ghosts are good company

my friend erin just posted in her blog about a class at uc berkeley that’s happening next semester – it’s called “Sex Change City: Theorizing History in Genderqueer San Francisco,” and is taught by susan stryker. this course makes me giddy.

i’ve been trying to figure out how to make things work out so that i can take the class. i found this bit on the ccsf website:

This program with CCSF and the University of California, Berkeley, provides qualified students the opportunity to enroll in one free UCB course.

… but then i came across this bit, finishing it up:

Students who have attended four-year colleges or universities are not eligible.

humbug.

all of this came up as i was in the middle of looking into some things that i’ve been wanting for christmas, and i was like “yes! this is the best christmas present ever!” … but it turned out to be a lie.

any ideas on how i can fenangle this, anyone?

in other news, i was a fantastic eleanor roosevelt! i’m thinking about wearing the costume again and making cubbie take pictures of me wearing it, because it’s pretty darn cute. i got a lot of compliments on the outfit, and it sounds like my fairly unrehearsed presentation was amusing and educational. woo! one course down.

today i purchased a coat! it is exciting and will keep me warm. i am so very happy to have a coat.

this coat is part of the final project for my lesbian and gay culture and society class, where i will be playing eleanor roosevelt. and it will keep me warm all winter!

sorry, i’m just excited about it. it was a good investment. which fits! (here is the part where i twirl around in circles) it was from old navy, which is silly, but coat!

it’s beginning to look a lot like christmas. during my costume shopping today, every store was playing christmas music. cubbie and i have finally ironed down our travel plans (san francisco to oakland to vegas to tampa (december nineteenth through the twenty-fifth) to albuquerque to san diego (december twenty-fifth to thirty-first) to oakland to san francisco. phew! now we all we have to do is figure out new year’s plans….

i mentioned a bit ago having taken diversity: transphobia. the course was a saturday course, taught by lydia sausa.

i’ve had some trouble with the “diversity:” courses in the past, so i was feeling fairly trepid, but it went well – really well. sausa offered a class that catered to people with all ranges of experience around trans issues – managing to both engage people who were new to trans experiences and also to offer relevant information for people with pasts in trans organizing and education. yay.

i’ve gained more resources to use in my education, and (hopefully) folks newer to these issues will have found an impetus to their working with them further.

perhaps my favorite part of the class was when sausa brought up different theories of gender. one of them was dylan vade’s concept of a gender galaxy… and the other, my favorite, comes from my favorite genderqueer rockstar, lynn(ee) breedlove. this is the “nesting doll” theory of gender, which i was immediately attracted to – if just because the czech parts of my family inundated me with matryoshka dolls as a child. so, this theory revolves around there being many layers of gender. in a sketch, breedlove suggests that hir tiniest inner gender is “peter pan – a young boy, always played by a woman” and that on the outside they’re unka lynnee, who is made up of all of those inner parts. of course, there are seven or eight other gender identites in between those – and for everybody, there is a different set of dolls. this concept makes me want to do art, to do paintings or molds or mini-statues (um, figurines?) of my own gender makeup. apparently breedlove was in class last semester to do their comedy routine about this. it’s probably the best thing that i wasn’t there for that one, as breedlove makes me fairly weak at the knees.

umm, where was i going here? oh! one of the folks in the class was touched by a lot of the exercises, to the point where they realized that they really did need to come out to their family. the wistful “i wish my parents could have been here!” made me realize that – hey! maybe their parents could be there… the course is going to be repeated on january sixth, from 10:00am to 6:00 pm. you should take it! it’d be something like $15 for california residents, $80 (i thiiink) for non-residents. thoughts?

City College of San Francisco:
IDST 80G Diversity: Transphobia 0.5 37954 W01 Lec SAT 10:00-06:00PM 01/06 BNGL Accessible: The classroom is fully ADA code compliant. Sausa, L

come visit us! come learn things. yes folks, that was an ad for my school.

there’s mariachi music wafting in the window. it’s thanksgiving. the mariachi happens sometimes, but usually we can only hear the oompah. tonight it’s in full force loud, people singing along joyfully and drunkenly.

our observaton of the day people celebrate thanksgiving was quieter, although there were about fifteen of us there eating delicious stuffed seitan (a wheat-gluten based tasty thing) and a pumpkin filled with stuffing and lots of other tasty things. we watched some of pride and prejudice, and while i was there i had three mugs full of spiced cider. num.

this weekend i am going to be writing, writing – four or five final papers, the first four of which will be for the same class. i’m a little overwhelmed.

but our neighbors are excited.

