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amazon_syren Aug. 11th, 2008 10:27 am)
amazon_syren Aug. 11th, 2008 10:27 am)Okay,
So, Saturday night I went to Café Umi and I read some of my own poetry and people clapped and everything! :-D (I wanna do it again!)
Also, Faye performed - and is awesome! (a few months ago - maybe in May? - I wrote a poemanifesto thing about Why I Can't Be Normal and it was rather too heavy on the rhetoric to be actually any good? She has a piece that talks about all that stuff, but it *is* good. I was, like, "Yes! That's what I wanted to say when I wrote that thing! Go you!" and I wonder how she found the way to make it so personal and so right.
There were many, many other performers, lots of laughing and lots of moving stuff -- by which I mean Stuff that was Very Moving, not shifting stuff around.
One gal, Monika, read a piece from "Without a Net", which is all about the experience of growing up in poverty.
That one was painful.
See I totally grew up middle-class and not hurting for money. There was never any question about whether or not we'd have enough to eat at the end of the month or anything like that.
So I don't actually understand why I start shaking and tearing up and all the rest of it when I hear stuff like that, but I do. I have no idea why that fear/shame/pain is familiar, but it feels like it is.
*~*~*~*~*
On Sunday, I went to Slashers' Brunch, which was marvelous fun! :-D
I think it must be one of those years. Big Changes for lots of people.
<*pokes the One Who Is Being Brave*>
<*also pokes the One Whose Intuition Has Been Talking*>
If either of you wanna bounce ideas off me, vent, yammer, verbally flail, or what-have-you, feel free to send me a note some time and we can chat. :-)
On Sunday night I did *not* go to the Radical Vulvas show.
Alas.
I got to South Keys (after having a nap, and hurriedly shoving some dinner into a tupperware to eat on the way) only to realize I had 13 minutes to wait until the next bus down town and that, consequently, I would be even later than I had expected.
:-P
I decided to go anyway but found myself litterally falling asleep within about five minutes.
Seriously.
So I decided I was way too exhausted to get much of any benefit out of the show (or be able to deal with the subsequent bus-wait and bus-ride back to my isolated end of town, afterwords), and so decided to just go back home.
Which I did.
I'm still sad that I missed it, though, and would love to hear how it went from those who were there. :-D
I spent th evening feeling like a too-tired todler. Seriously. Alternately complaining to myself that I'm tiiiiiiiiired!!! and raging at the circumstances 'cause, dammit, it's not FAIR that I'm this tired! I finally have the freedom to go out any night of the week, to not feel guilty for wanting to out to a show (a queer-possitive women-possitive show, no less) rather than wanting to stay in with my home-body husband[1], to not feel guilty about wanting to hang out with the queer women *because* they are queer women (and, okay, writers and feminists and such-like, too, but still - I want that like-minded-ness to be purely out of preference and/or good luck, not because I feel I need some sort of excuse...).
I have all this poetry squirrling around in my head.
By which I mean that I have these things/feelings/stuff squirrling around in my head that will, eventually, coalesce into poetry but, at present, are just driving me kind of insane.
Fragment:
but from this angle all I can see
is the widening gap between you and me
where "us" used to be
Fragment (or maybe more than that):
I think we're lost
going 'round in circles
I swear we've passed that argument before
that map they gave us doesn't make any sense
did we take a wrong turn somewhere?
I don't like the look of this road, hon
can we please get out and ask
for dirrections?
And there's that kid who kept talking to me while I was frantically jotting down gay-girl erotic poetry from my lj tags file (needed to write it out 'cause I didn't have a hard-copy and wanted to read it at Dykes with Mykes):
A twenty-year-old, white, hetersexual, cisgendered, almost-guaranteed-to-be-christian[2], educated (in one sense of the word), wealthy, boy who:
likes boating, golf and sky-scrapers
thinks that adicts bring perpetuate their addictions entirely through personal choice (and that, consequently, there could have been no extenuating circumstances that made that first choice the one that looked the most appropriate/advantageous)
that successful people (himself, in particular) are successful entirely because they "never lose sight of the ball" (and, consequently, that there could have been no extentuating circumstances that made that success easier for him/them to come by than it might have been for someone else with their eyes equally fixed on that "ball")
believes that queer is a choice (and the wrong one), and who - when called on the fact that, yes, he's most-likely met *lots* of queer people, but that it sure as hell doesn't mean they came out to *him* - held up the existence of his lesbian sister - sorry, half-sister (very important, that bit where they only have one parent in common and he didn't *really* grow up with her) - as if to say "But I can't be homophobic...!"
who thinks that Ivanka Trump is the prettiest woman in the world and that, as such, she would be the ideal woman for him - the kind of gal who could "comfort" him when he comes home from the nasty, cut-throat world of business -- he is, apparently, oblivious to the fact that, given she's a CEO in her own right, she might have other things on her mind...
