clare
Thursday, February 27, 2003
 
p.s. in case you're fired up to *do* something, here are a couple of sites:
***Win Without War
***MoveOn.org

and a couple of ideas:

use your artisitic talents! have fun! make a poster; publish a zine; get together a group of people you barely know and talk about it; guerrilla action--strategize with your friends about what the most effective moves are for your community; just DO something! and if you're at a loss, get ahold of me, and i'll see what we can come up with.
Comments-[ comments.]
 
PEACE, y'all.

peace.

how did we get to this point? to a point where it makes logical sense, we are told, that bombing a country literally into the ground is supposed to promote peace?

must we oust hussein? maybe. but why is this country so hot to do it now? NOW NOW NOW! we sound like a spoiled (american) child.

if things are as simple as we are led to believe, why isn't the world perfect yet? why haven't we solved the problems of the cold war? why aren't all people equal, safe, and fed? if it's so simple, then why haven't we solved this rubix cube of a world into neat little colored sides?

it's not simple. it's never simple. and don't let anyone tell you, "look, it's so simple!" because it's not.

i was just lamenting with a friend of mine that we feel no real power as citizens in this country. we feel that the only way to affect policy as citizens is to have the green stuff coming out of our ears. then, and only then, are we allowed to have a voice. since when did your everyday citizen get to meet and talk with the prez about his planz for the future?

i'm just mostly rambling; not really saying much. s'how it goes, i guess. and, like adam says, this weblog is for me a kind of linguistic/emotional/sensory dumping ground. a landfill of sorts for all of the trash being spewed by my brain.

good god! my brain is a stereotypical american.

i'm thinking that we need to reclaim what it means to be an american. last time i checked, being an american entitles us--no, REQUIRES us--to be critical of the government at each level, to excercise a certain amount of power over the way things proceed. as an american, i am allowed to say whatever i want to say, pump my fist in the air, and be perfectly protected therein. for example, i am supposed to be allowed to say things like "i'm with the terrorists--in the sense that i believe that there's something seriously wrong with the purported 'american' way of life. in the sense that i'm not 'with us,' as Bush said (which means i must be 'with the terrorists')" and NOT have my words tracked and loaded into a file somewhere, to be brought to bear on my sorry ass when i'm charged (pre-emptively?) with being a Terrorist.

i'm re-claiming what it means to be an american. i love the promise of america--especially the Emma Lazarus version, inscribed on the statue of liberty, which goes a little something like this:

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

by Emma Lazarus, New York City, 1883


whooooooaaaa... what? what what? NOT like the brazen giant of Greek fame? the Mother of Exiles? maaaan. this all sounds a bit too much Woody Guthrie for the way things turned out.

these days, though, this land is certainly not feeling like my land. or your land. and there aren't really many redwood forests or gulf stream waters to speak of, that haven't been contaminated or aren't on the chopping block.

i feel like i'm on an escalator.
a big, invisible machine that's all metal and sharp edges that's
only carrying us down. how can we
get a few more people
to turn around and start treading steel,
heading up against the grain
instead of glazing over
like cows grazing, hazy
blink, damn it!
see where you're descending
inferno
stop pretending; start offending.
offense.
so: here we go, yo.
Comments-[ comments.]
 
i want to reiterate what ann has posted on her website today.

sadness, indeed.

prior to hearing about his passing, i (inexplicably) had a few lines from his theme song stuck in my head as i was readying for work this morning. in particular, the lines were:

"it's such a good feeling to know you're alive.
it's such a happy feeling; you're growing inside..."

where else do kids learn that they're valuable? that they (to quote an atrocious commercial appropriation of what i would argue is more of a historically feminist concept, particularly for women) are "worth it?" that they are to be respected as human beings, no matter what? you'd hope that they would be taught these things by the adults in their community, be they co-parents, guardians, aunts & uncles, community leaders, regular parents, neighbors, friends of friends, public figures, even cousins and grandparents. you'd hope that they'd know that they're inherently worth something. in the absence of (and even in addition to) this ideal situation, though, you'd hope that they'd have access to Mr. Rogers.

