Just a few things

I’m tired of the Olympics and I don’t like the way they show a little bit of one event and then go to another event and then another one instead of just showing one event all the damn way through. Also, the figure skating is on until like two in the morning and I can’t stay up that late. If I set my DVR to record it then I already know who wins the next day when I watch the Today show but I can’t not watch the Today show because otherwise I wouldn’t know how much snow they’re getting on the East coast.

The women’s ski team? They’re bugging me.

When did the judges start looking at the tapes to see if a figure skater’s foot landed on an edge or a toe pic and measure the distance from whatever? Why isn’t it just about the costumes like it should be?

How is bobsledding a sport? I don’t get it. I know I’m apparently wrong in my thinking because it wouldn’t be an Olympic sport if it wasn’t a sport, but could someone explain?

And Bob Costas? Love him.

Today I had to buy a new battery for my car and two new tires and then they told me I needed new brakes. Yes. Lovely. Love that.

My wife is sick.

Hate that.

I hope she doesn’t have the HiNi flu.

Tomorrow we need to drive Halsey to Bremerton, WA to play in her first derby bout. If Cher is too sick to go and I have to drive by myself I may cry. I’ll try to be really grown up about it but inside I’ll be crying. A lot.

Today we saw the accountant and I told him how much income I earned last year and I think he chuckled under his breath. Yes, I know I’m poor. But I’m rich on Lacanian theory, essay writing, Spanish, Sociology and most of all, personality.

Seriously. Bobsledding?

Summer’s Day

I am in the summer of my life.

It is a time filled with happiness and long days emanating more light than darkness. The sounds of my children growing up are like the crickets chirping in the background–it’s notable but not really noticeable. I know that the Fall is coming sometime. If I close my eyes and breathe deep I can almost catch the slight scent of a yellow leaf falling to the ground. The Summer of one’s life is fun and happy and bright.

There are certain aspects about my life that have not been surprising and are as I would have imagined. I married–a couple of times. I had children. I bought a house–several of them–not at the same time and I did all of those typical things that girls do.

I walked down a misty path for many years. Cool Spring rain filled the air and I breathed in the newness. The tips of bulbs poked their heads out of the ground to seek the sun, but it was not yet shining. Through the fog, I could see what was along the way and on ahead but what I saw didn’t really please or excite me and I wondered what would become of my life when the short season of raising children came to an end; when I found myself alone with just my husband and friends. What will I do? “Anything you want,” my husband said, but this gave me no comfort or real hope for tomorrow.

I woke up one Spring day and changed my course. I took a turn down a dark, dank corridor. I could see no light and had no idea what was ahead. Was not seeing the future better than not liking what I did see? It was too late now–that ship had sailed into a vast unknown of stormy skies and no assurance that the world really was round.

“You must first sit in the darkness to fully appreciate a sunrise.” That was a line from a soap opera uttered in the early 1990’s and one I have always carried in my back pocket and for me it was true. Slowly the darkness lifted and the fog cleared. When the sun rose in the sky again and the storm stopped, I could see again.

The sun shines brightly on my life now, here in the Summer. When I look ahead, I see hope and inspiration.

And as I travel along I see the beauty of my life and that beauty is reflected in the faces of my children and my amazing wife who has been the greatest surprise and the greatest blessing the Summer has brought me.

It’s a lovely place to be.

Wintry Updates

Winter Term has started and I feel very spoiled this time. I am only attending classes at the university two days per week and taking one online writing class. The online writing class is a fiction writing class, which completely terrifies me beyond belief. I have absolutely no idea how to write fiction, but I guess that’s why I’m taking a class.

I’m taking a break from Spanish this term, not because I wanted to, but because it just didn’t fit in my schedule. So don’t send me emails in Spanish for the next ten weeks, I’m putting it aside. We can have margaritas however.