In short, he is the very distilation of patriarchal privilege, incarnate.
Good grief...
I mean, on the one hand, I couldn't help but laugh.
Cause if that was the very distilation of patriarchal privilege (okay, given W. this is probably a bit of stating the obvious), well, holy-fuck, The Patriarchy is dumb.
Good goggly-moggly, it boggles the mind...
But, at the same time, I was laughing in one part, and bemused/irritated in another (admittedly larger) part - because, hello, I was clearly trying to do something else, and giving many, many cues (mono-sylabic answers, impatient tone of voice, not looking in his dirrection, etc. etc.) that I wasn't interested in what he had to say, and also feeling a little bit of "teaching moment" sympathy... I can't get mad at someone for being raised ignorant, after all...
Despite all that, thought, I CAN (and DO) get made a people - myself included - for continuing to remail in wilfull ignorance once they are in a possition to change that situation.
Seriously.
How can a person - an individual - be SO self-righteous in his demeanor, so certain in his belief that he got to be "on top of the heap" through dint of his own hard work alone, and so unwilling to learn the truth of his privilege, or even the extent of his ignorance?
I honest-to-fuck don't understand how ANYONE can decide "Nope. Ignorance for me! I like it better that way!" when the alternative is, y'know, actually *learning* stuff and becoming a better human being?
(Granted: He and I, pretty damn clearly, have radically different criteria for what constitutes making oneself "better"...)
Nyurg...
Anyway. That was my public library experience on Saturday.
Lunch is calling (and I am *hungry*). Time for me to go. :-)
[1] That doesn't, inconveniently, mean that I *actually* don't feel guilty - as though I'm going to get in some sort of trouble for staying out late, doing stuff that I want and find interesting, rather than staying home like good, straight-acting (well, not particularly, but...) girl/wife/etc. Gotta get rid of that feeling... :-P
[2] I'm guessing Metropolital Bible Church - he reminds me that much of the kid who rented a room from my mother one year, also the attitude about queer-as-wrong-choice suggests he'd be located at that particular end of the christian spectrum.
So, Saturday night I went to Café Umi and I read some of my own poetry and people clapped and everything! :-D (I wanna do it again!)
Also, Faye performed - and is awesome! (a few months ago - maybe in May? - I wrote a poemanifesto thing about Why I Can't Be Normal and it was rather too heavy on the rhetoric to be actually any good? She has a piece that talks about all that stuff, but it *is* good. I was, like, "Yes! That's what I wanted to say when I wrote that thing! Go you!" and I wonder how she found the way to make it so personal and so right.
There were many, many other performers, lots of laughing and lots of moving stuff -- by which I mean Stuff that was Very Moving, not shifting stuff around.
One gal, Monika, read a piece from "Without a Net", which is all about the experience of growing up in poverty.
That one was painful.
See I totally grew up middle-class and not hurting for money. There was never any question about whether or not we'd have enough to eat at the end of the month or anything like that.
So I don't actually understand why I start shaking and tearing up and all the rest of it when I hear stuff like that, but I do. I have no idea why that fear/shame/pain is familiar, but it feels like it is.
*~*~*~*~*
On Sunday, I went to Slashers' Brunch, which was marvelous fun! :-D
I think it must be one of those years. Big Changes for lots of people.
<*pokes the One Who Is Being Brave*>
<*also pokes the One Whose Intuition Has Been Talking*>
If either of you wanna bounce ideas off me, vent, yammer, verbally flail, or what-have-you, feel free to send me a note some time and we can chat. :-)
On Sunday night I did *not* go to the Radical Vulvas show.
Alas.
I got to South Keys (after having a nap, and hurriedly shoving some dinner into a tupperware to eat on the way) only to realize I had 13 minutes to wait until the next bus down town and that, consequently, I would be even later than I had expected.
:-P
I decided to go anyway but found myself litterally falling asleep within about five minutes.
Seriously.
So I decided I was way too exhausted to get much of any benefit out of the show (or be able to deal with the subsequent bus-wait and bus-ride back to my isolated end of town, afterwords), and so decided to just go back home.
Which I did.
