DRAG, the Series: Human

I have decided to leave this series of posts, intentionally, in a very draft form. This owes to the upheaval of the past month of my personal life, yes ... but it also feels fitting, as the entire point of this discussion of drag is about construction and challenging assumptions. To smooth it all into coherent, long prose might obscure the various parts, and thoughts, I have put into this, and they perhaps should stand out starkly. In honesty, much of what I say is just intros to the links embedded. And so, here is this series. Unfinished. Challenging - to me, in one sense, and to the audience in another. Seems right ...

The essence of the art form is compassion.

Stories - both the wit onstage, and the realities of the performers: we all know these glorious manifestations were born of pain. Even the most loved and supported queens, who have enjoyed acceptance from their friends and/or families (genetic or adopted, by whatever means) performing right now are up against the WORLD of those who do not. And acceptance by those nearest and dearest is hardly guaranteed. Probably not a queen standing has not endured humiliation, doubts cast upon them, and discrimination - never even to mention the scrutiny of strangers who consider they have a right to particular knowledge of the most intimate aspects of their lives and even bodies. And yet, these people devote themselves to the art and entertainment they provide. This is not a minor risk ... even as many queens say their drag is their armor, the main reason it can be such is that they are forced to *need* armor at all ...



Drag Race capitalizes on turning self-expression into a competition - and then overturns all narratives about "winning" as Miss Congeniality and runners-up become superstars on tides of fan support ... or queens walk off voluntarily, messianic (no, seriously) figures simultaneously rejecting the crown and glorifying it, simultaneously gaming and messy, and - well - Miss Congeniality incarnate. The show has exemplified reality television's outcomes, where "winning" ends up meaningless - and might almost ruin the game, for some.


We all contain multitudes. Some of us may be less aware of that most of the time, and some may play it up more consciously, but few of us are glam queens 100% of the time any more than we're litter-cleaning schlubs 100% of the time.

Third genders

What is "authentic" anyway?


One of the major focal points of drag is the synthetic ideals we've applied to the idea of "femininity" - and thereby, obliquely, pointing to the synthetic nature of the masculine, and of binary sexuality and humanity. Drag queens rarely dress like (everyday, cis) women. I am in lug-heeled boots, jeans, and a chunky sweater as I write this - and, on average, a drag queen is not to be caught dead in the attire that outfits most "women" throughout our lives. A queen is OTT, pointed (ahem), fabulous. If a drag queen is a showgirl, the point is the showing-girliness. If the spotlight is on, it's not going to shine without some glitter.

Pigments are often seen as the root of complex symbolic behavior. Think of the way we use color on clothes, flags, and tattoos—all signals of social identity.

This series of posts has discussed the depths of social, cultural, *human* behavior in a lot of depth, and I've linked the dickens out of things which point to the fact that "human" does not strictly mean man-woman/nuclear family/hetero/binary/cis etc.

If "we" are hundreds of thousands of years old, and even before anatomically modern humanity we engaged in recognizeably human society and culture, how is it even possible to presume what any one of us thinks we know is any form of bedrock truth? If we were built to be, and survive only because we are, flexible and adaptable, why are there people who think their is safety lies in rigidity, in immutable definition and narrow parameters?

Why are people afraid of drag queens?

As natural as it is to be adaptable, it is also natural and human to harbor fear - and the original interpersonal fear, the greatest fear outside of fire and flood and hungry, toothy predators: is The Other. The person we do not know.

The person we do not understand.

As human as it is to self-decorate and put on uncomfortable shoes or shocking color: it is just as human to fear drawing attention, to fear those who brave it, and to fear behavior we cannot understand because we cannot bring ourselves to it at all.

Human innovation, our ingenuity itself, is born of fear and need. The need to eat and self-protect created community and the cultures we built to sustain the human herds within which we found it safest to function.

DRAG, the Series: Challenge

I have decided to leave this series of posts, intentionally, in a very draft form. This owes to the upheaval of the past month of my personal life, yes ... but it also feels fitting, as the entire point of this discussion of drag is about construction and challenging assumptions. To smooth it all into coherent, long prose might obscure the various parts, and thoughts, I have put into this, and they perhaps should stand out starkly. In honesty, much of what I say is just intros to the links embedded. And so, here is this series. Unfinished. Challenging - to me, in one sense, and to the audience in another. Seems right ...


The thing about most offputting entertainments and art forms throughout history is this: they *mean* to be offputting. To a certain audience. Ugliness, cacophany, discomfort in art are a direct challenge, always, to prevailing assumptions. And right now, for a western-centric culture out to homogenize the world, a culture which has dressed men the same for upward of 200 years, there can be little wonder that one of the most popular challenges is the industrial-scale insurgency of drag

I’m not doing drag to give you makeup tips. This has always been a political statement.
RuPaul Charles

Nancy Pelosi ... YOUTUBE CLIP OF HER FROM RDR



There is no one way to be gay ... or drag, or masculine, or feminine, or a particular age, or republican, or spiritual. More specifically: there is no wrong way to be any of these things, or any others.

I do Goth wrong. In my life, the very essence of nonconformity has been ... showing up at a tattoo convention and having a triple piercing removed. "You went to a tattoo festival and got yourself UN-maimed," my brother said, and it was a revelation to me. Or wearing sky blue and glitter lipgloss to a Type O Negative show, or putting together a 40s-vintage ensemble, but wearing forest green lipstick amongst otherwise "authentic" hair and clothing and period-perfect makeup.

We. All. Contain. Multitudes.



People have been weird since we've been people: truly, independently, fiercely weird. We have also been "people" for more than three hundred thousand years - not merely hairy little tool-users who put the dead away systematically or even ritually - but engaging in trade, and even processing pigment from stone.

Using pigment to permanently mark ourselves.

Pigment is at the heart not only of art, but of self-decoration. And even self-decoration performs double-duty - many people are aware that eyeliner dates back thousands of years, but fewer realize its practical application, in reducing visual glare in a very sunny region. The principal of dark patches on the face to improve bright-light vision survives today, quite prominently.



Our attachment to our tools and our expressions is the basis for the very concept of sin.



Fishy aesthetic versus Acid Betty, Dirt Woman, Divine (both glamorous and un-"pretty", using symbols of the former and co-opting the latter to invent something new)...

Perhaps especially during the 1970s and 1980s, punk and drag had a lot in common, and RuPaul's early days show a grungy, harder-edged New Wave image.



This post "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" and I'll publish it anyway ... this post is a challenge. Ooh, how meta.

Let's have a kiki

Image: Wikimedia Commons (labeled for re-use)
Miss Fame

It's on my mind to do a series of posts - specifically riffing on drag, though I will try to keep RuPaul's Drag Race references to a minimum - and focusing on the many layers of its making, as well as its cultural position and place(s). While I wonder a little whether this might alienate what audience I have, the point is more to look at the incredible breadth of Doing A Thing - and, in fact, one could write a similar series about just plain being an actor, or firefighter, musician, or visual artist. The discipline tends to be a part of the life of its practitioner, and I want to look at just how much we do in service of results which an awful lot of people might see as a single point in the wide tapestry of life.

Drag happens to touch on the recurrent thematics of this blog - social thought, yes, but also costuming, makeup, a focus on (at least certain particulars of) history, and the multifarious work of entertainment. It can be beautiful and challenging - at its best, and like so much art, it is both at once - and laughter and tears are all but mandatory.

Image: Wikimedia Commons (labeled for re-use)
This is Acid Betty

And too, like so much of what I write about, I am both an insider and very much NOT so. Subculturally, I've always been accepted even as I think of myself as an outsider, or even a poseur. So drag is one more thing I can appear to write about intelligently, but cannot with integrity claim to be any part of personally. Watching it, even caring deeply about it, being acquainted with those who *do* ... these are not qualifying criteria. So I have knowledge, but not cred.

So stay tuned. The organization is underway, and the thoughts, they are a-thinkin'. Your feedback in any form is always welcome, and I really hope to produce a thing or two of interest, even if the whole series may not be to all my readers' tastes.

Links:
Beauty
Challenge
Costume
Gender
Human

Preying Animals

Again.

And again. And again. And again. And again.



