Audium

Went to see the audium last night, a 35-year-old audio installation with many many speakers. It cost $12 to get in. Apparently, they've been playing the same piece of music there for the last nine years. The speakers are all 35 years old, it seems and not very sharp, but they are what they are. Despite having hundreds of speakers, they only have 4 tracks of audio. this is actually logical, as i was trying to figure out how anyone could afford hundreds of amplifiers for each speaker and hundreds of tracks of tape or whatever. but 4 tracks means 4 amps and 4 tracks of tape, which is reasonable. It's all analog, so the lack of crispness could just be from playing the same tape twice a week for nine years. the high pitched audio gradually gets rubbed off of the tape and gets stuck to the tape head. crispness is all pretty high-frequency. This hapens this way because the magnetic material on the tape has some thickness. High frequencies do not have a lot of energy to penetrate the tape, so they end up mostly on the surface. Low frequencies have much higher energy and end up at the "bottom" of the tape. this I think I recall from Maggi Payne's class in audio engineering.

Anyway, at the Audium, the same guy does this every time. I can't imagine spending nine years playing the same work twice a week. But he gets audience. There were more than 30 people there. He's working on a new piece, which will be deployed in a month or two. And there's talk of opening up the installation for other composers some time after that. But it might be a year or two. Things don't seem to move quickly at the audium.

the nine year old piece features some tape collage of recordings of birds and ocean sounds and stuff. then there are a bunch of cheesy analog synth sounds. alas, they really are cheesy. they sound like they must be much older than they apparently are. There was a cool Forbidden Planet type vibe around them, tho. (If you have not seen this movie, you must. It has an amazing soundtrack.) The room is darkened completely during the show. Pitch black. And then an intermission of 5 minutes and then pitch black again. I fell asleep during the first half. I don't think pitch black is the best way to listen to sound. I mean, you do want to concentrate with your ears more than your eyes, but I think senses highten each other more than they compete. Sitting in a dark, still room with no air circulation could tend to de-focus you, rather than steer your focus towards sounds, but I dunno. I know that if/when I go again, I'm going to be more rested. I fidgeted constantly during the second half to be wakeful, which worked, but there's still some sensory deprivation element that makes it hard for me to pay attention.

It would be cool to combine a million (ok, over a hundred) speakers with something like a planetarium, so you could do audio collage and laser light show at the same time! ok, maybe not...

other stuff

Today is the last non-travel day of my break. The navel gazing has come to an end so I can get some school work done and because it's undignified to make a spectacle of myself. No really. I have dropped down to my normal, background level of angst. I feel happy. (I just discovered halvah in the fridge that Ellen had been hiding from me, so it wouldn't all disappear. but then she decided it was safe to leave it in sight again..) I feel kind of transformed, maybe, but I'm not questioning everything anymore. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, but the over-examined life is a problem too. Yeah, this means I'm going to keep doing things just cuz it's how I've always done it and it seems not to be causing a problem. Maybe it's stupid to be a vegetarian. I don't care. I've been doing it for 11 years and I'm not stopping now.

As for identity: I am my ideas, experiences and perceptions. I start at the tips of my fingers and end at the bottom of my toes. That's it. "Finding myself" was my excuse for my 25-year-old driftiness. I am hereby declaring myself found. I'm the person sitting in front of the laptop.

happy happy happy

Jesus Christ Racing Team trying to witness for Jesus Christ by racing the Christmobile.

Quick Matthew, Mark and Luke! to the Christmobile! There are money changers in the temple!

audium tonight! Be there or be someplace else!

fate

this post killed for being too navel-gazing. for pete's sake.

--Update-- this post restored by popular demand

Lately, whatever I've needed has come to me. Not what I wanted, but what I needed. People are appearing at the right times and being helpful to me or nice to me or generally improving my situation a great deal. I feel happy right now and it's because of friends (current and from the past) and some people appearing that I didn't expect. I feel loved, not just by family and friends but also, somehow, by fate or whatever that seems to be steering me in the right direction and causing things to appear at exactly the right time. I think I'm going to become a unitarian.

