prop8: it’s not about being gay, or married.
this is one powerful piece of writing: An Open Letter to My Gay Friend; or Gay Marriage Is Not About Marriage.
the main point:
let’s establish something right at the outset. About the fundamental idea of marriage itself, straight or gay, I don’t give a shit. And as I said in a previous post, I’ve always been weary of same-sex marriage being the cause célèbre of the gay community. But the issue of marriage equality is something I have to support because gay marriage is not about marriage…
…Perhaps gay people are apathetic because we’re not hammering home the point that this is an important civil rights issue and, for the hundredth time, not about marriage. Look, it honestly doesn’t bother me that you don’t care about marriage rights, but, as a gay man who knows what it’s like to be teased, shunned, and discriminated against firsthand, it is your responsibility to care about civil rights.
There are people out there who want to change the law to designate an entire class of people as unequal to, as less than, every other class of people.
the poignant ending:
Small acts were what drove the civil rights movement: Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus in 1955; black students faced protesters when trying to attend a white school in 1957; people marched for voting rights in 1965. These small acts defied odds; these small acts helped to change the United States of America.
The rights, benefits, and acceptance that you are allowed and that you enjoy and that you take for granted as a gay man are the result of history—history created by regular people, just like you and me, who weren’t activists or politicians or crusaders. They were people who came out of the closet decades before us in a time when it was social suicide to do so; they were high school students who met opposition when they tried to start gay-straight alliances to foster tolerance at their schools; and they are the millions of people, gay and straight, who will vote no on Proposition 8 on November 4, 2008. The latter act is indeed a modest act, but one that will have far-reaching ramifications. One vote may be a footnote in our lives, but that footnote will explain how we stood up for what is fair, what is just, and what is humane. The story of lives tell our history; the footnotes give us depth.
why do i care so much about this, you might ask, as someone who a) isn’t into marriage and b) isn’t gay?
this is why. this isn’t about marriage, or about being gay. this is about equal rights. and i am into equal rights. for everyone.
again, please give even just $5 to the No on 8 campaign, even if you don’t live in California. letting this proposition pass is a cultural slide backwards that we can’t afford to take.
on a lighter note:
During his recent stopover at the Castro Theatre, John Waters quipped that if gays are denied the right to marry, then heterosexuals should be denied the right to divorce. –flavorpill
HA!
Filed in culture and random linkage, most linked/commented on, politics and news, things you can do | Tagged with prop8 | Comments (13)symptomatic
the long overdue health report is that since i’ve been back from burning man, i’ve been experiencing some moderate to severe physical symptoms that are vague yet consistent. these include: dizziness, vertigo, weakness, fatigue, strange burning/tingling sensations in my head and up and down my extremities, nerve tweaks/spasms, vision funkiness, pressure in my head, and sometimes nausea.
a few weeks ago i went to see my general physician and she didn’t have much to say – such vague symptoms without anything really “happening”, she couldn’t give me a diagnosis other than i should literally and figuratively get my head checked: revisit a neurologist, given my history of seizures (which were never attributed to anything specific being wrong), and possibly a psychologist/psychiatrist, to see about my anxiety.
after looking at my old records and giving me a few tests and asking a few pertinent questions, the neurologist also figures it’s generalized anxiety, as i don’t actually have what one would call a “headache” (suggesting a scary problem like a brain tumor), and my cognitive functions have remained just fine (suggesting i haven’t had any seizures), but with the continuing persistence of symptoms i am having the MRI and EEGs done again next week.
at the end of last week i thought i was getting better, that every day i was feeling a bit stronger, and i was feeling 90% ok. but then saturday came, and i spent the whole day weak and trembly, and since then i’ve felt horrid.
this has been more or less occupying most of my time, dealing with this, and has kept me from doing a lot of things, being a lot of places, writing a lot of blogs. i’ve been able to function at work just fine, although i’m probably a bit more irritable and surly than i should be, and i’ve tried to go on with my life as though everything is fine, which is maybe the worst thing to do, not ignoring the problem but not letting it take over my life. but everywhere i go, i am monitoring all these strange sensations in my body. when i walk down the street for lunch, i wonder if i’ll fall to my knees. when i’m sitting in a theatre seeing a play, i feel weak and wonder what would happen if i lost consciousness. like the world is so heavy, and my life force so weak, that i just might collapse under the weight of it all. i have also had a couple of standard anxiety attacks – the sweaty palms, the difficulty breathing – but these other symptoms are pretty much nonstop. all day long. the weakness and dizziness, and weird pressure/tingling in my head. i haven’t fallen, i haven’t lost consciousness, but it constantly feels like i might.