at 8:55 tonight it started raining. it was sudden, it started raining a lot. we keep the windows open about two inches – so there’s air, but so the kitties can’t get out (at least, not without pushing the windows up with their heads, which they can do… there are big windowsills, so they’re pretty safe out there, but its still scary). the rain fell hard, loud, beautiful, hard enough to start scooting in under the windows. they’re open about half an inch now. i picked butter up and stared at the rain for a while.

rain is a huge marker of my life. there are all those jokes about the rain in seattle, and while there’s less than folks say there is, it was still a huge part of my childhood and continues to be really important, almost holy, to me. which isn’t to say that i like being out in the rain, at least not when i have to get to work or class or anywhere where i need to not look like a soggy thing… it’s the safety of the sound, the coziness of the rain on the roof, that is important to me.

we’re on the fifth floor of seven in our apartment building, but we’ve still got the rain on the walls, and the windows, pounding insistently and with love.

i love the trappings of rain, the rainclothes, which is silly because i’ve never really found any that worked for me. rain coats always get too warm, so do rain boots… i’ve been in love with the rainboots they’ve been selling with cowboy boot stylings, but they’d have the same problem. the last time i was out in the rain, though, i just wore my normal cowboy boots, which are super-cheap silver-colored things. i was on the phone with my grandfather and i stepped in a giant puddle (it was a square of cementlessness supposed to hold a tree, but there was no tree, it was just dirty water), but my feet stayed dry!

i keep meaning to get an umbrella, but it’s only rained three times here since the rain started. each time it’s torrential, but then it goes away. the weather’s been in the sixties, and it’s been fall-ish lately, which is nice. even if it’s supposed to be winter by now.

(hmm. now there’s hush. has the rain stopped?)

i know i do. and i probably will talk about some things here that you won’t understand, or at least won’t understand why i care about them or why they’re important to me. but if i’m talking about them here (generally!) i do, or they are. so ask. i like to hope that i can provide articulate answers and explanations.
it’s been a time recently of a lot of Thinking. i’ve spent a large part of my life trying to figure out what i want to do When I Grow Up, and all that jazz. i was thinking about law for a while, i was thinking about museum studies, but after investigating them and taking classes around them, i found them all to be too… something. they were all too constrictive, in precise and difficult-to-articulate ways.

also for most of my life, i’ve been doing activist work. a lot of this has been done through nonprofit organizations, and i’ve thought time and time again about doing something in that arena – but also time and time again, i’ve burnt out like crazy. i need a career where i will not go through cycles of crazy.

and i don’t know if that exists yet, but i know that i need to build it. since moving to san francisco, i’ve met some folks who have been very supportive of me and helped me with ideas. one, who took it for granted that i was going to grad school, suggested a couple of graduate programs to me – the history of consciousness program at uc santa cruz and the modern thought and literature program at stanford both sound fantastic for me, especially the latter. i don’t know if i’m ready though, both because i’m so young still [twenty-one is so young for anything, for everything, but especially for commiting to a ph.d program! also, i should have mentioned in the baby chatter in my last entry - these are plans we're working on for five to ten to more years down the road], but also because i really need to get my mental health sorted out before i can move into anything that big. i’ve melted down so many times throughout college, which is what’s supposed to happen, somewhat, but… maybe not this much.

well, that was cheerful and optimistic.

there’s a small problem in the schedule of my world where i’d really like to graduate “on time” in the spring of 2007. i could do this if i took few credits during the summer, but what i’d really like to do to finish up my college work is this program, which would be a semester studying gender and sexuality in the netherlands. i think that something like this would be an important experience to cap off my four years of queer and gender studies, because so much of what i’ve done so far is from such a (generally liberal) united states perspective.

another reason taking summer classes might be tricky is that i’m looking at two different summer programs down here in the bay area, both of which are based around anti-oppression work. they seem remarkably similar, with some subtle differences. the first, which i learned about from a guest speaker in my “diversity: transphobia” course (which i will mention in its own entry, because it deserves it), is SOUL – the school of unity & liberation:

SOUL Summer School is an eight-week-long intensive introduction to community organizing and social change, designed for young activists (ages 18-25) who have been involved with social justice organizing for at least one year. SOUL is dedicated to helping young women, young people of color, young working class people and queer youth step up to lead the movement, and SOUL Summer School provides a structured time when [youth] can work full-time to develop [their] grassroots organizing skills and [their] political analysis.

the second, which i found while trying to find the soul program, is diversityworks’ the works program:

The Works begins with an intensive five-week, anti-oppression, social justice training program in which 15-18 youth will come together in the San Francisco Bay Area for educational workshops, service learning and community events. Through these activities, participants gain a deeper understanding of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, ableism, ageism, and other forms of oppression. Youth will also develop their own skills as leaders and gain tools for bringing about positive change in their communities. The training program is followed by a month of group-led community action.

