| |  | | | | August 23, 2016 | Letter No. 48 | | | | | | | | | | | | Lennys of my life, fire of my loins!
Hello, sweet ones. Happy August. I know summer is meant to be all cherry Popsicles and swingy skirts and meet-cutes at outdoor music venues, but I've always found August challenging. It's the end of the affair, the Sunday night of months, really (and no matter who you are, isn't Sunday night just a weekly tragedy?). The other day a childhood friend texted me, "I got those mid-August blues," and she didn't need to elaborate for me to understand just the dusky vibe she was hinting at.
Plus, this hasn't been your standard beach-blanket summer. I think we can all agree, no matter our own specific set of concerns, that this season has been a circus. Our national consciousness is enraged, aroused, and suffering from some serious vertigo. My friend Russell, an acupuncturist and feminist with better windows than Macy's at Christmastime, says that he's seeing his patients' bodies tweaked beyond belief by the stress of what's playing out in the political theater. Never has "self-care" been a more important concept.
My earliest memory of self-care, not yet named as such, was when my mother allowed me to take a "mental-health day" from third grade. That may sound like a parody of a precocious Wes Anderson character, but it was no joke: I desperately needed that day, a day away from bullying, from exclusion, from addition and subtraction. I read some American Girl fiction and ate my favorite kind of pound cake (a now-defunct deli brand called Mom's Best), and my mother and I went across Broadway to the five-dollar store so I could purchase a crushed-velvet T-shirt with the quarters from my piggy bank. By the time evening rolled around, I was positively euphoric. My mother had given me permission to relax every fiber of my being and, in doing so, reclaim my fight. And that's something I've found about self-care: we often need someone else to jump-start it for us. Giving ourselves permission — to rest, to recharge, to realize self-indulgence isn't actually self-indulgent at all — is especially hard for women. But we must. To quote the earth-angel Audre Lorde: "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."
Something I love about the Lenny community, besides your very fearless approach to switching up your hair looks, is that every single one of you is engaged in your own act of political warfare. Whether it's drawing, baking, doing a fucking awesome job at something that's traditionally male, OR being tough as nails at a job that's traditionally female, you are reconceiving what activism looks like. When I feel like my third-grade self, tired and excluded and in need of a mental-health day, I only have to look across the World Wide Web toward all of you, and my vigor-meter starts to rise. What a gift, especially in times like these. I hope this week's issue can provide you with some of what you provide me.
We Lennys gotta stick together :)
Lena | | | | | | | | | | | | Georgia Lerner Is Keeping Women Out of Jail | | | | By Taylor Schilling | | |
I first met Georgia Lerner, the Women's Prison Association's executive director, three years ago in the beautiful but weathered townhouse in the East Village where the WPA has been doing its work since 1874. Not much has changed since they first moved in: staff desks sit beside marble fireplaces, and filing cabinets share walls with portraits of the founders, abolitionists Isaac T. Hopper and Abigail Hopper Gibbons. Georgia offered me her famous homemade cookies (a tradition for new visitors) and allowed me to pore over the many historic logbooks and journals in her office.
At the time, I wondered how this old, worn, somewhat scrappy organization was still in working order, never mind at the forefront of today's most pressing social crises, mass incarceration and criminal-justice reform. It's clear to me now that the WPA is still around because it is saying — and doing — something different.
Georgia will tell you that she's not all that interested in talking about making prison better. She notoriously ignores media inquiries about how women do their makeup behind bars or fashion shower shoes from maxi pads. She wants to talk about what might happen if we stop relying on our need to punish people and instead consider what drives a woman to commit a crime in the first place.
The vast majority of the WPA's clients come to the agency experiencing homelessness, mental illness, domestic violence, addiction, a lack of education, a long history of unemployment, untreated trauma, or any combination thereof. What if, Georgia will ask you, we considered those circumstances at the moment of a woman's arrest? What if she were diverted from jail and presented with mental-health services or parenting classes or job training? What if one person — or one agency — saw her as a person, not a case, and provided the resources she needed to save and strengthen the trace of stability she was clinging to? We discussed these issues, and others, over the phone recently.