sad. i hope that they show re-runs of his show for a long, long time.
Comments-[ comments.]
Wednesday, February 26, 2003
 
later later
nothing greater

just and hour and a half or so. i am satisfied with the way things are, for the time being. i'll be satisfied when they change, as well.

speaking of gender... i was filling in some cheesy online form to register for something yesterday, and one of the required fields indicated that i must choose a "gender." my only options were "male" and "female," of course, and, in that moment, the constriction of options with regard to gender enforced by that form *really* pissed me off. i sent a notice to the customer service folks, saying that i want to register for their service, but i don't want to identify myself as either gender.

now, at this point, you're either thinking: "right on!" or "hmm, interesting." or "what the consarnitall are you saying? no such thing as anything *other* than two genders! you're either male or you're female! i refuse to see otherwise! blailsigphosioiaphosgdlh!" if you're a member of the latter categorie, go away. your head will explode if you read on, anyway.

there are folks in this world who choose not to identify as one or the other gender. and why not? to pick a category is to squish yourself into a jell-o mold not of your design. for the society in which we all live allows for only one "correct" version of "male" and "female," with minor variations here and there. for example, you're not considered "fully" female until you've had a child. this may be a tad hyperbolic, but you get the gist. if not, engage me, and we'll talk further. i get the sense that i'm putting this out there for no one but me, but i digress.

i'm sure we/you all have in mind a picture of what "female" consists of. i bet this hypothetical woman is white and thin, with both breasts attached and waist small. i bet she's young-ish--in her 20's, maybe--and she has a boyfriend, maybe a husband, maybe a child. but why should i, as a woman, be held up to this silly, arbitrary ideal? a majority of women *don't* look like the image that springs to mind when we think "woman." same's true of "man." why should all men be held up to a single ideal? although, i would argue, there's more leeway where men are concerned.

i KNOW, i KNOW--it's just a stupid online registration for a stupid company, and it doesn't matter in the long run. the folks at customer service will probably ignore my request, think it's a joke, or send me hate mail. true, all of that. so why should i bother?

here are my reasons for Bothering:
1. if i can get just one person to consider, for a moment, that trans folks and/or folks who don't identify as either imposed gender are actual *people* and deserve to be treated with respect, then it will have been worth the five seconds it took me to write the note and send it.
2. in case there's any doubt, indeed, there *are* trans folks and folks who don't identify in the world. i know a few. it scares the literal crap out of me to think of what they experience as they try to live their lives as whole, respected individuals.
3. i don't want anything about me to be assumed. in this case, that means that i don't want data about my presumed gender to be sent to all kinds of marketing agencies, added to all kinds of lists whereby it is assumed that i, as a theoretical "woman," am interested in, for example, weight loss products. or childcare paraphrenelia. or, as a man, be interested in porn sites. or penis enlargement products. but that'll all be taken care of in the Great Fine Tuning of the Massive Marketing Machine, now, won't it? i "look forward" to the day when everything i have purchased, borrowed, even glanced at gets recorded in a Great Electronic Logbook and corporations may steal glances at my life to the extent that it suits their needs and send me information they think i need so that i may Purchase their Stuff. Purchase purchase purchase.

oh, wait... that day is already upon us. heh.

and one more note: i KNOW i KNOW that i'm participating in the whole consumer culture even by friggin' writing in this little bloggie-blog-blog. by hungrily gassing up my car when it's runnin on empty. by selecting from a wide variety of yummy foods at the grocery store. by purchasing clothing from, well, anywhere. this is all an old argument, no less true today than when i first realized that i, too, am implicated in the smooth functioning of multiple systems of multiple, interconnected oppressions. duh. it's impossible to completely disentangle myself from this wasps' nest. but i can do the bogmanedd best that i can. and i can always do better. i guess this is me, trying to do better.

more about "trying to do better" and "why bother trying to do better if it makes you angry all of the time?" in the future...

aahhhh... the future....

