(no subject)

The women I know are all so strong and what astounds me the most is how long it takes to make that strength serve us, instead of someone else.

So many of them I know through stories, which just adds levels, often silent ones, to the already oddly nuanced world of women.

ladyjaida has written this story (yes, I'm reccing you original fic) that while in need of a few tweaks is quite masterful in the way and the why of how it allows us to identify or sympathize its the main character. The story is of note here, aside from being very good, because Jaida is also someone I have known through stories and here she also writes about endurance, although of a somewhat less womanish kind than inspired this post (which thanks to the new LJ draft feature was actually started last night).

When a lot of us talk about Iraq or the administration or whatever, we talk about outrage fatigue. We can't remember if we got the phrase from John Stewart or The Onion, but the sentiment works for us, an expression of rage and sadness without having to feel either. We phone in our objections and flip to see what's on the Bravo.

One of the results of reading His Dark Materials (which I fully acknowledged becomes a screed that seriously borders on the hateful in the last book as Pullman struggles with both "show don't tell" and his own senses of optimism and rage), is that I got angry again, angry at other people insisting on getting their god into my small, sweet life. But that didn't just make me angry about the sorry state of politics and leadership in America, and it didn't just make me angry about the lastest moves in the abortion wars, or America's absolutely depressing homo-obsession where on a good day queerness is fetishized and on a bad day everyone is more honest about just how human they think gays aren't (however, do see this amusing post from alterjess on one response to Ohio's proposed bill barring gays and lesbians from adopting kids). Was it really supposed to be an exciting, positive milestone when Queer Eye for the Straight Guy went from freaking out the straights to feaking out the gays? This is cultural evolution?

The other thing I've gotten angry about, and which I'm always angry about on some level, but there's been a real flurry of it reaching a head amongst my friends of late, is how so many women come so close to giving up everything that makes them utterly stellar in the name of some unholy intersection between their competence and their compassion. I've done it. It's a misguided belief in a finish line, and it's being told or shown that love looks different than your instincts once told you it does; it's the notion that we are so astoundingly beautiful in the placid and weighty calm that comes with relaionships no one else understands as they carve us out into some ethereal bone white core. To have a nerd metaphor moment -- we become the ringbearers to others' grief and insecurity and rage and too often we carry it until it becomes so heavy, and we become so alone, we cannot move.

I won't say this is about men or straight men -- my queer friends take up burdens from their lovers in this way too. And I won't say it's all crap, because truly how do you know freedom and power if you haven't for some moment given yours up? And I won't blame or it say it's a waste or anything else. But god almightly I wish more people could see soooner that endurance is for the trip on, the journey up -- it is for your own ambition and resilience to what thwarts it, which is quite different from what beats it down.

This is not as eloquent as I would like, and perhaps both more and less pointed than it should be. I am so proud of so many of my friends lately, but I just feel like I wish I didn't have to be.

One of the things I love the most in the Thelemic gnostic mass, and really that I just have an inordinate fondness for in a most general way, is the naming of the saints, because of its rhythm (which is really exquisite), but also because it's so clearly a moment of admiration that involves no shame before its subjects, nor about them. That's been important to me. It's so lacking in Tina-the-Troubled-Teen America. It's all force of will, darlings.

Off to work now. If I've said "call/page if you need," call/page if you need -- I'm too much of a misanthrope to say it if I didn't mean it.