Noël Lynne Figart » rant

The Book Club

Noël — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 13:24:24 +0000

If you’re a Reader, there might be times that you’ll get a big kick out of someone walking into your house then seeing their eyes go wide at the wall-to-wall bookshelves and piles of books everywhere. It’s your proof, your badge that you’re an intellectual. Or at least a bookworm, right? People know you’re a part of The Club the instant you walk into the house. Or maybe, if you’re a female Reader, you’ve spent most of your life choosing purses based on the book-carrying capacity. If you’re out and about, you’d use the downtime to read a bit, the cover of the book proclaiming your literary tastes.

My house did used to look like that – shelves and shelves of books. I also did choose purses based on being able to carry a couple of standard paperbacks.

You wouldn’t know it if you looked in my house now. Oh yeah, I have three of the old billy IKEA bookshelves. You know the ones –six and a half feet tall, holds loads of books. Yeah, they’re stuffed to bursting, but that’s hardly an amazingly large book collection. They’re also upstairs in a hallway. I don’t show this off in the living room. I also don’t have the teetering piles of the books I’m currently reading piled on side tables or anything even close to that. If you were a guest in my home and were not invited upstairs, there would be very little indication that I am a Reader. In fact, you’d be more likely to think I’m a major television addict due to a large and heavy entertainment center.

I’m not a TV addict, though I like the occasional movie. I am still a Reader. I read mostly using electrons these days – my Kindle, my phone, my computer. There’s no immediate badge any more. Shoot, I can fit a library in my pocket.

However, like many a bookworm, there is a sense of identity you derive from it. No, you weren’t one of the Cool Kids, but dammit, you were well-read. It was something that could make you feel good about yourself. The comments about, “Wow, what a lot of books!” were a small and sometimes rather needed ego-boo.

I wonder if this is what drives the popularity social media sites like Goodreads. You can still show that yes, you are a Reader, even if books are no longer shoving you out of the house, and that discrete little device means that there’s no real way to tell that yes, you’re reading your way through five books at once.

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Reminders and Perceptions

Noël — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:01:01 +0000

I’m going to be teaching a class in Outlook in a few weeks. It’s a lot less general than my usual class, so there needed to be a meeting about said needs. I showed up to it with my laptop, opened it up and started typing through the discussion. You know, taking notes, setting reminders about when to work on what for the time sensitive stuff, and all that smack.

Of course, this was seen as pretty much normal behavior at this meeting, and that was cool. Everyone was taking notes in some way or another –steno pads, laptops and smartphones were all in use. But I can remember working for people who would object when I started typing the second I got a task request. I was accused of not paying attention to what I was being asked.

What they didn’t see it as (and I used to find it confusing) was an attempt to make very sure I got all the detail. Also interesting was my own perceived professional status and how I was reacted to when I was doing it. As a menial, I wasn’t supposed to take notes. As a professional, it was seen as appropriate and professional. It’s like the waiter who doesn’t write down orders, I guess. I’d suck at such a job.

I’m the same person. My memory for exact detail when spoken to is the same (mostly not great) no matter the job title. But still, it’s a little bitterly amusing to me the difference in perception of the same behavior.

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Gendered Presents

Noël — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 16:35:25 +0000

Someone whose journal I read was commenting with frustration upon shopping for a Star Wars birthday card for his daughter.

I genuinely don’t know how much my parents thought about how gendered my presents were as a child. I expect what they were really thinking was, “What would Noël really like?”

Sometimes that did mean something girly. For my seventh birthday, I got a doll. I was never a major doll fan, but I did enjoy them. This doll, however, was made of awesome. Holly Hobby was incredibly popular at the time, but I got something even better. My doll, who I did name Holly in memory of the Christmas season, was hand-made. No-one in the whole world had that doll because it was made specifically for me. How much did I love that doll? Well this picture was taken ten minutes ago in my living room. That’s how much. I think I also got my Holly Hobby oven (which I adored) that year as well.

