Category: Musings

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#YesAllWomen and me

I read a bunch of friends’ status messages and comments with this hashtag on Facebook, so I was inspired to do a little research, read a few articles/blog posts and check out #YesAllWomen on Twitter for an hour or so. I think I need a shower.

Perhaps the strangest part about writing this is that I feel kind of awkward and almost guilty. It feels like this is women’s territory for sharing their feelings and experiences and a lot of guys using the hashtag #YesAllWomen sound like major assholes.

“Are all of you on the rag or something?”
“send nudes to me please all are accepted and appreciated”
“Because these bitches need to get off Twitter and back into the kitchen.”
“its mentally unstable women writing about their irrational fears of men because of what the media says.”

But the other almost guilty part is that I looked back through my blog archives and linking to this entry back in 2005 feels kinda like I’m bragging. I discovered firsthand how poorly guys can treat girls in social settings. I’m not going to speculate what anyone’s mindset was that night, but I just knew that the situation was bad. It felt wrong. I shouldn’t be patting myself on the back about that, but after spending a couple hours online tonight, it seems almost appropriate.

Years after that incident, I went to a fundraiser. It was kind of expensive for my budget, but the organizer was a friend of mine and she talked me into attending. It turned out to be mostly older people, but there was a Russian singer who was supposed to perform for a bit. (I don’t remember if it was because she had a sore throat, but they had to play a few of her songs off a CD instead.) Then they started playing regular dance music and I ended up joining her on the tiny dance floor.

It was just the two of us out there together and the only thing vaguely resembling “bumping and grinding” was when we were back to back with our shoulders together. It was lots of fun and she thanked me for dancing with her before she and the guy accompanying her took off. Now I’m thinking back at how innocent it seemed to me and how not innocent it might have seemed to her or anyone else who’s currently writing about #YesAllWomen.

The guy with her was a local newscaster who gave a brief speech before they played the singer’s CD. She asked him if it was okay for us to dance; he shrugged it off and said, “Sure.” At the time, I couldn’t imagine why she’d ask for permission. Now I think about how she might have been letting him know she’d be on the dance floor, she might have wanted to check if he thought it was safe… her question might have been worthy of shrugging off. But it might not have been.

I like to think I have good and pure intentions, but that’s what’s going through my head. What about a woman’s head? I have no idea. The more I’ve learned tonight, the more I’ve realized that I know even less than what I thought. I wave at passing strangers, I make eye contact, I smile when I talk to people. I have never, ever been afraid of doing these things. A lot of women have.

I’ll probably never be able to really appreciate that point of view, but what I can do is avoid perpetuating the problem, so I’m writing this blog post. Yes, it could be interpreted as bragging, but it could also be… if you’ll bear with this analogy, it could be like being a writer. When you first get started, you don’t know what you’re doing, you draw the basic framework of a story and barely scratch the surface. With more time and experience, you learn to dig deeper into implications and mindsets and make it more thorough, more complete.

And maybe that’s what this is. A story about how my viewpoint is becoming more complete. I’m learning more about what women experience on a regular basis and it’s kinda scary. I can’t exactly apologize for my gender, but I can be more cognizant on my own. I can keep pretend-drunkenly shoving guys away from girls who say “No.” I can remember that her not waving back at me doesn’t mean she’s not nice. I can avoid fighting with people who are developing a sense of mutual respect and support on Twitter. I can ignore hashtags that men are using to defend themselves and focus on the one that’s most important and deserves the most respect: #YesAllWomen.

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A state of imperfect perfection

On Thursdays, I go to the Green Mill in Lakeville for Trivia Night because some of my fellow cast members from Mind Over Matt were part of the team “Just For Fun” (which is kind of a misnomer since some of them are ultra-competitive) and they invited me to join them after Thursday night rehearsals. But most of the team came together because they’re members of the same church. They’re not Bible-thumpers by any means, but sometimes religion will come up in conversation.

