Notes from a spoiled Christmas

...And I don't mean spoiled as in bad, either. Yes, I am an only child.

Caveat: My family does BIG Christmases. I'm not really sure where it came from. My mother says it's what her parents did, so maybe that's it. And my grandfather used to pay for Christmas when I was little, so it was easier for my parents to just buy a lot. Then when he died, they felt bad about cutting back (no complaints here). In my defense, many of my friends have received money, generous donations of cars or furniture, and help with rent over the years. My parents aren't really into that. They like giving presents more than money or useful things, because it's a lot more fun.

So, anyway, I got a snowboard. Which I am super excited about. Alison and I are going to the Poconos in February, and now I don't need to rent a board & boots. Very exciting. I also received an awesome cookbook, black puffy winter coat, and running clothes. Good times.

In other news, I am trying to get back to work but finding it difficult--made worse by my parents' new Wii. Also, I finished "The Kite Runner" yesterday. It was an excellent book, and probably the last fiction book I'll have time to read for a while.

Happy Holidays, Friends!

As I do every year, I am taking this opportunity to eat lots of awesomely bad (but great) food, play board games with my parents, give and receive gifts, and watch terrible Christmas movies with thinly veiled "life lessons." Good times.

Merry Christmas--if, you know, you're into that sort of thing.

O-HI-O

So here I am, home for the holidays (Christmas, since we're all lapsed Catholics). Ohio is...cold. But it's nice to be with my parents. Unfortunately, I'm spending a lot of time working, which my stepmother is trying to not-so-subtly subvert. It's cute, actually. She thinks I work too much.

I drove to Ohio because we cannot have friends look after our cat--at age 18, she requires three pills a day and thrice weekly injections of subcutaneous fluids. Alison and I are practically vet techs at this point. I listened to NPR for most of the way, and I caught this gem. Now, I'm not usually interested in prodigies, and I'm not a big sucker for the "cute kid" gimmick. But Ethan Bortnick is really something special. Listen to the interview--a transcript will not do it justice.

I am not your "gay friend"

As everyone has heard by now, Rick Warren was chosen to give the invocation at Obama's inauguration. I am wavering between outrage and resignation. On the one hand, Rick Warren has said some terrible things about abortion, gays, and other religions. On the other, it is smart for Obama to win points with the religious right. In an attempt to make a decision on this, I googled the pastor to find the original sources of the quotes people have attributed to him. Instead, I stumbled across an interview in which he claimed to not be homophobic, because he had gay friends whose house he had recently visited.

Ah, the "gay friend." Little step-sister to the "black friend." Or the "disabled friend."

Here is the thing. I am not your "gay friend." If you need to take me out of your diversity wallet to defend yourself against the spector of homophobia, then I was never your friend to begin with. Talking about your "gay friend" immediately negates any friendship you thought you had.

Because:

1) You had to defend yourself against homophobia in the first place, and could not do so on its own merits. Being friendly is not a defense. Friendly people can be homophobic, and rude people can be accepting of different sexual orientations. Nice does not equal good.

2) If you think of me as your "gay friend"--the feather in your tolerance cap--then that is all I am to you. You feel better each time you are nice to me, the way you feel better when you give food to the homeless. That's not friendship. That's pity.

3) You are not my friend anyway. Newsflash: Gay people know the difference between "friends" and friends. I know whether you like me because I make you feel tolerant and good, or whether you like me because you think I'm fun to hang out with. I can be nice too--but I won't call you my "evangelical friend."

In the end, it comes down to the meaning of friendship. You are my friend if you enjoy being in my company, and I enjoy being in yours. You are my friend if you are happy for me when something good happens, and if you comfort me when I am sad. I am your friend in the same ways. Friendship does not require approval of everything I do. We can get irritated with one another and still be friends. But friendship does require a partnership of equals, respect, and understanding. And that is something that any would-be-tolerant people and their "gay friends" do not have.

