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!
Once upon a time I had a chance to have a kid with nappy hair. It was a long time ago and beside, that ex-husband is dead. (RIP Phillip, you were one powerfully strange dude).
BUT.
I WOULD NEVER HAVE DONE THIS TO MY KID.
Styled, wild, fro’ed, dreaded, combed, razored. It is not a sexualized thing, and I don’t normally publicly comment, but I love it, and when I see a really awesome do, I don’t say a damn thing. I just feel happy.
The Good Little Dood lived up to his moniker, doing the two things he’s best at, being adorable and farting pretty much continuously.
I held him while the homilist sang Angels Among Us and he smiled at me. He thought very hard about what was appropriate before he unfurled his brow and gave me that “your mirror neurons will go nuts” look. I suspect he came into the world with a rather solemn but undemanding temperament. Time will tell.
Autumn Cat has landed! Poor Margot.
Alex will be at church with Katie, or so it was arranged and I piously hope will come to pass. I do coffee today so it’s even money whether or not I get to be upstairs for the homily portion. Sue is taking me in early and I’ll do an inventory and see if there’s enough of whatnot for coffee etc., then cross the street and pick it up. Happy daze. Should be a good homily though. Marilyn asked me to do another homily for January 4 – one of the worst attended days of the year – so I’m going to do what I can to boost the numbers. If you’re reading this, why not come to church that day!!??
THE GREAT YULETIDE COOKIEPALOOZA happens next Friday. It will turn into a filk. A messy messy housefilk, with crumbs and greasy thumbprints on the music. Yes, indeed. Thanks to Tom and Peggy for hosting. We will also have the AMERICAN CONTINGENT, being the uber crafty Jeri-Lynn and the suavely geeky Jeff. Who are just so awesome. Cindy and possibly others will attend also.
It’s raining. After yesterday’s glorious sun (which I got to walk around in, thanks to Paul not understanding that the Brighton Costco parking lot at 11 am is the worst fucking place in the known universe and how long precisely has he been living in Burnaby grumble grumble, but no harm done). I drove through the parking lot and then drove back to Planet Bachelor and walked home from there, accompanied by Keith who just felt like continuing the conversation, which was pleasant, and made the walk back go in an eyeblink. I needed the exercise. I really wanted to pick some stuff up at Costco because there’s some bread there I can’t find anywhere else plus cheap butter and you know, baking, but perhaps I can borrer the car. Apart from the walk and the abortive Costco trip I basically stayed in bed crying all day, but I’m feeling much better now. Tammy is coming in December! Conflikt 8 (I can scarcely credit it…) is coming! And I still haven’t registered or figured out how I am getting there. If I’m staying extra long I may need to like, bus it. Bleaaugh.
I love my mOm and pOp. mOm provided the correct stream of unfiltered bubbliness (occasionally going off mike to inform pOp of my responses) to assist with my bad case of the Marthambles – why, she’s better than a dose of Dr. Tufts finest elixir.
Still no cat. I suspect what has happened is that the daughter has flung herself on the ground and pleaded her mom not to let Autumn go and the mom has been too embarrassed to tell Jeff she’s changed her mind, but perhaps Jeff is right and it’s just taking longer than expected. Sometimes I think this culture is so indulgent to its children because these are the last good days and everybody’s trying to make them seem extra special.
I removed an incredible amount of hair surplus to requirements from Margot yesterday. She was not amused.
Day five of Vitamin D, Vitamin C, B6, probiotics and MSM. I am definitely feeling less achey, except for my hands, which is making me not want to play my Otto.
Jeff’s playing computer games on line with somebody, I assume Andrew – I can hear him talking to somebody on the headset. “I think we just combined to kill one of our own tanks!” is the latest.
With sadness, I have cancelled the piano lessons. He wasn’t listening to my course corrections and I’m not paying a man $35 bucks an hour to ignore me when I can have it for free any time I want on the internet.
My most recent painting is an unmitigated disaster. I am going to paint over it. I got the colours right but the design has much suckage – I think I’ll paint over it as a zombie heart.
Now to make a chocolate cake for church and figure out what I am going to wear. And I have to remember to take a tape measure, for I mean to measure some crania, I do, I do, for future hatmaking endeavours. Hats and spats. Cravats with cats. Fingerless gloves and pleather utility belts. I have to figure out how to make a living, and since there seems to be an inexhaustible interest in the steampunk aesthetic, I shall pursue that hobby for a while.
The job interview evaporated. The job is located at a place impossible to get to by transit even though it’s only a few blocks from a Skytrain station. Without a car, it’s not going to fly, and at 12 bucks an hour I can’t afford to run a car. Other jobs that appeared this week want me to have a vehicle, work for less than 14 dollars an hour and be ‘youthful’ (which is not in accordance with the labour laws, but fuck me, right?) and an assortment of other ghastly jobs.
