coming together

Tonight I went to a UVEF study group, where we're reading Going Public. It was incredibly interesting and fulfilling. I've been looking my whole life for grownups who I could both respect and integrate into my social structure, and I'm finally finding them; they're passionate, educated, deeply involved in the community, disillusioned about environmental issues. They're the kind of people I can and want to work with, trying to get things done politically. Maybe someday I'll be more radical, but for now this is good. Plus, they liked my pumpkin muffins. :) Taking leftovers home is the sincerest form of flattery?

Tomorrow, I'm meeting Janice Allred to ask her questions about her work. I'm nervous and excited about this. She seems like an interesting person, but I've also spent so much of my life alone with my books that there's something a little magical about one of them talking back. Also, her account of her excommunication resonated very deeply with me, and I'm very grateful to her for publishing it.

Next week, I'm presenting at Bloomsbury (which I'm also nervous and excited about) about my research on people's relationship/s with physical objects.


Desired social life: a lot of time spent with smallish groups of people who make and do interesting productive things. Status? Getting there. I'll take it.

because people make it happen.

I don't think my mother can relax; it's physically impossible for her. The best she can do is temporarily vacate, typically escaping into a fantasy novel, often with a bowl of ice cream. She is the hardest working person I've ever met.

And I'd like if she didn't have to continue scraping and finangling and working sixty hour weeks the rest of her life to take care of her children, which is what she has done for as long as I can remember. She has due dates and interest rates and fine print memorized, filed away neatly in some corner of her extremely impressive brain. I don't know how she does it, because I suspect those numbers are taking up the same spaces that, in my life, hold the stillness of a winter morning, the hot desert under my toes. What makes my life marginally bearable, she never notices, too busy doing work and getting things done and constantly talking and moving from place to place in a flurry of productivity.

But she does notice me. So she sat me down and asked what was wrong, and when I could stop crying enough to talk I explained that life was overwhelm. And I made my specifically chosen request, (because I'm too old now to ask her to wave a magic wand and make everything better), to help pay for physical therapy.




This was my compromise: make it so it doesn't hurt to walk, and I'll find a way to deal with everything else. Make it so if I get drunk and do ballet one night in my kitchen, I will not pay for it with pain all of the following week. Make it so I can get out of the car and pass through the mountains under open sky, and I will find a way to deal with skeezy editors and invisible bosses and sleep deprivation and child abuse and radon.

She said, "yes. This is not a hard problem. Your father being still physically there, but mentally gone, is a hard problem. This--well, go until you are better. Pay for it as much as you can yourself. Find out if you can get a sliding scale or something. But go until you get better."

"How?" Because it certainly looks like a hard problem to me, and I know enough about my parents finances to know it isn't there.

But this is what my mother does. She gives up herself to make impossible things happen. She responds with perfect calm to someone else's storm.

trying not to think about the flu, and

whether perhaps I am inherently un-palatable.

I showed my therapist some of my unpublished writing, and now she can't decide whether I have Aspergers; "you're right," she says, "you are bordering on it." I think she's not sure. Maybe you're not supposed to be able to access that level of honesty and still be a normal human being. I am capable of keeping my mouth shut, but anxiously. My social anxiety isn't like the usual kind, she says. She is afraid of breaking me, by fixing it.

I'm pretty sure this could not happen without my consent, but still the idea is distressing. That I am so broken, or so wrong by nature, I would loose major parts of myself in learning how to function normally. That there is beauty in this structural abnormality. That to preserve this beauty, perhaps the pain will never go away. This idea makes me want to die. So, I'm trying not to think about it.

request

There are some small but important modifications that need to be made for radon and fire safety on my house. Repairs are pretty daunting for me right now, mostly because of pain issues. I'm asking for help via blog because there's less pressure this way than asking face to face, and because you never know who might be willing/able that you'd never have thought to ask.



I need these things:

-time, competence with power tools, and an able body
-the use of a jigsaw or reciprocal saw
-scrap wood or metal might also be of use, though I can probably improvise with what I have on hand.

The saw is the biggest thing. I could rent one, but I'm worried about safely using it, between health issues and being a power-tool noob.



Please let me know if you can help. It would be deeply appreciated.

Much thanks-

Day

maybe a little conflicted

I saw Bold Native at the animal allies club showing, and I've been somewhat floored by my own reaction to a movie that, over all, I liked a lot. In many ways it was a great film; in some, a film I've been waiting for. It was entertaining, engaging, and funny while intelligently bringing up very relevant ethical discussions. For a self-funded propaganda piece, it was spectacular. Afterwards I asked the film-makers: why is the left so stratified into single-issue organizations and causes, and how did they feel about (participating in) this?

They were in support of all forms of social justice. In fact, they just didn't understand why so many social justice activists drew the line at the edge of their species. They thought that the rape of cows for the production of dairy products was clearly a feminist issue. I heard several voicing approval in the audience behind me, and felt disoriented. Also a little sick.

Pathologically or not, at some point I came to associate my own safety--my own right to be safe--with feminism. At it's root, this is what my passion for feminism is all about; I want to be safe. I want a right to be safe. I want it to be unquestioned and upheld by all who surround me, even when this comes at a very high cost. I'm not going to argue that this always the most ethical thing, but however selfish, it's understandable that I should want this deeply.

Lest I'm unclear, when the choice comes between a cow being raped or myself, I want it to always be the cow. Always. Unquestionably. Without a shadow of a doubt or a moment of hesitation: I want it to be the cow. The usual animal-rights activist response to this is that you don't have to choose; you can (and should) be against the rape of everybody.

The problem is--you do have to choose. In principle you can coherently oppose it all but in practice you choose. To be spending time, energy, and money one one project inherently means you aren't spending those resources on something else. More than once I've watched in person while human beings were tortured, and been powerless to stop it. This very likely could have been prevented if the movement for protecting foster children were as active and involved as PETA. When you go through the effort it takes to make a movie entirely focused around animal rights, you are choosing to save the God damned fucking cow.

None of which negates the fact that we allow the creatures we eat to be treated in profoundly evil ways, all so we can pay less for a diet that's terrible for us and the planet.