The Practical Woman's Guide to Commonsensical Feminism

Perhaps because I'm a single, working, financially independent woman, people often assume I must also be a hardbitten, raving feminist. The kind who doesn't need a man at all and goes around talking men down and putting them in their place. Not quite.

With no brothers and my father dying young, I grew up in a very feminine environment. There was my mother, grandmother and three sisters. No man to kowtow to or lording it over the womenfolk, expecting to be waited upon or cleaned up after. No male so visually challenged or physically incompetent that he must royally summon a wife or daughter to turn on the radio that's just within his reach as he sits hogging the TV. At least that's what a friend once said was one of her father's most aggravating habits. When I reminded her about it recently, she said that was just what her husband now does, adding exasperatedly why is it that men just cannot seem to find anything around the house even if it's right in front of their noses.

I sympathise entirely with women who have to put up with that kind of running-after-grown-men-as-if-they're-infants-in-diapers affliction. At least infants grow out of their diapers into a happy I-can-take-care-of-myself-now independence. If they're not male, that is, hyuk hyuk.

Snipes apart, I'm not really one for an all-out, virulent feminism. In fact, I think men are really very useful creatures. And that's not being sardonic. I do really, actually mean it.

Precisely because I grew up and continue to live in a feminine environment, I've learnt to appreciate and be thankful for the way Nature has programmed and hardwired the male of the species. They don't think like us, for one thing, and I have the greatest respect for the male thought process especially in practical matters. Time and again, there have been problems around the house that leave me stumped and male friends/neighbours/relatives have bailed me out. Their qualifications and training often don't even begin to enter the picture. Just being male somehow seems to equip them with a natural-born know-how.

Unplugging drains and deflooding sinks, working out kinks in the mechanics of all things mechanical, sizing up a worrisome situation and swiftly coming up with a workable solution, I've lost count of the number of times men have come to our rescue with invaluable help and advice. A few years ago when we first brought my paraplegic sister home from hospital, I remember desperately wanting practical male advice on how to re-plan her room and parts of the house, and later her wheelchair so it could hold a toilet bowl. One by one, things fell into place with the systematic aid and advice of male guardian angels.

So it often seems absurd and unrealistic to me when overly strident feminists raise ex-parte slogans like Down With Men! Women Power! and the like. I believe in the indispensability of the male of the species. I believe in the structure of the male brain that approaches and responds to a problem coolly and logically. I believe men complement women perfectly by providing a down to earth take on things while women open up men's eyes to the emotional aspects of life. Ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, I believe in the perfection of the Maker's design in creating both male and female differently to form a complete whole. And vive la différence.

Sotto Voce

Just back from church and another sunday school session where I once again almost caused myself bodily harm trying to make myself audible to my little class of 8 teenaged girls, some of whom by the way, are much taller than me even in my 3 inch heels. That's the story of my life. Not the everyone towering over me bit. At 5'2, I'm perfectly happy with my view of the ground. What I'm not so happy about is my aggravatingly soft voice.

For as long as I can remember I was always told, "Speak up. Talk louder, nobody can hear you." I was always having to repeat myself. It didn't help that I was one of those painfully shy children who hang their heads and just can't seem to bring themselves to say a discernable word no matter how much they're coaxed. Of course as you get older, you don't find understanding, sympathetic adults supervising and helping your every move so I somehow must have learned to make a few slightly more distinct sounds over the years as I grew up. I have fond, proud memories of loud laughfests with friends and family, heated arguments - even the occasional screamathon with siblings, and then standing up in public and saying things without help of an amplifier. I even ended up with a job that calls for good, loud speaking, of all things.

But my poor voice remains my bugbear. Even when I think I'm speaking perfectly distinctly, people say, "Sorry, what did you say?" My sister constantly tells me to stop mumbling and at work, I haven't been given a large class (meaning something in excess of a 100 kids) for quite a few years now. Even with my smallish, 10 to 20 elite Honours classes, I still occasionally notice kids with furrowed brows, obviously straining against the noise pollution outside to catch the pearls of wisdom dropping from the teacher's mouth :D

Once in a while I do try lung exercises - the deep breaths in and out thing, and once it struck me that blowing balloons might be a great help. But I can never really remember to do it on a regular basis. So much as I'd love to sound authoritative and commanding and have people in splits with sharp, sotto voced repartee, I think I'll just have to resign myself to speaking pianissimo and have people eye me dubiously and go, "Yes dear, what was that again?"

