Morning, everyone. Hope…

Morning, everyone. Hope you're all doing well...

Well, I wasn't quite so bad yesterday as I thought...after I finished the journal entry, I put on some classical music, lighted a bunch of candles, focused my concentration and actually managed to write another 1500 words of the novella. 2500 to go and 2400 for Sizzle. I'm going to try and finish by Saturday sometime. Coul be worse...could be better. I'd hoped to get some writing done on Dreams this week...well, it's still a possibility. I've been thinking about it a fair bit, which is something.

Tonight's the local poly dinner up in Berkeley, and then Adam and I are going contra dancing in S.F. Should be fun. Then work tomorrow, and Sunday help Owen with his birthday party. Work more Monday. If I've finished the Puritan/Sizzle assignments, then Monday is dedicated to Dreams. We can hope, anyway.

Someone recently wrote to me and objected to my use of the word 'feminist'. I attempted to clarify what I meant by feminist, which wasn't what he meant by feminist, and we're now entangled in a discussion of the pro's and con's of equal opportunity programs. I'm going to post my reply here, in case you're curious, and as a bit of propagandizing. Maybe I'll convince you...maybe not. Keep in mind that I'm not sociologist...this is my rough idea of the theory/practice involved. I am in no way a representative for the math department at the Uiversity of Chicago (and my info may well be out of date -- for all I know, they may now have tenured women faculty.)

At the University of Chicago, one of the best math graduate departments in the country, there are no tenured women faculty. This is in part because for as far back as we know, women have not been encouraged to do math -- they've in fact been discouraged, by teachers/parents/society. There are studies to prove this. The math department feels that that is damaging to their department -- they're losing the input of half the population. Nobody knows in what ways math has been affected with only male brains and male perceptions working on the big problems. So they think it's worthwhile to spend a lot of money and time encouraging women to study math, and even accepting some who aren't quite as good as the men currently are -- the plan is that doing that will give them the chance to get better, now that they're not being stomped on all the time. And that eventually, both men and women will have a level playing field in math, and there won't be a need for any more equal opportunity programs...'cause they'll all *have* equal opportunities. So you see, the department isn't doing it to do women a favor -- they're doing it because they think it's better for their department and for math in the long run. Extrapolate outward.

It's like putting a crutch on a broken leg. Eventually you take the crutch off -- you don't ask the person with the broken leg to just walk around without it, saying 'Well, you've got one perfectly good leg.' The health of every part of the body (society) is essential to the health of the whole.

1:00 and I haven't done any writing yet. Ah well...still 5 hours to go. In the meantime, I did add a ton of new (well, old, since they were culled from some old files) quotes to my quotes page, and Sherman pointed me to an interesting summary of what's going on in the Supreme Court's hearing of the CDA case.

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