iPalimpsest

For our anniversary & my bday, we went to Lake Placid and the Ice Hotel in Quebec. Some of our photos are on flickr

My favorite things:

-- maple whiskey served in cups made of ice at the ice bar in the hotel
-- the outdoor hot tub and sauna, and how it steamed up my eyeglasses
-- how there are so many layers to sleeping bags made for sleeping on a block of ice
-- I wore a hat while sleeping, and when I woke up in the middle of the night, realized my hat (and head) were frozen to the wall of the ice-room
-- for a moment, I knew how to say "turnip" in French, but now I've forgotten-- the food was incredible
-- cotton is a bad fabric for ice hotels-- nylon and polyester are good
-- I thought we'd maybe get hypothermia from this vacation, but turns out sunstroke was a better bet. Sun reflecting on ice is so strong.
-- Our cats behaved for our friends who watched them... or at least, our friends said the cats were good, and I'm glad to hear this. One of our cats nearly threw up her dinner on them last time, so I'm glad the cats had an opportunity to redeem themselves.
-- customs takes a long time
-- I love maple cookies

A while ago, our friend said to notice our dreams while sleeping there... because she had really important dreams when she stayed at an ice hotel. I slept strangely, like one of those sleeps where you feel like you just blinked and then it's the middle of the night hours later. And then I blinked again and sunlight was streaming through the hole in the room's ceiling (not sure why they do this-- maybe ventilation)? I don't remember my dreams at all from the ice hotel night, but I did have really vivid dreams the next night.

Posted by kate at 9:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Finally. Don't you think it'll happen, that Bette & Tina will get back together? They were such a perfect couple in the first season. I don't think they needed to experiment for two seasons just to realize their initial instincts were right on, but I love the happily ever after endings, and I just really want this couple to be together.

In other news, what hottness!! Last season was distress and death and drama, and this season is just pure hotness. However, it's totally throwing off my theory that I can figure out whether I'm butch or femme based on who I like in the L Word because they're all hot. Every single last one of them.

Posted by kate at 10:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Jenny and I visited the Lesbian Herstory Archives today, and it was moving. There's a file of unpublished papers, many from 30-40 years ago, and I think this was the most amazing part for me because these women were just like me, and they were writing on topics that still have context for me, in today's political & social climate.

When I think of lesbians from before the 40s, 50s, 60s and even 70s, I think of them as "not like me." Maybe it's some leftover baggage from coming out.... I've certainly had moments where I didn't identify with the culture of LGBT community, and still sometimes I still feel, well, not so gay.

Reading papers about gender & sexuality girls wrote for school (or other unpublished academic or journal writing), so long ago, just like I wrote for school (or in my journal), where they question gender roles, marriage, coming out, hate... all of it, I felt "just like them."

Should these things have changed over the years? What parts of our collective experiences are defined by society, and what parts are truly shared, and going to endure for centuries?

For whatever reason, I never really thought of the individual experiences of women in the movement. I forgot they had sex. I just thought of whatever they were fighting for (the right to use bathrooms in a bar, to dance together, to wear what they wanted, to get married), and forgot what I have in common with them.

I'm so glad the archives exist. My first girl-kiss (and all the other firsts that go with this), my first girl-crush (and wondering whether it was just a weird extension of friendship and totally normal to be physically attracted to girls, and if acting on it meant I was gay), the first moment with a guy that I realized I really wasn't into guys, telling my family, wondering if its genetic... I think all these things may endure the generations.

I'm really thankful to Joan Nestle and the archives for reminding me that I'm part of a group. Even if I'm fighting for different rights, or wearing different clothing styles, or listening to different music, or whatever, the women younger than me, and the ones older than me, it's our desire & love that unites us.

Posted by kate at 8:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This morning I was in a meeting for SL library volunteers, and this guy teleported to the meeting, and he only spoke German, and I was reminded again of how global SL is. And this just made me think about how incredibly geographically driven our RL libraries are. Even in an academic library that offers online courses, I still feel completely like my library serves a specific community that's very much defined by our physical location. Another example-- urban public libraries are different than rural public libraries. In libraries we live by the "know the needs of your community" mantra.

So, where does this leave libraries in a virtual world completely undefined by geographic boundaries? How can my city's library system use my tax money to build a presence in SL that will support users who aren't paying taxes to our library system? Maybe if they use grant money? No. wait. Is this what people thought about building a website ten years ago (or getting a presence on MySpace before Beth Evans was named a LJ mover & shaker)? I think there's definitely an argument that a global presence serves a limited geographic region... and haven't we already argued that with the Internet?

