Deirdre Saoirse Moen

I can relate to more of this article, originally a study about the underlying history of obese people, than I can easily express.

I don’t have a typical build. This has been annoying for most of my life in some weird ways, especially in interactions with men and doctors.

For example, being told, within the same month, by my doctor that I was anorexic (and needed to gain weight) and the Navy that I was overweight (and if I wanted to join, I’d have to lose 17 pounds).

What I took away from that was that weight was confusing. If I felt okay, I was okay, right?

Catch is, of course, that I no longer feel okay. Weight is a part of the problem.

As mentioned in the article, a lot of kinds of harassment (by men) stopped when I reached a certain weight threshold. I stopped getting catcalled. I stopped having men tell me what mood I should be in. It was a relief. It was something I had control over.

Because “beauty” was no longer apparently a primary factor, I started being taken seriously for my technical skills. I still remember the first time I met a pretty woman who wanted to be an engineer. And I wondered why she wanted to become an engineer. Now, I wouldn’t wonder, but it was odd back then. I’d known so few female engineers, and none in the field she was interested in (mechanical). Now I wish I’d taken the time to learn more from her.

Then, a few years later, I got a serious marriage proposal from an on-again, off-again relationship I had. Unfortunately, it had strings attached: if I were of a “normal weight.” We went out to dinner (there’s some irony I never saw before, heh) so I could tell him no.

He still thinks that phrasing was a big mistake in his life, but there was a lot more to it than that. We just weren’t a good enough fit overall. It’s one of those relationships where his experience of who we were and mine were miles apart.

There were also downsides to the weight, of course. Like the guy you have a crush on who overlooks you, and you feel that weight is a significant factor. And you tell yourself, “What an ass,” but part of you wonders if you hadn’t been, well, you, if it would have turned out differently. And you hurt.

Despite what I was told, though, fewer men have a problem with it than I’d been led to expect. A lot of the “rules” about how women “should” behave stem from a time when many men were killed during wartime and there was a serious long-term disparity between available men and available women.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

(Repost of something I wrote on LiveJournal in 2010)

A while ago, Jay Lake talked about his privilege in his cancer treatment, and it got me to thinking about my privilege in a number of contexts.

I’m white, and that comes with power in our culture, but it’s not that that makes my own set of privileges interesting, at least I don’t think so.

Without further ado:

1. My parents, grandparents, and so forth, went to college. My mother has documented family members going to college as far back as the 1400s. My great-grandfather had three doctorates, one of them an M.D. So I never had to struggle with family to get a better education. It was expected.

2. Not only did my father work in the sciences when I was born, so did my mother. Not only that, my mother appeared in a science textbook in the 1950s, as though that were perfectly normal. More to the point, I was raised thinking this were normal and common, and that is a very odd privilege indeed.

   

3. My parents worked at an atom smasher:

   

   Later, my dad worked in aerospace. He worked on one of the Viking Lander projects (his specialty was mass specs, and the GCMS project was affectionately known as the “Green-colored Martian sniffer”). An early project where I worked for him was measuring the helium line of the sun. Later, he won a NASA prize for his work on the TOMS (ozone-mapping mass spec) project.

4. While I certainly know people who know more decorated scientists than I’ve met personally, especially as an adult, the fact that I’d met any as a child is a form of privilege. (My father taught the Feynman course on physics as a grad student, just as one example, and was asked to write part of the handouts for it.)

5. When I was a teenager, my father suggested I take a programming class. After I finished it, he asked me if I wanted to do programming — that’s how I got started on my career. He thought, correctly, that I would enjoy it, and his urging me to take classes like that was partly motivated by the fact that he didn’t enjoy programming that much but did have programming work that needed to be done. So it wasn’t just a class, it was the beginning of 35 years of work (so far) in the industry.

   It was a long, long time before I met another female software engineer; I’ve never worked on a team that was even majority female. In many cases, I’ve been the only woman with a group of a handful to more than 30 male software engineers.

6. Even when I wanted to be a musician, both my parents were willing to support that choice if and only if I got adequate education for a plan B. I got lured in by the consistent money in programming and for quite a while resented that I’d gone that way, but later came to peace with it after a summer off busking in Ireland. It met enough of the music goal that I was able to move on with my life. This is not to say that I don’t burn out occasionally — I have.