Cash Crunched

One thing I often dislike intensely about life here is the never-ending cash collecting by the Church and other social organisations. Apart from the monthly tithes that every God-fearing churchgoer gives in good faith, there are literally dozens of begging bowls that come around every month. There's the church building fund, the missionary fund, the Bible Society with its numerous offshoots like the Bible-a-month/Testament-a-day/ Bible for China and other schemes, the YMA building fund, etc etc etc. Just over the weekend, our veng had a cleaning-up-the-neighbourhood hnatlang where at least one volunteer from every family was expected to show up. That or fork out a hundred bucks or else. I opted to part with the hundred and later learned that a not-to-be-sneezed-at pile of Rs 16,700 was easily made from opt-outers.

Now while I accept without question that money matters big time in these times of big spending, it's always seemed to me that donations ought to be made voluntarily. People ought to be giving from the heart and not because they're pretty much ordered to shell out so and so amounts of their hard-come-by earnings. Years ago I always cringed at church begging announcements. Talking about money and the need for it so publicly always struck me as crass and vulgar. Now I've grown somewhat immune to it all though there are times I still wonder if it can't be done with a little more subtlety and finesse. In a manner more Christian, with a little more heart and humane consideration rather than as an arrogantly preemptory dik-tat.

Bitten by a Farm Bug

Every time I close my eyes these days, all I see are little squares of ploughed fields with grapes, potatoes, tomatoes, strawberries, etc flowering prettily while trees stand laden with red, yellow and orange fruit. I've been killing my eyes, totally absorbed in a game on Facebook called Farm Town.

It's a seriously addictive game where you literally spend hours ploughing fields, seeding plots, waiting for them to ripen, then harvesting them. There are always scores of online farmers literally begging for a harvesting job because it's a great way to score points and earn tons of coins. You can have your FB friends as neighbours whose farms you visit or tend while they're away and in return you get points and coins. You can send them gifts in the shape of animals or trees as well. You can also interact with other players by going to the marketplace which is always full of online FT players begging for harvesting jobs. Or to the very respectable Inn which serves only water, prompting wiseguy quips like, "Waiter, bring me a casket of your best water!" Likewise in the market, besides the tediously unimaginative job-beggars, "Hire me, please hire me, I need a job, big or small", you get the occasional, " I have starving children," or "I have only 3 cents." Don't you just love witticisms in the most unlikely places?

I got so addicted that on my second day, seeing a friend's farm with crops all ripe and ready to be picked (there's a time limit within which crops should be harvested or go to waste), I picked up the phone and called her. She was knee-deep in house repairs, pointing out to hired carpenters which window frames needed to be replaced et al. I felt like a total idiot troubling her about her virtual harvest but oh well, what's a good neighbour for anyway? Another time, I chased down another neighbour in an mirc trivia gameroom to ask if he would hire me to harvest his crops.

I'm not sure what's the highest level for this game but apparently you can buy a mansion at level 35. I'm on 12 now and hoping to buy a small house soon. It costs a kingly 70,000 coins and I have only about half of that now. I know someone who's on level 24 after playing for a week. He probably cheats though he insists he just knows the secret of scoring points. The other day he dropped by for a visit and was aghast at seeing my fences, animals and open spaces. He went, "Tsk tsk what did you put up all this for?! No need for it. Just cover every available inch of space with tons of crops." I told him the fun was in designing and creating your farm, even putting up initials of your sweetheart - check out pictures. He said he was going to do all that once he out-levelled everyone else, even people who'd been playing for 4/5 months. Claimed he'd buy a mansion and a swimming pool then. I told him he was way too competitive and to stop and smell the roses along the way.

The ambitious guy's get rich quick layout!

Some people just don't know how to have fun. Or maybe their idea of fun is getting to the top before everyone else. I've realised once again something about myself. I'm definitely not the ambitious type. No fast and furious, ambition-driven life for me. I'd rather indulge myself first with friends and have fun along the way. The gentle, peaceful, laid-back life and feel of the first farm (of my buddy Alex from Wales) appeals to me best.

My farm (as it stood last Saturday)

A Maid for all Seasons

Wanted: a maid to keep house when we're away and to cook us yummy meals. Sure, there are lots of wonderfully self-sufficient people who manage everything on their own without domestic help but we're in a critical position where we need one on the double.

So we've been placing ads in a local paper. No names or addresses, just our contact numbers. The responses have been frankly tragi comic. The first response came in the form of missed calls. Initially I dismissed them as crank calls but when they persisted, I called back and a young girl's voice asked if we were the people looking for a maid. Yeow, imagine looking for a job by making missed calls. Talk of cheapos.