And so I dunno what to do with myself when the semester ends. I want to come back here, where I'm surrounded by caring and kind people and to pick up things I've started while here. But, alas, Ellen points out that I really really must do more in nyc. (She's right. It's essential for my career.) Then I've got financial entanglements, in that I'll be paying my berkeley morgage and my CT rent no matter where in the world I go off to. And so I feel pulled in multiple directions by career, connections to home and whatnot.

So I'm going to send out some resumes in all directions and then trust in fate. I'm not sure how much trust I have in descision making right now. I decide things and they turn out to not matter cuz of changing circumstance or I decide something and later decide it was a disaster. Or I try to decide things, but am ultimately powerless. I have many feelings, but I don't know how much to trust them or how much weight to give them. All sort of new experiences that most folks have at age 20, not at age 28. filled with doubt. and pulled, ultimately, by the difference between what i want and what i need. alas. how can i tell which is which?

Event!

I am going tommorrow (friday) night to see the Audium. If you would like to join me (I would very much like it if you did), the instructions on the Audium website say to arrive at 1616 Bush St., SF. by 8:00 PM. As there are supposed to be large anti-war protests in the City, it might be a good idea to ride transit in (or head over after blocking the federal building or whatever).

The Audium is something of an SF landmark. It's been there since the 1970's. And it's a room with 169 speakers where concerts are given every weekend. I haven't gone before, so it's about time. Reviews of it have been mixed, but there's a few reasons to check it out aside from its landmarkness. some people complain about the old-school 70's synthesizer sounds. (!!????) 70's synths are awesome! They're way better than digital. Anyway, I heard a rumor that it might be opened up for other composers to write stuff for the space, so I want to check it out for that reason too. and I thought it might make a nifty group outing. so come, if you can!

Not Reading Freud

I'm supposed to be readin Freud right now, but I'm not doing it. I swear I will do it . . . later. I have to give a report on Monday, so yeah, I'll do it later. Anytime now. Right after I post to my blog and eat lunch and....

And what about ameliorating the crushing pain of existence? Life is inherently tumultuous. Bad things happen. All the freaking time. But good things happen too. You've got your joy of existance and your wonder of existence and your beauty of existence. Would it make a difference if we talked about things that adulterated to joy of existence rather than talking about things that ease the crushing pain of existence? How would our worldview suddenly shift? I mean, you can't avoid pain unless there's something wrong with you. Maybe you can't avoid joy either. Maybe there's more than one state of existence. Maybe the states of existence are not in binary opposition to each other. Maybe pain is a way of teaching us things and so adds to joy. Maybe joy is a way to create contrast and so adds to pain. Are you a pessimist or an optomist? Maybe this is all so knotted up and gordian you can never untangle it. Maybe any way you look at it is simultaneously a useful tool for understanding things and a distortion. What good are words anyway? Where would be without words? What if everything is in everything else? What if all distinctions and all ontology are just tricks we use to survive and find food?

I'm going to describe my current state as ungrounded. I don't know where the gound is. I don't know which way is up. I don't know if talking about "up" has meaning except in relation to gravity. It's not a useful direction to give in a space station. My words here are bordering on cliche. Ungrounded. Sleep-deprived. Experiencing beauty and wonder.

forgiveness

My highschool religion teacher in my junior year told us that we needed to always forgive but "don't be a doormat." I had the kind of disrespect for her that only a highschool student could have. What could this possibly mean aside from being a cliche or a half-hearted forgiveness?

Sharon Olds (I think) writes a lot of poetry about her father, who was abusive. In one of her poems, she talks about thinking of her father as a young boy, before he was abused and when he was joyful and not yet broken and transformed into a monster. She thought of him then and loved him then. Because holding hate in your heart is too heavy? Because everyone, even people who hurt you, deserves love or maybe it's easier to love than to hate? I don't have answers. I only have questions.

