Journal of a Sabbatical

it's raining and i'm ranting

August 17, 1998

Previous Entry Journal Index	x	x	x	OK, look, I don't want to know which of Clinton's body parts came into contact with which of Lewinsky's body parts. I really don't. What I want to know is what is up with Dan Rather? His gloom and doom lead-in to Clinton's speech gave it the gravity of ... oh .. I dunno... a national crisis like treason or something... not a ... umm...ah ... blow-job! Oh, and like CBS couldn't find anybody on the House Judiciary Committee to comment except Barney Frank? I mean do the CBS alleged newsgatherers sit there and ask themselves "Who can we get who's a Democrat who's survived a sex scandal?" I half expected them to ask Barney the question my friend QI was asked the other day. Can we please please please just let Clinton go back to running the country? Meanwhile, here at the condo among the "wild" trees, it rained all day and the humidity is so heavy I want to measure its viscosity and test how much it actually slows down motor vehicles passing through it. I'm already in a bad mood and the humidity is not helping. Why am I in a bad mood? Well: the republic is in jeopardy over a blow-job, my ISP installed some sort of upgrade to its version of UNIX, which seems to cause it to be unable to communicate for days at a time - love them upgrades I forgot to take my meds today the garden club junta who staged a landscaping revolt against the condo association is now slipping nasty memos under our doors moralizing at us about our responsibilities to the community to uproot wild trees and pull out bittersweet and wild roses (they didn't mention raspberries but they will, I just know it - they mentioned vines) and to clean up our cigarette butts and teach our children to do the same I expect an intervention team from the garden club to confront me about the Beans of Egypt Maine's cigarette butts on my back walk any minute now - not to mention the bittersweet it's raining it's humid I live in Massachusetts. I realized that only glamorous heterosexual women with at least two children can be role models for young women in computer science. I realized I am not a glamorous heterosexual woman with at least two children. I look ridiculous in a low-cut black dress at cocktail parties. Wait, wait, what would I be doing at a cocktail party? Hmm, not sure I've got the cause and effect straight here. And I mean absolutely no disrespect to Barney Frank - in fact he's one of my heroes. My disrespect is aimed at CBS. Anyway, as one can tell from my strange-oid list, I've been in a bad mood for some days. The humidity has been unbearable and I think I must be premenstrual (oh, no, not that excuse) because Constance Casey's column about Katrina Garnett in the Boston Globe on Saturday hit me like a ton of bricks. Hence the musings about how dumb I'd look in a black low-cut dress at a cocktail party. I personally am thrilled that Garnett is doing something to encourage young girls to study math in junior high and high school and go into computer science in college. They need all the encouragement they can get. And more power to the high school girls who've posted the Vanity Fair ad featuring Garnett in her low-cut dress as inspiration at their schools. However, must we pitch the encouragement only at the pretty girls and orient it toward convincing them they can still be pretty and sexy and sociable and major in computer science, and marry nice boys who are not "lonely miserable anti-social Twinkie eating" [Anita Borg's description of the hacker myth persona quoted in Casey's column] types and have 2 children and still look drop dead gorgeous after having two kids? What about girl nerds? Doesn't this whole campaign (www.backyard.org) leave girl nerds and tomboys out in the cold? Newsflash: there are little girls on the playground right now who hate to wear dresses, love to get dirty, are dreaming of finding a cure for cancer or going to the moon and we adults are not encouraging them in their dreams. OK, let's encourage the pretty ones, but let's encourage the plain ones too! Geez. Little girls have enough pressures on them. Girls who like math do not have to be ugly, but nor do they have to be model-gorgeous. They can be ordinary. OK so I was in a low mood and took this personally. Newsflash, I am not now nor have I ever been model-gorgeous. Besides having gained a lot of weight due to yo-yo dieting, my head is too big for my body (always has been), my teeth are crooked, I wear glasses, I limp from an old ankle injury (and more recent injuries). Even when I was thin, I looked ridiculous in low-cut black dresses no matter what I did. Even a portrait by Richard Avedon could not make me look glamorous. Despite my accomplishments in the computer industry, nobody would hold me up as role model to young girls. They'd be terrified that reading the UNIX kernel would make them fat, that debugging assembly language programs would make their teeth crooked, that negotiating with the world's largest telephone company would make them limp ... and gasp shudder eeek ... lesbians are yucky! :-) :-) :-) Back in the early 1970's there was a series of ads for line printers (those big huge old printers you see in old movies) that featured sexy female models in low-cut evening gowns draped over the printers waiting for their listings to print. Male and female colleagues alike found the ads hilariously funny because the printers were situated in frigidly air-conditioned raised-floor machine rooms where us normal folks often needed sweaters over our nerd t-shirts and jeans and the idea of a woman with bare shoulders and back and lots of cleavage standing there freezing was just too much to take. We wondered how they got the goose bumps not to show in the photo! The closing quote in Casey's column implies that Garnett dresses in the office the way she does in the Richard Avedon photo in Vanity Fair: "So many women say to me, 'I'm really good looking, and my boss thinks I'm an idiot.' So they dress down, in nerd clothes. I don't have to do that. I work for myself." -- Katrina Garnett Umm, whatever you're comfortable in, I guess. I work for myself too and it's 85 degrees and 110% humidity - I'm wearing pink shorts and a blue t-shirt (it has a picture of a lighthouse and says Nova Scotia on it), no shoes and no socks. And I really want to know what Bill Gates looks like in a low-cut black dress.
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