The Weinstein (etc. etc. etc.) scandal in Hollywood might seem to beg comment from a blogger such as myself, but the simple fact is my main reaction to the whole thing was, for a good while, mere exhaustion. The fact that MEN are surprised and offended ... I don't know. Maybe it's nice. But there isn't a woman I know who's taken aback at the information unearthed so far. No, not even the scope.

Remember, kids: we just watched a proudly bragging sexual predator take the White House. Oh yeah, and the supposed fall of Bill Cosby, though that story seems to have been forgotten ("Thanks again, Trump's distracting Tweets!") You think we are shocked about a movie mogul?

Watching the astonishment of *men*, who rather loudly insist upon swearing they had NO IDEA about all this, might be almost be amusing for some, but - again - merely a bit tiring for me. Talk about bad acting: "gents", you are either criminally incompetent, intellectually compromised, or lying your asses off. (Same goes for women.)


So, why am I bringing it up at all?



The drumbeat right now is all about men in power taking advantage of women who cannot reasonably consent, given that consent requires autonomy, and so few have it in the situations encountered.

That is an important dynamic to consider, it's important to fight.

But I know this: SEXUAL HARASSMENT IS NOT METED OUT ONLY BY THE ECONOMICALLY POWERFUL.

For men power comes in other forms, and other magnitudes, than Trump or Weinstein or congressmen or kings.

Sexual harassment comes from the contractor at work, whose only power lies in the fact of his maleness and his speaking up after-hours in a deserted office. Sexual harassment comes from an awful lot of guys at work, in fact - just everyday guys in cube farms - the guy leaving anonymous notes which are TERRIFYING evidence of being covertly *watched* by unknown eyes, the guy cornering a woman in the break room. It comes on the street. It lives in every possible environment.

It could by ANY guy. That's what's got me mad: that in sanctioning this "Hollywood is the dangerous place" "Powerful men are the ones to watch out for" groundswell, we are safely defining boundaries around predators, pointing to the most unusual varieties as if they encompassed all the perniciousness women face every day. And thereby nullifying the fact that indeed it IS every day. Everywhere. Not just these rich monsters. NOT just desperate actresses.

It's every woman. And it is, potentially, every man we meet.



It is pissing me off that the sudden vogue for pearl-clutching focuses so narrowly, so significantly, on plutocrats alone.


Not all power comes in the form of famous men using women who think they need these men in order to advance in an industry - or politics. These situations are not limited to the casting couch, or to some town or business the majority of people aren't in.

And not all blame belongs to these wealthy ... "exceptional" ... men.

#NotAllMen? Sure. Certainly not anyone I'd even call a "man".

But more than just a few, kids. And not just the one percent. Not by a long damned shot.

Taboo

It's dangerous ground.

Writers sometimes find ourselves in territory that is upsetting, criminal, perverse, perilous. We address not merely human behavior, but the least-traveled corners of our minds, many of them deep in shadow. Sometimes, the shadow is time itself: an historical author, writing about a period with scant or no primary resources to research. Sometimes, the shadow is more elusive, and all the darker: those places we don't want to look.

Sometimes, the shadows are simply what we cannot bring ourselves to understand, because what lies outside the light we have is too disturbing.

You can't get to civilization except through human sacrifice.

I come from a family of teachers - scientists and historians, both vocational and avocational. My brother is an anthropologist and archaeologist. I obviously have a strong affinity for the study of history, even as I avow strenuously that this makes me no expert. With me, it's the difference between learning and interpreting.

With me, it's the realm of feeling.

Writing is a striving to understand.

And so (and yes, being dried up and childless undoubtedly affects this), having recently had a conversation in which the quote above played a thematic part, I have of late been trying to understand human sacrifice. Child sacrifice.

That I have a character from (post-sacrificial era) Carthage plays in, but the immediate dynamics of her life are unrelated to this practice.

That no reading on the subject you can find with ease seems able to address it without the use of the word "bloodthirsty" - and why that frustrates me - is much more the crux.



We've lost much of the concept of "SACRIFICE", in modern America. The word is bandied about, and people even give of themselves; I don't mean to say the practice, the impulse, is dead.

But the sacred tenet of SACRIFICE - the actual blood, and giving-up and giving-over - this is something we all but revile.

Americans today, meat-eating or not, consider the idea of killing an animal and offering it to G-d antiquated beyond all propriety. It is offensive to such a degree we unthinkingly find it actually immoral - pagan - barbaric - every word of which I choose carefully, and y'all can see with an easy click what I think of "barbaric" in particular, and any cursory reader must be able to guess what I think of "pagan". The judgment is so deep even the words we've loaded up with pejorative meaning are only tools to load the concepts we apply them to.

It's all denial. The need to distance and to Other a thing, so that we may prove our credentials in fitting the current definition of morality, or rectitude, or just fitting in.

The very idea of understanding taboos has become outre' - to understand barbarity is to know it, and to know it is to be guilty of it. And we don't like to claim, to admit, culpability.



There's a screed in there on contemporary politics, but that is not today's text.



And so, we have avidly removed ourselves from the deeply human impulse to (blood) sacrifice.

It's cruel.

It's ignorant.

It's extraneous (and not merely in secularists' minds).

It's GROSS.



But the real study of human sacrifice - of child sacrifice - is not one of BLOODTHIRST: it is the revelation of what a society, what an individual, values most highly.

One of my recent readings of Carthaginian child sacrifice stated that parents gave up their children as lightly as if it were nothing. Even provided the queasy observation that child sacrifice worked for the city as population control, and actually conferred benefits on the society there over time.

The fact is, population control may have been some sort of benefit of child sacrifice.

But no society kills off its young without any greater justification than that ... even if it does factor into wider dynamics, to kill our fellow citizens, to kill our offspring is no light matter - no matter of logistics, especially in a city known for centuries for its wealth and culture. A parent might expose a child for many reasons, or sell into bondage, or abort, or kill with their own hands, in desperation and penury. But the development of ritual and sacrifice are not matters of immediate need, and centuries of religious practice are not explained by civic planning, nor by bloodthirst.

Religion is developed in OFFERING, not murder. Sacrifice is transactional, but with the Divine, not with mankind, not with our neighbors. We develop faith and religion along *with* our neighbors, but its practice is actually pointed elsewhere.



The simple idea of giving up what means the most to us is washed out at the time we live in now. And not the objects we think we love, and imbue with emotion, but things more ineffable, more genuinely powerful.

Things with life. Things with souls.

Sacrifice is the commitment to our god(s) to give up a part of our hearts, perhaps something that grew from the deepest loves we have known. In the case of a child, the very living fruit of consummation, which itself means so much to us, in all its good and ill and hardship.

The sacrifice is TREASURE.





The seed germinating in a shadow, in this writer, in the dark loam of my mind and my own heart - is a story of sacrifice.

Of what it means to consign love itself, and life itself, in worship.

Of - not the thirst for, but the *price*, the bone-deep value, the cost we set on giving to that we adore. Of the dust on the fingers, the stones on the ground, the orange, windy sky, and the young eyes ... of giving.

And how that is forgotten. And those fingers will be remembered only for barbarity. Bloodthirst.

Eddies (Not in the Space-Time Continuum)

York Minster is home to a series of statues that have always arrested me outright. The effect on me is mostly with the earliest Edwards post-Conquest, we have Longshanks (I), Edward II, and III. Each of these portrait sculptures has always seemed to me among the most animated statuary I have ever seen. But there is something about the style of the art that demands questioning and study, and is for me an illumination of the reason we study art from bygone periods.

Longshanks in particular has an imperiousness that is powerful in the extreme. Pointing down at you, his forehead creased with the stress of some imperative or command, even his curling hair alive with motion and unspoken intent, his vertical stretch, his heavy but moving robes, everything about him (not least a weighty sword he carries as if it were a feather) demands not only attention but acquiescence.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The thing about the fact these were done centuries before my generation came to be (or indeed my country, for that matter) is that there are conventions in place in the creation of these images that I almost certainly do not understand.

A modern American, the very concept of autocratic kingship is a toughie.

