breakinglight11 | Entries tagged with right and wrong

I've put together a couple of letters I plan on sending to relevant representatives and electors. I know it's not much, but it's a start.

In case it's helpful for anyone to send their own letters, here's the verbiage I'm using. It's not so much that it's super great or anything, but if not having to write it yourself makes it easier for you to send some, by all means feel free to copy these.

Here's the one I'm writing in protest of Stephen Bannon's appointment:

Dear Representative,

My name is Phoebe Roberts, a member of your constituency, an adjunct professor at Lesley University, and a concerned citizen. I am writing to you today to ask that you register displeasure at the appointment of white supremacist Stephen Bannon as White House Chief Strategist.

Bannon was “the main driver behind Breitbart becoming a white ethno-nationalist propaganda mill,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. To support this appointment is a destructive, racist position that would damage the wellbeing of so many diverse Americans. His presence in such a position legitimizes and normalizes hate in a manner that will create a license to discriminate against and harm many different kinds of people.

I ask that you speak out against this appointment as a representative of not only some kinds of Americans, but all of them.

Sincerely yours,
-Phoebe Roberts

And here's what I'm sending to Electoral College members asking that they not vote for Trump:

Dear Elector,

My name is Phoebe Roberts and I work as an adjunct professor at Lesley University. As an educator of future generations, and a citizen of the United States as well as the global community, I urge you not to cast your electoral vote in favor of Donald Trump.

His ignorance, inexperience, bigotry, and dishonesty makes him too dangerous a prospect to hold the highest office in the land. He will discriminate against the disabled, the poor, people of color, and the LGBT community. He will wreck the economy. He will destroy the environment and risk world war. Those of us who survive will suffer from his influence for years to come, and many of us will not survive.

Vote instead with your conscience and for the safety and wellbeing of our great nation. Do not give your electoral vote to Donald Trump.

Sincerely yours,
Phoebe Roberts

Small steps. It's something. We have to fight.

I am glad I went to the Mike Brown protest. It started out as just a rally in Dudley Square, but then the entire group marched through the city. There were people of many different races there. Almost everyone was under thirty. Fourteen hundred people filled the streets of Boston, shutting it down to traffic. That part was very powerful to me; the feeling was hard to describe. Cars could not pass, and people could not escape the chanting. We ended up at the jail at South Bay, held back from the highway by a police barricade. I tweeted a lot of it, but forgot to when I was on my way home because I was tired. No, I was not arrested.

I felt bad having to leave before it was totally over. I had to leave in time to let my dad into my house, as he was coming in for Thanksgiving. As he put it, after the year he's had, he's "suffered enough" and I didn't want to get in any trouble that would wreck his holiday. But it was a remarkable experience, and I'm glad I went.

I feel sick. I can't believe this is really America, that this is really what the justice system has become. I thought that better people would prevail in the light of the evidence, but no, it's all just one awful thing after another.

I am going to the Mike Brown Day After the Verdict protest tomorrow with

morethings5. It's at 2400 Washington Street, Roxbury, MA at 7PM. I've never done anything like this before, and I don't know if it will do any good. But it's something to do to show that this is not okay. Maybe if enough voices cry out against it, something could change. I don't know. But I don't want to do nothing.

For some hope to hold onto, it's a Missouri grand jury that refused to indict. That means that there's a chance that the federal court may say differently. Maybe the outcry could help that. I don't know. I only know no justice, no peace.

As media critics we are bored and fed up with many of the racist, misogynist, and queerphobic storytelling tropes we see taken for granted in mass media. Men motivated by dead women and daddy issues. Women killed to further the emotional arc of a man. Women needing to be rescued. Queer people getting killed off quickly. People of color existing only to help the white lead grow. The list of these and things like them goes on.

A lot of people attribute this to a disposability of these people in the minds of writers, and in many cases that’s absolutely true. (Steven fucking Moffatt comes to mind. :-P) I do think that everybody is at least a little bit racist and sexist and queer-phobic because of the society we live in; nobody escapes it, we’ve just all got to do the best we can to overcome it at all times. While there are definitely prejudiced people who indulge their biases blatantly and without effort to correct, I also believe there are many people for whom, due to the fact that it’s the result of subtle cultural ingraining, it is not conscious. It’s easy to absorb from our fucked-up media that white straight men are the “neutral,” the one that anybody can identify with and step into the place of, something we often want for our protagonists. That doesn’t make it any better, but I think it does mean those people are more likely to be open to learning better and working in the future not to make the same mistakes.

So in many other cases, I tend to think the biased treatment of non-protagonist characters comes not necessarily from a disbelief in the inherent humanity of women or racial and sexual minorities. It’s a side effect of having most of our protagonists be straight white men.

When you write a story, everything tends to spin out from the protagonist. People rarely start from circumstances and then design a person to center things around. When you end up with a straight white male hero, everything else becomes designed in relation to him. Because white people tend to come from white families, his parents and siblings are probably white too, so if you include them, you get more white people. Because straight people form romantic attachments to people of the opposite gender, his love interest has to be a woman. Because you already have a protagonist, even if you DO decide to include more diverse characters in addition, they HAVE to be subordinate in importance to the story because the most important role is already filled. It’s not necessarily that this theoretical writer don’t think people of color, queer people, or non-male people are interesting or that they’re unwilling to write about them— it’s that some of the logical consequences of the white straight male protagonist screw everything up.

Then, moving on from there, I can also see why those secondary characters end up getting killed or otherwise imperiled for the sake of the story. In drama, the stakes must be high. The protagonist must have a strong, compelling motivation to make them go through the maximum amount of struggle and the most intense emotional journey. Often the most powerful and relatable way is to put their loved ones in danger, because it is a fairly universal human experience to want to protect those you love and suffer as they suffer. This means family, friends, romantic interests—who as we have established are dictated in relation to what makes sense for the protagonist —end up on that chopping block for the emotional weight. This gives us fridging and the resultant dehumanization and marginalization.

