true confession

Last night I was embarrassingly maudlin about my life and cried myself to sleep while hugging my dog.

Also, I’m not sure I believe in astrology at all, but I looked up my Saturn Return and it will be January – October 2012. I will be 28 / 29.

bummer

I’m bummed.

A Grand Scheme™ I have been working on just ain’t gonna happen, and I’m not quite ready to let go yet.

Backstory: I belong to a very small Episcopal church (about 15 regular attendees). Last week I found out that our bishop’s office in Seattle wants to set up a distance learning center in the SW corner of the state, our home turf. They would provide $20,000 worth of fancy equipment that would enable real time video conversations between people in Seattle, Bellingham, Port Angeles, and two other sites. They had approached churches in Longview and Vancouver, much larger SW Washington cities with much larger Episcopal churches, but hadn’t found one to submit a proposal.

I wanted us to be one of the sites. I’m not really sure why I wanted it so badly. Other than paying for gas, I don’t honestly mind driving to Longview (45 minutes) or Vancouver (1.5 hours) for classes if that’s where a site ends up. If you live out here, you’re used to it.

But we have one of the larger physical facilities of Episcopal churches in these parts, due to sponsoring a child care / preschool facility. We also have a scholar who might conceivably teach some of the classes. We have people who would like to take classes.

The thing we don’t have is money. One of the requirements for potential sites is that they would have to provide a dedicated broadband connection of at least 1.5 mbps speed. I researched the cost with our local internet provider and found out it would likely cost us $74 a month. While that may not seem like very much money, our (volunteer) priest tells me it is too much for our budget.

I wish I could just cover that cost myself, but…I can’t.

I’ve put in a lot of time in the past week emailing different folks about this project. I guess that’s where I got invested in it, and why it’s hard to let it die over $74 a month.

But so it goes.

ethics

I’d thought it was my manual labor job that was causing numbness / stiffness in my wrist and arm, but I think it may be the office job where I sit on the computer all day.

Greaaaaaaat. I intend to quit unloading trucks relatively soon, but I’m not going to be leaving the other one.

Numb arms aside, this is me getting around to finally writing the blog entry I’ve been mulling over since beginning of the month.

One afternoon a woman came into our office to complain about an article we published. The article in question reported on a domestic violence incident in which her ex-boyfriend entered her home in violation of a restraining order. When a police officer arrived to arrest him, he assaulted the officer during an attempt to elude her.

The woman in question was not named, but people who recognized her ex’s name would be able to identify her. Due to the smallness of our community, that could have been many people. She stated that she felt the article shamed her, her ex, and their families. She said it made her life more difficult.

The discussion with her has caused me to do a lot of thinking. I do not want people experiencing domestic violence not to call the police because they fear ending up in the newspaper. That is about the last thing I want out of a career in small town journalism. On the other hand, I want domestic violence perpetrators to know that there are consequences for their actions, like arrest and prosecution. That our community takes it very seriously.

But where is the balance? What is newsworthy and what veers into an invasion of privacy?

Here is some pertinent information from Wikipedia: “Harm limitation deals with the questions of whether everything learned should be reported and, if so, how. This principle of limitation means that some weight needs to be given to the negative consequences of full disclosure, creating a practical and ethical dilemna. The Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics offers the following advice, which is representative of the practical ideals of most professional journalists. Quoting directly:

• Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage. Use special sensitivity when dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects.
• Be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.
• Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance.
• Recognize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than do public officials and others who seek power, influence or attention. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy.
• Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.
• Be cautious about identifying juvenile suspects or victims of sex crimes.
• Be judicious about naming criminal suspects before the formal filing of charges.
• Balance a criminal suspect’s fair trial rights with the public’s right to be informed.”

And here is the link to the full article.

Fodder for thought.

I may take this post down, but I wanted to get it out there and see what others have to say.

it must have been a miracle

I know several customers have scammed me on Amazon orders, but I just refunded them in the past to avoid a hassle (and bad feedback). But this is just ridiculous. You say I sent you a book I’ve never owned plus you say you ordered a different book from the book that Amazon says you ordered. WTF.

your future’s no future

When I walk down the road with my dog I say stuff like “your peepee all gone, dude?”  Hopefully this is somewhat normal. All I know is I have never talked to my cats that way.

I’ve been kind of a disaster lately, but yesterday I felt energized / accomplished cuz I got some work done.

Today I am feeling mired down due to reading / thinking about old sh!t.

I need to work on identifying my emotions. I need to work on getting back some self esteem. I need to be able to sleep more.

