Just getting back on track and already massive personal issues (and not just drama, actual problems) totally hit me out of nowhere and fuck with my world. Look for a post or two tomorrow, but I may not be able to keep up with my ambition of a post every day for a little while…too busy trying to pull my life (well, really, our lives…mine…and if I have anything to say about it, someone else’s) back together after a terrible, terrible day which is going to have lasting repercussions for a long time to come.

Posts on the fucked-upness of the criminal justice system may be forthcoming.

There are scars that run like rivers down my body, slowly snaking over flesh and bone, winding down along my skin in crooked red and silver streaks, over stomach, hips, and thigh — the burden of bearing children or merely the potential, skin stretched too thin, to the breaking point, leaving marks that never go away. I hide them beneath layers of clothing so that I won’t catch my own disapproving scowl in the mirror when I think that I am not paying attention; I will let my lover strip me bare and tell me I am beautiful, but I can’t bring myself to believe him.

There are red, angry scars like an alien landscape, craters across my cheeks and brow and shoulders and chest, and though I do nothing to hide them — I do not cake them in cosmetics to pretend they are not there — I secretly fret and fuss and worry, though I have never had the luxury of being the slender, pretty blonde in the sitcom with just one huge red zit appearing suddenly on the day of the prom. When I had hair, I hid behind that, burying myself so that no one could see the face riddled with pockmarks and inflamed follicles, the greasy sheen, the bad skin. Now I can’t hide it behind anything, and I am not always sure that is a good thing.

I have more scars. Cats and rats and ferrets scampering over my skin, the joys and sorrows of caring for a living breathing creature and the death of one. Whole pieces of flesh gone, razor burns and ingrown hairs, just a memory now that I have accepted the fact that I can never be conventionally beautiful and I will never be a silky-smooth hairless Barbie doll (though I will not lie — sometimes all of us wish that we could be that). Burns: angry brown marks on my left wrist and right arm, clumsy accidents in domesticity, glaring reminders of my failure to ever be the proper, meek, prospective housewife I was taught in Sunday School to be. More and more, scars marking territory and proclaiming my faults and flaws and, occasionally, a virtue, not all of them visible to the naked eye and some beneath the skin and in my blood, my mind, my soul — and I do not hide any of them from anyone.

I don’t make love in the dark. I have reconciled myself with the idea of being photographed for sentimental purposes. And though I try to care for my body and love it and secretly hope to improve it in pursuit of an unrealistic ideal, I do not conceal my flaws. I have never tried. It would be a futile exercise, and I would be found out for the clown I am, hiding behind the mask. And, truthfully, no one who has seen those myriad imperfections has ever expressed anything but enthusiasm for my body, heart, soul laid bare…

But I can’t bear to look.

Inmate Awaiting Sex Change Says State Has Stopped Treatment (Plus, an interesting LiveJournal discussion on the article.)

GOP To Americans: Take Your Government Transparency And Shove It

Navy Sonar Harms Whales (video)

Pondering a Post-Bullshit America

McCain Repudiates Comments of Introductory Speaker at Rally

PLUS: NPR interview with Cunningham re: McCain Flap (Can’t you smell the bullshit through the speakers? Hilarious.)

Anti-War Movement Wrestles with 1968 (The article isn’t great. The comments are interesting. What’s pertinent here is how fucking scary everyone finds the prospect of civil disobedience. OMG. ANARCHY!! Recreate68 rocks my socks.)

In case you haven’t seen it yet, because it is hilarious - Stuff White People Like

AUDIO: Fairytales My Mother Told Me

When I was young, my mama told me, little girl, you can do, you can be whatever you please, and you can do anything that a boy can do, and you can be anything that a boy can be, and you can do it just as well and, maybe, even better. She told me, little girl, nothing in this world can ever stop you.

When I was young, my mama told me, little girl, fairytales do come true, and Prince Charming will come for you, and you can find true love that never dies. She told me, little girl, you can have faithfulness and fidelity, a perfect happy family, if you are good and follow all the rules.

When I was young, my mama told me, little girl, God has a plan, though it cannot be seen or felt or understood by man, and He will always forgive you and love you no matter what you do (at least if you do nothing really bad). She said, He wants us all to be together for eternity, so if you do all that I say he said, maybe when we die in Heaven we can see each other, always be with one another, again.

