I got a new bike!

I got bronchitis!

Ah well, I suppose everyone needs at least one summer “adventure” involving an x-ray.

There’s an ongoing joke – one made out of love – among alumnae of Smith College’s Russian program that we majored in it for the candy (I say so myself on the “about” page here at Seeworthy). It’s true that the faculty in the department occasionally brought Russian candies and other goodies – painted spoons and eggs among them – to give to the students in their classes, but I’m willing to wager that all of us would tell you that there were far more compelling reasons that we chose Russian as one of (or our only) majors.

Russian paraphernelia I collected while at Smith.

I declared Russian relatively early in my Smith career – about a month into my second semester, still in my first year. I knew, probably by my second or third week in the fall of that year, that I wanted to major in Russian. I wasn’t at all familiar with the language and I had gone to Smith to major in Anthropology (of all things!), but I fell in love with the language and the stories and the close-knit department. My courses in Russian (both in the language and in translation, about Russian culture) at Smith were my favorites, and though I’ve gone on to do other things – my degree in Women’s Studies didn’t involve much Russian, and my current work in American Culture Studies doesn’t make extensive use of my Russian background – the critical thinking I gained in the program was invaluable, and learning Russian made me not only multi-lingual (I’d already spoken Spanish), but it made learning other languages so much less intimidating. In a country where familiarity with other cultures (much less speaking other languages) is valued so little, having a background in and an awareness of a culture and language other than the U.S. is extraordinarily important.

It’s because of this, because of my love of Russian language, culture and the program at Smith, that I was heartbroken when I learned (via a fellow Russian alum) that Smith is downsizing it’s Russian program. Sometime in the next few years it’s expected that a current faculty member – one of only three – will retire, leaving only two in the department, and Smith has chosen not to hire any new faculty in the department. Regardless of who these two remaining faculty members are, they alone won’t be enough to sustain a Russian department at the College. This isn’t to say that Smith isn’t hiring new faculty members – according to their site, they’re currently hiring in Chinese, Spanish, Chemistry and Math – just that they don’t seem to find preserving a whole department an important enough expenditure to justify bringing in a new faculty member (I’ll note that they haven’t hired any permanent faculty members since before I started, at least 7 years now).

Even more frustrating, the College seems to have unilaterally decided that, since they don’t value preserving the program, they’ll just fold the remaining Russian program – and perhaps the existing Russian majors? – into a “Russian/Eurasian Studies Program” at the 5 College level. This means that students wanting a holistic degree in Russian (if it’d even be a degree – there aren’t any specifics yet) would have to take courses at up to five area colleges to complete a degree, if that were even possible. From Maria Held, at the Smith Fund:

Upon a retirement, one position in Russian will not be filled (as part of a 25-position reduction across the college) but there are no plans to eliminate the Russian program at Smith. Discussions are under way for a more broadly interdisciplinary program in Russian/Eurasian Studies across the five colleges that would incorporate faculty expertise in our Religion and History departments.

I certainly took advantage of such courses while I was at Smith, benefiting from excellent classes in Russian Orthodoxy and Soviet History, but I had the option to take them at Smith, the college that I actually chose to attend – I didn’t have to bus (sometimes a very long time) to an area college for them or deal with inter-college course registration. As one engaged with American Studies and Women’s Studies, I celebrate a shift to include interdisciplinarity, but not at the expense of those who seek a strong, coherent Russian language and culture program. This move devalues Russian as a discipline, and demonstrates that the college has little (perhaps NO) interest in being recognized for a strong Russian program.

Cuts are happening all over the country, this is true, and it’s something that academics and students have to find ways to deal with. However, when – as in this case – cutting a single faculty member results in the obliteration of a thriving department and puts in peril the degrees of a number of current Russian majors, something needs to be done. Whether it’s an alum boycott of donations – something, in light of their financial situation, I doubt Smith College would want – or a campaign to add a Russian position to the current hirings in Chinese, Spanish, Chemistry and Mathematics – Smith’s Russian program needs to be saved. This particular cut may not be as well-known as the department cuts at other larger colleges, but to those who are affected by it – students, alums, the faculty and those who could benefit from the work of future Russian majors – it means so much.

If folks are interested in helping to save Russian at Smith College, I strongly encourage you to get in touch. Even if you’re not a Russian alum, or a Smith alum, or an alum of a liberal arts college or a Russian program or an alum of any college at all. We’re hopeful that, since nothing has been made official, there’s still time to save Russian at Smith – I’ve emailed Dean Maureen Mahoney, and hope that others will write in to express their support.

