ceelove

Hello, I continue to be using homesteadingdykes.com instead of blogging here. It’s likely that everyone who would like to keep up with me from here already is, but elusiveat has let me know that they have created a DW feed of the blog. Thanks and here y’all go:

https://homesteadingdykes-feed.dreamwidth.org/

May there be monumentally less suckage in 2021 for you and yours.

A bon mot I wrote in a style going around on Twitter:


Ah hell, I still miss the old days
back before the Extrasensory Policing Authority would put you in a CogniLoc
just for taking a quick peek in someone else’s daydream.

Now, I know what you’re thinking,

Bunny Petra died in May of last year; Milkweed in May of this year; and now Clay. Clay was a golden Palomino, big, handsome, clever, insistent on his way, irascible, not easy to get along with - but then neither am I, so I can hardly hold that against someone. I had him for 6 of his 7 years and we gradually found a way to rub along together - literally, he could absorb petting for ages, which endears any creature to me. He also had a terrific appetite for scraps from veggies I grew, another way to my heart.

His health declined precipitously in the last two weeks, the vet figured kidney disease or cancer, he was a respectable age in bunny years, and it would have been unlikely-to-impossible to restore him to health. Unlike with Milkweed or Petra, I was prepared for him to die, and he softened away to nothing in my arms.

That leaves me only one bunny, the elderly and asocial Sugar, which is obviously not enough to use up my extra garden produce, let alone provide a vessel for all my bunny-love. So, more bunnies soon, I hope. For now, some more grieving - though not as hard as with Milkweed, lagomorphic love of my life.

Hello, Duluth folks. I am a huuuuuge fan and have purchased scores of your items, including two pairs of overalls. They are, of course, wonderfully functional in many ways, but like every other pair of overalls in the history of MANkind, they fail women in a fundamental way.

I speak, of course, of the pain-in-the-tuchus of peeing while dressed in overalls.

To pee, one must unfasten one side of the overalls and push them down to one’s knees, being careful not to dunk the free strap into the toilet and preferably not letting it rest on the floor either. There’s an extra amount of rearranging one’s shirt, finding the free hanging strap, and getting fastened back in. And this is to say nothing of when one is wearing layers and must take off, for example, one’s winter coat in order to pee in an outhouse, which is brrrrrrr and yuck in equal measure.

There are devices in the world to help women pee while standing up - basically, funnels to cover the crotch and direct the flow away from the body. Could the lovely Duluth designers and engineers please work on integrating such a device into women’s overalls? A little waterproof pocket with a bit of rubber tubing, easy to detach (for rinsing at a more opportune time) and to fold away when not in use. Oh, and a flap at the crotch to unzip/snap, or the zipper that can start at the top or bottom of the torso. I promise you, we would love it so, so much.

Colleen Campbell, faithful but yearning customer

I’ll disable this feature, but: I just got a notice from Livejournal telling me,

“[user] posted entry for the first time in a while.
Your friend did not post 2 months, look at his new post”

It’s followed by “Read the news LiveJournal [news LJ button]”
and “We are in social networks [buttons for FB & Twitter]”.

Well, good to know that English’s difficulty to master is useful for something. I cannot help but read the email as with a Russian accent, the phrasing is so immediately “off”.

On a sadder note of life-reallocation, this seems also to be the year of letting go the identity of “being a writer.” I adopted it when dissecting a frog at thirteen convinced me that I would not be a veterinarian, and I Needed to Know right then what I could do instead. I made up stories, I would just start writing them down - crisis solved. Three atrocious teenage novels and loads of the requisite crappy poetry didn’t dissuade me. Then I wrote a play which my theater teachers had me direct. I got a standing ovation, praise from students and faculty, roses from my cast, and two of the three genuinely good days of my high school years. Hell yes, I wanted more!

My college playwriting had even more easy success, including winning a contest with a full production and cash award. That play got the attention of a Hollywood producer, who cold-called me at the callow age of 22, interested in adapting the play as a TV movie. I took that as a sign and abandoned the time invested in learning to write for the stage, thinking I would level up in screenwriting as easily as I had in theatrical writing.

Narrator’s voice: “She would not.”

So I wasted fifteen years, gave up my traction, skills, and industry connections, and never got so much as another nibble from Hollywood. Wrote three screenplays I’m happy with, but the only thing that ever came of them was a local theater adapting my lesbian fairytale musical to the stage. That easy success drew me back to stage writing, but that’s as far as it went. I learned a lot, got a lot of feedback and engagement from my community, got some nibbles here and there from small-scale theaters, but never another production.

And while I’ve genuinely loved the writing for its own sake - while I get a uniquely satisfying thrill from living in my brain while it’s crafting a story - it is a huge amount of work to plan, write, edit, and submit to theaters a full-length play. I can only do it so many times for the love of the craft and my dedicated little fan base. Might I reconsider? Sure, if something insistently demanded of me that I write it, or if the script that I put out there last year leads to a contest win or production. But without that, this year is the end of the line.

I know it matters to a few other people, who will be disappointed alongside me. And I know, simultaneously and contradictorily, that it doesn’t matter. Both in the sense that the world does not lack for good storytelling, and in that I never relied on my writing for an income or something crucial like that. I can step away with no repercussions other than a bruised ego.

But yeah, there’s a bruised ego in there. And some discomfort around letting go of the identity of a writer. Especially now.

“Writer” since thirteen.

“Massage therapist for life” since twenty-three.

“The center of my kid’s life” since thirty-three.