I am going to go back to bed until my ride shows up for an extended shopping trip. Can’t talk about the rest of it. It’s not like any random stranger could do anything about it, and my friends know the drill.
The only thing I managed to accomplish this week was getting a couple of hundred hours’ worth of movies shipped off to Sandy – there will be some real treats in there for her, I believe.
I have a job interview next week – no time set yet so it’s still a possibility rather than a sure thing. If I recall correctly it doesn’t pay well but it isn’t a ghastly way to make a living and it’s got a half hour commute, ten minutes if I’m in a car.
I bought a sewing machine…. looking forward to unlimbering it on some steampunk costuming and, er, baby clothes. Possibly steampunk baby clothes. Gack.
My youngest child is 26 today. A good age to be having a first child, not too young and not too old.
I am a clueless white liberal, so I am about to rant on something, and it’s my blog, so I’m not polluting anybody else’s airspace if they don’t want to be looking this way.
Has it occurred to no-one else that Bill Cosby has arc’d out of the Republicanesque Favorable Narrative of Blackness, with his education and charm and commitment to excellence and family values, into the Vile Caricature of Hypersexualized Negritude, which scales fame to access young white women to drug and abuse? He’ll die broke. I cheerfully predict it. As soon as someone with a credible civil case and an appropriate legal venue appears – and the sharks, they circle even now – he’s going to go bankrupt defending himself, as he will be honor bound to do, since he is, of course, innocent. As far as the courts are concerned, which means nothing in these parlous times. In a way, it’s a shame for him that he didn’t go to court ten years ago. The culture wars looked a little different back then, and he might have walked free with his fortune intact.
TTTO The Jersey Bounce. Extra credits if you can imagine Ella Fitzgerald singing it.
They call it that Philae bounce
Miscalculate by an ounce
The ESA tension mounts
Wherever they aimed, they really should feel no shame
It started in Darmstadt town
Decided to put it down
On Comet 67P
That’s quite a feat you will agree
Somehow, screws didn’t grab
Somehow, not like the lab
No grip, makes it bounce, real high
Microgravity
So if you are feeling blue
Go out to some space venue
And whether you’re hep or not
The Philae bounce’ll make you swing
(scat)
How I love that Philae bounce
(scat)
Oh come on replay that Philae bounce
(scat)
Ounce by ounce
The Philae Bounce
Puts you right in the swing
That Philae Bounce
It’ll make you swing
Give me that Philae Bounce.
I stayed in bed most of the day. I have no idea why I feel so etiolated.
I read this book – which turns out to have been almost entirely ghostwritten – dozens of times as a kid growing up. I can recite dozens of jokes from it.
I didn’t like the elder Hope, but the Bob Hope of the Road movies was a funny, funny guy. Here’s an article about that.
Yay! I got almost a decent night’s sleep.
So around 12:30 we went over to see Autumn. I left Jeff to commune with her and cut Paul’s hair.
He approves; in a couple of days we’ll get custody so the young person living with her gets a proper goodbye. This also gives us a chance to somewhat catproof the house, as we’ve been living with a cat that couldn’t jump onto a counter unless a JATO bottle was strapped to her ass, and I suspect from her build and the evidence of my own eyeballs that she is gonna be one impressive jumper, like top of the fridge with no apparent effort jumper. We’ll keep her in for a couple of days and then, she’ll be an outdoor kitty again.
Then Jeff and I helped with their move (they were both there and heaving and what not, and I mostly did useful but not as move-y type things). Jeff worked like a navvy there for a couple of hours.
Then Keith and I picked up Katie’s shower gifts and had a very pleasant time there. Nita and Mike were there, and it was lovely to see Nita. The GLD was in fine form, being passed from hand to sweaty hand without showing much signs of being bothered by it. Ah, Alex. His facial features are more defined and his eyes really look at you now. He’s mothering strong. I didn’t take pictures because it wasn’t really that kind of gathering; we were making real memories, not digital ones. Really good to see the folks.
Then Keith drove me home.
and a thinky thought or two plus a review.
I never really expected to get this old. Even as a teenager I expected something like the singularity to happen; not that I would necessarily conquer death but that the essential part of my brain that apprehends and manipulates the world to make art would still remain.
A body is entirely necessary for this, I have learned. Nothing else is as efficient. I am stuck with it, as well or as poorly as it functions inside the haphazard collection of coincidences that any human body is. I am thinking along those lines because of a documentary I just watched.
