American Airlines & Women

I still feel like this must be a joke, but it appears all too real: American Airlines has a special web page for female travelers, including a PINK, dumbed-down flight search box. It also has handy pointers to articles on safety and security, because we women are so scared to travel. They include safety tips like "Write down where you park"and "If you need directions, ask other women or couples."

Why is our society so keen on keeping people scared? Especially women. When a woman was attacked recently in a local park, during the daytime, the local news suggested women should not go there alone. Don't go to a public park for a walk, in the middle of the day. Yeah, women shouldn't go anywhere alone, really. Who will protect our women! Our poor, defenseless women! Where are the safety tips for men? I guess they don't need to write down where they parked, because men are really into cars and everything so I'm sure they'll have no trouble remembering.

Don't forget the fashion tips AA includes. Here's a great one: "Always bring a little black dress to wear with those heels. Fold it in thirds, roll it as tightly as you can, and place it in the smallest Ziploc bag you can. You may not wear it this trip, or the next, but one of these days, you'll be sitting next to that Japanese violinist who just happens to have an extra ticket to her sold-out performance one evening, and you will need it. Now go out and see the world, ladies."

I wrote an email to AA letting them know my thoughts. If you would like to as well, email them at wehearyou@aa.com.

Edited on 4/20 to add: They have removed the pink search box. Gee, thanks.

Mix Tapes

I've got about 100 cassette tapes that I have been hanging on to, not wanting to throw away. I still listen to them--I've got a cassette player in the car. Most of them are not store-bought albums, but mixes made by myself, friends, past boyfriends, etc. I have always loved the mix tape, ever since my sister and I first started taping things off the radio with our boom boxes back in the 1980s.

Each tape reminds me of a different time in my life. There's "Songs From the Vickster" that I taped from my friend Vickie at the end of high school. "Gobat: Stuff from Dave" from my college housemate's CD collection. The first tape I ever made for someone else, with the pretentious title "Premier Pour Quelq'un Autre" (supposed to be "First for someone else" but the French isn't even correct) for Jason. "Tape that proves Steve Winwood wasn't always a waste of DNA" from my college friend Lewis. "Mix Tape that Cathy Never Listens To" from Jamie.

Jason and I exchanged a lot of mixes and even kept it up when CDs came around. Our tradition was to exchange the tape with no song titles so each song would be a surprise. We still do it occasionally but in the day of iPods and MP3s, it doesn't have quite the same feeling as when you'd get a new tape in the mail and slide it into a tape deck, full of anticipation.

Lots of memories... and a lot of great songs. I certainly don't want to re-buy them all from iTunes. So, Chris bought me a great gift: a device you can hook up between a tape deck and your computer, plus software that records it and does a first pass at splitting them into individual songs.

I tried it out yesterday. It works quite well, but it's still a lot of work to go through each song, trim it, label it, convert it to MP3, etc. I could do one tape a day and it will still take me almost 4 months.

But I hope to do most of them if I can. I get a lot of pleasure for hearing all those old songs again. I'm very nostalgic, what can I say.