*P.S.: I realize that my readership is pretty limited to my close friends, so this probably doesn't apply to you. But it needed to be said. Also, this doesn't mean that talking about your gay friend is bad. Just not to defend yourself against a charge of homophobia. If you really aren't homophobic, you can do that on your own.

Addendum

To my last post--

1) Alison has the flu. While not a good thing, I am happy it was not my cooking that made her sick. Whew.

2) I read this article at the gym, and I had to add it to the "sociologists in the news" list. It is about whether people in cities are more lonely (bottom line, they're not). I loved reading this--the author quoted many prominent sociologists, and she concluded that living in a city like New York is actually good for people. Yay.

Cooking & Sociologists in the News

For the first time in many months, I have had an excellent week. So I celebrated last night by cooking dinner. I am not as good of a cook as a baker, but I think I did a good job. I made honey-roasted root vegetables and homemade pita and curried hummos. The dinner was great, if I may say so myself. Unfortunately, my wife ended up being ill all night with either a stomach flu or food poisoning, so I cannot claim complete success. I am worried that the veggies are the culprit. But I don't want to throw them out, because they were so tasty (and I did not get sick).

On to "Sociologists in the News..."

Racial Identity and Social Context
A very timely topic for the Chapel Hill folks--sociologists find that outsider perceptions of racial identity are affected by contextual information such as incarceration and job loss. These attributes increase the likelihood that an interviewer will identify an individual as Black, and this has become more true in recent years.

Religion Makes You Healthy
The findings of this study are not shocking. In fact, my primary comment for this article is "when are media outlets going to stop reporting on this topic?" It is not that I disagree with the premise, or that I think it should not be reported at all. It's just that the religion-health link appears to be one of the most reported findings from sociological work. We get it, already! There is more to sociology.

Demographers Rock!
The article is about a possible reduction in fertility and not the obvious fact that demographers are awesome. But I thought I would put in my two cents... Anyway, point is, people have fewer babies when they're worried about their pocketbook.

Families Matter
Using Add Health (yay!), a Penn State sociologist finds that family lifestyle affects obesity as much as genetics do.

Oooh, Fun!

So over at Scatterplot, there is an interesting discussion about which books people have not read. The more central to one's discipline, the better. Or if we're talking fiction, the more heralded, the better. Here are mine.

Sociology/Nonfiction
The Consequences of Modernity (Giddens)
Anything by Marx (I have tried, many times over. I finally gave up during comp exams time and just read every description of Marx's theory I could find).
The Second Shift (Hochschild)
Of Human Bonding: Parent-Child Relations... (Rossi & Rossi)
Bowling Alone
Democracy in America

Fiction
The Catcher in the Rye
The Canterbury Tales
Atlas Shrugged
For Whom the Bell Tolls

Although apparently many people have never read One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is one of my all-time favorite novels, so I do feel a little redeemed.

A few thoughts

I am returning to Philadelphia tomorrow. I had a great time here, but am homesick for Alison, my cat, my apartment, and walking as the primary mode of transportation. So all in all, I am looking forward to going back. The drive...not so much. But it will be okay. I'm used to long drives.

Anyway, some (maybe) interesting things:

Sad
A.O. Scott reviewed Wendy and Lucy and had this to say (among other things): "'Wendy and Lucy' is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has some swearing, a little drug use and a brief implication of violence, but no nudity, sex or murder. The rating seems to reflect, above all, an impulse to protect children from learning that people are lonely and that life can be hard." --I found this really disheartening. It's okay for adolescents to discover that life is hard. I think they probably know anyway.

More does not equal too much
This article dispels some of the myth around auto workers' salaries (it was also reported earlier by Media Matters). One additional point: just because workers in American auto plants make more than workers at foreign plants, it does not mean they necessarily make too much. Maybe the rest of us don't make enough...