Comments-[ comments.]
 
well, good. good good.
each and every one of us have our days. we each have our own days, and they follow us around like lost and fuzzy puppies with their sharp little teeth, tugging at our pantscuffs every so often, reminding us that we have our days. sometimes, we feel the sharp pinch of time, and a twinge of pain pokes in our brains--the teeth of a small day-puppy.
the good thing is that we all have our own days. they are unique to us, and they sometimes feel and look the same as those days following, for example, our partners and our co-workers around. but the bad thing is that we all have our own days. says something about the fundamental loneliness of human beings, that no two of our days are exactly alike. cliched like snowflakes. but sad and lonely. whimpering puppies.
like i say: it's all about context, and the day that's following me about at this moment is calm and soft and relatively warm. ready to jump, though. ready to spring.

i had a thought in the bathroom this morning. i was thinking about a boy who was bitching in our college weekly that there aren't enough bathrooms for boys in the library. aside from the initial "boo hoo, poor you. you're *so* discriminated against, aren't you? with your born privilege you're not even seeing because your sense of entitlement overshadows any groundedness, any reality, any *context* you might have developed," and in all honest attempts to validate this poor oppressed fellow's opinion, i thought quickly of a solution:
why not make all bathrooms unisex?
duh. no, really, why not?
are we so paranoid about each other's bodies that we won't even pee if there's *only* an aluminum door between us? horrors of horrors!
but, being a woman, the first thought that popped into my mind in response to this suggestion was: will this make women more susceptible to rape? which is, of course, wrong on so many levels... but i considered it seriously for a moment (because it's a real fear that runs through women's heads, believe it or not)...
and i lamented that women should be born with tazers at our fingertips, in order to painfully shock the assaulters (almost entirely men).
and then i corrected myself: what about the men who are assaulted by other men? should they be born with fingertip-tazers, too? then everyone would be born with an electric shock device embedded in their digits, and that would defeat the point of some people having them and some people not.
so, we're back to square one.
what does this all mean?
before i go about the rest of my puppy--i mean, day--i want to make one more attempt to contextualize that boy's opinion--because, after all, we're all entitled to our opinions.
when i think about all of the times that i and other individuals who identify with the female gender have had to wait in line, squeezing our eyes shut and dancing around with the need to pee, while our male-identifying counterparts have been able to just breeze in and out of their bathrooms as-they-please, i think that having one (or gads! even two) less bathrooms on a campus where you need only walk a few steps to another building that (presto!) contains similar accommodations (if you really need to pee that badly) is an eensy step toward overall equality at the very least, and fair at the very most.
i'm feeling the need to state again: i don't hate men. just, in context, men generally benefit from an amount of privilege they've come to expect as "normal" or "just the way it is." i'll problematize all of this gender binarization at a later date--because i have serious issues with that, too...
p.s. there are really, biologically, 48 genders. i shit you not.
Comments-[ comments.]
Tuesday, February 25, 2003
 
my brother makes me sad a little. it's not pity. it's not a sense of responsibility. it's not so much regret. but it... i've been reading surreptitiously his weblog for the past couple of weeks. sortof like diving into a cold pool, reading other people's innermost thoughts. woke me the fuck up, but anyway...
if he cuts himself, i don't much mind. we all do what we have to do to get by. for some of us, it's crapping into a weblog like what i'm doing these days. for others, it's alcohol; still others, marijuana or the more detrimental, life-crashing illegal substances. i'm not here to moralize. i'm not here to judge. but the one thing i wish my folks had given him (and, by extension, me and my sister) is unconditional, non-judgmental support, no matter what kind of trouble he (or we) got/get into. you know? the kind of support that says "i don't care right now how you got into this mess; i just want to make sure you're ok." i wish i could say that to my brother, because i think he doesn't hear that at all. and i don't care what he does to get by, as long as he's safe--well, i do care what he does, to the extent to which he is (like i said, oh, six bazillion times) safe.
so, bro, if you need a place to stay, a ride out of smalltown maine, some cats with which to de-stress, a meal out of the dining halls, a sympathetic but imperfect ear, or someone who doesn't care who or what is going on but just wants to make sure you take care--you got my number, you know where i'm at.
don't know if that helps him at all. don't think he even knows i'm reading/writing. maybe i'll let him know. and maybe i'm totally useless in this way. but i think the important thing is that he knows where i stand: with both feet firmly planted on the real goddamn ground.
Comments-[ comments.]
Monday, February 24, 2003
 
