My Curveball Spring Savior

It's mid-March. Which is when the greatest yearly sports event takes place--March Madness. The greatest sports event is the World Cup, but every four years? Sigh.

Despite the fast-paced, messy, winner-takes-all, upset-heavy characteristics of the college basketball tournament, the long crisp days of spring mean something else to me: baseball season is about to begin.

My history with baseball goes back to when I was a little kid, 6 or so. My mom was on a softball team and I used to play with the children of other parents while the adults practiced on the field. My dad bought me a left handed glove so I could play catch, too. I remember I took it to school and my bully told me I threw weird. He said I threw with the wrong hand. I was upset, I don't remember whether we already had the elastic pitchback, or whether this was the impetus for getting it, but I spent hours practicing until I could throw, and then hit, righty. For many years later I was ambidextrous, but then I ended up playing all sports righty.

Somewhere around this time my brother started working as a vendor at the SF Giants and Oakland A's home games.  He sold hot dogs for a $1.50, Drumsticks for $1.25, and even joined in on the vendor Olympics one year tossing peanuts.  My mom and I used to go to the games.  She'd buy a program and keep score, while I would look for my working brother through binoculars and contemplate which one snack I'd get that day. I was only allowed one per game. That went on for years, even after my brother went to college (he was 8 years older than me), he would return to vending each summer and I would return to my spot in the crowd collecting plastic baseball caps that held my hot fudge sundaes and begging the giveaway woman to give me the Mark McGuire figurine and not the Jose Canseco one. The love affair with Mark McGuire would later end in heartache, but under age 10 I was purely enamored.

I joined a baseball team when I was 11. It was an all boys league, besides myself that is.  All the other girls my age played softball. I didn't wanna play softball. That was not what Mark McGuire played, or Carney Lansford, or Dennis Eckersley, or Ricky Henderson. Why should I throw differently and use a different ball just because I was a girl. I wasn't the best player on the team, but I also wasn't the worst.  I was a platoon player, but often played third base. My career in baseball only lasted a year. I always said that it was because when the boys moved to the 12-13 range, they threw way too fast and it terrified me to have a ball hurdled at my body that fast. The truth was that this year coincided with the biggest trajectory change of my life. I didn't just stop playing on the baseball league, I stopped playing basketball, and my favorite, soccer, as well.

Age 11 was when I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. I didn't get it then, but I get it now--my whole world changed.  My sister always said she thought I would have gotten a sports scholarship to college.  I was almost as good at horse and my brother and two male cousins (the only basketball game where height didn't matter), and I was well on my way to be 5' 10" or 6' tall.  But I stopped growing at age 12, a mixture of steroid use (not the type my sports idol was taking) and malabsorption. By the end of 7th grade I was hospitalized for a month and had my first surgery to remove 100cm of small intestine.

Fast forward to age 16 and my junior year of highschool. I only had one year of remission after my first surgery and things had tailspinned again. I survived my first few years of high school on a cocktail of fever reducers, nausea calmers, and painkillers, until taking the cocktail every four hours wasn't good enough. At the end of the first half of my junior year I couldn't keep food down and my 5'6" frame body was closer to 100 pounds rather than 130 that the doctors informed me it should be. I spent the next 5 months on bed rest and received home-schooling. The nutritionist gave me a sheet that she handed out to over-weight children. It explained what NOT to eat. She said eat everything on the list.

And I remained like that until April. The only reason I know the month is because my first outing out of the house, besides to the doctor's office for weekly weigh-ins, was to an A's game. There was not much I had the energy to do when I was that sick. Even having my eyes open felt like a lot of energy for my brain. I started reading the SF Chronicle's sports section, though. I started following spring training. I listened to Bill King and Ken Korach call games at the Cactus League. And so when I felt like I was ready to get out of bed for something other than a visit to Children's hospital, I asked my dad to take me to an A's game.

In his truck on the way to the Stadium, I couldn't keep my eyes open.  It was too exhausting to see the other cars moving so fast on the freeway. I know he was worried that he was enabling me to do to much, we were taking it too fast. But we went.  I don't remember the walk to the stadium. We really should have gotten a handicap placard when I was sick, but I was too proud and I didn't have a visible disease, unless you count being pale as a blood-sucker and emaciated like a zombie. I thought people would judge me for using a handicap spot. A worry not unfounded in reality.

I might not remember the walk up to the stadium, but I do remember the walk inside the stadium. I walked extremely slowly because I was constantly out of breath. I didn't think I could manage the stairs to our seats on the second deck. Slow and steady, my dad said. It was like the whole stadium was quiet and in the distance. It was just me versus the mountain of evenly spaced out concrete blocks. After we found our seats I didn't get up until the game was over. On his way back from getting sodas and hot dogs my dad's back was facing the field as he walked up the stairs. He missed the grand slam which led to the A's victory.