it’s so hard to write this here, i don’t know why. maybe because i don’t want to hear everyone’s advice or seem like i’m asking for sympathy. or maybe because it feels like i am overreacting, and putting this into writing here, for everyone to read, feels like making a mountain out of a molehill, exaggerating my symptoms. are they really as bad as they seem? or am i just being hypersensitive? maybe because its so personal, and when things are really deep, really personal, i am usually silent, and this seems like a lot of myself to share. or maybe because regardless of what is or what isn’t, i’m fucking scared.
Filed in autobiographical, epilepsy, food, health & vegetarianism, me myself and i, most linked/commented on | Tagged with anxiety | Comments (12)the hipster vacuum
i don’t get or read Adbusters magazine anymore, because it was just so…..overbearing. and drumbeat. and depressing. and during the year or so i did subscribe to the print version i wondered if reading it every month was affecting my world view a little too much. but i still subscribe to the RSS feed and click over to the website once in a while, because while i find the imagery and language too much to deal with on a regular basis, especially in the print version (100 PAGES OF DOOM!), the content and values are still right in line with how i think, and they still say the things i have been trying to say, just always so much more pointedly.
We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality, and is leaving a generation pointlessly obsessing over fashion, faux individuality, cultural capital and the commodities of style. — Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization
it appears to me that post-9/11, the ambient insecurity in our culture has brought about the return of materialism in a big way. much like anorexia is not about food but about control and anxiety, national insecurity has manifested itself in various ways in our culture, most prominently through xenophobia (fear of “the other”, e.g. anti-immigration) and consumer materialism (propagated by our own government…remember this? and most recently via the “stimulus package”). not that materialism in america ever went away, but americans are currently more hyper-obsessed with their brands, their celebrities, their media, their image, and their possessions (including home-ownership) than ever before, and we have more and more tools every day to feed those obsessions. unlike previous periods of extreme aestheticism in western culture, this is not just the upper class. the lower classes are just as obsessed with their gucci ripoffs as the upper class are with the real thing. and yet for many, it feels like a vacuum. this culture continually keeps sucking things out of us: our money, our time, our individuality, our creativity, our passion. what we’re left with is a mass of confused, isolated people with lot of debt and insecurity, with closets and garages full of crap. kids are dropping out of school like flies, our healthcare costs are through the roof, and like Al Gore said: “The planet is in distress and all of the attention is on Paris Hilton.”
the article pokes at the specific “hipster” trend (see: american apparel) and its rehashing of everything retro, but i’m applying it to my own scene as well, cuz it fits:
Lovers of apathy and irony, hipsters are connected through a global network of blogs and shops that push forth a global vision of fashion-informed aesthetics. Loosely associated with some form of creative output, they attend art parties, take lo-fi pictures with analog cameras, ride their bikes to night clubs and sweat it up at nouveau disco-coke parties. The hipster tends to religiously blog about their daily exploits, usually while leafing through generation-defining magazines like Vice, Another Magazine and Wallpaper. This cursory and stylized lifestyle has made the hipster almost universally loathed.
in my own scene, this debate over the value we place on our specific forms of fashion and style and image gets rehashed every few months, and now that we’re in The Month of Burning Man, it’s coming up again as there are multiple “playa fashion” events every week, and people are wondering whether burning man is about personal expression, or really just one big fashion show where the HAVEs try to outdo the HAVE NOTs. is burning man anti-consumer as it claims to be, or just its own version of hipster? i’m tempted to go totally anti-fashion this year at burning man. i want to get a pair of coveralls, and just wear that all week.
Filed in burning man, culture and random linkage, most linked/commented on | Comments (20)We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.