Stepdaughter has a friend flying in from far away on Sunday. She has been in a sunny mood for days due to this. I feel some apprehension as we haven’t met him before (neither has she) and he is staying with us for five nights.

Saw my auto mechanic earlier and he told me he heard a dealership is doing an incentive for trade ins and thought of me. Told me to trade it in before the transmission gives out. Geez, even my mechanic is recommending I trade in my truck.  That’s bad.

So far this year, the alternator, e-brake, and clutch master cylinder have all crapped out on me. We’ve already used up our free AAA member tows for the year.

I’ve been looking, but we don’t have any money saved and I’m not sure what kind of financing we can get. Should be interesting to see what happens.

Had a long conversation with a guy that came in for copies. We discussed two different books about teenage girls in Forks, Washington– Twilight and Our Lady of the Forest (David Guterson). One generated tourism, one didn’t. Probably not a surprise if you’ve read both books.

That is all.

not recommended

I accidentally poisoned my parents’ cat, Gordita, with chocolate last night. She’s fine, though. Thankfully.

Yesterday was my wife’s birthday. I bought chocolates for her and left them on the dining room table last night while we were gone for around two hours. They were wrapped in tissues in a paper sack. When we got home, we noticed someone had delicately pulled out two, eaten them, and puked them out on the table. It wasn’t hard to figure out which cat it was – one was outside, one was up in my stepdaughter’s room, and Gordie has a history of getting into people food. One time she stole some French fries out of my mom’s purse. Another time she pulled olives off some pizza.

The chocolates were truffle-sized and milk chocolate rather than the more poisonous dark. She ate one with salted caramel and one with marionberry and avoided the one with chili powder.

My mom called a 24 hour vet clinic – the nearest is around two hours away – and they said to feed her and watch her. Mom took that to heart. Don’t think she really slept much. Gordie ate happily and then slept all night. If the chocolate had affected her it would likely make her agitated from a racing heart.

It was exciting.

The personal is political / Dean Spade is my hero for the day / sharing zines

Yesterday I got to have show and tell day. My coworker and I have been talking about zines. I gave her a copy of mine, and she asked me to bring in some others. She’s been to the Fisher Poets Gathering and seen Moe Bowstern read, so I brought her Xtra Tuf #1 from 1996 and the Xtra Tuf issue that has a story subtitled “How I Fed Glass To People I Despised And Made Them Bleed From The Mouth.” That is my favorite Moe story and I told her to read it first.

I also had her choose some of my perzines. She took Into the Grid, Driving Blind #4, and Nothing Rhymes #4.

This morning she sent me a link to an interview with Seattle University law professor Dean Spade. Spade takes a critical look at the limits of legal reform in tranformative social change. In the article he is speaking from the perspective of trans issues and intersections with class and race, etc. It’s fascinating stuff, people.

He’s got a book coming out from South End Press in September 2011 and here’s what he says about it: We’re in this moment where there’s this gay and lesbian politics that’s really lacking in its racial and economic justice analysis and overly relies on legal reform for its strategy and doesn’t really look at people in dire need today. So this book says, okay, we have the option to focus on hate crime laws and other legal reforms or we can reframe what trans politics is and center economic and racial justice. We can realize that changing the law doesn’t change people’s lives and have an understanding of the limitations of the nonprofit form, the ways in which concentrating leadership in professionals and having nondemocratic models for organizations and movements harms and undermines the transformative change we are seeking.

And he mentions zines:

Dean Spade: I came of age around politics in the nineties when there was this zine culture, where people were self-publishing and writing informally and sharing stuff with each other. People frequently spoke from the position of their own experiences and identities to talk about political and social issues. That’s where I got my start writing. I found that culture and way of communicating extremely powerful, especially when I felt alienated from what could be said in academic spaces. I wrote like that for years, and I still sometimes do. Because of the ways in which trans people are objectified in our culture sometimes that’s backfired on me. People have this fascination with trans people that can feel sensationalist and objectifying, so I think over the years my writing has trended away from some of that exposure. There are some things I wish weren’t out there, but I really believe in letting yourself change over time and accepting earlier iterations.

I totally hear what he’s saying about balancing personal exposure / privacy with the desire to speak from the position of our own experiences / identities in discussing political and social issues. I haven’t experienced that from zines (yet) but I used to occasionally speak about queerness. At my college, we called it Pride Panels, where people from our queer group the Rainbow Continuum would visit college classes where we would tell stories (usually about our experiences coming out) and then answer questions from the audience. And then I did it a couple times for church groups. I got less comfortable with doing it for the church groups over time. Telling specifically why is probably another blog entry, since it would require some backstory and I need to go home and take my dog for a walk, but the gist of it was several occasions in which I found out my personal story was shared without my consent in front of large groups of people for political purposes. I felt really uncomfortable with people speaking for me, about what they thought I had experienced or about why they thought I had made decisions that I had made.