Edward II, whose reputation has been reduced to his sexuality in modern times, appears less martial, but no less royal. His hair, like his father's and his son's, especially evokes a kind of intensity. I have to believe this is not intended to convey that these Plantagenets had hairstyles quite so specifically reminiscent of Roseanne Roseannadanna (though her intensity stands up next to the kings'!), but speaks to something other than feature-by-feature reproduction.

The portraiture, of course, comes from a single, briefer time frame than the Edwards' reigns; these images are not real time reflections, and would not have been taken as such. Rather, the features both individual and shared communicate something about kings in concept, and each of these kings' legacies in their particulars.

Edward II, not known as The Hammer of the Scots, nor for the long and prosperous rule of his son III, has a thoughtful mien about him. His left hand raised and wrist curving, his right holding NOT a sword. The lines of his height, his garments, are more broken, more complicated. He is belted, and he is draped in multiple directions. His head bows forward ever so slightly, and at a definite angle compared to his father. He appears to be contemplating something. Possibly, his thoughtful thousand-mile gaze could be seen as thought*less*, even stupid, the gesture of his hand equivocal, less strong than the others. What was I meant to see, looking at this figure? I may not see what was intended ...

Edward III, famed for a stupendously long reign, and often seen these days as having remediated some of the perceived sins of his father, looks almost as if he is answering someone. His brow is again furrowed, pressed downward, but his chin pointing upward. His beard is the longest and least curly; the lines of his garments, indicating his body beneath, are again long and straight, but like his father and unlike his grandfather Longshanks, he is belted. Girded. His mantle is thrown over his right shoulder, his arms free; again, he indicates motion. His hair may be the most startling of the three statues.

To III's right, the nearly beardless Richard II stands; the youth, the scion, the one who faced rebellions and a changing monarchy. His cheeks seem the faintest bit chubby. His forehead, his whole face indeed, is smooth and not caught in the extremity of expression of his forbears. His hair is almost horizontal. Richard's statue retains some pigment from its former painted decoration. Like his great-great grandfather, Richard bears a sword, its tip, strangely, lost in that hair. Like Longshanks and his grandfather, III, he is pointing at the viewer. Yet the impression is that we are looking at *youth*, looking at a king whose reign did not reach the maturity Edward III's long stint on the throne held and seasoned for England.

Richard II was the son of Edward the Black Prince, who did not live to ascend the throne. He was a boy-king, like Edward III had been before he overthrew the regency of his mother and her lover, Mortimer. Richard depended upon, and then fell out with, his uncle Lancaster and his cousin, the eventual Henry IV, whose son Henry V is reminding me for some reason of Martin Sheen in this link.

Henry has both hands full, and does not look to his viewers, eyes elevated, sword - we know - ever valiant. Ever more unto the breach, my friends.


Of all these figures, it is the Edwards who seem most alien to me, who arrest my attention. They are frankly ugly to my eyes. Startlingly so. Not as works of art, but as evocations of individuals, as portraits. The intensity is too much, the emphases uncanny.

To view the details of these statues closely, as is possible in photographs, was not the way they were made to be seen. Would have been inconceivable, when these were made. They reside, in physical reality, above the heads of anyone entering York Minster. And, for anyone standing in that consecrated place, it would even now be impossible to look at them with the care that we can in the reproductions and detail shots I have linked. It would in fact have been unseemly, in their day, to expend great attention on statues of kings - "what they looked like" - as a member of a religious congregation. And the multiplicity of these figures would have discouraged that sort of gazing.

The view when they were made did not allow the privilege of peering we have now.


As much particular attention as has been lavished on every one of the statues, the truth of the art was that they were meant to be part of a whole; elevated over the flesh-and-blood parishoners, but as much a part of the congregation gathered before G-d as lesser men. A mass of figures. These were statues glorifying the monarchy, certainly; even telling stories of each king's life and deeds. But they were ultimately part of the glorification of G-d - and the Church.

The potent energy of the Edwards may have been intended as part of a more en masse evocation of the intensity of worship, devotion, praise expected to be offered on this sacred ground.


Anyone who knows more of medieval art than I do - please disabuse me of any of these notions, or explain those aspects of what I am missing. I'd love to talk! These faces make me stop and stare every time.

All I can explain are those things I don't understand within the context of these works' creation - royalty itself; the finer points of Plantagenet politics or history; the specific legends of each of these individuals' reputations ... just how far these amazing portraits are even meant to be seen AS individuals. Allegorical implications. The filter of the history already passed between Longshanks and York Minster's decoration, so many generations later.

Born, and the Rest

Mama Ru on the Reagan years, tribe, and mainstreaming the un-mainstream-able (or NOT; for Ru is wise).



He IS an outstanding host, I've said it before, presiding over drag families for decades now and RuPaul's Drag Race for eight seasons and two All-Stars editions as well. Some of the people hes introduced us to mean a lot to those of us who are fans. Alaska T. is the only thing named Alaska on Earth I will ever love, and Katya and (OMG) Latrice Royale.

My friend Kristi and I agreed: Ru's saying recently that he could never go mainstream was marketing brilliance. The media has snapped-to - oh, and look, two Emmy nods as well. Whether you appreciate that sort of thing or not, this is a queen who has EARNED notoriety, and has worked his curvaceous ass off since he was scarcely a teenager. Someone who knows who he is (and does not care whether you call her he or she) and what he wants - you can really see it in some of the vintage vids available on YouTube (bonus if you click: Mama Ru's own mama, BUBBLE WRAP DANCING - and about 3/4 of a second of Ru with a beard - and I mean growing out of his face, not the metaphorical merkin).

Though there is the epic point-missing of not pointing out the incredible transformations on display every single week, times however-many-contestants-remain, take a look at some reasons to love RDR here. Go. Do. Enjoy! Gerald would.

Collection, With A Lot of Villainy

It’s the wrong Donald, Gromit.

Apparently (in certain others' minds, anyway) I am a ... PANK. Hm. Sounds distasteful. I'm not persuaded this is a label worth accepting - indeed, I'm not entirely persuaded by this article. Still, it's interesting to note that, invisible as I am being an old biddy aunt, I'm an impressively fast-growing demographic.

NPR did a piece today on why villains are always the interesting characters. I'd argue against the old "good guys are always boring" routine; a good writer doesn't leave the protagonist drab. As good writing goes, "good guys are boring" is lazy right there. It is right after they say villains are always the interesting ones, using Shakespeare's Iago (I am NOT linking that for you, if you don't know the reference, look it up) as a juicy example, that I immediately think of Claudius. Not Graves' Claudius (nor Derek Jacobi's), but Hamlet's. He does not steal the show. James Bond villains often don't either - Bond villains are MacGuffins, simply there to set everything in motion. Captain America: Civil War was the same - a villain we spend no time with, care about not one whit, and who in the end has nothing to do with anything at all. Surprisingly good movie, out of that.

But still. The montage of famous villains' voices at the top is worth the ride. Could use more of the Star Wars evil march music, though.

The MOST fascinating part of this story is its point regarding villains' never thinking they ARE bad guys or women. No matter your place on the political spectrum - right now, this year, there is no way around seeing that as a reference not to movies, but to this election.

Faces of Death

We've got to start off with the following phrase: the denial of human creatureliness. My stars, what a great twist of words, as cruel as any knife.

(B)eing an animal is threatening because it reminds people of their vulnerability to death...
--multiple authors, see link above

A few days ago, doing those things we do that we don't share with most others - showering and getting a look at my body's age and particulars - I was thinking, as I have before, of how I wish it were a different sight. Thinking about how age has changed things, how annoying bodies can be, not trapped in amber and constantly energetic and healthy got me to thinking (a) of all those things we are told we can do about that and, inevitably, (b) the people who do the most to give some plausible lie to the necessity of age and our animal nature.

Image: Wikipedia
Obvious choice? Heck yes.

If I'm honest, Dita von Teese actually occurs to me most often when I think about these things. She actually is lovely, but the image she's crafted - I sometimes wonder how well it will age. Perhaps it is her vintage spin that makes me look to the ways some of the Hollywood glamour goddesses who inspired her ended up; and at forty-four, you wonder how much mileage is left in her career of being alluring. The Kardashians are an industry, and nobody expects humanity of them, so contemplating how they age just means looking at Momma K and shrugging a bit.

