life in the gaps

forgive us our trespasses

2008-12-22T06:44:00.004-05:00

I have a hard time forgiving. Not in the sense that I hold grudges; most of the time I am all too willing to let sleeping dogs lie and act as if hurts never happened. My problem, I think, lies in actually acknowledging that a problem occurred at all.

It's interesting. I think most people, if asked, would say that I'm combative or aggressive when it comes to arguments and debates, and to a point it's true. In writing it is, except for an unfortunate predilection for adverbs and an unabashed love of arcane vocabulary. Matters of simple, verifiable fact I don't hesitate to correct, though I gave up fisking the email forwards I get from my mom as a lost cause. And I doubt anyone at Teh Forum would believe me if I told them that I not only hesitated to enter certain threads at all, I deliberately pulled some of my punches on the ones I did enter (though someone who read the non-redacted posts that I vented on LJ mentioned that he now knows better than to piss me off). I was downright recruited for the high school debate team,* and I kicked ass, if I do say so myself. If I'm cornered, I don't fuck around.

But if I'm given the barest opportunity or the excuse, I will almost without exception avoid, and demur, and hide. I can feel an itch between my shoulderblades compelling me to run away. I would rather ignore something and pretend it's not happening than face it head-on. I have never been the dumper in either of my two previous relationships.** I am the Ennis del Mar of interpersonal relationships.

In a conversation with a friend earlier the concept of forgiveness was being discussed and honestly, despite the fact that my parents hurt me the most, I feel the angriest at Dymphna for outing me not only once, but twice, and for the flimsiest of pretexts. I don't know if it's possible to forgive someone when you can't even stand to be in the same room as them. She's getting married, and I specifically requested not to be in the wedding party, a request that was accepted. Mostly I've been telling people who ask why that I can think of few things more horrifying than the prospect of my sister picking out my clothing, which in accord with my principles about outright lying actually is true, if not completely honest.

I have a serious problem with forgiveness as it applies to people who haven't actually asked for it. Someone who's actually repentant and wants to be given a second chance to prove it I can deal with; I can understand that I should grant someone the same slack I would want granted to me, and even if I have a hard time rebuilding trust with someone I can recognize the rightness of trying to do so. But someone who's either totally unrepentant or doesn't even realize what it is that they did wrong at all? There's not only no guarantee that they won't turn around and repeat it, there's a practical certainty that they WILL. Belief without evidence is faith; belief in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is denial. I can't believe that God asks us to be doormats; that doesn't serve justice at all, on an individual or social level. Even nonviolence and pacifism are intended to forestall further harm and pave way for restoration, not just to paper over the fact that wrong has been done.

Are we obligated to forgive people who deny that they have wronged us, whether through lack of compassion or comprehension? Even the granddaddy of forgiveness theories, substitutionary atonement, still posits that you have to want it as more than a get-out-of-jail-free card. It doesn't seem possible to force forgiveness on someone, inasmuch as forgiveness is intended to be a restoration of a relationship, or at least a cessation of hostilities, and it takes two to tango, as it were. The Buddhist conception appeals to me more in that it focuses more on letting go of the wrong than achieving justice with the wrong-er, but with that, I'm afraid it's appealing more to my preference for nonconfrontation than any actual desire to move forward. The concept makes perfect sense; the proper application, however, escapes me, because I am so direly willing to pretend things never happened that I'm afraid that it prevents any of the problems from being truly solved. It mostly seems like forgiveness of the forgetful kind just perpetuates the problem. You can't learn from something that you pretend never happened.

Does forgiveness require forgetting, or consent on the part of the forgiven?

*Interestingly enough, I discovered later through Facebook that I was not the only queer in Eastchester's debate team. I expected that from the drama team, but not the nerd herd.

**Iris and I have parted ways. Essentially it boiled down to her wanting to get started finding a long-term relationship and she wants kids and I don't, so that was just not going to work out for either of us. I was neither thrilled nor surprised, really. But we're still friends and all that, et cetera.

crossroads and stoplights

2008-07-21T05:32:00.004-04:00

I feel a bit, these days, like I'm out of the loop. It's not that I don't know what I want to do one day, but that I don't feel like I know what I need to do in order to get there.

As Bridget and Astrid and I have endlessly discussed every time we're in the same room, Terabil has this insidious ability to suck all the motivation to improve and move out out of you and lull you into complacency with its cheap rent and suburban sprawl until you're, well, living at home and working a shitty dead-end job a year later and wondering where the hell all your fire and passion went. It's truly disturbing. In fact, the only time I've produced any artwork this past year is when I have left the city and gone on vacation visiting someone else. This has led to some truly epic frustration on my part, as well as a half-sincere belief that this city has some kind of Frank Peretti-style demonic curse on it, except in this version the only people who are demonically possessed are the people who AREN'T college students.

I'm somewhat torn between accepting this job as the best I can do for a while and at least using that guaranteed income to get my own apartment, and continuing to try to find other jobs in other places and accepting living at home as the compromise I have to make for the chance to be able to take those other jobs if they come. Not that the other job offers are exactly flowing in, but the possibility makes me not want to settle down lest Murphy's law compel some employer to offer me a decent wage somewhere else right after I take out a lease. At one point recently I had a job opportunity elsewhere, which would have been just as unrelated to art as my current one and entailed a tripled cost of living in the new city for substantially similar wages, and I was ALL READY to jump on it until I looked at my work schedule and realized it would be impossible to make it to that city for an interview.

(Which is another work-related rant-- I am classed as a subcontractor, which makes taxes a right royal bitch to do, but I'm pretty much treated like an employee. Pretty much the only reason I put up with it is because I'm at least paid decently for my trouble, and I'm essentially being paid to be an insomniac with some nifty medical skills.)

Mostly what irritates me about the situation is that a full year and a month after graduating from college, and after swearing to myself that it would not be so, I am still, indeed, living at home and working at a job which has absolutely nothing to do with art. Not even the most tangential connection. And I have not produced a significant piece of artwork in nearly as long. In the last three months, I have produced two sketches each of a stuffed fish and a mounted deer head I found in the supply closet at work, as well as two small watercolors of eggplant from our garden. This is roughly equivalent to half a week's homework in college. A light week.

Now I'm looking up different graduate schools, and researching various financial aid things, and considering whether I would be able to work part-time and go to school or whether various programs would accept my somewhat baroque undergrad degree as an acceptable prerequisite or if I would have to take a lot of intro courses to get up to speed, and then I thought about portfolios... and realized that I basically have a big, blank year of doing dead-end work in the ideological armpit-pimple of the nation* and have absolutely nothing to show for it.

So pretty much now I'm looking for whatever entry-level design employment in pretty much any other city on the East Coast outside of NYC I can get and hoping that if I can just get out of Terabil, my right brain will wake up again and start making up for lost time.

*Anyone who's got real-name privilege, remind me to tell you sometime about the white-supremacy organization that's quartered here. And our newspaper, which likes to publish Michelle Malkin and Cal Thomas op-eds and letters-to-the-editor screeds about God-guns-and-gays. Oh, it's delightful.

arguments i no longer tolerate

2008-05-17T23:54:00.002-04:00

"Gay people already have the right to marry, they just have to marry someone of the opposite sex like heterosexuals have to."

By this logic, miscegenation laws were totally fair because everyone could marry, they just had to pick someone of their own race. See? Equality! Pay no attention to the emotional and social costs paid by lovers made strangers under law, or the societal costs of the racism and heterosexism these unequal marriage laws engender, and let's not question the compelling state interest in keeping a civil contract of mutual obligation between consenting adults gender-dependent, because we've got our Constitutional mint and rue nicely weighed out.

I always want to ask people who use this argument if they want to be the straight guy married to a lesbian, or the straight woman married to a gay man (assuming the lost cause straight guy in question doesn't retort "Hur hur, I'd marry a lesbian if I could watch!"). A variation on this one for the married heteros is "did you marry your husband/wife because they had a penis/vagina, or because you loved them and wanted to spend your life with them?"

Of course, this is rarely if ever a real argument. It's a "gotcha" argument made by people who are so entranced by their own cleverness that they can't be arsed to actually address the issues, like the "you're intolerant of my intolerance LOL!" schtick. And it can be logically countered with "Yes, and after sex-irrelevant marriage is law you'll have the right to marry someone you are constitutionally incapable of being sexually attracted to, just like I do now. Congratulations."

"Oh noes, bad timing! This is going to hurt more important political causes!"

Like there's ever a GOOD time. There will always be some bigger issue or more important thing that gays, or women, or transfolk, or people of color will have to take a back burner to.

The women's suffrage movement grew out of women in abolition movements who were angry at being barred from speaking at conferences about issues they were giving their hard work and money to. The second-wave feminist movement likewise grew out of women in antiwar and antiracist groups being relegated to making coffee and getting no credit for the work they did do.

For that matter, why are we trying to get progressive politicians elected in the first place? So we can DO something about this shit. If we can get it done sooner rather than later, then that's a GOOD thing. Bitching about how Middle America "isn't ready" isn't going to help anyone.

strawberries: a metaphor too far

2008-05-10T12:10:00.003-04:00

So one of my friends, a writer, occasionally sends out missives with essays about topics of faith, and the latest one was about taking care of his strawberry patch and weeding and pruning and whatnot, the gist being that sin is like weeds-- it spreads fast, hides well, and only pretends to produce delicious fruit.

This reminded me not only that I should probably reply to Dave's emails one of these days, but also that our strawberry patch needed picking.

In our strawberry patch I noticed that for every one perfectly conical red supermarket-ready strawberry, there were a dozen mutant berries-- the ones that are blobular masses of berry flesh, often resembling a Star Wars character.

I, personally, think that this provides a much more trenchant spiritual analysis, since as we all know, Christians, like all people, are imperfect, like mutant berries, and often we're envious of the shiny happy supermarket berries we think surround us, like the family in the other pew that you always run into at the grocery store when they're wearing chinos and perfect hair and you're in your pajamas buying zucchini and KY Jelly.

But me? I prefer the mutant berries, perhaps because I hold in my heart an abiding love for imperfection and uniqueness, or perhaps because I'm a big Star Wars nerd and can decide whether one looks more like Greedo or Admiral Ackbar before I gleefully bite it in half.

So I wrote a song!

[we all know the tune for this one]

Jesus loves the mutant ber-ries
All the weirdoes of the world
Big and lumpy,
short and squat,
Resembles Jabba the Hutt--
Jesus loves the mutant berries of the world!

But I couldn't stop there. It needed a second verse!

Delving deeper into my spiritual analysis of gardening, and opting to skip over the question of what the patch of ants I stuck my hand in chasing a berry signified, I wondered what the symbolic value of the rotten, bug-eaten berries was. Given that in this metaphor I was, theoretically, the Christ figure, and I was throwing the reject berries against the fence so they would make interesting splat shapes, I decided maybe a second verse about how Jesus likes to make damaged berries explode wasn't the best idea, and I wasn't sure if I could make it rhyme, either. So I stuck a (2x) on the end of the song and called it a day.

And this, kids, is why God didn't send me to seminary.

ten percent

2008-05-05T03:26:00.000-04:00

"I reached the realization sometime this year that Christianity is about 90 percent bullshit -- and that the 10 percent that isn't bullshit just won't let go of me." -- Marauder, from comments to this entry

Which, I think, is pretty much the long and short of why I haven't already packed up my theological toys and found a different playground. Christianity has a lot of bullies, a lot of potholes, poison ivy everywhere... and a set of truly kickass tire swings with really cool people in one corner if you stick around long enough to find it.

Logically speaking, when the way I thought about my relationship with my religion started to sound similar to a battered spouse ("I know that s/he still loves me DEEP DOWN, maybe we can still work things out once s/he stops beating me over the head!") I had to wonder if there's much left to debate, and I'm just clinging to the last shreds of my faith as a philosophical security blanket. Which very well probably is some of it. I was born and raised in this religion, and it would be painful to uproot my entire worldview.

But generally speaking, it's not really been the principles on which my orthodoxy was based that have changed as it has been a rethinking of the orthopraxis I was taught. I still believe in the power of the Bible, but I tend to locate that specialness in terms of its metaphors and narratives instead of its rules and prophecies. It's lost the sort of talismanic properties it held growing up; a Bible is just a Bible, but The Bible is something more than the sum of its parts.

For that matter, a lot of my progressive tendencies are rooted IN my religion. If everyone is at base a child of God, what with Galatians 3:28 and all that, why should society play favorites when God doesn't? What should the kingdom of Heaven on Earth look like, if not a place where everyone is treated with equal dignity and consideration? Was Jesus not, after all, the original dirty hippie radical?

I have a lot of sympathy for why many GLBT folks feel the need to leave religious institutions for atheism or more welcoming traditions, but at the same time I don't feel like I can abandon the same faith that's gotten me through a lot of the pain that resulted from how those hierarchies treat us. It's made a big difference to me to separate the church institutional from the church universal, to draw strength from the one while I end up in opposition to the other. I doubt I could ever quite convince myself of the nonexistence of God even if I frequently doubt God's existence, because there will always be the fact that the God I think of has only the most tenuous connection to the actual God that is, given that I'm constrained to think inside human limits. So even if it came to that, I'd still be a Christian agnostic at heart, and that same agnosticism would be more of a refusal to keep asking "if."

I suppose I feel like I do more good, ultimately, by sticking around to fuck up some paradigms than I would by leaving and accepting their definition of Christianity as the "correct" one.

"there seems to be a lot of bitterness here"

2008-05-05T02:49:00.002-04:00

I have no idea how many of the forumites read this. I have to admit, at this point I don't care.

I keep trying to make the point that The Issue of Gay Rights has a name and a face, and in the case of this forum it's the same sister in faith they've all known since she was fourteen. I've known these people for more than a third of my life. They had a front-row seat to the disaster that was my coming out to my parents because I trusted them enough to post about it, and knowing they were out there praying for me made a real difference in surviving that event.

Yet some of them still apparently see nothing wrong with talking about "protecting" traditional marriage and "the Christian view" of homosexuality.

If seeing what religious homophobia has done to me and my family, inasmuch as text can ever convey that, if that hasn't changed their mind, or at least their vocabulary, what the fuck would have to happen to me to drive the point home?

Some of them get it. I just don't know why all of them can't. It's not that difficult an intellectual exercise, and these are not stupid people. At this rate I sincerely don't give a shit what they believe about the relative morality of my "lifestyle," because they're so resistant to recognizing what a luxury it is to view "the issue of homosexuality" as something remote from one's own life that I'm running out of patience with their carefully considered, logical, ever-so-rational, doctrinally-supported bigotry.

I know that some of these people will go to the polls and vote against whatever bullshit "traditional marriage initiative" is up because they are so keen to "protect" their marriage from scary people like me, they will actively work to deny me the same rights they have. Because I am a threat, a disease, a problem. That these people who will in one breath call me "friend" will in the next disparage my humanity, or use my inability to get legally married in a throwaway punchline in a snarky letter to the editor.

Bitter? Probably. I have to live with this crap every day, from my country, my family, and my own damn religion, and it would be nice not to get it from the people I'd like to call my friends. There has to be a sanctuary somewhere.

newsflash: it's not about you

2008-04-23T00:05:00.007-04:00

Once you get past the abject hatred and disgust, the next in the anti-gay Bag O' Tricks is usually pity and patronization. "We love you sooooo much, we want to help you to be happier by encouraging you to be just like us instead of a miserable, emotionally crippled pervert!"

What's sort of pathetic is that this comes to them as some sort of great effort that will really and truly reveal the extent of their Christlike compassion for the poor, pathetic homosexuals. I bet it never even OCCURRED to them to just not be gay! Let's kill them with kindness instead of tire irons! Let's be the Good Cop instead of the Bad Cop! It's totally just like not stoning the adulteress!

Nice that they've finally decided to "love the sinner," but couldn't they just, you know, do so for once without banging on about "hating the sin" for ten times as long, and going to great lengths to make sure that everybody knows that they strongly disapprove of Homosexual Behavior even if, oh, well, it might not be terribly nice to beat them up for it? The day is supposed to be about bullying, not telling everybody that the bullies are just going about it the wrong way.

God forbid they just participate like everyone else without making a big fucking deal out of their oh-so-special disapproval. Then nobody will accidentally mistake them for Homosexual Activists, and they won't have to find out what it's actually like to be treated like a Homosexual, even for one damn day.

[edit, 4.28.08]

To clarify, the original post (which got too long and probably too profane to be a comment on the post from Box Turtle Bulletin that I linked) is about both the Day of Truth folks and the Golden Rule Pledge. Both of them are making the same mistake, though obviously the DoT are making it with considerably more gusto-- making their protest about their personal religious disapproval of Teh Homosexuality than about homophobic bullying, and in the case of the Golden Rule in particular, pretending that same disapproval isn't at the root of the bullying in the first case.

Consider the case of a run-of-the-mill straight ally participating in the DOS, and the "Golden Rule" allies-for-a-day participating. If I understand correctly, the point of the Golden Rule cards is to be able to hand them out while unable to speak. The regular straight ally is just going to be treated like a gay person, since of course only queers would stoop to standing up for queers, while the Golden Rule folks have this nifty card which says "Oh, I'm not GAY or ACCEPTING of Teh Gay, I just think Jesus wouldn't like it if we beat up people." It's, in effect, a get-out-of-jail-free card, a Band-aid on the fact that that same reluctance to be seen as supportive of the "gay agenda" is on the same continuum as those who take their reluctance to violent levels.

The way it's worded, I'm inclined to agree with Timothy that it's a very subtle way of setting up "Christian" in opposition to "homosexual" or "GLBT-affirming"-- you can paint yourself as being "against anti-gay violence 'cause violence is bad," without addressing the fact that quite a bit of that silencing is rooted in the way one regards homosexuality and Christianity as mutually exclusive.

If the Golden Rule folks are serious about wanting to combat anti-gay violence, for whatever reason, how about giving out their Golden Rule cards on the Day of Truth and just participating normally on the Day of Silence? Setting yourself up in opposition to the Christian mainstream "response" is a very different thing from making a special effort to differentiate yourself on the DoS, and if you're serious about wanting to make a break from the shitty way the Christian establishment treats GLBT folk, the former would make that point far more effectively.

Want to "break down the walls between the Christian and GLBT communities?" Ceasing to pretend that anyone other than the Christian establishment built that wall in the first place, and that it doesn't continue to supply the bricks, would be a nice first step.

christians are assholes.

2008-02-26T02:27:00.003-05:00

There. I said it. Christians are narrowminded, hypocritical, willfully ignorant assholes. And they piss me the fuck off.

What else am I supposed to think, when people like Menjaran are outnumbered by the thousands by people like Ken Hutcherson and James Dobson? At what point can you no longer say "well, they aren't really Christians because they're not actually following the Gospel" because they've redefined the term just by sheer numbers and volume? There is a reason Christianity has bigger PR problems than Exxon-Valdez, and it's because the people who claim its mantle most stridently are, on the whole, bass-ackwards pricks who are more than happy to trample widows and orphans in their grand quest to find the correct open-sesame to the Pearly Gates.

How can a religion based on self-sacrifice and humility spawn people like Benny Hinn? How does a religion founded by a single guy running around telling people to ditch their families and skip marriage come to signify White Nuclear Families Uber Alles? How does that even happen? What kind of theological Mobius strip do you have to subscribe to to have this make any kind of sense?

At what point do you just say "Fuck this. I'm going somewhere else and I'm taking Jesus with me," and stop even bothering to identify yourself with this Christianity thing because the baby drowned in the bathwater long ago? At what point do you simply leave "Christianity" to the "Christians" and just go try to build your low-key love-your-neighbor kingdom of God somewhere else?

I feel like something has been stolen from me, and I'm not sure whether it makes me angry or sad.

I just don't know anymore.

i think this is called "dysfunctional"

2008-02-16T22:53:00.002-05:00

I think there is some kind of algorithm to determine precisely how long I can avoid going to church before my mom starts breaking out the guilt trips. So far I think I'm standing at about a month and a half, and the Significant Glances and Not-So-Subtle Statements about We Missed You At Church and Christians Need To Attend Church Regularly Lest They Start Down The Non-Straight-And-Narrow-Path started about two Sundays ago.

She is no longer accepting "hey, this is my sleep schedule now, and I don't want to throw it off" as a valid excuse. Apparently I can somehow magically not have DSPS on Sundays. Which is not to say I didn't sort-of-on-purpose finesse my sleep schedule to make going to either morning OR evening services a legitimate hardship.

To top it off, my mom has again started asking that damn "what DO you do all night?" question, so familiar to me from the pre-Outing #1 days. I have discovered she asks this when she suspects I'm up all night visiting those icky "gay" "Christian" "websites" so I can be further warped into a perverted sodomitical apostate, and this whole "sleep disorder" thing is just a sneaky cover for inching out from under her constant supervisory thumb. Fortunately, I have a very convenient excuse in the pounds of jewelry I make at night hanging on the wall.

On the upside, on the rare occasions I reset the guilt clock by going to a service, she doesn't complain about me wearing pants anymore.

