... Randomizer (see button at left, and join in!) ~ gotta be buzz-trend compliant!

Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, United States, Washington, DC, Cathedral Heights, Pascale, Female!

11:50:44 PM    please comment []

I passed judgment pretty readily, back then, but I did feel uncomfortable about it. In retrospect, I suspect my intuitions about SA as a person were right on the money, but it does seem a bit much that I thought a (eventually to be prize-winning) professional composer would steal my 15-year-old attempts at composition.

Despite my righteous desire to leave everything in its naive state, I have fixed minor spelling errors, inserted missing words, and touched up punctuation. No redacting though. My babbling comes through in its aboriginal state.

10:20:59 PM    please comment []

Whenever I hear someone argue that human beings must be one way or another because it's "natural" ~ or draws an analogy from our close primate relations and assumes that their behavior must provide a close mirror to ours, or gives societal or dietary prescriptions based on theories of human evolutionary adaptation... well, let's just say that my skepticism radar gets deployed.

As Marlene Zuk demonstrates in her fascinating and persuasive new book, ''Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can't Learn About Sex From Animals,'' the tendency to hold up animals as role models -- to see in their behavior inspiration or vindication for our own -- is as rampant in science as the common cold, and considerably more debilitating. ''The lens of our own self-interest not only frequently distorts what we see when we look at other animals,'' she writes. ''It also in important ways determines what we do not see, what we are blind to.''

Zuk's book points out many examples of biological research blinded by assumptions about sex and behavior ~ including pointing out that part of the difficulty in acceptance faced by the theory of Darwinian selection was the notion that females chose whom to mate with (which contradicted prevailing cultural notions of female sexual passivity).

As the New York Times review quotes Zuk, "'nature does not provide object lessons so much as challenges to our assumptions.''

9:14:32 PM    please comment []

Given my lifelong struggle with the concept of femininity, I'm surprised at how stereotypically girly I sound in this entry from the way-back machine.

Also, I more attuned now to the family dynamic stuff. The fact is, my dad is capable of being a world-class jerk. This was a thought I didn't let myself think too often back then.

12:00:48 AM    please comment []