Heads up, fatties! I missed the video, but Marianne was in a segment on Good Morning America a few minutes ago. They haven’t posted video online yet, but there’s an article up on their website with arguably the most appropriate title ever: Fat Acceptance: ‘Young, Fat and Fabulous’ Say No to Yo-Yo Diets. There are your obligatory “but fat can also be unhealthy!” bits, but they are super-short and for the most part it’s an excellent, positive piece! Highlights include Gabrielle of Young, Fat and Fabulous mentioning “trying to change the world one fat girl at a time” and Marianne’s totally, totally sweet silver (!) top hat. Does it get much better? I think not.

ETA: Video’s up!

What’s that? It’s the middle of another summer? And I’ve got classes to take and a class to teach and a pretty sweet side project on the… er… side? Yeah, seems like it’s time to add a bit too much to my plate: Here comes Blogathon!

Truth be told, I’m elated to see it coming back for 2009. So far, I’m about 99.9% sure that I won’t actually be blogging this year – with everything else that’s going on, I’m already a little swamped with just helping Heather to run the Blogathon this year (I’ll never understand how Cat manages every other year!). I’m a little sad about not blogging – I’ve done it every year since the very first Blogathon (ever!) in 2001 – but I’m happy to not have to stress out about doing administrative stuff at the ‘thon site AND come up with my usual witty posts here. However, I am optimistic (perhaps overly) that we’ll see some sort of showing from the fat bloggers out there – there wasn’t much in 2007 during the last Blogathon, but in the past two years there’s been an explosion of fat blogs, and I’d be elated to see some of them raising money for charities – fat-related or otherwise.

And hey, to demonstrate that Seeworthy won’t spend the summer being *just* my blathering about Blogathon… here’s a photo dump! Welcome to my first ever summer in Northwest Ohio:

Realizing that I have perhaps been too enthusiastic about the new scarf trend!

New haircut for summer!

Barbecuing game parties with rad* feminists!

The vegan brownies that couldn’t!*

*Were, shockingly, from Zen and the Art of Brownie Baking, which has never let me down before. I’m guessing that the recipe was wrong and should have called for a half cup of flour and not a cup and a half, so perhaps it will work next time. Fortunately these vegan brownies, along with some super special vegan sugar (who knew regular sugar wasn’t vegan?!), saved the day.

The music just makes this video a million times more awesome. Stay Bias & accomplices offered free hugs in Portland this past weekend. Free Hugs Campaign AND body lovin? It pretty much does not get radder.

I’m glad Sotomayor was nominated; I don’t know a ton about her, but everyone I’ve read who does know about her seems to think she’s got serious progressive cred. That’s awesome! I’m thrilled that the court is getting another woman and its first Latina justice, too. More straight white guys =/= awesome.

However, in the hour or so since her nomination was announced, pretty much every person on CNN who has spoken about her talks about how OMFG amazing it is that someone who was POOR and raised by a SINGLE MOTHER and “HISPANIC” can become so great! Like, wow! Can you imagine? It’s the American dream, for real, y’all! The things that immediately annoy stick out to me about this are that a) people seem shocked that someone from a poor/working-class background can be successful at what they want to do, and she’s discussed as pretty much an anomaly, and b) the whole concept of the “American dream” at work here, that anyone can achieve their dreams.

I know there’s a hearty contradiction in the issues I take with the discussions of Sotomayor, that it’s a little odd that I’m both frustrated by this “wow, poor people aren’t always bums!” mentality on the one hand and the “wow, poor people can be anything if they work hard enough!” one on the other, but I think they’re both really functioning to do the same thing. They set up poverty and working-class (not middle-class – the two are too often conflated, I think) as something to be escaped, as a character flaw that people can overcome if they are basically perfect; furthermore, it says that by achieving this mythic “American dream” that poor people (who, it usually isn’t acknowledged, have had a pretty lucky set of opportunities) become better human beings.

What the hell? I’m glad Sotomayor was nominated and I hope she’s confirmed, but not because she was able to “overcome” being poor. I don’t necessarily think she’s pushing this particular POV of her, but it’s hard to avoid in mainstream media (seriously – anchor just started a story about her with “She grew up in a New York City housing project and…”).

In San Diego, it seemed like the majority of my cohort – or at least most of the people I was around at school – were vegan or vegetarian. Since I’ve moved to Ohio, this has definitely not been the case – the new cohort I’m in is almost the inverse of my San Diego group, with far fewer vegans/vegetarians (and women, and queers, and feminists…). However, I’ve ended up falling in with this awesome group of folks – mostly women, almost all feminist and queer or queer-pos – and some of whom are, yup, vegan. I didn’t do the social thing much in San Diego, largely because I lived so far away from folks that it wasn’t really feasible for me to hang out with folks often. However, in the small town where I live now, almost everyone is only a few minutes away (walking), and if they’re farther I finally have a license and a car to go meet them. And behold! I’m a social butterfly!

