Best episode of Wife Swap ever
Someone on my FB linked to this article called Why Women Aren’t Crazy. Basically, the article says that people who tell women they are just “being over sensitive” or “can’t take a joke” or “overreacting” are being “gaslighted” by the person saying it – which is essentially emotional abuse. The term, the author explains comes from this:
The term comes from the 1944 MGM film, Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman. Bergman’s husband in the film, played by Charles Boyer, wants to get his hands on her jewelry. He realizes he can accomplish this by having her certified as insane and hauled off to a mental institution. To pull of this task, he intentionally sets the gaslights in their home to flicker off and on, and every time Bergman’s character reacts to it, he tells her she’s just seeing things. In this setting, a gaslighter is someone who presents false information to alter the victim’s perception of him or herself.
Here’s what I’m thinking… I totally agree with the author and think I’ve fallen victim to this recently (and many times in my past) but on the other hand, the term can be abused very quickly. Examples of both:
Supportive: Recently a friend of mine who I briefly dated a while back made 2 or 3 remarks that I took as him hitting on me (which he does frequently). Usually I just tell him to not be inappropriate and we just move on. This time, however, I complained about it to my fiance because I am starting to get a bit sick of the passes. Uncharacteristically…my fiance messaged the friend telling him to step off. This opened up a bit argument between the friend and I where to told me I was just “overreacting” and obviously didn’t “get the joke”. Instead of saying to him “No! You’re just saying that because you don’t want to seem like the bad guy!!” I said “I guess…” and went back to reread the conversation 30 – 50 times to see if I could pick up on the joke while being aware that there was supposed to be one (I couldn’t). So… he got away with it. This is a case of gaslighting.
Unsupportive: Last week my fiance and I were talking about something, and he said something that normally I would have just laughed at. This time, however, I broke out into tears and told him he was a horrible person. He said “are you getting your period?” which threw me into a fit of rage screaming “DON’T DISMISS MY FEELINGS BECAUSE I GET MY PERIOD!!!!!!!!”……… he said “okay! okay! sorry!” and apologized about a million times. I basically told him he was gaslighting me when I was out of line. This was DEFINITELY a case of overreacting and being too sensitive to an issue. I can’t speak for all women but I do tend to be irrational and overemotional sometimes… sometimes, I am indeed crazy.
This is really the only recent picture I have of me that is full body - I tend to avoid them.
Last night I weighed myself and I am officially the heaviest I have ever been (again). I have no one to blame but myself… I spent the majority of the summer working midnights at an inbound Ontario-only call center (so we got like… 3 – 5 calls a night). There were a lot of McDonalds and pizza nights, so I ended up gaining back all the weight that I lost last year. My guess is that I weighed more before we took our trip to Italy since I came back a pant size smaller.
So, I am back on Weight Watchers and this time it’s the real deal. I’ve never been a “fat pride” girl, but I’ve always been pretty content being plus sized. I’ve never really felt the urge to be a size 4/6 or been (too) jealous of those who are. I like my curves a lot, actually. However, I want to be curvy… not lumpy. And more importantly – I want to be healthy. I am really sick of feeling heavy, and constantly scared that I’m going to die young of a heart attack or something… that’s not something a 24 year old should be thinking about! So for the sake of my love for John, our future kids and my desire to see the world for as long as possible … I need to do this properly this time.
The new WW is fantastic… you get more points overall (I don’t even use my points up in a day…) and all fruit/veggies are 0 points – which is amazing… because I love fruit. But it means that things like bread and chocolate have gone up quite a bit. But so far it seems to be working. I’ve traded in my evening munchies for grapes and light popcorn instead of …pizza, wings, candy, chocolate, peanut butter sandwiches.. etc etc etc.
I plan on doing the full on before and after shots, with updates with pictures every three months or so. My goal is to lose 100 lbs over the next year – 2 years… (my more immediate goal is to lose around 50 – 60 lbs before I go to China at the end of next May) I’m taking it slow and not pushing myself since we all know that’s how you become successful. This will really be about making better habits and life decisions to live better for the rest of my life.
My graduate school topic has evolved quite a bit. I’ve gone from wanting to look at the Chinese Ghost cities as a way to relieve population pressures on mega-cities to urban health issues. My initial pull was to look at some of the most polluted cities in China, to talk to people working in the coal mines and to end up with quantitative data expressing the problem… however… it’s China, so nothing is that easy.
While looking for some information on Linfen (China’s most polluted city) I came across a VBS documentary called Toxic where the documentary makers go to Linfen to document the coal mines and people living there. Basically no one will talk to them, in fear of the government finding out that they’ve spoken poorly of the coal factories (that are all government owned/run). The documentarians are essentially kicked out of the city after a week for prying.
That didn’t give me very high hopes for what to expect being an academic wanting to go in and pull out data about what exactly the coal mines and factories are doing to the citizens of the city.