But the fundamental point is, artifice is the denial of the animal.

There are times I revel in artifice. But the thing with me is, there are also times I revel in being an animal - in the biological status of my existence, as much as the spiritual or intellectual (or silly). In some ways, the best PART of getting dolled up (and note the word choice there, hah) is the way we start off - sweaty, sparse-eyebrowed, with imperfect skin and no ornament. For me, "gooping up" as my friend TEO and I used to call it, is an emphasis of artificiality, not of myself. When I go out in any sort of drag, it's not a presentation of myself, but of the things I like or find funny or a neat idea I had with hair or makeup, something archly and specifically NOT myself.

Anyone who believes I have purple hair - or those eyelashes - is not my responsibility to counsel.

Anyone who believes I am significantly younger than I am - well, I have two lovely parents certainly to thank. Assuming we take the cultural worship of youth as read.



For those less than eager to take on the entirety of the paper whose abstract is linked above, consider this. An interesting look at death, indeed, and possibly informative of more than America's own current state of politics.

Study subjects who were prompted to talk about their own death later rated their support for Trump 1.66 points higher on a five-point scale than those who were prompted to talk about pain generally.
--Max Ehrenfreund, Washington Post

The old "May you live in interesting times" joke comes to mind. Not only because ALL times for humans have been interesting, harrowing, joyous, and terrifying all at once, but because the first and foremost draw of Trumpery has been how interesting he is. He's entertainment, as well as a valve for the release of all those unseen things we hold inside; hatred and anger and fear. He's a really big show.

Image: Wikipedia
I chose this because it's about as dignified a shot of The Donald as I can find in fair use rules,
and the juxtaposition with someone notorious for his flamboyant looks was irresistible.
And he's really smiling.

***

It is common received wisdom that art and comedy are born out of our knowledge of death. Fashion and cosmetics are too, which is interesting given their connection to human sexuality, itself the only means toward immortality in providing for procreation.

Politics is death. And sometimes suicide is the way humans meet death.

***

I both revel in my creatureliness and play with those toys of denial. Most of us do the same in one way or another, saving contemplation of death for special occasions, but not actively denying it. Life just doesn't leave time for it, mostly. We get caught up in the day-to-day, and that works both in our favor and against us - it is all to easy to forget to deal with those parts of life that have to do with its cessation.

It is perhaps precisely because all times are interesting that we simultaneously gorge on it, and then need to retreat from it, and on a humankind scale this leads us to bewildering socio-political behavior. American media would have it that the Brexit vote came largely because people voted for exit thinking "this will never happen" and now they all wish they could take it back. How far this gibes with reality is debatable, but not a debate I wish to be party to. It's an interesting sort of finger-shaking version of "journalism" (a word that's been in scare-quotes for years now), but a curious look at the fear of death in itself. A few weeks go, Brexit looked like Roman decimation in broadcast media; right now, we're forgetting about it and "la-la-la-I-cant'-hear-you"-ing all the way to Sodom, most of the day-after pearl-clutching forgotten, at least amongst us unwashed masses. There isn't time to think about it.

Three days ago, I'd never heard of this dang Pokemon walking game, and now it is EVERYWHERE, both in hilarity and more finger-wagging ("don't play Pokemon games in the Holocaust museum" was an actual thing this morning).

Fantasy is our way of denying death - if we focus on what we find most beautiful, desirable ... death loses its hold in our minds, because those things are as strong for us as the unknowable inevitabilities of our bodies.

By writing, I revel in the creatureliness of my characters, and my own - and because I write fiction, I can deny it ALL. Nothing is real, and if I write about those things that frighten me most, that is not real either.

This is the essential appeal of horror.

The ultimate fantasy is control.

We seem to be exerting the fantasy of control by going out of control an awful lot lately.

Why *wouldn't* people rather contemplate the curiously human and artificial face of a Jenner or Kardashian ... ?

Snobbery, Fashion, and Manners of Speaking

The vocal fry thing was only the beginning.

In recent months, verbal linguistics have been a constant obsession. I keep noticing how speedily pronunciations are evolving, and thinking about how they have changed in the past.

Watching films made in the 1930s, I get a sense of the vogue way to speak when my grandmothers were young - what "modern" used to me - and I wonder how their voices differed from one another in their primes, based on the way I remember them before they died. Both Virginian, but from different places, different backgrounds. I can still hear my mom's mother's voice fairly clearly in my head.

Listening to younger women now - and knowing that, though my generation's ears often find it annoying and even unintelligent-sounding, vocal fry and creak are now considered signifiers of education and success - I listen for different types of this evolved valspeak, and try to understand where the annoying affectations of my own youth became the worthy attainments of a new age ... and I wonder how quickly another mode of speaking will take over, what *is* taking over, and how these things will sound to those finding their own, new voices. How quickly fashion will change.

I wonder, too, how much of this occurred - how quickly speech changed - before media developed and burgeoned and kept us constantly aware of how we and others sound. Those thirties movies came at an era when image was literally projected for the first time, and sound became an emblematic part of fashion.

Clearly, language has always changed its sound. If new ways of speaking had not always superseded old ways - in coinage, but just as fundamentally in sound and emphasis - we'd still be speaking in what we now like to call proto Indo-European roots.

It's hard not to think recorded sound and image have not affected the speed with which these changes occur. It seems only yesterday I was complaining about the ubiquity of people emphatically growling HUJAPASSENT to indicate their certainty about something, and now I haven't heard it in months. Already out of vogue? I'm not even sure when I last heard curate; but artisinal has been fairly popular for a couple of years.


Getting out of coinage trends and looking at pronunciation, current fashion sounds to fogeys of (say) my Certain Age ... well, actually infantile. There is a trend for both overstatement and inaccuracy in diction, and some of the inflections and emphases echo those of a child just learning to speak.

A sampling of pronunciations which seem to be crossing regional lines, so do not appear to be related to particular accents:

Overdone ...

           diDINT (didn't)

           JOOLuhree (jewelry)

           feahMAlee (family)
           FOWurd (forward)

           MEEkup (makeup)

Underdone ...

           fill (feel)
           housiz (houses - first S sibilant)         
           uhMAYzeen (amazing)

           BEEdy (it took me some patience to understand this as a pronunciation of "beauty")
           BEDdur (better**)
 

The intensity of emphasis on consonants in middle of a word reminds old folks like me of a liddle kid's care in speaking words still new to their tongues - training the tongue to every part, every syllable of a word. It is adorable in a three year old, the way a toddler's emphatic way of walking is cute, as they learn refined balance.

In an adult - to more elderly adults - all this sounds considerably strange.



Here's where it gets REALLY interesting:

Considering how strange my slurring and curiously unsyncopated manner of speech must sound to those putting (let's face it) so much more effort into their speaking.

At Janet Reid's blog yesterday, we touched in the comments on the concept of dated voice, looking at slang and its changes since the 80s. But the actual mechanics of my tongue and lips, trained in a different generation, are themselves probably a giveaway of my age.

In the same way that, say Rosalind Russell's or Katherine Hepburn's youthful staccato and volume make people think that the acting in old movies was unnaturalistic, perhaps - my own seventies and eighties infused rhythms and inflections are distinct from the modes of speech in the under-thirty-five set right now, and probably sound artificial, if not downright lazy. It may be a more accurate signifier of my age than the old "check a woman's hands and elbows to see how old she really is" thing.

And oddly enough: Rosalind Russell was the absolute mistress of vocal creak ...

**Lest we think I'm talking only about female voices;

some of the most egregious infantile pronunciation currently available... 

Forgivness is Loss

I'm going to do THAT Star Trek fan thing. I'm going to discuss an immensely serious issue, and couch it in the context of an episode of Deep Space Nine. It still may be worth reading anyway.

Doing this, I do not mean to trivialize human tragedy - and certainly not to praise Trek because/fangirl - but to point to one of the billion ways our culture - even pop culture - faces off with the nastiest elements of human nature ...

... and to recognize that sometimes, what we have to say with entertainment actually has something worthwhile to say about the history of human behavior.