But I remember another gift that I loved just as much, and in sober truth spent a lot more time playing with. I think I was nine or ten when I got it. But yes, my parents gave their little girl who loved wearing dresses an electronics kit as a present. I made an AM radio, a battery tester and a bunch of other things with it, and had the best time for hours on that thing. I also got a microscope one year, and a computer the another.

I never got Star Wars toys. No, it’s not because my parents wouldn’t get them for me. I was never an action figure person. To this day, I don’t understand my husband’s fondness for them, but merely accept that’s what he likes and keep it in my thoughts for gifts. But I got plenty of books that weren’t necessarily “girly”. (Other than Nancy Drew. I loved Nancy Drew, and my collection is a large one). I did get Star Wars books and loved them. Loved Leia. Loved, loved, loved that character.

But I’m pointing this out to show that even in the 70s and early 80s, my parents did think more about my tastes than whether or not they were gender-appropriate.

And my friend is right, Hallmark needs to get on the damn BALL!

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Food Banks Shelves are Empty

Noël — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 18:08:02 +0000

Times are rough. I don’t think this is a secret to anyone. So, what do people do in tough times? Try to survive, sure. And yes, one should. However, if you’re in any sort of position at all to do something positive, and try to make a good difference in the world, that’s what people should do, right?

If you have your charity thing, awesome. Keep doing it and thanks for contributing to something positive in this world.

If you don’t and are moved to do some good, I’d like to suggest donating to food banks. It’s my household’s thing as it’s our preference to do good at the local level as we often see need right in front of us. It doesn’t take much time, since most of us grocery shop on a regular basis and filling a few bags to drop off at the food bank is ridiculously simple. If all you can spare the price of a boxed meal or a can of soup a week, it’s still something, and can be a big help.

I’m making this specific plea now not only because we’re coming up on the holidays as a traditional time for charitable giving, but because when we dropped off some groceries this morning, my husband commented that he saw some bare shelves this time around. I live in a small community, but last year alone our food bank provided a week’s worth of food for over 1100 households. That’s like over 45,000 meals for the year, friends. Between a bad local flood and the economy, the pantry seems to be having a hard time keeping up this year.

So, what’s good to give to a food pantry?

Think non-perishable and think simple. Not everyone in need has access to full working kitchen facilities. They may not have the crock pot and the Kitchen-Aid you rely on to prepare delicious, inexpensive meals.

Boxed meals are good, especially when you don’t have to add an extra ingredient to make a meal. Betty Crocker has a complete meals version of their “Helper” product line. A few boxes of that can be useful. There’s a company that has a line of beans and rice type dishes that I’ve tried when camping. They’re tasty.
Hearty canned soups are also an excellent choice, especially when the can has a pull top rather than needs a a can opener.
Canned fruits and vegetables aren’t as awesome as fresh, sure. But they’re shelf-stable and getting a variety that’s not just starch is a welcome change in a tedious diet.
Peanut butter is also a good shelf-stable standby.
Canned meats can also be a good choice. Since a lot of protein isn’t shelf-stable, this is a big issue for food banks.
Powered or canned milk is also popular. Many powered milk products can be mixed up a serving at a time, so you don’t have to sweat whether or not you have good refrigeration available.

The thing is, a lot of what I’m talking about is food that is covered by food stamps. Food pantries also often carry toiletries, diapers, and feminine hygiene products. Donations of this sort are also welcome.

But don’t neglect giving money. Many food pantries have deals with local merchants and can get food much more cheaply than you or I could buy it in the store. Ask your local pantry. If that’s so, go for the money option. It’s really easy and will do a great deal of good.

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Food as Love

Noël — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 23:49:39 +0000

I saw an interesting comment on a journal I read. The original post was about food as love – not filling the kid up with sweets and treats, but making sure that healthy lunches got packed for her daughter to take to school. Obviously as a bentoist,¹ myself, I’m interested in healthy, tasty food for my family, too. So I agreed with the idea of nurturing family with healthy meals.