For special libraries that unite users by interest, I think the value of SL is clear. Comic book archives, LGBT archives-- I think you should be on SL now (or maybe last month). Your users aren't as defined by geographic location.

We've also got collaboration-- one of the vital library 2.0 organs. There's so much to think about:
-- Using virtual meeting spaces to deliver staff trainings or have meetings.
-- Global collaboration between librarians & information scientists (on an individual basis). Wow.
-- The whole fun thing! You know how it was easier to teach people to use the mouse when you started with Solitaire? They can learn to program by building their own stuff in SL. It really encourages content creation even more (I think) than the "traditional" library 2.0 blogs & wikis, etc. I think it's a good way to get reluctant staff to really interact with technology.
-- Organizational partnerships. I'm not sure about individual users, but organizations are certainly taking notice and getting set-up on SL.
-- Branding. I'm not on SL that much (yet!) but when I'm there, I notice who else is there. SJSU-- you're on top of innovation! Hello, ALA! UIUC is there, and I stand a little taller and love my alumni status even more. Even if you're not branding for your users, I think it's good to be on SL to recruit new librarians (bc they're there and you'll look a little cooler if you are, too). And your users who are there-- they'll take notice.

So-- I leave you with this prediction: Second Life will turn into something important some day, though I'm not sure what. When I log in, it feels like I'm back in 1986, at my Apple IIe, with a super-slow dial-up modem connected to CompuServe (remember when there were command-line proprietary network type things that didn't attract that many people, before Netscape got invented)? And CompuServe didn't that battle, but distributed networking won the future.

Posted by kate at 4:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jenny and I were married in New Paltz on March 27th, 2004. Mid-March 1996 we kind-of-got-together (the start of relationships is a little hard to identify, but we were totally together by the end of Spring Break in 1996), so it's about eleven years, and 3 since our marriage/ act-of-civil-disobedience.

In 2004, I really thought Jenny and I would be legally married by now. I can't believe our country still doesn't recognize our relationship as more than roommates.

Eleven years ago for Spring break, Jenny and I and two other friends tried to ride our bikes (by ourselves, not in any organized ride) across Florida. We were 2nd year students at Grinnell College, and we took the bus all the way from Iowa to our friend's uncle's apartment in Tampa. Then, we rented bikes and randomly started riding in some direction, and off we went. We stayed at crappy hotels at night, and even hitched a ride over a bridge without a bike lane, with some creepy guy (I know how lucky we are that nothing horrible happened during this trip).

Anyway, parts of this trip were completely miserable. We were lost, living on junk food (especially mini powdered donuts and vanilla milkshakes-- we weren't vegan yet), carrying everything in our backpacks, and we had a few biking incidents (Jenny jumped a curb and flew into a lampost!)-- some of the hotels were really questionable.

So, Jenny and I sort of got together in mid-March, swept away by the passion of Grinnell's annual Disco party, and then were sort of in denial. But during this bike trip, one night, we were in this creepy hotel, and Jenny and I were in the same bed (the other nights we were switching off who shared beds with who), and she grabbed my hand, and pulled me under the covers, and to the horror of our friends (why didn't Jenny wait until they'd at least turned off the lights?!) she kissed me under the covers. And that sort of sealed the deal, at least until study abroad the next year (but this is a story for some other time).

Posted by kate at 9:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I'm reading Joan Nestle's A Fragile Union and realize again how our history was rewritten. She writes,

"When I read the following sentence in Freedman's book, "By 1919, we are told, about 75% of the prisoners were prostitutes, 70% had venereal disease, a majority were of low mental ability and ten percent psychopaths," I was forced to see the lesbians encoded in this list. Mabel Hampton was among those counted women. As gays and lesbians, we have a special insight, a special charge in doing history work. We, too, have had our humanity hidden in such lists of undesirables." (p. 35)

Where do we learn this history? How do we learn to read through the text and see our community? It's such an easy history to dismiss because who wants to remember? And, while my family passes down our religious traditions (my mother's side is Catholic and my father's is Jewish) and our values & ethics, I'm not sure who's there to pass on the stories about the women before this generation, the ones arrested for not wearing three articles of women's clothing.

Yes-- this history is out there. There are archives, library collections, online information, etc, but we have to work too hard to find it. So, I charge all of you, loyal readers, go home and read a book about LGBT history, even (especially) if you're not gay. Then, tell someone else what you read. Have book discussions.

Posted by kate at 9:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)