channonyarrow

This weekend, I need to clean up some bits of my life.

I found out yesterday - because my mother found out the day before - that a woman who abandoned their friendship about twenty years ago died last year. It's been really strange to realise that we've been talking about Berkeley without knowing that - even two weeks ago we had a conversation about friendship that included my mom saying that if Berkeley called her tomorrow she would be able to speak to her, that the pain of the severance had eased enough that she would want to know why. This was provoked by my saying that when I have a friend who abandons me (or who I suppose I abandon) I want to know why. I won't fight you for the right to maintain a friendship you're not interested in, but I want to know why you've decided you can't be my friend, because otherwise, there are just unresolved bits of me out there in the world.

This is something like the mouse tattoo, I suppose, for those who read that post, ages ago.

So I have two plans of attack. One is to write letters to people that I am no longer able to contact - an excellent example is Evil Chris The Ex. The idea came about when I found a love letter in a book in the Pitt-Rivers library. My theory is, if you write a letter to the person who is no longer part of your life, you take it to a library and put it in a book. It will, someday, get where it needs to go, wherever that is. The person who finds it may ignore it, but you have to assume that they were where it needed to be, and maybe they'll know something from your letter.

The other is to write letters to some people I know who are currently being out of contact. I do require certain levels of interaction to assume that we have a relationship, and if you're being unwilling to go to lunch with me, call me, or get coffee with me, I have to assume that we no longer have a relationship. If that's in error, I want to give these people the chance to know that this is what I think - without judgement, but it's not a friendship if it's been eight months since you've initiated contact with me. I learned that a long time ago - there are too many people in the world who are willing to let you contact them but with no invested interest themselves, and I can't have time for those people any longer. It's too hard, and it's too pointless. I'd rather find out that the relationship should be severed, because then at least we can wrap things up on the same page.

I never want to find out that someone's been waiting twenty years for me to pull my head out of my ass and in the meantime I've died. Never. I can't conceive of voluntarily doing that to someone; that's what the unresolved nature of one-sided friendship-cancelling does. I promise: I can hear that you no longer want to be my friend without killing myself.

I can't believe that this has happened - it is so much more painful than my grandfather's death, and that's one I thought was unresolved. But I knew him, I know that he thought that if it was meant to be, it would happen, and I know that my mother had the chance to see him before he died. For her, that situation is resolved, and for me, I have to trust that someday, wherever we are, I'll have the chance to talk to him again and he'll know why I didn't take the time to come visit this month.

Though if he hadn't died, I'd be writing this from Montana, "almost" only counts in horseshoes and handgrenades.

It's time to get this cleaned up.

Okay.

This is something that has bugged me for-fucking-ever, and that most authors, I think, don't actually, consciously think about. Hell, I don't like to think about it, if only because anthropology as a discipline has gone so ass-over-teakettle about identifying potential ~influences on one's work that you practically can't get to the essay without reading about how the author was once bitten by a moose or some shit, so obviously that influences their understanding of the natives of Bongobongostan, who cover themselves in paint and feathers pretty much solely because they don't live in a place that moose find very congenial. Yadda yadda yadda, it's important that we know that EE Evans-Pritchard wasn't ACTUALLY living with the Nuer when he wrote his umpty jillion books about them, WHATEVER, DONE.

However, as we all know, the internet is srs fucking bzns. The internet may even be Sparta, for all I know.

So let's all take a deep breath and realise something.

You are reading this through Livejournal. I am writing this through Livejournal. We are communicating via the medium of the internet, and the internet is preeeeetty fucking stratified by class. (It's also stratified by age, but unless someone wants to introduce me to a granny slasher, I don't care about that.)

We are communicating about a subject that I think is pretty fucking firmly the purview of at least the middle class, whatever that means nowadays. The internet, in other words, has become our leisure time.

And this would lead to what logical conclusion?

That we all are at least middle class, relatively privileged people.

We have the education, the skills, and the time to learn to negotiate the internet and use it where past generations used visiting the sick. Fine, so far as it goes, but all of that is the setup for what I wish to bitch about today, so if you're not following, reread the above paragraph. We are all privileged fuckers here.

I'm having trouble with voice in this, actually - this could easily be a dear author: die rant, given how much time I had to spend making some works social-class appropriate. We're gonna go with the fannish context, but know that there is significant overlap with ~real authors here.

So. We're all privileged fuckers, so obviously we invest all our time in figuring out new ways to stick Tab A into Slot B and go UNF UNF UNF as we do it. We are not fighting off cholera, bandits, police repression, censorship, we are not concentrating solely on finding food, shelter, clothing, our missing loved ones, etc. When something is for porn, you know that that thing is about the most decadent of the cultural elaborations since the Kwakiutl were tossing shit off the side of a cliff as a potlatch. In fact, the internet could be considered the willful destruction OF a civilisation, since so few of society's mores actually apply to it.