You've done bad things. I've done bad things. Maybe you don't know why you did bad things. Maybe you've thought about it and found an explination or a reason, something so you can say that you were doing your best and forgive yourself. I shouldn't have called her an asshat, but I was really angry. I had a terrible day. My cat died that morning. Or something. I was fucked up. It was a fucked up time in my life. Or something.

Everyone has extenuating circumstances. Everyone has reasons. Everyone thought that what they were doing was the best thing to do or was under some sort of compulsion or was hurt or was damaged. You can empathize with yourself. Man, I yelled all the time when my mom was dying and that was extremely stressful for the people around me, but my mom was dying and I had no tools for dealing with it. I can empathize and forgive myself. Does this sound easy? It's not. Forgiving myself is harder than forgiving anyone else. This is how I've been doing it: Look at what I did that was wrong. Look at what I should have done different. Try to understand why I did wrong things. Empathize with myself. Try to avoid thinking errors like overgeneralization, labelling, emotional reasoning, all-or-nothingism, etc. Find places where I did things right, if I can. Keep in mind correct deeds in addition to misdeeds. Take deep breaths. Cry. Eat a lot of Halvah (or equivalent) (Ancient proverb: Halvah ameliorates the crushing pain of existence). Feel rage. Try to get rage to subside. Not a quick thing. this why I've done no homework. I tried to forgive other people. I put blame on myself for my part in causing disaster. I tried to forgive myself. Now I'm back to other people. I don't think there's a set algorythm for how to do this. I feel like to forgive other people, I need to keep love in mind. to forgive myself is the same deal, I think. "poor me. look at the mess i was in. i did my best." It sounds like ways I was trained not to think. I'm not supposed to feel sorry for myself. I'm supposed to have charecter, whatever that is. Freud says that people get hysteria because they supress emotions and reactions to things . . . and too much daydreaming.

Teaching myself new ways to think. Freud says (ok, I did some of my Freud reading afterall) that incorrect (or let's say instead "not useful") thought patterns can wear deep ruts really quickly. When you train yourself to think in a new way, you are literally forming new connections between neurons and neglecting strong, well-connected pathways. This is not an easy thing to do. It's why seeing those 3-D magic eye pictures is so difficult for the first time. You really, actually, need to rewire your brain. So I'm rewiring my brain, which is why it's not surprising that I couldn't concentrate on anything.

So what about forgiving other people? Empathy! Empathy! Empathy! What could have caused this person to behave in this way? What is good about this person? What can I love about this person? And then eat a lot of halvah. And then forgive, but don't be a doormat. Forgiving someone in your heart can be something you do entirely for your own self interest to lighten your load and to move on. Forgiving someone in your heart does not mean that your relationship with the forgiven reverts to the pre-hurt state. If I forgive myself for over-using rage as coping tool, I'm cartainly not going to do that again, if I can help it. so what about relationships with other people? Should I renew them? Change them? Break them off?

How likely is this to happen again? What steps have been taken by me or this person to prevent it? Have I removed some stressor? Has s/he learned some new coping strategy? Was this hurt in repsonce to a once-in-a-lifetime ordeal, or could something like this happen again? How can I communicate my expectations to the other person? Would it make a difference? How do I evaluate whether or not it has made a difference? Cluelessness is indistinguishable from malitiousness in certain instances, so says Dilbert. Was s/he clueless or malicious or can I tell? Can I clue this person in? How much maliciousness should I absorb before I seperate myself from this person? How much time to I allow? What do I do during this time? When do I stop trying? How do I love someone after I quit trying?

I've got none of those answers. but they seem like the right questions. Maybe the other person is asking the same questions too. what do I do if s/he gets different answers that I do? what if one of wants change and the other doesn't? What if one of us wants to break it off?

what is the nature of commitment and expectation? Does it change how much I have to try to change or renew rather than end? I think this is the definition of commitment: I will change and renew as much as I can. I will try to find compromise. I will do whatever I can within my boundaries. (my god, where do the boundaries go?) I think commitment means not giving up until you've exhuasted all your options. Of course, there are different levels of commitment. You can't make anyone else do anything. Just because an expectation seems reasonable to you, doesn't mean you won't be disappointed.