7. After my mom remarried, we always had a plane and a boat, and tended to travel places. I got to see a lot of places that other people just don’t. San Clemente Island while it was being shelled in a military exercise, for example.San Miguel Island, where a ton of stuff floating in from Japan landed on the long beach, and its odd caliche forest:

   

8. I didn’t realize how odd my upbringing was until I was in college and we were asked to write about our mother’s cooking, and most people wrote about white kitchens and poultry. Here’s an excerpt from my piece:

By far my favorite sea dish was the one I usually got to prepare–abalone. Abalone clings very hard to rocks and has to be pried not only off the rock but out of its shell. Once out, it doesn’t have the decency to just sit there and behave. No, it has to crawl all over. Abalone is inherently tough, so I would pound it with a meat tenderizer as it crawled across the cutting board. I’d stop wailing on it with the metal tenderizer and watch it to see if it had stopped moving, but it would curl up its edges and slide away.
So it’s hard for me to remember that some people have to fight to attend even two-year college, hard for me to remember that some people fight with their family about careers in the sciences and so on. It’s just so normal for me.

Then again, I grew up thinking radioactive hazard signs were normal, too….

So, yeah, I’m the weird kid, but I come by it honestly.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

Tanner is a rescue cat gotten when we had an elderly alpha cat and needed a beta. She’s always been skittish and prefers to spend most of her time outdoors.

Every November, she starts coming inside when it’s wet out, but she’s always avoided any of “my” spaces. She generally has 2-3 spots in the house and ignores the others.

One thing I know: cats love mohair (aka “momo”). When we went to Avoca in Ireland last year, we bought a mohair throw for the couch, which she ignored. A few weeks ago, I brought it out to my writing nook and left it on my ottoman. A few days ago, she decided that was a cool place to be.

This morning, when I got up, she was still there.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

When I was in college, I took a memoir writing class, and one of the in-class writing exercises we were to do was to write about “our mother’s cooking.” Or, if not our mother, who did the substantive cooking (which turned out to be a non-mother for a couple of people in the class).

There was a sameness to the stories: long, white kitchens, large meals of poultry, rather a blandness of cuisine that my family never shared.

Me? I wrote about the trimaran we built when I was a kid and the smell of the butane stove, the fun when people would go diving and bring back abalone. Then I got into an extended description of cutting abalone into pieces and having it still crawl across the cutting board, even while I was whaling on it with a meat tenderizer.

Abalone’s tough, you know. Really have to pound the everloving crap out of it for it to be tender enough.

Oh, and the island we were at (San Clemente) was being shelled by the military in training exercises at the time. From five miles out. Whoosh, boom!

Bonus.

Naturally, we had to read our little pieces aloud. As I read mine, I pounded the conference room table at the appropriate points.

At the end, everyone was a bit stunned, and the teacher said, “Okay then.”

It was not until that moment that I realized there was anything the least bit unusual about my upbringing. Truly.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

Mammoth Trip Report

My dad recently turned 80, so his friends wanted to throw him a party. Due to a history of altitude sickness and a dislike of mountain driving, I really don’t visit Mammoth frequently, but I was particularly motivated for this trip.

Dad recently mentioned that United had seasonal flights from San Francisco to Mammoth (airport code: MMH). Back in the day, there were only flights from the commuter terminal at LAX, and for quite a few years, there weren’t any commercial flights at all. So the revelation was a surprise to me.

So Rick and I booked a trip to visit my dad, flying out Saturday morning and flying back Monday morning so we’d get some good time with him.

My usual allegiance is with Hilton, but there are no Hilton properties in Mammoth, and the only Starwood property is a Westin at rates higher than I’m willing to pay.

Normally, I use TripIt to track flights and hotel reservations.. This has been a real boon in many cases, especially with schedule changes. This trip is the first time it’s ever led me astray: TripIt said the flight was leaving out of Terminal 1, but it turns out the flight operates out of Terminal 3. Neither United’s iPhone application nor the web site had info, nor did the departures board, so, after Rick picked up coffee for us, I actually called United on the house phone to get the information.

