Another snow update.

It took me 2hrs10min. today to commute in, rather than the usual 55-60min. door-to-door.

The commute in by train was okay - I had to squeeze in on my stop, and there's usually a ton of room!; you could tell people were not driving to work - and there were only a few delays, mostly due to a door malfunction from people trying to jam on.

Then, south of downtown, the train I was on had everyone unload since it was going express to the far south, and the next train (which came along 1-2 minutes later) did the same, though I was able to pick the next one up (though that came along also 1-2 minutes later).

After that, the ride was smooth... Huge snowbanks where I get my bus connection, but the bus came along in like 5 minutes...

And then we got 2 blocks and there was a huge stop-and-go traffic jam along that major artery. It took like 30-35 minutes till we almost got to the huge park, and the busdriver announced that the thoroughfare through the park was closed, so we'd have to go up 4 blocks, over, and then down 4 blocks to resume the route.

At that, I hopped off the bus, and sprinted across cleared paths to campus, since I had only 20min. till my section began.

I made it there with 7min. to spare, so I even got some coffee from the in-building coffee shop.

And, during section, that left me with great one liners, like when someone stopped halfway through a section that I asked them to read outloud.

"Yes, keep going, I didn't jog halfway across campus for you to stop reading there!!!", I was like.

I'M SO EXCITED!!!

"I Was a Negro Playboy Bunny" arrived today, just in time for the weekend. I flipped through it, and it's trashy...

E.g. this quote from an inside page -

"European men are color-
blind in love. They don't care
what color a girl's skin is, so
long as she --"

There's also (black) cheesecake photos inside, and this really torrid rough-focus photo of a a fully-dressed (black) man and fully-dressed a (white) woman embracing...

Snow update.

1) School was cancelled for Thurs., so I went to the martini lounge on Wed. for fun, and it was fun, though it was dead and they warned me when I came in that last call would be around 10pm.

Anyhow, this man and woman there at the bar started talking with me, and of course we ended up finally talking about the snow, and though I admitted that they had no place to put it, the sidewalks and streets weren't *that* bad (just a lot of trampled snow, and you'd have to walk over little snowbanks at crosswalks, and there was no place for cars to park, since the parking spaces were full of snow), and that it was kind of cute how all the city folks were acting like it was a lot of snow. The man owned a limo company and had been having 500 rides a day canceled because of air traffic being shut down, and he started saying something again about how it was a lot of snow, and I was like, "Come on, don't be such a pussy!", and we were arguing the point back and forth, and I was surprised at how I was so viscerally attached to it... When he went to the bathroom, his (very drunk) female friend held out my coat for me and kept saying pleasantly, "Go, go now, go go now!", and so while he was in the bathroom I fled.

2) When I microwaved some soup that day and the next - luckily I had made a huge pot of beef barley soup before the snow hit - like 3 minutes into the microwaving I heard this big "boom!", only the 1st time I couldn't figure out what it was...

The 2nd time, I opened the microwave, and there were shreds of meat scattered on the door, sides, and floor of the microwave, and I realized that since for this batch I didn't cut up the stew beef chunks but rather threw them in so I wouldn't get nauseated, that all the moisture inside of them must have not been able to escape the meat piece fast enough as it was heated, and so the beef chunk exploded... I had seen a big chunk on top of the soup when I put it in the microwave, so between that and the shreds of meat all over the microwave's inside, I put two and two together.

My Blizzard Experience.

I was on campus to teach from 10:30-1pm on Tuesday and then stuck around to do work and go to a lecture and then the gym.

Around 3pm I could see from the 4th-floor library windows that snow was blowing horizontally, so I checked the public transit websites and they said they'd be no problems on major roads and trains, and since that described my way to get home, I finished up my work and went to the 4:30-6pm lecture.

During the lecture - on 2nd Temple Judaism; the lecturer was Argentinian and had quite a good sense of humor (e.g. "If you celebrate Yom Kippur you're a good Jew, but if you don't and feel bad, you're also a good Jew") - every once in a while there'd be this big gust of wind blowing up against the windows and you could see snow just blow up from the ground and the wall and the window and up beyond sight.

Afterwards, I walked to the gym and the roads weren't that bad, so I stayed for my upper body workout...

At like 7:45pm, I walked out to the stop, since the bus-texting system said that I'd have 5 minutes to wait, though it turned out to be 10minutes... While waiting, this woman had her car get stuck when she was leaving a sidestreet, and someone had to help her push it.