Oinknigiri

But a comment got to me. The commenter was discussing the awesome mothering of a friend who also seemed to be a bentoist, and that it was proof that this person was a much better parent than the commenter would be. I felt kind of uncomfortable with that. I’m not entirely comfortable with the making good meals thing equaling a “good” wife and mother. My interest in food and cooking is at least on some level a hobby brought on by being the child of an excellent cook.² Yes, my mother was a good mother, but to make the food, especially making elaborate meals, a proxy for good parenting is missing the point.

On the flip side, is part of being a good parent making sure one’s child eats well and gets the appropriate nutrition to grow well? Sure. But that’s only part of the picture and making sure a kid eats well has zero to do with whether or not she gets cute piggie rice balls and carrot slices cut into flowers. Once you’ve gotten to that point, I think we’re dealing with a hobby the parent likes. I mean, sure, a hobby that benefits one’s family is nice and all, but I feel like I’d be just as good a mother if I supervised my child packing a sandwich, fruit and some veggies. In fact, in some ways, I’d be better. I’d be teaching my child to be self-sufficient.³Self-sufficiency is certainly more important in the long run. We’re training people to be adults, after all. It’s the job of being a parent.

________________________

¹ I’m running with the term favored by Maki at Just Bento in her article “What do you call a bento creator?”

² I’m sure the fact my brother and I are both foodies and cook well is because of our mother.

³ Though, for the record, my son is perfectly capable of cooking a healthy meal and will do so with no grumbling on request.

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The Name Game

Noël — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 13:03:53 +0000

Google+, a new social networking site that’s in theory still in beta, is having a serious issues amongst its users.

You see, Google+ wants to insist that people use their legal names on their social networking site. If you’re using a name that appears “fake” by various criteria, you stand to have the account axed.

Okay, does this affect me? Personally, not so much. I use my “real” name online and have for creeping up on two decades.

Oh, wait… No, I didn’t for a long time. For the first decade and a bit, I used my maiden name – not my legal name. When I got married, I actually took my husband’s last name. I used it to apply for jobs and sign checks. Socially? I tended to introduce myself with my maiden name. When I went online, I used my NoelFigart as my handle, typically. It wasn’t particularly a conscious decision. It’s my name. It’s unique, and I like my name a lot, so hey…

Notice how I phrased that “it’s my name”. It most certainly was not my legal name. It was the name I most identified with. It was my mental default that I used. I had to think about it a little when I was signing checks or in formal situations where I was addressed as Mrs. . Oh sure like many a traditionally-reared girl who is engaged, I did practice the “Married name signature” and played with it. I’m just saying that in my case, it didn’t stick much.

I changed it back to my maiden name about six years ago. There were a lot of driving reasons, but the most serious one for me was that my son, if asked what his mother’s name was, would say Noël Figart. The last time I heard him do it when before I changed my name back to my maiden name, this scene from the Bring on the Night movie floated through my mind:

Reporter: Well, Gordon…

Sting: My children call me Sting, my mother calls me Sting. Who is this Gordon¹ character?

I figured that when even my son used Figart instead of my married name, it was time to embrace it and have my legal name be the name I actually use.

If I had not changed my name, would Google+ have decided to kick me out if they’d discovered I wasn’t using my legal name? Or is a maiden name “legitimate” because there’s social precedent for a woman using her maiden name either professionally or socially.

However, what about pen names? I have one. One of my blogs is written under a sobriquet. I would (and do) answer to it as readily as Noël. I consider it one of my names. When we’re talking marketing and brand, it’s most certainly identified with me, even if many people who know it know my “real” name as well. In my case, it’s no big secret. It’s also a name that is so obviously “fake” that it would get me kicked off Google+ pretty quickly – never mind that it’s a legitimate identity that I am really, no kidding, known by. And in fact, my Google+ circles are more likely to contain people who know me in that context than as Noël.

I consider myself probably one of the simpler examples of the fluidity of name. So, I think that Google needs to think more carefully about the whole legal, Western-based “Firstname” “Lastname” requirement for its social circles. I get that it is trying to create a culture of transparency in the hopes that it will promote a friendlier environment and better behavior amongst its denizen.

I just think that they’re using a ball-peen hammer for a situation that might call for a scapel. Just sayin’.

