thinking of you

hello friends! of course i am always thinking of all my lovely ladies/man, but today i am thinking especially of the beautiful wonderful smart and fabulous destry - happy birthday m'lady! - and the sweet charming quirky post-apocalyptic bohemian rachel - happy trails to you as you start your journey through the appalachians! both of you are brave little ladies, and i am so proud to count you amongst my closest!
missing you, wishing i could squeeze you and give you a big SMOOCH!
bisoux to all from carmZella
ps i'm back in the south of france. we set sail to italy saturday morning!
pss universal health care whaaaaaat! for once in my life (besides nov 4 2008), i am proud to be an american!

ALSO

If you all post your mailing addresses or email them to me at dsibley09@amherst.edu (yes, I'm still using my Amherst address -- will change it eventually), I would love to send you a postcard. I have already collected and even written notes to a bunch of you, but need places to send them!

Pot is legal!

...in Amsterdam, that is.

Monty and I made it here yesterday after a horrible night in Hamburg. Don't go there, seriously. We accidentally booked a hostel in Europe's largest Red Light district, which could have been interesting (you know, from a sociological perspective), but turned out simply sleezy. Plus I'm pretty sure our hotel was for sex tourists.

But! All is well because we are in the beautiful Netherlands. Canals and marijuana galore. So far in Amsterdam we have discovered a delicious Belgian beer; bought a pot of pretty yellow flowers, which we promptly named Bruno; visited a lame photography museum; got lost on bikes trying to find a grocery store -- turned out to be the pretties bike ride anyway; and legally smoked pot on a sidewalk. Plus we're staying at something of a campground, in something of a trailer, which only adds to the charm.

Paris in a few days! And will definitely be returning Stateside at the beginning of August, so maybe I can see some of you then? I heart you guys.

Ps. Do you all think it's a little strange how sad people seem to be about Michael Jackson? I do. I mean, Thriller was great, and the man could dance, but he was also freakishly weird.

From Berlin

Hi Friends!

Apologies again for missing my day. As long as I'm in Europe, or at least as long as I'm bumming around outside of Paris, we should probably assume that I will post as regularly as I can, but not necessarily on Fridays.

Monty and I are still on a roll, having a great time wherever we end up. We're getting along despite constant 24-hours a day, 7-days a week contact. In fact, Monty has turned out to be a great travel buddy -- he's good at making me laugh even when things go awry.

So we decided to 'hop' into Germany and somehow made it all the way out to Berlin. But I'm really glad we did because Berlin is amazing! It's been the best time. The city has the most fascinating 20th century history, great modern and restored architecture, and fabulous museums and nightlife. (Damn, I sound like I'm writing for a travel guide, but seriously, I love it.)

Nerd that I am, I've been most excited by the history. I feel like I'm learning history lessons just by standing in this city. The Berlin Wall -- that stuff is crazy. And Rachel, we spent about five hours in the Jewish History Museum, and I was thinking of you the whole way through. Literally, from the Middle Ages exhibit right through to Zionism I was asking out loud, 'And what would Rachel think of THIS?'

Maybe the best part is that we're sharing an apartment with a great couple from Wisconsin. The past few days have felt a bit like a Berlin four-person version of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (if you haven't seen these movies, you should probably stop reading this and go watch them now). We all hit it off, and the four of us have been walking around the city, not always with a definite destination in mind, wandering into cafes and bars, and having great conversations. They are good both for a laugh and for intellectual stimulation, and they remind me of you guys.

I have to go apply for a job (yuck), but I wanted to let you guys know that all is well. I have so much more I could write but always feel overwhelmed when it comes time to post.

Oh, and I guess I should chart where we've been and where we're going (maybe should have done this first?): We jumped from Paris to St Emilion and Sarlat (little wine towns in central South France); then to Nice; then up to Geneva, Bern and Luzern, Switzerland; and here to Berlin. After this I think we will likely head across Germany to Hamburg, and then into the Netherlands for Amsterdam, and down to Brussels and/or Antwerp in Belgium, and back to Paris.