I saw this a lot in grad school. When somebody else wrote a story led by women, or people of color, or queer people, there was no real trouble on their part to invest in it, to believe that these people could be active or have stories worth telling. But when they told stories pulled from their own brains, they defaulted to white straight dudes, surrounded by other white straight dudes.

Now, I’m not saying that’s okay or that makes it not so bad. Far from it, there is something INTENSELY problematic with the idea that only WSM can be active or heroic or deserve to have their story at the center. But I do believe puzzling out why things happen is valuable, as when you attack the cause you might have a better chance of fixing the issue. And I tend to believe that people default to these WSM protagonists because they’ve been taught that the highest number of people can relate to them, and then all the other problems spin out from there.

So I think we as artists need to make a real effort to have different protagonists. Because every choice you make on them will ripple out into the rest of the story. So changing the center will change every spoke in the wheel. I know when I have even made the simple choice of having my protagonists be women (Mrs. Hawking is a great example) the tropes of the story are flipped just by the female character being the most important actor. If you think about it, it’s a relatively easy fix. We just have to change one character, and it helps the rest fall into place. :-)

Feeling "productive" or "useful" is probably more necessary to my mental wellbeing than anything else. I feel a strong compulsion to be making, doing, or enabling things that could be considered valuable, enough that I feel off and weird when I'm for whatever reason not able to.

It has its upshots. I get a lot done! I do a lot of cool things! It provides a sort of objective measure by which to regard myself; if I'm busy doing a lot of worthy things, it helps me to feel good about myself even if I feel down. It also acts as a countermeasure to depression-fueled inertia. My life never gets off the rails, nor do I ever fall down on my responsibilities, but I know that I will at least feel somewhat better if I keep doing things, and often that is the path for me to pulling through entirely.

The downside, however, is I have a hard time feeling good about myself if I'm not doing things, or enough things, I consider sufficiently worthy. Humans should have intrinsic value, but I have a hard time believing that in my gut. I should be doing things, making things, accomplishing things, in order to be valuable. I should be beautiful and strong and capable in order to be useful to people. It's not a healthy thing all the time, especially when you're too depleted to see that you're hitting all those marks. It's somewhat objectifying, really, to place that much of a person's value on how much or what sort of things they're doing, or how they are useful to others.

I shouldn't objectify myself that way, and I don't know why I do. I never felt anything but loved and valued growing up, regardless of what I did, though I did spend childhood watching two extremely capable parents who were staggeringly productive all the time. For whatever reason, it's a hard feeling to shake. I like the motivation it gives, but when I'm not able to get more done, especially when I'm not accomplishing a goal I set for myself, I feel an unreasonable amount of disgust for myself.

Most people I find (at least the ones I seem to most often associate with) see being “mean” as the worst possible thing you can be. They equate it with cruelty and malice, and see it as, if you’ll forgive the melodramatic phrasing, a real evil.

I have a problem with meanness. When I feel powerless or reduced, I get mean. It’s a way of venting the poison. Meanness means I am fierce and in control, I feel like I have power again. It sometimes gives me the boost I need to make a change happen.

It's not okay; in fact, it's unacceptable. I am working to fix this part of myself, though it's so natural to me I imagine it will take me a long time to truly move past. That's not an excuse not to work at it, though, and at the very least I can improve and do better in the meantime.

But maybe because I work that way, I don't see "meanness" as the worst thing to be. Sure, it can cause pain, but if someone is mean to me, I feel better able to handle it than some other things. You know what personally offends me the most? I call it “being a taker.” The expression of selfishness that focuses on one’s own needs in a manner that imposes on someone else. It’s one thing to accept an offer earnestly made, or to be in a reciprocal relationship where involved persons support one other in kind. But I can’t stand when someone expects things from others—time, attention, effort, care, resources, et cetera —without trying to invest just as much effort and consideration into the relationship.

I don't mean just any kind of person who prefers to have a network of interdependence with others. I mean the kind of person who only calls when they need a ride, a hand, a favor. The person who never offers to be the person to drive or to pay or to cook. The person who’s happy to enjoy your hospitality time and again but never thinks to ever treat you in any way. The person who uses you like their therapist rather than their friend. These people make my blood boil— I mean, if you are grateful and you care about a person, how could it never occur to you to ever try to take care of them the way they take care of you?

It’s not about love being a ledger where scores have to be kept—it’s about relationships having to be equal or else they don’t work. That you should put just as much effort and care into someone as they’re putting into you. You don’t have to pay it back the same way. If you are strapped for cash, or can’t cook or don’t have a car, make it up in effort of some other kind. Or at the fucking least, verbally acknowledge it. Jesus Christ, if it doesn’t even occur to you that you ought to take care of people who have taken care of you, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?

It’s one of the promises I make to any person who becomes my friend. I will take nothing from you that I cannot repay. If I don’t have the same thing you gave to me, I will make it up in some other form. You will not be the poorer for having been my friend. Not in ANY sense.

Additionally, when I am suffering, when I am tired, when I am depleted, do you know what gives me more relief than anything? Having nothing expected or needed of me. Being excused from the obligation to anything or anyone else. Being in a state where no one needs my time nor attention nor energy nor focus nor resources of any kind.

I may be mean sometimes, and there's no excuse for that. But I am not weak, I will never be your burden. I will never be a taker.

Maybe my priorities are a little misplaced. But personally that troubles me a lot more.

Was thinking today about the mentality I'll call "kids today"-- the idea that the new generation is in a state of decay from the abilities and values of the previous one. We know people have been doing it since Biblical times, so it's pretty safe to say we're not suddenly all going to hell in a hand basket. It seems to have to do more with how people fear the world changing away from what they know and what makes them most comfortable.

So it's not that things are getting worse, just different. When I think about it, I do, however, believe that with that changing of circumstances and values comes new personal strengths and weaknesses. What we value in the culture of our generation influences the things we're good at the and the things we're not so good at.