It’s so wintry in Portland right now. Cold and rainy. It’s the toughest time of the year in the NW. Pushing through the next few months is going to be difficult. It makes me want to run away to somewhere sunny and bright and warm. If you would like to fly me to your beach house in the Caribbean, please let me know.

Derby season is starting next week and Cher will be leading her team on a world domination tour 2010! If you’re in Portland, come to the Season Opener on January 16 to see some amazing derby!

My mom has a few feral cats that hang around her house. One of them had four wee small kittens in September. Two of them are still around and one in particular has become very friendly and even lets my mom pick him up and pet him. My mom thinks that one of you should adopt him (she thinks he’s a boy but I don’t know for sure.) I told her I would ask. So if you want a wee cat, let me know. This would save my mother from becoming more of a Crazy Cat Woman than she already is and I would appreciate that.

Finally, my column came out yesterday. You can read it here. Be one of five and have five. Read the piece and you’ll understand that! It’s my campaign for the year!

Thanks

It’s Thanksgiving in the United States. I have readers and friends from all over the world so to you I will just say Happy Thursday (except for those of you in Australia, I don’t know what day it is there.)

For the rest of my fellow Americans I would like to remind you that there are many reasons to not celebrate this holiday, mostly having to do with our forefathers raping, pillaging, murdering and thieving the land from the native people who lived here.

And there are many reason TO celebrate this holiday, mostly having to do with being grateful for the people and things that each of us have in our lives.

Some of us have more than others and some of us may be struggling today with problems that seem as though they are too insurmountable to overcome. But even if there are troubles in your life, there is always something to be thankful for.

Each person is loved. Each life is valuable and there is enough love and abundance in this world for everyone.

I am grateful for my children and family and friends and derby family. I am grateful for my dogs and my home and all of my blessings. I am grateful for my amazing wife who is currently upstairs doing my laundry so that we can pack and go away for the weekend just the two of us!

I am grateful that I woke up with her today and will go to sleep with her tonight. I am grateful that I live in a world that I can be who I am.

I am grateful for you.

What are you grateful for? I’m sure many things and I hope you will share that with the people that you love, today and every day!

My wife kicks ass

Yes that is my wife playing derby! She rocked it because she’s awesome! The photo was taken by my very cool friend Sharkey! More of his photos are on Flickr here.

I’m not afraid to shamelessly self-promote

Well now that I’m actually going to BlogHer and actually get to speak at BlogHer on a panel with two amazing queer bloggers, (Liza and Stacy, they rock!) I think I should do a blog re-design. The problem is that I’m way to lazy to do this and really need an assistant. Unfortunately there is no money left in my (non-existent) disposable income for an assistant. I figure I have a few choices:

1. Just do it myself.
2. Beg someone to do it.
3. Trade sexual favors.
4. Whine until someone helps me.

When you stop by here and see that things are different, you’ll know that one of those choices worked out for me. In the meantime, here is the description of what Stacy, Liza and I will be speaking about:

Room of Your Own 2: Blogqueers – LGBTQ BloggersQueer bloggers are in every corner of the blogosphere. Sometimes, but not always, their identities bring many issues to their blogging because they write and live through the lens of being queer. Their community is made up of mommybloggers, lifebloggers, craft bloggers, garden bloggers, foodies, business and marketing SMS pros, political pundits, infertility bloggers, literary bloggers, special topic bloggers and bloggers who feel that they don’t fit into any niche.

So let’s discuss some of the things that come up when blogging, such as: What is the state of the LBGTQ community? Does it meet your needs? Do you feel accepted by straight bloggers in your niche? Do you feel safe enough to blog out of the closet? Have you experienced backlash, and if so what has helped you respond to it? How have you dealt with your partners’ and friends’ thirst for privacy? And perhaps most importantly, what support do you need to continue blogging with your fullest passion and truest voice? Join Kathryn Martini, Stacy Jill Jacobs and Liza Barry-Kessler as they discuss with you the answers to these questions.

