and hardly slept last night but i want to post anyway. because i’m so angry about the fact that a man who hates women randomly shot up a fitness club around here. do any of you non-pittsburghers even know that that happened? did it make the news at all?
why did my dad call me to see if i was okay when those three cops were killed? (yeah, the cops were killed about a mile from my home, and this gym is pretty far away– it isn’t even technically in pittsburgh, but he doesn’t know that) but not now–i mean, i’m a woman. blatant misogyny like this is a threat TO MY LIFE, it’s a threat to the lives of all women. but oh, who cares? nobody’s going to throw a benefit concert for the families of these three women, even though one was a single mother with a fifteen-year-old son. they threw a benefit concert for the families of those cops, even though the pension for an officer killed in the line of duty is HUGE. but women getting murdered is just business as usual.
so fucked up. i could go on and on, but hopefully most of you understand the full ramifications of this and i don’t have to explain. adding insult to injury, the articles about these women in memoriam all go on and on and on about their bright smiles, their consideration for others, their subservience. when surely, surely, they did something else with their lives besides fucking smile. but who’ll remember now?
i spent nearly all of yesterday being angry with people i love for their inability to see the big picture, the focus on completely petty details, the complete & utter unwillingness to change for the better. the endless whining, the wheels spinning in the mud when a little brutally honest self-examination, and a commitment to do the hard and unglamorous work of real change could really go a long way. but no, why would anyone want to do that?
i am just frustrated. frustrated at my own complacency & tiredness just as much, if not more, as anyone else’s. no, i don’t wanna (re-)join facebook so i can read everyone’s status updates while my novel goes unwritten. i don’t want to play a video-game version of a farm when real farms are dying. why is this so hard for people to understand?
i am lucky that i have a few friends who unquestionably Get It. lucky that i have a cute lover who will let me read derrick jensen to him as he soaks the dirt off his body in my clawfoot bathtub. in these steam-filled moments, in those curry-and-kale moments surrounded by greenery with the noise of the freight train wafting in, i am happy. but those moments are just moments. good & life-sustaining & beautiful, but just moments nonetheless.
it’s been a while since i’ve had one of those moments looking at the site, where someone sends in something you didn’t write, but could have. i am at the office, feeling kind of jarred. i’m pretty cool with most of my secrets. i don’t have any secrets, really. but you know when you have a secret and don’t even know it and someone reveals it? whoa. it’s quite an indescribable feeling.
i have more going on in my life. but the internet has finally released its vise-like grip on my attention. it feels great. i’ve been doing a lot of writing, but probably not the kind of writing you’d expect. thus, no time, no time for blogs. but living, lots and lots of time for that.
my boss has either been absent from the office, or busy with other stuff all day, so i’ve spent most of the day reading “jesse in jail”, which is a really intense website full of letters from a transdude who did 3 months in a federal (women’s) prison for protesting the school of the americas. it’s beautiful and inspiring and haunting, especially the part called 32 bones. it was a bit of a tear-jerker, which is kind of lousy for the office, but whatever. there’s a link on the left-hand side, if you’d like to read it (which i highly suggest you do, especially if you fancy yourself some sort of prison activist)
what else? me and amanda had our FIRST OFFICIAL OUTDOORS FRIDAY LUNCH DATE of 2009. yes! thanks to global warming, no cowering in a house or coffee shop. back to the cannon at arsenal park, which is where we belong. well, i didn’t quite make it to the cannon, as it was swarming with teen boys when i got there & i wasn’t really in the mood to be called a faggot repeatedly. so we lunched on the wall, which was just as good.
today my boss asked me, out of nowhere, “how many pairs of shoes do you have?” i replied, “ten.” he said, “every woman should have at least ten pairs of shoes!” i said, “but i only really wear three on a regular basis.” he pondered this for a second, and then said, “so the rest are in hibernation. that’s great!” and then we went back to work.
1. yesterday, i saw a mouse run across the floor & i screamed. my boss asked what was wrong and i told him about the mouse. he pondered that for a moment, and then said, in a truly hopeful and inspired voice that i cannot replicate via text on the internet: “great! let’s have it for lunch!” (for those of you not in the know, my boss is 78, extremely eccentric, and growing more bizarre by the day.)
2. there is one half of the basement i usually don’t go into, as it contains files from 1955-1980 and we usually don’t need those. but one day last month we did & i was confronted with this gem:
3. we have a new client who is crazy. okay, they’re all crazy, but this one especially so. whenever i call him, i’m not allowed to use his real name. i have to call him “mountain man” (because he lives on a mountain!). when i asked him why i have to do this, he said, “let’s keep them guessing, okay?” without saying who “them” might be. anyway, today he showed up for his appointment an hour early & proceeded to take a nap in the waiting room. he was woken up by my boss, coming back from lunch, shouting, “what the hell’s going on here?!!?” to which he replied, “mountain man’s taking a lil’ nap,”. my boss sniffed, “this isn’t a hotel!”
[in case you can't tell i had 2 cupz of office coffee even though i really shouldn't thanks to my heart. caffeine + anticipation making my toes curly against my shoes. it's so bright outside.]