Crushes
Since Alison has been posting her "crush of the week", I thought I would post a list of my crushes. They are in no particular order, because my preferences change day to day:
-Tina Fey
-Amy Poehler
-Campbell Brown
-Roselyn Sanchez
-Rachel Maddow
-Seth Meyers

Jobs

I had intended to write about the need for equal job creation for men and women, inspired largely by Philip Cohen's post on this issue, but Linda Hirshman beat me to it. My point was initially similar to theirs--Obama's job creation plans are concentrated in sectors that traditionally employ men (engineering, construction, etc.), thus leaving women out of luck. So should the new government think about women, too?

As reported in the NY Times, job losses primarily affected those in manufacturing, construction, retailing, financial services, hotel and restaurant work, as well as temporary workers. Some of these are "male" jobs (manufacturing and construction), but many disproportionately affect women--particularly service sector jobs. Therefore, we might expect women to be losing jobs at a similar or even increased rate than men in the present downturn. However, the same article also lists the sectors in which employment is growing--areas such as health care, which disproportionately employs women. So maybe women are not really losing jobs, so much as moving to new jobs. Employment statistics suggest this is the case: men's unemployment has grown from 5.3 to 6.3 in the last three months (here I am looking at the seasonably adjusted rates for 20+ males), while women's unemployment has grown from 4.6 to 5.3. This is not changed by looking at labor force non-participation, either.

So is focusing on men's jobs more important? I would argue, along with Philip and Linda Hirshman, that we still need to consider women's employment. Most importantly, when we consider the impact of joblessness on children, women's employment becomes much more important. Men may be nearly 20% more likely to be unemployed than women, but children are about 10 times more likely to live with only their mothers than only their fathers. So mother's employment means a lot more in terms of family well-being.

What kinds of government initiatives could be instituted to support women? I can think of three: First, the government could couple Obama's interest in pre-kindergarten education with a job creation program, funding both educational initiatives for young children and job training to employ educators in these positions. Second, the federal government can create incentives to state and local governments as well as companies to provide on-site childcare for parents, thus making it easier for women to work and creating jobs in childcare. Third, legislation designed to fund retraining programs for unemployed workers should create specific plans to open traditionally "male jobs" to women, by training women to be able to work in these areas and by creating incentives for managers to hire women.

Well, that is, if anyone were asking me... :)

Sociologists in the news...

I have decided to try a new weekly segment of interesting news stories that either write about sociology for a mass audience, are written by a sociologist, or make reference to sociologists who are doing interesting research. So here it goes...in the news this week:

1. Happiness is...a virus?
Researchers at Harvard and UC San Diego find that if people in your social network are happy, you are more likely to be happy as well. This works particularly well through friends and neighbors, but less so through family members. This research was also profiled on the Today Show last week.

2. Automakers, Unions, and Competition
This was written by a sociologist at Wesleyan. Cutler argues that the failure of unions to organize companies at the manufacturing plants of foreign vehicles has contributed to the current crisis. Certainly, unionization could be a positive step for workers in the U.S. But I am uncomfortable with the blame for these crises being placed on workers, when their pay comprises a relatively small fraction of the total budget.

3. Religion, Religion, Religion
First, sociologist Wendy Cadge tells us that some people pray for parking spaces (Say it like Amy & Seth--Really? Really!) Then, Mark Chavez sings (or maybe writes) the praises (heh--get it?) of the mega-church. Finally, Dashefsky shows that interfaith Christian-Jewish married partners were more observant of Jewish religious traditions than non-interfaith couples. Go figure.

North Carolina

Yesterday I drove down to North Carolina for the week, to meet with my advisors, collaborators, and friends. And to attend three holiday parties. Why not get some free food while I'm at it, after all? The drive to NC was long but uneventful. The most exciting part of my drive occurred in DC in which I had my possibly dorkiest moment ever, listening to cspan radio. I didn't even know cspan radio existed. But it does. And I was able to listen to about an hour and a half (until I drove out of range) of Thursday's congressional hearings with the Detroit automakers. It was really fascinating! What I found particularly interesting was the fact that, despite news reports that seem to lump the three companies in the same boat, they are really quite distinct. I already knew that Ford was doing better than GM & Chrysler. They are only asking for access to money in case they need it, not a direct infusion of cash. I didn't know, though, that Chrysler is a) just waiting for someone to buy them up or merge with them--the bailout would just make them "more marriageable" as one senator put it and b) they are owned by private equity, which could invest in them, but doesn't. Kind of makes the idea of giving them money unappealing, no? GM is the real worry, as they employ so many people and do desperately need cash. I also found out that the automakers spend less than 10% of their money on labor (so the unions claim--rightly, it seems--that they cannot be blamed for the shortage of money), and that an economist named Moody estimates that they automakers will need more money eventually, putting the estimated price at somewhere between 75 and 125 billion. Interesting stuff!