That’s a little bit fancy, isn’t it?

There is one wee bit of sadness about this particular break-out session. It’s at the exact same time that Melissa Lion is also speaking, which means that she can’t come and pretend she’s a lezzie and ask poignant questions and I can’t go and pretend I’m a fancy businessy type person and ask her questions. I’m hoping someone will live-blog her session so at least I can hear what’s happening.

In other news: I’m getting some projects done around the house, my kids are cranky, I think I may ban sleep-overs for the rest of the summer, I need a good therapist, and it’s going to be god-awful hot the entire weekend.

Why is everyone so damned cranky around this house? It should be a happy time and a happy place.

Can someone please recommend a therapist?

Please?

It’s not even July

There are two full months of summer break left and I’ve already been exposed to every show imaginable about teenagers. Some sing, some surf, some do gymnastics and are bulimic, some are witches. Oh and that one show with Tamara from Tia and Tamara. I don’t know where Tia is but Tamara seems to be a slut.

It’s been a Big week. My mom had body parts removed, I sat in a hospital waiting room for 14 hours, HG and I went to Happy Hour with her team, I found out I’m actually GOING to BlogHer after all, I went to therapy, a politician got caught doing the nasty in Argentina and some celebrities died. Sad.

It’s a championship bout weekend for The Rose City Rollers and I’ve been twittering and facebooking my little heart out to help bring people to the bout because I do that on the side in my free time. Yes. My Free Time. Those extra hours in the day when I’m not taking care of people, working, or sleeping. Yep. Those hours. I hope you’ll come to the bout. You want to see HG play, right?

Did you catch that thing about me going to BlogHer after all? I prayed to Jesus and offered sexual favors and called the lesbian mafia and a ticket came available to me. God love the Lesbian Mafia. So it looks like I’ll be rubbing elbows with Eileen Chaiken and hopefully she’ll introduce me to Bette or Alice and Alice will fall in love with me and want to run away with me to an island where we’ll have hot sweaty sex in a hammock on the beach while sipping tropical drinks and her singing me love songs.

Or something along those lines.

Even if that doen’t happen, I am thrilled that I get to go and I learned a very valuable lesson about procrastination and the power of positive thought. Of course I’m broke now, but hell, that’s just money and there is always more money to be had. I’ll think positively about that next.

Oh and there’s one other little thing about BlogHer. If you click here and look at the agenda and scroll down to Day #1, Breakout Session #1 you may see someone you know (hint: me) and someone else you may know too.

Fancy.

In the meantime, my kids just left for the weekend and my house is in Weekend Quiet Mode and I am Thankful. I’m sitting in my reclining patio chair in the sunshine looking at my beautiful plants and ignoring the fact that my living room desperately needs to be vacuumed.It’s lovely.

So much to do but so much more to be had just by sitting and listening. It’s been a big week and I deserve to savor those moments because I know I don’t do enough self-care and when that happens I turn a little cranky. Or into a raging bitch, take your pick. The point is that everyone needs to just sit and be sometimes and not worry about the chores that need to be done or the emails that need to be returned. It’s a crazy world out there and anyone of us could drop dead in an instant and then it wouldn’t really matter if the dog poop was picked up in the yard. The tricky part of this “Ignore Stuff and Sit in The Sun” theory is the application but I do encourage everyone to try it at least once this weekend.

So go ahead, comment on this blog post and put your computer to sleep. Grab your sunglasses and go outside. Give yourself 15 minutes to just be.

When you’re finished with that, have a kick ass weekend!

Aloha

So school is over for the term and I can’t tell you how relieved I am but I wish someone would tell my body and my head: they haven’t yet been informed. Tomorrow we fly away to an island in the middle of the Pacific ocean where a cocktail with an umbrella is waiting for me.

I learned a lot these past ten weeks at school and I was going to share a bit of it but I’m too tired today. I will tell you this: Love is a Verb not a Noun, People never stop learning and growing, To have a healthy marriage you must avoid: Contempt, Criticism, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling, and finally, Mi esposa es muy guapa y yo tengo tres hijas.