There was one time I mentioned something about how some person or people were perfect—I don’t think I was referring to myself because I’m way too humble to say that out loud—and one of them commented that no one is perfect, that God created us all as flawed human beings. Something along those lines, anyway. I can dig that: we’re all sinners, Christ died for our sins, God loves us anyway, etc. (I don’t mean to belittle religion, but I don’t want to do any research to find biblical quotes for the lead-in to this blog entry.)

My question is this: even though God created us as imperfect beings, aren’t we still perfect in some sense?

The universe was created. *BOOM!* And then there was light and oceans and Elvis and a bunch of other stuff. From that point, everything that has ever happened was based on a cause-and-effect relationship. What happened only a second ago led to this moment in time, exactly the way it should have. Cause and effect.

Couldn’t that be considered perfection? We’re all in our current state of existence because of all of the events that occurred prior to this moment. I snore, I sometimes drool in my sleep, I probably don’t shower often enough… I’m a flawed human being, but everything that’s happened before now has led up to my snoring and drooling and lack of showering.

There’s no one else like me. No events that have occurred in the past or that will occur in the future will result in another me. (That’s probably for the best: it saves me the time and effort I’d need to hunt down and kill the other one.) I am the one and only Shawn Clarke Bakken. I’m just the way I’m supposed to be, a state of existence that includes all my flaws. I exist in a state of imperfect perfection.

And having written all of that, I wonder if God sounds anything like Billy Joel as He sits up in Heaven singing, “I love you just the way you are.”

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Origins of Minnesotan Gothic

I posted this picture by itself earlier this week. No explanation, no description, just the picture. Quite frankly, I didn’t think it needed one.

A bunch of people on the Interwebs agreed. My friends on Facebook (and some of my friends in real life) thought it was awesome, too. It was good enough that Mom and Dad are probably going to include it as part of the New Year’s letter to our family and friends in 2014.

But I’m not writing this to pat myself on the back. Well, not just to pat myself on the back. I think the picture’s inception was kind of interesting and thought it might be worth sharing as well.

It all started on the afternoon of the 17th when Mom, Dad and I went to my little brother’s house to shovel his driveway and sidewalk. Justin and his family were down in Florida for a week, but he assured us that it wouldn’t snow while he was gone. That afternoon was the second time we were at his house during that week because the weather didn’t care what he told us, it was gonna do what it damn well pleased.

A little while before we left the house, Justin texted the whole family a picture of him, his wife and their daughter in a swimming pool, enjoying the sunshine and having a grand old time. Nothing like unintentionally rubbing someone’s nose in their misfortune, right? But it did eventually lead to Minnesotan Gothic, so in retrospect, it wasn’t all bad.

When we got there, six inches of snow was eagerly waiting our shoveling efforts. On most of the driveway, at least. Next to the street, the snowplow had been by earlier, so all the snow on their side of street had been piled up there as well. I have no idea how deep it was, but it was also eagerly awaiting our shoveling efforts. Lots and lots of shoveling efforts.

Thankfully, a neighbor saw us and offered to clear off the end of the driveway with his snowblower when he was done with his own driveway. On his last pass, Mom asked me to take a couple pictures of him at work. Our original plan was to send one to Justin, let him know he picked a good week to skip town.

We finished up and were heading inside for a couple minutes, at which point we decided we should take a picture of ourselves instead. Swimming pool vs. snowdrifts. Sunshine vs. gray skies. Bare arms vs. heavy winter coats. Essentially telling each other “This is what you’re missing.”

Mom used to carry a small camera in her purse and I’d used it to take pictures of all three of us before. When we were in Norway, I got a shot of us on a boat crossing a fjord. (Also in Norway, I tried taking a picture of four people and cut off the outer halves of the outer people, so apparently, my aim was really good and my arm wasn’t long enough.) However, now that she has a phone that can take pictures, the camera was redundant and would just be taking up space.