Inevitable Trek Context (caveat/disclaimers for non-Trek-ites)

When DS9 came out, it was not universally adored. For one, it took place on a fixed space station instead of as space *ship*, which could go from place to place to place, and allowed for Alien of the Week eps, and may or may not have allowed character arcs to exist at all. For two, it took a dispiriting view of humanity-by-way-of-humans-and-aliens some found objectionable, in light of Gene Roddenberry's vision of a future mankind divested of money, illness (to a major degree), bigotry, and, frequently, many of its clothes. DS9 flew in the face of the enlightened evolution of TOS and TNG.

But that vision of human development had become at times insufferably smug, and shut down certain ways of telling stories that deal with the fundamental issues at the heart of Trek, and science fiction more generally.

DS9 debuted a story of a world fresh off fifty years' brutal occupation, and developed into the chronicle of a bitter war which actually affected its core ensemble (and many of its more peripheral characters) in genuinely terrible ways. It presented disharmonies - and even shone a light onto prejudices of previous Trek outings, taking on the presentation of the Ferengi, for instance - which had for years been seen as a rightly offensive caricature of anti-semitic stereotypes. DS9 dealt with religion in a way and with a depth and continuity that none of the previous series could, always in motion and never around any one culture long enough to really look at it sincerely.

DS9 was "dark."


***


It is with no disrespect nor trivialization that I turn to the news which prompted this post: that changes in German law initiated in 2011, after a retired Ohio auto worker was brought to trial for his role as a Nazi guard at the Sobibor concentration camp, have led to the opening of prosecution against other surviving persons who worked in the camps. Reinhold Hanning, at age ninety-four, is about to face trial for his own role as an SS guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau.


***


How Can This Have Anything to Do With Trek?

The connection is stark and direct, actually.

In "Duet", episode nineteen of season of Deep Space Nine, we are brought face to face with The Butcher of Gallitep, an occupying officer in charge of what essentially was a concentration camp run by occupying Cardassians on Bajor, something of a host planet to the space station, and home planet of core ensemble character, Major Kira, liaison officer to the Federation presence on the station.

An anonymous Cardassian traveler stopping at DS9 is detained almost by happenstance, because he is found to have a rare disease common only to those exposed to conditions at the camp at Gallitep. Clearly not a Bajoran victim of the place, we learn soon enough that this man turns out to have been none other than the Cardassian overseeing officer of the facility, The Butcher of Gallitep himself.

Kira, a resistance fighter who has risen from the ashes of her oppressed planet's release from occupation, is a passionate, partisan survivor. She instantly wants to punish The Butcher, and wins the privilege of taking on the investigation into this man, with an eye toward his prosecution.

It is Kira's own investigation that turns up the tragic, horrific truth: the man in custody is not The Butcher ... but was a file clerk at Gallitep, who has disguised himself as The Butcher. He is tormented with guilt because of the actions of his people, and his own banal, administrative role in the rape of Kira's world, that he has come to the station in order to bring about his own execution ... and perhaps, in the guise of The Butcher, to provide the Bajorans with a marquee defendant ...

The scenes the file clerk plays as The Butcher are genuinely harrowing TV - brutal, unrepentant, self-righteous. The scenes once his true identity are discovered are bruisingly sensitive, fraught, and intelligent. The show and the episode are as static and set-bound as the Trek of popular imagination, but this script is a stunner - made in a time where we had not yet applied cinematic production values, budgets, and expectations to serial science fiction - or any television at all - the show makes the most of its drama without these things.

Philosophically, "Duet" honors the questions it raises not by answering them, but by respecting them as perhaps ultimately unanswerable: no outcome can satisfy all witnesses. And any judicial proceeding is as much about its witnesses as it is about its plaintiffs or defendants, and rulings.


In the end, the episode is about loss - and yet, *what* is lost? For Kira, some prejudices. Some rigidity. And her convictions.

Is there virtue, in paring down a survivor's sustaining beliefs?

Kira has to deal, throughout the whole of this series, with the sickening giddiness that comes not after the world is torn from beneath her feet, but after the person that makes her is constantly and continually deconstructed, through the years following her redemption from Cardiassian overlordship. She has gained a certain freedom, but lost so much of the core of what has sustained her. She is forced, over and over, and no matter how much she grows, to lose still more - in order to grow still more. It is both the most sublime outcome for someone who would never submit to victimhood, and yet a continuing punishment to her, at the ghost hands of Cardassians long gone - and constantly reappearing, to reopen old wounds.

It is against this dynamic the firmness of her faith, of the religion of the Bajoran people (explicitly corrupt, and yet meaningful to its adherents) is represented.


***


It is beyond me utterly to grapple even with the questions raised in "Duet" - and beyond comprehension for me to contemplate "answers" to the question of what contemporary Nazi prosecutions mean for the world. I believe in consequences for atrocity and injustice. I also question whether humanity is the best provider of those, though the existence of such questioning CANNOT mean that we should throw up our hands and never punish, never seek justice.



One of my oldest friends in the world - so long a friend he is family - is a defense attorney, and a Jew.

He said to me once, "The system is not always good, but it is the best in the world, and I am proud to be part of it." He looked across the room, and said, "When it works, it is gratifying."
He said this while we were breaking bread together at the restaurant of a client he had saved from injustice. I will never forget it.

And now, for Hanning, for the survivors, I can do only this, in the face of Nazi prosecution so many years beyond the regime: pray that he is right - and that it works.

Falling

There are two great usages of the concept of "to fall" in English, to which modern ears are no longer very well attuned, and which twine around one another.

A fallen woman, in antique parlance, was a woman - married or not - who has lost her virtue. Virtue is another of those concepts whose meaning has changed (at the very least), but it is not the topic today.

These days, as sneeringly as a woman may be treated for this or that infraction against other people's morality, it is little likely to be the death of her - at least, outside of contexts I don't propose to write about just now. My mother thinks Miley Cyrus is SCUM (her word) - largely because Miley, less a person than a child raised to be a product, has played into one of the major product marketing techniques of American popular culture, sex. Women who marry rich are as likely to be congratulated as written off for golddigging bimbos, but few observing one appreciate the finer points of her humanity. Britney Spears was the very paragon for a certain set of younger cousins of mine, as long as she touted her purported virginity, but she lost steam with many through a series of ill-timed underpantsless photos and that one time she shaved her daft little head.

Sigh.

But Miley has not been shamed out of society, and certainly the pariah has become staple to a leering community of celebrity  consumers - who literally DO *consume* people famous for five minutes, fifteen, or even almost an hour. Reality TV is built most often on the need to feel superior, even as we aspire to this or that thing such-and-such celebrity owns/product places in their "life".

There was a time it would have taken only the hint of impropriety to destroy a woman. One named Theresa Longworth spent a great deal of her life fighting the destruction of her reputation; and, to this day, the very sexual details of her existence perhaps outlive any sense of how profoundly distressing it must have been for her to have those things so much as imagined. Novels we still read today turn on the virtue of women whose wellbeing depended upon its never being questioned, never being destroyed.

To fall, for a woman, has through history been as fundamental a peril as the fall of Lucifer himself. To be thrown from society has been for MOST women - or anyone at all - through history, the most violent punishment conceivable (another aspect of a quote brought up this week in my comments).

Outcast. To many modern, especially American, ears, the term equates to the kid who gets bullied, or the million invisible mentally ill or imprisoned or otherwise "marginalized" people we rarely see, or try not to.

But in its practical, fundamental sense, it is those whom a community have put into the outer darkness.

This is no small thing, to be alone. Life today may be built to accommodate it, but the life lived solitary is still considered abnormal, and we punish people for living thus, whether they have chosen it or not. I've had my rants and fears about my social marginality.

But I have never been put aside, forsaken, nor shunned.

I have never fallen. Society has not shut me out, I have chosen and found my own place, but never been excluded.


The profundity of shunning is difficult to convey anymore, I think.

An awful lot of us have experienced it to one degree or another, but the ancient practice of social punishment has found a new face, and works in ways just as impenetrable to understand as The Past is for us to comprehend.


I know those who have fallen away ...

But I know nobody who has had to be a forsaken woman ... who has been denied fire and shelter ... who has fallen ...