NPR: Hair Samples Used to Trace Geographic Moment

Microsoft Slapped by EU With $1.35B Fine

Mexican Border Wall Will Not Be Built On The Land of the Wealthy and Well-Connected

Feminists are “Language Rapists”

Hollywood Casting Call for that “Inbred” Look

Dead Baby Found In Basket at Denver Hospital (Safe haven laws I’m sure have some interesting feminist implications, but I’m sleepy right now.)

Some kickass poetry to start your day (yes I’m biased, and no reason, just ’cause) and audio!

Obama: I am not a liberal

Scandal-ridden homophobic D.A. in ‘Lawrence v. Texas’ case resigns

Gay Man Beaten for Saying “Hello”

Immigrants Commit Far Less Crimes Than “Native” Citizens in California

National Eating Disorder Awareness Week

Just because I am trying to learn how to do this: 5 Ingredient Crockpot Recipes

Look out.

Look out the bedroom window to the street–if it faces the street–and see it stretching like two long arms reaching forever and ever (or maybe not so far) in either direction. Let your line of sight be directed down a meandering road that may, in this corporeal world, terminate to the North, but which, some of us know, really leads West, West, further and further back, winding down through Grand Junction or up through Yellowstone past the Rockies to that body of water, a landlocked sea, dead to everyone and everything but the putrid flies and bugs inhabiting it, and the seagulls glutting themselves upon its salty shores. Let it take you further, submerge you in the Platte and then sweep you away, down, down toward Mexico to escape an invented persecution with two wives and too many mouths to feed and to Guatemala with pretensions of
Spanish aristocracy.

This is where we come from. This is where we’ve been.

Look out.

Read the rest of this entry »

First, a little humor to start off your day - Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results of the 2008 Election Early (video)

Huckabee Supports Proposed CO “Egg As Person” Amendment

Chavez Government Fights English “Linguistic Imperialism”

Interesting Guardian Article on Wikileaks: Online Anonymous Whistleblowing

Proposed Florida Confederate Heritage License Plate

Screw the Voters, Let the Superdelegates Decide!

Pakistan Blocks Access to YouTube

Gay Iranian Refugee Risks Deportation From UK (Not sure what can be done about this one at this point?)

Terrorist Watch List Contains Almost 1 Million Names, Most of them Americans

Google Claims IP Addresses Are Not Personally Identifiable Information

Banks Unable to Foreclose On Homes Due to Lost Paperwork

Lawmaker Proposes Stripping USDA of Safety Oversight

Rape: Pretty Real When It’s Happening

Gang Rape Video Posted to YouTube Viewed 600 Times Before Being Removed

NPR: New York Philharmonic Plays In Pyonyang

Dearest Family,

I am aware that you are concerned about me and only want the best for me, in your limited sense of what “best” means. (Hint: what you accept as “best” is nothing that makes me happy, and, in fact, tends to be exactly that which makes my life most unbearable. See: trying to convince me to waste my time at a vocational school or community college rather than pursuing a degree at an excellent, if expensive, school, in an area which excites me. See: trying to break me up with my boyfriend, who is in fact the reason I am going back to school and who is demonstratively good for me by most objective measures…just not the ones you think are important, apparently.) I appreciate that you genuinely care about me even if you do not understand me and generally give poor, unsolicited advice. I love you anyway, even when I sometimes probably shouldn’t. (See: trying to break me up with my boyfriend. Assholes.)

However, I cannot help but notice the irony of the girl with the terrifying facial piercings and tattoo in a dead-end job with no professional or intellectual aspirations in life lecturing the clean-cut aspiring art and creative writing student about her unprofessional appearance due to her short hair. I cannot also help but notice that the coincidence when this conversation coincides with a recent transphobic diatribe about the aforementioned sister’s distaste for people who defy conventional gender norms and preference for “girls who are feminine” and “men who are masculine”. This, combined with the failure of Congress to recognize that, once again, trans issues are everyone else’s issues, and that gender-nonconformity is in fact a very real area of concern re: discrimination in employment for the cisgendered, results in lectures about my appearance being far more personally hurtful and infuriating than you can possibly realize.

Furthermore, suggested solutions to this issue — “buy a cheap wig” — are laughable.
Read the rest of this entry »

So what I am going to do here is supply a list of assorted interesting links, in no particular order, on a daily or semi-daily basis without a lot of comment. They may have to do with pretty much anything. Because it’s easier than all the link-sending I do all over the place every day anyway.