More later

Better than Halvah

My experiments with ameliorating the crushing pain of existence are resoundingly successful. i'm still hella distracted though.

But I thought I'd share a weird and complicated story with you, on the 11th anniversary of my grandma's death:

How My Grandma Died

Well, when I was a youth, I eventually became dern certain that I was a homo and I've always been terrible about keeping secrets. furthermore, shameful secrets give people power over you. People can guess or find out and threaten to tell everybody. This happened to me on multiple occasions. And "I am not!" is not a good responce to any taunt, whether someone is calling you an asshat or a dyke. So I came out at school.

I was sixteen years old and it was the end of my sophomore year, about a week before final exams, maybe less. It was definitely the very end of May or the beginning of June. My friend had given me a bunch of information about Gay Pride Month events and parades. She had gotten a photocopy from someplace. This was before the internet. It was sometimes hard to find out about things, especially subculture events. Well, I've always been one for flyer-based activism. So I printed up 50 flyers that said "June is Gay Pride Month" and listed all the parades and street faires in the Bay Area. And I started handing them out to people. This was about equivalent to printing up flyers that said "Celeste is a big dyke!" I knew this would be the case and I had decided to answer any questions that anyone asked me. The other kids weren't sure what to do about this. They'd ask me "Are you a lesbian?" and I'd say yes. And they'd look at me quizzically and say , "ok." and go back to talking to their friends.

I went to talk to the director of student activities to get permission to post the flyers around school. He was my freshman english teacher (and was arrested last year for groping a student, but anyway), he was only in his second year of teaching then. I was used to occassionally seeing him nervous, but I'd never seen him so nervous as I did then. He explained that it was unfortunate that society (and specifically the catholic church who ran the school) was not accepting of homosexuality and maybe in future years, people would be allowed to post these flyers, but not now. I thanked him for his time.

Meanwhile, astounded kids were asking me for flyers. People would come up to me and ask if I was gay just because they couldn't beleive I would say it. It would walk past a cluster of kids that were talking amongst themselves and looking at me and then one of them would come up to me and ask, just to hear me say it. I remember one afternoon, I was walking the length of the quad, rolling my tuba behind me to go home at the end of the day. It seemed like a relay race. I started out across the quad and passed a group of kids, probably practicing cheerleaders. They talked excitedly amongst themselves for a minute and then dispatched a runner to the next group of people talking along the path. they would gossip excitedly! then they would send a runner to the next group. I don't remember if it was me or the rumor that crossed the quad frist. I do remember having stressful dreams about being chased by students with pitchforks and flaming torches, ala Doctor Frankenstein.

but my timing was really perfect. Just as things were getting to a riotous pitch, final exams struck. This was a college prep school. Kids took their finals very seriously. Nobody had time to worry about me anymore. And then school was out for the summer. I didn't know what would happen to me in the fall. I remember telling a coworker at Pizza Hut that summer that I didn't know if I had any school friends. But after spending a summer digesting it, they all calmed down and more or less accepted me.

This horrified my mother. she didn't like that i was queer. she didn't like that she hadn't been able to dissuade me from being queer. and what's worse is that now everybody knew! I would tell anybody! every day was coming out day for me. she pleaded with me not to tell my grandma. My grandma had a bad heart. if she knew i was a lesbian, clearly she would have a heart attack and die. I acquiessed. It was the only time my mom was able to restrain me. She tried to build on this success. She told me that I couldn't subscribe to any gay periodicals, because my grandma used to know the Cupertino postmaster (in the 1950's) and certainly the postal carriers would gossip about delivering the Advocate and it would get back to my grandma and she would have a heart attack and die. Other farfetched connections were made. Some completely unexplained. I couldn't go on a date with a girl because my grandma would have a heart attack and die. How would she know? she just would and it would kill her. My mom told me this over and over. If I went on a date with a girl, my grandma would somehow magically find out and have a heart attack and die. I was somewhat unconvinced and completely undeterred.

