“Apologies” for the Past-- with a Conniving Twist

On my way to work two days ago, I was obviously reading the iPhone version of the New York Times that I had so brilliantly pre-loaded before my subway went underground. In the section that hosts the “Most Popular” articles, I touched the article on the top of the list. Turns out it was about Anita Hill, the woman who, in 1991, accused Supreme Court Justice-to-be Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. She testified under oath that he had subjected her to comments of sexual and pornographic nature. Thomas still managed to receive the nomination to the United States’ highest court, but his ordeal with Hill has perhaps forever tainted the opinions many Americans hold toward him.

So in case you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of days (I don’t think any of my readers are starfish or worms, but who knows...) let me inform you that Hill was back in the news because of another interesting situation. Apparently she arrived to work at Brandeis University one morning last week, only to find a voicemail waiting from Thomas’s wife, Virginia. Virginia had decided that one morning at 7:30am just 19 years after her husband’s battle against Hill would be a good time to call Hill to “make amends.” Hill, upset and concerned for obvious reasons, called campus police who later informed the FBI. But, like any girl would, she made the situation explode even further: she also called The New York Times to let them listen to the message.

“Good morning Anita Hill, it’s Ginni Thomas,” she said in the message. “I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.”

She went on to tell Thomas to “have a good day.”

If I were reading that out of context, I’d have assumed that Thomas were asking Hill to apologize for something that happened yesterday or maybe the day before, but not nineteen years ago. I also would have thought (rather, hoped) that someone married to someone as much in the spotlight as a Supreme Court Justice might have a little more tact and understanding in terms of which battles to pick and when.

As I went to bed that night watching the news, I realized that this situation wasn’t going to blow overly so quickly and that Virginia’s message is still reaching “across the airwaves.” Yet another newscaster was providing their commentary on the story. Now, let’s be honest. Virgina must have been able to predict that her message would have become public, and she certainly couldn’t have thought that Hill would have kept the instance private. She had to have known that this would become a rather large and well-known scandal in itself.

At least in my eyes, this is the classic scenario of not only girl-to-girl bullying, but also a pathetic cry for attention on the part of Virginia. (Likewise, we could probably argue that to some extent Hill was vying for attention by publicising the occurrence.) I would have hoped that women of their age could have matured enough to avoid not only such a public spectacle, but a public spectacle nineteen years after beginning.

But, here’s what it boils down to: sometimes apologies (or some semblance of an apology to some degree) come when you least expect it. Maybe both women were instigating their own drama, but the situation shows that people revisit the past when the timing seems unusual or random. No one knows what triggered this event, perhaps marital problems between the Thomas’s, but what matters is that the Hill-Thomas situation was revisited and, even though it involves two prominent women, they still managed to slide in a conniving and girly twist. Apparently I was wrong in thinking that women grow up. Figures.

Summing up my post: WHY I DON'T WANT TO RELY ON A MAN TO SUPPORT ME.

Kick-Ass Quote of the Month...

Comes from a woman who listened to the KQED interview Michelle Cove did this month about Seeking Happily Ever After, her new documentary about women getting married later in life. Her comment:

"Being single in your 30's or older simply means you have to WORK to CREATE your life. True, it's probably not for the weak, lazy or uninspired. I've always chosen to create my life than to fall into a cookie cutter plan society has mapped out for me. The result? Passion, purpose, growth and a lifestyle most people I know say they envy. I consider myself blessed to walk the 'road less traveled.'"

Facebook and Our Feelings?!

So here’s an interesting one. Facebook cares about you. Not only does the company/website care about you, they care about your feelings and your emotions, especially when it comes to romantic breakups.
According to Samuel Axon’s “Facebook stops showing you photos of your ex” (http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/10/20/facebook.ex.photos.mashable/index.html?iref=NS1) on www.cnn.com, Facebook “used to constantly show you photos of your ex, which might have reminded you just how great things were before he or she dumped you, but it has stopped that now. Exes no longer show up in the ‘Photo Memories’ box.” For those unaware, the “Photo Memories” box refers to that subdivision of your Facebook screen that appears in the top right corner of certain pages on the site, like when you’re viewing friends or photos.

