Wow, that's a great discussion. One interesting effect I've noticed on the field is that men pay a lot of attention to female combatants. This attention is usually positive, thought it frequently has a tinge of condecension. But, female combatants are rarely treated as just another member of the fighter community. I believe that this holds true for the rapier community as for the armored combat fighters.

I am somewhat chagrined that I make the same mistake that I find so often. We continue to make generalizations and then draw preconceptions that color our interactions with female combatants. Profiling, unfair discrimination, bias based on gender (or other unfair bias), and pigeon-holing are all ways we describe the natural human pit fall of lazily deciding how to deal with people based on their membership in a larger group. I believe we must all fight these tendencies and deal with each person we come across as unique individuals and not fall back on generalizations.

Sometimes, I hate the Federal government. Generally, this is a bad idea. I make my living helping dedicated Federal employees conducting valuable reasearch and providing valuable information to policy makers. Right now, I hate the procurement process.

I'm working on a proposal. We're going to convince a government office the we're the best possible group to help them with a project. Strictly speaking, I probably shouldn't be writing this. Some competitor might use this information to deduce that we're bidding on this particular contract. I don't think I'll get in much trouble, we're the five time incumbant and our client is very happy with our performance. As well they should be, we stand on our heads for those folks. But, I digress, if a competitor has to read this diary to figure out that we're going to bid on this project, they've got no chance anyway. Though, just to be sure, I'll probably have to kill you after you read this.

The reason I'm upset is that a few short leagues from my location a band of my dear friends are bashing each other with stout lengths of rattan and I'm not there! I was so pumped to get to practice tonight but nooo! I get to sit in front of my computer (playing hookey right now) trying to pull information from a dozen different sources into a document that's a mish mash of old and new junk. There are disadvantages to being the incumbant.

So, here I fret with paragraphs to write before I sleep trying, unsuccessfully, not to think badly of the contracting officer who decided two weeks was long enough to write this proposal. Of course, I'm the only one who's unhappy. This time frame is harder on any potential competitor. Management is happy because we've got an inside track and the business development writers don't mind since they just squeeze the technical writers so they have the time they need. If we get the contract, we'll all be happy and the technical writers, including me, will get solid kudos. While no one thinks squeezing us is a bad idea, at least they recognize the situation and we'll get praise after the award. Of course, if we don't win the competition, things will be very tense. Oh well, next week at practice for sure.