sundries

Ho, ho, Chicago vacation approved, which means when Patty and I are in Chicago, I'm actually off the clock, as opposed to working from the hotel and calling in sick to go to a wedding.

Sleeping with the eye-mask is life-changing. Like, when I found out I had celiac disease and stopped eating gluten life-changing. I've always had very bright bedrooms. And now, suddenly I dream, or at least remember them. Oh.

Fun at graduate_maria continues. More items going up tonight! And I'll do a listing of things with one and no bids tomorrow. Check it out, she still really needs our help. Right now we've given her some hope, but the problem really is not solved.

kyburg posts about a legal immigrant who may be deported because of a paperwork snafu and needs a whole lot of help.

So, German with Rosetta Stone continues. ( Read more... )

As noted last night, the Prop 8 ruling is coming down today. As noted in the comments to that post, it's also quite unlikely that that's the end of this, or will make any marriages start happening again immediately.

I think, sometimes, because LJ can often be an echo-chamber of those we more or less agree with, how fucking hard it is to be gay. It's not just "oh, the laws suck and haven't caught up with reality yet." I have at least two people on my friendslist with profoundly strained relationships with their parents because they are in queer relationships. And I don't mean strained like "but what about grandkids?" I mean strained like making threats, demanding lies, gender-policing, shame, bullying, removal of resources, isolating from friends and family, other abusive behaviors, etc.

And here I am, out and loud and very much not much one for bullshit, but a week doesn't go by where I don't think to myself that when my mother had me in her mid-twenties I bet she never thought her life would look like this: breast cancer and a gay daughter. My parents aren't even mad or disappointed in me, but all I know from living in the world is that I've probably made them sad.

So, do I hate how much of the LGBTQ rights debate has come to rest on marriage when everything form healthcare to employment to housing can be denied to you simply because you're queer? Ayup. In spite of this, does the marketing person in me think the equal marriage rights issue is sensible from a PR perspective and a potential cascade from which all other rights will come? Ayup. Do I remain deeply conflicted because of the way the necessity of mainstream political activism combined with the AIDS crisis basically destroyed and remade the gay community in a totally different image (in your image, straight world, not ours) in just a few decades? Yeah.

But what's done is done, and hopefully soon we can simply live.

(This rant brought to you, in part, by having to explain the AIDS crisis to someone yesterday. I'll take being too young to remember when cashiers were afraid to take your money if you were male and read as gay because there might be AIDS on the dollar bill and people thought you could get it off toilet seats. But "I'm sheltered"? History is not an R-rated movie, and Wikipedia is a totally appropriate starting place but not a primary source. Thanks.)

The downtown mosque has been approved. Racist assholes are still freaking out though. And what the fuck was with the ADL weighing in on this one? And did people miss the part where us Jews aren't the only Semetic people out there? Argh argh argh.

Meanwhile, The New York Times points out of the obvious by saying the labor market is punishing to women. Then, of course, being the New York Times, it comes up with winners like, "Men and women are not identical, of course. Many more women take time off from work. Many more women work part time at some point in their careers. Many more women can’t get to work early or stay late," as if these are all biologically based facts.

Really, I'm starting to even wonder why I read the Times, and that's hard for me to say, as a native New Yorker, an educated person, and a J-school alum.

The Tea Party and 'historical fundamentalism.' (Sometimes this is saying you need to be subscriber, sometimes it isn't - apologies for their annoyingness).

Free-range lawn care and goat rental.

The Piano that Lives in the Hall now has a damaged microscope on it.

I know more things about my tentative Dragon*Con schedule. I've already hit one major conflict. If neither of the panels gets moved by the master scheduler, I'll be pulling off of one of my YA Lit track items (I'll be on others!) in order to give my mourning-related presentation at 8:30pm on Friday on the Anime/Manga track. That is some primetime loveliness. More when I know it, because depsite my typing this, I know nothing.

I completely regret ever linking to that thing about Tom Hardy and whether or not he's had sex with men, since it's keeps changing and won't go away. This is hopefully, yet surely not, the last word on that.

I have read two really good Big Bang fics for the Whoniverse in the last couple of days. I must note, however, that military don't call women "Mum." You're just hearing "Ma'am" in an accent that's unfamiliar to you and you're writing it down wrong. It's a very distracting wrong too. So, you know, FYI. And yes, really, I'm sure.

Confession, I didn't pay enough attention really to White Collar or Covert Affairs last night because Patty had just come home and I was multitasking other things, so I'll need to rewatch both shows.

It occurs to me that part of the problem with the slowly emerging Jack/Auggie fic is we're getting so much new backstory on Auggie every week that I still feel like I am in the middle of a rapidly shifting landscape. ( Read more... )

the questions of our times: formality and vampires

This, thanks to a discussion started by weirdquark. Please do visit the comments where you will learn many things including the many ways formality is structured in different languages (something my questions did not fully take into account, and I apologize for that), werewolf pack dynamics considerations, and whether there are vampires in France.

[Poll #1601631]

on the odd chance you haven't heard from an actual news source

Prop 8 Overturned.

For today, at least, we win. May it be so every day until the battle is over.

and this was one of the good days

Today was one of the good days, and yet I wound up in the bathroom at work. In tears. Twice. It was the first time I'd cried at the office since Torchwood: Children of Earth aired, and yes, I feel like a jackass for writing that sentence despite the fact that I'm always lecturing you all about the importance of story.

