September 15, 2020: Where There's Smoke, There Are Secretions

I attended a Zoom lesson for singers last night, and the teacher, a professor from California (where the air is crummy from wildfires), spent the first ten minutes or so on “mucus management,” another name for “how to clear your throat without roughing up your vocal cords.”

So if you have any mucus that needs managing, just give me a buzz, because I’m a Certified Mucus Manager (CMM) now.

(This is not true. I’m still coughing and honking and clearing away in the traditional fashion. It’s an onslaught all over the West, the air is toxic and “putrid,” as one headline writer nailed it today – perhaps because the garbage trucks aren’t on schedule “due to hazardous air,” and if they are just keeping their people safe indoors, that’s fine with me, but the air outside is thick and painful and it stinks - and Portland’s forecast for rain is moved out to Thursday. But I do get the mucus-management idea, in an aspirational way.)

It was fun, in the current version of attenuated online social “fun,” to “sing” “with” other people (on mute). Okay, it was “fun” to croak while watching faces in minuscule boxes. Whee!

A couple of weekends ago, before the fires and the smoke, but of course still during the pandemic, a friend and I went for a walk, and we went into (INTO! we went inside!) a little clothing store we love (masked! low occupancy! well ventilated! still in business, despite the pandemic! a miracle!) and without having planned it, we bought stuff.

My friend and I went into a store and bought stuff!

I know! It’s hard to get your mind around this. And it was fun in an old-fashioned way, because it wasn’t attenuated. It was a couple of girlfriends going shopping.

Later, we were sitting outside on the deck, and I saw a connection to a whole “women and money” topic, and I will spare you the loose associations that got me there, but I launched into describing this bar chart I had just seen (not this,exactly, but probably constructed from it) showing women’s contributions to political campaigns over the past umpteen years.

The chart displayed high-dollar contributions from women, “high” defined as “over $200.” Imagine the bars marching along, more or less the same height, year after year, until the Trump times, when they get a bit higher, until in 2020 the bar SHOOTS up: more women are donating more-than-$200 to political candidates this year than ever before. That’s the news.

When I saw the chart, I thought: Wait. Hang on.  I have some questions.

First, I don’t recall candidates asking me to check the M or F box before they take my money. Maybe I just didn’t notice. Or is somebody staring at first names?

And second, does it have to be $200+plus in one donation? Because sending small amounts of money is a mental-health thing I do to relieve frustration, and it adds up, but candidate-wise, I never send over-$200-at-once. ($200 turns out to be where you can itemize on your taxes, but I still don’t know about the cumulative thing. My tax lady has never mentioned it, which may be a sign.)

On the deck that afternoon, we got into discussing money and feminism, and being apologetic or defensive about spending money, and I realized I lusted to be on that bar chart, and when I got home I sent off $201 at once, just for once. And lo, now all those unsolicited solicitations ask me for multiples of $201.  “Give $402 today! Give $603 today!” No. I just lusted to get on the bar chart. Once.

(The discomfort of talking about money reminds me of an exquisite moment at a college reunion banquet, when the reunion-committee MC was up at the mic, thanking by name those classmates who had donated big bucks for the event, and my scrappy friend Johnny piped up, “Why not just publish everybody’s net worth, and be done with it?”

It was like time stood still, and then people laughed, and we were all our real selves again, and not our reunion selves. Things felt better. An undergrad working reunion said we were a great class, and honestly, we are. “You guys,” he said, “are straight out of Doonesbury.”

And that story reminds me of going to an ACLU fundraiser in the early Trump days, and feeling uncomfortable because I wasn’t going to be raising a paddle to show all the world that I was donating a hefty chunk of change, which I wasn’t, inasmuch as just buying the ticket had been a stretch. I cheered up when a tiny white-haired old lady mentioned that she was donating more than ever before, trying to counter Trump’s assaults on civil liberties. “Son of a bitch is costing me money,” she said.)

All of which brings me to the Pew Research Center folks, who have decided to change how they ask poll respondents about gender. There’s a long, very dry report here, which I will summarize: They once asked, “Are you male or female,” and now it’s “Do you describe yourself as a man, a woman, or in some other way?”

If this interests you, it’s worth reading the report, because the Pew people really wanted to rephrase the question in a way that worked. They didn’t want a chunk of respondents to get all offended and huff off when they ran into that question, because if a group of like-minded people huff off, the poll becomes inaccurate.  And they didn’t want to ask about plumbing, because that wasn’t relevant, or about what sex people were assigned at birth, because that didn’t matter either, hallelujah. They just wanted to be able to report interesting trends and distinctions, as with my bar chart above – women are contributing more than ever.

Maybe people who are not into the gender binary are contributing more than ever, too. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.