Why, then, in our pursuit of porn, do we not consider class when we're writing porn? I am not asking this because I get off on fucking Marxist-Leninist theory, or because I want everyone to have pity on the working man (ha! see what I did thar?), I'm asking because it is a reasonable fucking question.

I think that the assignation of bandom-villain status is classist. Here's why.

The three most common villains I've run across, where there is some other information to suggest that, you know, that might possibly be the tiniest bit of a misclassification, are Bert, Gabe, and William. Bert's the skeevy weird dude who - put your tinhats on with me - broke up with Gerard, Gabe's got creepy eyes and an intense personality and seemingly takes nothing seriously, and William is occasionally overly friendly with dudes, so he's obviously a slut.

These are the gimmes of bandom, and I am up to here with them.

Let's take 'em one at a time, shall we. We shall, because I fucking say so.

Bert: Okay, seriously, I kind of want to give him cookies and a hug, but he'd totally get lost in my cleavage. Bear in mind, this is one of the biggest assholes in MCR-centric fandom. He and Gerard were REAL close on Warped 2005 - REAL CLOSE. His mom, I think it was, gave him a picture of the two of them. BEFFIES 4EVA, at the very least. He is little, he is dirty, he is an ex addict, he is possibly slightly crazy in ways out of the norm for bands, who tend to be more than a little off level as it is. His girlfriend died of an overdose while pregnant with their child, his parents threw him out when he was a teenager for not adhering to their faith (Mormonism, BE SURPRISED) and he panhandled and lived at, I think, Quinn's house when he wasn't being homeless as fuck. He is possibly semi-openly bi; I seem to recall this, at any rate, but it's Bert, so who knows. He's pretty fearless about - well, about everything, but about stuff like labelling based on sexual orientation he makes all of FBR look like the shyest straight boys to ever walk the earth. He loves puppies, and his friends, and small children, and he tends not to do the very Scandinavian NO TOUCHY thing. Obviously, Bert is a skeevy dude who broke Gee's heart and deserves to hang, because his other pastime is curbstomping puppies.

Gabe: Conflicted dude. Don't believe me? Go read the lyrics to Being From Jersey Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry and come back. Done that? Good. Gabe wrote that song, so far as anyone knows, and this is a theory that flies to me, as a goodbye to the Jersey hardcore scene when he started Cobra Starship - and the scene, like it or not, is not really a place to float major, groundbreaking work. This song, for example, would not fly in the scene. He takes EVERYTHING waaaay too seriously (almost as seriously as William, actually) but is better at pretending like it's all bullshit, life's a game, and he's throwing the party at the end of the world. He started a band to change the world, for fuck's sake, and he's not shy about saying that - but unlike MCR, who also started a band to change the world and are deadly earnest about it, he hides it by saying that he had a vision of a cobra, who told him that humanity was fucked, and in the time left to us Gabe had to start a band to teach emo kids not to be such pussies and hipsters not to take themselves so seriously. He's not in this to save your life - except he totally is, he's just not saying it the same way. Obviously, Gabe is a creepy rapist because he wrote a song called "It's Warmer In The Basement" and also "The Church Of Hot Addiction".

William: This dude is a hider. Seriously. Don't believe me? Watch TAITV - there are very few shots of William where he's not acting like he's completely and totally aware of the camera even though he's TRYING not to be. He has no ability at ALL to forget that there's a camera in the room, and he comes off super earnest when he talks to the camera. He's a smart dude - 4.0 all the way through high school - and he's eloquent (sometimes I wish he would stop, actually, because it makes me a little bit nuts). But he is, from all I can see, simultaneously a nice guy - no one has ever said he was a fucking dick and they're not shy about saying that about Mike Carden, his bandmate - and a very shy one. So when he opens up physically, it's with pretty much three people: Gabe, Travis McCoy, and Nick Scimeca, who is not in a band. He's not even particularly touchy-feely with his band - unlike with MCR, or Panic, or FOB, some members of whom cannot get through a very short interview without touching. William also left home as a high school senior to live with Mike Carden and play music because his family disagreed so intensely with his choice of music as a profession that they wanted him to stop. He was working part time at the Gap, playing music part time, and going to school full time - and still making straight As and, for all I know, still playing on the baseball team. Obviously, William is a slut and never has had a problem in his life that couldn't be resolved by, basically, being white and pretty.

Now that I've proved I can regurgitate sufficient portions of the work other people have done, there is a point to this. The backgrounds and the crimes have been listed. Bert: skeevy because he broke Gee's heart. Gabe: creepy rapist because he's got weird eyes (I am never making this up). William: slut because he's shy and takes comfort from three very specific people.

Let's toss a monkeywrench in there.