An example would be the emphasis the current youth generation places on caring about the self. Older people are quick to deride kids for it, railing against things like "selfies," saying it's a symptom of their generation's narcissism. But everything is a two-edged sword, and your strengths are the flip side of your weaknesses. Focus on the self does sometimes lend itself to narcissism if it extends too far in one direction. But it also means we're better at prioritizing our own wellbeing, embracing our individual identity, and seeing ourselves as important and worthy. This quality of our generation gives us different propensities, but they are not uniformly better or worse.

I think this means one generation will be better at some things than others were, given their different values. I think of the way my father, a little over sixty years old, approached caring for my mother during her illness, and frankly somebody with a more modern concept of "self-care" likely would not have been able to do as good as a job. But he is not as inclined to some of the other virtues that accompany the current mentality.

I believe it's important to keep in mind that just because something is different doesn't mean it's worse. And that goes both ways-- as some people change, and as others remain the same.

Getting a touch burned out on social justice issues right now. Since I graduated I made a real effort to become an educated feminist, and you really can't responsibly study feminism without various other intersecting issues, so these things are my main form of informative reading these days. I care a great deal, want to learn as much as I can, and do what I can to live responsibly in a world with so many problems in these areas, but there's so much badness that it's been a bit overwhelming lately. I feel bad saying that, since as an extremely privileged person I can avoid dealing with any of it if I want to, when so few others have that choice, and since it hurts me personally so much less than many others I should have more strength to deal with it. But in the interest of self-care, to enable me to participate positively at all, I think it's okay if I acknowledge when I'm getting overwhelmed and need to recharge once in a while.

The one thing I am struggling with right now that I'm not so sure how to handle is how I feel like I can trust my own judgment so little when it comes to evaluating the situations and the best course of action in social justice issues. As I said, I am an extremely privileged person, a straight, white, cis, het, educated, Christian woman from a rich background who has but rarely even encountered a lot of sexism personally directed at her. All my life I've lived in a status quo that serves me, and has made me comfortable in it. And I worry that it's conditioned me to be resistant to ideas that challenge the notions I'm comfortable with-- like, how much or little racism there is in me, or how much I benefit from my privilege versus my own hard work. Or, worst of all, how bad/racist/homophobic/whatever any given behavior and situation is. So it's made me afraid that however I assess something, I can't trust that assessment because it might be too influenced by my privileged bias.

I know the basics. I know I am the sort of person who just needs to shut up and listen in most conversations (concerning queerness, race, poverty, et cetera). I know I don't get to speak for people in different circumstances, or decide what their reaction should be. I'm pretty good about those. But sometimes I run up against something that doesn't sit right with me. It doesn't sound like the assessment made of the situation is actually correct. Here's a fairly mild example. There was that nice Coke commercial during the Super Bowl where I think America the Beautiful or something was sung in a dozen different languages, many of them not your standard western-European ones. I thought that was very nice. But then one of the blogs I read reacted to it with how meaningless it was since Coke is a capitalistic imperialist company that benefits from unjust labor practices in third-world countries. My first reaction was, "Oh, come on, for Christ's sake! Representation matters, that commercial's diversity was a seriously good thing and it's not fair to devalue it just because it doesn't fix all problems." But is that because I'd rather enjoy some nice feel-good lip-service rather than take a company (who I have given probably THOUSANDS of dollars to over my twenty-seven years of life) to task for things that seriously hurt disadvantaged people?

I don't know. I have a really hard time telling if, when I react negatively, it's because there's something genuinely off about it, or because I'm a privileged person who doesn't like threats to the status quo that might paint me in a light I don't like. It's not that I want to have my lily-white privileged feelings coddled so I don't have to feel bad about my participation in the corrupt system. If my impressions of things are influenced by that ingrained part of myself, I want to know, so I can do what I can to stop reacting based on it. But I want to be able to trust my own judgment. There isn't always going to be a proper authority there to tell me what's problematic and what the most responsible course of action for me to take is. It's frustrating. I don't want any reassurance or anything that I'm doing okay or whatever, so don't worry about that. I'd like to develop the skills to identify that stuff on my own, plus to identify when I'm dealing with a bias that is clouding me.

It doesn't take knowing me very long to know that I have a thing for extremely beautiful men. I've never been shy about that fact, and indulging that part of myself is something I really enjoy. Female gaze is my pet feminist issue, partially because I think it's a small thing that is a good indicator of a number of much larger, more important matters of respect towards women. An acknowledgement of female gaze is the acknowledgement of women as sexual beings with preferences, agency, and desires of their own, and do not exist solely for the needs of men. It's an equalizing thing, an indicator that women aren't so different from men after all-- we're all visual, we all physically objectify each other sometimes.

But also it's important to me because I feel it so strongly. I get A LOT of joy out of looking at men I find physically attractive, probably more than the average person. It makes me feel good to exercise my ability to be the subject rather than the object; it makes me feel powerful, like my viewpoint and my desires matter. Generally, it's a fun thing for me. Sometimes, I want to just spend an evening parked in front of Tumblr or one of the Marvel films and do nothing all night except abandon myself to hard-core objectification mode and enjoy that warm, tight feeling it gives me in my chest.

I've also mentioned before, with no small degree of bemusement, how... stupid it can make me. Sometimes I have literally been so consumed with the beauty of a particular gentleman that I cannot think straight. It's like a cloud creeps into my brain, so slowly I don't notice it at first, but before I know it it's like my judgment has been fogged up. It sounds completely idiotic to say that, but I swear it sometimes happens and I feel like an absolute moron. It's like the worst stereotype of men, and here I am actually experiencing it. Most of the time it's not that big a deal-- I'm sure I've frustrated a friend or two with my occasional inability to hold a conversation after discovering a new screenshot of Captain America, but generally it hasn't really been a problem. I just sort of muddle through it and when it passes I move on.

But recently it's struck me just how much trouble this tendency in me can be. It's mostly been no problem because it usually only happens to people who aren't actually present, who I'm not interacting with in real life. But it can color my interactions with real person to an absurd degree. It makes me place a value on those people that they might not otherwise deserve-- what might otherwise not be appropriate. And when my judgment is already demonstrably less objective. That part of myself scares the hell out of me.