Another caller offered a package deal. His younger sister, 16, would work for free if he could come and live with her and continue his schooling (he said he was doing his 12th). Unfortunately, we don't have room for two and the idea of feeding two extra mouths was daunting so I said nothing doing.

Finally, we took in a young boy. He said he was 17 and could do anything a girl could and that he was desperate for a placement, so we decided there were times we needed a male hand around the house anyway. He stayed for over a week but didn't quite turn out to be what we had hoped for. On his second sunday day out, he came home after the stipulated hour saying he was going to learn driving, and that was it.

Our next try was a 22 year old girl who came with her aunt. She said she'd been married with a three year old child but the husband had taken to alcohol and turned abusive so they had separated last September. She was petite with heavily black eyelined eyes and tight jeans but once she settled down, seemed quite a find. She picked up things quickly and was neat, docile and seemed to enjoy working around the house. I had begun to breathe a sigh of relief but last sunday, around sunset, she told my sister she needed to buy a packet of tobacco just up the road and never came back. After frantic calls to her aunt, we learned she had gone to her friend's house and planned to stay the night there. The next day, it all came out. She'd told her aunt we had been getting her to take care of my paraplegic sister as well and that she couldn't cope with the workload. Needless to say, we took the aunt to my sister's room to see her with her daily attendant who is actually paid well over twice the salary we pay our house maids. We learned our girl was something of a pathological liar and had been surreptitiously using our landline cordless phone late at night etc.

So now we've placed yet another ad in the papers. We're dangling a bait of 1300/- per month this time. And there have been a number of callers already. One wanted to know if she could attend Burmese language church on sundays. When we said yes, she wanted to know if we could give her the bus fare every sunday. Yeow.

Calliopia who?

Almost three years after I started blogging, I still get the occasional query about the name I use here. Some assume it's just a fancy name I cooked up out of thin air but surprise, surprise, Calliopia isn't something I made up. Instead it's a very real name from the fascinating realm of Greek mythology which, incidentally, is something you can't escape from if you're a student of English lit. When I first decided to start up a blog, I thought it would make a great online scrapbook where I'd copy and paste all my treasured and favourite pieces of poetry and song lyrics. I figured I needed a name with poetic/songlike associations and that's where all the myth info overload came in.

Calliopia, also known as Calliope, was one of the nine Muses, and the Muse of epic and lyric poetry. And despite the fact that this is the internet and you can quickly google down every detail you never needed to know about Greek mythology, here's a quick summation.

The ancient Greeks, in the blissfully pagan times before the pre-Christian era, had a whole string of deities with a very clear cut hierachy. At the top of the table were the Olympian gods who were called so because they were believed to live at the top of Mount Olympus. There was Zeus, the El Supremo, god of the gods and ruler of mankind, the beloved Apollo, god of the sun and music, Hades the dark god of the underworld, Poseidon the stormy god of the seas, Aphrodite the original perfect 10, goddess of beauty, love and eternal youth, Hera the goddess of marriage and the family who also happened to be married to Zeus who regularly cheated on her and once famously seduced a mortal beauty in the guise of a swan, a union which led to the birth of the fabled Helen of Troy, etc etc. One great thing you can't help noticing about the pagan gods is that they didn't seem to have this much maligned distinction between male and female that plagues us today.

Next on the hierachy were the demi-gods and spirits. These included the Furies, who specialised in wreaking vengeance and retribution for crimes committed and relentlessly chased down the guilty, the Fates - the three sisters, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos who decided on the life span or destiny of every human being, the Graces or the Charities, the Nymphs, the Sirens, and the Muses. The Muses were nine sisters, daughters of a clandestine but passionate nine nighter between Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. They lived on Mount Helicon and rode on the back of the winged Pegasus, gifted to them by Minerva. These beautiful and highly intelligent immortals were given the privilege of being the representatives of poetry, the arts and science, and divine sources of inspiration and guidance for poets, artists, thinkers etc, in other words, the intelligentsia.

Calliopia was the eldest and wisest of the Muses, and was reputed to have mothered Orpheus, the greatest musician and poet of Greek myth, whose songs were said to charm wild beasts and coax even rocks and trees into movement. As a child, I remember being entranced by the story of the death of his wife, Eurydice, and his attempt to bring her back from the kingdom of the underworld. When he failed, he became so inconsolable that he forever rejected female company, a situation which led to his killing by a group of furious, scorned women. They tore him to pieces and threw his severed head, still singing beautifully, into the river Hebrus, and it finally came to rest at the isle of Lesbos, home of the original Lesbian, Sappho.

Now you know why I call Greek mythology fascinating, and why I choose to use this pseudonym.

