Vote for the YWCA!

Click here and vote for the YWCA Metropolitan Chicago; the organization with the most votes wins $15,000. We help women, girls, children and rape victims, for jeebus' sake! We help eliminate racism!

What to do:
1- Pick Chicago, IL
2- Click on YWCA Metropolitan Chicago
And that's it but you can only vote 1/day - so vote every day until December 10!

Frakking kids. We were kicking their butts until yesterday!

(yeah, conflict of interest. whatever. it's my blog and i can do what i want.)
(link now fixed.)

Advocacy Alert: Tell the CW No Never Means Yes!

from the ywca metropolitan chicago:

Tell the Media that No Never Means Yes!
In August, when the CW network announced Kevin Federline was going to guest star in a few episodes as a front man of a band called ‘No Means Yes,’ we asked the producers of the popular show One Tree Hill to change the name of the band before the season began. We thought the band name winked at sexual assault – an all too common reality for their target demographic. YWCA USA CEO Lorraine Cole, YWCA associations from Illinois and Greater Los Angeles agreed. The name of the band had to change!

But the CW is silent. Maybe they didn’t hear us. Maybe they don’t take sexual assault seriously.

For the YWCA’s Week Without Violence, send another message to the CW and tell them that No Never Means Yes!

Go to their Advocacy Action Center to send an email. Spread the word!

[and i am not exactly a disinterested party here]

update: if you need a good reason to protest, here's a guy who didn't even give women a chance to say no and raped women he met on Match.com. and he got away with it. totally gross.

plug plug plug

if you live in the chicago area and are looking for a great women's organization with an awesome mission and a really great history of civil and women's rights work, then make them your friend!

(no, no hidden vested interest in them at all...none!)

they shoot horses, don't they? well, duh!

i was at the planned parenthood gala/fundraiser tonight. i worked a little late so i missed half the cocktail hour and i've resolved that, next year, i am not going alone. it was totally boring without someone to dish with and get secretly smashed.

however, todd stroger, our new county board president, was there. he's really short. (i will ignore the fact that he looks like a guy i dated in my dad's church.) and his handwritten nametag gave him a forlorn, paddington bear kind of air. poor thing. (everyone called him Urkel behind his back.) but, hey, why should i feel sorry for him? there he is, in a feminist organization's annual gala, rubbing elbows with other politicos (like gov. rod blagojevich, jan schakowsky and carol ronen). he's made in the shade. but he's also the guy who's proposing to get rid of the women's justice services dept in the sherrif's dept (meanwhile, men's services stay intact.) i wonder if he felt the irony. i know i did. i wonder if anyone approached him to ask him about it. probably not.

then i hung out in the bar to drink a glass of jameson's and overheard some staffers complain that the big donors got tables while the frontline staff didn't; she railed on about the hyprocrisy and i hid a smile. i've heard this complaint before, from folks in my own organization, and i have to admit to a certain lack of patience with the complaint. it's petty and painfully childish.

in a perfect world, organizations that provide crucial social and human services would be fueled by all the good feelings it produces in the world. butterflies would bring me coffee and birds would read my email; then, a blue fairy would hit me with her wand and i'd suddenly become a real boy.

but, alas, we live in the world of cold, hard cash. the money that staffer is so quick to scoff at actually means something to the organization. it's a fucking line item in the budget - a line item that needs to exist if the organization is going to keep functioning.

fundraisers aren't about recognizing the hard work of front line staff; unfortunate, but true. they're about the story we tell donors so we can get our hands on their money. they're marginally about the work we do. what they're really about is telling a great story of our organization to the donor so the donor can feel good about parting with hefty sums of cash. it's an intricate dance of seduction - and, if you've done the job well, you will celebrate and feel a little icky that you've just spent one night whoring yourself out for nearly $1 million. (hence all the folks who shook hands with todd stroger with gritted teeth.)

yes. $1 million dollars. what would you do for $1 million, knowing that it pays for programs, overhead, education, advocacy capacity, and direct service? can those of us in the nonprofit arena afford to be so frakking naive about how our organizations operate and what our money is used for? with the increasing strictures of govt funding and private sources of funding becoming even more important, i think not.

(this is also what i think about my church's huge annual fundraiser; it's glitzy, obscenely rich and raises scads of cash for our social service center. a center that doesn't bring in PROFIT but needs to spend money in order to operate. while some folks get skeeved out about a church raising this amount of cash in this manner, i think, what else is it going to do? wait for the Budget Fairy to stop by?)

so i say this to all the true believer non-profiters out there who think the taint of cash pollutes their mission and work:
leave graduate school behind and frakking grow up a little.

if we're so empowered, why don't we vote?

do you want to do something for these upcoming mid term elections?
are you looking for a way to contribute?
do you live in the suburbs of chicago?

then click here.

the ywca metropolitan chicago and citizen action illinois are working together to try and make sure as many single women as possible, in the north and northwest suburbs, make it to the voting booth on nov 7.

why single women? because we have one of the lowest voter rates around. 20 million registered single women in the 2004 elections could have made a significant difference - but they never made it into the voting booth. we need to change that.

if you live in the surrounding glen ellyn area, any time will do - 90 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours.