here i am, and it's another day. a request was recently put to me by a well-meaning employee of the bo-bo bookstore who's assembling a display for women's history month. this person contacted the women's studies majors and faculty at bo-bo and, being a major myself, i was included among these contacts. the display for women's history month shall consist of recommendations by various wst-related individuals of books related in various ways to the topic of "women's history." hm. or, rather, good grief! now, overall, i think that this display is a good idea--it provides a human connection to an academic program that, i dare say, most individuals on campus believe consists of bra-burning, fuzzy-legged, womyn-loving, tofu-eating, men-hating "feminazis," which is *obviously* not true. well, ok, i may be one of those fuzzy-legged womyn-loving folk (and damned proud of it!), but i suspect that i'm the rarity in this place. in any case, i D0 take issue with the whole concept of "months" allocated to certain marginalized groups--black history month is another example. it's ridiculous, absolutely ASININE, to believe that non-white, -straight, -male (and, i would add, -wealthy) folk only deserve attention a month out of the year. throughout the rest of the year, we all fade into abnormalcy again, kicking and screaming as per our usual against the presumed membrane of what's believed to be "normal" or "just the way it is." bah! bah! i say.
on the other hand, i do believe that these "months" offer an opportunity to re-flect, re-group, re-organize, and ce-lebrate our multiple and multifarious identities. so, during women's history month, i get to say: yay (primarily straight white wealthy) women! wait a second, that's not right. what if i'm a queer latina woman? or a poor korean woman? i get to celebrate only a piece of me during the month of march. maybe i'd only end up feeling more fragmented.
hal said once that he doesn't want to be viewed in pieces--in fact, i think he gets really frustrated with all of the fragmentation among constructed oppressed groups. he wants to be a whole person--and he wants to be *seen* as a whole person--without being split into pieces. as for me, i don't want my queer piece and my woman piece and my white piece and my middle-class piece to be disconnected--all of these portions of my identity inform who i am every day, in every minute decision. but enough with the wst 101 lesson. maybe i'll post my wst concentration presentation on my website one of these days.
i chose the following 2 books for women's history month: _Zami: A New Spelling of My Name_ by Audre Lorde and _Stone Butch Blues_ by Leslie Feinberg.
a note about undoing racism:
i was at a training this weekend, and we were asked to complete the following activity (and i encourage all one of you to work along with me, here. i found it pretty enlightening):
we were asked to fold a paper into six boxes and prepare to sketch quickly the first image that popped into our minds when we heard the following things (no cheating--don't think too hard, just draw!):
--in the first box, draw a latina woman doing something
--in the second, draw a disabled person doing something
--divide the third in half; draw an african-american woman doing something in the first half. draw a black woman doing something in the second.
--in the fourth, draw a young person doing something
--in the fifth, draw a white man doing something
--in the sixth, draw a transgendered person doing something

this activity is meant to get folks to reflect on how we think about various groups of people--it's NOT meant to make folks feel guilty. think: are you satisfied with what you drew? why or why not? we talked about a couple of interesting phenomena that appeared when a lot more folks were asked to do this activity. in the first box, many people drew a woman cleaning and/or with several children. what does that mean? in the second, many drew a person in a wheelchair, often working at a computer. what about people with other disabilities? often people who were physically disabled felt that folks more often saw their wheelchair than they did the actual person. we had mixed results on the third. i just wanted to note that "black" and "african american" aren't the same thing. not only do they have different connotations for different people, but there are *lots* of people who may be considered black but whose ethnicity may not be traced to Africa. think about that. and youth are people, too... did you have a hard time with the fifth square? white men are sortof the standard, generic person. what does that say about everyone who's *not* white? or male? or straight? or wealthy? and, finally, trans folks are often perceived as only existing in the performance (for male-to-female) or stereotypically male employment (female-to-male) arenas. there's more to being trans than being a drag queen. and a construction worker. you know what i'm saying?

