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Nov. 5th, 2008 07:56 amThis outccome? That speech? In front of a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people? echoing the speech that really started this off in a lot of ways? Dude, that was a fucking West Wing moment right there.
Nov. 5th, 2008
- must do work.
- have written FOUR articles this morning, including one on Science Fiction Fashion. Yes, oh yes. My life is rad.
- have to do LJ Idol post.
- registered for WriterCon, although the logistics of that (is Patty coming with? is Kali going so we can do an awesome panel on writing collaboratively?) are not remotely settled, nor do they need to be right now. But hey, I can see my friends in Minneapolis!
- Prop 8 and the other anti-gay ballot measures -- really bad, and I'll have more to say later -- but here's the thing, it sucks, but I DON'T FEEL AFRAID FOR MY SAFETY. That's what Obama in the White House means to me.
- Hey, there are still tickets for the Sandman/CBLDF benefit on Saturday. Come on, you know you want to see me play both Desire and Delirium. You do. You really, really do.
- All the coat drama has finally resolved, AND I got paid today, which means, oh hey, time to bring it to a tailor!
- Firefly. We've finally started watching. Gods is Mal hot.
- Hey, why hasn't anyone written me James Bond/Jack Harkness crossover fic? Huh?
- Registered for Yuletide.
- Actually registering for the fencing tournament today, and possibly/presumably getting my saber and paying for my dagger and bayonet blades. The bayonet thing is still making me laugh darkly. It's like "how to be the most oddly useful resource to random fiction writers FOREVER."
- Behind on email, AGAIN.
- Totally going down to DC for the inauguration.
- Alison visits this weekend!
- have written FOUR articles this morning, including one on Science Fiction Fashion. Yes, oh yes. My life is rad.
- have to do LJ Idol post.
- registered for WriterCon, although the logistics of that (is Patty coming with? is Kali going so we can do an awesome panel on writing collaboratively?) are not remotely settled, nor do they need to be right now. But hey, I can see my friends in Minneapolis!
- Prop 8 and the other anti-gay ballot measures -- really bad, and I'll have more to say later -- but here's the thing, it sucks, but I DON'T FEEL AFRAID FOR MY SAFETY. That's what Obama in the White House means to me.
- Hey, there are still tickets for the Sandman/CBLDF benefit on Saturday. Come on, you know you want to see me play both Desire and Delirium. You do. You really, really do.
- All the coat drama has finally resolved, AND I got paid today, which means, oh hey, time to bring it to a tailor!
- Firefly. We've finally started watching. Gods is Mal hot.
- Hey, why hasn't anyone written me James Bond/Jack Harkness crossover fic? Huh?
- Registered for Yuletide.
- Actually registering for the fencing tournament today, and possibly/presumably getting my saber and paying for my dagger and bayonet blades. The bayonet thing is still making me laugh darkly. It's like "how to be the most oddly useful resource to random fiction writers FOREVER."
- Behind on email, AGAIN.
- Totally going down to DC for the inauguration.
- Alison visits this weekend!
LJ Idol, week 7: Hope
Nov. 5th, 2008 01:22 pmI took up fencing during what I call my black year. It was this sort of weird, gaping hollow of asceticism and sadness in the wake of a breakup that wasn't bad so much as complicated, and it really punched my buttons in all sorts of odd ways. It was not a good time, but I was utterly crystal clear, occasional moments of emotional ineptness aside, that this burden of a perfectly ordinary turn of events was both of my own making and utterly my own to solve.
Fencing came to me, like most things, as the product of stories. My parents never taught me that stories weren't real, and one of the lingering and embarrassing moments of my childhood is of my mother, suddenly weepy and terrified, that because I like Superman, I will jump off the terrace to my death in an attempt to fly. She has always been too literal minded to understand the way in which I feel all things are true.
One of my favorite films is Gattaca because it is, in many ways, the story of me. I was never supposed to be healthy; I was never supposed to be strong; and my heart does not work like other people's. When I saw it in the late night dark alone on the evening it was released, I walked out declaring I would run a marathon. But I will never run a marathon.