Jeff and I’ve just watched the second episode of Your Inner Fish, which is so superior to most contemporary documentaries that it’s hard to pick the most excellent bits out for comparison.
Let us start with the script. Lively, engaging, colloquial without any sacrifice of accuracy, it moves along at a goodly clip and only recapitulates at key points. From there we proceed through the outstanding use of three dimensional modeling to render the evolution of various features common to everything that’s come along since fish. The soundtrack is pedestrian without being annoying, which is all I truly ask of a documentary. The closeups of the various fossils are mindblowing. There were critters I had no idea existed; some have been found with so much detail that you’d be forgiven for thinking they were recently deposited. Some of them are tiny, no more than the size of a paper clip, and yet that tiny critter — with a brain half again as large as anything else then alive of that size — or something very like it, was the ancestor of every human being you have ever loved or hated.
Your Inner Fish showed science as tedious and glorious, backbreaking and cerebral, fun and scary, but mostly it showed science as the kind of thing a passionate and intelligent human being can throw every aspect of the self into; as you peer into the research of each scientist you see what it is about what they are doing that makes it good work, and get a sense for how the research is connected.
You travel from New Jersey to the Arctic, and from Nova Scotia to South Africa, which is where the best bones from the transitional periods between fish and amphibians, and amphibians and reptiles can be found, so it’s a bit of a travelogue as well.
I am really looking forward to seeing the conclusion.
The Other
I have a little other
I keep him safe with me
I cannot let him out to play
on that we can agree
He is a he and I am she
He’s grey and I am pink
All day lies he’s telling me
to say aloud and think
I’d like to think I’m smarter
I can keep him in his cage
perhaps instead to barter
his freedom for my rage
When I am whole and thinking straight
He cannot make me speak
when I’m frightened or upset
out the harsh words leap
The racial slurs, the horrid words
we use on young and old
“It’s just the way that I was taught
and how the tale is told”
My little other likes to laugh
at other folks’ expense
and wastes his brain in throwing shade
and vilest arguments
And with him I must abide
and I can never still him
He will always live inside
and I must never kill him
For if I do I will not know
that I am moving forward
I have to chase him as he goes
like naughty children doorward
He is my care long as I live
I wish I’d never met him
But he is not the boss of me
No, if I don’t let him.
I have now invested large chunks of many days in a row in Paul and Keith’s move, and I’m finding it rather a trial. For me a move is something other people get to show up at for one day. That means you pack everything, etc.
Too much on my plate today – Church, then moving, then cat acquisition, then Katie’s baby shower. It’s the story of my life, nothing for months and then everything piles up in one day. I have met the cat (her name is Autumn) and she is stunningly gorgeous, exceedingly athletic, and very clever. Margot’s gonna wonder what hit her if Autumn meets with Jeff’s approval. She needs to leave where she is because she is one cat surplus to the landpeer’s okay and she really is an outdoor cat, which she can be here, as Miss Margot is an outdoor cat. She shouldn’t be – you know it and I know it – but she is.
2020 says Autumn was male.
I was hoping to get out for a nice dinner tonight but I will probably curl up in a fetal ball and collapse instead.
My hot water bottle perished and voided itself on me this morning. I managed not to get any water on my computer or me, by a special mercy of providence.
The nerve of that guy! Jeff won’t take me to breakfast unless I change out of my pjs. Thank you Jeff for yummy noms.
Who is a noted MEN’S RIGHTS ACTIVIST. Who doesn’t want women to work outside the home at all.
No matter how much work of what type women do, they are going to get told that it isn’t real work, because real work is what men do. I hear what he’s feeling – he feels useless, he feels like his role has changed and nobody told him, he feels like that uselessness has to be somebody’s fault, the fault is society allowing women to work outside the home. What his emotions are doing to him is pretty ghastly. Too bad all the crap about women working that bothers him so much is a consequence and outgrowth of where feminism met the needs of the permanent war economy and of capitalism, and he’d rather hack his feet off and eat them than critique that. He’s not rational, and nobody in their right ****ing mind should even think about trying to refute him, because he’s too emotional. It’s a free country and he can say whatever he likes, but don’t waste a calorie on thinking about him; he’s the ineffectual and drunken uncle at the family reunion who wants attention for his divorce story and surrounds himself with the guys who don’t question him, and I’d rather party with the cool shiny haired dyke and her new wife, the guy who’s training to be a doula, and the spectrum kid who’s helping me learn to crochet, all of whom are better exemplars of humanity. Murmur ‘sh*tplatter’ and pass on. And yes, Jim, I totally agree that men need their own space. Men who don’t get the support and socialization of other sympatico men suffer, and many are too stoic to complain.