actually, i like to think about something that Michael Kimmel, a feminist theorist, said in a talk he gave at bo-bo last semester. he was talking about how the privilege of being a white man first hit him. he was conversing with a friend about some related topic, and the friend asked him what he saw when he looked in the mirror (think about this for a second--what do you see when you look in the mirror?). Kimmel said something to the effect of "well, i see a person who..." his friend said, "well, i see a black woman who..."
hmm. what's the assumed standard? the generic? the presumed norm? white on white? against which anything else stands out in sharp contrast? and, more importantly, how did it get to be this way? and how might it change?
.
.
.
.
.
.
"i went to the employment office
got a number and stood in line
they called everybody's number
but they would not call mine.
if you're white
you're alright
if you're brown
stick around
but if you're black,
oh, buddy,
get back
get back
get back..."
--a song i heard on American Roots a while back, but i don't remember who wrote or who sang it.
"take another little piece of my heart now, baby..." janis joplin
"they caught the last poor man
on a poor man's vacation
they cuffed him and confiscated his stuff
they dragged his black ass down to the station
and said, ok, the streets are safe now
all your pretty white children can come out and see spot run
and they came out of their houses
and they looked around
but they didn't see no one

my country 'tis of thee
to take swings at each other on the talkshow tv
why don't you just go ahead and turn off the sun
cuz we'll never live long enough
to undo everything they've done to you
undo everything they've done to you

above 96th street
they're handing out smallpox blankets so people don't freeze
the old dogs have got a new trick
it's called criminalize the symptoms
while you spread the disease
and i hold on hard to something
between my teeth when i'm sleeping
i wake up and my jaw aches
and the earth is full of earthquakes..."
--ani difranco, 'tis of thee
Comments-[ comments.]
Thursday, February 20, 2003
 
the weeks continue by and by...
this is my very first entry in my very first blog. go me. i was feeling mighty peaceful until a moment ago--when i had typed in a whole rambling diatribe about various people and things, but i'll never have that recipe again, if you know what i mean. if you don't, what i mean is that my blog inexplicably misfired and i lost the whole half-hour of work i had put into it. i can't capture what i said exactly again, so i'll just include a couple of highlights:
*i invented a new word: destinous. and then i added a disclaimer that i don't believe in destiny.
*i inadvertently wrote a little worrie prayer for all the folks about whom i'm worried and the things i wished for them. among these individuals were: my brother, my sister, and my partner.
*i mentioned that yesterday was hal's birthday, although he doesn't like folks to know about it. i had written him a little ode for his birthday, but i didn't include that information in my last attempted-post.
*i said something enormously, gargantuan-ly cliched about how time speeds (exponentially, it seems) as you (and by "you" of course i mean "me") age, and, in reference to the line with which i opened this entry, i said again: the weeks, they go by. and by.
*i referred fleetingly to a similarly fleeting desire to listen to Public Enemy at this particular moment in time.
*i wrote briefly about the souls of my feet, one of which is pure and the other of which is marred from committing Bad Crimes.
*i sang: i'm bloggin', yes, indeed, i'm bloggin' 'bout you and me. i'm hopin' that you'll blog back to me.

now that the guilt of Official "work" is bearing down on my pretty hard, i should probably get to it.

one more note: one of my favorite songs to sing loudly in the car when no one's looking is a song by, i think, system of a down that goes like this: "somewhere between the sacred silence and sleep, disORder, disORder, disORRRRder." that and some Nanci Griffith'll get you through to the end of the next day.
Comments-[ comments.]

Powered by Blogger