_________________________

¹ Sting was born Gordon Matthew Sumner.

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Mom is not an insult

Noël — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 12:16:09 +0000

I’ve had it with “Mom” being used as a prefix or descriptive for something backward, unattractive, technophobic or unfashionable. I wanna know since when was being a mother something shameful and backward?

The roots of this, I think are even worse than it looks on the surface. Mom, in general, also means “older woman”. And we all know older women are valueless, right? Women are worthwhile and tolerable when you wanna bang ‘em, but otherwise? Feh! Don’t clutter up the landscape!

While I’m enough of a child of my generation that I don’t think being a mother is the be-all and end-all of female accomplishment, it is a part of what I do and how I spend my days. All the moms reading this know it’s a tough job, and frankly, I’d like a little credit and respect for it. We may not be spending our lives trying to be all hot and hip, but part of that is because we’re trying against almost impossible societal odds to bring up the next generation of decent human beings. Sorry if that’s not cool enough for you, but I assure you that you would not want to live in a world where the difficult job of mother isn’t taken seriously by at least some of us.

Do I do other things? Yep. In fact everything I do requires me to learn and study new things on a very regular basis. So you can drop dead with that backward crap.

As far as being technologically hip?¹ That’s my job, thanks, so that whole backward thing when it comes to being a mom doesn’t wash at my business. In fact, a good 80% of my students are middle-aged women (moms) and this cultural view of older women being technophobic –that it’s expected for them to be so, isn’t something I let ‘em get away with. You know what? After a few weeks with me, most of them walk away just as eager to learn and discover on their own as any hip twenty-something.

So, as far as being a “Mom”? Fine, try and brush me aside as middle-aged and not worth too much.

Just don’t get in my goddamned way, because I have shit to do and I will run you over in the process.

¹And my mother’s Google-Fu is awesome and scary. So, this isn’t as generational as all that.

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Cultural Expectation Hilarity

Noël — Wed, 11 May 2011 21:32:28 +0000

I taught a class today through a company that serves lunch as part of the class day. We go to a local place that serves pizza, sandwiches and salads.

There were four of us who went – me and three men.

Now when I go I always order a BLT because I love BLTs and this is my chance to have one. I don’t know why particularly that I don’t make them at home, but I don’t.

Now, the company I teach through puts in the order before we get there to give us more time to enjoy our meal. It’s rather nice, and the restaurant knows us by now. So, we just come in and sit down, then have our meals served.

Today the order included three sandwiches and a salad. Remember the demographic of the group? Three men and a woman?

The waitress, without asking who ordered it, put the salad in front of me.

I think it was more about the fact I am female than being not slender, but I did roll my eyes internally at ingrained cultural ideas.

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But How Will You Improve, Part Two

Noël — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 11:59:28 +0000

Last week, I talked about exercise, improvement and whether or not to have goals.

A) My swimming time is definitely improving without extraordinary effort. I swam 1050 today in half an hour while pushing enough to be a pleasant muscular effort. I wasn’t feeling all gung-ho, but was just enjoying my swim. A month ago, I swam 900 yards in half an hour.

B) I do have an exercise goal. My goal is to show up!

I still question the “Get better and better and better!” thing for working out. Friends, I’m 42. Not a teenager any more. While yes, I do agree that we need to move our bodies to keep them healthy, we don’t have to be athletes.

When we talk about fitness, I really think “Fit for what?” becomes a genuine question to ask. The Crossfit people have their own ideas about this. I won’t argue too hard against them, but I will point out Crossfit was created as a training program for rescue workers. If you want to be able to perform at that physical level, I think that’s cool. Go for it. But accept that if you’re not a rescue worker, it’s more of a hobby than a reflection on how you live your life on a day to day basis. (And goodness knows I can think of worse hobbies!) I wouldn’t call it a moral imperative, even if fitness websites do often have testimonials about some emergency and how glad they are they did sort of training because it helped them.

I do think, however, that looking at the life you live and deciding what you want to be able to do physically is a good idea.