Taylor Schilling: The WPA is 171 years old, which blows my mind. What were the goals of the organization when it was founded in 1845? Have they changed since then?
Georgia Lerner: In a lot of ways, our work is driven by the same goals it was back then. When the WPA started, it branched off from what's still known as the Correctional Association today. They monitor conditions for men and women in jails and prisons. The WPA group decided to focus on what was happening to women when they were inside, but to focus even more on helping women when they got out, so they wouldn't be limited forever by the fact they had been incarcerated. So they'd be able to support themselves legally. We still do that.
We also work with women to divert them from going into the criminal-justice system in the first place. We do a lot of work with families to help them function better, be stronger, so ultimately they can avoid the criminal-justice system and other public systems that can be damaging.
TS: Part of what you guys do, that it looks like no one else does, is focus on evidence-based and gender-responsive interventions. Can you describe what those things mean and what they look like in practice?
GL: Today, we're lucky there's been quite a lot of research that helps us understand why men and women commit crimes. There are some shared reasons, like having what we call antisocial associates, friends who help you get into trouble. There's poverty, underemployment, poor education. Family dysfunction is actually a very big contributing factor for criminal behavior for men and for women.
But for women, there are additional factors. Women have also suffered trauma. They may have what we call parental stress, an overwhelming concern over whether they can be effective parents to their children. There are financial issues, emotional issues, mental illness that has not been treated, everything. Many of them have been victims of sexual abuse and have been pressured to keep it a secret. Insistence that they keep a secret makes the person who was victimized feel like there's something wrong with them. Sometimes the person who abuses them also offers them drugs to help them not feel the yucky way they're feeling.
TS: JusticeHome is your community-based or home-based alternative to incarceration. How does it work?
GL: When a woman is charged with a felony, we do a detailed profile and screening. That helps us understand what the reasons are that this particular woman is committing crimes. It often surprises judges, district attorneys, and defense attorneys that a woman with a drug charge very often does not have addiction or substance-abuse problems. Usually she has family dysfunction, unsafe housing, untreated trauma.
Then, instead of just sending a woman to jail and punishing her, we help her address the underlying reasons she's using drugs in the first place. Sometimes women stay at home, so our staff go into their homes and work with them in the community. A woman who needs to go to the doctor or go see a psychologist or psychiatrist for the first time will need support. I love using people's real lives as the classroom for them to develop the skills they need.
Over time, the underlying issues that led to her committing a crime, or being involved with people who are committing crimes, are treated and they go away. She's much less likely to get into trouble in the future. If we send a woman to jail, when she comes home she may be drug-free, but in jail they don't really have the ability to address her concerns about being a parent, or her trauma, or her issues in relationships.
This way, we address the reasons people are committing crimes so we can prevent future crimes and in the process stabilize families. Our program lets children avoid the trauma of their mother being taken away, and we can work with a mom and kids, in their own environment, to help the family function better. The effects are far more broad than just keeping a woman out of jail. It also costs a lot less.
TS: What, in your opinion, should be the focus of legislative reform?
GL: Prison and jail have to be a last resort. We need to shift our focus so most of the work we do is on the front end instead of just building more prisons. We do have to make sure prisons and jails are less inhumane, but we shouldn't necessarily try to turn our prisons into better mental-health hospitals and better schools. We should stop using them for that purpose.
We should enable people to use existing good schools and health providers and drug treatments that exist in the community. We should be trying to reduce crime. If somebody should be convicted of a crime, our response should have a result of reducing the likelihood that person is going to commit another crime. That, I think, would promote public safety.
TS: Every time I speak with you, I'm so intrigued and floored by your own power and your own strength to do what you do. How do you find that for yourself?
GL: I think being able to get through difficult times can come through surviving difficult things. I had a sister who was ill, and then, thank goodness, she got better, but that was the first bad thing that happened. My father died suddenly, my mother was killed in a shooting. Each time something happens you find a way to get back into your life and keep going. I've realized I can survive things.
