sundries

[rm]

At the moment, I do not have a piece of glass in my foot. This cannot be said for all of yesterday, wherein I thought I stepped on glass, did not know the glass was still in my foot, went out and did things, came home in scads of pain and then managed to get the glass out of my foot.

Patty and I are now into S2 of Buffy. We have met Spike. I may be the only person on the planet whose first impression of James Marsters was not Spike, but John Hart and a bunch of con appearances. Which actually makes Spike seem SUPER odd to me. Also, for all I've heard about Spike over the years no one ever mentioned to me that he was totally in thrall to his crazycakes vampire girlfriend. Patty says him being totally in thrall to various chicks is just sorta what he does throughout Buffy, which somehow makes the whole John Hart I-was-a-good-wife dialogue in Torchood about 800 times funnier.

The No H8 campaign is coming to NYC today. If I can find the time and the t-shirt, I'm so there.

Mandela site Robben Island overrun with rabbits.

Last US veteran of WWI turns 109.

Gallifrey One schedule 4.0 is up. Now with a map!

I have hit a level of ACUTE stress about my headshots.

I point you to an article called The Break-Up Kitten not because the article matters at all (but the cat is cute), but because on the left hand side is a list of bullet-point "article highlights." Something about the "article highlights" as if a piece of fluff about relationships and pets needs Cliff Notes has me laughing hysterically.

dr_is_in has been needing our help on and off for some time now. She doesn't like to ask for help, and I will tell you as someone who has needed the help of strangers in the past just how much it can be a huge stressor both to ask and to receive.

The good news in dr_is_in's life is that after she and her husband traveled to Rochester for his medical treatment he's doing a lot better.

The bad news is that their insurance plan is trying to drop them, claiming it's because they paid a premium late in 2007. She's protesting this every which way she can (although if you have any expertise in this area and can help her navigate the process, that sort of help would probably be appreciated too), but things look grim. She hasn't been able to work regularly in months and without insurance the level of jeopardy her family is in (she's already been struggling to pay for her husband's medication) is going to increase exponentially.

For many of us it's always felt like barbarism enough when we've had to wonder if we could afford to keep a beloved pet alive. Imagine if someone was forcing you to have to think that about your husband.

If you can help her with $$, insurance navigation advice, other resources, please visit her journal. Her paypal is tribereddragon [AT] gmail [dot] com.

UPDATE: a pharmaceutical assistance program is going to pay for her husband's meds for a full year beginning March 1. But she still needs $2,000 to get him his medication for February.

nekosensei wrote me about her friend Holly who needs help. Among other things, Holly has a lung condition that's rare enough that know one knows what to do about it. She can't work and she can't afford her COBRA payments. If she loses her insurance things will obviously go from bad to worse. I don't know Holly, and I only know nekosensei online, but Holly has received coverage in a few news stories and her website includes pictures of her in one of those articles with just some of the prescriptions she taking.

At some point, I tend to feel I should set an official policy about what I will and won't link to when people need help, but life is murky and a lot of people need help, and I think it just has to be a matter of whim and random and gut. The less I know you or the person in need the higher the bar is going to be, because I don't have any real way of vetting this stuff. Which, by the way, means if you all see a story you want to help, do your own homework so you're comfortable!

Anyway, people in my life have also suffered from mysterious debilitating lung ailments, so Holly's story jumped out at me. If you feel you want to help, visit her website.

I want to pause and take a moment to talk a little bit about "you don't get to be upset about [activist issue of personal concern] because [global poverty/natural disaster/social issue] is more important."

Look, perspective is good and so is helping people/being an activist/giving money.

But here's the horrible truth about existence: terrible things happening to someone else somewhere else doesn't suddenly give you the tools to not be upset by stuff going on in your own life.

More clearly: I have very little patience with people telling people what their priorities should be. I can be a queer activist AND donate money to Haiti. I can do clinic defense and still care about global warming. And I can write to my politicians regarding healthcare reform and still try to make an impact on global poverty.

I also, however, like everyone else, have limited resources, and I have about zero tolerance for people telling me I'm not allowed to be actively engaged in issues that affect my life directly because they view them as marginal or fringe (because they aren't queer, because they don't have a uterus, because they believe that good people never wind up screwed by the healthcare system) and think a good way to emphasize that marginalization (which they believe in as a righteous truth) is to engage in some apples & oranges suffering comparison.

Is there an issue you think I can make an impact on or might not be aware of? Tell me, but I will run out of time for you very quickly if the framework for that is that my issues as a [eighty billion boxes here] don't matter.

Finally, I don't think it's your business how much time and money I give to various causes and charities. I'm not running for public office. I'm not a role model. I'm not campaigning for some award. I do what I can. Sometimes with my wallet, sometimes with my little corner of the Internet. And it will always be a simple truth that I can always do better (I still, as an example, must post that EPIC charity list you all helped me assemble). But I don't owe you an accounting of these matters.

Comments

[therealycats.livejournal.com]

It's funny you should say that, because in my experience here (I'm also in Middle Tennessee), it seems that everyone is extremely caught up on only helping people locally, or if not immediately local, then within the country itself, but if you dare help someone in another country you get chastised for it and called unpatriotic. Apparently--and thankfully no one that I knew posted this, that I saw--there was a Facebook status meme going around that started out "Shame on America," and was basically about how dare America help Haiti. The thing is I'm willing to bet cold hard cash the type of people who say things like that don't actually contribute to anything at all. And if you can't or don't contribute or volunteer, you know what, that's fine; life happens and we can't all do everything we want to, but seriously, how dare someone try to make someone else feel bad for doing something to help others.

[nicoli-dominn.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm very sure that the panelists were not an accurate representation of the activism and the various non-profits in Nashville. That's why I was so BAFFLED. Perhaps they were selected because people thought there was too much focus on the local and not enough on the global, which could be an effort to counteract some of the sentiments you've described regarding the contempt for helping people outside of America. I haven't seen as much of that kind of thinking as you have, but that's probably because I've only been living in Nashville since May 2009 and don't know a ton of people.

That Facebook meme seems like it's based on the whole thing about Americans only helping Haiti in the time of a huge natural disaster, but otherwise not lifting a finger to eradicate the ill effects of globalization on some of the nations America has colonized or enslaved. Except that whoever wrote the meme completely missed the point - you know, that help for Haitians is still needed IN SPITE of America's follies. I'm sure your assessment is very accurate.

[therealycats.livejournal.com]

Based on the comment from the person who posted a comment about it (because some of her friends were posting the meme), it sounded like it was about Americans supposedly not helping America. Her comment was something along the lines of, "So what if I want to help Haiti? That doesn't mean I don't help out locally too."

[nicoli-dominn.livejournal.com]

Ahhh. I getcha.