i’ll keep this short (since i’m actually working on tidying things up around here):
last year choir sang along with some songs that the bundles were recording, and now you can listen to them through the magic of c.d. or on white vinyl! i haven’t picked a favorite yet, but i’m really into “desert bundles” at the moment. …which you can conveniently listen to here!
photo (of some of us) by berd!
the first class i ever took in college was called “philosophy of women in world cultures,” a look at how women were reflected in religions and cultural histories throughout the world. mostly the class was me and some army wives, as this was san diego. the main text was the subordinated sex: a history of attitudes toward women, which was pretty interesting. we were also supposed to read the bible, which i didn’t… so i guess i’m making up for it now.
i’ve been a little into reclaiming the bible lately. i’m pretty much an agnostic pagan nutjob, but when the bible isn’t being used to hurt people or take money from folks, it can be pretty wise. i’m learning the way that all those strange numbers tell you where you are, which makes them a lot less confusing.
we went to church with my (lutheran) grandmother this sunday, and the sermon was about unconditional love, which is something i can get behind. at choir last week i went and talked to a man who had peeked his head in and listened for a while, usually i invite them in to sing with us. trying to figure out who we were, he asked “is this church?!” …i didn’t really know how to respond. for me, the love that we bring to choir *is* religion.
so, 1 Corinthians 12:14-26. it begins (14-17):
Now the body is not made up of one part but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be?
it seems like this has been interpreted a lot around different religions being part of the church, but if you’re going to tell me that there’s nothing in the bible about the gays or what have you, i’m going to point you here. this is accepting everybody as they are, not kicking them out for being different than you are.
remember in april when i was freaking out about not being a part of my community? i still get frazzled about it, which is part of why i was excited about corinthians. above talks about folks not detaching, not isolating themselves for their differences, but look at what 21-26 says about taking care of the parts “that seem to be weaker:”
The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.
i’m excited here about a lot of things, about not throwing people out. about questioning our judgment of “honor” and what’s “unpresentable.” maybe the bible *does* want us to be socialist freaks, or maybe we should just take care of each other.
as the minister tried to get at unconditional love, something seemed to come up to the congregation about fear, fear of some kind of responsibility or catch to this unconditionality. this culture of fear is pervasive, and i think that the only way to work on it is by loving big. you wanna help?
“Someone like that, who does those kind of things, and goes out in public, knows full well that this might happen to him.”
a nineteen-year-old from puerto rico was horribly murdered last week. the above statement was from the local police investigator assigned to the case.
nobody deserves that treatment, that bias. but the sentiment happens world-wide.
it’s the trans day of remembrance.
this is the eleventh year of transfolks worldwide making a conscious effort to get together on the same day and remember their dead.
too many people are killed, (unsurprisingly) skewed largely toward transwomen of color.
there are vigils today, yeah, you can vigil at home, but to me this is a day to be with your people and love them,
and then think about who aren’t your people.
who’s not with you? how can you expand your world to include everybody? how can we work together to stop folks from slipping through the cracks?
i’m caught between an idealistic “don’t ever let your posse be alone” with a feminist “i should be able to be alone if i fucking want to.” how can we unite those concepts by making the streets safe for everyone?
gender jam is this weekend, but that kind of space needs to be available to folks always. how can we create immediate support while still maintaining hope and building toward long-term change?
three things for you to work on tonight: light a candle. change the world. keep breathing.
i know that sometimes it seems like choir is the only thing i talk about, probably because it… is the only thing i talk about. i started grad school and quit my job (again!) since i last posted, but really.
election day marked a year of choir, in which it has grown exponentially in awesomeness and more than doubled in the amount of time we meet each week. yesterday was kimya’s birthday, and she was super sick. she requested that her friends post videos of themselves singing soft rock, but instead of soft rock i decided to have choir work on a response to this new song of hers… we recorded it and i made it into a moving picture. hooray!
this weekend is gender jam: olympia’s 2009 lad.i.y. and trans fest. i’m greatly anticipating many of the awesome workshops (nat and i are taking our little brother to chelsea baker’s “comics aren’t just for boys” workshop – it’s one of chelsea’s comics that closes out the video), and then sunday’s free choir practice is going to be part of gender jam as well, from four to six, in fertile ground guesthouse’s living room. it’d be a great first visit to choir, if you’ve been holding back – there should be lots of other new folks too, and we’re focusing on making sure that everybody is able to feel super welcome.