In a related vein, we also disagree on what constitutes "dressy," re: my cousin's impending nuptial celebration. Apparently "dressy" does not currently exist in my closet, requiring me to go buy clothing that one of us will inevitably hate. It also precludes pants and requires pantyhose and leg-shaving. Personally, I consider pantyhose both ugly AND uncomfortable, which offends the two core doctrines of my stylistic philosophy-- it must look good, and it must not make me want to kill the person who invented the article. I'm not sure if she really believes I don't know what she's doing, or not, because it's pretty damn obvious that she's reduced to using the most feeble pretext to get me to femme it up.

Fortunately, I have my dad on my side on this one, because requiring me to buy "dressy" clothing requires him to spend money, and he is firmly on the side of not spending money if he doesn't have to.

I think what irritates me most about the War of Passive-Aggression is that it essentially requires us both to treat the other like an idiot. Not only do I have to accept that my mom still thinks I have the reasoning skills and emotional maturity of a twelve-year-old, I have to treat her like she's incapable of processing honest logic to get her to treat me any differently, and every aspect of our relationship ends up being a bargaining chip. God forbid we respect each other as adults.

two seemingly unrelated conversations

2008-02-12T23:26:00.004-05:00

Aelgifu is eleven years old. I am twenty-three.

A couple of weeks ago, I was helping Aelgifu study for her social studies test on Wilson's 14-part plan by making up silly mnemonics, while checking Wikipedia for background and clarification on what each point means. The difference between the Geneva Conventions and the Geneva Protocol comes up.

"The Geneva Convention? It's a set of agreements that a whole bunch of countries made about how to treat prisoners of war. Stuff like don't torture them."

"Does anyone actually torture people?"

I have to think about what I'm going to say here.

"... well... we do."

"We DO?"

"Um... yes. There's been a few cases lately where American soldiers have abused Iraqi prisoners or people they think are terrorists, like in a place called Abu Ghraib." I look up the Wikipedia article and opt not to show her the pictures, so I explain waterboarding as an example of what goes on.

"But how can they do that if we're not supposed to torture people?"

"Well, sometimes we get around it by saying that those people aren't really prisoners of war, they're detainees or enemy combatants instead."

Aelgifu makes a face.

"That, and there's a lot of people who say that things like waterboarding aren't really torture, so it's okay to do them."

Aelgifu kind of rolls her eyes here, since it's hard to describe waterboarding and not have it come across as something very, very mean.

"Yeah, I know. I think it's a little silly. That, or a lot of people think it's okay to torture if you do it to a terrorist. I... disagree, because I think that torture is wrong no matter who you do it to, and you know, you shouldn't lower yourself to that level, but a lot of people kind of like the idea of... revenge, I guess."

"But... that's WRONG."

"...Yeah, I agree. There's also something Congress passed where President Bush can... um, well, pretty much declare anyone he doesn't like to be an "enemy combatant," and that means they no longer have any right to things like due process or habeas corpus. Remember those?"

"Um..."

"Fourth amendment? And Fifth?"

"Oh yeah! Um... a speedy and public trial, with a jury, and they have to tell you what you're charged with!" We previously did the mnemonic thing with the Bill of Rights, obviously. "He can just do it for no reason?"

"Well, he's not supposed to, but he doesn't really have to have any hard evidence, he just has to suspect them of being a terrorist or a traitor or something. Like, technically, he could point to me, and say 'You are an ENEMY COMBATANT because you say mean things about me, and that helps the enemy!' and there's nothing I can really do about it. There's this guy named Jose Padilla..." Again, looking up the Wikipedia article on him. "President Bush thought he might be a terrorist, so they put him in a military prison, and then they kept him there for a really long time... um, it says three years... without telling his family where he was or what he was being accused of. And he might have been tortured too."

"They didn't even tell his FAMILY where he WAS? For THREE YEARS?"

"Nope."

"Or why they were putting him in jail?"

"Doesn't look like it."

"Why'd they think he was a terrorist? WAS he a terrorist?"

"Um, lemme look it up." Wikipedia! "Um, looks like he hung around with someone that had Al Qaeda connections and stuff like that, basically. Nothing on him specifically."

"Oh. That's it?"

"It doesn't say much more than that, I'd have to go looking for it. They might have had something else I don't know about."

"Couldn't he get a lawyer?"

"Not really, no. That's one of the rights he lost with all the due process stuff."

"How's he going to defend himself, then?"

"... well... he can't, really."

Aelgifu looks properly horrified, so I put in a point here. "Okay, I should point out here that all this is what I think, and Mom and Dad disagree with pretty much all of it and they'd be telling you something very different. And I'm not telling you any of this because I want to make you believe something, I want you to go look it up for yourself and make up your own mind. Make sense?"

"Yeah."

"Okay."

At some point we return to Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations.

-------

Today, Aelgifu wanted me to read her a bedtime story. (This is mainly an excuse to delay having to go to sleep and leave me alone, but hey. Quality time and all that.)

"So do you have a book?"

"Yeah, it's right over there."

I look. "... um... this one?" Please, for the love of sanity, tell me there's another book around here.

"Yeah."

"... do I have to?"

Aelgifu shrugs. She's aware that I have issues with Left Behind.

Sigh. "Aelgifu, I'm going to be honest, I think these books are complete crap. Can we please read something else?"

"Why?"

"They're... just... I think they're really badly written." And badly theologized, if that's a word, and totally devoid of redeeming value under any measure not involving recycling the paper it's printed on. To put it mildly. There's no really easy way to go into the psychotic horror that is premillennial dispensationalism with a fifth-grader who got the books from her mother.

"I like them..."

"I'm not saying you can't, but... just... can we read something else? Please?"

"I don't really have anything else I haven't read..." We look. "What about THIS one?" She pulls out the second book in the series. I give her the stinkeye, and she giggles.

We end up reading five pages of a book which according to the cover will be about a heroic mastiff named Thunder.

letdown

2007-11-21T05:14:00.000-05:00

So I have a job. More or less. I start training as a polysomnographic technician on Friday at the sleep lab that my dad's practice* works with. Basically, the job is to hook people up with various electrodes and CPAP masks and whatnot, send them off to sleep, watch the monitors and entertain yourself for the next seven hours, and then wake them up and unhook them and send 'em home.

On the one hand I'm obviously glad I can now earn some money instead of sitting at home assembling jewelry and reading politics blogs through the wee hours of the night. And it's nice to have my sleep disorder work in my favor for once. Though to be fair, it also gave me the ability to pull all-nighters without any stimulants, which was kind of impressive, but is kind of useless outside college.

On the other hand, it's sort of disappointing to know that your main qualification for your job is not your painstakingly acquired art skills, nor your scintillating wit, nor well-honed mental abilities, but a circadian quirk in your mental circuitry.

I thought at first I was compromising by looking for jobs in graphic design, which is not terribly close to my actual major but can be done with the skills acquired. And I thought that the last thing I would do is accept any job in my hometown, which I've been dying to leave for, oh, the past decade or so. And I really thought that getting my degree would be my ticket out of town. Nope. It's seven months after graduation and after two or three false starts**, I'm working at a totally unrelated job whose main appeal is the ability to wake up at three in the afternoon and watch late-night X-files marathons on TNT while working, and still in Terabil.

My main hope now is that after working six months or so I can transfer to a sleep lab in Broceliande or Avalon (which has one, fortunately, so theoretically I could work there during grad school). And while I'm working, I can use the downtime to do some artwork. I'm planning tentatively on using the time to get a webcomic version of my senior project started.

I feel kind of stupid for feeling disappointed about getting a job, and at the same time I feel kind of like I gave up too soon, and maybe I could have found something better if I'd held out and moved to Broceliande like I'd planned. Then I feel dumb for being picky and I should just be happy I have a job at all, even if it's not what I expected and not really what I want.

I also can't help but think, because The Little Voices like to creep up at times like these, that the reason I'm not getting any art- or design-related jobs is because secretly, I suck. And while I've received enough compliments and whatnot on my abilities in the past to know that I clearly have something going for me in that regard, and I've read enough to know that it's less a matter of ability and more a matter of connections and experience, it's not a hard leap from "not quite good enough" or "not good in the specific currently-marketable way" to "not good at all."

I had the same problem with portfolio reviews in my senior year, when I'd show my senior project to the visiting comics editors, who were all men with a strong preference for black-and-white serial work, and they had no idea what to do with a fully-painted female-centric graphic novel that didn't already look like someone else's style. (The closest comparison I've gotten is Terry Moore, which is awesome because I love him to death, but the older I get the less my stuff looks like his.) It clearly wasn't that I sucked, just that I was working outside the box, but it was hard to think so right when I had ZOMG FAMOUS EDITORS telling me "well, we don't really... do... this kind of stuff."

It doesn't help that I have produced absolutely no art since getting back from Broceliande, and very little in general since graduating. Terabil sucks my brain dry, I swear. In Broceliande I was seriously making up for lost time, and actually drawing for fun again, but the minute I get back home I can barely force myself to work on my commission piece for my aunt. It's extremely obnoxious.

-------
* My dad, not to give away identifying details or anything, specializes in a branch of medicine that usually has nothing to do with sleep, but all it took was one crossover ailment and now he's board-certified in sleep medicine as well as three other specialties. He also has a business degree and taught himself computer programming, apparently for fun. My dad, not to put too fine a point on it, is a nerd. At least I know where I get it.

** False start one-- got an interview, found a disgruntled employee report online for the company. False start two-- got an interview, did really well, previous occupant of position came back. False start three-- I don't even know why I didn't get it. My mom claims it was because I wore jeans to turn in the application.

bittersweet

2007-11-09T04:12:00.000-05:00

My birthday was recently, and I just got my present from Iris today (it's a stuffed animal that she made herself-- one of her hobbies is sewing plushies). I was squeefully posting about it on my livejournal, taking pictures of it sitting on my head and everything, and basically proclaiming it the Most Adorable Thing Ever (which it totally is, I've already named it and everything) and blathering to anyone online about how completely awesome my girlfriend is.

Only I can't pick it up and show it to all my family members because (a) it has little rainbow wings, and that would freak out my mom and (b) they'd wonder who it came from and I might have to Explain Things if questions got too detailed. And that would be the end of the happy and the beginning of another round of "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

One of the things I've noticed lately is that the more I spontaneously smile when I'm thinking about Iris or something she said or a goofy picture she posted somewhere, the sadder I am that I can't share that with my family. I've had to do it a lot-- closing the door or waiting until my family members are asleep or out of the house when I'm talking to her on the phone, or even talking about her to other people-- because the fact is that my obvious giddiness would raise uncomfortable questions, and those never end well. It's an odd sort of tension when happiness is an occasion for sadness.

It always makes me wonder if there will be a breaking point where I'll have to choose between loving a woman and having my family love me. The longer that the whole issue languishes in a sort of denial zone, where it's just the thing that nobody talks about, the fuzzier it gets. Sometimes I think that it's just the time that my parents need to get used to the idea, and maybe they'll eventually come around and, you know, not kick me out of the family.

It would be nice if I could really believe that.

I'm always envious (ooh, deadly sin!) of people with accepting families. Iris' family are all liberal hippie types, so they didn't care one way or another. Sorcha's dad once said he would be glad if both his daughters were lesbians (well, one out of two ain't bad). Hans' mom has practically adopted me as her lesbian daughter, for that matter. A few other gay or bi friends have accepting parents that they don't have to hide their rainbows or t-shirts or significant others from. The more I see the way things can be, the more disappointed I get that it doesn't look like that can or will happen for me.

because the comments box is only so big.

2007-10-26T02:03:00.000-04:00

Why hello there, Titration!

We are taught to read scripture in community so things don't get "off" (you know crazy talk), but... What do you do when a community reaches a stalemate?

Depends on the stalemate. If it's a matter of nobody being willing to cross the Rubicon in either direction and change their mind or loyalty to their pet interpretation, well, you're shit outta luck, but usually it's possible to find common ground to build on. Even when a group of people has opposite opinions about any given passage or interpretation, there's usually some common principle at work-- that Scripture is important and humans are fallible, if nothing else. Any interpretation is going to be "through a glass darkly" anyway, so it behooves Christians to spend more time building on the principles they do agree on than fighting pissing matches over the territory they differ on.

I get why the Church (universal) changes so slowly and why some things never change. The church is to be more of a thermostat and less of a thermometer. But then how does change in such an institution happen?

High doses of radiation. With any luck, the Church will develop superpowers and decide that with great power comes great responsibility. Of course, Uncle Ben might have to get shot before that happens.

What would God think if I got married (in a state/country that has same sex marriage)? And how would I go about that in a godly way?

For my part, I think God cares very little about the demographic classification of the person I marry, or whether it's officially stamped and approved; I'm fond of saying that when I meet the right woman, I'll call it a marriage whether the state does or not.

Godly marriage, to my mind, is built on the same foundation as any other relationship-- treat your spouse as you would any other human made in the image of God, take care of them as you would want to be cared for, etc. With marriage, in particular, you take an extra level obligation on yourself with regards to that person because the bond you have with them is that important to you. In that sense, be aware of the risks and obligations of marriage that almost always precede the rewards, and be willing to live up to them.

Is it ok if I lead chapel? I used to (like I did last year). The reason I worry it wouldn't be is because if people knew they might not want me to. But j said that's dumb. I did it before and nothing has changed about me.

Just don't stand near any metal poles during a thunderstorm, is all I'm sayin.' It'd be a shame if you were smited or anything during the service. Not that I'm implying anything, but, you know, accidental judgments on the unholy happen.

I asked my parents to tell me what questions they have so I can think about them before hand. They said they don't have questions they want to hear my story. What do I tell? What details do I leave out or in? What's the best way to tell such a story?

Start at the beginning, tell it simply and honestly, leave out the parts where they might interpret it as being anyone's "fault" (like "Remember when you didn't buy me the Easy-Bake Oven for my birthday?...") and being parents, they probably don't need any gory sexual details beyond "I realized I felt the same way about girls that my friends seemed to feel about boys."

After that, they probably will have questions. Know the statistics and the ideas to counter the wrong ones they probably have, as we all do. Don't let them blame anyone, especially themselves, for "what went wrong," since as we all know it's not a matter of anything going "wrong" to begin with.

What do I actually think? (Verses what all these very different voices from books and really different people think.)

What, hasn't the Homosexual Agenda sent you your marching orders yet? Put me down as a reference when you fill out the application, I could use a toaster oven.

Am I being a bad example because I am displaying all of my wrestling with faith and sexuality on this blog?

How do I explain what's going on in me to such divergent groups: to my family, to my church friends, to people who think christianity is of no use... with integrity? I sometimes hope my blog helps me name "what is" no matter who is reading it. To practice as much authenticity as I can muster. Am I being a bad example of faith because of my doubt?

Nope. Now, if you'd done what I did (*ahem* still do occasionally *cough* ) and sworn a whole lot and named names and basically been a whiny teenage angstbucket in the process... then we'd have something to talk about.

My role models, for what it's worth, have always been the people who have problems and deal with them in an honest, loving, and sacrificial way when necessary, instead of dealing with them with denial or destruction. The people who apparently don't have problems or doubts are fairly useless, since what the hell are you going to learn from them except that being problem- and doubt-free is probably pretty cozy?

Why am I a christian? (I've been asking this to everyone lately... Why are you a christian?) Am I being too selfish and myopic in this season of my life? What do I think of sin now? I think it's unhealthy to say "I should" But are there shoulds?
What does God want me to know about all this?

Woman, are you trying to break my blog?

What did my dream about my grandfathers wood cabinet filled with cross carvings "up for sale" mean?

You have a troubled relationship with your mother, prosperity will seek you out in the future, and you're sexually repressed. Your lotto numbers are 42-63-09-15.

not shutting up

2007-10-26T01:28:00.001-04:00

(in response to a "Why don't we just enact a national 'don't ask, don't tell' policy?" sort of thread)

What I want ... is for people just to shut up about it.

So... you want people to stop talking about their sexual orientation in public? Funny you should ask! I've been doing that for most of my life, so here's how you do it, translated for your benefit.

...

Don't tell anyone you're straight.

If put into a position where your orientation might become implied, or obvious, change the subject. If directly asked, say it's a personal matter and it's none of their business-- plead the Fifth, in other words. If someone says something to you that implies they think or assume you're straight, look uncomfortable and make some sort of vague sideways denial. Avoid. Deny. Lie, if necessary, and sometimes it will be, because some people just won't let you escape until they get the answer they want, and you cannot tell them you're straight at all costs. Your job, your family, your physical safety and that of your loved ones, your standing at church-- it's all on the line.

Police your mannerisms, clothing, and language-- try to femme it up a little when people are watching, things like crossing your legs at the knee and paying extra attention to your grooming, so people don't assume you're straight. Make sure your eyes don't linger too long on attractive women. Make extra-special effort to be as cool and aloof with women as possible, lest anyone think you're paying too much attention to them.

In conversation, omit any gendered pronouns concerning actual or hypothetical relationships and marriages-- this is called "the pronoun game," and it takes a great deal of skill to do well. Don't let it bother you when people give you funny looks because your phrasing is stilted and you keep trying to change the subject. In fact, don't ever let the conversation turn to things like sex, gender, relationships, marriage, children and parenting, religion, politics, or anything else where sexual orientation might possibly become relevant. Talk about the weather, or TV shows (but make sure you don't mention if actors are attractive, or comment on relationship dramas, or show an interest in shows about straight people like Friends or Grey's Anatomy...) or music (but make sure they don't think your interest in country, or rap, or whatever is too heterosexual) or sports (except not too enthusiastically, because then they might think you're a straight man; mention something about watching it for the tight pants). Do some community theatre-- throw them off the trail.

Make sure your browser history is cleared on shared computers, and that no one looks over your shoulder, in case they notice you've been surfing Playboy, or Focus on the Family (that heterosexual activist organization), or anything else that might give anyone the slightest hint that you're interested in women. Be very careful of your computer and email passwords. Hide your journals. Make sure you put your Maxims and Sports Illustrateds and Popular Mechanics in the bottom of the magazine basket underneath the National Geographics and Reader's Digest-- ooh, and some InStyles just to make it look good. Make sure the books and DVDs on your shelves are carefully neutral. Make sure your interior design isn't too masculine-- they'll think you're straight.

When you're around your family, everything above goes double, especially conversation topics. Make sure your comments on family goings-on like weddings and childbirths are carefully neutral; change the subject if you can. If someone asks if you have anyone you're dating, or if you'd like to have children someday, or why you're still single since you're such a nice, handsome man (because remember, you're not allowed to tell your family you're straight, lest they disown or estrange you if they don't like it!) start dodging. Tell your relatives you're too involved in your career to get into a relationship, and you haven't met a man you're interested in yet (which is true! allowing for the part where you never will). Talk about your close male friends-- with any luck, they'll light on them as Possibilities. They can think whatever they want; it's not your fault if they assume there's nothing there.

Don't mention your wife to anyone. In fact, obfuscate the fact that you're heterosexually married as much as possible. Take off your wedding ring. Avoid all mention of in-laws. Take down any pictures of her you have at your desk or work area. If she calls you, be careful that no affection shows in your voice beyond that which you would show to a friend or relative. Don't ever let anyone catch you telling her you love her.

If asked what you did over the weekend, avoid talking about watching movies and eating dinner with your wife. If you're out with [Wife] and you are obligated to introduce her to someone, make no mention of her relationship to you or refer to her vaguely as your "friend." Don't hold hands with your wife where people might see you; don't touch each other; don't walk too close. People can see you, and then they'll know you're straight, and what's more, that you have a female lover. It's rude to put it right out there and let everyone know that you enjoy penis-in-vagina intercourse. No one cares what you do in bed! Stop flaunting it!

...

[Heterosexual Married Man], *this* is what "shutting up about it" is. There is a social assumption of heterosexuality, and every time you break it in the smallest way, it's seen as a brazen political act in a way it's not when you're straight. God knows I wish it wasn't a Huge Freaking Deal every time I mention my girlfriend, or my preference for Scully over Mulder, or the fact that there will be no groom at my eventual wedding, but I'm not the one who's making stuff like this a matter of "talking about sexual preference in public" like I'm somehow telling people whether I prefer soft-focus and Barry Manilow to floggers and Nine Inch Nails.

-------

There is very little that annoys me more than people approaching living an out gay life from the standpoint of "Why you gotta flaunt it? No one cares about your sex life!" Honey, I'm hardly the one making it all about my sex life. If I was flaunting that, it would be obvious a lot sooner.

meme

2007-10-12T19:05:00.000-04:00

I've been tagged! In turn, I tag (if y'all do this sort of thing) Menjaran, Peterson and Feverdog.

1. What were you doing ten years ago?

1997 - I was an acne-riddled seventh-grader, in a fairly large and anonymous middle school, and hating every minute of it-- I lost track of most of my friends, my grades were dropping, and I was being teased for being smart, ugly, and reading "too much."

My mom had recently given birth to my youngest sister Aelgifu, who is now five feet tall-- up to my chin-- and wears a bigger shoe size than I do. How time does pass.

2. What were you doing one year ago?

Finishing my senior year of college, wracking my nerves about asking Iris out on a date, and discovering a serious love of painting.

3. What are five snacks you enjoy?

Pepperjack cheese, tortilla chips and queso, air-popped popcorn with real melted butter (if nothing else, Homestyle Pop-Secret will do), the White Rabbit milk candy Bridget got me from China, and lima beans. Yes, lima beans.

4. What are five songs you know the lyrics to?

I usually play a new CD until I can sing the whole thing, at which point I get sick of it and listen to something else.