i feel like i should take advantage of these opportunities while i’m still considered part of the “youth” community. maybe it seems like this should be obvious – summer program and then netherlands program – but graduating “on time” is for some reason so important to me. i think a lot of it is that i’m currently at my eleventh school in my lifetime, and that’s a lot. it’d be nice to graduate with a degree that says i spent four years learning somewhere (even if it’s pretty much only been two).

anyhow. i’ve been working on this post for two hours. i have class in the morning. this is why my grades are bad.

xo

i’ve been having trouble sleeping, so i’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking lately. tonight i took a bath and finished (re-)reading my copy of genderqueer. the article about transy house, which is on page 297, i think, if you want to read it in google books. they have a cooperative house that operates in a family structure. the author of the piece owns the house, and discusses how wearing it can be, but the piece is so very full of hope. combining thought about that with the way that babies have been stars in the media that i’ve been consuming lately (the baby on lost is being baptized as i write this) and the dufty-goldfaber baby – oh, also and tango makes three… i’ve been in community baby-raising mood. i suppose it could also be that one of the guys we are hoping will be helping us with hypothetical child(ren) was (maybe is?) in town – and that cubbie is becoming friends with one of his friends who might want to carry a baby… so yeah. babystuff like woah.

i also think that cubbie and i should get registered as domestic partners soon. legal paperwork is good, sometimes – i also want to start thinking about what would be necessary should this type of baby-housing arrangement ever happen. eep.

anyhow, i’ve been doing crazily at school. i think i’m going to make twelve credits this quarter (after having originally registered for seventeen), and i should really pull eighteen credits next semester. i think i can do that, at least if most of them are online.

here are the classes that i’m looking at:

online
intro. to les/bi/gay/trans studies (3 credits)
mass media and society (3 credits)
racial and ethnic groups in the us (3 credits)
strategies for problem studies (2 credits)

in-person
aids in america (3 credits, wednesdays 6:30-9:30)
anthropology of homosexualities (3 credits, mondays 6:30-9:30)
supporting lgbt families in early childhood education (3 credits, tuesdays 6:00-9:00)
diversity: racism (.5 credits, 9:00-1:00, march 3&10)
diversity: classism (.5 credits, 9:00-1:00, february 3&10)

i could pick up a one-credit class if i wanted to get rid of the diversities (they’re early! it’s saturday! i have to get up at seven to get there on time!) in addition to one of the three-credits… i’m thinking that the e.c.e. class might not be for me. i think the best plan is to rank them and see what classes i can get, since my registration date is really late.

anyhow. i need to do better in school next semester, and then i need to graduate, and then i need to do well this summer, and then i need to do… something. and then maybe i’ll feel like i know what’s going on.

so, this is it – good old greendinosaur.net. i have high hopes, but for now it’s just a handful of blogs. at the moment there’s just my cubbie and i here, but i’m hoping to open the space up for family and friends as well. this space, for me, is going to be a fairly general overview of whatever-strikes-my-fancy, and cubbie’s blog (which is entitled “the seams of a (newly) peculiar queer”) is going to be about his experiences as a queer kid who is new to the quaker faith.

i took a class this summer called “art of the blog,” and, well – i’ve been blogging since (eyesquint) 1999, first at diaryland and then at livejournal. this is my first time (outside of the class), though, of hosting my own platform and things. it seems like a good thing for now, to be away from the whims of sixapart (which owns livejournal now) and the like. i’m glad that i’ve practiced this all before, but woah am i rusty. i’m sure i’ll have lots of challenges in the administration of this space, but heck – i’m always up to a new web-adventure.

for some reason, it feels really important to let you know where i’m (literally) coming from. i was born and raised near seattle, and spent two of my last years of high school in san diego before heading to college in olympia, washington. now cubbie and i have relocated to san francisco, where i will finish college and we will while away our days. san francisco seems very important at the moment, probably because it’s so new. still, i feel like it’s a big thig in a way that none of my other moves so far have been.

there’s a lot to get done here before i’ll even think of this as a blog. one thing i’m going to miss about livejournal is the built-in community, what with the… communities. that type of camaraderie is something i’m not sure how to build. but! we’ll figure it out as we go.

i suppose that’s the moral of the story.

oh! and the current title of the blog, “ghosts are good company,” comes from the song of the same name by bishop allen – you can find the lyrics here. the subtitle, which i don’t think is visible with this theme, is “and now the world is suddenly wonderful.” this is my new favorite song, and you can look to see if hypemachine can find you a copy of it by clicking here.

take care, folks.

xoxpuck

[oh, p.s., i'm preparing to use my categories as tags. that's why i'm using so many of them. if you have any to suggest for any particular entry, or in general, please let me know.]