"As soon as we have achieved normality - whatever that is."

Nerdly brownie points to the first reader who nails the reference in today's title.

Normality has been much in the forefront of my conversations and reading for a few months now. An old friend of mine resurfaced after decades, and has had me looking at the state of mental illness in our culture and communities, but also: I'm a writer, and there are a lot of writers who consider being offbeat to be an important part of the identity.

My response to this is a certain bewilderment. Where did these people get the idea there is such a thing as normal?

My old friend - let's call him MOFF, because Star Wars is much at the forefront of our culture, too, right now, and y'all know I have this thing for acronyms - suffers anxiety and depression to the tune of actually being on disability. Many Americans are aware just how difficult it is to get disability in our country, so consider the context here. This is someone who has to take a Xanax, just to be on the safe side, in order to complete the task of sending out Christmas cards.

Now, as for me, I deal with that particular piece of stress by simply failing to send cards at all, for something like the last eighteen years. I hate drugs.

But MOFF and I have discussed normality at length, both as a subject of curiosity, and as a problematic goal/desire. It is a great desire of his, to be able to live a "normal" life ...

Interestingly, in he earlier iteration of our friendship, which was a bit more romantic and would make a great story I do not intend to tell y'all, he was often concerned with the same thing. What he considered to be his deviations from the norm were different matters, but the desire was the same; indeed, even the anxiety was there, all the way back then.

And, even then, I'd laugh him off and dismiss him, "Even my MOM knows there's no such thing as normal."

Which is true. My mom, who is as conventional as conventional gets in some ways, has always maintained - and taught me and my brother - that, really, "normal" is not really out there. It's a convenient construct, makes for a good context to tell a story which inevitably deviates, and gives us a sense of stability and reassurance. But, at bottom, "normal" is a sham. Nobody who seems it or claims it can withstand an honest investigation into their utter ordinariness.

So I've never been able to believe in "normal" and I can actually *feel* myself getting insufferable, sometimes, reassuring MOFF that "everyone feels what you do" TO SOME EXTENT or SOMETIMES or whatever palliative I wield at him in any given conversation. But even in those, I know that that is the very problem. What he experiences is multi-track, is unending, and is not something to be "got over" the way most of us have to in order to get on with a day. It's not merely brain chemicals, it's an emotional paralysis which - universal as it may be in moments or situations - is singular in its implacability.

I feel the way he does, sure. For a day, or for that one minute during PMS when I actually enjoy submitting to the weepies - or even for a few months, off and on, when I have to look for a job or am missing Mr. X, or whatever pain I may have to endure.

I've never experienced pain like this - the fear and hope conglomerated, influencing my entire life to the extent of in fact *becoming* the life I have left to lead.

I may not believe in "normal" - but I don't have to live so decidedly outside its apparent existence. I may not believe in "normal" - but I am not denied it, either.



So when writers start talking about how all writers are weird, or how all our work is offbeat - I actually recoil, emotionally.

I am not normal, no. But that's only because normal is a stupid idea to start with.

And my writing ... if it is offbeat at all, it's only in the fact that I wrote about a Frankish king most Americans haven't heard of, or much about at any rate. It's not because my form is innovative, nor my genre exceptional. If anything, the novels I've worked on are "traditional" in the extreme ....



... and here we go down the rabbit hole of whether "traditional" exists either: which I say it does not.



The need to categorize and quantify is so strong in our brains. We need to believe ourselves to be some thing or another, we need to believe others are, we need to think the world has order - in order that we may participate in it, or to rebel against it. We need a PICTURE - to view the landscape, or the people in it, or the acts played out upon it, in some coherent way.

We *need* "normal" - "traditional" ...

I depend on it. So do you. What form you depend upon is the question (and I hope someone will comment upon their framework, their "normal" and "traditional" - especially now, at a time so many experience their presence and absence with such acuteness).


And every one of us knows, there is no such thing.

Just ask my mom.

Collection

The Caustic Cover Critic has happened upon a truly stunning trove of wonderfully bewildering cover designs. Some are hilarious, some titillating in the most inappropriate way, many are just head-scratchers ...

The Atlantic has an intriguing look (listen?) at the way we talk on YouTube. Linguistics aren't just for the written word, kids!

Terrorism and radicalization – not just for the “other” anymore. One of the problems with dismissing a terrorist as being mentally ill is the burden of stigma loaded upon those who suffer mental illness and never harm a soul (the majority, by the way).

“Are we worshipping the same Jesus?”

A close reading of the Bible finds that one of its most common refrains sung by angels, humans and Christ alike is ‘Do not be afraid.’

THIS is the “joy” of Biblical spirituality. It has been a powerful message through the ages – “nothing to fear but fear itself” – “fear not” – “fear is the garden of sin” – “the enemy is fear” – “G-d gave us a spirit not of fear, but of power and love” – “Fear is stupid. So are regrets.”

 

The History Girls has a sad post here. "Our united voices counted for nothing against the commercial imperatives of a shop that employs no local people, sells nothing that we would want to buy (which would count as 'sustainable development') and sources most of its merchandise in far countries."

The Atlantic has another video illustrating a wonderfully diverse sample of the known history of hair styling. This one isn't all about white folks in Europe; a nice look, and some cool music too. They did get the date of the sidecut wrong, though - I was far from the first, and I had that going in 1985.

Pride and Prejudice and Privilege

Of all the literary scandals I've read in my day, holy heck is this a fascinating ethical exploration.

This cropped up in Janet's blog today, and for once the result was a comments section I did *not* find comfortable to read, so I am not linking it. It is only where I learned of this anyway, so go to the link above if you are curious about the deeper details. Skip over a LENGTHY intro all about rules, and most of a long series of paragraphs beginning with "I" and get to the one that begins with "I chose a strange and funny and rueful poem" and read from there.

The crux of the issue is a white male poet who submitted under an Asian (or Asian-sounding; I am not the one to verify other cultures' nomenclature) name, and whose poem was chosen for the Best American Poetry 2015 ... admittedly and partially because of this.

The examination of the man who made this choice, and both his culpability and the reasons for it, is devastatingly and honorably honest in the rarest way.

(T)here was no doubt that I would pull that fucking poem because of that deceitful pseudonym. But I realized that I would primarily be jettisoning the poem because of my own sense of embarrassment. I would have pulled it because I didn't want to hear people say, "Oh, look at the big Indian writer conned by the white guy." I would have dumped the poem because of my vanity. ...  I had to keep that pseudonymous poem in the anthology because it would have been dishonest to do otherwise.

That last sentence had to be an incredibly difficult conclusion to reach, and the conclusion of the post itself, Sherman Alexie's examination of his own identity, is a great example of integrity, whatever else the controversy may have borne for him.


It hasn't occurred to me to blog about this, but somehow it seems relevant in a sidelong way now.

At a very different point on an identity spectrum that spans not a line, but an entire plane and perhaps three dimensions, lies one Caitlyn Jenner. I've found myself watching a good deal of "I Am Cait", the reality show she launched along with the revolution in her own identity. It's the sort of thing I wanted to resist; frankly, it was unformed but in my mind to ignore the whole show attendant upon her transition, thereby proving my lack of prejudice (and maintaining a mile-wide perimeter against anything even Kardashian-adjacent). But, thanks to its ubiquity across many channels and many weeks, I caught the Diane Sawyer interview, and ended up reluctantly intrigued.

The theme of the reality show that has struck me far more than the splashy headline of "ooh, trans person" has by far and away been its examination of privilege.

Note that I do not say HER examination of privilege; because she went into the show with expectations that she would be exploring the process of gender transition, dealing with her family and her identity and the pain and the liberty she now has in her own skin, which has finally come to resemble the sense of self she's always harbored and hidden and lived with all her life.

But the fact is, Caitlyn's role - which she seems eager to adopt and live up to - has become that of an avatar for an entire "community" of transgender people ... and yet, "community" is a foolish term, because inherently the deepest problems with transgender individuals is that of isolation and even self-denial ... and yet, Caitlyn's experience is like NOTHING any other has ever experienced, or probably ever will.

For one, Caitlyn is transitioning at a time in her life which is not, perhaps (I am no judge here) typical of the experience.

