Don't you just love her?
One of the things I really like about my job is that it gives me frequent opportunities to subtly propagandize and/or proselytize for my own ideas about how the world should be. Witness exhibit A: this great stock photo of a fabulously voluptuous, not super young, more or less un-made-up and natural-haired woman of color, which I am using for the cover of one of my publications this week, along with a headline still to be finalized but along the lines of "every body is beautiful: get strong, feel fab, celebrate yourself." The story is about a local gym, and most of the photos suggested to me were of the 20-year-old hardbody variety. Which, yeah, is beautiful – of course it is! But kind of over-exposed, and frankly not that inspiring to me, and probably not to a lot of other people, either.
The only person who's questioned it so far was someone who sort of knit her brows and twisted her mouth and said, "But there are no black women in this town." I cringe even just writing it. Because, well, it's basically true. But so what? It's a great photo and I feel happy when I look at her. I love her smile. I'm going with it.
So anyway. Here's to one small score on the side of body-positive messaging in small-town community media. Yeay, me!
In other news, my advanced beekeeping class starts tonight and it's looking like I may be taking over as the head beekeeper of our project before too long here. So that's exciting.
We and some of our neighbors are petitioning Comcast to run their cables up our road. If we're successful, and I'm finally able to get a high-speed Internet connection, I will be able to work from home again. This could totally transform my work life, in a good way. We shall see.
And speaking of my work life, I've been crazy busy the last few days dealing with a crisis for my final remaining freelance client. Her domain registrar (also her host) has apparently gone under, leaving her website down, her domain name expired, and all of her data (which I learned yesterday she has never backed up, not even one single time) held hostage on servers that may not even exist anymore. I rebuilt her entire website in one very long night, painstakingly hand-coding every page from memory, in a text editor no less, and uploading them over my shaky and painfully slow dial-up connection. We bought the .net for her URL (the .org is the one that's being held hostage), and as of this afternoon the interim site is back up. Whew!
My horoscope this week says I've spent enough time relaxing and rejuvenating from past traumas, and I'd better start challenging myself a little more now or the universe will find its own way to snap me out of my comforting cocoon. Getting this site rebuilt and back up and running, I think, qualifies as sufficiently challenging. And this weekend I'm helping supervise a honey extraction and hive inspection to which I've invited about ten people from my beekeeping class.
Hopefully this little flurry of new activity will be enough to keep the universe at bay.
4 Comments:
That's wonderful--that image you petitioned for! It is fabulous and kudos, kudos to you for doing some consciousness raising. Why no black people in Sonoma? It's freaking California! Not Utah!
OMG!!!! in regard to rebuilding that Web site in its entirety in one night.
What a nightmare.
I hope the beekeeping activities are suitably restorative. Should be, I would think.
Being a tiny bit familiar with Sonoma, I'm not surprised that in '06 there are still no Black people there. But the comments you've gotten re your cover photo choice are interesting...i.e., re 'should' we choose images that are reflective of our communities?...or of the way we wish our communities looked? Hmmmm...food for thought...
Utah is, regardless of personal preference, a very conservative place. You can feel that the universe is helping you along, or you can feel that it is thwarting you, but the reality is that Utah's statistical distribution tends toward the conservative and severely religous side. The sad thing is that this point of view is not restricted to a specific geographic area, but rather is shared by a large number of people in a wide geographic distribution.
For your sake, I am glad that you can conceive of other ways of thinking. But your viewpoint is a tiny point of light in opposition to the realms of darkness preferred by those who disagree with you. If it makes you feel better to believe that reality is more in line with your beliefs than with the average viewpoint, this is good as far as what gets you though the day... but it doesn't change the fact that there exists a very large number of people who not only belive that you are wrong, but also believe that you are fundamentally incorrect in your viewpoint.
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