I was swimming with a friend (not someone I actually know) in the Olympic pool under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The pool was filled with ocean water (something that makes sense in Sydney sort of, but is not the case with this actual pool) and it was as hideously grey as the sky. But it was warm and very nice. We were treading water, and I wasn't moving my legs at all, just letting them float about together, and she was telling me about a friend who was working for Baz Luhrmann and had been since she finished university. She went on and on about all the places this friend had traveled and told some out of school stories that the first friend shouldn't have told and mine shouldn't have repeated. And I thought I am so envious and I said, with equal sincerity, "wow, I am so glad that's not me."
But I do miss Sydney, and not even for the story of what I was, or wanted to be there.
I'm so preoccupied with other matters (Bristol) that I find it hard to care. Although, I would be very happy if Elyse is there, as she was my very first friend I had a fandom with, and there are a few other people I would like to see because they were always kind. I am looking forward to seeing the space, particularly, to see how it has changed, to see to what degree it is as I remembered. And, I have practiced what to say if anyone apologizes to me for my school years as they have to my mother; it's all the very definition of awkward turtle.
I have also become both more and less concerned about what I am going to wear. It occurs to me that anything I show up in will seem as a costume to them, because I don't wear the Upper East Side uniform and because I was never supposed to be beautiful. That said, being as it is Hewitt and the Upper East Side, I can expect that nearly everyone there will, in fact, be thinner and richer than me, which isn't quite the equation with which I usually deal with the world.
Anyway, I'm too busy and I have too much typing to do, that I'm not even going to bother putting on fake nails. They can discuss my diseased hands all they want; I'm busy writing the world.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-13 02:11 pm (UTC)The trouble is, we don't yet outnumber the entrenched and elderly (age or way of thinking, both work for that adjective) masses who vote purely party line no matter how stupid the words coming out of the candidate's mouth.
LOTS of people come retire here for the golf and the lack of snow, and we get stuck with their political opinions and the worldviews they developed two generations ago. My own grandmother, who is as sweet as anything and never intended a person harm in her entire life, still refers to the degenerates in her neighborhood by race before any other descriptor. It's just how she was raised. It's not an excuse for her, but an example of what we're dealing with.
So, please, berate our politicians. We certainly are. I definitely am, especially as someone who could easily be and has previously been profiled as Mexican even though my genetic background is White European and Chinese.
So, please, try to remember that we do have a far more open-minded and aware generation here who doesn't believe in the crap our state and our voting majority is inflicting on us. We love our state, just not the decisions that are being made wholesale in and for it against our preferences.