I'm still sad that I missed it, though, and would love to hear how it went from those who were there. :-D
I spent th evening feeling like a too-tired todler. Seriously. Alternately complaining to myself that I'm tiiiiiiiiired!!! and raging at the circumstances 'cause, dammit, it's not FAIR that I'm this tired! I finally have the freedom to go out any night of the week, to not feel guilty for wanting to out to a show (a queer-possitive women-possitive show, no less) rather than wanting to stay in with my home-body husband[1], to not feel guilty about wanting to hang out with the queer women *because* they are queer women (and, okay, writers and feminists and such-like, too, but still - I want that like-minded-ness to be purely out of preference and/or good luck, not because I feel I need some sort of excuse...).
I have all this poetry squirrling around in my head.
By which I mean that I have these things/feelings/stuff squirrling around in my head that will, eventually, coalesce into poetry but, at present, are just driving me kind of insane.
Fragment:
but from this angle all I can see
is the widening gap between you and me
where "us" used to be
Fragment (or maybe more than that):
I think we're lost
going 'round in circles
I swear we've passed that argument before
that map they gave us doesn't make any sense
did we take a wrong turn somewhere?
I don't like the look of this road, hon
can we please get out and ask
for dirrections?
And there's that kid who kept talking to me while I was frantically jotting down gay-girl erotic poetry from my lj tags file (needed to write it out 'cause I didn't have a hard-copy and wanted to read it at Dykes with Mykes):
A twenty-year-old, white, hetersexual, cisgendered, almost-guaranteed-to-be-christian[2], educated (in one sense of the word), wealthy, boy who:
likes boating, golf and sky-scrapers
thinks that adicts bring perpetuate their addictions entirely through personal choice (and that, consequently, there could have been no extenuating circumstances that made that first choice the one that looked the most appropriate/advantageous)
that successful people (himself, in particular) are successful entirely because they "never lose sight of the ball" (and, consequently, that there could have been no extentuating circumstances that made that success easier for him/them to come by than it might have been for someone else with their eyes equally fixed on that "ball")
believes that queer is a choice (and the wrong one), and who - when called on the fact that, yes, he's most-likely met *lots* of queer people, but that it sure as hell doesn't mean they came out to *him* - held up the existence of his lesbian sister - sorry, half-sister (very important, that bit where they only have one parent in common and he didn't *really* grow up with her) - as if to say "But I can't be homophobic...!"
who thinks that Ivanka Trump is the prettiest woman in the world and that, as such, she would be the ideal woman for him - the kind of gal who could "comfort" him when he comes home from the nasty, cut-throat world of business -- he is, apparently, oblivious to the fact that, given she's a CEO in her own right, she might have other things on her mind...
In short, he is the very distilation of patriarchal privilege, incarnate.
Good grief...
I mean, on the one hand, I couldn't help but laugh.
Cause if that was the very distilation of patriarchal privilege (okay, given W. this is probably a bit of stating the obvious), well, holy-fuck, The Patriarchy is dumb.
Good goggly-moggly, it boggles the mind...
But, at the same time, I was laughing in one part, and bemused/irritated in another (admittedly larger) part - because, hello, I was clearly trying to do something else, and giving many, many cues (mono-sylabic answers, impatient tone of voice, not looking in his dirrection, etc. etc.) that I wasn't interested in what he had to say, and also feeling a little bit of "teaching moment" sympathy... I can't get mad at someone for being raised ignorant, after all...
Despite all that, thought, I CAN (and DO) get made a people - myself included - for continuing to remail in wilfull ignorance once they are in a possition to change that situation.
Seriously.
How can a person - an individual - be SO self-righteous in his demeanor, so certain in his belief that he got to be "on top of the heap" through dint of his own hard work alone, and so unwilling to learn the truth of his privilege, or even the extent of his ignorance?
I honest-to-fuck don't understand how ANYONE can decide "Nope. Ignorance for me! I like it better that way!" when the alternative is, y'know, actually *learning* stuff and becoming a better human being?
(Granted: He and I, pretty damn clearly, have radically different criteria for what constitutes making oneself "better"...)
Nyurg...
Anyway. That was my public library experience on Saturday.
Lunch is calling (and I am *hungry*). Time for me to go. :-)
[1] That doesn't, inconveniently, mean that I *actually* don't feel guilty - as though I'm going to get in some sort of trouble for staying out late, doing stuff that I want and find interesting, rather than staying home like good, straight-acting (well, not particularly, but...) girl/wife/etc. Gotta get rid of that feeling... :-P
[2] I'm guessing Metropolital Bible Church - he reminds me that much of the kid who rented a room from my mother one year, also the attitude about queer-as-wrong-choice suggests he'd be located at that particular end of the christian spectrum.