It was the beginning of the Billy Beane era. Just a year later this team would carry Miguel Tejada and Jason Giambi to the first A's post-season in seven years, the first in a longer time that didn't include McGuire. It was the beginning of my serious love affair with Oakland baseball, a relationship that hasn't wavered since. My idolization moved from a power hitter to three young starting pitchers; my favorite an intense small guy full of southern charm. It was baseball that got me through my rocky return to high school and through an even rockier experience in college. It's what kept me up until 4am when later in life I found myself streaming the A's post-season on my computer while living in the UK.

I can see why other people don't love baseball as much as I do. College basketball, for example, is a thrill ride from start to finish in a way that the pitch-by-pitch never will be.  For me, though, spring will always mean a rebirth and the beginning to long summer days filled with baseball.

Goodbye Job, Hello Holes in Obamacare

Ater two rounds of interviews, it is looking fairly likely that I will be offered a job next week. It's nothing fancy. An entry level job at a radio station with a salary under 40k. In the bay area, this is not a very livable wage. It certainly isn't in San Francisco, where the job is. The person I would be replacing lives in Pleasanton, an hour commute away, with roommates because that's where she can afford to live well. The job is also going to be tedious, and repetitive, and stressful, though the people who work there seem to be both nice and interesting. In the relatively healthy Bay Area economy, emphasis on 'relatively,' this job is a great opportunity. It requires little experience in the specific field and upward mobility and I was lucky that had a friend who worked there got my resume noticed by the hiring team. It's a golden opportunity in a land where the gold tends to stay in very few pockets.

The problem is that it's also looking fairly likely that I will have to turn down this job. The only job opportunity I see on the immediate horizon and I will have to turn it down because of healthcare costs and concerns. This job offers a Health Savings Account, or HSA, which means that for every dollar I put into this account the company will match $.30 up until the account has $3300 in total. All medical costs will be paid out of this account, but doctors visits and medications are not inexpensive--think along the lines of $50 a visit. For someone with a chronic disease who takes daily meds that $3300 will not last long. After that deductible, I would be responsible for 20-40% of potential medical costs up until I spend 14k. Which means if an unexpected complication happens I could find myself in debt very quickly.

In the end, I will have to turn down this job. While Obamacare has made it so those with chronic conditions can't be turned away from HMOs and insurance companies, Obamacare has not made it so those with long-term health costs can afford to pay for the coverage that is offered. Instead they may have to take shoddy coverage and risk nearly 14k in debt or continue searching for jobs with better coverage in a terrible job market. Obamacare has, indeed, been a great step forward in America's move toward affordable and universal healthcare. However, if those in need of a job, money for rent and food, as well as money to cover monthly meds, tests, and their higher-than-average likelihood of a medical complications, are still slipping through the cracks, then there is still a long way to go till we've fixed our healthcare inequalities. The US term 'pre-existing condition' is hopefully becoming outdated, but Americans with chronic conditions are still being systematically discriminated against and Obamacare is not yet the solution they were hoping for.

Finding MY Feminism

I didn't like feminism while I was growing up.

I was a tomboy. I liked sports and rock music and the X-Men. All my best friends were boys until age 12 when all that 'sexual' tension shit started to seep into the picture and fucked things up. But then I found the girls who were also badass and who'd go see Tank Girl with me or were listening to alt-rock.

The feminism I was around while I was growing up was fairly anti-male. It put down a lot of things I liked; boys included. I couldn't relate to 'Boys are Stupid' tees when I was 13. I've since called many a boy stupid, but they usually deserved it and I've said the same about many women, too.

In high-school the feminists my age were dominated by the Lilith fair folks. I couldn't relate to hairy armpits and acoustic covers of the Indigo girls by peole calling themselves hippies. It was as if the women's rights movement was stuck in bell bottoms with flowers in their hair. It didn't help that bell bottoms were back in style while I was in high school! There was some crossover. For example, I did like artists like Suzanne Vega and The Cardigans. The overall vibe, however, was totally unrelatable to me as I was listening to Radiohead, Nirvana, and No Doubt. No Doubt before they went soft, that is. Basically I wanted to be Gwen Stefani from Tragic Kingdom.

My relationship with feminism didn't get better in the early college years. At around 19 I remember getting into a fight with a friend of my mother's (and mine) who said that women of my generation were letting feminism down. She said we were leaving the work place to raise families and were letting the fight for equality die. We were ruining the progress her generation had worked so hard for. I remember feeling like feminism was telling me what I should and shouldn't do. I lumped it in with the male sexism that had come before. I can see now that was ridiculous and exaggerated, but the anger I felt then had the the affect of continuing my disdain toward feminism. Don't tell me how to behave, feminism!