The Standard American Life.
i don’t know how to feel about this. in perspective of my own life, i philosophically agree: i see people chasing this carrot of a happy marriage and a big house and 2.5 kids and a dog all that comes with it over the place, and for the most part i do find the whole thing a bit nauseating. i am NOT part of that and don’t want to be part of that. however, the thing that makes me not fully say “RIGHT ON!” to this message is that i can’t judge whether those people are happy or not, or whether they want something or someone else. endless books and movies and art have been created based on this topic of the unhappy suburbanite – from American Beauty to Fake Plastic Trees – and in the real world high rates of infidelity and divorce, not to mention the economic disaster propelled by it, prove that the american dream isn’t as easy as we’d all like it to be.
but does that make it a “wrong” way to want to live our life? i don’t think just because that lifestyle isn’t for me means it should be looked down upon as uncreative or a waste of life by default. sure, there are lot of unhappily married people out there who chose the “normal” path, but i do actually know a number of standard american families who seem quite happy, and i admit that my current crop of friends here in the bay area who have recently procreated and/or are going to have babies in the next couple of months have begun to change my feelings on the subject of reproduction, as many of them are “alternative families”. it’s my friends and family back home in the midwest (including those who were here and left to go back and pursue this path) that seem to be much more driven to conform to the kind of scenario represented in this animation. that’s a generalization, i know, but at the very least i think it’s true that here in SF there is much less “pressure”, as it were, to follow that path.
while i agree that there are a number of reasons why this kind of lifestyle can be labeled “wrong” (unsustainable living habits, urban sprawl, population growth issues, etc.), the thing that really irked me about this was the end. especially after looking at this photographic essay on Death yesterday (warning: not graphic, but may be disturbing for some), the assumption that anyone would give up their life so easily, so passively just because it wasn’t superfuckingspecial is really arrogant. in the end i think we all want to live, even if life isn’t what we wanted it to be.
so at first i thought the little video was funny, but then by the end i was like: wow. could it be more judgmental? it’s fucking hard to find happiness in this world. give people a break.
~via
Filed in culture and random linkage, most linked/commented on | Comments (13)presence
i found out she got divorced because she changed her online profile status from “married” to “single”, and the software notified me
he has boundary issues and doesn’t understand why people tune him out
she exaggerates being sick for sympathy, drinks and chain smokes while whining about how hard it is to go through chemo
he thinks he’s the best father in the world, but his kids are turning into assholes, just like him
everyone thinks she’s really crazy-sexual based on her appearance, but when it comes down to it she just likes to lay there
his attempt at aggressive behavior did nothing to make him look masculine; in fact he seemed more like a cornered wet kitten, cowering while swiping with one feeble paw
she ignored him because she could tell he would be bald in 10 years
he flinched because of the shoes she was wearing
her appetite for attention has now got her posting casual sex stories on the web and dressing like a girl who likes to take it from behind, in the dark
he thought marriage would make him faithful
she learned very adult lessons at a very young age because of her mother, and she resents her for it
his business partner is a complete sycophant but he keeps the relationship going because he’s afraid of confrontation
there’s a valuable chunk of real estate sitting in manhattan, the rent from which she uses to fund her carefree jobless artist lifestyle on the opposite coast
he is fond of spouting poetry, but he’s never been in love
her homosexual tendencies stem not from an innate attraction to women, but from the attention it brings and the out it gives her. either way, she likes girls
his former personality suggested he was someone you could trust; his current one makes you wonder what he was hiding back then
obfuscating and obfuscated, she plays it off as if she knows something you don’t, but in reality she needs all kinds of help to make things happen
you can sort of tell, now, when he walks – he doesn’t think so much of himself anymore, since she left him
“this city hates me”, she cries, wondering why she can’t find a job or keep a place to live, taking breaks between sobs to cut up lines
he looks down and sideways and blinks a lot when he talks to you, unsure; yet somehow, he’s the one everyone trusts
she is cold and brisk in conversation, yet utterly warm in intention, and she’s never sure why her personality does not match her beliefs
he does not wear the pants in his relationship, although with others he is totally demanding
she doesn’t ever think she could really love someone with a disease, yet the shame in admitting it to anyone keeps her there
he snorts a line off the back of his hand before putting the keys in the ignition, and talks a lot about love
she is poor, and she hates it. the starving artist thing is making her covetous in a very desperate way
he is a greek god on paper; in real life, being nearly perfect has meant he’s never had to work very hard, and at 30, it’s starting to show in odd ways
urban and conflicted, she wishes she were doing something completely different, like working in a hospital in africa, helping people who want to be helped, not sitting in a loud, smokey back room at 3am, watching the decadent feel pain they don’t deserve to feel and use their only resource to treat it: money
Filed in most linked/commented on, not poems, personal favorites | Comments (9)icky debate
one of the things that’s been sucking up my blogging time the past few days (besides having lots of fun with my friends! yay!) is this: on MSNBC’s “To Catch a Predator” show, where they set up a house and lure men who are looking to have sex with minors there and then catch them on film, entering the home of an unknown child with the intent of having sex, someone from the burning man community was recently caught. someone very popular, a member of probably the most successful performance group to come out of the playa. i’m not mentioning names here, because i don’t want to link the whole group to this one man’s act.