That, though, is less about ability (I don't know; I will never know) than common sense. Running is bad on your knees. It is a terrible thing for dancers. It is a terrible thing for fencers.
I fell in love with fencing, fast. But it was difficult. I felt isolated in my pursuit, embarrassed in my ardor, and abashed by my awkwardness. I struggled, not just with the inadvertent sexism that was certainly present in my salle, but with my own sexism, my own contempt for my spindly curves, when all I have ever wanted is a straight back and good shoulders.
Everything became about strength. The strength to hold, to endure, to fight, to wait. The strength to believe I would one day be spectacular at this, to talk about it, to prove I was all right, in a time when I was not all right at all. I can't believe I was fooling anyone, except, perhaps, I suspect I was.
Fencing was my hope. And sometimes, it was also my despair. I tried a hundred things to get through it, wrote of apprenticeship and bit my lip silently at the narrative grace of helping my fencing master with the German buttons on his fencing jacket. In my mind, I played attendant on a world that would never be formal or cruel enough to suit me -- not as a storyteller, not as someone with a broken heart, and not as someone who knew she would always be physically inadequate for the rest of her life from the simple act of doing what people do together: breaking bread.
At the end of Gattaca we discover how a man who should not have been capable of anything becomes capable of everything. It is not just through an elaborate, expensive and painful fraud, and it is not just through good luck or even will. We find out, you see, that he has never saved anything for the way back, that every time he swims out to sea, he worries neither about his heart, nor the shore. It was so good to know that I finally had a way of telling people what it is like to have a life, where no one can see what's wrong, but you feel like you can't do anything.
In a few weeks I will compete in my first fencing tournament. I will not win; I'm not that good and haven't been doing this that long, and if I cry, no one will know thanks to the mask. If I am lucky, I will surprise people a little. If I am the person I have always dreamt of being (and I am not) I will be cold and instinctive and precise.
My biggest worry, though, is merely getting through it. It is so much more likely that I will not have the endurance, that I will faint, that I will get ill, that my muscles will give out -- this is what the form of my flesh dictates.
More than anything when I fence the truth, perhaps sad, is that I want to make people proud: my fencing masters because they endure so much from us; the instructor whose left-handedness and grace was enough to make me not feel lonely; my partner, because we are together thanks to the story that made me want to fence in the first place; and my writing partner because even when I was nonsensical about it, she quietly let the sword be the thing that allowed me to endure.
But most of the people I want to make proud are fictional. Because my parents never taught me that stories aren't real. Because I do my best disarms when I borrow a humor about fighting I do not personally possess and a graveness I only pretend to.
Fencing is my hope, even when I hate it, even when it bores me, even when it breaks me and is a map of the indignities of my flesh, my nature, and my easy heart. Fencing is my thread back, the buoy to cling to between loss and love and a future I never, ever expected, but for which I am so goddamn grateful.
Fighting is, I know in truth, an ugly thing, and my romance over it is surely both barbaric and ignorant. But I have always been fighting. Myself and my sorrows, my flesh and its lies.
Sometimes heroes fight because they have to. Sometimes heroes fight because they want to. Sometimes heroes fight because they are too goddamn stupid to do anything else.
And I'll never be a hero, not really (that word is so shamefully overused). And I am fine with that, because being a hero means having to do terrible things. Fencing means not only do I not need to be a hero, I don't need a hero either to get me through my sometimes quite difficult life. That's more than enough. Because it's hope, sometimes for something as simple and mythical to me as a straighter spine and a broader back.
Hope, I know, is courage and grace and is often clumsy, small and flickering in the dark. Hope comes too from sorrow, and that is often what makes it fine.
--
for those lacking context about my health and my frustrations about it: I have, among other things, celiac disease, with which I was only recently diagnosed, and mitral valve prolapse syndrome. With common sense and attentiveness neither is life threatening, but both have had a profound impact on my physical and mental health. Both illnesses have limited my abilities in some ways at some times; both illnesses have also been used as excuses by both others and myself to encourage me to be less. I take their existence in my life extremely seriously in that I rage against them, these days, quite effectively.
