“Not like them”

I wrote a letter to a friend, triggered by but not really (only) about this quote attributed to Timothy Leary. Yes, this is how I write letters. No, I don’t know why I can’t break out of declaiming revolution mode either.

So there’s this meme (see: Doctor Who, goths, The Little Mermaid, geeks, etc) that some people are just “not like everyone else” and it’s predicated on the understanding that “everyone else” lives these mindlessly mundane lives, and consumes and drones is a sheeple and in all ways is just dull dull boringly DULL, and YOU, angsty rebel nonconformist deep thinker YOU are NOT LIKE THEM (ie you are better), because their life isn’t INTERESTING enough for you. I was sort of raised like this, in the SCA, and we were cool because we weren’t “cool” because we weren’t the mundanes.

And while I think there’s lots of interesting stuff there, that it’s a pushback to being excluded for oddness, that some people are more inclined to be the adventurers and some the culture keepers, all that aside: more and more I think it is, simply, bullshit. Because we ALL, to some degree, long for/fear novelty and change, and we ALL sometimes think about boogers and whether we left the stove on, and we ALL get bloody bored with the washing up, and we ALL sometimes wonder “is this all there is?”

And this meme, of special non-mundane, non-sheeple, is just another bullshit way of dehumanizing the people around us, of making ourselves feel better-than, and thus it perpetuates kyriarchy.

I’d much rather spend my time enjoying both the ways in which I am traditional and the ways I am not, exploring the boundaries of what we construct as “mundane”/”boring” and investigating why we do, and connecting with real people who, like me, are complex and nuanced and ugly and boring and bored and amazing.

And the point, the POINT, is we are ALL real people, and it’s up to me to see that, to get to know others’ realness, instead of dismissing them based on my own false imaginings.

On contrived debates, strawmoms, and kyriarchy’s binds

A rant inspired by far too many “feminism versus mothers/attachment parenting/stay at home moms! SHOW DOWN AT SUNDOWN!” articles I’ve encountered recently. Storified, because I ain’t typing all this twice. (I don’t know how well/whether Storify works with screen readers, so if you can’t access this, please let me know.)

And one more

This would be another reason.

(After watching Quick Thoughts on “Until Abortion Ends”, I have been on yet another Jay Smooth bender today. I highly recommend trying this, if you have the time.)

Six reasons I haven’t been blogging

I know, you’re not supposed to blog about why you haven’t been blogging. (Of course, you know how fond of blogging rules I am.) But I have been so. very. busy. in a not-online-for-blogging kind of way, and I thought you might like to know why.

Reasons 1-4

(Please forgive my horrid photography, though the disco pink is a product of the heat lamp.)

One week old

Allow me to introduce the Timechooks. Fore-left is Perpugillium Brown (Peri), and nearly hidden behind her is Melanie Bush (Mel). To the right fore is Leela of the Sevateem, and right aft, the yellow fluffball, is Nyssa of Traken.1

Yes, they are all named after companions of the Doctor. Yes, I am unrepentantly geeky. Yes, I really am ok with this.

For context, because to some people this seems sudden — first I did not have chickens, and then I started talking about getting chickens, and a week later, Timechooks! — but in truth I have known I wanted chickens for longer than I knew I wanted children. And a mere 8 years, 2,500 miles, 4 houses, 1 mortgage, and 2 children later: chickens!

I am more than a little excited. Allow me to show you an interpretive dance of how excited I have been the last month:

Excited like Leela with the Doctor's permission to cut someone

But that is not all! Oh no! That box Leela is doing her Dance of Joy in, under Nyssa’s calm and watchful eye? That would be during an early stage of…

Reasons 5-6

Gardens galore

Veggie beds! And portable strawberry beds2! And no dog poop!3 A month and a half ago, this corner of our yard was grass and shit and sun. Because for once Portland in Springtime has been cooperative (yay sunny weekends!), and because I Was Determined, there are now two fully installed up and running vegetable beds (and strawberry beds!). Although obviously I hope we are able to harvest food from here, at this point I almost don’t care4 because I am so very proud of how much I have been able to do.

How proud? This proud:

A boy and his (garden) bed

So very proud. And hammy.

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL!