Later, people on FlyerTalk explained it for me: it’s a frankenflight. It’s caught in something of a contract issue between United Express, United, and Continental where the flight was operated by Continental but had to be sold as United, and that kind of pain has made its way all the way through the system.

You may recall from prior adventures that I’d flown a lot last year, though a good chunk of it wasn’t on United or its partners, and I flew enough to earn what used to be called 2P status, but, in the post-merger world is called Premier Silver, United’s lowest status tier. Technically, that would waitlist me for Economy Plus, but it wasn’t offered to me on this particular flight even though there was not only Economy Plus, but also First class on the small jet. Oh well, it was a 37-minute flight, no big loss.

The plane was a Canadair regional jet, and it was nicely quiet, surprisingly so. Flying over the Sierras, we saw just how bad some of the snow fall had been this year, sadly.

Our flight was on time into Mammoth, which is a super-small airport with one gate and one waiting area (so they can only have people waiting for one flight at a time). We picked up our rental from Hertz, then went up to my dad’s place past the village near what used to be called Warming Hut 2 but now has a much more high-falutin’ name. It was really great to see dad again!

Dad’s favorite place for breakfast and lunch in town is Good Life Cafe, which had a dauntingly large menu. After determining that my first two choices could be made gluten-free, I had an Eye Opener with mahi mahi. Rick had the Chile Verde. I can’t recall what my father had. The food was good, and we were stuffed through to the dinner party dad’s friends had set up for him. One of his friends got him an awesome 80th birthday cake with ginormous strawberries. On the way there, the weather changed a bit and we had a light dusting of snow, which was welcome by my dad and all his skier friends.

We finally checked into the Shiloh Inn, which was decent enough but a bit drab. We didn’t use the pool, though I regret that choice now. After years of being a pool fiend, I haven’t been using them nearly enough, and this pool was open 24 hours. However, the side effects of the altitude medication meant I was in significant pain.

The following morning, we again headed to get my dad and again went out for brunch at Good Life Cafe, and several of dad’s friends joined us. It was great really getting to spend some time with people he’s known for years and talked about a lot, but whom I’ve barely met before. This time, my dad tried the Chile Verde. I had the same Eye Opener, just because it was that good. My dad was recovering from some illness, so he bowed out for the rest of the day.

Rick and I were feeling up for some extra altitude, so we took the gondola to the top of Mammoth and walked around the top of the gondola. We’d gone up pretty late in the day, so we had about half an hour up there, then went to the bar at the midpoint. Previously, I’d always had a hot chocolate, but none was available, so I had an Irish coffee instead.

We tried to find one place that seemed promising on Yelp, but couldn’t find what we were looking for, so we went to Red Lantern, where they were able to come up with some really tasty gluten-free food.

The following morning, Monday, was our flight out. Catch was, we woke up and it was completely clouded over and snowing. Now, there are quite a few microclimates there, and where my dad lives is a different microclimate from the center of town (where we were staying), which is a different microclimate from the airport. I checked my messages and the flight status and it looked like our flight was still on, so we ate our free breakfast downstairs (which basically only a piece of fruit for me as nothing else was edible) and drove to the airport.

After we arrived, I got an email from my mother and a phone call from United that our flight was canceled — after we’d returned the car. Several people were having meltdowns about that. Skiers who were happy about it were thrilled to change their flights. We were there early enough that we got rebooked for a later flight. By the time all that was done and we re-fetched the car keys from Hertz (who said we couldn’t drive the cars to San Francisco, not that I wanted to), the weather was starting to clear. Of course it was.

We got cocoa in the little refreshment hut, and then headed back to town, where we once again picked up my dad and went out to you-know-where. After that, we finally had enough time at our leisure to check out a place a couple doors down that Jaym Gates told me about: Looney Bean, one of those most beloved kinds of places where you can get good coffee and great atmosphere. Rick and I sat transfixed in front of the fire, mugs in hand.