Without a lens that I could aim and a button to push to take the picture, I wasn’t going to bother trying to get all three of us in a shot. As soon as I thought about Mom and Dad in front of a big snowdrift (“See what we’re sort of, but not really enjoying that you’re missing?”), I immediately opened up my phone, did a search for “farmer painting and there it was: American Gothic. That was our picture.

I showed it to them before we went back outside and initially thought we’d have to take it next to the street. For some reason, though, Justin had been shoveling the snow from their front walk into a giant pile and it was even bigger after two snowfalls. Perfect. Mom was holding a shovel and she and Dad started smiling: “No, you have to be stoic first.” I took three or four pictures that way, giggling pretty much the whole time, then got a couple of them smiling.

Unfortunately, I was holding my phone up high to get a better angle for the picture, so that combined with the light against the phone’s screen (plus all my giggling) meant I didn’t see my finger at the edge of the picture. And that’s why God created Photoshop. Photoshop, smartphones, snowdrifts, shovels, vacations in Florida, my parents and American Gothic. But maybe not in that order.

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Dad doesn’t do The Twitter

I know, I know, I’ve been neglecting the blog again. That’s in part because Dad’s in the hospital again. He’s been in and out for a total of about 30 days since mid-November. As you can imagine, he’s getting tired of the place.

They readmitted Dad most recently because he wasn’t getting better since he left. He was still having trouble breathing, he was still retaining a lot of fluid, he was still in a-fib. The doctors thought that some of it would get better on its own; it didn’t. We waited for almost two weeks, which was really longer than we should have. When someone gets to the top of a long staircase and has to take a five-minute break to catch his breath… he didn’t want to go back, but knew he had to.

Among all of the other stuff they were pumping into Dad’s body, one was a medication that would hopefully get his heart back in sync. It was still beating way too fast and way too ineffectively. The heart normally works at about 50% efficiency, whereas Dad’s was somewhere in the 35-40% range. Much like other medications, this stuff didn’t work well enough, so they had to resort to cardioversion.

Basically, they put an electrode on his chest, one on his back and send a mild electric pulse through his body to shock his heart back into rhythm. When it was time to get him hooked up, Mom and I went to the visitors’ lounge to wait. Twenty minutes later, a doctor came in to tell us they were done. We walked into the room, I looked at the machine showing his heart rate and it had dropped from 99 to 69.

So now Dad is going for longer walks through the hospital and isn’t getting as winded as before, but he’s still retaining a lot of fluid. Not as much, but still a lot. Consequently, he’s still at the hospital and getting bored out of his mind. Go figure. He doesn’t like watching TV, he’s not a big reader, so most of what he does is sit around. He gets to talk to the occasional visitor and the nursing staff when they’re in the room, but there’s still a lot of sitting and not doing much.

A couple days ago, Mom and I were walking back to his room with him and a physical therapist. We were talking about things that might keep him busy and the therapist suggested getting him a Twitter account. I thought that would be a fun idea, but he was stuck in the hospital. What would he tweet about? So a few minutes later, I started thinking of some things and sent them out via my own Twitter account:

We just thought about getting my dad a Twitter account to keep him busy in the hospital, but what would he write?
Day 11: Still chillin’ in my recliner.
Thank God I have a toilet in my room, these new diuretics don’t give me much warning before I have to pee!
I’m the mayor of the Cardiac Rehab Unit on Foursquare!
Chillin’ in my recliner AGAIN.
Just got a sponge bath. Life is good.
Why does the food here taste so nasty?!?! Oh, wait, that’s right, it’s hospital food.
I’d kill for a nurse’s pair of scrubs right now. It’s way too breezy downstairs when I stand up.
I think my butt is starting to conform to the shape of my recliner seat.
If I was the big bad wolf, I’d huff and I’d puff and then I’d have to sit down to catch my breath.
#whatdohashtagsdo?
I love my wife very much. No, she didn’t steal my phone to pretend I wrote that. Thanks for being here for me.
Do I get a sticker for hitting the 2-liter mark for peeing today? This new diuretic is REALLY working.
Ok, so maybe there ARE a lot of things Dad could tweet if he felt so inspired…