Monthly Archives: August 2007

And Yet My Wife Doesn’t Think I Am

Found a link to one of those quiz things. Found it on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, being guest-hosted this week, by a few folks, including Stephen Bainbridge. He’s 57% feminist. Tells me that I’m 95% feminist, by virtue of answering strongly agree to every question except the one about the morning after pill, to which I put not sure.

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You Are 95% Feminist
You are a total feminist. This doesn’t mean you’re a man hater (in fact, you may be a man).
You just think that men and women should be treated equally. It’s a simple idea but somehow complicated for the world to put into action.

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Dawn tells me that, despite my claim to being so, I am anything but a feminist. She thinks I’m a chauvinist pig.

Who ya gonna believe?

Bridges

When I lived in Minneapolis, I lived on campus at the University of Minnesota. I must’ve walked across the Washington Avenue Bridge a hundred or so times. About a mile north was the Tenth Avenue Bridge. I never made it up to that part of town, but I used to stop on the Washington Avenue Bridge sometimes and look over at the Tenth Avenue Bridge, off of which bridge Eric’s boyfriend had jumped to his death. Eric lived in my dorm. I didn’t know him especially well, but the day his boyfriend jumped Eric came into my room in a dazed mess and played absently with the junk on top of my dresser. I didn’t know what had happened, just that Eric was being numb and strange.

Just immediately north of the Tenth Avenue Bridge there is, or now was, a bridge carrying the interstate. Rush hour today, it just fell. Into the water. Just like that.

How completely unreal it is to think that something like that still happens. It reminds me of the story that my old boss Bethany told me, about when she had her first baby. She was getting out of the hospital the next day or the day after that, whenever it was, and she saw the husband of a woman whom she had met in the waiting room of the OB/GYN, a woman about in the same stage of pregnancy, a woman she’d chatted with a few times. She asked the husband after the woman, only to be told that she had died during childbirth. Bethany just immediately burst into tears. That sort of thing didn’t happen anymore, did it?

But these things still do. It’s hard to process these random, deadly things.