This summer been wacky. I haven’t been writing a lot lately as I’ve been traveling pretty much nonstop since the end of July. When I haven’t been on the road or spending time with family and friends, I’ve been recovering from having all that fun.

I haven’t even been reading much, unlike the beginning of the summer, when I read fourteen books in June and July. Still, I did just finish “Peel My Love Like an Onion” by Ana Castillo, and since this is a blog about feminism and disability (well most of the time), I thought I’d tell y’all about it

“Peel My Love Like An Onion” is the story of Carmen, a Mexican-American flamenco dancer from Chicago, and her long-running love affairs with two men, Augustín and Manolo. Carmen’s stage name is Carmen la Coja, which is Spanish for Carmen the Cripple, as she had polio as a child. Carmen wears a brace on her leg, walks (and dances) with a limp and, as the story progresses, begins to experience the effects of post-polio syndrome.

And yet, Carmen’s disability is not the focus of this novel. It is not about how she “overcomes” her disability to have a dancing career. Instead, “Peel My Love Like An Onion” is about the never-ending saga of the torrid love triangle between Carmen, Augustín and Manolo. It is about Carmen’s relationships with her parents and her brothers. It is about her identity and heritage as a Chicagoan, Chicana (Is tht the right word?) and American.

I’m not saying that disability, pain and illness are not crucial to this novel. They are, as they form the core of who Carmen is. But this is not just a disability novel. It is the story of Carmen’s dancing career, love affairs and family life. It is also the story of a woman who happens to have a disability.

If you need something good to read, “Peel My Love Like An Onion” by Ana Castillo is worth a look.

P.S. I have received absolutely no compensation for this review. I actually got the book out of the library.

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On the train to NYC!


Drinking Diet Pepsi (aka Patio) and eating Utz chips. How very Don Draper. Or maybe Peggy Olson?


Besties!


Hanging out at the gala


Where am I, Manhattan or a small town in northern Wisconsin?


More hijinx from the gala. I’m being totally serious in this one.


Walking sandals and orthopedic stockings always make me feel sexy.


Leaving BlogHer, the cabbie drove me through Times Square to get to Penn Station.


What would Forrest say?



It’s official: I’ve left NYC and BlogHer ’10 is over.


At least I have my Jimmy Dean alarm clock to console me. It may be the coolest thing evuh.

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So yesterday I told you about the 7 Random Things I Learned at BlogHer ’10. All kidding aside, here’s what I really learned at BlogHer ’10.

First, I need to write more. I need to write about what I’m passionate about. I need to write every day or most days whether it is blogging, journaling or creative writing of some sort. I need to just write and not worry about my own internal critic or what others will think of my writing. I need to believe that what I have to say is of value, that is important.

Second, I really want to use this blog to create a disability rights movement within mainstream feminism and there are a plethora of ways to start to do this.

  • Ask people to share their personal stories
  • Start petitions in support/protest of an issue
  • Use polls or surveys to gain or share information
  • Create a newsletter
  • Reach out to politicians and like-minded organizations
  • Document and research your issue. For example, Melissa Silverstein of Women and Hollywood documented and wrote about the lack of women in documentaries. The foreign press, especially in the UK, took notice and the issue started to get some attention.
  • Create relationships with other bloggers who care about your cause. The importance of this cannot be overstated.

Third, BlogHer attendees are very concerned about comments on their blogs. Several of the breakout sessions I attended on blogging and activism quickly turned into “How to Manage Negative Comments” sessions. Best advice: Remember that “people have issues” and

  1. Have a comments policy and stick to it
  2. No personal attacks
  3. Decide how you want to deal with inappropriate comments

Above all, I need to decide what my mission is as a blogger and stick to it. Do I want to my blog to be about disability rights and feminism or am I happy with the current mix of feminism, politics, disability rights and random other things? BlogHer showed me that if I really want to become a better blogger, writer and activist, I need to focus on the former, not the latter.