Anyway, I really do have to go home. Writing this took me longer than I thought.

special snowflakes

Stepkid goes to orientation at the local-ish community college tonight, then starts her first quarter next Tuesday. This is very exciting to all of us in the N-F-B family.

Also, there are many special snowflakes in the world and we should all celebrate that.

Nickel Soda Guy

Nickel Soda Guy came in again today. He insists that he used to buy nickel sodas as a kid from a restaurant located in the space that is now our office. One significant issue: there never was a restaurant here during his lifetime. Obviously this is proof that people have memories from past lives.

And that reminds me of a conversation I had this morning about dreams. Memories from past lives are kinda like dreams, right? At least as a mental segue in my head.

My friend told me she has recurring dreams in which her teeth are falling out and others in which her contact lenses are bigger than her eyes and she can’t get them in. I frequently dream that I have found out I didn’t really graduate from college and am unhappily back in school in Idaho for one more semester, even though dream-me knows somewhere deep down that I really did get that diploma.  We both dream we forgot we enrolled in a class and didn’t remember until far too late in the semester to pass.

Awhile back I mentioned a book I wanted to purchase: The Tawqacores. I was able to order it through interlibrary loan and finish reading it last night. Meh. A fine read, but not a book I need to own. I would also like to suggest to the author that he include a glossary for the massive amount of Arabic vocabulary liberally sprinkled through every single page. It wasn’t really the sort of stuff where you can glean meaning through context, either.

blog recommendations / zine review / musings on matrimony

Sweeeeet! Things You Say Distro will soon carry my zine (Erin, if you’re reading this, thank you for the email. You made my day.).

I finished reading Cindy Crabb’s new zine Filling the Void the other night. The content is interviews with people about their experiences quitting drinking / using. I happen to love reading interviews and / or interviewing people myself, plus drinking or not drinking has been on my mind a lot lately, so I ordered the zine as soon as I saw it on the Doris zine blog.

What stands out to me from the interviews was that in some ways the interviewees’ lives didn’t magically get better the immediate moment they quit for good. In some ways, yes, but they had years of tough emotional / interpersonal work to go through afterwards. This may seem obvious to the casual observer but it was really apparent in those stories.

I have not had an experience with addiction, but I have learned from periods of grief and hugely life-altering events that the way I feel often gets worse before it gets better, if that makes any sense. I don’t know if it’s just me though. I would like to find words to use other than “feel” and “worse”, because it’s more than that, but I don’t have a way to express it right now.

I want to add some more blogs to my daily reading list. Any recommendations? Check out the sidebar to see who I am currently following.

Tomorrow Dana, Stepkid, and I are going to a wedding. Grr. I am a wedding curmudgeon. I feel really uncomfortable at them. There’s nothing that makes me feel more non-gender normative than going to a heterosexual wedding bachelorette party (*shudder*). I’m not keen on going to this one tomorrow, but I’ll try to put on a happy face.

And if you’re wondering, yes, we had one. Two, actually. The first was when we went to the courthouse in Seattle and had our state domestic partnership registration forms notarized. Just the two of us, nothing ceremony-like really, except that then we went to the beach in West Seattle and read the vows we’d written to each other.  And just like that, we were done, and I was happy about it.

But weddings are ALWAYS required to be more complicated than that, especially when you have family and religious traditions involved.  We briefly looked into getting married at the Episcopal cathedral where I worked and we worshipped, but the costs pretty soon added up to way more than I was down with, even if we’d had disposable income to spend. Cuz when you know everyone, who do you leave out?

And then there was the family. I would be the only grandchild my one remaining grandparent would get to see marry. My mom wanted to have a reception with a kransekake, a traditional Norwegian ring cake. And so forth, and so forth.

So a year after our first wedding, we got married again, in the little Episcopal church in my hometown. Very quick ceremony, no music, no attendents. We were actually wearing white dresses, though. Dana and I had picked out matching outfits to wear that were not super dressy and that we’d actually wear again, and my mom put down her foot because they had black. “Married in black, wish yourself back.” Oh how I detest that particular little jingle.

Then we had a party at my parents’ house in their huge front yard. Amazingly, it did not rain. The party was nice, we didn’t take ourselves too seriously, and it was over and done with. The end.