The original Calliopia, painted by Simon Vouet, 1634.

High tech learning, anyone?

What puts me off most about blogging is the regular updating thing. It's great when you have tons of things on your mind or just need to vent. I've done a lot of blowing my top online, not necessarily on my blog but on online forums I've patronised over the years. Anything that I felt was inaccurate, mispresented or didn't agree with, I had absolutely no qualms in making my difference of opinion quite clear but I guess I now have to accept defeat. There are just so many morons who cannot be talked sense into, I'd rather save my breath and leave them to drown in their ignorance. I've had it with trying to be a catcher in the rye.

Of the last 8 or so years that I've been online, it was only last year that I finally got a fast connnection. Earlier I'd been enthusiastically but laboriously exploring the much hyped world wide web at a top speed of 52 kbps. Laughable as it sounds now, it didn't stop me getting what I wanted. I frequented chatrooms, talked to all kinds of people all over the globe. Satiated my curiousity about people in far away, distant, seemingly glamourous places. Found out that they're just regular folks and some are even unbelievably dumb. Fell madly in love a few times with people I always knew I was never going to ever meet anytime but still stayed up long hours at night connecting with. I made a lot of friends, others, while I wouldn't call them enemies exactly, definitely not people I'd so much as say hello to were I to bump into them tomorrow.

What the little old dial-up connectivity couldn't deliver though was meaningful video streaming. I rarely, if ever, attempted to watch youtube. It just wasn't worth the hassle. And even after I got my broadband connection early last year, I'd got so much into the habit of avoiding watching videos online I often forgot about them. Now though I'm pleasantly surprised with the variety of visual information that's available. Last summer, I'd hunted down a few pieces of Hamlet that I wanted to show my students - from Laurence Olivier to Kenneth Branagh and Mel Gibson to this ingenious little rap piece made by a couple of American high schoolers.



Now there's a youtube/edu category which has so many amazing educational vids you could just sit and watch all day. Like how to roast the perfect chicken, poetry readings (mmm perhaps someday we can get our very own Mona reading her Ernestina), plenty of scholarly lectures from universities all the US (not exactly visual treats but there's only so much entertainment you can provide while giving a lecture). I think I can quite safely recommend this youtube/edu thing to my students. Perhaps one day I can just flick on a video of a Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads class in session and let the kids draw their conclusions from it while I recline in the back bench with an Archie comics :o)

Anatomy of a Rainstorm on the Mountains

Ruahthimpui is what we call them up here. Ruah for rain, thim for dark, pui for big, so literally a big, black rainstorm. As opposed to those summery showers which thoroughly wet your umbrella but don't last very long. An RTP usually visits these mountains at least a couple of times a year, sometimes unexpectedly at the beginning of the year around February or March, much before the onset of the monsoon rains, and more usually during mid-monsoon from July to October.

There's never any indication earlier on in the day that an RTP is brewing. No bleary sunrise, no overcast skies, no agitated bird alarms. Just business as usual everywhere, people going about their work, children playing outside. Then suddenly, thick dark clouds start sweeping ominously down the mountains, a strong wind whips out of nowhere and noisily flaps clothes hanging out on lines, bangs shut unbolted windows and doors, stirs dust from the ground and sends debris swirling in the air. There are short, sharp sounds everywhere. Glass shattering, neighbours calling out to one another in high, hurried tones as they rush around collecting their wash, voices screaming for the children to get indoors immediately. Windows and doors are noisily shut and firmly bolted, the steel doors of shops dragged way down low, people on the streets, with or without umbrellas, rush for the nearest shelter. Lightning streaks viciously across blackened skies and thunder rumbles.

Within minutes, heavy raindrops smack fatly down, relentlessly rattling tin rooftops and glass windows. A smothering curtain of grey, impenetrable mist and fog settles over everything, drawing visibility to claustrophobic limits. Sometimes, little iceballs of petrified rain pelt down, hammering roofs of cars and houses. Hail always causes excitement. Children are especially fascinated and a few daring ones dart out to pick up the glistening, white stones.

Within four walls, the electricity is invariably cut off. Darkness reigns supreme. People light candles or old-fashioned lanterns at noon, a few awestruck faces peer through glass panes at nature's unleashed fury raging outside. Some huddle down on long chairs, others bunk down under warm blankets in bed to comfortably wait out the storm.

Sometimes it continues for as long as an hour. Sometimes it's done in a few minutes. The rain stops, the fog clears, the clouds roll back to their places somewhere beyond the mountains. The sun reappears. People open windows and doors and come outside. Everything is bedraggled and dripping. And life picks up again.