TS: You're passing that on to other women, that the incredibly dark moments in life can be what leads to strength.
GL: At WPA, on a big scale, we believe that people should not be limited forever by their worst act. If we all were judged by the worst thing we ever did, I think many of us would not be where we are today. It's not fair we do that to anyone. I want women to stop doing it to themselves.
Change comes from building on strength, not from people telling us how bad we are.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Taylor Schilling is a Golden Globe– and Primetime Emmy–nominated actress best known for her role as Piper Chapman on the Netflix original comedy-drama series Orange Is the New Black. | | | | | | | | | | | | Finding a Home in Language | | | | By Jowita Bydlowska | | |
So. I was a loser. I found this out when I wore a furry, bright-red cowl-neck sweater to school one day, and Lisa said, "Where did you get this thing? Bi-Way?"
Bi-Way was a chain of Canadian stores that sold cheapo merchandise: badly stitched muumuus; "three T-shirts for the price of one!"; candy dispensers that were also mini fans that stopped working after one use; fake Barbies with giant heads and breakable plastic limbs. I'd gotten the sweater at Zellers, which was also a chain of stores, but a few grades above Bi-Way. I told Lisa proudly where the sweater came from and she said with a smirk, "Nice socks." They were, indeed, nice — as fiery red as the sweater: I liked to match.
"Say vagina," Lisa said before walking away with her posse of cool girls, and I said vagina, and they laughed. Later, I looked up vagina in my dictionary.
Fuck.
That was in grade nine, and I had been in Canada for about three months by then. I knew almost zero English, except for the names of vegetables that my elderly English-as-a-second-language instructor was adamant about teaching us in the summer, when we first arrived from Poland. He would frequently take us to the grocery store and introduce cucumbers, carrots, and apples to our new vocabulary.
The problem with the sweater, as I found out later, was that it was not a "label" — not Calvin Klein or Tommy Hilfiger — plus, it was the kind of sweater a girl my age, back then, would never wear. The cool girls, skater girls or girlfriends of skaters, wore oversize T-shirts, loose pants, and Vans or Airwalks. The other cool girls wore skirts and tight shirts and they smoked cigarettes in the parking lot and giggled with boys who wanted to get with them.
There were some Polish kids in my school, but they all knew one another from elementary school and they were a tight clique. The city I'd moved to was small (36,000 people), and most of the other Poles had come from even smaller villages. Sometimes entire villages would immigrate: uncles, cousins, and grandparents would pick up their lives and move en masse. A sponsor — an established Canadian citizen of Polish heritage who could vouch for one particular family — would bring a family, and then once that family established itself, they would sponsor another one, and eventually the village would start emptying out. Everyone would catch the virus of immigration. The reason? People in North America had VCRs and Mars Bars that in communist Poland were available only in concession stores like Pewex (now the name of an ironic hipster bar in Warsaw) and only if you had American dollars. So by the time we got there, my Canadian city already had a bunch of "skis" in it — the last three letters of almost every Polish name being basically the same, including mine.
The children of those immigrants were known in my school as the "Polish mafia," and they were an impenetrable group. My main disadvantage was that I came from a big city — Warsaw, the capital of Poland. I was immediately dubbed a "snob." I didn't help myself by behaving like one and complaining about the crappy town we lived in. (Consider this: the most exciting venue was the dumpster behind 7-Eleven, where you could drink fluorescent slushies and smoke pot if you were cool and had pot.)
As fall turned into winter, I wasn't progressing: I was still trying to match my tops with my socks. And I couldn't afford to spend the money I made at Wendy's — my first job, hands smelling of mustard and ketchup for days — on labels. I was saving up for a ticket to Poland, to run away back to Warsaw after the school year was over.
At school, I spent my lunches at the library — my safe place, a library, always. I was mesmerized by the glossy magazines: Sassy and Seventeen. I learned how to dress from them — no more matchy matchy. I found out that flowered grunge dresses were in, and I bought my first pair of Doc Martens and an oversize sweater that had the right designer label from a secondhand store. I was finally getting the look. I still had no friends, but my dresses were like camouflage — I could hide better; the teasing stopped.