Fragile Masculinity and Murder

A Few Other Responses to the Murder of Larry King

The Great Green Land Grab

Health Net ordered to pay $9 million after canceling cancer patient’s policy

ACLU Sues To Protect Marriages Threatened By Recent Court Decision

Conservative doctors to unmarried women: If you’re having sex, you *should* die of cervical cancer

Latest Anti-Pot Quack Science: ‘Marijuana Makes Your Teeth Fall Out’

The Growing Battle for the Right to Water

Gay man bequeaths $65 million to LGBT groups

Feminist Bloggers Unite! (Facebook)

The Science of Fairy Tales

A History of Evil (video)

Oh, and for those of you who are not up on the whole RSS thing, you can now receive a daily digest of new posts via email using the “e-mail subscription” link on the left.

It’s time for a renaissance. This part of me has gone neglected far too long, but I have reasons. I burned out, a meteoric rise and fall to earth, and I have taken my sweet time in trying to find my way back to some space of ambition and idealism once more. Depression is no simple thing. But I am in love and I have found other people in my life who could love me, too, and I have concrete goals and plans for the first time in four years, and though this is something I have thought, many times, that I should do, I am finally somewhere where, yes, I think that I really can do it again.

But it won’t be quite the same.

I have spent the past six months loving, growing, learning, talking, making connections. I have been creating, writing, painting, and concocting plans for my (our) future. I have engaged in everyday action and activism and have been planning to do so much more. I have not left the feminist blogosphere at all, spending lazy Saturday mornings naked in my lover’s bed perusing my RSS feeds while he dozes beside me, and so often the women I have connected with through blogging and those I do not know personally but follow religiously, inspire me to outrage and elation…and yet, I have felt too burdened by life and all its complications to write. This will change.

I am going to approach this differently, though, than I have before. I am a creative writer. I am a poet. I am an artist. But I am not and have never had pretensions of being a journalist. This is a problem in a political community where readers expect facts and figures and objective truth. I am not objective. I have never pretended to be. I have never been interested in sparking debate or even stimulating discussion. All I have wanted to do was to make people think about things differently. Not to talk or argue with me. To think about what I have said and agree or disagree. I am not interested in proving anyone wrong or being proven wrong, because I think there is room enough in this world for disagreement and that it is perfectly all right for people to have different perspectives from their respective vantage points.

What I want is to let my writing and my art speak for itself. I am not interested in defending myself from personal attacks, in that they do not largely bother me enough for me to feel they are worth addressing. I am not interested so much in defending my ideas, not because I want to ignore criticism but because they are my ideas, not my identity, and they are fluid and often shift. I want to impact the shared discourse. I want to demolish frameworks and alter the world as we see it, but not to propose solutions because I don’t pretend to know better than anyone else what is best for anyone but myself.

I do not and have never worked in things which can be qualified, quantified, proven. Not everything has to be concrete. Not everything has to be objectively true. (And objectivity is an illusion, anyway.) I am an artist and I experiment in thought. The mind is my canvas. Ideas are my medium. But I am not a scientist, a sociologist, and economist, a journalist. I might be called a philosopher, if an examination of my own internal mechanisms can be termed “philosophy”. Because that is all that this blog is or ever has been.

I have been lost and disoriented, trying to make this personal exploration into something more. I have tried to be too many things for too many people. It is not that I dislike writing critical, persuasive essays. It is not that I do not want to engage with others. It is not that I do not want to have a space to post interesting articles. But it can’t be just that. That can’t be all. That can’t be what is at the heart of all this. I had abandoned this project in favor of more creative pursuits. This project must be and will be more creatively-driven from now on in order for me to maintain interest in its growth and evolution.

That does not mean I will post fiction. But what I write will be art. It will be true, it will be flawed, it will be subjective, it will be beautiful and sometimes terrifying, it will be nonfiction and autobiographical, and it will be poetry.

I don’t know if there is a place in the political blogosphere for these ambitions. I don’t know if there is a niche that I can fill. Obviously, I had found one before. But I am going to try, and I hope that you are all willing to join me in this experiment, to hold on tight and see where my musings take us… I have things in store I hope you will enjoy. Some things will be the same. But the focus will be radically different.

This is Definition version 2.0. Enjoy the ride.