Settler words&music in S'ólh Téméxw, (leanpub.com/upsun) living where privilege meets precarity in MST country. she/her/they———– Novels: Midnite Moving Co., Upsun; Sweep Off Those Waves coming soon, Hair Sinister after that. —Restore All Indigenous Lands!
Sexism takedown. Funny military story.
Poop is Coming – to infinity and beyond. Ad astra per fecula!
Mindblowing investigation into how our nervous system could help with infectious disease diagnosis.
Me nervously looking at my novel to see if I have offended.
Cosby sold access to keep his rapes out of the press. Classic.
Well, it’s one way to get a divorce.
Paul and Katie are going to come get me to go …. stroller shopping. That money the fOlks gave me for just such a purpose will now be used….
I am feeling much better today. I have apparently been shortlisted for a job, and am just waiting to hear back. Coconut oil is a healing balm.
Also, I made cake!
This interview was assembled by Lorraine Murphy, an internet colleague.
They told me what would happen. I started following racism eradication activists on twitter, and they told me, down to the last squeak of privilege and bleat of illogic and roar of cognitive bias and growl of hatred and whine of misdirection and concussive threat of personal violence and siren of tone policing, exactly what would happen to me when I started confronting racist speech in others, in public. In a three round conversation, I got it all but the threat of violence, including how the other person’s spelling and grammar devolved as (I assume from the name) he completely lost his shit.
I’ve spent a lifetime avoiding conflict and trying to talk pretty; this is going to make the friendships I have with people who want to help me with the work even more important. It already IS ugly. Up until this point I’ve had no skin in the game. That’s what privilege does. Now I want to have skin in the game without getting my feelings hurt, and that’s just not going to happen, and I have to get over it, and I’m scared.
One of the things that is helping is learning about the Japanese-American and African-American troops as they served their country fighting in the Second World War. They wanted to prove two things, their patriotism and their worth. Many made the ultimate sacrifice to demonstrate both. As they fought in their campaigns, they encountered the worst of what human beings can do to each other, and helped destroy the engines of fascism and racism, although they could not eradicate those ideologies. With their sacrifice in mind, I will get off my ass; I will quit whining; I will do the work.
Keystone XL needs to run a pipeline through my city when we’ll be able to make fuel from algae?
This is funny even though the circumstances are not? (Kingston fire picture).
Sabotaging birth control isn’t already a crime in the US? It’s certainly a whopping great tort, even if there’s no criminal law on the books….
Anybody is surprised fewer kids are driving? Between making a conscious decision not to contribute to pollution and the crappy economy, it all makes sense to me. Both of my kids were well into their 20’s before they even started learning how, whereas I was 17 and wild to have my license.
Anybody wants to argue about what colour Santa is (when he’s an imaginary figure largely promoted by the Coca-Cola company) Link goes to retro Afro American Christmas cards, some of which are the ‘essence’ of charming.
When I no longer have a car, I can finally get a decal which adequately represents my tribble of a cat?
Science news keeps saying that a new species has been ‘discovered’ when the indigenous population knew they were there the whole time? This is really annoying; saying it’s received a Latin name is different than “New Discovery.”
I didn’t know that Diana Cooper once referred to Winston Churchill as looking like the good little pig who built his house of bricks?
This is even a thing? (Fundraiser to make a headset that reads dog thoughts which sounds like BS as yet).
Losing three traffic wardens causes chaos in Aberystwyth? It reads like an Onion article.
More judges don’t use their hearts as well as their brains in sentencing?
I didn’t start watching Call the Midwife until yesterday?
Oh my screaming g’s the Detroit Philly game. It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Six inches of snow on the camera crew and half the football disappears when you put it down. When the player rooted double handsful of snow out of his face mask I howled.
Furnace is broken, internet is spotty. Working right now, but who knows later. It’s been like this for days now.