Brendon: I don't like Panic, not one tiny bit. I will never like Panic. There is literally nothing they could do to get me to be a fan of theirs. As such, I am a lot fuzzier on the timeline of events here, but you can't be in scene fandom and not pick up a few things, so I'm gonna go the fuck ahead and hope that I have gotten this right. Brendon was also kicked out of his house for being not-sufficiently-Mormon and wanting to play music instead of going on mission. Brendon also worked part time and went to school. Brendon and his parents have, evidently, reconciled since it became obvious that playing music was the right decision, though everything I've seen suggests that relationship is a touch bit strained (I also expect it to fly apart if Spencer does any more ground-laying work for Brendon to come out as bi or gay.) Personally, if it were me, they could crawl on fucking broken glass to grovel at my feet and I'd not have shit to do with them, but that's me.

Brendon, however, does not get a bad rap in fandom. Brendon's a spaz, he's a musical prodigy, he looks hot in girl jeans (he has, I think, actually SAID that he HAS to wear girl jeans because of his butt, which is, uh, womanly at best) and he's VERY pretty, if you're into that sort of thing. I will never not want to slap Brendon in the face with a haddock, so I won't judge you, but I also won't judge whether he's hot. I don't even care if he is. But he is not a rapist, a slut, or a generally-all-purpose bad guy; in fact, when Brendon is characterised as a slut, the times I've seen, it's entirely more positive than it is when it's William being labeled.

Normally, I would throw my hands up in the air and stomp off and say "FINE, FUCK YOU ALL, BE WRONG IF YOU WANT," because there is nothing I can do about it if someone is wrong on the internet, short of stalking them, caging them, and gradually brainwashing them into believing MY point of view, which is obviously correct. (Yours is wrong.) But! Two more MASSIVE points to introduce, in case you've lived through the wall of text so far!

The Gimme: A writing "technique" wherein nothing needs to be explained, it merely needs to be accepted.

Social class: Remember what I said above about the internet and its users? Yeah. We're all privileged, and presumably, in the sectors of fandom I've interacted with, we all have someone in our family who loves us without reservation and supports us. Few, if ANY, of us, have dealt with the things that Bert and William and Brendon have. Few of us have seemingly felt so strongly that we would be mocked for doing something that we felt was necessary that we had to hide why we were doing it, like Gabe.

Your social class informs your vision of the world. If you don't think that's true, let me rent you a $500/month apartment in South Park for a few weeks and we'll see how you function, living in Seattle's version of fairly extreme, ethnically-based poverty. I don't think that's gonna go well.

I think - and this is where I sound deadly earnest, PLEASE SHOOT ME - that because of social class there is very little credence given to Bert, Gabe, and William's situations. I think that they are very abstract at best to most writers, and completely alien at worst - so it's easy to demonise later actions rather than placing them truly into context. So WHAT if Bert and Gerard broke up? Isn't it possible that Gerard, whose life more closely mirrors the middle-class ideal, could have been the one to say "No, this isn't working"? The pretty one is not always dumped by the skeevy one, people! Isn't it POSSIBLE that Gabe isn't actually a creepy rapist, despite his eyes? That he actually DOES want to save your life and maybe his own as well, with his music, and that he DEFINITELY wants to see a fucking change in the world? Isn't it possible that William is so overwhelmed by the stardom that he also courts that he takes refuge in comfort with a very small group of people, yet is not, actually, fucking all of them, much less anyone else whose path he crosses?

Brendon didn't make a choice, true. But it's a lot easier to accept what's happened to him, and to empathise with it, because he did not go on to become a fucking junkie. Bandom is an amazingly virginal place, and I don't mean that physically; for all I know, everyone in bandom goes to an orgy every night of the week. But in terms of extrapolating from what is known to what could be, there is an AMAZING sympathy gap, and that gap happens the moment that someone exhibits behaviour that is difficult to reconcile. What would you like Bert to have done, while living on the streets? SHOULD Gabe never have formed Cobra? If William had a choice in the matter now, do you think he might choose to be a baseball player instead of a musician?

No. You think - you have decided, through your lens of privilege and comfort, that hard choices equal easy answers, and the answer for those three people is that they are demons, sometimes very, very fucking dangerous ones. But you have not faced the same choice. You can't extrapolate what YOU think should have happened into what IS because you don't know what happened, what the motives were - all you know is that Bert is not nearly as pretty as Gerard, and that Gabe can't take a reasonable picture to save his life and that William likes to very, very openly grab Travis or Gabe whenever they are performing together - and three quarters of the time, "grab" is the wrong fucking verb. The actions you judge are not placed into the context of where they came from; I think that's because, for much of bandom, where they came from is literally unthinkable, unsympathisable, and not understandable.

You have, through lack of empathy, turned these peoples' very real lives and choices into a fucking gimme.