Anyway, during this time, I was young and naive. I thought that people mostly discriminated against queers by accident. As in, they didn't think about anything but straight people, so they wouldn't realize that queers were being excluded. As in, privledge is blinding. People who are able-bodied often don't notice a lack of ramps for handicapped accessiblity and so can create barriers without meaning to. I used to think people only discriminated against disabled people by accident, which alas is not true. and I thought they discriminated against gay people by accident, which alas, really was not true. so when my highschool responded to slam-dancing at the Valentines dance by banning people from getting same-sex guest passes, I thought I could just explain to them about how this was disciminatory and they would fix it.

I had only gone to the homecoming dance of my freshman year and I went with a band guy, so no paperwork was required. But if you wanted to take somebody who went to a different highschool or something, a permission slip was needed, called a guest pass. At the valentines dance of my junior year, a bunch of guys got guest passes for their friends at Bellarmine, the catholic all-boys higschool down the peninsula. Boys will be boys and there were too many of them and they got rowdy. Instead of issuing a proclimation "no slam dancing," the administration decided to just make sure all the non-St Francis boys were on some sort of leash, like a female date.

My friend knew a lesbian who went to Castilleja, an all-girls highschool in Palo Alto. She gave me contact info and I called this girl up. Her name was Emma, as I recall. I made a date to meet her after school one day to get the pertinent information for the guest pass. She was a granola girl. She was cute, she was friendly, she was flirty. I was on cloud 9. I remember walking with her in Memorial Park in Cupertino, holding hands that first day. I pushed her on the swing. Parents with kids saw us, realized we were two girls together grabbed their children and left. But it just made it all the more exciting. At the end of the afternoon, I drove her home. I sat in my pickup truck, looking over at her and she kissed me! I had kissed a lot of boys by then. Maybe 10. I was looking for the right one, but all I had found was slimy toungues and bad breath. But her! It was the first time I had kissed a girl. It was astoundingly wonderful. I felt dizzy. My foot slipped off the break of my truck and it rolled several feet. I promised her that I would see her the night of the dance.

Meanwhile, the wheels of the school machinery were turning. I got a slip saying I should go to the dean's office. The assistant dean, a really butch PE teacher, told me to go to the dean. The dean told me to go to the vice principal. The vice principal told me to go the the principal. the principal wanted nothing to do with me and sent me back to the vice principal. He helpfully explained that the school had to answer to the standards of the catholic community in which it existed and could not issue me a guest pass. I met with him and argued with him several times. I was surprised. I remember my heart sinking when my English teacher, a silent ally, said, "you don't think you're going to win, do you?"

the night of the Saint Patricks Day Dance came and I had lost. The next dance was the junior prom, for which a date was pretty much required and which, it was clear, would also deny me entry. My (one and only) ex-boyfriend asked me to hang out with him, so me, him, a friend of his, and Emma were tooling around in his car. I don't remember where we went or what we did. I do remember spending quite a lot of the evening making out with Emma in the back of Brian's car. Brian was probably not amused, but I didn't notice. I didn't care. Girls! Girls are awesome! Emma was awesome! It was the best thing ever!

I came home from that night, my first date with a girl, walking about a foot off the ground, I was so happy. It was the best thing ever. All of my lingering doubts or confusions about my identity seemed to have been swept away. I felt like a new person. It was the best thing ever. the guest pass thing didn't even matter anymore.

I went inside my house and my parents were still awake, which was somewhat unsusual given the hour, but not unheard of as they were night people. But they were acting very strangely. What happened, I asked?

My grandma had a heart attack. the next wednesday, St Patricks Day, she was dead.

I never saw Emma again.