It takes me back to when I was obsessed with Alain. I just found him so attractive that I couldn't think straight around him. I mean, I was also eighteen and had never experienced feelings of romantic attachment to a real person before, so I had much worse sense of how to handle that situation. But because I found him so beautiful I made decisions as if he were a much better man that he was, as if it gave him a value he didn't really have. And this did not work out well for me.

I learned a ton from that awful experience and would never get into that mess ever again. But there's a small part of me that's really glad he's put on weight and doesn't have that raw beauty anymore. And I can feel that tendency in myself still. I have to watch myself really carefully to make sure it doesn't lead me to do things I'll regret. And I hate that shallowness in myself. I would do well to find the way to rip that part out of me. There's nothing wrong with enjoying the physical beauty of others, but it shouldn't have so much control over me.

Lately, as I've gotten more into feminism and related forms of social justice, I've come up with what I've found to be a way of addressing a lot of the criticisms people have to certain techniques used in SJ theory. I'm sure someone else has thought of this in some form or other, but I've never seen it quantified, and I find it really effective when pointing out the flaws in many of these critiques. I call it the Perfect World argument.

I'm sure if you're at all interested in or on the side of social progress you've heard someone resent what they usually call "reverse whatever-ism," such as when some compensatory preference is given to a member of a disadvantaged group, or when a member of a majority/privileged group is not welcome in a space or conversation. For example, when white people are told that it is not for them to weigh in on certain racial issues because they are white, or when men are excluded from certain feminist spaces because they are men. This offends a lot of people, often because they are so accustomed to their privileged status that it is difficult for them to be forced to take a subordinate position in anything, but also because they think to themselves that if discrimination based on sex or color is a bad thing, it is a bad thing in any case, so men or white people should be no more excluded than people of other genders or races.

This is flawed because it is an example of what I call the Perfect World argument. It is a theory that, in pure raw theory-land, is technically correct. That "technical correctness" is what a lot of critics hinge on to justify their objection. It is even something that social justice agrees on (in its purely theoretical state.) But it is not a valid argument because it assumes social conditions other than situation at hand being perfect-- that no larger inequalities exist already that require mending or compensating for. The equivalent of trying to find the actual speed of a racehorse when you're assuming the horse is spherical and the track without friction. The "Perfect World" in this case would be one that was not systemically racist and sexist, where all examples of racism and sexism occurred on a micro-scale between individuals as opposed to being an undercurrent that affects us all unconsciously to some level or another. In that world, any behavior that contributes to less of the injustice at hand in any sense, in any case, is a net positive. In that most generous interpretation, I understand people without a huge amount of study into the state of social justice who are otherwise well-meaning defaulting to that seemingly logical perspective. They may even think that by speaking out against ALL prejudiced behavior, they are modeling correct behavior for others.

But we DO live in a world that is systemically full of bias. And not all kinds of bias, either, there is obviously a substantially greater amount of prejudice against people of color than white, and women and gender-variant than men. The scales are already so unbalanced that you are not actually aiding in the cause of bringing more justice into the world by advocating for somebody who already has significantly fewer disadvantages. So when you, for example, stand up for the right of a white person to contribute to a conversation about and for people of color, you are actually just making yet another example of privileging white voices-- you've added another drop in bucket of white presence and representation while taking a scoop out of the much small bucket of the presence of people of color. It's assuming your racetrack is so frictionless and your horses are so spherical that your calculus for the speed they're moving at is a million miles off.

So, "Perfect World Argument"-- a point of view that isn't exactly wrong in a pure theory sense, but assumes outside conditions being equal when they are not, and so is not applicable to the situation under the conditions in which it actually exists. I have found this a really helpful concept for explaining to people why a lot of pure theories are not appropriate to real world justice issues. People tend to respond better to hearing, "Well, you're not wrong in theory, but it doesn't account for all the uncontrolled variables."

My brother Casey works in a restaurant that was nearby to the explosion. He went to work today excited, thinking they'd be busy because of the marathon crowds. The glass windows out front blew in from the blast. Thank Jesus he wasn't hurt, but everyone sitting near them was all cut up from the shards. He had to help people who were bleeding all over the place. He was very shaken up, but he got home safely, and I'm just so glad he's okay. Saying a prayer for those poor people who weren't okay, for those killed, those injured, those who had arms and legs blown off.

We're going home for a few days tomorrow. The visit was planned, as we've been trying to get home every six weeks or so, but I think my parents will be especially glad to see him after this. I just hate this. Yet one more beautiful cultural institution, from people who want nothing more than to participate in a fun activity and make an athletic achievement, used to maximize the causing of pain. And now the fear that this is going to instill in people will just up the pain-in-the-ass security measures that are going to compromise liberty in return for no more than an illusion of safety. Thanks, bomber, you jackass. Thanks for wrecking the beautiful things in the world.

At least the outpouring of support, help, and generosity from people in response to those hurt has shown that most of us aren't monsters. Most of us make those things beautiful. Thank God that's what wins out in the end.

Watch on YouTube

I am so excited for the movie 42 to come out this April. I've watched the trailer about six times now, and it looks great. Plus I am a huge Jackie Robinson fan. He was just so cool. You see how truly amazing he was when you look at what that demanded from him in breaking the color barrier. He was actually not the best player in the Negro Leagues. Old man Satchel Paige was a better pitcher, and Josh Gibson was considered to be the best all-around player. But he was damn talented, and moreover, he was a special man. He was polite, well-spoken, a personable and charismatic guy. He was a soldier and even went to college; none of my grandparents did. They picked Jackie because he had the guts to face the brutal, disgusting racism he would encounter with dignity and grace.