so now on various social networking sites, people in the burning man community are debating this. debating whether it’s ever “ok” for an adult to attempt to have anonymous sex with a 13 year old child. i am completely ASTONISHED by the number of people who are rationalizing this, men and women, with statements about “biological urges” and “when i was 13 i had sex with older guys and i turned out fine”. sure, a 19 year old guy getting busted for sex with his 16 year old minor girlfriend is a bit over the line in most cases. but a 30+ y/o man attempting sex with a 13 y/o he met in a chat room?? how is this even defendable?
as for the women who spoke up to say they had sex at a young age and therefore think it might be ok, how many those were sex with someone they met anonymously who they had never seen before in their lives nor knew anything about?
people are claiming the punishment doesn’t fit the crime for these guys caught on tape, who were immediately arrested outside the house and charged with attempts to commit lewd acts with a minor. “they’re confused”, “they didn’t know it was wrong because the young person was consenting”, “they didn’t actual do anything”, “they probably learned their lessons, they should just get counseling”, etc. yeah, except for the guy that got caught by this sting TWICE and the guy who knew exactly what was going on immediately because he’d seen the show. all of them immediately say “i’m sorry! i’m sorry! i won’t do it again!” none of them pull the george costanza excuse “was that wrong? no one ever told me that was wrong”. they all know it’s wrong.
others are crying “entrapment!”. for the record:
“ENTRAPMENT – A person is ‘entrapped’ when he is induced or persuaded by law enforcement officers or their agents to commit a crime that he had no previous intent to commit; and the law as a matter of policy forbids conviction in such a case.
However, there is no entrapment where a person is ready and willing to break the law and the Government agents merely provide what appears to be a favorable opportunity for the person to commit the crime. For example, it is not entrapment for a Government agent to pretend to be someone else and to offer, either directly or through an informer or other decoy, to engage in an unlawful transaction with the person. So, a person would not be a victim of entrapment if the person was ready, willing and able to commit the crime charged in the indictment whenever opportunity was afforded, and that Government officers or their agents did no more than offer an opportunity.” — www.lectlaw.com/def/e024.htm
these men are not being entrapped.
these men had every intent of doing one thing: having sex with a VERY YOUNG minor. (they purposely used “13″ as the age, as it is fairly universally considered too young, unlike “17″, which most people don’t feel so strongly about.) that’s what they went into the chatroom for, whether or not they were deceived into thinking that’s what they were getting when they arrived.
this is about intent. and the intent here is very much, in my opinion, dangerous and i fully agree with the punishment.
and as for those arguing that this isn’t “forced sex” and it’s therefore “consensual” and shouldn’t be punishable as a sex crime:
MOST girls of barely-pubescent age in the united states (some cultures are different) are not psychologically ready to make consensual sex decisions. SOME girls *might* be, but most aren’t, and i have a hard time believing that ANY 13 y/o girl is developmentally stable enough to understand the risks of anonymous sex with a grown man and allowing one to enter your house. therefore, statements about these men not having “intent to cause harm” are invalid. they might not have wished to HURT her physically or at that time, but you have no idea what a confused sex act at a young age will do to a girl for the rest of her life (either in a big way, or small ways, such as how she feels about sex from then on), and so while it is not always “harmful” for a guy to do this, it is undeniably IRRESPONSIBLE in my opinion and probably harmful in ways that might never be measured.
what, some people ask, is a 13yo girl doing soliciting sex online if she’s not ready for it? girls these days are very confused. many girls seek attention from men for various badly-formed reasons. just because a girl asks for it does not mean than an older man should feel OK about responding, nor does it mean that it’s 100% consensual in the end, especially in the eyes of the law. same with young confused boys who might just be discovering that they are gay.
not only is it bothersome that so many are expressing that they don’t think this is a criminal act, this extreme taking advantage of naivete – but it’s disturbing that people in the BM community seem like they are defending this guy because he’s “one of their own”. this is SO WRONG.
this is not to say in any way that the majority of people involved in these discussions are supporting this activity, or that the BM community in general supports anything like it – of course not. most people agree it’s reprehensible and wrong. but i’m just so surprised by the size of the minority of people who are defending this man in various ways for either personal or political reasons.