Now, if I remember correctly from The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg certainly cared about algorithms. He definitely didn’t care about social relationships on the personal level. Rather, he was concerned about how they applied to other people and how he could capitalize on essentially helping technologically define other people’s social ties. But, hey, money talks and a good business person knows what their client is after. And Zuckerberg’s clients, we can assume, certainly aren’t after making their lives miserable and depressing through constant visual reminders of relationships past. Well, some of them might be, but here I’m assuming that we’re not all crazy emo people who strive to be depressed all day. Or at least I hope not.

Anyway, according to this source, a group of people made a Facebook group where they protested the “Photo Memories” box. Their efforts, it seems, made an impact as they got their way. Facebook developed a set of rules in their programing code to make it so that our exes essentially no longer pop up unwanted on our screens. What the code entails no one but insiders knows for sure; maybe the system recognizes when we used to click on someone’s profile all the time and then stopped, or perhaps it’s based solely on changed relationship statuses. As one of my friends said once, “I don’t question it, I just know that Facebook somehow knows everything.” Scary but somehow true.

Since Facebook already has way too much of my information (and I’m really the only one at fault for that) I’m not sure what I think. I can’t decide if I like that they’re using my clicking-habits to help me out or if I’d really appreciate that they stay out of my personal life. I’d like to think that when I feel as if the whole world knows I’ve just experienced a tragic breakup at least animals and non-human, inanimate objects, like the internet and our computers, are unaware. Apparently no long the case.

Now, I do have to say that it might bring on a sense of relief if an ex’s picture no longer pops up when we didn’t even go to their page. I mean, sometimes it’s unavoidable, especially if you two still maintain mutual friendships. He or she is bound to appear in a picture you’re looking at for an entirely different reason than to stalk him. My own algorithm helps me calculate me that there’s a good chance this will happen. (Funny role reversal here, I’m pretending to enter the mathematical/computer science world as Facebook and its developers try to edge into the realities of the social world.)

When it comes down to it, I think I appreciate the intentions of the company here. In the olden days (read: Y2K and before) we didn’t have to look at pictures of an ex unless we pulled out and dusted the photo box we kept under our bed. Now, with the prolific nature of social networking online, we have no choice but to keep seeing reminders of what was. If Facebook can even help me to avoid one of those hurtful moments, even just one, then I say all the power to them. I’d prefer to spend that moment not thinking about an ex, wouldn’t you?

WHY I DON'T WANT TO RELY ON A MAN TO SUPPORT ME.

I’ve got a problem. I’ve become a feminist. I’ve never been a feminist before and, quite honestly, I’m not really sure what to make of it or how to deal with it. Before you go off thinking that I’m about to be burning my bra and protesting the male race, hear me out.

It recently occurred to me that I value my education, acquired skills and the mere fact that I have a job and an income. At this point in life there are very few things that are worth more to me than being able to support myself financially, pay my own bills and, as a result, not have to answer to anyone or anything besides myself. Maybe that’s being selfish, not feminist, but I personally still think it’s a little bit more feministy than I’ve ever been in the past.

I have to take a step back and wonder why this whole overarching “job” and “career” and “financial stability” concept is so important to me right now. Why this second? Why do I care?

First off, I realize that at some points during my educational career I worked hard for my grades. Sure, in college I slacked off plenty, but just being in college (physically) was work on its own-- both emotionally and academically. But moreso emotionally. (Hey, it’s tough to learn how to share a living space with conniving girls or to deal with that best friend whose idea of a good time is to get wasted and then destroy property!) Second, I realize that I’m goddamned lucky to have a job during these years that are so difficult financially for most Americans.

After considering these two things, I then think about so many girls my age whose only wish (whether or not they have yet fulfilled it) is to get married and have babies. Now, I’m not about to argue that either of those are bad things in themselves, but I will defend my opinion to the death that there is a proper time and place for these things to happen in our lives. Just as much as it wouldn’t have been appropriate to pop out a few kids in high school, it wouldn’t be the ideal time in my life now, either. I’m 23 and baby, I’ve got this decade to live without the hassel of raising my own family. I need to raise MYSELF before I can be responsible for anyone else. I just envision myself encouraging a child to make their bed or maintain a healthy diet when I don’t yet do it myself. Those alone provide an instant reminder that I’m not ready.