Take off your fucking glasses the next time you decide who your villain is. Don't go with a fucking stock character just because you don't understand how they came to be where they are, and who they are. Find someone who's really a fucking villain and use them instead.

Don't let your privilege inform your work. Don't let your privilege keep you from trying to see and understand what might really be going on, rather than whatever the hell construct fandom is fucking playing with today.

Dear self,

Okay, you know what? This is absolutely fucking ridiculous, that's what. So. Sit down, shut up, and fucking just live each day as if it's your last. STOP trying to make contingency plans for what you'll do in 2013, STOP worrying about the death of capitalism (you don't like it all that much anyway) and STOP rerunning issues of Transmetropolitan in your head.

Because you know what?

There is nothing you can do about it. You can't. You're not a city planner, you're not an automotive engineer, and your only involvement in the process is to make sure that the city planners and automotive engineers have really good books to read while they're figuring all this fucked up shit out.

Stop and think about it, self: on balance, you would prefer to see the end of oil. You would rather see culture become far less mass-culture, you would rather see peoples' carbon footprints disappear, you would rather see a lot less overconsumption. The sight of a stack of 300 pairs of jeans at the store does not fill you with joy.

And you know what else?

If push really, really comes to it, you will have warning. You will have warning, and you will be able to throw it all over and go buy a fucking farm in the Midwest and raise your own food. You may never leave that farm again, but you'll at least have that option. You will not starve. You will not be naked. You have skills, and you will survive.

You can do nothing right now, except be prepared. It's a porcupine; you're not going to reach into it and get anything other than spikes, no matter how hard you try.

And you know what else, else?

You're a pessimist. Humans are inventive creatures. You are an inventive creature. You will not live your life to a normal span and never see your friends again or be able to take that trip around the world you're thinking of: it will be bad for a while, but people are willing, always, to go with fast and expensive, in the end, and if America is faced with the end of oil, America will figure its shit out really damn quick and do something else. You are discounting the billions of people in the developing world who are also thinking about this problem; America itself may be too tied to Big Oil to be able to think straight, but there are millions of people out there who want American lifestyles, and don't have Big Oil.

Remember all that. Keep breathing, and remember that. Remember that you make the changes you can, and that you support the changes you need, and that as long as you are alive, tomorrow is another day.

And someday you will have that again, that feeling of driving with the top down and the radio up on the way to nowhere except that you can go.

You do not live in an age of limited choices. You are an American, and quite frankly, Americans will not stand for limited choices.

You live in an age of decisions: how much, how long, and what's the tipping point?

But not limited choices. Not yet.

Remember, also, these things:
Live each day as if it is your last. Plan for the things you can see happening, but do not try to lock in plans contingent upon the apocalypse happening. Have some grace. Remember that every empire falls, and that is not always a bad thing; by the time it falls, the empire is rotten. Remember that you can make the future, every day.

And remember to breathe.

Breathe.

Do not borrow trouble. Trouble will come, with interest, regardless, but borrowing it makes it that much worse.

Remember to breathe.

Everyone faces a world-shaking catastrophe; the question is getting through it with grace. Do not assume no other changes to your life than the increasing cost of oil: you have no idea what you will be doing, what options will be available, in five years.

And remember that even if it all goes to shit in five years, at least we'll have stopped global warming, and that's not a bad result to have.

But remember: every year, every winter, we get better and better, and we refine who we are and who we are becoming, and who we want to be, and how we want to be those people, and the main thing, the absolute main thing, is to do it with grace.

Live each day as if it is your last.

Love,
Me

I rant too much for some people. *happyfaces*

I want a little icon of someone, like an AIM smiley, with a big thumbs up that possibly says ++GOOD! on it, but that's because I'm basically mean, and also completely bulletproof today*. I had an awesome day (despite the weird previously-ranted shit) that culminated with espousing my philosophy of "Everybody wins and my job is to make the world a little weirder" to my mother and feeling very positive about how all that went down, though I did refrain from directly quoting XKCD to her. So today I'm pretty happy.

I'm a little annoyed and frustrated that I haven't been able to replace anger as my motivating device, but I think that will change over time (or else I'll get completely pissed off and regress to being an angry teenager and then it's all moot). That's really the biggest age-related change I've experienced (at my mighty age of 912 years in cynicism) and it's kind of disheartening, but also: I could be going bald, and I'm not. Neener neener!

I am amazingly sane according to every therapist I've ever seen. I think about that sometimes. It's kind of awesome: it means I'm not being weird because God said I should, it's because I want to be. That's a good place to be, though I would like a time machine to go smack myself up as a teenager. On the other hand, I survived high school, so I guess I don't need to. Making that self be like this self would be blood in the fucking water, believe me. I'm sort of glad we hadn't invented emo back in the dark ages when I was in high school.


