brief reports

Snow, snow snow snow snow.

Must go into work now.

With a hefty post office stop first. (Dread. Woe. -- post office of the damned).

Raha called me, which was so weird, because I always pretend to know who people are on the phone even when it takes me a few minutes to figure it out, so I was doing one of my "right, yeah, OH!" things, which makes me seem like an ass, but there you are. You'd think the British accent _might_ give it away (not in my world). There is actually a woman by the same real name I deal with in my professional world with a voice of a similar pitch, hence my confusion. Well and the general brain deathness. Bwah! Hi!

Preparing frantically for Texas -- have bought food for the ride each way (lots of non perishables incuding single serve apple sauce, vacuum sealed packages of perperoni, poptarts, tuna lunch kits, etc). It was the most gruesome and embarassing shopping trip of my life.

I'm cooking Christmas eve dinner for my familly this year because my mother has to work until 7.

Mom, btw, is driving me insane. Calling me with odd worry requests and explaining that she just worries and me slowly slowly trying to drill into her head that it's not something I want to participate in with her -- I do it enough on my own.

My hair is desperately trying to immitate Hugh Grant's at the moment because I was a fool and slept on it wet.

That is all. And quite frankly, it's enough.

Silence=Death

I just deleted a long ramble related to Act Up, the early 1990s and my life in Wasington DC, that didn't really say anything I wanted it to.

This piece in the New York Times though is excellent http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/magazine/07AIDS.html
And so SILENCE=DEATH, which almost immediately was pressed into service as the unofficial logo of the nascent AIDS advocacy and protest organization Act Up, has long outlasted that group's vigorous prime, if not its agenda. It became the museum piece its creators did not want it to be. Printing out a copy from the Internet recently, I nevertheless found that it still has the power to move and disturb. What's new is that it now has the power, at least over me, to comfort. ''People did something,'' it seems to say. ''People are good.'' Surely this represents not just a separation from its original intentions but also a rancorous divorce. So did it succeed or fail?

One day, I'll try to write about what it was like to be woman involved with Act Up, about what it was like to wonder if I was neglible to that particular branch of that particular movement because of my genitals or my age. As a college student I probably seemed the most temporary sort of adhearant imaginable.

Act Up moved me not in the anger or outre nature of its protests, but in the simple SILENCE=DEATH campaign. It was a witnessing and a warning, and always drawn to an acute starkness in marketing, I understood it. It was supposed to make you cold all over every time you saw it, and it was supposed to make you want to change things, and it did.

My time in college was marked by many things -- the usual struggle to graduate, a serious relationship or two, the inevitable petty tragedies of 19, but it was also marked by the Internet. And because of the when and how of my initial experiences on the Internet, that meant largely two things -- dissent and personal narrative.

The first mailing list I ever subscribed to online was a BITNET-based newsletter published by dissident students in China. I was never even that interested in Chinese politics or issues -- but it was whispers in the dark, and I had seen the kids get run over by the tanks on the news while eating dinner with my parents. That, and like most kids fitting my demographics at that moment in time, I was all about Amnesty International and the like, and here I was, witness to a world I maybe wasn't sure existed until it fluttered up on my screen in green glowing characters at 3:30 on Thursday mornings.

The first online community I was ever a part of, whose sole purpose was community (as opposed to gaming or discussing some sort of common interest), was not like Livejournal in that it was not clearly about the telling of personal stories. But because my style of communication involves a great deal of relating my own stories to find insight and make points that are hopefully occassionally useful or of interest to others, it became that for me.

And that style of communication was very much both what made people interested in me, or like me, or wanting to hear what I had to say, as much as it really rubbed some people the wrong way -- sometimes to a point of such agression that things transpired that I remain puzzled, hurt and wounded by to this day (which is not to say I wasn't an irritant, of course I was, I was 19). And at the time, it felt like I was supposed to be quiet, a dumb little girl, who had less of a right to tell her flawed stories than other people, for reasons not only unknown to her, but reasons she could never know.

While my involvement in Act Up started marginally in high school, it was far more significant in college, mainly due to the freedom living somewhere else gave me. But for me, Act Up wasn't just about AIDS, wasn't just about the fact that it seemed as if it would be more convenient in the eyes of most politicians if my friends were simply dead; it was about my need to be heard, and my need to learn that I had a right to be heard.

And the process of learning that involved a lot of grief and aggravation about things that today I don't feel are so much resolved in my life as just not interesting enough to let hold me back anymore. That process also meant learning ASL. It meant wearing my SILENCE=DEATH t-shirt with that phrase spelled out in sign. It meant knowing that I could communicate in every conceivable way in every conceivable circumstance -- I could write, I could use computers, I could interact with the Deaf community, you could try to shut me up and I would speak in some other way, even if only by the indictment of my eyes.

Those ideas became the foundation of the first really solid creative vision I ever worked with, and remain something I revisit a great deal today, although in a different way. Silence does equal death, and in my mind you are, everyone is, obligated to tell their stories. As many of them as possible. For most of us have lived through things no one else could possibly imagine. And most of us have had experiences we're supposed to be ashamed of, even if 20% or 40% or 80% of the world has had those experiences too. We are obligated to speak because through speech we learn, as well as teach, and we ultimately do a little bit towards eliminating and mitigating shame and fear and embarassment and all that other crap with each word we breathe. Mainly though we teach each other that we are all extraordinary, not in the bullshit A-for-effort most-improved-in-gym award way that is so prevalent in schools and parenting now, where we erroneously convince children they can have it all without slaving for it and getting damn lucky too, but in a simpler way that says people are fascinating and proves that the old addage about men writing about ideas and women writing about relationships is bullshit, because at their heart they're really the same thing, or at least should be.

Act Up matters because it changed the world. And it matters to me, because very accidentally, it showed me I could live in it.

Regardless of all of that, the Times article moved me to tears, and I hope that you'll read it, especially my friends who are younger than me that may not have a strong conception of what the public discourse about AIDS in the 80s was like.