2013
“I will not become my mother.”
One of the podcasts I listen to, Women on the Line ended with this poem recently. And I love everything about it.
Subtext
Maxine Clark(sung):
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
A long way from home(spoken):
When we say, “I don’t want to become my mother,”
that isn’t an invitation to laugh.
Thinking about your mother-in-law.
And maybe the way she talks too loud
Or repeats herself when she gets excited.Or maybe you hate
that somehow
your children love her
more than they do you.
‘Cause usually men don’t understand
that to their child,
“that woman” is also their mother.
There is no distinction.If you listen to us,
you would hear that when we say,
“I don’t want to become my mother,”
what we are really saying is
“I want to be like my mother never had the chance to be.”
Or maybe even,
“I want to be like my father never let her be
or even understood she was.”Listen hard.
Because when we say,
“I will not become my mother,”
What we are really saying is,
“I will leave you
if you buy me a big, square house
in the ‘burbs
and especially if you present it to me
like we’re a match made in heaven.”We are saying,
“Who are you?”
and
“Do you even know who I am?!”What we are really saying is,
“As bad a mother as you may think I am for it,
my children
are just my children.
And not my dreams.”I would’ve been about seven
the first time I saw my mother on stage.
It took me seven years to realize who she was.When I say, “I will not become my mother,”
What I am really saying is,“I am my mother’s dreams.
I can’t afford to fail.”She was our mother,
I loved that, but damn,
this woman!
she could’ve really been something.When I say, “I will not become my mother,”
What I am saying is,
“I am going to be.
I will be.
I am.
What my mother was.
Before the world and his dog told that girl to stop.”And I am saying,
“If you love me,
then when I say,
‘I will not become my mother,’
Listen.
and be frickin’ smart about it.”
It’s from this episode (iTunes link; poem at 25:40) and I copied it while listening to it, so apologies to Maxine Clark if the punctuation or line breaks are all kinds of wrong.
2012
[Belated] Secret Santa Can Suck It: Selfish Santa
The best part of the countdown to the War on Christmas each year is, in my estimation, Secret Santa Can Suck It, organized by the Caretaker over at Shadow Manor. It’s a virtual gift swap which means that money is no object—one is only limited by one’s imagination. And possibly by how well one knows (or doesn’t know) the recipient.
This year I was super excited because I drew the Caretaker herself! (She had me one year and I got a Cthulhu makeover, eeeeee!) I immediately began scheming about what I was going to get her. Muahaha. Read more >>
2012
Music Monday: All You Have to Do is Dance!
[All linked YouTube clips have NSFW audio.]
I have just discovered Macklemore, an extremely irreverent musician who walks the line between hiphop and nerdcore. (I recently tweeted his Thrift Shop, which is simultaneously Ke$ha’s fashion anthem, my approach to steampunk, and an indictment of corporate fashion culture. So…yeah.) I think what I love most about his stuff is that he’s having so much fun!!!, which makes it so much fun to listen to.
[Aside that will be relevant to readers of MoF: Macklemore did an amazing piece called Same Love in advance of the vote on Referendum 74, which eventually legalized marriage equality in the State of Washington. It's a beautiful song: I cried.]
But this song is currently my favorite.
Read more >>
Contradictory Beliefs
Much has been made (often by atheists) about the necessarily contradictory beliefs that theists must hold. It may be that the “iron of Calvinism” Catholicism is wrapped ’round my bones, but I still manage to hold intensely contradictory beliefs. I am absolutely an atheist, but it comforts me to believe in the Divine, and so I do. I know I’m wrong, but I believe I’m right. I don’t know if that’s helpful at all, but I ran across this quote recently and I can pretty much get behind every statement in it.
I can believe that things are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
- Samantha Black Crow in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods
helpfully transcribed by FantasyMaps.com
linked to by the Wild Hunt
What are your contradictory beliefs?
2012
the School of Life
If you haven’t yet started listening to On Being, I can highly recommend it. It’s a respectful and varied trip through people’s belief systems. I rarely do not enjoy it. Some memorable—and perhaps pertinent to MoF readers—shows include an interview with Terry Tempest Williams and two recent episodes focusing on Istanbul (one an interview with a local Dominican friar).
But today, if you only listen to one, let it be Alain de Botton on atheism and keeping the good parts of religion. He has organized what he calls “the School of Life” to fill the community and thinking-deep-thoughts void of areligion. It includes nightly “sermons”, a word he uses instead of lectures to encourage people to take what they learn—or think about—and apply it to their life outside; to keep it from remaining a purely academic pursuit.
This is a place I’d love to visit. I hope that, next time I’m in London, I get the chance to. I hope that it branches out and opens one down the street from me.
One of the major points he makes in this interview is that we are not born knowing how to live—we need to be taught morals, how to love, and how to deal with death. Religion does this well; atheism generally does not. To this end, he’s written a book, Religion for Atheists: a Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion, which I have not yet read but which has definitely been added to my List.
2012
Black Rock City
I went to Burning Man for the first time in 7 years this year. Every year, it flits in and out of the news, with some calling it proof that civilization is doomed and others finding in it proof that there is hope for humanity.