Because what he did was about so much more than just making a major league career for a talented ball player. It was a huge mission for the civil rights movement. The eyes of the nation whose minds needed to be changed were on him. And what they saw was that a black man could be so remarkable— smart, classy, strong, talented, all the sorts of things people like and respect —succeeding in the highest arena of the most American game there is. While other men acted like beasts, he faced them with courage and dignity. He never gave in, never let anybody drag him down to their level, no matter how many slurs they yelled at him, no matter how many pitchers tried to bean him. Jackie made people love him, respect him. And when they realized they could love and respect one black man, it suddenly wasn’t so strange to think that maybe all of them deserved that same chance. His virtue and strength were directly responsible for tangible social change.

Because that’s the way. Hate and prejudice’s greatest enemy is humanity. Seeing the humanity of another person does more to break down barriers between people than anyone else.

With everything that's been going on, Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday have already come and gone without my realizing. Even so, I want to do something for Lent. I thought about it and I've decided that I'm going to give up being ashamed of myself. I have spent so much time and energy trying to hide things that I'm struggling with, to stop myself from displays of emotionality that I'm afraid people will think are unseemly. But I feel like I shouldn't do that right now. It might have saved me some judgment from people, but I shouldn't care about people who would judge me for being in pain over legitimate struggles in my life, and I think it did much more to trap me into having no way to deal with those struggles. Also, I just don't have the strength to pretend about that stuff. I have to get myself through this without wrecking my whole life, I need to have fewer things to worry about in order to do it. I have more important things to do than keep things that have hurt me secret.

This will be a big shift for me. It might end up being easier to do things the way I always have. But this also might help makes things easier in the process. I don't know. But I'm going to try it, in hopes that getting a little healthier will help me get through.

My family received some terrible news this past holiday season. I am a wreck, have been for weeks now, and I think I am finally ready to talk about why.

As you may know, my mother's been battling lung cancer for the last four years. Three days before Christmas, she lost function on the right side of her body. She couldn’t use that hand properly, couldn’t stand on that leg, and she seemed a bit cloudy, like she couldn’t think straight. We took her to the hospital on December 22nd. Mom dreads the hospital, after all the time she’s been stuck in them for her treatments, but things seemed bad enough that we had to go. All we could do was get her checked out and pray.

She got a CAT scan which told us what happened. Things were bad. The cancer had metastasized, and she had significant lesion development in both halves of her brain. The swelling was pressing on her brain and impairing her function. The sort of thing that you don’t get better from.

The doctor started crying himself when he gave us the news. Bless him for that. It was a good contrast to the parade of doctors and nurses that day who were content to sashay through as if we hadn’t just had our world blown apart. I can’t for the life of me understand why these people just don’t freaking share information when something this serious happens.

We all sat there quietly for a while. It’s not like we didn’t know this was coming someday. She’s a stage-four lung cancer patient. But now it’s finally come. I started crying very softly to myself. Everyone else was quiet. Taking it in. Processing it. This is my family. What does it say that, of all of us, I’m the one who’s the pussy?

Later I saw that Dad had tears in his eyes. I’ve never seen my dad cry before. He is a tough man. I can't begin to express how much so. I heard he got misty at his mother’s funeral, though I didn’t see it myself. And he says he cried when I was born sick, and when John Lennon was shot. Not quite sure I believe that. But this was the first time I’d ever seen it. The world must really be ending.

I spent a long time just watching them together. My mother and my father. They’ve been dealing with the reality of cancer every day since she was diagnosed. She is tough, she has fought this bravely, tirelessly, has been as on top of her own care as anyone can possibly be, but she’s needed him, she would never have gotten through without him there to take care of her. And he’s done it. Completely rearranged his life to be there for her.

I took this picture of them. I probably shouldn’t have. It was kind of intruding on their privacy. We are private people, and Mom hates pictures of herself these days. I don’t think my mother or father would be completely comfortable with everything I’m sharing here. But… I want to remember this moment. I want to remember what these things look like.

It isn’t often that we get the chance to really show our quality. Most of the time we just get to muddle through our mundane lives, getting by with doing a decent job. Even if you want to, there’s not many chances to step up and be a hero. To show just how deeply you love. But in times like these… it reveals you. It reveals what you really have inside you.

Almost forty years ago now, just before they got married, they spoke to the priest who was going to perform the ceremony. My father spoke to him first, and when it was my mother’s turn that priest said, “He’s selfish. Don’t marry him.” My parents tell that story laughing. It’s not even completely false. My dad has always been the sort of man who does exactly what he wants to do. But I wish that priest could see my parents now. “Now I know why they say ‘for better or for worse,’” Dad said. “But for me it doesn’t feel like ‘for worse.’ I just want to take care of her.”

I’m proud of the man who is my father.

And there's Mom herself. Dad says that he knows there must be some good in him, because he's been loved by the two kindest women he ever knew-- his mother, and mine. I still can't believe how bravely she's endured all this. The pain, the weakness. The ravages of the treatments. The increasing helplessness. The loss of two of her most remarkable traits, her easy capability and her striking beauty. The constant sense of impending doom. When she was first diagnosed, she was told she had maybe six months. She ended up getting four years, so as she said, "This is no more of a death sentence than I ever had." She wants to live, she wants to be there for us, so she keeps going on, keeps fighting. For love of us. For love.

You want to know what love is? Let me tell you. My whole family came down with chest colds that week, my mom worst of all because of her compromised condition. Love is when you’re sitting in the hospital, dying of the tumors in your lungs and your brain, and you save one of the strong Mucinex they give you so you can pass it on to your husband for his cold.

And she's still facing her death with strength and dignity. I have been called strong, but I am only the reflection of the bright steel inside her. I'm proud of the woman who is my mother.

How blessed I am. To be their child. To have seen this. I want to remember what this looks like. What that sort of love looks like. What my parents loving each other looks like, while I still can.

Adversity introduces a man to himself. I wonder if God allows bad things to happen to give us a chance to be good in a way we never could otherwise. I mentioned this to my dad. His response was, “I never wanted to be good.” Of course, that’s probably the point. And whatever awfulness comes from this, however terrible it is, at least I’ve seen this. I’ve seen how much my parents love each other. I’ve seen how good they can be.

It’s a costly gift, one I must treasure. My mother buys it with her life.