i hadn’t actually spend much time with seahorses before i had them tattooed on my leg, so it was nice that i had a chance to see some at the birch aquarium. the aquarium itself i didn’t like as much as the california academy of sciences‘ setup of fishyness, but the academy only had dead seahorses, so i maybe cried a little bit. until i wandered into the penguin room where they were feeding the penguins.
but the birch aquarium. seahorses that are alive, yes. a big porcupine pufferfish, yes. mostly, though, the baaaaby seahorses pictured (and titular). so small, two inches or so from head to tail-tip, they made the bumbling adult seahorses look positively graceful. the babies had managed to get tangled up when we first found them, but eventually unlinked themselves (i think they designed monkeys in a barrel after seahorses) and started bobbing around, upside-down and sideways. i love them.
other than the seahorses and the faux otka (r.i.p. real otka), the aquarium was just so-so. but there were four separate tanks with seahorses in them, so it was a worthwhile trip all-in-all.
of course now that we’ve got the computers figured out at home and the internet all set up, i’m writing this from the deliciously free wireless at sacramento airport.
which makes sense – i got in early and my flight to san diego is late, so what else should i be doing than catching up on the last two months with you Strangers From The Internets?
since i have that penchant for reverse chronology (and the bad memory, i’m sure that has a lot to do with it), i’ll start with last night’s double-stuf’d amazingness. the evening started with a free choir practice/performance at what i’ve been calling the stretch pants summer jam. it’s always fun to get out of our rut (as we’re doing next week at the shelton library, as well), especially in stretch pants. mine were purple lame and quite glam.
the glam continued with tragic magic at northern, where i promptly fell in love with all of the performers. i had a theater mentor tell me once that he thought i’d make a great performance artist – after seeing these kids, it’s firmly in the compliment column (again).
golly, if there was stuff that happened in the past two months that wasn’t choir and/or awesome queers, i don’t remember it. also it doesn’t seem likely to have been my life.
i have a new job, starting on tuesday – thus the trip to san diego now. i went to san francisco for the national conference on volunteering and service (huge! overwhelming!) over pride weekend and was elated by trans march. while i was there i was able to catch Chagall and the Russian Jewish Theater, which was spectacular. so much of his work was done so quickly, i learned, that it could only be almost a stream-of-consciousness.
the first piece i saw of his, like most people i’m sure, is america’s windows. i actually have a tote bag of it, which was one of my favorite bags to carry around when i was high school. he’s done a lot of work, i’m not sure if that was his only stained glass (research finds that no, there are lots of amazing glass pieces of his around!), but the most stunning part of the russian jewish theater exhibit was a set that he had created for a show… i could have stood there for hours staring at the details, and apparently i should have. one of the museum guards yelled at me for trying to take a picture of my favorite bit, and of course i can’t find it online. i wish my memory was better; i’m tired of things i love being so ephemeral. anyhow, the beauty that i can’t find is part of “chagall’s box,” and you can read more about it here.
May has been busy what with the sun being out and the houses being moved and the seedlings that *still* need to go into the ground… We have deer all over the place in our back acres, and I can’t stand the thought of planting the babes without some kind of deer protection.
Cable internet should show up next week, in which case I’ll have more of an opportunity to update – dial up, ah how I did not miss you.
last night i had a long and complicated dream, which isn’t so surprising… the surprising part is that i then remembered this dream when i woke up. this isn’t so much the “look at what a wacky dream i had” narrative as it is a “what does this mean about waking life?”
because in this dream i was having an argument with someone who was in to me, liked me a lot, wanted to be my friend, but flatly refused to accept that i was part of the trans community.
… and this is something that i’ve been worrying about a lot lately, as i explore what it means to be largely femme-identified in a female body. in my burlesque class i’ve been trying to choose between two pieces – one that’s pretty much just high femme, and one that’s obviously a genderqueer commentary. my analysis of these two pieces is that the genderqueer one would be easier and probably more interesting, and that the femme one would be more challenging, but also potentially boring.
i’m in burlesque 101 to challenge myself (i’m in this world to challenge myself?), but also to increase my strength as a performer. i was thinking seriously about starting hormones a few months ago, when i realized that the only thing holding me back was fear of societal repercussion (the alternate word that i was going to put there was “asshattery”)… i think that somehow i’ve come to believe that if i’m not challenged, if i’m comfortable, things aren’t worth my time.