5. Five Things You Would Do If You Were A Millionaire

1. grad school
2. stay home and paint for a year
3. donate to every charity I've ever wanted to donate to
4. feed my savings account a bit / start some decent investments
5. put some away for my youngest sister's college tuition

6. Five Bad Habits

1. cuticle-picking (Nail-biting serves a purpose, since I keep them short anyway.)
2. dropping strings and threads and bits of craft material on my floor instead of throwing them away
3. drinking Coke way too near the keyboard
4. procrastinating
5. discouraging myself

7. Five Things You Like To Do

1. read: long, dense, cheesy paperback novels, constantly and often simultaneously
2. craft: jewelry, chainmail, rugs, reconstructed clothes, you name it. I have a pathological need to keep my hands busy. I hope to hell I never get arthritis.
3. art: illustration, fine, and comics. I draw a lot of cute girls in striped socks when I have nothing else I can think of, and I have a particular fondness for watercolors and oils.
4. sleep: late.
5. Internet: it's a verb if I say it is, dammit.

8. Five Things You Would Never Wear

1. Pink, orange, and yellow. Pink on principle, and orange or yellow because they make me look like I have liver disease.
2. Poofy things. I hate poof with an undying passion.
3. Stiletto heels. I like my ankles unbroken and my dignity intact.
4. Scratchy or itchy things. Cheap wool and crappy lace underwear would come to mind here.
5. Short skirts. Not that I ever wear skirts or dresses anyway, but I'm not wholly opposed to wearing them on special occasions. But if I have to sit down in a special way in order to avoid ripping the material or flashing the room, it's not an option.

9. Five Favorite Toys

Computer, fan brush, my Seal of Approval keychain, bubbles, and Silly Putty.

10. Five Things You Hate To Do

Pose for photographs, wake up early, wash dishes, clean up animal poo and/or vomit, and make small talk with strangers.

sororizing with the enemy

2007-08-29T00:42:00.001-04:00

Precipitated by a forum post on regrets, in which mine was "Not passwording my computer." Which brought to mind a theme I've been debating the past year or so.

The older I get, and the more people who instantly react to the bare-bones story of "My older sister outed me to my parents. Twice" with "Gosh, she must really hate you!"* the more I really do wonder if Dymphna did it (either time) for her own benefit. Inasmuch as she never does anything against her own best interests, I know she did, but whether she did it maliciously or simply out of a misguided sense of responsibility to her poor little sister being led astray, or some such.

It clearly won her brownie points with the parents around those times, simply because my huge negative score of said points automatically put her in the lead, so to speak. I think she believes I'm the "favored child," ironically. I tend to be a lot more easygoing and certainly cheaper to entertain,** so I got along better with our parents most of the time growing up. She's very strong-willed and aggressive and, like my mom, has an insatiable need to have the last word during an argument, so her fights with my mom were quite frequently explosive. I think she got spanked*** more than any of us, including my brothers, which is sort of impressive considering how much it actually took to get my dad to spank us. I think I had a lifetime total of maybe two, in comparison.

She had another huge fight with my mom the last time she was home over whether she would stay home with her kids (once she has them) instead of going back to work. It was intensely bizarre to find myself on her side for once, because unlike my militantly stay-at-home mom, I don't think that putting your kids in daycare makes you a bad mother who's letting horrible baby abusers raise your kids for you. But I digress.

She had a seemingly magical ability to choose the worst possible timing in both cases-- a month before I left for my first year at college, and a month before I left for my junior year at college. Having such perfectly abominable timing once is, perhaps, coincidental. Twice... is still within the realm of happenstance, but seriously, it's not like most people expect to have a third chance. Though I wouldn't be surprised to have her try, at this rate, which is why I have her blocked on Facebook and obsessively pseudonym my entire journal.

Considered in terms of a strict cost-benefit analysis, it definitely looks like she did it deliberately.

On the other hand, she's not a completely evil person (despite what my less optimistic musings on the subject usually indicate), and in any case is self-absorbed enough to never want to think of herself as one. So it's doubtful that she would set out to do something which is pretty clearly malicious, at least not something of this magnitude. She certainly endeavored to convince me that she meant well, and I tended to believe her. Why, I don't know. Maybe my last shred of hope in basic humanity.

However, in the case of the Second Great Declosetation, she already knew damn well what was going to happen-- and had my entire journal in front of her to prove exactly what kind of mental anguish was likely to happen again. I mean, what part of "I think I might kill myself" is unclear as to how much shit I was going through?

This indicates to me that she's either supremely dense and was still trying the same "for your own good" sort of thing, or, well, is a vindictive bitch.

She's long been noted (by people other than myself) for being extremely self-centered and focused on appearances, so in particular, the second time would have been damage control of a negative reflection on her for having a queer freak as a sister-- my homosexuality, her closet. Which, honestly, I can't say I never tried to embarrass her in high school by being... myself... in front of her friends, but hey, it was funny. To me, anyway. But then, I'm weird.

This carried over into a lot of other areas of our relationship (if you can call our strained acknowledgement of shared DNA a relationship)-- I was (am!) weird, and that embarrassed her, so she would attempt to make me embarrassed about it too. Since it didn't work, and I wasn't obliging enough to change my entire way of life in order to make her more comfortable, she tried to distance herself from me as much as possible on a social level. Most people at our high school never knew we were even related until they realized (a) we had the same last name and (b) we rode to school in the same car. I suppose on that level, outing me and letting the parents take over from there would have been just a different way of trying to keep me from being visibly weird in front of people who knew her.

I think I'm willing to believe in some kind of misapplied good intentions in the first instance, but the second was either pure stupid, or pure mean.

I still, however, find her insistence the first time that she has gay friends the first time to be laughable. Besides the fact that it rings of the "But some of my best friends are black!" school of heterosexism, if she really did have any close gay friends and not just a friendly acquaintance with someone of a homosexual persuasion, they should have put her through quite a bit of hell for even THINKING about outing someone.

*Such as my entire senior project class.

** What it takes to make Dymphna happy: Kate Spade and expensive furniture. What it takes to make me happy: a paperback novel and a pair of socks. Let's play "Spot the difference!"

***Why yes, my parents DID read Herr Doktor Dobson.

misapplication

2007-08-03T21:24:00.000-04:00

Ah yes, it's that time of... life... where the bright-eyed young college graduate slowly begins to realize that despite what her parents and teachers endeavoured to convince her, in the eyes of employers everywhere, she is not a special little snowflake.

Currently my days are filled with a smattering of freelance projects, crafty pursuits (such as using up my bead stash in an effort to make shiny objects for friends), sleeping all day, sending off applications to various employers in Broceliande and Lemuria, drinking a lot of caffeine, and hanging out with Astrid commiserating about Terabil's massive amount of suckage. Not terribly productive, but enough to keep myself from feeling guilty about not being productive.

I'm considering applying for an internship at Relevant Media Group, given that I am, it seems, a "spiritually focused twentysomething." I'm not sure if I should, though, given that besides being a spiritual twentysomething I'm also a foulmouthed liberal feminist lesbian firebrand-of-sorts, and the Relevant target audience seems to be... not so much. If I recall correctly, once upon a time when they first started out and I read them regularly, their "special gay articles" could pretty much be summed up as "Poor pitiful homosexuals. Let's feel sorry for them instead of beating them with lead pipes! (P.S. God hates gay sex)."

If I was feeling snarky, I would call that "limpwristed." I also massively enjoy the assumption that the queers haven't already infiltrated their compound of evangelical hipsterdom. Trust me, Relevant kids-- "they" are "us."

So I'm sending off my new online portfolio to anyone looking for entry-level graphic design lackeys and hoping someone, somewhere, is arrested by my finesse in cover letter writing. And if anyone who reads this needs an extremely eager graphic design / illustration / making-things-pretty-in-Adobe CS2 lackey or knows someone who does, preferably somewhere in the South, let me know.

all right, now i'm pissed.

2007-07-22T17:03:00.000-04:00

Setting: the kitchen. MOM is getting ready to go to the pre-evening-service prayer meeting. The sisters AELGIFU and LIADAN are looking for food.

MOM: (to LIADAN) Are you coming to the prayer meeting?

LIADAN: Nope! (enters pantry, stage left)

MOM: Why? (raised eyebrows, Knowing And Not Liking Glance)

LIADAN: 'Cause I don't want to.

MOM: (displeased) Well, make sure you meet us at church at six. (shift target) Aelgifu? Are you coming?

AELGIFU: No...

MOM: Why not?

AELGIFU: (shrugs, looking uncomfortable)

MOM: Is prayer not important to you? Do you not like prayer?

LIADAN: (exit pantry, enter kitchen) Mom! Way to guilt trip her!

MOM: (primly) Are you part of this conversation?

LIADAN: Geez. (exit kitchen, stage left)

MOM: (exit kitchen, stage right)

Setting: LIADAN's room.

AELGIFU: (enters) Can you braid my hair?

LIADAN: Sure.

AELGIFU sits on LIADAN's knees, which she is getting way too big for.

AELGIFU: Mom does that all the time.

LIADAN: I know, she does it to me too. I hate it.

AELGIFU: Me too.

LIADAN: You know that not liking church isn't the same thing as not liking God, right?

AELGIFU: Yeah.

LIADAN: Okay. Hair's done!

AELGIFU: Thank you! (bounds out of room)

--------

I still can't fucking believe she did that. It's not enough that she does it to me, now she has to do it to my little sister, whose reasons for not leaping at the chance to go to a pre-church service church service for after going to a church service in the morning have more to do with the fact that she's ten and it's usually rather boring?

Fuck that noise. I'm twenty-two and I can argue with her when she pulls that on me. It's not fair to lay that kind of warped shit on a ten-year-old.

another coming-out

2007-07-08T03:41:00.000-04:00

So I came out to my entire family at the dinner table last night.

As a heretic, I mean.

My mom had been told that the reason my graduation announcement wasn't going in the church bulletin was because I was not a member (we'll call my parent's church Terabil Presbyterian, for future reference). She and my dad had been under the impression that I had transferred my membership from the old church with the rest of the family. I reminded them that I was the only one that hadn't done so, and when told that my mom would just tell them to go ahead and sign me up, mentioned that I hadn't joined on purpose because I wouldn't have been able to sign the Westminster Confession of Faith due to not believing in predestination.

Given her boggled and defensive reaction to what's really a pretty dry piece of doctrine, I'd hate to think of what would have happened if I'd mentioned my various other reasons for not jumping on the Terabil Presbandwagon-- the fact that I don't believe in premillennial dispensationalism, their disavowal of women in any positions of authority outside the nursery and the kitchen, and oh yes, the fact that I hate going to church. After having Ephesians something or other quoted at me I just said "Look, the reason I disagree with you isn't because I haven't thought about it. Give me a little credit here."

I'm not even really going to get into it here because frankly, I don't think it's that big a deal. Suffice it to say that I think the entire predestination-versus-free-will is another example of "looking through a glass darkly," and I find it more beneficial to me personally to view things through an Arminianist lens.

My dad didn't really say anything. Which is amusing, considering he's a deacon and is oathbound to keep his family toeing the Christian line, if I recall his ordination correctly.

It's something that's happened before when we were out at a barbecue restaurant for Ignatius' birthday, and he was asking me what I thought about the current crop of presidential candidates. I was saying "Well, I like Obama's idealism, but I also like the fact that Edwards has a health care plan--"

"Ooooh, not EDWARDS!" quoth Mother. "He's a TRIAL LAWYER. He'll put doctors like your father out of business!"

"... anyway. I'm not sure what to think about Hillary, because--"

"Pfft! HILLARY! Don't you know that--"

"Hey Mom! How about not interrupting me."

Mom looks offended. "I was just participating!"

"Uh, no, you were being rude and talking over everything I tried to say. Are you going to let me finish a sentence now?"

There was this fascinating little bit here where I sat and stared at her, waiting for her to answer, and her face went through three distinct expressions. First, she sort of snickered at me, like there was no way I could really be serious. When I kept staring, she sniffed and looked around, like I couldn't possibly expect her to answer that question! And when I continued to stare, she got an angry expression, because I, the disrespectful child, was daring to disrespect her authority. And then, she just started to sulk, because you know, she HAD been interrupting me and I wasn't letting her get around it.

This is especially funny because she'd recently gotten angry at my dad for interrupting and ignoring HER when SHE tried to speak.

I'm just sayin' it would be nice to have my opinions respected once in a while, instead of being treated like everything I think is just belated teenage rebellion.

sad grad

2007-05-21T01:48:00.000-04:00

I have come to the carefully considered conclusion that I do not want to graduate. Which sucks, because I'm not going to have a say in the matter in less than two weeks.

I already know I'll be coming back for graduate school, but I don't want to have to leave and come back at all. I just want to stay here, because for once, I'm actually happy and the thought of going "home" to Terabil makes me want to crawl under the covers and never come out.

It seems like just when I have things going well, when I seem to be doing things right-- I'm in a city I like, doing well in my art and my classes, surrounded by people I care about-- I'm just expected to drop it all and "start a life in the real world."

You know what? Fuck the "real world." I like the world I'm already in.

I keep getting asked what I'll be doing after graduation and frankly, I wish the hell I knew. I've had so much work this quarter I haven't been able to do more than a cursory job search, and while there are a lot of things I'd want to do, I've seen my roommate doing enough job searches and cover letters to know how few of those jobs would probably want me.

What I do know is that I would rather have my fingernails ripped out with pliers than spend any significant amount of time in Terabil. Unfortunately my mom would rather I stayed at home while I looked for a job, which might take months. My grandmother has also offered to let me live with her while I look for jobs in her city, which to me sounds like a much more palatable option, but my mom insists that there won't be enough space for both of us (notwithstanding the fact that I've been living in an 18x12 dorm room with another person for the past four years, so I think I can deal with a house), and besides, there's this newspaper internship they found a classified ad for in the paper, and I can live at home! for free!

"Free" is a subjective term. If there's anything I've learned, it's that living with my family has its own very special costs.

art <--> life

2007-04-27T18:12:00.000-04:00

I just entered a couple of pieces in my school's foundations exhibition (mostly because I had them sitting around, my portrait professor pointed out I could list the exhibition on my resume, and hey, cash prizes) and thought that since I post so rarely, I'd put 'em here:

Still Life with Clock and Branch, courtesy of my color drawing class two quarters back. Sennelier pastels on sanded paper, in case anyone was curious.

Double Self-portrait, my portrait midterm, white & black charcoal on toned paper. Figured some of y'all might want to put a face (or two) to the pseudonym.

behind the mask

2007-04-02T01:33:00.000-04:00

Written for my portrait class. The assignment is a double self-portrait, one of our "outer self" and one of our "inner self" or the self that we don't show to others, and we were to write a paper about what's "behind the mask."

I swear, one of these days I'll write something that's not crossposted from a class assignment...

What is behind my "mask" of public persona? What is my "inner self" which I don't allow most people, if anyone at all, to see? What do I hide from public view?

Frankly, just about everything.

I have met people with Asperger's syndrome who are more socially apt than I am. I can't take more than an hour at parties because I get exhausted and drained doing nothing more than sitting, drinking soda, and trying to make awkward small talk with people; in fact, people who are now my close friends have told me that they thought I hated them when they first met me-- I'm that bad at basic social situations. I like books more than people because books didn't make fun of me all through middle school. When I take personality quizzes, I rarely score anywhere below the top percentile on introversion, and I don't even have to jimmy the results. They simply don't make them much more introverted than I am.

What that means is that generally speaking, I present a fairly blank mask to the world. It's not so much that I control or suppress my emotions or thoughts as that I never quite learned to display them in the first place. Often this comes across as cold or disdainful to people who don't know me (or who haven't been warned by people that know me); I get asked a lot if something is "wrong" or if I'm "okay" when I'm just staring off into space, which I suppose means that my "neutral" expression often gets read as anger or sadness, or at the very least off-putting. All it really means is that it's extremely hard for me to physically interact with people I don't know well. I generally don't have a problem expressing abstract opinions or information, probably because of time spent in high school debate, and I have very little trouble being expressive in writing or artwork, but ask me about myself to my face and I won't have a damn clue what to tell you.

Most of my feelings, thoughts, and desires are going to totally fly under the radar of someone who's just "reading" my public persona, because that's about as informative as a blank check is to someone's bank balance. Growing up as a Southern evangelical Christian, I was subjected to enough well-meaning youth-group leaders whose entire profession was attempting to befriend me in order to convert me that I have a basic distrust of interpersonal relationships. I basically believe that to tell people what you want, or what affects you, is to give them a license to punish or manipulate you by withholding or obstructing your desires or using your triggers against you, so I tend to avoid revealing myself to people until I've established that they're not going to try to mess with my head. Most of the time, my "mask" is calculated, consciously or unconsciously, to attract as little attention and give away as little information as possible.

However, I'm a fantastically terrible actor. It's not in my nature to invent another persona to hide behind. I lie by omission, not commission. When I was part of the drama team in high school (ironically, I have a bizarre number of friends who are actors and performers) I worked behind the stage, running the lights. My costume was black clothing and a headset. Pretending to be another person is just as, if not more, draining in the long run as telling the truth about yourself; either way, you're telling a story, whether it's your own or someone else's. It's simpler to wear a blank mask than full Kabuki makeup.

So what is it that's "behind the mask?" Feeling. Passion. Desire and fear. Thought and belief, spirituality and sexuality, anger and joy. Anything that I perceive as potential vulnerability gets edited out of my public mask. It's all concealed by a blank facade like a stained-glass window behind a plaster coating, because the congregation is afraid of people throwing rocks through the glass.

Is it necessarily a bad thing? I would guess that most people find it incomprehensible, or at least a little sad, that I find it that difficult to open up to other people. Sometimes I wish it were easier to get along with strangers in everyday life. It's definitely hell on my love life, since it means I can flirt about as well as a brick.

It conflicts strangely with being an artist, since my artworks and stories are all based on outworkings of personal issues and conflicts, but I'll theorize that my creativity is a natural reaction to it and an outlet for all the mental/emotional turmoil that gets bottled up as a matter of standard operating procedure. I don't find my artwork personally threatening because the artwork is removed from myself and thus becomes universalized. Instead of it being about just my problems and fears, it becomes about anyone who feels that fear or struggles with that problem. It invokes compassion, not derision, because as an artist I can make someone feel what I'm feeling as well.

Art might not replace the mask, but it can provide a look through the same eyeholes.

quote meme

2007-03-25T17:23:00.000-04:00

I done been tagged to give out five of my favorite quotes. To the Ginormous Text File of Collected Quotations, Batman!

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love." - Neil Gaiman

"I'm sure there's something more to be read in a man. People dare not - they dare not turn the page. The laws of mimicry - I call them the laws of fear. People are afraid to find themselves alone, and don't find themselves at all. I hate all this moral agoraphobia - it's the worst kind of cowardice. You can't create something without being alone. But who's trying to create here? What seems different in yourself that's the one rare thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth and that's just what we try to suppress. We imitate. And we claim to love life." -- André Gide

"Once in awhile it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told to." --Alan Keightley

"Life is like a box of chocolates...a cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. You're stuck with this undefinable whipped-mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there's nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while, there's a peanut butter cup, or an English toffee. But they're gone too fast, and the taste is fleeting. So you end up with broken bits, filled with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts, and if you're desperate enough to eat those, all you've got left is a...is an empty box...filled with useless, brown paper wrappers." - Cancerman, The X-Files

KUZCO: Don't tell me. We're about to go over a huge waterfall.
PANCHO: Yup.
KUZCO: Sharp rocks at the bottom?
PANCHO: Most likely.
KUZCO: Bring it on.
-The Emperor's New Groove

(I picked all my favoritest long ones because I don't get a chance to deploy those as often.)

"pan's labyrinth" and "[local play]"

2007-03-14T03:48:00.002-04:00

From my Art & Spirituality journal. I would include the name of the play, but since it's a local production, it'd be too easy to Google it and find out where I live. Hurray for paranoia!

They aren't much alike, on the surface. Pan's Labyrinth is a story juxtaposing a child's journeys in a supernatural fairy world with the rebel resistance to Fascist Spain. [Local Play] is an exploration of mental illness and creativity on the personal scale. One involves a relatively benevolent faun, the other a malevolent reptile demon.

They both, however, nearly made me cry in the theatre.

I was once a child who invented fantasy worlds to live in when the reality around me was too dark and too big to deal with. I was once a teenager who made bargains with my internal demons because I thought they constituted my creative powers. The tightrope between reality as it is and reality as I lived it is one I have balanced on before.

In my lived experience of spirituality, I have lately been separating the truths and the falsehoods from the systems I was given wholesale as a child, comparing and contrasting it with my own experiences and my own discoveries. Sometimes I don't know if I cling to certain beliefs because I believe them true on my own terms or because I fear the consequences of proving them false. Sometimes I still come home to an empty house and think I'm the only one who hasn't been raptured because I wasn't a Real Christian. I wonder if I might have to be the only one who can see the truth, like Ofelia as the sole believer in fairies and [Protagonist] as the only one who can see the lizards, and whether something exists independent of anyone's belief in it other than my own.

