This is: What Makes Us Girls?

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I took this week off to try and finish a project that we started a couple of years ago. Except for today, when I had to deal with a software upgrade that broke some things at work, I have been painting the exterior of our house every day since Saturday.

Painting is one of those tasks where you have to be careful about what you are doing, cutting in lines where two colors meet for example, combined with times when it is extremely tedious, as when you have a couple of hundred square feet of siding to cover. Folks who are very good at it can paint very well, very quickly. I'm not "very good" at it. I've done it enough that I'm OK but take much longer than one with more experience would. My neighbor, a carpenter and tech-ed teacher, commented that painting is something anybody CAN do, but not everyone SHOULD do. We were sharing the shade of a border tree after he'd finished mowing his bit of grass with a manual push mower and was drinking some water. I don't THINK he was judging the quality of my work but rather sharing a general observation. I tend to agree with him. (We do have a crew of pros coming in to deal with the old part of our house and it's layers of lead paint.

But I didn't set out to to write about painting here

Whenever I'm working around the house or in my shop I need to have music playing. This week has been no exception. My music collection isn't huge but I have almost everything that I have purchased over the past 45 years, including vinyl and CDs, ripped to mp3's on a server (and backed up online) that I can stream to what ever device is most appropriate. I am a bit old-fashioned and still pay for my music; granted, some is at yard sales, but still. This week it has been fairly hot here - not as bad as most of the country, but still hot enough that I find ear buds uncomfortable. I have a small FM transmitter so I plugged it into my PC,set it up on a unused frequency and tuned a boom-box into it. My son, a carpenter with a philosophy degree, jokes that a radio is the most important tool on a job site.

I have a few themed playlists that I used for sit-down listening. When I want background music for working, I usually create a playlist by adding a number of albums or songs until I have several hours queued, shuffle it and kick it off. Yesterday's list was pretty typical and below are links to a YouTube piece for everyone that on that list. The only artist that stands out as being out of character with the rest is Terry Riley, but I hadn't heard it in a while so I started my day off with it. I put these links up, mostly because I often stumble across music in random places and thought that maybe someone here would find something new, or even revisit a group they'd forgotten about.

Some of these are "official", some are just audio with a static image and a couple are TV clips.

Canadians:

Swedes:

International:

  • Chicha Libre ( Brooklyn based but from all over.)
    The Ride of the Valkyries
    This may seem especially strange, but it works.
  • Gotan Project (Paris based from France, Switzerland, Argentina)
    La Gloria
  • Luisa Maita (Brazil)
    Lero-Lero

Americans:

British Isles:

Aussies:

But I didn't set out to to write about music here.

Lana Del Rey has been accused of having daddy finance her album and its promotion. It is over-produced, and her appearance on Saturday Night Live was awful. Whatever. I like it okay. One song on her album is This Is What Makes Us Girls which has nothing to do with our identity issues, but (while painting and letting my mind wander) lead me to ponder: What IS it that makes us girls? (Or guys, for that matter - it's the same question.)

Some of us will transition physically, some of us will remain closeted. Some of us will live it only in our fiction and others in real life. I certainly don't have an answer for myself and know each one is unique. (I've also been accused in life of coming up with more questions than answers.) But where does this come from? I don't know.

That is what set out to write. And at this point, I have to get to bed - got doors to paint tomorrow.

Comments

painting

Submitted by on

some tips for you, Those store bought scrapers dont peel paint worth a dang. I usually file them nice and sharp in a vise 10 at a time. Makes the work alot quicker when they actually scrap the paint off in one go.

Second painting lines. Pull tape off roll and stick it to your tshirt 2 or 3 times put over the paint you want to keep but not pull off house. Take paper preferably waxed one side fold it over so that the edge where you will tape is actually two layers(this is where you usually have the most paint and single layer it can bleed thru.)

3rd rent or buy a spray gun. There is electric ones that actually dont work that bad now on the market. Add paint spray it all over and your done.

Old people like to use paintbrushes, Ok if your that type make sure you got ALOT of paint on the brush and the project otherwise you leave lines that show up big time.

I am an oddball I like to fix anything I can get my little hands on. Or take it apart to see how it works/clean/ service it.

What makes you, you.

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Society in general tends to be rather blinkered and for sake of convenience, turns a very complex issue into a binary one: [M] or [F].

In reality, it's waaaaay more complicated than that. Think of an equaliser on a music system - a dozen or so sliders. Imagine each one corresponds to a different aspect of 'you', and for added complexity, may change from time to time (just like you may change your audio equalisation based on mood / music etc.) For most factors, the sliders will range from extremely masculine (can't see many here having many of their sliders at that end of the scale!) to extremely feminine (probably got a few here), with an androgynous zone hovering around the middle. Put in those terms, a scale of 10 may not be sufficient to cover the entire range :)

I suppose they could be split into three groups: internal (how you see yourself), external (how you present to the world), and third party (how the world sees you). A few from the top of my head:

The crucial one's how you feel inside - I suppose the 'essence' of you.

There's the internal social aspect - i.e. ignoring situation, location, time of day, clothing, appearance etc., if you overhear a conversation between members of an (apparently) single gendered social group, what would be the 'type' that you can internally empathise with / 'connect' with (regardless of whether you'd actually be able to do so) - in other words, excluding all other aspects, which position on the scale would represent the social group you'd be most at home with, given half a chance.

Subconscious mannerisms (i.e. in private, without having to 'pretend' to be a member of one particular social group)

Appearance (as in the bits of body people see, rather than what's underneath!)

Clothing choices (although nowadays the masculine end's rather truncated and replaced with a very large androgynous zone, given almost anything a bloke can wear, a girl can also wear without raising any eyebrows)

The hardest aspect for many is probably phenotype: the appearance of the unclothed body. If it's fairly androgynous, it may be a blessing - if not, a curse.

There's probably oodles more, but you get the idea...

As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!

Songs

Submitted by on

Recognised very, very few till I got to the 'British Isles' and there were Pete, Maddy and Liam. Following Sandy...could I propose this version? I was actually at the gig.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e196Jsd-oQ

I do spend a lot of time considering 'who' and 'why', but that is the nature of the beast I am. Anyone who has read my stuff will see how music permeates all I do and think, so here are a few of my own "Moods of Me" pieces of me. A theme may be detectable, but is that surprising?
Tori Amos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smJ23yBfm7A
Lisa Ekdahl
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR3nKgju4ho&feature=results_m...
Meic Stevens
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ejh95ELeaA
The film is of the place Sarah used to ride out to for peace and a place to think in my 'Cold Feet'.
Richard and Linda Thompson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYi2UDhl4ts
Fairport with Sandy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2xODjbfYw8&feature=fvwrel
Suzanne Vega
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBFG372HsW8
John Martyn
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv2J09XgO2g
(and the Portishead original) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3LK5ELvZwI&feature=related
Jethro Tull
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWubhw8SoBE

And just for some politics...
Dafydd Iwan. 'We are still here, in spite of everyone and everything. We are still here!'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WooUv0QttKs

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