Now, one of the challenges of Mammoth is altitude. It’s at 7,000 feet, is a difficult takeoff, and skiers are not known for being light packers. Weight and balance are always issues on regional jets, and this one actually has a first class and economy plus to make the load lighter (fewer seats and all that). But sometimes, that’s not enough. Due to the canceled flights earlier, the flight was oversold, so they’d had to involuntarily deny boarding to some people. They’d asked for four volunteers before boarding. After that was done, they began boarding us.

Due to my status, I was upgraded to first, and they accidentally gave Rick’s seat away (he wasn’t upgraded as he doesn’t have status), so they put him in first too. Because they couldn’t move anyone else forward, but because they needed more weight forward, they moved some of the luggage into the other four seats in first class; luggage weighs less than people do. Still, three more people volunteered to be bumped, and, after all that changing people around, we were finally under the projected weight by two pounds.

We had a beautiful and uneventful flight back, and I was happy to see more snow on the mountains on the way back. My full photo set is available on flickr.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

New Year's Eve was lost largely to jet lag. In fact, I slept right through midnight.

When Rick was disassembling the house looking for Jackson (our inherited still-missing cat), my huge pile o' clothes got moved, which kicked up dust, and Rick got really sick as a result. So instead of handbag day, we've been doing several days of clothing re-org. I'll have vastly fewer clothes, but they'll all fit into their designated space. It's long needed doing.

So I went to go look for an air ionizer on Craigslist, and found a used Sharper Image one that had all the cool features. Probably cost $400 new, guy was selling it for $80. Catch was, it was in Santa Rosa. We made an appointment to pick it up, then the three of us (including my mom) went to Peter's Café for breakfast.

Then Rick and I went off to Santa Rosa to pick up our gadget.

We were close to Occidental, so Rick and I went. I Yelped for food possibilities. There were two Italian restaurants and one Mexican. I said, "Just watch, the Italian ones will be open and the Mexican one will be closed." Which actually happened, fwiw. Since neither Italian place seemed to be particularly celiac-compatible, I passed on both places. If there's no sides I can eat, just not worth the bother, frankly, and one can't trust salad dressing unless you brought it yourself. Since the fryers were shared with gluten, I hoped for better options in a different town.

We were passing Sebastopol on the way back to a place we'd already earmarked, so I Yelped some possible places to eat. We wound up at a BBQ place in Sebastapol that had gluten-free items clearly marked on the menu. It was awesome.

Sometimes, it really is worth not settling for the first place you see.

Last night, I went to go see my Clarion classmate, Catherine Holm read from her collection, My Heart Is a Mountain and talk about yoga practices in writing. Karen Joy Fowler [1], one of our Clarion instructors, was also there, as well as Cat’s brother Paul Dybiec, who is a clothing designer for maternity clothing maker Japanese Weekend, so we all went out for coffee afterward.

I got to East West early [2], so I was noodling in a notebook about Disbelievers and got some good ideas. One of my standard noodling ideas is: Imagine what 100 cool things in this universe might be and write them down. You likely won’t use all 100, but the goal is to get a few new ideas that will help you. In this case, I realized what a big tentpole scene about 3/4 of the way through the book will be. It is something that’ll create an aftermath, and it’s the big scene that forces the climax.

Catherine’s stories are often about relationship with the land and environment, living as she does on a farm in northern Minnesota. They reminded me of the Vermont writers I’d heard speak on similar topics. She read a wonderful piece about a woman being taken away from her farm into community housing.

There’s something about these stories, though, that always make me feel like the weird child. Don’t get me wrong, I am the weird child, but most of the time my life feels normal to me.

Back when I was in college, we had a group writing session where we sat around a conference table and wrote on the topic of “my mother’s cooking.” We then read our entries out loud to each other. I came near the end, so I got to hear everyone’s tales of white galley kitchens and sizzling poultry, and canning.

My piece was titled “Pounding Abalone.” Here’s an excerpt.

The few times mom and I collaborated on a meal were usually on a boat working in cramped quarters. Mom and Bill [my stepfather] were avid scuba divers; I preferred to snorkel. I remember sitting up on deck while the others sought food, sitting under a light blanket (to reduce glare) while reading a book. Once, a shadow of a lobster caught my attention under the blanket, startling me. It turns out that the lobster had crawled up the blanket about four feet before I noticed it. I got my revenge though —- I boiled him.