Loooove and tchuss (my one of three German words, which really doesn't even sound right as used like this, which I'm sure Hannah and Julian will tell you).

OH! and Megan: I really gave myself the worst bangs-trim ever. I needed you or Selena or Rose or my grandma or someone else so badly. Way too short and fairly crooked. I tried to tell myself that I looked like Audrey Hepburn, but really it was quite bad. I think it's grown a bit now, but I was definitely lamenting your absence for a few days there.

Good feminists, read it

xx factor xxtra

White Men Can't Judge?

Why Sonia Sotomayor might really believe that Latina women make better judges.

By Dahlia Lithwick
Updated Thursday, June 11, 2009, at 12:56 PM ET

---

For a few days there, it looked as if all the Sturm und Drang over Judge Sonia Sotomayor's "wise Latina woman" comment was going to fade away. Speaking at Berkeley's law school in 2001 at a conference about race and gender, she said, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." Thirty-two words that launched a thousand tantrums.

The talk-radio crowd had mostly backed away from charges that Sotomayor was a racist or "reverse-racist." The White House was claiming the speech was a one-off. Also that Sotomayor's "word choice in 2001 was poor" and that, as President Obama told NBC's Brian Williams, given the chance, "I'm sure she would have restated it."

But then we learned late last week that Judge Sotomayor chose to use those or similar words more than once; indeed, by one count, seven times. Suddenly Sotomayor's defenders went dark. For all of the efforts to justify and rationalize and contextualize her 32 words, their repetition over the years sure sounds like a blanket claim that Latinas make better judges than white guys. And that's kind of a big deal for liberals who purport to believe that race and gender don't generally make one "better" at things.

As my colleague John Dickerson noted, the word better, repeated on various occasions, forces Sotomayor's defenders to grapple with a question they plainly don't want to think about: "Does she think she's better positioned than a white male judge would be in hearing cases of sex and racial discrimination—or even other kinds of cases as well?"

This conversation might have generated less heat if Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had not blown on the embers by offering up her own ambiguous claims of female "betterness" in certain cases. In the wake of a maddeningly clueless oral argument about a 13-year-old girl who was strip-searched, Ginsburg expressed frustration in an interview with Joan Biskupic of USA Today: "They have never been a 13-year-old girl. It's a very sensitive age for a girl. I didn't think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood."

Ginsburg—who has only in recent years come to talk openly about how gender has influenced her legal views—added: "[T]here are perceptions that we have because we are women. It's a subtle influence. We can be sensitive to things that are said in draft opinions that (male justices) are not aware can be offensive."

So what are Sotomayor and Ginsburg really talking about when they claim that white male judges don't always get it, and does saying that women are "better" on race or gender make them reverse racists and sexists? We know what the studies about judging say, but what does the relevant social science say?

Reader Patrick St. John recently brought to my attention research that describes a phenomenon called "imaginative identification." The gist of it is that in order to get ahead in the world, you learn to see life through the eyes of those who have already succeeded. According to at least some anthropologists, women have had to get awfully good at understanding what it would be like to be a man. Men, on the other hand, are rarely forced to think about life in a woman's Manolos.

Anthropologist David Graeber makes this precise point in an essay about women and imaginative identification. He argues, for instance, that women imagine life as a man every day of their lives. As he explains it:

A constant staple of 1950s situation comedies, in America, were jokes about the impossibility of understanding women. The jokes of course were always told by men. Women's logic was always being treated as alien and incomprehensible. One never had the impression, on the other hand, that women had much trouble understanding the men. That's because the women had no choice but to understand men.