To a large degree, as an artist, I still negotiate the balances inherent in trying to make my own visions into a reality to be experienced by others, and the difficulties of the process of unraveling the fabric of my own reality in order to study the threads of which it is woven. I deal with my own experience of mental illness in order to help friends who are dealing with some of the same issues, separating the real from the illusory and the true from the false, and discovering the ways in which something real may be false and something dreamed can be the truth in the end.

pretty much everything: reaction

2007-03-14T03:48:00.001-04:00

From my Art & Spirituality journal.

Perhaps as a result of my previous art history elective, Women in Art (which I loved and adored, in part because I savored the chance to make all my feminist wonkery useful for something other than pissing off my parents), one question kept nagging at me throughout the quarter:

"Where are the women?"

I saw more female nudes than female artists. I counted two women that we studied throughout the entire quarter-- Georgia O'Keefe and Frida Kahlo. These two tend to be the standard artists to use when the occasion calls for "[insert girl painter here]," so it's not quite that I quibble with their inclusion per se, but that they were the only ones. Given that the twentieth century was a time of unprecedented accessibility for female artists, there should have been far more than just two female artists to analyze.

Where was Hannah Koch and the spirituality of Dada? Romaine Brooks' somber exploration of solitude and sexuality? Eva Hesse's tactile minimalism? It bothered me in particular that Sonia Delaunay was excluded from the book's discussion of her husband Robert's work, considering that hers was similar in outlook as well as incorporating collage and fiber elements and using abstraction in a manner predating even Kandinsky's.

It bothers me, as a woman and an artist, that art history can apparently blithely exclude an entire gender's perceptions of spiritual and artistic experience without noticing anything missing.

noise meditation: reaction

2007-03-14T03:43:00.000-04:00

From my Art & Spirituality journal. I can't remember the names of the music in question.

I have a curious relationship with noise. Growing up as the second of five children, I have come to hold a certain sort of distrust of total silence. The absence of sound generally makes me feel on edge and somewhat paranoid, perhaps because I feel like my siblings or parents are plotting some evil distraction or onerous chore to spring on me at any moment. Silence is the prelude to something extremely obnoxious. Partly as a result, I can't deal with total quiet; it's necessary for music or the fan to be on for me to feel comfortable enough to focus on either working or sleeping. Whenever I return to [Terabil] from [Avalon], the first night always weirds me out because I can't hear the bizarrely comforting night soundscape of sirens and dehumidifier rattling that I'm used to.

However, I could no more "mjavascript:void(0)editate" to either the "noise music" or the Balinese ritual than I could work or sleep to the soothing sound of jackhammers. The Balinese participation game reminded me all too familiarly of family car trips which would devolve into verbal sparring matches until my father demanded to know if we'd like him to turn the car around or I put my headphones on, whichever came first. The second didn't bother me at first, until the whining drill noise came on. There's nothing less soothing than being reminded of dental surgery, particularly to someone with such a bad gag reflex that she had to take Valium to get her braces taken off without barfing on the orthodontic personnel.

Apparently pure noise simply has too many negative associations for me to ever feel up to contemplating it on the level of meditation. I don't think a mantra consisting of "make it stop! make it stop!" is very spiritual at all.

wolves and werewomen

2007-03-14T03:42:00.000-04:00

From my Art & Spirituality journal.

My senior project is centered around a girl's simultaneous experience of lycanthropy and adolescence. To this end I've had to do a lot of research into werewolf myths, which involves watching and reading a lot of horror movies and books. (My life is so hard.)

Among other things, one of the major themes I'd like to explore is the relationship between the mind and the body, particularly the division between the intellectual and the sexual. One of the major themes of most werewolf myths is a sense of mind-body dualism, particularly a Gnostic / Manichean duality in which the body represents and constitutes the base, animalistic material nature. In this paradigm, the body, as seen in the "beast" form of the wolf-man, must be subdued if possible, and destroyed if necessary, as an impediment to the essential goodness of the human. To be good is to be disassociated from the physical.

Typically, this kind of "matter is evil" philosophy tends to be fairly misogynistic, since women are supposed to be more rooted to their physical bodies than men. Women are generally tied to their reproductive systems, their menstrual cycles and their pregnancies, in a way that men are not. Women therefore tend to be equated with "The Physical," symbolically, and therefore with Evil. In many ways, for women to be considered fully human, they have to overcome their femaleness. You can interpret werewolf myths, in that sense, as The Intellectual Man overcoming or being overcome (and destroyed) by his lunarly-controlled Physical Woman Side.

In particular, a lot of Western spiritual systems tend to portray sexuality as the enemy of spirituality, especially the more intellectual or systematic the religion tends to be. I learned that lesson early as an evangelical teenager, where my job as a girl was to be the gatekeeper of sexuality. I, as a Good Christian Girl, was supposed to focus on allowing or disallowing boys access to my body based on whether he said the Magic Words (something along the lines of "Will You Marry Me?") Sexuality was something to be channeled into Approved Modes of Expression, which were mainly limited to monogamous heterosexual marriage. The idea that I might want something different, or anything at all, on my own terms, particularly not the idea that I might not want boys at all, was never presented as an option. Since I, as a female person, represented sexuality, it was all the more my burden to overcome it to be considered truly pure and spiritual.

This, not to put too blunt a point on it, is pure bullshit.

To this end, much of the story is meant to question this duality of Mind Is Good, Body Is Bad. The heroine fails at all the obvious solutions-- she can't simply deny the reality of her wolf self, she can't control or subdue her wolf self without damage to her whole self, and she can't entirely throw herself over to being totally wolfy without doing injury to her human self as well. She, as a werewolf, is neither entirely human nor entirely wolf, and living as one or the other therefore makes no sense. The solution, for her, is not to try to compartmentalize and hierarchalize the components of her nature, but to integrate them into a working whole. The body and the mind, the right brain and the left brain, the sexual and the spiritual, are not enemies, nor are they even necessarily separate parts of a larger whole, but different lenses through which to view the world and different modes in which to act.

zelana's meditation: reaction

2007-03-14T03:40:00.000-04:00

From my Art & Spirituality journal. The meditation in question had us imagine ourselves with a tail which dug deep into the center of the earth, where we released our "negative energy." Then we howled like wolves. Yeah.

I think I got the point of the meditation, but my ingrained sense of parody prevents me from seriously contemplating my imaginary tail drilling into Mother Earth to release my "negative energy."

I, personally, have always wanted a tail, if for no other reason than to have an extra hand to do things like open and close doors and hit light switches when my actual hands are full. (I've also always wanted to be telekinetic so I can turn off the lights when I'm in bed rather than having to get up to do so. Also, if I had wings, I wouldn't have to wait for the crosswalk. Sometimes I'm too practical for my own good.) When asked to imagine that I have a tail, I can think of many, many more interesting things to do with a tail-- ooh, is it pointy so I can use it as a weapon? Can I write or draw with it? Can I use it to tap people on the shoulder and then pretend I didn't do it so they keep looking around for who tapped them and meanwhile I look perfectly innocent because both of my hands are in my pockets and I'm too far away?-- than dig a hole in the ground with it. As well, being an imperturbably visual thinker, I have to first imagine what this tail looks like-- fuzzy and swishy like a husky's tail? long and stripey like a lemur tail? can it have spikes like a dinosaur?-- and by the time I'm done working out the particulars of My Psychic Tail, I'm already distracted from the point of the meditation.

This is why I couldn't ever be Buddhist. I need no outside distractions because I'm so perfectly capable of being one for myself.

I also have to admit that I relexively scorn ideas having to do with spiritual "vibrations" or "energies" or other psychic emanations. Perhaps as a result of having depression for so long, I don't really think ideas like "negative energy" are very useful, at least for me, inasmuch as they tend to give concrete existence to something that's not really real in the strictest metaphysical sense. Spirituality, for my purposes, needs to be rooted in the practical and the lived for it to be relevant. I've never felt any negative energy that I could treat as something apart from my own human energy, such as it is, and I don't think treating my own energy as something to be dumped into the lap of the cosmos for God/Nature/[insert deity and/or force of universe here as desired] to deal with is very useful, no more than offloading my own feelings and problems onto other people was helpful to anyone, least of all myself.

Also, wolf howling? Less freeing, more embarrassing for the introverts among us. I also feel sorry for the poor confused dogs who thought they were going to get to go to a party.

That said, I did like being outside for once. I wish I could have smelled the frankincense better, but apparently the smell genes I got were the defective ones. I blame my father.

spirals

2007-03-14T03:38:00.000-04:00

From my Art & Spirituality journal.

I am fascinated by spiral objects. Seashells, snails, fingerprints, the arrangements of flower petals, smoke traces in still air, labyrinths and any number of things which start at the center and twirl out into infinity.

Symbols.com lists various associations of spirals as representing water, movement, and power. Spirals have represented the sun and eclipses, stars and planets, tribe migrations and rainy seasons, leavetaking and homecoming (depending on the direction of the spiral), and randomly enough, spin drying on clothes labels and horse dung in alchemy.

One of the compositional tactics I often use I learned in Drawing for Sequential class, and it employs the Golden Section by way of a spiral. Diving the picture into spiraling sections leads one to the focus of the drawing in a journey of narrative discovery on the way. In any given drawing, a tied-back curtain may point down to a hand, which points sideways at a rug, which leads to a wall corner which leads up to a windowsill (on which sits a knife) which leads to the face of the corpse, whose open eyes point subtly to a shadow which leads to a silhouette of the killer in a mirror held by the hand of the murder victim. (The professor introduced this concept during the horror assignment.)

Paradoxically, spirals can lead one inward or pull one outward, depending on whether one is inclined to go one way or the other already. I tend to search for the infinitely vanishing center out of an introverted tendency which always leads me to look inward and deep. Someone else may follow the motion of the ray out to infinity in the other direction. Whichever direction one goes in, one is led to the conclusion that a spiral essentially has no beginning and no ending, but only places where one decides to start and end.

escapes

2007-03-14T03:36:00.000-04:00

From my Art & Spirituality journal.

A perhaps telling amount of my artwork has dealt with themes of escape, confinement, and freedom, realized or thwarted. I tend to use flying metaphors, particularly women with wings, to describe "flight" as both a literal and metaphorical concept. What would we learn if we were not confined to earth or the quotidian?

My favorite story I've now written three times, twice as a comic and once as a prose story. The last version, a four-page painted comic, is probably the closest to the "definitive version" as it's ever going to get, and it tends to be fairly popular. It involves a girl named Faith (both comic versions are wordless, but she acquired a name in the prose version) who, unhappy with her boring and static life, gets wings tattooed on her back and drives out to the mountains to jump off a cliff. The last page shows her wings of ink transforming into real ones, allowing her to fly into the distance.

My Fiction professor insisted on seeing this as a suicide metaphor, and in many ways, it can be, what with my protagonist jumping off a cliff and all. But the main idea behind it is the idea of escape from the quotidian, in this case through a leap of faith.

One of my dilemmas of faith is having a space to retreat to in order to clear my head, when I find church overbearing and stifling and home intrusive and busy. My bedroom at home used to be my space, but when I left for college, my family moved and I now share a room with my older sister, so I'm not allowed to decorate it-- and beige walls and floral fabric aren't exactly conducive to spiritual experience for me. My freshman year, I had a habit of walking down to [X] Street at midnight and sitting on the pier to think. I stopped doing that when someone pointed out that small, defenseless-looking women might not find it in the interests of their safety to walk around at night downtown.

Nowadays my occasional spiritual ritual is to make myself a cup of green tea, sit on the staircase outside my top-floor dorm room, and warm my hands on the cup while I ponder the mysteries of life, the universe, and the busy intersection I can see from my sitting place. It's a good place to people-watch while being remote enough so that I'm not bothered. Sometimes I pray to myself, but most of the time I just sit and think.

roots: the formation of faith

2007-03-14T03:34:00.000-04:00

From my Art & Spirituality journal.

I was born in [a different Southern city], but raised in [Terabil], a town which would like to think of itself as a city but is really a suburb that metastasized enough to strangle the city it grew around. Given its position in the Bible Belt, it's not entirely surprising that I was raised as a conservative evangelical Presbyterian.

My childhood was generally unexceptional in a very middle-class WASP sort of way. I have four siblings, one older and three younger, and as we all grew up it was increasingly clear that I was going to be characterized as the black sheep (or, well, the rainbow sheep in my case). We were all smart, and encouraged to get good grades, but I was the one who really liked to Question Things. Just as an indication, my older sister works at a banking corporation and is applying to law school, and my younger college-age brother is going to med school like my father. And I'm at art school majoring in comics. Not exactly the respectable, comfortable option.

My major difficulty with the insular spiritual mindset I was raised with began, not surprisingly, at puberty. Throughout twelve or thirteen years of Sunday School, I was taught to memorize verses and recite catechisms and obey teachers, and this began to clash with my increasing insistence on analyzing verses and questioning catechisms and beginning to wonder where, precisely, my teachers derived their incontrovertible spiritual authority from if we were all, as we were taught, part of the priesthood of believers. I noticed where certain assumptions conflicted with each other or didn't seem to apply to my life, or in the case of admonitions to boys not to lust after attractive girls, applied to me when they probably weren't intended to.

The older I got, the less orthodox I became, especially when I got internet access and could look up any theological or spiritual topic which interested me. I went through a short atheist phase, but eventually came back to theism; a bit of a halfhearted Wiccan phase lasted until the pervasive fluffybunny syncretism got on my nerves. I still have a soft spot in my heart for Taoism, but the lack of, well, Jesus made it ultimately unworkable for me. Sometimes you can't leave behind everything.

Nowadays I identify somewhere around Quaker Christianity, which has a strong emphasis on individual connection to God and the essential primacy of conscience over doctrine or tradition, as well as honesty, integrity, and equality, which jibes well with my sense of what religion should be about-- one's relationship to God as best expressed in one's treatment of other people, who like oneself are made in the image of God.

first meditation: reaction

2007-03-14T03:30:00.000-04:00

From my Art & Spirituality journal. The meditation is as described in Art & Fluffybunny Cosmic Lightballs.

The meditation on the universe bothered me, partly because I couldn't resist the characterization of it as cheesy New Ageyness. Feeling the earth rotating under your feet and whirling through the universe? If gravity and your inner ear are doing their job right, you shouldn't feel this at all.

As well, I don't think I'd really realized how much I distrusted organized worship until I was put in that situation. I really disliked closing my eyes because to me, removing my sight is removing the main way I relate to the world, and it puts me in a very psychologically vulnerable position. When someone tells me to close my eyes, my first reaction is to think that they're trying to put something over on me. It's not something I'll do for someone I don't already know and trust.

The idea of being graded on how open I was willing to be about my spirituality recalled way too strongly the idea of "brokenness" I grew up with, where the more "spiritually helpless" you were, the more you boasted of your (nonspecific, naturally) weakness and pathetic humanity, the more virtuous you seemed. Here are people demanding that I make myself vulnerable before them and trust them when I have no assurance that they're not going to hurt me if I do, when I have been hurt before by those I did trust that manipulated my emotions and beliefs to their predetermined purposes? Man, I don't think so.

It bothers me that my initial reaction to anything spiritual is so violently allergic, but I don't feel like there's much I can do about it at the moment.

one of those other kinds of days

2007-03-08T00:31:00.000-05:00

I actually had a really good day today.

I know. I was shocked too. That's the nice thing about being a pessimist-- the only surprises you get are pleasant ones. Particularly the better you get at anticipating the worst, which is in itself a sort of creative exercise. Pessimism is a paradoxical win-win situation-- either good stuff happens, or you get the satisfaction of being right all along.

Painting class was nice. Not only did I get a lot of work done, which nearly brings me to a finish on my still life (I had to stop early so I'd have something to do while logging out-of-class work hours) I asked the prof for a final check and he looked at my painting for a minute, and then asked "So, what's your major again?"

"Sequential art."*

"Are you a painting minor?"

"Nope. I'm a drawing minor, though." (Which is pretty similar, since "drawing" is more about the technical qualities of art than draftsmanship per se. I've done paintings for projects in drawing classes, particularly my color drawing class.)

"Have you considered a minor in painting?"

"Well, it's too late to do anything about it since I graduate next quarter, but hey. I've thought about grad school in painting, though."

"Yeah, you could do that."

So yay, that was my ego boost for the day. ^_____^

My other happy moment was, after missing Iris walking to class about four classes in a row on my way to art history (which sucked because that had been the high point of my art history class days), I caught up with her today. So that just put me in a better mood altogether.

And the BEST part is that it's nearly one in the morning and the other shoe never dropped. ... Well, I found out that my art history journal was due today, but since I'm pretty confident in my ability to pull a B in that class anyway, it wasn't a huge shoe-drop, as these things go.

So! Yes. Now I must needs return to my finals schedule, which involves finishing two oil paintings (one of which I, um, kind of haven't started yet) and my art history journal (subtitle: The Great Bullshitting Extravaganza) by Monday and my illustration class final (which involves dragons!) by next Thursday.)

I will not be sleeping much this weekend, but since I'm an insomniac who works best between the hours of 12 and 5 a.m. anyway, this probably works in my favor.

* Yes, I'm majoring in comics. And it's awesome.

public service announcement

2007-02-20T02:44:00.000-05:00

[+] Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. (I had midterms.)

[+] I'm trying very hard not to think about the fact that I'm GRADUATING IN FIVE MONTHS AND I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M GOING TO DO HOLY SHIT SNOOZE BUTTON! SNOOZE BUTTON ON LIFE!

I know that I definitely don't want to go back to live in Terabil, because Terabil is the sort of place that eats your soul and makes it impossible to leave. It's like the Sarlacc Pit of employment opportunities-- you can make just enough to make it there, and even live well there since it's relatively cheap as far as cost-of-living goes, but the opportunities for advancement even for a normal non-creative job are few and far between. And I did not just spend four years in art school to be a cubicle monkey.

Not to mention the fact that I would rather chew off my right arm than be forced to live within supervisory distance of my immediate family.

[+] I know that at some point I want to come back for my MFA, but I don't yet know in what. I'm seriously considering coming back to get it in painting instead of sequential art because I'm completely in love with my basic painting class right now.

[+] Iris and I are still dating, but not seriously. She isn't looking for a serious relationship, and while I wouldn't turn one down I don't have the time or energy to work on developing one, but we make time to hang out on weekends and I usually see her on my walk to my art history class. It's sort of a relief not to have to think about OMG Are We A Couple Now sorts of things and just enjoying her company. And, you know, the earlobe nibbling and random kisses and whatnot are a rather nice bonus too. Mmm, earlobes.

[cheesy moment] I was over at her dorm last Saturday after helping out on Hans' senior project film shoot (my role was Anonymous Office Lackey Windexing the Plastic Plants in the Background) and when I had to go walk home we kissed goodnight. About six times. She almost didn't let me leave. Heehee. [/cheese]

[+] Helga dumped Hans the day before his birthday back in December. On Valentine's day, of all days, he officially started a New And Improved relationship with the heretoforth named Heather, whom he has been acquainted with for years and who only recently he started getting to know in earnest because of a shared interest in Japanese monster movies and the fact that she's in my art history class and is also my next-door neighbor, so she hung out around me a lot, and anyone who hangs around me a lot eventually ends up hanging around Hans a lot too.

They are a very well-matched couple, and I'm happy for them both because they're both my friends, but if they don't stop making out in front of me I'm going to start carrying a bucket of cold water around when I'm with them. I am violently allergic to PDA, particularly the kind that produces wet smacking noises. Eurgh.

[+] I (sort of) cleaned my room today. Go me!

stuff

2007-01-16T19:36:00.000-05:00

I just went through and labeled all the old entries from resipiscence. Reading one's old journal entries is WEEEEEEIRD. I swear a lot more than I used to.

Also, as suggested, I swear I'll get around to talking about Iris at some point. I'm still collecting neurons for an entry. It's going well, though, if you were curious. ^_^

art & fluffybunny cosmic lightballs

2007-01-09T18:06:00.000-05:00

If you do not like the swears, you may prefer to skip this post.

Fuckin' hell. I read the professor reviews for Spirituality & Art, but no one mentioned that this teacher is OFF HER ROCKER. (Okay, one said she was "cuckoo." I thought that meant "mildly absentminded in an endearing way," not "why is this woman allowed out unsupervised?")

I signed up for the class thinking it was going to be a class on how artists' spirituality and religious beliefs influenced their work and certain movements. I didn't expect to have to give the teacher an account of my own "spiritual journey" for a journal grade and spend an entire first class not even MENTIONING religion until one student asked if we were allowed to talk about God. Most of what she was talking about was Happy Shiny New-Agey "feeling your connection with the cosmos" crap. This is the ultimate "I'm spiritual but not religious" class, and it's beginning to annoy me after one session.

I have to admit that a major part of my annoyance right now is the journal assignment. I generally find class journals not just useless, but distracting, because while I'm spending time "reflecting on lessons," which means coming up with a page or so of bullshit about how Russian Suprematism touches my soul, or addressing journal topics like "who are my hero/ines?" and "where am I on my spiritual journey?", neither of which I feel like talking about to a TOTAL STRANGER, I could be doing something productive like, you know, working on the research paper she also assigned us.