Mom would make a great bouillabaisse, simmering the sauce all day while out catching the fish for the soup. We usually had mostly shellfish—lobster, abalone bits, tiny shrimp—rather than fish.

By far my favorite sea dish was the one I usually got to prepare -— abalone. Abalone clings very hard to rocks and has to be pried not only off the rock but out of its shell. Once out, it doesn’t have the decency to just sit there and behave. No, it has to crawl all over. Abalone is inherently tough, so I would pound it with a meat tenderizer as it crawled across the cutting board. I’d stop wailing on it with the metal tenderizer and watch it to see if it had stopped moving, but it would curl up its edges and slide away.

When we were getting ready to cook, I’d cut the abalone up, but even that didn’t prevent it crawling. It would move in my hands as I rolled it in the batter mom made. Then, when she put it on the sizzling pan, only then would it stop moving.

Since the last time mom and I went out boating together, I’ve never had abalone properly prepared. I’m not sure if it was my pounding or her cooking, but perhaps it was simply the magic of shared experience.

I think everyone was horrified, but then I never heard tales of plucking chickens….

One of the people at the reading was a licensed therapist who asked some interesting questions. She specifically asked about ego in writing. I can’t remember the exact question she asked because my mind was already racing with the question’s implications, but it made me realize what it was that bothered me about the “thou shalt outline” writers: they’re ego and super-ego writers. I’m an id writer. I describe my writing as backing into a story with blinders: I can only see where I’ve been — at least until the story catches, and at many points thereafter. That is, by definition, id writing. It’s also why my first drafts can be so craptastic.

This is, btw, one of two reasons I dropped out of James Gunn’s workshop: it simply wasn’t compatible with my process.

Also, one of the writers who’s been on an e-mail list of women writers said that, for years, people were discussing craft issues. About a year ago, this flipped, and now most of the discussions were about marketing. This has depressed me as well; I’ve been noticing it more and more.

[1] A big thank you to Shweta Narayan. When I was having a rough emotional time a couple of years ago, I asked her for recommendations for a light book to help me through, and she recommended Karen’s Wit’s End. It was perfect, just exactly what I needed, and it was really nice to be able to tell Karen that.

[2] Due to a short in a power strip that tripped the circuit breaker to my office. Great.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

My middle stepson, Alexis, turns 30 today.

It's also Rick's birthday, though he's rather older. :)

Decade wrap up:

1) Changed fields and am now where I want to be work-wise.
2) Finished both my MA (Popular Fiction) and my MS (Computer Science).
3) Moved to Menlo Park.
4) Got married for the second time.
5) Went to Clarion and Viable Paradise.
6) Turned my health around a lot, though it needs more work.
7) Sold my first fiction under my own name (as opposed to the work-for-hire fiction I did in the 90s and non-fiction work). Then resold the same piece. Submitted twice, sold twice.
8) Saw the last daily aspect of my first marriage -- Scruffy the cat -- fade away and die. At that point, it really felt like my first husband was truly dead in a way it hadn't before. (His three sons are still very much alive and I'm in contact with them, but my contact with them wasn't daily like it was with the four cats we had.)
9) Traveled. New countries visited (per the Travelers' Century Club list, which is quite permissive): Greece, Egypt, Turkey (Asia), Turkey (Europe), Crete, Corfu, Denmark, Estonia, Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand, Australia. This means two new continents for me as well: Australia and Africa.

Ten Things I've Done That You Probably Haven't:

1) Worked as a contractor (albeit briefly) on Cunard's Queen Elizabeth II. Sadly, my contract firm lost the contract to another company, so I had to get off at Barbados.
2) Walked from the Plaka district of Athens up to and completely around the Acropolis, then walked back. (I know rinolj also did this.)
3) Recovered from workshop-itis: Odyssey, Clarion, and Viable Paradise twice, plus grad school. I dropped out of my MFA program because I realized that I'd been saturated with workshops and what I really needed was different.
4) Wrote porn for pay.
5) Went snorkeling in a bay while the bay's island was being shelled by the military. (San Clemente Island, California)
6) Have dived in a passenger submarine. More than once.
7) Walked through the caliche forest on San Miguel Island.
8) Have skiied a mogul field of moguls taller than I was at the time.
9) Joined -- and left -- a cult.
10) Have taken a train across the US (Vermont to Southern California). Have also taken a passenger train through Wyoming, where Amtrak doesn't usually travel.