All shifting, no longer part of the bedrock of my identity. I mean, “crappy romantic partner” used to be in the mix too, so it’s not like I’m opposed to change. Just, there’s an awful lot going out the window in relatively short time.

Oh well. All in service to transitioning towards being a homesteading innkeeper across the nation, I guess.

I am the kind of white woman whom 2016 America desperately needed to be paying closer attention. Earlier too of course, but 2016 was when I came to understand that my way of doing things was untenable. I had said many times since 9/11 that I kept myself in-a-bubble-in-a-bubble of my lunatic-fringe-progressive community, isolated from the increasing deplorability of America. Perhaps understandable, but not okay.

I went to the 2017 Women’s March in DC, where I encountered the term “intersectional feminism” and the Angela Y. Davis quote, “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” Slow and therefore picky reader that I am, I got myself her collection of essays, Women, Culture, & Politics, and a year later took it in for Black History Month.

Wow, was that a serendipitous choice. I’ve spent the last year learning why African American people, and women in particular, are pissed off at me, the oblivious white woman. This book makes it clear that everything they’ve been trying to get through to me, they’ve been saying the exact same for decades. Black women have been telling white women for generations that we cannot decouple racism and sexism and poverty issues, we cannot make significant progress towards the betterment of women while ignoring racial inequality. American white supremacy and male supremacy are inextricably linked.

I’ve been watching #MeToo unfurl in amazement, disgust, schadenfreude, new hope, etc, and with #TimesUp, am freshly aware of the prevalence of harassment against lower wage workers and minorities. And there’s Davis telling us over 30 years ago, “As domestic racist violence mounts - and as global imperialist aggression becomes more widespread - so women can expect that individual men will be more prone to commit acts of sexual violence against the women around them.” She talks of the battle against rape culture going back to the 1970’s. It is painful reading, but then most worthwhile things are these days.

And then there are nuggets like this, from 1985: “I was privileged to hear Maxine Waters...[speak of] the painful reality that only one Black woman then served in Congress... I could not help but speculate that if Maxine Waters herself were elected to Congress, Ronald Reagan and his cohorts would find it all the more difficult to execute their heinous schemes.” The book is liberally sprinkled with anecdotes with an all-too-familiar feel, of fighting the unbridled greed and bad faith of a hostile and reactionary administration.

One of the most surprising bits was in a visit Davis made to Egypt, where she was roundly scolded by the Egyptian feminists for focusing on issues of female genital mutilation and the veil. They schooled her that she had been made a tool of the oppressive white American feminists, whose focus on FGM to the exclusion of economic issues was somewhere between useless and dangerous to the Egyptian women. An unnamed woman tells her, “We want to be liberated, we want to be emancipated, we want to be equal - but from an economic point of view, not from a sexual point of view.” Davis muses, “She seemed to be suggesting that an isolated challenge to sexual inequality would not solve the problems associated with women’s state of economic dependency or their exclusion from the political process, not to mention the exploitation and poverty suffered by women and men alike.” It was a powerful lesson in speaking truths and listening to what disadvantaged people have to say about their own lives, which is, again, the sort of thing that has come into focus for me this last year.

Of course, some of the book is wincingly ironic. Davis’s wishes for her people are, if anything, less fulfilled now than then. She says to a high school graduating class, “Imagine that the Ku Klux Klan had already been relegated to the distant past and that we would never again have to worry about the establishment of camps where young white kids learn to hate and brutalize Black people, Mexican-Americans, Native Americans, and Jews...
“Imagine that we lived in a world where Mexicans, Central Americans, and Haitians without immigrant papers would not be rounded up like cattle and incarcerated in concentration camps, only to be shipped back to their own countries, where they face abject poverty and brutal political repression...
“Imagine that we lived in a world where physically and mentally disabled youth would not be subject to devastating routine discrimination...”

Then she says, to these kids, “My young sisters and brothers, we must do more than engage in such flights of imagination. All of us, the young and the old alike, women as well as men, must stand up, speak out, and fight for a better world.” Watching the Parkland kids now taking up the banner really brings that home to me. And this year, for the first time in my life, I feel like I’m finally over the hump myself: I’m paying attention, taking cues from people of color, doing my phone calls and marching and widow’s mite of donations and stuff. I feel embarrassed at how much catch-up I’ve needed to do, that I not be giving mere lip service to Black History Month, but I no longer feel shamefully ignorant.

I’m sure you’ve all wondered from time to time, so I decided to share at last my answer to one of the world’s great mysteries: What is the weirdest thing I’ve ever had in my mouth?

“It looked like something from a horror movie and smelled worse, which rather suggested that drinking it would be…problematic. Like sucking down Chthulu-flavored cake batter.” And yet, this is not the answer.

http://fiddlersgreen.me/2018/01/29/the-weirdest-thing-ive-ever-had-in-my-mouth/

The blizz-icane (or whatever) bolluxed my massage schedule, so instead I have written about the importance of massage in my life, in yet another blog post which approximately 1.4 people will read:

http://fiddlersgreen.me/2018/01/05/in-which-i-say-massage-a-lot-which-is-no-surprise-it-being-a-favorite-and-quintessential-thing/

My friends Pamela and Jesse have been working on a musical together the whole time I’ve known them, and in a week it’s going on in Winchester. It’s the story of Prometheus & Pandora, and it incorporates fire-spinning into the action. Just one day, next Monday at 8:00, and free.

https://www.facebook.com/events/372678776523452/