I remember wanting to befriend Nancy, who seemed really sweet. I practiced for hours how to ask her in English to borrow an eraser, but when I tried she couldn't understand what I was saying. The only person who accepted me was Sarah, who was developmentally challenged. Part of me felt even more desperate about my loser status when I sensed her trotting behind me. At the same time, her existence made me feel better because she proved there were people below me in the high-school hierarchy. I ignored her, and eventually she got the hint. Sarah is one of the few people I still think about when reminiscing about St. Mary's. I feel guilty about how I treated her, but I would never contact her to apologize. That life is gone forever, and with it, Sarah.
My English was improving slowly because of my frequent visits to the library. I would borrow books with large fonts — young-adult books usually, with some supernatural bent where a girl was secretly a vampire and a boy was a werewolf. In Polish I read canonical literary novels — Lolita and 1984 — but in English I had to be a twelve-year-old for the time being.
I also rented out old movies like Cleopatra and Gone With the Wind and watched them in the slow, boredom-filled afternoons. The popular girls in Airwalks skateboarded on the streets with boys who loved them.
Despite my movie-watching and reading, I still had a lot of problems understanding the new language. Before exams, I would study definitions and formulas without really absorbing the words behind them. I would memorize them the way one memorizes poems: "Velocity can be positive or negative. A positive velocity points in the direction you chose as positive in your coordinate system. A negative velocity points in the direction opposite to the positive direction."
Whatever that meant.
Once, trying to be clever, I wrote on a page of my exam, "On the next shit," meaning "sheet." The science teacher gave me an F. There were other, similar, screwups. When a boy I liked who flipped burgers with me at Wendy's asked me to "see a show," I didn't understand what he was asking me. Just in case, I said "no" quite enthusiastically. Years later, I remembered the exact words and felt sad for both of us.
Eventually, as time went on, my English improved enough that I was able to communicate with people, and I made a new friend — another Polish girl who was also an outcast due to her mean nature. She loved to offend people; her primary language was neither Polish nor English, but Sarcastic. I became her minion and trailed behind her to parties where we would drop acid or smoke pot and drink beer. I hated pot and acid, but beer made me more confident and miraculously made me speak English much better — or so I thought. Either way, with my new skills and false confidence I was able to talk to boys and started going on dates. My first serious boyfriend was a skater who was also a small-time drug dealer and further helped me to shed my loser status.
I changed schools, too, from my Catholic school to a public one, where I reinvented myself as "goth." I hung out in parking lots and smoked cigarettes and rolled my eyes when I couldn't recall how to say things. That was acceptable, and in my senior yearbook I had lots of signatures, some with declarations that I was a "cool cat" and that it was great to know me.
By the end of high school, my reading and understanding of English was fluent enough that I managed to get into my top-choice university to study psychology. I survived the next four years on B's and C's with an occasional A. In my third year, while studying for a statistics exam, I wrote a short story about a man who gets killed by a vending machine and submitted it to a fiction contest at our university newspaper. It was accepted, and people talked about it. I barely passed the statistics exam, but I now had an idea about what it was that I was really good at: language.
As I progressed in my career as a writer, I realized that language is not something that's for pleasing other people, or about fitting in. It's about expressing something much more elemental. People have asked me what language I think in. But that's like trying to define what home is, what dreams are, how you dream. After I emigrated from Poland, I had one recurring image in my head. Cobblestones. What I see is my feet walking on cobblestones on the way to the church where I had my first communion. I don't care about the communion anymore, but the cobblestones vision still hurts, still makes my chest seize. Whenever I meet someone who has immigrated to Canada, I wonder about his or her country. What are they missing? Cobblestones? A white-sand beach? Favelas? Gargoyle sculptures? Music? Unpaved roads? The entire city of Lisbon?
I have two homes.
I write in one.
The other one is my soul.