Back to my day...When I arrived in Chapel Hill, I immediately headed to the gym (six hours in a car makes this a necessity). It was a gratifying experience, as I watch unranked Michigan beat sixth ranked Duke in basketball. Since I am no longer living in Chapel Hill, I worried that my basketball interest would wane. But no, I hung around the gym stretching until I saw the final frown on Coach K's face.

After this, I headed to my temporary "home" in Chapel Hill to shower and change, and then drove to the department Holiday party, bearing wine. The party was well-attended, and much more enjoyable than I expected. Good job, Sociability Committee (formerly Social Committee, until someone took issue with the adjective "social", saying, "Humans are always social by nature, so it should really be called the sociability committee." Huh?) Anyway, after the Holiday party, I went with Vanesa and her sister, Mel, a friend of Mel's, Anne, and Yingchun to a lesbian bar in Durham called Steel Blue. Sounds like a lady cop dive. But, actually, it was a decent enough club (for Durham--let's be real).

And yet...this place did the same thing that the other lesbian club in Durham does--at some point in the night, the club plays a certain song, and 3/4ths of the people get up, go to the dance floor, and start line dancing. Seriously. And it's not even a country song! They play a vaguely hip hop-sounding song. But apparently everyone knows that it is a cue to get up and start shuffling awkwardly, side-to-side. Ohhhh, southern gay bars. How I haven't missed you.

Baking or blogging

...but certainly not dissertating.

I am getting used to failure. However, I need affirmation from somewhere, and it is certainly not coming from my profession. So here are my plans.

Baking
I love to bake. I am not particularly detail-oriented, but I can produce a good cookie. And an excellent lattice-topped pie, as I discovered over Thanksgiving. And as Alison has said, I love the positive reactions I get from baking. Last year I made Valentine's Day heart cookies for people at UNC. They were poppyseed sugar cookies with a clear sugar frosting and candied lemon peel. I am *still* living off the high I got from people's reaction to my candied lemon peel. That's right, I did it myself, bitches!

So anyway, my plan this year is to perfect some recipes of my own. I decided that I would hold off on cookies (except for the near future...more on that in a sec). Instead, I am going to work on cupcakes this winter. Why? Cupcakes are really only one item, rather than cookies which offer unlimited possibilities. And yet, by concentrating on perfecting a cupcake recipe, I can create some interesting combinations of cake & icing. Of course, pre-Christmas, I need to focus on Christmas cookies. I am baking the first batches tomorrow. But starting in January, get ready for the cupcake onslaught!

Blogging
I'm not good at blogging yet. The best blogs focus on a single topic, but I'm really more of a lazy generalist. I have added the Arianna Huffington blogging book to my amazon.com wishlist.* So maybe I will get some ideas. I do know that she says to blog your passion, but sociology is quickly losing steam for me. I do love baking, but I'm not sure I can bake often enough to blog about it. And I love politics, but there are better sites out there written by people who are paid to blog. I am a mere amateur. So I'm still seeking ideas. Because my life is...well, boring. I need a topic. Or at least a muse!

* I just discovered the most wonderful thing ever: the global amazon.com wishlist. Why did no one tell me sooner? Amazon.com, you are a genius.

P.S. I added a "followers" link to my sidebar, because I have delusions of grandeur. Actually, I was looking for a way to create those "after the jump" links, and came across the followers widget. I'll probably delete it if no one uses it, but I thought I would try it out for now.