Fencing came to me, like most things, as the product of stories. My parents never taught me that stories weren't real, and one of the lingering and embarrassing moments of my childhood is of my mother, suddenly weepy and terrified, that because I like Superman, I will jump off the terrace to my death in an attempt to fly. She has always been too literal minded to understand the way in which I feel all things are true.
One of my favorite films is Gattaca because it is, in many ways, the story of me. I was never supposed to be healthy; I was never supposed to be strong; and my heart does not work like other people's. When I saw it in the late night dark alone on the evening it was released, I walked out declaring I would run a marathon. But I will never run a marathon.
That, though, is less about ability (I don't know; I will never know) than common sense. Running is bad on your knees. It is a terrible thing for dancers. It is a terrible thing for fencers.
I fell in love with fencing, fast. But it was difficult. I felt isolated in my pursuit, embarrassed in my ardor, and abashed by my awkwardness. I struggled, not just with the inadvertent sexism that was certainly present in my salle, but with my own sexism, my own contempt for my spindly curves, when all I have ever wanted is a straight back and good shoulders.
Everything became about strength. The strength to hold, to endure, to fight, to wait. The strength to believe I would one day be spectacular at this, to talk about it, to prove I was all right, in a time when I was not all right at all. I can't believe I was fooling anyone, except, perhaps, I suspect I was.
Fencing was my hope. And sometimes, it was also my despair. I tried a hundred things to get through it, wrote of apprenticeship and bit my lip silently at the narrative grace of helping my fencing master with the German buttons on his fencing jacket. In my mind, I played attendant on a world that would never be formal or cruel enough to suit me -- not as a storyteller, not as someone with a broken heart, and not as someone who knew she would always be physically inadequate for the rest of her life from the simple act of doing what people do together: breaking bread.
At the end of Gattaca we discover how a man who should not have been capable of anything becomes capable of everything. It is not just through an elaborate, expensive and painful fraud, and it is not just through good luck or even will. We find out, you see, that he has never saved anything for the way back, that every time he swims out to sea, he worries neither about his heart, nor the shore. It was so good to know that I finally had a way of telling people what it is like to have a life, where no one can see what's wrong, but you feel like you can't do anything.
In a few weeks I will compete in my first fencing tournament. I will not win; I'm not that good and haven't been doing this that long, and if I cry, no one will know thanks to the mask. If I am lucky, I will surprise people a little. If I am the person I have always dreamt of being (and I am not) I will be cold and instinctive and precise.
My biggest worry, though, is merely getting through it. It is so much more likely that I will not have the endurance, that I will faint, that I will get ill, that my muscles will give out -- this is what the form of my flesh dictates.
More than anything when I fence the truth, perhaps sad, is that I want to make people proud: my fencing masters because they endure so much from us; the instructor whose left-handedness and grace was enough to make me not feel lonely; my partner, because we are together thanks to the story that made me want to fence in the first place; and my writing partner because even when I was nonsensical about it, she quietly let the sword be the thing that allowed me to endure.
But most of the people I want to make proud are fictional. Because my parents never taught me that stories aren't real. Because I do my best disarms when I borrow a humor about fighting I do not personally possess and a graveness I only pretend to.
Fencing is my hope, even when I hate it, even when it bores me, even when it breaks me and is a map of the indignities of my flesh, my nature, and my easy heart. Fencing is my thread back, the buoy to cling to between loss and love and a future I never, ever expected, but for which I am so goddamn grateful.
Fighting is, I know in truth, an ugly thing, and my romance over it is surely both barbaric and ignorant. But I have always been fighting. Myself and my sorrows, my flesh and its lies.
Sometimes heroes fight because they have to. Sometimes heroes fight because they want to. Sometimes heroes fight because they are too goddamn stupid to do anything else.
And I'll never be a hero, not really (that word is so shamefully overused). And I am fine with that, because being a hero means having to do terrible things. Fencing means not only do I not need to be a hero, I don't need a hero either to get me through my sometimes quite difficult life. That's more than enough. Because it's hope, sometimes for something as simple and mythical to me as a straighter spine and a broader back.