I also have decided that if I were, in theory, to just quit my job to get married and have kids, it would demonstrate a complete lack of ambition. Don’t get me wrong, I understand how challenging it is to raise a kid and maintain a household even without a job. As Oprah says, being a mom is the hardest job in the world. But if I were to marry someone in order to have kids right now for any other purpose other than for love, it would not only be not only unfair to the guy, but really unfair to myself. Why shouldn’t I be in a position to strive to improve upon or advance in my career? Do I really want to have to trust one person’s dealings at work to ensure my own monetary stability? Why should he have to do all of the work outside the house to support me when I have a perfectly worthy college degree?

All in all, it comes down to one thing: I don’t want to be lazy. I’d like to think that I have more personality, education and intelligence than to just give up my outside world to rely on some husband’s paychecks so I can clean toilets and do laundry all day. There is absolutely no reason for me to resign myself to a life at home watching soaps while the baby sleeps. It’s early enough in time that I can still prove myself as my own person out there in the working world while saving time in the future to both have a family and a career.

Besides, the workplace is often the best place for me to get story ideas. And we all know I wouldn’t get to maintain this blog, one of my favorite things to write, if I didn’t have interesting stories. I’d rather be writing from my Cloroxed cubicle than from a rocking chair as a baby spits up on me, thank you very much.

You Ended It, Now YOU Move On.

At one point or another, most of us have been there: we’ve been broken up with. We know what it’s like to feel torn apart at the seams, and we suddenly recognize what our old stuffed animal felt like back in 1989 after we chewed him apart a little too much. Maybe it feels as if life will never be the same since that person who played such an important role will now be out of the picture. Maybe we feel hopeless-- will I ever find someone to love me as much as he or she did?

Oftentimes when someone breaks up with us they shoot off a barrage of excuses. “I just want to be young and party unattached” or “I’m just not at a place in my life where I can have someone else relying on me.” Truth of the matter is that, yes, maybe your significant other is telling it straight. Or, if you know me, you know that I always refer back to the basic premise of my favorite book: maybe, just maybe, he’s just not that into you. A lot of the time we don’t know why exactly someone chose to end things with us, especially when we haven’t done something especially wrong or offensive. It doesn’t take an episode of cheating to make someone want to make a swift exit from the relationship. Sometimes it just happens, for whatever reason, and the person ending it doesn’t provide a proper explanation. It sucks but it happens. We all deal with this.

So maybe the person doesn’t give us a good explanation as to why they’re ending things. Perhaps the breakup leaves us wondering what we did wrong or how we could have salvaged the relationship. At one point or another, though, I hope that we all come to the same conclusion: it’s over, it will be over forever, and there’s not a heck of a lot that we can do to change it. I know it sounds pessimistic (and it actually is) but hey, that’s reality. Can’t spend our lives chasing something we really shouldn’t have. As my roommate explained, “In some situations you realize that you wasted just way too much energy on something to make it work when, in reality, it was no longer worth the fight but it takes a bad break up to make you realize it.”

So months later, when you finally get over it, something interesting inevitably happens: your ex comes crawling back. Now I’m not suggesting that it ALWAYS happens, but, a good chunk of the time when things ended expectantly, it does. Usually it’s when you least expect it, like you’re sitting at your desk at work on a Thursday at 4pm and-- oh hey-- one new email in your inbox. Your heart stops because, well, that name hasn’t appeared in your inbox in months!

Sometimes, in the worst of situations, it’s in public. An ex might approach you when other people are around, just so that you feel the need to be a polite and proper person and actually have a conversation. Or, unfortunately, sometimes an ex isn’t so kind. In the case of my roommate, her ex-boyfriend isn’t even attempting to put on a gentlemanly act. Rather, he’s resorted to the oh-so-mature behavior of public embarrassment, screaming at her across the room at parties and talking trash behind her back to all of her friends. Now, if he’s not embarrassing HIMSELF in public, I don’t know who is. Hello, YOU made the mistake, and now you’re taking it out on her, right after she’s gotten over you? I say let him keep shouting and making scenes. Pretty soon other people besides us will realize that he’s beating himself up for what he did and trying to place the blame on her!

As Bob Dylan sang, "I ain't sayin' you treated me unkind.You could have done better but I don't mind.You just kinda wasted my precious time." Sometimes, we just have to look back on things and realize that, yes, maybe we think we wasted some of our time, but everything usually works itself out well. We learned from our past relationships (I hope!) and, believe it or not, the person who wrongfully ended them (if that’s the case) usually learns their lesson as well, as evidenced by the ones who come crawling back. After all, isn’t it nice to realize that we’re living in the present while an ex who hurt us so much in the past is still living in it?