Jowita Bydlowska is the author of a memoir, Drunk Mom, and a novel, GUY. | | | | | | | | | | | | The Queen of Shitty Robots | | | | By Sarah Sahim | | |
Are you interested in a machine that wakes you up? One that makes you breakfast? What about a drone that cuts your hair? Swedish engineer Simone Giertz (pronounced "Yatch") has built robots to execute all these tasks — but the results always go terribly wrong. The self-taught Giertz, who just moved from a houseboat in Stockholm to a loft in San Francisco, doesn't aim to create anything of intrinsic value but rather something with an intended use that doesn't necessarily work out. Her idiosyncratic take on robotics and deadpan delivery combined with a charming sense of humor have garnered her an online following many beauty bloggers would envy.
I chatted with Giertz on the phone, and she talked me through her journey and delved deeper into her beautiful mind.
Sarah Sahim: How did you get into engineering?
Simone Giertz: I didn't get into it in the traditional way. I started studying physics in college, but I dropped out after a year because it just was kind of a bore for me. I did a lot of other stuff in the meantime. I went to advertising school and I worked as an editor for Sweden's official website, but I always had a lot of ideas of things I wanted to prototype and code. I was always looking for somebody who could do it for me, until I realized: "Hey, dumb-ass, just teach yourself how to do it." I started teaching myself to program at 22, and then eventually I learned about hardware.
SS: Was there a particular moment that inspired you to veer into the world of shitty robots? Was it a eureka moment, or was it gradual?
SG: It was a gradual thing. I mix comedy and humor into almost everything I do. It's the way that I approach things, especially things that I find tricky. I realized after I built some things that the useless projects were a lot more fun and I enjoyed building them a lot more. It takes the pressure off of it because when you set out to do something useful, there are all these goals that you have to reach. Making something that's not useful lets me enjoy the process more.
SS: Are shitty robots a "thing"? Do other people do it?
SG: There's kind of a subculture of shitty robots. It's not huge, but there is definitely something there. I think the one that I like the most and that still inspires me is the ketchup robot. It's a ketchup bottle on four wheels and it just drives around and sprays a bunch of hot dogs with ketchup. It's a brilliant piece of tech.
SS: What's the brainstorming process like for creating these machines?
SG: There actually isn't that much of a brainstorming process. I realized whenever I think, OK, now I'm going to sit down and I'm going to come up with ideas, everything I come up with is pretty terrible, and I mean terrible in the wrong kind of way. I get most of my ideas when I'm very bored or when I'm frustrated with something. My brain just starts going off in tangents.
SS: Do you purposely engineer the robots to be bad?
SG: I definitely set out to make them bad. I'm not such a terrible builder that I would always unintentionally end up making something that works terribly. It's funny, because a lot of people think that that's the case, and some are pretty snarky about it. They're like, "Oh my God, this is so bad." But some people are heartbreakingly sweet about it in the sense that they're like, "Simone, just hang in there, eventually you'll manage to build something good; just keep on inventing." I see myself as a robot comedian, which is a title that I made up myself. I definitely seek the entertainment in it.
SS: What have you built that you think is actually really impressive?
SG: [Laughs.] I would say everything is really impressive, Sarah! Actually, my first hardware project is probably still one of my most impressive ones. I built it with a friend of mine, and it's an iPhone case with retractable guitar strings. You can actually play guitar on it — just pull the guitar strings from the bottom and clip them to your belt. Then you use your fingers to hold the chord on the screen, and it wirelessly sends the signal over to your phone whenever a string is touched, so it plays a coherent sound according to how you hold your hand in the app. That was pretty impressive, I would say, especially as my first project.
SS: Is there anything you wish you'd invented or you wish you had the resources to invent? A world-destroying laser-ray?
SG: Contrary to popular opinion, I am not set out to destroy the world or start the robot uprising apocalypse. My long-term goal is to go to space, and I'm working my way there. I think if I would have the means to build myself a rocket, I would do that.