They couldn’t give us a time frame on how long they expect her to have. There are treatments they can do, radiation, continuing with her current chemo. But the five-year survival rate for patients with her sort of lung cancer is in the single digits, even without the brain tumors. She could have a few months, six months, maybe a year if we’re lucky. They think they can keep her lucid and stable until the end, which is about as much as we can hope to have. Her doctors are dedicated to helping her. She's always been the sort of person who inspires love and goodwill from others, but having seen how far she's come against such odds, with how intelligent, aware, and committed she's been to her own treatments, how bravely she's taken on the suffering that is part of it, she's made people care that she makes it. So she's still getting treatments, both for her lungs and for her brain. Because it might give her a bit more time with us, a bit more time for those she loves.

I shouldn't dwell on it now, but I can't help but look ahead to what life will be like without her. I can't imagine. How I dithered around, trying to make sure everything she wasn't able to do was ready for Christmas, and was struck by how much she does, so effortlessly, so well, that leaves me at a loss. Everything I've ever done-- from the way I lay a table to the way I go through the struggles of life --has been trying to live up to her creativity, her grace, her selfless goodness, her steely inner strength. What will I do if she's not there to show me how? And there's all the things she's going to miss. If I ever become a successful writer, she won't be there to see it. She won't be at my wedding. She won't help me take care of my first baby. She won't see me ever get past my stupid pride and arrogance and meanness to be the kind of selfless, giving person she was.

We are all doing the best we can. Being loving, be there for each other, as long as we still have her. Our hearts break, but we are strong. We have a good family, we've always said. We have our love for each other. And so we'll get through somehow. I have iron inside me, which I hope one day will be tempered into my mother's steel. But I am wrecked now. I am going to be wrecked for a very long time.

Pray for us.

Finally saw The Hunger Games last night. It was all right, not badly made, but I had a lot of the same problems with it that I did with the book. I only read the first one, and I was not terribly motivated to read the next ones. The character of Katniss doesn't have much dimension to her besides her steely determination to get through whatever it is she's up against-- survive, really, I guess --and I was really disappointed by how little the story treats with the issue of how horrible it is to be forced to participate in the violence. I feel like the notion of how terrible the violent child-on-child murder for entertainment is gets lost by how both the book and the movie just... graphically provide the terrible violent child-on-child murder for our entertainment. They kind of just handwave the horribleness-- yeah, yeah, this shit's bad, we're much more concerned with finding out how Katniss gets through this struggle and making sure all the right people (ie, the people we have not been led to sympathize with) died. I found it very emotionally unsatisfying that the heroine just sort of... plays the game. Everyone just plays the game. Nobody tries to resist being forced to participate in such a disgusting ritual; they just kind of focus on getting through it alive. No analysis is made, no attempt to strive for a higher moral truth. And nobody ever attempts to deal with the emotional consequences of playing the game-- you killed other kids! For somebody's entertainment! For no reason! And you never tried to resist it, or find some other way out! You're never going to think about it, you're never going to experience the repercussions to your soul? Well, no matter, all the right people die! Except for the ones we like, which we mourn without thought for the, "Well, what did you expect? That's the game!" aspect of their deaths. It's sad because we lost them, but not at all because of the fact that, good or bad, these children are being put through something ABOMINABLE. We liked the cute, angelic little Rue girl, and that big blond boy from District 1, despite being a horribly warped child raised to be a killing machine, we're glad Katniss ices. Again, no thought for the horribleness of being in the situation-- we just kill the baddies and cry for the goodies. A very immature way to approach the situation. The one nod to it was the previous champion Haymitch is now an embittered alcoholic, ostensibly driven to it by the trauma of the experience, but it's never directly referenced.

On the plus side, when did Lenny Kravitz get so hot? Damn, sir. Must be I like him better without the afro. And the gold eyeshadow. Man, did he rock the gold eyeshadow.

Whenever I see a family, or a depiction of a family, that has extended, ongoing arguments, I'm always vaguely amazed. I'm much more used to GINORMOUS ANGRY EXPLOSIONS that are forgotten about the next morning. My family is loving, close, and affectionate, but of course nobody can get to your sore spots like the people you're closest to. My dad calls the way we fight "the Italian way." We YELL, we SCREAM, sometimes we say TERRIBLE THINGS WE DON'T REALLY MEAN, then we stomp off to our separate corners to cool down. And after the cool down, the next time we see each other... everything's okay. The argument's pretty much forgotten, and we get along better again. It is predicated on the assumption that nothing can ever break the bonds of our love for each other, and that the right thing to do is always forgive. I am grateful to have that; it's taught me trust my loved ones, and of course, to be forgiving as an act of love.

The downside, however, is that it's also based on the assumption that people don't really change. They act the way they way they're going to act because that's just part of who they are. To a certain extent I do believe it. Change comes slowly and only with a lot of work and focus. Sometimes when you love somebody you just have to accept that there's always going to be things about them that you don't like or find frustrating.

But often that means that nothing gets resolved. I mean, yeah, I do think that sometimes you can't work through differences and you just have to agree to disagree. But if there is a chance that they can, you never find out, because nobody tries. There's just an explosion that you have to get over immediately. It's nice to have people who always love you and forgive you NO MATTER WHAT, but sometimes it might be nice to see something change for the better next time. Or hell, even hear somebody say "I'm sorry."

Given to me by

rigel for the 7 Topics Meme:

- Self-analysis through theater
- Religion
- Performance in LARPing
- Dressing for fuller-figured women
- Self-control
- Cooking
- Generosity

Now I'm going to talk about self-control. I tend to see self-control as a positive, necessary thing. It can require a lot of discipline to accomplish and is often required to doing the right thing. But I try not to think of it so much as "Stop yourself from doing the bad things you're naturally inclined to do," and more about "Make yourself do the good things you know you should but are hard for some reason."