Be careful about threats you make over and over again, as you never know when they'll come true.

still philosophising endlessly, don't mind me

Today's subject is still anger. Anger provides temporary relief. Somebody hurting you? Don't get sad, get mad! If you're angry, you're energetic and you can go do something like hate them or get revenge. It's really easy to get mad. Just look only at somebody's flaws, turn off empathy and assign them the worst possible motives. The more you love somebody, the easier this is, because you've got a lot of experience with the flaws of people you love. It's rewarding and easy to turn love into hate. Everything is the other person's fault. And you can burn with a justified and bitter rage.

This, however, is akin to visitting a loan shark. Lots of funds now, lots of debt later. Hate almost always hurts the hater more than the hatee (excluding acts of violence. silent hate is more self-destructive). Hate burns a hole in you. And hate doesn't hurt the other person, usually. I mean, you can do things to hurt them, but they might fail to work and then, either way, you feel guilty or enraged or some other taxing emotion.

anger causes explosions. Get mad! Get wound up tighter than a spring! freak out at small provocations or for no reasons at all! yell at your cat! Mad! Mad! Mad! BOOM!!

Of course, maybe you do succeed in hurting the other person. then s/he gets mad too and extracts revenge in return! and then you extract revenge! and the s/he does! and then you! ohhh all this righteous rage is enough to burn down a house, or a temple . . . some people think their body is a temple. somepeople would gladly burn their bodies to the ground. Anger could be addictive, you need more and more to keep hurt at bay. And when you're wound up so tight, how do you stop?

Man, I dunno. Take a deep breath. As Jean says, if you're not breathing, you're not doing your best thinking. Then think of something good about your nemesis. Everyone has something good about them. If this person was all bad, they wouldn't have been able to attract your attention long enough to get you mad. This strategy may not work for elected officials, but it's got to work for people you love. Yeah s/he's got more flaws and misdeeds than you can shake a stick at. And her/his nose was always just a little bit pointy in an unasthetic way. And s/he did yell at you and say something maybe s/he regretted later. But abstractly, without hurt, there would be no hope. Concretely, there is something that made you love this person. And that something is still there. S/he still has a contagious laugh. there was that time s/he bought you ice cream when you were having a bad day. there's all the love you shared and that still counts for something. Breathe. find love. find a stable platform. then figure out what to do. imho.

facing facts

well, christi has gone back to Paris, and we're still seperated or broken up or whatever you call divorcing queers. thus meaning that i'm still single. thus meaning that there's still time for a very short tumultuous affair. it would be an affair on a budget, as i have not done any school work and really need to spend time on that. i'm not sure that me just being here till (very very very early) sunday morning is even long enough to qualify for a tumultuous affair. maybe just a tumlutuous couple of evenings? no committment, lots of fun.....

i am not special

many young people are angry. many are militant. this is a cliche. the world is full of angry young women in their late teens and early to mid 20's. then, in their late 20's to early 30's or so, most angry young women chill out a bit. people are like honey mead or some wines. they mellow with age. stuff happens to them. they learn to talk. they learn to have boundaries. they learn mostly by making mistakes. sometimes from a teacher-type figure or a book, but mostly through trial and error.

This stuff that's going on in my life is a story told over and over. i was young and angry. now i'm less young and less angry. i was in a relationship. now i'm not. If I wrote something dramatic, like my heart felt like shards of broken glass cutting into me with every beat, you would all know what i meant. almost everyone gets their heart broken. almost everyone outlives their parents. almost everyone has a life filled with emotional ups and downs. almost everyone my age gets shaken up and re-examines things. we all live this story over and over. we all tell this story over and over. This is what the novel Generation X is all about. It's what many many novels are about. it's a story we never get tired of because it is universal. it is what happened to all of us, over and over again, but with different details, different faces, different names. what makes my story special to me is that i'm in it. what makes it special to you is that it reminds you of your own story.

We're all in this together. We're all looking for love, feeling pain, facing challenges, changing according to somewhat predictable patterns. because we're all human. and we all hurt each other or goof up or fail to communicate or act our age. nobody in this world is perfect. what makes us human is our errors, our hurts, our foibles, our personal drama, which is really our shared experiences of life.