When the bus came, it was going 20miles an hour, but we made it slowly but surely through the horizontal-blowing snow... We had to wait 10minutes at this big curve in the road for a huge line of cars to one-by-one make lefthand turns, so I decided to hop off at the 1st subway line and not the 2nd, since though the 2nd would take me home, they link up downtown and it seemed better to go that way then maybe encounter more problems on the road.

So, I waited 10minutes, got the train downtown, and then made the connection to the other train - and discovered on there people from the bus! So, my way *didn't* turn out to be faster, but oh well.

After that, it was pretty uneventful until 4 stops before mine, when we had to wait for a train ahead of us to turn around and reverse direction.

Then, 2 stops before mine, they said the train wasn't going further, and we'd have to de-board and get onto shuttle busses to take us home.

Only, at the next stop, when everyone started getting off, suddenly they announced that we were leaving for the next stop, so people had to hop back on and then we left!

At my stop, when I was getting off, they started announcing that the train would only go 5 or 6 stops more further, then there was no service for the last 4 stops, only shuttle busses.

But, that didn't matter to me, I was home.

University toilet graffiti.

(one hand): HOW IS A RAVEN LIKE A WRITING DESK?

(other hand): POE WROTE ON BOTH.

And people say that it's too much how nerdy the undergrads are here!

Update - My lunch with an abortionist.

My lunch with an abortionist was because of this lunchtime programming series by the gender studies dept. on campus for undergrads, where people are invited in to talk who've had careers that are related to gender and women's studies outside of academia...

The doctor was younger (white) female, originally from a Catholic family in St. Louis, and had a lot of makeup on, and was like 7-8 months pregnant and sat slouched back in her chair with her belly stuck out and her hands resting on it, and she had a small tattoo by her wrist (something another woman who was there and her age had - perhaps it's a generational thing?)...

It's interesting how every abortion doctor has a conversion story. Hers was that during her ob-gyn residency she had to "opt in" for training and above and beyond her 80 hour workweek, she had to spend Fri. afternoons and some Saturdays at the local Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis. Then, one day this 18-year old came in for an abortion. It was her 3rd pregnancy, and her 1st two pregnancies had each resulted in twins, and her ultrasound that she had gotten had shown that this 3rd preganancy was also twins ("Which is medically crazy," the doctor was like). After hearing this, the girl drove a car into a tree in a suicide attempt but survived with brain and spinal damage, and she came into the Planned Parenthood Clinic in a full-body cast. As it was, she needed an abortion in the hospital because it was already 12 weeks in and there were too many possible medical complications to do it in a clinic, but of the 4 ob-gyn specialists at the hospital, none would do, though the head of ob-gyn said he'd step up if no-one would. So, the doctor stepped up and did it, and the head of ob-gyn assisted/observed and pulled the necessary strings to make sure they could use the university hospital (which wasn't a given), and even then despite hearing the full story a lot of nurses anesthesiologists etc. pulled out from working with the case.

"And that's when I realized that this is what I was called to do," the doctor was like.

She also said her parents were staunch St. Louis Catholics she was the only 1 of her 5 siblings not to have a Catholic education all the way through college etc., but since talking with her about her experiences and finding out about the situations of women that she meets, her mom has started to say, "I'm pro-life, but I think that abortion should be legal because of certain cases..."

"Which is in favor of choice," the doctor said, "Though I don't press that point with her."

In terms of protests, she said she hasn't gotten too many because she mostly works in hospitals, except that a few weeks ago a dead possum was left in a garbage bag on the doorstep of the urban clinic here where she sometimes goes, and they had to call the bomb squad in. And, at this one clinic where she used to volunteer, people would line up and call names at her when she walked in, and put up little gravestones out front with dolls positioned in front of them holding signs saying things like:

MY NAME IS [----].
DR. [----] KILLED ME.

But, she said the main abortion provider in St. Louis was this old gay who did abortions pre-Roe and used to fly in from Kansas City, and he got crazy harrassment and people tracked down his house and everything, and that her friends who fly in to do abortions in the Dakotas face the same (no abortion providers live in either Dakota).

Anecdotally, I asked her if location of clinics affected protests, because a friend's spouse who raised money for Planned Parenthood in Nashville said they didn't get many protestors because it was in a "bad" (=black) neighborhood. She agreed with that, and said that the whack-job doctor in Phillie flew under the radar partly because he was in such a bad neighborhood.

She also said she didn't have her picture on the talk-flyer, "just in case"...

Someone also asked her about "look alike" crisis pregnancy centers, and she wasn't viscerally pissed, but this just kind of shaking her head and was like, "And they give out bad information, like how abortions will make you sterile, or they show women false ultrasounds to make women think that the fetus is more developed than it is," and then she said how some woman who was 7 weeks pregnant came in with a little plastic doll they gave her that was 3 inches long and baby-looking and that was nowhere near how developed her little muffin was, though they said hers was that well-developed.