So this is what I learned at BlogHer ’10. Hopefully, you can take some of these lessons and apply them to your own blog. If you went to BlogHer, I’d love to hear what you took away from the conference. Please feel free to leave a comment below!

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I’m back from my ten day trip to Washington D.C. and New York City, the highlights of which were hanging out with friends and, of course, attending the BlogHer ’10 conference in NYC. BlogHer was an amazing experience, which can’t be summed up in just one post, so I’m going to spread it out over the next three days. Today, a quirky list of random things I learned while at the conference. Tomorrow I’ll write a more serious post about the breakout sessions I attended and what I took away from the conference. Finally, on Saturday, no vacation would be complete without pictures so it will be a Photo Blog Day.

So, without further adieu…

7 Random Things I Learned at BlogHer ’10

1. The Hilton New York Hotel does dessert really well: cookies, brownies, petit fours, tiramisu and Italian pastries…. Oh. My. Gawd.

2. BlogHer is a strange and wonderful place where best-selling authors (like Gretchen Rubin, who wrote the New York Times bestselling book The Happiness Project sit two rows behind you in a breakout session on publishing and you get to meet some of your idols. For me, this was people like Gloria Feldt, former president of Planned Parenthood of America and author of the upcoming book No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power. I was also super-psyched to meet and hang out with Jenn Pozner, founder and executive director of Women in Media and News (WIMN) and author of Reality Bites Back, slated to be released in November.

3. Bruce Jenner, formerly of Olympic fame and now best-known as the nerdy step-dad on the reality show The Kardashians, is a man-whore. Apparently, part of how he helps support not-so-little Kylie and Kendall is by showing up at conventions and conferences like BlogHer where his adoring public can get their picture taken with him or even, if they’re very lucky, an autograph(!). Think Mickey Rourke in “The Wrestler,” only this event was corporate-sponsored and the fallen idol wore chinos and had a bowl-cut.

4. BlogHer isn’t very diverse. While attempts were made at diversity, such as token women of color in many panels, the conference was still really targeted towards mommy bloggers. The token lesbian in the Voices of the Year even wrote about motherhood. I’m not saying that mommy bloggers don’t deserve a voice at Blogher. They do: a large one. By the same token, we need to realize not every women blogger talks about politics, sexuality, race, books, health care, pop culture, technology and everything else under the sun as it relates to motherhood.

5. “Legally Blonde” was originally a self-published book that, as we all know, has gone on to spawn two major motion pictures and a smash Broadway play. Take heart, self-published authors, it could happen for you, too.

6. Not enough people hate me. No, for realz, people. During a breakout session on “Creating Tangible Social Change”, Melissa Silverstein of Women and Hollywood explained that having naysayers and negative comments on your blog is a good thing. “If you don’t have haters, you’re not doing it right”.

7. The rumors are true. New York really is hotter than you-know-where in August. Good grief.

And there you have it, folks. Just a few of the notable tidbits I picked up while taking a bite out of the Big Apple. Be sure to check back tomorrow and Saturday for more posts on my time at BlogHer ’10!

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Mad Men is back for its fourth season and the core gang from Sterling Cooper have jumped ship to start a new agency. In Sunday night’s season premiere, Don was interviewed by a reporter from “Advertising Age” magazine in an attempt to gain publicity for the fledgling enterprise. The interview took place in a fancy-schmancy restaurant and, as usual, Don had trouble divulging any precious details about himself. Thus, the interview was a disaster and Don knew it. Roger and Pete joined Don and the reporter at the end of the interview. When the reporter got up to leave the table, he stumbled, revealing a detached proesthetic leg. When questioned, the reporter said his leg had been amputated as a result of an injury sustained in the Korean War.

Don, Pete and Roger’s reactions to this man’s disability were fascinating. Don accepted it as it was, which is his usual modus operandi with disability. He seems to treat it as private matter, as though it would be disrespectful to even acknowledge it. For example, he never seemed to notice his “ex-wife” Anna’s limp, he chatised the boys for laughing about Freddie Rumsen’s alcoholism (“It’s only a man’s reputation”) and he told Peggy to bury any memory of her time in the pychiatric hospital (“It will shock you how much it never happened.”)