this is bothersome more than usual because one of the MAJOR negative perceptions of the BM community by the outside world is that we’re all a bunch of immoral perverted sexual deviants. having an online discussion in the BM community wherein a small vocal minority of burners are defending this action is not helping that. i am fine with grown ADULTS doing whatever they want to eachother, as long as no one gets hurt, so i think it’s wrong to label CONSENTING ADULTS who are into kinky sex as sexual perverts. but when those same people start to defend anonymous sex with minors, it all starts looking really bad. it reflects badly on the community, and what the community is supposed to stand for: love, respect, growth, mutual freedom.
these predators neither love nor respect these children, or care about their futures as human beings. if they did, they wouldn’t be showing up for lunchtime sex with pockets full of lube.
there are of course also significant cultural discussions to be had about this issue outside of the context of this incident – about the desexualization of sex in america leading to higher rates in sex crimes, about the american confusion caused by being told by hollywood and the media to want sex and to be sexy but also at the same time being told sex is wrong/bad, making it a secretive, shameful act for some people, etc. all that leads into this. but, that gives no one an excuse – “blaming it on society” does not work with me.
Filed in most linked/commented on | Comments (10)not to be
as a side note, this post was sort of formed because i watched V for Vendetta last night, which, if you haven’t seen, is all about the dangers of passive conformity and how it can lead to dogmatic governments and totalitarianism. more on the movie in a separate post.
although it hasn’t always been incredibly obvious or vocalized, i struggle with discipline and conformity, both from self and authority. although i did very well in school (class valedictorian), i was not a Perfect Student. i turned in hundreds of assignments late. in high school, i skipped a lot. in college, i just didn’t go. i do what needs to be done, but i’d rather figure it out myself than have someone else teach me how to do it. i haven’t taken any professional classes to learn how to do things because i find most classes a waste of time, catering to the LCD.
with my body, i have zero discipline when it comes to working out/excercising. i do it when i feel like it. thank the universe i’ve never had a weight problem, because if i did, i’d never be able to manage it. i stick to a strict vegegatrian diet, but for me that’s not about discipline. i have no interest in eating meat.
sure, lots of people are self-taught and are irritated by authority. this does not make me special. lots of people rebel against society’s laws in their own little ways, whether it’s showing up late and leaving early from their 9-2-5, or doing illegal drugs even though on the surface they’re squeaky clean GAP ads, or reading soft-core porn before they go to sleep at night.
what i don’t like is that my inner rebellion against any sort of conformity or Group Think is uncomfortable. even the most lovable and benign, like a burning man theme camp, or formal classes, or clubs – sororities, activity groups, ballet – all send a twinge of loathing through my body. i’m not really a loner, though, and not incredibly independent. i actually follow most of society’s rules, and think the world would be a better place if most others did too. so what is it?
it has been ingrained in me that blind conformity is a sign of weakness, so anything that contains hints of conformity that seem to be more about following along than really making sense culturally makes me agitated. as a child, i fought really hard to conform and it never quite worked. by the time i was a teenager, i discovered that i no longer cared much for trying to keep up, but those younger years, those ‘tween years, when i so desperately wanted to conform but couldn’t, mostly for economic reasons – those were painful. i shoplifted things that i couldn’t afford. i played suck up to the cool kids. i pretended to like music i really didn’t. it was all terribly awkward, and i still have those moments. once i grew out of that phase, in retrospect i felt that struggling to keep up with the cool kids was also a sign of weakness. character weakness. at some point, i learned that noncomformity was what was really cool, and then i lost interest in that too. the fact that i generally don’t appear entirely alt/indie/alternative on the surface is evidence of this struggle.
i obviously had issues with this “counterculture conformity” at burning man this year; it nagged at me all week. but one of the most uncomfortable areas this shows up in my life is regarding me & jay and the Big Question: why aren’t we married?