We’re at the end of Season 4 for Burn Notice and Jeff has declared a short moratorium. That’s okay, because I’m currently thrilling to the amazing dress sense of the lovely Phryne Fisher of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. It’s very much in the Foyle’s War category of murder mysteries, except Australian and Phryne is a SLUTTTT! A cheerful, unapologetic and unambiguous one (but sex scenes are strictly decorous and mostly off screen). She drives a Hispano Suiza! She has a gold plated pistol, which never seems to have any ammo! She is awesome. So until I get Michael Westen back, probably about a week from now, I’ll have to watch Farscape and Miss Fisher instead.
Person to see the shop yesterday didn’t show. Somebody else called, I’m showing it Tuesday.
David Simon (of the Wire) talkin”bout capitalizm.
I am thinking of going to the shooting range the next time Keith and Rob go.
I know I spend a lot of time whining, but I am really happy to be alive, and I’m writing and practicing every day, and there’s food in the fridge, and my friends love me, and my cat is cheerfully indifferent to me unless I’m crinkling packaging.
Eddie is feeling a bit better – his appetite has returned – but he’s now hiding in Jeff’s bathroom cupboard a good chunk of the time.
I have half completed my first of two new homilies (March 9 and May 11, or perhaps the other way around) and intend to have a completed draft of the first by the end of the week. mOm I should have a bit off to you shortly.
The Alberta government has tabled legislation that will prevent public sector union employees from even TALKING about striking. What unutterable bullshit! My prairie populist ancestors are whirling in their graves like a rotisserie set on stun.
Yay, Natalie Reed is blogging again. She is a queer trans blogger living in Vancouver and she can write like a m*****-******* riot.
Woke up this morning, checked facebook and found out that relatives of a friend of mine were under fire in Westgate Mall in Nairobi. I told Salim that I could only hope that I’d never get into religion or politics to the extent that I felt shooting my neighbours was appropriate. Twenty dead at least, fifty injured at least. What a world.
Saw Keith briefly yesterday, and read the Shiduri sequence out of the Epic of Gilgamesh to him. I liked the new translation / new gloss of it so much I actually bought it. As a writer I guess I feel I should own the oldest surviving story (there are older documents but they are storage related…).
My stop digging exercises have commenced; the kitchen is coming along and I’ll be poking at other piles of disorder gradually over the next few weeks. Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day. Also, wrote stuff yesterday, put a song into Songwriter, did some ‘work on my projects’ stuff as well as cleaning and watching tv. Also, applied for a job, since one of my contacts hailed me and gave me the frequency. Nothing is likely to come of it, but I can’t look any gift horses in any particular elevation.
The exercises continue apace. Next physio Monday, next doc appointment a month.
I tried the cpap again last night and MAYBE got two hours. I think my sleep disorder is actually a little more nuanced than this machine can deal with. Also, I really think I’ve got the wrong mask.
I got a really good and extremely cheap back rest for the driver’s seat in Ziva. She has been very well behaved since she was smacked in the parking lot.
Another nibble on the café.
I leave you with a John Shirley quote (from New Taboos).
People who are quadriplegic have stated that they feel less emotion than they could when they could still feel their entire bodies. The projection of the self into our electronics reduces the relationship to the body, the seat of our emotions, and for several reasons that might lead to an increase in psychopathology.
I have started making lists again vs. the overwhelm.
Wrote some on both projects this morning.
This made me laugh very very hard. It’s a combination of the clothing and the locomotion.
Slept at least a couple of hours in the cpap machine last night. I don’t remember waking up and tearing it off, but I did.
Today, more laundry. Really what I should do is get rid, mercilessly, of every piece of clothing that is too tight or ugly or stained, but I get super attached to clothing.
I show the shop again today at noon. Heavy sigh. At least the last time I went in I got rid of the last of the stuff that was going bad (I hadn’t been able to see it, unfortunately, and this last time I crawled around on my hands and knees until I saw it, removed it, bleaugh). So it will smell a lot more like a restaurant thankfully. (Added later… another person wants to see it.)
I think in about two weeks I may be able to handle a tray of cookies, so if I don’t sell it, I will be going back to work.
I forgot my physio appointment yesterday – how, I have no idea. However I get another on Friday. I am getting stronger, but sometimes things ‘catch’ and it hurts A LOT. There’s a huge divot in my shoulder where all the muscle attachments fell away. Or whatever, I am not one hundred percent sure about what is going on except I sheared off my greater tuberosity. I have to check on my next doctor appointment, I sure don’t want to miss that.