For myself, this is my physical baseline. I want to be able to:

Swim a mile comfortably
Walk two miles without feeling tired afterwards
Lift a standard copier paper box of books comfortably
Wrangle a snow-blower after a two foot snowfall (I live in Northern New England)
Be able to stack a couple of cords of wood in a day (see previous)
Be able to help push a car out of a ditch (again, see previous)
Be active enough that I think driving to a grocery store is a silly waste of gas. This means being able to carry a heavy back pack full of groceries about a half a mile.
Be able to lift a suitcase over my head into the overhead compartment on a train or airplane
Be able to run from one end of an airport to another to catch a flight on too close of a connection.
Be able to give a four to six hour lecture on my feet being physically active and animated the whole time. (I teach computer applications as well as rant about physical fitness. If you’re not active and animated, you lose your audience quick).
Be able to change a 5 gallon water jug in a water cooler without spilling water all over the floor or throwing out my back.

Notice none of the goals are particularly exciting or dramatic. I don’t have survivalist goals. I live a heavily technologically-based life and I’m cool with that. I grew up during the tail end of the Cold War fifty miles from Washington DC, a state capital, and about a dozen military bases. I’m used to living on the slopes of Vesuvius, thanks. If I sweated it, I’d be more of a basket case than I already am. I can pretty much do all of the things listed above already, but it’s my baseline. Every one of them can be achieved or maintained by working out a half an hour every weekday.

Do your desired physical abilities levels look different? I bet they do. Know why? You live a different life. I do think it is a good idea, though, to sit down and give what you want to be able to do physically some logical thought. What can you do now? What do you want to be able to do? Do you have any physical limitations that are a factor? I do. There’s a reason I’m an enthusiastic swimmer above and beyond my love of water, ya know!

I’m curious to know what other people’s goals look like, if you want to share. I’m curious to know how they reflect real-world daily life v. numbers measuring athletic performance.

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Athleticism vs. Fitness

Noël — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:42:28 +0000

I am very tired of fitness writers applying competitive athlete solutions to the problems of everyday fitness. The fact the body needs to move is not an issue that only pertains to competitive athletes. As a corollary, just because a world-class athlete does something doesn’t mean that it’s needed for every-day fitness.

When you thumb through a swimming mag, you’ll see articles talking about how to shave fractions of a second off your time offering all kinds of advice. I’m not going to buy the special swimsuit made of Neptunium-coated fiber blessed by the Dolphin Gods because it will reduce my drag in the water by .001%. Nor do I think that for my daily workout, shaving off all body hair below the neck to reduce drag is necessarily crucial. That .001% might matter to an Olympic athlete a great deal. But I’m not a competitive swimmer. I don’t need to apply the problems of athletic competition to daily fitness. I need to show up daily for daily fitness. That’s a completely different problem, especially when being athletic is not generally the focus of my whole day.¹

I recognize that many fitness writers are competitive athletes. It’s how they motivate themselves and they tend to like the mindset. There’s nothing wrong with being a competitive athlete, of course. It can be a good way to motivate oneself, if that’s to one’s taste. But what it means is that articles on activities are going to be geared to constantly improving athletic performance with a competitive mindset.

But I think the needs of people who have absolutely no interest in being competitive athletes, but are interested in making sure they get in enough movement to keep healthy are being completely underserved. It’s logical that it’s happening. Most people in the fitness industry do get there by means of having been a competitive athlete. Hellfire, I was as a teenager, myself.

What we need to see are more articles talking about consistency of exercise rather than training for competitions, or imitating training for competitions as a workout strategy. We need to talk about staying motivated when one hasn’t the slighted interest in treating exercise like a competitive activity. We need to talk more about modifications for physical issues. We need to talk about what being fit really means instead of implying you’ll be immortal if you’re thin enough, work out enough and take all the right vitamins.

I’d be curious to know what people who aren’t into the athlete mindset, but who still work out like to do and how they keep motivated on a daily level.

¹ I mean, come on, I’m a writer and a teacher. While the performance art of teaching can be pretty physical when you’re trying to keep your students interested and engaged, it’s not like being a lumberjack.

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