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there are many reasons, and some are too personal to discuss here. in general, though, there are several things about the idea of marriage that irk this part of me that hates the idea of doing anything the rest of the world condones and rewards even though it has serious flaws and negative impacts on our culture.
first, i don’t like the fact that having a wedding somehow validates a relationship, when in our current culture, weddings are basically disposable. i’m not even 30 and i have several friends who are already in their 2nd marriages. to me, weddings seem like they are more of a conformist act to gain approval of your relationship from everyone else, to show EVERYONE ELSE you’re serious.
of course the counter-argument to that is that it doesn’t have to be so – that you can make a wedding ALL ABOUT YOUR LOVE, you can tell eachother that the committment means to you, and promise to keep that committment, and forget what everyone else thinks it means. but still, it’s not so much the act of getting married that i don’t like, but how everyone views it. how, if we suddenly announced and engagement, everyone we know would suddenly see us differenlty. suddenly everyone would have more respect for what we’ve been doing the past 8 years. why should i care what everyone else thinks? you ask. because – if they think you’re buying into what they’re selling, even if you’re not, the pattern continues. perception is key.
i want to be clear that my unwillingness to get married has nothing to do with how much i love jay – for those who would suggest that we do not love eachother as much as those who are more formally committed because we haven’t tied the knot, i say: the fact that we’ve stayed together, lived together, breathed together, laughed together, cried together, slept together, worried together, loved together for the past 8 1/2 years WITHOUT being legally bound means a whole lot more to me. either of us could walk away any day, no strings attached, but we’d never even think of doing so.
and then there IS the actual having of the wedding. the possible financial and logistical nightmare aside, another reason i don’t like the whole thing is because of the “wedding industrial complex”, the ideas they’ve cultivated about what a proper wedding should entail, the myth of a perfect wedding for everyone little girl in america. i’ve not grown up dreaming of my walk down the aisle. i think matching bridesmaid dresses are ridiculous. i would never spend that much money on mediocre food.
sure, you can have an offbeat wedding and make it all indie and cool and DIY and only use all those old issues of Bride Magazine your friends gave you to create recycled confetti or whatever, but for me, it would still be saying “hey, i support this idea/institution” when, really, i don’t. i don’t support that fact that marriage is still only for 1 man + 1 woman, that it is viewed as a Christian institution, and i don’t support the idea that a marriage certificate means more than words and feelings in the eyes of most people. the gay marriage aspect is the part that most intersects with my thoughts stemming from V for Vendetta – the language from the homophobic future was not far off from what we hear GW and evangelicals on TV spewing about “sanctity of marriage” and it being a “pillar of our commUNITY”. interestingly, i don’t think about this subject much from the feminist perspective – the idea of marriage doesn’t bother me much as a WOMAN, perhaps because of where i live/who i live with; i think about it more in terms of humanity and consumption.
the blurbs written for ariel’s book by authors of other wedding-related books/sites make me uncomfortable. they seem double-edged. while seemingly shit-talking the “wedding industrial complex” (2 of them use that phrase) and encouraging women to express their unique, creative selves, those authors, and ariel, are still making money off that same wedding industry. they’re just creating a new niche for it: indie weddings. it’s still the same piece of paper at the end of the day, isn’t it? you can dress it however you want : goth, hippie, whatever : but it’s still part of the societal construct of weddings. even non-legal weddings (gay weddings) irk me in this way. why are you supporting the idea of something from which you’re being excluded?
while i do not doubt for a minute that the emotional value of these events is completely raw and human, it still seems odd to me that they are all formatted and packaged in such similar ways. swap out the white dress for a red one, the church for a nightclub, and suddenly you’ve escaped society’s expectations of you? i don’t think so. sure, you could argue that these people are attempting to redefine what marriage means, but to me they are talking about what it means to INDIVIDUALS, which, yes, is fantastic. here though, i’m talking about what i means to SOCIETY, and as long as you get that piece of paper from the government, it means what society says it means.
this is by no means a belittlement of my friends who are married, or the dedication they have to their spouses. some of them DID dream of their Perfect Wedding Day for years, and so i can’t deny them that happiness. but to me, the fact that they went through the marriage process means very little when i consider the value of their relationships.
while i am adressing this as a wide cultural issue, i realize that the decision to get married is complex, personal, and subjective. i do not mean to say that marriage is complete bullshit and REAL nonconformists would never consider it, and i would never ask anyone to defend their decision. but what i DO mean to say that this is how i feel, and i feel very alone in how i feel about it, especially since i know many super cool, very conscientious people who are highly aware of such cultural issues who’ve gotten married (including Ariel), so i feel insecure in why this is still such a thing with me when so many others seem to have “gotten over it” once they fell in love and/or found some other good reason to formalize their relationship. i realize that my perspective is not a popular one. i realize that why i feel that way has a lot of layers, some of which have nothing to do with love and marriage. but after seeing V for Vendetta last night, thinking much about hegemony and conformity, and then reading the blurbs about ariel’s book, i found myself twisting all these ideas around in my head again, and so here they are.