We can look at people around us and see that they're all highly flawed. We're all born with Original Sin, according to Catholic dogma, meaning we're all doomed to fail sometimes. this makes us human. it is a cause for making connections instead of driving folks apart. how often is it that people appear more human and more likable because they're not perfect? we all share flaws, we all feel pain, we all bleed and this teaches all of us compassion. this can teach us forgiveness. we hurt each other and otherwise fail all the time. most times, people don't do this on purpose. all of us have done it. all of us have purposefully hurt each other. all of us have accidentally hurt each other. hopefully, more often the latter.

keeping a list of misdeeds of ourselves or anyone else would be exhausting. every person you'll ever meet will have a million things wrong with them. they probably have more wrong than right. if you know them long enough, they'll hurt you more than once and long enough again, they'll hurt you on purpose. we're all fucked up people and we're all fucking up all the time. you. me. everybody.

diogenes walked around with a lantern, looking for an honest man and never found anyone. anyone now looking for someone perfect or someone that won't hurt them is going to meet a similar fate. you can search yourself with a lantern and be similarly disappointed. but perfection is not actually desirable. what would you have in common with someone who had never hurt anyone or been hurt? no shared humanity. and perfectionism is even more undesirable. holding anyone, including yourself to overly high standards is just going to lead to more hurt and more heartbreak and a terrible feeling of aloneness.

this is why we must forgive. because our shared pain is an essential part of our existence. it binds us together while it pushes us apart. forgiveness is the final glue that holds us together. she who forgives is happier. the happiest people keep trying and trying again. they see faults and flaws and mistakes in themselves and everyone around them, but they look for the good. they look for what is beautiful and lovely. they look for what flaws have taught us, like compassion, forgiveness and hope. (perfection defies hope. it is a hopeless state, since it leaves nothing to aspiration.) the happiest people know that love and growth and mistakes and hurt and forgiveness and patience and compassion and compromise are not incompatible. they are essential. they exist in all relationships. if everyone of us is wrong and everyone of us is wronged, then we all desperately need values of compassion, forgiveness and compromise.

love is too important to be perfect. it is too human to never err. love is as fucked up as the rest of the emotional lives of people. love is the most important thing in our lives. to feel love is to look for the good amidst everything else. love is hope. love is forgiveness. love is compassion. in short, love is a product of hurt and errors. love is a second chance.

Asshat

today's word is "asshat," pronounced ass-hat. this is an insult. it can be used with great satisfaction

when i was a senior in highschool, i told the vice principal that if he didn't let me take my gf to prom, that queer nation would have a sit-in in front of the school and that the front page editor of the santa cruz sentinel was anxious to cover it. I said, "and the ACLU told me I should sue you, but I don't want to do that..." in a voice that suggested that all this activism was spinning out of my control and i could end up with a lawsuit in my name against my will. suddenly, it was decided that people could take "friends" to proms instead of merely dates, the compromise I had been suggesting all along. muahahahaha. He had said earlier that some of the students would later marry their dates and since gay marriage isn't allowed.... blah blah blah and that's falling down now too. (my response: um, what if we promise not to get married at prom?)

We live in happy times and the asshats are losing.

Origins of weird ideas

Self-esteem

When I was in 6th or 7th grade, my class had to sing that song that starts "I believe the children are our future" as part of some school production. I still know almost all the words to that song and will sing it to you if provoked. My mom, a devout Catholic who was somehwat uncomfortable with Vatican II, was also somewhat uncomfortable with that song. I was at a Catholic school. My mom thought we should not be singing that song, which has a line near the end, "learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all." What sort of stuff were they teaching us? God's love is the greatest love of all, she told me.

Some years later, I had gotten a free glossy magazine, prolly at gay pride, which had a page that said in large, colorful block letters, "love your body." Being a teenager who pasted all sorts of stuff to the walls of my room, I cut that out and stuck it in the next available space. My mom scowled at it. Self-love was definitely suspect. Any corporal self-love was doubly suspect. It was always worse to be egotistical than to have low self-esteem. And really, my mom's self-esteem was not high. She was terrified of going to hell her entire life. this is a cultural thing for Irish Catholics and maybe most catholics in the US. It's how they're taught to behave. And it's incompatible with high self-esteem and it's how I was raised.