this is everywhere in my life – work, relationships, gender – and it has such an amazing contradiction with my agoraphobia, i can’t even begin to fathom. i wonder if it comes from judging myself harshly for letting the agoraphobia win and not facing the challenges? and i wonder how the hell i might try to beat it.
this isn’t at all where i thought this entry was going to go. it was initially just going to be a reassertion of my place in the trans/gender/queer community, my role as a “militant genderqueer” … but then i wonder, if i feel the need to constantly remind everybody that i belong… am i feeling like i belong? obviously not. i have no way of knowing what everybody else is feeling, but i keep distancing myself from transmasculine spaces in particular because of my femme presentation – but other than being the most femme gay guy you might ever meet, i’m also pretty darn gay and man.
i don’t know, sweethearts. i have no idea.
tomorrow i’m going to a “first time homebuyers class.” i’m going to bring my padfolio (yes, i just said padfolio) and pretend to be a grown up. i really like this house, but it’d be a super-long commute to oly. still, it’d be amazing tto live on way to tipperary street. who thought that putting the word “way” in a street name was a good idea? i also love this one, but i think it’s a little to old for me to be able to keep it happy, it needs someone a little better at taking care of the puppy once they’ve brought the puppy home.
also tomorrow is nettlefest! where choir is singing. and my friend andrew is moving away, so he’s holding a party for us to kick him and tell him not to move away. at least i’m pretty sure what the party is for.
sunday i might go to look at the way to tipperary house! also it is blintzapalooza, which – oh my goodness exciting.
on monday i have my first burlesque 101 class! i’m excited and petrified. a few weeks ago i did a basic class and tassle twirling, but this six-week course ends with a performance which is… golly. it’s funny, though – at the tassle twirling class i had to ask about a “how to twirl your tassles” article i pulled out of the stranger when i was sixteen, it was illustrated by ellen forney… i knew even back then that i wanted to be a drag queen, and indeed the article was about miss indigo blue’s going-ons. it became suddenly obvious, afterward, that ellen had done the illustration of indigo that’s the academy logo.
……..i tend to get fixated on things. sometimes i check my email in the early morning, when i should be going back to sleep, and one day i got an email from sophie asking if ghosts are good company (the song, also the name of this blog probably maybe obviously also i am the fourth result for that phrase on google) was by bishop allen as it… is… or by the moldy peaches as it is often labeled. and instead of just going “no, it’s really bishop allen” i spent a good hour of my sleeping time on the internet being grumpy. and then listening to the song again and going “well, i can see how it sounds like the moldy peaches to some people, but it’s totally not kimya.” and then thinking about how much i love bishop allen and how much i love the moldy peaches kids and is the latter why i got so into the former? are more of their songs similar-sounding and i just didn’t know it? speaking of which, that comcast ad campaign? grr.
my extracurriculars have been making life pretty tasty lately. there’s been knitting, which is always fun but extra-fun since it’s full of good queers! and then, mostly, there’s been choir which has been great. i joked when i decided to stay in olympia that it was for sophie and the choir(, which at that point was pending), and now that sophie’s up and moved to portland, i have to say that choir’s almost worth it on its own (not to say that i don’t miss sophie. i just got an amtrak free companion ticket and i’m going to make nat come with me to visit her and erica at some point). i’ve found it’s the same with a few of us – that even if we don’t want to go be social, we go to choir and leave feeling awesome.
nat’s feeling awesome RIGHT NOW because his top surgery funding has just come through – he can pay for it!, he just needs to make an appointment. (he says, not actually in a monotone, “i feel like jumping up and down for joy.”) i’m excited for that too, and also because i’m typing this on my new tiny computer. it’s named after our “darling, dearest, dead” friend otka, and has only fallen on the floor once – when i got butter too excited about the toy he was chasing around, causing him and otka to go flying. i’ve hidden that toy, but he’s since found another one.
……and now he’s been sitting in the dryer for the last twenty minutes.
national mentoring month celebrations went well, and i had a good time and learned a lot at the guiding lights weekend, as well. it’s really strange to go from the hectic-ness of january to a february that has almost nothing on my to-do list.
but, i’m sure i’ll figure something out. knit-n-nature is one thing i really want to do. fort flagler is one of my favorite places, and combining that with knitting? yes please.
… which reminds me that i should get back to the argyle sweatervest that i’m knitting for butter.