This has done a couple of things for/to me. One, it’s exacerbated my gossipy tendencies by about ten million. Two, it’s made me much more conscious of the fact that pretty much nothing that I can cook or eat is veg(etari)an-friendly.

I live behind/across the street from/down the block from all these awesome people, and since it’s summer and we have a yard, I’m thinking a summer barbecue is nigh. C and I do pretty well with the grilled meat-type things, but if I want all my veg(etari)an friends to come over and chow down, I’m thinking I need to seriously expand my repertoire. Thus, the other day we snagged two cookbooks: The New Vegetarian Grill and The Voluptuous Vegan, the latter of which we grabbed mainly for the sweet, sweet cover. We’ve been browsing through both, and the first big recipe that we gave a spin was the “Dilled and Grilled Veggie Burgers” from The New Vegetarian Grill. We followed the recipe pretty much exactly. The grilled veggies smelled delicious, but I’m thinking we maybe should have just made kabobs. Things started looking grim when we got to the “veggie mush” stage:

The end result looked a lot tastier than it, well, tasted.

Actually, that’s a lie. The “burgers” themselves had great flavor, but the texture was vaguely similar to grilled baby food patties, or maybe just a totally rare burger whose “cooking” included making pretty grill marks. I’ve never tried to go vegan or vegetarian, but Colleen’s been sporadically vegetarian and she ranked these above Boca burgers but below Garden burgers. On the upside, of course, there’s tons of other stuff we can plan that’s not burger-esque, like kabobs and all kinds of grilled veggies (C’s a big fan of the “Grilled Eggplant Steaks” in the grill book – a super-simple recipe, but she thought they were pretty delicious). So, even if we don’t master the art of elaborate vegan cooking, I’m thinking the simple stuff will work out okay.

It’s been a while since this academic has had a chance to flex her activist muscles, and tonight we did it aplenty.

The inspiration? Robert Chang’s film Nothing to Lose, which at one point features a bunch of members of the New York chapter of NAAFA putting fat-pos bookmarks in the books at a NYC bookstore.
The team? Me, C, and Adrienne, a fellow rad fattie and brilliant Critical Fat Studies scholar.
The venue? Books-A-Million in Perrysburg, Ohio.

The mission (lifted mostly from distant memory of the film): Create a fat-positive bookmark with info about fat health, fat lib, and resources on fat activism and fat positivity. Go to a local bookstore and (heavily) sprinkle any diet or weight loss books with the fat positive bookmarks. Take pictures if you can do so; if one of you gets the boot, the rest of you should stay until you’re either booted, or you run out of bookmarks.

We started in the most obvious (and most expansive, it seemed) section of the bookstore, “Diets and Nutrition.” Early documentation was blurry because, hell, I was nervous:

However, my accomplices and I got warmed up pretty quickly and started spreading the good word:

While I was “working” elsewhere in the store, C and Adrienne tackled the main diet “table” in the center aisle of the store. It’s one of the first tables on the way in and in direct sight of the cash registers, but they successfully evaded detection (/ejection).

While they worked on the main display and the magazines, I wandered the store and discovered probably the most amusing (depressing? surprising? distressing?) diet section of all: the Jesus diet section.

My favorite was The Hallelujah Diet, though The Maker’s Diet comes in a close second. Of course, when we were done we high-tailed it the hell out of there, because who knows, maybe you can be arrested for placing subversive bookmarks in diet books? We did not wait to find out. There was, of course, the obligatory victory shot, which is necessarily blurry because, again, high-tailing it the fuck out of there:

There are already plans to tackle the other area bookstores, though of course BAM will always be held fondly in my heart as numero uno. If you’re not the letter-writing or protest-attending type, it’s definitely a gratifying form of activism – probably more gratifying if you actually hung around to see the reaction to the bookmarks. I’d suggest making your own bookmarks, but if you’re one of those people who are “busy” with “work” or “school” then you’re welcome to snag ours here. The info was gleaned from a bunch of sites, which we probably should have referenced and definitely will on the second go-round. We also promoted a bunch of other books, including (of course!) the new book by Marianne Kirby and Kate Harding, Lessons from the Fat-O-Sphere, Paul Campos’s The Diet Myth, Shanker’s Fat Girl’s Guide to Life and Wann’s Fat!So?, though Fat-O-Sphere was the only one that we actually saw in-store. Serious kudos to Chang for making the documentary, and the fab activists of NYNAAFA for giving us the idea.