Bah, can't stop at ten:

11) Hand-fed sting rays in the Caribbean. (They are like little puppies, they will rub up against you for food.)
12) Rode an Olympic medal-winning horse. Not while he won the medal, sadly.
13) Stood inside Newgrange.
14) When Rick proposed to me in Esperanto, I answered in a language that had no words for yes or no (Irish Gaelic, fwiw).
( And I very much hope this one never applies to you )

A while ago, jaylake talked about his privilege in his cancer treatment, and it got me to thinking about my privilege in a number of contexts.

I'm white, and that comes with power in our culture, but it's not that that makes my own set of privileges interesting, at least I don't think so.

Without further ado:

1) My parents, grandparents, and so forth, went to college. My mother has documented family members going to college as far back as the 1400s. My great-grandfather had three doctorates, one of them an M.D. So I never had to struggle with family to get a better education. It was expected.

2) Not only did my father work in the sciences when I was born, so did my mother. Not only that, my mother appeared in a science textbook in the 1950s, as though that were perfectly normal. More to the point, I was raised thinking this were normal and common, and that is a very odd privilege indeed.



3) My parents worked at an atom smasher:



Later, my dad worked in aerospace. He worked on one of the Viking Lander projects (his specialty was mass specs, and the GCMS project was affectionately known as the "Green-colored Martian sniffer"). An early project where I worked for him was measuring the helium line of the sun. Later, he won a NASA prize for his work on the TOMS (ozone-mapping mass spec) project.

4) While I certainly know people who know more decorated scientists than I've met personally, especially as an adult, the fact that I'd met any as a child is a form of privilege. (My father taught the Feynman course on physics as a grad student, just as one example, and was asked to write part of the handouts for it.)

5) When I was a teenager, my father suggested I take a programming class. After I finished it, he asked me if I wanted to do programming -- that's how I got started on my career. He thought, correctly, that I would enjoy it, and his urging me to take classes like that was partly motivated by the fact that he didn't enjoy programming that much but did have programming work that needed to be done. So it wasn't just a class, it was the beginning of 35 years of work (so far) in the industry.

It was a long, long time before I met another female software engineer; I've never worked on a team that was even majority female. In many cases, I've been the only woman with a group of a handful to more than 30 male software engineers.

6) Even when I wanted to be a musician, both my parents were willing to support that choice if and only if I got adequate education for a plan B. I got lured in by the consistent money in programming and for quite a while resented that I'd gone that way, but later came to peace with it after a summer off busking in Ireland. It met enough of the music goal that I was able to move on with my life. This is not to say that I don't burn out occasionally -- I have.

7) After my mom remarried, we always had a plane and a boat, and tended to travel places. I got to see a lot of places that other people just don't. San Clemente Island while it was being shelled in a military exercise, for example.San Miguel Island, where a ton of stuff floating in from Japan landed on the long beach, and its odd caliche forest:



8) I didn't realize how odd my upbringing was until I was in college and we were asked to write about our mother's cooking, and most people wrote about white kitchens and poultry. Here's an excerpt from my piece:

By far my favorite sea dish was the one I usually got to prepare--abalone. Abalone clings very hard to rocks and has to be pried not only off the rock but out of its shell. Once out, it doesn't have the decency to just sit there and behave. No, it has to crawl all over. Abalone is inherently tough, so I would pound it with a meat tenderizer as it crawled across the cutting board. I'd stop wailing on it with the metal tenderizer and watch it to see if it had stopped moving, but it would curl up its edges and slide away.

So it's hard for me to remember that some people have to fight to attend even two-year college, hard for me to remember that some people fight with their family about careers in the sciences and so on. It's just so normal for me.

Then again, I grew up thinking radioactive hazard signs were normal, too....

So, yeah, I'm the weird kid, but I come by it honestly.