* The world needs a functionality like AIM icons or LJ icons where I can just have something like that hanging around me all the time and I can change it as needed. I suppose, if you want to be technical, that would be my face, but I'm not writing ++GOOD! on my face for a one-off. I'm still waiting for Life 2.0.

You know what? I really hate anonymous shit. I really, really do. I realise this is no surprise (and probably to at least one person who will read this, completely uninteresting since it's me whining about everything I hate, as I always do) but seriously, I really hate it.

Fucking own what you don't like. Admit it and move on. Don't take the path of easy resistance. Not even I do that, and I'm the biggest avoider of confrontation EVER. But my posts in bad_rpers_suck are under my name, not a sock, and if someone found them, that was a risk.

It is not acceptable, in any world other than the playyard, to continue to make yourself miserable for no good reason. If you cannot get acceptance from people other than by spouting agreeable opinions, and can't keep peace within yourself by accepting that there are things you don't like that other people don't want to know about, then why are you trying to curry favour by not saying them out loud under a name and still being upset enough to need to vent them? I'm all in favour of venting, but not anonymously.

That is not okay. I do not support that, and I'm really fucking annoyed that anyone does. If it is so important that you MUST VENT, jesus, you're making yourself ill.

"To say that you have forgiven but not forgotten is to say that you have not truly forgiven."

And you know what else? Lack of a name and lack of ownership of a perfectly valid sentiment (if that comment was about me, then fine, it's totally acceptable to think that, but fucking say it to my face) makes people who suspect that they might be the person in question but aren't able to be sure - it could very well be someone I've never interacted with; at the same time, it could very well be someone I thought I could trust, insofar as one can trust online - not likely to be very happy.

So thanks, person with no balls. Seriously. I'm pleased you decided to ruin my day by not having a fucking spine. And if I find out who you are, and if you do have a problem with me, not with someone else, I will be sure to point that out - that you're a coward, and that I am not impressed.

Step the fuck up. Take action to make yourself happy. You don't need to read me if you don't like what I have to say; I'd prefer that you didn't, because I'd prefer not to turn around and find knives in my back.

Oh internet, you make me so crazy. Crazy enough to take my toys and go the fuck home.

Recap the umpty-umpth.

The fastest way I've ever known to make money is to work in Alaska. It's hard work, yes, and occasionally you lose your mind and forget that you don't go into overtime at twelve hours a day but at eight, and you have NO TIME to do anything else (somehow, you fit "drinking a lot" into your schedule anyway) but where else can you, working for minimum wage, make $5000 after taxes in less than two months without being a whore?

Which is not minimum wage work in any event.

But I loved working in Alaska in 1999. Or rather, I didn't LOVE it - I'll be fine if I never have to do housekeeping again, thx, even though I can now clean a bathroom in ten minutes flat - but I liked the money. I worked for Princess Cruises' Denali Resort and their pay scale, at least at the time, is such that you make overtime at more than eight hours a day AND forty hours a week. So when I worked twelve hours on Monday, four of it was overtime, but it ALL counted to hitting overtime for the week by Wednesday night. Add in that my jobs both got tips (sometimes in food!) and we had a total underground economy going on food and all drinks were a dollar for staff, and you get good money.

So I went back in 2001 when I needed money to finance my edumacation. And being the genius of travel that I totally am not, I booked my flight home for just after midnight, September 12.

Let that roll gently off your tongue, but first!

When I went back, I couldn't get on at Denali Princess (I think that the manager for the foodservice staff, who I swear to god had a doorknob on the back of her head, said that none of us were rehirable because we didn't kiss her ass hard enough) so I was working at this other place that was a small independent campground that didn't believe in overtime. But whatever, I pulled another job at the Holland America place across the street and still got decent money. But when you spend the summer working that hard, you mainly want to leave, especially once you add in the lovely abusive boyfriend who wanted to kill me for calling the police on him (not my boyfriend, I add, but the boyfriend of the girl who had the cabin next to me) because I couldn't fucking sleep because they were FIGHTING LIKE WHOA. I actually had to file a deposition with the North Star court about this.

So, I wanted to leave. Now go back and consider the date of my flight home.

My job ended a couple days early, so I was up in Fairbanks with my brother and his wife, planning to take the bus to Anchorage for my flight out.

We woke up to the news of the second tower going down.

I got on the bus anyway because no one knew what was going to happen, and all I knew was that if they did call my flight and I wasn't there I was going to have to pay for it. So we listened to the coverage all the way back to Anchorage, with the news getting worse and worse, and...it was just completely fucked up. Like, that was the day that I saw Denali, which is fogged in approximately two out of three days every year.

By the time we got to Anchorage, it was obvious there was no point in going to the airport, so I got a room at a hostel. Abbie had given me the phone number of a friend of hers in case it got really bad and I had to stay longer - and I was glad I had it, given that I called her friend and arranged to be picked up to stay with her for the duration on September 13th, and then I turned around when I was off the phone, and Mike, the crazy boyfriend was staring at me.