Filed in culture and random linkage, most linked/commented on | Comments (15)bummed blogger
i’m not really into blogging right now. i have a whole list of pending posts, but i just don’t feel like writing them.
in the past few days i’ve had some particularly negative experiences online, wherein i thought i was spreading positivity, or at least trying to STOP negativity, that only resulted in people telling me i have no right to speak on certain subjects.
for example, does anything else think this (or elements of it) is just a tad bit RACIST?
i would particularly like to hear from any asian readers out there about how they feel about this. note that in his “feedback” section, at least one asian person expressed the same sentiments i did in that sites like this contribute to racist stereotypes and oppression, which he blows off.
i was told, that as a white person, i have no right to an opinion on the matter. that it’s a “joke”, and i should get a sense of humor, and that the language presented there (like “Fresh Off The Boat”, or “FOB”) is “perfectly acceptable” within the asian communities. in fact, after i sent a feedback email expressing my distaste regarding the language (and how i know a lot of people who would be offended) to the webmaster (who is a friend of a friend), i received this incredibly negative and condescending response in which he goes on and on to justify how all of his asian friends think it’s hilarious and how they all use that kind of language to refer to eachother all the time and no one thinks it’s an issue, repeatedly attacking me for being white and thus having no right to an opinion (which i feel no qualms about posting here, as he claims the right to post all email feedback to his website with snarky comebacks, so shall i):
“I can tell you are white. It is okay. Thanks for the tips on the battles of racism. Growing up white I’m sure you really struggled and now that you work with some children who are not white you are even more so the champion of racism. Nelson Mandela would be proud. I’m sure you’ll accomplish a lot in your Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Parade.
I commend you on taking a stand on racism with your groundbreaking comments “Racism is bad!” Rosa Parks would be proud. You should make other prolific statements like “Murder is bad!” Your philosophies are revolutionary and have inspired me. A single tear runs down my cheek as I write this…
…How are the children you teach fighting “REALLY HARD” to get the word “FOB” out of their community? Are they tearing the page out of a dictionary? Are they having rallies or a Five Billion FOB March on Washington or something? I’d really like to know.
As for the term FOB, it is much more common in the Asian vernacular than you think. FOB’s are not mad when they are called FOB’s. It seems only you are mad when someone calls a FOB a FOB. Do not try to create tension where there is none for the sake of being overly PC. I call my coworkers FOB’s all the time and they call me an ABCD. Now, not being a person of color, I’m pretty sure you don’t know what that term means, but if you did, I’m also pretty sure you’d find it deragatory as well. But it’s not.
the first two paragraphs of that response, in my opinion, were completely unwarranted. i would probably have had a lot of sympathy for his response – the part about how he and his friends use those terms in jest is understandable, as other minorities often “reclaim” negative terminology as a defense mechanism – if he had not made so many ridiculous assumptions about me (and presumably about other white people who fight to end racism) and started off his email with an attack on me and included those lines. he has no idea who i am or what i do or who the kids are that i worked with, and those comments were completely demeaning and inappropriate. his response only let me know that he is not respectful of other cultures – his own or anyone else’s – and is just out for cheap laughs at others’ expense – and thus i can’t support his website or his position.
sure – when i received a link to the site from my friend, i could have just passed it off without a word, but i’m usually inclined to give feedback to people within my circle – this wasn’t a random person. i wasn’t expecting him to agree with me – obviously he thinks racist jokes are funny – but i WASN’T expecting an attack on my personal character – not to mention my color – for bringing up a valid point of view.
how hard is it to understand that just because something is funny, that doesn’t make it OK? even i will admit that “funny” and “racist” aren’t mutually exclusive.
~~
i go through phases with my love of the internets, and right now i’m really disenchanted. people hide behind their screens, so much passive-agressiveness, people will write things they would NEVER, EVER say to someone’s face, and then defend it, sitting in comfort of their chairs.
yesterday, i tried to do something nice for someone online, with only the most sincere intentions, and was told to please not. i respect that person’s wishes by all means, but it still made me really sad that positivity is seen as insincere while negativity is given full room to bloom and often lauded as “constructive dialogue”.
and, last week, more than one person stated on Tribe and elsewhere that they felt bloggers were self-involved, vain people who only like to listen to themselves talk. that’s a hard thing to roll off when you’ve been a blogger for a lot of years, and if that’s how i’m being perceived, i’d rather just not and return to my only using my non-public journals.
so, i might be quiet around these parts for a while. i’m tired of the blowback.