I am reading Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian and it’s making me REALLY REALLY MAD about policy toward native people in Canada (and in the US, because like most First Nations people he considers the border a willful chimera, and so deals with both nations). I mean foaming at the mouth mad. His metaphor to deal with the constant refrain of ‘get over it’ is miraculous, and I will be using it whenever I talk about intersectionality and civil rights in future. He also makes mincemeat of the whole sad and tired trope I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS RACIST STUFF AND I’M NOT RACIST SO QUIT CALLING ME ONE. It’s certainly not an academic work, but there’s plenty of followup reading. I had NO FRICKING IDEA that there were first nations film documentarians (including a woman??!!) in the 20’s in the US, whose work of course is so far out in the margins I’ll be lucky to ever see it. We get Nanook of the North instead. Tanks Mr. Flaherty.
I am going to – definitely! – read more Will Rogers.
have about the same effect as driving while black…
Including using popular image sharing destination URL Pinterest for mugshots. From the article.
Cops’ experimentation with Pinterest appears, like the service itself, to have grown up outside of the elite cities and high-profile departments like New York and Los Angeles. The Pinterest policing pioneers are lower-profile cities in the middle of the country, places like Kansas City, Mo.–whose police department appears to have been the first on Pinterest–and Pottstown, Penn (pop. 22,377), thirty miles outside Philadelphia.
Almost 100 years old! no work no more
Tammy is here for Christmas, yay! I’m going with her to Granville Island today.
If you’re near water and have a drum, beat it in solidarity with the Idle No More movement at 11 am today (PST).
Now, the laundry before I leave for downtown. Tammy’s mum has already told me where to park for free at Granville Island… but I’ve lived in Vancouver 15 years and I already know. Tee hee.
I get to see a gospel concert in the next couple of days. I am a bit foggy on when and where, but I’m hoping I don’t have to drive too far.
It’s time for me to start practicing my Compost song for the sermon in January.
If we now construct the word fabulous to mean that ‘We did nothing, and enjoyed it immensely’ I had a fabulous visit to the parents’. My role as a grandchild deliverywoman is now complete. Katie had a really good night of sleep, which is excellent because she hasn’t been sleeping too well. I slept 8 hours continuously which must be a recent record. I think one of the reasons I sleep so well there is because they keep the humidity set to “Human, rejoice!” as opposed to most gas heated homes, which in the winter time is “Human, all your mucous mebranes are belong to us! Suffer! Mwa ha ha!”
My blood sugar is 6. My blood pressure is 136 over 88. Not worrisome but it’s definitely time to take some weight off. These are the kinds of things one learns when one visits parents!
I bought the What Colour is Your Parachute 2012 workbook, and it’s making me turn things over in my mind. I also bought yet another writing book. I haven’t set a record, but I may yet.
Home made bean with bacon soup going to church with me today. I extracted one bowlful for Jeff, as he said “Oo!” when he saw/smelled it.
Izzy is doing very well. He’s eating every five days, and becoming quite hand tame. He really likes Katie’s glasses. He will be almost two metres long when he quits growing in a couple of years.
State Troopers of Connecticut have assigned a detail of Troopers to protect the families of the slain children and staff from unwanted attention. This is in response to the crushing attention of the media, may they all experience the pangs of conscience, and the unindicted miscreants of the Westboro Baptist Church, who have promised to picket the funeral. Given that the American public LOATHES the Westboro Baptist Church and is starting to get pissed off at the media, I think the response is fitting and an appropriate use of government resources.
Now I DEFINITELY need more coffee. This is going to be a long day. I am once again opening and closing at church and there is yet another interminable church discussion today. If I get out of the meeting without offending anyone I’ll count it a plus. HA HA KIDDING. That’s half the fun. NEED COFFEE.
Margot didn’t even respond when I came through the door last night (after a 6 hour journey, blech, thanks to the *ing weather in the Strait yesterday).