Pete was politely inappropriate, of course. “Thank you for your sacrifice,” he told the reporter. Pete, being Pete, was referring to the reporter’s missing limb, not his war service or time spent away from family and friends. Pete was not expressing empathy for physical pain, illness and post-traumatic stress the man probably experienced as he recovered from the war and his wounds and surgeries. No, Pete was thanking him for going to war, taking the hit and “suffering” the stigma of disability so trust fund babies like him didn’t have to. (Yes, I know: Pete’s dearly-departed daddy spent every cent but he’s still got his darling Trudy, right?)

And then there’s good ol’ Roger Sterling. His was the most intriguing reaction of all. When it was clear the interview hadn’t gone well, Roger chewed Don out for half a second for being his usual laconic self and then took the heat off the golden boy by blaming the magazine. “Why’d they send half a reporter, anyways?” he snapped.

Half a reporter?

Oh, Roger.

Rather than lambasting the reporter for shoddy journalism, Roger equated the missing limb with professional ineptitude. He blamed the man’s disability, not his poor interviewing skills or lousy writing. It was a cheap shot but Roger is not alone in thinking (or saying) such things. The idea that having a disability is dehumanizing, that it makes one passive, weak and “less of a man” is well-ingrained in our culture.

But why did Roger say it? We don’t know a lot about Roger. While he seems to have found happiness with Jane (for now), the sharp barbs and acerbic wit are definitely a defense mechanism. But for what? We know that Roger has something of an inferiority complex, having ridden his father’s coattails to success on Madison Avenue. (The “Sterling” in Sterling Cooper is for his dad, Roger, Sr.)

We also know that Roger is a WWII veteran. Roger’s time during the war remains a black hole, as empty as the reporter’s wooden leg. What happened during the war, besides the fact that he loved and lost Annabelle? How do all of these factors combine to produce a spiteful retort like, “Why’d they send half a reporter, anyways?”

I don’t know. I find it curious that this was the very first scene of the new season, which takes place in 1964 as the Vietnam War really starts to get heated. This promises to make things very interesting for the new Sterling Coop: Joan’s hubby Greg is in the Army, Pete brought a defense contractor (North American Aviation) with him from the old agency and you know Sally is going to be a love child. As the war progresses, the wounded warriors will be coming home, many of them with permanent disabilities. Disability will be fundamentally changed during the Vietnam era, as the disability rights movement formed during the ’60s and ’70s to fight for deinstitutionalization and equal access to housing, employment, transportation, health care, education and much more.

How will the Sterling Cooper (Draper Pryce) folks handle all the changes the war will surely bring? Will it change how they see disability? I’ll be watching to find out!

.

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two wild daisies on the side of the road

Just a quick update on my pledge to walk twenty miles in the “20 Days to BlogHer” that I started a week ago Saturday. Over the last ten days, I have walked four times for a total of 5.1 miles and rode the stationary bike once for thirty minutes.

Considering I haven’t gotten any physical activity over much of the winter, I’m very happy with this progress. It also helps that my goal is primarily to increase my endurance and mileage rather than “I have to lose weight or I’m a big fat cow” as The Beauty Myth would have me believe.

I know I won’t reach my “20 miles in 20 Days” goal but thinking about physical activity (I refuse to call it exercise) in this manner makes it much more pleasurable and even, dare I say it, fun.

How do you approach physical activity without being sucked into the Beauty Myth that says you have to lose weight in order to be beautiful?

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I think I broke my toe. I stubbed it this morning on a chair and it hurts when I put weight on it. I can bend it so it’s probably not broken, but it’s sprained at the very least.

Fantastic.

This was the last thing I needed right now. Forget the pain, which is minimal. A broken or sprained toe, particularly the one right next to the pinkie, is going to wreak havoc on my balance and coordination for a while and make me even more wobbly and accident-prone than I already am.