I also asked her about a trend I'd noticed in (female) friends my age and younger, who say they support abortion but would never have one, and if it was a generational thing. She said it was because they had never known a world without legal abortion, and that it bugs the hell out of her when women say "...but I'd never have one."

"Like who sits around saying, 'Oh, I'm going to have an abortion this year!'?", she was like. "It's just like with health care reform where you have to choose a track that provides for abortions or one that doesn't, are women really going to sit around and say, 'Well, let me set aside this amount of money here, because I want an abortion next year'? Abortions are a response to pregnancies that are unexpected."

She also said that she hopes no one has to make a choice with an abortion, finds out their baby doesn't have a brain, etc. She said that the worst is when the baby is really wanted, but then the parents find out that there's some horrendous genetic disorder "that's uncompatible with life" and choose to abort.

"One of the 1st abortions I provided was to this great young couple who really wanted a child," she was like, "But they found out too late about genetic disorders. She was crying, and her husband was there with her and crying, and of course I started crying too. But, that was early on, it got easier after the first 50."

I also also asked about community among abortion doctors, since this one memoir of an abortion doctor I had read said that most only did 1st trimester abortions, but had some sort of solidarity with doctors who did later-term abortions... She said that one factor is that you have to do a fair number of 2nd trimester abortions per year to keep up your clinical skills, but on top of that there's an "ick factor" where 2nd trimester abortions start to look a lot like babies (at that point I suddenly became very conscious that I was chewing on a piece of a sliced chicken that I had gotten from the deli tray that had been set out; lunch had been provided with the talk).

"My husband is a pro-choice physician, and I can't even talk with him about this," she was like, "So a community of doctors who perform the same procedure is very important."

She added that doctors would def. refer patients to you and be glad that someone did them, but at the same time they'd say things to your face like, "But I could never do that."

Perhaps the most interesting point is that 1 out of 3 women get an abortion in the U.S., but because of the clinic-hospital divide, most ob-gyns know nothing about abortions.

"Which is just mind-blowing," she was like, "Could you be a specialist in any other field and know nothing about a procedure which 1 out of every 3 of your patients undergoes?"

She added that the 1st trimester abortions are rather cut-and-dry and not technically challenging, and there's not much to diagnose, but rather it's just service to provide, beyond emotional care for the women, so a lot of doctors just aren't interested in that.

NEWSFLASH - Lunch plans.

Today I'm having lunch with an abortionist!

3 Sunday events.

1) When I talked with my parents, I was asking them if they had watched Obama's State of the Union address. My mom hadn't, but my dad had.

"So what did you think?", I was like.

"It was like always, a lot of generalities and no particulars," he was like.

But, I then asked him about some of the themes on "investment in the future", and my dad said he supported money going into education, infrastructure, and research, especially infrastructure.

"American infrastructure is a disaster waiting to happen," my dad was like, "And I've thought that for a long time."

When I brought up immigration reform, he also said that something had to be done, especially for kids who grew up here, though Obama might not get what he wants, and when I asked him what he thought of Obama's argument that it strengthens America to let those kids go to college, rather than give spots to foreign kids to get educated here and then go home and compete against us, my dad was like, "I found that to be a really interesting point!", so you could tell that he was on board with that.

When I asked about the responses, my dad said he had gone to the kitchen and missed some of them. "But I'll tell you what, that Tea Party response was something else. That Tea Partier guy was nuts!"

"Uh, Dad," I was like, "A woman gave the Tea Party response."

"Oh," he was like, "Then that Republican responder was off the wall. Was he the best they could find?"

2) At the corner store I go to, I was standing at the meat counter to buy stew meat, and a small cockroach lazily walked out from between a pallet of rice bags and underneath the deli counter, lingering half-in and half-out of the counter.

3) At the corner store I go to, I bought some fig jam, and when I got home, I looked at the label closely and discovered it was from Syria. How do they import that? Am I supporting terrorism or an oppressive Arab regime with my purchase? I know shit about Syria, but I have vaguely negative associations with it.

Reactions (II of II): My one British friend.

My one British friend responded back right away saying something about how proud he was that the British were so progressive (I'm assuming he didn't know who Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was, but thought his name sounded British?), so I texted him back about how he was actually American, but that it was great to want to claim a figure like that, to which he texted back:

...Well, that just goes to show you how open-minded you Americans are!! I wish I were one!

I found it interested that he used the adjective "open-minded". I've noticed that he uses that whenever he talks about people he respects, much like how George Eliot describes the characters she likes as "ardent".