This journal isn't just that, but it's almost like an entire class notebook. Except it's not, because our class notes (which, well, note-taking isn't my strength or my style) are supposed to be kept separate from them. The contents of this journal are to include:

Title page, contents page, syllabus, glossary, index, and that sort of thing¹
Homework assignments
Study skills tips ²
Reading Notes ³
Research notes ⁴
Class notes, numbered and dated.⁵
Special things that you copy from your class notes, like inspirational words, new and useful concepts, creative developments on topics handled in the class ⁶
Journal topics ⁷

1. This is supposed to be an actual book-type journal. The last time I had to do this was back in Fiction Writing, where it actually made a lick of sense. In an art history course this is pointless. Not to mention the fact that I usually cut up my syllabus to post the class schedule on my wall.

2. Like what?

"Don't fall asleep during the class meditations. This is considered Bad Form."

"Listen in class. If you're lucky, she'll say something that's objectively provable, like 'Kandinsky was raised Russian Orthodox.' Chances are slim that she'll actually discuss how this impacted his art, or that he was also interested in Theosophy, or, you know, what Theosophy was at the time and ths symbology and methods it uses, or basically any of the things I took the class expecting to learn about. No, this is all about YOUR Spiritual Development as an Artist."

3. Which I don't take, because I have this thing called reading comprehension where I actually remember what I read.

4. Dude, I don't think she really wants me to cram my illegible scribbled outlines and random phrases, scraps of paper with noted-down call numbers, and highlighted photocopies in my Happy Shiny Spiritual Travel Diary.

5. Let's talk about the last time a teacher wanted to see my nice, organized class notes. No, really. Let's.

I took Bible class in high school, and Mr. Trunk did notebook checks where he expected to see all of our class notes. Our notes were graded according to neatness and content, and if we didn't write down every golden word he put on the overhead, we were penalized. We were also supposed to collect all our old quizzes and tests to use as study guides. All this was to make sure we had something to study for the tests and final exam.

I did none of this. And I did it blatantly. When Mr. Trunk asked why I wasn't taking notes in class, I would tell him quite clearly it was because I never used them. My notes consisted of noted-down dates and names with very little else. Whatever quizzes survived to the end of the class were the ones I happened to find folded in my textbook. Naturally my notebook grade was something like a D, and yet I still made a decent B in the class-- because I scored well on all the tests, even without obsessively taking notes and hoarding quizzes.

The lesson I learned from this is to do what works for me, not what I'm told should work for me. Which is why I hate Notebook Checks, which is essentially what this assignment is.

6. WTF does this even mean?

7. The journal topics are pretty boilerplate things, like "who are your heroes/heroines?" "what are your current spiritual practices?" "what's your spiritual background?" We also have daily class "meditations" we're supposed to reflect on.

This bothers me a lot, partly because it's so New Agey in tone (the first class' meditation was all about feeling the earth rotating under your feet and whirling through the universe, which, frankly, if gravity and your inner ear are doing their job right, you shouldn't feel this in any physical sense) and partly because my extreme distaste for the Church right now is spilling over into any kind of organized group spiritual activity. I don't think she'd like it if my reflections on the class meditations consisted of what a nice nap I had that day.

I knew from reading class reviews that the meditation thing was a regular feature, and as long as it stayed nonsectarian I was fairly game, but I reacted with a distrust that was surprising even to me the moment she told us to close our eyes. To me, removing my sight is removing the main way I relate to the world, and it puts me in a very psychologically vulnerable position. When someone tells me to close my eyes, my first reaction is to think that they're trying to put something over on me. It's not something I'll do for someone I don't already know and trust.

I don't think I'd really realized how much I distrusted organized worship until I was put in that situation. The idea of being graded on how open I was willing to be about my spirituality recalled way too strongly the idea of "brokenness" I grew up with, where the more "spiritually helpless" you were, the more you boasted of your (nonspecific, normally) weakness and pathetic humanity, the more virtuous you seemed. Here are these people demanding that I make myself vulnerable before them and trust them when I have no assurance that they're not going to hurt me if I do, when I have been hurt before by those I did trust that manipulated my emotions and beliefs to their predetermined purposes? Man, I don't think so.

I'm honestly afraid that this class is going to put a really bad connotation to any kind of spiritual activity to me, and it's going to exacerbate my natural skepticism and distrust of group worship/meditation and turn me into a raging atheist, or at least a fairly pissed-off agnostic. It bothers me that my initial reaction to anything spiritual is so violently allergic, but I don't feel like there's much I can do about it where I am at the moment.

happy holidays...?

2006-12-31T02:53:00.000-05:00

So Christmas with my family was about the same as it always is. Most of it was okay-to-boring, some of it annoyed the hell out of me, I still hate Terabil, and I got presents.

I totally had the "war on Christmas" argument with my mom, and I swear she lifted every single phrase she said directly from Fox News.

[+]"But it's CHRISTMAS!" Yes, along with plenty of other holidays, hence, Happy Holidays.

[+] "America was founded as a CHRISTIAN nation!" No it wasn't. And the Puritans banned Christmas, if that's what you want to invoke.

[+] "It's not right to remove Christ from Christmas!" He's not part of all the other holidays, in case you haven't noticed, and if you want to blame someone for removing Jesus, talk to the corporations flogging commercialism.

[+] "They're excluding Christians!" Um, Christmas is INCLUDED in the Holidays from whence the greeting comes. Unlike all of the other holidays being included in Christmas, which seems to be her bizarre point.

I gave up when she started just repeating herself.

I also had a harrowing experience visiting Ignatius' apartment on the way to visit relatives-- my dad, he and I went to set up his new game table while the others went separately to my grandmother's. His apartment was utterly foul-- I've seen cleaner homes inhabited by crazy cat ladies on animal rescue shows. I'm a clutterer myself, and my half of the room gets pretty messy around finals, but I don't leave weeks' worth of empty soda cans, unwashed dishes, pots encrusted with petrified, ramen noodles, moldy coffee mugs, stale food, dead/dying houseplants, mounds of dirty laundry, food wrappers, giant pickle jars half-full of brine (?), and assorted detritus covering every available surface and floor. I'd heard that his roommate's girlfriend had refused to enter the apartment, and I don't blame her-- this place was a certifiable health hazard.

While doing the dishes (because I am a selfless, loving sister, naturally) I discovered a new taxonomical kingdom in a travel mug after I pried off the lid and the Creature inside spewed mold spores at me. I called it "WHAT THE FUCK--?! IGNATIUS! YOU ARE DISGUSTING! EEEEWWWWW!!!"

In more interesting news, I found numerous Bud Lite bottlecaps on the ground whilst doing the initial trash sweep. I quietly pointed this out to Ignatius and was met with "Oh yeah--" as he reached into his closet, pulled out a half-empty bottle of what looked like cheap vodka, and stuffed it deep into the trash bag while making sure our dad wasn't looking. There was also an ashtray full of cigar butts on the porch. This wouldn't be an issue, obviously, if Ignatius weren't underage.

I thought about it later, trying to figure out what, if anything, to say to him about it, and realized that the only thing I hadn't seem was condom wrappers or boxes. While I hope that's because he's either not having sex (possible, but if he's drinking and smoking, both of which were fulminated against at least as much as premarital boinking...) or actually disposing of that trash (given the state of his apartment and the fact that he failed to throw away the incriminating evidence of alcohol and tobacco... not bloody likely), I'm not holding my breath on that account.

Ignatius has not, to my knowledge, been informed of Teh Gay, and frankly I'm not especially keen on telling either of my brothers given their propensity to describe things they don't like as "gay" or "homo." With that in mind I'm not entirely sure how to tell him that if he's been having sex sans protection I'm going to remove his gonads and keep them in a jar until he's proven he can use them responsibly without encountering questions of what (or who) I've been doing.

Speaking of which.

During one of the rare occasions in which our family is all in one place and talking civilly, we got onto the subject of parents setting up kids and how my mom likes to pick the blandest, most inoffensive potential partners for us on the grounds that they're "nice Christian boys/girls." I was stupid enough to actually stick around for this, so it was my own damn fault when my grandmother piped up with "So tell us about YOUR ideal type, Liadan! What do YOU like?"

I'm pretty sure the look on my face was priceless, in retrospect, since I spent about ten seconds trying to figure out how to extricate myself without revealing my propensity for geeky redheads with hourglass figures. I squeaked out something about "I don't think so... because.. you'll just ignore it and pick someone really boring and unappealing!" before I suavely made my escape to the kitchen.

It's sort of uncomfortable because there's a distinct pattern of my grandmother preferring me over Dymphna, and giving me proportionately more attention and affection than her. Essentially it's because I tended to be less confrontational and acquisitive growing up, and thus looked more like the Good Child by default. It's ironic given that Dymphna fits the definition of success by my family's standards for women far more than I do; she has a respectable, well-paying job, dates nice white boys, acts and dresses in a stereotypically feminine manner, and is largely conservative in her politics and social outlook. Basically the only thing that ruins it for her is that she's a materialistic snot.

Ah, family togetherness.

textbook case

2006-11-15T19:00:00.000-05:00

When I was little-- eight or nine, just before puberty basically-- I held the firm belief that everything useful to know could be found in a book. (Nowadays I'm more likely to believe that it can be at least located via Google, though it may be behind a subscription wall.)

At the same time, I wondered why all the other little girls were always running around talking about wanting "boyfriends." I had boys who were friends, of course, but I wasn't precisely sure why someone would want a "boyfriend." What, exactly, would you do with one that would be different from just having a boy friend, or a girl friend for that matter? Was I missing something here?

So at that age, I sincerely believed that one day, I would receive a book, in the mail perhaps, entitled "How to Have a Boyfriend," that would clear up this mystery for me.

Maybe I'm just gay because my book got lost in the postal system.

I think at this point I could probably use the companion volume, though. Starting with When To Tell If You Can Use The G-Word, 'cause honestly, I can't tell.

My friends will refer to Iris as my "girlfriend," albeit in a joking tone, and tell me I can't look at cute girls anymore because I'm "taken." I'm more along the lines of describing it as "sort of dating," for lack of a better term, even though none of the times we've been together could be really described as a traditional date (...inasmuch as anything lesbians do can really be traditional, I suppose). We've both hung out with each others' friends, and sat around watching movies together. I'm at the point of not worrying too much about the specific terminology, "going with the flow" and whatnot.

I think in a lot of ways, dating Hans was the merest of training wheels when it came to relationships. I'm totally thrown by the simplest things now because it matters now in a way it didn't before. Like, do I call her and see when she's free, or see if she calls me, because I don't want to be stalkery, but I also don't want her to think I'm not interested? Didn't matter with Hans, both because he usually called and because I always had an underlying sense that that relationship wasn't the most important thing ever. Do these jeans make my butt look fat? What if she LIKES fat butts? I told Hans to fuck off if he didn't like what I was wearing, but I really want to look nice to Iris because it matters to me what she thinks (though the available evidence suggests she doesn't have a problem with how I look).

In other words, I'm completely acting like a girl. There goes the "wanting to be a man" part of my mom's Theory of Lesbianism.

I might not get to see her this weekend, because we both have craploads of finals to finish. This makes me sad, because this is the last weekend before winter break and then I won't see her again until January.

I'm hoping to work in a viewing of But I'm a Cheerleader before then, because she hasn't seen it. I will MAKE time, dammit.

a very small update

2006-11-06T01:02:00.000-05:00

She squeaked when I kissed her on the cheek.

It was so cute.

opportunity knocks

2006-10-25T02:56:00.000-04:00

I kind of have a date. Or I have a kind-of-date. Whichever it is when you have a culinary gathering for your natal festivities and invite a girl you've been trying to get together with for a while. I don't know if it's technically a DATE date, but it serves the same general purpose, so I'll go with it.

--------
Backstory: Here's where it gets complicated. Feel free to skip it if you like. Pardon my rambling, this is all exciting for me and I know people who'd like to hear the gossipy bits.

This Girl (call her Iris) whom several mutual friends have told me I should get together with. I know that she's (a) single and (b) gay, which eliminates the two major reasons why girls are usually unavailable to me. Being the proto-stalker I am, I looked up her profile on Facebook and basically, she's a big ol' geek, like me. And she ain't bad lookin', either. So after the couple dozenth repetition of "You should really get together with Iris," and constantly seeing her around at the strangest places (like Waffle House at four a.m. and a local Mexican restaurant the day after getting back to school, among a ton of other incidences) and wondering if Someone was trying to tell me something, I bit the bullet and sent her a message on FB asking if she'd like to hang out sometime.

The main friend we had in common, Chuck, informed me that she doesn't check her FB or her school email (to which FB reports) very often. He said he gave her my phone number. I waited around for a week or so with no response, and figured that meant "no thanks."

Now, my roommate Maureen (whose boyfriend Mercer knows Iris) knows Iris' best friend, who told her that Chuck was not necessarily in Iris' good graces at the moment (truth be told, I'm sort of annoyed with him as well, for various reasons) and that it was likely that she'd just ignored him. So Maureen asked her to pass the message along again, and so about two weeks after I sent the original message I got a reply saying of course! Iris would LOVE to hang out sometime! here's her e-mail, and her deviantArt site, which she checks often! and her room number if I'd like to stop by anytime! (She writes really girly. I'm not even including the smileys.)

(Maureen chewed Chuck out for screwing things up. He implied that it must be my fault somehow. He is now officially banned from matchmaking capacity, because Maureen is really scary when she's mad. I've seen it. Don't piss the bubbly little blonde girl off if you want to keep your head.)

So I e-mailed her asking about schedules and gave her my screenname, and she IMed me later while I was away so I got hers. Thus establishing something like five routes of communication. Ah, technology.

Anyway, I was going for coffee during midterms with Maureen and my friend Helena and she happened to be online, so I asked her if she'd like to come along. Alas, it was midterms, and she was busy. (I was too, at that point, so I didn't blame her.) Maureen has made it her mission to Get Me Laid, Or At Least Pretty Close To It, so she suggested (read: browbeated me into) setting up a group thing that I could invite her to. Given that my birthday is fairly close, I decided to throw myself a pizza party and sent her an email inviting her, to which I got a "Count me in, I'm glad we finally get to meet!"

So. Yay. ^_^
-------

Before all this happened, I had no idea that relationships between two people would involve so much strategy and networking on the part of so many other people. It struck me during all this how... social dating is. It's not just about the two people involved; all these social connections are intertwined based on who knows who and what their relation to each other is. It's hard for me to conceptualize, being someone who builds friendships one by one, but there it is in all its six-degrees-of-separation glory: society.

In this sense, gay marriage bans can be constructed as an attempt to exclude gay people and their relationships from the community, partly to delegitimize them, since relationships outside the general social network and the auspices of legal obligation can be seen as less "real", and partly to make it harder for them to exist at all-- I wouldn't have known Iris even existed were it not for the people I knew that did know her, and it wouldn't have gotten to even this tentative stage were it not for the encouragement and social support of my friends. (I was frequently threatened with bodily harm for being waffly on sending the invitations.)

It was hard for me to take the initiative. Part of it is just my extremely ingrained introversion; it's hard for me to reach out to people period. I frequently say that I make all my friends by accident. Part of it is also, frankly, women aren't socialized to make the first move. I just got tired of sitting around waiting to be noticed.

As well, I was/am concerned about the repercussions of having what will almost certainly be a relationship closeted from my parents. Lying sucks hardcore, I'm really, really bad at it, and I've developed an attachment to the Quaker idea of integrity (blame Peterson for making me into a wannabe Friend) as an ideal for me.

I dislike the implications of going against their stated policy of not wanting to "financially support a gay lifestyle." Up until now I could just say "well, I'm not doing anything really gay, like, oh, dating a woman, so I don't feel overly guilty about being out since my actions are basically congruent with their expectations otherwise." If I end up dating a woman, though, I have to deal with this.

And outside Teh Gay Issue, I love my parents. I mean, they're sending me to college sans loans, they bought me a car, they get antsy when I don't call home frequently enough... if I wasn't gay, there wouldn't be a problem in the world. If I don't push the issue, if I stay in the closet for their peace of mind, everything functions fine. I wonder in my more insecure moments why I have to fuck everything up by being selfish enough to insist on my sexuality.

Which is, I suppose, the sticking point. All this material and emotional support-- essentially, my parents' love-- is predicated on the assumption that I'm not "being gay." Am I willing to risk that? What matters more to me: being gay, or being part of my family? Obviously, it sucks that this even has to be a choice, but this is indeed how it stands unless my family has a radical change of heart. Or unless I magically wake up craving penis one day. (Ask Hans-- penis is, at best, something that can be overruled by extraneous factors, like friendship and/or sheer lonely desperation. It's not exactly a selling point for me like, say, boobies.)

When I had no prospects, it seemed like I was going to go crazy because I was beginning to consider that I might never have any. I almost want to say I sent the original message because I subconsciously believed that I was going to get rejected anyway, so it wouldn't matter. Now that this might not be the case, it looks like I'm going into reflexive self-doubt about the whole thing.

I'm almost worried that outside of just being a weirdo whom she might not like anyway, which is indeed a distinct possibility, I might subconsciously sabotage things just so I don't have to deal with the questions.

But... the chance, the mere possibility... it makes me happy. I sit around with a goofy look saying stupid things like "She really talks about me all the time?" (Which is apparently what Helena's friend who knows her said.) I run down to Hans' room just so I can tell someone "I got an Ijavascript:void(0)M from Iris and it says [blah blah blah] and she put a smiley at the end and yaaaaay!" I discovered I bite my thumbs when I'm excited and nervous.

This... feels real to me, in a way that even dating Hans didn't. It's hard to say what I mean.

I guess I feel like crap for feeling happy, essentially.

no news is good news

2006-08-28T06:46:00.000-04:00

I'm not dead! Just lazy. And bored. And writing about being bored is boring, so I can only imagine how much more so reading about someone else being bored is. Therefore, I spare you.

Otherwise, my back hurts and I hate the color beige, Terabil, and being single, not necessarily in that order.

church guilt

2006-07-31T02:23:00.000-04:00

My mom is currently giving me the silent treatment. Which is a bit of a misnomer because she still does speak to me, albeit as enthusiastically as she would a telemarketer. But essentially her communication to me is limited to necessary speech such as "pass the salt" and lots of Significant Glances.

I always tell my mom that she should really be Jewish because of her well-worn repertoire of guilt-trip strategies. She denies this vociferously, but Ignatius agrees with me and my father refuses to comment, which is quite often his way of agreeing. To be honest, I'm not sure whether she denies it because she realizes that admitting that she uses emotional manipulation as a parenting device would seriously undermine her authority, or if she actually doesn't realize that she does it.

The current situation involves church, or specifically my conspicuous lack of enthusiasm for such. This one is particularly fun for my mom because she gets to invoke not only her own personal wrath, but that of the Almighty as well. Righteousness: fun for the whole family! If you don't count the lavender sheep.

Since the dissolution of the previous church, my parents have ramped up their ecclesiastical involvement. Church used to be largely limited to a Sunday morning pilgrimage downtown; now it involves both morning and evening services as well as various weekday events in a Baptist church that lends the congregation space to meet until their expensive new building (which if I recall the plans correctly is just as big and plain and ugly) is built. My dad is a deacon and thusly also an usher; my mom is on several committees and very involved socially.

I used to be bored by church. Now I actively hate it.

I was raised Presbyterian, so it's not as if the austerity of the architecture and the worship is unfamiliar to me. But the old church was one of Terabil's historical features, so there was some wood carving and some vaulted ceilings to keep my visual brain busy. The Baptist building is almost painfully bare. It's all white with just enough crown molding to keep it from looking low-rent, wth the standard bench pews with cheap cushions. I spent one of the last services staring at the back of my former Spanish teacher's dress trying to figure out why it was cut like it was for utter lack of anything else to think about.

I used to bring my sketchbook and draw random pieces of the church and the backs of peoples' heads. However, not only did my mom start getting on my case about not paying attention, I realized that I'd run out of architectural elements to draw and every woman in the congregation has a simple variation on the same curly-helmet-shag hairstyle. (The men simply have one haircut and varying amounts of hair.)

I started bringing a book with me, but then I couldn't really claim I was even halfway paying attention to the sermon. Particularly not if I happen to be reading the Anita Blake series. Nothing says "I'm not paying attention" like covers that basically scream "Lookit me, I'm reading about vampire nookie!"

Today, I brought nothing with me and spent pretty much the entire service vaccilating between making snarky mental commentary on the sermon and staring in fascination at an old man with particularly protuberant ears.

(If you want me to pray for my sins you'll need to give me more than five seconds before the corporate intercession... wow, he's got big ears... Hmm. Why yes, I'm quite acquainted with the phenomenon of being in a philosophical minority and having to defend my position, but I don't think my quandary is quite what you're getting at... dude, I swear, he should be able to fly with those things. Like Dumbo...)

It's gotten to the point where I can't even attend with the possibility of getting something spiritual out of the service. I go purely because my mother makes life difficult for me if I don't. The entire experience for me is one of bitterness. After having my last journal with its inherent trust and vulnerability broadcast among the Good Christians and handed to my parents to beat me with, it's hard for me to view groups of gathered church folk as anything but a bunch of vicious hyenas waiting for me to let my guard down so they can drop-kick me through the goalposts of hell again.

Granted, they're vicious soul-footballing hyenas who mean well, but still.

So when my mom wakes us up for church on Sunday mornings, it might not be entirely an accident if I fall back asleep and I'm not dressed when everyone's ready to leave. And forgive me if I go out to the craft store or the bookstore and accidentally get back just a little bit after everyone's left for the evening service. Oops. Guess I'll attend the Happy Shiny Christian Borg Assimilationfest next week.