About ten minutes before the Prop 8 decision came down, I got a call from the New York City Fire Department that began with them assuring me this was not an emergency. When they told me what it was about, it felt like an emergency pretty fast.

You see, the NYFD was responsible for the ambulance that brought me to the hospital from the doctor's office when I had my kidney stone incident just before Bristol, and they were now trying to process my claim with my insurance company. There was just one problem: the insurance company was telling them my policy expired in 2003.

So there I am, standing in the hallway of the office suite, my head swimming with questions on the formal address of vampires and the Prop 8 decision anticipation and suddenly the insurance I pay a lot of money for doesn't exist.

The NYFD verifies my company, policy number, name, group number and everything else I can think of. Yeah. They've got everything, and I'm uninsured.

"Excuse me," I said abruptly before hanging up, "I need to go talk to HR."

We don't really have HR. We have a guy that sits about a foot away from me and runs interference with the accountant's office.

"Dude, call the accountant, right now," I said, after offering a brief explanation.

"Send me an email with all the information."

"That is all the information! My policy doesn't exist. Fine, I'll call the insurance company."

So I call the insurance company, who also tell me, that yes, my policy expired in 2003.

"Look again."

"Oh, here it is!"

Apparently, if you have an insurance policy with this company that gets closed because you switch jobs or whatever, that one will always come up first, as opposed to the active one. Meaning that when providers submit your insurance information for payment, the first thing the system kicks out is that you don't have any, and then you get freaky phone calls from the NYFD at a key moment of deeply personal political history.

By the time I got off the phone with the insurance company, the NYFD had called me back and left a message to say they had figured it out on their own, and the Prop 8 results had been announced. And me? My adrenalin was all fucking up over the insurance and I'd missed my moment to celebrate.

Cue crying moment #1. This first time, I didn't even bother with the bathroom. I read a lot of Twitter, tried to get excited, get happy, and do the obligatory LJ post on the odd chance I'm a primary news source for anyone (please let that not be true).

Then, amidst the huzzahs! and the discussion of what happens next, someone came into my Prop 8 post to explain why judges doing what judges are supposed to do in the US system of justice was a constitutional travesty. I was insulted, lectured and condescended to until I banned the individual, at which point I did walk, quite briskly, to the bathroom to cry.

Standing there in the stall, hands over my face sobbing because of the stupid insurance debacle and the stupid LJ drama and the stupid elevators that never work in my office building and the stupid inconsiderateness of the people we share an office suite with, all I could think of, suddenly, was last damn July and Children of Earth, because here I was again, sobbing over something that was a central event in my social circle that no one else in the building gave a crap about, or maybe, hadn't even heard of.

And if I wasn't already in a cascade of tears, well, that was it.

The worst thing about mourning for people is that they never see you do it.

The worst thing about fictional characters isn't that they'll never console you by holding your hand, but that you can never console them by holding theirs.

The worst things about these fundamental political events when you're a minority is that you're surrounded by people who don't notice, don't give a crap, or think it's a great opportunity to ignore that you're real and use it to exercise their rhetorical and devil's advocacy skills.

All of it was, yet the fuck again, like the realization I kept having in fencing over and over again, that when you fight, you fight alone. No matter who's standing right there next to you.

Back at my desk, I started looking at the news articles, at the people celebrating, at the discussion of what would happen next, and I had that other moment of realization in this gay rights thing that is always total shit.

You know the one, the one where I stop being grateful for the fact that my humanity, while affirmed this go around, is fundamentally in question because My god, we are actually having this conversation.

And to add to that list of worsts a few lines back: there is nothing worse when you suddenly have to be grateful for something you were always supposed to have known or have had.

So, yeah, bathroom crying jag #2, and then I was just done. I couldn't do the office anymore and took off, taking a cab because I couldn't be on the subway with people who didn't know or wouldn't care or might, if I was so stupid as to try to talk to them, congratulate me on having my humanity affirmed, and then I'd start crying and talking about stories or something and it would just be embarrassing.

So I took a cab.

And called my mother.

And carefully broached Prop 8, because I couldn't avoid it. I have no self-control -- it's a feature of those homosexuals, don't you know? And sometimes I wonder if storytelling is a necessary congenital defect of our kind.

My mom listened, and said, "Huh."

I hated to do this to her, to hear it wash over her that the good news can feel like bad news. But instead of giving me platitudes or changing the topic, she got it. She really got it. And was quietly awed by the weight of it. I never ever wanted to do anything that would require my mother to be an impressive person on my behalf, not that I am not grateful, because I am.

So today was one of the good days. I am actually insured. A judge did the right thing with eloquence and intellectual rigor. My mother listened to me and saw me.

And nobody real died.

But I keep crying. And I keep saying, so softly, "I remember you," meaning all these people who fight, all these communities that are fading in the face of normativity and youth and the forgetfulness of those who have never known the things I have seen, many of them as a child, when I should not have had to see.

My tattoo is obscured today under a navy blue racer-back tank, and it's like holding the hand of made-up strangers when the plane takes off.

It's like sitting across from the woman on the train hugging The New York Times to her chest and sobbing the morning after the 2004 presidential election.

And it's like fencing, when everyone else was busy pretending we weren't all in the same war.

Happy should never have to be this way.

And one day, maybe, maybe maybe maybe, at least for my people, it won't be.