SL 617

~ Laura

Today, I’m deep cleaning the house (hello, spider webs under the coffe table!) and making five different kids of cold side salads. There will be 26 relatives here tomorrow to celebrate my parents’ 50 anniversary. Everybody will be here all day, so I’m arranging two meals. It will all be fine, just lots of moving around today. It’s another 10 days until I have the kids in school full time. 10 days.

Here are some things that caught my eye:

Horrific child abuse case in England.

Boycott APSA because it falls on Labor Day.

The gay subculture at Fire Island.

I’m reading stuff today in between the cobweb cleaning, so I’m here.

Published by Laura

14 thoughts on “SL 617”

  1. That’s a late school year. We’re finishing the first week.

    I will continue by proud boycott of APSA. I’m up to 20 years.

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  3. One of the American Philosophical Association’s conferences (the West Coast one?) routinely falls on Easter weekend. When they’re really on the ball, they have managed to wreck both Easter and Passover at the same time.

    There’s another APA (the NE one?) that’s always between Christmas and New Year’s. This one is for the philosophers who don’t actually like their families.

    So, Labor Day is pretty small potatoes.

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    1. It’s worth noting that the (claimed) problem w/ Labor day is that it conflicts w/ the start of (her) kids school year, too (not that she wanted to take a vacation or something.) But, if it were moved a week or two either way, it would conflict w/ other kids school starts. Whenever there are polls on these things, it turns out that there is no time that is not much more expensive (business groups will pay a lot more for the very most attractive times) that doesn’t conflict w/ _someone’s_ desired dates. Now, I’m in favor of changing if the majority wants a change, but the idea that these are all just obviously wrong times is just silly and narrow-sighted.

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      1. Yes about differing school start times.

        By Labor Day, our kids have sometimes been in school nearly two full weeks.

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  4. If you’re one of those people for whom APSA ALWAYS conflicts with your kids starting school, then the fact that there will always be a time that is inconvenient for someone is irrelevant. THe point is that APSA has NEVER once worked for me. It is also particularly anti-woman. LIke it or not, women are kinda into wanting to be there for their child’s first day of school. I finished my PhD in 1997 and I too have never attended APSA. It’s really insulting that the old codgers with the stay at home wives refuse to understand why this is important.

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  5. First, anyone that has a conference about work over the Labor Day holiday should be taken out, placed in front of a brick wall, and shot.

    I’m not buying the “oh, but there will always be a conflict for someone…” argument. The mistake is thinking that this particular time frame is an individual conflict; one that couldn’t be assumed to negatively impact an overwhelming majority of people. It’s Labor Day. And Labor Day coincides with a large number of school year starts, not just a handful.

    My labor union has a significant number of conferences too, at the state, regional, and national level (the international conference only takes place once every three years). Somehow this all gets done on a human scale—they don’t take place over major holidays, and they don’t take place during a time when a large proportion of people are predictably experiencing major transitions (school years starts, graduation). Not because we’re the patron saints of inclusion, or because we’re scheduling gurus. It’s our core assumptions: that (a) people give a damn about their families, and (b) that parents work—married, single, men, women, doesn’t matter—-the reasonable assumption is that all parents in the household work full time.

    It is also particularly anti-woman. LIke it or not, women are kinda into wanting to be there for their child’s first day of school. I finished my PhD in 1997 and I too have never attended APSA. It’s really insulting that the old codgers with the stay at home wives refuse to understand why this is important.

    Yeah, and this is being framed by APSA and its supporters as a frilly emotional issue (“those silly women and their tears at Little Johnny going off to school for the first time”), when in reality it’s a practical matter of not being there to insure that all the things that need to get done are done, not to mention the daunting task of finding childcare at that particularly volatile time. “Classroom management plans” have to be signed, and they don’t accept electronic copies for the most part (although if you bitch enough they might. Then you’re just stuck with the daunting task of finding a scanner during a tightly-scheduled conference in a city you aren’t familiar with, without personal transportation and/or with astronomical parking fees and good luck finding another space). (and no, waiting until you get back isn’t really an option, because they have to issue a detention to your kid for each day it’s late otherwise they aren’t reinforcing the rules. no leeway on that. which means you’ll have to spend some conference time phoning your babysitting backup to explain the new pickup time, and neither your kid nor the babysitter thinks the school’s response is reasonable—which it isn’t—and you’ll go back into the conference room really pissed off and unable to concentrate on whatever the hell it is they’re saying because you just want to strangle someone). The start of school is when you find out just how irrelevant the school supply list is, and the considerable number of things left off. Plus it’s when you have to arrange for alternate transportation for the after-school activities, because the bus company is a hell of a lot less accommodating than the school. Plus, this is the time you’re supposed to be meeting a new slate of teachers, for whom you’ll have to prove you’re not a don’t-give-a-damn parent—extra important for parents with a kid who has an IEP. And yes, being out of town on work seems to have the same effect as being on the couch hitting a bong (not that I have any familiarity with that since the age of sixteen) when it comes to teacher assumptions about your give-a-damn level. Because if you Really Cared, you’d Make the Arrangements.

    Who doesn’t worry about all that? Those old codgers, stuck in the sixties. And it isn’t going to change because they’re raising up a new cadre of codgers that don’t see a problem they’ve never personally had to face. When will it change? When academics start adopting some of the tactics of the labor movement, or better yet, organizing as a labor movement, and taking the fight from the atomized individual level to the collective.

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      1. (shrug). It needed to be said. I’m assuming this association takes dues, no? Then why isn’t it serving all of its members? Does the leadership of this association have no respect for its membership?

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