Sigh.

I had this grand plan that I would walk 20 miles in the “20 days to BlogHer” countdown that I started on Saturday. Putting aside the fact that this scheme has already been slightly derailed due to ginormous bumper crop of mosquitoes we’ve got this year. I swear to Goddess, it’s like a reenactment of Tippi Hedren and “The Birds” in Skeeterville every time I step out the door. Last night, I had to forego the walk for a 30-spin on the stationary bike instead. While I got a good workout and use different muscles than I would normally, I want to walk.

tree-lined country road

This is the otherwise-lovely road the mosquitoes are keeping me from walking on

Walking makes me feel powerful. It makes me feel ‘normal’ or that I can pass as ‘normal’. Part of why I am pushing myself so much harder to be physically active than I usually am is because I want to be able to keep up with everyone at BlogHer and participate in as much as possible without embarrassing myself. Of course, I have to do all of this without getting so tired that I don’t trip and fall so if someone could please point out the Diet Coke vendor, that would be terrific, thanks. I also have to worry about my feet swelling to three times their normal size. In addition to looking gross, it’s not great for my foot health. But the orthopedic stockings are hot and ugly so don’t be surprised my feet are bare.

Argh.

On a happier note, I don’t think they have mosquitoes in Manhattan. Cockroaches, I hear that’s a different story….

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wild daisies on the side of the roadGood grief, it’s been way too long since I’ve blogged. Sorry guys. I’ve been trying to recover from a neck injury and get myself physically and emotionally ready for a long trip to the East Coast at the end of the month. I’ll be flying out to DC at the end of July to spend a few days with my best friend and then taking the train up to NYC for BlogHer ’10, the mega-bloggers’ conference that’ll be taking over the Big Apple on August 7-8.

Three Blackd Eyed Susans flowers on the side of the road

August 7th is 20 days from now and I have been in major training for it. And I do mean physically training. I haven’t gotten much physical activity since my two falls on Dec. 21st and Jan. 21st (yes, they happened exactly a month apart) and I really need to build up my physical stamina, as I know I’ll be doing a lot of walking, both in DC and New York. So, I’ve been trying to get some walking in each day. My house is 0.3 miles off of the main road so walking to the highway and back is 0.6 miles. I’ve been trying to walk at least that much most days. I’ve gotten to the point where that is pretty easy and am now struggling with two laps (1.2 miles). I am hoping that by the time I leave for DC on July 30th, I will be comfortably walking 3 laps (1.8 miles) and approaching 4 laps (2.4 miles).

Now that you know how incredibly out of shape I am, I’m hoping that if I post an update each day, along with some random musings about feminism and disability as well as a few pics from along the trail, maybe you could cheer me on as I train for BlogHer?

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MIA

I know I’ve been MIA and haven’t blogged much lately. I’ve even been slacking on the Twitter machine. I’m sorry, loyal readers. Life’s been hard lately and I physically haven’t been able to write.

With the change in seasons, from eight months of winter to four months of spring/summer/fall, I get terrible headaches and I’ve spent a lot of time lately hopped up on pain meds. The drugs don’t really make me high and sometimes just barely help with the pain, but they do make me a little ‘fuzzy’. It’s hard to write when I feel fuzzy, even though I’ve got a lot to say.

I’ve also been dealing with a flareup of my post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ve been anxious and jumpy like you wouldn’t believe. I haven’t been sleeping well. I’ve been having nightmares and have been sleeping with the lamp on all night. In addition, there have been a lot of nights where I fall asleep sitting up. Somehow, during one of these nights, I slept with my neck scrunched at an angle and pulled something. That “something” is a problem as I think I pulled one of the three shunts I have draining excess CSF fluid from my brain to my belly. I don’t think I actually damaged the shunt but it does feel like I pulled on it and it’s going to take a couple of weeks to heal.

My life is fun like this. A lot of times I feel like friends and relatives look at me and wonder why I’m still on disability. There are a lot of reasons. These are a couple.