Obviously my mom notices when this happens, oh, three weeks in a row and starts giving me dirty looks of Why Must You Hate God And Your Mother So Much? So I dutifully drag my evil pants-wearing, blue-haired, grumpy self to Heaven's Vacant Lot and mostly refrain from fantasies involving nocturnal breaking and entering resulting in colorful Rococo triptych murals where the sinners in Hell are all prominent evangelical Republicans.

Now my mom is cranky because I didn't realize that "If you're living under my roof, you have to go to church" meant both morning AND evening services.

I'm not entirely sure this is a bad thing. If she really wants to leave me alone, far be it from me to disabuse her from the notion that this is a form of punishment.

ARGH!

2006-06-15T06:41:00.000-04:00

*kicks layout* Anyone want to tell me why my posts are floating below the sidebar? 'Cause I've been trying to figure it out for the past half hour and no answers are forthcoming.

[edit] I think I fixed it, plus a couple of other snafus (like the right bit of titlebar being a random one pixel out of alignment). At least, it looks fine in Firefox, safari, and IE 5 for Mac OSX. Thanks to Brucker for the tips.

Apparently, Blogger's CSS was interacting with my code in unexpected ways, so I had to poke around to find out by accident that a checkbox under "settings" -> "formatting" allows one to remove the (div style="clear:both") to enable float alignment.(Frankly I don't understand why the tag is there to begin with, but it probably has to do with the default templates.) After that it was checking widths and tweaking.

It was a bit of an adventure given that this is the first tableless layout I've worked out pretty much from scratch, and the first layout I've done in a while period. Now I want to use the excuse of updating my gallery site to redo that one as well.

thought exercise: why am i gay?

2006-06-10T01:46:00.000-04:00

It strikes me as funny that when reading through various conservative explanations of why someone "is turned homosexual," none of the reasons ever seem to really apply to me. There is practically no environmental (in the sense of non-biological) reason why I should be attracted to women instead of men. I am, as it were, something of a statistical outlier.

According to Paul Cameron, I must have:

1. Had a homosexual experience, in childhood or adulthood, especially with an adult or authority figure.

As far as I can remember, I've had no sexual experiences with adult women or girls at any age, consensual or not. Which is disappointing, really.

2. A dominant, possessive, or rejecting mother.

Apparently your mother must strike a careful balance between caring too much and not caring enough, lest she be either "possessive" or "rejecting." This strikes me as one of those things where you can pretty much shoehorn ANY mother into a reason why one is gay. Hell, you could peg June Cleaver as possessive if you wanted to.

But no, mine was practically a textbook-perfect mother. Though she did become fairly rejecting after she learned of Teh Gay.

3. An absent, distant, or rejecting father.

Okay, if I had to peg a reason, this could be one. My dad isn't hugely demonstrative in his affection, and he spends a lot of time in his office apart from the rest of the family. I recall being fairly resentful of my dad's reclusiveness when I was younger.

However, this is a little deceptive. Ironically, I realized that the things I complained about him are fairly strong presences in my own personality, and if I kept resenting him for it, that would indeed make me a hypocrite. I'm probably even more of a reclusive introvert than he is, and I've been described as "cold" or "distant" by more than one person in part because I'm not touchy-feely or overtly affectionate with most people.

The thing I came to realize about my dad is that he demonstrates affection in different, smaller ways that might fly under the radar if you're looking for blatant, obvious demonstrations. Generally speaking, he tends to do it with gifts-- not necessarily in a 'buy-my-affection' sort of way, but in a 'thinking of you' way. He always brings my siblings and I little things home from business trips, especially the kind of weird nifty gadgets that physicians usually get free from pharmaceutical companies. Among other things, I got a Viagra booklight, which totally amuses me beyond all reason, and a stapler with some medicine's name on it that he gave me solely because it was blue and he knew I'd like it for that reason.

I have a clear memory of going downstairs in the middle of the night to ask my dad what DNA was (when I was maybe six or seven) and getting a complete lecture in response, including little circles drawn on my arm in ballpoint pen to illustrate "cells." So while he may have been reclusive, it wasn't as if I didn't have the option of bearding him in his lair.

All this insight came after I'd realized I was gay. So I no longer feel rejected by my father, yet I still like chicks. Odd.

4. A parent or sibling with homosexual proclivities, particularly one who molests a child/sibling of the same sex.

Dymphna has had boyfriends. Ignatius and Sigismund call everything they don't like "gay." Aelgifu went through a phase of putting up Jesse Carter posters everywhere and profaning my stereo with his CDs while dancing to it. It seems that of my siblings, I'm the only queer one.

Presumably, after twenty-odd years of marriage and five children, plus a very negative reaction to the news of one of said children's queeritude, my parents are also heterosexual.

None of the above molested me.

5. Lack of a religious home environment.

I had to fight tooth and nail to wear pants to church, if that demonstrates my religious home environment well enough.

6. Divorce.

Nope.

7. Parents who model unconventional sex roles.

My father is a doctor and sole breadwinner, while my mother was a nurse before quitting to become a stay-at-home mother. The only unconventional thing about their roles is that my mom mows the lawn and my dad doesn't watch sports.

8. Condoning homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle– welcoming homosexuals (e.g., co-workers, friends) into the family circle.

HAHAHAHAHAHA. Haha. Ha. Eheh.

9. Unusual sexual experience, particularly in early childhood, including precocious or excessive masturbation, exposure to pornography in childhood, depersonalized sex (e.g., group sex, sex with animals), and/or sexual interaction with adult males (for girls)

For one thing, let's define "excessive masturbation." In many circles, girls masturbating AT ALL is excessive, ipso facto. Personally, I define "excessive masturbation" as "carpal tunnel syndrome and/or rug burn in the applicable areas."

At any rate, I was not a precocious or excessive masturbator, I was not exposed to pornography in childhood (unless you count National Geographics' topless-indigenous-women pictorials), nor did I have childhood sex with animals, adult men, or large groups of people. In fact, I had an obnoxiously sheltered childhood.

10. Cultural influences, including a visible and socially approved homosexual sub-culture that invites curiosity and encourages exploration; pro-homosexual sex education; openly homosexual authority figures, such as teachers; societal and legal toleration of homosexual acts; and/or depictions of homosexuality as normal and/or desirable behavior.

Nope. I barely knew gay people existed, except as some distant and ineffable threat somewhere Out There, involving Other People.

So what made me gay?

My guess? The Internet, sunspots, select few of Nostradamus' prophecies, and Al Gore.

normalcy and blue

2006-05-16T02:54:00.000-04:00

I think the biggest difference between me and the majority of my peers as a teenager, middle-school era, is that I never wanted to be normal.

Not to say that this was a conscious choice. As the refrain goes, I didn't wake up one morning and decide I wanted to be a freak. Not that I particularly enjoyed being made fun of for being a "nerd." Or being socially rejected because I didn't dress or style myself like everyone else. Or, you know, melting my brain trying to figure out the whole queer angle.

But in the end, I valued my differences, the qualities that make me "weird," more than I valued ease of acceptance. I loved intellectual pursuits and comfortable clothes, and ultimately, my sexuality, more than I would have liked "fitting in."

I notice this same quality among my friends. The people I'm attracted to (platonically and not) radiate a strong sense of themselves. They all have their passions and interests and quirks that come together to make them distinctive. I have the kind of friends that aren't hard to pick out of crowds. (Unless it's the Harry Potter book-release party, in which case I just try to keep an eye on the tall friends.)

The idea of "ex-gay programs," in that line of thought, gives me the chills. On a very basic level, I'm not sure I really understand what would drive someone to want to change her self. On the other hand, I do remember regarding myself as a 'straight girl with a nameless problem.' Had I been offered the chance to erase this seeming intruder into my thought life, I might have taken it. Problem with that, though, is that it would have required me to name it before I could get rid of it.

I remember when I finally did figure it out. Flicking through testimonies on Whosoever, attempting to formulate some sort of socially responsible opinion on this Gay Issue I kept hearing about, and finding myself in them instead. Especially that oft-mentioned sense of "being different." Putting words to this underlying dissonance and feeling the puzzle pieces click into place.

Also freaking out because "HOLY SHIT, my parents are NOT going to like this if they ever find out."

There's a test question with no right answer that gay people sometimes are asked. "If there was a pill to make you straight, would you take it?" There are plenty of gay folk who say they would leap on the chance because who would choose, after all, to make their lives as difficult as being gay makes life?

I might have answered this way, once, when I thought that my sexuality was an incidental part of who I was. There is some truth to that. I am not wholly defined by the fact that I prefer women to men. On the other hand, I don't think I can be who I am apart from that fact, either. Sexuality is not some discrete part of brain function that can be subtracted or substituted without affecting other parts, like a car engine with interchangeable parts. It works to me a bit more like paint mixing, where the presence or absence of a given hue can radically alter the picture.

Asking what I would be like without my gayness is like asking what the world would be like if blue didn't exist.

I like blue. I would be without a favorite color if blue were nonexistent. I might be able to get along with red, maybe, in the absence of an alternative, but since blue does in fact exist, why bother?

...I am fully aware of the fact that since it's about three-thirty in the morning it's entirely possible that the preceding post makes little sense to anyone but me. Oh well.

justify my love

2006-04-27T19:31:00.000-04:00

Just read someone's LJ post essentially bringing up the NT clobber passages and asking for them to be rebutted for, oh, the sixty thousandth time.

1 Corinthians 6:9-11
"Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God."

I love the end of that, because it completely sums up our beliefs! It also proves two points: The practice of homosexuality is a sin, and it can be washed away with Jesus' blood, just like EVERY other sin. Homosexuality is no different, and God judges all sins equally, although I can't remember the verse reference for that right now, sorry.

Frankly I'm sick of having to justify my existence to everyone with the bright idea of "but there's no such thing as a gay Christian! You're either gay OR Christian!" It speaks of such a gross misunderstanding of what it means to be gay and to be Christian that I don't even know where to start.

What do they mean by "the practice of homosexuality"? Gay sex? Fine, then, what's "sex"? Am I allowed anything up to third base? Can I kiss my girlfriend? Cheek only? Hold her hand? Should we wear hazmat suits around each other to ward off the mere possibility of teh 3v1l l3sb1an s3xx0rz? This is probably even harder to answer for a lesbian, since our sex lives don't involve penises (at least the sort not made of silicone, which are optional in any case), so by community standards we might not even be having Real Sex, whatever the hell that is.

Or on the flip side, am I totally disbarred from falling in love, full stop? That's a burden not laid on even totally celibate straight single Christians. If you want me to be totally physically and emotionally celibate without any hope of being otherwise, you damn well better give me a better reason than "'Cause homosexuality is wrong, of course. Haven't you read the Bible?"

Paul saw pagans banging anything that moved below them on a social hierarchy and spoke against it. What does this have to do with me being in a committed monogamous loving relationship with someone of my own sex? Nothing, thank you, and I hate having to qualify any relationship I might have as "committed and monogamous and loving." As far as I know, Christians don't have big political hissy fits over nonmonogamous hetero marriages of convenience.

I have seen Christians who don't believe in the existence of God who join a church as a political move field fewer questions as to their legitimacy as Christians. When did my sex life (or lack thereof) become a better measure of my faith than my faith?

As well, what sin exactly would Jesus be washing away from me? My entire sense of sexuality, or just my homosexually oriented clitoris? Will the blood of the Lamb brainwash me into finding a nice Christian man to lay back and think of England with?

Fuck that.

dare to damage

2006-04-16T16:13:00.000-04:00

I remember finding Dobson's "The Strong-Willed Child" on my parents' bookshelf when I was, oh, ten or so. I spirited it away to read it to see what it was about.

Once I was done, I was so appalled that I hid it. Granted, they probably bought it in an bid to deal with Dymphna, who was (and still is, despite the book) a self-centered brat. But I think their techniques came to full fruition in their dealing with my brother Ignatius and me.

I had another friend in high school whose parents used the Dobson Method and spanked her and her brother with a paint-stirring stick. She eventually took the stick and hid it under her bed, whereupon her parents would find another spanking implement. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Essentially Dobson describes any child with ANY modicum of self-will (a child who "does not obey orders without question," as an example, is apparently a BAD thing) as a child to be ~~abused~~ "disciplined" and "directed" to realize that ~~might makes right~~ their parents are to be obeyed without question.

Ignatius and I have the trait in common of questioning orders. Neither of us has a problem with obeying, per se, but we do want to know WHY we're doing something. If we're told "Because I said so" or "because your mother asked you to," we're more than likely to resist because an answer like that is an insult to our intelligence-- and if there's one way my siblings and I are all alike, it's that we are far from unintelligent.

Dobson treats any kind of question as a "challenge to authority." This really sucks when you're the kind of kid that questions everything.

I don't know where the hell I got this idea, since it obviously wasn't at home, but I have a sort of personal policy of never giving anyone my respect until they've actually earned it. Not that I actively disrespect someone, but if you want to give me orders, expect to have to back them up until you've proven yourself the kind of person I can trust not to give stupid orders, and expect to lose that privilege the first time you give me a stupid order. In my mind, no one gains authority merely because of their position. (This is likely why I have such a problem with the traditional idea of 'headship.' I don't see how being born with a penis automatically grants you leader status in any relationship, much less one that's supposed to be a partnership.)

I think a lot of parents use this as a defense maneuver. As long as they don't have to answer any questions, they never have to worry about having answers to begin with. They are Right, not by any standard of logic or truth, but by Fiat Parentis. If your kid wants to know why she should clean her room, it's not because messy rooms can be a health hazard (which, honestly, I probably was the kind of kid who would have accepted that kind of reason) but because You Said So. If the kid wants to know why she shouldn't be friends with Megan, it's not because you don't like her skater haircut or vaguely punky fashion, but because You Said So. If she wants you to understand that she does, in fact, like girls instead of boys, you can reject this not because it doesn't match with your worldview or your vicarious plans for her, but because You Said So.

I remember in particular that my parents, particularly my mom, would either laugh at me or accuse me of "playing the victim" if I cried. Given that I cry if I'm frustrated, and trying to reason with parents who wouldn't give me any better reason than "Because I'm the parent and you're the child" was infinitely frustrating, and being laughed at is rather hurtful when you're a sobbing twelve- or eight- or five-year-old, it would just make me sob harder. We would reach a point where they would be ordering me to stop crying and I would be physically unable to either do so or explain that I could not just turn the tears off like a faucet.

I hesitate to label it abuse, though I've had friends I told describe it as such, but it was a fairly traumatic thing for a sensitive kid, and in retrospect, it's definitely a Dobsonesque thing to refer to any non-approved action on the part of the child, no matter how normal and reasonable it is, as a challenge to authority rather than a sign of developing personality.

I suppose I would be skirting Godwin's Law of Debate to mention that we don't exactly laud Nazi soldiers for obeying orders without question.

Unconditional Cruelty: Parents Gone Wild
They Dared to Discipline

various and sundry

2006-03-27T00:47:00.000-05:00

[+] Eugene at Paradoxy linked this personality test thingy, whereupon I found out that I am a Reserved Inventor. w00t.

[+] According to my pencilling professor, I need to work on my drawing skills. According to my painting professor, Professor #1's out of his mind and I need to show him the stuff I did for painting class. Who should I believe, I wonder?

Frankly it probably has a lot to do with the way the projects for each class worked. For the pencilling class it was all pencil and ink work with pretty straightforward project mandates. Do this, this way, in two weeks. With the painting projects I felt like I had more creative agency; I was working with paint and color and mixed media and all sorts of new and interesting things, and my technical skill wasn't as important as my ability to get the story across. I enjoyed the projects more because I was more interested in them, and thus, they tended not to suck as much as the boilerplate just-meet-the-critera-dammit stuff I turned in for pencilling.

[+] Spring quarter classes start tomorrow. Oddly, this is the second quarter I've been at AIUA that I've had all female teachers. Given that I'm majoring in a department with only one female teacher, it's sort of impressive.

[+] I have made a promise to myself that I will NOT crush madly on one of my classmates. I mostly expect to break this within two weeks, maximum, because it's sort of a stupid promise to make anyway. After all, if I had any control in the matter it wouldn't be a problem in the first place.

[+] I talked about my meds with my shrink at my last appointment, and told him about a growing suspicion I had that they were flattening my creative drive.

Lexapro (and SSRIs in general) have a really short half-life; it doesn't remain in your system for more than about twenty-six hours or so. I'd noticed before that if I accidentally missed a dose, I would crash into a sobby depressed puddle approximately a day and a half later.

I'd also noticed over the past quarter that I did my best work after about one a.m. through about eight in the morning. I pulled seven allnighters because I couldn't get the work done any other time, and then just slept during the day between classes. If I tried working during the day, I just couldn't find the motivation to get the creative work done. This is relevant because I also take my pill at night, usually before I sleep, so I don't have to deal with it making me nauseous. So in other words, one a.m. was just about when the Lexapro was beginning to fade from my system.

Based on just my knowledge of my own mental states, I'd figured that Lexapro does, in fact, cushion my depressive lows, but on the flip side it also damps my natural highs. It had an overall numbing effect, which was probably helpful during that initial re-coming-out shit with my parents but isn't quite so beneficial in the long run.

My guess, then, is that the Lexapro was interfering with all the complex motivations and emotions that go into my creative state. I need to be able to feel my own emotions to be able to work effectively.

So the compromise now is that I'm on a half dose of the Lexapro for a trial run, to see if the effect is ameliorated, and if it seems to be lingering on, perhaps a switch to yet another antidepressant. I'd thought about Wellbutrin, since I know a couple of creative-type friends that have had decent experiences with it, but since I also have a particular insomniac disorder and one of bupropion's main side effects is insomnia, that might have to be defaulted. The doctor suggested Effexor or Cymbalta as possible replacements; I still need to do my research on those.

So far, on just a few day's lowered dose, I've noticed a greater variation in my moods. Granted, it's not necessarily the best time to measure the effect since I'm also on my period at the moment, so chemicals are swirling about madly at any rate. I have been drawing more lately, and feeling more creative, but I think it's too early to tell whether it's wishful thinking or not.

blargh.

2006-03-12T05:52:00.000-05:00

Thanks to finals week(s), my natural nocturnal tendencies, and what I suspect is the growing inefficacy of Lexapro, I've discovered that I do my best artwork between one and eight a.m.

Seriously. It's almost tomorrow already and I'm not near sleepy. Given that I went to bed at nine-thirty a.m. yesterday and slept until five p.m., that's probably not terribly surprising.

I pulled two all-nighters on one of my final projects, but it's done now and it completely kicks ass. Since I finished my art history report before then, now I have only one final to go. Unfortunately, it's the final for the teacher who told me during midterm (well, more like end-of-quarter) conferences "You're very bright, but it's not coming out in your work. Have you considered being just a writer?"

Which is a backhanded compliment, at least, since one thing most comic artists can't do is write, but STILL. I didn't just spend three years in art school to be told I should've just been an English major. Besides the fact that I'm very picky about how I want my stories drawn (which is to say by myself, dammit), the probability of breaking into the comic writing business is about equivalent to the odds of spontaneously combusting.

Gah.

At any rate, I haven't been posting much (okay, AT ALL) lately, partly due to a nasty depressive episode and partly due to school and whatnot. I'm hoping to post a bit during spring break. Of course, for that to happen, I'd have to finish my damn final...

Which is IMPECCABLY written and paced, even if it's not going to have breathtakingly accurate perspective shots.

good for you. now shut up.

2006-02-18T23:59:00.000-05:00

Hans has a new girlfriend (well, new-ish). He met Helga online (she lives on the West Coast) through his art gallery site. From all indications they're perfect for each other and she makes him delirious with joy. All of which is fine and dandy. I'm glad for him. I just wish he would shut the fuck up about how gloriously in love he is and how marvelous his ladylove is and how he's never felt this way before and how he wants to marry her and have babies and live happily ever after.

In fact, all my closest friends (within, say, a five-hour drive) are rapidly becoming smugly coupled. My friend Bennett just found a boyfriend. Sorcha is totally besotted with Scott (who I met and actually rather like, so it's not as if I resent it). Maureen and Mercer still glomp all over each other in plain sight. I can't go anywhere without being visually assaulted with Shiny Happy Couples.

Don't even talk to me about Valentine's Day. As if a celebration of all things pink and heterosexual weren't enough for one day, they had to start putting up decorations halfway through January. I swear, if I saw one more diamond commercial ("Propitiate the little woman-- buy her a shiny rock!") I was going to break the TV. Rub it in, why don't you, you corporate sons of bitches.

All of this was probably exacerbated by the fact that while grocery shopping the other week, I saw a girl from one of my classes that I was developing a crush on, attempted to strike up a conversation, and was quite soundly blown off. I figure four monosyllabic responses in a row and a refusal to make eye contact pretty much constitutes a nonverbal "please go away, you're embarrassing yourself."

If I complain about being single, I'm told that I should try to get out there more. When I try to "get out there more," I get blown off. Then it's my fault for not knowing HOW to get out there. I wish my advisers would be a tad more specific in the first place.

Random venues for meeting people-- classes, clubs, friends-of-a-friend, etc.-- are sort of aligned against me; my most generous estimates give me a 15% chance tops for said target being inclined to my gender. Out of that, then, assume that two-thirds of those girls will be bisexual and, most likely, have boyfriends. This leaves me with five percent, of which, say half will already have girlfriends, bringing me to a best-case-scenario of 39:1 odds against.