Graeber continues:

Faced with the prospect of even trying to imagine a women's perspective, many recoil in horror. In the US, one popular trick among High School creative writing teachers is to assign students to write an essay imagining that they were to switch genders, and describe what it would be like to live for one day as a member of the opposite sex. The results are almost always exactly the same: all the girls in class write long and detailed essays demonstrating that they have spent a great deal of time thinking about such questions; roughly half the boys refuse to write the essay entirely. Almost invariably they express profound resentment about having to imagine what it might be like to be a woman.

Now I am no social scientist, and this argument may be riddled with empirical holes. But it strikes me as intuitively obvious that in order to succeed in a white man's world, women must learn to see both sides in ways that men do not. If that is true, it just might make them "better" judges, at least in some circumstances. I don't know whether Judge Sotomayor was trying, albeit rather artlessly, to make some version of that argument in her speeches about the relative wisdom of Latina woman. But if I could ask her just one question at her confirmation hearing about that Berkeley speech, that would be it.

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2220225/

Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Negligent blogger

Hi friends,

I am so terribly sorry for having missed my day last week. This post will have to serve for both this and last Friday. I have actually tried to post a few times from Monty's iPhone and it hasn't worked! Very frustrating. But I have kept up with reading and love hearing everybody's news.

All is wonderful here. I am in Nice with Monty after jumping through Valencia, Sevilla, Paris, St Emilion and Sarlat. The last two are tiny medieval towns in rural wine country of southern France. So so lovely. We have been museum going, wine tasting, bike riding, picknicking, getting caught in rain storms, and riding lots of trains. So far it has been just the break I needed to clear my head after senior year and graduation. I do catch myself thinking about you guys a lot though -- did I say that last time? -- and missing Amherst.

In other news, I am fairly certain that I did not get into the Spain year-long teaching program. I think admissions was rolling and I sent my application in significantly later than other applicants. Same goes for Monty. Oh well. For now I get to think about where I want to be in the US and what I want to do! Haven't yet heard about the job in Holyoke -- should know soon -- but am starting to feel more and more drawn to New York. (Could this have something to do with Selena's post? Seems very likely, doesn't it?) I'll keep you posted (hah, literally) as I know and when I can. From here it's on to Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands.... and eventually Paris.

Loooooooooooooooooooooove.

Chapman goes to Valencia

Hi friends!

I love this blog. Selena, I love your genius.

All is well in Spain. I am here for a week with my mom, grandmother, older sister and younger brother before traveling on to France to meet Monty. We have spent the last few days in Valencia, moving at a snail´s pace as my grandmother takes tiny steps down the streets and stops to comment on everything from Catalan architecture to bird poo. But the trip has been amazing because my grandmother lived in Valencia for four years under Franco, after the Spanish Civil War. (She was born here, fled to Mexico when she was three, returned after the war when she was 12, and then moved back to Mexico for good when she was 16.) She keeps surfacing all these incredible stories and memories that I´ve never heard before. A few examples: Today we went swimming in the Mediterranean and she told us that, when she was 13, she almost drowned at the very same beach because she accidentally stepped into a crater in the ocean where a bomb had dropped during the war. Or we visited the park where she used to go on Sundays with her sister to walk, and she was awed because she saw a couple holding hands -- something totally forbidden under Franco. When we went to Valencia´s mercado central, she told me that the first time that she returned to Spain after Franco fell, all she wanted to do was go to markets because she was so excited by the abundance of food that Spain now had.

So it´s a real trip traveling with my little Spanish grandmother. Also, today we went to a zoo and saw a bunch of monkeys getting it on. When I asked my grandmother what she thought about that, she said, ¨Well, that male monkey didn´t take very long. That female monkey should turn around and tell him, `hey mister, not so fast!´¨. Words of the wise.

There is so much I could write but I should get to sleeping. I have stayed distracted enough not to dwell on our graduation. Even so, I catch myself thinking about Chapman at down times -- before I fall asleep, when I´m walking alone, etc. I had a terrible time sleeping the first nights after I left Amherst -- and we all know that something must be up if Destry can´t fall asleep. I heart you from Spain.