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While my relatives were here last week, we took the kids to the local children’s museum. I was sitting with the three year-old, who I’ll call Jon*, in a little alcove while he played with a super-cool medieval castle, knights and even a few dragons. After a while, a little boy, perhaps seven or eight, came in pushing himself in a wheelchair. I became a little bit flustered. What would I say to Jon if he asked about the boy with the wheelchair? I wasn’t sure how to explain to a preschooler that some people need to use wheelchairs for mobility. I didn’t want to just say, “His legs don’t work so he needs a wheelchair” because what if the boy had a heart problem or what if he could walk with crutches or a walker but couldn’t walk long distances? That would apply in either case or a hundred others.

I was really frustrated with myself because I didn’t know what to tell Jon. I didn’t want to offend the other little boy by saying the wrong thing because I know that non-disabled people say stupid things about disabilities every single minute of every single day. While I was trying to figure it all out, the boy got up out of his chair to get a better look at his train exhibit and then sat back down. Now I definitely didn’t know what to tell Jon about the boy’s disability. What kind of condition did he have that allowed him partial mobility? Luckily, the boy soon wheeled himself around and left the room. Jon had been so engrossed with the knights and dragons that he never even noticed the other boy.

Later on, I was exploring the museum with Jon’s five year-old brother, Don*, when we visited the “medical center” exhibit. This included a dentist’s office, doctor’s office and exam area, surgery area including a cloth “cadaver” that the kids could open up and look at the body parts, and a hollowed out ambulance with flashing lights that actually worked. (Don loved this.) The medical center was pretty cool and I thought it was one of the best parts of the museum.

However, I have one major complaint.  The exhibit also included two wheelchairs that the kids could sit in and push themselves around in. Yeah. It was about then I noticed the boy from the other room walking around without any difficulty. He had just been “playing” at being disabled. Other children treated the wheelchairs like toys, too. The museum had a couple of bikes sitting around for the kids to ride and they played with the wheelchairs in the same manner as the bikes, as if they were a moving toy that they could tire of and cast aside. And that’s the problem.

Wheelchairs aren’t toys. For people living with paralysis and other mobility impairments, wheelchairs are a vital lifeline to independence. But society doesn’t see wheelchairs that way. They see them as a sign of dependence, something the “wheelchair-bound” or those “confined to a wheelchair” have to use. In fact, the children’s museum reinforces this prejudice by teaching kids to associate wheelchairs with hospitals and sickness.

There was no education about the wheelchairs. The kids weren’t taught about the wheels, locks, handles or footplates. They didn’t learn about who uses a wheelchair and when and why. Forget about people with disabilities. They didn’t even learn about why they might need to use a wheelchair at the doctor’s office or hospital. All they learned was that it was a chair propelled by wheels and that when they were sick of riding in it, they could hop out and move on to something else.

It all just gave me an icky feeling. It felt disrespectful to all the kids who can’t jump out of the chair when they decide they want a different “toy” to play with. Pretending a wheelchair is a toy felt disrespectful to all the kids for whom a wheelchair means the independence to move from room to room at home and school. They can hang out with their friends on the sidewalk and the playground.

When you have your own wheelchair, you control where it goes. You are in charge of your own movement, even if you can’t control your body. In other words, Wheelchairs are serious business. They aren’t symbols of dependence but independence. They aren’t toys.

While I had a great time at the children’s museum, the wheelchairs in the medical office exhibit were a huge missed opportunity for kids to learn about disability.

Here are a couple photos of the medical center exhibit, which I “borrowed” from the museum website:

Children dressed as patients, sitting in wheelchairs & using crutches in the medical center exhibit at the children's museum in Eagle River, Wisconsin One girl sitting in wheelchair and one girl using crutches in medical center exhibit at children's museum in Eagle River, Wisconsin

* Since we’re fast approaching the premiere of Mad Men, I went with “Jon” for Jon Hamm and “Don” for Don Draper. :)

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