Sometimes for me it is about the first one. I have a pretty bad temper these days. I didn't always, it just developed over the last few years or so due I think to having a greater amount of struggle and frustration in my life than I ever had before. But it makes me act like a real ass, so I should be doing my damnedest to see that when I feel it boiling over, I make sure my behavior is controlled. I really dislike when people behave badly for failing to impose proper control on their impulses. We are thinking, reasoning creatures; emotions are powerful and significant, worth taking into consideration, but they should not rule us.

To a certain extent, I think any instance of doing the right thing when it's hard is a matter of self-control. I don't think it's all right to fail to do the right thing just because it conflicts with your personal desires. You must control your baser instincts when you wish to avoid responsibility that is yours, to tell lies that are convenient to you, to violate bonds and promises that no longer match up with your personal wishes. These are bigger things that just "don't eat too many cookies" and "don't buy that blouse you don't need."

On another matter of "making yourself do the good things you know you should but are hard for some reason," lately I find myself confronted with a bizarre lack of mental discipline. In the last month, I have been having an increasingly hard time buckling down to focus on my work. I want to do these things, I want to complete my meaningful work, but I have a hell of a time MAKING MYSELF DO IT. It's a point of pride for me that I've never missed a deadline in my life, but I used to not be all that much of a procrastinator and this most recent submission cycle I procrastinated like whoa. This can't go on, it's compromising the quality of what I produce. I must control my laziness and inability to focus in the services of accomplishing the things I want to accomplish. And that's the real advantage of having self-control.

rigel gave me some suggestions for posting about for the 7 Topics Meme:

- Self-analysis through theater
- Religion
- Performance in LARPing
- Dressing for fuller-figured women
- Self-control
- Cooking
- Generosity

The first one I'm going to write about is generosity. Something I have been concerned about a lot recently is whether I'm generous enough. I'm afraid I'm a little too absorbed in my own business a lot of the time to really do generosity right. I hate occasions that are traditionally gift-giving, because I find the press burdensome, both because of the imposition of having to do it, and how hard it can be to find a gift that would really be appropriate for the person at that time. I'm also a fiercely independent person, and I value that virtue so highly that I often wish or even expect others to be the same, "requiring no generosity" you might say.

There's also the matter of the subtle distinction I make between selfishness and self-centeredness. I see a selfish person as someone who takes too much. A self-centered person is someone who just doesn't give enough. The first is about a fixation on "personal increase," let's say, getting more happiness or more comfort or more whatever for themselves, while the second is fixation on preventing "personal decrease," minimizing the loss of the happiness or comfort or whatever they already have. I have a lot more contempt and a lot less patience for the first kind of person-- which is very likely at least in part because the second person describes me a lot more closely. It's in my view not as bad as selfishness, but it still makes you disinclined to generosity-- give nothing, take nothing in that scheme. But there's a flip side to that, the question of the shades of generosity as giving and not taking. Personally, I am much more inclined to offer loving treatment in the form of not taking, freeing someone from the obligation to expend effort and energy. "You don't have to worry about me, you don't have to take care of me, I will place no burdens on you." To someone like me, so inclined to self-centeredness, that is the sort of gift I appreciate myself, but I have to acknowledge that it requires less of me than actually extending myself might.

I do have some generous tendencies in other ways. I have been known, on rare occasion, to notice that somebody needs something and with little fanfare go out and buy it for them, or otherwise quietly take care of some little problem they might have. Not often, that's not really my way, but I've done it and felt the pleasure of doing a kindness to another person for it. Much more my style is that I love hosting and entertaining, I love expending effort and resources in order to see other people have a good time. I will spend all day cooking and organizing in the service of providing a fun and memorable experience to those I care about. Maybe it's because I think experiences are much more valuable and satisfying than things, and I force my values on others. ;-) But even then, I have to admit there's some reasons of self-gratification in why I like to do it. I like being seen as the slick, awesome person who throws the coolest parties. Sure, I enjoy giving other people joy, but I also like the status and validation it confers on me. So again, generosity is not the strongest the virtues in me.

Which is something I should work on. I should make more of an effort to give of myself when it's not completely convenient to me, at least of my attention and time. And I should do more generous acts that don't directly involve making myself feel like a cool kid.

I was in an audition situation recently where I had to do an emotional scene with a partner who I felt was a strong, cooperative actor. As the scene reached its emotional point, he put his arm around me for emphasis. I didn't know this guy at all, and normally, I would not choose to allow a stranger to touch me like that, especially by presumption. But in the context of the scene we were doing, a scene meant to impress the directors with our performances, I was fine with him doing it and in fact kind of glad that he was willing to make that effort despite the boldness it required. It made the interaction feel more complete, more real.

I believe in absolute bodily autonomy. There is no "fair play" when it comes to your physical boundaries, you have the right to say at every minute on every occasion whether or not a touch of any kind is acceptable to you. But sometimes I wish it were more acceptable in our culture to be casually physical. Our culture has kind of decided that unless you are quite young, closely related, or necessarily both, touch is an indicator of romantic connection or sexual interest rather than part of the way human beings are naturally inclined to interact with each other. And if you don't want to convey either of those things, your safest bet is to just not touch somebody. I often find myself feeling resistant to making or accepting physical contact for reasons other than because contact is unwelcome. I worry that I will come off as boundary crossing, or indicating an interest that does exist, or inappropriate because of my current romantic status. (I also worry that if I allow some people to touch me others I'm less comfortable with will think they can do the same, though that's another issue entirely.)

That bugs me because it's a cultural notion that I don't want to have to deal with. I don't like the idea that my actions are limited because people will make assumptions about those actions that are incorrect. I don't like the idea that there's something to be automatically on guard against as far as touch is concerned, because that's not part of normal human interaction and it always means an intrusion or an advance. Again, I'm not suggesting that people should have to get more comfortable with touch. I'm just wishing certain views and attitudes that contribute to people not being comfortable with touch were not part of our collective culture.

I remember in my run of The Prince Comes of Age, I had interactions with Calliope Desenberg, for whom it was her first larp. Not only was I impressed by her willingness to throw herself in despite her inexperience, but also by how she would take my hand when she spoke to me. It was gutsy and real and made the experience of roleplaying with her stronger. Her lack of fear in that area made me wish that I did the same thing more often.