Sarah Sahim is a music and culture writer. You can stalk her inane thoughts here and read more of her work here. | | | | | | | | | | | | How to Write a Sitcom About Muslims: Carefully | | | | By Zarqa Nawaz | | | |
"We can use the laundry room to wash and shroud the dead bodies," said Baber, the crusty, bearded Muslim patriarch in front of a suspicious white interloper who had come to spy on the local mosque.
That's a line I wrote for the pilot of Little Mosque on the Prairie, a sitcom I created in 2007 about a group of desperate Muslims in the fictional town of Mercy, Saskatchewan, who can't afford to build a mosque, so they rent out space from an equally desperate Anglican church in need of funds because of a dwindling congregation. It was aired in Canada by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The premise was pretty hokey, so everyone was surprised, including the network, when the show became a ratings bonanza. The CBC was thrilled to have, at long last, a hit.
My Muslim community, not so much. As the episodes rolled out, its members began to squirm.
Yes, some mosques do have rooms to wash dead bodies before burial, but why make that public? Don't people already think that Muslims are a bunch of whack jobs? I was literally washing our dirty laundry on air. Then there was the episode where an overzealous convert named Marlin irritates the mosque members so much they pretend to be terrible Muslims by eating ham and drinking alcohol in order to scare him off. The CBC got letters from Muslims concerned that I had gone too far. Converts shouldn't be pushed out of the community, one woman wrote. Marlin should be treated with patience until he calms down.
The idea for the series came out of a documentary I made in 2005 titled Me and the Mosque. As a child growing up in Canada, I loved going to the mosque but I had noticed that women were forced to pray behind curtains or in balconies where they couldn't be seen by the men. The idea was that women were a distraction during prayers. In the documentary, I revealed that these barriers in the prayer space didn't originate with Islam. They actually stemmed from an eighteenth-century puritanical reform movement called Wahhabism that took hold in Saudi Arabia, and unfortunately oil money made it possible to fund imams who then spread cultural misogyny to mosques all over the world. Some remnants of equality linger — women and men pray side by side during the hajj (the annual pilgrimage to Mecca) — but much of the community remains segregated.
My idea for Little Mosque on the Prairie was simple: what would happen to a mosque if the imam believed passionately in gender equality?
Feminism as an origin story would be considered strange for any comedic TV series, much less one about Muslims, but it worked. I planned to also draw on the tensions I had as a child. Growing up, Halloween was always a sore point for my mother. She felt it was the devil's holiday, so my brothers and I had to sit in the basement while our house got pelted with eggs.
On the show, the imam tries to make Halloween more acceptable to the conservative members by suggesting the kids dress up like creatures in the Qur'an, such as ants and figs.
We got letters about this as well. Some wrote their opinions on various blogs: "She's trying to dilute Islam and make up her own rules" or "The Imam was clean-shaven and Westernized" or "She has a liberal agenda." In one episode, a character pinched his wife's butt in the prayer hall in a private moment. I was asked to denounce this moment at a Muslim conference. I refused. It may have been unorthodox behavior, but it was certainly not un-Islamic. But for some conservative Muslims, "there was too much sexual innuendo on the show."
A few episodes in, my local community issued a petition to have me removed as a member from the Islamic Association of Saskatchewan. I was making fun of them (translation: I was making fun of Islam) so I couldn't be part of the mosque anymore. It was a huge shock, since going to the mosque had been one of the most important aspects of my life growing up. I withdrew my membership and decided to take a break from attending my local mosque for a while. Instead, I prayed on the mosque set of the show.
Old friends would corner my beleaguered parents and tell them that their daughter was "selling out the Muslim community to make money." My elderly mother-in-law's medical specialist from Libya would tell her I was giving our community a bad image. Eventually, I had to call him and give a cease-and-desist order because I was worried she'd get an ulcer from her visits to the doctor.
With all the anger and vitriol coming my way, I had to make a decision. I couldn't please everyone. I decided the show had to reflect my reality growing up. I'm sure Friends didn't reflect every white person's reality either. Not every American frequented coffee shops, rarely interacted with minorities, lived in meticulously decorated New York apartments on paltry salaries, or was stick-thin and blemish-free.