She is also essentially chairing a public discourse and her own personal experience from a position of wealth and power pretty much nobody else in her position has ever possessed.

And the show is illustrating, in pretty clear detail, just how powerful Caitlyn's privilege is. The new trans friends with whom she is surrounding herself are keeping her pretty honest at every turn ("Why do you keep saying THEY when you talk about trans people? You are a trans person!" ... "You keep saying how normal we are. This is because you are aware of the freak factor." ... "YES, many trans women turn to sex work; not a lot of us have the privilege you do, and being trans can make it harder to keep a job, or lose you one if you have it." and so on). They are begging her to look at the power she wields, having been Bruce Jenner for as long as she felt she must or could hide - and to use it.

In a year when I've spent so much time examining my own privilege, to watch someone with this much of it trying to do the same, and doing so earnestly, if sometimes imperfectly, has been an unexpected lens through which to examine someone's transition into a physical body that aligns with their sense of self better than the one issued at birth.

Caitlyn has made a hell of an avatar. Statuesque and showing pride as well as vulnerability, gorgeously attired and constantly attended, the chrysalis has opened and someone unexpected and in some ways both spectacular and delicate seems to be emerging.

I don't essentially admire Jenner as a woman, any more than I did before we knew she was, particularly; but I respect her stepping up, acknowledging her power in a position which for most is the opposite of powerful, and trying to do good. Even for her, it cannot be easy; just as admitting his bias has hardly been easy for Alexie, in a situation he could have avoided if he chose to.

Caitlyn Jenner could have avoided this ... and yet, could not. Not while living with the fullest integrity.

Sherman Alexie could have avoided the controversy, too ... and yet, could not. He clearly placed honesty higher than comfort, and that is never simple, never easy.

Withdrawing From the Moral Bank --- OR --- "I Want the Vaccuum"

The odd thing about this article, and a few others I looked at when I found it, was the repeated idea that transactional rectitude is unconscious.  How many times a day do you witness someone saying, or do the office break room chat-and agree, that “if it’s for someone’s birthday, the cake has no calories” or fill-in-your-equivalency … ?  Or the “I worked out, I can have more – or I’m GOING to work out (I swear!), I can have more”, or what have you.  Not only is this conscious, the joke of it is culturally enshrined by now – that we acknowledge some foible with a laugh, but we foible away nonetheless, even seeking approval for some exchange or other.

It’s most often caloric, in American culture at least, but I’ve certainly seen people explicitly note their moral or social cred before whipping out some racist or privilege-blind remark or other.  The old “but I have (such and such minority) friends” clause seems to go far, for a lot of us, in excusing saying things it would otherwise be unthinkable to voice publicly.  I’ve heard someone describe Blacks as “monkeys”, who then went on to use that old saw.  (Fortunately, not someone I’ve been associated with for decades now.)

As to the gas-guzzling vehicle owner boggling minds by purchasing locally or ecologically, I’m highly amused by the use of Whole Foods as some sort of example of the ultimate in moral retail.  Whole Foods is a wildly cache’ brand, affordable frankly to few, and appealing more for its elitist snootery than for its marvelous righteousness.  I am acquainted with exactly nobody who could ever afford to shop there exclusively for food, and those I know who shop there at all do so precisely to splurge in one way or another.  Splurge.  Not the baseline I would have used, in terms of examining the motivations and/or behavior of the population at large, who would go broke in a week trying to feed a family at their prices.

I drive a Prius, but it is not a motorized reservoir, for me, of opportunities to waste in other areas.  Per the comments at the first link above, I drive it because it reduces my gas consumption – which, while nicely affecting my carbon footprint, is also cheaper in what I hope will be a long run.  I also put out recycling every time they come to pick it up – but produce, as a single-person household, barely enough garbage to fill the extremely huge rollaway bin provided by the county in the space of a *month*.  This isn’t, for me, a matter of morality except insofar as I consider profligacy in any form – drinking, eating, spending, or using the resources of my environment – generally to be avoided.  I like my driver’s license, current wardrobe, credit rating/savings, and planet more than I do the rewards of most behaviors which could, in excess, endanger these things.  It would be a pretty tough row to hoe, at that, destroying any one of these things – for myself OR for anybody else, depending on the scale of my effects in this world.  I like the garden growing as it is, as it were.

Like a lot of women, I certainly enjoy some level of Martyr’s Complex – “ahh, I work so hard, and it’s just never done” – but I keep two things on hand at all times to prevent too much self indulgence.  One is gratitude:  that my life is cram-STUFFED with blessings (and, that thing noted above, with privilege I never did anything to earn nor deserve).  Two, self awareness.  If I let myself believe for one second I ever deserved any of the good I’ve got, I won’t deserve one iota of it.  Ever.

It’s like this, in shorthand:  I live my life striving to be good enough for those who love me.

I used to say “my dog” – but now I have dog and cat, and let it be said, I also understand the enormity of the love of those who’ve proven willing to tolerate me in their lives.  I have a LOT to live up to, if the love in one’s life is any measure, and to deserve it all will take beyond all my life to even hope to attain.

If I dented whatever wee and paltry contributions my life provides in this world, because I believed my contributions were a sort of personal savings account – an annuity of “goodness” I could DRAW from as if there were some right to that – then there is no contribution at all.  And if I make no contribution to the world, attaching the strings of self-indulgence to even the smallest of “good” acts (with, of course, myself as the judge of what may be good), I’m lost to ever being good “enough” for the abundance I have been given.

You never get to be good enough for your dog, being an emotional/moral/righteous accountant.  You can never pay back anyone – if you consider life anything that can be balanced like a checkbook.

Yeah, I’ll eat far too many Chee-tos in one sitting, and I accidentally leave the AC on too cold for too long, when I set it to “hold” while I was sweating and working, and forgot to put it back on schedule.  When it comes to my writing - my unpaid job - I am excuse-maker extraordinaire:  "fallow time" or "my computer is on Safe Mode" or "I've been wiped out from work for three weeks - and I haven't had a vacation in three YEARS now" make it all to easy to do other things than quering or researching.  That desk I was on about this week is in some ways, "I'll start the diet Monday" of my unpaid/unpublished authorial career.  I just failed, for three weeks, to do my little calesthenics at my desk, and don’t think the size of my arms doesn’t reflect the lassitude.

But:  don't think I don't know when I'm bargaining with myself (a.k.a. "the Devil") - and cheating myself, all in the same acts.

But #2):  I also don't exchange eating crap for drinking a diet soda, and I don’t tell myself there’s no sin nor effect, when I push life’s balances out of whack.  I even participate in the “well someone worked so hard to make these brownies, surely I have to have another one” games we all sometimes play.  Frankly, playing games SOMETIMES is a part of the pleasure of life.

Just ask my dog.

Then watch, and see if she cheats on her taxes because she was nice to ME today …

THAT House on the Block

The yard is badly in need of mowing right now - not only has spring finally arrived, but we've had a great deal of rain, so (where Penelope hasn't worn it out running along the fence - which will save me some weed-eating!) it's a bit thick.  I won't say "lush", because what's really thick right now is the early-spring growth of rubbery purple weed flowers, which tend to be clumpy and fail to live up to the suburban ideal of pure green grass.  My neighbors' homes have a lovely growth of Easter grass right now, but my place is not the beauty of the block.

It wouldn't take much work, nor much time - but since Wednesday I've had a fairly severe case of instant allergies, and mowing the grass, no matter how community-minded it may be, just is not on my list, even though in actuality I'd kind of like the time outside in a wonderful breeze, and the exercise.  Note to intrepid suburban kids anywhere:  if you showed up at my door right now, I'd gladly pay you to take care of this for me, providing gas and mower personally.  Just sayin' - if you want a buck, the scruffy house on the block might be for you.