Still I gravitated toward women's rights. From the time I first read about women being mistreated in other countries: their clitorises being mutilated, not being allowed to leave the house without a man or a veil, or being told that women's rights were a western convention; I screamed at whoever would listen. Literally. My poor mother and father. I also found myself angry when people had expectations about how I should be, told me what I could do with my body, told me I wasn't being lady-like, or when I saw men and women slut-shaming those who were just feeding their sex drives. I surrounded myself with women who were strong and independent and men who liked opinionated and smart women.

I still hated the feminism, though. In my world I saw it as stagnant, exclusionary, and often mean. Then when I was twenty-one or so, things changed. I found out that feminism I'd dreamed of was alive, I'd just been missing it. I found Sleater-Kinney and it snow-balled from there. I fell in love with this new-to-me modern feminism. It was not about telling men their behavior was sexist--though, sometimes--it was about breaking the perceptions of what it means to be a woman, about loving whatever you are, and about not taking shit from anyone who wants to hurt you or get in your way. It was inclusive and opinionated and stong.

As I'd known deep down, feminism wasn't dead in the western world and society still needed it. We needed it not just to get through to old dudes who filled the seats of congress, but because there are still liberal progressives who are tainted by the stereotypical idea of what it means to be a women or what it means to have feminine sexuality, or by those who believe that women need to proove the stereotype wrong by being the opposite.

I knew we still needed feminism from firsthand experience. For example, just a year and a half ago I went from long hair to short hair. My girlfriends loved it. A small handful of my dudefriends did, too. A pleasant side-effect was that icky men hollered at me less, but so did the cute men at bars and pubs. In fact, I was more invisible to almost all men. Disappointing for a single girl in her 30s, but not soul crushing. The sad thing came from some of the reactions I got from friends. Friend who were are self-proclaimed progressives. Suddenly my biker boots were 'lesbian boots.' My LGBTQ+ friend half-jokingly suggested I may be somewhere on a lesbian spectrum. Not once but quite a few times. As if trying to see if I would reveal a hidden truth about my sexuality I'd bottled up inside.

I've never been stereotypically feminine girl. I like sports. I like rock. I speak my mind about everything: politics, religion, sex. I don't cry about things and I rarely ask for help or talk about my emotions. I can handle myself with the boys. I drink whisky and beer along with my cocktails. I love getting dolled up, but I'm more comfortable in jeans than in a skirt. I don't like the way I look in skirts, but I love fashion. And that's not being anti-feminism. That just being a me. If I wanna sleep with boys or girls, or both, it's not because I have biker boots or cut my hair short. It's because that's who I am and that's what I want to do. I promise whatever I do, I'm not the type who'd be afraid to tell you honestly who I am. I'm not all that excited, however, to hear what or who you think I am.

I still struggle against others perceptions of sexuality and gender and battle with my views of feminism in a world with complex social structures and difficult issues of fairness. I'm so happy to have found my relationship with feminism, though. I only wish I handn't missed the salvation I could have had in high-school if I'd known about riot grrrl back then. I obviously was not reading my Sassy magazines closely enough.

I Don't Understand Twitter

I don't understand Twitter.

I've tried.

Multiple times.

I got bored.

Multiple times.

Now, I'm not some sort of Luddite who hates new tech things. I've signed onto half a dozen music sites, at least. I'm on Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, Imgur, and Reddit. Yet, I still don't understand Twitter.

It seems to me that Twitter is made for those who want to be on the bully pulpit or those that wish they were a part of an inner circle. Like Facebook, Twitter is a one to many platform. But unlike Facebook, Twitter can feel like a shot in the dark. Interactions feel like they are threads on a spindle in larger tangle of fabric that mostly go unseen. 140 characters or less careening past you on the opposite side of the highway.

It's a place for people to network for their careers. Whether it's a relatively small profession of big fish in a little pond, or whether it's a celebrity with many fans, Twitter isn't a very social social network. It feels more like a pyramid scheme for those who manage to get an audience. Share my stuff and I'll do better, feel happier. And maybe, just maybe, I'll share some of the glory with you if you've said something I think is witty or deem important enough.

Now it's possible there are exceptions.

The Egyptian uprise against former President Mubarak is a prime example of Twitter's potential in helping to motivate masses of people, in this case toward political protest in the streets. The Occupy movements are another possible example of Twitter potentially having a political affect on people. However, as I'm not sure those masses of people really represent the wider population, nor whether those masses would have protested anyhow and that Twitter was just one of the many ways in which the message could have gotten out.