Now would be a good time to mention that I lose a lot at games of chance.

Should I choose to increase my chances by gravitating towards a more pointedly gay establishment, I'm still at a disadvantage. It's pointless for me to try bars or nightclubs because I can't drink (meds) and can't dance (natural lack of talent). I went to a few meetings of the school's GSA, but it struck me as rather cliquey. The last meeting I went to, I would sit down next to someone and five minutes later, s/he would get up and move across the room. After this happened about three times, I gave up and just sort of watched everyone else talk to each other from the other side of the room.

I've very little chance of attracting anyone with my dazzling outer beauty-- I would actually have to be attractive for that to happen. I suppose a certain segment of the population might have some sort of predilection for geekily androgynous Christina Ricci/Summer Glau* lookalikes, but I have yet to meet any.

You know those coming-out stories where people will fall in love with a best friend / roommate / next-door neighbor / barista / Wal-Mart greeter / etc. and fortuitously find out that the person is just as madly in love with them, and they're still happily partnered twenty-five years later? I want one of those.

Lately I've been fairly depressed by the above ruminations, which tend to pop up every time I see yet another Smug Couple holding hands (which is, oh, every ten minutes or so). My mom complained that every time she called and asked me how I was, I was always "tired," and wanted to know if "everything was okay."

Frankly, no, but I sincerely doubt she'd be much help.

cryptic thought

2006-02-06T02:49:00.000-05:00

I think I labor under the delusion that anyone else cares what I think.

car tripping

2005-12-28T00:29:00.000-05:00

Since my dad is planning on trading my and Ignatius' cars in for new ones, I have had the pleasure lately of going to dealerships and test-driving cars.

Now, the first salesman (Mazda, for the record) was quite nice. Looked me in the eye, didn't seem surprise when my handshake wasn't limp (I sometimes get comments on the fact that I have a grip, which I think is sad), explained all the mechanical components of the engine and whatnot along with all the twiddly little details about the car. (Like the sound system controls on the steering wheel, which I thought was kinda spiffy.) I wasn't familiar with the area the dealership was in so he gave me a route to test-drive which included some twists and bumps so I could get a better idea of how the car handled, which I appreciated.

Last salesman (Nissan) was busy helping a bunch of other people, so left me to poke about on my own after asking if that was okay with me, which it was. I asked him the few questions I had and got pretty straightforward answers. I test-drove it by myself as well, which was kinda nice.

The second salesguy, though, at Toyota, made the mistake of trying to sell me a car as if I were a girl.

I am a young, Caucasian, upper-middle-class female, a demographic which is probably deservedly notorious for not knowing shit about cars. I will freely admit that in general the term "independent multi-link Macpherson suspension" doesn't mean a whole lot to me. However, I'm quite familiar with things like gas mileage, horsepower and torque, and passenger/cargo space. I'm a decently skilled driver, at least on automatic. I actually researched the cars in question online and already knew most of the features and comparisons between them. So when a salesman asks me if I have a color preference as to which car I test-drive, and repeatedly informs me that "we need to put [me] in" a "peppy," "sporty" car, especially after I tell him that I really don't give a flying fuck about appearance (albeit phrased more politely), I get a little irked.

Especially when after I evince knowledge of the capabilities of the car, I'm told that since I've "done my homework" I'll "make someone a good wife someday." I think he caught the Look I gave him after that.

Seriously, he described the car as "peppy" something like six times. I asked him what he could tell me about the engine, expecting to get something about 1.8 versus 2.3 liters maybe, and he described it as "peppy." Fuck "peppy," I'd like something approaching specificity about the damn hunk of metal bits.

I thought about telling him what his mistake was, since I'm sure as hell not buying that car now (not solely as a result of his gross miscalculation of his customer, but it didn't help), but I figure that if he wants to stereotype every chick that walks into the showroom he can reap the results of doing so.

Thing is, there's really nothing in my appearance that would signal that I would appreciate that kind of treatment. I'm wearing plain dark jeans and t-shirts with sneakers and a leather jacket. I don't wear makeup. I had glasses on (which I actually did on purpose for the "intellectual" angle they can provide). I looked him in the eye, asked relatively technical questions and quite bluntly told him what I needed. I don't think I look like the kind of girl who wants a car to match her heels and thinks the lack of makeup mirrors on the sun visors is a dealbreaker. So what compelled him to sell the car to my tits instead of my brain?

Who knows. Maybe my ass is too nice and it looks like I work out.

In retrospect, it's more amusing than angering, since he's the one who's losing a sale. It takes a certain sort of idiocy to make that kind of error, somewhat analogous to the kind needed to try to sell a subscription to Bitch magazine to Pat Buchanan.

high school retrospective

2005-12-23T01:10:00.000-05:00

On Facebook recently, someone I went to high school with (I'll call him Friedrich) messaged me wondering about my profile. He wanted to know if my "interested in: women" was a joke or actuality.

I know it probably should be obvious, but I was actually somewhat surprised to find out that I was not the only queer that went to Eastchester.

Eastchester is your prototypical WASP-y private academy. I can count on one hand the number of students that weren't white when I was there, and religious diversity only extended to Protestant denomination. The vast majority of the families were upper-middle-class (if not downright filthy-rich) conservative white evangelicals.

I was notable among the student body (which was tiny; my graduating class was thirty-seven people) for being an outspoken liberal. I was recruited for the debate team because I'd developed a well-earned reputation for being argumentative and articulate. My Bible teachers tended to regard me with a mix of amusement and exasperation. Most of my classmates tended to think that "love the sinner, hate the sin" was downright progressive, and there I was unapologetically identifying myself as a feminist and a non-Republican. Frankly, I'd be surprised if there were never rumors about a deeper meaning to my love of comfortable shoes.

It actually wasn't that difficult to maintain a "straight facade." The student body being as small as it was, there actually wasn't much dating on-campus; I was never questioned about my lack of boyfriends because hardly any girls did have one. I wasn't visibly butch, since for a long time I maintained long hair. Mostly, though, there was an underlying assumption of default heterosexuality that no one bothered to question. The idea that one of their classmates might be gay simply never occured to them for the most part because homosexuality was something that occurred Out There, not In Here where it's Normal. As long as you didn't raise the question yourself, no one would think to ask it.

In some ways I guess I fell for the same thinking, because before I told any of my friends I felt horribly alone and isolated. Nobody else seemed to be asking the same questions about their sexuality that I was. For most girls, it seemed to be a question of which boy and how far to go. For me, it was who I wanted and why, and if I would ever find a chance to go anywhere at all. I assumed my classmates were all essentially straight.

Friedrich apparently thought that he too was "the only one who escaped the gender-unfriendly brainwashing of the [...] fire and brimstone empire," as he put it. He made the point that both of us were seen as "discontents," which is pretty accurate, though in his case it was for being publically atheist.

I have to wonder if being gay in high school, for us, was a reason for the discontent. When you find yourself questioning the most basic tenets upon which your educational society operates, like "girls go with boys, full stop," there's precious little stopping you from questioning secondary concerns like whether chapel attendance should be mandatory, or whether the Creationism Vs. Evolution class is composed of pure bullshit.

I wonder, then, who else was simply trying to blend in as hard as they could. Whoever did it was pretty convincing since I never gaydared anyone positively, though I had my guesses. I knew of a couple of bisexual (to some extent; both are currently dating men) girls, but no one else. Friedrich says he had "more than suspicions" but no solid evidence, though given the environment I'd be more surprised if there were any. I can't say I'd be totally shocked to go to a class reunion to see at least one other person bringing a same-sex spouse, but I'd probably be surprised to find out which one.

textual preference

2005-12-01T00:47:00.000-05:00

My parents moved from a big house to a smaller house awhile back, and in the process of moving, my books got lost.

I'm a bookslut. A "voracious reader," if you prefer to be polite about it. I suppose if I were a professional reviewer or critic I would be getting paid to read a lot of books and could thus be accurately called a bookwhore, but alas, my literary promiscuity is entirely unpaid. Basically, I love books. I really, really love books. Reading and writing alike, though I have yet to write more than short stories. If I had not been an art major I would have been an English major and worked as a librarian. Hell, I'd still like to be a librarian.

I like to say I spent my childhood with books instead of other children. I wasn't as interested in playing with other kids as I was with sitting by myself and immersing myself in alternate worlds. I remember being in third grade and finishing my checked-out books before even leaving the library. My teacher wouldn't let me pick books above a 3rd-grade level and by that time I was reading at a high-school rate. (I also read almost abnormally fast. Your average mass-market paperback, at about 200-300 pages, takes me about an hour to finish.)

I devoured books on Greco-Roman and Norse mythology and marveled at the epic oddity of a universe where gods were just really, really big people. Half of everything written for kids is historical fiction (it's educational, y'know) so I did read a bunch of it, but I never really developed much of a liking for it. I liked my books to be otherworldly, something to escape to. From there most of my fiction reading (and the bulk of my reading has always been fiction) has been sci-fi and fantasy, with a liberal helping of horror and other unclassifiable weirdness.

Over the years, then, I've amassed a pretty hefty collection of well-loved paperbacks. Since I go through books so fast, I reread them frequently, and since most of them are long, dense trilogies or series, they provide plenty of reread value. Most of them are in decent shape; I started collecting the Dragonriders of Pern books back in sixth grade and they're all still intact, if somewhat dog-eared.

I packed all these books in two boxes (one big one of all the paperbacks and another of hardbacks and weird-sized trade paperbacks) when my parents moved. They accomplished the transfer while I was at school, and I came back to the new house.

After a couple of days in the new room, I noticed something missing.

"Mom, I had two boxes of books, and they're not in my room. Where are they?"

"Are they not in your closet?" (With all the other boxes of junk.)

"Nope." (The small box of hardbacks and trades was, but not the big one.)

"They must be in the garage."

So I went out to the garage. It was packed almost up to the ceiling in identical brown boxes. And being me, I had only labeled mine on the top, not on all sides.

Saving some time, then, I never found my books, so I went without my familiar rereads for the past couple of years, until this weekend, when my dad cleaned up the garage-- and FOUND MY BOOKS.

It was incredibly comforting to rip open cardboard and find stacks of familiar books that I'd thought would be gone until my parents moved again. I stole the shelves from the hallway to accomodate my old friends. (I still have a ton of books on borrowed space in the boys' and Aelgifu's rooms, but the main ones are in here.)

And now my room really feels like my room now. It never felt quite comfortable to me, but now that my books are in the corner crammed onto a dinky little bookshelf, it feels more like... a home, I suppose.

Maybe home to me will always be where my books are.

winter breakdown

2005-11-11T19:39:00.000-05:00

Going back to Terabil for winter break is a bit like an excruciatingly long dental appointment. I go only because I know it's necessary, and then I retreat to my Happy Place until it's over and I can go home.

Granted, going back doesn't jam sharp metal tools into my gums, nor does going to the dentist last six weeks, but the general experience is about the same.

It's finals here, since AIUA is on the quarter system, and then we're all out for winter break until January. I'm (supposed to be) finishing up all my classes and final projects at the moment, but I've been so tired all the time, regardless of how much sleep I'm getting, that it's hard to work. At first I thought it was caffeine deprivation, but I've been drinking green tea today and I'm still as lethargic as ever. That leads me to think it's more a dread of leaving Avalon, like my subconscious thinks "Hey, maybe if I don't finish my finals, they won't let me go!"

I wish.

I'm considering taking a summer quarter this year so I don't have to endure summer in Terabil, but I'd have to find and pay for an apartment if I did that.

Seriously, I doubt it's mentally healthy to have to steel myself against potential psychic violence every time I go back to my hometown. I wish it didn't have to be that way, but when every moment my mom can catch me alone is a potential moment to battle against Teh Gay, or when Sunday morning means I get to hear "I do wish you'd find a church in Avalon-- it's so important to be around fellow Christians!" for the hundredth time, it gets old real fast.

Church is another dental appointment experience. Frankly, I enjoy not being around "fellow" "Christians" all the time, given that usually that means simply all the other WASP families that congregate in the same social arenas every Sunday or so. They're not my "fellows" and quite a few of them aren't necessarily very Christian either, unless by "Christian" you simply mean "conservative Republican who bleats the right things." It's not particularly spiritually beneficial to me to sit around a bunch of people who have the effect of making me cynical and withdrawn every Sunday. I could have a better worship experience at a bar-- at least drunk people are willing to admit their problems.

Paradoxically, if my mom really wanted me to go to church, the best way she could do it is to stop bugging me to go. She apparently believes that if she just keeps after me long enough I'll cave and do what she wants, and as long as I'll be reinforcing that belief, I refuse to give in. I'll go back to church because I want to go back to church, because I believe it will be of spiritual value to me, not because I want my mom to shut up about me going back to church.

Much less the fact that if I did pick a church down here, it would have to be a mom-approved church of the conservative Protestant non-gay-friendly variety. Call me crazy but I don't think going to the local Unitarian Universalist church would qualify.

taboo

2005-11-09T00:09:00.000-05:00

Sad, but true: "Yvonne" said the magic phrase that does a stompy dance all over my hopes: "my boyfriend."

Oh well. Moving on.

While I was home a while back, we were discussing (for whatever reason) the fact that the new puppy needs to be neutered. (Mainly he keeps humping everyone's arm and biting them, and while he's small enough so that kind of dominance behavior's not dangerous it is rather annoying.)

I discovered that I seem to be the only person in my family who can unhesitatingly say the words "penis" and "testicles." There is more than a little irony in this.

Maybe it's lifedrawing class, where you get used to contemplating a nude human in a fairly dispassionate manner, or maybe it's just that everyone at art school has a more relaxed manner towards sexual matters in general, but I don't have a problem with nudity. When I did my nude self-portrait, I was a bit self-conscious hanging it up in class, but while I was actually doing it Maureen and Hans would hang out in the room with me while I was nude (in socks). It was funny when Maureen decided to draw my "shining ass," but it wasn't embarrassing.

On the flip side my family has always had pet terms for genitalia, and sex and genitals are discussed with a sort of giggly hesitation, as if they were something "naughty." They give lip service to the idea that "sex is a beautiful thing" and whatnot, but their ATTITUDE towards sex and nudity says something totally different.

I don't remember ever getting a Sex Talk, or at least anything beyond an explanation of menstruation. Most of my sex education came from classmates and books. I remember being ten or so and reading a book about various stories in a maternity ward, with graphic descriptions of women giving birth or their various sexual ailments. I sort of hid it as if it were a "dirty" book, even though there was nothing actually sexual in it. It was just various stories of women in pregnancy and labor, and I somehow felt like just the fact that it discussed genitalia made it taboo.

On the flip side, I've gotten shit about my more-modest-than-average way of dressing. I have been explicitly encouraged to wear "shorter skirts" and "lower-cut shirts." My response to it is usually along the lines of "I'm not advertising what I'm not selling," which is essentially true but doesn't quite get at the point. Frankly, I don't wear revealing clothing because I don't like being revealed.

Women's clothing is calculated to reveal. It becomes a game to see how low your neckline or waistline can go before it's public indecency. Women's bodies are so relentlessly sexualized that it's numbing. I've gotten to where it's a downright turnoff for me to see a girl whose breasts seem to be making a bid for freedom from their Wonderbra.

My roommate first year asked me once "You have such a nice figure. Why don't you show it off more?" Because to me, my body is not an object for everyone else to look at. It's mine to use as I see fit, when I see fit, and that does not include displaying it for public approval. I'm happy with my body and my looks, and frankly I couldn't care less if some random schmoe walking down the street I live decides I'm fuckable or not. Talk to me, not my cleavage.

So where does this fit into the messages I get about sex from my upbringing? If sex is dirty, why should I use my clothes and my body to elicit sexual desire from men? If nudity is taboo, why flirt with the edge?

polyglot mute

2005-10-24T03:07:00.000-04:00

(I never did finish this one, but I figured I might as well go ahead and publish it anyway.)

Am I the only person who feels loneliest when surrounded by other people?

Today I went with Hans, Maureen and Mercer to a theme event in my dorm. It was fun for a while, batting balloons around and waiting to see what getups everyone had come up with, but when the dancing and socializing started in earnest I sort of melted off to the sidelines. I think we stayed maybe an hour or so before getting bored and leaving.

I can't dance. Period. I did ballet, jazz and tap when (and only when) I was in my single-digit age range, and there was an ill-fated period in my teens where my mom made me take ballroom dancing lessons. In any case, I've tried, and I just inherently suck at it. There is a certain kinesthetic sense of where my body is in space that I lack (which is also why I suck at sports). So I can't exactly walk up to anyone I fancy and ask them to dance unless I want to make a total fool of myself.

I also can't socialize. I spent most of my childhood with books instead of other children. I make friends by accident; my friends tend to be more extroverted and outgoing because someone who isn't usually doesn't bother to try to draw me out of my shell. In stark defiance of my Southern lady upbringing, I managed to skip learning the trick of small talk, and as a result, I find it next to impossible to strike up conversation with someone I don't already know.

When it comes to social situations, for all my fluency in writing and journaling, absurdly extensive vocabulary and Nazi-like command of grammar, I can't talk worth a damn.

Mostly, going to the party reminded me why I never go to parties: because parties are depressing.

nude with socks

2005-10-19T01:13:00.000-04:00

So my last assignment in my lifedrawing class was a figure rendering on toned paper (blah blah blah). Since I couldn't find a friend with the time to model for me, I ended up doing myself. And since it was indeed a figure drawing, I did have to draw myself naked. I ended up doing a side/back pose wearing black-and-white-striped knee-high socks, because if you're going to be showing off your conte-rendered ass to your entire class, you might as well do it wearing fun socks.

At class, everyone starts putting theirs up right after they walk in. Mine goes up on the wall and I sit down to see what everyone else puts up. So Cute Girl (Yvonne, for the sake of creative pseudonymity) walks in with hers, and I'm looking around at everyone else's while waiting to see what hers looks like...

Hers was an extremely well-rendered full frontal nude self-portrait.

No socks.

When class was over and I'd already put mine in the pile, I looked around to see where Yvonne was, and walked over and said (mostly to my feet but NOT ALL) "Hey, um, I just wanted to tell you that I thought your picture was gorgeous. I figured you'd probably see me steal it, though, but I thought it was really well-done..."

And she laughed, and said thanks, and reaches out to pat my hand AND I SEE THAT SHE'S REACHING OUT TO PAT MY HAND AND...

well, I bolted, really. But I was still sorta proud that I had the wherewithal to say anything at all. And it was a really good drawing, the class was agreed on that.

(Critique revealed a consensus that the best part of my picture was, yes, the socks. Not that the rest of it was bad, but that the socks were simply the coolest. I tend to agree.)

Also, she sat next to me on the floor during critiques and struck up conversation again. I'M SO CONFUSED. But HAPPY.

gaydar calibration

2005-10-12T02:43:00.000-04:00

How do you tell if a girl is flirting with you? Especially if you are a girl?

In my Lifedrawing 2 class, there is a girl (well, duh). She's absolutely gorgeous, seems quite friendly and reasonably intelligent, and incidentally draws really well (not that it's necessarily a consideration, but it didn't hurt that her bra-wearing self-portrait was extremely well-rendered).

Several times she's given me compliments on my work in class or made small talk with me. Today she took the drawing board next to mine (while the majority of the easels in the room were still unclaimed) and struck up conversation with me throughout class time. We were talking about the model's particular body peculiarities and how different models' proportions and structures are easier or harder to draw, and she began using her own form as an example. "See, I have a really short torso-- my belly button is all the way up here..."

Oh geez. Please don't ask me to stare at your torso (any more than I already have been).

I have no "gaydar" for women. Men I can pick out fairly easily and on at least two occasions have predicted it before he himself knew it. Women? If she's not wearing rainbows, double-venus-symbols, or a t-shirt saying "Yes I am, and no, you can't watch," I've got no way of telling which way(s) she swings. Go figure.

I also have no skills in or refined knowledge of flirtation. I can't really do it, being prone to doing things like conversing with my shoes, temporarily losing my grasp of basic grammar and extensive vocabulary, tripping over my own feet, and generally finding ways to make myself look more inept than usual. I also have a hard time recognizing when other people are trying to flirt with me; usually I only realize it in retrospect, after having done something that in retrospect was probably mean. Hence, my dilemma.

Hans, being who he is, says she's obviously hot for me and I should suggest private lifedrawing study sessions. Maureen asked how long her hair was. (Longer than mine is, so no help there. If she was visibly queer this wouldn't be nearly as much of a dilemma.) Paul (Hans' roommate), like me, had no idea.

My wishful thinking says anything's possible, but then again, my natural pessimism says that given the usual statistics there's about a 90% chance she's just being friendly.

Oh well.

so...

2005-10-08T01:43:00.000-04:00

I moved almost all of Old Journal. What I did was go through and move the entries that were actually substantial, since I did a lot of "bulletpoint entries" on occasion when I was too busy or uninspired to write full entries. I had second thoughts about it for a while, wondering if I was just being an attention whore or trying to get one back at the 'rents by doing so. But honestly I think it's a valuable thing only in its being shared by other people. I know random folk would email or IM me just to tell me that they appreciated my writing, because they had the same problems.