(and, yeah, i'm not exactly a disinterested party here.)

what making an effort will give you

my new year's resolution was to Make an Effort. i thought it would be a good way to end complacency, laziness and get my life in order. who knew that Making an Effort would be quite so effective?

i look at my calendar now and whimper. my free and open spaces are beginning to disappear with the alacrity of conservatives reacting to michael moore.

my current boy situation aside (which actually isn't that big a deal since expectations were so low - in short, he didn't want to meet my friends and act like a normal grown up), this week is going to give me a stroke.

work has, to put a fine point on it, exploded all over me like a flaming bag of poo. i stepped into my new position officially last week and, man, is the learning curve fast and steep. our government affairs contact said to me, as she handed me her copy of the IL general assembly directory, 'don't worry. in a year, you'll be great. flashcards are useful.'

holy crap. flashcards. and - a year?!

i have to learn names, committees, titles, interest areas - for city, county, state, and federal level officials (elected and appointed).

what the hell. those past 7 years of frolicking were nice. who needs friends, family and boys? not me.

i have the illinois general assemby and the cook county board to keep me warm.

(of course, i'm secretly thrilled. it's like i'm in my own personal episode of 'west wing.' love it.)

school's back in: Philobiblon

Philobiblon

can't get enough of feminist writing? wondering where all the feminists are? curious what feminists think? thinking all we need to do is get over it and have a baby? looking forward to a long weekend and have nothing to do?

then surf through these links at the first Feminist Carnival! i can't wait to dive in.

(the huge fundraiser is over; i did yoga in my hotel room wednesday night while watching a documentary about the blood rituals of the ancient maya and i think i pulled something; i'm so totally over Huge Fundraiser; and i had an extremely vivid, naughty dream about an ex-boy this morning that made me late for work. thanks for letting me share.)

work

has been heating up so much that my father left a voicemail on my cell phone and said, if you don't return my call i will get on a plane and fly out to chicago to check up on you.

so, of course, i returned his call.

but all this is to say that i'm working hard at this social do-gooding thing and loving every single minute of it. (it also helps to work for two really great women.) i passed my 90-day review with flying colors; i believe the words 'glowing performance' were actually used.

i don't usually gloat over things like this but i have to admit that this fits. what i'm doing right now feels right to me (and it feels so good i barely feel the 15k paycut i took.)

if only there was a boy that makes me feel like this...hm.

in other news, i am the newest member on the Board of Directors for a non-profit whose work on women and employment is really good and valuable. i had been recommended by a woman doing consulting work for us and after a few meetings with a current board member and a couple of staffers, they invited me and i accepted. my schedule is about to become less free, but it's worth it. in deaconship, i'm on a couple of committees and our sessions are about to ramp up. soon, i'll be too busy to think about boys.

(this period of my life reminds me of the time in grad school when i was leading the union, building the dept's new interdepartmental composition curricula, writing my dissertation, teaching and drinking every night at the pub. everything is the same except the drinking every night. my body can't take that anymore.)

and i finished writing another chapter of the Worst Romance Novel Ever.

thank you, Lord, for this period of productivity and opprotunity in my life.

the horns of my dilemma

so.
met today with the ceo and head of marketing of a national women's non-profit. they'd welcome me in their organization and it'd be a fantastic way to get my feet wet in the non profit world - programming, marketing/communication, development and administration. they're looking for someone to mentor and i'm looking for experience. the organization hits my sweet spot: women, racism, reproductive and economic empowerment. i'd be able to write. the learning would be incredible. the exposure would be fantastic and the women i met with are fabulous - willing to put me in touch with other women and organizations.

but. the pay is SO low. it can't be ignored and, since it's non profit, can't be avoided. i'd be taking at least a 15k hit. 15k. not forever. there's no way i'd stay in this position for more than 2 years. but jeebus. 15k. that takes me back to grad school. and i remember why i chucked the phd program - i hated being poor. i hated living in a small town eating ramen out of my coffee maker. i was tired of it. there would be no extras: books, music, travel, shopping, cleaning lady or cocktails. (the less said about sex the better.) i'm not materialistic but i have to admit i have a life that's relatively sweet. that sweetness would just about evaporate.

i have a couple of bites from the corporate world this week; i have to give the nonprofit my answer probably by friday. eeks.

Body and Soul: Onward, Christianist soldiers

Body and Soul: Onward, Christianist soldiers

i'm writing an article about this now. but this is a good post about some of the things i'm concerned with: the new heavily reactionist, anti-rational wing of the right. if this is the face of christianity, then we have a problem.

sorry i've been absent. the election knocked me for a loop.
but now i'm back.

i'm quitting my cushy job to fight for the left. so if you thought i was militant before, wait until i really get warmed up.