I couldn't get booked out of the airport when they started getting flights back up. In hindsight, what I should have done was gone to the airport as soon as flights were announced again rather than trying to get a slot on a plane that was guaranteed, or trying to find some people to share the cost of a rental car to drive back to Seattle, but I didn't do that. And it turned out that, at that time, because it was so much easier to book a round trip and just leave the return leg empty, I couldn't book the flight because I had a return flight for the first day I could get a plane out and they wouldn't book it. They wouldn't tell me WHY, but I found out later that I would have been in Seattle for approximately two hours before turning around for Alaska, so obviously they wouldn't update the flight.

Eventually, I got out and went to England two weeks later. But 9/11 remained with me. I don't mean to make that sound like it didn't remain with other people, or even that I had it worse than others (I know someone whose father should have been on one of the NYC flights, in fact) but somehow the stress of the time made that particularly moving to me, emotionally.

What do I know, I picked up a coffee table book of things that have been left at the Vietnam Memorial and started crying. I'm emo like that.

So I've been totally addicted to footage of 9/11 - I watched that portion of Ken Burns' New York three times in two days - ever since. And when I realised that I had, predictably, cocked up and booked my flight to Jersey for Monday night when the concert was Wednesday evening, I decided I'd go into New York. And one of the things I'd do there was go to Ground Zero.

So I went, expecting some kind of amazing impact. After all, this was the sort of shit I was a total junkie for. How could it not be moving to me?

It turns out that it's really, really easy not to be moved. It's a big fucking hole in the ground, with construction equipment and all that, because - obviously - they're building on the site. It was nothing at all like what I expected, and it meant nothing at all to me.

Personally, I think that the best thing the Bush administration could have done, if they wanted us to still remember 9/11, is leave the rubble there. Leave that big pile of building debris, with the American flag on top, leave it all, call it good, let us look at that, let us see the sacrifice that we made, let us see the reason for invading Afghanistan and Iraq, the reason for killing Saddam Hussein, the reason for killing our troops, for killing innocent civilians, the reason for an expensive, stupid, pointless war.

Leaving that rubble there would have been a punch to the gut. There is no question in my mind that if that had been what I'd seen, rather than a very silly hole in the ground, I would have stood there and cried, unashamed of that fact. Call me a tourist if you like, but that's how it would have been.

But no. We have to build, build, build. I don't even know, much less care, what they're building there - the only thing I know is that I went, expecting some kind of closure, some kind of catharsis, and got a big hole in the ground with a bunch of construction vehicles moving around in it.

The fact that that means nothing to me is far worse than I expected it to be. Because it really does mean absolutely nothing. It matches nothing that I've looked at obsessively, it means sod and fucking all to me - and that bothers me a lot, that we can decide to rewrite the past that way, that we can't, because that's some of the most valuable real estate in America, leave it well enough alone and let thatbe the memorial.

We have to rescript the past and forget the things that make us who we are, lest we allow them to mean anything to us.

Today, I think I have solved the inexplicable problem of answering emails, feeling obligated, and doing things I really don't want to. I did not, in fact, get drunk to do this.

Instead, I found my self-esteem, in a small box under the bed. And I realised, looking at it, that it'd been a while since I'd worn a spine to work, so I decided to. And now I'm kicking ass and taking names, because after I put on my spine, I realised something. You all know this, so bear with me.

Every single person who emails me, professionally and/or personally (though particularly professionally) wants something from me. This is not a bad thing, per se, it's simply a thing, but I have trouble, as I've discussed in the past, with reading emails promptly because I've somehow become convinced that people hate me. If they do, they have yet to email me. But everyone who emails me at work from outside the company (therefore in the category of "people I don't trust") wants something from ME, usually a book contract but occasionally other things.

They would have to be fools to take offence at my behaviour. That doesn't mean I can behave badly toward them, but it does mean that it's unlikely I'll open the emails and see only a string of expletives.

It also means that I am not obligated to achieve perfection before I send emails back to people. If you want perfection, tell me before it's going to happen, not after.

I feel very guilt-free now, and that's a nice feeling, because I've been conflating a couple of real things with a couple of not-real things and imagining that the real things and the not-real things informed each other, when the reality is they don't. So I have not failed, and I do not have to feel guilty.

And it turns out that it's easier to get through the day if you're not hunching over, waiting for someone's scorn and disapproval, particularly when they have no reason to provide either.

We all believe we were slaves to fashion back in the day, but that's not true. There were, always will be, and always have been, other clothes available than what was fashionable. Granted, it might be hard - like the time I spent weeks looking, in two countries and about ten shops, for a green button down shirt - but it's always possible to get something else.