What I learned was that comedy doesn't always translate from one culture to another or even from one generation to another within a culture. The president of the Islamic Association of Saskatchewan was from Indonesia. "I don't understand a word of this show, but my son loves it and laughs at every joke," he told me with worry in his voice. "Just tell me you're not insulting Islam." I assured him my intentions were honorable.
Despite the pushback from some, mostly older parts of the Muslim community, a younger generation of Western-born Muslims was thrilled with the show. One young man commented on my Facebook page that hearing the joke about washing the dead bodies "broke my brain like a glow stick because I didn't know we were allowed to talk about our own experiences in comedy, much less on prime-time TV."
By the third season, the more reluctant members of my community started to come around. At the water cooler, non-Muslim colleagues were telling their Muslim friends how relatable the situations and characters were. Turns out every church, temple, and soccer association has a conservative misogynist wreaking havoc on people's lives.
People started to tell me about the balconies and curtains that existed to separate women from men in their synagogues, or how some Christian denominations also don't celebrate Halloween, or how many converts were overly enthusiastic when they first joined a new religion. I began to understand that we had much in common.
Although the mosque was a new setting for a sitcom, the stories, in one iteration or another, had been told before. Muslims hadn't invented weirdness or the patriarchy — humans had, and we were part of that family. I started going back to my mosque. The shock of being the subjects of a first-ever sitcom featuring Muslims had worn off, and people were able to laugh at themselves.
Ten years after the documentary Me and the Mosque aired, the largest Islamic association in North America passed a petition asking for mosques to do away with partitions and barriers, separating women from men.
I'd like to think that a documentary and a television series that used Islam as a framework to talk about gender equity helped propel some of that change. What I learned from the painful and often heartbreaking experience of writing this show is that you don't always have to throw away religion to grow feminism. In fact, sometimes, faith can be your ally.
Zarqa Nawaz is the creator of the TV series Little Mosque on the Prairie, which streams on Hulu, and the author of Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, which was just released in the United States. Learn more at zarqanawaz.com and follow her @ZarqaNawaz. | | | | | | | | | | | | Five Projects You Can Do in 30 Minutes to Improve Your Life | | | | By Jolie Kerr | | |
Welcome to Quick, Not Dirty, monthly cleaning and organizing projects from cleaning expert and advice columnist Jolie Kerr. These discrete jobs are easy to pick off and will earn you the satisfaction of seeing a task to completion without an enormous amount of effort.
Think about all the innocuous things that take up 30 minutes of your day: watching an episode of House Hunters International. Making Shake 'N Bake chicken. Painting your fingernails.
Thirty minutes isn't a whole lot of time — just half an hour, and we've got 24 of those babies in a day! But a lot can get done in those minutes, and I'm here to help you maximize that time by suggesting five cleaning and organizing projects you can get done during a sitcom.
Shoe Management
Maybe it's summer and you want to perform winter-shoe purge. Or you're finally admitting to yourself that your flip-flop stash is unreasonably large. (Guilty as charged.) Perhaps your work-shoe collection has gotten out of control and you want to pare it down to the best of the best. Here's how.
First, Gather All the Shoes
All of them! Well, at least the ones that fall within the parameters you've set for this project. Gather shoes off the porch, out of the car, from under your desk, etcetera. Don't forget removing the shoes from your closet. You'll want to skip this step, but don't — it's the most important one.
Then, Sort
The reason I'm a monster who's making you take all your shoes out of their hiding places is that doing so will let you assess them with a critical eye. Were you aware that you own five pairs of camel-colored knee-high boots? Well, now you are.
Once the shoes are out in the open, sort them in a way that makes sense to you; whatever your system is, it will help you make choices about what to keep and what can go. (I mean, maybe you need all five of those pairs of camel-colored knee-high boots! But also, maybe you don't.)