Filed in most linked/commented on | Comments (16).dots.
on friday night, we went to the Space Gallery to see an exhibit celebrating the art of William Noguera, who has been in San Quentin on death row for 17 years. in that time he has become a highly-skilled pointillist, an art that takes great patience, and, in my opinion, insight into and compassion for the human condition.
when we walked out of the rain into the gallery, mr. noguera was speaking live, via speakerphone. there was a reproduction of his 4×8′ cell: art on cement walls, lights on, books opened, clothing hanging on the wall. his art is done almost solely in black ink, so all of the works are black and white, and we were encouraged to also dress in b&w in honor of the artist. how strange, i thought, as i looked around at the crowd, mostly upper-middle class art connoisseurs, wearing standard black-bourgeois apparel, some even wearing berets, that this man has no idea who he is speaking to. he is there, trapped behind bars, and we are here, sipping wine and staring at years of his only means of personal expression from that small cell. it felt very disconnected, but his voice over the phone was articulate, even warm, and excited.
i was staring at an incredibly photographic piece – so many thousands of dots, arranged just so – when i was approached by a man with a video camera and asked if i knew anything about art. i said sure. i know about art.
what do you like about this form of art (pointillism/stippling)?
i find pointillism to be one of the most passionate forms of art. the time and attention it takes to create a world out of thousands of tiny dots, to examine the subject’s every curve, every shadow, every hint of life and place each particularly shaded dot so discreetly is a true art. somehow, the method also brings an incredible amount of life and movement to the works. i’m surprised by the amount of life in his images. william noguera’s work is incredibly precise, not at all impressionist like Seurat, and genuinely photographic in detail, which is quite impressive.
in what way do you think this exhibit could inspire others?
it is obviously an incredible testament to the ability of art to provide both escape and release for the artist – the title of the exhibition as Escape Artist says it all. this man has been confined to imprisonment for more than 20 years, and in his own words has stated that his art has saved his soul. while other men whither and die staring at cement walls, his imagination travels the world and the pen in his hand recreates it for him, moment by moment, pixel by pixel, shape by shape. and not only is he an inspiration for artists or those seeking a voice, an instrument of expression, but it is important for each of us to recognize that no matter how confined we may be, how many obstacles may appear, if there is a will there is a way to not only improve upon your situation but make your voice heard and make it matter. it is also inspiring to see that a man condemned can find redemption, and he is a shining example of the reasons way our prison system is so incredibly flawed, keeping changed men behind bars. with the recent state-inflicted death of Tookie Williams, i think William Noguera’s art is incredibly important at this time.
that was a good answer.
the interviewer moved on, and i went back to starting at the dots.
Filed in art, most linked/commented on, personal favorites | Comment (1)water
at a friend’s housewarming party last weekend, one of the other guests argued with me about san francisco municipal water, proudly stating that SF adds NOTHING to their drinking water supply (uh….yeah. what utopia does she live in?). i argued that this wasn’t true at all, they add at least chlorine and probably fluoride, but she proudly insisted she was right. not in the mood to argue, i let it go. however, a little research easily shows that SF adds both chloramine and fluoride.
while i’m against major consumption of bottled water because of the waste of energy to bottle and ship and enormous amounts of refuse they produce, particularly the scam of selling bottled TAP water (“purified drinking water”), i also don’t think people should be drinking straight from the tap unless they live in a very rural area far far away from industry and ESPECIALLY far away from farming (for example, mountain locations are generally fairly pure sources of groundwater depending on how close they are to urban areas) and have water pulled from their own well.
it’s sad but true: most water isn’t safe to drink, either from the sky or from a river or from the ground or from your tap. pollution on this planet is so complete that even the isolated regions of the arctic and antarctic show residues in the snow. it may be “safe” by EPA standards, but i think in the long run the buildup of levels of chemical residues allowed by the government will prove to be harmful to human health and development.
the solution? stop wasting money and plastic on endless bottles of water and get a $30 filter for your tap – like a PUR or a Brita – and a bottle to refill. if you have enough money, home-wide water filters are the best bet. i hope the girl i was arguing with takes a minute to research water in SF because i hate to think there are people out there who have been led to believe (by whom i wonder?) their drinking water is safer than it is and so don’t do anything to protect themselves from it.
Filed in environment, most linked/commented on, things you can do | Comments (10)