I started this post and intended to finish it later when I had time and then didn’t have time. So I will bid you all adieu my internet friends and will catch up when I return.

Aloha!

A Matter of Class

I clearly remember sitting in the Laundromat on hot summer days while my mother washed our laundry. When I was about five or six we got a washing machine—it was a gold Kenmore and my mother was thrilled—but we didn’t have the dryer until much later so my mother hung our clothes out side on the line to dry.

Our house was very old and my parents rented it for $100 a month and we lived on my mother’s small salary while my father went to college on the G.I. Bill. For extra money, my mother would clean apartments sometimes and I would help her by “helping” clean the refrigerator. Childcare was an issue for my mother and I remember being left in strange places where I didn’t know anyone: my most vivid memory of this is being left at a strange woman’s house who smoked and watched television the entire day. I sat in a corner of her house and played with my Barbie, miserable and missing my mother. I don’t think I knew at the time that we were poor because everyone else around us was poor too. It wasn’t until much later that I realized where I had come from was not the same place that I ended up.

My mother went on to become a nurse and my father a white-collar insurance adjuster and even through their subsequent divorce my mother was always able to provide for me, albeit not glamorously. We never went hungry and never worried about where we would live. My troubles were few and as an adult I made my own way in the world in a similar fashion. I’m grateful that my family was able to upwardly move into a more middle-class lifestyle and I try very hard to remember how easily I could lose what I currently have.

Until I went back to school and began to learn more about oppression and how class issues affect our world, I never gave class status much thought. I’ve learned that for some reason when we talk about oppression, we rarely relate it to class. Instead, marginalized minorities compete in our “oppression Olympics” and forget about that group who is continuously oppressed with little chance for freedom—the working poor.

My own middle-class lifestyle was something I completely took for granted and worse, I wanted more. Realizing my own privilege in regards to class is very important especially when considering that even if I were to lose every material possession I own tomorrow, I would be able to rebuild what I had lost much more quickly than someone who did not share my same class status. Because of my: race, education, connections, family and community support, my family and I would probably be okay, even in the worst of circumstances. This is something I never considered until now and I will always try to remember that I have a responsibility to use my privilege for good.

Addressing the issues of class and the struggle of power needs to begin with individuals and our personal responsibility to recognize our own privilege and be aware of why we are in the position we are in. Part of being privileged is not realizing you have it and that is exactly where people of privilege need to begin in order to make change. Each person needs to take a look at their position in this world and make a commitment not to look down on or criticize those who don’t share our same status.

Just like I do not tolerate people using racist or homophobic rhetoric around me, I will no longer tolerate negative comments about the working poor. I will also point out to others (gently) when they are being discriminatory towards a group of people based on class because somehow, we as a society have easily accepted doing so. When people make negative statements about poor undocumented immigrants, crack addicts, welfare mothers, white trash, gang bangers, ghetto breeders and the like—they are being discriminatory not as much about race, but more about class. Groups of different races, religions, and cultures seem to be just fine, as long as they are in a similar class as we are; it’s when they are poor that they become something much less.

Immigrants with money don’t need to come to this country illegally, they are afforded the luxury of Visas and green cards; housewives in the suburbs addicted to pain medicine and Xanax are no different than the “crack mothers” we like to demonize; rich people take advantage of corporate welfare every day and mobsters are nothing more than rich gang members but somehow their status is elevated significantly.

These are the things that need to be realized.

As part of my responsibility, I will carry this message forward and be an example to others. Change in the world begins with ourselves and sometimes just changing one small thing has a much larger effect than we realize. Dr. King once said, “The arc of history is long and it leads towards justice”. I believe this justice is for all people of all: colors, creeds, sexual orientation, religious beliefs AND class.

HG The RG

Hottie