Next, Make Purging and Repair Decisions
This is the easiest to say and the hardest to do: Decide which, if any, pairs have served their time and can be released from duty. Make note of any repairs, from cleaning to polishing to resoling, that need to be made. Do you need help figuring out how best to care for shoes that require a little TLC? Here is some archival footage that may help:
How to Keep the Winter from Ruining Your Footwear
Here's How to Shine Your Shoes Like a Pro
How to Keep Shoes From Smelling
Caring for Suede Shoes
How to Keep Your Cute White Sneakers Cute and White
What to Do About Your Grimy, Smelly Uggs
Lastly, Clean the Closet Floor and Put the Shoes Away
Oh, right! Closet floors get super-dirty, so take a minute to vacuum or sweep before you put everything back! Do you need new shoe storage or organizers? The time to address that is after you've performed this whole routine — always wait to buy new storage systems until you know exactly what style and size you need to fit your stuff.
Polish and Dust Framed Items
The challenge is to not become distracted from this highly focused task. Arm yourself with glass cleaner, paper towels, and a rag, and stroll from room to room dusting and polishing all your framed items, from photos in frames on stands to prints hanging on the wall. Use the cleaner and paper towels on the glass encasement and the rag to wipe the frames themselves, paying special attention to the top of the frame. You will be surprised and, if you're anything like me, somewhat delighted by the amount of gross buildup there is on the tops of those frames.
So! It's an easy task, like I said, but the problem is that once you start noticing the dust on top of your framed items, you'll start looking for other weird pockets of grime. RESIST THIS URGE. When you find yourself drifting off to dust a baseboard, you must exercise control of your mind and refocus on only the task at hand.
I know you can do it.
Clean and Organize Your Desk
Even if you're a person who prefers to work at a messy desk, you can (and should!) still take a half-hour from time to time to contend with your workspace. Here are four steps to a tidy desk:
Step 1: Start with the trash.
It's easy for trash to accumulate on a desk, but it's also easy to get rid of it, so grab your wastepaper basket and pitch the garbage.
Step 2: Get your filing done.
Look, filing is kind of a drag. But you'll be glad once it's done. I find it helpful to make stacks of papers organized by project or subject, survey my categories, and then put them into folders or binders. Don't forget the labels!
Step 3: Organize your desk accessories and supplies.
I hope this will make up for the fact that filing is such dull work: now it's time to gather all your fun desk accessories and office supplies — the stapler, the pen-and-pencil holder, the tape dispenser, all that good stuff — and put them in an easy-to-reach cluster on the desktop. Stash supplies and less frequently used items in a drawer.
Step 4: Wipe everything off.
The final step is to give all the surfaces a quick cleaning using an all-purpose spray or disinfecting wipe. You may also want to wipe off places that you frequently touch, like the arms of your desk chair or the telephone receiver.
Weed Out Old Socks, Tights, and Leggings
It's mindless and oddly relaxing to sort through old socks, tights (including hosiery), and leggings. We tend to have an easier time getting rid of things like socks, which aren't likely to hold sentimental value.
It's a pretty self-explanatory task, but here are a few thoughts and guidelines that may be helpful for you: Anything with holes should either go or be mended within a week. If you let darning projects linger, you're unlikely to complete them, so be honest with yourself about your intentions. Tights, leggings, and socks that have lost their elastic are goners, because they're beyond repair. Tights, leggings, and socks that pinch or fit oddly are also goners, because life is too short for that sort of discomfort.
Disinfect High-touch Areas
I'm not particularly a germaphobe, much to people's surprise, but this one — doing a full walk-through of your home to clean and disinfect high-touch areas like doorknobs, switch plates, refrigerator and faucet handles, remotes, cell phones, etcetera — can make me a little obsessive, I'll admit.
The idea here is so simple, and it's fairly similar to the frame-cleaning project: grab an all-purpose spray and paper towels or rags, go room to room identifying all the high-touch items you can, and just wipe 'em down. This is a good time to practice your calming-breath techniques while quietly repeating this mantra: "I will not freak out about germs, I will not freak out about germs."
Jolie Kerr is a cleaning expert and advice columnist. Her weekly column "Ask a Clean Person" appears on esquire.com. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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