Another rather unique characteristic of Twitter is that real-time news spreads fast from people on the scene of an event. Even news sources need time to get to news sites, but people located at an event at the time it occurs can immediately get on their phones and their tablets and send out tweets about what they see. As 24 hour news has showed time and time again, and as Jon Stewart has adeptly satirized, fast news isn't always accurate news. In fact, often it is the exact opposite. Fast news is news porn for news junkies. It makes the pimp (the medium spreading the news) some money, but doesn't help people find a quality relationship.

So who is Twitter's target audience then? From what I can tell it's those who a) want to network, b) want benefits those networking or marketing, and c) those who enjoy speaking to hoards of people/enjoy or crave being the center of attention. This, I believe, explains why Twitter is used by teenagers, politicians, celebrities, and girls who are searching for a social network that their exes aren't on.

Um...anyhow...I don't see how Twitter will last very long, or at least how it will grow to a wider audience. It's generally too big for many people to have fun interacting with celebrities or with people one doesn't already know--something I've heard was more likely in the early years of Twitter and made it feel more like a community. In fact, I don't think interacting is Twitter's strong point. From my admittedly limited experience of Twitter, slivers of connections can  feel extremely superficial. If you weren't on Twitter ages ago, and if all your friends aren't already on Twitter and consistently using the platform, I'm unconvinced you're likely to enjoy it if you try it now.

That is, unless you want to try to get into the spotlight or you enjoy watching those who already are.

To each their own!

A Five Fail Night, or The Tale of the Girl and Her Hot Dog

When I was a child there was a Time Magazine cover...or a New York Times Magazine cover...or an Atlantic Monthly cover...well, I can't remember which exactly, but I do remember the picture clearly:  a table with three plates of lobster and one plate with a plain hot dog. My parents had a long conversation regarding this cover, but I didn't really get it. Not until I was older.

The basics of the article, as my parents explained, was that even if you don't want to spend a lot of money going out with a group, an economic/rational choice/game theory model states that you should assume that the ones who order lobster will want to split the bill. So even if all you can afford is a hot dog, you're better off getting lobster and paying a little more than you split three lobsters and a hot dog (because at least you are getting to eat that lobster and paying for what you ate) than being stuck subsidizing the crustaceans filling other's bellies while you munch on a processed meat roll. Not that there's anything wrong with processed meat rolls (vegans and vegetarians, this is not the time or place).

We've all been there.

Stuck paying for things you didn't get. Stuck paying for people who didn't quite get it.

And I was there last night.

I'm low on cash these days. One on the list of statistics on unemployed millenials. My dear friends know this. For example, they know I can't take BART to meet them in the city for drinks or a movie like I used to. That's a whole eight more dollars to spend on a night out! That's like a bunch of cans of cheap beer we could pick up at the corner store and drink in someone's living room while watching trashy tv! But just because friends know that you're skint, doesn't always mean they remember.

Last night was book group and my plot to live within my means was thwarted because this time we happened to be going out for dinner. We went to a cheap-ish pizza place not too far from me, so I thought I'd be fine. I looked at the menu in advance. If I didn't get a drink and ordered the cheapest pizza, I could be out of there for less than $20. Huzzah! I could totally splurge on that.

But the best laid plans...

When I arrived I ordered a beer because we were waiting for more than half our group and who wants to wait without alcohol (alcoholics anonymous, this is not the time or place). So an $8 beer it was, because it's the Bay Area and that's the cheapest beer they had. Fail one. Totally my bad.

Then someone asked if the table wanted to split an appetizer. I said I was fine without, but everyone else went in on it. I would realize later that this fail two was the beginning of the end of my $20 meal plan.

Fail three occurred when my good friend asked the waitress how many pizzas would be needed to feed the table of seven. Five was the answer and an ominous sign of my total fails to come.

When dessert happened, I thought maybe I'd spring for some soft-serve frozen yogurt. Luckily the frozen yogurt machine tried to halt my spending by breaking down. I decided better of splurging on dessert and declined to order anything in it's place. Man is still mightier than machine, though, and so not ordering dessert was my fourth fail.

My fifth fail was my greatest.

The bill came to the other side of the long table. Before I knew what was going on people had put in cash and cards. $37 per person, that's what was going on. I split 5 pizzas and two salads between seven people, and I'd had a beer, and suddenly I owed $37.

Now I never read that Time Magazine article. Maybe it talks about how our psychological and social molding makes it hard to squabble with those ordering lobster when all we can afford is a hot dog. What I do know is that being the 'penny pincher' in a group of people who don't have to worry about a nearly forty dollar pizza dinner is a hard role to assume. At this point it was on me to speak up and say that the math needed to be recalculated, but rational choice doesn't kick in then, social pressure does.

So next time I'm gonna have to learn how to ask for my own check from the get go, no matter how awkward that might feel. Because I'd still like to be able to go out with friends, and I'm not all that into lobster anyhow.