Touch is healthy. It's one of the reasons massage can be healing; even laying your hand on someone encourages blood flow to that area, which can speed recovery and cleansing. Babies who aren't held and touched enough don't develop normally, it's such an important part of their formative period. People who don't experience some kind of physical contact on a regular basis, even something as simple as handshakes or pats on the shoulder, are much more prone to physical unwellness. I don't really like the notion that the optimum state of affairs is that we all have a bubble around us that it is necessarily creepy and wrong to move out of. I've heard that in some circles even tapping someone on the shoulder without permission is considered inappropriate, and yes, while everyone has the right to totally determine their own boundaries and I'm never going to tell someone who feels that way that they can't choose that if they want to, way to operate off the assumption that all touch is a potential violation and an unnatural interaction between human beings.

But at the same time, I am glad that we have the notion that touch can be an intrusive thing and you are not allowed to just go around touching whoever you want. Forget the creepier and more dangerous manifestations of being who do not respect boundaries; there are definitely casual huggers I know who I wish would cut it out, to which my reaction tends to be, "We don't have this kind of relationship." It's not that I think they're so wrong or inappropriate for being that way, I just don't really want to participate in it. I should have that right, as much as the no-shoulder-tapping person should so that they feel physically safe. But I do wish people formed their personal preferences based on their comfort rather than from the influence of weird social pressures that may not necessarily reflect the truth.

A couple of years ago, Jared introduced me to an Internet reviewer of movies and video games who calls himself Spoony. He's pretty funny and has a good eye for evaluating media, so I've come to be a follower of his site, The Spoony Experiment.

For a while, he was dating a woman who helped him produce his videos during the course of their relationship. Spoony projects an air of being a lonely, horny gamer geek as part of his reviewer persona, so I hadn't been aware that he even had a girlfriend for most of the time I've been watching. Apparently a lot of his fans developed a distaste for her, I'm not sure why. I guess some of them started disliking things Spoony began doing in his work, and in typical misogynist Internet troll fashion, they started blaming her influence despite her probably having nothing to do with it, calling her "Yoko," because of course they couldn't just disagree with their hero's artistic choices, it had to be the fault of that harpy in his life. And of course, they starting running down her appearance because you can't criticize a woman without bringing that up. She showed up in one of his videos once, and was immediately met with a flood of comments about how fat and ugly she was. There are not too many images of her on the web these days, I gather because of a purge in response to that outpouring of cruelty. They are no longer together now, but I only just heard about this stomach-turning little saga. Which has gotten me thinking about something tangentially related that I want to talk about now.

I will say that the woman is not beautiful, at least not to my tastes. Coarse features, a little too heavily made up, and kind of a blocky build. I am not bringing this because I am in any way suggesting that they way they treated her was acceptable. It's one thing to hold a private opinion, it's quite another to treat someone like they've committed a trespass against you simply for daring to appear in public when they don't conform to your personal aesthetic. She's not here to decorate your world, assholes.

The reason I bring it up is because, also as part of the lonely, horny gamer geek persona, Spoony spends a decent chunk of time going on about how hot various female characters are in the course of his reviews. And in general, given that these are media figures and artists' renderings, those characters tend to conform to the very mainstream notion of beauty, suggesting that slavish devotion to the ideal that makes so many women feel like they can never possibly measure up. And yet, for as much as he goes on and on about characters that look like that, he was involved, and apparently happy, with a woman who was in no way like that ideal.

The extremity of that contrast has got me thinking, and this is the reason I'm writing this entry. Because of the omnipresence of the tall thin stacked woman with delicate features held up as the beautiful ideal by the media, a lot of women struggle with the notion that this really is the best kind of beauty. This is something I certainly wrestle with myself. I have a hard time letting go of the notion that the current beauty ideal has attained its primacy because that's what people, at least most people, genuinely like best. And that if I don't conform to it myself, then at best someone who wants me is "settling" for being less attracted?

And yet. How often do we encounter people attracted to woman who drool over media figures and yet are in a relationship with a more average-looking woman who they clearly adore? Where does that come from? That's not the message we have driven home all the time.

Jared's take on it was that, at least for him, there are many kinds of beauty that he finds attractive. Yes, Airbrushed Skinny Stacked Celebrity Woman is definitely appealing. But she's just one kind of appealing, perhaps one that he is less likely to encounter in real life and so must be enjoyed in her media context. But she's not better than the other kinds of appealing that women can be. He just enjoys her as well as all the other kinds.

That's it for Jared, anyway. I'm sure it's different for other people. But I do think a fairly universal truth of it is, as much as the media and advertising may suggest to the contrary, I think most real people genuinely don't hold up one notion of beauty as the "best" or "most desirable." And even if a person does find a "more idealized" appearance technically more attractive, appearance becomes genuinely less important in the wake of the more significant qualities of personhood. It may be that we don't actually need to teach each other to stop fixating on unattainable beauty, because we're not actually all that fixated on it. We just need to keep from internalizing the idea that that's actually what others want and expect us to be.

No one in my life thinks I'm not good enough the way I am. So I need to stop being afraid of something that's not there.

It's not a new idea I'm talking about here. It's just a hard one that I, and I think other people as well, have a hard time holding in my head. But there's evidence of it everywhere, if we just believe the evidence of our eyes.

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All Eyes on Me

"Do you know why heroes boast? Because it makes them brave."

Entries tagged with right and wrong

The protest letters I'm sending

My first protest

No justice, no peace

The Problem of the Protagonist

Object of value

On taking

"Kids today" musings

Trusting my judgment while acknowledging my bias

Really beautiful boys

The Perfect World argument

Thank Christ my brother's okay

Can't wait to see 42

No shame for Lent

"I never wanted to be good."

Emotionally unsatisfied by The Hunger Games

Fighting the Italian way

7 Topics Meme - Self-Control

7 Topics Meme - Generosity

Touch boundaries

Musing on body image drawn out of an unlikely place