Even if it is unfashionable. Stores don't sell complete outfits (well, yes, they do, but unless you're buying a seventies-style jumpsuit, they're not holding a gun to your head and demanding that you wear the whole thing), they sell pieces. Your job is to put the pieces together in a way that pleases yourself. I have had more than one conversation in my life where people have been amazed to find out that something they took as being very punk (or pirate, or conservative, or whatever) came from a store that they didn't associate with that type of clothing. Or from a pattern that didn't look anything like what I did in the end.

And it's because you put the pieces together yourself.

Unless you are insane, you put the pieces together in a way you think is acceptable - I even include that of the woman I saw on the bus once that - I shit you not at all, and I wish to god I'd had a cameraphone - had stepped straight out of the seventies, from her glasses to her shoes. Rarely do people dress seriously in a way that they dislike - even if there is a dress code for an event, most people will find something that makes them comfortable unless it is absolutely impossible.

So why do we look at pictures of ourselves and complain? The woman who runs the coffeeshop here was given a stack of old photos of herself by her mother - in the middle of myself and someone else looking at them, she was complaining about her eighties style and how horrible it was.

Wrong. It is only horrible in hindsight because now we realise how bad most of the fashion choices that were all the go at the time really were. At the time - it was awesome. And we shouldn't judge the past by the standards of the present. That leads to things like saying that OBVIOUSLY George Washington can't be the father of our country because he owned slaves and that's omgeleventyone wrongzzors.

I'm sorry, that wasn't legally wrong until 1863, and whether it was socially wrong or not is a matter of opinion and rather strong ones at that. It would be wrong of me to say that owning slaves in 1799 was actually wrong - that's my opinion, not his, nor the opinion of the time he lived in. And it's fallacious to judge someone who is dead by the standards of a time past the one they lived in. It's equally fallacious to judge our fashion sense in the seventies or the eighties or the nineties or last week by the standards now. Remember, we thought we looked great in the eighties, scrunchy socks and stupid hair and all. And in the end, it all comes down to the fashion industry telling us that omg bootcut jeans are GHASTLY YOU MUST BURN THEM, when the reality is that people don't buy jeans that often - they're obviously designed to take damage - and so they change the styles to make people buy more jeans.

That's all it is. There is no mystery. This is the same logic that prevailed in the Victorian era when fabric was milled in such a way as to be very suited for specific types of dresses, or in the late forties when Lucky Strike convinced Chanel and a couple other fashion houses to make green the new colour, on the basis that women would buy cigarettes that coordinated with their clothing. It's all the fashion industry telling us that what we did in the past was horrible.

Because it wasn't. There's never been a fashion for wearing the bones of your enemies as outerwear, at least in non-native western culture (I think those Plains breastplates were animal bone anyway). Nor for walking around with feces plastered over yourself. It's simply out of fashion - not inherently horrible. We all looked fine at the time. We don't think we did now, but we generally did then.

It's all right that we all had ghastly hair in the eighties. Even I did, and I was only four when the decade started. It doesn't mean that we were stupid (well, yes, actually, we WERE, but for different reasons) or that we need to pretend that those photos aren't real. Just because we've changed and fashion has changed and now we know that no one, really, should consider bangs that stick up the be-all-and-end-all doesn't mean that we should look at photos of ourselves then and exclaim how horrible they are.

We all looked like that back then. That's why it was the fashion, after all. And it's easier to do something other than the fashion as we get older and realise that, really, it's not important to buy all our clothing from Hot Topic, which sort of limits what people can do. It's easier to go with what we find comfortable and defies fashion as we age than it is when we're younger, but that doesn't mean that the fashion of the time is inherently bad or that we need to spend a lot of time commenting on how horrible we looked.

I begin to suspect that I should have another journal that no one knows. There are loads of things I'd love to discuss, even just as theoretical concepts, that have occurred to or around me lately, but I can't. The people involved by and large read LJ, and it's not fair to throw their issues out for discussion by me without their knowledge that it will hit them like a bat when they go to check their flists.

I could say that these are not my stories to tell, but frankly, I don't believe that. I believe that the minute I am involved in the story, it is mine as well, and I can and should discuss what happened and how it made me feel. There's a difference between reporting an event that happened to other people and discussing something that happened to me. It just so happens that I am usually not the one things are happening to, I am the one they happen around.

I feel like I might go out on a limb today and try to discuss one of these stories, since it's something that people have been bringing to me for years now, but the risk is pretty high that I'll lose some valuable friendships if I do that.

Catch-22.

How valuable are these friendships if they are generating situations that I cannot discuss because the people involved would be mad for discussing them here? Are they actually people I want to be involved with? (an interesting typo replaced "people" with "things" there, scarily enough) I wouldn't say something like "Jane called yesterday and she was just hysterical because it turned out that Dean had hijacked an airplane to get to his mail-order bride who was stranded in Kuwait, the love slave of Jim-Bob the Oil Millionaire Extraordinaire."