So I’ve had to change… again. My new proposal has me going to China for 6 weeks next month to do some unstructured interviews with people living in China. I will be using storytelling as a method for data collection where I will simply be asking citizens to tell me about their life. I want to know how their urban experience has changed in the past 30 years and their own personal stories about the economic development happening around them. I don’t plan on asking any pointed questions about the environment, I just want a plethora of case studies to look at which can then be turned into rich pictures and analyzed using soft systems methodologies. My hope is that I will gain some insights from listening to their stories and also do some work on post-normal science and the value of atypical or non-scientific knowledge. But I will write more about the analysis once I’m back. For now I’m just focusing on who I’m going to talk to and how I want to approach it. It’s difficult to be an academic who wants to look into China because the government doesn’t want anything done that will have them lose face… so I need to work around that culturally sensitivity and try not to step on any toes along the way.
Besides these issues I’m running into, grad school has been great. The hardest part has been learning Chinese… In regards to speaking I am picking it up very well. Also writing/reading in pinyin has been relatively easy. Memorizing the characters has been the tricky part. We’re supposed to know around 500 by the end of the course…and right now I’m learning the first batch of about 65 – 70 for my first written test. I can write simple sentences about introductory stuff to a person (hello my name is kai-lin…my phone number is…i have 5 people in my family..they are… etc) but I am a LONG ways off from writing my first Chinese academic paper (however, my school plan has me writing one at the end of next summer…ha). The nice thing about typing on the computer is that you just type in the pinyin and then it automatically comes up with some characters so then you just need to recognize it. I can write on the computer pretty quickly.
I also got my Chinese name: 凯麟 which is Kᾰi-Lín…and means triumphant female unicorn. 
yeah… pretty pleased with myself for that one.
иконографияПравославни икониI am taking …um 1 class. …Which is super lame. 
But it means I have time for volunteering. So next week I’m checking out 3 or 4 different opportunities to see what I want to spend my time doing. There is really less than a month left of school, so I can’t do something that needs to be long term.
For the summer I think I’m going to be back at Accu-Link. I contacted them – they didn’t really say yes, but they didn’t say no. They asked how long I’d want to stay this time, but then didn’t respond… but I’m sure it will be fine.
My summer goals are pretty solidified in my head:
- lose weight
- find a thesis topic
Losing weight should be pretty easy at my mom’s during the summer. There is an elliptical trainer that I really like going on, I can cut the grass, I’ll be walking around and they don’t have a lot of crappy food in their house. I mean – they eat really rich food… like cheese and real butter, but they don’t have a lot of things with sugar or salt. …Also, I’ll get yelled at if I buy chips or junk food.
About the thesis – …turns out my whole idea of studying these “ghost cities” of China may not pan out as planned. I don’t really think it’s as big a mystery as people make it out to be. …China needed to increase their GDP by 8% in a year… so each regional government was given the instruction to do so. The easiest way to do it was to build infrastructure. Not only would this falsely inflate the GDP by making it seem like more money was being spent but it would also employ more workers. As for why they stayed empty – investors bought out most of the housing and now are just holding onto it, waiting to sell. So what houses are left are actually really expensive. Also – no one wants to move there because there is currently no economy there. Is this all a problem? I dunno, it’s weird – but I think it’s going to play itself out in a few years. I’d rather work on something that really will help people when I get involved. …So I’ve been doing a shit ton of reading about coal mining in China and the effects on people’s health, the lack of environmental health education, the effects on live stock, farms and water… There are lots of issues with coal, it’s just not a horribly original topic. The ghost cities were original… oh well, such is life.
I still need to talk to my advisor about all this – but I haven’t gotten into York yet, so I’m not going to bother him until I do.
To test out my new e-book reader (aka my gigantic, beautiful and multi-purpose Dell Streak 5 that now has the newest version of Android and launcher pro on it…*sigh*) I’m reading Escape. It is horribly depressing and really makes the issue of atheist groups needing to be more inclusive to women all that more important, in my mind. Carolyn, an ex-FLDS (Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) accounts her life growing up in the “church”. She is beaten by her mother as a command from their religion, beaten at school, taken away from her friends and deprived of her dreams to be a doctor. Why is she deprived of that dream? … Because she is married off to an old man when she is only 18 years old… the old guy already has like 3 or 4 wives and actually chose her as a mistake. How brutal…
I just wrote a semi-lengthy post for Canadian Atheist about feminism in the atheist movement, but I didn’t drive in this point nearly enough: RELIGION IS INCREDIBLY SEXIST. Women are abused, taken advantage of, seen as less than men..etc etc etc. It’s hard enough to leave a religion why make it harder to enter a support group of atheists that could help in the transition?
It is vital to have an inclusive environment that anyone can walk into. When you enter into a church people are warm and welcoming despite race, gender and age. At atheist events its a bit harder if you’re not white, female or young. I want to believe that if a woman like Carolyn, who had experienced a life of abuse from religion, entered into one of our buildings that she would be welcomed with open arms and a shoulder for support.
This is my hope, anyway.
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