Reasons the next

Having acquired chickens and installed a vegetable garden, the next several weeks will be spent building a coop to house the chickens and a fence to keep the two apart. And somewhere in there I have to finish painting my office (friends are staying with us in a couple months and would probably appreciate having some place other than the cupboard under the stairs5 to do it in), cook, clean, parent, and, y’know, not go crazy.

And I want to tell you about why these things are/are not amazingly good for my mental health, the joy in finally putting in to action desires I’ve had for nearly a decade, the satisfaction and pride of completing a project I’ve set out to do, the humility in realizing I cannot do it all (at least not at once), the sheer fun (and feminist implications) of working with power tools, and so much more –

But if you’ll excuse me, I have to go buy lumber.

  1. Their breeds, respectively, are Ameraucana, Speckled Sussex, Welsummer, and Buff Orpington. Now you know.
  2. Made out of old PAX drawers from IKEA we hadn’t yet gotten around to tossing out, which yes I do believe was exceptionally clever of me.
  3. Note: There is probably still dog poop.
  4. Note: I care very much.
  5. No really! We have a cupboard under the stairs! It is, I swear unto you, for reasons indiscernible but please someone become a multibillionaire writing a story why, pink!

Guest post: Losing My Words

Today’s guest post, which I can relate to far more than I’d like, is from Emilia. You can find her on Twitter, talking rubbish and revolution.

Losing My Words

Words are just about the most important thing in the world to me. I make my living with them, I breathe them in, all day and all night. Sometimes I am so engrossed in my own flow of words, I can’t even hear the people around me, it takes them two or three times to get my attention. But this post, I am sad to say, is hard for me to write.

I don’t mean emotionally–though it is that–I mean literally. For the past five years, I’ve had chronic migraines of various kinds. I have the regular ones, the skull-splitting oh DEAR G_D NO SOUND OR LIGHT FOR ME TODAY migraines, at least once a week. I also have hemiplegic migraines, migraines which mimic a stroke, which are truly terrifying, though these are mostly under control with medication. And lastly, more lately there’s the possibility that I have vestibular migraines which are affecting my balance (I’m still having tests on this, I don’t have a dx on that yet).

My neurologist does a pretty good job with all this, providing me with an array of preventatives, painkillers that keep me roughly functional. Chiro and massage help immensely.* My case, she says, is just one of those tricky ones where it’s more pain management than cure. Which is okay, as far as chronic illness goes. I know it could be much, much worse.

But. I’m vastly diminished from the time I first started having regular migraines. Besides the obvious pain and exhaustion, I walk around in a brain fog a lot of the time, which dulls my critical capacities, my ability to form sentences (let alone coherent arguments). And worst of all for me, I have a mild form of aphasia, meaning that when I reach for a word, I often pull out another word that my mind has mentally related to it as similar. Or I use odd tenses, rearranging sentences into odd shapes, like a Cubist writer. The meaning is clear but the expression is unorthodox.

As a wanky theorist person, this is occasionally fascinating in the way it recalls Ferdinand de Saussure’s argument that language is differential, that words have particular relationships of difference to one another. As a writer with a disability, however, it mostly just fucking sucks.

There are times where I have sent work to a journal, thinking it was fine, only to have the response suggest that I check my work first with a native English speaker. As a native English speaker, and once with a PhD in English to boot, I can’t tell you how mortifying that is.

Worse than even the blow to my pride, is the feeling that I am losing my sense of myself, the very fibre of my being. I feel a tremendous sense of loss, of the person I was. Sometimes I mourn for my lost quickness. Indeed, I’ve begun to feel dispossessed from language itself, the very medium we use to convey our relation to the world of objects and each other.

There’s a fear lingering at the back of my brain, what if this gets worse, what if I end up losing my ability altogether? It’s not an altogether unfounded fear – my neurologist tells me there is markedly increased risk of strokes for people with hemiplegic migraines.

But for now, however painful and slow the process is, I am still writing. Given time and patience, I can still write. I take longer, and I make many more mistakes, and the attention of a good editor/friend certainly helps, but I can still do it… and I will continue to write until I can write no more.

*I hear Arwyn is a Trained Professional in that area, you Portland people should request her services. [Ed. note: I was threatened with pain of pain if I removed this footnote. It was emphatically Not My Idea.]