Hope, I know, is courage and grace and is often clumsy, small and flickering in the dark. Hope comes too from sorrow, and that is often what makes it fine.
--
for those lacking context about my health and my frustrations about it: I have, among other things, celiac disease, with which I was only recently diagnosed, and mitral valve prolapse syndrome. With common sense and attentiveness neither is life threatening, but both have had a profound impact on my physical and mental health. Both illnesses have limited my abilities in some ways at some times; both illnesses have also been used as excuses by both others and myself to encourage me to be less. I take their existence in my life extremely seriously in that I rage against them, these days, quite effectively.
(no subject)
Nov. 5th, 2008 03:48 pmIn looking for something for me that will also fit Patty as an outfit for the holiday ball, I came across this page of things:
http://recollections.biz/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=sale
The $99 taffeta gown with the barely there sleeves (in green) with the belted sash in same and a nice hoop seems good and likely for a range of events and steampunkery for us both.
But can you guess what thing I totally don't need on that page I totally fucking want?
ETA: comments now totally hilarious
http://recollections.biz/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=sale
The $99 taffeta gown with the barely there sleeves (in green) with the belted sash in same and a nice hoop seems good and likely for a range of events and steampunkery for us both.
But can you guess what thing I totally don't need on that page I totally fucking want?
ETA: comments now totally hilarious
from Lambda Legal
Nov. 5th, 2008 06:13 pmToday, as the ballot counting for Proposition 8 in California continues, Lambda Legal, along with the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the ACLU, filed a petition in the California Supreme Court on behalf of Equality California and six same-sex couples urging the court to invalidate Prop 8 if it passes. The petition charges that Prop 8 is invalid because the initiative process was improperly used in an attempt to undo the constitution's core commitment to equality for everyone by eliminating a fundamental right from just one group — lesbian and gay Californians. Prop 8 also improperly attempts to prevent the courts from exercising their essential constitutional role of protecting the equal protection rights of minorities. Whatever the outcome of the election or the lawsuit, we and the California Attorney General agree that existing California marriages are valid, and Lambda Legal will work in the courts to protect these marriages if they are attacked.
The news from other states with ballot measures affecting LGBT people was extremely disappointing. Florida's Amendment 2, which excludes same-sex couples from a constitutional definition of marriage, was approved by a vote of 62 to 38 percent — a narrow margin because constitutional amendments require a vote of 60 percent for passage in Florida. In Arizona, Prop 102 also was approved and will amend the state constitution to exclude same-sex couples from marriage. In Arkansas, voters approved a ballot measure that prohibits unmarried individuals or couples from fostering or adopting children effectively excluding gay and lesbian individuals and same-sex couples from the pool of adoptive and foster parents. In one state victory, Connecticut voters defeated a call for a constitutional convention that was promoted by groups eager to eliminate the right to marry for same-sex couples.
Last night's results also brought us hope. The election of Barack Obama as president presents exciting new opportunities to advance equality at the national level. Lambda Legal is committed to working with the new administration and the entire civil rights community to enact an inclusive employment nondiscrimination law, as well as fair and inclusive immigration and hate crime laws; to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and the federal Defense of Marriage Act; and to implement better policies for those with HIV. And once these laws and policies take effect, Lambda Legal will have new tools at its disposal to do what we do best: fight in the courts against the discrimination that LGBT people and those with HIV experience all across the nation.
holiday cards
Nov. 5th, 2008 07:10 pmWhile Patty and I have not yet planned or designed the holiday cards, maybe if we get started early this year it will all get done on time (mainly because it has to get done on time, because she leaves for her dig on 2 Jan).
Comments screened. Leave address and name of choice if you want to be able to add a random artsy picture of New York lesbians to your holiday refrigerator dislpay.
Comments screened. Leave address and name of choice if you want to be able to add a random artsy picture of New York lesbians to your holiday refrigerator dislpay.