Monthly Archives: November 2017

Casual ableism and sexism: still not OK

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Sitting around a table with a bunch of attorneys.  One guy describes a multi-party case involving parties who are blind.  He says:  “We call them the ‘two blind mice.'”

My brain chokes momentarily.  I call him out:  “you gotta be kidding me!”

No one else says a thing.

He says, “sorry you were offended.  People have different senses of humor.”

Earlier in the meeting, he consistently referred to female judges and magistrates as “The,” for example “The Krieger” or “The Tafoya.”  Male judges were just “Hegarty” or “Watanabe.”

Called him on that, too:  “Are we only The-ing the women?  Or the men, too?  I want to know how we should use our determiners.”  I was actually sort of cracking myself up with those questions, but appear to have been the only person amused.

Don’t think he really knew what I was talking about.  I did get an eyeroll from another woman in the room for that one.

I’m guessing I’ve been added to everyone’s list of humorless women.  Whatever.  Way too old to give a fuck about that.

Or maybe now I’m The Robertson.

Not Giving A Fuck: The Graph

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Trigger warning:  Profanity.  A lot. Mostly the F word. Prepare yourself.

One of the most wonderful things about getting older is — each year — giving fewer and fewer fucks about things that don’t deserve them.  I’ve pondered this each year, relieved — as each birthday arrived — at all the many additional things I didn’t give a fuck about. Then my dear brother recommended an excellent and hilarious book that spoke directly to this phenomenon: “The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck: How to Stop Spending Time You Don’t Have with People You Don’t Like Doing Things You Don’t Want to Do (A No F*cks Given Guide)” by Sarah Knight.

Knight correctly notes that there are three categories of people who don’t give any fucks: babies; assholes; and the enlightened (that is people who have bought and read her book). I would add, of course, old people. But she’s right and of course I have a graph to prove it.

Image: bar graph showing "give a fuck level" on the Y axis and "age" on the X axis, with the level of fucks given starting at zero, rising slowly, then faster up to 70 through high school and college, lower for 3 years in my 20s, high agian for law school, and then gradually decreasing to about 14 this year, age 57.

The author is right that babies don’t give a fuck at least about things that don’t deserve it. But think I didn’t give much of a fuck until junior high school when I and every other 13-year-old started to give a fuck about EVERY FUCKING THING. For me, starting college started the long process of giving less of a fuck.  It involved plenty of academic fuck-giving, but fundamentally I was surrounded by Nerds Like Me and there was a lot less to stress about in the other-people department.  I then spent three years traveling — mostly in Taiwan — and giving very few fucks because I was surrounded by people for whom my weirdness factor started around 95%, so I did not give a fuck if my marginal weirdness was marginally higher or lower on any given day.  Also the food was amazing.  Law school of course brought a major increase in fuck-giving, but I think it’s been on a gradual downward trend since then.

As with most self help books (or so I hear), Knight gives you self-improvement homework: to make lists of the things you give a fuck about, and then determine whether each one is deserving of the fucks you devote to it.  I’m working on that list, but also — therapeutically — created the list of Things I Have Already Succeeded In Not Giving A Fuck About:

  • Knowing about, drinking, or liking wine.
  • Knowing about or listening to classical music or opera.  The music genes were distributed very unevenly in our family, and appear to have skipped me completely.
  • Camping, hiking, swimming, exercising, or being outdoorsy.
  • Staying home on Friday or Saturday night — indeed, this is now at the top of my list of Things I Love To Do.
  • Most clothing choices — especially any pressure to achieve variety in my wardrobe.
  • Whether the forks, knives, and spoons are on the right or left because Emily Post says so possibly based on a configuration designed to discourage dinner guests from stabbing each other in the middle ages (and some modern family dinners). I can’t tell left from right, everyone gets the utensils they need, and I don’t give a fuck!
  • Eating dinner unfashionably early, say, at 5:00, and sometimes bracket-creeping that back to 4:00, 3:00, or even 2:00 at which point we just call it “second lunch” or just “lunch” since “second breakfast” happened around 10:00.
  • Having gray hair. The dyeing process requires you to sit still and make conversation with someone you barely know on topics you don’t care about for HOURS, and then a week later to start giving a fuck about — but not actually doing anything about — your roots.
  • Whether I have selected the fastest driving route from one place to another.  Try it:  you cannot imagine how liberating it is to choose a route and never think about whether the traffic might have been just a little faster on the alternate route.
  • What most of the world thinks of me, which of course does not stop me from giving over brainspace to the opinions of totally random and/or toxic people or perseverating about something I said several decades ago. Still working on that.

So to anyone stressing about a milestone birthday, I say:  it gets better — you give less and less of a fuck with each passing year, and it’s glorious.