Today is the first day I've had open windows, and I did start the meds on Wednesday night.  I think it's helped, at least as far as beginning to fight the overarching symptoms of seasonal allergies - itchy eyes, SNEEZING - but the more immediate symptoms - sore throat, congestion, laryngitis - are tenacious.  They spawn further symptoms of their own - mouth-breathing, for instance, which then leads to chapped lips and feeling dehydrated, which leads to constant water-drinking, which leads to feeling bloated.  I'm almost fascinated at the daisy-chain of cause, effect, and annoyance - but, honestly, I don't actually feel as rotten as, for instance, I sounded this morning at nearly ELEVEN a.m. when my mom called and I was still half-zonked on nighttime cold/allergy pills.  Oops.

A bit of high-cacao chocolate being my preferred caffeine delivery method, I induced Godiva therapy after talking with her, and have done a lot at least upstairs.  On the main floor, I need to shove enough furniture out of the way to remove The Winter Rug - yes, it's a stupid idea; dusty and heavy-breathing-inducing (and if I can't mow the grass, how can I move a 200-pound rug?), but it's my idea and I'm all into it.

And here we have the point of this post.  I've written here many times about what it's like living alone, but the underlying issue is almost cultural.  The nuclear family ideal, and its analogue, Living Independently, make "going out on your own" sound like the way we're all supposed to structure our lives.  Living Independently, of course - that thing where we're expected to leave the nest at eighteen and live on our own until we create our own nuclear family with McMansion, starter-spouse, 2.38 children, and 2.38 cars - is the shaming device we use against such adults as have to go home to mom and dad for one reason or another.  I internalized Living Independently really early, and am not ready to give it up (the idea of living with my mom if, G-d forbid, she were ever widowed again, for instance, is beyond my ability to tolerate).  But it comes with its price.  And its fears.

It's not just the daily inconveniences, when I have to do EVERY last thing in the world that needs to be done, and perpetually fall short, by the estimation of an awful lot of people who see fit to have ideas about what needs to be done in my house, personal life, etc.  My finances, far from being my own as an Independent Woman, are the subject of MANY people's speculation and advice - and not just people I consider to be close family or friends.  "You should buy a such-and-such car" is the easy expectation of people I hardly know with whom I casually mention I have been looking.  Of course, mentioning such a thing is guaranteed to bring that on, but I don't even have a wife I can hide behind to demur on the more insistent suggestions of people who apparently know my needs better than I do ...

So it's an odd thing.  The more independent we are in the society I happen to have grown up in, the LESS autonomy people ascribe to my way of living.  People give advice to any and all, of course, but it *feels* like the advice to a single woman has a special insistence.

We've created a world in which "failing" to live independently is shamed and unnatural (natural as multi-generational living was for thousands of years before the 20th century), but doing so carries not only its own judgments, but also the fears and perils that go with ageing with no partner, no family, nobody in the home.  It's not a minor price to pay for the pride and accomplishment of living on our own terms, and it's something I wrestle with all the time.  The responsibility is both a matter of pride and chagrin - and, while I think I may be unable ever to be the person who'd blend again with my mom, or a geriatric roommate situation a'la The Golden Girls, I'm hardly gratified by the prospect of the next twenty or forty years of what it *really* means to be on my own.

Pride wins, with me (... apparently ...), but it's not because I never think about whether I could be wrong.  I've fulfilled some of the expectations of my upbringing, and it's beyond me to honestly imagine anything I'd change.  But that doesn't mean I think I've done everything just right.  Life *shouldn't* feel like it's gone exactly right, I think in a way.  If we felt completely righteous and satisfied - what would there be to work on in ourselves, or for others?

And who's going to do the dusting, with me here blogging?  A good question.  And I'm off ...

Except the Admin

Throughout my career, I've lived under the caveat, "except the admin."

What I mean by this is, I go to meetings about employee engagement or corporate structure, or participate in training and so on geared to the widest possible swath of a given employee population - and, almost always, the target as envisioned by committee can be defined as "everyone who works here from execs to analysts - except the admins."  Administrative support is always just to one side of whatever is being discussed, always just outside given parameters of training, discussion, expectation, what have you.  I don't think I've ever even SEEN a performance evaluation which relevantly expresses the nature of my job nor provides for development.

It doesn't particularly bug me, but I have brought it up before at meetings throughout the years - "you are interested in diversity but there's always this 'except the admin' configuration" - "this training is not relevant to my job, but there are things that are which are not addressed and should be" - "there is no on-boarding process for admins" - and on and on.

April marks Administrative Professionals Month, and we just completed Women's History Month and right before that was Black History Month.  During each of these months every year, there are voices saying "I'm more than the month (or even the day) you've assigned me for relevance" but these are always ignored.  The fact that Women and Admins fall right next to each other isn't lost on me either - it's no accident that every year when I attend Administrative Professionals events, if there's a man involved at all, he's probably a speaker and not anyone employed in "assisting" anyone for a living and by title.

So it is perhaps odd - and it is certainly maddening - that throughout my entire life, whenever I have heard a story about equal pay for women (happy April Fool's everyone: this is a relevant topic after all) *I* have mentally pronounced the marginalizer:  "Except the admin."

Women don't get paid as much as men in comparable positions.

Admins don't get paid as much as ANYBODY, period.  Ever.

Again, I signed up for it, and I am not starving.  But it's a galling and absolute fact that my chosen profession is seen as less "professional" than others, across the board.  I didn't get an MBA, I didn't go to Wharton, I don't travel for meetings (indeed, if  I can help it, I don't participate in meetings at all except to implement them for those poor souls who must).  I bring, in short, less "value" to an employer.  I worked at one place once, where it was all but explicit that admins were nothing but "OVERHEAD" and were a painful necessity.  This was very heavily part of the office culture.

I don't make $.80 on any man's dollar.  I make $.60 to ANYONE else's dollar.

One of the aspects of being an admin is that, in many jobs, we're the ones who know what everyone's pay is.  And I've never known anyone in any group ever who made even within a 20% margin of as little as I did.  Indeed, it's often as much as a 50% jump between my solitary salary and the next-lowest-paid member of a team.  There is nothing whatever unusual in that.


All this is not to complain, oddly enough, that I don't get paid what I should.  If I have a complaint, it is that people imagine what I do is "menial."

I actually ran across that word just this past week, on LinkedIn.  Some frothy article or other about job seekers - and a commenter who listed herself as an EVP, telling the supposedly heart-touching story of her youthful executive aspirations, subsequent wife-dom and widowhood, and how when she came back into the workforce she had only "menial" CSR and admin work for options - oh, but (let the music swell now) she told the world to stuff that MENIAL work and now she's an EVP.

People like this, who believe my work is "menial", perpetuate a classist and heirarchical culture in the workplace which is entirely inappropriate to the actual efficient running of ANY organization.  Without us "menials", our friend the EVP - and any company as a whole - would not survive for one day.  There isn't an industry, service, nor office which can be run without administration.

One of the difficulties I had in leaving my last job was the degree to which my team understood and valued what I provided for them, objectively and subjectively as well.  Several of them were in the habit of calling me "Goddess" - which might be a patronizing joke in some quarters, but which was a clear marker of their deference to my armament in service of their goals.  One of my executives happily called me Madam Secretary when he realized my relationship to the term, and it was a mutually agreed-upon title of respect.  He even looked for a long time one April, trying to find a card for Admin's Day or Week or whatever, that had the word on it.  "Do you know how hard it is to find a card with 'secretary' on it instead of admin?"

I still have the card.  I still use the gifts he gave me, too.  They were as much appreciated as I was.

I've had jobs where I wasn't given recognition and appreciation.  One, in fact, I lost on March 31 some years back.  I always remember it as the lousiest April Fool's joke ever - "they even got the DATE wrong."  But in fact I was glad to be out of there; I'd been looking for months before they fired me.

And even there, one of my bosses paid me a personal visit one day, to express his outrage that I'd been laid off.  Many of us had, but to my knowledge I was the only one he reached out to like that.



What I do is important.  What I do:  I really love.  You can have your paychecks and your meetings and your TRAVEL, all you non-"menial" types who don't get what I do at all (and who think there's something wrong with me for doing it).  People like that I am immensely grateful I don't have to work with.

The people I *do* work with are still learning just what I have to give.  I'm learning my way around what I can provide and even improve.  In the end, it's a nice time to celebrate my little "month" (or week or day, or whatever anyone gives and/or calls it).  The weather's just getting warmed up ... and so am I ...