I changed the template of the former journal to display a link to Family Acceptance, because I figured if I was going to get the last word there I might as well be snarky with heart.

In the process of moving, I ended up rereading just about everything I wrote from midway through 2002 to midway through 2005. It was a definite headtrip. I think I might have even seen myself grow a little, and believe me that was a shocker. It was funny, the things I used to worry about. Some of it seems light-years away now. I was also an angry little bitch quite often along the way. Hell, I'm still an angry little bitch sometimes. I can't entirely blame my mom for being angry at some of what I wrote.

On the other hand, I'm disappointed that she skipped over the points I was trying to make sometimes and simply absorbed implicit (or, well, explicit) insults to her. She complained to me that she comes off as a hateful, ignorant bigot in the journal.

I can see that. Quite a lot of the time I did see her as willfully ignorant; she did (and does) refuse to learn about things that might upset her worldview. In retrospect I don't really blame her for that, because that's how she was raised and that's how she is. I mean, I spent from puberty to age 18 pretending to myself that I was a straight girl with a "problem" that would go away if I stopped thinking about it. I of all people know how comfortable that kind of certainty can be.

And as for hateful... when she spent three hours talking at me about how sick and filthy I am until I'm curled in a fetal ball on the bed, no, I didn't find that particularly loving. On the other hand, honestly, it was hard to take precisely because I knew she was only doing it because she loved me. She knew what was good for me, and by God she was going to help me if she had to kill me to do it.

That's sort of the crux of it, really. My mom thinks of this "lezz-bee-an life-style" that she's built up in her mind to be the paramount of all that is sick and evil and icky, and she wants to save me from that. She truly believes that once I'm where she thinks I should be, I'll be happy. She's happy doing her stay-at-home mother-and-wife thing, why wouldn't I be happy doing the same?

I sort of wish she put the same effort into understanding me that I have to put into understanding her.

old journal woes

2005-10-03T00:34:00.000-04:00

*looks at unfinished panel on last page beside her, due tomorrow* Right, then. I'll write another entry.

My mom first found out I'm a lesbian a month before I left for my freshman year of college, when Dymphna showed her my start page (you know, the page you get when you start up your browser? I make my own with all the links I usually visit) which had a link to Christian Lesbians on it. (Personally, I think it could have been worse; it could have been something like MuffDiversGalore.com or AnarchistBabyEatingDykes.com.) My world imploded for a little while, and through a series of events I sort of accidentally went back in the closet.

Demonstrating her impeccable sense of timing and self-restraint a second time, Dymphna showed my mother my online journal a month before I was to return to my third year of school this past summer. She was directed to it by a few of my high school classmates who had recognized me. Apparently my journal was something of a hot gossip topic, since I used a pseudonym for myself but no one else, so there were identifying details aplenty. Yeah, that was stupid; hence, why this time I changed every proper noun I could think of that would lead someone here via Google, and have not linked to any of my other pages, nor let anyone I know in Real Life™ link to here.

Also, hence the footnote at the bottom of the page. I still don't know who first found my page and started passing it around, but rest assured should I ever find out who it was they will know the extent of my pissedness. Currently, I've changed the public template to display a snarky message to said offender, without deleting any of the entries. The content is still there, simply unviewable.

I definitely don't want to completely delete it. I kept that journal from 2002 until this year (I had previous journals). In total there's about two hundred entries, and they average about six thousand words each. That journal took me through just about my entire journey:

- Coming to grips with the fact that I indeed did like girls.
- Dealing with being in the closet and hiding something very basic from the people I loved the most.
- Slowly starting to tell my friends, or deciding which not to tell.
- Coming out (as bisexual) to the Internet in one entry and getting the most amazing outpouring of love and support from a readership composed of a shocking percentage of Christians; I got comments that made me cry with how much they understood and cared about me.
- Figuring out that maybe I was more accurately described as gay than bi. (When you realize that you've "always been more concerned with personality than looks," tend to go for boys that look and act like girls, and if told to pick would choose women with no qualms, you start to wonder if you really like boys per se at all.)
- Wrestling with the religious consequences and interpretations.
- Getting emails and comments from people who read my entries and identified with them, often undergoing the same struggles themselves, and thanking me for putting words to screen.
- The fallout from the first coming-out to my parents.
- The frustration and pain and stress that came with recloseting myself.

Depression. Religion. Sexuality. Politics. The good and the bad. God and art and life.

That journal's got a shitload of meaning, to me and others, and I'll be damned if I erase years with a few clicks just because some jackass I went to school with decided my revelations made good gossip fodder.

Thing is, when my mom read it, she didn't see pain and frustration. She saw spite, rebellion and hate. And I did vent a lot in no uncertain terms. When something frustrates me, I don't mince words about it. If I think something is fucking stupid, I will write "This is FUCKING STUPID." And usually I'll follow up with about a paragraph or so about why, exactly, I think something is fucking stupid. (I did debate in high school. I can hold forth for quite a long time in blunt, concise prose about my opinions. I also have an absurdly large vocabulary.) I hated a lot of things my mom did and said, and they made me angry. I thought a lot of her reactions were at best, inappropriate, and at worst ludicrous. When all that came out in writing, it looks a lot like I really just hate my mom. So I can't necessarily blame her for getting angry about some of the content, even if I think she sort of missed the point.

I also rather abused my sister in the journal, but I'm quite open (in person, as well) about the fact that even if I have to love her as a sister I will probably never like her as a person. She has treated me like something she would scrape off her designer-label pointy-toed high heels for about as long as I can remember, and I see no reason why I should do much more than avoid her as much as possible and civil when it is impossible to be elsewhere. Her actions regarding my journal didn't exactly do much to contradict my opinion of her.

At any rate, the question of what to do with the damn thing still stands. I've considered going back and re-copying select entries to either here or a separate journal (after going through and obliterating the identifying details this time). I've also considered just downloading the whole shebang to my computer and saving it that way, but a lot of the meaning it holds for me is in how others reacted to it, and I would sort of prefer to let it be public in some way. What can I say, I'm an artist and I'm a storyteller, and I like/need to be heard.

Anyone got any opinions on what I do with it?

their worst nightmare

2005-10-02T23:07:00.000-04:00

I just now remembered a particular conversation with someone on how to "solve" my problem with my mom over Teh Gay as quickly as possible.

We eventually concluded that all I would have to do would be to bring home unannounced a big, black, Jewish butch girlfriend who wears Gay Pride everything, votes Democrat, shaves her head (and nothing else), has multiple facial piercings and lots of visible tattoos, and speaks with a New York accent.

Thereupon my parents would spontaneously combust.

skirts with pockets

2005-10-01T02:08:00.000-04:00

Guess what my shrink and I spent two and a half hours talking about today?

Pants.

No, seriously. After we got the stuff about how lovely school was going and how I was doing on Lexapro out of the way, we talked about pants. Mostly jeans, really. It started out being about why I wear pants and not skirts, but we got into the specifics: why I buy my jeans at Goodwill and not the mall, how I secretly believe I started that fad for letting out jeans hems so the uneven bleaching pattern showed, why it's stupid that mall stores sell "deconstructed denim" for fifty bucks when I put authentic holes in my ten-dollar pants for free, what "boot-cut" means, and why men buy women's jeans and why women buy men's jeans.

So, how much an hour do my parents pay for this guy to listen to me, again?

I think said shrink is a little too focused on the SEX part of "homosexual," because when I mentioned the whole celibacy thing to him he said "So you desire a SEXUAL relationship with a woman, with ORGASMS and [blah blah blah]?"

"Well... yeah, in the same sense that straight people usually desire a sexual relationship with a member of their preferred gender. But what I'm getting at is that I'd like a MARITAL-type relationship with a woman partner, and marriages usually involve sex."

Seriously, does everyone not get that? It's not just about bumping uglies with a willing nymphet. It's about building long-term, committed, loving relationships with a willing nymphet, with whom I would indeed want to share a sex life. If orgasm was all I was after, I'd marry a vibrator, thankyouverymuch.

I think he's particularly interested in my gender identification, especially in relation to my sister Dymphna. Whenever anything about femininity comes up, he asks me to compare what I do (how I dress, think, whatever) with what I think my sister does, or what she thinks or says about what I do. 'Tis true, we have a long-standing mutual dislike. 'Tis also true that Dymphna could be quite accurately described as traditionally femme, whereas I could quite accurately be described as aggressively androgynous. 'Tis also also true that Dymphna is heterosexual, which I am not. Dymphna is on record as saying that she believes that I am gay because (a) I was despondent over my inability to get men and (b) I was seeking "acceptance." Because, you know, it's so much easier to get laid and/or loved as a LESBIAN in the BIBLE BELT. I am on record (now, at least) as saying that I think Dymphna is on crack.

I eventually explained my entire philosophy of gender with regard to clothing thus (paraphrased):

"Why do I wear pants and not skirts? Because pants are comfortable. I view clothes as a purely utilitarian matter; I wear them to keep from breaking public nudity laws. I don't dress the way I do because it's 'butch,' I dress the way I do because it's comfortable. My mom and sister tend to believe that femininity is something you achieve through clothes and makeup and manners and that kind of thing; I think femininity is something that I have simply by virtue of being female."

So, why do I not wear skirts? Because it's a bitch to find skirts with pockets. I don't carry a purse because I find they're more hassle than they're worth, so I need functional pockets in my clothing. In my years of searching I found exactly two skirts with pockets (that were long enough to make sitting down a non-underwear-revealing affair and loose enough so that the hem didn't cut my stride short). Hence, jeans became my uniform of choice.

hurting and happy

2005-09-26T22:59:00.000-04:00

Well, that should make for a suitably provocative title.

Hurting refers to my throat. I think it's sinus drainage or something similarly prosaic, and it's not particularly debilitating, besides the coughing, the cough-induced headache, and sounding like the Southern female equivalent of Ben Stein on a cigarettes-and-bourbon bender. (Normally I just sound like the Southern female equivalent of Ben Stein.) Mostly I'm downing Luden's Wild Cherry Throat Drops like there's no tomorrow and getting on with things as usual.

Anyway, on to things as usual.

Hans is apparently "in love" with an Italian redhead in his film class who is even shorter than me and likes God of War and other similarly bloody video games. What's really funny about this is how much he protested that he wasn't going for another relationship, he just wanted to play the field and not get tied down... Right, well, that resolve lasted about two weeks. He's such a sap. I was almost surprised at my own reaction to it, but quite honestly I was happy for him. I expected to feel a little jealous or something, but... nope. Nothing. I just feel glad that he's found another "prospect," and genuinely happy at my friend's good luck. It was... odd. (I'm a little peeved that he got a redhead before I did, though.)

As long as he continues to let me play Burnout: Revenge, all will be well between us.

I sort of hope that he doesn't go into Couple Mode too soon, given that just about all of my friends are paired off. Maureen has Mercer, Hans' roommate Paul has his girlfriend Paige, my friend Tom has Teresa... I can really only think of maybe two people I'm friendly with here that aren't currently attached. (For that matter I can only think of two friends I have that aren't heterosexual, and they're both bi males.) It gets sort of depressing seeing yet another Happy Couple™ every time I turn around and everywhere I go.

Mostly it reminds me that I am not part of a Happy Couple™ and not likely to be anytime soon, and if I chance to find anyone amenable to relieving said condition, it would have to be a guilty underground relationship because of my parents' ultimatum about not "financially supporting" a "lifestyle" they "disagree with," which translates to "dare to date anyone but fully be-penised manly men, and you can forget about having a family, much less the rest of your college funding."

It's something my mom brought up on the drive back to Terabil: "Maybe... maybe you're not meant to be married. God makes some people to be single. Maybe you're meant to be single."

I think it was a stretch for her because it meant she would even give up all her hopes and preconceptions about my getting heterosexually married and wife-and-mothering my own perfect suburban nuclear family (white picket fence not included) if I would just not end up with another woman. That, at least, was sort of impressive. At least she wouldn't be pissy that I'm not spawning.

I don't think she was best pleased when I told her that I'd thought about that scenario, and I honestly didn't think I was cut out for the celibacy business, and I definitely didn't want to marry a man. (Then she brought up Adam and Steve and I think I quit listening.)

Thing is, people with "the gift of celibacy," as it's called, actually have the capacity to deal with life without a partner. Some people really are set up that way and it would be as ill-advised to make them marry as it would to make someone not set up that way try to hack it alone. Me, I can only deal with singleness with the consoling mindset that it's not a forever thing. When I consider that I might have to be alone and unpartnered for the whole of my life, it's... well, depressing, to say the least. Hell, it's depressing to think that barring a miraculous change of heart on my parents' part I'm going to have to spend at least the next two years as a prospectless singleton.

Things are made for people to do in pairs. Free vacations come with tickets for two. Restaurant booths default to tables for two. Ever noticed how hard it is to walk in groups of three? Someone always ends up weaving around the lampposts and falling behind the other two because the sidewalk isn't wide enough. There's a reason that they're called "smug marrieds," and it's because the world is arranged to suit them.

I feel a little left out sometimes. A little envious. Lonely, mostly.

Pseudonyms and whatnot

2005-09-23T16:56:00.000-04:00

Obviously, I'm starting this journal with All New and Improved Names. (All my siblings are named after medieval saints, f'rinstance.) If you have a preference as to your particular pseudonym, feel free to email me and let me know. Otherwise I'm just going to pick one. Also, try to keep the farce going in the comments as well.

Also, if you know me in RL, please don't link here. Feel free to link to the LJ, which I will continue to update with the minutiae of daily existence.

snerk

2005-09-23T15:49:00.000-04:00

From the Blogger TOS (yes, I actually did read it before agreeing to it):

(e) IF YOU HAVE READ THIS FAR THEN YOUR EYES PROBABLY HURT. ALL CAPS, WHAT WERE WE THINKING? HOWEVER, WE ARE NOT LIABLE FOR THIS OR ANY OTHER OCULAR MALADY.

I suppose that's one way to make writing the TOS interesting.

Facebook rejection

2005-09-19T15:26:00.000-04:00

A while back I went through Facebook, changed my privacy settings so my profile is only viewable to my friends, blocked my sister completely (for obvious reasons), and removed just about everyone from Eastchester except for people I actually *did* like. (This dropped me from about 15 "friends" at a particular college to 2.) One of them just tried to re-friend me. I rejected him. edit: I've since rejected ~~three~~ ten more attempted re-friendings and friendings from other people.

Honestly, I don't really see why you would expect to be considered my "friend" if throughout high school you probably only acknowledged my existence when forced to. Just because I graduated with you doesn't mean I have to like you.

This goes double for people I went to elementary school with. I removed one of those too. I haven't seen hide nor hair of you for a decade or so, nor did I particularly get along with you while we were in school, so why do I need to be your "friend" other than to pad your Facebook stats?

updatage

2005-09-18T00:27:00.000-04:00

Mom still hates Teh Gay and wants me to "reconsider" and "not pigeonhole [my]self." (Only she is allowed to do that, apparently.)

She now blames and hates my college and doesn't really like Maureen much either. I have come to the conclusion that my love for something is inversely proportional for her love for it.

She pulled out the "maybe [I] just haven't met the right man yet" line. I have to wonder how many men I would have to meet before she would concede that there isn't a right one. She also did the whole "you'll trust those... women on the Internet over your own parents?" routine. I thought about asking her why she trusts what James Dobson or some other straight man says about my sexual orientation over what I say about it.

At that point, though, I'd sort of stopped responding. She doesn't want answers; to her, they're rhetorical questions. I'm not supposed to actually disagree with the implicit sentiments.

The whole conversation started when she asked how I was doing on the meds and asked me if I thought I was happier, and I tried to explain that it was really being in the closet that does me in mentally. Mom didn't like my characterization of it that way, preferring the idea that Teh Gay was responsible for my depression instead of her reaction to it, and it kind of went downhill from there.

Also, she asked me to get rid of the LEZ shirt. I didn't respond, and currently, I have not thrown it out. Frankly, it's a freaking t-shirt, and I've worn in public maybe three times; mostly I sleep in it because it's a comfortable shirt. She's taken it to symbolize my entire "rebellion," and tossing it would be implicitly conceding that there is something shameful about what it represents.

Mom wishes I could go to the ex-gay-proponent dude I talked to on the phone. I can only thank God he lives in a different state, and that she doesn't find one of those Exodus boot camps, one of which is located in our state.

-------

I still hate taking medication. Lexapro is having just about the same effect Zoloft did, minus the weird heart palpitations. In particular, it makes me nauseous while I'm driving, which is bad. If I have to try one more SSRI I'm going to actually go nuts.

-------

I miss having a real journal and website. One of these days I may set up a (better-protected, with better pseudonyms, unlinked to my site) journal somewhere.

two weeks and counting

2005-08-28T20:43:00.000-04:00

Dear Terabil:

This morning I left beautiful, intelligent Broceliande and drove seven hours to be with you, and I'm already regretting it. You offer nothing to do, no one to do it with, and online access only when my mom is at church and can't give me the Evil Eye. I'm leaving you for Avalon, who loves me in a way you will never comprehend.

It's not me, it's you.

Fuck you very much,
Liadan

last call

2005-08-27T03:50:00.000-04:00

Well, this will probably be my last real Internet access until I get back to school-- I brought Hans back to Broceliande yesterday and I'm supposed to head back to Terabil tomorrow, weather permitting (and believe me, I'm hoping it rains). My computer is staying packed in its box until I leave for school because my mom gives me the evil eye whenever I so much as approach the computer, and has begun to refer to the Internet as a "cesspool of filth and smut." I might possibly be able to hop online and check email if she's out running errands or whatever during the day, but don't count on it.

Anyway, as things stand now:

[+] I hate the pills and told the psych during our last (extremely banal) session that if they were still having the same side effects (nausea, emotional deadness, etc.) by Christmas I was quitting and trying something non-pharmaceutical for once.

[+] My mom seems to believe that the psych is no longer needed now that I'm on meds and presumably "taken care of," and didn't attend the session she was supposed to. So much for her willingness to change.

[+] I still don't know if they ever informed my brother, who is now at college, of the proceedings. I'm of half a mind to tell him myself. Oh well.

[+] Terabil sucks.

realizations

2005-08-21T20:30:00.000-04:00

I'm frustrated at all this stuff because I feel like I'm failing.

I'm failing as a daughter because I can't make my mother happy. Well, I could, but only at the cost of my self. She's asking a price I can't pay and then she's hurt because she doesn't believe that I can't.

I'm failing as an artist, where my entire vocation is to show things and ask questions and make people understand, or at least want to know. And in the one case where the truth seems so simple, I keep explaining and talking and trying to make them understand, and I can't quite accept yet that not only do they not understand, they don't want to and they probably never will. It's not just that I can't make people understand, I can't even pique their interest.

I'm failing as a Christian because I'm supposed to be a source of compassion and healing here. I'm supposed to NOT make people hurt. It's not even like I want to save the world here, I only want to help a little piece of it. But every time I do something it seems like someone gets hurt, and if I do anything to help myself it's because I'm selfish and angry and hateful and spiteful. No matter what I try to do I'm being a stumbling block to someone.

The one time that it really matters most, where I should be able to make a difference, nothing I do makes anything better and everything I do to try to protect myself ends up hurting someone else.

It's hard to win this sort of thing.

I feel like I gave up by agreeing to take the Lexapro, even though I honestly don't want to and don't think it's going to help. I already know that it's going to be even harder to be "allowed" to go off the next time, when I get so numb that I can't stand it, because my mom believes that the Zoloft made me "happy" last time. It made me numb and I can't stand the thought that it might happen again.

pills

2005-08-21T16:32:00.000-04:00

I think what bothered me most about the psych appointment was how fast he was to prescribe antidepressants.

My mom maintains that Zoloft made me "happy" and "sweet" and "positive," and there is very little I can say to the contrary that will convince her otherwise because the points at which I started and stopped taking them were so tied to events. I keep trying to explain that what made my mood lift was not having to lie and hide anymore, but she persists in thinking that it was the Z because it's a simpler explanation that suggests a simple solution to this time.

I also tried to explain to the doctor that I didn't like being on the meds, that besides the physical side effects they made me feel emotionally numb. Sure I couldn't feel bad enough to want to hurt myself, but I couldn't really feel good either. I couldn't really feel much at all; I sort of wandered around feeling detached all the time. Even when I did feel angry or happy it was like I was sitting back watching someone else feel something. I ended up what Hans calls "Cardboard (me)". Now I've been on Lexapro a grand total of two days, and not only is it already making me nauseous and giving me headaches, it's already deadening my moods and generally making me feel even worse.

Seriously, these things fuck around with your BRAIN. Who the hell knows what kind of long-term effect that'll have? It's already been noticed anecdotally, and I can corroborate this from experience, that SSRIs can be habit-forming. That bothered me enough to want to get off the Zoloft in the first place.

And I felt BETTER once it was out of my system. I could feel HAPPY again. I could feel sad too, but anything was better than feeling nothing at all.

I already know that when I go back to the psych and mention that it's having the same effects, side and main, he'll probably feed me some line of crap about "adjusting the dosage" and "allowing up to eight weeks for it to take effect." I feel like he's just throwing pills at the problem and hoping it'll work without him having to put forth too much effort.

You know what I think would work? I think that someone actually bothering to LISTEN to me about my own fucking life once in a while would be nice, and it wouldn't require cramming me full of ersatz serotonin for the comfort of everyone else.