No, it would be anonymous discussion of my feelings. But my feelings on so many of these things are so rarely positive (hence my desire to, you know, write about them) that I think it would be perceived as bitching and moaning, which it would be, but not maliciously, which I think it would also be seen as.

As it stands, I can't discuss the problems I have always had at relating to people on a sympathetic level - I just don't. I can't discuss my views on suicide, mental illness, or medication. I can't discuss why I have such issues with two of the three. I can't discuss that I'm being manipulated by someone who's really quite crap at it, and it's becoming a turn off, making me not want to do what they want simply because it's all they discuss.

And now that I've pissed off - at a rough guess - five people, perhaps I should quit digging. But I think it defeats the point to make a blog part of a community. I can't express my feelings when I know that the people I'm interacting with are going to read this and going to see it as part of a public forum. And I have no idea who all reads this.

I do not have the security (however stupid it was to believe) that I had using Blogger, because I was not part of any comms. I had no idea who my readership was, beyond Tararaven, Lzz, Hilarityallen, and Codesmith, simply because there was no other way to track than by comments. My thoughts there could occur in a vacuum, to all intents and purposes. I didn't have to censor the way I feel that I do with Livejournal.

It's a quandary. I don't believe at this point that switching back to Blogger is the solution, and that's not what I'm talking about. I want to know what stories are public domain, and how far am I willing to go in pissing people off by reporting my feelings on stories that involve both of us.

Once, when a friend of mine killed himself, I wound up writing a letter to him, that obviously could not be sent. Rather than sending it, I took it to the library and put it in a book that I pulled off a shelf at random. It may not get read for 50 years, it might have been read the next week. I like to think it'll get where it needs to go, just like the letter that I ran across in a book, from a woman to her boyfriend, discussing some of the issues in their relationship, came to me at the right time.

This is not that letter, and the internet is not a book. I have no idea who's out there.

So. Gender has been much on my mind lately. Possibly because of discussion with the crew, not to be confused with Lzz's Buccaneer Crew, the topic has come up a lot lately. Fortunately, I studied it last year and have an Informed Opinion.

Basically, the next time someone confuses "sex" with "gender", I will tear their liver out with a spork. "Sex" is the physical, and "gender" is the mental, and you can get even more elaborate and start adding on preferences in partners, whether those partners are sexual or otherwise. But to go back to the previous sentence, they are two very distinct concepts, and ones that do not need to correspond, whatever society says.

In fact, I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the notion of gender is fundamentally flawed (so speaketh the female who genders male and can't quite figure out how to cross-dress...). Although people have an identity, there is no reason that that identity should be (or can be) bound up in terms of gender - which are, essentially, specific notions about how people behave.

Those notions are defined by society, which, as we all know, is a stable and rational institution, dedicated to making life easier for all of us, correct?

Wrong. Society is merely the notion of a group of individuals collectively identifying with each other and generally speaking occupying a specific area of land. It has nothing whatsoever to do with nationality, government, or any other institution. Society is a collective process, defined by its members. Or, to look at it another way, society tends to make decisions based on what's shoved under it's nose.

Consequently, society's default response setting is to do nothing. Once something - gender, in this case - is shoved under society's nose, the response setting is division by zero. We live in a time when gender and sexuality are fluid concepts, at least for a percentage of the population (I sometimes have trouble remembering that not everyone cherishes their one straight friend as an aberration). Society's response to this has been to overwhelmingly define "acceptable" gender and sexual roles, and this is done through fairly insidious techniques.*

Look at the proposed marriage amendment. Society is reacting, via division by zero, to any idea that it is possible to be in a satisfying relationship, one of permanence and that is not a phase, with a same-sex partner. Society has decided that, by and large, it likes its relationships to be opposite sexes, thanks, and it's going to mandate that.

This is, of course, muddled by Bush's need to make political hay, but the point remains - this was not an issue until someone tried to get married to their same-sex partner. Or, to look at it from an even more fundamental standpoint, until the word "homosexual" was created, "heterosexual" did not need to be defined. It is, etymologically, the newer word and was defined solely on the basis of the recognition of "homosexual".

Consequently, I have lost interest in society's notion of gender. I think it's time to start redefining (if it's possible to escape labels, another thing I hate) gender and sexuality. Hell, we can even redesignate sex.

There is no reason to continue to conflate sex with gender because the concepts are transitory. They are being redefined on a larger scale than ever before, a fact that warms the cockles of my heart when I stop to think about it.

I admit, I'm biased. I live in my own little bubble of a world, filled with like-minded individuals, or at least ones who are coherent in defence of their positions on such matters. And I've no idea what The Public thinks.

But I stand by what I've said.

*A further explanation of this concept can be found in either Backlash or Stiffed, both by Susan Faludi.