What I have come to realize after two weeks on the Playa is that Burning Man is a giant Rorschach.
Seven years ago, my fiance and I headed out to Black Rock City and staked our claim to a little plot of land in the Alternative Energy Zone. I found people who ran their cars on biodiesel, baked cookies in solar ovens, and lived off the grid. I found people who realized they were in a desert and water was precious. I found people who knew that what they wanted from life wasn’t what the default world considered the “norm” and found ways to get what they wanted on their own terms. In a desert in Nevada, I found respect for the desert in Los Angeles that I lived in, mediated by the religions of a desert in Egypt. I found peace that, even though I’m a child of the mountains—of cold, wind, and rain—I could be at home in a place of heat, sun, and cloudless skies. I found exactly what I needed 7 years ago.
This year, I was talking with my co-blogger, John, about going this year and about what it was. Is it a rave? Yes. Is it a nudist colony? Yes. Is it a pagan festival? Yes. But it’s more than that. It’s whatever you want it to be—and sometimes, whatever you need it to be.
Two weeks ago, my husband and I headed out to Reno, where we met our campmates for the first time. Although we were the same people who made pilgrimage seven years ago, we were absolutely not the same people. We waited in line with playa-siblings for four hours as the sun set and the moon rose. We laughed, we played, we danced. And then we got to the gate and were welcomed home. We claimed a plot of land for our campmates to meet us at and, in the pitch-black night, cobbled together a perimeter of emergency tape and bike lights. And then we slept. In the morning, our campmates joined us and set up a compound (RVs around the perimeter for protection from wind and dust, a geodesic dome in the center for camaraderie and food, hexayurts inside the perimeter for sleeping). And we were home.
This year, I was reminded of the importance of disaster preparedness and came home with resolutions to do better (I’m going to get my ham radio license!). This year, I watched the sun rise over the Temple with thousands of others—some who had woken for this purpose, others who were still up from the night before—dressed in white. I mused about the concepts central concepts of Burning Man as a sacrifice to no god and a Temple with no priests. I participated.
I got exactly what I needed.
2012
Music Monday: Things That Never Cross a Man’s Mind
Does it make me sexist if I think this is a hilarious song? In fact, I don’t know any man to whom all of these apply—and many women to whom at least some of them do. So: here’s a good song with some tropes but a good beat.
Discuss.
2012
Valentine’s Day Idea
While the recent decision in the Prop 8 debacle was a great birthday present for me, Valentine’s Day is coming up and the battle isn’t over yet.
Here is a fantastic idea for Valentine’s: the All You Need Is Love Campaign. Someone found out that the average person (? couple?) spends $100 on Valentine’s Day and recommends that, instead of chocolates and cards and wine, lovers give that money to the Human Rights Campaign (or other worthy marriage equality and love-promoting charity).
So whether you celebrate Valentine’s Day or Singles Awareness Day, All You Need is Love.
2012
Proposition 8: Still Unconstitutional
Today, the Ninth Circuit (the federal court in whose jurisdiction California falls) published its decision upholding the prior ruling that stated that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.
Of course, this is a bit of a “duh” moment, but it’s still good news.
What follows is, I hope, an English translation of the decision for the lay-person. It is not intended to be a legal note on the decision (although I have provided citations for those who want to dive into the text). Others have likely interpreted the decision for the legal community far better than I can or care to. Read more >>
Spark: Ashay!
I don’t know how much longer this (iTunes link) will be up, so dl it today and give it a listen.
The Moth is “true stories told live” without notes. There is a podcast which I love listening to. It’s like This American Life without the host. I just heard this amazing story (iTunes link) by Ava Kay Jones.
Her ancestors are not my ancestors and her gods are not my gods, but her saints are my father’s and my mother’s saints. Her story spoke to me and when she cried “Ashay! Ashay! Ashay!” (if that is how it is spelled), my soul cried “Ashay! Ashay! Ashay!” with her and with the people in the Superdome. Time and space collapsed and I was there instead of here, then instead of now.
Give her a listen.
2012
It’s happening again.
Remember Prop 8? For me, the wounds are still raw (current status: overturned but implementation stayed; trapped in the appellate process [English: not legal but in effect]). I went to a school that threw its 501(c) out the window in the name of religious zealotry and continues to treat some of its students as second-class.
Well, the human-rights-refusing fever has reached Minnesota—and, surprise surprise!, it’s excessively entangled with religion…again.
Go read this. My friend says it better than I could.
2012
“I’d do her.”
These words make me cringe. As though that’s a compliment. As though the opposite is an insult. But I ran across this recently and it struck me as being a perfect sentiment:
I’d do her.If, like, she were still alive. And would have me.
[Obviously, this was about a historic figure.]
“And would have me.” is the pertinent point. But it changes the whole sentiment from, “I am in a position of power and deign to choose her,” to “We are equals and I would like her if she agrees.”
It’s all about consent.
[Source: Balloon Juice on "Emma Goldman", trying hard to make fun of the amazing and awesome Take Back Halloween, and failing miserably.]