I am not blaming my mom for my own low self-esteem. I'm grown up now. I can fix this. I just wanted to know where it came from.

Anger versus Hurt and Not Asking for Help

I told my parents that I thought I was queer when I was 14 years old. This was in 1990. They were the first people that I told. I wasn't even totally sure at the time. this was a huge mistake. 1990 was before Ellen, it was before gay-straight alliances. Most adults weren't even out then, at work or to their families. I mean, in big cities, yeah, but in the south bay, no. People thought that they didn't know any gay people then. so much has changed in the last 14 years, it's incredible.

But there I was, 14, a freshman at a catholic high school with no gay friends, role models or anything except for some books like One Teenage in Ten that I found in the Cupertino library. I was profoundly alone and confused and my parents said they would help me with whatever my problems were and they would understand and so I told them and it blew up.

My mom would call my friends parents and they would swap their litanies of complaints about their children. "Paul isn't doing well in math." "Sandy got detention for chewing gum in class." "Celeste thinks she's a lesbian." My mom never told me what other parents said about their kids, because it wasn't my buisiness. However, some other parents did not subscribe to the same philosophy. It got around my freshman class in high school four seperate times that I was queer. Kinds in my PE class were screaming at me in the locker room. they would sneak up behind me and hit the top of my head and then dissolve into a giggling group. This was not good. finally, I beat up one of them and that stopped, but the rest didn't. there was nobody to complain to. My religion teacher told us that god blew up Soddom and Gommorah to get the fairies. I was really into the Catholic thing at the time. I played trumpet in mass every week. I thought that God hated me. I knew my peers hated me. And meanwhile, my mom had started a reform program to discourage me from being gay by giving me a hard time about it. she and my brother would sit around making homophobic comments whenever I was there. My brother was delighted. I had always done better in school than him and had been the "good" kid. finally, it was his turn to be the favored child.

I know now that my brother just wanted approval from mom and was finally getting it. And I know mom really loved me and thought that being queer would be a disaster for me and was tryign to stop it any way she could. But at the time, I felt outcast by peers, by religion and by my family. I contemplated suicide, as did most gay kids at that time. About a third of them would actually try. Chapters of PFLAG were starting to be formed to address this problem, but my folks didn't want to join.

It was really really important to me that nobody could know they were hurting me. I didn't want my parents or mean kids to know they were getting to me. I eventualy started reading Hothead Paisan:homicidal Lesbian Terrorist comics. The motto: "it's better to be homicidal than sucidal." I cultivated anger to protect myself. If I could just get really mad, I could do something. And I did. I was the first out person at my highschool. I actively came out, it wasn't just rumors. I took my girlfriend to senior prom, after more than year of clashing with the administration in an argument that started a few months before junior prom. I think queer kids that went to that hischool after me had an easier time because of the battles I fought, mostly alone (although I had great band friends who kept talking to me despite major social stigma. They weren't necessarily supportive, but they were there and that was a lot. and some were accepting). Four years or so after I graduated, a stranger approached me at dyke march and explained that she had been a freshman at that school while I was a senior.

And my mom finally came to terms with me being queer and really loved Christi. So it all worked out in the end. I had a much easier time than a lot of other queer kids. I never got gay bahsed. I had friends. A few people yelled "dyke" at me, but I ignored tham and they stopped and prolly feared detention anyway. African American kids had a much harder time at that school than I did. I found a strategy for dealing with stress that was the best I could do under the circumstances. And it was getting angry instead of sad. Hiding my feelings. And not asking for help.

I should have jettisonned this long before now, but really, my life wasn't very stressful for the next several years. This strategy wasn't working as well as other strategies would have, but it wasn't really ever tested. Until my mom died. and now I'm getting rid of it.