chemistry of women’s brains is responsible for the shifting reality of their lives.”
It’s not surprising that my family were taken off guard by the changes in me – I was shocked and bewildered myself. It felt as if I had woken up from a long dream. Overnight (or so it felt at the time), I found myself wondering: “What the hell am I doing here?”
Ross’s absence probably accelerated the change: “The normal contact of living in the same house [with one’s children] provides enough sensation to maintain a woman’s tending and caretaking behaviors toward her kids – even grown-up kids. Once the kids leave the house, however… if a mother is menopausal at the same time, the hormones that built, primed, and maintained those brain circuits are also gone.”
It’s not that a mother no longer cares about her grown children, but, in American culture, she is likely to be ready to get on with her own life. Dr. Brizendine says of a patient: “she felt as though a haze had been lifted recently, and she could see in a way she hadn’t been able to before. The tugs she used to feel at her heartstrings to rescue and care for others had all but vanished. She was ready to take some risks and start walking in the direction of her dreams.”
From Brizendine’s anecdotes, and observing friends my own age, it’s very common for American women to suddenly make big changes in their lives around menopause (“65% of divorces after the age of 50 are initiated by women”). This does not happen as much in Italy, where many mothers continue their legendary nurturing as long as they are physically able. It may be that la mamma does not experience the empty-nest oxytocin shutdown because her children don’t actually leave the nest: Italian offspring may live at home til age 30 or beyond. When they finally leave, they may move no further than an apartment in the same building or immediate neighborhood, and continue to have daily contact with their parents.
Just as it is economically difficult for Italian children to leave the nest, Italian women may have no choice but to stay in a marriage, however unhappy. Many Italian women of my generation were raised by their own traditional parents to be wives and mothers. Having spent most of their lives in that role, they have few skills to offer the job market, even if there were any jobs. For this and other reasons, “fewer than half of Italian women work outside the home.”
Italy even has an informal institution which would be considered bizarre by most Americans (though I know of at least one American example): separazione in casa – separated at home. When a couple realize that their marriage is effectively over, but they cannot afford to live apart, and/or feel they should stay together for the kids, they move into separate bedrooms in the family home, and begin seeing other people. I am not close enough to any examples to know how this works out for all concerned. If amicable, I imagine it could be good for the kids, but it must be a difficult line to walk.
All in all, it’s not surprising that the mothers of Ross’ Italian friends continue to dedicate their lives to their families, contentedly or otherwise. But it also should surprise no one that I am not behaving like – nor ever claimed to be – the typical Italian mamma.
* Another book, “The Wisdom of Menopause” by Christiane Northrup mentioned in passing that renewed anger at one’s parents can be a common effect of menopause.
The title of this piece comes from a song.
